The star dreamer: A romance

by Agnes Castle; Egerton Castle

BOOK II

The night

Hath been to me a more familiar face

Than that of man; and in her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness

I learned the language of another world.

—Tennyson.

CHAPTER I
MIDSUMMER SUNRISE

... the blue

Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew

Of summer nights collected still to make

The morning precious: Beauty was awake.

—Keats (Sleep and Poetry).

A dawn in June: the dawn of a night that has held no real blackness, but merged from a sky of sapphire to one of grey pearl—sapphire so starlit, that ever deeper deeps and ever bluer transparencies seemed to unveil themselves to the watchers eye; grey pearl pulsing into opal, shot with milky pinks, faint greens, ambers and primroses.

Into the dewy morning world came Ellinor; down through the long stone passages that still held night and silence; out into this awakening, this freshness, this lightsomeness.

The wonders of the summer dawn, day after day, bring to the old Earth, as it were, a new creation. She awakes and finds the forgotten paradise from which man, of his own sluggard choice, shuts himself out with gates of darkness and leaden bolts of sleep.

Ellinor, her fair face emerging from the folds of her dark, grey-hooded cloak, came pearl-like as the young day itself from the folds of the night. Her slender foot left its print on the dew-moist path. She passed between the stately flower-beds through the great formal pleasure-grounds where, under the sunrise radiance, the masses of geranium blooms were taking to themselves silvery colours unknown to the later day; between the ranks of cypress and box, whose grotesque and fantastic shapes were duskily cut out against the transparent sky one moment and the next seemed fringed with green flame as the level rays leaped at them; up the shrubbery walks, where the white syringa was breaking into odorous stars, scattering its scented dew upon her as she brushed the outstretched branches; under the black and solemn shades of the yew-trees, until she reached the gate that gave access to the Herb-Garden.

She walked slowly, drinking in the loveliness of the hour. The bees were humming loudly over the spicy beds. The whole garden was full of sweet growing hum and stir; of the flash of wet bird wings. Its strange blossoms swaying in the capricious little breeze seemed to hold private councils, then nod familiarly at her, welcoming and beckoning on.

Ellinor stood, her hand still on the gate, her brow towards the radiant east; the hood had slipped from her head and a sun-shaft pierced her hair. She never crossed the threshold of this garden without a curious sense of something impending. And now, as she paused to breathe its ever new fragrances, the happy humour in which she had started on her quest for herbs (to be gathered at the hour of sunrise, according to Master Gerard’s own prescription) gave place to the old childish sense of mysterious awe and attraction.

And as she stood, musing, the sound of a rapid step was heard on this garden space, so far consecrate to herself and to the wild things; a darker shadow detached itself from the heavy shade of the yew-tree. She turned round quickly to face it. Sir David was beside her.

“The purity of the morning,” he thought, “and the dawn still in her eyes!”

“David!” she cried, astonished; and a happy rose leapt into her cheek.

“I saw you,” he said, “from my tower.”

She glanced up to the frowning grey stone mass that was beginning to cast sharply its long shadow on the sunlit garden—then she looked back at his face, pallid and a little drawn. And if he had seen the dawn in her eyes she saw in his shadow of the night watch.

“Ah,” she cried and menaced him with her white finger. “No sleep again, David! And your promise?”

“The stars lured me,” he answered, smiling faintly. Ellinor, however, did not smile. The rose flush faded slowly from her face. The stars lured him! Would it then always be so? She gave a little sigh. Then, without speaking, she drew a key from her reticule and slipped it into the lock; it required the effort of both her strong hands to turn it, but she would do it herself.

“Nay, cousin, it is a fancy of mine. I alone am trusted with the keys of the sanctuary. It is I that shall open to you the gate of our Herb-Garden.”

It fell back, groaning on its hinges; and she stood inside, smiling again.

“Come in, David.”

“Do you know,” he said, still standing on the threshold, humouring her mood according to his wont, “that I have actually never trodden this rood of ground before.”

She clapped her hands with joy.

“Then it is indeed I who will have brought you here,” she cried. “That is right. Oh, cousin, don’t you know, this is the enchanted garden, my garden! Ah, you did not know that, lord of Bindon! You deemed it was yours perhaps, though you never bethought yourself even of visiting it. But it was given to me by a fairy, years and years ago. And it is full of spells and dreams and magic! I will tell you something: That night, when I came back last autumn ... the first thing I did when I went to my room was to open my window that gives on the garden—you see that window there—and I leant out over the whispering ivy leaves to greet my garden. And in the dark of the night I heard it speak to me. And it said: I am still yours—David, come in!”

With one of his unconsciously courtly gestures to mark that it was indeed on her invitation that he came upon her ground, he entered slowly, looking at her with a little wonder. For this fantastic Ellinor was as new to him as this day’s dawn. She guessed his thoughts.

“I vow,” she said and seemed to shake off her fancy as she might have brushed from before her face a floating gossamer—“I vow that I am becoming infected with some musing sickness! But between you, my cousin star-gazer, and my good alchemist father, it were odd if there were no such humour in the air. Hold my basket, dear David, I will be practical again.”

CHAPTER II
EUPHROSINE, STAR-OF-COMFORT

She still took note that, when the living smile

Died from his lips, across him came a cloud

Of melancholy severe; from which again,

Whenever in her hovering to and fro,

The lily-maid had striven to make him cheer,

There brake a sudden beaming tenderness.

—Tennyson (Elaine).

“And do you not wish to know,” asked Ellinor, “what has brought me with the dawn to these gardens?”

He had been watching silently by her side—watching her, as here she snipped a bundle of leaves and there a sheaf of blossoms, and mechanically extending the basket that she might lay them therein. Now, after a fashion of his, to which she had grown well accustomed, he let fall a glance upon her as one bringing himself back from a distance.

She repeated her question, with a little pretence of impatience.

“I do not think that I wondered to see you,” he answered slowly.—Fastidious as he was in his garb and every exterior detail that concerned him, it was all as nothing, Ellinor had learned to know, compared to his mental fastidiousness. A silent man he was, but when he spoke no words could serve him but such as could clothe the truth to the most exquisite nicety. Could anyone have been more ill equipped for the battle of life?

“I was standing on the tower,” he went on, “watching the withdrawal of the stars and the rise of another day. It is not often that I look to the earth. When the stars go, then, you see, the world is blank to me. But this morning, I know not why, when the skies grew faint I did look upon the earth and found it very fair. And so I stood and watched and saw the colours grow. Then you came forth into the midst of them; and somehow I thought it was as if you were part of the beauty of it all—part of the dawn; as if you were something that the earth and I myself had unconsciously been waiting for to complete the whole. Thus you see, Ellinor, it did not enter into my mind to ask why you had come. I sought you,” he smiled as he spoke, “also, indeed, I know not why.”

As Ellinor listened her white eyelids had fallen over her eyes, lower and lower, till the long lashes, black at the base, upturned and tipped with gold at their ends, cast shadows on her cheek. Her breast heaved with the quickening of her breath. But at the last word she looked up at him, and her eyes were sad.

“Ah, cousin, will you ever know?”

It was almost a cry; it had a ring of hidden bitterness in it. Then, after a slight pause, she resumed her snipping and became once more, as she had announced, practical.

“Well, now you shall be told why I am here. And first, please understand that I combine with my duties of housekeeper to the lord of Bindon, those of ’prentice or familiar to the alchemist—simpler—sorcerer; in short, to Master Simon, my father. Now, as you know,” she pursued, assuming a mock orating tone, “my said father spends now all his days and most of his night in extracting divers salts, distilling essences, elixirs, what not—remedies for which the village folk flock to him with enthusiasm, and which being, praise Heaven, harmless enough, are applied to their ills with varying success but entire satisfaction to themselves. These remedies are mostly grown in this garden.”

She began to move down the path which led from bed to bed and which no foot but that of the simpler himself, of the dumb boy Barnaby, or her own having hitherto trod, was so narrow and encroached upon by the wild luxuriance of the herbs and shrubs that she was fain to walk in front of him and to speak over her shoulder. And even then, beneath their feet, many a broken and crushed simple gave forth its spicy ghost.

Her face presented itself to him in different aspects every moment. Now he caught but a rim of pearly cheek; now a clear cut profile; now nearly the whole delicate oval narrowed as she turned it towards him over her shoulder, the white chin more pointed. Meanwhile she spoke on gaily, with only here and there a pause to consider, to select and cull.

“I need not tell you, who have known my father so many more years than I myself, that while he makes use of the good old simple writers, Master Gerard, Master Robert Turner, Master Parkinson and the rest, he scoffs at what he calls their superstition. But I, having relieved him from the task of gathering, find it my pleasure to follow the quaint old directions in their least particular. And when Master Gerard, for instance, says, ‘This herb loseth its power unless it be gathered under the rays of the moon in her first quarter’ why then, cousin David,” she laughed, “under the rays of the moon in her first quarter I gather it. Who knows if I do not please thereby some honest ghost? Who knows if there be not in very truth some hidden virtue in the hour? You will have divined that the hour of sunrise is, on the same authority, the only fit season for the culling of certain other precious plants. And so I am here to cull betony and ditander in the dew. (Betony, you must know, sir, is of all simples, except vervaine, the most excellent, so that it is an old say: ‘If you be ill, sell your coat and buy betony.’)”

Here she pushed her way through a bed where thyme had grown breast high. She came back again presently, flushed and be-pearled, merry with the breath of the spices clinging to her garments, and with as much betony as one hand could hold together. This she added to the basket’s burden.

On ran her tongue the while:

“Ah,” catching herself up abruptly and retracing her way by a step, “the ditander is also blossoming, I see. Father will be glad to see it. It is sovereign against the wounds of arrows ‘shot from guns, and also for the healing of poisoned hurts.’ You would never guess,” she added, “that the juice of this modest little plant is so powerful that, Master Gerard avers, ‘the mere smell of it will drive away venomous beasts and doth astonish them!’” Her laugh rang out, clear as crystal. “You are not convinced, cousin. I would I could see more speculation in that eye! What if I were to tell you that the thing grows under the influence of Mars—would it awaken more interest?”

His grave lip was faintly lifted to a smile.

“It might account at least for its virtue against wounds of arrows,” said he.

“Nay, there’s sarcasm in that tone,” she said, shaking her head. “More respect, I beg of you, Sir David, for this little borage. Does it not look quaint and simple with its baby-blue flowers and its white downy stem? Ah, I warrant me you have had borage in your wine ere this—but you never knew why or how it came there! Oh, sir, it is no less—on authority, mark me—than one of the four great cordial flowers most deserving of esteem for cheering the spirits. The other three are the violet, the rose, and alkanet. And what the alkanet is I should much like to know!”

... “You know so much,” he said, “that I have no thought to spare for what you do not know.”

“Sarcastic again—take care, cousin! Do not mock at Jupiter’s own cordial. And I tell you more, sir: conjoined with hellebore—black hellebore—that dark and gloomy plant will, as one Robert Burton has it:

‘Purge the veins

Of Melancholy and cheer the Heart

Of those black fumes that make it smart;

And clear the brain of misty fogs

Which dull our senses, our souls’ clogs....

“It’s a favourite quotation of my father’s. Would you drink of it, if I brewed it for you?”

There fell a sudden silence—a something dividing their pleasant warmth of sympathy as of a chill breeze blowing between them. And she knew a thoughtless word had struck upon his hidden sore. She stood, as if convicted, with eyes averted from his face. Then he spoke:

“Every man in his youth brews the cup of his own life and spends his age in drinking of it, willy nilly. Sometimes, I think, it is blind fate that has gathered the ingredients to his hand. Sometimes I see they are but the choice of his own perversity. But once brewed, he must drink, be they bitter or sweet.”

“Cousin—” she began timidly. Then, after her woman’s way, courage came to her on a sudden turn of passion: “I’ll not believe it!” she cried, flashing upon him. “Throw the poison away, David. There is glad wine yet in this beautiful world.”

His face relaxed as he looked upon her; the gloomy cloud passed from it. But the melancholy remained.

“Do you remember,” said he, “for I too can quote—what Lady Macbeth says: ‘All the perfumes of Araby cannot sweeten this little hand!’ My bright cousin, believe me, there is a bitterness which no sweetness that ever was distilled, nay, I fear, not even such as you could distil, can ever mitigate. Have you not learned,” he added, and a certain inner agitation made his lips twitch and the pupils of his eyes dilate and found a distant echo in his voice as of some roaring waters deeply hidden—“have you not learned, over your father’s crucibles and phials, that the sweetest essence does but lose its nature and become bitter too for ever, when mingled with but a few drops of the acrid draught. Ellinor, I have warned you already.”

She felt as if some cold hand had been laid on her heart:—here spoke again the voice of the sick soul determined to renounce. And here was the one man in her whole world, to whom she would so fain give extravagantly. There are natures to which love means taking only; others to which it means giving all. How she would have given! The ache of the tide thrust back upon her heart rose to her very throat. She went white, even to her brave lips. But still they smiled, as women’s lips will smile in such straits.

