The star dreamer: A romance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I must keep my place,” insisted Ellinor.

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

She raised her eyes, startled, indeterminate.

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

At that he smiled as one smiles upon a child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sister, Bindon greets you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Lochore disengaged herself unceremoniously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our cousin, Ellinor Marvel!”

“How do you do,” said Ellinor composedly.

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

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

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

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

The clatter of the second coach was heard without.

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

“Mamma’s own!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Lochore plunged upon him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There came a knock at the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still Sir David looked rigidly down at his plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shook her hand in his face.

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

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

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

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

“Tell her so, then,” said Sir David.

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

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

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