Chapter IV: Back at a New Door of Life

Joy’s recollection is no longer joy
While sorrow’s memory is sorrow still!
—BYRON (_Doge of Venice_).

“Eh?” said the old man.

He fixed his gaze once more upon his daughter, and stared at her for a moment as if her comely presence were but some freakish play of his own senses.

“Father?”

The knotted wrinkles became softened into an unwilling smile.

“I spoke aloud, didn’t I?” said she. “It must be an inherited trick! I was thinking of David. He never thought more of marriage?”

“Marriage!”

“Will he never marry, father?”

“David, marry! Oh, pooh! David, wise man, has consecrated his youth to his pursuit. Pity, though, he did not choose a more satisfactory one!”

Mrs. Marvel lifted Belphegor from her shoulders to the floor and drew her chair closer.

“You mean his star-gazing? He sits in his tower all night, peering at the skies, ‘and dreams all day, like an owl.’ That’s what Willum said when I questioned him just now. Do you also call his a foolish pursuit?”

“He’s a visionary, a dreamer,” answered the other testily. “A splendid mind, the vigour of a young brain ... and to waste it on the stars, on distant worlds with which no telescope can ever bring him into any useful contact, from which no nights of study, were he to live as long as Methuselah, will ever enable him to gain one single grain heavy enough to weigh down that scale there, that scale which as you saw, will not even bear a breath unmoved! And all this world, child, all this world!” In his enthusiasm the old man had risen and now was pacing the room. “This teeming, inexhaustible world of ours, full of marvellous, most subtle secrets yet submissive to our investigation, from the mass that blocks out our horizon to the tiniest atom that, even beneath this glass,”—he was now by his work-table and his fingers caressed the microscope—“is scarce visible to the eye, all obedient to the same laws and amenable to our ken! With all these treasures at his hand, awaiting him, he throws away his life on the unattainable, on the stars, on moonshine!”

The faded dressing-gown flapped about the speaker’s lean legs as he walked; his white hair swung lightly over his bent shoulders.

Ellinor looked after him with eyes of amusement.

“The short of it,” said she, “is that he prefers his telescope to your microscope.”

“Fancy to fact, girl! Dreams to reality! Speculation to uses! Ah, what should we not have done, we two, had he been willing to work down here instead of up there!”

With a growl Master Simon returned to his sweet-smelling furnace and began mechanically to feed the fires with charcoal. She heard him mutter, as if to himself:

“Work with me? Why, I hardly ever even see him! David’s a ghost, rather than a man—a ghost that rises with the evening shades and disappears at dawn; that never speaks unless you charge him!”

Ellinor remained silent a while, pondering. Presently she said, in the voice of one who sees in what to others seems incomprehensible a very simple proposition:

“He lives, it would appear, uplifted in thoughts beyond the sordid things of earth. He knows no disillusion, for the unattainable star will never crumble to ashes in his hand. He will never see of what ugly clay the distant and glorious planet may, after all, be made! I say: happy David ... not to have married his first love.”

“Tush! Don’t you believe that David ever thinks of love.”

He made an impatient motion with the bellows and cast over his shoulder a look of severity, of surprise that a person who had shown herself capable of managing the rider on his scale should endeavour to engage him in the discussion of such trivialities in this appallingly short life.

Their glances met. It was his own spirit that looked back to him, brightly defiant, out of eyes as brilliant and as searching as his own, and as blue.

“These things, these unconsidered trifles of hearts and hopes and sorrows, they’re quite beneath notice, are they not, father? You know no more of the woman that drove poor David to the top of his tower—the David I remember was not a recluse—than you did of the dashing, handsome youth to whom you handed over your only child ... that she might live happy ever after!”

The widow laughed. But it was with a twist of her ripe, red mouth and a harsh sound like the note of an indignant bird.

The old man, remained arrested for a space, stooping over the stove with the bellows poised in his hand, as if the meaning of her words were slowly filtering to his brain. Then, letting his implement fall with a little clatter, he shuffled back towards his daughter and stood again gazing at her, his lips moving noiselessly, his eye dim and troubled. Master Simon’s mind, trained to such alertness in dealing with a certain set of ideas, groped like that of a child in the endeavour to lay hold of the new living problem.

At length he put out a trembling finger and timidly laid it for a second on her hand. She looked up at him with an altered expression, infinitely soft and womanly.

“I am afraid,” said he quickly, as if ashamed of the breakdown of his own philosophy, “I am afraid you have suffered, my girl.”

“I never complained while it lasted,” she answered. “I shall not complain now that it is over.”

He gathered the skirts of his gown more closely about him and regarded her from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression of deadly earnestness in singular contrast with his appearance.

“You spent long nights in tears, child, longing for the sound of his step?”

