‘AND IN MY HERTE WONDREN I BEGAN.’
For a man to waltz in the gloaming with a girl whom he passionately
loves, and who has contemptuously rejected him, is a kind of pleasure
too near the edge of pain to be altogether blissful. Yet Edgar came
every non-hunting day to South Hill, and was always ready to dance to
Daphne’s piping. He was her first partner since the little crabbed old
French master at Asnières, who had taken a few turns with her now and
then, fiddling all the time, in order to show his other pupils what
dancing meant. He declared that Daphne was the only one of them all who
had the soul of a dancer.
‘_Elle est née sylphide._ She moves in harmony with the music; she is a
part of the melody,’ he said, as he scraped away at the languishing Duc
de Reichstadt valse, the tune to which our grandmothers used to revolve
in the days when the newly imported waltz was denounced as an iniquity.
The grand Hunt Ball, which took place only once in two years at
Stratford Town Hall, was to be held in the coming January, and Sir
Vernon had consented that Daphne should appear at this festivity,
chaperoned by her aunt and accompanied by her elder sister. It was an
assembly so thoroughly local that Mrs. Ferrers felt it a solemn duty to
be present: even her parochial character, which to the narrow-minded
might seem incongruous, made it, she asserted, all the more incumbent
upon her to be there.
‘A clergyman’s wife ought to show her interest in all innocent
amusements,’ she said. ‘If there were any fear of doubtful people
getting admitted, of course I would sooner cut off my feet than cross
the threshold; but where the voucher system is so thoroughly carried
out——’
‘There are sure to be plenty of pretty girls,’ said the Rector, ‘and I
believe there’s a capital card-room. I’ve a good mind to go with you.’
‘If it were in summer, Duke, I should urge it on you as a duty; but in
this severe weather the change from a hot room——’
‘Might bring on my bronchitis. I think you’re right, Rhoda. And the
champagne at these places is generally a doubtful brand, while of all
earthly delusions and snares a ball-supper is the most hollow. But I
should like to have seen Daphne at her first ball. I am very fond of
little Daphne.’
‘I am always pleased for you to be interested in my relations,’
replied Mrs. Ferrers, with a sour look; ‘but I must say, of all the
young people I ever had anything to do with, Daphne is the most
unsatisfactory.’
‘In what way?’ asked Mr. Ferrers, looking lazily up from his tea-cup.
It was afternoon tea-time, and the husband and wife were sitting
_tête-à-tête_ before the fire in the Rector’s snug study, where the old
black oak shelves were full of the most delightful books, which he was
proud to possess but rarely looked at—inside. The outsides, beautiful
in tawny and crimson leather, tooled and gilded and labelled and
lettered, regaled his eye in many a lazy reverie, when he reposed in
his armchair, and watched the firelight winking and blinking at those
treasuries of wit and wisdom.
‘In what way is Daphne troublesome, my dear?’ repeated the Rector. ‘I
am interested in the puss. I taught her her Catechism.’
‘I wish you had taught her the spirit as well as the letter,’ retorted
Mrs. Ferrers tartly. ‘The girl is an absolute pagan. After flirting
with Edgar Turchill in a manner that would have endangered her
reputation had she belonged to people of inferior position, she has the
supreme folly to refuse him.’
‘What you call folly may be her idea of wisdom,’ answered the Rector.
‘She may do better than Turchill—a young man of excellent family, but
with very humdrum surroundings, and a frightful dead-weight in that
mother, who I believe has a life-interest in the estate which would
prevent his striking out in any way till she is under the turf. Such
a girl as Daphne should do better than Edgar Turchill. She is wise to
wait for her chances.’
‘How worldly you are, Marmaduke! It shocks me to hear such sentiments
from a minister of the gospel.’
‘My dear, he who was in every attribute a model for ministers of the
gospel boasted that he was all things to all men. When I discuss
worldly matters I talk as a man of the world. I think Daphne ought to
make a brilliant marriage. She has the finest eyes I have seen for a
long time—always excepting those which illuminate my own fireside,’ he
added, smiling benignly on his wife.
‘Oh, pray make no exception,’ she answered snappishly. ‘I never
pretended to be a beauty; though my features are certainly more regular
than Daphne’s. I am a genuine Lawford, and the Lawfords have had
straight noses from time immemorial. Daphne takes after her unhappy
mother.’
