The star dreamer: A romance

It should be easy!... Yes, it should be easy ... in a dish of tea! What a round throat the hussy has!”

“Well, father,” said Ellinor’s clear voice, “I must see to David’s sleeping draught.”

Lady Lochore in the doorway started and turned round. All at once a light shone into her brain as if some invisible hand had turned the lens of a lantern upon it: David’s sleeping draught—David.... Of course! How clear the whole thing lay before her! She had been about to be clumsy, stupid, inartistic. But now.... Oh, truly this one drop of the old man’s Elixir had been a drop of genius.... “The secret of genius,” had the old man said! Ellinor—what of Ellinor! Merely a thing in the way; a stone to trip up the step of her son’s fate. Throw it aside, and who shall say how soon another might not cast the beloved lad to earth? Aye, and when she would not be there to help. David—it was David!... Who could reckon on the doings of such a madman as David now this wooing mood had been started?

Presently, with slow steps, she came down the room once more.

Ellinor, bending over her fragrant infusion, felt a shadowing presence and looked round, to find Lady Lochore at her shoulder. It was in the dim and vapoury corner behind the screen lit only by the glow of the charcoal. An impression of gleaming eyes and of teeth from which the lips were drawn back for one moment troubled her vaguely; but the next she was full of pity. “Poor creature! How ill she is, and how restless!” she thought.

“Is that the stuff?” inquired Lady Lochore, laughing aimlessly like a mischievous child. And Mrs. Marvel answered her gently, as if it had been indeed a child who questioned:

“Yes, does it not smell sweet? An old recipe, ‘The Good Woman’s Brew’; Vervaine, Red Lavender and Violet, Thyme, Camphire, and a sprig of Basil.”

She now placed the vessel on a low shelf close at hand, and began deftly lifting out the sodden herbs with a glass rod. Little jets of aromatic steam rose and circled about her. Lady Lochore followed her, and once again bent over her shoulder. Barnaby seated, cross-legged, in the darkest corner near the furnace and nursing humpy Belphegor, stared at the two women with all the might of his wistful eyes.

“What are you doing?” asked Lady Lochore.

“Surely you see: clearing these grosser leaves away before finally straining.”

“Oh, let me!”

Ellinor laid down the rod and looked at the speaker with mingled surprise and anxiety. “I hope in Heaven,” she was thinking, “that my father has given her no more than the one drop.”

“Do let me,” insisted Lady Lochore and laid a burning finger on the other’s cool hand.

“Oh, certainly if it pleases you. Meanwhile I will get the cup,” said Ellinor and turned away.

She had hardly had time to take down the chosen goblet from a cupboard, when there came a strange and sudden uproar from behind the screen.—A growl like that of a wild beast from Barnaby, a snarl from Belphegor, a wild shriek from Lady Lochore.

“Help, help!”

Ellinor sprang to the rescue. But her father had already forestalled her. When she reached the spot he was in the act of plucking the dumb boy’s great hands from Lady Lochore’s throat. Lady Lochore was talking volubly, in a high hysterical voice, between laughing and crying:

“He’s mad, I think! These afflicted creatures are never safe! He wants to murder me. I was just stirring David’s potion, as she told me, and he sprang on me like an ape. Ah, God! I am nearly strangled! Fortunately,” she added, with a shrieking laugh, “David’s precious potion is safe!”

She had been clasping both hands over her breast, and now rapidly passing one hand over the other, drew the folds of her kerchief closer about her throat; for glancing down, she had seen a small yellow stain upon the lace, and quickly covered it.

“But what can have happened?” exclaimed Ellinor, “Barnaby is the gentlest creature....”

Gentle, however, seemed hardly a word to apply to the lad at the moment. Struggling in Master Simon’s grasp, mouthing, gesticulating, uttering ghastly sounds, Barnaby seemed indeed to justify Lady Lochore’s epithet—mad.

“He must be shut up!” cried Master Simon, and, with unwonted harshness, shook the boy as he led him away by the collar.

Now Barnaby crouched down and whimpered. The old man paused:

“It’s possible he may have been at my drugs,” said he, looking at his servant curiously. “So—it will be interesting to watch. I will make the rogue show me by and by which it is he has been after. Strange! That would be the first time!”

“For God’s sake, lock him up, lock him up!” screamed Lady Lochore, suddenly breaking into fury. “One’s life’s not safe in this lunatic asylum, between your potions and your idiots. Lock him up, I say, or I’ll not dare trust myself alone another minute. I ought to be thankful, surely,” she turned sneering upon Ellinor, “that David’s hospitality ends for us to-morrow.”

“Come, come,” said Master Simon, as if the afflicted creature could hear him. So deep engrained was the habit of submissiveness, that it needed but the pressure of the old man’s finger to lead the culprit to the little room off the laboratory. Master Simon pointed with his finger and Barnaby crawled in, much as a dog retires to his kennel against his will, pausing to cast imploring glances back. But as the chemist closed the door and turned the key, there came a fresh outburst from within, followed by a muffled sound of sobs and cries.

Master Simon stood a moment with reflective eye, muttering to himself: he had an unwilling notion that the famous Euphrosinum Elixir might have something to say to these unpleasant symptoms.