“You mind me,” she said, “that I was after all forgetting to gather the hellebore. ’Tis a dark drug-plant, cousin and loves the shade; and, if the old simplers speak truth, it must be gathered before a ray of sun shall of a morning have opened its green petals. I see that I must hurry. Already the shadow of your grey tower is shortening across the beds.”

She took her basket from his arm, gave him a little nod as of dismissal and passed quickly from him. He let her go without a word or a gesture, standing still, wrapt in himself, with eyes downcast. Those deep waters in his soul, that for so many long years had lain black and stagnant—what was it that had so stirred them of late days, that they should rise in waves like the salt and bitter sea and dash against his laboriously built dykes of peace and renunciation?

Ellinor was long on her knees beside the hellebore, not indeed that she was busy picking it, for her hands lay idly before her. With eyes fixed unseeingly upon its dark, poisonous looking tufts, she was tasting the savour of a slow gathering tear. Suddenly she felt her cousin’s presence again close upon her and began feverishly to tear at the plant, every energy of her mind bent upon concealing her weakness. In another moment, with a sweetness that was almost overpowering, she knew that he was kneeling beside her, his shoulder to her shoulder, his hands over hers.

“Dear Ellinor,” he said softly in her ear, “I do not like to see you touch this poisonous plant, let me——” And then, breaking off, when she turned her face, so close to his, as if irresistibly drawn to seek his glance: “Forgive me!” he cried, with more emotion than she had ever heard his measured tones express before. “By what right am I always thus casting upon your happy heart the shadow of my gloom!”

Her fingers closed passionately round his.

“David,” she said, almost in a whisper, “don’t forget I too have known suffering. David you were wrong just now. The sweet and the bitter work together make wholesome beverage. And see, for that do I gather hellebore that it may blend with the borage. Did I not tell you so? And—ah, forgive, but I must say it, sometimes the bitterness and the sorrow are not real, only fancied.... And then it may be that real adversity must come to make us see it. And even then, if we do see it, sweet are the uses of adversity!”

“Why, then, I could believe,” he answered her, and his deep voice still thrilled with that note of emotion that was so inexpressibly musical to her ear, “that if a man were to be comforted by such as you, he might find a sweetness even in adversity—that is,” he added on a yet deeper note, “did he dare let himself be comforted.”

She sighed and dropped her hands from his; took up her basket and rose to her feet. He also rose hastily, as if ashamed of his emotion, and once more wrapped reserve around him like a mantle. Presently he said, in that slightly jesting manner that never lost touch with melancholy:

“Your father has long been looking for the lost ‘Star-of-Comfort.’ Your father is an amiable materialist and believes that a right-chosen drug can minister to a mind diseased. I fear me it will prove to him as frail a quest as that of the Fern Seed of invisibility and the Lotos of forgetfulness—and such like dreams of unattainable good!”

“You are wrong, wrong again!” Although the moisture she scorned to brush away was still in her eyes, the smile was on her lip once more; and the dimple by it—a triumphant dimple.

“How so?” he asked.

“Why, sir, you once were a truer prophet than now you wot of. Did you not foretell to me, on the first day of my return, that I might help him to find it? The lost plant was, according to Master Ralph Prynne (of fragrant memory) well-known at one time in the south of France where, says he, upon diligent search it may even now be discovered among ruins and rocks!” Here she resumed her mock didactic manner. “‘It is my belief,’ says he, ‘that the gay and singularly careless temper of these peoples is due in great part to the ancient custom of brewing it into the wine they did drink of—whereby their sons and daughters did inherit the happy tendencies engendered in themselves—and splenetic melancholy which sits so black on many of our country is never known among them.’”

“A wondrous drug!” said David.

“So I thought,” she retorted; and, with a mocking glance at him, went on: “And knowing how many indeed stand in need of it here, I who had recently come myself from the south of France, resolved to get him the seed or root, if such were to be obtained. Master Prynne gives a very detailed description and I have a good memory. There was one, a wise woman I knew of, who was learned in simples. In fine, sir, turn and behold!”

She twisted him round, led him a pace or two forward, and pointed.

On a shallow bed, sloping to due south, screened from the north and prepared with a kind of rockery clothed with mingled sand and heather soil, a hardy-looking dwarf plant was growing in thick patches. And sundry small but vigorous off-shoots, darting here and there gave promise that they would soon cover the bed and overhang its rocky borders. The full sunshine blazed down upon it, and the minute bright and bold blossoms that gemmed it already in places looked like stars of bluish flame among the lustrous dark green leaves.

“Behold!” repeated Ellinor, with a dramatic gesture.

There was a stimulating aromatic fragrance in the air. The morning sun which had just emerged from the edge of the keep bore down upon them with an effulgence as yet merely grateful. A band of puzzled bees was hovering musically above the last attractive new-comer in the herbary. David looked from the flourishing bed to the straight, strong figure, the brave countenance of his cousin.

“And so you have succeeded,” he said with a look of smiling wonder. “Succeeded where Master Simon has sought in vain so many years! Everything you touch seems to prosper.”

Some realisation of that spirit of gay perseverance which had been so beneficently active in his neglected house all these months, beneath whose influence flowers of order and brightness seemed to have sprung up, magic and fragrant as the lost “Star-of-Comfort” itself, kindled a new light in the eye he now kept fixed upon her. It was a realisation, a sense of admiration, distinct from the ever-present, albeit hardly-conscious attraction. He looked back at the flame-starred creeping shrub.

“So there blooms Master Simon’s True-Grace, this Euphrosinum, his Star-of-Comfort, after all these years,” he went on musingly.

And the sense of her presence was intermingled with the penetrating fragrance of the strange flower, the music of bees and bird call, the fanning of the breeze, and the warmth of the sun.

“In Persian,” she resumed, “they call it Rustian-al-Misrour—the ‘Plant-of-Heart’s-Joy’ is the meaning of it, so Prynne tells us. It was brought to Europe by the Crusaders, but lost in the destruction of monastery gardens in England, and fell into disuse elsewhere—and thus came to be regarded as a myth. But things are not myths because we lose them,” she added wistfully. “Who knows, sometimes the joy we deem lost is under our hand.” She picked off a branchlet and absently nibbled it. And her light breath, already sweet as of clover or lavender, came wafted across spiced with this new fragrance.

“Well,” said he then slowly, “according to the bygone simplers, there it lies. Ellinor, when you brew me a cordial of the Star-of-Comfort, I shall drink it.”

“I may mind you of that promise one day,” said she.

Then, upon the little pause that ensued, she looked at the shortening shadows and the skies and said, in her womanly, careful manner, that it was time for her to be in the dairy. At the garden gate, however, he paused.

“And under the influence of what star,” he asked, “is the wondrous plant supposed to bloom?”

She could not guess from his manner whether he spoke in jest or in earnest, but she answered him mischievously, as she turned the key in the lock: “Master Prynne was silent on this point; and nowhere could I find news of it. But we are quite safe, cousin David, for I planted the first cutting myself under your new star.”

He started ever so slightly.

“Did you indeed?” he murmured dreamily.

“But I don’t know its name yet. Tell me, you must have given your new star a name by now—for I think it grows brighter night by night.”

In silence he let his deep gaze rest for a moment upon her, then answered:

“To me it is still nameless, though meaning things beyond words.”

He paused, and went on, still compassing her with his absorbed look. “You and the star came to me together—shall I not call it also,” with a gesture at the flowering bed, “Euphrosine—Star-of-Comfort?”

These words, accompanied by the glance that seemed to give them so earnest a significance, troubled Ellinor strangely. She could find no response. She drew the key from the lock and was moving forward with downcast eyes when he laid his touch lightly upon her arm.

“Thank you,” said he, “for admitting me into your enchanted garden! Some morning when the dawn birds are calling, or some evening before the stars come out, may I knock at this gate again?”

“Nay, David,” cried she, with swift uplifted eyes, holding out to him the key on the impulse of her leaping heart, “this gate must never be locked for you! My father has another—take this one!”

His fingers closed upon her hand and then he took the brown key and looked at it.

“For you and me alone,” he said.

She knew then that this hour they had spent together in the dew-besprinkled closes was to him as sacred and as sweet as it would ever be to her. But now he had folded his lips together and went beside her in silence.

CHAPTER III
A QUEEN OF CURDS AND CREAM

And Enid brought sweet cakes to make them cheer,

· · · · ·

And stood behind and waited ...

And seeing her so sweet and serviceable,

Geraint had longing in him evermore

To stoop and kiss the tender little thumb

That crost the trencher as she laid it down.

—Tennyson (Idylls).

At the end of the lane, Ellinor took the path which branched off to the courtyards; and, as she made no movement of farewell or dismissal, the master of the place, with great simplicity, followed her. These courtyards were located in the most ancient part of Bindon, where in mediæval days had been the inner bailey. What remained of the lowered towers and curtains had been utilised for the peaceful purposes of spences, bakehouses and dairies.

As in the case of all buildings, the life of which has gradually dwindled, these precincts had gathered to themselves a mellow and placid picturesqueness. Long tranquil years had clothed them with luxuriance. It was as if the green tide of surrounding nature had taken delight in reconquering the whilom bare array of stone and mortar. Rampant ivies and wild creeping plants had long ago stormed the half-razed ramparts from the outside, and unchecked in their assault now pounced into the yards over the roofs. On the inside the blush roses were foaming up the grey walls; the square of grass in this shaded spot was deeply green.

In the early light and the silence it was a scene of singular placidity and fitted well with David’s unwontedly pleasant mood; mood of tired body and vaguely happy mind. A few pigeons from the high-reared cot came fluttering down and walked about, curtseying expectantly.

Presently two milk-maids, in print frocks, sun bonnets and clogs, clattered down some stairs and went in quickly through the dairy door, agitated at perceiving the task-mistress up before them. Their entrance broke the musing spell of the two unavowed lovers. As they drew near the open door of the house, the cool breath of the dairy—a sort of cowslip breath, of much cleanliness, mingled with the faintly acrid sweetness of the milk—came to their nostrils. A row of shining pails were ranged upon the low stone bench just outside the door. A lad and maid hurried past, each carrying two more foaming buckets.

Ellinor now became the decided, almost stern, mistress of household matters. She counted the milk pails and gave an order to each maid, who curtseyed and stood at attention, but could not keep a roving, awestruck eye from the unwonted spectacle of their master.

“Rosemary, three pails for the dairy, as usual. Two for the house: up with them, Kate! Sally, back to your skimming as soon as you have filled the steward’s can and carried in the pail for the parish dole out of the sunshine. Stay a moment,” her tone and manner altered, “leave one of those here—Cousin David, have you broken your fast? Of course not! Then you and I, shall we not do so now together? Nay, I shall be disappointed if you refuse. You have made me queen of these realms—the ‘queen of curds and cream,’ as Doctor Tutterville calls me—and all must obey me here!”

There was a stone porch jutting forth over the side door that led into the passage. Within this refuge, on either side, was set a stone bench under an unglazed ogee window. Honeysuckle had intermingled its growth with that of the climbing roses, and made there a parlour of perfume. Hither Ellinor conducted the lord of Bindon, and here he allowed himself to be installed, obeying her as one who walks in dreams and is glad to dream on.

The maids had parted in noisy flight, each on her different errand, starched gowns crackling, clogs clacking, pails clinking as they went. Ellinor threw down her cloak and her basket and disappeared, light as the lapwing, rejoicing with all a woman’s joy to minister to the beloved. She returned with a little wooden table, which, smiling, she set before him and was gone again. This time it was out into the yard and into the dairy, and her head flashed in a sun-shaft. When she reappeared, she was walking more slowly, and between her hands was a yellow glazed bowl brimming with new-drawn milk.

“For you, Sir David,” she said.

It was foaming and fragrant of clover blossom as he lifted it to his lips.

“And now,” she went on, “you shall taste of my baking. I had a batch set last night and the rolls ought to be crisp to a touch.”

The following minute brought her back, flushed and triumphant, bearing on a tray a smoking brown loaflet, a ray of amber honey and a rustic basket full of strawberries. She paused a second reflectively, and cried:

“A pat of fresh-churned butter!”

And again his eyes watched her cross the shaft of sunshine and come back, and they were the eyes of a man gazing on a dear and lovely picture.

“Now, David, is this not a breakfast fit for a king?”

He looked at the table and then at her; and then put down the loaf his long fingers had been absently crushing.

“And you?” he asked and rose. “You—the queen?”

“I? Oh, I think I forgot myself. Oh, don’t get up, David. Don’t, please! You cannot imagine how much refreshed I shall feel when you have eaten. There, then, I will sit beside you. But as there is no pleasure in waiting upon oneself, I must call up a court menial. Katy! A bowl of milk for me. Rosemary, another roll from the oven!”

This was to remain a memory of gold in Ellinor’s life. Poets may sing as they will of the joys of mutual love confessed. But there is an hour more exquisite yet in man and woman’s life: the hour of love still untold. The hour of trembling hopes and uncertainties; of ecstasies hidden away in the inmost sanctuary of the being; of dreams so much more beautiful than reality; of thoughts that no words can clothe and music that no instrument can render. Hour of doubt which is to certainty as the dawn is to the day, as mystery is to revelation: as much more enthralling, as much more exquisite.

