CHAPTER I.

‘AND SHE WAS FAIR AS IS THE ROSE IN MAY.’

‘Oh, you glorious old Sol, how I love you!’ cried Daphne.

It was a day on which common mortals were almost fainting with the heat, puffing and blowing and complaining—a blazing midsummer-day; and even here, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where the mere idea of innumerable trees was suggestive of shadow and coolness, the heat was barely supportable—a heavy slumberous heat, loud with the hum of millions of insects, perfumed with the breath of a thousand pines.

Daphne revelled in the fierce sunshine—she threw back her crest of waving hair, bright as yellow gold, she smiled up at the cloudless blue, she looked unwinkingly even at Sol himself, the mighty unquenchable king of the sky, glorious yonder in his highest heaven.

She was lying at full length on a moss-grown block of stone at the top of a hill, which was one of the highest points in the forest, a hill-top overlooking on one side a fair sweep of champagne country, fertile valleys, church steeples, village roofs, vineyards and rose gardens, and winding streams; and on the other side, woodlands stretching away into infinite distance, darkly purple.

It was the choicest spot in a forest which, at its best, is a poor thing compared with the immemorial growth of an old English wood. Here there are no such oaks and beeches as our Hampshire forest can show—no such lovely mystical glades—no such richness of undergrowth. Everything seems of yesterday, save here and there a tree that looks as if he had seen something of bygone generations, and here and there a wreck of an ancient oak, proudly labelled ‘The Great Pharamond,’ or ‘_Le Chêne de Henri IV._,’ with a placard hung round his poor old neck to say that he is not to be damaged ‘on pain of amend.’ Such Pharamonds and Henris abound in the forest where Rufus was killed, and nobody heeds them. The owls build in them, the field-mice find shelter in them, the woodpecker taps at them, unscared by placards or the threat of an amend.

But in the Fontainebleau woods there are rocky glades which English forests cannot boast—wild walks between walls of gigantic granite boulders—queer shapes of monsters and animals in gray stone, which seem to leap out at one from the shadows as one passes; innumerable pine-trees; hills and hollows; pathways carpeted with red fir-needles, mosses, ferns, and wild-flowers; and a bluer brighter sky than the heaven which roofs an English landscape.

‘Isn’t this worlds better than Asnières?’ asked Daphne of her companion; ‘and aren’t you ever so grateful to those poor girls for catching scarlet-fever?’

Asnières was school and constraint, Fontainebleau was liberty; so if the forest had been a poorer place, Daphne, who hated all restraints, would have loved it.

‘Poor girls!’ sighed Martha Dibb, a stupid, honest-minded young person, whose father kept an Italian warehouse in New Oxford street, and whose mother had been seized with the aspiration to have her daughters finished at Continental schools; whereby one Miss Dibb was being half-starved upon sausage and cabbage at Hanover, while the other grew fat upon _croûte au pot_ and _bouilli_ in the neighbourhood of Paris, and was supposed to be acquiring the true Parisian accent. ‘Poor girls; it was very bad for them,’ sighed Martha.

‘Yes; but it was very good for us,’ answered Daphne lightly; ‘and if it was a part of their destiny to have scarlet-fever, how very nice of them to have it in the term instead of in the holidays, when we shouldn’t have profited by it.’

‘And how lucky that we had that good-natured Miss Toby sent with us instead of one of the French governesses.’

‘Lucky, indeed!’ cried Daphne, with her bright laugh. ‘That good simple Toby, with whom we can do exactly what we like, and who is the image of quiet contentment, so long as she has even the stupidest novel to read, and some acid-drops to suck. I tremble when I think of the amount of acid-drops she must consume in the course of a year.’

‘Why do you give her so many?’ asked the practical Martha.

‘They are my peace-offerings when I have been especially troublesome,’ said Daphne, with the air of a sinner who glories in her troublesomeness. ‘Poor dear old Toby! if I were to give her a block of sweetstuff as tall as King Cheops’s pyramid, it wouldn’t atone for the life I lead her.’

‘I hope she won’t get into trouble with Madame for letting us run wild like this,’ suggested Miss Dibb doubtfully.

