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.