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Title: Asphodel
        a novel

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: March 3, 2025 [eBook #75506]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1890

Credits: Bob Taylor, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPHODEL ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  ASPHODEL

  A Novel

  BY THE AUTHOR OF

  “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “ISHMAEL,”

  ETC. ETC.

  Stereotyped Edition

  LONDON:

  SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LIMITED,

  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT

  1890.

  [_All rights reserved_]




MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.

NOW READY AT ALL BOOKSELLERS’ AND BOOKSTALLS, PRICE 2_s._ 6_d._ EACH,
CLOTH GILT.

THE AUTHOR’S AUTOGRAPH EDITION OF MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.


“No one can be dull who has a novel by Miss Braddon in hand. The
most tiresome journey is beguiled, and the most wearisome illness is
brightened, by any one of her books.”

“Miss Braddon is the Queen of the circulating libraries.”

  _The World._


  LONDON:
  SIMPKIN & CO., LIMITED,
  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT.
  _And at all Railway Bookstalls, Booksellers’, and Libraries._




CONTENTS


    CHAP.                                                           PAGE

       I. ‘AND SHE WAS FAIR AS IS THE ROSE IN MAY’                     5

      II. ‘AND THIS WAS GLADLY IN THE EVENTIDE’                       15

     III. ‘AND VOLATILE, AS AY WAS HIS USAGE’                         25

      IV. ‘CURTEIS SHE WAS, DISCRETE, AND DEBONAIRE’                  41

       V. ‘THOU LOVEST ME, THAT WOT I WEL CERTAIN’                    52

      VI. ‘LOVE MAKETH ALL TO GONE MISWAY’                            64

     VII. ‘HIS HERTE BATHED IN A BATH OF BLISSE’                      78

    VIII. ‘GOD WOTE THAT WORLDLY JOY IS SONE AGO’                     89

      IX. ‘OF COLOUR PALE AND DEAD WAS SHE’                          101

       X. ‘AND SPENDING SILVER HAD HE RIGHT YNOW’                    111

      XI. ‘YEVE ME MY DETH, OR THAT I HAVE A SHAME’                  123

     XII. ‘AND TO THE DINNER FASTE THEY HEM SPEDDE’                  133

    XIII. ‘AFTER MY MIGHT FUL FAYNE WOLD I YOU PLESE’                144

     XIV. ‘LOVE IS A THING, AS ANY SPIRIT, FREE’                     154

      XV. ‘NOT FOR YOUR LINAGE, NE FOR YOUR RICHESSE’                165

     XVI. ‘NO MAN MAY ALWAY HAVE PROSPERITEE’                        174

    XVII. ‘AND IN MY HERTE WONDREN I BEGAN’                          184

   XVIII. ‘LOVE WOL NOT BE CONSTREINED BY MAISTRIE’                  194

     XIX. ‘I DEME THAT HIRE HERTE WAS FUL OF WO’                     205

      XX. ‘AL SODENLY SHE SWAPT ADOWN TO GROUND’                     216

     XXI. ‘FOR WELE OR WO, FOR CAROLE, OR FOR DAUNCE’                227

    XXII. ‘FOR I WOL GLADLY YELDEN HIRE MY PLACE’                    239

   XXIII. ‘AND COME AGEN, BE IT BY DAY OR NIGHT’                     250

    XXIV. ‘AY FLETH THE TIME, IT WOL NO MAN ABIDE’                   260

     XXV. ‘BUT I WOT BEST WHER WRINGETH ME MY SHO’                   271

    XXVI. ‘FORBID A LOVE AND IT IS TEN TIMES SO WODE’                285

   XXVII. ‘I MAY NOT DON AS EVERY PLOUGHMAN MAY’                     295

  XXVIII. ‘LOVE IS NOT OLD, AS WHAN THAT IT IS NEW’                  305

    XXIX. ‘I MEANE WELL, BY GOD THAT SIT ABOVE’                      319

     XXX. ‘THER WAS NO WIGHT, TO WHOM SHE DURSTE PLAIN’              330

    XXXI. ‘I WOLDE LIVE IN PEES, IF THAT I MIGHT’                    342

   XXXII. ‘FOR LOVE AND NOT FOR HATE THOU MUST BE DED’               349

  XXXIII. ‘IS THERE NO GRACE? IS THERE NO REMEDIE?’                  358

   XXXIV. ‘SENS LOVE HATH BROUGHT US TO THIS PITEOUS END’            373




ASPHODEL




CHAPTER I.

‘AND SHE WAS FAIR AS IS THE ROSE IN MAY.’


‘Oh, you glorious old Sol, how I love you!’ cried Daphne.

It was a day on which common mortals were almost fainting with the
heat, puffing and blowing and complaining—a blazing midsummer-day;
and even here, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where the mere idea
of innumerable trees was suggestive of shadow and coolness, the heat
was barely supportable—a heavy slumberous heat, loud with the hum of
millions of insects, perfumed with the breath of a thousand pines.

Daphne revelled in the fierce sunshine—she threw back her crest of
waving hair, bright as yellow gold, she smiled up at the cloudless
blue, she looked unwinkingly even at Sol himself, the mighty
unquenchable king of the sky, glorious yonder in his highest heaven.

She was lying at full length on a moss-grown block of stone at the
top of a hill, which was one of the highest points in the forest, a
hill-top overlooking on one side a fair sweep of champagne country,
fertile valleys, church steeples, village roofs, vineyards and rose
gardens, and winding streams; and on the other side, woodlands
stretching away into infinite distance, darkly purple.

It was the choicest spot in a forest which, at its best, is a poor
thing compared with the immemorial growth of an old English wood. Here
there are no such oaks and beeches as our Hampshire forest can show—no
such lovely mystical glades—no such richness of undergrowth. Everything
seems of yesterday, save here and there a tree that looks as if he had
seen something of bygone generations, and here and there a wreck of an
ancient oak, proudly labelled ‘The Great Pharamond,’ or ‘_Le Chêne de
Henri IV._,’ with a placard hung round his poor old neck to say that
he is not to be damaged ‘on pain of amend.’ Such Pharamonds and Henris
abound in the forest where Rufus was killed, and nobody heeds them. The
owls build in them, the field-mice find shelter in them, the woodpecker
taps at them, unscared by placards or the threat of an amend.

But in the Fontainebleau woods there are rocky glades which English
forests cannot boast—wild walks between walls of gigantic granite
boulders—queer shapes of monsters and animals in gray stone, which
seem to leap out at one from the shadows as one passes; innumerable
pine-trees; hills and hollows; pathways carpeted with red fir-needles,
mosses, ferns, and wild-flowers; and a bluer brighter sky than the
heaven which roofs an English landscape.

‘Isn’t this worlds better than Asnières?’ asked Daphne of her
companion; ‘and aren’t you ever so grateful to those poor girls for
catching scarlet-fever?’

Asnières was school and constraint, Fontainebleau was liberty; so if
the forest had been a poorer place, Daphne, who hated all restraints,
would have loved it.

‘Poor girls!’ sighed Martha Dibb, a stupid, honest-minded young person,
whose father kept an Italian warehouse in New Oxford street, and whose
mother had been seized with the aspiration to have her daughters
finished at Continental schools; whereby one Miss Dibb was being
half-starved upon sausage and cabbage at Hanover, while the other grew
fat upon _croûte au pot_ and _bouilli_ in the neighbourhood of Paris,
and was supposed to be acquiring the true Parisian accent. ‘Poor girls;
it was very bad for them,’ sighed Martha.

‘Yes; but it was very good for us,’ answered Daphne lightly; ‘and if
it was a part of their destiny to have scarlet-fever, how very nice
of them to have it in the term instead of in the holidays, when we
shouldn’t have profited by it.’

‘And how lucky that we had that good-natured Miss Toby sent with us
instead of one of the French governesses.’

‘Lucky, indeed!’ cried Daphne, with her bright laugh. ‘That good simple
Toby, with whom we can do exactly what we like, and who is the image of
quiet contentment, so long as she has even the stupidest novel to read,
and some acid-drops to suck. I tremble when I think of the amount of
acid-drops she must consume in the course of a year.’

‘Why do you give her so many?’ asked the practical Martha.

‘They are my peace-offerings when I have been especially troublesome,’
said Daphne, with the air of a sinner who glories in her
troublesomeness. ‘Poor dear old Toby! if I were to give her a block of
sweetstuff as tall as King Cheops’s pyramid, it wouldn’t atone for the
life I lead her.’

‘I hope she won’t get into trouble with Madame for letting us run wild
like this,’ suggested Miss Dibb doubtfully.

‘How should Madame know anything about it? And do you think she
would care a straw if she did?’ retorted Daphne. ‘She will get paid
exactly the same for us whether we are roaming at large in this lovely
old forest, or grinding at grammar, and analysis, and Racine, and
Lafontaine in the stuffy school-room at Asnières, where the train
goes shrieking over the bridge every half-hour carrying happy people
to Paris and gaiety, and theatres and operas, and all the good things
of this life. What does Madame Tolmache care, so long as we are out of
mischief? And I don’t see how we can get into any mischief here, unless
that lovely green lizard we saw darting up the gray rock just now
should turn into an adder and sting us to death.’

‘If Miss Toby hadn’t a headache we couldn’t have come out without her,’
said Martha musingly.

‘May Toby and her headache flourish! If she had been well enough to
come with us we should have been crawling along the dusty white road at
the edge of the forest, and should never have got here. Toby has corns.
And now I am going to sketch,’ said Daphne in an authoritative tone.
‘You can do your crochet: for I really suppose now that to you and a
certain class of intellects there is a kind of pleasure to be derived
from poking an ivory hook into a loop of berlin wool and pulling it out
again. But please sit so that I can’t see your work, Dibb dear. The
very look of that fluffy wool on this hot day almost suffocates me.’

Daphne produced her drawing-block and opened her colour-box, and
settled herself in a half-recumbent position on the great granite
slab, and surveyed the wide landscape below her with that gaze of calm
patronage which the amateur artist bestows on grand, illimitable,
untranslatable Nature. She looked across the vast valley, with its
silver streak of river and its distant spires, its ever varying lights
and shadows—a scene which Turner would have contemplated with awe and a
sense of comparative impotence; but which ignorance, as personified by
Daphne, surveyed complacently, wondering where she should begin.

‘I think it will make a pretty picture,’ she said, ‘if I can succeed
with it.’

‘Why don’t you do a tree, or a cottage, or something, as the
drawing-master said we ought to do—just one simple little thing that
one could draw correctly?’ asked Martha, who was provokingly well
furnished with the aggravating quality of commonsense.

‘Drawing-masters are such grovellers,’ said Daphne, dashing in a faint
outline with her facile pencil. ‘I would rather go on making splendid
failures all my life than creep along the dull path of mediocre merit
by the lines and rules of a drawing-master. I have no doubt this is
going to be a splendid failure, and I shall do a devil’s dance upon it
presently, as Müller used in the woods near Bristol, when he couldn’t
please himself. But it amuses one for the moment,’ concluded Daphne,
with whom life was all in the present, and self the centre of the
universe.

She splashed away at her sky with her biggest brush, sweeping across
from left to right with a wash of cobalt, and then began to edge off
the colour into ragged little clouds as the despised drawing-master had
taught her. There was not a cloud in the hot blue sky this midsummer
afternoon, and Daphne’s treatment was purely conventional.

And now she began her landscape, and tried with multitudinous dabs of
gray, and green, and blue, Indian red, and Italian pink, ochre, and
umber, and lake, and sienna, to imitate the glory of a fertile valley
basking in the sun.

The colours were beginning to get into confusion. The foreground and
the distance were all on one plane, and Daphne was on the point of
flinging her block on the red sandy ground, and indulging in the luxury
of a demon-dance upon her unsuccessful effort, when a voice behind her
murmured quietly: ‘Give your background a wash of light gray, and fetch
up your middle-distance with a little body colour.’

‘Thanks awfully,’ replied Daphne without looking round, and without the
faintest indication of surprise. Painters in the forest were almost as
common as gadflies. They seemed indigenous to the soil. ‘Shall I make
my pine-trunks umber or Venetian red?’

‘Neither,’ answered the unseen adviser. ‘Those tall pine-stems are
madder-brown, except where the shadows tint them with purple.’

‘You are exceedingly kind,’ said Daphne, stifling a yawn, ‘but I don’t
think I’ll go on with it. I am so obviously in a mess; I suppose nobody
but a Turner ought to attempt such a valley as that.’

‘Perhaps not. Linnell or Vicat Cole might be able to give a faint idea
of it.’

‘Linnell!’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I thought he painted nothing but
wheat-fields, and that his only idea of Nature was a blaze of yellow.’

‘Have you seen many of his pictures?’

‘One. I was taken to the Academy last year.’

‘Were you very pleased with what you saw?’

‘Delighted—with the gowns and bonnets. It was a Saturday afternoon in
the height of the season, and I plead guilty to seeing very little of
the pictures. There were always people in the way, and the people were
ever so much more interesting than the paintings.’

‘What picture can compare with a well-made gown or the latest invention
in bonnets?’ exclaimed the unknown with good-humoured irony.

Daphne hacked the spoiled sheet off her block with a dainty little
penknife, and looked at the daub longingly, wishing that the stranger
would depart and leave her free to execute a _pas seul_ upon her
abortive effort. But the stranger seemed to have no idea of departure.
He had evidently settled himself behind her, on a camp-stool, or a
rock, or some kind of seat; and he meant to stay.

She had not yet seen his face. She liked his voice, which was of the
baritone order, full, and round, and grave, and his intonation was that
of a man who had lived in what the world calls Society. It might not
be the best possible intonation—since orators and great preachers and
successful actors have another style—but it was the tone approved by
the best people, and the only tone that Daphne liked.

‘A drawing-master, no doubt,’ she thought, ‘whose manners have been
formed in decent society.’

She wiped her brushes and shut her colour-box, with languid
deliberation, not yet feeling curious enough to turn and inspect
the stranger, although Martha Dibb was staring at him open-mouthed,
as still as a stone, and the image of astonishment. Daphne augured
from that gaping mouth of Martha’s that the unknown must be somewhat
eccentric in appearance or attire, and began to feel faintly
inquisitive.

She rose from her recumbent attitude on the rock, drew herself as
straight as an arrow, shook out her indigo-coloured serge petticoat,
from beneath whose hem flashed a pair of scarlet stockings and neat
buckled shoes, shook loose her mane of golden-bright hair, and looked
deliberately round at Nature generally—the woods, the rocks, the
brigand’s cave yonder, and the stalls where toys and trifles in carved
wood were set out to tempt the tourist—and finally at the stranger. He
lounged at his ease on a neighbouring rock, looking up at her with a
provokingly self-assured expression. Her supposition had been correct,
she told herself. He evidently belonged to the artistic classes—a
drawing-master, or a third-rate water-colour painter—a man whose little
bits of landscape or foreign architecture would be hung near the floor,
and priced at a few guineas in the official list. He was a Bohemian
to the tips of his nails. He wore an old velveteen coat—Daphne was
not experienced enough to know that it had been cut by a genius among
tailors—a shabby felt hat lay on the grass beside him; every one of his
garments had seen good service, even to the boots, whose neat shape
indicated a refinement that struggled against adverse circumstances. He
was young, tall, and slim, with long slender fingers, and hands that
looked artistic without looking effeminate. He had dark brown hair cut
close to a well-shaped head, a dark brown moustache shading a sensitive
and somewhat melancholy mouth. His complexion was pale, inclining to
sallowness, his nose well formed, his forehead broad and low. His eyes
were of so peculiar a colour that Daphne was at first sorely perplexed
as to whether they were brown or blue, and finally came to the
conclusion that they were neither colour, but a variable greenish-gray.
But whatever their hue she was fain to admit to herself that the eyes
were handsome eyes—far too good for the man’s position. Something of
their beauty was doubtless owing to the thick dark lashes, the strongly
marked brows. Just now the eyes, after a brief upward glance at Daphne,
who fairly merited a longer regard, were fixed dreamily on the soft
dreamlike landscape—the sun-steeped valley, the purple distance. It was
a day for languorous dreaming; a day in which the world-worn soul might
slip off the fetters of reality and roam at large in shadowland.

‘Dibb,’ said Daphne, ever so slightly piqued at the unknown’s absent
air, ‘don’t you think we ought to be going home? Poor dear Miss Toby
will be anxious.’

‘Not before six o’clock,’ replied the matter-of-fact Martha. ‘You told
her with your own lips that she wasn’t to expect us before six. And
what was the good of our carrying that heavy basket if we are not to
eat our dinner here?’

‘You have brought your dinner!’ exclaimed the stranger, suddenly waking
from his dream. ‘How very delightful! Let us improvise a picnic.’

‘The poor thing is hungry,’ thought Daphne, rather disappointed at what
she considered a low trait in his character.

Martha, with her face addressed to Daphne, began to distort her
countenance in the most frightful manner, mutely protesting against the
impropriety of sharing their meal with an unknown wanderer. Daphne, who
was as mischievous as Robin Goodfellow, and doated on everything that
was wrong, laughed these dumb appeals to scorn.

‘The poor thing shall be fed,’ she said to herself. ‘Perhaps he has
hardly a penny in his pockets. It will be a pleasure to give him a good
meal and send him on his way rejoicing. I shall feel as meritorious as
the Good Samaritan.’

‘Is this the basket?’ asked the painter, pouncing upon the beehive
receptacle which Martha had been hugging for the last five minutes. ‘Do
let me be useful. I have a genius for picnics.’

‘I never heard of such impertinence!’ ejaculated Miss Dibb inwardly;
and then she began to wonder whether the valuable watch and chain
which her father had given her on her last birthday were safe in such
company, or whether her earrings might not be suddenly wrenched out of
her ears.

And there was that reckless Daphne, who had not the faintest notion
of propriety, entering into the thing eagerly as a capital joke, and
making herself as much at home with the nameless intruder as if she had
known him all her life.

Miss Dibb had been Daphne’s devoted slave for the last two years, had
admired her and believed in her, and fetched and carried for her,
and had been landed in all manner of scrapes and difficulties by her
without a murmur; but she had never been so near revolt as at this
moment, when her deep-rooted, thoroughly British sense of propriety
was outraged as it had never in all Daphne’s escapades been outraged
before. A strange man, fairly well-mannered it is true, but shabbily
clad, was to be allowed to hob and nob in a place of public resort with
two of Madame Tolmache’s young ladies.

Martha looked despairingly round, as if to see that help was nigh. They
were not alone in the forest. This hill side at the top of the rocky
walk was a favourite resort. There were stalls for toys and stalls for
refreshments close at hand. There were half-a-dozen groups of idle
people enjoying themselves under the tall pines and in the shadow of
the big blue-gray rocks. The mother of one estimable family had taken
off her boots, and was lying at full length, with her stockings exposed
to the libertine gaze of passers-by. Some were eating, some were
sleeping. Children with cropped heads, short petticoats, and a great
deal of stocking, were flying gaudy-coloured air-balls, and screaming
at each other as only French children can scream. There was not the
stillness of a dense primeval wood, the awful solitude of the Great
Dismal Swamp. The place was rather like a bit of Greenwich Park or
Hampstead Heath on a comparatively quiet afternoon in the middle of the
week.

Miss Dibb took heart of grace, and decided that her watch and earrings
were safe. It was only her character that was likely to suffer. Daphne
was dancing about among the rocks all this time, spreading a damask
napkin on a smooth slab of granite, and making the most of the dinner.
Her red stockings flashed to and fro like fireflies. She had a scarlet
ribbon round her neck, and the dark serge gown was laced up the back
with a scarlet cord, and, with her feathery hair flying loose and
glittering in the sun, she was as bright a figure as ever lit up the
foreground of a forest scene.

The unknown forgot to be useful, and sat on his granite bench lazily
contemplating her as she completed her preparations.

‘What an idle person you are!’ she exclaimed, looking up from her task.
‘Tumbler!’

He explored the basket and produced the required article.

‘Thanks. Corkscrew! Don’t run away with the idea that you are going to
have wine. The corkscrew is for our lemonade.’

‘You needn’t put such a selfish emphasis on the possessive pronoun,’
said the stranger. ‘I mean to have some of that lemonade.’

Daphne surveyed the banquet critically, with her head on one side. It
was not a stupendous meal for two hungry school-girls and an unknown
pedestrian, whom Daphne supposed to have been on short commons for
the last week or two. There was half a roasted fowl—a fowl who in his
zenith had no claim to be considered a fine specimen, and who seemed
to have fallen upon evil days before he was sacrificed, so gaunt was
his leg, so shrunken his wing, so withered his breast; there were some
thin slices of carmine ham, with a bread-crumby edge instead of fat.
Of one thing there was abundance, and that was the staff of life. Two
long brown loaves—the genuine _pain de ménage_—suggested a homely kind
of plenty. For dessert there was a basket of wood-strawberries, a thin
slab of Gruyère, and some small specimens of high-art confectionery,
more attractive to the eye than the palate.

‘Now, Dibb dear, grace, if you please,’ commanded Daphne, with a
mischievous side-glance at the unknown.

That French grace of poor Martha’s was a performance which always
delighted Daphne, and she wanted the wayfarer to enjoy himself. The
‘ongs’ and ‘dongs’ were worth hearing. Gravely the submissive Martha
complied, and with solemn countenance asked a blessing on the meal.

‘You can have all the fowl,’ said Daphne to her guest; ‘Martha and I
like bread and cheese ever so much better.’

She tore one of the big brown loaves in two, tossed one half to Martha,
and broke a great knob off the other for her own eating, attacking it
ravenously with her strong white teeth.

‘You are more than good,’ replied the stranger with his pleasantly
listless air, as if there were nothing in life worth being energetic
about; ‘you are actually self-sacrificing. But, to tell you the honest
truth, I have not the slightest appetite. I had my second breakfast at
one o’clock, and I had much rather carve that elderly member of the
feathered tribe for you than eat him. I wish he were better worthy of
your consideration.’

Daphne looked at him doubtfully, unconvinced.

‘I know you’re disparaging the bird out of kindness to us,’ she said;
‘you might just as well eat a good luncheon. Martha and I adore bread
and cheese.’

She emphasised this assertion with a stealthy frown at poor Miss
Dibb, who saw her dinner thus coolly confiscated for the good of a
suspicious-looking interloper.

‘You doat upon Gruyère, don’t you, Martha?’ she demanded.

‘I like it pretty well,’ answered Miss Dibb sulkily; ‘but I think the
holes are the nicest part.’

The stranger was cutting up the meagre fowl, giving the wing and
breast to Daphne, the sinewy leg to Martha, who was the kind of girl
to go through life getting the legs of fowls and the back seat in
opera-boxes, and the worst partners at afternoon dances.

Finding the unknown inflexible, and being herself desperately hungry,
Daphne ended by taking her share of the poultry, while her guest ate a
few strawberries and munched a crust of bread, lying along the grass
all the while, almost at her feet. It was a new experience, and the
more horrified Martha looked the more Daphne enjoyed it.

What was life to her but the present hour, with its radiant sun and
glad earth flushed with colour, the scent of the pines, the hum of the
bees, the delight of the butterflies flashing across the blue? Utterly
innocent in her utter ignorance of evil, she saw no snare in such
simple joys, she had no premonition of danger. Her worst suspicion of
the stranger was that he might be poor. That was the only social crime
whereof she knew. And the more convinced she felt of his poverty, the
more determined she was to be civil to him.

He lay at her feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, looking up at her with
an admiration almost as purely artistic as that which he had felt an
hour ago for a green and purple lizard which he had caught asleep on
one of the rocks, and which had darted up a sheer wall of granite,
swift as a sun-ray, at the light touch of his finger-tip. With a love
of the beautiful almost as abstract as that which he had felt for the
graceful curves and rainbow tints of the lizard, he lay and basked in
the light of this school-girl’s violet eyes, and watched the play of
sunbeam and shadow on her golden hair. To him, too, the present hour
was all in all—an hour of sunlight and perfume and balmiest atmosphere,
an hour’s sweet idleness, empty of thought and care.

The face he looked at was not one of those perfect faces which
would bear to be transfixed in marble. It was a countenance whose
chief beauty lay in colour and expression—a face full of variety;
now whimsically gay, now pouting, now pert; anon suddenly pensive.
Infinitely bewitching in some phases, it was infinitely provoking in
others; but, under all conditions, it was a face full of interest.

The complexion was brilliant, the true English red and white; no
ivory-pale beauty this, with the sickly tints of Gibson’s painted
Venus, but the creamy fairness and the vivid rose of health, and youth,
and happiness. The eyes were of darkest gray, that deep violet which,
under thick dark lashes, looks black as night. The nose was short and
_retroussé_, nothing to boast of in noses; the mouth was a trifle wide,
but the lips were of loveliest form and richest carmine, the teeth
flashing beneath them absolutely perfect. Above those violet eyes
arched strongly-marked brows of darkest brown, contrasting curiously
with the thick fringe of golden hair. Altogether the face was more
original in its beauty than any which the stronger had looked upon for
a long time.

‘Have you any sketches to show us?’ asked Daphne when she had finished
her dinner.

‘No; I have not been sketching this morning; and if I had done anything
I doubt if it would have been worth looking at. You must not suppose
that I am a grand artist. But if you don’t mind lending me your block
and your colour-box for half an hour I should like to make a little
sketch now.’

‘Cool,’ thought Daphne. ‘But calm impudence is this gentleman’s leading
characteristic.’

She handed him block and box with an amused smile.

‘Are you going to paint the valley?’ she asked.

‘No; I leave that for a new Turner. I am only going to try my hand at a
rock with a young lady sitting on it.’

‘I’m sure Martha won’t mind being painted,’ replied Daphne, with a
mischievous glance at Miss Dibb, who was sitting bolt upright on
her particular block of granite, the image of stiffness and dumb
disapproval. She was a thick-set girl with sandy hair and freckles, not
bad-looking after her homely fashion, but utterly wanting in grace.

‘I couldn’t think of taking such a liberty with Miss Martha,’
returned the stranger; ‘the freemasonry of art puts me at my ease
with you. Would you mind sitting quiet for half an hour or so? That
semi-recumbent position will do beautifully.’

He sketched in rock and figure as he spoke, with a free facile touch
that showed a practised hand.

‘I’m sure you can paint beautifully,’ said Daphne, watching his pencil
as he sat a little way off, glancing up at her every now and then.

‘Wait till you see how I shall interpret your lilies and roses. I ought
to be as good a colourist as Rubens or John Phillip to do you justice.’

She had fallen into a reposeful attitude after finishing her meal, her
arms folded on the rock, her head resting on the folded arms, her eyes
gazing sleepily at the sunlit valley in front of her, one little foot
pendent from the edge of the greenish gray stone, the other tucked
under her dark blue skirt, a mass of yellow tresses falling over one
dark blue shoulder, and a scarlet ribbon fluttering on the other.

Martha Dibb looked more and more horrified. Could there be a lower deep
than this? To sit for one’s portrait to an unknown artist in a shabby
coat. The man was unquestionably a vagabond, although he did not make
havoc of his aspirates like poor dear papa; and Daphne was bringing
disgrace on Madame Tolmache’s whole establishment.

‘Suppose I should meet him in Regent Street one day after I leave
school, and he were to speak to me, what would mamma and Jane say?’
thought Miss Dibb.




CHAPTER II.

‘AND THIS WAS GLADLY IN THE EVENTIDE.’


Daphne was as still as a statue, her vanity gratified by this homage
to her charms. There had been nobody to admire her at Asnières but the
old music-master, into whose hat she had sometimes put a little bouquet
from the trim suburban garden, or a spray of acacia from the grove that
screened the maiden meditations of Madame Tolmache’s pupils from the
vulgar gaze of the outside world. She retained her recumbent attitude
patiently for nearly an hour, half asleep in the balmy afternoon
atmosphere, while the outraged Martha sat on her rock apart, digging
her everlasting crochet-hook into the fluffy mass of wool, and saying
never a word.

The stranger was nearly as silent as Martha. He was working
industriously at his sketch, and smoking his cigar as he worked, having
first ascertained that the ladies were tolerant of the weed. He painted
in a large dashing style that got over the ground very quickly, and
made a good effect. He had nearly finished his sketch of the figure
on the rock—the indigo gown, scarlet ribbon, bright hair, and dark
luminous eyes, when Daphne jumped up suddenly, and vowed that her every
limb was an agony to her.

‘I couldn’t endure it an instant longer!’ she exclaimed. ‘I hope you’ve
finished.’

‘Not quite; but you may change your attitude as much as you like if
you’ll only keep your head the same way. I am working at the face now.’

‘What are you going to do with the picture when it’s finished?’

‘Keep it till my dying day.’

‘I thought you would perhaps give it—I mean sell it—to me. I could not
afford a large price, for my people are very poor, but——’

‘Your looking-glass will show you a better portrait than this poor
sketch of mine. And, in after years, even this libellous daub will
serve to remind me of a happy hour in my life.’

‘I am glad you have enjoyed yourself,’ said Daphne; ‘but I really wish
you had eaten that fowl. Have you far to go home to dinner?’

‘Only to Fontainebleau.’

‘You are living there?’

‘I am staying there. I may strike my tent and be across the Jura
to-morrow night. I never live anywhere.’

‘But haven’t you a home and people?’

‘I have a kind of home, but no people.’

‘Poor fellow!’ murmured Daphne, with exquisite compassion. ‘Are you an
orphan?’

‘Yes; my father died nine years ago, my mother last year.’

‘How awfully sad! No brothers or sisters?’

‘None. I am a crystallisation, the last of a vanishing race. And now
I have done as much as I dare to your portrait. Any attempt at finish
would result in failure. I am writing the place and the date in the
corner of my sketch. May I write your name?’

‘My name!’ exclaimed Daphne, her eyes sparkling with mischief, her
cheeks curving into dimples.

‘Yes; your name. You have a name, I suppose: unless you are the
nameless spirit of sunlit woodlands, masquerading in a blue gown?’

‘My name—is—Poppæa,’ faltered Daphne, whose latest chapter of Roman
history had been the story of Nero and his various crimes, toned down
and expurgated to suit young ladies’ schools.

Poppæa Sabina, thus chastely handled, had appeared nothing worse than
a dressy lady of extravagant tastes, who took elaborate care of her
complexion, and had a fancy for shoeing her mules with gold.

‘Did you say Poppet?’ inquired the stranger.

‘No; Poppæa. You must have heard the name before, I should think. It is
a Roman name. My father is a great classical scholar, and he chose it
for me. And pray what is your name?’

‘Nero.’

The stranger pronounced the word without moving a muscle of his face,
still intent upon his sketch; for it is vain for a man to say he has
finished a thing of that kind; so long as his brushes are within reach,
he will be putting in new touches. There was not a twinkle in those
dubious eyes of his—not an upward move of those mobile lips. He was as
grave as a judge.

‘I don’t believe it!’ cried Daphne, bouncing up from her rock.

‘Don’t believe what?’

‘That your name is Nero.’

‘Why not? Have I not as good a right to bear a Roman name as you have?
Suppose I had a classical father as well as you. Why not?’

‘It is too absurd.’

‘Many things are absurd which yet are absolutely true.’

‘And you are really called Nero?’

‘As really as you are called Poppæa.’

‘It is so dreadfully like a dog’s name.’

‘It is a dog’s name. But you may call your dog Bill, or Joe, or Paul,
or Peter. I don’t think that makes any difference. I would sooner have
some dogs for my namesakes than some men.’

‘Dibb, dear,’ said Daphne, turning sharply upon the victim of her
folly, the long-suffering, patient Martha. ‘What’s the time?’

She had a watch of her own, a neat little gold hunter; but it was
rarely in going order for two consecutive days, and she was generally
dependent on the methodical Dibb for all information as to the flight
of time.

‘A quarter to five.’

‘Then we must be going home instantly. How could you let me stay so
long, you foolish girl? I am sure it must be more than an hour’s walk
to the town, and we promised poor dear Toby to be home by six.’

‘It isn’t my fault,’ remarked Miss Dibb; ‘I should have been glad to go
ever so long ago, if you had thought fit.’

‘Hurry up, then, Dibb dear. Put away your crochet. Have you quite done
with my block?’ to the unknown. ‘Thank you muchly. And now my box?
Those go into the basket. Thanks, awfully,’ as he helped her to pack
the tumblers, corkscrew, plates, and knives, which had served for their
primitive repast. ‘And now we will wish you good-day—Mr.—Nero.’

‘On no account. I am going to carry that basket back to Fontainebleau
for you.’

‘All along that dusty high road. We couldn’t think of such a thing;
could we, Martha?’

‘I don’t know that my opinion is of much account,’ said Martha stiffly.

‘Don’t, you dear creature!’ cried Daphne, darting at her, and hugging
her affectionately. ‘Don’t try to be ill-tempered, for you can’t
do it. The thing is an ignominious failure. You were created to be
good-natured, and nice, and devoted—especially to me.’

‘You know how fond I am of you,’ murmured Martha reproachfully; ‘and
you take a mean advantage of me when you go on so.’

‘How am I going on? Is it very dreadful to let a gentleman carry a
heavy basket for me?’

‘A gentleman!’ muttered Martha, with a supercilious glance at the
stranger’s well-worn velveteen.

He was standing a little way off, out of hearing, taking a last long
look at the valley.

‘Yes; and every inch a gentleman, though his coat is shabby, and though
he may be as poor as Job, and though he makes game of me!’ protested
Daphne with conviction.

‘Have your own way,’ replied Martha.

‘I generally do,’ answered Daphne.

And so they went slowly winding downhill in the westering sunshine, all
among the gray rocks on which the purple shadows were deepening, the
warm umber lights glowing, while the rosy evening light came creeping
up in the distant west, and the voice of an occasional bird, so rare in
this Gallic wood, took a vesper sound in the summer stillness.

The holiday makers had all gone home. The French matron who had taken
her rest so luxuriously, surrounded by her olivebranches, had put on
her boots and departed. The women who sold cakes and fruit, and wooden
paper-knives, had packed up their wares and gone away. All was silence
and loneliness; and for a little while Daphne and her companions
wandered on in quiet enjoyment of the scene and the atmosphere,
treading the mossy, sandy path that wound in and out among the big
rocks, sometimes nearly losing themselves, and anon following the blue
arrow points which a careful hand had painted on the rocks to show them
which way they should go.

But Daphne was not given to silence. She found something to talk about
before they had gone very far.

‘You have travelled immensely, I suppose?’ she said to the stranger.

‘I don’t know exactly what significance you attach to the word. Young
ladies use such large words nowadays for such very small things. From
a scientific explorer’s point of view, my wanderings have been very
limited, but I daresay one of Cook’s tourists would consider me a
respectable traveller. I have never seen the buried cities of Central
America, nor surveyed the world from the top of Mount Everest, nor
even climbed the Caucasus, nor wandered by stormy Hydaspes: but I have
done Egypt, and Algeria, and Greece, and all that is tolerably worth
seeing in Southern Europe, and have tried my hand, or rather my legs,
at Alpine climbing, and have come to the conclusion that, although
Nature is mountainous, life is everywhere more or less flat, stale, and
unprofitable.’

‘I’m sure I shouldn’t feel that if I were free to roam the world, and
could paint as sweetly as you do.’

‘I had a sweet subject, remember.’

‘Please don’t,’ cried Daphne; ‘I rather like you when you are rude, but
if you flatter I shall hate you.’

‘Then I’ll be rude. To win your liking I would be more uncivil than
Petruchio.’

‘Katharine was a fool!’ exclaimed Daphne, skipping up the craggy side
of one of the biggest rocks. ‘I have always despised her. To begin so
well, and end so tamely.’

‘If you don’t take care you’ll end by slipping off that rock, and
spraining an ankle or two,’ said Nero warningly.

‘Not I,’ answered Daphne confidently; ‘you don’t know how used I am to
climbing. Oh, look at that too delicious lizard!’

She was on her knees admiring the emerald-hued changeful creature.
She touched it only with her breath, and it flashed away from her and
vanished in some crevice of the rock.

‘Silly thing, did it think I wanted to hurt it, when I was only
worshipping its beauty?’ she cried.

Then she rose suddenly, and stood on the rock, a slim girlish figure,
with flattering drapery, poised as lightly as Mercury, gazing round
her, admiring the tall slim stems of the beeches growing in groups
like clustered columns, the long vista of rocks, the dark wall of
fir-trees, mounting up and up to the edge of a saffron-tinted sky—for
these loiterers had lost count of time since steady-going Martha looked
at her reliable watch, and the last of the finches had sung his lullaby
to his wife and family, and the golden ship called Sol had gone down to
Night’s dark sea.

‘Come down, you absurd creature!’ exclaimed Nero, with a peremptory
voice, winding one arm about the light figure, and lifting the girl off
the rock as easily as if she had been a feather-weight.

‘You are very horrid!’ protested Daphne indignantly. ‘You are ever so
much ruder than Petruchio. Why shouldn’t I stand on that rock? I was
only admiring the landscape!’

‘No doubt, and two minutes hence you would be calling upon us to admire
a fine example of a sprained ankle.’

‘I’m sure if your namesake was ever as unkind to my namesake, it’s no
wonder she died young,’ said Daphne, pouting.

‘I believe he was occasionally a little rough upon her,’ answered
the artist with his imperturbable air. ‘But of course you have read
your Tacitus and your Suetonius in the original. Young ladies know
everything nowadays.’

‘The Roman history we read is by a clergyman, written expressly for
ladies’ schools,’ said Miss Dibb demurely.

‘How intensely graphic and interesting that chronicle must be!’
retorted the stranger.

They had come to the end of the winding path among the rocks by this
time, and were in a long, straight road, cut through the heart of
the forest, between tall trees that seemed to have outgrown their
strength—weedy-looking trees, planted too thickly, and only able to
push their feeble growth up towards the sun, with no room for spreading
boughs or interlacing roots. The evening light was growing grave and
gray. Bats were skimming across the path, uncomfortably near Daphne’s
flowing hair. Miss Dibb began to grumble.

‘How dreadfully we have loitered!’ she cried, looking at her watch. ‘It
is nearly eight, and we have so far to go. What will Miss Toby say?’

‘Well, she will moan a little, no doubt,’ answered Daphne lightly,
‘and will tell us that her heart has been in her mouth for the
last hour, which need not distress us much, as we know it’s a
physical impossibility; and that anyone might knock her down with a
feather—another obvious impossibility, seeing that poor Toby weighs
eleven stone—and then I shall kiss her and make much of her, and give
her the packet of nougat I mean to buy on the way home, and all will be
sunshine. She takes a sticky delight in nougat And now please talk and
amuse us,’ said Daphne, turning to the artist with an authoritative
air. ‘Tell us about some of your travels, or tell us where you live
when you’re at home.’

‘I think I’d rather talk of my travels. I’ve just come from Italy.’

‘Where you have been painting prodigiously, of course. It is a land of
pictures, is it not?’

‘Yes; but Nature’s pictures are even better than the treasures of art.’

‘If ever I should marry,’ said Daphne with a dreamy look, as if she
were contemplating an event far off in the dimness of twenty years
hence, ‘I should insist upon my husband taking me to Italy.’

‘Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to afford the expense,’ suggested the
practical Martha.

‘Then I wouldn’t marry him,’ Daphne retorted decisively.

‘Isn’t that rather a mercenary notion?’ asked the gentleman with the
basket.

‘Not at all. Do you suppose I should marry just for the sake of having
a husband? If ever I do marry—which I think is more than doubtful—it
will be, first and foremost, in order that I may do everything I wish
to do, and have everything I want to have. Is there anything singular
in that?’

‘No; I suppose it is a young beauty’s innate idea of marriage. She sees
herself in a glass, and recognises perfection, and knows her own value.’

‘Are you married?’ asked Daphne abruptly, eager to change the
conversation when the stranger became complimentary.

‘No.’

‘Engaged?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is she like?’ inquired Daphne eagerly. ‘Please tell us about her.
It will be ever so much more interesting than Italy; for, after all,
when one hasn’t seen a country description goes for so little. What is
she like?’

‘I could best answer that question in one word if I were to say she is
perfection.’

‘You called me perfection just now,’said Daphne pettishly.

‘I was talking of your face. She is perfection in all things.
Perfectly pure, and true, and good, and noble. She is handsome, highly
accomplished, rich.’

‘And yet you go wandering about the world in that coat,’ exclaimed
Daphne, too impulsive to be polite.

‘It is shabby, is it not? But if you knew how comfortable it is you
wouldn’t wonder that I have an affection for it.’

‘Go on about the young lady, please. Have you been long engaged to her?’

‘Ever since I can remember, in my heart of hearts: she was my bright
particular star when I was a boy at school: she was my sole incentive
to work, or decent behaviour, when I was at the University. And now I
am not going to say any more about her. I think I have told you enough
to gratify any reasonable curiosity. Ask me conundrums, young ladies,
if you please, or do something to amuse me. Remember, I am carrying the
basket, and a man is something more than a beast of burden. My mind
requires relaxation.’

Martha Dibb grinned all over broad frank face. Riddles were her
delight. She had little manuscript books filled with them in her
scrawly, pointed writing. She began at once, like a musical-box that
has been wound up, and did not leave off asking conundrums till they
were half-way down the long street leading to the palace, near which
Miss Toby and her pupils had their lodging.

But Daphne had no intention that the stranger should learn exactly
where she lived. Reckless as she was, mirthful and mischievous as Puck
or Robin Goodfellow, she had still a dim idea that her conduct was not
exactly correct, or would not be correct in England. On the Continent,
of course, there must be a certain license. English travellers dined at
public tables, and gamed in public rooms—were altogether more sociable
and open to approach than on their native soil. It was only a chosen
few—the peculiarly gifted in stiffness—who retained their glacial
crust through every change of scene and climate, and who would perish
rather than cross the street ungloved, or discourse familiarly with an
unaccredited stranger. But, even with due allowance for Continental
laxity, Daphne felt that she had gone a little too far. So she pulled
up suddenly at the corner of a side street, and demanded her basket.

‘What does that mean?’ asked the painter, with a look of lazy surprise.

‘Only that this is our way home, and that we won’t trouble you to carry
the basket any further, thanks intensely.’

‘But I am going to carry it to your door.’

‘It’s awfully good of you to propose it, but our governess would be
angry with us for imposing on the kindness of a stranger, and I am
afraid we should get into trouble.’

‘Then I haven’t a word to say,’ answered the painter, smiling at her
blushing eloquent face. Verily a speaking face—beautiful just as a
sunlit meadow is beautiful, because of the lights and shadows that flit
and play perpetually across it.

‘Do you live in this street?’ he asked.

‘No; our house is in the second turning to the right, seven doors from
the corner,’ said Daphne, who had obtained possession of the basket.
‘Good-bye.’

She ran off with light swift foot, followed lumpishly and breathlessly
by the scandalised Martha.

‘Daphne, how could you tell him such an outrageous story?’ she
exclaimed.

‘Do you think I was going to tell him the truth?’ asked Daphne, still
fluttering on, light as a lapwing. ‘We should have had him calling on
Miss Toby to-morrow morning to ask if we were fatigued by our walk,
or perhaps singing the serenade from Don Giovanni under our windows
to-night. Now, Martha dearest, don’t say one word; I know I have
behaved shamefully, but it has been awful fun, hasn’t it?’

‘I’m sure I felt ready to sink through the ground all the time,’ panted
Martha.

‘Darling, the ground and you are both too solid for there to be any
fear of that.’

They had turned a corner by this time, and doubling and winding, always
at a run, they came very speedily to the quiet spot near the palace,
where their governess had lodged them in a low blind-looking white
house, with only one window that commanded a view of the street.

They had been so fleet of foot, and had so doubled on the unknown,
that, from this upper window, they had presently the satisfaction
of seeing him come sauntering along the empty street, careless,
indifferent, with dreamy eyes looking forward into vacancy, a man
without a care.

‘He doesn’t look as if he minded our having given him the slip one
little bit,’ said Daphne.

‘Why should he?’ asked the matter-of-fact Martha. ‘I daresay he was
tired of carrying the basket.’

‘Go your ways,’ said Daphne with a faint sigh, waving her hand at the
vanishing figure. ‘Go your ways over mountain and sea, through wood
and valley. This world is a big place, and it isn’t likely you and I
will ever meet again.’ Then, turning to her companion with a sudden
change of manner, she exclaimed: ‘Martha, I believe we have both made a
monstrous mistake.’

‘As how?’ asked Miss Dibb stupidly.

‘In taking him for a poor artist.’

‘He looks like one.’

‘Not he. There is nothing about him but his coat that looks poor, and
he wears that as if it were purple and ermine. Did you notice his eye
when he ordered us to change the conversation, an eye accustomed to
look at inferiors? And there is a careless pride in his manner, like
a man who believes that the world was made on purpose for him, yet
doesn’t want to make any fuss about it. Then he is engaged to a rich
lady, and he has been at a university. No, Martha, I am sure he is no
wandering artist living on his pencil.’

‘Then he must think all the worse of us,’ said Martha, solemnly.

‘What does it matter?’ asked Daphne, with a careless shrug. ‘We have
seen the last of each other.’

‘We can never be sure of that. One might meet him at a party.’

‘I don’t think you will,’ said Daphne, faintly supercilious, ‘and the
chances are ever so many to one against even my meeting him anywhere.’

Here Miss Toby burst into the room. She had been lying down in an
adjacent chamber, resting her poor bilious head, when the girls came
softly in, and had only just heard their voices.

‘Oh, you dreadful girls, what hours of torture you have caused me!’ she
exclaimed. ‘I thought something must have happened.’

‘Something did happen,’ said Daphne; whereupon Martha thought she was
going to confess everything.

‘What?’

‘A lizard.’

‘Did it sting you?’

‘No; it darted away when I looked at it. A lovely glittering green
thing. I wish I could tame one and wear it for a necklace. And I nearly
fell off a rock; and I tried hard to paint the valley, and made a most
dismal failure. But the view from the hill is positively delicious,
Toby dear, and the rocks are wonderful; huge masses of granite tumbled
about among the trees anyhow, as if Titans had been pelting one
another. It’s altogether lovely. You must go with us to-morrow, Toby
love.’

Miss Toby, diverted from her intention to scold, shook her head
despondingly.

‘I should like it of all things,’ she sighed. ‘But I am such a bad
walker, and the heat always affects my head. Besides, I think we ought
to go over the palace to-morrow. There is so much instruction to be
derived from a place so full of historical associations.’

‘No doubt,’ answered the flippant Daphne, ‘though if you were to tell
me that it had been built by Julius Cæsar or Alfred the Great, I should
hardly be wise enough to contradict you.’

‘My dear Daphne, after you have been so carefully grounded in history,’
remonstrated Miss Toby.

‘I know, dear; but then you see I have never built anything on the
ground. It’s all very well to dig out foundations, but if one never
gets any further than that! But we’ll see the palace to-morrow, and you
shall teach me no end of history while we are looking at pictures and
things.’

‘If my poor head be well enough,’ sighed Miss Toby, and then she began
to move languidly to and fro, arranging for the refreshment of her
pupils, who wanted their supper.

When the supper was ready, Daphne could eat nothing although five
minutes before she had declared herself ravenous. She was too excited
to eat. She talked of the forest, the view, the heat, the sky,
everything except the stranger, and his name was trembling on her lips
perpetually. Every now and then she pulled herself up abruptly in the
middle of a sentence, and flashed a vivid glance at stolid Martha,
her dark gray eyes shining like stars, full of mischievous light. She
would have liked to tell Miss Toby everything, but to do so might be
to surrender all future liberty. Headache or no headache, the honest
little governess would never have allowed her pupils to wander about
alone again, could she have beheld them, in her mind’s eye, picnicking
with a nameless stranger.

There was a little bit of garden at the back of the low, white house,
hardly more than a green courtyard, with a square grass plot and a
few shrubs, into which enclosure the windows all looked, save that
one peep-hole towards the street. Above the white wall that shut in
the bit of green rose the foliage of a much larger garden—acacias
shedding their delicate perfume on the cool night, limes just breaking
into flower, dark-leaved magnolias, tulip-trees, birch and aspen—a
lovely variety of verdure. And over all this shone the broad disk of a
ripening moon, flooding the world with light.

When supper was over, Daphne bounded out into the moonlit garden, and
began to play at battledore and shuttlecock. She was all life and fire
and movement, and could not have sat still for the world.

‘Come,’ she cried to Martha; ‘bring your battledore. A match for a
franc’s worth of nougat.’

Miss Dibb had settled herself to her everlasting crochet by the light
of two tall candles. Miss Toby was reading a Tauchnitz novel.

‘I’m tired to death,’ grumbled Martha. ‘I’m sure we must have walked
miles upon miles. How can you be so restless?’

‘How can you mope indoors on such an exquisite night?’ exclaimed
Daphne. ‘I feel as if I could send my shuttlecock up to the moon. Come
out and be beaten! No; you are too wise. You know that I should win
to-night.’

The little toy of cork and feathers quivered high up in the bright air;
the slender, swaying figure bent back like a reed as the girl looked
upward; the fair golden head moved with every motion of the battledore
as the player bent or rose to anticipate the flying cork.

She was glad to be out there alone. She was thinking of the unknown
all the time. She could not get him out of her mind. She had a vague
unreasonable idea that he must be near her; that he saw her as she
played; that he was hiding somewhere in the shadow yonder, peeping
over the wall; that he was in the moon—in the night—everywhere; that
it was his breath which flattered those leaves trembling above the
wall; that it was his footfall which she heard rustling among the
shrubs—a stealthy, mysterious sound mingling with the plish-plash of
the fountain in the next garden. She had talked lightly enough a little
while ago of having seen the last of him: yet now, alone with her
thoughts in the moonlit garden, it seemed as if this nameless stranger
were interwoven with the fabric of her life, a part of her destiny for
evermore.




CHAPTER III.

‘AND VOLATILE, AS AY WAS HIS USAGE.’


Another brilliant summer day, a cloudless blue sky, a world steeped in
sunshine. On the broad gravelled space in front of the palace-railings
the heat and glare would have been too much for a salamander, and even
Daphne, who belonged to the salamander species in so much as she had
an infinite capacity for enjoying sunshine, blinked a little as she
crossed the shelterless promenade, under her big tussore parasol, a
delightfully cool-looking figure, in a plain white muslin gown, and a
muslin shepherdess hat.

Poor Miss Toby’s chronic headache had been a little worse this
morning. Heroically had she striven to fulfil her duty, albeit to lift
her leaden head from the pillow was absolute agony. She sat at the
breakfast-table, white, ghastly, uncomplaining, pouring out coffee, at
the very odour of which her bilious soul sickened. Vainly did Daphne
entreat her to go back to bed, and to leave her charges to take care of
themselves, as they had done yesterday.

‘We won’t go to the forest any more till you are able to go with us,’
said Daphne, dimly conscious that her behaviour in that woodland region
had been open to blame. ‘We can just go quietly to the palace, and
stroll through the rooms with the few tourists who are likely to be
there to-day. The Fontainebleau season has hardly begun, don’t you
know, and we may have nobody but the guide, and of course he must be a
respectable person.’

‘My dear, I was sent here to take care of you both, and I must do my
duty,’ answered Miss Toby with a sickly smile. ‘Yesterday my temples
throbbed so that I could hardly move, but I am a little better to-day,
and I shall put on my bonnet and come with you.’

She rose, staggered a few paces towards the adjacent chamber, and
reeled like a landsman at sea. Then she sank into the nearest chair,
and breathed a weary sigh.

‘It’s no use, Toby darling,’ cried Daphne, bending over her with
tenderest sympathy. To be tender, sweet, and sympathetic in little
outward ways, tones of voice, smiles, and looks, was one of Daphne’s
dangerous gifts. ‘My dearest Toby, why struggle against the
inevitable?’ she urged. ‘It is simply one of your regular bilious
attacks. All you have to do is to lie quietly in a dark room and sleep
it off, just as you have so often done before. To-morrow you will be as
well as I am.’

‘Then why not wait till to-morrow for seeing the palace,’ said Miss
Toby faintly, ‘and amuse yourselves at home, for once in a way? You
really ought to study a little, Daphne. Madame will be horrified if she
finds you have done no work all this time.’

‘But I do work of an evening—sometimes, dearest,’ expostulated Daphne;
‘and I’m sure you would not like us to be half suffocated all day in
this stifling little salon, poring over horrid books. We should be
having the fever next, and then how would you account to Madame for
your stewardship?’

‘Don’t be irreverent, Daphne,’ said Miss Toby, who thought that any use
of scriptural phrases out of church was a kind of blasphemy. ‘I think
you would really be better indoors upon such a day as this; but I feel
too languid to argue the point. What would you like best, Martha?’

Miss Dibb, who employed every odd scrap of spare time in the
development of her _magnum opus_ in crochet-work, looked up with a
glance of indifference, and was about to declare her willingness to
stay indoors for ever, so that the crochet counterpane might flourish
and wax wide, when a stealthy frown from Daphne checked her.

‘Daphne would rather see the palace to-day, I know,’ she replied
meekly, ‘and I think,’ with a nervous glance at her schoolfellow, who
was scowling savagely, ‘I think I would rather go too.’

‘Well,’ sighed Miss Toby, ‘I have made an effort, but I feel that I
could not endure the glare out of doors. You must go alone. Be sure you
are both very quiet, if there are tourists about. Don’t giggle, or look
round at people, or make fun of their gowns and bonnets, as you are too
fond of doing. It is horribly unladylike. And if any stranger should
try to get into conversation with you—of course only a low-bred person
would do such a thing—pray remember that your own self-respect would
counsel you to be dumb.’

‘Can you suppose we would speak to anyone?’ exclaimed Daphne, as she
tripped away to her little bedroom, next door to Miss Toby’s. It was
the queerest little room, with a narrow, white-muslin-curtained bed
in a recess, and a marvellous piece of furniture which was washstand,
chest of drawers, and dressing-table all in one. A fly-spotted glass,
inclining from the wall above this _multum in parvo_, was Daphne’s only
mirror.

Here she put on her muslin hat, with a bouquet of blue cornflowers
perched coquettishly on the brim, making a patch of bright cool colour
that refreshed the eye. Never had she looked prettier than this
midsummer morning. Even the fly-spotted clouded old glass told her as
much as that.

‘If—if he were to be doing the _château_ to-day,’ she thought,
tremulous with excitement, ‘how strange it would be. But that’s not
likely. He is not of the common class of tourists, who all follow the
same beaten track. I daresay he will idle away the afternoon in the
woods, just as he did yesterday.’

‘Martha, shall we go to the forest to-day, and leave the _château_ to
be done to-morrow with Toby?’ Daphne asked, when she and her companion
were crossing the wide parade-ground, where the soldiers trotted by
with a great noise and clatter early in the morning, with a fanfare of
trumpets and an occasional roll of a drum. ‘It might seem kinder to
poor dear Toby, don’t you know.’

‘I think it would be very wrong, Daphne,’ answered the serious Martha.
‘We told Miss Toby we were going to the palace, and we are bound to go
straight there and nowhere else. Besides, I want to see the pictures
and statues and things, and I am sick to death of that forest.’

‘After one day! Oh, Martha, what an unromantic soul you must have. I
could live and die there, if I had pleasant company. I have always
envied Rosalind and Celia.’

‘They must have been very glad when they got home,’ said Martha.

Out of the blinding whiteness of the open street they went in at a gate
to a gravelled quadrangle, where the sun seemed to burn with yet more
fiery heat. Even Daphne felt breathless, but it was a pleasant feeling,
the delight of absolute summer, which comes so seldom in the changeful
year. Then they went under an archway, and into the inner quadrangle,
with the white palace on all sides of them. It wanted some minutes of
eleven, and they were shown into a cool official-looking room, where
they were to wait till the striking of the hour. The room was panelled,
painted white, a room of Louis the Fourteenth’s time most likely; what
little furniture there was being quaint and rococo, but not old. The
blinds were down, the shutters half-closed, and the room was in deep
shadow.

‘How nice!’ gasped Martha, who had been panting like a fish out of
water all the way.

‘It is like coming into a grotto,’ said Daphne, sinking into a chair.

‘It is not half so nice as the forest,’ said a voice in the
semi-darkness.

Daphne gave a visible start. She had mused upon the possibility of
meeting her acquaintance of yesterday, and had decided that the thing
was unlikely. Yet her spirits had been buoyed by a lurking idea that he
might crop up somehow before the day was done. But to find him here at
the very beginning of things was startling.

‘Did you know that we were coming here to-day?’ she faltered.

‘Hadn’t the slightest idea; but I wanted to see the place myself,’ he
answered coolly.

Daphne blushed rosy-red, deeply ashamed of her foolish, impulsive
speech. The stranger had been sitting in that cool shade for the last
ten minutes, and his eyes had grown accustomed to the obscurity. He saw
the blush, he saw the bright expressive face under the muslin hat, the
slim figure in the white frock, every line sharply accentuated against
a gray background, the slender hand in a long Swedish glove. She looked
more womanly in her white gown and hat—and yet more childlike—than she
had looked yesterday in blue and scarlet.

They sat for about five minutes in profound silence. Daphne, usually
loquacious, felt as if she could not have spoken for the world. Martha
was by nature stolid and inclined to dumbness. The stranger was
watching Daphne’s face in a lazy reverie, thinking that his hurried
sketch of yesterday was not half so lovely as the original, and yet it
had seemed to him almost the prettiest head he had ever painted.

‘The provoking minx has hardly one good feature,’ he thought. ‘It is
an utterly unpaintable beauty—a beauty of colour, life, and movement.
Photograph her asleep, and she would be as plain as a pike-staff. How
different from——’

He gave a faint sigh, and was startled from his musing by the door
opening with a bang and an official calling out, ‘This way, ladies and
gentlemen.’

They crossed the blazing courtyard in the wake of a brisk little
gentleman in uniform, who led them up a flight of stone steps, and
into a stony hall. Thence to the chapel, and then to an upper story,
and over polished floors through long suites of rooms, everyone made
more or less sacred by historical memories. Here was the table on which
Napoleon the Great signed his abdication, while his Old Guard waited
in the quadrangle below. Daphne looked first at the table and then out
of the window, almost as if she expected to see that faithful soldiery
drawn up in the stony courtyard—grim bearded men who had fought and
conquered on so many a field, victors of Lodi and Arcola, Austerlitz
and Jena, Friedland and Wagram, and who knew now that all was over and
their leader’s star had gone down.

Then to rooms hallowed by noble Marie Antoinette, lovely alike in
felicity and in ruin. Smaller, prettier, more home-like rooms came
next, where the Citizen King and his gentle wife tasted the sweetness
of calm domestic joys; a tranquil gracious family circle; to be
transferred, with but a brief interval of stormy weather, to the
quiet reaches of the Thames, in Horace Walpole’s beloved ‘County of
Twits.’ Then back to the age of tournaments and tented fields; and, lo!
they were in the rooms which courtly Francis built and adorned, and
glorified by his august presence. Here, amidst glitter of gold and glow
of colour, the great King—Charles the Fifth’s rival and victor—lived
and loved, and shed sunshine upon an adoring court. Here from many a
canvas, fresh as if painted yesterday, looked the faces of the past.
Names fraught with romantic memories sanctify every nook and corner
of the palace. Everywhere appears the cypher of Diana of Poitiers
linked with that of her royal lover, Henry the Second. Catherine de
Médicis must have looked upon those interlaced initials many a time in
the period of her probation, looked, and held her peace, and schooled
herself to patience, waiting till Fortune’s wheel should turn and bring
her day of power. Here in this long, lofty chamber, sunlit, beautiful,
the fated Monaldeschi’s life-blood stained the polished floor.

‘To say the least of it, the act was an impertinence on Queen
Christina’s part, seeing that she was only a visitor at Fontainebleau,’
said the stranger languidly. ‘Don’t you think so, Poppæa?’

Daphne required to have the whole story told her; that particular event
not having impressed itself on her mind.

‘I have read all through Bonnechose’s history of France, and half way
from the beginning again,’ she explained. ‘But when one sits droning
history in a row of droning girls, even a murder doesn’t make much
impression upon one. It’s all put in the same dull, dry way. This year
there was a great scarcity of corn. The poor in the provinces suffered
extreme privations. Queen Christina, of Sweden, while on a visit at
Fontainebleau, ordered the execution of her counsellor Monaldeschi.
There was also a plague at Marseilles. The Dauphin died suddenly in the
fifteenth year of his age. The king held a Bed of Justice for the first
time since he ascended the throne. That is the kind of thing, you know.’

‘I can conceive that so bald a calendar would scarcely take a firm grip
upon one’s memory,’ assented the stranger. ‘Details are apt to impress
the mind more than events.’

After this came the rooms which the Pope occupied during his
captivity—rooms that had double and treble memories; here a
nuptial-chamber, there a room all a-glitter with gilding—a room
that had sheltered Charles the Fifth, and afterwards fair, and not
altogether fortunate, Anne of Austria. Daphne felt as if her brain
would hardly hold so much history. She felt a kind of relief when they
came to a theatre, where plays had been acted before Napoleon the Third
and his lovely empress in days that seemed to belong to her own life.

‘I think I was born then,’ she said naïvely.

There had been no other visitors—no tourists of high or low degree. The
two girls and the unknown had had the palace to themselves, and the
guide, mollified by a five-franc piece slipped into his hand by the
gentleman, had allowed them to make their circuit at a somewhat more
leisurely pace than that brisk trot on which he usually insisted.

Yet for all this it was still early when they came down the double
flight of steps and found themselves once again in the quadrangle, the
Court of Farewells, so called from the day when the great emperor bade
adieu to pomp and power, and passed like a splendid apparition from the
scene he had glorified. The sun had lost none of his fervour—nay, had
ascended to his topmost heaven, and was pouring down his rays upon the
baking earth.

‘Let us go to the gardens and feed the carp,’ said Nero, and it was
an infinite relief, were it only for the refreshment of the eye, to
find themselves under green leaves and by the margin of a lovely lake,
statues of white marble gleaming yonder at the end of verdant arcades,
fountains plashing. Here under the trees a delicious coolness and
stillness contrasted with the glare of light on the open space yonder,
where an old woman sat at a stall, set out with cakes and sweetmeats,
ready to supply food for the carp-feeders.

‘Yes: let us feed the carp,’ cried Daphne, running out into this
sunlit space, her white gown looking like some saintly raiment in the
supernatural light of a transfiguration. ‘That will be lovely! I have
heard of them. They are intensely old, are they not—older than the
palace itself?’

‘They are said to have been here when Henry and Diana walked in yonder
alleys,’ replied Nero. ‘I believe they were here when the Roman legions
conquered Gaul. One thing seems as likely as the other, doesn’t it,
Poppæa?’

‘I don’t know about that: but I like to think they are intensely old,’
answered Daphne, leaning on the iron railing, and looking down at the
fish, which were already competing for her favours, feeling assured she
meant to feed them.

The old woman got up from her stool, and came over to ask if the young
lady would like some bread for the carp.

‘Yes, please—a lot,’ cried Daphne, and she began to fumble in her
pocket for the little purse with its three or four francs and
half-francs.

The stranger tossed a franc to the woman before Daphne’s hand could
get to the bottom of her pocket, and the bread was forthcoming—a
large hunch off a long loaf. Daphne began eagerly to feed the fish.
They were capital fun, disputing vehemently for her bounty, huge
gray creatures which looked centuries old—savage, artful, vicious
exceedingly. She gave them each a name. One she called Francis, another
Henry, another Diana, another Catherine. She was as pleased and amused
as a child, now throwing her bit of bread as far as her arm could fling
it, and laughing merrily at the eager rush of competitors, now luring
them close to the rails, and smiling down at the gray snouts yawning
for their prey.

‘Do you think they would eat me if I were to tumble in among them?’
asked Daphne. ‘Greedy creatures! They seem ravenous enough for
anything. There! they have devoured all my bread.’

‘Shall I buy you some more?’

‘Please, no. This kind of thing might go on for ever. They are
insatiable. You would be ruined.’

‘Shall we go under the trees?’

‘If you like. But don’t you think this sunshine delicious? It is so
nice to bask. I think I am rather like a cat in my enjoyment of the
sun.’

‘Your friend seems to have had enough of it,’ said Nero, glancing
towards a sheltered bench to which Miss Dibb had discreetly withdrawn
herself.

‘Martha! I had almost forgotten her existence. The carp are so
absorbing.’

‘Let us stay in the sunshine. We can rejoin your friend presently. She
has taken out her needlework, and seems to be enjoying herself.’

‘Another strip of her everlasting counterpane,’ said Daphne. ‘That
girl’s persevering industry is maddening. It makes one feel so
abominably idle. Would you be very shocked to know that I detest
needlework?’

‘I should as soon expect a butterfly to be fond of needlework as you,’
answered Nero. ‘Let me see your hand.’

She had taken off her glove to feed the carp, and her hand lay upon
the iron rail, dazzlingly white in the sunshine; Nero took it up in
his, so gently, so reverently, that she could not resent the action. He
took it as a priest or physician might have taken it: altogether with a
professional or scientific air.

‘Do you know that I am a student of chiromancy?’ he asked.

‘How should I, when I don’t know anything about you? And I don’t even
know what chiromancy is.’

‘The science of reading fate and character from the configuration of
the hand.’

‘Why, that is what gipsies pretend to do,’ cried Daphne. ‘You surely
cannot believe in such nonsense.’

‘I don’t know that my belief goes very far; but I have found the study
full of interest, and more than once I have stumbled upon curious
truths.’

‘So do the most ignorant gipsy fortune-tellers,’ retorted Daphne.
‘People who are always guessing must sometimes guess right. But you may
tell my fortune all the same, please; it will be more amusing than the
carp.’

‘If you approach the subject in such an irreverent spirit, I don’t
think I will have anything to say to you. Remember, I have gone into
this question thoroughly, from a scientific point of view.’

‘I am sure you are wonderfully clever,’ said Daphne; and then, in a
coaxing voice, with a lovely look from the sparkling gray eyes, she
pleaded: ‘Pray tell my fortune. I shall be wretched if you refuse.’

‘And I should be wretched if I were to disoblige you. Your left hand,
please, and be serious, for it is a very solemn ordeal.’

She gave him her left hand. He turned the soft rosy childish palm to
the sunlight, and pored over it as intently as if it had been some
manuscript treatise of Albertus Magnus, written in cypher, to be
understood only by the hierophant in science.

‘You are of a fitful temper,’ he said, ‘and do not make many friends.
Yet you are capable of loving intensely—one or two persons perhaps,
not more; indeed, I think only one at a time, for your nature is
concentrative rather than diffuse.’

He spoke slowly and deliberately—coldly indifferent as an antique
oracle—with his eyes upon her hand all the time. He took no note of the
changes in her expressive face, which would have told him that he had
hit the truth.

‘You are apt to be dissatisfied with life.’

‘Oh, indeed I am,’ she cried, with a weary sigh; ‘there are times when
I do so hate my life and all things belonging to me—except just one
person—that I would change places with any peasant-girl trudging home
from market.’

‘You are romantic, variable. You do not care for beaten paths, and have
a hankering for the wild and strange. You love the sea better than the
land, the night better than the day.’

‘You are a wizard,’ cried Daphne, remembering her wild delight in the
dancing waves as she stood on the deck of the Channel steamer, her
intense love of the winding river at home—the deep, rapid stream—and of
fresh salt breezes, and a free ocean life; remembering, too, how her
soul had thrilled with rapture in the shadowy courtyard last night,
when her shuttlecock flew up towards the moon. ‘You have a wonderful
knack of finding out things,’ she said. ‘Go on, please.’

He had dropped her hand suddenly, and was looking up at her with
intense earnestness.

‘Please go on,’ she repeated impatiently.

‘I have done. There is no more to be told.’

‘Nonsense. I know you are keeping back something; I can see it in your
face. There is something unpleasant—or something strange—I could see it
in the way you looked at me just now. I insist upon knowing everything.’

‘Insist! I am only a fortune-teller so far as it pleases me. Do you
think if a man’s hand told me that he was destined to be hanged, I
should make him uneasy by saying so?’

‘But my case is not so bad as that?’

‘No; not quite so bad as that,’ he answered lightly, trying to smile.

The whole thing seemed more or less a joke; but there are some natures
so sensitive that they tremble at the lightest touch; and Daphne felt
uncomfortable.

‘Do tell me what it was,’ she urged earnestly.

‘My dear child, I have no more to tell you. The hand shows character
rather than fate. Your character is as yet but half developed. If you
want a warning, I would say to you: Beware of the strength of your own
nature. In that lies your greatest danger. Life is easiest to those
who can take it lightly—who can bend their backs to any burden, and be
grateful for every ray of sunshine.’

‘Yes,’ she answered contemptuously; ‘for the drudges. But please tell
me the rest. I know you read something in these queer little lines and
wrinkles,’ scrutinising her pink palm as she spoke, ‘something strange
and startling—for you were startled. You can’t deny that.’

‘I am not going to admit or deny anything,’ said Nero, with a quiet
firmness that conquered her, resolute as she was when her own pleasure
or inclination was in question. ‘The oracle has spoken. Make the most
you can of his wisdom.’

‘You have told me nothing,’ she said, pouting, but submissive.

‘And now let us go out of this bakery, under the trees yonder, where
your friend looks so happy with her crochet-work.’

‘I think we ought to go home,’ hesitated Daphne, not in the least as if
she meant it.

‘Home! nonsense. It isn’t one o’clock yet; and you don’t dine at one,
do you?’

‘We dine at six,’ replied Daphne with dignity, ‘but we sometimes lunch
at half-past one.’

‘Your luncheon isn’t a very formidable affair, is it—hardly worth going
home for?’

‘It will keep,’ said Daphne. ‘If there is anything more to be seen,
Martha and I may as well stop and see it.’

‘There are the gardens, beyond measure lovely on such a day as this;
and there is the famous vinery; and, I think, if we could find a very
retired spot out of the ken of yonder beardless patrol, I might smuggle
in the materials for another picnic.’

‘That would be too delightful,’ cried Daphne, clapping her hands in
childish glee, forgetful of fate and clairvoyance.

They strolled slowly through the blinding heat towards that cool grove
where patient Martha sat weaving her web, as inflexible in her stolid
industry as if she had been one of the fatal sisters.

‘What have you been doing all this time, Daphne?’ she asked, lifting up
her eyes as they approached.

‘Feeding the carp. You have no idea what fun they are.’

‘I wonder you are not afraid of a sunstroke.’

‘I am never afraid of anything, and I love the sun. Come, Martha, roll
up that everlasting crochet, and come for a ramble. We are going to
explore the gardens, and by-and-by Mr. Nero is going to get us some
lunch.’

Martha looked at the unknown doubtfully, yet not without favour. She
was a good, conscientious girl: but she was fond of her meals, and
a luncheon in the cool shade of these lovely groves would be very
agreeable. She fancied, too, that the stranger would be a good caterer.
He was much more carefully dressed to-day, in a gray travelling suit.
Everything about him looked fresh and bright, and suggestive of easy
circumstances. She began to think that Daphne was right, and that he
was no Bohemian artist, living from hand to mouth, but a gentleman
of position, and that it would not be so very awkward to meet him in
Regent street, when she should be shopping with mamma and Jane.

They strolled along the leafy aisle on the margin of the blue bright
lake, faintly stirred by lightest zephyrs. They admired the marble
figures of nymph and dryad, which Martha thought would have looked
better if they had been more elaborately clad. They wasted half an
hour in happy idleness, enjoying the air, the cool umbrage of lime
and chestnut, the glory of the distant light yonder on green sward or
blue placid lake, enjoying Nature as she should be enjoyed, in perfect
carelessness of mind and heart—as Horace enjoyed his Sabine wood,
singing his idle praise of Lalage as he wandered, empty of care.

They found at last an utterly secluded spot, where no eye of military
or civil authority could reach them.

‘Now, if you two young ladies will only be patient, and amuse
yourselves here for a quarter of an hour or so, I will see what can be
done in the smuggling line,’ said the unknown.

‘I could stay here for a week,’ said Daphne, establishing herself
comfortably on the velvet turf, while Martha pulled out her work-bag
and resumed her crochet-hook. ‘Take your time, Mr. Nero. I am going to
sleep.’

She threw off her muslin hat, and laid her cheek upon the soft mossy
bank, letting her pale golden hair fall like a veil over her neck and
shoulders. They were in the heart of a green _bosquet_, far from the
palace, far from the beaten track of tourists. Nero stopped at a curve
in the path to look back at the recumbent figure, the sunny falling
hair, the exquisite tint of cheek and chin and lips, just touched by
the sun-ray glinting through a break in the foliage. He stood for a few
momenta admiring this living picture, and then walked slowly down the
avenue.

‘A curious idle way of wasting a day,’ he mused; ‘but when a man has
nothing particular to do with his days he may as well waste them
one way as another. How lovely the child is in her imperfection! a
faulty beauty—a faulty nature—but full of fascination. I must write a
description of her in my next letter to my dear one. How interested she
would feel in this childish, undisciplined character.’

But somehow when his next letter to the lady of his love came to be
written he was in a lazy mood, and did not mention Daphne. The subject,
to be interesting, required to be treated in detail, and he did not
feel himself equal to the task.

‘Isn’t he nice?’ asked Daphne, when the unknown had departed.

‘He is very gentlemanlike,’ assented Martha, ‘but still I feel we are
doing wrong in encouraging him.’

‘Encouraging him!’ echoed her schoolfellow. ‘You talk as if he were a
stray cur that had followed us.’

‘You perfectly well know what I mean, Daphne. It cannot be right to get
acquainted with a strange gentleman as we have done. I wouldn’t have
mamma or Jane know of it for the world.’

‘Then don’t tell them,’ said Daphne, yawning listlessly, and opening
her rosy palm for a nondescript green insect to crawl over it.

‘But it seems such a want of candour,’ objected Martha.

‘Then tell them, and defy them. But whatever you do, don’t be fussy,
you dear good-natured old Martha; for of all things fussiness is the
most detestable in hot weather. As for Mr. Nero, he will be off and
away across the Jura before to-morrow night, I daresay, and he will
forget us, and we shall forget him, and the thing will be all over and
done with. I wish he would bring us our luncheon. I’m hungry.’

‘I feel rather faint,’ admitted Martha, who thought it ungenteel to
confess absolute hunger. ‘That bread we get for breakfast is all
sponginess. Shall you tell your sister about Mr. Nero?’

‘That depends. I may, perhaps, if I should be hard up for something to
say to her.’

‘Don’t you think she would be angry?’

‘She never is angry. She is all sweetness and goodness, and belief
in other people. I have spent very little of my life with her, or I
should be ever so much better than I am. I should have grown up like
her perhaps—or just a little like her, for I’m afraid the clay is
different—if my father would have let me be brought up at home.’

‘And he wouldn’t?’ asked Martha.

She had heard her friend’s history very often, or as much of it as
Daphne cared to tell, but she was always interested in the subject,
and encouraged her schoolfellow’s egotism. Daphne’s people belonged
to a world which Miss Dibb could never hope to enter; though perhaps
Daphne’s father, Sir Vernon Lawford, had no larger income than Mr.
Dibb, whose furniture and general surroundings were the best and most
gorgeous that money could buy.

‘No. When I was a little thing I was sent to a lady at Brighton,
who kept a select school for little things; because my father could
not bear a small child about the house. When I grew too tall for my
frocks, and was all stocking and long hair, I was transferred to a
very superior establishment at Cheltenham, because my father could not
be worried by the spectacle of an awkward growing girl. When I grew
still taller, and was almost a young woman, I was packed off to Madame
Tolmache to be finished; and I am to be finished early next year, I
believe, and then I am to go home, and my father will have to endure
me.’

‘How nice for you to go home for good! And your home is very beautiful,
is it not?’ asked Martha, who had heard it described a hundred times.

‘It is a lovely house in Warwickshire, all amongst meadows and winding
streams—a long, low, white house, don’t you know, with no end of
verandahs and balconies. I have been there very little, as you may
imagine, but I love the dear old place all the same.’

‘I don’t think I should like to live so far in the country,’ said
Martha: ‘Clapham is so much nicer.’

‘_Connais pas_,’ said Daphne indifferently.

The unknown came sauntering back along the leafy arcade, but not
alone; an individual quite as fashionably clad, and of appearance as
gentlemanlike, walked a pace or two behind him.

‘Well, young ladies, I have succeeded splendidly as a smuggler; but
I thought two could bring more than one, so I engaged an ally. Now,
Dickson, produce the Cliquot.’

The individual addressed as Dickson took a gold-topped pint bottle out
of each side-pocket. He then, from some crafty lurking-place, drew
forth a crockery encased pie, some knives and forks, and a couple
of napkins, while Nero emptied his own pockets, and spread their
contents on the turf. He had brought some wonderful cherries—riper and
sweeter-looking than French fruit usually is—several small white paper
packages which suggested confectionery, a tumbler, and half-a-dozen
rolls, which he had artfully disposed in his various pockets.

‘We must have looked rather bulky,’ he said; ‘but I suppose the
custodians of the place were too sleepy to take any notice of us. The
nippers, Dickson? Yes! Thoughtful man! You can come back in an hour for
the bottles and the pie-dish.’

Dickson bowed respectfully and retired.

‘Is that your valet?’ asked Daphne.

‘He has the misfortune to fill that thankless office.’

Daphne burst out laughing.

‘And you travel with your own servant?’ she exclaimed. ‘It is too
absurd! Do you know that yesterday I took you for a poor strolling
artist, and I felt that it would be an act of charity to give you
half-a-guinea for that sketch?’

‘You would not have obtained it from me for a thousand half-guineas.
No; I do not belong to the hard-up section of humanity. Perhaps many
a penniless scamp is a better and happier man than I; but, although
poverty is the school for heroes, I have never regretted that it was
not my lot to be a pupil in that particular academy. And now, young
ladies, fall to, if you please. Here is a Perigord pie, which I am
assured is the best that Strasbourg can produce, and here are a few
pretty tiny kickshaws in the way of pastry; and here, to wash these
trifles down, is a bottle of the Widow Cliquot’s champagne.’

‘I don’t know that I ever tasted champagne in my life.’

‘How odd!’ cried Martha. ‘What, not at juvenile parties?’

‘I have never been at any juvenile parties.’

‘We have it often at home,’ said Martha, with a swelling consciousness
of belonging to wealthy people. ‘At picnics, and whenever there is
company to luncheon. The grown-ups have it every evening at dinner, if
they like. Papa takes a particular pride in his champagne.’

They grouped themselves upon the grass, hidden from all the outside
world by rich summer foliage, much more alone than they had been
yesterday in the heart of the forest. Honest Martha Dibb, who had
been sorely affronted at the free-and-easiness of yesterday’s simple
meal, offered no objection to the luxurious feast of to-day. A man
who travelled with his valet could not be altogether an objectionable
person. The whole thing was unconventional—slightly incorrect, even—but
there was no longer any fear that they were making friends with a
vagabond, who might turn up in after life and ask for small loans.

‘He is evidently a gentleman,’ thought Martha, quite overcome by the
gentility of the valet. ‘I daresay papa and mamma would be glad to know
him.’

Her spirits enlivened by the champagne, Miss Dibb became talkative.

‘Do you know Clapham Common?’ she asked the stranger.

‘I have heard of such a place. I believe I have driven past it
occasionally on my way to Epsom,’ he answered listlessly, with his
eyes on Daphne, who was seated in a lazy attitude, her back supported
by the trunk of a lime-tree, her head resting against the brown bark,
which made a sombre background for her yellow hair, her arms hanging
loose at her sides in perfect restfulness, her face and attitude alike
expressing a dreamy softness, as of one for whom the present hour is
enough, and all time and life beyond it no more than a vague dream. She
had just touched the brim of the champagne glass with her lips and that
was all. She had pronounced the Perigord pie the nastiest thing that
she had ever tasted; and she had lunched luxuriously upon pastry and
cherries.

‘I live on Clapham Common, when I am at home,’ said Martha. ‘Papa has
bought a large house, with a Corinthian portico, and we have ever so
many hot-houses. Papa takes particular pride in his grapes and pines.
Are you fond of pines?’

‘Not particularly,’ answered Nero, stifling a yawn. ‘And where do you
live when you are at home, my pretty Poppæa?’ he asked, smiling at
Daphne, who had lifted one languid arm to convey a ripe red cherry to
lips that were as fresh and rosy as the fruit.

‘In Oxford Street,’ answered Daphne coolly.

Miss Dibb’s eyebrows went up in horrified wonder; she gave a little
gasp, as who should say, ‘This is too much!’ but did not venture a
contradiction.

‘In Oxford Street? Why, that is quite a business thoroughfare. Is your
father in trade?’

‘Yes. He keeps an Italian warehouse.’

Martha became red as a turkey-cock. This was a liberty which she felt
she ought to resent at once; but, sooth to say, the matter-of-fact
Martha had a wholesome awe of her friend. Daphne was very sweet; Daphne
and she were sworn allies: but Daphne had a sharp tongue, and could let
fly little shafts of speech, half playful, half satiric, that pierced
her friend to the quick.

‘I hope there is nothing that I need be ashamed of in my father’s
trade,’ she said gravely.

‘Of course not,’ faltered the stranger. ‘Trade is a most honourable
employment of capital and intelligence. I have the greatest respect for
the trading classes—but——’

‘But you seemed surprised when I told you my father’s position.’

‘Yes; I confess that I was surprised. You don’t look like a tradesman’s
daughter, somehow. If you had told me that your father was a painter,
or a poet, or an actor even, I should have thought it the most natural
thing in the world. You look as if you were allied to the arts.’

‘Is that a polite way of saying that I don’t look quite respectable?’

‘I am not going to tell you what I mean. You would say I was paying you
compliments, and I believe you have tabooed all compliments. I may be
ruder than Petruchio—didn’t you tell me so in the forest yesterday?—but
any attempt at playing Sir Charles Grandison will be resented.’

‘I certainly like you best when you are rude,’ answered Daphne.

She was not as animated as she had been yesterday during their homeward
walk. The heat and the supreme stillness of the spot invited silence
and repose. She was, perhaps, a little tired by the exploration of
the _château_. She sat under the drooping branches of the lime, whose
blossoms sweetened all the air, half in light, half in shadow: while
Martha, who had eaten a hearty luncheon, and consumed nearly a pint
of Cliquot, plodded on with her crochet-work, and tried to keep the
unknown in conversation.

She asked him if he had seen this, and that, and the other—operas,
theatres, horticultural fêtes—labouring hard to make him understand
that her people were in the very best society—as if opera-boxes and
horticultural fêtes meant society! and succeeded only in boring him
outrageously.

He would have been content to sit in dreamy silence watching Daphne
eat her cherries. Such an occupation seemed best suited to the sultry
summer silence, the perfumed atmosphere.

But Martha thought silence must mean dulness.

‘We are dreadfully quiet to-day,’ she said. ‘We must do something to
get the steam up. Shall we have some riddles? I know lots of good ones
that I didn’t ask you yesterday.’

‘Please don’t,’ cried Nero; ‘I am not equal to it. I think a single
conundrum would crush me. Let us sit and dream.

    “How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
     With half-shut eyes ever to seem
     Falling asleep in a half-dream!
     To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
     Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height.”’

Martha looked round inquiringly. She did not see either myrrh-bush or
height in the landscape. They were in a level bit of the park, shut in
by trees.

‘Is that poetry?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s the nearest approach to it that the last half-century has
produced,’ replied the unknown, and then he went on quoting:

    ‘“But propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
      How sweet (while warm airs lull us blowing lowly),
      With half-dropt eyelids still,
      Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
      To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
      His waters from the purple hill.”

Poppæa, I wish you and I were queen and king of a Lotos Island, and
could idle away our lives in perpetual summer.’

‘We should soon grow tired of it,’ answered Daphne. ‘I am like the
little boy in the French story-book. I delight in all the seasons. And
I daresay you skate, hunt, and do all manner of things that couldn’t be
done in summer.’

‘True, my astute empress. But when one is setting under lime-boughs on
such a day as this, eternal summer seems your only idea of happiness.’

He gave himself up to idle musing. Yes; he was surprised, disappointed
even, at the notion of this bright-haired nymph’s parentage. There was
no discredit in being a tradesman’s daughter. He was very far from
feeling a contempt for commerce. There were reasons in his own history
why he should have considerable respect for successful trade. But for
this girl he had imagined a different pedigree. She had a high-bred
air—even in her reckless unconventionally—which accorded ill with
his idea of a prosperous tradesman’s daughter. There was a poetry in
her every look and movement, a wild untutored grace, which was the
strangest of all flowers to have blossomed in a parlour behind a London
shop. Reared in the smoke and grime of Oxford Street! Brought up amidst
ever present considerations of pounds, shillings, and pence! The girl
and her surroundings were so incongruous that the mere idea of them
worried him.

‘And by-and-by she will marry some bloated butcher or pompous
coach-builder, and spend all her days among the newly rich,’ he
thought. ‘She will grow into the fat wife of a fat alderman, and
overdress and overeat herself, and live a life of prosperous vulgarity.’

The notion was painful to him, and he was obliged to remind himself
that there was very little likelihood of his ever seeing this girl
again, so that the natural commonplaceness of her fate could make very
little difference to him.

‘Better to be vulgarly prosperous and live to be a great-grandmother
than to fulfil the prophecy written on her hand,’ he said to himself.
‘What does it matter? Let us enjoy to-day, and let the long line of
to-morrows rest in the shadow that wraps the unknown future. To-morrow
I shall be on my way to Geneva, panting and stifling in a padded
railway-carriage, with oily Frenchmen, who will insist upon having the
windows up through the heat and dust of the long summer day, and I
shall look back with envy to this delicious afternoon.’

They sat under the limes for a couple of hours, talking a little now
and then in a desultory way; Martha trying her hardest to impress the
unknown with the grandeurs and splendours of Lebanon Lodge, Clapham
Common; Daphne saying very little, content to sit in the shade and
dream. Then having taken their fill of rest and shadow, they ventured
out into the sun, and went to see the famous grapery, and then Martha
looked at her watch and protested that they must go home to tea. Miss
Toby would be expecting them.

Nero went with them to the gates of the palace, and would fain have
gone further, but Daphne begged him to leave them there.

‘You would only frighten our poor governess,’ she said. ‘She would
think it quite a terrible thing for us to have made your acquaintance.
Please go back to your hotel at once.’

‘If you command me to do so, I must obey,’ said Nero politely.

He shook hands with them for the first time, gravely lifted his hat,
and walked across to his hotel. It was on the opposite side of the
way, a big white house, with a garden in front of it, and a fountain
playing. The two girls stood in the shadow watching him.

‘He is really very nice,’ said Martha. ‘I think mamma would like to
have him at one of her dinner-parties. But he did not tell us anything
about himself, did he?’

Daphne did not hear her. There was hardly room in that girlish brain
for all the thoughts that were crowding into it.




CHAPTER IV.

‘CURTEIS SHE WAS, DISCRETE, AND DEBONAIRE.’


The world was nine months older since Daphne picnicked in the park
at Fontainebleau, and the scenery of her life was changed to a
fair English landscape in one of the fairest of English shires.
Here, in fertile Warwickshire, within three miles of Shakespeare’s
birthplace, within a drive of Warwick and Leamington, and Kenilworth,
and Stoneleigh Park, to say nothing of ribbon-weaving, watch-making
Coventry, Daphne wandered in happy idleness through the low-lying
water-meadows, which bounded the sloping lawns and shady gardens of
South Hill.

South Hill was a gentle elevation in the midst of a pastoral valley.
A long, low, white house, which had been added to from time to time,
crowned the grassy slope, and from its balconied windows commanded
one of the prettiest views in England—a landscape purely pastoral
and rustic; low meadows through which the Avon wound his silvery way
between sedgy banks, with here a willowy islet, and there a flowery
creek. On one side the distant roofs and gables and tall spire of
Stratford, seen above intervening wood and water; on the other a gentle
undulating landscape, bounded by a range of hills purple with distance.

It was not an old house. There was nothing historical about it; though
South Hill, with between three and four hundred acres, had belonged to
Sir Vernon Lawford’s family since the reign of Elizabeth. There had
been an ancient mansion; but the ancient mansion, being an unhealthy
barrack of small low rooms, and requiring the expenditure of five
thousand pounds to make it healthy and habitable, Sir Vernon’s father
had conceived the idea that he could make a better use of his money if
he pulled down the old house and built himself a new one: whereupon the
venerable pile was demolished, much to the disgust of archæologists,
and an Italian villa rose from its ashes: a house with wide French
windows opening into broad verandahs, delicious places in which to
waste a summer morning, or the idle after-dinner hour watching the
sunset. All the best rooms at South Hill faced the south-west, and the
sunsets there seemed to Madoline Lawford more beautiful than anywhere
else in the world. It was a house of the simplest form, built for ease
and comfort rather than for architectural display. There were long cool
corridors, lofty rooms below and above stairs, a roomy hall, a broad
shallow staircase, and at one end of the house a spacious conservatory
which had been added by Sir Vernon soon after his marriage. This
conservatory was the great feature of South Hill. It was a lofty
stone building, with a double flight of marble steps descending from
the drawing-room to the billiard-room below. Thus drawing-room and
billiard-room both commanded a full view of the conservatory through
wide glass doors.

There were melancholy associations for Sir Vernon Lawford in this wing
which he had added to South Hill. He had built it to give pleasure to
his first wife, an heiress, and the most amiable of women: but before
the building was finished the first Lady Lawford was in her grave,
leaving a baby girl of two months old behind her. The widower grieved
intensely; but he proved no exception to the general rule that the more
intense the sorrow of the bereaved the more speedily does he or she
seek consolation in new ties. Sir Vernon married again within two years
of his wife’s death; and, this time, instead of giving satisfaction
to the county by choosing one of the best born and wealthiest ladies
within its length and breadth, he picked up his wife somewhere on
the Continent—a fact which in the opinion of the county was much in
her disfavour—and when he brought her home and introduced her to his
friends, he was singularly reticent as to her previous history.

The county people shrugged their shoulders, and doubted if this
marriage would end well. They had some years later the morbid
satisfaction of being able to say that they had prophesied aright. The
second Lady Lawford bore her husband two children, a boy and a girl,
and within a year of her daughter’s birth mysteriously disappeared.
She went to the South of France, it was said, for her lungs; though
everybody’s latest recollection of her was of a young woman in the
heyday of health, strength, and beauty; somewhat self-willed, very
extravagant, inordinately fond of pleasure, and governing her husband
with the insolence of conscious beauty.

From that southern journey she never came back. Nobody ever heard
any explicit account of her death; yet after two or three years it
became an accepted fact that she was dead. Sir Vernon travelled a
good deal, while his maiden sister kept house for him at South Hill,
and superintended the rearing of his children. Madoline, daughter and
heiress of the first Lady Lawford, was brought up and educated at home.
Loftus, the boy, went to a private tutor at Stratford, and thence
to Rugby, where he fell ill and died. Daphne’s childhood and early
girlhood were spent almost entirely at school. Only a week ago she was
still at Asnières, grinding away at the everlasting prosy old books,
reciting Lafontaine’s fables, droning out long singsong speeches from
Athalie or Iphigénie, teasing poor patient Miss Toby, domineering over
Martha Dibb. And now her education was supposed to be finished, and
she was free—free to roam like a wild thing about the lovely grounds
at South Hill, in the water-meadows where the daffodils grew in such
rank luxuriance; and where, years ago, when she was a little child, and
had crowned herself with a chaplet of those yellow flowers, scarcely
brighter than her hair, a painter-friend of her father’s had called her
Asphodel.

How well she remembered that sunny morning in early April—ages ago!
Childhood seems so far off at seventeen. How distinctly she remembered
the artist whose refined and gentle manners had won her childish heart!
She had been so little praised at South Hill that her pulses thrilled
with pleasure when her father’s friend smiled at her flower-crowned
head and cried: ‘What a lovely picture! Look, Lawford, would not you
like me to paint her just as she is at this moment, with her hair
flying in the wind, and that background of rushes and blue water?’ But
Sir Vernon turned on his heel with a curt half-muttered answer, and the
two men walked on and left her, smoking their cigarettes as they went.
She remembered how, in a blind childish fury, scarce knowing why she
was angry, she tore the daffodil crown from her hair and trampled it
under foot.

To the end of his visit the painter called her Asphodel, and one
morning finding her alone in the garden, he carried her off to the
billiard-room and made a sketch of her head with its loose tangled
hair: a head which appeared next year on the line at the Royal Academy
and was raved about by all artistic London.

And now it was early April again, and she was a girl in the fair dawn
of womanhood, free to do what she liked with her life, and there were
many things that she was beginning to understand, things not altogether
pleasant to her womanly pride. She was beginning to perceive very
clearly that her father did not love her, and was never likely to love
her, that her presence in his home gave him no pleasure, that he simply
endured her as part of the burden of life, while to her sister he gave
love without stint or measure. True that he was by nature and habit
selfish and self-indulgent, and that the love of such a man is at best
hardly worth having. But Daphne would have been glad of her father’s
love, were the affection of ever so poor a quality. His indifference
chilled her soul. She had been accustomed to command affection; to be
petted and praised and bowed down to for her pretty looks and pretty
ways; to take a leading position with her schoolfellows, partly because
she was Sir Vernon Lawford’s daughter, and partly for those subtle
charms and graces which made her superior to the rank and file of
school-girls.

Yet, though Sir Vernon was wanting in affection for his younger
daughter, Daphne was not unloved at South Hill. Her sister Madoline
loved her dearly, had so loved her ever since those unforgotten summer
days when the grave girl of nine and the toddling two-year-old baby
wandered hand-in-hand in shrubberies and gardens, and seemed to have
the whole domain of South Hill to themselves, Sir Vernon and Lady
Lawford being somewhere on the Continent, and the maiden aunt being a
lady very much in request in the best society in the neighbourhood, and
very willing to take the utmost enjoyment out of life, and to delegate
her duties to nurses and maids. The love that had grown up in those
days between the sisters had been in no wise lessened by severance.
They were as devoted to each other now as they had been in the dawn
of life: Madoline loving Daphne with a proud protecting love; Daphne
looking up to Madoline with intense respect, and believing in her as
the most perfect of women.

‘I’m afraid I shall never be able to leave off talking,’ said Daphne
upon this particular April morning, when she had come in from a long
ramble by the Avon, with her apron full of daffodils; ‘I seem to have
such a world of things to tell you.’

‘Don’t put any check upon your eloquence, darling. You won’t tire me,’
said Madoline in her low gentle voice.

She had a very soft voice, and a slow calm way of speaking, which
seemed to most people to be the true patrician tone. She spoke like a
person who had never been in a hurry, and had never been in a passion.

The sisters were in Madoline’s morning-room, sometimes called the
old drawing-room, as it had been the chief reception-room at South
Hill before Sir Vernon built the west wing. It was a large airy room,
painted white, with chintz draperies of the lightest and most delicate
tints—apple-blossoms on a creamy ground; the furniture all of light
woods; the china celadon or turquoise; but the chief beauty of the
room, its hot-house flowers—tulips, gardenias, arums, hyacinths,
pansies, grouped with exquisite taste on tables and in jardinières, on
brackets and mantelpiece. The love of flowers was almost a passion with
Madoline Lawford, and she was rich enough to indulge this inclination
to her heart’s content. She had built a long line of hot-houses in one
of the lower gardens, and kept a small regiment of gardeners and boys.
She could afford to do this, and yet to be Lady Bountiful in all the
district round about South Hill; so nobody ventured to blame her for
the money she spent upon horticulture.

She was a very handsome woman—handsome in that perfectly regular
style about which there can be no difference of opinion. Some might
call her beauty cold, but all must own she was beautiful. Her profile
was strongly marked, the forehead high and broad, the nose somewhat
aquiline; the mouth proud, calm, resolute, yet infinitely sweet when
she smiled; the eyes almost black, with long dark lashes, sculptured
eyelids, and delicately-pencilled brows. She wore her hair as she might
have worn it had she lived in the days of Pericles and Aspasia—simply
drawn back from her forehead, and twisted in a heavy Greek knot at the
back of her head; no fringed locks or fluffiness gave their factitious
charm to her face. Her beauty was of that calm statuesque type which
has nothing to do with chic, piquancy, dash, audacity, or any of
those qualities which go such a long way in the composition of modern
loveliness.

All her tastes were artistic; but her love of art showed itself
rather in the details of daily life than in any actual achievement
with brush or pencil. She worked exquisitely in crewels and silks,
drew her own designs from natural flowers, and produced embroideries
on linen or satin which were worthy to be hung in a picture-gallery.
She had a truly feminine love of needlework, and was never idle—in
this the very reverse of Daphne, who loved to loll at ease, looking
lazily at the sky or the landscape, and making up her mind to be
tremendously busy by-and-by Daphne was always beginning work, and
never finishing anything; while every task undertaken by Madoline was
carried on to completion. The very essence of her own character was
completeness—fulfilling every duty to the uttermost, satisfying in
fullest measure every demand which home or society could make upon her.

‘I’m sure you’ll be tired of me, Lina,’ protested Daphne, kneeling on
the fender-stool, while Madoline sat at work in her accustomed place,
with a Japanese bamboo table at her side for the accommodation of her
crewels. ‘You can’t imagine what a capacity I have for talking.’

‘Then I must be very dull,’ murmured Madoline, smiling at her. ‘You
have been home a week.’

‘Well, certainly, you have had some experience of me; but you might
think my loquacity a temporary affliction, and that when I had said my
say after nearly two years of separation—oh, Lina, how horrid it was
spending all my holidays at Asnières!—I should subside into comparative
silence. But I shall always have worlds to tell you. It is my nature
to say everything that comes into my mind. That’s why I got on so well
with Dibb.’

‘Was Dibb a dog, dear?’

‘A dog!’ cried Daphne, with a sparkling smile. ‘No, Dibb was my
schoolfellow—a dear good thing—stupid, clumsy, innately vulgar, but
devoted to me. “A poor thing, but mine own,” as Touchstone says. We
were tremendous chums.’

‘I am sorry you should make a friend of any innately vulgar girl,
Daphne dear,’ said Madoline gravely; ‘and don’t you think it rather
vulgar to talk of your friend as Dibb?’

‘We all did it,’ answered Daphne with a shrug; ‘I was always called
Lawford. It saves trouble, and sounds friendly. You talk about Disraeli
and Gladstone; why not Dibb and Lawford?’

‘I think there’s a difference, Daphne. If you were very friendly with
this Miss Dibb, why not speak of her by her Christian name?’

‘So be it, my dearest. In future she shall be Martha, to please you.
She really is a good inoffensive soul. Her father keeps a big shop in
Oxford Street; but the family live in a palace on Clapham Common, with
gardens, and vineries, and pineries, and goodness knows what. When I
call her vulgar it is because she and all her people are so proud of
their money, and measure everything by the standard of money. Martha
was very inquisitive about my means. She wanted to know whether I was
rich or poor, and I really couldn’t inform her. Which am I, Lina?’

Daphne looked up at her sister as if it were a question about which
she was slightly curious, but not a matter of supreme moment. A faint
flush mounted to Madoline’s calm brow. The soft dark eyes looked
tenderly at Daphne’s eager face.

‘Dearest, why trouble yourself about the money question? Have you ever
felt the inconvenience of poverty?’

‘Never. You sent me everything I could possibly wish for; and I always
had more pocket-money than any girl in the school, not excepting
Martha; though she took care to inform me that her father could have
allowed her ten times as much if he had chosen. No, dear; I don’t know
what poverty means; but I should like to understand my own position
very precisely, now that I am a woman, don’t you know? I am quite aware
that you are an heiress; everybody at South Hill has taken pains to
impress that fact upon my mind. Please, dear, what am I?’

‘Darling, papa is not a rich man, but he——’ Madoline paled a little
as she spoke, knowing that South Hill had been settled on her mother,
and her mother’s children after her, and that, in all probability, Sir
Vernon had hardly any other property in the world. ‘He will provide for
you, no doubt. And if he were unable to leave you much by-and-by, I
have plenty for both.’

‘I understand,’ said Daphne, growing pale in her turn; ‘I am a pauper.’

‘Daphne!’

‘My mother had not a sixpence, I suppose; and that is why nobody ever
speaks of her; and that is why there is not a portrait of her in this
house, where she lived, and was admired, and loved. I was wrong to call
Dibb vulgar for measuring all things by a money standard. It is other
people’s measure, as well as hers.’

‘Daphne, how can you say such things?’

‘Didn’t I tell you that I say everything that comes into my head? Oh,
Madoline, don’t for pity’s sake think that I envy you your wealth—you
who have been so good to me, you who are all I have to love in this
world! It is not the money I care for. I think I would just as soon be
poor as rich, if I could be free to roam the world, like a man. But to
live in a great house, waited on by an army of servants, and to know
that I am nobody, of no account, a mere waif, the penniless daughter of
a penniless mother—that wounds me to the quick.’

‘My dearest, my pet, what a false, foolish notion! Do you think anybody
in this house values you less because I have a fortune tied to me by
all manner of parchment deeds, and you have no particular settlement,
and have only expectations from a not over-rich father? Do you think
you are not admired for your grace and pretty looks, and that by-and-by
there will not come the best substitute which modern life can give for
the prince of our dear old fairy tales—a good husband, who will be
wealthy enough to give my darling all she can desire in this world?’

‘I’m sure I shall hate him, whoever he may be,’ said Daphne, with a
short, impatient sigh.

Madoline looked at her earnestly, with the tender motherly look which
came naturally to the beautiful face when the elder sister looked at
the younger. She had put aside her crewel-work at the beginning of this
conversation, and had given all her attention to Daphne.

‘Why do you say that, dearest?’ she asked gravely.

‘Oh, I don’t know, really. But I’m sure I shall never marry.’

‘Isn’t it rather early to make up your mind on that point?’

‘Why should it be? Hasn’t one a mind and a heart at seventeen as well
as at seven-and-twenty? I should like well enough to have a very rich
husband by-and-by, so that, instead of being Daphne, the pauper, I
might be Mrs. Somebody, with ever so much a year settled upon me for
ever and ever. But I don’t believe I shall ever see anybody I shall be
able to care for.’

‘I hope, darling, you haven’t taken it into your foolish head that you
care for some one already. School-girls are so silly.’

‘And generally fall in love with the dancing-master,’ said Daphne,
with a laugh. ‘I think I tried rather hard to do that, but I couldn’t
succeed. The poor man wore a wig; a dreadfully natural, dreadfully
curly wig; like the pictures of Lord Byron. No, Lina; I pledge you my
word that no dancing-master’s image occupies my breast.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ answered Madoline. ‘I hope there is no one
else.’

Daphne blushed rosy red. She took a gardenia from the low glass vase on
her sister’s work-table, where the white waxen flowers were clustered
in the centre of a circle of purple pansies, and began to pick the
petals off slowly, one by one.

‘He loves me—loves me not,’ she whispered softly, smiling all the while
at her own foolishness, till the smile faded slowly at sight of the
barren stem.

‘Loves me not,’ she sighed. ‘You see, Fate is against me, Lina. I am
doomed to die unmarried.’

‘Daphne, do you mean that there is someone?’ faltered Madoline, more
in earnest than it might seem needful to be with a creature so utterly
childlike.

‘There was a man once in a wood,’ said Daphne, with crimson cheeks
and downcast eyelids, yet with an arch smile curling her lips all the
while. ‘There was a man whom Dibb—I beg your pardon, Martha—and I once
met in a wood in our holidays—papa would have me spend my holidays at
school, you see—and I have thought since, sometimes—mere idle fancy, no
doubt—that he is the only man I should ever care to marry; and that is
impossible, for he is engaged to someone else. So you see I am fated to
die a spinster.’

‘Daphne, what do you mean? A man whom you met in a wood, and he was
engaged—and——! You don’t mean that you and your friend Miss Dibb made
the acquaintance of a strange man whom you met when you were out
walking,’ exclaimed Madoline, aghast at the idea. ‘Surely you were too
well looked after for that! You never went out walking alone, did you?
I thought Frenchwomen were so extremely particular.’

‘Of course they are,’ replied Daphne, laughing. ‘I was only drawing
on my imagination, dearest, just to see that solemn face of yours. It
was worth the trouble. No, Lina dear, there is no one. My heart is as
free as my shuttlecock, when I send it flying over the roof scaring the
swallows. And now, let us talk about your dear self. I want you to tell
me all about Mr. Goring; about Gerald. I suppose I may call him by his
christian name, as he is to be my brother-in-law by-and-by.’

‘Your brother, dear.’

‘Thank you, Lina. That sounds ever so much nicer. I am so short of
relations. Then I shall always call him Gerald. What a pretty name!’

‘He was called after his mother, Lady Geraldine.’

‘I see. She represented the patrician half of his family, and his
father the plebeian half, I believe? The father was a Dibb, was he
not—a money-grubber?’

‘His father was a very worthy man, who rose from the ranks, and made
his fortune as a contractor.’

‘And Lady Geraldine married him for the sake of his worthiness; and you
and Gerald are going to spend his money.’

‘Mr. Goring and his wife were a very united couple, I believe, Daphne.
There is no reason why you should laugh at them.’

‘Except my natural malice, which makes me inclined to ridicule good
people. You should have said that, Madoline; for you look as if you
meant it. Was the contractor’s name always Goring?’

‘No; he was originally a Mr. Giles, but he changed his name soon after
his marriage, and took the name of his wife’s maternal grandfather, a
Warwickshire squire.’

‘What a clever way of hooking himself on to the landed gentry!’ said
Daphne. ‘And now, please tell me all about Gerald. Is he very nice?’

‘You may suppose that I think him so,’ answered Madoline, going on with
the fashioning of a water-lily on a ground of soft gray cloth. ‘I can
hardly trust myself to praise him, for fear I should say too much.’

‘How is it that I have seen no photograph of him? I expected to see
half-a-dozen portraits of him in this room alone; but I suppose you
have an album crammed with his photos somewhere under lock and key.’

‘He has not been photographed since he was a school-boy. He detests
photography; and though he has often promised me that he would
sacrifice his own feelings so far as to be photographed, he has never
kept his word.’

‘That is very bad of him,’ said Daphne. ‘I am bursting with curiosity
about his looks. But—perhaps,’ she faltered, with a deprecating air,
‘the poor thing is rather plain, and that is why he does not care to be
photographed.’

‘No,’ replied Madoline, with her gentle smile; ‘I do not think his
worst enemy could call him plain—not that I should love him less if he
were the plainest of mankind.’

‘Yes, you would,’ exclaimed Daphne, with conviction. ‘It is all very
well to talk about loving a man for his mind, or his heart, and all
that kind of thing. You wouldn’t love a man with a potato-nose or a
pimply complexion, if he were morally the most perfect creature in the
universe. I am very glad my future brother is handsome.’

‘That is a matter of opinion—I don’t know your idea of a handsome man.’

‘Let me see,’ paid Daphne, clasping her bands above her head, in a
charmingly listless attitude, and giving herself up to thought. ‘My
idea of good looks in a man? The subject requires deliberation. What
do you say to a pale complexion, inclining to sallowness; dreamy eyes,
under dark straight brows; forehead low, yet broad enough to give room
for plenty of brains; mouth grave, and even mournful in expression,
except when he smiles—the whole face must light up like a god’s when he
smiles; hair darkest brown, short, straight, silky?’

‘One would think you had seen Mr. Goring, and were describing him,’
said Madoline.

‘What, Lina, is he like that?’

‘It is so difficult to realise a description, but really yours might do
for Gerald. Yet, I daresay, the image in your mind is totally different
from that in mine.’

‘No doubt,’ answered Daphne, and then, with a half-breathed sigh, she
quoted her favourite Tennyson. ‘No two dreams are alike.’

‘You will be able to judge for yourself before long,’ said Madoline;
‘Gerald is coming home in the autumn.’

‘The autumn!’ cried Daphne. ‘That is an age to wait. And then, I
suppose, you are to be married immediately?’

‘Not till next spring, That is my father’s wish. You see, I don’t come
of age till I’m twenty-five, and there are settlements and technical
difficulties. Papa thought it best for us to wait, and I did not wish
to oppose him.’

‘I believe it is all my father’s selfishness. He can’t bear to lose
you.’

‘Can I be angry with him for that?’ asked Madoline, smiling tenderly
at the thought of her father’s love. ‘I am proud to think that I am
necessary to his happiness.’

‘But there is your happiness—and Mr. Goring’s—to be considered. It has
been such a long engagement, and you have been kept so much apart. It
must have been a dreary time for you. If ever I am engaged I hope my
young man will always be dancing attendance upon me.’

‘My father thought it best that we should not be too much together,
for fear we should get tired of each other,’ said Madoline, with an
incredulous smile; ‘and as Gerald is very fond of travelling, and
wanted change after the shock of his mother’s death, papa proposed
that he should spend the greater part of his life abroad until my
twenty-fifth birthday. The separation would be a test for us both, my
father thought.’

‘A most cruel, unjustifiable test,’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘Your
twenty-fifth birthday, forsooth! Why, you will be an old woman before
you are married. In all the novels I ever read, the heroine married
before she was twenty, and even then she seemed sometimes quite an old
thing. Eighteen is the proper age for orange-blossoms and a Brussels
veil.’

