The star dreamer: A romance

On that evening of the autumnal equinox Master Simon Rickart—the simpler or the student as he liked to call himself, the alchemist as many held him to be—alone, save for the company of his cat, in his laboratory at the foot of the keep, was luxuriating as usual in his work of research.

The black cat sat by the wood fire and watched the man.

As Master Simon moved to and fro, the topaz eyes followed him. When he spoke (which he constantly did to himself, under his voice and disjointedly, after the wont of some solitary old people) they became narrowed into slits of cunning intelligence. But when the observations were personally addressed to his Catship, Belphegor blinked in comfortable acknowledgment. “As wise as Master Simon himself,” the country folk vowed: and indeed, wherever the fame of the alchemist had spread through the country-side, so had that of the alchemist’s cat.

There were two fires in the laboratory. One of timber, that roared and crackled its life away and sank into an ever increasing heap of fair white ash. In the vault-like room this fire burned year in year out on a hearth hewn many feet into the deep wall; and from many points of view Belphegor found it vastly more satisfactory than the other fire, which generally engrossed the best of his master’s attention. That was a stealthy red glow, nurtured on a wide stove built into another wall recess, sheltered behind a glass screen under a tall hood:—a fire productive of the strangest smells, at times evil, but as often sweet and aromatic: a fire also productive on occasions of coloured vapours and dancing flamelets of suspicious nature. There, as the cat knew, happened now and again unexpected ebullitions, disastrous alike to the nerves and to the fur. In his kitten days, Belphegor, led ostensibly by overpowering affection but really by the constitutional curiosity of his genus, had been wont to accompany his chosen master behind the screen. He knew better now. And there was a bald spot near the end of his tail, where no amount of licking on his part, no cunning unguent of Master Simon’s himself could to this day induce a hair to grow again.

The old man had closed the door of the stove; rearranged, crown-like, a set of glass vessels of engaging shapes: alembics and matrasses, filled with decoctions of green and amber, gorgeous colours shot with the red reflection of the fire; tucked a baby-small porcelain crucible in its fireclay cradle and banked the glowing cinders around it. The touch of the wrinkled hands was neat, almost caressing. After a last look around, he emerged, blowing a breath of content:

“Everything in good trim, so far, for to-night’s work, my cat.”

And Belphegor blinked both eyes.

Faint vapours, herb-scented, voluptuous, rose and circled to the groined roof. The log fire on the hearth had fallen to red stillness. In the silence, delicate sounds of bubbling and simmering, little songs in different keys, gurgles as of fairy laughter, became audible.

“Hark to it!” said the simpler, and bent his ear with a smile of satisfaction. He spoke in a monotonous undertone, not unlike the muttering of the sleep-walker—“Hark to it! There is a concert for you—new tunes to-night, Belphegor. Strange, delightful! There is not a little plant but has its own voice, its own soul-song. Hark, how they yield them up! Good little souls! Bad little souls, some of them, he, he! Enough in that retort yonder to make helpless idiots, or dead flesh of a hundred lusty men. Dead flesh of eleven such fine cats as yourself and one kitten, he, he! Yet—for properly directed, friend Belphegor, vice may become virtue—enough here to keep the fever from the homestead for three generations....”

The old man moved noiselessly in his slippers across the stone floor, flung a couple of fresh logs on the sinking hearth, then stretched out his frail hands to the blaze and laughed gently. The flame light played fantastically on his shrunken figure:—a being, it would seem, so ætherealised that it scarcely looked as if blood could still be circulating beneath that skin, like yellow ivory, tensely stretched over the vast, denuded forehead and the bold, high-featured face. Mind alone, one would have thought, must animate that emaciated body; mind alone light up those steel-blue eyes with such keenness that, by contrast with the age-stricken countenance, they shone with almost unearthly vitality.

The cat stretched himself, yawned; then advanced, humping his back and bristling, to rub himself against his master’s legs. The fire roared again in the chimney, a score of greedy tongues licking up the last drops of sap that oozed forth, hissing, from the beech logs.

“Aha,” said Master Simon, bending down somewhat painfully to give a scratch to the animal’s neck, “that’s the fire-song you prefer. I fear, I fear, Belphegor, you will never rise beyond the grossest everyday materialism!”

Purring Belphegor endorsed the opinion by curling up luxuriously on his head and stretching out his hind paws to the flame. The little scene was an allegory of peace and comfort. The old man, straightening himself, remained awhile musing:

“Well, it is good music—a song of the people. All of the stout woods of Bindon, of the deep English earth, of the salt English airs. No subtle virtue in it: a roaring good tune, a homely smell and a heap of ash behind—but all clean, my cat, clean!”

He gathered the folds of his dressing-gown around him; a garment that had once been wondrous fine and set in fashion (in the days of his elegant youth) by no less a person than his present Majesty, King George IV., but now so stained, so singed and scorched and generally faded, that its original hues were but things of memory.

“And now we shall have a quiet hour before supper. What a good thing, my cat, that neither you nor I are attractive to company! The original man was created to be alone. But the fool could not appreciate his bliss, and so he was given a companion—a woman, Belphegor, a woman!—and Paradise was lost.”

Again Master Simon chuckled. It was a sound of ineffable content, weirdly escaping through the nostrils above compressed lips. He took up a lighted candle, stepped carefully over the cat and, selecting between his fingers a key from a bunch at his girdle, approached a wooden press that cut off an angle of the room.

