Chapter XIX: Grey Departure

Here then she comes.—I’ll have a bout with thee:
Devil, or devil’s dam!...
Blood will I draw on thee—thou art a witch!
And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv’st!
—SHAKESPEARE (_Henry VI._)

The next morning, at an hour unwontedly early for such a ceremony, they laid Master Simon’s remains to rest in the family vault. The discontent in the village, aroused by the series of mishaps attendant on the simpler’s last experiments and fostered of late by Margery’s subtle calumnies, had been fanned to fury by her last round of farewell visits. The death of the warlock himself had little effect in assuaging the new-risen hatred which now was aimed at his living daughter.

It was a morning of weeping skies; a fine rain-shroud enveloped the land; Bindon looked desolate enough to be mourning a mightier scion than this poor eccentric old child. The creepers clung to the tower and the ruins, like sodden garments. The blurred panes looked like tear-dimmed eyes. The dripping flag of Bindon-Cheveral hung at half-mast, so limp and darkened with wet that it might have been a funeral scarf.

The ceremonial was performed before a congregation pitiable in its tenuity. Beyond the sexton, the clerk, old Giles and sobbing Barnaby, not another human being escorted the dead student to his last home, save the narrow circle of his own kinsfolk. Not one of the many he had helped in life, or of the many he had healed, could remember his debt of gratitude, so little did the many lives he had saved weigh against those few he had lost.

Good Doctor Tutterville officiated with something less than his usual dignity. He was painfully distracted. There were two or three raw graves yawning, without, in the little wet churchyard, that felt to his kind heart as if they had been dug into it. He was anxious too; his ear was strained for the dreaded sound of angry voices breaking in upon the sanctity of his dead. The words of the solemn service escaped his lips in haste, and he breathed a sigh of relief when at last the great stone was rolled back into its place and, the keys being returned to his own possession, he knew his old friend’s remains were safe from desecration.

When he emerged from the vestry with David beside him, both instinctively looked round for Ellinor. But she was gone, and Madam Tutterville, her round face for once the image of dissatisfaction, could or would give them no information on the subject. Her high nostril and short answer quite sufficiently indicated that she regarded Ellinor’s departure and their curiosity concerning it as equally unbecoming.

“No doubt you will find her at the rectory, if you wish,” she remarked with a snort.

But here old Giles, who had betaken his way back to the House—the thought of his restored keys and the comfort of a glowing glass on such a morning luring him to a sort of shuffling trot—returned hastily to the church, emotion of a very different kind lending speed to his clogged limbs:

“They were up at the house,” he explained, panting, “a score of them, and even more on the way! They were in the Herb-Garden; they had sworn to leave standing neither stick nor leaf! They had broken into Master Simon’s laboratory, laying about them like mad! They meant to leave no bottle or powders of the sorcerer to poison any more of them!”

Sir David and the rector looked at each other as the same thought flashed into each brain: Ellinor!

Then they started off running. It was a fearful possibility that the daughter might have returned to either of her father’s haunts; and the thought of the danger to which she was exposed amid an angry, ignorant rabble was hardly to be framed in words.

But Ellinor had had but little time to bestow on the sensibility of grief.

An interview which her aunt had inflicted upon her the previous night had taught her that the last day’s events had left her poorer even than she had reckoned. Her hope had been to find a few days’ harbourage in the rectory and the counsel of friends, before sailing further on the bitter waters of life. She had hoped—God knows what a woman will hope, so long as she is in the neighbourhood of her beloved! But Madam Tutterville’s very first words had called her pride in arms.

The lady had gathered good store of awful texts and apposite instances wherewith to lace her discourse; and before a tithe of them had been delivered, Ellinor, scarlet-faced and writhing, had felt herself sullied in all her chastest instincts by the mere fact of listening.

Madam Tutterville looked upon this case as well within her competence: she had not consulted with her lord. But her self-sufficiency overreached her purpose. It was little likely that her pragmatic methods should have extracted the humble and full confession from her niece which seemed to be demanded by every authority, old or new, even had the young widow’s steadfastness been less complete than it was.

