‘BUT I WOT BEST WHER WRINGETH ME MY SHO.’
Twenty-four hours after that quiet row up the moonlit river, the South
Hill party were on the Calais steamer, tossing and tumbling about in
the Channel, much to the discomfiture of Mrs. Mowser, who was a bad
sailor, and took care to make everybody in the ladies’ cabin perfectly
familiar with that fact. There was nothing of the Spartan about
Mowser, nothing in any wise heroic in her conduct under the trial of
sea-sickness. Yet there was a kind of martyrlike fidelity in her; for
even in her agony she never let her mistress’s travelling-bag and
jewel-box out of her eye—nay, would hardly trust those valuables out
of her own grasp, clutching at them convulsively in the throes of her
malady, and suspecting evil intentions in guileless fellow-sufferers.
It was a lovely night, and Madoline and Daphne both stayed on deck, to
the indignation of Mowser, who was sure Miss Lawford would catch cold,
and declared it was all Miss Daphne’s doing.
‘I thought you’d have come down to the cabin and had a comfortable
lay-down,’ said Mowser when they had all scrambled or staggered up the
oozy steps, and had been interrogated as to their names by an alert
official, in a manner somewhat alarming to the sleepy and feeble-minded
voyager.
Then came a weary hour or so in the warm light refreshment-room, a
cup of coffee, or a _bouillon_, a few stifled yawns, an occasional
excursion to the platform, and finally the welcome departure, by flat
fields and unknown marsh-lands, with the inevitable row of poplars
against the horizon. Daphne seemed to know the depressing landscape by
heart. Her father, muffled in his corner, slept peacefully. Madoline
slumbered, or seemed to slumber. Gerald and Edgar had secured a _coupé_
to smoke in; and by a judicious arrangement with the guard Sir Vernon
and his daughters had a compartment all to themselves. But not one wink
of sleep visited Daphne’s eyelids. Wearily she watched the monotonous
landscape, enlivened a little now and then by a glimpse of village
life in the clear cold light of early morning; cattle moving about
in misty meadows, casements opening to the balmy air. What a long
journey it seemed to that one wakeful passenger! but the longest—were
it even a long unprofitable, uneventful life-journey—must end at last;
and by-and-by there came the cry of ‘Paris!’ and the mandate that
all passengers were to pass into the great bare luggage repository
to answer for the contents of bags and baggage; a weary interval,
during which the South Hill party loitered in bleak waiting-rooms,
while Jinman and Mrs. Mowser delivered up keys, and satisfied the
requirements of the State.
A long day in Paris, during which Sir Vernon reposed from his fatigues
at the Bristol Hotel, while the young people went about sight-seeing;
a dinner at Bignon’s, where Daphne protested she could perceive no
difference between the much-vaunted _consommé_ of that establishment
and Mrs. Spicer’s clear soup; an evening at the Français, where they
saw Got in Mercadet; and then off again in the early summer morning by
the eight o’clock train for Dijon and Geneva, a twelve hours’ journey.
It was a peerless morning. Paris, with its busy markets and
teeming life, seemed brimming over with brightness and gaiety;
boulevard-building in full progress; waggons coming in from the
country; artisans hurrying, grisettes tripping to their work. Daphne’s
spirits rose with the thought of fresh woods and pastures new.
‘I have been longing all my life to see Switzerland,’ she said, when
all the difficulties of departure were overcome, and the train was
speeding gaily past suburban gardens, and groves, and bridges, ‘and now
I can hardly believe I am going there. It is a journey to dream about
and look forward to, not to come to pass.’
‘Are no bright things ever to come to pass? Is all life to be dull
and colourless?’ asked Gerald Goring, sitting opposite her in the
railway-carriage, with Lina by his side. They were all together to-day,
having established themselves as comfortably as possible in the
spacious compartment, and having provided themselves largely with light
literature, wherewith to beguile the tedium of the journey.
‘I don’t know about you,’ said Daphne; ‘you are an exceptional person,
and have been able to realise all your dreams!’
‘Not all,’ answered Gerald gravely: ‘I suppose no one ever does that.’
