‘FORBID A LOVE AND IT IS TEN TIMES SO WODE.’
Sir Vernon showed himself especially gracious to his younger daughter
and her lover next morning at breakfast, when the itinerary of their
holiday was discussed. So far as his own pleasure was concerned, he
would have liked nothing better than to go straight to Montreux, where
a delightful villa, with a garden sloping to the lake, had been secured
for his accommodation; but he did not forget that Daphne had seen
nothing of Switzerland, and Edgar very little; and for their sakes he
was ready to make considerable sacrifices.
‘I am a wretched traveller, and I detest sight-seeing,’ he said
languidly; ‘but I don’t wish to spoil other people’s pleasure. Suppose
we make a little round before we settle down in our villa by the
lake? Let us go to Fribourg and hear the organ, and then on to Berne
for a day or so, and then to Interlaken. There I can rest quietly in
my own rooms at the Jungfraublich, while you young people drive to
Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, and do any little climbing in a mild way
which is compatible with the safety of your necks and bones generally;
and then we can come straight back to Montreux. How would you like
that, Madoline?’
‘Very much, indeed, dear father. It will be a delight to me to go over
the old ground with Daphne.’
‘And you, Goring?’
‘I am Lina’s slave—her shadow; true as the dial to the sun.’
‘Papa,’ said Daphne, drawing her chair nearer to him, and with a
coaxing look which no man but a father could have resisted, ‘it is
so good of you to propose such a charming trip, and I shall enjoy it
immensely; but would it be any way possible, now we are so near, to go
to Chamounix, and get to the top of Mont Blanc; or, at least, part of
the way up?’
‘No, my dear. Quite out of the question.’
‘But it is only a drive to Chamounix; and there is a diligence goes
every morning.’
‘Edgar can take you there next year, when you are married. I am too old
for a drive of fourteen hours’ duration.’
Daphne looked miserable. Mont Blanc was the central point of all her
desires. It irked her to be so near and not to reach the world-famous
mountain. She looked at Edgar doubtfully. No; she could not realise the
idea of coming back next year, alone with him. She had never been able
to project her mind into that future in which they two should be one,
bound by a sacred yoke, doomed to be for ever together. From any casual
glance at such a future her mind always shrank away shudderingly, as
from the dim memory of a bad dream.
‘I don’t believe I shall ever come to Switzerland again,’ she said
discontentedly, when breakfast was finished and her father had retired
to his own room to write letters.
Madoline was sitting at work by an open window, silken water-lilies and
bulrushes developing themselves gradually under her skilful fingers, on
a ground of sage-green cloth. The tables were covered with books and
miniature stands; the room was bright with flowers, and looked almost
as home-like as South Hill; but before the evening Mowser and Jinman
would have packed all these things, and despatched the greater part of
them to Montreux, while the travellers went on to Fribourg in light
marching order, which in this case meant about three portmanteaux per
head. Some books must, of course, be taken, and drawing materials, and
fancy-work, and a writing-desk or two, and camp-stools for sitting
about in romantic places, and a good deal more, which made a formidable
array of luggage by-and-by when Sir Vernon and his family were
assembled at the railway-station.
‘Do you mean to tell me that we require all these things for a week or
ten days?’ he said, scowling at the patient Jinman, who was standing
on guard over a compact pyramid of trunks, portmanteaux, and Gladstone
bags, umbrellas, sunshades, and heterogeneous etceteras.
‘I don’t think there’s anything could have been dispensed with, Sir
Vernon,’ answered Jinman. ‘The books and ornaments and most of the
heavy luggage have gone on to Montrooks.’
‘Great Heaven, in the face of this would any man marry, and make
himself responsible for feminine existences!’ exclaimed Sir Vernon,
shrugging his shoulders disgustedly as he turned away; yet Jinman could
have informed him that his own share of the luggage was quite equal to
that of his daughters.
