CHAPTER I

THE STAR DREAMER

BY THE SAME AUTHORS

_By Egerton Castle_

YOUNG APRIL

THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY

MARSHFIELD THE OBSERVER

CONSEQUENCES

ENGLISH BOOK-PLATES—Ancient and Modern (_Illustrated_)

SCHOOLS AND MASTERS OF FENCE. A History of the Art of the

Sword from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century.

(_Illustrated_)

THE JERNINGHAM LETTERS. (_With Portraits_)

LE ROMAN DU PRINCE OTHON. A rendering in French of R. L.

Stevenson’s PRINCE OTTO.

_By Agnes and Egerton Castle_

THE PRIDE OF JENNICO

THE BATH COMEDY

THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE

THE SECRET ORCHARD

THE STAR DREAMER

INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS. (_In the Press_)

[Illustration:

THE HERB-GARDEN

_An ancient gateway, looking as though it were closed forever ... and,

through the bars, the wild, imprisoned garden...._

]

THE STAR DREAMER

_A ROMANCE_

BY

AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE

_Authors of_

“THE PRIDE OF JENNICO,” “YOUNG APRIL,” “THE SECRET ORCHARD,” “THE HOUSE

OF ROMANCE,” “THE BATH COMEDY,” ETC.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1903,

BY EGERTON CASTLE.

_All rights reserved._

PUBLISHED IN JANUARY, 1903.

Press of

Braunworth & Co.

Bookbinders and Printers

Brooklyn, N. Y.

TO

LADY STANLEY

(DOROTHY TENNANT)

HERSELF SO GRACIOUS AN IMPERSONATION OF GIFTED AND GENEROUS WOMANHOOD,

THIS STORY OF A WOMAN’S INFLUENCE IS DEDICATED, IN ESTEEM, SYMPATHY, AND

FRIENDSHIP, BY THE AUTHORS

CONTENTS

THE ARGUMENT, vii

INTRODUCTORY, ix

BOOK I.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. FAIR, YOUNG CAPABLE HANDS, 3

II. A MASS OF SELFISHNESS, 13

III. RUSTLING LEAVES OF MEMORY, 18

IV. BACK AT A NEW DOOR OF LIFE, 24

V. QUENCHLESS STARS ELOQUENT, 34

VI. EYES, BLUE AS HIS STAR, 40

VII. NEW ROADS UNFOLDING, 50

VIII. WARM HEART, SUPERFLUOUS WISDOM, 56

IX. HEALING HERBS, WARNING TEXTS, 66

X. COMPACT AND ACCEPTANCE, 73

XI. LAYING THE GHOSTS, 83

XII. A KINDLY EPICURE, 92

BOOK II.

I. MIDSUMMER SUNRISE, 105

II. _EUPHROSINE_, STAR-OF-COMFORT, 109

III. A QUEEN OF CURDS AND CREAM, 120

IV. OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY, 127

V. EVIL PROMPTER, JEALOUSY, 138

VI. THE PERFECT ROSE, DROOPING, 150

VII. NODS AND WREATHÉD SMILES, 157

VIII. A GREY GOWN AND RED ROSES, 164

IX. A RIDER INTO BATH, 174

BOOK III.

I. THE LITTLE MASTER OF BINDON, 181

II. TOTTERING LIFE AND FORTUNE, 188

III. STRAWS ON THE WIND, 195

IV. A SHOCK AND A REVELATION, 200

V. SILENT NIGHT THE REFUGE, 207

VI. THE LUST OF RENUNCIATION, 215

VII. SHADOWS OF THE HEART OF YOUTH, 224

VIII. THE HERB EUPHROSINE, 232

IX. AN OMINOUS JINGLE, 239

X. A VAGUE DESPERATE SCHEME, 245

XI. A PARLOUR OF PERFUME, 252

XII. TO SLEEP—PERCHANCE TO DREAM! 262

XIII. THOU CANST NOT SAY I DID IT, 274

XIV. JEALOUS WATCHERS OF THE NIGHT, 285

XV. A SIMPLER’S EUTHANASIA, 294

XVI. THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT, 297

XVII. TREACHERIES OF SILENCE, 311

XVIII. GONE LIKE A DREAM, 319

XIX. GREY DEPARTURE, 331

BOOK IV.

I. AH ME, THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN! 341

II. A MESSENGER OF GLAD TIDINGS, 350

III. NOT WORDS, BUT HANDS MEETING, 359

IV. A DREAM OF WOODS AND OF LOVE, 367

THE ARGUMENT

I have clung

To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen

Or felt but a great dream! O I have been

Presumptuous against love, against the sky,

Against all elements, against the tie

Of mortals each to each....

... Against his proper glory

Has my soul conspired; so my story

Will I to children utter, and repent.

There never lived a mortal man, who bent

His appetite beyond his natural sphere

But starv’d and died....

Here will I kneel, for thou redeemest hast

My life from too thin breathing: gone and past

Are cloudy phantasms!

—KEATS.

INTRODUCTORY

CONCERNING BINDON-CHEVERAL.

_An ancient gateway, looking as though it were closed for ever; with its

carved stone pillar bramble-grown, its scrolled ironwork yielded to

silence and immobility, to crumbling rust—and through the bars the wild

imprisoned garden...._

_The haunting of the locked door, of the condemned apartment in a house

of life and prosperity, how unfailingly it appeals to the romantic

fibre! Yet, more suggestive still, in the heart of a rich and trim

estate, is the forbidden garden jealously walled, sternly abandoned,

weed-invaded, falling (and seemingly conscious of its own doom) into a

rank desolation. The hidden room is enigmatic enough, but how stirring

to the fancy this peep of condemned ground, descried through bars of

such graceful design as could only have been once conceived for the

portals of a garden of delight!—Thus stands, in the midst of the

nurtured pleasaunces of Bindon-Cheveral, the curvetting iron gate

leading to the close known on the estate as the Garden of Herbs—a place

of mystery always, as reported by tradition; and, by the legend touching

certain events in the life of one of its owners, a place of somewhat

sinister repute. Even in the eyes of the casual visitor it has all the

air of_

_Some complaining dim retreat

For fear and melancholy meet._

_And in truth_ (_being fain to pursue the quotation further_)

_I blame them not

Whose fancy in this lonely spot

Was moved._

_Ancient haunts of men have numberless tongues for those who know how to

hear them speak; therein lies the whole secret of the fascination that

they cast, even upon the uninitiated. Those, on the other hand, whose

minds are attuned to the sweetness of “unheard melodies” turn to such

places of long descent with the joy of the lover towards his bridal

chamber, for the wedding of fantasy with truth. Divers, indeed, and

many, might be the tales which the walls of Bindon-Cheveral could tell,

from what remains of its old battlements to the present mansion._

_Its front, which the passer-by upon the turnpike-road may in leafless

winter-time descry at the end of the long avenue of elms, has the

peaceful and rich stateliness of the Jacobean country seat—but there is

scarce a stone of its grey masonry, with its wide mullioned windows, its

terrace balustrades and garden stairways, that has not once been piled

to the arrogant height from which the Bindon Castle of stark Edward’s

times looked down upon the country-side. The towers and walls are gone;

but the keep still stands, sleeping now and shrouded under centuries of

ivy—a kindly massive prop to the younger house, its descendant. The

ornamental waters were once defensive moats: red they have turned with

other than the sunset glow, and secretly they have rippled to different

causes than the casting of a careless stone or the leap of the great fat

carp after a bait. Where the pleasure-grounds are now stretched in

formal Italian pride spread, centuries back, the outer bailey of the

once famous, now forgotten, stronghold._

_Stirring would be the Romance of old Bindon I could recount, as old

Bindon revealed it to me—many the tales of love, of deeds, of hatred, of

ambition. I could tell brave things of the builder of the Castle, and

how he held the keep in defiance of Longshanks’ royal displeasure; or of

the Walter, Lord of Bindon, Knight of the Garter, High Treasurer to the

last Lancaster, and of his fortunes between the Two Roses; or yet of his

grandson, beheaded after Hexham; and, under Richard Crookback, of the

transfer of the good lands of Bindon to the “Jockey of Norfolk” who

perished on Bosworth Field.—And these would be tales of clash of steel

and waving banner as well as of wily diplomacy. Great figures would

stalk across my page; it would be shot with scarlet and gold, royal

colours; and high fortunes, those of England herself, would be mingled

with the lesser doings of knight and baron._

_I could set forth the truth touching some of those inner tragedies, now

legendary, that the warlike walls once witnessed after the first Tudor

had restored the estate of Bindon to the last descendant of its rightful

owner, a Cheveral, whereby the line of Bindon-Cheveral joined on the

older branch.—There was the Agnes Cheveral of the ballad singers—“so

false and fair”—who left the tradition of poison in the wine cup as a

fate to be dreaded by the Lords of Bindon.—And there was the Sir Richard

who kept his childless wife a life-long prisoner in the topmost chamber

of that keep now so placidly dreaming under its creepers!_

_Or I could reel you a bustling Restoration narrative of the doing of

the Edmund Cheveral known in the family as Edmund the Spendthrift, who

had roamed England, hunted and fasting, with Charles; had stagnated with

him, had junketed and roystered in Holland. He it was who brought over

the shrewish little French wife and her great fortune, and also foreign

notions of display, to old English Bindon. He it was who pulled down the

gloomy loopholed walls, built the present House, laid out the park and

the renowned gardens; who introduced the carp into the pacific moat

after the fashion of French châteaux; and who, bitten with fanciful

scientific aspiration—a friend of Rupert and a member of the Royal

Society—laid out in a sunken and wall-sheltered part of the old

fortified ground an inner pleasaunce of exotic plants and shrubs, after

the manner of Dutch Physick-Gardens._

_Or would you have the story of the new heir—a silent, dark man—and of

his mystic Welsh wife and of the new wealth and strain of blood that

came with her into the race? Or again, no doubt for those who care to

hear the call of horn and hounds, to see the port pass over the

mahogany; who find your three-bottle man the best company and the jokes

of the stable and of the gun-room the only ones worth cracking with the

walnut, there were a pleasant rollicking chapter or two to be chronicled

anent the generation of fox-hunting, hard-living Squires who kept Bindon

prosperous, made its cellars celebrated and its hospitality a byword._

_And yet, my fancy lingers upon the spot where it was first awakened;

dwells on the story of the deserted Physick-Garden, with its closed

exquisitely-wrought gate, its mystery and its melancholy; with its

wildness wherein lies no hint of sordidness, but rather a fascinating,

elusive beauty. It is of this that I fain would write._

_Standing barred out, in this still autumn twilight, as the first stars

flash out faintly on the deepening vault; gazing upon its overgrown

paths, where the leaves of so many summers make rich mould; inhaling its

strange fragrances, the scent of the wholesome decay of nature mixed

with odd spices that come from far lands; hearing the wild birds cry as

they fly free in its imprisoned space—it seems to me as if the spirit of

my romance dwelt in these, and I could evoke it._

_A tale of well-nigh a century ago; when George III. lay dying.—It was a

strangely silent Bindon then; and the whole house seemed to lie under

much such a spell as now holds its Herb-Garden. Yet those same garden

paths, if wild, were not deserted; and the gate, though locked to the

world at large, still rolled upon its hinges for one or two who had the

key._

_In those days of slow journeys and quick adventure, had you been a

traveller on the turnpike-road between Devizes and Bath, you could not,

looking over the park wall from your high seat, but have been struck by

the brooding, solitary look that lay all upon this great House, with its

shuttered windows and upon these wide lands, so rich, yet so lonely._

_The driver of the coach would, no doubt, have pointed with his whip;

his tongue would have been ready to wag—was not Bindon one of the

wonders of his road?_

“_Aye, you might well say it looked strange! There were odd stories

about the place, and odd folk living there, if all folk said were true.

The owner, Sir David Cheveral (as good blood as any in the county, and

once as likely a young man as one could wish to see), had turned crazy

with staring at the stars and took no bit nor sup but plain bread and

water. That was what some said; and others that he was bewitched by an

old kinsman of his that lived with him—an old, old man, bearded like a

Jew, who could not die, and who practised spell-work on the village

folk. That was what others said. Anyhow, they two lived in there quite

alone; one on his tower, the other underground. And that was true. And

the flowers bloomed in the garden, and the fruit ripened on the walls;

there were horses in the stables and cattle in the byres (the like of

which could not be bettered in Wiltshire); the whole place was flowing

with milk and honey, as they say, and the only ones to use it all were

the servants! Oh, there the servants grew fat and did well, while the

master looked up to the skies and grew lean._”

_And presently, to the sound of your driver’s jovial laugh the coach

would bowl clear of the long grey walls, emerge from under the

overhanging branches; and then the well-known stretch of superb scenery

suddenly revealed at the bend of the road would perhaps so engross your

attention that your transient traveller’s interest in the eccentric,

world-forsaking master of Bindon-Cheveral would no doubt have

evaporated._

_But pray you who travel with me to-day give me longer patience. I have

to tell the story of Bindon’s awakening._

THE STAR DREAMER

BOOK I

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart.

WORDSWORTH (_Sonnets_).

THE STAR DREAMER

CHAPTER I

FAIR, YOUNG, CAPABLE HANDS

Alone and forgotten, absolutely free,

His happy time he spends, the works of God to see

In those wonderful herbs which here in plenty grow,

Whose sundry strange effects he only seeks to know,

And choicely sorts his simples got abroad,

And dreams of the All-Heal that is still on the road....

—DRAYTON (_Polyolbion_).

On that evening of the autumnal equinox Master Simon Rickart—the simpler

or the student as he liked to call himself, the alchemist as many held

him to be—alone, save for the company of his cat, in his laboratory at

the foot of the keep, was luxuriating as usual in his work of research.

The black cat sat by the wood fire and watched the man.

As Master Simon moved to and fro, the topaz eyes followed him. When he

spoke (which he constantly did to himself, under his voice and

disjointedly, after the wont of some solitary old people) they became

narrowed into slits of cunning intelligence. But when the observations

were personally addressed to his Catship, Belphegor blinked in

comfortable acknowledgment. “As wise as Master Simon himself,” the

country folk vowed: and indeed, wherever the fame of the alchemist had

spread through the country-side, so had that of the alchemist’s cat.

There were two fires in the laboratory. One of timber, that roared and

crackled its life away and sank into an ever increasing heap of fair

white ash. In the vault-like room this fire burned year in year out on a

hearth hewn many feet into the deep wall; and from many points of view

Belphegor found it vastly more satisfactory than the other fire, which

generally engrossed the best of his master’s attention. That was a

stealthy red glow, nurtured on a wide stove built into another wall

recess, sheltered behind a glass screen under a tall hood:—a fire

productive of the strangest smells, at times evil, but as often sweet

and aromatic: a fire also productive on occasions of coloured vapours

and dancing flamelets of suspicious nature. There, as the cat knew,

happened now and again unexpected ebullitions, disastrous alike to the

nerves and to the fur. In his kitten days, Belphegor, led ostensibly by

overpowering affection but really by the constitutional curiosity of his

genus, had been wont to accompany his chosen master behind the screen.

He knew better now. And there was a bald spot near the end of his tail,

where no amount of licking on his part, no cunning unguent of Master

Simon’s himself could to this day induce a hair to grow again.

The old man had closed the door of the stove; rearranged, crown-like, a

set of glass vessels of engaging shapes: alembics and matrasses, filled

with decoctions of green and amber, gorgeous colours shot with the red

reflection of the fire; tucked a baby-small porcelain crucible in its

fireclay cradle and banked the glowing cinders around it. The touch of

the wrinkled hands was neat, almost caressing. After a last look around,

he emerged, blowing a breath of content:

“Everything in good trim, so far, for to-night’s work, my cat.”

And Belphegor blinked both eyes.

Faint vapours, herb-scented, voluptuous, rose and circled to the groined

roof. The log fire on the hearth had fallen to red stillness. In the

silence, delicate sounds of bubbling and simmering, little songs in

different keys, gurgles as of fairy laughter, became audible.

“Hark to it!” said the simpler, and bent his ear with a smile of

satisfaction. He spoke in a monotonous undertone, not unlike the

muttering of the sleep-walker—“Hark to it! There is a concert for

you—new tunes to-night, Belphegor. Strange, delightful! There is not a

little plant but has its own voice, its own soul-song. Hark, how they

yield them up! Good little souls! Bad little souls, some of them, he,

he! Enough in that retort yonder to make helpless idiots, or dead flesh

of a hundred lusty men. Dead flesh of eleven such fine cats as yourself

and one kitten, he, he! Yet—for properly directed, friend Belphegor,

vice may become virtue—enough here to keep the fever from the homestead

for three generations....”

The old man moved noiselessly in his slippers across the stone floor,

flung a couple of fresh logs on the sinking hearth, then stretched out

his frail hands to the blaze and laughed gently. The flame light played

fantastically on his shrunken figure:—a being, it would seem, so

ætherealised that it scarcely looked as if blood could still be

circulating beneath that skin, like yellow ivory, tensely stretched over

the vast, denuded forehead and the bold, high-featured face. Mind alone,

one would have thought, must animate that emaciated body; mind alone

light up those steel-blue eyes with such keenness that, by contrast with

the age-stricken countenance, they shone with almost unearthly vitality.

The cat stretched himself, yawned; then advanced, humping his back and

bristling, to rub himself against his master’s legs. The fire roared

again in the chimney, a score of greedy tongues licking up the last

drops of sap that oozed forth, hissing, from the beech logs.

“Aha,” said Master Simon, bending down somewhat painfully to give a

scratch to the animal’s neck, “that’s the fire-song you prefer. I fear,

I fear, Belphegor, you will never rise beyond the grossest everyday

materialism!”

Purring Belphegor endorsed the opinion by curling up luxuriously on his

head and stretching out his hind paws to the flame. The little scene was

an allegory of peace and comfort. The old man, straightening himself,

remained awhile musing:

“Well, it is good music—a song of the people. All of the stout woods of

Bindon, of the deep English earth, of the salt English airs. No subtle

virtue in it: a roaring good tune, a homely smell and a heap of ash

behind—but all clean, my cat, clean!”

He gathered the folds of his dressing-gown around him; a garment that

had once been wondrous fine and set in fashion (in the days of his

elegant youth) by no less a person than his present Majesty, King George

IV., but now so stained, so singed and scorched and generally faded,

that its original hues were but things of memory.

“And now we shall have a quiet hour before supper. What a good thing, my

cat, that neither you nor I are attractive to company! The original man

was created to be alone. But the fool could not appreciate his bliss,

and so he was given a companion—a woman, Belphegor, a woman!—and

Paradise was lost.”

Again Master Simon chuckled. It was a sound of ineffable content,

weirdly escaping through the nostrils above compressed lips. He took up

a lighted candle, stepped carefully over the cat and, selecting between

his fingers a key from a bunch at his girdle, approached a wooden press

that cut off an angle of the room.

This was built of heavily carved black oak, secured with sturdy iron

hinges; had high double doors and small peeping keyholes, suggestive of

much cunning. It was a press to receive and keep secrets. And yet, when

the panels were thrown open, nothing of more formidable nature was

displayed than rows upon rows of inner drawers and shelves, the latter

covered some with philosophical instruments, others displaying piles of

neatly ticketed boxes, ranks of phials, and sealed tubes of various

liquids or crystals that flashed in the light with prismatic

scintillation.

Holding the candle above his head the old man selected:

“The box of Moorish powder from Tangiers—the bottle of Java Water—the

paste of _Cannabis Arabiensis_—the _Hippomane Mancenilla_ gum of

Yucatan.”

He placed the materials on a glass tray and carried them over to the

working table.

“Excellent Captain Trevor! The simple fellow has never done thanking me

for curing him of his West Coast fever with a course of _Herba

Betonica_; he, he! the common, ignored, humble Wood Betony. Thanking

me—he, he! Never did a pinch of powder bring better interest...! Oh, my

cat, I’m a mass of selfishness! And here I have at last the Java Water

and the Yucatan gum!”

The cat roused himself, walked sedately but circuitously across the

room, leaped up and took his position with feet and tail well tucked in

on the bare space left, by right of custom, where the warmth of the lamp

should comfort his back.

On Master Simon’s table lay a row of small covered watch-glasses, thin

as films, each containing a small heap of some greenish crystalline

powder. A pair of chemical scales held out slender arms within the walls

of its glass case. The neat array looked inviting.

With a noise as of rustling parchment the simpler rubbed his hands; he

was in high good humour. The tall clock at the end of the room wheezed

out the ghost of nine beats, and the strangled sounds seemed but to

point the depth of the environing silence. For the thick walls kept out

all the voices of nature, and at all times enwrapt the underground room

with a solemn stillness that gave prominence to its whispers of secret

doings.

“Nine o’clock!” muttered the self-communer. “Another hour’s peace before

even Barnaby break in upon us with his supper tray. Hey, but this is a

good hour! This is luxury. I feel positively abandoned! Not a soul in

this whole wing of Bindon, save you and me—unless we reckon our good

star-dreamer above—good youth with his head in the clouds. Heigh ho, men

are mostly fools, and all women! Therefore wisely did I choose my only

familiar—thou prince of reliable confidants.”

The man stretched out his hand and caressed the beast’s round head.

Belphegor tilted his chin to lead the scratching finger to its favourite

spot.

“Hey, but man must speak—it is part of his incomplete nature—were it

only to put order in his ideas, to marshall them without tripping hurry.

And you neither argue nor contradict, nor give a fool’s acquiescence.

You listen and are silent. Wise cat! Now, men are mostly fools ... and

all women!”

Master Simon lifted the phial of Java Water, a fluid of opalescent pink,

between his eye and the light. He removed the stopper and sniffed at it.

Then compared the fragrance with that of the Moorish powders, and became

absorbed in thought. At one moment he seemed, absently, on the point of

comparing the tastes in the same manner, but paused.

“No, sir, not to-night,” he murmured. “We must keep our brain clear, our

hand steady. But it will be an experiment of quite unusual

interest—quite unusual.... I am convinced the essential components are

the same.—Belphegor! Keep your nozzle off that gallipot! Do you not

dream enough as it is?”

He pushed the turn-back cuffs still further from his attenuated wrists,

and with infinite precaution addressed himself to the manipulation of

his watch-glasses, silver pincers and scales: the final stage of

weighing and apportioning the result of an analytical experiment of

already long standing was at hand.

His great white eyebrows contracted. Now, bending close, he held his

breath to watch the swing of the delicate balance; now with fevered

fingers he jotted notes and figures. At times a snapping hand, a

clacking tongue, proclaimed dissatisfaction; but presently, widening his

eyes and moistening his lips, he started upon a fresh clue with renewed

gusto.

The clock had ticked and jerked its way through the better part of the

hour when the weird muttering became once more audible:

“Curious, curious! Yet it works to my theory. Now if these last figures

agree it will be proof. Pshaw, the scales are tired. How they fidget!

Belphegor, my friend, down with you, the smallest vibration would ruin

my week’s work. Down! Now let us see. As seventy-three is to a hundred

and twenty-five ... as seventy-three is to a hundred and twenty-five....

A plague on it!” exclaimed Master Simon pettishly, without looking up.

“There’s that Barnaby, of course in the nick of wrong time!”

The door at the dim end of the room had been opened softly. A puff of

wood smoke had been blown down the chimney. A tiny draught skimmed

across the table; the steady lamplight flickered and cast dancing

shadows; and Master Simon’s tense fingers trembled with irritation.

“All to begin again. Curse you, Barnaby! You’re deaf, I can curse you,

thank Providence!”

Without turning round he made a hasty, forbidding gesture of one hand.

The door was shut as gently as it had been opened.

Master Simon gave a deep sigh, and still fixedly eyeing the scales,

stretched his cramped hands along the table for a moment’s rest.

“Now, now? Ha—Ho—What? Sixty-nine to eighty-two? Impossible! Tchah!

Those scales have the palsy—nay, Simon Rickart, it is your impotent

hand. Old age, old age, my friend ... or stormy youth, alas!” His

muttering whisper rose to louder cadence. “Had you but known then, in

your young folly, the chains you were forging, for your aged wisdom! But

sixty to-day, and this senile trembling! Not a shake of that hand,

Simon, but is paying for the toss of the cup; not a mist in that brain

but is the smoke of wanton, bygone fires. Well vast is the pity of it!

Had you but the hand now of that dreamer up above! Had you but the

virtue of his temperate life! And the fool is staring at his feeble

twinklers ... worshipping the unattainable, while all rich Nature, here

at hand, awaits the explorer. Oh, to feel able to trace Earth mysteries

to the marrow of Man; to hold the six days’ wonder in one single action

of the mind ... and to be foiled at every turn by the trembling of a

finger!”

He leaned back in his chair, long lines of discouragement furrowing his

face.

Behind him, in the silence, barely more audible than the simmering

sounds of the fires and the lembics, there was a stir of another

presence, quiet, but living. But Master Simon, absorbed in his own world

of thought, perceived nothing.

With closed eyes, he made another effort to conquer the rebellious

weakness of the flesh and bring it into proper subjection to the

merciless vigour of the mind. At that moment the one important thing on

earth to the old student was the success of his analysis. And had the

Trump of Doom begun to sound in his ears, his single desire would still

have been to endeavour to conclude it before the final crash.

Light footfalls in the room—not caused by Belphegor’s stealthy paws,

certainly not by Barnaby’s masculine foot—a sound as of the rustle of a

woman’s garments, a sound unprecedented for years in these consecrated

precincts, failed to reach his faculties. Once more he drew his chair

forward, leant his elbows on the table, and, stooping his head so that

eyes and hands were nearly on the same level, set himself to the

exasperatingly delicate task of minute weighing. And the while he

muttered on with a droll effect of giving directions to himself:

“The right rider, half a line to the right. That should do it this time!

Too much—bring it back! Faugh, out of all gear! Too much back now. Fie,

fie, confusion upon my spinal cord—nerves, muscles, and the whole old

fumbling fabric!”

Here, two hands, with unerring swoop like that of an alighting dove,

came out of the dimness on each side of the bent figure, and with cool,

determined touch gently withdrew the old man’s hot and shaking fingers

from their futile task.

Master Simon’s ancient bones shook with a convulsive start; a look of

intense amazement passed into his straining eye, then the faintest shade

of a smile on his lips. But, characteristically, he never turned his

head or otherwise moved: the business at hand was of too high import. He

sat rigid, silently watching.

The interfering hands now became busy for a space with soft unhurried

purpose. Beautiful hands they were, white as ivory outside and

strawberry pink within, taper-fingered and almond-nailed; not too small,

and capable in the least of their movements. Compared to those other

hands that now lay, still trembling in pathetic supineness, where they

had been placed, they were as young shoots, full of vital sap, to the

barren and withered branch. A woman’s warm presence enfolded the

student. A young bosom brushed by his bloodless cheek. A light breath

fanned his temples. A scent as of lavender bushes in the sun, of bean

fields in blossom, of meadowsweet among the new-mown hay; something

indescribably fresh, an out-of-door breath as of English summer, spread

around him, curiously different from the essences of his phials and

stills. But Master Simon had no senses, no thought but for the work

those busy hands were now performing.

“The right rider, to the right, just half a line?” said a voice,

repeating his last words in a tranquil tone. “A line—those little

streaks on the arms are lines?”

Master Simon assented briefly: “Yes.”

The fingers moved.

“Enough, enough!” ordered he. “Now back gently till the needle swings

evenly.”

The pulse of the scales, hitherto leaping like that of a frightened

heart, first steadied itself into regularity and then slowed down into

stillness. The long needle pointed at last to nought. The white hands

hovered a second.

“Not another touch!” faintly screamed the old man.

He craned forward, his body again tense; gazed and muttered, wrote and

rapidly calculated.

“Yes, yes, yes! Seventy-three to a hundred and twenty-five—I was

right—Eureka! The principles of the two are the same. Right! Right!”

Now Simon Rickart, rubbing his hands, turned round delightedly.

CHAPTER II

A MASS OF SELFISHNESS

... Such eyes were in her head;

And so much grace and power, breathing down

From over her arch’d brows, with every turn

Lived thro’ her to the tips of her long hands....

—TENNYSON (_The Princess_).

“Well, Father?”

Master Simon started. His eyes shot a look of searching inquiry at the

young woman who now came round to the side of the high table, and bent

down to bring her fresh face to a level with his.

“Ellinor? Not Ellinor, not my daughter...!” he said.

“Ellinor. The only daughter you ever had. The only child, as far as I

know!”

The tranquil voice had a pleasant, matter-of-fact note. The last words

were pointed merely by a sudden deep dimple at the corner of the lips

that spoke them. But it was trouble, amounting to agitation, that here

took possession of the father. He pushed his chair back from the table,

rubbed his hands through his scant silver locks, tugged at his beard.

“You’ve come on ... on a visit, I suppose?” he said presently, with

hesitation.

“I have come to stay some time—a long time, if I may.”

“But—Marvel, but your husband?”

“Dead.”

The dimple disappeared, but the voice was quite unaltered. She had not

shifted her position.

“Dead?” echoed Master Simon. His eyes travelled wonderingly from her

black stuff gown—a widow’s gown indeed—to the head with its unwidow-like

crown of hair; to the face so youthful, so curiously serene, so

unmournful.

Her hands were lightly clasped under the pointed white chin. Here the

father’s eyes rested; and from the chaos of his disturbed mind the last

element of his surprise struggled to the surface and formulated itself

into another question:

“Where is your wedding ring?”

“I took it off.”

Ellinor Marvel straightened her figure.

“Father,” she said, “we have always seen very little of each other, but

I know you spend your life as a searcher after truth. Since we are now,

as I hope, to live together, you will be glad to take notice from the

first that I have at least one virtue: I am a truthful woman. It will

save a good deal of explanation if I tell you now that, when the coach

crossed the bridge this evening and I threw into the waters of the Avon

the gold ring I had worn for ten miserable years, I said: ‘Thank God!’”

Simon Rickart took a stumbling turn up and down the room: his daughter

stood watching him, motionless. Then he halted before her and broke into

a protest, by turns incoherent, testy, and plaintive.

“Come to stay—stay a long time! But, this is folly! We’ve no women here,

child, except the servants. David wants no women about him. I don’t want

any women about me! There’s not been a petticoat in this room since you

were last here yourself. And that, that’s ten years ago. You will be

very uncomfortable. You have no kind of an idea of what sort of

existence you are proposing to yourself. I am a mass of selfishness. I

should make your life a burden to you. Be reasonable, my dear! I am a

very old man. Pooh, pooh, I won’t allow it! You must go elsewhere. Hey,

what?”

“I cannot go elsewhere, I have no money.”

“No money! But Marvel! But the fortune I gave you? Tut, tut, what folly

is this now?”

“Gone, gone—and more! He would have died in the Fleet had we not escaped

abroad. The guineas I have now in my purse are the last I own in the

world. All my other worldly goods are in the couple of trunks now in the

passage.” She stopped, and remained awhile silent, then in a lower voice

and slowly: “Look at me, father,” she added, “can I live alone?”

He looked as he was bidden. He, the man who had not always been a

recluse, the whilom man of the world who in older years had taken study

as a hobby, the man of bygone pleasures, appraised her ripe woman’s

beauty with rapid discrimination. Then into the father’s eyes there

sprang a gleam of something like pride—pride of such a daughter—a light

of remembrance, a struggling tenderness. The next moment the worn lids

fell and the old man stood ashamed:

“I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said, gravely, and sank into his chair.

She came round and looked down at him a moment smiling.

“You never heard me walk all about the room,” she said, “I have a light

tread. And I’ll always wear stuff dresses here.” Then, more coaxingly:

“I don’t think you’ll find me much in the way, father. I’ve got good

eyes, I am remarkably intelligent”—she paused a second and, thrusting

out her hands under his brooding gaze, added with a soft laugh: “And you

know I’ve steady hands!”

He stared at the pretty white things. Faintly he murmured:

“But I’m a mass of selfishness!”

“Then I’ll be the more useful to you!” she cried gaily and laid first

her cool, young cheek, then her warm, young lips upon his forehead.

The sap was not yet dead in the old branch, after all. Master Simon’s

body had not become the mere thinking machine he fain would have made

it. There was blood enough still in his old veins to answer to the call

of its own. Memories, tender, remorseful, all human, were still lurking

in forgotten corners of a brain consecrated, he fancied, wholly to

Science; memories which now awoke and clamoured. Slowly he stretched out

his hand and touched his daughter’s cheek.

“Poor child!”

Ellinor Marvel now drew back quietly. Master Simon passed a finger

across his eyes and muttered that their light was getting dim.

“The lamp wants trimming,” she said, and proceeded to do it with that

calm diligence of hers that made her activity seem almost like repose.

But she knew well enough that neither sight nor lamp was failing; and

she felt her home-coming sanctioned.

At this point something black and stealthy began to circle irregularly

round her skirts, tipping them with hardly tangible brush, while a vague

whirring as of a spinning-wheel arose in the air. She stepped back: the

thing followed her and seemed to swell larger and larger, while the

whirrs became as it were multiplied and punctuated by an occasional

catch like the click of clockwork.

“Why, look father!”

There was a gay note in her voice. Master Simon looked, and amazement

was writ upon his learned countenance.

“Belphegor likes you!” he exclaimed, pulling at his beard. “Singular,

most singular! I have never known the creature tolerate anyone’s touch

but my own or Barnaby’s.”

Hardly were the words spoken when, with a magnificent bound, Belphegor

rose from the floor and alighted upon her shoulder—at the exact place he

had selected between the white column of the throat and the spring of

the arm—and instantly folded himself in comfort, his great tail sweeping

her back to and fro, his head caressing her cheek with the touch of a

butterfly’s wing, his enigmatic eyes fixed the while upon his master.

Ellinor laughed aloud, and presently the sound of Master Simon’s nasal

chuckle came into chorus. He rubbed his hands; he was extraordinarily

pleased, though quite unaware of it himself.

Ellinor sat on the arm of his winged elbow-chair—his “Considering

Chair,” as he was wont to describe it—and looked around smiling.

“Still at the same studies, father? How sweet it smells in this room! It

looks smaller than I remember it. I once thought it was as big as a

cathedral. But I myself felt smaller then. How long ago it seems! And

what is that discovery that I came just in time for?”

Master Rickart engaged willingly enough in the track of that pleasant

thought.

“Why, my dear, simply that an old surmise of mine was right. Ha, ha, I

was right.... The active principle of _Geranium Cyanthos_ with the root

of which, as Fabricius relates—Fabricius, the great Dutch traveller and

plant-hunter—the Kaffir warlocks are said to cure dysentery.... It is

positively identical with a similar crystalline substance which I have

for many years obtained from _Hedera Warneriensis_—the species of ivy

that grows about the ruins of Bindhurst Abbey, of which mention is made

by Prynne....”

