Chapter IX: An Ominous Jingle

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power.
—SHAKESPEARE (_Romeo and Juliet_).

The old man good-humouredly, but firmly, resisted his daughter’s anxious endeavours to lead him back to his room. He entered the garden, established himself on the bench, and, waving a branch of the beloved herb to emphasise his words, embarked upon a profuse discourse upon its properties. The others gathered round him in curiosity and amusement.

Ellinor could not leave him a prey to the freakish humours of the company at such a moment. His brain seemed to work with an extraordinary clarity and vigour, his worn frame seemed to have regained an energy and elasticity it could not have known these twenty years. And the contrast between his aspect of æthereal age and the youthful exuberance of joy now written on his features struck her as alarming in the extreme.

Her anxiety was not lessened when Master Simon now wound up his first oration by proclaiming that, after various long hours of work, he had at last extracted so pure an essence of the _Euphrosine_ that one drop had sufficed to produce this result upon himself.

“Then, surely, father,” she cried, “you have prepared a dangerous drug! Out of its beneficence you must have drawn a deadly poison——”

Lady Lochore had seated herself on the bench on the other side of the old student. She evinced a great interest in his remarks; encouraged him by exclamation, laughter and question to further garrulity. At Ellinor’s words she lifted her head with a sudden quick movement, like that of a stag on the alert. And into her eyes flashed a look so eager, and so evil, that she herself, in consciousness of it, instantly dropped the lids over them. She felt Harcourt’s glance upon her.

“Poison,” said she, feigning to yawn. “Oh, fie! then I’ll have none of your remedy.”

Priscilla, idly turning the pages of the “Gerard” which Ellinor had left out of her hand on the sundial, stood silent, shooting glances by turns at Harcourt and Herrick. The former, standing with folded arms behind Ellinor, the latter, lying stretched on the hot soil at her feet, seemed too thoroughly content with their posts to be lured from them. But at Ellinor’s exclamation, the little circle had been stirred.

“Poison?” echoed Master Simon in his turn. “Tush! Ellinor, I am ashamed of you! By this time you should know better. Is not every medicine, nay, every distilled spirit, poison in certain degrees? And how about Opium? How about Digitalis, Aconite and Laurel, Mercury and Antimony? Pooh! What need of names?”

“Even in love a poison lies!” murmured Herrick, and looked up languishingly at Ellinor’s unseeing face.

“No doubt,” said Harcourt, in a most indifferent voice, “so wise a philosopher as Master Simon always locks up his poisons!”

“Child,” pursued the old man, “I tell you, this herb which was lost to the world, but which you yourself found again, planted and nurtured, is destined to be the greatest boon mankind has yet known! The older students had some hints of its powers, some glimmering of its uses. But it wanted the resources of modern methods of modern chemistry to develop them. I have now reduced its essence to the most convenient form. A drop, one drop a day—ah, ladies and gentlemen, farewell to all your miseries!”

“Is it not wonderful!” cried Lady Lochore. She clasped her hands and looked keenly at the old man; and he, anxious to improve the occasion upon so earnest a believer and so interesting a case for experiment, now gave her his undivided attention.

Ellinor, with a sigh of impatience, rose, and, taking up her basket, proceeded to her neglected work of plant gathering, here and there consulting a pencilled list that was pinned to the handle. Herrick was promptly at her side.

“What are you going to make of those?” he asked, plucking in his turn a leaf from every plant that her scissors had visited.

“A febrifuge for an old woman in the village. It is promised for to-night.”

“And if I do—I have half a mind to come into your den and let you give it to me yourself—what effect could one drop have on me?” Lady Lochore was saying. And the old man answered:

“It would arrest the disease that is ravaging your strength and at the same time stimulate your nerves; so that, waste ceasing, all the energies of your body would unite in building up strength and health again.”

“How truly delightful!”

“Your restlessness would vanish. This morbid mental condition, which is so apparent, would become replaced by a calm, cheerful, contented frame of mind—like mine!”