They were all established presently in a German railway compartment:
Sir Vernon seated in his corner and absorbed in an English newspaper,
whose ample sheet excluded every glimpse of lake and wooded slopes,
Alps and Jura; while Edgar smoked on the platform outside, and Daphne
stood at the open door, gazing at the changing landscape: the smiling
lake below; the dark slopes and mountain range on the farther shore;
the villages nestling in the valley on this nearer bank; the cosy
little homesteads and bright gardens; the vine-clad terraces, divided
by low gray walls; the quaint old churches, with tiled roofs and square
clock-towers; and yonder, far away at the end of the lake, Chillon’s
gloomy fortress, which she recognised with a cry of delight, having
seen its presentment in engravings and photographs, and knowing Byron’s
poem by heart.
She gave a sigh of regret as a curve of the line carried her away from
the azure lake and its panorama of hills.
‘I can hardly bear to leave it,’ she said; ‘but, thank Heaven, we are
coming back to it soon.’
‘You are reconciled to Switzerland, then, in spite of your
disillusions,’ said Gerald.
‘Reconciled! I should like to live and die here.’
‘What! abandon your beloved Shakespeare’s country?’
‘I am heartily sick of Shakespeare’s country.’
‘Daphne,’ cried Edgar, with a look of deepest mortification, ‘that is a
bad look-out for poor old Hawksyard.’
‘Hawksyard is a dear old place, but I don’t want to be reminded of
it—or of anything else in Warwickshire—now I am in Switzerland. I want
to soar, if I can. I am in Byron’s country. He lived there,’ pointing
downwards to where they had left Lausanne and Ouchy. ‘He wrote some
of his loveliest poetry there; his genius is for ever associated with
these scenes. Sad, unsatisfied spirit!’
Her eyes filled with sudden tears at the thought of that disappointed
life, seeking solace from all that is loveliest in Nature, shunning the
beaten tracks, yet never finding peace.
‘If you are very good,’ said Gerald gravely, ‘within the next ten
minutes I will show you something you are anxious to see.’
‘What is that?’
‘Mont Blanc. Get your glass ready.’
‘Why, we left him behind us, across the lake, sulkily veiled in
impenetrable cloud.’
‘He will show himself more amiable presently. You will get a good view
of him in five minutes if you focus your glass properly and don’t
chatter.’
Daphne spoke never a word, but stood motionless, with her landscape
glass glued to her eyes, and waited, as for a divine revelation.
Yes, yonder it arose, white and cloudlike on the edge of the blue
summer sky, the mighty snow-clad range, of which Mont Blanc is but a
detail—the grand inaccessible region; mountain-top beyond mountain-top;
peak above peak; everlasting, untrodden hills, producing nothing,
pasturing nothing, stupendous and ghastly as the polar seas; a world
apart from all other worlds; a spectacle to awe the dullest soul and
thrill the coldest heart; a revelation of Nature’s Titanic beauty.
‘Oh, it must have been such mountains as those that the Titans hurled
about them when they fought with Zeus,’ cried Daphne when she had gazed
and gazed till the last gleam of those white crests vanished in the
distance.
‘Do you feel better?’ asked Gerald, with his mocking smile.
‘I feel as if I had seen the world that we are to know after death,’
answered Daphne.
‘Would you be surprised to hear that these excrescences, which you
think so grand, are but modern incidents in the history of the earth?
Time was when Switzerland was one vast ice-field: nay, if we can
believe Lyell, the clay of London was in course of accumulation as
marine mud at a time when the ocean still rolled its waves over the
space now occupied by some of the loftiest Alpine summits.’
‘Please don’t be instructive,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I want to know
nothing about them, except that they are there, and that they are
beautiful.’
At Fribourg they drove down the narrow street to the Zähringer Hof, the
hotel by the suspension bridge, where from a balcony they looked down
a sheer descent to the river, and to the roofs and chimneys of the old
town lying in a cleft of the hills, while yonder, suspended in mid-air,
a mere spider-thread across the sky, stretched the upper and loftier
bridge. It was nearly dinner-time when they arrived. There were dark
clouds on the horizon, and only gleams of watery sunshine behind the
gray old watch-towers on the crest of the hill across the river.