‘That is all a matter of opinion, pet. I don’t think young lady
novelists of seventeen and eighteen have always the wisest views of
life. You must not say a word against your father, Daphne. He always
acts for the best.’

‘I never heard of a domestic tyrant yet of whom that could not be
said,’ retorted Daphne. ‘However, darling, if you are satisfied, I am
content; and I shall look forward impatiently to the autumn, and to the
pleasure of making my new brother’s acquaintance. I hope he will like
me.’

‘No fear of that, Daphne.’

‘I am not at all sure of winning his regard. Look at my father! I would
give a great deal to be loved by him, yet he detests me.’

‘Daphne! How can you say such a thing?’

‘It is the truth. Why should I not say it? Do you suppose I don’t
know the signs or aversion as well as the signs of love? I know that
you love me. You have no need to tell me so. I do not even want the
evidence of your kind acts. I am assured of your love. I can see it in
your face; I can hear it in every tone of your voice. And I know just
as well that my father dislikes me. He kept me at a distance as long
as ever he could, and now that duty—or his regard for other people’s
opinion—obliges him to have me at home, he avoids me as if I were a
roaring lion, or something equally unpleasant.’

‘Only be patient, dear. You will win his heart in time,’ said
Madoline soothingly. She had put aside the water-lily, and had drawn
her sister’s fair head upon her shoulder with caressing fondness. ‘He
cannot fail to love my sweet Daphne when he knows her better,’ she said.

‘I don’t know that. I fancy he was prejudiced against me when I was a
little thing and could scarcely have offended him; unless it were by
cutting my teeth disgustingly, or having nettlerash, or something of
that kind. Lina, do you think he hated my mother?’

Madoline started, and flushed crimson.

‘Daphne! what a question! Why, my father’s second marriage was a
love-match, like his first.’

‘Yes, I suppose he was in love with her, or he would hardly have
married a nobody,’ said Daphne, in a musing tone; ‘but he might have
got to hate her afterwards.’

At this moment the door was opened, and a voice, full, round, manly in
tone, said: ‘Madoline, I want you.’

Lina rose hastily, letting her work fall out of her lap, kissed Daphne,
and hurried from the room at her father’s summons.




CHAPTER V.

‘THOU LOVEST ME, THAT WOT I WEL CERTAIN.’


Many a time since her home-coming had Daphne been on the point of
telling her sister all about that more or less anonymous traveller,
whom she called the man in the wood; but her picnicking adventures,
looked at retrospectively from the strictly-correct atmosphere of home,
seemed much more terrible than they had appeared to her at Asnières;
where a vague hankering after forbidden pleasures was an element in
the girlish mind, and where there was a current idea that the most
appalling impropriety was allowable, provided the whole business were
meant as a joke. But Daphne, seated at Madoline’s feet, began to feel
doubtful if there were any excuse for such joking; and, after that
one skirmishing approach to the subject, she said no more about the
gentleman who had called himself Nero. It was hateful to her to have a
secret, were it the veriest trifle, from her sister; but the idea of
Madoline’s disapproval was still more repugnant to her; and she was
very certain that Madoline would disapprove of the whole transaction in
which Mr. Nero had been concerned.

‘I could never tell her how thoroughly at home I felt with him,’ mused
Daphne; ‘how easy and natural our acquaintance seemed—just as if we
had been destined from the very beginning of time to meet at that hour
and at that spot. And to part so soon!’ added Daphne with a sigh. ‘It
seemed hardly worth while to meet.’

Yes; it was a mystery upon which Daphne brooded very often in the fair
spring weather, as she wandered by her beloved river. Strange that two
lives should meet and touch for a moment, like circles on yonder placid
water—meet, and touch, and part, and never meet again!

‘The rings on the river break when they touch,’ thought Daphne. ‘They
are fatal to each other. Our meeting had no significance: two summer
days and it was all over and ended. I wonder whether Nero ever thought
of Poppæa after he left Fontainebleau? Poppæa! What a silly name; and
what a simpleton he must have thought me for assuming it.’

Of all things at South Hill, where there was so much that was
beautiful, Daphne loved the river. It had been her delight when she
was a tiny child, hardly able to syllable the words that were meant to
express admiration. She had wanted to walk into the water—had struggled
in her nurse’s arms to get at it, and make herself a part of the thing
that seemed so beautiful. Then when she was just a little older and
a little wiser, it had been her delight to sit on the very edge of
the stream, to sit hidden in the rushes, spelling out a fairy tale.
In those early days she would have been happy if the world had begun
and ended in those low-lying meadows where daffodils, and orchises,
and blue-bells grew in such rich abundance that she could gather and
waste them all day long, yet make no perceptible difference in their
number; where the lazy cattle stood half the day breast-high in the
weedy water, dreaming with wide open eyes; where the shadow of a bird
flitting across the stream was the only thing that gave token of
life’s restlessness. Later there came a happy midsummer holiday when
her father was away at Ems, nursing his last fancied disorder, and she
and Madoline were alone together at South Hill under the protection of
the maiden aunt, who never interfered with anybody’s pleasure so long
as she could enjoy her own way of life; and in a willow-shaded creek
Daphne found a disused forgotten punt which had lain stagnant in the
mud for the last seven years, and with the aid of a youth who worked in
the gardens she had so patched and caulked and painted this derelict
as to make it tolerably water-tight, and in this frail and clumsy
craft she had punted herself up and down a shallow tributary of the
deep swift Avon, as far afield as she could go without making Madoline
absolutely miserable.

And now being ‘finished,’ and a young woman, Daphne asked herself where
she was to get a boat. She had plenty of pocket-money. There was an old
boat-house under one of the willows where she could keep her skiff. She
had learnt to swim at Asnières, so there could be no danger. So she
took counsel with the garden youth, who had grown into a man by this
time, and asked him whether he could buy her a boat, and where.

‘That’s accordin’ to the kind o’ boat as you might fancy, miss,’
answered her friend. ‘There’s a many kind o’ boats, you see.’

‘Oh, I hardly know; but I should like something light and pretty, a
long, narrow boat, don’t you know?’ and Daphne went on to describe an
outrigger.

‘Lord, miss, it would be fearful dangerous. You’d be getting he among
the weeds, and upsettin’ un. You’d better have a dingey. That’s safe
and comfortable like.’

‘A dingey’s a thing like a washing-tub, isn’t it?’

‘Rayther that shape, miss.’

‘I wouldn’t sit in such a thing for the world. No, Bink, if I can’t
have a long, narrow boat with a sharp nose, I’ll have a punt. I think
I should really like a punt. I was so fond of that one. I feel quite
sorry that the rats ate it. Yes; you must buy me a punt. There’ll
be plenty of room in it for my drawing-board, and my books, and my
crewel-work; for I mean to live on the river when the summer comes. How
soon can you buy me my punt?’

‘I think as how you’d better have a dingey, miss,’ said Bink. ‘It was
all very well pushing about a punt in the creeks when you was a child,
but a punt don’t do in deep water. You can have a nice-shaped dingey,
not too much of a tub, you know, and a pair o’ sculls, and I’ll teach
you to row. I can order it any arternoon that I can get an ’oliday,
miss. There’s a good boat-builder at Stratford. I’ll order he to build
it.’

‘How lovely,’ cried Daphne, clapping her hands. ‘A boat built on
purpose for me! It must have no end of cushions, for my sister will
come with me very often, of course. And it must be painted in the early
English style. I’ll have a dark red dado.’

‘A what, miss?’

‘A dado, Bink. The lower half of the inside must be painted dark red,
and the upper half a lovely cream colour; and the outside must be a
dark greenish-brown. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Not over well, miss. You’d better write it down for the boat-builder.’

‘I’ll do better than that, Bink—I’ll make a sketch of the boat, and
paint it the colours I want. And it—she—must have a name, I suppose.’

‘Boats has names mostly, miss.’

‘My boat shall not be nameless. I’ll call her——’ A pause, then a sudden
dimpling smile and a bright blush, loveliness thrown away on Bink, who
stood at ease leaning on his hoe and staring at the river. ‘I’ll call
her—Nero.’

‘An ’ero, miss. What ’ero? The old Dook o’ Wellington? He were an
’ero, warn’t he? Or Nelson? That’s more of a name for a boat.’

‘Nero, Bink, Nero. I’ll write it down for the boat-builder.’

‘You’d better, please, miss. I never was good at remembering names.’

When Daphne had given Bink the sketch, with full authority to
commission her boat, she had an after-thought about her father. The
boat-house was his property; even the river in some measure belonged
to him; he had at least riparian rights. So after dinner that evening,
when Madoline and she were sitting opposite each other in silence
at the pretty table, bright with velvety gloxinias and maidenhair
ferns, while Sir Vernon leant back in his chair, sipping his claret,
and grumbling vaguely about things in general, the indolence of his
servants, the unfitness of his horses, the impending ruin of the land
in which he lived, and the crass ignorance of the pig-headed body
of men who were pretending to govern it, Daphne, in a pause of the
paternal monologue, lifted up her voice.

‘Papa, may I have a dingey, please? I can buy it with my own money.’

‘A dingey!’ exclaimed Sir Vernon. ‘What in Heaven’s name is a dingey?’

He had an idea that it must be some article of female attire or of
fancy-work, since his frivolous young daughter desired to possess it.

‘A dingey—is—a kind of boat, papa.’

‘On, a dingey!’ exclaimed Sir Vernon, as if she had said something else
in the first instance. ‘What can you want with a dingey?’

‘I am so dearly fond of the river, papa; and a dingey is such a safe
boat, Bink says.’

‘Who is Bink?’

‘One of the under gardeners.’

‘A curious authority to quote. So you want a dingey, and to row
yourself about the river like a boy.’

‘There is no one to notice me, papa.’

‘The place is secluded enough, so long as you don’t go beyond our own
meadows. I desired Madame Tolmache to have you taught swimming. Can you
swim?’

‘Yes, papa. I believe I am a rather good swimmer.’

‘Well, you can have your boat—it is a horribly masculine taste—always
provided you do not go beyond our own fields. I cannot have you boating
over half the county.’

‘I shall be quite happy to keep to our own fields, papa,’ Daphne
answered meekly.

She enlisted the devoted Bink in her service next morning; he patched
up the old boat-house, and whitewashed the inside walls; much to
the displeasure of Mr. MacCloskie, the head gardener, a gentleman
in broadcloth and a top-hat, who seemed to do little more than walk
about the grounds, smoke his pipe in the hot-houses, plan expensive
improvements, and order costly novelties from the most famous nurseries
at home and abroad. Bink ought to have been wheeling manure from the
stable during that very afternoon which he had devoted to the repair of
the boat-house; and Mr. MacCloskie declared that the future well-being
of his melon-bed was imperilled by the young man’s misconduct.

‘I shall complain to Sir Vernon,’ said MacCloskie.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. MacCloskie, but Miss Daphne told me to do it.’

‘Miss Daphne, indeed! I can’t have my gardeners interfered with by Miss
Daphne,’ exclaimed MacCloskie; as much as to say that his master’s
second daughter was a person of very small account.

He gave Daphne a lecture that evening, in very broad Scotch, when he
met her in the rose-garden.

‘You’ll be meddling with my roses next, miss, I suppose,’ he said
severely. ‘You young ladies from boarding-school have no respect for
anything.’

‘Your roses!’ cried Daphne, with a contemptuous glance at the
closely-pruned twigs of the standards, which at this early period
looked as if they would never flower again. ‘When I see any I shall
know how to appreciate them. Roses, indeed! I wonder you like to
mention them. Everything flowers a month earlier in France than you
can make it do here. I had a finer Gloire de Dijon nodding in at my
window at Asnières this time last year than you ever saw in your life’;
and she marched off, leaving MacCloskie with a dim idea that in any
skirmish with this young lady he was likely to be worsted.

How ardently she had longed for home a few weeks ago, when she was
counting the days that must pass before the appointed date of her
return, under the wing of Madame Tolmache, who crossed the Channel
reluctantly once or twice a year to escort pupils, and was prostrate in
the cabin throughout the brief sea-passage, leaving the pupils to take
care of themselves, and so horribly ill on landing that the pupils had
to take care of her. So long as South Hill was in the future Daphne
had believed that perfect happiness awaited her there—gladness without
a flaw—but now that she was at home, established, a recognised member
of the family for all her life to come, she began to discover that
even at South Hill life was not perfect happiness. She was devotedly
fond of Madoline, and Madoline was full of affection—careful, anxious,
almost maternal love—for her. There was no flaw in her gladness here.
But every hour she spent in her father’s company made her more certain
of the one painful fact that he did not care for her. There was even
in her mind the terrible suspicion that he actually disliked her; that
he would have been glad to have her out of his way—married, dead and
buried—anything so that she might be removed from his path.

She was very young, and her spirits had all the buoyancy of youth that
has never been acquainted with sordid cares. So there was plenty of
gladness in her life. It was only now and then that the thought of her
father’s indifference, or possible dislike, drifted like a passing
cloud across her mind, and took the charm out of everything.

‘What a lovely place it is!’ she said to Madoline, one evening after
dinner, when they were strolling about the lawn, where three of the
finest deodaras in the county rose like green towers against the warm
western sky; ‘I am fonder of it every day, yet I can’t help feeling
that I’m an interloper.’

‘Daphne! You—the daughter of the house!’

‘A daughter; not the daughter,’ answered Daphne. ‘Sometimes I fancy
that I am a daughter too many. You should have heard how MacCloskie
talked to me yesterday because I had taken Bink from his work for an
hour or two. If I had been a poor little underpaid nursery governess
he couldn’t have scolded me more severely. And I think servants have a
knack of finding out their master’s feelings. If I had been a favourite
with my father, MacCloskie would never have talked like that. A
favourite! What nonsense! It is so obvious that I bore him awfully.’

‘Daphne, if you are going to nurse this kind of fancy you will never
be happy,’ Madoline said earnestly, winding her arm round her sister,
as they sauntered slowly down the sloping lawn, side by side. ‘You
must make every allowance for papa; he is not a demonstrative man. His
manner may seem cold, perhaps—’

‘Cold!’ cried Daphne; ‘it is ice. I feel I have entered the frigid zone
directly I go into his presence. But he is not cold to you; he has love
enough, and to spare, for you.’

‘We have been so much together. I have learned to be useful to him.’

‘Yes; you have spent your life with him, while I have been an outcast
and an alien.’

‘Daphne, you have no right to speak like that. My father is a man of
peculiar temper. It pleased him to have only one daughter at home
till both were grown up. You were more lively than I—younger by seven
years—and he fancied you would be noisy. He is a nervous man, wanting
an atmosphere of complete repose. And now you are grown up, and have
come home for good; and I really cannot see any reason why you should
complain.’

‘No; there is nothing to complain about,’ cried Daphne bitterly, ‘only
that I have been cheated out of a father’s love. Not by you, Lina
dearest; no, not by you,’ she exclaimed, when her sister would have
spoken. ‘I am not base enough to be jealous of you; you who have been
my good angel always. No, dear; but he has cheated me. My father has
cheated me in not giving me a chance of getting at his heart when I was
a child. What is the good of my trying now? I come home to him as a
stranger. How can he be expected to care for me?’

‘If he does not love you now, my pet—and mind, I don’t admit that it
is so—he will soon learn to be fond of you. He can’t help admiring my
sweet young sister,’ said Madoline, with tearful eyes.

‘I will never plague you about him any more, dear,’ protested Daphne,
with a penitent air. ‘I will try to be satisfied with your affection.
You do love me, don’t you?’

‘With all my strength.’

‘And to do my duty in that state of life, etc., etc., etc.’

‘Talking of duty, Daphne, I have been wanting to make a suggestion for
the last week or two,’ said Madoline gently. ‘Don’t you think it would
be better for you if you were to employ yourself a little more?’

‘Employ myself!’ cried Daphne. ‘Why, I have been tremendously busy for
the last three days—about the dingey.’

‘Dearest, you are laughing at me. I mean that at seventeen—’

‘And a half,’ interjected Daphne, with dignity.

‘At seventeen your education can hardly be completed.’

‘I know ridiculously little, though I have been outrageously crammed.
I’m afraid all the sciences and languages and literature have got
mixed up in my brain, somehow,’ said Daphne; ‘but I am awfully fond of
poetry. I know a good deal of Tennyson by heart. I could repeat every
line of “The Lotos Eaters,” if you asked me,’ said Daphne, blushing
unaccountably.

‘I think you ought to read, dear,’ pursued Madoline gravely.

‘Why, so I do. Didn’t I read three volumes of “Sair for Somebody,” in a
single day, in order that the book might go back to Mudie’s?’

‘That rubbishing story! Daphne dear, you know I am talking of serious
reading.’

‘Then you had better find somebody else to talk to,’ said Daphne.
‘I never could pin my mind to a dull book; my thoughts go dancing
off like butterflies, skimming away like swallows. I could no more
plod through a history, or a volume of “Voyages in Timbuctoo,” or
“Sir Somebody’s Memoirs at the Court of Queen Joan of Naples,” or “A
Waiting-woman’s Recollections of Peter the Great,” than I could fly.
There are a few characters in history I like to read about—in short
instalments. Napoleon the Great, for instance. There is a hero for
you—bloodthirsty, but nice. Mary Stuart, Julius Cæsar, Sir Walter
Raleigh, Columbus, Shakespeare. These shine out like stars. But the
dull dead level of history—the going out of the Whigs and the coming
in of the Tories, the everlasting battles in the Netherlands or the
Punjaub! I envy you your faculty of taking interest in such dry-as-dust
stuff, but I cannot imitate you.’

‘I like to be able to talk to papa—and to Gerald, by-and-by,’ said
Madoline shyly.

‘Does papa talk of the Punjaub?’

‘Not often, dear; but in order to understand the events of one’s own
day, it is necessary to know the history of the past. Papa likes to
discuss public affairs, and I generally read the _Times_ to him every
morning, as you know.’

‘Yes,’ answered Daphne; ‘I know you are his slave.’

‘Daphne, it is my delight to be useful to him.’

‘Yes; that is the sort of woman you are, always sacrificing your own
happiness for other people. But I love you for it, dearest,’ exclaimed
Daphne, with one of her sudden gushes of affection. ‘Only don’t ask me
to improve myself, darling, now that I am tasting perfect liberty for
the first time in my life. Think how I have been ground and polished
and governessed and preached at, and back-boarded,’ drawing up her slim
figure straight as an arrow, ‘and dumb-belled, and fifth-positioned,
for so many weary years of my life, and let me have my fling of
idleness at home. I began to wonder if I really had a home, my father
kept me away from it so long. Let me be idle and happy, Lina, for a
little while; I shall mend by-and-by.’

‘My pet, do you suppose I don’t wish you to be happy? But I don’t want
your education to come to a full stop, because you have left school.’

‘Let me learn to be like you, if I can. There could be no higher
education than that.’

‘Flatterer!’

‘No, Lina, no one can flatter perfection.’

Madoline stopped her with a kiss, blushing at her praise. And then they
turned and walked slowly back to the house, across the dewy lawn, where
the shadows of the deodaras had deepened and lengthened with the rising
of the moon. Daphne paused on the terrace to look back at the low-lying
river gleaming between its willowy banks—so beautiful and ghostly a
thing in the moonlight that it almost seemed as if it belonged to
another world.

‘How lovely it is out of doors!’ sighed Daphne. ‘Doesn’t it seem
foolishness to shut oneself up in a house? Stay a little longer, Lina.’

‘Papa would not like to be deserted, dear. And Aunt Rhoda talked about
coming in this evening.’

‘Then I am in for a lecture,’ said Daphne. ‘Aunt Rhoda told me to go
and see her, and I haven’t been.’

There was a brilliant light in the billiard-room, and the two girls
went in through the conservatory and down the marble steps to the room
where they were most likely to find their father at this time of the
evening. Sir Vernon Lawford was not an enthusiastic billiard-player;
indeed, he was not enthusiastic about anything, except his own merits,
of which he had a very exalted opinion. He played a game of billiards
every evening, because it kept him awake and kept him in gentle
movement, which state of being he considered good for his health. He
played gravely, as if he were doing his duty to society, and played
well; and though he liked to have his elder daughter in the room while
he played, and could bring himself to tolerate the presence of other
people, he resented anything distracting in the way of conversation.

Seen in the bright white light of the carcel lamps, Sir Vernon Lawford,
at fifty-three years of age, was still a handsome man—a tall, well
set up man, with a hard, clearly chiselled face, eyes of lightish
gray, cold and severe in expression, gray hair and whiskers, hands
of feminine delicacy in shape and colour, and something rigid and
soldierlike in his bearing, as of a man who had been severely drilled
himself, and would be a martinet in his rule over others.

He was bending over the table with frowning brow, meditating a
difficult stroke, as the two girls came softly in through the wide
doorway—two tall slim figures in white gowns, with a background of
flowers and palms showing dimly behind them, and beyond the foliage and
flowers, the glimmer of a marble balustrade.

A fashionably-dressed lady of uncertain age, the solitary spectator of
the game, sat fanning herself in silence by the wide marble fire-place.

Sir Vernon’s antagonist came quietly forward to greet Madoline and her
sister.

‘I am so glad you have come in,’ he said confidentially. ‘I am getting
ignominiously licked. I had a good mind to throw up the sponge and bolt
out into the garden after you just now; only I thought if I didn’t take
my licking decently, Sir Vernon would never play with me again. Isn’t
it too delicious out there among the deodaras?’

‘Heavenly,’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘and the river looks like the _chemin du
Paradis_. I wonder you can stay in this glaring room.’

Sir Vernon had made up his mind by this time, and with a slow and
gentle stroke, made a cannon and sent his adversary’s ball into a
pocket.

‘Just like my luck,’ said the adversary, while Sir Vernon again
deliberated.

He was a man of about seven-and-twenty, tall, broad-shouldered,
good-looking, with something of a gladiatorial air in his billiard-room
undress. He was fair, with a healthy Saxon colour, and Saxon blue
eyes; features not chiselled, but somewhat heavily moulded, yet
straight and regular withal; hair, a lightish brown, cropped closely
to a well-shaped head; forehead, fairly furnished with intellectual
organs, but not the brow of poet or philosopher, wit or savant: a good
average English forehead, a good average English face, beaming with
good-nature, as he stands by Madoline’s side, chalking his cue as
industriously as if chalk could win the game.

This was Edgar Turchill, of Hawksyard Grange, Sir Vernon Lawford’s
most influential and pleasantest neighbour, a country squire of old
family and fair fortune, owner of one of the most interesting places in
the county, a real Warwickshire manor-house, and the only son of his
widowed mother.

The lady by the fire-place now began to think she had been neglected
long enough, and beckoned Daphne with her fan. She beckoned the girl
with an authoritative air which distinctly indicated relationship.

‘Come here and sit by me, child,’ she whispered, tapping the
fender-stool with the point of her embroidered shoe, whereupon Daphne
meekly crouched at the lady’s feet, prepared for the worst. ‘Why have
you never been to the Rectory?’

Daphne twisted her fingers in and out of her slender watch-chain with
an embarrassed air.

‘Indeed, I hardly know why, Aunt Rhoda,’ she faltered; ‘perhaps it was
because I was enjoying myself so much. Everything at home was so new to
me, you see—the gardens, the river, the meadows.’

‘You were enjoying yourself so much that you had no inclination to see
your aunt and uncle?’

‘Uncle?’ echoed Daphne. ‘Oh, you mean the Rector?’

‘Of course. Is he not your uncle?’

‘Is he, aunt? I know he’s your husband; but as you only married him a
year ago, and he hadn’t begun to be my uncle when I was last at home,
it never occurred to me——’

‘That by my marriage with him he had become your uncle. That looks like
ignorance, Daphne, or want of proper feeling,’ said the Rector’s wife
with an offended air.

‘It was ignorance, Aunt Rhoda. At Madame Tolmache’s they taught us so
much geography and geology and astronomy, don’t you know, that they
were obliged to keep us in the dark about uncles and aunts. And am I
really to call the Rector, uncle? It seems quite awful.’

‘Why awful?’

‘Because I have looked up to him all my life as a being in a black silk
gown who preached long sermons and would do something awful to me if
I laughed in church. I looked upon him as the very embodiment of the
Church, don’t you know, and should hardly have believed that he wanted
breakfast and dinner, and wore out his clothes and boots like other
men. When he came to call I used to run away and hide myself. I had an
idea that he would scold me if I came in his way—take me to task for
not being a christian, or ask me to repeat last Sunday’s Gospel. And to
think that he should be my uncle. How curiously things come round in
this life!’

‘I hope you will not cease to respect him, and that you will learn to
love him,’ said Aunt Rhoda severely.

‘Learn to love him! Do you think he would like it?’ asked Daphne
doubtfully.

‘He would like you to behave to him as a niece ought, Daphne. Marmaduke
considers my relations his own.’

‘I’m sure it is very good of him,’ said Daphne, ‘but I should think it
must come a little difficult after having known us so long in quite
another capacity.’

The Rector’s wife gave her niece a look of half interrogation, half
disapproval. She did not know how much malice might lurk under the
girl’s seeming innocence. She and Daphne had never got on very well
together in the old days, when Miss Lawford was the mistress of South
Hill, and the arbiter of her nieces’ lives.

A year ago, and Rhoda Lawford, at three-and-forty, was still Rhoda
Lawford; and any idea of matrimonial promotion which she had once
cherished might fairly be supposed to have expired in the cold shade
of a neighbourhood where there were very few marriageable men. But
Rhoda had begun life as a girl with considerable pretensions. She had
never asserted herself or been put forward by her friends as a beauty.
The material for that kind of reputation was wanting. But she had been
admired and praised for her style, her manner, her complexion, her
hair, her hands, her feet, her waist, her shoulders. She was a young
lady with good points, and had been admired for her points. People had
talked of her as the elegant Miss Lawford: and as, happily, elegance
is a quality which time need not impair, Rhoda had gone on being
elegant for five-and-twenty years. The waist and shoulders, the hands
and feet, had never been out of training for a quarter of a century.
More ephemeral charms had bloomed and faded; and many a fair friend
of Rhoda’s who had triumphed in the insolence of conscious beauty was
now a _passée_ matron, of whom her acquaintance said pityingly, ‘You
have no idea how pretty that woman was fifteen years ago;’ but the
elegant Miss Lawford’s attractions were unimpaired, and the elegant
Miss Lawford had not yet surrendered the hope of winning a prize in the
matrimonial lottery.

The living of Baddesley-with-Arden was one of those fat sinecures
which are usually given to men of good family and considerable private
means. The Reverend Marmaduke Ferrers was the descendant of a race
well rooted in the soil, and had, by the demise of two bachelor uncles
and three maiden aunts, accumulated to himself a handsome property,
in land, and houses, and the safer kind of public securities. These
legacies had fallen in at longish intervals, some of the aunts being
slow in relaxing their grip upon this world’s gear; but had all the
wealth of a Westminster or a Rothschild been poured into the Reverend
Marmaduke’s lap, he would not have renounced the great tithes of
Baddesley-with-Arden, or the important, and, in a manner, judicial
and dictatorial position which he held as Rector of those two small
parishes. Mr. Ferrers loved the exercise of authority on a small
scale. He had an autocratic mind, but it was a very small mind, and it
suited him to be the autocrat of two insignificant pastoral villages,
rather than to measure his power against the men of cities. To hector
Giles for getting drunk on a Saturday night, to lecture Joan for her
absence from church on Sunday, afforded the Rector as much delight as
a bigger man might have felt in towering over the riot of a Republican
chamber or proroguing a Rump parliament. Mr. Ferrers had been Rector
of Baddesley thirty years, and in all that time he had never once
thought of taking to himself a wife. He had a lovely old Rectory and a
lovelier garden; he had the best servants in the neighbourhood—partly
because he was a most exacting master, and partly because he paid his
housekeeper largely, and made her responsible for everybody else. The
whole machinery of his life worked with a delightful smoothness. He
had nothing to gain from matrimony in the way of domestic comfort; and
there is always the possibility of loss. Thus it happened that although
he had gone on admiring Miss Lawford for a round dozen years, talking
of her as a most ladylike and remarkably well-informed person, pouring
all his small grievances into her ear, confiding to her the most
recondite details of any little complaint from which he happened to
suffer, consulting her about his garden, his stable, his parish, it had
never occurred to him that he should improve his condition or increase
his happiness by making the lady his wife.

Yet, throughout this time, Rhoda Lawford had always had it in her
mind that if all other views failed, she could wind up fairly well
by marrying the Rector. It was not at all the kind of fate she had
imagined for herself years ago in the freshness of her charms; but it
would be a respectable match. Nobody could presume to pity her, or say
that she had done badly. The Rector was ten years her senior, so nobody
could laugh at her for marrying a youth. Altogether there would be a
fitness and a propriety about the alliance, which would be in perfect
harmony with the elegance of her person and the spotlessness of her
character. On her fortieth birthday, Miss Lawford told herself that
the time had now come when the Rector must be taken seriously in hand,
and taught to see what was good for himself. A friendship which had
been meandering on for the last twelve years must be brought to a head;
dangling attention and old-fashioned compliments must be reduced into
something more tangible. In a word, the Rector must be converted from a
friend into a suitor.

It had taken Miss Lawford two years to open the Reverend Marmaduke’s
eyes; but at the end of those two years the thing was done, and the
Rector was sighing, somewhat apoplectically, for the approach of his
wedding-day, and the privilege of claiming Rhoda for his own. The whole
process had been carried out with such consummate tact that Marmaduke
Ferrers had not the faintest suspicion that the matrimonial card which
he had drawn had been forced upon him. He believed in his engagement
as the spontaneous growth of his own mind. ‘Strange that I should have
known you so long, my Rhoda, and only discovered lately that you were
so dear to me,’ he murmured in his fat voice, as he dawdled with his
betrothed in one of those shadowy Warwickshire lanes which seem made
for the meandering of lovers. His Rhoda smiled tenderly; and then they
began to talk about the new carpet for the Rectory drawing-room, the
_Sèvres garniture de cheminée_ which Sir Vernon had given his sister
for a wedding present, dwelling rather upon the objective than the
subjective side of their position, as middle-aged lovers are apt to do.

‘I hope you will not mind my keeping Todd,’ said the Rector presently,
pausing to recover his breath, and plucking a dog-rose in absence of
mind.

‘Dearest, have I any wish in opposition to yours?’ murmured Rhoda, but
not without a shadow of sourness in the droop of her lips, for she had
a shrewd idea that so long as the Rector’s housekeeper, Mrs. Todd,
remained at the Rectory, nobody else could be mistress there.




CHAPTER VI.

‘LOVE MAKETH ALL TO GONE MISWAY.’


Aunt Rhoda was not a person to be set at defiance, even by Daphne,
who was by no means a tractable spirit. She had said, ‘Come to the
Rectory,’ and had said it with such an air of offended dignity that
Daphne felt she must obey, and promptly, lest a worse lecture should
befall her. So directly after luncheon on the following day she changed
her gown, and prepared herself for the distasteful visit. Madoline was
going to drive to Warwick with her father, so Daphne would have to
perform her penance alone.

It was a lovely afternoon in the first week of May, the air balmy and
summer-like, the meadows looking their greenest before the golden glory
of buttercup time. Yonder in the reedy hollows the first of the marsh
marigolds were opening their yellow cups, and smiling up at the yellow
sun. The walk to Arden Rectory was something over a mile, and it was
as lovely a walk as any one need care to take; through meadows, beside
flowery hedgerows, with the river flowing near, but almost hidden by a
thick screen of willows; and then by one of the most delightful lanes
in the county, a green arcade of old elms, with here a spreading oak,
and there a mountain ash, to give variety to the foliage.

Daphne set out alone, as soon as she had seen the carriage drive away
from the door; but she was not destined to go her way unaccompanied.
Half way down the avenue she met Mr. Turchill, strolling at a lazy
pace, a cigar in his mouth, and a red setter of Irish pedigree at his
heels.

At sight of Daphne he threw away his cigar, and took his hands out of
his pockets.

‘I was coming up to the Hill to ask somebody to play a game of
billiards, and everybody seems going out,’ he said.

They had known him so long in an easy-going neighbourly way that he
almost took rank as a relation. Daphne, who had spent so much of her
life away from home, had naturally seen less of him than anybody
else; but as she had been a child during the greater part of their
acquaintance, he had fallen into the way of treating her as an elder
brother might have done; and he had not yet become impressed with the
dignity of her advancing years. For him she was still the Daphne he had
romped with in the Christmas holidays, and whose very small pony it had
been his particular care to get broken.

‘I met Madoline and Sir Vernon going to Warwick. Why go to Warwick?
What is there for anyone but a Cook’s tourist to do in Warwick? But I
thought you would be at home. You haven’t a bad notion of billiards,
and you might have helped a fellow to while away an afternoon.’

‘You are like the idle boy in the spelling-book story, wanting someone
to play with you,’ said Daphne, laughing at him. He had turned, and was
walking beside her, the docile setter following meekly, like a dog who
felt that he was of no consequence in the world now that the days of
sport were done.

‘Well, the hunting’s all over, don’t you know, and there’s no more
shooting, and I never cared much for fishing, and I’ve got such a
confoundedly clever bailiff that he won’t let me open my mouth on the
farm. So the days do hang rather heavy on a fellow’s hands.’

‘Why don’t you take to Alpine climbing?’ suggested Daphne. ‘I don’t
mean Mont Blanc—everybody does that—but the Matterhorn, or Monte Rosa,
or something. If I were a young man I should amuse myself in that way.’

‘I don’t set an exaggerated value on my life, but when I do make up my
mind to throw it away, I think I’ll do the thing more comfortably,’
replied Edgar Turchill. ‘Don’t trouble yourself to suggest employment
for me. I’m not complaining of my life. There’s a good deal of loafing
in it, but I rather like loafing, especially when I can loaf in
pleasant company. Where are you going, and may I go with you?’

‘I am going on a duty visit to Aunt Rhoda and my new uncle. Isn’t it
rather dreadful to have an uncle thrust upon one in that way?’

‘Well,’ returned Edgar deliberately, ‘I must say if I had the choosing
of my relations I should leave out the Rector. But you needn’t mind
him. Practically he’s no more to you than he was before he married your
aunt.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Daphne doubtfully. ‘He may take liberties. He was
always a lecturing old thing, and he’ll lecture ever so much more now
that he’s a relation.’

‘But you needn’t stand his lecturing. Just tell him quietly that you
don’t hold with clerical interference in the affairs of the laity.’

‘He got me ready for my confirmation, and that gave him a kind of
hold over me,’ said Daphne. ‘You see, he found out the depth of my
ignorance.’

‘I’ll wager he’d be ploughed in a divinity exam, to-morrow,’ said
Edgar. ‘These old heathens of village parsons got their degrees in
a day when the dons were a set of sleepy-headed old duffers like
themselves. But don’t let’s talk about him. What is Madoline going to
do in Warwick?’

‘She and my father are going to make some calls in the neighbourhood,
and I believe she has a little shopping to do.’

‘Why didn’t you go with them?’

‘Papa does not like to have three people in the barouche. Besides, I
had promised to call on my aunt. She talked to me quite awfully last
night about my want of proper feeling in never having visited her in
her new house.’

‘Why didn’t you wait till she asked you to dinner? They give capital
dinners at the Rectory, but their feeds are few and far between. I
don’t want to say anything rude about your aunt, but she strikes me
as a lady who has too keen an appreciation of the value of money to
fritter it away upon other people.’

‘Why don’t you say at once that she’s horribly stingy?’ said the
outspoken Daphne. ‘I don’t think she ever spent sixpence, except upon
her own clothes, all the time she lived in my father’s house, and I
know she was always getting gowns and bonnets out of Madoline. I’ve
seen her do it. But please don’t let’s talk of her any more. It’s
rather worse than talking of him. I shall have to kiss her, and call
her dear aunt presently, and I shall detest myself for being such a
hypocrite.’

They had gone out by the lodge-gate by this time, the lodge with its
thatched roof and dormer window, like a big eye looking out under a
shaggy pent-house eyebrow; the lodge by which there grew one of those
tall deodaras which were the chief glory of the grounds at South
Hill. They crossed the high road, and entered the meadow-path which
led towards Arden Rectory; and the setter finding himself at large
in a field, frisked about a little as if with a faint suspicion of
partridges.

‘Oh, by-the-by,’ began Daphne, in quite a new tone, ‘now that we are
alone, I want you to tell me all about Lina’s engagement. Is he nice?’

Edgar Turchill’s face clouded over so darkly that the look seemed a
sufficient answer to her question.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You don’t like him.’

‘I can’t say that. He’s an old acquaintance—a friend—a kind of family
connection even, for his mother’s grandmother was a Turchill. But to be
candid, I don’t like the engagement.’

‘Why not, unless you know something against him?’

‘I know nothing against him. He is a gentleman. He is ten times
cleverer than I, ten times richer, a great deal handsomer—my superior
in every way. I should be a mean cad if I couldn’t acknowledge as much
as that. But——’

‘You think Lina ought to have accepted him.’

‘I think the match in every way suitable, natural, inevitable. How
could he help falling in love with her? Why should she refuse him?’

‘You are talking in riddles,’ said Daphne. ‘You say it is a suitable
match, and a minute ago you said you did not like the engagement.’

‘I say so still. Can’t you imagine a reason for my feelings?’

Daphne contemplated him thoughtfully for a few moments as they walked
on. His frank English face looked graver than she ever remembered to
have seen it—grave to mournfulness.

‘I am very sorry,’ she faltered. ‘I see. You are fond of her yourself.
I am desperately sorry. I should have liked you ever so much better for
a brother.’

‘Don’t say that till you have seen Gerald. He has wonderful powers of
fascination. He paints and poetises, and all that kind of thing, don’t
you know; the sort of thing that pleases women. He can’t ride a little
bit—no seat—no hands.’

‘How dreadful!’ cried Daphne, aghast. ‘Does he tumble off?’

‘I don’t mean that. He can stick in his saddle somehow; and he hunts
when he’s at home in the season; but he can’t ride.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne, as if she were trying to understand this distinction.

‘Yes, Daphne. I don’t mind your knowing it—now it’s all over and done
with,’ pursued Edgar, glad to pour his griefs into a friendly ear.
‘You’re my old playfellow—almost like a little sister—and I don’t think
you’ll laugh at me, will you, dear?’

‘Laugh at you!’ cried Daphne. ‘If I do may I never be able to smile
again.’

‘I asked your sister to marry me. I had gone on loving her for I don’t
know how long, before I could pluck up courage to ask the question, I
was so afraid of being refused. And I knew if she would only say “Yes,”
that my mother would be the proudest woman in the county, for she
positively adores Madoline. And I knew Lina liked Hawksyard; and that
was encouraging. So one day, about four years ago, I got desperate,
and asked the plain question in a plain way. Heaven knows how much
of my happiness hung on the answer; but I couldn’t have screwed any
poetry out of myself to save my life. I could only tell her the honest
truth—that I loved her as well as man ever loved woman.’

‘Well?’ asked Daphne.

‘It was no use. She said “No,” so kindly, so sweetly, so
affectionately—for she really likes me, you know, in a sisterly
way—that she made me cry like a child. Yes, Daphne, I made a miserable
ass of myself. She must have despised such unmanly weakness. And then
in a few minutes it was all over. All my hopes were extinguished like
a candle blown out by the wind, and all my future life was dark. And I
had to go back and tell the poor mother that the daughter she wanted
was never to come to Hawksyard.’

‘I am so sorry for you,’ faltered Daphne.

‘Thank you, dear. I knew you would be sympathetic. The blow was a
crusher, I assure you. I went away for a few months deer-stalking
in the Highlands; but lying on a mountain side in a gray mist for
hours on end, not daring to move an eyelash, gives a fellow too much
time for thought. I was always thinking of Madoline, and my thoughts
were just two hundred and fifty miles due south of the stag when he
came across, so I generally shot wild, and felt myself altogether a
failure. Then I tried a month in Normandy and Brittany with a knapsack,
thinking I might walk down my trouble. But I found that tramping from
one badly-drained town to another badly-drained town—all infected with
garlic—and looking at churches I didn’t particularly want to see, was a
sham kind of consolation for a very real disappointment; so I made up
my mind to come back to Hawksyard and live it down. And I have lived it
down,’ concluded Edgar exultantly.

‘You don’t care for Madoline any longer?’

‘Not care for her! I shall worship her as long as I have breath in
my body. But I have resigned myself to the idea that somebody else
is going to marry her—that the most I can ever be to her is a good,
useful, humdrum kind of friend, who will be godfather to one of her
boys by-and-by; ready to ride helter-skelter for the doctor if any of
her children show symptoms of measles or whooping-cough; glad to take
dummy of an evening when she and her husband want to play whist; or to
entertain the boys at Hawksyard for their summer holidays while she and
he are enjoying a _tête-à-tête_ ramble in the Engadine. That is the
sort of man I shall be.’

‘How good you are!’ said Daphne, slipping her hand through his arm with
an affectionate impulse.

‘Ah, my little Daphne, it will be your turn to full in love some of
these days; put it off as long as you can, dear, for there’s more pain
than pleasure in it at best.’ Daphne gave an involuntary sigh. ‘And
then I hope you’ll confide in me just as freely as I have confided
in you. I may be useful as an adviser, you know, having had my own
troubles.’

‘You could only advise me to be patient, and give up all hope,’ said
Daphne, drawing her hand from his arm. ‘What would be the good of
such advice? But I shall never trouble you. I am not going to fall in
love—ever.’

She gave the last word an almost angry emphasis.

‘Poor little Daphne! as if you could know anything about it,’ exclaimed
Edgar, smiling incredulously at her. ‘That kind of thing comes upon one
unawares. You talk as if you could choose whether you would fall in
love or not—like Hercules between his two roads, deliberating whether
he should go to the right or the left. Ah, my dear, when we come to
that stage of our journey there is but one road for us: and whether it
lead to the Garden of Eden or the Slough of Despond, we must travel
over it.’

‘You are getting poetical,’ exclaimed Daphne scornfully; ‘I didn’t know
that was in your line. But please tell me about Gerald. I have never
seen him, you know. He was always at Oxford, or roaming about the world
somewhere, when I was at home for the holidays. I have been at home
so little, you see,’ she interjected with a piteous air. ‘I used to
hear a great deal about a very wonderful personage, enormously rich,
fabulously clever, and accomplished, and handsome; and I grew rather to
hate him, as one is apt to hate such perfection; and then one day I got
a letter from Lina—a letter brimming over with happiness—to say that
she and this demigod were engaged to be married, but it was to be a
long engagement, because the other demigod—my father—wished for delay.
So you see I know very little about my future brother.’

‘You are sure to like him,’ said Edgar with a somewhat regretful air.
‘He has all the qualities which please women. Another man might be as
handsome, or even handsomer, yet not half so sure of winning a woman’s
love. There is something languid, lackadaisical—poetical, I suppose
Madoline would call it—in his appearance and manner which women admire.’

‘I hope he is not effeminate,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I hate a womanish
man.’

‘No; I don’t think anyone could call him effeminate; but he is dreamy,
bookish, fond of lolling about under trees, smoking cigarettes and
reading verses.’

‘I’m certain I shall detest him,’ said Daphne with conviction, ‘and
it will be very dreadful, since I must pretend to like him for Lina’s
sake. You must stand by me, Edgar, when he is at the Hill. You and
I can chum together, and leave the lovers to spoon by themselves.
Oh, by-the-by, of course you haven’t lived on the Avon all your life
without being able to row a boat?’

‘No; I can row pretty well.’

‘Then you must teach me, please. I am going to have a boat, my very
own. It is being built for me. You’ll teach me to row, won’t you,
Edgar?’ she asked with a pleading smile.

‘I shall be delighted.’

‘Thanks tremendously. That will be ever so much better than learning of
Bink.’

‘Indeed! And who is Bink?’ asked Edgar, somewhat dashed.

‘One of the under gardeners. Such an honest creature, and devoted to
me.’

‘I see: and your first idea was to have been taught by Bink?’

‘If there had been no one else,’ she admitted apologetically. ‘You see,
having ordered a boat, it is essential that I should learn to row.’

‘Naturally.’

They had arrived at the last field by this time. The village lay before
them in the sunlight: an old gray church in an old churchyard on the
edge of the river, a cluster of half-timbered cottages, with walls
of wattle and dab, a homestead dwarfed by rick-yard and barns, and
finally the Rectory, a low, many-gabled house, half-timbered, like the
cottages, a regular sixteenth-century house, with clustered chimneys of
massive ruddy-brown brickwork, finished by a stone coping, in which the
martens had built from time immemorial.

‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you with me,’ said Daphne as
they came near the stile. ‘It will take the edge off my visit.’

‘Oh, but I did not mean to go in with you. I only walked with you for
the pleasure of being your escort.’

‘Nonsense; you are going in, and you are going to stay till I go home,
and you are going back with me to dinner. I’m sure you must owe Aunt
Rhoda a call. Just consider now if you don’t.’

Edgar, who had a guilty memory of being a guest at one of the Rector’s
rare but admirable dinners, just five weeks ago, blushed as he admitted
his indebtedness.

‘I certainly haven’t called since I dined there,’ he said; ‘but the
fact is, I don’t get on very fast with your aunt, although I’ve known
her so long.’

‘Of course not. I never knew any one who could get on with her, except
Lina, and she’s an angel.’

They came to the stile, which was what the country people call a
tumble-down stile, all the timbers of the gate sliding down with a
clatter when a handle is moved, and leaving space for the pedestrian
to step over. The Rectory gate stood before them, a low wide gate,
standing open to admit the entrance of a carriage. The garden was
lovely, even before the season of bedding-out plants and carpet
horticulture. For the last twenty years the Rector had annually
imported a choice selection of Dutch bulbs, whereby his flower-beds and
borders on this May afternoon were a blaze of colour—tulip, hyacinth,
ranunculus, polyanthus—each and every flower that blooms in the sweet
youth of the year; and as a background for the level lawn with its
many flower-beds, there was a belt of such timber and an inner circle
of such shrubs as are only to be found in a garden that has been
cultivated and improved for a century or so. Copper beeches, Spanish
chestnuts, curious specimens of the oak tribe, the feathery foliage
of acacia and mountain ash, the pink bloom of the wild plum, and the
snowy clusters of the American crab, deodara, cypress, yew, and in the
foreground arbutus and seringa, lilac, laburnum, guelder rose, with all
the family of laurel, laurustinus, and bay; a shrubbery so exquisitely
kept, that not a blighted branch or withered leaf was to be seen in the
spacious circle which fenced and protected that smiling lawn from all
the outer world.

The house was, in its way, as perfect as the garden. There were many
rooms, but none large or lofty. The Rectory had all the shortcomings
and all the fascinations of an old house: wide hearths and dog-stoves,
high mantelpieces, deep-recessed casements, diamond panes, leaden
lattices, massive roughly-hewn beams supporting the ceilings, a wide
shallow staircase, rooms opening one out of another, irregular levels,
dark oak floors, a little stained glass here and there—real old glass,
of rich dark red, or sombre green, or deep dull topaz.

The house was delightfully furnished, though Mr. Ferrers had never
taken any trouble about it. Many a collector, worn out before his time
by the fever and anxiety of long summer afternoons at Christie’s, would
have envied Marmaduke Ferrers the treasures which had fallen to him
without the trouble of collecting. Residuary legatee to all his aunts
and uncles, he had taken to himself the things that were worth having
among their goods and chattels, and had sold all the rubbish.

The aunts and uncles had been old-fashioned non-locomotive people,
hoarding up and garnering the furniture of past generations. Thus had
the Rector acquired Chippendale chairs and tables, old Dutch tulip-wood
cabinets and bureaus, Louis Quinze commodes, Elizabethan clocks, Derby
and Worcester, Bow, Bristol, Leeds, and Swansea crockery, with a
sprinkling of those dubious jugs and bowls that are generally fathered
on Lowestoft. Past generations had amassed and hoarded in order that
the Rector might be rich in art treasures without ever putting his hand
in his pocket. Furniture that had cost a few pounds when it was bought
was now worth hundreds, and the Rector had it all for nothing, just
because he came of a selfish celibate race. The Chippendale furniture,
the Dutch marqueterie work, old china, and old plate had all been in
Miss Lawford’s mind when she took the Rector in hand and brought him to
see her fitness for his wife.

True that her home at South Hill was as elegant, and in all things as
desirable; but there was a wide difference between living under the
roof of her brother, more or less on sufferance, and being mistress
of her own house. Thus the humbler charms of the Rectory impressed
her more than the dignity of the Hill. Sir Vernon Lawford was not a
pleasant man to whom to be beholden. His daughters were now grown up.
Madoline was sovereign mistress of the house which must one day be her
own; and Rhoda Lawford felt that to stay at the Hill would be to sink
to the humdrum position of a maiden aunt, for whom nobody cared very
much.

Mrs. Ferrers was sitting in a Japanese chair on the lawn, in front of
the drawing-room windows, nursing a black and white Japanese pug, and
rather yearning for someone from the outer world, even in that earthy
paradise where the guelder roses were all in bloom and the air was
heavy with the odour of hawthorn-blossom.

‘At last!’ she exclaimed, as Daphne and her companion made their
timorous advance across the velvet turf, mown twice a week in the
growing season. ‘You too, Mr. Turchill; I thought you were never coming
to see me.’

‘After that delightful evening with the Mowbrays and the people from
Liddington! It was too ungrateful of me,’ said Edgar. ‘If you call me
Mr. Turchill I shall think I am never to be forgiven.’

‘Well, then, it shall be Edgar, as it was in the old days,’ said Mrs.
Ferrers, with a faint suspicion of sentiment.

There had been a time when it had seemed to her not altogether
impossible that she should become Mrs. Turchill. Hawksyard Grange was
such a delicious old place; and Edgar was her junior by only fourteen
years.

‘I don’t want you to make ceremonious calls just because you happen
to have dined here; but I want you to drop in often because you like
us. I want you to bring me breathings of the outside world. The life
of a clergyman’s wife in a country parish is so narrow. I feel hourly
becoming a vegetable.’

Mrs. Ferrers looked complacently down at her tea-gown of soft creamy
Indian silk, copiously trimmed with softer Breton lace, and felt that
at least she was a very well-dressed vegetable. Knots of palest blue
satin nestled here and there among the lace; a cluster of hot-house
roses—large velvety yellow roses—reposed on Mrs. Ferrers’s shoulder,
and agreeably contrasted with her dark, smoothly-banded hair. She
prided herself on the classic form of her small head, and the classic
simplicity of her coiffure.

‘I think we all belong, more or less, to the vegetable tribe about
here,’ said Mr. Turchill. ‘There is something sleepy in the very air of
our pastoral valleys. I sometimes long to get away to the stone-wall
country yonder, on the Cotswolds, to breathe a freer, more wakeful air.’

‘I can’t say that I languish for the Cotswolds,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers,
‘but I should very much like a fortnight in Mayfair. Do you know if
your father and Madoline are going to London this season, Daphne?’

‘I think not. Papa fancies himself not quite well enough for the
fatigue of London, and Lina does not care about going.’

It had been Sir Vernon’s habit to take a furnished house at
the West End for part of May and June, in order to see all the
picture-galleries, and hear all the operas that were worth being
heard, and to do a little visiting among his very select circle of
acquaintance. He was not a man who made new acquaintances if he could
help it, or who went to people because they lived in big houses and
gave big dinners. He was exclusive to a fault, detested crowds, and had
a rooted conviction that every new man was a swindler, who was destined
to end his career in ignominious bankruptcy. It had gone hard with him
to consent to his daughter’s engagement with a man who on the father’s
side was a parvenu; but he had consoled himself as best he might
with the idea of Lady Geraldine’s blue blood, and Mr. Goring’s very
substantial fortune.

‘And so you are no longer a school-girl, Daphne, and have come home
for good,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, dropping her elegant society manner and
putting on a sententious air, which Daphne knew too well. ‘I hope you
are going to try to improve yourself—for what girls learn at school is
a mere smattering—and that you are aware how much room there is for
improvement—in your carriage, for instance.’

‘I haven’t any carriage, aunt, but papa is going to let me keep a
boat,’ said Daphne, who had been absently watching the little yellow
butterflies skimming above the flame-coloured tulips.

‘My dear, I am talking of your deportment. You are sitting most
awkwardly at this moment, one shoulder at least three inches higher
than the other.’

‘Don’t worry about it, aunt,’ said Daphne indifferently; ‘perhaps it’s
a natural deformity.’

‘I hope not. I think it rests with yourself to become a very decent
figure,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, straightening her own slim waist. ‘Here
comes your uncle, returning from his round of duty in time to enjoy his
afternoon tea.’

The Rector drove up to the gate in a low park-phaeton, drawn by a sleek
bay cob; a cob too well fed and lazy to think of running away, but a
little apt to become what the groom called ‘a bit above himself,’ and
to prance and toss his head in an arrogant manner, or even to shy at
a stray rabbit, as if he had never seen such a creature before, and
hadn’t the least idea what the apparition meant. The Rector’s round
of duty had been a quiet drive through elm-shadowed lanes, and rustic
occupation roads, with an occasional pull-up before the door of a
cottage, or a farm-house, where, without alighting, he would inquire in
a fat pompous voice after the welfare, spiritual and temporal, of his
parishioners, and then shedding on them the light of a benignant smile,
or a few solemn words of clerical patronage, he would give the reins a
gentle shake and drive off again. This kind of parochial visitation,
lasting for about two hours, the Rector performed twice or three times
a week, always selecting a fine afternoon. It kept him in the fresh
air, gave him an appetite for his dinner, and maintained pleasant
relations between the pastor and his flock.

Mr. Ferrers flung the reins to his groom, a man of middle age, in sober
dark livery, and got himself ponderously out of his carriage on to the
gravel drive. He was a large man, tall and broad, with a high bald
head, red-brown eyes of the protuberant order, a florid complexion,
pendulous cheeks and chin, and mutton-chop whiskers of a warm chestnut.
He was a man whose appearance, even to the stranger, suggested a life
devoted to dining; a man to whom dinner was the one abiding reality of
life, the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow—a memory, an actuality,
a hope. He was the man for whom asparagus and peas are forced into
untimely perfection—the man who eats poached salmon in January, and
gives a fabulous price for the first of the grouse—the man for whom
green geese are roasted in June, and who requires immature turkeys to
be fatted for him in October; who can enjoy oysters at fourpence a
piece; who thinks ninety shillings a dozen a reasonable price for dry
champagne, and would drive thirty miles to secure a few dozen of the
late Colonel Somebody’s famous East India sherry.

Rhoda had married the Reverend Marmaduke with her eyes fully opened to
the materialistic side of his character. She knew that if she wanted
to live happily with him and to exercise that gentle and imperceptible
sway, which vulgar people call hen-pecking, she must make dinner the
chief study of her life. So long as she gave full satisfaction upon
this point; so long as she could maintain a table, in which the homely
English virtue of substantial abundance was combined with the artistic
variety of French cooking; so long as she anticipated the Rector’s
fancies, and forestalled the seasons, she would be sure to please. But
an hour’s forgetfulness of his tastes or prejudices, a single failure,
an experimental dish, would shatter for the time being the whole fabric
of domestic bliss, and weaken her hold of the matrimonial sceptre. The
Rector’s wife had considered all this before she took upon herself the
responsibilities of married life. Supremely indifferent herself to the
pleasures of the table, she had to devote one thoughtful hour of every
day to the consideration of what her husband would like to eat, drink,
and avoid. She had to project her mind into the future to secure for
him novelty of diet. Todd, the housekeeper, had ministered to him for
many years, and knew all his tastes: but Mrs. Ferrers wanted to do
better than Todd had done, and to prove to the Rector that he had acted
wisely in committing himself to the dulcet bondage of matrimony. She
was a clever woman—not bookish or highly cultured—but skilled in all
the small arts and devices of daily life; and so far she had succeeded
admirably. The Rector, granted the supreme indulgence of all his
desires, was his wife’s admiring slave. He flattered her, he deferred
to her, he praised her, he boasted of her to all his acquaintance as
the most perfect thing in wives, just as he boasted of the sleek bay as
the paragon of cobs, and his garden as the archetype of gardens.

And now for the first time Daphne had to salute this great man in his
new character of an uncle. She went up to him timidly; a graceful,
gracious figure in a pale yellow batiste gown, a knot of straw-coloured
Marguerites shining on her breast, her lovely liquid eyes darkened by
the shadow of her Tuscan hat.

‘How do you do, uncle?’ she said, holding out a slender hand, in a long
loose Swedish glove.

The Rector started, and stared at her dumbly, whether bewildered
by so fair a vision, or taken aback by the unexpected assertion of
kinsmanship, only he himself knew.

‘Bless my soul!’ he cried. ‘Is this Daphne? Why the child has grown out
of all knowledge. How d’ye do, my dear? Very glad to see you. You’ll
stop to dinner, of course. You and Turchill. How d’ye do, Turchill?’

The Rector had a troublesome trick of asking everybody who crossed his
threshold in the afternoon to dinner. He had an abiding idea that his
friends wanted to be fed; that they would rather dine with him than
go home; and that if they refused, their refusal was mere modesty and
self-denial, and ought not to be accepted. Vainly had Rhoda lectured
her spouse upon this evil habit, vainly had she tried to demonstrate
to him that an afternoon visit should be received as such, and need
not degenerate into a dinner-party. The Rector was incorrigible.
Hospitality was his redeeming virtue.

‘Thanks awfully,’ replied Daphne; ‘but I must go home to dinner. Papa
and Lina expect me. Of course Mr. Turchill can do as he likes.’

‘Then Turchill will stay,’ said the Rector.

‘My dear Rector, you are very kind, but I must go home with Daphne. I
brought her, don’t you see, and I’m bound to take her back. There might
be a bull, or something.’

‘Do you think I am afraid of bulls?’ cried Daphne; ‘why I love the
whole cow tribe. If I saw a bull in one of our meadows, I should walk
up to him and make friends.’

The Rector surveyed the yellow damsel with an unctuous smile.

‘It would be dangerous,’ he said in his fat voice, ‘if I were the bull.’

‘Why?’

‘I should be tempted to imitate an animal famous in classic story, and
swim the Avon with you on my back,’ replied the Rector.

‘Duke,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, with her blandest smile, ‘don’t you think
you had better rest yourself in your cool study while we take our tea?
I’m sure you must be tired after your long drive. These first warm days
are so exhausting. I’ll bring you your cup of tea.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself, my love,’ replied the Rector; ‘Daphne can wait
upon me. Her legs are younger than yours.’

This unflattering comparison, to say nothing of the vulgar allusion to
‘legs,’ was too much for Rhoda’s carefully educated temper. She gave
her Marmaduke a glance of undisguised displeasure.

‘I am not so ancient or infirm as to find my duties irksome,’ she said
severely; ‘I shall certainly bring you your tea.’

The Rector had a weakness about pretty girls. There was no harm in it.
He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of beauty, and no scandal
had ever arisen about peeress or peasant. He happened to possess an
artistic appreciation of female loveliness, and he took no trouble to
disguise the fact. Youth and beauty and freshness were to him as the
very wine of life—second only to actual Cliquot, or Roederer, Clos
Vougeot, or Marcobrünner. His wife was too well acquainted with this
weakness. She had known it years before she had secured Marmaduke for
her own; and she had flattered herself that she could cure him of this
inclination to philander; but so far the curative process had been a
failure.

But Marmaduke, though inclined to folly, was not rebellious. He
loved a gentle doze in the cool shade of his study, where there were
old-fashioned easy-chairs of a shape more comfortable than has ever
revealed itself to the mind of modern upholsterer. The brief slumber
gave him strength to support the fatigue of dressing for dinner, for
the Reverend Marmaduke was as careful of the outward man as of the
inner, and had never been seen in slovenly attire, or with unshaven
visage.

Mrs. Ferrers sank into her chair with a sigh of relief as the Rector
disappeared through the deep rustic porch. The irreproachable butler,
who had grown gray in Mr. Ferrers’s service, brought the tea-tray,
with its Japanese cups and saucers. Edgar Turchill subsided upon a
low rustic stool at Daphne’s feet, just where his length of arm would
enable him to wait upon the two ladies. They made a pretty domestic
group: the westering sun shining upon them, the Japanese pug fawning at
their feet, flowers and foliage surrounding them, birds singing, bees
humming, cattle lowing in the neighbouring fields.

Edgar looked up admiringly at the bright young face above him: eyes
so darkly luminous, a complexion of lilies and roses, that exquisite
creamy whiteness which goes with pale auburn hair, that lovely varying
bloom which seems a beauty of the mind rather than of the person, so
subtly does it indicate every emotion and follow the phases of thought.
Yes; the face was full of charm, though it was not the face of his
dreams—not the face he had worshipped for years before he presumed to
reveal his love for the owner. If a man cannot win the woman he loves
it were better surely that he should teach himself to love one who
seems more easily attainable. The bright particular star shines afar
off in an inaccessible heaven; but lovely humanity is here at his side,
smiling on him, ready to be wooed and won.

Edgar’s reflections did not go quite so far as this, but he felt that
he was spending his afternoon pleasantly, and he looked forward with
complacency to the homeward walk through the meadows.




CHAPTER VII.

‘HIS HERTE BATHED IN A BATH OF BLISSE.’


Daphne’s boat came home from the builder’s at the end of three weeks of
longing and expectation, a light wherry-shaped boat, not the tub-like
sea-going dingey, but a neat little craft which would have done no
discredit to a Thames waterman. Daphne was in raptures; Mr. Turchill
was impressed into her service, in nowise reluctant; and all the
mornings of that happy June were devoted to the art of rowing a pair of
sculls on the rapid Avon. Never had the river been in better condition;
there was plenty of water, but there had been no heavy rains since
April, and the river had not overflowed its natural limits; the stream
ran smoothly between its green and willowy banks, just such a lenient
tide as Horace loved to sing.

When Daphne took up a new thing it was a passion with her. She was
at the exuberant age when all fresh fancies are fevers. She had had
her fever for water-colours, for battledore and shuttlecock, for
crewel-work. She had risen at daybreak to pursue each new delight:
but this fancy for the boat was the most intense of all her fevers,
for the love of the river was a love dating from infancy, and she had
never been able to gratify it thoroughly until now. Every evening in
the billiard-room she addressed the same prayer to Edgar Turchill,
when she bade him good-night: ‘Come as early as you can to-morrow
morning, please.’ And to do her pleasure the Squire of Hawksyard rose
at cockcrow and rode six miles in the dewy morning, so as to be at the
boat-house in Sir Vernon’s meadow before Arden church clock struck
seven.

Let him be there as early as he might Daphne was always waiting for
him, fresh as the morning, in her dark blue linen gown and sailor hat,
the sleeves tucked up to the elbow to give free play to her supple
wrists, her arms lily-white in spite of wind and weather.

‘It’s much too good of you,’ said she, in her careless way, not
ungrateful, but with the air of a girl who thinks men were created to
wait upon her. ‘How very early you must have been up!’

‘Not so much earlier than you. It is only an hour’s ride from
Hawksyard, even when I take it gently.’

‘And you have had no breakfast, I daresay.’

‘I have had nothing since the tumbler of St. Galmier you poured out for
me in the billiard-room last night.’

‘Poor—dear—soul!’ sighed Daphne, with a pause after each word. ‘How
quite too shocking! We most institute a gipsy tea-kettle. This kind of
thing shall not occur again.’

She looked at him with her loveliest smile, as much as to say: ‘I have
made you my slave, but I mean your bondage to be pleasant.’

When he came to the boat-house next morning he found a kettle singing
gaily on a rakish-looking gipsy-stove, a table laid for breakfast
inside the boat-house, a smoking dish of eggs and bacon, and the
faithful Bink doing butler, rough and rustic, but devoted.

‘I wonder whether she has read Don Juan?’ thought Edgar. The water,
the gipsy breakfast, the sweet face smiling at him, reminded him of an
episode in that poem. ‘Were I shipwrecked to-morrow I would not wish to
awaken in a fairer paradise,’ he said to himself, while Bink adjusted
a camp-stool for him, breathing his hardest all the time. ‘This is a
delicious surprise,’ he exclaimed.

‘The eggs and bacon?’

‘No; the privilege of a _tête-à-tête_ breakfast with you.’

‘Tête-à-fiddlestick; Bink is my chaperon. If you are impertinent I
will ask Mr. MacCloskie to join us to-morrow morning. Sugar? Yes, of
course, sugar and cream. Aren’t the eggs and bacon nice? I cooked them.
It was Bink’s suggestion. I was going to confine myself to rolls and
strawberry jam; but the eggs and bacon are more fun, aren’t they? You
should have heard how they frizzled and sputtered in the frying-pan. I
had no idea bacon was so noisy.’

‘Your first lesson in cookery,’ said Edgar. ‘We shall hear of you
graduating at South Kensington.’

‘My first lesson, indeed! Why, I fried pancakes over a spirit-lamp ever
so many times at Asnières; and I don’t know which smelt nastiest, the
pancakes or the lamp. Our dormitory got into awful disgrace about it.’

She had seated herself on her camp-stool and was drinking tea, while
she watched Edgar eat the eggs and bacon with an artistic interest in
the process.

‘Is the bacon done?’ she asked. ‘Did I frizzle it long enough?’

‘It’s simply delicious; I never ate such a breakfast.’

It was indeed a meal in fairyland. The soft clear morning light, the
fresh yet balmy atmosphere, the sunlit river and shadowy boat-house,
all things about and around lent their enchantment to the scene. Edgar
forgot that he had ever cared for anyone in the world except this girl,
with the soft gray eyes and sunny hair, and all too captivating smile.
To be with her, to watch her, to enjoy her girlishness and bright
vivacity, to minister to her amusement and wait upon her fancies—what
better use could a young man, free to take his pleasure where he liked,
find for his life? And far away in the future, in the remoteness of
years to come, Edgar Turchill saw this lovely being, tamed and sobered
and subdued into the pattern of his ideal wife, losing no charm that
made her girlhood lovely, but gaining the holier graces of womanhood
and wifehood. To-day she was little more than a child, seeking her
pleasure as a child does, draining the cup of each new joy like a
child; and he knew that he was no more to her than the agreeable
companion of her pleasures. But such an association, such girlish
friendship so freely given, must surely ripen into a warmer feeling.
His pulses could not be so deeply stirred and hers give no responsive
throb. There must be some sympathy, some answering emotion in a nature
so intensely sensitive.

Cheered by such hopeful reflections, Mr. Turchill ate an excellent
breakfast, while Daphne somewhat timorously tried an egg, and was
agreeably surprised to find it tasted pretty much the same as if the
cook had fried it; a little leathery, perhaps, but that was a detail.

‘I feel so relieved,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have been surprised if
I had turned them into chickens. And now, if you have quite finished
we’ll begin our rowing. I have a conviction that if I don’t learn to
feather properly to-day I shall never accomplish it while I live.’

The boat was ready for them, moored to a steep flight of steps which
Bink had hewn out of the bank after his working hours. He had found
odd planks in the wood-house, and had contrived to face the steps with
timber in a most respectable manner, rewarded by Daphne by sweet words
and sweeter looks, and by such a shower of shillings that he had opened
a post-office savings-bank book on the strength of her bounty, and felt
himself on the road to fortune.

There was the boat in all the smartness of new varnished wood.
Daphne had given up her idea of a Pompeian red dado to oblige the
boat-builder. There were the oars and sculls, with Daphne’s monogram in
dark blue and gold; and there, glittering in the sunlight, was the name
she had chosen for her craft, in bright golden letters—Nero.

‘What a queer name to choose!’ said Edgar. ‘He was such an out-and-out
beast, you know.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ retorted Daphne. ‘I read an article yesterday in
an old volume of Cornhill, in which the writer demonstrates that he
was rather a nice man. He didn’t poison Britannicus; he didn’t make
away with his mamma; he didn’t set fire to Rome, though he did play
the violin beautifully. He was a very accomplished young man, and the
historians of his time were silly _gobe-mouches_, who jotted down
every ridiculous scandal that was floating in society. I think that
Taci——what’s his name ought to be ashamed of himself.’

‘Oh, Nero has been set on his legs, has he?’ said Edgar carelessly,
as he took the rudder lines, while Daphne bent over her sculls, and
began—rather too vehemently—to feather. ‘And I suppose Tiberius was a
very meritorious monarch, and all those scandals about Capri were so
many airy fictions? Well, it doesn’t make much difference to us, does
it?—except that it will go hard with me by-and-by, when my boys come to
learn the history of the future, to have the young scamps tell me that
all I learnt at Rugby was bosh.’

‘At Rugby!’ cried Daphne, suddenly earnest. ‘You were at Rugby with my
brother, weren’t you? Were you great friends?’

Edgar leant over the boat, concerned about some weeds that were
possibly interfering with the rudder.

‘We didn’t see much of each other. He was ever so much younger than I,
you know.’

‘Was he nice? Were people fond of him?’

‘Everybody was dreadfully sorry when he died of scarlet-fever, poor
fellow!’ answered Edgar, without looking at her.

‘Yes, it was terrible, was it not? I can just remember him. Such a
bright, handsome boy; full of life and spirits. He used to tease me
a good deal, but that is the nature of boys. And then, when I was at
Brighton, there came a letter to say that he was dead, and I had to
wear black frocks for ever so long. Poor Loftus! How dearly I should
have loved him if he had lived!’

‘Yes; it would have been nice for you to have a brother, would it not?’
said Edgar, still with a shade of embarrassment.

‘Nice! It would have been my salvation, to have someone of my own
kindred, quite my brother. I love Madoline, with all my heart and
soul; but she is only my half-sister. I always feel that there is a
difference between us. She is my superior; she comes of a better stock.
Nobody ever talks of my mother, or my mother’s family; but Lina’s
parentage is in everybody’s mouth; she seems to be related—at least in
heraldry—to everybody worth knowing in the county. But Loftus would
have been the same clay that I am made of, don’t you know, neither
better nor worse. Blood is thicker than water.’

‘That’s a morbid feeling of yours, Daphne.’

‘Is it? I’m afraid I have a few morbid feelings.’

‘Get rid of them. There never was a better sister than Madoline is to
you.’

‘I know it. She is perfection; but that only makes her further away
from me. I reverence her, I look up to her and admire her; but I can
never feel on an equality with her.’

‘That shows your good sense. It is an advantage for you to have someone
to look up to.’

‘Yes; but I should like someone on my own level as well.’

‘You’ve got me,’ said Edgar bluntly. ‘Can’t you make a brother of me
for the nonce?’

‘For ever and always, if you like,’ replied Daphne. ‘I’m sure I’ve got
the best of the bargain. I don’t believe any brother would get up at
five o’clock to teach me to row.’

Edgar felt very sure that Loftus would not have done it; that
short-lived youth having been the very essence of selfishness, and
debased by a marked inclination towards juvenile profligacy.

‘Brothers are not the most self-sacrificing of human beings,’ he said.
‘I think you’ll find finer instances of devotion in an Irish or a
Scottish foster-brother than in the Saxon blood-relation. But Madoline
is a sister in a thousand. Take care of that willow,’ as the boat shot
under the drooping foliage of an ancient pollard. ‘How bright and happy
she looked last night!’

‘Yes; she had just received a long letter from Gerald, and he talks
of coming home sooner than she expected him. He will give up his
fishing in Norway, though I believe he had engaged an inland sea all to
himself, and he will be home before the end of July. Isn’t it nice? I
am dying with curiosity to see what he is like.’

‘Didn’t I describe him to you?’

‘In the vaguest way. You said I was sure to like him. Now I have an
invincible conviction that I shall detest him; just because it is my
duty to feel a sisterly affection for him.’

‘Take care that you keep within the line of duty, and that your
affection doesn’t go beyond the sisterly limit,’ said Edgar, with a
grim smile. ‘There is no fear of the other thing.’

‘What a savage look!’ cried Daphne laughingly. ‘How horridly jealous
you must be of him!’

‘Hasn’t he robbed me of my first love?’ demanded Edgar; ‘and now——’

‘Don’t be so gloomy. Didn’t you tell me you had got over your
disappointment, and that you meant to be a dear useful bachelor-uncle
to Madoline’s children by-and-by?’

‘I don’t know about being always a bachelor,’ said Edgar doubtfully.
‘That would imply that I hadn’t got over my disappointment.’

‘That is what you said the other day. I am only quoting yourself
against yourself. I like to think of you as a perpetual bachelor
for Lina’s sake. It is a more poetical idea than the notion of your
consoling yourself with somebody else.’

‘Yet a man does generally console himself. It is in human nature.’

‘Don’t say another word,’ cried Daphne. ‘You are positively hateful
this morning—so low and material. I’m afraid it must be the consequence
of eggs and bacon, such a vulgar unæsthetic breakfast—Bink’s idea.
I shall give you bread and butter and strawberries to-morrow, if
MacCloskie will let me have any strawberries.’

‘If you were to talk a little less and row a little more, I think we
should get on faster,’ suggested Edgar, smiling at her.

They had got into a spot where a little green peninsula jutted out into
the stream, and where the current was almost a whirlpool. The boat had
been travelling in a circle for the last five minutes, while Daphne
plied her sculls, unconscious of the fact. They were nearing Stratford;
the low level meadows lay round them, the tall spire rose yonder, above
the many-arched Gothic bridge built by good Sir Hugh Clopton before
Shakespeare was born. William Shakespeare must have crossed it many and
many a time, with the light foot of boyhood; a joyous spirit, finding
ineffable delight in simplest things. And, again, after he had lived
his life and had measured himself amidst the greatest minds of his
age, in the greatest city of the world, and had toiled, and conquered
independence and fame, and came back rich enough to buy the great house
hard by the grammar-school, how often must he have lounged against the
gray stone parapet, in the calm eventide, watching the light linger and
fade upon the reedy river, bats and swallows skimming across the water,
the grand old Gothic church embowered in trees, and the level meadows
beyond!

They were in the very heart of Shakespeare’s country. Yonder, far away
to their right, lay the meadow-path by which he walked to Shottery.
Memories of him were interwoven with every feature in the landscape.

‘My father told me I was not to go beyond our own meadows,’ said
Daphne, ‘but of course he meant when I was alone. It is quite different
when you are with me.’

‘Naturally. I think I am capable of taking care of you.’

This kind of thing went on for another week of weather which at worst
was showery. They breakfasted in the boat-house every morning, Daphne
exercising all her ingenuity in the arrangement of the meal, and making
rapid strides in the art of cookery.

It must be confessed that Mr. Turchill seemed to enjoy the breakfasts
suggested by the vulgar-minded Bink, rather more than those which were
direct emanations of Daphne’s delicate fancy. He liked broiled mackerel
better than cream and raspberry jam. He preferred devilled kidneys to
honeycomb and milk-rolls. But whatever Daphne set before him he ate
with thankfulness. It was so sweet to spend his mornings in this bright
joyous company. It was a grand thing to have so intelligent a pupil,
for Daphne was becoming very skilful in the management of her boat. She
was able to navigate her bark safely through the most difficult bits of
the deep swift river. She could shoot the narrow arches of Stratford
bridge in as good style as a professional waterman.

But when two young pure-minded people are enjoying themselves in this
frank, easy-going fashion, there is generally some one of mature age
near at hand to suggest evil, and to put a stop to their enjoyment.
So it was in this case. The Rector’s wife heard of her niece’s watery
meanderings and gipsy breakfasts, and took upon herself to interfere.
Mr. MacCloskie, who had reluctantly furnished a dish of forced
strawberries for the boat-house breakfast, happened to stroll over to
Arden Rectory in the afternoon with a basket of the same fruit, as an
offering from himself to Mrs. Ferrers—an inevitable half-crown tip
to the head gardener, and dear at the price in the lady’s opinion.
Naturally a man of MacCloskie’s consequence required refreshment after
his walk; so Mrs. Todd entertained him in her snug little sanctum next
the pantry, with a dish of strong tea and a crusty knob of home-baked
bread, lavishly buttered. Whereupon, in the course of conversation, Mr.
MacCloskie let fall that Miss Daphne was carrying on finely with Mr.
Turchill, of Hawksyard, and that he supposed that would be a match some
of these days. Pressed for details, he described the early breakfasts
at the boat-house, the long mornings spent on the river, the afternoons
at billiards, the tea-drinkings in the conservatory. All this Todd, who
was an irrepressible gossip, retailed to her mistress next morning,
when the bill of fare had been written, and the campaign of gluttony
for the next twenty-four hours had been carefully mapped out.

Mrs. Ferrers heard with the air of profound indifference which she
always assumed on such occasions.

‘MacCloskie is an incorrigible gossip,’ she said, ‘and you are almost
as bad.’

But, directly she had dismissed Todd, the fair Rhoda went up to
her dressing-room and arrayed herself for a rural walk. Life in
a pastoral district, with a husband of few ideas, will now and
then wax monotonous, and Rhoda was glad to have some little mental
excitement—something which made it necessary for her to bestir herself,
and which enabled her to be useful, after her manner, to her kith and
kin.

‘I shall not speak to her father, yet,’ she said to herself. ‘He has
strict ideas of propriety, and might be too severe. Madoline must
remonstrate with her.’

She walked across the smiling fields, light of foot, buoyed up by the
pleasing idea that she was performing a Christian duty, that her errand
was in all things befitting her double position as near relation and
pastor’s wife. She felt that if Fate had made her a man she would
have been an excellent bishop. All the sterner duties of that high
calling—visitations, remonstrances, suspensions—would have come easy to
her.

She found Madoline in the morning-room, the French windows wide open,
the balcony full of flowers, the tables and mantelpiece and cabinets
all abloom with roses.

‘Sorry to interrupt your morning practice, dearest,’ said Mrs. Ferrers
as Madoline rose from the piano. ‘You play those sweet classic bits so
deliciously. Mendelssohn, is it not?’

‘No; Raff. How early you are, Aunt Rhoda!’

‘I have something very particular to say to you, Lina, so I came
directly I had done with Todd.’

This kind of address from a woman of Rhoda’s type generally forbodes
unpleasantness. Madoline looked alarmed.

‘There’s nothing wrong, I hope,’ she faltered.

‘Not absolutely—not intentionally wrong, I trust,’ said Mrs. Ferrers.
‘But it must be put a stop to immediately.’

Madoline turned pale. In the days that were gone Aunt Rhoda had
always been a dreadful nuisance to the servants. She had been
perpetually making unpleasant discoveries—peculations, dissipations,
and carryings-on of divers kinds. Not unfrequently she had stumbled
upon mares’-nests, and after making everybody uncomfortable for a
week or two, had been constrained to confess herself mistaken. Her
rule at South Hill had not been peace. And now Lina feared that, even
outside the house, Aunt Rhoda had contrived to make one of her terrible
discoveries. Someone had been giving away the milk or selling the corn,
or stealing garden-stuff.

‘What is it, Aunt Rhoda?’

Mrs. Ferrers did not give a direct answer. Her cold gray eyes made the
circuit of the room, and then she asked:

‘Where is Daphne?’

‘In her own room—lying down, I think, tired out with rowing.’

‘And where is Mr. Turchill?’

‘Gone home. He had some important business, I believe—a horse to look
at.’

‘Oh, he does go home sometimes?’

‘How curiously you talk, Aunt Rhoda. Is there any harm in his coming
here as often as he likes? He is our oldest friend. Papa treats him
like a son.’

‘Oh, no harm, of course, if Vernon is satisfied. But I don’t wonder
Daphne is tired, and is lying down at mid-day—a horribly lazy,
unladylike habit, by the way. Are you aware that she is down at the
boat-house before seven every morning?’

‘Certainly, aunt. It is much nicer for her to row at that early hour
than later in the day. Edgar is teaching her; she is quite safe in his
care.’

‘And do you know that there is a gipsy breakfast every morning in the
boat-house?’

‘I have heard something about a tea-kettle, and ham and eggs. Daphne
has an idea that she is learning to cook.’

‘And do you approve of all this?’

Madoline smiled at the question. ‘I like her to be happy. I think she
wastes a good deal of time; that she is doing nothing to carry on her
education; but idleness is only natural in a girl of her age, and she
has been at home such a short time, and she is so fond of the river.’

‘Has it never occurred to you, Madoline, that there is some impropriety
in these _tête-à-tête_ mornings with Edgar Turchill?’

‘Impropriety! Impropriety in Daphne being on friendly terms with
Edgar—Edgar, who has been brought up with us almost as a brother!’

‘With you, perhaps; not with Daphne. She has spent most of her life
away from South Hill. She is little more than a stranger to Mr.
Turchill.’

‘She would be very much surprised if you were to tell her so, and so
would Edgar. Why, he used always to make himself her playfellow in her
holidays, before she went to Madame Tolmache.’

‘That was all very well while she was in short frocks. But she is now a
woman, and people will talk about her.’

‘About Daphne, my innocent childlike sister, little more than a child
in years, quite a child in gaiety and light-heartedness! How can
such an idea enter your head, Aunt Rhoda? Surely the most hardened
scandalmonger could not find anything to say against Daphne.’

‘My dear Madoline,’ began Mrs. Ferrers severely, ‘you are usually so
sensible in all you do and say that I really wonder at the way you are
talking this morning. There are certain rules of conduct, established
time out of mind, for well-bred young women; and Daphne can no more
violate those rules with impunity than anybody else can. It is not
because she wears her hair down her back and her petticoats immodestly
scanty that she is to go scot-free,’ added Aunt Rhoda in a little
involuntary burst of malevolence.

She had not been fond of Daphne as a child; she liked her much less as
a young woman. To a well-preserved woman of forty, who still affects
to be young, there is apt to be something aggravating in the wild
freshness and unconscious insolence of lovely seventeen.

‘Aunt Rhoda, I think you forget that Daphne is my sister—my very dear
sister.’

‘Your half-sister, Madoline. I forget nothing. It is you who forget
that there are reasons in Daphne’s antecedents why we should be most
especially careful about her.’

‘It is unkind of you to speak of that, aunt,’ protested Madoline,
blushing. ‘As to Edgar Turchill, he is my father’s favourite companion;
he is devoted to all of us. There can be no possible harm in his being
a kind of adopted brother to Daphne.’

‘He was an adopted brother to you three years ago, and we all know what
came of it.’

‘Pshaw! That was a foolish fancy, and is all over and done with.’

‘The same thing may happen in Daphne’s case.’

‘If it should, would you be sorry? I am sure I should not. I know my
father would approve.’

‘Oh, if Vernon is satisfied with the state of affairs, I can have
nothing further to say,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers with dignity; ‘but if
Daphne were my daughter—and Heaven forbid I should ever have such a
responsibility as an overgrown girl of that temperament!—I would allow
no boat-house breakfastings, no meanderings on the Avon. However, it
is no business of mine,’ concluded Mrs. Ferrers with an injured air,
having said all she had to say. ‘How is your water-lily counterpane
getting on?’

‘Nearly finished,’ answered Madoline, delighted to change the
conversation. ‘It will be ready for papa’s birthday.’

‘How is my brother, by-the-by?’

‘He has been complaining of rheumatic pains. I’m afraid we shall have
to spend next winter abroad.’

‘What nonsense, Lina! It is mere hypochondria on Vernon’s part. He was
always full of fancies. He is as well as I am.’

‘He does not think so himself, aunt; and he ought to know best.’

‘I am not sure of that. A hypochondriac may fancy he has hydrophobia,
but he is not obliged to be right. You foster Vernon’s imaginary
complaints by pretending to believe in them.’

Lina did not argue the point, perceiving very plainly that her aunt
was out of temper. Nor did she press that lady to stay to luncheon,
nor offer any polite impediment to her departure. But the interference
of starched propriety had the usual effect. Lightly as Madoline had
seemed to hold her aunt’s advice, she was too thorough a woman not
to act upon it. She went up to Daphne’s room directly Mrs. Ferrers
left the house. She stole softly in, so as not to disturb the girl’s
slumber, and seated herself by the open window calmly to await her
waking. Daphne’s room was one of the prettiest in the house. It had a
wide window, overlooking the pastoral valley and winding Avon. It was
neatly furnished with birchwood, and turquoise cretonne, and white
and gold crockery, but it was sorely out of order. Daphne’s gowns of
yesterday and the day before were flung on the sofa. Daphne’s hats of
all the week round were strewed on tables and chairs. Her sunshade
lay across the dressing-table among the brushes, and scent bottles,
and flower-glasses, and pincushions, and trumpery. She had no maid of
her own, and her sister’s maid, in whose articles of service it was
to attend upon her, had renounced that duty as a task impossible of
performance. No well-drilled maid could have anything to do—except
when positively obliged—with such an untidy and unpunctual young
lady. A young lady who would appoint to have her hair dressed and
her gown laced at seven, and come running into the house breathless
and panting at twenty minutes to eight; a young lady who made hay of
her cuffs and collars whenever she was in a hurry, and whose drawer
of ribbons was always being upheaved as if by an earthquake. Daphne,
being remonstrated with and complained of, protested that she would
infinitely rather wait upon herself than be worried.

‘You are all goodness, Lina dear, but half a maid is no maid. I would
rather do without one altogether,’ she said.

The room was not absolutely ugly, even in its disorder. All the things
that were scattered about were pretty things. There were a good
many ornaments, such as are apt to be accumulated by young ladies
with plenty of pocket-money, and very little common sense. Mock
Venetian-glass flower-vases of every shape and colour; Japanese cups
and saucers, and fans and screens; Swiss brackets; willow-pattern
plates; a jumble of everything trumpery and fashionable; flowers
everywhere, and the atmosphere sickly sweet with the odour of tuberose.

Daphne stirred in her sleep, faintly conscious of a new presence in the
room, sighed, turned on her pillow, and presently sat up, flushed and
towzled, in her indigo gown, just as she had come in from her boating
excursion.

‘Have you had a nice nap, dear?’

‘Lovely. I was awfully tired. We rowed to Stratford Weir.’

‘And you are quite able to row now?’

‘Edgar says I scull as well as he does.’

‘Then, dearest, I think you ought to dispense with Edgar in future and
keep to our own meadows, as papa said he wished you to do.’

‘Oh!’ said Daphne. ‘Is that a message from my father?’

‘No, dear. But I am sure it will be better for you to consider his
wishes upon this point. He is very particular about being obeyed.’

‘Oh! very well, Lina. Of course if you wish it I will tell Edgar the
course of lessons is concluded. He has been awfully good. It will be
rather slow without him. But I was beginning to find the breakfasts
a weight on my mind. It was so difficult to maintain variety—and
Bink has such low ideas. Do you know that he actually suggested
sausages—pork-sausages in June! And I could not make him comprehend the
nauseousness of the notion.’

‘Then it is understood, darling, that you row by yourself in future. I
know my father would prefer it.’

‘You prefer it, Lina; that is enough for me,’ answered Daphne in her
coaxing way. ‘But I think I ought to give Edgar some little present
for all his goodness to me. A smoking-cap, or a cigar-case, or an
antimacassar for his mother. I could work it in crewels, don’t you
know.’

‘You never finish anything, Daphne.’

‘Because the beginning is always so much nicer. But if I should break
down in this, you would finish it, wouldn’t you, Lina?’

‘With pleasure, my pet.’

Edgar was told that evening that his services as a teacher of rowing
would no longer be required. And though the fact was imparted to him
with infinite sweetness, he felt as if half the sunshine was taken out
of his life.




CHAPTER VIII.

‘GOD WOTE THAT WORLDLY JOY IS SONE AGO.’


Perfect mistress of her boat, Daphne revelled in the lonely delight of
the river. She felt no grief at the loss of Mr. Turchill’s company.
He had been very kind to her, he had been altogether devoted and
unselfish, and the gipsy breakfasts in the old boat-house had been
capital fun. But these delights would have palled in time; while the
languid pleasure of drifting quietly down the stream, thinking her
own thoughts, dreaming her own dreams, could never know satiety. She
was so full of thoughts, sweet thoughts, vague fancies, visions of an
impossible future, dreams which made up half her life. What did it
matter that this airy fantastic castle she had built for herself was
no earthly edifice, that she could never live in it, or be any nearer
it than she was to-day? To her the thing existed, were it only in
dreamland; it was a part of herself and of her life, it was of more
consequence to her than the commonplace routine of daily existence—the
dressing, and dining, and driving, and visiting.

Had her life been more varied, full of duty, or even diversified by the
frivolous activity of pleasure, she could not have thus given herself
up to dreaming. But she had few pleasures and no duties. Madoline held
her absolved from every care and every trouble on the ground of her
youth. She did not like parish work of any kind; she hated the idea of
visiting the poor; so Madoline held her excused from that duty, as from
all others. Her mind would awaken to the serious side of life when she
was older, her sister thought. She seemed now to belong to the flowers
and butterflies, and the fair ephemeral things of the garden.

Thus Daphne, ignored by her father, indulged by her sister, enjoyed
a freedom which is rarely accorded to a girl of seventeen. Her Aunt
Rhoda looked on and disapproved, and hoped piously that she would come
to no harm, and was surprised at Lina’s weakness, and thought Daphne’s
bright little boat a blot upon the landscape when it came gliding
down the river below the Rectory windows. The parson’s rich glebe was
conterminous with Sir Vernon Lawford’s property, and Daphne hardly knew
where her father’s fields ended or where the church fields began.

Edgar Turchill, degraded from his post of instructor, still contrived
to spend a considerable portion of his life at South Hill. If he was
not there for lawn-tennis in the afternoon, with the Rector’s wife for
a fourth, he was there in the evening for billiards. He fetched and
carried for Madoline, rode over to Warwick to get her a new book, or
to Leamington to match a skein of crewel. There was no commission too
petty for him, no office too trivial or lowly, so that he might be
permitted to spend his time with the sisters.

Daphne thought this devotedness a bad sign, and began to fear that the
canker was at his heart, and that he would die for love of Madoline
when the fortunate Gerald came home to claim her.

‘You poor creature,’ she said to him one day, ‘you foolish moth, why
flutter round the flame that must destroy you? I declare you are
getting worse every day.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Edgar; ‘I believe I am getting cured.’

What did Daphne dream about in those languid summer mornings, as her
boat moved slowly down the stream in the cool shadow of the willows,
with only a gentle dip of the sculls now and then to keep her straight?
Her thoughts were all of the past, her fancies were all of the future.
Her thoughts were of the nameless stranger who went across the Jura
last year—one little year ago—almost at this season. Her dreams were of
meeting him again. Yet the chances against such a meeting reduced it
almost to an impossibility.

‘The world is so horribly large,’ she reflected sadly, ‘and I told him
such atrocious stories. It will be a just punishment if I never see him
any more. Yet how am I to live through my life without ever looking on
his face again!’

It had gone so far as this: it seemed to her almost an absolute need of
her soul that they two should meet, and know more of each other.

The ardent sensive nature had been thus deeply impressed by the first
bright and picturesque image presented to the girlish fancy. It was
something more than love at first sight. It was the awakening of a
fresh young mind to the passion of love. She had changed from a child
to a woman, in the hour when she met the unknown in the forest.

‘Who is he, what is he? where shall I find him?’ she asked herself. ‘He
is the only man I can ever love. He is the only man I will ever marry.
All other men are low and commonplace beside him.’

The river was the confidant and companion of all her dreams—the sweet
lonely river, flowing serenely between green pastures, where the cattle
stood in tranquil idleness, pastern deep in purple clover. She had no
other ear into which to whisper her secret. She had tried, ever so many
times, to tell Madoline, and had failed. Lina was so sensible, and
would be deeply shocked at such folly. How could she tell Lina—whose
wooing had been conducted in the most conventionally correct manner,
with everybody’s consent and approval—that she had flung her heart
under the feet of a nameless stranger, of whom the only one fact she
knew was that he was engaged to be married?

So she kept this one foolish secret locked in her own breast. The
passion was not deep enough to make her miserable, or to spoil the
unsophisticated joys of her life. Perhaps it was rather fancy than
passion. It was fed and fostered by all her dreams. But her life was
in no wise unhappy because this love lacked more substantial food
than dreaming. God had given her that intense delight in Nature, that
love of His beautiful earth, for which Faustus thanked his creator.
Field, streamlet, wood, and garden, were sources of inexhaustible
pleasure. She loved animals of all kinds. The gray Jersey cows in
the marshy water-meadows; the house dogs, and yard dogs, and stable
terriers—supposed to be tremendous at rats, yet never causing any
perceptible diminution of that prolific race; the big white horses at
the farm, with their coarse plebeian tails tied up into tight knots,
their manes elaborately plaited, and their harness bedizened with much
brazen ornamentation; Madoline’s exquisite pair of dark chestnuts,
thoroughbred to the tips of their delicate ears; Sir Vernon’s massive
roadster; Boiler and Crock, the old carriage-horses—Daphne had an
affection for them all. They were living things, with soft friendly
eyes, more unvaryingly kind than human eyes, and they all seemed to
love her. She was more at her ease with them than in the dimly-lighted,
flower-scented drawing-room, where Sir Vernon always seemed to look at
her as if he wished her away, and where her aunt worried her about her
want of deportment.

With Lina she was always happy. Lina’s love and gentleness never varied.

Daphne came home after a morning wasted on the river, to sit at her
sister’s feet while she worked, or to lie on the sofa while Lina read
to her, glad to get in the thin edge of the educational wedge in the
form of an interesting article from one of the Quarterlies, or a few
pages of good poetry. Daphne was a fervent lover of verse, so that it
came within the limits of her comprehension. Her tastes were catholic;
she worshipped Shakespeare; she adored Byron and Shelley and Tennyson,
Mrs. Browning, and the simpler poems of Robert Browning; and she had
heard vaguely of verses written by a poet called Swinburne; but this
was all she had been permitted to learn of the latest development of
the lyric muse. Byron and Tennyson, it is needless to say, were her
especial favourites.

‘One makes me feel wicked, and the other makes me feel good; but I
adore them both,’ she said.

‘I don’t see what you can find in Childe Harold to make you wicked,’
argued Madoline, who had the old-fashioned idea, hereditary of course,
that Byron was the poet of the century.

‘Oh, I can hardly tell you; but there is a something, a sense of
shortcoming in the world generally, an idea that life is not worth
living, that amidst all that is most beautiful and sacred and solemn
and interesting upon earth, one might just as well be dead; one would
be better off than walking about a world in which virtue was never
rightly rewarded, truth and honour and courage or lofty thoughts never
fairly understood—where everything is at sixes and sevens, in short.
I know I express myself horribly, but the feeling is difficult to
explain.’

‘I think what you mean is that Byron, even at his loftiest and best,
wrote like a misanthrope.’

‘I suppose that’s it. Now, Tennyson, though his poetry never lifts
me to the skies, makes me feel that earth is a good place and heaven
better; that high thoughts and noble deeds bear their fruit somehow,
and somewhere; that it is better to suffer a good deal, and sacrifice
one’s dearest desires in the cause of duty and right, than to snatch
some brief joys out of life, and perish like the insects that are born
and die in a day.’

‘I am so glad you can enjoy good poetry, dear,’ said Madoline,
delighted at any surcease of frivolity in her young sister.

‘Enjoy it! I revel in it; it is my delight. Pray don’t suppose that I
dislike books, Lina. Only keep away from me grammars, and geographies,
and biographies of learned men, and voyages to the North Pole—there is
a South Pole, too, isn’t there, dear? though nobody even seems to worry
about it—and you may read me as many books as you like.’

‘How condescending of you, little one!’ said Madoline, smiling at the
bright young face looking up from the sofa-pillow, on which Daphne’s
golden head reclined in luxurious restfulness. ‘Well, I will read to
you with pleasure. It will be my delight to help to carry on your
education; for though girls learn an immense number of things at
school they don’t seem to know much when they come away. We will read
together for a couple of hours a day if you like, dear.’

‘Till Gerald comes home,’ retorted Daphne; ‘he will not let you give me
two hours of your life every day. He will want you all to himself.’

‘He can join our studies; he is a great reader.’

‘Expose my ignorance to a future brother-in-law? Not for worlds!’ cried
Daphne. ‘Let us talk about him, Lina. Aren’t you delighted to think he
is coming home?’

‘Yes; I am very glad.’

‘How do my father and Gerald get on together?’

‘Not too well, I am sorry to say. Papa is fonder of Edgar than of
Gerald, you know how prejudiced he is about race and high birth. I
don’t think he has ever quite forgiven Gerald his father’s trade.’

‘But there is Lady Geraldine to fall back upon. Surely she makes
amends.’

‘Hardly, according to papa’s ideas. You see the Earldom of Heronville
is only a creation of Charles the Second’s reign, and his peerages
are not always respectable. I believe there were scandals about the
first countess. Her portrait by Sir Peter Lely hangs in the refectory
at Goring Abbey. She was a very lovely woman, and Lady Geraldine was
rather proud of being thought like her.’

‘Although she was not respectable,’ said Daphne. ‘And was there really
a likeness?’

‘Yes; and a marked one. I can see it even in Gerald, who is the image
of his mother—the same dreamy eyes, the same thoughtful mouth. But you
will be able to judge for yourself when Gerald comes home, for I have
no doubt we shall be going over to the Abbey.’

‘The Abbey! It is a very old place, I suppose?’

‘No; it was built by Mr. Goring.’

‘Why Abbey? Surely that means an old place that was once inhabited by
monks.’

‘It was Mr. Goring’s fancy. He insisted upon calling his house an
abbey. It was foolish, of course; but, though he was a very good man,
I believe he had a slight leaven of obstinacy in his disposition, and
when once he had made up his mind about anything he was not to be
turned from his purpose.’

‘Perverse old creature! And is the Abbey nice?’

‘It is as grand and as beautiful a place as money could make it. There
are cloisters copied from those at Muckross, and the dining-room has
a Gothic roof, and is called a refectory. The situation is positively
lovely: a richly timbered valley, sheltered by green hills.’

‘And you are to be mistress of this magnificent place. Oh, Lina,
what shall I do when you are married, and I am left alone here
_tête-à-tête_ with papa? How shall I support my life?’

‘Dearest, by that time you will have learned to understand your father,
and you will be quite at your ease with him.’

‘I think not. I am afraid he is one of those mysteries which I shall
never fathom.’

‘My love, that is such a foolish notion. Besides, in a year or
two my Daphne may have a husband and a house of her own—perhaps a
more interesting place then Goring Abbey,’ added Lina, thinking of
Hawksyard, which seemed to her Daphne’s natural destination.

       *       *       *       *       *

June ripened, and bloomed, and grew daily more beautiful. It was
peerless weather, with just such blue skies and sunny noontides as
there had been at Fontainebleau last year, but without the baking heat
and the breathless atmosphere. Here there were cool winds to lift the
rippling hair from Daphne’s brow, and cool grass under her feet. She
revelled in the summer beauty of the earth; she spent almost all her
life out of doors, on the river, in the woods, in the garden. If she
studied, it was under the spreading boughs of the low Spanish chestnut
which made a tent of greenery on the lawn. Sometimes she carried her
drawing-book to some point of vantage on a neighbouring hill, and
sketched the outline of a wide range of landscape, and washed in a
sky, and began a tree in the foreground, and left off in disgust. She
never finished anything. Her portfolio was full of beginnings, not
altogether devoid of talent: mouse-coloured cows, deep-red oxen, every
kind of tree and rock and old English cottage, or rick-yard, or gray
stone village church; but nothing finished—the stamp of an impetuous,
impatient temper upon all.

There had been no definite announcement as to Gerald’s return. He was
in Sweden, seeing wonderful falls and grottoes, which he described
in his letters to Madoline, and he was coming back soon, perhaps
before the end of July. He had told the Abbey servants to be prepared
for him at any time. This indefiniteness kept Madoline’s mind in a
somewhat perturbed state; yet she had to be outwardly calm, and full
of thoughtfulness for her father, who required constant attention. His
love for his elder daughter was the one redeeming grace of a selfish
nature. It was a selfish love, for he would have willingly let her
waste her life in maiden solitude for the sake of keeping her by his
side; but it was love, and this was something in a man of so stern and
unyielding a temper.

He liked her to be always near him, always within call, his companion
abroad, his counsellor at home. He consulted her about all the details
of his estate and her own, rarely wrote a business letter without
reading it to her. She was wanted in his study continually. When he
was tired after a morning’s business, she read the newspapers to him,
or a heavy political article in Blackwood or one of the Quarterlies,
were he inclined to hear it. She never shirked a duty, or considered
her own pleasure. She had educated herself to be her father’s
companion, and counted it a privilege to minister to him.

‘Faultless daughter, perfect wife,’ said Sir Vernon, clasping her hand
as she sat beside his sofa; ‘Goring is a lucky fellow to get such a
prize.’

‘Why should he not have a good wife, dear father? He is good himself.
Remember what a good son he was.’

‘To his mother, admirable. I doubt if he and old Goring hit it quite so
well. I wish he came of a better stock.’

‘That is a prejudice of yours, father.’

‘It is a prejudice that I have rarely seen belied by experience. I
wish you had chosen Edgar. There is a fine fellow for you, a lineal
descendant of that Turchill who was sheriff of Warwickshire in the
reign of the Confessor. Shakespeare’s mother could trace her descent
from the same stock. So you see that Edgar can claim alliance with the
greatest poet of all time.’

‘I should never have thought it,’ said Madoline laughingly; ‘his
lineage doesn’t show itself in his conversation. I like him very much,
you know, papa; indeed, I may say I love him, but it is in a thoroughly
sisterly fashion. By-the-by, papa, don’t you think he might make an
excellent husband for Daphne?’ she faltered, with downcast eyes, as she
went on with her crewel-work.

‘She would be an uncommonly fortunate girl if she got him,’ retorted
Sir Vernon, with a clouding countenance; ‘he is too good for her.’

‘Oh, father! can you speak like that of your own daughter?’
remonstrated Lina.

‘Is a man to shut his eyes to a girl’s character because she happens
to bear his name?’ asked Sir Vernon impatiently. ‘Daphne is a lump of
self-indulgent frivolity.’

‘Indeed you are mistaken,’ cried Lina; ‘she is very sweet-tempered and
loving.’

‘Sweet-tempered! Yes; I know the kind of thing. Winning words,
pretty looks, trivial fascinations; a creature whose movements you
watch—fascinated by her variety—as you watch a bird in a cage.
Graceful, beautiful, false, worthless! I have some experience of the
type.’

‘Father, this is the most cruel prejudice. What can Daphne have ever
done to offend you?’

‘Done! Is she not her mother’s daughter? Don’t argue with me about her,
Lina. She is here beside my hearth, and I must make the best of her.
God grant she may come to no harm; but I am full of fear when I think
of her future.’

‘Then you would be glad if Edgar were to propose for her, and she were
to accept him?’

‘Certainly. It would be the very best thing that could happen to her. I
should only feel sorry for him. But I don’t think a man who once loved
you would ever content himself with Daphne.’

‘He is very attentive to her.’

‘_Che sara, sara!_’ murmured Sir Vernon languidly.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was Midsummer-day—the hottest, brightest day there had been yet,
and Daphne had given herself up to unmixed enjoyment of the warmth and
light and cloudless blue sky. Sir Vernon and Madoline had a luncheon
engagement at a house beyond Stoneleigh, a drive of eleven miles each
way, so dinner had been postponed from eight to half-past, and Daphne
had the livelong day to herself; free to follow her own devices, free
even from the company of her devoted slave Edgar, who would have hung
upon her like a burr had he been at home, but who was spending a few
days in London with his mother, escorting that somewhat homely matron
to picture-galleries, garden-parties, and theatres, and trying to rub
off a year’s rural rust by a week’s metropolitan friction.

Edgar was away; the light park-phaeton with the chestnuts had driven
off at half-past eleven, Madoline looking lovely in a Madras muslin
gown and a bonnet made of roses, her father content to loll in the low
seat by her side while she managed the somewhat vivacious cobs. Daphne
watched the carriage till it vanished at a curve of the narrow wooded
drive, and then ran back to the house to plan her own campaign.

‘I will have a picnic,’ she said to herself, ‘a solitary, selfish,
Robinson Crusoe-like picnic. I will have nobody but Tennyson and Lina’s
collie to keep me company. Goldie and I will go trespassing, and find a
sly secret corner in Charlecote Park where we can eat our luncheon. I
believe it is against the law to stray from the miserable footpath; but
who cares for law on Midsummer-day? I shall feel myself almost as brave
as Shakespeare when he went poaching; and thank goodness there is no
Justice Shallow to call me to order.’

She ran to her own room for a basket, a picturesque beehive basket, the
very one she had carried—and he had carried—at Fontainebleau. What a
foolish impulse it must have been which made her touch the senseless
straw with her lips, remembering whose hand had held it! Then to the
housekeeper’s room to forage for provisions. The wing of a chicken:
a thick wedge of pound-cake; a punnet of strawberries; a bottle of
lemonade; a couple of milk-rolls. Mrs. Spicer would have packed these
things neatly in white paper, but Daphne bundled them into the basket
anyhow.

‘Don’t trouble, you dear good soul; they are only for Goldie and me,’
she said.

‘You may just as well have things nice, miss. There, you’d have forgot
the salt if I wasn’t here. And if you’re going to take that there
obstreperous collie you’ll want something more substantial.’

‘Give me a slice of beef for him then, and a couple more of your
delicious rolls,’ asked Daphne coaxingly. ‘My Goldie mustn’t be
starved. And be quick, like a love, for I’m in an awful hurry.’

‘Lor, miss, when you’ve got all the day before you! You’ll be fearful
lonesome.’

‘What, with Goldie and the “Idylls of the King!”’ exclaimed Daphne,
glancing downwards at her little green cloth volume.

‘Ah, well; I know when young ladies have got a nice novel to read they
never feel lonesome,’ said Mrs. Spicer, filling every available corner
of the basket, with which Daphne stepped off gaily to summon Goldie.

Goldie was a bright yellow collie, intensely vivacious, sharp-nosed,
brown-eyed; a dog that knew not what it was to be quiet; a dog you
might lose at the other end of the county, confident that he would
scamper home across wood and hill and valley as straight as the crow’s
flight. He spent half his life tied up in the stable-yard, and the
other half rushing about the country with Daphne. He travelled an
incalculable number of miles in the course of an ordinary walk, and was
given to racing cattle. He worshipped Daphne, and held her in some awe
on this cattle question; would leap into the air with mad delight when
she was kind to him, or grovel at her feet when she was angry.

‘Now, Goldie dear, if you and I are to lunch in Charlecote Park, I
must take a strap for you,’ said Daphne, as they started from the
stable-yard, Goldie proclaiming his rapture by clamorous barking.
‘It will never do for you to go racing the Lucy deer, or even the
Lucy oxen. We should get into worse trouble than Shakespeare did, for
Shakespeare had not such a frigid father as mine. I daresay old John,
the glover, was an easy-going indulgent soul whom his son could treat
anyhow.’

It was only a walk of two miles across the fields to Charlecote; two
miles by meadows that are as lovely and as richly timbered as they
could have been in Shakespeare’s time. High farming is not yet the rule
in Warwickshire. Hedges grow high and wild; broad oaks spread their
kingly branches above the rich rank grass; dock and mallow, foxglove,
fern, and dog-rose thrive and bloom beside every ditch; and many a
fair stretch of grass by the roadside—a no man’s land of pleasant
pasture—offers space for the hawker’s van, or the children’s noonday
sports, or the repose of the tired tramp, lying face downwards in a
rapture of rest, while the skylark trills in the distant blue above
him, and the rustle of summer leaves soothes his slumber.

It is a lovely country, lovely in its simple, pastoral, English beauty,
calm and fitting cradle for a great mind.

After the fields came a lane, a green arcade with a leafy roof, through
which the sun-rays crept in quivering lines of light, and then the gate
that opened on the footpath across Charlecote Park. Yonder showed the
gray walls of the house, venerable on one side, modern on the other,
and the stone single-arched bridge, and the lake, narrowing to a dull
sluggish-looking stream that seemed to flow nowhere in particular. The
tallest and stoutest of the elms looked too young for Shakespeare’s
time. But here and there appeared the ruin of a tree, hollow of trunk,
gaunt of limb, whose green branches may once have sheltered the deer he
stole.

The place was very lonely. There was nobody to interfere with Daphne’s
pleasure, or even to object to the collie, who crept meekly to her
side, held by a strap, and casting longing looks at the distant oxen.
She wandered about in the loneliest bits of the park, supremely
indifferent to rules and regulations as to where she might go and where
she might not; till she finally deposited her basket and sunshade under
a stalwart oak, and sat down at the foot thereof, with Goldie still
strapped, and constrained to virtue. She fastened one end of the strap
to the lowest branch of the tree, Goldie standing on end licking her
hands all the time.

‘Now, dear, you are as comfortable as in your own stable-yard. You can
admire the cows and sheep in the distance, standing about so peacefully
in the sunshine, as if they had never heard of sunstroke, but you can’t
hunt them. And now you shall have your dinner.’

It was a very quiet picnic, perhaps even a trifle dull; though, at
the worst, it might be better to picnic alone among the four-footed
beasts in Charlecote Park, than to assume a forced gaiety in a party
of stupid people, at the conventional banquet of doubtful lobster and
tepid champagne, in one of the time-honoured haunts of the cockney
picknicker. Daphne thought of Midsummer-day in the year that was gone,
as she sat eating her chicken and sipping her lemonade, half of which
had been lost in the process of uncorking. How gay she had been, how
foolishly, unreasonably glad! And now a great deal of the flavour had
gone out of life since her seventeenth birthday.