‘How should Madame know anything about it? And do you think she would care a straw if she did?’ retorted Daphne. ‘She will get paid exactly the same for us whether we are roaming at large in this lovely old forest, or grinding at grammar, and analysis, and Racine, and Lafontaine in the stuffy school-room at Asnières, where the train goes shrieking over the bridge every half-hour carrying happy people to Paris and gaiety, and theatres and operas, and all the good things of this life. What does Madame Tolmache care, so long as we are out of mischief? And I don’t see how we can get into any mischief here, unless that lovely green lizard we saw darting up the gray rock just now should turn into an adder and sting us to death.’

‘If Miss Toby hadn’t a headache we couldn’t have come out without her,’ said Martha musingly.

‘May Toby and her headache flourish! If she had been well enough to come with us we should have been crawling along the dusty white road at the edge of the forest, and should never have got here. Toby has corns. And now I am going to sketch,’ said Daphne in an authoritative tone. ‘You can do your crochet: for I really suppose now that to you and a certain class of intellects there is a kind of pleasure to be derived from poking an ivory hook into a loop of berlin wool and pulling it out again. But please sit so that I can’t see your work, Dibb dear. The very look of that fluffy wool on this hot day almost suffocates me.’

Daphne produced her drawing-block and opened her colour-box, and settled herself in a half-recumbent position on the great granite slab, and surveyed the wide landscape below her with that gaze of calm patronage which the amateur artist bestows on grand, illimitable, untranslatable Nature. She looked across the vast valley, with its silver streak of river and its distant spires, its ever varying lights and shadows—a scene which Turner would have contemplated with awe and a sense of comparative impotence; but which ignorance, as personified by Daphne, surveyed complacently, wondering where she should begin.

‘I think it will make a pretty picture,’ she said, ‘if I can succeed with it.’

‘Why don’t you do a tree, or a cottage, or something, as the drawing-master said we ought to do—just one simple little thing that one could draw correctly?’ asked Martha, who was provokingly well furnished with the aggravating quality of commonsense.

‘Drawing-masters are such grovellers,’ said Daphne, dashing in a faint outline with her facile pencil. ‘I would rather go on making splendid failures all my life than creep along the dull path of mediocre merit by the lines and rules of a drawing-master. I have no doubt this is going to be a splendid failure, and I shall do a devil’s dance upon it presently, as Müller used in the woods near Bristol, when he couldn’t please himself. But it amuses one for the moment,’ concluded Daphne, with whom life was all in the present, and self the centre of the universe.

She splashed away at her sky with her biggest brush, sweeping across from left to right with a wash of cobalt, and then began to edge off the colour into ragged little clouds as the despised drawing-master had taught her. There was not a cloud in the hot blue sky this midsummer afternoon, and Daphne’s treatment was purely conventional.

And now she began her landscape, and tried with multitudinous dabs of gray, and green, and blue, Indian red, and Italian pink, ochre, and umber, and lake, and sienna, to imitate the glory of a fertile valley basking in the sun.

The colours were beginning to get into confusion. The foreground and the distance were all on one plane, and Daphne was on the point of flinging her block on the red sandy ground, and indulging in the luxury of a demon-dance upon her unsuccessful effort, when a voice behind her murmured quietly: ‘Give your background a wash of light gray, and fetch up your middle-distance with a little body colour.’

‘Thanks awfully,’ replied Daphne without looking round, and without the faintest indication of surprise. Painters in the forest were almost as common as gadflies. They seemed indigenous to the soil. ‘Shall I make my pine-trunks umber or Venetian red?’

‘Neither,’ answered the unseen adviser. ‘Those tall pine-stems are madder-brown, except where the shadows tint them with purple.’

‘You are exceedingly kind,’ said Daphne, stifling a yawn, ‘but I don’t think I’ll go on with it. I am so obviously in a mess; I suppose nobody but a Turner ought to attempt such a valley as that.’

‘Perhaps not. Linnell or Vicat Cole might be able to give a faint idea of it.’

‘Linnell!’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I thought he painted nothing but wheat-fields, and that his only idea of Nature was a blaze of yellow.’

‘Have you seen many of his pictures?’

‘One. I was taken to the Academy last year.’

‘Were you very pleased with what you saw?’

‘Delighted—with the gowns and bonnets. It was a Saturday afternoon in the height of the season, and I plead guilty to seeing very little of the pictures. There were always people in the way, and the people were ever so much more interesting than the paintings.’

‘What picture can compare with a well-made gown or the latest invention in bonnets?’ exclaimed the unknown with good-humoured irony.

