Chapter I: Ah Me, the Might-Have-Been!

I cry to vacant chairs and widowed walls,
My house is left unto me desolate.
—TENNYSON (_Aylmer’s Field_).

Bindon woods were growing yellow. After an early and glorious summer, rain had set in with much wind and storm, and though it was but the first of September, the country had already begun to don its autumn livery.

Sir David, returning from a devious pilgrimage, rode slowly up the avenue. There was the scent of fallen leaves in the air and the ground beneath the tread of his horse’s feet was sodden and spongy. It was a sad and cloudy afternoon, with just now a brief respite between two gusts of wind and rain, a streak of blue in the watery sky above the soaking land. He had come fast and far; his horse was mud-bespattered, his riding-boots discoloured to the knees. Both rider and steed seemed dejected: so comes a man home from fruitless quest.

At the bend of the way, where the rectory walls skirted the avenue, Dr. Tutterville suddenly stood forth. From afar, and with anxious eyes, the parson and the squire scrutinised each other’s bearing, and it hardly needed the melancholy greeting:

“No news!”

“No news!” to confirm the impression of failure.

The reverend Horatio had, during the last four weeks of anxiety and fruitless search, lost some of his comfortable rotundity, some of his placid ease of manner. The iron grey of his hair had lightened a little more towards silver. He laid his hand upon the rider’s muddy knee and paced beside him towards the house. After a little silence a melancholy converse began.

“Wherever the poor child may be,” said the parson, “at any rate you are satisfied that she has not fallen into the hands either of that evil-living man, Colonel Harcourt, or of that light-spirited youth, Mr. Luke Herrick. That at least should be a consolation.”

Yet he sighed as he spoke and looked questioningly at the other. But David’s face became still more darkened.

“As I wrote to you,” he replied, after a little pause and with a sort of repugnance, “I had Colonel Harcourt’s movements closely traced from the moment of his leaving the ‘Cheveral Arms’ to the moment of our meeting in Richmond Park, and afterwards. Ellinor and he——” He broke off then, with a sudden irritation: “Great God,” he cried, “it was infamous to suspect her of favour to that man.”

Dr. Tutterville shook his head.

“The best and the purest,” said he, “are often and naturally the most easily deluded, David. I suspect her of nothing more than——”

But seeing Sir David wince he did not conclude his phrase. There fell another silence, emphasised by the sucking sound of the horse’s hoofs on the moist pathway and the dripping of the leaves over their heads. Then the rector began again plaintively:

“The fair creature had grown into my old heart! Without her Bindon is desolate! At any rate you are satisfied,” he repeated in a tone of the most uncomfortable indecision, “and also as regards Mr. Herrick.”

Anger began to creep to the rider’s brow once more. But he mastered himself and answered calmly enough:

“My dear doctor, I have written all this to you; do not bring me over the weary ground again. Harcourt is now in bed, being nursed for his second wound. I mentioned, did I not, that he had scarce recovered from the ball I left in his shoulder—ah, doctor, I used to have a steadier hand—before he had a second encounter, this time with Mr. Herrick.”

“I confess,” said the parson, with a melancholy shake of the head, “that it is precisely this second meeting which reawakened all my doubts. You know I had never been disposed to consider Colonel Harcourt seriously in the matter, deeming it so much more probable that Ellinor should have been attracted by the younger gentleman. And I had most earnestly trusted that, the latter being (or I am no judge of character) an honest-hearted youth, affairs were by no means past remedy.”

“You are right,” answered David, “Mr. Herrick is an honourable man. I saw him the day before his meeting with Harcourt. What passed between us is sacred to both. Suffice it: I am satisfied.”

The parson sighed and again shook his head.

“Satisfied!” he echoed. “Would I could feel satisfied about the welfare of that poor child; nay, about any one detail of the whole incredible business! At first I could have sworn.... You see, since her flight all my theories are upset. There is only one thing clear, and that is the emptiness of our lives without her!”

Thereupon the younger man’s passion burst forth. He struck the saddle bow with his clenched hand:

“In Heaven’s name, spare me any more of this! My God, man, do you not think I feel it at least as much as you? If she had grown into your heart, how had it been with mine?”