Sir David came into the laboratory. He was seeking Ellinor; he looked neither to the right nor to the left, nor seemed aware of any other presence.

“Dear Ellinor,” said he, taking both her hands in his, “I feel more and more weary—and sleep would be most blessed. Give me the promised cup.”

“Dear David,” said Ellinor, starting from him, “it is ready.”

Lady Lochore watched them a moment, darkly intent. Then she came striding down the length of the room with great steps, her silken skirts swishing from side to side. She halted before the simpler:

“Good evening and good-bye, cousin!”

“Stay a moment,” said he perturbedly. “That phial——”

“What of it?” she cried, and her eyes shot defiance.

“I have been thinking, my child—not that I have any doubt of it, for it is a grand drug—but I have been thinking it might be better, perhaps, if I prepared a more diluted solution. Give me back that bottle.”

“Not for the world!” said she harshly, and fingered the empty bottle in her bosom. “What, can you not trust me? Oh, it’s precious, precious!” Her voice rang again with wild note. “It has given me back my life.”

She turned to gaze once more, with chin bent down and half-closed eyes, at the figures of Ellinor and David at the distant end of the room. “Look, look! She pours his draught into the cup. From her hand he takes it! ‘Dear Ellinor, sleep would be most blessed to-night.’ He drinks! He will sleep——” So the interior voice, shrill in the silence of her soul. Then aloud:

“Good evening, cousin Simon, and good-bye!” she repeated.

She again took up her interrupted way. As she drew nearer to the door:

“And good-bye to you, David, sleep well!” she called from the threshold upon a strange high pitch.

Master Simon looked after her, shook his head, drew a deep breath of doubt through his nostrils and ran his hand distractedly through his beard. He was very tired, and felt a certain confusion in his head, succeeding the exhilaration of an hour ago. Belphegor was humped in a corner. Nothing seemed to be going quite according to calculations. David passed him with a quick step. “I am going to sleep,” said he, in a curious still voice, as he went by.

Sleep! It was a pleasing suggestion.

“Ellinor,” said the old man plaintively, “if there is any of that calming decoction left, I think I might do well to partake of it myself to-night.”

“There is a whole cup still,” said Ellinor, and turned back to the shelf.

Ellinor brought so weary a body, so weary a mind to bed that night, that almost as soon as her head touched the pillow she fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

But before long a dim consciousness of trouble began to stir within her mind, a feeling of sorrow and oppression to bring sighs from her breast. There was in her ears a sound as of lamentation and tears. At first this was vaguely interwoven with her own sub-acute consciousness of distress; but presently, and suddenly it seemed, it became so insistent that she started and sat straight up in bed, eyes and ears alert, staring and listening.

It was her custom to keep both her windows uncurtained at night, so that, waking, she might exchange a look with his stars, and sleeping, let them look at her. One window was always wide open. Like a flower, she craved for all the light and air that heaven and earth could give.

She sat and stared and listened. Not from her own heart, as she at first thought, did these sounds of trouble ring in her dream: attuned to trouble as it was, her heart had but echoed another’s misery. Something—what was it? Nothing human, surely—was appealing, calling with moans and whines, like that of some piteous trapped animal that clamours to the unhearing skies. Aye, and that square of closed moonlit window, where there should be but the silhouette of an ivy spray or two, was blocked out by some monstrous shape. Again she thought it was nothing human, though the casement shook and there were sounds of taps as if from desperate hands. Her pulses beat thick and hard in her temples and she had a moment’s paralysing terror. But she was at least a fearless woman. The next instant she sprang out of bed, and wrapping herself in the cloak that lay to her hand, she seized the rushlight and advanced boldly. Before raising an alarm she would see for herself what the thing was.

She had not reached within a yard of the window, when with an exclamation of mingled relief and astonishment, she laid the light aside and sprang forward and flung open the casement.

“Barnaby!” she cried, and drew the boy by main force into the room.

He fell like a dead weight at her feet, exhausted, unable to sustain himself, his hands feebly closing upon the hem of her garment as if thereby clinging to safety.

On the wall of the Herb-Garden the young poetaster Herrick had sought a sentimental seat from which he could feast his love-lorn gaze on the windows of Mrs. Marvel’s chamber; and, watching the tiny flickering light within rise and sink against the naked panes, feast his heart on God knows what innocently passionate dreams.

It was an ideal night for such dreamings; and the Italian-soft airs that blew upon young Romeo’s cheek could scarcely have been more tender than this English Lammas-night breath that gently fanned young Luke’s ardour. A night of nights to sit lost in luxurious despair, to rock a fancied sorrow and a fanciful love with poetic metre and rhyme; to weave the sacred thought of the lady’s bower with the melancholy of the moonlit hour, the sob of unrequited love with the plaint of the night-bird in the grove.

To this idyllic love-dream what an awakening! Shattering these ideals how brutal, how horrid a reality!