Daphne hacked the spoiled sheet off her block with a dainty little penknife, and looked at the daub longingly, wishing that the stranger would depart and leave her free to execute a _pas seul_ upon her abortive effort. But the stranger seemed to have no idea of departure. He had evidently settled himself behind her, on a camp-stool, or a rock, or some kind of seat; and he meant to stay.

She had not yet seen his face. She liked his voice, which was of the baritone order, full, and round, and grave, and his intonation was that of a man who had lived in what the world calls Society. It might not be the best possible intonation—since orators and great preachers and successful actors have another style—but it was the tone approved by the best people, and the only tone that Daphne liked.

‘A drawing-master, no doubt,’ she thought, ‘whose manners have been formed in decent society.’

She wiped her brushes and shut her colour-box, with languid deliberation, not yet feeling curious enough to turn and inspect the stranger, although Martha Dibb was staring at him open-mouthed, as still as a stone, and the image of astonishment. Daphne augured from that gaping mouth of Martha’s that the unknown must be somewhat eccentric in appearance or attire, and began to feel faintly inquisitive.

She rose from her recumbent attitude on the rock, drew herself as straight as an arrow, shook out her indigo-coloured serge petticoat, from beneath whose hem flashed a pair of scarlet stockings and neat buckled shoes, shook loose her mane of golden-bright hair, and looked deliberately round at Nature generally—the woods, the rocks, the brigand’s cave yonder, and the stalls where toys and trifles in carved wood were set out to tempt the tourist—and finally at the stranger. He lounged at his ease on a neighbouring rock, looking up at her with a provokingly self-assured expression. Her supposition had been correct, she told herself. He evidently belonged to the artistic classes—a drawing-master, or a third-rate water-colour painter—a man whose little bits of landscape or foreign architecture would be hung near the floor, and priced at a few guineas in the official list. He was a Bohemian to the tips of his nails. He wore an old velveteen coat—Daphne was not experienced enough to know that it had been cut by a genius among tailors—a shabby felt hat lay on the grass beside him; every one of his garments had seen good service, even to the boots, whose neat shape indicated a refinement that struggled against adverse circumstances. He was young, tall, and slim, with long slender fingers, and hands that looked artistic without looking effeminate. He had dark brown hair cut close to a well-shaped head, a dark brown moustache shading a sensitive and somewhat melancholy mouth. His complexion was pale, inclining to sallowness, his nose well formed, his forehead broad and low. His eyes were of so peculiar a colour that Daphne was at first sorely perplexed as to whether they were brown or blue, and finally came to the conclusion that they were neither colour, but a variable greenish-gray. But whatever their hue she was fain to admit to herself that the eyes were handsome eyes—far too good for the man’s position. Something of their beauty was doubtless owing to the thick dark lashes, the strongly marked brows. Just now the eyes, after a brief upward glance at Daphne, who fairly merited a longer regard, were fixed dreamily on the soft dreamlike landscape—the sun-steeped valley, the purple distance. It was a day for languorous dreaming; a day in which the world-worn soul might slip off the fetters of reality and roam at large in shadowland.

‘Dibb,’ said Daphne, ever so slightly piqued at the unknown’s absent air, ‘don’t you think we ought to be going home? Poor dear Miss Toby will be anxious.’

‘Not before six o’clock,’ replied the matter-of-fact Martha. ‘You told her with your own lips that she wasn’t to expect us before six. And what was the good of our carrying that heavy basket if we are not to eat our dinner here?’

‘You have brought your dinner!’ exclaimed the stranger, suddenly waking from his dream. ‘How very delightful! Let us improvise a picnic.’

‘The poor thing is hungry,’ thought Daphne, rather disappointed at what she considered a low trait in his character.

Martha, with her face addressed to Daphne, began to distort her countenance in the most frightful manner, mutely protesting against the impropriety of sharing their meal with an unknown wanderer. Daphne, who was as mischievous as Robin Goodfellow, and doated on everything that was wrong, laughed these dumb appeals to scorn.

‘The poor thing shall be fed,’ she said to herself. ‘Perhaps he has hardly a penny in his pockets. It will be a pleasure to give him a good meal and send him on his way rejoicing. I shall feel as meritorious as the Good Samaritan.’

‘Is this the basket?’ asked the painter, pouncing upon the beehive receptacle which Martha had been hugging for the last five minutes. ‘Do let me be useful. I have a genius for picnics.’