Thus he rambled on with the selfish garrulity of the old man in the grip

of his hobby; presently, however, he fell back to addressing himself

rather than his listener, and gradually subsided into reflectiveness.

And once more silence drew upon the room.

CHAPTER III

RUSTLING LEAVES OF MEMORY

... The garden-scent

Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation

Of love that came and love that went.

—DOBSON (_A Garden Idyll_).

Long drawn minutes, ticked off by the slow beat of the laboratory clock,

dropped into the abysm of the past.

Master Simon, sunk in his chair, his head bent on his breast, had fallen

into a deep muse. His eyes, fixed upon the face of his daughter—fair and

thrown into fairer relief by Belphegor’s black muzzle nestling close to

it—had gradually gathered to themselves that blank, unseeing look which

betrays a mind set upon inner things.

Ellinor sat still, her shapely hands folded on her lap. She was glad of

the rest, for this was the end of a weary journey. She was glad, also,

of the silence, which gave room to her clamourous thought.

Home again! The only home she had ever known. For those last ten years

seemed only like one hideous, interminable voyage in which she, the

unwilling traveller, had been hurried from port to port without one hour

of rest.

To this house of peace, encircled by a triple ring of silence—the great

walls, the still waters of the moat, and the vast, stately park with its

mute army of trees—she had first been brought at so early an age that

any recollections of other hearth or roof were as vague as those of a

dream-world. But vivid were the memories now crowding back of her former

life here—memories of rosy, healthy childhood.—Aunt Sophia’s kind,

foolish face and her indulgent, unwise rule. Baby Ellinor rolling again

on the velvet sward and pulling off the tulip blossoms by the head;

child Ellinor ranging and roaming in stable and farm, running wild in

the gardens.... Nearly all her joys were somehow mingled with gardens;

with the rosary in the pleasure-grounds, which she roamed every day of

the summer; with the old kitchen garden, where she devoured the

baby-peas and the green gooseberries; with the Herb-Garden—the

mysterious, the strictly forbidden, the alluring Herb-Garden, her

father’s living museum of strange plants!

Between high walls it lay: a long, narrow strip, running down to the

moat on one side and abutting to the blind masonry of the keep on the

other. Here her father—an ever more remote figure, and for some reason

unintelligible to her child’s mind, ever more detached from the common

existence of the house, took his sole taste of air and sunshine. How

often, peeping in through the locked iron gates, she had watched him,

with curiosity and awe, as he passed and re-passed amid the rank

luxuriance of the herbs and bushes, so absorbed in cogitation that his

eyes, when they fell upon the little face behind the bars, never seemed

to see it.—The Herb-Garden! Naturally, this one spot (where, it seemed,

grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil) had a vastly greater

attraction for the small daughter of Eve than the paradise of which she

had the freedom. Aunt Sophia had warned her that the leaf of any one of

those strange herbs might be death! Yet visit the Herbary she often did,

all parental threats and injunctions notwithstanding, by a secret

entrance through the ruins of the keep.

Strange that her thoughts should from the very hour of her return home

hark back so much to the Herb-Garden! No doubt there was suggestion in

all the sweet smells floating now around her. She thought she recognised

_Camphire_ and _Frangipanni_; but there were others too, known yet

nameless; and they brought her back to the fragrant spot, the delights

of which had so long been forgotten.

Her memories were nearly all of solitary childhood. Sir David, the young

master of Bindon, the orphan cousin to whom Simon Rickart was in those

days humourously supposed to play the part of guardian, entered but

little into them, and then only as a grave Eton boy, disdainful of her

torn frocks, of her soiled hands, her shrill joyousness. He and his

sister Maud kept fastidiously aloof.... Maud of the black ringlets and

the fine frocks, who from the first had made her little cousin realise

the gulf that must exist between the child of the poor guardian and the

daughter of the House.

But later came a change.

She was Miss Ellinor—a tall maiden, suddenly alive to the desirableness

of ordered locks and pretty gowns; and young Sir David began to assume

importance within her horizon. How these fleeting memories, evoked by

the essence of Master Simon’s distilling, were sailing in the silence of

the room round Ellinor’s head!

It was during his University years. The young master brought into his

house every vacation an extraordinary stir of eager life. There came

batches of favoured companions, varying according to the mood of the

moment:—youthful philosophers who had got so far beyond the most

advanced thought of the age as to have lost all footing; or exquisite

young dandies, with lisps and miraculously fitting kerseymere pantaloons

and ruffles of lace before which Miss Sophia opened wide mouth and eyes;

or again, serious, aristocratic striplings of earnest political views.

During these invasions Aunt Sophia suddenly developed a spirit of

prudence quite unknown to her usual practice, and Miss Ellinor, much to

her disappointment, was kept studiously in the background. Upon this

head cousin David entered suddenly into the narrow circle of her

emotions. Chafing against the unwonted restraint, Ellinor one day defied

orders, and boldly presented herself at the breakfast-table while her

cousin and two young men of dazzling beauty, all in hunting pink and

buckskins, were partaking of chops and coffee under the chaste ægis of

Miss Sophia Rickart’s ringlets.

How well Ellinor could recall the startling effect of her entrance. She

had walked in with that boldness which girlish timidity can assume under

the spur of a strong will. Miss Sophia had gaped. Three pairs of eyes

were fixed upon the intruder. David’s serious gaze, always so enigmatic

to her. Then the Master of Lochore’s red-brown orbs.—They were something

of the colour of his auburn hair. She had come under their range before,

and had hated them and him upon a sudden instinct, all the more perhaps

for the singular attachment which David was known to have found for

him.—The third espial upon her was one of soft, yet piercing blackness:

she was pulled-up in her would-be nonchalant advance as by an invisible

barrier. David, long and lean in his red and white, had risen and come

across to her with great deliberation. He had taken her hand.

“Cousin Ellinor,” he had said, in a voice of most gentle courtesy, “you

have been misinformed: Aunt Sophia did not request your presence.”

He had bowed, led her out across the threshold, bowed again, and closed

the door. There had been a shout from within, expostulation and

laughter. And she, without, had stamped her sandalled foot and waited to

hear no more. With tears of bitter mortification streaming down her

cheeks she had rushed to her beloved old haunt in the Herb-Garden,

carrying with her an odious vision of her cousin’s face as it bent over

her; of his grave eyes, so strangely light in contrast with the dark

cheek; of the satirical twist of his lips and the mock ceremony of his

manner.

But she had taken with her also another vision; and that was then so

consoling that, as she marched to and fro among the fragrant bushes that

were growing yellow and crisp under autumn skies, she was fain to let

her mind dwell lingeringly upon it. It was the black broad stare of

surprised admiration in young Marvel’s eyes.

Many a time, in the subsequent days, did the walls of the forbidden

gardens enfold her in their secrecy—but not alone. He of the black eyes

had heard of the secret entrance and was by her side many a time—Aye,

and many a time, in the years that followed, had Ellinor told herself,

in the bitterness of her heart, how far better it would have been for

her then to have sucked the poison of the most evil plant that had clung

appealingly round her as she brushed by, listening to young Marvel’s

wooing.

Those were days of courtship: an epidemic of sentiment seemed to have

spread through Bindon. Handsome, ease-loving, bachelor parson

Tutterville developed a sudden energy in the courtship which had

stagnated for years between him and Aunt Sophia, on whose round cheeks

long-forgotten roses bloomed again.

And David too! From one day to the other Sir David Cheveral had

received, it seemed, fair and square in his virgin heart, virgin for all

the brilliant and fast life he seemed to lead, the most piercing dart in

Love’s whole quiver. He was one of those with whom such wounds are ill

to heal. Poor David!

In the prevailing atmosphere he of the black eyes had got his own way

easily enough. Marriage bells were the music of the hour. Parson

Tutterville led the way to the altar with Miss Sophia’s ringlets

drooping upon his arm. Ellinor promptly followed, with lids that were

not easily drooped cast down under the blaze of the drowning black

stare. Ellinor the child, confident little moth throwing her soul

against the first alluring flame, to its torture and undoing!

Well, all that was past! She had revived. She was back at the door of

life, stronger and wiser. But David? David was also alone. After scaling

to the pinnacle of the most exalted, devouring passion, he had had to go

down into the valley again, alone, carrying the sting in his heart.

Alone, always, she had heard. Poor David!

“No!—Happy David,” said Ellinor aloud.

CHAPTER IV

BACK AT A NEW DOOR OF LIFE

Joy’s recollection is no longer joy

While sorrow’s memory is sorrow still!

—BYRON (_Doge of Venice_).

“Eh?” said the old man.

He fixed his gaze once more upon his daughter, and stared at her for a

moment as if her comely presence were but some freakish play of his own

senses.

“Father?”

The knotted wrinkles became softened into an unwilling smile.

“I spoke aloud, didn’t I?” said she. “It must be an inherited trick! I

was thinking of David. He never thought more of marriage?”

“Marriage!”

“Will he never marry, father?”

“David, marry! Oh, pooh! David, wise man, has consecrated his youth to

his pursuit. Pity, though, he did not choose a more satisfactory one!”

Mrs. Marvel lifted Belphegor from her shoulders to the floor and drew

her chair closer.

“You mean his star-gazing? He sits in his tower all night, peering at

the skies, ‘and dreams all day, like an owl.’ That’s what Willum said

when I questioned him just now. Do you also call his a foolish pursuit?”

“He’s a visionary, a dreamer,” answered the other testily. “A splendid

mind, the vigour of a young brain ... and to waste it on the stars, on

distant worlds with which no telescope can ever bring him into any

useful contact, from which no nights of study, were he to live as long

as Methuselah, will ever enable him to gain one single grain heavy

enough to weigh down that scale there, that scale which as you saw, will

not even bear a breath unmoved! And all this world, child, all this

world!” In his enthusiasm the old man had risen and now was pacing the

room. “This teeming, inexhaustible world of ours, full of marvellous,

most subtle secrets yet submissive to our investigation, from the mass

that blocks out our horizon to the tiniest atom that, even beneath this

glass,”—he was now by his work-table and his fingers caressed the

microscope—“is scarce visible to the eye, all obedient to the same laws

and amenable to our ken! With all these treasures at his hand, awaiting

him, he throws away his life on the unattainable, on the stars, on

moonshine!”

The faded dressing-gown flapped about the speaker’s lean legs as he

walked; his white hair swung lightly over his bent shoulders.

Ellinor looked after him with eyes of amusement.

“The short of it,” said she, “is that he prefers his telescope to your

microscope.”

“Fancy to fact, girl! Dreams to reality! Speculation to uses! Ah, what

should we not have done, we two, had he been willing to work down here

instead of up there!”

With a growl Master Simon returned to his sweet-smelling furnace and

began mechanically to feed the fires with charcoal. She heard him

mutter, as if to himself:

“Work with me? Why, I hardly ever even see him! David’s a ghost, rather

than a man—a ghost that rises with the evening shades and disappears at

dawn; that never speaks unless you charge him!”

Ellinor remained silent a while, pondering. Presently she said, in the

voice of one who sees in what to others seems incomprehensible a very

simple proposition:

“He lives, it would appear, uplifted in thoughts beyond the sordid

things of earth. He knows no disillusion, for the unattainable star will

never crumble to ashes in his hand. He will never see of what ugly clay

the distant and glorious planet may, after all, be made! I say: happy

David ... not to have married his first love.”

“Tush! Don’t you believe that David ever thinks of love.”

He made an impatient motion with the bellows and cast over his shoulder

a look of severity, of surprise that a person who had shown herself

capable of managing the rider on his scale should endeavour to engage

him in the discussion of such trivialities in this appallingly short

life.

Their glances met. It was his own spirit that looked back to him,

brightly defiant, out of eyes as brilliant and as searching as his own,

and as blue.

“These things, these unconsidered trifles of hearts and hopes and

sorrows, they’re quite beneath notice, are they not, father? You know no

more of the woman that drove poor David to the top of his tower—the

David I remember was not a recluse—than you did of the dashing, handsome

youth to whom you handed over your only child ... that she might live

happy ever after!”

The widow laughed. But it was with a twist of her ripe, red mouth and a

harsh sound like the note of an indignant bird.

The old man, remained arrested for a space, stooping over the stove with

the bellows poised in his hand, as if the meaning of her words were

slowly filtering to his brain. Then, letting his implement fall with a

little clatter, he shuffled back towards his daughter and stood again

gazing at her, his lips moving noiselessly, his eye dim and troubled.

Master Simon’s mind, trained to such alertness in dealing with a certain

set of ideas, groped like that of a child in the endeavour to lay hold

of the new living problem.

At length he put out a trembling finger and timidly laid it for a second

on her hand. She looked up at him with an altered expression, infinitely

soft and womanly.

“I am afraid,” said he quickly, as if ashamed of the breakdown of his

own philosophy, “I am afraid you have suffered, my girl.”

“I never complained while it lasted,” she answered. “I shall not

complain now that it is over.”

He gathered the skirts of his gown more closely about him and regarded

her from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression of deadly

earnestness in singular contrast with his appearance.

“You spent long nights in tears, child, longing for the sound of his

step?”

“How do you know?” she answered, flashing at him.

“Your mother did,” he sighed.

There fell a heavy pause, during which Belphegor sang with the simmering

phials a quaint duet as fine as a gossamer thread.

“Until the morning dawned, when I dreaded the sound of that step,” said

the widow at last.

Master Simon frowned more deeply. New wrinkles gathered on his

countenance.

“A worthless fellow! A wastrel, a gambler, a reprobate! And you doing

your wife’s part of screening and mending, nursing and paying. Aye, aye,

I know it all. It was your mother’s fate.”

“And did my mother get cursed for her pains, and struck?”

The old man started as if the word had indeed been a blow.

“Ah, no,” he cried sharply. “Ah, no, not that, never that!”

Ellinor came close and laid her hands on his shoulders.

“Bad enough, God knows,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Heedless and

selfish—but that, never!”

She looked at him, long and tenderly. When she spoke her tones and words

were as full of deliberate comfort as her touch.

“Father,” she said, “compare yourself no more to that man. Your mind and

his—what his was—are as the poles asunder. My mother’s life and mine, as

Heaven and Hell. I did my duty to the end: whilst he lived, I lived by

his side. He is dead—let him be forgotten! Life, surely, is not all

bitterness and ashes,” she added a little wistfully. Then, with a return

of brightness: “I have come back to you. I don’t know what I should have

done if I had not had you. But here I am. This is the opening hour of my

new life!”

The clock, in its dumb way, struck the hour of ten.

“Surely, father,” said Ellinor suddenly, “one of your little pots is

rocking!”

There was a spirt of aromatic steam, in the midst of which white head

and golden head bent together over the furnace; and young eyes and old

eyes, so strangely alike, were fixed upon the boiling mysteries of the

pharmacopic experiment. An adroit question here, a steadying touch there

of those admirable hands and Master Simon, forgetting all else, began to

direct and once more to explain—explain with an eager flow of words very

different indeed from his disjointed solitary talk.

Chemistry or alchemy—how were the whimsical old student’s laboratory

pursuits to be described? Chemist he was undoubtedly, by exactness of

knowledge; but alchemist, too, by the visionary character of his

scientific enthusiasm, though he himself derided the suggestion.

“Powder of projection? Nonsense, nonsense!” he would have cried. “Not in

the scheme of our world. Much use to mankind if gold became cheaper than

lead!... Elixir of Life? Again preposterous! Given birth, death is

Nature’s law.... But pain and premature decay—ah, there opens quite

another road!—that is the physician’s province to conquer. And if one

seeks but well enough for the _panacea_, the _universal anodyne_, the

true _nepenthes_, eh, eh, who knows? Such a thing is undoubtedly to be

found. Doubtless! Have we not already partially lifted up the veil?

_Opium_ (grandest of brain soothers!) and _Jesuit’s Bark_ and the

_Ether_ of Frobœnius, and Sir Humphry’s _laughing gas_! Yet those are

but partial victors; the All-Conqueror has yet to be discovered.”

Such a discovery Master Simon (who was first of all a botanist) had

settled in his mind was to be made in the veins of some plant or other;

and, therefore, with all the ardour of the student of mature years

racing against Time, he now devoted all his energies to this special

branch of investigation. Hence, perhaps the forgotten title of “simpler”

was the most appropriate to this follower of Boerhaave and Hales. In the

absorbing delight of his hobby he was given to experiment recklessly

upon himself as well as upon others, after the method of that other

fervent student of old, Conrad Gessner; and whatever the result, noxious

or beneficent, he generally found in it confirmation of some theory.

“If the juices of certain herbs can produce melancholia, or the fury of

madness, or idiocy, why should we not find in others the soothing of

oblivion, or the stimulus to exalted thought, or the spur of genius? Why

not,” he would say, “But life’s so short, life’s so short....”

The door was opened noiselessly. Barnaby, the _famulus_, clutching the

tray, stood staring, open mouthed, in upon them.

“Hang that boy!” said Master Simon testily and, pretending not to notice

the interruption, proceeded with his disquisition on the admirable

things he meant to extract from Camphire or Henne-weed.

“Is that all they give you for supper, father?”

She had walked up to the tray which had been deposited on a corner of

the table.

“A jug of ale!” she exclaimed with disfavour. “Small-ale—and sour at

that, I’ll be bound!” She poured a few drops into the tumbler, sipped

and grimaced. “Pah! Bread—heavy and yesterday’s. Cheese! Last year’s, I

should say—and simply because the mice wouldn’t have any more of it!”

Indignation rose within her as she compared this treatment of her father

with memories of Bindon’s hospitality in bygone days. “And an apple!”

she added, with scathing precision.

“Most wholesome,” suggested the simpler, deprecating interference.

“Wholesome!” she snorted. “Upon the theory of the dangers of

over-eating, I suppose! And what a jug—what a tumbler!”

“Barnaby is rather clumsy,” apologised his master. “Apt to break a good

deal. So I, it was I, begged Mrs. Nutmeg to provide us with stout ware.”

“What old Margery!—old Margery Nutmeg still here!” A shadow fell upon

Ellinor’s face—the next moment it was gone. “Ugh! How I always hated

that woman! I had forgotten all about her. It is a way I have: I forget

the unpleasant! Well!” with a laugh, “now I understand. But I’ll warrant

her well-cushioned frame is not supported upon the diet of wholesomeness

meted out to you! Heavens! but what is this dreadful little mess in the

brown bowl?”

“Belphegor’s supper,” answered his master with rebuking gravity.

“They treat him no better than they do you, father!”

She paused, took the edge of the tablecloth between her taper finger and

thumb and thrust out a disdainful lip.

“What a cloth! Not even quite clean!”

“Mrs. Nutmeg has limited us. Barnaby has an unfortunate propensity for

upsetting things,” humbly interposed the philosopher.

“Then Barnaby, whoever he is, ought to be soundly trounced,” asserted

Mrs. Marvel.

She wheeled round on the boy, who still stared at her with round

eyes—but her father laid an averting hand upon her arm.

“Hush,” he said, inconsequently lowering his voice, “the poor lad is

deaf and dumb.”

“Deaf and dumb, your servant?”

Fresh amazement sprang to her face, succeeded by a lightening

tenderness.

“He suits me, child,” cried the old man, hurriedly. “Pray do not

attribute to me any foolish philanthropy, I’m a——”

She interrupted him with a gay note:

“A mass of selfishness, of course—Who could doubt it, who knew you an

hour? Well, I am a mass of selfishness, too. Oh, I am your own daughter,

as you’ll discover for yourself very soon! And such frugality as Master

Simon is made to practise will never suit Mistress Ellinor. Can your

appetite for these, these wholesome things, bide half an hour, father?”

Without awaiting the answer, she placed Belphegor’s portion on the

floor, handy to his convenience, then whisked up the tray, bestowed a

nod and a radiant smile upon Barnaby (that made him her slave from

henceforth) and briskly left the room. Barnaby automatically followed.

Master Simon rubbed his bald head and tugged at his beard. Belphegor was

stamping on the hearth rug with a monstrous hump and bristling tail,

preparatory to addressing himself to his supper.

“So here we are, with a female about us after all, my cat! But she seems

an exceptionally reasonable person—quite a remarkable woman.”

His eye fell on the notes of his experiment, and a crinkling smile

spread upon his countenance. “There is something about the touch of a

woman’s hand,” he murmured, and promptly became absorbed again.

“I have not been very long, have I?” said Ellinor, when in due course

she returned, followed by Barnaby with a tray.

The student lifted his hand warningly without withdrawing his eyes from

his array of figures.

“Never fear,” said she, “your table shall be sacred.”

She fetched a large round stool and motioned to Barnaby to deposit his

burden thereon. It was a tray of mightily increased dimensions, graced

with damask (a little yellow, perhaps, from the long hoarding, but fine

and pure), laden with cut crystal, with purple and gold china. The light

of a pair of silver candlesticks gleamed on the red of wine, on the

flowery whiteness of bread, on the engaging pink of wafer slices of ham

and the firm primrose roll of a proper housewife’s butter.

“Shall we not sup?” said Mistress Marvel.

She poured into the diamond-cut glass a liquor of exquisite fragrance

and colour, and placed it in her father’s hand. And, as he raised it to

his lips almost unconsciously, a faint glow, like the spectre of the

ruby in his glass, crept upon the pallor of his cheek.

“What is this?” he exclaimed, in interested tones, holding out the

beaker to the light.

“Not small-ale!” laughed she. “Not small beer whatever it be! I have

seen,” she added musingly, whilst her father contemplated her with

astonishment, “I have seen strange things at Bindon since I arrived this

evening, and could scarce obtain admittance in the unlit courtyard, (old

watchman Willum recognised me, that was at least something). At the

front door, dark, cold, forbidding, not one servant in attendance! I had

to enter the house like a thief, by the back ways. It seems like a house

under a spell! Ah, very different from the Bindon of old! But I have

seen nothing stranger than the servants’ hall, whither Barnaby took me

in silence—a good lad, your Barnaby,” and she cast a friendly glance

over her shoulder at the still figure behind her. “I don’t know,” she

resumed, taking up the fork, “whether they treat David as they treat

you, his cousin, but they look well after themselves!”

She laughed, but a colour of anger had mounted again to her brow.

“Margery is away, it seems; so old Giles tells me. He was bringing up

the wine for supper. Are you listening, father? Wine for the servants’

supper! And lighting these candlesticks! And if they consider cheese and

ale good enough for you, do not think they misunderstand the meaning of

good cheer. So we made the raid—and here you have some of their fare.

Drink sir!”

CHAPTER V

QUENCHLESS STARS ELOQUENT

O, who shall tell what deep inspirèd things

Thou speakest me, when, tranquil as the skies,

O Night, I stand in shadow of thy wings,

And with thy robe of suns fulfil mine eyes!

—E. SWEETMAN (_The Star-Gazer_).

It is no unusual thing for a man whom human love has betrayed and left

bare; whose life some violent human passion has robbed of all savour, to

turn for consolation to the things of heaven. This is what, in course of

time, had befallen Sir David Cheveral, when his youthful dream of

happiness had fled before a bitter awakening. But the heaven to which he

had turned was not that “Realm beyond the Stars” pictured by the faith

of ages, but that actual region above and about our globe, as mysterious

a world, perhaps, and as little heeded by the bulk of mankind; that

immensity peopled by other suns and earths, ruled by a harmony so vast

and grandiose that the thought of centuries is but beginning to grasp

it; that universe of space and time, as unfathomable to our finite

groping senses and as appealing to imagination and reason both as any

realm of eternity pictured by the poets of any creed!

The worlds outside the earth, then, seemed for years to have given to

his desolate spirit, gradually and absorbingly, all that the world of

earth has in different ways to give to man.

The dome of heaven was David Cheveral’s mistress. To his phantasy, a

mistress ever variable and ever loved; whether chastely remote, ridden

by the fine silver crescent, emblem of virginity; or passionate,

low-brooding, full-mooned and crimson, pregnant with autumn promise; or

yet high and cold, in winter magnificence, sparkling with the jewels

that are beyond dreams of splendour; or yet again veiled and

indifferent; or stormy, cloud-wracked with the anger of the gods;

condescending now with exquisite intimacy, anon passing as irrevocably

as Diana from her shepherd. Who that had once loved such a mistress

could ever turn back to one of earth again? So thought the star-dreamer

of Bindon.

And this esthetic passion was at the same time his art and his

life-work. It filled not only heart, but mind. Endless was the lesson to

be learned, opening the road endlessly to others; untiring the labour to

be expended; his own the genius to divine, to grasp, to translate; and

his also every gratification, every reward! So thought the star-dreamer.

He had drifted into a life of study and contemplation as solitary men

drift into eccentricity; and if in its all absorbing tendency there

lurked madness of a sort, there was a harmonious method in it; and to

him, at least (precious boon!), it spelt peace of soul.

Every day’s work of such a study meant a fresh conquest of the mind,

noble and peaceful. Mighty conceptions unfolded themselves to an

ever-soaring intellect and thrust back more and more the pigmy doings of

this small earth into their proper insignificance. Meanwhile his sight

was rejoiced with beauty ever renewed. The music of the spheres played

its great harmonies to his fastidious ear; the rhythm of a universal

poetry, too exquisite to find expression in mere words, settled upon a

mind ever attuned to vastness, till the drab miseries of humanity seemed

well-nigh fallen away, and the petty fret of everyday life, the chafing,

the disillusion, the smart of pride, the cry of the senses, were as

forgotten things.—His soul was filled with visions.

Now on this evening, while Master Simon in his laboratory underground

was being called by unexpected claims from his own line of abstraction,

something equally startling had occurred to Sir David Cheveral in his

observatory.

He was pacing his airy platform on the top of the keep, under an

exquisite and pensive sky of most benign charity. Never had he felt

himself more uplifted to the empyrean, more detached from a sordid

world, than at the beginning of this watch. Deep beyond deep spread the

blue vasts above him. As the lover knows the soul of his beloved, so his

vision, unaided, pierced into the heart of mysteries that even through

the telescope would be veiled to the neophyte.

Upon her moonless brow this autumnal night wore a coronal of stars that

might have shamed her later glories. The Heavenly Twins and Giant Orion

beginning the southward ascent in splendid company; Aldebaran, fiery-red

eye of the Bull; the tremulous pearly sheen of the Pleiades; the grand,

upright cross of Cygnus, planted in the very stream of the Milky Way,

and, slowly sinking towards the West, the gracious circlet of the

Northern Crown—when had Night’s greater jewels shone with more

entrancing lustre upon the diaper of her endless lesser gems!

David Cheveral turned from one field of beauty to another; anon

reckoning his treasures with a jealous eye, anon letting the vast beauty

mirror itself in his soul as in a placid pool.

But rapture is ever tracked by fatigue: it seems to be an envious,

miserly law of our finite nature that every spell of exaltation must be

paid for by despondency. Melancholy is but the weariness either of mind

or of body: often of both. The airs were variable and cold, and food had

not passed his lips for many hours; yet he had no conscious hankering

for the warm hearthstones beneath him; no conscious desire for the touch

of a fellow hand or the sound of a human voice. But, by slow degrees

there crept upon him an unwonted and profound sadness.

A familiar catch-phrase of Master Simon’s:—“And life’s so short! and

life’s so short!”—had begun to haunt his thoughts, to whisper in his

ear, lulled though it was by the voice of solitude. A sense of his own

limitations before this illimitable began to oppress him. So much beauty

and but one sense with which to possess it: but weak mortal eyes and an

imperfect vision, inferior even to that of many an animal! To feel

within oneself the intellect, the power to conceive the creations of a

God, and to know that one’s ignorance was still as vast as the field of

knowledge offered ... the pity of it! With every gracious night such as

this to glean a little more of the rich harvest—and life so short that,

were one to live a cycle beyond the allotted span, the truth garnered in

the end would be but as motes glinting here and there in floods of

light!

Such revolts give way to lassitude. The useless “Why?” is inevitably

succeeded by the “_Cui bono?_”

The astronomer who was too much of a poet—the star-dreamer, as men

called him—drew a deep sigh. He had been tempted from his self-allotted

task of calculation as a lover may be tempted to dally in adoration of

his beloved. He now turned to go back to his table, but as he did so was

once more arrested in spite of himself by the fascination of the great

dome.

As it is the desire of man to possess what he finds most beautiful, so

is it the instinct of the poet, of the painter, of the musician, to

express and give again to the world the captured ideal.—The pain of

impotency clutched at the dreamer’s heart.

But of a sudden he started; his sad eyes became alert and fixed.—An

event that happens but at rarest times in the history of human

observation had taken place under his very gaze.

A new gem had been added to the splendours of the heavens!

His languid pulses beat quicker. He passed his hand across his brow; no,

it was not the overworked student’s hallucination! Did he not know every

aspect of the constellation, of the evening, of the hour? Sooner might a

woman miscount her jewels, a collector his treasures, than he misread

the face of his idol! It was no fancy. There, above the Northern Crown,

a new star—a fire of surpassing radiance had flashed out of his sky even

at the moment of his looking.

He had seen it suddenly blossoming, as if it were into his own garden,

like a magic flower from some hidden bud. An unknown light had pulsed

into existence where darkness hitherto had reigned.

A new star had been born! His soul caught up the fire of its brilliance.

It was as if his transient faithlessness had been beautifully rebuked;

his faintness of heart driven forth by a glance of his beloved’s eyes.

Nay, it was as if, in some fashion, his mystic espousal had brought

forth life. To him had been given what is not given to man once in a

cycle—to receive the first flash of a world!

Inexpressibly stirred, filled with enthusiasm, he hurried to his

instruments and with eager hand turned the great lenses upon the

apparition.

Out of the chasm of those inconceivable spaces—from the first

contemplation of which, it is said, the neophyte recoils with something

like terror—broke, swirling, the splendour of a star where certainly no

star had ever been seen before. _His star!_ Breaking from the darkness,

it sailed across the field of his vision, radiant, sapphire, gorgeously,

exquisitely blue!

To every man who lives more in the spirit than in the flesh there come

moments when the _afflatus_ of the gods seems to descend upon him;

moments of intuition, inspiration or hallucination, when he sees things

not revealed to the ordinary mortal. What, in his sudden exalted mood,

David Cheveral saw that night was never vouchsafed to him again. It was

beyond anything he could ever put into words; almost, in saner moments,

he shrank from putting it into thought.

When at length he descended from his altitudes and touched earth again,

though still as in a trance, he entered a record of the discovery on his

chart. Every student of the heavens knows that a new star is oftener

than not temporary and may fade away as mysteriously as it has blazed

forth. His next care, although it was against his habits to invite the

company of his fellow creature, was instinctively to seek another

witness to the event.

However man may cut himself adrift from his kin, the impulses of his

nature remain ever the same in critical moments. A joy is not complete

until it is shared; a triumph is savourless until it is acclaimed.

He was still dazed from the strain of watching, from the gloom of the

black tower stairs and of the long unlit passages when he reached the

basement rooms that were Master Simon’s province at Bindon.

Pushing open the heavy oaken door, he stood a moment looking in.

There was cheerful candle-gleam where he was wont to find dimness; a gay

sound of laughter and words where silence used to reign; and instead of

Master Simon’s bent grey head, there rose before his sight, haloed with

light, so white and pure as almost to seem luminous itself, a young

forehead set in a radiance of crisp, fiery-gold hair. His eyes

encountered the beam of two unknown eyes, exquisitely blue. Blue as his

star!

And he thought he still saw visions; thought that his star had as

suddenly and sweetly taken living shape here below as above in the

unattainable skies.

CHAPTER VI

EYES, BLUE AS HIS STAR

——Dwelt on my heaven a face

Most starry-fair, but kindled from within

As ’twere with dawn!

—TENNYSON (_The Lover’s Tale_).

On the new-comer’s entrance Ellinor looked up. The smile was arrested on

her lips and her eyes grew grave with wonder: there was something

curiously unsubstantial, something almost fantastic in the man that

stood thus, framed in the gaping darkness of the doorway.

That pale head, refined to ætherealisation, with its masses of dense,

black hair; that straight figure, unusually tall and seeming taller

still by reason of its exceeding leanness, romantically draped in the

folds of a sable-lined cloak; above all, those eyes, under penthouse

brows, singularly light and luminous in spite of their deep-setting,

gazing straight at her, through her and beyond her—the eyes of the

dreamer, or rather of the seer! In her surprise she failed for the

moment to connect with this apparition the forgotten identity of the

“cousin David” she had known in her girl days; the smooth-cheeked

lad—dandy, fox-hunter, poet, politician—but in every phase, image of

assertive and satisfied youth.

Master Simon broke the spell of the singular moment.

“Ah, David,” quoth he, “dazed—moonstruck as usual? Awake, good dreamer,

awake! There have been fine happenings here below while you were

frittering God’s good time, blinking at your stars!”

He rose from his seat and shuffled round the table with quite unusual

alertness. A glass of the vintage served to him by his daughter had

brought a transient fire into the sluggish veins. As he tapped David on

the arm, the latter turned his abstracted gaze upon him with a new

bewilderment: the bloodless simpler, with a pink glow upon his cheek,

with skull-cap rakishly askew on his bald head, with a roguish gleam in

his usually keenly-cold eye—unwonted spectacle!

“We’ve done great things to-night,” repeated the old gentleman

excitedly. “That experiment, David, successfully carried through at

last! It is exactly as I surmised—you remember? The Geranium of the

Hottentot, Fabricius’ plant and our Ivy here—contain the same principle!

Ah, that was worth finding out, if you like!”

His bony fingers beat a triumphant tattoo on David’s motionless arm.

“What do you say to that?” insisted Master Simon.

The astronomer was still silent. The light in his eyes had faded; but

they brightened again when he brought them back upon Ellinor. This time,

however, they were less distant, less dreamily amazed, more humanly

curious.

“And I have drunk wine,” pursued Master Simon. An unctuous chuckle ran

through his ancient pipe. “Ichor from the veins of a noble plant, _Vitis

Vinifera_, David, compounded of dew and earth juices, sublimated by

sunshine.... Beautiful cryptic processes!” He paused, closed his eyes

over the inward vision, and then added with solemn simplicity: “It is

chemically richer, that’s obvious, I may say it is altogether superior

as a cerebral stimulant to table-ale. That was her opinion.” He jerked

his thumb in the direction of Ellinor. “And I endorse it.... I endorse

it. She——”

“She?” interrupted Sir David. His voice was deep and grave, and Ellinor

then remembered vaguely that even as a child she had liked the sound of

it. A new flood of old memories rushed back upon her; she rose to her

feet and came forward quickly, stretching out both her hands:

“Cousin David, don’t you know me?”

“To be sure,” cried her father gaily, “I have been extremely remiss.

