Chapter II: A Messenger of Glad Tidings

Oh, my love, my breath of life, where art thou!
—KEATS (_Endymion_).

Sir David turned into the library and flung himself into a chair with a sigh that was almost a groan. And Dr. Tutterville could have echoed it as he looked round:—the ghosts that Ellinor had chased had all returned with the dust on the window-pane, with the dead flowers in the bowl, with the stagnant atmosphere of a fireless unaired room. The very books seemed to have lost their souls, to have become but matter, telling of nought but the futility of all things. Dimness and desolation brooded again over the house.

The parson tried to pump up some consoling phrase, stopped midway, coughed, went to the window and began to tap aimlessly on the pane. A selfish, elderly longing seemed to draw him back towards his own cosy fireside, where no haunting regret had ever quite extinguished the light of sunny Greek or philosophic Latin; where melancholy assumed no sterner guise than the placid analytic countenance of old Burton. He glanced again at the long figure in the chair, now bent in utter weariness, and the inner voice asked anxiously in a whisper: “How long will the new-found sanity last in such conditions as these?”

Into this brooding came a sudden clamour from without. It was the voice of Madam Tutterville calling upon her spouse with every note of impatience and exultation; and a moment later the lady herself appeared in the doorway, panting but radiant.

“Horatio, my dear doctor! Good gracious, man, what are you doing here? I have sought you everywhere as the spouse of the canticle sought the goat. Oh, my goodness, let me sit down and find breath! I have news!”

News! On her entrance, David had drawn himself slowly together with lustreless eye and turned vaguely to greet the new-comer, but her last words brought him to her side with a spring that overtook even his exclamation.

“News!” he echoed. And the two men looked at each other. What could news mean to them but one thing?

Madam Tutterville tottered to a chair, untied her hat-strings, let her hands drop upon her comfortable knees, and turned her eyes from one eager face to the other. Her own full-moon countenance was irradiated with a harvest-like glow. The infantile smile of her best moods was upon her lips.

But woman will remain woman no matter how clothed with superfluous flesh. Sophia positively coquetted with the moment, dallied with her own consciousness of power as complacently as any slim chit of eighteen. She vowed she was tired to death; pettishly requested Horatio not to hang over her: she was hot, she was stifling. She then, in a tone of promising importance, announced that she was back from Bath (for her autumn shopping), and then broke off to stare at David as if she had but just become aware of his presence, and to comment upon his unexpected return with exasperating interest.

“And what news have you brought?” quoth she, with emphasis.

Bitter disappointment set its mark on David’s face.

“Have you found traces of Ellinor?” pursued the lady.

David drew back, shaking his head; but the parson found a different meaning in his wife’s bantering tone. He caught her plump hand.

“Ah, excellent Sophia!” said he. “I might have known you would come to the rescue, as ever! You have heard of the child!”

Madam Tutterville was no longer able to control the tide of her triumph:

“Heard of her? Traced—found her—seen her! But this hour come from her! Have held her in these arms!”

Her voice rose with ever increasing flourish till it broke upon the over-high note.

The next instant she was clasped in her lord’s embrace; and, as she sobbed with joy upon his shoulder, it may be that even the worthy gentleman’s own eyes grew wet. David stood quite still, in that intensity of stillness which cloaks an intensity of emotion. When the worthy couple had recovered from their effusiveness, Madam Tutterville, now with full gusto, began to narrate her story:

“You see, dear Horatio, I could not but feel that you regarded me to blame for poor Ellinor’s flight. And perhaps you are right, doctor, for I fear, in my anxiety, I did indeed fail to observe the scriptural rule that silence is a most excellent thing in woman: A melancholy breach of my usual rule of life——”

“Yes, dear,” said the parson blandly, “and so it was in Bath, Sophia——”

“Pray, my dear doctor, allow me time to speak. I do not mind admitting to you that the expedition to Bath was undertaken less with a view to the store-room (though you did require the Spanish olives), than——” she paused. “There has been a coldness in your eye this past month, Horatio. Oh, yes, my dear doctor, there is no use in denying! And, well, well, I grant you, it was a very sad thing, whatever we might have to reproach her with, to think of that poor young thing cast upon the world. You have always laughed at my presentiments; but, as the prophet says, there are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio——”

“For God’s sake,” interrupted David suddenly, “this is torture! Where did you see Ellinor? How is she?”

