‘GOD WOTE THAT WORLDLY JOY IS SONE AGO.’
Perfect mistress of her boat, Daphne revelled in the lonely delight of
the river. She felt no grief at the loss of Mr. Turchill’s company.
He had been very kind to her, he had been altogether devoted and
unselfish, and the gipsy breakfasts in the old boat-house had been
capital fun. But these delights would have palled in time; while the
languid pleasure of drifting quietly down the stream, thinking her
own thoughts, dreaming her own dreams, could never know satiety. She
was so full of thoughts, sweet thoughts, vague fancies, visions of an
impossible future, dreams which made up half her life. What did it
matter that this airy fantastic castle she had built for herself was
no earthly edifice, that she could never live in it, or be any nearer
it than she was to-day? To her the thing existed, were it only in
dreamland; it was a part of herself and of her life, it was of more
consequence to her than the commonplace routine of daily existence—the
dressing, and dining, and driving, and visiting.
Had her life been more varied, full of duty, or even diversified by the
frivolous activity of pleasure, she could not have thus given herself
up to dreaming. But she had few pleasures and no duties. Madoline held
her absolved from every care and every trouble on the ground of her
youth. She did not like parish work of any kind; she hated the idea of
visiting the poor; so Madoline held her excused from that duty, as from
all others. Her mind would awaken to the serious side of life when she
was older, her sister thought. She seemed now to belong to the flowers
and butterflies, and the fair ephemeral things of the garden.
Thus Daphne, ignored by her father, indulged by her sister, enjoyed
a freedom which is rarely accorded to a girl of seventeen. Her Aunt
Rhoda looked on and disapproved, and hoped piously that she would come
to no harm, and was surprised at Lina’s weakness, and thought Daphne’s
bright little boat a blot upon the landscape when it came gliding
down the river below the Rectory windows. The parson’s rich glebe was
conterminous with Sir Vernon Lawford’s property, and Daphne hardly knew
where her father’s fields ended or where the church fields began.
Edgar Turchill, degraded from his post of instructor, still contrived
to spend a considerable portion of his life at South Hill. If he was
not there for lawn-tennis in the afternoon, with the Rector’s wife for
a fourth, he was there in the evening for billiards. He fetched and
carried for Madoline, rode over to Warwick to get her a new book, or
to Leamington to match a skein of crewel. There was no commission too
petty for him, no office too trivial or lowly, so that he might be
permitted to spend his time with the sisters.
Daphne thought this devotedness a bad sign, and began to fear that the
canker was at his heart, and that he would die for love of Madoline
when the fortunate Gerald came home to claim her.
‘You poor creature,’ she said to him one day, ‘you foolish moth, why
flutter round the flame that must destroy you? I declare you are
getting worse every day.’
‘You are wrong,’ said Edgar; ‘I believe I am getting cured.’
What did Daphne dream about in those languid summer mornings, as her
boat moved slowly down the stream in the cool shadow of the willows,
with only a gentle dip of the sculls now and then to keep her straight?
Her thoughts were all of the past, her fancies were all of the future.
Her thoughts were of the nameless stranger who went across the Jura
last year—one little year ago—almost at this season. Her dreams were of
meeting him again. Yet the chances against such a meeting reduced it
almost to an impossibility.
‘The world is so horribly large,’ she reflected sadly, ‘and I told him
such atrocious stories. It will be a just punishment if I never see him
any more. Yet how am I to live through my life without ever looking on
his face again!’
It had gone so far as this: it seemed to her almost an absolute need of
her soul that they two should meet, and know more of each other.
The ardent sensive nature had been thus deeply impressed by the first
bright and picturesque image presented to the girlish fancy. It was
something more than love at first sight. It was the awakening of a
fresh young mind to the passion of love. She had changed from a child
to a woman, in the hour when she met the unknown in the forest.
‘Who is he, what is he? where shall I find him?’ she asked herself. ‘He
is the only man I can ever love. He is the only man I will ever marry.
All other men are low and commonplace beside him.’