‘Ah, poor thing!’ sighed the Rector. ‘She was a lovely young creature
when Lawford brought her home.’
‘Daphne resembles her to a most unfortunate degree,’ said Aunt Rhoda.
‘A sad story,’ sighed the Rector; ‘a sad story.’
‘I think it would better become us to forget it,’ said his wife.
‘My love it was you who spoke of poor Lady Lawford.’
‘Marmaduke, I am disgusted at the tone you take about her. Poor Lady
Lawford indeed! I consider her quite the most execrable woman I ever
heard of.’
‘She was beautiful; men told her so, and she believed them. She was
tempted; and she was weak. Execrable is a hard word, Rhoda. She never
injured you.’
‘She blighted my brother’s life. Do you suppose I can easily forgive
that? You men are always ready to make excuses for a pretty woman. I
heard of Colonel Kirkbank, the other day. Lady Hetheridge met him at
Baden—a wreck. They say he is immensely rich. He has never married, it
seems.’
‘That at least is a grace in him. “His honour rooted in dishonour
stood; and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”’
‘You are in a sentimental mood this evening, Marmaduke,’ sneered Rhoda.
‘One would suppose that you had been in love with my brother’s second
wife.’
‘She has been so long in her grave that I don’t think you and I need
quarrel if I confess that I admired her. There is a look in Daphne’s
face now she has grown up that recalls her mother almost painfully. I
hope Todd won’t burn that pheasant, Rhoda. I’m afraid she is getting a
little careless. The last was as dry as a stick.’
* * * * *
Scotland made up for a chilly and inferior summer by an altogether
superior autumn. The days were ever so much fairer and longer on that
wild north coast than they were in Warwickshire; and tempted by the
beauty of sky and sea, backed by the urgent desire of his bachelor
friend, the skipper of the smart schooner-rigged yacht _Kelpie_, Gerald
Goring stayed much longer than he had intended to stay; atoning, so far
as he could atone, for his prolonged absence, by writing his betrothed
the most delightful letters, and sending a weekly packet of sepia
sketches, which reflected every phase of sea and sky, rock and hill. To
describe these things with his brush was as easy to Gerald as it is to
other men to describe with their pens.
‘It is an idle dreamy life,’ he wrote. ‘When I am not shooting
land-fowl on the hills, or water-fowl from my dingey, I sit on the
deck and sketch, till I grow almost into a seavegetable—a zoophyte
which contracts and expands with a faintly pleasurable sensation—and
calls that life. I read no end of poetry—Byron, Shelley, Keats—and
that book whose wisdom and whose beauty no amount of reading can
ever dry up—Goethe’s “Faust.” I want no new books—the old ones are
inexhaustible. Curiosity may tempt me to look at a new writer; but in
an age of literary mediocrity I go back for choice to the Titans of
the past. Do you think I am scornful of your favourites, Tennyson and
Browning? No, love. They, too, are Titans; but we shall value them more
when they have received the divine honours that can only come after
death.
‘I am longing to be with you, and yet I feel that I am doing myself
a world of good in this rough open-air life. I was getting a little
moped at the Abbey. The place is so big, and so dreary, like the palace
of the Sleeping Beauty—waiting to wake into life and brightness at
the coming of love and you. The lonely rooms are haunted by my dear
mother’s image, and by the sense of my loss. When you come I shall be
so happy in the present that the pain of past sorrow will be softened.
‘I sit sketching these romantic caves—where we earn our dinner by
shooting the innocent rock-pigeons—and thinking of you, and of my
delight in showing you this coast next autumn.
‘Yes, love, we will have a yacht. I know you are fond of the sea. Your
sister is a fanatic in her love of the water. How she will delight in
these islands!’
He thought of Daphne sometimes, as he sat in the bow of the boat,
lulled almost to slumber by the rise and fall of the waves gently
lapping the hull. His brush fell idle across the little tin colour-box,
and he gave himself up to listless reverie. How Daphne would love this
free unfettered life: a life in which there were no formalities; no
sitting prim and straight at an orderly dinner-table; no conventional
sequence of everyday ceremonies in a hideous monotony. It was a roving
gipsy life which must needs please that erratic soul.
