The star dreamer: A romance

by Agnes Castle; Egerton Castle

BOOK III

Come down ... from yonder mountain heights.

And come, for Love is of the valley, come,

For Love is of the valley, come thou down!

Tennyson (The Princess.)

CHAPTER I
THE LITTLE MASTER OF BINDON

She played about with slight and sprightly talk,

And vivid smiles, and faintly venom’d points

Of slander, glancing here and grazing there.

—Tennyson (Merlin and Vivien).

In the terraced gardens, under the spreading shadows of the cedar trees, was gathered a motley group. Beyond that patch of shade the sun blazed down on stone steps and balusters, on green turf and scarlet geranium, with a fervour the eye could scarce endure. The air was full of hot scents. On a day such as this, Bindon of old was wont to seem asleep: lulled by the rhythmic, rocking dream-note of the wild pigeons, deep in its encircling woods. On a day such as this, the wise rooks would put off conclave and it would be but some irrepressible younger member of the ancient community that would take a wild flight away from leafy shade and, wheeling over the tree tops, drop between the blue and the green a drowsy caw. But things were changed this July at Bindon: these very rooks held noisy counsel in mid air and discussed what flock of strange bright birds it was that had alighted in their quiet corner of the world, to startle its greens and greys, to out-flaunt its flower-beds with outlandish parrot plumage, to break the humming summer silence with unknown clamours.

“The Deyvil take my soul!” said Thomas Villars reflectively.

He was sitting on the grass at Lady Lochore’s feet; his long legs in the last cut of trousers strapped over positively the latest boots. The slimness of his waist, the juvenility of his manner, the black curls that hung luxuriantly over his clean-shaven face, all this conspired to give Mr. Villars quite an illusive air of youth, even from a very short distance. Only a close examination revealed the lines on the rouged cheek and the wrinkled fall of chin that the highest and finest stock could not quite conceal. The latest pedigree gave the year of his birth as some lost fifty years ago—it also described the lady who had presided at that event as belonging to the illustrious Castillian house of Lara. But ill-natured friends persisted, averred that this lady had belonged to no more foreign regions than the Minories, and thus they accounted for Tom’s black ringlets, for his bold arch of nose, for his slightly thick consonants and his unconquerable fondness for personal jewellery.

Mr. Villars was, however, almost universally accepted by society: his knowledge of the share market was only second to his astounding acquaintance with everyone’s exact financial situation.

“Deyvil take my soul!” he insisted. Tom Villars was fond of an oath as of a fine genteel habit.

“I defy even the Devil to do that,” said Lady Lochore, stopping the languidly pettish flap of her fan to shoot an angry look at him over its edge.

“Why so, fairest Queen of the Roses?”

“Tom Villars sold his soul to the Devil long ago,” put in Colonel Harcourt. “It is no longer an asset.”

Frankly fifty, with a handsome ruddy face under a sweep of grey hair that almost gave the impression of the forgotten becomingness of the powdered peruke, Colonel Harcourt, of the Grenadiers, erect, broad-chested, pleasantly swaggering, good humoured and yet haughty, proclaimed the guardsman to the first glance, even in his easy country garb.

“Sold his soul to the Devil?” echoed Luke Herrick, lifting his handsome young face from the daisies he was piling in pretty Priscilla Geary’s pink silk lap. “Sold his soul, did he? Uncommon bargain for Beelzebub and Co.! I thought the firm did better business.”

“You are quite wrong,” said Lady Lochore, looking down with disfavour upon the countenance of her victim, who feigned excessive enjoyment of the ambient wit and humour. “The Devil cannot take Tom Villars’ soul, nor could Tom Villars sell it to the Devil, for the very good reason that Tom Villars never had a soul to be disposed of.”

A shout of laughter went round the glowing idle group.

“Cruel, cruel, lady mine!” murmured the oriental Villars, striving to throw a fire of pleading devotion into his close-set shallow eyes as he looked up at Lady Lochore and at the same time to turn a dignified deaf ear upon his less important tormentors. “In how have I offended that you thus make a pincushion of my heart?”

Mr. Villars knew right well that with Lady Lochore, as with the other fair of his acquaintance, his favour fell with the barometer of certain little negotiations. But it was a characteristic—no doubt maternally inherited—that soft as he was upon the pleasure side of nature, when it came to business, he was invulnerable.

At this point Mr. Herrick burst into song. He had a pretty tenor voice:

Come, bring your sampler, and with art

Draw in’t a wounded heart

And dropping here and there!

Not that I think that any dart

Can make yours bleed a tear

Or pierce it anywhere——

This youth was proud of tracing a collateral relationship with the genial Cavalier singer, whom he was fond of quoting in season and out of season. He was a poet himself, or fancied so; cultivated loose locks, open collars and flying ties—something also of poetic license in other matters besides verse. But as his spirits were as inexhaustible as his purse—and he was at heart a guileless boy—there were not many who would hold him in rigour.

Lady Lochore looked at him with approval, as he lay stretched at her feet, just then pleasantly occupied in sticking his decapitated daisies into Miss Priscilla’s uncovered curls—a process to which that damsel submitted without so much as a blink of her demure eyelid.

“Heart!” echoed Lady Lochore. She had received that morning a postal application for overdue interest, and Tom Villars had been so detachedly sympathetic that there were no tortures she would not now cheerfully have inflicted upon him. “Heart!” she cried again, “why don’t you know what is going to happen, when the poor old machine that is Tom Villars comes to a standstill at last——”

“There will be a great concourse of physicians,” broke in Colonel Harcourt, whose wit was not equal to his humour, “and when they’ve taken off his wig and his stays and cut him open——”

“Out will fall,” interrupted Herrick, “the portrait of his dear cousin Rebecca—whom he loved in the days of George II.

‘Be she likewise one of those

That an acre hath of nose——’”

“The physician will find a dreadful little withered fungus,” pursued Lady Lochore, unheeding.

“Which,” lisped Priscilla, suddenly raising the most innocent eyes in all the world, “which they will send to Master Rickart to find a grand name for, as the deadliest kind of poison that ever set doctors wondering. And sure, ’tisn’t poison at all! Master Rickart will say, but just a poor kind of snuff that wouldn’t even make a cat sneeze.”

Mr. Villars had met Miss Priscilla Geary upon the great oak stair this morning; and, examining her through his single eyeglass, had vowed she was a rosebud, and pinched her chin—all in a very condescending manner.

“I think you’re all talking very great nonsense,” remarked the Dishonourable Caroline.

Mrs. Geary was comfortably ensconced in a deep garden chair. Now raising her large pale face and protuberant pale eye from a note-book upon which she had been making calculations, she seemed to become aware for the first time of the irresponsible clatter around her.

“Mr. Villars,” she proceeded, in soft gurgling notes not unlike those of the ringdove’s, “I have been just going over last night’s calculations and I think there’s a little error—on your side, dear Mr. Villars.”

Mr. Villars scrambled to his feet, more discomfited by this polite observation than by the broad insolence of the others’ banter.

“My dear Madam, I really think, ah—pray allow me—we went thoroughly into the matter last night.”

The little pupils in Mrs. Geary’s goggling eyes narrowed to pins’ points.

“I do not think anyone can ever accuse me of inaccuracy,” she cooed with emphasis. “Come and look for yourself, Mr. Villars. You owe me still three pounds nine and eightpence—and three farthings.”

“Bianca let

Me pay the debt

I owe thee, for a kiss!”

sang the irrepressible Herrick—stretching his arms dramatically to Priscilla, and advancing his impudent comely face as if to substantiate the words—upon which she slapped him with little angry fingers outspread; and Lady Lochore first frowned, then laughed; then suddenly sighed.

“Peep-bo, mamma!” cried a high baby voice.

Every line of Lady Lochore’s face became softened, at the same time intensified with that wonderful change that her child’s presence always brought to her. But her heavy frown instantly came back as she beheld Ellinor, hatless, bearing a glass of milk upon a tray, while, from behind the crisp folds of her skirt, the heir-presumptive of Lochore (and Bindon) peeped roguishly at his mother.

Herrick sprang to his feet. Colonel Harcourt turned his brown face to measure the new-comer with his frank eye and then rose also.

“Hebe,” said he, looking down with admiration at the fresh, sun-kissed cheek and the sun-illumined head, “Hebe, with the nectar of the God!”

He took the tray from her hand.

“Give me my milk,” said Lady Lochore. “Edmund, come here! Come here, darling. Are you thirsty? You shall drink out of mother’s glass. Come here, sir, this minute! Really, Mrs. Marvel, you should not take him from his nurse like this!”

With a shrill cry the child rushed back to Ellinor and clutched her skirt again, announcing in his wilful way that he would have no nasty milk, and that he loved the pretty lady. Ellinor had some little ado to restore him to his mother. Then, seeing him firmly captured at last by the end of his tartan sash, she stood a moment facing Lady Lochore’s vindictive eyes with scornful placidity.

“My father hopes you will drink the milk, cousin Maud,” said she, “and if you would add to it the little packet of powder that lies beside it on the tray, he bids me say that it would be most beneficial to your cough.”

For all response Lady Lochore drank off the glass; then handed back the tray to Ellinor as if she had been a servant, the little powder conspicuously untouched. Ellinor looked from one to the other of the two men; then with a fine careless gesture passed her burden to Herrick, and, without another word, walked away up the terrace steps.

Herrick glanced after her, glanced at the tray in his hand, and breaking into a quick laugh, promptly thrust it into Colonel Harcourt’s hands and scurried off in pursuit. Colonel Harcourt good-humouredly echoed the laugh, as he finally deposited the object on the grass, then stood in his turn, gazing philosophically after the two retreating figures that were now progressing side by side, while Lady Lochore and her son out-wrangled Mrs. Geary and Mr. Villars.

“’Pon my soul,” said Colonel Harcourt, “vera incessu patuit Dea. That woman walks as well as any I’ve ever seen!”

Lady Lochore caught the words, and they added to the irritation with which she was endeavouring to stifle her son’s protestation that he hated mamma.

“I’ll have you know who’s master, sir!” she cried, pinning down the struggling arms with sudden anger.

“I’m master. I am the little Master of Lochore—and Margery says I’m to be the little master here!”

The mother suddenly relaxed her grasp of him and sat stonily gazing at him while he rubbed his chubby arm and stared back at her with pouting lips. The next moment she went down on her knees beside him, and took him up in her arms, smothering him with kisses.

“Darling, so he shall be, darling, darling!”

A panting nurse here rushed upon the scene.

“Wretch!” exclaimed my lady, “you are not worth your salt! How dare you let the child escape you. Yes, take him, take him!—the weight of him!”

She caught Harcourt’s eye fixed reflectively upon her.

“Come and walk with me,” she commanded.

“I was two by honours, you remember,” cooed Mrs. Geary.

“I am positive, the Deyvil take my soul, Madam! But ’tis my score you are marking instead of your own!”

Deserted Priscilla sat making reflective bunches of daisies. She had not once looked up since Herrick so unceremoniously left her.

The sky was still as blue, the grass as green, the flowers as bright, the whole summer’s day as lovely; but fret and discord had crept in among them.

CHAPTER II
TOTTERING LIFE AND FORTUNE

... Loathsome sight,

How from the rosy lips of life and love

Flashed the bare grinning skeleton of death!

White was her cheek; sharp breaths of anger puff’d

Her nostrils....

—Tennyson (Merlin and Vivien).

With head erect, Lady Lochore walked on between the borders of lilies. The path was so narrow and the lilies had grown to such height and luxuriance that they struck heavily against her; and each time, like swinging censers, sent gushes of perfume up towards the hot blue sky.

Colonel Harcourt went perforce a step behind her, just avoiding to tread on her garments as they trailed, dragging the little pebbles on the hot grey soil. Now and again he mopped his brow. He liked neither the sun on his back nor the strong breath of the flowers, nor this aimless promenade. But, in his dealings with women, he had kept an invariable rule of almost exaggerated deference in little things, and he had found that he could go further in great ones than most men who disdained such nicety.

Suddenly Lady Lochore stopped and began to cough. Then she wheeled round and looked at Harcourt with irate eyes over the folds of her handkerchief she was pressing to her lips.

Anthony Harcourt possessed a breast as hard as granite, withal an easy superficial gentlemanly benevolence which did very well for the world in lieu of deeper feeling; and a great deal better for himself. He was quite shocked at the sound of that cough; still more so when Lady Lochore flung out the handkerchief towards him with the inimitable gesture of the living tragedy and showed it to him stained with blood.

“Look at that, Tony,” said she, “and tell me how long do you think it will be before I bark myself to death?”

Her cheek was scarlet and her eyes shone with unnatural brilliance in their wasted sockets. She swayed a little as she stood, like the lilies about her; and indeed she herself looked like some passionate southern flower wasting life and essence even as one looked at her.

“Come out of this heat,” said Harcourt. He took her left arm and placed it within his; led her to a stone bench in the shade. She sat down with an impatient sigh, passed the back of the hand he had held impatiently over her wet forehead and closed her eyes. In her right hand, crushed upon her lap, the stained cambric lay hidden.

“Is not this better,” said her companion, as if he were speaking to a child, “out of that sunshine and the sickly smell of those flowers? Here we get the breeze from the woods and the scent of the hay. A sort of little heaven after a successful imitation of the infernal regions.”

“If you mean Hell, why don’t you say Hell?” said Lady Lochore. She laughed in that bitterness of soul that can find no expression but in irony. “Bah!” she went on, half to herself. “It’s no use trying not to believe in Hell, my friend; you have to, when you’ve got it in you! Look here,” she suddenly blazed her unhappy eyes upon him. “Look here, Tony—honour, now! How long do you give me?”

All the man’s superficial benevolence looked sadly at her from his handsome face.

“I am no doctor.”

“Faugh! Subterfuge!”

“Why, then, at the rate going, not three months,” said he. “But, with rational care, I’ve no doubt, as long as most.”

“Not three months!” She clenched her right hand convulsively and glanced down at the white folds escaping from her fingers as if they contained her death warrant. “Thank, you, Tony. You’re a beast at heart, like the rest of us, but you’re a gentleman. I am going at a rapid rate, am I not? Oh, God! I shouldn’t care—what’s beyond can’t be worse than what’s here. But it’s the child!”

The man made no answer. He had the tact of all situations. Here silence spoke the sympathy that was deeper than words. There was a pause, Lady Lochore drew her breath in gasps.

“It’s a pretty state of affairs here,” she said, at last, with her hard laugh.

“You mean——?”

“I mean my sanctimonious brother and his prudish lady!”

“Surely——?” He raised his eyebrows in expressive query.

“Not she!” cried Lady Lochore in passionate disgust. “I would think the better of her if she did. No, she’s none of those who deem the world well lost for love. Oh, she’ll calculate! She’ll give nothing for nothing! She’s laid her plans.” Lady Lochore began reckoning on three angry fingers uplifted. “There’s the equivocal position—one; my brother’s diseased notions of honour—two; her own bread-and-butter comeliness—three. She’ll hook him, Tony. She’ll hook him, and my boy will go a beggar! Lochore has pretty well ruined us as it is.”

“I should not regard Sir David as a marrying man, myself,” said the colonel soothingly.

“No,” said she, “the last man in the world to marry, but the first to be married on some preposterous claim! Look here, Tony, we are old friends. I have not walked you off here to waste your time. You know that my fortunes are in even more rapid decline than myself. There’s the child; he is the heir to this place. Before God, what is it to me, but the child and his rights! I’ll fight for them till I die. Not much of a boast, you say, but when a woman’s pushed to it, as I am”—her voice failed her. There was something awful in the contrast between the energy of her passion and the frailness of her body and in the way they reacted one upon another.

“Poor soul!” said Colonel Harcourt to himself—and his kind eyes were almost suffused.

“Tony, Tony!” she panted in a whisper of frantic intensity, “you can help. Oh, don’t look like that! I know I’m boring you, but I’ll not bore anyone for long. Think what it means to me! Fool! As if any man could understand! Don’t be afraid, I won’t ask anything hard of you. Only to make love to the rosy dairymaid, to the prim housekeeper, to the pretty widow. Why, man, you can’t keep your wicked eyes off her as it is!”

He leaned back against the bench, crossed one shapely leg over the other, closed his eyes and laughed gently to himself. Lady Lochore, bending forward, measured him with a swift glance, and her lips parted in a sneer.

“You’re but a lazy fellow. You like your peach growing at your elbow. You’ve been afraid of hurting my feelings ... you have been so long regarded as my possession! Oh, Tony, that’s all over now. Listen—if you don’t know the ways of woman, who does? The case is very plain: that creature is planning to compromise David. I know how you can make love when you choose, and I know my fool of a brother. I’ll have her compromised first! And then——”

She pressed her hands to her heart, then to her throat; for a moment or two the poor body had struck work. Only her eyes pleaded, threatened.

“And then? Before the Lord, you ladies!”

For all his bonhommie de viveur, Colonel Harcourt, of the First Guards, was known about Town to be a good deal of “a tiger,” as the cant of the day had it; and he held a justified reputation as an expert with the “saw-handle and hair-trigger.” Conscious of this, he went on:

“Truly, Maud, it may well be said there’s never a man sent below but a woman showed the way! But is there not something a little crude in your plan?”

“Crude! Have I time to be mealy-mouthed? I’m not asking you anything very hard, God knows! Merely to follow your own bent, Tony Harcourt; you have had your way with me, but that is over now, and you know it. I want you to devote yourself to that piece of country bloom instead. In three months you know what I shall be!...”

“My dear Maud.... And then?” He was amused no longer: Lady Lochore was undeniably crude. “A regular conspiracy!” he went on. But, after a moment’s musing, a gleam came into his eye. “What of it!” he cried, “all’s fair in love and war—a soldier’s motto, and it has been mine! And as for you, why, your spirits would keep twenty alive!”

She laughed scornfully.

“It sounds better to say so, anyhow,” she retorted. “I don’t want any mewing over me. So it’s a bargain, Tony? For old sake’s sake you’ll go against all your principles and make love to a pretty woman? And we’ll have this new Pamela out of the citadel. We’ll have this scheming dairy-wench shown up in her true colours! My precious brother, as you know, or you don’t know, has got some rather freakish notions about women. He’s had a slap in the face once already, and it turned him silly. Disgust him of this second love affair, he’ll never have a third and I shall die in peace. You have marked the affectionate, fraternal way in which he treats me! I had to force my way back into this house. He’ll never forgive me for marrying Lochore—and as for Lochore himself, to the trump of doom David will never forgive him for.... Bah! for doing him the best turn one man ever did another!”

“And what was that?” asked the colonel, with a slight yawn.

“What you and I are going to do now,” said my Lady. She smoothed her ruffled hair, folded her stained kerchief and slipped it into her bag; rose, and looked down smiling once more at the man, her fine nostrils fluttering with her quick breath in a way that gave a singular expression of mocking cruelty to her face. “Lochore saved Sir David from marrying beneath him.”

“And how did he accomplish that?” asked the colonel, rising too.

There was now a faint flutter of curiosity in his breast The reasons for Sir David’s eccentricity had once been much discussed. Lady Lochore took two steps down the path, then looked back over her shoulder.

“In the simplest way in the world,” she answered. “He gave a greedy child an apple, while my simpleton of a brother was solemnly forging a wedding ring.”

“Why”—the colonel stared, then laughed—“my Lady,” said he “these are strange counsels! Why—absurd! How could I think the plump, pretty Phyllis would as much as blink at an old fogey like me. And, as for me——”

Again Lady Lochore turned her head and looked long and fully at the speaker.

“Oh, Tony!” she said slowly at last. “Tony, Tony!”

Colonel Harcourt tried in vain to present a set face of innocence; the self-conscious smile of the gratified roué quivered on his lips. He broke into a sudden loud laugh and wagged his head at her. She dropped her eyelids for a second to shut out the sight.

“And she bit into the apple?” asked the colonel, presently.

“With all her teeth, my dear friend. Heavens! isn’t the world’s history but one long monotonous repetition? With us Eves, everything depends upon the way the fruit is offered. And that is why, I suppose, it is seldom Adam and his legitimate orchard that tempts us. Reflect on that, Tony.”

With this fleer, and a careless forbidding motion of her hand, she left him standing and looking after her.

There was a mixture of admiration and distrust in his eyes.

“By George, what a woman!” said he. “Gad, I’m glad I am not her Adam, anyhow!”

Then his glance grew veiled, as it fixed itself upon an inward thought, and a slow complacent smile crept upon his face.

CHAPTER III
STRAWS ON THE WIND

... I feel my genial spirits droop,

My hopes all flat....

—Milton (Samson Agonistes).

“I never heard you, my dear Doctor, preach better!” said Madam Tutterville.

But the worthy lady’s countenance was overcast as she spoke; and the hands which were smoothing and folding the surplice that the parson had just laid aside were shaking. The reverend Horatio turned upon his spouse with a philosophic smile. The lady did not use to seek him thus in the sacristy after service unless something in the Sunday congregation seemed to call for her immediate comment. On this particular morning he well knew where the thorn pricked; for he himself, mounting to the pulpit with the consciousness of an extra-polished discourse awaiting that choice Oxford delivery which had so rare a chance of being appreciated, had not seen without a pang of vexation that the Bindon House pew was empty save for its usual occupant—Mrs. Marvel. Having promptly overcome his small weakness and proceeded with his sermon with all the eloquence he would have bestowed on the expected cultivated, or at least fashionable, audience, he was now all the more ready to banter his wife upon her distress.

“What is the matter, dear Sophia?”

“An ungrateful and reprobate generation! He that will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican!” cried Madam, suddenly rolling the surplice into a tight bundle and indignantly gesticulating with it.

“How now! has Joe Mossmason been snoring under your very nose, or has Barbara——”

“Tush, tush, Doctor! You know right well what I mean. Was not that empty pew a scandal and a disgrace? Bindon House full of guests and not one to come and bend the knee to their Lord!”

“And admire my rolling periods, is it not so, my faithful spouse?” quoth the parson good-naturedly.

“I took special care to remind them of the hour of service last night; not, indeed, that I ever expected anything of Maud; although she might well be thinking that in every cough she gives she can find the hand-writing on the wall. Amen, amen, I come like a thief in the night!”

The parson’s eyelids contracted slightly, but he made no reply. Seating himself in the wooden armchair, he began with some labour to encircle his unimpeachable legs with the light summer gaiters that their unprotected, silk-stocking state demanded for out-door walking.

“My dear Horatio, what are you doing? Allow me!” She was down on her knees in a second; and while, with her amazing activity of body, she wielded the button-hook, her tongue never ceased to wag under the stress of her equally amazing activity of mind.

“But that card-playing woman—that Jezebel—one would have thought she’d have had the decency to open a prayer-book on the day when the commandments of the Lord forbid her to shuffle a pack; she’s old enough to know better!”

“I’m not so sure,” said the reverend Horatio, complacently stretching out the other leg, “that she interprets the Sabbath ordinance in that spirit.”

“Horatio!” ejaculated the outraged churchwoman, “you do not mean to insinuate that such simony could take place within our diocese as card-playing on the Sunday?”

“I think, from what I have seen from the Honourable Mrs. Geary, that she is likely to show more interest in the card-tables than in the tables of Moses.”

He laughed gently.

“Talking of Moses,” cried Madam Tutterville, feverishly buttoning, “there’s that Mr. Villars—one would have thought he would come, if only to show himself a Christian.”

But she was careful, even in her righteous exasperation, not to nip her parson’s tender flesh.

“Thank you, Sophia!”

He rose and reached for his broad-brimmed hat; then suddenly perceiving from his wife’s empurpled cheek and trembling lip that the slight had gone deeper than he thought, he patted her on the shoulder and said in an altered manner:

“Come, come, Sophia, let us remember that fortunately we are not responsible for the shortcomings of Lady Lochore’s guests. Indeed, from what I saw last night, it is a matter of far deeper moment to consider the effect of their presence upon those two who are dear to us at Bindon.”

“You mean, Doctor?”

“I did not like David’s looks, my dear. I fear the strain and the disgust, and the effort to repress himself, are too much for him. And besides”—he paused a moment—“I don’t know that I altogether liked Ellinor’s looks either.”

“My dear Horatio! I thought I had never seen her so gay and so handsome.”

“Too gay, Sophia, and too handsome. So Mr. Herrick and Colonel Harcourt not to speak of that pitiable person, Mr. Villars, seem to find her. She appears to me to take their admiration with rather more ease than is perhaps altogether wise in a young woman in her position. I do not say,” he went on, bearing down the lady’s horrified exclamation—“I do not go so far as yourself in surmising that David had formed any serious attachment in that quarter; but then, you see, it might have ripened into one. There is no doubt there was a singular air of peace and happiness about Bindon before this most undesirable influx. But last night David’s eyes——” He broke off, readied for his cane and moved towards the porch.

“My dear sir,” panted Madam Tutterville after him, “you have plunged me in very deep anxiety! We seem indeed, as Paul says, to be going from Scyllis to Charybda! Pray proceed with your sentence—David’s eyes?”

But the parson had already repented.

“Nay, it is after all but a small matter. All I mean is that this noise, this wrangling, this frivolity, this trivial mirth, which is, after all, but the crackling of thorns, is peculiarly distasteful to such a man as David, and I was only sorry that your niece should seem to countenance it.”

“I will speak to her,” announced Madam Tutterville. “I will instantly seek her.”

“Nay,” said her lord, “my dear Sophia, here we have no right to interfere. Ellinor has sufficient experience of the world to be left to her own devices. I understand that Colonel Harcourt and Mr. Herrick are neither of them a mean parti, and, unless I am seriously mistaken, the younger man at least is genuinely enamoured. By what right can we permit our own secret wishes, our own rather wild match-making plans, to step in here?”

“Oh, dear!” sighed Sophia. “And we were so comfortable!”

The two stood arm-in-arm at the lych-gate and absently watched the last of their parishioners straggling homeward in groups through the avenue trees. Suddenly Madam Tutterville touched her husband’s arm and pointed with a dramatic gesture in the direction of the House.

Two tall slight figures were moving side by side across the sunlit green. Even as the rector looked a third, emerging from the shadows of the beeches, joined them with sweeping gestures of greeting.

“They have been, I declare, lying in wait for Ellinor ... and there she goes off between them, Sunday morning and all!”

Deeply shocked and annoyed was Madam Tutterville.

“I think,” said the parson, “that I will take an hour’s rest in the garden. I would, my dear Sophia, you had as soothing an acquaintance, on such an occasion as Ovid.”

CHAPTER IV
A SHOCK AND A REVELATION

Into these sacred shades (quoth she)

How dar’st thou be so bold

To enter, consecrate to me,

Or touch this hallowed mould?

—Michael Drayton (Quest of Cynthia).

Ellinor sat on the stone bench in the Herb-Garden, gazing disconsolately at the flourishing bed of Euphrosinum—at the Star-of-Comfort—and reviewing the events of the past days with a heavy and discomforted heart.

It is but seldom now that she could find a few minutes of solitude, so many were the claims upon her time. For, besides the household duties and Master Simon’s unconscious tyranny, she was subjected to a kind of persecution of admiration on the part of Bindon’s male guests. There were times, indeed, when Colonel Harcourt’s shadowing attendance became so embarrassing that she was glad to turn to the protection which the boyish worship of Luke Herrick afforded.

With the former she felt instinctively that under an almost exaggerated gentleness and deference there lurked a gathering danger; whereas the youthful poet, however exuberant in his devotion, was not only a harmless, but a sympathetic companion.

While she was far from realising the peril in which she stood where her dearest hopes were concerned, she felt the difficulty of her position increase at every turn. Forced by David’s wish into the society of his visitors, she was there completely ostracised by the ladies after an art only known to the feminine community. Thus she was thrown upon the mercies of the gentlemen, and they were extended to her with but too ready charity. It would not have been in human nature not to talk and laugh with Luke Herrick when Miss Priscilla was going by, her little nose in the air. It was impossible not to accept with a smiling grace the chair, the footstool, the greeting offered to her with a mixture of paternal and courtierlike solicitude, amid the icy silence and the drawing away of skirts whenever she entered upon the circle.