There came running steps in the shaded garden paths, a black, furtive figure across a white-lit garden space; and then—Herrick looked and rubbed his eyes like a child and looked again before he could believe—a man’s figure, to his distressed vision tall and largely proportioned, climbing, yes, ye gods! climbing up, up, the ivy ropes, up to that window where his own fancy hardly dared to-night to reach, albeit with such reverend haltings, with such swoonings almost from its own temerity.

The night picture swam before his eyes. He gripped the stones on either side of him. When the mists cleared, he must look again. He looked and saw a white figure, all white even as he had held her to be—all white above the world—was it a minute, was it a lifetime ago? The white figure opened its arms, drew into its embrace the dark visitor. All the whiteness seemed to become lost in the blackness. Black, too, it grew before the eyes of the youthful poet—black the whole world and black his heart!

He let himself drop from his perch down into the herb-beds. And there he lay, crushing vervaine and balsam and sweet thyme into aromatic death. There he lay a long, long time.

Mistress Margery Nutmeg had tied her goffered nightcap under her decent chin and laid her respectable head upon a chaste pillow with all her usual expectation of that rest which is the reward of an excellent conscience. But (as she afterwards averred) the first strange thing in a night which was to prove one of the strangest at Bindon-Cheveral was that she could not sleep. She felt, she said, as if the Angel of Death was beating his wings about the House; and whenever she closed her eyes she saw rows of little phials before her; and, considering she was so much accustomed to poor dear Master Rickart’s odd ways, it was the most curious thing of all that she could not get the thought of Poison out of her head. At last she could almost have believed she was beginning to doze when there came sounds without her window as of a tapping, a scratching, a scraping, a rustling.

She listened; there was no mistake. Out of bed she got. Out of the window she looked!

In Lady Lochore’s boudoir, despite the midnight hour, the candles were still burning in goodly array, illuminating round the green board four tired faces, the play of eight hands, the flutter of cards and the flash of dice. Two of these faces showed greedy interest: the wax-like pale-orbed countenance, to wit, of the Dishonourable Caroline and the oriental visage of Villars. But the third, Lady Lochore’s, fever-spotted and haunted, beheld the capricious fortunes of chance ebb or flow with equal indifference. What cared she whether gold grew in a little pile beside her, or whether she had to jot down sums no banker would credit now to the name of Lochore? As little for the game, as little for loss or profit, as small Priscilla herself, whose black-rimmed eyes pleaded for bed, who took no pains to conceal her yawns and played her cards as if she were already in a dream.

Yet Lady Lochore was eager to keep company about her to-night. She was the first to insist on the fresh round; the first to press the willing elderly gamblers to another cast. It seemed as if she wanted to throw her heart into the excitement; to hear the rattle of the dice and her own loud laugh; to force herself to interest in her opponents’ wrangles; to pin her attention to the adding of points and the deduction of loss and gain—as if she welcomed anything that might drown the small insistent whisper at her ear. Anything to drive away the vision of the great four-post bed waiting for her in the night’s solitude.

Crouching at Ellinor’s feet, Barnaby was trying to tell her, to tell her something, to get her aid for something, with all the agonised effort of the human soul struggling to find expression through limitations worse than those of the brute animal. Deaf and dumb, and so vital a message to be conveyed!

With patience as pitiful as the creature was pitiable, Ellinor bent and tried in vain to understand.

How he had come to seek her in so perilous a fashion she had, however, no difficulty in divining. It was but too likely that Master Simon in his present condition had been oblivious of his prisoner, insensible of his cries and knocks. But, with his ape-like activity, the lad could escape easily enough through the window; and she was herself the only person from whom he could confidently seek help. All that she could understand readily enough. But why should he require this help?

As a first thought she endeavoured to discover if he were hungry; he vehemently shook his head. He almost struck from her hand the glass of water she, misled by his repeated gesture of one in the act of drinking, then held to his lips. He was obviously in sore need of restorative, but the mental distress overshadowed the physical. Now his plucking fingers began to urge her to the door: he pointed, dragged himself a little way on his hands and knees, like a dog, came back and again pulled her towards it.

Ellinor might have been more alarmed had she not remembered his attack on Lady Lochore, and been persuaded that the poor fellow was still suffering from the effects of her father’s mania for experiment.

She resolved at length to humour the boy as far as she could, and at the same time, from her own little pharmacy downstairs, to obtain some harmless sedative and then coax him into bed again. Drawing her cloak more closely over her white garb, she took up the rushlight in one hand and extended the other to Barnaby, who in joy staggered to his feet and precipitated himself forward.

As they entered the ante-room there came from the stone passage without a sound of unfaltering steps, approaching with singular rapidity. They hardly seemed to halt a second upon the threshold of the outer door before its lock was turned and it opened before them.

Ellinor glanced at Barnaby in surprise, and marked a sudden terror in his face that infected her in spite of herself. But the next instant, as she looked round to see Sir David standing before her, sprung as it were out of the blackness, the feeling gave way to a glow of courage. Ellinor’s heart always rose to the fence. Barnaby, however, remained very differently impressed; the human soul in him seemed to wither away in fear. Like an animal before some abnormal manifestation of nature, he crept back, cowering, with eyes fixed on the new-comer’s face, to the further corner of the inner room.