‘Poor little Daphne! It is strange that she and I don’t get on better,’
he said to himself. ‘We were such capital friends at Fontainebleau.
Perhaps the recollection of that day is in some way disagreeable to
her. She has been very stand-offish to me ever since—except by fits and
starts. There are times when she forgets to be formal; and then she is
charming.’
Yes; there had been times—times when all that was picturesque
and poetical in her nature asserted itself, and when her future
brother-in-law succumbed to the spell, and admired her just a little
more warmly than he felt to be altogether well for his peace, or
perchance for hers.
Perhaps he, too, had been somewhat formal—had fenced himself round with
forms and ceremonies—lest some lurking sentiment which he had never
dared to analyse, or even to think about, should grow stronger. He
wanted to be honest; he wanted to be true and loyal. But the lovely
young face, so piquant, so entrancing in its exquisite girlishness,
came across his fancies too often for perfect repose of conscience.
The memory of those two summer days at Fontainebleau—idle, foolish,
unconsidered hours—was an ever-present part of his mind. It was so
small a thing; yet it haunted him. How much better it would have been,
he thought, if Daphne had been more candid, had allowed him to speak
freely of that innocent adventure! Concealment gave it a flavour of
guilt. A hundred times he had been on the point of letting out the
secret by this or that allusion, when Daphne’s blush and the quiver
of Daphne’s lip had startled him into caution. This made a secret
understanding between them in spite of his own desire to be honest; and
it worried him to think that there should be any such hidden bond.
Madoline was the love of his life, the hope and glory of his days. He
had no doubt as to his feelings about her. From his boyhood he had
admired, revered, and loved her. He was only three years her senior,
and in their early youth the delicately-nurtured, carefully-educated
girl, reared among grown-up people, and far in advance of her years,
had seemed in all intellectual things the boy’s superior. Lady
Geraldine was idle and self-indulgent; she petted and spoiled her
son, but she taught him nothing. Had he not a private tutor—a young
clergyman who preferred the luxurious leisure of the Abbey to the
hard work of a curacy—and was not his education sufficiently provided
for when this well-recommended young Oxonian had been engaged at
a munificent salary? The young Oxonian was as fond of shooting,
billiards, cricket, and boating as his pupil; so the greater part of
Gerald’s early youth was devoted to these accomplishments; and it was
only the boy’s natural aptitude for learning whatever he wished to
learn which saved him from being a dunce. At fifteen he was transferred
to Eton, where he found better cricketing and a better river than in
Warwickshire.
From Lady Geraldine the boy had received no bent towards high thoughts
or a noble ambition. She loved him passionately, but with a love
that was both weak and selfish. She would have had him educated at
home, a boudoir sybarite, to lie on the Persian rug at her feet and
read frivolous books in fine bindings; to sit by her side when she
drove; to be pampered and idolised and ruined in body and soul. The
father’s strong sense interfered to prevent this. Mr. Giles-Goring
was no classic, and he was a self-taught mathematician, while the
boy’s tutor had taken honours in both branches of learning; but he was
clever enough to see that this luxurious home-education was a mockery,
that the lad was being flattered by an obsequious tutor, and spoiled
by a foolish mother. He sent the Oxonian about his business, and
took the boy to Eton, not before Lady Geraldine had done him as much
harm as a doting mother can do to a beloved son. She had taught him,
unintentionally and unconsciously, perhaps, to despise his father. She
had taught him to consider himself, by right of his likeness to her and
his keen sympathy with all her thoughts and fancies and prejudices—a
sympathy to which she had, as unconsciously, trained and schooled
him—belonging to her class and not to his father’s. The low-born father
was an accident in his life—a good endurable man, and to be respected
(after a fashion) for his lowly worth, but spiritually, eclectically,
æsthetically, of no kin with the son who bore his name, and who was to
inherit, and perhaps waste, his hard-won wealth.
The mother and son had a code of signals, little looks and subtle
smiles, with which they communicated their ideas before the blunt
plain-spoken father. Lady Geraldine never spoke against her husband:
nor did she descend even in moments of confidence to vulgar ridicule.