‘You have but to form a wish, and, lo! it is gratified,’ murmured
Daphne, taking no notice of his interruption. ‘Last winter it flashed
across your brain that it would be nice to shoot cariboos—poor innocent
harmless cariboos, who had never injured you—and, in a thought, you are
off and away by seas and rivers and snow and ice to gratify the whim.
What pleasure can Switzerland have for you? Every inch of it must be as
vapidly familiar as that dear old English Warwickshire which you esteem
so lightly.’
‘Perhaps; but it is a pleasure to revisit a familiar place with those I
love. I was a poor solitary waif when I went through Switzerland, from
Geneva to Constance, from Lindau to Samaden, picking up my companions
by the way, or travelling in Byronic solitude—though, by the way, I
doubt if Byron ever was much alone. Judged by his poetry, he may be a
gloomy and solitary spirit; but judged by his life and letters, he was
a social soul.’
‘I like to think of him as gloomy and alone,’ said Daphne, with a
determined air. ‘Please don’t dispel all my illusions.’
Edgar was sitting by her side, cutting up magazines and newspapers,
watchful of her every look, thinking her every word delightful, ready
to minister to her comfort or pleasure, but without much ability to
entertain her with any conversational brightness—unless they two
could have been alone, and could have talked of their future life at
Hawksyard; the stables, the gardens, the horses they were to ride
together next winter, when Daphne was to take the field, a heaven-born
Diana. He was never tired of talking of that happy future, so near, so
near, and to which he looked forward with such fervent hope.
They were nearing Fontainebleau; already the forest showed dark on the
horizon. Daphne, so vivacious hitherto, became curiously silent. She
sat looking towards that distant line of wood, that smiling valley
with its winding river. All her soul was in her eyes as she looked.
Two years ago—almost day for day, two years—and her heart had awakened
suddenly from its long sleep of childish innocence to feel and to
suffer.
Gerald stole a look—guiltily as it were—at the too expressive face.
Yes, she remembered. Her soul was full of sad and tender memories. He
could read all her secrets in those lovely eyes, the lips slightly
parted, the lace about her neck stirred faintly by the throbbing of her
heart. She had no more forgotten Fontainebleau and their meetings there
than he had. To each it dated a crisis in life: for each it had given a
new colour to every thought and feeling.
Lina, her hands moving slowly in some easy knitting, looked up at her
sister.
‘Are we not near Fontainebleau, where you spent your holidays once?’
she asked.
‘Yes,’ Daphne answered shortly.
‘You speak as if you had not been happy there.’
‘I liked the place very much; but it was a dull life. Poor Miss Toby
and her sick headaches, and Dibb for my only companion.’
‘And Dibb was ineffably stupid,’ said Gerald, suddenly forgetting
himself, and moved to laughter at the thought of honest Martha’s
stolidity; ‘at least, I have often heard you say as much,’ he added
hastily.
‘She was a good harmless thing, and I won’t have her ridiculed,’
said Daphne, brightening, all serious thoughts taking flight at the
absurdity of Gerald’s lapse. ‘I wonder if she has finished that crochet
counterpane.’
‘Finished it! Of course not,’ cried Gerald. ‘She is the sort of girl
who would die, and come to life again in a better world still working
at the same counterpane—as I imagine from your description of her,’ he
concluded meekly.
They were leaving Fontainebleau far behind them by this time; its old
church, and its palace, with all its historic memories of Francis and
Henri, Napoleon and Pius VII. The forest was but a dark spot in the
vanishing distance; they were speeding away to the rich wine country
with its vast green plains, and steep hillsides clothed with vines. At
two o’clock they were at Dijon, and seemed to have been travelling a
week. Sir Vernon grumbled at the dust and heat, and regretted that he
had undertaken the whole journey in a day.
‘We ought to have stayed the night at Dijon,’ he said fretfully, when
they were out of the station, steaming away towards Macon, after a
hurried luncheon in the well-furnished refreshment-room.
‘It is a wretchedly dull place to stop at, sir,’ said Gerald; ‘hardly
anything to see.’