‘How happy Lina looks, now that the time for her lover’s return draws
near!’ she thought. ‘She has something to look forward to, some reason
for counting the days; while to me time is all alike, one week just the
same as another. I am a horribly selfish creature. I ought to feel glad
of her gladness I ought to rejoice in her joy. But Nature made me out
of poor stuff, didn’t she, Goldie dear?’

She laid her bright head on the collie’s tawny coat. The pale gold of
her soft flowing hair contrasted and yet harmonised with the ruddy
hue of the dog, and made a picture fair to look upon. But there was
no one wandering in Charlecote Park to paint Daphne’s portrait. She
was very lucky in not being discovered by a party of eager Americans,
spectacled, waterproofed, hyper-intelligent, and knowing a great deal
more about Shakespeare’s biography than is known to the duller remnant
of the Anglo-Saxon race still extant on this side the Atlantic.

She ate her strawberries in dreamy thoughtfulness, and fed Goldie to
repletion, till he stretched himself luxuriously upon her gown, and
dreamed of a chase he was too lazy to follow, had he been ever so free.
Then she shut the empty basket, propped herself up against the rugged
old trunk, and opened the ‘Idylls.’ It is a book to be read over and
over again, for ever and ever, just one of those rare books of which
the soul knows no weariness—like Shakespeare, or Goethe’s Faust, or
Childe Harold—a book to be opened, haphazard, anywhere.

But Daphne did not so open the volume. Elaine was her poem of poems,
and it was Elaine she read to-day in that placid shade amidst green
pastures and venerable trees, under a cloudless sky. Launcelot was her
ideal man—faulty, but more lovable in his faultiness than even the
perfect Arthur. Yet what woman would not wish—ay, even the guilty one
grovelling at his feet—to be Arthur’s wife?

She read slowly, pondering every word, for that fair young Saxon was
to her a very real personage—a being whose sorrows gave her absolute
pain as she read. Time had been when she could not read Elaine’s story
without tears, but to-day her eyes were dry, even to the last, when her
fancy saw the barge gliding silently down the stream, with the fair
dead face looking up to the sky, and the waxen hands meekly folded
above the heart that had broken for love of Launcelot.

‘I wonder how long his sorrow lasted,’ she thought, as she closed
the book; and then she clasped her hands above the fair head resting
against the rugged bark of the oak, and gave herself up to day-dreams,
and let the afternoon wear on as it might, in placid enjoyment of the
atmosphere and the landscape.

Charlecote church clock had struck five when she plucked herself out of
dreamland with an effort, unstrapped her dog from the tree, took up her
empty basket, and started on the journey home. She had ample leisure
for her walk. Dinner was not to be until half-past eight, and Sir
Vernon and his daughter were hardly likely to be back till dinner-time.

It was a stately feast to which they had been bidden—a feast in honour
of somebody’s coming of age: a champagne breakfast for the quality,
roasted oxen and strong ale for the commonalty, speechifying, military
bands—an altogether ponderous entertainment. Sir Vernon had groaned
over the inevitable weariness of the affair in advance, and had talked
of himself as a martyr to neighbourly feeling.

The homeward walk in the quiet afternoon light was delicious. Goldie,
released from his strap directly they left Charlecote, ran and leapt
like a creature possessed. Oh, how he enjoyed himself with the
first herd they came to, scampering after innocent milch-cows, and
endangering his life by flying at the foreheads of horned oxen! Daphne
let him do as he liked. She wandered out of her way a little to follow
the windings of her beloved river. It was between seven and eight when
she despatched Goldie to his stable-yard, and went into the cool shady
hall, where two old orange-trees in great green crockery tubs scented
the air.

The butler met her on her way to the morning-room.

‘Oh, if you please, Miss Daphne, Mr. Goring has arrived, and would
like to see you before you dress for dinner. He was so disappointed at
finding Miss Lawford away from home, and he would like to have a talk
with you.’

Daphne looked at the tumbled white gown—it was the same she had worn
last year at Fontainebleau—and thought of her towzled hair. ‘I am
so shamefully untidy,’ she said; ‘I think I had better dress first,
Brooks.’

‘Oh, don’t, Miss Daphne. You look nice enough, I’m sure. And I daresay
Mr. Goring is impatient to hear all about Miss Lawford, or he wouldn’t
have asked so particular to see you.’

‘Of course not. No; perhaps he won’t notice my untidiness. I’ll risk
it. Yet first impressions——I don’t want him to think me an underbred
school-girl,’ muttered Daphne as she opened the drawing-room door.

The room was large, and full of flowers and objects that broke the
view; and all the glow and glory of a summer sunset was shining in at
the wide west window.

For a moment or so Daphne could see no one; the room seemed empty of
humanity. There was the American squirrel revolving in his big airy
cage; there lay Fluff, the Maltese terrier, curled into a silky ball in
a corner of the sofa; and that seemed all. But as Daphne went timidly
towards the window, a figure rose from a low chair, a face turned to
meet her.

She lifted her clasped hands to her breast with a startled cry.

‘Nero!’

‘Poppæa!’




CHAPTER IX.

‘OF COLOUR PALE AND DEAD WAS SHE.’


‘And so you are Daphne?’ said Mr. Goring, taking both her hands, and
looking at her with an amused smile, not without tender admiration of
the fair pale face and widely-opened blue eyes. Months afterwards he
remembered the scared look in those lovely eyes, the death-like pallor
of the complexion; but just now he ascribed Daphne’s evident agitation
to a school-girl’s natural discomfiture at being found out in a risky
escapade.

‘And so you are Daphne?’ he repeated. ‘Why, you told me your father
was a grocer in Oxford Street. Was not that what school-boys call a
crumper?’

‘No,’ said Daphne, recovering herself, and a sparkle of mischief
lighting up her eyes; ‘it was strictly true—of Martha Dibb’s father.’

‘And you adopted your friend’s parent for the nonce; a thoroughly Roman
custom that of adoption, and in harmony with your Roman name. By the
way, were you christened Poppæa Daphne, or Daphne Poppæa?’

He had been amusing himself with the squirrel for the last half-hour;
but he found Daphne’s embarrassment ever so much more amusing than the
squirrel. He felt no more seriously about the one than about the other.

‘Don’t,’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘you must have known quite well from the
first moment that my name wasn’t Poppæa, just as well as I knew that
yours wasn’t Nero.’

‘Well, I had a shrewd suspicion that you were romancing about the name;
but I swallowed the grocer. That was too bad of you. Do you know that
you made me quite unhappy? I was miserable at the idea that such a girl
as you could be allied with grocery. A ridiculous prejudice, was it
not, in a man whose father began life as a day-labourer?’

Daphne had sunk into a low chair by the squirrel’s cage, and was
feeding that pampered favourite with the green points of some choice
conifer. She seemed more taken up by his movements than by her future
brother-in-law. Her agitation had passed, yet she was pale still, only
the faintest bloom in her fair cheek, the pink of a wild rose.

‘Please don’t tell Lina,’ she pleaded, with her eyes on the squirrel.

‘Oh, she doesn’t know anything about it then?’

‘Not a word. I dared not tell her. When I tried to do so, I became
suddenly aware how horridly I had behaved. Martha Dibb and I were
silly, thoughtless creatures, acting on the impulse of the moment.’

‘I don’t think there was much impulse about Miss Dibb,’ said Mr.
Goring. ‘It seemed to me that she only looked on.’

‘It is disgustingly mean of you to say that!’ exclaimed Daphne,
recurring to her school-girl phraseology, which she had somewhat
modified at South Hill.

‘Forgive me. And I must really hold my tongue about our delicious
picnics? Of course I shall obey you, little one. But I hate secrets,
and am a bad hand at keeping them. I shall never forget those two happy
days at Fontainebleau. How strange that you and I, who were destined
to become brother and sister, should make each other’s acquaintance in
that haphazard, informal fashion! It seemed almost as if we were fated
to meet, didn’t it?’

‘Was that the fate you read in my hand?’

‘No,’ he answered, suddenly grave; ‘that was not what I read. Pshaw,’
he added in a lighter tone, ‘chiromancy is all nonsense. Why should a
man, not too much given to belief in the things that are good for him
to believe, pin his faith on a fanciful science of that kind? I have
left off looking at palms ever since that day at Fontainebleau. And now
tell me about your sister. I am longing to see her. To think that I
should have stumbled on just the one particular afternoon on which she
was to be so long away! I pictured her sitting by yonder bamboo table,
like Penelope waiting for her Odysseus. Do you know that I have come
straight through from Bergen without stopping?’

‘And you have not been home to your Abbey?’

‘My Abbey will keep. By-the-by, how is the place looking—the gardens
all in their beauty, I suppose?’

‘I have never seen it.’

‘Never! Why, I thought Lina would be driving over once or twice a week
to survey her future domain. I take it positively unkind that you
have never seen my Abbey: my cloisters where never monk walked; my
refectory, where never monk ate; my chapel, where no priest ever said
mass. I should have thought curiosity would have impelled you to go and
look at Goring Abbey. It is such a charming anomaly. But it pleased my
poor father to build it, so I must not complain.’

‘I think you ought to be very proud of it when you consider how hard
your father must have worked for the money it cost,’ said Daphne
bluntly.

‘Yes, John Giles had to put a long career of honest labour behind him,
before he became Giles-Goring and owner of Goring Abbey. He was a good
old man. I feel sorry sometimes that I am not more like him.

‘Lina says you are like your mother.’

‘Yes, I believe I resemble her side of the house. It was by no means
the more meritorious side, for the Heronvilles were always loose fish,
while my father was one of the best men who ever wore shoe-leather. Do
you think Lina will be pleasantly surprised by my return?’

‘Do I think it?’ echoed Daphne. ‘Why, she has been longing for your
coming—counting every hour. I know that, though she has not said as
much. I can read her thoughts.’

‘Clever little puss. Daphne, do you know I am quite delighted to find
that my grocer’s daughter of Fontainebleau Forest is to be my new
sister.’

‘You are very good,’ returned Daphne rather stiffly. ‘It is eight
o’clock, so I think, if you’ll excuse me, I had better go and dress for
dinner.’

‘Wait till your people come home. I’ve ever so many questions to ask.’

‘There is the carriage! You can ask them of Lina herself.’

She ran out of the room by the glass door leading into the
conservatory, leaving Mr. Goring to meet his betrothed at the opposite
door. She ran through the conservatory to the garden. The sun was
sinking in a sea of many-coloured clouds, yonder on the edge of the
hills, and the river at the bottom of the valley ran between the rushes
like liquid gold. Daphne stood on the sloping lawn staring at the light
like a bewildered creature.

She stood thus for some minutes motionless, with clasped hands, gazing
at the sunset. Then she turned and walked slowly back to the house.
There was no one to watch her, no one to think of her at this moment.
Gerald and Lina were together in the drawing-room, steeped in the
rapture of reunion.

‘Let me be rational, let me be reasonable, if I can,’ Daphne said to
herself. She re-entered the house by an obscure door at the east end,
and went up to her own room. There, in the soft evening light, she
cast herself upon her knees by the bed, and prayed: prayed with all
the fervour of her untried soul, prayed that she might be kept from
temptation and led to do the thing that was right. Prayer so earnest in
a nature so light and reckless was a new experience. She rose from her
knees like a new creature, and fancied she had plucked the evil weed
of a fatal fancy out of her heart. She moved about her room calmly and
quietly, dressed herself carefully, and went back to the drawing-room,
two minutes before the half-hour, radiant and smiling.

Madoline was still in the gown she had worn at the _déjeuner_. She had
taken off her hat, and that was all, too happy in her lover’s company
to spare five minutes for the revision of her toilet. Gerald had done
nothing to improve his travelling attire. Even the dust of the long
railroad journey from Hull was still upon his clothes.

‘Gerald tells me that you and he have made friends already, Daphne,’
said Lina in a happy voice.

She was standing by her lover’s side in front of the open window, while
Sir Vernon sat in an easy-chair devouring his _Times_, and trying to
make up for the lost hours since the post came in.

‘Yes; Daphne and I have sworn eternal friendship,’ exclaimed Gerald
gaily. ‘We mean to be a most devoted brother and sister. It was quite
wonderful how quickly we broke the ice, and how thoroughly at home we
became in a quarter of an hour.’

‘Daphne is not a very terrible personage,’ said Madoline, smiling at
her sister’s bright young face. ‘Well, darling, had you a happy day all
by yourself? I was almost glad you were not with us. The coming of age
was a very tiresome business. I had ten times rather have been in our
own gardens with you.’

‘The whole entertainment was ineffably dull,’ said Sir Vernon, without
looking from his paper.

And now the well-bred butler glided across the threshold, and gently
insinuated that dinner was served, if it might be the pleasure of
his people to come and eat it: whereupon Mr. Goring gave his arm
to Madoline, and Sir Vernon for the first time since his younger
daughter’s return felt himself constrained to escort her to the
dining-room, or leave her to follow in his wake like a lap-dog.

He deliberated for a moment or two as to which he should do, then made
a hook of his elbow, and looked down at her dubiously, as much as to
say that she might take it or leave it.

Daphne would have much liked to refuse the proffered boon, but she
was in a dutiful mood to-night, so she meekly slipped her little
gloved hand under her parent’s sleeve, and walked by his side to the
dining-room, where he let her hand drop directly they were inside the
door.

Everyone at South Hill hated a glare, so the dining-room, like the
drawing-room, was lighted by moderator lamps under velvet shades. Two
large brazen lamps with deep-fringed purple shades hung a little way
above the table; two more lighted the sideboard. The French windows
stood wide open, and across a balcony full of flowers appeared the
shadowy landscape and the cool evening sky.

Sir Vernon was tired and out of spirits. He had very little to say
about anything except the proceedings of the afternoon, and all his
remarks upon the hospitalities at which he had assisted were of an
abusive character. He could eat no dinner, his internal economy having
been thrown altogether out of gear by the barbarity of a solid meal at
three o’clock. His discontent would have effectually damped the spirits
of any human beings except lovers. Those privileged beings inhabit a
world of their own; so Madoline and Gerald smiled at each other, and
talked to each other across the roses and lilies that beautified the
dinner-table, and seemed unconscious that anything unpleasant was going
on.

Daphne watched them thoughtfully. How lovely her sister looked in the
new light of this perfect happiness—how unaffectedly she revealed her
delight at her lover’s return!

‘How good it was of you to come back a month sooner than you had
promised, Gerald!’ she said.

‘My dear girl, I have been pining to come home for the last six months,
but, as you and your father and I had chalked out a certain portion
of Europe which I was to travel over, I thought I ought to go through
with it; but if you knew how heartily sick I am of going from pillar to
post, of craning my neck to look at the roofs of churches, and dancing
attendance upon grubby old sacristans, and riding up narrow pathways
on mules, and having myself and my luggage registered through from the
bustling commercial city I am sick of to loathing after twenty-four
hours’ experience, to the sleepy mediæval town which I inevitably tire
of in ten, you would be able to understand my delight in coming back to
you and placid Warwickshire. By-the-by, why didn’t you take Daphne to
see the Abbey? She tells me she has never been over to Goring.’

‘I should have had no pleasure in showing her your house’—‘Our house,’
interjected Gerald—‘while you were away.’

‘Well, dearest, it was a loving fancy, so I won’t scold you for it.
We’ll have a——’ He paused for an instant, looking at Daphne with a
mischievous smile. ‘We’ll have a picnic there to-morrow.’

‘Why a picnic?’ grumbled Sir Vernon. ‘I can understand people eating
out of doors when they have no house to shelter them, but nobody but
an idiot would squat on the grass to dine if he could get at chairs
and tables. Look at your gipsies and hawkers now—you seldom catch them
picnicking. If their tent or their caravan is ever so small and stuffy
they generally feed inside it.’

‘Never mind the hawkers,’ exclaimed Gerald contemptuously. ‘A fig for
commonsense. Of course, everybody in his senses knows that such a
dinner as this is much more comfortable than the most perfect picnic
that ever was organised. But, for all that, I adore picnics; and we’ll
have one to-morrow, won’t we, Daphne?’

He looked across the table at her in the subdued lamplight, smiling,
and expecting to see a responsive smile in her eyes; but she was
preternaturally grave.

‘Just as you like,’ she said.

‘Just as I like! What a chilling repulse! Why, unless Madoline and you
approve of the idea, I don’t care a straw for it. I’ll punish you for
your indifference, Miss Daphne. You shall have a formal luncheon in
the refectory, at a table large enough for thirty, and groaning under
my father’s family plate—Garrard’s, of the reign of Victoria, strictly
ponderous and utilitarian. What a lovely light there is in the western
sky!’ said Gerald, as Madoline and her sister rose from the table.
‘Shall we all walk down to the river, before we join Sir Vernon in the
billiard-room? You’d like to try your hand against me, sir, I suppose,
now that I come fresh from benighted lands where the tables have no
pockets.’

‘Yes; I’ll play a game with you presently.’

Gerald and the two girls went into the verandah, and thence by a
flight of shallow steps to the lawn. It was a peerless night after a
peerless day. A young moon was shining above the topmost branches of
the deodaras, and touching the Avon with patches of silvery light. The
scene was lovely, the atmosphere delicious, but Daphne felt that she
was one too many, though Madoline had linked an arm through hers. Those
two had so much to talk about, so many questions to ask each other.

‘And you have really come home for good,’ said Madoline.

‘For good, dearest; for the brightest fate that can befall a man, to
marry the woman he loves and settle down to a peaceful placid life in
the home of his—ancestor. I have been a rover quite long enough, and I
shall rove no more, except at your command.’

‘There are places I should love to visit with you, Gerald—Switzerland,
Italy, the Tyrol.’

‘We will go wherever you please, dearest. It will be delightful to me
to show you all that is fairest on this earth, and to hear you say,
when we are hunting vainly for some undiscovered nook, where we may
escape from the tourist herd—“After all, there is no place like home.”’

‘I shall only be too much inclined to say that. I love our own country,
and the scenery I have known all my life.’

‘We must start early to-morrow, Lina. We have a great deal of business
to get through at the Abbey.’

‘Business!’

‘Yes, dear; I want you to give me your ideas about the building of new
hot-houses. With your passion for flowers the present amount of glass
will never be enough. What do you say to sending MacCloskie over to
meet us there? His opinion as a practical man might be of use.’

‘If Mr. MacCloskie is going to picnic with you I’ll stay at home,’ said
Daphne.’ I admire the gentleman as a gardener, but I detest him as a
human being.’

‘Don’t be frightened, Daphne,’ said Gerald, laughing. ‘It is a
levelling age, but we have not yet come to picnicking with our
gardeners.’

‘Mr. MacCloskie is such a very superior person,’ retorted Daphne, ‘I
don’t know what he might expect.’

They had strolled down to the meadow by the river, a long stretch of
level pasture, richly timbered, divided from the gardens by a ha-ha,
over which there was a light iron bridge. They lingered for a little
while by this bridge, looking across at the river.

‘Do you know that Daphne has started a boat,’ said Madoline, ‘and
has become very expert with a pair of sculls? She rowed me down to
Stratford the day before yesterday, and back against the stream.’

‘Indeed! I congratulate you on a delightful accomplishment, Daphne. I
don’t see why girls should not have their pleasure out of the river as
well as boys. I’ve a brilliant idea. The Abbey is only five miles up
the stream. Suppose we charter Daphne’s boat for to-morrow. I can pull
a pretty good stroke, and the distance will be easy between us two.
Will your boat hold three of us comfortably, do you think, Daphne?’

‘It would hold six.’

‘Then consider your services retained for to-morrow. I shall enjoy the
miniature prettiness of the Avon, after the mightier streams I have
been upon lately.’

‘I don’t suppose Lina would like it,’ faltered Daphne, not appearing
elated at the idea.

‘Lina would like it immensely,’ said her sister. ‘I shall feel so safe
if you are with us, Gerald. What a strange girl you are, Daphne! A week
ago you were eager to carry me to the end of the world in your boat.’

‘You can have the boat, of course, if you like, and I’ll pull if you
want me,’ returned Daphne, somewhat ungraciously; ‘but I think you’ll
find five miles of the Avon rather a monotonous business. It is a very
lovely river if you take it in sections, but as both banks present a
succession of green fields and pollard willows, it is just possible for
the human mind to tire of it.’

‘Daphne, you are an absolute cynic—and at seventeen!’ exclaimed Gerald,
with pretended horror. ‘What will you be by the time you are forty?’

‘If I am alive I daresay I shall be a very horrid old woman,’ said
Daphne. ‘Perhaps something after the pattern of Aunt Rhoda. I can’t
conceive anything much worse than that.’

‘Papa will be waiting for his game of billiards,’ said Lina. ‘We had
better hurry back to the house.’

They were met on the threshold of the conservatory by Mrs. Ferrers.
That lady had a wonderful knack of getting acquainted with everything
that happened at South Hill. If there had been a semaphore on the roof
she could hardly have known things sooner.

‘My dear Gerald, what a delightful surprise you have given us!’ she
exclaimed. ‘I put on my hat the instant the Rector had said grace. I
left him to drink his claret alone—a thing that has not happened since
we were married—and walked over to bid you welcome. How well you are
looking! How very brown you have grown: I am so glad to see you.’

‘It was very good of you to come over on purpose, Mrs. Ferrers.’

‘May I not be Aunt Rhoda instead of Mrs. Ferrers? I should like it ever
so much better. Next year I shall be really your aunt, you know.’

‘And the Rector will be your uncle,’ said Daphne pertly. ‘He is mine
already, and he is ever so much kinder than when I was only his
parishioner.’

Mrs. Ferrers shot a piercing look, half-angry, half-interrogative, at
her younger niece. The Rector had shown a reprehensible tendency to
praise the girl’s beauty, had on one occasion gone so far as to offer
her a patriarchal kiss, from which Daphne had recoiled involuntarily,
saying afterwards to her sister that ‘one must draw the line somewhere.’

‘Vernon has gone to bed,’ said Aunt Rhoda; ‘he felt thoroughly wearied
out after the gathering at Holmsley, which seems from his account to
have been a very dull business. I am glad the Rector and I declined. A
cold luncheon is positive death to him.’

‘Then we needn’t go indoors yet awhile,’ said Gerald. ‘It is lovely out
here. Shall I fetch a wrap for you, Lina?’

Mrs. Ferrers was carefully draped in her China-crape shawl, one of
Madoline’s wedding gifts to her aunt, and costly enough for a royal
present.

‘Thanks. There is a shawl on a sofa in the drawing-room.’

‘Let Daphne fetch it,’ interjected Mrs. Ferrers; and her niece flew to
obey, while the other three sauntered slowly along the broad terrace in
front of the windows.

There were some light iron chairs and a table at one end of the walk,
and here they seated themselves to enjoy the summer night.

‘As our English summer is a matter of about five weeks, broken by a
good deal of storm and rain, we ought to make the most of it,’ remarked
Gerald. ‘I hope we shall have a fine day for the Abbey to-morrow.’

‘You are going to take Lina to the Abbey?’

‘Yes, for a regular businesslike inspection; that we may see what will
have to be improved or altered, or added or done away with before next
year.’

‘How interesting! I should like so much to drive over with you. My
experience in housekeeping matters might possibly be of use.’

‘Invaluable, no doubt,’ answered Gerald, with his easy-going,
half-listless air; ‘but we must postpone that advantage until the
next time. We are going in Daphne’s boat, which will only comfortably
hold three,’ said Gerald, with a calm contempt for actual truth which
horrified Madoline, who was rigidly truthful even in the most trivial
things.

‘Going in Daphne’s boat! What an absurd idea!’

‘Don’t say that, Aunt Rhoda, for it’s my idea,’ remonstrated Gerald.

‘But I can’t help saying it. When you have half-a-dozen carriages at
your disposal, and when the drive to Goring is absolutely lovely, to go
in a horrid little boat.’

‘It is a very nice boat, Aunt Rhoda, and Daphne manages it capitally,’
said Lina.

‘I think it will be a delightfully dreamy way of going,’ said Gerald.
‘We shall take our time about it. There is no reason we should hurry. I
shall order a carriage to meet us at the bottom of Goring Lane, where
we shall land. If we prefer to drive home we can do so.’

‘My dear Gerald, you and Madoline are the best judges of what is
agreeable to yourselves; but I cannot help thinking that you are
encouraging Daphne in a most unbecoming pursuit.’

The appearance of Daphne herself with the shawl put a stop to the
argument. She folded the soft woollen wrap round her sister, and then
stopped to kiss her.

‘Good-night, Lina,’ she said.

‘Going to bed so early, Daphne? I hope you are not ill.’

‘Only a little tired after my rambles. Good-night, Aunt Rhoda;
good-night, Mr. Goring,’ and Daphne ran away.

‘Aunt Rhoda might drive over and meet us at Goring, Gerald,’ suggested
Madoline, who was always thoughtful of other people’s pleasure and did
not wish her aunt to fancy herself ignored.

‘Certainly. I shall be charmed, if you think it worth your while,’ said
Gerald.

‘Then I shall certainly come. My ponies want exercise, and to-morrow is
one of the Rector’s parochial days, so he won’t miss me for an hour or
two. What time do you contemplate arriving at the Abbey?’

‘Oh, I suppose between one and two, the orthodox luncheon-hour,’
answered Gerald.

Daphne was up and dressed before five o’clock next morning. She had set
her little American alarum-clock for five; but that had been a needless
precaution, since she had not slept above a quarter of an hour at a
time all through the short summer night. She had seen the last glimmer
of the fading moon, the first faint glow of sunlight flickering on her
wall. She stole softly downstairs, unlocked doors and drew bolts with
the silent dexterity of a professional housebreaker, feeling almost as
guilty as if she had been one; and in the cool quiet morning, while all
the world beside herself seemed asleep, she ran lightly across the dewy
lawn, down to the iron bridge by which she had stood with Madoline and
Gerald last night. Then she crossed the meadow, wading ankle-deep in
wet grass, and scaring the placid kine, and thus to the boat-house.

She went in and got into her boat, which was drawn up under cover, and
carefully protected by linen clothing. She whisked the covering off,
and seated herself on the floor of the boat in front of the place of
honour, above which appeared the name of the craft, in gilded letters
on the polished pine—‘Nero.’

She took out her penknife and began carefully, laboriously, to scrape
away the gilt lettering. The thing had been so conscientiously done,
the letters were so sunk and branded into the wood, that the task
seemed endless; she was still digging and scraping at the first letter
when Arden church clock struck six, every stroke floating clear and
sweet across the river.

‘What—an—utter—idiot I was!’ she said to herself, in an exasperated
tone, emphasising each word with a savage dig of her knife into the
gilded wood. ‘And how shall I ever get all these letters out before
breakfast time?’

‘Why attempt it?’ asked a low pleasant voice close at hand, and Daphne,
becoming suddenly aware of the odour of tobacco mixed with the perfumes
of a summer meadow, looked up and saw Gerald Goring lounging against
the door-post, smoking a cigarette.

‘Why erase the name?’ he asked. ‘It is a very good name—classical,
historical, and not altogether inappropriate. Nero was a boat-builder
himself, you know.’

‘Was he?’ said Daphne, sitting limply in the bottom of her boat,
completely unnerved.

‘Yes; the vessel he built was a failure, or at any rate the result of
his experiment was unsatisfactory, but the intention was original, and
deserves praise. I am sorry you have spoilt the first letter of his
name.’

‘Don’t distress yourself,’ exclaimed Daphne, jumping up and stepping
briskly out of her boat. ‘I am going to change the name of my boat, and
I thought I could do it this morning as a surprise for Lina; but it
was a more difficult business than I supposed. And now I must run home
as fast as I can, and make myself tidy for breakfast. My father is the
essence of punctuality.’

‘But as half-past eight is his breakfast hour you need not be in a
desperate hurry. It has only just struck six. Will you come for a
stroll?’

‘No, thank you. I have ever so much to do before breakfast.’

‘Czerny’s “Studies of Velocity”?’

‘No.’

‘French grammar?’

‘No.’

‘Be sure you are ready to start directly after breakfast.’

Daphne scampered off through the wet grass, leaving Mr. Goring standing
by the boat-house door, looking down with an amused smile at the
mutilated name.




CHAPTER X.

‘AND SPENDING SILVER HAD HE RIGHT YNOW.’


At ten o’clock Daphne was down at the boat-house again, ready for
the aquatic excursion, looking as fresh and bright as if nothing had
ever occurred to vex her. She wore a workmanlike attire of indigo
serge—no gay fluttering scarlet ribbons this time. Her whole costume
was studiously plain, from the sailor hat to the stout Cromwell shoe
and dark blue stocking, the wash-leather glove and leathern belt with
a broad steel buckle. Madoline’s flowing muslin skirts and flowery hat
contrasted charmingly with her sister’s more masculine attire.

‘This looks like business,’ said Gerald, as Bink ran the boat into the
water, and held her while the ladies stepped on board. ‘Now, Daphne,
whichever of us gets tired first must forfeit a dozen pairs of gloves.’

‘I think it will be you, from the look of you,’ returned Daphne, as
she rolled up her sleeves and took hold of an oar in an off-hand
waterman-like manner. ‘When you are tired I’ll take the sculls.’

‘Well, you see I am likely to be in very bad form. It is four years
since I rowed in the ‘Varsity race.’

‘What, you rowed in the great race? What affectation to talk about
being in bad form. I should think a man could never forget training of
that kind.’

‘He can never forget the theory, but he may feel the want of practice.
However, I fancy I shall survive till we get to Goring Lane, and that
you’ll win no gloves to-day. I suppose you never wear anything less
than twelve buttons?’

‘Madoline gives me plenty of gloves, thank you,’ replied Daphne with
dignity. ‘My glove-box is not supported by voluntary contributions.’

‘Daphne, do you know that for a young woman who is speedily to become
my sister you are barely civil?’ said Gerald.

‘I beg your pardon, I am practising a sisterly manner. I never met with
a brother and sister yet who were particularly civil to each other.’

They were rowing quietly up the stream, lowering their heads now and
then to clear the drooping tresses of a willow. The verdant banks,
the perpetual willows, were beautiful, but with a monotonous beauty.
It was the ripe middle of the year, when all things are of one rich
green—meadows and woods and hills—and in a country chiefly pastoral
there must needs be a touch of sameness in the landscape. Here and
there a spire showed above the trees, or a gray stone mansion stood
boldly out upon the green hillside.

Daphne had so arranged cushions and wraps upon the principal seat as to
conceal the mutilated name. Gerald rowed stroke, she sat in the bows,
and Madoline reclined luxuriously in the stern with the Maltese terrier
Fluff in her lap.

‘If we are lucky we shall be at the Abbey an hour and a half before
your aunt and her ponies,’ said Gerald. ‘It was extremely obliging of
her to volunteer the inestimable boon of her advice, but I fancy we
should get on quite as well without her.’

‘It would have been unkind to let her think we didn’t want her,’ said
Madoline deprecatingly.

‘That is so like you, Lina; you will go through life putting up with
people you don’t care about, rather than wound their feelings,’ said
Gerald carelessly.

‘Aunt Rhoda is my father’s only sister. I am bound to respect her.’

‘I’ve no doubt the Old Man of the Sea was a very estimable person in
the abstract,’ said Gerald, ‘but Sindbad shunted him at the first
opportunity. Don’t look so distressed, dearest. Aunt Rhoda shall
patronise us, and dictate to us all our lives, if it please you.
By-the-by, what has become of your devoted slave and ally, Turchill? I
expected to find him on the premises when I arrived at South Hill.’

‘He went up to London last week with his mother, to make a round of
the theatres and picture-galleries. They will be home in a few days, I
daresay.’

‘I wonder he can exist out of Warwickshire. He is so thoroughly
bucolic, so permeated by the flavour of his native soil.’

‘He is very kind and good and true-hearted,’ protested Daphne, flushing
indignantly; ‘and he is your old friend and kinsman. I wonder you can
speak so contemptuously of him, Mr. Goring.’

‘What, my vixenish little Pop—Daphne,’ cried Gerald, colouring at
this slip of the tongue, ‘is it thus the cat jumps? I would not
underrate Edgar for worlds. He is out and away the best fellow I know;
but, however much you may admire him, little one, that his mind is
essentially bucolic is a fact—and facts are stubborn things.’

‘You have no right to say that I admire him. I respect and esteem him,
and I am not ashamed to own as much, though you may think it a reason
for laughing at me,’ retorted Daphne, still angry. ‘He taught me to row
this very boat. He used to get up every morning at a ridiculously early
hour, in order to be at South Hill in time to give me a lesson before
breakfast.’

‘A man might do twice as much for your _beaux yeux_, and yet deem it no
self-sacrifice.’

‘Don’t,’ cried Daphne. ‘Didn’t I tell you ages ago that I detest you
when you flatter me?’

Madoline looked up with momentary wonder at that expression ‘ages
ago;’ but Daphne was so given to wild exaggerations and a school-girl
latitude of phrase, that ‘ages ago’ might naturally mean yesterday.

‘Daphne dearest, what has put you out of temper?’ she asked gently.
‘I’m afraid you’re getting tired.’

‘If she give in before we get to Goring Lane I shall claim a dozen
pairs of gloves.’

‘I am not the least little bit tired; I could row you to Naseby, if you
liked,’ replied Daphne haughtily; whereupon the lovers began to talk
of their own affairs, somewhat lazily, as suited the summer morning
and the quiet landscape, where a light haze that yet lingered over the
fields seemed the cool and misty forecast of a blazing afternoon.

Goring Lane was an accommodation road, leading down from the home farm
to the meadows on the river bank, and here they found a light open
carriage and a pair of strong country-made gray horses waiting for them.

Gerald had sent his valet over before breakfast to make all
arrangements for their reception. The man was waiting beside the
carriage, and to Daphne’s horror she beheld in him the grave gentleman
in gray who had helped to convey provisions for the Fontainebleau
picnic: but not a muscle of the valet’s face betrayed the fact that he
had ever seen this young lady before.

At the end of the lane they came into a shady park-like avenue, and
then to a gray stone gateway, pillared, mediæval, grandiose; on the
summit of each granite pillar a griffin of the most correct heraldic
make grasped a shield, and on the shield were quarterings that hinted
at a palmer’s pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and a ragged staff that
suggested kindred with the historic race of Dudley.

The lodge-keeper’s wife and her three children were standing by the
open gate, ready to duck profusely in significance of delight in their
lord’s return. The male bird as usual was absent from the nest. Nobody
ever saw a man at an entrance lodge.

The avenue of limes was of but thirty years’ growth, but there was
plenty of good old timber on the broad expanse of meadow-land which
Mr. Goring had converted into a park. There was a broad blue lake in
the distance, created by the late Mr. Goring, an island in the middle
of it, also of his creation; while a fleet of rare and costly foreign
aquatic birds of Mr. Goring’s importation were sailing calmly on the
calm water. And yonder, in the green valley, with a wooded amphitheatre
behind it, stood the Abbey, built strictly after the fashion of the
fifteenth century, but every block of stone and every lattice obviously
of yesterday.

‘It wouldn’t be half a bad place if it would only mellow down to a
sober grayness, instead of being so uncomfortably white and dazzling,’
said Gerald as they drew near the house.

‘It is positively lovely,’ answered Madoline.

She was looking at the gardens, which thirty years of care and outlay
had made about as perfect as gardens of the Italian style can be. They
were not such old English gardens as Lord Bacon wrote about. There was
nothing wild, no intricate shrubberies, no scope for the imagination,
as there was at South Hill. All was planned and filled in with a Dutch
neatness. The parterres were laid out in blocks, and in the centre
of each rose a fountain from a polished marble basin. Statues by
sculptors of note were placed here and there against a background of
tall orange-trees, arbutus, or yew. Everything was on a large scale,
which suited this palatial Italian manner. Such a garden might have
fitly framed the palace of a Medici or a Borgia; nay, in such a garden
might Horace have walked by the side of Mæcenas, or Virgil recited a
portion of his Æneid to Augustus and Octavia. There was a dignity, a
splendour, in these parterres which Daphne thought finer than anything
she had seen even at Versailles, whither Madame Tolmache had escorted
her English pupils on a certain summer holiday.

‘The rose-garden will please you better than this formal pleasaunce,
I daresay,’ said Gerald. ‘It is on the other side of the house, and
consists wholly of grass walks and rose-trees. My dear mother gave her
whole mind to the cultivation and improvement of her gardens. I believe
she was rather extravagant in this one matter—at least, I have heard my
father say so. But I think the result justified her outlay.’

‘And yet you want to build more hot-houses on my account, Gerald.
Surely arrangements that satisfied Lady Geraldine will be good enough
for me,’ said Madoline.

‘Oh, one ought to go on improving. Besides, you are fonder of exotics
than my mother was. And the rage for church decoration is getting
stronger every day. You will have plenty of use for your hot-houses.
And now we will go and take a sketchy survey of the house, before we
interview the worthy MacCloskie. Has Miss Lawford’s gardener arrived?’
Gerald asked of the gentleman in gray, who had occupied the box-seat,
and was again in attendance at the carriage-door, while a portly butler
and a powdered footman, both of the true English pattern, waited in the
Gothic porch.

‘Yes, sir; Mr. MacCloskie is in the housekeeper’s room.’

‘I hope they have given him luncheon.’

‘No, sir, thank you, sir. He would take nothing but a glass of claret
and a cigar. He has taken a stroll round the gardens, sir, so as to be
prepared to give an opinion.’

The house was deliciously cool, almost as if ice had been laid on in
the pipes which were used in winter for hot water. The hall was as
profoundly Gothic as that at Penshurst—it was difficult to believe
that the reek of a log fire piled in the middle of the stone floor had
never gone up through yonder rafters, that the rude vassals of a feudal
lord had never squatted by the blaze, or slept on yonder ponderous
oaken settles. Nothing was wanting that should have been there to tell
of an ancient ancestry. Armour that had been battered and dented at
Cressy or Bannockburn, or at any rate most skilfully manipulated at
Birmingham, adorned the walls. Banners drooped from the rafters; heads
of noble stags that had been shot in Arden’s primeval wood, spears
and battle-axes that had been used in the Crusades, and collected in
Wardour Street, gave variety to the artistic decoration of the walls,
while tapestry of undoubted antiquity hung before the doorways.

These things had given pleasure to Mr. Giles-Goring, but to his son
they were absolutely obnoxious. Yet the father had been so good a
father, and had done such honest and useful work in the world before
he began to amass this trumpery, that the son had not the heart to
dislodge anything.

They went through room after room—all richly furnished, all strictly
mediæval: old oak carving collected in the Low Countries; cabinets that
reached from floor to ceiling; sideboards large enough to barricade a
Parisian boulevard; all the legends of Holy Writ exemplified by the
patient Fleming’s chisel; polished oaken floors; panelled walls. The
only modern rooms were those at one end of the Abbey, which had been
refurnished by Lady Geraldine during her widowhood, and here there was
all the lightness and grace of modern upholstery of the highest order.
Satinwood furniture and pale-tinted draperies; choice water-colours
and choicer porcelain on the walls; books in every available nook.

‘How lovely!’ cried Daphne, who had not been impressed by the modern
mediævalism of the other rooms. ‘This is where I should like to live.’

Lady Geraldine’s morning-room looked into the rose-garden. She had not
been able to do away with the mullioned windows, but a little glass
door—an anachronism, but vastly convenient—had been squeezed into a
corner to give her easy access to her favourite garden.

Madoline looked at everything with tender regard. Lady Geraldine had
been fond of her and kind to her, and had most heartily approved her
son’s choice. Tears dimmed Lina’s sight as she looked at the familiar
room, which seemed so empty without the gracious figure of its mistress.

‘I fancied you would like to occupy these rooms by-and-by, Lina,’ said
Gerald.

‘I should like it of all things.’

‘And can you suggest any alterations—any improvements?’

‘Gerald, do you think that I would change a thing that your mother
cared for? The rooms are lovely in themselves; but were they ever so
old-fashioned or shabby, I should like them best as your mother left
them.’

‘Lina, you are simply perfect!’ exclaimed Gerald tenderly. ‘You are
just the one faultless woman I have ever met. Chaucer’s Grisel was not
a diviner creature.’

‘I hope you are not going to try my sister as that horrid man in the
story tried Grisel,’ cried Daphne, bristling with indignation. ‘I only
wish I had lived in those days, and had the reversion of Count Walter,
as a widower. I’d have made him repent his brutality.’

‘I have no doubt you would have proved skilful in the art of
husband-government,’ said Gerald. ‘But you needn’t be alarmed. Much
as I admire Grisel I shan’t try to emulate her husband. I could not
leave my wife in agony, and walk away smiling at the cleverness of my
practical joke. Well, Lina, then it is settled that in these rooms
there is to be no alteration,’ he added, turning to Madoline, who had
been taking up the volumes on a little ebony bookstand and looking at
their titles.

‘Please make no alteration anywhere. Let the house be as your father
and mother arranged it.’

‘My sweet conservative! And we are to keep all the old servants, I
conclude. They are all of my father’s and mother’s choosing.’

‘Pray keep them all. If you could any way find room for MacCloskie,
without offending your head gardener——’

‘MacCloskie shall be superintendent of your own special hot-houses, my
darling. It will be an easy, remunerative place—good wages and plenty
of perquisites.’

A grinding of wheels on the gravel, and a tremendous peal of the bell
at the principal entrance proclaimed the advent of a visitor.

‘Aunt Rhoda, no doubt,’ said Gerald. ‘Let us be sober.’

They went back to the hall to greet the new arrival. It was Mrs.
Ferrers’s youthful groom, a smart young gentleman of the tiger species,
who had made that tremendous peal. Mrs. Ferrers’s roan ponies were
scratching up the gravel; but Mrs. Ferrers was not alone; a gentleman
had just dismounted from a fine upstanding bay, and that gentleman was
Edgar Turchill.

‘So glad to see you here, Aunt Rhoda,’ cried Gerald. ‘Why, Turchill,
they told me you were in London!’

‘Came home last night, rode over to South Hill this morning, overtook
Mrs. Ferrers on the way, and——’

‘I asked him to come on with me and to join in our round of
inspection,’ said Aunt Rhoda. ‘I hope I did not do very wrong.’

‘You did very right. I don’t think Turchill feels himself much of a
stranger at the Abbey, even though it has been a very inhospitable
place for the last year or so. And now before we go in for any
more business let’s proceed to luncheon. Your boat has had a most
invigorating effect on my appetite, Daphne. I’m simply famished.’

‘So you came in Daphne’s boat. She rows pretty well, doesn’t she?’
asked Edgar, with a glance of mingled pride and tenderness at his pupil.

‘She might win a cup to-morrow. You have reason to be proud of her.’

They all went into the refectory, where, under the lofty open timber
roof, a small oval table looked like an island in a sea of Turkey
carpet and polished oak flooring.

‘It would have served you right if we had had the long dinner-table,’
Gerald said to Daphne, as he passed her with Mrs. Ferrers on his arm.

‘I thought we were going to picnic in the park,’ said Madoline.

‘Daphne——Neither you nor Daphne seemed to care about it,’ replied
Gerald.

‘This is a great deal more sensible,’ remarked Mrs. Ferrers.

‘Oh, I don’t know; it’s awfully jolly to eat one’s luncheon under the
trees in such weather as this,’ said Edgar.

‘For Mr. Turchill’s particular gratification, we will have afternoon
tea in the cloisters,’ said Gerald. ‘Blake,’ to the butler, ‘let there
be tea at half-past four on the grass in the cloisters.’

Daphne could eat or drink very little, though Edgar, who sat next
to her, was pressing in his offers of lobster mayonnaise, and cold
chicken, cutlets, sole à la maître d’hôtel, Perigord pie. She was
looking about her at the portraits on the walls.

Facing her hung Prescott Knight’s picture of the man who began his
career by wheeling barrows, and who ended it by building mighty
viaducts, levelling hills, filling valleys, making the crooked paths
straight. It was a brave honest English face, plain, rugged even, the
painter having in no wise flattered his sitter; but a countenance that
was pleasanter to the eye than many a handsome face. A countenance that
promised truth and honour, manliness and warm feelings in its possessor.

Daphne looked from the portrait on the wall to the present master of
the Abbey. No; there was not one point of resemblance between Gerald
Goring and his father.

Then she looked at another portrait hanging in the place of honour
above the wide Gothic mantelpiece. Lady Geraldine, by Buckner: the
picture of an elegant high-bred woman of between thirty and forty,
dressed in amber satin and black lace, one bare arm lifted to pluck a
rose from a lattice, the other hand resting on a marble balustrade,
across which an Indian shawl had been flung carelessly. Face and figure
were both perfect after their kind—figure tall and willowy, a swan’s
neck, a proud and pensive countenance, with eyes of the same doubtful
colour as Gerald’s, the same dreamy look in them. Then Daphne turned
her gaze to the other end of the room, where hung the famous Sir Peter
Lely, a replica of the well-known picture in Hampton Court, for which
replica Mr. Giles-Goring had paid a preposterous price to a poor and
proud member of his wife’s family, who was lucky enough to possess it.
Strange that a singleminded, honest-hearted man like John Giles-Goring
should have been proud of his son’s descent from a king’s mistress, and
should have hung the portrait of Felicia, Countess of Heronville, above
the desk at which he read family prayers to his assembled household.
Yes; Lady Heronville’s eyes were like Gerald’s, dreamily beautiful.

Everybody at the table had plenty to say, except Daphne. She was
absorbed by her contemplation of the pictures. Edgar was concerned at
her want of appetite. He tried to entertain her by telling her of the
plays and pictures he had seen.

‘Your father ought to take you to town before the season is over.
There is so much to see,’ he said; ‘and though I am told that all the
West End tradespeople are complaining, it seems to me that London was
never so full as this year. Hyde Park in the morning and afternoon is
something wonderful.’

‘I should like to go to the opera,’ said Daphne rather listlessly.
‘Madame Tolmache took us to hear “Faust” one evening. She said that
an occasional visit to the opera was the highest form of cultivation
for the youthful mind. I believe she had a box given her by the
music-master, and that she turned it to her own advantage that
way—charging it in her bills, don’t you know. I shall never forget
that evening. It was at the end of August, and Paris was wrapped in a
white mist, and the air had a breathless, suffocating feeling, and the
streets smelt of over-ripe peaches. But when we got out of the jolting
fly that took us from the station to the theatre, and went to a box
that seemed in the clouds, we had to go up so many stairs to reach it,
and the music began, and the curtain went up, it was like being in a
new world. I felt as if I were holding my breath all the time. Even
Martha Dibb—that stupid, good-natured girl I told you about—seemed
spell-bound, and sat with her mouth open, gasping like a fish. Nilsson
was Marguerite, and Faure was Mephistopheles. I shall remember them to
the end of my life.’

‘You’ll hear them again often, I hope. Nilsson was singing the other
night, when I took my mother to hear Wagner’s great opera. The music
is quite the rage, I believe; but I don’t like it as well as “Don
Giovanni.”’

Luncheon was over by this time—a formal ceremonious luncheon, such as
Daphne detested. It was her punishment for having been uncivil last
night when the picnic idea was mooted. And now they all repaired to the
gardens, and perambulated the parterre, and criticised the statues:
Leda with her swan, Venus with an infant Cupid, Hebe offering her cup,
Ganymede on his eagle—all the most familiar personages in Lemprière.
The fountains were sending up their rainbow spray in the blazing
afternoon sun. The geraniums, and calceolarias, and pansies, and
petunias, and all the tribe of begonias, and house-leeks, newly bedded
out, seemed to quiver in the fierce bright light.

‘For pity’s sake let us get out of this burning flowery furnace,’ cried
Gerald. ‘Let’s go to the rose-garden; it’s on the shady side of the
house, and within reach of my mother’s favourite tulip-trees.’

The rose-garden was a blessed refuge after that exposed parterre facing
due south. Here there was velvet turf on which to walk, and here were
trellised screens and arches wreathed with the yellow clusters of
the Celine Forestier, and the Devoniensis. Mrs. Ferrers was a person
who always discoursed of flowers by their botanical or fashionable
names. She did not call a rose a rose, but went into raptures over a
Marguerite de St. Armand, a Garnet Wolseley, a Gloire de Vitry, or an
Etienne Levet, as the case might be.

Here, smoking his cigar, which he politely suppressed at their
approach, they discovered Mr. MacCloskie, the hard-faced, sandy-haired
Scottish gardener.

‘You have been taking a look at my grounds, I hear, MacCloskie,’ Mr.
Goring said pleasantly.

‘Yes, sir; I’ve looked about me a bit. I think I’ve seen pretty well
everything.’

‘And the hot-houses leave room for improvement, I suppose?’

‘Well, sir, I’m not wishing to say anything disrespectful to your
architect,’ began MacCloskie, with that deliberation which gave all
his speeches an air of superior wisdom, ‘but if he had tried his
hardest to spend the maximum of money in attaining the minimum of space
and accommodation—to say nothing of his ventilation and his heating
apparatus, which are just abominable—he couldn’t have succeeded better
than he has—unconsciously.’

‘Dear me, Mr. MacCloskie, that’s a bad account. And yet the gardeners
here have managed to rub on very decently for a quarter of a century,
with no better accommodation than you have seen to-day.’

‘Ay, sir, that’s where it is. They just roobed on, poor fellows. And I
can only say that it’s very creditable to them to do as well as they
have done, and if they’re about a quarter of a century behind the times
nobody can blame them.’

‘Then we must build new houses—that’s inevitable, I conclude.’

‘Yes, sir, if you want to grow exotics.’

‘Yet I used to see a good deal of stephanotis about the rooms in my
father’s time.’

‘Ay, there’s a fine plant growing in a bit of a glass—shed,’ said
Mr. MacCloskie with ineffable contempt. ‘Necessity’s the mother of
invention, Mr. Goring. Your gardeners have done just wonders. But with
all deference to you, sir, that kind of thing wouldn’t suit me. And
if Miss Lawford has any idea of my coming here by-and-by——’ with a
respectful glance at his mistress, as he stood at ease, contemplating
the spotless lining of his top-hat.

‘Miss Lawford would like you to continue in her service when she is
Mrs. Goring. Perhaps you will be good enough to give me an exact
specification of the space you would require, and the form of house you
would suggest. I wish Miss Lawford to be in no way a loser when she
exchanges South Hill for Goring Abbey.’

‘Thank you, sir, you are very good, sir,’ murmured the Scotchman, as
if it were for his gratification the houses were to be built. ‘This is
a very fine place, sir; it would be a pity if it were to be behind the
times in any particular.’

The head gardener bowed and withdrew, everyone—even Aunt
Rhoda—breathing more freely when he had vanished.

‘Isn’t he too utterly horrid?’ asked Daphne. ‘If there is a being I
detest in this world it is he. Were I in Lina’s place I should take
advantage of my marriage to get rid of him; but she will just go down
to her grave domineered over by that man,’ concluded Daphne, mimicking
MacCloskie’s northern tongue.

‘He is not the most agreeable person in the world,’ said Lina; ‘but he
is thoroughly conscientious.’

‘Did you ever know a disagreeable person who did not set up for being a
paragon of honesty?’ exclaimed Daphne contemptuously.

They roamed about the rose-garden, which was a lovely place to loiter
in upon a summer day, and lingered under the tulip-trees, where there
were rustic chairs and a rustic table, and every incentive to idleness.
Beyond the tulip-trees there was a shrubbery on the slope of the hill,
a shrubbery which sheltered the rose-garden from bleak winds, and
made it a thoroughly secluded spot. While the rest of the party sat
talking under the big broad-leaved trees, Daphne shot off to explore
the shrubbery. The first thing that attracted her attention was a large
wire cage among the laurels.

‘Is that an aviary?’ she asked.

‘No,’ answered Gerald, rising and going over to her. ‘These are my
father’s antecedents.’

He pulled away the laurel branches which had spread themselves in front
of the cage, and Daphne saw that it contained only a shabby old barrow,
a pickaxe, and shovel.

‘Those were the stock-in-trade with which my father began his career,’
he said. ‘I don’t believe he had even the traditional half-crown. I’ve
no doubt if he had possessed such a coin his mates would have made him
spend it on beer. He began life, a barefooted, ignorant lad, upon a
railroad in the north of England; and before his fortieth birthday he
was one of the greatest contractors and one of the best-informed men
of his time; but he never mastered the right use of the aspirate, and
he never could bring himself to wear gloves. It was his fancy to keep
those old tools of his, and to take his visitors to look at them, after
they had gone the round of house and gardens.’

‘I hope you are proud of him,’ said Daphne, with a bright penetrating
glance which seemed to pierce Mr. Goring’s soul. ‘I should hate you
if I thought that, even for one moment in your life, you could feel
ashamed of such a father.’

‘Then I’m afraid I must endure your hate,’ said Gerald. ‘No; I have
never felt ashamed of my father: he was the dearest, kindest, most
unselfish, most indulgent father that ever spoiled an unworthy son.
But I have occasionally felt ashamed of that barrow, when it has been
exhibited and explained to a new acquaintance, and I have seen that the
now acquaintance thought the whole thing—the mock mediæval abbey, and
the barrow, and my dear simple-hearted dad—one stupendous joke.’

‘I should be more ashamed of Felicia, Countess of Heronville, than of
that barrow, if I were you,’ exclaimed Daphne, flushed and indignant.

‘You little radical! Mistress Felicia was by no means an exemplary
person, but she was one of the loveliest women at Charles’s court,
where lovely women congregated by common consent, while all the ugly
ones buried themselves at their husbands’ country seats, and thought
that some fiery comet must be swooping down upon the world because of
wickedness in high places. Don’t be too hard upon poor Lady Heronville.
She died in the zenith of her charms, while quite a young woman.’

‘Do you think she ought to be pitied for that?’ demanded Daphne. ‘Why,
it was the brightest fate Heaven could give her. The just punishment
for her evil ways would have been a long loveless old age, and to
see her beauty fade day by day, and to know that the world she loved
despised and forgot her.

    “Whom the gods love die young, was said of old;
     And many deaths do they escape by this.”’

‘Where did you find those lines, little one?’

‘In a book we used to read aloud at Madame Tolmache’s, “Gems from
Byron.”’

‘Oh, I see! Mere chippings, diamond dust. I was afraid you’d been at
the Koh-i-noor itself.’

‘Are we to have some tea, Gerald?’ asked Madoline, crossing to them and
looking at her watch as she came. ‘It is half-past four, and we must be
going home soon.’

‘To the cloisters, ladies and gentlemen, to all that there is of the
most mediæval in the Abbey.’

They passed under a Gothic archway and found themselves on a square
green lawn, in the midst of which was another fountain in a genuine old
marble basin, a Roman relic dug up thirty years ago in the peninsula
of Portland. A cloistered walk surrounded this grass-plot. A striped
awning had been put up beside the fountain, and under this the
tea-table was spread.

‘Now, Lina, let us see if you can manage that ponderous tea-kettle,’
said Gerald.

‘It is the handsomest I ever saw,’ sleepily remarked Mrs. Ferrers, who
had found the afternoon somewhat dreary, since nobody had seemed to
want her advice about anything. ‘But I must confess that I prefer the
Rector’s George the Second silver, and old Swansea cups and saucers, to
the highest exemplars of modern art.’




CHAPTER XI.

‘YEVE ME MY DETH, OR THAT I HAVE A SHAME.’


Sir Vernon Lawford was sitting alone in his study on the morning after
the visit to Goring Abbey, when the door opened suddenly with a sharp
jerk, and his younger daughter stood before him. The very manner in
which the door opened told him, before he looked up from his desk, that
the intruder was Daphne, and not the always welcome Madoline.

He looked at his daughter with cold severe eyes, as at a person who
had no right to be there. Ever since she could remember, Daphne had
feared her father much more than she loved him; but never had he
seemed to her so awful a being as he appeared this morning in his
own room, surrounded by all the symbols of power—the bronze bust of
Cicero looking down at him from the bookcase; his despatch-box open
at his side, bristling with pen-knives and paper-knives, and stern
official stationery; his ponderous silver inkstand, presented by the
Warwickshire yeomanry in acknowledgment of his merits as colonel;
his russia-leather bound dictionaries and directories, and brazen
letter-weighing machine—and all the pomp and circumstance of his
business life about him.

‘Well, Daphne, what do you want?’ he asked, looking at her without a
ray of sympathetic feeling in his handsome gray eyes.

‘If you please, papa,’ she faltered, blushing deeply under that severe
gaze, and pleating up the edge of her lawn-tennis pinafore in supreme
nervousness, ‘I don’t think I’m really finished.’

‘Finished!’ he exclaimed, looking at her as if he thought she was an
idiot. ‘Finished what? You never finish anything, or begin anything
either, so far as I can hear, that is worth doing.’

‘My education, I mean, papa,’ she said, looking at him with eyes so
lovely in hue and expression, so piteous in their timid pleading, that
they ought to have touched him. ‘I know you sent me to Madame Tolmache
to be finished, and that she was very expensive; but I’m afraid I came
away horribly ignorant; and I begin to feel that a year or two more of
schooling would be of very great value to me. I am older now, don’t
you know, papa; and I should try more earnestly to improve myself.
Indeed, indeed, papa, I would work very hard this time,’ urged Daphne,
remorsefully remembering how little she had worked in the past. ‘I
don’t care where you send me: to Asnières, or to Germany, or anywhere:
so that I could only go on with my education.’

‘Go on with it at home,’ answered Sir Vernon contemptuously. ‘You can
read, and write, and spell, I suppose. Yes; I have some of your letters
asking me for different things in those pigeon-holes. Any woman who can
do as much as that can improve herself. There are books enough on those
shelves’—with a glance at his classical and correct collection—‘to make
you wiser than any woman need be. But as for this freak of wanting to
go back to school——’

‘It is no freak, papa. It is my most earnest desire. I feel it would be
better—for all of us.’

She had changed from red to white by this time, and stood before her
father like a culprit, downcast and deadly pale.

‘It would not be better for me who would have to pay the bills. I have
paid a pretty penny already for your education; and you may suppose
how vastly agreeable it is to me to hear your frank confession of
ignorance.’

‘It is best for me to tell the truth, papa. Do not deny me this favour.
It is the first great thing I have ever asked of you.’

‘It is a very foolish thing, and I should be a fool if I humoured your
caprice.’

She gave a little cry of mental pain.

‘How can I convince you that it is no caprice?’ she asked despairingly.
‘I was lying awake all last night thinking about it. I am most
thoroughly in earnest, papa.’

‘You were thoroughly in earnest about your boat; and now you are tired
of it. You were intensely anxious to come home; and now you are tired
of home. You are a creature of whims and fancies.’

‘No, I am not tired of my boat,’ she cried passionately. ‘I love it
with all my heart, and the dear river, and this place, and Madoline—and
you—if you would only let me love you. Father,’ she said in a low
tremulous voice, coming hurriedly to her father and kneeling at his
feet, with clasped hands uplifted beseechingly, ‘there are times in a
woman’s life when a light shines suddenly upon her, showing her where
her duty lies. I believe that it is my duty to go back to school,
somewhere in France, or Germany, where I can get on with my education
and grow serious and useful, as a woman ought to be. It will be very
hard, it will be parting from all I love best in the world, but I feel
and know that it is my duty. Let me go, dear father. The outlay of a
few pounds cannot affect you.’

‘Can it not? That shows how little you know of the world. When a man is
overweighted as I am in this place, living up to every sixpence of his
income, and so fettered that he cannot realise an acre of his estate,
every hundred he has to spend is of moment. Your education has been
a costly business already; and I distinctly refuse to spend another
sixpence on it. If you have not profited by my outlay, so much the
worse for you. Get up, child.’ She was still on her knees, looking
at him in blank despair. ‘This melo-dramatic fooling is the very last
thing to succeed with a man of my stamp. I detest heroics.’

‘Very well, father,’ she answered in a subdued tone, strangling her
sobs and standing straight and tall before him. ‘I hope if you should
ever have cause to blame me for anything in the future you will
remember this refusal to-day.’

‘I shall blame you if you deserve blame, you may be sure of that,’ he
answered harshly.

‘And never praise me when I deserve praise, and never love me, or
sympathise with me, or be a father to me—except in name.’

‘Precisely,’ he said, looking downward with a gloomy brow. ‘Except in
name. And now be kind enough to leave me. I have a good many letters to
write.’

Daphne obeyed without a word. When she was in the corridor outside, and
had shut the door behind her, she stopped for a few moments leaning
against the wall, looking straight before her with a countenance of
inexpressible sadness.

‘It was the only thing I could do,’ she murmured with a heavy sigh.

Sir Vernon told his elder daughter that afternoon of Daphne’s absurd
fancy about going back to school.

‘Did you ever hear of such a mass of inconsistency?’ he exclaimed
angrily. ‘After worrying you continually with appealing letters to be
brought home, she is tired of us all and wants to be off again in less
than six months.’

‘It is strange, papa, especially in one who is so thoroughly sweet and
loving,’ said Madoline thoughtfully. ‘Do you know I’m afraid it must be
my fault.’

‘In what way?’

‘I have been urging her to continue her education; and perhaps I may
have inadvertently given her the idea that she ought to go back to
school.’

‘That is simply to suppose her an idiot, and unable to comprehend plain
English,’ retorted Sir Vernon testily. ‘You are always making excuses
for her. Hark!’ he cried, as a bright girlish laugh came ringing across
the summer air. ‘There she is, playing tennis with Turchill. Would you
suppose that two hours ago she was kneeling to me like a tragedy queen,
her eyes streaming with tears, entreating to be sent back to school?’

‘I’ll reason her out of her fancy, dear father. She always gives way to
me when I wish it.’

‘I am glad she has just sense enough to understand your superiority.’

‘Dearest father, if you would be a little more affectionate to her—in
your manner, I mean—I believe she would be a great deal happier.’

Another ringing laugh from Daphne.

‘She is monstrously unhappy, is she not?’ exclaimed Sir Vernon. ‘My
dear Lina, that girl is a born _comédienne_. She will always be acting
tragedy or comedy all her life through. This morning it was tragedy;
this afternoon it is comedy. Do not let yourself be duped by her.’

‘Believe me, papa, you misjudge her.’

‘I hope it may be so.’

       *       *       *       *       *

‘Daphne, what is this fancy of yours about going back to school?’ asked
Madoline, when she and her sister were sitting in the conservatory that
evening in the sultry summer dusk, while Sir Vernon and the two young
men were talking politics over their claret. ‘I was quite grieved to
hear of it, believing, as I did, that you were very happy at home.’

‘Why, so I am—intensely happy—with you, darling,’ answered Daphne,
taking her sister’s hand, and twisting the old-fashioned brilliant
hoops, which Lina had inherited from her grandmother, round and round
upon the slender finger. ‘So I am, dear, utterly happy. But happiness
is not the be-all and end-all of this life, is it, Lina? The Rector is
continually telling us that it isn’t, in those prosy port-winey old
sermons of his; but if he were only candid about his feelings he would
say that the end and aim of this life was dinner. I don’t suppose I was
born only to be happy, was I, Lina? We unfortunate mortals are supposed
to belong to the silkworm rather than to the butterfly species, and to
work out a career of usefulness in the grub and worm stages, before
we earn the right to flutter feebly for a little while as elderly
moths. Youth, from a Christian point of view, is meant for work and
self-abnegation, and duty, and all that kind of thing; isn’t it, Lina?’

‘Every stage of life has its obligations, dearest; but your duties
are very easy ones,’ answered Madoline gently. ‘You have only to be
respectful and obedient to your father, and to do as much good as you
can to those who need your kindness, and to be grateful to God for the
many good gifts He has lavished upon you.’

‘Yes; I suppose that upon the whole I am a very fortunate young person,
although I am a pauper,’ said Daphne sententiously. ‘I have youth, and
the use of all my faculties, and a ridiculously good constitution. I
know I can walk knee-deep in wet grass and never catch cold, and drink
quarts of iced water when I am in a fever of heat, and do all manner
of things that people consider tantamount to suicide, and be none the
worse for my folly. And then I have a fine house to live in; though I
have the sense that I am nobody in it; and I have a very aristocratic
father—to look at. Yes, Madoline, I have all these things, and they are
of no account to me; but I have your love, and that is worth them all
a hundred times over.’

The sisters sat with clasped hands, Madoline touched by the wayward
girl’s affection. The moon was shining above the deodaras; the last of
the nightingales was singing amidst the darkness of the shrubbery.

‘Why do you want to go back to school, Daphne?’ asked Lina again,
coaxingly.

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘But this morning you were begging papa to send you back.’

‘Yes; I had an idea that I ought to improve myself—this morning. But
as papa refused to grant my request in a very decisive manner, I have
put the notion out of my head. I thought that another year with Madame
Tolmache might have improved my French, and reconciled me to the
necessity for a subjunctive mood, which I never could see while I was
at Asnières; or that a twelvemonth in Germany might have enabled me to
distinguish the verbs that require the dative case after them, from the
verbs that are satisfied with the accusative, which at present is a
thing utterly beyond me. But papa says no, and, as I am much fonder of
boating and tennis and billiards than of study, I am not going to find
fault with papa’s decision.’

This was all said so lightly, with so much of the natural recklessness
of a high-spirited girl who has never had a secret in her life, that
Madoline had not a moment’s doubt of her sister’s candour. Yet there
was a hardness in Daphne’s tone to-night that grieved her.

‘Who is fond of billiards?’ asked Gerald’s lazy tones, a little way
above them, and, looking up, they saw him leaning with folded arms upon
the broad marble balustrade. ‘Are you coming up to the drawing-room to
give us some music, or are we coming down to the billiard-room to play
a match with you?’ he inquired.

‘Whichever my father likes,’ answered Madoline.

‘Sir Vernon will not play this evening. He has gone to his room to read
the evening papers. I think he has not forgiven Turchill for the series
of flukes by which he won that game last night. Edgar and I will have
a clear stage and no favour this evening, and we mean to give you two
young ladies a tremendous licking.’

‘You will have an easy victim in me,’ said Madoline. ‘I have not played
half-a-dozen times since you left home.’

‘Devotion surpassing Penelope’s. And Daphne, I suppose, is still a tyro
at the game. We must give you seventy-five out of a hundred.’

‘You are vastly condescending,’ exclaimed Daphne, drawing herself up.
‘You will give me nothing! I don’t care how ignominiously I am beaten;
but I will not be treated like a baby.’

‘_Und etwas schnïppish doch zugleich_,’ quoted Mr. Goring, smiling to
himself in the darkness.

And now Edgar Turchill came out of the drawing-room, and the two young
men went down the shallow flight of steps to the conservatory, where
Madoline and her sister were still seated in their wicker-work chairs
in front of the open door, through which the moonlit garden looked so
fair a scene of silent peace.

‘Daphne is quite right to reject your humiliating concessions,’ said
Edgar. ‘She and I will play against you and Madoline, and beat you.’

‘Easily done, my worthy Saxon,’ answered Gerald, who was apt to make
light of his friend’s ancient lineage, in a good-natured easy-going
way. ‘I have never given more than a fraction of my mind to billiards.’

‘Then you must be a deuced bad player,’ said Edgar bluntly. They all
went down into the billiard-room, where Daphne’s eyes sparkled with
unaccustomed fire in the lamplight, as if the mere notion of the coming
contest had fevered her excitable brain. Turchill, who was thoroughly
earnest in his amusements, took off his coat with the air of a man who
meant business. Gerald Goring slipped out of his as if he were going to
lie down for an after-dinner nap on one of the broad morocco-covered
divans.

And now began the fight. Gerald and Madoline were obviously nowhere,
from the very beginning. Daphne had a firmness of wrist, a hawklike
keenness of eye, an audacity of purpose that accomplished miracles.
The more difficult the position the better her stroke. Her boldness
conquered where a more cautious player must have failed. She sent her
adversaries’ ball rattling into the pockets with a dash that even
stimulated Gerald Goring to applaud his antagonist. And while she
swelled the score by the most startling strokes, Edgar crept quietly
after her with his judicious and careful play—doing wonderful things
with his arms behind his back, in the easiest manner.

‘I throw up the sponge,’ cried Gerald, after struggling feebly against
his fate. ‘Lina, dearest, forgive me for my candour, but you are
playing almost as wretchedly as I. We are both out of it. You two young
gladiators had better finish the game by playing against each other up
to a hundred, while Lina and I look on and applaud you. I like to see
youth energetic, even if its energies are misdirected.’

He seated himself languidly on the divan which commanded the best view
of the table. Lina sat by his side, her white hands moving with an
almost rhythmical regularity as she knitted a soft woollen comforter
for one of her numerous pensioners.

‘My busy Penelope, don’t you think you night rest from your labours now
that Ulysses is safe at home, and the suitors are all put to flight?’
asked Gerald, looking admiringly at the industrious hands. ‘You have no
idea how horribly idle you make me feel.’

‘I think idleness is the privilege of your sex, Gerald; but it would be
the penalty of ours. I am wretched without some kind of work.’

‘Another case of misdirected energy,’ sighed Gerald, throwing himself
lazily back against the India-matting dado, and clasping his hands
above his head, as he watched the antagonists.

Daphne was playing as if her life depended on her victory. Her slim
figure was braced like a young athlete’s, every muscle of the round
white arm defined under her muslin sleeve—the bare supple wrist and
delicate hand looking as strong as steel. She moved round the table
with the swift lightness of some wild thing of the woods—graceful, shy,
untamable, half savage, yet wholly beautiful.

Edgar Turchill went on all the while in his businesslike way, playing
with either hand, and behaving just as coolly as if he had been playing
against Sir Vernon. Yet every now and then, when it was Daphne’s turn
to play, he fell into a dreamy contemplative mood, and stood on one
side watching her as if she were something too wonderful to be quite
human.

‘There’s a stroke!’ he cried, as she left him tight under the cushion,
with nothing to play for. ‘I taught her. Oughtn’t I to be proud of such
a pupil?’

‘You taught me sculling, and lawn-tennis, and billiards,’ said Daphne,
considering what she should do next. ‘All I have ever learnt worth
knowing.’

‘Daphne!’ murmured Madoline, looking up reproachfully from her ivory
needles.

‘I say it advisedly,’ argued Daphne, making another score. ‘Edgar, I am
not at all sure you are marking honestly. Mr. Goring would mark for us
if he were not too lazy.’

‘Not too lazy,’ murmured Gerald languidly, ‘but too delightfully
occupied in watching you. I would not spoil my pleasure by mixing it
with business for the world.’

‘What is the use of book-learning?’ continued Daphne, going on with
her argument. ‘I maintain that Edgar has taught me all I know worth
knowing, for he has taught me how to be happy. I adore the river; I
doat upon billiards; and next best after billiards I like lawn-tennis.
Do you suppose I shall ever be happier for having learnt French
grammar, or the Rule of Three!’

‘Daphne, you are the most inconsistent person I ever met with,’ said
Madoline, almost angry. ‘Only this morning you wanted to go back to
school to finish your education.’

‘Did she?’ asked Gerald, suddenly attentive.

‘That was all nonsense,’ exclaimed Daphne, colouring violently.

Mr. Turchill laughed heartily at the idea.

‘Go back to school!’ he exclaimed. ‘What, after having tasted liberty,
and learnt to shoot Stratford bridge, and to beat her master at
billiards—for that last cannon makes the hundred, Daphne! Back to
school, indeed! What a little humbug you must be to talk of such a
thing!’

‘Yes,’ answered Daphne coolly, as she put away her cue, and came
quietly round to her sister’s side; ‘I am a little bit of a humbug. I
think I try to humbug myself sometimes. I persuaded myself this morning
that I really thirsted for knowledge; but my father contrived to quench
that righteous thirst with a very big dose of cold water—so henceforth
I renounce all attempts to improve myself.’

The clock on the chimney-piece struck the half-hour after ten.

‘I ordered my dog-cart for ten,’ said Gerald; ‘I hope we have not
transgressed, Lina, by staying so late?’

‘I am not going till eleven, unless Miss Lawford sends me away,’ said
Turchill. ‘Eleven is the mystic hour at which Sir Vernon usually tells
me to go about my business. I know the ways and manners of the house
better than a wretched wanderer like you, whose last idea of time is
derived from some wretched old Dalecarlian town-clock.’

‘We had better go back to the drawing-room,’ suggested Madoline. ‘My
father has finished his letters by this time, I daresay.’

‘Then good-night everybody,’ said Daphne. ‘I’m going into the garden to
cool myself after that fearful struggle, and then to bed.’

She ran off through the conservatory while Gerald was opening the
opposite door for Madoline to go up to the drawing-room by the indoor
staircase.

Daphne stopped to draw breath on the moonlit terrace.

‘How ridiculously I have been gabbling!’ she said to herself, with her
hands clasping her burning forehead. ‘Why can’t I hold my tongue? I am
detestable to myself and everybody.’

‘Daphne,’ said someone close at her side, in a tone of friendliest
concern, ‘I’m afraid you’re really tired.’

It was Edgar Turchill, who had followed her through the conservatory.

‘Tired! Not at all. I would play against you again to-night—and beat
you—if it were not too late.’

‘But I am sure you are tired; there is a something in your
voice—strained, unnatural. Have you been vexed to-day? My poor little
Daphne,’ he went on tenderly, taking her hand, ‘something has gone
wrong with you, I am sure. Has your aunt been lecturing?’

‘No. My father was unkind to me this morning; and I was weak enough to
take his unkindness to heart; which I ought not to have done, being so
well broken in to it.’

‘And did you really and truly wish to go back to school?’

‘I really and truly felt that I was an ignoramus, and that I had better
go on with my education while I was young enough to learn.’

‘Daphne, if you had all the knowledge of all the girls in Girton
screwed into that little golden head of yours, you wouldn’t be one whit
more charming than you are now.’

‘I daresay the effect would be the other way; but I might be a great
deal more useful. I might teach in a poor school, or nurse the sick, or
do something in some way to help my fellow-creatures. But sculling, and
billiard-playing, and lawn-tennis—isn’t it a horridly empty life?’

‘If there were not birds and butterflies, and many bright useless
things, this world wouldn’t be half so beautiful as it is, Daphne.’

‘Oh, now you are dropping into poetry, like Mr. Wegg, and I must go
to bed,’ she retorted, with good-humoured petulance, cheered by his
kindness. ‘Good-night, Edgar. You are always good to me. I shall always
like you,’ she said gently.

‘Always like me. Yes, I hope so, Daphne. And do you still think that
you would rather have had me than Gerald Goring for your brother?’

‘Ten thousand times.’

‘Yet he is a thoroughly amiable fellow, kind to everyone, generous to a
fault.’

‘A man with a million of money can’t be generous,’ answered Daphne; ‘he
can never give anything that he wants for himself. Generosity means
self-sacrifice, doesn’t it? It was generous of you to leave Hawksyard
at six in the morning in order to teach me to scull.’

‘I would do a great deal more than that to please you, and count it no
sacrifice,’ said Edgar gravely.

‘I am sure you would,’ answered Daphne, with easy frankness.

She was so thoroughly convinced that he would never leave off caring
for Madoline, and would go down to his grave fondly faithful to his
first misplaced affection, that no word or tone or look of his, however
significant, suggested to her any other feeling on his part than an
honest brotherly regard for herself.

‘Tell me what you think of Goring, now that you have had time to form
an opinion about him.’

‘I think that he is devoted to Lina, and that is all I want to know
about him,’ answered Daphne decisively.

‘And do you think him worthy of her?’

‘Oh, that is a wide question. There was never a man living except King
Arthur that I should think absolutely worthy of my sister Madoline; but
as he is lying in Glastonbury Abbey, I think Mr. Goring will do as well
as anyone else. I hope Lina will govern him, for his own sake as well
as hers.’

‘You think him weak, then?’

‘I think him self-indulgent; and a self-indulgent man is always a weak
man, isn’t he? Look at Gladstone now, a man of surpassing energy, of
illimitable industry, a man who will eat a snack of cold beef and drink
a glass of cold water for his luncheon, at his desk, in the midst of
his work, anyhow. Mr. Lampton, the new member who went up to see him,
gave us a sketch of him in his study, living so simply and working so
hard, so thoroughly homely and unaffected.’

‘Daphne, I thought you were a hardened little Tory!’

‘So I am; but I can admire the individual though I may detest his
politics. That is the kind of man I should like Lina to marry: a man
without a selfish thought, a man made of iron.’

‘Don’t you think a wife might hurt herself now and then against the
rough edges of the iron? Those unselfish men are apt to demand a good
deal of self-sacrifice from others.’

‘And you think Lina was made to sit in a drawing-room all her life,
among hot-house flowers. Well, I believe she will be very happy at
Goring Abbey. She likes a quiet domestic life, and to live among the
people she loves. And Mr. Goring’s selfishness will hardly trouble her.
She has had such splendid training with papa.’

‘Daphne, do you think it is quite right to speak of your father in that
way?’ asked Edgar reproachfully.

He was wounded by her flippant tone, hurt by every evidence of
faultiness in one whom he hoped the future would develop into perfect
woman and perfect wife.

‘Would you like me to be a hypocrite?’

‘No, Daphne. But if you can’t speak of Sir Vernon as he ought to be
spoken of, don’t you think it would be better to say nothing at all?’

‘For the future I shall be dumb, in deference to Mr. Turchill—and the
proprieties. But it was nice to have one friend in the world with whom
I could be thoroughly confidential,’ she added coaxingly.

‘Pray be confidential with me.’

‘I can’t, if you once begin to lecture. I have a horror of people who
talk to me for my own good. That is Aunt Rhoda’s line. She is never
tired of preaching to me for my good, and I never feel so utterly
bad as I do after one of her preachments. And now I really must say
good-night. Don’t forget that you are engaged to dine at the Rectory
to-morrow.’

‘Are not you and Lina going?’

‘Yes, and Mr. Goring. It is to be a regular family gathering. Papa
is asked, but I cherish a faint hope that he may not feel in the
humour for going. I beg your pardon,’ exclaimed Daphne, making him a
ceremonious curtsy. ‘My honoured parent has been invited, and wherever
he is his children must be happy. Is that the kind of thing you like?’
she asked tripping away to the little half-glass door at the other end
of the terrace.

Edgar ran after her to open the door for her; but she was fleet as
Atalanta, and there was nobody to distract her with golden apples. She
shut the door and drew the bolt, just as Edgar reached it, and nodded
a smiling good-night to him through the glass. He stopped to see the
white frock vanish from the lamp-lit lobby, and then turned away to
light a cigarette and take a solitary turn on the terrace before going
back to the drawing-room to make his adieux.

It was a spot where a man might love to linger on such a night as this.
The winding river, showing in fitful glimpses between its shadowy
willows; the distant woods; the dim lights of the little quiet town;
the tall spire rising above the trees; made up a landscape dearer to
Edgar Turchill’s honest English heart than all the blue mountains and
vine-clad valleys of the Sunny South. He was a son of the soil, with
all his desires and prejudices and affections rooted in the land on
which he had been born. ‘How sweet—how completely lovable she is,’
he said to himself, meditating over that final cigarette, ‘and how
thoroughly she trusts me! Her mind is as clear as a rivulet, through
which one can count every pebble and every grain of golden sand.’




CHAPTER XII.

‘AND TO THE DINNER FASTE THEY HEM SPEDDE.’


Mr. MacCloskie’s suggestions for new hot-houses at Goring Abbey were
on so large a scale as to necessitate a good deal of consultation with
architect and builder before the new constructions and alterations of
existing structures were put in hand. The head gardener at South Hill
had tried his hardest to secure the whole organisation and direction of
the work for himself, and to have large powers in the choice of the men
who were to carry it out.

‘Ye’ll not need any architect, Mr. Goring, if ye’ll joost let me
explain my mind to the builder,’ said this modest Caledonian.
‘Architects know a deal about the Parthenon and the Temple of the
Winds, and that kind of old-fashioned classical stuff, but there’s not
one of ’em knows how to plan a good workable hot-house, or to build a
flue that won’t smoke when the wind’s contrary. Architects are very
good for the fronts of clubhouses and ceevil-service stores, and that
like; but if you trust your new houses to an architect, I’ll give odds
when they’re done there’ll be no place for me to put my coals. If
you’ll just give me free scope——’

‘You are very good, Mr. MacCloskie,’ answered Gerald with velvety
softness, ‘but my father was a thoroughly practical man, and I believe
he knew as much of the science of construction as any man living; yet
he always employed an architect when he wanted anything built for
himself, were it only a dustbin. I’ll stick to his lines.’

‘Very well, sir, you must please yourself. But an orchid-house is a
creetical thing to build. The outside of it may be as handsome as St.
Peter’s at Rome; but your orchids won’t thrive unless they like the
inside arrangements, and for them ye’ll want a practical man.’

‘I’ll get a practical man, Mr. MacCloskie; you may be sure of that,’
answered Gerald, ineffably calm, though the Scot was looking daggers.

The morning before Mrs. Ferrers’s family dinner was devoted to the
architect, who came down from London to Goring Abbey, expressly to
advise and be instructed. He was entertained at luncheon at the Abbey;
and Lina drove over under her aunt’s wing to meet him, while Gerald’s
thoroughbred hack—a horse of such perfect manners that it mattered very
little whether his rider had hands or no hands—ambled along the turfy
borders of the pleasant country road beside the phaeton.

Daphne had her day all to herself, since, knowing her to be alone at
South Hill, Edgar had no excuse for going there; and, as Mr. Turchill
argued with himself, a man must give some portion of his life to the
dearest old mother and the most picturesque old house in the county.
So, Edgar, with his fancies flying off and circling about South Hill,
contrived to spend a moony day at home, mending his fishing-rods,
reviewing his guns, writing a few letters, and going in and out of
his mother’s homely old-fashioned morning-room twenty times between
breakfast and luncheon.

Mrs. Turchill had been invited to the family dinner at Arden Rectory,
and had accepted the invitation, though she was not given to
dissipation of any kind, and she and her son found a good deal to say
about the coming feast during Edgar’s desultory droppings-in.

‘I hope you’ll like her, mother,’ said Edgar, stopping, with a gun in
one hand and an oily rag in the other, to look dreamily across the moat
to the quiet meadows beyond, where the dark red Devon cows contrasted
deliciously with the fresh green turf sprinkled with golden buttercups
and silvery marguerites.

‘Like her!’ echoed Mrs. Turchill, lifting her soft blue eyes in mild
astonishment from her matronly task of darning one of the best damask
table-cloths. ‘Why she is the sweetest girl I know. I would have given
ten years of my life for you to have married her.’

This was awkward for Edgar, who had spoken of Daphne, while Mrs.
Turchill thought of Madoline.

‘Not with my consent, mother,’ he said, laughing, and reddening as he
laughed. ‘I couldn’t have spared a single year. But I wasn’t speaking
of Madoline just then. I know of old how fond you are of her. I was
talking of poor little Daphne, whom you haven’t seen since she came
from her French school.’

‘French school!’ exclaimed Mrs. Turchill contemptuously. ‘I hate the
idea of those foreign schools, regular Jesuitical places, where they
take girls to operas and theatres and give them fine notions,’ pursued
the Saxon matron, whose ideas on the subject were slightly mixed. ‘Why
couldn’t Sir Vernon send her to the Misses Tompion, at Leamington?
That’s a respectable school if you like. Good evangelical principles,
separate bedrooms, and plain English diet. I hope the French school
hasn’t spoilt Daphne. She was a pretty little girl with bright hair, I
remember, but she had rather wild ways. Something too much of a tomboy
for my taste.’

‘She was so young, mother, when you saw her last, not fifteen.’

‘Well, I suppose French governesses have tamed her down, and that she’s
pretty stiff and prim by this time,’ said Mrs. Turchill with chilling
indifference.

‘No, mother, she is a kind of girl whom no training would ever make
conventional. She is thoroughly natural, original even, and doesn’t
mind what she says.’

‘That sounds as if she talked slang,’ said Mrs. Turchill, who, although
the kindest of women in her conduct, could be severe of speech on
occasion, ‘and of all things I detest slang in a woman. I hope she is
industrious. The idleness of the young women of the present day is a
crying sin.’

Edgar Turchill seemed hardly to be aware of this last remark. He was
polishing the gun-metal industriously with that horrible oily rag which
accompanied him everywhere on his muddling mornings at home.

‘She’s accomplished, I suppose,’ speculated Mrs. Turchill—‘plays, and
sings, and paints on velvet.’

‘Ye—es; that’s to say I’m not sure about the velvet,’ answered Edgar
faintly, not remembering any special artistic performances of Daphne’s
except certain attempts on a drawing-block, which had seemed to him too
green and too cloudy to lead to much, and which he had never beheld in
an advanced stage. ‘She is awfully fond of reading,’ he added in rather
a spasmodic manner, after an interval of silent thought. ‘The poetry
she knows would astonish you.’

‘That would be easy,’ retorted Mrs. Turchill. ‘My father and mother
didn’t approve of poetry, and Cowper, Thomson, and Kirke White were the
only poets allowed to be read by us girls at old Miss Tompion’s—these
ladies are nieces of my Miss Tompion, you know, Edgar.’

‘How can I help knowing it, mother, when you’ve told me a hundred and
fifty times?’ exclaimed her son, more impatiently than his wont.

‘Well, Edgar, my dear, if you’re tired of my conversation—’

‘No, you dear peppery old party, not a bit. Go on like an old dear as
you are. Only I thought you were rather hard upon poor little Daphne
just now.’

‘How can I be hard upon her, when I haven’t seen her for the last three
years! Dear, dear, what a small place Leamington was in my time,’
pursued Mrs. Turchill, musing blandly upon the days of her youth; ‘but
it was much more select. None of these rich people from Birmingham;
none of these Londoners coming down to hunt; but a very superior
class—invalids, elderly people who came to drink the waters, and to
consult Doctor Jephson.’

‘It must have been lively,’ murmured Edgar, not deeply interested.

‘It was not lively, Edgar, but it was select,’ corrected Mrs. Turchill
with dignity, as she paused with her head on one side to admire the
neatness of her own work.

She was the kindest and best of mothers, but Edgar felt on this
particular occasion that she was rather stupid, and a trifle narrow in
her ideas. A purely rustic life has its disadvantages, and a life which
is one long procession of placid prosperous days, knowing little more
variety than the change of the seasons, is apt to blunt the edge of the
keenest intellect. Mrs. Turchill ought to have been more interested in
Daphne, Edgar thought.

‘She will be delighted with her when she sees her,’ he reasoned,
comforting himself. ‘Who can help being charmed with a girl who is so
thoroughly charming?’

And then he took up his gun and his rag, and strolled away to another
part of the roomy old house, so soberly and thoroughly old-fashioned,
not with the gimcrack spurious old fashion of to-day, but with the
grave ponderous realities of centuries ago—walls four feet thick,
deeply-recessed windows, massive untrimmed joists, low ceilings,
narrow passages, oak wainscoting, inconveniences and shortcomings
of all kinds, but the subtle charm of the remote past, the romantic
feeling of a house that has many histories, pervading everything.
Edgar would not have changed Hawksyard and his three thousand a-year
for Goring Abbey and a million. The house and the land around it—or at
any rate the land—had belonged to his race from time immemorial, far
back in the dim days of the Heptarchy. Tradition held that the first
of the Turchills had been a sokeman who possessed a yard of land on
the old feudal tenure, one of his obligations being that he should
breed hawks for the king’s falconers, and thus the place had come
in time to be called Hawksyard, long after the last hawk bred there
had flown away to join some wild branch of the honey-buzzard family
in the tree-tops of primeval Arden, and the yard of land had swelled
into a very respectable manor. Edgar rather liked to believe that the
founder of his race had been a sokeman, who had held thirty acres of
land from the king at a penny an acre, and had furnished labourers for
the royal harvest, and had ridden up and down the field with a wand in
his hand to see that his men worked properly. This curious young man
was as proud of Turchill the sokeman as of Turchill the high sheriff.
If it was a humble origin its humility was of such ancient date that
it became distinction. Turchill of the thirty acres was like Adam,
or Paris, or David. In the long line of the Turchills whose bones
were lying in the vaults below Hawksyard Church there had been men
distinguished in the field, the Church, and the law; men who had fought
on sea and land; men who had won power in the State, and used it well,
true alike to king and commons. But the ruck of the Turchills had been
country squires like Edgar, and Edgar’s father; men who farmed their
own land and lived upon it, and who had no ambitions and few interests
or desires beyond their native soil.

Hawksyard was a real moated grange. The house formed three sides of a
quadrangle, with a heavily buttressed garden wall for the fourth side.
The water flowed all round the solid base of the building, a wide deep
moat, well stocked with pike and eels, carp and roach. The square inner
garden was a prim parterre of the seventeenth century, and there was
not a flower grew there more modern than Lord Bacon’s day. This was a
Turchill fancy. All the novelties of nineteenth-century horticulture
might flourish in the spacious garden on the other side of the moat;
but this little bit of ground within the gray old walls was a sacred
enclosure, dedicated to the spirit of the past. Here the old yew-trees
were clipped into peacocks. Here grew rosemary; lavender; periwinkle,
white, purple, and blue; germander; flags; sweet marjoram; primroses;
anemones; hyacinths; and the rare fritillaria; double white violets,
which bloom in April, and again at Bartholomew-tide; gilliflowers;
sweetbrier; and the musk-rose. Here the brazen sun-dial, on its
crumbling stone pedestal, reminded the passer-by that no man is always
wise. Here soft mosses, like tawny velvet, crept over the gray relics
of an abbey that had been destroyed soon after the grange was built—the
stone coffin of a mitred abbot; the crossed legs of a knightly
crusader, with a headless heraldic dog at his feet. Here was the small
circular fish-pond into which the last of the abbots was supposed to
have pitched headforemost, and incontinently drowned himself, walking
alone at midnight in a holy trance.

Mrs. Turchill was almost as fond as Edgar was of Hawksyard; but her
affection took a commonplace turn. She was not to the manner born.

She had come to the grange from a smart nineteenth-century villa, and
though she was very proud of the grave old house of which her husband
had made her the mistress, her pride was mingled with an idea that
Hawksyard was inconvenient, and that its old fashion was a thing to be
apologised for and deprecated at every turn. Her chief delight was in
keeping her house in order; and her servants were drilled to an almost
impossible perfection in every duty appertaining to house-cleaning.
Nobody’s brasses, or oak floors, or furniture, or family plate, or
pewter dinner-service, ever looked so bright as Mrs. Turchill’s.
Nowhere were windows so spotless; nowhere was linen so exquisitely
white, or of such satin-like smoothness. Mrs. Turchill lived for these
things. When she was in London, or at the sea-side, she would be
miserable on rainy days at the idea that Jane or Mary would leave the
windows open, and that the brass fenders and fire-irons were all going
to ruin.

Edgar spent a moony purposeless day, dawdling a good deal in the garden
on the other side of the moat, where the long old-fashioned borders
were full of tall white lilies and red moss-roses, vivid scarlet
geranium, heliotrope and calceolaria, a feast of sweet scents and
bright colours. There was a long and wide lawn without a flower bed on
it—a level expanse of grass; and on the side opposite the flower border
there was a row of good old mulberry and walnut trees; then came a
light iron fence, and a stretch of meadow land beyond it. The grounds
at Hawksyard made no pretence of being a park. There was not even a
shrubbery, only that straight row of old trees, standing up out of the
grass, with a gravel walk between them and the fence, across which
Edgar used to feed and fondle his cows, or coax the shy brood mares and
their foals to social intercourse.

He looked round his domain doubtfully to-day, wondering if it were
good enough for Daphne, this poor table-land of a garden, a flat lawn,
a long old-fashioned border crammed with homely flowers, the yew-tree
arbour at the end of yonder walk. How poor a thing it seemed after
South Hill, with its picturesque timber and extensive view, its broad
terrace and sloping lawn, its rich variety of shrubs and conifers!

‘It isn’t because I am fond of the place that she would care for it,’
he told himself despondently. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing romantic or
striking about it—except the moat. I’m glad she’s so fond of water.’

Edgar smoked a cigarette or two under the mulberry-trees, looked at his
cows, talked to some of his men, and thus contrived to wear away the
afternoon till the clock over the gateway struck five.

‘Mother’s tea-time. I’ll go and have a cup with her,’ he said to
himself.

Going out to dinner was a tremendous piece of business with Mrs.
Turchill. She was more serious and solemn about it than a strictly
modern lady would feel about going to be married. Even in an
instance of this kind, where the dinner was supposed to be entirely
unceremonious, a friendly little gathering arranged on the spur of the
moment, she was still full of fuss and preparation. She had spent an
hour in her bed-chamber before luncheon, arranging and discussing with
her maid Deborah what gown she would or would not wear on the occasion;
and this discussion involved a taking out and unfolding of all her
dinner-gowns, and an offering of divers laces upon divers bodices, to
see which went best with which. A review of this kind generally ended
by a decision in favour of black velvet, or satin, or silk, or brocade,
as the case might be; Mrs. Turchill being much richer in gowns than in
opportunities for wearing them.

‘I always like myself best in black,’ she would say, with a glance at
the reflection of her somewhat florid complexion in the Chippendale
glass.

‘You always look the lady in your velvet, mum,’ Deborah would answer
sententiously.

Then after a day of quiet usefulness about her house the worthy matron
would collect her energies over a leisurely cup of tea, and perhaps
allow herself the refreshment of a nap after her tea, before she began
the solemn business of the toilet.

The carriage had been ordered for a quarter past seven, though it was
but half an hour’s drive to Arden Rectory, and at seven o’clock Mrs.
Turchill was seated in the white parlour, in all the dignity of her
velvet gown and point-lace cap, her hereditary amethysts, supposed to
be second only to those once possessed by George the Third’s virtuous
consort, and her scarlet and gold Indian shawl. She was a comely
matron, with a complexion that had never been damaged by cark or
care, gas or late hours: a rosy-faced country-bred dame, with bright
blue eyes, white teeth, and plentiful brown hair, in which the silver
threads were hardly visible.

Edgar was standing by the open window, just where he had stood in the
morning with his gun, sorely perplexed as to the disposal of those
fifteen minutes which had to be got through before the most punctual of
coachmen would bring the carriage to the door. The London papers were
lying unheeded on the table; but Edgar had felt very little interest of
late in the welfare of nations, or even in the last dreadful murder in
Whitechapel.

‘I hope my cap is right,’ said Mrs. Turchill anxiously.

‘How could it be wrong, mother, when you’ve Deborah and your
looking-glass, and have never been known to dress yourself in a hurry?’

‘I dislike doing anything in a hurry, Edgar. It is against my
principles. But I never feel sure about the set of my cap. I am
afraid Deborah’s eye is not quite correct, and a glass is dreadfully
deceiving. I wish you’d look, Edgar, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

This was said reproachfully, as her son was kneeling on the window-seat
staring idly down into the moat, as if he wanted to discover the
whereabouts of an ancient pike that had evaded him last year.

‘My dear mother,’ he exclaimed, turning himself about to survey her,
‘to my eye—which may be no better than Deborah’s—that lace arrangement
which you call a cap appears mathematically exact, as precise as your
own straight, honest mind. There’s Dobson with the carriage. Come
along, mother.’

He led her out, established her comfortably in her own particular seat
in the large landau, and seated himself opposite to her with a beaming
countenance.

‘How happy you look, Edgar!’ said Mrs. Turchill, wondering at this
unusual radiance. ‘One would think it were a novelty for you to dine
out. Yet I am sure,’ somewhat plaintively, ‘you don’t very often dine
at home.’

‘The Rectory dinners are not to be despised, mother.’

‘Mrs. Ferrers is an excellent manager, and does everything very nicely;
but as you don’t much care what you eat that would hardly make you so
elated. I am rather surprised that you care about meeting Madoline and
Mr. Goring so often,’ added Mrs. Turchill, who had not quite forgiven
Lina for having refused to marry her son.

That is the worst of making a confidante of a mother. She has an
inconveniently long memory.

‘I have nothing but kindly feelings for either of them,’ answered
Edgar. ‘Don’t you know the old song, mother—“Shall I, wasting in
despair, die because a woman’s fair?” I don’t look much like wasting in
despair, do I, old lady?’

‘I should be very sorry to see you unhappy, Edgar; but I shall never
love any wife of yours as well as I could have loved Madoline.’

‘Don’t say that, mother. That’s too hard on the future Mrs. Turchill.’

This was a curious speech from a youth who six months ago had protested
that he should never marry. But perhaps this was only Edgar’s fun. Mrs.
Turchill shared the common delusion of mothers, and thought her son a
particularly humorous young man.

What a sweetly Arcadian retreat Arden Rectory looked on this fair
summer evening, and how savoury was the odour of a _sole au gratin_
which blended with the flowery perfumes of the low-panelled hall! The
guests had wandered out through the window of the small drawing-room
to the verandah and lawn in front of it. That long French window was a
blot upon the architectural beauty of the half-timbered Tudor cottage,
but it was very useful for circulation between drawing-room and garden.

Mrs. Ferrers and Madoline were sitting under the verandah; Daphne was
standing a little way off on the lawn talking to the Rector and Gerald
Goring. She was speaking with intense animation, her face full of
brightness. Edgar darted off to join the group, directly he had shaken
hands with the two ladies, leaving his mother to subside into one of
those new-fangled bamboo chairs which she felt assured would leave its
basket-work impression on her velvet gown.

‘Edgar,’ cried Daphne as he came towards her, ‘did you ever hear of
such a heathen—a man born on the soil—a very pagan?’

‘Who is the culprit?’ asked Edgar; ‘and what has he done?’

‘Mr. Goring has never seen Ann Hathaway’s cottage.’

‘I don’t believe he knew who Ann Hathaway was till we told him,’ said
the Rector, with his fat laugh.

‘And he has ridden and driven through Shottery hundreds of times, and
he never stopped to look at the cottage where Shakespeare—the most
wonderful man in the whole world—wooed and won his wife.’

‘I have heard it dimly suggested that she wooed and won him,’ remarked
Gerald placidly; ‘she was old enough.’

‘You are too horrid,’ cried Daphne. ‘Would you be surprised to hear
that Americans cross the Atlantic—three thousand miles of winds and
waves and sea-sickness—on purpose to see Stratford-on-Avon, and
Shottery, and Wilmcote, and Snitterfield?’

‘I could believe anything of a Yankee,’ answered Gerald, unmoved by
these reproaches. ‘But why Wilmcote? why Snitterfield? They are as poky
little settlements as you could find in any agricultural district.’

‘Did you ever hear of such hideous ignorance?’ cried Daphne, ‘and in
a son of the soil. You are most unworthy of the honour of having been
raised in Shakespeare’s country. Why John Shakespeare was born at
Snitterfield, and Mary Arden lived with her father at Wilmcote; and it
was there he courted her.’

‘John—Mary—oh, distant relations of the poet’s, I suppose?’ inquired
Gerald easily.

‘This is revolting,’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘but he is shamming—he must be
shamming.’

‘Punish him for his ignorance, whether it is real or pretended,’ cried
Edgar. ‘Make him row us all down to Stratford to-morrow morning; and
then we’ll walk him over to Shottery, and make him give a new gown to
the nice old woman who keeps the cottage.’

‘A new gown,’ echoed Daphne contemptuously; ‘he ought to be made to
give her a cow—a beautiful mouse-coloured Channel Island cow.’

‘I’ll give her anything you like, as long as you don’t bore me to death
about Shakespeare. I hate sights and lions of all kinds. I went through
Frankfort without looking at the house where Goethe was born.’

‘A depraved desire to be singular,’ said the Rector. ‘I think he ought
to forfeit a cow to Mrs. Baker. Rhoda, my love,’ glancing furtively at
his watch, ‘our friends are all here. Todd is usually more punctual.’

Mrs. Ferrers, Lina, and Mrs. Turchill had strolled out to join the
others. The prim rustic matron was looking at Daphne with astonishment
rather than admiration. She was pretty, no doubt. Mrs. Turchill had
never seen a more transparent complexion, or lovelier eyes; but there
was a reckless vivacity about the girl’s manner which horrified the
thoroughly British matron.

‘Daphne,’ said Edgar, ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten my mother. Mother,
this is Daphne.’

Mrs. Turchill drew back a pace or two with extreme deliberation,
and sank gracefully in the curtsy which she had been taught by the
Leamington dancing-master—an undoubted Parisian—five-and-thirty years
ago. After the curtsy she extended her hand and allowed Daphne to shake
it.

‘Come, Mrs. Turchill,’ said the Rector, offering his arm. ‘Goring,
bring Miss Lawford; Turchill will take care of my wife; and Daphne’—he
paused, smiling at the fair young face and slender girlish figure in
soft white muslin—‘Daphne shall have my other arm, and sit on my left
hand. I feel there is a bond of friendship between us now that I find
she is so fond of Shakespeare.’

‘I’m afraid I know Hamlet’s soliloquies better than I do my duty to my
neighbour,’ said Daphne, on the way to the dining-room, remembering how
the Rector used to glower at her under his heavy brows when she broke
down in that portion of the Church Catechism.

Mrs. Ferrers, from her opposite seat at the oval table, had a full view
of her husband’s demeanour, across the roses and maidenhair ferns and
old Derby crimson and purple dessert dishes. It was rather trying to
her to see that he devoted himself entirely to Daphne during the pauses
of the meal; and that, while he as in duty bound provided for all Mrs.
Turchill’s corporeal needs, and was solicitous that she should do ample
justice to his wines and his dishes, he allowed her mind to starve upon
the merest scraps of speech dropped into her ear at long intervals.

Nor was Edgar much better behaved to Mrs. Ferrers, for he sank into
such a slough of despond at finding himself separated from Daphne,
that his conversational sources ran suddenly dry, and Rhoda’s lively
inquiries about the plays and pictures he had just been seeing elicited
only the humiliating fact that she, who had not seen them, knew a great
deal more about them than he who had.

‘What did you think of the Millais landscape?’ she asked.

‘Was there a landscape by Millais? I thought he was a portrait painter.’

This looked hopeless, but she tried again.

‘And Frith’s picture; you saw that of course.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he replied, brightening; ‘but I saw the people looking
at it. It was immensely good, I believe. There was a railing, and a
policeman to make the people move on. My mother was delighted. She and
another lady trod on each other’s gowns in their eagerness to get at
the picture. I believe they would have come to blows, if it hadn’t been
for the policeman.’

‘And there was Miss Thompson’s picture.’

‘Yes; and another crowd. That is the sort of picture mother enjoys. I
think the harder the struggle is the better she likes the picture.’

Gerald and Madoline were sitting side by side, talking as happily
as if they had been in Eden. All the world might have heard their
conversation—there were no secrets, there was no exchange of
confidences—and yet they were as far away from the world about them,
and as completely out of it, as if they had been in the planet Venus,
rising so calmly yonder above the willows, and sending one tremulous
arrow of light deep down into the dark brown river. For these two
Mrs. Todd’s most careful achievements were as nothing. Her _sole
au gratin_ might have been served with horse-radish sauce—or fried
onions; her _vol-au-vent_ might have been as heavy as suet-pudding; her
_blanquette_ might have been bill-sticker’s paste; her _soufflé_ might
have been flavoured with peppermint instead of _vanille_; and they
would hardly have discovered that anything was wrong.

And what delight it was by-and-by to wander out into the cool garden,
leaving the Rector to prose to poor Edgar over his Chambertin, and to
lose themselves in the shadowy shrubbery, where the perfume of golden
broom and mock orange seemed intensified by the darkness. Daphne sat
in the quaint old candle-lit drawing-room conversing with the two
matrons—Aunt Rhoda inclined to lecture; Mrs. Turchill inclined to
sleepiness, having eaten a more elaborate dinner than she was used to,
and feeling an uncomfortable tightness in the region of her velvet
waistband.

Edgar got away from the Rector as soon as he decently could, and came
to the relief of the damsel.

‘Well, mother, how are you and Daphne getting on?’ he asked cheerily.
‘I hope you have made her promise to come to see you at Hawksyard.’

Mrs. Turchill started from semi-somnolence, and her waistband gave a
little creak.

‘I shall be delighted if Madoline will bring her sister to call on
me some day,’ she replied stiffly, addressing herself to nobody in
particular.

‘Call on you—some day! What an invitation!’ cried Edgar. ‘Why, mother,
what has become of your old-fashioned hospitality? I want Daphne to
come and stay with you, and to run about the house with you, and help
you in your dairy and poultry-yard—and—get used to the place.’

Get used to the place! Why should Daphne get used to the place? For
what reason was a fair-haired chit in a white frock suddenly projected
upon Mrs. Turchill’s cows and poultry—cows as sacred in her mind as
if she had been a Hindoo; poultry which she only allowed the most
trusted of her dependents to attend upon? She felt a sudden sinking of
the heart, which was much worse than after-dinner tightness. Could it
be that Edgar, her cherished Edgar, was going to throw himself away
upon such a frivolous chit as this; a mere school-girl, without the
slightest pretension to deportment?

Daphne all this time sat in a low basket-chair by the open window, and
looked up at Edgar with calm friendly eyes—eyes which were at least
without guile when they looked at him.




CHAPTER XIII.

‘AFTER MY MIGHT FUL FAYNE WOLD I YOU PLESE.’


The day after the family dinner was hopelessly wet; so the expedition
to Shottery, proposed by Edgar Turchill and seconded by Daphne, was
indefinitely postponed. The summer fleeted by, the beautiful bounteous
summer, with her lap full of sweet-scented flowers; the corn grew tall,
the hay was being carted in many a meadow within sound of Stratford
bells; and the woods began to put on that look of dull uniform green
which indicates the beginning of the end. For the sisters at South
Hill, for Gerald Goring and Edgar Turchill, July and August had been
one long holiday. There was so little in life for these young people
to do except take their pleasure. Theirs was an existence of perpetual
rose-gathering; and the roses of life budded and bloomed for them with
an inexhaustible fertility. Perhaps Madoline was the only one among
them who had any idea of duty. Edgar was an affectionate son, a good
master, and a liberal landlord, but he had never been called upon
to sacrifice his own inclinations for the welfare of others, and he
had never given his mind to any of the graver questions of the day.
To him it mattered very little how the labouring classes as a body
were taught and housed, so long as the peasants on his own land had
decent cottages, and were strangers to want. It irked him not whether
the mass of mankind were Jews or Gentiles, Ritualists, Dissenters,
or rank unbelievers, so long as he sat in the old cloth-lined family
pew on Sunday morning assisting at the same service which had been
all-sufficient for his father, and seeing his dependents deporting
themselves discreetly in their places in the gallery. His life was a
narrow life, travelling in a narrow path that had been worn for him by
the footsteps of his ancestors. He was a good man in a limited way.
But he had never read the modern gospel, according to Thomas Carlyle,
which after all is but an expansion of the Parable of the Talents:
and he knew not that every man must work after some fashion or other,
and do something for the time in which he lives. He was so thoroughly
honest and true-hearted, that if the narrowness and uselessness of his
life had been revealed to him, he would assuredly have girded his loins
and taken up the pilgrim’s staff. Never having had any such revelation
he took his pleasure as innocently as a school-boy at home for the
holidays, and had no idea that he was open to the same reproach which
that man received who had buried the wealth entrusted to him.

He was as near happiness in this bright summer-tide as a mortal can
hope to be. The greater part of his days were spent with Daphne, and
Daphne was always delighted. True that she was changeable as the light
July winds, and that there were times when she most unmercifully
snubbed him. But to be snubbed by her was better than the smiles
and blandishments of other women. She was given to that coyness and
skittishness, the _grata protervitas_, which seems to have been the
chief fascination of the professional beauty of the Augustan era.
She was as coy as Chloe; coquettish as Glycera; fickle as Lydia,
who, supposing there was only one lady of that name, and she a real
personage, was rather too bad. Daphne was half-a-dozen girls is one;
sometimes welcoming her swain so sweetly that he felt sure she loved
him, and the next day turning from him with scornful impatience, as if
his very presence were weariness to her.

He bore it all. ‘Being her slave what could he do,’ etc. He had
Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and was somewhat of the slavish lover
therein depictured. His Lydia might flout him to-day, and he was just
as ready to fetch and carry for her on the morrow. She had changed,
and for the worse, since the sweet fresh early summer-tide when they
two had breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in the boat-house. She was not so
even-tempered. She was ever so much more capricious and exacting; and
she was prone to gloomy intervals which anyone other than a lover
might have ascribed to sulks. Edgar wondered, not without sorrow, at
the change; but it was not in him to blame her. He made all manner
of excuses. Bad health was, perhaps, at the root of these discords.
She might be a victim to obscure neuralgic pains and aches, which
she heroically concealed from her friends—albeit her fair and fresh
appearance belied the supposition. Perhaps it was the weather which
made her occasionally cross. Who could go on in simpering placidity
with the thermometer at ninety in the shade?

‘And then we spoil her,’ argued Edgar, urging his final plea. ‘She is
so bewitching that one can’t help spoiling her. Madoline spoils her. I
am an idiot about her; and even Goring, for all his contemptuous airs
and graces, is almost as easily fooled by her as the rest of us. If we
were more rational in our treatment of her, she would be less faulty.
But then her very faults are charming.’

