‘I WOLDE LIVE IN PEES, IF THAT I MIGHT.’
They had been three days at the homely, comfortable hotel at Les
Avants, and Madoline was looking all the better for the fresh hillside
air, an improvement upon which Mrs. Ferrers expatiated as the latest
confirmation of the one all-abiding fact of her own ineffable wisdom.
It was one of the loveliest days there had been in all that delicious
month of summer weather—passing warm, yet with a gentle west wind that
faintly stirred the heavy chestnut leaves, and breathed on Daphne’s
cheek, or fluttered round her neck like a caress, scarcely moving the
soft lace ruffle round her throat. It was a day on which a white gown
seemed the only thing possible in costume, and Daphne and Lina were
both dressed in white. It was not by any means the kind of day for
climbing or excursionising of any kind, as even that ardent explorer
Aunt Rhoda was fain to confess; rather a day on which to wander gently
up and down easy paths, or to sit in the pine-woods reading Tennyson or
Browning, or adding a few lazy stitches to the last sunflower in hand.
‘You seem to go at your work with a good deal less vigour, Daphne,’
said Edgar, seated at his lady’s feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, his
knees drawn up to his chin, clad in light-gray alpaca, and a Panama hat
on the back of his head—a cool but not especially becoming costume. Mr.
Turchill was not one of those few men who look well in unconventional
clothes.
‘The weather is too warm for industry.’
‘I’m afraid those curtains will never be finished.’
‘Oh yes, they will!’ said Daphne, ‘I mean to persevere. I may be a
very old woman by the time they are done, but I am not going to give
in. Lina says my life is a thing of shreds and patches. I will show
her that I am not to be daunted by the stupendousness of a task. Three
hundred and fifty-one and a quarter sunflowers still to be done.
Doesn’t it rather remind you of that type of the everlasting—a rock
against which a bird scrapes its beak once in a thousand years, and
when the bird has worn away the whole rock, time will come to an end?
Please go on with “Luria,” and try to be a little more dramatic and a
little less monotonous.’
‘I am a wretched reader,’ said Edgar apologetically, as he looked for
his place; ‘but I think I might read a shade better if I understood
what I was reading. Browning is rather obscure.’
‘I’m afraid you have not a poetic mind. You didn’t seem to understand
much of “Atalanta in Calydon,” which you so kindly read to us
yesterday.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t,’ confessed the Squire of Hawksyard, with
praiseworthy meekness. ‘Modern poetry is rather difficult. I can always
understand Shakespeare, and Pope, and Crabbe, and Byron, but I own that
even Wordsworth is beyond me. His meaning is pretty clear, but I can’t
discover his beauties.’
‘Simply because your intellectual growth was allowed to stop when you
left Rugby. But I insist upon you learning to appreciate Tennyson and
Browning; so please go on with “Luria.”’
‘In my opinion, Daphne,’ remarked Aunt Rhoda, with an oracular air, ‘it
would have been much better for the balance of your mind if you had
read a great deal more prose and a great deal less poetry. Good solid
reading of a thoroughly useful kind would have taught you to think
properly, and to express yourself carefully, instead of perpetually
startling people by giving utterance to the wildest ideas.’
‘I think I speak as the birds sing,’ answered Daphne, ‘because I can’t
help it.’
‘The habit of sober thought is a valuable one, which I hope you will
acquire by-and-by, when you are mistress of a household; or else I am
sorry for your future husband.’
‘Please don’t be sorry for me, Mrs. Ferrers,’ protested Edgar,
reddening angrily, as he always did at any slight to Daphne; ‘I am so
perfectly contented with my fate that it would be a waste of power to
pity me.’
‘It is early days yet,’ sighed Aunt Rhoda. ‘But I live in the hope that
Daphne will steady and tone down before she becomes a wife.’
‘If you don’t begin to read this instant,’ whispered Daphne, with her
rosy lips close to Edgar’s ear, ‘I shall be made the text of one of
Aunt Rhoda’s homilies.’
Edgar took the hint, and plunged anyhow and anywhere into the pages of
Browning.
They lived all day in the woods, taking their luncheon picnic fashion
under the pine-trees. The two young men catered, and fetched and
carried for them, assisted by Mowser. They brought cold fowls,
and sliced Strasbourg ham, and salad, fruit and cake, a bottle of
Bordeaux, and another of a Swiss white wine, which was rather like
a weak imitation of Devonshire perry. But such a meal, spread upon
a snow-white tablecloth under pine-trees, over whose dark feathery
tops gleam the blue bright summer heaven, is about the most enjoyable
banquet possible for youthful revellers. Even Aunt Rhoda admitted that
it was an agreeable change from the home comforts of Arden Rectory.