Even as the soul is constrained by the body, so must the ideal thought lose of its fragrance when limited to the spoken word. But the very condition of life’s tenure urges us to hasten ever onwards towards the success of attainment. We may not sit and taste the full sweetness of the present because our foreseeing nature and old Time are spurring us on, on! This present of ours is fleeting enough, God knows. Yet the miserable restlessness within us robs us of the minute even while it is ours. Thus the most perfect things in our lives will ever be a memory. But when the golden hours have all tolled for us, when the flowers are all withered, at least we can look back and say: “That was my sunrise hour. ... That was my perfect rose!”

They spoke little to each other, but Ellinor saw the lines of melancholy fade out of his face and become replaced by soft restfulness. Tired he looked, the watcher of the night, in the broad radiance of the day, but happy. It was as if the fatigue itself brought a sense of peace, lulling him to dreaminess and depriving him of the energy to fight against the sweetness of the moment.

Suddenly, with the light tread of a cat, the squat figure of Mrs. Nutmeg, in her decent widow’s black and her snowy mutch, came upon them from the house. She paused with a start of such extreme surprise that it was in itself an impertinence, and the more galling because it could not be resented. Ignoring the scarlet-cheeked Ellinor, the housekeeper dropped her curtsey and offered ostentatious excuses to Sir David.

“I humbly ask your pardon, sir. Indeed, sir, I had no idea, or I would not have made so bold as to intrude. I hope, sir, you’ll forgive me for disturbing you at such a moment!”

Her eye roved as she spoke over the disordered table, aside to Ellinor’s cloak and the basket of withering herbs; then back to Ellinor herself, where it deliberately measured every detail—the dusty shoe, the green stains on the gown, the flushed brow, the disordered hair.

Her unconscious master waved his hand a little impatiently with his formal “Good morrow,” that was more a dismissal than a greeting. Mrs. Nutmeg returned Sir David’s brief salutation with another unctuous curtsey. Withdrawing her glance from Ellinor, she fixed it upon his face, with a vain attempt to throw an expression of tender solicitude into the opaque white and the meaningless black of her eye.

“Excuse the liberty, sir,” she began again, “but do you feel quite yourself this morning? It do go to my heart to see how drawn and ill you be looking! I fear these last months, sir, you haven’t been as usual. Not at all. More has remarked it than myself.”

Ellinor rose.

“It’s getting late, Margery,” she said, “and the cream is not skimmed yet. Ring the bell for the girls.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Margery curtseyed, her eyes still clinging unwaveringly to her master’s face. This was now turned upon her with a sudden frown.

“Do you not hear?” said Sir David.

They robbed him freely in his absence, this household of his, but none could forget in his presence that he was master.

“Yes, sir, yes ma’am. I ask your pardon,” said Mrs. Nutmeg.

And this time there was flurry in her step as she moved away, her list slippers padding on the flags. She cast not another glance behind her; yet Ellinor felt chilled, she knew not why. Upon the dial that had marked her warm-tinted hour a grey shadow had fallen. She took up her basket of herbs. Most of the perishable things were already withering, but the dry vivacious stems of the Star-of-Comfort flaunted their glossy leaves and their tiny brilliant blossom undimmed. She noticed this, and was superstitiously glad.

“I must go, cousin,” she said, “but later, if you will, I shall come and help on with the new chart.”

She nodded and left him. As she moved across the courtyard towards her father’s den, the maids, hustling each other as they clacked into the dairy, looked after her with inimical stare. Then one whispered to the other, and the other nudged back, while the third surreptitiously shook her mottled fist. And as Ellinor walked on with steady step she knew it all. She knew that “the Queen of curds and cream” sat on an insecure throne; and that, were the power that had placed her there to be withdrawn from her, many eager hands would be stretched out to pull her into the mire.

But upon the first step leading down to the laboratory, she turned and cast a glance back: in the deep shadow of the porch David was still standing. Out of the dark face the light eyes were watching her; when she turned, he smiled and waved his hand. And her spirits rose again as she ran down the stairs, to begin her long round of various work. She had stuck a sprig of the Euphrosinum in her kerchief; and during the whole day, whether over crucible or household book, in linen closet or still-room, each time the scent of it was wafted to her nostrils there came and went upon her lips a little secret smile, as if the fragrant thing on her bosom were but the symbol of some inner fragrance rising in little fitful storms from her heart.

CHAPTER IV
OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

Let me loose thy tongue with wine:

No, I love not what is new:

She is of the ancient house,

And I think we know the hue

Of that cap upon her brows!

—Tennyson (Vision of Sin).

Old Giles, in the plate-room! Old Giles, butler of Bindon and confidential servant to Sir David, sunk in his wooden armchair and his head inclined till his double chin rested on his greasy stock, surveying with distasteful eye the mug of small-ale on the table before him.

A stout old man with a reddening nose may be no unpleasant picture if superabundance of flesh and misplacement of carmine bear witness to jollity and good cheer; but oh lamentable spectacle if melancholy droop that ruby nose; if fat cheeks hang disconsolate! Then for every added ounce of avoirdupois is added a pound of misery. Your melancholy thin man is fitted by nature to bear his burden, but the sad fat man seems to deliquesce, to collapse—so much in his case is affliction against the obvious design of nature!

From the inner pantry door Margery stood a moment and contemplated her fellow servant awhile, with an air of deeper commiseration than her usually set visage was wont to express. Then she carefully closed the door and advanced to the table. In her rolled up apron she was clasping something with both hands.

“Eh,” she said, in a long drawn note, “it do go to my heart, Mister Giles, to see you so cast down!”

The butler rolled his lack-lustre eye from the mug of beer to the housekeeper’s countenance; then his underlip began to tremble.

“Ah,” he answered, “that stuff is killing me, Mrs. Nutmeg. The cold of it on my stomach! It’ll creep up to my heart some of these nights, it will! And that will be the end of poor old faithful Giles!”

A tear twinkled on his vast cheek. He stretched out his hand for the glass, gulped a mouthful of it and replaced it on the table, drawing down the corners of his mouth into a grimace not unlike that which in an infant heralds a burst of wailing.

“Cold, cruel, poisonous stuff, that lies as heavy as heavy! Half a caskful, ma’am will not stimulate a man as much as half a wineglassful of port-wine or sherry-wine. It’s murder—that’s what it is!”

“Murder it is,” assented Margery. She took the glass and threw its contents into the grate: sympathy personified. Then she began to move about the room with an air of so much mystery that Giles’ attention was faintly roused in something external to himself and to the odiousness of small-ale.

Mrs. Nutmeg went to the pantry door, listened a moment with stooped head, then released her right hand from the enfolded object and turned the key in the lock. Stepping to the high-set window, she next squinted east and west, as if to make sure that no watchers were about; then returned to the table, slowly unrolled her apron and displayed to the butler’s astonished gaze a black bottle, cobwebbed, dust-crusted, red-sealed—a bottle of venerable appearance and, to the initiated, of Olympian promise. With infinite precaution she tilted it into a vertical position and placed it on the table, displaying in so doing the dusty streak of whitewash which had marked the upper side of its repose these twenty years. Into old Giles’ expressionless stare leaped a light of rapturous recognition.

“The Comet port, by gum! The port from the fifth bin!”

He raised himself in his chair and, as if sight were not enough for conviction, began with trembling hands to caress the bottle, and smacking his lips as if the taste were already upon them. Margery surveyed him with her head slightly on one side.

“How—how did you get it?” he babbled, now sniffing at the seal, his red nose laid fondly first on one side then on the other.

“Never you mind,” said she, “I’m not the one to stand by and see old service drove to death by stinginess nor yet by interference. There’s more where it came from.”

“The last bottle we drank together,” interrupted he, “was the first to break in upon the sixth dozen. Six dozen, minus one, seventy-one bottles. That makes——”

“Seventy bottles still,” said she. “Enough to warm your heart again for many a long day.” She stooped, and whipped out a corkscrew from one of her capacious pockets.

“Give me that bottle, Mister Giles.”

She lifted it from his grasp. He raised his hands, protesting, quivering.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t shake it, ma’am! Don’t shake it! It’s thirty year old, if it’s a day. Oh, Lord, Mrs. Nutmeg, give it to me, ma’am!”

She cast one swift, contemptuous glance upon him.

“I think my wrist is steadier than yours,” she remarked drily, while with the neatest precision she inserted the point of the corkscrew into the middle of the seal.

“’Tis the yale,” he palpitated.

“Oh, aye,” said she, “the ale, of course.” She smiled in her sleek way while she turned the corkscrew. “Here,” she added, “is what will steady them for a while at any rate.”

The cork came forth with a chirp that once more brought the fire to the toper’s eye.

“Ho, ho!” he cried, every crease in his face that had before spelt despondency now wreathing rapture.

“Wait a bit,” she bade him, still keeping her strong hand on the bottle neck. She dived into the left pocket and brought forth a short cut-glass beaker. “You’re not going,” said she, “to drink Sir David’s Comet port out of a mug!”

She poured it out, gently tilting the venerable bottle. He could hardly wait till the gorgeous liquid garnet had brimmed to the edge, before grasping the glass. But palsied as his hands were not a drop did they spill. A mouthful first, to let the taste of it lie on his palate; another to roll round his tongue; then unctuously, as slowly as was compatible with the act of swallowing, the ichor of the grape destined to warm a high-born heart and to illumine the workings of a noble mind, was sent to kindle the base fires of Sir David’s thieving old servant.

“Ah!”

He took a deep-drawn breath of utter satisfaction, reached for the bottle, boldly poured himself forth another glass and drank again. Motionless, the woman watched.

“As good a bottle,” said he garrulously, “as ever came out of the bin! ’Twas of the laying of the good Sir Everard—Sir David’s grandfather, you mark, Mrs. Nutmeg. You wasn’t in these parts then. Ah, a judge of wine he was. I tell ye I could pick every drop he had bottled blindfold this minute, at the first taste. He and Master Rickart, Lord, what wild times they had together! Ah, he was a blade in those days, was old Rickart. Now——’Tis well there’s someone left at Bindon that knows the valley of precious liquor, for it’s been disgusting, I assure you, ma’am. There’s master had nothing but the light clary—French stuff—and not known the differ these five years! Well, well, ’twould have broken Sir Everard’s heart, but”—piously, “there’s one left as remembers him and his tastes. May I offer you a thimbleful, Mrs. Nutmeg? ’Tis as good as a cordial!”

He was once more the man of importance: the steward dispensing his master’s goods with a fine air of hospitality.

“No, Mister Giles, I thank you kindly,” said the lady. Then she measured him again with one of her deep looks, marked the hand which he was stretching out for the port and suddenly whipped the desired object from its reach. Her calculated moment had come.—The butler’s limbs had lost their palsied trembling and there was some kind of speculation in his eye.

“No, Mister Giles,” she said, as he gaped at her. “I came here for a little chat, if you please. You’re feeling more yourself again?”

The memory of his injuries, forgotten for the brief span of ecstasy, returned in full force. His lip drooped.

“Aye, ma’am, a little, a little. But I am sadly weak.”

He pushed his glass tentatively forward, but she ignored the hint.

“I thought you was a-dying by inches before my eyes,” she announced deliberately.

The red face opposite to her grew mottled grey and purple. Mr. Giles began to whimper:

“So I was, ma’am. So I be!”

Margery sat down and, clasping the bottle with both her determined hands, leaned her head on one side of it.

“Another month of small-ale,” she said, “would bring you to your grave, Mister Giles. Aye, you may groan. How many bottles be left of this old port? Seventy ye said. And there be as good besides.”

“The East India sherry,” said he, the light of his one remaining interest flickering up again in the aged sockets. “Oh, it’s a beauty, that wine is! As dry, ma’am, and as mellow!” He smacked his tongue. “And there’s the Madeiry, got at the Dook of Sussex’s sale. ‘Royal wine,’ says Sir Everard to me. And Royal wine it is! But you know the taste of it yourself. Then there are the Burgundy bins. Women folk,” said Mr. Giles, “have that inferiority, they can’t appreciate red wine. But there’s Burgundy down in my cellars that I’d rather go to bed on a bottle of as even of the Comet port.”

Margery broke in with a short laugh.

“Yes, yes,” said she; “I’ll warrant there is good stuff in your cellars. But who’s got the key of them now, if I may make so bold?”

Once again the toper was brought up to the sense of present limitations as by the tug of a merciless bit cunningly handled. With open mouth and starting eyes he paused, and the dark, senile blood rushed up to his face. Then he struck the table with his hand:

“That vixen of old Rickart’s, blast her!”

“And he—the daft old gentleman,” Margery’s voice dropped soft, as oil trickling down to fire, “eating the bread of charity, one may say, without so much as doing a stroke of work to save the shame of it!”

“Blast him!” cried Giles, with another thump.

“Oh, yes, when I brought you that bottle, I told you there was more where it came from. But the question is, who’s to have it, Mr. Giles! Is it all to be for that clever young lady and her crazy old father—that’s come like cuckoos to settle at Bindon, and bamfoozle that poor innocent gentleman, Sir David, and oust us as has served him so faithful and so long?”

“No, no, no!” cried old Giles, “blast ’em, blast ’em!”