It had been, or had seemed to be, an utterly happy summer for everybody
at South Hill. Two months of splendid weather; two months wasted
in picnicking, and excursionising, driving, boating, lawn-tennis,
tea-drinking, journeying to and fro between South Hill and Goring Abbey
to watch the progress of the hot-houses, which, despite the unlimited
means of their proprietor, progressed with a provoking slowness.

For some little time after Gerald’s arrival Daphne had held herself as
much as possible in the background. She had tried to keep aloof from
the life of the two lovers; but this Madoline would not suffer.

‘You are to be in all our amusements, and to hear all our plans, dear,’
she told her sister one day. ‘I never meant that you and I should be
less together, or less dear to each other, because of Gerald’s return.
Do you think my heart is not big enough to hold you both?’

‘I know it is, Lina. But I fancy Mr. Goring would like to have it all
to himself, and would soon get to look upon me as an intruder, if I
were too much with you. You had better leave me at home to amuse myself
on the river, or to play ball with Goldie, who is more than a person
as to sense and sensibility.’

To this Madoline would not consent. Her love of her sister was so
tempered with pity, so chastened and softened by her knowledge of the
shadow that darkened the beginning of Daphne’s life, that it was much
deeper and stronger than the affection common among sisters. She wanted
to make up to Daphne for all she had lost; for the cruel mother who had
deserted her in her cradle; for the father’s unjust resentment. And
then there was the delightful idea that Edgar Turchill, that second
best of men, whom she had rejected as a husband, would by-and-by be
her brother; and that Daphne’s future, sheltered and cherished by a
good man’s devoted love, would be as complete and perfect a life as
the fairest and sweetest of women need desire to live. Madoline had
quite made up her mind that Edgar was to marry Daphne. That he was
passionately in love with her was obvious to the meanest capacity.
Everybody at South Hill knew it except perhaps Daphne herself. That
she liked him with placid sisterly regard was equally clear. And who
could doubt that time would ripen this sisterly regard into that warmer
feeling which could alone recompense him for his devotion? Thus,
against the girl’s own better sense, it became an understood fact that
Daphne was to be a third in all the lovers’ amusements and occupations,
and that Mr. Turchill was very frequently to make a fourth in the same.
To Gerald Goring the presence of these two seemed in no wise obnoxious.
Daphne’s vivacity amused him, and he looked upon his old friend
Turchill as a considerably inferior order of being, not altogether
unamusing after his kind. He was not an exacting lover. He accepted his
bliss as a settled thing; he knew that no rock on Cornwall’s rugged
coast was more securely based than his hold on Madoline’s affection. He
was troubled by no jealous doubts; his love knew no hot fits or cold
fits, no quarrelling for the after bliss of reconciliation. There was
nothing of the _grata protervitas_ in Madoline’s gentle nature. Her
well-balanced mind could not have stooped to coquetry.

August was drawing to its close. It had been a month of glorious
weather, such halcyon days as made the farmer’s occupation seem just
the most delightful calling possible for man. There was not much arable
land within ken of South Hill, but what cornfields there were promised
abundant crops; and one of the magnates of the land—who, in his dudgeon
against a revolutionary re-adjustment of the game-laws at that time
looming in the dim future, had rough-ploughed a thousand acres or so of
his best land rather than let it under obnoxious conditions—may have
thought regretfully of the corn that might have been reaped off those
breezy uplands and in those fertile valleys, where at his bidding
sprang cockle instead of barley. It was a month of holiday-making
for everybody—for even the labour of the fields, looked at from the
outside, seemed like holiday-making. Quiet little Stratford, flushed
with spasmodic life by the arrival of a corps of artillery, tootled on
trumpets, and daddy-mammyed on drums; while the horn of the Leamington
coach blew lustily every morning and afternoon, and the foxhound puppy
at nurse at The Red Horse found the middle of the highway no longer
a comfortable place for his after-dinner nap. It was the season of
American tourists, doing Stratford and its environs, guide-book in
hand, and crowding in to The Red Horse parlour, after luncheon, to see
the veritable chair in which Washington Irving used to sit.

There came a drowsy sunny noontide when the lovers had no particular
employment for their day. They had been reduced to playing billiards
directly after breakfast, until Gerald discovered that it was too warm
for billiards, whereupon the four players—Lina, Daphne, Gerald, and
Turchill—repaired to the garden in search of shade.

‘Shade!’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘Who wants shade? Who could ever
have too much of Phœbus Apollo? Not I. We see too little of his godlike
countenance, and I will never turn my back upon him.’

She seated herself on the burnt grass in the full blaze of the sun,
while the other three sat in the shadow of an immense Spanish chestnut,
which grew wide and low, making a leafy tent.

‘This is a horrid idle way of spending one’s day,’ said Daphne, jumping
up with sudden impatience, after they had all sat for half an hour
talking lazily of the weather and their neighbours. ‘Is there nothing
for us to do?’

‘Yes, you excitable young person,’ answered Gerald; ‘since your
restless temper won’t let us be comfortable here, we’ll make you exert
yourself elsewhere. The river is the only place where life can be
tolerable upon such a day as this. The nicest thing would be to be in
it: the next best thing perhaps is to be on it. You shall row us to
Stratford Weir, Miss Daphne.’

‘I should like it of all things. I am dying for something to do,’
responded Daphne, brightening. ‘You’ll take an oar, won’t you, Edgar?’

‘Of course, if you’d really like to go. By-the-by, suppose we improve
the occasion by landing at Stratford, and walking Gerald over to
Shottery to see Ann Hathaway’s cottage.’

‘Delicious,’ cried Daphne. ‘It shall be a regular Shakespearian
pilgrimage. We’ll take tea and things, and have kettledrum in Mrs.
Baker’s house-place. She’ll let me do what I like, I know. And Mr.
Goring shall carry the basket, as a punishment for his hideous apathy.
And we’ll talk to him about Shakespeare’s early life all the way.’

‘Shakespeare’s life, forsooth!’ cried Gerald scornfully. ‘Who is
there that knows anything about it? Half-a-dozen entries in a parish
register; a few traditional sayings of Ben Jonson’s; and a pack
of sentimentalists—English and German—evolve out of their inner
consciousness a sentimental biography. “We may picture him as a youth
going across the fields to Shottery: because it is the shortest way,
and a man of his Titanic mind would naturally have taken it: yes, over
the same meadows we tread this day: on the same ground, if not actually
on the same grass.” Or again: “Seeing that Apostle-spoons were still
in common use in the reign of Elizabeth, it may be fairly concluded
that the immortal poet used one for his bread and treacle: for who
shall affirm that he did not eat bread and treacle, that the inspired
lad of the Stratford grammar-school had not the same weaknesses and
boyish affections as his schoolmates? Who would not love to possess
Shakespeare’s spoon, or to eat out of Shakespeare’s porringer?” That is
the kind of rot which clever men write about Shakespeare: and I think
it is because I have been overdosed with such stuff that I have learned
to detest the bard in his private character.’

‘You are a hardened infidel, and you shall certainly carry the basket.’

‘What, madam, would you degrade me to a hireling’s office? “Gregory, o’
my word, we’ll not carry coals.”’

‘There, you see,’ cried Daphne triumphantly, ‘you can’t live without
quoting him. He has interwoven himself with our daily speech.’

‘Because we are parrots, without ideas of our own,’ answered Gerald.

‘Oh, I am proud of belonging to the soil on which he was reared. I
wish there was one drop of his blood in my veins. I envy Edgar because
his remote ancestry claim kin with the Ardens. I almost wish I were a
Turchill.’

‘That would be so easy to accomplish,’ said Edgar softly, blushing at
his own audacity.

Daphne noticed neither his speech nor his confusion. She was all
excitement at the idea of an adventurous afternoon, were it only a
visit to the familiar cottage.

‘Madoline, dearest, may I order them to pack us a really nice tea?’ she
asked.

‘Yes, dear, if we are all decided upon going.’

‘It seems to me that the whole thing has been decided for us,’ said
Gerald, smiling indulgently at the vivacious face, radiant in the broad
noonday light, the willowy figure in a white gown flecked and chequered
with sunshine.

‘You order me to row you down the Avon,’ said Daphne, ‘and I condemn
you to a penitential walk to Shottery. You ought by rights to go
barefoot, dressed in a white sheet; only I don’t think it would become
you.’

‘It might be too suggestive of the Turkish bath,’ said Gerald. ‘Well,
I submit, and if needs be I’ll carry the basket, provided you don’t
plague me too much about your poet.’

‘I move an amendment,’ interposed Edgar. ‘Sir Vernon is to take the
chair at Warwick at the Yeomanry dinner, so Miss Lawford is off
duty. Let us all go on to Hawksyard and dine with the old mother.
It’ll delight her, and it won’t be half bad fun for us. There’ll be
the harvest moon to light you home, Madoline, and the drive will be
delicious in the cool of the——’

‘Cockchafers,’ cried Gerald. ‘They are particularly cool at that
hour—come banging against one’s nose with ineffable assurance.’

‘Say you’ll come, Lina,’ pleaded Edgar, ‘and I’ll send one of Sir
Vernon’s stable-boys to Hawksyard on my horse with a line to the mater,
if I may.’

‘I should enjoy it immensely—if Gerald likes, and if you are sure Mrs.
Turchill would like to have us.’

‘I think I’d better be out of it. I’m not a favourite with Mrs.
Turchill,’ said Daphne bluntly.

‘Oh, Daphne!’ cried Turchill ruefully.

‘Oh, Edgar!’ cried Daphne, mocking him. ‘Can you lay your hand upon
your heart, and declare, as an honest man, that your mother likes me?’

‘Perhaps not quite so much as she will when she knows more of you,’
answers the Squire of Hawksyard, as red as a turkey-cock. ‘The fact is,
she so worships Madoline that you are a little thrown into the shade.’

‘Of course. How could anyone who likes Madoline care about me? It isn’t
possible,’ retorted Daphne, with a somewhat bitter laugh. ‘If I were
one of a boisterous brood of underbred girls I might have a chance
of being considered just endurable; but as Lina’s sister I am as the
shadow to the sunlight; I am like the back of a beautiful picture—a
square of dirty canvas.’

‘If you are fishing for compliments, you are wasting trouble,’ said
Gerald. ‘It is not a day on which any man will rack his brains in the
composition of pretty speeches.’

‘May I write the note? May I send the boy?’ asked Edgar.

Lina looked at her lover, and finding him consentient, consented;
whereupon Edgar hurried off, intensely pleased, to make his
arrangements.

So far, he had been disappointed in the hope of seeing Daphne a
frequent guest at Hawksyard, the petted companion and plaything of his
mother. He had made for himself an almost Arcadian picture: Daphne
basking on the stone bench in the Baconian garden; amusing herself with
the poultry; even milking a cow on occasion; and making junkets in the
picturesque old dairy. He had fancied her upstairs and downstairs,
in my lady’s chamber; unearthing all Mrs. Turchill’s long-hoarded
treasures of laces and ribbons, kept to be looked at rather than to be
worn; sorting the house-linen, which would have stocked a Swiss hotel,
and which ran the risk of perishing by slow decay upon its shelves or
ever it was worn by usage. He had pictured her accepted as the daughter
of the house; waking the solemn old echoes with her glad young voice;
fondling his dogs; riding his hunters in the green lanes, and across
the level fields. She was pining to ride; but of the six horses at
South Hill there was not one which Sir Vernon would allow her to mount.

The pleasant picture was as yet only a phantasm of the mind. Mrs.
Turchill had not yet taken to Daphne. She was a good woman—truthful,
honest, kindhearted—but she had her prejudices, and was passing
obstinate.

‘I don’t deny her prettiness,’ she said, when Edgar tried to convince
her that not to admire Daphne was a fault in herself, ‘but she is not a
girl that I could ever make a friend of.’

‘That’s because you don’t take the trouble to know her, mother. If you
would ask her here oftener——’

‘I hope I know my place, Edgar,’ said the mistress of the Grange
stiffly. ‘If Miss Daphne Lawford wishes to improve my acquaintance she
knows where to find me.’

But Daphne had taken no pains to secure to herself the advantages
of Mrs. Turchill’s friendship. There was no particular reason why
she should go to Hawksyard: so, after one solemn afternoon call with
Madoline—on which occasion they were received with chilling formality
in the best drawing-room: an apartment with an eight-foot oak dado,
deeply-recessed mullioned windows, and a state bedroom adjoining—Daphne
went there no more. And now here was a splendid opportunity of
making her at home in the dear old house, and of showing her all the
surroundings which its master loved and cherished.

 ‘BEST OF MOTHERS,’ wrote Edgar, ‘I am going to take you by storm this
 afternoon. We—Lina, Daphne, Mr. Goring, and I—are going to Shottery,
 and propose driving on to Hawksyard afterwards. Get up the best dinner
 you can at so short a notice, and give us your warmest welcome. You
 had better put out some of Hirsch’s Liebfraumilch and a little dry
 cham. for Goring. The girls drink only water. Let there be syllabubs
 and junkets and everything pastoral. Don’t ask anyone to meet them,’
 added Edgar, with a dread of having the local parson projected on
 his love-feast; ‘we want a jolly, free-and-easy evening. Dinner at
 eight.—Your loving

  TED.’

This brief epistle was handed to Mrs. Turchill just as she was sitting
down to luncheon. Her first idea was to strike. Her son might have
brought home half-a-dozen of his bachelor friends, and it would have
been a pleasure to her to kill fatted calves and put out expensive
wines. She would have racked her brain to produce an attractive _menu_,
and taxed the resources of poultry-yard and dairy to the uttermost.
But to be bidden to prepare a feast for Madoline, who had rejected her
paragon son, for the rival who had supplanted him, and for Daphne,
whom she most cordially disliked, was something too much. She sat at
her simple meal bridling and murmuring to herself in subdued revolt.
She was tempted to ring for Deborah and confide her wrongs to that
sympathetic ear; but discretion and her very genuine love for her son
prevailed; and instead of summoning Deborah, she sent for the cook, and
announced the dinner party as cheerfully as if it were the fulfilment
of a long-cherished desire.

Daphne ran down to the boat-house before the others had finished
luncheon, and with Bink’s assistance made her boat a picture of
comfort. Gerald was excused from the burden of the basket, as that
could be conveyed in the carriage which was to pick up the party at
Shottery and take them on to Hawksyard. The old name of the boat had
been erased for ever by workmanlike hands the day after Daphne’s futile
attempt to obliterate it. ‘Nora Creina’ now appeared in fresh gilding
above the deposed emperor.

‘You ought not to have altered it,’ said Gerald. ‘There was something
original in calling your boat after a bloodthirsty lunatic. “Nora
Creina” is the essence of Cockneyism.’

‘It was the boat-builder’s suggestion,’ Daphne answered indifferently.
‘What’s in a name?’

‘True! Your boat by any other name would go as fast.’

Daphne had to wait some time by the water’s edge before the other three
came quietly strolling across the meadow. She had been sculling gently
up and down under the willows while she waited.

‘Now then, Empress,’ said Gerald, when he had arranged Lina’s shawls,
and settled her comfortably in her place, ‘you are to sit beside your
sister. Edgar and I will take an oar apiece, while you and Lina amuse
ur conversation.’

This nickname of Empress was a reminiscence of Daphne’s adventure
in Fontainebleau Forest. It matched very well with her occasional
imperiousness, and the association was known only to Gerald Goring and
herself. It amused him when he was in a mischievous humour to call her
by a name which she never heard without a blush.

‘I thought I was to row you,’ said Daphne.

‘No, Empress; as it’s all down stream we of the sterner sex will
relieve you of the duty. Besides, you could never row comfortably
in that go-to-meeting get-up,’ said Gerald, looking critically at
Daphne’s straw-coloured Indian silk, embroidered with scarlet poppies
and amber wheat-ears, and fluffy with soft lace about the neck and
arms, and the Swiss milkmaid’s hat with its wreath of cornflowers.

‘I could not wear a boating-dress, as we are to dine with Mrs.
Turchill,’ said Daphne.

‘You might have worn what you liked,’ protested Edgar eagerly, ‘but
you look so lovely in that yellow gown that I shall be pleased for my
mother to see you in it. She is weak about gowns. I believe she has a
wardrobe full of gorgeous attire, which she and Deborah review once a
week, but which nobody ever wears.’

‘The gowns will do for the chair-covers of a future generation,’ said
Gerald; ‘all the chair-covers in my mother’s morning-room are made out
of the Court trains of her grandmothers and great-aunts. I believe a
Court mantle in those days consumed two yards and a half of stuff.’

He had taken off his coat, and bared his arms to above the elbow.

‘What a splendid stroke you pull still, Goring!’ said Edgar admiringly,
‘and you have the wrist of a navvy.’

‘One of my paternal inheritances,’ answered Gerald coolly; ‘you know my
father was a navvy.’

At which frank speech everybody in the boat blushed except the speaker.

‘He must have been a glorious fellow,’ faltered Edgar, after an awkward
pause.

‘Any man who can make a million of money, and keep it without leaving
speck or flaw upon his good name, must be a glorious fellow,’ answered
Gerald, with more heartiness than was usual to him. ‘My father lived
to do good to others as well as to himself, and went down to his grave
honoured and beloved. I wish I were more like him.’

‘That’s the nicest thing I ever heard you say,’ exclaimed Daphne.

‘Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley——,’ murmured Gerald; ‘I am
beginning to feel proud of myself.’

They landed at the boat-builder’s below the bridge, hard by that
decayed old inn which must have seen courtlier company than the
waggoners and wayfarers who drink there now. Then they crossed Sir Hugh
Clopton’s granite bridge, and walked through the quiet town to the
meadows that lead to Shottery. It is but a mile from the town to the
village, a mile of meadow pathway, every step of which is haunted by
ghostly footsteps—the Sacred Way of English literature.

‘It’s no use telling me not to talk about him,’ cried Daphne, as she
jumped lightly from the top of a stile, the ascent whereof tested the
capacity of a fashionable frock; ‘I cannot tread this ground without
thinking of him. I am positively bursting with the idea of him.’

‘Which is the fortunate he whose image haunts you?’ asked Gerald, with
that languid upward twitch of his dark brows which gracefully expressed
a mild drawing-room cynicism. ‘Do these fields suggest grave thoughts
about tenant-right or game-laws, or the land question generally? Is it
Beaconsfield or Gladstone whose _eidolon_ pursues you?’

‘Please don’t be disgusting,’ cried Daphne. ‘_Can_ one think of anybody
in these meadows except——’

‘The inevitable William. A man does not live near Stratford with
impunity. He must be dosed. Well, child, what are you bursting to say?’

‘I have been thinking what a happiness it is to know that the dear
creature travelled so little,’ responded Daphne; ‘and that whether he
talks of Bohemia, or France, or Germany, Rome, Verona, Elsinore, or
Inverness——’

‘Somebody wrote a treatise an inch thick to show that Shakespeare may
have gone to Scotland with the king’s players, but I fancy he left his
case as hypothetical as he found it,’ interjected Gerald.

‘Whether he talks of Athens—or Africa—he really means Warwickshire,’
pursued Daphne. ‘It is his own native county that is always present to
his mind. Florizel and Perdita make love in our meadows. There is the
catalogue of flowers just as they bloom to-day. And Rosalind’s cottage
was in a lane near the few old oaks which still remain to show where
Arden Forest once stood. And poor Ophelia drowned herself in one of the
backwaters of our Avon. I can show you the very willow growing aslant
the brook.’

‘A backwater isn’t a brook,’ murmured Edgar mildly.

‘I allow that local colour is not our William’s strong point,’ answered
Gerald. ‘Not being a traveller, he would have done better had he never
ventured beyond the limits of his Warwickshire experience; for in that
case he would not have imagined lions in the streets of Rome, or a
sea-coast in Bohemia.’

‘Wait till you write a play or a novel,’ retorted Daphne, ‘and you’ll
find you’ll have to adapt yourself to circumstances.’

‘That’s exactly what your divine bard did not do. He adapted
circumstances to suit his plays.’




CHAPTER XIV.

‘LOVE IS A THING, AS ANY SPIRIT, FREE.’


Past a garden or two and a few cottages; a long garden wail with heavy
coping, shutting in treasures of fruit and vegetables; an old inn; a
new school-house, built at the corner of a lane shaded by as stately
an avenue of elms as any nobleman need desire for the approach to his
mansion. And yet mansion there is none at the end of this verdant
aisle. The lane is only an accommodation road leading to somebody’s
farm. A youthful monitor is trying to drill some small boys in front
of the school-porch, and the small boys are defying him; whereat a
shrill-voiced woman, unseen in the interior of the school, calls out an
occasional word of reproof. All the houses in the little village belong
to the past—they have the grace of a day that is dead. In a farm garden
a buxom servant in a kilted petticoat is feeding a family of gigantic
hens and chickens with something thick and slab out of an iron pot.

Daphne and her companions felt that there could have been little change
since the old romantic Elizabethan time. The village lay off the beaten
tracks. Three or four modern houses, scattered about here and there in
spacious gardens, were the only addition time had made to Shottery.

They walked briskly along the narrow road, across the bridge where
the shallow streamlet came tumbling picturesquely over gray stones.
Then a few paces, and before them stood the little block of cottages
which genius has transformed into a temple. Whether the building was
originally one house, it were difficult to decide. The levels are
different; but a variety in levels was the order of that day. The whole
block is a timber-framed structure—a panelled house, the panels filled
with dab and wattle. Jutting casements, diamond-paned, look out upon an
ancient garden, and an ancient well. Beside the house and garden there
is an old orchard, where on this day a couple of sheep are placidly
nibbling the sweet grass. The cottage is almost smothered in greenery.
Honeysuckle, jasmine, roses, hang about the walls as if they loved
them. The old timber porch is curtained with flowers.

The South Hill carriage was waiting in the lane when Daphne and her
companions arrived. The basket had been duly delivered over to Mrs.
Baker. She was standing at the door awaiting them with a smiling
welcome.

‘So glad to see you, ladies. The kettle’s on the boil, and you can have
your tea as soon as you please.’

‘Thanks, you dear thing,’ cried Daphne; ‘but isn’t it almost sacrilege
to drink tea in his room?’

‘It isn’t everybody I’d let do it, miss; not any of those Americans;
though I must say they’re uncommonly civil, and know more about
Shakespeare than the common run of English do, and are more liberal
in their ways too,’ added Mrs. Baker, with a lively remembrance of
half-crowns from Transatlantic visitors.

‘Mrs. Baker,’ began Daphne in a solemn tone, laying a little
tawny-gloved hand lightly on the collar of Gerald’s coat, ‘you see this
man?’

‘Yes, miss, and a very nice-looking gentleman he is for anybody to look
at,’ answered Mrs. Baker smirkingly, making up her mind that the tall
dark-eyed gentleman must belong to one or other of the two young ladies.

‘He may be nice to the outward eye,’ said Daphne gravely, ‘but he is
dust and ashes inside. He is anathema maranatha, or he ought to be, if
there were anybody in Warwickshire who knew how to anathematise him
properly. He lives in this county—within twelve miles of this house—and
he has never been to see the ingle-nook where Shakespeare courted his
wife. I’m afraid it won’t make the faintest impression upon his callous
mind when I tell him that you are a lineal descendant of the Hathaways,
and that this house has never been out of a Hathaway’s possession since
Shakespeare’s time.’

‘I appreciate the lady for her own sake, and don’t care a jot for her
ancestry,’ answered Gerald, with a friendly air.

They followed Mrs. Baker into the house-place, where all was cool
and shadowy after the glare of sunshine outside. It was a low but
somewhat spacious room, with casements looking back and front; recessed
casements, furnished with oaken seats, one of which was known as
the lovers’ seat; for here, the lovers of the present day argued by
analogy, William and Ann must have sat to watch many a sunset, and many
a moonlit sky. Here they must have whispered their foolish lovers’ talk
in the twilight, and shyly kissed at parting. The fire-place was in a
deep recess, a roomy ingle-nook where half-a-dozen people could have
gathered comfortably round the broad open hearth. On one side of the
ingle-nook was a cupboard in the wall, known as the bacon-cupboard; on
the other the high-backed settle. Opposite the fire-place there was
a noble old dresser—polished oak or mahogany—with turned legs and a
good deal of elaborate carpentry: a dresser which was supposed to be
Elizabethan, but which was suggestive rather of the Carolian period.
The dark brown panels made an effective background for an old willow
dinner-service.

Daphne made Mr. Goring explore every inch of the house which Mrs.
Baker was able conveniently to show. She led him up a breakneck little
staircase, showed him lintels and doorposts, and locks and bolts,
which had been extant in Shakespeare’s time; made him admire the queer
little carved four-poster which was even older than the poet’s epoch;
and the old fine linen sheet, richly worked by patient fingers, which
had been in the family for centuries, only used at a birth or a death.
She excused him from nothing; and he bore the infliction with calm
resignation, and allowed her to lead him back to the house-place in
triumph.

Madoline and Edgar Turchill were sitting in the lovers’ seat, talking,
after having unpacked the basket, and made all preparation for tea,
assisted by Mrs. Baker’s modest handmaiden.

‘Now, Mr. Goring,’ said Daphne, when she and Gerald and the old lady
had rejoined the others, ‘how do you feel about that Channel Island
cow?’

‘Oh, I am content,’ answered Gerald, laughing at her. ‘I submit to the
extortion; you carry matters with such a high hand that if you were to
demand all my flocks and herds I should hardly feel surprised.’

‘Mrs. Baker,’ said Daphne, with a businesslike air, ‘this gentleman is
going to give you a cow.’

‘Oh, miss, you don’t mean it, surely!’ murmured Mrs. Baker, overcome
with confusion.

‘Yes; a lovely fawn-coloured, hazel-eyed Alderney. Don’t refuse
her. He can as well afford to give you a cow as I can to give you
a neck-ribbon. When would you like the animal sent home? To-morrow
morning? Yes, of course; to-morrow morning. You hear, Mr. Goring?
And now you may consider yourself forgiven, and I’ll show you the
visitors’-book and all the interesting autographs.’

They went over to the table near the window, and turned the leaves of
that volume! Alas! how many a hand that had written in it was now dust.
Here was the signature of Charles Dickens, nearly thirty years old, and
pale with age. But the descendant of the Hathaways remembered the day
when it was written, and recalled the visit with pride.

‘He took the book out into the garden, and sat on the stone slab over
the well to write his name,’ she said. ‘I remember how full of life and
fun he and Mr. Mark Lemon were; he was laughing as he wrote, and he
looked at everything, and was so pleased and so pleasant.’

Sir Walter Scott’s name was in an older book. Both of these were
as dead—and as undying—as Shakespeare. And compared with these two
immortal names all the rest of the signatures in the big book were zero.

It was the merriest tea-party imaginable. Mrs. Baker’s best Pembroke
table had been brought into the middle of the room; her best teapot
and cups and saucers were set out upon it. Cakes and hot-house
fruit had been liberally supplied by Mrs. Spicer. Daphne whispered
in her sister’s ear a request that Mrs. Baker might be invited to
join them, to which Madoline nodded a smiling assent. Was not the
descendant of the Hathaways a lady by right of her gentle manners and
ancient descent? She belonged to a class that is an honour to the
land—the honest independent yeoman who tills the soil his forefathers
cultivated before him. The birth and death sheet in the oak chest
upstairs was like a patent of nobility. And yet perhaps not one of
these agricultural Hathaways had ever enjoyed as large an income as a
first-class mechanic in a manufacturing town—a man who dies and leaves
not a rap behind him to show that he was once respectable. They had
been upheld in their places by the pride of race, which the mechanic
knows not.

Mrs. Baker was installed in the place of honour in front of the
tea-tray, and asked everyone in her nice old-fashioned way whether
their tea was to their liking. Upon being coaxed to talk she told
stories about the defunct Hathaways, and explained how the house that
had once been all one dwelling-place had come to be divided.

It was Daphne and she who supplied the conversation. The two young men
looked on amused; Edgar openly admiring the bright changeful face under
the little Swiss hat. Lina was pleased that her sister should be so
innocently glad.

‘O, how happy I am,’ cried Daphne suddenly, in a pause of the talk,
clasping her hands above her head in a kind of ecstasy. ‘If it could
only last!’

‘Why should it not last?’ asked Edgar, in his matter-of-fact way.

Gerald looked at her gravely, with a puzzled look. Yes; this was
the girl who had stood in the dazzling sunshine beside the lake at
Fontainebleau, in whose hand he had read the forecast of an evil fate.

‘God help her!’ he thought, ‘she is so impulsive—such a creature of the
moment. How is such an one to travel safely through the thorny ways of
life? Happily there seems little fear of thorniness for her footsteps.
Here is my honest Turchill dying for her—and just the kind of man to
make her an excellent husband, and give the lie to palmistry. Yet it
seems a common place fate; almost as vulgar as the Italian warehouse in
Oxford Street.’

He sat musing thus in the lazy afternoon atmosphere, and watching
Daphne with something of an artistic rather than an actually friendly
interest. It seemed a shallow nature that must be always expressing
itself in speech or movement. There could be no depth of thought allied
with such vivacity—keenness of feeling, perhaps, but for the moment
only.

Nobody was in a hurry to leave the cottage. Tea-drinking is of all
sensualities the most intellectual. The mind is refreshed rather than
the body. There was nothing coarse in the meal. The golden tinge of the
almond pound-cake—a master work of Mrs. Spicer’s—contrasted with the
purple bloom of grapes and blue-gages, the olive tint of ripe figs.

‘We are making such a tremendous meal that I’m afraid we shall none of
us do justice to my mother’s dinner,’ remonstrated Edgar at last, ‘and
that will make her miserable.’

‘A quarter to seven,’ said Gerald, stealing a glance at a little
effeminate watch. ‘Don’t you think it is time we should descend from
this Shakespearian empyrean to common earth?’

This was the signal for a general move. The heavy, comfortable-looking
old carriage-horses had been walked up and down in shady places, while
the portly coachman dozed on his box, and the more vivacious footman
execrated the flies. And now the landau bowled briskly along the smooth
high road to Hawksyard, containing as cheerful a quartette as ever went
out to dinner.

Madoline was delighted to see her sister so happy, delighted at Edgar’s
obvious devotion. She had no doubt that his love would be rewarded in
due course. It is in a woman’s nature to be grateful for such honest
affection, to be won by such disinterested fidelity.

The brazen hands of the old clock at Hawksyard indicated a quarter to
eight, as the carriage drove across the bridge, and under the arched
gateway into the quadrangular garden, with its sunk pathways, and
shallow steps, and border-lines of crumbling old stone. Mrs. Turchill
was standing on the threshold—a dignified figure in a gray poplin gown
and old thread-lace cap and ruffles—ready to receive them. She gave
Madoline her blandest smile, and was tolerably gracious to the rival
who had spoiled her son’s chances; but she could not bring herself to
be cordial to Daphne. Her silk bodice became as rigid as an Elizabethan
corset when she greeted that obnoxious damsel. She had a shrewd
suspicion that it was for her sake the fatted calf had been killed, and
all the available cream in the dairy squandered upon sweets and made
dishes, with a reckless disregard of next Saturday’s butter-making.
Yet as Daphne shyly put out her hand to accept that cold greeting,
too sensitive not to perceive the matron’s unfriendliness, Mrs.
Turchill could but own to herself that the minx was passing lovely.
The brilliant gray eyes, shadowed with dark lashes; the dark brows
and golden hair; the complexion of lilies and roses; the sensitive
mouth; the play of life and colour in a face that varied with every
thought—yes; this made beauty which even Mrs. Turchill could not deny.

‘Handsome is that handsome does,’ thought the dowager. ‘God forbid that
my boy should trust the happiness of his life to such a butterfly.’

Inwardly rebellious, she had nevertheless done her duty as a good
housekeeper. The old oak-dadoed drawing-room was looking its prettiest,
brightened by oriental jars and bowls of scarlet geraniums and creamy
roses, lavender and honeysuckle. The silver chandelier and fire-irons
were resplendent with recent polishing. The diamond-paned lattices
were opened to admit the scent of heliotrope and mignonette from the
garden on the other side of the moat; while one deeply-recessed window
looking into the quadrangle let in the perfume of the old-world
flowers Francis Bacon loved.

Edgar insisted upon showing Daphne the house during the ten minutes
before dinner.

‘You have only been here once,’ he said, ‘and my mother did not show
you anything.’

After the two girls had taken off their hats in the state bed-chamber
next the drawing-room—a room whose walls were panelled with needlework
executed by an ancestress of Edgar’s in the reign of Charles the
First—they all went off to explore the house; ascending a steep
secret stair which they entered from a door in the panelling of the
dining-room; exploring long slippery corridors and queer little
rooms that opened mysteriously out of other rooms; and triangular
dressing-closets squeezed into a corner between a chimney and an
outer-wall; laughing at the old furniture: the tall toppling four-post
bed-steads; the sage-green tapestry; the capacious old grates, or still
older brazen dogs; the inimitable Dutch tiles.

‘It must be heavenly to live in such a funny old house,’ cried Daphne,
as they came cautiously down the black oak staircase, slippery as
glass, pausing to admire a ramshackle collection of Indian curios and
Japanese pottery on the broad window-ledge half-way down.

‘If you would only try it,’ murmured Edgar close in her ear, and
looking ineffably sheepish as he spoke.

Again the all-significant words fell unheeded. She skipped lightly down
the remaining stairs, protesting she could get accustomed to them in no
time.

‘“So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint,”’ said
Gerald.

‘Didn’t I tell you so? You can’t live without quoting him,’ cried
Daphne triumphantly.

The dinner went off merrily. It was a capital dinner in a good old
English style, ponderous but excellent. There were none of those
refinements which distinguished the board over which Mrs. Ferrers
presided. The attempts at elegance smacked of a banished era. A
turbot decorated with sliced lemon and barberries; a befrilled
haunch, exhibiting its noble proportions in a heavy silver dish; a
superabundance of creams and jellies and trifles and syllabubs; an
elaborate dessert lying in state on the sideboard, to be slowly and
laboriously transferred to the polished oak after the cloth was drawn;
and the coachman to help wait at table. The whole thing was rustic and
old-fashioned, and Edgar was afraid Daphne was secretly turning it all
into ridicule. Yet she seemed happy, and she said so much in praise of
Hawksyard and of the perfect order in which the house was kept, that
Mrs. Turchill’s heart began to soften towards her.

‘You seem fond of the country, and of countrified ways, Miss Daphne,’
said the matron relentingly. ‘Yet I should have thought a young lady
like you would have been pining for London, and balls and theatres.’

‘I never was at a dance in my life,’ answered Daphne, ‘and only once at
a theatre, and that was the great opera-house in Paris. I don’t think I
should ever care to go to a meaner theatre. My thoughts went up so high
that night, I shouldn’t like to let them down again by seeing trumpery.’

‘The London theatres are very nice,’ said Mrs. Turchill, not quite
following Daphne’s idea. ‘But they are rather warm in summer. Yet one
likes to go up to town in the height of the season. There is so much to
see.’

‘Mother’s constitution is cast-iron when she gets to London,’
said Edgar. ‘She is up at six every morning, and goes to the
picture-galleries as soon as the doors are opened; and does her morning
in Hyde Park, and her afternoon in Regent Street, shopping, or staring
in at the shop-windows; and eats her dinner at the most crowded
restaurant I can take her to; and winds up at the theatre. I believe
she’d accept a lobster-supper in the Haymarket if I were to offer one.’

‘Has Miss Daphne Lawford never been in London?’ asked Mrs. Turchill.

‘Oh, please don’t call me miss. I am never anything but Daphne to my
friends.’

‘You are very kind,’ answered Mrs. Turchill, stiffening; ‘but I
don’t think I could take so great a liberty with you on such a short
acquaintance.’

‘Short acquaintance!’ echoed Daphne, laughing. ‘Why, you must have
known me when I was in my cradle.’

Mrs. Turchill grew suddenly red, as if the idea were embarrassing.

‘I was invited to your christening,’ she said; ‘but—afterwards—there
were circumstances—Sir Vernon was so often abroad. We did not see much
of you.’

‘If you wish me to feel at home at Hawksyard you must call me Daphne,
please,’ said the girl gently.

Mrs. Turchill did not wish her to feel at home at Hawksyard; yet she
could not refuse compliance with so gracious a request.

The ladies rose to retire, Edgar opening the door for them.

‘Do you want any more wine, Turchill?’ asked Gerald.

‘No, not particularly; but you’ll try that other claret, won’t you?’

‘Not a drop of it. I vote we all adjourn to the garden.’

So they all went out together into the twilit quadrangle, where the
old-fashioned flowers were folding their petals for night and slumber,
while the moon was rising above a cluster of stone chimneys. Mrs.
Turchill walked once round the little enclosure, discoursing graciously
with Madoline, and then confessed to feeling chilly, and being afraid
of the night air; although a very clever doctor, with somewhat
new-fangled ideas, had told her that the air was as good by night as by
day, provided the weather were dry.

‘I think I’ll go indoors and sit in the drawing-room till you come in
to tea,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t think me rude.’

Madoline offered to go with her, but this Mrs. Turchill would not allow.

‘Young people enjoy a moonlight stroll,’ she said; ‘I liked it myself
when I was your age. There’s no occasion for any of you to hurry. I
shall amuse myself with _The Times_. I haven’t looked at it yet.’

The four being left together naturally divided themselves into two
couples. Gerald and Lina seemed fascinated by the flowery quadrangle,
with its narrow walks, and ancient dial, on which the moon was now
shining. They strolled slowly up and down the paths; or lingered beside
the dial; or stood looking down at the fish-pond. Daphne’s restless
spirit soon tired of these narrow bounds.

‘Is there nothing else to look at?’ she asked.

‘There are the stables, and the dairy, and the farm-yard. But you must
see those by daylight; you must come here for a long day,’ said Edgar
eagerly. ‘Would you like to see the garden on the other side of the
moat?’

‘Above all things.’

‘It is very flat,’ said Edgar apologetically.

‘All the better for tennis.’

‘Yes, the lawn would make a magnificent tennis-ground. We might have
eight courts if we liked. But it is a very commonplace garden after
South Hill.’

‘Don’t apologise. I am sure it is nice; a dear old-fashioned sort of
garden—hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and things.’

‘My old gardener is rather proud of his hollyhocks.’

‘Precisely; I knew he would be. And that horrid MacCloskie will hear
of nothing but the newest inventions in flowers. He gives us floral
figures in Euclid; floral hearthrugs sprawling over the lawn, as if
one of the housemaids had taken out a Persian rug to dust it, and had
forgotten to take it in again. He takes tremendous pains to build up
beds like supper-dishes—ornamental salads, don’t you know—and calls
that high-art gardening. I would rather have your hollyhocks and
sunflowers, and the old-fashioned scented clematis climbing about
everywhere in a tangled mass of sweetness.’

‘I’m glad you like antiquated gardens,’ said Edgar.

They went under the archway, which echoed the sound of their footsteps,
and round by a gravel walk to the spacious lawn, and the long border
which was the despair of the gardeners when they tried to fill it, and
which yet provided flowers enough to keep all the sitting-rooms bright
and sweet with summer bloom. The moon was high above Hawksyard by this
time: a glorious harvest moon, pouring down her golden light upon tree
and flower, and giving intensity to the shadows under the wall. The
waters of the moat looked black, save where the moonbeams touched them;
and yonder under the tall spreading walnut boughs the gravel walk was
all in shadow.

Daphne paced the lawn, disputing as to how many tennis-courts one might
have on such on extensive parallelogram. She admired the height of the
hollyhocks, and regretted that their colour did not show by moonlight.
The sunflowers appeared to better advantage.

‘What awful stories poets tell about them!’ said Daphne. ‘Just look at
that brazen-faced creature, smirking at the moon; just as if she had
never turned her head sunwards in her life.’

Edgar was in a sentimental mood, and inclined to see things from a
sentimental point of view

‘It mayn’t be botanically true,’ he said, ‘but it’s a pretty idea all
the same;’ and then he trolled out in a fine baritone:

    ‘No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
       But as truly loves on to the close;
     As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,
       The same look which she turned when he rose.’

‘What’s the use of singing that when you know it isn’t true?’ cried
Daphne contemptuously. ‘Do you suppose a stiff-necked thing like that,
with a stalk a quarter of an inch in diameter, could turn and twist
from east to west every day, without wringing its head off? The idea is
obviously absurd. What lovely old walnut-trees!’ she exclaimed, looking
across the lawn. ‘Centuries upon centuries old, are they not?’

‘I believe they were planted soon after George the Third came to the
throne.’

‘Is that all? They look as old as the Wrekin.’

They strolled across the wide lawn, and in among the shadows of the old
trees. The cows were moving stealthily about in the meadow on the other
side of the fence, as if sleep were the last thing they ever thought of.

‘And you really like Hawksyard?’ demanded Edgar earnestly.

‘Like it! I think it is quite the most delicious place I ever saw.
Those high dadoes; these deep-set stone-mullioned windows; those
eccentric little bedrooms; that secret staircase, so sweetly suggestive
of murder and treason. The whole place is so thoroughly original.’

‘It is one of the few moated granges left in England,’ said Edgar with
an air of conscious merit.

‘It is quite too lovely.’

‘Daphne, do you really mean what you say?’ he asked with sudden
intensity. ‘Are you only talking like this to please me—out of
kindness?’

‘If I have a fault it is a habit of blurting out what I think, without
reference to other people’s feelings. I am thoroughly in earnest about
Hawksyard.’

‘Then be its mistress,’ exclaimed Edgar, taking her hand, and trying to
draw her towards him; ‘be queen of my house, darling, as you have long
been sovereign of my heart. Make me the happiest man that ever yonder
old roof sheltered—the proudest, the most entirely blest. Daphne, I am
not poetical, or clever. I can’t find many words, but—I love you—I love
you.’

She laughed in his face, a clear and silvery peal—laughed him to
absolute scorn; yet without a touch of ill-nature.

‘My dear Edgar, this is too much,’ she cried. ‘A few months ago you
were fondly, devotedly, irrevocably in love with Lina. Don’t you
remember how we sympathised that afternoon in the meadows? This is the
sunflower over again: first to the sun and then to the moon. No, dear
Edgar, never talk to me of love. I have a real honest regard for you. I
respect you. I trust you as my very brother. It would spoil all if you
were to persist in talking nonsense of this kind.’

She left him, planted there—mute as a statue—frozen with mortification,
humiliation, despair.

    ‘He either fears his fate too much,
       Or his deserts are small,
     Who dares not put it to the touch,
       To win or lose it all.’

He had tried his fate—hopefully, confidently even—lured on by her
deceptive sweetness; and all was lost.

She had run lightly off. She was on the other side of the lawn before
he stirred from the attitude in which she left him; his hands clenched,
his head bent, his eyes staring stupidly at the gravel walk.

‘She does not care a straw for me,’ he said to himself, ‘not a straw.
And I thought she had grown fond of me. I thought I had but to speak.’

A friendly hand touched him lightly on the shoulder. It was Gerald,
the man for whom Fate had reserved all good things—unbounded talents,
unbounded wealth, the love of a perfect woman.

‘Cheer up, old fellow,’ said Gerald heartily. ‘Forgive me if I heard
more than you intended me to hear. Mrs. Turchill sent me in quest of
you and Daphne, and I came up—just as you—’

‘Just as I made an ass of myself,’ interrupted Edgar. ‘It doesn’t
matter. I don’t a bit mind your knowing. I have no pride of that kind.
I am proud of loving her, even in vain.’

‘Don’t be down-hearted, man. A girl of that kind must be played as
an expert angler plays a frisky young salmon. She has refused you
to-night; she may accept you three months hence.’

‘She laughed at me,’ said Edgar, with deepest despondency.

‘It is her disposition to laugh at all things. You must have patience,
man; patience and persistence. “My love is but a lassie yet.” Thy
beloved one still delights in the green fields; her tender neck cannot
bear the yoke. Wait, and she will turn to thee—as—as the sunflower
turns to the sun,’ concluded Gerald, having vainly sought a better
comparison.

‘It doesn’t,’ cried Edgar dejectedly. ‘That is what we have just been
talking about. The sunflower is a stiff-necked impostor.’




CHAPTER XV.

‘NOT FOR YOUR LINAGE, NE FOR YOUR RICHESSE.’


The two young men walked up and down under the walnut-trees for nearly
an hour, Gerald Goring playing the unaccustomed part of consoler.
He liked Edgar Turchill with an honest liking. There was a shade of
condescension, of unconscious patronage, in the feeling; but it was
thoroughly sincere. The Saxon squire was of course distinctly on a
lower intellectual level than the man of mixed race—the man whose
father had thrust himself into the front ranks of life by the sheer
force of will and brains, unaided by conventional training of any kind;
whose mother had been the last development of a family reared in courts
and palaces. Compared with the quicksilver that flowed in his own
veins, Edgar Turchill’s blood was a fluid that smacked of the vegetable
kingdom—watery stuff such as oozes out of a turnip or a cabbage when
the cook-maid cuts it. Yet the man could feel, and so keenly, that
Gerald was touched with tender pity.

‘Don’t be down-hearted, old fellow,’ he said, walking slowly under the
spreading boughs, with his hand resting affectionately upon Turchill’s
shoulder. ‘Be sure things will work round in time. She is a pert
capricious minx; but she cannot help being fond of you, if you are only
patient.’

‘I would wait for her as Jacob waited for Rachel, if I were as sure
of winning her,’ answered Edgar; ‘but I am afraid there’s no chance.
If she detested me; if the very sight of me were odious to her; there
might be some hope. But she likes me—she is even fond of me; in a calm
sisterly way. If you knew how sweet she was to me in the spring before
you came—she had no fits of temper then—when I taught her sculling; how
she used to boil a kettle down in the boat-house and——’

‘Yes; it was awfully nice of her,’ interjected Gerald somewhat
impatiently, having heard the story of these boat-house breakfasts
several times before.

‘If she were less kind I should have more hope,’ pursued Edgar. ‘I
think I shall go away—out of the country—where I shall never see her
lovely face. I have a great mind to go to India and shoot big game.’

‘And stick pigs?—a curious cure for the heart-ache. No, old fellow;
stay at home and bide your time. That’s your game.’

‘I could never look her in the face after to-night,’ said Edgar.

‘Nonsense, man! Treat this capricious minx as coolly as if nothing
had ever been said about love and despair. Let her think to-night’s
avowal the consequence of too much wine—a mere after-dinner outburst
of sentiment. Look her in the face, forsooth! If you are a wise man,
you may make her ashamed to look you in the face before she is six
months older. You have spoilt her by your flatteries and footings
and compliances. Give her a little of the rough side of your bark.
She professes to care for you as a brother, quotha! Treat her with
brotherly discourtesy—brotherly indifference. Be as candid about her
faults and follies as if you were her very brother. When she finds you
can live without her she will begin to languish for the old adulation.’

‘I love her too well to be such a Jesuit,’ said Edgar.

‘Pshaw! do you suppose Petruchio did not love Kate? He knew there was
but one way of taming his fair shrew, and he used the wisdom Heaven had
given him.’

‘I couldn’t act a part where she is concerned,’ argued Edgar. ‘She
would find me out in a moment.’

They talked for a long time upon the same subject, wearing the theme
threadbare; travelling backwards and forwards over the same line of
argument, while the moon climbed higher and higher in the cloudless
blue; and in the end Edgar acknowledged that it would be a foolish
thing to leave his farm before the harvest was all in; or his mother,
before she had enjoyed her annual fortnight at the sea-side; or to
uproot himself violently from his native soil in the vain hope of
curing his heart-wound. He had tried foreign air for his malady before,
and foreign air had done nothing for him; and this time he believed the
wound to be ever so much deeper. A lifetime in a strange country would
hardly heal it.

At last Edgar consented to be led despondently back to the house, which
he had left a little while ago with his heart beating high, full of
hope and delight. They found the three ladies seated in the quaint old
drawing-room, dimly lighted by a dozen or so of candles in the silver
sconces against the wall. There was nothing so distinctly modern as a
moderator-lamp at Hawksyard.

Mrs. Turchill was enlarging mildly in a lowered voice upon the various
shortcomings of her servants, who, although old servants and infinitely
better than other people’s, were yet so far human in their faultiness
as to afford food for conversation. Madoline was listening with polite
interest, throwing in an encouraging word now and then, which was
hardly needed, for Mrs. Turchill’s monologue would have gone on just
the same without it. Daphne, exhausted by a long day’s vivacity, had
fallen asleep, bolt erect in a straight-backed cherry-wood chair.

Gerald Goring remembered that day at Fontainebleau when he had told
himself that Daphne asleep would be a very commonplace young person;
yet, as he looked at her to-night, he was fain to own that even in
slumber she was lovely. Was it some trick of candle-light and shadow
which gave such piquancy to the delicate features, which gave such
expression to the dark-pencilled brows and drooping eyelids? The bright
hair, the pale yellow gown, the exquisite fairness of the complexion,
gave a lily-like loveliness to the whole figure. So pale; so pure; so
little earthly.

‘Poor Edgar!’ sighed Mr. Goring. ‘He is very much to be pitied. How
desperately I could have loved such a girl, if I had not already
adored her opposite. And how I would have made her love me,’ he added,
remembering all their foolish talk, and how easy it had seemed to him
to play upon that sensitive nature.

‘I am afraid the tea is cold,’ said Mrs. Turchill. ‘You gentlemen have
been enjoying your cigars in the walnut walk, I suppose.’

The clatter of cups and saucers startled Daphne. She opened her eyes,
and saw Edgar looking at her with piteous reproachfulness. She could
calmly sleep just after giving him his death-wound. There was a
refinement of cruelty in such indifference. Then he suddenly remembered
Gerald’s advice, and tried to seem equally at his ease.

‘I’ll wager mother has been bemoaning the vices of the new dairymaid,
and the ingratitude of the old one in going away to be married,’ said
he. ‘That’s what sent you to sleep, wasn’t it, Daphne?’

‘I was tired. We had such a long afternoon,’ she answered wearily.

‘The carriage has been waiting half an hour,’ said Madoline. ‘I think
we had better put on our hats, and then say good-night.’

‘Mr. Goring will drive home with you, of course,’ said Mrs. Turchill.

‘Yes; I am going to see them safe home, Mrs. Turchill,’ answered
Gerald. ‘I am to stay at South Hill to-night, and hear Sir Vernon’s
account of the Yeomanry dinner.’

Edgar, who had just been talking of eternal banishment, was longing to
ask for the fourth seat in the landau. The walk home between midnight
and morning would be delightful.

‘I should have liked to hear about the dinner,’ he began dubiously; and
then meeting Gerald’s eye, quailed beneath its friendly ridicule, and
said no more.

He escorted Daphne to the carriage, helped to arrange her wraps with a
steady hand, though his heart beat passionately all the time; and bade
her good-night in so thoroughly cheery a voice, that she wondered a
little to find how easily he had taken her rejection of him.

‘Poor dear Edgar!’ she said to herself as they drove along the shadowy
Warwickshire lane, through the calm beauty of the summer night, ‘I
daresay it was only an impulse of the moment—or perhaps it was the
moon—that made him propose to me. Yet he seemed awfully in earnest, and
I was afraid I might have offended him by laughing. But, after being
devoted to Lina, and making me the confidante of his grief, it was
certainly rather impertinent to offer himself to me. But he is a dear
good-natured creature all the same, and I should be sorry to offend
him.’

She was silent all the way home; sitting in her comfortable corner
of the carriage, wrapped to her chin in her soft white shawl, to all
appearance asleep. Yet not once did her senses lose themselves in
slumber. She was listening to the happy lovers, as they talked of the
past—that part of the past which they had spent asunder. Gerald had
been talking of a long mule-ride in Switzerland under just such a
moonlit sky. It was no tremendous mountain ascent, only a ride from
Evian up to a village at the foot of the Dent d’Oche, to look down upon
Lake Leman and its lovely shores bathed in moonlight; the long dark
range of the Jura rising like a wall on the western side; picturesque
villages on the banks gleaming in the silver light, with their old
church towers half hidden by masses of dark foliage; one lonely boat
with its twin sails skimming like a swallow across the moonlit water.

‘It must have been delicious,’ said Lina.

‘It was very nice—except that you were not there. “But one thing want
these banks of Rhine.”’

‘And did you really miss me at such moments, Gerald? When you were
looking at some especially lovely scene, had you really and truly a
feeling that I ought to have been by your side?’

‘Really and truly; the better half of myself was missing. Pleasure
was only a one-sided affair, as that moon will appear next week—an
uncomfortable-looking fragmentary kind of planet.’

‘I love to hear of your travels, Gerald,’ said Lina softly. ‘Have you
told me all about them, do you think?’

‘All that’s worth telling, I fancy,’ he answered lightly, with an
involuntary glance at Daphne to see if she were really asleep.

There was no quiver of the dark lashes, no movement in the restful
figure. Her face had that pale unearthly look which all faces have in
the moonlight. A pain shot through his heart as he thought that it was
thus she would look in death. It was one of those involuntary flashes
of thought which sometimes flit across a mind unacquainted with actual
sorrow—the phantom of a grief that might be.

When they arrived at South Hill Daphne wished her sister and Mr.
Goring a brief good-night, and went straight to her room. She had no
motive for awaiting her father’s home-coming. He would have nothing
to say to her. His only greeting would be a look which seemed to ask
what business she had there. It was on the stroke of eleven. Madoline
and Gerald walked up and down the gravel drive in front of the house,
waiting for the carriage from Warwick; and during this interval Mr.
Goring told his sweetheart how Edgar Turchill had been rejected by
Daphne. Madoline was deeply distressed by this news. She had made up
her mind that her sister’s life was to be made happy in this particular
way. She had imagined a fair and peaceful future in which she would be
living at the Abbey, and Daphne at Hawksyard—not a dozen miles apart.
And now this wilful Daphne had rejected the moated grange and its
owner, and that fair picture of the future had no more reality in it
than a mirage city seen from the dreary sands of a desert.

‘I thought she was attached to him,’ said Madoline, when she had been
told the whole story. ‘She has encouraged him to come here; she has
always seemed happy in his company. Half her life, since she came from
school, has been spent with him.’

‘In sober earnest, darling, I’m afraid this fascinating little sister
of yours is an arrant coquette. She has flirted with Edgar because
there was no one else to flirt with.’

‘Please don’t say that, Gerald, for I know you are mistaken,’ answered
Madoline eagerly. ‘Daphne is no flirt. She looks upon Edgar as a kind
of adopted brother. I have always known that, but I fancied that this
friendly trustful feeling of hers would lead in time to a warmer
attachment. As to coquetry, she does not know what it means. She is
thoroughly childlike and innocent.’

‘Possibly, dearest. Yet in her childishness she knows how to fool a
man as thoroughly as Ninon de l’Enclos could have done after half a
century’s practice. However, I hope Edgar will stand his ground and
bring this wayward puss to her senses.’

‘I cannot understand how she can help liking him,’ mused Madoline. ‘He
is so good, so frank, and brave, and true.’

‘All noble qualities, and deserving a woman’s affection. Yet the
sentimental history of the human race tends to show that a man endowed
with all those virtues is not the most dangerous to the fair sex.’

‘Gerald,’ said Lina, ‘I have an idea that pride is at the bottom of
Daphne’s refusal.’

‘Why pride? What kind of pride?’

‘She has harped a good deal, at different times, upon her penniless
position; has called herself a pauper, half in joke, half in earnest,
but with a bitterness of tone that wounded me. She may think that as
Edgar is well off, and she has no fortune, she ought not to accept him.’

‘My dearest love, what an utterly quixotic idea. The only thought a
pretty young woman ever has about a man’s wealth is that when she shall
be his wife she can have more frocks than the common run of women.
There is no sense of obligation. She is so conscious of the boon she
bestows that she accepts his filthy lucre as a matter of course.’

‘I don’t think that would be Daphne’s way of thinking.’

‘Dearest, if she were wholly your sister I should say not. But as she
is only your half-sister, I can suppose her only about half as good
again as the ruck of womankind.’

‘You are very rich, are you not, Gerald?’

‘Well, yes; it would take a large amount of idiocy on my part to spoil
the income my father left me. It might be done, no doubt, if I went
into the right circles. My ruin would be only a question of so many
years and so many racehorses. But while I live as I am living now,
there is very little chance of my becoming acquainted with want.’

‘I know, dear; and I don’t think it was for the sake of my fortune you
chose me, was it, Gerald?’

‘My dearest love, I only wish some old nurse would turn up on your
wedding morning and tell you that you are not the Lady Clare, so that I
might prove to you how little wealth or position influenced my choice.
I think I know what you are going to say, Lina. As I have more money
than you and I together—indulge our caprices as we may—are ever likely
to spend, why not give your fortune to Daphne?’

‘Dear Gerald, how good of you to guess my wish! I should like to divide
my fortune with my sister when I come of age. I don’t want to give her
all, for half would be ample. And I am so accustomed to the idea of
independence, that I should hardly like to be a pensioner even upon
you. Will you speak to the lawyers, Gerald, and find out how the gift
had better be made?’

‘Yes, dear; I’ll settle everything with the men of law. It seems to me
that you can do just what you like, as soon as you come of age. But
you’ll have to wait till then.’

‘Only ascertain that it can be done, Gerald, and then I can tell
Daphne, and she will no longer fancy herself a pauper. It may influence
her in her conduct to Edgar.’

‘It may,’ answered Gerald dubiously; ‘but somehow I don’t think it
will. Edgar must win the game off his own bat.’

       *       *       *       *       *

The sisters were alone together in Madoline’s morning-room after
breakfast next day. Gerald had gone to the Abbey to look after the
builders, and settle various matters with his steward. Daphne was
sitting half in and half out of the balcony, idle as was natural to
her, but listless and discontented-looking, which was a state of mind
she did not often exhibit.

There was no Edgar this morning, and she missed her faithful slave.

Perhaps he meant never to come to South Hill any more; in which case it
would be difficult for her to get rid of her life.

‘Daphne,’ began Madoline gravely, ‘I have heard something which has
made me very unhappy; which has altogether surprised and disappointed
me. I am told that Edgar proposed to you last night, and that you
refused him.’

‘Did he send you the news in a telegram?’ asked Daphne, flaming red. ‘I
don’t see how else you could have heard it.’

‘No matter how I heard it, dear. It is the truth, I suppose.’

‘Yes; it is the truth. But I despise him for telling you,’ answered
Daphne angrily.

‘It was not he who told me. It was Gerald, who by accident overheard
the end of your conversation with Edgar, and who——’

‘What! he has been interfering, has he?’ cried Daphne, looking still
more angry. ‘It is supremely impertinent of him to busy himself about
my affairs.’

‘Daphne! Is that the way you speak of my future husband—your future
brother?’

‘He has no right to dictate whom I am to accept or reject. What can it
matter to him?’

‘He does not presume to dictate: but it does matter a great deal to him
that my sister should choose the path in life which is most likely to
lead to happiness.’

‘How can he tell which path will lead me to happiness? Does he suppose
that I am going to have a husband chosen for me—as if I were a wretched
French girl educated in a convent?’

‘He thought—just as I thought—that you could hardly help liking such a
thoroughly good fellow as Edgar; a man so devoted to you; so unselfish;
such a good son.’

‘What have I to do with his virtues? I don’t care a straw for him,
except as a friendly sort of creature who will do anything I ask him,
and who is very nice to play tennis or billiards with. He ought not to
be offended at my refusing him. It would have been all the same had he
been anyone else. I shall never marry.’

‘But why not, Daphne?’

‘Oh, for no particular reason: except perhaps that I am too fond of my
own way, and shouldn’t like a master.’

‘Daphne, there is something in your tone that alarms me. It is so
unnatural in a girl of your age. While you were at Asnières, did you
ever see anyone—you were such a child, that it seems foolish to ask
such a question—but was there anyone at Asnières whom——’

‘Whom I fell in love with? No, dearest, there was no one at Asnières.
Madame Tolmache was most judicious in her selection of masters. I don’t
think the most romantic school-girl, fed upon three-volume novels,
could have fancied herself in love even with the best-looking of them.’

‘I can’t make you out, Daphne. Yet I think you might be very happy as
Edgar Turchill’s wife. It would be so nice for us to be living in the
same county, within a few miles of each other.’

‘Yes, that would be nice; and it would be nicer to be at Hawksyard than
to stay at South Hill when you are gone. Yet you see I have too much
self-respect to perjure myself, and pretend to return poor Edgar’s
affection.’

‘I have been thinking, Daphne, that perhaps some sense of mistaken
pride may stand between you and Edgar.’

And then, falteringly, ashamed of her own generosity, Madoline told her
sister how she meant to divide her fortune.

‘What!’ cried Daphne, turning pale; ‘take his money? Not a sixpence.
Never speak of it—never think of such a thing again.’

‘Whose money, dear? It is mine, and mine alone. I have the right to do
what I like with it.’

‘Would you dispose of it without asking Mr. Goring’s leave—without
consulting him?’

‘Hardly, because I love him too well to take any step in life without
asking his advice—without confiding fully in him. But he goes with me
in this heart and soul, Daphne; he most thoroughly approves my plan.’

‘You are very good—he is very generous—but I will never consent to
accept sixpence out of your fortune. You may be as generous to me as
you like—as you have always been, darling. You may give me gloves and
frocks and pocket-money, while you are Miss Lawford: but to rob you of
your rights; to lessen your importance as Mrs. Goring; to feel myself
under an obligation to your husband—not for all this wide world. Not if
money could make me happy—which it could not,’ she added with a stifled
sob.

‘Daphne, are you not happy?’ questioned Lina, looking at her with
sudden distress. ‘My bright one, I thought your life here was all
gladness and pleasure. You have seemed so happy with Edgar, so
thoroughly at your ease with him, that I fancied you must be fond of
him.’

‘Should I be thoroughly at my ease with a man I loved, unless—unless
our attachment were an old story—a settled business—like yours and Mr.
Goring’s?’

‘Why will you persist in calling him Mr. Goring?’

‘Oh, he is such a grand personage—the owner of an abbey, with
cloisters, and half a mile of hot-houses—I could not bring myself to
call him by his christian-name.’

‘As if the abbey and the hot-houses made any difference! Well, darling,
I am not going to worry you about poor Edgar. You must choose your own
way of being happy. I would not for all the world that you should marry
a man you did not love; but I should have been so glad if you could
have loved Edgar. And I think, dear, that unintentionally—unconsciously
even—you have done him a wrong. You have led him to believe you like
him.’

‘And so I do like him, better than anyone in the world—after my own
flesh and blood.’

‘Yes, dear. But he has been led to hope something more than that. I
fear he will feel his disappointment keenly.’

‘Nonsense, Lina. Don’t you know that six months ago he was still
suffering from his disappointment about you? and now you imagine he is
going to break his heart for me. A heart so easily transferred cannot
be easily broken. It is a portable article. No doubt he will carry it
somewhere else.’

She kissed her sister and ran out of the room, leaving Madoline anxious
and perplexed, yet not the less resolved to endow Daphne with half her
wealth as soon as she came of age.

‘Providence never intended that two sisters should be so unequally
circumstanced,’ she said to herself. ‘Willy-nilly, Daphne must accept
what I am determined to give her. The lawyers will find out a way.’




CHAPTER XVI.

‘NO MAN MAY ALWAY HAVE PROSPERITEE.’


Edgar Turchill did not go to the other end of the world to hide his
grief and mortification at this second overthrow of his fondest
hopes. He absented himself from South Hill for nearly a month, yet
so contrived as that his absence should not appear the result of
pride or anger. Mrs. Turchill’s annual sea-side holiday was as much
an institution as the opening of Parliament, or the Derby: and she
expected on all such occasions to be escorted and accompanied by
her only son. She liked a fashionable watering-place, where there
was a well-dressed crowd to be seen on parade or pier; she required
to have her leisure enlivened by a good brass band; and she would
accept nothing less in the way of lodgings than an airy bay-windowed
drawing-room in the very best part of the sea front.

‘If I am not to come to the sea-side comfortably I would rather stay
at home,’ she said to her confidante Deborah; an axiom which Deborah
received as respectfully as if it had been Holy Writ.

‘Of course, mum. Why should you come away from Hawksyard to be cramped
or moped?’ said Deborah. ‘You’ve all you can wish for there.’

Such murmurings as these had arisen when Edgar, sick to death of
Brighton and Eastbourne, Scarborough and Torquay, had tempted his
mother to visit some more romantic and less civilised shore; where
the accommodation was of the rough-and-ready order, and where there
was neither parade nor pier for the exhibition of fine clothes to the
music of brazen bands. For picturesque scenery Mrs. Turchill cared
not a jot. All wild and rugged coasts she denounced sweepingly, as
dangerous to life and limb, and therefore to be avoided. The wildest
bit of scenery she could tolerate was Beachy Head; and even that
grassy height she deemed objectionable. Nor did she appreciate any
watering-place which could not boast a smart array of shop-windows. She
liked to be tempted by trumpery modern Dresden; or to have her love of
colour gratified by the latest invention in bonnets and parasols. She
liked a circulating library of the old-fashioned, Miss Burney type;
where she could dawdle away an hour looking at new books and papers,
soothed by the sympathetic strains of a musical-box. She liked to have
her son well-dressed and in a top-hat, in attendance upon her during
her afternoon drive in the local fly, along a smooth chalky high-road
leading to nowhere in particular. She liked to attend local concerts,
or to hear Miss Snevillici, the renowned Shakespearian elocutionist,
read the Trial Scene in the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ followed by
Tennyson’s ‘Queen of the May.’

To poor Edgar this sea-side holiday seemed always a foretaste of
purgatory. It was ever so much worse than the fortnight’s hard labour
in London, for in the big city there were sights worth seeing; while
here, at the stereotyped watering-place, life was one dismal round of
genteel inactivity.

But this year Edgar was seized with a sudden desire to hasten the
annual expedition.

‘Mother, I think this lovely weather must break up before long,’ he
said briskly, with a laborious affectation of cheerfulness, as he sat
at dinner with his parent on the day after Daphne’s cruelty. ‘What
should you say to our starting for the sea-side to-morrow?’

‘To-morrow! My dear Edgar, that would be quite impossible. I shall want
a week for packing.’

‘A week! Surely Deborah could put your things into a portmanteau in six
hours as easily as in six days.’

‘You don’t know what you are talking about, my dear. A lady’s wardrobe
is so different from a man’s. All my gowns will want looking over
carefully before they are packed. And I must have Miss Piper over from
Warwick to do some alterations for me. The fashions change so quickly
nowadays. And some of my laces will have to be washed. And I am not
sure that I shall not have to drive over to Leamington and order a
bonnet. I should not like to disgrace you by appearing on the parade
with a dowdy bonnet.’

Edgar sighed. He would have liked to go to some wild Welsh or Scottish
coast, far from beaten tracks. He would have liked some sea-side
village in the south of Ireland—Dunmore, or Tramore, or Kilkee; some
quiet retreat nestled in a hollow of the cliffs, where as yet never
brass band nor fashionable gowns had come; a place to which people came
for pure love of fine air and grand scenery, and not to show off their
clothes or advertise their easy circumstances. But he knew that if he
took his mother to such a place she would be miserable; so he held his
peace.

‘Where would you like to go this year?’ he said presently.

‘Well, I have been considering that point, Edgar. Let me see now. We
went to Brighton last year——’

‘Yes,’ sighed Edgar, remembering what a tread-mill business the lawn
had seemed to him; how ineffably tiresome the Aquarium; how monotonous
the shops in the King’s Road, and the entertainments at the Pavilion.

‘And to Scarborough the year before.’

‘Yes,’ with a still wearier sigh.

‘And the year before that to Eastbourne; and the year before that to
Torquay. Don’t you think we might go to Torquay again this year? I hear
it is very much improved.’

‘Very much built upon, I suppose you mean, mother. More smoky
chimneys, more hotels, more churches, longer streets. I should think,
judging by what it had come to when we saw it, that by this time
Torquay must be a very good imitation of Bayswater. However, if you
like Torquay——’

‘It is one of the few places I do like.’

‘Then let it be Torquay, by all means. I’ll tell you what I’ll do,
mother. I’ll run down to Torquay to-morrow, find some nice lodgings for
you—I think by this time I know exactly what you want in that way—and
engage them for any day you like to name.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Edgar. But be sure you get some reference as
to the landlady’s character, so that you may be certain there has been
no fever case in the house during the last twelvemonth. And it would be
as well to get a local architect to look at the drains. It would be a
guinea well spent.’

‘All right, mother; I’ll do anything you like. I am longing for a blow
of sea-air.’

‘But it will be at least a week before I can come. What will you do
with yourself in the meantime?’

‘Oh, I shall contrive to amuse myself somehow. I might go on to
Dartmouth, and charter a boat, and go up the Dart. I want very much to
see the Dart. Only say on what day I may expect you at Torquay.’

‘Am I to travel alone, Edgar?’

‘You’ll have Deborah. And the journey won’t be difficult. You’ll join
the express at Swindon, don’t you know——’

‘If you think I can trust to Deborah’s care of the luggage,’ said Mrs.
Turchill dubiously. ‘She’s very steady.’

‘Steady! Well she ought to be at her age. You’ve only to get the
luggage labelled, you see, mother——’

‘I never trust to that,’ answered the matron solemnly. ‘I like Deborah
to get out at every station where the train stops, and see with her own
eyes that my luggage is in the van. Railway people are so stupid.’

Edgar did not envy Deborah. Having thus adroitly planned an immediate
departure he was off soon after daybreak next morning, and arrived
at Torquay in time for dinner. He perambulated the loneliest places
he could find all the evening, brooding over his disappointment, and
wondering if there were any foundation for Gerald Goring’s idea that
Daphne was to be won by him even yet. He slept at The Imperial, and
devoted the next morning to lodging hunting; till his soul sickened at
the very sight of the inevitable housemaid, who can’t answer the most
general inquiry—not so far as to say how many bedrooms there are in
the house, without reference to the higher powers—and the inevitable
landlady, who cannot make up her mind about the rent till she has
asked how many there are in family, and whether late dinners will be
required. Before sundown, however, after ascending innumerable flights
of stairs, and looking into a dismal series of newly-furnished rooms,
he found a suite of apartments which he believed would satisfy his
mother and Deborah; and having engaged the same for a period of three
weeks, he went down to the water’s edge, to a spot where boating men
most did congregate, and there negotiated the hire of a rakish little
yawl, just big enough to be safe in a summer sea. In this light craft
he was to sail at six o’clock next morning with a man and a boy.

‘How Daphne would enjoy knocking about this lovely coast in just such
a boat!’ he thought. ‘If she were my wife, I would buy her as pretty a
yacht as any lady could desire, and she and I would sail half round the
world together. She must be tired of the Avon, poor child.’

Daphne was very tired of the Avon. Never had the days of her life
seemed longer or drearier than they seemed to her just now, when
her faithful slave Edgar was no longer at hand to minister to her
caprices. A strange stillness seemed to have fallen upon South Hill.
Sir Vernon was laid up with that suppressed gout which Daphne fancied
was only another name for unsuppressed ill-temper, so closely did the
two complaints seem allied. At such times Madoline was more than ever
necessary to his well-being. She sat with him in the library; she read
to him; she wrote his letters; and was in all things verily his right
hand. The most pure and perfect filial love sweetened an office which
would have seemed hard to an ungrateful or cold-hearted daughter. Yet
in the close retirement of the stern-looking businesslike chamber, with
its prim bookshelves and standard literature—not a book which every
decently-read student does not know from cover to cover—she could but
remember the bright summer days that were done; the aimless wanderings
in meadow and wood; the drives to Goring Abbey; the tea-drinkings in
the cloisters or in the gardens; the happy season which was gone. The
knowledge that this one happy summer, the first she and Gerald had
ever spent together as engaged lovers, was ended and over, made her
feel as if some part of her own youth had gone with it—something which
could never come again. It had been such an utterly happy period;
such peerless weather; such a fair gladsome earth, teeming with all
good things—even the farmers ceasing to grumble, and owning that, for
once in a way, there was hope of a prosperous harvest. And now it
was over; the corn was reaped, and sportsmen were tramping over the
stubble; the plough-horses were creeping slowly across the hill; the
sun was beginning to decline soon after five-o’clock tea; breathings of
approaching winter sharpened the sweet morning breezes; autumnal mists
veiled the meadows at eventide.

Gerald Goring had gone to Scotland to shoot grouse. It seemed to
Daphne, prowling about gardens and meadows with Goldie in a purposeless
manner that was the essence of idleness, as if the summer had gone in
a breath. Yesterday she was here, that glorious, radiant, disembodied
goddess we call Summer—yesterday she was here, and all the lanes were
sweetened with lime-blossoms, and the roses were being wasted with
prodigal profusion, and the river ran liquid gold; and to sit on a
sunny bank was to be steeped in warm delight. To-day there were only
stiff-looking dahlias, and variegated foliage, and mouse-coloured
plants, and house-leek borders, in the gardens where the roses had
been; and to sit on a grassy bank was to shiver or to sneeze. The river
had a dismal look. There had been heavy rains within the last few days,
and the willowy banks were hidden under dull mud-coloured water. There
was no more pleasure in boating.

‘You may oil her, or varnish her, or do anything that is proper to be
done with her before you put her away for the winter, Bink,’ Daphne
said to her faithful attendant; ‘I shan’t row any more this year.’

‘Lor, miss, we may have plenty more fine days yet.’

‘I don’t care for that. I am tired of rowing. Perhaps I may never row
again.’

She went into luncheon yawning, and looking much more tired than
Madoline, who had been writing letters for her father all the morning.

‘I wish I were a hunting young woman, Lina,’ she said.

‘Why, dear?’

‘Because I should have something to look forward to in the winter.’

‘If you could only employ yourself more indoors, Daphne.’

‘Do I not employ myself indoors? Why, I play billiards for hours at a
stretch when I have anyone to play with. I practised out-of-the-way
strokes for an hour and a half this morning.’

‘I am sure, dear, you would be happier if you had some more feminine
amusements; if you were to go on with your water-colour painting, for
instance. Gerald could give you a little instruction when he is here.
He paints beautifully. I’m sure he would be pleased to help you.’

‘No, dear; I have no talent. I like beginning a sketch; but directly
it begins to look horrid I lose patience; and then I begin to lay on
colour in a desperate way, till the whole thing is the most execrable
daub imaginable; and then I get into a rage and tear it into a thousand
bits. It’s just the same with my needlework; there always comes a time
when I get my thread entangled, and begin to pucker, and the whole
business goes wrong. I have no patience. I shall never finish anything.
I shall never achieve anything. I am an absolute failure.’

‘Daphne, if you only knew how it pains me to hear you talk of yourself
like that——’

‘Then I won’t do it again. I would not pain you for the wealth of this
world—not even to have it always summer, instead of a dull, abominable,
shivery season like this.’

‘Gerald says it is lovely in Argyleshire; balmy and warm; almost too
hot for walking over the hills.’

‘He is enjoying himself, I suppose,’ said Daphne coldly.

‘Yes; he is having capital sport.’

‘Shooting those birds that make our dining-room smell so nasty every
evening, and helping to stock Aunt Rhoda’s larder.’

‘He does not intend to stay after the end of this month. He will be
home early in October.’

Daphne did not even affect to be interested. She was feeding Goldie,
who was allowed to come in to luncheon when Sir Vernon was not in the
way.

‘I had a letter from Mrs. Turchill this morning,’ said Lina; ‘she is
enjoying herself immensely at Torquay. Edgar is very attentive and
devoted to her, going everywhere with her. He is a most affectionate
son.’

‘And a good son makes a good husband, doesn’t he, Lina? Is that idea
at the bottom of your mind when you talk of his goodness to his very
commonplace mother?’

‘I don’t want to talk of him, Daphne, to any one who values him so
little as you do.’

‘But I value him very much—almost as much as I do Goldie—but not quite,
not quite, my pet,’ she added reassuringly to the dog, lest he should
be jealous. ‘I have missed him horribly; no one to tease; no one to
talk nonsense with. You are so sensible that I could not afford to
shock you by my absurdities; and Mr. Goring is so cynical that I fancy
he is always laughing. I miss Edgar every hour of the day.’

‘And yet——’

‘And yet I don’t care one little straw for him—in the kind of way you
care for Mr. Goring,’ said Daphne, with a sudden blush.

Lina sighed and was silent. She had not abandoned all hope that Daphne
would in time grow more warmly attached to the faithful swain, whose
society she evidently missed sorely in these dull autumnal days, during
which the only possible excitement was a box of new books from Mudie’s.

‘More “Voyages to the North Pole”; more “Three Weeks on the Top
of the Biggest Pyramid”; more “Memoirs of Philip of Macedon’s
Private Secretary,”’ cried Daphne, sitting on the ground beside the
newly-arrived box, and tossing all the instructive books on the carpet,
after a contemptuous glance at their titles. ‘Here is Browning’s new
poem, thank goodness! and a novel, “My Only Jo.” Told in the first
person and present tense, no doubt; nice and light and lively. I think
I’ll take that and Browning, if you don’t mind, Lina; and you shall
have all the Travels and Memoirs.’

With the help of novels and poetry, and long rambles even in the wild
showery weather, waterproofed and booted against the storm, and wearing
a neat little felt wide-awake which weather could not spoil, Daphne
contrived to get through her life somehow while her faithful slave was
away. Was it indeed he whom she missed so sorely? Was it his footfall
which her ear knew so well; his step which quickened the beating of her
heart, and brought the warm blood to her cheek? Was it his coming and
going which so deeply stirred the current of her life? Life had been
empty of delight for the last three weeks; but was it Edgar’s absence
made the little world of South Hill so blank and dreary? In her heart
of hearts Daphne knew too well that it was not. Yet Edgar had made an
important element in her life. He had helped her, if not to forget,
at least to banish thought. He had sympathised with all her frivolous
pleasures, and made it easier for her to take life lightly.

‘If I were once to be serious I should break my heart,’ she said to
herself, as she sat curled up on the fluffy white rug by one of the
morning-room windows, her thoughts straying off from ‘My Only Jo,’
which was the most frothy of fashionable novels.

Mrs. Turchill was so delighted with Torquay, in its increased towniness
and shoppiness, its interesting Ritualistic services, at which it was
agreeable to assist once in a way, however a well-regulated mind might
disapprove all such Papistical innovations, that October had begun
before she and her son returned to Hawksyard. Edgar had been glad to
stay away. He shrank with a strange shyness from meeting Daphne; albeit
he was always longing for her as the hart for water-brooks. He amused
himself knocking about in his little yawl-rigged yacht, thinking of the
girl he loved. Mrs. Turchill complained that he had grown selfish and
inattentive. He rarely walked with her on the parade; he refused to
listen to the town band; he went reluctantly to hear Miss Snevillici:
and slumbered in his too-conspicuous front seat while that lady
declaimed the Balcony Scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

‘If it were not for Deborah I should feel horribly lonely,’ complained
Mrs. Turchill. ‘And it is not right that I should be dependent upon a
servant for society.’

Gerald had not yet returned. He had gone on a yachting expedition
with an old college chum. He was enjoying the wild free life, and his
letters to Madoline were full of fun and high spirits.

‘Next year we shall be here together, perhaps,’ he wrote. ‘I think
you would like the fun. It would be so new to you after the placid
pleasures of South Hill. And what a yacht we would have! This I am now
upon is a mere cockleshell to the ship I would build for my dear love.
There should be room enough for you and all your pets—Fluff and the
squirrel, your books, your piano, and for Daphne, too, if she would
like to come; only she is such a wild young person that I should live
in constant fear of her falling overboard.’

Madoline read this passage to Daphne laughingly. ‘You see that he
remembers you, dear. The thought of you enters into his plans for the
future.’

‘He is very kind: I am much obliged to him,’ Daphne answered icily.

It was not the first time she had responded coldly to Madoline’s
mention of her lover. Her sister felt the slight against her idol, and
was deeply wounded.

‘Daphne,’ she said in a voice that was faintly tremulous in spite of
her effort to be calm, ‘you have said many little things lately—or
perhaps it is hardly what you have said, but only your looks and
tones—which make me think that you dislike Gerald.’

‘Dislike him! No, that is impossible. He has all the attributes which
make people admired and liked.’

‘Yet I don’t think you like him.’

‘It is not in my nature to like many people. I like Edgar. I love
you, with all my heart and soul. Be content with that, darling,’ said
Daphne, kneeling by Madoline’s side, resting the bright head, with its
soft silken hair, on her shoulder—the face looking downward and half
hidden.

‘No; I cannot be content. I made up my mind that Gerald was to be as
dear to you as a brother—as dear as the brother you lost might have
been, had God spared him and made him all we could wish. And now you
set up some barrier of false pride against him.’

‘I don’t know about false pride. I can hardly be very fond of a man who
ridicules me, and treats me like a child, or a plaything. Affection
will scarcely thrive in an atmosphere of contempt.’

‘Contempt! Why, Daphne, what can have put such an idea into your head?
Gerald likes and admires you. If you knew how he praises your beauty,
your fascinating ways! You would not have him praise you to your face,
would you? My pet, I should be sorry to see you spoiled by adulation.’

‘Do you suppose I want praise or flattery?’ cried Daphne angrily.
‘I want to be respected. I want to be treated like a woman, not a
child. I——Forgive me, Lina dearest. I daresay I am disagreeable and
ill-tempered.’

‘Only believe the truth, dear. Gerald has no thought of you that is
not tender and flattering. If he teases you a little now and then it
is only as a brother might tease you. He wishes you to think of him
in every way as a brother. It always wounds me when you call him Mr.
Goring.’

‘I shall never call him anything else,’ said Daphne sullenly.

‘And if you do not marry as soon as I do——’

‘I shall never marry——’

‘Dearest, forgive me for not believing that. If you are not married
next year you will have a second home at the Abbey. Gerald and I have
chosen the rooms we intend for you; the dearest little boudoir over the
porch, with an oriel window, just such a room as will delight you.’

‘You are all that is good: but I don’t suppose I shall be able often
to take advantage of your kindness. When you are married it will be my
duty to dance attendance upon papa, and to try and make him like me.
I don’t suppose I shall ever succeed but I mean to make the effort,
however unpleasant it may be to both of us.’

‘My sweet one, you are sure to win his love. Who could help loving you?’

‘My father has helped it all this time,’ answered Daphne, still moody
and with downcast eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Edgar and his mother stayed away till the third week in September.
When they came back to Hawksyard cub-hunting was in full swing, and
Mr. Turchill rose at five o’clock three mornings a week to ride to the
kennels. He rode with two sets of hounds, making nothing of distance.
He bought himself a fifth hunter—having four good ones already—which
was naturally supposed to overtop all the rest in strength, pace, and
beauty. His mother began to fear that the stables would be her son’s
ruin.

‘Three thousand a-year was considered a large income when your father
and I were married,’ she said; ‘but it is a mere pittance now for a
country gentleman in your position. We ought to be careful, Edgar.’

‘Who said we were going to be careless, mother mine? I am sure you are
a model among housewives,’ said Edgar lightly.

‘You’ve taken on a new man in the stable, I hear, Edgar—to attend to
your new horse, I suppose.’

‘Only a new boy at fourteen bob a week, mother. We were rather
short-handed.’

‘Short-handed! With four men!’

Edgar could not stop to debate the matter. It was nine o’clock, and he
was eating a hurried breakfast before starting on his useful covert
hack for Snitterfield, where the hounds were to meet. It was to be the
first meet of the season, an occasion for some excitement. Pleasant to
see all the old company, with a new face or two perhaps among them, and
a sprinkling of new horses—young ones whose education had only just
begun. Edgar was going to exhibit his new mare, an almost thoroughbred
black, and was all aglow with pride at the thought of the admiration
she would receive. He looked his best in his well-worn red coat, new
buckskins, and mahogany tops.

‘I hope you’ll be careful, Edgar,’ said his mother, hanging about him
in the hall, ‘and that you won’t go taking desperate jumps with that
new mare. She has a nasty vicious look in her hind legs; and yesterday,
when I opened the stable-door to speak to Baker, she put back her ears.’

‘A horse may do that without being an absolute fiend, mother. Black
Pearl is the kindest creature in Christendom. Good-bye.’

‘Dinner at eight, I suppose,’ sighed Mrs. Turchill, who preferred an
earlier hour.

‘Yes, if you don’t mind. It gives me plenty of time for a bath. Ta, ta.’

He had swung himself on to the thick-set chestnut roadster, and was
trotting merrily away on the other side of the drawbridge, before his
mother had finished her regretful sigh. The groom had gone on before
with Black Pearl. These hunting mornings were the only occasions on
which Mr. Turchill forgot his disappointment. The keen delight of fresh
air, a fast run, pleasant company, familiar voices, brushed away all
dark thoughts. For the moment he lived only to fly across the level
fields, in a country which seemed altogether changed from the scene of
his daily walks and rides; all familiar things—hedges, bills, commons,
brooks—taking a look of newness, as if he were galloping through a
newly-invented world. For the moment he lived as the bird lives—a thing
of life and motion, a creature too swift for thought or pain or care.
Then, after the day’s hard riding, came the lazy homeward walk side
by side with a friend, and friendly talk about horses and dogs and
neighbours. Then a dinner for which even a lover’s appetite showed no
sign of decay. Then pleasant exhaustion; a cigar; a nap; and a long
night of dreamless rest.

No doubt it was this relief afforded by the hunting season which saved
Mr. Turchill from exhibiting himself in the dejected condition which
Rosalind declared to be an essential mark of a lover. No lean cheek or
sunken eye, neglected beard or sullen spirit, marked Edgar when he came
to South Hill. He seemed so much at his ease, and had so much to tell
about that first meet at Snitterfield, and the delightful run which
followed it, that Daphne was confirmed in her idea that in affairs of
the heart Mr. Turchill belonged to the weathercock species.

‘If he could get over your rejection of him, you may suppose how easily
he would get over mine,’ she said to her sister.

Yet she was very glad to have Edgar back again: to be able to order
him about, to beat him at billiards, or waltz with him in the dusky
hall between five-o’clock tea and the dressing-bell, while Lina played
for them in the morning-room. In this one accomplishment Daphne was
teacher, and a most imperious mistress.

‘If you expect me to be seen dancing with you at the Hunt Ball, you
must improve vastly between this and January,’ she said.




CHAPTER XVII.

‘AND IN MY HERTE WONDREN I BEGAN.’


For a man to waltz in the gloaming with a girl whom he passionately
loves, and who has contemptuously rejected him, is a kind of pleasure
too near the edge of pain to be altogether blissful. Yet Edgar came
every non-hunting day to South Hill, and was always ready to dance to
Daphne’s piping. He was her first partner since the little crabbed old
French master at Asnières, who had taken a few turns with her now and
then, fiddling all the time, in order to show his other pupils what
dancing meant. He declared that Daphne was the only one of them all who
had the soul of a dancer.

‘_Elle est née sylphide._ She moves in harmony with the music; she is a
part of the melody,’ he said, as he scraped away at the languishing Duc
de Reichstadt valse, the tune to which our grandmothers used to revolve
in the days when the newly imported waltz was denounced as an iniquity.

The grand Hunt Ball, which took place only once in two years at
Stratford Town Hall, was to be held in the coming January, and Sir
Vernon had consented that Daphne should appear at this festivity,
chaperoned by her aunt and accompanied by her elder sister. It was an
assembly so thoroughly local that Mrs. Ferrers felt it a solemn duty to
be present: even her parochial character, which to the narrow-minded
might seem incongruous, made it, she asserted, all the more incumbent
upon her to be there.

‘A clergyman’s wife ought to show her interest in all innocent
amusements,’ she said. ‘If there were any fear of doubtful people
getting admitted, of course I would sooner cut off my feet than cross
the threshold; but where the voucher system is so thoroughly carried
out——’

‘There are sure to be plenty of pretty girls,’ said the Rector, ‘and I
believe there’s a capital card-room. I’ve a good mind to go with you.’

‘If it were in summer, Duke, I should urge it on you as a duty; but in
this severe weather the change from a hot room——’

‘Might bring on my bronchitis. I think you’re right, Rhoda. And the
champagne at these places is generally a doubtful brand, while of all
earthly delusions and snares a ball-supper is the most hollow. But I
should like to have seen Daphne at her first ball. I am very fond of
little Daphne.’

‘I am always pleased for you to be interested in my relations,’
replied Mrs. Ferrers, with a sour look; ‘but I must say, of all the
young people I ever had anything to do with, Daphne is the most
unsatisfactory.’

‘In what way?’ asked Mr. Ferrers, looking lazily up from his tea-cup.

It was afternoon tea-time, and the husband and wife were sitting
_tête-à-tête_ before the fire in the Rector’s snug study, where the old
black oak shelves were full of the most delightful books, which he was
proud to possess but rarely looked at—inside. The outsides, beautiful
in tawny and crimson leather, tooled and gilded and labelled and
lettered, regaled his eye in many a lazy reverie, when he reposed in
his armchair, and watched the firelight winking and blinking at those
treasuries of wit and wisdom.

‘In what way is Daphne troublesome, my dear?’ repeated the Rector. ‘I
am interested in the puss. I taught her her Catechism.’

‘I wish you had taught her the spirit as well as the letter,’ retorted
Mrs. Ferrers tartly. ‘The girl is an absolute pagan. After flirting
with Edgar Turchill in a manner that would have endangered her
reputation had she belonged to people of inferior position, she has the
supreme folly to refuse him.’

‘What you call folly may be her idea of wisdom,’ answered the Rector.
‘She may do better than Turchill—a young man of excellent family, but
with very humdrum surroundings, and a frightful dead-weight in that
mother, who I believe has a life-interest in the estate which would
prevent his striking out in any way till she is under the turf. Such
a girl as Daphne should do better than Edgar Turchill. She is wise to
wait for her chances.’

‘How worldly you are, Marmaduke! It shocks me to hear such sentiments
from a minister of the gospel.’

‘My dear, he who was in every attribute a model for ministers of the
gospel boasted that he was all things to all men. When I discuss
worldly matters I talk as a man of the world. I think Daphne ought to
make a brilliant marriage. She has the finest eyes I have seen for a
long time—always excepting those which illuminate my own fireside,’ he
added, smiling benignly on his wife.

‘Oh, pray make no exception,’ she answered snappishly. ‘I never
pretended to be a beauty; though my features are certainly more regular
than Daphne’s. I am a genuine Lawford, and the Lawfords have had
straight noses from time immemorial. Daphne takes after her unhappy
mother.’

‘Ah, poor thing!’ sighed the Rector. ‘She was a lovely young creature
when Lawford brought her home.’

‘Daphne resembles her to a most unfortunate degree,’ said Aunt Rhoda.

‘A sad story,’ sighed the Rector; ‘a sad story.’

‘I think it would better become us to forget it,’ said his wife.

‘My love it was you who spoke of poor Lady Lawford.’

‘Marmaduke, I am disgusted at the tone you take about her. Poor Lady
Lawford indeed! I consider her quite the most execrable woman I ever
heard of.’

‘She was beautiful; men told her so, and she believed them. She was
tempted; and she was weak. Execrable is a hard word, Rhoda. She never
injured you.’

‘She blighted my brother’s life. Do you suppose I can easily forgive
that? You men are always ready to make excuses for a pretty woman. I
heard of Colonel Kirkbank, the other day. Lady Hetheridge met him at
Baden—a wreck. They say he is immensely rich. He has never married, it
seems.’

‘That at least is a grace in him. “His honour rooted in dishonour
stood; and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”’

‘You are in a sentimental mood this evening, Marmaduke,’ sneered Rhoda.
‘One would suppose that you had been in love with my brother’s second
wife.’

‘She has been so long in her grave that I don’t think you and I need
quarrel if I confess that I admired her. There is a look in Daphne’s
face now she has grown up that recalls her mother almost painfully. I
hope Todd won’t burn that pheasant, Rhoda. I’m afraid she is getting a
little careless. The last was as dry as a stick.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Scotland made up for a chilly and inferior summer by an altogether
superior autumn. The days were ever so much fairer and longer on that
wild north coast than they were in Warwickshire; and tempted by the
beauty of sky and sea, backed by the urgent desire of his bachelor
friend, the skipper of the smart schooner-rigged yacht _Kelpie_, Gerald
Goring stayed much longer than he had intended to stay; atoning, so far
as he could atone, for his prolonged absence, by writing his betrothed
the most delightful letters, and sending a weekly packet of sepia
sketches, which reflected every phase of sea and sky, rock and hill. To
describe these things with his brush was as easy to Gerald as it is to
other men to describe with their pens.

‘It is an idle dreamy life,’ he wrote. ‘When I am not shooting
land-fowl on the hills, or water-fowl from my dingey, I sit on the
deck and sketch, till I grow almost into a seavegetable—a zoophyte
which contracts and expands with a faintly pleasurable sensation—and
calls that life. I read no end of poetry—Byron, Shelley, Keats—and
that book whose wisdom and whose beauty no amount of reading can
ever dry up—Goethe’s “Faust.” I want no new books—the old ones are
inexhaustible. Curiosity may tempt me to look at a new writer; but in
an age of literary mediocrity I go back for choice to the Titans of
the past. Do you think I am scornful of your favourites, Tennyson and
Browning? No, love. They, too, are Titans; but we shall value them more
when they have received the divine honours that can only come after
death.

‘I am longing to be with you, and yet I feel that I am doing myself
a world of good in this rough open-air life. I was getting a little
moped at the Abbey. The place is so big, and so dreary, like the palace
of the Sleeping Beauty—waiting to wake into life and brightness at
the coming of love and you. The lonely rooms are haunted by my dear
mother’s image, and by the sense of my loss. When you come I shall be
so happy in the present that the pain of past sorrow will be softened.

‘I sit sketching these romantic caves—where we earn our dinner by
shooting the innocent rock-pigeons—and thinking of you, and of my
delight in showing you this coast next autumn.

‘Yes, love, we will have a yacht. I know you are fond of the sea. Your
sister is a fanatic in her love of the water. How she will delight in
these islands!’

He thought of Daphne sometimes, as he sat in the bow of the boat,
lulled almost to slumber by the rise and fall of the waves gently
lapping the hull. His brush fell idle across the little tin colour-box,
and he gave himself up to listless reverie. How Daphne would love this
free unfettered life: a life in which there were no formalities; no
sitting prim and straight at an orderly dinner-table; no conventional
sequence of everyday ceremonies in a hideous monotony. It was a roving
gipsy life which must needs please that erratic soul.

‘Poor little Daphne! It is strange that she and I don’t get on better,’
he said to himself. ‘We were such capital friends at Fontainebleau.
Perhaps the recollection of that day is in some way disagreeable to
her. She has been very stand-offish to me ever since—except by fits and
starts. There are times when she forgets to be formal; and then she is
charming.’

Yes; there had been times—times when all that was picturesque
and poetical in her nature asserted itself, and when her future
brother-in-law succumbed to the spell, and admired her just a little
more warmly than he felt to be altogether well for his peace, or
perchance for hers.

Perhaps he, too, had been somewhat formal—had fenced himself round with
forms and ceremonies—lest some lurking sentiment which he had never
dared to analyse, or even to think about, should grow stronger. He
wanted to be honest; he wanted to be true and loyal. But the lovely
young face, so piquant, so entrancing in its exquisite girlishness,
came across his fancies too often for perfect repose of conscience.
The memory of those two summer days at Fontainebleau—idle, foolish,
unconsidered hours—was an ever-present part of his mind. It was so
small a thing; yet it haunted him. How much better it would have been,
he thought, if Daphne had been more candid, had allowed him to speak
freely of that innocent adventure! Concealment gave it a flavour of
guilt. A hundred times he had been on the point of letting out the
secret by this or that allusion, when Daphne’s blush and the quiver
of Daphne’s lip had startled him into caution. This made a secret
understanding between them in spite of his own desire to be honest; and
it worried him to think that there should be any such hidden bond.

Madoline was the love of his life, the hope and glory of his days. He
had no doubt as to his feelings about her. From his boyhood he had
admired, revered, and loved her. He was only three years her senior,
and in their early youth the delicately-nurtured, carefully-educated
girl, reared among grown-up people, and far in advance of her years,
had seemed in all intellectual things the boy’s superior. Lady
Geraldine was idle and self-indulgent; she petted and spoiled her
son, but she taught him nothing. Had he not a private tutor—a young
clergyman who preferred the luxurious leisure of the Abbey to the
hard work of a curacy—and was not his education sufficiently provided
for when this well-recommended young Oxonian had been engaged at
a munificent salary? The young Oxonian was as fond of shooting,
billiards, cricket, and boating as his pupil; so the greater part of
Gerald’s early youth was devoted to these accomplishments; and it was
only the boy’s natural aptitude for learning whatever he wished to
learn which saved him from being a dunce. At fifteen he was transferred
to Eton, where he found better cricketing and a better river than in
Warwickshire.

From Lady Geraldine the boy had received no bent towards high thoughts
or a noble ambition. She loved him passionately, but with a love
that was both weak and selfish. She would have had him educated at
home, a boudoir sybarite, to lie on the Persian rug at her feet and
read frivolous books in fine bindings; to sit by her side when she
drove; to be pampered and idolised and ruined in body and soul. The
father’s strong sense interfered to prevent this. Mr. Giles-Goring
was no classic, and he was a self-taught mathematician, while the
boy’s tutor had taken honours in both branches of learning; but he was
clever enough to see that this luxurious home-education was a mockery,
that the lad was being flattered by an obsequious tutor, and spoiled
by a foolish mother. He sent the Oxonian about his business, and
took the boy to Eton, not before Lady Geraldine had done him as much
harm as a doting mother can do to a beloved son. She had taught him,
unintentionally and unconsciously, perhaps, to despise his father. She
had taught him to consider himself, by right of his likeness to her and
his keen sympathy with all her thoughts and fancies and prejudices—a
sympathy to which she had, as unconsciously, trained and schooled
him—belonging to her class and not to his father’s. The low-born father
was an accident in his life—a good endurable man, and to be respected
(after a fashion) for his lowly worth, but spiritually, eclectically,
æsthetically, of no kin with the son who bore his name, and who was to
inherit, and perhaps waste, his hard-won wealth.

The mother and son had a code of signals, little looks and subtle
smiles, with which they communicated their ideas before the blunt
plain-spoken father. Lady Geraldine never spoke against her husband:
nor did she descend even in moments of confidence to vulgar ridicule.
‘So like your father,’ she would say, with her languid smile, of any
honest unconventional act or speech of Mr. Giles-Goring’s; and it must
be confessed that Mr. Giles-Goring was one of those impulsive outspoken
men who do somewhat exercise a wife’s patience. Lady Geraldine never
lost her temper with him; she was never rude; she never overtly
thwarted his wishes, or opposed his plans; but she shrugged her
graceful shoulders, and lifted her delicately-pencilled eyebrows, and
allowed her son to understand what an impassable gulf yawned between
her, the daughter of a hundred earls—or at least half-a-dozen—and the
self-made millionaire.

Escaping from the stifling moral atmosphere of his mother’s boudoir,
Gerald found his first ideas of a higher and a nobler life at South
Hill. At the Abbey he had been taught to believe that there were two
good things in the world, rank and money; but that even rank, the very
flower of life, must droop and fade if not manured with gold. At South
Hill he learned to think lightly of both, and to aspire to something
better than either. For the sake of being praised and admired by
Madoline he worked, almost honestly, at Eton and Oxford. She kindled
his ambition, and, inspired by her, his youth and talent blossomed into
poetry. He sat up late at nights writing impassioned verse. He dashed
off wild stanzas in the ‘To Thyrza’ style, when his brain was fired by
the mild orgies of a modern wine, and the fiercer rapture of a modern
bear-fight. And Madoline was his only Thyrza. He was not a man who can
find his Egeria in every street. For a little while he fancied that it
was in him to be a second Byron; that the divine breath inflated his
lungs; that he had but to strike on the cithara for the divine accords
to come. He strummed cleverly enough upon the sacred strings, spoiled
a good deal of clean paper, and amused himself considerably. Then,
failing—in consequence of an utter absence of the critical faculty—to
win the prize for English verse, he turned his back upon the Muses, and
henceforward spoke with ridicule of his poetic adolescence. Still the
Muse had exercised her elevating influence; and, inspired by her and by
Madoline, Gerald Goring had learned to despise those lesser aims which
his mother had held before him as the sublimities of life.

He was fond of art, and had a marked talent for painting; but as he
never extended his labours or his studies beyond the amateur’s easy
course, he was not likely to rise above the amateur’s level. Why should
a man who is sure to inherit a million submit to the drudgery of severe
technical training in order to take the bread out of the mouths of
painters who must needs live by their art? Gerald painted a little, now
landscape, now figure, as the spirit moved him; sculptured a little;
poetised a little; set a little song of his own to music now and then
to please Lina; and was altogether accomplished and interesting. But he
would have liked to be great, to have had his name bandied about for
praise or blame upon the lips of men; and it irked him somewhat to know
and feel that he was not of the stuff which makes great men; or, in
other words, that he entirely lacked that power of sustained industry
which can alone achieve greatness. For his own inward satisfaction,
and for Lina’s sake, he would have liked to distinguish himself. But
the pathway of life had been made fatally smooth for him; it lay
through a land of flowery pastures and running brooks, a happy valley
of all earthly delights; and how could any man be resolute enough to
turn aside from all sensuous pleasures to climb rugged rocky hills in
pursuit of some perchance unattainable spiritual delight? There was
so much that wealth could give him, that it would have been hardly
natural for Gerald Goring to live laborious days for the sake of the
one thing which wealth could not give. He had just that dreamy poetic
temperament which can clothe sensual joys with the glory and radiance
of the intellectual. Politics, statecraft, he frankly detested; science
he considered an insult to poetry. He would have liked the stir and
excitement, the fever and glory of war; but not the daily dry-as-dust
work of a soldier’s life, or the hardships of campaigning. He was not
an unbeliever, but his religious belief was too vague for a Churchman.
Having failed to distinguish himself as a poet, and being too idle to
succeed as a painter, he saw no royal road to fame open to him; and so
was content to fall back from the race, and enjoy the delicious repose
of an utterly aimless life. He pictured to himself a future in which
there should be no crumpled rose-leaf; a wife in all things perfect,
fondly loved, admired, respected; children as lovely as a poet’s dream
of childhood; an existence passed amidst the fairest scenes of earth,
with such endless variety of background as unlimited wealth can give.
He would not, like Tiberius, build himself a dozen villas upon one
rock-bound island; but he would make his temporary nest in every valley
and by every lake, striking his tents before ever satiety could dull
the keen edge of enjoyment.

Nor should this ideal life, though aimless, be empty of good works.
Madoline should have _carte blanche_ for the gratification of her
benevolent schemes, great or small, and he would be ready to help
her with counsel and sympathy; provided always that he were not
called upon to work, or to put himself _en rapport_ with professional
philanthropists—a most useful class, no doubt, but obnoxious to him as
a lover of ease and pleasure.

He had looked forward with placid self-satisfaction to this life ever
since his engagement—and indeed for some time before that solemn
betrothal. From his boyhood he had loved Madoline, and had believed
himself beloved by her. Betrothal followed almost as a matter of
course. Lady Geraldine had spoken of the engagement as a settled thing,
ever so long before the lovers had bound themselves each to each. She
had told Lina that she was to be her daughter, the only girl she could
love as her son’s wife; and when Gerald was away at Oxford, Lina had
spent half her life at Goring with his mother, talking about him,
worshipping him, as men are worshipped sometimes by women infinitely
above them.

From the time of his engagement—nay, from the time when first his
boyish heart recognised a mistress—Gerald’s affection for Madoline had
known no change or diminution. Never had his soul wavered. Nor did it
waver in his regard and reverence for her now, as he sat on the sunlit
deck of the _Kelpie_ in this fair autumn weather, his brush lying idle
by his side, his thoughts perplexed and wandering. Yet there was a
jar in the harmony of his life; a dissonant interval somewhere in the
music. The thought of Daphne troubled him. He had a suspicion that she
was not happy. Gay and sparkling as she was at times, she was prone to
fits of silence and sullenness unaccountable in so young a creature:
unless it were that she cherished some secret grief, and that the
hidden fox so many of us carry had his tooth in her young breast.

He was no coxcomb, not in the least degree inclined to suppose that
women had a natural bent towards falling in love with him: yet in this
case he was troubled by the suspicion that Daphne’s stand-offishness
was not so much a token of indifference or dislike, as the sign of a
deeper feeling. She had been so variable in her manner to him. Now all
sweet, and anon all sour; now avoiding him, now showing but too plainly
her intense delight in his presence—by subtlest signs; by sudden
blushes; by loveliest looks; by faintly quivering lip of trembling
hand; by the swift lighting up of her whole face at his coming; by the
low veiled tones of her soft sweet voice. Yes; by too many a sign and
token—fighting her hardest to hide her secret all the time—she had
given him ground for suspecting that she loved him.

He recalled, with unspeakable pain, her pale distressed face that
day of their first meeting at South Hill; the absolute horror in her
widely-opened eyes; the deadly coldness of her trembling hand. Why had
she called her boat by that ridiculous name: and why had she been so
anxious to cancel it? The thought of those things disturbed his peace.
She was so lovely, so innocent, so wild, so wilful.

‘My bright spirit of the woods,’ he said to himself, ‘I should like
your fate to be happy. And yet—and yet—’

He dared not shape his thought further, but the question was in his
mind: ‘Would I like her fate to be far apart from mine?’

Why had she rejected Edgar Turchill, a man so honestly, so obviously
devoted to her?—able, one might suppose, to sympathise with all her
girlish fancies, to gratify every whim.

‘She ought to like him; she must be made to like him,’ he said to
himself, his heart suddenly aglow with virtuous, almost heroical
resolve.

His heart had thrilled that night in the shadow of the walnut boughs
when he heard Daphne’s contemptuous rejection of her lover. He had
been guiltily glad. And yet he was ready to do his duty: he was eager
to play the mediator, and win the girl for that true-hearted lover. He
meant to be loyal.

‘Poor Daphne!’ he sighed. ‘Her cradle was shadowed by a guilty mother’s
folly. She had been cheated out of her father’s love. She need have
something good in this life to make amends for all she has lost. Edgar
would make an admirable husband.’

The _Kelpie_ turned her nose towards home next day; and soon Gerald was
dreamily watching the play of sunbeam and shadow on the heathery slopes
above the Kyles of Bute, very near Greenock, and the station and the
express train that was to carry him home. He turned his back almost
reluctantly on the sea life, the unfettered bachelor habits. Though he
longed to see Madoline again, almost as fondly as he had longed for her
four months ago when he was leaving Bergen, yet there was a curious
indefinable pain mingled with the lover’s yearning. An image thrust
itself between him and his own true love; a haunting shape was mingled
with all his dreams of the future.

‘Pray God she may marry soon, and have children, and get matronly and
dull and stupid!’ he said to himself savagely; ‘and then I shall forget
the dryad of Fontainebleau.’

He travelled all night and got to Stratford early in the afternoon.
He had given no notice of his coming, either at the Abbey or South
Hill, and his first visit was naturally to the house that held his
betrothed. His limbs were cramped and stiffened by the long journey,
and he despatched his valet and his portmanteau to Goring in a fly, and
walked across the fields to South Hill. It was a long walk and he took
his time about it, stopping now and then to look somewhat wistfully at
the brown river, on whose breast the scattered leaves were drifting.
The sky was dull and gray, with only faint patches of wintry sunlight
in the west; the atmosphere was heavy; and the year seemed ever so much
older here than in Scotland.

He passed Baddesley and Arden, with only a glance across the smooth
lawn at the Rectory, where the china-asters were in their glory, and
the majolica vases under the rustic verandah made bright spots of
colour in the autumn gloom. Then, instead of taking the meadow-path
to South Hill, he chose the longer way, and followed the windings of
the Avon, intending to let himself into the South Hill grounds by the
little gate near Daphne’s boat-house.

He was within about a quarter of a mile of the boat-house when he saw
a spot of scarlet gleaming amidst the shadows of the rustic roof. The
boat-house was a thatched erection of the Noah’s Ark pattern, and the
front was open to the water. Below this thatched gable-end, and on a
level with the river, showed the vivid spot of red. Gerald quickened
his pace unconsciously, with a curious eagerness to solve the mystery
of that bit of colour.

Yes; it was as he had fancied. It was Daphne, seated alone and dejected
on the keel of her upturned boat. The yellow collie darted out and
leapt up at him, growling and snapping, as he drew near her. Daphne
looked at him—or he so fancied—with a piteous half-beseeching gaze. She
was very pale, and he thought she looked wretchedly ill.

‘Have you been ill?’ he asked eagerly, as they shook hands. ‘Quiet, you
mongrel!’ to the suspicious Goldie.

‘Never was better in my life,’ she answered briskly.

‘Then your looks belie you. I was afraid you had been seriously ill.’

‘Don’t you think if I had Lina would have mentioned it to you in a
postscript, or a _nota bene_, or something?’

‘Of course.’

‘I detest cold weather, and I am chilled to the bone, in spite of this
thick shawl,’ she answered lightly, glancing at the scarlet wrap which
had caught Gerald’s eye from afar.

‘I wonder you choose such a spot as this for your afternoon
meditations. It is certainly about the dampest and chilliest place you
could find.’