Madam Tutterville started, less at the words than at the tone. She stared a second blankly at the speaker, then meekly replied:

“I found her at Bath. She actually was no further than Bath! In a little lodging. She has been ill, poor dear, but now is strong again. Oh, poor child, she has suffered!”

David turned away. But the parson interposed eagerly:

“And was she alone? Has she told you all?”

Whereat Madam Tutterville was not a little irate.

“Alone, sir—what are you thinking of! I pray you remember, she is my own niece.” She checked herself. “Alone, yes, indeed save for the two dumb things, Belphegor and Barnaby. And as for telling me.... What do you take me for? Do you suppose I should be plaguing her with questions at such a moment? And it’s my belief,” asserted Aunt Sophia energetically, “that she’ll never tell anyone anything. When I as much as hinted again that she might confide in my bosom, she closed her lips and neither man nor mortal could have drawn a word from her; no, not if they had put her on the rack!”

“Singular,” mused the parson. But there was a latent illumination in his eye.

After a while, which was a long while to the impatience of her two hearers, Madam Tutterville had told all she had to tell:

She had traced Ellinor, “in a luminous fashion,” she averred; first by the sight of the unmistakable Belphegor washing his face on the window ledge of a quiet little grey house in a quiet little back street up which Providence (as she piously expressed it), in the shape of a stupid chairman, had inadvertently led her. So struck was she at the remarkable resemblance to her old cat-acquaintance, she noted in the four-legged philosopher seated among certain dead geraniums, that she had, upon an impulse, arrested her progress. And here (as she took some trouble to point to her spouse) her intelligence had given that effective aid to the designs of Providence, without which the Heavenly Hints would have been thrown away. No sooner had she called a halt than Barnaby himself appeared on the doorstep with a basket on his arm. And after that it was but a short way from the chair to the poor room: and Ellinor was gathered to her arms!

But, to all their questioning, in which indeed it seemed the rector for the most part voiced Sir David’s eagerness, beyond the capital fact of the discovery of the truant, Madam Tutterville could give them but little information concerning Ellinor herself; none as to her plans. She had been ill. She was well again. She looked pale, but not sickly; was very silent; refused to come back to the rectory; was in no want, and had prospect of employment. What work and where, she avoided telling. The utmost Madam Tutterville had been able to extract from her was the solemn promise not to leave Bath without further communicating with her; and this was on the understanding that Madam Tutterville would then take Barnaby into the rectory—since it was now safe to do so.

“And did she ever speak of David?” asked the reverend Horatio, his eye just blinking across to the latter’s white face.

“Oh, she asked me how he was ... just at the end. I was actually on the doorstep when she caught me by the arm: ‘How is David, aunt?’” quoth she.

Madam Tuttervile’s tone expressed the mystification which something singular in her niece’s manner seemed to have evoked.

“I told her he was away in London. Believing, of course, that you were still there, David. And I told her how well you are. What wonderful accounts we had to give of you. Quite, quite your old self, before—Ah!”

She broke off a little disconcerted at the allusions to which her tongue was drifting.

“And Ellinor said?” inquired the parson gently, this time keeping his gaze away from his friend’s face.

“Ellinor!” The lady’s visage became wrinkled into fresh lines of perplexity. “Poor dear child! I fear she is very weak and nervous still. ‘I am so glad, so glad!’ she said, that was all.... But, do you know, I verily believe that, as she closed the door on me, I heard her sob. I had it in my heart to go back but, dear Horatio, she had pushed the bolt!”

Madam Tutterville turned from her contemplation of the doctor’s determinedly impassive features to stare at David. And whatever she then saw, it seemed all at once to procure her the liveliest, yet the most agreeable, surprise. On the verge of an outcry, she checked herself, nodded, pursed her lips, rolled an eye of weighty meaning at her lord, and rising, remarked with an air of abnormal detachment, that it was getting late and she had had a vast of fatigue.

The parson, with a gesture of acquiescence, turned to David.

“Good evening, then,” said he.

And with a little burst of feeling which sat very well on his dignity, he turned back to look admiringly at his wife.

“How beautiful over the hills,” he exclaimed, “are the feet of the messenger of glad tidings!”