“How do you know?” she answered, flashing at him.

“Your mother did,” he sighed.

There fell a heavy pause, during which Belphegor sang with the simmering phials a quaint duet as fine as a gossamer thread.

“Until the morning dawned, when I dreaded the sound of that step,” said the widow at last.

Master Simon frowned more deeply. New wrinkles gathered on his countenance.

“A worthless fellow! A wastrel, a gambler, a reprobate! And you doing your wife’s part of screening and mending, nursing and paying. Aye, aye, I know it all. It was your mother’s fate.”

“And did my mother get cursed for her pains, and struck?”

The old man started as if the word had indeed been a blow.

“Ah, no,” he cried sharply. “Ah, no, not that, never that!”

Ellinor came close and laid her hands on his shoulders.

“Bad enough, God knows,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Heedless and selfish—but that, never!”

She looked at him, long and tenderly. When she spoke her tones and words were as full of deliberate comfort as her touch.

“Father,” she said, “compare yourself no more to that man. Your mind and his—what his was—are as the poles asunder. My mother’s life and mine, as Heaven and Hell. I did my duty to the end: whilst he lived, I lived by his side. He is dead—let him be forgotten! Life, surely, is not all bitterness and ashes,” she added a little wistfully. Then, with a return of brightness: “I have come back to you. I don’t know what I should have done if I had not had you. But here I am. This is the opening hour of my new life!”

The clock, in its dumb way, struck the hour of ten.

“Surely, father,” said Ellinor suddenly, “one of your little pots is rocking!”

There was a spirt of aromatic steam, in the midst of which white head and golden head bent together over the furnace; and young eyes and old eyes, so strangely alike, were fixed upon the boiling mysteries of the pharmacopic experiment. An adroit question here, a steadying touch there of those admirable hands and Master Simon, forgetting all else, began to direct and once more to explain—explain with an eager flow of words very different indeed from his disjointed solitary talk.

Chemistry or alchemy—how were the whimsical old student’s laboratory pursuits to be described? Chemist he was undoubtedly, by exactness of knowledge; but alchemist, too, by the visionary character of his scientific enthusiasm, though he himself derided the suggestion.

“Powder of projection? Nonsense, nonsense!” he would have cried. “Not in the scheme of our world. Much use to mankind if gold became cheaper than lead!... Elixir of Life? Again preposterous! Given birth, death is Nature’s law.... But pain and premature decay—ah, there opens quite another road!—that is the physician’s province to conquer. And if one seeks but well enough for the _panacea_, the _universal anodyne_, the true _nepenthes_, eh, eh, who knows? Such a thing is undoubtedly to be found. Doubtless! Have we not already partially lifted up the veil? _Opium_ (grandest of brain soothers!) and _Jesuit’s Bark_ and the _Ether_ of Frobœnius, and Sir Humphry’s _laughing gas_! Yet those are but partial victors; the All-Conqueror has yet to be discovered.”

Such a discovery Master Simon (who was first of all a botanist) had settled in his mind was to be made in the veins of some plant or other; and, therefore, with all the ardour of the student of mature years racing against Time, he now devoted all his energies to this special branch of investigation. Hence, perhaps the forgotten title of “simpler” was the most appropriate to this follower of Boerhaave and Hales. In the absorbing delight of his hobby he was given to experiment recklessly upon himself as well as upon others, after the method of that other fervent student of old, Conrad Gessner; and whatever the result, noxious or beneficent, he generally found in it confirmation of some theory.

“If the juices of certain herbs can produce melancholia, or the fury of madness, or idiocy, why should we not find in others the soothing of oblivion, or the stimulus to exalted thought, or the spur of genius? Why not,” he would say, “But life’s so short, life’s so short....”

The door was opened noiselessly. Barnaby, the _famulus_, clutching the tray, stood staring, open mouthed, in upon them.

“Hang that boy!” said Master Simon testily and, pretending not to notice the interruption, proceeded with his disquisition on the admirable things he meant to extract from Camphire or Henne-weed.

“Is that all they give you for supper, father?”

She had walked up to the tray which had been deposited on a corner of the table.

“A jug of ale!” she exclaimed with disfavour. “Small-ale—and sour at that, I’ll be bound!” She poured a few drops into the tumbler, sipped and grimaced. “Pah! Bread—heavy and yesterday’s. Cheese! Last year’s, I should say—and simply because the mice wouldn’t have any more of it!” Indignation rose within her as she compared this treatment of her father with memories of Bindon’s hospitality in bygone days. “And an apple!” she added, with scathing precision.

“Most wholesome,” suggested the simpler, deprecating interference.

“Wholesome!” she snorted. “Upon the theory of the dangers of over-eating, I suppose! And what a jug—what a tumbler!”