Above the turmoil of Ellinor’s emotions one thing soon became clear: not an hour longer than possible could she remain under this roof. The bread of Madam Tutterville would stick in her throat. The cold charity of strangers would be sweet compared with the bounty of one that could think so meanly of her own kin. Ellinor was indignant, Madam Tutterville severe; so true it is that where most the human of all feelings is concerned, the best and most tender-hearted woman seems suddenly merciless. They parted in anger.

Early then, on this most gloomy day, had Ellinor taken all her measures. Her available funds were small, but she had saved enough from those limited stores which her father had handed over to her to provide for the immediate future. She had, besides, the capital of splendid health, of indomitable will and energy; so that, for her modest material needs Ellinor Marvel, though now a poor woman once more, had no anxiety. But, oh, for the needs of her heart—that passionate awakened heart that had learned to want so much! It was worse than death to have to tear herself from Bindon.

Nevertheless, unfalteringly, with the secrecy of one who will not be prevented, she considered and carried out her plans. A place was privately retained on the Bath and Devizes coach which passed every morning before the gates of Bindon. Her few garments were gathered and packed. A letter to the rector was left to be delivered after her departure. It briefly stated that she felt it impossible to remain at Bindon, and promised to communicate with him later on.

Unnoticed, she slipped away through the shadows of the little church; and after consigning her small effects to Barnaby (and picking up, on a sudden tender thought of her father, the anxious Belphegor) she struck across the wet grass towards the park entrance, followed by the dismal tolling of the Bindon church bell.

The hood of her cloak pulled over her face, its folds wrapped round her, she sped through the misting rain, so plunged in thought as scarcely to notice, until within a few paces, the knot of village folk advancing up the avenue.

Then she halted, unpleasantly struck by something strange and threatening in their demeanour. They were coming along at a great rate, like people belated, talking eagerly among themselves, and with fierce gesture. There were some eight or ten of them: an elderly man with a long draggled streamer of black crape tied to a bludgeon, a couple of lanky lads fighting over the possession of a pitchfork, and the rest women, one of whom dragged a child by the hand.

Upon the instant that Ellinor and Barnaby halted they were recognised, and a shout went up that made her blood run cold. The next moment she was surrounded, and the words of execration hurled at her fell with almost as stunning effect as the blows they seemed to presage.

“Witch! Poisoner! Murderer of poor people! She’s trying to run away! It was she planted the poison bush: burn her with a faggot of it! She’s in league with the Devil, and that’s the Devil’s imp. The witch and her boy! Seize her, duck her!”

Angry hands were outstretched, and Ellinor, with energies suddenly restored by the realisation of danger, stepped back against one of the mighty beeches, holding out the wide cloak to shield Barnaby. A new howl broke out at the sight of her burden.

“The witch and her cat! Burn her! Burn them!”

“Give me back my wife!” cried the man with the bludgeon.

“And where’s good Mrs. Nutmeg?” shrieked an old hag.

“See, Jamesie,” exclaimed the woman with the child, “spit upon her! It is she who bewitched your poor daddy!”

The child hurled a stone which fell short of its aim. This was the signal for the passage from anger to frenzy; and it would have fared ill with Master Simon’s three innocent associates, had not it been for an unexpected aid. Barnaby’s face was already streaming with blood, and Ellinor had received on her arm a vicious blow—which Jamesie’s mother, armed with a flint, had levelled at Belphegor—when the sound of an authoritative shout produced a sudden halt. The sight of the keeper, advancing at full run from his gate-lodge and significantly handling his gun, immediately altered the complexion of affairs. Yet he had not come a moment too soon, nor was there one to be lost; for already a few stragglers, drunk with the triumph of destruction, were running down the avenue towards them from the Herb-Garden.