Margery put her finger to her lip with a long drawn “Hush!” and glanced warningly round the room, though indeed, stronghold as it was, there was little fear of the sound escaping to the outer world. She then poured out a measured half glass and pushed it towards the butler, corked the bottle, placed it on the top of the safe; and betaking herself once again to her inexhaustible pockets, drew forth one after another and set in their turn upon the table a small unopened bottle of ink, a goose quill pen, of which she tested the nib, and a large sheet of paper, which she unfolded and smoothed.

“Now, Mr. Giles,” said she sharply.

He was absently sucking his empty glass and started to look upon her preparations uncomprehendingly.

“You write a fine hand,” said she, picking the stopper out of the inkpot with the point of the corkscrew.

“Ah,” said he, “my cellar book was a sight to see! It’s lain useless these six months. But so long,” he said, proudly but sadly, “as I kept the keys no one can say but as I kept the book.”

So he had indeed, with a quaint fidelity; and amazing reading it would have proved to the casual inspector, who would have founded wild opinions of Sir David’s and his cousin’s prowesses in the matter of toping.

“Do you want the keys back?” asked Margery, in a quiet whisper, “or is this to be the last bottle of port you’ll ever taste?”

He stared at her, his moist lip working. She seemed to find the answer sufficient, for she motioned him into his seat.

“Then you sit down and write,” said she, “and I promise you Bindon shall get his rights again, and our good master’s quiet, comfortable house be rid of her that brings no good to it.”

Giles sat down submissively, dipped the quill into the ink, manipulated it with the flourish of the proud penman; then, squaring his wrists flat on the sheet, prepared to start.

“I’d never have troubled you,” explained Margery, apologetically, “had I had your grand education, Mr. Giles.”

“Who be I to write to?” said Giles, with the stern air of the male mind controlling the female one, as it would wander from the point.

Again Margery whispered, not for fear of listeners, but to give the allurement of mystery to her purpose:

“To the Lady Lochore,” said she.

The pen dropped from Giles’ fingers, making a great blot at the top of the sheet, which Margery, with clacking tongue, deftly mopped up with a corner of her apron. Consternation and awe wrote themselves on the butler’s face. Faithless old ingrate as he was, robbing with remorseless system the hand that fed him, something of family spirit, some sense of clanship, still existed in his muddled mind. Enough of their master’s secrets had filtered to the household for everyone to know that his only sister had wedded the man who, under the pretending cloak of friendship, had done him mortal injury; and that from the moment she had thus given herself to his enemy, the lord of Bindon had cut her off from his life. But there were things beside, which old Giles alone knew; which he had kept to himself, even after his long devotion to the Bindon cellars had wreaked havoc upon the intelligence of his conscience.

It was but ten years back when a mounted messenger had brought the tidings to Sir David of the birth of an heir to the house of Lochore: heir also, as matters now stood, to the childless house of Bindon. Giles had conducted this messenger to Sir David’s presence. Giles had stood by and watched his master’s pale face grow death livid as he listened to the envoy’s tale, had seen him recoil from even the touch of his kinsman’s letter. It was Giles who had received the curt instructions: “Take the messenger away, give him food, rest and drink, and let him ride and bear back to Lord Lochore that letter he has sent me.” And now old Giles looked up into Margery’s inscrutable face, and cried with echoes of forgotten loyalty in his husky voice:

“Write to Miss Maud?—to my Lady, I mean. Nay, nay, Mrs. Nutmeg, I’ll not do that!”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Nutmeg.

She had been standing over his shoulder, showing more eagerness than her wont, and licking her lips over the words she was about to dictate to him, while a light shone in her eyes that was never kindled so long as she was under observation. At the check of his words the old sleek change came over her. The curtain of impassiveness fell over her countenance. The gleam went out in her eyes. She came quietly round, sat down, opposite him and, folding her hands, let them rest on the table before her.

“Ah,” said she, “it do go again the grain, don’t it, Mr. Giles? And if it was not for Sir David——”

Giles meanwhile, having pushed the writing materials on one side, had risen and helped himself freely again to the Comet port, drinking courage to his own half-repented resolution, a babble of disjointed phrases escaping from him in the intervals of his gulps. “No, he could not go against Sir David—poor old man, not many years to live—served his father’s father. Eh, and Sir Edmund had put him into these arms; and he but a babe—the greatest toper in the house, says Sir Edmund...” Here there was a chuckle and a tear, and a fresh glass poured out.

Margery never blinked towards the bottle. Unfolding her hands, she presently began to smooth out the writing paper, and by-and-bye began to speak. At first it was a merely soothing trickle of talk. No one knew Mr. Giles’ high-mindedness and nobility of character better than she did; though, indeed, she herself was but a new-comer at Bindon, compared to him—the third of his generation in the service of the house, and himself the servant of three Cheveral masters. By-and-bye, from this primrose path of flattery she turned aside into less smooth ground. Something she said of the real duties of old service, of the mistaken duty of blind submission. There was a dark hint of Sir David’s helplessness, a prey to designing intruders—“and him as easy to cheat as a child!” A tear here welled to Mistress Margery’s eyelid; there was no doubt she spoke as one whose knowledge was first hand.

Mister Giles knew best, of course; but, in her humble opinion, it was an old servitor’s bounden duty to let their master’s nearest relative know. Here Margery became very dark again; things are so much more terrible when merely hinted at. The butler’s hand halted with the sixth glass on the way to his lips; he put it down again untasted.

“Who’s to look after Master, I should like to know?” asked Margery boldly, “when you and I and all the old faithful folk is turned out of Bindon, and that deep young lady and Master Rickart reign alone, with their poisons and their powders?”

“By gum!” cried Giles, with a shout, thumping the table, so that the precious wine this time slopped over its barrier. “By gum! hand me that paper, and say your say, ma’am, and I’ll write it!”

The man was just tipsy enough already to be easily worked up, and unable to analyse the means by which his passion was roused; not too tipsy to be a perfectly capable instrument in the housekeeper’s hands.

The following was the letter that Giles, the butler of Bindon, wrote to “the Lady Lochore,” at her house in London:

My Lady.—Trusting you will excuse the liberty and in the hopes this finds your Ladyship well, as is the humble wish of the writer. My Lady, I have not been the servant of your Ladyship’s brother, my most honoured master, Sir David Cheveral of Bindon, without knowing the sad facts of family divisions between yourself and Sir David. But, my Lady, wishing to do my duty by my master, as has always been my humble endeavour, I should consider myself deaf to the Voice of Conscience, did I not take the pen this day to let you know the state of affairs at Bindon at this present time.

Master Rickart’s daughter, Mistress Marvel, has come back to Bindon, to live, and my Lady, she and her father is now master and mistress here. Sir David being such as my Lady knows he is, different from other people, is no match for such.

My Lady, what the end of it will be no one can tell. None of us like to think of it. What is said in the village and all over the country already, is what I must excuse myself from writing, not being fit for your Ladyship’s eyes. But as your Ladyship’s father’s old and trusted servant, I am doing no less than my bounden duty, in warning your Ladyship.

Here Margery had halted, and flouted several eager suggestions on the part of the faithful butler, who was anxious to mention poisons and phials and black practises, who, moreover, had wished to introduce after every sentence a detailed account of the unmerited cruelty practised upon himself in forcing him to give up the keys of the family cellar, and express his intimate persuasion of the restlessness thereby caused to the good Sir Everard’s bones in their honoured grave. But Margery was firm; and now, after due reflection, sternly commanded Mr. Giles’ respects and signature. When this flourishing signature at length adorned the page, Margery laid a flat finger below it.

“Write: Post-Scriptum,” ordered she. “I humbly trust your Ladyship’s little son is well. There was great joy among us when we heard of his honoured birth. We was, up to now, all used to think of him as the heir to Bindon.”

Here she hesitated again; but finally, true to her instinct that suggestion is more potent than explanation, demanded the folding of the letter, its addressing and sealing. The latter duty she undertook herself, with the help of the inexhaustible bag. And as she laid her thumb on the hot wax, she smiled, well content, and allowed Giles to finish the bottle and drown any possible misgivings.

As she left the room to watch for the post-boy, and herself place the fruit of her morning labour in the bag, Giles, with tipsy gravity and mechanical neatness, was posting his too long disused cellar book up to date:

June 24th., 1823.

Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.

CHAPTER V
EVIL PROMPTER, JEALOUSY

Great bliss was with them and great happiness

Grew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.

—Keats (Pot of Basil).

July over the meadows, sweeter in death than in life, where the long grass lay in swathes and the bared earth split and crumbled under the fierce sun. July in the great woods, with leaves at their deepest green, nobly still against the noble still azure, throwing blocks of green shade in the mossy aisles and wondrous grey designs of leaf and branch on the hardened ground. July in the drowsy hum of the laden bee; in the birds’ silence and the insects’ orchestra—those undertones of sounds—everywhere; July in the sweet hearted rose, in the plenitude of summer fulfilment. July over garden and cornfield and purple moor....

So it had been all day, a long, gorgeous day, busy and yet lazy, full to the brim of nature’s slow, ripe work. And now the evening had come; the fires of the sunset had cooled and a deep-bosomed sky had begun to brood over the teeming earth, lit only by the sickle of a young moon that had hung, ghost-like, in the airs the whole afternoon.

The fields of heaven were yet nearly as bare of stars as the meadows of their murdered flowers; but here and there, with a sudden little leap like a kindling lamp, some distant sun—white Vega or ruddy Arcturus—began to send its gold or silver messages across the firmament where the summer sun of our world held lingering monarchy.

Ellinor had spent a long hot day in the parsonage, helping that pearl of housewives, Madam Tutterville, with the potting of cherry jam. She had come home across the fields with lagging step, drawing in the luxury of the evening silence, the cool fragrance of the woods, the beauties of the advancing night. She bore, as an offering, a handsome basketful of rectory peaches, over which her soul was grateful: a proper dish to set before him in whose service she took her joy.

On re-entering the house, according to her usual wont, she at first sought her father, but found the laboratory empty of any presence save that of the herb-spirits singing in the throat of the retort. She made no doubt then but that the simpler had sought the star-gazer’s high seat.

One result of her presence at Bindon had been the gradual drawing together of the two men, with herself as a centring link. David was more prone to come down from his tower and her father to come up from his vault. And she took a sweet and secret pleasure in the quite unconscious sense of grievance they would both display when her duty or her mood took her for any length of time away from either of them.

As she reached the foot of the tower stairs a hand was placed upon her arm. She turned with that irrepressible inner revulsion which always heralded to her Margery’s presence.

“Asking your pardon, ma’am,” came the usual silky formula, “may I inquire if you are going up to see my master?”

“To be sure,” answered Ellinor quietly, though she blushed in the dark. “Do you not see that I am going up to the tower?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mrs. Nutmeg, humbly. “I made so bold as to trouble you, ma’am, not wishing to intrude upon my master myself. The postman left a letter, ma’am.”

Mrs. Nutmeg drew the object in question from under her black silk apron. Very white it shone in the gloom:—a large, oblong folded sheet, with a black blotch in the centre where sprawled an enormous seal.

“This letter, ma’am,” she repeated, “came this evening. Would you be good enough to hand it yourself to my master?”

Ellinor had a superstitious feeling that Margery Nutmeg was one day, somehow, destined to bring misfortune upon her; and it was this perhaps which always left her discomfited after even the most trivial interview with the housekeeper. But determinedly shaking off the sensation, she slipped the letter in her basket and began the ascent of the rugged stairs. No matter how tired she might be, her foot was always light when it led her to the tower, because her impatient heart went on before.

Leaving the basket in the observatory, she retained the letter in her hand, instinctively avoiding any scrutiny of its superscription, although seen here in the lamplight the thought did strike her that it looked like a woman’s writing. Sir David’s correspondence, as she knew, was so scanty that the sealed missive might indeed mean an event in their lives; and now the present was too full of delicate happiness for her to welcome anything that might portend change.

She stood for a moment on the threshold of the platform, looking out on the two figures silhouetted against the sky. Her father, as usual in his gown, seated on the stone ledge of the parapet, was speaking. David, leaning against the wall with folded arms, was looking down at him. Master Simon’s chuckle, followed by the rare low note of the star-gazer’s laughter, fell upon her ear.

“I do assure you,” the old man was saying, “it was the very surliest fellow in the whole of Bindon village. A complete misanthropist, a perfect curmudgeon! The poor woman would come to me in tears, with sometime a black eye, sometime a swollen lip—I have known her actually cut about the occiput. ‘My poor creature,’ I would say to her, ‘plaster your wound I can, but alter your husband’s humours is at present beyond my power.’”

“Not having yet re-discovered the ‘Star-of-Comfort,’” interrupted David.

The sound of that voice, gently sarcastic and indulgently mocking, had become so dear to Ellinor that she lingered yet for the mere chance of indulging her ear again unobserved.

“Not having then re-discovered the Euphrosinum,” corrected Master Simon, with emphasis on the word “then.” “But that excellent young woman, my daughter, has been of service to me there.”

“She has been of service everywhere.”

This tribute brought joy to the listener. Forced by the turn the conversation was taking to disclose her presence, she emerged upon the platform, but took a seat beside her father’s in silence, the letter for the moment quite forgotten in her pocket.