‘So like your father,’ she would say, with her languid smile, of any
honest unconventional act or speech of Mr. Giles-Goring’s; and it must
be confessed that Mr. Giles-Goring was one of those impulsive outspoken
men who do somewhat exercise a wife’s patience. Lady Geraldine never
lost her temper with him; she was never rude; she never overtly
thwarted his wishes, or opposed his plans; but she shrugged her
graceful shoulders, and lifted her delicately-pencilled eyebrows, and
allowed her son to understand what an impassable gulf yawned between
her, the daughter of a hundred earls—or at least half-a-dozen—and the
self-made millionaire.
Escaping from the stifling moral atmosphere of his mother’s boudoir,
Gerald found his first ideas of a higher and a nobler life at South
Hill. At the Abbey he had been taught to believe that there were two
good things in the world, rank and money; but that even rank, the very
flower of life, must droop and fade if not manured with gold. At South
Hill he learned to think lightly of both, and to aspire to something
better than either. For the sake of being praised and admired by
Madoline he worked, almost honestly, at Eton and Oxford. She kindled
his ambition, and, inspired by her, his youth and talent blossomed into
poetry. He sat up late at nights writing impassioned verse. He dashed
off wild stanzas in the ‘To Thyrza’ style, when his brain was fired by
the mild orgies of a modern wine, and the fiercer rapture of a modern
bear-fight. And Madoline was his only Thyrza. He was not a man who can
find his Egeria in every street. For a little while he fancied that it
was in him to be a second Byron; that the divine breath inflated his
lungs; that he had but to strike on the cithara for the divine accords
to come. He strummed cleverly enough upon the sacred strings, spoiled
a good deal of clean paper, and amused himself considerably. Then,
failing—in consequence of an utter absence of the critical faculty—to
win the prize for English verse, he turned his back upon the Muses, and
henceforward spoke with ridicule of his poetic adolescence. Still the
Muse had exercised her elevating influence; and, inspired by her and by
Madoline, Gerald Goring had learned to despise those lesser aims which
his mother had held before him as the sublimities of life.
He was fond of art, and had a marked talent for painting; but as he
never extended his labours or his studies beyond the amateur’s easy
course, he was not likely to rise above the amateur’s level. Why should
a man who is sure to inherit a million submit to the drudgery of severe
technical training in order to take the bread out of the mouths of
painters who must needs live by their art? Gerald painted a little, now
landscape, now figure, as the spirit moved him; sculptured a little;
poetised a little; set a little song of his own to music now and then
to please Lina; and was altogether accomplished and interesting. But he
would have liked to be great, to have had his name bandied about for
praise or blame upon the lips of men; and it irked him somewhat to know
and feel that he was not of the stuff which makes great men; or, in
other words, that he entirely lacked that power of sustained industry
which can alone achieve greatness. For his own inward satisfaction,
and for Lina’s sake, he would have liked to distinguish himself. But
the pathway of life had been made fatally smooth for him; it lay
through a land of flowery pastures and running brooks, a happy valley
of all earthly delights; and how could any man be resolute enough to
turn aside from all sensuous pleasures to climb rugged rocky hills in
pursuit of some perchance unattainable spiritual delight? There was
so much that wealth could give him, that it would have been hardly
natural for Gerald Goring to live laborious days for the sake of the
one thing which wealth could not give. He had just that dreamy poetic
temperament which can clothe sensual joys with the glory and radiance
of the intellectual. Politics, statecraft, he frankly detested; science
he considered an insult to poetry. He would have liked the stir and
excitement, the fever and glory of war; but not the daily dry-as-dust
work of a soldier’s life, or the hardships of campaigning. He was not
an unbeliever, but his religious belief was too vague for a Churchman.
Having failed to distinguish himself as a poet, and being too idle to
succeed as a painter, he saw no royal road to fame open to him; and so
was content to fall back from the race, and enjoy the delicious repose
of an utterly aimless life. He pictured to himself a future in which
there should be no crumpled rose-leaf; a wife in all things perfect,
fondly loved, admired, respected; children as lovely as a poet’s dream
of childhood; an existence passed amidst the fairest scenes of earth,
with such endless variety of background as unlimited wealth can give.
He would not, like Tiberius, build himself a dozen villas upon one
rock-bound island; but he would make his temporary nest in every valley
and by every lake, striking his tents before ever satiety could dull
the keen edge of enjoyment.
Nor should this ideal life, though aimless, be empty of good works.