The river was the confidant and companion of all her dreams—the sweet
lonely river, flowing serenely between green pastures, where the cattle
stood in tranquil idleness, pastern deep in purple clover. She had no
other ear into which to whisper her secret. She had tried, ever so many
times, to tell Madoline, and had failed. Lina was so sensible, and
would be deeply shocked at such folly. How could she tell Lina—whose
wooing had been conducted in the most conventionally correct manner,
with everybody’s consent and approval—that she had flung her heart
under the feet of a nameless stranger, of whom the only one fact she
knew was that he was engaged to be married?
So she kept this one foolish secret locked in her own breast. The
passion was not deep enough to make her miserable, or to spoil the
unsophisticated joys of her life. Perhaps it was rather fancy than
passion. It was fed and fostered by all her dreams. But her life was
in no wise unhappy because this love lacked more substantial food
than dreaming. God had given her that intense delight in Nature, that
love of His beautiful earth, for which Faustus thanked his creator.
Field, streamlet, wood, and garden, were sources of inexhaustible
pleasure. She loved animals of all kinds. The gray Jersey cows in
the marshy water-meadows; the house dogs, and yard dogs, and stable
terriers—supposed to be tremendous at rats, yet never causing any
perceptible diminution of that prolific race; the big white horses at
the farm, with their coarse plebeian tails tied up into tight knots,
their manes elaborately plaited, and their harness bedizened with much
brazen ornamentation; Madoline’s exquisite pair of dark chestnuts,
thoroughbred to the tips of their delicate ears; Sir Vernon’s massive
roadster; Boiler and Crock, the old carriage-horses—Daphne had an
affection for them all. They were living things, with soft friendly
eyes, more unvaryingly kind than human eyes, and they all seemed to
love her. She was more at her ease with them than in the dimly-lighted,
flower-scented drawing-room, where Sir Vernon always seemed to look at
her as if he wished her away, and where her aunt worried her about her
want of deportment.
With Lina she was always happy. Lina’s love and gentleness never varied.
Daphne came home after a morning wasted on the river, to sit at her
sister’s feet while she worked, or to lie on the sofa while Lina read
to her, glad to get in the thin edge of the educational wedge in the
form of an interesting article from one of the Quarterlies, or a few
pages of good poetry. Daphne was a fervent lover of verse, so that it
came within the limits of her comprehension. Her tastes were catholic;
she worshipped Shakespeare; she adored Byron and Shelley and Tennyson,
Mrs. Browning, and the simpler poems of Robert Browning; and she had
heard vaguely of verses written by a poet called Swinburne; but this
was all she had been permitted to learn of the latest development of
the lyric muse. Byron and Tennyson, it is needless to say, were her
especial favourites.
‘One makes me feel wicked, and the other makes me feel good; but I
adore them both,’ she said.
‘I don’t see what you can find in Childe Harold to make you wicked,’
argued Madoline, who had the old-fashioned idea, hereditary of course,
that Byron was the poet of the century.
‘Oh, I can hardly tell you; but there is a something, a sense of
shortcoming in the world generally, an idea that life is not worth
living, that amidst all that is most beautiful and sacred and solemn
and interesting upon earth, one might just as well be dead; one would
be better off than walking about a world in which virtue was never
rightly rewarded, truth and honour and courage or lofty thoughts never
fairly understood—where everything is at sixes and sevens, in short.
I know I express myself horribly, but the feeling is difficult to
explain.’
‘I think what you mean is that Byron, even at his loftiest and best,
wrote like a misanthrope.’
‘I suppose that’s it. Now, Tennyson, though his poetry never lifts
me to the skies, makes me feel that earth is a good place and heaven
better; that high thoughts and noble deeds bear their fruit somehow,
and somewhere; that it is better to suffer a good deal, and sacrifice
one’s dearest desires in the cause of duty and right, than to snatch
some brief joys out of life, and perish like the insects that are born
and die in a day.’
‘I am so glad you can enjoy good poetry, dear,’ said Madoline,
delighted at any surcease of frivolity in her young sister.
