Chapter VI: Eyes, Blue as His Star

——Dwelt on my heaven a face
Most starry-fair, but kindled from within
As ’twere with dawn!
—TENNYSON (_The Lover’s Tale_).

On the new-comer’s entrance Ellinor looked up. The smile was arrested on her lips and her eyes grew grave with wonder: there was something curiously unsubstantial, something almost fantastic in the man that stood thus, framed in the gaping darkness of the doorway.

That pale head, refined to ætherealisation, with its masses of dense, black hair; that straight figure, unusually tall and seeming taller still by reason of its exceeding leanness, romantically draped in the folds of a sable-lined cloak; above all, those eyes, under penthouse brows, singularly light and luminous in spite of their deep-setting, gazing straight at her, through her and beyond her—the eyes of the dreamer, or rather of the seer! In her surprise she failed for the moment to connect with this apparition the forgotten identity of the “cousin David” she had known in her girl days; the smooth-cheeked lad—dandy, fox-hunter, poet, politician—but in every phase, image of assertive and satisfied youth.

Master Simon broke the spell of the singular moment.

“Ah, David,” quoth he, “dazed—moonstruck as usual? Awake, good dreamer, awake! There have been fine happenings here below while you were frittering God’s good time, blinking at your stars!”

He rose from his seat and shuffled round the table with quite unusual alertness. A glass of the vintage served to him by his daughter had brought a transient fire into the sluggish veins. As he tapped David on the arm, the latter turned his abstracted gaze upon him with a new bewilderment: the bloodless simpler, with a pink glow upon his cheek, with skull-cap rakishly askew on his bald head, with a roguish gleam in his usually keenly-cold eye—unwonted spectacle!

“We’ve done great things to-night,” repeated the old gentleman excitedly. “That experiment, David, successfully carried through at last! It is exactly as I surmised—you remember? The Geranium of the Hottentot, Fabricius’ plant and our Ivy here—contain the same principle! Ah, that was worth finding out, if you like!”

His bony fingers beat a triumphant tattoo on David’s motionless arm.

“What do you say to that?” insisted Master Simon.

The astronomer was still silent. The light in his eyes had faded; but they brightened again when he brought them back upon Ellinor. This time, however, they were less distant, less dreamily amazed, more humanly curious.

“And I have drunk wine,” pursued Master Simon. An unctuous chuckle ran through his ancient pipe. “Ichor from the veins of a noble plant, _Vitis Vinifera_, David, compounded of dew and earth juices, sublimated by sunshine.... Beautiful cryptic processes!” He paused, closed his eyes over the inward vision, and then added with solemn simplicity: “It is chemically richer, that’s obvious, I may say it is altogether superior as a cerebral stimulant to table-ale. That was her opinion.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Ellinor. “And I endorse it.... I endorse it. She——”

“She?” interrupted Sir David. His voice was deep and grave, and Ellinor then remembered vaguely that even as a child she had liked the sound of it. A new flood of old memories rushed back upon her; she rose to her feet and came forward quickly, stretching out both her hands:

“Cousin David, don’t you know me?”

“To be sure,” cried her father gaily, “I have been extremely remiss. This is Ellinor, our little Ellinor. Shake hands with Ellinor. She’s come to stay here. So she says.”

He stopped upon the phrase and pulled at his beard, flinging a quick, doubtful look at the master of the house. “I told her we, neither of us, are good company for women that—in fact, it is impossible for thinking men, such as we are, to have a high opinion of her sex, but”—he waved his arm with a magisterial gesture—“I have already discovered, and you know my diagnoses are habitually correct, that my daughter is an unusually intelligent, sensible person, and that we might no doubt both benefit by her company.”

“If cousin David will allow me to stay,” said Ellinor gently.

She was standing quite motionless in the same attitude, her hands outstretched, bending a little forward, her face slightly uplifted—for tall as she was she had to look up to meet her cousin’s eyes. Repose was so essentially one of her characteristics, that there was nothing suggestive either of awkwardness or of affectation in this arrested poise of impulsive gesture.

The heavy cloak fell from David as he unfolded his arms and, hardly conscious of what he was doing, slowly took both her hands. Her fingers closed upon his in a grasp that felt warm and firm.

“That’s right,” said Master Simon. “Why, you were big brother and little sister in the old days. Kiss her David.”

The magic Burgundy was still working wonders; for the moment this old fantastic being had gone back thirty years in geniality, in humanity. “Kiss her, David,” he repeated.

The dark and pale face of Sir David, severe yet gentle, bent over Ellinor.

Half-laughing, half-startled, yet with a feminine unwillingness to be the one to attach importance to a cousinly greeting, she turned her cheek towards him. But the kiss of the recluse, was—she never knew whether by design or accident—laid slowly upon her half-opened, smiling lips.

