Chapter VI: The Perfect Rose, Drooping

Such is the fond illusion of my heart,
Such pictures would I at that time have made;
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been—’tis so no more:
I have submitted to a new control,
A power is gone which nothing can restore....
—WORDSWORTH (_Elegiacs_).

Sir David sat down upon the parapet, shifted the lantern and began to read. Ellinor watched him, the tumultuous beating of her heart gradually sinking down to a dull languor. Master Simon was pacing the platform, now conning over some chemical formula to himself, now pausing to gaze upon the stars with a good humoured sneer upon the futility of astronomy in general and the absurdity of Sir David’s in particular. A bat came and flapped with noiseless wings round the lantern and was lost again in the darkness of the surrounding deeps. It seemed to Ellinor a heavy space of time, and still David sat with a contracted brow, motionless, staring at the open sheet in his hand. At length he raised his head. His eyes sought, not herself, but the comrade of his long years of solitude.

“Cousin Simon!”

The old man turned in his walk, a fantastic figure in his flapping skirts as he shuffled forward out of the gloom. Evidently he had perceived a note of urgency in Sir David’s tone, for he came quickly.

“Yes, lad!”

Ellinor had not yet heard that inflection of solicitude in her father’s voice, but she recognised that it belonged also to that past they all dreaded; and for the first time she realised something of the ties that bound these unlikely companions to each other.

“Cousin Simon,” said David with stiff lips, “she asks me to receive her here!”

“Who? Maud?—What! the heathen vixen! Don’t answer her, don’t answer her!”

Sir David looked up. There was the stamp of pain upon his features; and yet, as she told herself, it was not so much pain as the loathing of one forced to contemplate something of utter abhorrence. Both men, she saw, were quite oblivious of her presence: the past was now stronger about them than the present. As Sir David made no answer beyond that dumb look, Master Simon grew yet more vehement.

“Pshaw! man, you’re not going to give way now after all these years! The thing’s irreparable between you. Why, David, what are you thinking of? How could you bear it? Think for a moment what her presence here would mean!”

Then Sir David spoke:

“It is not,” he said, “a question now, of my wishes. So long as I felt justified in considering myself alone, I had no hesitation. But to-night I have to face this: What is my duty?”

“Eh? How, now!” Master Simon stuttered, and could find no word. “Pooh! fudge!” He thrust out a testy hand for the letter.

“Read!” said the master of Bindon, “and then you will understand.”

Master Simon seized the document and, stooping to the light began to read the words aloud to himself, according to his custom. Ellinor drew near and listened. Nothing could have now kept her from yielding to her intense desire to know.

“‘Dear Brother,’” read the old gentleman (“Dear Brother!—A dear sister she’s proved to you!”) “‘It is very likely you may never read these lines’ (if that isn’t a woman all over! ... where am I?) ‘according to your heartless custom’—(Ha!” said Master Simon, shooting a swift ironical look at Sir David from under his ever-hanging eyebrows, “since when has Lady Lochore become qualified to pronounce upon heartlessness? Pooh!”)

Sir David made no reply. His eyes were fixed on some inward visions. The simpler gave a snort, and resumed his reading:

“‘Oh, David, let me see my home once more!’ (No, Madam!) ‘Let me come to you alone with my child. I am ill——’ (Devil doubt her—they’re all ill when they don’t get their way!) ‘I am ill, dying, and sometimes I think that it is because you have not forgiven me. In the name of our father, in the name of our mother,’ (’pon my word, she’s a clever one!) ‘I have a right to demand this! I must see my home before I die.’”

Sir David’s compressed lips suddenly worked. He rose and walked across to the other side of the platform, where against the lambent sky, his form once more became a mere silhouette. Master Simon proceeded quietly to finish the letter.

“There’s a postscript,” he said, and read out: “‘You cannot refuse me the hospitality of Bindon for a few weeks, remember that I, too, am a child of the house.’”

“‘Remember that I, too, am a child of the house!’”

Ellinor repeated the words drearily to herself. That was the key she herself had found to unlock the door of Sir David’s hospitality.

“Upon my soul,” said Master Simon, “I shall never fall foul of the female intellect again!”

He looked at Ellinor, and laughed drily.

“Oh,” she cried, shocked at this inopportune mirth, “she must not come here—we must prevent it!”

“Prevent it!” he cried irritably. “Do so, if you can, my girl. By the Lord Harry!” the forgotten expletive of his jaunty youth leaped oddly forth over his white beard, “she’s done the trick! Touch David upon his honour, his family obligations! Ha! she knows it too. A pest on you!” he went on, his anger rising suddenly, “with your silly female inquisitiveness. ‘Read it, read it!’ quoth she. Without you, Mrs. Marvel, he’d have sent the precious missive back—unopened, like all the others! Ha, that’s an astute one! ‘If you read these lines,’ she writes. Well she knew that if he once did read them she would win her game!”

