“The thought of steel in one’s body makes one shiver.”
She seemed to persist in her morbid melancholy like one whose thoughts move in a circle.
“Is that the sword with which you fought Lord Pembroke?”
“Let me look at it. Strange that such bodkin can be so deadly.”
He took it for a whim of hers, and humored her, hiding the pity in his eyes.
“Why, it is not much heavier than a gentleman’s cane!”
She held it in her two hands, balancing it, and looking at the silver work upon the sheath. John Gore watched her, grave-eyed and compassionate.
“It is said that the sword suits itself to the age.”
“Oh!” And she drew back innocently, step by step.
“Then you would call this a sword for a treacherous hand?”
“No, rather a tool for the man with a brain. Any fool can fight with a club.”
She drew the blade sharply from the scabbard, still moving backward step by step till the table was between her and John Gore.
“It was some such sword as this that killed my father.”
He shirked the subject, as though afraid of paining her or abetting her in her distemper.
“If I could only know the truth! The mystery of it haunts me.”
She laid the sword upon the table, quite close to her hand, so that she could snatch at it if things came to such a pass.
“Some parts of life are better forgotten.”
A great impulse stirred in him, bidding him go to her and take her hands.
“The bitter things remain, and with them—for contrast—the silliest trifles.”
He looked up at her with a brightening of the eyes.
“Yes; why, Heaven alone knows! I can remember kissing my mother when she lay dead. And with the same vividness I can remember a wooden horse I had as a boy, a gray horse with a brown saddle painted on his back, and his nostrils a gay scarlet. Whenever I see a horse I think of that wooden horse’s nose.”
Barbara gave a queer, short laugh, her face firing with sudden animation.
“That is just what life is. And sometimes we see the same thing again—afterward. I can call to mind looking into the window of a goldsmith’s shop, and seeing upon a little green board a short gold chain with a knot of pearls for a button. Why I should have noticed and remembered that one thing I can’t tell. But I saw its brother chain one night this summer.”