“I trust that Sir Lionel is hearty as ever?”
She seized the handle of the door and shook it.
Barbara kept one shoulder turned toward him, her face, bleak and white, reflected in the glass panel of the door.
There was the sound of a key turning in a lock. She pushed past the man as he opened the door, leaving John Gore wondering what manner of mischief three years had made in a girl’s temper.
In the parlor, with its panelling, its massive furniture, and great fireplace filled with blue Dutch tiles, Anne Purcell and my Lord Gore had been talking for above an hour. My lord was standing at a window in his favorite attitude of philosophic stateliness. The lady’s face had an impatient sharpness of expression that hinted that the man’s sympathy had not sounded the deeps of her unrest.
“I tell you, Nan, that these—these possibilities—leave us where we stood before. The girl may be a little touched in the head. Leave her to Hortense; if she cannot tame her, well, there are other ways.”
Anne seemed less credulous—and more obstinate than he desired.
“I am not superstitious, but to think of the girl praying to those—I tell you, Stephen, the thought of it makes me afraid. Thank Heaven, she is praying—in the dark.”
“Tush—tush,” and he smiled down at her, “the girl is not quite human. We understand her, you—and I. Yet you seem to lack that diplomatic foresight, Nan, that sees in an enemy’s tricks—the very tools for one’s own hand.”
“No, I foresee nothing save that—betrayal.”
“Which, if it occurred, could be turned aside as easily as I snap my fingers. There is but one person to be considered, and we must keep her fat and contented.”
“Yes; the woman is greedy; that simplifies everything. To-morrow, then, you will come with me to the Mancini’s?”
They heard the footsteps of the servant climbing the stairs, and in ten seconds my Lord Gore had the first news of his seafaring and unshaven son.
My Lord Gore could not conceal an instinct of fastidious disapproval as he walked homeward with his son along Pall Mall. Sumptuousness came before godliness in his scheme of values, and though poverty and slovenliness were inevitable to the world, my lord found them useful as a respectable background to heighten the effect of an exquisite refinement in dress. But to have a soiled and weather-beaten scamp familiarly at one’s elbow offered too crude a contrast, and suggested a sinister interest in Whitefriars.