So impossible a situation was it that her cousin should seek her in her own apartment at midnight, that it hardly needed the look on his face to convince her that something was strangely wrong.

Faint as was the gleam of colour thrown by the rushlight she held aloft, his countenance appeared to her all transfigured; so much so that she had an unreasoning impression that his white face itself diffused radiance in the gloom. His heavy hair was tossed away from his forehead as if wild fingers had played with it. Fragments of moss, a withered leaf here and there, clung to his garments; but it did not need this evidence to tell Ellinor that he was straight from the woods—the breath of the trees and of the deep night emanated from him, fresh and pungent, indescribable.

“David!” she cried, retreating step by step from his advance. “I thought, I hoped you had been asleep!”

“Asleep!” he answered. He tossed his hair from his brow. “Nay, Ellinor I have but just awakened from a long, long sleep: from a sleep like the sleep of death.”

Notwithstanding his pallor, he looked strong and young; the tired lines and the unconscious frown of sorrow were smoothed away. Slowly she had stepped back into the inner room and he had followed eagerly. She had little thought at the moment for transgressed conventions. Every energy of her being was absorbed in the desire so to deal with him as to give no shock to a brain acting under some inexplicable influence. She instinctively felt that he must be treated even as the sleep-walker who has above all things to be guarded against sudden waking.

Assuming a look of perfect calmness, she lit her candles and made him welcome with a smile as if her white bedchamber had been a drawing-room, and she, in her cloaked nightdress, had worn garments of state.

“Sit down, dear cousin, and we can talk a little—but not long, for we both must sleep.”

His eye clung to her, as she moved about, with an unfaltering gaze of delight. So had she seen him look at his stars! In her turmoil of doubt and anxiety there was an under movement, as of a long conceived joy that had strength to stir at last. Even if he were distraught, he loved her! But the impression that things were ill with him soon devoured every other.

“I, sit down!” he cried. “I, sleep! Nay, Ellinor, do you not understand! I have been in bondage all this time, and now this blessed cup you gave me has set my soul free. First it ran like fire through my veins. It drove me out into the woods, I ran among the singing trees. I cannot tell how it was with me, but I felt strength growing within my soul. There was struggle, there was pain, but this giant strength grew up. I fought. One by one I broke the rusting chains that so long have bound me—I threw the links away! Memories, doubt, hate, despondency, I cast them all by! I stood in the glade, looked up to the stars. I was free—free, Ellinor, free to act, free to speak. To love you, to love you...! Then the trees took voice: ‘Go to her!’ they said, and waved their arms towards you. They ran with me. Straight as the arrow from the bow, I started, leaping over the mountains. And now, Ellinor, love, I have come!”

He drew near to her as he spoke, and in his hands, cold as ice, he held both hers. She would not have drawn away if she could. About herself with David she had not a second’s doubt; by a look, she knew, she could have thrown him to her feet.

His words flowed on like ceaseless music. Was woman ever wooed by lips so eloquent and so beautiful, with touch so passionate and yet so reverent! The pity of it: it was only a dream!

“I knew you were waiting for me in your white garments, with your light burning. I knew you would open your inner door for me. Oh, faithful heart!”

Now he raised both her hands and brushed them with his lips one after the other but so lightly that she hardly knew the caress. Then she felt his arms hover about her like wings: the shadow of a lover’s embrace. He bent his face close to hers. His voice, through passionate inflexions, sank to an undertone of tenderness.

“You have stood beside me on my platform at night. You did not know it always, but you were always there! You have stood beside me in the dawn, and in the dawn I sought you in the garden. Ah, that morning I would have broken my chains and awakened to freedom if I could! Always, since that first night, my heart has been singing to you, though my lips were silent. But you heard, did you not, the song of my heart? I heard the song of yours, Ellinor, through all the evil things that beat around me, demons of the past that put troubles and discords between two songs that should ever rise together. Do not say anything—do not tell me anything of those dark hours!” he went on, arresting her as she was about to speak. The serenity of his own countenance became disturbed for a moment, its radiance overclouded. He fixed her, with piercing question:

“Can I trust you?”

And, her true eyes on his, she made answer:

“To the death!”

He drew a long deep breath; and, with both hands, made a gesture as if thrusting back victoriously some spectre enemy. Smiling, and with exultation clanging in his voice:

“See, see,” he cried, “how they fade, how they melt away! Freedom is ours!”

Now he flung his arm around her and strained her to his breast. To be held to his heart and feel the passion of his embrace—it ought to have brought to her that sweet ecstasy of trouble, which to a pure woman is sacred to her only love. But to Ellinor this moment was perhaps the cruellest of her life. Must love remain to her ever but a dream, that only in dream, or in delirium, she should be wooed! Her dominant thought, however, was still for David. She saw him, like the sleep-walker of the legend, advancing along a perilous bridge beneath which lay the chasm of madness or death.

“Oh, God,” she cried in her soul, “let not mine be the hand to thrust him down!”

Then, as if in answer to her prayer, there came upon her through the open window, like a promise of peace, the vision of the night’s sky. Just against the black edge of the tower, emerging even as she looked, appeared pure and bright and steady the effulgent light of the new star.