Madoline should have _carte blanche_ for the gratification of her
benevolent schemes, great or small, and he would be ready to help
her with counsel and sympathy; provided always that he were not
called upon to work, or to put himself _en rapport_ with professional
philanthropists—a most useful class, no doubt, but obnoxious to him as
a lover of ease and pleasure.
He had looked forward with placid self-satisfaction to this life ever
since his engagement—and indeed for some time before that solemn
betrothal. From his boyhood he had loved Madoline, and had believed
himself beloved by her. Betrothal followed almost as a matter of
course. Lady Geraldine had spoken of the engagement as a settled thing,
ever so long before the lovers had bound themselves each to each. She
had told Lina that she was to be her daughter, the only girl she could
love as her son’s wife; and when Gerald was away at Oxford, Lina had
spent half her life at Goring with his mother, talking about him,
worshipping him, as men are worshipped sometimes by women infinitely
above them.
From the time of his engagement—nay, from the time when first his
boyish heart recognised a mistress—Gerald’s affection for Madoline had
known no change or diminution. Never had his soul wavered. Nor did it
waver in his regard and reverence for her now, as he sat on the sunlit
deck of the _Kelpie_ in this fair autumn weather, his brush lying idle
by his side, his thoughts perplexed and wandering. Yet there was a
jar in the harmony of his life; a dissonant interval somewhere in the
music. The thought of Daphne troubled him. He had a suspicion that she
was not happy. Gay and sparkling as she was at times, she was prone to
fits of silence and sullenness unaccountable in so young a creature:
unless it were that she cherished some secret grief, and that the
hidden fox so many of us carry had his tooth in her young breast.
He was no coxcomb, not in the least degree inclined to suppose that
women had a natural bent towards falling in love with him: yet in this
case he was troubled by the suspicion that Daphne’s stand-offishness
was not so much a token of indifference or dislike, as the sign of a
deeper feeling. She had been so variable in her manner to him. Now all
sweet, and anon all sour; now avoiding him, now showing but too plainly
her intense delight in his presence—by subtlest signs; by sudden
blushes; by loveliest looks; by faintly quivering lip of trembling
hand; by the swift lighting up of her whole face at his coming; by the
low veiled tones of her soft sweet voice. Yes; by too many a sign and
token—fighting her hardest to hide her secret all the time—she had
given him ground for suspecting that she loved him.
He recalled, with unspeakable pain, her pale distressed face that
day of their first meeting at South Hill; the absolute horror in her
widely-opened eyes; the deadly coldness of her trembling hand. Why had
she called her boat by that ridiculous name: and why had she been so
anxious to cancel it? The thought of those things disturbed his peace.
She was so lovely, so innocent, so wild, so wilful.
‘My bright spirit of the woods,’ he said to himself, ‘I should like
your fate to be happy. And yet—and yet—’
He dared not shape his thought further, but the question was in his
mind: ‘Would I like her fate to be far apart from mine?’
Why had she rejected Edgar Turchill, a man so honestly, so obviously
devoted to her?—able, one might suppose, to sympathise with all her
girlish fancies, to gratify every whim.
‘She ought to like him; she must be made to like him,’ he said to
himself, his heart suddenly aglow with virtuous, almost heroical
resolve.
His heart had thrilled that night in the shadow of the walnut boughs
when he heard Daphne’s contemptuous rejection of her lover. He had
been guiltily glad. And yet he was ready to do his duty: he was eager
to play the mediator, and win the girl for that true-hearted lover. He
meant to be loyal.
‘Poor Daphne!’ he sighed. ‘Her cradle was shadowed by a guilty mother’s
folly. She had been cheated out of her father’s love. She need have
something good in this life to make amends for all she has lost. Edgar
would make an admirable husband.’
The _Kelpie_ turned her nose towards home next day; and soon Gerald was
dreamily watching the play of sunbeam and shadow on the heathery slopes
above the Kyles of Bute, very near Greenock, and the station and the
express train that was to carry him home. He turned his back almost
reluctantly on the sea life, the unfettered bachelor habits. Though he
longed to see Madoline again, almost as fondly as he had longed for her
four months ago when he was leaving Bergen, yet there was a curious
indefinable pain mingled with the lover’s yearning. An image thrust
itself between him and his own true love; a haunting shape was mingled
with all his dreams of the future.