‘At my age a man does not want always to be seeing things,’ growled Sir
Vernon; ‘he wants rest.’
The day had been oppressively hot—a sultry heat, a sunbaked landscape.
Madoline and her sister bore it with admirable patience, beguiling the
tedium of those long hours now with conversation, now with books, anon
with quiet contemplation of the landscape, which for a long way offered
no striking features. It was growing towards evening when they entered
the Jura region, and found themselves in a world that was really worth
looking at: a wild strange world, as it appeared to Daphne’s eye; vast
rolling masses of hill that seemed to have been thrown up in long waves
before this little world assumed shape and solidity; precipitous green
slopes, grassy walls that shut out the day, and the deep rapid river
cleaving its tumultuous course through the trough of the hills.
‘Don’t you think this is better than Stratford-upon-Avon?’ asked Gerald
mockingly, as he watched Daphne’s excited face, her eyes wide with
wonder.
‘Ever so much wilder and grander. I should like to live here.’
‘Why?’
‘Because in such a world one would forget oneself. One’s own poor
little troubles would seem too mean and trumpery to be thought about.’
‘No man’s trouble is small or mean to the sufferer himself,’ replied
Gerald. ‘There is nothing grand or dignified in the abstract notion of
Job’s boils; yet to him they meant an unendurable agony which tempted
him to curse his Creator and destroy his own life. I don’t believe the
grandest natural surroundings would lessen one’s sense of the thorn in
one’s side.’
‘I don’t think you have any thorns, Daphne,’ said Edgar tenderly,
‘or that you need take refuge from your sorrows among these
desolate-looking mountains.’
‘Of course not. I was only speaking generally,’ answered Daphne
lightly; ‘but oh! what a mighty world it is—hills that climb to the
sky, and such lovely tranquil valleys lying between those dark earth
walls. Vines, and water-mills, and waterfalls tumbling over rocky beds.
If Switzerland is much grander than this, I think its grandeur will
kill me. I can hardly breathe when I look up at those great dark hills.’
‘I don’t know that there is anything in Switzerland that impresses one
so much as one’s first view of the Jura,’ said Gerald. ‘It is the giant
gateway of mountain-land—the entrance into a new world.’
The heat seemed to increase rather than diminish with the shades of
evening. No cool breeze sprang up with the going down of the sun. The
sultry atmosphere thickened, and became almost stifling; and then, just
as it was growing dark, big raindrops came splashing down, a roar of
thunder rolled along the hills, like a volley of cannon; thin threads
of vivid light trembled and zigzagged behind the hill-tops, and the
storm which had been brooding over them all the afternoon broke in real
earnest.
‘A thunderstorm in the Jura,’ exclaimed Gerald; ‘what a lucky young
woman you are, Mistress Daphne! Here is one of Nature’s grandest
effects got up as if on purpose to give you pleasure.’
‘I hope it may cool the air,’ said Sir Vernon, from the comfortable
corner where he had been fitfully slumbering ever since they left the
French territory.
Daphne sat looking out of the window, and spoke never a word. She
was drinking in the beauty and grandeur of this unspeakable region,
trying to fill her soul with the form and manner of it. Yes, it was
worth while living, were it only to see these mountain peaks and
gorges; these hurrying waters and leaping torrents; these living forces
of everlasting Nature. She had been weary of her life very often of
late, so weary that she would gladly have flung it off her like a
worn-out garment, and have lain down in dull contentment to take her
last earthly rest; but to-night she was glad to be alive—to see the
forked lightnings dancing upon the mountain-sides; to hear all earth
shudder at the roar of the thunder; to feel herself a part of that
grand conflict. A little later, when they had gone through an almost
endless tunnel, and were nearing Geneva, the thunder grew more and more
distant, seemed to travel slowly away, like an enemy’s cannon firing
stray shots as the foe retreated; and the night sky flung off its black
cloud-mantle, and all the stars shone out of a calm purple heaven;
while the little lights of the city, faint yellow spots upon the dark
blue night, trembled and quivered in the distance.
