June 24th., 1823.Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.
June 24th., 1823.Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.
June 24th., 1823.Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.
June 24th., 1823.
Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.
CHAPTER VEVIL PROMPTER, JEALOUSY
Great bliss was with them and great happinessGrew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.—Keats(Pot of Basil).
Great bliss was with them and great happinessGrew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.—Keats(Pot of Basil).
Great bliss was with them and great happinessGrew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.—Keats(Pot of Basil).
Great bliss was with them and great happiness
Grew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.
—Keats(Pot of Basil).
July over the meadows, sweeter in death than in life, where the long grass lay in swathes and the bared earth split and crumbled under the fierce sun. July in the great woods, with leaves at their deepest green, nobly still against the noble still azure, throwing blocks of green shade in the mossy aisles and wondrous grey designs of leaf and branch on the hardened ground. July in the drowsy hum of the laden bee; in the birds’ silence and the insects’ orchestra—those undertones of sounds—everywhere; July in the sweet hearted rose, in the plenitude of summer fulfilment. July over garden and cornfield and purple moor....
So it had been all day, a long, gorgeous day, busy and yet lazy, full to the brim of nature’s slow, ripe work. And now the evening had come; the fires of the sunset had cooled and a deep-bosomed sky had begun to brood over the teeming earth, lit only by the sickle of a young moon that had hung, ghost-like, in the airs the whole afternoon.
The fields of heaven were yet nearly as bare of stars as the meadows of their murdered flowers; but here and there, with a sudden little leap like a kindling lamp, some distant sun—white Vega or ruddy Arcturus—began to send its gold or silver messages across the firmament where the summer sun of our world held lingering monarchy.
Ellinor had spent a long hot day in the parsonage, helpingthat pearl of housewives, Madam Tutterville, with the potting of cherry jam. She had come home across the fields with lagging step, drawing in the luxury of the evening silence, the cool fragrance of the woods, the beauties of the advancing night. She bore, as an offering, a handsome basketful of rectory peaches, over which her soul was grateful: a proper dish to set before him in whose service she took her joy.
On re-entering the house, according to her usual wont, she at first sought her father, but found the laboratory empty of any presence save that of the herb-spirits singing in the throat of the retort. She made no doubt then but that the simpler had sought the star-gazer’s high seat.
One result of her presence at Bindon had been the gradual drawing together of the two men, with herself as a centring link. David was more prone to come down from his tower and her father to come up from his vault. And she took a sweet and secret pleasure in the quite unconscious sense of grievance they would both display when her duty or her mood took her for any length of time away from either of them.
As she reached the foot of the tower stairs a hand was placed upon her arm. She turned with that irrepressible inner revulsion which always heralded to her Margery’s presence.
“Asking your pardon, ma’am,” came the usual silky formula, “may I inquire if you are going up to see my master?”
“To be sure,” answered Ellinor quietly, though she blushed in the dark. “Do you not see that I am going up to the tower?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mrs. Nutmeg, humbly. “I made so bold as to trouble you, ma’am, not wishing to intrude upon my master myself. The postman left a letter, ma’am.”
Mrs. Nutmeg drew the object in question from under her black silk apron. Very white it shone in the gloom:—alarge, oblong folded sheet, with a black blotch in the centre where sprawled an enormous seal.
“This letter, ma’am,” she repeated, “came this evening. Would you be good enough to hand it yourself to my master?”
Ellinor had a superstitious feeling that Margery Nutmeg was one day, somehow, destined to bring misfortune upon her; and it was this perhaps which always left her discomfited after even the most trivial interview with the housekeeper. But determinedly shaking off the sensation, she slipped the letter in her basket and began the ascent of the rugged stairs. No matter how tired she might be, her foot was always light when it led her to the tower, because her impatient heart went on before.
Leaving the basket in the observatory, she retained the letter in her hand, instinctively avoiding any scrutiny of its superscription, although seen here in the lamplight the thought did strike her that it looked like a woman’s writing. Sir David’s correspondence, as she knew, was so scanty that the sealed missive might indeed mean an event in their lives; and now the present was too full of delicate happiness for her to welcome anything that might portend change.
She stood for a moment on the threshold of the platform, looking out on the two figures silhouetted against the sky. Her father, as usual in his gown, seated on the stone ledge of the parapet, was speaking. David, leaning against the wall with folded arms, was looking down at him. Master Simon’s chuckle, followed by the rare low note of the star-gazer’s laughter, fell upon her ear.
“I do assure you,” the old man was saying, “it was the very surliest fellow in the whole of Bindon village. A complete misanthropist, a perfect curmudgeon! The poor woman would come to me in tears, with sometime a black eye, sometime a swollen lip—I have known her actually cut about the occiput. ‘My poor creature,’ I would say to her, ‘plaster your wound I can, but alteryour husband’s humours is at present beyond my power.’”
“Not having yet re-discovered the ‘Star-of-Comfort,’” interrupted David.