“See, David,” she said, and turned his face from its ardent seeking of her own, “there are the stars, there is your Star, looking in upon us! Shall we not go and look at her from the tower. Surely she is even more radiant than usual!”

For a second his passion resisted the gentle touch; then all at once she felt his frenzied grasp relax. She drew a long breath! She slipped from his relaxing hold as the mother slips her arm from under her sleeping child. A change came over his face; a wistful expression of struggle and doubt as between reason and madness. But the next instant the wild light flamed up again.

“The star!” he whispered, then loudly repeated: “My star!” and stretched out his arms to it, with the airy unmeasured gesture of the delirious.

Her heart stood still. Like a fire or a fever, his exaltation had but leaped up the higher for the momentary check.

“Ellinor, my star! The world’s desire, my love—I come to you!”

He made a spring towards the window, and paused. With arms still wide outstretched, he looked like some god poised before taking wing for endless space. She flung herself against him, and forced him back from the window.

“David—Beloved...!” And, almost with relief, she felt the second danger of his passion close round her again.

“My star!” he repeated exultingly. His voice rang out now with high unnatural note, now sank to rapid whispering. “Sweet miracle—the star that shines in my sky and walks in beauty beside me! You remember, you remember, Ellinor,” he whispered, “we had met already, that first night, spirit to spirit, my soul to yours, O Star, before we met in the flesh!” He laughed in joy, and she felt the scalding tears rush up to her eyes.

“Ah, poor David!”

“Oh, I knew you at once! There you shone out of the dim old room, as you had shone out of my black spaces. Your brow of radiance, your hair of fire! And your eyes—oh, blue, blue! Ellinor, you remember! I kissed you—my star! I held you and I kissed you.” The whisper now sank so low that she could hardly follow his words. A tremor had come into the arms that encompassed her. She felt as if a weakness, a dimness, were gathered upon him. “That night we opened the door and stood upon the threshold of the golden chamber. Why did we not go in? I do not know. Shall we not go in now? Ellinor, bride, give me again your lips, those lips that have haunted me waking and sleeping. Ellinor!”

The last articulate words broke way almost upon a moan. He was breathing with panting effort. Suddenly he swayed, and she upheld him. Then he failed altogether, and she guided his fall—strong as she was, it was all she could do—till he lay stretched his length on the floor at her feet. Then she knelt beside him.

His eyes looked up at her, pleading through the mists that were thickening over them. His lips, without sound, formed the prayer for her kiss. She knew not what despair was coming upon her. The apprehensions, vague yet so evil, that had yet been gathering thick about her all this strange acute hour, seemed now massed into one terrible tangible shape: in a second she must look upon its awful face. Well, what she could still give her beloved in life—that she would give from her breaking woman’s heart.

And bending down, she laid her lips upon his.

She thought it was the kiss of death. He smiled faintly, his eyelids fell. Like a child, he turned his head upon his arm and drew a long deep sigh as of the peace of repose after unutterable restlessness. She crouched down close to watch for the moment of the passing of all she loved.

Once before she had seen another strong man’s life go from him as she knelt by his side; had known the very instant between the last heaving of his breast and its eternal stillness. And she thought now, that when that minute should again strike for her and she should wait for the sound of the breath that was never to come, her own life would be driven out under the pressure of that slow agony!

So prepared was she for horror that she could hardly credit her own senses when presently it was borne in upon her that his respiration was becoming gradually deeper and more assured, that his pallid face was assuming a more natural look. She slid her trembling fingers upon his hand; it was warm and humanly relaxed.

He was alive! He was asleep! The Spectre of Terror had fled from before her without unveiling its countenance. She had thought their kiss was the kiss of death, and behold, it was as the kiss of Life!

Yet the tide of relief, passionate as it was, could not carry away with it all doubt and fear. He was deaf to her call, insensible to the pressure of her fingers. Even as she knew that no man in ordinary circumstances could fall thus suddenly from waking into slumber, she knew that this was the unconsciousness of the drugged.

Across a lively interchange of words between Mrs. Geary and Mr. Villars, across Lady Lochore’s shrill laughter and malicious intervention, there fell a silence. It was as if a shadow had suddenly eaten up the light. Lady Lochore became rigid, and the dice-box dropped from her hand.—All looked towards the door. There stood a broad and placid figure, white-capped and white-aproned, with folded hands; a figure surely the very sight of which should have brought comfort and confidence. But Lady Lochore stared at it with terror on her face.

“Please, my lady, could I speak with you a minute?”

Sir David’s sister rose slowly and moved like an automaton across the room. She lifted her hand to her contracted throat.

“I am sorry to tell you, my lady, there is something seriously amiss.”

Lady Lochore spread out her arms as if groping for support. Her dry tongue clicked.

“I knew there was no use going to Sir David,” continued the unctuous whisper.

Sir David! The blackness suddenly passed away from before Lady Lochore’s eyes.

“Sir David, woman!” She clutched the housekeeper’s wrist and pinched it sharply.

“Yes, my lady.” Margery looked mildly surprised. “Him being always lost in stars, so to speak, and locked up in his tower.”