Madam Tutterville glanced down at her sandals and smiled with whole-hearted delight and pride. But the rector, instead of following up his leave-taking, halted on his way to the door, lost in profound reflection. She respected the mood for an appreciable moment, then called on him, first tenderly, then with a shade of impatience.

“My dear love,” said he, when roused at last, “I pray you, wait for me in the parlour. There are now, I remember, a few words I must say to David. I will not keep you above a minute, my beloved Sophia.”

As the door closed the parson stood a little while in silence beside David’s motionless figure, regarding him gravely. Then said he:

“David! What is Bindon without Ellinor?”

David slowly turned his eyes.

“Why do you say that to me? Do I not know? Have I not felt it? Did you not yourself see what the moment of crossing my desolate threshold was to me! Did you not come with me into this empty room and hear its emptiness howl for her like the emptiness of my heart? Oh, for the sound of the rustle of her dress—of the least of her footfalls on the stairs!” He broke off, and suddenly lost his concentrated composure in a cry: “I’d give my soul to have her back!”

At this the parson was not shocked. Indeed he smiled more genially than if his companion had expressed the most pious resignation.

“Fortunately,” said he, “the price need not be so great!”

For a moment, in the glimmering dusk, David stared. Then catching his meaning, gave an inarticulate exclamation and sprang towards the door, where laughing now, the elder man laid hands on him.

“What! Is it boot and saddle, and spur and away? A Lochinvar! A very Lochinvar! Nay, nay, we are boys no longer, David. That is the right spirit, man, but we must act more circumspectly. Remember, it is a wounded bird, mysteriously wounded, and must be approached gently and touched tenderly. Nay, never look like that! Lord, what weak children this love doth make of men! See, David, leave me but one day to work for you. Trust the older head. Age has its privileges: the old man can step in where the lover must stand aloof. As for you, get you to your stars: the clouds are driving off, ’tis like to be a clear night. Get you to your stars and dream!”

And as the Star-Dreamer made a gesture of indignant denegation the other broke again into a chuckling laugh.

“To your tower!” he insisted. “I never bade you dream only of heavenly things—go dream, in your endless spaces, of the sweetest thing on earth!”

“Horatio,” began Madam Tutterville with great solemnity. They had reached the shade of the avenue and the lady, while leaning affectionately on the rector’s arm, had maintained up to this an unwonted silence—“Horatio,” said she, “you will no doubt scarcely credit it, but, without vanity, I may say that this has been a day of special revelation between myself and the Lord. I have observed. I have noted. There are certain signs. A woman’s eye, my dear sir, is quick in these matters. In fact, Horatio, I really believe David is in love with Ellinor.”

“My dear Sophia, you do not say so!”

“Indeed, doctor, but I do. Ah, you smile, you shake your head! Well, well, it would be strange, I grant, and something contradictious of fate that this should come to pass at last, which we have both so much desired, when one may say it would only seem now but an added complication. But (pray let me finish, Horatio), who are we that we should doubt the power of Providence? ‘He can make the wilderness blossom like the rose.’”

“A beautiful text, Sophia, and quoted with commendable accuracy! Nevertheless,” returned the parson, “I would most earnestly advise you not to confide these very extraordinary suppositions of yours to any other human being. I have so high an opinion of your acumen, Madam Tutterville, and you have so brilliantly acquitted yourself to-day, that it would be a thousand pities to spoil so bright a record by these wild—these altogether feminine imaginings.”

The poor lady acquiesced with a chastened air. When her Horatio adopted this decisive tone her submission was unqualified.

She did not speak again till they had reached the mellow mossy wall of the rectory orchard. Then she hazarded, in a small voice, that she dared say Dr. Tutterville would only laugh at her again, but she could not rest easy in her conscience without telling him that the more she had thought of the matter lately, and especially since her recent interview with Ellinor, the more the conviction had grown in her mind that the poor, pretty dear had been the victim of some base conspiracy. “That Margery!... not to speak of Lady Lochore——”

The rector halted, seized his wife by both hands, and exclaimed in a tone of genial admiration that brought back with a leap all her self-esteem:

“Sophia, there speaks your wise head! And,” he added, pressing the hands he held: “there speaks my Sophia’s kind heart.”

And arm-in-arm once more, and both smiling, they crossed the peaceful threshold of their home.