“My dear Sir! How my friends would bless you!”

“In the course of a few months——”

“Months? La! I can’t wait months. I’ll have five drops a day.”

“God forbid! That would defeat its own end. To stimulate is one thing, but to over-excite——”

“Would five drops over-excite me?”

“Indubitably. If one has already so potently invigorating an effect, five drops would produce a most undesirable condition of mental super-excitement—most undesirable!”

“Then ten drops?”

“Colonel Harcourt,” cried Priscilla pettishly, “pray come to my rescue: there’s a wasp on my book!”

The colonel obeyed the summons, but without any extraordinary alacrity; Lady Lochore’s conversation with Master Simon was unexpectedly interesting.

“Ten drops?” Master Simon was explaining. “Madness probably. More than ten, paralysis, no doubt. Twenty? Oh, twenty would be stillness for evermore—Death!”

Having duly murdered the wasp, Colonel Harcourt was chagrined to find that the new student of pharmacopœia seemed to have already had enough of her lesson. She had risen to her feet and was standing deeply reflective. Her great eyes were roaming from side to side, yet unseeing. Her lips were moving noiselessly. He went up to her. An unusual gravity was upon his smooth countenance. He bent to her ear:

“What are you saying to yourself?” he whispered.

She started, flashed round half in anger, half in mockery; then their glances met and her face grew hard.

“I was merely conning over to myself,” answered she, “our dear old necromancer’s last pregnant utterance; it sounds like a popular rhyme:

One drop gladness,
Ten drops madness,
Twice ten a living death
After that no more breath.

Have I not put it into a useful jingle for you?” she cried, interpellating the old man.

But Master Simon, deeply absorbed in watching Belphegor, as the beast stretched and yawned and rolled restlessly in the sun, never turned his head. Colonel Harcourt laid a finger on her wrist, and drew her away from the others.

“What are you planning now?” he asked, in the same repressed undertone as before.

“Planning?” she echoed, and crossed his searching gaze with one of stormy defiance. “Oh, my dear confidant, do you not know all my inmost secrets? _Dieu_, how you stare! Two drops gladness, ten drops madness. Let me give you some of the stimulant—say three drops—’twould stir your sluggish wits. Do, I pray you, accompany me to the laboratory, and with these fair hands I will measure you a dose from the magic phial. Oh, how Master Simon will love me if I bring him a new patient! Believe me, it will do you a vast service, my dear sir, you have grown dull and slow of late—very slow.”

Out of her laughing face her eyes looked fiercely. He walked away from her; paused, with his back upon them all, to ponder. Then he frowned, and after that shrugged his shoulders.

“What a fool you are, Antony Harcourt,” said he to himself, “to have let yourself be mixed up with this woman’s business! I vow you’ll pack!”

Lady Lochore had returned to the bench and was again sitting beside Master Simon, and once more brooding. Tragedy was writ in large letters all over her wasted, death-stricken figure. Above all things the colonel hated tragedy. Violent emotions were so ill-bred, tiresome. What could not be accomplished with a gentlemanly ease, that, by the Lord, was not for him! A love intrigue, well and good. And if there were tears at the end of it, so long as they were not shed upon his waistcoat—and none knew better how to avoid that—here was your man. But when it came to—“By Gad!” thought Colonel Harcourt, with fresh emphasis, “the place is getting too hot for me.”

And back again he came to his resolution; this time fixed.

“I will take my leave of all this to-night. But, faith! I’ll part friends with the pretty widow.”

After her spasmodic fashion Lady Lochore now suddenly resumed her wild humours. She smiled as she saw how the two cavaliers were now again in close attendance upon Ellinor; smiled at the deserted Priscilla; and finally, at the sight of two figures approaching from the direction of the entrance, broke into open laughter.

David in the strange comradeship of Villars!

David, jealous and wrathful, coming to rescue his invaded garden, suspicious of Ellinor’s faithlessness—a possible quarrel! For the mere mischief of it, it was enough to make Lady Lochore laugh. And laugh she did.