Now and again, perhaps, her laugh may have been a little too loud, her smile a shade too sweet; but she would not have been a woman had the insulting attitude of the other women not led her to some reprisals. Moreover there was a deep sore place in her soul which cried out that he who should by rights be her protector held himself too scornfully aloof; nay, that he actually included her now and again in the cold glance which he swept round the table upon his unwelcome guests. To the end of the chapter a woman will always seize the obvious weapon wherewith to fight the indifference of the man she loves, and nine times out of ten it is herself she wounds therewith.

The basket that was to hold the health of the village was still empty by her side. Absently she fingered a sprig of wormwood—meet emblem, she thought, of her present mood. Indeed, Ellinor’s thoughts were not often so bitter. Not often was her brave spirit so dashed.

There came a light rapid step behind her, a burst of laughter; and, as she turned, the triumphant face of Herrick met her glance at so slight a distance from her own that she drew back in double indignation.

“Why have you followed me?” she exclaimed indignantly. “You know that no one is allowed here!”

“How can I choose but love and follow her

Whose shadow smells like mild pomander?

How can I choose but——”

The gay voice broke off suddenly, and a flush—fellow to that of Ellinor, yet one of engaging embarrassment, overspread the singer’s face.

“Well, sir?” she asked.

How stern, how stiff, how unapproachable, this woman whom nature had made of such soft lovely stuff! Luke Herrick stooped, lifted a corner of her muslin apron, and carried it humbly to his lips.

“How could I choose but kiss her! Whence does come

The storax, spikenard, myrrh and labdanum?”

he went on, dropping his recitative note for what was almost a whisper. From his suppliant posture he looked up with eyes in which the man pleaded, yet where the boy’s irrepressible, irresponsible mischievousness still lurked. It was impossible not to feel that anger was an absurd weapon against so frivolous a foe. Moreover she liked him. There was something infectious in his mercurial humour, something attractive in the honest boy nature that lay open for all to read. There was something of a relief, also, to be obliged to jest and to laugh. To be near him was like meeting a breeze from some lost, careless youth.

Why, after all, should she not try and forget her own troubles? What was the Herb-Garden to him, to David, that, with a fond faithfulness she should insist on keeping it consecrate to the memory of one dawn! He who had begged for the key of it—what use had he made of the gift? How many a golden morning, how many a pearly day-break, how many an amethyst evening, had she haunted the scented enclosure—always alone!

“I’ll not say a single little word,” he urged. “I’ll be as mute as a sundial, if you’ll only let me bask in your radiance! I’ll just hold your basket and your scissors, and I’ll chew every single herb and tell you whether its taste be sweet, sour or bitter, if you’ll only give me a leaf between your white fingers. And then if I die——”

He thumped his ruffled shirt and languished.

“How did you get in?” she asked.

But though her tone was still rebuking, he laughed back into her blue eyes. He made a gesture: she saw the traces of moss, of lichen and crumbling mortar upon his kerseymere, the rent in his lace ruffle, the tiny broken twig that had caught his crisp curl.

“Ah,” she cried, “you have found my old secret scaling place.... Did you land in the balm bed?” she asked, laughing.

Colonel Harcourt, in search of Ellinor, looked in through the locked gate and knocked once or twice, then called gently. But, though he could hear bursts of laughter and the intermingling sounds of voices in gay conversation, he could see nothing but the strange herb-beds and bushes, intersected by narrow paths, overhung by swarmlets of humming bees and other honey-seeking insects; and no one seemed to hear him.

As he stood, smiling to himself in good humoured cynicism, the tall figure of his host, with bare head, came slowly out of the laurel walk that led to the open plot before the gate. Sir David seemed absorbed in thought. And it was not until he was within a pace or two of the other man that he suddenly looked up.

“Good morning!” said the colonel genially. “A lovely day, is it not? Queer place, that old garden of weeds—our friend, Master Simon’s herbary, as I understand. The gate is locked, I find.”

As he spoke, Colonel Harcourt scanned the set, pallid face with a keen curiosity. It required all a sick woman’s disordered fancy (he told himself) to imagine that this cold-blooded student, this walking symbol of abstractedness should be in danger of being led away into romantic folly. The soldier’s full smiling lips parted still more broadly, as he went on to reflect that, whatever designs the pretty widow might have upon her cousin’s fortune, her warm splendid personality was scarce likely to be attracted by “this long, thin, icy, fish of a fellow!”

Sir David had inclined his head gravely on the other’s greeting. When the hearty voice had rattled off its speech, he answered that he regretted that it was the rule to admit no visitors to the Herb-Garden. And then drew a key from his pocket and slipped it into the lock, so completely ignoring his guest’s persistent proximity, that the colonel, as a man of breeding would have felt it incumbent upon him to retire, had he not special reasons for standing his ground.

“Indeed!” said he. “Forbidden ground?”

“Yes, the plants are many of them deadly poison. It is a necessary precaution.”

“No doubt—quite right. Very prudent. But—what about the charming Mrs. Ellinor Marvel, the beauteous widow, the bewitching and amiable cousin, whom you are fortunate to have as companion in this romantic house?”

David dropped his hand from the key, turned and fixed his grave eyes on the speaker. Their expression was merely one of waiting for the next remark. The colonel hardly felt quite as assured of his ground as before, but he resumed in the same tone of banter:

“I saw her going there just now. Is it quite safe to let so precious a being into such dangerous precincts?”

The remark ended with that laugh upon the hearty note of which so much of his popularity rested. Most people found it impossible not to respond to this breezy way of Colonel Harcourt’s. But there was not a flicker of change upon Sir David’s countenance.

Yet, when he spoke, after coldly pausing till the other’s mirth should have utterly ceased, and remarked that his cousin, Mrs. Marvel, was associated with her father’s scientific investigations and therefore was the only person, besides the speaker himself, whom he allowed to make use of the garden, the colonel felt that his insinuation had been understood and rebuked by a courtesy severer than anger. His resentment suddenly rose. The easy contempt with which he had hitherto regarded the uncongenial personality of his host, flamed on the instant into active dislike; and he was glad to have a weapon in his hand which might find a joint in this irritatingly impenetrable armour.

“Indeed!” cried he, ruffled out of his usual commanding urbanity.—Trying to smile he found himself sneering. “Indeed? Aha, very good, I declare! It is worth while living on a tower to be able to retain those confiding views of life! It has never struck you, I suppose—the stars are doubtless never in the least irregular in their courses, but young and charming widows have little ways of their own—it has never struck you that this forbidden wilderness might be an ideal spot for rendezvous?”

Sir David shot at the speaker a look very unlike that far-off indifferent glance which was all he had hitherto vouchsafed him. This sudden, steel-bright, concentrated gaze was like the baring of a blade. Dim stories of the recluse’s romantic and violent youth began to stir in Harcourt’s memory. He straightened his own sturdy figure and the instinctive hot defiance of the fighter at the first hint of an opposing spirit ran tingling to his stiffening muscles.

So, for a quick-breathing moment, they fixed each other. Then, through the drowsy humming summer stillness rang from within the Herb-Garden the note of Herrick’s singing voice:

“Go, lovely rose and, interwove

With other flowers, bind my love.

Tell her too, she must not be,

Longer flowing, longer free——”

The melody broke off. There was a burst of laughter; and then Ellinor’s voice, with an unusual sound of young merriment in it, sprang up into hearing as a crystal fountain springs into sight:

“Foolish boy, there are no roses here!”

Sir David started. His eyes remained fixed, but they no longer saw. In yet another moment he had turned away and was gone, leaving Colonel Harcourt staring after him.

“’Pon my life,” said the roué to himself, “the woman was right—My God, he’s mad for her!”

Upon a second and more composed thought, he began to chuckle and feel his own personality resume its lost importance.

“The situation is becoming interesting,” he thought. His eye fell on the key, forgotten in the lock and he broke into a short laugh. He then unlocked the gate, slipped the key into his pocket and walked into the garden.

“I had no idea,” he said, addressing the balm beds, as he passed them, “that I could be such a useful friend to my Lady.”

CHAPTER V
SILENT NIGHT THE REFUGE

My life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,

That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year

When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs

... and the Charioteer

And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns

Over Orion’s grave low down in the west.

—Tennyson.

Ellinor had had, perforce, so busy an afternoon (to make up for time lost in the morning) that, marshalled by Lady Lochore, all the guests were already at table when she came in that night.

She stood a moment framed in the doorway, a brilliant apparition. Despite its many candelabras and the soft light that still poured into it through open windows, the great room—oak-panelled and oak-ceiled—was of its essence richly dark. Nearly black were those panels, polished by centuries to inimitable gloss and reflecting the flames of the candles like so many little yellow crocuses.—Such walls are the best background for fair women and fine clothes; for roses and silver and gold.

This evening Ellinor had been moved—though she hardly knew why—to discard her severely simple gowns for a relic of the early days of her married life, a garment of a fashion already passed. In the embroidered fabric she was clothed as a flower is clothed by its sheath. A narrow white satin train with a heavy border of little golden roses fell from her shoulders in folds that accentuated her height. The classic cut, that laid bare a sweep of neck and arm that not another woman in the county could boast, became her as simplicity does royalty. The mingling of the white and gold was repeated by her skin and hair. As she cast a last look at herself, in the mirror before leaving her room, a smile of innocent delight had parted her lips. She had seen herself beautiful—how beautiful she was, she herself indeed did not know. She had thought of David and had been glad. The ever more open admiration with which both Herrick and Colonel Harcourt had surrounded her throughout the day had stimulated her in some strange, but very feminine and quite pure, manner, to make better use of these gifts of hers to pleasure the eyes of the man she loved.

Now Lady Lochore was the first to see her on her entrance. She put up her eyeglasses and stared, and then dropped them with a pale convulsion which turned the next moment to a vindictive smile.

Colonel Harcourt followed the direction of her eyes and positively started with a frank stare of delight. He wheeled boldly round to feast his eyes at ease; the action and the attitude were almost equivalent to applause. Then it seemed to Ellinor that every head was turned, that every eye was upon her; and her innocent assurance suddenly failed her. Timidly she shot a glance towards the head of the table. Alas! everyone was looking at her, except him whose gaze alone meant anything. All her childish pleasure fell from her.

She advanced composedly enough, however, and took the only vacant seat, which was between the colonel and young Herrick, vaguely responding to their advance. After a while a sort of invincible attraction made her look up. She met David’s eyes—met the chill of death where she had expected the warmth of life!

What had happened? Her heart seemed to wither away, the smile was paralysed on her lips; the flowers, the lights, the flashes of silver and colour, the babel of talk about her—it all became nightmare, an unreal world of mocking shadows, in which one thing only was horribly and intensely alive, the pain of her sudden misery. After a moment, however, some kind of self-possession returned. The pressing exigency that weighs upon us all, of preserving our bearing in company, no matter whether soul or body be at torture, forced her to answer the running fire of remarks that seemed to be levelled at her with diabolical persistency.

Even the kind, friendly presence of the rectory pair seemed destined that night to add to her difficulty; for while uncle Horatio was quoting Greek at her across the table, Madam Tutterville was assuring her neighbors that if Mrs. Marvel was unpunctual for once she was nevertheless the faithful virgin with lamp in excellent condition, who knew how to trim her wicks; and was, in fact, the strong woman of Proverbs who got up early.

“One rose in the fair garden was missing, and I missed her!” said the rector, poetically, while he turned an affectionate glance upon his niece.

“Dear uncle Horatio,” said she, “I had rather be greeted by you than acclaimed by a court.”

“Horrible, horrible cruel to poor adoring courtiers!” murmured Colonel Harcourt in her ear.

At any moment, that confidential lowering of the voice, that bold intimacy of the gaze would have excited Ellinor’s swiftest rebuke; but now she only laughed nervously as she endeavoured to rally in reply to Herrick’s equally low-pitched, but quite guileless show of interest.

“What is the matter with you?” he was whispering; “you went as white as a sheet just now. Has anyone annoyed you? Do tell me!”

“I, white—what nonsense!” she cried; and her voice rang a little louder and harder than usual in her effort, while the rush of blood that had succeeded her momentary faintness left an unusual scarlet on both cheeks. “Why, I am burning! And so would you be if you had spent the day between the alembic stove and the kitchen!”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Priscilla, lifting her innocent eyes to shoot baby-anger across at the neglectful Herrick, “perhaps,” she said, in her small soft voice, “it also was sitting so long in the sun in the Herb-Garden, that’s given you that colour. There’s Mister Luke has got the match of it himself.”

Lady Lochore gave a loud laugh.

“Mrs. Marvel has so many irons in the fire!” she suggested.

Ellinor looked round the table. She seemed to remain the centre of notice: on the part of the women (with the exception of aunt Sophia) an inimical, almost vindictive notice; while, where the men were concerned, she could not turn her gaze without meeting glances of undisguised hot admiration. Instinctively, as if for help, she again sought David’s gaze, and again was thrown back into indescribable terror and bewilderment by his countenance. Only once through all the phases of gloom, discouragement, renunciation that his soul had passed through in her company, had she seen his features wear that deathlike mask—it was when he had battled with himself before reading his sister’s letter. And now this repudiation, nay, this contempt of things, was directed—she felt it with a nightmare sense of inevitableness—towards herself. Herself!

Oh, the torture of that long elaborate repast, the nauseating weariness of the ceaseless round of dishes, the inane ceremonies of wine-taking, the glass clinking, the jokes, the laughter, the compliments, the struggle to parry the spiteful or the too ardent innuendo, to laugh with the rest at Aunt Sophia’s happy inaccuracy, to respond to her proud congratulations over the success of each remove! Ellinor’s life had not been an easy one; but no harder hour had it ever meted out to her than this.

Parson Tutterville had suddenly become grave and silent. His kind, shrewd gaze had wandered several times from the gloom of David’s countenance to the flush upon Ellinor’s cheek. Then, with fixed eyes, fell into a reflection so profound that—most unusual occurrence in the amiable epicure’s existence—the superb wine before him waited in vain to whisper its fragrant secret, and the most artistic succulence was left untasted upon his plate.

When the party at length broke up, he himself, in a coign of vantage, caught Ellinor’s arm as she passed him.

“My dear child,” he said under his voice, “something must have happened! I have not seen David look like this since the old evil days—the Black Dog is sitting on his shoulder with a vengeance! What is it?”

Ellinor’s lip quivered. She shook her head, words failed her. A shade of severity crept into the rector’s face.

“Have you quarrelled?”

Again the mute reply.

“Have you nothing to tell me? Ah, child, take care; David is not like other men! His mind is a complicated piece of machinery—and the common tools, Ellinor, will only work havoc here!”

Ellinor’s sore heart was stabbed again. She understood the veiled rebuke; and the injustice of it so hurt her that to hide her tears, she broke from the kind hand and rushed from the room in the wake of the disdainful petticoats that had just swept by her.

Parson Tutterville looked after her with puzzled air; then, sighing, returned to the table. Here David was dispensing the hospitality of Bindon’s matchless cellar, discoursing to his guests in a mood of irony so bitter yet so intangible as to fill the rector with fresh alarm.

The reverend Horatio took his seat at the right of the master; and, without a spark of interest, watched the pale hand busy among the decanters fill his beaker. He would, indeed, have preferred not to put his lips to it, had the exigencies of the social moment but permitted it, so utterly had that smile of David’s turned its flavour for him.

“By George!” exclaimed the colonel, flinging himself luxuriously back in his chair and speaking with the enthusiasm of an experienced sensualist, “by George, a glorious tipple! Enough to turn the whitest-livered cur into a hero! Come, come, gentlemen, we must not let such grape juice run down our throats unconsecrate, as if we were beasts. Let us dedicate every drop of it.—A toast, a toast!”

He had reached that agreeable state which should be the aim of the expert diner at this crucial moment of the repast. He had eaten well and had drunk wisely; and was now on the fine border line where the utmost enjoyment of the sober man merges into the first elevation of spirit of the slightly intoxicated.

“I propose our amiable host,” he went on, just as Herrick, springing to his feet and raising his glass exclaimed:

“There can be here but one worthy toast—the fair ones of Bindon.”

“Our Queens, our Goddesses, our Nymphs, our Angels!” interrupted Villars, with his usual inspiration.

“Our fair ones!” echoed David, rising also; “indeed nothing could be more just than that we should devote the blood wrung from the grape that makes, as Colonel Harcourt truly says, heroes of mankind, to woman, that other spring of all our noble actions. Is it not so, my gallant Colonel?”

“Hear him, hear!” cried innocent Herrick, beating the table with an excited hand.

David’s glacial eye fell for a moment on the hot boy-face, and there flickered in it a kind of faint pity. So, one might fantastically fancy, would a spirit recently rent from the body by an agonising death, look from its own corpse upon those who had yet to die.

“Let us drink,” said David, and raised his glass, “to Woman! Without her what should we know of ourselves, of our friends, of the treasures of the human heart and the nobility of the human mind, of honour, of purity, of faithfulness!”

Dr. Tutterville looked up at the speaker, resting his hand on the table in the attitude of one prepared to spring forward in an emergency. As David’s voice rang out ever more incisive he was reminded of the breaking of sheets of ice under the stress of dark waters below.

“A moment, please,” here intervened Colonel Harcourt’s mellow note. “Friend Herrick’s excellent suggestion, and our host’s most eloquent adoption of it, can yet (craving your pardon, gentlemen) be amended. Let us not dilute the enjoyment of this excellent moment—let us concentrate it, as good Master Simon would say. Gentlemen, this glass not to women, but to the one woman! Come, parson, up with you! Fie—what would Madam Tutterville say? And he has but given half his heart who fears to proclaim its mistress. Hoy! Gone away! And out on you if you shy at the fence! I drink to Mistress Marvel—to the marvel of Marvels, aha!”

He tossed down his glass, looking coolly at David, while Herrick, leaning forward with the furious eyes of the young lover stung, glared across the table and balanced his own glass in his hand with an intent which another second had seen carried out, had not the parson’s fingers quietly closed upon his; had not the parson’s voice murmured in his ear:

“Remember, my young friend, that the imprudent champion is a lady’s greatest enemy.”

This while Villars, on his side, sputtering into silly laughter, protested that fair play was a jewel and that if Harcourt had stolen a march upon him, he Villars might yet be in “at the death!”

David stood still, glass in hand, dangerously still, while his eyes first wandered round the table, from face to face, and then beyond out to the midsummer twilight sky that shone through the parted folds of the curtains. And then the parson, who was watching him, saw a marvellous change come over the bitter passion of his face. It was as if the mask had fallen away. The rigid composure, the tense lines relaxed, the sombre eye was lit with a new light; and ethereal peace touched the troubled forehead.

Wondering, the divine turned to the window also; followed the direction of David’s abstracted gaze and saw how, in the placid primrose space, the first evening star had lit her tender little lamp.

There was a moment’s curious silence in the great room. Then, from David’s hand the glass fell, breaking on the mahogany; and the ruby wine was spilled in a great splash and ran stealthily, looking like blood. And the host, the lord of Bindon, with head erect and eyes fixed upon visions that none could even guess at, turned and left them all—without a word.

Re-acting against the unusual sensation that had almost paralysed them, Bindon’s guests raised a shout of protest, and Harcourt sprang angrily towards the closing door. But the parson again interposed.

“I pray you,” he said, with a dignity that imposed obedience, “I pray you let Sir David depart. He has gone back to his tower, and there no one must disturb him. He leaves you to your own more congenial company.”

Colonel Harcourt broke into a boisterous laugh as he sank back into his chair, and reached for the bottle.

“Pity for the good wine spilt—that’s all,” he cried. “But ’twas wasted anyhow upon such a dreamy lunatic!”

Unceremoniously he filled himself another brimmer, and reflecting a moment—

“Now to my Lady Lochore!” said he at length slowly, “and to the wish of her heart!”

Doctor Tutterville looked at him askance. Then, after a moment, he too rose, and with an old-fashioned bow all round, left the room.

CHAPTER VI
THE LUST OF RENUNCIATION

O purblind race of miserable men,

How many among us at this very hour

Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves

By taking true for false or false for true!

—Tennyson (Geraint and Enid).

Ellinor went straight from the dining-room to seek her father in his peaceful retreat. Courage failed her to face the company any longer that night; she had, moreover, a longing to be with one who at least would not misunderstand her.

But, on the very threshold, her heart sank. It hardly needed Barnaby’s warning clutch at her gown from where he sat like a statue of watchfulness, just inside the door, his shake of the head and mysterious finger on lip to show her that her coming was inopportune. The very atmosphere of the room forbade interruption. The air seemed full of floating thoughts, of whispering voices and stealthy vapours; of these singular aromas that to her were like the letters of a strange language which she had hardly yet learned to spell. Up to the vaulted roof the whole space was humming with mysterious activity; a thousand energies were in being around some secret work. And there, master-brain and centre power, her father, seated at his table, like a mimic creator evolving a world of his own out of the forces of his chaos!

She came forward a step or two. His underlip was moving rapidly; and broken, unintelligible words dropped from time to time among the whispering vapour-voices all about him, like stones into a singing fountain. Now he lifted his blue eyes, stared straight at her—and saw her not!

Once or twice before she had known him in this state of mental isolation; she was aware that his brain was wound up to an extraordinary pitch, and that to interfere with its operations or endeavour now to bring its thoughts into another current would be at once useless to herself and cruel to him.

Alas! He had been at his mysterious drugs again—those unknown powers that were beginning to fill her with secret terrors. She had more than once implored him to deal no more with them; but she might as well have implored a Napoleon to desist from planning conquest as the old chemist from experimenting upon himself or others.

She turned, and looked questioningly at Barnaby, who, by some strange dog-like intuition, never failed to remain within sight of his master at such moments. And the lad’s expressive pantomime convinced her that her surmises were right. With a new anxiety added to her burden, she withdrew.

As she stood a moment outside the door, in deep despondency, she heard footfalls coming rapidly down the long passage which led from the tower-wing to the main body of the house. Her heart leaped: her heart would always echo to the sound of that step, as an untouched lute will answer to the call of its own harmony. It was David!

His brow uplifted, his gaze fixed, he came swiftly out of the shadow into the little circle of light; passed her so closely as nearly to brush her with his sleeve and crossed into the darkness again. And she heard the beat of his foot on the tower stairs in the distance, mount, mount, and die away. As little as her father, had he been aware of her presence!

She pressed her hands against her breast; and the taste of the tears she would not shed lay bitter on her tongue, the grip of the sob she would not utter left strangling pain in her throat. Poor all-human thing, with all her human passions, human longings, human weakness, what was she to do between these two visionaries!

Then, in the natural revolt of youth repressed, she came to a sudden resolution. Her father was old; and, besides, he had drugged himself to-night till nothing lived in him but the mind. But David was young, young like herself! What was to hinder from following him again to his altitude; from calling upon him, by all the blood of her beating heart to the blood of his own, to come back from that spirit-world where she could not stand beside him—back to her level, where only a little while ago he had found a green and flowering resting-place? Then she would let him look into her soul. Then, with a tender hand, she would take that mask from his face. Then the hideous incomprehensible shadow that had come between them would fly before the light of truth, and (even to herself she could hardly formulate the sweetness of that hope into words) before the revelation of Love!

She caught up her heavy satin train and her gossamer muslins and ran, as if flying from her own hesitation, up the great stone stairs without a pause to listen to the beating of her heart, across the threshold of that room where, upon that first evening of tender memory, she had tripped and been caught against his breast.

He was not in the observatory. She sought the platform. She had known that she would find him there: and there indeed he stood, even as pictured in her mind, with folded arms and looking up at the sky. She looked up also, and was jealously glad, in her woman’s heart, that, so radiant was the summer moon to-night, those shining rivals of hers were but few and faint to the eye.

She laid her hand upon his arm; he turned, without a word, stared a second:

“Ellinor!”

She had meant to call him back to earth, but not like this! Here was again the incomprehensible look that had rested upon her at dinner, but with an added fierceness of anger so foreign to all she had known of him that she felt as if it slashed her.

“Oh, what has happened? David, what have I done?”

She clasped and wrung her hands. On her heat of pleading his answer fell like ice.

“Done?” he echoed, with that pale smile that seemed to mock at itself; “done, my fair cousin? Nothing in truth that anyone—I least of all—could find fault with. It would be as wise to chide the winds for shifting from north to south as to hold a woman responsible for her own nature.”

His light tones was in startling contrast with the flame of his eye. All unaware of any incident of the day that could have afforded ground for this change, she found as yet no clue in his words to guide her.

“David, David—what is it?” she cried again.

In the anguish of her desire to break down the barrier between them, to get close to his soul again, she stepped towards him, hardly noticing that he drew back from her until he was brought up by the parapet of the platform. When he could retreat no further, he threw out his hand with a forbidding gesture.

She stood obedient but bewildered, as a child that is threatened though it knows not why. The winds of the summer night played with the tendrils of her hair and softly blew the fair white fabric of her gown closer against her, while the tide of moon rays, pouring over her bare shoulders and arms, glorifying the smooth skin with a radiant gleam as of mother-of-pearl, flashed back in scintillations from the burnished embroideries of her robes; so that, with the heaving of her breast and the tremor which shook her whole frame, she seemed to be enveloped with running silver fires.

Something—a passion, a mad desire—flickered into the man’s face, as if, for an instant, a hidden fire had leapt up. The next instant this was succeeded by the former cruel gaze of contempt and anger, the more intense because so icily controlled. Once more measuring her from head to foot, he murmured, with an extraordinary bitterness of accent:

“Are all women either fools or wantons?”

One moment indeed she swayed as if she would have fallen; but instantly she recovered herself, and, with a movement, full of pride and dignity, stooped to gather the folds of her heavy train into her hands and fling them across those shoulders and arms she had so innocently left bare to walk in beauty before him. That the man she loved could have looked, could have spoken such insult, oh, no hand could ever draw the blade from out her heart! There would it remain and rust till she died. Her cheeks—nothing but death indeed would ever cool them again, she thought. And no waters, no snow, no fire would cleanse her white garments from the mud he had just cast at them.

She turned upon him, her arms folded under the swathes of satin.

They were no longer master of the place and voluntary servant; no longer rich lord of the land and recipient of his bounty; no longer the protector and the protected—no longer even the secretly beloved and the loving—they were man and woman upon the equality in which Nature had placed them in their young life. Man and woman, alone in the night, under the great open sky, the wide star-pointed heaven, high-uplifted above the land, far apart from any living creature, unrestrained by any convention, any extraneous touch; face to face, so utterly man and woman alone on this high peak of passion, that it almost seemed as if their bodily envelope must fall away also and leave naked soul to naked soul. And yet, such lonely things has God made us in spirit, He who nevertheless said: “It is not good for man to be alone,” that when two souls meet in conflict and there is no tender hand touch, no meeting of lip to lip to draw the two together without words (we are always so betrayed by the treachery of word!) the difference in each soul is so essential that it seems as if nothing could ever bring them into union again. And there are battles in life which the soul traverses as utterly single as that final battle of all which each one of us is doomed to fight alone.

“David!” cried Ellinor, “explain!”

It was a command, enforced by eye and tone. So had Ellinor never looked before upon David; so had her voice never rung in his ear.

“Explain!” he echoed. “Of what value can the opinions of this poor fool among men, this recluse, this dreamer be to you, what consequences can you attach to them? Go back to the gay circle to which your nature belongs! There is your centre. Have I not seen it this month? Did I not see it to-day—to-night? What have we really in common, you and I?”

A glimmer of comprehension began to dawn upon Ellinor’s mind. But, sweetly stirring as it might have been at another moment to know David jealous, his mistrust came too closely upon his offence to avail. It was but added fuel to her wrath.

“How unjust!” she cried. “How ungenerous, how untrue!”

His haggard eye rested upon her with a sudden doubt of himself. Yet it was but as the pause before the widening rent in the breach—the pressure of the pent-up feelings on their unnatural height was too much now for the already weakened defences. The torrents were loose! He began, in hoarse, rapid, whispering voice:

“Oh, how you must laugh—you women that make us dance like puppets as you hold the strings!”

