Chapter III: Rustling Leaves of Memory

... The garden-scent
Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation
Of love that came and love that went.
—DOBSON (_A Garden Idyll_).

Long drawn minutes, ticked off by the slow beat of the laboratory clock, dropped into the abysm of the past.

Master Simon, sunk in his chair, his head bent on his breast, had fallen into a deep muse. His eyes, fixed upon the face of his daughter—fair and thrown into fairer relief by Belphegor’s black muzzle nestling close to it—had gradually gathered to themselves that blank, unseeing look which betrays a mind set upon inner things.

Ellinor sat still, her shapely hands folded on her lap. She was glad of the rest, for this was the end of a weary journey. She was glad, also, of the silence, which gave room to her clamourous thought.

Home again! The only home she had ever known. For those last ten years seemed only like one hideous, interminable voyage in which she, the unwilling traveller, had been hurried from port to port without one hour of rest.

To this house of peace, encircled by a triple ring of silence—the great walls, the still waters of the moat, and the vast, stately park with its mute army of trees—she had first been brought at so early an age that any recollections of other hearth or roof were as vague as those of a dream-world. But vivid were the memories now crowding back of her former life here—memories of rosy, healthy childhood.—Aunt Sophia’s kind, foolish face and her indulgent, unwise rule. Baby Ellinor rolling again on the velvet sward and pulling off the tulip blossoms by the head; child Ellinor ranging and roaming in stable and farm, running wild in the gardens.... Nearly all her joys were somehow mingled with gardens; with the rosary in the pleasure-grounds, which she roamed every day of the summer; with the old kitchen garden, where she devoured the baby-peas and the green gooseberries; with the Herb-Garden—the mysterious, the strictly forbidden, the alluring Herb-Garden, her father’s living museum of strange plants!

Between high walls it lay: a long, narrow strip, running down to the moat on one side and abutting to the blind masonry of the keep on the other. Here her father—an ever more remote figure, and for some reason unintelligible to her child’s mind, ever more detached from the common existence of the house, took his sole taste of air and sunshine. How often, peeping in through the locked iron gates, she had watched him, with curiosity and awe, as he passed and re-passed amid the rank luxuriance of the herbs and bushes, so absorbed in cogitation that his eyes, when they fell upon the little face behind the bars, never seemed to see it.—The Herb-Garden! Naturally, this one spot (where, it seemed, grew the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil) had a vastly greater attraction for the small daughter of Eve than the paradise of which she had the freedom. Aunt Sophia had warned her that the leaf of any one of those strange herbs might be death! Yet visit the Herbary she often did, all parental threats and injunctions notwithstanding, by a secret entrance through the ruins of the keep.

Strange that her thoughts should from the very hour of her return home hark back so much to the Herb-Garden! No doubt there was suggestion in all the sweet smells floating now around her. She thought she recognised _Camphire_ and _Frangipanni_; but there were others too, known yet nameless; and they brought her back to the fragrant spot, the delights of which had so long been forgotten.

Her memories were nearly all of solitary childhood. Sir David, the young master of Bindon, the orphan cousin to whom Simon Rickart was in those days humourously supposed to play the part of guardian, entered but little into them, and then only as a grave Eton boy, disdainful of her torn frocks, of her soiled hands, her shrill joyousness. He and his sister Maud kept fastidiously aloof.... Maud of the black ringlets and the fine frocks, who from the first had made her little cousin realise the gulf that must exist between the child of the poor guardian and the daughter of the House.

But later came a change.

She was Miss Ellinor—a tall maiden, suddenly alive to the desirableness of ordered locks and pretty gowns; and young Sir David began to assume importance within her horizon. How these fleeting memories, evoked by the essence of Master Simon’s distilling, were sailing in the silence of the room round Ellinor’s head!