“Then he’s not ill?” Lady Lochore flung the servant’s hand away from her. She drew a deep breath, then gave a little rasping laugh. What news she had hoped for? Relief and disappointment ran through her like cross currents.

“Ill, my lady? Sir David? Thank God, no! Not as I know, my lady.”

Margery did not often show emotion beyond a well fixed point. But she was surprised; she really was.

“Please, my lady,” began the whisper again, and Lady Lochore bent for a moment a scornful ear. Then her laughter rang out again, louder this time.

“Excellent Nutmeg! What a story! You have been having toasted cheese for supper, sure!—Listen, good people: some one has been trying to break into Margery’s sacred chamber. Oh, fie, Mrs. Nutmeg!”

Her pale lips seemed withered with her forced merriment as she turned upon the trio still sitting round the green cloth. The gamblers halted in their renewed wrangle to give her an impatient attention. Little Priscilla, arrested in a yawn, twisted a small weary face over her shoulder to stare.

“Not my chamber,” said Mrs. Nutmeg, raising her voice slightly, but otherwise quite unmoved.

“Not yours.”

“No, my lady—the chamber over mine.”

“Mrs. Marvel’s!”

And once more Maud Lochore’s hysterical mirth broke forth. The next instant it was suddenly hushed, and stillness fell again upon them. Priscilla rose from the table and came forward three steps impetuously, then halted, crimsoning to the roots of her hair, clasping and unclasping her hands. The Dishonourable Caroline looked at her daughter for a second with a pale, hard eye, then said in a repressive tone curiously at variance with the meaning of her words:

“Thieves and housebreakers; we shall all be murdered in our beds! Let the men be called! Let search be made! Come, Priscilla.” She slowly waddled round to the girl’s side. “You shall remain in my room till the miscreants are captured. No doubt some of the gentlemen would stay within call.”

“The gentlemen—where are they?” asked Lady Lochore. Then bending her brow darkly on Margery: “But why did you not call the men?” she asked.

Margery pleated her apron.

“Please, your ladyship,” she answered, in that sort of whisper that is more effectively heard than the natural voice, “it was no thief, whoever it was. He knocked at Mrs. Marvel’s window and the window was opened to him.”

Lady Lochore gave a cry, a cry charged with a curious triumph as well as a stabbing remorse. Was her enemy delivered into her hands after all! Then that secret minute in the laboratory, that dire deed of impulse and opportunity, it had all been useless! For a brief black space she fought the thought in her heart. Well, who could tell, after all? Old Rickart was mad, mad as a hatter; and his theories, his famous discoveries might well prove but moonshine spun from his own crazy brain, while she, poor fool, was wearing out her short remnant of life with leaps and bounds, with senseless terrors, with weak repentances for a deed that perhaps had never been done! And if it were done? Up sprang her indomitable spirit. If it were done, it was well done! And, done or no, the hour of personal vengeance was vouchsafed her at the moment she had ceased to hope for it, least expected it. She would not be Maud Lochore, with the strength of death upon her, did she not use it to the full.

Old Villars rose from his seat, his face working with varied emotions: anger, greedy curiosity, low vindictive pleasure. The Dishonourable Caroline packed her daughter’s arm firmly under her own.

“It is time for bed,” she asserted.

But Priscilla wrenched herself from her mother’s grasp and stamped her foot.

“Where is Mr. Herrick?” she exclaimed, and burst into tears.

Meanwhile Lady Lochore was speaking in broken sentences of ejaculation and command: “Shame, disgrace upon the House of Bindon! How dared the creature bring her wanton ways under our roof? But it was well, order should be put to it all.”

“Take these candles, Margery,” she ordered, “and lead the way. My good friends, I crave your support. I am a daughter of this house. I have to defend its honour and expose those who would bring shame upon it. You see, you have all seen: I stand alone. My poor brother—” But her voice broke. Again the awful sickening qualm that she had been fighting against all the evening seized upon her. Of him she could not nerve herself to speak. Savagely rallying her strength, she took up her candle. “I must have some disinterested witnesses,” she went on. “Come and see me pluck the mask from a smooth hypocrite’s face. What’s the child sobbing for? Why doesn’t she go to bed as she is bid? Is she so very anxious to see Mrs. Marvel’s Romeo?”

With a cruel little laugh she passed on, disdaining Villars’ eagerly proffered arm.

“Thank you, but you had better follow behind, most faithful cavalier. How strange that both the other gentlemen should be missing! But we shall soon know which has the best excuse.”

Ellinor knelt brooding over her beloved, now cold to the heart again with the doubt how this might end, now reassured by the depth of his repose. There was nothing stertorous in the long easy breathing. A natural moisture had gathered on the sleeper’s brow. The fluttering irregularity of the pulse was settling down under her fingers into fuller, slower measure. That the “Good Woman’s” sleeping draught which she had herself prepared for David could produce so potent an effect was, she knew, impossible. But, however produced, it seemed, so far, beneficial.

It was for a space of time, almost happiness to see him sleep and in such peace, with the shadow of the smile her kiss had called up still upon his lips; to feel herself so necessary to him; to be alone with him and her secret in the night.