Then, suddenly, as with a crash and almost a cry, came the first leap of the flood.

“Why do you seek me? Could you not be content to have brought into my peace—God knows how hardly won!—this disturbance, this trouble, this disillusion? Have you not shown me once again that no woman, however kind, can be true; however fair but must be false; however straight-limbed, but must be tortuous of mind; however sweet to draw a man to her but must be black at heart! Is not that enough? I had gone back to my stars, back to all they mean to me; they had called me from among that ignoble crew where you—oh, incredible! seem to have found yourself so well! I had gone back to them, to their serenity, to their high communion.... Why did you call me down? Take your false troubling beauty from this my own peace ground!”

“But David! But, dear cousin, what insanity is this?”

“No,” he cried, with outflung hands beating back the sudden tender relaxation in her voice, the loosening movement of her folded arms under their mantle. “No,” he repeated loudly and harshly. “Once deceived where I most loved! Again deceived where I most trusted! Deceived again where nature, common blood, and family honour, should have most bound to faithfulness—it is enough! I have done with life. I will never again risk my hard-won peace of mind—life’s most precious possession—upon the frail stake of another’s loyalty. I have no friend, I have no sister. Ellinor, I will love no woman!”

His loud voice suddenly sank; and towards the last sentences, with a falling of her high spirit of anger, she saw him resume the old unnatural look, the old passionless tone of detachment and renunciation. The phrase with which he concluded rang in her ears more like a knell of all her secret hopes than the conventional offence.

“Oh,” said she, and the clear sweet note was shot through with a tremor of pain, “neither friend nor kin nor love? It is a hard sentence, David! Is it not as bad to mistrust truth as to break troth?”

But though her words were gentle she felt herself more aloof as she spoke than at any moment of their interview. Their two souls were drawing away from each other in the storm as the same wind and the same waves may part consorting vessels.

She moved, as to leave him, when he arrested her.

“You know the story of my life,” said he. “Stay, Ellinor, the night is mild.”

He put out his hand; but hesitated, and did not touch her. The frenzy of passion had left him, with that sudden change of mood that marks the fevered brain. She sat down on the parapet without a word. The night was mild, as he had said; yet, even under her improvised mantle she was cold—cold to the soul.

Now he had sealed the vial of her love. And, unless his hand knew the cunning of it and could break it open again, sealed it must remain till death. Had he but looked upon her first as now, but spoken as now, how different she might have made it! But even with his eyes upon her once more kind, and his voice in her ear once more gentle; with his hand trembling upon the stone of the bench, but a tiny span from hers; with the atmosphere of his presence enfolding her, she felt that they were still drifting apart further and further across the waste of waters.

“What have I said to you to-night?” he asked, and drew his hand across his brow. “Forgive me, you have always been very good to me. I owe you a great deal.”

She smiled with a welling bitterness.

“If you speak of owing,” she said, “I owe you the very bread I eat.” “And never felt it till to-night,” she added in her heart, but could not speak those words aloud because, in spite of everything, she loved him with that woman’s love that is kept tender by the mother instinct.—She could not hurt him who had hurt her so much.

His troubled gaze on her widened and then became abstracted.

“I have become a creature of the night,” said he, almost as if to himself. “For, by the light of day I cast such shadows as I go, that nothing, I think, could prosper near me. Always I have paid such toll for every good that it had been better I had never known it. The old curse is still upon me. Even for the comfort of your smile, Ellinor, I have had to pay.”

She drew a breath as if she would speak, but closed her lips proudly again. She could not plead for his happiness, for now that meant pleading for herself.

“Let me tell you,” said he once more, “what life has done to me.”

“I am listening,” she replied coldly, after a pause.

“Thank you—you are always patient with me. It is the last time that I shall ever bring a human being into my confidence, but I think you have a right to know, Ellinor, why I have been so moved to-day; to know how it is that events have once more shown me my own unfitness to mix with my fellow-creatures.”

He paused a second, then went on, resentment once more threatening in his voice like distant thunder.

“I cannot do with the meanness, the small duplicities, the little treacheries. Oh, God, duplicity is never small, and to me there is no little treachery. Ellinor, let but the tiniest rift be sprung in the crystal, and its note can never ring pure again. Oh, Ellinor, had you forgotten that?”

He stared at her with a new passion of reproach. But she sat, marble-still, with downcast lids: a cold white thing in the moonlight. And that passion of his that might just then have broken into tenderness, like a wave upon a gentle beach, recoiled upon itself as it met the barrier of her high hard pride.

He rose, thrust his nervous hands through his hair, pulling the heavy locks back from his brow. Then he began to speak very rapidly; sometimes turning towards her, as if his emotion must find an object; sometimes in lower tones, as if communing with himself; sometimes again throwing his words, as it were, into space. And thus he made his indictment against the mysterious powers that had ruled his fate.

CHAPTER VII
SHADOWS OF THE HEART OF YOUTH

Be mine a philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways,

Where, if I cannot be gay, let a passionless peace be my lot.

Far off from the clamour of liars, ...

And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love,

The poison of honey-flowers, and all the measureless ills!

—Tennyson (Maud).

The moon, fulfilling its lower summer circuit, had moved already a considerable span upon the wondrous measure that, to the watcher, seems imperceptibly slow, and yet, like the passing of the hour, asserts itself with such irrevocable swiftness. The night had deepened from pale sapphire to dark amethyst. Below, all around, the great woods at Bindon, silver-crested southwards, whispered; and the light airs that stirred them gathered sweets from the rose-gardens and spices from the Herbary before reaching the two on their tower. These airs, Ellinor thought, must pass on their way again, heavy with the sighs of her heart!

“On such a night,” what might not have been this meeting! With life all before them yet, what perversity was it to spend this silvery hour in the story of old and ugly wrongs; when God had made a heaven so fair, an earth so scented and a woman’s heart so true, to see all with distorted vision and consort with the remembrance of injury until the voice of no better comrade could make itself heard!

He told her with how high a heart he had set forth on life; and indeed she well remembered his gallant figure in the pride of youth, his lofty idealism and his fine intolerant scorn. She remembered, too, the witty mocking countenance, the cold green eye, the dark, auburn head of the Master of Lochore.—Lochore! Ellinor had instinctively dreaded and hated him. But with David he had taken the lead in everything; the relentless strength of the elder man’s nature had transformed him into a kind of hero for the younger, at a time when student-brains are peopled with ideals of the highest pitch in all things, be it love or sport, war or friendship. David’s reflective temperament was fascinated by a spirit of essential joyousness and fierceness.—In but a few words David touched on his past romantic affection for this Cosmo Lochore. It was with a sneer, as if the ghost of his own green youth had risen up before him and he could have withered it for his contemptible folly.

“Then,” he went on, “came the long-promised month on the moors, at the edge of the Lochore Forest. Cosmo, in his kilt, at early dawn ... to see his crest of hair and his eagle feather flame in the first shaft of light! I don’t suppose that any feelings can ever be quite so pure, so strong, so ideal, as this sort of boy adoration for the man. Ideal!” repeated David, and struck with his buckled shoe against a fernlet that had found a home for itself between two stones of the tower flooring and cast a little shadow in the moonlight.

Ellinor saw how he set his foot upon it, and thought the action symbolic.

“Ideal!” cried he, gibing at himself. “That is my curse, you see, that I cannot even now, accept life as it is! Fie! How ugly is all reality to me! What is in the doom of corruption that we carry in the flesh compared to the doom of corruption in the spirit? No! Rather this stone at my feet and the stars above my head!” He lifted, as he spoke, his face towards the sky; but it caught now no reflection of serenity, only light upon its own trouble. “I was an idealiser in friendship—how much more when it came to love!”

Impassively as she held herself, she could not control a slight start, a quick look at him. He was gazing beyond her, as if out there, in the night, the phantom of his first lost love had arisen before him. And when he went on speaking after a pause, it was as if he were addressing not Ellinor, but her—the Unknown—who had brought short joy and lasting sorrow into his life. Oh! Ellinor had been a fool not to have known how deep it had gone with him, since, after all these long years his every word, every action, bore witness to it! And yet, as she now looked at his face, she told herself she had not known it.

“A little creature—a kind of sprite, as light as a little brown bird, as lissom, as hardy as a heather blossom!”

Thus, from the unknown past, Ellinor’s rival rose before her: to be light, to be little, to be swift and lissom and brown—that was the way into his heart!... In every inch of her own splendid frame the listening woman felt great and massive, marble-white and still.

He paused. His mind was miles and years away. She caught her breath with a sigh that sounded so loud in her own ears that she tried to cover it with a laugh. Quickly the man wheeled round upon her.

“There is humour in my tale, is there not?” cried he, and his look and tone cut like the lash of a whip. “But give me your patience—the cream of the humour has yet to come!”

“Oh, David,” cried she in anger. “If I am not light of body, neither am I light of mind!”

If one like Colonel Harcourt, who understood the ways of women, had heard this cry, how knowing would have been his smile! What could David see of the heart laid bare? He looked upon her face and marked it scornful. The anger in her voice had struck him, but the wail of it had passed him by.

“Do I accuse you women?” he exclaimed. “Why should I! Have you not been made to match us men? The night that Lochore and I lost our way upon the moor and found refuge under the roof where she dwelt was the beginning of my instruction in life! Ah, God! The old story—I fell in love as I had fallen in friendship. It had been sweet to me to look up and feel myself protected by one like Lochore, stronger and better, as I thought, than myself. I thought it was ineffably sweet to find something so much weaker, so much smaller than I; something I could protect, something that looked up to me; brown eyes that seemed as true as they were deep—and scarlet lips that could kiss with such innocently ardent kisses....”

A fresh wave of anger swept through Ellinor’s veins. There came to her an almost overpowering impulse to spring to her feet, throw away her cloak and stand forth in her scorn, in her pride of life, in her wholesome humanity. Those unknown lips, those scarlet lips ... disowned now as they were, had still power to sting her. But she sat immovable, and let jealousy and love work their torture.

“You must think me mad,” cried David, with another abrupt change, “to inflict the old story upon you, the trite old story all the world knows. You know, Ellinor, you know.” He now addressed her with a personal, almost violent, directness. The matter seemed once more to lie between him and her alone. “I loved her, and she said she loved me. I was to make her my wife—my wife! Lochore mocked first, then stormed. We had our first quarrel; he swore he would prevent this madness. I was strong against him with a new strength—the strength of love against friendship.... Friendship! I forgave him, because I thought I must forgive such friendship! I left her. She wrote tender letters. I was to claim her in a few weeks. Suddenly I got a longing for her that could not be denied: a poet’s longing—the poet that lies in the heart of every lad of twenty! And then, do you need to be told how there was murder done upon that poet, murder upon the dreamer! upon his trust and his faith, upon his every hold on life? Had it been but on his wretched flesh! But that they let live!”

He now bent over her, a bitter laugh upon his lips.

“There was a certain walk, Ellinor, sacred to our love. All those weeks I had dreamed of it, of the primrose sky and the meeting of our lips—in my ideal way!” He laughed aloud. “I ran to it straight. I had not gone two steps when I heard there on that consecrated spot, a laugh. The sound of her laughter so much more joyous than ever she had laughed for me—the sound of her voice, high and bright. And mingling with it, in familiar jests and tenderness the sound of a man’s voice——” He stopped, and fixed her; then, once more drawing back, laughed again: “I had thought it was consecrated ground, you see!”

His ironic fury, as yet contained, was so intently pointed at herself that it could not but be revealing. The reproach of betrayal, then, was not to the little brown thing of the moor, but to her—to the great white woman!

Could it be possible? What insanity! And yet what sweetness! He had known, then, of that infraction in their own Herb-Garden this morning! Jealousy! There is no jealousy without love ... oh, then, she could forgive him all!

She rose, drawing a deep, joyous breath, and answered the indictment as she had taken it to herself.

“And what of it, David?” said she. Trembling upon her lips was almost that surrender which it is a woman’s pride never to offer. “What of it?” And she would have added—“A woman cannot always be guardian of the outer world, however consecrated she may hold certain gardens. But so long as her heart remains inviolate, so long as that remains consecrate, what does anything else matter?” But he had quickly caught up her spoken word with a fresh outburst of frenzy.

“What of it?” he echoed. “You may well ask the question. Is it not a thing that happens every day? You are right, the man who would live in the world must close his ears to what is not meant for them; as he must shut his eyes, no matter how flagrant the treachery, that is spread out before him. And then, no doubt, he may find the world a vastly pleasant place. That is the proper doctrine. Oh, and ’tis the natural one, for we are all made cowards? I myself, when I heard, I ran from the sound. I threw myself upon the moor that evening. I thrust my fingers into my ears. I reasoned with myself against what I knew was the truth—that is what people call reason. And I said what you have said: What of it!”

There was a moment’s silence. Then his voice rang out once more:

“But I could not!” He struck his breast. “I could not. There is something here even now in this dead heart of mine that must live in me as long as the spirit is in me. The truth, the truth! I cannot lie to myself, I cannot believe in another’s lies—I had heard, I must see. I rose from the ground, it was drenched with dew. It was night. Something led me, angel or demon. There was fire-light leaping up against the window. I looked in—I saw. Oh, you woman, turn away your false, compassionate eyes, for one thing I have sworn that I will never look on a woman’s treachery again!”

“David,” cried Ellinor again, “remember that I am of your blood!”

“Aye, of my blood. The mockery of fate is complete: betrayed by friendship, betrayed by love, betrayed by my own blood——!”

“David!”

“Yes—Maud, my sister, that is my own blood, is it not? Maud laughed, oh, she laughed! She came and sat by the side of my bed, the wound that Lochore’s bullet had made was yet green in my lung—for the memory of our old friendship he could not even do me the mercy to shoot straight—and she, my own sister ... my blood! She was to marry the man whose hand was red and whose soul was black, the man who had openly flaunted about Town, as the latest Corinthian, the girl that was to have been his friend’s bride, and boasted that he had done me what he called the best service one man could do another. ‘Why, fool, you owe him eternal gratitude,’ said Maud. It was a huge joke!”

Terrified, Ellinor stood looking at him. If her pride had allowed her to reason with him earlier, perhaps it might have availed. Now she felt that any words of hers would be worse than useless. As well try to reason away ague or delirium.

“My friend, my love, my kin, you see!” he cried. “History repeats itself. You, you,” he came close to her with a frenzied gesture as if to overwhelm her with reproach, “you, my kin, you who came into my solitude as my friend, you whom some blind madness has kept whispering to me was to be my love, you would combine in your single person the three traitors that stabbed my youth!”

She never knew if she had screamed, or if it was only the cry of her heart that suddenly rang in her ears. But she seized and clung to his descending hand as it would have waved her from him for ever.

“Ah, no, David, no!” she repeated, the denegation in a voice as frenzied as his own. And suddenly her ice of pride melted and the tears came streaming from her eyes. At the sight the man seemed to come back in some way to his senses. The cold hand she held became more human warm.

“Tears?” he said in an altered voice. “Have I caused you tears? Ah, don’t cry, Ellinor! I must not blame you; it is only that the world is not made for me, nor I for the world. Forgive me and forget. You are what you are. I am what I am.” He drew his hand from hers, turned his glance away. “To-night, as you sat, so resplendent, so pleased with the flattery and the admiration of these ... these creatures; so decked out, so different, the scales fell away from my eyes. I saw the new course of self-deception I had entered upon; and it was very bitter. I have had no sleep this month. The past has been brought back upon me. I knew that it would be so—and dreaded it. Forgive me, Ellinor!”

He took her hand and led her, as he spoke, back into the observatory and towards the stairs. She felt she was being dismissed from her high place in his life.

When they reached the tower stair he said again: “Forgive me, forget.”

And as he spoke he dropped her hand. And she ran from him into the shelter of the darkness.

She wept through the night. But, heavy as was the darkness about her soul, in it shone one star at least. Jealous! He was jealous ... and without love there is no jealousy.

CHAPTER VIII
THE HERB EUPHROSINE

Had’st thou but shook thy head or made a pause

When I spake darkly ...

Or turned an eye of doubt upon my face

As bid me tell my tale in express words....

—Shakespeare (King John).

Before her mirror the next morning Lady Lochore sat wrapt in sullen thoughts, thoughts of impotent anger, of failure, punctuated now and again by glances at her own ravaged countenance.

She had dwelt in Bindon well-nigh her allotted month, and she had accomplished nothing—unless an increase of David’s eccentricity and a marked accentuation of his antipathy towards herself could be reckoned a gain! The sands were running low. But it was not the span of the time that remained hers at Bindon (for she had no intention of leaving of her own accord and hardly believed the dreamer would find the energy to expel her, if, indeed, he were even aware of the consummation of time)—it was the span of her own life.

The sands were running very low. Meanwhile she had not conciliated David, nor had she ousted Ellinor. She had not even compromised her. Herrick was sighing pour le bon motif (young fool!) and in vain. Harcourt roué and duellist, “he who ought to have rid me,” thought she, raging, “of one or the other in a week,” had made no more progress than might old Villars himself. “Lochore did his business better!” she said half-aloud, and broke into a solitary laugh of inexpressible bitterness.

There came a tap at the door and Margery entered. Lady Lochore wheeled round, but it was idle to try and read any tidings upon the housekeeper’s impassive face.

“Well,” cried she, imperiously waving away the usual morning inquiries. “Well, speak, woman! Have you something to tell me at last?”

“Indeed, my lady, very little. Everything is much as usual. I am sorry to see your ladyship looking so ill. There do seem to be sickness about the house this morning, to be sure! Master Rickart indeed took to drugging himself last night—though that’s nothing new—and Barnaby sat up with him and lies in a dead sleep on the mat this minute outside the laboratory door just like a dog.”

“Pshaw! Go on.”

“Sir David, he was not himself yesterday, so Mr. Giles tells me; and a bad night he had too. Eh! He paced that platform, my lady, right through from midnight to dawn. Not a wink of sleep did I have either with hearing through the window the sound of his steps and knowing him so tormented, poor gentleman! That was after Mrs. Marvel had left him!”

Lady Lochore struck the table with her beringed hand and started to her feet.

“Mrs. Marvel!”

Margery began to pleat a corner of her apron.

“Yes, my lady. She was up with him there on the tower till nigh midnight.”

“On the tower!”

“Oh, yes, my lady. Not that that’s anything new either. She used to be half the night with him sometimes. But that was before your ladyship came. She stopped going this last month. But last night—eh, my lady, they did talk! I could hear the sound of their voices—she has great power with Sir David—has Mrs. Marvel.”

Lady Lochore sat down again. Her fingers closed on the muslin of the dressing-table. Helplessly and hopelessly her haggard eyes looked forth into a black prospective. Oh, she had failed—failed!

“’Tis indeed a sad day for Bindon,” said Margery after a pause, as if in answer to Lady Lochore. “No wonder your ladyship is anxious. There are times when I do think we’ll have some dreadful catastrophe here. If it’s nothing worse there’ll be an accident with them drugs, as sure as fate. Master Rickart will be poisoning some of the poor folk again, or himself, maybe, or, indeed, it might be Mrs. Marvel, she that’s always in with him.”

Lady Lochore started ever so slightly and turned round sharply. Never had Margery looked more benevolent, more virtuous.

“Yes, that’s what I do be saying to myself,” pursued the housekeeper. “Somebody will be found dead, and nobody to fix the blame on, with the way things are going on.” (The pupils of Lady Lochore’s eyes narrowed like a hawk’s.) “And when I see Mrs. Marvel going about, so young and fresh and strong, and sure of herself:—‘Maybe it will be you,’ thinks I.”

“Oh, get away with you!” cried Lady Lochore, and buried her head on her hands with a frenzied gesture.

“Shall we go and look through the bars into the little paradise of poisons?”

When Colonel Harcourt had suddenly made this suggestion to his friends, as they lay, in somewhat discontented mood, under the shade of the spreading cedar tree this oppressive summer day, he had cast a meaning glance towards Lady Lochore and she had risen with alacrity.

“Excellent!” she cried, when at the forbidden gate Harcourt produced the key with a flourish.

She knew of David’s difference with the colonel on the previous day; and though it had sunk into insignificance before the news of Ellinor’s return to the tower, she was now as the drowning creature that clutches at straws-Colonel Harcourt was a noted shot. And she clapped her hands when the gate rolled back on its hinges. She had no need to be told that the dangerous Mrs. Marvel was busy among the herbs within.

Herrick, moodily striding beside the Dishonourable Caroline, gave but the most perfunctory ear to a discourse upon the inductions to be drawn from a partner’s first play of trumps—with especial reference to certain crimes of his own committed the previous night. He started as he saw Harcourt’s action.

“No—no!” he exclaimed. “I understand that this would be an indiscretion.”

“You will perhaps allow me,” said Harcourt blandly, “to make use of a key delivered over by no less a person than our host himself.”

“Mr. Herrick thinks it more discreet to climb over the wall!” suggested Priscilla. She had a happy faculty for being spiteful with a rosebud look of innocence.

“What, Luke!” cried Lady Lochore, seizing the young man by the arm and dragging him towards the entrance, “so cast down! Was the fair widow then hard of approach to-day? Pluck up heart, lad. What! You a poet, you a little nephew of the original Herrick, and not know that when a woman assumes the defensive she is just considering the question of surrender? Why, what a lady this is! Eh, Priscilla, poor you and poor me must hide our diminished heads!”

She broke into a jeering laugh as the girl crimsoned and tossed her chin; her great hollow eyes danced, brighter even that those of the lover in his renewed confidence; her cheeks flamed a deeper scarlet than those of the mortified girl herself. She sketched a favorite gavotte step or two, as she gave her hand with a flourish to Colonel Harcourt that he might lead her across the forbidden threshold.

Ellinor, seated on the stone bench, with her empty basket before her, staring with unseeing eyes at the little bluish stars that spread all over the bed where flourished the herb Euphrosine, was suddenly disturbed from her melancholy musing.

These loud voices, this trivial laughter! By what freak of irresponsible folly were these few roods of ground (which now she had as much interest to keep inviolate, as ever Vestal virgin to keep her flame alive) to be again invaded? The intruders were actually in the garden: and no spot of it was hidden from David’s tower! She had just been chiding herself for her thoughtlessness of the previous day in permitting for a moment Herrick’s uninvited presence; for her light-mindedness in having found transient amusement in his company. Had she now failed again in faithfulness, was it possible that she could have omitted to lock the gate behind her? She hurriedly felt for her key; it hung on the ribbon of her apron. Then she rose upon an impulse: David had made her guardian here, she would keep the trust.

With head held high and with determined step, she went to meet them. She lifted her voice boldly as she came within speaking distance.

“Lady Lochore, if you found the gate open, this garden is none the less forbidden to visitors, by your brother’s wish. I must beg you all to leave it!”

Lady Lochore, her white teeth gleaming between her parted lips, her deep eyes insolently fixed upon her cousin’s face, listened without a word. Then:

“Calmez-vous, ma chère,” said she, “the gate was opened for us.”

“Chide me!” Colonel Harcourt thrust his handsome presence to the front. “It would be sweet to be chidden by those rosy lips. The next best thing, I declare, to being——” He paused, let his eye finish the phrase with bold suggestion, and then concluded humourously, with an almost farcical hesitation and change of tone: “praised by them!”

There was a new freedom in his manner and Ellinor was prompt to feel it. She remembered as with a dim sense of nightmare those burning glances, unnoticed then, which had fixed her last night. What had she done to forfeit the respect even of this hitherto courteous and kindly gentleman? She stepped back as he approached and looked at him icily.

“Whether you opened the gate or found it opened, I must repeat, Colonel Harcourt, that your presence here is a breach of courtesy—to your host and to me.”

Smiling, Colonel Harcourt opened his mouth to speak. But Lady Lochore intervened.

“How well you know my brother’s mind, Mrs. Marvel!” she jeered. “But you see, even men change their minds sometimes. Colonel Harcourt, show the lady with whose key you opened the gate.”

“Sir David’s own key,” confirmed the colonel blandly, as he held it aloft. “We are not quite the trespassers you think.”

“David gave it to you?” Her eyes were dark with trouble as she said the words, less as a question than as if she were setting forth her own grief. Harcourt did not answer for a moment. Then, slipping the key into his pocket with a laugh:

“Gave?” he cried. “Gave is hardly the word. He abandoned it to me. People change their minds, as my lady says. Sir David may once have wished to keep this curious spot sacred to himself——”

“And to Mistress Marvel, but now you may all eat the forbidden fruit!” cried Lady Lochore, with a glance first at the three men and then at Ellinor. “Sir David has at last found that it is not worth keeping to himself.”

Herrick, quick to perceive that Ellinor was being baited yet unable to gather the clue to the purpose which seemed to underlie her tormentor’s words, now came forward.

“But surely,” he urged, blushing ingenuously, “it is enough for us if Mrs. Marvel does not wish our presence.”

Almost before Lady Lochore’s hard laugh had time to ring out, Ellinor answered:

“Oh, no,” she said. The exceeding bitterness of her humiliation drew down the lips that tried to smile. “Pray, what can it be to me? I was only guardian. I am relieved of my trust.”

She made a sort of little curtsey, half-ironic. And then moved away from them.

But she was not destined to carry her bursting heart to solitude this morning.—Master Simon, his white hair fluttering, the tassel of his velvet cap swinging, the skirts of his dressing-gown flapping as he advanced with a high jerky step quite unlike his usual slow shuffling gait, emerged from the shade of the yew-tree, even as she stood on the threshold of the gate.

One glance at his wildly-lighted eye and the flush on his cheek bones, sufficed to convince Ellinor of the cause of this extraordinary infraction of his rule of life. He was still under the influence of the last night’s drug; or, worse still perhaps, of some new one. He waved his arm at her and at the group beyond.

“Admit me among you, ladies!” he cried, in a high thin tone. “I will tell you all great news! Daughter, child, this hour strikes a new era in the world’s history! The herb Euphrosine has given me back my youth!”

And, to complete the fantastic scene, Belphegor, every hair bristling, tail erect, eyes aflame with green phosphorescence, sprang from the bushes and performed a wild saraband around his master, uttering uncouth little cries.

Master Simon broke into shrill laughter.

“Ask Belphegor if we have not found the secret of youth restored!”

CHAPTER IX
AN OMINOUS JINGLE

Within the infant rind of this weak flower

Poison hath residence, and medicine power.

—Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet).

The old man good-humouredly, but firmly, resisted his daughter’s anxious endeavours to lead him back to his room. He entered the garden, established himself on the bench, and, waving a branch of the beloved herb to emphasise his words, embarked upon a profuse discourse upon its properties. The others gathered round him in curiosity and amusement.

Ellinor could not leave him a prey to the freakish humours of the company at such a moment. His brain seemed to work with an extraordinary clarity and vigour, his worn frame seemed to have regained an energy and elasticity it could not have known these twenty years. And the contrast between his aspect of æthereal age and the youthful exuberance of joy now written on his features struck her as alarming in the extreme.

Her anxiety was not lessened when Master Simon now wound up his first oration by proclaiming that, after various long hours of work, he had at last extracted so pure an essence of the Euphrosine that one drop had sufficed to produce this result upon himself.

“Then, surely, father,” she cried, “you have prepared a dangerous drug! Out of its beneficence you must have drawn a deadly poison——”

Lady Lochore had seated herself on the bench on the other side of the old student. She evinced a great interest in his remarks; encouraged him by exclamation, laughter and question to further garrulity. At Ellinor’s words she lifted her head with a sudden quick movement, like that of a stag on the alert. And into her eyes flashed a look so eager, and so evil, that she herself, in consciousness of it, instantly dropped the lids over them. She felt Harcourt’s glance upon her.

“Poison,” said she, feigning to yawn. “Oh, fie! then I’ll have none of your remedy.”

