“Not a sound, Barbe; be ready to slip away when I take your hand.”
They could hear the steady thud of hoofs over the grass, and even the heavy breathing of the beast, as though he had been pushed and bustled by the spur. John Gore guessed that his rider was skirting along the moat. Then came the sharper clatter of the iron shoes upon the timbers of the bridge. The dog set up a savage barking, and in the moonlight they saw a man ride into the court of Thorn, steam rising from his horse like smoke, so that the beast looked huge and spectral. The man himself, though outlined against the moon, showed nothing but the sweep of a cloak and the droop of a black beaver.
He sat motionless a moment in the saddle, and then, dismounting, led his horse by the bridle toward the mist of light that came from the archway leading into the kitchen. John Gore felt for Barbara’s hand, and they glided along the wall toward the gate, for the man’s back was toward them, while the barking of the dog and his grinding against the chain drowned the sound of their footsteps utterly. They made the gate, and went out hand in hand over the bridge and away over the moonlit grass-land, with the barking of the dog dying down into a hoarse whimper. John Gore had thrust the pistol in his belt and swung the sack over his left shoulder. He put his right arm about Barbara’s body and swept her along by main strength toward the towering beech-trees that shone in the moonlight while the seal of silence seemed over Thorn.
It was Stephen Gore who had ridden that steaming horse into the court-yard of Thorn—Stephen Gore, with jaded, twitching face, and eyes that looked weary with straining and gazing into the deeps of the night.
No man can be constantly and statuesquely selfish through life; the very whims and impulses of human nature are against such a frozen constancy in self-seeking. Nor can a man ever swear to being master either of himself or of his future; the whole gamut of the emotions are arrayed against him; a child may prove his vanquisher or a woman his seducer.
Stephen Gore exchanging epigrams with some princely wit or bending over a pretty woman’s chair was a different creature from Stephen Gore shabby, saddle-sore, jaded to death, riding with an imagined price upon his head and a prophetic mist of blood before his eyes. Throw a man out of his natural environment and he may lose all the genius of self, and even the poise of manhood. Milton seated upon a boat’s thwart in the midst of mad, cursing Jamaica buccaneers would have probably seemed contemptible and a coward. March out a fop in vile clothes, and he may prove a sneaking, cringing, self-shamed thing, for all his soul was in his coat. We are so much the creatures of habit that our habits flatter us like well-trained and obsequious servants, and we lose our dignity and even ourselves without their ministrations.