‘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.