‘I’m afraid we are going to have another storm,’ said Gerald, lounging
against the embrasure of a window, and looking as if Fribourg, with its
modern suspension bridges and mediæval watch-towers, were just the most
uninteresting place in the world.
He looked thoroughly worn-out and weary, as if he had been
labouring hard with body and mind all day, instead of lolling in a
railway-carriage, staring listlessly at the landscape. Sir Vernon, the
ostensible invalid, was not more languid.
‘Let it come down,’ cried Daphne; ‘but whatever the weather may be,
I shall go and hear the organ after dinner. There is the bell for
vespers. How nice it is to find oneself in a Roman Catholic town, with
vesper-bells ringing, and dear old priests and nuns and all sorts of
picturesque creatures walking about the streets!’
They dined in their own sitting-room, Sir Vernon having a good old
English dislike to any intercourse with unintroduced fellow-creatures.
To sit at a _table-d’hôte_ with the Tom, Dick, and Harry of cockney
Switzerland would have been abhorrent to him.
‘We may get a worse dinner in our own room,’ he said, looking
doubtfully at some unknown spoon-food offered to him by way of an
_entrée_, ‘but we avoid rubbing shoulders with the kind of people who
travel nowadays.’
‘Are they so much worse than the people who used to travel——’
‘When I was a young man? Yes, Daphne, quite a different race,’ said Sir
Vernon with authority. ‘Gerald was right. We are in for another storm.’
A quiver of livid light, a crash of thunder, and black darkness yonder
behind the hills gave emphasis to his statement. Daphne flew to the
window to look at the bridges and the towers, which were almost
expunged from the face of creation by a thick blinding rain. A waggon
was crawling across the nearer and lower bridge, and the whole fabric
rocked under its weight.
‘Nobody will dream of going to the cathedral to-night,’ said Sir Vernon.
But the waiter in attendance declared that everyone would go. There
would be a concert on the great organ from eight to nine. The cathedral
was close by; there would be a carriage in waiting at ten minutes to
eight to convey those guests who graciously deigned to patronise the
concert, for which the waiter was privileged to dispose of tickets.
Furthermore, the storm would assuredly abate before long. It was but a
thunder-shower.
Daphne stood at the window watching the thunder-shower, which seemed
to be drowning the lower town and flooding the river. The rain came
down in torrents; the thunder roared and bellowed over the hills; the
chainwork of the suspension bridge creaked and groaned.
Sir Vernon protested that the storm made him nervous, and retired to
his room, leaving the young people to do as they pleased.
They sat in the stormy dusk sipping their coffee, ready to put on their
hats and be off the minute the carriage was announced. Daphne wore a
gown of some creamy-white material, which gave her a ghostly look in
the gloom.
‘You have heard this famous organ, Lina,’ she said. ‘Is it really worth
stopping at Fribourg on purpose to hear it when, with a little more
time and trouble, one might get half-way up Mont Blanc?’
‘It is a wonderful organ; but you will be able to judge for yourself in
a few minutes.’
‘We should have been getting near Chamounix by this time, if we had
started by this morning’s diligence,’ sighed Daphne.
‘Restless, unsatisfied soul! still harping on the mountain,’ said
Gerald.
‘I have seen him, at least,’ exclaimed Daphne, clasping her hands;
‘that is something. Far, far away, like a glimpse of another world: but
still I have seen him. Shall we see him again to-morrow, do you think,
on the way to Interlaken?’
‘I’m afraid not. To-morrow I shall have the honour to introduce you to
the Jungfrau.’
‘I don t care a straw for her,’ exclaimed Daphne contemptuously.
‘What, not for Manfred’s mountain? Can you, who have so devoured your
Byron, be indifferent to the background of that gloomy individual’s
existence?’
‘There is an interest in that, certainly; but Mont Blanc is my
beau-ideal of a mountain.’