This is Ellinor, our little Ellinor. Shake hands with Ellinor. She’s

come to stay here. So she says.”

He stopped upon the phrase and pulled at his beard, flinging a quick,

doubtful look at the master of the house. “I told her we, neither of us,

are good company for women that—in fact, it is impossible for thinking

men, such as we are, to have a high opinion of her sex, but”—he waved

his arm with a magisterial gesture—“I have already discovered, and you

know my diagnoses are habitually correct, that my daughter is an

unusually intelligent, sensible person, and that we might no doubt both

benefit by her company.”

“If cousin David will allow me to stay,” said Ellinor gently.

She was standing quite motionless in the same attitude, her hands

outstretched, bending a little forward, her face slightly uplifted—for

tall as she was she had to look up to meet her cousin’s eyes. Repose was

so essentially one of her characteristics, that there was nothing

suggestive either of awkwardness or of affectation in this arrested

poise of impulsive gesture.

The heavy cloak fell from David as he unfolded his arms and, hardly

conscious of what he was doing, slowly took both her hands. Her fingers

closed upon his in a grasp that felt warm and firm.

“That’s right,” said Master Simon. “Why, you were big brother and little

sister in the old days. Kiss her David.”

The magic Burgundy was still working wonders; for the moment this old

fantastic being had gone back thirty years in geniality, in humanity.

“Kiss her, David,” he repeated.

The dark and pale face of Sir David, severe yet gentle, bent over

Ellinor.

Half-laughing, half-startled, yet with a feminine unwillingness to be

the one to attach importance to a cousinly greeting, she turned her

cheek towards him. But the kiss of the recluse, was—she never knew

whether by design or accident—laid slowly upon her half-opened, smiling

lips.

Had anyone told Ellinor Marvel who, during four years had cried at love

and during six years more had railed at it, that her heart would ever be

stirred in the old, sweet mad way because of the touch of a man’s lips,

she would, in superb security, have scorned the suggestion. Yet now,

when she turned away, it was to hide a crimsoning face and a quickening

breath.

Nay, such a flutter, as of wild birds’ wings, was in her breast, that

she vaguely feared it could not escape the notice even of Master Simon’s

happy abstractedness.

When she again looked at his kinsman, she found that he had been pressed

into a chair beside hers; and that her father, with guileless

hospitality, was forcing upon his host a glass of his own choice

vintage.

But, as she looked, she thought she could note a flush, kindred to her

own, slowly fading from David’s forehead, and, in the hand he extended

passively for the glass, ever so slight a trembling. The next moment she

was full of doubt: his reserve seemed complete, his presence almost

austere. And she blushed again, for her own blushes.

As if to a silent toast, Sir David drained the goblet; then turning his

eyes upon her:

“You are welcome, Ellinor,” he said.

The young widow started at the words, and her discomposure increased.

There occurred to her for the first time a sense of the strange position

in which she had placed herself; of her impertinence in thus coolly

announcing her intention of taking up her residence at Bindon, without

even the formality of asking its owner’s leave. But after listening a

while to the disjointed conversation that now had become engaged between

her father and David, the quaintness and sweetness of the relationship

between the two men—the unconscious manner in which such whole-hearted

hospitality was bestowed and received without any sense of obligation on

one side, or of generosity on the other, struck her deeply, and brought

at once a smile to her lips and a mist to her eyes.

“To every law there are special exceptions,” remarked Master Simon,

sententiously. “David may be quite convinced that I should not have

entertained the idea of permitting any ordinary young person of the

opposite sex to take up her abode under our studious roof. But a few

moments have convinced me, as I said before, that Ellinor may be classed

among the abnormal—the abnormal which, as you know, David, can be

typically represented as well by the double-hearted rose as by the

double-headed calf.” He paused to enjoy the conceit, then insisted:

“Represented, I say, by the beautiful no less than by the monstrous.”

“By the beautiful indeed,” echoed the astronomer.

Ellinor glanced at him quickly. But his gaze, though fixed upon her

eyes, was so abstracted, that she could not take the words to herself.

Altogether her cousin’s personality baffled her. He had not been one

minute beside her, before, in her woman’s way, she had noted every

detail of his appearance; noted, approved, and wondered.

This recluse, indeed, seemed to bestow the most fastidious care on his

person. At a glance she had marked the long, slender hands, white and

shapely, the singularly fine linen, the fit and texture of the sombre

clothes of a past mode that clung to his spare, but well-knit limbs. The

contrast between this choiceness, which would not have misfitted a dandy

of the Town, and his dreamer’s countenance offered a problem which was

undoubtedly fascinating.

There was also something of pride of blood in her approval of his

high-bred air; and, at the same time, a sufficient consciousness of the

remoteness of their kinship to make the memory of his lips upon hers a

troubling one. Added to this, there was a baffling impression in the

atmosphere of apartness from the world which enwrapped him. His

eyes—what did they see as they looked at her so long, so straight? Not

the living Ellinor: no man could so look on a woman, as man on woman,

without passion or effrontery! Not once had he smiled. With all his

courtesy—a courtesy that sat on him as becomingly as his garments—hardly

had he noticed her ministration to plate or glass. The carelessness,

also, with which he accepted her arrival, without an inquiry as to its

cause, without the smallest show of interest in her past and present

circumstances, stirred her imagination, whilst it vexed her vanity.

“I believe,” she thought, “he has even forgotten I have ever been

married. Nay I vow,” thought she, a little amused, a good deal piqued,

“it is a matter of serene indifference to cousin David whether I be

maid, wife, or widow!”

“Ellinor, my girl,” said the old man, pushing his plate from him, “this

sort of thing is well enough for once in a way, and more particularly as

my work, thanks to your timely assistance, is concluded for the night.

But I must not be tempted to such an abandonment to the appetites

another evening!”

“Very well, father,” answered she demurely, while a dimple crept out, as

she surveyed his unfinished slice of ham and the fragments of his bread.

“As to the wine,” pursued he, “it is another matter. I will not deny

that wine, producing this pleasant exhilaration (were it not accompanied

by the not disagreeable langour which I now feel, and which is the

result of my own self-indulgence) might stimulate the brain to greater

lucidity than does the usual liquor provided by Mrs. Nutmeg. It is quite

possible,” he went on, leaning back in his chair while the lamplight

played on the shrunken line of his figure, on the silver beard, and the

diaphanous countenance. “It is quite possible that even as the plant

requires sun-rays to produce its designed colour, so the veins of man

may require this distillation of sun-heat and sun-light to liberate to

the utmost his potential forces. David, we may both be the better of

this drinkable sunshine!”

As he spoke, he meditatively sipped and gazed at the glass which his

daughter had unobtrusively refilled.

The astronomer had been crumbling the white bread and eating and

drinking much in the same frugal and half unconscious manner as the

simpler; it seemed as if spirits so attuned to secluded paths of thought

could scarce condescend to notice the material needs.

But upon Master Simon’s last remark, Sir David put down his beaker.

“Drinkable sunshine!” he cried, the light of the enthusiast leaped into

his eye. He rose from the table as he spoke. “Ah, cousin Simon, I have

this night drunk into my soul its fill of creating light.”

“Pooh! With your cold stars,” scoffed the simpler, once more eyeing the

gorgeous colour of the wine against the light.

“The sun that raises from the soil and vivifies your plants, that gives

the soul to the wine you are drinking, is one of the lesser stars,” said

the astronomer gravely. “The countless stars you deem so cold are suns—I

have to-night watched the birth of a new distant world of fire.”

“Ah,” commented the other, calmly scientific. “A phenomenon, like

Ellinor here, rare, but possible.”

“I came down to tell you, to bring you back with me to see it,” David

continued, and Ellinor could detect the exaltation of his thoughts in

manner and voice. “Come, master of the microscope and of the test-tube,

come and see the new star. Come and witness such a wonder as those

microscopes, those crucibles will never show you.”

“My good young friend,” exclaimed the aged student, “while you, through

your astrolabes, watch the revolving, the fading and growing of systems

which you can neither control nor make use of, I, through those second

eyes and those regulated fires, not only learn for the great benefit of

science at large, the workings of the atoms that absolutely rule, nay,

compose all life here below, but I can direct and guide them in one

direction, neutralise or stimulate them in another, make them in short

bring good or evil to humanity. I delight my own brain, but I also

benefit the vast, suffering body of my kind.”

“The body, the body!” repeated the other, at once sweetly and

contemptuously but still with the fire in his eye.

On his side Master Simon chuckled and rubbed his hands over his

irrefutable arguments.

Then Sir David said again, almost as if he had not before proffered the

request:

“Come, cousin, I want you to look at my new star.”

“Not I,” laughed Master Simon, tossing down the last drop of his second

glass with the quaintest air of “abandonment,” wrapping his faded gown

about him and folding himself in it as in a mantle of luxurious egotism.

“Not I? Shall I spoil all these excellent impressions and bring my poor

old bones back to a sense of age and infirmity by dragging them up your

cold stairs to the top of your tower, there to stand in your draughty

box and let all the winds of heaven find out my weak points—for the

pleasure of gaping at a speck of light than which this lamp here is not

less handsome, while immeasurably more useful? No, Sir David!”

Ellinor laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm.

“May I come?”

She spoke upon the true feminine impulse which cannot bear to see the

avoidable disappointment inflicted; a feeling which men, and wisely,

cultivate not at all in their commerce with each other.

David, again back in spirit with the heavens, turned upon her much the

same look he had given her upon his first entrance. Then, as he stood a

second, to all outward appearance impassive and detached, a curious

feeling as of the realisation of some beautiful dream took possession of

his senses. The fragrant breath of the distilled and sublimated herbs,

“yielding up their little souls, good little souls!” in aromatic

dissolution, filled his nostrils as with an extraordinary meaning. The

sound of his kinswoman’s voice, the touch of her hand, the subtle,

out-of-door freshness of her presence in this warm room—all these things

struck chords that had long been silent in his being. And the glance of

her eyes! It was as blue as his star!

He took her fingers with a certain grace of gesture, born it might be of

the forgotten minuets of his adolescent days, and prepared to lead her

forth. But at the door he paused.

“As your father says, it is cold upon my tower.”

So speaking, he placed upon her shoulders his own cloak of furs. And, as

he drew the folds together under her chin, their eyes met again. She

looked very young and very fair. For the first time that evening he

smiled.

“Big brother and little sister!” he said.

Now, for some reason which at the moment Ellinor would stoutly have

refused to define even to herself, the words were in no way such as it

pleased her to hear from his lips. But the smile that lit up the

darkness and austerity of his countenance like a ray of light, and

altered its whole character into something indescribably gentle, went

straight to her heart and lingered there as a memory sweet and rare.

Master Simon watched the door close upon them with an expression at once

humourous and philosophically disapproving. Belphegor, sharpening his

claws on the hearthrug, glanced up at his master with a soundless mew,

as after all these distractions and disturbances the well-known quiet

muttering fell again upon the air.

“I took her for the _rara avis_,” said the old man to himself, “but, I

fear me, what I thought at first was the black swan may prove but a

little grey goose after all! handmaid to that poor loony, with his

circles and degrees as to assist me—me! And after displaying such an

intelligent interest, too ...! Alas, my cat, ’tis but a woman!”

CHAPTER VII

NEW ROADS UNFOLDING

The stars at midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place ...

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

—WORDSWORTH (_Lyrical Poems_).

The first hour which Ellinor spent with David, uplifted from the gloomy

earth into the bosom of the night—they were so unutterably alone, amid

the sleeping world with the great, watchful company of the stars!—was

one, she knew, that would alter the whole course of her life; the pearly

colour of which would thenceforth tint her every emotion.

Not indeed that one word, one touch, one look even of his could lead her

to believe she had made on the man anything approaching the impression

that she herself had felt. On the contrary, the apartness which had been

noticeable even under the genial circumstances of the meal shared

together in the light and warmth of Master Simon’s room became

intensified when they entered the solitude, the mystic atmosphere of his

high, silent retreat.

And yet she knew that she would not by one hair’s breadth have him

different! In the whirlpool of the fast existence into which, like a

straw, her young life had been tossed, there was not one man—even during

that early period when “pinks” and “bucks,” undeniable gentlemen, were

her husband’s faithful companions—but would have regarded the situation

as an opportunity that, “as you live,” should be gallantly taken

advantage of. But he—through the long passages of the house, up the

narrow, winding stairs of the tower, he conducted her, for all his

absent-mindedness, as a courtier might conduct his queen! When they

reached the platform of the keep, upon the threshold of the observatory

she tripped up against some unnoticed step, and would have fallen had he

not caught her in his arms. For an instant her bosom must have lain

against his heart, the strands of her hair against his lips; and she

honoured him for the simplicity with which he supported her and gave her

his hand to lead her in.

A strange apartment, the like of which she had never dreamed, this

chosen haunt of her strange kinsman! Wrapt in the sables that

encompassed her so warmly, her eye wandered, from the dome with its

triangular slit through which a slice of sky looked ineffably remote, to

the fantastic instruments (or so they seemed to her) just visible in the

diffuse light, with gleams here and there of brass or silver, or milky

polish of ivory.

She watched him move about, now a shadow in the shadow, now with a white

flicker from the lamp upon the pale beauty of his face. She listened in

the deep night’s silence, now to the inexorable dry beat of the

astronomer’s clock, now to the grave music of his voice, as he spoke

words which, for all her comprehension of their meaning, might have been

in an unknown tongue, and yet delighted her ear.

“There is the mural circle, and yonder my altazimuth. But what I wanted

to show you is to be best seen in this, the equatorial.”

Under his manipulation the machine moved with a magic softness of

action—the domed roof turning with roll of wheels to let in upon them a

new aspect of space. She reclined, as he bade her, on a couch. He

adjusted the pointing of the mighty lens, and then she made her

initiating plunge into the wonders of the skies.

First there came as it were upon her the great, black chasm before which

the soul is seized with trembling, the infinitude of which the mind

refuses to grasp—then a point of light or two—little fingers it seemed

pointing to the gulphs—then more and more, a medley of brilliancy, of

colours, torch-red, flaming orange, diamond white, sailing slowly across

the black field; then, dropping straight into her brain, like the fall

of a glorious gem into a pool, carrying its own light as it comes—the

blue glory of Sir David’s new-born star.

Ellinor told herself, with a mingling of regret and pride, that since

her soul had received the message of his star she understood David’s

vocation. And, however much she might wish in the coming days to draw

him back to the homely things of earth, she could never be of those now

who mocked or pitied.

A little later they stood upon the open platform together, and he

pointed out to her the exact place of the marvel that had just been

revealed to her. Again he spoke words of little meaning to her, yet

fraught it seemed in their strangeness with deeper significance than

those of a familiar language; but as she listened it was upon his

transfigured countenance that all her wonder hung.

“See you, there, by Alphecca. Nay, you are looking at Vega of the

Lyre-Vega the beautiful she is called: no wonder she draws your eyes!

But lower them, Ellinor, and look a shade to the right. Turn to Corona,

the Northern Crown.”

With the abstraction of the enthusiast, he was quite unconscious that to

her uninitiated ear the names could convey no sense, that to her

uninitiated eye the aspect of the sky could show nothing abnormal.

“See, there, just to the right of Alphecca—oh, you see, surely, the most

beautiful—my star, virgin to man, to the sight of this earth until

to-night!”

Still as he looked upward, she looked at him.

The wind was blustering. The breath of the northwest had swept the

heavens clear before bringing up its own phalanx of cloud and rain. The

complaint of the great woods, far below their feet, rose about them; the

thousand small voices of moving leaf and branch swelling like the murmur

of a crowd into one pervading sound. Ellinor felt as if these voices of

the earth were claiming her while the astronomer’s ears were deaf.

Whilst they had remained within the observatory she had shared for a

moment some of his own exaltation, heard the mysteries speaking to him,

felt as if each star that struck her vision was in direct and personal

communication with herself. But, once in the open air, as she leant over

the parapet, this sense fell away from her. The heavens were chillingly

remote, and remote was the spirit of their high priest and worshipper.

Indeed he was gradually becoming oblivious of her presence.

After a prolonged silence she slipped out of his cloak and quietly

placed it upon his own shoulders. He gathered the folds around him,

crossed his arms with the gesture of the man who suffices to himself—all

unconsciously, without even turning his eyes from their far-off

contemplation.

And so she stole away from him—and sought her father once more. But

finding him peacefully asleep in his high armchair, by a well-heaped

fire and with the dumb _famulus_ in attendance, she made her way through

the deserted, silent house towards her own quarters, a little saddened

in her heart, and yet happy.

A home-coming strange indeed, but strangely sweet.

With the quiet authority that so far had obtained for her all she wanted

this evening, she had, on her arrival, bidden the only servant she could

find prepare the chambers that had been hers in the old days. To these

little gable-rooms, high perched in that wing of the house that

connected it with the ancient keep, she now at last retired. Candle in

hand, she stood still a moment, holding the light above her head, and

dreamily surveyed the place that had known the joyous hopes of her

childhood. There was an odd feeling in her throat akin to a rising sob

of tenderness.

Then she walked slowly round. It was like stepping back into the past;

like awakening from a fever sleep of pain and toil.

Home—the reality! The rest was gone—over—of no more consequence than a

nightmare! And yet, interwoven with this quiet sense of comfort and

shelter, was an eager little thread of hope in the new, unknown life

opening before her.

From her windows she could look up to the faint light of the observatory

at the top of the black mass of the tower; and below it, she knew, the

sheer depth of wall ran down into the dim spaces of the Herb-Garden. She

gazed forth at the heavens. Never before this hour had she seen in its

depths anything but the skies of night or the skies of day; now they

were peopled with marvels. Never could they seem empty or commonplace

again.

She watched for a moment, musingly, the rounded dome on the distant

platform where to-night she had beheld so much in so short a time; where

even now he was, no doubt still working at his lofty schemes. Then she

tried to peer down through the darkness into her favourite haunt of old,

the Herb-Garden—the garden of healing and poisons, where she had so

disastrously plighted her young troth.

Shivering a little, for she was wearied with the long journey and the

emotions of the day, and it was late, she drew back, closed the

casements and sat down by the fire. The place was all strange, yet

familiar. The little narrow, carved oak bed, the billowing feather quilt

covered with Indian chintz by Miss Sophia’s own hands, nothing had

changed in this virginal room after so many years but the occupant

herself. There was the armchair with the faded cushions, and there her

own writing table with the pigeon-holes; aye, and the secret drawer

where her lover’s scrawling protestations had been deposited with

trembling fingers....

The hand that wrote them—it had since been raised to strike her! And the

precious missives themselves? All that was dust and ashes now; dust and

ashes its memory to Ellinor. Yet it was not all a dream after all; and

yonder stood the little cabinet, lest she forgot! It had a secret look,

she thought, of slyness and mockery.

She pulled her seat nearer the hearth. A wood fire was sinking into red

embers between the iron dogs. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she gazed

at it, and mused, until the red faded to grey and the grey blanched into

cold lifelessness.

It was not of the child, of the girl, of the unhappy wife that she now

thought, but of the new roads that opened before the free woman—roads

more alluring, more fantastic in their promise than even the ways in

which her early fancy had loved to roam.

It was a change indeed from the sordid grey and drab atmosphere of her

recent experiences, to be dwelling once more in this ancient mansion,

the majestic interest of which she had before been too young to realise;

to find herself adopted, with a simplicity that savoured more of the

fairy tale than of these workaday times, accepted as their future

companion by those two unworldly beings, the star-gazing lord of Bindon

and his quaint guardian of old, the distiller of simples.

Yet it was not the thought of her father’s odd figure and his venerable

head and his droll sallies that occupied her mind with such absorbing

interest as to make her forget the hour, the cold, and her fatigue; in

truth it was the memory of the tall, fur-clad figure, of the white hand,

and the luminous eyes, and the single moment of that smile. Again she

felt upon her lips the touch that had made her heart leap, and again at

the mere thought flushed and shook.

CHAPTER VIII

WARM HEART, SUPERFLUOUS WISDOM

Of simples in these groves that grow

He’ll learn the perfect skill;

The nature of each herb to know

Which cures and which can kill.

—DRYDEN.

When the fame of her housekeeperly prowesses had gained for comely Miss

Sophia Rickart the unexpected offer of parson Tutterville’s hand and

heart—the divine had taken this wise step after many years of

bachelorhood and varied, but always intolerable slavery to “sluts,

minxes, and hags”—like the dauntless woman she was, she resolved to

prove herself worthy of the promotion.

Although her horizon had hitherto been bounded by duck-pond to the north

and dairy to the south, still-room to the east and linen-cupboard to the

west, she argued that one so admittedly passed mistress in the arts of

providing for her neighbour’s body need have little fear about dealing

with the comparatively simple requirements of his soul! It was,

therefore, after but a short course of study that she claimed to have

graduated from the status of scholar to that of qualified expounder.

Indeed, she was as pungently and comfortably stuffed with undigested

texts and parables as her plumpest roast ducks with sage and onions.

Before long she began to consider herself, entitled by special grace of

state, to interpret _in partibus_ the will of the Almighty to less

privileged individuals; and, in course of time, the enthusiastic spouse

succeeded in taking the more trivial parish cares almost as completely

off the parson’s hands as those of his household. What if, her flow of

ideas being in excess of memory and understanding, the language of the

Bindon prophetess were on occasions the cause of much secret amusement

to the scholarly gentleman—one sip of her exquisite coffee was

sufficient to re-establish the balance of things!

“Sophia’s texts will do the villagers quite as much good as mine,” he

used to say, philosophically, and allow himself an extra spell with his

Horace or his _Spectator_, whilst his wife sallied forth upon the path

of war and mission.

With a large garden hat tied somewhat askew under the most amenable of

her chins, with exuberant ringlets bobbing excitedly round her face,

Madam Tutterville, as old-fashioned Bindon invariably called the

parson’s lady—burst in upon Ellinor’s breakfast the morning after the

latter’s arrival.

It was a day of alternate moods, now with loud wind voice and

storm-tears lamenting, like Shylock, the loss of its treasures; now,

like prodigal Jessica, tossing the gold shekels into space, making mock

in sunshine of age and sorrow, recklessly hurrying on the inevitable

ruin.

That Madam Tutterville had on her way been pelted with rain and buffeted

with wind, her curls testified. But Ellinor, as she rose from behind her

table by the open window, had the glory of a fresh sunburst on her hair

and in her eyes.

She had left her bed early, full of brisk plans which concerned the

greater comfort of her father’s life and were also to reach as far as

her cousin’s tower. But even as she fastened the crisp ’kerchief round a

throat that shamed the cambric with its living white, she had been

handed a note from Master Rickart himself.

This was pencilled on a slip of paper, one half of which had obviously

been devoted to some fugitive calculations, and which ran therefore in a

curious strain:

MY DEAR GIRL,—Do not Ash: salts (50) : (20.1722...)

attempt I beg of you, to disturb traces of sulphur but not

me this morning. I shall be gaugeable Calcium as before in

engaged on important work re- the ratio 7.171 5.32

quiring the undivided attention 7027.001

which solitude alone can secure. Mem. try in Val. foetida.

Ellinor read and was dashed, read again and laughed aloud.—Gracious

powers what a pair of eccentrics had her relatives grown into!

But she was in high spirits, and hope rose in her heart. She was free

from her chains; she was back from her exile, home in England, home in

the dearest spot of that dear island! Her first outlook upon the world

had been into the closes of the Garden of Herbs; and it had been to her

as if the familiar face of a friend had looked back at her unchanged,

yet full of promise. The beauty of the freshly-washed woods (still in

their autumn coats of many colours: from russet to lemon-yellow, from

the vermilion of the turning ash-leaf to the grey-white of the fir

needle), she drew it all into her long-starved soul, even as she

breathed in the wild purity of the air.

Therefore, as she had sat down to breakfast alone in the gay Chinese

parlour where once Miss Sophia had reigned, the refrain of the song in

her heart was an undismayed, nay, joyous: “Wait, my masters, wait!”

And therefore, also, as Madam Tutterville walked on to the scene of her

past dominion she found a merry, hungry niece; and she was scandalised,

for she had come armed with texts wherewith to console the widow.

“‘Him whom he loveth, he blasteth’!” she cried enthusiastically from the

threshold, “‘aye, even to the third and fourth generation’—my afflicted

Ellinor...!”

She stopped, stared, her manner changed with comical suddenness.

“Mercy on us, child, I must have been misinformed!”

“Misinformed, dear aunt!”

“They told me your husband was dead!”

Ellinor came forward, kissed the lady on either wholesome cheek,

divested her of her wet shawl and exclaimed at its condition.

“Tush, child, that is nought. ‘The sun shineth on the evil and the rain

raineth on the just.’ Matthew, my dear.”—Madam Tutterville was on

sufficiently good terms with her authorities to justify a pleasant

familiarity. “They told me,” she repeated, “your husband was dead. I

shall chide cook Rachael for unfounded gossip. What saith Solomon: ‘The

tongue of the wise woman is far above rubies.’”

Ellinor laughed, then became grave.

“Oliver is dead,” she said.

“Dead!”

The rector’s lady fell into a chair, tossed her hat-strings over her

shoulders, and fixed her light, prominent eyes upon her niece.

“Your weeds?” she gasped.

“I do not intend to wear any mourning but this black gown.”

“Ellinor!”

“Please, aunt, not another word upon the subject!”

For yet another outraged, scandalised moment, the spiritual autocrat of

Bindon glared. But the very placidity of Ellinor’s determination was

more baffling than any other attitude could have been to one who, after

all ruled more by opportunity than capacity.

“‘All flesh is hay,’” she remarked at length, in plaintive tones. “We

shall speak further of this anon. Now tell me what are your intentions

for the future?”

Ellinor’s eyes and dimples betrayed mischievous amusement.

“Do you not think, aunt,” she asked, “that Bindon would be the better

for some one who could look after it? The place seems to be going to

rack and ruin!”

“Alas, my niece, since to a higher sphere I was called forth from this

house, ‘the roaring lion who walketh about has entered in with seven

lions worse than himself.’”

Ellinor crossed the floor and suddenly surprised her aunt’s dignity by

falling on her knees beside her and hugging her. And, hiding her sunny

head on the capacious shoulder, she made vain efforts to conceal the

inextinguishable laughter that shook her.

“Why, aunt, why, dear aunt! Oh! Oh! Oh! What has happened since we

parted? You’ve grown so—so learned, so eloquent!”

Despite the strength of Madam Tutterville’s brain, her heart was never

proof against attack. The clinging, young arms awoke memories and tender

instincts. And while the comments upon her new attainments called a

smile upon her countenance (which made it resemble that of a huge,

complacent baby) she responded to the embrace with the utmost warmth.

“Eh, Ellinor, poor little girl!”

“Oh, Aunt Sophia, it’s good to be home again!”

Once more they hugged; then Ellinor sat back on her heels and Madam

Tutterville resumed, as best she could, the mantle of the prophetess.

“You see, my dear, it having pleased the Lord to call me into a place or

state of spiritual supererogation, it hath become necessary for me to

frame the tongue according to its vocation.”

Ellinor nodded, compressing her dimples.

“My brother Simon and your cousin David—God knows I have done my best

for them! But it is casting pearls before—you know the scriptural

allusion, my dear—to endeavour to raise them to any sense of duty. The

place is indeed going to wrack and ruin. They are no better than

Amalakites and Ephesians. Between David’s star-worshipping on the one

side, like the Muezzin on his Marinet, and your father’s black arts and

other incomprehensible doings in his cave of Adullam, my heart is nearly

broken. And yet, my dear child, I have not failed, as Paul enjoins, with

the word in reason and out of reason. I fear for you, child in this

Topheepot!”

“Do not fear for me,” cried Ellinor; her voice was caught up by little

titters. “Perhaps,” she added insinuatingly, “if you advise me things

may alter for the better.”

“Advice shall not fail you.”

“I shall coax cousin David to let me manage for him.”

Ellinor was still sitting on her heels. She now looked up innocently at

Madam Tutterville. And Madam Tutterville looked down at her with a

suddenly appraising eye and was struck by a brilliant inspiration over

which, in her determination to keep to herself, she buttoned up her

mouth with much mystery.

Ellinor had grown—there could be no doubt of that—into a remarkably

handsome woman. There was so much gold in her hair, there were so many

twists and little misty tendrils, that one could hardly find it in one’s

heart to regret that it should so closely verge on the red. It grew in

three peaks and wantoned upon a luminously white forehead.

“She has the Cheveral eyebrows,” thought the parson’s wife, absently

tracing her own with a plump, approving finger.

Of the charm of the little straight nose, of the pointed chin, of the

curves of the wide, eager mouth, there could be no two opinions. Nothing

but admiration likewise for the lines of throat and shoulder and all the

rest of the lithe figure on the eve of perfection. It was the beauty of

the rose the day before it ought to be gathered. Madam Tutterville gave

a small laugh, fraught with secret meaning.

“Amen, child,” said she irrelevantly at last. “Yes, I will have some

corporal refreshment; you may give me a cup of tea. But you will have

your hands full, I can tell you, with that Nutmeg—Oh, what a house of

squanderings and malversations has Bindon become since my days!”

“I saw something of the state of affairs last night,” said Ellinor, as

she lifted the kettle from the hob on to the fire to boil again and

emptied the contents of the squat teapot into the basin.

Madam Tutterville watched her with approval.

“Another girl would have given me cold slop,” she commented internally.

“That husband of hers must have been a brute!”

“Lord, Lord! I never see brother Simon and cousin David, but what I

think of Jacob’s dream of the lean kine devoured by the fat ones.” Madam

Tutterville, contentedly sipping her tea, had settled herself for a

comfortable gossip. “But, there, so long as David is clothed in purple

and fine linen (I speak fictitiously, child, as regards colour, for I do

not think, indeed, I ever saw David in purple) the servants may rob him

as they please. A strange man—never sees a soul, and yet clothes himself

like a prince. That old sinner Giles goes to London twice a year and

brings back trunks full, all in the fashion of ten years ago. He’ll

never use a napkin twice, Ellinor—he don’t care if he never eats but a

bit of bread or drinks but water, but it must be from the most polished

crystal, the finest porcelain.”

Ellinor listened without manifesting either amusement or impatience.

When her aunt paused she herself remained silent for a while; then, in a

low voice, she asked:

“And what then occurred to change his whole life in this manner?”

Madam Tutterville’s eyes became rounder than ever. She shook her head

with an air of the deepest gravity and importance.

“Do not ask me, my dear—do not ask me, for I may not reveal it,” she

said. And the next instant the truth leapt from her guileless lips:

“There are only three people here that know the whole secret, and they

never would tell me, no matter how I tried. David himself, your father

and my Horatio.”

The lady’s countenance assumed a pensive cast, as she reflected upon

this want of conjugal confidence.

“His marriage was to have been soon after ours,” observed Ellinor

musingly.

“Aye, child, so it was. But the girl David loved and that Lochore

man—well, well, I can only surmise. But in the end there was devil’s

work, fighting and duelling! David was brought home wounded, mad, and

like to die; and for days and nights, my dear, Simon and Horatio nursed

him between them and would not let any one near him while his ravings

lasted—not even me, think of that! Of course, my love,” she added

comfortably, “it is not that my Horatio has not the highest opinion of

my discretion; but he had to humour David, and he would die rather than

break his word even to a——” She paused, and significantly tapped her

forehead. “Well, well, the poor lad got better at last, and then——Oh, if

it were not true no one could have believed it! Maud, his sister (I

never could endure her, with her bold black eyes and her proud ways),

nothing would serve her but she must marry the very man who all but

murdered her own brother! She became Lady Lochore—that was all she cared

for! Pride was always eating into her! ‘Proud and haughty scorner is her

name, and her proud heart stirreth up strife.’—Proverbs, dear.”

“And David?”

“David, when he heard the news, fell into the fever again; worse than

ever. Many was the night Horatio never came home at all, expecting each

morning to be the last! It was a terrible time, but, thank the Lord, he

got well, if well it can be called. And then this kind of thing began.

He withdrew himself completely, no one was ever admitted. Bindon became

a waste and a desert. He cannot forgive, child, and he cannot forget—and

that is the long and the short of it! Horatio has secured an honest

bailiff for the estate, ’twas all he could avail—but, inside, that rogue

Margery Nutmeg reigns supreme! And, upon my soul, if something’s not

done, brother Simon and cousin David will be both fit for bedlam before

the end of the chapter!”

Here the flow of Madam Tutterville’s eloquence was suddenly checked. She

sniffed, she snorted; there was a rattle of buckram skirts as of the

clank of armour resumed. With finger sternly extended she pointed in the

direction of the window—all the gossip in her again sunk in the apostle.

Ellinor’s eyes followed the direction of the finger.

The casement gave upon a green-hedged path that led from one of the

moat-bridges to the courtyards behind the keep. By this path the

villagers were admitted to Bindon House.

The head of a lame man bobbed fantastically across Ellinor’s line of

vision. This apparition was succeeded immediately by that of a fiery

shock of hair over which met, in upstanding donkey’s ears, the ends of a

red handkerchief folded round an almost equally red expanse of swollen

cheek. The silhouette of a girl holding her apron to one eye next

flitted past.

“In the name of Heaven,” exclaimed Ellinor, “is the whole of Bindon sick

this morning? And what brings them to the house?”

“The evil one is still busy among them,” quoth the parson’s wife

oracularly, “and I grieve to say it is your father who is his minister!”

There was something so irresistibly comic in the angry disorder

noticeable on the face, heretofore so kindly placid, of Madam

Tutterville, that her niece was again overcome by laughter.

“Do not laugh!” said the lady severely; “‘The mirth of fools is as the

cackle of thorns’—Ecclesiastes—We may all have to laugh one day at the

wrong side of our mouths. I live in fear of a great calamity. There have

been mistakes already!” she added, lowering her voice to a mysterious

whisper, “as Horatio and I know.”

Ellinor had grown grave again.

“Even doctors are not infallible,” said she reproachfully. “Is poor

father the minister of evil because he may have made a mistake?”

“Ah, child, that’s just it! Brother Simon is not a doctor, he is—I don’t

know what he is. He tries his herbs and plants upon the village folk.

They flock to him and swallow his drugs because he bribes them, my love,

by playing on their heathen superstitions about spells and fairies and

bogles and what not. They believe themselves cured because they believe

him to be in league with the powers of darkness—a warlock, Ellinor! Bred

in the bone, alas! Horatio may joke about it, but so long as I have life

I will combat that back-sliding influence. God knows, it is ill and hard

work. I am as the voice of one crying in the wilderness to the locusts

and wild honey, but I’ll not lift my finger from the plough now!”

