‘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.