‘I did not come here to meditate, but to read,’ answered Daphne. ‘I
have got Browning’s new poem, and it requires a great deal of hard
thinking before one can quite appreciate it; and if I tell you that
Aunt Rhoda is in the drawing-room, and means to stick there till
dinner-time, you will not require any further reason for my being here.’

‘That’s dreadful. Yet I must face the gorgon. I am dying to see Lina.’

‘Naturally; and she will be enraptured at your return,’ answered Daphne
in her most natural manner. ‘She has been expecting you every day i’
the hour.’

‘“For in a minute there are many days”—Shakespeare.’

‘Thank God! I don’t object to the bard of Avon half so strongly now.
I have been in a country where everybody quotes an uncouth rhymester
whom they call Bobbie Bairrns. Shakespeare seems almost civilised in
comparison. Will you walk up to the house with me?’

She looked down at her open book. She had not been reading when he came
unawares upon her solitude. He had seen that; just as surely as he had
seen the faint convulsive movement of her throat, the start, the pallor
that marked her surprise at his approach. He had acquired a fatal habit
of watching and analysing her emotions; and it seemed to him that she
had brightened since his coming, that new light and colour had returned
to her face; almost as you may see the revival of a flower that has
drooped in the drought, and which revivifies under the gentle summer
rain.

She looked at her book doubtfully, as if she would like to say no.

‘You had better come with me. It is nearly tea-time, and I know you are
dying for a cup of tea. I never knew a woman that wasn’t.’

‘Exhausted nature tells me that it is tea-time. Yes; I suppose I had
better come.’




CHAPTER XVIII.

‘LOVE WOL NOT BE CONSTREINED BY MAISTRIE.’


A man who lives within easy reach of two good packs of fox-hounds, and
in a fair hunting country on the very edge of the shires, can hardly
mope, albeit he may feel that, in a general way, his heart is broken.
Thus it was with Edgar Turchill, who hunted four days a week, and came
to South Hill on the off-days to suffer and enjoy all those hot fits
and cold fits, those desperate delights plucked from the jaws of pain,
which a man feels when he adores a girl who does not care a straw
for him. He had been rejected, even with contumely, as it seemed to
him: yet so dearly did he delight in Daphne’s society that if he were
destined never to win her for his own, the next best blessing he asked
from Fate was to be allowed to dangle about her for ever—to fetch and
carry, to be snubbed, and laughed at, and patronised, as it pleased her
wilful humour.

The autumn and early winter were mild—a capital season for hunting.

‘What selfish creatures you sporting men are!’ cried Daphne one
morning, looking gloomily out at the gloomy November day; ‘so long as
you can go galloping over the muggy fields after innocent foxes you
don’t care how dreary the world is for other people. We want a hard
frost, for then we might have some skating on the pond. I wish the Avon
would freeze, so that we could skate to Tewkesbury.’

‘I daresay we shall have plenty of hard weather in January,’ said Edgar
apologetically. It was one of his off-days, and he had ridden over to
South Hill directly after luncheon. ‘You ought to hunt, Daphne.’

‘Of course I ought; but Sir Vernon does not see it in the same light.
When I mildly suggested that I thought you wouldn’t mind lending me a
horse—’

‘Mind!’ cried Edgar. ‘That little mare of mine would carry you to
perfection; and she’s so clever you’d have nothing to do but to sit
upon her.’

‘Exactly. It would be a foretaste of paradise. But at my hinting such a
possibility my father gave me a look that almost annihilated me.’

‘You may be more independently situated next season,’ suggested Mr.
Goring, looking up from the billiard-table, where he was amusing
himself with a few random strokes while Madoline was putting on her hat
and jacket for a rustic ramble. ‘You may have your own stable, perhaps,
and a nice sporting husband to look after it for you.’

Daphne reddened angrily at the suggestion; while poor Edgar put on his
sheepish look, and took refuge at the billiard-table.

‘Are you coming out for a walk, Empress?’ asked Gerald carelessly.

‘I don’t know. It’s such dreary work prowling about a wintry landscape.
I think I shall stay at home and read.’

‘You’d better come,’ pleaded Edgar, feeling that he would not be
allowed the perilous bliss of a _tête-à-tête_ afternoon with her, and
that, if such bliss were permissible, the pleasure would be mixed with
too deep a pain. Out in the fields and lanes, with Goring and Madoline,
he might enjoy her society.

She half consented to go, and then, discovering that Madoline was going
to make some calls, changed her mind.

‘I’ll go to my room and finish my third volume,’ she said.

‘What a misanthrope you are, Daphne—a female Timon! I think I shall
call you Timonia henceforward,’ retorted Gerald.

‘When it is a question of making ceremonious afternoon visits, I rather
hate my fellow-creatures,’ replied Daphne, with charming frankness.
‘The nicest people one knows are not half so nice as the figments of
fancy one meets in a book; and if the book-person waxes stupid, we can
shut him up—which one can’t do to a living friend.’

So Daphne wished Mr. Turchill good-day, and went off to her own
den—the pretty chintz-draperied bedroom, with its frivolities and
individualities in the way of furniture and ornament, and its
privileged solitude.

Edgar, feeling that he might be a nuisance to the other two if he
offered to accompany them, prepared to take his leave, yet with a
lingering hope that Madoline would ask him to remain.

Her kindness divined his wish, and she asked him to stay to dinner.

‘You’re very kind,’ he faltered, having dined at South Hill once in
the current week, and sorely afraid that he was degenerating into a
sponge, ‘but I’ve got a fellow to see at Warwick; I shall have to dine
with him. But if you’ll let me come back in the evening for a game at
billiards?’

‘Let you? Why, Edgar, you know my father is always glad to see you.’

‘He is very good—only—I’m afraid of becoming a nuisance. I can’t help
hanging about the place.’

‘We are always pleased to have you here—all of us.’

Edgar thanked her warmly. He had fallen into a dejected condition;
fancying himself of less account than the rest of men since Daphne had
spurned him; a creature to be scorned and trampled under foot. Nor did
Daphne’s easy kindness give him any comfort. She had resumed her tone
of sisterly friendship. She seemed to forget that he had ever proposed
to her. She was serenely unconscious that he was breaking his heart for
her. Why could he not get himself killed, or desperately hurt in the
hunting-field, so that she might be sorry for him? He was almost angry
with his horses for being such clever jumpers, and never putting his
neck in peril. A purl across a bullfinch, a broken collar-bone, might
melt that obdurate heart. And a man may get through life very well with
a damaged collar-bone.

‘I’m afraid the collar-bone wouldn’t be enough,’ mused Edgar. ‘It
doesn’t sound romantic. A broken arm, worn in a sling, might be of some
use.’

He would have suffered anything, hazarded anything, to improve his
chances. He tried to lure Daphne to Hawksyard again; tempting her with
the stables, the dogs, the poultry-yard; but it was no use. She had
always some excuse for declining his or his mother’s invitations. She
would not even accompany Lina when she went to call upon Mrs. Turchill.
She had an idea that Edgar was in the habit of offering his hand and
heart to every young lady visitor.

‘He made such an utter idiot of himself the night we dined there,’ she
said to Lina. ‘I shall never again trust myself upon his patrimonial
estate. On neutral ground I haven’t the least objection to him.’

‘Daphne, is it kind to speak of him like that, when you know that he
was thoroughly in earnest?’

‘He was thoroughly in earnest about you before. True love cannot change
like that.’

‘Yet I am convinced that he is true, Daphne,’ Lina answered seriously.

Autumn slipped into winter. There was a light frost every night, and
in the misty mornings the low meadows glittered whitely with a thin
coating of rime, which vanished with those early mists. There was no
weather cold enough to curdle the water in the shallow pond yonder by
the plantation, or to stop Lord Willoughby’s hounds. Daphne sighed in
vain for the delight of skating.

Christmas at South Hill was not a period of exuberant mirth. Ever
since his second wife’s death Sir Vernon Lawford had held himself as
much aloof from county society as he conveniently could, without being
considered either inhospitable or eccentric. There was a good deal
done for the poor, in a very quiet way, by Madoline, and the servants
were allowed to enjoy themselves; but of old-fashioned festivity
there was none. Mr. and Mrs. Ferrers were asked to dine on Christmas
Day. Aunt Rhoda suggested that they should be asked, and accepted the
invitation in advance; in order, as she observed, that the bond of
family union might be strengthened by genial intercourse upon that
sacred anniversary. Gerald was of course to be at South Hill, where at
all times he spent more of his waking hours than at Goring Abbey. Edgar
had spoken so dolefully of the dulness of a Christmas Day at Hawksyard
that Madoline had been moved by pity to suggest that Mrs. Turchill and
her son might be invited to the family feast.

‘That will make it a party,’ said Sir Vernon, when his daughter pleaded
for this grace, ‘and I am not well enough to stand a party.’

He was not well. Of that fact there could be no doubt. He had been
given to hypochondriacal fancies for the last five years, but there was
a certain amount of fact underlying these fancies. The effeminately
white hand was growing more transparent; the capricious appetite was
more difficult to tempt; the slow promenade on the garden terrace was
growing slower; the thin face was more drawn; the aquiline nose was
sharper in outline. There was a chronic complaint of some obscure kind,
vaguely described by a London specialist, and dimly understood by the
family doctor, which must eventually shorten the baronet’s life; but
his mind was so vigorous and unbending, his countenance so stern, his
manner so uncompromising, that it was difficult to believe that Death
had set his mark upon him. To his elder daughter alone he revealed the
one tender feeling left in him—and that was his very real affection for
herself; a love that was chastened and poetised by his reverent and
regretful memory of her mother.

‘Dear father, it need not be a party because of the Turchills. Edgar is
like one of ourselves, and Mrs. Turchill is so very quiet.’

‘Ask them, Lina, ask them, if it will be any pleasure to you.’

‘I think it will please Edgar. He says Hawksyard is so dreary at
Christmas.’

‘If people had not set up a fictitious idea of Christmas gaiety, they
would not complain of the season being dull,’ said Sir Vernon somewhat
impatiently. ‘That notion of unlimited junketing doesn’t come from any
real religious feeling. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men doesn’t
mean snapdragon and childish foolery. It is a silly myth of the Middle
Ages, which sticks like a burr to the modern mind.’

‘It is a pleasant idea that kindred and old friends should meet at that
sacred time,’ argued Lina gently.

‘Yes, if kindred in a general way could meet without quarrelling.
That there should be a good deal done for the poor at Christmas I can
understand and approve. It is the central point of winter; and then
there is the Divine association which beautifies every gift. And that
children should look forward to Christmas as an extra birthday in every
nursery is a pretty fancy enough. But that men and women of the world
should foregather and pretend to be fonder of one another on that day
than at any other season is too hollow a sham for my patience.’

Madoline wrote a friendly invitation to Mrs. Turchill, and gave her
note to Edgar to carry home that evening.

‘It’s awfully good of you,’ he said ruefully, when she told him the
purport of her letter, ‘but I’m afraid it won’t answer. Mother stands
on her dignity about Christmas Day; and I don’t think wild horses
would drag her away from her own dining-room. I shall have to dine
_tête-à-tête_ with her, poor old dear; and we shall sit staring at the
oak panelling, and pretending to enjoy the plum-pudding made according
to the old lady’s own particular recipe handed down by her grandmother.
There has been an agreeable sameness about our Christmas dinner for
the last ten years. It is as solemn as a Druidical sacrifice. I could
almost fancy that mother had been out in the woods at daybreak cutting
mistletoe with a golden sickle.’

Edgar was correct in his idea of his mother’s reply. Mrs. Turchill
wrote with much ceremony and politeness that, delighted as she and her
son would have been to accept so gratifying an invitation, she must on
principle reluctantly decline it. She never had dined away from her
own house on Christmas Day, and she never would. She considered it a
day upon which families should gather round their own firesides, etc.,
etc., etc., and remained, with affectionate regards, etc.

‘How can a family of two gather round the fireside?’ asked Edgar
dolefully. ‘The dear old mother writes rank nonsense.’

‘Don’t be down-hearted, Turchill,’ said Gerald. ‘Perhaps by Christmas
twelvemonth you may be a family of three; and the year after that a
family of four; and the year after that, five. Who knows? Time brings
all good things.’

‘I am just as grateful to you, Madoline, as if mother had accepted,’
said Edgar, ignoring his friend’s speech, though he blushed at its
meaning. ‘It will be ineffably dreary. If the old lady should go to
bed extra early—she sometimes does on Christmas Day—I might ride over,
just—just——’

‘In time for a rattling good game of billiards,’ interjected Gerald.
‘Lina and I are improving. You and Daphne needn’t give us more than
twenty-five in fifty.’

‘I’ll have a horse ready saddled. Mother likes me to read some of the
verses in the “Christian Year” to her after tea. I’m afraid I’m not a
good reader, for Keble and I always send her to sleep.’

‘Be particularly monotonous on this occasion,’ said Daphne, ‘and come
over in time for a match.’

‘You wouldn’t be shocked if I came in as late as ten o’clock?’

‘I mean to sit up till two,’ protested Daphne. ‘It is my first
Christmas at home, since I was in the nursery. It must be a
Shakespearian Christmas. We’ll have a wassail bowl: roasted apples
bobbing about in warm negus, or something of that kind. I shall copy
out some mediæval recipes for Spicer. Come as late as you like, Edgar.
Papa is sure to go to bed early. Christmas will have a soporific effect
upon him, as well as upon Mrs. Turchill, no doubt; and the Ferrers
people will go when he retires; and we can have no end of fun in the
billiard-room, where not a mortal can hear us.’

‘You seem to be providing for a night of riot—a regular orgy—something
almost as dissipated as Nero’s banquet on the lake of Agrippa,’ said
Gerald, laughing at her earnestness.

‘Why should not one be merry for once in one’s life?’

‘Why indeed?’ cried Gerald, ‘_Vogue la galère_.

    “Forget me not, en _vogant la galère_.”

There’s a line from an early English poet for you, my Shakespearian
student.’

Christmas Day was not joyless. Daphne, so fitful in her mirth, so
sudden in her intervals of gloom—periods of depression which Sir
Vernon, Aunt Rhoda, and Madoline’s confidential maid and umquhile nurse
Mowser, stigmatised as sulks—was on this occasion all sunshine.

‘I have made up my mind to be happy,’ she said at breakfast; which
meal she and Madoline were enjoying alone in the bright cheery room,
the table gay with winter flowers and old silver, a wood fire burning
merrily in the bright brass grate. ‘Even my father’s coldness shall
not freeze me. Last Christmas Day I was eating my heart at Asnières,
and envying that vulgar Dibb, whose people had had her sent home, and
hoping savagely that she would be ever so sick in crossing the Channel.
There I was in that dreary tawdry school-room, with half-a-dozen
mahogany-coloured girls from Toulon, and Toulouse, and Carcassonne; and
now I am at home and with you, and I mean to be happy. Discontent shall
not come near me to-day. And you will taste my wassail bowl, won’t you,
Lina?’

‘Yes, dear, if it isn’t quite too nasty.’

Lina had given her younger sister license for any kind of mediæval
experiments, in conjunction with Mrs. Spicer; and there had been
much consultation of authorities—Knight, and Timbs, and Washington
Irving—and a good deal of messing in the spacious still-room, with a
profligate consumption of lemons and sherry, and spices and russet
apples. With the dinner at which her father and the Rectory people
were to assist, Daphne ventured no interference; but she had planned a
Shakespearian refection in the billiard-room at midnight—if they could
only get rid of Aunt Rhoda, whose sense of propriety was so strong that
she might perhaps insist upon staying till the two young men had taken
their departure.

‘I wish we could have old Spicer in to matronise the party,’ said
Daphne. ‘She looks lovely in her Sunday evening gown. She would
sit smiling benevolently at us till she dropped asleep; instead of
contemplating us as if she thought the next stage of our existence
would be a lunatic asylum, as Aunt Rhoda generally does when we are
cheerful.’

‘I’m afraid you must put up with Aunt Rhoda to-night, Daphne,’ answered
Madoline. ‘She has suggested that she and the Rector should have the
Blue Room, as the drive home might bring on his bronchitis.’

‘His bronchitis, indeed!’ cried Daphne. ‘He appropriates the complaint
as if nobody else had ever had it. So they are going to stay the night!
Of all the cool proceedings I ever heard of that is about the coolest.
And Aunt Rhoda is one of those people who are never sleepy. She will
sit us out, however late we are. Never mind. The banquet will be all
the more classical and complete. Aunt Rhoda will be the skeleton.’

Daphne contrived to be happy all day, in spite of Mrs. Ferrers, who
was particularly ungracious to her younger niece, while she was lavish
of compliments and pretty speeches to the elder. The faithful slave
Edgar was absent on duty—going to church twice with his mother; dining
with her; devoted to her altogether, or as much as he could be with
a heart that longed to be elsewhere. But Daphne hardly missed him.
Gerald Goring was in high spirits, full of life and talk and fun, as
if he too had made up his mind that this great day in the Christian
calendar should be a day of rejoicing for him. They all went to church
together in the morning, and admired the decorations, which owed all
their artistic beauty to Madoline’s taste, and were in a large measure
the work of her own industrious fingers. They joined reverently in the
Liturgy, and listened patiently to the Rector’s sermon, in which he
aired a few of those good old orthodox truisms which have been repeated
time out of mind by rural incumbents upon Christmas mornings.

After luncheon they all three went on a round of visits to Madoline’s
cottagers—those special, old-established families to whose various
needs, intellectual and corporeal, she had ministered from her early
girlhood, and who esteemed a Christmas visit from Miss Lawford as the
highest honour and privilege of the year. It was pleasant to look in at
the tidy little keeping-rooms, where the dressers shone with a bright
array of crockery, and the hearths were so neatly swept, and the pots
and pans and brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, and the little
black-framed scriptural pictures, were all decorated with sprigs of ivy
and holly. Pleasant the air of dinner and dessert which pervaded every
house. Daphne had a basket of toys for the children; a basket which
Gerald insisted upon carrying, looking into it every now and then, and
affecting an intense curiosity as to the contents. The sky was dark,
save for one low red streak above the ragged edge of the wooded lane,
when they went back to afternoon tea: and what a comfortable change it
was from the wintry world outside to Madoline’s flowery morning-room,
heavy with the scent of hyacinths and Parma violets, and bright with
blazing logs! The low Japanese tea-table was drawn in front of the
fire, and the basket-chairs stood ready for the tea-drinkers.

‘I was afraid Aunt Rhoda would be here to tea,’ said Daphne, sinking
into her favourite seat on the fender-stool, in the shadow of the
draped mantelpiece. ‘Is it not delicious to have this firelight hour
all to ourselves? I always feel that just this time—this changeful
light—stands apart from the rest of our lives. Our thoughts and fancies
are all different somehow. They seem to take the rosy colour out of the
fire; they are dim and dreamy and full of change, like the shadows on
the wall. _We_ are different. Just now I feel as if I had not a care.’

‘And have you many cares at other times?’ asked Gerald scoffingly.

‘A few.’

‘The fear that your ball-dress may not fit; or that some clumsy
fox-hunting partner may smash the ivory fan which Lina gave you
yesterday.’

‘Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward,’ answered Daphne
sententiously. ‘Do you think, because I live in a fine house, and have
food and raiment found for me, that I do not know the meaning of care?’

‘Well, I should fancy there is a long way between your comprehension of
the word and that of a Whitechapel seamstress: a widow, with five small
children to keep, and a lodging to pay, upon the produce of her needle,
with famine or the workhouse staring her in the face.’

‘It is the hour for telling ghost-stories,’ exclaimed Daphne, kneeling
at her sister’s side to receive her cup and saucer, and trifling
daintily with the miniature Queen Anne tongs as she helped herself to
sugar. ‘Lina, tell us the story of this house. It ought to be haunted.’

‘I am thankful to say I have never heard of any ghosts,’ answered
Madoline. ‘Every house that has been lived in fifty years must have
some sad memories; but our dead do not come back to us, except in our
dreams.’

‘Mr. Goring, I insist upon a ghost-story,’ said Daphne. ‘On this
particular day—at this particular hour—in this delicious half-light, a
story of some kind must be told.’

‘I delight in ghost-stories—good grim old German legends,’ answered
Gerald languidly, looking deliciously comfortable in the depths of an
immense armchair, so low that it needed the dexterity of a gymnast to
enable man or woman to get in or out of it gracefully—a downy-cushioned
nest when one was there. ‘I adore phantoms, and fiends, and the whole
shopful; but I never could remember a story in my life.’

‘You must tell one to-night,’ cried Daphne eagerly. ‘It need not be
ghostly. A nice murder would do—a grisly murder. My blood begins to
turn cold in advance.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you,’ said Gerald; ‘but although I have made
a careful study of all the interesting murders of my age I could never
distinctly remember details. I should get hideously mixed if I tried
to relate the circumstances of a famous crime. I should confound Rush
with Palmer, the Mannings with the Greenacres; put the pistol into the
hand that used the knife; give the dagger to the man who pinned his
faith on the bowl. Not to be done, Daphne. I am no _raconteur_. You
or Lina had better amuse me. One of you can tell me a story—something
classical—John Gilpin, or the Old Woman with her Pig.’

‘John Gilpin! a horridly cheerful singsong ballad—and in such a
fantastic dreamy light as this! I wonder you have not more sense of the
fitness of things. Besides, it is your duty to amuse us. A story of
some kind we must have, mustn’t we, Lina dearest?’

‘It would be very pleasant in this half-light,’ answered Lina softly,
quite happy, sitting silently between those two whom she loved so
dearly, pleased especially at Daphne’s brightness and good-humour, and
apparently friendly feeling for Gerald.

‘You hear,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘Your liege lady commands you.’

‘A story,’ mused Gerald in his laziest tone, with his head lying back
on the cushions, and his eyes looking dreamily up at the ceiling,
where the lights and shadows came and went so fantastically. ‘A story,
ghostly or murderous, tragical, comical, amorous, sentimental—well,
suppose now I were to tell you a classical story, as old as the hills,
or as the laurel-bushes in your garden, the story of your namesake
Daphne.’

‘Namesake!’ echoed the girl, with her golden head resting against the
arm of her sister’s chair, her eyes gravely contemplative of the fire.
‘Had I ever a namesake? Could there be another set of godfathers and
godmothers in the world stupid enough, or hard-hearted enough, to give
an unconscious innocent such a name as mine?’

‘The namesake I am thinking of lived before the days of godfathers and
godmothers,’ answered Gerald, still looking up at the ceiling, with a
dreamy smile on his face; ‘she was the daughter of a river-god and a
naiad, a wild, free-born, untamable creature, beautiful as a dream,
variable as the winds that rippled the stream from which her father
took his name. Wooers had sought her, but in vain. She loved the wood
and the chase, all free and sylvan delights—the unfettered life of a
virgin. She emulated the fame of Diana. She desired to live and die
apart from the rude race of men—a woodland goddess among her maidens.
Often her father said: “Daughter, thou owest me a son.” Often her
father said: “Child, thou owest me grandchildren.” She, with blushing
cheeks, hung on her father’s neck, and repulsed the torch of Hymen, as
if it were a crime to love. “Let me, like Diana, live unwedded,” she
pleaded. “Grant me the same boon Jove gave his daughter.” “Sweet one,”
said the father, “thy duty forbids the destiny thy soul desires. Love
will find thee out.” The river-god spoke words of fatal truth. Love
sought Daphne, and he came in a godlike form. Phœbus Apollo was the
lover. Phœbus, the spirit of light, and music, and beauty. He saw her,
and all his soul was on fire with love. The dupe of his own oracles,
he hoped for victory. He saw Daphne’s hair floating carelessly upon
the wind; the eyes, like shining stars; the sweet lips, which it was
pain to see and not to kiss. But lighter than the wind the cruel nymph
fled from him. In vain he called her, in vain he tried to stop her.
“Stay, sweet one,” he cried, “it is no enemy who pursues thee. So
flies the lamb the wolf, the hind the lion, the trembling dove from
the strong-winged eagle. But ’tis love bids me follow. Stay thy steps,
suspend thy flight, and I will slacken my pursuit. Foolish one, thou
knowest not whom thou fliest. No rude mountaineer, or ungainly shepherd
pursues thee, but a god before whose law Delphos, Claros, and Tenedos
obey; the son of high Jove himself; the deity who reveals the past, the
present, and the future; who first wedded song to the stringed lyre. My
arrows are deadly, but a deadlier shaft has pierced my heart.” Thus and
much more he pleaded, yet Daphne still fled from him, heedless of the
briers that wounded her naked feet, the winds that lifted her flowing
hair. The breathless god could no longer find words of entreaty.
Maddened by love he followed in feverish haste; he gained on her; his
breath touched her floating tresses. The inexorable nymph felt her
strength failing; with outstretched arms, with beseeching eyes, she
appealed to the river: “Oh, father, if thy waves have power to save me,
come to my aid! Oh, mother earth, open and fold me in thine arms, or
by some sudden change destroy the beauty that subjects me to outrage.”
Scarcely was the prayer spoken when a heavy torpor crept over her
limbs; the nymph’s lovely shoulders covered themselves with a smooth
bark; her hair changed to leaves; her arms to branches; her feet, a
moment before so agile, became rooted to the ground. Yet Phœbus still
loved. He felt beneath the bark of the tree the heart beat of the nymph
he adored; he covered the senseless tree with his despairing kisses;
and then, when he knew that the nymph was lost to him for ever, he
cried: “If thou canst not be my wife, thou shalt be at least Apollo’s
sacred tree. Laurel, thou shalt for ever wreathe my hair, my lyre,
my quiver. Thou shalt crown Rome’s heroes; thy sacred branches shall
shelter and guard the palace of her Cæsars; and as the god, thy lover,
shines with the lustre of eternal youth, so, too, shalt thou preserve
thy beauty and freshness to the end of time.”’

‘Poor Daphne,’ sighed Lina.

‘Poor Apollo, I think,’ said Gerald; ‘he was the loser. What do you
think of my story, Mistress Daphne?’

‘I rather like my namesake,’ answered Daphne deliberately. ‘She was
thorough. When she pretended to mean a thing she really did mean it.
There is a virtue in sincerity.’

‘And obstinacy is a vice,’ said Gerald. ‘I consider the river-god’s
daughter a pig-headed young person, whose natural coldness of heart
predisposed her to transformation into a vegetable. Apollo made too
much of her.’




CHAPTER XIX.

‘I DEME THAT HIRE HERTE WAS FUL OF WO.’


All the servants at South Hill were old servants. Sir Vernon was a
stern and an exacting master, but he only asked fair change for his
shilling. He did not expect to reap where he had not sown, nor to
gather where he had not strewed. His household was carried on upon a
large and liberal scale, and the servants had privileges which they
would hardly have enjoyed elsewhere. Therefore, with the disinterested
fidelity of their profession, and of the human race generally, they
stayed with him, growing old and gray in his service.

Among these faithful followers was one who made a stronger point of her
fidelity than any of the others, and affected a certain superiority to
all the rest. This was Mowser, Madoline’s own maid, who had been maid
to Lady Lawford until her death, and who, on that melancholy event, had
taken upon herself the office of nurse to the orphan girl. That she was
faithful to Madoline, and strongly attached to Madoline, there could
be no doubt; but it was rather hard upon the outstanding balance of
humanity that she could consider herself privileged by reason of this
attachment to be as disagreeable as she pleased to everyone else.

In those early days of Madoline’s infancy Mowser had taken possession
of the nurseries as her own domain—belonging to her by some sovereign
right of custodianship, as entirely hers as if they had been her
freehold. Strong in her convictions on this point, she had resented
all intrusion from the outer world; she had looked daggers at innocent
visitors who were brought to see the baby; she had carried on war to
the knife—a war of impertinences and uncivil looks—with Aunt Rhoda,
firmly possessed by the idea that an aunt was an outsider as compared
with a nurse.

‘Didn’t I sit up night after night with her when she had the
scarlet-fever, and go without my sleep and rest for a fortnight?’ said
the faithful one, expatiating vindictively upon her wrongs, in the
conversational freedom of the servants’-hall. ‘Will any of your fine
ladies of fashion do that?’

Mrs. Spicer was of opinion that some might, but not Miss Rhoda Lawford.
She was a great deal too fond of her own comfort.

Mowser was not a woman of high culture. She had begun the battle of
life early, and was too old to have been subject to the exactions
of the School Board. She had been born and bred in a Warwickshire
village, and educated five-and-thirty years ago at a Warwickshire dame
school. Gerald told Daphne that he had no doubt Mowser had every whit
as much book-learning as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. She was
not averse from the use of fine words, but pronounced them after her
own fancy. All unauthorised visitors to the nursery she denounced as
antelopes, meaning, it was supposed, not the graceful animal of the
stag species usually known by that name, but the more obnoxious human
individual commonly called an interloper. Even Daphne, when she took
the liberty to be born, and was brought by her own particular nurse
to Mowser’s nursery, was looked upon as belonging in some wise to the
antelope family; while the strange nurse was, of course, a thoroughbred
specimen of that race. While Daphne was an infant, and the second nurse
remained, there were fearful wars and rumours of wars in Mowser’s
apartments, and exultantly did that injured female lift up her voice
when Daphne went to her first school—at an age when few children of the
landed gentry are sent to school—and the unsanctified nurse departed.
She came a Pariah, and she went a Pariah—a creature under a ban.

‘Now I can breathe free,’ exclaimed Mowser, after she had
ostentatiously opened the windows and aired the nurseries, as in a
Jewish household windows and doors are flung wide when the spirit has
departed. ‘I felt almost stuffocated while she was here.’

Sir Vernon, seeing very little of Mowser, and knowing that she was a
devoted nurse to his beloved elder daughter, had troubled himself very
little about such complaints of her ‘tempers’ as from time to time
reached his ears. He discouraged all fault-finding in his sister upon
principle. So long as everything in the house, which concerned himself
and his own comfort, went on velvet, he was unaffected by the fact that
the servants made themselves disagreeable to other people. It was no
matter to him that Spicer had been abominably impertinent to Aunt Rhoda
in the morning, provided his dinner were well cooked in the evening.
Nor did Rhoda’s raven croakings about the profligate wastefulness of
his household distress him. He knew what he was spending, and that
his expenses were so nearly on a level with his income that he always
seemed poor: but though he liked to growl and grumble after every
inspection of his banker’s book, he hated to be worried about pounds of
butter, and quarts of milk, and dozens of eggs, by his sister.

‘If you pretend to keep my house, Rhoda, you must keep it quietly,
and not plague me about these disgusting details,’ he said savagely;
whereat Rhoda shrugged her elegant shoulders, and protested that if
her brother liked to be cheated it was of course no business of hers to
step in between him and the depredators.

‘I don’t like to be cheated, but I like still less to be worried,’
said Sir Vernon decisively; and Rhoda was wise enough to carry on the
struggle no longer.

She had her own comfort and her own advantage to consider, and she
troubled her brother no further about domestic difficulties: but she
carried on her war with the enemy vigorously notwithstanding—fiercest
of all with Mowser, who looked upon Miss Lawford as the very head and
front of the antelope tribe.

Mowser was a servant of the old school. She prided herself upon the
manners and habits of a past generation. She wore corkscrew ringlets,
and a cap trimmed with real Buckinghamshire lace—none of your
Nottingham machine-made stuff for Mowser. Her petticoats were short and
scanty, and her side-laced cashmere boots were a relic of the past. She
wore an ostentatious gold chain round her neck, and a portly silver
watch at her side. She was rarely seen without a black-silk apron,
which rustled exceedingly. She was of a bony figure, her face sharp and
angular, her eyes a cold hard-looking gray.

When Madoline left the nursery Mowser resumed her original function
of lady’s-maid. She had no particular gifts for the office. She had
no taste for millinery; she had no skill in hair-dressing. She had
been chosen by Madoline’s mother—a young lady of very simple habits—on
account of her respectability and local status. She was the daughter
of Old Mrs. Somebody, who had been thirty years a servant in the first
Lady Lawford’s family. The houses of the menial and the mistress had
been allied for a century or so; and for this reason, rather than for
any other, Jane Mowser had been considered eligible for the office of
maid.

She was active and industrious, kept her mistress’s wardrobe and
her mistress’s dressing-room in exquisite order. She could wash and
mend laces to perfection. She could pack, and unpack, and was a
devoted attendant in illness. But here her powers found their limit.
The milliner and the dressmaker had to do all the rest. Mowser had
no more taste than any villager in her native hamlet; no capacity
for advising or assisting her mistress in any of the details of the
toilet. She looked upon all modern fashions as iniquities which were
perpetually inviting from heaven a re-issue of that fiery rain which
buried Sodom and Gomorrah. To Mowser’s mind, jersey jackets and
eel-skin dresses, idiot fringes and Toby frills, were the fulfilment
of the prophet Isaiah’s prophecy. These were the ‘changeable suits
of apparel, the mantles, and the tires, and the crisping pins, the
mufflers, and round-tires like the moon;’ and all these things were
the forecast of some awful doom. It might be earthquakes, or floods,
or a hideous concatenation of railway accidents, or the exhaustion of
our coal mines, or the total failure of butcher’s meat by reason of the
foot-and-mouth disease. Mowser did not know what form the scourge would
take; but she felt that retribution, prompt and dire, must follow the
reign of painted faces, jersey bodies, and tight-fitting skirts. Young
women could not be allowed so to display their figures with impunity.
Providence had an eye on their sham complexions and borrowed locks.

All picturesqueness of attire Mowser resented as a play-actress style
of dress, altogether degrading to a respectable mind. She objected to
Daphne’s neatly-fitting, tailor-made gowns, her soft creamy muslins,
relieved by dashes of vivid colour, and thought they would end badly.
Not so did young ladies dress in Mowser’s youth. Small-patterned
striped or checked silks, with neat laced berthas fitting close to
modestly-covered shoulders, were then the mode. There was none of that
artistic coquetry which gives to every woman’s dress a distinctive
character, marking her out from the throng.

Vainly did Mowser sigh for those vanished days, the simplicity, the
high thinking and plain living, of her girlhood. Here was Mrs. Ferrers
wasting the Rector’s substance upon gowns which five-and-twenty years
ago would have been considered extravagant for a duchess; here was
Daphne dressing herself up—with Madoline’s approval—to look as much as
possible like a play-actress or an old picture.

Mowser was no fonder of Daphne now than she had been in the days when
the unwelcome addition to the nursery was stigmatised as an ‘antelope.’
There was still a good deal of the antelope about Daphne, in Mowser’s
opinion. ‘It would have been better for all parties if Miss Daphne had
stayed a year or two longer at her finishing school,’ Mowser remarked
sententiously in the housekeeper’s room, where she was regarded, or
at any rate was known to regard herself, as an oracle. ‘First and
foremost, she hasn’t half finished her education.’

‘Haven’t she, Mowser?’ asked Jinman, Sir Vernon’s own man, with a
malicious twinkle in his eye. ‘How did you find out that? Have you been
putting her through her paces?’

‘No, Mr. Jinman; but I hope I know whether a young lady’s education is
finished, without the help of book-learning. My mother was left a lone
widow before I was three years old, and I hadn’t the opportunities some
people have had, and might have made better use of. But I know what a
young lady ought to be, and what she oughtn’t to be; and I say Miss
Daphne leans most to the last. Why, her manners are not half formed.
She goes rushing about the house like a whirlwind; always in high
spirits, or in the dumps—no mejum.’

‘She’s dev’lish pretty,’ said Jinman, who, on the strength of having
spent a good deal of time with his master at Limmer’s Hotel, put on a
metropolitan and somewhat rakish air.

‘She’s not fit to hold a candle to my mistress,’ retorted Mowser.

‘Not such a reg’lar style of beauty, perhaps, but more taking, more
“chick,”’ said the valet.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “chick.” She’s a born flirt. Perhaps
that’s what you mean. She’s her mother all over, worse luck for her!
the same ways, the same looks, the same tones of voice. I wish she was
out of the house. I never feel safe or comfortable about her. She’s
like a dagger hanging over my head; and I don’t know when she may drop.’

‘It’s a pity she refused young Turchill,’ said Jinman. ‘He’s the right
sort. But as he still hangs on, I suppose she means to have him sooner
or later.’

‘No, she don’t. _That’s_ not her meaning,’ answered Mowser with
significance.

‘What does she mean, then?’

‘I know what she means. I know her; much better than her poor innocent
sister does. Masks and artifexes ain’t no use with me. I can read her.
Mr. Turchill ain’t good enough for her. She wants someone better than
him. But she won’t succeed in her mackinventions, while Mowser is by to
file her—double-faced as she is.’

There was a subtlety about Mowser this evening which her
fellow-servants were hardly able to follow. They all liked Daphne,
for her pretty looks and bright girlish ways, yet, with that love of
slander and mystery which is common to humanity in all circles, they
rather inclined to hear Mowser hint darkly at the girl’s unworthiness.
They all preferred the slandered to the slanderer; but they listened
all the same.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now Christmas was over, and the night of the Hunt Ball at Stratford
was approaching. It was to be Daphne’s first public appearance; first
dance; first grown-up party of any kind. She was to see the county
people assembled in a multitude for the first time in her life. A few
of them she had seen by instalments at South Hill—callers and diners.
She had been invited by these to various lawn parties: but her sister
had refused all invitations of this kind, wishing that the occasion of
Daphne’s _début_ should be something more brilliant than a mere garden
party, a fool’s paradise of curates and young ladies.

Daphne looked forward to the night with excitement, but excitement
of that fitful kind which was common to her—now on the tiptoe of
expectation, anon not caring a straw for the entertainment. There had
been the usual talk about gowns; and Aunt Rhoda had insisted upon
coming over to South Hill to give her opinion.

‘White, of course, for the _débutante_,’ said Madoline. ‘There can be
no question about that.’

Mrs. Ferrers screwed up her lips in a severe manner, and looked at
Daphne with a coldly critical stare.

‘White is so very trying,’ she said, as if Daphne’s were not a beauty
that could afford to be tried; ‘and then it has such a bridal air.
I daresay there will be half-a-dozen brides at the ball. I know of
two—Mrs. Toddlington, and Mrs. Frank Lothrop.’

‘I don’t think Daphne need fear comparison with either of those,’
answered Madoline, looking fondly at her sister, who was sitting on
a cushion at her feet, turning over a book of fashion plates. ‘Well,
darling, do you see anything there you would like?’

‘Nothing. Every one of the dresses is utterly hideous; stiff,
elaborate; fantastical, without being artistic; gaged and puffed and
pleated, and festooned and fringed and gimped. Please dress me for the
ball as you have always dressed me, out of your own head, Lina, without
any help from Miss Piper’s fashion plates.’

‘Shall I, dear? Would you really prefer that to choosing something in
the very last fashion?’

‘Infinitely.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what it shall be. I will dress you like a portrait
by Sir Joshua. The richest white satin that money can buy, made as
simply as Miss Piper can possibly be persuaded to make it. A little
thin lace, cloudlike, about your neck and arms, and my small pearl
necklace for your only ornament.’

‘Madoline, do you think it is wise of you to let Daphne appear in
borrowed plumes?’ asked Mrs. Ferrers severely. ‘It may be giving her
wrong ideas.’

‘They shall not be borrowed plumes. The necklace shall be my New Year’s
gift to you, Daphne, darling.’

‘No, no, Lina. I am not going to despoil you of your jewels. I have
always thought it was dreadfully bad of the Jewesses to swindle the
Egyptians before they crossed the Red Sea, even though they were told
to do it.’

‘Daphne!’ screamed Aunt Rhoda; ‘your profanity is something too
shocking.’

‘My pet, I am not going to be contradicted,’ said Lina, not remarking
upon this reproof. ‘The little necklace is yours henceforward. I have
more jewellery than I can ever wear.’

‘It was your mother’s, Madoline, and you ought to respect it.’

‘It was my mother’s nature to give, and not to hoard, Aunt Rhoda. She
would have been ashamed of a selfish daughter. Will that do, Daphne?
The white satin and old Mechlin lace, and just one spray of stephanotis
in your hair?’

‘Nothing could be prettier, Lina.’

‘What are you going to wear yourself, Madoline?’ asked Mrs. Ferrers
with a dissatisfied air. ‘I suppose you are going to indulge in a new
gown.’

‘I have hardly made up my mind to be so extravagant. There is the
gold-coloured satin I had for the dinner at Warwick Castle.’

‘Much too heavy for a ball. No, you must have something new, Lina, if
it be only to keep me in countenance. I had quite made up my mind to
wear that pearl-gray sicilienne which you all so much admired; but the
Rector insisted upon my getting a new gown from Paris.’

‘From Worth?’

‘Can you suppose I could be so extravagant? No, Lina; when I venture
upon a French gown I get it from a little woman on a third floor in the
Rue Vivienne. She was Worth’s right hand some years ago, and she has
quite his style. I tell her what colours I should like, and how much
money I am prepared to spend, and she does all the rest without giving
me any trouble.’

It was decided that Madoline should have a new gown of the palest
salmon, or blush-rose colour; something which would look well with
a profusion of those exquisite tea-roses which MacCloskie produced
grudgingly in the winter-tide, burning as much coal in the process
as if he were steaming home from China with the first of the
tea-gatherings, and wanted to be beforehand with the rest of the
trade. Mrs. Ferrers made a good many objections to Daphne’s white
satin, and was convinced it would be unbecoming to her; also that
it would be wanting in style; yet it would be conspicuous, if not
positively _outré_. But Lina had made up her mind, and was a person of
considerable decision on occasions. Whatever the colour or material
chosen, Aunt Rhoda would have objected to it, as she had not been
called upon to advise in the matter.

‘Well, Lina, my dear, I must go home and give the Rector his afternoon
tea,’ she said, rising and putting on her fur-lined mantle. ‘I might
have spared myself the trouble of walking over to discuss the ball
dresses. You haven’t wanted my advice.’

‘It was very sweet of you to come all the same, auntie,’ said Lina,
kissing her, ‘and we might have wanted you badly. Besides, your advice
is going to be taken. It is to please you that I am going to have a new
gown—which I really don’t want.’

‘Be sure Miss Piper makes your waist longer. The last was too short.
She is not a patch upon my little Frenchwoman. But you are so bent upon
employing the people about you.’

‘I like to spend my money near home, auntie.’

‘Even if you are rewarded by being made a guy. Well, at your age, and
with your advantages, you can afford to be careless. I can’t.’

New Year’s Day passed very quietly. There was much less fuss about
the new year at South Hill than there had been at Madame Tolmache’s
twelve months ago; where the young ladies had prepared a stupendous
surprise—of which she was perfectly aware a month beforehand—for that
lady, in the shape of an embroidered sofa-cushion; and where the pupils
presented each other with boxes of sweetmeats, and gushed exceedingly,
in sentiments appropriate to the occasion.

Except that Daphne found the pearl necklace in a little old-fashioned
red morocco case under her pillow when she awoke on that first dawn of
the year, the day might have been the same as other days. She sat up
in her little curtainless bed, with the necklace in her hand, looking
straight before her, into the wintry landscape, into the new year.

‘What is it going to be like for me? What is it going to bring me?’
she asked herself, her eyes slowly filling with tears, her face and
attitude, even to the listless hand which loosely held the string of
pearls, expressive of a dejection that was akin to despair. ‘What will
this new-born year bring me? Not happiness. No, that could not be—that
can never be. I lost the hope of that a year and a half ago—on one
foolish, never-to-be-forgotten summer day. If I had died before that
day—if I had taken the fever like those other girls, and had it badly,
and died of it, would it not have been a better fate than to be always
fluttering on the edge of happiness; wickedly, wildly happy sometimes
when I am with him—wretched when he is away; guilty always—guilty
to her, my best and my dearest; shameful to myself; lost to honour;
conscience-stricken, miserable?’

Her tears fell thick and fast now, and for some moments she wept
passionately, greeting the new year with tears. Then, growing calmer,
she lifted the pearls to her lips, and kissed them tenderly.

‘It shall be a talisman,’ she said to herself. ‘White gift from a white
soul, pure and perfect as the giver. Yes, it shall be a charm. I will
sin no more. I will think of him no more of whom to think is sin. I
will shut him out of my heart. My love, I will forget you! My love, who
held my hand that summer day, and read my fate there—an evil fate—yes,
for is it not evil to love you? my love, who stole my heart with sweet
low words and magical looks—looks and words that meant nothing to you,
but all the world—more than the world—to me. Oh, I must find some way
of forgetting you. I must teach myself to be proud. It is so mean, so
degrading, to go on loving where I have never been loved. If he knew
it, how he would despise me! I would die rather than he should know!’

Hard to face a new-born year in such a temper as this, with a heart
heavily burdened by a fatal secret; all the world, to outward seeming,
smiles and sunshine. For what care could such a girl as Daphne have, a
girl who had no more need for the serious consideration of life than
the lilies have? All without sunshine and turtle-doves; all within,
darkness and scorpions.

When she was dressed, save for the putting on of her warm winter gown,
Daphne clasped the necklace round her throat. The pearls were not
whiter or more perfectly shaped than the neck they clasped.

‘I must wear my talisman always,’ she thought, as she fastened the
snap. ‘Let me be like the prince in the fairy tale, whose ring used to
remind him by a sharp little stab when he was drifting into sin.’

She went downstairs in a somewhat more cheerful mood than that of her
first awaking. There was comfort in the pearls. She kissed her sister
lovingly, kneeling by her side as she thanked her for the New Year’s
gift. There was an open jewel-case on the breakfast-table, and beside
it a basket of summer flowers—a basket that had come straight from the
sunny south, from the winterless flower-gardens on the shores of the
Mediterranean.

Daphne looked at the jewels first—a low thing in human nature, but
inevitable. The case contained a sapphire cross, the stones large and
lustrous, perfect in their deep azure, and set in the lightest, most
delicate mounting—a cross which a princess might hold choicest amongst
all her jewels. The flowers were roses, camellias, violets, and a
curious thorny-stemmed orange-blossom.

‘Oh, Lina,’ cried Daphne; ‘orange-blossom with thorns! Isn’t that an
evil omen?’

‘I hope not, dear, but I like the other kind best. This is almost too
spiky to put in a flower-glass. But wasn’t it good of Gerald to get
these flowers sent over from Nice for a New Year’s greeting?’

‘Oh, it was he who sent them?’

‘Who else? There was a little note at the bottom of the basket; and
see, this lovely camellia bud is labelled “For Daphne.”’

‘“There’s rue for you,”’ quoted Daphne, with her half bitter smile.
‘Yes, it was very polite of him to remember my existence.’

‘There is something else for you, darling—a locket, which Gerald asks
me to give you from him. He hopes you will wear it at your first ball.’

She opened a small blue velvet case, and Daphne beheld an oval locket
of dead dull gold with a diagonal band of sapphires. It had a kind of
moonlight effect which was very fascinating.

‘No,’ said Daphne gently, but with unmistakable resolve; ‘I will accept
jewels from no one but you. You can afford to give me all I shall ever
want, and it is a pleasure to you to give—I know that, dearest—and to
me to receive. I cannot accept Mr. Goring’s gift, although I appreciate
his kindness in offering it.’

‘Daphne! He will be dreadfully wounded.’

‘No, he won’t. He will understand that I have a touch of pride. From my
sister all the benefits in the world; but from him nothing—except this
cold white bud!’

She put it to her lips involuntarily, unconsciously; but the contact of
the flower he had touched thrilled her with mysterious passion—as if it
were his very soul that touched her soul. She shivered and turned pale.

‘My pet, you are looking so ill this morning, so cold and wretched,’
said Madoline, looking up from fond contemplation of her lover’s gifts
just in time to see that white wan look of Daphne’s.

‘I am well enough, but it is a cold wretched morning,’ answered
Daphne, as she bent over the fire, spreading out her dimpled
hands before the blaze. ‘Don’t you think New Year’s Day is a
horrid anniversary?—beginning everything over again from a fresh
starting-point; tempting one to think about the future; obliging one
to look back at the past and be sorry for having wasted another year.
You will go to church, I suppose, and take your dose of remorse in an
orthodox form!’

‘Won’t you come with me, Daphne? Everyone ought to go to church on New
Year’s Day, even if it were not a sacred anniversary.’

‘Yes, I’ll come, if you like. I may as well be there as anywhere else.’

‘My darling, is that the way to speak or to think about it?’

‘I don’t know. I’m afraid I am desperately irreligious. If I had
ever found religion do me any good I might be more seriously-minded,
perhaps. But when I pray, my prayers seem to come back to me unheard. I
am always asking for bread, and getting a stone.’

‘Dearest, there can be but one reason for that. You do not pray
rightly. Constant, fervent prayer never failed yet to bring a blessing:
perhaps not the very blessing we have asked for, but something purer,
higher—the peace of God which passeth all understanding. That for the
most part is God’s answer to faithful prayer.’

‘Perhaps that is it. I pray in a half-hearted way. “My words fly up,
my thoughts remain below.” I am anchored too heavily to this wicked
world. I stretch out my hands to heaven, but not my heart: that is of
the earth earthy.’

‘Come to church, dear, and this solemn day will bring serious thoughts.’

‘I would go if it were only for the sake of going a little way towards
heaven with you. Yes, Lina dearest, I will go and kneel by your side,
and pray to become more like you.’

‘A poor example,’ answered Madoline, smiling.

And now Sir Vernon entered, pale and drawn after his late illness, but
erect and dignified. There were no family prayers at South Hill, and
there never had been since the first Lady Lawford’s death. Sir Vernon
went to church on Sunday morning, when he considered himself well
enough, but all other religious offices he performed in the seclusion
of his own rooms. There was therefore no morning muster for prayers,
and the servants at South Hill were free to choose their own road to
heaven.

Madoline rose to greet her father with loving New Year wishes. Daphne
kept her kneeling attitude by the fire, with her face turned towards
the blaze, feeling that good wishes from her would be a superfluity.

‘My years must always be happy while I have you, dearest,’ said Sir
Vernon, kissing his elder daughter; and then, with some touch of
gentlemanly feeling, bethinking himself of the child he did not love,
he laid his hand lightly on Daphne’s golden head.

‘Good morning, Daphne. A happy New Year to you!’ he said gently.

She silently turned from the fire, took her father’s hand, and raised
it to her lips. It was the first time she had ever done such a thing:
a little gush of spontaneous feeling, and the father’s heart was
touched—touched, albeit, like all Daphne’s graces, this little bit of
girlish graciousness recalled her mother’s fatal charms.

‘“Bless me, even me also, O my father!”’ she exclaimed, recalling one
of the most pathetic passages of Holy Writ.

‘God bless and prosper you, my dear.’

‘Thank you, papa. That is a good beginning for the year,’ said Daphne,
stifling a sob. ‘I don’t think I shall feel like Esau any more.’

‘My dearest, what comparisons you make,’ cried Madoline. ‘In what have
you ever been like Esau? Have I ever cheated you?’

‘Not willingly, darling,’ answered Daphne, nestling close beside
Madoline as she began to pour out Sir Vernon’s tea. ‘You are my
benefactress, my guardian angel. Is it your fault if I belong by nature
and pedigree to the tribe of Ishmael?’




CHAPTER XX.

‘AL SODENLY SHE SWAPT ADOWN TO GROUND.’


The second week of January was half over, and it was the night of the
Hunt Ball. What girl of eighteen, were her breast ever so gnawed by
secret cark and care, could refrain from giving way to some excitement
upon the occasion of her first dance, and that a dance which was
to be danced by all Warwickshire’s beauty and chivalry—a dance as
distinguished, from a local standpoint, as that famous assembly in
Belgium’s capital, which was scared by the thunder of distant guns, the
prelude of instant war?

Daphne gave herself up wholly to the delight of the hour. She had been
unusually cheerful and equable in her temper since New Year’s Day.
That parental blessing, freely and ungrudgingly given, seemed to have
sweetened her whole nature. She went to church with Madoline, and
prayed with all her heart and soul, and listened without impatience to
a string of seasonable platitudes, culled from the elder divines, and
pronounced in a humdrum style of elocution by the Reverend Marmaduke
Ferrers. She had been altogether blameless in her bearing and her
conduct in this new-fledged year: so much so that Mrs. Ferrers had
deigned to concede, with chilly patronage, that Daphne was beginning to
become a reasonable being.

She had been fighting her inward battle honestly and bravely. She had
avoided as much as possible that society which was so poisonously sweet
to her. She had been less exacting to her devoted slave, Edgar. She had
given more time to improving studies. She had taken up Mendelssohn’s
Lieder, and practised them industriously, breathing, ah! too much
soul into the pathetic passages, dwelling too fondly on the deep
ground-swell of melody, which carries a passionate heart along on its
fierce tide, and, in its fervid feeling and exaltation of spirit, is
akin to the actual triumph of a happy love.

Unconscious of the danger, and resolutely bent on curing herself of a
futile foolish attachment, she yet fed her passion with the fatal food
of poetry and music, finding in every heroine she most admired, from
Juliet to Enid, a love as inevitably doomed to misery as her own. But
all the while she was earnest in her desire to forget.

‘If my namesake, in the pride of her purity, could fly from a god who
adored her, surely it cannot be hard for me to harden my heart against
a man who does not care a straw for me,’ she told herself scornfully.

The day of the Hunt Ball brought pleasure enough to thrust aside every
other thought. Miss Piper had done as well as if she had been born and
bred in Paris. Daphne’s white satin gown fitted the slim and supple
figure to perfection. It was not the ivory tint of late years, but that
exquisite pearly white, with a blackish tint in the shadows, which one
sees in old pictures. Daphne, with her wavy hair coiled at the back of
her beautifully-shaped head, and with just one spray of stephanotis
nestling in the coils, looked like a Juliet painted by Sir Joshua. It
was Juliet’s dress, as Juliet used to be dressed by actresses of an age
less given to the research of correctness and elaboration in costume.
The single string of pearls on the pearly neck, the bodice modestly
draping the lovely shoulders, the round white arms peeping from
elbow-sleeves of satin and lace, the long loose gloves, the slender
feet in white satin sandalled shoes, meant for dancing—not in those
impossible high-heeled instruments of torture which Parisian bootmakers
have inflicted on weak woman—all had something of an old-fashioned air;
but it was a very lovely old fashion, and Madoline was delighted with
the result.

‘Rather _outré_, don’t you think?’ said Mrs. Ferrers, sourly
contemplative of Daphne’s fresh young beauty, which made her own
complexion look so much yellower than usual, when she happened to
glance across the girl’s shoulder at her own face in the big cheval
glass. ‘A little too suggestive of Kate Greenaway’s Baby Books.’

She was trying to settle herself in her panoply of state, a gorgeous
arrangement in ruby velvet and cream-coloured satin, which the little
Frenchwoman in the Rue Vivienne had only sent off in time to reach Mrs.
Ferrers two hours ago, after keeping her in an agony of mind for the
last three days. It was a very splendid gown, so slashed, and draped,
and festooned, that it was a mystery how it could ever be put together.
The velvet cuirass was laced up the back with thick gold cord, and
fitted like a strait-waistcoat; and the ruby scarf was fringed with
heavy bullion, which drooped above a stormy sea of cream-coloured
satin, that went billowing and surging round the lady’s legs till
it met a long narrow streak of ruby velvet lined with satin, which
meandered for about twelve feet along the floor. That Mrs. Ferrers must
be a nuisance to herself and everybody else in such a dress no one
in their senses could doubt; but then on the other hand the gown was
undoubtedly in the latest fashion, and was one which must evoke a pang
of envy in every female breast.

‘I don’t wonder you look disdainfully at my short petticoats, Aunt
Rhoda,’ said Daphne, smiling at the effect of her sandalled ankles as
she pirouetted before the looking-glass; ‘but I think, when it comes to
dancing, I shall be better off than you with your velvet train.’

‘I am not likely to dance much,’ answered Mrs. Ferrers, with dignity.
‘Indeed, as a clergyman’s wife, I don’t know that I shall dance at
all.’

‘Then you will have to sit with your train coiled round your feet to
prevent people walking on it, and that will be worse,’ retorted Daphne.

It was a clear cold night, with a brilliant moon—a glorious night for a
country drive—frosty, but not severe enough to make the roads slippery;
besides, Boiler and Crock were the kind of horses that nobody hesitates
to have roughed on occasion.

Sir Vernon had decided on escorting his daughters to the ball. It was
a sacrifice of his own ease and comfort, but he felt that the occasion
required it.

‘I shall stay an hour,’ he said, ‘and then Rodgers can drive me home,
and go back to fetch you later. It won’t hurt the horses going over the
ground a second time.’

‘Dear father,’ said Madoline, ‘it is so good of you to go with us.’

And now, after a reviving cup of tea, and careful wrapping in fur-lined
cloaks and Shetland shawls, the three ladies and Sir Vernon conveyed
themselves into the roomy landau, and were soon bowling along the
smooth high-road towards Stratford. What a transformed and glorified
place the little town seemed to-night—all lights, and people, and loud
and authoritative constabulary! such an array of fiery-eyed carriages,
three abreast in the wide street in front of The Red Horse! such a
block in the narrower regions about the Town Hall! so much confusion,
despite of such loud endeavours to maintain order!

It seemed to Daphne as if they were going to sit in the carriage all
night, with the humbler townsfolk peering in at them from the pavement,
and making critical remarks to each other in painfully distinct voices.

‘Ain’t the fair one pretty?’ ‘The dark one’s the handsomest.’ ‘My eye!
look at the old lady’s diamonds.’ ‘That’s Lord Willerby.’ ‘No, it
ain’t, stoopid.’ ‘I see the coronet on the kerridge.’ ‘My, what lovely
hair she’s got!’ ‘White satin, ain’t it?’ and so on, while cornets and
violins sounded in the distance with distracting melody.

‘It’ll be dreadful if we have to sit in the street quite all the
evening,’ said Daphne, listening hopelessly to the voice of authority,
with its perpetual ‘Move on, coachman.’

They waited about twenty minutes, and then slowly drove up to the
doorway, where the eager faces of the crowd made a hedge on each
side. Difficult to believe that this entrance hall, luminous with
lamps and bright flowers, was the same which gave admittance to such
prosaic beings as town-clerks and vestrymen, justices of the peace
and policemen. Edgar and Gerald were both hovering near the doorway,
waiting for the South Hill party: Edgar, at the risk of being accused
of deserting his mother, whom he had established in a comfortable
corner of the ball-room, and then incontinently left to her own
reflections, or to such conversation as she might be able to find
among sundry other dowagers arrived at the same wall-flower stage of
existence.

‘I thought you were never coming,’ said Edgar, offering Daphne his arm,
and in a manner appropriating her.

‘I thought we were going to spend the evening in the street,’ answered
Daphne.

Gerald gave his arm to Madoline; Sir Vernon followed with his sister,
whose high-heeled Louis Quinze shoes matched her gown to perfection,
but were not adapted for locomotion. Happily she was a light and
active figure, and managed to trip up the broad oak stairs somehow;
though she felt as if her feet had been replaced by the primitive
style of wooden leg, the mere dot-and-go-one drumstick, with which the
Chelsea pensioner used to be accommodated before the days of elaborate
mechanical arrangements in cork and metal.

The ball-room was already crowded, the South Hill party having arrived
late, by special desire of Aunt Rhoda, who strongly objected to be
among those early comers who roam about empty halls dejectedly, taking
the chill off the atmosphere for the late arrivals. Dancing was in full
swing, and the assembly in the big ball-room made a blaze of colour
against the delicate French-gray walls; the pink of the fox-hunters,
and the uniforms of the officers from Warwick and Coventry, showing
vividly amongst the pale and airy drapery of their partners. There were
more than two hundred in the room already, Edgar told Daphne, as he
pointed out the more striking features of the scene.

‘I daresay there’ll be nearer three hundred before midnight,’ he said.
‘It’s going to be a grand affair. Only once in two years, you see:
people save themselves up for it. A lot of fellows in pink, aren’t
they?’

‘Yes. Why didn’t you wear a scarlet coat? It’s much prettier than
black.’

‘Do you really think so? If I’d known—’ faltered Edgar. ‘But I felt
sure you would have laughed at me if I’d sported the swallow-tail I
wear at hunt dinners sometimes.’

‘I daresay I should,’ Daphne answered coolly; ‘but you’d have looked
ever so much nicer all the same.’

Edgar felt regretful. He had debated with himself that question of pink
or no pink; and the thought of Daphne’s possible ridicule had turned
the scale in favour of sober black; and now she told him he would have
looked better in the more distinctive garb. And there were fellows who
could hardly jump a drain-pipe showing off in their Poole or Smallpage
coats, and giving themselves Nimrod airs which imposed upon the sweet
simplicity of their partners.

The room was a noble room, long and lofty, divided from a spacious
antechamber by a wide square doorway, supported by classic pillars.
Over this doorway was the open gallery for the band. The ball-room
was lighted by a large central chandelier, and two sun-burners in the
ceiling; while from lyre-shaped medallions on the walls projected
modern gas brackets in imitation of old-fashioned girandoles of the
wax-candle period.

There were four full length portraits on the walls: the Duke of Dorset,
by Romney; a portrait of Queen Anne, as uninteresting as that harmless
lady was in the flesh. The remaining two pictures had to do with the
local divinity. One was Gainsborough’s portrait of Garrick, leaning
against the bust of Shakespeare; the other was the poet seated, in his
habit as he lived, by Wilson.

‘You see,’ said Gerald, close behind Daphne, ‘there is the Warwickshire
idol. One can’t get away from him. Why can these bucolics worship
nothing but the intellectual emanation of their soil? Why not a little
homage to muscular Christianity, in the person of Guy, Earl of Warwick,
a paladin of the first water, a man who rescued damsels, and fought
with giants and dun cows, and was strong and brave, and faithful,
pious, self-sacrificing, devoted in every act of his life? There is a
hero worthy of worship. Yet you all ignore him, and bow down before
this golden calf of a dramatist, who sued his friend for a twopenny
loan, and left the wife of his bosom a second-best bedstead—a paltry
fellow beside Guy, the hero-hermit, living on bread and water, and only
revealing himself at his death to the wife he adored.’

‘Guy was a very nice person, if one could quite believe in the giant
and the dun cow,’ said Daphne.

‘I believe implicitly in Colbrand the giant,’ answered Gerald, ‘but I
own I have never been able to swallow the monster cow; and I am all
the more inclined to repudiate her because her bones were on view at
Warwick in Shakespeare’s time.’

‘And it was very sweet of him to end his days so quietly in the
hermit’s cave at Guy’s Cliff,’ pursued Daphne, who was well versed in
all Warwickshire lore, chiefly by oral instruction from Edgar, ‘and
to take alms from his own wife every morning, as one of the thirteen
beggars she was in the habit of relieving; though I have never quite
understood why he did it. But in spite of all these grand acts of Guy’s
we know nothing of the man himself, while Shakespeare is like one’s
brother. He has sounded the deep of every mind, and has given us the
treasures of his own.’

‘I suspect he would rather have given anything than his money,’
retorted Gerald.

They had penetrated to Mrs. Turchill’s corner by this time. That matron
was looking the picture of disconsolate solitude—the dowager with whom
she had been talking about her servants and her tradespeople having
left her to look after a brace of somewhat go-ahead daughters, who
in pale blue silk jerseys, and tight cream-coloured cashmere skirts,
looked very much as if they were attired for some acrobatic performance.

‘I am so glad you have come,’ exclaimed poor Mrs. Turchill, brightening
at the sight of Madoline. ‘The room is dreadfully crowded, and there
are so many strangers.’ This was said resentfully, no stranger having
any more right to be present, from Mrs. Turchill’s point of view, than
Pentheus at his mother’s party. ‘I feel as if I hardly knew a creature
here.’

‘Oh, mother, when there are the Hilldrops, and the Westerns, and the
Hilliers, and the Perkinses,’ remonstrated Edgar, running over a string
of names.

‘All I can say is that if there are any of my friends in the room no
one has taken the trouble to bring them to me,’ retorted Mrs. Turchill.
‘And for any enjoyment I have had from the society of my friends I
might as well be at that horrid Academy conversazione for which you
took so much trouble to get tickets the year before last, and where I
was jammed into a corner of the sculpture room half the evening, with
rude young women sitting upon me.’

Here Sir Vernon and Mrs. Ferrers approached, and Mrs. Turchill resumed
her company smile in honour of people of such importance. Aunt Rhoda
had been exchanging greetings with the cream of the county people
during her leisurely progress through the rooms, and felt that her gown
was a success, and that the little woman in the Rue Vivienne was worthy
of her hire. Everybody was looking at Daphne. Her youth and freshness,
her vivid smiles and natural girlish animation, as she conversed
now with Edgar, and anon with Gerald, fascinated everyone; it was a
manner entirely without reserve, yet with no taint of forwardness or
coquetry—the manner of a happy child, whose sum of life was bounded
by the delight of the moment, rather than of a woman conscious of her
loveliness, and knowing herself admired.

‘Who is that pretty girl in the white satin frock—the girl like an
old picture?’ people were asking, somewhat to the annoyance of older
stagers in the beauty-trade, who felt that here was a new business
opened, which threatened competition, stock-in-trade of the best
quality, and perfectly fresh.

One young lady, whose charms had suffered the wear and tear of seven
seasons, contemplated Daphne languidly through her eye-glass, and
summed her up with scornful brevity as ‘the little Gainsborough girl!’

‘Quite too lovely, for the next six months,’ said another, ‘but her
beauty depends entirely on her complexion. A year hence she will have
lost all that brightness, and will be a very wishy-washy little person.’

‘And then I suppose she’ll paint, as the others do, don’t you know,’
drawled her partner; ‘carmine her lips, and all that sort of thing.’

The lady looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of a carefully
darkened eyelid.

‘Let us hope she won’t sink quite so low as that,’ she said with
dignity.

There was no doubt as to Daphne’s triumph. Before she had been an hour
in the room, she was the acknowledged belle of the ball. People went
out of their way to look at her. She walked once round the rooms on
her father’s arm, and in that slow and languid progress held, as it
were, her first court. It was her first public appearance; her father’s
friends clustered round him, eager to be presented to the _débutante_.
Stately dowagers begged that she might be made known to them. All the
best people in the room knew Sir Vernon, and all professed a friendly
desire to know his younger daughter. Her card was full before she knew
what she was doing.

‘Our little Daphne is a success!’ said Gerald to his betrothed, as they
glided round the room in a languorous troistemps. ‘All the Apollos are
running after her.’

‘I am so glad. Dear child! It is such a pleasure to see her happy,’
answered Madoline softly.

‘I hope her head won’t be turned by all this adulation. It is such a
poor little puff-ball of a head. I sometimes fancy she has thistledown
inside it instead of brains.’

‘Indeed, dear, she has plenty of sense and serious feeling,’
remonstrated Madoline, wounded by this allegation. ‘But she is
painfully sensitive. She needs very tender treatment.’

‘Poor butterfly!’

‘Do you like her dress?’

‘It is simply perfect. Your taste, of course.’

‘Yes; she let me have my own way in the matter.’

‘And as a reward she is looking her loveliest. It is not the calm
beauty of a princess, like my Lina’s; but for a spoiled-child kind of
prettiness, capricious, mutinous, variable, there could be nothing
better.’

Later he was at Daphne’s side, as she sat in a corner by her aunt, with
half-a-dozen young men hovering near, Edgar nearest of all, holding her
fan.

‘I suppose you have saved at least one dance for me, Empress,’ he said,
taking her programme from her hand.

‘I don’t know. All sorts of people have been writing down their names.’

‘All sorts of people,’ echoed Gerald, examining the card. ‘You will be
a little more respectful about your partners in your seventh or eighth
season. Why, here, under various hieroglyphics, are the very topmost
strawberries in the social basket—masters of fox-hounds, eldest sons of
every degree, majors and colonels—and not one little waltz left for
me! I claim you for the first extra.’

‘I—I’m rather afraid I’m engaged for the extras.’

‘No matter. You were solemnly engaged to me for one particular waltz
when first this ball was spoken of at South Hill. You don’t remember,
perhaps; but I do. I claim my bond. I will be a very Shylock in the
exaction of my due.’

‘If you were a better Shakespearian it would occur to you that Shylock
got nothing,’ retorted Daphne, smiling up at him.

‘He was an old idiot. Remember, the first extra valse. We shall meet at
Philippi.’

He was off to claim Lina for the Lancers. It was the last dance before
supper. Sir Vernon had disappeared ever so long ago. Mrs. Ferrers was
standing up with a major of dragoons, in all the splendour of his
uniform, and felt that she and her partner made an imposing picture.
Edgar and Daphne were sitting out this square dance on the stairs,
the girl somewhat exhausted by much waltzing, the man exalted to the
seventh heaven of bliss at being permitted to bear her company.

‘May I take you down to supper?’ he asked.

‘Thanks; no. My last partner—the man in the red coat——’

‘Clinton Chetwynd, master of the Harrowby Harriers?’ interjected Edgar.

‘Told me that the best dancing will be when two-thirds of the people
are gormandising downstairs. You can get me an ice, if you like.’

Edgar obeyed; but when he came back with the ice Daphne had vanished
from the landing, and he got himself entangled in a block of people
struggling down to supper.

The rooms below—those solemn halls in which on ordinary occasions
the local offender stood at the bar of justice to answer for his
misdeeds—were now a scene of glitter and gaiety; flower-wreathed
épergnes, barley-sugar pagodas, and all the tinselly splendour of a
ball-supper. Bar, and bench, and magisterial chairs had vanished as
if by magic. The magistrate’s private apartment and the justice hall
had been thrown into one spacious banqueting-chamber, where even the
proverbial greediness of the best society—the people who tread upon
each other’s toes and rush for the grapes and peaches at Buckingham
Palace—might be satisfied without undue scrambling. But though there
would have been room for him at the banquet, and although there were
any number of eligible young ladies waiting to be taken down, Edgar
scorned the idea of a supper which Daphne did not care for. To have
sat by her, squeezed into some impossible corner of a rout-seat, to
have fought for lobster-salad for her, and guarded her frock from the
ravages of awkward people, and pulled cracker bon-bons with her, would
have been bliss; but the festal board without her would be every whit
as funereal a banquet as the famous sable feast at which that cheerful
practical joker Domitian entertained his courtiers.

Mr. Turchill found a good-natured fox-hunter to take his mother down,
and having seen that lady’s silver-gray satin—newly done up with violet
velvet by Miss Piper for the occasion—making its deliberate way down
the broad staircase, on the sportsman’s sturdy scarlet arm, Edgar went
back to the almost empty ball-room, where about fifteen or twenty
couples were revolving to the last sugary-sweet German waltz, ‘_Glaubst
du nicht_?’

Daphne and Gerald were amongst these; Madoline was sitting with some
girl-friends in the entrance of one of the windows, and to this point
Edgar made his way.

‘You’ve not been down to supper,’ he remarked, by way of saying
something original.

‘Do you know, I don’t much care about going down. If Gerald
particularly wishes it I shall go after this dance; but I think I
should enjoy a sandwich and a cup of tea when I get home better than
the scramble downstairs.’

The waltzers were dropping off by degrees; but Gerald and Daphne still
went on revolving with gliding languid steps to the dreamy melody. They
moved in exquisite harmony, although this was the first time they had
ever waltzed together. Never in the twilight dances at South Hill had
Mr. Goring asked Daphne to be his partner. He had been content to stand
outside in the porch, smoking his cigarette, and looking on, while she
and Edgar waltzed, or to take a few lazy turns afterwards with Madoline
to Daphne’s music. To-night for the first time his arm encircled her;
her sunlit head rested against his shoulder. It seemed to him that his
hand had never clasped hers since that summer day at Fontainebleau,
just a year and a half ago; when they had stood by the golden water,
with the hungry-eyed carp watching them, and a sky of molten gold above
their heads. They had been far apart since that day; dissevered by
an impalpable abyss; and now for the moment they were one, united by
that love-sick melody, their pulses stirred by the same current. Was
it strange that in such a moment Gerald Goring forgot all the world
except this perfect flower of youth and girlhood which he held in his
arms—forgot his betrothed wife, and all her grace and beauty; lived
for the moment, and in the moment only, as butterflies live—with a
past not worth remembering, and annihilation for their only future? As
the dancers dropped off the band played slower and slower, meaning to
expire in a _rallentando_, and those two waltzers gliding round drifted
unawares into the outer and smaller room, where there was no one.

‘_Glaubst du nicht_?’ sighed the band, ‘_Glaubst du nicht_? _Ach
Liebchen, glaubst du nicht_?’ and with the last sigh of the melody,
Gerald bent his lips over Daphne’s golden hair and breathed a word into
her ear—only one word, wrung from him in despite of himself. But that
one word so breathed from such lips was all the history of a passionate
love which had been fought against in vain. The last sigh of the music
faded as the word was spoken, and Daphne was standing by her partner’s
side white as ashes.

‘Take me back to my sister, please.’

He gave her his arm without a word, and they walked slowly across to
the group by the window; but before Madoline could make room for Daphne
to sit by her side the girl tottered, and would have fallen, if Edgar
had not caught her in his arms.

‘She is fainting!’ he cried, alarmed. ‘Some water—brandy—something!’
He wrenched open the window, still holding Daphne on his left arm.
The frosty night-air blew in upon them, keen and cold. Daphne’s white
lips trembled, and the dark gray eyes opened and looked round with
a bewildered expression, as she sank slowly into the seat beside
Madoline, whose arms were supporting and embracing her.

‘My darling, you have danced too much. You have overexcited yourself,’
said Lina tenderly; while three or four smelling-bottles came to the
rescue.

‘Yes; that last dance was too much,’ faltered Daphne, cold and
trembling in her sister’s arms. ‘But I’m quite well now, Lina. It was
nothing. The heat of the room.’

‘And you are tired. We’ll go home directly we can find Aunt Rhoda.’

‘I’ll go and hunt for her,’ said Gerald, who had been standing vacantly
looking on, his brain on fire, his heart beating tumultuously, the
vulture conscience gnawing his vitals already.

He had been thinking of Rousseau’s Julie, and that first kiss given in
the bosquet—the fatal first kiss—the beginning of all evil.

‘My sweeter Julie—so much more lovely—so much more innocent,’ he
thought, as he went slowly downstairs in quest of the ruby velvet
arrangement which contained Mrs. Ferrers. ‘God give me grace to respect
your purity!’

The winter wind rushed into the heated ball-room with a sharp chill
breath that was suggestive of another and a colder world, like the
deadly air from a vault, and soon steadied Daphne’s reeling brain.

‘You see I am not such a good waltzer as I thought I was,’ she said,
looking up at Edgar with a sickly smile. ‘I did not think anything
could make me giddy.’

‘You would rather go home now, would you not, dear?’ asked Madoline.
‘You have had enough of the ball.’

‘More than enough.’

‘Let me fetch your wraps from the cloak-room,’ said Edgar. ‘It will
save you a good deal of trouble.’

‘If you would be so very kind.’

‘Delighted. Give me your ticket. Seventy-nine. All under one number, I
suppose.’

He ran off, and this time had to stem the tide setting in towards the
ball-room; the young men and maidens who had eaten their supper and
were eager for more dancing. Coming back with a pile of cloaks and
shawls on his arm, he joined Gerald and Mrs. Ferrers, her red-coated
major still in attendance.

‘What can Daphne mean by making a spectacle of herself at her first
ball?’ asked Aunt Rhoda, not a little aggrieved at being ruthlessly
dragged away from a knot of the very best people, a little group of
privileged ones, which included a countess and two baronets’ wives.
‘But it is just like her.’

‘There was no affectation in the matter, I can assure you,’ said Edgar
indignantly; ‘she looked as white as death.’

‘Then she should have danced less. I detest any exhibition of that
kind. I am very glad my brother was not here to see it.’

‘I think Sir Vernon has had so much reason to be proud of his daughter
this evening that he would readily have forgiven her iniquity in
fainting,’ retorted Edgar, his blood at boiling-point from honest
indignation.

Daphne, wrapped in a long white cashmere cloak lined with white fur,
looked very pale and ghostlike as she went slowly through the rooms on
Edgar’s arm, attacked on her way by the reproaches of the partners with
whom she was breaking faith by this untimely departure.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, with a faint touch of her natural
gaiety, ‘but I’ll pay my debts this time two years. The engagements can
stand over.’

When the bi-annual Hunt Ball comes round at Stratford-on-Avon there are
some, perhaps, who will remember her promise, and the pale, pathetic
face, and white-robed figure.

Five minutes later the three ladies were seated in their carriage, Mrs.
Ferrers still grumbling, while Edgar lingered at the door adjusting
Daphne’s wraps.

Just as he was going to shut the door, having no excuse for further
delay, Daphne took his hand and clasped it with friendly warmth.

‘How good you are!’ she said softly, looking up at him with eyes that
to his mind seemed lovelier than all the lights of the firmament,
infinitely glorious on this frosty night in the steel-blue sky. ‘How
good you are! how staunch and true!’

It was only well-merited praise, but it moved him so deeply that
he had no power to answer, even by the smallest word. He could only
grasp the slender little hand fervently in his own, and then shut the
carriage-door with a bang, as if to drown the tumult of his own heart.

‘Home, coachman,’ he called, in a choking voice; an entirely
superfluous mandate, neither coachman, nor footman, nor horses, having
the least idea of going anywhere else.




CHAPTER XXI.

‘FOR WELE OR WO, FOR CAROLE, OR FOR DAUNCE.’


Edgar went back to the ball-room with his heart so penetrated with
bliss, that the whole scene had an unreal look to him in its brightness
and gaiety, as if in the next instant dancers, and lights, and music,
and familiar faces might vanish altogether, and leave him suspended in
empty space, alone with his own deep delight. He was as near Berkeley’s
idea of the universe as a man so solid and substantial in his habits
could be. Thought and feeling to-night made up his world; all the
rest might be nothing but a spectral emanation from his own brain. He
lived, he thought, he felt; and his heart and brain were filled with
one idea, and that was Daphne. The ball-room without Daphne, albeit
the Caledonians were just being danced with considerable spirit, was
all falsehood and hollowness. He saw the spurious complexions, the
scanty draperies, all the artificial graces and meretricious charms,
as he had not seen them while she was there. That little leaven had
leavened the whole lump. His eye, gladdened by her presence, had seen
all things fair. But although he was inclined to look contemptuously
upon the crowd in which she was not, the gladness of his heart made him
good-naturedly disposed to all creation. He would have liked to leave
that gay and festive scene immediately; but finding his mother enjoying
herself very much in a snug corner with three other matrons, all in
after-supper spirits, he consented to wait till Mrs. Turchill had seen
one or two more dances.

‘I like to watch them, Edgar,’ she said, ‘though I feel very thankful
to Providence that we didn’t dance in the same style, or wear such
tight dresses, in my time. I remember reading that they wore scanty
skirts and hardly any bodices in the period of the French Revolution,
and that some of their fashionable women even went so far as to appear
with bare feet, which is almost too revolting to mention. All I can
say is, that I hope the dresses I see to-night are not the signs of an
approaching revolution in England; but I should hardly be surprised
if they were. Do go and get a nice partner and let me see you waltz,
Edgar. You’ve improved wonderfully since the Infirmary Ball last year.’

‘I’m glad you think so, mother, but I shan’t dance any more to-night. I
made no engagements for after supper, except with Daphne, and she has
gone home.’

‘Oh, the South Hill people have gone, have they? Well, if you’re not
going to dance any more perhaps we may as well be going too,’ said
Mrs. Turchill, perceiving that a good many of the county people were
slipping quietly away, and not wishing to be left with the masses.

So Edgar, very glad to escape, gave his mother his arm and assisted
her to the cloak-room, where she completely extinguished herself in a
valuable though somewhat old-fashioned set of sables, which covered her
from head to foot, and made her look like a walking haystack.

How full of happy fancies the young man’s mind was as they drove
through the lanes and cross-country roads to Hawksyard under that
brilliant sky, so peopled with worlds of light—‘gods, or the abodes of
gods;’ he cared to-night no more than Sardanapalus what those stars
might be—with now a view of distant hills, far away towards the famous
Wrekin, a cloudlike spot in the extreme distance, and now vivid gleams
of the nearer river, glittering under those glittering stars.

‘Isn’t it a delicious night, mother?’ he cried, and only a gentle
snore—a snore expressive of the blissfulness of repose after
exertion—breathed from the matronly mass of furred cloak and hood.

He was quite alone—glad to be alone—alone with his new sense of
happiness, and the starry night, and the image of his dear love.

She had spoken him fair; she meant to make him happier than man ever
was upon earth, since the earth could have produced but one Daphne.
She must have meant something by those delicious words, that sweet
spontaneous praise. Unsolicited she had taken his hand and pressed
it with affectionate warmth—she who had been so cold to him—she who
had never evinced one touch of tender feeling before; only a frank,
sisterly kindness, which was more galling than cruelty. And to-night
she had lifted up her eyes and looked at him—eyes so mournfully sweet,
so exquisitely beautiful.

‘My angel, that marble heart is melted at last,’ he said to himself.
‘Who would not be constant, for such a reward?’

He had only been in love with Daphne a little over six months, yet it
seemed to him now that in that half year lay the drama of his life.
All that went before had been only prologue. True that he had fancied
himself in love with Madoline—the lovely and gracious lady of his
youthful dreams—but this was but the false light that comes before
the dawn. He felt some touch of shame at having been so deceived
as to his own feelings. He remembered that afternoon in the meadows
between South Hill and Arden Rectory, when he had poured his woes
into Daphne’s sympathising ears; when she, his idol of to-night, his
idol for evermore, had seemed to him only a pretty school-girl in a
muslin frock. Was she the same Daphne? Was he the same Edgar? She who
now was a goddess in his sight. He who wondered that he could ever
have cared for any other woman. The disciple of Condillac, when he
sits himself down seriously to think out the question whether the
rose which he touches and smells is really an independent existence,
or only exists in relation to his own senses, was never in a more
bewildered condition than honest Edgar Turchill when he remembered how
devotedly, despairingly, undyingly, he had once loved—or fancied that
he loved—Madoline.

‘Romeo was the same,’ he told himself sheepishly, having taken to
reading Shakespeare of late, to curry favour with that fervid little
Shakespearian, Daphne; ‘madly in love with Rosaline at noon—over head
and ears in love with Juliet before midnight. And critics say that
Shakespeare knew the human heart.’

Sleep that night was impossible for the master of Hawksyard. Happily
there was but a brief remnant of the night left in which he need lie
tossing on his sleepless couch, staring at the brown oak panels, where
the reflection of the night-lamp glimmered like a dim starbeam in a
turbid pool. Cold wintry dawn came creeping over the hills, and at the
first streak of daylight he was up and in his icy bath, and then on
with his riding-clothes and away to the stable, where only one sleepy
underling was moving slowly about with a lantern, calling drowsily to
the horses to stand up and come out of a warm stable, in order to be
tied to a wall and have pails of water thrown at them in a cold yard.

To saddle Black Pearl with his own hands was but five minutes’ work,
and in less than five more he was clattering under the archway and off
to the nearest bit of open country, to take it out of the mare, who had
not done any work for a week, and was in a humour to take a good deal
out of her rider. Edgar this morning felt as if he could conquer the
wildest horse that ever was foaled—nay, the Prince of Darkness himself,
had he been called upon to wrestle with him under an equine guise.

A hard gallop over a broad expanse of flat common, where the winter
rime lay silver-white above the russet sward, quieted horse and rider;
and, after a long round by lane and wood, Edgar rode quietly back to
Hawksyard between ten and eleven, just in time to find his mother
seated at breakfast, and wondering at her own dissipation.

After this unusually late breakfast Mr. Turchill went to look at his
horses—a regular thing on a non-hunting morning. ‘I took it out of the
mare,’ he said, as Black Pearl stood reeking in her box, waiting to
cool down before she was groomed.

‘Indeed you have, sir,’ answered his head man—a faithful creature, but
not ceremonious with a master he adored. ‘You don’t mean hunting her
to-morrow, I suppose?’

‘Well, yes, I did, if the weather allows. Don’t you think she’ll be
fit?’

‘I think you’ve pretty well whacked her out for the next week to come.
She won’t touch her corn.’

‘Poor old woman!’ said Edgar, going into the box and fondling the
beautiful black head. ‘Did we go too fast, my girl? It was as much your
fault as mine, my beauty. I think we were both bewitched; but I must
take the nonsense out of you somehow, before you carry a lady.’

‘You didn’t think of putting a lady on that mare, did you, sir?’ asked
the groom.

‘Yes, I do. I think she’d carry a lady beautifully.’

‘So she would, sir; but she wouldn’t carry the same lady twice. There’d
be very little left of the lady when she’d done.’

‘Think so, Jarvey? Then we must find something better for the
lady—something as safe as a house, and as handsome as—as paint,’
concluded Edgar, whose mind was not richly stocked with poetical
similes. ‘If you hear of anything very perfect in the market you can
let me know.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It seemed early in the day to think of buying a horse for a wife who
was yet to be won; but, encouraged by those few words of Daphne’s,
Edgar saw all the future in so rosy a light that, this morning,
freshened and exhilarated by his long ride, he felt as secure of
happiness as if the wedding-bells were ringing their gay joy-peal over
the flat green fields and winding waters. He was longing to see Daphne
again, to win from her some confirmation of his hope; and now as he
moved about the poultry-yard and gardens he was counting the minutes
which must pass before he could with decency present himself at South
Hill.

It would not do for him to go there before luncheon. Everybody would
be tired. Afternoon tea-time would perhaps be the more agreeable hour.
It was a period of the day in which women always seemed to him more
friendly and amiable than at any other time—content to lay aside the
most enthralling book, or the newest passion in fancy-work, and to
abandon themselves graciously to the milder pleasures of society.

The afternoon was so fine that he went on foot to pay his visit, glad
to get rid of the time between luncheon and five o’clock in a leisurely
six-mile walk. It was a delicious walk by meadow, and copse, and
river-side, and although Edgar knew every inch of the way, he loved
nature in all her moods so well that the varying beauties of a frosty
winter afternoon were as welcome to his eye and spirit as the lush
loveliness of midsummer; and he was thinking of Daphne all the way,
picturing her smile of greeting, feeling the thrilling touch of her
hand, warm in his own.

Madoline, or Sir Vernon, would ask him to dinner, no doubt; and then,
some time during the evening, he would be able to get Daphne all to
himself in the conservatory, on the stairs, in the corridor. His heart
and mind were so full of purpose that he felt what he had to say could
be said briefly. He would ask her if she had not repented her cruelty
that night in the walnut walk; if she had not found out that true love,
even from a somewhat inferior kind of person, was worth having—a jewel
not to be flung under the feet of swine. And then, and then, she would
lift up those sweet eyes to his face—as she had done last night—and
he would clasp her unreproved in his arms, and know himself supremely
blest. Life could hold no more delight. Death might come that moment
and find him content to die.

It was dusk when he came to South Hill, a frosty twilight, with a
crimson glow of sunset low down in the gray sky, and happy robins
chirruping in the plantations, where the purple rhododendrons flowered
so luxuriantly in spring-time, and where scarlet berries of holly and
mountain ash enlivened the dull dark greenery of winter. The house
on the hill, with its many windows, some shining with firelight from
within, others reflecting the ruddier light in the sky, made a pleasant
picture after a six-mile tramp through a somewhat lonely landscape. It
looked a hospitable house, a house full of happy people, a house where
a man might find a temporary haven from the cares of life. To Edgar’s
eyes the firelight shining from within was like a welcome.

‘Miss Lawford at home?’ he inquired.

‘Not at home,’ answered the footman with a decisive air.

Now there is something much more crushing in the manner of a footman
when he tells you that his people are out than in that of the
homelier parlour-maid who gives the same information. The girl would
fain reconcile you to the blow; she sympathises with you in your
disappointment. Perhaps she offers you the somewhat futile consolation
implied in the fact that her mistress has only just stepped out, or
comforts you with the distant hope that your friend will be home to
dinner. She would be glad if she could to lessen your regret. But the
well-trained man-servant looks at you with the blank and stony gaze of
a blind destiny. His voice is doom. ‘Not at home,’ he says curtly; and
if, perchance, there be any expression in his face, it will be a veiled
scorn, as who should say, ‘Not at home—to you.’

But Edgar was in a mood not to be daunted by the most icy of menials—a
Warwickshire bumpkin two years ago, but steeped to the lips in the
languid insolence of May Fair to-day.

‘Is Miss Daphne Lawford at home?’ he asked.

The footman believed, with supreme indifference, as if the presence or
absence of a younger daughter who was not an heiress were a question
he could hardly stoop to contemplate, that Miss Daphne Lawford might
possibly be found upon the premises; and he further condescended to
impart the information that Miss Lawford had driven to the Abbey with
Mrs. Ferrers and Mr. Goring to see the improvements.

‘I’ll go and find her for myself,’ said Edgar, too eager to wait for
forms and ceremonies; ‘I daresay she is in the morning-room.’

He passed the servant, and went straight to the pretty room where he
had been so much at home for the last ten years. There were no lamps or
candles; Daphne was sitting alone in the firelight, in one of those low
roomy chairs which modern upholsterers delight in—sitting alone, with
neither book nor work, and Fluff, the Maltese terrier, curled up in her
lap.

Her eyelids were lowered, and Edgar approached her softly, thinking she
was asleep; but at the sound of his footfall she looked up, gently,
gravely, without any surprise at his coming.

‘I hope that you are better—quite well, in fact; that you have entirely
recovered from your fatigue last night,’ he began tenderly.

‘I am quite well,’ she answered almost angrily, and blushing crimson
with vexation. ‘Pray don’t make a fuss about it. Waltzing so long made
me giddy. That was all.’

Her snappish tone was a cruel change after her sweetness last night.
Edgar’s heart sank very low at this unexpected rebuff.

‘You are all alone,’ he said feebly.

‘Unless you count Fluff and the squirrel, yes. But they are very good
company,’ answered Daphne, brightening a little, and smiling at him
with that provoking kindness, that easy friendliness, which always
chilled his soul.

It was so hopelessly unlike the feeling he wished to awaken.

‘Madoline drove to the Abbey with Aunt Rhoda and Mr. Goring directly
after luncheon. The new hot-houses are finished, I believe, at last. I
have been horribly lazy. I only came down an hour ago.’

‘I am glad you were able to sleep,’ said Edgar. ‘It was more than I
could do.’

‘I suppose nobody ever does sleep much after a ball,’ answered Daphne.
‘The music goes on repeating itself over and over again in one’s brain,
and one goes spinning round in a perpetual imaginary waltz. I was
thinking all last night of Don Ramiro and Donna Clara.’

‘Friends of yours?’ inquired Edgar.

Daphne’s eyes sparkled at the question, but she did not laugh. She only
looked at him with a compassionate smile.

‘You have never read Heine?’

‘Never. Is it interesting?’

‘Heinrich Heine? He was a German poet, don’t you know. As great a poet,
almost, as Byron.’

‘Unhappily I don’t read German.’

‘Oh, but some of his poetry has been translated. The translations are
not much like the original, but still they are something.’

‘And who is Don— Ra——what’s-his-name?’ inquired Edgar, still very much
in the dark.

‘The hero of a ballad—an awful, ghastly, ghostly ballad, ever so much
ghastlier than Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene, and the worms
they crept in, and the worms they crept out, don’t you know. He is
dead, and she has jilted him, and married somebody else; and he has
promised her on the eve of her wedding that he will come to the wedding
feast: and he comes and waltzes with her, and she doesn’t know that
he is dead, and she reproaches him for wearing a black cloak at her
bridal, and she asks him why his cheeks are snow-white and his hands
ice-cold, and they go on whirling round all the time, the trumpets
blowing and the drums beating, and to all she says he gives the same
answer:

    “Said I not that I would come?”

That awful ballad was in my mind all night, and when I did at last fall
asleep, I dreamt I was at the ball again, and instead of Stratford Town
Hall we were in an old Gothic palace at Toledo and—and—the person I was
dancing with was Don Ramiro. His white dead face looked down at me, and
all the people vanished, and we were dancing alone in the dark cold
hall.’

She shuddered at the recollection of her dream, clasping her hands
before her face, as if to shut out some hideous sight.

‘You ought not to read such poetry,’ said Edgar, deeply concerned. ‘How
can people let you have such books?’

‘Oh, there is no harm in the book. You know I adore poetry. Directly
I was able to write a German exercise, I got hold of Heine, and began
to spell out his verses. They are so sweet, so mournful, so full of a
patient despair.’

‘You have too much imagination,’ said Edgar. ‘You ought to read sober
solid prose.’

‘“Blair’s Lectures,” “Sturm’s Reflections,” “Locke on the
Understanding,”’ retorted Daphne, laughing. ‘No; I like books that take
me out of myself and into another world.’

‘But if they only take you into charnel-houses, among ghosts and dead
people, I don’t see the advantage of that.’

‘Don’t you? There are times when anything is better than one’s own
thoughts.’

‘Why should you shrink from thought?’ asked Edgar tenderly. ‘You can
have nothing painful to remember or think about; unless,’ he added,
seeing an opening, ‘you feel remorseful for having been so cruel to me.’

He had drawn his chair close to hers in the firelight—the ruddy,
comfortable light which folded them round like a rosy cloud. She sat
far back in her downy nest, almost buried in its soft depths, her eyes
gazing dreamily at the fire, her sunny hair glittering in the fitful
light. If she had been looking him full in the face, in broad day,
Edgar Turchill could hardly have been so bold.

‘I did feel very sorry, last night, when you were so good to me,’ she
said slowly.

‘Good to you! Why, I did nothing!’

‘You are so loyal and good. I saw it all last night, as if your heart
had suddenly been spread open before me like a book. I think I read you
plainly last night for the first time. You are faithful and true; a
gentleman to the core of your heart. All men ought to be like that: but
they are not.’

‘You can have had very little experience of their shortcomings,’ said
Edgar, his heart glowing at her praise. And then, emboldened, and yet
full of fear, he hastened to take advantage of her humour. ‘If you can
trust me; if you think me in the slightest measure worthy of these
sweet words, which might be a much better man’s crown of bliss, why
will you not make me completely happy? I love you so truly, so dearly,
that, if to have an honest man for your slave can help to make your
life pleasant, you had better take me. I know that I am not worthy of
you, that you are as high above me in intellect, and grace, and beauty,
as the stars are in their mystery and splendour; but a more brilliant
man might not be quite so ready to mould himself according to your
will, to sink his own identity in yours, to be your very slave, in
fact; to have no purpose except to obey you.’

‘Don’t!’ cried Daphne. ‘If you were my husband, I should like you to
make me obey. I am not such a fool as to want a slave.’

‘Let me be your husband; we can settle afterwards who shall obey,’
pleaded Edgar, leaning with folded arms upon the broad elbow of her
chair, trying to get as near her as her entrenched position would allow.

‘I like you very much. After Madoline there is no one I like better,’
faltered Daphne; ‘but I am not the least little bit in love with you. I
suppose it is wrong to be so candid; but I want you to know the truth.’

‘If you like me well enough to marry me, I am content.’

‘Really and truly? Content to accept liking instead of love; confidence
and frank straightforward friendship instead of sentiment or romance?’

‘I do not care a straw for romance. And to be liked and trusted——well,
that is something. So long as there is no one else you have ever liked
better——’

The face turned towards the fire quivered with the passing of a strong
emotion, but Edgar could only see the thick ripple a of golden hair
making a wavy line above the delicate ear, and the perfect outline of
the throat, rising out of its soft lace ruffle like the stem of a lily
from among its leaves.

‘Who else is there for me to like?’ she asked with a faint laugh.

‘Then, dearest, I would rather have your liking than any other woman’s
love: and it shall go hard with me if liking do not grow to love before
our lives are ended,’ said Edgar, clasping the hand that lay inert upon
Fluff’s silky back.

The Maltese resented the liberty by an ineffectual snap.

‘Please, don’t—don’t think it quite settled yet,’ cried Daphne, scared
by this hand-clasp, which seemed like taking possession of her. ‘You
must give me time to breathe—time to think. I want to be worthy of
you, if I can—if—if—I am ever to be your wife. I want to be loyal—and
honest—as you are.’

‘Only say that you will be my wife. I can trust you with the rest of my
fate.’

‘Give me a few days—a few hours, at least—to consider.’

‘But why not to-day? Let it be to-day,’ he pleaded passionately.

‘You must give me a little while,’ answered Daphne, smiling faintly at
his impatience, which seemed to her something childish, she not being
touched by the same passion, or inspired by the same hope, being, as it
were, outside the circle of his thoughts. ‘If—if—you are very anxious
to be answered—let it be to-day.’

‘Bless you, darling!’

‘But don’t be grateful in advance. The answer may be No.’

‘It must not. You would not break my heart a second time.’

‘Ah, then you contrived to mend it after the first breakage,’ retorted
Daphne, laughing with something of her old mirth. ‘Madoline broke it
first, and you patched it together and made quite a good job of it, and
then offered it to me. Well, if you really wish it, you shall have your
answer to-night. I must speak to Lina first.’

‘I know she will be on my side.’

‘Tremendously. You will dine here, of course. And I suppose you will go
away at about eleven o’clock. You know the window of my room?’

‘Know it!’ cried Edgar, who had lingered to gaze at that particular
casement under every condition of sky and temperature. ‘Know it? Did
Romeo know Juliet’s balcony?’

‘Well, then, at ten minutes past eleven look up at my window. If the
answer be No, the shutters will be shut, and all dark; if the answer be
Yes, the lamp shall be in the window.’

‘Oh, blessed light. I know the lamp will be there.’

‘And now no more of this nonsense,’ said Daphne imperatively. ‘I am
going to give you some tea.’

‘Put a dose of poison in it, and finish me off straight, if the lamp is
not going to shine in your window.’

‘Absurd man! Do you suppose I know any more than you what the answer is
to be? We are the sport of Fate.’

The door was opened gently, as if it had been the entrance to a sick
man’s chamber, and the well-drilled footman brought in a little folding
table, and then a tea-tray, an intensely new-fashioned old-fashioned
oval oaken tray, with a silver railing, and oriental cups and saucers
_à la Belinda_—everything strictly of the hoop-and-patch period. These
frivolities of tray and tea-things were one of Mr. Goring’s latest
gifts to his mistress.

Not another tender word would Daphne allow from her lover. She talked
of the people at the ball, asked for details about everybody—the girl
in the pink frock; the matron with hardly any frock at all; the hunting
men and squires of high degree. She kept Edgar so fully employed
answering her questions that he had no time to edge in an amorous
speech, though his whole being was breathing love.

Madoline and Gerald Goring came in and found them _tête-à-tête_ by the
fire. They had made a _détour_ on their way home, and had deposited
Mrs. Ferrers at the Rectory. It was the first time Gerald had seen
Daphne since the ball.

‘Better?’ he inquired, with a friendly nod.

‘Quite well, thanks. I have not been ill,’ she answered curtly.

Mr. Goring seated himself in a shadowy corner, remote from the little
group by the tea-table.

‘Shall I ring for more tea, or have you had some at the Abbey?’ asked
Daphne, with a businesslike air.

‘We had tea in Lady Geraldine’s room,’ answered Madoline. ‘I wish you
had been with us, Daphne. It is such a lovely room in the firelight.
The houses are all finished, and Cormack has filled three of them
already. Such lovely flowers! I can’t imagine where he has found them.’

‘Easy to do that kind of thing when one has a floating balance of
fifty thousand or so at one’s bankers,’ answered Edgar cheerily. ‘My
wife will have to put up with a few old orange-trees that have been at
Hawksyard for a century.’

The tone in which he uttered those two words ‘my wife,’ startled
Gerald out of his reverie. There was a world of suppressed delight and
triumph in the utterance.

‘He has been asking her to marry him, and she has relented, and
accepted him,’ he thought, hardly knowing whether to be glad or angry.

Was it not ever so much better that she should reward this faithful
fellow’s devotion, and marry, and be happy in the beaten track of
life? He had told himself once that she was a creature just a little
too bright and lovely for treading beaten tracks, a girl who ought to
be the heroine of some romantic history. Yet, are these heroines of
romance the happiest among women? Was the young woman who was sewn up
in a sack and drowned in the Bosphorus happy, though her fate inspired
one of the finest poems that ever was written? Was Sappho particularly
blest, or Hero, Heloise, or Juliet? Their fame was the fruit of
exceptional disaster, and not of exceptional joy. The Greek was wise
who said that the happiest she is the woman who has no history.

Sir Vernon Lawford came in while they were all talking of hot-houses,
and asked for a cup of tea, an unusual condescension on his part, and
which fluttered Daphne a little as she rang the bell for a fresh teapot.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, my dear. Give me anything you have there,’ he
said, more kindly than he was wont to speak. ‘So you were too tired to
show at luncheon. Your aunt says you danced too much.’

‘It was her first ball,’ pleaded Madoline.

‘Yes; the first, but not likely to be the last. She is launched now,
and will have plenty of invitations. A foolish friend of mine told me
that Daphne was the belle of the ball.’

‘She was,’ said Edgar sturdily. ‘I saw two old women standing on a
rout-seat to look at her.’

‘Is that conclusive?’ asked Sir Vernon good-humouredly, and with a
shrewd glance from Edgar to his fair-haired daughter.

‘I think people must have been demented if they wasted a look upon me
while Lina was in the room,’ said Daphne.

‘Oh, but every one knows Lina,’ answered her father, pleased at this
homage to his beloved elder daughter. ‘You are a novelty.’

He was proud of her success, in spite of himself; proud that she should
have burst upon his Warwickshire friends like a revelation of hitherto
unknown beauty—unknown, at least, since his second wife, in all the
witchery of her charms, had turned the heads of the county twenty years
ago. That beauty had been a fatal dower—fatal to her, fatal to him—and
he had often told himself that Daphne’s prettiness was a perilous
thing; to be looked at with the eye of fear and suspicion rather than
that of love. And yet he was pleased at her triumph, and inclined to be
kinder to her on account thereof.

They seemed a happy family-party at dinner that day. Madoline was full
of delight in the improvement of her future home—full of gratitude
to her betrothed for the largeness with which he had anticipated her
wishes. Edgar was in high spirits; Daphne all gaiety; Sir Vernon
unusually open in speech and manner. If Gerald was more silent than the
others, nobody noticed his reserve. He had been quiet all day, and when
Madoline had questioned him as to the cause, had owned to not being
particularly well.

Later in the evening they all adjourned to the billiard-room, with
the exception of Daphne, who pleaded a headache, and bade every one
good-night; but about an hour afterwards, upon the stroke of eleven,
Madoline, who had just gone up to her room, was startled by a knock
at her door, and then by the apparition of Daphne in her long white
dressing-gown.

‘My pet, I thought you went to bed an hour ago.’

‘No, dear. I had a headache, but I was not sleepy.’

‘My poor darling; you are so pale and heavy-eyed. Come to the fire.’

Madoline wanted to instal her in one of the cosy armchairs by the
hearth, but Daphne slipped to her favourite seat on the fleecy white
rug at her sister’s feet.

‘No, dear; like this,’ she said, looking up at Madoline with tearful
eyes; ‘at your feet—always at your feet; so much lower than you in all
things—so little worthy of your love.’

‘Daphne, it offends me to hear you talk like that. You are all that is
sweet and dear. You and I are equal in all things, except fortune: and
it shall not be my fault if we are not made equal in that.’

‘Fortune!’ echoed Daphne drearily. ‘Oh, if you but knew how little I
value that. It is your goodness I revere—your purity, your—’

She burst into tears, and sobbed passionately, with her face hidden on
her sister’s knee.

‘Daphne, what has happened—what has grieved you so? Tell me, darling;
trust me.’

‘It is nothing; mere foolishness of mine.’

‘You have something to tell me, I know.’

‘Yes,’ answered Daphne, drying her tears hastily and looking up with
a grave set face. ‘I have come to ask your advice. I mean to abide by
your decision, whichever way it may fall. Edgar wants me to marry him,
and I have promised him an answer to-night. Shall it be “Yes” or “No?”’

‘Yes, of course, my pet, if you love him.’

‘But I don’t; not the least atom. I have told him so in the very
plainest straightest words I could find. But he still wishes me to be
Mrs. Turchill; and he seems to think that when I have been married to
him twenty years or so I shall get really attached to him—as Mrs. John
Anderson, my Jo, did, don’t you know? She may have cared very little
for Mr. Anderson at the outset.’

‘Oh, Daphne,’ sighed Madoline, with a distressed look, ‘this is very
puzzling. I don’t know what to say. I like Edgar so much—I value him so
highly—and I should dearly like you to marry him.’

‘You would!’ cried Daphne decisively. ‘Then that settles it. I shall
marry him.’

‘But you don’t care for him.’

‘I care for you. I would do anything in this world—yes,’ with sudden
energy, ‘the most difficult thing, were it at the cost of my life—to
make you happy. Would it make you happy for me to marry Edgar?’

‘I believe it would.’

‘Then I’ll do it. Hark! there’s the outer door shutting,’ cried Daphne,
as the hall-door closed with a hollow reverberation. ‘Edgar will be
under my window in a minute or two. I’ll run and give him my answer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A lamp in my window is to signify Yes.’

‘Go and put the lamp there, darling. May it be a star for you both,
shining upon the beginning of a bright happy life!’

A few minutes later Edgar, standing in the shrubbery walk, with
his eyes fixed on Daphne’s casement, the owner of them unconscious
of winter’s cold, saw the bright spot of light stream out upon the
darkness, and knew that he was to be blest. He went home like a man in
a happy dream, scarce knowing by what paths he went; and it is a mercy
he did not walk into the Avon and incontinently drown himself.




CHAPTER XXII.

‘FOR I WOL GLADLY YELDEN HIRE MY PLACE.’


Edgar Turchill rode over to South Hill directly after breakfast next
morning. It was a hunting-day, and the meet was at a favourite spot;
but he had business to do which could brook no delay, and even the
delight of skimming across the Vale of the Red Horse, on a hunter well
able to carry him, must give way to the more vital matter which called
him to the house on the hill. So soon as Sir Vernon Lawford might be
fairly supposed to be accessible to a visitor, Mr. Turchill presented
himself, and asked for an interview.

He was ushered straight to Sir Vernon’s study, that sacred, and in a
manner official chamber, which he had ever held in awe; a room in
which the driest possible books, in the richest possible bindings,
repelled the inquiring mind of an ordinary student, who, looking for
Waverley, found himself confronted with Blackstone, or exploring for
Byron, found himself face to face with Coke or Chitty.

Here, Sir Vernon, seated reposefully in his great red morocco armchair,
listened courteously to Edgar’s relation of his love, and his hope
that, subject to parental approval, his constancy might speedily be
rewarded. ‘I have heard something of this before,’ said Sir Vernon.
‘My sister told me you had proposed to Daphne, and had been rejected.
I was sorry the child had not better taste; for I like you very much,
Turchill, as I believe you know.’

‘You have been very good to me,’ answered Edgar, reddening with the
honest warmth of his feelings. ‘South Hill has been my second home. The
happiest hours of my life have been spent here. Yes, Sir Vernon, Daphne
certainly did refuse me in the summer; but I felt that it was my own
fault. I spoke too soon. I ought to have bided my time. And last night,
after the ball, I spoke again, and—’

‘With a happier result,’ said Sir Vernon. ‘But Daphne is little
more than a child—no wiser than a child in her whims and fancies. I
should not like a straightforward fellow like you to suffer from a
school-girl’s frivolity. Do you think she knows her own mind now any
better than she did in the summer, when she gave you quite a different
answer? Are you sure that she is in earnest—that she is as fond of you
as you are of her?’

‘I have no hope of that,’ answered Edgar, a little despondently. ‘I
have been loving her ever since she came home, and my love has grown
stronger with every day of my life. If she likes me well enough to
marry me, I am content.’

Sir Vernon remained silent for some moments, gravely contemplating the
fire, as if he were reading somebody’s history in it, and that a gloomy
one.

‘I am fond enough of you to be sorry you should marry on such
conditions,’ he answered, after a longish pause. ‘My younger daughter
is a very pretty girl—people persecuted me with compliments about her
the other night—and, I suppose, a very fascinating girl; but if she
does not honestly and sincerely return your love, I say, Do not marry
her. Pluck her out of your heart, Edgar, as you would a poisonous weed.
Be sure, if you don’t, the poison will rankle there by-and-by, and
develop its venom at the time you are least prepared for it.’

Edgar, secure in his assurance of future happiness—for what man, having
won Daphne, could fail to be happy?—smiled at the unwonted energy of
Sir Vernon’s address.

‘My dear sir, you take this matter too seriously,’ he replied. ‘I have
no fear of the issue. Daphne’s heart is free, and it will be very hard
if I cannot make myself owner of it, loving her as I do, and having her
promise to marry me. I only want to be assured of your approval.’

‘That you have with all heartiness, my dear boy. But I should like to
be sure that Daphne is worthy of you.’

‘Worthy of me!’ echoed Edgar, with a tender smile; ‘I wish to Heaven I
were worthy of her.’

‘She is very young,’ said Sir Vernon thoughtfully.

‘Nineteen on her next birthday.’

‘But that birthday is nearly a year off. I hope you will not be in a
hurry to be married.’

‘I shall defer that to your judgment; though I think, as I can never
feel warmly interested in Hawksyard till I have a wife there, the
sooner we are married, so far as my happiness is concerned, the better.’