Beneath an impatient stamp one slipper fell off. Thrusting his foot back into it, he began to hobble in the direction of Sir David, muttering and growling as he went, not unlike his own Belphegor when his cat-dignity had been grievously offended. Disjointed scraps of his remarks reached Ellinor, as she stood, disconsolate and cold at heart, facing the probable results of her impulse:—“A pretty thing ... disturbing the peace of the house ... a mass of selfishness ... a pack of silly women!”

“Well,” said Sir David, turning round as his cousin drew near.

“Why do you say ‘well’?” snapped the simpler. “You know you’ve made up your mind already, and need none of my advice.”

A bitter smile flickered over Sir David’s face.

“Can you say after reading that letter that there is any other course open to me?”

“Stuff and nonsense! A half-dozen excellent courses. You can leave the letter unanswered. You can write to the lady that these home affections come a little late in the day. You can write, if you like, and forgive her by post. You can take coach to London and forgive her there, and.... But, in Heaven’s name, stem the stream of petticoats from invading our peace here!”

“What,” exclaimed the younger man, a blackness as of thunder gathering on his brow. “Do you, do you, cousin Simon, bid me enter Lochore’s house!”

Disconcerted, Master Simon lost his ill humour, though to conceal the fact he still tried to bluster.

“Pooh! You’re not of this century. You’re mediæval, quixotic! David, man, high feelings are not worn nowadays. They have been put by, with knighthood’s armour. Don’t forgive her then, lad. I am sure I see no reason why you should.”

“Forgiveness!” echoed Sir David.

Ellinor had crept close to them once more. That bitter ring in David’s voice smote her heart.

“Forgiveness!” he repeated. “Does he who remembers ever forgive? My sister is ill and craves to return to her old home. Well, I recognise her right to its hospitality and also to my courtesy as the dispenser of it. More I cannot give her.”

“She’ll not ask for more!” interrupted the unconvinced simpler. “Eh, eh! It is my fault, David: I might have known how it would be. I brought in the first petticoat and there the mischief began.”

“Oh, father!”

The tears sprang to Ellinor’s eyes. Sir David turned round and seemed to become again aware of her presence.

“No, no,” he said, “that is ungrateful.” He took her hand. “She brought us sunshine,” he said.

But she missed from his pressure the tremulous touch of passion; she missed from his eyes that flame she had shrunk from and that now her heart would always hunger for. Pure kindness, mild sadness—what could her enkindled soul make now of such gifts as these? With an inarticulate sound she drew her fingers from his clasp; and, turning, fled downstairs again and back to her room.

A taper was burning on her writing table, and in its small meek circle of light a bowl of monthly roses displayed their innocent pink beauty. The latticed casement was thrown open. In the square of sky a single silver star pointed the illimitable distance. From the Herb-Garden below rose gushes of aromatic airs, as, from some secret cloister by night the voices of the dedicated rise and fall. Vaguely, in her seething misery, she seemed to recognise the special essence of the new plant giving to the cool night the sweetness accumulated during the long, hot hours of the day.

She sat down on the narrow bed, folded her hands on her lap and stared dully forth at the square of sky and the single star. Presently, almost without her own consciousness, her bosom began to heave with long sighs and tears to course down her cheeks. Where was now the strength, the indifference to passing events which she boasted her long battle with life had given her? Gone, gone at the first touch of passion! Throughout a sordid marriage she had remained virgin of heart, she had kept the virgin’s peace—and now?

Alternations of pride and despair broke over her like waves, salt and bitter as her own tears. How happy they had been! And the unknown fiend, jealousy, had urged her to break the still current of that sweet, restful half-unwitting happiness of their life all three together—a current flowing, she had told herself with conviction, to a full tide of unimaginable bliss.

My God, how he had looked at her only that night! And it was in that pearl of moments that she had thrust his past back upon him and bade him, with her precious, new-found power, read the letter that should never have been opened. The perfect rose had been within her grasp. It was her own hand that had flung it in the dust.

Master Simon, still shaking his head and muttering disapproval, went slowly back to his laboratory.

“The cunning jade!” he was grumbling, “she’s no more ill than I am. Or if she be, a pretty business we shall have with her—a fine lady with vapours, and megrims, and tantrums! I’ve not forgotten the ways of them...!”

But here an illuminating idea flashed upon his brain. He stopped at the corner of a passage, cocking his head like an old grey jackdaw. “Eh, but a fine lady in her tantrums.... What a test for the virtues of my paragon herb!”

All very well to rejoice at its efficacy upon the homely rustic. Master Simon had experimented upon the homely rustic too many years not to have developed a fine contempt for his vile corpus; he was too true an enthusiast not to long for something like a proper nervous system upon which to work.

An air of returning good humour now settled upon his face; and by the time he was seated at his table, he had begun to wish his unwelcome cousin really a prey to the most advanced melancholia, and was conning over what phrases he could remember of her letter—delighted when they seemed to point to that conclusion.

“And even if she be not pining away for sorrow, as she would like poor David to believe, if I remember the lady aright, she has as disordered a temper of her own as John Cantrip himself.”