‘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.