This was built of heavily carved black oak, secured with sturdy iron hinges; had high double doors and small peeping keyholes, suggestive of much cunning. It was a press to receive and keep secrets. And yet, when the panels were thrown open, nothing of more formidable nature was displayed than rows upon rows of inner drawers and shelves, the latter covered some with philosophical instruments, others displaying piles of neatly ticketed boxes, ranks of phials, and sealed tubes of various liquids or crystals that flashed in the light with prismatic scintillation.

Holding the candle above his head the old man selected:

“The box of Moorish powder from Tangiers—the bottle of Java Water—the paste of Cannabis Arabiensis—the Hippomane Mancenilla gum of Yucatan.”

He placed the materials on a glass tray and carried them over to the working table.

“Excellent Captain Trevor! The simple fellow has never done thanking me for curing him of his West Coast fever with a course of Herba Betonica; he, he! the common, ignored, humble Wood Betony. Thanking me—he, he! Never did a pinch of powder bring better interest...! Oh, my cat, I’m a mass of selfishness! And here I have at last the Java Water and the Yucatan gum!”

The cat roused himself, walked sedately but circuitously across the room, leaped up and took his position with feet and tail well tucked in on the bare space left, by right of custom, where the warmth of the lamp should comfort his back.

On Master Simon’s table lay a row of small covered watch-glasses, thin as films, each containing a small heap of some greenish crystalline powder. A pair of chemical scales held out slender arms within the walls of its glass case. The neat array looked inviting.

With a noise as of rustling parchment the simpler rubbed his hands; he was in high good humour. The tall clock at the end of the room wheezed out the ghost of nine beats, and the strangled sounds seemed but to point the depth of the environing silence. For the thick walls kept out all the voices of nature, and at all times enwrapt the underground room with a solemn stillness that gave prominence to its whispers of secret doings.

“Nine o’clock!” muttered the self-communer. “Another hour’s peace before even Barnaby break in upon us with his supper tray. Hey, but this is a good hour! This is luxury. I feel positively abandoned! Not a soul in this whole wing of Bindon, save you and me—unless we reckon our good star-dreamer above—good youth with his head in the clouds. Heigh ho, men are mostly fools, and all women! Therefore wisely did I choose my only familiar—thou prince of reliable confidants.”

The man stretched out his hand and caressed the beast’s round head. Belphegor tilted his chin to lead the scratching finger to its favourite spot.

“Hey, but man must speak—it is part of his incomplete nature—were it only to put order in his ideas, to marshall them without tripping hurry. And you neither argue nor contradict, nor give a fool’s acquiescence. You listen and are silent. Wise cat! Now, men are mostly fools ... and all women!”

Master Simon lifted the phial of Java Water, a fluid of opalescent pink, between his eye and the light. He removed the stopper and sniffed at it. Then compared the fragrance with that of the Moorish powders, and became absorbed in thought. At one moment he seemed, absently, on the point of comparing the tastes in the same manner, but paused.

“No, sir, not to-night,” he murmured. “We must keep our brain clear, our hand steady. But it will be an experiment of quite unusual interest—quite unusual.... I am convinced the essential components are the same.—Belphegor! Keep your nozzle off that gallipot! Do you not dream enough as it is?”

He pushed the turn-back cuffs still further from his attenuated wrists, and with infinite precaution addressed himself to the manipulation of his watch-glasses, silver pincers and scales: the final stage of weighing and apportioning the result of an analytical experiment of already long standing was at hand.

His great white eyebrows contracted. Now, bending close, he held his breath to watch the swing of the delicate balance; now with fevered fingers he jotted notes and figures. At times a snapping hand, a clacking tongue, proclaimed dissatisfaction; but presently, widening his eyes and moistening his lips, he started upon a fresh clue with renewed gusto.

The clock had ticked and jerked its way through the better part of the hour when the weird muttering became once more audible:

“Curious, curious! Yet it works to my theory. Now if these last figures agree it will be proof. Pshaw, the scales are tired. How they fidget! Belphegor, my friend, down with you, the smallest vibration would ruin my week’s work. Down! Now let us see. As seventy-three is to a hundred and twenty-five ... as seventy-three is to a hundred and twenty-five.... A plague on it!” exclaimed Master Simon pettishly, without looking up. “There’s that Barnaby, of course in the nick of wrong time!”

The door at the dim end of the room had been opened softly. A puff of wood smoke had been blown down the chimney. A tiny draught skimmed across the table; the steady lamplight flickered and cast dancing shadows; and Master Simon’s tense fingers trembled with irritation.

“All to begin again. Curse you, Barnaby! You’re deaf, I can curse you, thank Providence!”

Without turning round he made a hasty, forbidding gesture of one hand. The door was shut as gently as it had been opened.

Master Simon gave a deep sigh, and still fixedly eyeing the scales, stretched his cramped hands along the table for a moment’s rest.

“Now, now? Ha—Ho—What? Sixty-nine to eighty-two? Impossible! Tchah! Those scales have the palsy—nay, Simon Rickart, it is your impotent hand. Old age, old age, my friend ... or stormy youth, alas!” His muttering whisper rose to louder cadence. “Had you but known then, in your young folly, the chains you were forging, for your aged wisdom! But sixty to-day, and this senile trembling! Not a shake of that hand, Simon, but is paying for the toss of the cup; not a mist in that brain but is the smoke of wanton, bygone fires. Well vast is the pity of it! Had you but the hand now of that dreamer up above! Had you but the virtue of his temperate life! And the fool is staring at his feeble twinklers ... worshipping the unattainable, while all rich Nature, here at hand, awaits the explorer. Oh, to feel able to trace Earth mysteries to the marrow of Man; to hold the six days’ wonder in one single action of the mind ... and to be foiled at every turn by the trembling of a finger!”