Here the carriage was announced. The two girls put on their hats and
wraps, soft China crape and gray camel’s-hair shawls, and hurried down
to the hall. The rain was still falling, the thunder still grumbling
amidst distant hills. They crowded into the fly, and were jolted over
stony and uneven ways to the cathedral.
They went in at a narrow little door to a great dark church, with
solitary lamps dotted about here and there in the gloom. Everything had
a mysterious look; the richly-carved oak, the shrines, the chapels, the
shrouded altar far away at the end.
There were, perhaps, a hundred people sitting about in high narrow pews
with massive carved oak seats, sitting here and there in a scattered
way, all wrapped in shadow and gloom, silent, overawed, expectant.
Madoline and Daphne walked side by side up the long nave, between two
lines of oaken seats, the two men following; then midway between the
organ and the altar, they went into one of the pews—Lina first, then
Daphne. She had been sitting there a minute or so looking about the dim
dark church before she discovered that it was Gerald, and not Edgar,
who sat by her side. Edgar had taken the seat behind them.
They sat there for five or ten minutes, hushed and listening; the rain
splashing on the roof, the distant thunder reverberating; nothing to
be seen in the vast building but those yellow lamps gleaming here and
there, and patching with faint light an isolated statue, or a pulpit,
or a clustered column.
At last, when the silence, broken only by faintest whisperings among
the expectant audience, had endured for what seemed a weary while,
the organ pealed forth in a grand burst of sound, which swept along
the arched roof, and filled the church with music. Then after that
crash of mighty chords came tenderest phrases, a flowing melody that
sank low as a whisper, and then that strain of almost supernatural
likeness to the human voice rose up above the legato arpeggios of the
accompaniment, and thrilled every ear—tender, angelic, a divine whisper
of love and melancholy. Daphne had risen from her seat, and stood with
her arms resting upon the massive woodwork in front of her, gazing up
through the darkness towards that glimmering spot of light yonder,
near the arch of the roof, which showed where the organ was, far away,
mysterious.
Oh, that heavenly voice, with its soul-moving sadness! A rush of tears
streamed from her eyes; she stretched out her hands unconsciously, as
if yearning for some human touch to break the mournful spell of that
divine sorrow, and the hand nearest Gerald was clasped in the darkness;
clasped by a warm strong hand which held it and kept it—kept it without
a struggle, for, alas! it lay unresistingly in his. They drew a little
nearer to each other involuntarily, shudderingly happy—with the deep
sense of an unpardonable guilt, a shameful treason; yet forgetting
everything except that vain foolish love against which both had fought
long and valiantly.
A peal of thunder on the organ within, an answering peal from the storm
without. The mimic tempest blended itself with heaven’s own artillery;
and at the terrible sound those guilty creatures in the church let go
each other’s hands. Daphne clasped hers before her face, and sank on
her knees.
‘Pity me and help me, O God!’ she prayed, and looking up she saw just
above her in a marble niche the image of the Mother of God; and in this
moment of temptation and self-abandonment, it seemed to her a natural
thing that women should ask a woman’s mediation in their hour of sorrow.
A funeral hymn of Sebastian Bach’s pealed from the organ with an awful
grandeur which thrilled every listener; and then came a silence, and
after that the low murmur of the storm dying away in the distance, from
the overture to ‘William Tell,’ the flutelike tones of the ‘_Ranz des
Vaches_,’ telling of pastoral valleys and solemn mountains, a life of
Arcadian innocence and peace.
With those lighter, gayer strains the concert ended, and they all went
slowly and silently out of the church. The storm was over, and the moon
was breaking through dark clouds.
‘Don’t let us go back in that jingling abomination of a fly,’ said
Gerald, striding on over the wet pavement, leaving the two girls to
follow with Edgar Turchill.
They picked their way through the streets. The town was all dark and
quiet, save for a glimmering yellow candle here and there under a
gable; there was none of the brightness and out-of-door life of a
French town. A couple of omnibuses and a fly or two carried off the
people who had been in the cathedral to their several hotels.