She rose. “Come child,” she commanded; and followed by Ellinor, led the

way downstairs and through long passages to a small dairy room, the

window of which gave upon the outer entrance to Master Simon’s

laboratory.

Here, with tragic gesture, she halted, and bade her niece look forth.

CHAPTER IX

HEALING HERBS, WARNING TEXTS

Here finds he on the oak rheum-purging Polypode;

And in some open place that to the sun doth lie

He Fumitory gets, and Eyebright for the eye;

The Yarrow wherewithal he stays the wound-made gore,

The healing Tutsan then, and Plantaine for a sore.

—DRAYTON (_Polyolbion_).

The lagging sun of autumn had travelled but a small part of its ascent,

and the green inner courtyard of what was known as “the keep wing” of

Bindon, so stilly enclosed by its three tall walls and the towering

screen of the keep itself, was yet in shadow—not the cheerless,

universal grey of a clouded sky, but the friendly, coloured shadiness

that is the sunshine’s own doing.

Against the grey stone walls the spreading branches of the blush-rose

trees that had yielded of yore so much sweetness to Ellinor’s childish

grasp, clung, yellowing and now but thinly clad, yet not all dismantled,

with here and there a wan flower or a brave rosebud to bear witness,

like the gems of poor gentility, to past riches.

The scene, the special savour of wet grass, the fragrant breath of the

dairy were of old familiar to Ellinor; but not so the bench placed upon

the flags alongside the wall, with its row of dismal figures; not so the

businesslike-looking table, whereat, behind a score of gallipots and

phials, a basin of water and a basket full of leaves, stood Master Simon

in his flowing gown. He was gravely investigating through his spectacles

the finger which a boy whimperingly upheld for his inspection. The

while, Barnaby, uncouthly busy, flitted to and fro between his master’s

chair and the steps that led down to the laboratory.

Ellinor leant out of the window to gaze in surprise. Here, then, was the

work which her father could only pursue in solitude! She now understood

the nature of this branch of his studies: the student was testing upon

the _corpus vile_ of the willing population the virtues of his simples!

“Fortunately,” thought Ellinor, “such remedies can proverbially do but

little harm and often do much good.” And she watched his doings with

amused interest.

But Madam Tutterville could not look upon them in the same tolerant

spirit. When she had numbered the congregation, she stood a moment with

empurpled cheeks and rounded lips, inhaling a mighty breath of

reprobation, preparatory to launching forth the “word in reason and out

of reason” as soon as she saw her chance.

“Now, Thomas Lane,” said the unconscious Master Simon impressively, as

he wrapped round the finger a rag smeared with green ointment, “if you

do as I bid you the fairies won’t pinch your poor thumb any more; let me

see it next Tuesday. Who is next?”

The buxom damsel, whom Ellinor had noted and who still held the corner

of her apron to her eye, advanced and curtseyed.

“Deborah!” cried Madam Tutterville, recognising with horror one of her

model village maids.

Master Simon shot a swift glance upwards from under his bushy brows; too

well did he recognise the tones of his sister’s voice. Ellinor had not

deemed him capable of looking so angry; and, unwilling to be associated

with any hostile interference, she moved away quietly from her aunt’s

side, left the room and proceeded to the courtyard itself. She was drawn

thither also by another reason. There is the woman who shrinks from the

sight of sores and wounds; and there is the woman whose sensitiveness

takes the form of longing to lave and bind. She was of the latter.

When she reached the table the action had briskly begun between Madam

Tutterville and her brother. The artillery on the lady’s side was

characterised rather by rapidity of delivery than by accuracy of aim.

The old man’s replies were few and short, but every shot told.

Deborah, distracted between awe of the wizard’s cunning and deference to

a reproving yet liberal mistress, stood whimpering between the two fires

of words, her apron making excursions from the sick to the sound eye.

Some of the patients grinned, others looked alarmed.

“Are ye not afraid of the Judgment?” Madam Tutterville was saying, ever

more fancifully biblical as her wrath rose higher. “So it’s your eye

that’s sore, Deborah! I’m not surprised. Remember how Elijah the

sorcerer was struck blind by Peter!”

Deborah wailed:

“Please, ma’am, it wasn’t Peter, it was the cat’s tail!”

“The cat’s tail, Deborah! There is no truth in thy bones!”

“Tut, tut!” here interposed Master Simon. “Who bid you go to the cat’s

tail?—Sophia, life is short. You are wasting an hour of valuable

existence. Go away!”

“’Tis the punishment of the deceitful man,” intoned Madam Tutterville

from her window as from a pulpit, and emphatically pounded the sill.

“‘By their figs ye shall know them!’ This cat’s tail work is the fruit

of the tree of your black art, Simon Rickart, of your unholy necrology!”

The simpler’s voice cut in like a knife:

“Who bid you rub your sore eye with a cat’s tail?”

“Please, sir, please, ma’am, Peter hadn’t anything to say to it, indeed

he hadn’t. But, please, ma’am, it was parson’s brindled cat, and Mrs.

Rachael—that’s the cook at Madam’s, sir—she do tell me nothing be better

for a sore eye than the wiping of it with a brindled cat’s tail. And

please, ma’am, I held him while she did rub my sore eye.”

“Mrs. Rachael!”

This was none less than Sophia’s own estimable cook, who read her Bible

as earnestly as Madam herself, and was the stoutest church woman (and

the best cook) in the country; the model, in fact, of Madam

Tutterville’s making.

Master Simon was deftly laving the inflamed eye. And into the silence

allowed for this startling minute by his sister’s discomfiture he

dropped a few sarcastic words:

“You are fond of texts, Sophia.—Here is one for you: ‘First cast the

beam out of thine own eye.’ You have an admirable way of applying them,

pray apply this: ‘Cast the sorcery out of thine own kitchen.’ Cats’

tails, indeed! Now, remember, child! (has anyone got a soft

handkerchief) I am the only proper authorised magician in this county.

If you want magic, come to me and leave Mrs. Rachael and her brindled

receipts severely alone. You understand what I mean; I am Bindon’s

sorcerer as much as parson is Bindon’s parson.”

Here he seized the silk handkerchief which Ellinor silently offered and

began to fold it neatly on the table. Next, from his basket he selected

certain bright-green leaves of smooth and cool texture. One of these he

clapped over the flaming orb, and tied the silk handkerchief neatly

across it.

“And with that upon your eye, my dear, you may defy,” he remarked,

maliciously, “even the witch and her cat.—Let me see it next Friday.”

The poor lady at the window was by no means willing to admit defeat;

but, nonplussed for the moment, she babbled more incoherently than usual

in the endeavour to return the attack.

“The Devil can quote scripts from texture!”

“But give him his due, Sophia, give him his due: he can quote at least

with accuracy! Ha, ha!—Now, Amos Mossmason, come forward! I thought

you’d come to me at last! I have ready for thee a brew of the most

superlative quality! You’re pretty bad, I see, but we shall have you

dancing at the harvest-home. Here are seven little packets, one for

every day in the week in a cup of water. The little plant, Amos, from

which I have extracted this precious stuff, was known to Hippocrates as

Chara Saxifraga (think of that!), and those wise and learned men, the

Monks of Sermano—”

At this Madam Tutterville again lifted up her voice, and with such

piercing insistence that it became impossible to ignore her.

“Now, indeed, has Satan revealed himself! Amos Mossmason, beware! Have

nought to do with these Popish spells—it is thus the Scarlet Woman

disseminates poison!”

At the word poison the patient hurriedly dropped the packets back on the

table, and stared in dismay from the lady of the church to the gentleman

of science.

Ellinor, keeping well in the shadow of the window-ledge, out of the

range of her aunt’s vision, was startled in the midst of her amusement

by an unexpected thunder in her father’s voice:

“Sophia,” he commanded, “go back to your home, open your Bible and seek

among the Proverbs for the following text, to wit: ‘The legs of the lame

are not equal, so is a parable in the mouth of fools.’ ... Thereupon

meditate! You are a good creature, but weak in the brain, and you do not

know your place among the people. Go!”

Madam Tutterville gave a small cry like that of a clucking hen suddenly

seized by the throat. She staggered from the window and retired. To

confound her by a text was indeed to seethe the kid in its mother’s

milk.

“Amos,” said Master Simon, “don’t you be a fool too; take your powders

and begone likewise, and let me hear of you next week. Now who will hold

the bandage while I dress Ebenezer Tozer’s sore ear?”

“I will,” said Ellinor.

“So you are there?” said the father, without astonishment. “Why, you

seem always to be at hand when wanted!”

And Ellinor smiled, well content.

Madam Tutterville sat on a stool in the dairy, fanning herself with her

kerchief. She was in a sort of mental swoon, unable as yet to realise

the fact that she and the church had been worsted before their own

flock.

Presently, with deliberate step, emphasised by a rhythmic jingle of

keys, the housekeeper of Bindon appeared in the doorway and looked in

upon her in affected astonishment.

Mrs. Margery Nutmeg had a meek and suave countenance under a spotless

high-cap unimpeachably goffered and tied under her chin. Her cheeks

looked surprisingly fresh and smooth for her sixty-five years; her hair,

banded across her placid forehead, was surprisingly black. Her eye moved

slowly. She was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. Her hands

were folded at her waist. Anything more decent, more respectful, more

completely attuned to her proper position, it would be impossible to

imagine. Yet before this redoubtable woman, Bindon House and village

shook; and in spite of valiant denunciations at a distance Madam

Tutterville herself was rather disposed to conciliate than to rebuke her

when they met.

There was indeed no one at the present moment whom she so little desired

as witness to her discomposure. Quite deserted by her usual volubility,

she had no word by which to retrieve the situation. It was almost an

imploring eye that she rolled over the fluttering kerchief. She knew

Margery Nutmeg.

“Ain’t you well, ma’am?” asked that dame, with dulcet tones of sympathy.

Madam Tutterville tried to smile, gave it up, panted and shook her head.

“Don’t you, ma’am,” implored Margery, after a moment’s unrelenting gaze,

“don’t you, now, so agitate yourself. It’s not good for you, Miss

Sophia, I beg pardon, I mean ma’am. It’s not indeed! And you so stout

and short-necked! Eh, we’re all sorry for you: the way you’ve been

treated, and before the villagers too! But, there, Master Rickart is a

very learned gentleman! You ought to be more careful of yourself, ma’am,

knowing what a loss you’d be to us all! It do go to my heart to hear

your breath going that hard! Let me get you a glass of buttermilk—’tis a

grand thing for thinning the blood.”

Madam Tutterville pushed away the officious hand and moved past the

steady figure with an indignant ejaculation:

“Margery, you’re an impudent woman!”

She had not even the relief of a text upon her tongue. Her florid cheek

had grown pale as she tottered out again through the now empty

courtyard. Yes, it was a painfully broad shadow that went by her side.

She longed for the comfort of her Horatio’s philosophic presence; for

the respectful atmosphere of her own well-ordered household. But she

dared not hurry: for there was no doubt of it, her breathing was short.

CHAPTER X

COMPACT AND ACCEPTANCE

——Upon nearer view,

A spirit, yet a woman too!

And steps of virgin liberty—

Her household motions light and free

A countenance in which did meet

Sweet records, and promises as sweet.

—WORDSWORTH (_Lyrical Poems_).

“Dear, dear,” said Master Simon, “what can have become of my

‘Woodville’?”

Ellinor looked up from the little packet of powdered herbs that for the

last hour, in the stillness of the laboratory, she had been weighing and

dividing.—Great had been her delight to find her help accepted without

fresh demur, for she was bent on making herself indispensable.

“My ‘Woodville,’ child!” repeated Master Simon. “Ah, true, true, it has

been taken back to the library. David is a good lad, but I could wish

him less absolutely particular about his books. Books are made for use,

not to show a pretty binding on a shelf! But stars and books—’tis all he

cares for!”

Ellinor rose and slipped from the room. Well, she remembered the old

“Woodville,” in its grey-tooled vellum with the thick bands and clasps.

She knew its very resting-place, between “Master Parkinson,” in black

gilt calf, and “Gerard’s Herbal,” in oaken boards.

Once outside she stretched her limbs after the cramping work and began

humming the refrain of a little song that came back to her, she knew not

how or why, as she plunged into the loneliness of the rambling

corridors:

’Twas you, sir, ’twas you, sir!

I tell you nothing new, sir—

’Twas you kissed the pretty girl!

At a bend of the passage she stopped: she thought she heard a stealthy

footfall behind, and her heart beat faster for the moment with a sense

of long-forgotten child-terrors. Then the woman reasserted herself. Yet,

as she took up the burden of her catch again and walked on steadily,

Mrs. Marvel tossed her head in just the same defiant manner as had been

the wont of the child Ellinor, who would have died rather than own to

fear.

Dim was the library, but with a warm and golden dimness that was as far

removed from gloom as the warm twilight of a golden day.

The scent of the burning wood upon the hearth mingled with the spice of

the old leather—Persian, Russian, Morocco, Calf—with the pungency of the

old parchment and of the old print upon ancient paper. The air was

filled as with the breath of ages.

There is not one of our senses which so masterfully controls the

well-springs of memory as that rather contemned and (in this our western

hemisphere) uncultivated sense of smell. With a rush as of leaping

waters, the founts of the past now fully opened upon Ellinor—bitter and

sweet together, as the waters of memory always are. Here had she taken

refuge many a time, in the days when nothing stirred in the library but

the fire licking the logs, and (as she loved to fancy) the kind, honest

spirits of the dead.

Every imaginative child has its bugbear, self-created, or imposed on its

helplessness by the coward cruelty of some older person. Her childish

dreams had been haunted by that perfectly respectable-looking and urbane

bogey, Margery Nutmeg. Under the housekeeper’s sleek exterior she had

instinctively felt an extraordinary power of malice, and had always

recoiled from her most coaxing approach with a repulsion that nothing

could conquer. Just now, as she came along the passage, she had vaguely

thought, just as in the old days, that Margery might be secretly

following her.

She laughed at herself as she closed the door; but the sound of the

catching lock struck comfort in her heart, and so did the enclosed

feeling of sanctuary, of protection.

“Oh, dear old room!” she said aloud. “Dear old books, dear friendly

hearth! God grant this may indeed be home at last!”

She looked round, from the oriel window, purple-hung with its deep

recess; from its shelves, seat, and screen, set apart like the side

chapel of a cathedral for private devotion, to the high-carved ceiling

where, in faded colours, the coat-of-arms of past Cheverals displayed

honours that could never fade. She kissed her hand to the full length

Reynolds of that Sir Everard Cheveral, whose daughter had been her own

mother, empanelled above the stone mantelpiece. It was sweet to feel one

of such a house.

Again she spoke, half to herself, half to the mellow, genial presentment

of her ancestor:

“You would have said that no daughter of Bindon should seek refuge

elsewhere but in the house of her fathers.”

“Please, ma’am,” said a low voice at her elbow.

Ellinor started. A woman whom life had taught to keep her nerves under

control, it is doubtful whether anything but the old terrors of her

childhood would have had the power to send the blood thus back to her

heart. Mrs. Nutmeg was at her elbow—Mrs. Nutmeg hardly changed, with the

same obsequious smile and deadly eye, dropping another curtsey of

greeting as their glances met, and speaking in the familiar, purring

manner:

“Mrs. Marvel, ma’am, begging you’ll forgive the liberty in offering you

my respectful welcome! I made so bold as to follow you and trust you

will excuse the intrusion.”

“How do you do?” said Ellinor.

This, of all possible greetings, was the one she least desired. She

hated herself for her weakness; but as she held out her hand, she shrank

inwardly from the remembered touch.

“How do you do, ma’am?” responded the other, with perfunctory humility.

“I trust I see you well.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Marvel over her shoulder, more shortly than her

wont, and turned to the shelf to look for her father’s book.

But the obnoxious presence was not so easily dismissed. It followed her

to the shelves; it stood behind her; it breathed in her ear. After a

minute of irritated endurance, during which her mind absolutely refused

to work, Ellinor whisked round impatiently.

“Well?”

“Asking your pardon, ma’am. But, as you are aware, I was unable to

attend to you last night, having only returned this morning from

Devizes. I must beg your forgiveness for anything you might have to

complain of, not having been made aware that you were coming.”

“Oh, everything was quite comfortable,” began Ellinor. Then suddenly

remembering her raid over-night, she hesitated and fell silent.

“Yes, ma’am,” pursued the housekeeper, who, among other uncanny

characteristics, possessed that of answering thoughts rather than words.

“Yes, I was sorry indeed to hear that you had to get things for

yourself. I am sure if Sir David knew, it would go near to make Mr.

Giles lose his place, that a guest should be treated so—him that has the

cellar key on trust, so to speak.”

“I shall explain to your master,” said Ellinor, after a perceptible

pause.

“Thank you, ma’am. Mr. Giles and me would be obliged. No doubt my master

will give me instructions. But I should be grateful—having to provide,

and gentlemen liking different fare. (I ought to know their tastes by

this time, ma’am.) But ladies being otherwise, and not proposing to lay

before you what satisfies us humble servants—I should be grateful to

you, ma’am, to let me know how many days your visit at the House is

likely to be.”

Again there was silence. Ellinor stood looking down, struggling against

the feeling of helplessness that seemed to be closing in upon her. Once

more the undignified side of her position reasserted itself. But she

fought against the thought. Why, between high-minded people of the same

blood should this sordid question of give and take come to awaken false

pride? Nay, could she not actually serve David by her presence? The hand

and eye of a mistress were sorely needed here. Truly, she had heard

enough from Madam Tutterville, seen enough herself on the previous

night, to realise that Bindon House had become but as a vast cheese in

the heart of which the rats preyed unrebuked.

“I cannot tell you yet,” said she steadily, though the ripe colour still

mounted in her cheeks.

Margery blinked softly like a cat, and, like a cat with claws folded in,

she stood. Her voice had a comfortably shocked note as she replied:

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“That will do,” cried Ellinor.

“Yes, ma’am, thank you. No doubt. But until my master gives me my

instructions——”

She stopped; in the listening silence of the room a slight noise had

caught her ear. She looked slowly round and Ellinor followed the

direction of her eye. From the window recess Sir David himself had

emerged, pen in hand, and now came towards them.

Mrs. Nutmeg passed the corner of her apron over her lips and dropped her

curtsey. Ellinor stood, her head thrown back like a young deer, watching

her cousin’s advance with a look of confidence, though beneath her

folded kerchief her heart beat quick.

He took her hand, bent, and kissed it. Then retaining it in his, turned

upon the housekeeper. Ellinor, with the clasp of his fingers going

straight to her heart, was unable to shift her gaze from his face.

“You wish for instructions, Margery,” said he, “take them now. You shall

obey this lady as you would myself. While she remains here you shall

treat her as my honoured guest. Long may it be! And further, if she so

pleases, Mr. Rickart’s daughter shall be looked upon as mistress at

Bindon. And what she does or orders to be done shall be well done for

me.”

Margery dipped humble acquiescence to each command.

Ellinor had not thought those dreamy eyes of David’s could give so cold

and yet angry a flash. His brows were hardly knitted, and his voice,

though raised to extra clearness, was singularly under control; yet she

had a sudden revelation, not only of present anger in the man, but of an

extraordinary capacity for strong emotion. And she thought that if ever

an evil fate should bring her beneath his wrath, it would be more than

she could bear.

“Go, now,” said Sir David, still addressing his servant, “but remember,

and let the household remember, that though I prefer to watch the stars

rather than your doings, I am not really blind to what goes on.”

“I am truly glad, sir, to be authorised to give the servants any message

from you,” said Mrs. Nutmeg.

She reached the door, paused and threw one of her expressionless glances

for no longer than a second or two towards Ellinor; raising her eyes,

however, no higher than the knees. Then the door closed softly upon the

retreating figure.

David’s slightly slackened grasp was tightened for a moment round his

cousin’s fingers, then it relinquished them.

“Forgive me, Ellinor,” said he, “a bad master makes a bad host.”

“David,” said she, looking him bravely in the eyes, “I have hardly a

guinea in the world.”

“Oh,” he cried quickly, “you humiliate me——”

She interrupted him in her turn, and as quickly:

“Oh, no, indeed do not think that because of what she said I should seek

such protestation from you. But David, though I came here because it was

the only refuge open to me, I could not stay unless I had a task to do.

I saw last night—before I had been in dear old Bindon an hour—that sadly

you want one honest servant here. Let me be that servant to your house;

let me be at least now what Aunt Sophia was. I can do the work.”

She had flushed and paled as she spoke, but gained confidence towards

the end; and she looked what she felt herself to be, a strong, capable

woman.

His eye dwelt upon her, not as last night in exaltation that amounted to

hallucination, but as one whose deep and restless sadness finds an

unsought peace.

“Will you, indeed?” he said at last. “Will you indeed take under your

gracious care my poor, neglected house?”

Their eyes met again. It was a silent compact. After a little pause:

“Do you not think I am very brave to be ready to face Margery?” she

asked, with a mischievous dimple.

At this his rare smile flashed out—that smile before which she felt, as

she had already over-night, that, in her heart, she abdicated.

“Oh, I know Margery well,” he said, “but her husband was my father’s

faithful man, and to keep her was a promise to his dying ears. She knows

it and trades on it. I am not—do not believe it,” he added, “quite the

lunatic cousin Simon would make me out. At least, I have my lucid

moments. This is one. I have profited by it.”

“So have I,” said Ellinor with a lovely smile of gratitude that robbed

the words of any flippancy.

They turned together, tall woman behind tall man, the crest of her

copper curls on a level with his eyes. Thus they traversed together the

great length of the room. Once she paused, mechanically to draw a bunch

of dead roses from a dried-up vase—roses placed there, God knows how

many summers ago! He marked the action by a glance. Almost unconsciously

she lifted the powdering flowers to her lips, inhaling their faint,

ghostly fragrance.

As they passed the window recess where, unknown to the new-comers, he

had been sitting at his work, he stopped in his turn to lay a

paper-weight on the loose sheets that were scattered on the table. A

great map, from Hevelius’s Atlas of the Stars, lay outspread, and

displayed its phantom-like constellation figures. Ellinor bent down to

look.

“See,” said he gravely, placing his finger on the regal crown that the

genial old astronomer had lovingly designed for _Corona Borealis_—“see,

it is there that the new star has come into being; a fresh gem to the

Crown of the North, fairer even, with its sapphire glance, than

Margarita the pearl——”

She looked up, inquiringly:

“Your star?”

“My star,” he answered.

Her words pleased him, and he marked the earnest brilliancy of her blue

eyes. His answering look, though unconsciously, was tender as a caress;

and she felt it most sweetly. The crumbling rose-leaves scattered

themselves in powder upon his papers. She brushed them impatiently away

with a superstitious feeling that the past was already too much with

her, too much with him. And as she leaned over the table, the live,

real, blushing rose that she had gathered in the courtyard that morning

loosened itself from her bosom and fell softly on the outmost sheet of

the manuscript notes. Here David’s hand had sketched boldly the

wreath-like constellation that had borne him an unexpected blossom.

Ellinor saw her flower lie upon it with pleasure.

“Could Hevelius have seen his crown so enriched—but it is given to few

to chronicle a name in the Heavens! A star may appear and then wane, but

not this one, not this one!” He spoke half to himself.

“When was the last great star born?” she asked.

“Before this old Hevelius’ day,” said David. He drew another map from

under the tossed book and flung it open for her, never heeding that it

rested on the petals of her rose. “But see here, 1660—on a day of

rejoicing for England—the King had returned to his own—what seemed to

many to be a new star appeared, brightly burning. Flamsteed named it,

out of the joy of the people, _Cor Caroli_—the Heart of Charles.”

“The heart of Charles,” she repeated. “It is pretty. What will you call

yours?”

“I dare not name it yet,” he said.

“Dare not?” she echoed astonished.

“Lest it should belie me—fade and leave me the poorer,” he answered.

There came a silence. The clock punctuated the fitful rushing sound of

the wind round the house, ticked off a minute of life for Ellinor as

full of thought and as pregnant of possibility, as sweet and as rich in

promise as any she had ever passed in her already eventful life.

She had the impression of some extraordinary happiness that might be

hers; that yet was so elusive, so high, so shy a thing, that it would

melt away in the grasp of human hands. She had, too, a little

unreasonable foreboding, because her rose lay crushed under his

astronomy. With a sigh at last, chiding herself for folly and dreams

unworthy of her new life—she who had offered herself, and been accepted

as his servant, no more—she moved away from the table.

The action roused him. He went with her. On the way to the door he made

another halt, and indicated by a slight gesture the urbane countenance

of that common ancestor whom Ellinor had addressed and who now, lighted

up by a capricious ray, seemed to look down upon them with a living eye

of favour. She stood confused as she remembered how boldly, as if by

right of kinship, she had claimed aloud in that silent room the

hospitality of Bindon.

“I only represent him here,” said he, divining her thought.

“Ah, cousin David,” said she, “say what you will, my father and I will

always be deeply in your debt.”

He turned and looked at her gravely.

“Surely,” he answered, after a pause, “a man’s inheritance is not solely

his own. It is but a trust. It is to be used and passed on. Those that

come after me,” added he musingly, “will not be the poorer, but the

richer for my unwonted mode of life. Yet, meanwhile, Ellinor, you can

help me to put to better purpose the wealth yearly expended in this

house. For there are abuses in a household which only a woman’s hand can

reach.”

“They shall be reached then,” said she.

CHAPTER XI

LAYING THE GHOSTS

Her eyes

Had such a star of morning in their blue

That all neglected places ...

Broke into music.

—TENNYSON (_Aylmer’s Field_).

Out of the warm library into the deserted, echoing round-vaulted hall,

on the walls of which broad sheets of tapestry hung, dimly splendid,

between fluted pilasters of marble. It seemed to Ellinor, when the swing

door had fallen behind her with its soft thud, as if they had left the

nave of some church; left a home-like refuge filled with living

presences, benign spirits and warm incense; to enter the coldness of a

crypt that spoke but of the tomb.

She shivered, and the gay smile faded on her lips. Their footsteps fell

forlorn upon the stone floor. David now seemed to drift apart from her,

to move unsubstantial in these forsaken haunts of grandeur. But it was

her nature to re-act against such impressions. Her alert eye noted the

moth in the tapestry, the rust on the armour, the dust lying thick on

the white marble heads and limbs of statues that kept spectre company in

the semi-darkness.

“Oh,” she cried suddenly, “what red fires we shall have on these cold

hearths! How the village maids shall rub and scrub! How God’s good

sunshine shall come pouring in through those dull windows! How rosy this

Venus shall shine under the glow of the stained glass!”

He turned to her, as if called by the sound of the young voice back from

the habitual grey dream that his own silent home had come to be for him.

“See, cousin David, poor Diana too! She has not felt on her breast a

breath of sweet woodland air, I verily believe, since—since I left the

place myself these ten years. She shall spring,” added Ellinor, after a

moment’s abstraction, “from a grove of palms. And when the wind blows

free, the shadow of the leaves shall fall to and fro upon her and cheat

her forest heart. At least”—catching herself up as she noted his eye

fixed upon her with a strange look—“at least, Sir David, if you will so

permit.”

He still looked at her musingly. In reality he was going over the mere

sound of her words in his mind, as a man might recall the sweetness of a

strain of music.

“You shall have a free hand,” he said. “And, once more, what you do

shall be well done.”

An odd sense of emotion took hold of her, she knew not why. More to

conceal it than from any set intent, she moved forward and turned the

handle of the door that, on the other side of the hall, led to the suite

of drawing-rooms. He followed close and they looked in together. The

vast abandoned apartment was full of a musty darkness.

“Heavens!” she cried, “do they never open a window?”

Narrow slits of light darting in from the divisions in the shutters cut

through the heavy air and revealed, when their eyes had grown accustomed

to this deeper gloom, the shapeless, huddled rows of linen-covered

furniture.

“Ghosts—ghosts!” said David under his breath.

With quick hands she unbarred a shutter and, her impetuous strength

making little of rusty resistance, flung open the casement before he had

had time to divine her intention. He halted on his way to help her,

arrested by the gush of blinding light and the blast of wild wind, that

seemed to leap at his throat.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, standing in the full ray and breathing in—so it

seemed to him—both the elements. “Oh, the warm light, the sweet air!”

A line of Shakespeare awoke in some corner of his memory: “A thing of

fire and air.” ... How vividly it seemed to fit her then!

Without, the changeful day had turned to wind and sun. She stood in the

very shaft of the light, in the flood of the breeze; he stood watching

her from within, in the gloom and the stagnation. Her black gown

fluttered and turned flame at the edges; alternately clung to, and waved

away from her straight limbs, now revealing, now throwing into shadow

the curves of a foot that, in its sandal, pressed the ground as lithely

as ever a Diana’s arrested on the spring. The fresh airs engulfed

themselves under her kerchief into her white bosom. It was as if he

could watch them playing around her throat, even as if he could see them

fluttering and flattering her hair.... Her hair! The sun’s sparkles had

got into it! Now it rose, nimbus-like; now it danced, a spray of fire,

back from her forehead; now again, under the flying touches, it fell

back and rippled like a cornfield in the breeze.

This radiant creature! The more Sir David looked, the further apart he

felt his fate from hers. She seemed to belong all to the dancing wind

and the glad sun-light. From such an one as he, from his melancholy, his

gloom, his fading life, she seemed as much cut off as ever the

unattainable stars from his wondering night watch.

Thus they stood for the space of a minute. Then Ellinor turned. Light

and freshness now filled the great room. The keen breath of the woods

gaily drove into corners and chased away the mouldy vapours, the vague,

shut-up breath of the old brocades, of the crumbling potpourris, of the

sandal-wood and Indian rose; even as the light of Heaven drove the

shadows back under the cabinets and behind the pillars, and awoke to

life the gold moulding and the fleur-de-lis on the white walls, the

delicate wreaths and tracery on the trellised ceilings.

“See, cousin David, the ghosts are gone!”

But the man had withdrawn to the shadow. There was now no answering

light in his eye. He had now no phrase, tardy in coming, yet quick in

the sympathy of her thought, such as had before delighted her. What had

come to him? She gave a little laugh; the vigour, the freedom from

without had got so keenly into her veins that she was as though

intoxicated.

“I vow,” she cried, “you are like a ghost yourself! Why, you look like a

dim knight from the tapestry yonder in the hall, wandering ...”

She broke off. The words were barely out of her mouth before she had

read upon his countenance that they had struck some chord which it

should have been all her care to leave silent. It was not so much that

his pale face had grown paler or his deep eye more brooding, it was more

as if something that had been for a while restored to life had once more

settled into death; as if an open door had been closed upon her.

“A ghost, indeed,” he said at last, after a silence, during which she

thought the sunshine faded and the wind ceased to sing. “A ghost among

ghosts!”

“David!” she cried and quickly came close to him in the shadow. The

light passed from her face as the sun sparkled away from her hair: a

pale woman in a black dress, she was now nothing more!

Imagination, that plant which wreathes with flowers the open life of

man, grows to mere clinging, unwholesome luxuriance of stem and leaf in

dark, secluded existences. Sir David’s fanciful mind, disordered by too

long solitude, had become incapable of viewing in just perspective the

small events and transient pictures of that every day world to which he

had so persistently made himself a stranger.

The sudden difference in Ellinor’s appearance, following as it did upon

a deeply melancholy impression, struck him as an evil portent.—This,

then, was what would happen to her youth and brightness, were fate to

link her life with one so unfortunate as he!

She stretched out her hand to touch him. The riddle of his attitude

baffled her.

“David!” she repeated, pleadingly. He drew gently back from her touch.

“Cousin,” he said, and she heard a vibration as of some dark trouble in

his voice, “keep to what sunshine this old house will admit. But in

God’s name do not seek to explore its shadows.”

“But do you not see,” she cried, pointing to the open window, “that all

shadows give way before my hand?”

He made no answer, unless a long look, inscrutable to her, but yet that

seemed to search into her very soul, could be deemed an answer.

“Come,” she went on resolutely. “Let us go through this dim house of

yours together, and see what can be done. Ghosts!” she repeated, “the

ghosts of Bindon are rust and dust and emptiness and silence and

neglect. God’s light, dear cousin, and the wood airs, the birds’ songs,

soap and water, stout hearts and true, and good company—give me but

these and I’ll warrant you I’ll lay your ghosts.”

Into his earnest gaze came a sort of tender indulgence, as for the

prattle of a child.

“Come then,” said he, simply.

But she felt that now it was to humour her, and not because she had

reached the seat of his melancholy.

However, with heart and spirit as determined as her step, she drew him

with her through the long, desolate rooms, leaving everywhere light and

freshness where she had found darkness and oppression. Then through the

ball-room, where the silence and the weighted atmosphere, the shrouded

splendour and the faded brilliancy made doubly sad a space designed all

for mirth and music. This feeling struck her in spite of her resolution;

and when, before passing out into the hall again, David paused to look

back and said, as if to himself: “Sometimes darkness is best; at least

it hides the void,” she had this time no answer for him.

Slowly they ascended the great oaken stairs that creaked beneath their

tread as if too long unused to human steps. Slowly they paced the length

of the picture gallery, just illumined enough through drawn blinds to

show the little clouds of dust set astir by their feet and to draw the

pale faces of pictured ancestors from the gloom of their canvas

backgrounds. The shadowed eyes, divined rather than seen in the delusive

light, seemed to follow Ellinor with wistful questioning: “What will

this child of ours do for our sorrowful house?”

Slowly and silently they progressed through the long suites of empty

guest-chambers, where four-posters stood like catafalques and

unsuspected mirrors threw back at them sudden phantom-like images of

their own passing countenances. At length Ellinor paused irresolute;

then she arrested David as he once more mechanically advanced to unbar a

shutter.

“Nay,” she said, “the rest shall sleep a few days more. I have seen

enough of the enchanted castle.” She tried to laugh. “Not, mind you,

that I doubt being able to break its spell!” she added. But her laugh

rang muffled, even to herself, in an air that seemed too heavy to hold

it. She caught David by the sleeve, and dragged him into the comparative

cheerfulness of a corridor lit at either end by a blessed gleam of blue

sky.

They had reached once more the keep wing of the house. There was stone

beneath their feet, stone above their heads, stone walls, ochre-washed

on either side.

“Ah,” cried she, a sudden wave of memory breaking over her, called up by

the vision through the deep hewn windows. “How well I recollect! I used

to play here. This is the old nursery.”

She flung open a narrow door; the long, low-ceiled room within was

flooded with whitest light, for its barred windows boasted no shutters.

The shadows of the tall trees outside danced like waters on the walls.

Cobwebs hung in festoons even in the yawning grate. Two little beds

stood covered with a patchwork quilt; a headless rocking-horse was in

one corner, a tiny wooden chair in another. An empty nursery! As sad to

look on as an empty nest! Ellinor’s eyes brightened with tears; a hot

tide of passion, sprung of an inexplicable mixture of feeling, rushed

from her heart to her lips. She turned almost fiercely on David, who had

remained in the doorway.