‘Of course. You young men have always some all-sufficient reason for
being over the border with the lady. How will your mother relish the
change?’

Poor Edgar winced at the question, feeling very sure that Mrs. Turchill
would take the event as her death-blow.

‘My mother is perfectly independent,’ he faltered. ‘She has her
jointure.’

‘Has she not Hawksyard for her life?’

‘No; the estate was strictly entailed. I am sole master there.’

‘I am glad of that,’ said Sir Vernon. ‘It is an interesting old place.’

‘Daphne likes it,’ murmured Edgar fatuously.

‘I suppose you know that I can give my younger daughter no fortune?’

‘If you could give her a million, it would not make me one whit better
pleased at winning her.’

‘I believe you, Edgar,’ answered Sir Vernon. ‘When a man of your mould
is in love, filthy lucre has very little weight with him. There will
be a residue, I have no doubt, when I am gone—a few thousands; but the
bulk of my property was settled when I married Lina’s mother. I suppose
you know that Lina is very pleased at the idea of having you for a
brother-in-law?’

‘I know nothing, except that Daphne has consented to be my wife.’

‘Lina announced the fact to me this morning at breakfast. Daphne was
not down—a headache—a little natural shyness, I daresay. Lina is very
glad—very much your friend.’

‘She has always been that,’ faltered Edgar, looking back with
half-incredulous wonder to the time when a word from Lina had been
enough to stir the pulses of his heart, when the mention of her name
was music.

‘I think I cannot do better for you than leave your happiness in Lina’s
care,’ said Sir Vernon. ‘Daphne will not be married first, of course.’

‘Might they not be married on the same day?’ suggested Edgar. ‘Lina is
to be married directly she comes of age, is she not?’

‘That has been proposed,’ said Sir Vernon reluctantly, ‘but I am in no
hurry to lose my daughter, and I don’t think Lina is eager to leave me.
In my precarious state of health it will be hard for me to bear the
pain of parting.’

‘But, my dear Sir Vernon, she will be so near you—quite close at hand,’
remonstrated Edgar, inwardly revolting against this selfishness, which
would delay his own happiness as well as Goring’s.

‘Don’t talk about it, Turchill,’ exclaimed Sir Vernon testily. ‘You
don’t understand—you can’t enter into my feelings. My daughter is all
the world to me now. What will she be when she is a wife, a mother,
with a hundred different interests and anxieties plucking at her
heart-strings? Why, I daresay a teething-baby would be more to her than
her father, if I were on my death-bed.’

‘Indeed, Sir Vernon, you wrong her.’

‘I daresay I do. But I am devoured with jealousy when I think of her
belonging to anyone else. It is the penalty she pays for having been
perfect as a daughter. Our virtues, as well as our vices, are often
scourges for our own backs. However, when the time comes I must bear
the blow with a smiling countenance, that she may never know how hard I
am hit. Only you can imagine I don’t want to hasten the evil hour. And
now, as I think we understand each other, you may be off to pleasanter
society than mine.’

Edgar instantly availed himself of this permission, and hastened to the
morning-room, where Madoline was seated at her work-table, while Daphne
twisted herself round and round on the music-stool, now talking to her
sister, now playing a few bars of one of Schumann’s ‘_Kinderstücken_,’
anon picking out a popular melody she had heard the faithful Bink
whistle as he weeded his flower-beds.

She started a little at Edgar’s entrance, and ‘blushed celestial red,
love’s proper hue,’ much to the delight of her lover, who hung out a
rosy flag on his own side, and looked as shy as any school-girl.

He shook hands with Madoline, and then went straight to the piano, and
tried by a tender pressure of Daphne’s hand to express something of the
rapture that was flooding his soul.

‘I have seen your father, dearest,’ he said in her ear, as she went on
lightly playing little bits of Schumann. ‘He thoroughly approves—he is
glad.’

‘Then I am glad if he is glad, and you are glad, and Madoline is glad,’
answered Daphne, with a smile in which there was a subtle mockery
that escaped Edgar’s perception. ‘What can I do better than please
everybody?’

‘You have made me the happiest man in creation.’

‘Does not every young man say that when he is engaged?’ asked Daphne
laughingly. ‘I believe it is a formula. And when he has been married a
year the happiest man in creation takes to quarrelling with his wife.
However, I hope we may not quarrel. I will try to be as good to you as
you have been to me; and that is saying a good deal.’

They lingered by the piano, Edgar pouring forth vague expressions of
his delight, his gratitude, his intoxication of bliss. Daphne playing
a little, and listening a little, with her eyes always on the keys,
offering her lover only the lashes, dark brown with sparks of gold upon
their tips, for his contemplation. But such lashes, and such eyelids,
and such a lovely droop of the small classic head, were enough to
satisfy a lover’s eye for longer than Edgar was required to look at
them.

By-and-by, when he had exhausted a lover’s capacity for talking
nonsense, he made a sudden dash at the practical.

‘I want you to come and see my mother, Daphne.’

‘Have you told her?’

‘No, not yet. There has been no opportunity, you know.’

This was hardly true, since, seated opposite Mrs. Turchill at the
breakfast-table that morning, Edgar had vainly endeavoured to frame the
sentence which should announce his bliss, and had found an awkwardness
in the revelation which required to be surmounted at more leisure.

‘I am going to tell her directly I go home. It was better to see Sir
Vernon first, don’t you know. And I want you and Madoline to come over
to tea this afternoon. You could drive over to Hawksyard with Daphne
after luncheon, couldn’t you, Madoline?’ he asked, going over to the
work-table. ‘It would be so good of you, and would please my mother so
very much.’

‘Would it?’ asked Lina, smiling up at him. ‘Then it shall be done.’

The young man lingered as long as he could, consistently with his
performance of that duty which he felt must not be deferred beyond
luncheon time. It was hardly a good time to choose for the revelation,
for Mrs. Turchill was apt to be somewhat disturbed in her temper at the
mid-day meal; her patience having been exercised by sundry defalcations
discovered in her morning round of the house. It might be that new
milk had been given away to unauthorised recipients, or to pensioners
who were only entitled to receive skimmed milk; it might be an
unexplainable evanishment of home-brewed beer: or that the principal
oak staircase was not so slippery as it ought to be; or that the famous
pewter dinner-service was tarnished; or a favourite fender displayed
spots of rust; but there was generally something, some feather-weight
of domestic care which disturbed the even balance of Mrs. Turchill’s
mind at this hour. Like those modern scales which can be turned by an
infinitesimal portion of a human hair, so the fine balance of Mrs.
Turchill’s temper required but very little to alter it.

Edgar rode home to Hawksyard in the clear bright winter noontide,
feeling as much like a convicted criminal as a young man of pure
mind and clear conscience well could feel. He went bustling into
the dining-room, rubbing his hands, and making a great pretence of
cheeriness. His mother was standing on the hearth-rug knitting a useful
brown winter sock—for him, he knew. Those active knitting-needles of
hers were always at work for him. He felt himself an ingrate, as he
thought of her labour.

‘Well, mother; lovely weather, isn’t it, so wintry and seasonable? I
hope you have had a pleasant morning.’

‘About as pleasant as I can have in a nest of vipers,’ answered Mrs.
Turchill, frowning at her work, and intent upon turning a heel.

‘What’s up now?’ asked Edgar, nothing startled by the vigour of her
speech.

‘The beer consumed at Christmas—I won’t say drunk, for gallons of it
must have been given away—is something too dreadful to contemplate,’
replied Mrs. Turchill.

‘Never mind the beer, mother,’ answered Edgar, still rubbing his hands
before the fire, and shifting from one foot to another in a manner that
indicated a certain perturbation of spirit; ‘Christmas comes only once
a year, you know, and the servants ought to enjoy themselves.’

‘That’s all very well, Edgar, within proper limits; but when I see them
stepping over the boundary line——’

‘You feel that it’s time to put on the drag,’ interjected Edgar. ‘Of
course; very right and proper. Whatever should I do without such a dear
prudent mother to look after things?’

And then, suddenly remembering that the most eager desire of his heart
at this very moment was to substitute a foolish young wife for this
wise and experienced housekeeper, Edgar Turchill became suddenly as
vermilion as the most vivid cock’s-comb in his mother’s poultry-yard.
He felt that the revelation he had to make must be blurted out somehow.
There was no use in prancing before the fire, making such a serious
business of warming his hands.

‘I’ve been over to South Hill this morning, mother,’ he said at last,
rather jerkily.

‘Have you?’ said Mrs. Turchill curtly. ‘It seems to me you never go
anywhere else.’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s a true bill,’ he answered, laughing with
affected heartiness, very much as the timorous traveller whistles in a
lonely wood. ‘I love the place, and the people who live in it. South
Hill has been my second home ever since I was a little bit of a chap at
Rugby. But this morning I have been there on very particular business.
I have been having a serious talk with Sir Vernon. I wonder if you
could guess the subject of our conversation, mother, and spare my
blushes in telling it?’

It was Mrs. Turchill’s turn to assume the cock’s-comb’s flaming hue.

‘If you have done anything to blush for, Edgar, I am sorry for you,’
she observed sternly. ‘Your father was one of the most respectable men
in Warwickshire, and the most looked up to, or my father would not have
allowed me to marry him.’

‘You are taking me a trifle too literally, mother,’ answered Edgar,
laughing uneasily. ‘I hope there is nothing disreputable in a man of my
age falling in love and wanting to be married. That’s the only crime I
have to confess this morning. Yesterday afternoon I asked Daphne to be
my wife, and she consented; and this morning I settled it all with Sir
Vernon. We are to be married on the same day as Goring and Madoline—at
least, Sir Vernon said something to that effect.’

‘Indeed!’ exclaimed Mrs. Turchill freezingly. ‘Indeed! And now Miss
Daphne has consented and Sir Vernon has consented, and the very
wedding-day is fixed, you do me the honour to inform me. I thank you
from my heart, Edgar, for the respect and affection, the consideration
and regard, you have shown for me in this matter. I am not likely to
forget your conduct.’

‘Dearest mother,’ gasped Edgar affrightedly, for the icy indignation
of his parent’s speech and manner went beyond the worst he had feared,
‘surely you are not offended—surely——’

‘But it is only what I might reasonably have expected,’ pursued Mrs.
Turchill, ignoring the interruption. ‘It is only what I ought to
have looked for. When a mother devotes herself day and night to her
son; when she studies his welfare and his comfort in everything;
when she sits up with him night after night with the measles—quite
unnecessarily, as the doctor said at the time—and reduces herself to
a shadow when he has the scarlatina; when she worries herself about
him every time he gets damp feet, and endures agony every hour of the
day while he is out shooting; this is pretty sore to be the result. He
is caught by the first pretty face he sees, and his mother becomes a
cipher in his estimation.’

‘Believe me that is not my case, dear mother,’ protested Edgar,
putting his arm round the matron’s waist, which she made as inflexible
as she possibly could for the occasion, and trying to kiss her, which
she would not allow. ‘You will never cease to be valued and dear. Do
you suppose there is no room in my heart for you and Daphne? I know she
is a mere child, a positive baby, to place at the head of a house which
you have managed so cleverly all these years; but everything in this
life must have a beginning, don’t you know, and I rely upon you for
teaching Daphne how to manage her house.’

‘That kind of thing cannot be taught, Edgar,’ answered his mother
severely. ‘It must be the gradual growth of years in an adaptable mind.
I don’t believe Daphne Lawford will ever be a housekeeper. It is not in
her. You might as well expect a butterfly to sit upon its eggs with the
patience of a farm-yard hen. However,’ sighed Mrs. Turchill, ‘you have
chosen for yourself.’

‘Did you suppose I should let anyone else choose for me in such a
matter, mother?’

‘I am sorry for my lovely stock of house-linen. The tea-cloths will get
used in the stable; and the kitchen-cloths will be made away with by
wholesale.’

‘Never mind a few tea-cloths, mother.’

‘But it is not a few, it is a great many. I daresay that out of the
twelve dozen that are now in the linen-closet you won’t have two dozen
sound ones a twelvemonth after your marriage.’

‘I think I should survive even that loss, mother, if you were happy,’
answered Edgar lightly.

‘How could I possibly be happy knowing the waste and destruction of
things that I have taken so much trouble to get together? I’m sure I
feel positively ill at the idea of the best glass and china under the
authority of a girl of eighteen; your great grandmother’s Crown Derby
dessert-set, which I have often been told is priceless.’

‘Yes, mother, by people who don’t want to buy it. If you wanted to
sell it, you would hear a very different story. However, I don’t
see any reason why Daphne should not be able to take care of the
dessert-plates——’

‘I have always kept chamois-leather over each plate,’ interrupted Mrs.
Turchill, with a pensive shake of her head. ‘Will she take as much
trouble?’

‘Or why there should be waste and destruction anywhere. Daphne will not
be the first young wife who ever had to take care of a house, and I
know by the way she learnt to row how easy it is to teach her anything.’

‘Easy to teach her to row, or to ride, or to play lawn-tennis, or to
do anything frivolous and useless, I have no doubt,’ retorted his
mother; ‘but I don’t believe it is in her to learn careful ways, and
the management of servants. I only hope the waste and destruction will
stop at the house-linen. I only hope she won’t bring ruin upon you; but
when I think how many a young man of good means has been utterly ruined
by an extravagant wife——’

‘Upon my word, mother,’ protested Edgar, with a dash of resentment,
feeling that this was too much, ‘you are making a perfect raven of
yourself, instead of being cheery and pleasant, as I expected you to
be. I’m sorry I have not been able to choose a wife more to your liking
as a daughter-in-law; but marriage is one of the few circumstances of
life in which selfishness is a duty, and a man must please himself at
any hazard of displeasing other people. I don’t believe there’s a man
who was at the Hunt Ball the other night who won’t envy me my good
luck.’

‘Very likely; since men are influenced by mere outside prettiness,’
said Mrs. Turchill. ‘Though even there Daphne is by no means faultless.
Her nose is too short.’

‘Now, mother, you have been so good to me all my life that it would be
a very unnatural thing if you were to begin to be unkind all at once,
and in a crisis of my life in which I most need your love,’ pleaded
Edgar with genuine feeling.

He put his arm round his mother’s waist, which, this time, was less
inflexible than before. He turned the matron’s face towards his, and,
lo! her eyes were full of tears.

‘It would be very strange, indeed, if I could deny you anything,’ she
said, strangling a sob. ‘There never was a child so much indulged as
you were. If you had cried for the moon, it would have quite worried me
that I wasn’t able to get it for you.’

‘And you would have given me a stable-lantern instead,’ answered Edgar,
smiling. ‘Yes, best of mothers, you have always been indulgent, and you
are going to be indulgent now, and you will take Daphne to your heart
of hearts, and be as fond of her as if she were that baby-girl you
lost, grown up to womanhood.’

‘Don’t, Edgar, don’t!’ cried Mrs. Turchill, fairly overcome. ‘Her
bassinet is in the little oak room. I was looking at it yesterday. I
have never got over that loss.’

‘You will think she has come back to you some day, when you have a
little granddaughter,’ said Edgar tenderly.

His mother, once reduced to the pathetic mood, was perfectly tractable.
Edgar petted and soothed her; protested somewhat recklessly that the
chief desire of Daphne’s life was to gain her affection; announced
the intended afternoon visit; and obtained his mother’s promise of a
gracious reception.

When Miss Lawford and her sister arrived at about half-past four the
drawing-room wore a hospitable aspect; a huge log burning in the
Elizabethan fire-place; flowers of a homely kind—chrysanthemums and
Christmas roses, crocuses and snow-drops—about the rooms; and an
old-fashioned silver tea-tray on an old-fashioned sofa-table, nothing
of Adam or Chippendale or Queen Anne about it, but a good old ponderous
piece of rosewood furniture, almost as heavy as a house.

Mrs. Turchill received her guests with gracious smiles and with a
heartiness that took Daphne by surprise. She had made up her mind that
she was going to be snubbed, and a dash of timidity gave a new grace
to her beauty. She was very grave, and seemed, to Mrs. Turchill’s
scrutinising eye, to be fully awakened to the responsibilities of her
position. Could she but remain in this better frame of mind she might
fairly be trusted with the Derby dessert-service and the piled-up
treasures of the linen-closet.

Mrs. Turchill made Daphne sit on the sofa by her side while she poured
out the tea, and was positively affectionate in her manner.

‘You will be making tea in this pot before long,’ she said, with a
loving glance at the fluted teapot. ‘It is not a good pourer. You’ll
have to learn the knack of holding it exactly in the right position.’

‘I hope you are not sorry,’ faltered Daphne in a very low voice,
meaning about the event generally, not with any special reference to
the teapot.

‘Well, my dear, I am too truthful a woman to deny that it was a blow,’
returned Mrs. Turchill candidly. Edgar had kept out of the way when the
sisters arrived, wishing his mother to have Daphne all to herself for a
little while. ‘I suppose that kind of thing must always be a blow to a
mother. “My son’s my son till he gets him a wife,” you know.’

‘I hope Edgar will never be any less your son than he is at this
moment,’ said Daphne. ‘I should not like him so well as I do if thought
his regard for me could make him one shade less devoted to you.’

‘Well, my dear, time will show,’ replied Mrs. Turchill doubtfully. ‘As
a rule young wives are very selfish; they expect to monopolise their
husbands’ affection. All I hope is that you love Edgar as he deserves
to be loved. There never was a worthier young man, and no girl could
hope for a better husband than he will make.’

To this exhortation Daphne replied nothing. She sat with downcast eyes,
stirring her tea; and Mrs. Turchill, taking this silence for maidenly
reserve, transferred her attentions to Madoline.

‘I am so sorry Mr. Goring did not drive over with you,’ she said. ‘I
quite expected him.’

‘You are very kind,’ answered Lina. ‘He has gone to London. I had a
telegram from Euston Station an hour ago. Gerald has some business to
settle with his London lawyers, and is likely to be away for some days.’

‘I’m afraid you must find South Hill very dull in his absence,’
suggested Mrs. Turchill politely.

‘I miss him very much; but I don’t think I am very dull. My father
occupies a good deal of my time; and then there is Daphne, who has
generally plenty to say for herself.’

‘Meaning that I am an insatiable chatterer,’ said Daphne, laughing.
‘I’m afraid it was Dibb—I mean Martha, an old schoolfellow of mine—who
got me into the habit of talking so much.’

‘Was she a great talker?’

‘Quite the contrary. She rarely opened her mouth except to put
something into it, so I acquired the pernicious habit of talking for
two.’

Edgar now came in, and seeing Daphne and his mother seated side by side
upon the sofa, felt himself exalted to the seventh heaven of tranquil
joy. This and this only was needed to fill his cup of bliss: that his
mother should be content, that life should flow on smoothly in the old
grooves.

‘Well, Daphne, how do you like the look of Hawksyard in the winter?’

‘I think it is quite the nicest old place in the world. I haven’t seen
much of the world; but I can’t imagine a more interesting old house.’

‘You will like it better and better as you become acquainted with
it,’ said Mrs. Turchill. ‘It is one of the most convenient houses I
ever saw, and I have seen a good many in my time. My husband’s mother
was a capital housekeeper, and she did not rest till she had made the
domestic arrangements as near perfection as was possible in her time. I
have tried to follow in her footsteps.’

‘And to make perfection still more perfect,’ said Edgar.

‘There are modern inventions and improvements, Edgar, which your
grandmother knew nothing about. Not that I hold with them all. If you
are not tied for time,’ added Mrs. Turchill, addressing herself to the
two young ladies, ‘I should very much like to show Daphne the domestic
offices. It would give her an idea of what she will have to deal with
by-and-by.’

Daphne, who knew about as much as a butterfly knows of the management
of a house, smiled faintly but said nothing. She had come to Hawksyard
determined to make herself pleasing to Mrs. Turchill, if it were
possible, for Edgar’s sake.

‘I ventured to tell them to take out the horses,’ said Edgar, ‘knowing
that you don’t dine till eight.’

‘I shall be pleased to stay as long as Mrs. Turchill likes,’ answered
Madoline; whereupon the matron, acknowledging this speech with a
gracious bend, rose from her sofa, took her key-basket from the table,
and led the way to the corridor in which opened those china and linen
stores which were the supreme delight of her soul.

Swelling with pride and the consciousness of duty done, she displayed
and descanted on her treasures and the convenient arrangement thereof;
the old diamond-cut glass; the Bow, the Staffordshire, the Swansea, the
Derby cups and saucers, and plates and dishes—crockery bought in the
common way of life, and now of inestimable value. She showed her goodly
piles of linen and damask, which a Flemish housewife might have envied.
She led her guests to the dairy, which in its smaller and humbler
way was as neat and dainty and ornamental as Her Majesty’s dairy at
Frogmore. She talked learnedly of butter-making, cream-cheeses, and the
disposal of skim milk. Daphne wondered to find how large a science was
this domestic management of which she knew absolutely nothing.

‘A house of this kind requires a great deal of care and a great deal
of thought,’ said Mrs. Turchill with a solemn air. ‘Old servants are a
great comfort, but they have their drawbacks, and require to be kept
in check. With a young, inexperienced mistress I’m afraid they will be
tempted to take many liberties.’

Mrs. Turchill concluded her speech with a gentle sigh, and a regretful
glance at Daphne—not an unfriendly look, by any means; but it expressed
her foreboding of future ruin for the house of Hawksyard.




CHAPTER XXIII.

‘AND COME AGEN, BE IT BY DAY OR NIGHT.’


The next three days passed somewhat slowly at South Hill. Unselfish
as Madoline was, even her delight in Daphne’s engagement could not
altogether compensate for Gerald’s absence. Life without him hung
heavily. She missed him at all those accustomed hours which they had
spent together. In the bright noontide, when he rode over fresh and
full of vivacity after a late breakfast; in the afternoon dusk, when
they had been wont to waste time so pleasantly beside the low wood
fire; in the evening; always. He had been away for three days, and she
had received only one shabby little letter—just a few feeble sentences
explaining that he had been obliged to run up to London at an hour’s
notice to see his lawyers upon some dry-as-dust business relating to
his Stock Exchange investments. He hoped to settle it all speedily, and
come back to Warwickshire. The letter gave her very little comfort.

‘I am afraid he is being worried,’ she said to Daphne, after she had
read this brief communication two or three times over. ‘It is not like
one of his letters.’

The week after the ball began with one of those dull Sundays which come
down upon country life like an atmosphere of gloom, and seem to blot
out all the pleasantness of creation. A drizzling Scotch-misty Sabbath,
painfully suggestive of Glasgow and the Free Kirk. Madoline and Daphne
walked to church, waterproofed to the eyes, and assisted sadly at a
damp service; the whole congregation smelling of macintoshes; the drip
drip from umbrellas on the encaustic pavement audible in the pauses
of the Liturgy. It was a rule at South Hill that horses and coachmen
should rest on the seventh day, save under direst pressure. Neither of
the sisters objected to a wet walk. Edgar met them at church, having
tramped over through mud and rain, much to the disgust of his mother,
who deemed that to be absent from one’s parish church on a Sunday
morning was a social misdemeanour not to be atoned for by the most
fervent worship in a strange tabernacle. He joined Lina and her sister
in the porch, and walked home with them by moist fields and a swollen
Avon, whose fringe of willows never looked more funereal than on this
dull wintry noontide, when the scant bare shoots stood straight up
against a sky of level gray.

‘Any news from Goring?’ asked Edgar, by way of making himself agreeable.

‘Not since I saw you last. I fancy he must be very busy. He is usually
such a good correspondent.’

‘Busy!’ cried Edgar, laughing heartily at the idea. ‘What can he have
to be busy about?—unless it’s the fit of a new suit of clothes, or
some original idea in shooting-boots which he wants carried out, or
the choice of a new horse; but, for that matter, I believe he doesn’t
seriously care what he rides. Busy, indeed! He can’t know what work
means. His bread was buttered for him on both sides, before he was
born.’

‘Isn’t that rather a juvenile notion of yours, Edgar?’ asked Madoline.
‘I believe the richest people are often the busiest. Property has its
duties as well as its rights.’

‘No doubt. But a rich man can always take the rights for his own share,
and pay somebody else to perform the duties,’ answered Edgar shrewdly.
‘And I should think Goring was about the last man to let his property
be a source of care to him.’

‘In this instance I am afraid he is being worried about it,’ said Lina
decisively; and with a look which seemed to say, ‘nobody has any right
to have an opinion about my lover.’

The day was a long one, even with the assistance of Edgar in the task
of getting through it. Daphne, considerably sobered by her engagement,
behaved irreproachably all the afternoon and evening; but she stifled a
good many yawns, until the effort made her eyes water.

Her father had been unusually kind to her since the announcement of
her betrothal. All his anxieties about her—and it had been the habit
of his mind to regard her as a source of trouble and difficulty, or
even of future woe—were now set at rest. Married in the early bloom
of her girlhood to such a man as Edgar, all her life to come would be
so fenced round and protected, so sheltered and guarded by love and
honour, that perversity itself could scarce go astray.

‘Daphne’s mother was spoiled before I married her,’ he told himself,
remembering the misery of his second marriage. ‘If I had won her before
her heart was corrupted our lives might have been different.’

It seemed to him, looking at the matter soberly, that there could be no
better alliance for his younger daughter than this with Edgar Turchill.
He had seen them together continually, in a companionship which seemed
full of pleasure for both: boating together, at lawn-tennis, at
billiards, sympathising, as it appeared to him from his superficial
point of view, in every thought and feeling. It never occurred to him
that this was a mere surface sympathy, and that the hidden deeps of
Daphne’s mind and soul were far beyond the plummet-line of Edgar’s
sympathy or comprehension. Sir Vernon had made up his mind that his
younger daughter was a frivolous butterfly-being, who needed only
frivolous pleasures and girlish amusements to make her happy.

Everybody, or almost everybody, approved of Daphne’s engagement. It was
pleasant to the girl to live for a little while in an atmosphere of
praise. Even Aunt Rhoda, upon whose being Daphne had exercised the kind
of influence which some people feel when there is a cat in the room,
even Aunt Rhoda professed herself delighted. She came over between the
showers and the church services upon this particular Sunday, on purpose
to tell Daphne how very heartily she approved of her conduct.

‘You have acted wisely for once in your life,’ she said sententiously;
‘I hope it is the beginning of many wise acts. I suppose you will be
married at the same time as Lina. The double wedding will have a very
brilliant effect, and will save your father ever so much trouble and
expense.’

‘Oh no; I should not like that,’ cried Daphne hurriedly.

‘You wouldn’t like a double wedding!’ ejaculated Mrs. Ferrers
indignantly. ‘Why, what a vain, arrogant little person you must be. I
suppose you fancy your own importance would be lessened if you were
married at the same time as your elder sister?’

‘No, no, Aunt; indeed, it is not that. I am quite content to seem of no
account beside Lina. I love her far too dearly to envy her superiority.
But—if—when—I am married I should like it to be very quietly—no people
looking on—no fuss—no fine gowns. When my father and Edgar have made
up their minds that the proper time has come, I should like just to
walk into my uncle’s church early some morning, with papa and Lina, and
for Edgar to meet us there, just as quietly as if we were poor people,
and for no one to be told anything about it.’

‘What a romantic schoolgirlish notion!’ said Mrs. Ferrers
contemptuously. ‘Such a marriage would be a discredit to your family;
and I should think it most unlikely my brother would ever give his
consent to such a hole-and-corner way of doing things.’

The one person at South Hill who absolutely refused to smile upon
Daphne’s engagement was Madoline’s faithful Mowser. That devoted female
received the announcement with shrugs and ominous shakings of a head
which carried itself as if it were the living temple of wisdom, and in
a manner incomplete without that helmet of Minerva which obviously of
right belonged to it.

‘You don’t seem as pleased as the rest of us at the notion of this
second marriage,’ said good-tempered Mrs. Spicer, housekeeper and cook,
to whom ‘the family’ was the central point of the universe; sun, moon,
and stars, earth and ocean, and the residue of mankind, being merely so
much furniture created to make ‘the family’ comfortable.

‘I hear and see and say nothing,’ answered Mowser, as oracular in most
of her utterances as Friar Bacon’s brazen head. ‘Time will show.’

‘Well, all I can say is,’ said Jinman, ‘that our Miss Daphne is an
uncommon pretty girl, and deserves a good husband. She has just that
spice of devilry in her which I like in a woman. Your even-tempered
girls are too insipid for my taste.’

‘I suppose you would have admired the spice of devilry in Miss Daphne’s
mar,’ retorted Mowser venomously, ‘which made her run away from her
husband.’

‘No, Mrs. Mowser; I draw the line at that. A man may want to get rid
of his wife, but he don’t like her to take the initial’—Mr. Jinman
meant initiative—‘and bolt. A spice of devilry is all very well, but
one doesn’t want the entire animal. I like a shake of the grater in my
negus, but I don’t desire the whole nutmeg. But I do think that it’s a
low-minded thing to cast up Miss Daphne’s mar whenever the young lady’s
talked about. Every tub must stand on its own bottom.’

‘Well, Mr. Jinman,’ said Mowser, ‘all I hope is, that Miss Daphne will
carry through her engagement now she’s made it. She’s welcome to her
own sweetheart, as far as I am concerned, so long as she doesn’t hanker
after other people’s.’

The phrase sounded vague, and neither Mr. Jinman, nor Mrs. Spicer, nor
the coachman (who had dropped in to tea and toast and a poached egg
or two in the housekeeper’s room) had any clear idea of what Mowser
meant, except that it was something ill-natured. On that point there
was no room to doubt.

Another week wore on, the second after the ball, and Gerald Goring
had not yet returned. He wrote every other day, telling Madoline all
he had been doing; the picture-galleries and theatres he had visited,
the clubs at which he had dined; yet in all these letters of his,
affectionate as they were, there was a tone which sustained in Lina’s
mind the idea that her lover was in some way troubled or worried. The
few words which gave rise to this impression were slight enough; she
hardly knew how or why the notion had entered her mind, but it was
there, and remained there, and it increased her anxiety for his return
to an almost painful degree. While she was expecting him daily and
hourly, a much longer letter arrived, which on the first reading almost
broke her heart:

 ‘MY DEAR ONE,—I write in tremendous excitement and flurry of mind to
 tell you something which I fear may displease you; yet at the very
 beginning I will disarm your wrath by saying that if you put a veto
 upon this intention of mine it shall be instantly abandoned. Subject
 to this, dear love, I am going, in hot haste, to Canada. Don’t be
 startled, Lina. It is no more nowadays than going to Scotland. Men I
 know go across for the salmon-fishing every autumn, and are absent
 so short a time that their friends hardly miss them from the beaten
 tracks at home.

 ‘And now I will tell you what has put this Canadian idea into my
 head. I have for some time been feeling a little below par—mopish,
 lymphatic, disinclined for exertion of any kind. My holiday in the
 Orkneys was a _dolce far niente_ business, which did me no real good.
 I went the other day to a famous doctor in Cavendish Square, a man
 who puts our prime ministers on their legs when they are inclined to
 drop, like tired cab horses, under the burden of the public weal. He
 ausculted me carefully, found me sound in wind and limb, but nerves
 and muscles alike in need of bracing. “You want change of scene
 and occupation,” he said, “and a climate that will make you exert
 yourself. Go to Vienna and skate.” I daresay this would have been
 good advice for a man who had never seen Vienna; but as I know that
 brilliant capital by heart, with all its virtues, and a few of its
 vices, I rejected it. “Please yourself,” said my physician, pocketing
 his fee; “but I recommend complete change, and the hardest climate
 you can bear.” I do not feel sure that I intended to take his advice,
 or should have thought any more about it; but I happened to meet Lord
 Loftus Berwick, the Duke of Bamborough’s youngest son, and an old Eton
 chum of mine, in the smoking-room at the Reform that very evening,
 and he told me he was just off to Canada, dilated enthusiastically
 upon the delights of that wintry region, and the various sports
 congenial to the month of February. He goes _viâ_ New York, Delaware
 and Hudson Railway to Montreal, thence to Quebec, and from Quebec by
 the Intercolonial Railway to Rimouski, where he is to charter a small
 schooner and cross the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Natashquan
 River, which river belongs to two particular friends of his, both
 distinguished comedians, and men of unbounded popularity on each side
 of the Atlantic. Here Loftus proposes to hunt cariboo, moose, elk, and
 I don’t know what else. But before he puts on his snow-shoes, loads
 his sledges, and harnesses his dogs for those happy hunting-grounds,
 he is going to revel in the more civilised and sophisticated pleasures
 of a Canadian winter, curling-clubs, sleigh-rides around the mountain
 at Montreal, tobogganing at the Falls of Montmorenci, near Quebec, and
 so on. Just the thing for me, thought I—a hard climate, only about
 eight days’ voyage—if my dearest did not object to my being away from
 my natural place at her feet for five or six weeks. At my hinting a
 wish to accompany him Loftus became still more enthusiastic, and was
 eager to have the whole thing settled that moment. And now, love, it
 is for you to decide. I think the run would do me good; but perish the
 thought of benefit to me if it must be bought at the price of pain to
 you. Loftus is going in the Cunard, which leaves Liverpool the day
 after to-morrow. Telegraph your wishes, and be assured beforehand of
 obedience from your devoted slave,

  ‘GERALD GORING.’

Madoline’s first thoughts were of the pain of being parted from her
lover, whose presence had for so long been the sunshine of her days,
and so much a part of her life, that she seemed scarcely to live while
he was away from her. Existence was reduced to a mere mechanical moving
about, and doing duties which had lost all their savour. But these
first thoughts, being selfish, were swiftly succeeded in a mind so
entirely unselfish by other considerations. If it were for Gerald’s
good that he should go to the other end of the world, that they should
be parted for much longer than the five or six weeks of which he spoke
so lightly, it would not have been in Madoline’s nature to desire him
to forego even a possible advantage. She had fancied sometimes of late
that he was occasionally dull and low-spirited; and now this letter
explained all. He was out of health. He had been leading too quiet
and womanish a life, no doubt, in his willingness to spend his days
in her society. He had foregone all those hardy exercises and field
sports which are so necessary to a man who has no serious work in life.
Madoline’s telegram ran thus:

‘Go by all means, if you think the change will do you good. I tremble
at the idea of your crossing the sea at this time of the year. Let me
see you before you go. If you cannot come here, I will ask my aunt to
go to London with me that I may at least bid you good-bye.’

The answer came as quickly as electricity could bring it, and although
laconic, was satisfactory: ‘I will be with you about five o’clock this
afternoon.’

‘Dear fellow, how little he thinks of the trouble of travelling so many
miles to please me,’ thought Madoline; and the idea of her lover’s
affection sustained her against the pain of parting.

‘Next year I shall have the right to go wherever he goes,’ she told
herself.

Daphne heard of the Canadian expedition, but said so little about it
that Lina wondered at her coolness.

‘I thought you would have been more surprised,’ she said.

‘Did you? Why, there is really nothing startling or uncommon in the
idea,’ answered Daphne smilingly. ‘This rushing about the world for
sport seems the most fashionable thing among young men with plenty of
money. The Society Journals are always telling us how Lord This or Sir
John That has gone to the Rockies to shoot wild sheep, or to the North
Pole for bears, or to Hungary or Wallachia, or the Balkan range. The
beaten tracks count for nothing nowadays.’

When the afternoon came, Lina was alone to receive her lover. Daphne
had been seized with a dutiful impulse towards her aunt, and had gone
to drink tea at the Rectory, with Edgar in attendance upon her.

‘Won’t you defer your duty-visit till to-morrow, and wish Gerald
good-bye?’ asked Lina, when Daphne proposed the expedition.

‘No, dear; you can do that for me. This is an occasion on which you
ought to have him all to yourself. You will have so much to say to each
other.’

‘If it were mother, she would occupy all the time in begging him to
wear flannels, put cork soles in all his boots, and avoid damp beds,’
said Edgar laughing. ‘Now, Daphne, put on your hat as quick as you can.
It’s a lovely afternoon for a walk across the fields. If this frost
continues we shall have skating presently.’

The daylight faded slowly; a bright frosty day, a clear and rosy
sunset. Lina sat by the pretty hearth in her morning-room, and exactly
as the clock struck five the footman brought in her dainty little
tea-tray, set out the table before the fire, and lighted three or four
wax-candles in the old Sèvres candelabra on the mantelpiece. Here she
and her lover would be secure from the interruption of callers, which
they could not be if in the drawing-room.

Five minutes after the hour there came the sound of wheels upon the
gravel drive, a loud ring at the bell, and in the next instant the door
of the morning-room was opened, and Gerald came in, looking bulkier
than usual in his furred travelling coat.

‘Dear Gerald, this is so good of you!’ said Madoline, rising to welcome
him.

‘Dearest!’ he took both her hands, and stood looking at her in
the firelight, with a countenance full of tenderness—a mournful
tenderness—as if he were saddened by the thought of parting. ‘You are
not angry with me for leaving you for a few weeks?’

‘Angry, when you are told the change is necessary for your health! How
could you think me so selfish? Let me look at you. Yes; you are looking
ill—pale and wan. Gerald, you have been ill, seriously ill, perhaps,
since you left here, and you would not tell me for fear of alarming me.
I am sure that it is so. Your letters were so hurried, so different
from——’

‘My dear girl, you are mistaken. I told you the exact truth about
myself when I owned to feeling mopish and depressed. I have had no
actual illness; but I feel that a run across the Atlantic will revive
and invigorate me.’

‘And it is quite right of you to go, if the voyage is not dangerous in
this weather.’

‘Dear love, it is no more dangerous than calling a hansom to take one
down Regent Street. The hansom may come to grief somehow, or there may
be a gale between Liverpool and New York; but there is hardly any safer
way a man can dispose of his life than to trust himself to a Cunard
steamer.’

‘And do you think you will enjoy yourself in Canada?’

‘As much as I can enjoy myself anywhere, away from you. According to
my friend Loftus, a Canadian winter is the acme of bliss; and if the
winter should break up early, we may contrive to get a little run into
the Hudson’s Bay country, and a glimpse of the Rockies before we come
home.’

‘That sounds as if you meant to stay rather a long time,’ said Lina,
with a touch of anxiety.

‘Indeed, no, dear. At latest I shall be with you before April is half
over. Think what is to happen early in May.’

‘My coming of age. It seems so absurd to come of age at twenty-five,
when one is almost an old woman.’

‘An old woman verily. A girl as fresh in youthful purity as if her
cheek still wore the baby-bloom of seventeen summers! But have you
forgotten something else that is to happen next May, Lina—our wedding?’

‘There has been nothing fixed about that,’ faltered Madoline ‘except,
perhaps, that it is to be this year. My father has not said a word as
to the actual time, and I know that he wants to keep me as long as he
can.’

‘And I think you know that I want to have you at the Abbey as soon as I
can. I am getting to loathe that big house, for lack of your presence
to transform it into a home. We must be married in May, dearest.
Remember we have only been waiting for you to come of age, and for all
dry-as-dust questions of property to be settled. If we had been Darby
the gardener and Joan the dairymaid, we should have been married four
years ago, shouldn’t we, Lina?’

‘I suppose so,’ she answered, blushing, and taking refuge in the
occupation of pouring out the tea, adjusting the egg-shell cups
and saucers, the slender little rat-tailed spoons, all the dainty
affectations and quaintnesses of high-art tea-drinking, ‘Darby and Joan
are always so imprudent.’

‘Yes, but they are often happy. They marry foolishly, and perhaps
starve a little after marriage; but they wed while the first bloom is
on their love. Come, Lina, say that we shall be married early in May.’

‘I can promise nothing without my father’s consent. My aunt was
suggesting that Daphne and I should be married on the same day.’

‘Did she?’ asked Gerald, his head bent, his hands engaged with his cup
and saucer. ‘Two victims led to the altar: Iphigenia and Polyxena, and
no likelihood of a hind being substituted for either young lady. Don’t
you think there is a dash of vulgarity in a double wedding: a desire
to make the very most of the event, to intensify the parade: two sets
of bridesmaids, two displays of presents, two honeymoon departures:
all the tawdriness and show and artificiality of a modern wedding
exaggerated by duplication?’

‘I think that is rather Daphne’s idea. She begs that she and Edgar may
be married very quietly, without fuss of any kind.’

‘I had no idea that Daphne was capable of such wisdom. I thought she
would have asked for four-and-twenty bridesmaids,’ said Gerald with a
cynical laugh.

‘She is much more sensible than you have ever given her credit for
being,’ answered Madoline, a little offended at his tone. ‘She has
behaved sweetly since her engagement.’

‘And—you—think—she—is—happy?’

How slowly he said this, stirring his tea all the while, as if the
words were spoken mechanically, his thoughts being wide-away from them.

‘Do you suppose I should be satisfied if I were not sure, in my own
mind, of her happiness? How can she fail to be happy? She is engaged to
a thoroughly good man, who adores her; and if—if she is not quite as
deep in love with him as he is with her, there is no doubt that her
affection for him will increase and strengthen every day.’

‘Naturally. He will flatter and fool her till—were it only from sheer
vanity—she will ultimately find him necessary to her existence. I
knew he had only to persevere in order to win her. I told him so last
summer.’

‘And Edgar is grateful to you for encouraging him when he was inclined
to despair. He told me so yesterday. But do not let us talk of Daphne
all the time. I want you to tell me about yourself. How good it was of
you to come down to say good-bye!’

‘Could I do less, dearest? Good-byes are always painful, even when the
parting is to be of the briefest, as in this case: but from the moment
I knew you wished to see me it was my duty to come.’

‘Can you stay here to-night?’

‘I can stay exactly ten minutes, and no more. I have to catch the
half-past six express.’

‘You are not going to the Abbey?’

‘No. I have written to my steward, and I am such a _roi fainéant_ at
the best of times that my coming or going makes very little difference.
I leave the new hot-houses under your care and governance, subject
to MacCloskie, who governs you. All their contents are to be for the
separate use and maintenance of your rooms while I am away.’

‘I shall be smothered with flowers.’

‘May there be never a thorn among them! And now, love, adieu. This
time to-morrow I shall be steaming out of the Mersey. I have to see
that Dickson has not come to grief in the preparation of my outfit.
A man wants a world of strange things for Canada, according to the
outfitters. My own love, good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, Gerald dearest, best, good-bye. Every wind that blows will
make me miserable while you are on the sea. You’ll let me know directly
you arrive, won’t you? You’ll put me out of my misery as soon as you
can?’

‘I’ll cable the hour I land.’

‘That will be so good of you,’ she said, going with him to the door.

How calm and clear the frosty evening looked! how vivid the steely
stars up yonder above the feathery tree-tops! how peaceful and happy
all the world!

‘God bless you, dear one!’ said each to each, as they kissed their
parting kiss—both hearts so heavy; but one so pure and free from guile;
the other so weighed down by secret cares that could not be told.




CHAPTER XXIV.

‘AY FLETH THE TIME, IT WOL NO MAN ABIDE.’


Nearly six months had gone since that wintry parting, when the lovers
clasped hands and blessed each other under the sign of Aries; and now
it was midsummer, and all the fields were green, and the limes were
breaking into blossom, and the hawthorn-flower was dead, and the last
of the blue-bells had faded, and all the white orchard-blooms, the
tender loveliness of spring, belonged to the past; for the beauty of
earth and nature is a thing of perpetual change, so closely allied with
death that in every rapture there is the beginning of a regret.

Gerald Goring had returned, not quite so soon as he had promised beside
the winter hearth, but in time to offer birthday greetings to Lina,
and to assist in those legal preparations and argumentations which
preceded the marriage settlement; in this case a formidable document,
involving large interests, and full of consideration for children and
grandchildren yet unborn; for daughters dying unmarried, or requiring
to be dowered for marriage; for sons who might have to make marriage
settlements of their own. There was to be a complete family history,
put hypothetically, in Miss Lawford’s marriage settlement.

Vainly had Lina tried to dower her sister with half, or at least some
portion of her own wealth. Daphne obstinately refused to accept any
such boon; and Edgar as obstinately sustained her in her determination.

‘I won’t accept a penny,’ said she.

‘I don’t want a halfpenny with her,’ said he; a refusal which
Mrs. Turchill considered supreme folly on the part of son and
daughter-in-law; for what improvements might have been made at
Hawksyard with a few spare thousands, whereas her son’s income, though
ample for all the needs and comforts of this life, left no margin for
building.

‘Why should not Daphne have a range of hot-houses like those Mr. Goring
has built for her sister?’ argued Mrs. Turchill. ‘Or why should not you
rebuild the stables, which are dreadfully old-fashioned?’

‘I would not change the dear old fashion for worlds, mother, now that
I have made every sanitary improvement,’ answered Edgar; ‘least of all
would I improve Hawksyard into a modern house with Goring’s money.’

‘But it is not Mr. Goring’s money that is offered; it is Miss
Lawford’s.’

‘That is the same thing. The loss would be his. Don’t talk any more
about it, mother; Daphne and I have made up our minds.’

This was decisive; for Mrs. Turchill knew that Daphne’s word was
Edgar’s law. She was reconciled to the idea of the marriage, but in
her confidences with Deborah, she could not help talking of her son’s
attachment as an infatuation.

Gerald had come back considerably improved in health and spirits by
his Canadian and Hudson’s Bay adventures. He had crossed the Turtle
Mountain, and the arid plains beyond, and from the crest of one of the
Sweet Grass Hills had seen the rugged and snowy outline of the Rockies,
standing out in full relief against the western sky-line. He had shot a
bear or two, and had some experience of wolves. He had eaten pemmican,
and ridden a woolly horse; he had slept at a Hudson’s Bay station, and
had passed a night or two, half-frozen and wholly awake, under canvas.
Variety and adventure had done him good physically and mentally; and he
told himself that of that fever which had tormented him when he left
England—a fever of foolish longings and fond regrets, idle thoughts
of things that might have been—he was cured wholly. Yet who shall say
whether time might not show some resemblance between this cure and that
of a dangerous lunatic, who is discharged from Bedlam a sane man, and
who cuts his mother’s head off with a carving-knife a fortnight after
his release?

The double wedding was to take place in October. Nothing could induce
Sir Vernon to consent to an earlier date.

‘I shall lose my darling soon enough,’ he said, ignoring Daphne in his
calculations of loss. ‘Let me keep her till the end of the summer. Let
us spend this one summer together. Who knows that it may not be my
last?’

Any wish expressed by her father would have governed Madoline’s
conduct, and this wish, expressed so stringently, could not be
disregarded. Sir Vernon was frequently ailing, in a languid
half-hearted way, which looked like hypochondriasis, but might be
actual disease, and a part of that organic evil which was never
clearly described. His doctor recommended an entire change of
scene—Switzerland, the Engadine, if he could make up his mind to travel
so far, and to be satisfied with the simpler diet and accommodation
of that skyey world. There was a good deal of discussion, and it was
ultimately settled that Sir Vernon and his daughters should start for
Switzerland at the end of June, and move quietly about there, studying
the invalid’s pleasure in all things. Sir Vernon set his face against
the Engadine, preferring the more civilised shores of Lake Leman, which
he knew by heart.

Daphne had never been beyond Fontainebleau, and was enraptured at the
idea of seeing snow-clad mountains and strange people. Gerald and Edgar
were to be of the party, and they were only to return to England in
time for the double wedding. The sisters were to be married on the same
day, after all. That had been settled for them arbitrarily by family
and friends, despite Daphne’s objection; and Warwickshire people were
already beginning to speculate upon the details of the ceremony, and
to wonder what dean or bishop would be privileged to tie the knot,
assisted by the Rev. Marmaduke Ferrers.

Daphne’s conduct since her engagement had been unobjectionable. Nobody
could deny her sweetness, or could fail to approve the sobriety which
had come over her manners and conversation. Her hot fits and cold fits,
her high spirits and low spirits, were all over. She was uniformly
amiable and uniformly grave—not taking rapturous pleasure in anything,
but seemingly contented with her lot in life, devoted in her affection
to her sister, unvaryingly kind to her lover. Edgar was never tired of
thanking heaven for the blessedness of his lot. He had remitted his
tenants five-and-twenty per cent. of their March rents; not that there
was any special need for such indulgence, but because he longed to be
generous to somebody, and to disseminate his overflowing joy.

‘I shall do the same for you next October, in honour of my marriage,’
he said in his speech at the audit dinner; ‘and after that I shall want
all the money you can pay me, as a family man.’

Madoline, utterly happy in her lover’s society, after that interval of
severance which had seemed so long and dreary, cared very little where
their lives were to be spent, so long as they were to be together. Yet
the idea of revisiting Lake Leman—which she had seen and loved seven
years ago in a quiet pilgrimage with her father—with Gerald for her
attendant and companion, had a certain fascination.

‘It is rather like anticipating our honeymoon, is it not, dear?’ he
asked laughingly. ‘But when the honeymoon comes we shall find some new
world to explore.’

‘Would you like to take me to the Red River?’

‘I think that would be a shade too rough, even for your endurance.
The Italian lakes, and a winter in Rome, would suit us better. It is
all very well for a man to travel in a district where he has to cover
his face with a muffler, and head the driving snow, till he is nearly
suffocated with his frozen breath, and has to get himself thawed
carefully at the first camp-fire; but that kind of experience lasts
a long time, and it is pleasing to fall back upon the old habit of
luxurious travelling, and to ride in a _coupé_ through Mont Cenis or
St. Gotthard, and to arrive at one’s destination without any large risk
of being swallowed whole in a swamp, or burned alive in a prairie fire.’

‘I shall delight in seeing Rome with you,’ Madoline answered gently.

‘I thought you would like it. I really know my Rome. It is a subject I
have studied thoroughly, and I shall love playing cicerone for you.’

It was midsummer, a perfect midsummer evening, the placid sky still
faintly tinted with rose and amethyst yonder where the sun had just
gone down behind the undulating line of willows. The little town of
Stratford lay in its valley, folded in a purple cloud, only the slender
church spire rising clear and sharp against that tranquil evening sky.
Daphne had stolen away from Madoline and Gerald, who were sitting on
the terrace, while Edgar, chained to his post in the dining-room by
a lengthy monologue upon certain political difficulties, with which
Sir Vernon was pleased to favour him, vainly longed for liberty to
rejoin his idol. She had put on her hat, and had set out upon a lonely
pilgrimage to Stratford. They were all to leave South Hill early
to-morrow, and it was Daphne’s fancy to bid good-bye to the church
which sheltered those ashes it were the worst of sacrilege to disturb.

It was an idle fancy, no doubt, engendered of a mind prone to idle
thoughts; but Daphne, having no urgent occupation for her time this
evening, fancied she had a right to indulge it.

‘I am going for a little walk,’ she had told Edgar, as she left the
dining-room; ‘don’t fidget yourself about me.’

From which moment poor Edgar had been in agonies of restlessness,
turning an ear deafer than any adder’s to Sir Vernon’s disquisition
upon the critical state of the country, and the utter incapacity of the
men in office to deal with such a crisis, and inwardly chafing against
every extension of the subject which prolonged the seemingly endless
discourse.

‘A little walk!’ and why, and where, and with whom? Vainly did Edgar’s
strained gaze explore the distant landscape. From his position at the
dinner-table, he could see a fine range of country ten or fifteen miles
away; but never a glimpse of terrace or garden by which Daphne must go.
And it was the rule of his life to show Sir Vernon the extremity of
respect, an almost old-fashioned and Grandisonian reverence. Therefore
to cut short that prosy discourse was impossible.

The blessed moment of release came at last. Sir Vernon finished his
claret with a sigh, and left nation and ministry to their fate. Edgar
hurried to the terrace. Gerald and Madoline were sipping their coffee
at a little rustic bamboo table, the Maltese Fluff lying luxuriously in
his mistress’s silken lap.

‘Have you any idea where Daphne has gone?’ Edgar asked despairingly.

‘No, indeed. I saw her stroll down towards the river. Perhaps she has
gone to see her aunt.’

‘Thanks, yes, I daresay,’ replied Edgar, speeding off towards the
Rectory without waiting to consider whether the clue were worth
following.

While Mr. Turchill was hastening across the fields at a racing pace,
Daphne was seated in her boat, quietly drifting towards Stratford,
along a dreamy twilit river, where every willow had a ghostly look in
the evening dimness.

She was full of grave thoughts on this her last night in Warwickshire.
It was more than a year—a year and a quarter—since she had come home
for good, as the phrase goes, and a year and a quarter makes a large
section of a young life. The years are so long in early youth, when the
heart and mind live so fast, and every day is a history: so strangely
different from the monotonous years of middle age, which glide past
unawares, like the level flats seen from a canal-boat, each meadow so
like the last that the voyager is unconscious of progress, till he
feels the salt breath of Death’s ocean creeping across the low marshes
of declining life, and knows that his journey is nearly done.

To Daphne that year at South Hill had been a lifetime. How ardently she
had felt and thought and suffered within the time; what resolutions
made and broken; what fevers of dangerous delight, and dull intervals
of remorse; what wild wicked hopes; what black despair! Looking back
at the time that was gone and dead, she was inclined to exaggerate its
joys, to gloss over its pain.

‘At the worst I have been happy with him,’ she said, remembering how
much of that vanished time had been spent in Gerald Goring’s society,
‘though he is nothing to me, and never can be anything to me but a man
to be shunned; yet we have been happy together, and that is something.’

She remembered some lines of Dryden’s which Gerald had quoted in her
presence:

    ‘To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
     Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
     The joys I have possessed, in spite of Fate, are mine.’

She had lived her day. There had been moments in the past; moments
that had stirred the deeps of her soul with a power as mysterious as
the sweep of the angelic wing on Bethesda’s pool; moments when she had
fancied herself beloved by him, whom to love was treason. These stood
out upon the page of memory in fiery characters, and in their supernal
light all the rest of the record seemed dull and dark. There had been
hours of unquestioning bliss when she had in no wise reasoned upon
her happiness, when she had not asked herself whether she was loved
or scorned, but had been happy as the summer insects are among the
flowers, vivified by the sunshine, asking nothing but to live and enjoy
that glorious warmth and brightness. So at times she had abandoned
herself to the delight of his society, whom she had loved from the hour
of their first meeting, giving all her heart and mind to him at once,
as utterly as Juliet gave hers to Romeo.

She had lived her day. The long vista of to-morrow and to-morrow opened
before her joyless gaze, and she could look down the tranquil path it
was her fate to tread, a wife beloved and honoured, a sister fondly
loved, a daughter reconciled with her father, mistress of a fine old
house, full of quaint and pleasant associations, established for life
in the heart of rural scenes which her soul loved. Surely it was not a
destiny to be contemplated with such profound sadness as shadowed her
face to-night, while she leant listlessly on her oars and drifted down
the full dark river.

All was very quiet below the bridge when she landed at the
boat-builder’s yard, and left her craft in charge of that amphibious
and more than half-intoxicated hanger-on who is generally to be found
waiting on fortune at every landing-stage. The walk to the church was
dark and shadowy; lights twinkling in the low cottage windows; glimpses
of home-life dimly seen through open doors. Daphne walked quickly to
the avenue of limes, that green odorous aisle that leads to the porch.
There had been evening service, and the lights were still burning
here and there, and the heavy old door stood ajar. Daphne pushed it
gently open, and crept into the church, past the stately monuments of
mediæval Cloptons, whose marble effigies reposed in solemn pomp upon
sculptured tombs, rich in armorial emblazonment. In the faint light and
mysterious shadow the stony figures looked like real sleepers, waiting
for the last dread summons. Daphne stole past them with noiseless
footfall, and crept along the aisle to the lovely old chancel, where,
just within the altar-rails, William Shakespeare takes his last earthly
rest. The sexton came out of the vestry to see whose footfall it was
that fell so lightly on that everlasting flint. Daphne was standing by
the altar-rail in a reverie, looking up at the calm sculptured face,
so serene in its contentment with a life which, in the vast range and
dominion of a mind that was in itself a kingdom, had held all things
worth having. These are the full and rounded lives, complete and
perfect in themselves, the calm and placid lives of contemplative men,
for whom the gates of the spiritual universe stand ever open, who are
in no wise dependent upon the joys, and gains, and triumphs of this
work-a-day world.

‘Were you always happy, my calm-faced Shakespeare?’ wondered Daphne.
‘Could you have sounded all the deeps of sorrow without having yourself
suffered? I think not. Yet there seems hardly any room in your life for
great sorrow, except perhaps in the loss of that child who died young.
Was Ann Hathaway your only love, I wonder—you who wrote so sweetly of
sorrowful hopeless love—or was there another, another whom we know as
Juliet, and Imogen, and Cordelia: another from whom you always lived
far apart, yet whom you always loved?’

‘I beg your pardon, miss,’ said the sexton; ‘I’m going to lock up the
church.’

‘Let me stay a few minutes longer,’ pleaded Daphne, taking out her
purse. ‘I am going away from England to-morrow, and I have come to say
good-bye to the dear old church.’

‘Are you going to be away long, miss?’

‘Nearly three months.’

‘That’s a very short time,’ said the old man, pocketing Daphne’s
half-crown. ‘I thought perhaps you were going away for many years—going
to settle somewhere across the sea. It hardly seems like saying
good-bye to the church if you are to be back among us this side
Michaelmas.’

‘No,’ said Daphne dreamily, looking along the shadowy nave, where
broken rays of moonlight from the painted windows shone upon the dark
oak benches like dropped jewels. ‘It is not long; but one never knows.
To-night I feel as if it were going to be for ever. I am so fond of
this old church.’

‘No wonder, miss. It’s a beautiful church. You should hear the
Americans admire it. I suppose they’ve nothing half as good in their
country.’

The moon was up when Daphne left the church, and walked round by
head-stones and memorial-crosses to the shaded path beside the river,
where here and there a seat on the low wall invited the weary to repose
in the cool shade of ancient elms. The broad full river looked calm and
bright under the moonlit sky; the murmur of the weir sounded like a
lullaby.

Daphne walked slowly to the end of the path, and stood for a long time
looking down at the river. She felt curiously loth to leave the spot.
Yet it was time she were on her homeward way. They would miss her,
perhaps, and be perplexed, and even anxious about her. But in the next
moment she dismissed the idea of any such anxiety on her behalf.

‘Lina will not think about me while Mr. Goring is with her; and my
father is not likely to trouble himself. There is only poor Edgar, and
he will guess which way I have come, and follow me if he takes it into
his head to be uneasy.’

Reassured by this idea, Daphne resolved to gratify her fancy for
farewells to the uttermost, and to say good-bye to the house where the
poet was born. Stratford streets were very empty and quiet at this
period of the summer evening, and she met only a few people between
the churchyard and the sacred dwelling. To a stranger, entrance into
the sanctuary at such an hour would have been out of the question; but
Daphne was on friendly terms with the lady custodians of the temple,
and knew she could coax them to unlock the door for her pleasure. Never
lamp or candle was admitted within the precincts, but on such a night
as this there would be no need for artificial light; and Daphne only
wanted to creep into the quaint old rooms, to look round her quietly
for a minute or two, and feel the spirit of the place breathing poetry
into her soul.

‘I have such a strange fancy that I may never see these things again,’
she said to herself as she stood in the moonlit garden, where only such
flowers grew as were known in Shakespeare’s time.

The two ladies lived in a snug little house with a strictly Elizabethan
front, and casement windows that looked into the poet’s garden. All
that taste, and research, and an ardent love could do had been done to
make Shakespeare’s house and its surroundings exactly what they were
when Shakespeare lived. The wise men of Stratford had brought their
offerings, in the shape of old pictures, and manuscripts, and relics
of all kinds; the rooms had been restored to their original form and
semblance; and pilgrims from afar had no longer need to blush for the
nation which owned such a poet and held his memorials so lightly. A
very different state of things from the vulgar neglect which obtained
when Washington Irving visited Stratford.

The maiden warders of the house were a little surprised at so late a
visit, but received Daphne kindly all the same, and were disposed to be
indulgent to girlish enthusiasm in so worthy a cause. It was against
the rules to open the house at so late an hour; but as no light was
needed, Daphne should be allowed just to creep in, and bid good-bye to
the hearth beside which Shakespeare had played at his mother’s knees.

‘One would think you were going away for a long while, Miss Lawford,’
said one of the ladies, smiling at Daphne’s eager face.

It was exactly what the sexton had said, and Daphne made the same
answer as she had given him.

‘One never knows,’ she said.

‘Ah, but we know. You are coming home to be married in the autumn. We
have heard all about it. Stratford Bells will ring a merry peal on that
day, I should think; though I suppose the wedding will be at Arden
Church. I am so glad you are going to settle in the neighbourhood, like
your sister. What a grand place Goring Abbey is, to be sure! My sister
and I drove over in a fly last summer to look at it. We went all over
the house and grounds. It is a beautiful place. Yet I don’t know but
that I like Mr. Turchill’s old manor-house best.’

‘So do I,’ answered Daphne absently.

‘Of course you do!’ cried the other sister, laughing. ‘That’s only
natural.’

They all three went across the garden in the moonlight, and the elder
sister unlocked the house-door.

‘Would you like go in alone?’ she asked. ‘You are not afraid of
ghosts?’

‘Of Shakespeare’s ghost? No, I should dearly love to see him. I would
fall on my knees and worship the beautiful spirit.’

‘Go in, then. We’ll wait in the garden.’

Daphne went softly into the empty house. It was more ghostly than the
church—more uncanny in its emptiness. She felt as if the disembodied
souls of the dead were verily around and about her. That empty hearth,
on which the moonbeams shone so coldly; those dusky walls; a vacant
chair or two; a gleam of coloured light from an old scrap of stained
glass. How cold it all felt in its dismal loneliness. She tried to
conjure up a vision of the poet’s home three hundred years ago—in its
old-world simplicity, its homely comfort and repose; a world before
steam-engines, gas, and electricity; a world in which printing and
gunpowder were almost new. To think of it was like going back to the
childhood of this earth.

Daphne left the outer door ajar, and crept softly through the rooms,
half expectant of ghostly company. What tricks moonbeam and shadow
played upon the walls, upon the solid old timber crossbeams, where in
the unregenerate days, a quarter of a century ago, pilgrims used to
pencil their miserable names upon the wood or whitewash, childishly
fancying they were securing to themselves a kind of immortality.
Daphne stood by the window with her heart beating feverishly, and her
ear strained to catch the footfall of the sisters in the garden, and
thus to be sure of human company. She looked along the empty street,
moonlighted, peaceful; even the tavern over the way a place of seeming
tranquillity, notable only by its glimmering window and red curtain.
The silence and shadowiness of the house were beginning to frighten her
in spite of her better reason, when a step came behind her—a firm light
tread which her ear and heart knew too well. It seemed almost as if her
heart stopped beating at the sound of that footfall. She stood like a
thing of marble, scarce breathing. The step had crossed the threshold
of the outer room, and was drawing nearer, when an eager voice outside
broke the spell:

‘Is she there? Have you found her?’

It was Edgar’s voice at the outer door.

‘Yes. Where else should she be?’ answered Gerald Goring.

‘Well, my lady, I hope you are satisfied with the nice little dance you
have led us,’ he said to Daphne as coolly as if he had been talking to
a refractory child.

‘You need not have troubled yourself about me,’ she answered curtly. ‘I
told Lina I was coming for a walk. How did Edgar know I was here?’

‘Edgar knew nothing,’ answered Gerald, with a light laugh that was
something too scornful for perfect friendship. ‘Edgar would as soon
have looked for you at Guy’s Cliff or Warwick Castle, or in the moon.
I knew you were nothing if not Shakespearian; and when I heard you had
taken your boat I guessed you had gone to worship at your favourite
shrine. We heard of you at the church, and hunted for you among the
trees and tombs.’

‘And then we went back to the landing-stage, where you always stop,
don’t you know, when you go as far as Stratford, and finding you had
not come back for your boat, I was almost in despair. But Gerald
suggested Shakespeare’s birthplace, and here we are.’

It was Gerald, then, who had found her; it was Gerald whose quick
sympathy, prompt to divine her thoughts, had told him where she would
be. Her future husband, the man to whom she was bound, had guessed
nothing, had no faculty for understanding her fancies, whims, and
follies. How wide apart must she and he remain all their lives, though
nominally one!

They all three went quietly back to the garden, where the sisters were
waiting, amused at Daphne’s folly, and thinking it quite the most
charming thing in girlhood; for to these vestals Shakespeare was a
religion.

‘I am really very sorry to have caused you so much trouble,’ said
Daphne, apologising in a general way; ‘but I had no idea my absence
would give anyone concern. Perhaps I have been longer than I intended
to be.’

‘It struck ten a quarter of an hour ago,’ said Edgar.

‘That’s really dreadful; I had no idea it was so late.’

Daphne bade the sisters good-bye, apologising humbly for her nocturnal
visit. They went to the garden-gate with her, and stood there watching
the light slim figure till it vanished in the moonlight, full of
interest in her prettiness and her fancies.

‘Is it not a sweet face?’ asked one.

‘And was it not a sweet idea to come and bid good-bye to this house
before she went abroad?’ said the other.

Daphne and her companions walked down to the landing-stage, talking
very little by the way. Edgar and his betrothed side by side, Gerald
walking apart with a cigar.

Daphne wanted to row, but Edgar insisted on establishing her in the
stern, wrapped in a shawl which he found in the boat. He took the
sculls, and Gerald reclined in the bows, smoking and looking up at the
night sky.

It was a lovely night, all the landscape sublimated by that glory of
moonbeam and shadow into something better and more beautiful than
its daylight simplicity; every little creek and curve of the river a
glimpse of fairyland; all things so radiantly and mysteriously lovely
that Daphne almost hoped to see the river-god and his attendant nymphs
disporting themselves in some reedy shallow.

‘On such a night as this one would expect to see the old Greek gods
come back to earth. I can’t help feeling sorry sometimes, like Alfred
de Musset, that they are all dead and gone,’ she said, looking with
dreamy eyes down the moonlit tide across which the shadows of the
willows fell so darkly.

‘I think, considering the general tenor of their conduct, every
proper-minded young lady ought to feel very glad we have got rid of
them,’ said Gerald, throwing away the end of his cigar, which fizzed
and sparkled and made a little red spot in the moonlit water, a light
that was of the earth earthy amidst all that heavenly radiance. ‘How
would you like to be run away with by a wicked old man disguised as a
bull; or to have the earth open as you were gathering daffodils, and a
still wickeder old gentleman leap out of his chariot to carry you off
to Tartarus?’

‘How dare you call Zeus old?’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘The gods were
for ever young.’

‘Well, he was a family man at any rate, and ought to have known better
than to go masquerading about the plains and valleys when he ought to
have been sitting in state on Olympus,’ answered Gerald. ‘Now such a
river on such a night as this puts me in mind of old German legends
rather than of Greek gods and goddesses. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised
if Miss Daphne Lawford were suddenly to develop into an Undine, and
take a header into the river, cleaving the silvery tide, and going
down to depths beyond any earthly fathom-line, leaving Turchill and me
aghast in the boat.’

‘I have often envied Undine,’ answered Daphne; ‘I love the river so
dearly that years ago I used really to fancy that there must be a
bright world underneath it, where there are gnomes and fairies, and
where one might be happy for ever. Even now, though I have left off
believing in fairies, I cannot help thinking that there is profound
peace at the bottom of this quiet river.’

‘If you were to go down experimentally in a diving-bell, I’m afraid
you’d find only profound mud,’ said Gerald, with his cynical laugh.

Since his return from Canada he had treated Daphne much in the old
fashion—as if she were a child upon whose foolishness his wisdom looked
down from an ineffable height. There was nothing in manner, word, or
look to show that he remembered that one fatal moment of self-betrayal,
when his passionate heart gave up its secret.

‘I wonder what Daphne will think of this turbid Avon after she has seen
Lake Leman,’ he speculated presently, ‘eh, Turchill?’

‘The lake is a great deal wider,’ said Edgar, with his matter-of-fact
air; ‘and those capital steamers are a great attraction.’

‘A lake with steamers upon it! Too horrible!’ cried Daphne. ‘I shall
not like it half so well as my romantic Avon, though its waters are
sometimes “drumly.” Dear old Avon!’—they were at the boat-house by this
time, and she was stepping on shore as she spoke—‘how long before I
shall see you again?’

‘Less than three months,’ said Edgar, clasping her hand as she sprang
up the steps which Bink had cut in the meadow bank. ‘Not quite three
months; and then, darling,’ in a lower tone, ‘you will be all my own,
and I shall be the happiest man on earth.’

‘Who knows?’ returned Daphne. ‘How can one be sure when one is leaving
a place that one will ever come back to it? Good-bye, dear old river!’
she cried, turning to look back at it with eyes full of tears. ‘I feel
as sad as if I were taking my last look at you.’




CHAPTER XXV.

‘BUT I WOT BEST WHER WRINGETH ME MY SHO.’


Twenty-four hours after that quiet row up the moonlit river, the South
Hill party were on the Calais steamer, tossing and tumbling about in
the Channel, much to the discomfiture of Mrs. Mowser, who was a bad
sailor, and took care to make everybody in the ladies’ cabin perfectly
familiar with that fact. There was nothing of the Spartan about
Mowser, nothing in any wise heroic in her conduct under the trial of
sea-sickness. Yet there was a kind of martyrlike fidelity in her; for
even in her agony she never let her mistress’s travelling-bag and
jewel-box out of her eye—nay, would hardly trust those valuables out
of her own grasp, clutching at them convulsively in the throes of her
malady, and suspecting evil intentions in guileless fellow-sufferers.

It was a lovely night, and Madoline and Daphne both stayed on deck, to
the indignation of Mowser, who was sure Miss Lawford would catch cold,
and declared it was all Miss Daphne’s doing.

‘I thought you’d have come down to the cabin and had a comfortable
lay-down,’ said Mowser when they had all scrambled or staggered up the
oozy steps, and had been interrogated as to their names by an alert
official, in a manner somewhat alarming to the sleepy and feeble-minded
voyager.

Then came a weary hour or so in the warm light refreshment-room, a
cup of coffee, or a _bouillon_, a few stifled yawns, an occasional
excursion to the platform, and finally the welcome departure, by flat
fields and unknown marsh-lands, with the inevitable row of poplars
against the horizon. Daphne seemed to know the depressing landscape by
heart. Her father, muffled in his corner, slept peacefully. Madoline
slumbered, or seemed to slumber. Gerald and Edgar had secured a _coupé_
to smoke in; and by a judicious arrangement with the guard Sir Vernon
and his daughters had a compartment all to themselves. But not one wink
of sleep visited Daphne’s eyelids. Wearily she watched the monotonous
landscape, enlivened a little now and then by a glimpse of village
life in the clear cold light of early morning; cattle moving about
in misty meadows, casements opening to the balmy air. What a long
journey it seemed to that one wakeful passenger! but the longest—were
it even a long unprofitable, uneventful life-journey—must end at last;
and by-and-by there came the cry of ‘Paris!’ and the mandate that
all passengers were to pass into the great bare luggage repository
to answer for the contents of bags and baggage; a weary interval,
during which the South Hill party loitered in bleak waiting-rooms,
while Jinman and Mrs. Mowser delivered up keys, and satisfied the
requirements of the State.

A long day in Paris, during which Sir Vernon reposed from his fatigues
at the Bristol Hotel, while the young people went about sight-seeing;
a dinner at Bignon’s, where Daphne protested she could perceive no
difference between the much-vaunted _consommé_ of that establishment
and Mrs. Spicer’s clear soup; an evening at the Français, where they
saw Got in Mercadet; and then off again in the early summer morning by
the eight o’clock train for Dijon and Geneva, a twelve hours’ journey.

It was a peerless morning. Paris, with its busy markets and
teeming life, seemed brimming over with brightness and gaiety;
boulevard-building in full progress; waggons coming in from the
country; artisans hurrying, grisettes tripping to their work. Daphne’s
spirits rose with the thought of fresh woods and pastures new.

‘I have been longing all my life to see Switzerland,’ she said, when
all the difficulties of departure were overcome, and the train was
speeding gaily past suburban gardens, and groves, and bridges, ‘and now
I can hardly believe I am going there. It is a journey to dream about
and look forward to, not to come to pass.’

‘Are no bright things ever to come to pass? Is all life to be dull
and colourless?’ asked Gerald Goring, sitting opposite her in the
railway-carriage, with Lina by his side. They were all together to-day,
having established themselves as comfortably as possible in the
spacious compartment, and having provided themselves largely with light
literature, wherewith to beguile the tedium of the journey.

‘I don’t know about you,’ said Daphne; ‘you are an exceptional person,
and have been able to realise all your dreams!’

‘Not all,’ answered Gerald gravely: ‘I suppose no one ever does that.’

‘You have but to form a wish, and, lo! it is gratified,’ murmured
Daphne, taking no notice of his interruption. ‘Last winter it flashed
across your brain that it would be nice to shoot cariboos—poor innocent
harmless cariboos, who had never injured you—and, in a thought, you are
off and away by seas and rivers and snow and ice to gratify the whim.
What pleasure can Switzerland have for you? Every inch of it must be as
vapidly familiar as that dear old English Warwickshire which you esteem
so lightly.’

‘Perhaps; but it is a pleasure to revisit a familiar place with those I
love. I was a poor solitary waif when I went through Switzerland, from
Geneva to Constance, from Lindau to Samaden, picking up my companions
by the way, or travelling in Byronic solitude—though, by the way, I
doubt if Byron ever was much alone. Judged by his poetry, he may be a
gloomy and solitary spirit; but judged by his life and letters, he was
a social soul.’

‘I like to think of him as gloomy and alone,’ said Daphne, with a
determined air. ‘Please don’t dispel all my illusions.’

Edgar was sitting by her side, cutting up magazines and newspapers,
watchful of her every look, thinking her every word delightful, ready
to minister to her comfort or pleasure, but without much ability to
entertain her with any conversational brightness—unless they two
could have been alone, and could have talked of their future life at
Hawksyard; the stables, the gardens, the horses they were to ride
together next winter, when Daphne was to take the field, a heaven-born
Diana. He was never tired of talking of that happy future, so near, so
near, and to which he looked forward with such fervent hope.

They were nearing Fontainebleau; already the forest showed dark on the
horizon. Daphne, so vivacious hitherto, became curiously silent. She
sat looking towards that distant line of wood, that smiling valley
with its winding river. All her soul was in her eyes as she looked.
Two years ago—almost day for day, two years—and her heart had awakened
suddenly from its long sleep of childish innocence to feel and to
suffer.

Gerald stole a look—guiltily as it were—at the too expressive face.
Yes, she remembered. Her soul was full of sad and tender memories. He
could read all her secrets in those lovely eyes, the lips slightly
parted, the lace about her neck stirred faintly by the throbbing of her
heart. She had no more forgotten Fontainebleau and their meetings there
than he had. To each it dated a crisis in life: for each it had given a
new colour to every thought and feeling.

Lina, her hands moving slowly in some easy knitting, looked up at her
sister.

‘Are we not near Fontainebleau, where you spent your holidays once?’
she asked.

‘Yes,’ Daphne answered shortly.

‘You speak as if you had not been happy there.’

‘I liked the place very much; but it was a dull life. Poor Miss Toby
and her sick headaches, and Dibb for my only companion.’

‘And Dibb was ineffably stupid,’ said Gerald, suddenly forgetting
himself, and moved to laughter at the thought of honest Martha’s
stolidity; ‘at least, I have often heard you say as much,’ he added
hastily.

‘She was a good harmless thing, and I won’t have her ridiculed,’
said Daphne, brightening, all serious thoughts taking flight at the
absurdity of Gerald’s lapse. ‘I wonder if she has finished that crochet
counterpane.’

‘Finished it! Of course not,’ cried Gerald. ‘She is the sort of girl
who would die, and come to life again in a better world still working
at the same counterpane—as I imagine from your description of her,’ he
concluded meekly.

They were leaving Fontainebleau far behind them by this time; its old
church, and its palace, with all its historic memories of Francis and
Henri, Napoleon and Pius VII. The forest was but a dark spot in the
vanishing distance; they were speeding away to the rich wine country
with its vast green plains, and steep hillsides clothed with vines. At
two o’clock they were at Dijon, and seemed to have been travelling a
week. Sir Vernon grumbled at the dust and heat, and regretted that he
had undertaken the whole journey in a day.

‘We ought to have stayed the night at Dijon,’ he said fretfully, when
they were out of the station, steaming away towards Macon, after a
hurried luncheon in the well-furnished refreshment-room.

‘It is a wretchedly dull place to stop at, sir,’ said Gerald; ‘hardly
anything to see.’

‘At my age a man does not want always to be seeing things,’ growled Sir
Vernon; ‘he wants rest.’

The day had been oppressively hot—a sultry heat, a sunbaked landscape.
Madoline and her sister bore it with admirable patience, beguiling the
tedium of those long hours now with conversation, now with books, anon
with quiet contemplation of the landscape, which for a long way offered
no striking features. It was growing towards evening when they entered
the Jura region, and found themselves in a world that was really worth
looking at: a wild strange world, as it appeared to Daphne’s eye; vast
rolling masses of hill that seemed to have been thrown up in long waves
before this little world assumed shape and solidity; precipitous green
slopes, grassy walls that shut out the day, and the deep rapid river
cleaving its tumultuous course through the trough of the hills.

‘Don’t you think this is better than Stratford-upon-Avon?’ asked Gerald
mockingly, as he watched Daphne’s excited face, her eyes wide with
wonder.

‘Ever so much wilder and grander. I should like to live here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because in such a world one would forget oneself. One’s own poor
little troubles would seem too mean and trumpery to be thought about.’

‘No man’s trouble is small or mean to the sufferer himself,’ replied
Gerald. ‘There is nothing grand or dignified in the abstract notion of
Job’s boils; yet to him they meant an unendurable agony which tempted
him to curse his Creator and destroy his own life. I don’t believe the
grandest natural surroundings would lessen one’s sense of the thorn in
one’s side.’

‘I don’t think you have any thorns, Daphne,’ said Edgar tenderly,
‘or that you need take refuge from your sorrows among these
desolate-looking mountains.’

‘Of course not. I was only speaking generally,’ answered Daphne
lightly; ‘but oh! what a mighty world it is—hills that climb to the
sky, and such lovely tranquil valleys lying between those dark earth
walls. Vines, and water-mills, and waterfalls tumbling over rocky beds.
If Switzerland is much grander than this, I think its grandeur will
kill me. I can hardly breathe when I look up at those great dark hills.’

‘I don’t know that there is anything in Switzerland that impresses one
so much as one’s first view of the Jura,’ said Gerald. ‘It is the giant
gateway of mountain-land—the entrance into a new world.’

The heat seemed to increase rather than diminish with the shades of
evening. No cool breeze sprang up with the going down of the sun. The
sultry atmosphere thickened, and became almost stifling; and then, just
as it was growing dark, big raindrops came splashing down, a roar of
thunder rolled along the hills, like a volley of cannon; thin threads
of vivid light trembled and zigzagged behind the hill-tops, and the
storm which had been brooding over them all the afternoon broke in real
earnest.

‘A thunderstorm in the Jura,’ exclaimed Gerald; ‘what a lucky young
woman you are, Mistress Daphne! Here is one of Nature’s grandest
effects got up as if on purpose to give you pleasure.’

‘I hope it may cool the air,’ said Sir Vernon, from the comfortable
corner where he had been fitfully slumbering ever since they left the
French territory.

Daphne sat looking out of the window, and spoke never a word. She
was drinking in the beauty and grandeur of this unspeakable region,
trying to fill her soul with the form and manner of it. Yes, it was
worth while living, were it only to see these mountain peaks and
gorges; these hurrying waters and leaping torrents; these living forces
of everlasting Nature. She had been weary of her life very often of
late, so weary that she would gladly have flung it off her like a
worn-out garment, and have lain down in dull contentment to take her
last earthly rest; but to-night she was glad to be alive—to see the
forked lightnings dancing upon the mountain-sides; to hear all earth
shudder at the roar of the thunder; to feel herself a part of that
grand conflict. A little later, when they had gone through an almost
endless tunnel, and were nearing Geneva, the thunder grew more and more
distant, seemed to travel slowly away, like an enemy’s cannon firing
stray shots as the foe retreated; and the night sky flung off its black
cloud-mantle, and all the stars shone out of a calm purple heaven;
while the little lights of the city, faint yellow spots upon the dark
blue night, trembled and quivered in the distance.

‘Isn’t this dreadfully like one’s idea of Manchester?’ said Daphne,
when they were in the station, and tickets were being collected in the
usual businesslike way.

‘Can there be a higher model than Manchester for any commercial city?’
asked Gerald.

‘Commercial! Oh, I hope there is nothing commercial in Switzerland. I
have always thought of it as a land of mountains and lakes.’

‘So is Scotland, yet there is such an element as trade in that country.’

‘You are bent on destroying my illusions. Oh, what a horrid row
of omnibuses!’ cried Daphne, as they came out of the station and
confronted about twenty of those vehicles, with doors hospitably open,
and commissionaires eager to abduct new arrivals for their several
hotels. ‘And where is Mont Blanc?’ she inquired, looking up at the
surrounding chimney-pots.

‘At your elbow,’ answered Gerald; ‘but you may not see him to-night.
The monarch of mountains is like our own gracious sovereign, and is not
always visible to his subjects.’

There was a private carriage from the Beau Rivage Hotel waiting for the
South Hill party, and in this they all drove down a hilly-street, which
was bright and clean, and wide, and prosperous-looking, but cruelly
disappointing to Daphne. Jinman and Mowser followed in the omnibus with
the luggage. Mowser, like Daphne, was considerably disappointed.

‘If this is Switzerland, I call it very inferior to Brighton,’ she said
snappishly. ‘Where are the glaziers and the mountings?’

‘Did you expect to find them just outside the station?’ demanded the
more travelled Jinman. ‘I have lived months in Switzerland and never
seen a glashyeer. I don’t hold with having one’s bones rattled to bits
upon a mule for the sake of seeing a lot of dirty ice. One can look at
that any hard winter on the Serpentine.’

‘Swisserland is Swisserland,’ answered Mowser sententiously, ‘and I
don’t hold with travelling all this way from home—I’m sure I thought
this blessed day would never come to an end—unless we are to see
somethink out of the common.’

‘The hotels are first-class,’ said Jinman, ‘and so are the restorongs
on board the boats. Nobody need starve in Switzerland.’

‘Can we get a decent cup of tea?’ asked Mowser. ‘There’s not a
scullery-maid at South Hill as would drink such cat-lap as they brought
me at the Bristol.’

Jinman explained that the teapot was an institution fully understood in
the Helvetian States.

‘They’re a more domestic people than the French,’ said Jinman
condescendingly, ‘I must say that for them. But Genever is the poorest
place for restorongs I was ever at; plenty of your caffy-staminies,
where you may drink bad wine and smoke bad cigars to your heart’s
content; but hardly a decent house where you can get a dejoonay à la
fourchette, or give a little bit of dinner to a friend. The hotels have
got it all their own way.’

‘They ought to,’ answered Mowser, ‘when there’s such a many of ’em. I
wonder they can all pay.’

At the Beau Rivage, Sir Vernon and his daughters found a spacious
suite of rooms on the third floor, many-windowed, balconied, looking
over the lake. The two young men had secured quarters a little way off
at the International. Sir Vernon grumbled at being put on the third
storey, after having given due notice of his coming; but the American
dollar and the Russian rouble had bought up the first and second stages
of the big hotel, and an English country gentleman must needs be
contented with an upper floor. But the rooms were lovely, and Daphne
was delighted with their altitude.

‘We are all the nearer Mont Blanc,’ she said, standing half in and half
out of the window; ‘one of the waiters told me it was over there—_tout
près_—but though I have been straining my eyes ever since, I can’t
discover a gleam of snow behind those dark hills.’

There were the loveliest flowers on the tables and cabinets, such
flowers as one hardly expects to find at an hotel, were it never so
luxurious. Madoline admired them wonderingly.

‘One would think the people here knew my particular vanity, and were
anxious to gratify me,’ she said; and then turning to one of the
waiters who was arranging books and writing-desks on the tables, she
asked: ‘Have you always such lovely flowers in the rooms?’

‘No, madame. They were ordered this morning by a telegram from Paris.’

‘Father! No, Gerald; it must have been your doing.’

‘A happy thought while I was loitering about that miserable
railway-station,’ replied Gerald.

‘How good of you! Dear flowers. They make the place seem like home.’

‘When you are settled at Montreux we can arrange for the contents of
the Abbey hot-houses to be sent you weekly. It will be something for
that pampered menial MacCloskie to look after, in the intervals of his
cigars and metaphysical studies. I have an idea that he employs all his
leisure in reading Dugald Stewart. There is a hardness about him which
I can only attribute to a close study of abstract truth.’

Daphne was standing out in the balcony, with Edgar at her side, looking
down at the scene below. Geneva seemed pretty enough in this night
view—a city of lake and lamplight, ringed round with mountains; a city
of angles and bridges, sharp lines, lofty houses, peaked roofs; the
dark bulk of a cathedral, with, a picturesque lantern on the roof,
dominating all the rest.

‘I think if it would only lighten I could see Mont Blanc,’ said Daphne,
with her eyes fixed upon that bit of sky to which the waiter had
pointed when she questioned him about the mountain. ‘One good vivid
flash would light it up beautifully.’

‘My dearest, how dangerous!’ exclaimed Edgar; ‘pray, come out of the
balcony. You might be blinded.’

‘I’ll risk that. It will not be the first time I have stared the
lightning out of countenance.’

A summer flash lit up the sky as she spoke. There was one wide quiver
of pale blue light, but never a glimpse of snow-clad peak gleamed from
the distance.

‘How horrid!’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘but that was a very poor flash. I’ll
wait for a better one.’

She waited for half-a-dozen, in spite of Edgar’s urgent efforts to lure
her indoors, but the summer flashes showed her nothing but their own
vivid light.

‘If the electric light prove no better than that for all practical
uses, I don’t envy the inventor,’ she exclaimed with infinite disgust.

Dinner was served in the adjoining room, but Madoline and her sister
begged to be excused from dining. They would take tea together in the
drawing-room while the three gentlemen dined. Sir Vernon declared that
he had no appetite, but he was willing to sit down, for the public good
as it were. After which protest he did ample justice to a _sole à la
Normande_, and a _poulet à la Marengo_, to say nothing of such pretty
tiny kickshaws as _gâteau St. Honoré_ and ice-pudding.

For Madeline and Daphne a round table was spread with a snowy cloth,
a pile of delicious rolls, unquestionable butter, and a glass dish of
pale golden honey, excellent tea, and cream—a thoroughly Arcadian meal.

‘Dearest, how brightly your eyes are sparkling,’ said Lina, with an
admiring look at the young face opposite. ‘I can see you are enjoying
yourself.’

‘Yes, there is always a pleasure in novelty. Why cannot one pass all
one’s life in new places? The world is wide enough. It is only our own
foolishness that keeps us tied, like a poor tethered animal, to one
dull spot.’

‘Why, Daphne, I thought you were so fond of home, that the banks of the
Warwickshire Avon made up your idea of earthly paradise!’

‘Sometimes, yes. But lately I have grown terribly tired of
Warwickshire.’

‘That’s a bad hearing; and next year, when you are settled at
Hawksyard——’

‘Please don’t speak of that. Thank Heaven we are three days’ journey
from Hawksyard. Let me forget it if I can.’

‘Daphne, how can you talk like that of a dear old place which is to be
your home—a place where one of the best men living was born?’

‘If you think him such a wonder of goodness, why did you not have
him when he asked you?’ cried Daphne, in a sudden fit of irritation.
Those nerves of hers, always too highly strung, were to-night at their
sharpest tension. ‘I am sick to death of hearing him praised by people
who don’t care a straw about him.’

‘Daphne!’ exclaimed Lina, more grieved than offended at this outburst.

Daphne was on her knees beside her sister in the next moment.

‘Forgive me, darling, I am hideously cross and disagreeable. I suppose
it is that tiresome lightning and the annoyance of not seeing Mont
Blanc. All that long, dusty, fusty journey, and nothing but an hotel
and a lamp-lit town at the end of it. I wanted to find myself in the
very heart of mountains, and glaciers, and avalanches.’

‘I think you know how honestly I like Edgar,’ said Madoline, believing
in her guilelessness that Daphne had resented her praise of Mr.
Turchill because she fancied it hollow and insincere. ‘I daresay if I
had not cared for Gerald long before Edgar proposed to me, I might have
given Mr. Turchill a different answer. I cannot tell how that might
have been. My life has had only one love. I loved Gerald from the days
when he first came to South Hill, a school-boy, when he used to tell
me all his troubles and his triumphs, when any success of his made me
prouder than if it had been my own. My heart was given away ages before
Edgar ever spoke to me of love.’

‘I know, dear; I can understand it all; only, don’t you know, when
everybody conspires to praise the young man to whom one is engaged,
and when all one’s relations are everlastingly congratulating one
upon one’s good fortune—the implication being that it is quite
undeserved—there is a kind of weariness that creeps over one’s soul at
the sound of those familiar phrases.’

‘I will never praise him again, dear,’ answered Lina, smiling at her.
‘I shall be perfectly contented to know that you value him as he
deserves to be valued, and that your future happiness is assured by his
devoted love.’

Daphne gave a fretful little sigh, but made no further protest. She was
thinking that she had seen a Newfoundland dog every whit as devoted as
Edgar. Yet the affection of that Newfoundland would have hardly been
deemed all-sufficient for the happiness of a lifetime.

She went back to the table, and did execution upon the rolls and honey
with a healthy girlish appetite, despite that feverish unrest which
disturbed the equal balance of her mind.

Daphne ordered Edgar to attend her on an exploration of the city next
morning, directly after breakfast.

‘Madoline and my father know the place by heart,’ she said; ‘and, of
course, Mr. Goring is tired of it. How could a man who is weary of all
creation care for Geneva?’

‘Who told you I was weary of creation?’ asked Gerald languidly.

‘Your ways and your manners,’ replied Daphne. ‘I knew as much the first
time I saw you.’

The weather was clear and bright, the town looking its best, as Daphne
and her lover left the hotel on their excursion. They were to be back
before noon, at which hour they were to start with Gerald and Madoline
for Ferney.

‘If it were not for the lake this place would be beneath contempt,’
said Daphne decisively, as they crossed the low level bridge, and
lingered to look at the sapphire Rhone, and to speculate upon that
deepened azure hue which the waters assume when they flow from the lake
into the river. ‘It is no more like the Geneva of my dreams than it is
like Jerusalem the Golden.’

‘Is it not really?’

‘Of course not. My idea of Switzerland was a succession of mountain
ledges, varied by an occasional plank across a torrent. Imagine
my revulsion of feeling at finding a big businesslike town, with
omnibuses, and cafés, and manufactories, and everything that is
commonplace and despicable.’

‘But, surely, I think you must have known that Geneva was a town,’
faltered Edgar, grieved at his dear one’s ignorance, and glad to think
his mother was not by to compare this foolishness with her own precise
geographical knowledge, acquired thirty years ago at Miss Tompion’s,
and carefully harvested in the store-house of a methodical mind.

‘Well, perhaps I may have expected something in the way of a city; a
semi-circle of white peaky houses on the margin of the lake; a mediæval
watch-tower or two; a Gothic gateway, the very gate that was shut
against Rousseau, don’t you know; and Mont Blanc in full view.’

‘I call it a very fine town,’ said Edgar, venturing to disagree with
his beloved.

‘I wish it did not swarm so with English and Americans. I have heard
nothing but my own tongue since I came out,’ protested Daphne.

She was better pleased presently when they mounted a narrow street on
the side of a breakneck hill. She was tolerably satisfied with the
cathedral, where the tomb of the great Protestant leader Henri de Rohan
took her fancy by its massive grandeur, couchant lions at its base,
the soldier in his armour above. She was interested in the pulpit from
which Calvin and Theodore de Bèze preached the Reformed Faith, and was
somewhat disgusted with her companion for his utter ignorance of the
historic past, save inasmuch as it was feebly reflected in the most
limited and conventional course of instruction.

‘What did you learn at Rugby?’ she asked impatiently. ‘You don’t seem
to know anything.’

‘We didn’t give much time to history, except Livy and Xenophon,’
answered Edgar, feebly apologetic.

‘And therefore you are not a bit of use as a cicerone. You really ought
to subscribe to Mudie and read a lot of instructive books. There’s no
good in reading old histories; people are always discovering letters
and archives that put the whole story of the past in a new light. You
must get your history hot from the press.’

‘I would rather take my information at second-hand from you, dear,’
answered Edgar meekly. ‘It seems natural to women to read a great deal,
and to find almost a second life in books, but men——’

‘Are so shamefully lazy that their capacity for taking in knowledge is
exhausted by the time they have skimmed the daily papers,’ answered
Daphne. ‘And now, please, take me to the museums Mr. Goring told you
about.’

With some trouble, and a good deal of inquiring, they found a private
collection of art and _bric-à-brac_, historical relics, furniture,
delft, and china, that was well worth seeing. Then, having regaled
their eyes upon this to the uttermost, they scampered off to the
public museum, where the only objects of thrilling interest were the
manuscripts and letters of dead and gone celebrities, from Calvin
downwards. They found that famous reformer’s penmanship as angular as
his character; they found Bossuet a careless and sprawling writer;
Fénelon careful, neat, and fine; the Duc de Richelieu a fop even in the
use of his pen, his writing exquisitely clear, minute, and regular;
while De Maintenon’s hand was large, bold, angular, and eminently
readable—the natural indication of an unscrupulous managing temper, a
woman born to govern, by fair means or foul. Daphne lingered a little
over Rousseau’s manuscript of ‘Julie,’ a work of delicate neatness,
evidently copied from the rough draft.

‘Is not “Julie” one of the novels which one mustn’t read?’ asked
Daphne, when she had perused half a page. ‘It looks uncommonly dull. I
thought wicked stories were always interesting.’

Edgar had never heard of ‘Julie.’ It was doubtful if he had ever
heard of Rousseau; but at this remark he hurried Daphne away from the
manuscript, lest some snaky little bit of immorality should uncurl
itself on the page, and lift up its evil head before her. It was time
for them to get back to the hotel, so they gave but a cursory glance at
the pictures and other treasures of the museum, and hastened into the
glare of the broad white street, where Edgar insisted upon putting his
betrothed into a fly. They found Madoline and Gerald waiting for them
in the porch of the Beau Rivage, and a smart open carriage with a pair
of horses ready to take them to Ferney.

‘Thank goodness we are going away from Geneva,’ said Daphne, as the
carriage rattled through the wide clean streets towards the country;
‘and now I suppose we shall see something really Swiss.’

‘You will see the home of a great man of letters,’ answered Gerald,
looking at her lazily with those languid dreamy eyes whose shifting hue
had so puzzled her in the forest of Fontainebleau, ‘and as you are such
a hero-worshipper, that ought to satisfy you.’

‘I don’t care a straw for Voltaire,’ said Daphne.

‘Indeed! And pray how much do you know about him?’

‘Everything. I have read Carlyle’s description of him in “Frederick the
Great.” He was a horrid man; cringed to his goat-faced eminence Dubois;
allowed himself to be caned by the Duc de Rohan’s hired bravoes, the
Duc looking on out of a hackney coach window all the time.’

‘Don’t say allowed himself. I don’t suppose he could help it.’

‘He ought to have prevented it. Imagine a great man beginning his
career by being beaten in the public streets.’

‘Who knows that your Shakespeare did not get a sound drubbing from Sir
Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, before he was stung into retaliating by
that exquisitely refined lampoon which tradition ascribes to him? You
worship your Swan of Avon for what he wrote, not for what he did. Can
you not deal the same measure to Voltaire?’

‘I don’t know anything of his writing, except a few speeches out of
“Zaïre,” and an epitome of his “Louis Quatorze.” If you are going to
put him on an equality with Shakespeare——’

‘I am not. But I say that as an all-round literary worker he never had
an equal, unless it were Scott, who has surpassed him in many things,
and who could, I believe, have equalled him on any ground.’

‘Scott was an old dear,’ answered Daphne, with her usual flippancy,
‘and I would rather have “Kenilworth” and “The Bride of Lammermoor”
than all this Voltaire of yours ever wrote.’

‘And which you, most conscientious of critics, never read.’

‘Well, Daphne, what do you think of the country?’ asked Madoline, now
that they had left the city and were driving slowly up hill through a
pastoral district. ‘Is it not pretty?’

‘Pretty,’ cried Daphne, ‘of course it is pretty; but it isn’t Swiss.
What do I care for prettiness? There is enough of that and to spare in
Warwickshire. Why,’ with ineffable disgust, ‘the country is absolutely
green!’

‘What colour did you expect it to be?’ asked Edgar, smiling at her
energetic displeasure.

‘White, of course! One dazzling sweep of snow. One blinding world of
whiteness.’

‘If you want that kind of thing you had better go to the North Pole,’
said Gerald.

‘Not I. If this is Switzerland I have done with travelling. I daresay
the North Pole is as tame as Stratford High Street.’

‘Does not that grand Jura range frowning yonder content you?’ asked
Gerald. ‘Is not your eye satisfied by the cloud-wrapped Alps on the
other side of that blue lake?’

‘No; they are too far off. I want to be among them—a part of them.
After a hypocritical waiter telling me last night that Mont Blanc was
_là, tout près_, a truthful chambermaid confessed this morning that it
is fourteen hours’ drive to Chamounix, and then one is only at the foot
of the mountain. As for this landscape we are now travelling through——’

‘It is uncommonly like Jersey,’ said Edgar. ‘I took my mother there for
her holiday five summers ago. It is a capital place for boating and
rambling about, and crossing over to the other islands: but the mater
didn’t like it. The people weren’t genteel enough for her. The gowns
and bonnets weren’t up to her mark.’

They were at Ferney by this time, a rustic village with one or two
humble cafés, a few small shops, a farm-yard. Here Daphne descried
a pair of oxen drawing a waggon of hay—noble beasts, dappled and
tawny—and the sight of these gave a foreign air to the scene which in
some wise lessened her disgust.

A shaded shrubberied drive admitted them to the house where Voltaire
lived so long and so peacefully, and which is now in the occupation of
a gentleman who graciously allows it to be shown—rather ungraciously—by
his major-domo. Lightly as Daphne had spoken of Voltaire, she was too
keenly imaginative not to be interested in the house which any famous
man had inhabited. Two quiet rooms, _salon_ and bed-chamber, looked
into a short broad alley of trees, a garden, and summer-house perched
high on the hillside, and commanding a wide prospect of fertile valley
and gloomy mountain. All things in those two rooms were exactly as
they had been in the great man’s lifetime; everything was exquisitely
neat, and all the colours had faded to those delicate half-tints which
the artistic soul loveth: faint grays and purples, fainter greens and
fawn colours. Here was the narrow bed on which Voltaire slept, with its
embroidered coverlet; chairs and _fauteuils_ covered with tapestry;
walls upholstered with figured satin damask, pale with age; Lekain’s
portrait over the bed; Madame du Châtelet’s opposite, where the great
satirist’s cynical glance must have rested on it as he awakened from
his slumbers.

They all looked reverently at these things, hushed and subdued by the
thought that they were amidst the surroundings of the dead; belongings
that had once been familiar and precious to him who now slept the last
long sleep in his vault at the Pantheon; where never-ending gangs of
Cook’s tourists are perpetually being ushered into his mausoleum, and
perpetually asking one another who was Voltaire?

They loitered a little in the garden, wrote their names in a
visitors’-book, and then went back to explore the village, and to take
a modest luncheon of coffee and bread and butter, sour claret, and
Gruyère cheese at one of the humble taverns, while the horses stood at
ease before the door, and the driver refreshed himself modestly at the
expense of his fare.

They drove home to the hotel by a way which passed through a quaint
village, and then skirted the lake, and which was somewhat more
romantic than the country road by which they had come, and Daphne
expressed herself satisfied, on the whole, with her first day in
Switzerland.




CHAPTER XXVI.

‘FORBID A LOVE AND IT IS TEN TIMES SO WODE.’


Sir Vernon showed himself especially gracious to his younger daughter
and her lover next morning at breakfast, when the itinerary of their
holiday was discussed. So far as his own pleasure was concerned, he
would have liked nothing better than to go straight to Montreux, where
a delightful villa, with a garden sloping to the lake, had been secured
for his accommodation; but he did not forget that Daphne had seen
nothing of Switzerland, and Edgar very little; and for their sakes he
was ready to make considerable sacrifices.

‘I am a wretched traveller, and I detest sight-seeing,’ he said
languidly; ‘but I don’t wish to spoil other people’s pleasure. Suppose
we make a little round before we settle down in our villa by the
lake? Let us go to Fribourg and hear the organ, and then on to Berne
for a day or so, and then to Interlaken. There I can rest quietly in
my own rooms at the Jungfraublich, while you young people drive to
Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, and do any little climbing in a mild way
which is compatible with the safety of your necks and bones generally;
and then we can come straight back to Montreux. How would you like
that, Madoline?’

‘Very much, indeed, dear father. It will be a delight to me to go over
the old ground with Daphne.’

‘And you, Goring?’

‘I am Lina’s slave—her shadow; true as the dial to the sun.’

‘Papa,’ said Daphne, drawing her chair nearer to him, and with a
coaxing look which no man but a father could have resisted, ‘it is
so good of you to propose such a charming trip, and I shall enjoy it
immensely; but would it be any way possible, now we are so near, to go
to Chamounix, and get to the top of Mont Blanc; or, at least, part of
the way up?’

‘No, my dear. Quite out of the question.’

‘But it is only a drive to Chamounix; and there is a diligence goes
every morning.’

‘Edgar can take you there next year, when you are married. I am too old
for a drive of fourteen hours’ duration.’

Daphne looked miserable. Mont Blanc was the central point of all her
desires. It irked her to be so near and not to reach the world-famous
mountain. She looked at Edgar doubtfully. No; she could not realise the
idea of coming back next year, alone with him. She had never been able
to project her mind into that future in which they two should be one,
bound by a sacred yoke, doomed to be for ever together. From any casual
glance at such a future her mind always shrank away shudderingly, as
from the dim memory of a bad dream.

‘I don’t believe I shall ever come to Switzerland again,’ she said
discontentedly, when breakfast was finished and her father had retired
to his own room to write letters.

Madoline was sitting at work by an open window, silken water-lilies and
bulrushes developing themselves gradually under her skilful fingers, on
a ground of sage-green cloth. The tables were covered with books and
miniature stands; the room was bright with flowers, and looked almost
as home-like as South Hill; but before the evening Mowser and Jinman
would have packed all these things, and despatched the greater part of
them to Montreux, while the travellers went on to Fribourg in light
marching order, which in this case meant about three portmanteaux per
head. Some books must, of course, be taken, and drawing materials, and
fancy-work, and a writing-desk or two, and camp-stools for sitting
about in romantic places, and a good deal more, which made a formidable
array of luggage by-and-by when Sir Vernon and his family were
assembled at the railway-station.

‘Do you mean to tell me that we require all these things for a week or
ten days?’ he said, scowling at the patient Jinman, who was standing
on guard over a compact pyramid of trunks, portmanteaux, and Gladstone
bags, umbrellas, sunshades, and heterogeneous etceteras.

‘I don’t think there’s anything could have been dispensed with, Sir
Vernon,’ answered Jinman. ‘The books and ornaments and most of the
heavy luggage have gone on to Montrooks.’

‘Great Heaven, in the face of this would any man marry, and make
himself responsible for feminine existences!’ exclaimed Sir Vernon,
shrugging his shoulders disgustedly as he turned away; yet Jinman could
have informed him that his own share of the luggage was quite equal to
that of his daughters.

They were all established presently in a German railway compartment:
Sir Vernon seated in his corner and absorbed in an English newspaper,
whose ample sheet excluded every glimpse of lake and wooded slopes,
Alps and Jura; while Edgar smoked on the platform outside, and Daphne
stood at the open door, gazing at the changing landscape: the smiling
lake below; the dark slopes and mountain range on the farther shore;
the villages nestling in the valley on this nearer bank; the cosy
little homesteads and bright gardens; the vine-clad terraces, divided
by low gray walls; the quaint old churches, with tiled roofs and square
clock-towers; and yonder, far away at the end of the lake, Chillon’s
gloomy fortress, which she recognised with a cry of delight, having
seen its presentment in engravings and photographs, and knowing Byron’s
poem by heart.

She gave a sigh of regret as a curve of the line carried her away from
the azure lake and its panorama of hills.

‘I can hardly bear to leave it,’ she said; ‘but, thank Heaven, we are
coming back to it soon.’

‘You are reconciled to Switzerland, then, in spite of your
disillusions,’ said Gerald.

‘Reconciled! I should like to live and die here.’

‘What! abandon your beloved Shakespeare’s country?’

‘I am heartily sick of Shakespeare’s country.’

‘Daphne,’ cried Edgar, with a look of deepest mortification, ‘that is a
bad look-out for poor old Hawksyard.’

‘Hawksyard is a dear old place, but I don’t want to be reminded of
it—or of anything else in Warwickshire—now I am in Switzerland. I want
to soar, if I can. I am in Byron’s country. He lived there,’ pointing
downwards to where they had left Lausanne and Ouchy. ‘He wrote some
of his loveliest poetry there; his genius is for ever associated with
these scenes. Sad, unsatisfied spirit!’

Her eyes filled with sudden tears at the thought of that disappointed
life, seeking solace from all that is loveliest in Nature, shunning the
beaten tracks, yet never finding peace.

‘If you are very good,’ said Gerald gravely, ‘within the next ten
minutes I will show you something you are anxious to see.’

‘What is that?’

‘Mont Blanc. Get your glass ready.’

‘Why, we left him behind us, across the lake, sulkily veiled in
impenetrable cloud.’

‘He will show himself more amiable presently. You will get a good view
of him in five minutes if you focus your glass properly and don’t
chatter.’

Daphne spoke never a word, but stood motionless, with her landscape
glass glued to her eyes, and waited, as for a divine revelation.

Yes, yonder it arose, white and cloudlike on the edge of the blue
summer sky, the mighty snow-clad range, of which Mont Blanc is but a
detail—the grand inaccessible region; mountain-top beyond mountain-top;
peak above peak; everlasting, untrodden hills, producing nothing,
pasturing nothing, stupendous and ghastly as the polar seas; a world
apart from all other worlds; a spectacle to awe the dullest soul and
thrill the coldest heart; a revelation of Nature’s Titanic beauty.

‘Oh, it must have been such mountains as those that the Titans hurled
about them when they fought with Zeus,’ cried Daphne when she had gazed
and gazed till the last gleam of those white crests vanished in the
distance.

‘Do you feel better?’ asked Gerald, with his mocking smile.

‘I feel as if I had seen the world that we are to know after death,’
answered Daphne.

‘Would you be surprised to hear that these excrescences, which you
think so grand, are but modern incidents in the history of the earth?
Time was when Switzerland was one vast ice-field: nay, if we can
believe Lyell, the clay of London was in course of accumulation as
marine mud at a time when the ocean still rolled its waves over the
space now occupied by some of the loftiest Alpine summits.’

‘Please don’t be instructive,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I want to know
nothing about them, except that they are there, and that they are
beautiful.’

At Fribourg they drove down the narrow street to the Zähringer Hof, the
hotel by the suspension bridge, where from a balcony they looked down
a sheer descent to the river, and to the roofs and chimneys of the old
town lying in a cleft of the hills, while yonder, suspended in mid-air,
a mere spider-thread across the sky, stretched the upper and loftier
bridge. It was nearly dinner-time when they arrived. There were dark
clouds on the horizon, and only gleams of watery sunshine behind the
gray old watch-towers on the crest of the hill across the river.

‘I’m afraid we are going to have another storm,’ said Gerald, lounging
against the embrasure of a window, and looking as if Fribourg, with its
modern suspension bridges and mediæval watch-towers, were just the most
uninteresting place in the world.

He looked thoroughly worn-out and weary, as if he had been
labouring hard with body and mind all day, instead of lolling in a
railway-carriage, staring listlessly at the landscape. Sir Vernon, the
ostensible invalid, was not more languid.

‘Let it come down,’ cried Daphne; ‘but whatever the weather may be,
I shall go and hear the organ after dinner. There is the bell for
vespers. How nice it is to find oneself in a Roman Catholic town, with
vesper-bells ringing, and dear old priests and nuns and all sorts of
picturesque creatures walking about the streets!’

They dined in their own sitting-room, Sir Vernon having a good old
English dislike to any intercourse with unintroduced fellow-creatures.
To sit at a _table-d’hôte_ with the Tom, Dick, and Harry of cockney
Switzerland would have been abhorrent to him.

‘We may get a worse dinner in our own room,’ he said, looking
doubtfully at some unknown spoon-food offered to him by way of an
_entrée_, ‘but we avoid rubbing shoulders with the kind of people who
travel nowadays.’

‘Are they so much worse than the people who used to travel——’

‘When I was a young man? Yes, Daphne, quite a different race,’ said Sir
Vernon with authority. ‘Gerald was right. We are in for another storm.’

A quiver of livid light, a crash of thunder, and black darkness yonder
behind the hills gave emphasis to his statement. Daphne flew to the
window to look at the bridges and the towers, which were almost
expunged from the face of creation by a thick blinding rain. A waggon
was crawling across the nearer and lower bridge, and the whole fabric
rocked under its weight.