Had anyone told Ellinor Marvel who, during four years had cried at love and during six years more had railed at it, that her heart would ever be stirred in the old, sweet mad way because of the touch of a man’s lips, she would, in superb security, have scorned the suggestion. Yet now, when she turned away, it was to hide a crimsoning face and a quickening breath.

Nay, such a flutter, as of wild birds’ wings, was in her breast, that she vaguely feared it could not escape the notice even of Master Simon’s happy abstractedness.

When she again looked at his kinsman, she found that he had been pressed into a chair beside hers; and that her father, with guileless hospitality, was forcing upon his host a glass of his own choice vintage.

But, as she looked, she thought she could note a flush, kindred to her own, slowly fading from David’s forehead, and, in the hand he extended passively for the glass, ever so slight a trembling. The next moment she was full of doubt: his reserve seemed complete, his presence almost austere. And she blushed again, for her own blushes.

As if to a silent toast, Sir David drained the goblet; then turning his eyes upon her:

“You are welcome, Ellinor,” he said.

The young widow started at the words, and her discomposure increased. There occurred to her for the first time a sense of the strange position in which she had placed herself; of her impertinence in thus coolly announcing her intention of taking up her residence at Bindon, without even the formality of asking its owner’s leave. But after listening a while to the disjointed conversation that now had become engaged between her father and David, the quaintness and sweetness of the relationship between the two men—the unconscious manner in which such whole-hearted hospitality was bestowed and received without any sense of obligation on one side, or of generosity on the other, struck her deeply, and brought at once a smile to her lips and a mist to her eyes.

“To every law there are special exceptions,” remarked Master Simon, sententiously. “David may be quite convinced that I should not have entertained the idea of permitting any ordinary young person of the opposite sex to take up her abode under our studious roof. But a few moments have convinced me, as I said before, that Ellinor may be classed among the abnormal—the abnormal which, as you know, David, can be typically represented as well by the double-hearted rose as by the double-headed calf.” He paused to enjoy the conceit, then insisted: “Represented, I say, by the beautiful no less than by the monstrous.”

“By the beautiful indeed,” echoed the astronomer.

Ellinor glanced at him quickly. But his gaze, though fixed upon her eyes, was so abstracted, that she could not take the words to herself.

Altogether her cousin’s personality baffled her. He had not been one minute beside her, before, in her woman’s way, she had noted every detail of his appearance; noted, approved, and wondered.

This recluse, indeed, seemed to bestow the most fastidious care on his person. At a glance she had marked the long, slender hands, white and shapely, the singularly fine linen, the fit and texture of the sombre clothes of a past mode that clung to his spare, but well-knit limbs. The contrast between this choiceness, which would not have misfitted a dandy of the Town, and his dreamer’s countenance offered a problem which was undoubtedly fascinating.

There was also something of pride of blood in her approval of his high-bred air; and, at the same time, a sufficient consciousness of the remoteness of their kinship to make the memory of his lips upon hers a troubling one. Added to this, there was a baffling impression in the atmosphere of apartness from the world which enwrapped him. His eyes—what did they see as they looked at her so long, so straight? Not the living Ellinor: no man could so look on a woman, as man on woman, without passion or effrontery! Not once had he smiled. With all his courtesy—a courtesy that sat on him as becomingly as his garments—hardly had he noticed her ministration to plate or glass. The carelessness, also, with which he accepted her arrival, without an inquiry as to its cause, without the smallest show of interest in her past and present circumstances, stirred her imagination, whilst it vexed her vanity.

“I believe,” she thought, “he has even forgotten I have ever been married. Nay I vow,” thought she, a little amused, a good deal piqued, “it is a matter of serene indifference to cousin David whether I be maid, wife, or widow!”

“Ellinor, my girl,” said the old man, pushing his plate from him, “this sort of thing is well enough for once in a way, and more particularly as my work, thanks to your timely assistance, is concluded for the night. But I must not be tempted to such an abandonment to the appetites another evening!”

“Very well, father,” answered she demurely, while a dimple crept out, as she surveyed his unfinished slice of ham and the fragments of his bread.

“As to the wine,” pursued he, “it is another matter. I will not deny that wine, producing this pleasant exhilaration (were it not accompanied by the not disagreeable langour which I now feel, and which is the result of my own self-indulgence) might stimulate the brain to greater lucidity than does the usual liquor provided by Mrs. Nutmeg. It is quite possible,” he went on, leaning back in his chair while the lamplight played on the shrunken line of his figure, on the silver beard, and the diaphanous countenance. “It is quite possible that even as the plant requires sun-rays to produce its designed colour, so the veins of man may require this distillation of sun-heat and sun-light to liberate to the utmost his potential forces. David, we may both be the better of this drinkable sunshine!”