‘Enjoy it! I revel in it; it is my delight. Pray don’t suppose that I
dislike books, Lina. Only keep away from me grammars, and geographies,
and biographies of learned men, and voyages to the North Pole—there is
a South Pole, too, isn’t there, dear? though nobody even seems to worry
about it—and you may read me as many books as you like.’
‘How condescending of you, little one!’ said Madoline, smiling at the
bright young face looking up from the sofa-pillow, on which Daphne’s
golden head reclined in luxurious restfulness. ‘Well, I will read to
you with pleasure. It will be my delight to help to carry on your
education; for though girls learn an immense number of things at
school they don’t seem to know much when they come away. We will read
together for a couple of hours a day if you like, dear.’
‘Till Gerald comes home,’ retorted Daphne; ‘he will not let you give me
two hours of your life every day. He will want you all to himself.’
‘He can join our studies; he is a great reader.’
‘Expose my ignorance to a future brother-in-law? Not for worlds!’ cried
Daphne. ‘Let us talk about him, Lina. Aren’t you delighted to think he
is coming home?’
‘Yes; I am very glad.’
‘How do my father and Gerald get on together?’
‘Not too well, I am sorry to say. Papa is fonder of Edgar than of
Gerald, you know how prejudiced he is about race and high birth. I
don’t think he has ever quite forgiven Gerald his father’s trade.’
‘But there is Lady Geraldine to fall back upon. Surely she makes
amends.’
‘Hardly, according to papa’s ideas. You see the Earldom of Heronville
is only a creation of Charles the Second’s reign, and his peerages
are not always respectable. I believe there were scandals about the
first countess. Her portrait by Sir Peter Lely hangs in the refectory
at Goring Abbey. She was a very lovely woman, and Lady Geraldine was
rather proud of being thought like her.’
‘Although she was not respectable,’ said Daphne. ‘And was there really
a likeness?’
‘Yes; and a marked one. I can see it even in Gerald, who is the image
of his mother—the same dreamy eyes, the same thoughtful mouth. But you
will be able to judge for yourself when Gerald comes home, for I have
no doubt we shall be going over to the Abbey.’
‘The Abbey! It is a very old place, I suppose?’
‘No; it was built by Mr. Goring.’
‘Why Abbey? Surely that means an old place that was once inhabited by
monks.’
‘It was Mr. Goring’s fancy. He insisted upon calling his house an
abbey. It was foolish, of course; but, though he was a very good man,
I believe he had a slight leaven of obstinacy in his disposition, and
when once he had made up his mind about anything he was not to be
turned from his purpose.’
‘Perverse old creature! And is the Abbey nice?’
‘It is as grand and as beautiful a place as money could make it. There
are cloisters copied from those at Muckross, and the dining-room has
a Gothic roof, and is called a refectory. The situation is positively
lovely: a richly timbered valley, sheltered by green hills.’
‘And you are to be mistress of this magnificent place. Oh, Lina,
what shall I do when you are married, and I am left alone here
_tête-à-tête_ with papa? How shall I support my life?’
‘Dearest, by that time you will have learned to understand your father,
and you will be quite at your ease with him.’
‘I think not. I am afraid he is one of those mysteries which I shall
never fathom.’
‘My love, that is such a foolish notion. Besides, in a year or
two my Daphne may have a husband and a house of her own—perhaps a
more interesting place then Goring Abbey,’ added Lina, thinking of
Hawksyard, which seemed to her Daphne’s natural destination.
* * * * *
June ripened, and bloomed, and grew daily more beautiful. It was
peerless weather, with just such blue skies and sunny noontides as
there had been at Fontainebleau last year, but without the baking heat
and the breathless atmosphere. Here there were cool winds to lift the
rippling hair from Daphne’s brow, and cool grass under her feet. She
revelled in the summer beauty of the earth; she spent almost all her
life out of doors, on the river, in the woods, in the garden. If she
studied, it was under the spreading boughs of the low Spanish chestnut
which made a tent of greenery on the lawn. Sometimes she carried her
drawing-book to some point of vantage on a neighbouring hill, and
sketched the outline of a wide range of landscape, and washed in a
sky, and began a tree in the foreground, and left off in disgust. She
never finished anything. Her portfolio was full of beginnings, not
altogether devoid of talent: mouse-coloured cows, deep-red oxen, every
kind of tree and rock and old English cottage, or rick-yard, or gray
stone village church; but nothing finished—the stamp of an impetuous,
impatient temper upon all.
