Agnes Castle

“ Why, after all, should she not try and forget her own troubles? What was the Herb-Garden to him, to David, that, with a fond faithfulness she should insist on keeping it consecrate to the memory of one dawn! He who had begged for the key of it—what use had he made of the gift? How many a golden morning, how many a pearly day-break, how many an amethyst evening, had she haunted the scented enclosure—always alone!
“I’ll not say a single little word,” he urged. “I’ll be as mute as a sundial, if you’ll only let me bask in your radiance! ”

“ A fresh wave of anger swept through Ellinor’s veins. There came to her an almost overpowering impulse to spring to her feet, throw away her cloak and stand forth in her scorn, in her pride of life, in her wholesome humanity. Those unknown lips, those scarlet lips ... disowned now as they were, had still power to sting her. But she sat immovable, and let jealousy and love work their torture.
“You must think me mad,” cried David, with another abrupt change, “to inflict the old story upon you, the trite old story all the world knows. You know, Ellinor, you know.” ”

“ It is not often that I look to the earth. When the 110stars go, then, you see, the world is blank to me. But this morning, I know not why, when the skies grew faint I did look upon the earth and found it very fair. And so I stood and watched and saw the colours grow. Then you came forth into the midst of them; and somehow I thought it was as if you were part of the beauty of it all—part of the dawn; as if you were something that the earth and I myself had unconsciously been waiting for to complete the whole. Thus you see, Ellinor, it did not enter into my mind to ask why you had come. ”

“ Oh, brother David, the mere stretching of a cloak is not quite sufficient to hide scandal.”
Scandal!—that evil word again! The more burningly it stung the parson, the more gallantly he resisted the doubt.
“Maud,” said he firmly; “hearing is one thing, believing, thank Heaven, is another. Those who would assail Ellinor Marvel’s honour, I should be inclined to rebuke much more severely than David has done. Madness? No, Lady Lochore, but deliberate falsehood, the fruit of Envy, Malice and all uncharitableness.” ”

“ When she said this, even as before on that Lammas-tide, he kissed both her hands. But he had no word for her. Yet she saw how the radiance of her dawn strove with the clouds of his doubt and darkness.
“Always, since first we met,” she went on, “have our hearts been singing to each other. I have stood beside you on your tower ... perhaps you did not know it always,” the tears brimmed to her lashes, but the dimple by her smile was arch as she paraphrased his unforgettable words to suit her woman’s lips: “In the dawn you sought me in the garden....” ”

“ 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. ”

“ No man of his mind and heart could look upon Ellinor and deem her a wanton as she now stood; and yet both her self-accusation and her reticence proclaimed how deeply she must love the unknown man she could thus shield with her own honour. Was this the end of all their fond secret hopes for Bindon!
Now David gazed at Ellinor almost as if the old dream-palsy had returned upon him. As in a dream, too, he seemed to see again some past picture which had foretold this hour. Thus on the first day of her return to Bindon had he seen her pass from sunshine and colour and brilliancy into darkness ”

“ A month ago, if anyone had told him that his elegant person should house two such wild beasts, he would not have thought the suggestion even worth the trouble of a smile. Now, as he lay back on his wooden chair, eyeing the ruby in his glass with a deep, vindictive eye, Colonel Harcourt felt his savage guests tear at him, and was in as dangerous a mood as ever undid a fool or made a criminal. All at once the heat of the room, of the wine, of his own fierce mood, stifled him. He rose, lit himself a cigar, and sallied out, bare-headed and uncloaked, into the sweet, still night. ”

“ But she seized and clung to his descending hand as it would have waved her from him for ever.
“Ah, no, David, no!” she repeated, the denegation in a voice as frenzied as his own. And suddenly her ice of pride melted and the tears came streaming from her eyes. At the sight the man seemed to come back in some way to his senses. The cold hand she held became more human warm.
“Tears?” he said in an altered voice. “Have I caused you tears? Ah, don’t cry, Ellinor! I must not blame you; it is only that the world is not made for me, nor I for the world. Forgive me and forget. You are what you are. ”