‘Isn’t this dreadfully like one’s idea of Manchester?’ said Daphne,
when they were in the station, and tickets were being collected in the
usual businesslike way.
‘Can there be a higher model than Manchester for any commercial city?’
asked Gerald.
‘Commercial! Oh, I hope there is nothing commercial in Switzerland. I
have always thought of it as a land of mountains and lakes.’
‘So is Scotland, yet there is such an element as trade in that country.’
‘You are bent on destroying my illusions. Oh, what a horrid row
of omnibuses!’ cried Daphne, as they came out of the station and
confronted about twenty of those vehicles, with doors hospitably open,
and commissionaires eager to abduct new arrivals for their several
hotels. ‘And where is Mont Blanc?’ she inquired, looking up at the
surrounding chimney-pots.
‘At your elbow,’ answered Gerald; ‘but you may not see him to-night.
The monarch of mountains is like our own gracious sovereign, and is not
always visible to his subjects.’
There was a private carriage from the Beau Rivage Hotel waiting for the
South Hill party, and in this they all drove down a hilly-street, which
was bright and clean, and wide, and prosperous-looking, but cruelly
disappointing to Daphne. Jinman and Mowser followed in the omnibus with
the luggage. Mowser, like Daphne, was considerably disappointed.
‘If this is Switzerland, I call it very inferior to Brighton,’ she said
snappishly. ‘Where are the glaziers and the mountings?’
‘Did you expect to find them just outside the station?’ demanded the
more travelled Jinman. ‘I have lived months in Switzerland and never
seen a glashyeer. I don’t hold with having one’s bones rattled to bits
upon a mule for the sake of seeing a lot of dirty ice. One can look at
that any hard winter on the Serpentine.’
‘Swisserland is Swisserland,’ answered Mowser sententiously, ‘and I
don’t hold with travelling all this way from home—I’m sure I thought
this blessed day would never come to an end—unless we are to see
somethink out of the common.’
‘The hotels are first-class,’ said Jinman, ‘and so are the restorongs
on board the boats. Nobody need starve in Switzerland.’
‘Can we get a decent cup of tea?’ asked Mowser. ‘There’s not a
scullery-maid at South Hill as would drink such cat-lap as they brought
me at the Bristol.’
Jinman explained that the teapot was an institution fully understood in
the Helvetian States.
‘They’re a more domestic people than the French,’ said Jinman
condescendingly, ‘I must say that for them. But Genever is the poorest
place for restorongs I was ever at; plenty of your caffy-staminies,
where you may drink bad wine and smoke bad cigars to your heart’s
content; but hardly a decent house where you can get a dejoonay à la
fourchette, or give a little bit of dinner to a friend. The hotels have
got it all their own way.’
‘They ought to,’ answered Mowser, ‘when there’s such a many of ’em. I
wonder they can all pay.’
At the Beau Rivage, Sir Vernon and his daughters found a spacious
suite of rooms on the third floor, many-windowed, balconied, looking
over the lake. The two young men had secured quarters a little way off
at the International. Sir Vernon grumbled at being put on the third
storey, after having given due notice of his coming; but the American
dollar and the Russian rouble had bought up the first and second stages
of the big hotel, and an English country gentleman must needs be
contented with an upper floor. But the rooms were lovely, and Daphne
was delighted with their altitude.
‘We are all the nearer Mont Blanc,’ she said, standing half in and half
out of the window; ‘one of the waiters told me it was over there—_tout
près_—but though I have been straining my eyes ever since, I can’t
discover a gleam of snow behind those dark hills.’
There were the loveliest flowers on the tables and cabinets, such
flowers as one hardly expects to find at an hotel, were it never so
luxurious. Madoline admired them wonderingly.
‘One would think the people here knew my particular vanity, and were
anxious to gratify me,’ she said; and then turning to one of the
waiters who was arranging books and writing-desks on the tables, she
asked: ‘Have you always such lovely flowers in the rooms?’
‘No, madame. They were ordered this morning by a telegram from Paris.’
‘Father! No, Gerald; it must have been your doing.’
‘A happy thought while I was loitering about that miserable
railway-station,’ replied Gerald.