The sound of that voice, gently sarcastic and indulgently mocking, had become so dear to Ellinor that she lingered yet for the mere chance of indulging her ear again unobserved.
“Not having then re-discovered theEuphrosinum,” corrected Master Simon, with emphasis on the word “then.” “But that excellent young woman, my daughter, has been of service to me there.”
“She has been of service everywhere.”
This tribute brought joy to the listener. Forced by the turn the conversation was taking to disclose her presence, she emerged upon the platform, but took a seat beside her father’s in silence, the letter for the moment quite forgotten in her pocket.
“Ah, there is Ellinor!”
Sir David had seen her coming first and was the first to greet her. She thought, she hoped, there was gladness in the exclamation.
“Eh, eh!” said Master Simon. “Back from the prophetess’s jam-pots?” He fondled the hand she had laid on his knee. “Did the virtuous woman open her mouth with wisdom, while you, my girl, girded your loins with strength? We were talking of you, my girl. Ah, David, did I not do well for both you and me, when I craved house-room at Bindon for this Exception-to-her-Sex?”
David did not answer. But in the gloom she felt his eye upon her, and her heart throbbed. Master Simon, after a little pause, resumed the thread of his discourse.
“Ha, I am a mass of selfishness, a mass of selfishness! And the plant of True Grace is found; theEuphrosinumis found, Sir David Cheveral. Found, planted, culled and tested.” The utmost triumph was in his accents. “Aye,my dear young man, you will be rejoiced to hear that the effects of this most precious of simples have in no wise been overrated by the writers of old. They have far exceeded my most sanguine expectation. Why, sir, I said to myself: this fellow, this John Cantrip with his evil spleen, he has been marked by destiny for the first experiment. I prepared a decoction, making it duly palatable (for if you will remember your natural history, even bears like honey), I bade the poor, much-tried wife—he had just deprived her of both her front teeth—place a spoonful daily in his morning draught. That was a week ago. She came here this morning ... you will hardly credit it——”
The speaker paused, became absorbed in a delightful memory and began to laugh softly to himself. And the infection again gained the listener.
“Well, sir, has the bear turned to lamb? And is the dame content with the metamorphosis?”
“You will hardly credit it,” repeated the simpler, rubbing his hands, “the silly woman was beside herself with the most intemperate passion. There was no sort of abuse she did not heap upon me. She swears I have bewitched her husband and that she will have the law of me. He, he! You must know, David, the fellow is a carpenter; and, although his tempers were objectionable, he was a good worker. Indeed, I gather that the exasperated condition of his system found relief in the constant hammering of nails, punching of holes, sawing and planing of hard substance. But now——” Again delighted chuckle and mental review took the place of speech.
“Well?” asked Sir David. His tone was broken with an undercurrent of laughter. Ellinor smiled in her dark corner. She compared this David, interested and amused in human matters, pleasant of intercourse himself and appreciative of another’s company, to the man of taciturn moods and melancholy, who fed on his own morbid thought and fled from his fellow men—to the David ofbut a few months ago. She knew it was her woman’s presence that had, as if unconsciously, wrought the change.
“Well?” said Sir David again.
“My dear fellow,” cried Master Simon, breaking into a louder cackle. “John Cantrip, as you say, has changed from a bear into a lamb; at least from a sullen, dangerous animal into an exceedingly pleasant, light-hearted one. He sings, he whistles, he laughs—all that cerebral congestion, that nervous irritation, has been soothed away under the balmy influence of this valuable plant. The excellent creature is able to take delight in his life, in the beautiful objects of Nature around him. He admires the blue sky, he rejoices in the seasonable heat, he embraces his spouse—he will hang over his infant’s cradle and express a tender, paternal desire to rock him to slumber. Every happy instinct has been wakened, every morose one lulled. Would I could induce the government of this land to enforce in each parish the cultivation ofEuphrosinum. My good sir, we should have no more need of prisons, or stocks, or gallows!”
“And yet you say,” quoth David, “that Mrs. Cantrip is dissatisfied.”
“Most excellent David, from early days of the earth downwards, the woman was ever the most unreasonable of all God’s creatures. She wants the impossible, she wants the perfection of things, which is not of this world. Instead of rejoicing, this foolish person complains.”
“Complains?”
“Oh, well, it seems the carpenter is now disinclined for work. I endeavoured to explain to her that the morbid reason for his love of hammering no longer exists. The good fellow is placid and content and an agreeable companion. But the absurd female is tearing her hair! ‘What,’ said I, ‘he has not struck you once since Saturday week, and you do not rejoice?’ ‘Rejoice!’ she screams. ‘And he’s not struck a nail either.’ ‘If this happy effect continues,’ I assured her, ‘you will be ableto keep the remainder of your teeth.’ ‘I’ll have nothing to put between them if it does,’ she responds. In vain I represented to her,mulier—in short, that I, having done my part, it was now hers to utilise these new dispositions for her own ends. She must beguile him back to his everyday duties with tender smiles and womanly wiles—the female’s place in nature being to play this part towards the ruder male. But it was absolutely impossible to get her so much as to listen to me! She vowed that she had lost all patience—which was indeed very patent—that she had even clouted him (as she expressed it), without producing any other result than a smile at her. ‘Grins,’ says she, ‘like a zany!’ and with the want of logic of her sex, utterly fails to perceive what a triumphant attestation she is making to the efficacy of my plant.”