Priscilla, idly turning the pages of the “Gerard” which Ellinor had left out of her hand on the sundial, stood silent, shooting glances by turns at Harcourt and Herrick. The former, standing with folded arms behind Ellinor, the latter, lying stretched on the hot soil at her feet, seemed too thoroughly content with their posts to be lured from them. But at Ellinor’s exclamation, the little circle had been stirred.

“Poison?” echoed Master Simon in his turn. “Tush! Ellinor, I am ashamed of you! By this time you should know better. Is not every medicine, nay, every distilled spirit, poison in certain degrees? And how about Opium? How about Digitalis, Aconite and Laurel, Mercury and Antimony? Pooh! What need of names?”

“Even in love a poison lies!” murmured Herrick, and looked up languishingly at Ellinor’s unseeing face.

“No doubt,” said Harcourt, in a most indifferent voice, “so wise a philosopher as Master Simon always locks up his poisons!”

“Child,” pursued the old man, “I tell you, this herb which was lost to the world, but which you yourself found again, planted and nurtured, is destined to be the greatest boon mankind has yet known! The older students had some hints of its powers, some glimmering of its uses. But it wanted the resources of modern methods of modern chemistry to develop them. I have now reduced its essence to the most convenient form. A drop, one drop a day—ah, ladies and gentlemen, farewell to all your miseries!”

“Is it not wonderful!” cried Lady Lochore. She clasped her hands and looked keenly at the old man; and he, anxious to improve the occasion upon so earnest a believer and so interesting a case for experiment, now gave her his undivided attention.

Ellinor, with a sigh of impatience, rose, and, taking up her basket, proceeded to her neglected work of plant gathering, here and there consulting a pencilled list that was pinned to the handle. Herrick was promptly at her side.

“What are you going to make of those?” he asked, plucking in his turn a leaf from every plant that her scissors had visited.

“A febrifuge for an old woman in the village. It is promised for to-night.”

“And if I do—I have half a mind to come into your den and let you give it to me yourself—what effect could one drop have on me?” Lady Lochore was saying. And the old man answered:

“It would arrest the disease that is ravaging your strength and at the same time stimulate your nerves; so that, waste ceasing, all the energies of your body would unite in building up strength and health again.”

“How truly delightful!”

“Your restlessness would vanish. This morbid mental condition, which is so apparent, would become replaced by a calm, cheerful, contented frame of mind—like mine!”

“My dear Sir! How my friends would bless you!”

“In the course of a few months——”

“Months? La! I can’t wait months. I’ll have five drops a day.”

“God forbid! That would defeat its own end. To stimulate is one thing, but to over-excite——”

“Would five drops over-excite me?”

“Indubitably. If one has already so potently invigorating an effect, five drops would produce a most undesirable condition of mental super-excitement—most undesirable!”

“Then ten drops?”

“Colonel Harcourt,” cried Priscilla pettishly, “pray come to my rescue: there’s a wasp on my book!”

The colonel obeyed the summons, but without any extraordinary alacrity; Lady Lochore’s conversation with Master Simon was unexpectedly interesting.

“Ten drops?” Master Simon was explaining. “Madness probably. More than ten, paralysis, no doubt. Twenty? Oh, twenty would be stillness for evermore—Death!”

Having duly murdered the wasp, Colonel Harcourt was chagrined to find that the new student of pharmacopœia seemed to have already had enough of her lesson. She had risen to her feet and was standing deeply reflective. Her great eyes were roaming from side to side, yet unseeing. Her lips were moving noiselessly. He went up to her. An unusual gravity was upon his smooth countenance. He bent to her ear:

“What are you saying to yourself?” he whispered.

She started, flashed round half in anger, half in mockery; then their glances met and her face grew hard.

“I was merely conning over to myself,” answered she, “our dear old necromancer’s last pregnant utterance; it sounds like a popular rhyme:

One drop gladness,

Ten drops madness,

Twice ten a living death

After that no more breath.

Have I not put it into a useful jingle for you?” she cried, interpellating the old man.

But Master Simon, deeply absorbed in watching Belphegor, as the beast stretched and yawned and rolled restlessly in the sun, never turned his head. Colonel Harcourt laid a finger on her wrist, and drew her away from the others.

“What are you planning now?” he asked, in the same repressed undertone as before.

“Planning?” she echoed, and crossed his searching gaze with one of stormy defiance. “Oh, my dear confidant, do you not know all my inmost secrets? Dieu, how you stare! Two drops gladness, ten drops madness. Let me give you some of the stimulant—say three drops—’twould stir your sluggish wits. Do, I pray you, accompany me to the laboratory, and with these fair hands I will measure you a dose from the magic phial. Oh, how Master Simon will love me if I bring him a new patient! Believe me, it will do you a vast service, my dear sir, you have grown dull and slow of late—very slow.”

Out of her laughing face her eyes looked fiercely. He walked away from her; paused, with his back upon them all, to ponder. Then he frowned, and after that shrugged his shoulders.

“What a fool you are, Antony Harcourt,” said he to himself, “to have let yourself be mixed up with this woman’s business! I vow you’ll pack!”

Lady Lochore had returned to the bench and was again sitting beside Master Simon, and once more brooding. Tragedy was writ in large letters all over her wasted, death-stricken figure. Above all things the colonel hated tragedy. Violent emotions were so ill-bred, tiresome. What could not be accomplished with a gentlemanly ease, that, by the Lord, was not for him! A love intrigue, well and good. And if there were tears at the end of it, so long as they were not shed upon his waistcoat—and none knew better how to avoid that—here was your man. But when it came to—“By Gad!” thought Colonel Harcourt, with fresh emphasis, “the place is getting too hot for me.”

And back again he came to his resolution; this time fixed.

“I will take my leave of all this to-night. But, faith! I’ll part friends with the pretty widow.”

After her spasmodic fashion Lady Lochore now suddenly resumed her wild humours. She smiled as she saw how the two cavaliers were now again in close attendance upon Ellinor; smiled at the deserted Priscilla; and finally, at the sight of two figures approaching from the direction of the entrance, broke into open laughter.

David in the strange comradeship of Villars!

David, jealous and wrathful, coming to rescue his invaded garden, suspicious of Ellinor’s faithlessness—a possible quarrel! For the mere mischief of it, it was enough to make Lady Lochore laugh. And laugh she did.

CHAPTER X
A VAGUE DESPERATE SCHEME

Now let it work: mischief thou art afoot!

Take thou what course thou wilt.

—Shakespeare (Julius Cæsar).

“Ah, David,” cried Master Simon, in excited greeting, “you come very well to complete our pleasant party—you come well! ’Tis the red-letter day in the calendar of my life. See that flourishing growth?” He waved his spray in the direction of the parent bed. “It is bearing fruit, lad! Seed of health, for the future generation! My long life has borne its fruit at last! Euphrosine ... Gladsome Wort ... Etoile-de-Bon-Secours ... Star-of-Comfort indeed! Behold a more useful constellation than any of yours, aha! I can cry Eureka! I can sing Nunc dimittis. ’Tis the Elixir of Genius!”

Sir David threw a wondering glance at his old friend, but was arrested before he could speak in reply. Miss Priscilla put out her hand in shy greeting. (Sir David and she had never exchanged but a bow before; but it was quite evident that retiring people could not get on in this world.) David, taking off his wide-brimmed hat, bowed mechanically over the little hand, and Priscilla looked quickly up as he bent over her. But as she looked, she shrunk back. She could not have believed that any one should be so pale and yet be alive and walk abroad and smile. She flew to Herrick’s side and caught his arm upon the impulse of the moment.

“Why, Miss Pris?” said the young poet. If his eyes were not lover-like, they were kind; his cheek was ruddy-brown, his lip was red. Priscilla clung to the sturdy arm she had captured.

“It’s never you, my brother?” cried Lady Lochore. “What brings you among us frivolous humans at this unwonted hour? Have you come to turn us out of paradise with a flaming sword?”

Ellinor, who had been anxiously gazing at David, thrust herself forward in a manner quite unlike her usual reserve.

“David,” she cried, “you are ill!” She laid her hand a second upon his. “Father,” she went on, turning round appealingly, “do you not see? Cousin David is ill.” And as Master Simon took no heed, but rambled on in fresh rhapsodies, she and David remained a moment as if alone.

“They had your key, David,” she said, speaking rapidly, “and forced their way in. I have never opened the gate of our garden to a human being since you and I were here together.”

He turned to her, and seemed to bring, from a great distance, his mind to bear upon her words. Then his eyes softened, became almost tender as they rested upon her face. After a little pause, during which he was quite oblivious of the curious looks cast from all sides upon him, he answered in a low voice:

“Thank you. I think I understand now.”

Then he turned—bracing himself in mind and body—and swept the company with the gaze of the master and the host.

“I forgot my key in the gate, it seems, and you all took advantage of the circumstance—Oh, pray, not a word, Colonel Harcourt! Indeed, Mr. Herrick, do not misunderstand me. I should be infringing the most elementary tenets of hospitality did I wish to deny such honoured guests when it seems they had set their hearts on so trifling a pleasure. Pray remain in the garden, pray use it as much as you wish—to-day. I have no doubt,” he went on with a sarcastic smile, “that you will all be heartily sick of it before nightfall. Meanwhile, since to-morrow sees the end of your visit to my house, I am the more glad to gratify you in this instance.”

There was a slight pause. Harcourt exchanged a look with Herrick and shrugged his shoulders; then he turned his glance towards Lady Lochore. Her face was livid, but for the hectic patch on either cheek.

“A congé, as neatly given as ever I heard!” whispered Herrick to Priscilla, while his cheek reddened.

“Very courteous, very courteous indeed!” cried Villars in his cracked voice, making two or three quick bows in Sir David’s direction.

“My sister,” said David, taking up his unfinished thread of speech, in the same decided tone, “was good enough to promise me a month out of her gay existence. I should be indeed ungrateful if I did not appreciate the manner in which she has brought so much life and animation into our seclusion, and I must be deeply indebted to her for the well-chosen company she has collected for this purpose under my roof.” Here he made a grave inclination in which his astonished guests were all included. “But all good things come to an end; and to-morrow will see Bindon deserted of its lively guests, see us resuming the former quiet tenor of our lives with what heart we may.”

He smiled again as he concluded.

Herrick, in boyish huff, walked abruptly off with Priscilla still on his arm. Villars followed in their wake, anxious to discuss so extraordinary a situation. Lady Lochore wheeled round and caught Harcourt by the arm.

“Tony, will you submit to such treatment?” she whispered fiercely.

For a moment Harcourt looked at her, with a curious green gleam in his eye:—the affable roué was also “something of a tiger,” as David’s sister had not forgotten. But the next instant he shrugged his shoulders and detached himself from her grasp with some show of annoyance. Ellinor stood beside her cousin, face uplifted, pride of him, joy for herself exulting within her. But David suddenly put his hands to his forehead:

“If I do not get some sleep at last,” he murmured with a distraught air, “I shall go mad!”

“Father,” she cried sharply once more alarmed. “Look to David, he is ill!”

Master Simon woke up this time like the hound to the sound of the horn, and came forward with quite a new expression of acuteness and gravity on his face.

“And, by my faith!” exclaimed Lady Lochore, in fury, “this passes endurance! With your leave, Mrs. Marvel, if David is unwell, he has his sister to see to him.”

She pushed past Master Simon, who, however, put her back with a decided hand.

“One minute, Madam, this good lad will be seen to by him who has done so these many years—and in much graver circumstances, as you may remember.”

Abashed, yet still raging, she stood back.

“A trifle of fever,” said the simpler, shooting scrutiny at his patient’s face from under his drawn bushy eyebrows. “Hot and cold, flame and shiver? Eh, eh. I can read you like a book. Never has my insight been clearer. We’ll make you a draught, we’ll have you a new man. Ellinor shall brew you an anodyne. Eh, what? Come now, you’ll have to drink it. What’s that?”

David was speaking, but not to Master Simon.

“I will drink it if she gives it to me,” he said dreamily. It was to Ellinor he turned.

“And perhaps a drop—eh, child?—just one drop of the Elixir!” continued the old man, ruminating and chuckling again.

“Not one,” said Ellinor to herself. “Vervaine and violet, and perhaps one poppy head.” “David,” she pursued aloud, “no hand but mine shall mix this cup.”

And, with a swift foot she departed.

“The Elixir?” exclaimed Lady Lochore, taking up Master Simon’s word; and seizing a fold of his gown pulled at it like a spoiled child to force his attention. “Don’t forget you have promised me first some of that marvellous remedy. Look at me! Don’t you think I want a new lease of life? The present one is pretty well run out anyhow.”

She tried to smile, but her lips only twitched convulsively. There was desperation in her eye. Master Simon, instantly bestowing upon her the concentrated, almost loving, attention which a willing patient never failed to arouse in him, noted these symptoms, those of a soul well nigh as mortally sick as the body; noted them with joyous confidence. The greater the need the greater the triumph. What a subject for the grand panacea!

“Ah, you’ll give me a little bottle. You’ll give me some, now, into my hands—now—dear cousin!”

“I will myself measure you what is required, myself watch!” replied Simon. “Then, after I——”

She broke in upon his complacent speech.

“Don’t you know that we are turned out to-morrow!” she screamed. “Have you not heard David dismissing his dying sister from her father’s door!”

But Sir David, slowly moving in Ellinor’s wake, never even turned his head at this wild cry. Lady Lochore caught herself back with surprising strength of will.

“Supposing you were to take me to your mysterious room now—old Rickart?” she wheedled. “Since we have so little time, the sooner the better to begin this magic treatment. I’ve never been in that room of yours, you know, since I was a brat—I do want my little bottle!” she reiterated.

The simpler was flattered by her words to the choicest fibre of his soul. The mental intoxication had got hold of him once more. She was right, a thousand times right! She knew better than that lunatic brother of hers. The first maxim of all intelligent existence was to take the good that came, and without delay. Delay, delay! More lives lost, more discoveries lost, empires lost, souls lost by hesitation than by any other crime.

She hooked her arm in his gaily.

“To your cavern we will go!”

Half ways towards the house, Colonel Harcourt suddenly drew alongside with Sir David. They were separated from the rest of the company by the turn of the path. The guest spoke twice before he could awaken his host’s attention to his proximity. But the second interpellation was so peremptory that David started from his fevered abstraction and came to a halt, with an angry look and very much alive to the occasion.

“Well, Colonel Harcourt?”

The colonel was, on the instant, his urbane self once more.

“Forgive my interrupting you in the midst of your lofty cogitations; but, as it is my purpose to leave your hospitable house to-day, and not to-morrow, I will even say farewell to my genial entertainer, and proffer my thanks for a hearty welcome and a no less hearty speeding.”

“Farewell, then, sir,” said David coldly. “Yet one word more, before we part,” he added, with sternness: “If hosts have duties toward their guests, Colonel Harcourt—you have reminded me of it—do not yourself forget again that guests have a duty toward their hosts. That key, of which you unwarrantably——”

“A lesson, sir? By Heaven!——”

“May you take it so, Colonel Harcourt.”

The colonel’s face became purple, but Sir David was angry too: and the white heat is even more deadly than the red. The guardsman, actor in endless honourable encounters, had learned to know his match when he met him; and, as the beast passion within him cooled to merely human pitch, he was seized with a kind of grudging admiration. Here he could no longer sneer and contend. Nay, here, as a gentleman, he must show himself worthy of his antagonist.

Bowing his still crimson face with as good a grace as he could assume:

“Then, no farewell yet, Sir David; to our next meeting,” he said.

The lord of Bindon raised his hat and passed on whilst his guest remained standing.

CHAPTER XI
A PARLOUR OF PERFUME

O magic sleep! O comfortable bird

That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind,

Till it is hushed and smooth!...

—Keats (Endymion).

The atmosphere of Master Simon’s laboratory was much the same, winter or summer. No extreme of heat or cold could penetrate this crypt, deep set as it was in the foundations of the keep; and, though against the long narrow windows, cut into the wall on the level of the moat, one could see the slender spikes of reed and rushy grass perpetually trembling in the airs, there was but little direct sunshine. Sometimes, however, downward thrusts, like spears, when Sol was high; or again when he was about to sink a level shaft, rose-red in winter, amber glowing in summer, would come driving in through the vaulted spaces, high above Master Simon’s head and show to the eye that cared to notice, how dim and vapour-heavy was all the room below.

The two fires then came not amiss. Despite the flame on the open hearth and the glow of the little furnace, Lady Lochore, as she entered, shivered after the hot sunshine.

“How dark it is with you!” she cried. “And what strange odours! Ha! It smells of poison here!”

“To treat the unknown as unwholesome is the animal instinct,” said the chemist, didactically, with a glance of contempt. “How differently does it affect the intellectual being! Fortunately it is in man’s power to extract good or bad from everything. Listen! Every one of those little apparatus simmering over yonder is yielding up juices for healing. Did I choose, child—there might indeed be death in those retorts; just as there is death in fire and water, in air and in sun. These things are our servants, and we use them. Poison! How you women prate of poison! Timorous souls!”

“I, prate of poison?” exclaimed Lady Lochore. “I, timorous! Where is my phial, sir? Oh, I’ll show you if I am afraid!”

She advanced upon him swiftly through the half light to which her eyes had not yet become accustomed, and instantly belied her own words by a violent start and scream. Out of the recess where murmured the furnace fires, Barnaby illumined by the lurid glow, with elf locks hanging and face and hands blackened, suddenly emerged in his peculiar noiseless fashion; on his shoulder was Belphegor still all a-bristle and with phosphorescent eyes.

“Do you keep devils here, too?” she screeched.

The dumb boy made an inarticulate sound and stared at the lady. Who shall say the thoughts that revolved in that brain relentlessly shut off from communion with the rest of the world? In those beings who are deprived of certain senses the remaining wits seem often to become proportionately acute! Nobody could walk so softly, touch so gently as Barnaby; and nobody could see so swiftly, so deeply. He started back in his turn and glowered. This was the first time he had looked into the visitor’s face; her hectic cheek, her roving eyes, her eager teeth glimmering between ever parted lips—they liked him not. Or, perhaps, who can say, it was the soul behind those eyes that liked him not.

Master Simon chuckled.

“Poisons and devils!... my good Herbs! My faithful Barnaby! A deaf and dumb lad, my dear, nothing more! But we shall have these nerves of yours in vastly different trim, even before the day is out. Come here to the table and sit you down. Nay, now, if you laugh like that, how can we discuss in reason, how can I trust you with this precious stuff?”

Lady Lochore made a violent effort to repress the nervous tremor that still shook her.

“When I’ve had my first dose,” she said, artfully, “I shall be so much better that you will trust me with anything.”

This betokened so excellent a spirit that Master Simon could not be expected to show further disapproval. How could he, indeed, feeling in his own veins a new ichor of life, in his own brain an increased lucidity, in his temper so grand a mood of confidence and decision? He had seated the lady in his own chair and was seeking in the press for the new essence, when Barnaby arrested his attention by a timid hand. The lad pointed significantly to the cat which he was now nursing against his breast. Master Simon glanced at the animal’s staring coat, its protruding eye, noted the quick breathing and touched the hot ear. Belphegor growled fiercely.

The old man’s countenance became clouded for a moment; a shade as of misgiving crept into his eye.

“Come, come cousin,” rose the complaining note of his new patient’s voice; and Master Simon waved Barnaby away with peremptory gesture.

The boy slunk back with his burden and the simpler lifted the precious phial from its shelf.

“Here,” said he, bearing it over to the table with infinite care, and admiring its orange colour against the light, “here is the Elixir.”

When Ellinor came down the steps into the laboratory, she found her father still holding forth in the highest good humour, and Lady Lochore listening with bent head in an attitude of profound attention. At the sound of her step he broke off with an excited laugh.

“Aha, Ellinor, the cure has begun! She’s better, she’s better already. Look at her. Ah, you doubted, you, my daughter, you who worked with me side by side! Out on you, you of little faith! This is to be my best case. In a month’s time you will see what you will see.”

Lady Lochore had risen from her chair and, fixing Ellinor with unfathomable looks, in the same measure as she drew nearer drew slowly back herself.

“By the lord, to see her come, in her hateful youth and strength, in her pride—and I, I to have failed!” These were the words of the interior voice. With a convulsive movement she lifted her hand, pressed the little phial where it lay against the wasted bosom. And the pain of that pressure was, of a sudden, fierce joy. Failed? Not yet! Her glorious boy was not to go a beggar whilst such creatures as that rode!

Like a tingling fire the exultation of that single drop of magic cordial began to course through her. She had hated Ellinor before she knew her, with the instinctive hatred of the destined enemy. The instant she had set eyes upon the fresh face, the placid brow, the serious quiet eyes, this instinctive hatred had surged into a living passion that was like a wild beast ever ready to spring. And if now she were to slip the leash and let the leopard go, who could punish her, dying woman as she was? What evil would it bring upon her, were it ever known? Aye, who would ever be the wiser (as Margery said) in this house of craziness where people dabbled with unknown poisons at their own fantasy?

Thus the muttering voice within. Then it was hushed upon the silence of a resolution.

“Lady Lochore,” said Ellinor, “I must warn you, that drug is not safe!”

“Be silent!” exclaimed Master Simon, angrily.

Lady Lochore did not answer, for she was seized with laughter.

“Dear father,” insisted Ellinor. She had come round to the old man and had laid her hand caressingly upon his shoulder, “I have nothing but mistrust for your new Elixir. You have taught me too much for me not to realise its danger. If you were not now under its influence yourself, I know you would see it too. Even a mere infusion of the leaves has so strange an effect, that I have ceased—forgive me, dear—to let the villagers have it.”

The simpler threw off her touch in high displeasure.

“A woman all over!” he muttered. “Fool indeed that I was to think there could be an exception to the ineptitude of the sex! A pretty helpmate for a man of science! But I went myself to the village to-day. Aye!” the fanatic light once more shone under the white eyebrows. “There were many who needed it. Wait, Ellinor, wait! My discovery shall speak for itself—shall refute——”

“Good God!” cried Mrs. Marvel, aghast, and turned instinctively to Lady Lochore, “what will be the outcome of this?”

Lady Lochore laughed again.

“Mrs. Marvel,” she gibed, “has developed all of a sudden a mighty dread of scientific investigation. Out upon such paltry spirit! She should take a lesson by my valour, should she not, most wise and excellent alchemist? And if a little mistake does occur now and again, ’tis but the more instructive, all in the interest of mankind. Now, Mistress Marvel, would not that console you?”

Still clasping her hand over the phial in her breast, Lady Lochore now moved towards the door—slowly, for the little voice within was beginning to speak again, and she had to listen as she went. There was a new jingle rustling in her brain:

“Ten drops madness

Twenty stillness,

And after that ... blackness!

It should be easy!... Yes, it should be easy ... in a dish of tea! What a round throat the hussy has!”

“Well, father,” said Ellinor’s clear voice, “I must see to David’s sleeping draught.”

Lady Lochore in the doorway started and turned round. All at once a light shone into her brain as if some invisible hand had turned the lens of a lantern upon it: David’s sleeping draught—David.... Of course! How clear the whole thing lay before her! She had been about to be clumsy, stupid, inartistic. But now.... Oh, truly this one drop of the old man’s Elixir had been a drop of genius.... “The secret of genius,” had the old man said! Ellinor—what of Ellinor! Merely a thing in the way; a stone to trip up the step of her son’s fate. Throw it aside, and who shall say how soon another might not cast the beloved lad to earth? Aye, and when she would not be there to help. David—it was David!... Who could reckon on the doings of such a madman as David now this wooing mood had been started?

Presently, with slow steps, she came down the room once more.

Ellinor, bending over her fragrant infusion, felt a shadowing presence and looked round, to find Lady Lochore at her shoulder. It was in the dim and vapoury corner behind the screen lit only by the glow of the charcoal. An impression of gleaming eyes and of teeth from which the lips were drawn back for one moment troubled her vaguely; but the next she was full of pity. “Poor creature! How ill she is, and how restless!” she thought.

“Is that the stuff?” inquired Lady Lochore, laughing aimlessly like a mischievous child. And Mrs. Marvel answered her gently, as if it had been indeed a child who questioned:

“Yes, does it not smell sweet? An old recipe, ‘The Good Woman’s Brew’; Vervaine, Red Lavender and Violet, Thyme, Camphire, and a sprig of Basil.”

She now placed the vessel on a low shelf close at hand, and began deftly lifting out the sodden herbs with a glass rod. Little jets of aromatic steam rose and circled about her. Lady Lochore followed her, and once again bent over her shoulder. Barnaby seated, cross-legged, in the darkest corner near the furnace and nursing humpy Belphegor, stared at the two women with all the might of his wistful eyes.

“What are you doing?” asked Lady Lochore.

“Surely you see: clearing these grosser leaves away before finally straining.”

“Oh, let me!”

Ellinor laid down the rod and looked at the speaker with mingled surprise and anxiety. “I hope in Heaven,” she was thinking, “that my father has given her no more than the one drop.”

“Do let me,” insisted Lady Lochore and laid a burning finger on the other’s cool hand.

“Oh, certainly if it pleases you. Meanwhile I will get the cup,” said Ellinor and turned away.

She had hardly had time to take down the chosen goblet from a cupboard, when there came a strange and sudden uproar from behind the screen.—A growl like that of a wild beast from Barnaby, a snarl from Belphegor, a wild shriek from Lady Lochore.

“Help, help!”

Ellinor sprang to the rescue. But her father had already forestalled her. When she reached the spot he was in the act of plucking the dumb boy’s great hands from Lady Lochore’s throat. Lady Lochore was talking volubly, in a high hysterical voice, between laughing and crying:

“He’s mad, I think! These afflicted creatures are never safe! He wants to murder me. I was just stirring David’s potion, as she told me, and he sprang on me like an ape. Ah, God! I am nearly strangled! Fortunately,” she added, with a shrieking laugh, “David’s precious potion is safe!”

She had been clasping both hands over her breast, and now rapidly passing one hand over the other, drew the folds of her kerchief closer about her throat; for glancing down, she had seen a small yellow stain upon the lace, and quickly covered it.

“But what can have happened?” exclaimed Ellinor, “Barnaby is the gentlest creature....”

Gentle, however, seemed hardly a word to apply to the lad at the moment. Struggling in Master Simon’s grasp, mouthing, gesticulating, uttering ghastly sounds, Barnaby seemed indeed to justify Lady Lochore’s epithet—mad.

“He must be shut up!” cried Master Simon, and, with unwonted harshness, shook the boy as he led him away by the collar.

Now Barnaby crouched down and whimpered. The old man paused:

“It’s possible he may have been at my drugs,” said he, looking at his servant curiously. “So—it will be interesting to watch. I will make the rogue show me by and by which it is he has been after. Strange! That would be the first time!”

“For God’s sake, lock him up, lock him up!” screamed Lady Lochore, suddenly breaking into fury. “One’s life’s not safe in this lunatic asylum, between your potions and your idiots. Lock him up, I say, or I’ll not dare trust myself alone another minute. I ought to be thankful, surely,” she turned sneering upon Ellinor, “that David’s hospitality ends for us to-morrow.”

“Come, come,” said Master Simon, as if the afflicted creature could hear him. So deep engrained was the habit of submissiveness, that it needed but the pressure of the old man’s finger to lead the culprit to the little room off the laboratory. Master Simon pointed with his finger and Barnaby crawled in, much as a dog retires to his kennel against his will, pausing to cast imploring glances back. But as the chemist closed the door and turned the key, there came a fresh outburst from within, followed by a muffled sound of sobs and cries.

Master Simon stood a moment with reflective eye, muttering to himself: he had an unwilling notion that the famous Euphrosinum Elixir might have something to say to these unpleasant symptoms.

Sir David came into the laboratory. He was seeking Ellinor; he looked neither to the right nor to the left, nor seemed aware of any other presence.

“Dear Ellinor,” said he, taking both her hands in his, “I feel more and more weary—and sleep would be most blessed. Give me the promised cup.”

“Dear David,” said Ellinor, starting from him, “it is ready.”