“Ah, there is Ellinor!”

Sir David had seen her coming first and was the first to greet her. She thought, she hoped, there was gladness in the exclamation.

“Eh, eh!” said Master Simon. “Back from the prophetess’s jam-pots?” He fondled the hand she had laid on his knee. “Did the virtuous woman open her mouth with wisdom, while you, my girl, girded your loins with strength? We were talking of you, my girl. Ah, David, did I not do well for both you and me, when I craved house-room at Bindon for this Exception-to-her-Sex?”

David did not answer. But in the gloom she felt his eye upon her, and her heart throbbed. Master Simon, after a little pause, resumed the thread of his discourse.

“Ha, I am a mass of selfishness, a mass of selfishness! And the plant of True Grace is found; the Euphrosinum is found, Sir David Cheveral. Found, planted, culled and tested.” The utmost triumph was in his accents. “Aye, my dear young man, you will be rejoiced to hear that the effects of this most precious of simples have in no wise been overrated by the writers of old. They have far exceeded my most sanguine expectation. Why, sir, I said to myself: this fellow, this John Cantrip with his evil spleen, he has been marked by destiny for the first experiment. I prepared a decoction, making it duly palatable (for if you will remember your natural history, even bears like honey), I bade the poor, much-tried wife—he had just deprived her of both her front teeth—place a spoonful daily in his morning draught. That was a week ago. She came here this morning ... you will hardly credit it——”

The speaker paused, became absorbed in a delightful memory and began to laugh softly to himself. And the infection again gained the listener.

“Well, sir, has the bear turned to lamb? And is the dame content with the metamorphosis?”

“You will hardly credit it,” repeated the simpler, rubbing his hands, “the silly woman was beside herself with the most intemperate passion. There was no sort of abuse she did not heap upon me. She swears I have bewitched her husband and that she will have the law of me. He, he! You must know, David, the fellow is a carpenter; and, although his tempers were objectionable, he was a good worker. Indeed, I gather that the exasperated condition of his system found relief in the constant hammering of nails, punching of holes, sawing and planing of hard substance. But now——” Again delighted chuckle and mental review took the place of speech.

“Well?” asked Sir David. His tone was broken with an undercurrent of laughter. Ellinor smiled in her dark corner. She compared this David, interested and amused in human matters, pleasant of intercourse himself and appreciative of another’s company, to the man of taciturn moods and melancholy, who fed on his own morbid thought and fled from his fellow men—to the David of but a few months ago. She knew it was her woman’s presence that had, as if unconsciously, wrought the change.

“Well?” said Sir David again.

“My dear fellow,” cried Master Simon, breaking into a louder cackle. “John Cantrip, as you say, has changed from a bear into a lamb; at least from a sullen, dangerous animal into an exceedingly pleasant, light-hearted one. He sings, he whistles, he laughs—all that cerebral congestion, that nervous irritation, has been soothed away under the balmy influence of this valuable plant. The excellent creature is able to take delight in his life, in the beautiful objects of Nature around him. He admires the blue sky, he rejoices in the seasonable heat, he embraces his spouse—he will hang over his infant’s cradle and express a tender, paternal desire to rock him to slumber. Every happy instinct has been wakened, every morose one lulled. Would I could induce the government of this land to enforce in each parish the cultivation of Euphrosinum. My good sir, we should have no more need of prisons, or stocks, or gallows!”

“And yet you say,” quoth David, “that Mrs. Cantrip is dissatisfied.”

“Most excellent David, from early days of the earth downwards, the woman was ever the most unreasonable of all God’s creatures. She wants the impossible, she wants the perfection of things, which is not of this world. Instead of rejoicing, this foolish person complains.”

“Complains?”

“Oh, well, it seems the carpenter is now disinclined for work. I endeavoured to explain to her that the morbid reason for his love of hammering no longer exists. The good fellow is placid and content and an agreeable companion. But the absurd female is tearing her hair! ‘What,’ said I, ‘he has not struck you once since Saturday week, and you do not rejoice?’ ‘Rejoice!’ she screams. ‘And he’s not struck a nail either.’ ‘If this happy effect continues,’ I assured her, ‘you will be able to keep the remainder of your teeth.’ ‘I’ll have nothing to put between them if it does,’ she responds. In vain I represented to her, mulier—in short, that I, having done my part, it was now hers to utilise these new dispositions for her own ends. She must beguile him back to his everyday duties with tender smiles and womanly wiles—the female’s place in nature being to play this part towards the ruder male. But it was absolutely impossible to get her so much as to listen to me! She vowed that she had lost all patience—which was indeed very patent—that she had even clouted him (as she expressed it), without producing any other result than a smile at her. ‘Grins,’ says she, ‘like a zany!’ and with the want of logic of her sex, utterly fails to perceive what a triumphant attestation she is making to the efficacy of my plant.”

“It is extremely droll,” said David.

“Of course it will at once strike you,” pursued the old student, “that the obvious course was to induce the dissatisfied lady to partake of the soothing lotion herself. But, would you believe it? She became more violently abusive than ever at the bare suggestion!”

“Indeed,” said Ellinor, interrupting, “not only did she decline to make any acquaintance herself with the remedy, but she brought back the jar, with all that was left of our infusion, and vowed that she was well punished for dealing with the Devil and his daughter. You know, cousin David, I fear that I am rapidly gaining something of a reputation for black art! I do not mind, of course. Only,” she faltered a little, “a child ran from me in the village this morning. I was sorry for that.”

David’s face grew scornful. Popularity was so poor a thing in his eyes, that popular hate was not, he deemed, worth even a passing thought. But Ellinor, who could not look upon the world from a tower and whose self-allotted tasks lay, of necessity, much among the humble many, had not this lofty indifference. She knew she had already more enemies than friends. And she knew also to what she owed the sowing of this hostility—not to her association with her father, whose eccentric experiments in pharmacy on the whole worked to the benefit, and gave an extraordinary zest to the lives, of the village community—not to Madam Tutterville’s texts; for, indeed, that good lady was so subjugated by her niece’s housekeeperly qualifications that she elected for the nonce to be blind to the daughter’s abetting of the father’s pursuits. Well did Ellinor know to whom it was she owed her growing ill-repute.

Yet the cloud in her sky, no bigger at first than a woman’s hand, was growing, she felt, and was sufficient already to cast a shadow. And now, as she sat in such perfect content this summer night between her father and her cousin, her duty and her love, and felt herself a centre of peace and harmony, the mere passing remembrance of Margery sufficed to make her heart contract.

With the thought of Margery, the recollection of her commission leaped up in her mind. She laid the letter on her knee, gazing down at its whiteness a moment or two before she could overcome her extraordinary repugnance to deliver it.

Meanwhile Master Simon was flowing happily on again, quite oblivious of the fact that neither David, whose gaze had once more turned starward, nor his daughter, absorbed in inner reflection, were paying the least heed to his discourse.

“Naturally, poor Cantrip will relapse. And he will hammer wife and nails once more, and as energetically as ever. But this is immaterial. The principle, my good young people, you are both intelligent enough to see at once, is firmly established. In another year the face of Bindon will have changed. Beldam will scold no more nor maiden mope. You yourself, David—we should have no more of these heavy sighs, if——”

Here Ellinor broke in, rising and holding out the letter.

“Cousin David, I quite forgot—the post brought this for you and I promised to give it.”

“A letter,” said Sir David. He took it from her hand and placed it on the stone parapet. “It is too dark to read it now.” She fancied his voice was troubled, and immediately there grew upon her an inexplicable jealous desire that the letter should be opened in her presence, that she might gain some hint of its contents.

“I will bring out a light,” she said and flew upon her errand, returning presently with a little silver lantern from the observatory. She placed it on the ledge; and from the three glass sides its light threw cross shaped beams, one uselessly into the dark space, one upon the rough stone and the letter, one upon her own bending face, pale and eager, with aureole of disordered hair.

From the darkness Sir David looked at her face first: and it was as if the revealing light had shot into the mists of his own heart.

The passion of love comes to men from so many different paths that to each individual it may be said to come in a new guise. To no one does it come as an invited guest. It may be the chance meeting, the love at first sight—“she never loved at all who loved not at first sight.” But Shakespeare knew better than to advance this as an axiom. ’Tis but the insolent phrase on the lover’s mouth who deems his own passion the only true one, the model for the world. Some, on the other hand, find with amazement that long, long already, in some sweet and familiar shape, love has been with them and they knew it not. They have entertained an angel unawares; and suddenly, it may be on a trivial occasion, the veil has been lifted and the heavenly countenance revealed. Others, like the poor man in the fable, take the treacherous thing to the warmth of their bosom in all trustfulness and only by the sting of it as it uncoils know that they have been struck to the heart. Others, again, as unfortunate, bolt their inhospitable doors upon the wayfarer and perhaps, as they sit by a lonely hearth, never know that it was love that knocked and went its way, to pass the desolate house no more.

To Sir David Cheveral, whose hot and hopeful youth had been betrayed by life, this sudden apprehension of love in his set manhood came, not in sweetness nor yet in pain, but in a bewildering upheaval of all things ordered—as an earthquake flinging up new heights and baring unknown depths in the staid familiar landscape; as a flash of light—“the light that never was on sea or land,” after which nothing ever could look the same again.

It may, in one sense, be true that the man of pleasure is an easier prey to his feelings than he who in asceticism spends his days feeding the spirit at the expense of the flesh; but it is true only because the former man is weak, not because his passion is strong. By so much as the deep river that has been driven to course between its own silent banks is more mighty than the shallow waters that expand themselves in a hundred noisy channels, by so much is the passion of the recluse a thing more irresistible, more terrible to reckon with than the bubble obsession of the self indulgent.

But he who outrages Nature by excess in other direction, by Nature herself is punished. The recluse of Bindon was now to grapple with the avenging strength of his denied manhood. By the leaping of his blood and the tremor of his being, by the joy of his heart, which his instinctive sudden resistance turned into as fierce an anguish, by the heat that rushed to his brow, he knew at last that love was upon him; and he knew that, were he to resist love in obedience to so many unspoken vows, victory would be more bitter than death.

As he looked with a haggard eye at the lovely transfigured face, it was suddenly lost in the shadows again; only a hand flashed forth into the light and this hand held a letter, persisting. He passed his fingers over his eyes and brushed the damp masses of hair from his forehead.

“Will you not read your letter, cousin David?” asked Ellinor.

Mechanically he took the paper held out towards him. She lifted the lantern, that its light might serve him: it trembled a little in her grasp. And now his glance dropped upon the seal. He stared, started, turned the letter over and stared again. Then his warm emotion fell from him.

“You,” said he, “you to bring me this!”

She bent forward, the pale oval of her face coming within the radius of the light again.

“I have no wish to read this letter,” he went on.

There was a deep, a contained emotion in his air. All was fuel to Ellinor’s suddenly risen unreasoning flame of jealousy. That he should take the letter into his solitude, maybe, that she should not know, never know—it was not to be borne!

“Read, read!” she cried, unconsciously imperative by right of her passion.

Their gaze met. His was gloomy and startled, then suddenly became ardent. She saw such a flame leap into his eyes that her own fell before them; then her bold heart sank.

“I would not have opened it. But it shall be as you wish,” he answered. And as David broke the seal, Master Simon’s curious, wrinkled face peered over his shoulder.

“Ha,” said the old man, wonderingly, “The Lochore arms.”

Sir David turned the letter in his hand.

“From your sister?” asked the simpler, with amazed emphasis.

“Once I called her so,” answered the astronomer, with an effort that told of his inner repugnance.

As one wakes from a fevered dream Ellinor awoke from her brief madness. Her father’s placid tones, the everyday obvious explanation fell upon her heart like drops of cold water. But the reaction was scarcely one of relief. How was it possible that she, Ellinor Marvel, the woman of many experiences, of the cool brain and the strong heart, should have yielded to this degrading folly, this futile jealousy? What had she done! She shivered as a rapid sequence of thought forced its logic upon her unwilling mind. She had feared that the touch of some woman out of his past should reach David now, at the very moment when a lover’s heart was opening to her in his bosom. Behold! she had herself delivered him over to the one woman of all others she had most reason to dread—the woman who, out of her own outrage upon him had acquired the most influence over his life. It seemed to Ellinor as if she herself who had so laboured to call him to the present and lure him with hopes of a brighter future, had now handed him back to the slavery of the past.

The seal cracked under his fingers.

“Ah, no,” she cried, now springing forward on the new impulse. “No, no, David, do not read it! Send it back, like the others!”

He flung on her a single glance.

“It is too late,” he said, “the seal is broken.”

“Ah, me,” cried Ellinor. “And we were so happy!”

She remembered Margery’s sleek face as it had peered at her in the shadows of the passage: “Will you be good enough to hand this letter yourself to my master?”

Margery had known that from her hand he would take it. Margery had a devil’s instinct of the folly of men and women.

CHAPTER VI
THE PERFECT ROSE, DROOPING

Such is the fond illusion of my heart,

Such pictures would I at that time have made;

And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been—’tis so no more:

I have submitted to a new control,

A power is gone which nothing can restore....

—Wordsworth (Elegiacs).