Not yet had she time to examine the wild conjectures flitting through her mind; not yet time to face the problem of saving her good name and his gentleman’s honour from the consequences of this most innocent love meeting. She wanted to taste this exquisite relief, to rest her soul upon the brown-gold wings of hope before taking up her burden again.

Suddenly an insolent knock on the panel of her door startled her from her contemplation. She had but the time to spring to her feet; and upon the flash of a single thought, to unfasten her cloak and fling it hastily over David’s body, before the knock was repeated louder and the door thrown open.

Lady Lochore stood on the threshold.

Behind her was a peering group. Ellinor, in the first moment of strained fancy, saw a thousand lights, a thousand staring eyes, a sea of faces. The next instant the tide of blood began slowly to ebb from her brain. She felt herself strong, cold, indifferent. She knew she stood in night-garb before them all, she knew that the covered figure lay in full line of sight, in full light. She did not care. All her energies were concentrated in one fierce resolve: she would save the honour of this helpless man, no matter at what cost. So long as she had life and could stand before him, no one should lift that cloak to see who lay beneath it.

She took her post and faced the intruders:—Lady Lochore, with harpy countenance, craning forward, greedy of vengeance; Mr. Villars, with goatish face, looking over her shoulder, greedy of scandal; Margery with stony eyes, holding the candelabra up aloft to shed more light upon her enemy’s shame; Mrs. Geary, staring with pallid orbs.... Ellinor clenched her arms over her heaving breast.

But they who had expected so different a scene, and thought to find a panting young Romeo behind a curtain or a suave experienced Don Juan ready with explanations, a languorous Juliet or a distraught Elvira, halted almost with fear before the strange spectacle:—the prone figure, quite still, covered away, more sinister in its suggestion than even the sight of death; the menacing woman nobly robed from the spring of her full throat to the arch of her bare foot in heavy white folds, who, in her strength and purity, might have been a model for the vestal virgin guarding her sacred fire.

Lady Lochore’s indictment froze unspoken upon her lips; her face became set as in a mask of terror; the hand flung out in gesture of vindictive reprobation, finger ready pointed in scorn, shook as with palsy. Her eye quailed from the stern beauty of Ellinor’s face and dropped to the dark mask on the floor; there, clear of the folds, lay a slender hand, helpless and relaxed, with the gleam of a well-known signet-ring upon the third finger. Her mouth dropped open, her terrified eyes almost started from their sockets. She flung a bewildered look around, and met full the accusing glare of Barnaby’s gaze fixed upon her from the shadow of the window curtain. Barnaby, monstrous figure, as if her crime itself had taken shape, to call for retribution!

“Lady Lochore, what do you seek here? Have you not done evil enough already in this house!”

Ellinor’s voice pierced with direct accusation to Lady Lochore’s soul. For a second the guilty woman fairly struggled for breath. Margery saved her from self-betrayal:

“Her ladyship has surely seen enough!”

Their eyes met. These words, too, were capable of a terrible undermeaning. But the housekeeper contrived to convey through her expressionless gaze a sense of support. If this woman knew the secret, she knew it as an accomplice; there was help in the thought.

“You are right,” cried Lady Lochore shrilly, “we have seen enough! Forgive me, my friends, for having brought you to such a spectacle. Back, back, shut the door. I forbid—I forbid anyone to make a step forward. Leave the creature to her shame. Oh, it is horrible!”

She beat them back with her hands as she felt Villars’ eager pressure on one side and the slow, steady advance of Mrs. Geary on the other. She knew that their fingers itched to raise the veil of that cloak. If they had raised it, she must have gone mad!

Margery firmly closed the door.

“Really, my dear Lady Lochore,” complained Villars, “I think the matter should be further investigated. I can understand your delicate repugnance, but positively that figure on the floor—Deyvil take me—it looked like a corpse!”

“Fool, do you not see it was a ruse, a trick? Ah, it has made me sick—it is too disgusting——”

She wiped the sweat from her brow, and then in truth shuddered as from a deadly nausea.

Mrs. Geary, breathing hard and fanning herself with her handkerchief, had fixed her gaze on the speaker’s face. Her ideas moved very slowly, but they were sure.

“My dear, your whole behaviour is incomprehensible,” she said. “Mr. Villars is quite right. The matter should be investigated. Who, and in what condition, is the man under that woman’s cloak? It is our duty to elucidate the matter. Where is Mr. Herrick?”

“And for that matter, where is Colonel Harcourt?” sneered Mr. Villars.

“You shall not dare!” screamed Lady Lochore. She arrested a retrograde movement on either side with violently extended arms. “Out—back to your rooms, all of you! Are you devils, that you should want to gloat—”

Margery laid her left hand warningly on her elbow, and Lady Lochore broke off abruptly. What had she said? She had no idea herself. She could have flung herself on her face and shrieked aloud. The fearful deed was done! There could now be no more doubt. The brand of Cain was on her brow! Her death-sweat would not wash it off! It was burnt into the very bone!