“It is extremely droll,” said David.
“Of course it will at once strike you,” pursued the old student, “that the obvious course was to induce the dissatisfied lady to partake of the soothing lotion herself. But, would you believe it? She became more violently abusive than ever at the bare suggestion!”
“Indeed,” said Ellinor, interrupting, “not only did she decline to make any acquaintance herself with the remedy, but she brought back the jar, with all that was left of our infusion, and vowed that she was well punished for dealing with the Devil and his daughter. You know, cousin David, I fear that I am rapidly gaining something of a reputation for black art! I do not mind, of course. Only,” she faltered a little, “a child ran from me in the village this morning. I was sorry for that.”
David’s face grew scornful. Popularity was so poor a thing in his eyes, that popular hate was not, he deemed, worth even a passing thought. But Ellinor, who could not look upon the world from a tower and whose self-allotted tasks lay, of necessity, much among the humble many, had not this lofty indifference. She knew she had already more enemies than friends. And she knew also to what she owed the sowing of this hostility—not to herassociation with her father, whose eccentric experiments in pharmacy on the whole worked to the benefit, and gave an extraordinary zest to the lives, of the village community—not to Madam Tutterville’s texts; for, indeed, that good lady was so subjugated by her niece’s housekeeperly qualifications that she elected for the nonce to be blind to the daughter’s abetting of the father’s pursuits. Well did Ellinor know to whom it was she owed her growing ill-repute.
Yet the cloud in her sky, no bigger at first than a woman’s hand, was growing, she felt, and was sufficient already to cast a shadow. And now, as she sat in such perfect content this summer night between her father and her cousin, her duty and her love, and felt herself a centre of peace and harmony, the mere passing remembrance of Margery sufficed to make her heart contract.
With the thought of Margery, the recollection of her commission leaped up in her mind. She laid the letter on her knee, gazing down at its whiteness a moment or two before she could overcome her extraordinary repugnance to deliver it.
Meanwhile Master Simon was flowing happily on again, quite oblivious of the fact that neither David, whose gaze had once more turned starward, nor his daughter, absorbed in inner reflection, were paying the least heed to his discourse.
“Naturally, poor Cantrip will relapse. And he will hammer wife and nails once more, and as energetically as ever. But this is immaterial. The principle, my good young people, you are both intelligent enough to see at once, is firmly established. In another year the face of Bindon will have changed. Beldam will scold no more nor maiden mope. You yourself, David—we should have no more of these heavy sighs, if——”
Here Ellinor broke in, rising and holding out the letter.
“Cousin David, I quite forgot—the post brought this for you and I promised to give it.”
“A letter,” said Sir David. He took it from her handand placed it on the stone parapet. “It is too dark to read it now.” She fancied his voice was troubled, and immediately there grew upon her an inexplicable jealous desire that the letter should be opened in her presence, that she might gain some hint of its contents.
“I will bring out a light,” she said and flew upon her errand, returning presently with a little silver lantern from the observatory. She placed it on the ledge; and from the three glass sides its light threw cross shaped beams, one uselessly into the dark space, one upon the rough stone and the letter, one upon her own bending face, pale and eager, with aureole of disordered hair.
From the darkness Sir David looked at her face first: and it was as if the revealing light had shot into the mists of his own heart.
The passion of love comes to men from so many different paths that to each individual it may be said to come in a new guise. To no one does it come as an invited guest. It may be the chance meeting, the love at first sight—“she never loved at all who loved not at first sight.” But Shakespeare knew better than to advance this as an axiom. ’Tis but the insolent phrase on the lover’s mouth who deems his own passion the only true one, the model for the world. Some, on the other hand, find with amazement that long, long already, in some sweet and familiar shape, love has been with them and they knew it not. They have entertained an angel unawares; and suddenly, it may be on a trivial occasion, the veil has been lifted and the heavenly countenance revealed. Others, like the poor man in the fable, take the treacherous thing to the warmth of their bosom in all trustfulness and only by the sting of it as it uncoils know that they have been struck to the heart. Others, again, as unfortunate, bolt their inhospitable doors upon the wayfarer and perhaps, as they sit by a lonely hearth, never know that it was love that knocked and went its way, to pass the desolate house no more.
To Sir David Cheveral, whose hot and hopeful youth had been betrayed by life, this sudden apprehension of love in his set manhood came, not in sweetness nor yet in pain, but in a bewildering upheaval of all things ordered—as an earthquake flinging up new heights and baring unknown depths in the staid familiar landscape; as a flash of light—“the light that never was on sea or land,” after which nothing ever could look the same again.