Sir David sat down upon the parapet, shifted the lantern and began to read. Ellinor watched him, the tumultuous beating of her heart gradually sinking down to a dull languor. Master Simon was pacing the platform, now conning over some chemical formula to himself, now pausing to gaze upon the stars with a good humoured sneer upon the futility of astronomy in general and the absurdity of Sir David’s in particular. A bat came and flapped with noiseless wings round the lantern and was lost again in the darkness of the surrounding deeps. It seemed to Ellinor a heavy space of time, and still David sat with a contracted brow, motionless, staring at the open sheet in his hand. At length he raised his head. His eyes sought, not herself, but the comrade of his long years of solitude.

“Cousin Simon!”

The old man turned in his walk, a fantastic figure in his flapping skirts as he shuffled forward out of the gloom. Evidently he had perceived a note of urgency in Sir David’s tone, for he came quickly.

“Yes, lad!”

Ellinor had not yet heard that inflection of solicitude in her father’s voice, but she recognised that it belonged also to that past they all dreaded; and for the first time she realised something of the ties that bound these unlikely companions to each other.

“Cousin Simon,” said David with stiff lips, “she asks me to receive her here!”

“Who? Maud?—What! the heathen vixen! Don’t answer her, don’t answer her!”

Sir David looked up. There was the stamp of pain upon his features; and yet, as she told herself, it was not so much pain as the loathing of one forced to contemplate something of utter abhorrence. Both men, she saw, were quite oblivious of her presence: the past was now stronger about them than the present. As Sir David made no answer beyond that dumb look, Master Simon grew yet more vehement.

“Pshaw! man, you’re not going to give way now after all these years! The thing’s irreparable between you. Why, David, what are you thinking of? How could you bear it? Think for a moment what her presence here would mean!”

Then Sir David spoke:

“It is not,” he said, “a question now, of my wishes. So long as I felt justified in considering myself alone, I had no hesitation. But to-night I have to face this: What is my duty?”

“Eh? How, now!” Master Simon stuttered, and could find no word. “Pooh! fudge!” He thrust out a testy hand for the letter.

“Read!” said the master of Bindon, “and then you will understand.”

Master Simon seized the document and, stooping to the light began to read the words aloud to himself, according to his custom. Ellinor drew near and listened. Nothing could have now kept her from yielding to her intense desire to know.

“‘Dear Brother,’” read the old gentleman (“Dear Brother!—A dear sister she’s proved to you!”) “‘It is very likely you may never read these lines’ (if that isn’t a woman all over! ... where am I?) ‘according to your heartless custom’—(Ha!” said Master Simon, shooting a swift ironical look at Sir David from under his ever-hanging eyebrows, “since when has Lady Lochore become qualified to pronounce upon heartlessness? Pooh!”)

Sir David made no reply. His eyes were fixed on some inward visions. The simpler gave a snort, and resumed his reading:

“‘Oh, David, let me see my home once more!’ (No, Madam!) ‘Let me come to you alone with my child. I am ill——’ (Devil doubt her—they’re all ill when they don’t get their way!) ‘I am ill, dying, and sometimes I think that it is because you have not forgiven me. In the name of our father, in the name of our mother,’ (’pon my word, she’s a clever one!) ‘I have a right to demand this! I must see my home before I die.’”

Sir David’s compressed lips suddenly worked. He rose and walked across to the other side of the platform, where against the lambent sky, his form once more became a mere silhouette. Master Simon proceeded quietly to finish the letter.

“There’s a postscript,” he said, and read out: “‘You cannot refuse me the hospitality of Bindon for a few weeks, remember that I, too, am a child of the house.’”

“‘Remember that I, too, am a child of the house!’”

Ellinor repeated the words drearily to herself. That was the key she herself had found to unlock the door of Sir David’s hospitality.

“Upon my soul,” said Master Simon, “I shall never fall foul of the female intellect again!”

He looked at Ellinor, and laughed drily.

“Oh,” she cried, shocked at this inopportune mirth, “she must not come here—we must prevent it!”

“Prevent it!” he cried irritably. “Do so, if you can, my girl. By the Lord Harry!” the forgotten expletive of his jaunty youth leaped oddly forth over his white beard, “she’s done the trick! Touch David upon his honour, his family obligations! Ha! she knows it too. A pest on you!” he went on, his anger rising suddenly, “with your silly female inquisitiveness. ‘Read it, read it!’ quoth she. Without you, Mrs. Marvel, he’d have sent the precious missive back—unopened, like all the others! Ha, that’s an astute one! ‘If you read these lines,’ she writes. Well she knew that if he once did read them she would win her game!”

Beneath an impatient stamp one slipper fell off. Thrusting his foot back into it, he began to hobble in the direction of Sir David, muttering and growling as he went, not unlike his own Belphegor when his cat-dignity had been grievously offended. Disjointed scraps of his remarks reached Ellinor, as she stood, disconsolate and cold at heart, facing the probable results of her impulse:—“A pretty thing ... disturbing the peace of the house ... a mass of selfishness ... a pack of silly women!”

“Well,” said Sir David, turning round as his cousin drew near.

“Why do you say ‘well’?” snapped the simpler. “You know you’ve made up your mind already, and need none of my advice.”

A bitter smile flickered over Sir David’s face.

“Can you say after reading that letter that there is any other course open to me?”

“Stuff and nonsense! A half-dozen excellent courses. You can leave the letter unanswered. You can write to the lady that these home affections come a little late in the day. You can write, if you like, and forgive her by post. You can take coach to London and forgive her there, and.... But, in Heaven’s name, stem the stream of petticoats from invading our peace here!”

“What,” exclaimed the younger man, a blackness as of thunder gathering on his brow. “Do you, do you, cousin Simon, bid me enter Lochore’s house!”

Disconcerted, Master Simon lost his ill humour, though to conceal the fact he still tried to bluster.

“Pooh! You’re not of this century. You’re mediæval, quixotic! David, man, high feelings are not worn nowadays. They have been put by, with knighthood’s armour. Don’t forgive her then, lad. I am sure I see no reason why you should.”

“Forgiveness!” echoed Sir David.

Ellinor had crept close to them once more. That bitter ring in David’s voice smote her heart.

“Forgiveness!” he repeated. “Does he who remembers ever forgive? My sister is ill and craves to return to her old home. Well, I recognise her right to its hospitality and also to my courtesy as the dispenser of it. More I cannot give her.”

“She’ll not ask for more!” interrupted the unconvinced simpler. “Eh, eh! It is my fault, David: I might have known how it would be. I brought in the first petticoat and there the mischief began.”

“Oh, father!”

The tears sprang to Ellinor’s eyes. Sir David turned round and seemed to become again aware of her presence.

“No, no,” he said, “that is ungrateful.” He took her hand. “She brought us sunshine,” he said.

But she missed from his pressure the tremulous touch of passion; she missed from his eyes that flame she had shrunk from and that now her heart would always hunger for. Pure kindness, mild sadness—what could her enkindled soul make now of such gifts as these? With an inarticulate sound she drew her fingers from his clasp; and, turning, fled downstairs again and back to her room.

A taper was burning on her writing table, and in its small meek circle of light a bowl of monthly roses displayed their innocent pink beauty. The latticed casement was thrown open. In the square of sky a single silver star pointed the illimitable distance. From the Herb-Garden below rose gushes of aromatic airs, as, from some secret cloister by night the voices of the dedicated rise and fall. Vaguely, in her seething misery, she seemed to recognise the special essence of the new plant giving to the cool night the sweetness accumulated during the long, hot hours of the day.

She sat down on the narrow bed, folded her hands on her lap and stared dully forth at the square of sky and the single star. Presently, almost without her own consciousness, her bosom began to heave with long sighs and tears to course down her cheeks. Where was now the strength, the indifference to passing events which she boasted her long battle with life had given her? Gone, gone at the first touch of passion! Throughout a sordid marriage she had remained virgin of heart, she had kept the virgin’s peace—and now?

Alternations of pride and despair broke over her like waves, salt and bitter as her own tears. How happy they had been! And the unknown fiend, jealousy, had urged her to break the still current of that sweet, restful half-unwitting happiness of their life all three together—a current flowing, she had told herself with conviction, to a full tide of unimaginable bliss.

My God, how he had looked at her only that night! And it was in that pearl of moments that she had thrust his past back upon him and bade him, with her precious, new-found power, read the letter that should never have been opened. The perfect rose had been within her grasp. It was her own hand that had flung it in the dust.

Master Simon, still shaking his head and muttering disapproval, went slowly back to his laboratory.

“The cunning jade!” he was grumbling, “she’s no more ill than I am. Or if she be, a pretty business we shall have with her—a fine lady with vapours, and megrims, and tantrums! I’ve not forgotten the ways of them...!”

But here an illuminating idea flashed upon his brain. He stopped at the corner of a passage, cocking his head like an old grey jackdaw. “Eh, but a fine lady in her tantrums.... What a test for the virtues of my paragon herb!”

All very well to rejoice at its efficacy upon the homely rustic. Master Simon had experimented upon the homely rustic too many years not to have developed a fine contempt for his vile corpus; he was too true an enthusiast not to long for something like a proper nervous system upon which to work.

An air of returning good humour now settled upon his face; and by the time he was seated at his table, he had begun to wish his unwelcome cousin really a prey to the most advanced melancholia, and was conning over what phrases he could remember of her letter—delighted when they seemed to point to that conclusion.

“And even if she be not pining away for sorrow, as she would like poor David to believe, if I remember the lady aright, she has as disordered a temper of her own as John Cantrip himself.”

CHAPTER VII
NODS AND WREATHÉD SMILES

... Half light, half shade,

She stood, a sight to make an old man young.

—Tennyson (Gardener’s Daughter).

Within Bindon house the next ten days were as uneventful as those that had preceded this night of emotional trouble; days similar in routine, in outward tranquillity. But how unlike in colour, in atmosphere! It was as if thunder-clouds had chased all the summer peace; as if brooding skies had taken the place of radiance and laughing blue; as if close mists enshrouded the earth, robbing the woods of living light and shade, dulling the tints of flower and turf, contracting the horizon. The former days had been days of many-hued hope; these now were days of drab suspense. And ever and anon, in the listening stillness, there came upon Ellinor’s inner senses, as from behind hiding hills, the far-off mutter of a gathering storm.

But in the outer world the summer still kept its glory, the sky its undisturbed azure, the flowers their jewel hues. Never had Bindon looked fairer, more nobly itself. Preparations went on apace for the reception of the visitor. Ellinor personally saw to every detail—she piqued herself that no one could reproach her with not carrying out to the finest line of conscientiousness her duties as housekeeper of Sir David’s home. A little paler, a little colder, more silently and with just a note of sternness, she moved about her tasks. Nothing was made easy for her: the household, scenting a possible change, became more openly inclined to mutiny.

Master Simon, also, seemed to become more exacting in his demands upon her time. Sir David, on the other hand, had withdrawn almost as completely as had been his wont before her arrival. And her woman’s pride and tact alike kept her from those raids upon his tower privacy, which but a little time ago had caused him so much pleasure, it seemed, and herself such infinite sweetness.

It was hard, too, to have to meet Margery’s paroxysm of astonishment; Margery’s ostentatious outburst of joy at the thought of “her dear young lady coming back to her rightful place at last”; Margery’s insolence of triumph as regarded “the interloper,” astutely conveyed in such humble garments that to notice it would have been but a crowning humiliation.

“Eh, to think, ma’am,” the ex-housekeeper would say in her innocent voice, “that it should have been that very letter I handed you myself, never dreaming, that’s brought this blessed reconciliation about! It do seem like the finger of the Lord. Ah, ma’am, but you must be glad in your heart, to feel yourself the instrument of peace. Who knows, if the master would have taken it from any hand but yours, he that used to return them as regular and just as fast as they came!”

And then came parson and Madam Tutterville: he, as beseemed the God-chosen and state-appointed minister of the gospel of charity, most duly (and unconvincingly) approving the proposed reconciliation; and, as man of the world, most humanly and convincingly dubious of its results: she, openly bewailing, with all her store of texts and feminine logic, so inconvenient a hitch in her secret plans.

Ellinor had to receive them both. For the lower door of Sir David’s turret stairs was bolted, and Master Simon on his side had stoutly refused any manner of interview with anyone so sturdily healthy as the rector, or so disdainful of his remedies as the rector’s lady.

“Under every law,” said Doctor Tutterville, “the Jewish, the Pagan, the Philosophic and the Christian in its many variations, it has been enjoined upon our human weakness that it is advisable to forgive: Æquum est peccatis veniam poscentem reddere rursus.

So the rector, acknowledging his share of frailty—a share so pleasant to himself and so inoffensive to others that it was no wonder he showed little desire to repudiate it.

“One may forgive,” said Madam Tutterville sententiously. “Heaven knows I should be the last to deny that!”—this with the air of making a valuable concession to the decrees of Providence—“But there is another law: that chastisement shall follow misdoing. Was not David punished through Jonathan’s hair?”