‘How good of you! Dear flowers. They make the place seem like home.’
‘When you are settled at Montreux we can arrange for the contents of
the Abbey hot-houses to be sent you weekly. It will be something for
that pampered menial MacCloskie to look after, in the intervals of his
cigars and metaphysical studies. I have an idea that he employs all his
leisure in reading Dugald Stewart. There is a hardness about him which
I can only attribute to a close study of abstract truth.’
Daphne was standing out in the balcony, with Edgar at her side, looking
down at the scene below. Geneva seemed pretty enough in this night
view—a city of lake and lamplight, ringed round with mountains; a city
of angles and bridges, sharp lines, lofty houses, peaked roofs; the
dark bulk of a cathedral, with, a picturesque lantern on the roof,
dominating all the rest.
‘I think if it would only lighten I could see Mont Blanc,’ said Daphne,
with her eyes fixed upon that bit of sky to which the waiter had
pointed when she questioned him about the mountain. ‘One good vivid
flash would light it up beautifully.’
‘My dearest, how dangerous!’ exclaimed Edgar; ‘pray, come out of the
balcony. You might be blinded.’
‘I’ll risk that. It will not be the first time I have stared the
lightning out of countenance.’
A summer flash lit up the sky as she spoke. There was one wide quiver
of pale blue light, but never a glimpse of snow-clad peak gleamed from
the distance.
‘How horrid!’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘but that was a very poor flash. I’ll
wait for a better one.’
She waited for half-a-dozen, in spite of Edgar’s urgent efforts to lure
her indoors, but the summer flashes showed her nothing but their own
vivid light.
‘If the electric light prove no better than that for all practical
uses, I don’t envy the inventor,’ she exclaimed with infinite disgust.
Dinner was served in the adjoining room, but Madoline and her sister
begged to be excused from dining. They would take tea together in the
drawing-room while the three gentlemen dined. Sir Vernon declared that
he had no appetite, but he was willing to sit down, for the public good
as it were. After which protest he did ample justice to a _sole à la
Normande_, and a _poulet à la Marengo_, to say nothing of such pretty
tiny kickshaws as _gâteau St. Honoré_ and ice-pudding.
For Madeline and Daphne a round table was spread with a snowy cloth,
a pile of delicious rolls, unquestionable butter, and a glass dish of
pale golden honey, excellent tea, and cream—a thoroughly Arcadian meal.
‘Dearest, how brightly your eyes are sparkling,’ said Lina, with an
admiring look at the young face opposite. ‘I can see you are enjoying
yourself.’
‘Yes, there is always a pleasure in novelty. Why cannot one pass all
one’s life in new places? The world is wide enough. It is only our own
foolishness that keeps us tied, like a poor tethered animal, to one
dull spot.’
‘Why, Daphne, I thought you were so fond of home, that the banks of the
Warwickshire Avon made up your idea of earthly paradise!’
‘Sometimes, yes. But lately I have grown terribly tired of
Warwickshire.’
‘That’s a bad hearing; and next year, when you are settled at
Hawksyard——’
‘Please don’t speak of that. Thank Heaven we are three days’ journey
from Hawksyard. Let me forget it if I can.’
‘Daphne, how can you talk like that of a dear old place which is to be
your home—a place where one of the best men living was born?’
‘If you think him such a wonder of goodness, why did you not have
him when he asked you?’ cried Daphne, in a sudden fit of irritation.
Those nerves of hers, always too highly strung, were to-night at their
sharpest tension. ‘I am sick to death of hearing him praised by people
who don’t care a straw about him.’
‘Daphne!’ exclaimed Lina, more grieved than offended at this outburst.
Daphne was on her knees beside her sister in the next moment.
‘Forgive me, darling, I am hideously cross and disagreeable. I suppose
it is that tiresome lightning and the annoyance of not seeing Mont
Blanc. All that long, dusty, fusty journey, and nothing but an hotel
and a lamp-lit town at the end of it. I wanted to find myself in the
very heart of mountains, and glaciers, and avalanches.’