‘I hope my dear Rector is being taken care of,’ she murmured
plaintively, when she had dulled the edge of an appetite sharpened by
that clear air.
‘I hope you will all do justice to the chickens,’ said Gerald, looking
across at Daphne, who sat by Edgar’s side in a thoroughly Darby and
Joanish manner. ‘I remember once being at a picnic in a forest where
an elderly fowl was made quite a feature of. My hostess fancied I was
desperately hungry, and was quite distressed at my avoidance of the
ancient bird.’
Daphne’s eyes were on her plate, but a slow smile crept over her
face in spite of herself. She and Gerald had scarcely looked at each
other in all those days among the pine-trees. They had lived in daily
intercourse, and yet contrived to dwell as completely apart as if the
lake had flowed between them; as if he, like St. Preux, had gazed
across the blue waters to catch the glimmer of his beloved’s casement,
and she, like Julie, had pined in the home that was desolate without
love’s fatal presence. It was hardly possible for resolve to have
been firmer than Daphne’s had been since that night at Fribourg. It
was hardly possible for an honest purpose to have been more honestly
fulfilled.
Mowser, waiting upon the picnickers, saw that significant look of
Gerald’s, and Daphne’s answering smile; just as she had seen many
things at South Hill and elsewhere which only her observant eyes had
noted.
‘Still at your old tricks, my young lady,’ she said to herself; ‘but
Jane Mowser has got an eye upon you, and your mockinventions shan’t
succeed, if Mowser’s faithful service can circum-prevent you.’
After luncheon they all sat idly looking down at the distant lake,
lying so far beneath their feet, like a pool of blue water in the
hollow of the hills, or wandered a little here and there, searching
out higher points from which to look down at the lake, or across to
the cloud-wrapped Alps. As the day wore on the light western breeze
dropped and died away, and there came the stillness of a sultry August
afternoon, just such an atmosphere as that of the lotus-eaters’ isle,
the land where it was always afternoon.
Aunt Rhoda, who had lunched more copiously than the others, succumbed
to the enervating influence of summer. The outline antimacassar
on which she had been diligently stitching a design of infantine
simplicity—a little girl with a watering-pot, a little boy with an
umbrella—dropped from her hands. The blue lake below winked at her in
the sunshine like a Titanic eye. The soft sweet breath of the pines
gratified her nostrils, and that delicious sense of being gently baked
through and through in Nature’s slow oven finally overcame her, and she
sank into a thoroughly enjoyable slumber, a sleep in which she knew she
was sleeping, and tasted all the blessedness of repose.
Daphne sat on a knoll a little way below her aunt, struggling with a
sunflower, heartily tired of it all the time, and painfully oppressed
by the consciousness of three hundred and fifty-one sunflowers
remaining to be done after this one.
‘It is like the line of the Egyptian kings,’ she murmured with a sigh.
‘An endless procession—too stupendous for the imagination to grasp.’
Edgar, stretched at the feet of his adored, had fallen as fast asleep
as Aunt Rhoda. Madoline and Gerald had wandered off to the higher
grounds. They were going to the Col du Jaman for anything Daphne knew
to the contrary.
This particular sunflower now approaching a finish seemed the most
irritating of all his tribe. Daphne tightened her thread, pulled it
into a knot, boggled at the knot, lost patience, and threw the work
aside in a rage.
‘Who could do crewel-work on such a stifling day?’ she cried, looking
angrily down at the lake, with its girdle of towns and villages,
gardens and vineyards; looking angrily even at picturesque Chillon,
with its mediæval turrets and drawbridge, angrily at the calm,
snow-shrouded Dent du Midi, and the dark green hills around its base.
Then, having explored the wide landscape with eyes blind for this
moment to its beauty, she looked discontentedly at the reclining form
at her feet, the faithful lover, slumbering serenely, oblivious of
wasps and centipedes.
‘A log,’ she muttered to herself, ‘a log. Blind and deaf! Good; yes, I
know he is good, and I try to value him for his goodness; but oh, how
weary I am—how weary—how weary!’
She flung aside her work, and wandered away along a narrow winding
pathway, trodden by the feet of previous wanderers, upward and upward
towards the granite point of the Dent du Jaman, gray against the
sapphire sky. She walked, scarcely knowing where she went, or why:
urged by a fever of the mind, which hurried her any whither to escape
from the weariness of her own thoughts; as if such escape were possible
to humanity.
