Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/86

76 said Eileen, sadly. "All day and all night I am tormented. And here is a strange thing, Nurse Phaire: all day and all night I am longing for my cousin Estercel to come, and when I do see him riding to the door I am forced to go away to hide. I cannot bear that he should look at me. Nurse, you know when the sun shines in the middle of the blue sky, you cannot look up without being blinded. That is how my cousin Estercel's eyes appear to me; like the sun in a shining blue sky. And, oh, nurse, the curls of his hair! They are like the color of the sun itself; and I am so ugly and dark and brown. It is no wonder he will not look at me."

"What!" said the old woman, in indignation. "He not look at my girl, and she an O'Neil and the heiress of Kintra, and he only an O'Neil on his grandmother's side, and that three times removed?"

"You are forgetting now that my father will marry again, nurse," said Eileen, seriously. "And my cousin Estercel has no covetous mind. He is not the man to go hunting castles. It is only that he does not care for me. And he never will; of that I am sure; and I shall be lonely till I die," and down fell her tears.

"Hush now, hush; and never fear, my precious jewel," said the nurse, taking her to her bosom. "He shall turn to love you as sure as the sun shines this day. We will find a good plan. I will be thinking now that my child may have her wish."

She rocked the young girl to and fro upon her knee while she gazed out upon the rolling woods, and every wrinkle in her old face seemed as wise as a hundred years.

Presently she spoke. "There is a drink we could be giving him," she said, musing, "if I could mind what to put in it. This was how my grandmother used to be saying it"—she still rocked her nursling, while she bent her ear sideways, as if listening far down the past: Take the blood of a black hen, seven spiders' stones, the ashes of a ram's thigh-bone

"No, no, nurse," cried Eileen, leaving the old woman's knee and moving to the casement. "I do not like that at all. You need not tell me any more of it."

"Just as you please, my lamb, just as you please. And, indeed, that drink is troublesome to make; and since you are not liking it, maybe I can find some other way."

Still keeping her place on the low oak chair, she rested her elbows upon her knees and her white-capped head upon her hands.

Eileen stood by the window, gazing, a small, slight figure, well bred, keen, and full of a fire that was now half quenched in sorrow.

"There is a charm that I mind now," said the nurse at last, "and I never heard tell of it failing. You must take a ring and put it in a bird's nest for the whole season of the spring; and when it is well warmed through with bird-love and the young are ready to fly, you must give it to the person upon whom you have placed your love, and in a while it is sure that he will love you back again."

Eileen turned her face eagerly upon her nurse, and then her look again faded. "Ah, but," she said, "my cousin Estercel has great hands and fingers. Where will I find a man's ring to put in the nest?"

"Mistress Eileen," said the nurse, "the brooches and the chains and the rings that were my lady your mamma's, that's now in glory, are all put by for you till you come to be eighteen years of age, and the case they are in is in the old press in the blue room, and the key of the press is upon my bunch. Shall we go now and search and see if there is a man's ring amongst them?"

Eileen sprang forward and seized her nurse's hand to pull her from the chair. "We will go down at once," she cried.

Then together they descended to the long room below. It was lit by three narrow windows, and at one end was a great bed of state in faded blue, holding the secret of many a birth and death of that dwindled house.

Against the wall, facing the blue bed, was a tall cupboard of black oak carved with curious figures strangely spreading their feet and hands.

Having closed the door, the nurse chose a key from her dangling bunch; opening an inner drawer, she drew out a velvet case, once purple, now faded to a score of different hues.