It may, in one sense, be true that the man of pleasure is an easier prey to his feelings than he who in asceticism spends his days feeding the spirit at the expense of the flesh; but it is true only because the former man is weak, not because his passion is strong. By so much as the deep river that has been driven to course between its own silent banks is more mighty than the shallow waters that expand themselves in a hundred noisy channels, by so much is the passion of the recluse a thing more irresistible, more terrible to reckon with than the bubble obsession of the self indulgent.
But he who outrages Nature by excess in other direction, by Nature herself is punished. The recluse of Bindon was now to grapple with the avenging strength of his denied manhood. By the leaping of his blood and the tremor of his being, by the joy of his heart, which his instinctive sudden resistance turned into as fierce an anguish, by the heat that rushed to his brow, he knew at last that love was upon him; and he knew that, were he to resist love in obedience to so many unspoken vows, victory would be more bitter than death.
As he looked with a haggard eye at the lovely transfigured face, it was suddenly lost in the shadows again; only a hand flashed forth into the light and this hand held a letter, persisting. He passed his fingers over his eyes and brushed the damp masses of hair from his forehead.
“Will you not read your letter, cousin David?” asked Ellinor.
Mechanically he took the paper held out towards him. She lifted the lantern, that its light might serve him: it trembled a little in her grasp. And now his glance dropped upon the seal. He stared, started, turned the letter over and stared again. Then his warm emotion fell from him.
“You,” said he, “you to bring me this!”
She bent forward, the pale oval of her face coming within the radius of the light again.
“I have no wish to read this letter,” he went on.
There was a deep, a contained emotion in his air. All was fuel to Ellinor’s suddenly risen unreasoning flame of jealousy. That he should take the letter into his solitude, maybe, that she should not know, never know—it was not to be borne!
“Read, read!” she cried, unconsciously imperative by right of her passion.
Their gaze met. His was gloomy and startled, then suddenly became ardent. She saw such a flame leap into his eyes that her own fell before them; then her bold heart sank.
“I would not have opened it. But it shall be as you wish,” he answered. And as David broke the seal, Master Simon’s curious, wrinkled face peered over his shoulder.
“Ha,” said the old man, wonderingly, “The Lochore arms.”
Sir David turned the letter in his hand.
“From your sister?” asked the simpler, with amazed emphasis.
“Once I called her so,” answered the astronomer, with an effort that told of his inner repugnance.
As one wakes from a fevered dream Ellinor awoke from her brief madness. Her father’s placid tones, the everyday obvious explanation fell upon her heart like drops of cold water. But the reaction was scarcely one of relief. How was it possible that she, Ellinor Marvel, the woman of many experiences, of the cool brain and thestrong heart, should have yielded to this degrading folly, this futile jealousy? What had she done! She shivered as a rapid sequence of thought forced its logic upon her unwilling mind. She had feared that the touch of some woman out of his past should reach David now, at the very moment when a lover’s heart was opening to her in his bosom. Behold! she had herself delivered him over to the one woman of all others she had most reason to dread—the woman who, out of her own outrage upon him had acquired the most influence over his life. It seemed to Ellinor as if she herself who had so laboured to call him to the present and lure him with hopes of a brighter future, had now handed him back to the slavery of the past.
The seal cracked under his fingers.
“Ah, no,” she cried, now springing forward on the new impulse. “No, no, David, do not read it! Send it back, like the others!”
He flung on her a single glance.
“It is too late,” he said, “the seal is broken.”
“Ah, me,” cried Ellinor. “And we were so happy!”
She remembered Margery’s sleek face as it had peered at her in the shadows of the passage: “Will you be good enough to hand this letter yourself to my master?”
Margery had known that from her hand he would take it. Margery had a devil’s instinct of the folly of men and women.
CHAPTER VITHE PERFECT ROSE, DROOPING
Such is the fond illusion of my heart,Such pictures would I at that time have made;And seen the soul of truth in every part,A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.So once it would have been—’tis so no more:I have submitted to a new control,A power is gone which nothing can restore....—Wordsworth(Elegiacs).
Such is the fond illusion of my heart,Such pictures would I at that time have made;And seen the soul of truth in every part,A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.So once it would have been—’tis so no more:I have submitted to a new control,A power is gone which nothing can restore....—Wordsworth(Elegiacs).
Such is the fond illusion of my heart,Such pictures would I at that time have made;And seen the soul of truth in every part,A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.
Such is the fond illusion of my heart,
Such pictures would I at that time have made;
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.
So once it would have been—’tis so no more:I have submitted to a new control,A power is gone which nothing can restore....—Wordsworth(Elegiacs).
So once it would have been—’tis so no more:
I have submitted to a new control,
A power is gone which nothing can restore....
—Wordsworth(Elegiacs).