‘I think you know how honestly I like Edgar,’ said Madoline, believing
in her guilelessness that Daphne had resented her praise of Mr.
Turchill because she fancied it hollow and insincere. ‘I daresay if I
had not cared for Gerald long before Edgar proposed to me, I might have
given Mr. Turchill a different answer. I cannot tell how that might
have been. My life has had only one love. I loved Gerald from the days
when he first came to South Hill, a school-boy, when he used to tell
me all his troubles and his triumphs, when any success of his made me
prouder than if it had been my own. My heart was given away ages before
Edgar ever spoke to me of love.’
‘I know, dear; I can understand it all; only, don’t you know, when
everybody conspires to praise the young man to whom one is engaged,
and when all one’s relations are everlastingly congratulating one
upon one’s good fortune—the implication being that it is quite
undeserved—there is a kind of weariness that creeps over one’s soul at
the sound of those familiar phrases.’
‘I will never praise him again, dear,’ answered Lina, smiling at her.
‘I shall be perfectly contented to know that you value him as he
deserves to be valued, and that your future happiness is assured by his
devoted love.’
Daphne gave a fretful little sigh, but made no further protest. She was
thinking that she had seen a Newfoundland dog every whit as devoted as
Edgar. Yet the affection of that Newfoundland would have hardly been
deemed all-sufficient for the happiness of a lifetime.
She went back to the table, and did execution upon the rolls and honey
with a healthy girlish appetite, despite that feverish unrest which
disturbed the equal balance of her mind.
Daphne ordered Edgar to attend her on an exploration of the city next
morning, directly after breakfast.
‘Madoline and my father know the place by heart,’ she said; ‘and, of
course, Mr. Goring is tired of it. How could a man who is weary of all
creation care for Geneva?’
‘Who told you I was weary of creation?’ asked Gerald languidly.
‘Your ways and your manners,’ replied Daphne. ‘I knew as much the first
time I saw you.’
The weather was clear and bright, the town looking its best, as Daphne
and her lover left the hotel on their excursion. They were to be back
before noon, at which hour they were to start with Gerald and Madoline
for Ferney.
‘If it were not for the lake this place would be beneath contempt,’
said Daphne decisively, as they crossed the low level bridge, and
lingered to look at the sapphire Rhone, and to speculate upon that
deepened azure hue which the waters assume when they flow from the lake
into the river. ‘It is no more like the Geneva of my dreams than it is
like Jerusalem the Golden.’
‘Is it not really?’
‘Of course not. My idea of Switzerland was a succession of mountain
ledges, varied by an occasional plank across a torrent. Imagine
my revulsion of feeling at finding a big businesslike town, with
omnibuses, and cafés, and manufactories, and everything that is
commonplace and despicable.’
‘But, surely, I think you must have known that Geneva was a town,’
faltered Edgar, grieved at his dear one’s ignorance, and glad to think
his mother was not by to compare this foolishness with her own precise
geographical knowledge, acquired thirty years ago at Miss Tompion’s,
and carefully harvested in the store-house of a methodical mind.
‘Well, perhaps I may have expected something in the way of a city; a
semi-circle of white peaky houses on the margin of the lake; a mediæval
watch-tower or two; a Gothic gateway, the very gate that was shut
against Rousseau, don’t you know; and Mont Blanc in full view.’
‘I call it a very fine town,’ said Edgar, venturing to disagree with
his beloved.
‘I wish it did not swarm so with English and Americans. I have heard
nothing but my own tongue since I came out,’ protested Daphne.
She was better pleased presently when they mounted a narrow street on
the side of a breakneck hill. She was tolerably satisfied with the
cathedral, where the tomb of the great Protestant leader Henri de Rohan
took her fancy by its massive grandeur, couchant lions at its base,
the soldier in his armour above. She was interested in the pulpit from
which Calvin and Theodore de Bèze preached the Reformed Faith, and was
somewhat disgusted with her companion for his utter ignorance of the
historic past, save inasmuch as it was feebly reflected in the most
limited and conventional course of instruction.
‘What did you learn at Rugby?’ she asked impatiently. ‘You don’t seem
to know anything.’
