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[Illustration: BARBARA FELL BACK AGAINST THE WALL]




                              MAD BARBARA


                                   BY

                            WARWICK DEEPING


                               AUTHOR OF
                 “BERTRAND OF BRITTANY” “A WOMAN’S WAR”
                       “THE SLANDERERS” ETC. ETC.


                         WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY
                        CHRISTOPHER CLARK, R. I.


                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                      HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                                 MCMIX




                 Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
                         _All rights reserved._
                       Published February, 1909.




                              MAD BARBARA




                                   I


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