“Forgive me,” interposed the other in alarm at his companion’s vehemence. (Was this the old brain-sick David back again, was the old story of Bindon House to begin once more?) “Forgive me,” he repeated. “I had no idea....”

“No idea!” The rider looked down upon his companion with a bitter smile. “And did I not hear you boast, but a moment ago, that you could read the human countenance? No idea that I loved Ellinor! Why, man, have I not loved her since the first instant these eyes beheld her, ah, me, nearly a year ago! with the lamplight shining on her golden head! And her blue eyes—her blue eyes!”

With the inexplicable shyness of the man for his fellow-human, the parson almost recoiled from the vision of passion unexpectedly laid bare before him. But like those mountain-chasms filled with mist to the wayfarer’s eye, save when a rare and sudden gust of wind allows their depth to be fathomed for a moment, the deeps of Sir David’s heart were swiftly veiled again. He resumed the thread of his thought, in a composed manner, though somewhat dreamily, as if speaking to himself rather than to a listener:

“I came down that first night from my tower, I remember, eyes and mind dazed by the glory of that new star which I was so inordinately elated at having been the first to see, and I thought,” with a little laugh at once tender and exceedingly melancholy, “that another miracle—I was in the mood for miracles—had been wrought for me, and that the star in the firmament had taken living shape on earth!”

“In the name of goodness, what prevented you from telling her so then!” exclaimed the parson with sudden testiness. “Aye, David, and sparing us all this sorrow? You could have won her easily enough.”

“Because I was mad, I suppose. Oh, my dear old friend, never protest! I am sane again now, sane enough at least to know how mad I have been—call it by what euphemistic name you like. I might have won her, but did not know myself, could not trust myself. I believed I had done with human love, you know. I had consecrated myself to worlds beyond this one. She came to call me down from my unnatural life. She spoke to me, with sweet human voice, of lovely human things; she laid her tender hand on mine. It was my madness that I dulled my ears, that I made no answer to her touch. And yet there was happiness, ah, God, what happiness, in it all! Then came that last strange night! What happened to me I cannot recall. But ever since then I have been so sane, that, before God, I could almost wish the old folly back now that I have lost all. The curse of common sense is on me: I can no longer lose myself in visions on my tower. There stands Bindon, my house, my desolate house, an empty shell, full of echoes. Before me lies a desolate, empty life, full of memories. Everything, everything speaks of her, calls for her! Nothing can ever be sweet to me for the want of her. Once she said to me: ‘David, David, why is your heart empty, why are there no children round your knee!’ And I made answer: ‘Never can such things be for me.’ And then she wept over me.... You are right, sir, I might have won her. Sometimes, reason notwithstanding, under the pulse of vague, elusive memories I cannot fix, I think that in spite of all she loved me.”

The parson started again and flung an apprehensive glance at the speaker. The latter noted it; and the cold desolation of his voice changed for a light tone of irony that was somehow quite as melancholy:

“But never fear, dear sir, this is no return of madness. Who can fathom a woman’s heart? All lies shrouded in mystery and, as you say, we know but one thing:—that we have lost her!”

“Strange is it not?” began David once more, “that I should remember so clearly every word she ever said to me, though my poor brain was so sick at the time! But indeed it seems to me as if, until the moment when first a mantle of gorgeous dream enwrapt me round and then a blank, a blessed blank fell on me and in it I lost as in a great sea all the miserable wreckage of my wasted life—it seems to me, I say, as if my illness was that I remembered too much, too constantly, too vividly, for mental health. And now I remember still, yet not as of old with torture of shame and fury, but as if memories of her were all that life has left of sweetness.” He reined in his horse, and, gazing straight before him as at the rift of blue between the heavy clouds, went on still dreamily: “Strange, does it not seem to you? Strange even to myself! And I who could not trust her, when her every look and smile was for me, now I trust her, although, standing before us all, she would not defend her woman’s fame by one word.”

They had reached the bridge that led across the moat to the yards. Here David, having hailed a stableman from a distance, dismounted and delivered over his horse.

“Give me your arm, doctor,” said he, “I am stiff from the saddle and cold from my thoughts. I dread the going in; let us prolong our way sufficiently to put my dull blood in movement again. Yes, my kind old friend,” he went on, in answer to a shrewd look, “it is even so; I dread the moment of crossing my threshold where there is nought to greet us but whispers of the might-have-been.”