He leaned back in his chair, long lines of discouragement furrowing his face.

Behind him, in the silence, barely more audible than the simmering sounds of the fires and the lembics, there was a stir of another presence, quiet, but living. But Master Simon, absorbed in his own world of thought, perceived nothing.

With closed eyes, he made another effort to conquer the rebellious weakness of the flesh and bring it into proper subjection to the merciless vigour of the mind. At that moment the one important thing on earth to the old student was the success of his analysis. And had the Trump of Doom begun to sound in his ears, his single desire would still have been to endeavour to conclude it before the final crash.

Light footfalls in the room—not caused by Belphegor’s stealthy paws, certainly not by Barnaby’s masculine foot—a sound as of the rustle of a woman’s garments, a sound unprecedented for years in these consecrated precincts, failed to reach his faculties. Once more he drew his chair forward, leant his elbows on the table, and, stooping his head so that eyes and hands were nearly on the same level, set himself to the exasperatingly delicate task of minute weighing. And the while he muttered on with a droll effect of giving directions to himself:

“The right rider, half a line to the right. That should do it this time! Too much—bring it back! Faugh, out of all gear! Too much back now. Fie, fie, confusion upon my spinal cord—nerves, muscles, and the whole old fumbling fabric!”

Here, two hands, with unerring swoop like that of an alighting dove, came out of the dimness on each side of the bent figure, and with cool, determined touch gently withdrew the old man’s hot and shaking fingers from their futile task.

Master Simon’s ancient bones shook with a convulsive start; a look of intense amazement passed into his straining eye, then the faintest shade of a smile on his lips. But, characteristically, he never turned his head or otherwise moved: the business at hand was of too high import. He sat rigid, silently watching.

The interfering hands now became busy for a space with soft unhurried purpose. Beautiful hands they were, white as ivory outside and strawberry pink within, taper-fingered and almond-nailed; not too small, and capable in the least of their movements. Compared to those other hands that now lay, still trembling in pathetic supineness, where they had been placed, they were as young shoots, full of vital sap, to the barren and withered branch. A woman’s warm presence enfolded the student. A young bosom brushed by his bloodless cheek. A light breath fanned his temples. A scent as of lavender bushes in the sun, of bean fields in blossom, of meadowsweet among the new-mown hay; something indescribably fresh, an out-of-door breath as of English summer, spread around him, curiously different from the essences of his phials and stills. But Master Simon had no senses, no thought but for the work those busy hands were now performing.

“The right rider, to the right, just half a line?” said a voice, repeating his last words in a tranquil tone. “A line—those little streaks on the arms are lines?”

Master Simon assented briefly: “Yes.”

The fingers moved.

“Enough, enough!” ordered he. “Now back gently till the needle swings evenly.”

The pulse of the scales, hitherto leaping like that of a frightened heart, first steadied itself into regularity and then slowed down into stillness. The long needle pointed at last to nought. The white hands hovered a second.

“Not another touch!” faintly screamed the old man.

He craned forward, his body again tense; gazed and muttered, wrote and rapidly calculated.

“Yes, yes, yes! Seventy-three to a hundred and twenty-five—I was right—Eureka! The principles of the two are the same. Right! Right!”

Now Simon Rickart, rubbing his hands, turned round delightedly.

“Well, Father?”

Master Simon started. His eyes shot a look of searching inquiry at the young woman who now came round to the side of the high table, and bent down to bring her fresh face to a level with his.

“Ellinor? Not Ellinor, not my daughter...!” he said.

“Ellinor. The only daughter you ever had. The only child, as far as I know!”

The tranquil voice had a pleasant, matter-of-fact note. The last words were pointed merely by a sudden deep dimple at the corner of the lips that spoke them. But it was trouble, amounting to agitation, that here took possession of the father. He pushed his chair back from the table, rubbed his hands through his scant silver locks, tugged at his beard.

“You’ve come on ... on a visit, I suppose?” he said presently, with hesitation.

“I have come to stay some time—a long time, if I may.”

“But—Marvel, but your husband?”

“Dead.”

The dimple disappeared, but the voice was quite unaltered. She had not shifted her position.

“Dead?” echoed Master Simon. His eyes travelled wonderingly from her black stuff gown—a widow’s gown indeed—to the head with its unwidow-like crown of hair; to the face so youthful, so curiously serene, so unmournful.

Her hands were lightly clasped under the pointed white chin. Here the father’s eyes rested; and from the chaos of his disturbed mind the last element of his surprise struggled to the surface and formulated itself into another question:

“Where is your wedding ring?”

“I took it off.”

Ellinor Marvel straightened her figure.

“Father,” she said, “we have always seen very little of each other, but I know you spend your life as a searcher after truth. Since we are now, as I hope, to live together, you will be glad to take notice from the first that I have at least one virtue: I am a truthful woman. It will save a good deal of explanation if I tell you now that, when the coach crossed the bridge this evening and I threw into the waters of the Avon the gold ring I had worn for ten miserable years, I said: ‘Thank God!’”

