Read Ebook: The star dreamer: A romance by Castle Agnes Castle Egerton

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Ebook has 2340 lines and 120580 words, and 47 pages

Light footfalls in the room--not caused by Belphegor's stealthy paws, certainly not by Barnaby's masculine foot--a sound as of the rustle of a woman's garments, a sound unprecedented for years in these consecrated precincts, failed to reach his faculties. Once more he drew his chair forward, leant his elbows on the table, and, stooping his head so that eyes and hands were nearly on the same level, set himself to the exasperatingly delicate task of minute weighing. And the while he muttered on with a droll effect of giving directions to himself:

"The right rider, half a line to the right. That should do it this time! Too much--bring it back! Faugh, out of all gear! Too much back now. Fie, fie, confusion upon my spinal cord--nerves, muscles, and the whole old fumbling fabric!"

Here, two hands, with unerring swoop like that of an alighting dove, came out of the dimness on each side of the bent figure, and with cool, determined touch gently withdrew the old man's hot and shaking fingers from their futile task.

Master Simon's ancient bones shook with a convulsive start; a look of intense amazement passed into his straining eye, then the faintest shade of a smile on his lips. But, characteristically, he never turned his head or otherwise moved: the business at hand was of too high import. He sat rigid, silently watching.

The interfering hands now became busy for a space with soft unhurried purpose. Beautiful hands they were, white as ivory outside and strawberry pink within, taper-fingered and almond-nailed; not too small, and capable in the least of their movements. Compared to those other hands that now lay, still trembling in pathetic supineness, where they had been placed, they were as young shoots, full of vital sap, to the barren and withered branch. A woman's warm presence enfolded the student. A young bosom brushed by his bloodless cheek. A light breath fanned his temples. A scent as of lavender bushes in the sun, of bean fields in blossom, of meadowsweet among the new-mown hay; something indescribably fresh, an out-of-door breath as of English summer, spread around him, curiously different from the essences of his phials and stills. But Master Simon had no senses, no thought but for the work those busy hands were now performing.

"The right rider, to the right, just half a line?" said a voice, repeating his last words in a tranquil tone. "A line--those little streaks on the arms are lines?"

Master Simon assented briefly: "Yes."

The fingers moved.

"Enough, enough!" ordered he. "Now back gently till the needle swings evenly."

The pulse of the scales, hitherto leaping like that of a frightened heart, first steadied itself into regularity and then slowed down into stillness. The long needle pointed at last to nought. The white hands hovered a second.

"Not another touch!" faintly screamed the old man.

He craned forward, his body again tense; gazed and muttered, wrote and rapidly calculated.

"Yes, yes, yes! Seventy-three to a hundred and twenty-five--I was right--Eureka! The principles of the two are the same. Right! Right!"

Now Simon Rickart, rubbing his hands, turned round delightedly.

... 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 .

"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."

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