“Oh, why have you wasted your life?” she cried. “Why have you turned

your back on all the good things God gives man? Why is your home

desolate, your hearth vacant, your heart solitary? David, David, this

house should never have been empty thus; there should be children round

your knee! What have you done with your life?”

The tears brimmed over and ran down her cheeks. Then her strange passion

fell away from her, and she stood ashamed. He had started first and put

up his hand as if to thrust back her words. There was a long silence.

When he broke it, it was as one who speaks upon the second thought, with

the cold control that follows an unadmitted emotion.

“For me such things will never be.”

“Why, why?” The cry seemed forced from her.

He waved his hand with the gesture of the most complete renunciation.

“Never,” he repeated.

The word, she felt, was final. She gazed at him almost angrily; then

tears, caused now by mortification and confusion, rose irresistibly

again. To conceal them she turned to the window, pulled open the queer

little casement and, leaning on her elbows, looked out in silence.

Below her lay the Herb-Garden, with its variegated autumn burden of

berries, red or purple or sinister orange; its groups of fantastically

shaped leaves, turning to tints not usually known in this sober clime;

here a patch, violet, nearly black; and there a streak of tropical

scarlet; elsewhere again mauve, verdigris-green—colours, indeed, that

village folk said, “no Christian plants ought to produce.” The scents of

them, as pungent yet different in decay as ever in their blossom time,

rose to her nostrils mixed sweet and bitter, over-dulcet, poisonous or

aromatic-wholesome.

The sight and the smell were full of subtle reminiscence. She felt her

throbbing heart calm down, her hot cheeks grow cool. In some mysterious

way, now as in her childhood, the Herb-Garden seemed to draw her and to

speak to her; to promise and withhold some fairy secret, she knew not

whether for joy or sorrow, but yet incomparably sweet. As she gazed

forth she noticed the quaint figure of her father come into view from

behind a clump of bushes. He was attended by Barnaby, who, under the

direction of his master’s gesture, culled leaves and flowers. Circling

round the pair, Belphegor, the black cat, could be seen gravely watching

the proceedings. There was something peaceful and world-detached in the

silent scene, and it brought back some of that sense of rest and

home-return which she had found so blessed the previous night.

All at once she felt close to her the shadowing presence of her cousin,

and the next moment his touch upon her shoulder sent her blood leaping.

“For five years,” said David, “your father has been looking for a

certain plant. He says, Ellinor, that it is the ‘True-Grace,’ the

_Euphrosinum_ of the ancients, called by the primitive simplers at home,

‘Star-of-Comfort.’ And its properties, as he believes, are to bring

gladness to the sore heart and the drooping spirit. But all traces of it

have been lost. If it still blooms, it blooms somewhere unknown. Never

an autumn passes but your father plants fresh seeds, seeds that reach

him from all parts of the world ... with fresh hope.” He stopped

significantly.

She turned to him with wide eyes; he looked back at her. Both his glance

and voice were full of kindness.

“That would be a precious plant, would it not?” he went on.

“‘True-Grace’ ... ‘Star-of-Comfort.’ Is there such a thing in this

world? To your father its discovery is what the quest of the Powder of

Projection, of the Elixir of Life was to the alchemist of old; of

Eldorado to the merchant-adventurer, of Truth to the philosopher—does it

exist? Will he ever find it?” Then he added: “Who knows ... perhaps you

will have brought him luck.”

And when he had said this his dark face was lit by his rare smile.

“What is it that could comfort you?” she cried, clasping her hands.

His very gentleness brought her some comprehension of a sadness

illimitable as when the mists rise dimly above vast seas and fall again.

His face set into gravity once more, his gaze wandered from her face out

through the little window to the far-off amethyst hills on the horizon.

“To be able to forget ... perhaps,” he answered, as if in a dream.

CHAPTER XII

A KINDLY EPICURE

——The easy man

Who sits at his own door; and, like the pear

That overhangs his head from the green wall,

Feeds in the sunshine ...

—WORDSWORTH (_Reflective Poems_).

The fruit in the rectory garden, the pears from the rector’s own tree,

had all been culled; Madam Tutterville had seen to that. And where she

ruled, if there was always abundance of the choicest description, there

was no waste.

The rector liked fruit to his breakfast. He belonged to a generation who

made breakfast an important meal; an occasion for the feast of wit as

well as of palate; for the consorting of choice souls, the first

freshness upon them and the dew still sparkling upon the laurel that

binds the poet’s brow. The breakfast hour is one when the mellow beam of

good repose shines still in the eye, mitigating the sarcasm of the man

of humour, enhancing the charm of the man of elegant parts, ripening the

wits of the learned. That hour (not unduly early, mind you) when the

morning has already gained warmth but not lost crispness; when with

pleasure and profit a party of cultured gentlemen can meet, bloom as of

peach on well-shaven cheek—_rasés à velour_, as the French barber of

those days quaintly had it—silk stocking precisely drawn over

re-invigorated muscle; and, thus meeting, exchange the good things of

the mutual mind with critical sobriety, while discussing in similar

manner the good things of bodily refreshment.

They were good days when social convention countenanced such hours of

elegant leisure! Good times were they that still cherished the

delicately dallying scholar, the epicure in life and in learning; that

admired the man who knew how to sip and relish, and to whom essential

quality was of overpoweringly vaster importance than quantity. A good

age, when hurry was looked upon almost as an ungentlemanly vice and the

anxious mind of business was held incompatible with culture!

Of such was the reverend Horatio Tutterville, D.D., late Fellow of Oriel

College, Oxford, Rector of Bindon. And to him the breakfast hour was

still sacred: an hour of serene enjoyment to which he daily looked

forward as the great prize of life, and which prepared him for a day of

duties performed with admirable deliberation.

True, the fates had so marshalled his existence that but few were the

congenial friends who could now and again come and share these pleasant

moments under the flickering shades of the pear-tree, or in the cosy

parsonage dining-room; sit at those tables—both round! —which it was at

once Madam Sophia’s pride and privilege to supply with an exquisite and

varied fare.

But little recked he of that; choice spirits there were still with whom

he could consort at any time; spirits as rare as any who in Oxford

Common-Room, in Town, or in Cathedral precincts ever had communed with

him. Aye, and rarer! Spirits, moreover, ready at all hours of the night

or day, and always in gracious mood, to yield their hoarded wisdom or

sweetness to the lingering appreciation of his palate.

The choice of his morning’s companion always was with Dr. Tutterville

one of solicitude and discrimination. A Virgil, or some other subtle

singer of like brilliance, on mornings when the sun was very hot and the

sky of Italian blue between the high garden walls; when the bees were

extra busy over the fragrant thyme beds, and when some fresh cream

cheese and honey and whitest flour of wheat were most tempting on the

fair cloth. “Rare Ben Jonson,” perhaps, on a stormy autumn day, when the

wood fire roared up the chimney and a fine old hearty English breakfast

of the game pie or boar-head order could be fitly topped up by a short,

but nobly creaming beaker of Audit ale.

Like so many men who have read sedulously in their student days the

reverend Horatio, now in his dignified leisure, read little, but with

nicest discrimination; and in that little found an inexhaustible fund of

unalloyed contentment. He would also quote felicitously from his daily

reading as a man might from the conversation of a valued friend.

It is indeed not every one who ever learns the art of book-enjoyment.

Your true reader must be no devourer of books. To him the thought

committed to the immortality of print, crystallised to its shapeliest

form, polished to its best lustre, is one which demands and repays

lingering communion. If books are worth reading at all, they should be

allowed to speak their full meaning; they should be hearkened to with

deference. And it was always in pages that compelled such honourable

attention that Dr. Tutterville sought that intellectual companionship

which made his country seclusion not only tolerable, but blissfully

serene.

Madam Tutterville, whether from convenience to herself, or (we had

rather believe), from shrewd conception of the proprieties and wifely

respect for the moods of her lord, never shared the forenoon repast.

Indeed, she had generally accomplished much business in household or

village before the learned divine emerged from that sanctuary where the

mysteries of his careful toilet and of his early meditation were

conducted in privacy and decorum.

But it was on rare occasions indeed that she could not snatch five

minutes out of her multifarious occupations for the pure pleasure of

watching her Horatio’s complacency as he sipped her coffee and his book.

Happy man, whose own capacity for enjoyment could so gratify another’s!

On this particular morning—a week after the exciting day of Ellinor

Marvel’s return—Madam Tutterville, having duly examined the

weather-glass, scanned the sky and personally tested the warmth of the

air, deemed that for perhaps the last time that year she might safely

set her rector’s breakfast in the garden.

For it was one of those days which a reluctant summer drops into the lap

of autumn; a day of still airs and high vaulted skies, faintly but

exquisitely blue; when, red and yellow, the leaves cling trembling to

the bough from which there is not a puff of wind to detach them—and if

they fall, fall gently as with a little sigh.

On such a day the frost, that over-night has laid light, white fingers

everywhere, would be unguessed at but for the delicate tart purity of

the air, which the sunshine, however it may warm it, cannot eliminate. A

day in which you might be cheated into thoughts of spring, were it not

for the pathos of the rustling leaf, the solitary monthly rose, the

boughs that let in so much more heaven between them, and the lonely

eaves where swallow broods are rioting no longer.

Madam Tutterville, as we have said, knew her parson’s tastes to a shade.

The round green table and rustic chair were therefore set between that

edge of sunshine and shadow that spelt comfort. In her devoted soul the

autumnal poetry was translated into housewife practicality: into broiled

partridge still fizzling under the silver cover, a comb of

heather-honey, a purple bunch of grapes invitingly stretched on their

own changing leaves.

An hour later the good soul came forth again into the garden to enjoy

her reward. A covered basket on her arm, that same plump, white member

tightly folded with its comrade over the crisp muslin kerchief and the

capacious bosom; the Swiss straw-hat, tied with a black ribband under

the chin, shading, but not concealing the lace cap of fine Mechlin, the

curls, and the rosy smiling countenance.... No unpleasing spectacle for

any reasonable husband’s eye! So thought the parson. As her shadow fell

across the patch of sunshine in front of him, he looked up and smiled

from the pages of his book.

The companion of the morning was the Olympian who has immortalised in

beauty almost every theme and mood of the human mind. It had struck the

divine, whilst inquiringly surveying his shelves, that the noble figure

of Prospero would be evoked with singular fitness on this placid October

morn. The volume—propped against the glistening decanter of water—was

one Baskerville’s edition of Shakespeare and opened at Act IV. of the

Tempest.

The rector, brought back from the green sward of the wizard’s cell to

his actual surroundings, smilingly looked his inquiry as his spouse

stood in patience before him.

“Ah, my delicate Ariel!” said he, with the most benevolent sarcasm.

Nor, as Madam Tutterville gazed down upon him, was she behind him in

conjugal complacency. Nay, as her eyes wandered over the handsome

countenance with the classic firm roundness of outline, which might have

graced a Roman medal, her heart swelled within her with a tender pride.

“What a man is my Horatio!” she thought, not without emphasis on the

word “my.” For well she knew how much her care had contributed to that

same rich outline.

Everything about this excellent man was ample. Ample the wave of hair

that rose in a crest from an expansive brow and still sported a cloud of

scented powder after the fashion of his younger years. Ample the curve

of his high nose; ample the chin and nobly proportioned. Ample the chest

that gently swelled from under the snowy ruffles to that fine display of

broadcloth waistcoat where dangled the golden seals and the watch that

methodically marked the flight of the rector’s golden moments. But the

rector’s legs had so far resisted the encroachment of general amplitude.

There the only curve, one in which he took an innocent pride, was a fine

line that, under the meshes of well-drawn silk hose, led from knee to

heel with clean and elegant finality.

No wonder that Madam Tutterville’s breast should heave with the glory of

possession.

Her smile broadened, as she glanced from the well-picked partridge bones

to the plump fingers that now toyed with the grapes. She noted also the

reticent smile that hovered on the divine’s lips, as if in sympathetic

answer to her own. Yet, though she beamed to see her lord so content,

the true inwardness of this same content escaped her—naturally enough.

What could Madam Sophia know of that thousandth new elusive beauty he

had even now discovered in Prospero’s green and yellow island? How could

she guess that it had broken upon his mental palate with a flavour

cognate to that of the luscious grapes she had provided? What could she

know of the spice of genial sarcasm that likened one of her own vast

proportions to the ministering sprite of the amiable wizard—and yet saw

a delightful modern fitness in the comparison? Far indeed was she from

realising the endless amusement her conversation afforded to a mind as

accurate on one side as it was humourous on the other.

_Sermo index animi._ If speech be the mirror of the mind, Doctor

Tutterville’s mind revealed itself as elegant, balanced, and polished.

Nothing more orderly, more concise, more jealously chosen than his word

and enunciation. Nothing, in short, could have been in more absolute

contrast to the hurling ambitious volubility of his consort.

“Well, Doctor Tutterville,” said madam, “did the bird like you well!”

“The bird? Excellent well, Sophia. But first, or last, your fine

Egyptian cookery shall have the fame!”

“Ah,” said the lady, beaming, “Proverbs!—Yes. I must say that for

Solomon, he knew how to value a wife.”

“No one was ever better qualified, my dear,” said the parson kindly.

It was characteristic of the lady that, however unknown the source of

her husband’s illustrations, however unintelligible his allusions,

sooner would she have perished than own it even to herself. And as he,

in his original enjoyment of her happy shots, was careful never to

correct her, the conversation of the admirable couple proceeded with

unchecked briskness on one side and ungrudging appreciation on the

other.

Doctor Tutterville drew his chair back from the table, crossed his legs

and prepared to enjoy himself, nothing being better for the digestion

than quiet laughter. Madam deposited her basket, and selecting a snowy

churchwarden pipe from the box that reposed upon the bench by the side

of the pear-tree, proceeded to fill it with Bristol tobacco out of a

brass pot. Very lightly did she stuff the bowl: for the Rector took his

tobacco as he took his other pleasures—a few light whiffs, the best of

the herb! “Once the freshness and fragrance gone,” he was wont to say,

“you might as well drink wine after you had ceased to possess its

flavour.”

“Well, my love?” said he, as he took the brittle stem between his fore

and second finger.

“Well, Horatio,” said she, comfortably subsiding on the bench. “I have

been to Bindon, and, oh, my dear Doctor, what a change has come over the

place!”

“I remarked the improvement,” said the parson, “both in sweetness and in

light upon my visit three days ago. That daughter of brother Rickart’s

seems a capable young woman.”

“Bring up a child,” quoth Madam Sophia, complacently. “I flatter myself

she does credit to my early training. You have not forgotten, Doctor,

that ’twas I who (as the scripture bids us) directed that young idea how

to shoot. I vow,” cried she, “I could not be setting about things better

myself. But, oh, Horatio, how are the mighty humbled!... I refer to

Margery Nutmeg.”

“Mrs. Nutmeg’s manners are always so much too humble for my liking,”

said the divine, “that I presume you allude thus rhetorically to her

circumstances.”

“Certainly, my dear Doctor—_ex cathedrum_, as you would say.”

“I never should, my dear. But let it pass.”

“You know what a thorn in the spirits these goings on of hers have been

to me and you will therefore lift up your voice and rejoice, I feel

sure, when I tell you that my dear niece has now all the keys in her

possession. Margery has found her mistress again.”

The divine laid down his pipe and the benign amusement of his expression

gave way to a look of gravity.

“No doubt,” he said, after a pause, “you good ladies know what you are

doing. But personally, I should prefer not to retain Mrs. Nutmeg on the

premises if it was my business to thwart her.”

But madam, strong in a sense of victory over the dreaded enemy, scouted

the suggestion.

“That excellent girl, Ellinor, was actually having the meat weighed and

apportioned,” she announced triumphantly, “at the very moment of my

arrival this morning. So Mistress Margery’s retail business hath come to

an end. A sheep killed every week, Horatio, and pork in the servants’

hall! The woman was an absolute Salomite! How often did I not remind her

of Paul’s warning! ‘Serve ye your masters with flesh in fear and

trembling.’”

The gentle merriment that Madam Tutterville was happily wont to take as

a token of approval in her lord, here shook his goodly form.

“But my voice was as that of the pelican in the wilderness. Well, all

her sweet smiles and curtseys this morning would not take me in. She

knows her day is over—though she hides her rage.”

“_Malevolus animus abditos dentes habet_,” murmured the parson.

“Indeed, my dear Doctor,” plunged the lady, “you never said a truer

word. But what could she expect?”

“And have you forgiven your brother for so incontinently presuming to

quote the scriptures against you the other day?”

“Why, Doctor, you know I never bear malice. And, dear sir, if you had

but seen him, I vow you’d scarcely know him. He hath a new dressing-gown

and that dear, excellent girl has actually prevailed on him to trim his

beard!”

“I hope,” said the parson, “the young lady will leave something of my

old friend. From the days of Samson I mistrust woman when she begins to

wield her scissors upon man. And have Simon’s other peculiarities

departed from him with his patriarchal beard and ancient garments?”

“Indeed, my dear Doctor, he was quite a lamb. I have promised him a

volume of your sermons, that which refers to the keeping of the first,

second, and third commandments, that he may see for himself how

reprehensible are his dealings with magic and such things. ‘Take a

lesson’ (I cried to him) ‘of my Horatio’!”

She was proceeding with ever increasing, ever more tripping volubility

and unction—“Model your life ever upon the Decameron, and you will never

be far wrong!” But here a Homeric burst of merriment interrupted the

flow of her eloquence.

The reverend Horatio lay back in his chair, while the quiet garden close

rang to the unwonted sound of sonorous laughter. When at length, with

catching breath and streaming eyes, he found strength wherewith to

speak:

“Perdition, catch my soul, most excellent wretch, but I do love thee!”

quoted he, and was promptly off again with such whole-hearted and jovial

appreciation that, feeling she must indeed have pointed her moral with

telling appositeness, his lady’s countenance became suffused with

crimson and was also irradiated by her peculiarly infantile smile of

conscious delight. She pursed her lips to prevent herself from spoiling

the situation by another word.

“And what did brother Simon reply?” asked the rector, as soon as he

became able to articulate.

“Oh,” said she proudly, “you will be gratified, Horatio: he looked very

grave and seemed much impressed; said he could not promise, but that he

would think it over; he would watch and see how you got on.”

Loud rang the parson’s laugh again.

“Meanwhile,” shrieked Madam Sophia, triumphantly, “he said he would

prefer to study the question in the original Italian—whatever he may

have meant by that. I cannot but feel there is promise.”

“Extraordinary, extraordinary!” said Horatio Tutterville. “And David?”

he asked presently. “Are you going to enrol him as a follower of

Boccacio?”

“My dear Doctor,” smiled the lady, “I flatter myself that I can follow

you in the vernal tongue as well as anyone—but when it comes to Hebrew,

I plead the privileges of my sex! This much I understand, however: you

refer to David. Well, he also is putting off the old man. Doctor,” she

clasped her hands and drew her large countenance wreathed in smiles of

mystery, close to his ear to whisper: “This will end in marriage bells!

Mark my words.”

“Thus the prophetess!” replied the rector, with the scoff of the true

man for the match-making feminine. “Alas, my poor Sophia, there’s no

marrying stuff in David!”

He wiped his eyes, and rose.

“Well,” he said, “after the bee has sipped he must to work.”

“You will find,” said she, “a fire in your study, your books as you left

them last night and a bunch of our last roses where you love to see

them.”

Sedately the reverend Horatio moved towards the peaceful precincts,

where awaited him the pages of his next Advent sermons—and perhaps also

the manuscripts of those delicate commentaries on Tibullus, long

promised to his Oxford publisher.

THE STAR DREAMER

BOOK II

The night

Hath been to me a more familiar face

Than that of man; and in her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness

I learned the language of another world.

—TENNYSON.

CHAPTER I

MIDSUMMER SUNRISE

... the blue

Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew

Of summer nights collected still to make

The morning precious: Beauty was awake.

—KEATS (_Sleep and Poetry_).

A dawn in June: the dawn of a night that has held no real blackness, but

merged from a sky of sapphire to one of grey pearl—sapphire so starlit,

that ever deeper deeps and ever bluer transparencies seemed to unveil

themselves to the watchers eye; grey pearl pulsing into opal, shot with

milky pinks, faint greens, ambers and primroses.

Into the dewy morning world came Ellinor; down through the long stone

passages that still held night and silence; out into this awakening,

this freshness, this lightsomeness.

The wonders of the summer dawn, day after day, bring to the old Earth,

as it were, a new creation. She awakes and finds the forgotten paradise

from which man, of his own sluggard choice, shuts himself out with gates

of darkness and leaden bolts of sleep.

Ellinor, her fair face emerging from the folds of her dark, grey-hooded

cloak, came pearl-like as the young day itself from the folds of the

night. Her slender foot left its print on the dew-moist path. She passed

between the stately flower-beds through the great formal

pleasure-grounds where, under the sunrise radiance, the masses of

geranium blooms were taking to themselves silvery colours unknown to the

later day; between the ranks of cypress and box, whose grotesque and

fantastic shapes were duskily cut out against the transparent sky one

moment and the next seemed fringed with green flame as the level rays

leaped at them; up the shrubbery walks, where the white syringa was

breaking into odorous stars, scattering its scented dew upon her as she

brushed the outstretched branches; under the black and solemn shades of

the yew-trees, until she reached the gate that gave access to the

Herb-Garden.

She walked slowly, drinking in the loveliness of the hour. The bees were

humming loudly over the spicy beds. The whole garden was full of sweet

growing hum and stir; of the flash of wet bird wings. Its strange

blossoms swaying in the capricious little breeze seemed to hold private

councils, then nod familiarly at her, welcoming and beckoning on.

Ellinor stood, her hand still on the gate, her brow towards the radiant

east; the hood had slipped from her head and a sun-shaft pierced her

hair. She never crossed the threshold of this garden without a curious

sense of something impending. And now, as she paused to breathe its ever

new fragrances, the happy humour in which she had started on her quest

for herbs (to be gathered at the hour of sunrise, according to Master

Gerard’s own prescription) gave place to the old childish sense of

mysterious awe and attraction.

And as she stood, musing, the sound of a rapid step was heard on this

garden space, so far consecrate to herself and to the wild things; a

darker shadow detached itself from the heavy shade of the yew-tree. She

turned round quickly to face it. Sir David was beside her.

“The purity of the morning,” he thought, “and the dawn still in her

eyes!”

“David!” she cried, astonished; and a happy rose leapt into her cheek.

“I saw you,” he said, “from my tower.”

She glanced up to the frowning grey stone mass that was beginning to

cast sharply its long shadow on the sunlit garden—then she looked back

at his face, pallid and a little drawn. And if he had seen the dawn in

her eyes she saw in his shadow of the night watch.

“Ah,” she cried and menaced him with her white finger. “No sleep again,

David! And your promise?”

“The stars lured me,” he answered, smiling faintly. Ellinor, however,

did not smile. The rose flush faded slowly from her face. The stars

lured him! Would it then always be so? She gave a little sigh. Then,

without speaking, she drew a key from her reticule and slipped it into

the lock; it required the effort of both her strong hands to turn it,

but she would do it herself.

“Nay, cousin, it is a fancy of mine. I alone am trusted with the keys of

the sanctuary. It is I that shall open to you the gate of our

Herb-Garden.”

It fell back, groaning on its hinges; and she stood inside, smiling

again.

“Come in, David.”

“Do you know,” he said, still standing on the threshold, humouring her

mood according to his wont, “that I have actually never trodden this

rood of ground before.”

She clapped her hands with joy.

“Then it is indeed I who will have brought you here,” she cried. “That

is right. Oh, cousin, don’t you know, this is the enchanted garden, my

garden! Ah, you did not know that, lord of Bindon! You deemed it was

yours perhaps, though you never bethought yourself even of visiting it.

But it was given to me by a fairy, years and years ago. And it is full

of spells and dreams and magic! I will tell you something: That night,

when I came back last autumn ... the first thing I did when I went to my

room was to open my window that gives on the garden—you see that window

there—and I leant out over the whispering ivy leaves to greet my garden.

And in the dark of the night I heard it speak to me. And it said: I am

still yours—David, come in!”

With one of his unconsciously courtly gestures to mark that it was

indeed on her invitation that he came upon her ground, he entered

slowly, looking at her with a little wonder. For this fantastic Ellinor

was as new to him as this day’s dawn. She guessed his thoughts.

“I vow,” she said and seemed to shake off her fancy as she might have

brushed from before her face a floating gossamer—“I vow that I am

becoming infected with some musing sickness! But between you, my cousin

star-gazer, and my good alchemist father, it were odd if there were no

such humour in the air. Hold my basket, dear David, I will be practical

again.”

CHAPTER II

_EUPHROSINE_, STAR-OF-COMFORT

She still took note that, when the living smile

Died from his lips, across him came a cloud

Of melancholy severe; from which again,

Whenever in her hovering to and fro,

The lily-maid had striven to make him cheer,

There brake a sudden beaming tenderness.

—TENNYSON (_Elaine_).

“And do you not wish to know,” asked Ellinor, “what has brought me with

the dawn to these gardens?”

He had been watching silently by her side—watching her, as here she

snipped a bundle of leaves and there a sheaf of blossoms, and

mechanically extending the basket that she might lay them therein. Now,

after a fashion of his, to which she had grown well accustomed, he let

fall a glance upon her as one bringing himself back from a distance.

She repeated her question, with a little pretence of impatience.

“I do not think that I wondered to see you,” he answered

slowly.—Fastidious as he was in his garb and every exterior detail that

concerned him, it was all as nothing, Ellinor had learned to know,

compared to his mental fastidiousness. A silent man he was, but when he

spoke no words could serve him but such as could clothe the truth to the

most exquisite nicety. Could anyone have been more ill equipped for the

battle of life?

“I was standing on the tower,” he went on, “watching the withdrawal of

the stars and the rise of another day. It is not often that I look to

the earth. When the stars go, then, you see, the world is blank to me.

But this morning, I know not why, when the skies grew faint I did look

upon the earth and found it very fair. And so I stood and watched and

saw the colours grow. Then you came forth into the midst of them; and

somehow I thought it was as if you were part of the beauty of it

all—part of the dawn; as if you were something that the earth and I

myself had unconsciously been waiting for to complete the whole. Thus

you see, Ellinor, it did not enter into my mind to ask why you had come.

I sought you,” he smiled as he spoke, “also, indeed, I know not why.”

As Ellinor listened her white eyelids had fallen over her eyes, lower

and lower, till the long lashes, black at the base, upturned and tipped

with gold at their ends, cast shadows on her cheek. Her breast heaved

with the quickening of her breath. But at the last word she looked up at

him, and her eyes were sad.

“Ah, cousin, will you ever know?”

It was almost a cry; it had a ring of hidden bitterness in it. Then,

after a slight pause, she resumed her snipping and became once more, as

she had announced, practical.

“Well, now you shall be told why I am here. And first, please understand

that I combine with my duties of housekeeper to the lord of Bindon,

those of ’prentice or familiar to the alchemist—simpler—sorcerer; in

short, to Master Simon, my father. Now, as you know,” she pursued,

assuming a mock orating tone, “my said father spends now all his days

and most of his night in extracting divers salts, distilling essences,

elixirs, what not—remedies for which the village folk flock to him with

enthusiasm, and which being, praise Heaven, harmless enough, are applied

to their ills with varying success but entire satisfaction to

themselves. These remedies are mostly grown in this garden.”

She began to move down the path which led from bed to bed and which no

foot but that of the simpler himself, of the dumb boy Barnaby, or her

own having hitherto trod, was so narrow and encroached upon by the wild

luxuriance of the herbs and shrubs that she was fain to walk in front of

him and to speak over her shoulder. And even then, beneath their feet,

many a broken and crushed simple gave forth its spicy ghost.

Her face presented itself to him in different aspects every moment. Now

he caught but a rim of pearly cheek; now a clear cut profile; now nearly

the whole delicate oval narrowed as she turned it towards him over her

shoulder, the white chin more pointed. Meanwhile she spoke on gaily,

with only here and there a pause to consider, to select and cull.

“I need not tell you, who have known my father so many more years than I

myself, that while he makes use of the good old simple writers, Master

Gerard, Master Robert Turner, Master Parkinson and the rest, he scoffs

at what he calls their superstition. But I, having relieved him from the

task of gathering, find it my pleasure to follow the quaint old

directions in their least particular. And when Master Gerard, for

instance, says, ‘This herb loseth its power unless it be gathered under

the rays of the moon in her first quarter’ why then, cousin David,” she

laughed, “under the rays of the moon in her first quarter I gather it.

Who knows if I do not please thereby some honest ghost? Who knows if

there be not in very truth some hidden virtue in the hour? You will have

divined that the hour of sunrise is, on the same authority, the only fit

season for the culling of certain other precious plants. And so I am

here to cull betony and ditander in the dew. (Betony, you must know,

sir, is of all simples, except vervaine, the most excellent, so that it

is an old say: ‘If you be ill, sell your coat and buy betony.’)”

Here she pushed her way through a bed where thyme had grown breast high.

She came back again presently, flushed and be-pearled, merry with the

breath of the spices clinging to her garments, and with as much betony

as one hand could hold together. This she added to the basket’s burden.

On ran her tongue the while:

“Ah,” catching herself up abruptly and retracing her way by a step, “the

ditander is also blossoming, I see. Father will be glad to see it. It is

sovereign against the wounds of arrows ‘shot from guns, and also for the

healing of poisoned hurts.’ You would never guess,” she added, “that the

juice of this modest little plant is so powerful that, Master Gerard

avers, ‘the mere smell of it will drive away venomous beasts and doth

astonish them!’” Her laugh rang out, clear as crystal. “You are not

convinced, cousin. I would I could see more speculation in that eye!

What if I were to tell you that the thing grows under the influence of

Mars—would it awaken more interest?”

His grave lip was faintly lifted to a smile.

“It might account at least for its virtue against wounds of arrows,”

said he.

“Nay, there’s sarcasm in that tone,” she said, shaking her head. “More

respect, I beg of you, Sir David, for this little borage. Does it not

look quaint and simple with its baby-blue flowers and its white downy

stem? Ah, I warrant me you have had borage in your wine ere this—but you

never knew why or how it came there! Oh, sir, it is no less—on

authority, mark me—than one of the four great cordial flowers most

deserving of esteem for cheering the spirits. The other three are the

violet, the rose, and alkanet. And what the alkanet is I should much

like to know!”

... “You know so much,” he said, “that I have no thought to spare for

what you do not know.”

“Sarcastic again—take care, cousin! Do not mock at Jupiter’s own

cordial. And I tell you more, sir: conjoined with hellebore—black

hellebore—that dark and gloomy plant will, as one Robert Burton has it:

‘Purge the veins

Of Melancholy and cheer the Heart

Of those black fumes that make it smart;

And clear the brain of misty fogs

Which dull our senses, our souls’ clogs....

“It’s a favourite quotation of my father’s. Would you drink of it, if I

brewed it for you?”

There fell a sudden silence—a something dividing their pleasant warmth

of sympathy as of a chill breeze blowing between them. And she knew a

thoughtless word had struck upon his hidden sore. She stood, as if

convicted, with eyes averted from his face. Then he spoke:

“Every man in his youth brews the cup of his own life and spends his age

in drinking of it, willy nilly. Sometimes, I think, it is blind fate

that has gathered the ingredients to his hand. Sometimes I see they are

but the choice of his own perversity. But once brewed, he must drink, be

they bitter or sweet.”

“Cousin—” she began timidly. Then, after her woman’s way, courage came

to her on a sudden turn of passion: “I’ll not believe it!” she cried,

flashing upon him. “Throw the poison away, David. There is glad wine yet

in this beautiful world.”

His face relaxed as he looked upon her; the gloomy cloud passed from it.

But the melancholy remained.

“Do you remember,” said he, “for I too can quote—what Lady Macbeth says:

‘All the perfumes of Araby cannot sweeten this little hand!’ My bright

cousin, believe me, there is a bitterness which no sweetness that ever

was distilled, nay, I fear, not even such as you could distil, can ever

mitigate. Have you not learned,” he added, and a certain inner agitation

made his lips twitch and the pupils of his eyes dilate and found a

distant echo in his voice as of some roaring waters deeply hidden—“have

you not learned, over your father’s crucibles and phials, that the

sweetest essence does but lose its nature and become bitter too for

ever, when mingled with but a few drops of the acrid draught. Ellinor, I

have warned you already.”

She felt as if some cold hand had been laid on her heart:—here spoke

again the voice of the sick soul determined to renounce. And here was

the one man in her whole world, to whom she would so fain give

extravagantly. There are natures to which love means taking only; others

to which it means giving all. How she would have given! The ache of the

tide thrust back upon her heart rose to her very throat. She went white,

even to her brave lips. But still they smiled, as women’s lips will

smile in such straits.

“You mind me,” she said, “that I was after all forgetting to gather the

hellebore. ’Tis a dark drug-plant, cousin and loves the shade; and, if

the old simplers speak truth, it must be gathered before a ray of sun

shall of a morning have opened its green petals. I see that I must

hurry. Already the shadow of your grey tower is shortening across the

beds.”

She took her basket from his arm, gave him a little nod as of dismissal

and passed quickly from him. He let her go without a word or a gesture,

standing still, wrapt in himself, with eyes downcast. Those deep waters

in his soul, that for so many long years had lain black and

stagnant—what was it that had so stirred them of late days, that they

should rise in waves like the salt and bitter sea and dash against his

laboriously built dykes of peace and renunciation?

Ellinor was long on her knees beside the hellebore, not indeed that she

was busy picking it, for her hands lay idly before her. With eyes fixed

unseeingly upon its dark, poisonous looking tufts, she was tasting the

savour of a slow gathering tear. Suddenly she felt her cousin’s presence

again close upon her and began feverishly to tear at the plant, every

energy of her mind bent upon concealing her weakness. In another moment,

with a sweetness that was almost overpowering, she knew that he was

kneeling beside her, his shoulder to her shoulder, his hands over hers.

“Dear Ellinor,” he said softly in her ear, “I do not like to see you

touch this poisonous plant, let me——” And then, breaking off, when she

turned her face, so close to his, as if irresistibly drawn to seek his

glance: “Forgive me!” he cried, with more emotion than she had ever

heard his measured tones express before. “By what right am I always thus

casting upon your happy heart the shadow of my gloom!”

Her fingers closed passionately round his.

“David,” she said, almost in a whisper, “don’t forget I too have known

suffering. David you were wrong just now. The sweet and the bitter work

together make wholesome beverage. And see, for that do I gather

hellebore that it may blend with the borage. Did I not tell you so?

