“Every man in his youth brews the cup of his own life and spends his age in drinking of it, willy nilly. Sometimes, I think, it is blind fate that has gathered the ingredients to his hand. Sometimes I see they are but the choice of his own perversity. But once brewed, he must drink, be they bitter or sweet.”
“Cousin—” she began timidly. Then, after her woman’s way, courage came to her on a sudden turn of passion: “I’ll not believe it!” she cried, flashing upon him. “Throw the poison away, David. There is glad wine yet in this beautiful world.”
His face relaxed as he looked upon her; the gloomy cloud passed from it. But the melancholy remained.
“Do you remember,” said he, “for I too can quote—what Lady Macbeth says: ‘All the perfumes of Araby cannot sweeten this little hand!’ My bright cousin, believe me, there is a bitterness which no sweetness that ever was distilled, nay, I fear, not even such as you could distil, can ever mitigate. Have you not learned,” he added, and a certain inner agitation made his lips twitch and the pupils of his eyes dilate and found a distant echo in his voice as of some roaring waters deeply hidden—“have you not learned, over your father’s crucibles and phials, that the sweetest essence does but lose its nature and become bitter too for ever, when mingled with but a few drops of the acrid draught. Ellinor, I have warned you already.”
She felt as if some cold hand had been laid on her heart:—here spoke again the voice of the sick soul determined to renounce. And here was the one man in her whole world, to whom she would so fain give extravagantly. There are natures to which love means taking only; others to which it means giving all. How she would have given! The ache of the tide thrust back upon her heart rose to her very throat. She went white, even to her brave lips. But still they smiled, as women’s lips will smile in such straits.
“You mind me,” she said, “that I was after all forgetting to gather the hellebore. ’Tis a dark drug-plant, cousin and loves the shade; and, if the old simplers speak truth, it must be gathered before a ray of sun shall of a morning have opened its green petals. I see that I must hurry. Already the shadow of your grey tower is shortening across the beds.”
She took her basket from his arm, gave him a little nod as of dismissal and passed quickly from him. He let her go without a word or a gesture, standing still, wrapt in himself, with eyes downcast. Those deep waters in his soul, that for so many long years had lain black and stagnant—what was it that had so stirred them of late days, that they should rise in waves like the salt and bitter sea and dash against his laboriously built dykes of peace and renunciation?
Ellinor was long on her knees beside the hellebore, not indeed that she was busy picking it, for her hands lay idly before her. With eyes fixed unseeingly upon its dark, poisonous looking tufts, she was tasting the savour of a slow gathering tear. Suddenly she felt her cousin’s presence again close upon her and began feverishly to tear at the plant, every energy of her mind bent upon concealing her weakness. In another moment, with a sweetness that was almost overpowering, she knew that he was kneeling beside her, his shoulder to her shoulder, his hands over hers.
“Dear Ellinor,” he said softly in her ear, “I do not like to see you touch this poisonous plant, let me——” And then, breaking off, when she turned her face, so close to his, as if irresistibly drawn to seek his glance: “Forgive me!” he cried, with more emotion than she had ever heard his measured tones express before. “By what right am I always thus casting upon your happy heart the shadow of my gloom!”
Her fingers closed passionately round his.