Sir David sat down upon the parapet, shifted the lantern and began to read. Ellinor watched him, the tumultuous beating of her heart gradually sinking down to a dull languor. Master Simon was pacing the platform, now conning over some chemical formula to himself, now pausing to gaze upon the stars with a good humoured sneer upon the futility of astronomy in general and the absurdity of Sir David’s in particular. A bat came and flapped with noiseless wings round the lantern and was lost again in the darkness of the surrounding deeps. It seemed to Ellinor a heavy space of time, and still David sat with a contracted brow, motionless, staring at the open sheet in his hand. At length he raised his head. His eyes sought, not herself, but the comrade of his long years of solitude.
“Cousin Simon!”
The old man turned in his walk, a fantastic figure in his flapping skirts as he shuffled forward out of the gloom. Evidently he had perceived a note of urgency in Sir David’s tone, for he came quickly.
“Yes, lad!”
Ellinor had not yet heard that inflection of solicitude in her father’s voice, but she recognised that it belonged also to that past they all dreaded; and for the first time she realised something of the ties that bound these unlikely companions to each other.
“Cousin Simon,” said David with stiff lips, “she asks me to receive her here!”
“Who? Maud?—What! the heathen vixen! Don’t answer her, don’t answer her!”
Sir David looked up. There was the stamp of pain upon his features; and yet, as she told herself, it was not so much pain as the loathing of one forced to contemplate something of utter abhorrence. Both men, she saw, were quite oblivious of her presence: the past was now stronger about them than the present. As Sir David made no answer beyond that dumb look, Master Simon grew yet more vehement.
“Pshaw! man, you’re not going to give way now after all these years! The thing’s irreparable between you. Why, David, what are you thinking of? How could you bear it? Think for a moment what her presence here would mean!”
Then Sir David spoke:
“It is not,” he said, “a question now, of my wishes. So long as I felt justified in considering myself alone, I had no hesitation. But to-night I have to face this: What is my duty?”
“Eh? How, now!” Master Simon stuttered, and could find no word. “Pooh! fudge!” He thrust out a testy hand for the letter.
“Read!” said the master of Bindon, “and then you will understand.”
Master Simon seized the document and, stooping to the light began to read the words aloud to himself, according to his custom. Ellinor drew near and listened. Nothing could have now kept her from yielding to her intense desire to know.
“‘Dear Brother,’” read the old gentleman (“DearBrother!—A dear sister she’s proved to you!”) “‘It is very likely you may never read these lines’ (if that isn’t a woman all over! ... where am I?) ‘according to your heartless custom’—(Ha!” said Master Simon, shooting a swift ironical look at Sir David from under his ever-hanging eyebrows, “since when has Lady Lochore become qualified to pronounce upon heartlessness? Pooh!”)
Sir David made no reply. His eyes were fixed on some inward visions. The simpler gave a snort, and resumed his reading:
“‘Oh, David, let me see my home once more!’ (No, Madam!) ‘Let me come to you alone with my child. I am ill——’ (Devil doubt her—they’re all ill when they don’t get their way!) ‘I am ill, dying, and sometimes I think that it is because you have not forgiven me. In the name of our father, in the name of our mother,’ (’pon my word, she’s a clever one!) ‘I have a right to demand this! I must see my home before I die.’”
Sir David’s compressed lips suddenly worked. He rose and walked across to the other side of the platform, where against the lambent sky, his form once more became a mere silhouette. Master Simon proceeded quietly to finish the letter.
“There’s a postscript,” he said, and read out: “‘You cannot refuse me the hospitality of Bindon for a few weeks, remember that I, too, am a child of the house.’”
“‘Remember that I, too, am a child of the house!’”
Ellinor repeated the words drearily to herself. That was the key she herself had found to unlock the door of Sir David’s hospitality.
“Upon my soul,” said Master Simon, “I shall never fall foul of the female intellect again!”
He looked at Ellinor, and laughed drily.
“Oh,” she cried, shocked at this inopportune mirth, “she must not come here—we must prevent it!”
“Prevent it!” he cried irritably. “Do so, if you can,my girl. By the Lord Harry!” the forgotten expletive of his jaunty youth leaped oddly forth over his white beard, “she’s done the trick! Touch David upon his honour, his family obligations! Ha! she knows it too. A pest on you!” he went on, his anger rising suddenly, “with your silly female inquisitiveness. ‘Read it, read it!’ quoth she. Without you, Mrs. Marvel, he’d have sent the precious missive back—unopened, like all the others! Ha, that’s an astute one! ‘If you read these lines,’ she writes. Well she knew that if he once did read them she would win her game!”
Beneath an impatient stamp one slipper fell off. Thrusting his foot back into it, he began to hobble in the direction of Sir David, muttering and growling as he went, not unlike his own Belphegor when his cat-dignity had been grievously offended. Disjointed scraps of his remarks reached Ellinor, as she stood, disconsolate and cold at heart, facing the probable results of her impulse:—“A pretty thing ... disturbing the peace of the house ... a mass of selfishness ... a pack of silly women!”