‘We didn’t give much time to history, except Livy and Xenophon,’
answered Edgar, feebly apologetic.
‘And therefore you are not a bit of use as a cicerone. You really ought
to subscribe to Mudie and read a lot of instructive books. There’s no
good in reading old histories; people are always discovering letters
and archives that put the whole story of the past in a new light. You
must get your history hot from the press.’
‘I would rather take my information at second-hand from you, dear,’
answered Edgar meekly. ‘It seems natural to women to read a great deal,
and to find almost a second life in books, but men——’
‘Are so shamefully lazy that their capacity for taking in knowledge is
exhausted by the time they have skimmed the daily papers,’ answered
Daphne. ‘And now, please, take me to the museums Mr. Goring told you
about.’
With some trouble, and a good deal of inquiring, they found a private
collection of art and _bric-à-brac_, historical relics, furniture,
delft, and china, that was well worth seeing. Then, having regaled
their eyes upon this to the uttermost, they scampered off to the
public museum, where the only objects of thrilling interest were the
manuscripts and letters of dead and gone celebrities, from Calvin
downwards. They found that famous reformer’s penmanship as angular as
his character; they found Bossuet a careless and sprawling writer;
Fénelon careful, neat, and fine; the Duc de Richelieu a fop even in the
use of his pen, his writing exquisitely clear, minute, and regular;
while De Maintenon’s hand was large, bold, angular, and eminently
readable—the natural indication of an unscrupulous managing temper, a
woman born to govern, by fair means or foul. Daphne lingered a little
over Rousseau’s manuscript of ‘Julie,’ a work of delicate neatness,
evidently copied from the rough draft.
‘Is not “Julie” one of the novels which one mustn’t read?’ asked
Daphne, when she had perused half a page. ‘It looks uncommonly dull. I
thought wicked stories were always interesting.’
Edgar had never heard of ‘Julie.’ It was doubtful if he had ever
heard of Rousseau; but at this remark he hurried Daphne away from the
manuscript, lest some snaky little bit of immorality should uncurl
itself on the page, and lift up its evil head before her. It was time
for them to get back to the hotel, so they gave but a cursory glance at
the pictures and other treasures of the museum, and hastened into the
glare of the broad white street, where Edgar insisted upon putting his
betrothed into a fly. They found Madoline and Gerald waiting for them
in the porch of the Beau Rivage, and a smart open carriage with a pair
of horses ready to take them to Ferney.
‘Thank goodness we are going away from Geneva,’ said Daphne, as the
carriage rattled through the wide clean streets towards the country;
‘and now I suppose we shall see something really Swiss.’
‘You will see the home of a great man of letters,’ answered Gerald,
looking at her lazily with those languid dreamy eyes whose shifting hue
had so puzzled her in the forest of Fontainebleau, ‘and as you are such
a hero-worshipper, that ought to satisfy you.’
‘I don’t care a straw for Voltaire,’ said Daphne.
‘Indeed! And pray how much do you know about him?’
‘Everything. I have read Carlyle’s description of him in “Frederick the
Great.” He was a horrid man; cringed to his goat-faced eminence Dubois;
allowed himself to be caned by the Duc de Rohan’s hired bravoes, the
Duc looking on out of a hackney coach window all the time.’
‘Don’t say allowed himself. I don’t suppose he could help it.’
‘He ought to have prevented it. Imagine a great man beginning his
career by being beaten in the public streets.’
‘Who knows that your Shakespeare did not get a sound drubbing from Sir
Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, before he was stung into retaliating by
that exquisitely refined lampoon which tradition ascribes to him? You
worship your Swan of Avon for what he wrote, not for what he did. Can
you not deal the same measure to Voltaire?’
‘I don’t know anything of his writing, except a few speeches out of
“Zaïre,” and an epitome of his “Louis Quatorze.” If you are going to
put him on an equality with Shakespeare——’
‘I am not. But I say that as an all-round literary worker he never had
an equal, unless it were Scott, who has surpassed him in many things,
and who could, I believe, have equalled him on any ground.’