‘Pray God she may marry soon, and have children, and get matronly and
dull and stupid!’ he said to himself savagely; ‘and then I shall forget
the dryad of Fontainebleau.’
He travelled all night and got to Stratford early in the afternoon.
He had given no notice of his coming, either at the Abbey or South
Hill, and his first visit was naturally to the house that held his
betrothed. His limbs were cramped and stiffened by the long journey,
and he despatched his valet and his portmanteau to Goring in a fly, and
walked across the fields to South Hill. It was a long walk and he took
his time about it, stopping now and then to look somewhat wistfully at
the brown river, on whose breast the scattered leaves were drifting.
The sky was dull and gray, with only faint patches of wintry sunlight
in the west; the atmosphere was heavy; and the year seemed ever so much
older here than in Scotland.
He passed Baddesley and Arden, with only a glance across the smooth
lawn at the Rectory, where the china-asters were in their glory, and
the majolica vases under the rustic verandah made bright spots of
colour in the autumn gloom. Then, instead of taking the meadow-path
to South Hill, he chose the longer way, and followed the windings of
the Avon, intending to let himself into the South Hill grounds by the
little gate near Daphne’s boat-house.
He was within about a quarter of a mile of the boat-house when he saw
a spot of scarlet gleaming amidst the shadows of the rustic roof. The
boat-house was a thatched erection of the Noah’s Ark pattern, and the
front was open to the water. Below this thatched gable-end, and on a
level with the river, showed the vivid spot of red. Gerald quickened
his pace unconsciously, with a curious eagerness to solve the mystery
of that bit of colour.
Yes; it was as he had fancied. It was Daphne, seated alone and dejected
on the keel of her upturned boat. The yellow collie darted out and
leapt up at him, growling and snapping, as he drew near her. Daphne
looked at him—or he so fancied—with a piteous half-beseeching gaze. She
was very pale, and he thought she looked wretchedly ill.
‘Have you been ill?’ he asked eagerly, as they shook hands. ‘Quiet, you
mongrel!’ to the suspicious Goldie.
‘Never was better in my life,’ she answered briskly.
‘Then your looks belie you. I was afraid you had been seriously ill.’
‘Don’t you think if I had Lina would have mentioned it to you in a
postscript, or a _nota bene_, or something?’
‘Of course.’
‘I detest cold weather, and I am chilled to the bone, in spite of this
thick shawl,’ she answered lightly, glancing at the scarlet wrap which
had caught Gerald’s eye from afar.
‘I wonder you choose such a spot as this for your afternoon
meditations. It is certainly about the dampest and chilliest place you
could find.’
‘I did not come here to meditate, but to read,’ answered Daphne. ‘I
have got Browning’s new poem, and it requires a great deal of hard
thinking before one can quite appreciate it; and if I tell you that
Aunt Rhoda is in the drawing-room, and means to stick there till
dinner-time, you will not require any further reason for my being here.’
‘That’s dreadful. Yet I must face the gorgon. I am dying to see Lina.’
‘Naturally; and she will be enraptured at your return,’ answered Daphne
in her most natural manner. ‘She has been expecting you every day i’
the hour.’
‘“For in a minute there are many days”—Shakespeare.’
‘Thank God! I don’t object to the bard of Avon half so strongly now.
I have been in a country where everybody quotes an uncouth rhymester
whom they call Bobbie Bairrns. Shakespeare seems almost civilised in
comparison. Will you walk up to the house with me?’
She looked down at her open book. She had not been reading when he came
unawares upon her solitude. He had seen that; just as surely as he had
seen the faint convulsive movement of her throat, the start, the pallor
that marked her surprise at his approach. He had acquired a fatal habit
of watching and analysing her emotions; and it seemed to him that she
had brightened since his coming, that new light and colour had returned
to her face; almost as you may see the revival of a flower that has
drooped in the drought, and which revivifies under the gentle summer
rain.
She looked at her book doubtfully, as if she would like to say no.
‘You had better come with me. It is nearly tea-time, and I know you are
dying for a cup of tea. I never knew a woman that wasn’t.’
‘Exhausted nature tells me that it is tea-time. Yes; I suppose I had
better come.’