“Well,” said Sir David, turning round as his cousin drew near.
“Why do you say ‘well’?” snapped the simpler. “You know you’ve made up your mind already, and need none of my advice.”
A bitter smile flickered over Sir David’s face.
“Can you say after reading that letter that there is any other course open to me?”
“Stuff and nonsense! A half-dozen excellent courses. You can leave the letter unanswered. You can write to the lady that these home affections come a little late in the day. You can write, if you like, and forgive her by post. You can take coach to London and forgive her there, and.... But, in Heaven’s name, stem the stream of petticoats from invading our peace here!”
“What,” exclaimed the younger man, a blackness as of thunder gathering on his brow. “Do you, do you, cousin Simon, bid me enter Lochore’s house!”
Disconcerted, Master Simon lost his ill humour, though to conceal the fact he still tried to bluster.
“Pooh! You’re not of this century. You’re mediæval, quixotic! David, man, high feelings are not worn nowadays. They have been put by, with knighthood’s armour. Don’t forgive her then, lad. I am sure I see no reason why you should.”
“Forgiveness!” echoed Sir David.
Ellinor had crept close to them once more. That bitter ring in David’s voice smote her heart.
“Forgiveness!” he repeated. “Does he who remembers ever forgive? My sister is ill and craves to return to her old home. Well, I recognise her right to its hospitality and also to my courtesy as the dispenser of it. More I cannot give her.”
“She’ll not ask for more!” interrupted the unconvinced simpler. “Eh, eh! It is my fault, David: I might have known how it would be. I brought in the first petticoat and there the mischief began.”
“Oh, father!”
The tears sprang to Ellinor’s eyes. Sir David turned round and seemed to become again aware of her presence.
“No, no,” he said, “that is ungrateful.” He took her hand. “She brought us sunshine,” he said.
But she missed from his pressure the tremulous touch of passion; she missed from his eyes that flame she had shrunk from and that now her heart would always hunger for. Pure kindness, mild sadness—what could her enkindled soul make now of such gifts as these? With an inarticulate sound she drew her fingers from his clasp; and, turning, fled downstairs again and back to her room.
A taper was burning on her writing table, and in its small meek circle of light a bowl of monthly roses displayedtheir innocent pink beauty. The latticed casement was thrown open. In the square of sky a single silver star pointed the illimitable distance. From the Herb-Garden below rose gushes of aromatic airs, as, from some secret cloister by night the voices of the dedicated rise and fall. Vaguely, in her seething misery, she seemed to recognise the special essence of the new plant giving to the cool night the sweetness accumulated during the long, hot hours of the day.
She sat down on the narrow bed, folded her hands on her lap and stared dully forth at the square of sky and the single star. Presently, almost without her own consciousness, her bosom began to heave with long sighs and tears to course down her cheeks. Where was now the strength, the indifference to passing events which she boasted her long battle with life had given her? Gone, gone at the first touch of passion! Throughout a sordid marriage she had remained virgin of heart, she had kept the virgin’s peace—and now?
Alternations of pride and despair broke over her like waves, salt and bitter as her own tears. How happy they had been! And the unknown fiend, jealousy, had urged her to break the still current of that sweet, restful half-unwitting happiness of their life all three together—a current flowing, she had told herself with conviction, to a full tide of unimaginable bliss.
My God, how he had looked at her only that night! And it was in that pearl of moments that she had thrust his past back upon him and bade him, with her precious, new-found power, read the letter that should never have been opened. The perfect rose had been within her grasp. It was her own hand that had flung it in the dust.
Master Simon, still shaking his head and muttering disapproval, went slowly back to his laboratory.
“The cunning jade!” he was grumbling, “she’s no more ill than I am. Or if she be, a pretty business weshall have with her—a fine lady with vapours, and megrims, and tantrums! I’ve not forgotten the ways of them...!”
But here an illuminating idea flashed upon his brain. He stopped at the corner of a passage, cocking his head like an old grey jackdaw. “Eh, but a fine lady in her tantrums.... What a test for the virtues of my paragon herb!”
All very well to rejoice at its efficacy upon the homely rustic. Master Simon had experimented upon the homely rustic too many years not to have developed a fine contempt for his vile corpus; he was too true an enthusiast not to long for something like a proper nervous system upon which to work.
An air of returning good humour now settled upon his face; and by the time he was seated at his table, he had begun to wish his unwelcome cousin really a prey to the most advanced melancholia, and was conning over what phrases he could remember of her letter—delighted when they seemed to point to that conclusion.
“And even if she be not pining away for sorrow, as she would like poor David to believe, if I remember the lady aright, she has as disordered a temper of her own as John Cantrip himself.”
CHAPTER VIINODS AND WREATHÉD SMILES
... Half light, half shade,She stood, a sight to make an old man young.—Tennyson(Gardener’s Daughter).