There had been no definite announcement as to Gerald’s return. He was
in Sweden, seeing wonderful falls and grottoes, which he described
in his letters to Madoline, and he was coming back soon, perhaps
before the end of July. He had told the Abbey servants to be prepared
for him at any time. This indefiniteness kept Madoline’s mind in a
somewhat perturbed state; yet she had to be outwardly calm, and full
of thoughtfulness for her father, who required constant attention. His
love for his elder daughter was the one redeeming grace of a selfish
nature. It was a selfish love, for he would have willingly let her
waste her life in maiden solitude for the sake of keeping her by his
side; but it was love, and this was something in a man of so stern and
unyielding a temper.
He liked her to be always near him, always within call, his companion
abroad, his counsellor at home. He consulted her about all the details
of his estate and her own, rarely wrote a business letter without
reading it to her. She was wanted in his study continually. When he
was tired after a morning’s business, she read the newspapers to him,
or a heavy political article in Blackwood or one of the Quarterlies,
were he inclined to hear it. She never shirked a duty, or considered
her own pleasure. She had educated herself to be her father’s
companion, and counted it a privilege to minister to him.
‘Faultless daughter, perfect wife,’ said Sir Vernon, clasping her hand
as she sat beside his sofa; ‘Goring is a lucky fellow to get such a
prize.’
‘Why should he not have a good wife, dear father? He is good himself.
Remember what a good son he was.’
‘To his mother, admirable. I doubt if he and old Goring hit it quite so
well. I wish he came of a better stock.’
‘That is a prejudice of yours, father.’
‘It is a prejudice that I have rarely seen belied by experience. I
wish you had chosen Edgar. There is a fine fellow for you, a lineal
descendant of that Turchill who was sheriff of Warwickshire in the
reign of the Confessor. Shakespeare’s mother could trace her descent
from the same stock. So you see that Edgar can claim alliance with the
greatest poet of all time.’
‘I should never have thought it,’ said Madoline laughingly; ‘his
lineage doesn’t show itself in his conversation. I like him very much,
you know, papa; indeed, I may say I love him, but it is in a thoroughly
sisterly fashion. By-the-by, papa, don’t you think he might make an
excellent husband for Daphne?’ she faltered, with downcast eyes, as she
went on with her crewel-work.
‘She would be an uncommonly fortunate girl if she got him,’ retorted
Sir Vernon, with a clouding countenance; ‘he is too good for her.’
‘Oh, father! can you speak like that of your own daughter?’
remonstrated Lina.
‘Is a man to shut his eyes to a girl’s character because she happens
to bear his name?’ asked Sir Vernon impatiently. ‘Daphne is a lump of
self-indulgent frivolity.’
‘Indeed you are mistaken,’ cried Lina; ‘she is very sweet-tempered and
loving.’
‘Sweet-tempered! Yes; I know the kind of thing. Winning words,
pretty looks, trivial fascinations; a creature whose movements you
watch—fascinated by her variety—as you watch a bird in a cage.
Graceful, beautiful, false, worthless! I have some experience of the
type.’
‘Father, this is the most cruel prejudice. What can Daphne have ever
done to offend you?’
‘Done! Is she not her mother’s daughter? Don’t argue with me about her,
Lina. She is here beside my hearth, and I must make the best of her.
God grant she may come to no harm; but I am full of fear when I think
of her future.’
‘Then you would be glad if Edgar were to propose for her, and she were
to accept him?’
‘Certainly. It would be the very best thing that could happen to her. I
should only feel sorry for him. But I don’t think a man who once loved
you would ever content himself with Daphne.’