‘Scott was an old dear,’ answered Daphne, with her usual flippancy,
‘and I would rather have “Kenilworth” and “The Bride of Lammermoor”
than all this Voltaire of yours ever wrote.’
‘And which you, most conscientious of critics, never read.’
‘Well, Daphne, what do you think of the country?’ asked Madoline, now
that they had left the city and were driving slowly up hill through a
pastoral district. ‘Is it not pretty?’
‘Pretty,’ cried Daphne, ‘of course it is pretty; but it isn’t Swiss.
What do I care for prettiness? There is enough of that and to spare in
Warwickshire. Why,’ with ineffable disgust, ‘the country is absolutely
green!’
‘What colour did you expect it to be?’ asked Edgar, smiling at her
energetic displeasure.
‘White, of course! One dazzling sweep of snow. One blinding world of
whiteness.’
‘If you want that kind of thing you had better go to the North Pole,’
said Gerald.
‘Not I. If this is Switzerland I have done with travelling. I daresay
the North Pole is as tame as Stratford High Street.’
‘Does not that grand Jura range frowning yonder content you?’ asked
Gerald. ‘Is not your eye satisfied by the cloud-wrapped Alps on the
other side of that blue lake?’
‘No; they are too far off. I want to be among them—a part of them.
After a hypocritical waiter telling me last night that Mont Blanc was
_là, tout près_, a truthful chambermaid confessed this morning that it
is fourteen hours’ drive to Chamounix, and then one is only at the foot
of the mountain. As for this landscape we are now travelling through——’
‘It is uncommonly like Jersey,’ said Edgar. ‘I took my mother there for
her holiday five summers ago. It is a capital place for boating and
rambling about, and crossing over to the other islands: but the mater
didn’t like it. The people weren’t genteel enough for her. The gowns
and bonnets weren’t up to her mark.’
They were at Ferney by this time, a rustic village with one or two
humble cafés, a few small shops, a farm-yard. Here Daphne descried
a pair of oxen drawing a waggon of hay—noble beasts, dappled and
tawny—and the sight of these gave a foreign air to the scene which in
some wise lessened her disgust.
A shaded shrubberied drive admitted them to the house where Voltaire
lived so long and so peacefully, and which is now in the occupation of
a gentleman who graciously allows it to be shown—rather ungraciously—by
his major-domo. Lightly as Daphne had spoken of Voltaire, she was too
keenly imaginative not to be interested in the house which any famous
man had inhabited. Two quiet rooms, _salon_ and bed-chamber, looked
into a short broad alley of trees, a garden, and summer-house perched
high on the hillside, and commanding a wide prospect of fertile valley
and gloomy mountain. All things in those two rooms were exactly as
they had been in the great man’s lifetime; everything was exquisitely
neat, and all the colours had faded to those delicate half-tints which
the artistic soul loveth: faint grays and purples, fainter greens and
fawn colours. Here was the narrow bed on which Voltaire slept, with its
embroidered coverlet; chairs and _fauteuils_ covered with tapestry;
walls upholstered with figured satin damask, pale with age; Lekain’s
portrait over the bed; Madame du Châtelet’s opposite, where the great
satirist’s cynical glance must have rested on it as he awakened from
his slumbers.
They all looked reverently at these things, hushed and subdued by the
thought that they were amidst the surroundings of the dead; belongings
that had once been familiar and precious to him who now slept the last
long sleep in his vault at the Pantheon; where never-ending gangs of
Cook’s tourists are perpetually being ushered into his mausoleum, and
perpetually asking one another who was Voltaire?
They loitered a little in the garden, wrote their names in a
visitors’-book, and then went back to explore the village, and to take
a modest luncheon of coffee and bread and butter, sour claret, and
Gruyère cheese at one of the humble taverns, while the horses stood at
ease before the door, and the driver refreshed himself modestly at the
expense of his fare.
They drove home to the hotel by a way which passed through a quaint
village, and then skirted the lake, and which was somewhat more
romantic than the country road by which they had come, and Daphne
expressed herself satisfied, on the whole, with her first day in
Switzerland.