... Half light, half shade,She stood, a sight to make an old man young.—Tennyson(Gardener’s Daughter).
... Half light, half shade,She stood, a sight to make an old man young.—Tennyson(Gardener’s Daughter).
... Half light, half shade,
She stood, a sight to make an old man young.
—Tennyson(Gardener’s Daughter).
Within Bindon house the next ten days were as uneventful as those that had preceded this night of emotional trouble; days similar in routine, in outward tranquillity. But how unlike in colour, in atmosphere! It was as if thunder-clouds had chased all the summer peace; as if brooding skies had taken the place of radiance and laughing blue; as if close mists enshrouded the earth, robbing the woods of living light and shade, dulling the tints of flower and turf, contracting the horizon. The former days had been days of many-hued hope; these now were days of drab suspense. And ever and anon, in the listening stillness, there came upon Ellinor’s inner senses, as from behind hiding hills, the far-off mutter of a gathering storm.
But in the outer world the summer still kept its glory, the sky its undisturbed azure, the flowers their jewel hues. Never had Bindon looked fairer, more nobly itself. Preparations went on apace for the reception of the visitor. Ellinor personally saw to every detail—she piqued herself that no one could reproach her with not carrying out to the finest line of conscientiousness her duties as housekeeper of Sir David’s home. A little paler, a little colder, more silently and with just a note of sternness, she moved about her tasks. Nothing was made easy for her: the household, scenting a possible change, became more openly inclined to mutiny.
Master Simon, also, seemed to become more exacting in his demands upon her time. Sir David, on the other hand, had withdrawn almost as completely as had been his wont before her arrival. And her woman’s pride and tact alike kept her from those raids upon his tower privacy, which but a little time ago had caused him so much pleasure, it seemed, and herself such infinite sweetness.
It was hard, too, to have to meet Margery’s paroxysm of astonishment; Margery’s ostentatious outburst of joy at the thought of “her dear young lady coming back to her rightful place at last”; Margery’s insolence of triumph as regarded “the interloper,” astutely conveyed in such humble garments that to notice it would have been but a crowning humiliation.
“Eh, to think, ma’am,” the ex-housekeeper would say in her innocent voice, “that it should have been that very letter I handed you myself, never dreaming, that’s brought this blessed reconciliation about! It do seem like the finger of the Lord. Ah, ma’am, but you must be glad in your heart, to feel yourself the instrument of peace. Who knows, if the master would have taken it from any hand but yours, he that used to return them as regular and just as fast as they came!”
And then came parson and Madam Tutterville: he, as beseemed the God-chosen and state-appointed minister of the gospel of charity, most duly (and unconvincingly) approving the proposed reconciliation; and, as man of the world, most humanly and convincingly dubious of its results: she, openly bewailing, with all her store of texts and feminine logic, so inconvenient a hitch in her secret plans.
Ellinor had to receive them both. For the lower door of Sir David’s turret stairs was bolted, and Master Simon on his side had stoutly refused any manner of interview with anyone so sturdily healthy as the rector, or so disdainful of his remedies as the rector’s lady.
“Under every law,” said Doctor Tutterville, “theJewish, the Pagan, the Philosophic and the Christian in its many variations, it has been enjoined upon our human weakness that it is advisable to forgive:Æquum est peccatis veniam poscentem reddere rursus.
So the rector, acknowledging his share of frailty—a share so pleasant to himself and so inoffensive to others that it was no wonder he showed little desire to repudiate it.
“One may forgive,” said Madam Tutterville sententiously. “Heaven knows I should be the last to deny that!”—this with the air of making a valuable concession to the decrees of Providence—“But there is another law: that chastisement shall follow misdoing. Was not David punished through Jonathan’s hair?”
The parson’s waistcoat rippled over his gentle laughter. He was seated in one of the deep-winged library armchairs, and while he spoke his eyes roamed with ever renewed satisfaction over the appointments of the room—the silver bowl of roses, fresh filled, the artistic neatness of writing table, the high polish of oak and gilt leather. His fine appreciation for the fitness of things was tickled; his glance finally rested with complacency upon the figure of the young woman herself—the capable young woman who had wrought so many pleasing changes. And as he looked he smiled: Ellinor was the culminating point of agreeable contemplation amid exceedingly agreeable surroundings.
She toned in so well with the scene! The sober golds and russets of the walls repeated their highest note in her burnished hair. Her outline, as she sat, exactly corresponded to the rector’s theory of what the female line of beauty should be. He liked the close, fine texture of her skin and the hues upon her cheeks, which fluctuated from geranium-white to glorious rose. The proud curl of her lip appealed to him; so did the sudden dimple. He liked the direct gaze of her honest blue eyes, and he was not unaware of the thickness and length of eyelashes that seemed to have little points of fire on their tips.