‘He is very attentive to her.’
‘_Che sara, sara!_’ murmured Sir Vernon languidly.
* * * * *
It was Midsummer-day—the hottest, brightest day there had been yet,
and Daphne had given herself up to unmixed enjoyment of the warmth and
light and cloudless blue sky. Sir Vernon and Madoline had a luncheon
engagement at a house beyond Stoneleigh, a drive of eleven miles each
way, so dinner had been postponed from eight to half-past, and Daphne
had the livelong day to herself; free to follow her own devices, free
even from the company of her devoted slave Edgar, who would have hung
upon her like a burr had he been at home, but who was spending a few
days in London with his mother, escorting that somewhat homely matron
to picture-galleries, garden-parties, and theatres, and trying to rub
off a year’s rural rust by a week’s metropolitan friction.
Edgar was away; the light park-phaeton with the chestnuts had driven
off at half-past eleven, Madoline looking lovely in a Madras muslin
gown and a bonnet made of roses, her father content to loll in the low
seat by her side while she managed the somewhat vivacious cobs. Daphne
watched the carriage till it vanished at a curve of the narrow wooded
drive, and then ran back to the house to plan her own campaign.
‘I will have a picnic,’ she said to herself, ‘a solitary, selfish,
Robinson Crusoe-like picnic. I will have nobody but Tennyson and Lina’s
collie to keep me company. Goldie and I will go trespassing, and find a
sly secret corner in Charlecote Park where we can eat our luncheon. I
believe it is against the law to stray from the miserable footpath; but
who cares for law on Midsummer-day? I shall feel myself almost as brave
as Shakespeare when he went poaching; and thank goodness there is no
Justice Shallow to call me to order.’
She ran to her own room for a basket, a picturesque beehive basket, the
very one she had carried—and he had carried—at Fontainebleau. What a
foolish impulse it must have been which made her touch the senseless
straw with her lips, remembering whose hand had held it! Then to the
housekeeper’s room to forage for provisions. The wing of a chicken:
a thick wedge of pound-cake; a punnet of strawberries; a bottle of
lemonade; a couple of milk-rolls. Mrs. Spicer would have packed these
things neatly in white paper, but Daphne bundled them into the basket
anyhow.
‘Don’t trouble, you dear good soul; they are only for Goldie and me,’
she said.
‘You may just as well have things nice, miss. There, you’d have forgot
the salt if I wasn’t here. And if you’re going to take that there
obstreperous collie you’ll want something more substantial.’
‘Give me a slice of beef for him then, and a couple more of your
delicious rolls,’ asked Daphne coaxingly. ‘My Goldie mustn’t be
starved. And be quick, like a love, for I’m in an awful hurry.’
‘Lor, miss, when you’ve got all the day before you! You’ll be fearful
lonesome.’
‘What, with Goldie and the “Idylls of the King!”’ exclaimed Daphne,
glancing downwards at her little green cloth volume.
‘Ah, well; I know when young ladies have got a nice novel to read they
never feel lonesome,’ said Mrs. Spicer, filling every available corner
of the basket, with which Daphne stepped off gaily to summon Goldie.
Goldie was a bright yellow collie, intensely vivacious, sharp-nosed,
brown-eyed; a dog that knew not what it was to be quiet; a dog you
might lose at the other end of the county, confident that he would
scamper home across wood and hill and valley as straight as the crow’s
flight. He spent half his life tied up in the stable-yard, and the
other half rushing about the country with Daphne. He travelled an
incalculable number of miles in the course of an ordinary walk, and was
given to racing cattle. He worshipped Daphne, and held her in some awe
on this cattle question; would leap into the air with mad delight when
she was kind to him, or grovel at her feet when she was angry.
‘Now, Goldie dear, if you and I are to lunch in Charlecote Park, I
must take a strap for you,’ said Daphne, as they started from the
stable-yard, Goldie proclaiming his rapture by clamorous barking.