She had thrust her guests into the passage with as little ceremony as Lady Macbeth dismissing the feasters. When the door of Ellinor’s outer room was closed between them and that something with Sir David’s signet-ring, the clutch at her heart relaxed a little and she could draw her breath with more ease. A sort of apathy began to creep over her. Margery was speaking and she could listen:

“Her ladyship being so delicate, it is quite natural she should be upset. It is her ladyship’s way to act on impulse. But to find such doings under her ladyship’s own roof, so to speak, and the person a close relation of the family! Mistress Marvel is a very clever lady, and whether the gentleman were drunk or asleep—” she looked up a second swiftly at Lady Lochore, and resumed the soothing trickle of speech, “her ladyship is quite right. So long as she knows how she stands with regard to Mrs. Marvel, there had better be no open scandal, such as leads,” said Margery piously, “to gentlemen’s duels and the like.”

There now came a patter of feet, a flutter of soft garments, a sobbing, uplifted voice—

“What was it? Which of them was it?”

“Priscilla!” Mrs. Geary caught her daughter’s wrist and the girl gave a cry of pain. “Disobedient child, back to your room!”

Priscilla whimpered and writhed; but the lady maintained her firm grasp and, with dignity accepting a candle from Margery’s candelabra, turned and marched the truant down the passage that led to her apartments.

Bowing and smirking, Mr. Villars, whose further advice and proffers of help were ruthlessly cut short by an impatient wave of Lady Lochore’s hand, had no resource but to betake himself with his triple light in the direction of his own quarters. He had no idea of letting matters rest there, but feigned nevertheless immediate submission.

They parted in the round gallery where three corridors met—two belonging to the modern house, the third leading to the tower-wing which had been the territory of their raid. Mrs. Nutmeg looked awhile after the bobbing lights; then, with a pensive smile upon her lips, laid down the candelabra, and after some effort, for it was not usually moved, closed the heavy oaken door which shut off the tower-wing from the newer parts of the Bindon House; locked it, and in silence placed the key in her apron pocket. Lady Lochore stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“It is as well, my lady, to know that no one can get in or out of the keep end—except through the window! The lower door I locked myself and Sir David of course has his key. But it is to be hoped that none of the disturbance reach him on his tower, poor gentleman!”

The horror returned to Lady Lochore’s eyes; how much did this secret, impassive woman really know of to-night’s deeds?

“Margery!” she cried.

“Yes, my lady, it is a grand night for the stars,” said Margery. And as the other groaned: “Will your ladyship come to bed?” she went on; “I humbly hope you have not let Master Rickart give you any of his queer drugs; you don’t look yourself. He has a kind of stuff, I have heard tell, that upsets people’s brains, fills them with queer fancies, like nightmare, so to speak. And there’s been madness in the village already. Master Rickart will have a deal to explain, I’m thinking. There, my lady, you’re shivering. Come to bed!”

Lady Lochore suffered herself to be led to her room; to be unclothed and assisted into the great four-post bed. Margery’s presence, her touch, was agony to her, and yet, when she left the room, Lady Lochore could have shrieked after her. But she closed her lips, closed her eyes.

At last she was shut in alone with her own conscience. She had never before been afraid, this woman who had been ready to take death as recklessly as she had taken life. After a while, she crawled out of bed and into the adjoining room. Above the throbbing of her pulses and her own gasping respiration she could hear the light breathing from the cot. Noiselessly she parted the curtains and let an opalescent ray of moon in upon the little sleeper.

Surely, surely, when she looked upon him for whom she had done it—her boy, whom a fool and a wanton would have conspired to keep out of his rights!—this horrible agony would leave her. She would be proud of her own courage, proud to have been strong enough to act. Crime! What was crime? The crime had been to try and defraud her child! “Ten drops madness!” How many drops could that phial have contained? Madness! Well, he had method enough in his madness to remember the way to his mistress’s arms!... “After that darkness”—the long, long Darkness! Her teeth chattered. What then? It was but retribution if his long sleep came upon him thus! Ah, they had caught the scheming widow red-handed. Red-handed was the word—oh, the hussy’s conscience was not so clear either! Why had she covered him up from their sight? Let her answer for it, she and her poisoning old father! But what was this fantastic water? Surely it was his hideous drug, little as she had had of it, that drove out this clammy sweat upon her, made her heart sink—sink with this awful sickness, filled her brain with those black fleeting shadows that even the child’s warm presence could not conjure away.

She closed her eyes, for it was almost as if the unconscious baby-visage added to her terror. But a glare swam before her inner vision, and out of it and in the midst of it, in some horrible fashion, Barnaby’s face with accusing eyes looked forth. What had brought Barnaby in Mrs. Marvel’s room—Barnaby who knew? She put her hands to her throat as if she still felt the clutch of his fingers upon it. The next instant, with a spasm of relief, she had almost called aloud with guilty Macbeth—“Thou canst not say I did it!” Let the deaf and dumb boy point and mouth and gibber, what he had seen he never could bear witness to.... Deaf and dumb—oh rare!

She stood beside the cot and gazed with a desperate tenderness upon it. There now slept the lord of Bindon! His fortune was secured, and by her deed. She bent her head to kiss the little chubby hand. But before her lips had reached it she shuddered back:—between her and her child’s hand rose the vision of another hand, pale, limp, with a signet-ring.