Lady Lochore watched them a moment, darkly intent. Then she came striding down the length of the room with great steps, her silken skirts swishing from side to side. She halted before the simpler:

“Good evening and good-bye, cousin!”

“Stay a moment,” said he perturbedly. “That phial——”

“What of it?” she cried, and her eyes shot defiance.

“I have been thinking, my child—not that I have any doubt of it, for it is a grand drug—but I have been thinking it might be better, perhaps, if I prepared a more diluted solution. Give me back that bottle.”

“Not for the world!” said she harshly, and fingered the empty bottle in her bosom. “What, can you not trust me? Oh, it’s precious, precious!” Her voice rang again with wild note. “It has given me back my life.”

She turned to gaze once more, with chin bent down and half-closed eyes, at the figures of Ellinor and David at the distant end of the room. “Look, look! She pours his draught into the cup. From her hand he takes it! ‘Dear Ellinor, sleep would be most blessed to-night.’ He drinks! He will sleep——” So the interior voice, shrill in the silence of her soul. Then aloud:

“Good evening, cousin Simon, and good-bye!” she repeated.

She again took up her interrupted way. As she drew nearer to the door:

“And good-bye to you, David, sleep well!” she called from the threshold upon a strange high pitch.

Master Simon looked after her, shook his head, drew a deep breath of doubt through his nostrils and ran his hand distractedly through his beard. He was very tired, and felt a certain confusion in his head, succeeding the exhilaration of an hour ago. Belphegor was humped in a corner. Nothing seemed to be going quite according to calculations. David passed him with a quick step. “I am going to sleep,” said he, in a curious still voice, as he went by.

Sleep! It was a pleasing suggestion.

“Ellinor,” said the old man plaintively, “if there is any of that calming decoction left, I think I might do well to partake of it myself to-night.”

“There is a whole cup still,” said Ellinor, and turned back to the shelf.

CHAPTER XII
TO SLEEP—PERCHANCE TO DREAM!

My heart a charmed slumber keeps

And a languid fire creeps

Through my veins to all my frame,

Dissolvingly and slowly: soon

From thy rose-red lips my name

Floweth. And then, as in a swoon,

With dinning sounds my ears are rife.

My tremulous tongue faltereth.

I lose my colour, I lose my breath,

I drink the cup of a costly death

Brimmed with delirious draughts of warmest life!

—Tennyson (Eleänore).

Ellinor brought so weary a body, so weary a mind to bed that night, that almost as soon as her head touched the pillow she fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

But before long a dim consciousness of trouble began to stir within her mind, a feeling of sorrow and oppression to bring sighs from her breast. There was in her ears a sound as of lamentation and tears. At first this was vaguely interwoven with her own sub-acute consciousness of distress; but presently, and suddenly it seemed, it became so insistent that she started and sat straight up in bed, eyes and ears alert, staring and listening.

It was her custom to keep both her windows uncurtained at night, so that, waking, she might exchange a look with his stars, and sleeping, let them look at her. One window was always wide open. Like a flower, she craved for all the light and air that heaven and earth could give.

She sat and stared and listened. Not from her own heart, as she at first thought, did these sounds of trouble ring in her dream: attuned to trouble as it was, her heart had but echoed another’s misery. Something—what was it? Nothing human, surely—was appealing, calling with moans and whines, like that of some piteous trapped animal that clamours to the unhearing skies. Aye, and that square of closed moonlit window, where there should be but the silhouette of an ivy spray or two, was blocked out by some monstrous shape. Again she thought it was nothing human, though the casement shook and there were sounds of taps as if from desperate hands. Her pulses beat thick and hard in her temples and she had a moment’s paralysing terror. But she was at least a fearless woman. The next instant she sprang out of bed, and wrapping herself in the cloak that lay to her hand, she seized the rushlight and advanced boldly. Before raising an alarm she would see for herself what the thing was.

She had not reached within a yard of the window, when with an exclamation of mingled relief and astonishment, she laid the light aside and sprang forward and flung open the casement.

“Barnaby!” she cried, and drew the boy by main force into the room.

He fell like a dead weight at her feet, exhausted, unable to sustain himself, his hands feebly closing upon the hem of her garment as if thereby clinging to safety.

On the wall of the Herb-Garden the young poetaster Herrick had sought a sentimental seat from which he could feast his love-lorn gaze on the windows of Mrs. Marvel’s chamber; and, watching the tiny flickering light within rise and sink against the naked panes, feast his heart on God knows what innocently passionate dreams.

It was an ideal night for such dreamings; and the Italian-soft airs that blew upon young Romeo’s cheek could scarcely have been more tender than this English Lammas-night breath that gently fanned young Luke’s ardour. A night of nights to sit lost in luxurious despair, to rock a fancied sorrow and a fanciful love with poetic metre and rhyme; to weave the sacred thought of the lady’s bower with the melancholy of the moonlit hour, the sob of unrequited love with the plaint of the night-bird in the grove.

To this idyllic love-dream what an awakening! Shattering these ideals how brutal, how horrid a reality!

There came running steps in the shaded garden paths, a black, furtive figure across a white-lit garden space; and then—Herrick looked and rubbed his eyes like a child and looked again before he could believe—a man’s figure, to his distressed vision tall and largely proportioned, climbing, yes, ye gods! climbing up, up, the ivy ropes, up to that window where his own fancy hardly dared to-night to reach, albeit with such reverend haltings, with such swoonings almost from its own temerity.

The night picture swam before his eyes. He gripped the stones on either side of him. When the mists cleared, he must look again. He looked and saw a white figure, all white even as he had held her to be—all white above the world—was it a minute, was it a lifetime ago? The white figure opened its arms, drew into its embrace the dark visitor. All the whiteness seemed to become lost in the blackness. Black, too, it grew before the eyes of the youthful poet—black the whole world and black his heart!

He let himself drop from his perch down into the herb-beds. And there he lay, crushing vervaine and balsam and sweet thyme into aromatic death. There he lay a long, long time.

Mistress Margery Nutmeg had tied her goffered nightcap under her decent chin and laid her respectable head upon a chaste pillow with all her usual expectation of that rest which is the reward of an excellent conscience. But (as she afterwards averred) the first strange thing in a night which was to prove one of the strangest at Bindon-Cheveral was that she could not sleep. She felt, she said, as if the Angel of Death was beating his wings about the House; and whenever she closed her eyes she saw rows of little phials before her; and, considering she was so much accustomed to poor dear Master Rickart’s odd ways, it was the most curious thing of all that she could not get the thought of Poison out of her head. At last she could almost have believed she was beginning to doze when there came sounds without her window as of a tapping, a scratching, a scraping, a rustling.

She listened; there was no mistake. Out of bed she got. Out of the window she looked!

In Lady Lochore’s boudoir, despite the midnight hour, the candles were still burning in goodly array, illuminating round the green board four tired faces, the play of eight hands, the flutter of cards and the flash of dice. Two of these faces showed greedy interest: the wax-like pale-orbed countenance, to wit, of the Dishonourable Caroline and the oriental visage of Villars. But the third, Lady Lochore’s, fever-spotted and haunted, beheld the capricious fortunes of chance ebb or flow with equal indifference. What cared she whether gold grew in a little pile beside her, or whether she had to jot down sums no banker would credit now to the name of Lochore? As little for the game, as little for loss or profit, as small Priscilla herself, whose black-rimmed eyes pleaded for bed, who took no pains to conceal her yawns and played her cards as if she were already in a dream.

Yet Lady Lochore was eager to keep company about her to-night. She was the first to insist on the fresh round; the first to press the willing elderly gamblers to another cast. It seemed as if she wanted to throw her heart into the excitement; to hear the rattle of the dice and her own loud laugh; to force herself to interest in her opponents’ wrangles; to pin her attention to the adding of points and the deduction of loss and gain—as if she welcomed anything that might drown the small insistent whisper at her ear. Anything to drive away the vision of the great four-post bed waiting for her in the night’s solitude.

Crouching at Ellinor’s feet, Barnaby was trying to tell her, to tell her something, to get her aid for something, with all the agonised effort of the human soul struggling to find expression through limitations worse than those of the brute animal. Deaf and dumb, and so vital a message to be conveyed!

With patience as pitiful as the creature was pitiable, Ellinor bent and tried in vain to understand.

How he had come to seek her in so perilous a fashion she had, however, no difficulty in divining. It was but too likely that Master Simon in his present condition had been oblivious of his prisoner, insensible of his cries and knocks. But, with his ape-like activity, the lad could escape easily enough through the window; and she was herself the only person from whom he could confidently seek help. All that she could understand readily enough. But why should he require this help?

As a first thought she endeavoured to discover if he were hungry; he vehemently shook his head. He almost struck from her hand the glass of water she, misled by his repeated gesture of one in the act of drinking, then held to his lips. He was obviously in sore need of restorative, but the mental distress overshadowed the physical. Now his plucking fingers began to urge her to the door: he pointed, dragged himself a little way on his hands and knees, like a dog, came back and again pulled her towards it.

Ellinor might have been more alarmed had she not remembered his attack on Lady Lochore, and been persuaded that the poor fellow was still suffering from the effects of her father’s mania for experiment.

She resolved at length to humour the boy as far as she could, and at the same time, from her own little pharmacy downstairs, to obtain some harmless sedative and then coax him into bed again. Drawing her cloak more closely over her white garb, she took up the rushlight in one hand and extended the other to Barnaby, who in joy staggered to his feet and precipitated himself forward.

As they entered the ante-room there came from the stone passage without a sound of unfaltering steps, approaching with singular rapidity. They hardly seemed to halt a second upon the threshold of the outer door before its lock was turned and it opened before them.

Ellinor glanced at Barnaby in surprise, and marked a sudden terror in his face that infected her in spite of herself. But the next instant, as she looked round to see Sir David standing before her, sprung as it were out of the blackness, the feeling gave way to a glow of courage. Ellinor’s heart always rose to the fence. Barnaby, however, remained very differently impressed; the human soul in him seemed to wither away in fear. Like an animal before some abnormal manifestation of nature, he crept back, cowering, with eyes fixed on the new-comer’s face, to the further corner of the inner room.

So impossible a situation was it that her cousin should seek her in her own apartment at midnight, that it hardly needed the look on his face to convince her that something was strangely wrong.

Faint as was the gleam of colour thrown by the rushlight she held aloft, his countenance appeared to her all transfigured; so much so that she had an unreasoning impression that his white face itself diffused radiance in the gloom. His heavy hair was tossed away from his forehead as if wild fingers had played with it. Fragments of moss, a withered leaf here and there, clung to his garments; but it did not need this evidence to tell Ellinor that he was straight from the woods—the breath of the trees and of the deep night emanated from him, fresh and pungent, indescribable.

“David!” she cried, retreating step by step from his advance. “I thought, I hoped you had been asleep!”

“Asleep!” he answered. He tossed his hair from his brow. “Nay, Ellinor I have but just awakened from a long, long sleep: from a sleep like the sleep of death.”

Notwithstanding his pallor, he looked strong and young; the tired lines and the unconscious frown of sorrow were smoothed away. Slowly she had stepped back into the inner room and he had followed eagerly. She had little thought at the moment for transgressed conventions. Every energy of her being was absorbed in the desire so to deal with him as to give no shock to a brain acting under some inexplicable influence. She instinctively felt that he must be treated even as the sleep-walker who has above all things to be guarded against sudden waking.

Assuming a look of perfect calmness, she lit her candles and made him welcome with a smile as if her white bedchamber had been a drawing-room, and she, in her cloaked nightdress, had worn garments of state.

“Sit down, dear cousin, and we can talk a little—but not long, for we both must sleep.”

His eye clung to her, as she moved about, with an unfaltering gaze of delight. So had she seen him look at his stars! In her turmoil of doubt and anxiety there was an under movement, as of a long conceived joy that had strength to stir at last. Even if he were distraught, he loved her! But the impression that things were ill with him soon devoured every other.

“I, sit down!” he cried. “I, sleep! Nay, Ellinor, do you not understand! I have been in bondage all this time, and now this blessed cup you gave me has set my soul free. First it ran like fire through my veins. It drove me out into the woods, I ran among the singing trees. I cannot tell how it was with me, but I felt strength growing within my soul. There was struggle, there was pain, but this giant strength grew up. I fought. One by one I broke the rusting chains that so long have bound me—I threw the links away! Memories, doubt, hate, despondency, I cast them all by! I stood in the glade, looked up to the stars. I was free—free, Ellinor, free to act, free to speak. To love you, to love you...! Then the trees took voice: ‘Go to her!’ they said, and waved their arms towards you. They ran with me. Straight as the arrow from the bow, I started, leaping over the mountains. And now, Ellinor, love, I have come!”

He drew near to her as he spoke, and in his hands, cold as ice, he held both hers. She would not have drawn away if she could. About herself with David she had not a second’s doubt; by a look, she knew, she could have thrown him to her feet.

His words flowed on like ceaseless music. Was woman ever wooed by lips so eloquent and so beautiful, with touch so passionate and yet so reverent! The pity of it: it was only a dream!

“I knew you were waiting for me in your white garments, with your light burning. I knew you would open your inner door for me. Oh, faithful heart!”

Now he raised both her hands and brushed them with his lips one after the other but so lightly that she hardly knew the caress. Then she felt his arms hover about her like wings: the shadow of a lover’s embrace. He bent his face close to hers. His voice, through passionate inflexions, sank to an undertone of tenderness.

“You have stood beside me on my platform at night. You did not know it always, but you were always there! You have stood beside me in the dawn, and in the dawn I sought you in the garden. Ah, that morning I would have broken my chains and awakened to freedom if I could! Always, since that first night, my heart has been singing to you, though my lips were silent. But you heard, did you not, the song of my heart? I heard the song of yours, Ellinor, through all the evil things that beat around me, demons of the past that put troubles and discords between two songs that should ever rise together. Do not say anything—do not tell me anything of those dark hours!” he went on, arresting her as she was about to speak. The serenity of his own countenance became disturbed for a moment, its radiance overclouded. He fixed her, with piercing question:

“Can I trust you?”

And, her true eyes on his, she made answer:

“To the death!”

He drew a long deep breath; and, with both hands, made a gesture as if thrusting back victoriously some spectre enemy. Smiling, and with exultation clanging in his voice:

“See, see,” he cried, “how they fade, how they melt away! Freedom is ours!”

Now he flung his arm around her and strained her to his breast. To be held to his heart and feel the passion of his embrace—it ought to have brought to her that sweet ecstasy of trouble, which to a pure woman is sacred to her only love. But to Ellinor this moment was perhaps the cruellest of her life. Must love remain to her ever but a dream, that only in dream, or in delirium, she should be wooed! Her dominant thought, however, was still for David. She saw him, like the sleep-walker of the legend, advancing along a perilous bridge beneath which lay the chasm of madness or death.

“Oh, God,” she cried in her soul, “let not mine be the hand to thrust him down!”

Then, as if in answer to her prayer, there came upon her through the open window, like a promise of peace, the vision of the night’s sky. Just against the black edge of the tower, emerging even as she looked, appeared pure and bright and steady the effulgent light of the new star.

“See, David,” she said, and turned his face from its ardent seeking of her own, “there are the stars, there is your Star, looking in upon us! Shall we not go and look at her from the tower. Surely she is even more radiant than usual!”

For a second his passion resisted the gentle touch; then all at once she felt his frenzied grasp relax. She drew a long breath! She slipped from his relaxing hold as the mother slips her arm from under her sleeping child. A change came over his face; a wistful expression of struggle and doubt as between reason and madness. But the next instant the wild light flamed up again.

“The star!” he whispered, then loudly repeated: “My star!” and stretched out his arms to it, with the airy unmeasured gesture of the delirious.

Her heart stood still. Like a fire or a fever, his exaltation had but leaped up the higher for the momentary check.

“Ellinor, my star! The world’s desire, my love—I come to you!”

He made a spring towards the window, and paused. With arms still wide outstretched, he looked like some god poised before taking wing for endless space. She flung herself against him, and forced him back from the window.

“David—Beloved...!” And, almost with relief, she felt the second danger of his passion close round her again.

“My star!” he repeated exultingly. His voice rang out now with high unnatural note, now sank to rapid whispering. “Sweet miracle—the star that shines in my sky and walks in beauty beside me! You remember, you remember, Ellinor,” he whispered, “we had met already, that first night, spirit to spirit, my soul to yours, O Star, before we met in the flesh!” He laughed in joy, and she felt the scalding tears rush up to her eyes.

“Ah, poor David!”

“Oh, I knew you at once! There you shone out of the dim old room, as you had shone out of my black spaces. Your brow of radiance, your hair of fire! And your eyes—oh, blue, blue! Ellinor, you remember! I kissed you—my star! I held you and I kissed you.” The whisper now sank so low that she could hardly follow his words. A tremor had come into the arms that encompassed her. She felt as if a weakness, a dimness, were gathered upon him. “That night we opened the door and stood upon the threshold of the golden chamber. Why did we not go in? I do not know. Shall we not go in now? Ellinor, bride, give me again your lips, those lips that have haunted me waking and sleeping. Ellinor!”

The last articulate words broke way almost upon a moan. He was breathing with panting effort. Suddenly he swayed, and she upheld him. Then he failed altogether, and she guided his fall—strong as she was, it was all she could do—till he lay stretched his length on the floor at her feet. Then she knelt beside him.

His eyes looked up at her, pleading through the mists that were thickening over them. His lips, without sound, formed the prayer for her kiss. She knew not what despair was coming upon her. The apprehensions, vague yet so evil, that had yet been gathering thick about her all this strange acute hour, seemed now massed into one terrible tangible shape: in a second she must look upon its awful face. Well, what she could still give her beloved in life—that she would give from her breaking woman’s heart.

And bending down, she laid her lips upon his.

She thought it was the kiss of death. He smiled faintly, his eyelids fell. Like a child, he turned his head upon his arm and drew a long deep sigh as of the peace of repose after unutterable restlessness. She crouched down close to watch for the moment of the passing of all she loved.

Once before she had seen another strong man’s life go from him as she knelt by his side; had known the very instant between the last heaving of his breast and its eternal stillness. And she thought now, that when that minute should again strike for her and she should wait for the sound of the breath that was never to come, her own life would be driven out under the pressure of that slow agony!

So prepared was she for horror that she could hardly credit her own senses when presently it was borne in upon her that his respiration was becoming gradually deeper and more assured, that his pallid face was assuming a more natural look. She slid her trembling fingers upon his hand; it was warm and humanly relaxed.

He was alive! He was asleep! The Spectre of Terror had fled from before her without unveiling its countenance. She had thought their kiss was the kiss of death, and behold, it was as the kiss of Life!

Yet the tide of relief, passionate as it was, could not carry away with it all doubt and fear. He was deaf to her call, insensible to the pressure of her fingers. Even as she knew that no man in ordinary circumstances could fall thus suddenly from waking into slumber, she knew that this was the unconsciousness of the drugged.

CHAPTER XIII
THOU CANST NOT SAY I DID IT

O! my fear interprets. What! is he dead?

—Shakespeare (Othello).

Across a lively interchange of words between Mrs. Geary and Mr. Villars, across Lady Lochore’s shrill laughter and malicious intervention, there fell a silence. It was as if a shadow had suddenly eaten up the light. Lady Lochore became rigid, and the dice-box dropped from her hand.—All looked towards the door. There stood a broad and placid figure, white-capped and white-aproned, with folded hands; a figure surely the very sight of which should have brought comfort and confidence. But Lady Lochore stared at it with terror on her face.

“Please, my lady, could I speak with you a minute?”

Sir David’s sister rose slowly and moved like an automaton across the room. She lifted her hand to her contracted throat.

“I am sorry to tell you, my lady, there is something seriously amiss.”

Lady Lochore spread out her arms as if groping for support. Her dry tongue clicked.

“I knew there was no use going to Sir David,” continued the unctuous whisper.

Sir David! The blackness suddenly passed away from before Lady Lochore’s eyes.

“Sir David, woman!” She clutched the housekeeper’s wrist and pinched it sharply.

“Yes, my lady.” Margery looked mildly surprised. “Him being always lost in stars, so to speak, and locked up in his tower.”

“Then he’s not ill?” Lady Lochore flung the servant’s hand away from her. She drew a deep breath, then gave a little rasping laugh. What news she had hoped for? Relief and disappointment ran through her like cross currents.

“Ill, my lady? Sir David? Thank God, no! Not as I know, my lady.”

Margery did not often show emotion beyond a well fixed point. But she was surprised; she really was.

“Please, my lady,” began the whisper again, and Lady Lochore bent for a moment a scornful ear. Then her laughter rang out again, louder this time.

“Excellent Nutmeg! What a story! You have been having toasted cheese for supper, sure!—Listen, good people: some one has been trying to break into Margery’s sacred chamber. Oh, fie, Mrs. Nutmeg!”

Her pale lips seemed withered with her forced merriment as she turned upon the trio still sitting round the green cloth. The gamblers halted in their renewed wrangle to give her an impatient attention. Little Priscilla, arrested in a yawn, twisted a small weary face over her shoulder to stare.

“Not my chamber,” said Mrs. Nutmeg, raising her voice slightly, but otherwise quite unmoved.

“Not yours.”

“No, my lady—the chamber over mine.”

“Mrs. Marvel’s!”

And once more Maud Lochore’s hysterical mirth broke forth. The next instant it was suddenly hushed, and stillness fell again upon them. Priscilla rose from the table and came forward three steps impetuously, then halted, crimsoning to the roots of her hair, clasping and unclasping her hands. The Dishonourable Caroline looked at her daughter for a second with a pale, hard eye, then said in a repressive tone curiously at variance with the meaning of her words:

“Thieves and housebreakers; we shall all be murdered in our beds! Let the men be called! Let search be made! Come, Priscilla.” She slowly waddled round to the girl’s side. “You shall remain in my room till the miscreants are captured. No doubt some of the gentlemen would stay within call.”

“The gentlemen—where are they?” asked Lady Lochore. Then bending her brow darkly on Margery: “But why did you not call the men?” she asked.

Margery pleated her apron.

“Please, your ladyship,” she answered, in that sort of whisper that is more effectively heard than the natural voice, “it was no thief, whoever it was. He knocked at Mrs. Marvel’s window and the window was opened to him.”

Lady Lochore gave a cry, a cry charged with a curious triumph as well as a stabbing remorse. Was her enemy delivered into her hands after all! Then that secret minute in the laboratory, that dire deed of impulse and opportunity, it had all been useless! For a brief black space she fought the thought in her heart. Well, who could tell, after all? Old Rickart was mad, mad as a hatter; and his theories, his famous discoveries might well prove but moonshine spun from his own crazy brain, while she, poor fool, was wearing out her short remnant of life with leaps and bounds, with senseless terrors, with weak repentances for a deed that perhaps had never been done! And if it were done? Up sprang her indomitable spirit. If it were done, it was well done! And, done or no, the hour of personal vengeance was vouchsafed her at the moment she had ceased to hope for it, least expected it. She would not be Maud Lochore, with the strength of death upon her, did she not use it to the full.

Old Villars rose from his seat, his face working with varied emotions: anger, greedy curiosity, low vindictive pleasure. The Dishonourable Caroline packed her daughter’s arm firmly under her own.

“It is time for bed,” she asserted.

But Priscilla wrenched herself from her mother’s grasp and stamped her foot.

“Where is Mr. Herrick?” she exclaimed, and burst into tears.

Meanwhile Lady Lochore was speaking in broken sentences of ejaculation and command: “Shame, disgrace upon the House of Bindon! How dared the creature bring her wanton ways under our roof? But it was well, order should be put to it all.”

“Take these candles, Margery,” she ordered, “and lead the way. My good friends, I crave your support. I am a daughter of this house. I have to defend its honour and expose those who would bring shame upon it. You see, you have all seen: I stand alone. My poor brother—” But her voice broke. Again the awful sickening qualm that she had been fighting against all the evening seized upon her. Of him she could not nerve herself to speak. Savagely rallying her strength, she took up her candle. “I must have some disinterested witnesses,” she went on. “Come and see me pluck the mask from a smooth hypocrite’s face. What’s the child sobbing for? Why doesn’t she go to bed as she is bid? Is she so very anxious to see Mrs. Marvel’s Romeo?”

With a cruel little laugh she passed on, disdaining Villars’ eagerly proffered arm.

“Thank you, but you had better follow behind, most faithful cavalier. How strange that both the other gentlemen should be missing! But we shall soon know which has the best excuse.”

Ellinor knelt brooding over her beloved, now cold to the heart again with the doubt how this might end, now reassured by the depth of his repose. There was nothing stertorous in the long easy breathing. A natural moisture had gathered on the sleeper’s brow. The fluttering irregularity of the pulse was settling down under her fingers into fuller, slower measure. That the “Good Woman’s” sleeping draught which she had herself prepared for David could produce so potent an effect was, she knew, impossible. But, however produced, it seemed, so far, beneficial.

It was for a space of time, almost happiness to see him sleep and in such peace, with the shadow of the smile her kiss had called up still upon his lips; to feel herself so necessary to him; to be alone with him and her secret in the night.

Not yet had she time to examine the wild conjectures flitting through her mind; not yet time to face the problem of saving her good name and his gentleman’s honour from the consequences of this most innocent love meeting. She wanted to taste this exquisite relief, to rest her soul upon the brown-gold wings of hope before taking up her burden again.

Suddenly an insolent knock on the panel of her door startled her from her contemplation. She had but the time to spring to her feet; and upon the flash of a single thought, to unfasten her cloak and fling it hastily over David’s body, before the knock was repeated louder and the door thrown open.

Lady Lochore stood on the threshold.

Behind her was a peering group. Ellinor, in the first moment of strained fancy, saw a thousand lights, a thousand staring eyes, a sea of faces. The next instant the tide of blood began slowly to ebb from her brain. She felt herself strong, cold, indifferent. She knew she stood in night-garb before them all, she knew that the covered figure lay in full line of sight, in full light. She did not care. All her energies were concentrated in one fierce resolve: she would save the honour of this helpless man, no matter at what cost. So long as she had life and could stand before him, no one should lift that cloak to see who lay beneath it.

She took her post and faced the intruders:—Lady Lochore, with harpy countenance, craning forward, greedy of vengeance; Mr. Villars, with goatish face, looking over her shoulder, greedy of scandal; Margery with stony eyes, holding the candelabra up aloft to shed more light upon her enemy’s shame; Mrs. Geary, staring with pallid orbs.... Ellinor clenched her arms over her heaving breast.

But they who had expected so different a scene, and thought to find a panting young Romeo behind a curtain or a suave experienced Don Juan ready with explanations, a languorous Juliet or a distraught Elvira, halted almost with fear before the strange spectacle:—the prone figure, quite still, covered away, more sinister in its suggestion than even the sight of death; the menacing woman nobly robed from the spring of her full throat to the arch of her bare foot in heavy white folds, who, in her strength and purity, might have been a model for the vestal virgin guarding her sacred fire.

Lady Lochore’s indictment froze unspoken upon her lips; her face became set as in a mask of terror; the hand flung out in gesture of vindictive reprobation, finger ready pointed in scorn, shook as with palsy. Her eye quailed from the stern beauty of Ellinor’s face and dropped to the dark mask on the floor; there, clear of the folds, lay a slender hand, helpless and relaxed, with the gleam of a well-known signet-ring upon the third finger. Her mouth dropped open, her terrified eyes almost started from their sockets. She flung a bewildered look around, and met full the accusing glare of Barnaby’s gaze fixed upon her from the shadow of the window curtain. Barnaby, monstrous figure, as if her crime itself had taken shape, to call for retribution!

“Lady Lochore, what do you seek here? Have you not done evil enough already in this house!”

Ellinor’s voice pierced with direct accusation to Lady Lochore’s soul. For a second the guilty woman fairly struggled for breath. Margery saved her from self-betrayal:

“Her ladyship has surely seen enough!”

Their eyes met. These words, too, were capable of a terrible undermeaning. But the housekeeper contrived to convey through her expressionless gaze a sense of support. If this woman knew the secret, she knew it as an accomplice; there was help in the thought.