And—ah, forgive, but I must say it, sometimes the bitterness and the

sorrow are not real, only fancied.... And then it may be that real

adversity must come to make us see it. And even then, if we do see it,

sweet are the uses of adversity!”

“Why, then, I could believe,” he answered her, and his deep voice still

thrilled with that note of emotion that was so inexpressibly musical to

her ear, “that if a man were to be comforted by such as you, he might

find a sweetness even in adversity—that is,” he added on a yet deeper

note, “did he dare let himself be comforted.”

She sighed and dropped her hands from his; took up her basket and rose

to her feet. He also rose hastily, as if ashamed of his emotion, and

once more wrapped reserve around him like a mantle. Presently he said,

in that slightly jesting manner that never lost touch with melancholy:

“Your father has long been looking for the lost ‘Star-of-Comfort.’ Your

father is an amiable materialist and believes that a right-chosen drug

can minister to a mind diseased. I fear me it will prove to him as frail

a quest as that of the Fern Seed of invisibility and the Lotos of

forgetfulness—and such like dreams of unattainable good!”

“You are wrong, wrong again!” Although the moisture she scorned to brush

away was still in her eyes, the smile was on her lip once more; and the

dimple by it—a triumphant dimple.

“How so?” he asked.

“Why, sir, you once were a truer prophet than now you wot of. Did you

not foretell to me, on the first day of my return, that I might help him

to find it? The lost plant was, according to Master Ralph Prynne (of

fragrant memory) well-known at one time in the south of France where,

says he, upon diligent search it may even now be discovered among ruins

and rocks!” Here she resumed her mock didactic manner. “‘It is my

belief,’ says he, ‘that the gay and singularly careless temper of these

peoples is due in great part to the ancient custom of brewing it into

the wine they did drink of—whereby their sons and daughters did inherit

the happy tendencies engendered in themselves—and splenetic melancholy

which sits so black on many of our country is never known among them.’”

“A wondrous drug!” said David.

“So I thought,” she retorted; and, with a mocking glance at him, went

on: “And knowing how many indeed stand in need of it here, I who had

recently come myself from the south of France, resolved to get him the

seed or root, if such were to be obtained. Master Prynne gives a very

detailed description and I have a good memory. There was one, a wise

woman I knew of, who was learned in simples. In fine, sir, turn and

behold!”

She twisted him round, led him a pace or two forward, and pointed.

On a shallow bed, sloping to due south, screened from the north and

prepared with a kind of rockery clothed with mingled sand and heather

soil, a hardy-looking dwarf plant was growing in thick patches. And

sundry small but vigorous off-shoots, darting here and there gave

promise that they would soon cover the bed and overhang its rocky

borders. The full sunshine blazed down upon it, and the minute bright

and bold blossoms that gemmed it already in places looked like stars of

bluish flame among the lustrous dark green leaves.

“Behold!” repeated Ellinor, with a dramatic gesture.

There was a stimulating aromatic fragrance in the air. The morning sun

which had just emerged from the edge of the keep bore down upon them

with an effulgence as yet merely grateful. A band of puzzled bees was

hovering musically above the last attractive new-comer in the herbary.

David looked from the flourishing bed to the straight, strong figure,

the brave countenance of his cousin.

“And so you have succeeded,” he said with a look of smiling wonder.

“Succeeded where Master Simon has sought in vain so many years!

Everything you touch seems to prosper.”

Some realisation of that spirit of gay perseverance which had been so

beneficently active in his neglected house all these months, beneath

whose influence flowers of order and brightness seemed to have sprung

up, magic and fragrant as the lost “Star-of-Comfort” itself, kindled a

new light in the eye he now kept fixed upon her. It was a realisation, a

sense of admiration, distinct from the ever-present, albeit

hardly-conscious attraction. He looked back at the flame-starred

creeping shrub.

“So there blooms Master Simon’s True-Grace, this _Euphrosinum_, his

Star-of-Comfort, after all these years,” he went on musingly.

And the sense of her presence was intermingled with the penetrating

fragrance of the strange flower, the music of bees and bird call, the

fanning of the breeze, and the warmth of the sun.

“In Persian,” she resumed, “they call it _Rustian-al-Misrour_—the

‘Plant-of-Heart’s-Joy’ is the meaning of it, so Prynne tells us. It was

brought to Europe by the Crusaders, but lost in the destruction of

monastery gardens in England, and fell into disuse elsewhere—and thus

came to be regarded as a myth. But things are not myths because we lose

them,” she added wistfully. “Who knows, sometimes the joy we deem lost

is under our hand.” She picked off a branchlet and absently nibbled it.

And her light breath, already sweet as of clover or lavender, came

wafted across spiced with this new fragrance.

“Well,” said he then slowly, “according to the bygone simplers, there it

lies. Ellinor, when you brew me a cordial of the Star-of-Comfort, I

shall drink it.”

“I may mind you of that promise one day,” said she.

Then, upon the little pause that ensued, she looked at the shortening

shadows and the skies and said, in her womanly, careful manner, that it

was time for her to be in the dairy. At the garden gate, however, he

paused.

“And under the influence of what star,” he asked, “is the wondrous plant

supposed to bloom?”

She could not guess from his manner whether he spoke in jest or in

earnest, but she answered him mischievously, as she turned the key in

the lock: “Master Prynne was silent on this point; and nowhere could I

find news of it. But we are quite safe, cousin David, for I planted the

first cutting myself under your new star.”

He started ever so slightly.

“Did you indeed?” he murmured dreamily.

“But I don’t know its name yet. Tell me, you must have given your new

star a name by now—for I think it grows brighter night by night.”

In silence he let his deep gaze rest for a moment upon her, then

answered:

“To me it is still nameless, though meaning things beyond words.”

He paused, and went on, still compassing her with his absorbed look.

“You and the star came to me together—shall I not call it also,” with a

gesture at the flowering bed, “Euphrosine—Star-of-Comfort?”

These words, accompanied by the glance that seemed to give them so

earnest a significance, troubled Ellinor strangely. She could find no

response. She drew the key from the lock and was moving forward with

downcast eyes when he laid his touch lightly upon her arm.

“Thank you,” said he, “for admitting me into your enchanted garden! Some

morning when the dawn birds are calling, or some evening before the

stars come out, may I knock at this gate again?”

“Nay, David,” cried she, with swift uplifted eyes, holding out to him

the key on the impulse of her leaping heart, “this gate must never be

locked for you! My father has another—take this one!”

His fingers closed upon her hand and then he took the brown key and

looked at it.

“For you and me alone,” he said.

She knew then that this hour they had spent together in the

dew-besprinkled closes was to him as sacred and as sweet as it would

ever be to her. But now he had folded his lips together and went beside

her in silence.

CHAPTER III

A QUEEN OF CURDS AND CREAM

And Enid brought sweet cakes to make them cheer,

· · · · ·

And stood behind and waited ...

And seeing her so sweet and serviceable,

Geraint had longing in him evermore

To stoop and kiss the tender little thumb

That crost the trencher as she laid it down.

—TENNYSON (_Idylls_).

At the end of the lane, Ellinor took the path which branched off to the

courtyards; and, as she made no movement of farewell or dismissal, the

master of the place, with great simplicity, followed her. These

courtyards were located in the most ancient part of Bindon, where in

mediæval days had been the inner bailey. What remained of the lowered

towers and curtains had been utilised for the peaceful purposes of

spences, bakehouses and dairies.

As in the case of all buildings, the life of which has gradually

dwindled, these precincts had gathered to themselves a mellow and placid

picturesqueness. Long tranquil years had clothed them with luxuriance.

It was as if the green tide of surrounding nature had taken delight in

reconquering the whilom bare array of stone and mortar. Rampant ivies

and wild creeping plants had long ago stormed the half-razed ramparts

from the outside, and unchecked in their assault now pounced into the

yards over the roofs. On the inside the blush roses were foaming up the

grey walls; the square of grass in this shaded spot was deeply green.

In the early light and the silence it was a scene of singular placidity

and fitted well with David’s unwontedly pleasant mood; mood of tired

body and vaguely happy mind. A few pigeons from the high-reared cot came

fluttering down and walked about, curtseying expectantly.

Presently two milk-maids, in print frocks, sun bonnets and clogs,

clattered down some stairs and went in quickly through the dairy door,

agitated at perceiving the task-mistress up before them. Their entrance

broke the musing spell of the two unavowed lovers. As they drew near the

open door of the house, the cool breath of the dairy—a sort of cowslip

breath, of much cleanliness, mingled with the faintly acrid sweetness of

the milk—came to their nostrils. A row of shining pails were ranged upon

the low stone bench just outside the door. A lad and maid hurried past,

each carrying two more foaming buckets.

Ellinor now became the decided, almost stern, mistress of household

matters. She counted the milk pails and gave an order to each maid, who

curtseyed and stood at attention, but could not keep a roving, awestruck

eye from the unwonted spectacle of their master.

“Rosemary, three pails for the dairy, as usual. Two for the house: up

with them, Kate! Sally, back to your skimming as soon as you have filled

the steward’s can and carried in the pail for the parish dole out of the

sunshine. Stay a moment,” her tone and manner altered, “leave one of

those here—Cousin David, have you broken your fast? Of course not! Then

you and I, shall we not do so now together? Nay, I shall be disappointed

if you refuse. You have made me queen of these realms—the ‘queen of

curds and cream,’ as Doctor Tutterville calls me—and all must obey me

here!”

There was a stone porch jutting forth over the side door that led into

the passage. Within this refuge, on either side, was set a stone bench

under an unglazed ogee window. Honeysuckle had intermingled its growth

with that of the climbing roses, and made there a parlour of perfume.

Hither Ellinor conducted the lord of Bindon, and here he allowed himself

to be installed, obeying her as one who walks in dreams and is glad to

dream on.

The maids had parted in noisy flight, each on her different errand,

starched gowns crackling, clogs clacking, pails clinking as they went.

Ellinor threw down her cloak and her basket and disappeared, light as

the lapwing, rejoicing with all a woman’s joy to minister to the

beloved. She returned with a little wooden table, which, smiling, she

set before him and was gone again. This time it was out into the yard

and into the dairy, and her head flashed in a sun-shaft. When she

reappeared, she was walking more slowly, and between her hands was a

yellow glazed bowl brimming with new-drawn milk.

“For you, Sir David,” she said.

It was foaming and fragrant of clover blossom as he lifted it to his

lips.

“And now,” she went on, “you shall taste of my baking. I had a batch set

last night and the rolls ought to be crisp to a touch.”

The following minute brought her back, flushed and triumphant, bearing

on a tray a smoking brown loaflet, a ray of amber honey and a rustic

basket full of strawberries. She paused a second reflectively, and

cried:

“A pat of fresh-churned butter!”

And again his eyes watched her cross the shaft of sunshine and come

back, and they were the eyes of a man gazing on a dear and lovely

picture.

“Now, David, is this not a breakfast fit for a king?”

He looked at the table and then at her; and then put down the loaf his

long fingers had been absently crushing.

“And you?” he asked and rose. “You—the queen?”

“I? Oh, I think I forgot myself. Oh, don’t get up, David. Don’t, please!

You cannot imagine how much refreshed I shall feel when you have eaten.

There, then, I will sit beside you. But as there is no pleasure in

waiting upon oneself, I must call up a court menial. Katy! A bowl of

milk for me. Rosemary, another roll from the oven!”

This was to remain a memory of gold in Ellinor’s life. Poets may sing as

they will of the joys of mutual love confessed. But there is an hour

more exquisite yet in man and woman’s life: the hour of love still

untold. The hour of trembling hopes and uncertainties; of ecstasies

hidden away in the inmost sanctuary of the being; of dreams so much more

beautiful than reality; of thoughts that no words can clothe and music

that no instrument can render. Hour of doubt which is to certainty as

the dawn is to the day, as mystery is to revelation: as much more

enthralling, as much more exquisite.

Even as the soul is constrained by the body, so must the ideal thought

lose of its fragrance when limited to the spoken word. But the very

condition of life’s tenure urges us to hasten ever onwards towards the

success of attainment. We may not sit and taste the full sweetness of

the present because our foreseeing nature and old Time are spurring us

on, on! This present of ours is fleeting enough, God knows. Yet the

miserable restlessness within us robs us of the minute even while it is

ours. Thus the most perfect things in our lives will ever be a memory.

But when the golden hours have all tolled for us, when the flowers are

all withered, at least we can look back and say: “That was my sunrise

hour. ... That was my perfect rose!”

They spoke little to each other, but Ellinor saw the lines of melancholy

fade out of his face and become replaced by soft restfulness. Tired he

looked, the watcher of the night, in the broad radiance of the day, but

happy. It was as if the fatigue itself brought a sense of peace, lulling

him to dreaminess and depriving him of the energy to fight against the

sweetness of the moment.

Suddenly, with the light tread of a cat, the squat figure of Mrs.

Nutmeg, in her decent widow’s black and her snowy mutch, came upon them

from the house. She paused with a start of such extreme surprise that it

was in itself an impertinence, and the more galling because it could not

be resented. Ignoring the scarlet-cheeked Ellinor, the housekeeper

dropped her curtsey and offered ostentatious excuses to Sir David.

“I humbly ask your pardon, sir. Indeed, sir, I had no idea, or I would

not have made so bold as to intrude. I hope, sir, you’ll forgive me for

disturbing you at such a moment!”

Her eye roved as she spoke over the disordered table, aside to Ellinor’s

cloak and the basket of withering herbs; then back to Ellinor herself,

where it deliberately measured every detail—the dusty shoe, the green

stains on the gown, the flushed brow, the disordered hair.

Her unconscious master waved his hand a little impatiently with his

formal “Good morrow,” that was more a dismissal than a greeting. Mrs.

Nutmeg returned Sir David’s brief salutation with another unctuous

curtsey. Withdrawing her glance from Ellinor, she fixed it upon his

face, with a vain attempt to throw an expression of tender solicitude

into the opaque white and the meaningless black of her eye.

“Excuse the liberty, sir,” she began again, “but do you feel quite

yourself this morning? It do go to my heart to see how drawn and ill you

be looking! I fear these last months, sir, you haven’t been as usual.

Not at all. More has remarked it than myself.”

Ellinor rose.

“It’s getting late, Margery,” she said, “and the cream is not skimmed

yet. Ring the bell for the girls.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Margery curtseyed, her eyes still clinging unwaveringly to

her master’s face. This was now turned upon her with a sudden frown.

“Do you not hear?” said Sir David.

They robbed him freely in his absence, this household of his, but none

could forget in his presence that he was master.

“Yes, sir, yes ma’am. I ask your pardon,” said Mrs. Nutmeg.

And this time there was flurry in her step as she moved away, her list

slippers padding on the flags. She cast not another glance behind her;

yet Ellinor felt chilled, she knew not why. Upon the dial that had

marked her warm-tinted hour a grey shadow had fallen. She took up her

basket of herbs. Most of the perishable things were already withering,

but the dry vivacious stems of the Star-of-Comfort flaunted their glossy

leaves and their tiny brilliant blossom undimmed. She noticed this, and

was superstitiously glad.

“I must go, cousin,” she said, “but later, if you will, I shall come and

help on with the new chart.”

She nodded and left him. As she moved across the courtyard towards her

father’s den, the maids, hustling each other as they clacked into the

dairy, looked after her with inimical stare. Then one whispered to the

other, and the other nudged back, while the third surreptitiously shook

her mottled fist. And as Ellinor walked on with steady step she knew it

all. She knew that “the Queen of curds and cream” sat on an insecure

throne; and that, were the power that had placed her there to be

withdrawn from her, many eager hands would be stretched out to pull her

into the mire.

But upon the first step leading down to the laboratory, she turned and

cast a glance back: in the deep shadow of the porch David was still

standing. Out of the dark face the light eyes were watching her; when

she turned, he smiled and waved his hand. And her spirits rose again as

she ran down the stairs, to begin her long round of various work. She

had stuck a sprig of the Euphrosinum in her kerchief; and during the

whole day, whether over crucible or household book, in linen closet or

still-room, each time the scent of it was wafted to her nostrils there

came and went upon her lips a little secret smile, as if the fragrant

thing on her bosom were but the symbol of some inner fragrance rising in

little fitful storms from her heart.

CHAPTER IV

OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

Let me loose thy tongue with wine:

No, I love not what is new:

She is of the ancient house,

And I think we know the hue

Of that cap upon her brows!

—TENNYSON (_Vision of Sin_).

Old Giles, in the plate-room! Old Giles, butler of Bindon and

confidential servant to Sir David, sunk in his wooden armchair and his

head inclined till his double chin rested on his greasy stock, surveying

with distasteful eye the mug of small-ale on the table before him.

A stout old man with a reddening nose may be no unpleasant picture if

superabundance of flesh and misplacement of carmine bear witness to

jollity and good cheer; but oh lamentable spectacle if melancholy droop

that ruby nose; if fat cheeks hang disconsolate! Then for every added

ounce of avoirdupois is added a pound of misery. Your melancholy thin

man is fitted by nature to bear his burden, but the sad fat man seems to

deliquesce, to collapse—so much in his case is affliction against the

obvious design of nature!

From the inner pantry door Margery stood a moment and contemplated her

fellow servant awhile, with an air of deeper commiseration than her

usually set visage was wont to express. Then she carefully closed the

door and advanced to the table. In her rolled up apron she was clasping

something with both hands.

“Eh,” she said, in a long drawn note, “it do go to my heart, Mister

Giles, to see you so cast down!”

The butler rolled his lack-lustre eye from the mug of beer to the

housekeeper’s countenance; then his underlip began to tremble.

“Ah,” he answered, “that stuff is killing me, Mrs. Nutmeg. The cold of

it on my stomach! It’ll creep up to my heart some of these nights, it

will! And that will be the end of poor old faithful Giles!”

A tear twinkled on his vast cheek. He stretched out his hand for the

glass, gulped a mouthful of it and replaced it on the table, drawing

down the corners of his mouth into a grimace not unlike that which in an

infant heralds a burst of wailing.

“Cold, cruel, poisonous stuff, that lies as heavy as heavy! Half a

caskful, ma’am will not stimulate a man as much as half a wineglassful

of port-wine or sherry-wine. It’s murder—that’s what it is!”

“Murder it is,” assented Margery. She took the glass and threw its

contents into the grate: sympathy personified. Then she began to move

about the room with an air of so much mystery that Giles’ attention was

faintly roused in something external to himself and to the odiousness of

small-ale.

Mrs. Nutmeg went to the pantry door, listened a moment with stooped

head, then released her right hand from the enfolded object and turned

the key in the lock. Stepping to the high-set window, she next squinted

east and west, as if to make sure that no watchers were about; then

returned to the table, slowly unrolled her apron and displayed to the

butler’s astonished gaze a black bottle, cobwebbed, dust-crusted,

red-sealed—a bottle of venerable appearance and, to the initiated, of

Olympian promise. With infinite precaution she tilted it into a vertical

position and placed it on the table, displaying in so doing the dusty

streak of whitewash which had marked the upper side of its repose these

twenty years. Into old Giles’ expressionless stare leaped a light of

rapturous recognition.

“The Comet port, by gum! The port from the fifth bin!”

He raised himself in his chair and, as if sight were not enough for

conviction, began with trembling hands to caress the bottle, and

smacking his lips as if the taste were already upon them. Margery

surveyed him with her head slightly on one side.

“How—how did you get it?” he babbled, now sniffing at the seal, his red

nose laid fondly first on one side then on the other.

“Never you mind,” said she, “I’m not the one to stand by and see old

service drove to death by stinginess nor yet by interference. There’s

more where it came from.”

“The last bottle we drank together,” interrupted he, “was the first to

break in upon the sixth dozen. Six dozen, minus one, seventy-one

bottles. That makes——”

“Seventy bottles still,” said she. “Enough to warm your heart again for

many a long day.” She stooped, and whipped out a corkscrew from one of

her capacious pockets.

“Give me that bottle, Mister Giles.”

She lifted it from his grasp. He raised his hands, protesting,

quivering.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t shake it, ma’am! Don’t shake it! It’s thirty

year old, if it’s a day. Oh, Lord, Mrs. Nutmeg, give it to me, ma’am!”

She cast one swift, contemptuous glance upon him.

“I think my wrist is steadier than yours,” she remarked drily, while

with the neatest precision she inserted the point of the corkscrew into

the middle of the seal.

“’Tis the yale,” he palpitated.

“Oh, aye,” said she, “the ale, of course.” She smiled in her sleek way

while she turned the corkscrew. “Here,” she added, “is what will steady

them for a while at any rate.”

The cork came forth with a chirp that once more brought the fire to the

toper’s eye.

“Ho, ho!” he cried, every crease in his face that had before spelt

despondency now wreathing rapture.

“Wait a bit,” she bade him, still keeping her strong hand on the bottle

neck. She dived into the left pocket and brought forth a short cut-glass

beaker. “You’re not going,” said she, “to drink Sir David’s Comet port

out of a mug!”

She poured it out, gently tilting the venerable bottle. He could hardly

wait till the gorgeous liquid garnet had brimmed to the edge, before

grasping the glass. But palsied as his hands were not a drop did they

spill. A mouthful first, to let the taste of it lie on his palate;

another to roll round his tongue; then unctuously, as slowly as was

compatible with the act of swallowing, the ichor of the grape destined

to warm a high-born heart and to illumine the workings of a noble mind,

was sent to kindle the base fires of Sir David’s thieving old servant.

“Ah!”

He took a deep-drawn breath of utter satisfaction, reached for the

bottle, boldly poured himself forth another glass and drank again.

Motionless, the woman watched.

“As good a bottle,” said he garrulously, “as ever came out of the bin!

’Twas of the laying of the good Sir Everard—Sir David’s grandfather, you

mark, Mrs. Nutmeg. You wasn’t in these parts then. Ah, a judge of wine

he was. I tell ye I could pick every drop he had bottled blindfold this

minute, at the first taste. He and Master Rickart, Lord, what wild times

they had together! Ah, he was a blade in those days, was old Rickart.

Now——’Tis well there’s someone left at Bindon that knows the valley of

precious liquor, for it’s been disgusting, I assure you, ma’am. There’s

master had nothing but the light clary—French stuff—and not known the

differ these five years! Well, well, ’twould have broken Sir Everard’s

heart, but”—piously, “there’s one left as remembers him and his tastes.

May I offer you a thimbleful, Mrs. Nutmeg? ’Tis as good as a cordial!”

He was once more the man of importance: the steward dispensing his

master’s goods with a fine air of hospitality.

“No, Mister Giles, I thank you kindly,” said the lady. Then she measured

him again with one of her deep looks, marked the hand which he was

stretching out for the port and suddenly whipped the desired object from

its reach. Her calculated moment had come.—The butler’s limbs had lost

their palsied trembling and there was some kind of speculation in his

eye.

“No, Mister Giles,” she said, as he gaped at her. “I came here for a

little chat, if you please. You’re feeling more yourself again?”

The memory of his injuries, forgotten for the brief span of ecstasy,

returned in full force. His lip drooped.

“Aye, ma’am, a little, a little. But I am sadly weak.”

He pushed his glass tentatively forward, but she ignored the hint.

“I thought you was a-dying by inches before my eyes,” she announced

deliberately.

The red face opposite to her grew mottled grey and purple. Mr. Giles

began to whimper:

“So I was, ma’am. So I be!”

Margery sat down and, clasping the bottle with both her determined

hands, leaned her head on one side of it.

“Another month of small-ale,” she said, “would bring you to your grave,

Mister Giles. Aye, you may groan. How many bottles be left of this old

port? Seventy ye said. And there be as good besides.”

“The East India sherry,” said he, the light of his one remaining

interest flickering up again in the aged sockets. “Oh, it’s a beauty,

that wine is! As dry, ma’am, and as mellow!” He smacked his tongue. “And

there’s the Madeiry, got at the Dook of Sussex’s sale. ‘Royal wine,’

says Sir Everard to me. And Royal wine it is! But you know the taste of

it yourself. Then there are the Burgundy bins. Women folk,” said Mr.

Giles, “have that inferiority, they can’t appreciate red wine. But

there’s Burgundy down in my cellars that I’d rather go to bed on a

bottle of as even of the Comet port.”

Margery broke in with a short laugh.

“Yes, yes,” said she; “I’ll warrant there is good stuff in your cellars.

But who’s got the key of them now, if I may make so bold?”

Once again the toper was brought up to the sense of present limitations

as by the tug of a merciless bit cunningly handled. With open mouth and

starting eyes he paused, and the dark, senile blood rushed up to his

face. Then he struck the table with his hand:

“That vixen of old Rickart’s, blast her!”

“And he—the daft old gentleman,” Margery’s voice dropped soft, as oil

trickling down to fire, “eating the bread of charity, one may say,

without so much as doing a stroke of work to save the shame of it!”

“Blast him!” cried Giles, with another thump.

“Oh, yes, when I brought you that bottle, I told you there was more

where it came from. But the question is, who’s to have it, Mr. Giles! Is

it all to be for that clever young lady and her crazy old father—that’s

come like cuckoos to settle at Bindon, and bamfoozle that poor innocent

gentleman, Sir David, and oust us as has served him so faithful and so

long?”

“No, no, no!” cried old Giles, “blast ’em, blast ’em!”

Margery put her finger to her lip with a long drawn “Hush!” and glanced

warningly round the room, though indeed, stronghold as it was, there was

little fear of the sound escaping to the outer world. She then poured

out a measured half glass and pushed it towards the butler, corked the

bottle, placed it on the top of the safe; and betaking herself once

again to her inexhaustible pockets, drew forth one after another and set

in their turn upon the table a small unopened bottle of ink, a goose

quill pen, of which she tested the nib, and a large sheet of paper,

which she unfolded and smoothed.

“Now, Mr. Giles,” said she sharply.

He was absently sucking his empty glass and started to look upon her

preparations uncomprehendingly.

“You write a fine hand,” said she, picking the stopper out of the inkpot

with the point of the corkscrew.

“Ah,” said he, “my cellar book was a sight to see! It’s lain useless

these six months. But so long,” he said, proudly but sadly, “as I kept

the keys no one can say but as I kept the book.”

So he had indeed, with a quaint fidelity; and amazing reading it would

have proved to the casual inspector, who would have founded wild

opinions of Sir David’s and his cousin’s prowesses in the matter of

toping.

“Do you want the keys back?” asked Margery, in a quiet whisper, “or is

this to be the last bottle of port you’ll ever taste?”

He stared at her, his moist lip working. She seemed to find the answer

sufficient, for she motioned him into his seat.

“Then you sit down and write,” said she, “and I promise you Bindon shall

get his rights again, and our good master’s quiet, comfortable house be

rid of her that brings no good to it.”

Giles sat down submissively, dipped the quill into the ink, manipulated

it with the flourish of the proud penman; then, squaring his wrists flat

on the sheet, prepared to start.

“I’d never have troubled you,” explained Margery, apologetically, “had I

had your grand education, Mr. Giles.”

“Who be I to write to?” said Giles, with the stern air of the male mind

controlling the female one, as it would wander from the point.

Again Margery whispered, not for fear of listeners, but to give the

allurement of mystery to her purpose:

“To the Lady Lochore,” said she.

The pen dropped from Giles’ fingers, making a great blot at the top of

the sheet, which Margery, with clacking tongue, deftly mopped up with a

corner of her apron. Consternation and awe wrote themselves on the

butler’s face. Faithless old ingrate as he was, robbing with remorseless

system the hand that fed him, something of family spirit, some sense of

clanship, still existed in his muddled mind. Enough of their master’s

secrets had filtered to the household for everyone to know that his only

sister had wedded the man who, under the pretending cloak of friendship,

had done him mortal injury; and that from the moment she had thus given

herself to his enemy, the lord of Bindon had cut her off from his life.

But there were things beside, which old Giles alone knew; which he had

kept to himself, even after his long devotion to the Bindon cellars had

wreaked havoc upon the intelligence of his conscience.

It was but ten years back when a mounted messenger had brought the

tidings to Sir David of the birth of an heir to the house of Lochore:

heir also, as matters now stood, to the childless house of Bindon. Giles

had conducted this messenger to Sir David’s presence. Giles had stood by

and watched his master’s pale face grow death livid as he listened to

the envoy’s tale, had seen him recoil from even the touch of his

kinsman’s letter. It was Giles who had received the curt instructions:

“Take the messenger away, give him food, rest and drink, and let him

ride and bear back to Lord Lochore that letter he has sent me.” And now

old Giles looked up into Margery’s inscrutable face, and cried with

echoes of forgotten loyalty in his husky voice:

“Write to Miss Maud?—to my Lady, I mean. Nay, nay, Mrs. Nutmeg, I’ll not

do that!”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Nutmeg.

She had been standing over his shoulder, showing more eagerness than her

wont, and licking her lips over the words she was about to dictate to

him, while a light shone in her eyes that was never kindled so long as

she was under observation. At the check of his words the old sleek

change came over her. The curtain of impassiveness fell over her

countenance. The gleam went out in her eyes. She came quietly round, sat

down, opposite him and, folding her hands, let them rest on the table

before her.

“Ah,” said she, “it do go again the grain, don’t it, Mr. Giles? And if

it was not for Sir David——”

Giles meanwhile, having pushed the writing materials on one side, had

risen and helped himself freely again to the Comet port, drinking

courage to his own half-repented resolution, a babble of disjointed

phrases escaping from him in the intervals of his gulps. “No, he could

not go against Sir David—poor old man, not many years to live—served his

father’s father. Eh, and Sir Edmund had put him into these arms; and he

but a babe—the greatest toper in the house, says Sir Edmund...” Here

there was a chuckle and a tear, and a fresh glass poured out.

Margery never blinked towards the bottle. Unfolding her hands, she

presently began to smooth out the writing paper, and by-and-bye began to

speak. At first it was a merely soothing trickle of talk. No one knew

Mr. Giles’ high-mindedness and nobility of character better than she

did; though, indeed, she herself was but a new-comer at Bindon, compared

to him—the third of his generation in the service of the house, and

himself the servant of three Cheveral masters. By-and-bye, from this

primrose path of flattery she turned aside into less smooth ground.

Something she said of the real duties of old service, of the mistaken

duty of blind submission. There was a dark hint of Sir David’s

helplessness, a prey to designing intruders—“and him as easy to cheat as

a child!” A tear here welled to Mistress Margery’s eyelid; there was no

doubt she spoke as one whose knowledge was first hand.

Mister Giles knew best, of course; but, in her humble opinion, it was an

old servitor’s bounden duty to let their master’s nearest relative know.

Here Margery became very dark again; things are so much more terrible

when merely hinted at. The butler’s hand halted with the sixth glass on

the way to his lips; he put it down again untasted.

“Who’s to look after Master, I should like to know?” asked Margery

boldly, “when you and I and all the old faithful folk is turned out of

Bindon, and that deep young lady and Master Rickart reign alone, with

their poisons and their powders?”

“By gum!” cried Giles, with a shout, thumping the table, so that the

precious wine this time slopped over its barrier. “By gum! hand me that

paper, and say your say, ma’am, and I’ll write it!”

The man was just tipsy enough already to be easily worked up, and unable

to analyse the means by which his passion was roused; not too tipsy to

be a perfectly capable instrument in the housekeeper’s hands.

The following was the letter that Giles, the butler of Bindon, wrote to

“the Lady Lochore,” at her house in London:

MY LADY.—Trusting you will excuse the liberty and in the hopes this

finds your Ladyship well, as is the humble wish of the writer. My

Lady, I have not been the servant of your Ladyship’s brother, my most

honoured master, Sir David Cheveral of Bindon, without knowing the sad

facts of family divisions between yourself and Sir David. But, my

Lady, wishing to do my duty by my master, as has always been my humble

endeavour, I should consider myself deaf to the Voice of Conscience,

did I not take the pen this day to let you know the state of affairs

at Bindon at this present time.

Master Rickart’s daughter, Mistress Marvel, has come back to Bindon,

to live, and my Lady, she and her father is now master and mistress

here. Sir David being such as my Lady knows he is, different from

other people, is no match for such.

My Lady, what the end of it will be no one can tell. None of us like

to think of it. What is said in the village and all over the country

already, is what I must excuse myself from writing, not being fit for

your Ladyship’s eyes. But as your Ladyship’s father’s old and trusted

servant, I am doing no less than my bounden duty, in warning your

Ladyship.

Here Margery had halted, and flouted several eager suggestions on the

part of the faithful butler, who was anxious to mention poisons and

phials and black practises, who, moreover, had wished to introduce after

every sentence a detailed account of the unmerited cruelty practised

upon himself in forcing him to give up the keys of the family cellar,

and express his intimate persuasion of the restlessness thereby caused

to the good Sir Everard’s bones in their honoured grave. But Margery was

firm; and now, after due reflection, sternly commanded Mr. Giles’

respects and signature. When this flourishing signature at length

adorned the page, Margery laid a flat finger below it.

“Write: Post-Scriptum,” ordered she. “I humbly trust your Ladyship’s

little son is well. There was great joy among us when we heard of his

honoured birth. We was, up to now, all used to think of him as the heir

to Bindon.”

Here she hesitated again; but finally, true to her instinct that

suggestion is more potent than explanation, demanded the folding of the

letter, its addressing and sealing. The latter duty she undertook

herself, with the help of the inexhaustible bag. And as she laid her

thumb on the hot wax, she smiled, well content, and allowed Giles to

finish the bottle and drown any possible misgivings.

As she left the room to watch for the post-boy, and herself place the

fruit of her morning labour in the bag, Giles, with tipsy gravity and

mechanical neatness, was posting his too long disused cellar book up to

date:

June 24th., 1823.

Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.

CHAPTER V

EVIL PROMPTER, JEALOUSY

Great bliss was with them and great happiness

Grew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.

—KEATS (_Pot of Basil_).

July over the meadows, sweeter in death than in life, where the long

grass lay in swathes and the bared earth split and crumbled under the

fierce sun. July in the great woods, with leaves at their deepest green,

nobly still against the noble still azure, throwing blocks of green

shade in the mossy aisles and wondrous grey designs of leaf and branch

on the hardened ground. July in the drowsy hum of the laden bee; in the

birds’ silence and the insects’ orchestra—those undertones of

sounds—everywhere; July in the sweet hearted rose, in the plenitude of

summer fulfilment. July over garden and cornfield and purple moor....

So it had been all day, a long, gorgeous day, busy and yet lazy, full to

the brim of nature’s slow, ripe work. And now the evening had come; the

fires of the sunset had cooled and a deep-bosomed sky had begun to brood

over the teeming earth, lit only by the sickle of a young moon that had

hung, ghost-like, in the airs the whole afternoon.