Gerald Goring was waiting for them in front of the Zähringer.
‘What made you hurry on so?’ asked Madoline wonderingly.
‘Did I hurry? I think it was you others who crawled. That music
irritated my nerves a little. It is full of studied effects; the
organist has trained himself to play upon the emotions of his audience,
now soaring to the seraph choir, now going down to the depths of
Pandemonium. The thunderstorm and the organ together would have been
too much for anybody. Oh, pray don’t go indoors yet,’ he exclaimed, as
they were all three moving towards the entrance of the hotel. ‘Let us
go for a walk on the bridge. Don’t you know that after the organ the
great feature of Fribourg is the bridge?’
‘If we are to be on our way to Interlaken to-morrow, we had better see
all we can to-night,’ said the practical Edgar.
They went on the bridge; Gerald still walking ahead, and keeping in
some wise aloof from them. Daphne had not spoken since they left the
cathedral.
‘Had the music an unpleasant effect upon you too, dear, that you are so
silent?’ Madoline asked, as they two walked side by side.
‘It was only too beautiful,’ answered Daphne.
‘And you are glad we came here.’
‘No. Yes. I would rather have been half-way up Mont Blanc.’
‘Poor child! But that is a pleasure in reserve for another holiday. I
know Edgar will take you wherever you like to go.’
‘Do you think so? What a dance I shall lead him!’ cried Daphne with
a mocking laugh. ‘I shall not be content with Mont Blanc or the
Matterhorn. I shall insist upon seeing all the extinct volcanoes, the
wonderful fiery mountains that have burned themselves out. Cotopaxi is
about the mildest hill he will be invited to climb.’
Mr. Turchill had dropped into the background, and was quietly enjoying
his cigar, unaware of the pleasures in store for him. Gerald walked
ever so far ahead, cigarless, a gloomy figure.
‘I’m afraid either the thunder or the organ has given Gerald one of his
nervous headaches,’ said Lina anxiously.
The moon showed herself fitfully athwart hurrying clouds, now lighting
up hills and watch-towers, river and rugged ravine, with a wild
Salvator-Rosa-esque effect, now hidden altogether, and leaving all in
gloom. Midway upon the bridge Madoline and Daphne stopped, and stood
looking down into the hollow below, where the quiet sleeping town
was dimly visible, with its quaint street lamps, and rare gleams of
light from narrow casements, and stony ways shining after the rain.
Here, when they had stood for some minutes, Edgar joined them, having
finished his cigar, and he and Madoline began to talk about the place;
he questioning, she expounding its features.
While they two were talking, Gerald came slowly back, and stood by
Daphne’s side, a few paces apart from the others. She said never a
word. They stood side by side for some minutes like statues. She was
wondering if he could hear the passionate throbbing of her heart, which
would not be stilled.
They were standing thus, as if bound by a spell, when a heavy waggon
came creeping slowly along the bridge, making the spot on which they
stood tremble and sway under their feet.
‘We are hanging by a thread between time and eternity,’ said Gerald,
drawing closer to her. ‘What if the thread were to snap, and drop us,
hand in hand, into the black gulf of death?’
She did not shudder at the thought, but turned and looked at him in the
moonlight, with a strange sad smile.
‘Would you be glad?’ he asked softly.
‘Yes,’ she answered, between a sigh and a whisper, still looking up
at him with that pathetic smile; and his eyes looked fondly down into
hers, losing themselves in the depth of a fathomless mystery.
‘Do you know that this bridge is the second longest in the world,
three hundred yards long, and a hundred and sixty-eight feet above
the river?’ asked Edgar Turchill’s matter-of-fact tones, as he walked
towards them, cheerful, contented, pleased with himself and all the
world.
‘For God’s sake spare us a gush of second-hand Baedeker,’ cried Gerald
with intense irritation. ‘As if any living soul, except a Cook’s
tourist, could care how many feet or how many yards long a bridge is.