Simon Rickart took a stumbling turn up and down the room: his daughter stood watching him, motionless. Then he halted before her and broke into a protest, by turns incoherent, testy, and plaintive.

“Come to stay—stay a long time! But, this is folly! We’ve no women here, child, except the servants. David wants no women about him. I don’t want any women about me! There’s not been a petticoat in this room since you were last here yourself. And that, that’s ten years ago. You will be very uncomfortable. You have no kind of an idea of what sort of existence you are proposing to yourself. I am a mass of selfishness. I should make your life a burden to you. Be reasonable, my dear! I am a very old man. Pooh, pooh, I won’t allow it! You must go elsewhere. Hey, what?”

“I cannot go elsewhere, I have no money.”

“No money! But Marvel! But the fortune I gave you? Tut, tut, what folly is this now?”

“Gone, gone—and more! He would have died in the Fleet had we not escaped abroad. The guineas I have now in my purse are the last I own in the world. All my other worldly goods are in the couple of trunks now in the passage.” She stopped, and remained awhile silent, then in a lower voice and slowly: “Look at me, father,” she added, “can I live alone?”

He looked as he was bidden. He, the man who had not always been a recluse, the whilom man of the world who in older years had taken study as a hobby, the man of bygone pleasures, appraised her ripe woman’s beauty with rapid discrimination. Then into the father’s eyes there sprang a gleam of something like pride—pride of such a daughter—a light of remembrance, a struggling tenderness. The next moment the worn lids fell and the old man stood ashamed:

“I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said, gravely, and sank into his chair.

She came round and looked down at him a moment smiling.

“You never heard me walk all about the room,” she said, “I have a light tread. And I’ll always wear stuff dresses here.” Then, more coaxingly: “I don’t think you’ll find me much in the way, father. I’ve got good eyes, I am remarkably intelligent”—she paused a second and, thrusting out her hands under his brooding gaze, added with a soft laugh: “And you know I’ve steady hands!”

He stared at the pretty white things. Faintly he murmured:

“But I’m a mass of selfishness!”

“Then I’ll be the more useful to you!” she cried gaily and laid first her cool, young cheek, then her warm, young lips upon his forehead.

The sap was not yet dead in the old branch, after all. Master Simon’s body had not become the mere thinking machine he fain would have made it. There was blood enough still in his old veins to answer to the call of its own. Memories, tender, remorseful, all human, were still lurking in forgotten corners of a brain consecrated, he fancied, wholly to Science; memories which now awoke and clamoured. Slowly he stretched out his hand and touched his daughter’s cheek.

“Poor child!”

Ellinor Marvel now drew back quietly. Master Simon passed a finger across his eyes and muttered that their light was getting dim.

“The lamp wants trimming,” she said, and proceeded to do it with that calm diligence of hers that made her activity seem almost like repose. But she knew well enough that neither sight nor lamp was failing; and she felt her home-coming sanctioned.

At this point something black and stealthy began to circle irregularly round her skirts, tipping them with hardly tangible brush, while a vague whirring as of a spinning-wheel arose in the air. She stepped back: the thing followed her and seemed to swell larger and larger, while the whirrs became as it were multiplied and punctuated by an occasional catch like the click of clockwork.

“Why, look father!”

There was a gay note in her voice. Master Simon looked, and amazement was writ upon his learned countenance.

“Belphegor likes you!” he exclaimed, pulling at his beard. “Singular, most singular! I have never known the creature tolerate anyone’s touch but my own or Barnaby’s.”

Hardly were the words spoken when, with a magnificent bound, Belphegor rose from the floor and alighted upon her shoulder—at the exact place he had selected between the white column of the throat and the spring of the arm—and instantly folded himself in comfort, his great tail sweeping her back to and fro, his head caressing her cheek with the touch of a butterfly’s wing, his enigmatic eyes fixed the while upon his master. Ellinor laughed aloud, and presently the sound of Master Simon’s nasal chuckle came into chorus. He rubbed his hands; he was extraordinarily pleased, though quite unaware of it himself.

Ellinor sat on the arm of his winged elbow-chair—his “Considering Chair,” as he was wont to describe it—and looked around smiling.

“Still at the same studies, father? How sweet it smells in this room! It looks smaller than I remember it. I once thought it was as big as a cathedral. But I myself felt smaller then. How long ago it seems! And what is that discovery that I came just in time for?”

Master Rickart engaged willingly enough in the track of that pleasant thought.

“Why, my dear, simply that an old surmise of mine was right. Ha, ha, I was right.... The active principle of Geranium Cyanthos with the root of which, as Fabricius relates—Fabricius, the great Dutch traveller and plant-hunter—the Kaffir warlocks are said to cure dysentery.... It is positively identical with a similar crystalline substance which I have for many years obtained from Hedera Warneriensis—the species of ivy that grows about the ruins of Bindhurst Abbey, of which mention is made by Prynne....”

Thus he rambled on with the selfish garrulity of the old man in the grip of his hobby; presently, however, he fell back to addressing himself rather than his listener, and gradually subsided into reflectiveness. And once more silence drew upon the room.

Long drawn minutes, ticked off by the slow beat of the laboratory clock, dropped into the abysm of the past.

