THE HERB EUPHROSINE
Had’st thou but shook thy head or made a pause
When I spake darkly ...
Or turned an eye of doubt upon my face
As bid me tell my tale in express words....
—SHAKESPEARE (_King John_).
Before her mirror the next morning Lady Lochore sat wrapt in sullen
thoughts, thoughts of impotent anger, of failure, punctuated now and
again by glances at her own ravaged countenance.
She had dwelt in Bindon well-nigh her allotted month, and she had
accomplished nothing—unless an increase of David’s eccentricity and a
marked accentuation of his antipathy towards herself could be reckoned a
gain! The sands were running low. But it was not the span of the time
that remained hers at Bindon (for she had no intention of leaving of her
own accord and hardly believed the dreamer would find the energy to
expel her, if, indeed, he were even aware of the consummation of
time)—it was the span of her own life.
The sands were running very low. Meanwhile she had not conciliated
David, nor had she ousted Ellinor. She had not even compromised her.
Herrick was sighing _pour le bon motif_ (young fool!) and in vain.
Harcourt _roué_ and duellist, “he who ought to have rid me,” thought
she, raging, “of one or the other in a week,” had made no more progress
than might old Villars himself. “Lochore did his business better!” she
said half-aloud, and broke into a solitary laugh of inexpressible
bitterness.
There came a tap at the door and Margery entered. Lady Lochore wheeled
round, but it was idle to try and read any tidings upon the
housekeeper’s impassive face.
“Well,” cried she, imperiously waving away the usual morning inquiries.
“Well, speak, woman! Have you something to tell me at last?”
“Indeed, my lady, very little. Everything is much as usual. I am sorry
to see your ladyship looking so ill. There do seem to be sickness about
the house this morning, to be sure! Master Rickart indeed took to
drugging himself last night—though that’s nothing new—and Barnaby sat up
with him and lies in a dead sleep on the mat this minute outside the
laboratory door just like a dog.”
“Pshaw! Go on.”
“Sir David, he was not himself yesterday, so Mr. Giles tells me; and a
bad night he had too. Eh! He paced that platform, my lady, right through
from midnight to dawn. Not a wink of sleep did I have either with
hearing through the window the sound of his steps and knowing him so
tormented, poor gentleman! That was after Mrs. Marvel had left him!”
Lady Lochore struck the table with her beringed hand and started to her
feet.
“Mrs. Marvel!”
Margery began to pleat a corner of her apron.
“Yes, my lady. She was up with him there on the tower till nigh
midnight.”
“On the tower!”
“Oh, yes, my lady. Not that that’s anything new either. She used to be
half the night with him sometimes. But that was before your ladyship
came. She stopped going this last month. But last night—eh, my lady,
they did talk! I could hear the sound of their voices—she has great
power with Sir David—has Mrs. Marvel.”
Lady Lochore sat down again. Her fingers closed on the muslin of the
dressing-table. Helplessly and hopelessly her haggard eyes looked forth
into a black prospective. Oh, she had failed—failed!
“’Tis indeed a sad day for Bindon,” said Margery after a pause, as if in
answer to Lady Lochore. “No wonder your ladyship is anxious. There are
times when I do think we’ll have some dreadful catastrophe here. If it’s
nothing worse there’ll be an accident with them drugs, as sure as fate.
Master Rickart will be poisoning some of the poor folk again, or
himself, maybe, or, indeed, it might be Mrs. Marvel, she that’s always
in with him.”
Lady Lochore started ever so slightly and turned round sharply. Never
had Margery looked more benevolent, more virtuous.
“Yes, that’s what I do be saying to myself,” pursued the housekeeper.
“Somebody will be found dead, and nobody to fix the blame on, with the
way things are going on.” (The pupils of Lady Lochore’s eyes narrowed
like a hawk’s.) “And when I see Mrs. Marvel going about, so young and
fresh and strong, and sure of herself:—‘Maybe it will be you,’ thinks
I.”
“Oh, get away with you!” cried Lady Lochore, and buried her head on her
hands with a frenzied gesture.
“Shall we go and look through the bars into the little paradise of
poisons?”
When Colonel Harcourt had suddenly made this suggestion to his friends,
as they lay, in somewhat discontented mood, under the shade of the
spreading cedar tree this oppressive summer day, he had cast a meaning
glance towards Lady Lochore and she had risen with alacrity.
“Excellent!” she cried, when at the forbidden gate Harcourt produced the
key with a flourish.
She knew of David’s difference with the colonel on the previous day; and
though it had sunk into insignificance before the news of Ellinor’s
return to the tower, she was now as the drowning creature that clutches
at straws-Colonel Harcourt was a noted shot. And she clapped her hands
when the gate rolled back on its hinges. She had no need to be told that
the dangerous Mrs. Marvel was busy among the herbs within.
Herrick, moodily striding beside the Dishonourable Caroline, gave but
the most perfunctory ear to a discourse upon the inductions to be drawn
from a partner’s first play of trumps—with especial reference to certain
crimes of his own committed the previous night. He started as he saw
Harcourt’s action.
“No—no!” he exclaimed. “I understand that this would be an
indiscretion.”
“You will perhaps allow me,” said Harcourt blandly, “to make use of a
key delivered over by no less a person than our host himself.”
“Mr. Herrick thinks it more discreet to climb over the wall!” suggested
Priscilla. She had a happy faculty for being spiteful with a rosebud
look of innocence.
