The Charming of Estercel
BY GRACE RHYS
YOUNG Mistress Eileen lay on her nurse's neck.
From the window high up in the gray walls of Kintra Castle the nurse could see the spring woods descending, pouring down the castle slopes in waves of purple, snow white, and faint green.
But young Mistress Eileen turned her face from the delight of the window and buried it, sighing, in her nurse's bosom. Above the brown head the old face was wrinkled and lined as if with the handwriting of a hundred years, but the hollow eyes beamed with love.
"I think," said Mistress Eileen, sighing once more, "there is something the matter with me, Nurse Phaire."
"Pulse of my heart," answered the nurse, "is it sickening you are, or what?"
Mistress Eileen lifted up her head, then turned again and gazed upon the floor. Her brown cheek was flushed red and her hands were pressed together. She shook back the mass of curls that fell from under her ribbon, half turned towards her nurse, and spoke, using a most pitiful voice.
"I have a pain somewhere," she said.
"And where, my jewel?" asked the nurse, anxiously.
"It is in my heart, nurse," cried Mistress Eileen, suddenly flinging her arms about the old woman's neck and sobbing aloud. "I never meant to tell, but when I am without a mother, and father is full of trouble and weighty affairs, whom have I to find comfort with but you?"
"What's this you're telling me now?" said the nurse, doubtfully; then all at once reading the secret half discovered by the flushed cheek and the sighing mouth, she cried, "Ah, my lamb and my heart's treasure, you're not after giving your heart away, and you so young?"
"Indeed and I have not given it away," answered the young girl. "It has gone from me by no will of my own and left an empty place behind. Night and day I am in trouble from it, and by no wish of my own at all. Last year, I remember, I was happy, and now that seems so long ago."
"And who in the world, child, is it that your heart has gone seeking after?"
The young girl hesitated a moment, then turned and whispered in the nurse's ear: "It is my cousin Estercel. It is a great pity, but he is not caring for me at all."
"Well, well, well;" and, "well, well, well, to be sure," said the old woman, softly, as she patted her charge; "and it not so long since you were children together!"
"He is twenty-one years old, and a man, nurse," said Eileen.
"That is a great age, indeed," said the old woman, smiling.
But Eileen only sighed and pressed her hands together upon her bosom.
"It is a dreadful sorrow," she said. "I could not have imagined that I should suffer like this. Perhaps I shall die."
The nurse looked anxiously upon her; the flushed cheek was thinner than it had used to be; the small fingers had surely grown finer. The old woman turned the delicate face round between her two hands and examined it; there beneath the forehead's arch each brow's edge was surely sharper, and her eyes burned with a painful look.
"My darling love," said the old woman, as she gazed; "and there was I thinking it was nothing but the spring weather—sure that was why I was giving you a little morning dose."
"I never took it, nurse," said Eileen. "I always poured it out of the window. I have been most unhappy. If I cannot have some love to call my own, I would rather die."
"It will come, my child; have patience, and it will come. A face like my darling's will surely gather love."
"I cannot find patience any more,"