As he spoke, he meditatively sipped and gazed at the glass which his daughter had unobtrusively refilled.

The astronomer had been crumbling the white bread and eating and drinking much in the same frugal and half unconscious manner as the simpler; it seemed as if spirits so attuned to secluded paths of thought could scarce condescend to notice the material needs.

But upon Master Simon’s last remark, Sir David put down his beaker.

“Drinkable sunshine!” he cried, the light of the enthusiast leaped into his eye. He rose from the table as he spoke. “Ah, cousin Simon, I have this night drunk into my soul its fill of creating light.”

“Pooh! With your cold stars,” scoffed the simpler, once more eyeing the gorgeous colour of the wine against the light.

“The sun that raises from the soil and vivifies your plants, that gives the soul to the wine you are drinking, is one of the lesser stars,” said the astronomer gravely. “The countless stars you deem so cold are suns—I have to-night watched the birth of a new distant world of fire.”

“Ah,” commented the other, calmly scientific. “A phenomenon, like Ellinor here, rare, but possible.”

“I came down to tell you, to bring you back with me to see it,” David continued, and Ellinor could detect the exaltation of his thoughts in manner and voice. “Come, master of the microscope and of the test-tube, come and see the new star. Come and witness such a wonder as those microscopes, those crucibles will never show you.”

“My good young friend,” exclaimed the aged student, “while you, through your astrolabes, watch the revolving, the fading and growing of systems which you can neither control nor make use of, I, through those second eyes and those regulated fires, not only learn for the great benefit of science at large, the workings of the atoms that absolutely rule, nay, compose all life here below, but I can direct and guide them in one direction, neutralise or stimulate them in another, make them in short bring good or evil to humanity. I delight my own brain, but I also benefit the vast, suffering body of my kind.”

“The body, the body!” repeated the other, at once sweetly and contemptuously but still with the fire in his eye.

On his side Master Simon chuckled and rubbed his hands over his irrefutable arguments.

Then Sir David said again, almost as if he had not before proffered the request:

“Come, cousin, I want you to look at my new star.”

“Not I,” laughed Master Simon, tossing down the last drop of his second glass with the quaintest air of “abandonment,” wrapping his faded gown about him and folding himself in it as in a mantle of luxurious egotism. “Not I? Shall I spoil all these excellent impressions and bring my poor old bones back to a sense of age and infirmity by dragging them up your cold stairs to the top of your tower, there to stand in your draughty box and let all the winds of heaven find out my weak points—for the pleasure of gaping at a speck of light than which this lamp here is not less handsome, while immeasurably more useful? No, Sir David!”

Ellinor laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm.

“May I come?”

She spoke upon the true feminine impulse which cannot bear to see the avoidable disappointment inflicted; a feeling which men, and wisely, cultivate not at all in their commerce with each other.

David, again back in spirit with the heavens, turned upon her much the same look he had given her upon his first entrance. Then, as he stood a second, to all outward appearance impassive and detached, a curious feeling as of the realisation of some beautiful dream took possession of his senses. The fragrant breath of the distilled and sublimated herbs, “yielding up their little souls, good little souls!” in aromatic dissolution, filled his nostrils as with an extraordinary meaning. The sound of his kinswoman’s voice, the touch of her hand, the subtle, out-of-door freshness of her presence in this warm room—all these things struck chords that had long been silent in his being. And the glance of her eyes! It was as blue as his star!

He took her fingers with a certain grace of gesture, born it might be of the forgotten minuets of his adolescent days, and prepared to lead her forth. But at the door he paused.

“As your father says, it is cold upon my tower.”

So speaking, he placed upon her shoulders his own cloak of furs. And, as he drew the folds together under her chin, their eyes met again. She looked very young and very fair. For the first time that evening he smiled.

“Big brother and little sister!” he said.

Now, for some reason which at the moment Ellinor would stoutly have refused to define even to herself, the words were in no way such as it pleased her to hear from his lips. But the smile that lit up the darkness and austerity of his countenance like a ray of light, and altered its whole character into something indescribably gentle, went straight to her heart and lingered there as a memory sweet and rare.

Master Simon watched the door close upon them with an expression at once humourous and philosophically disapproving. Belphegor, sharpening his claws on the hearthrug, glanced up at his master with a soundless mew, as after all these distractions and disturbances the well-known quiet muttering fell again upon the air.

“I took her for the _rara avis_,” said the old man to himself, “but, I fear me, what I thought at first was the black swan may prove but a little grey goose after all! handmaid to that poor loony, with his circles and degrees as to assist me—me! And after displaying such an intelligent interest, too ...! Alas, my cat, ’tis but a woman!”