The fields of heaven were yet nearly as bare of stars as the meadows of

their murdered flowers; but here and there, with a sudden little leap

like a kindling lamp, some distant sun—white Vega or ruddy

Arcturus—began to send its gold or silver messages across the firmament

where the summer sun of our world held lingering monarchy.

Ellinor had spent a long hot day in the parsonage, helping that pearl of

housewives, Madam Tutterville, with the potting of cherry jam. She had

come home across the fields with lagging step, drawing in the luxury of

the evening silence, the cool fragrance of the woods, the beauties of

the advancing night. She bore, as an offering, a handsome basketful of

rectory peaches, over which her soul was grateful: a proper dish to set

before him in whose service she took her joy.

On re-entering the house, according to her usual wont, she at first

sought her father, but found the laboratory empty of any presence save

that of the herb-spirits singing in the throat of the retort. She made

no doubt then but that the simpler had sought the star-gazer’s high

seat.

One result of her presence at Bindon had been the gradual drawing

together of the two men, with herself as a centring link. David was more

prone to come down from his tower and her father to come up from his

vault. And she took a sweet and secret pleasure in the quite unconscious

sense of grievance they would both display when her duty or her mood

took her for any length of time away from either of them.

As she reached the foot of the tower stairs a hand was placed upon her

arm. She turned with that irrepressible inner revulsion which always

heralded to her Margery’s presence.

“Asking your pardon, ma’am,” came the usual silky formula, “may I

inquire if you are going up to see my master?”

“To be sure,” answered Ellinor quietly, though she blushed in the dark.

“Do you not see that I am going up to the tower?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mrs. Nutmeg, humbly. “I made so bold as to trouble

you, ma’am, not wishing to intrude upon my master myself. The postman

left a letter, ma’am.”

Mrs. Nutmeg drew the object in question from under her black silk apron.

Very white it shone in the gloom:—a large, oblong folded sheet, with a

black blotch in the centre where sprawled an enormous seal.

“This letter, ma’am,” she repeated, “came this evening. Would you be

good enough to hand it yourself to my master?”

Ellinor had a superstitious feeling that Margery Nutmeg was one day,

somehow, destined to bring misfortune upon her; and it was this perhaps

which always left her discomfited after even the most trivial interview

with the housekeeper. But determinedly shaking off the sensation, she

slipped the letter in her basket and began the ascent of the rugged

stairs. No matter how tired she might be, her foot was always light when

it led her to the tower, because her impatient heart went on before.

Leaving the basket in the observatory, she retained the letter in her

hand, instinctively avoiding any scrutiny of its superscription,

although seen here in the lamplight the thought did strike her that it

looked like a woman’s writing. Sir David’s correspondence, as she knew,

was so scanty that the sealed missive might indeed mean an event in

their lives; and now the present was too full of delicate happiness for

her to welcome anything that might portend change.

She stood for a moment on the threshold of the platform, looking out on

the two figures silhouetted against the sky. Her father, as usual in his

gown, seated on the stone ledge of the parapet, was speaking. David,

leaning against the wall with folded arms, was looking down at him.

Master Simon’s chuckle, followed by the rare low note of the

star-gazer’s laughter, fell upon her ear.

“I do assure you,” the old man was saying, “it was the very surliest

fellow in the whole of Bindon village. A complete misanthropist, a

perfect curmudgeon! The poor woman would come to me in tears, with

sometime a black eye, sometime a swollen lip—I have known her actually

cut about the occiput. ‘My poor creature,’ I would say to her, ‘plaster

your wound I can, but alter your husband’s humours is at present beyond

my power.’”

“Not having yet re-discovered the ‘Star-of-Comfort,’” interrupted David.

The sound of that voice, gently sarcastic and indulgently mocking, had

become so dear to Ellinor that she lingered yet for the mere chance of

indulging her ear again unobserved.

“Not having then re-discovered the _Euphrosinum_,” corrected Master

Simon, with emphasis on the word “then.” “But that excellent young

woman, my daughter, has been of service to me there.”

“She has been of service everywhere.”

This tribute brought joy to the listener. Forced by the turn the

conversation was taking to disclose her presence, she emerged upon the

platform, but took a seat beside her father’s in silence, the letter for

the moment quite forgotten in her pocket.

“Ah, there is Ellinor!”

Sir David had seen her coming first and was the first to greet her. She

thought, she hoped, there was gladness in the exclamation.

“Eh, eh!” said Master Simon. “Back from the prophetess’s jam-pots?” He

fondled the hand she had laid on his knee. “Did the virtuous woman open

her mouth with wisdom, while you, my girl, girded your loins with

strength? We were talking of you, my girl. Ah, David, did I not do well

for both you and me, when I craved house-room at Bindon for this

Exception-to-her-Sex?”

David did not answer. But in the gloom she felt his eye upon her, and

her heart throbbed. Master Simon, after a little pause, resumed the

thread of his discourse.

“Ha, I am a mass of selfishness, a mass of selfishness! And the plant of

True Grace is found; the _Euphrosinum_ is found, Sir David Cheveral.

Found, planted, culled and tested.” The utmost triumph was in his

accents. “Aye, my dear young man, you will be rejoiced to hear that the

effects of this most precious of simples have in no wise been overrated

by the writers of old. They have far exceeded my most sanguine

expectation. Why, sir, I said to myself: this fellow, this John Cantrip

with his evil spleen, he has been marked by destiny for the first

experiment. I prepared a decoction, making it duly palatable (for if you

will remember your natural history, even bears like honey), I bade the

poor, much-tried wife—he had just deprived her of both her front

teeth—place a spoonful daily in his morning draught. That was a week

ago. She came here this morning ... you will hardly credit it——”

The speaker paused, became absorbed in a delightful memory and began to

laugh softly to himself. And the infection again gained the listener.

“Well, sir, has the bear turned to lamb? And is the dame content with

the metamorphosis?”

“You will hardly credit it,” repeated the simpler, rubbing his hands,

“the silly woman was beside herself with the most intemperate passion.

There was no sort of abuse she did not heap upon me. She swears I have

bewitched her husband and that she will have the law of me. He, he! You

must know, David, the fellow is a carpenter; and, although his tempers

were objectionable, he was a good worker. Indeed, I gather that the

exasperated condition of his system found relief in the constant

hammering of nails, punching of holes, sawing and planing of hard

substance. But now——” Again delighted chuckle and mental review took the

place of speech.

“Well?” asked Sir David. His tone was broken with an undercurrent of

laughter. Ellinor smiled in her dark corner. She compared this David,

interested and amused in human matters, pleasant of intercourse himself

and appreciative of another’s company, to the man of taciturn moods and

melancholy, who fed on his own morbid thought and fled from his fellow

men—to the David of but a few months ago. She knew it was her woman’s

presence that had, as if unconsciously, wrought the change.

“Well?” said Sir David again.

“My dear fellow,” cried Master Simon, breaking into a louder cackle.

“John Cantrip, as you say, has changed from a bear into a lamb; at least

from a sullen, dangerous animal into an exceedingly pleasant,

light-hearted one. He sings, he whistles, he laughs—all that cerebral

congestion, that nervous irritation, has been soothed away under the

balmy influence of this valuable plant. The excellent creature is able

to take delight in his life, in the beautiful objects of Nature around

him. He admires the blue sky, he rejoices in the seasonable heat, he

embraces his spouse—he will hang over his infant’s cradle and express a

tender, paternal desire to rock him to slumber. Every happy instinct has

been wakened, every morose one lulled. Would I could induce the

government of this land to enforce in each parish the cultivation of

_Euphrosinum_. My good sir, we should have no more need of prisons, or

stocks, or gallows!”

“And yet you say,” quoth David, “that Mrs. Cantrip is dissatisfied.”

“Most excellent David, from early days of the earth downwards, the woman

was ever the most unreasonable of all God’s creatures. She wants the

impossible, she wants the perfection of things, which is not of this

world. Instead of rejoicing, this foolish person complains.”

“Complains?”

“Oh, well, it seems the carpenter is now disinclined for work. I

endeavoured to explain to her that the morbid reason for his love of

hammering no longer exists. The good fellow is placid and content and an

agreeable companion. But the absurd female is tearing her hair! ‘What,’

said I, ‘he has not struck you once since Saturday week, and you do not

rejoice?’ ‘Rejoice!’ she screams. ‘And he’s not struck a nail either.’

‘If this happy effect continues,’ I assured her, ‘you will be able to

keep the remainder of your teeth.’ ‘I’ll have nothing to put between

them if it does,’ she responds. In vain I represented to her,

_mulier_—in short, that I, having done my part, it was now hers to

utilise these new dispositions for her own ends. She must beguile him

back to his everyday duties with tender smiles and womanly wiles—the

female’s place in nature being to play this part towards the ruder male.

But it was absolutely impossible to get her so much as to listen to me!

She vowed that she had lost all patience—which was indeed very

patent—that she had even clouted him (as she expressed it), without

producing any other result than a smile at her. ‘Grins,’ says she, ‘like

a zany!’ and with the want of logic of her sex, utterly fails to

perceive what a triumphant attestation she is making to the efficacy of

my plant.”

“It is extremely droll,” said David.

“Of course it will at once strike you,” pursued the old student, “that

the obvious course was to induce the dissatisfied lady to partake of the

soothing lotion herself. But, would you believe it? She became more

violently abusive than ever at the bare suggestion!”

“Indeed,” said Ellinor, interrupting, “not only did she decline to make

any acquaintance herself with the remedy, but she brought back the jar,

with all that was left of our infusion, and vowed that she was well

punished for dealing with the Devil and his daughter. You know, cousin

David, I fear that I am rapidly gaining something of a reputation for

black art! I do not mind, of course. Only,” she faltered a little, “a

child ran from me in the village this morning. I was sorry for that.”

David’s face grew scornful. Popularity was so poor a thing in his eyes,

that popular hate was not, he deemed, worth even a passing thought. But

Ellinor, who could not look upon the world from a tower and whose

self-allotted tasks lay, of necessity, much among the humble many, had

not this lofty indifference. She knew she had already more enemies than

friends. And she knew also to what she owed the sowing of this

hostility—not to her association with her father, whose eccentric

experiments in pharmacy on the whole worked to the benefit, and gave an

extraordinary zest to the lives, of the village community—not to Madam

Tutterville’s texts; for, indeed, that good lady was so subjugated by

her niece’s housekeeperly qualifications that she elected for the nonce

to be blind to the daughter’s abetting of the father’s pursuits. Well

did Ellinor know to whom it was she owed her growing ill-repute.

Yet the cloud in her sky, no bigger at first than a woman’s hand, was

growing, she felt, and was sufficient already to cast a shadow. And now,

as she sat in such perfect content this summer night between her father

and her cousin, her duty and her love, and felt herself a centre of

peace and harmony, the mere passing remembrance of Margery sufficed to

make her heart contract.

With the thought of Margery, the recollection of her commission leaped

up in her mind. She laid the letter on her knee, gazing down at its

whiteness a moment or two before she could overcome her extraordinary

repugnance to deliver it.

Meanwhile Master Simon was flowing happily on again, quite oblivious of

the fact that neither David, whose gaze had once more turned starward,

nor his daughter, absorbed in inner reflection, were paying the least

heed to his discourse.

“Naturally, poor Cantrip will relapse. And he will hammer wife and nails

once more, and as energetically as ever. But this is immaterial. The

principle, my good young people, you are both intelligent enough to see

at once, is firmly established. In another year the face of Bindon will

have changed. Beldam will scold no more nor maiden mope. You yourself,

David—we should have no more of these heavy sighs, if——”

Here Ellinor broke in, rising and holding out the letter.

“Cousin David, I quite forgot—the post brought this for you and I

promised to give it.”

“A letter,” said Sir David. He took it from her hand and placed it on

the stone parapet. “It is too dark to read it now.” She fancied his

voice was troubled, and immediately there grew upon her an inexplicable

jealous desire that the letter should be opened in her presence, that

she might gain some hint of its contents.

“I will bring out a light,” she said and flew upon her errand, returning

presently with a little silver lantern from the observatory. She placed

it on the ledge; and from the three glass sides its light threw cross

shaped beams, one uselessly into the dark space, one upon the rough

stone and the letter, one upon her own bending face, pale and eager,

with aureole of disordered hair.

From the darkness Sir David looked at her face first: and it was as if

the revealing light had shot into the mists of his own heart.

The passion of love comes to men from so many different paths that to

each individual it may be said to come in a new guise. To no one does it

come as an invited guest. It may be the chance meeting, the love at

first sight—“she never loved at all who loved not at first sight.” But

Shakespeare knew better than to advance this as an axiom. ’Tis but the

insolent phrase on the lover’s mouth who deems his own passion the only

true one, the model for the world. Some, on the other hand, find with

amazement that long, long already, in some sweet and familiar shape,

love has been with them and they knew it not. They have entertained an

angel unawares; and suddenly, it may be on a trivial occasion, the veil

has been lifted and the heavenly countenance revealed. Others, like the

poor man in the fable, take the treacherous thing to the warmth of their

bosom in all trustfulness and only by the sting of it as it uncoils know

that they have been struck to the heart. Others, again, as unfortunate,

bolt their inhospitable doors upon the wayfarer and perhaps, as they sit

by a lonely hearth, never know that it was love that knocked and went

its way, to pass the desolate house no more.

To Sir David Cheveral, whose hot and hopeful youth had been betrayed by

life, this sudden apprehension of love in his set manhood came, not in

sweetness nor yet in pain, but in a bewildering upheaval of all things

ordered—as an earthquake flinging up new heights and baring unknown

depths in the staid familiar landscape; as a flash of light—“the light

that never was on sea or land,” after which nothing ever could look the

same again.

It may, in one sense, be true that the man of pleasure is an easier prey

to his feelings than he who in asceticism spends his days feeding the

spirit at the expense of the flesh; but it is true only because the

former man is weak, not because his passion is strong. By so much as the

deep river that has been driven to course between its own silent banks

is more mighty than the shallow waters that expand themselves in a

hundred noisy channels, by so much is the passion of the recluse a thing

more irresistible, more terrible to reckon with than the bubble

obsession of the self indulgent.

But he who outrages Nature by excess in other direction, by Nature

herself is punished. The recluse of Bindon was now to grapple with the

avenging strength of his denied manhood. By the leaping of his blood and

the tremor of his being, by the joy of his heart, which his instinctive

sudden resistance turned into as fierce an anguish, by the heat that

rushed to his brow, he knew at last that love was upon him; and he knew

that, were he to resist love in obedience to so many unspoken vows,

victory would be more bitter than death.

As he looked with a haggard eye at the lovely transfigured face, it was

suddenly lost in the shadows again; only a hand flashed forth into the

light and this hand held a letter, persisting. He passed his fingers

over his eyes and brushed the damp masses of hair from his forehead.

“Will you not read your letter, cousin David?” asked Ellinor.

Mechanically he took the paper held out towards him. She lifted the

lantern, that its light might serve him: it trembled a little in her

grasp. And now his glance dropped upon the seal. He stared, started,

turned the letter over and stared again. Then his warm emotion fell from

him.

“You,” said he, “you to bring me this!”

She bent forward, the pale oval of her face coming within the radius of

the light again.

“I have no wish to read this letter,” he went on.

There was a deep, a contained emotion in his air. All was fuel to

Ellinor’s suddenly risen unreasoning flame of jealousy. That he should

take the letter into his solitude, maybe, that she should not know,

never know—it was not to be borne!

“Read, read!” she cried, unconsciously imperative by right of her

passion.

Their gaze met. His was gloomy and startled, then suddenly became

ardent. She saw such a flame leap into his eyes that her own fell before

them; then her bold heart sank.

“I would not have opened it. But it shall be as you wish,” he answered.

And as David broke the seal, Master Simon’s curious, wrinkled face

peered over his shoulder.

“Ha,” said the old man, wonderingly, “The Lochore arms.”

Sir David turned the letter in his hand.

“From your sister?” asked the simpler, with amazed emphasis.

“Once I called her so,” answered the astronomer, with an effort that

told of his inner repugnance.

As one wakes from a fevered dream Ellinor awoke from her brief madness.

Her father’s placid tones, the everyday obvious explanation fell upon

her heart like drops of cold water. But the reaction was scarcely one of

relief. How was it possible that she, Ellinor Marvel, the woman of many

experiences, of the cool brain and the strong heart, should have yielded

to this degrading folly, this futile jealousy? What had she done! She

shivered as a rapid sequence of thought forced its logic upon her

unwilling mind. She had feared that the touch of some woman out of his

past should reach David now, at the very moment when a lover’s heart was

opening to her in his bosom. Behold! she had herself delivered him over

to the one woman of all others she had most reason to dread—the woman

who, out of her own outrage upon him had acquired the most influence

over his life. It seemed to Ellinor as if she herself who had so

laboured to call him to the present and lure him with hopes of a

brighter future, had now handed him back to the slavery of the past.

The seal cracked under his fingers.

“Ah, no,” she cried, now springing forward on the new impulse. “No, no,

David, do not read it! Send it back, like the others!”

He flung on her a single glance.

“It is too late,” he said, “the seal is broken.”

“Ah, me,” cried Ellinor. “And we were so happy!”

She remembered Margery’s sleek face as it had peered at her in the

shadows of the passage: “Will you be good enough to hand this letter

yourself to my master?”

Margery had known that from her hand he would take it. Margery had a

devil’s instinct of the folly of men and women.

CHAPTER VI

THE PERFECT ROSE, DROOPING

Such is the fond illusion of my heart,

Such pictures would I at that time have made;

And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been—’tis so no more:

I have submitted to a new control,

A power is gone which nothing can restore....

—WORDSWORTH (_Elegiacs_).

Sir David sat down upon the parapet, shifted the lantern and began to

read. Ellinor watched him, the tumultuous beating of her heart gradually

sinking down to a dull languor. Master Simon was pacing the platform,

now conning over some chemical formula to himself, now pausing to gaze

upon the stars with a good humoured sneer upon the futility of astronomy

in general and the absurdity of Sir David’s in particular. A bat came

and flapped with noiseless wings round the lantern and was lost again in

the darkness of the surrounding deeps. It seemed to Ellinor a heavy

space of time, and still David sat with a contracted brow, motionless,

staring at the open sheet in his hand. At length he raised his head. His

eyes sought, not herself, but the comrade of his long years of solitude.

“Cousin Simon!”

The old man turned in his walk, a fantastic figure in his flapping

skirts as he shuffled forward out of the gloom. Evidently he had

perceived a note of urgency in Sir David’s tone, for he came quickly.

“Yes, lad!”

Ellinor had not yet heard that inflection of solicitude in her father’s

voice, but she recognised that it belonged also to that past they all

dreaded; and for the first time she realised something of the ties that

bound these unlikely companions to each other.

“Cousin Simon,” said David with stiff lips, “she asks me to receive her

here!”

“Who? Maud?—What! the heathen vixen! Don’t answer her, don’t answer

her!”

Sir David looked up. There was the stamp of pain upon his features; and

yet, as she told herself, it was not so much pain as the loathing of one

forced to contemplate something of utter abhorrence. Both men, she saw,

were quite oblivious of her presence: the past was now stronger about

them than the present. As Sir David made no answer beyond that dumb

look, Master Simon grew yet more vehement.

“Pshaw! man, you’re not going to give way now after all these years! The

thing’s irreparable between you. Why, David, what are you thinking of?

How could you bear it? Think for a moment what her presence here would

mean!”

Then Sir David spoke:

“It is not,” he said, “a question now, of my wishes. So long as I felt

justified in considering myself alone, I had no hesitation. But to-night

I have to face this: What is my duty?”

“Eh? How, now!” Master Simon stuttered, and could find no word. “Pooh!

fudge!” He thrust out a testy hand for the letter.

“Read!” said the master of Bindon, “and then you will understand.”

Master Simon seized the document and, stooping to the light began to

read the words aloud to himself, according to his custom. Ellinor drew

near and listened. Nothing could have now kept her from yielding to her

intense desire to know.

“‘Dear Brother,’” read the old gentleman (“Dear Brother!—A dear sister

she’s proved to you!”) “‘It is very likely you may never read these

lines’ (if that isn’t a woman all over! ... where am I?) ‘according to

your heartless custom’—(Ha!” said Master Simon, shooting a swift

ironical look at Sir David from under his ever-hanging eyebrows, “since

when has Lady Lochore become qualified to pronounce upon heartlessness?

Pooh!”)

Sir David made no reply. His eyes were fixed on some inward visions. The

simpler gave a snort, and resumed his reading:

“‘Oh, David, let me see my home once more!’ (No, Madam!) ‘Let me come to

you alone with my child. I am ill——’ (Devil doubt her—they’re all ill

when they don’t get their way!) ‘I am ill, dying, and sometimes I think

that it is because you have not forgiven me. In the name of our father,

in the name of our mother,’ (’pon my word, she’s a clever one!) ‘I have

a right to demand this! I must see my home before I die.’”

Sir David’s compressed lips suddenly worked. He rose and walked across

to the other side of the platform, where against the lambent sky, his

form once more became a mere silhouette. Master Simon proceeded quietly

to finish the letter.

“There’s a postscript,” he said, and read out: “‘You cannot refuse me

the hospitality of Bindon for a few weeks, remember that I, too, am a

child of the house.’”

“‘Remember that I, too, am a child of the house!’”

Ellinor repeated the words drearily to herself. That was the key she

herself had found to unlock the door of Sir David’s hospitality.

“Upon my soul,” said Master Simon, “I shall never fall foul of the

female intellect again!”

He looked at Ellinor, and laughed drily.

“Oh,” she cried, shocked at this inopportune mirth, “she must not come

here—we must prevent it!”

“Prevent it!” he cried irritably. “Do so, if you can, my girl. By the

Lord Harry!” the forgotten expletive of his jaunty youth leaped oddly

forth over his white beard, “she’s done the trick! Touch David upon his

honour, his family obligations! Ha! she knows it too. A pest on you!” he

went on, his anger rising suddenly, “with your silly female

inquisitiveness. ‘Read it, read it!’ quoth she. Without you, Mrs.

Marvel, he’d have sent the precious missive back—unopened, like all the

others! Ha, that’s an astute one! ‘If you read these lines,’ she writes.

Well she knew that if he once did read them she would win her game!”

Beneath an impatient stamp one slipper fell off. Thrusting his foot back

into it, he began to hobble in the direction of Sir David, muttering and

growling as he went, not unlike his own Belphegor when his cat-dignity

had been grievously offended. Disjointed scraps of his remarks reached

Ellinor, as she stood, disconsolate and cold at heart, facing the

probable results of her impulse:—“A pretty thing ... disturbing the

peace of the house ... a mass of selfishness ... a pack of silly women!”

“Well,” said Sir David, turning round as his cousin drew near.

“Why do you say ‘well’?” snapped the simpler. “You know you’ve made up

your mind already, and need none of my advice.”

A bitter smile flickered over Sir David’s face.

“Can you say after reading that letter that there is any other course

open to me?”

“Stuff and nonsense! A half-dozen excellent courses. You can leave the

letter unanswered. You can write to the lady that these home affections

come a little late in the day. You can write, if you like, and forgive

her by post. You can take coach to London and forgive her there, and....

But, in Heaven’s name, stem the stream of petticoats from invading our

peace here!”

“What,” exclaimed the younger man, a blackness as of thunder gathering

on his brow. “Do you, do you, cousin Simon, bid me enter Lochore’s

house!”

Disconcerted, Master Simon lost his ill humour, though to conceal the

fact he still tried to bluster.

“Pooh! You’re not of this century. You’re mediæval, quixotic! David,

man, high feelings are not worn nowadays. They have been put by, with

knighthood’s armour. Don’t forgive her then, lad. I am sure I see no

reason why you should.”

“Forgiveness!” echoed Sir David.

Ellinor had crept close to them once more. That bitter ring in David’s

voice smote her heart.

“Forgiveness!” he repeated. “Does he who remembers ever forgive? My

sister is ill and craves to return to her old home. Well, I recognise

her right to its hospitality and also to my courtesy as the dispenser of

it. More I cannot give her.”

“She’ll not ask for more!” interrupted the unconvinced simpler. “Eh, eh!

It is my fault, David: I might have known how it would be. I brought in

the first petticoat and there the mischief began.”

“Oh, father!”

The tears sprang to Ellinor’s eyes. Sir David turned round and seemed to

become again aware of her presence.

“No, no,” he said, “that is ungrateful.” He took her hand. “She brought

us sunshine,” he said.

But she missed from his pressure the tremulous touch of passion; she

missed from his eyes that flame she had shrunk from and that now her

heart would always hunger for. Pure kindness, mild sadness—what could

her enkindled soul make now of such gifts as these? With an inarticulate

sound she drew her fingers from his clasp; and, turning, fled downstairs

again and back to her room.

A taper was burning on her writing table, and in its small meek circle

of light a bowl of monthly roses displayed their innocent pink beauty.

The latticed casement was thrown open. In the square of sky a single

silver star pointed the illimitable distance. From the Herb-Garden below

rose gushes of aromatic airs, as, from some secret cloister by night the

voices of the dedicated rise and fall. Vaguely, in her seething misery,

she seemed to recognise the special essence of the new plant giving to

the cool night the sweetness accumulated during the long, hot hours of

the day.

She sat down on the narrow bed, folded her hands on her lap and stared

dully forth at the square of sky and the single star. Presently, almost

without her own consciousness, her bosom began to heave with long sighs

and tears to course down her cheeks. Where was now the strength, the

indifference to passing events which she boasted her long battle with

life had given her? Gone, gone at the first touch of passion! Throughout

a sordid marriage she had remained virgin of heart, she had kept the

virgin’s peace—and now?

Alternations of pride and despair broke over her like waves, salt and

bitter as her own tears. How happy they had been! And the unknown fiend,

jealousy, had urged her to break the still current of that sweet,

restful half-unwitting happiness of their life all three together—a

current flowing, she had told herself with conviction, to a full tide of

unimaginable bliss.

My God, how he had looked at her only that night! And it was in that

pearl of moments that she had thrust his past back upon him and bade

him, with her precious, new-found power, read the letter that should

never have been opened. The perfect rose had been within her grasp. It

was her own hand that had flung it in the dust.

Master Simon, still shaking his head and muttering disapproval, went

slowly back to his laboratory.

“The cunning jade!” he was grumbling, “she’s no more ill than I am. Or

if she be, a pretty business we shall have with her—a fine lady with

vapours, and megrims, and tantrums! I’ve not forgotten the ways of

them...!”

But here an illuminating idea flashed upon his brain. He stopped at the

corner of a passage, cocking his head like an old grey jackdaw. “Eh, but

a fine lady in her tantrums.... What a test for the virtues of my

paragon herb!”

All very well to rejoice at its efficacy upon the homely rustic. Master

Simon had experimented upon the homely rustic too many years not to have

developed a fine contempt for his vile corpus; he was too true an

enthusiast not to long for something like a proper nervous system upon

which to work.

An air of returning good humour now settled upon his face; and by the

time he was seated at his table, he had begun to wish his unwelcome

cousin really a prey to the most advanced melancholia, and was conning

over what phrases he could remember of her letter—delighted when they

seemed to point to that conclusion.

“And even if she be not pining away for sorrow, as she would like poor

David to believe, if I remember the lady aright, she has as disordered a

temper of her own as John Cantrip himself.”

CHAPTER VII

NODS AND WREATHÉD SMILES

... Half light, half shade,

She stood, a sight to make an old man young.

—TENNYSON (_Gardener’s Daughter_).

Within Bindon house the next ten days were as uneventful as those that

had preceded this night of emotional trouble; days similar in routine,

in outward tranquillity. But how unlike in colour, in atmosphere! It was

as if thunder-clouds had chased all the summer peace; as if brooding

skies had taken the place of radiance and laughing blue; as if close

mists enshrouded the earth, robbing the woods of living light and shade,

dulling the tints of flower and turf, contracting the horizon. The

former days had been days of many-hued hope; these now were days of drab

suspense. And ever and anon, in the listening stillness, there came upon

Ellinor’s inner senses, as from behind hiding hills, the far-off mutter

of a gathering storm.

But in the outer world the summer still kept its glory, the sky its

undisturbed azure, the flowers their jewel hues. Never had Bindon looked

fairer, more nobly itself. Preparations went on apace for the reception

of the visitor. Ellinor personally saw to every detail—she piqued

herself that no one could reproach her with not carrying out to the

finest line of conscientiousness her duties as housekeeper of Sir

David’s home. A little paler, a little colder, more silently and with

just a note of sternness, she moved about her tasks. Nothing was made

easy for her: the household, scenting a possible change, became more

openly inclined to mutiny.

Master Simon, also, seemed to become more exacting in his demands upon

her time. Sir David, on the other hand, had withdrawn almost as

completely as had been his wont before her arrival. And her woman’s

pride and tact alike kept her from those raids upon his tower privacy,

which but a little time ago had caused him so much pleasure, it seemed,

and herself such infinite sweetness.

It was hard, too, to have to meet Margery’s paroxysm of astonishment;

Margery’s ostentatious outburst of joy at the thought of “her dear young

lady coming back to her rightful place at last”; Margery’s insolence of

triumph as regarded “the interloper,” astutely conveyed in such humble

garments that to notice it would have been but a crowning humiliation.

“Eh, to think, ma’am,” the ex-housekeeper would say in her innocent

voice, “that it should have been that very letter I handed you myself,

never dreaming, that’s brought this blessed reconciliation about! It do

seem like the finger of the Lord. Ah, ma’am, but you must be glad in

your heart, to feel yourself the instrument of peace. Who knows, if the

master would have taken it from any hand but yours, he that used to

return them as regular and just as fast as they came!”

And then came parson and Madam Tutterville: he, as beseemed the

God-chosen and state-appointed minister of the gospel of charity, most

duly (and unconvincingly) approving the proposed reconciliation; and, as

man of the world, most humanly and convincingly dubious of its results:

she, openly bewailing, with all her store of texts and feminine logic,

so inconvenient a hitch in her secret plans.

Ellinor had to receive them both. For the lower door of Sir David’s

turret stairs was bolted, and Master Simon on his side had stoutly

refused any manner of interview with anyone so sturdily healthy as the

rector, or so disdainful of his remedies as the rector’s lady.

“Under every law,” said Doctor Tutterville, “the Jewish, the Pagan, the

Philosophic and the Christian in its many variations, it has been

enjoined upon our human weakness that it is advisable to forgive: _Æquum

est peccatis veniam poscentem reddere rursus_.

So the rector, acknowledging his share of frailty—a share so pleasant to

himself and so inoffensive to others that it was no wonder he showed

little desire to repudiate it.

“One may forgive,” said Madam Tutterville sententiously. “Heaven knows I

should be the last to deny that!”—this with the air of making a valuable

concession to the decrees of Providence—“But there is another law: that

chastisement shall follow misdoing. Was not David punished through

Jonathan’s hair?”

The parson’s waistcoat rippled over his gentle laughter. He was seated

in one of the deep-winged library armchairs, and while he spoke his eyes

roamed with ever renewed satisfaction over the appointments of the

room—the silver bowl of roses, fresh filled, the artistic neatness of

writing table, the high polish of oak and gilt leather. His fine

appreciation for the fitness of things was tickled; his glance finally

rested with complacency upon the figure of the young woman herself—the

capable young woman who had wrought so many pleasing changes. And as he

looked he smiled: Ellinor was the culminating point of agreeable

contemplation amid exceedingly agreeable surroundings.

She toned in so well with the scene! The sober golds and russets of the

walls repeated their highest note in her burnished hair. Her outline, as

she sat, exactly corresponded to the rector’s theory of what the female

line of beauty should be. He liked the close, fine texture of her skin

and the hues upon her cheeks, which fluctuated from geranium-white to

glorious rose. The proud curl of her lip appealed to him; so did the

sudden dimple. He liked the direct gaze of her honest blue eyes, and he

was not unaware of the thickness and length of eyelashes that seemed to

have little points of fire on their tips.

That scholarly gentleman’s admiration was of so lofty, so philosophic a

nature, that even his Sophia could have found no fault with it. But as

he yielded himself to it, the conviction was ever more strongly borne in

upon him that his wife, in her impetuosity, had reached to a juster

conclusion concerning Ellinor than he in his own ripe wisdom. He had

treated her repeated remark that “Here was just the wife for David, here

the proper mistress of Bindon,” with his usual good-natured contempt.

But to-day he saw Ellinor with new eyes. Yes, this was a gem worthy of

Bindon setting. This would be a noble wife for any man; an ideal one for

David—for fastidious David, to whom the old epicure felt especially

drawn, although he recognised that one may make of fastidiousness a fine

art and not push the cult to the point of David’s eccentricity.

Here, then, was a woman fair enough to bring the Star-Dreamer, the

soaring idealist back to earth; wholesomely human enough to keep him

there in sanity and content, once Love had clipped his wing.

Meanwhile Madam Tutterville was bringing a long dissertation to an end.

In it, by the help of the scriptures, old and new, she had proved that

while it was indubitably David’s duty to forgive his sister up to a

certain point, it was likewise indubitably incumbent upon him to

continue to keep her in wholesome remembrance of her offences by

excluding her from Bindon, until——. Here the lady became exceedingly

mysterious and addressed herself with nods and becks solely to her

husband, ignoring Ellinor’s presence, much after the fashion of nurses

over the heads of their charges.

“At least until that happy consummation of affairs, Horatio, which you

and I have so much discussed.”

“My dear Ellinor,” she pursued, turning blandly to her niece, who with a

suddenly scarlet face was trying in vain to look as if she had not

understood, “be guided by my advice, by my advice. It is extremely

desirable, I might say imperative, that things should remain at present

at Bindon House in what your good uncle would term the state of quo, a

Greek word, my dear, signifying that it is best to leave well alone.”

“What is it you would have me do?”

“Well, my dear, seeing that everything has been going on so nicely these

months, and that Bindon has become no longer like a family lunatic

asylum, but quite a respectable, clean house, and that Nutmeg thing

reduced to proper order, and David almost human, coming down to meals

just as if he were in his right mind (though I’ve given up your father,

my dear), I’m afraid that in his case that clear cohesion of intellect

which is so necessary (is it not, Horatio?) is irrevocably affected.”

She tapped her forehead and shook her head, murmured something about the

instance of John Cantrip, hesitated for a moment, as if on the point of

gliding off in another direction, but saved herself with a heroic jerk.

“I would be glad,” she went on, “to have had speech of David myself; but

since you tell me that is impossible, Ellinor, I must be content with

laying my injunctions upon you. And indeed (is it not so, Horatio?) you

are perhaps the most fitted for this delicate task. The voice of the

turtle, my dear, is more likely to reach his heart than the dictates of

wisdom.”