‘It will never do for you to go racing the Lucy deer, or even the
Lucy oxen. We should get into worse trouble than Shakespeare did, for
Shakespeare had not such a frigid father as mine. I daresay old John,
the glover, was an easy-going indulgent soul whom his son could treat
anyhow.’
It was only a walk of two miles across the fields to Charlecote; two
miles by meadows that are as lovely and as richly timbered as they
could have been in Shakespeare’s time. High farming is not yet the rule
in Warwickshire. Hedges grow high and wild; broad oaks spread their
kingly branches above the rich rank grass; dock and mallow, foxglove,
fern, and dog-rose thrive and bloom beside every ditch; and many a
fair stretch of grass by the roadside—a no man’s land of pleasant
pasture—offers space for the hawker’s van, or the children’s noonday
sports, or the repose of the tired tramp, lying face downwards in a
rapture of rest, while the skylark trills in the distant blue above
him, and the rustle of summer leaves soothes his slumber.
It is a lovely country, lovely in its simple, pastoral, English beauty,
calm and fitting cradle for a great mind.
After the fields came a lane, a green arcade with a leafy roof, through
which the sun-rays crept in quivering lines of light, and then the gate
that opened on the footpath across Charlecote Park. Yonder showed the
gray walls of the house, venerable on one side, modern on the other,
and the stone single-arched bridge, and the lake, narrowing to a dull
sluggish-looking stream that seemed to flow nowhere in particular. The
tallest and stoutest of the elms looked too young for Shakespeare’s
time. But here and there appeared the ruin of a tree, hollow of trunk,
gaunt of limb, whose green branches may once have sheltered the deer he
stole.
The place was very lonely. There was nobody to interfere with Daphne’s
pleasure, or even to object to the collie, who crept meekly to her
side, held by a strap, and casting longing looks at the distant oxen.
She wandered about in the loneliest bits of the park, supremely
indifferent to rules and regulations as to where she might go and where
she might not; till she finally deposited her basket and sunshade under
a stalwart oak, and sat down at the foot thereof, with Goldie still
strapped, and constrained to virtue. She fastened one end of the strap
to the lowest branch of the tree, Goldie standing on end licking her
hands all the time.
‘Now, dear, you are as comfortable as in your own stable-yard. You can
admire the cows and sheep in the distance, standing about so peacefully
in the sunshine, as if they had never heard of sunstroke, but you can’t
hunt them. And now you shall have your dinner.’
It was a very quiet picnic, perhaps even a trifle dull; though, at
the worst, it might be better to picnic alone among the four-footed
beasts in Charlecote Park, than to assume a forced gaiety in a party
of stupid people, at the conventional banquet of doubtful lobster and
tepid champagne, in one of the time-honoured haunts of the cockney
picknicker. Daphne thought of Midsummer-day in the year that was gone,
as she sat eating her chicken and sipping her lemonade, half of which
had been lost in the process of uncorking. How gay she had been, how
foolishly, unreasonably glad! And now a great deal of the flavour had
gone out of life since her seventeenth birthday.
‘How happy Lina looks, now that the time for her lover’s return draws
near!’ she thought. ‘She has something to look forward to, some reason
for counting the days; while to me time is all alike, one week just the
same as another. I am a horribly selfish creature. I ought to feel glad
of her gladness I ought to rejoice in her joy. But Nature made me out
of poor stuff, didn’t she, Goldie dear?’
She laid her bright head on the collie’s tawny coat. The pale gold of
her soft flowing hair contrasted and yet harmonised with the ruddy
hue of the dog, and made a picture fair to look upon. But there was
no one wandering in Charlecote Park to paint Daphne’s portrait. She
was very lucky in not being discovered by a party of eager Americans,
spectacled, waterproofed, hyper-intelligent, and knowing a great deal
more about Shakespeare’s biography than is known to the duller remnant
of the Anglo-Saxon race still extant on this side the Atlantic.
She ate her strawberries in dreamy thoughtfulness, and fed Goldie to
repletion, till he stretched himself luxuriously upon her gown, and
dreamed of a chase he was too lazy to follow, had he been ever so free.