Master Simon, sunk in his chair, his head bent on his breast, had fallen into a deep muse. His eyes, fixed upon the face of his daughter—fair and thrown into fairer relief by Belphegor’s black muzzle nestling close to it—had gradually gathered to themselves that blank, unseeing look which betrays a mind set upon inner things.

Ellinor sat still, her shapely hands folded on her lap. She was glad of the rest, for this was the end of a weary journey. She was glad, also, of the silence, which gave room to her clamourous thought.

Home again! The only home she had ever known. For those last ten years seemed only like one hideous, interminable voyage in which she, the unwilling traveller, had been hurried from port to port without one hour of rest.

To this house of peace, encircled by a triple ring of silence—the great walls, the still waters of the moat, and the vast, stately park with its mute army of trees—she had first been brought at so early an age that any recollections of other hearth or roof were as vague as those of a dream-world. But vivid were the memories now crowding back of her former life here—memories of rosy, healthy childhood.—Aunt Sophia’s kind, foolish face and her indulgent, unwise rule. Baby Ellinor rolling again on the velvet sward and pulling off the tulip blossoms by the head; child Ellinor ranging and roaming in stable and farm, running wild in the gardens.... Nearly all her joys were somehow mingled with gardens; with the rosary in the pleasure-grounds, which she roamed every day of the summer; with the old kitchen garden, where she devoured the baby-peas and the green gooseberries; with the Herb-Garden—the mysterious, the strictly forbidden, the alluring Herb-Garden, her father’s living museum of strange plants!

Between high walls it lay: a long, narrow strip, running down to the moat on one side and abutting to the blind masonry of the keep on the other. Here her father—an ever more remote figure, and for some reason unintelligible to her child’s mind, ever more detached from the common existence of the house, took his sole taste of air and sunshine. How often, peeping in through the locked iron gates, she had watched him, with curiosity and awe, as he passed and re-passed amid the rank luxuriance of the herbs and bushes, so absorbed in cogitation that his eyes, when they fell upon the little face behind the bars, never seemed to see it.—The Herb-Garden! Naturally, this one spot (where, it seemed, grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil) had a vastly greater attraction for the small daughter of Eve than the paradise of which she had the freedom. Aunt Sophia had warned her that the leaf of any one of those strange herbs might be death! Yet visit the Herbary she often did, all parental threats and injunctions notwithstanding, by a secret entrance through the ruins of the keep.

Strange that her thoughts should from the very hour of her return home hark back so much to the Herb-Garden! No doubt there was suggestion in all the sweet smells floating now around her. She thought she recognised Camphire and Frangipanni; but there were others too, known yet nameless; and they brought her back to the fragrant spot, the delights of which had so long been forgotten.

Her memories were nearly all of solitary childhood. Sir David, the young master of Bindon, the orphan cousin to whom Simon Rickart was in those days humourously supposed to play the part of guardian, entered but little into them, and then only as a grave Eton boy, disdainful of her torn frocks, of her soiled hands, her shrill joyousness. He and his sister Maud kept fastidiously aloof.... Maud of the black ringlets and the fine frocks, who from the first had made her little cousin realise the gulf that must exist between the child of the poor guardian and the daughter of the House.

But later came a change.

She was Miss Ellinor—a tall maiden, suddenly alive to the desirableness of ordered locks and pretty gowns; and young Sir David began to assume importance within her horizon. How these fleeting memories, evoked by the essence of Master Simon’s distilling, were sailing in the silence of the room round Ellinor’s head!

It was during his University years. The young master brought into his house every vacation an extraordinary stir of eager life. There came batches of favoured companions, varying according to the mood of the moment:—youthful philosophers who had got so far beyond the most advanced thought of the age as to have lost all footing; or exquisite young dandies, with lisps and miraculously fitting kerseymere pantaloons and ruffles of lace before which Miss Sophia opened wide mouth and eyes; or again, serious, aristocratic striplings of earnest political views.

During these invasions Aunt Sophia suddenly developed a spirit of prudence quite unknown to her usual practice, and Miss Ellinor, much to her disappointment, was kept studiously in the background. Upon this head cousin David entered suddenly into the narrow circle of her emotions. Chafing against the unwonted restraint, Ellinor one day defied orders, and boldly presented herself at the breakfast-table while her cousin and two young men of dazzling beauty, all in hunting pink and buckskins, were partaking of chops and coffee under the chaste ægis of Miss Sophia Rickart’s ringlets.

How well Ellinor could recall the startling effect of her entrance. She had walked in with that boldness which girlish timidity can assume under the spur of a strong will. Miss Sophia had gaped. Three pairs of eyes were fixed upon the intruder. David’s serious gaze, always so enigmatic to her. Then the Master of Lochore’s red-brown orbs.—They were something of the colour of his auburn hair. She had come under their range before, and had hated them and him upon a sudden instinct, all the more perhaps for the singular attachment which David was known to have found for him.—The third espial upon her was one of soft, yet piercing blackness: she was pulled-up in her would-be nonchalant advance as by an invisible barrier. David, long and lean in his red and white, had risen and come across to her with great deliberation. He had taken her hand.

“Cousin Ellinor,” he had said, in a voice of most gentle courtesy, “you have been misinformed: Aunt Sophia did not request your presence.”

