The star dreamer: A romance

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.”

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.

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.

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.