‘Nobody will dream of going to the cathedral to-night,’ said Sir Vernon.

But the waiter in attendance declared that everyone would go. There
would be a concert on the great organ from eight to nine. The cathedral
was close by; there would be a carriage in waiting at ten minutes to
eight to convey those guests who graciously deigned to patronise the
concert, for which the waiter was privileged to dispose of tickets.
Furthermore, the storm would assuredly abate before long. It was but a
thunder-shower.

Daphne stood at the window watching the thunder-shower, which seemed
to be drowning the lower town and flooding the river. The rain came
down in torrents; the thunder roared and bellowed over the hills; the
chainwork of the suspension bridge creaked and groaned.

Sir Vernon protested that the storm made him nervous, and retired to
his room, leaving the young people to do as they pleased.

They sat in the stormy dusk sipping their coffee, ready to put on their
hats and be off the minute the carriage was announced. Daphne wore a
gown of some creamy-white material, which gave her a ghostly look in
the gloom.

‘You have heard this famous organ, Lina,’ she said. ‘Is it really worth
stopping at Fribourg on purpose to hear it when, with a little more
time and trouble, one might get half-way up Mont Blanc?’

‘It is a wonderful organ; but you will be able to judge for yourself in
a few minutes.’

‘We should have been getting near Chamounix by this time, if we had
started by this morning’s diligence,’ sighed Daphne.

‘Restless, unsatisfied soul! still harping on the mountain,’ said
Gerald.

‘I have seen him, at least,’ exclaimed Daphne, clasping her hands;
‘that is something. Far, far away, like a glimpse of another world: but
still I have seen him. Shall we see him again to-morrow, do you think,
on the way to Interlaken?’

‘I’m afraid not. To-morrow I shall have the honour to introduce you to
the Jungfrau.’

‘I don t care a straw for her,’ exclaimed Daphne contemptuously.

‘What, not for Manfred’s mountain? Can you, who have so devoured your
Byron, be indifferent to the background of that gloomy individual’s
existence?’

‘There is an interest in that, certainly; but Mont Blanc is my
beau-ideal of a mountain.’

Here the carriage was announced. The two girls put on their hats and
wraps, soft China crape and gray camel’s-hair shawls, and hurried down
to the hall. The rain was still falling, the thunder still grumbling
amidst distant hills. They crowded into the fly, and were jolted over
stony and uneven ways to the cathedral.

They went in at a narrow little door to a great dark church, with
solitary lamps dotted about here and there in the gloom. Everything had
a mysterious look; the richly-carved oak, the shrines, the chapels, the
shrouded altar far away at the end.

There were, perhaps, a hundred people sitting about in high narrow pews
with massive carved oak seats, sitting here and there in a scattered
way, all wrapped in shadow and gloom, silent, overawed, expectant.

Madoline and Daphne walked side by side up the long nave, between two
lines of oaken seats, the two men following; then midway between the
organ and the altar, they went into one of the pews—Lina first, then
Daphne. She had been sitting there a minute or so looking about the dim
dark church before she discovered that it was Gerald, and not Edgar,
who sat by her side. Edgar had taken the seat behind them.

They sat there for five or ten minutes, hushed and listening; the rain
splashing on the roof, the distant thunder reverberating; nothing to
be seen in the vast building but those yellow lamps gleaming here and
there, and patching with faint light an isolated statue, or a pulpit,
or a clustered column.

At last, when the silence, broken only by faintest whisperings among
the expectant audience, had endured for what seemed a weary while,
the organ pealed forth in a grand burst of sound, which swept along
the arched roof, and filled the church with music. Then after that
crash of mighty chords came tenderest phrases, a flowing melody that
sank low as a whisper, and then that strain of almost supernatural
likeness to the human voice rose up above the legato arpeggios of the
accompaniment, and thrilled every ear—tender, angelic, a divine whisper
of love and melancholy. Daphne had risen from her seat, and stood with
her arms resting upon the massive woodwork in front of her, gazing up
through the darkness towards that glimmering spot of light yonder,
near the arch of the roof, which showed where the organ was, far away,
mysterious.

Oh, that heavenly voice, with its soul-moving sadness! A rush of tears
streamed from her eyes; she stretched out her hands unconsciously, as
if yearning for some human touch to break the mournful spell of that
divine sorrow, and the hand nearest Gerald was clasped in the darkness;
clasped by a warm strong hand which held it and kept it—kept it without
a struggle, for, alas! it lay unresistingly in his. They drew a little
nearer to each other involuntarily, shudderingly happy—with the deep
sense of an unpardonable guilt, a shameful treason; yet forgetting
everything except that vain foolish love against which both had fought
long and valiantly.

A peal of thunder on the organ within, an answering peal from the storm
without. The mimic tempest blended itself with heaven’s own artillery;
and at the terrible sound those guilty creatures in the church let go
each other’s hands. Daphne clasped hers before her face, and sank on
her knees.

‘Pity me and help me, O God!’ she prayed, and looking up she saw just
above her in a marble niche the image of the Mother of God; and in this
moment of temptation and self-abandonment, it seemed to her a natural
thing that women should ask a woman’s mediation in their hour of sorrow.

A funeral hymn of Sebastian Bach’s pealed from the organ with an awful
grandeur which thrilled every listener; and then came a silence, and
after that the low murmur of the storm dying away in the distance, from
the overture to ‘William Tell,’ the flutelike tones of the ‘_Ranz des
Vaches_,’ telling of pastoral valleys and solemn mountains, a life of
Arcadian innocence and peace.

With those lighter, gayer strains the concert ended, and they all went
slowly and silently out of the church. The storm was over, and the moon
was breaking through dark clouds.

‘Don’t let us go back in that jingling abomination of a fly,’ said
Gerald, striding on over the wet pavement, leaving the two girls to
follow with Edgar Turchill.

They picked their way through the streets. The town was all dark and
quiet, save for a glimmering yellow candle here and there under a
gable; there was none of the brightness and out-of-door life of a
French town. A couple of omnibuses and a fly or two carried off the
people who had been in the cathedral to their several hotels.

Gerald Goring was waiting for them in front of the Zähringer.

‘What made you hurry on so?’ asked Madoline wonderingly.

‘Did I hurry? I think it was you others who crawled. That music
irritated my nerves a little. It is full of studied effects; the
organist has trained himself to play upon the emotions of his audience,
now soaring to the seraph choir, now going down to the depths of
Pandemonium. The thunderstorm and the organ together would have been
too much for anybody. Oh, pray don’t go indoors yet,’ he exclaimed, as
they were all three moving towards the entrance of the hotel. ‘Let us
go for a walk on the bridge. Don’t you know that after the organ the
great feature of Fribourg is the bridge?’

‘If we are to be on our way to Interlaken to-morrow, we had better see
all we can to-night,’ said the practical Edgar.

They went on the bridge; Gerald still walking ahead, and keeping in
some wise aloof from them. Daphne had not spoken since they left the
cathedral.

‘Had the music an unpleasant effect upon you too, dear, that you are so
silent?’ Madoline asked, as they two walked side by side.

‘It was only too beautiful,’ answered Daphne.

‘And you are glad we came here.’

‘No. Yes. I would rather have been half-way up Mont Blanc.’

‘Poor child! But that is a pleasure in reserve for another holiday. I
know Edgar will take you wherever you like to go.’

‘Do you think so? What a dance I shall lead him!’ cried Daphne with
a mocking laugh. ‘I shall not be content with Mont Blanc or the
Matterhorn. I shall insist upon seeing all the extinct volcanoes, the
wonderful fiery mountains that have burned themselves out. Cotopaxi is
about the mildest hill he will be invited to climb.’

Mr. Turchill had dropped into the background, and was quietly enjoying
his cigar, unaware of the pleasures in store for him. Gerald walked
ever so far ahead, cigarless, a gloomy figure.

‘I’m afraid either the thunder or the organ has given Gerald one of his
nervous headaches,’ said Lina anxiously.

The moon showed herself fitfully athwart hurrying clouds, now lighting
up hills and watch-towers, river and rugged ravine, with a wild
Salvator-Rosa-esque effect, now hidden altogether, and leaving all in
gloom. Midway upon the bridge Madoline and Daphne stopped, and stood
looking down into the hollow below, where the quiet sleeping town
was dimly visible, with its quaint street lamps, and rare gleams of
light from narrow casements, and stony ways shining after the rain.
Here, when they had stood for some minutes, Edgar joined them, having
finished his cigar, and he and Madoline began to talk about the place;
he questioning, she expounding its features.

While they two were talking, Gerald came slowly back, and stood by
Daphne’s side, a few paces apart from the others. She said never a
word. They stood side by side for some minutes like statues. She was
wondering if he could hear the passionate throbbing of her heart, which
would not be stilled.

They were standing thus, as if bound by a spell, when a heavy waggon
came creeping slowly along the bridge, making the spot on which they
stood tremble and sway under their feet.

‘We are hanging by a thread between time and eternity,’ said Gerald,
drawing closer to her. ‘What if the thread were to snap, and drop us,
hand in hand, into the black gulf of death?’

She did not shudder at the thought, but turned and looked at him in the
moonlight, with a strange sad smile.

‘Would you be glad?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes,’ she answered, between a sigh and a whisper, still looking up
at him with that pathetic smile; and his eyes looked fondly down into
hers, losing themselves in the depth of a fathomless mystery.

‘Do you know that this bridge is the second longest in the world,
three hundred yards long, and a hundred and sixty-eight feet above
the river?’ asked Edgar Turchill’s matter-of-fact tones, as he walked
towards them, cheerful, contented, pleased with himself and all the
world.

‘For God’s sake spare us a gush of second-hand Baedeker,’ cried Gerald
with intense irritation. ‘As if any living soul, except a Cook’s
tourist, could care how many feet or how many yards long a bridge is.
It is the effect one values, the general idea that one is on that very
bridge of Al Sirât, laid over the midst of hell, and finer than a
hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which the righteous
must pass to Mahomet’s paradise. It is the notion of man’s audacity in
making perilous ways that is really delightful. When that waggon went
across just now, I thought the last straw was being laid, and we were
all going.’

Edgar came round to Daphne with a calm air of proprietorship which made
her shudder.

‘What an interesting evening we have had!’ he said.

‘Very.’

‘You look pale and tired. Has it all been too much for you?’ he asked
tenderly.

‘I think that organ would be too much for anyone.’

‘Do you know—I am no judge, and you mustn’t laugh at me for expressing
an opinion—I hardly thought it equal, as an organ, to the one at St.
Paul’s. I took my mother there once when all the charity children were
assembled. I can’t tell you what a grand sight it was, the dome crowded
with their fresh young faces.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake don’t talk about it,’ cried Daphne, almost
hysterically. ‘To compare that dark solemn cathedral, with just a few
people dotted about among the shadows, and the thunder pealing over the
roof—to compare such a scene with that pagan St. Paul’s, and the dome
crowded with rosy-cheeked children, all white caps and pinafores and
yellow worsted stockings!’

‘I was talking of the organ,’ replied Edgar, somewhat offended.

‘Then why introduce the charity children? Oh, please let my thoughts
dwell upon that dark church to-night; let me remember the music, the
darkness.’

‘Daphne, dearest one, you are crying,’ exclaimed Edgar, startled at the
sound of a stifled sob.

‘Who would not cry at such music?’

‘But so long after. You are nervous and hysterical.’

‘I am only tired. Please don’t worry me,’ retorted Daphne fretfully,
wrapping herself tightly in her soft gray shawl, and quickening her
pace.

She said not a word more till they were inside the Zähringer Hof,
when she wished the other three a brief good-night, declaring herself
utterly worn out, and tripped lightly upstairs to her room on the
second storey. Madoline’s room was next her sister’s, and when she
went up a few minutes later, and knocked at the door of communication
between the two rooms, Daphne excused herself from opening it.

‘I’m dreadfully sleepy, dear,’ she said; ‘please leave me alone for
to-night!’

‘Willingly, dearest, if you are sure you are not ill.’

‘Not the least in the world.’

‘And there is nothing you want Mowser to do for you?’

‘Nothing. She has unpacked my things. I have everything I want.’

‘Then good-night, and God bless you.’

‘Good-night,’ answered Daphne, but invoked no blessing upon the sister
she loved so well. Prayer breathed from such a guilty heart would be
almost blasphemy.

She walked up and down the room for a long time, up and down, up and
down, her soul filled with ineffable joy. Yes; guilty, treacherous,
vile, ungrateful as she knew herself to be, she could not stifle that
wild sense of happiness, the rapture of knowing herself beloved by
the man she loved. Nothing but evil could ever come out of that love;
nothing but struggle, and sorrow, and pain; yet it was deep delight to
have been loved, the one perfect joy that was possible for her upon
this earth. To have missed it would have been never to have lived: and
now death might come when it would. She had lived her life; she had had
her day.

That this love was a thing of guilt, a scorpion to be crushed and
trodden under her foot, she never questioned. Not for an instant
did it enter into her mind that she could profit by Gerald Goring’s
inconstancy, that she was to take to herself the lover whose faith had
been violated by to-night’s revelation. Never did it occur to her that
any alteration in his future or hers was involved in the admissions
which each had made to the other.

‘He knows that I love him; he knows how weak and vile I am,’ she said
to herself. ‘If Lina were to know too? If she were to see me with
the mask off my face, what a monster of perfidy and ingratitude I
should seem to her! Oh, I should die of shame. I could never endure
the discovery. And to make her unhappy—her to whom I owe so much, my
dearest, my best, the guardian angel of my life. Oh, Lina, Lina, if you
knew!’

She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, and, with hands clasped
above her head, breathed her passionate prayer:

‘Let me die to-night. Oh, Thou who knowest how sinful and weak I am,
let me die to-night!’




CHAPTER XXVII.

‘I MAY NOT DON AS EVERY PLOUGHMAN MAY.’


A chambermaid brought Daphne a letter at half-past six o’clock next
morning. She had fallen asleep in the summer sunlight after a night of
almost utter sleeplessness; the warm air blowing in upon her across
the hills on the opposite side of the river; the noises of the early
awakened town floating up from the valley below.

She started from her pillow, scared and agitated at the sound of
the chambermaid’s knock, and took the letter with a trembling hand.
Gerald’s writing! She knew it too well; yet this was the first letter
he had ever addressed to her.

‘How dare he write to me?’ she exclaimed angrily, as she tore open the
envelope.

The letter began with no fond words of endearment. The writer dashed at
his meaning with passionate directness, with feeling too intense to be
eloquent.

 ‘Tell me what I am to do. After last night, my future, my life, are in
 your hands. Both belong to you if you will have them. Shall I break
 the truth to Lina? Shall I tell her how, little by little, in spite of
 myself, my heart has been beguiled away from that calm affection which
 was once all-sufficient for the joy of life; how a new and passionate
 love has replaced the old; and that, although I shall honour, respect,
 and admire her as the first and best of women till the end of my days,
 I am no longer, I never can be again, her lover? I think, Daphne, that
 the hard, outspoken, brutal truth may be the wisest and best. Let us
 look Fate in the face. Neither you nor I can ever be happy asunder.
 Will the sacrifice of my happiness secure Lina’s? Answer me from your
 heart of hearts, my beloved, as you answered me on the bridge last
 night.’

There was not an instant’s doubt in Daphne’s mind as to how this letter
must be answered. Lina’s happiness sacrificed to hers! Lina, so good,
so pure-minded, in all things so much above her, to be made miserable,
in order that she might triumph in a successful treachery!

‘I don’t think the most virtuous person in the world could loathe me
worse than I should loathe myself, if I were to do this thing,’ she
said to herself resolutely.

She sat down by the open window, wrapped in her loose white
dressing-gown, her soft golden hair falling over her shoulders like a
veil, her cheeks pale, her eyes heavy, an image of youthful sorrow.

 ‘Not for this wide world,’ she wrote, answering Gerald Goring’s
 question as directly as he had asked it, ‘not to be completely and
 unspeakably happy would I rob my sister of her happiness; not if it
 could be done without making me a monster of ingratitude, the most
 treacherous and despicable of women. All you and I have to do is to
 forget our folly of last night, and to be true, each of us, to the
 promises we have made. You would be, indeed, a loser, condemned to
 pay a life-long penalty for your foolishness, if you could barter
 such a flower as Madoline for such a weed as me. Be true to her, and
 you will find your reward in that truth. Do you know how good she is;
 how priceless in her purity and love; and could you let her go for my
 sake—for a creature who is compounded of faults and inconsistencies,
 caprices, self-will; a creature with no more soul than Undine?
 Remember how long she has loved you; think how much she is above you
 in the beauty of her character; how fitted she is to make your home
 happy, your life nobler and better than it could ever be without
 her. Why, if, in some moment of madness, you were to surrender her
 love, your life to come would be one long regret for having lost her.
 Forget, as I shall forget; be true, as I will be true, heaven helping
 me; and let me write myself, without a blush, in this my first, and,
 perhaps, my last letter to you,—Your Sister,

  DAPHNE.’

Her eyes were streaming with tears as she wrote. Every word came from
her heart. There was no duplicity of thought, no lurking hope that
Gerald might refuse to be ruled by her. She wrote to him faithfully,
honestly, resolutely, her heart and mind exalted by her intense
love of her sister. And when the letter was sealed and given to the
chambermaid—who must have wondered a little at this outbreak of
letter-writing before breakfast as a new development in the British
tourist—she stole softly to the door leading into Madoline’s room and
opened it as noiselessly as she could.

Lina was still asleep, the calm beautiful face turned towards the
sunlight, the long dark lashes dropping on the oval cheek, the lips
faintly parted. Daphne crept to the bed-side and sat down beside her
sister’s pillow. Lina awoke and looked up at her.

‘My pet, have you been here long? Is it late?’ she asked.

‘Late for you, love. About half-past seven. I have only this moment
come in.’

‘How white and haggard you look!’ said Lina anxiously. ‘Have you had a
bad night?’

‘I did not sleep particularly well. I seldom can in a strange place.’

‘Daphne, I am afraid you are ill—or unhappy. There was something in
your manner last night that alarmed me.’

‘I am not ill: and I have not felt so happy for a long time as I feel
this morning.’

‘Why, dearest?’

‘Because I have been making good resolutions, and I mean to act upon
them.’

‘Would it be too much to ask what they are?’

‘Oh, a general determination to be very obedient to you, and very
respectful to my father, and very tolerant of Edgar’s stupidities, and
all that kind of thing, don’t you know?’

‘My darling, I can’t bear to hear you talk of Edgar like that. He is so
thoroughly good.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Daphne, with an air of resignation. ‘If there were only a
little rift in his goodness, I should get on with him so much better.
It is dreadful to have to deal with a man whose excellence is always
putting one to shame.’

‘I think you could be easily worthy of him.’

‘No, I couldn’t. And if I could I wouldn’t. And now I must run away
and dress, for I want to explore those hills across the river before
breakfast.’

She looked bright and fresh and full of youthful energy an hour
afterwards, when she went down to the sitting-room, where Edgar was
loafing about wearily, longing for her to appear. Her neat tailor gown
of darkest olive cashmere, and coquettish little olive-green toque,
set off the pearly tints of her complexion and the brightness of her
loosely-coiled hair. She came into the room buttoning a long Swedish
glove, the turned-back sleeve showing the round white arm.

‘What a fetching get-up,’ said Edgar, who was apt to embellish his
speech with those flowers of slang which are in everybody’s mouth; ‘but
what is the use of those long gloves tucked away under the sleeve of
your gown?’

‘No use,’ answered Daphne; ‘but they’re fashionable. I want you to
come and ramble on that hill over there before breakfast. Do you mind?’

‘Mind!’ cried Edgar. ‘You know I am always delighted to walk with you.
But, I say, Daphne, what was the matter with you last night? You were
so cross.’

‘I know I was; but I am never going to be cross again. I am going to
turn over a new leaf. I have been wild and wilful, but I am not wilful
now.’

‘You are always the dearest and best of girls,’ answered Edgar
fatuously.

They passed Gerald Goring on the stairs. Daphne gave him a friendly
nod, just the easiest salutation possible; but her cheek paled as she
went by, and her reply to Edgar’s next observation was somewhat wide of
the mark.

He talked Baedeker to her as they went across the bridge; and he talked
Baedeker about the watch-towers; and still again Baedeker when, in the
course of their wanderings, they came to a chapel on a height, from
whence there was a lovely view, exquisitely beautiful in the clear calm
summer morning. They roamed about together till it was time to go back
to the ten o’clock breakfast, by which hour Sir Vernon had resigned
himself to the ordeal of facing his family.

After breakfast there came more sight-seeing, Sir Vernon having decided
upon going on to Berne by a late afternoon train. So they all set out
together in a roomy landau to explore the town and neighbourhood. They
went into the arsenal, where a funny old man in a blue blouse showed
them ancient and modern gunnery. They saw the venerable lime-tree which
stands in front of the Town Hall and the Rathhaus, propped up with
wood and stone; a tree which, according to tradition, was originally a
twig borne by a young native of Fribourg when he arrived in the town,
breathless from loss of blood, to bring the news of the victory of
Morat. ‘Victory!’ he gasped, and died.

Gerald, more than usually cynical this morning, declined to believe in
either the twig or the heroic messenger.

‘I always shut my mind against all these romantic stories upon
principle,’ he said languidly. ‘The outcome of all modern research—Mr.
Brewer, and all the rest of it—is to prove that none of these
delightful traditions has a germ of truth in it. It saves a great deal
of trouble to begin by disbelieving them.’

They went about the town in rather a dawdling desultory way, looking at
the fronts of old houses, at the queer little shops, and finally paused
before the church of St. Nicholas, which they had seen so dimly last
night. Edgar insisted upon going in, but Daphne would go no farther
than the doorway, where she looked respectfully at the bas-reliefs
which she was told to admire.

‘I saw quite enough of it last night,’ she said, when Edgar urged her
to go in and explore the interior.

‘Why, Daphne, it was too dark for you to see anything.’

‘All churches are alike,’ she answered impatiently. ‘Please don’t
worry.’

Sir Vernon, who happened to be within earshot, looked at his daughter
curiously, wondering at this development of modern manners. Could a
pearly delicacy of complexion, luminous eyes of that dark gray which
is almost violet, and bright gold hair, quite make amends for this
utter want of courtesy? But Edgar appeared perfectly content to be so
treated; and it was Edgar who was most concerned in the matter.

They dawdled away a long morning seeing the town and driving about
the somewhat pastoral landscape which surrounds it, lunched late, and
started at five o’clock for Berne, where they arrived at the Berner
Hof in time for a late dinner. Daphne grumbled a little on the way,
protesting against the landscape between Fribourg and Berne as a
relapse into English pastoral scenery.

‘What do I want with meadows, and orchards, and cottages?’ she
exclaimed. ‘I can see those in England. If it were not for the cows
living on the ground-floor, and the fodder being carried up to the roof
by those queer slanting covered ways, there wouldn’t be a shade of
difference between the houses here and those at home, except that these
are ever so much dirtier.’

‘You ought to have come a few million years ago, when Switzerland was a
glacial chaos,’ said Gerald.

The Berner Hof pleased Sir Vernon by its spaciousness and air of
English comfort, but it impressed Daphne as an hotel which would have
been more in keeping with Liverpool or Manchester.

‘I had quite made up my mind that in Switzerland we should stop at
wooden _châlets_ perched upon mountain ledges, with an impending
avalanche always in view, and the “_Ranz des Vaches_” sounding in the
distance all day long.’

‘There are such hostelries,’ answered Gerald; ‘but I think, if you
found yourself at one of them, you would be rather inclined to wish
yourself at the Berner Hof, or the Beau Rivage.’

Next day was the first Tuesday in the month, and the occasion of the
monthly market, a grand assemblage of small dealers from the adjacent
country.

They all went out directly after breakfast, and proceeded straight
to the noble central street, a mile in length, which under various
names pierces the town in a straight unbroken line from one end to
the other. Very old and quaint are the houses in this long street,
many of them built over arcades, under which the foot-passengers walk,
and within whose arches the market-people set out their stalls. The
drapery stalls, gay with many-coloured handkerchiefs fluttering in the
summer air; the jewellers’ stalls, all twinkling and flashing with that
silver trinketry which is a national institution, chains of endless
length, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, glittering in the sun; stalls
loaded with fruits and vegetables; stalls of gaudy-coloured pottery,
jugs and jars of queerest, quaintest shapes; and up and down the stony
street cows and oxen being led perpetually, meek, submissive, gentle,
beautiful, in an endless procession; while every here and there under
a countryman’s cart the patient dogs of burden lay at rest, placid
but watchful, faithful guardians of the master’s property. It was a
scene of picturesque and national life which pleased Daphne immensely.
She had never seen such a market before, never seen so long a street,
except the monotonous length of a Parisian boulevard as she was being
jolted along in a fly from station to station. Here she saw the people
in their national costume. Here Switzerland seemed really Swiss.

She flew from stall to stall, admiring, selecting, bargaining, wanting
to buy a barrowful of red and orange pots and pans.

‘They would look so lovely in the corridor at South Hill, on high
brackets,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid the brackets would have to be very high,’ answered Lina,
smiling at her.

‘I suppose you mean that for a sneer,’ retorted Daphne, ‘but if Mr.
Burne Jones, or Mr. Rosetti, or Mr. Morris were to say those pots and
pans were the right thing, there would be an eruption of them over the
walls of every fashionable room in England. I consider them positively
lovely. And as for the silver chains, I shall never live without one
round my neck.’

‘Come and make your selection,’ said Edgar, pointing to one of
the biggest and grandest stalls in the open place near the famous
clock-tower, where the cock was to crow, and the figure of grim old
Time was to turn his glass, and all manner of wonderful things were
to happen just before the striking of the hour. This stall showed the
best array of silver trinketry which they had seen yet, and the country
people were clustered about it, gazing at the bright new silver, and
a good deal at golden-haired Daphne in her creamy Indian silk gown, a
radiant figure under a creamy silk umbrella.

‘Choose the prettiest, Daphne, and wear it for my sake,’ said Edgar,
with his portly leather purse in his hand, an English pigeon offering
himself up to be plucked.

‘_Combien?_’ he asked, rather proud of his readiness with a foreign
language, pointing to the handsomest of the chains, a duster of many
slender chainlets, about three yards long.

‘_Wie viel?_’ asked Daphne, with a compassionate glance at her
affianced.

‘It is ver sheep,’ answered the vendor, showing a disgusting
familiarity with the English tongue. ‘Gut und sheep, sehr schön, ver
prurty, funf pound Englees.’

‘Five pounds!’ screamed Daphne: ‘why, I thought it would be about five
shillings! Pray come away, Mr. Turchill. They see we are English.’

She turned from the stall indignantly, and marched across to look
at the fountain, where the gigantic figure of an ogre, in the act
of dropping a child into the yawning cavern of his jaws, stands out
against the tall white houses, balconied, jalousied, like a bit of
Parisian boulevard made picturesque by a dash of Swiss quaintness.
The vegetables and the pottery stalls, and the fluttering cotton
handkerchiefs were grouped all about the fountain, a confusion of vivid
colour.

‘That is something like a statue,’ cried Daphne, looking up
unblinkingly at the giant grinning at her through a warm hazy
atmosphere. ‘A dear old thing which recalls the fairy-tales of
one’s childhood, instead of a stupid old Anglo-Indian general, whom
nobody ever heard of, riding a tame old horse. Why don’t we have
Kindlifressers and other fairy tale statues in the London streets? They
would make London ever so much livelier.’

Here Edgar came after her, carrying a small box neatly papered and tied
up, which he put into her hand.

‘May you never wear heavier fetters than these!’ he said, having
composed the little speech as he came along.

‘What,’ she exclaimed, ‘did you actually buy the chain after all? Well,
I do despise you. Could you not see that the man was swindling you?’

‘He was not so bad as you think. I only gave him three pounds for the
chain, and I believe it is worth as much as that. I should think it
cheap at thirty if you were pleased with it,’ he added, with homely
tenderness.

‘Oh, you poor predestined victim to extortion,’ exclaimed Daphne,
looking at him with a serio-comic air. ‘Such a man as you ought never
to go about without a keeper. However, as you have been so good as
to allow yourself to be fleeced for my sake, I accept the chain with
pleasure, and will wear it as the badge of my future captivity.’

She shot a swift side-glance at Gerald as she spoke, curious to see
how he took this direct allusion to an engagement which it had been
her habit somewhat to ignore. He was standing looking listlessly along
the street, interested neither in man nor woman; but though he had an
air of utter vacancy, eyes that saw not, ears that heard not, Daphne
detected a quiver of lip and brow, which showed her that the shot had
gone home.

Sir Vernon had gone to the museum to look at the pictures, leaving the
young people free to wander where they pleased until dinner-time. They
went up and down the arched ways, looking at the shops and stalls, the
country people, the dogs, the cattle; then turned aside from this busy
thoroughfare, where all the life and commerce of the canton seemed to
have concentrated itself, to explore the dusky cathedral, where all was
silence, and coolness, and repose. There was one great disappointment
for Daphne. The grand panoramic picture of the Alps, for which the
minster terrace is celebrated, was not on view to-day. The mountains
hid themselves behind a gauzy veil, a warm vapour which thickened the
air above the old city.

‘I can’t think what I have done to offend the Alps,’ cried Daphne
petulantly. ‘They seem to bear a grudge against me. They wouldn’t show
me their frosty pows at Geneva, and they won’t at Berne. I am not going
to break my heart about them, however. Please let us get the cathedral
over as fast as we can, and go and look at the bears. I am dying to see
the live bears; for I have seen so many inanimate ones in stone, and
wood, and iron, that I seem to have bears on the brain.’

They were standing in the open square in front of the cathedral,
looking up at the bronze statue of Rudolph von Erlach, with the four
seated bears at its base. They went into the church presently, and
admired the fifteenth-century stained glass, and sculptured Pietas, and
the choir stalls. As they were leaving the church, they saw a man and
a woman going quietly into the vestry, preceded by the minister in his
black gown.

‘A wedding evidently,’ whispered Edgar to Daphne. ‘Wouldn’t you like to
see a Swiss wedding?’

‘Do you think they are going to be married? What a sober idea of
matrimony! I should have thought a Swiss wedding would have been like a
scene in an opera.’

An inquiry of the verger proved that it was really a wedding, so
they all crept quietly into the spacious vestry, and stood in the
background, while the priest tied the knot according to the Calvinistic
manner.

It was not a grandiose or thrilling ceremonial, yet there was a
certain sober earnestness in its very simplicity. The rite, shorn
of all ornament, was a religious rite performed with all the grave
businesslike straightforwardness of a civil agreement. Matrimony thus
approached wore a somewhat appalling aspect: no sweet harmony of boyish
voices shrilling a bridal hymn; no mighty organ exploding suddenly
in the crashing chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March; only a man
and woman standing before a priest in a naked stony vestry; a priest
who interrogated them coldly, with his eyes on his book, very much
as if he had been hearing them their Catechism. The man had a dull
indifferent look, and there was that in the bearing and appearance
of the dowdily-dressed woman which hinted that the marriage was an
after-thought.

Daphne shuddered as she came out of the sunless vestry.

‘That is not my idea of a quiet wedding,’ she said. ‘Please let us go
to the bears; I am dying to see something cheerful.’

They went back to the crowded arcades, the stalls, the processional
cattle, and all the life and bustle of a monthly market, and down the
whole length of the street, till they found themselves on a bridge that
spanned a deep hollow between two hills. On one side of the bridge
they looked down into the cattle market, where a multitude of blue
blouses, of every shade and tone, from the vivid azure garment bought
yesterday, to the faded and patched coat of age and poverty, mixed up
with the brown, and cream, and roan, and dun of the cows and oxen,
made a wonderful harmony in blues and browns. On the other side there
was a famous bear-pit, where half-a-dozen mangy-looking animals are
maintained in a state of inglorious repose for the honour of the city.

The bear is not a handsome or a graceful beast, nor does his woolly
front beam with intelligence. Yet he has a look of ponderous
benevolence, a placid air of being nobody’s enemy but his own, which
commends him to those who enjoy his acquaintance only at a distance.
He is fond of being fed, and has an amiable greediness, which brings
him in direct sympathy with his patrons. There is something childlike,
too, and distinctly human in his love of buns, to say nothing of his
innate aptitude for dancing. These qualities are liable to distract
the judgment of his admirers, who forget that at heart he is still a
savage, and that his hug is mortal.

Daphne had provided herself with a bag of cakes, and immediately
became on the friendliest terms with three ragged-looking Bruins who
were squatting on their haunches, ready to receive the favours of
an admiring public. She would not believe Baedeker’s story of the
English officer, who fell into the den, and was killed by these woolly
monsters, after a desperate fight for life.

‘I couldn’t credit anything unkind of them,’ she protested. ‘See how
patiently that dear thing waits, with his mouth wide open, and how
dexterously he catches a bit of roll.’

Even the delight of leaning upon a stone parapet to feed bears in a not
too odoriferous den must come to an end at last, and Daphne, having
had enough of the national beasts, consented to get into a roomy open
carriage which Gerald had found while she was dispensing her favours,
to the admiration of half-a-dozen country people, who were leaning
lazily against the parapet, and wondering at the beauty of the two
English girls in their cool delicate-hued raiment.

There was plenty to admire in the neighbourhood of Berne, albeit the
Alps were in hiding, and after a light luncheon at a confectioner’s
in one of the arcades, they drove about till it was time to dress for
dinner.

They started early on the next afternoon for Thun, and between Berne
and Thun the Jungfrau first revealed herself in all her virginal
beauty—whiter, purer than all the rest of the mountain world—to
Daphne’s delighted eyes. Never could she take her fill of gazing on
that divine pinnacle, that heaven-aspiring mount, rising above a
cluster of satellite hills, like Jupiter surrounded by his moons.

‘If you told me that on that very mountain-top Moses saw God, I should
believe you,’ cried Daphne, deeply moved.

‘I am sorry to say the pinnacle on which Jehovah revealed Himself to
His chosen mouthpiece is a shabby affair in comparison with yonder
peak, a mere hillock of seven thousand feet or so,’ said Gerald,
looking up from the day before yesterday’s _Times_.

‘You have seen it?’

‘I have stood on Serbâl, and Gebel Mousa, and Bas Sasâfeh, the three
separate mountain-tops which contend for the honour of having been
trodden by the feet of the Creator.’

‘How delightful to have seen so much of this world!’

‘And to have so little left in this world to see,’ answered Gerald;
‘there is always the reverse of the shield.’

‘It will make it all the pleasanter for you to settle down at Goring
Abbey,’ said Daphne, assuming her most practical tone. ‘You will not be
tormented by the idea of all the lovely spots of earth, the wonderful
rivers and forests and mountains which you have not seen, as Edgar and
I must be at dear old Hawksyard. But we mean to travel immensely, do we
not, Edgar?’

Another distinct allusion to her coming life, the near approaching
time when she and Edgar would be one. The Squire of Hawksyard smiled
delightedly at this recognition of the bond.

‘I am sure to do whatever you wish, and go wherever you like,’ he
answered; ‘but I am tremendously fond of home, one’s own fireside,
don’t you know, and one’s own stable.’

‘And one’s own china-closet, and one’s own linen-presses,’ added
Daphne, laughing; ‘and one’s own jams and pickles and raspberry
vinegar. Are not those things numbered among the delights of Hawksyard?
But I mean you to take me to the Amazon, and when we have thoroughly
done the Andes, we’ll go over the Isthmus of Panama, and across Mexico,
and finish up with the Rockies. They are only a continuation of the
same range, don’t you know, the backbone of the two Americas.’

Edgar laughed as at an agreeable joke.

‘But I mean it,’ protested Daphne, with her elbow resting on the ledge
of the window, and her eyes devouring the Jungfrau. ‘We are going to be
a second Mr. and Mrs. Brassey in the way of travelling.’

Mr. Turchill looked somewhat uncomfortable, moved by the thought of a
hunting-stable running to seed, at home, while he, a wretched sailor at
the best of times, lay tossing in some southern archipelago, all among
dusky islanders, and reduced to a fishy and vegetable diet. If Daphne
were in earnest the sacrifice would have to be made. Upon that point
he was certain. Never could he resist that capricious creature; never
could he deny her a pleasure, or beat down her airy whims with the
sledge-hammer of common sense.

‘I believe we shall be one of the most foolish couples in Christendom,’
he said aloud; ‘but I think we shall be one of the happiest.’

‘A girl must be very hard-hearted who could not be happy with you,
Edgar,’ said Madoline, looking at him with a frank sisterly smile. ‘You
are so thoroughly good and kind.’

‘Ah, but goodness and kindness don’t always score, you know,’ he
replied, with a laugh in which there was just a shade of sadness.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

‘LOVE IS NOT OLD, AS WHAN THAT IT IS NEW.’


Sir Vernon’s party had sailed over the smiling waters of Thun, with its
villa-dotted shores, and its low amphitheatre of pastoral hills which
form the foreground to the sublimer mountain-land. They and all their
belongings had been carried into Interlaken by the funny little railway
across the Bodelei, that fertile garden-ground between two lakes, which
has such an obvious air of having begun life under water. They had seen
the long rank of prosperous-looking omnibuses waiting for travellers,
and in one of those vehicles they had been carried away from the
walnut-tree boulevard, and all the gaiety and fashion of Interlaken,
to a rustic road ascending the hill towards the pine-woods, and the
mountain peaks far away beyond them, piled up against the sky.

Here at the Jungfraublich they found a charming suite of rooms prepared
for them; rooms not gorgeously furnished or richly ornamented, but
with long French windows which looked upon as fair a landscape as the
eye of man could desire to behold. There rose the Jungfrau in her
sublime beauty, above the fertile valley with its lakes and meadows,
its _châlets_ and gardens, orchards and _bosquets_; all the simplicity
and prettiness of Nature on a small scale lying at the feet of the
immensities.

It was twilight when they arrived, and the first star of evening, a
faint luminous spot in the blue gray, hovered over the snowy pinnacle
of the mountain.

‘Oh, you dear!’ cried Daphne, to the mountain and not to the star;
‘you will be a part of my life from this night. How shall I ever live
without you when I go back to Warwickshire?’

‘You will have to console yourself with an occasional glimpse of the
Wrekin or the Cotswolds,’ said Madoline, laughing.

‘I am almost sorry I ever came to Switzerland,’ murmured Daphne,
turning away from the open window with a sigh, when she had gazed, and
gazed, as if she would fain have made herself a part of the thing she
looked at.

‘Why, dearest?’ asked Lina.

‘Because I shall be always longing to come back here. I shall never be
able to tolerate the eternal flatness of home—mole-hills instead of
mountains.’

‘Hawksyard is rather flat, I admit,’ said Edgar, apologetically;
‘but it is remarkably well drained. There isn’t a healthier house in
England.’

‘Will not all their modern aestheticism—their Queen Anne worship; their
straight garden walks, and straight-backed chairs; their everlasting
tea-trays, and Japanese screens, and sunflowers, and dadoes—sicken
you after this mountain-land?’ cried Daphne. ‘Such a narrow, petty,
childish idea of beauty! Have these perpendicular people ever seen the
Jungfrau, do you suppose?’

‘Seen her, and outlived her, and ascended to a higher empyrean of art,’
answered Gerald. ‘You poor child, do you know that you are going into
raptures about things which a well-bred person would hardly deign to
mention, any more than a Pytchley man would stoop to talk about the
Brighton Harriers? This is cockney Switzerland, as cockney as the
Trossachs, or Killarney, as Ramsgate and Margate. Everybody knows the
Jungfrau, at least by sight; everybody has been at Interlaken. It is
the chief rendezvous of the travellers who come in flocks, and are
driven from pillar to post like sheep, with an intelligent interpreter
playing the part of sheep-dog. I hope you will do the Matterhorn and
Monte Rosa before you go home; and then you will be acquainted with a
brace of mountains which may be spoken about in polite society.’

‘The Jungfrau is good enough for me,’ answered Daphne; ‘I shall never
behold anything more beautiful. Manfred loved her.’

‘I beg your pardon, that amiable gentleman did not love anything. “And
you, ye mountains,” he exclaims, “why are ye beautiful? I cannot
love ye.” He does not care for the sun, nor for his fellow-men, nor
for his own life. He has all the misanthropy of Hamlet, without
Hamlet’s unselfish reasons for being misanthropic. However, I suppose
to young ladies in their teens he will always appear an interesting
character. No doubt you will be starting with your alpenstock at
daybreak to-morrow in search of the Witch of the Alps. You will most
likely discover her by one of the bridges on the road to Grindelwald,
offering dirty bunches of edelweiss, or indifferently fresh milk, to
the passers-by.’

‘Daphne is going nowhere without me,’ said Lina, laying her hand
caressingly upon her sister’s shoulder. ‘She is too enthusiastic to be
trusted in strange places. You will not go anywhere alone, will you,
darling?’

‘I will do nothing in this world to vex you,’ answered Daphne
earnestly, with the straightest, clearest look in her lovely eyes.

Gerald Goring heard her tone, and saw that direct and truthful gaze.
He knew well how much that little speech meant; how grave and complete
was the promise in those few words. Yes, she would be true, she would
be faithful: were it at the cost of two broken hearts. He began to
perceive that he had underrated the moral force of this seemingly
volatile creature; physically so fragile, so made up of whims and
fancies, yet, where honour and affection were concerned, so staunch.

Later in the evening, after they had dined, and Sir Vernon had retired
for the night, Mr. Goring loitered alone in the terraced garden of the
hotel. The mountain, faintly touched with silvery light from a young
moon, rose in front of him, and below glimmered those earthlier lights
which told of human life—yellow candle-light in wooden _châlets_; the
flare of the gas yonder, faint in the distance, where the walnut-tree
walk was all alive with the light of its hotels and its modest Kursaal.
A fitful gust of music from the band came floating up the valley.
Behind him the hotel stood out whitely against a background of dark
pine-woods; lights in many windows. Those ten lighted windows in a row
on the first storey belonged to Sir Vernon’s apartments. He looked
up, vaguely wondering which was Daphne’s window. That one, at the end
of the range, most likely—the casement wide open to the night and the
mystic mountain-land. While he was deciding this a white-robed figure
stepped lightly out upon the balcony, and stood there, gazing at the
far-away peaks faintly outlined against a purple sky.

There were three or four other loungers upon the terrace, each with
his cigar, the luminous point of which gleamed here and there among
the bushes like a glowworm. There was no reason why Daphne should
distinguish Gerald Goring from the rest, as he sat in an angle of the
stone balustrade, half hidden in the shadow of an acacia, lonely,
dissatisfied; yet it was painful to him, in his egotism, to see her
standing there, immovable, a lovely statuesque form, with upturned face
and clasped hands, worshipping the blind, dumb, unresponsive goddess
Nature, and all unconscious that he, her lover, with a human heart to
feel and to suffer, was looking up at her with passionate yearning from
the dewy darkness below.

‘She does not care a jot for me; she is harder than the nether
millstone,’ he said to himself savagely. ‘Yet I once thought her the
softest, most yielding thing in creation—a being so impressionable that
she might be moulded by a thought of mine. I feared the touching of our
spirits, as if I were flame and she tinder. Yet our souls have touched,
and kindled, and burst into a blaze; and she has strength of mind to
pluck herself away unscathed, not a feather of her purity scorched,
from that fiery contact.’

He sat in his shadowy corner, lazily finishing his cigar, and looking
up at the figure in the balcony till it slowly melted from his gaze,
and a muslin curtain was dropped across the open window. Then he left
the garden and wandered away up the wooded hillside, by narrow winding
paths, which seemed to have no particular direction, but to have been
worn by the footprints of other idlers as purposeless—it might be as
unhappy—as he. He stayed in the shadowy wood for a long time, smoking a
second cigar, and preferring that perfumed solitude, and his own gloomy
thoughts to any diversion which the little lighted town down in the
green hollow yonder could have furnished him. And then, at last, on the
verge of midnight, when all the lighted windows of the Jungfraublich
had gone out one after another, and the big white barrack looked blank
and bare, he turned and groped his way back to it through the sinuous
woodland paths, and was admitted by a sleepy porter, who was mildly
reproachful at having been kept up so long.

A grand excursion had been planned for the next day, Sir Vernon
approving the scheme, and politely requesting to be left out of it.

‘You wouldn’t know what to do with me,’ he said. ‘I should be a burden
to you, and I should be terribly tiresome to myself. I have letters to
write which will occupy me all the morning, and in the afternoon I can
stroll down to the Kursaal, or sit in the garden here, or take a little
walk in the wood. You will be back before nine o’clock, I daresay.’

Madoline was loth to leave her father for so long a day. He was an
invalid, and required a good deal of attention, she reminded him.

‘There is Jinman, my dear; he can do all I want. Of course it is much
pleasanter for me to be waited on by you; but Jinman is very handy, and
will serve on a pinch.’

‘But all those letters, dear father,’ urged Lina, looking at an
alarming bundle of businesslike documents. ‘Could I not help you with
those? Could not the greater part of them stand over till we are at
Montreux?’

‘Some of them might, perhaps; but some must be answered to-day. Don’t
worry yourself about me, Lina; I know you have set your heart upon
going up to Müren with Daphne.’

‘I should like to show her the scenery which delighted me so years
ago,’ answered Lina; ‘but I can’t bear the idea of leaving you for so
long.’

‘My dear child, you are talking nonsense,’ said Sir Vernon testily. ‘In
October you are going to leave me altogether.’

‘Yes; but I shall not be leaving you in a strange hotel; and I shall be
so near, at your beck and call, always.’

Sir Vernon, having made up his mind to the sacrifice, carried it out
with consistent fortitude. He himself ordered the carriage which was
to carry off his beloved daughter, with those other three who were
comparatively indifferent to him.

They drove away from the hotel immediately after a seven o’clock
breakfast, in the clear light of morning, while the fields and hedges
were still dewy, and the earth wore her fairest freshest colours and
breathed out her sweetest odours. Soon after they left the village they
came to the road beside the deep and rapid Lutschine, which cleaves the
heart of the valley. On either side rose a lofty wall of hills, slope
above slope, climbing up to heaven, clothed to the very summit with
tall feathery firs, some of stupendous size, the sombre tints of these
patriarchs relieved by the tender green of the young larches; the White
Lutschine rushing on all the while, a wild romantic stream, tumbling
and seething over masses of stone. Here by the river bank they stopped
to see the murder-stone, an inscription cut on the face of the rock,
which tells how at this spot a brother slew his brother.

It is a lovely drive, so lovely that it is hardly possible for the
mind to be distracted from its fairness by any other thought. Daphne
sat silent in her corner of the carriage, drinking in the beauty of
the scene, her gaze wandering upward and upward to those mighty hills,
those forests upon the edge of heaven, so remote, so inaccessible in
their loveliness, the greenery pierced every here and there by narrow
streamlets that came trickling down like wandering flashes of silvery
light. Solitude and silence were the prevailing expression of that
exquisite scene. The cattle had all been removed to the upper regions,
to remote pastures on the borderland of the everlasting snow-fields; of
human life there were few signs; only a distant _châlet_ showing here
and there, perched on some ledge of the green hills. The voice of the
river was the one sound that broke the summer stillness.

There was a pleasant contrast to this solemn loneliness, this silent
loveliness of Nature without humanity, when the carriage drove
jingling up to the inn at Lauterbrunnen, where there was all the life
and bustle of a country inn at fair-time or market. Many vehicles
and horses in the open space in front of the house; a long verandah,
under which travellers were sitting resting after an early morning
tramp from Mürren or Grindelwald; guides, with swarthy sunburnt faces,
homely, good-natured, unintelligent, sitting at ease upon a long stone
parapet, waiting their chances; a great fuss and noise of taking
horses in and bringing horses out; a call for hay and water; a few
people strolling down the road to look at the Staubach, and telling
each other admiringly, inspired by the prophet Baedeker, that it is
the highest unbroken fall in the world. It was very glorious in the
morning sunshine, a dim rainbow-tinted arc of spray; and Daphne thought
of the Witch of the Alps, and how she had worn this cloudlike fall as
a garment, when she showed herself to Manfred. There was no inn there
in those far-away romantic days—no odour of bad brandy and worse wine;
no tourists; no cockneyism of any kind—only the sweet pastoral valley
in its lonely beauty, and the solemn regions of mountain and snow
rising whitely above its placid greenery, and walling it in from the
commonplace earth.

There was a halt of half an hour or so at Lauterbrunnen, just long
enough to pay proper homage to the Staubach, and to explore the queer
little primitive village, and for Daphne to burden herself with a
number of souvenirs, all more or less of a staggy or goaty order,
bargaining sturdily for the same with the sunburnt proprietor of a
covered stall opposite the inn, whose honesty in no case demanded
more than thrice the amount he was prepared to accept. By the time
Daphne had concluded her transactions with this merchant of mountain
_bric-à-brac_, and had made herself spiky with paper-knives and
walking-sticks of the horny kind—which treasures she reluctantly
surrendered to the safe keeping of an inn servant, to be packed in the
carriage against her return—the steeds were ready to convey the two
ladies up the mountain-path, the gentlemen being bent upon going up on
foot. Daphne wanted to walk, and had just bought herself an alpenstock
with that view, but Lina would not let her undertake the journey; so
she handed Edgar her alpenstock, and allowed herself to be hoisted
into a queer kind of saddle, with a railing round it, and Lina being
similarly mounted, they began the ascent, going through more mud, just
at starting, than seemed compatible with such perfect summer weather.

‘I hope, Edgar,’ said Daphne gravely, ‘that you won’t take your idea of
my horsemanship from my performance on this animal, and in this saddle,
or else I am afraid you’ll never let me ride Black Pearl.’

Edgar laughingly assured her that her seat was perfection, even in the
railed-in saddle, and that she should have the best horse money could
buy, or judgment secure.

The two young men went on before them, leaping from stone to stone, and
making great play with their alpenstocks as they bounded across the
streamlets which frequently intersected their path. It was a narrow,
narrow way, winding up the shoulder of the hill, now in sunlight, now
in shade; the summer air sweetened with the scent of the pine-trees;
pine-clad slopes above, pine-clad slopes below, sometimes gently
slanting downward, a green hillside which little children might play
upon, sometimes a sheer descent, terrible to the eye; _châlets_ dotting
the meadows far below; villages spread out on the greensward of the
valley, and looking like clusters of toy houses; the road winding
through the valley like a silver ribbon; the awful Jungfrau range
facing them, as they ascended, in all its unspeakable majesty; grander,
and yet ever grander, as they came nearer to it.

Sometimes, as they rode through the pine-trees, they seemed to be
riding straight into the snowy mountains; they were so close, so close
to that white majesty. Then as they came suddenly into the open, those
airy peaks receded, remote as ever, melting farther and farther away as
one rode after them, like a never-to-be-reached fairyland.

‘I could almost cry with vexation,’ exclaimed Daphne after one of these
optical illusions. ‘I thought we were close to the Jungfrau, and there
she stands smiling down at me, with her pallid enigmatical smile, from
the very top of the world. Edgar, if you love me, you must take me up
that impertinent mountain before I am year older.’

‘You were talking yesterday of the Cordilleras.’

‘I know, but we must finish off the Alps first—Mont Blanc, and
the Jungfrau, the Schreckhorn, the Rothhorn, the Matterhorn, the
Finsteraarhorn, and all the rest of them. I cannot be defied by the
insolence of Nature. She has thrown her gauntlet, and I must positively
pick it up. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet—and the general
experience seems to show that mountains are obstinate things—Mahomet
must go to the mountain. I mean to have it out with Mont Blanc before I
die.’

‘I don’t believe a lady has ever done the ascent,’ said Edgar, leading
his mistress’s meek and patient steed along a winding ledge. The animal
was a mere infant, rising three, but as free from skittishness as if he
had been rising three-and-twenty.

‘That shows how densely ignorant you must be of the age you live in,’
protested Daphne. ‘Be sure that there is nothing in this life which the
man of the present can do which the woman of the present won’t imitate;
and the more essentially masculine the thing is the more certain she is
to attempt it.’

‘But I hope you don’t rank yourself among masculine women, Daphne,’
murmured Edgar, drawing protectingly near her, as they turned a sharp
corner.

‘I don’t; but I mean to ascend Mont Blanc.’

They were approaching the village on the height. The Lauterbrunnen
valley was sinking deeper and deeper into remoteness, a mere green
cleft in the mountains. They had met and passed many people on
their way: ladies being carried down by sturdy natives in a kind of
sedan-chair, something of the palki species; voyagers struggling
upwards with their belongings, with a view to spending some days in the
quiet settlement among the snow-peaks; guides jogging by with somebody
else’s luggage; mules laden with provisions. The guides gave each
other a grinning good-day as they passed, and exchanged remarks in a
_patois_ not very easy to understand; remarks that had a suggestion of
being critical, and not altogether commendatory, of the clients at that
moment under escort.

‘Here we are, up in the skies at last,’ cried Daphne, as she sprang
lightly to the ground, spurning her lover’s proffered aid, and just
brushing against the eager arms held out to receive her; ‘and oh how
dreadfully far away the top of the Jungfrau still is, and how very
dirty she looks now we are on a level with her shoulder!’

‘It is too late in the year for you to see her in her virginal purity.
A good deal of the snow has melted,’ said Madoline apologetically.

‘But it ought not to melt. I thought I was coming to a region of
eternal snow. Why, the lower peaks are horribly streaky and brown.
Thank Heaven the Silberhorn still looks dazzlingly white. And is this
Mürren? A real mountain village? How I wish we were going to live here
for a month.’

‘I fancy you would get horribly tired of it,’ suggested Gerald Goring.

She did not stay to argue the point, but ordered Edgar to explore the
village with her immediately. The big wooden barrack of an hotel,
with its bright green blinds and pine balconies, looked down upon
her, the commonplace type of an advanced civilisation. Young men,
all affecting a more or less Alpine-Clubbish air, lounged about in
various easy attitudes; young women, in every variety of hat and gauze
veil, read Tauchnitz novels, or made believe to be sketching, under
artistic-looking umbrellas. Daphne made but a cursory survey of this
tourist population before she started off upon her voyage of discovery,
with Edgar in delighted attendance on her steps. Madoline and Gerald,
who both knew all that there was to be known about Mürren, were content
to loiter in the garden of the Hôtel des Alpes, dreamily contemplative
of the sublimities around and about them.

‘I give you half an hour for your explorations,’ said Gerald, as Daphne
and her swain departed; ‘if you are not back by that time, Lina and I
will eat all the luncheon. At this elevation luncheon is not a matter
to be trifled with. There are limits to the supplies.’

He went into the hotel to give his orders, while Lina walked slowly up
and down one of the terraced pathways, looking at the wild chaos of
glacier and rock before her, looking, yet seeing but little of that
chilly grandeur, caring but little for its origin or its history, with
sad eyes turned inward, vaguely contemplating a vague sorrow.

It was not a grief of yesterday’s date—it was a sorrow made up of
doubts and anxieties which had their beginning in Gerald Goring’s
letter telling her of his intended trip to Canada. From that hour to
this she had perceived a gradual change in him. His letters from the
Western world, kind and affectionate as they had been, were altogether
different from the letters he had written to her in former years. When
he came back the man himself seemed different. He was not less kind, or
less attentive, less eager to gratify and to anticipate her wishes. To
her, and in all his relations with her, he was faultless: but he was
changed. Something had gone out of him—life, spirit, soul, the flame
which makes the lamp glorious and beautiful; something was faded and
dead in him; leaving the man himself a gentlemanly piece of mechanism,
like one of those victims to anatomical experiment from whose living
body the brain, or some particular portion of the brain, has been
abstracted, and which mechanically performs and repeats the same
actions with a hideous soulless monotony. ‘Was it that he loved her
less? Was it that he had ceased to love her?’ she had asked herself,
recoiling with shuddering heart-sickness from the thought; as if she
had found herself suddenly on the verge of some horrible abyss, and
seen inevitable ruin and death below. No, she told herself, judging his
heart by her own. A love that had grown as theirs had grown, side by
side with the gradual growth of mind and body, a love interwoven with
every memory and every hope, was not of the kind to change unawares
to indifference. She was perfectly free from the taint of vanity;
but she knew that she was worthy of her lover’s love. She, who had
been her father’s idol, the object of respect and consideration from
all about her, was accustomed to the idea of being beloved. She had
been told too often of her beauty not to know that she was handsomer
than the majority of women. She knew that in mental power she was her
lover’s equal: by birth, by fortune, by every attribute and quality,
she was fitted to be his wife, to rule over his household, and to be a
purifying and elevating influence in his life. His mother had loved her
as warmly as it was possible for that languid nature to love anything.
Their two lives were interwoven by the tenderest associations of
the past as well as by the solemn engagement which bound them in the
present. No, it was not possible for Madoline, seeing all things from
the standpoint of her own calm and evenly-balanced mind, to imagine
infidelity in a lover so long and so closely bound to her. Those sudden
aberrations of the human mind which wreck so many lives, for which no
looker-on can account, and which make men and women a world’s wonder,
had never come within the range of her experience.

Rejecting the idea of inconstancy, Madoline was compelled to find some
other reason for the indefinable change which had slowly been revealed
to her since Gerald’s last home-coming. What could it be except the
languor of ill-health, or, perhaps, the terrible satiety of a life
which had so few duties, and so many indulgences, a life that called
for no effort of mind, for not one act of self-denial?

‘Every man ought to have a career,’ she said to herself. ‘My poor
Gerald has none; no ambition; nothing to hope for, or work for,
or build upon. The new days of his life bring him nothing but old
pleasures. He is getting weary and worn out in the very morning of
existence. What will he be when the day begins to wane?’

She had been thinking of these things for a long time, and had
determined upon opening her mind to her lover, seriously, candidly,
without reserve, with all the outspoken freedom of one who deemed
herself a part of his life, his second self.

Here, in the face of these solemn heights, which seem ever typical of
the loftier aims of life—all the more so, perhaps, because of that air
of unattainableness which pervades them—she felt as if they were more
alone, farther from all the sordid considerations of worldly wisdom
than in the valley below. She could speak to him here from her heart of
hearts.

He was walking by her side along one of the narrow paths, just where a
rustic fence separated the grounds of the hotel from the steep mountain
side—walking somewhat listlessly, lost in a dreamy silence—when she put
her arm gently through his and drew a little nearer to him.

‘Gerald dearest, I want to talk to you—seriously.’

He turned suddenly, and looked at her, with more of alarm in his
countenance than she had anticipated.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said with a sweet smile. ‘I am not going to
be severe. I am only anxious.’

‘Anxious about what?’

‘About you, dear love; about your health, mental and physical. You
remember what you told me before you went to Canada.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your trip did you good, did it not?’

‘Worlds of good. I came home a whole man.’

‘But since you came home the old feeling of languor has returned, has
it not? You take so little interest in life; you look at everything
with such a weary indifferent air.’

‘My dearest, do you expect me to go into raptures with the beaten
tracks and cockney lions of Switzerland, as poor little Daphne does?
There is not a yard of the ground we have been passing over that I
do not know by heart—that I have not seen under every condition of
atmosphere, and in every variety of circumstances. You forget how
many months of my life I wasted in balancing myself upon razor-edged
_arrêtes_, and hewing my way up perpendicular peaks with an ice-axe. I
cannot gush about these dear old familiar mountains, or fall into an
ecstasy because the lakes are bluer and broader than our Avon.’

‘I don’t expect you to be ecstatic, dear; I only want to know that
you are happy, and that you take a healthy interest in life. I have
been thinking lately that a man in your position ought to have a
public career. Without public duties the life of a very rich man must
inevitably be idle, since all his private duties are done by other
people. And an idle life never yet was a happy one.’

‘Spoken like a copy-book, my dearest,’ answered Gerald lightly. ‘Well,
I own I have led an idle life hitherto, but some of it has been rather
laborious idleness; as when I accomplished the passage of the Roththal
Sattel and ascended yonder Jungfrau between sunrise and sundown; or
when I came as near death as a man can come, and yet escape it, while
climbing the Pointe des Ecrins, in the French Alps.’

‘I want you by-and-by to think of another kind of labour, Gerald,’
said Lina, with tender seriousness. ‘I want you to think of doing good
to your fellow-men—you, who are so gifted, and who have the means of
carrying out every benevolent intention. I want you to be useful in
your generation, and to win for yourself one of those great enduring
names which are only won by usefulness.’

‘Come now, my sweetest monitor, there you shoot beyond the mark. Surely
Virgil and Horace, Dante and Shakespeare, have won names of wider glory
than all the useful men who ever lived. That idea of usefulness has
never had much charm for me. I have not a practical mind. I take after
my mother, who was one of the lilies of the field, rather than after my
father, who belonged to the toilers and spinners. If I had discovered
in my nature any vein of the gold of poetry, I would have been willing
to dig hard for that immortal ore; but as I can’t be a poet, I don’t
care to be anything else.’

‘And with your talents and your wealth you con be content to be
nothing?’ exclaimed Lina, deeply shocked.

‘Nothing, except a tolerably indulgent landlord, a patron
of the fine arts, on a small scale, and by-and-by, if you
please—your—obedient—husband.’

The last words came somewhat slowly.

‘If you are happy, I am content,’ said Lina, with a sigh; ‘but it is
because I fancy you are not happy that I urge you to lead a more active
life, to give yourself greater variety of thought and occupation.’

‘And do you think that, if I were unhappy, the wear and fret of public
life, the dealing with workers whose chief object seems to be to
frustrate and stultify each other’s efforts; to be continually baulked
and disappointed; to have my most generous impulses ridiculed, my
loftiest hopes cried down as the dreams of a madman; perhaps, at the
close of my career, after I had given my days and nights, my brain
and body, to the public cause, to be denounced as an incendiary and a
lunatic—do you think a career of that kind would ensure happiness? No,
love, Providence, in its divine wisdom, has allowed me to belong to
the lotus-eating class. Let me nibble my lotus, and lie at ease in my
sunshiny valley, and be content to let others enjoy the rapture of the
fray.’

‘If I could be sure that you were happy,’ faltered Lina, feeling very
unhappy herself.

‘Ought I not to be happy, when you are so good to me?’ he asked, taking
her hand and pressing it tenderly, with very real affection, but an
affection chastened by remorse. ‘I am as happy as a man can be who has
inherited a natural bent to melancholy. My mother was not a cheerful
woman, as you know.’

This was an undeniable fact. Lady Geraldine, after having made what
some people called a splendid marriage, and others a _mésalliance_,
had gone through life with an air of subdued melancholy, an elegant
pensiveness which suited her languid beauty as well as the colours
she chose for her gowns, or the flowers she wore in her hair. She
had borne herself with infinite grace, as one whose cup of life was
tinctured with sorrow, beneath the snowy calm of whose bosom the slow
consuming fire of grief was working its gradual ravages. She died of an
altogether commonplace disease, but she contrived so to bear herself
in her decay, that when she was dead everybody was convinced she had
perished slowly of a broken heart, and that she had never smiled after
her marriage with Mr. Giles-Goring. This was society’s verdict upon a
woman who had lived an utterly selfish and self-indulgent life, and who
had spent fifteen hundred a-year upon her milliner.

Lina and Gerald strolled up and down for a little while, almost
in silence. She had said her say, and nothing had come of it. Her
disappointment was bitter; for she had fancied that it needed but a
few words from her to kindle the smouldering fires of ambition. She
had supposed that every man was ambitious, however he might allow his
aspirations to be choked by the thorns of this world: and here she had
found in the lover of her choice a man without the faintest desire
to achieve greatness, or to do good in his generation. Had he been
such a man as Edgar Turchill, she would have felt no surprise at his
indifference to the wider questions of life. Edgar was a man born to do
his duty in a narrow groove; a large-hearted, simple-minded creature,
but little removed from the peasant who tills the fields, and whose
desires and hopes are shut in by the narrow circle of village life. But
Gerald Goring—Gerald, whose ardent boyhood, whose passion for all the
loftier delights of life, had lifted him so high above the common ruck
of mankind—to find him at nine-and-twenty a languid pessimist, willing
to live a life as selfish and as useless as his mother had led before
him: this was indeed hard. And it was harder still for Madoline to
discover how much she had overrated her influence upon him. A few years
ago a word from her had been sufficient to urge him to any effort, to
give bent and purpose to his mind; but a few years ago he had been
still warm with the flush and fire of early youth.

Daphne and Edgar joined them presently, both warm and breathless after
a small experiment in the climbing way.

‘We have seen everything, and we have been up a mountain,’ exclaimed
Daphne. ‘It is the funniest little village—a handful of wooden cottages
perched on a narrow track straggling along anyhow on the very edge of
the hill; a little new church that looks as if it had dropped from the
clouds; a morsel of a post-office; a stack of wood beside every house;
and a bundle of green vegetables hanging to dry in every porch and
balcony. Poor people, do they live upon dried vegetables, I wonder? We
found an English lady and her son sitting in the middle of the road—if
you can call it a road—sketching a native boy. He was a very handsome
boy, and sat as still as a statue. We stood ever so long and watched
the two artists; and then we had a climb; and Edgar says I am a good
climber. Do you think,’ coaxingly to Lina, ‘we might try the Silberhorn
after luncheon?’

They lunched in a sunny airy corner of the big bare _salle-à-manger_
merrily enough, or with that seeming gaiety of heart which brightens
so many a board, notwithstanding that the stream flows darkly enough
below the ripple and the gleam. Daphne had made it the business of her
life to seem happy and at ease ever since that fatal night at Fribourg.
She wanted Gerald Goring to believe that she was satisfied with her
lot—nay, even that she was honestly attached to her plighted husband,
and that her conduct that night had been but a truant impulse, a
momentary aberration from common sense and duty. She was fighting her
battle bravely, sometimes smiling with an aching heart, sometimes
really succeeding in being happy, with the inconsiderate unreasoning
happiness of youth and health, and the rapture of living in a world
where all was alike new and beautiful. After luncheon she went out with
Edgar for another ramble, until it should be time to begin the descent
to Lauterbrunnen. They had all agreed to walk down, in a leisurely
way, after tea; and the horses had already gone back with the two men
who had led them up. Daphne wanted to learn where and how she could
get nearest to the mountains. It seemed provoking to see them there,
so near, and yet as far beyond her reach as if she had been looking at
them from her window at Interlaken.

‘Would it really be too much for an afternoon walk?’ she asked, gazing
longingly at the Silberhorn.

Gerald explained the preparations and the assistance, and the length of
time which would be required for any attempt upon that snowy crest.

‘Please show me the very ledge where the child’s red frock used to be
seen,’ she asked, perusing the wilderness of crag and peak.

‘What child? what frock?’ asked Edgar.

‘Don’t you know that ever so many years ago a lammergeier carried
off a child from this village of Mürren, and alighted with it upon
an inaccessible shelf of rock on the side of the Jungfrau, and that
for years afterwards some red scraps, the remnants of the poor baby’s
clothes, were seen amongst the snow?’

‘A pitiful story, wherever you found it,’ said Gerald; ‘but I think the
baby’s frock would have been blown away or buried under the snow before
the vulture had forgotten the flavour of the baby.’

And then, seeing that Daphne hungered for any information about yonder
mountain, he condescended to tell her how he and a couple of friends,
allied by the climbing propensity rather than by ancient friendship,
had ascended the north face of the Silberhorn, with the idea of finding
a direct route over its summit to the top of the Jungfrau; how after
ten hours of very hard work they had planted their feet on the top of
the dazzling peak, only to find the snow falling thickly round them,
and the Jungfrau and the Giessen glacier already hidden behind a fleecy
cloud; how, after waiting in vain for the storm to pass, they had made
a perilous descent to the upper plateau of the Giessen glacier; and
how there, amidst thick clouds and driving snow, they groped their way
round the edges of huge crevasses before they hit on a practical path
descending the ice-fall; and how, finding the night closing in upon
them, they were fain to sit upon a ledge of rock under a sheltering
cliff till daybreak.

‘Poor things!’ exclaimed Daphne with infinite compassion; ‘and you
never reached the top of the Jungfrau after all.’

‘Not by that way. I have scaled her granite point from the Roththal
Sattel.’

‘And is it very lovely up there?’

‘_C’est selon._ When I mounted, the Maiden was wrapped in cloud, and
there was no distant view, nor could we spare more than a quarter of an
hour for rest on the summit; but we saw an avalanche or two on our way,
and altogether we had a very good time.’




CHAPTER XXIX.

‘I MEANE WELL, BY GOD THAT SIT ABOVE.’


It was pleasant to drink tea at a little table in the garden of the
inn, with the white mountain world spread before them in all its glory,
flushed with the golden lights of afternoon. Edgar looked ineffably
happy as he sat sipping his tea and watching Daphne eat bread and
honey, which seemed her chief nutriment in this part of the world; for
Swiss poultry and Swiss veal, for all the varieties of _vol-au-vent_,
_fricandeau_, _ris de veau_, and _fricassée_, under which the
inevitable calf disguised himself, she showed herself absolutely
indifferent; but she had an infinite capacity for Swiss rolls and Swiss
honey.

While they were sitting at tea, resting before they began the downward
walk, Mr. Turchill produced a letter which that morning’s post had
brought him from his mother: one of those worthy commonplace letters
which set one’s teeth on edge when read aloud amidst the loftiest
aspects of nature. But Edgar saw nothing beyond the love and the
kindness in his mother’s epistle, and would have read it on the summit
of Caucasus, yea, on that topmost untrodden snow-peak which the
Persians call the Holy Mountain, and would have perceived no discord
between the letter and the scene.

‘The dear mother’s letter is full of you, Daphne,’ he said; ‘would it
bore you and Mr. Goring if I were to read a little of it, Lina?’

Mr. Goring protested, with a stifled yawn, that he would be delighted.
‘There is nothing,’ he asserted, ‘more interesting than domestic
correspondence. Look at the Paston letters, for instance. And I
could fancy your mother writing quite in the Paston style,’ he added
graciously.

Edgar unfolded the thin, closely written sheet, written in those neat,
sloping characters which had been drilled into all the young ladies
at Miss Tompion’s academy, and crossed—for the habit of crossing a
letter had obtained in Mrs. Turchill’s youth, and she returned to
it instinctively under stress of foreign postage, albeit twopence
halfpenny is not a ruinous amount to pay for a letter.

‘“I am pleased to hear that Daphne is enjoying herself, and that she
is so enthusiastic about the scenery. I remember, when I learned
drawing at Miss Tompion’s, doing a very pretty sketch of Chamounix,
with Mont Blanc in the background, in black and white chalks on tinted
paper. I believe some of the snow was scratched in with a penknife
by Signor Pasticcio, but all the rest was my very own, and papa gave
me a sovereign when the drawing was sent home. It used to hang in
your father’s dressing-room, but one of the housemaids contrived to
break the glass one day with her broom-handle, and I did not care
to go to the expense of having it reglazed: Gilbert is so dear for
all jobs of that kind. I have always understood that the Jungfrau is
very inferior to Mont Blanc; but as you say Byron admired it I have
no doubt it is very beautiful, though, of course, in a minor degree.
Every geography will tell you that Mont Blanc is the higher. I hope you
are careful to avoid wet feet”—hum—hum—hum,’ mumbled Edgar, skipping
the tender mother’s injunctions about his care of his health, and
hurrying on to that part of the letter which related to Daphne. ‘Oh,
here it is. “Tell Daphne, with my love, that I am going carefully over
all the house-linen—weeding out all the sheets that are weak in the
middle”—dear old mother! she always will go into details—“and making a
large addition to the table-linen. I have also had a new inventory made
in duplicate. I know that the modern idea is for the bride to provide
the house-linen. That is all very well when the husband is a young
man who has his own way to make in the world, but not for my boy, who
has a home of his own—a fine old house which his ancestors have lived
in, and spent their money upon, from generation to generation. I hope
Daphne will be as fond of the old Hawksyard glass and china—which, as
she knows, is the collection of more than a century—as she is of the
mountains; but I’m afraid the romantic kind of temperament which goes
into raptures with mountains is hardly the disposition which could take
delight in housekeeping, and the many details of home-life.”’

       *       *       *       *       *

‘I hope you won’t be angry with her for saying that,’ added Edgar
apologetically, as he hastily folded the letter, feeling that he had
read too much. ‘You know she means it kindly.’

‘I know she has been ever so much more indulgent than I deserve,’
answered Daphne gaily; ‘I mean to be a most dutiful daughter-in-law,
and to learn everything your mother will deign to teach me in the way
of housekeeping, from hemming tea-cloths to making mincemeat. One ought
to make one’s own mincemeat, ought one not, Edgar? Do you and I belong
to the class who make their own mincemeat?’

‘I think it’s rather a question of inclination than of rank, love.
But I’d rather you left the pies and puddings to the cook. I’d rather
have you riding across the Vale of the Red Horse with me than stoning
raisins or chopping suet in the still-room.’

‘And I would rather, too.’

‘Do you know that there is a great deal of quiet sagacity in your
mother’s gentle depreciation of Daphne’s passion for mountain scenery?’
said Gerald, his face lighting up with something of the old mischievous
spirit, something of that gaiety of heart with which he had teased
Daphne in the days when she was Poppæa and he was Nero! ‘This frantic
admiration of snow-peaks is only a modern feeling, a mere fashion
and fad of the moment, like the worship of Chippendale furniture and
Adam chimney-pieces. The old Greeks knew nothing of it. The ancients
never raved about their mountains. They valued them only because their
tops touched the blue ether, the world peopled by the gods. Even your
Shakespeare, the man of universal mind, had no passion for mountain
lands.’

‘Because he had never seen anything higher than the Wrekin, poor
darling!’ said Daphne, with delicious compassion; as if she were
speaking of a London Arab who had never seen a buttercup.

‘Ruskin thinks it was good for his genius to have seen so little.
“No mountain passions were to be allowed to Shakespeare,” he says;
“Shakespeare could be allowed no mountains—not even any supreme natural
beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and clover, pansies, the
passing clouds, the Avon’s flow, and the undulating hills and woods of
Warwickshire, lest it should make him in the least overrate their power
on the strong, full-fledged minds of men.”’

‘That is remarkably clever,’ said Daphne; ‘but there is a tone of
calm superiority about it which makes my blood boil. Why will all the
critics insist upon patronising Shakespeare, as if they knew so much
more about him than ever be know about himself? Talk of vivisection
indeed, vivisection is not half so atrocious as the way Shakespeare has
been treated by modern criticism!’

And now, when all the valley below them lay steeped in golden light,
when the northward-facing mountains were beginning to take the chill
cold gray of evening, and the western pinnacles were flushed with rose
and purple, they began their descent of the narrow winding way, gaily,
to all seeming, for they talked a good deal, and Daphne lingered on her
way to gather the wild flowers that grew on the thymy banks—harebells,
and clover, gentian, and the Alpine rose, a white starry flower with
a long fragile stem, and delicate ferns, and here and there a handful
of wild strawberries. Gerald had more than once to insist upon her
hastening her footsteps, lest night should overtake them on the steep
mountain path.

‘If you loiter so much I will put you into a wooden sledge when we get
to the half-way house, and run you down the mountain,’ he threatened.

Lovelier and yet more lovely looked the pine-woods, the green slopes,
the fertile valley, the far-away white peaks, so shadowy, so awful in
the changing lights of evening. Half the sky was ablaze with crimson
and orange, fading off into tender opalescent greens and purples, the
indescribable hues of rare jasper and rarer jade, as they neared the
Staubach. They had loitered as long as it was safe to loiter. The lamps
were lighted at the inn, and their coachman was watching for their
return. They drove home through the gray twilight, which was fast
deepening into night, and through a landscape of deepest gloom—a narrow
region, walled in by dark hills; dim lights, dotted here and there
amidst the darkness, ever so far apart, telling of lonely lives, of
humble peasant homes where pleasure and variety were unknown, a life of
monotonous labour, hidden from the world.

‘Have you enjoyed your day, Daphne?’ asked Lina, as they drove home,
the rapid river flowing noisily beside them, the white foam on the
waters flashing through the gloom.

‘Enjoyed it? There is no word big enough to say how delightful it has
been! It is a day that will stand apart in the history of my life,’
answered Daphne, slipping her hand lovingly through her sister’s arm.

‘What a privileged nature to be so easily made happy!’ said Gerald,
with a palpable sneer.

People are apt to let slip society’s mask in such a moment, on a dark
road shut in by mountain and wood, after a long and thoughtful silence,
forgetting that feeling is audible in the darkness, though faces are
hidden, and the clouded brow or the quiver of the lip is invisible.

Gerald Goring had been thinking deeply during the hillside walk and
the homeward drive, touched inexpressibly by Madoline’s affection, and
trying as honestly as was possible to a character which was not given
to mental or moral effort—trying to face a future clouded over with
fears. Could he ever be again as he had been, Madoline’s true lover?
This was the question which he asked himself, coming down the hill in
the glory of the evening light, a little aloof from the other three.
His honour and reverence for her were in nowise lessened by that fatal
passion which had changed the current of his life. He knew that of
all women he had ever met she was the noblest and the best; that, with
her, life would be lifted above the sordid, vulgar level of selfish
pleasures and sensual indulgences; that, as her husband, he could not
fail to become in somewise useful to his species, to win some measure
of renown, and to leave a name behind him that would sound sweet in the
ears of generations to come. He could imagine her in the riper beauty
of matronhood, the mother of his children, training up his sons to
tread the loftier paths of life, rearing his daughters in an atmosphere
of purity and love. He pictured her at the head of his household; he
told himself that with such a wife he must be an idiot if he missed
happiness. And then he looked with gloomy despairing eyes at the other
side of the question, and tried to realise what his life would be with
the butterfly being who had crept into his heart and made herself its
empress.

As well as he knew Lina’s perfection did he know Daphne’s faultiness.
She was frivolous, selfish, shallow, capricious, vehement. Yes, but
he loved her. She had no higher idea of this world than as a place
made exquisitely beautiful in order that she might be happy in it;
nor of her fellow-creatures than as persons provided to minister to
her pleasures; nor of the future beyond life than as a vague misty
something which had better not be thought about; nor of duty, but
as a word found in the Church Catechism, and which one might banish
from one’s mind after one’s confirmation. Yes, but he loved her.
Her faultiness did not lessen his love by the weight of a grain of
thistledown. He yearned to take her to his heart, faulty as she was,
and cherish her there for ever. He longed to spend the rest of his days
with her, and it seemed to him that life would be worthless without
her. She might prove a silly wife, a careless mother. Yes, but he loved
her. For him she was just the one most exquisite thing in creation, the
one supreme necessity of his soul.

‘“_Animæ dimidium meæ._” Yes, that is what she is,’ he said to himself
as he sat in the summer darkness, with dreamy eyes looking upward to
the lonely melancholy hills, where huge arollas of a thousand years’
growth spread their black branches against the snow-line just above
them. What a desolate world it looked in the gathering gloom!—only a
few solitary stars gleaming in the infinite remoteness of the sky, the
moon not yet risen above yonder snowy battlements.

It was past nine o’clock when they drove into the shrubberied approach
to the Jungfraublich. The hotel looked dazzling after the obscurity of
the valley. Daphne would have liked to dash into the billiard-room and
challenge her lover to a game; but, since it was impossible for a young
lady to play at a public table, she went upstairs to the sitting-room
on the first floor, where Sir Vernon was waiting for them, and where
there was a table spread with tea, cold chickens, and rolls and honey.
Lina sat by her father, telling him the history of their day, and
hearing all he had to say about his letters and papers. Edgar was
in tremendous spirits, and inclined to make fun of the queer little
village on the edge of everlasting snows; Daphne was talkative; Sir
Vernon was gracious. It was only Gerald Goring who bore no part in
the conversation. He looked worn and wearied with the day’s work, and
yet it had been nothing for an Alpine climber; a mere constitutional
walk, barely enough to keep a man in training. When tea was over he
retired to the balcony, and sat there, smoking cigarettes and watching
the moon climb the dark slopes of heaven; while the others looked over
newly-arrived papers and periodicals, and discussed to-morrow’s trip to
Grindelwald and the glaciers.

The morning came, as fair and fresh a dawn as ever peeped shyly
across the edge of the Alps, but Gerald, watching the slow kindling
of that rosy glow after a sleepless night, greeted the new day with
no thanksgiving. To him, in his present frame of mind, it would have
seemed a good thing if that day had never dawned; if this planet
Earth had dropped out of its place in the starry procession, and gone
down to darkness and chaos, like a torch burnt out. He rose with that
inexorable sun, which pursues his course with so little regard for the
griefs and perplexities of humanity, and was out in the dewy woods
above the hotel before civilised people were stirring. Anything was
better than to lie on a sleepless couch staring at the light. Here,
moving about among the dark pine-stems, treading the narrow tracks,
shifting his point of view at every turn in the path, life was less
intolerable. He could think better—his brain was clearer—his pulse less
feverish.

‘What was he to do?’ he asked himself helplessly. What did Wisdom
counsel? What did Honour urge? Surely about this latter voice there
could be no question. Honour would have him be true to Madoline, at
any sacrifice of his own feelings. Duty was plain enough here. He had
pledged himself to her by every bond which honest men hold sacred. He
must keep his word.

‘But if we are both miserable for life?’ he asked himself. ‘Can she be
happy if I am wretched? And what charm has existence for me without
Daphne?’

‘You must forget Daphne,’ urged Duty; ‘your first and nobler love must
obtain the mastery. You must pluck this idle weed, this mere caprice,
out of your heart.’

He told himself that the thing was to be done and he would try honestly
to do it. He would steel himself against Daphne’s wiles. Did not
Ulysses pluck himself away from the enchantress’s fatal island, wrench
himself out of her very web, and get home to Ithaca sound in body and
mind, and live happy ever afterwards with his faithful Penelope? Or at
least this is the popular idea of Ulysses, in spite of those breathings
of slander which make the Circe episode something more than Platonic.
What nobler image can life give than that of a faithful lover, a loyal
husband, tempted and yet true? Nor did poor little Daphne go out of
her way to exercise Circean arts. She charmed as the flowers charm,
innocently and unconsciously. She was no Becky Sharp, weaving a subtle
web out of people’s looks and smiles, drooping lashes, lifted eyelids,
the arrowy gleams of fatal green eyes. She wanted to be faithful to her
lover, and loyal to her sister. Her letter had been straight and true.
If he sinned, he sinned of his own accord, and had no such excuses as
Adam used against the partner God had given him.

He wandered about restlessly, in an utterly purposeless way, till it
was time to go back to the seven o’clock breakfast. He would have liked
to start alone for the shining slate mountain yonder, to spend the day
there in a sultry solitude, lying on his back and staring up at the
unfathomable blue, smoking a little, reading Heine a little—Heine’s
ballad-book had been his gospel of late—idling away the empty day,
and growing wiser and better in solitude. But he was pledged to go in
beaten tracks; to go and eat and drink at The Bear, and gaze at the
lower glacier, like a Cook’s tourist, and be faintly interested in the
coachman’s exposition of the view, and be blandly tolerant of girls
selling edelweiss, and boys waking the echoes with Alpine horns, and
all the conventional features of that exquisite drive from Interlaken
to Grindelwald.

However much he might affect to despise the familiar route, he could
not deny the beauty of the landscape by-and-by, when they were all
seated in the carriage and had crossed the Lutschine for the first
time, and were climbing slowly up the raised road above the river.
It was a brilliant morning, the wooded hills steeped in sunlight
and balmy summer air; the tender green of the young shoots showing
bright against the sombre darkness of the everlasting pines; water
rushing down the hillsides every here and there, sometimes a torrent,
sometimes a fine thread like spun glass, dropping from crag to crag.
The two young men got out of the carriage and walked up the hills; the
valley through which the road wound was exquisitely verdant—a scene of
pastoral beauty, fertile, richly wooded, but passing lonely. Daphne
sorely missed the dappled kine which relieve and animate a Warwickshire
landscape.

‘What in Heaven’s name has become of the cattle?’ she exclaimed.
‘Here are meadows, and homesteads, and gardens, and orchards, but
not a living object in the landscape. I thought Switzerland swarmed
with cows, and was musical with cowbells. And where is the chorus of
herdsmen singing the “_Ranz des Vaches_?”’

‘Perhaps there has been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and the
cows have all been condemned,’ speculated Edgar.

Gerald explained that the cattle and their keepers had all gone up into
the higher regions to crop the summer herbage.

‘And that accounts for this green and silent valley,’ said Daphne. ‘It
is rather a romantic idea; but I should have liked to see the cattle
all the same. I adore cows. I think a Jersey cow, with her stag-like
head and eyes, is almost the loveliest thing in creation.’

‘You shall have a herd of them at Hawksyard,’ exclaimed Edgar eagerly;
‘and I will build you a Swiss cowhouse at the end of the walnut walk.’

‘Thank you so much,’ said Daphne, with a faint smile, ‘but I was
thinking of them only in the abstract.’

There were times when any allusion to Hawksyard and the future
irritated her like the sting of a summer insect.

Children appeared at every turn of the circuitous road. Here a sickly,
large-eyed girl offered a handful of dingy edelweiss; there an unkempt
ill-fed boy ran beside the horses, flapping off the flies with a leafy
branch of ash or walnut; anon appeared the mountain musician playing
his plaintive strain upon the native horn, and waking melancholiest
echoes amid the solemn hills. The road crossed the river several times,
over covered bridges, wooden arcades, which made a picturesque bit in
the landscape, a pleasant lounging place too, on such a summer morning.
But there seemed to be nobody about save the fly-flapping boys, and
women and children offering new milk or the everlasting edelweiss.

It was the first time Daphne had seen the little velvety white flower,
and she was keenly interested in it.

‘Poor little colourless ice-blossom, so pale and dull-looking, like a
life without joy or variety!’ she said. ‘They say that it grows under
the snow. How nice it would be to go and hunt for it oneself! Please
give the children plenty of money, Edgar.’ And Mr. Turchill, whose
pockets were always full of loose Helvetian coins—leaden sous and
dingy-looking half-francs—scattered his largesse among the natives with
a liberality rare in modern excursionists.

Half-way up the hill they came to a rustic restaurant, where the horses
stopped to blow, and where the coachman invited the ladies to go and
see a tame chamois in a little shed at the back of the house.

‘He will be the first of his race I have seen,’ said Daphne, ‘though in
Manfred’s time this part of the country seems to have been overrun by
them.’

They went through the restaurant kitchen to the shed behind it, to
see the four-footed mountaineer. He was a melancholy little animal,
altogether a shabby specimen of the chamois tribe, and looked sadly
forlorn in his narrow den. One of his horns had been broken off,
perhaps in the struggles that attended his capture.

‘It is a painful sight,’ said Daphne, turning away with a sigh.

She would have given all her pocket-money to set the chamois free; but
he was one of the attractions of the house, and could not have been
easily ransomed.

And now again across the Black Lutschine, by another covered bridge,
and up the steep winding road through a narrow gorge in the hills,
until the cleft widens, and the Grindelwald valley opens before them in
all its glory, ringed round with mountains, the Great Eiger standing
boldly out in front of them, with broad patches of snow on his dark
stony front, behind a bold edge of pine-clad hill. There is unspeakable
grandeur in that bleak and rugged mountain rising above the verdure and
beauty of the nearer hills.

Daphne clasped her hands in unalloyed delight.

‘It would be worth while coming to Switzerland if it were only for
this,’ she exclaimed; ‘yet I am tortured by the idea of all the
mountain-passes, glaciers, and waterfalls that we are not going to see.
I have a great mind to throw away my Baedeker. He makes me positively
miserable with suggestions that I can’t carry out.’

‘You will be able to see all you care about next year,’ said Edgar,
‘when you and I are free to go where we like. I believe it will be
always where _you_ like.’

‘Next year seems half a century off,’ she answered carelessly.

Their journey was nearly done. The carriage went down into the valley,
then climbed another hill, and they had paused the outskirts of the
village of Grindelwald, and were drawing up in the garden in front of
the Bear Hotel. Very full of life and bustle was the inn garden on
this bright summer morning. Tourists without number standing about,
or sitting under the verandah, Americans, Germans, English, French,
all full of life and enjoyment; some starting with their alpenstocks,
intent on pedestrian excursions; ladies and sedentary middle-aged
gentlemen being hoisted on to mules; carriages driving in; horses being
fed and cleaned; a Babel of languages, a perpetual moving in and out.

Mr. Goring ordered a slight refection of wine and coffee, rolls and
honey, to be brought to a pleasant spot under the verandah, at a point
where the view across the deep valley to the hills beyond was widest
and grandest. Here they rested themselves a little before starting on
foot for the lower glacier. Both Madoline and Daphne were in favour of
walking.

‘I went on a mule when I was here with my father,’ said Lina, ‘and I
remember thinking how much I should have preferred being free to choose
my own path.’

It was a lovely walk, so soon as they were clear of the hotels and
boarding-houses, and the scattered wooden _châlets_ of the village,
just such a ramble as Daphne loved; a narrow footpath winding up and
down a verdant hillside—here a garden, and there an orchard—funny
little cottages and cottage-gardens perched anyhow on slopes and angles
of the road; a rustic bridge across the rocky bed of a river; and there
in front of them the glacier—a mass of corrugated ice lying on a steep
slope between two mountains—shining, beautiful, like a pale sapphire.
They loitered as much as they pleased by the wayside, Daphne straying
here and there as her fancy led her—a restless, birdlike creature,
almost seeming to have wings, so lightly did she flutter from hillock
to crag, so airy was the step with which she skimmed along the narrow
rocky pathway, beaten by the feet of so many travellers. They spent a
good deal of time in the immediate neighbourhood of the glacier, ‘doing
it thoroughly,’ as Edgar remarked afterwards, with a satisfied air; and
then they went quietly back to The Bear, and dined in a corner of the
big, barren dining-room, and drove back to Interlaken in the summer
dusk, Gerald almost as silent as he had been the night before during
the much shorter drive from Lauterbrunnen.

‘I’m afraid it bores you to go over the ground you know so well,’ said
Madoline, grieved at her lover’s silence, which looked like depression,
or mental weariness.

‘No; the country is too lovely, one could hardly tire of it,’ he
answered; ‘but don’t you think it intensely melancholy? There is
something in the silence and darkness of these hills which fills my
soul with gloom. Even the lights scattered about here and there are so
remote and so few that they only serve to intensify the solitude. So
long as sunlight and shadow give life and motion to the scene it is gay
enough; but with nightfall one finds out all at once how desolate it
is.’

There was more excursionising next day, and again on the next; then
came Sunday morning and church, and then a walk through the pine-woods
to see some athletic sports that were held in a green basin which made
a splendid amphitheatre, round whose grassy sides the audience sat
picturesquely grouped on the velvet sward. On this day the young women
came out in all the glory of their canton costume—snowy habit-shirts
and black velvet bodices, silver chains pendent from their shoulders,
silver daggers or arrows thrust through their plaited hair, long
silk aprons of brightest colours—a costume which gave new gaiety to
the landscape. Then in the evening there was a concert at the little
conversation-house in the walnut avenue, a concert so crowded by native
and foreigner that there was never an empty seat in the verandah, and
the waiters were at their wits’ ends to keep everyone supplied with tea
and coffee, lemonade and wine. After the concert there were fireworks,
coloured lights to glorify the fountains—almost the gayest, brightest
scene that Daphne’s eyes had ever looked upon. Then, when Bengal lights
and rockets had faded and vanished into the summer night, they walked
quietly back to the hotel under a starry sky.

‘I believe Daphne likes Bengal lights better than stars,’ said Gerald
mockingly, as he gave Madoline his arm, and went on with her in advance
of the others, across a field that lay on the other side of the walnut
walk.

‘You may believe anything you like of Daphne’s bad taste and general
idiocy,’ the girl retorted; and Lina was distressed at thinking how
disagreeable these two, whom she would have had so affectionately
attached, always were to each other.

And all the while Gerald Goring was wondering what he was to do with
his life—whether it were possible to break the chain which bound him,
that golden chain which had once been his chief glory—whether it were
possible to reconcile honour and love.

They left Interlaken next morning, and went straight through to the
little station at Montreux. Daphne, who had pored over her Baedeker
till she fancied that she knew every inch of Switzerland, was deeply
grieved at not being able to go on to Lucerne and the Rigi, Flüelen,
and all the Tell district; but Sir Vernon would go no farther than
Interlaken. He considered that he had made a sufficient sacrifice of
his own comfort already for his younger daughter’s pleasure.

‘I hate moving about, and I detest hotels,’ he said; ‘I am yearning for
the quiet of my own house.’

After this no more could be said. Daphne gave herself up to silent
contemplation of the Jungfrau range throughout the journey, by boat and
rail, hardly taking her eyes from those snowy peaks till they melted
from her view, fading ghostlike in the blue ether.

‘They seem to be a part of my life,’ she said, as she turned from the
carriage window with a regretful sigh; ‘I cannot bear to think that I
have seen the last of them.’

‘Only for this year,’ answered Edgar cheerily, not caring much for
mountains in the abstract, but ready to admire anything that Daphne
loved. ‘It is such an easy matter to come to Switzerland nowadays. The
Jungfrau is as accessible as Brighton Pier.’




CHAPTER XXX.

‘THER WAS NO WIGHT, TO WHOM SHE DURSTE PLAIN.’


They had been at Montreux more than a week, and it seemed to Daphne as
if she had lived half her life on the shore of the beautiful lake, with
the snowy summit of the Dent du Midi rising yonder in its inaccessible
grandeur, above the fertile hills of the foreground, those precipitous
green slopes, where _châlets_ and farms were dotted about picturesquely
in positions that would have seemed perilous for birds’ nests.

The villa was charming; a white-walled _château_ all plate-glass
windows, verandahs, balconies, brightened from roof to basement by
crimson and white Spanish blinds. The rooms were prettily furnished
in a foreign style—commodes, cabinets, clocks, candelabra, and Louis
Quatorze chairs of a painfully upright architecture. To these Sir
Vernon had added several easy-chairs and couches of the _pouf_ species,
hired from an upholsterer at Geneva. Photographs in velvet or ivory
frames, books, work-baskets, easels, and five-o’clock tea-tables,
brought from South Hill, gave a home-like air to the rooms; and a
profusion of the loveliest flowers, exquisitely arranged, told of
Madoline’s presence.

There was a delicious garden sloping down to the lake, whose
gently-curving shore made here a lovely bay; a garden in which
roses grew as they only grow in the neighbourhood of water. There
were summer-houses of the airiest construction; trellised walks,
rose-shaded; a parterre of carefully-chosen flowers, with a fountain in
the centre; and the blue bright water at the edge of the lawn.

Here Daphne had established her boat, a light skiff with a felucca
sail and a striped awning, to be used at pleasure; a boat which, seen
flitting across the lake in the sunshine, looked like a swallow.
There was a capital boat-house at a corner of the lawn, wooden and
delightfully Swiss, with balconies fronting the lake, and an upper room
in which one could take one’s pleasure, sketching, writing, reading,
tea-drinking. The weather had been peerless since their arrival at
Montreux; and Madoline and Daphne spent the greater part of their lives
out of doors. They were always together, Daphne rarely leaving the
shelter of her sister’s wing. She had become amazingly industrious, and
had begun a tremendous piece of work in crewels, neither more nor less
than a set of curtain-borderings for the drawing-room at Hawksyard.
Vainly had Madoline entreated her to begin with an antimacassar or a
fender-stool, some undertaking which would demand but a reasonable
exercise of patience and perseverance. Daphne would hear of no work
that was not gigantic.

‘Do you think Cheops would ever have been famous if he had begun to
make pyramids on a small scale?’ she asked. ‘He would have exhausted
his interest in the idea, frittered away his enthusiasm upon trifles.
How much wiser it was in him to make a dash at something big while his
fancy was at a white heat! If I don’t embroider a set of curtains I’ll
do nothing.’

‘Well, dearest, you must follow your own fancy,’ answered Lina gently;
‘but I’m afraid your life will be a history of great beginnings.’

Daphne began with extraordinary industry upon a bold pattern of
sunflowers and acanthus leaves, huge sunflowers, huge foliage, on a
Pompeian-red ground. Whenever she was not in her boat, skimming about
the lake, she was toiling at a leaf or a sunflower, sitting on a
cushion at Lina’s feet, the sunny head bent over her work, the slim
white fingers moving busily, the dark brows knitted, in the intensity
of her occupation. She was always intent upon finishing a leaf, or a
stalk, or a petal, or on realising the grand effect of a completed
flower. She would sit till the last available moment before dinner,
rushing off to dress in a frantic hurry, and reappearing just as the
subdued announcement of dinner was being breathed into Sir Vernon’s
ear. Edgar was filled with delight to see her so occupied. It seemed to
him a pledge of future domesticity.

‘It is so sweet to see you working for our home,’ he said one
afternoon, seated on the grass at her feet, and placidly watching every
stitch.

‘Eh?’ she said, looking up in half-surprise, being much more interested
in the sunflowers for their own sakes than in their future relation to
the old Warwickshire Grange. ‘Oh yes, to be sure. I hope I shall finish
the curtains; but it is a dreadful long way to look forward. There will
be three hundred and fifty-five sunflowers. I have done one and a half.
That leaves just three hundred and fifty-three and a half to do. I
rather wish it were the other way.’

‘Beginning to flag already?’ said Lina, who was sketching a little bit
of the mountain landscape on the other side of the lake, a bold effect
of sun and shadow.

‘Not the least in the world,’ cried Daphne; ‘only I do so long to
see the effect of the curtains when they are finished. It will be
stupendous. But do you know, Edgar, I am afraid your mother will detest
them. One requires to be educated up to sunflowers; and Mrs. Turchill
belongs to that degraded period of art in which people could see beauty
in roses and lilies.’

‘One can hardly look back upon those dark ages without a shudder,’ said
Gerald Goring, stretched on a rustic bench close at hand, looking up at
the blue sky, an image of purposeless idleness. ‘Thank Providence we
have emerged from the age of curves into the age of angles—from the
Hogarthian to the Burne-Jonesian ideal of beauty.’

‘There was a period in my own life when I had not awakened to the
loveliness of the sunflower,’ said Daphne gravely. ‘I know the first
time I was introduced to one in crewel-work I thought it hideous; but
since I have known Tadema’s pictures I am another creature. Yet I doubt
if, even in my regenerate state, a garden all sunflowers would be quite
satisfactory.’

‘You would require the Roman atmosphere, classic busts and columns,
Tyrian-dyed draperies, and everybody dressed in the straight-down
Roman fashion,’ replied Gerald languidly. ‘No doubt Poppæa was fond
of sunflowers; and I daresay they grew in that royal garden where
Messalina held such high jinks that time her imperial husband came home
unexpectedly and somewhat disturbed the harmony of the evening.’

It was altogether an idle kind of life which they were leading just now
at Montreux. During the first week Edgar and Daphne had excursionised
a little upon the nearest hillsides in the early morning before
breakfast; but lovely as were the chestnut-woods and the limpid
streamlets gushing out of their rocky beds and dripping into stone
troughs fringed with delicate ferns, exquisite as was the morning air,
and the fairy picture of the lake below them, developing some new charm
with every hundred yards of the ascent, Daphne soon wearied of these
morning rambles, and seemed glad to forego them.

‘The weather is getting horribly oppressive,’ she said, ‘or perhaps
I am not quite so strong as I used to be. I would rather sit in the
garden and amuse myself more lazily.’

‘You must not pretend to be an invalid,’ said Edgar cheerily; ‘come
now, Daphne: why, there are not many girls can handle a pair of sculls
as you do.’

‘I didn’t say I was an invalid. In my boat I feel in my element, but
listlessly creeping about these hills wearies me to death.’

‘You are very different from me,’ answered Edgar reproachfully. ‘Your
company is always enough for my happiness.’

‘Then you shall have as much of my company as you please in the garden
or on the lake. But pray let us be idle while we can. When Aunt Rhoda
arrives we shall be goaded to all kinds of excursionising, dragged up
every hill in the district.’

‘I thought you wanted to climb mountains?’

‘Yes, mountains; Mont Blanc, or the Matterhorn, or Monte Rosa—anything
respectable. But to exhaust one’s energy in scaling green banks! Why,
in Wales they would call the Col du Jaman a bank. However, when Aunt
Rhoda arrive I shall be equal to the effort. Of course we shall have to
do Chillon.’

‘I thought you were so interested in Chillon.’

‘Yes, as an image in my mind. I love to gaze at its dark towers from
the distance, to send my fancies back to the Middle Ages, penetrate the
gloomy prison and keep the captives company—but to go over the cells
formally, in the midst of a little herd of tourists, staring over each
other’s shoulders, and treading upon each other’s toes—to be shown by
a snuffy old custodian the ring to which Bonnivard was chained, the
grating out of which he could see the “little isle that in his very
face did smile”—that is a kind of thing which I absolutely abhor.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Ferrers had written to her brother, informing him that as she
had been all her life longing for a glimpse of Swiss scenery, and
that as so favourable an opportunity had now presented itself for the
gratification of that desire, she had made up her mind to come straight
to Montreux by herself.

‘It is a tremendous undertaking for one who has travelled so little,’
she wrote; ‘for you know, dear Vernon, how my devotion to Lina and
your interests kept me a prisoner at South Hill during those years in
which I should naturally have been seeing all that is worth seeing in
this beautiful world. It is an awful idea to travel all the way from
Warwickshire to Lake Leman, with only a maid, but I feel that this is
a golden opportunity which must not be lost. To be in Switzerland with
you and dearest Lina will be a delight, the memory of which will endure
all my life. It is quite hopeless to suppose that dear Marmaduke can
ever travel with me beyond Cheltenham, or Bath, or Torquay. His health
and his settled habits both forbid the thought. Why, then, should I not
take advantage of your being in Switzerland to realise a long-cherished
wish? I shall be no trouble to you: I do not ask you even to receive me
under your roof, unless indeed you happen to have a spare room or two
at your disposal. You can make arrangements for me and my maid to live
_en pension_ at one of those excellent hotels which I am told abound
on the banks of the lake, and I can spend all my days with you without
feeling myself either a burden or an expense.’

‘What are we to do, Lina?’ asked Sir Vernon, when his elder daughter
had read the letter; ‘your aunt will be a terrible bore in any case,
but I suppose she will be a little less of a nuisance if we put her out
of the house.’

‘There are three spare rooms,’ said Lina. ‘It would be rather
inhospitable to send her to an hotel—if she will not be any trouble to
you, dear father——’

‘Oh, she will be no trouble to me,’ said Sir Vernon. ‘I’ll take care of
that.’

‘Then I think you had better let me write and ask her to stay with us.’

‘Ask her!’ quoth Sir Vernon, ‘egad, she has asked herself.’

The letter was written, and by return of post there came a gushing
reply, announcing that Mrs. Ferrers had broken the intelligence of her
departure to dear Marmaduke, who had borne the blow better than might
have been expected, and who was amiably resigned to the loss of his
wife’s society during the ensuing six weeks. Is not a modern Anglican
cleric bound to imitate in somewise the example of the early Christian
martyrs? Fire or sword he is not called upon to suffer, nor to fight
with wild beasts in the arena; but these small domestic deprivations
are a scourge of the flesh, which tend to exercise his heroic temper.

‘Todd,’ said Marmaduke, in a fat and unctuous voice, ‘you must take
particular care of me while your mistress is away. You know what I
like, Todd, and you must make sure that I have it.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Ferrers arrived one sunny afternoon, with three Saratoga trunks,
and the newest things in sunshades. She had a generally exhausted air
after her journey, and declared that she seemed to have been travelling
since the beginning of the world.

‘The dust, the heat, the glare between Paris and Dijon I can never
describe,’ she protested as she sank into the most luxurious of the
easy-chairs, which her eagle eye had detected at the first glance.

‘Please don’t try,’ said Gerald, ‘we went through it all ourselves.’

‘It was something too dreadful,’ murmured Aunt Rhoda, looking so cool
and ladylike in her pale-gray cashmere gown and flounced sicilienne
petticoat, that it was difficult to believe she had ever been a victim
to dust and heat.

She was refreshed with tea and bread and butter, and looked round her
with placid satisfaction.

‘It is really very sweet,’ she murmured. ‘This villa reminds me so
much of the Fothergills’ place just above Teddington Lock—the lawn—the
flower-beds—everything. But, do you know, Switzerland is not quite so
Swiss as I expected to find it.’

‘That was just what Daphne said,’ answered Madoline.

‘Did she really?’ murmured Aunt Rhoda, looking across at Daphne, who
was sitting idly by the low tea-table. Mrs. Ferrers felt a little vexed
with herself at being convicted of coinciding with Daphne.

‘I suppose it is inevitable,’ she said, with a lofty air, ‘that a
place of which one has dreamed all one’s life, which one has pictured
to oneself in all the brightest colours of one’s own mind and fancy,
should be just a little disappointing. It was tiresome to be told
at Geneva that Mont Blanc had not been seen for weeks, and it was
provoking to find the cabman horribly indifferent about Rousseau—for,
of course, I made a point of going to see his house.’

‘And did you go to Ferney?’ asked Daphne eagerly. ‘Isn’t it pretty?’

‘My dear Daphne, you forget that I am a clergyman’s wife,’ said Mrs.
Ferrers, with dignity. ‘Do you suppose that I would worship at the
shrine of a man who made a mock of religion?’

‘Not of religion,’ muttered Gerald, ‘but of priestcraft.’

‘But you were interested about Rousseau,’ said Daphne. ‘I thought they
were both wicked men—that there was nothing to choose between them.’

‘Voltaire’s infidelity was more notorious,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers; ‘I
could never have told Marmaduke that I visited the house of an avowed——’

‘Deist,’ interjected Gerald.

Hard pressed, Mrs. Ferrers was constrained to admit that she had never
read a line written by either Voltaire or Rousseau, and that she had
only a kind of dictionary idea of the two men, so vague that their
images might at any moment become confounded in her mind.

When she had reposed a little after her journey, and had seen the
contents of the Saratoga trunks arranged in wardrobe and drawers, Aunt
Rhoda showed herself a most ardent votary of the picturesque. She had
a volume of Byron in her hand all day, and quoted his description of
Leman and Chillon in a way that was almost as exasperating as the
torture inflicted by a professional punster. She insisted upon being
taken to Chillon on the morning after her arrival. She made Gerald
organise an excursion from Evian to the mountain village above, at the
foot of the Dent d’Oche, for the following day. She made them take
her to the Rochers de Naye, to the Gorge du Chauderon; to Lausanne by
steamer one day, to Nyon another day. She was always exploring the
guide-books in search of excursions that could be managed between
sunrise and sundown.

Sir Vernon, having settled himself in his study at Montreux, with books
and papers about him, was just as much dependent for his comfort and
happiness upon Lina’s society as ever he had been at South Hill. It
was out of the question that a daughter so unselfish and devoted could
leave her invalid father day after day. Thus it happened that Madoline
in a manner dropped out of the excursionising party. Gerald could
not be dispensed with—though he more than once declared in favour of
staying at home—for nobody else was familiar with those shores, and
Mrs. Ferrers protested that it would be impossible to get on without
him.

‘You all have your Baedekers,’ he argued, ‘and you are only going over
beaten tracks. What more can you want?’

‘Beaten tracks!’ exclaimed Aunt Rhoda indignantly. ‘I’m sure those
pathways you took us up yesterday on the way to the Dent d’Oche had
never been trodden upon except by the cows. And I hate groping about
with my nose in a guide-book. One always misses the things best worth
seeing. Do you think we could get on without him, Daphne?’ she asked
in conclusion, appealing to her younger niece, to whom she had been
unusually amiable ever since her arrival.

‘I think we might manage without Mr. Goring,’ Daphne answered gravely,
with never a glance at Gerald. She had scrupulously avoided all
direct association with him of late. ‘Edgar and I are getting to know
Switzerland and Swiss ways wonderfully well.’

‘Have you ever been to the Gorge du Chauderon?’ asked Aunt Rhoda.

Daphne confessed that this particular locality was unknown to her. She
did not even know what the Gorge was, except that it sounded, in a
general way, like a glen or ravine.

‘Then how can you talk such arrant nonsense?’ demanded her aunt
contemptuously. ‘What good could you or Edgar be in a place that
neither of you have ever seen in your lives? You can’t know the proper
way to get to it, or the safest way to get away from it. We should all
tumble over some hidden precipice, and break our necks.’

‘Baedeker doesn’t say anything about precipices,’ said Daphne, with her
eyes on that authority.

‘Baedeker thinks no more of precipices than I think of a country lane,’
answered Aunt Rhoda.

‘I am sure Lina would like to have Mr. Goring at home sometimes,’ said
Daphne. Gerald had strolled out into the garden while they talked.
‘Could we not get a guide?’

‘I detest guides,’ replied her aunt, who knew that those guardians of
the strangers’ safety were expensive, and fancied she might have to pay
her share of the cost. ‘Gerald may just as well be with us as moping
here. I know what my brother is, and that he will keep Lina dancing
attendance upon him all day long.’