He had bowed, led her out across the threshold, bowed again, and closed the door. There had been a shout from within, expostulation and laughter. And she, without, had stamped her sandalled foot and waited to hear no more. With tears of bitter mortification streaming down her cheeks she had rushed to her beloved old haunt in the Herb-Garden, carrying with her an odious vision of her cousin’s face as it bent over her; of his grave eyes, so strangely light in contrast with the dark cheek; of the satirical twist of his lips and the mock ceremony of his manner.

But she had taken with her also another vision; and that was then so consoling that, as she marched to and fro among the fragrant bushes that were growing yellow and crisp under autumn skies, she was fain to let her mind dwell lingeringly upon it. It was the black broad stare of surprised admiration in young Marvel’s eyes.

Many a time, in the subsequent days, did the walls of the forbidden gardens enfold her in their secrecy—but not alone. He of the black eyes had heard of the secret entrance and was by her side many a time—Aye, and many a time, in the years that followed, had Ellinor told herself, in the bitterness of her heart, how far better it would have been for her then to have sucked the poison of the most evil plant that had clung appealingly round her as she brushed by, listening to young Marvel’s wooing.

Those were days of courtship: an epidemic of sentiment seemed to have spread through Bindon. Handsome, ease-loving, bachelor parson Tutterville developed a sudden energy in the courtship which had stagnated for years between him and Aunt Sophia, on whose round cheeks long-forgotten roses bloomed again.

And David too! From one day to the other Sir David Cheveral had received, it seemed, fair and square in his virgin heart, virgin for all the brilliant and fast life he seemed to lead, the most piercing dart in Love’s whole quiver. He was one of those with whom such wounds are ill to heal. Poor David!

In the prevailing atmosphere he of the black eyes had got his own way easily enough. Marriage bells were the music of the hour. Parson Tutterville led the way to the altar with Miss Sophia’s ringlets drooping upon his arm. Ellinor promptly followed, with lids that were not easily drooped cast down under the blaze of the drowning black stare. Ellinor the child, confident little moth throwing her soul against the first alluring flame, to its torture and undoing!

Well, all that was past! She had revived. She was back at the door of life, stronger and wiser. But David? David was also alone. After scaling to the pinnacle of the most exalted, devouring passion, he had had to go down into the valley again, alone, carrying the sting in his heart. Alone, always, she had heard. Poor David!

“No!—Happy David,” said Ellinor aloud.

“Eh?” said the old man.

He fixed his gaze once more upon his daughter, and stared at her for a moment as if her comely presence were but some freakish play of his own senses.

“Father?”

The knotted wrinkles became softened into an unwilling smile.

“I spoke aloud, didn’t I?” said she. “It must be an inherited trick! I was thinking of David. He never thought more of marriage?”

“Marriage!”

“Will he never marry, father?”

“David, marry! Oh, pooh! David, wise man, has consecrated his youth to his pursuit. Pity, though, he did not choose a more satisfactory one!”

Mrs. Marvel lifted Belphegor from her shoulders to the floor and drew her chair closer.

“You mean his star-gazing? He sits in his tower all night, peering at the skies, ‘and dreams all day, like an owl.’ That’s what Willum said when I questioned him just now. Do you also call his a foolish pursuit?”

“He’s a visionary, a dreamer,” answered the other testily. “A splendid mind, the vigour of a young brain ... and to waste it on the stars, on distant worlds with which no telescope can ever bring him into any useful contact, from which no nights of study, were he to live as long as Methuselah, will ever enable him to gain one single grain heavy enough to weigh down that scale there, that scale which as you saw, will not even bear a breath unmoved! And all this world, child, all this world!” In his enthusiasm the old man had risen and now was pacing the room. “This teeming, inexhaustible world of ours, full of marvellous, most subtle secrets yet submissive to our investigation, from the mass that blocks out our horizon to the tiniest atom that, even beneath this glass,”—he was now by his work-table and his fingers caressed the microscope—“is scarce visible to the eye, all obedient to the same laws and amenable to our ken! With all these treasures at his hand, awaiting him, he throws away his life on the unattainable, on the stars, on moonshine!”

The faded dressing-gown flapped about the speaker’s lean legs as he walked; his white hair swung lightly over his bent shoulders.

Ellinor looked after him with eyes of amusement.

“The short of it,” said she, “is that he prefers his telescope to your microscope.”

“Fancy to fact, girl! Dreams to reality! Speculation to uses! Ah, what should we not have done, we two, had he been willing to work down here instead of up there!”

With a growl Master Simon returned to his sweet-smelling furnace and began mechanically to feed the fires with charcoal. She heard him mutter, as if to himself:

“Work with me? Why, I hardly ever even see him! David’s a ghost, rather than a man—a ghost that rises with the evening shades and disappears at dawn; that never speaks unless you charge him!”

Ellinor remained silent a while, pondering. Presently she said, in the voice of one who sees in what to others seems incomprehensible a very simple proposition:

“He lives, it would appear, uplifted in thoughts beyond the sordid things of earth. He knows no disillusion, for the unattainable star will never crumble to ashes in his hand. He will never see of what ugly clay the distant and glorious planet may, after all, be made! I say: happy David ... not to have married his first love.”

“Tush! Don’t you believe that David ever thinks of love.”

He made an impatient motion with the bellows and cast over his shoulder a look of severity, of surprise that a person who had shown herself capable of managing the rider on his scale should endeavour to engage him in the discussion of such trivialities in this appallingly short life.

Their glances met. It was his own spirit that looked back to him, brightly defiant, out of eyes as brilliant and as searching as his own, and as blue.

