Chapter II: A Mass of Selfishness

... Such eyes were in her head;
And so much grace and power, breathing down
From over her arch’d brows, with every turn
Lived thro’ her to the tips of her long hands....
—TENNYSON (_The Princess_).

“Well, Father?”

Master Simon started. His eyes shot a look of searching inquiry at the young woman who now came round to the side of the high table, and bent down to bring her fresh face to a level with his.

“Ellinor? Not Ellinor, not my daughter...!” he said.

“Ellinor. The only daughter you ever had. The only child, as far as I know!”

The tranquil voice had a pleasant, matter-of-fact note. The last words were pointed merely by a sudden deep dimple at the corner of the lips that spoke them. But it was trouble, amounting to agitation, that here took possession of the father. He pushed his chair back from the table, rubbed his hands through his scant silver locks, tugged at his beard.

“You’ve come on ... on a visit, I suppose?” he said presently, with hesitation.

“I have come to stay some time—a long time, if I may.”

“But—Marvel, but your husband?”

“Dead.”

The dimple disappeared, but the voice was quite unaltered. She had not shifted her position.

“Dead?” echoed Master Simon. His eyes travelled wonderingly from her black stuff gown—a widow’s gown indeed—to the head with its unwidow-like crown of hair; to the face so youthful, so curiously serene, so unmournful.

Her hands were lightly clasped under the pointed white chin. Here the father’s eyes rested; and from the chaos of his disturbed mind the last element of his surprise struggled to the surface and formulated itself into another question:

“Where is your wedding ring?”

“I took it off.”

Ellinor Marvel straightened her figure.

“Father,” she said, “we have always seen very little of each other, but I know you spend your life as a searcher after truth. Since we are now, as I hope, to live together, you will be glad to take notice from the first that I have at least one virtue: I am a truthful woman. It will save a good deal of explanation if I tell you now that, when the coach crossed the bridge this evening and I threw into the waters of the Avon the gold ring I had worn for ten miserable years, I said: ‘Thank God!’”

Simon Rickart took a stumbling turn up and down the room: his daughter stood watching him, motionless. Then he halted before her and broke into a protest, by turns incoherent, testy, and plaintive.

“Come to stay—stay a long time! But, this is folly! We’ve no women here, child, except the servants. David wants no women about him. I don’t want any women about me! There’s not been a petticoat in this room since you were last here yourself. And that, that’s ten years ago. You will be very uncomfortable. You have no kind of an idea of what sort of existence you are proposing to yourself. I am a mass of selfishness. I should make your life a burden to you. Be reasonable, my dear! I am a very old man. Pooh, pooh, I won’t allow it! You must go elsewhere. Hey, what?”

“I cannot go elsewhere, I have no money.”

“No money! But Marvel! But the fortune I gave you? Tut, tut, what folly is this now?”

“Gone, gone—and more! He would have died in the Fleet had we not escaped abroad. The guineas I have now in my purse are the last I own in the world. All my other worldly goods are in the couple of trunks now in the passage.” She stopped, and remained awhile silent, then in a lower voice and slowly: “Look at me, father,” she added, “can I live alone?”

He looked as he was bidden. He, the man who had not always been a recluse, the whilom man of the world who in older years had taken study as a hobby, the man of bygone pleasures, appraised her ripe woman’s beauty with rapid discrimination. Then into the father’s eyes there sprang a gleam of something like pride—pride of such a daughter—a light of remembrance, a struggling tenderness. The next moment the worn lids fell and the old man stood ashamed:

“I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said, gravely, and sank into his chair.

She came round and looked down at him a moment smiling.

“You never heard me walk all about the room,” she said, “I have a light tread. And I’ll always wear stuff dresses here.” Then, more coaxingly: “I don’t think you’ll find me much in the way, father. I’ve got good eyes, I am remarkably intelligent”—she paused a second and, thrusting out her hands under his brooding gaze, added with a soft laugh: “And you know I’ve steady hands!”

He stared at the pretty white things. Faintly he murmured:

“But I’m a mass of selfishness!”

“Then I’ll be the more useful to you!” she cried gaily and laid first her cool, young cheek, then her warm, young lips upon his forehead.

The sap was not yet dead in the old branch, after all. Master Simon’s body had not become the mere thinking machine he fain would have made it. There was blood enough still in his old veins to answer to the call of its own. Memories, tender, remorseful, all human, were still lurking in forgotten corners of a brain consecrated, he fancied, wholly to Science; memories which now awoke and clamoured. Slowly he stretched out his hand and touched his daughter’s cheek.

“Poor child!”

Ellinor Marvel now drew back quietly. Master Simon passed a finger across his eyes and muttered that their light was getting dim.

“The lamp wants trimming,” she said, and proceeded to do it with that calm diligence of hers that made her activity seem almost like repose. But she knew well enough that neither sight nor lamp was failing; and she felt her home-coming sanctioned.

At this point something black and stealthy began to circle irregularly round her skirts, tipping them with hardly tangible brush, while a vague whirring as of a spinning-wheel arose in the air. She stepped back: the thing followed her and seemed to swell larger and larger, while the whirrs became as it were multiplied and punctuated by an occasional catch like the click of clockwork.

“Why, look father!”

There was a gay note in her voice. Master Simon looked, and amazement was writ upon his learned countenance.

“Belphegor likes you!” he exclaimed, pulling at his beard. “Singular, most singular! I have never known the creature tolerate anyone’s touch but my own or Barnaby’s.”

Hardly were the words spoken when, with a magnificent bound, Belphegor rose from the floor and alighted upon her shoulder—at the exact place he had selected between the white column of the throat and the spring of the arm—and instantly folded himself in comfort, his great tail sweeping her back to and fro, his head caressing her cheek with the touch of a butterfly’s wing, his enigmatic eyes fixed the while upon his master. Ellinor laughed aloud, and presently the sound of Master Simon’s nasal chuckle came into chorus. He rubbed his hands; he was extraordinarily pleased, though quite unaware of it himself.

Ellinor sat on the arm of his winged elbow-chair—his “Considering Chair,” as he was wont to describe it—and looked around smiling.

“Still at the same studies, father? How sweet it smells in this room! It looks smaller than I remember it. I once thought it was as big as a cathedral. But I myself felt smaller then. How long ago it seems! And what is that discovery that I came just in time for?”

Master Rickart engaged willingly enough in the track of that pleasant thought.

“Why, my dear, simply that an old surmise of mine was right. Ha, ha, I was right.... The active principle of _Geranium Cyanthos_ with the root of which, as Fabricius relates—Fabricius, the great Dutch traveller and plant-hunter—the Kaffir warlocks are said to cure dysentery.... It is positively identical with a similar crystalline substance which I have for many years obtained from _Hedera Warneriensis_—the species of ivy that grows about the ruins of Bindhurst Abbey, of which mention is made by Prynne....”

Thus he rambled on with the selfish garrulity of the old man in the grip of his hobby; presently, however, he fell back to addressing himself rather than his listener, and gradually subsided into reflectiveness. And once more silence drew upon the room.