Mr. Goring went with them everywhere, and seemed nothing loth to
labour in their service. He knew the ground thoroughly, and led them
over it in a quiet leisurely way, unknown to the average tourist, who
goes everywhere in a scamper, and returns to his native land with his
mind full of confused memories. He had to put up with a great deal of
Aunt Rhoda’s society during all these excursions, and was gratified
with lengthy confidences from that lady; for Daphne was loyal to her
faithful lover, and walked with him and talked with him, and gave him
as much of her company as was possible. She talked of Hawksyard and her
future mother-in-law, of the tenants, and the villagers, the horses and
dogs. She talked of hunting and shooting, of everything which most
interested her lover; and then she went home in the evening so weary
and worn out and heart-sick that she was glad to sit quietly in the
verandah after dinner, petting a tawny St. Bernard dog called Monk,
a gigantic animal, who belonged to the house, and who had attached
himself to Daphne from her first coming with a warm regard. He was her
sole companion very often in her boating excursions, when she went
roaming about the lake in her light skiff, enjoying all the loveliness
of the scene, as she could only enjoy it, in perfect solitude.

‘Surely it is hardly safe for that child to go about without a
boatman,’ exclaimed Mrs. Ferrers, as she stood at the open window of
her brother’s study, watching the swallow-sail as it flitted across the
sunlit ripples, bending to every movement of the water. ‘Vernon, do you
know that the lake is over a thousand feet deep?’

‘I don’t think the depth of water makes any difference,’ replied Sir
Vernon calmly. ‘The Avon is deep enough to drown her; yet we never
troubled ourselves about her aquatic amusements in Warwickshire. I have
Turchill’s assurance that she is perfect mistress of her boat, and I
think that ought to be enough.’

‘Of course if you are satisfied I ought to be,’ said Mrs. Ferrers,
with her ladylike shrug; ‘but I can only say that if I had a daughter
I should not encourage her in a taste for boating. In the first place,
because I cannot dispossess my mind of the idea of danger; and in the
second, because I consider such an amusement revoltingly masculine.
Daphne’s hands are ever so much wider since she began to row. I was
horrified the other day at discovering that she wears six-and-a-half
gloves.’

Daphne liked those quiet mornings on the lake, or a ramble among
vineyards or orchards, with Monk for her sole companion, better than
the formal pilgrimages to some scene made famous by the guide-books.
Those excursions with her aunt and Mr. Goring and Edgar had become
passing wearisome. The strain upon her spirits was too great. The
desire to appear gay and happy and at ease exhausted her. The effort
to banish thought and memory, and to take a rapturous pleasure in
the beauty of a picturesque scene, or the glory of a summer sky, was
becoming daily more severe. To talk twaddle with Edgar, to smile in his
face, with that gnawing pain, that passion of longing and regret always
troubling her soul, was a slow torture which she began to think must
sooner or later be mortal.

‘Can I go on living like this for ever?’ she asked herself, after
one of those endless summer days, when, in the same boat, in the
same carriage with Gerald Goring, lunching at the same inn, admiring
the same views, treading the same narrow paths or perilous wooden
footbridges, she had yet contrived to keep herself aloof from him.
‘Can I always go on acting a part—pretending to be true when I am
false to the core of my wicked heart, pretending to be happy when I am
miserable?’

The mountains and the lake were beginning to lose something of their
enchantment, something of their power to lift her out of herself and
to make her forget human sorrow amidst the immensities of Nature. She
did not love them less as they grew familiar, nay, her love increased
with her knowledge; but the distraction diminished. She could think
of herself and her own sorrow now, under the walls of Chillon, just
as keenly as in the elm walk in Stratford churchyard. The wide lake
glittering in the morning sun was no longer a magical picture, before
which every thought of self faded. Gliding dreamily along the blue
water she gave herself up to a sadness that was half bitter, half
sweet; bitter, because she knew that her life was to be spent apart
from Gerald Goring; sweet, because she was so certain of his love. He
told her of it every day, however carefully she avoided all direct
association with him: told her by veiled words, by stolen looks, by
that despondency and gloom which hung about him like a cloud. Love has
a hundred subtle ways of revealing itself. A fatal passion needs not to
be expounded in the preachments of a St. Preux, in the moral lectures
and intellectual flights of a Julie. Briefer and more direct is the
language of an unhappy love. It reveals itself unawares; it escapes
from the soul unconsciously, as the perfume from the rose.

Daphne was very thankful when her aunt’s active and insatiable spirit
was fain to subside into repose; not because Mrs. Ferrers was tired
of sight-seeing, but simply because she had conscientiously done
every lion within a manageable distance of Montreux. In her secret
soul Aunt Rhoda thought contemptuously of the bluest, biggest, lake
in Switzerland, and all the glory of the Savoy range. Had not these
easily-reached districts long ceased to be fashionable? Her soul
yearned for Ragatz or Davos, St. Moritz or Pontresina, the only places
of which people with any pretence to good style ever talked nowadays.
It was all very well for Byron to be eloquent about Lake Leman or
ecstatic about Mont Blanc; for in his time railways and monster
steamboats had not vulgarised Savoy, and a gentleman might be rapturous
about scenes which were only known to the travelled Englishman. But
to-day, when every Cook’s tourist had scaled the Montanvert, when ‘Arry
was a familiar figure on the skirts of the Great Glacier, who could
feel any pride or real satisfaction in a prolonged residence on the
Lake of Geneva. With all those subtle wiles of which a worldly woman
is mistress did Mrs. Ferrers try to direct her brother’s thoughts and
fancies towards the Engadine. She reminded him how the fashionable
London physician had lauded the life-giving, youth-renewing quality
of the atmosphere, and had particularly recommended Pontresina, if he
could but manage the journey.

‘But I can’t manage it, and I don’t mean to manage it,’ retorted Sir
Vernon testily. ‘Do you suppose I am going to endure a jolting drive of
twenty-four hours——’

‘Fourteen at most,’ murmured his sister.

‘A great deal you know about it! Do you think I am going to be carted
up hill and down hill in order to get beforehand with winter on a bleak
plateau, diversified with glaciers and pine-trees? It is absurd to
suggest such a thing to a man in weak health.’

‘It is for your health that I make the suggestion, Vernon,’ replied
his sister meekly. ‘You cannot deny that Dr. Cavendish recommended the
Engadine.’

‘Simply because the Engadine is the last fad of the moneyed classes.
These doctors all sing the same song. One year they send everyone to
Egypt, another year they try to popularise Algiers. One would suppose
they were in league with the Continental railways and steam companies.
One might get one’s nerves braced just as well at Broadway or Malvern,
or on the Cornish moors; one might get well or die just as comfortably
at Penzance or Torquay. You quite ignore the trouble of a change of
quarters. I have made myself thoroughly comfortable here. If I were to
go to the Engadine I should take only Lina and Jinman, and you would
have to take Daphne home and keep her at the Rectory till our return.’

This was not at all what Mrs. Ferrers had in view. She had taken for
granted that if she could induce her brother to go to the Engadine
she would be taken, as a matter of course, in his train. He was a
free-handed man in all domestic matters, though he very often grumbled
about his poverty; and he would have paid his sister’s expenses without
a thought, if he were willing to endure her company. But it seemed that
he was not willing, and that she had been unconsciously urging him to
her own ruin. To have her Swiss experiences suddenly cut short, to
have that audacious little flirt Daphne planted upon her for a month’s
visit! The thing was too horrible to contemplate.

‘My dear Vernon,’ she exclaimed, with affectionate eagerness, ‘if
you do not feel yourself equal to the journey it would be madness to
undertake it.’

‘Exactly my own idea. Please say no more about it,’ he answered coldly.
‘I am sorry you are tired of Montreux.’

‘Tired! I adore the place. It is positively delicious. A little
stifling, perhaps, in the heat of the day, but beyond measure, lovely.’

After this Mrs. Ferrers never more spoke word about St. Moritz or
Pontresina. She saw by last week’s society papers that everybody worth
talking about was taking his or her pleasure in that exalted region;
but she only sighed and kept silence. The ‘society papers’ ignored
Lake Leman altogether, nor did they ever mention Mont Blanc. It seemed
as if they hardly knew that such things existed. Their contributors all
went straight through. Aunt Rhoda remembered how, many years before,
when she had gone through the Trossachs and had been full of enthusiasm
and delight, and had gone home proud of her tour, her travelled friends
had so scorned her that she had never again ventured to mention Katrine
or Lomond, Inversnaid or the Falls of Clyde.

She settled down as well as she could to the domestic quiet of
Montreux—the mornings and afternoons in the garden; the everlasting
novels and poetry and crewel-work; Daphne and the St. Bernard sitting
on the sloping grass by the edge of the water, or loitering about among
the flowers. She bore this luxurious monotony as long as she could, and
then she was seized with a happy thought which opened a little vista of
variety.

She discovered, one sultry afternoon, that Lina was looking pale and
fagged, and called her brother’s attention to that fact.

‘I don’t wish to alarm you, Vernon,’ she said, as they were all
sitting at afternoon tea on the lawn, in the shade of a magnificent
willow, whose long tresses trailed in the lake; ‘but I believe if you
don’t give Lina a little change from this baking valley, she will be
seriously ill.’

‘Pray don’t say that, Aunt Rhoda; I assure you that I am perfectly
well,’ remonstrated Madoline, looking up from her cups and saucers.

‘My dear, you are one of those unselfish creatures who go on pretending
to be well until they sink,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, with an air of
knowing ever so much more about Lina than Lina knew herself. ‘You
are languishing—positively pining for mountain air. Everybody is not
created with the constitution of a salamander,’ she added, with a
contemptuous glance at Daphne, who was sitting in the full glare of the
afternoon sun, ‘and for anybody except a salamander this place for the
last three days has been almost intolerable. Dearly as I love you all,
and delighted as I am to be with you, it has been only the idea of the
dust and the heat of the railway that has prevented my going back to
Warwickshire.’

Sir Vernon looked uneasily at his beloved daughter. He had kept her a
good deal about him; he had let her stay at home to bear him company,
when the others were breathing the cool air of the lake, or climbing
into the fresher atmosphere of the hills; and now it slowly dawned upon
him that his selfishness might have endangered her health. Rhoda was
always an alarmist—one of those unpleasant people who scent calamity
afar off, and are prescient of coming trouble in the hour of present
joy; but it was true that Madoline was pale and languid-looking. She
had a fatigued look, and her beauty had lost much of its bloom and
freshness.

‘Lina is not looking well,’ he said, glancing at her uneasily; ‘what
can we do for you, dear?’

‘Nothing, father,’ answered Lina, with her gentle smile: ‘there is
nothing the matter.’

‘You told me this morning that you could not sleep last night,’
murmured Mrs. Ferrers.

‘It was a very warm night,’ admitted Lina, vexed at her aunt’s
fussiness.

‘Warm! It was stifling. This lake is at the bottom of a basin,
completely shut in by hills,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, as if she had made a
discovery. ‘I’ll tell you what we could do, Vernon. I might take the
two girls up to the hotel at Glion, or at Les Avants. They are both
very nice rustic hotels, clean and airy. A few days in that mountain
air would pick Lina up wonderfully.’

‘Would you like to go, dear?’ asked Sir Vernon doubtfully.

‘I should like it of all things, if you would go with us,’ answered his
daughter; ‘but I don’t want to leave you.’

‘Never mind me, Lina. I can get on pretty well for a few days, sorely
as I shall miss you. I suppose three or four days will be enough?’

‘Ample,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, delighted at having gained her point. ‘We
can ramble about and see everything that is to be seen in three or four
days.’

‘So be it, then. Start as soon as you like. You had better send Jinman
up at once to engage rooms for you. This is Monday. I suppose if you
start to-morrow morning you can come back on Friday.’

‘Certainly. Three days in that magnificent air will be quite long
enough to make Lina strong,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, assured that in
three days she would have exhausted the pleasures of a lively hotel and
picturesque surroundings.

‘I wish you were coming with us, dear father,’ said Madoline.

‘My dearest, do you think it would do me any good to have my old
bones dragged up an almost perpendicular hill, and to put up with the
indifferent accommodation of a rustic hotel? I am much better taking my
ease here. The young men will want to go with you, no doubt.’

‘If you please, sir,’ answered Edgar.

Gerald Goring said never a word, but it was taken for granted that he
meant to go. He and Madoline must, of course, be inseparable until that
solemn knot should be tied which would make them one and indivisible
for ever and ever.




CHAPTER XXXI.

‘I WOLDE LIVE IN PEES, IF THAT I MIGHT.’


They had been three days at the homely, comfortable hotel at Les
Avants, and Madoline was looking all the better for the fresh hillside
air, an improvement upon which Mrs. Ferrers expatiated as the latest
confirmation of the one all-abiding fact of her own ineffable wisdom.
It was one of the loveliest days there had been in all that delicious
month of summer weather—passing warm, yet with a gentle west wind that
faintly stirred the heavy chestnut leaves, and breathed on Daphne’s
cheek, or fluttered round her neck like a caress, scarcely moving the
soft lace ruffle round her throat. It was a day on which a white gown
seemed the only thing possible in costume, and Daphne and Lina were
both dressed in white. It was not by any means the kind of day for
climbing or excursionising of any kind, as even that ardent explorer
Aunt Rhoda was fain to confess; rather a day on which to wander gently
up and down easy paths, or to sit in the pine-woods reading Tennyson or
Browning, or adding a few lazy stitches to the last sunflower in hand.

‘You seem to go at your work with a good deal less vigour, Daphne,’
said Edgar, seated at his lady’s feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, his
knees drawn up to his chin, clad in light-gray alpaca, and a Panama hat
on the back of his head—a cool but not especially becoming costume. Mr.
Turchill was not one of those few men who look well in unconventional
clothes.

‘The weather is too warm for industry.’

‘I’m afraid those curtains will never be finished.’

‘Oh yes, they will!’ said Daphne, ‘I mean to persevere. I may be a
very old woman by the time they are done, but I am not going to give
in. Lina says my life is a thing of shreds and patches. I will show
her that I am not to be daunted by the stupendousness of a task. Three
hundred and fifty-one and a quarter sunflowers still to be done.
Doesn’t it rather remind you of that type of the everlasting—a rock
against which a bird scrapes its beak once in a thousand years, and
when the bird has worn away the whole rock, time will come to an end?
Please go on with “Luria,” and try to be a little more dramatic and a
little less monotonous.’

‘I am a wretched reader,’ said Edgar apologetically, as he looked for
his place; ‘but I think I might read a shade better if I understood
what I was reading. Browning is rather obscure.’

‘I’m afraid you have not a poetic mind. You didn’t seem to understand
much of “Atalanta in Calydon,” which you so kindly read to us
yesterday.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t,’ confessed the Squire of Hawksyard, with
praiseworthy meekness. ‘Modern poetry is rather difficult. I can always
understand Shakespeare, and Pope, and Crabbe, and Byron, but I own that
even Wordsworth is beyond me. His meaning is pretty clear, but I can’t
discover his beauties.’

‘Simply because your intellectual growth was allowed to stop when you
left Rugby. But I insist upon you learning to appreciate Tennyson and
Browning; so please go on with “Luria.”’

‘In my opinion, Daphne,’ remarked Aunt Rhoda, with an oracular air, ‘it
would have been much better for the balance of your mind if you had
read a great deal more prose and a great deal less poetry. Good solid
reading of a thoroughly useful kind would have taught you to think
properly, and to express yourself carefully, instead of perpetually
startling people by giving utterance to the wildest ideas.’

‘I think I speak as the birds sing,’ answered Daphne, ‘because I can’t
help it.’

‘The habit of sober thought is a valuable one, which I hope you will
acquire by-and-by, when you are mistress of a household; or else I am
sorry for your future husband.’

‘Please don’t be sorry for me, Mrs. Ferrers,’ protested Edgar,
reddening angrily, as he always did at any slight to Daphne; ‘I am so
perfectly contented with my fate that it would be a waste of power to
pity me.’

‘It is early days yet,’ sighed Aunt Rhoda. ‘But I live in the hope that
Daphne will steady and tone down before she becomes a wife.’

‘If you don’t begin to read this instant,’ whispered Daphne, with her
rosy lips close to Edgar’s ear, ‘I shall be made the text of one of
Aunt Rhoda’s homilies.’

Edgar took the hint, and plunged anyhow and anywhere into the pages of
Browning.

They lived all day in the woods, taking their luncheon picnic fashion
under the pine-trees. The two young men catered, and fetched and
carried for them, assisted by Mowser. They brought cold fowls,
and sliced Strasbourg ham, and salad, fruit and cake, a bottle of
Bordeaux, and another of a Swiss white wine, which was rather like
a weak imitation of Devonshire perry. But such a meal, spread upon
a snow-white tablecloth under pine-trees, over whose dark feathery
tops gleam the blue bright summer heaven, is about the most enjoyable
banquet possible for youthful revellers. Even Aunt Rhoda admitted that
it was an agreeable change from the home comforts of Arden Rectory.

‘I hope my dear Rector is being taken care of,’ she murmured
plaintively, when she had dulled the edge of an appetite sharpened by
that clear air.

‘I hope you will all do justice to the chickens,’ said Gerald, looking
across at Daphne, who sat by Edgar’s side in a thoroughly Darby and
Joanish manner. ‘I remember once being at a picnic in a forest where
an elderly fowl was made quite a feature of. My hostess fancied I was
desperately hungry, and was quite distressed at my avoidance of the
ancient bird.’

Daphne’s eyes were on her plate, but a slow smile crept over her
face in spite of herself. She and Gerald had scarcely looked at each
other in all those days among the pine-trees. They had lived in daily
intercourse, and yet contrived to dwell as completely apart as if the
lake had flowed between them; as if he, like St. Preux, had gazed
across the blue waters to catch the glimmer of his beloved’s casement,
and she, like Julie, had pined in the home that was desolate without
love’s fatal presence. It was hardly possible for resolve to have
been firmer than Daphne’s had been since that night at Fribourg. It
was hardly possible for an honest purpose to have been more honestly
fulfilled.

Mowser, waiting upon the picnickers, saw that significant look of
Gerald’s, and Daphne’s answering smile; just as she had seen many
things at South Hill and elsewhere which only her observant eyes had
noted.

‘Still at your old tricks, my young lady,’ she said to herself; ‘but
Jane Mowser has got an eye upon you, and your mockinventions shan’t
succeed, if Mowser’s faithful service can circum-prevent you.’

After luncheon they all sat idly looking down at the distant lake,
lying so far beneath their feet, like a pool of blue water in the
hollow of the hills, or wandered a little here and there, searching
out higher points from which to look down at the lake, or across to
the cloud-wrapped Alps. As the day wore on the light western breeze
dropped and died away, and there came the stillness of a sultry August
afternoon, just such an atmosphere as that of the lotus-eaters’ isle,
the land where it was always afternoon.

Aunt Rhoda, who had lunched more copiously than the others, succumbed
to the enervating influence of summer. The outline antimacassar
on which she had been diligently stitching a design of infantine
simplicity—a little girl with a watering-pot, a little boy with an
umbrella—dropped from her hands. The blue lake below winked at her in
the sunshine like a Titanic eye. The soft sweet breath of the pines
gratified her nostrils, and that delicious sense of being gently baked
through and through in Nature’s slow oven finally overcame her, and she
sank into a thoroughly enjoyable slumber, a sleep in which she knew she
was sleeping, and tasted all the blessedness of repose.

Daphne sat on a knoll a little way below her aunt, struggling with a
sunflower, heartily tired of it all the time, and painfully oppressed
by the consciousness of three hundred and fifty-one sunflowers
remaining to be done after this one.

‘It is like the line of the Egyptian kings,’ she murmured with a sigh.
‘An endless procession—too stupendous for the imagination to grasp.’

Edgar, stretched at the feet of his adored, had fallen as fast asleep
as Aunt Rhoda. Madoline and Gerald had wandered off to the higher
grounds. They were going to the Col du Jaman for anything Daphne knew
to the contrary.

This particular sunflower now approaching a finish seemed the most
irritating of all his tribe. Daphne tightened her thread, pulled it
into a knot, boggled at the knot, lost patience, and threw the work
aside in a rage.

‘Who could do crewel-work on such a stifling day?’ she cried, looking
angrily down at the lake, with its girdle of towns and villages,
gardens and vineyards; looking angrily even at picturesque Chillon,
with its mediæval turrets and drawbridge, angrily at the calm,
snow-shrouded Dent du Midi, and the dark green hills around its base.

Then, having explored the wide landscape with eyes blind for this
moment to its beauty, she looked discontentedly at the reclining form
at her feet, the faithful lover, slumbering serenely, oblivious of
wasps and centipedes.

‘A log,’ she muttered to herself, ‘a log. Blind and deaf! Good; yes, I
know he is good, and I try to value him for his goodness; but oh, how
weary I am—how weary—how weary!’

She flung aside her work, and wandered away along a narrow winding
pathway, trodden by the feet of previous wanderers, upward and upward
towards the granite point of the Dent du Jaman, gray against the
sapphire sky. She walked, scarcely knowing where she went, or why:
urged by a fever of the mind, which hurried her any whither to escape
from the weariness of her own thoughts; as if such escape were possible
to humanity.

She had been walking along the same serpentine path for nearly an
hour, neither knowing nor caring where it might be leading her. The
gray peak of the granite rock always rose yonder in the same distant
patch of blue above the dark pine-trees. It seemed as if she might go
on mounting this hilly path for ever and get no nearer to that lonely
point.

‘It as far off as happiness or contentment,’ she said to herself; ‘vain
to dream of reaching it.’

She stopped at last, and looked at her watch, feeling that the
afternoon was wearing on, and that it might be time for her to hurry
back to the family circle. It was past five, and the dinner hour was
seven; and she had been roaming upwards by paths which might lead her
astray in the descent, one woodland path being so like another. She
began her homeward journey, walking quickly, her thoughtful eyes bent
upon the ground. She was hurrying on, absorbed in her own thoughts,
when her name was uttered by that one only voice which had power to
thrill her soul.

‘Daphne!’

She looked up and saw Gerald Goring, seated on a fallen pine-trunk,
smoking.

He flung away his cigarette and came towards her.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said, with a careless nod; ‘I am hurrying back to
dinner.’

He put out his hand and caught her by the arm, and drew her towards him
authoritatively.

‘You are not going to escape me so easily,’ he said, pale to the lips
with strongest feeling. ‘No; you and I have a long reckoning to settle.
What do you think I am made of, that you dare to treat me as you have
done for the last month? Am I a dog to be whistled to your side, to be
lured away from love and fealty to another by every trick, and grace,
and charm within the compass of woman’s art, and then to be dismissed
like a dog—sent back to my former owner? You think you can cure me of
my folly—cure me by silence and averted looks—that I can forget you and
be again the man I was before I loved you. Daphne, you should know me
better than that. You have kindled a fire in my blood which you alone
can quench. You have steeped me in a poison for which you have the only
antidote. Oh! my Œnone! my Œnone! will you refuse the balm that can
heal my wounds, the balsam that you alone can bestow?’

Daphne looked at him without flinching, the sweet girlish face deadly
pale, but fixed as marble.

‘I told you what I thought and meant in my letter,’ she said quietly.
‘I have never wavered from that.’

‘Never wavered!’ he cried savagely. ‘You are made of stone. I have
been trying you. I have been waiting for you to give way. I knew it
must come in the end, for I know that you love me—I know it—I know
it. I have known it almost ever since I came back to South Hill, and
saw your cheek whiten when you recognised me; and I have been waiting
to see how long this drama of self-sacrifice would last—how long you
would deny your love, and falsify your whole nature. It has lasted long
enough, Daphne. The chase has been severe enough. Your tender feet have
been wounded by the thorny ways of self-sacrifice. Your poor Apollo’s
patience is well-nigh worn out. My love, my love, why should we go on
dissembling to each other, and to all the rest of the world, looking at
each other with stony countenances—dumb—cold, when every throb of each
burning heart beats for the other, when every feeling in each breast
responds to its twin soul, as finely as a note of music to the touch
of the player? Let us end it all, Daphne. Let us make an end of this
long dissimulation—this life of hypocrisy. Come with me, dear; fly with
me. Now, Daphne—now, this instant, before there is time for either of
us to repent. We can be married to-morrow morning at Geneva—it can be
easily managed in that Puritan city. Come away with me, my beloved.
I will honour and respect your purity as faithfully as if a hundred
knights rode at your saddle-bow. My beloved, do you think that good can
come to anyone by a life-long lie, by the trampling out of Nature’s
sweetest purest feeling in two loving hearts?’

He had drawn her to his breast. Folded in a lover’s arms for the first
time in her life, she looked up into eyes whose passionate ardour
seemed to encompass her with a divine flame: as if this man who clasped
her to his breast had been indeed the old Greek god, sublime in the
radiance of youth and genius and immortal beauty.

‘Daphne, will you be my wife?’

‘I cannot answer that question yet,’ she said slowly, falteringly,
after a pause of some moments. ‘You must give me time. Let me go
now—this instant. I must hurry back to the hotel.’

‘What! when I hold you in my arms for the first time?—when I am steeped
in the rapture of a satisfied love? Oh Daphne, if you knew how often
in feverish dreams I have held you thus; I have looked down into your
eyes, and drunk the nectar of your lips. What?’ as she drew herself
suddenly away from him; ‘even now you refuse me one kiss—the solemn
pledge of our union; cruel, too cruel girl!’

‘To-morrow shall decide our fate,’ she said. ‘For pity’s sake, as you
are a gentleman, let me go.’

He released her that moment. His arms dropped at his sides, and she was
free.

‘There was no necessity for that appeal,’ he said coldly; ‘you can
go—alone if you choose—though I should like to walk back to the hotel
with you. I left—your sister’ (it seemed as if it were difficult for
him to pronounce Lina’s name) ‘in the garden before I strolled up here.
I thought you were with your devoted lover. You say to-morrow shall
decide our fate. I cannot imagine why you should hesitate, or postpone
your decision. I know that you love me as fondly as I love you, and
that neither of us can ever care for anyone else. Promise me at least
one thing before we part to-day. Promise me that you will break off
this pitiful mockery of an engagement to a man whom you despise.’

‘I do not despise him—that is too hard a word—but I promise that I will
never be Edgar Turchill’s wife.’

‘Lose no time in letting him know that. My blood boils and my heart
sickens every time I see him touch your hand. Thank God, he keeps his
kisses for your hours of privacy.’

‘He has never kissed me but once in my life,’ said Daphne, tossing up
her head, and blushing angrily.

‘Thank God again.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said, looking at him with a pathetic tenderness, love
struggling with despair.

He leaned against the brown trunk of a fir-tree, pale to the lips,
his eyes fixed on the ground, where the mosses and starry white
blossoms, and tremulous harebells, and delicate maidenhair fern shone
like jewels in the golden patches of light which flickered with every
movement of the dark branches above them. His eyes perused every leaf
and every petal, noting their form and colour with mechanical accuracy
of observation. His pencil could have reproduced every detail of that
little bit of broken ground six months afterwards.

‘Daphne,’ he said huskily, ‘you are very cruel to me. I am not going to
let you see how low a man can sink when he loves a woman as weakly, as
blindly, as madly as I love you. I am not going to show you how base he
can be—how sunk in his own esteem. There is some remnant of pride left
in me. I am not going to crawl at your feet, or to shed womanish tears.
But I tell you all the same, you are breaking my heart.’

‘It is all foolishness,’ said Daphne, pale, but calm of speech and
eye, every nerve braced in the intensity of her resolution. ‘It is
folly and madness from beginning to end. You confessed as much just
this moment. Why should I sacrifice my honour and my self-respect to
gratify a weak, blind, mad love? I love my sister with a truer, better,
holier affection than I could ever feel for you—if I had been your wife
five-and-twenty years, and it were our silver wedding-day.’

She smiled even in her despair at the impossible image of herself and
Gerald Goring grown middle-aged and stout and commonplace, like the
principal figures in a silver wedding.

‘Why cannot you let the past be past—forget that you ever have been so
foolish, so false, as to care for me?’

‘Forget! yes, if I could do that. It would be as easy to pluck my
heart out of my body and go on living comfortably afterwards. No,
Daphne, I can never forget. No, Daphne, I can never go back to the old
calm tranquil love. It never was love. It was friendship, affection,
respect—what you will, but not love. I never knew what love meant till
I knew you.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said gently, perceiving that an argument of this kind
might go on for ever.

It was sweet to hear him plead; there was even a fearful kind of
happiness—half sweet, half bitter—in being alone with him in that
silent wood, in knowing that he was her own; heart, mind, and soul
devoted to her; ready to sacrifice honour and good name for her sake:
for what would the world say of him if he jilted Madoline and ran away
with Madoline’s sister? Her breast swelled with ineffable pride at the
thought of her triumph over this man to whom her girlish heart had
given itself unwittingly, on just such a summer afternoon as this, two
years ago. The man who had so often seemed to scorn her, to regard her
only as a subject for friendly ridicule, in the beginning of things at
South Hill. He was at her feet; she had made him her slave. Her heart
thrilled with delight at the knowledge of his love; yet above every
selfish consideration was her thought of her sister, and that made her
firm as the granite peak of Jaman yonder, rising sharply above its
black girdle of firs.

She looked at him for a few moments steadily, with a curious smile,
a smile which lighted up the expressive face with an almost inspired
look. Her hand rested lightly on the lace at her throat, the
finger-tips just touching the pearl necklace, Lina’a new year’s gift,
which she wore constantly. It was her talisman.

‘Let us shake hands,’ she said, ‘and part friends.’

‘Friends!’ he echoed scornfully, ‘am I ever anything else than your
friend? I am your slave. The greater includes the less.’

He clasped her hand in both of his, lifted it to his lips, and then let
her go without a word.

The smile faded from her face as she turned from him. She went slowly
down the hill by the winding path. Gerald took a hasty survey of the
scene, and then struck downwards by a descent that seemed almost
perpendicular.




CHAPTER XXXII.

‘FOR LOVE AND NOT FOR HATE THOU MUST BE DED.’


When Daphne and Gerald were gone, and the fair woodland scene was
empty, a third figure came slowly out of the fir-grove, a substantial
form clad in a rusty black-silk gown, short petticoats, side-laced
cashmere boots, and a bonnet which was only thirty years behind the
prevailing fashion. This antique form belonged to Jane Mowser, who
carried a little basket of an almost infantine shape, and who had
been gathering wild strawberries for her afternoon refreshment. While
thus engaged she had espied Daphne’s white frock gleaming athwart the
dark stems of the firs, and had contrived to skirt the pathway, and
keep the young lady in view. Thus she had been within earshot when
Daphne and Gerald Goring met, and had heard the greater part of their
conversation. ‘I’ve known it and foreseen it. I knew it would come
to this from the very beginning,’ she muttered breathlessly; ‘and I’m
thankful that I’m the chosen instrument for finding them out. Oh, my
poor Miss Madoline, what a viper you have nourished in your loving
bosom! Oh, the artfulness of that anteloping girl! pretending to reject
him, and leading him on all the time, and meaning to run away with him
to-morrow, and be married on the sly at Geneva, as truly as my name is
Mowser. But I’ll put a stop to their goings on. I’ll let in the light
upon their dark ways. Jane Mowser will prove a match for an antelope
and a traitor.’

The little basket trembled in Mrs. Mowser’s agitated grasp, as she
trotted briskly downhill to the hotel. ‘I’ll make their baseness known
to Sir Vernon,’ said Mowser, ‘and if he has the heart of a man he’ll
crush that fair-haired young viper.’

Having detested Daphne from the day of her birth, Mowser now felt a
virtuous thrill, the sense of a relieved conscience, in the idea that
Daphne had justified her dislike. It would have been pain and grief to
her had the girl turned out well; but to have her judgment borne out,
her wisdom made clear as daylight, every evil feeling of her heart
fully excused by the girl’s bad conduct, this was comfort which weighed
heavily in the scale against her honest sorrow for the mistress whom
she honestly loved.

She had no idea that the revelation she was going to make must
necessarily lead to the cancelment of Madoline’s engagement. Her notion
was that if Sir Vernon were made acquainted with the treachery that had
been going on in his family circle, he would turn his younger daughter
out of doors, and compel Gerald Goring to keep faith with his elder
daughter. She allowed nothing for those finer shades of feeling which
generally lead to the breaking of matrimonial engagements. It seemed to
her that if a man had got himself engaged to a girl, and wanted to cry
off, he must be taken by the scruff off his neck, as it were, and made
to fulfill his promise.

When seven o’clock came and the _table-d’hôte_, Daphne was shut up in
her own room with a bad headache; Mr. Goring was missing; and there
were only Aunt Rhoda, Madoline, and Edgar to take their accustomed
places near one end of the long table. A little pencilled note from
Daphne had been brought to Madoline by one of the chambermaids, just
before dinner:

‘I have been for a long, long walk, and the heat has given me a
dreadful headache. Please excuse my coming to dinner. I will have some
tea in my room.’

‘That foolish girl has been walking too far for her strength, no
doubt,’ said Mrs. Ferrers. ‘She is always in extremes. But what has
become of Mr. Goring? Has he been overwalking himself too?’

‘I think not,’ answered Lina, smiling; ‘we were dawdling about together
near the hotel till four o’clock, and I don’t suppose he would start
for a long ramble after that.’

‘Then why is he not at dinner?’

This question was unanswerable. They could only speculate vaguely about
the absent one. Nobody had seen him after he parted from Madoline at
the garden gate. Perhaps he had walked to Vevey, perhaps to Montreux,
miscalculating the distance, and the time it would take him to go
and return. There was an uncomfortable feeling all through the slow
protracted dinner, Madoline’s eyes wandering to the door every now
and then, expecting to see Gerald enter; Edgar out of spirits because
Daphne was absent; Mrs. Ferrers overcome by the heat, and beginning to
perceive that Swiss scenery was a delight of which one might become
weary.

‘I am so vexed with myself for falling asleep and letting Daphne roam
about alone,’ said Edgar, staring absently at a savoury mess of veal
and vegetable to which he had mechanically helped himself.

‘I don’t see why you should blame yourself for Daphne’s want of common
sense,’ answered Aunt Rhoda somewhat snappishly. ‘It was an afternoon
that would have sent anybody to sleep. Even I, who am generally so
wakeful, closed my eyes for a few minutes over my book.’

If Mrs. Ferrers had confessed that she had been snoring vigorously for
an hour and a half, she would have been nearer the truth.

Dinner came to its formal close in the shape of an unripe dessert, and
there was still no sign of Gerald. Edgar went up to the corridor and
knocked at Daphne’s door to inquire if her head were better.

She answered from within in a weary voice:

‘Thanks; no! It is aching awfully. Please don’t trouble yourself about
me. Go for a nice walk with Lina.’

‘Don’t you think if you were to come out and sit in the garden the cool
evening air would do you good?’

‘I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow.’

‘Then you will not be well enough to go back to Montreux to-morrow
morning? We had better put off the journey.’

‘On no account. I shall be quite well to-morrow. It is only a headache.
Please go away and enjoy your evening.’

‘As if I could enjoy life without you. Good-night, darling. God bless
you!’

‘Good-night,’ replied the tired voice, and he went away sorrowing.

What was his life worth without her? Absolutely nothing. He had chosen
to make this one delight, this one love, the all-in-all of existence.

He went down into the garden with a moody dejected air and joined Lina,
who was sitting in a spot where the view of the valley below and the
height above was loveliest; but Lina was scarcely more cheerful than
Edgar. She was beginning to feel seriously uneasy at Gerald’s absence.

‘You don’t think anything can have happened—any accident?’ she asked
falteringly.

‘Do you mean that he can have tumbled off a precipice? Hardly likely.
A man who has climbed Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau would scarcely come
to grief hereabouts. I think the worst that has befallen him is to have
lost his dinner.’

They sat in the garden till the valley and lake below were folded in
darkness, and the moon was climbing high above the dark fir trees and
the gray peak, and then Lina’s heart was lightened by the sound of a
sympathetic tenor voice, whose every tone she knew, singing _La Donna e
mobile_, in notes that floated nearer and nearer as the singer came up
the grassy slope below the garden. She went to meet him.

‘My dear Gerald, I have been miserable about you.’

‘Because I didn’t appear at dinner? Forgive me, dearest. The heat gave
me a racking headache, and I thought a tremendous walk was the only way
to cure it. I have been down to Montreux, and seen your father, who is
pining for your return. He looked quite scared when I dashed into the
garden where he was reading his paper on the terrace by the lake. I was
not ten minutes at Montreux altogether.’

‘Dear father! It was very good of you to go and see him.’

‘It was only a peep. I’m sorry you felt fidgety about me.’

‘I am sorry you had a headache. It seems an epidemic. Daphne was not
able to appear at dinner for the same reason.’

‘Poor little Daphne!’

       *       *       *       *       *

They were to start upon their return journey early next morning, so
as to reach Montreux before the tropical heat of afternoon. They all
breakfasted together in Madoline’s sitting-room between six and seven,
Aunt Rhoda, who was a great advocate of early rising, looking much the
sleepiest of the party. Daphne was pale and spiritless, but as she
declared herself perfectly well nobody could say anything to her.

They started at seven o’clock. There were two carriages; a roomy
landau, and a vehicle of composite shape and long service for Mowser
and the luggage. Daphne at once declared her intention of walking.

‘The walk downhill through fields and orchards and vineyards’ will be
lovely,’ she said.

‘Delicious,’ exclaimed Edgar; ‘but don’t you think it is rather too far
for a walk?’

‘Are you too lazy to walk with me?’

‘I don’t think you need insult me by such a question.’ On which Daphne
set out without another word, waving her hand lightly to Madoline as
she vanished at a turn in the road.

Gerald Goring handed the two ladies to their seats in the landau, and
took his place facing them. He had a listless worn-out look, as if his
pedestrianism last night had exhausted him.

‘You are not looking well, Gerald,’ Lina said anxiously, disturbed at
seeing his haggard countenance in the clear morning light.

‘My dearest, who could possibly look well in such a languid atmosphere
as this? We are in a vaporous basin, shut in by a circle of hills. Down
at Montreux it is like being at the bottom of a gigantic forcing-pit;
here, though we fancy ourselves ever so high, we are only on the side
of the incline. The wall still rises above us. At this season we ought
to be at Davos or Pontresina.’

‘Those are the only places people go to nowadays,’ said Mrs. Ferrers
discontentedly. ‘I shall be almost ashamed to tell my friends where I
have been. All the people one meets in society go to the Engadine.’

‘I don’t think that idea need spoil our enjoyment of this lovely
scenery,’ said Madoline. ‘Look at Daphne and Mr. Turchill, what a way
they are below us!’

She pointed with her sunshade to a glancing white figure among the
chestnut groves below. Edgar and Daphne had descended by those steep
straight paths which made so little of the distance, while the horses
were travelling quietly along the gentle windings of the road. It was
a lovely drive to Montreux, the town and its adjacent villages looking
like a child’s toys set out upon a green table; the castle of Chillon
distinctly seen at every turn of the road; the hillsides shaded by
Spanish chestnuts, big and old; verdant slopes mounting up and up
towards a blue heaven. They passed the little post and telegraph office
at Glion, a wooden hut, baked through and through with the sun, like
an oven; the hotel where the children were at play in the garden, and
a few early-rising adults strolled about rather listlessly, waiting
for breakfast; and then down by the ever-winding road, past many a
trickling waterfall; sometimes a mere cleft in the rock, sometimes a
stony recess in a low wall, fringed with ferns, where the water drops
perpetually into the basin below, and so by wooded slopes descending
steeply to the sapphire lake, past the parish church, picturesquely
situated on the hillside, and by many a public pump with a double
spout, and tanks where the women were washing linen or vegetables under
an open roof. Some kind of industry was going on at all these public
fountains; or at least there was a group of children dabbling in the
water.

They were at Montreux before ten o’clock; Sir Vernon delighted to have
his elder daughter back again, and even inquiring civilly about Daphne,
who had not yet arrived, despite the tremendous spurt she and Edgar had
begun with.

‘That is just like Daphne,’ said her father, when he was told how she
had insisted on walking all the way. ‘She is always beginning something
tremendous and never finishing it. I daresay we shall have Turchill
down here presently in search of a carriage to bring her the second
half of the way.’

‘Yesterday she gave herself a headache by roaming about the hills,’
said Aunt Rhoda; ‘she has not a particle of discretion.’

‘Do you expect her to be full of wisdom at eighteen, Auntie?’ asked
Madoline deprecatingly.

‘I can only say, my dear, that at eighteen I was not a fool,’ replied
Mrs. Ferrers sourly; and Lina did not argue the question further,
knowing but too well how her aunt was affected towards Daphne.

The pedestrians made their appearance five minutes later, none the
worse for their long walk through fields and vineyards, and across
cottage-gardens and orchards, a walk full of interest and diversity.
Daphne, flushed with exercise, looked ever so much better than she had
looked at breakfast, where she had been without appetite even for her
beloved rolls and honey.

‘I have a little business to arrange in Geneva,’ said Gerald, while
they were all sitting about the airy drawing-room in a purposeless way,
before settling down into their old quarters and old habits. ‘I think
I shall take the train, as the quicker way, and then I can be back to
dinner.’

Madoline looked surprised.

‘Have you anything very important to do in Geneva?’ she asked; ‘you
never said anything about it before.’

‘No; it is a necessity which has arisen quite lately. I’ll tell you all
about it—afterwards. Good-bye till dinner-time. You must be tired after
your morning drive, and you won’t feel inclined for much excursionising
to-day.’

‘I’m afraid we’ve seen everything there is to be seen within a
manageable distance,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, rather dolefully.

Daphne was sitting near the door. She had dropped into a low deep
chair, and sat with her straw hat in her lap, full of wild flowers
which she had gathered on her way down. Gerald stooped as he passed
her, and took one of the half-withered blossoms—things so fragile in
their delicate beauty that they faded as soon as plucked—and put it in
his breast. The act was so carelessly done that no one seeing it would
have perceived any significance in it, or could have guessed that the
hand which took the flower trembled with suppressed feeling, and that
the heart against which it lay beat loud with passion.

‘I am going to make all arrangements for our marriage,’ he said in a
low voice.

‘Good-bye,’ she answered, looking straight up at him.

He was gone. Her gaze followed him slowly to the door, and lingered
there; then she rose and gathered up her flowers.

‘I think I’ll go to my room and lie down,’ she said to Madoline.
‘Please don’t let Edgar come worrying about me. Tell him to amuse
himself without my company for once in a way.’

‘My dearest, I don’t think he has any idea of amusing himself without
you in Switzerland. How tired you look, my poor pet! Go and lie down
and get a nice refreshing sleep after your walk. You shall not be
disturbed till I come myself to bring you some tea. That will be better
for you than coming down to luncheon.’

‘I don’t feel much inclined for sleep, though I confess to being tired.
I should like you to come and sit with me for a little, Lina, soon
after luncheon, if you don’t mind.’

‘Mind! My darling, as if I were not always glad to be with you.’

Daphne went slowly up to her room, very slowly, with automatic steps,
as one who walks in his sleep. The dark gray eyes looked straight into
space, fixed and heavy with despair.

‘He is mad, and I am mad,’ she said to herself. ‘How can it
end—except——’

Her room was bright and pretty, gaily furnished in that bright foreign
style which studies scenic effect rather than solid comfort; French
windows opening upon a balcony, shaded with a striped awning. The
windows looked on to the lake, across the bright blue water to the
opposite shore, with its grand and solitary hills, its villages few
and far apart. Daphne stood for a long while looking dreamily at the
expanse of bright water, and the bold and rugged shore beyond; at
Chillon in its rocky corner; at the deep dark gorge whence the yellow
Rhone comes rushing in, staining Lake Loman’s azure floor. How lovely
it all was—how lovely, and yet of how little account in the sum of
man’s destiny! All Nature’s loveliness was powerless to mend one broken
heart.

‘What was it that he read on my hand that day at Fontainebleau?’ she
asked herself. ‘Was it this? was it this?’

A steamer went by laden with people, a band playing a waltz tune. The
world seemed full of thoughtless souls, for whom life meant only idle
empty pleasures. Daphne turned away from that sunlit scene sick at
heart, wishing that she were lying quietly in one of those green dells
through which they had passed to-day, a leafy hollow hidden in the
hillside, and that life were ebbing away without an effort.

‘Seneca was a wise and learned man,’ she thought; ‘but with all his
wisdom he found it difficult to die. Cleopatra’s death sounds easier—a
basket of fruit and a little gliding snake a bright pretty creature
that a child might have played with, and been stung to death unawares.’

She threw herself on the bed, not tired from her walk, which seemed
as nothing to the lithe active limbs, but weary of life and its
perplexities. Oh, how he loved her, and how she loved him! And what a
glorious godlike thing life would be in his company! Glorious, but it
must not be; godlike, but honour barred the way.

‘Oh God! let me never forget what she has been to me,’ she prayed, with
clasped hands, with all her soul in that prayer—‘sister, mother, all
the world of love, and protection, and comfort—teach me to be true to
her; teach me to be loyal.’

For two long hours she lay, broad awake, in a blank tearless despair;
and then the door was gently opened, and Madoline came softly into the
room and seated herself by the bed. Daphne was lying with her face to
the wall. She did not turn immediately, but stretched out her hand to
her sister without a word.

‘Dearest, your hand is burning hot; you must be in a fever,’ said
Madoline.

‘No; there is nothing the matter with me.’

‘I’m afraid there is. I’m afraid that walk was too fatiguing. I have
ordered some tea for you.’ The maid brought it in as she spoke; not
Mowser; Mowser had kept herself aloof with an air of settled gloom,
ever since her return to Montreux. ‘I hope you have had a nice long
sleep.’

‘I have not been able to sleep much,’ answered Daphne, turning her
languid head upon her pillow, and then sitting up on the bed, a
listless figure in a tumbled white gown, with loose hair falling
over shoulders; ‘I have not been able to sleep much, but I have been
resting. Don’t trouble about me, Lina dear. I am very well. What
delicious tea!’ she said, as she tasted the cup which Madoline had just
poured out for her. ‘How good you are! I want to talk with you—to have
a long serious talk—about you and—Mr. Goring.’

‘Indeed, dear. It is not often my lively sister has any inclination for
seriousness.’

‘No; but I have been thinking deeply of late about long engagements,
and short engagements, and love before marriage, and love after
marriage—don’t you know.’ Her eyes were hidden under their drooping
lids, but her colour changed from pale to rose and from rose to pale as
she spoke.

‘And what wise thoughts have you had upon the subject, dearest?’ asked
Lina lightly.

‘I can hardly explain them; but I have been thinking—you know that I am
not desperately in love with—poor Edgar. I have never pretended to be
so; have I, dear?’

‘You have always spoken lightly of him. But it is your way to speak
lightly of everything; and I hope and believe that he is much more dear
to you than you say he is.’

‘He is not. I respect him, because I know how good he is; but that
is all. And do you know, Lina, I have sometimes fancied that your
feeling for Mr. Goring is not much stronger than mine for Edgar. You
are attached to him; you have an affection for him, which has grown
out of long acquaintance and habit—an almost sisterly affection; but
you are not passionately in love with him. If he were to die you would
be grieved, but you would not be heartbroken.’ She said this slowly,
deliberately, her eyes no longer downcast, but reading her sister’s
face.

‘Daphne!’ cried Madoline, ‘how dare you? How can you be so cruel? Not
love him! Why, you know that I have loved him ever since I was a child,
with a love which every day of my life has made stronger—a love which
is so rooted in my heart that I cannot imagine what life would be like
without him. I am not impulsive or demonstrative—I do not talk about
those things which are most dear and most sacred in my life, simply
because they are too sacred to be spoken about. If he were—to die—if I
were to lose him—no, I cannot think of that. It is heartless of you to
put such thoughts into my mind. My life has been all sunshine—a calm
happy life. God may be keeping some great grief in store for my later
days. If it were to come I should bow beneath the rod; but my heart
would break all the same.’

‘And if the grief took another shape—if he were to be false to you?’
said Daphne, laying her hand, icy cold now, upon her sister’s.

‘That would be worse,’ answered Lina huskily; ‘it would kill me.’

Daphne said not a word more. Her hands were clasped, as in prayer; the
dark sorrowful eyes were lifted, and the lips moved dumbly.

‘I ought not to have talked of such things, dear,’ she said, gently,
after that voiceless prayer. ‘It was very foolish.’

Lina was profoundly agitated. That calm and gentle nature was capable
of strongest feeling. The image of a terrible sorrow—a sorrow which,
however unlikely, was not impossible—once evoked was not to be banished
in a moment.

‘Yes; it was foolish, Daphne,’ she answered tremulously. ‘No good can
ever come of such thoughts. We are in God’s hands. We can only be happy
in this life with fear and trembling, for our joy is so easily turned
into sorrow. And now, dear, if you are quite comfortable, and there is
nothing more I can do for you, I must go back to Aunt Rhoda. I promised
to go for a walk with her.’

‘Isn’t it too warm for walking?’

‘Not for Aunt Rhoda’s idea of an afternoon walk, which is generally to
stroll down to the pier, and sit under the trees watching the people
land from the steamers.’

‘Shall you be out long, do you think?’

‘That will depend upon Aunt Rhoda. She said something about wanting
to go in the steamer to Vevey, if it could be done comfortably before
dinner.’

‘Good-bye! Kiss me, Lina. Tell me you are not angry with me for what I
said just now. I wanted to sound the depths of your love.’

‘It was cruel, dear; but I am not angry,’ answered Lina, kissing her
tenderly.

Daphne put her arms round her sister’s neck, just as she had done years
ago when she was a child.

‘God bless you, and reward you for all you have been to me, Lina!’ she
faltered tearfully; and so, with a fervent embrace, they parted.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

‘IS THERE NO GRACE? IS THERE NO REMEDIE?’


When the door closed on Madoline, Daphne rose and changed her
crumpled muslin for a dressing-gown, and brushed the bright silky
hair and rolled it up in a loose knot at the back of her head, and
bathed her feverish face, and put on a fresh gown, and made herself
altogether a respectable young person. Then she seated herself before
a dressing-table, which was littered all over with trinket-boxes and
miscellaneous trifles more or less indispensable to a young lady’s
happiness.

She had acquired a larger collection of jewellery than is usually
possessed by a girl of eighteen.

There were all Madoline’s birthday and New Year gifts: rings, lockets,
bracelets, brooches, all in the simplest style, as became her youth,
but all valuable after their kind. And there were Edgar’s presents: a
broad gold bracelet, set with pearls, to match her necklace; a locket
with her own and her lover’s initials interwoven in a diamond monogram;
a diamond and turquoise cross; and the engagement ring—a half-hoop of
magnificent opals.

‘I wonder why he chose opals,’ mused Daphne, as she put the ring into
the purple-velvet case in which it had come from the jeweller’s.
‘Most people think them unlucky; but it seems as if my life was to be
overshadowed with omens.’

She put all her lover’s presents together, and packed them neatly in a
sheet of drawing-paper, the largest and strongest kind of wrapper she
could find. Then, when she had lighted her taper and carefully sealed
this packet, she wrote upon it: ‘For Edgar, with Daphne’s love’—a
curious way in which to return a jilted lover’s gifts.

Then she sat for some time with the rest of her treasures opened out
before her on the table where she wrote her letters, and finally she
wrapped up each trinket separately, and wrote on each packet. On one:
‘For Madame Tolmache;’ on another: ‘For Miss Toby;’ on a third: ‘For
Martha Dibb.’ On a box containing her neatest brooch she wrote: ‘For
dear old Spicer.’ There were others inscribed with other names. She
forgot no one; and then at the last she sat looking dreamily at a
little ring, the first she had ever worn—best loved of all her jewels,
a single heart-shaped turquoise set in a slender circlet of plain gold.
Madoline had sent it to her on her thirteenth birthday. The gold was
worn and bent with long use, but the stone had kept its colour.

‘I should like him to have something that was mine,’ she said to
herself; and then she put the ring into a tiny cardboard box, and
sealed it in an envelope, on which she wrote: ‘For Mr. Goring.’

This was the last of her treasures, except the pearl necklace which she
always wore—her amulet, as she called it—and now she put all the neat
little packages carefully away in her desk, and on the top of them she
laid a slip of paper on which she had written:

‘If I should die suddenly, please let these parcels be given as I have
directed.’

This task being accomplished at her leisure, and the desk locked, she
went once more to the open window, and looked out at the lake. The
atmosphere and expression of the scene had changed since she looked
at it last. The vivid dancing brightness of morning was gone, and the
mellow light of afternoon touched all things with its pensive radiance.
The joyousness of the picture had fled. Its beauty was now more in
harmony with Daphne’s soul. While she was standing there in an idle
reverie, a peremptory tap came at the door.

‘Come in,’ she answered mechanically, without turning her head.

It was Mowser, whose severe countenance appeared round the half-open
door.

‘If you please, Miss Daphne, Sir Vernon wishes to speak to you,
immediate, in his study.’

Seldom in Daphne’s life had such a message reached her. Sir Vernon had
not been in the habit of seeking private conferences with his younger
daughter. He had given her an occasional lecture _en passant_, but
however he might have disapproved of the flightiness of her conduct, he
had never summoned her to his presence for a scolding in cold blood.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked hurriedly; but Mowser had
disappeared.

She went slowly down the broad shallow staircase, and to the room which
her father had made his private apartment. It was one of the best rooms
in the house, facing the lake, and sheltered from the glare of the sun
by a couple of magnificent magnolia trees, which shaded the lawn in
front of the windows. It was a large room with a polished floor, and
pretty Swiss furniture, carved cabinets, and a carved chimney-piece,
and a little blue china clock set in a garland of carved flowers.

Sir Vernon was seated at his writing-table, grim, stern-looking, his
open despatch-box before him in the usual official style. A little way
off sat Edgar Turchill, his folded arms resting on the back of a high
chair, his face hidden. It was the attitude of profound despondency,
or even of despair. One glance at her father’s face, and then at that
lowered head and clenched hands, told Daphne what was coming.

‘You sent for me,’ she faltered, standing in the middle of the bare
polished floor, and looking straight at her father, fearlessly, for
there is a desperate sorrow which knows not fear.

‘Yes, madam,’ replied Sir Vernon in his severest voice. ‘I sent for
you to tell you, in the presence of the man who was to have been your
husband, that your abominable treachery has been discovered.’

‘I am not treacherous,’ she answered, ‘only miserable, the most
miserable girl that ever lived.’

Edgar lifted up his face, and looked at her, with such a depth of
tender reproachfulness, with such ineffable pity as made his homely
countenance altogether beautiful.

‘I hoped I should have made you happy,’ he said. ‘God knows I have
tried hard enough.’

She neither answered nor looked at him. Her eyes were fixed upon her
father—solemn tearless eyes, a marble passionless face—she stood
motionless, as if awaiting judgment.

‘You are the falsest and the vilest girl that ever lived,’ retorted Sir
Vernon. ‘Perhaps I ought hardly to be surprised at that. Your mother
was——’

‘For God’s sake, spare her!’ cried Edgar huskily, stretching out
his arm as if to ward off a blow, and the word on Sir Vernon’s lips
remained unspoken. ‘That is no fault of hers. Let her bear her own
burden.’

‘She ought to find it heavy enough, if she has a heart or a
conscience,’ cried Sir Vernon passionately. ‘But I don’t believe she
has either. If she had a shred of self-respect, or common gratitude,
or honour, or womanly feeling, she would not have stolen her sister’s
lover.’

‘I did not steal him,’ answered Daphne resolutely. ‘His heart came
to me of its own accord. We both fought hard against Fate. And even
now there is no harm done; it has been only a foolish fancy of Mr.
Goring’s; he will forget all about it when I am—far away. I will never
look in his face again. I will go to the uttermost end of the earth,
to my grave, rather than stand between him and Madoline. Oh father,
father, you who have always been so hard with me, do you remember that
day at South Hill, directly after Mr. Goring came home, when I begged
you, on my knees, to send me back to school, to France, or Germany,
anywhere, so that I should be far away from my happy home—and from him?’

Her tears came at this bitter memory. Yes, she had fought the good
fight: but so vainly, to such little purpose!

‘I knew that I was weak,’ she sobbed,’and I wanted to be saved from
myself. But I am not so wicked as you think. I never tried to steal
Mr. Goring’s heart. I have never imagined the possibility of my being
in any way the gainer by his inconstancy. I have told myself always
that his love for me was a passing folly, of which he would be cured,
as a man is cured of a fever. I do not know what you have been told
about him and me, or who is your informant; but if you have been told
the truth you must know that I have been true to my sister—even in my
misery.’

‘My informant saw you in Mr. Goring’s arms; my informant heard his
avowal of love, and your promise to run away with him, and be married
at Geneva.’

‘It is false. I made no such promise. I never meant to marry him. I
would die a hundred deaths rather than injure Madoline. I am glad you
know the truth. And you, Edgar, I have tried to love you, my poor dear;
I have prayed that I might become attached to you, and be a good wife
to you in the days to come. I have been honest, I have been loyal.
Ask Mr. Goring, by-and-by, if it is not so. He knows, and only he can
know, the truth. Father, Madoline need never be told that her lover has
wavered. She must not know. Do you understand? She must not! It would
break her heart, it would kill her. He will forget me when I am far
away—gone out of his sight for ever. He will forgot me; and the old,
holier, truer love will return in all its strength and purity. All this
pain and folly will seem no more to him than a feverish dream. Pray do
not let her know.’

‘Do you think I would do her so great a wrong as to let her marry a
traitor? a false-hearted scoundrel, who can smile in her face, and make
love to her sister behind her back. She is a little too good to have
your leavings foisted upon her.’

‘If you tell her, you will break her heart.’

‘That will lie at your door. I would rather see her in her coffin than
married to a villain.’

Edgar rose slowly from his seat and moved towards the door. He had
nothing to do with this discussion. His mind could hardly enter into
the question of Gerald Goring’s treachery. It was Daphne who had
betrayed him; Daphne who had deceived him, and mocked him with sweet
words; Daphne whose liking had seemed more precious to him than any
other woman’s love, because he believed that no other man had ever
touched the virginal unawakened heart. And now he was told that she
could love passionately, that she could give kiss for kiss, and rain
tears upon a lover’s breast, that from first to last he had been her
victim and her dupe!

‘Good-bye, Daphne!’ he said, very quietly. ‘I am going home as fast
as train and boat can take me. I would have been contented to accept
something less than your love, believing that I should win your heart
in time, but not to take a wife whose heart belonged to another man.
You told me there was no one else; you told me your heart was free.’

‘I told you there was no one else who had ever cared for me,’ faltered
Daphne, remembering her equivocating answer that evening at South Hill.

‘I don’t want to reproach you, Daphne. I am very sorry for you.’

‘And I am very sorry that an honest man whom I respect should have
been fooled by a worthless girl,’ said Sir Vernon. ‘Give him back his
engagement ring. Understand that all is over between you and him,’ he
added, turning to his daughter.

‘I wish it to be so. I have put all your presents together in a parcel,
Edgar,’ answered Daphne. ‘You will receive them in due course.’

‘It is best to be off with the old love before we are on with the new,’
quoted Sir Vernon scornfully; ‘and she says she did not mean to run
away with Goring, in spite of this deliberate preparation.’

Edgar was gone. Daphne and her father were alone, the girl still
standing on the very spot where she had stood when she first came into
the room.

‘I have told you nothing but the truth,’ she said. ‘Why are you so hard
with me?’

‘Hard with you!’ he echoed, getting up from before his desk and looking
at her with vindictive eyes as he moved slowly towards the door. ‘How
can I be hard enough to you? You have broken my daughter’s heart.’

‘Father!’ she cried, falling on her knees and clinging to him in her
despair. ‘Father, is she to have all your love? Have you no tenderness,
no pity left for me? Am I not your daughter too?’

‘Your mother was my wife,’ he answered curtly, pushing her out of his
way as he passed from the room.

He was gone. She knelt where he had left her, a desolate figure in the
spacious bright-looking room, the afternoon sun making golden bars upon
the brown floor, her yellow hair touched here and there with glintings
of yellow light.

She remained in the same attitude for some minutes, her heavy eyelids
drooping over tearless eyes, her arms hanging listlessly, her hands
loosely clasped. Her mind for a little while was a blank: and then
there came into it unawares a verse, taken at random, from a familiar
hymn:

    ‘The trials that beset you,
        The sorrows ye endure,
     The manifold temptations,
        That death alone can cure.’

‘That death alone can cure,’ she repeated slowly, pushing back the
loose hair from her eyes; and then she rose from her knees and went out
through an open window into the garden.

It was about five o’clock. There was a look of exquisite repose over
all the scene, from the snow-bound summit of the Dent du Midi yonder,
down to the gardens that edged the lake, like a garland of summer
flowers encircling that peerless blue. It was abright glad-looking
world, and passing peaceful. Far away beyond that grand range of hills
lay the ice-fields of Savoy, the everlasting glaciers, gliding with
impalpable motion in obedience to some mysterious law which is still
one of Nature’s secrets, the wilderness of snow-clad peaks and wild
moraines, the gulfs and caverns, the unfathomable abysses of silence
and of death. Daphne thought of those unseen regions with a thrill of
awe as she walked slowly down the slope of the lawn.

‘I have seen so little of Switzerland after all,’ she said to herself,
‘so little of this wide wonderful world.’

She went to the toy _châlet_, the dainty opera-stage boat-house where
her boat was kept. There was no friendly Bink here to launch the
skiff for her, but the lower part of the boat-house jutted out over
the gable, and the boat was always bobbing about in the limpid water.
She had only to go down the wooden steps, unmoor her boat, and row
away over that wide stretch of placid water which she had never seen
disturbed by a tempest.

As she was stepping into the boat, the dog Monk came bounding and
leaping across the grass, and bounced into her arms, putting his huge
fore-feet on her shoulders, and swooping an affectionate tongue over
her pallid face. He had not seen her since her return from the hills,
and was wild with rapture at the idea of reunion.

‘No, Monk, not to-day,’ she said gently, as he tried to get into the
boat with her; ‘not to-day, dear faithful old Monk.’

The huge creature could have upset the boat with one bound; and
the little hand stretched out to push him back must have been as a
fluttering rose-leaf against his sinewy breast; but there was a moral
force in the blanched face and the steady eye which dominated his brute
power. He recoiled, and lifted up his head with a plaintive howl as the
boat shot off, the twin sails, the white and scarlet awning, flashing
in the sun.

A little way from the shore Daphne paused, resting on her oars, and
looking back at the bright garden, with its roses and magnolias, and
many-coloured flower-beds, the white villa gay with its crimson-striped
blinds; and then with one wide gaze she looked round the lovely
landscape, the long range of hills, in all their infinite variety of
light and shadow, verdant slopes streaked with threads of glittering
water, vineyards and low gray walls, rising terrace above terrace,
quaint Vevey, and gray old Chillon, the black gorge that lets in the
turbid Rhone; churches with square towers and ivy-covered walls; and
yonder the inexorable mountains of Savoy. For a little while her
eye took in every detail of the scene: and then it all melted from
her troubled gaze, and she saw not that grand Alpine chain, showing
cloudlike amid the clouds, but the brown Avon and its dipping willows,
the low Warwickshire hills and village gables, the distant spire of
Stratford above the many-arched bridge, the water-meadows at South
Hill, and the long fringe of yellow daffodils waving in the March wind.

‘Oh for the reedy banks and shallow reaches of the Avon!’ she thought,
her heart yearning for home.

Then with bowed head she bent over her oars, and the light boat shot
away across the wake of a passing steamer; it shot away, far away to
the middle of the lake; it vanished like a feather blown by a summer
breeze; and it never came back again.

       *       *       *       *       *

The empty boat drifted ashore at Evian in the gray light of morning,
while Gerald Goring, with a couple of Swiss boatmen, was rowing about
the lake, stopping to make inquiries at every landing-place, sending
scouts in every direction, in quest of that missing craft. No one ever
knew, no one dared to guess, how it had happened: but every one knew
that in some dark spot below that deep blue water Daphne was at rest.
The dog had been down by the boat-house all night, howling fitfully
through the dark silent hours. He had not left the spot since Daphne’s
boat glided away from the steps.

It had been a night of anguish and terror for all that household at
Montreux—a night of agitation, of alternations of hope and fear. Even
Sir Vernon was profoundly moved by anxiety about the daughter to whom
he had given so little of his love. He knew that he had been hard and
merciless in that last interview. He had thought only of Madoline; and
the knowledge that Madoline had been wronged—that the elder sister’s
love had been tempted to falsehood by the arts and coquetries of the
younger sister—had stung him to a frenzy of anger. Nothing could be
too bad for the ingrate who had sinned against the best of sisters. He
was too hard a man to give the sinner the benefit of the doubt, and
to believe that she had sinned unconsciously. In his mind Daphne had
wickedly and deliberately corrupted the heart of her sister’s affianced
husband. Angry as he had felt with Gerald, his indignation against the
weaker vessel was fiercer than his wrath against the stronger.

Mowser had told her story with truth as to the main facts; but with
such embellishments and heightened colouring as made Daphne appear
the boldest and most depraved of her sex. In Mowser’s version of that
scene in the pine-wood there was no hint of temptation resisted, of
a noble soul struggling with an unworthy passion, of a tender heart
trying to be faithful to sisterly affection, while every impulse of a
passionate love tugged the other way. All Mowser could tell was that
Miss Daphne had sobbed in Mr. Goring’s arms, that he had kissed her,
as she, Mowser, had never been kissed, although she had kept company
and been on the brink of marriage with a builder’s foreman; and that
they had talked of being married at Geneva—leastways Mr. Goring had
asked Miss Daphne to run away with him for that purpose, and she
had not said no, but had only begged him to give her twenty-four
hours—naturally requiring that time to pack her clothes and make all
needful preparation for flight.

Passionately attached to his elder daughter, and always ready to think
evil of Daphne, Sir Vernon needed no confirmation of Mowser’s story.
It was only the realisation of what he always feared—the mother’s
falsehood showing itself in the daughter—hereditary baseness. It was
the girl’s nature to betray. She had all her mother’s outward graces
and too fascinating prettiness. How could he have hoped that she would
have any higher notions of truth and honour?

Moved to deepest wrath at the wrong done to Madoline, Sir Vernon’s
first impulse had been to send for Gerald Goring, in order to come
to an immediate understanding with that offender. He was told that
Mr. Goring had gone to Geneva, and was not expected home before eight
o’clock. He then sent for Edgar, and to that unhappy lover bluntly
and almost brutally related the story of Daphne’s baseness. Edgar was
inclined to disbelieve, nay, even to laugh Mowser’s slander to scorn;
but Mowser, summoned to a second interview, stuck resolutely to her
text, and was not to be shaken.

‘I can’t believe it,’ faltered Edgar, stricken to the heart, ‘unless I
hear it from her own lips.’

‘Go and fetch her,’ said Sir Vernon to Mowser, and then had followed
Daphne’s appearance, and those admissions of hers which told Edgar only
too clearly how he had been deceived.

The two men, Gerald and Edgar, passed each other on the railway between
Lausanne and Geneva—Edgar on his way to the city, Gerald going back to
Montreux. Mr. Goring wondered at seeing his friend’s pale face glide
slowly by as the two trains crossed at the junction.

‘It looks as if she had given him his quietus already,’ he said to
himself. ‘My brave little Daphne!’

He was going back to Montreux with his heart full of hope and gladness.
He had taken all the needful measures at Geneva to make his marriage
with Daphne an easy matter, would she but consent to marry him. And
he had no doubt of her consent. Could a girl love as she loved, and
obstinately withhold herself from her lover?

He forgot the pain he must inflict on one who had been so dear; forgot
the woman who had been the guiding star of his boyhood and youth;
forget everything except that one consummate bliss which he longed
for—the triumph of a passionate love. That crown of life once snatched
from reluctant Fate, all other things would come right in time.
Madoline’s gentle nature would forgive a wrong which was the work of
destiny rather than of man’s falsehood. Sir Vernon would be angry and
unpleasant, no doubt; but Gerald Goring cared very little about Sir
Vernon. The world would wonder; but Gerald cared nothing for the world.
He only desired Daphne, and Daphne’s love; having all other good things
which life, looked at from the worldling’s standpoint, could give.

The sun was setting as he approached Montreux, and all the lake was
clothed in golden light. Rose-hued mountains, golden water, smiled at
him as if in welcome.

‘What a lovely world it is!’ he said to himself; ‘and how happy Daphne
and I will be in it—in spite of Fate and metaphysical aid. There I go,
quoting the Inevitable, as usual!’

He walked quickly from the station to the villa, eager to see Daphne,
to hear her voice, to touch the warm soft hand, and be assured that
there was such a being, and that he had not been the dupe of some
vision of intangible loveliness, as Shelley’s Alastor was in the
cavern. That last look of Daphne’s haunted him—so direct, so solemn a
gaze, so unlike the shy glance of conscious love. Nay, it resembled
rather the look of some departed spirit, returning from Pluto’s drear
abode to take its last fond farewell of the living.

The vestibule stood open to the road, an outer hall filled with plants
and flowers, an airy Italian-looking entrance. Gerald walked straight
in, and to the drawing-room. It was striking eight as he entered.

‘I hope you won’t wait for me,’ he began, looking round for Daphne;
‘I am a dusty object, and I don’t think I can make myself presentable
under twenty minutes. The train dawdled abominably.’

Mrs. Ferrers and Madoline were standing by the open window, looking
out. Lina turned, and at the first glimpse of her pale face Gerald
knew that there was something wrong. There had been a scene, perhaps,
between the sisters. Daphne had betrayed herself and him. Well! The
truth must be told very soon now. It were best to precipitate matters.

‘We are frightened about Daphne,’ said Lina; ‘she went out in her boat
a little before five—the gardener saw her leave—and she has not come
back yet.’

Three hours. It was long, but she was fond of solitary excursions on
the lake.

‘I don’t think there is much cause for alarm in that,’ he said, trying
to speak lightly, yet with a strange terror at his heart. ‘Shall I get
a boat and go after her? I had better, perhaps; she cannot be very far
off—dawdling about by Chillon, I daresay. Those dank stone walls have a
fascination for her.’

‘Yes, I shall be glad, if you don’t mind going. My father seems uneasy.
It is so strange that she should stay away three hours without leaving
word where she was going. Edgar is out. My aunt and I have not known
what to do, and when I told my father just now he looked dreadfully
alarmed.’

‘I will go this instant, and not come back till I have found her,’
answered Gerald huskily.

That last look of Daphne’s was in his mind. That never-to-be-forgotten
look from her dark eyes lifted fearlessly, with sad and steady gaze.

‘Oh God! did it mean farewell?’

He was out on the lake all night, with two of the most experienced
boatmen in the district, and it was only in the gray of morning that he
heard of the empty boat blown ashore a little below Evian—Evian, where
they had landed so merrily once from the same cockleshell boat, on a
sunny morning, for a pilgrimage to a drowsy village on the hills, a
cluster of picturesque homesteads sheltered by patriarchal walnut and
chestnut trees, where looking downward through the rich foliage they
saw the blue lake below.

The evening had been calm. There had been no accident or collision of
any kind on the lake; the little boat showed no sign of injury. It lay
on the shingly shore, just as the fishermen had pulled it in; an empty
boat. That was all.

Gerald stayed at Evian, and from Evian wrote briefly to Madoline
telling her all.

‘My life for the last six months has been a tissue of lies,’ he wrote;
‘and yet, God knows, I have tried to be true and honest, just as she
tried; but she with more purpose, yes, poor child! with much more
fidelity than mine. I wanted to tell you the truth when we were at
Fribourg, to make an end of all shams and deceptions, but she would not
let me. She meant to hold to her bond with Edgar—to be true to you. She
would have persevered in this to the end, if I had let her. But I would
not, and she has died rather than do you a wrong; it is my guilt—mine
alone. The brand of Cain is on me: and, like Cain, I shall be a
wanderer till I die. I do not ask you to forgive me, for I shall never
forgive myself; or to pity me, for mine is a grief which pity cannot
touch. If I could hope that you could ever forget me there would be
comfort in the thought; but I dare not hope for that. You might forget
your false lover, but how can you forget Daphne’s murderer?’

To this letter Madoline answered briefly: ‘You have broken my sister’s
heart and mine. A little honesty, a little truth, would have spared us
both. You might have been happy in your own way, and I might have kept
my sister. You are right—I can neither forget nor forgive. I thought
till this trouble came upon me that I was a Christian; I know now, God
help me! how far I am away from Christian feeling. All I can hope or
pray about you is that we two may never see each other’s face again. I
send you Daphne’s legacy.’

Enclosed in the letter was the little packet containing the turquoise
ring, with ‘For Mr. Goring’ written on the cover in Daphne’s dashing
penmanship. The hand had not trembled, though the heart beat high, when
that superscription was penned.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir Vernon stayed at Montreux for more than a month after that fatal
summer day, though the very sight of lake and mountain in their
inexorable beauty, so remote from all human trouble or human pity,
was terrible to him. Madoline urged him to stay. There were hours in
which, after many tears and many prayers, faint gleams of hope visited
her sorrowful soul. Daphne might not be dead. She might have landed
unnoticed at one of those quiet villages, and made her way to some
distant place where she could live hidden and unknown. Those farewell
gifts left in her desk must needs mean a deliberate departure: but they
need not mean death. She might be hiding somewhere, little knowing the
agony she was inflicting on those who had loved her, fearing only to be
found and taken home. Madoline could fancy her sister self-sacrificing
enough to live apart from home and kindred all her days, to earn her
bread in a stranger’s house. Oh, if it were thus only, and not that
other and awful fate—a young life flung away in its flower, a young
soul going forth unbidden to meet God’s judgment, burdened with the
deadly sin of self-murder!

‘Let us stay a few days longer, father,’ she pleaded. ‘We may hear
something. There may be some good news.’

‘God grant that it may be so,’ answered Sir Vernon, without a ray of
hope.

What of his remorse whose hardness had pressed so heavily upon his
child in that last hour of her brief life, whose bitter words had
perhaps confirmed the sinner in her desperate resolve, making it very
clear to her that this earth held no peaceful haven, that for her there
was no fatherly breast on which she could pour out the story of her
weakness and her struggle—no friend with the father’s sacred name from
whom she could ask counsel or seek protection? Alone in her misery, she
had sought the one refuge which remained for her—death; believing that
by that fatal deed she would secure her sister’s peace.

‘His heart will return to its truer nobler love when I am gone,’
she said to herself. Poor shallow soul, unsustained by any deep
sense of religion, or by any firm principle; tender heart, strong in
unquestioning fidelity. It was easy to follow out the train of false
reasoning which made her believe that death would be best; that in
throwing away her fair young life she was making a sacrifice to love
and honour.

       *       *       *       *       *

They remained at Montreux till the beginning of October, till autumnal
tints were stealing over the landscape, and the happy vintage-time had
begun, making all those gentle slopes alive with picturesque figures,
every turn in the road a scene for a painter. It was a dreary time
for Madoline and her father. Edgar was with them; called back from
Geneva by a telegram on the night of Daphne’s disappearance. He, like
his rival, had been unweary in his endeavour to obtain some knowledge
of Daphne’s fate. He had been from village to village, had made his
inquiries at every landing-place along the lake—had availed himself
of every local intelligence; but all to no purpose. One of the Vevey
boatmen had seen Daphne’s light skiff as she rowed swiftly towards
the middle of the lake. He saw the little boat dancing in the wake of
a steamer, watched it and its girl-owner till it floated into smooth
water, and then saw the boat never more.

There had been no reason for an accident upon that particular
afternoon; no sudden gust of wind; no mysterious rising of the lake;
nothing. In a sultry calm the little boat had last been seen gliding
smoothly over the smooth blue water.

Had she rowed to the end of the lake, where the tumultuous Rhone rushes
in from rocky St. Maurice, and been swamped by those turbid waters? Who
could tell? The stranded boat bore no sign of having been under water.

The time came when they must go back, when to remain any longer by the
lake seemed mere foolishness, a persistent brooding upon sorrow; more
especially as Sir Vernon’s health had become much worse since this
calamity had fallen upon him, and a change of some kind was imperative.

Aunt Rhoda had gone home a week after the fatal day, though to the last
expressing herself willing to remain and comfort Madoline.

‘You are very kind, Aunt, but you could not comfort me. You did not
care for her,’ Lina answered, with a touch of bitterness.

So Mrs. Ferrers, aggrieved at this rebuff, had gone back to her Rector,
whom she found more painfully affected by Daphne’s evil fate than she
thought consistent with his clerical character.

‘I shall never look at the garden in summer-time without thinking of
that bright face and girlish figure flitting about among the roses,
as I have seen her in the days that are gone,’ he said; ‘a man of my
age is uncomfortably reminded of his shortening lease of life when the
young are taken before him.’

And now that bitter day came upon which Madoline was obliged to leave
the banks of the fatal lake, and turn her sad face homewards, to South
Hill. South Hill without Daphne, without Gerald—those two familiar
figures gone out of her life for ever; the house empty of laughter and
gladness for evermore! All the sweetest things of life proved false,
every hope crushed, every possibility of future happiness gone from her
for ever! She could imagine no new hopes, no fresh beginning of life.
To do her duty to an invalid father; to use her ample fortune for the
comfort and advantage of the friendless and the needy, was all that
remained to her; a narrow round of daily tasks not less monotonous than
the humblest char’s, because she wore a silk gown and lived in a fine
house. So far her prayer had been granted. She and Gerald Goring had
never met since Daphne’s death. He had been heard of at Evian and then
at Vevey; but none of the South Hill people had seen him.

Edgar went back with them, a man so changed by grief that it would be
hard for the mother, who had seen him go forth in the strength and
gladness of happy youth, to recognise the haggard hopeless countenance
of the son who returned to her. He had borne his trouble bravely,
asking comfort from no one, anxious to console others whenever
consolation seemed possible. He had tried his best to persuade Madoline
that Daphne’s boat had been overturned by the current, that the sweet
young life had been lost by accident. Those carefully-sealed packets in
the desk hinted at a darker doom; yet it might be that they had been
prepared by Daphne under some vague idea of leaving home, in order to
escape the difficulties of her position; an intention to be carried out
at some indefinite time.

Hawksyard in the autumn, with white vapours stealing over the
low meadows at sunrise and sunset, with the large leaves of the
walnut-trees drifting heavily down, seemed a fitting place for a man
to nurse his grief and meditate upon the greatness of his loss. Edgar
roamed about the gardens and the fields like an unquiet spirit, or rode
for long hours in the lonely lanes, keeping as much as possible aloof
from all who knew him. Even the approach of the hunting season gave him
no pleasure.

‘I shall not hunt this year,’ he told his mother. ‘Indeed I doubt if I
shall ever follow the hounds again.’

‘Don’t say that, Edgar,’ cried Mrs. Turchill plaintively. ‘Wretched
as I am every day you are out with the hounds, I should be still more
miserable if you were to deprive yourself of your favourite amusement.
But you will think differently next October, I hope, dear. It isn’t
natural for young people to go on grieving for ever.’

‘Isn’t it, mother?’ asked her son bitterly. ‘Isn’t it natural for a
watch to stop when its mainspring is broken?’

The application of this inquiry was beyond Mrs. Turchill, so she made
no attempt to answer it.

She had been very good to her son since his sorrowful home-coming, not
tormenting him with futile consolations, but offering him that silent
sympathy which has always healing in it. Of Daphne’s fate she knew no
more than that the girl had gone out on the lake one sunny afternoon
and had never come back again. The announcement in _The Times_ had
said: ‘Accidentally drowned in the Lake of Geneva,’ and Mrs. Turchill
had never thought of seeking to know more. But she was much exercised
in her mind as the autumn wore into winter at the prolonged absence of
Gerald Goring.

‘Why does not Mr. Goring come back?’ she inquired of Edgar. ‘I should
think poor Miss Lawford must need his society now more than ever. It is
natural that the wedding should be postponed for a few months; but Mr.
Goring ought not to be away.’

‘That engagement is broken off, mother,’ her son answered briefly.

‘Broken off! But why?’

‘I can’t tell you. That concerns no one but Miss Lawford and Mr.
Goring. Don’t trouble about it, mother.’

At any other time Mrs. Turchill would have troubled very much about
such a piece of intelligence, would have insisted upon knowing the
rights and wrongs of the matter, and of expatiating upon it at her
leisure. But her respect for Edgar’s grief made her very discreet; and
seeing that the subject was painful to him, she said no more about
it No more to him, that is to say, but very much more to Deborah, to
whom she discoursed freely upon the extraordinary fact, delicately
suggesting that as Deborah was on intimate terms with the upper
servants at South Hill, she would no doubt hear all the ins and outs of
the story in due time.

‘I should be the last person to encourage gossip,’ remarked the matron
with dignity, ‘but there are some things which people cannot help
talking about, especially where a young lady is as much beloved and
respected as Miss Lawford.’

Deborah went to South Hill on her next Sunday out, and drank tea in the
housekeeper’s room, where Mrs. Spicer, though unable to speak with dry
eyes of Miss Daphne, was nevertheless much interested in the fit and
fashion of her black gown, the quality of which Deborah both appraised
and admired. But Mrs. Spicer only knew that Miss Lawford’s engagement
was broken off. She knew nothing as to the why and the wherefore, but
she surmised, somewhat vaguely, that Miss Lawford had turned against
Mr. Goring after her sister’s death.

Only one of the South Hill servants could have explained the cause of
that cancelled engagement, and she had been dismissed with a handsome
pension, and had gone to live in the outskirts of Birmingham, with her
own kith and kin. Sir Vernon could never endure the presence of the
faithful Mowser after Daphne’s death. ‘You did your duty, according to
your lights, I have no doubt,’ he said, when he sent her away; ‘but I
can never look at you without regretting that you did not hold your
tongue. You have told Miss Lawford nothing—about—that scene in the
pine-wood, I hope?’

Mowser protested that she would have had her tongue cut out rather than
speak one such word to her mistress.

‘I am glad of that. She knows too much already—enough to make her life
miserable. We must spare her what pain we can.’

Mowser assented, with a convulsion of her elderly throat, which looked
like a repressed sob. The pension promised was liberal; but it was a
hard thing to be dismissed, to be told that life at South Hill could be
carried on without her.

‘I don’t know what Miss Lawford will do when I’m gone,’ she faltered
tearfully; ‘I’m used to her ways, and she’s used to mine. A strange
maid will seem like an antelope to her.’

Sir Vernon stared, but did not deign to discuss the probabilities as
to his daughter’s feelings. He ordered Jinman—who on the strength
of knowing two or three dozen substantives in French and Italian,
considered himself an accomplished linguist—to conduct Mrs. Mowser to
Geneva, and to book her through, so far as it were possible, to her
native shores. He felt that he could breathe more freely when that evil
presence was out of the house. ‘She provoked me to torture that poor
child in her last hour upon earth,’ he thought. ‘She maddened me with
the idea that Lina’s lover had been stolen from her.’




CHAPTER XXXIV.

‘SENS LOVE HATH BROUGHT US TO THIS PITEOUS END.’

FROM THE REV. JULIAN TEMPLE TO MISS AYLMER.


  ‘Schaffhausen, September 11th, 187—.

  ‘MY DEAR FLORA,

‘You ask me for a detailed account of the melancholy accident on the
Matterhorn, of which I had the misfortune to be an eye-witness, and
the memory of which will haunt me for years to come—yes, even in that
blessed time when I shall be quietly settled down in domestic life
with my dear girl, and must needs have a thousand reasons for being
completely happy.

‘I kept you so well posted in my movements, until the occurrence of
this unhappy event made it painful to me to write about our Alpine
experiences, that you no doubt remember how Trevor and I, after our
successful attempt upon the Finsteraarhorn, made our way quietly down
to Zermatt, by way of Thun and Vispach. Never shall I forget the
calm delight of the last day’s walk between Vispach and Zermatt. The
distance is only thirty miles, we were in high spirits and in excellent
condition for the tramp, and we had a cart for our mountaineering gear,
and our knapsacks, so were able to take things easily.

‘We started at six o’clock, breakfasted at St. Nicolas, and reached
Zermatt early in the evening. Our road—a mule-path for the greater part
of the way—led us through scenes of infinite variety, and opened to us
views of surpassing grandeur and beauty. Amidst all the wildness of
a mountainous landscape we were struck with the profusion of flowers
which gave life and colour to the foreground, and the wild fruits
which rivalled the flowers in their vivid beauty; beds of Alpine
strawberries, thickets of raspberries and barberries, bordered the
path, and every village we entered lay sheltered amidst patriarchal
walnut or chestnut trees.

‘How can I describe to you the glory of the Matterhorn, as that
mighty monolith reveals itself for the first time to the eve of
the traveller?—an obelisk of dazzling whiteness cleaving the blue
sky, blanking out earth and heaven with its gigantic form, the one
mountain-peak which reigns supreme in a kingly solitude, not lifting
his proud head from a group of brother peaks, not buttressed by
inferior hills, but solitary as the Prince of Darkness, a being apart
and alone. Mont Blanc overawes by massive grandeur, but I should choose
the Matterhorn for the monarch of mountains.

‘The sun was setting as we crossed the Visp for the last time before
entering Zermatt. Trevor and I had been in the gayest spirits
throughout our journey. We had rested two hours at St. Nicolas, and
had taken a leisurely luncheon at Randa. We were full of talk about
the day after to-morrow, which date we had chosen for our attempt on
the Matterhorn, thinking it wise to give ourselves a day’s rest, or at
least partial rest, after our thirty miles’ walk, and to leave time for
engaging guides and making all necessary preparations in a leisurely
manner.

‘Trevor was a stranger to the district, but he had done much good work
on Mont Blanc, and he had behaved so well on the Finsteraarhorn that I
had no doubt of his mettle. I had familiarised myself with the Monte
Rosa group three years before, and I knew the Zermatt guides and their
ways and manners. We interviewed some of these gentry after our dinner,
and I picked two of the sturdiest and trustiest, made my bargain with
them, and told them to examine our ropes and other gear carefully by
daylight next morning.

‘We had a pleasant evening, sauntering about the quiet little town in
the light of a glorious full moon, smoking our cigars, talking of our
future prospects, of the Church, and of you. Yes, dear love, Trevor is
just one of those faithful souls with whom a man can talk about his
sweetheart.

‘Next morning we breakfasted at daybreak and started luxuriously on
a brace of mules for the Riffelberg, to reconnoitre our mountain.
How grand and beautiful was the circle of snow-clad peaks which we
beheld from that dark hillside: Monte Rosa on the south-east, on the
south-west the Matterhorn, on the east, the Cima de Jassi, to the
west the Dent Blanche, to the north-eastward the Dom, and westward
the Weisshorn—gigantic crags and domes and solitary peaks, all bathed
in sunshine, and as dazzling in their glorified whiteness as the sun
himself! We spent some hours in quiet contemplation of that sublime
and awful scene gazing at that circle of Titanic peaks, which had a
sphinx-like and mysterious air as they looked back at us in their dumb
unapproachable majesty.

‘“Is it not a kind of blasphemy to pollute them with our footsteps, to
be always trying to get nearer and nearer to them, into Nature’s Holy
of Holies?”’ I asked, carried away by the grandeur of the scene.

‘But Trevor’s manner of look at the question was practical rather than
imaginative.

‘“I shouldn’t like to go back without having done the Matterhorn,” he
said, “though the terrible accident a few years ago makes one inclined
to be cautious.”

‘We had a rough-and-ready luncheon on the Rothe Kumm, and took our time
about the descent. It was nearly dark when we got back to Zermatt.
The _table-d’hôte_ dinner was over, and we dined together at a small
table in a corner of the coffee-room, a table near a window, that stood
open to a verandah. As we took our seats we noticed that there was a
gentleman sitting smoking a little way from the window. I sat facing
him, and as we began dinner he asked politely whether his cigar annoyed
us. This broke the ice, and he began to talk of our intended ascent,
which he had heard of from the guides.

‘“I should very much like to join you,” he said. “We could take another
guide if you think it advisable. I am used to Alpine climbing. I came
here on purpose to ascend the Matterhorn, and I shall do it in any
case; but it would be pleasant to have congenial company,” he added,
with a light laugh.

‘“Pleasant for us as well as for you,” I replied, for there was
something particularly winning in his manner; “but you must not
consider me impertinent if I say that you hardly seem in strong enough
health for mountain climbing. You look as if you had not long recovered
from a severe illness.”

‘“Do I?” he asked, in the same light tone; “I was always a sallow
individual. No, I have not been ill; and I am sinewy and wiry enough
for pretty hard work in the climbing way, though I have no superfluous
flesh. I don’t think you’ll find me an encumbrance to you; but if you
have any doubt upon the subject you can ask your chief guide, Peter
Hirsch, for my character, He and I have done same pretty rapid ascents
together in past years.”

‘He handed me his card. “Mr. Goring, Goring Abbey, Warwickshire.”

‘There was nothing of the braggart about him, and I had no doubt as
to his Alpine experience, but I could not dispossess myself of the
idea that he was in weak health, and out of condition for a fatiguing
ascent; for though the approach to the Matterhorn has been made much
easier than it was in ’65, when it was ascended for the first time by
Mr. Whymper and three other gentlemen, with most lamentable results, it
is still a toughish piece of work.

‘I heard a good deal of Mr. Goring later from our landlord; he was well
known in the district, and known as an experienced mountaineer. He was
a man of large wealth, very generous, very good to the poor. He had
been living in Switzerland for the past year, shifting from town to
town along the banks of Lake Leman, but never leaving the shores of the
lake, until a few weeks ago, when he set out on a walking expedition
to Italy. He had stopped at Zermatt on his way southward; had idled
away his days in a listless purposeless way; now doing a little
climbing, now spending whole days lying about in the woods, with his
books and his sketching materials. He kept himself as much aloof from
the tourists as it was possible for him to do, occupying his own rooms,
and never dining at the _table-d’hôte_; and the landlord was surprised
that he should wish to join our party. His story was at once romantic
and tragical. He had come to Montreux with the family of the young lady
to whom he was engaged. This young lady was accidentally drowned in
the lake last summer, and Mr. Goring had never left the scene of her
untimely death till he came to Zermatt.

‘I asked the landlord if there was any fear of his mind being affected
by this trouble, and he assured me that there was not the slightest
ground for such an idea. Mr. Goring kept himself to himself; but he
was as rational and as clever a man to talk to as any gentleman the
landlord had ever known.

‘This settled the matter. To make assurance doubly sure I engaged a
third guide, and a young man to help in carrying tents, ropes, etc.,
and we set out, a little party of seven, gaily enough, in the early
morning. We meant to take things quietly, and to spend the first night
in the tent, or in blanket-bags, if the weather were as mild as it
promised to be. We carried provisions enough to last for three days,
in case the ascent should take even longer than we anticipated. We
took sketching materials, a tin box for any botanical or entomological
specimens we might collect, and two or three well-worn volumes of
poetry which had accompanied us in all our excursions, but had not been
largely read. The great and varied book of Nature had generally proved
all-sufficient.

‘We left Zermatt soon after five, the Lac Noir between eight and nine,
and a little before noon we had chosen our spot for a camping-place,
eleven thousand feet high, and the men set to work making a platform
for the tent, while we took our ease on the mountain, basking in
the sunshine, sketching, collecting a little, and talking a great
deal. We found Mr. Goring a delightful companion. He was a man of
considerable culture; had travelled much and read much. There was a
dash of nineteenth-century cynicism in his talk, and it was but too
easy to see that his view of this life and the world beyond it was of
that sombre hue which so deeply overshadows modern thought. Still he
was a most agreeable companion; and Trevor told me more than once, in a
confidential aside, that our new acquaintance was a decided acquisition.

‘In all our conversation, which was perfectly unreserved on all sides,
it was noticeable that Mr. Goring talked very little of himself or of
his own affairs. He spoke vaguely of an idea of going on to Italy, and
wintering at Naples, but rather as an intention he had entertained and
abandoned, than as one which he meant to carry out.

‘I ventured to say that I should have thought that, for a man of his
culture, Paris or Berlin would have been a pleasanter wintering-place;
but he shrugged his shoulders and declared that he detested both these
cities, and the society to be found in them. “French charlatanism or
German pedantry,” he said, “God knows which is worse.”

‘There was a magnificent sunset. Never shall I forget the awful beauty
of the sky and mountains as we watched the decline of that ineffable
glory—watched in silence, subdued to gravity by the unspeakable
grandeur of that mighty panorama, in the midst of which our own
littleness was brought painfully home to our minds.

‘The night was singularly mild, and we preferred sleeping in our
blanket-bags to the stuffy atmosphere of a tent.

‘We were up before daybreak next morning, and breakfasted merrily
enough by the light of the stars, which were dropping out of the purple
sky, like lamps burned out, as the colder light of day crept slowly
along the edges of the eastward snow-peaks—such a livid ghastly light.
I remember wondering at Mr. Goring’s good spirits, which seemed by no
means to accord with the landlord’s account of him. Had there been
anything forced or hysterical about his gaiety I should have taken
alarm: but nothing could be easier or more natural than his manner;
and I was pleased to think that, however deeply he might regret the
poor girl whom he had lost by so sad a fate, he had his hours of
forgetfulness and tranquillity.

‘We made the ascent slowly but easily, our guides seeing no risk from
any quarter; and between one and two o’clock we stood on the top of
that peak which of all others had most impressed me by its grand air
of solitude and inaccessibility. Throughout the ascent Mr. Goring had
shown himself a skilful and experienced mountaineer; and there was no
thought further from my mind than the apprehension of hazard to him
more than to anyone of us in the descent, or of recklessness on his
part.

‘We stayed on the summit a little over an hour, and then prepared
ourselves for the descent. There were some difficult bits to be passed
in going down, and it was suggested by the most experienced of the
guides that we should be all roped together with the stoutest of our
Alpine-Club ropes. But this Mr. Goring negatived. “Where there is only
one rope, a false step for one means death to all,” he said. “It was
that which caused the calamity in Mr. Whymper’s descent; if the rope
had not broken there would not have been a man left to tell the story
of that fatal day.” At his urgent request we formed ourselves into
three parties, each of the guides being roped to one of us. He chose
the least experienced of the three men, and he, with this youngest of
the guides, went first.

‘“You need not be afraid about me,” he said cheerily. “I am as
sure-footed as the best guide in Zermatt.”

‘The two men who were with us assented heartily to this, and my own
observation went far to assure me that Mr. Goring’s assertion was no
idle boast.

‘Those were the last words I ever heard him speak. We were all intent
upon the descent, the guides cutting footsteps now and then in the ice.
There was neither inclination nor opportunity for much talk of any
kind. Mr. Goring and his companion moved more quickly than we did; and
I began to fear, as I saw the two dark figures ever so far below us
amidst the dazzling whiteness, that there was a dash of recklessness in
him after all.

‘This made me feel uneasy, and I found my attention wandering from my
own position, which was not without peril, to those two in advance
of us. Suddenly, to my surprise, I saw Goring change places with the
guide, who until this moment had been foremost. I saw also in the same
instant that the rope which had been hanging somewhat loosely between
them a minute or so before—always a source of danger—was now tightly
braced. It seemed to me that Goring stood still for a moment or two,
looking down the sheer precipice that yawned on one side of him, as if
admiring the awful grandeur of the abyss, then I saw a sharp sudden
movement of his right arm; there was a cry from the guide, and in the
next moment a dark figure slid with a fearful velocity along the smooth
whiteness of the frozen snow, and then shot over the edge, and dropped
from precipice to precipice to the Matterhorn glacier below, a distance
of nearly four thousand feet. How the guide contrived to maintain his
footing in that awful moment I know not. He never could have done it
had the rope been slack before it broke—or was severed. In those last
words lies the saddest part of the story. It is the guide’s opinion,
and mine, that the rope was deliberately cut by Mr. Goring. He could
scarcely have done this all at once by one movement of his knife; but
the guide believes that he had contrived to cut it three parts through,
unobserved by him, in the course of the descent. I asked how it came
about that he and the guide changed places, and the young man told me
that it was at Mr. Goring’s desire, a desire so calmly and naturally
expressed that it had occasioned neither wonder nor alarm.

‘His body has not been found, though the people of Zermatt have been
diligent in their search. He lies locked in his frozen tomb in some
crevasse of the glacier.

‘A very beautiful marble cross has been erected to his memory in the
little churchyard at Zermatt. I am told that it exactly resembles one
that was placed last year in the churchyard at Montreux, in memory of
the young lady who was drowned in the lake near that town.

‘It may interest you to know that Mr. Goring’s will bequeaths the whole
of his enormous fortune to the elder sister of this unfortunate lady,
the testator being assured that she will make a much more noble use of
that fortune than he could ever have done.

‘Those are the words of the legacy.’


THE END.


  LONDON:
  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.




MISS BRADDON’S NEW NOVEL.

MOUNT ROYAL

Opinions of the Press.


‘“Mount Royal” is a very readable book, and the interest is sustained
by the _dénouement_ being left in doubt to the very end of the
penultimate chapter.’—_Times._

‘Miss Braddon’s numerous admirers can hardly fail to have been struck
by the remarkable advance shown by her most recent novels, not only
in point of style, but in the natural delineation of those phases
of modern society which no living writer of fiction treats more
agreeably or with more sustained power. The most striking instance
of this may, perhaps, be found in “Vixen;” and if the present work
is not superior to that charming tale—which would involve excellence
of an unexceptionally high order—it will, at least, not suffer from
comparison with its predecessor. The plot will be preferred by many,
as dealing with the more tragic side of life, and with more serious
issues; but, granting that such preference must be a matter of taste,
all will admit the touch of a master-hand in development of the
action and the carefully artistic treatment which renders each of the
_dramatis personæ_, estimable or otherwise, a living sentient being,
with human idiosyncrasies and distinct personality.... The scene, by
the bye, in which this episode occurs is unquestionably one of the
finest and most dramatic that even Miss Braddon has ever written, and
is only to be surpassed in point of intensity by the two still finer
interviews between Leonard and his wife, and the remorseful woman and
her intended tool, the adventurer De Cazalet.... We may say, without
hesitation, that Miss Braddon has never employed her great talents
to better purpose than in “Mount Royal.” It is the worthy work of a
thorough artist.’—_Morning Post._

‘Miss Braddon’s ever-active and ever-fascinating pen has just completed
a new work of fiction, entitled “Mount Royal.” If it does not appeal as
immediately and powerfully to the feelings as “Lady Audley’s Secret,”
or “Lucius Davoren,” or some of the gifted authoress’s more recent
novels, such as “Vixen,” it is replete with all the freshness and
charm which she has taught the public to expect from her, which makes
the book one that will attract by its power as well as charm by its
style.’—_Daily Telegraph._

‘Miss Braddon has never, in our opinion, written a novel at once more
clever and more true than this.’—_Morning Advertiser._

‘The interest is unmistakable, and the way in which this is sustained
from first to last proves that its author’s command of the art of
storytelling has in no wise diminished.’—_Observer._

‘“Mount Royal” is entitled to rank high among our modern works of
fiction.’—_Society._

‘Miss Braddon has maintained in “Mount Royal” the standard of her later
period.’—_Athenæum._

‘The story is clearly developed and vigorously written.’—_Pall Mall
Gazette._

‘“Mount Royal” will not only be found a pleasant sea-side companion
during the coming season, but a friend in need during many a solitary
hour in the country. It is not only one of the best ever written by
the author of “Lady Audley’s Secret,” but one of the most original
likewise.’—_Court Journal._

‘To return for a last word to “Mount Royal,” the more we have of Miss
Braddon, and the less of Miss Rhoda Dendron and Weeder, the better, in
our opinion, for all novel-readers, old and young.’—_Punch._

‘As a novelist, she is almost without a rival in the art of
plot-weaving; so delicate are her meshes, and so subtle her
discrimination, that the inherent interest of her books carries us
along with her. She is the high priest of a school which, since
she inaugurated it, has had many more or less feeble imitators....
Painfully and terribly true to life, and rightly understood, “Mount
Royal” is capable of making us appreciate truth and purity more
heartily than ever.’—_Evening News._

‘The great body of novel-readers who have for so many years found
recreation and delight in the brilliant works of imagination which have
come from the pen of Miss Braddon, will need no inducement to turn to
a new story by this accomplished authoress.... As is always the case
in Miss Braddon’s stories, the characters are powerfully drawn. They
are not merely people of whom we read, but seem to enjoy an actual
existence during the time that their movements are being followed
with such rapt attention. The lives of these inhabitants of the old
Cornish manor-house, known as Mount Royal, are not free from the cares
and excitement which the world calls sensational, albeit the stronger
element is made subordinate to gentler and more subtle influences.
Judged relatively to other works, “Mount Royal” must be awarded a
place midway between the early impulsiveness of “Lady Audley” and the
charming fancy displayed in “Vixen,” the novel in which Miss Braddon’s
maturer style reached its highest excellence.... Readers will find
in “Mount Royal,” in its pathetic views of life and love, echoes of
their own experience that are sure to command absorbing interest. Miss
Braddon’s romantic spirit has been in no way quenched; but in this last
novel its brighter rays are tempered by experience and the saddening
influence of earth’s sorrows and troubles.’—_Daily Chronicle._

‘An interesting and clever story. The excitement and expectation
are well sustained throughout; the incidents are original, and the
characters are neatly drawn. Miss Braddon has written some delightful
pictures of scenery in Cornwall.’—_Sunday Times._

‘That Miss Braddon’s hand has not lost its cunning is evidenced by the
excellent work which she has given us in “Mount Royal.” The same skill
in construction, the same charm of description as marked her earlier
efforts, are all here in this present work, matured and mellowed,
it may be, by experience, but not one whit dulled or destroyed by
lapse of time. We welcome “Mount Royal.” Miss Braddon has given us a
story which, while it adds to her fame as an authoress, increases our
indebtedness to her: the healthy tone of “Mount Royal” is not one of
its least charms.’—_Pictorial World._

‘For one “who has been long in city pent” the pictures of Cornish
scenery, drawn by the free bold hand of the authoress, are delightful;
no landscape-painter could produce a more vivid impression.... We
anticipate that this powerful tragic story will enhance the high
reputation of its authoress.’—_Echo._

‘The situations are worked out with so much skill, and the probability
of details is so well managed, that the story can be followed with the
keenest interest.’—_St. James’s Gazette._

‘There is much effective writing in the course of the novel, and we
must add that the minor characters are individualised with all the
accustomed power of the authoress.’—_News of the World._

‘Miss Braddon never disappoints her readers. Whoever takes up “Mount
Royal” will be prepared for an interesting story, excellently well
told, and that they will get. Her scenes never fall flat, nor does
her weapon ever miss fire. The incidents of her stories are always
marshalled with very great skill, so as to produce the best effect
which is to be got from them. In fewer words, Miss Braddon is, as our
readers know without our telling them, a story-teller of consummate
ability. To be able to conceive a thrilling plot is one thing; to be
able to work it out in a story is another. Miss Braddon has from the
beginning shown that she possesses both these gifts. Her fertility
in plot-making is nothing short of marvellous; and when we find that
her conceptions are always worked out by the aid of characters of
flesh and blood, who stand prominently forth from the canvas, and look
at you with living eyes, we are lost in wonder at a fancy, a power,
so inexhaustible. Scarcely ever is there a trace of any strain, any
fatigue. We might say that she appears to be telling a story for the
first time, did not the ease and skill displayed in the process betray
to the close observer a vast amount of practice added to natural
talents of a high order. Her descriptive power and her dramatic
instinct are never weakened. She never fails to bring before the reader
the objects of persons she is describing. Moreover, she can describe
indirectly as well as directly.’—_Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper._

‘Many of the descriptions of the scenery of Cornwall are well worth
reading; while London fashionable circles are hit off in a vein of
satire occasionally, but with a considerable resemblance, we should
imagine, to what really takes place. The scene where Christabel meets
Psyche in her own dwelling is full of womanly tenderness, and suggests
to the poor victim the existence of a world of compassion of which
she had never dreamed. The marshalling and management also of the
characters as a whole reveal, it must be admitted, the possession of
high artistic powers, as well as a wide observation of men and things.
Major Broe is drawn to the life. Mrs. Tregonell senior, with her
mother’s fondness for the roving Leonard, is also as true to nature as
can well be imagined.’—_Liverpool Mercury._

‘Miss Braddon, if not the most industrious of modern novelists, is
certainly unrivalled in this respect among those whose works are in
great demand at the circulating libraries. Let the reader once become
really interested in the fortunes of the lovely, but unhappy, Mrs.
Tregonell, and he will not willingly put down the book until the end of
the third volume.’—_Manchester Examiner and Times._

‘We have followed the plot out with considerable interest, and no fault
is to be found in the novel in the way of dulness.’—_John Bull._

‘The scene in which her new novel is chiefly laid is to the full as
enchanting as it is painted by her skilful hand. That there is plenty
to interest and something to excite in any book from the pen of Miss
Braddon may be taken for granted. The ingenuity of the plot is worthy
of the author.’—_London Figaro._

‘A most attractive and interesting novel. The genius of Miss Braddon
evolves a number of most ingenious plots, and the reader’s interest is
kept engaged through the development of them with absorbing power. Miss
Braddon deals with persons and places that are familiar to us, and her
descriptions of the scenery of the north coast, of Tintagel, Boscastle,
and all the neighboring shores, are photographed with great clearness
in beautiful language and with perfect knowledge. Miss Braddon’s
works are always interesting, and these volumes will add to her
well-established reputation. There are many phases of life described
in them which we know exist; but there are few who have the power of
placing either the people or their surroundings so completely before
us. She hits off admirably the follies and fashions of the hour as they
prevail in fashionable life. So great was the demand for Miss Braddon’s
new novel, “Mount Royal,” the other day, that the circulating libraries
subscribed for the whole of the first edition, and the publisher had to
go to press immediately with a new impression.’—_Plymouth Western Daily
Mercury._

‘In “Mount Royal” Miss Braddon appears to us not only to have surpassed
her own previous performances, numerous and successful as they have
been, but even to have distanced all her competitors in that class of
literature. We know of no recent novel which we would place before
“Mount Royal” in its power of exciting the emotions.’—_Sheffield Post._

‘“Mount Royal” is an addition to the Braddon library that will be
heartily welcomed by all who can appreciate a sound, healthy, and
thoroughly interesting novel.’—_Belfast News Letter._

‘Taking the novel altogether, “Mount Royal” will compare favourably
with any that have preceded it from the same pen. In point of character
delineation and skilfulness of construction, its merits are very
considerable.’—_Bradford Observer._

‘“Mount Royal” is well written, as all Miss Braddon’s books are. It is
bright, and catches with great accuracy the precise tone of the people
whose lives are being sketched. A good novel.’—_Scotsman._

‘“Mount Royal” is powerful and artistic—a finished bit of
workmanship.’—_Edinburgh Daily Review._

‘We may fairly say of it that it contains many sparkling passages
and many happy thoughts. It shows that the writer has an extensive
acquaintance with the best English authors, and it shows that she is an
adept in word-painting.’—_Sheffield Daily Telegraph._

‘Miss Braddon’s last production is as engrossing, as dramatic, and as
fresh as if it were only her second or third. There is not a dull page
in the three volumes.’—_Brighton Fashionable Visitors’ List._

‘“Mount Royal” is an exceptionally favorable specimen. The story is
told with singular neatness, and grace almost equally unusual in works
of this kind. The novel is, without doubt, a good and a bright one,
with plenty of incidents and plenty of character.’—_Manchester Courier._

‘The story, as a whole, is extremely interesting. It is emphatically
a novel of the present day, and we predict for it an extensive
demand.’—_York Herald._




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 49 Changed: Miss Dibb made the acqaintance of a strange man
             to: Miss Dibb made the acquaintance of a strange man

  pg 92 Changed: there is a South Pole, too, isn’t here, dear
             to: there is a South Pole, too, isn’t there, dear

  pg 109 Changed: She folded the soft wollen wrap
              to: She folded the soft woollen wrap

  pg 110 Changed: she was still digging and and scraping
              to: she was still digging and scraping

  pg 112 Changed: the Maltese terrior Fluff in her lap
              to: the Maltese terrier Fluff in her lap

  pg 138 Changed: There was not even a shrubberry
              to: There was not even a shrubbery

  pg 188 Changed: see that this luxurions home-education
              to: see that this luxurious home-education

  pg 220 Changed: and faithful, pious, self-sacricing
              to: and faithful, pious, self-sacrificing

  pg 235 Changed: the perfact outline of the throat
              to: the perfect outline of the throat

  pg 235 Changed: hand that lay inhert upon Fluff
              to: hand that lay inert upon Fluff

  pg 243 Changed: deferred boyond luncheon time
              to: deferred beyond luncheon time

  pg 255 Changed: toboggining at the Falls of Montmorenci
              to: tobogganing at the Falls of Montmorenci

  pg 261 Changed: Daphne had never been beyond Fontainbleau
              to: Daphne had never been beyond Fontainebleau

  pg 270 Changed: surprised if Miss Dapne Lawford
              to: surprised if Miss Daphne Lawford

  pg 282 Changed: furniture, delf, and china
              to: furniture, delft, and china

  pg 302 Changed: It was not a grandoise or thrilling ceremonial
              to: It was not a grandiose or thrilling ceremonial

  pg 321 Changed: That is remakably clever
              to: That is remarkably clever

  pg 372 Changed: to whom she dicoursed freely upon
              to: to whom she discoursed freely upon





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