‘I never heard of such impertinence!’ ejaculated Miss Dibb inwardly; and then she began to wonder whether the valuable watch and chain which her father had given her on her last birthday were safe in such company, or whether her earrings might not be suddenly wrenched out of her ears.

And there was that reckless Daphne, who had not the faintest notion of propriety, entering into the thing eagerly as a capital joke, and making herself as much at home with the nameless intruder as if she had known him all her life.

Miss Dibb had been Daphne’s devoted slave for the last two years, had admired her and believed in her, and fetched and carried for her, and had been landed in all manner of scrapes and difficulties by her without a murmur; but she had never been so near revolt as at this moment, when her deep-rooted, thoroughly British sense of propriety was outraged as it had never in all Daphne’s escapades been outraged before. A strange man, fairly well-mannered it is true, but shabbily clad, was to be allowed to hob and nob in a place of public resort with two of Madame Tolmache’s young ladies.

Martha looked despairingly round, as if to see that help was nigh. They were not alone in the forest. This hill side at the top of the rocky walk was a favourite resort. There were stalls for toys and stalls for refreshments close at hand. There were half-a-dozen groups of idle people enjoying themselves under the tall pines and in the shadow of the big blue-gray rocks. The mother of one estimable family had taken off her boots, and was lying at full length, with her stockings exposed to the libertine gaze of passers-by. Some were eating, some were sleeping. Children with cropped heads, short petticoats, and a great deal of stocking, were flying gaudy-coloured air-balls, and screaming at each other as only French children can scream. There was not the stillness of a dense primeval wood, the awful solitude of the Great Dismal Swamp. The place was rather like a bit of Greenwich Park or Hampstead Heath on a comparatively quiet afternoon in the middle of the week.

Miss Dibb took heart of grace, and decided that her watch and earrings were safe. It was only her character that was likely to suffer. Daphne was dancing about among the rocks all this time, spreading a damask napkin on a smooth slab of granite, and making the most of the dinner. Her red stockings flashed to and fro like fireflies. She had a scarlet ribbon round her neck, and the dark serge gown was laced up the back with a scarlet cord, and, with her feathery hair flying loose and glittering in the sun, she was as bright a figure as ever lit up the foreground of a forest scene.

The unknown forgot to be useful, and sat on his granite bench lazily contemplating her as she completed her preparations.

‘What an idle person you are!’ she exclaimed, looking up from her task. ‘Tumbler!’

He explored the basket and produced the required article.

‘Thanks. Corkscrew! Don’t run away with the idea that you are going to have wine. The corkscrew is for our lemonade.’

‘You needn’t put such a selfish emphasis on the possessive pronoun,’ said the stranger. ‘I mean to have some of that lemonade.’

Daphne surveyed the banquet critically, with her head on one side. It was not a stupendous meal for two hungry school-girls and an unknown pedestrian, whom Daphne supposed to have been on short commons for the last week or two. There was half a roasted fowl—a fowl who in his zenith had no claim to be considered a fine specimen, and who seemed to have fallen upon evil days before he was sacrificed, so gaunt was his leg, so shrunken his wing, so withered his breast; there were some thin slices of carmine ham, with a bread-crumby edge instead of fat. Of one thing there was abundance, and that was the staff of life. Two long brown loaves—the genuine _pain de ménage_—suggested a homely kind of plenty. For dessert there was a basket of wood-strawberries, a thin slab of Gruyère, and some small specimens of high-art confectionery, more attractive to the eye than the palate.

‘Now, Dibb dear, grace, if you please,’ commanded Daphne, with a mischievous side-glance at the unknown.

That French grace of poor Martha’s was a performance which always delighted Daphne, and she wanted the wayfarer to enjoy himself. The ‘ongs’ and ‘dongs’ were worth hearing. Gravely the submissive Martha complied, and with solemn countenance asked a blessing on the meal.

‘You can have all the fowl,’ said Daphne to her guest; ‘Martha and I like bread and cheese ever so much better.’

She tore one of the big brown loaves in two, tossed one half to Martha, and broke a great knob off the other for her own eating, attacking it ravenously with her strong white teeth.

‘You are more than good,’ replied the stranger with his pleasantly listless air, as if there were nothing in life worth being energetic about; ‘you are actually self-sacrificing. But, to tell you the honest truth, I have not the slightest appetite. I had my second breakfast at one o’clock, and I had much rather carve that elderly member of the feathered tribe for you than eat him. I wish he were better worthy of your consideration.’