“Man was never meant to live alone,” said Tutterville sententiously. “How often have I not told you so?”

Leaning on the parson’s arm, David impelled him towards the narrow path that led to the fateful Herb-Garden. The wind had risen again; a rainstorm was impending. Overhead the branches were shaken as by an angry capricious hand; shreds of green foliage, and now and then an isolated prematurely yellow leaf, fluttered athwart them as they went.

Sir David halted with a start as they came into the open space under the yew-tree. Where the ancient gateway had, with delicate curvet and strength of iron, guarded the forbidden close, was now a gap, ugly as a wound, beyond which the stretch of devastated garden lay raw to the gaze. Against the broken-down wall the useless unhinged doors lay propped.

“I have had nothing done to this place since you left,” said the rector, breaking the heavy pause. “I thought that perhaps your wish would coincide with mine; that you would give orders to have these precincts cleared and levelled, and thrown in with the rest of the grounds, so that even its unhappy memory might die out among us. Over those new graves in the churchyard the sod is growing green again; and in the hearts of our poor ignorant village folk, resignation to the will of Providence, and repentance and shame for their cowardly turbulence, has taken the place of all angry feelings. I may tell you now, David, how grateful they all are for your not pursuing them with punishment.”

“Pah!” interrupted Sir David with impatient contempt. “What were the wretches to me—since I had heard she had escaped! What care I but to find her again!”

The parson halted disconcerted. Sir David had abruptly left his side to walk rapidly up to the gates and examine them. Then he turned. His look and demeanour had something of the singularity of former days. And from his distance:

“Rase these walls!” he cried. “Sweep these memories!... Have I not just said to you that memory is all that I have left! This wall shall be built up, these gates hung again; and no hand but mine shall touch what remains of those beds that she tended and planted. No feet but mine shall tread the paths her feet have pressed. Here shall all lie as secret and desolate as my life without her.—Let us go!”

Worthy Dr. Tutterville walked on in silence. His warm heart was too sincerely grieved for his eccentric companion to resent his present attitude; at the same time he was conscious of a humanly-irritated regret that the present form of eccentricity should not have manifested itself a little earlier. Presently Sir David took up the thread of the conversation where the rector had left it.

“So your good parishioners are grateful for my indulgence,” he said, with something approaching a sneer. “Let them thank the Providence to whom, as you tell me, they are beginning to be resigned, that He protected the object of their hatred from them! Had I not received the keeper’s word that she was safe and sound, I would have left no stone unturned to make every scoundrel of them know the full penalties of the law touching assault and housebreaking. They complained of poison ... they would have learned something of gallows! But their offence to me was not worth the trouble their punishment would entail. She escaped—let them be!”

“These are hard words,” said the parson disturbed, and he was about to add all the excuses he had already found for his flock in the trouble they had themselves endured and in the evil influence of Margery among them, when David interrupted again:

“I am a hard man, it seems! Well, I need be, to endure life.”

And Dr. Tutterville wisely held his peace.

The two friends proceeded towards Bindon House in silence. The reverend Horatio was now pondering over certain phrases of David’s which seemed ever and again, like the lightning that on a dark night flashes out upon the bewildered wayfarer, one instant to show him the road, only to leave him the next hopelessly groping in the mire.

“If she had grown into your heart, how had it been with mine!... Why, man, I have loved her since the first instant! First I was wrapt in gorgeous dreams, and then there came the blank. Then came the blank—then came the _blank_.” The phrase recurred, with meaning insistence like the burden of a catch. Presently he gave a kind of start. If he dared but connect these flashes! If he but dared hazard his unsteady steps upon the astonishing road they seemed to reveal! But he kept his peace.

In spirit David was back in the Herb-Garden, not the poor, dishonoured, bruised place upon which he had just turned his back, but the garden of that wondrous dawn where he and Ellinor had wandered into such a lovely land. He yearned for the moment when the guardian gates should be erect once more and the key of them within his hand.—Therein, as a man locks up the casket that holds the faded flowers, the crushed letters, all that fate has left him of his love, would he hold close for evermore the tenderest memory of his life.