It was during his University years. The young master brought into his house every vacation an extraordinary stir of eager life. There came batches of favoured companions, varying according to the mood of the moment:—youthful philosophers who had got so far beyond the most advanced thought of the age as to have lost all footing; or exquisite young dandies, with lisps and miraculously fitting kerseymere pantaloons and ruffles of lace before which Miss Sophia opened wide mouth and eyes; or again, serious, aristocratic striplings of earnest political views.

During these invasions Aunt Sophia suddenly developed a spirit of prudence quite unknown to her usual practice, and Miss Ellinor, much to her disappointment, was kept studiously in the background. Upon this head cousin David entered suddenly into the narrow circle of her emotions. Chafing against the unwonted restraint, Ellinor one day defied orders, and boldly presented herself at the breakfast-table while her cousin and two young men of dazzling beauty, all in hunting pink and buckskins, were partaking of chops and coffee under the chaste ægis of Miss Sophia Rickart’s ringlets.

How well Ellinor could recall the startling effect of her entrance. She had walked in with that boldness which girlish timidity can assume under the spur of a strong will. Miss Sophia had gaped. Three pairs of eyes were fixed upon the intruder. David’s serious gaze, always so enigmatic to her. Then the Master of Lochore’s red-brown orbs.—They were something of the colour of his auburn hair. She had come under their range before, and had hated them and him upon a sudden instinct, all the more perhaps for the singular attachment which David was known to have found for him.—The third espial upon her was one of soft, yet piercing blackness: she was pulled-up in her would-be nonchalant advance as by an invisible barrier. David, long and lean in his red and white, had risen and come across to her with great deliberation. He had taken her hand.

“Cousin Ellinor,” he had said, in a voice of most gentle courtesy, “you have been misinformed: Aunt Sophia did not request your presence.”

He had bowed, led her out across the threshold, bowed again, and closed the door. There had been a shout from within, expostulation and laughter. And she, without, had stamped her sandalled foot and waited to hear no more. With tears of bitter mortification streaming down her cheeks she had rushed to her beloved old haunt in the Herb-Garden, carrying with her an odious vision of her cousin’s face as it bent over her; of his grave eyes, so strangely light in contrast with the dark cheek; of the satirical twist of his lips and the mock ceremony of his manner.

But she had taken with her also another vision; and that was then so consoling that, as she marched to and fro among the fragrant bushes that were growing yellow and crisp under autumn skies, she was fain to let her mind dwell lingeringly upon it. It was the black broad stare of surprised admiration in young Marvel’s eyes.

Many a time, in the subsequent days, did the walls of the forbidden gardens enfold her in their secrecy—but not alone. He of the black eyes had heard of the secret entrance and was by her side many a time—Aye, and many a time, in the years that followed, had Ellinor told herself, in the bitterness of her heart, how far better it would have been for her then to have sucked the poison of the most evil plant that had clung appealingly round her as she brushed by, listening to young Marvel’s wooing.

Those were days of courtship: an epidemic of sentiment seemed to have spread through Bindon. Handsome, ease-loving, bachelor parson Tutterville developed a sudden energy in the courtship which had stagnated for years between him and Aunt Sophia, on whose round cheeks long-forgotten roses bloomed again.

And David too! From one day to the other Sir David Cheveral had received, it seemed, fair and square in his virgin heart, virgin for all the brilliant and fast life he seemed to lead, the most piercing dart in Love’s whole quiver. He was one of those with whom such wounds are ill to heal. Poor David!

In the prevailing atmosphere he of the black eyes had got his own way easily enough. Marriage bells were the music of the hour. Parson Tutterville led the way to the altar with Miss Sophia’s ringlets drooping upon his arm. Ellinor promptly followed, with lids that were not easily drooped cast down under the blaze of the drowning black stare. Ellinor the child, confident little moth throwing her soul against the first alluring flame, to its torture and undoing!

Well, all that was past! She had revived. She was back at the door of life, stronger and wiser. But David? David was also alone. After scaling to the pinnacle of the most exalted, devouring passion, he had had to go down into the valley again, alone, carrying the sting in his heart. Alone, always, she had heard. Poor David!

“No!—Happy David,” said Ellinor aloud.