“These things, these unconsidered trifles of hearts and hopes and sorrows, they’re quite beneath notice, are they not, father? You know no more of the woman that drove poor David to the top of his tower—the David I remember was not a recluse—than you did of the dashing, handsome youth to whom you handed over your only child ... that she might live happy ever after!”

The widow laughed. But it was with a twist of her ripe, red mouth and a harsh sound like the note of an indignant bird.

The old man, remained arrested for a space, stooping over the stove with the bellows poised in his hand, as if the meaning of her words were slowly filtering to his brain. Then, letting his implement fall with a little clatter, he shuffled back towards his daughter and stood again gazing at her, his lips moving noiselessly, his eye dim and troubled. Master Simon’s mind, trained to such alertness in dealing with a certain set of ideas, groped like that of a child in the endeavour to lay hold of the new living problem.

At length he put out a trembling finger and timidly laid it for a second on her hand. She looked up at him with an altered expression, infinitely soft and womanly.

“I am afraid,” said he quickly, as if ashamed of the breakdown of his own philosophy, “I am afraid you have suffered, my girl.”

“I never complained while it lasted,” she answered. “I shall not complain now that it is over.”

He gathered the skirts of his gown more closely about him and regarded her from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression of deadly earnestness in singular contrast with his appearance.

“You spent long nights in tears, child, longing for the sound of his step?”

“How do you know?” she answered, flashing at him.

“Your mother did,” he sighed.

There fell a heavy pause, during which Belphegor sang with the simmering phials a quaint duet as fine as a gossamer thread.

“Until the morning dawned, when I dreaded the sound of that step,” said the widow at last.

Master Simon frowned more deeply. New wrinkles gathered on his countenance.

“A worthless fellow! A wastrel, a gambler, a reprobate! And you doing your wife’s part of screening and mending, nursing and paying. Aye, aye, I know it all. It was your mother’s fate.”

“And did my mother get cursed for her pains, and struck?”

The old man started as if the word had indeed been a blow.

“Ah, no,” he cried sharply. “Ah, no, not that, never that!”

Ellinor came close and laid her hands on his shoulders.

“Bad enough, God knows,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Heedless and selfish—but that, never!”

She looked at him, long and tenderly. When she spoke her tones and words were as full of deliberate comfort as her touch.

“Father,” she said, “compare yourself no more to that man. Your mind and his—what his was—are as the poles asunder. My mother’s life and mine, as Heaven and Hell. I did my duty to the end: whilst he lived, I lived by his side. He is dead—let him be forgotten! Life, surely, is not all bitterness and ashes,” she added a little wistfully. Then, with a return of brightness: “I have come back to you. I don’t know what I should have done if I had not had you. But here I am. This is the opening hour of my new life!”

The clock, in its dumb way, struck the hour of ten.

“Surely, father,” said Ellinor suddenly, “one of your little pots is rocking!”

There was a spirt of aromatic steam, in the midst of which white head and golden head bent together over the furnace; and young eyes and old eyes, so strangely alike, were fixed upon the boiling mysteries of the pharmacopic experiment. An adroit question here, a steadying touch there of those admirable hands and Master Simon, forgetting all else, began to direct and once more to explain—explain with an eager flow of words very different indeed from his disjointed solitary talk.

Chemistry or alchemy—how were the whimsical old student’s laboratory pursuits to be described? Chemist he was undoubtedly, by exactness of knowledge; but alchemist, too, by the visionary character of his scientific enthusiasm, though he himself derided the suggestion.

“Powder of projection? Nonsense, nonsense!” he would have cried. “Not in the scheme of our world. Much use to mankind if gold became cheaper than lead!... Elixir of Life? Again preposterous! Given birth, death is Nature’s law.... But pain and premature decay—ah, there opens quite another road!—that is the physician’s province to conquer. And if one seeks but well enough for the panacea, the universal anodyne, the true nepenthes, eh, eh, who knows? Such a thing is undoubtedly to be found. Doubtless! Have we not already partially lifted up the veil? Opium (grandest of brain soothers!) and Jesuit’s Bark and the Ether of Frobœnius, and Sir Humphry’s laughing gas! Yet those are but partial victors; the All-Conqueror has yet to be discovered.”

Such a discovery Master Simon (who was first of all a botanist) had settled in his mind was to be made in the veins of some plant or other; and, therefore, with all the ardour of the student of mature years racing against Time, he now devoted all his energies to this special branch of investigation. Hence, perhaps the forgotten title of “simpler” was the most appropriate to this follower of Boerhaave and Hales. In the absorbing delight of his hobby he was given to experiment recklessly upon himself as well as upon others, after the method of that other fervent student of old, Conrad Gessner; and whatever the result, noxious or beneficent, he generally found in it confirmation of some theory.

“If the juices of certain herbs can produce melancholia, or the fury of madness, or idiocy, why should we not find in others the soothing of oblivion, or the stimulus to exalted thought, or the spur of genius? Why not,” he would say, “But life’s so short, life’s so short....”

The door was opened noiselessly. Barnaby, the famulus, clutching the tray, stood staring, open mouthed, in upon them.

“Hang that boy!” said Master Simon testily and, pretending not to notice the interruption, proceeded with his disquisition on the admirable things he meant to extract from Camphire or Henne-weed.

“Is that all they give you for supper, father?”

She had walked up to the tray which had been deposited on a corner of the table.