“Stand back!” cried the keeper. “Stand back, John Mossmason, or I’ll plug you! And you, Joe Barnwall, if you don’t drop that pitchfork you’ll never dig a turnip again, or my name is not keeper!”

The broad cord-clad back was now between Ellinor and her foes. Keeping his barrels levelled at the rioters, he whispered to her over his shoulder:

“Run, ma’am, run and get into the lodge!”

At that instant the note of the post-horn rang out upon the air; the Bath and Devizes coach was passing through the village.

The younger of the two discontented gentlemen who occupied damp outside seats on the coach that day and had been looking forth in dudgeon upon a world of dudgeon, never ceased in after years to recall the tale of that ride as one fit for walnuts and wine.

“It was raining cats and dogs, and by ill-luck (as I thought then), I and an elderly old buck had to put up with outsides: it was packed inside. Well, sir, I was cursing pretty freely by the time we were drawing Devizes. And when the coachman said he had to pick up a passenger at the gates of Bindon-Cheveral, I was getting a curse out of that, for an irregularity—when, gad, the words died on my tongue!

“A woman, sir, the loveliest woman these eyes were ever laid upon (my good lady is not here, I can say it in your ear), running, running for her life, bare-headed in the rain! By George, that was hair worth gazing at! She held a cat in her arms, like a baby, her cloak, half-torn from her back, flying behind. She was making for our coach. After her, an overgrown gawk of a lad, with a bloody sconce, lugging her bundles anyhow, the most frightened hare of a fellow it has ever been my lot to see—turned out afterwards, to be a kind of natural, deaf and dumb. But she, gad! she was brave for both! A grand creature, ’pon my word! Inside the park there was a prodigious deal of shouting and scuffling, and two or three big devils with pitchforks yelling something about a witch.

“‘Pray, gentlemen,’ says she, looking up at us, her eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, her face as white as this napkin, but as calm as you or I, ‘help me up,’ says she, ‘or they will kill me.’ And would you believe, it, she hands the cat up first before she’d let any one extend a hand to her? And the boy, he must come too! ‘I can’t leave him behind,’ says she, ‘they would tear him to pieces.’ And, zounds, sir, if it had not been for a keeper fellow with a gun who ran up and locked the wicket gate in their very faces, some of those lads meant murder or I never saw it written on a human face. Then it was: ‘On with you John!’ Off went the horn. Off went we, the inside females screeching like mad, and the devils at the gate bellowing like wild beasts after their prey....

“‘Well, this is a rum go!’ says the coachman, as he tucks the cat between his boots. ‘I always thought this here place of the Cheverals was asleep; dang me if it hasn’t wakened up with a vengeance!’

“A witch, sir, they’d called her. Not so far wrong there! Between you and me and the bottle I’ve never been able to forget her. A strange creature—all the women I’ve known would have gone off in a screaming fit or a swoon. Not she. The first thing she does is to whip open one of her little bundles and out with her handkerchief, and wipe and bind the boy’s broken head as he squatted beside her; and then she turns to me on the other side and hands me a scarf, and says she: ‘Would I be so kind as to tie it round her arm, as tight as might be.’ And then I saw an ugly gash in the pretty white flesh. ‘A hit with a stone,’ she says. And not another word could I get, nor the other old boy (who was green with jealousy at her speaking with me), nor John the coachman, though he called her ‘my dear,’ and was as round as round with her, a fatherly sort of man that any young female might confide in.

“She just pulled her hood over her face and lay back folding her arms, the sound one over the hurt one, and sat staring at the gray wet walls of Cheveral park as we skirted them. Her face looked like a white rose in the black shadow, and by and by, I saw the great tears begin to gather and roll down her cheeks one by one. I tell you, sir, my heart’s not a particularly soft one, but it made it ache.

“Well, we set her down and her cat and her boy at York House. She paid the boy’s fare and thanked us. I thought she was going in at the York—but she went up without another word by Bartlett street. And I never saw her again, nor heard more of her story.—Pass the bottle.”

THE STAR DREAMER