The parson’s waistcoat rippled over his gentle laughter. He was seated in one of the deep-winged library armchairs, and while he spoke his eyes roamed with ever renewed satisfaction over the appointments of the room—the silver bowl of roses, fresh filled, the artistic neatness of writing table, the high polish of oak and gilt leather. His fine appreciation for the fitness of things was tickled; his glance finally rested with complacency upon the figure of the young woman herself—the capable young woman who had wrought so many pleasing changes. And as he looked he smiled: Ellinor was the culminating point of agreeable contemplation amid exceedingly agreeable surroundings.

She toned in so well with the scene! The sober golds and russets of the walls repeated their highest note in her burnished hair. Her outline, as she sat, exactly corresponded to the rector’s theory of what the female line of beauty should be. He liked the close, fine texture of her skin and the hues upon her cheeks, which fluctuated from geranium-white to glorious rose. The proud curl of her lip appealed to him; so did the sudden dimple. He liked the direct gaze of her honest blue eyes, and he was not unaware of the thickness and length of eyelashes that seemed to have little points of fire on their tips.

That scholarly gentleman’s admiration was of so lofty, so philosophic a nature, that even his Sophia could have found no fault with it. But as he yielded himself to it, the conviction was ever more strongly borne in upon him that his wife, in her impetuosity, had reached to a juster conclusion concerning Ellinor than he in his own ripe wisdom. He had treated her repeated remark that “Here was just the wife for David, here the proper mistress of Bindon,” with his usual good-natured contempt. But to-day he saw Ellinor with new eyes. Yes, this was a gem worthy of Bindon setting. This would be a noble wife for any man; an ideal one for David—for fastidious David, to whom the old epicure felt especially drawn, although he recognised that one may make of fastidiousness a fine art and not push the cult to the point of David’s eccentricity.

Here, then, was a woman fair enough to bring the Star-Dreamer, the soaring idealist back to earth; wholesomely human enough to keep him there in sanity and content, once Love had clipped his wing.

Meanwhile Madam Tutterville was bringing a long dissertation to an end. In it, by the help of the scriptures, old and new, she had proved that while it was indubitably David’s duty to forgive his sister up to a certain point, it was likewise indubitably incumbent upon him to continue to keep her in wholesome remembrance of her offences by excluding her from Bindon, until——. Here the lady became exceedingly mysterious and addressed herself with nods and becks solely to her husband, ignoring Ellinor’s presence, much after the fashion of nurses over the heads of their charges.

“At least until that happy consummation of affairs, Horatio, which you and I have so much discussed.”

“My dear Ellinor,” she pursued, turning blandly to her niece, who with a suddenly scarlet face was trying in vain to look as if she had not understood, “be guided by my advice, by my advice. It is extremely desirable, I might say imperative, that things should remain at present at Bindon House in what your good uncle would term the state of quo, a Greek word, my dear, signifying that it is best to leave well alone.”

“What is it you would have me do?”

“Well, my dear, seeing that everything has been going on so nicely these months, and that Bindon has become no longer like a family lunatic asylum, but quite a respectable, clean house, and that Nutmeg thing reduced to proper order, and David almost human, coming down to meals just as if he were in his right mind (though I’ve given up your father, my dear), I’m afraid that in his case that clear cohesion of intellect which is so necessary (is it not, Horatio?) is irrevocably affected.”

She tapped her forehead and shook her head, murmured something about the instance of John Cantrip, hesitated for a moment, as if on the point of gliding off in another direction, but saved herself with a heroic jerk.

“I would be glad,” she went on, “to have had speech of David myself; but since you tell me that is impossible, Ellinor, I must be content with laying my injunctions upon you. And indeed (is it not so, Horatio?) you are perhaps the most fitted for this delicate task. The voice of the turtle, my dear, is more likely to reach his heart than the dictates of wisdom.”

“The voice of the turtle, aunt?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Madam Tutterville, putting her head on one side with a languishing air. “In the beautiful imagery of Solomon the turtle—the bird, my love, not the shell-fish—is always brought forward as the emblem of female devotion.”

“I don’t see how that can refer to me!”

Ellinor sprang to her feet as she spoke: the rector’s gurgle of amusement was the last straw to her patience. Angry humiliation dyed her face, her blue eyes shot flames.

“Oh, don’t explain, I can’t bear it! But please, dear aunt, please, don’t call me a turtle again! It’s the last thing I am, or want to be!”

She broke, in spite of herself, into laughter; laughter with a lump in her throat.

Parson Tutterville had been highly entertained. Mrs. Marvel was quite as agreeable to watch in wrath as in repose. But he was a man of feeling.

“I think, Sophia,” he said, in the tone she never resisted, “we will pursue the subject no further. However we may regret any interruption to the present satisfactory state of affairs, regret for David a visit that is likely to prove distressing, we cannot but agree with Mrs. Marvel that it is not her place to interfere.”

He rose as he spoke. The morning visit was at an end.

Even an encounter with Mrs. Nutmeg could not have left Ellinor in a more irritated condition.

“What do they all think of me?” she asked herself, and pride forbade her to shed a single one of the hot tears that rose to her lids.

“What have I done?” was the question that next forced itself upon a mind that was singularly truthful. She had placed herself indeed in a position open to comment and misinterpretation. And then and there she had given herself up so wholly, so unrestrainedly to love that she had actually come to measure the strength of her attraction for her unconsenting lover against the strength, or the weakness, of his will.

As she faced the thought, a sense of shame overcame her. Had she not known how helpless both her father and David would be without her, especially at this juncture, she would have been sorely tempted to be gone as she had come. It was not in her nature to contemplate anything ungenerous, even for the gratification of that strongest of passions in woman, self respect. But in her present mood, even the rector’s well-meant, kindly words recurred to sting—“It was not her place to interfere!” Well, she would keep her place, as David’s servant, and not presume again beyond her duty!

Yes, and she would take that other place, too—the woman’s place, the queen’s place, not to be won without being wooed. If David wanted her now he must seek her!

CHAPTER VIII
A GREY GOWN AND RED ROSES

And then we met in wrath and wrong.

We met, but only meant to part.

Full cold my greeting was and dry;

She faintly smiled ...

—Tennyson (The Letters).

Fain would Ellinor have avoided being present at the reception of the guests. But Sir David willed it otherwise.

Bearing an armful of roses, she met him on the morning of the arrival at the foot of the great stairs. She had scarcely seen him since the night on the tower; and hurt to her heart’s core, as only a woman can be, by his seeming avoidance of her, she faced him with a front as cold, a manner as courteously reserved as his own. For it was a different David from any she had hitherto known that now emerged from many days’ seclusion and soul struggle.

“What, ’tis you, cousin Ellinor!” He took her hand and ceremoniously kissed it.

There was a tone of artificiality about his words. This perfunctory touch of his lips on her hand, this formal bow, all these things belonged to that past of the lord of Bindon, when society knew and petted him; and in that past Ellinor felt with fresh acuteness that she had no part. She drew her hand away.

“I hope,” she said, “the arrangements may be to your liking.”

He glanced at her as if puzzled; then his eye travelled over her figure—an exquisite model of neatness she always was, but in this, her working gown, no more fashionably clad than dairy Moll or Sue. He took up a fold of her sleeve between his first and second finger.

“My sister used to be a very fine lady,” said he gently.

“And I am none,” cried Ellinor, flushing. Then, gathering the roses into her arms and moving away: “But it matters the less,” she added over her shoulder, “as Lady Lochore and I are not likely to come much across each other.”

But David, this new David, a painful enigma to her, touched her detainingly on the shoulder; and in his touch was authority.

“On the contrary,” said he, “I beg you will see much of my sister. Dispenser as you are of my hospitality, you must needs see much of her.”

The flush had faded. Proud and pale she looked at him long, but his face was as a sealed page to her. What was this turn of fortune’s wheel bringing, glory or abasement?

“I must keep my place,” insisted Ellinor.

“That will be your place,” he answered. “Pray be ready to receive my guests with me.”

She raised her eyes, startled, indeterminate.

“I and my frocks are poor company for great ladies,” she said with a scornful dimple.

At that he smiled as one smiles upon a child.

“You have a certain grey gown,” he said. And, after a little pause, he added: “Some of those roses.”

The fragrance of them had come over to him as they moved with her breath. Once more she hesitated for a second, then dropping her eyelids, she said, with mock humility:

“It shall be as you order,” and went up the stairs with head erect and steady step, feeling that his gaze was following her.

She could hardly have explained to herself why this attitude of David’s, this sudden proof of his strength in forcing himself to become like other people, should cause her so much resentment and so much pain. But she felt that this man of the world was infinitely far removed from the absent star-gazer, from the neglected recluse who had so needed her ministrations. The rôles seemed reversed. It was no longer she who was the protector, the power directing events, no longer she who ruled by right of wisdom and sweet common sense. David had become independent of her. Hardest thing of all, to be no longer indispensable to him! And yet even in this unexpected cup of bitterness there was a redeeming sweet: he had remembered her grey gown, he had noticed that the roses became her.

My Lady Lochore arrived towards that falling hour of the day when the shadows are growing long and soft, when the slanting light is amber: it might be called the coloured hour, for the sun begins to veil its splendour, so that eyes, undazzled, may rejoice. The swallows were dipping across the sward of golden-emerald and Bindon stood proudly golden-grey in the light, silver-grey in the shadows and against the blue.

This daughter of the house came back to it with a fine clatter of horses and a blasting of post horns; followed by a retinue of valets and maids; acclaimed along the village street by shouting children, while aged gaffers and gammers bobbed on their cottage door-steps and showered interested blessings. (Margery had prepared that ground in good time.) She was welcomed in stately fashion by the chief servants and the master of the house himself on the threshold of her old home.

Ellinor, half hidden behind the statue of Diana and its spreading green, watched the scene, waiting for her own moment.

How different had been, she thought to herself, the return of poor Ellinor Marvel, that other daughter of Bindon, upon the cold September night, solitary, travel-worn, penniless, knocking in vain at the door her forefathers had built, creeping round back ways like a beggar, with the bats circling by her in the darkness and the watchdog growling at her from his kennel; unbidden, entering her old house, unwelcomed.—Unwelcomed? Was cousin Maud welcomed?

In her rustling thin silk spencer and her fluttering muslin, with hectic, handsome face, looking anxiously out from under the wide befeathered bonnet, Lady Lochore advanced her thin sandalled foot on the step of the coach and rested her hand upon David’s extended arm.

This was their meeting after years of estrangement! For a second she wavered, made a movement as if she would fling herself into her brother’s arms; the ribbons on her bosom fluttered—was it with a heaving sob? She glanced up at David’s severe countenance and suddenly stiffened herself. He bent and brushed the gloved wrist with his lips.

“Sister, Bindon greets you!”

She tossed her head, and her plumes shook. It seemed to the watching Ellinor as if she would have twitched her hand from his fingers; but he led her on. And the two last Cheverals walked up the steps together.

The servants, Margery at their head, breathed respectful whispers of welcome. The lady nodded haughtily and vaguely. She stood in the hall and David dropped her hand. His eye was cold, there was a faint sneer on his lips.

Welcomed? Ah, no! Ellinor would not have exchanged her dark night of home-coming for her cousin’s golden ceremonious day. Ellinor had cared little at heart—absorbed in her young freedom and her new confidence in life—how she should be received, but the lord of Bindon had looked into her eyes and bade her “welcome,” and laid his lips, lips that could not lie, upon hers.

When Ellinor emerged from behind her foliage screen, Lady Lochore was struggling in Madam Tutterville’s stout embrace. Sir David had summoned all his family upon the scene; and—yes, actually it was her father (in a wonderful blue anachronism of a coat) who was talking so eagerly to the smiling rector that he seemed quite oblivious of the purpose of his own presence.

Aunt Sophia had prepared a fitting address for one whom she had been long wont to regard (however regretfully) as Jezebel. But, as usual, her sternness had melted under the impulse of her warm heart.

“My goodness, child,” she exclaimed, “you look ill indeed!” and folded her arms about her wasted figure.

Lady Lochore disengaged herself unceremoniously.

“Is that you, Aunt Sophy? Lord, you have grown stout! Ill? Of course I am! And your jolting roads are not likely to mend matters. Has the second coach come up? Where’s Josephine? Where is my boy?”

“The second coach is just rounding the avenue corner,” said Margery at her elbow, “please my lady.”

Lady Lochore wheeled round. Her movements were all restless and impatient, like those of a creature fevered. “Goodness, woman, how you made me jump!”

She put up her long handled eyeglasses and fixed the simpler and the parson with a momentary interest. Her white teeth shone in a smile soon gone. Hardly would she answer the rector’s elegantly turned compliment; but she vouchsafed a more flattering attention to Master Simon, as he bowed with an antiquated, severe courtesy that was quite his own.

“That’s cousin Simon! I remember him and all his little watch-glasses, tubes, and things. I hope you’ve got the little watch-glasses still, cousin. I used to like you. You made Bindon rather interesting, I remember.” She yawned, as if to the recollection of past dulness; an open unchecked yawn, such as your fine lady alone can comfortably achieve in company. “I hope you’ll make some little nostrum for me, something nice smelling to dab on a freckle, or kill a wrinkle with—I think I have a wrinkle coming under my left eye.”

She suddenly arrested the dropping impudent langour of her speech, clenched a fine gloved hand over the stick of her eyeglass and stared fixedly: Ellinor had come out and stood in a shaft of light, as she had an unconscious trick of doing, seeking the warmth instinctively as any frank young animal might.