It is the effect one values, the general idea that one is on that very
bridge of Al Sirât, laid over the midst of hell, and finer than a
hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which the righteous
must pass to Mahomet’s paradise. It is the notion of man’s audacity in
making perilous ways that is really delightful. When that waggon went
across just now, I thought the last straw was being laid, and we were
all going.’
Edgar came round to Daphne with a calm air of proprietorship which made
her shudder.
‘What an interesting evening we have had!’ he said.
‘Very.’
‘You look pale and tired. Has it all been too much for you?’ he asked
tenderly.
‘I think that organ would be too much for anyone.’
‘Do you know—I am no judge, and you mustn’t laugh at me for expressing
an opinion—I hardly thought it equal, as an organ, to the one at St.
Paul’s. I took my mother there once when all the charity children were
assembled. I can’t tell you what a grand sight it was, the dome crowded
with their fresh young faces.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake don’t talk about it,’ cried Daphne, almost
hysterically. ‘To compare that dark solemn cathedral, with just a few
people dotted about among the shadows, and the thunder pealing over the
roof—to compare such a scene with that pagan St. Paul’s, and the dome
crowded with rosy-cheeked children, all white caps and pinafores and
yellow worsted stockings!’
‘I was talking of the organ,’ replied Edgar, somewhat offended.
‘Then why introduce the charity children? Oh, please let my thoughts
dwell upon that dark church to-night; let me remember the music, the
darkness.’
‘Daphne, dearest one, you are crying,’ exclaimed Edgar, startled at the
sound of a stifled sob.
‘Who would not cry at such music?’
‘But so long after. You are nervous and hysterical.’
‘I am only tired. Please don’t worry me,’ retorted Daphne fretfully,
wrapping herself tightly in her soft gray shawl, and quickening her
pace.
She said not a word more till they were inside the Zähringer Hof,
when she wished the other three a brief good-night, declaring herself
utterly worn out, and tripped lightly upstairs to her room on the
second storey. Madoline’s room was next her sister’s, and when she
went up a few minutes later, and knocked at the door of communication
between the two rooms, Daphne excused herself from opening it.
‘I’m dreadfully sleepy, dear,’ she said; ‘please leave me alone for
to-night!’
‘Willingly, dearest, if you are sure you are not ill.’
‘Not the least in the world.’
‘And there is nothing you want Mowser to do for you?’
‘Nothing. She has unpacked my things. I have everything I want.’
‘Then good-night, and God bless you.’
‘Good-night,’ answered Daphne, but invoked no blessing upon the sister
she loved so well. Prayer breathed from such a guilty heart would be
almost blasphemy.
She walked up and down the room for a long time, up and down, up and
down, her soul filled with ineffable joy. Yes; guilty, treacherous,
vile, ungrateful as she knew herself to be, she could not stifle that
wild sense of happiness, the rapture of knowing herself beloved by
the man she loved. Nothing but evil could ever come out of that love;
nothing but struggle, and sorrow, and pain; yet it was deep delight to
have been loved, the one perfect joy that was possible for her upon
this earth. To have missed it would have been never to have lived: and
now death might come when it would. She had lived her life; she had had
her day.
That this love was a thing of guilt, a scorpion to be crushed and
trodden under her foot, she never questioned. Not for an instant
did it enter into her mind that she could profit by Gerald Goring’s
inconstancy, that she was to take to herself the lover whose faith had
been violated by to-night’s revelation. Never did it occur to her that
any alteration in his future or hers was involved in the admissions
which each had made to the other.
‘He knows that I love him; he knows how weak and vile I am,’ she said
to herself. ‘If Lina were to know too? If she were to see me with
the mask off my face, what a monster of perfidy and ingratitude I
should seem to her! Oh, I should die of shame. I could never endure
the discovery. And to make her unhappy—her to whom I owe so much, my
dearest, my best, the guardian angel of my life. Oh, Lina, Lina, if you
knew!’
She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, and, with hands clasped
above her head, breathed her passionate prayer:
‘Let me die to-night. Oh, Thou who knowest how sinful and weak I am,
let me die to-night!’