“A jug of ale!” she exclaimed with disfavour. “Small-ale—and sour at that, I’ll be bound!” She poured a few drops into the tumbler, sipped and grimaced. “Pah! Bread—heavy and yesterday’s. Cheese! Last year’s, I should say—and simply because the mice wouldn’t have any more of it!” Indignation rose within her as she compared this treatment of her father with memories of Bindon’s hospitality in bygone days. “And an apple!” she added, with scathing precision.

“Most wholesome,” suggested the simpler, deprecating interference.

“Wholesome!” she snorted. “Upon the theory of the dangers of over-eating, I suppose! And what a jug—what a tumbler!”

“Barnaby is rather clumsy,” apologised his master. “Apt to break a good deal. So I, it was I, begged Mrs. Nutmeg to provide us with stout ware.”

“What old Margery!—old Margery Nutmeg still here!” A shadow fell upon Ellinor’s face—the next moment it was gone. “Ugh! How I always hated that woman! I had forgotten all about her. It is a way I have: I forget the unpleasant! Well!” with a laugh, “now I understand. But I’ll warrant her well-cushioned frame is not supported upon the diet of wholesomeness meted out to you! Heavens! but what is this dreadful little mess in the brown bowl?”

“Belphegor’s supper,” answered his master with rebuking gravity.

“They treat him no better than they do you, father!”

She paused, took the edge of the tablecloth between her taper finger and thumb and thrust out a disdainful lip.

“What a cloth! Not even quite clean!”

“Mrs. Nutmeg has limited us. Barnaby has an unfortunate propensity for upsetting things,” humbly interposed the philosopher.

“Then Barnaby, whoever he is, ought to be soundly trounced,” asserted Mrs. Marvel.

She wheeled round on the boy, who still stared at her with round eyes—but her father laid an averting hand upon her arm.

“Hush,” he said, inconsequently lowering his voice, “the poor lad is deaf and dumb.”

“Deaf and dumb, your servant?”

Fresh amazement sprang to her face, succeeded by a lightening tenderness.

“He suits me, child,” cried the old man, hurriedly. “Pray do not attribute to me any foolish philanthropy, I’m a——”

She interrupted him with a gay note:

“A mass of selfishness, of course—Who could doubt it, who knew you an hour? Well, I am a mass of selfishness, too. Oh, I am your own daughter, as you’ll discover for yourself very soon! And such frugality as Master Simon is made to practise will never suit Mistress Ellinor. Can your appetite for these, these wholesome things, bide half an hour, father?”

Without awaiting the answer, she placed Belphegor’s portion on the floor, handy to his convenience, then whisked up the tray, bestowed a nod and a radiant smile upon Barnaby (that made him her slave from henceforth) and briskly left the room. Barnaby automatically followed.

Master Simon rubbed his bald head and tugged at his beard. Belphegor was stamping on the hearth rug with a monstrous hump and bristling tail, preparatory to addressing himself to his supper.

“So here we are, with a female about us after all, my cat! But she seems an exceptionally reasonable person—quite a remarkable woman.”

His eye fell on the notes of his experiment, and a crinkling smile spread upon his countenance. “There is something about the touch of a woman’s hand,” he murmured, and promptly became absorbed again.

“I have not been very long, have I?” said Ellinor, when in due course she returned, followed by Barnaby with a tray.

The student lifted his hand warningly without withdrawing his eyes from his array of figures.

“Never fear,” said she, “your table shall be sacred.”

She fetched a large round stool and motioned to Barnaby to deposit his burden thereon. It was a tray of mightily increased dimensions, graced with damask (a little yellow, perhaps, from the long hoarding, but fine and pure), laden with cut crystal, with purple and gold china. The light of a pair of silver candlesticks gleamed on the red of wine, on the flowery whiteness of bread, on the engaging pink of wafer slices of ham and the firm primrose roll of a proper housewife’s butter.

“Shall we not sup?” said Mistress Marvel.

She poured into the diamond-cut glass a liquor of exquisite fragrance and colour, and placed it in her father’s hand. And, as he raised it to his lips almost unconsciously, a faint glow, like the spectre of the ruby in his glass, crept upon the pallor of his cheek.

“What is this?” he exclaimed, in interested tones, holding out the beaker to the light.

“Not small-ale!” laughed she. “Not small beer whatever it be! I have seen,” she added musingly, whilst her father contemplated her with astonishment, “I have seen strange things at Bindon since I arrived this evening, and could scarce obtain admittance in the unlit courtyard, (old watchman Willum recognised me, that was at least something). At the front door, dark, cold, forbidding, not one servant in attendance! I had to enter the house like a thief, by the back ways. It seems like a house under a spell! Ah, very different from the Bindon of old! But I have seen nothing stranger than the servants’ hall, whither Barnaby took me in silence—a good lad, your Barnaby,” and she cast a friendly glance over her shoulder at the still figure behind her. “I don’t know,” she resumed, taking up the fork, “whether they treat David as they treat you, his cousin, but they look well after themselves!”

She laughed, but a colour of anger had mounted again to her brow.

“Margery is away, it seems; so old Giles tells me. He was bringing up the wine for supper. Are you listening, father? Wine for the servants’ supper! And lighting these candlesticks! And if they consider cheese and ale good enough for you, do not think they misunderstand the meaning of good cheer. So we made the raid—and here you have some of their fare. Drink sir!”