A radiant thing she looked, grey-clad, with the gorgeous crimson of a summer rose at her belt, her crisp rebellious hair on fire, her chin and neck gold outlined.

“Who is this?” said Lady Lochore, in a new voice, as sharp as a needle. It was David who answered:

“Our cousin, Ellinor Marvel!”

“How do you do,” said Ellinor composedly.

There was no attempt on either side at even a hand touch. Lady Lochore nodded.

“Ellinor is my good providence here,” continued Sir David. “I should not have ventured to receive you in this bachelor establishment had it not been for her presence. But now everything, I am confident, will be as it should be during the month that you honour this house with your presence.” He enunciated each word with determined deliberateness; it was like the pronouncing of a sentence. Once again Ellinor felt the implacable passion of the man under the set, controlled manner. “If you should desire anything, pray address yourself to cousin Ellinor,” he added.

Lady Lochore put down her eyeglasses and looked for a second with natural angry eyes from one to the other. She bit her lip and it seemed as if beneath the rouge her cheek turned ghastly.

She had come prepared to fight and prepared to hate. Yet this sudden rage springing up within her was not due to reason but to instinct. It was the ferocious antipathy of the fading woman for the fresh beauty; of the woman who has failed in love for her who seems born to command love as she goes. Lady Lochore could not look upon her cousin’s fairness without that inner revulsion of anger which not only works havoc with the mind but distils acrid poison into the blood.

The clatter of the second coach was heard without.

“Give me the child, give me the boy!” cried Lady Lochore. She made a rush, with fluttering silks, to the doors. “No one shall show my boy to his uncle but myself!”

“Mamma’s own!”

Could that be Lady Lochore’s voice? She came staggering back upon them, clasping a lusty, kicking child in her frail arms; the whole countenance of the woman was changed—“A heartless, callow creature,” so Madam Tutterville had called her, and so Ellinor had learned to regard her. But even the legendary monster has its vulnerable spot: there could be no mistaking Maud Lochore’s passionate maternity. Ellinor drew a step nearer, attracted in spite of herself; she could almost have wished to see David’s face unbend. But its previous severity only gave way to something like mockery, as he looked at mother and child.

“David!” cried his sister, “David, this is my boy!” There was a wild appeal in her voice, almost breaking upon tears. “Edmund I have called him, after our father, David. Edmund, my treasure, speak to your uncle!”

“I will, if you put me down!” The three-year-old boy struggled to free himself from his mother’s embrace. His velvet cap fell off and a cherub face under deep red curls was revealed. Ellinor remembered how the Master of Lochore’s red head had flashed through these very halls in the old days, and she hardly dared glance at David.

“I’ll stand down on my own legs, please!” said the child. “And now I’ll speak.”

He shook out his ruffled petticoat and looked up, and his great, velvet brown eyes wandered from face to face. The genial ruddiness, the benevolent smile of the good, childless parson appealed to him first.

“Good morning, mine uncle, I hope you’ll learn to love——”

Lady Lochore plunged upon him.

“No, Edmund, no! not there! See boy, this is your uncle.”

She clutched at David’s sleeve, while Madam Tutterville’s tears of easy emotion ran into her melting smile; and quite unscriptural exclamations, such as “duck,” and “little pet,” and “lambkin” fell from her delighted lips.

“Speak to uncle David, darling! David, won’t you say a word to my child?”

Ellinor could almost have echoed the wail—it cut into her womanly heart to see David repel the little one. But he bent and looked down searchingly into the little face. At that moment the child, again struggling against the maternal control, drew his baby brows together and set his baby features into a scowl of temper. Sir David looked; and in the defiant eyes, in the little set mouth, in the very frown, saw the image of his traitor friend. His own brows gathered into as black a knot as if he had been confronting Lochore himself. He drew himself up and folded his arms:

“Cease prompting the child, Maud,” said he, “let his lips speak truth, at least as long as they may!”

He turned and left them. The little Master of Lochore was ill-accustomed to meet an angry eye or to hear a disapproving voice. And, as his mother rose to her feet, shooting fury through her wet eyes upon the discomfited circle, he, too, glanced round for comfort and rapidly making his choice, flung himself upon Ellinor and hid his face in her skirts, screaming.

The clinging hands, the hot, tear-stained cheeks, the baby lips, opened yet responsive to her kisses—Ellinor never forgot the touch of these things. Almost it was, when Lady Lochore wrenched him from her arms, as if something of her own had been plucked from her.

“I want the pretty lady, I will have the pretty lady!” roared the heir, as Josephine, the nurse, and Margery carried him between them to his nursery.

As Lady Lochore, following in their wake, swept by Ellinor, she gathered her draperies and shot a single phrase from between her teeth. It was so low, however, that Ellinor only caught one word. The blood leaped to her brow as under the flick of a lash. But even alone, in her bed at night, she would not, could not admit to herself that it had had the hideous significance which the look, the gesture seemed to throw into it.

“So it is war!” said Lady Lochore, standing in the middle of her gorgeous room, the flame of anger devouring her tears. “Well, so much the better!”

She stood before the mirror, her chin sunk on her breast, biting at the laces of her kerchief, while her great eyes stared unseeingly at the reflection of her own sullen, wasted beauty. War! On the whole it suited her better than a hypocritical peace. Hers was not a nature that could long wear a mask. She was one who could better fight for what she loved than fawn. And now she had got her foot into her old home at last; aye, and her boy’s! After so many years of struggle and failure it was a triumph that must augur well for the future.

Never had she realised so fully how prosperous, how noble an estate was Bindon, how altogether desirable; how different from the barren acres of Roy and the savage discomfort of its neglected castle. To this plenty, this refinement, this richness, these traditions, her splendid boy was heir by right of blood. And she would have him remain so! She laughed aloud, suddenly, scornfully, and tossed her head with a ghost of the wild grace that had made Maud Cheveral the toast of a London season; a grace that still drew in the wake of the capricious, fading Lady Lochore a score of idle admirers. It would be odd indeed if the sly country widow, pink and white as she was, should be a match for her, now that they could meet on level ground.

There came a knock at the door.

“If you please, my lady,” said Margery, “humbly asking your pardon for intruding, I hope your ladyship remembers me. I’m one of the old servants, and glad to welcome your ladyship back again to your rightful place. And the little heir, as we call him, God bless him for a beauty——”

“Come in, woman,” cried Lady Lochore, “come in and shut the door!”

CHAPTER IX
A RIDER INTO BATH

It is not quiet, is not ease,

But something deeper far than these:

The separation that is here is of the grave.

—Wordsworth (Elegiac Poems).

If a woman, being in love, gain thereby a certain intuition into the character of the man she loves, the thousand contradictory emotions of that unrestful state, its despairs, angers, jealousies, its unreasonable susceptibilities, all combine to obscure her judgment; so that, at the same time she knows him better than anyone else can, and yet can be harsher, more unjust to him than the rest of the world.

Thus Ellinor understood exactly what was now causing the metamorphosis of David. She alone guessed the struggle of his week’s seclusion, from which he had emerged armoured, as it were, to face the slings and arrows of the new turn of fate. She alone knew the inward shrinking, the sick distaste which were covered by this polished breast-plate of sarcastic reserve; knew that this deadly courtesy was the only weapon to his hand, and that he would not lay it aside for a second in the enemy’s presence. At that moment when she had seen him read in the child’s face the image of its father, she had read in his own eyes the irrevocable truth of those slow words of his under the night sky: “He who remembers never forgives.”

She felt, too, that his very regard for her made it incumbent on him to treat her now as ceremoniously as his other guest; that to have openly singled her out for notice, or privately to have indulged himself with her company, would have been alike tactless and ungenerous. But in spite of all reason could tell her, she felt hurt, she was chilled, she gave him back coldness for coldness and mocking formality for his grave courtesy.

Now and again his eyes would rest upon her, questioning. But shut out from his night watch on the tower; shut out by day from their former intimacy by his every speech and gesture, Ellinor’s feminine sensibility always overcame her clear head and her generous heart.

A few days dragged by thus; slow, stiff, intolerable days. At last Lady Lochore threw off the mask insolently. Towards the end of their late breakfast, after an hour of yawns and sighs and pettish tossing of the good things upon her plate, she suddenly requested of her brother, in tones that made of the request a command, permission to invite some guests.

“Bindon shrieks for company,” said she, “and, thanks as I understand, to Mrs. Marvel, it is fairly fit to receive company. And, I know you like frankness, brother, I will admit I am used to some company.”

She flung a fleering look from Ellinor’s erect head to the alchemist’s bent, rounded crown. (Master Simon was deeply interested in Lady Lochore’s case, and as he entertained certain experimental schemes in his own mind, sought her company at every opportunity: hence his unwonted appearance at meals.) Sir David slowly turned an eye of ironic inquiry upon his sister; but his lips were too polite to criticise.

“Anything that can add to your entertainment during your short stay here,” said he, “must, of course, commend itself to us.”

Had Ellinor been less straitened by her own passionate pride, she might have stooped to pick up solace from that little plural word.

“Then I shall write,” said Lady Lochore, with her usual toss of the head. “If you’ll kindly send a rider into Bath—there are a few of my friends yet there, I learn by my morning’s courier—I’ll have the letters ready for the mail.”

Sir David went on slowly peeling a peach. For a while he seemed absorbed in the delicate task. Then, laying down the fruit, but without looking up from his plate, he said:

“I presume, before you write those letters that you intend to submit the names of my prospective guests to me.”

Lady Lochore flushed. She knew to what he referred; knew that there was one guest to which the doors of Bindon would never be opened in its present master’s lifetime. She was angry with herself for having made the blunder of allowing him to imagine for a moment that she was plotting so absurd a move. She hesitated, and then, with characteristic cynicism:

“What!” she cried, “do you think I want that devil here? No more than you do yourself.”

“Hey, hey!” cried Master Simon, startled from some abstruse cogitation.

Still Sir David looked rigidly down at his plate.

“God knows,” pursued the reckless woman, “it’s little enough I see of him now—but that is already too much!”

She paused, and yet there was no answer. Then with her scornful laugh:

“There’s old Mrs. Geary, the Honourable Caroline—you remember her, David?—the Dishonourable Caroline, as they call her in the Assembly Rooms; whether she cheats or not is no business of mine, but she is the only woman I care to play piquet with. There’s Colonel Harcourt and Luke Herrick—they make up the four, and I don’t think you’ll find anything wrong with their pedigree. Herrick’s too young for you to know. Priscilla Geary is in love with him—he’s a parti, as rich as he is handsome—and I’ll want a bait to lure the old lady from the green cloth at Bath. And if we have Herrick we must have Tom Villars too, else Herrick will have no one to jest at. And besides, the creature is useful to me.”

Sir David interrupted her with a sudden movement. He pushed his chair away from the table and, looking up from the untouched fruit, fixed for a second a glance of such weary contempt upon his sister that even her bold eyes fell.

“A Jew, a libertine, an admitted cheat—oh yes, I remember Mr. Villars, Colonel Harcourt, and Mrs. Geary. The younger generation, of whose acquaintance I have not yet the honour, will no doubt prove worthy of such elders!” He paused again, to continue in his uninflected voice: “Since these are the sort of guests you most wish to see at Bindon, you have my permission to invite them.”

He rose as he spoke, giving the signal for the breaking up of the uncomfortable circle. As Lady Lochore whisked past Master Simon, in his antiquated blue garment, she paused. She had a sort of liking for the old man, odd enough when contrasted with the deadly enmity she had vowed his daughter.

“Could you not discover,” she whispered, “a leaf or a berry that might take some effect upon the disease of priggishness? That new plant of yours. Did you not say ... didn’t you call it the Star-of-Comfort? I am sure it would be a comfort.”

The effect of the whisper told upon a chest that occasionally found the ordinary drawing of breath too much for it. She broke off to cough, and coughed till her frail form seemed like to be riven. Master Simon watched her gravely.

“I could give you something for that cough, child,” said he. Then his withered cheek began to kindle, “Something to soothe the cough first, and then, perhaps, I—I—that restless temperament of yours, that dissatisfied and capricious disposition—the Star-of-Comfort, indeed——”

She shook her hand in his face.

“Not I,” she gasped. “No more quackery for me! Lord, I’m as tough as a worm, Simon.” She laughed and coughed and struggled for breath. “I believe if you were to cut me up into little bits, I’d wriggle together again, but I’ll not answer for poison.”

She flung him a malicious look and flaunted forth, ostentatiously oblivious of Ellinor—her habitual practise when not openly insulting.

When Sir David and Master Simon were alone together the old man went solemnly up to his cousin, and laid his hand upon his breast.

“David,” said he, “that sister of yours won’t live another year unless she gives up the adverse climate of Scotland, the impure air of the town and the racket of fashionable life.”

“Tell her so, then,” said Sir David.

Master Simon drew back and blinkingly surveyed the set face with an expression of doubt, surprise and unwilling respect.

“The woman’s ill,” he ventured at last.

“Shall I bid her rest? Shall I cancel those letters of invitation?” asked Sir David ironically.

THE STAR DREAMER