Chapter VIII: The Herb Euphrosine

Had’st thou but shook thy head or made a pause
When I spake darkly ...
Or turned an eye of doubt upon my face
As bid me tell my tale in express words....
—SHAKESPEARE (_King John_).

Before her mirror the next morning Lady Lochore sat wrapt in sullen thoughts, thoughts of impotent anger, of failure, punctuated now and again by glances at her own ravaged countenance.

She had dwelt in Bindon well-nigh her allotted month, and she had accomplished nothing—unless an increase of David’s eccentricity and a marked accentuation of his antipathy towards herself could be reckoned a gain! The sands were running low. But it was not the span of the time that remained hers at Bindon (for she had no intention of leaving of her own accord and hardly believed the dreamer would find the energy to expel her, if, indeed, he were even aware of the consummation of time)—it was the span of her own life.

The sands were running very low. Meanwhile she had not conciliated David, nor had she ousted Ellinor. She had not even compromised her. Herrick was sighing _pour le bon motif_ (young fool!) and in vain. Harcourt _roué_ and duellist, “he who ought to have rid me,” thought she, raging, “of one or the other in a week,” had made no more progress than might old Villars himself. “Lochore did his business better!” she said half-aloud, and broke into a solitary laugh of inexpressible bitterness.

There came a tap at the door and Margery entered. Lady Lochore wheeled round, but it was idle to try and read any tidings upon the housekeeper’s impassive face.

“Well,” cried she, imperiously waving away the usual morning inquiries. “Well, speak, woman! Have you something to tell me at last?”

“Indeed, my lady, very little. Everything is much as usual. I am sorry to see your ladyship looking so ill. There do seem to be sickness about the house this morning, to be sure! Master Rickart indeed took to drugging himself last night—though that’s nothing new—and Barnaby sat up with him and lies in a dead sleep on the mat this minute outside the laboratory door just like a dog.”

“Pshaw! Go on.”

“Sir David, he was not himself yesterday, so Mr. Giles tells me; and a bad night he had too. Eh! He paced that platform, my lady, right through from midnight to dawn. Not a wink of sleep did I have either with hearing through the window the sound of his steps and knowing him so tormented, poor gentleman! That was after Mrs. Marvel had left him!”

Lady Lochore struck the table with her beringed hand and started to her feet.

“Mrs. Marvel!”

Margery began to pleat a corner of her apron.

“Yes, my lady. She was up with him there on the tower till nigh midnight.”

“On the tower!”

“Oh, yes, my lady. Not that that’s anything new either. She used to be half the night with him sometimes. But that was before your ladyship came. She stopped going this last month. But last night—eh, my lady, they did talk! I could hear the sound of their voices—she has great power with Sir David—has Mrs. Marvel.”

Lady Lochore sat down again. Her fingers closed on the muslin of the dressing-table. Helplessly and hopelessly her haggard eyes looked forth into a black prospective. Oh, she had failed—failed!

“’Tis indeed a sad day for Bindon,” said Margery after a pause, as if in answer to Lady Lochore. “No wonder your ladyship is anxious. There are times when I do think we’ll have some dreadful catastrophe here. If it’s nothing worse there’ll be an accident with them drugs, as sure as fate. Master Rickart will be poisoning some of the poor folk again, or himself, maybe, or, indeed, it might be Mrs. Marvel, she that’s always in with him.”

Lady Lochore started ever so slightly and turned round sharply. Never had Margery looked more benevolent, more virtuous.

“Yes, that’s what I do be saying to myself,” pursued the housekeeper. “Somebody will be found dead, and nobody to fix the blame on, with the way things are going on.” (The pupils of Lady Lochore’s eyes narrowed like a hawk’s.) “And when I see Mrs. Marvel going about, so young and fresh and strong, and sure of herself:—‘Maybe it will be you,’ thinks I.”

“Oh, get away with you!” cried Lady Lochore, and buried her head on her hands with a frenzied gesture.

“Shall we go and look through the bars into the little paradise of poisons?”

When Colonel Harcourt had suddenly made this suggestion to his friends, as they lay, in somewhat discontented mood, under the shade of the spreading cedar tree this oppressive summer day, he had cast a meaning glance towards Lady Lochore and she had risen with alacrity.

“Excellent!” she cried, when at the forbidden gate Harcourt produced the key with a flourish.

She knew of David’s difference with the colonel on the previous day; and though it had sunk into insignificance before the news of Ellinor’s return to the tower, she was now as the drowning creature that clutches at straws-Colonel Harcourt was a noted shot. And she clapped her hands when the gate rolled back on its hinges. She had no need to be told that the dangerous Mrs. Marvel was busy among the herbs within.

Herrick, moodily striding beside the Dishonourable Caroline, gave but the most perfunctory ear to a discourse upon the inductions to be drawn from a partner’s first play of trumps—with especial reference to certain crimes of his own committed the previous night. He started as he saw Harcourt’s action.

“No—no!” he exclaimed. “I understand that this would be an indiscretion.”

“You will perhaps allow me,” said Harcourt blandly, “to make use of a key delivered over by no less a person than our host himself.”

“Mr. Herrick thinks it more discreet to climb over the wall!” suggested Priscilla. She had a happy faculty for being spiteful with a rosebud look of innocence.