“ Ideal!” repeated David, and struck with his buckled shoe against a fernlet that had found a home for itself between two stones of the tower flooring and cast a little shadow in the moonlight.
Ellinor saw how he set his foot upon it, and thought the action symbolic.
“Ideal!” cried he, gibing at himself. “That is my curse, you see, that I cannot even now, accept life as it is! Fie! How ugly is all reality to me! What is in the doom of corruption that we carry in the flesh compared to the doom of corruption in the spirit? ”

“ Ellinor glanced at Barnaby in surprise, and marked a sudden terror in his face that infected her in spite of herself. But the next instant, as she looked round to see Sir David standing before her, sprung as it were out of the blackness, the feeling gave way to a glow of courage. Ellinor’s heart always rose to the fence. Barnaby, however, remained very differently impressed; the human soul in him seemed to wither away in fear. Like an animal before some abnormal manifestation of nature, he crept back, cowering, with eyes fixed on the new-comer’s face, to the further corner of the inner room. ”

“ From the darkness Sir David looked at her face first: and it was as if the revealing light had shot into the mists of his own heart.
The passion of love comes to men from so many different paths that to each individual it may be said to come in a new guise. To no one does it come as an invited guest. It may be the chance meeting, the love at first sight—“she never loved at all who loved not at first sight.” But Shakespeare knew better than to advance this as an axiom. ’Tis but the insolent phrase on the lover’s mouth who deems his own passion the only true one, the model for the world. ”

“ The presence of death itself cannot rob the living thing of the beauty of its destined hour.
Ellinor’s arms, moreover, were full of branching leaves and strange blossoms. She had had the womanly thought to lay upon her father’s body a wreath made of the plants he had loved. Purple and mauve, crimson and orange, with foliage of many greens, it was a sheaf of rich hues she held against her black dress; and she seemed to bring with her into the room all the breath of the Herb-Garden and all its imprisoned sunshine.
She had walked straight in, seeking and seeing no one but David. ”

“ No idea that I loved Ellinor! Why, man, have I not loved her since the first instant these eyes 344beheld her, ah, me, nearly a year ago! with the lamplight shining on her golden head! And her blue eyes—her blue eyes!”
With the inexplicable shyness of the man for his fellow-human, the parson almost recoiled from the vision of passion unexpectedly laid bare before him. But like those mountain-chasms filled with mist to the wayfarer’s eye, save when a rare and sudden gust of wind allows their depth to be fathomed for a moment, the deeps of Sir David’s heart were swiftly veiled again. ”

“ There was a stimulating aromatic fragrance in the air. The morning sun which had just emerged from the edge of the keep bore down upon them with an effulgence as yet merely grateful. A band of puzzled bees was hovering musically above the last attractive new-comer in the herbary. David looked from the flourishing bed to the straight, strong figure, the brave countenance of his cousin.
“And so you have succeeded,” he said with a look of smiling wonder. “Succeeded where Master Simon has sought in vain so many years! Everything you touch seems to prosper.” ”

“ She took her basket from his arm, gave him a little nod as of dismissal and passed quickly from him. He let her go without a word or a gesture, standing still, wrapt in himself, with eyes downcast. Those deep waters in his soul, that for so many long years had lain black and stagnant—what was it that had so stirred them of late days, that they should rise in waves like the salt and bitter sea and dash against his laboriously built dykes of peace and renunciation?
Ellinor was long on her knees beside the hellebore, not indeed that she was busy picking it, for her hands lay idly before her. ”

“ With a rush as of leaping waters, the founts of the past now fully opened upon Ellinor—bitter and sweet together, as the waters of memory always are. Here had she taken refuge many a time, in the days when nothing stirred in the library but the fire licking the logs, and (as she loved to fancy) the kind, honest spirits of the dead.
Every imaginative child has its bugbear, self-created, or imposed on its helplessness by the coward cruelty of some older person. Her childish dreams had been haunted by that perfectly respectable-looking and urbane bogey, Margery Nutmeg. ”