Then she shut the empty basket, propped herself up against the rugged
old trunk, and opened the ‘Idylls.’ It is a book to be read over and
over again, for ever and ever, just one of those rare books of which
the soul knows no weariness—like Shakespeare, or Goethe’s Faust, or
Childe Harold—a book to be opened, haphazard, anywhere.
But Daphne did not so open the volume. Elaine was her poem of poems,
and it was Elaine she read to-day in that placid shade amidst green
pastures and venerable trees, under a cloudless sky. Launcelot was her
ideal man—faulty, but more lovable in his faultiness than even the
perfect Arthur. Yet what woman would not wish—ay, even the guilty one
grovelling at his feet—to be Arthur’s wife?
She read slowly, pondering every word, for that fair young Saxon was
to her a very real personage—a being whose sorrows gave her absolute
pain as she read. Time had been when she could not read Elaine’s story
without tears, but to-day her eyes were dry, even to the last, when her
fancy saw the barge gliding silently down the stream, with the fair
dead face looking up to the sky, and the waxen hands meekly folded
above the heart that had broken for love of Launcelot.
‘I wonder how long his sorrow lasted,’ she thought, as she closed
the book; and then she clasped her hands above the fair head resting
against the rugged bark of the oak, and gave herself up to day-dreams,
and let the afternoon wear on as it might, in placid enjoyment of the
atmosphere and the landscape.
Charlecote church clock had struck five when she plucked herself out of
dreamland with an effort, unstrapped her dog from the tree, took up her
empty basket, and started on the journey home. She had ample leisure
for her walk. Dinner was not to be until half-past eight, and Sir
Vernon and his daughter were hardly likely to be back till dinner-time.
It was a stately feast to which they had been bidden—a feast in honour
of somebody’s coming of age: a champagne breakfast for the quality,
roasted oxen and strong ale for the commonalty, speechifying, military
bands—an altogether ponderous entertainment. Sir Vernon had groaned
over the inevitable weariness of the affair in advance, and had talked
of himself as a martyr to neighbourly feeling.
The homeward walk in the quiet afternoon light was delicious. Goldie,
released from his strap directly they left Charlecote, ran and leapt
like a creature possessed. Oh, how he enjoyed himself with the
first herd they came to, scampering after innocent milch-cows, and
endangering his life by flying at the foreheads of horned oxen! Daphne
let him do as he liked. She wandered out of her way a little to follow
the windings of her beloved river. It was between seven and eight when
she despatched Goldie to his stable-yard, and went into the cool shady
hall, where two old orange-trees in great green crockery tubs scented
the air.
The butler met her on her way to the morning-room.
‘Oh, if you please, Miss Daphne, Mr. Goring has arrived, and would
like to see you before you dress for dinner. He was so disappointed at
finding Miss Lawford away from home, and he would like to have a talk
with you.’
Daphne looked at the tumbled white gown—it was the same she had worn
last year at Fontainebleau—and thought of her towzled hair. ‘I am
so shamefully untidy,’ she said; ‘I think I had better dress first,
Brooks.’
‘Oh, don’t, Miss Daphne. You look nice enough, I’m sure. And I daresay
Mr. Goring is impatient to hear all about Miss Lawford, or he wouldn’t
have asked so particular to see you.’
‘Of course not. No; perhaps he won’t notice my untidiness. I’ll risk
it. Yet first impressions——I don’t want him to think me an underbred
school-girl,’ muttered Daphne as she opened the drawing-room door.
The room was large, and full of flowers and objects that broke the
view; and all the glow and glory of a summer sunset was shining in at
the wide west window.
For a moment or so Daphne could see no one; the room seemed empty of
humanity. There was the American squirrel revolving in his big airy
cage; there lay Fluff, the Maltese terrier, curled into a silky ball in
a corner of the sofa; and that seemed all. But as Daphne went timidly
towards the window, a figure rose from a low chair, a face turned to
meet her.
She lifted her clasped hands to her breast with a startled cry.
‘Nero!’
‘Poppæa!’