That scholarly gentleman’s admiration was of so lofty, so philosophic a nature, that even his Sophia could have found no fault with it. But as he yielded himself to it, the conviction was ever more strongly borne in upon him that his wife, in her impetuosity, had reached to a juster conclusion concerning Ellinor than he in his own ripe wisdom. He had treated her repeated remark that “Here was just the wife for David, here the proper mistress of Bindon,” with his usual good-natured contempt. But to-day he saw Ellinor with new eyes. Yes, this was a gem worthy of Bindon setting. This would be a noble wife for any man; an ideal one for David—for fastidious David, to whom the old epicure felt especially drawn, although he recognised that one may make of fastidiousness a fine art and not push the cult to the point of David’s eccentricity.
Here, then, was a woman fair enough to bring the Star-Dreamer, the soaring idealist back to earth; wholesomely human enough to keep him there in sanity and content, once Love had clipped his wing.
Meanwhile Madam Tutterville was bringing a long dissertation to an end. In it, by the help of the scriptures, old and new, she had proved that while it was indubitably David’s duty to forgive his sister up to a certain point, it was likewise indubitably incumbent upon him to continue to keep her in wholesome remembrance of her offences by excluding her from Bindon, until——. Here the lady became exceedingly mysterious and addressed herself with nods and becks solely to her husband, ignoring Ellinor’s presence, much after the fashion of nurses over the heads of their charges.
“At least until that happy consummation of affairs, Horatio, which you and I have so much discussed.”
“My dear Ellinor,” she pursued, turning blandly to her niece, who with a suddenly scarlet face was trying in vain to look as if she had not understood, “be guidedby my advice, by my advice. It is extremely desirable, I might say imperative, that things should remain at present at Bindon House in what your good uncle would term the state of quo, a Greek word, my dear, signifying that it is best to leave well alone.”
“What is it you would have me do?”
“Well, my dear, seeing that everything has been going on so nicely these months, and that Bindon has become no longer like a family lunatic asylum, but quite a respectable, clean house, and that Nutmeg thing reduced to proper order, and David almost human, coming down to meals just as if he were in his right mind (though I’ve given up your father, my dear), I’m afraid that in his case that clear cohesion of intellect which is so necessary (is it not, Horatio?) is irrevocably affected.”
She tapped her forehead and shook her head, murmured something about the instance of John Cantrip, hesitated for a moment, as if on the point of gliding off in another direction, but saved herself with a heroic jerk.
“I would be glad,” she went on, “to have had speech of David myself; but since you tell me that is impossible, Ellinor, I must be content with laying my injunctions upon you. And indeed (is it not so, Horatio?) you are perhaps the most fitted for this delicate task. The voice of the turtle, my dear, is more likely to reach his heart than the dictates of wisdom.”
“The voice of the turtle, aunt?”
“Yes, my dear,” said Madam Tutterville, putting her head on one side with a languishing air. “In the beautiful imagery of Solomon the turtle—the bird, my love, not the shell-fish—is always brought forward as the emblem of female devotion.”
“I don’t see how that can refer to me!”
Ellinor sprang to her feet as she spoke: the rector’s gurgle of amusement was the last straw to her patience. Angry humiliation dyed her face, her blue eyes shot flames.
“Oh, don’t explain, I can’t bear it! But please, dearaunt, please, don’t call me a turtle again! It’s the last thing I am, or want to be!”
She broke, in spite of herself, into laughter; laughter with a lump in her throat.
Parson Tutterville had been highly entertained. Mrs. Marvel was quite as agreeable to watch in wrath as in repose. But he was a man of feeling.
“I think, Sophia,” he said, in the tone she never resisted, “we will pursue the subject no further. However we may regret any interruption to the present satisfactory state of affairs, regret for David a visit that is likely to prove distressing, we cannot but agree with Mrs. Marvel that it is not her place to interfere.”
He rose as he spoke. The morning visit was at an end.
Even an encounter with Mrs. Nutmeg could not have left Ellinor in a more irritated condition.
“What do they all think of me?” she asked herself, and pride forbade her to shed a single one of the hot tears that rose to her lids.
“What have I done?” was the question that next forced itself upon a mind that was singularly truthful. She had placed herself indeed in a position open to comment and misinterpretation. And then and there she had given herself up so wholly, so unrestrainedly to love that she had actually come to measure the strength of her attraction for her unconsenting lover against the strength, or the weakness, of his will.
As she faced the thought, a sense of shame overcame her. Had she not known how helpless both her father and David would be without her, especially at this juncture, she would have been sorely tempted to be gone as she had come. It was not in her nature to contemplate anything ungenerous, even for the gratification of that strongest of passions in woman, self respect. But in her present mood, even the rector’s well-meant, kindly words recurred to sting—“It was not her place to interfere!”Well, she would keep her place, as David’s servant, and not presume again beyond her duty!
Yes, and she would take that other place, too—the woman’s place, the queen’s place, not to be won without being wooed. If David wanted her now he must seek her!