“What, Luke!” cried Lady Lochore, seizing the young man by the arm and dragging him towards the entrance, “so cast down! Was the fair widow then hard of approach to-day? Pluck up heart, lad. What! You a poet, you a little nephew of the original Herrick, and not know that when a woman assumes the defensive she is just considering the question of surrender? Why, what a lady this is! Eh, Priscilla, poor you and poor me must hide our diminished heads!”

She broke into a jeering laugh as the girl crimsoned and tossed her chin; her great hollow eyes danced, brighter even that those of the lover in his renewed confidence; her cheeks flamed a deeper scarlet than those of the mortified girl herself. She sketched a favorite gavotte step or two, as she gave her hand with a flourish to Colonel Harcourt that he might lead her across the forbidden threshold.

Ellinor, seated on the stone bench, with her empty basket before her, staring with unseeing eyes at the little bluish stars that spread all over the bed where flourished the herb Euphrosine, was suddenly disturbed from her melancholy musing.

These loud voices, this trivial laughter! By what freak of irresponsible folly were these few roods of ground (which now she had as much interest to keep inviolate, as ever Vestal virgin to keep her flame alive) to be again invaded? The intruders were actually in the garden: and no spot of it was hidden from David’s tower! She had just been chiding herself for her thoughtlessness of the previous day in permitting for a moment Herrick’s uninvited presence; for her light-mindedness in having found transient amusement in his company. Had she now failed again in faithfulness, was it possible that she could have omitted to lock the gate behind her? She hurriedly felt for her key; it hung on the ribbon of her apron. Then she rose upon an impulse: David had made her guardian here, she would keep the trust.

With head held high and with determined step, she went to meet them. She lifted her voice boldly as she came within speaking distance.

“Lady Lochore, if you found the gate open, this garden is none the less forbidden to visitors, by your brother’s wish. I must beg you all to leave it!”

Lady Lochore, her white teeth gleaming between her parted lips, her deep eyes insolently fixed upon her cousin’s face, listened without a word. Then:

“_Calmez-vous, ma chère_,” said she, “the gate was opened for us.”

“Chide me!” Colonel Harcourt thrust his handsome presence to the front. “It would be sweet to be chidden by those rosy lips. The next best thing, I declare, to being——” He paused, let his eye finish the phrase with bold suggestion, and then concluded humourously, with an almost farcical hesitation and change of tone: “praised by them!”

There was a new freedom in his manner and Ellinor was prompt to feel it. She remembered as with a dim sense of nightmare those burning glances, unnoticed then, which had fixed her last night. What had she done to forfeit the respect even of this hitherto courteous and kindly gentleman? She stepped back as he approached and looked at him icily.

“Whether you opened the gate or found it opened, I must repeat, Colonel Harcourt, that your presence here is a breach of courtesy—to your host and to me.”

Smiling, Colonel Harcourt opened his mouth to speak. But Lady Lochore intervened.

“How well you know my brother’s mind, Mrs. Marvel!” she jeered. “But you see, even men change their minds sometimes. Colonel Harcourt, show the lady with whose key you opened the gate.”

“Sir David’s own key,” confirmed the colonel blandly, as he held it aloft. “We are not quite the trespassers you think.”

“David gave it to you?” Her eyes were dark with trouble as she said the words, less as a question than as if she were setting forth her own grief. Harcourt did not answer for a moment. Then, slipping the key into his pocket with a laugh:

“Gave?” he cried. “Gave is hardly the word. He abandoned it to me. People change their minds, as my lady says. Sir David may once have wished to keep this curious spot sacred to himself——”

“And to Mistress Marvel, but now you may all eat the forbidden fruit!” cried Lady Lochore, with a glance first at the three men and then at Ellinor. “Sir David has at last found that it is not worth keeping to himself.”

Herrick, quick to perceive that Ellinor was being baited yet unable to gather the clue to the purpose which seemed to underlie her tormentor’s words, now came forward.

“But surely,” he urged, blushing ingenuously, “it is enough for us if Mrs. Marvel does not wish our presence.”

Almost before Lady Lochore’s hard laugh had time to ring out, Ellinor answered:

“Oh, no,” she said. The exceeding bitterness of her humiliation drew down the lips that tried to smile. “Pray, what can it be to me? I was only guardian. I am relieved of my trust.”

She made a sort of little curtsey, half-ironic. And then moved away from them.

But she was not destined to carry her bursting heart to solitude this morning.—Master Simon, his white hair fluttering, the tassel of his velvet cap swinging, the skirts of his dressing-gown flapping as he advanced with a high jerky step quite unlike his usual slow shuffling gait, emerged from the shade of the yew-tree, even as she stood on the threshold of the gate.

One glance at his wildly-lighted eye and the flush on his cheek bones, sufficed to convince Ellinor of the cause of this extraordinary infraction of his rule of life. He was still under the influence of the last night’s drug; or, worse still perhaps, of some new one. He waved his arm at her and at the group beyond.

“Admit me among you, ladies!” he cried, in a high thin tone. “I will tell you all great news! Daughter, child, this hour strikes a new era in the world’s history! The herb Euphrosine has given me back my youth!”

And, to complete the fantastic scene, Belphegor, every hair bristling, tail erect, eyes aflame with green phosphorescence, sprang from the bushes and performed a wild saraband around his master, uttering uncouth little cries.

Master Simon broke into shrill laughter.

“Ask Belphegor if we have not found the secret of youth restored!”