The star dreamer: A romance

by Agnes Castle; Egerton Castle

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