“The evil one is still busy among them,” quoth the parson’s wife oracularly, “and I grieve to say it is your father who is his minister!” There was something so irresistibly comic in the angry disorder noticeable on the face, heretofore so kindly placid, of Madam Tutterville, that her niece was again overcome by laughter. “Do not laugh!” said the lady severely; “‘The mirth of fools is as the cackle of thorns’—Ecclesiastes—We may all have to laugh one day at the wrong side of our mouths. I live in fear of a great calamity. There have been mistakes already!” she added, lowering her voice to a mysterious whisper, “as Horatio and I know.” Ellinor had grown grave again. “Even doctors are not infallible,” said she reproachfully. “Is poor father the minister of evil because he may have made a mistake?” “Ah, child, that’s just it! Brother Simon is not a doctor, he is—I don’t know what he is. He tries his herbs and plants upon the village folk. They flock to him and swallow his drugs because he bribes them, my love, by playing on their heathen superstitions about spells and fairies and bogles and what not. They believe themselves cured because they believe him to be in league with the powers of darkness—a warlock, Ellinor! Bred in the bone, alas! Horatio may joke about it, but so long as I have life I will combat that back-sliding influence. God knows, it is ill and hard work. I am as the voice of one crying in the wilderness to the locusts and wild honey, but I’ll not lift my finger from the plough now!” She rose. “Come child,” she commanded; and followed by Ellinor, led the way downstairs and through long passages to a small dairy room, the window of which gave upon the outer entrance to Master Simon’s laboratory. Here, with tragic gesture, she halted, and bade her niece look forth. CHAPTER IX HEALING HERBS, WARNING TEXTS Here finds he on the oak rheum-purging Polypode; And in some open place that to the sun doth lie He Fumitory gets, and Eyebright for the eye; The Yarrow wherewithal he stays the wound-made gore, The healing Tutsan then, and Plantaine for a sore. —DRAYTON (_Polyolbion_). The lagging sun of autumn had travelled but a small part of its ascent, and the green inner courtyard of what was known as “the keep wing” of Bindon, so stilly enclosed by its three tall walls and the towering screen of the keep itself, was yet in shadow—not the cheerless, universal grey of a clouded sky, but the friendly, coloured shadiness that is the sunshine’s own doing. Against the grey stone walls the spreading branches of the blush-rose trees that had yielded of yore so much sweetness to Ellinor’s childish grasp, clung, yellowing and now but thinly clad, yet not all dismantled, with here and there a wan flower or a brave rosebud to bear witness, like the gems of poor gentility, to past riches.