She had been walking along the same serpentine path for nearly an
hour, neither knowing nor caring where it might be leading her. The
gray peak of the granite rock always rose yonder in the same distant
patch of blue above the dark pine-trees. It seemed as if she might go
on mounting this hilly path for ever and get no nearer to that lonely
point.
‘It as far off as happiness or contentment,’ she said to herself; ‘vain
to dream of reaching it.’
She stopped at last, and looked at her watch, feeling that the
afternoon was wearing on, and that it might be time for her to hurry
back to the family circle. It was past five, and the dinner hour was
seven; and she had been roaming upwards by paths which might lead her
astray in the descent, one woodland path being so like another. She
began her homeward journey, walking quickly, her thoughtful eyes bent
upon the ground. She was hurrying on, absorbed in her own thoughts,
when her name was uttered by that one only voice which had power to
thrill her soul.
‘Daphne!’
She looked up and saw Gerald Goring, seated on a fallen pine-trunk,
smoking.
He flung away his cigarette and came towards her.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, with a careless nod; ‘I am hurrying back to
dinner.’
He put out his hand and caught her by the arm, and drew her towards him
authoritatively.
‘You are not going to escape me so easily,’ he said, pale to the lips
with strongest feeling. ‘No; you and I have a long reckoning to settle.
What do you think I am made of, that you dare to treat me as you have
done for the last month? Am I a dog to be whistled to your side, to be
lured away from love and fealty to another by every trick, and grace,
and charm within the compass of woman’s art, and then to be dismissed
like a dog—sent back to my former owner? You think you can cure me of
my folly—cure me by silence and averted looks—that I can forget you and
be again the man I was before I loved you. Daphne, you should know me
better than that. You have kindled a fire in my blood which you alone
can quench. You have steeped me in a poison for which you have the only
antidote. Oh! my Œnone! my Œnone! will you refuse the balm that can
heal my wounds, the balsam that you alone can bestow?’
Daphne looked at him without flinching, the sweet girlish face deadly
pale, but fixed as marble.
‘I told you what I thought and meant in my letter,’ she said quietly.
‘I have never wavered from that.’
‘Never wavered!’ he cried savagely. ‘You are made of stone. I have
been trying you. I have been waiting for you to give way. I knew it
must come in the end, for I know that you love me—I know it—I know
it. I have known it almost ever since I came back to South Hill, and
saw your cheek whiten when you recognised me; and I have been waiting
to see how long this drama of self-sacrifice would last—how long you
would deny your love, and falsify your whole nature. It has lasted long
enough, Daphne. The chase has been severe enough. Your tender feet have
been wounded by the thorny ways of self-sacrifice. Your poor Apollo’s
patience is well-nigh worn out. My love, my love, why should we go on
dissembling to each other, and to all the rest of the world, looking at
each other with stony countenances—dumb—cold, when every throb of each
burning heart beats for the other, when every feeling in each breast
responds to its twin soul, as finely as a note of music to the touch
of the player? Let us end it all, Daphne. Let us make an end of this
long dissimulation—this life of hypocrisy. Come with me, dear; fly with
me. Now, Daphne—now, this instant, before there is time for either of
us to repent. We can be married to-morrow morning at Geneva—it can be
easily managed in that Puritan city. Come away with me, my beloved.
I will honour and respect your purity as faithfully as if a hundred
knights rode at your saddle-bow. My beloved, do you think that good can
come to anyone by a life-long lie, by the trampling out of Nature’s
sweetest purest feeling in two loving hearts?’
He had drawn her to his breast. Folded in a lover’s arms for the first
time in her life, she looked up into eyes whose passionate ardour
seemed to encompass her with a divine flame: as if this man who clasped
her to his breast had been indeed the old Greek god, sublime in the
radiance of youth and genius and immortal beauty.
‘Daphne, will you be my wife?’
‘I cannot answer that question yet,’ she said slowly, falteringly,
after a pause of some moments. ‘You must give me time. Let me go
now—this instant. I must hurry back to the hotel.’
‘What! when I hold you in my arms for the first time?—when I am steeped
in the rapture of a satisfied love? Oh Daphne, if you knew how often
in feverish dreams I have held you thus; I have looked down into your
eyes, and drunk the nectar of your lips. What?’ as she drew herself
suddenly away from him; ‘even now you refuse me one kiss—the solemn
pledge of our union; cruel, too cruel girl!’
‘To-morrow shall decide our fate,’ she said. ‘For pity’s sake, as you
are a gentleman, let me go.’
He released her that moment. His arms dropped at his sides, and she was
free.