“You are right,” cried Lady Lochore shrilly, “we have seen enough! Forgive me, my friends, for having brought you to such a spectacle. Back, back, shut the door. I forbid—I forbid anyone to make a step forward. Leave the creature to her shame. Oh, it is horrible!”

She beat them back with her hands as she felt Villars’ eager pressure on one side and the slow, steady advance of Mrs. Geary on the other. She knew that their fingers itched to raise the veil of that cloak. If they had raised it, she must have gone mad!

Margery firmly closed the door.

“Really, my dear Lady Lochore,” complained Villars, “I think the matter should be further investigated. I can understand your delicate repugnance, but positively that figure on the floor—Deyvil take me—it looked like a corpse!”

“Fool, do you not see it was a ruse, a trick? Ah, it has made me sick—it is too disgusting——”

She wiped the sweat from her brow, and then in truth shuddered as from a deadly nausea.

Mrs. Geary, breathing hard and fanning herself with her handkerchief, had fixed her gaze on the speaker’s face. Her ideas moved very slowly, but they were sure.

“My dear, your whole behaviour is incomprehensible,” she said. “Mr. Villars is quite right. The matter should be investigated. Who, and in what condition, is the man under that woman’s cloak? It is our duty to elucidate the matter. Where is Mr. Herrick?”

“And for that matter, where is Colonel Harcourt?” sneered Mr. Villars.

“You shall not dare!” screamed Lady Lochore. She arrested a retrograde movement on either side with violently extended arms. “Out—back to your rooms, all of you! Are you devils, that you should want to gloat—”

Margery laid her left hand warningly on her elbow, and Lady Lochore broke off abruptly. What had she said? She had no idea herself. She could have flung herself on her face and shrieked aloud. The fearful deed was done! There could now be no more doubt. The brand of Cain was on her brow! Her death-sweat would not wash it off! It was burnt into the very bone!

She had thrust her guests into the passage with as little ceremony as Lady Macbeth dismissing the feasters. When the door of Ellinor’s outer room was closed between them and that something with Sir David’s signet-ring, the clutch at her heart relaxed a little and she could draw her breath with more ease. A sort of apathy began to creep over her. Margery was speaking and she could listen:

“Her ladyship being so delicate, it is quite natural she should be upset. It is her ladyship’s way to act on impulse. But to find such doings under her ladyship’s own roof, so to speak, and the person a close relation of the family! Mistress Marvel is a very clever lady, and whether the gentleman were drunk or asleep—” she looked up a second swiftly at Lady Lochore, and resumed the soothing trickle of speech, “her ladyship is quite right. So long as she knows how she stands with regard to Mrs. Marvel, there had better be no open scandal, such as leads,” said Margery piously, “to gentlemen’s duels and the like.”

There now came a patter of feet, a flutter of soft garments, a sobbing, uplifted voice—

“What was it? Which of them was it?”

“Priscilla!” Mrs. Geary caught her daughter’s wrist and the girl gave a cry of pain. “Disobedient child, back to your room!”

Priscilla whimpered and writhed; but the lady maintained her firm grasp and, with dignity accepting a candle from Margery’s candelabra, turned and marched the truant down the passage that led to her apartments.

Bowing and smirking, Mr. Villars, whose further advice and proffers of help were ruthlessly cut short by an impatient wave of Lady Lochore’s hand, had no resource but to betake himself with his triple light in the direction of his own quarters. He had no idea of letting matters rest there, but feigned nevertheless immediate submission.

They parted in the round gallery where three corridors met—two belonging to the modern house, the third leading to the tower-wing which had been the territory of their raid. Mrs. Nutmeg looked awhile after the bobbing lights; then, with a pensive smile upon her lips, laid down the candelabra, and after some effort, for it was not usually moved, closed the heavy oaken door which shut off the tower-wing from the newer parts of the Bindon House; locked it, and in silence placed the key in her apron pocket. Lady Lochore stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“It is as well, my lady, to know that no one can get in or out of the keep end—except through the window! The lower door I locked myself and Sir David of course has his key. But it is to be hoped that none of the disturbance reach him on his tower, poor gentleman!”

The horror returned to Lady Lochore’s eyes; how much did this secret, impassive woman really know of to-night’s deeds?

“Margery!” she cried.

“Yes, my lady, it is a grand night for the stars,” said Margery. And as the other groaned: “Will your ladyship come to bed?” she went on; “I humbly hope you have not let Master Rickart give you any of his queer drugs; you don’t look yourself. He has a kind of stuff, I have heard tell, that upsets people’s brains, fills them with queer fancies, like nightmare, so to speak. And there’s been madness in the village already. Master Rickart will have a deal to explain, I’m thinking. There, my lady, you’re shivering. Come to bed!”

Lady Lochore suffered herself to be led to her room; to be unclothed and assisted into the great four-post bed. Margery’s presence, her touch, was agony to her, and yet, when she left the room, Lady Lochore could have shrieked after her. But she closed her lips, closed her eyes.

At last she was shut in alone with her own conscience. She had never before been afraid, this woman who had been ready to take death as recklessly as she had taken life. After a while, she crawled out of bed and into the adjoining room. Above the throbbing of her pulses and her own gasping respiration she could hear the light breathing from the cot. Noiselessly she parted the curtains and let an opalescent ray of moon in upon the little sleeper.

Surely, surely, when she looked upon him for whom she had done it—her boy, whom a fool and a wanton would have conspired to keep out of his rights!—this horrible agony would leave her. She would be proud of her own courage, proud to have been strong enough to act. Crime! What was crime? The crime had been to try and defraud her child! “Ten drops madness!” How many drops could that phial have contained? Madness! Well, he had method enough in his madness to remember the way to his mistress’s arms!... “After that darkness”—the long, long Darkness! Her teeth chattered. What then? It was but retribution if his long sleep came upon him thus! Ah, they had caught the scheming widow red-handed. Red-handed was the word—oh, the hussy’s conscience was not so clear either! Why had she covered him up from their sight? Let her answer for it, she and her poisoning old father! But what was this fantastic water? Surely it was his hideous drug, little as she had had of it, that drove out this clammy sweat upon her, made her heart sink—sink with this awful sickness, filled her brain with those black fleeting shadows that even the child’s warm presence could not conjure away.

She closed her eyes, for it was almost as if the unconscious baby-visage added to her terror. But a glare swam before her inner vision, and out of it and in the midst of it, in some horrible fashion, Barnaby’s face with accusing eyes looked forth. What had brought Barnaby in Mrs. Marvel’s room—Barnaby who knew? She put her hands to her throat as if she still felt the clutch of his fingers upon it. The next instant, with a spasm of relief, she had almost called aloud with guilty Macbeth—“Thou canst not say I did it!” Let the deaf and dumb boy point and mouth and gibber, what he had seen he never could bear witness to.... Deaf and dumb—oh rare!

She stood beside the cot and gazed with a desperate tenderness upon it. There now slept the lord of Bindon! His fortune was secured, and by her deed. She bent her head to kiss the little chubby hand. But before her lips had reached it she shuddered back:—between her and her child’s hand rose the vision of another hand, pale, limp, with a signet-ring.

CHAPTER XIV
JEALOUS WATCHERS OF THE NIGHT

Fie on’t! Oh fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden

That’s gone to seed: things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely....

... Frailty thy name is woman!

—Shakespeare (Hamlet).

It was late at night when Colonel Harcourt dismounted, stiff and tired, in front of the Cheveral Arms. He had successfully sought at Bath a pair of friends who were to call upon Sir David on the morrow; but he had, somewhat morosely, declined their proffered hospitality. For some ill-defined reason he had been drawn back to Bindon.

The sleepy landlord had but a poor supper to serve: per contra an excellent bottle of wine. One, indeed, that so curiously resembled the Clos-Royal of which the colonel had approved at Bindon House that, as he tasted it, he found himself sardonically regretting that he had not pressed a more handsome gratuity into old Giles’s palm.

Indeed, he soon called for another bottle. Yet he was in no better a humour after the cracking of the second seal. The thoughts seething in his brain remained as dark and heavy as the liquor in his glass, but were far from being as generous.

His physical equilibrium was disturbed. It had always been a part of Antony Harcourt’s power with men, as with women, that no matter how seriously they might take him, he should take himself and them with gentlest ease. But to-night he was a prey to two passions that would not let their presence be denied. A passion of resentment against his whilom host; a longing to feel his own hand striking that cold, pale cheek, or yet to see a thin stain of blood upon that affectedly old-fashioned waistcoat spreading and running down, whilst he should smile and wonder that it should actually show red.

The other passion! He was in love with the widow Marvel—as damnably in love as the raw boy, Herrick, himself, with the added torture of the roué who has never yet known denial, of the materialist who can console himself with no poetic fancies and can dull his senses with no falutin of sensibility.

A month ago, if anyone had told him that his elegant person should house two such wild beasts, he would not have thought the suggestion even worth the trouble of a smile. Now, as he lay back on his wooden chair, eyeing the ruby in his glass with a deep, vindictive eye, Colonel Harcourt felt his savage guests tear at him, and was in as dangerous a mood as ever undid a fool or made a criminal. All at once the heat of the room, of the wine, of his own fierce mood, stifled him. He rose, lit himself a cigar, and sallied out, bare-headed and uncloaked, into the sweet, still night.

The inn stood a little apart from the village—a gunshot distance from the gates of Bindon Park. Colonel Harcourt paced a few steps down the moonlit white road and paused, drawing reflective puffs, feeling almost without noticing how grateful was the cool air upon his head, hearing without listening the mysterious whisper of the trees on the other side of the park walls. He moved his cigar from his lips and hesitated.

Then, on an impulse that was as sudden as it was purposeless, he turned off from the hard road, silver in the moonlight, and struck over the stile into the darkness of the narrow, tree-shaded path that led to the church on the grounds. From this, giving the Rectory a wide berth, he branched off, and, aimlessly enough, directed his steps towards the House. Twelve strokes of the night floated gravely from the little square church tower. A dog bayed in the village and was answered in deeper note from Bindon stable-yards. On went Antony Harcourt fitfully, slowly, now pausing, now beating time with steady footfall to an evil little pipe of song that the dark secret world and his own heart seemed to take up, one after the other, like a catch.

A dry stick snapped sharply under his feet, the light of a lantern flashed upon his face, a hand fell heavily on his shoulder. It was one of the keepers, who instantly apologised profoundly to Bindon’s personable guest and sped him on his way with a reverential “Good-night, sir,” succeeded by a stare and a shrug. The ways of gentle-folk were strange.

Burgundy is a wine that long remains hot in the blood. Colonel Harcourt’s pulses were throbbing. A curious excitement pervaded his being. Like the sails of a mill under a fitful breeze, anon his brain whirled with plans, anon seemed to stagnate, unable to formulate a thought. He found himself at last standing at the entrance of the ruins, at the back of the Herb-Garden. Before him the tower-wing of the house cut the shimmering star-shine with pointed gable, with massed chimney stack, with the huge black square of the keep, all fantastically picked out by stripes of moonlight. The curious exotic spices of the Herb-Garden rose against his nostrils.

He flung upwards a look of scorn:—was the brain-sick star-gazer even now at his telescope? Upon the sweep of his downward glance an illumined window caught and arrested his attention. He made a rapid calculation from the gables—Mistress Marvel’s window!

Lady Lochore still kept them at late hours it seemed, in this whilom sleepy house! The fair widow was doubtless but just disrobing for the night. As he gazed somewhat sentimentally—what tricks will Clos-Royal and the witchery of a Lammas-night play even with a middle-aged gentleman of vast experience and acute sense of humour!—suddenly he started and stared, open mouthed upon a curse.

Something black and tall and slight, a man’s figure, had appeared against the bright open window, cutting it across with outstretched arms and, almost at the same moment, something dimly pale and of soft outline, a woman’s figure, flung itself between his eyes and the unexpected vision. He caught a glimpse of white bare arms. Then all vanished again as if it had not been, and there was naught but the lighted window, open to the night, confiding, innocent, tranquil.

Colonel Harcourt gnashed his teeth and cursed long and deep within himself. For all his libertine theories and Lady Lochore’s denunciations he had never doubted for a moment but that Mrs. Marvel’s favours were a prize as yet untouched. And now—behold! One more audacious than himself had slily reached up and plucked the golden fruit!

“By the Lord, I’ll run that Lovelace to earth!” This was the first articulate thing out of his fury.

He began scrambling through the ruins in his frantic desire to reach a closer point of view. A dangerous way, in truth, but one that would perchance prove more dangerous by daylight, since the perils that are unknown do not exist and the god of chance proverbially favours the reckless. Colonel Harcourt risked his life a score of times and knew it not. Hot in his determination, he scarcely felt the hurt when he fell; and, when he spurned the crumbling, slipping stone beside him, the sound of its drop into unknown vaults evoked no image of what he himself had escaped. As little had he heeded the song of the bullet in his ear or the roar of the mine beside him when he had led his lads up the French lines at Barrosa, a dozen years before. Torn, panting, bruised, he landed at length safely on a poison-plot of the Herb-Garden. Even as he looked up again the light at the gable-end window went out.

With that light went out his own heat of disappointed passion. Homme à bonnes fortunes as he was, he was not the man to care to come second anywhere. Mrs. Marvel’s chief charm after all had been her unattainableness. The colonel, as he stood in the moonlight, was all at once a sober man. It seemed to him now that, culminating with that second bottle, he had gradually been getting drunk this whole fantastic fortnight.

“What, in all the devils’ names, did it really matter that a weak-minded recluse should slight him and his fellow guests, that he should have taken upon himself this absurd challenge, from which there was now no retreat? What was there in the country widow? And why should he have seen red because of the timely discovery that she was wanton and not virtuous? And how the devil was he to get out of this infernal garden?”

A pretty situation wherein to bring his forty-eight years’ experience and his thirteen stone of flesh! As he ruefully felt over his bruised body and damaged garments, his fingers struck against a hard outline in his waistcoat pocket. The key! He gave a soft chuckle. It was a poor end to a summer night’s venture, but an undoubted relief to be able to extricate oneself in commonplace fashion by walking out through an open gate.

Wrapping his philosophical humour round him as the best cloak to cover his sense of moral dilapidation, he was cautiously picking his way, when he became aware of a hasty footstep behind him. As he turned round, the moonlight showed him a tall, slender black figure, a haggard, white face!

“Luke Herrick!”

“Colonel Harcourt!”

The older man was the first to speak. He was not astonished—only (he told himself) highly amused. There was a tone in his voice, however, which belonged less to amusement than to some biting desire to use the keenest-edged weapon wits could provide.

“How fortunate that I should have the key of the gate and be able to let you out, Mr. Herrick!”

He began to fumble for the lock in the darkness of that shaded spot, and laughed as he felt the young man press forward suddenly behind him and then draw back a step with a hissing breath. The gate creaked on its hinges. Colonel Harcourt, with a gesture the mocking courtesy of which was lost in the night, invited the other to proceed.

“After you, sir. Why do you hesitate? It is quite fit that dashing youth should take precedence of middle-age on certain occasions.”

Herrick clenched his fist; then with a desperate effort regained control of his most sore and injured self and stalked out of the garden, spurning that earth his feet would tread for the last time.

“You walk late, my young friend,” resumed Harcourt, as he joined him.

“So do you, sir!” cried Herrick thickly.

The colonel laughed with quite a mellow sound. In proportion as Herrick’s discomfiture became manifest his own geniality returned.

“Our ways lie together as far as the moat-bridge,” remarked he.

Herrick made no reply. What though she had fallen, and fallen to such an one, she was still a woman; and through him, who had worshipped her, shame should not come upon her. Let Harcourt mock and jeer in his triumph, he would be patient ... till a fitter moment.

“By George! our little Romeo is discreet,” thought the colonel. “But I’ll loosen your tongue yet, you dog!—A charming night!” quoth he aloud. “Delightful last remembrance to carry away with one, is it not?”

Herrick paused for an appreciable instant; then steadily took up his way again, still in silence.

“I presume you leave to-morrow?” pursued the elder man. “Our good host——”

“You, I presume,” interrupted Herrick, “intend to remain, at least in the neighbourhood!”

They were in the thickest shade of the shrubbery, but each knew the other’s eye upon him. Their attitude, morally, was like that of men fencing in the dark, feeling blade on blade yet never venturing a full thrust.

“You are right. I do not leave just yet. In truth, I have a transaction to complete before I altogether withdraw from this delightful spot. But you——”

“I, sir?” echoed Luke, breathing quickly through his nostrils.

“Oh, you——” Harcourt laughed good-humouredly, almost paternally. “I was going, I declare, to commit the folly, unpardonable in my years, of offering a young man advice. I was going to say, my good lad, that from the poetic point of view, your visit here must have been so inspiring, so, what shall I say? so eminently successful, that it would be a thousand pities for you to prolong it. Disillusion,” he added, with a light sigh, “swiftly follows upon joy.”

Herrick chewed a thousand savage retorts, but let not one escape beyond his clenched teeth.

“You have doubtless a vast experience, sir,” he responded at last; and the colonel was forced to admit in his own mind that his adversary was stronger than he had deemed him.

In this mood they reached the moat-bridge, and the full-spaced moonlight. Then both paused, and, for the first time, saw each other clearly. The imaginary rivals stood a moment and took stock of each other’s tell-tale appearance.

“By the Lord,” thought Colonel Harcourt, running his eye sardonically over the dark stains on Herrick’s handsome evening suit, his tossed and dishevelled hair, “it is all correct and complete! He’s had to come down by the window! The deuce!... I who thought the situation would have suited me!” He had another quiet laugh which enraged the youth almost beyond endurance. For one voluptuous moment Herrick saw himself laying this triumphant elderly Lothario at his feet. For every stain, for every rent in that riding suit, for every stone scratch on those heavy boots—brute beast, who could enter thus into his lady’s presence!—he should feel the cuffing of an honest fist! Nor were Colonel Harcourt’s next words likely to conduce to the young man’s self-control.

“Most poetical Herrick,” he said, “you have lost your hat, and you are in sad need of a brush!”

“For the matter of that, sir, where is your hat? And as for requiring a brush——”

Then he clenched his fist, this time for a most deliberate purpose. The situation was undoubtedly strained. Suddenly a piping voice drew their attention to quite a new quarter.—Upon the other side of the moat-bridge stood the quaint be-frilled, be-ringletted, tightly be-pantalooned figure of Mr. Villars. And even as they gazed this worthy hobbled across and came close to them, his face under the moonlight visibly quivering with excitement.

“My dear Harcourt! ... Luke, my poor lad!”

They turned upon him like angry dogs disturbed in the preliminaries of a private quarrel. The colonel’s somewhat precarious and thin-spread geniality was not proof against this witness of his inexplicable plight.

“My good friends,” pursued Villars, the mystification on his countenance giving way to a gloating delight as he looked from one to the other, “what has happened? This has been indeed a night of adventures! We thought you had gone to Bath, Colonel. Luke, lad, the ladies have missed you—at least some of them, he—he—he!” The skin of his dry hands crackled as he rubbed them. “This is extraordinary. This is something quite romantic, he—he!”

“Mr. Villars,” interrupted Harcourt suddenly, “is it not time you were in your beauty sleep, and your hair in curl papers?”

He turned his broad back upon the inquisitive gentleman and fixed Herrick for a couple of seconds with a hard straight look.

“Colonel Harcourt,” cried the boy hotly in answer, “I am at your service.”

“Mr. Herrick,” returned the other, “you are an understanding youth. I regret to be unable to respond just now as I should wish. But in a few days perhaps—I have a good memory.”

His tone was now as hard as his eye. He nodded towards the speechless poet with a little wave of the hand that was full of significance. Then without further noticing Mr. Villars, he turned on his heel and walked away towards the trees where he was instantly swallowed in the black shadows.

As Herrick stood glaring after him into space, his wrist was seized and a wrinkled eager face was thrust offensively close to his.

“My dear boy, I know all about it—all about it. The Deyvil! But that was a brilliant idea of yours to fox under that cloak. Her suggestion, eh? Naughty boy. Lucky dog, he—he! But what about the colonel, eh? What? You don’t mean to say the pretty widow has two——”

In the great silence of this hour before the dawn the sound of a master slap rang out sharp as a pistol shot; and the echo of it came back like a jeer from the terrace walls.

“A raving lunatic,” said Villars to himself with wry lips, as he nursed his cheek and blankly watched Herrick stride towards the house. “Certainly not worth taking the least notice of!”

Nevertheless, if that young man’s paper ever fell into his hands!

But Herrick was taking to his rooms a heart heavy enough to have satisfied even the financier’s vindictiveness.

CHAPTER XV
A SIMPLER’S EUTHANASIA

Tired, he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

—Pope (Essay on Man).

Ellinor, after hastily donning a few garments, stole on light foot in her visitors’ wake and reached the cross-door at the instant when, on the other side, the key was being turned by Margery. There she waited in the darkness until voices and footsteps had died away beyond, when, feeling for the old disused bolt on the inside, she drew it into its socket. Then she ran back to her own room. She had arduous work to perform before Margery should have time to return round by all the basement passages to the keep wing and resume her office of spy. She had, by some means or other, to convey David back to his tower so that none should ever know the truth of this night’s events—none but he and she.

How with her unaided strength she was to achieve this she did not stop to consider: it must be done. As she re-entered the room it was a joyful relief to find Barnaby kneeling on the floor beside Sir David.—Barnaby! In the agitation of the night she had forgotten his presence. Barnaby—the ideal silent helper.

The dumb lad looked up, nodded, then pillowed his cheek on his hand, closed his eyes, drew a few deep breaths in pantomime of sleep and nodded again. She knelt down for a moment beside him and laid her hand lightly on David’s brow and over his heart. It was in truth a deep, and it seemed a healing, sleep. Then she rose to her purpose. And in a shorter space of time than she had dared to hope, Barnaby with her help had safely laid Sir David on the couch in the observatory. A pillow was placed under his head, his furred cloak over his feet; and still he slept like a tired-out soldier.

After a quick look round, Ellinor closed the rolling dome and shut out the sky, drew the heavy curtains before the door, and, satisfied that all was as well as she could make it, was hurrying forth again when Barnaby arrested her.

He had been passive enough under her imperative demand for help, but now, to her surprise, the old look of distress and pleading had returned upon his face. Again he plucked her by the sleeve and gesticulated, then stopped short, pointed to the sleeper, and once more made that gesture of conveying something to his lips which he had repeated so often after his attack on Lady Lochore that afternoon.

Ellinor stood still, palsied by the lightning stroke that flashed into her brain: she had divided the cup between David and her father! Now she knew who it was Barnaby was seeking help for with such persistence.

The space of time between the moments when she fled from David’s side and reached the threshold of the laboratory was ever a blank in Ellinor’s memory. She had no consciousness even of Barnaby’s piteous joy at being at last understood, of the long passages, the steep, winding stairs, down and ever down. She never knew that she had crossed Margery coming up with lighted candle, and staring at them in blank amazement. She only knew that, when she stood upon the threshold of the room that had received her with so dear a welcome, there in his chair, under the light of the lamp, sat Master Simon, his grey head fallen forward on his breast. He seemed profoundly and peacefully asleep—just as she had left David. But even before she had laid her hand on his forehead to find it stone cold, she knew in her heart that her father was dead.

Squatting on the old man’s knee, Belphegor gazed at her inquiringly with yellow eyes.

Out of warm slumber, tinted like his books with rich and sober hues of fawn and russet, with here and there a glint of faded gold, Parson Tutterville was roused in the chill encircling dawn by a cry beneath his windows—a wild and urgent cry that drew him from his down before he was well awake:

“Uncle Horatio, for God’s sake!”

And as he thrust his night-capped head out of the casement, he asked himself if he had not suddenly wandered into a terrible dream, for the voice went on:

“My father is dead, and David, for aught I know, is dying!”

CHAPTER XVI
THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

“Thou Ghost,” I said, “and is thy name To-day?—

Yesterday’s son, with such an abject brow!—

And can To-morrow be more pale than thou?”

While yet I spoke, the silence answered: Yea,

Henceforth our issue is all grieved and grey....

—Rossetti (The House of Life).

The morning after Master Simon’s death was filled for Parson Tutterville with sadder and more responsible duties than any in his experience. Before a stormy scarlet sun had well cleared the eastern line of the hill he was standing with Mr. Webb (the country practitioner) by the body of his life-long friend, and listening to the professional verdict on the obvious fact.

The medical man, a not particularly sagacious specimen of his order, who had for many years treated Master Rickart’s pursuits with the contempt of prejudice, discovered no specific symptoms of any known toxic, declared the death to be perfectly natural and announced his intention of so certifying it. This decision was, in the circumstances, too desirable not to be accepted with alacrity.

Leaving Ellinor at the head of the truckle-bed whereon lay the shrunken figure with the waxen, silver-bearded face—the one so pitiably small under the white sheet, the other so startlingly great with the peace of the striving thinker who has attained Truth at last—the Doctor of Divinity led the Doctor of Medicine away, and hurried him from the side of the dead to that of the living patient. As he mounted the weary stairs, his mind was uncomfortably haunted by the remembrance of Ellinor’s haggard and wistful eyes, of her unnatural composure. She had not shed a tear, though the rector’s own eyes had overflowed at the sound of Barnaby’s sobs. With dry lips she had told him a brief, bald story:

“My father was making experiments all day with his new extract. I divided the sleeping draught between him and David. Barnaby called me in the night. I found my father dead. When I tried to rouse David, I could not. He lies in a deep sleep in the observatory.”

His insistent questions could draw no further detail from her. It was almost like a lesson learnt off by heart; each time she replied in exactly the same words.

Mr. Webb, who had been almost brutally superficial upon the cause of his old antagonist’s death, became extremely learned and involved over Sir David’s case. But the parson, accustomed by his calling to the sight of the sick, was happily able to see for himself that David’s sleep, though abnormally profound, was restful; he promptly took it upon himself to interfere when the doctor offered to proceed to blistering and blood-letting as a rousing treatment.

Somewhat unceremoniously he insisted on his withdrawal; and, returning himself to the observatory, stood gazing at his friend for some time before determining on the step of sending a post-boy into Bath for a more noted physician. As the divine was thus pondering, David suddenly opened his eyes, saw and recognised him, without surprise; smiled and fell asleep again. And Dr. Tutterville felt greatly reassured. Whatever the cup may have contained that Ellinor had divided between the star-dreamer and the simpler, here it was evident that nature was working her own cure and that no other physician was needed.

Upon this the parson carefully piloted Dr. Webb out of the tower-wing and delivered him to Giles to be ministered unto as the hour required. Then he sent a note to his good lady, bidding her come and take up her post by David’s couch until he could himself relieve her watch. His heart was much eased.

He was on his way to bring his consoling report to Ellinor, when, at a corner of the passage, he heard his name called in a hoarse whisper, and, looking round, beheld Lady Lochore, ghastly-faced, in her flaming brocade dressing-gown.

“How is it with——” she cried. Something seemed to click in her throat, she could not pronounce the name. But Dr. Tutterville thought that her twitching hand pointed towards the laboratory door. He shook his head.

“Alas, I fear there is nothing to be done!”

Her lips framed the word:

“Dead!”

Then she swayed and he had to uphold her.

“Come, come!” said he soothingly, yet shuddering all over his comfortable flesh to feel what skeleton attenuation lay between his hands. “My dear child, do not give way to this. There is nothing, there can be really nothing alarming about the passing away of one who has attained the allotted span. Poor Simon!”

She reared herself with extraordinary energy to fix eyes full of fierce questioning upon him. He went on:

“Thank God, I can quite reassure you about David—”

“David!”

She echoed the name with what was almost a shriek; then caught the end of her hanging sleeve and thrust it to her mouth, as if to keep any further sound from escaping.

“Did you not know?” asked the rector. “We were in much anxiety, but whatever noxious drug was——” he stopped unwilling to raise the question.

He saw a terror come into those strange fixed eyes. Quite bewildered himself, he proceeded again, trying to reassure the woman:

“David’s in no danger, thank Heaven!”

