Mad Barbara

In the little music-house in his garden overlooking the Park of St. James’s, Sir Lionel Purcell—Knight—lay dead, with his cloak half thrown across his face and one hand still gripping the hilt of his sword. The door of the music-room stood ajar, giving a glimpse of the autumn garden, the grass silvered with heavy dew, yellow leaves flaking it, like splashes of gold on a green shield. The curtains were drawn across the windows, so that a few stray shafts of light alone streamed in, giving a sense of some mystery unrevealed as yet, some riddle of human passion waiting to be read.

The silent room seemed all shadows, save where those Rembrandtesque strands of sunlight slanted upon the floor. And there, as though touched by light from another world, the dead man’s forehead gleamed out above the black folds of his cloak. His sword, a streak of silver, joined him to the surrounding shadows, a last bond between him and the past.

Without—an autumn morning, with the clocks chiming the hour of six, and the water-fowl calling from the decoy in the park. A golden mist swimming in the east; the grass white with dew; the trees still sleeping, though the yellow leaves fell slowly, softly from the silent branches overhead. A virginal gray-eyed wonder in the eyes of the day. Freshness and fragrance everywhere, with the spires of Westminster striking upward into pearly haze, and the broad river catching the sunlight that sifted through the ragged vapor.

Dawn may be the egotist’s hour of smug self-congratulation, or the poet’s moment for praising solitude, even though like Thomson he buries his head in a nightcap, and wallows in bed till noon. The dead man had no one as yet to question his quietude, though there was a sense of stirring everywhere—attic windows opening, milk frothing into jugs at kitchen steps, carts lumbering lazily over the cobbles. The sun ascended, the mist began to rise, the sunflowers in a row along the wall had their broad faces made splendid by the day. A couple of thrushes were hopping to and fro over the grass. An inquisitive robin came perking in through the half-shut door, to stand twittering with one black, beady eye cocked curiously at the motionless figure on the floor. In one dark corner a harpsichord showed the ivory of its key-board with something suggestive of a sinister smile.

Had that ingenious connoisseur of feminine beauty—Mr. Pepys—taken an early stroll in the park that morning, he might have derived infinite contentment from the sight of a young girl, a “comely black wench,” standing at her open window with nothing but a red cloak to hide the whiteness of her night-gear. She was binding her hair, her eyes gazing over the empty park, a little table at the window beside her full of ribbons, pins, trinkets, and laces. She was wondering whether her father would walk early in the park that morning. She had fallen asleep before he had returned from supping at my Lord Montague’s the night before, though Mrs. Jael—her mother’s woman, had sat up to watch for the flare of links along the street.

The garden looked innocent enough in the morning sunlight, with its gravel walks, sleek grass, and quaint bay-trees trimmed into the likeness of pinnacles. The music-room, with its diminutive classic portico, lyre, mask, and trumpets in gilt upon the tympanum, seemed, with its white pillars, no place where tragedy might watch and wait.

Whatever impulse drew the girl to the music-room that autumn morning, she had caught no prophetic gleam of the thing that waited to be known. A few steps across the grass, a moment’s surprise at finding the door ajar, a startled pause upon the threshold. Then, the lights and shadows of that Rembrandtesque interior burning themselves in upon the brain, the limning of that motionless figure in lines of fire against a background of imperishable memories.

That he was dead, a touch of the hand betrayed without one moment’s hope. The reason of his death blazoned in gules, with a red rose over the heart. The face set in a smile of infinite sadness. An overturned candle with the wax spilled upon the table, a bowl of flowers broken upon the floor. And in the left hand, held by the stiff fingers, a short chain of gold with a knot of pearls, for a button, like a loop torn from a man’s cloak.

It was thus that Barbara Purcell, child that she yet was, found her father lying dead with a sword-thrust through the heart. He had been a silent man, no courtier, a man whose life had hoped more from the quiet corners of the world than from the pageantry of state. He had had no enemies, so far as the child knew; yet the world might have warned her that a man may be grudged the possession of a handsome wife. Even the Bible might have told her that.

As for the short curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she took it from the dead hand, and hid the thing in her bosom under her dress. To blazon the truth abroad, to run shrieking into the house, that was not the way the passion of her grief expressed itself. The curb of gold was the one link that might join the future to the past. She would show it to no one. That right should be hers to watch and to discover.