“The voice of the turtle, aunt?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Madam Tutterville, putting her head on one side

with a languishing air. “In the beautiful imagery of Solomon the

turtle—the bird, my love, not the shell-fish—is always brought forward

as the emblem of female devotion.”

“I don’t see how that can refer to me!”

Ellinor sprang to her feet as she spoke: the rector’s gurgle of

amusement was the last straw to her patience. Angry humiliation dyed her

face, her blue eyes shot flames.

“Oh, don’t explain, I can’t bear it! But please, dear aunt, please,

don’t call me a turtle again! It’s the last thing I am, or want to be!”

She broke, in spite of herself, into laughter; laughter with a lump in

her throat.

Parson Tutterville had been highly entertained. Mrs. Marvel was quite as

agreeable to watch in wrath as in repose. But he was a man of feeling.

“I think, Sophia,” he said, in the tone she never resisted, “we will

pursue the subject no further. However we may regret any interruption to

the present satisfactory state of affairs, regret for David a visit that

is likely to prove distressing, we cannot but agree with Mrs. Marvel

that it is not her place to interfere.”

He rose as he spoke. The morning visit was at an end.

Even an encounter with Mrs. Nutmeg could not have left Ellinor in a more

irritated condition.

“What do they all think of me?” she asked herself, and pride forbade her

to shed a single one of the hot tears that rose to her lids.

“What have I done?” was the question that next forced itself upon a mind

that was singularly truthful. She had placed herself indeed in a

position open to comment and misinterpretation. And then and there she

had given herself up so wholly, so unrestrainedly to love that she had

actually come to measure the strength of her attraction for her

unconsenting lover against the strength, or the weakness, of his will.

As she faced the thought, a sense of shame overcame her. Had she not

known how helpless both her father and David would be without her,

especially at this juncture, she would have been sorely tempted to be

gone as she had come. It was not in her nature to contemplate anything

ungenerous, even for the gratification of that strongest of passions in

woman, self respect. But in her present mood, even the rector’s

well-meant, kindly words recurred to sting—“It was not her place to

interfere!” Well, she would keep her place, as David’s servant, and not

presume again beyond her duty!

Yes, and she would take that other place, too—the woman’s place, the

queen’s place, not to be won without being wooed. If David wanted her

now he must seek her!

CHAPTER VIII

A GREY GOWN AND RED ROSES

And then we met in wrath and wrong.

We met, but only meant to part.

Full cold my greeting was and dry;

She faintly smiled ...

—TENNYSON (_The Letters_).

Fain would Ellinor have avoided being present at the reception of the

guests. But Sir David willed it otherwise.

Bearing an armful of roses, she met him on the morning of the arrival at

the foot of the great stairs. She had scarcely seen him since the night

on the tower; and hurt to her heart’s core, as only a woman can be, by

his seeming avoidance of her, she faced him with a front as cold, a

manner as courteously reserved as his own. For it was a different David

from any she had hitherto known that now emerged from many days’

seclusion and soul struggle.

“What, ’tis you, cousin Ellinor!” He took her hand and ceremoniously

kissed it.

There was a tone of artificiality about his words. This perfunctory

touch of his lips on her hand, this formal bow, all these things

belonged to that past of the lord of Bindon, when society knew and

petted him; and in that past Ellinor felt with fresh acuteness that she

had no part. She drew her hand away.

“I hope,” she said, “the arrangements may be to your liking.”

He glanced at her as if puzzled; then his eye travelled over her

figure—an exquisite model of neatness she always was, but in this, her

working gown, no more fashionably clad than dairy Moll or Sue. He took

up a fold of her sleeve between his first and second finger.

“My sister used to be a very fine lady,” said he gently.

“And I am none,” cried Ellinor, flushing. Then, gathering the roses into

her arms and moving away: “But it matters the less,” she added over her

shoulder, “as Lady Lochore and I are not likely to come much across each

other.”

But David, this new David, a painful enigma to her, touched her

detainingly on the shoulder; and in his touch was authority.

“On the contrary,” said he, “I beg you will see much of my sister.

Dispenser as you are of my hospitality, you must needs see much of her.”

The flush had faded. Proud and pale she looked at him long, but his face

was as a sealed page to her. What was this turn of fortune’s wheel

bringing, glory or abasement?

“I must keep my place,” insisted Ellinor.

“That will be your place,” he answered. “Pray be ready to receive my

guests with me.”

She raised her eyes, startled, indeterminate.

“I and my frocks are poor company for great ladies,” she said with a

scornful dimple.

At that he smiled as one smiles upon a child.

“You have a certain grey gown,” he said. And, after a little pause, he

added: “Some of those roses.”

The fragrance of them had come over to him as they moved with her

breath. Once more she hesitated for a second, then dropping her eyelids,

she said, with mock humility:

“It shall be as you order,” and went up the stairs with head erect and

steady step, feeling that his gaze was following her.

She could hardly have explained to herself why this attitude of David’s,

this sudden proof of his strength in forcing himself to become like

other people, should cause her so much resentment and so much pain. But

she felt that this man of the world was infinitely far removed from the

absent star-gazer, from the neglected recluse who had so needed her

ministrations. The _rôles_ seemed reversed. It was no longer she who was

the protector, the power directing events, no longer she who ruled by

right of wisdom and sweet common sense. David had become independent of

her. Hardest thing of all, to be no longer indispensable to him! And yet

even in this unexpected cup of bitterness there was a redeeming sweet:

he had remembered her grey gown, he had noticed that the roses became

her.

My Lady Lochore arrived towards that falling hour of the day when the

shadows are growing long and soft, when the slanting light is amber: it

might be called the coloured hour, for the sun begins to veil its

splendour, so that eyes, undazzled, may rejoice. The swallows were

dipping across the sward of golden-emerald and Bindon stood proudly

golden-grey in the light, silver-grey in the shadows and against the

blue.

This daughter of the house came back to it with a fine clatter of horses

and a blasting of post horns; followed by a retinue of valets and maids;

acclaimed along the village street by shouting children, while aged

gaffers and gammers bobbed on their cottage door-steps and showered

interested blessings. (Margery had prepared that ground in good time.)

She was welcomed in stately fashion by the chief servants and the master

of the house himself on the threshold of her old home.

Ellinor, half hidden behind the statue of Diana and its spreading green,

watched the scene, waiting for her own moment.

How different had been, she thought to herself, the return of poor

Ellinor Marvel, that other daughter of Bindon, upon the cold September

night, solitary, travel-worn, penniless, knocking in vain at the door

her forefathers had built, creeping round back ways like a beggar,

with the bats circling by her in the darkness and the watchdog

growling at her from his kennel; unbidden, entering her old house,

unwelcomed.—Unwelcomed? Was cousin Maud welcomed?

In her rustling thin silk spencer and her fluttering muslin, with

hectic, handsome face, looking anxiously out from under the wide

befeathered bonnet, Lady Lochore advanced her thin sandalled foot on the

step of the coach and rested her hand upon David’s extended arm.

This was their meeting after years of estrangement! For a second she

wavered, made a movement as if she would fling herself into her

brother’s arms; the ribbons on her bosom fluttered—was it with a heaving

sob? She glanced up at David’s severe countenance and suddenly stiffened

herself. He bent and brushed the gloved wrist with his lips.

“Sister, Bindon greets you!”

She tossed her head, and her plumes shook. It seemed to the watching

Ellinor as if she would have twitched her hand from his fingers; but he

led her on. And the two last Cheverals walked up the steps together.

The servants, Margery at their head, breathed respectful whispers of

welcome. The lady nodded haughtily and vaguely. She stood in the hall

and David dropped her hand. His eye was cold, there was a faint sneer on

his lips.

Welcomed? Ah, no! Ellinor would not have exchanged her dark night of

home-coming for her cousin’s golden ceremonious day. Ellinor had cared

little at heart—absorbed in her young freedom and her new confidence in

life—how she should be received, but the lord of Bindon had looked into

her eyes and bade her “welcome,” and laid his lips, lips that could not

lie, upon hers.

When Ellinor emerged from behind her foliage screen, Lady Lochore was

struggling in Madam Tutterville’s stout embrace. Sir David had summoned

all his family upon the scene; and—yes, actually it was her father (in a

wonderful blue anachronism of a coat) who was talking so eagerly to the

smiling rector that he seemed quite oblivious of the purpose of his own

presence.

Aunt Sophia had prepared a fitting address for one whom she had been

long wont to regard (however regretfully) as Jezebel. But, as usual, her

sternness had melted under the impulse of her warm heart.

“My goodness, child,” she exclaimed, “you look ill indeed!” and folded

her arms about her wasted figure.

Lady Lochore disengaged herself unceremoniously.

“Is that you, Aunt Sophy? Lord, you have grown stout! Ill? Of course I

am! And your jolting roads are not likely to mend matters. Has the

second coach come up? Where’s Josephine? Where is my boy?”

“The second coach is just rounding the avenue corner,” said Margery at

her elbow, “please my lady.”

Lady Lochore wheeled round. Her movements were all restless and

impatient, like those of a creature fevered. “Goodness, woman, how you

made me jump!”

She put up her long handled eyeglasses and fixed the simpler and the

parson with a momentary interest. Her white teeth shone in a smile soon

gone. Hardly would she answer the rector’s elegantly turned compliment;

but she vouchsafed a more flattering attention to Master Simon, as he

bowed with an antiquated, severe courtesy that was quite his own.

“That’s cousin Simon! I remember him and all his little watch-glasses,

tubes, and things. I hope you’ve got the little watch-glasses still,

cousin. I used to like you. You made Bindon rather interesting, I

remember.” She yawned, as if to the recollection of past dulness; an

open unchecked yawn, such as your fine lady alone can comfortably

achieve in company. “I hope you’ll make some little nostrum for me,

something nice smelling to dab on a freckle, or kill a wrinkle with—I

think I have a wrinkle coming under my left eye.”

She suddenly arrested the dropping impudent langour of her speech,

clenched a fine gloved hand over the stick of her eyeglass and stared

fixedly: Ellinor had come out and stood in a shaft of light, as she had

an unconscious trick of doing, seeking the warmth instinctively as any

frank young animal might.

A radiant thing she looked, grey-clad, with the gorgeous crimson of a

summer rose at her belt, her crisp rebellious hair on fire, her chin and

neck gold outlined.

“Who is this?” said Lady Lochore, in a new voice, as sharp as a needle.

It was David who answered:

“Our cousin, Ellinor Marvel!”

“How do you do,” said Ellinor composedly.

There was no attempt on either side at even a hand touch. Lady Lochore

nodded.

“Ellinor is my good providence here,” continued Sir David. “I should not

have ventured to receive you in this bachelor establishment had it not

been for her presence. But now everything, I am confident, will be as it

should be during the month that you honour this house with your

presence.” He enunciated each word with determined deliberateness; it

was like the pronouncing of a sentence. Once again Ellinor felt the

implacable passion of the man under the set, controlled manner. “If you

should desire anything, pray address yourself to cousin Ellinor,” he

added.

Lady Lochore put down her eyeglasses and looked for a second with

natural angry eyes from one to the other. She bit her lip and it seemed

as if beneath the rouge her cheek turned ghastly.

She had come prepared to fight and prepared to hate. Yet this sudden

rage springing up within her was not due to reason but to instinct. It

was the ferocious antipathy of the fading woman for the fresh beauty; of

the woman who has failed in love for her who seems born to command love

as she goes. Lady Lochore could not look upon her cousin’s fairness

without that inner revulsion of anger which not only works havoc with

the mind but distils acrid poison into the blood.

The clatter of the second coach was heard without.

“Give me the child, give me the boy!” cried Lady Lochore. She made a

rush, with fluttering silks, to the doors. “No one shall show my boy to

his uncle but myself!”

“Mamma’s own!”

Could that be Lady Lochore’s voice? She came staggering back upon them,

clasping a lusty, kicking child in her frail arms; the whole countenance

of the woman was changed—“A heartless, callow creature,” so Madam

Tutterville had called her, and so Ellinor had learned to regard her.

But even the legendary monster has its vulnerable spot: there could be

no mistaking Maud Lochore’s passionate maternity. Ellinor drew a step

nearer, attracted in spite of herself; she could almost have wished to

see David’s face unbend. But its previous severity only gave way to

something like mockery, as he looked at mother and child.

“David!” cried his sister, “David, this is my boy!” There was a wild

appeal in her voice, almost breaking upon tears. “Edmund I have called

him, after our father, David. Edmund, my treasure, speak to your uncle!”

“I will, if you put me down!” The three-year-old boy struggled to free

himself from his mother’s embrace. His velvet cap fell off and a cherub

face under deep red curls was revealed. Ellinor remembered how the

Master of Lochore’s red head had flashed through these very halls in the

old days, and she hardly dared glance at David.

“I’ll stand down on my own legs, please!” said the child. “And now I’ll

speak.”

He shook out his ruffled petticoat and looked up, and his great, velvet

brown eyes wandered from face to face. The genial ruddiness, the

benevolent smile of the good, childless parson appealed to him first.

“Good morning, mine uncle, I hope you’ll learn to love——”

Lady Lochore plunged upon him.

“No, Edmund, no! not there! See boy, this is your uncle.”

She clutched at David’s sleeve, while Madam Tutterville’s tears of easy

emotion ran into her melting smile; and quite unscriptural exclamations,

such as “duck,” and “little pet,” and “lambkin” fell from her delighted

lips.

“Speak to uncle David, darling! David, won’t you say a word to my

child?”

Ellinor could almost have echoed the wail—it cut into her womanly heart

to see David repel the little one. But he bent and looked down

searchingly into the little face. At that moment the child, again

struggling against the maternal control, drew his baby brows together

and set his baby features into a scowl of temper. Sir David looked; and

in the defiant eyes, in the little set mouth, in the very frown, saw the

image of his traitor friend. His own brows gathered into as black a knot

as if he had been confronting Lochore himself. He drew himself up and

folded his arms:

“Cease prompting the child, Maud,” said he, “let his lips speak truth,

at least as long as they may!”

He turned and left them. The little Master of Lochore was ill-accustomed

to meet an angry eye or to hear a disapproving voice. And, as his mother

rose to her feet, shooting fury through her wet eyes upon the

discomfited circle, he, too, glanced round for comfort and rapidly

making his choice, flung himself upon Ellinor and hid his face in her

skirts, screaming.

The clinging hands, the hot, tear-stained cheeks, the baby lips, opened

yet responsive to her kisses—Ellinor never forgot the touch of these

things. Almost it was, when Lady Lochore wrenched him from her arms, as

if something of her own had been plucked from her.

“I want the pretty lady, I will have the pretty lady!” roared the heir,

as Josephine, the nurse, and Margery carried him between them to his

nursery.

As Lady Lochore, following in their wake, swept by Ellinor, she gathered

her draperies and shot a single phrase from between her teeth. It was so

low, however, that Ellinor only caught one word. The blood leaped to her

brow as under the flick of a lash. But even alone, in her bed at night,

she would not, could not admit to herself that it had had the hideous

significance which the look, the gesture seemed to throw into it.

“So it is war!” said Lady Lochore, standing in the middle of her

gorgeous room, the flame of anger devouring her tears. “Well, so much

the better!”

She stood before the mirror, her chin sunk on her breast, biting at the

laces of her kerchief, while her great eyes stared unseeingly at the

reflection of her own sullen, wasted beauty. War! On the whole it suited

her better than a hypocritical peace. Hers was not a nature that could

long wear a mask. She was one who could better fight for what she loved

than fawn. And now she had got her foot into her old home at last; aye,

and her boy’s! After so many years of struggle and failure it was a

triumph that must augur well for the future.

Never had she realised so fully how prosperous, how noble an estate was

Bindon, how altogether desirable; how different from the barren acres of

Roy and the savage discomfort of its neglected castle. To this plenty,

this refinement, this richness, these traditions, her splendid boy was

heir by right of blood. And she would have him remain so! She laughed

aloud, suddenly, scornfully, and tossed her head with a ghost of the

wild grace that had made Maud Cheveral the toast of a London season; a

grace that still drew in the wake of the capricious, fading Lady Lochore

a score of idle admirers. It would be odd indeed if the sly country

widow, pink and white as she was, should be a match for her, now that

they could meet on level ground.

There came a knock at the door.

“If you please, my lady,” said Margery, “humbly asking your pardon for

intruding, I hope your ladyship remembers me. I’m one of the old

servants, and glad to welcome your ladyship back again to your rightful

place. And the little heir, as we call him, God bless him for a

beauty——”

“Come in, woman,” cried Lady Lochore, “come in and shut the door!”

CHAPTER IX

A RIDER INTO BATH

It is not quiet, is not ease,

But something deeper far than these:

The separation that is here is of the grave.

—WORDSWORTH (_Elegiac Poems_).

If a woman, being in love, gain thereby a certain intuition into the

character of the man she loves, the thousand contradictory emotions of

that unrestful state, its despairs, angers, jealousies, its unreasonable

susceptibilities, all combine to obscure her judgment; so that, at the

same time she knows him better than anyone else can, and yet can be

harsher, more unjust to him than the rest of the world.

Thus Ellinor understood exactly what was now causing the metamorphosis

of David. She alone guessed the struggle of his week’s seclusion, from

which he had emerged armoured, as it were, to face the slings and arrows

of the new turn of fate. She alone knew the inward shrinking, the sick

distaste which were covered by this polished breast-plate of sarcastic

reserve; knew that this deadly courtesy was the only weapon to his hand,

and that he would not lay it aside for a second in the enemy’s presence.

At that moment when she had seen him read in the child’s face the image

of its father, she had read in his own eyes the irrevocable truth of

those slow words of his under the night sky: “He who remembers never

forgives.”

She felt, too, that his very regard for her made it incumbent on him to

treat her now as ceremoniously as his other guest; that to have openly

singled her out for notice, or privately to have indulged himself with

her company, would have been alike tactless and ungenerous. But in spite

of all reason could tell her, she felt hurt, she was chilled, she gave

him back coldness for coldness and mocking formality for his grave

courtesy.

Now and again his eyes would rest upon her, questioning. But shut out

from his night watch on the tower; shut out by day from their former

intimacy by his every speech and gesture, Ellinor’s feminine sensibility

always overcame her clear head and her generous heart.

A few days dragged by thus; slow, stiff, intolerable days. At last Lady

Lochore threw off the mask insolently. Towards the end of their late

breakfast, after an hour of yawns and sighs and pettish tossing of the

good things upon her plate, she suddenly requested of her brother, in

tones that made of the request a command, permission to invite some

guests.

“Bindon shrieks for company,” said she, “and, thanks as I understand, to

Mrs. Marvel, it is fairly fit to receive company. And, I know you like

frankness, brother, I will admit I am used to some company.”

She flung a fleering look from Ellinor’s erect head to the alchemist’s

bent, rounded crown. (Master Simon was deeply interested in Lady

Lochore’s case, and as he entertained certain experimental schemes in

his own mind, sought her company at every opportunity: hence his

unwonted appearance at meals.) Sir David slowly turned an eye of ironic

inquiry upon his sister; but his lips were too polite to criticise.

“Anything that can add to your entertainment during your short stay

here,” said he, “must, of course, commend itself to us.”

Had Ellinor been less straitened by her own passionate pride, she might

have stooped to pick up solace from that little plural word.

“Then I shall write,” said Lady Lochore, with her usual toss of the

head. “If you’ll kindly send a rider into Bath—there are a few of my

friends yet there, I learn by my morning’s _courier_—I’ll have the

letters ready for the mail.”

Sir David went on slowly peeling a peach. For a while he seemed absorbed

in the delicate task. Then, laying down the fruit, but without looking

up from his plate, he said:

“I presume, before you write those letters that you intend to submit the

names of my prospective guests to me.”

Lady Lochore flushed. She knew to what he referred; knew that there was

one guest to which the doors of Bindon would never be opened in its

present master’s lifetime. She was angry with herself for having made

the blunder of allowing him to imagine for a moment that she was

plotting so absurd a move. She hesitated, and then, with characteristic

cynicism:

“What!” she cried, “do you think I want that devil here? No more than

you do yourself.”

“Hey, hey!” cried Master Simon, startled from some abstruse cogitation.

Still Sir David looked rigidly down at his plate.

“God knows,” pursued the reckless woman, “it’s little enough I see of

him now—but that is already too much!”

She paused, and yet there was no answer. Then with her scornful laugh:

“There’s old Mrs. Geary, the Honourable Caroline—you remember her,

David?—the Dishonourable Caroline, as they call her in the Assembly

Rooms; whether she cheats or not is no business of mine, but she is the

only woman I care to play piquet with. There’s Colonel Harcourt and Luke

Herrick—they make up the four, and I don’t think you’ll find anything

wrong with their pedigree. Herrick’s too young for you to know.

Priscilla Geary is in love with him—he’s a _parti_, as rich as he is

handsome—and I’ll want a bait to lure the old lady from the green cloth

at Bath. And if we have Herrick we must have Tom Villars too, else

Herrick will have no one to jest at. And besides, the creature is useful

to me.”

Sir David interrupted her with a sudden movement. He pushed his chair

away from the table and, looking up from the untouched fruit, fixed for

a second a glance of such weary contempt upon his sister that even her

bold eyes fell.

“A Jew, a libertine, an admitted cheat—oh yes, I remember Mr. Villars,

Colonel Harcourt, and Mrs. Geary. The younger generation, of whose

acquaintance I have not yet the honour, will no doubt prove worthy of

such elders!” He paused again, to continue in his uninflected voice:

“Since these are the sort of guests you most wish to see at Bindon, you

have my permission to invite them.”

He rose as he spoke, giving the signal for the breaking up of the

uncomfortable circle. As Lady Lochore whisked past Master Simon, in his

antiquated blue garment, she paused. She had a sort of liking for the

old man, odd enough when contrasted with the deadly enmity she had vowed

his daughter.

“Could you not discover,” she whispered, “a leaf or a berry that might

take some effect upon the disease of priggishness? That new plant of

yours. Did you not say ... didn’t you call it the Star-of-Comfort? I am

sure it would be a comfort.”

The effect of the whisper told upon a chest that occasionally found the

ordinary drawing of breath too much for it. She broke off to cough, and

coughed till her frail form seemed like to be riven. Master Simon

watched her gravely.

“I could give you something for that cough, child,” said he. Then his

withered cheek began to kindle, “Something to soothe the cough first,

and then, perhaps, I—I—that restless temperament of yours, that

dissatisfied and capricious disposition—the Star-of-Comfort, indeed——”

She shook her hand in his face.

“Not I,” she gasped. “No more quackery for me! Lord, I’m as tough as a

worm, Simon.” She laughed and coughed and struggled for breath. “I

believe if you were to cut me up into little bits, I’d wriggle together

again, but I’ll not answer for poison.”

She flung him a malicious look and flaunted forth, ostentatiously

oblivious of Ellinor—her habitual practise when not openly insulting.

When Sir David and Master Simon were alone together the old man went

solemnly up to his cousin, and laid his hand upon his breast.

“David,” said he, “that sister of yours won’t live another year unless

she gives up the adverse climate of Scotland, the impure air of the town

and the racket of fashionable life.”

“Tell her so, then,” said Sir David.

Master Simon drew back and blinkingly surveyed the set face with an

expression of doubt, surprise and unwilling respect.

“The woman’s ill,” he ventured at last.

“Shall I bid her rest? Shall I cancel those letters of invitation?”

asked Sir David ironically.

THE STAR DREAMER

BOOK III

Come down ... from yonder mountain heights.

And come, for Love is of the valley, come,

For Love is of the valley, come thou down!

TENNYSON (_The Princess._)

CHAPTER I

THE LITTLE MASTER OF BINDON

She played about with slight and sprightly talk,

And vivid smiles, and faintly venom’d points

Of slander, glancing here and grazing there.

—TENNYSON (_Merlin and Vivien_).

In the terraced gardens, under the spreading shadows of the cedar trees,

was gathered a motley group. Beyond that patch of shade the sun blazed

down on stone steps and balusters, on green turf and scarlet geranium,

with a fervour the eye could scarce endure. The air was full of hot

scents. On a day such as this, Bindon of old was wont to seem asleep:

lulled by the rhythmic, rocking dream-note of the wild pigeons, deep in

its encircling woods. On a day such as this, the wise rooks would put

off conclave and it would be but some irrepressible younger member of

the ancient community that would take a wild flight away from leafy

shade and, wheeling over the tree tops, drop between the blue and the

green a drowsy caw. But things were changed this July at Bindon: these

very rooks held noisy counsel in mid air and discussed what flock of

strange bright birds it was that had alighted in their quiet corner of

the world, to startle its greens and greys, to out-flaunt its

flower-beds with outlandish parrot plumage, to break the humming summer

silence with unknown clamours.

“The Deyvil take my soul!” said Thomas Villars reflectively.

He was sitting on the grass at Lady Lochore’s feet; his long legs in the

last cut of trousers strapped over positively the latest boots. The

slimness of his waist, the juvenility of his manner, the black curls

that hung luxuriantly over his clean-shaven face, all this conspired to

give Mr. Villars quite an illusive air of youth, even from a very short

distance. Only a close examination revealed the lines on the rouged

cheek and the wrinkled fall of chin that the highest and finest stock

could not quite conceal. The latest pedigree gave the year of his birth

as some lost fifty years ago—it also described the lady who had presided

at that event as belonging to the illustrious Castillian house of Lara.

But ill-natured friends persisted, averred that this lady had belonged

to no more foreign regions than the Minories, and thus they accounted

for Tom’s black ringlets, for his bold arch of nose, for his slightly

thick consonants and his unconquerable fondness for personal jewellery.

Mr. Villars was, however, almost universally accepted by society: his

knowledge of the share market was only second to his astounding

acquaintance with everyone’s exact financial situation.

“Deyvil take my soul!” he insisted. Tom Villars was fond of an oath as

of a fine genteel habit.

“I defy even the Devil to do that,” said Lady Lochore, stopping the

languidly pettish flap of her fan to shoot an angry look at him over its

edge.

“Why so, fairest Queen of the Roses?”

“Tom Villars sold his soul to the Devil long ago,” put in Colonel

Harcourt. “It is no longer an asset.”

Frankly fifty, with a handsome ruddy face under a sweep of grey hair

that almost gave the impression of the forgotten becomingness of the

powdered peruke, Colonel Harcourt, of the Grenadiers, erect,

broad-chested, pleasantly swaggering, good humoured and yet haughty,

proclaimed the guardsman to the first glance, even in his easy country

garb.

“Sold his soul to the Devil?” echoed Luke Herrick, lifting his handsome

young face from the daisies he was piling in pretty Priscilla Geary’s

pink silk lap. “Sold his soul, did he? Uncommon bargain for Beelzebub

and Co.! I thought the firm did better business.”

“You are quite wrong,” said Lady Lochore, looking down with disfavour

upon the countenance of her victim, who feigned excessive enjoyment of

the ambient wit and humour. “The Devil cannot take Tom Villars’ soul,

nor could Tom Villars sell it to the Devil, for the very good reason

that Tom Villars never had a soul to be disposed of.”

A shout of laughter went round the glowing idle group.

“Cruel, cruel, lady mine!” murmured the oriental Villars, striving to

throw a fire of pleading devotion into his close-set shallow eyes as he

looked up at Lady Lochore and at the same time to turn a dignified deaf

ear upon his less important tormentors. “In how have I offended that you

thus make a pincushion of my heart?”

Mr. Villars knew right well that with Lady Lochore, as with the other

fair of his acquaintance, his favour fell with the barometer of certain

little negotiations. But it was a characteristic—no doubt maternally

inherited—that soft as he was upon the pleasure side of nature, when it

came to business, he was invulnerable.

At this point Mr. Herrick burst into song. He had a pretty tenor voice:

Come, bring your sampler, and with art

Draw in’t a wounded heart

And dropping here and there!

Not that I think that any dart

Can make yours bleed a tear

Or pierce it anywhere——

This youth was proud of tracing a collateral relationship with the

genial Cavalier singer, whom he was fond of quoting in season and out of

season. He was a poet himself, or fancied so; cultivated loose locks,

open collars and flying ties—something also of poetic license in other

matters besides verse. But as his spirits were as inexhaustible as his

purse—and he was at heart a guileless boy—there were not many who would

hold him in rigour.

Lady Lochore looked at him with approval, as he lay stretched at her

feet, just then pleasantly occupied in sticking his decapitated daisies

into Miss Priscilla’s uncovered curls—a process to which that damsel

submitted without so much as a blink of her demure eyelid.

“Heart!” echoed Lady Lochore. She had received that morning a postal

application for overdue interest, and Tom Villars had been so detachedly

sympathetic that there were no tortures she would not now cheerfully

have inflicted upon him. “Heart!” she cried again, “why don’t you know

what is going to happen, when the poor old machine that is Tom Villars

comes to a standstill at last——”

“There will be a great concourse of physicians,” broke in Colonel

Harcourt, whose wit was not equal to his humour, “and when they’ve taken

off his wig and his stays and cut him open——”

“Out will fall,” interrupted Herrick, “the portrait of his dear cousin

Rebecca—whom he loved in the days of George II.

‘Be she likewise one of those

That an acre hath of nose——’”

“The physician will find a dreadful little withered fungus,” pursued

Lady Lochore, unheeding.

“Which,” lisped Priscilla, suddenly raising the most innocent eyes in

all the world, “which they will send to Master Rickart to find a grand

name for, as the deadliest kind of poison that ever set doctors

wondering. And sure, ’tisn’t poison at all! Master Rickart will say, but

just a poor kind of snuff that wouldn’t even make a cat sneeze.”

Mr. Villars had met Miss Priscilla Geary upon the great oak stair this

morning; and, examining her through his single eyeglass, had vowed she

was a rosebud, and pinched her chin—all in a very condescending manner.

“I think you’re all talking very great nonsense,” remarked the

Dishonourable Caroline.

Mrs. Geary was comfortably ensconced in a deep garden chair. Now raising

her large pale face and protuberant pale eye from a note-book upon which

she had been making calculations, she seemed to become aware for the

first time of the irresponsible clatter around her.

“Mr. Villars,” she proceeded, in soft gurgling notes not unlike those of

the ringdove’s, “I have been just going over last night’s calculations

and I think there’s a little error—on your side, dear Mr. Villars.”

Mr. Villars scrambled to his feet, more discomfited by this polite

observation than by the broad insolence of the others’ banter.

“My dear Madam, I really think, ah—pray allow me—we went thoroughly into

the matter last night.”

The little pupils in Mrs. Geary’s goggling eyes narrowed to pins’

points.

“I do not think anyone can ever accuse me of inaccuracy,” she cooed with

emphasis. “Come and look for yourself, Mr. Villars. You owe me still

three pounds nine and eightpence—and three farthings.”

“Bianca let

Me pay the debt

I owe thee, for a kiss!”

sang the irrepressible Herrick—stretching his arms dramatically to

Priscilla, and advancing his impudent comely face as if to substantiate

the words—upon which she slapped him with little angry fingers

outspread; and Lady Lochore first frowned, then laughed; then suddenly

sighed.

“Peep-bo, mamma!” cried a high baby voice.

Every line of Lady Lochore’s face became softened, at the same time

intensified with that wonderful change that her child’s presence always

brought to her. But her heavy frown instantly came back as she beheld

Ellinor, hatless, bearing a glass of milk upon a tray, while, from

behind the crisp folds of her skirt, the heir-presumptive of Lochore

(and Bindon) peeped roguishly at his mother.

Herrick sprang to his feet. Colonel Harcourt turned his brown face to

measure the new-comer with his frank eye and then rose also.

“Hebe,” said he, looking down with admiration at the fresh, sun-kissed

cheek and the sun-illumined head, “Hebe, with the nectar of the God!”

He took the tray from her hand.

“Give me my milk,” said Lady Lochore. “Edmund, come here! Come here,

darling. Are you thirsty? You shall drink out of mother’s glass. Come

here, sir, this minute! Really, Mrs. Marvel, you should not take him

from his nurse like this!”

With a shrill cry the child rushed back to Ellinor and clutched her

skirt again, announcing in his wilful way that he would have no nasty

milk, and that he loved the pretty lady. Ellinor had some little ado to

restore him to his mother. Then, seeing him firmly captured at last by

the end of his tartan sash, she stood a moment facing Lady Lochore’s

vindictive eyes with scornful placidity.

“My father hopes you will drink the milk, cousin Maud,” said she, “and

if you would add to it the little packet of powder that lies beside it

on the tray, he bids me say that it would be most beneficial to your

cough.”

For all response Lady Lochore drank off the glass; then handed back the

tray to Ellinor as if she had been a servant, the little powder

conspicuously untouched. Ellinor looked from one to the other of the two

men; then with a fine careless gesture passed her burden to Herrick,

and, without another word, walked away up the terrace steps.

Herrick glanced after her, glanced at the tray in his hand, and breaking

into a quick laugh, promptly thrust it into Colonel Harcourt’s hands and

scurried off in pursuit. Colonel Harcourt good-humouredly echoed the

laugh, as he finally deposited the object on the grass, then stood in

his turn, gazing philosophically after the two retreating figures that

were now progressing side by side, while Lady Lochore and her son

out-wrangled Mrs. Geary and Mr. Villars.

“’Pon my soul,” said Colonel Harcourt, “_vera incessu patuit Dea_. That

woman walks as well as any I’ve ever seen!”

Lady Lochore caught the words, and they added to the irritation with

which she was endeavouring to stifle her son’s protestation that he

hated mamma.

“I’ll have you know who’s master, sir!” she cried, pinning down the

struggling arms with sudden anger.

“I’m master. I am the little Master of Lochore—and Margery says I’m to

be the little master here!”

The mother suddenly relaxed her grasp of him and sat stonily gazing at

him while he rubbed his chubby arm and stared back at her with pouting

lips. The next moment she went down on her knees beside him, and took

him up in her arms, smothering him with kisses.

“Darling, so he shall be, darling, darling!”

A panting nurse here rushed upon the scene.

“Wretch!” exclaimed my lady, “you are not worth your salt! How dare you

let the child escape you. Yes, take him, take him!—the weight of him!”

She caught Harcourt’s eye fixed reflectively upon her.

“Come and walk with me,” she commanded.

“I was two by honours, you remember,” cooed Mrs. Geary.

“I am positive, the Deyvil take my soul, Madam! But ’tis my score you

are marking instead of your own!”

Deserted Priscilla sat making reflective bunches of daisies. She had not

once looked up since Herrick so unceremoniously left her.

The sky was still as blue, the grass as green, the flowers as bright,

the whole summer’s day as lovely; but fret and discord had crept in

among them.