Dropping her hand, Lady Lochore turned upon the astonished rector a countenance of such fury that he stepped back hastily as from a madwoman.

“Thank Heaven!” she repeated with a laugh, that made his blood run cold. The next instant she turned and fled from him, once more stopping her mouth with her sleeve; in spite of which the sound of her hysterical mirth continued to echo back to him down the vaulted passage after she had turned the corner. The rector remained lost in thought.

“She is very ill—dying!” he told himself. “Lord, thy hand is heavy on this house!”

Even in the secrecy of his soul he was loth to search into the weird feeling now encompassing him, that there was more than illness in Lady Lochore’s face.

The parson hoped that, under the reaction of the good news he brought her, Ellinor might obtain the relief of tears. But in this he was disappointed.

“Thank you,” she said, in a whisper; and sat down again upon the bench from which, upon his entrance, she had risen rigidly and as if bracing herself for a final blow. Her clenched hands relaxed; while the left lay passive on her knee, she began with the right absently to pat and fondle the folds of sheet that lay over her father’s cold breast.

Dr. Tutterville looked at her in puzzled silence. The action was full of a woman’s tenderness, yet he intuitively felt that the thoughts behind the faintly drawn brow, under the marble composure, were not occupied with a daughter’s sorrow. He felt he had been denied a confidence of vital importance. Strange things had taken place in the house, of which he had yet no explanation. Gently he laid the warm comfort of his clasp upon the woman’s hand and stayed its futile caress.

“Dear child, what is it? Can I not help?”

She started, and flung a swift look at his wise and grave face. There came a sort of fear also in her eyes. Fear into the true eyes of Ellinor! Then she fell back into her abstraction.

“Thank you,” she repeated in a slow dreamy tone. “I can wait.”

He was pondering over the inexplicable word, when a new call drew him to other cares. “Two gentlemen,” a servant informed him, “had driven over from Bath and were demanding to see Sir David. They had not seemed satisfied on being told that Sir David was not well enough to receive visitors.” Visitors for Sir David! So unwonted an event these ten years that even the rector was moved to curiosity as he hastened to wait on the callers.

Pacing the library were found an elderly man of military bearing and haughty countenance, in befrogged coat and smart Hessians, and a slight, fair youth—in the extreme of the fashion, with an eyeglass on a black ribband, miraculous kerseymeres, a velvet waistcoat embroidered with gold and silver roses, and a fob with more seals and watches than any one person could require. The elder stranger turned to the younger with a sarcastic smile as the door opened; and then, with a slight bow, addressed the new-comer.

“Sir David Cheveral, I presume,” he began, and stopped short.

His eyes rested in amaze upon the clerical silk hose; ran swiftly up to the long clerical waistcoat, over its gentle undulation across the unmistakable neckband, to stop at last with angry insolent stare upon the clerical countenance, handsome, dignified and self-possessed despite a fasting morning and unshaven chin. Then he flung another quizzical look at the younger man and shrugged his shoulders; whereat the latter gave vent to a shrill titter and vowed with a lisp that in all his life, by gad, he had never come across anything so rich!

“To whom have I the honour—?” asked Dr. Tutterville.

“Before we waste our breath, sir, and take you away from the thoughts of your next sermon, one word.” Thus the military gentleman, with the tone of one in superior form of courtesy mockingly addressing an inferior species. “Do you represent here Sir David Cheveral?” he asked.

“Sir David,” said the parson, with that serene ignoring of impertinence which is its best rebuke, “is unable this morning, either to receive visitors himself or to instruct a delegate.”

For a third time the visitors exchanged looks.

“A curious indisposition, evidently,” remarked the elder, slapping his Hessians with his cane. “Cursed curious!”

“Deuced opportune, by gad!” added the younger.

“No, sir,” said Dr. Tutterville, turning so suddenly and severely upon the youth that he started back a couple of paces. “No, young man, not opportune. There is death in this house, and the master of it is wanted for more important matters than either you or your friend can possibly have to communicate—I wish you good morning.” And he wheeled upon his heel with an elastic bounce.

Before he had reached the door, however, the strident voice of the well-booted visitor arrested him:

“Tis, of course, your trade, sir, to preach the peace. But the mere gentleman is prejudiced in favour of honour being considered first. However, if Sir David Cheveral, who cannot but have been prepared for our visit, has deputed you in the interest of holy peace, perhaps you will kindly bestow upon us now sufficient of your reverend time to enable us to gather what form of apology Sir David——”

The reverend Horatio again turned round, this time slowly, and showed to this trivial sneering pair a Jove-like countenance, which the wrath of natural humanity and the reprobation of the church combined to empurple.

He allowed the weight of his silent rebuke to press upon them sufficiently long for their grins to give place to looks of anger. Then he spoke. And although under the silk meshes of his stockings the very muscles were quivering with the intensity of his feelings, never in hall or pulpit had the parson delivered himself to better effect. Yet his discourse was extremely brief:

“Gentlemen—forgive me if, not having the advantage of your acquaintance, I am forced to address you thus indeterminedly—as regards the honour of Sir David Cheveral, my kinsman:

Falsus Honor juvat et mendax infamia terret

Quem nisi mendosum et mendacem?

You may possibly fail to follow me. I will translate liberally: The dog—aye, and the puppy—may bark at the moon, it will not affect her brightness.... As regards an apology, I will take upon myself to allow you to convey this one to your principal, whoever he may be, convinced from what I know of Sir David that he will not repudiate the form of it:—If, as I gather, he is called upon to give a lesson in honourable dealing to some friend of yours, he regrets having to postpone that duty for a short while. The delay, allow me to assure you, will but the better enable him to fulfil his part when the time comes. You will find paper and all that is necessary upon yonder table. You can write your communication to Sir David, and I will undertake to see that it is delivered at a fitting moment.”

“’Pon my soul,” said the elder ambassador, turning to his satellite as the door closed upon the clergyman’s dignified exit—“that’s a game old cock!”

“Dog! by Jove—aye, and puppy!” growled the younger man.

On the other side of the oak the rector had halted, rubbing his unusually bristly chin, and uncomfortably mindful of certain remarks from the still small voice within concerning next Sunday’s sermon that was to be upon the beatitude: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

“I will change my text,” thought the rector. “It were a sorry thing for a scholar and a clergyman if there were no issues from such accidental straits! ‘Ye shall smite them hip and thigh!’ Yes, that will do. That will meet the case.”

The excellent gentleman had scarcely settled this delicate point with his conscience when he was intercepted by Mrs. Geary. The lady was in a high state of indignation, first at a death having actually been allowed to take place in a house where she was guest, secondly and especially at Lady Lochore having locked herself up in her own apartments and rudely denied her admittance. She now demanded instant means of departure for herself and her daughter; for her man and her maid. This the rector, with joy, promised to provide forthwith; and even suggested that the remaining gentlemen of the party might make use of the same conveyance with both pleasure and profit to all concerned. But even as he was congratulating himself upon an easy riddance of at least one difficulty, he was plunged into a far deeper state of perturbation by a most unexpected word:

“Mr. Herrick has already gone,” sniffed Priscilla, who stood at her mother’s elbow. Her face was swollen with crying; she spoke in a small vindictive voice which drew the parson’s attention to her in mild surprise.

Mrs. Geary tossed her head:

“I am glad to hear it,” she remarked icily, “and I am surprised you should have suggested his accompanying us.”

“My dear madam,” protested the rector, who found the look of meaning in the lady’s protuberant eye exceedingly discomforting. “My dear madam?”

“After last night’s scandal,” said she in her deepest bass.

“Last night’s scandal!” he echoed.

“Hush!” she cried, “I will not have the innocence of my child further contaminated——”

“Contaminated, madam!”

“Contaminated, sir! Ask Mrs. Marvel, Dr. Tutterville! Ask your niece!”

She brushed past, hustling Priscilla before her.

“A most unpleasant female,” thought the parson, endeavouring to dismiss Mrs. Geary from his mind. But she had left a disturbing impression, which was presently to be heightened. In response to a message, courteous, but firm, informing him at what hour the chaise would await him, Mr. Villars next presented himself before the rector and interrupted him in the midst of some of his sad business details.

“Sir?” said the parson, at the same time arresting by a gesture the withdrawing of the bailiff with whom he was then in consultation. “In what can I be of service?”

“My dear Dr. Tutterville, I came to offer my services to you.”

“You are vastly obliging, Mr. Villars. The best service friends can render a house of mourning is to leave it to itself.”

“Sad business—sad business this! Deyvilish!”

“Good-bye, sir, I trust you may have a pleasant journey. Good-bye.”

“One word, dear and reverend sir. How is—how is Mrs. Marvel?”

“Bearing up fairly well, I thank you.”

“I am rejoiced. Rejoiced. After so many emotions! Ah, I was going to suggest that it might perhaps be of some advantage, some advantage, perhaps, to Mrs. Marvel, were I to defer my departure for a day or two. I would gladly do so if——”

“I cannot conceive,” interrupted Dr. Tutterville, “any circumstance that would make this probable.”

Mr. Villars hemmed meaningly, looked at the bailiff’s stolid countenance, and winked importantly at the rector. But as the latter remained unresponsive, Mr. Villars proceeded with a point of acrimony in his tone:

“No doubt Mrs. Marvel has already given satisfactory explanation of last night’s——”

“Sir,” interposed Dr. Tutterville, opening the study door, “you force me to remark that my time is valuable.”

“Your wife’s niece, sir, I understand.”

“Mr. Villars, the chaise will be ready in half an hour.”

“Dr. Tutterville, you are making a mistake. I might have been of some use. Of use, sir, as a witness, in this unfortunate scandal——”

“Mr. Villars, I am a clergyman, and this is a house of mourning. But——”

Mr. Villars slipped suddenly like an eel through the half-open door; for there was something ominously unclerical both in the parson’s eye and in the twitching of his right hand. But as Horatio Tutterville sat down to his table and beckoned once more to the bailiff, the word scandal weighed heavily on his heart.

Half an hour later, the comforting vision of Madam Tutterville’s round countenance rose upon his cold distress like a ruddy sunrise over a winter scene. But, though she brought him upon a fair tray, crowned with a most fragrant aroma, restoratives for the inner man as well as excellent tidings of her patient in his tower, she had a further budget of news which was to add considerably to the burden of his day.

“My dear doctor,” she said with effusion, and for once unscripturally, “I came the instant I received your note. David is sleeping like a lamb. You need have no anxiety there. I shall instantly return to him. But there is no use in the world in your making yourself ill too. You were off without bite or sup this morning, and not one has thought of making you so much as a cup of tea! The world is a vastly selfish place, and I am surprised at Ellinor. Drink this coffee, my dear doctor. I have prepared some likewise for David—’tis a sovereign restorative. Nay, and you must eat too.”

The rector smiled faintly. The prospect was in sooth not ungrateful. And now that his attention was drawn to it, the unusual vacuity within became painfully obvious.

“Excellent Sophia!” he murmured.

Her coffee was always incomparable. It may be a moot point whether, in moments of man’s trouble, the woman who ministers to the creature-comforts is not the truer helpmate than the transcendental consoler.

Madam Tutterville watched her lord partake in silence. That in itself was a notable thing. She showed little of her usual satisfaction in his appetite; and that was ominous. Her whole person was clouded over with an anxiety which could not be attributed to her brother’s death; a trial indeed she had promptly dismissed with two tears and one text. As soon as the rector appeared sufficiently fortified, Madam Tutterville drew a deep breath; no more odious task could be assigned to her than that of having to bring trouble to her Horatio.

“It is my duty to tell you, doctor, that there have been several calls for you this morning. I went through the village to ascertain for myself and I found indeed some cases of serious illness. The widow Green died suddenly last night. Joe (the hedger) has gone raving mad; it took four men to bind him with ropes and lock him in a barn. I heard his screams myself. Mossmason seems struck with a kind of palsy. Penelope Jones and old——”

“In God’s name,” cried the reverend Horatio, springing to his feet, “stop, woman, or I shall go crazy myself! What can have happened? How have we all sinned against Heaven to be thus stricken upon the same day!”

Madam Tutterville pursed her mouth for an awful whisper:

“They say,” she breathed, “that poor Simon went all round the place yesterday with some of his dreadful little bottles.”

The rector clapped his hands on his knees:

“Then have we indeed been mad to let him have his way so long!” For an instant the learned man looked helplessly at his wife: “What is to be done?”

“A doctor,” she murmured.

“A doctor—Sophia, you’re a woman in a thousand. Not that noodle we’ve had here just now, but the best opinion from Bath. I shall despatch a post-boy. My poor simple flock!”

He had reached the door when she caught him by the skirts of his coat.

“They are raging against poor Simon in the village, and against Ellinor. It might well end in a riot. Had you not better warn constables and the headborough?”

He turned upon his heel in fresh dismay. Then resuming courage:

“Nay, nay, I must see what I can do myself first!”

But Madam Tutterville looked unconvinced.

“I believe they would tear Ellinor in pieces, were she to go out among them to-day. I have had to warn her. Horatio—Horatio, have you seen Ellinor?”

Dr. Tutterville nodded. For some undefined reasons he would have given worlds not to be obliged to discuss Ellinor just now. He tried to slip his portly person through the door, but the hand of his spouse was still restraining.

“Do you think she could have been given any of that dreadful stuff too? She is so strange in her manner. And the servants are saying such extraordinary things—not that I would allow them to do so before me—but I could not help hearing.”

With one mute look of reproach the rector wrenched himself away.

“Lord, Lord,” he was saying to himself in a grim spirit of prophecy, as he hurried towards the stables: “There will be but too much time I fear by and by, for the drawing to light of poor Ellinor’s affairs whatever they may be.”

Love is the crown of life: a life without love is a life wasted. Not necessarily must the love that crowns be that of lovers: love of saint for God, of soldier for captain, of comrade for comrade, of student for master, of partisan for King; or, again, love for the abstract object, of artist for art; of patriot for country, of philanthropist for the cause, of seekers for science—one such great love in a life is sufficient to fill it to the brim, to absorb all its energy. But how few are capable of the passion that shall crown them heroes or saints, leaders of thought or of men! Though every man and every woman avidly claim to possess in the full the power of natural love, the real lover is a genius. And genius, of its essence, is rare. To nearly all it is given to strum the tune, to how few is it given to bring forth the full harmony!

Ellinor had one of those rare natures especially designed for the heights and the deeps of love. It had been for many years her curse that some indefinable charm, quite apart from her beauty and strength, should, wherever she went, make her the desire of men’s eyes. But she herself had passed as untouched by the flame, through her too early marriage and the ordeals to which she had been recklessly exposed, as true gold through the test-furnace.

Now, like a wave that has been gathering from the fulness of the ocean’s bosom, the great waters had broken over her and were sweeping her on.

As she sat by her father’s body she tried to force the image of her loss upon her mind—in vain. One single idea absorbed her; the whole energy of her being was with David. Anon she recalled every instant of his fantastic wooing of the previous night. Anon she would be seized with an agony of terror about his present condition. Again she would float away in a vague warm dream of the moment when he should awaken.... Awaken and remember! People addressed her, and she answered mechanically; but, even while answering, forgot the speaker’s presence.

When Madam Tutterville came to conduct her to her room that night, Ellinor was aware that she had walked through a group of whispering and pointing servants; and she was indifferent. She felt that the good lady herself was looking at her with strange, anxious gaze; and she merely smiled vaguely back. Her soul was in the tower.

Madam Tutterville wore a grave countenance.

“Have you nothing to say to me, Ellinor?” she asked at length.

Ellinor hesitated a second; she wanted to beg for a share in the watch by David’s side; wanted to hear repeated once more the last reassuring news. But the deeper the passion the more closely the woman draws the veil about her; she could not even speak his name.

“Nothing, dear aunt,” she answered.

Madam Tutterville shook her head in troubled fashion, sighed and withdrew.

CHAPTER XVII
TREACHERIES OF SILENCE

——Slander, meanest spawn of Hell,

And woman’s slander is the worst...!

—Tennyson (The Letters).

On the following morning Margery drew the curtains of Lady Lochore’s bed and looked down upon her.

It was ten o’clock, and not even the barred shutters, not even the heavy hangings, could keep shafts of sunshine from piercing through. Lady Lochore wanted to shut out the light and the day and the world: whatever the news might be that the morning was to bring, whether of life or of death, they were fearful to her. And now, though she knew well enough whose eyes were fixed upon her, she feigned sleep. Margery, on her side, perfectly aware of the pretence, drew a stool with ostentatious precautions to the bedside, sat down and waited. But the feeling of being watched became quickly intolerable. Lady Lochore rolled petulantly over on her pillows.

“What in God’s name do you want? Great heavens, one would imagine that you at least would know better than to disturb me!”

“My lady,” cooed Margery, “Sir David is awake.”

Lady Lochore sat bolt upright and, under the thin cambric and lace that fell in such empty folds over her bosom, the sudden leaping of her heart was visible.

“Awake!”

“Yes, my lady—awake and up. I thought it my duty to let your ladyship know.”

“You have seen him! You——?”

A horrible hope danced like a flame in her eyes; but even to Margery she dared not speak the question that would make it patent.

“Quite himself, yes, my lady,” went on the steady tones, answering as usual the unspoken thought. There was a lengthy silence. Then Margery began again: “Whatever drug Mrs. Marvel gave Sir David, it has done him good, my lady. I’ve not known Sir David look so well, nor speak so dear and sensible since before his—his great illness.”

Mrs. Nutmeg had respectfully shifted her gaze from her ladyship’s countenance to a knot of ribbons at her ladyship’s breast. But, nevertheless, Maud Lochore felt that her criminal soul was being mercilessly laid bare.

“Leave me alone,” she said faintly, leaning back on her pillow and turning her head away.

“I think your ladyship had better get up,” said Margery Nutmeg, and stood her ground.

By the time Maud Lochore, robed and tired, had sailed from her apartments, with head set high and determined step, to seek her brother, the housekeeper was able to retreat to her own room with the feeling that the morning’s eloquence of insinuation had not been altogether wasted. What though Fortune still seemed to favour Mrs. Marvel, the path of that would-be mistress of Bindon might yet, after all, be made rough enough to trip her.

Sir David turned his head as the door of the library opened, and Lady Lochore was involuntarily brought to a halt in her indignant entry. Those clear eyes! The steady, peaceful gaze was that of a man looking upon health returned after long sickness. Margery was right. She was right! Sir David was himself again; and the coiling, twisting serpents within her seemed to nip at her heart in their thwarted fury. Hers had been the hand to fill this magic cup! She could have laughed aloud for the irony at it. Then there came a second thought, lashing her with an unknown terror! Was God himself against her, that the poison which had uselessly brought death and madness to so many besides old Simon, should here have turned to a healing remedy?

Sir David and the rector had been engaged in earnest converse for the last hour. The matter of the challenge had first demanded their attention. Sir David had, with a contemptuous smile, perused the letter left on his table, had listened to Dr. Tutterville’s account of the interview without comment and briefly dismissed the subject with the announcement of his intention to send a messenger to Bath that day. His whole treatment of the affair was such as vastly pleased the old-fashioned spirit of the parson—a duly shaven parson, this morning, who could not keep the beam of satisfaction from his glance every time it rested upon his companion.

And yet it was a rare complication of troubles they had to face. Three deaths in the village, besides that of the poor old alchemist himself; a case of madness, and one or two of minor brain disturbance. And a general threatening resentment throughout the parish. Good cause indeed had the spiritual and the secular masters of Bindon for consultation together; little cause had they to welcome interruption. But both gentlemen rose with due courtesy; and while the parson placed a chair, Sir David took his sister’s hand and led her to it, inquiring upon her health.

She looked up at him without speaking, an exceedingly bitter smile on her lips. Yes, there was no doubt about it: her brother stood before her, master of himself, master of his fate once more.

In the silence, the two men exchanged a glance as upon some pre-decided arrangement. Then the rector spoke:

“These sad events have necessarily postponed your departure; but, believe me, my dear Maud, you will do well, and it is also David’s opinion, to delay it no longer than this afternoon.”

Lady Lochore clutched the arms of her chair.

“We anticipate some excitement among the villagers,” pursued the parson. “Then there is the ceremony to-morrow. You are unfortunately in no state of health to risk painful emotions. And, in fact, David would not be doing his duty did he not insist upon your being safely out of the way.”

Lady Lochore rose stiffly.

“And Mrs. Marvel?”

The rector fell back a pace; the hissing word had struck him like a stone. But Sir David stepped forward, a light flame mounting to his brow.

“Does David consider it his duty to have Mistress Marvel also removed from this dangerous house?” she inquired, and her voice broke on a shrill laugh.

“Maud,” said her brother, almost under his breath, “have a care!”

But Lady Lochore had let herself go; the serpents were hissing, ready to strike. Glib words of venom fell from her lips:

“His duty! Touching solicitude all at once for my humble self! ’Tis vastly flattering, my God! What a model host, so preoccupied about his guests! Excellent Rector, is this your work? A conversion you may well be proud of: but is it not a little abrupt for security?” A hard cough here cut the thread of her tirade. And the acrid taste of blood, loathsome reminder of doom, brought her suddenly from irony to open rage: “Yes, turn your sister out of the house! Turn your flesh and blood from your doors! But house the wanton, cherish the abandoned wretch that dares to call herself our kin, that brought under Bindon’s roof practices that would disgrace Cremorne! Keep Mrs. Marvel, Sir David Cheveral, put her tarnished honour in our mother’s place and you—and you—you sanctimonious old man, give the blessing of the church upon that degrading union! Oh, Mistress Marvel is a young, comely woman, and David is indeed converted! This time, I am glad to see, he has been more practical than with his other—lady!”

“Silence!”

It was not that the word rang very loud, or that Sir David’s mien was threatening; but, as she herself had grasped the truth a little while ago, that he was master. It seemed to her now as if she must wither before him. Her voice, her laugh sank into the silence bidden. Then Sir David turned:

“She is mad!” he said, addressing the rector, and made a gesture with his hand as if dismissing a subject painful in the abstract, but unimportant to himself.

His sister’s glance followed his movement to alight upon Dr. Tutterville. Then the cowering snakes reared their crests again. If he had to be slain for it, the parson could not have kept a look of perturbation, almost of guilt from his countenance; and the woman was quick to see it. She pointed her finger at him:

“Ask the reverend gentleman if I am so mad. Ask him if some account of the virtues of his niece has not already reached his consecrated ears! Oh, brother David, the mere stretching of a cloak is not quite sufficient to hide scandal.”

Scandal!—that evil word again! The more burningly it stung the parson, the more gallantly he resisted the doubt.

“Maud,” said he firmly; “hearing is one thing, believing, thank Heaven, is another. Those who would assail Ellinor Marvel’s honour, I should be inclined to rebuke much more severely than David has done. Madness? No, Lady Lochore, but deliberate falsehood, the fruit of Envy, Malice and all uncharitableness.”

“Ellinor Marvel’s honour!” said Sir David. He repeated the words steadily, then threw up his head and slightly uplifted his eyes and looked away as if fixing some entrancing vision.

Health of body and health of mind had, it seemed, been restored to him by the cup of strange mixing. The morbid doubt, the fever, the long oppression—all were gone. He had faith where he loved. The expression of his face drove the furious woman nigh to the madness he had proclaimed.

“Ellinor Marvel’s honour!” she repeated in her turn, “the honour of a woman, who receives her lover in her room at midnight!”

The rector gave a short groan; it might have been horror or indignation. Sir David merely turned to stare at his sister; then he smiled in contemptuous pity.

“Oh, David, David!” cried Lady Lochore, shaking in an agony of laughter and rage, “whom do you think to take in with these hypocritical airs, this ostrich concealment? It is, of course, your interest to hush things up. Naturally! But—”

He would not permit her to finish:

“Naturally it is my interest,” he said, hotly, “to defend a woman whom I know to be as innocent of what you accuse her as I am myself; in whose honour I believe as in my own.”

In the diplomacy of life, how often does the course of fate turn to unexpected channels upon the mere speaking of one word. At the strenuous instant of the conflict of purpose, how far-reaching may be the consequence of one phrase, perhaps pronounced too soon, or left unsaid too long!

Had David not thus cut short the speech on his sister’s lips, her very next word would have rendered the object of her hatred the best service that at such a strange juncture could have been devised; and she would at the same time have dashed for ever the success of her last desperate scheme. The revealing accusation that still hung on her tongue was barely arrested in time. With her familiar gesture, she had to clap her hand to her mouth.

“Why, great God! He knows nothing! he remembers nothing! First madness, then long, long sleep! Old man, I thank thee for that fantastic drug!”

Over her gagging hand Lady Lochore’s eyes danced with a flame so fierce and unholy that the bewildered and unhappy parson shuddered. He felt instinctively as if the meshes of the web which seemed to have been skilfully flung round Ellinor were tightening in remorseless hands. The very deliberation, the sudden calmness which presently came over Lady Lochore filled him with a yet deeper foreboding. She dropped her hand, stood a moment, tall and straight and dignified, as if wrapt in thought, her countenance composed: a noble looking woman, in spite of the ravages of disease, now that the unlovely mask of fury had fallen from her. Then she turned to Sir David, who had deliberately seated himself at his papers as if for him the discussion were ended, and said:

“Since neither brother nor kinsman believe my word worthy of credit, I am forced to bring other testimony—much as I should wish to spare myself and this house the humiliation.”

She stretched her hand to the bell-rope, and the parson upon an impulse of weakness for which he immediately chided himself, stretched out his own to arrest her. But David, without looking up from his writing, said gently: “Let her call up whom she will.” And Lady Lochore demanded Mrs. Nutmeg’s appearance.

“My friends,” she added, after a spell of brooding silence, once more addressing her brother, “have been so summarily turned out of this house that their immediate evidence is unobtainable. A letter to Bath, however, would produce their attendance or their answer by writing if——”

But at this point Margery knocked at the door. Slowly Sir David looked up:

“I may as well tell you at once,” said he, “that were you to fetch witnesses from the four corners of the globe, there is but one person’s word which I would be willing to take in this matter—and hers I do not intend to ask for.”

The rector gazed in astonishment upon the determined speaker. This confidence, he thought, showed almost like a new phase of eccentricity; it was as exaggerated in its way as the previous universal distrust of humanity and more likely to be followed by a reaction. Sir David had but shortly before informed him that since the moment when he had received the sleeping draught from Ellinor’s hand, he had not met her. His attitude seemed the more inexplicable. But Dr. Tutterville was now all anxious to clear up this strange matter; for, since Lady Lochore’s excited entrance upon the scene, he had become convinced that Ellinor was the victim of some cunning conspiracy, and was increasingly ashamed of his own previous misgivings.

“Nay, David,” he cried, interposing sudden authority, “that is not fair to Mrs. Marvel. She must have the opportunity of self-vindication; she must be urged to speak that word which we indeed do not need, but without which, slanderous tongues will continue to wag. See, yonder she goes,” he added, pointing through the window.

David then, without a word, rose and went to the open casement; he beckoned and called:

“Ellinor! Can you come to me?”

Margery Nutmeg took a few humble steps aside and remained in a shadowy corner.

CHAPTER XVIII
GONE LIKE A DREAM

... My sweet dream

Fell into nothing.

Ah, my sighs, my tears,

My clenched hands;—for, lo! the poppies hung

Dew-dabbled on their stalk, the ousel sung

A heavy ditty, and the sullen day

Had chidden herald Hesperus away

With leaden looks.

—Keats (Endymion).

Ellinor entered the room.

“The heartless wretch!” thought Lady Lochore, with the marvellous inconsequence of hatred, “her old father lying dead and she in all these colours!”

But the next glance showed her that the only colours Ellinor wore were those that cannot be doffed at will—gold of hair, rose of cheek, blue of eye and dazzling white of throat. The flower had opened wide to the sun of great love! The presence of death itself cannot rob the living thing of the beauty of its destined hour.