‘There was no necessity for that appeal,’ he said coldly; ‘you can
go—alone if you choose—though I should like to walk back to the hotel
with you. I left—your sister’ (it seemed as if it were difficult for
him to pronounce Lina’s name) ‘in the garden before I strolled up here.
I thought you were with your devoted lover. You say to-morrow shall
decide our fate. I cannot imagine why you should hesitate, or postpone
your decision. I know that you love me as fondly as I love you, and
that neither of us can ever care for anyone else. Promise me at least
one thing before we part to-day. Promise me that you will break off
this pitiful mockery of an engagement to a man whom you despise.’
‘I do not despise him—that is too hard a word—but I promise that I will
never be Edgar Turchill’s wife.’
‘Lose no time in letting him know that. My blood boils and my heart
sickens every time I see him touch your hand. Thank God, he keeps his
kisses for your hours of privacy.’
‘He has never kissed me but once in my life,’ said Daphne, tossing up
her head, and blushing angrily.
‘Thank God again.’
‘Good-bye,’ she said, looking at him with a pathetic tenderness, love
struggling with despair.
He leaned against the brown trunk of a fir-tree, pale to the lips,
his eyes fixed on the ground, where the mosses and starry white
blossoms, and tremulous harebells, and delicate maidenhair fern shone
like jewels in the golden patches of light which flickered with every
movement of the dark branches above them. His eyes perused every leaf
and every petal, noting their form and colour with mechanical accuracy
of observation. His pencil could have reproduced every detail of that
little bit of broken ground six months afterwards.
‘Daphne,’ he said huskily, ‘you are very cruel to me. I am not going to
let you see how low a man can sink when he loves a woman as weakly, as
blindly, as madly as I love you. I am not going to show you how base he
can be—how sunk in his own esteem. There is some remnant of pride left
in me. I am not going to crawl at your feet, or to shed womanish tears.
But I tell you all the same, you are breaking my heart.’
‘It is all foolishness,’ said Daphne, pale, but calm of speech and
eye, every nerve braced in the intensity of her resolution. ‘It is
folly and madness from beginning to end. You confessed as much just
this moment. Why should I sacrifice my honour and my self-respect to
gratify a weak, blind, mad love? I love my sister with a truer, better,
holier affection than I could ever feel for you—if I had been your wife
five-and-twenty years, and it were our silver wedding-day.’
She smiled even in her despair at the impossible image of herself and
Gerald Goring grown middle-aged and stout and commonplace, like the
principal figures in a silver wedding.
‘Why cannot you let the past be past—forget that you ever have been so
foolish, so false, as to care for me?’
‘Forget! yes, if I could do that. It would be as easy to pluck my
heart out of my body and go on living comfortably afterwards. No,
Daphne, I can never forget. No, Daphne, I can never go back to the old
calm tranquil love. It never was love. It was friendship, affection,
respect—what you will, but not love. I never knew what love meant till
I knew you.’
‘Good-bye,’ she said gently, perceiving that an argument of this kind
might go on for ever.
It was sweet to hear him plead; there was even a fearful kind of
happiness—half sweet, half bitter—in being alone with him in that
silent wood, in knowing that he was her own; heart, mind, and soul
devoted to her; ready to sacrifice honour and good name for her sake:
for what would the world say of him if he jilted Madoline and ran away
with Madoline’s sister? Her breast swelled with ineffable pride at the
thought of her triumph over this man to whom her girlish heart had
given itself unwittingly, on just such a summer afternoon as this, two
years ago. The man who had so often seemed to scorn her, to regard her
only as a subject for friendly ridicule, in the beginning of things at
South Hill. He was at her feet; she had made him her slave. Her heart
thrilled with delight at the knowledge of his love; yet above every
selfish consideration was her thought of her sister, and that made her
firm as the granite peak of Jaman yonder, rising sharply above its
black girdle of firs.
She looked at him for a few moments steadily, with a curious smile,
a smile which lighted up the expressive face with an almost inspired
look. Her hand rested lightly on the lace at her throat, the
finger-tips just touching the pearl necklace, Lina’a new year’s gift,
which she wore constantly. It was her talisman.
‘Let us shake hands,’ she said, ‘and part friends.’
‘Friends!’ he echoed scornfully, ‘am I ever anything else than your
friend? I am your slave. The greater includes the less.’
He clasped her hand in both of his, lifted it to his lips, and then let
her go without a word.
The smile faded from her face as she turned from him. She went slowly
down the hill by the winding path. Gerald took a hasty survey of the
scene, and then struck downwards by a descent that seemed almost
perpendicular.