“Barnaby is rather clumsy,” apologised his master. “Apt to break a good deal. So I, it was I, begged Mrs. Nutmeg to provide us with stout ware.”

“What old Margery!—old Margery Nutmeg still here!” A shadow fell upon Ellinor’s face—the next moment it was gone. “Ugh! How I always hated that woman! I had forgotten all about her. It is a way I have: I forget the unpleasant! Well!” with a laugh, “now I understand. But I’ll warrant her well-cushioned frame is not supported upon the diet of wholesomeness meted out to you! Heavens! but what is this dreadful little mess in the brown bowl?”

“Belphegor’s supper,” answered his master with rebuking gravity.

“They treat him no better than they do you, father!”

She paused, took the edge of the tablecloth between her taper finger and thumb and thrust out a disdainful lip.

“What a cloth! Not even quite clean!”

“Mrs. Nutmeg has limited us. Barnaby has an unfortunate propensity for upsetting things,” humbly interposed the philosopher.

“Then Barnaby, whoever he is, ought to be soundly trounced,” asserted Mrs. Marvel.

She wheeled round on the boy, who still stared at her with round eyes—but her father laid an averting hand upon her arm.

“Hush,” he said, inconsequently lowering his voice, “the poor lad is deaf and dumb.”

“Deaf and dumb, your servant?”

Fresh amazement sprang to her face, succeeded by a lightening tenderness.

“He suits me, child,” cried the old man, hurriedly. “Pray do not attribute to me any foolish philanthropy, I’m a——”

She interrupted him with a gay note:

“A mass of selfishness, of course—Who could doubt it, who knew you an hour? Well, I am a mass of selfishness, too. Oh, I am your own daughter, as you’ll discover for yourself very soon! And such frugality as Master Simon is made to practise will never suit Mistress Ellinor. Can your appetite for these, these wholesome things, bide half an hour, father?”

Without awaiting the answer, she placed Belphegor’s portion on the floor, handy to his convenience, then whisked up the tray, bestowed a nod and a radiant smile upon Barnaby (that made him her slave from henceforth) and briskly left the room. Barnaby automatically followed.

Master Simon rubbed his bald head and tugged at his beard. Belphegor was stamping on the hearth rug with a monstrous hump and bristling tail, preparatory to addressing himself to his supper.

“So here we are, with a female about us after all, my cat! But she seems an exceptionally reasonable person—quite a remarkable woman.”

His eye fell on the notes of his experiment, and a crinkling smile spread upon his countenance. “There is something about the touch of a woman’s hand,” he murmured, and promptly became absorbed again.

“I have not been very long, have I?” said Ellinor, when in due course she returned, followed by Barnaby with a tray.

The student lifted his hand warningly without withdrawing his eyes from his array of figures.

“Never fear,” said she, “your table shall be sacred.”

She fetched a large round stool and motioned to Barnaby to deposit his burden thereon. It was a tray of mightily increased dimensions, graced with damask (a little yellow, perhaps, from the long hoarding, but fine and pure), laden with cut crystal, with purple and gold china. The light of a pair of silver candlesticks gleamed on the red of wine, on the flowery whiteness of bread, on the engaging pink of wafer slices of ham and the firm primrose roll of a proper housewife’s butter.

“Shall we not sup?” said Mistress Marvel.

She poured into the diamond-cut glass a liquor of exquisite fragrance and colour, and placed it in her father’s hand. And, as he raised it to his lips almost unconsciously, a faint glow, like the spectre of the ruby in his glass, crept upon the pallor of his cheek.

“What is this?” he exclaimed, in interested tones, holding out the beaker to the light.

“Not small-ale!” laughed she. “Not small beer whatever it be! I have seen,” she added musingly, whilst her father contemplated her with astonishment, “I have seen strange things at Bindon since I arrived this evening, and could scarce obtain admittance in the unlit courtyard, (old watchman Willum recognised me, that was at least something). At the front door, dark, cold, forbidding, not one servant in attendance! I had to enter the house like a thief, by the back ways. It seems like a house under a spell! Ah, very different from the Bindon of old! But I have seen nothing stranger than the servants’ hall, whither Barnaby took me in silence—a good lad, your Barnaby,” and she cast a friendly glance over her shoulder at the still figure behind her. “I don’t know,” she resumed, taking up the fork, “whether they treat David as they treat you, his cousin, but they look well after themselves!”

She laughed, but a colour of anger had mounted again to her brow.

“Margery is away, it seems; so old Giles tells me. He was bringing up the wine for supper. Are you listening, father? Wine for the servants’ supper! And lighting these candlesticks! And if they consider cheese and ale good enough for you, do not think they misunderstand the meaning of good cheer. So we made the raid—and here you have some of their fare. Drink sir!”