“What, Luke!” cried Lady Lochore, seizing the young man by the arm and
dragging him towards the entrance, “so cast down! Was the fair widow
then hard of approach to-day? Pluck up heart, lad. What! You a poet, you
a little nephew of the original Herrick, and not know that when a woman
assumes the defensive she is just considering the question of surrender?
Why, what a lady this is! Eh, Priscilla, poor you and poor me must hide
our diminished heads!”
She broke into a jeering laugh as the girl crimsoned and tossed her
chin; her great hollow eyes danced, brighter even that those of the
lover in his renewed confidence; her cheeks flamed a deeper scarlet than
those of the mortified girl herself. She sketched a favorite gavotte
step or two, as she gave her hand with a flourish to Colonel Harcourt
that he might lead her across the forbidden threshold.
Ellinor, seated on the stone bench, with her empty basket before her,
staring with unseeing eyes at the little bluish stars that spread all
over the bed where flourished the herb Euphrosine, was suddenly
disturbed from her melancholy musing.
These loud voices, this trivial laughter! By what freak of irresponsible
folly were these few roods of ground (which now she had as much interest
to keep inviolate, as ever Vestal virgin to keep her flame alive) to be
again invaded? The intruders were actually in the garden: and no spot of
it was hidden from David’s tower! She had just been chiding herself for
her thoughtlessness of the previous day in permitting for a moment
Herrick’s uninvited presence; for her light-mindedness in having found
transient amusement in his company. Had she now failed again in
faithfulness, was it possible that she could have omitted to lock the
gate behind her? She hurriedly felt for her key; it hung on the ribbon
of her apron. Then she rose upon an impulse: David had made her guardian
here, she would keep the trust.
With head held high and with determined step, she went to meet them. She
lifted her voice boldly as she came within speaking distance.
“Lady Lochore, if you found the gate open, this garden is none the less
forbidden to visitors, by your brother’s wish. I must beg you all to
leave it!”
Lady Lochore, her white teeth gleaming between her parted lips, her deep
eyes insolently fixed upon her cousin’s face, listened without a word.
Then:
“_Calmez-vous, ma chère_,” said she, “the gate was opened for us.”
“Chide me!” Colonel Harcourt thrust his handsome presence to the front.
“It would be sweet to be chidden by those rosy lips. The next best
thing, I declare, to being——” He paused, let his eye finish the phrase
with bold suggestion, and then concluded humourously, with an almost
farcical hesitation and change of tone: “praised by them!”
There was a new freedom in his manner and Ellinor was prompt to feel it.
She remembered as with a dim sense of nightmare those burning glances,
unnoticed then, which had fixed her last night. What had she done to
forfeit the respect even of this hitherto courteous and kindly
gentleman? She stepped back as he approached and looked at him icily.
“Whether you opened the gate or found it opened, I must repeat, Colonel
Harcourt, that your presence here is a breach of courtesy—to your host
and to me.”
Smiling, Colonel Harcourt opened his mouth to speak. But Lady Lochore
intervened.
“How well you know my brother’s mind, Mrs. Marvel!” she jeered. “But you
see, even men change their minds sometimes. Colonel Harcourt, show the
lady with whose key you opened the gate.”
“Sir David’s own key,” confirmed the colonel blandly, as he held it
aloft. “We are not quite the trespassers you think.”
“David gave it to you?” Her eyes were dark with trouble as she said the
words, less as a question than as if she were setting forth her own
grief. Harcourt did not answer for a moment. Then, slipping the key into
his pocket with a laugh:
“Gave?” he cried. “Gave is hardly the word. He abandoned it to me.
People change their minds, as my lady says. Sir David may once have
wished to keep this curious spot sacred to himself——”
“And to Mistress Marvel, but now you may all eat the forbidden fruit!”
cried Lady Lochore, with a glance first at the three men and then at
Ellinor. “Sir David has at last found that it is not worth keeping to
himself.”
Herrick, quick to perceive that Ellinor was being baited yet unable to
gather the clue to the purpose which seemed to underlie her tormentor’s
words, now came forward.
“But surely,” he urged, blushing ingenuously, “it is enough for us if
Mrs. Marvel does not wish our presence.”
Almost before Lady Lochore’s hard laugh had time to ring out, Ellinor
answered:
“Oh, no,” she said. The exceeding bitterness of her humiliation drew
down the lips that tried to smile. “Pray, what can it be to me? I was
only guardian. I am relieved of my trust.”
She made a sort of little curtsey, half-ironic. And then moved away from
them.
But she was not destined to carry her bursting heart to solitude this
morning.—Master Simon, his white hair fluttering, the tassel of his
velvet cap swinging, the skirts of his dressing-gown flapping as he
advanced with a high jerky step quite unlike his usual slow shuffling
gait, emerged from the shade of the yew-tree, even as she stood on the
threshold of the gate.
One glance at his wildly-lighted eye and the flush on his cheek bones,
sufficed to convince Ellinor of the cause of this extraordinary
infraction of his rule of life. He was still under the influence of the
last night’s drug; or, worse still perhaps, of some new one. He waved
his arm at her and at the group beyond.
“Admit me among you, ladies!” he cried, in a high thin tone. “I will
tell you all great news! Daughter, child, this hour strikes a new era in
the world’s history! The herb Euphrosine has given me back my youth!”
And, to complete the fantastic scene, Belphegor, every hair bristling,
tail erect, eyes aflame with green phosphorescence, sprang from the
bushes and performed a wild saraband around his master, uttering uncouth
little cries.
Master Simon broke into shrill laughter.
“Ask Belphegor if we have not found the secret of youth restored!”