Ellinor’s arms, moreover, were full of branching leaves and strange blossoms. She had had the womanly thought to lay upon her father’s body a wreath made of the plants he had loved. Purple and mauve, crimson and orange, with foliage of many greens, it was a sheaf of rich hues she held against her black dress; and she seemed to bring with her into the room all the breath of the Herb-Garden and all its imprisoned sunshine.

She had walked straight in, seeking and seeing no one but David. He was still standing and, as she halted he moved nearer to her. For a while they were silent, gazing on each other. And her beauty seemed to grow into brighter and brighter radiance.—Every woman is a goddess once at least in her life. But Ellinor stood upon her Olympian height but for a short moment.

“Mrs. Marvel!”

At the first sound of Lady Lochore’s voice, at the sight of Margery’s face, she fell from her pinnacle, suddenly and piteously. Why were these, her enemies, here, and why had she been convened into their presence? Why did the rector sit there like a judge and wear that uneasy countenance? Her brain whirled. It could fasten on no settled thought. But in the great crisis of life what woman trusts to thought when she can feel! Ellinor felt:—this bodes evil! Yet David had looked at her with beautiful eyes of faith and gladness. Her fate was in his hands, what then had she to fear? She turned her glance again upon him. In spite of her boding heart she trusted.

“Mrs. Marvel,” said Lady Lochore. “I have considered it my duty to speak to my brother on the subject of the painful episode of the other night.”

Ellinor crimsoned to the roots of her hair, to the tips of her fingers. She dropped her eyes. Yet in the midst of all the agony of woman’s modesty outraged before the man she loved, there remained a deep sweetness of anticipation in her heart. She waited, motionless, for the touch of his hand, the sound of his voice that should proclaim her his bride. She waited. The silence enveloped her like a pall. Lady Lochore laughed and the blood rushed back to Ellinor’s heart.

“David!”

There was everything in that cry, everything in the look she cast upon him, to appeal to a man’s chivalry, to his honour, to his love: the pride of the innocent woman, the reproach of the wronged woman, the trust of the loving woman. And David spoke:

“You need say nothing, Ellinor, need not condescend to answer.”

Alas, what vindication was this!

“Does Mrs. Marvel deny then,” resumed Lady Lochore, “that she was discovered two nights ago——”

David lifted his hand and his voice in a superb unison of anger:

“Be silent. It is I who deny it! And let that suffice!” Then he went on rapidly, with more self-control yet still vibrating with indignation: “I know this to be a base lie, an iniquitous conspiracy. Your motives, my poor sister, are but too obvious! Your treatment of our kinswoman who has brought comfort and gladness to my house, has been odious from the first moment of your uninvited presence here. This is the climax! Now hear my last word:—not only is Mrs. Marvel, as I know her, incapable of desecrating the hospitality she honours me by accepting, but she is incapable of harbouring an unworthy thought.”

David’s countenance was lit by every generous impulse. Yet each vindicating word fell upon Ellinor’s ear like the sounds of her death sentence—death to both honour and happiness! A chasm was opening before her feet, the depths of which she could not yet fathom. One thing alone was dawning upon her moment by moment, with more inexorable light—David did not know! All this had been but a dream to him. And even as a dream he remembered nothing. He did not remember! Unconsciously she repeated to herself, even as Lady Lochore awhile before: Madness and then sleep! He knew nothing of his own vows of love to her, he knew nothing of his own words of passion! He did not know; and her lips were sealed!

At first Lady Lochore wondered whether David were playing a deep and subtle game; whether the two were in collusion. But a glance from his transfigured countenance to Ellinor’s stricken look, the sight of the rector’s evident perturbation, her own knowledge of the crystal truth of her brother’s character, promptly dispelled the doubt. The game was hers!

“All well and good,” said she. “Your cavalier attitude, most romantic David, is fit to grace the pages of the latest Scotch novel! But allow me to point out that it will not pass current in the every day world. Besides the fact that these eyes of mine and those of my friends beheld a scene in Mrs. Marvel’s room the like of which our honourable house never sheltered before, Margery Nutmeg can tell you how she heard an adventurous climber mount to Mrs. Marvel’s window. How Joyce, your head-keeper, met Colonel Harcourt, skulking through the park at midnight—”

Dr. Tutterville started. David made no movement, but something in his very stillness showed that the words had struck him.

“Mr. Villars, again, could have informed you, how he came upon Mr. Herrick and Colonel Harcourt brawling on the bridge an hour later, both in torn garments and as highly incensed one against the other, as only rivals——”

“Needless, all this,” said Ellinor, in a low clear voice. She had flung back her head and stood, white as death, but composed, holding herself as proudly as a queen. “I deny nothing. It would be useless to deny, did I wish it, what Lady Lochore and her friends and Mrs. Nutmeg have seen for themselves.” She paused, then resumed, gaining firmness in voice and manner: “I give you the truth, in so far as I am myself concerned. Judge of me as you will. Barnaby escaped from his room after my father had locked him up, climbed up to my window, where I let him in—”

“Barnaby,” exclaimed the parson with a loud burst of relieved laughter. “’Pon my word, a pretty storm in a tea-cup, Maud Lochore!”

Lady Lochore grew grey, save for the bloody fingerprint of death upon either cheek.

“And was it Barnaby,” she hissed, “whom you covered with your cloak, to hide him from our eyes?”

Ellinor flung a glance of a sad, yet lovely self-abnegation upon David before she answered:

“No, it was not Barnaby.”

For all its melancholy ring of renunciation the word could not have fallen from her lips in a tone of more exquisite sweetness had it been an avowal of love in the ear of the only one who had a right to demand it. The love that makes the willing martyr, as well as the pride that can face ignominy, had enabled her to surmount the failing of her heart over this bitterness. Was she not bound to silence by a thousand shackles of loyalty, of woman’s reticence, of elementary delicacy, of love for him? The sacrifice was for him. He must never know that it was his madness that had wronged her in the world’s eyes. Her hand could not deal this blow to his fastidious honour. Moreover, had it not been all a dream? How did she know that, waking, he could love her as he had loved her in his dream? Nay, his very defence of her, his calmness and freedom from jealousy seemed to her aching heart to argue a mere friendliness incompatible with passion. Thus for herself, too, her pride could endure to stand with tarnished fame before him, but could not stoop to demand the reparation she knew he would so quickly have offered. She went on, steadily ignoring alike the rector’s shocked distress, Lady Lochore’s triumph and Margery’s insolent silence.

“After Barnaby had taken refuge with me—some one, a man, entered my room. He did not know what he was doing. And because of that I shall never tell his name.”

Lady Lochore quailed before the high soul and generous heart of the woman she was ruining; and quailing, abashed, shamed in her own tempest-tossed desperate nature, hated her but the more.

The poor rector clacked his tongue aloud in dismay, chiding himself for his over-zeal. He had meant to straighten matters, and, lo, they were more inextricably knotted than ever! Here was a mystery to which he had not the beginning of a clue. No man of his mind and heart could look upon Ellinor and deem her a wanton as she now stood; and yet both her self-accusation and her reticence proclaimed how deeply she must love the unknown man she could thus shield with her own honour. Was this the end of all their fond secret hopes for Bindon!

Now David gazed at Ellinor almost as if the old dream-palsy had returned upon him. As in a dream, too, he seemed to see again some past picture which had foretold this hour. Thus on the first day of her return to Bindon had he seen her pass from sunshine and colour and brilliancy into darkness; seen the goddess turn to a pale woman in a black dress. Was this what his house had brought upon her!

His eyes dilated with pity, his whole being seemed to become broken by pity, given over to pity, till, for the moment, there was no room for any other feeling. Pity of the man for the woman, of the strong for the weak. He sank back into his seat and shaded his eyes with his hand. He could not look upon that high golden head abased.

But Ellinor had lost little of her proud bearing. Love is royalty, and royalty can walk to the scaffold as if to the throne.

“I cannot think,” she said with a pale smile, “that Lady Lochore can have any further need of my testimony.”

“Stay, stay!” cried Dr. Tutterville. “There is more in this than meets the eye. Ellinor, you have let yourself be caught in some cunning trap!”

“Uncle Horatio,” answered she, “you are right. Yes, things are not as you think.”

And upon this enigmatic phrase she left them.

Lady Lochore went straight up to her child. She told herself she was extraordinarily happy. She had been providentially saved from fratricide and yet had encompassed her end:—Ellinor’s position at Bindon had at last been rendered untenable. And her boy’s inheritance was safe! She hugged him, teased him, rollicked with him till he shrieked with joy. But for all that her heart was well-nigh as heavy within her as it had been upon her awakening; if she had not her brother’s death on her conscience, it could not acquit her of all share in Master Simon’s sudden end. David and he had shared the same cup—that was servant’s talk all through the house. And how much did Margery know? That inscrutable woman was now at her elbow; and the sleek and meaning words that fell from her lips, the very feeling of her shadowy presence irritated the guilty woman almost beyond bounds. Yet she could not, dared not, dismiss this Margery.

David lifted a grave face from his shielding hands, looked at Dr. Tutterville and then, arrested by a gesture the words brimming on the elder man’s lips:

“Hush! Do not let us discuss this now.”

The parson, wondering, saw him sort his papers and lay them aside, then ring the bell, and again send for Margery. Sir David looked at her for a brief moment as she stood before him apparently wrapt in her usual smug composure, but, by the twitching of her hands and the furtive working of her lips, betraying some hidden agitation.

“Margery Nutmeg,” said her master then, “in an hour you leave my house and my service.” A sudden livid fury came over the woman’s face. But David’s gesture, his determined speech bore down the inarticulate protest that broke from her. “It is useless to attempt to make me alter my decision. I know how you have considered me bound by promise to your husband, and how you have traded upon it. That promise, in so far as I consider it binding, I shall keep till you die. You shall receive fit and sufficient maintenance from me. But in my house or upon my estate you shall dwell no more.” He dismissed her with a wave of the hand, merely adding: “If you present yourself at the bailiffs office in an hour, you will receive your money. Go!”

And Margery went, without another word.

“Ah, David,” said the reverend Horatio admiringly, “had you but done this earlier!” And in his heart was the thought, based upon too unsubstantial ground to put it into words: “Then things would surely not stand now at this pass!”

Sir David made no reply. He did not even seem to hear. He was seated at his writing table, inditing a letter of reply to Colonel Harcourt’s friend. As he wrote, the crimson of a deep, slow-burning resentment mounted to his face.

Lady Lochore’s enforced departure fitted in well enough in her mind with the new turn of events. Now that Master Simon was dead, Ellinor’s residence at Bindon became an impossibility so soon as she herself had gone. To be sure Madam Tutterville might give her niece harbourage; but Lady Lochore was quite satisfied that if she had failed to convince the rector of Mrs. Marvel’s frailty the rector’s wife had been more easy to deal with. Therefore she hurried on her preparations with a sick desire to escape from surroundings charged with such ugly memories. Even as the four horses drew the travelling chaise up to the door she stood ready in the hall, feverishly hustling her servants.

Sir David was there too, attentive to speed his sister’s parting, but certes, with even less warmth than he had welcomed her arrival. She spoke her bitterly sarcastic word of thanks. He answered by the cold wish that her health might have been benefited, according to her hopes, by her visit to her home of old. This time even the kiss upon the hand was omitted. But as he was leading her across the threshold, her mood changed hysterically:

“David,” said she, in a panting whisper, “oh, no, you cannot let me go like this! Some day you’ll thank me for having saved you ... for you are saved a second time.” She could not keep the taunt out of her mouth. “After all, I am your only sister, and this is the last time we shall ever meet. I am dying!”

“My only sister died to me ten years ago,” said David. His tone was quite unmoved; and he added, almost in the same breath: “There is a high wind rising, you had better wrap your cloak over your mouth.”

She struck away in fury the hand that held hers, ran down the steps alone, and sprang into the carriage, where, seizing the child, she held him up at the window in a sort of vengeful mute defiance that, louder than any shriek, spoke her secret meaning: “Fool, you shall not keep this hated flesh and blood from ruling in your place some day!”

As the wheels began to crunch round in the gravel, she suddenly became aware of a dull grey face and black eyes looking upon her out of the shade of the opposite seat. It was not her maid! A shudder ran through her frame. She stared without speaking.

But Margery’s voice was silky as ever:

“Asking your pardon, my lady, I made so bold. Mamselle Josephine is in the other coach. Sir David has dismissed me. But I knew your ladyship would offer me a home and welcome, seeing that it is my devotion to your ladyship that’s lost me my bread and my station in my old age. I made so bold,” repeated Mrs. Nutmeg, and the veiled threat was all the more awful to the listener because of the unemotional tone, “knowing your ladyship’s heart as I know it.”

“Mamma,” cried the spoilt child, “let me go! I don’t like your cold hands!”

And thus, with Nemesis by her side, Lady Lochore left Bindon-Cheveral for the last time, and drove through the gathering storm on her speedy way to die Valley of the Shadows.

Ellinor took her last look at her father’s face and laid the wreath of herbs at his feet and a sprig of his Euphrosinum, fatal plant! upon his breast.

Madam Tutterville, in wifely solicitude for her Horatio’s unphilosophic depression, had insisted on his returning with her to the rectory. Without her, Ellinor could not remain at Bindon. But even had it not been so, to abide as David’s guest would have been the one thing to render her trouble unbearable. And there was nothing in the last cruel details that precede the returning of earth to earth to make her desire to linger in the death-chamber. She, therefore, accepted her aunt Sophia’s offer of hospitality. Had she not been all absorbed in her own troubles the lady’s altered manner, and the rebuffingly Christian spirit in which the invitation was offered, might have struck her painfully. But she was past noticing such things.

The falling dusk of that miserable day found her at the door of the tower-wing, Barnaby at her side loaded with her modest baggage, Belphegor ruffled and protesting under her arm. She was dry-eyed: there is an arid misery the desolation of which no well-spring can relieve. In this silent company she sallied out.

A dumb boy, and a cat! After these months of full life, after her gorgeous dream of happiness—this was all that was left her. The road that had opened before her, alluring, fantastic almost in its promise, had led to this desolation.

The Star-Dreamer sat by the open coffin in the laboratory, his head bent, his hands clasped upon his knees, holding between them the sprig of the Euphrosinum which he had absently taken from the heap of wild flowers that lay on his old friend’s breast. He was absorbed in thought.

A great silence was in the room erstwhile so filled with a thousand minute sounds of restless energy. Extinct the hearth; extinct the furnace which for over twenty years had glowed night and day; mute all the little voices, cold the matras and crucibles, all as silent and as cold, as extinguished as the once eager brain of their master. But the watcher’s mind was seething with keen thoughts, busy sorrows. He had lost her—she was gone! She who had come like a lovely vision to this house when it was held as under a spell of twilight dreaming; who had reanimated it with her own life; who had brought, as she had promised, sunshine into its dusk, fresh air into its stagnation, sweetness where the must had lain; she was gone from his sweet hopes, gone in sorrow and shame! Her bright head dimmed as even now was his star under the clouds that were gathering thick and thicker with the brooding storm.

And he, the Star-Dreamer? He had been called back from his unnatural life of solitude, step by step had been brought down from his height, had been taught once more to see the fairness of earth, had been made to feel the desire of the eyes, to hear the cry of his forgotten manhood: all to the end of this vault, this chamber of death, this knowledge of loss. Yet, no! She had once said to him in an unforgettable hour: “Sometimes a harboured sorrow is only fancied, not real; and it may be that real adversity must come to make us see it.” And now he felt that she had been right. His reawakened virility was strong within him. True, he had for a second time, and in middle life, been struck to the heart; yet, strange working of Fate! the new sorrow seemed not only to drive away the last remnant of the old, but actually to strengthen and arm him again for the fight of life. Although from his long sleep he had carried forth no conscious memory of a dream, that hour spent in Ellinor’s room when, in the body’s weakness, his spirit had come so close to hers, had left an ineffaceable stamp upon his mind. He had asked her, in trouble: “Can I trust you?” She had answered him: “To the death,” and he had believed. And now, though he had seen her stand self-accused before him, he believed still.

The crisis often heralds the cure. He was cured of his strange palsy of mind, of his infirmity of purpose, of his sick melancholy. He was a fighting man again in a world where everything must be fought for, above all things happiness. Cured—aye, but too late! She, the joy he might but a few weeks before have taken for his own, she had passed from his gates.

Cured, made strong again.... How? By what? In that soothing draught, of whose nature he had known nothing, but which her own hand had prepared, had she steeped a branch of that wondrous plant which held so many unknown properties? Had that given him a new life and sanity while it had brought death or madness to others? Ah, no! The transformation was her own doing. She had found him weak and ignorant of the one beauty of life, and left him strong, awakened. Awakened, but desolate.

CHAPTER XIX
GREY DEPARTURE

Here then she comes.—I’ll have a bout with thee:

Devil, or devil’s dam!...

Blood will I draw on thee—thou art a witch!

And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv’st!

—Shakespeare (Henry VI.)

The next morning, at an hour unwontedly early for such a ceremony, they laid Master Simon’s remains to rest in the family vault. The discontent in the village, aroused by the series of mishaps attendant on the simpler’s last experiments and fostered of late by Margery’s subtle calumnies, had been fanned to fury by her last round of farewell visits. The death of the warlock himself had little effect in assuaging the new-risen hatred which now was aimed at his living daughter.

It was a morning of weeping skies; a fine rain-shroud enveloped the land; Bindon looked desolate enough to be mourning a mightier scion than this poor eccentric old child. The creepers clung to the tower and the ruins, like sodden garments. The blurred panes looked like tear-dimmed eyes. The dripping flag of Bindon-Cheveral hung at half-mast, so limp and darkened with wet that it might have been a funeral scarf.

The ceremonial was performed before a congregation pitiable in its tenuity. Beyond the sexton, the clerk, old Giles and sobbing Barnaby, not another human being escorted the dead student to his last home, save the narrow circle of his own kinsfolk. Not one of the many he had helped in life, or of the many he had healed, could remember his debt of gratitude, so little did the many lives he had saved weigh against those few he had lost.

Good Doctor Tutterville officiated with something less than his usual dignity. He was painfully distracted. There were two or three raw graves yawning, without, in the little wet churchyard, that felt to his kind heart as if they had been dug into it. He was anxious too; his ear was strained for the dreaded sound of angry voices breaking in upon the sanctity of his dead. The words of the solemn service escaped his lips in haste, and he breathed a sigh of relief when at last the great stone was rolled back into its place and, the keys being returned to his own possession, he knew his old friend’s remains were safe from desecration.

When he emerged from the vestry with David beside him, both instinctively looked round for Ellinor. But she was gone, and Madam Tutterville, her round face for once the image of dissatisfaction, could or would give them no information on the subject. Her high nostril and short answer quite sufficiently indicated that she regarded Ellinor’s departure and their curiosity concerning it as equally unbecoming.

“No doubt you will find her at the rectory, if you wish,” she remarked with a snort.

But here old Giles, who had betaken his way back to the House—the thought of his restored keys and the comfort of a glowing glass on such a morning luring him to a sort of shuffling trot—returned hastily to the church, emotion of a very different kind lending speed to his clogged limbs:

“They were up at the house,” he explained, panting, “a score of them, and even more on the way! They were in the Herb-Garden; they had sworn to leave standing neither stick nor leaf! They had broken into Master Simon’s laboratory, laying about them like mad! They meant to leave no bottle or powders of the sorcerer to poison any more of them!”

Sir David and the rector looked at each other as the same thought flashed into each brain: Ellinor!

Then they started off running. It was a fearful possibility that the daughter might have returned to either of her father’s haunts; and the thought of the danger to which she was exposed amid an angry, ignorant rabble was hardly to be framed in words.

But Ellinor had had but little time to bestow on the sensibility of grief.

An interview which her aunt had inflicted upon her the previous night had taught her that the last day’s events had left her poorer even than she had reckoned. Her hope had been to find a few days’ harbourage in the rectory and the counsel of friends, before sailing further on the bitter waters of life. She had hoped—God knows what a woman will hope, so long as she is in the neighbourhood of her beloved! But Madam Tutterville’s very first words had called her pride in arms.

The lady had gathered good store of awful texts and apposite instances wherewith to lace her discourse; and before a tithe of them had been delivered, Ellinor, scarlet-faced and writhing, had felt herself sullied in all her chastest instincts by the mere fact of listening.

Madam Tutterville looked upon this case as well within her competence: she had not consulted with her lord. But her self-sufficiency overreached her purpose. It was little likely that her pragmatic methods should have extracted the humble and full confession from her niece which seemed to be demanded by every authority, old or new, even had the young widow’s steadfastness been less complete than it was.

Above the turmoil of Ellinor’s emotions one thing soon became clear: not an hour longer than possible could she remain under this roof. The bread of Madam Tutterville would stick in her throat. The cold charity of strangers would be sweet compared with the bounty of one that could think so meanly of her own kin. Ellinor was indignant, Madam Tutterville severe; so true it is that where most the human of all feelings is concerned, the best and most tender-hearted woman seems suddenly merciless. They parted in anger.

Early then, on this most gloomy day, had Ellinor taken all her measures. Her available funds were small, but she had saved enough from those limited stores which her father had handed over to her to provide for the immediate future. She had, besides, the capital of splendid health, of indomitable will and energy; so that, for her modest material needs Ellinor Marvel, though now a poor woman once more, had no anxiety. But, oh, for the needs of her heart—that passionate awakened heart that had learned to want so much! It was worse than death to have to tear herself from Bindon.

Nevertheless, unfalteringly, with the secrecy of one who will not be prevented, she considered and carried out her plans. A place was privately retained on the Bath and Devizes coach which passed every morning before the gates of Bindon. Her few garments were gathered and packed. A letter to the rector was left to be delivered after her departure. It briefly stated that she felt it impossible to remain at Bindon, and promised to communicate with him later on.

Unnoticed, she slipped away through the shadows of the little church; and after consigning her small effects to Barnaby (and picking up, on a sudden tender thought of her father, the anxious Belphegor) she struck across the wet grass towards the park entrance, followed by the dismal tolling of the Bindon church bell.

The hood of her cloak pulled over her face, its folds wrapped round her, she sped through the misting rain, so plunged in thought as scarcely to notice, until within a few paces, the knot of village folk advancing up the avenue.

Then she halted, unpleasantly struck by something strange and threatening in their demeanour. They were coming along at a great rate, like people belated, talking eagerly among themselves, and with fierce gesture. There were some eight or ten of them: an elderly man with a long draggled streamer of black crape tied to a bludgeon, a couple of lanky lads fighting over the possession of a pitchfork, and the rest women, one of whom dragged a child by the hand.

Upon the instant that Ellinor and Barnaby halted they were recognised, and a shout went up that made her blood run cold. The next moment she was surrounded, and the words of execration hurled at her fell with almost as stunning effect as the blows they seemed to presage.

“Witch! Poisoner! Murderer of poor people! She’s trying to run away! It was she planted the poison bush: burn her with a faggot of it! She’s in league with the Devil, and that’s the Devil’s imp. The witch and her boy! Seize her, duck her!”

Angry hands were outstretched, and Ellinor, with energies suddenly restored by the realisation of danger, stepped back against one of the mighty beeches, holding out the wide cloak to shield Barnaby. A new howl broke out at the sight of her burden.

“The witch and her cat! Burn her! Burn them!”

“Give me back my wife!” cried the man with the bludgeon.

“And where’s good Mrs. Nutmeg?” shrieked an old hag.

“See, Jamesie,” exclaimed the woman with the child, “spit upon her! It is she who bewitched your poor daddy!”

The child hurled a stone which fell short of its aim. This was the signal for the passage from anger to frenzy; and it would have fared ill with Master Simon’s three innocent associates, had not it been for an unexpected aid. Barnaby’s face was already streaming with blood, and Ellinor had received on her arm a vicious blow—which Jamesie’s mother, armed with a flint, had levelled at Belphegor—when the sound of an authoritative shout produced a sudden halt. The sight of the keeper, advancing at full run from his gate-lodge and significantly handling his gun, immediately altered the complexion of affairs. Yet he had not come a moment too soon, nor was there one to be lost; for already a few stragglers, drunk with the triumph of destruction, were running down the avenue towards them from the Herb-Garden.

“Stand back!” cried the keeper. “Stand back, John Mossmason, or I’ll plug you! And you, Joe Barnwall, if you don’t drop that pitchfork you’ll never dig a turnip again, or my name is not keeper!”

The broad cord-clad back was now between Ellinor and her foes. Keeping his barrels levelled at the rioters, he whispered to her over his shoulder:

“Run, ma’am, run and get into the lodge!”

At that instant the note of the post-horn rang out upon the air; the Bath and Devizes coach was passing through the village.

The younger of the two discontented gentlemen who occupied damp outside seats on the coach that day and had been looking forth in dudgeon upon a world of dudgeon, never ceased in after years to recall the tale of that ride as one fit for walnuts and wine.

“It was raining cats and dogs, and by ill-luck (as I thought then), I and an elderly old buck had to put up with outsides: it was packed inside. Well, sir, I was cursing pretty freely by the time we were drawing Devizes. And when the coachman said he had to pick up a passenger at the gates of Bindon-Cheveral, I was getting a curse out of that, for an irregularity—when, gad, the words died on my tongue!

“A woman, sir, the loveliest woman these eyes were ever laid upon (my good lady is not here, I can say it in your ear), running, running for her life, bare-headed in the rain! By George, that was hair worth gazing at! She held a cat in her arms, like a baby, her cloak, half-torn from her back, flying behind. She was making for our coach. After her, an overgrown gawk of a lad, with a bloody sconce, lugging her bundles anyhow, the most frightened hare of a fellow it has ever been my lot to see—turned out afterwards, to be a kind of natural, deaf and dumb. But she, gad! she was brave for both! A grand creature, ’pon my word! Inside the park there was a prodigious deal of shouting and scuffling, and two or three big devils with pitchforks yelling something about a witch.

“‘Pray, gentlemen,’ says she, looking up at us, her eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, her face as white as this napkin, but as calm as you or I, ‘help me up,’ says she, ‘or they will kill me.’ And would you believe, it, she hands the cat up first before she’d let any one extend a hand to her? And the boy, he must come too! ‘I can’t leave him behind,’ says she, ‘they would tear him to pieces.’ And, zounds, sir, if it had not been for a keeper fellow with a gun who ran up and locked the wicket gate in their very faces, some of those lads meant murder or I never saw it written on a human face. Then it was: ‘On with you John!’ Off went the horn. Off went we, the inside females screeching like mad, and the devils at the gate bellowing like wild beasts after their prey....

“‘Well, this is a rum go!’ says the coachman, as he tucks the cat between his boots. ‘I always thought this here place of the Cheverals was asleep; dang me if it hasn’t wakened up with a vengeance!’

“A witch, sir, they’d called her. Not so far wrong there! Between you and me and the bottle I’ve never been able to forget her. A strange creature—all the women I’ve known would have gone off in a screaming fit or a swoon. Not she. The first thing she does is to whip open one of her little bundles and out with her handkerchief, and wipe and bind the boy’s broken head as he squatted beside her; and then she turns to me on the other side and hands me a scarf, and says she: ‘Would I be so kind as to tie it round her arm, as tight as might be.’ And then I saw an ugly gash in the pretty white flesh. ‘A hit with a stone,’ she says. And not another word could I get, nor the other old boy (who was green with jealousy at her speaking with me), nor John the coachman, though he called her ‘my dear,’ and was as round as round with her, a fatherly sort of man that any young female might confide in.

“She just pulled her hood over her face and lay back folding her arms, the sound one over the hurt one, and sat staring at the gray wet walls of Cheveral park as we skirted them. Her face looked like a white rose in the black shadow, and by and by, I saw the great tears begin to gather and roll down her cheeks one by one. I tell you, sir, my heart’s not a particularly soft one, but it made it ache.

“Well, we set her down and her cat and her boy at York House. She paid the boy’s fare and thanked us. I thought she was going in at the York—but she went up without another word by Bartlett street. And I never saw her again, nor heard more of her story.—Pass the bottle.”

THE STAR DREAMER