Daphne looked at him doubtfully, unconvinced.

‘I know you’re disparaging the bird out of kindness to us,’ she said; ‘you might just as well eat a good luncheon. Martha and I adore bread and cheese.’

She emphasised this assertion with a stealthy frown at poor Miss Dibb, who saw her dinner thus coolly confiscated for the good of a suspicious-looking interloper.

‘You doat upon Gruyère, don’t you, Martha?’ she demanded.

‘I like it pretty well,’ answered Miss Dibb sulkily; ‘but I think the holes are the nicest part.’

The stranger was cutting up the meagre fowl, giving the wing and breast to Daphne, the sinewy leg to Martha, who was the kind of girl to go through life getting the legs of fowls and the back seat in opera-boxes, and the worst partners at afternoon dances.

Finding the unknown inflexible, and being herself desperately hungry, Daphne ended by taking her share of the poultry, while her guest ate a few strawberries and munched a crust of bread, lying along the grass all the while, almost at her feet. It was a new experience, and the more horrified Martha looked the more Daphne enjoyed it.

What was life to her but the present hour, with its radiant sun and glad earth flushed with colour, the scent of the pines, the hum of the bees, the delight of the butterflies flashing across the blue? Utterly innocent in her utter ignorance of evil, she saw no snare in such simple joys, she had no premonition of danger. Her worst suspicion of the stranger was that he might be poor. That was the only social crime whereof she knew. And the more convinced she felt of his poverty, the more determined she was to be civil to him.

He lay at her feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, looking up at her with an admiration almost as purely artistic as that which he had felt an hour ago for a green and purple lizard which he had caught asleep on one of the rocks, and which had darted up a sheer wall of granite, swift as a sun-ray, at the light touch of his finger-tip. With a love of the beautiful almost as abstract as that which he had felt for the graceful curves and rainbow tints of the lizard, he lay and basked in the light of this school-girl’s violet eyes, and watched the play of sunbeam and shadow on her golden hair. To him, too, the present hour was all in all—an hour of sunlight and perfume and balmiest atmosphere, an hour’s sweet idleness, empty of thought and care.

The face he looked at was not one of those perfect faces which would bear to be transfixed in marble. It was a countenance whose chief beauty lay in colour and expression—a face full of variety; now whimsically gay, now pouting, now pert; anon suddenly pensive. Infinitely bewitching in some phases, it was infinitely provoking in others; but, under all conditions, it was a face full of interest.

The complexion was brilliant, the true English red and white; no ivory-pale beauty this, with the sickly tints of Gibson’s painted Venus, but the creamy fairness and the vivid rose of health, and youth, and happiness. The eyes were of darkest gray, that deep violet which, under thick dark lashes, looks black as night. The nose was short and _retroussé_, nothing to boast of in noses; the mouth was a trifle wide, but the lips were of loveliest form and richest carmine, the teeth flashing beneath them absolutely perfect. Above those violet eyes arched strongly-marked brows of darkest brown, contrasting curiously with the thick fringe of golden hair. Altogether the face was more original in its beauty than any which the stronger had looked upon for a long time.

‘Have you any sketches to show us?’ asked Daphne when she had finished her dinner.

‘No; I have not been sketching this morning; and if I had done anything I doubt if it would have been worth looking at. You must not suppose that I am a grand artist. But if you don’t mind lending me your block and your colour-box for half an hour I should like to make a little sketch now.’

‘Cool,’ thought Daphne. ‘But calm impudence is this gentleman’s leading characteristic.’

She handed him block and box with an amused smile.

‘Are you going to paint the valley?’ she asked.

‘No; I leave that for a new Turner. I am only going to try my hand at a rock with a young lady sitting on it.’

‘I’m sure Martha won’t mind being painted,’ replied Daphne, with a mischievous glance at Miss Dibb, who was sitting bolt upright on her particular block of granite, the image of stiffness and dumb disapproval. She was a thick-set girl with sandy hair and freckles, not bad-looking after her homely fashion, but utterly wanting in grace.

‘I couldn’t think of taking such a liberty with Miss Martha,’ returned the stranger; ‘the freemasonry of art puts me at my ease with you. Would you mind sitting quiet for half an hour or so? That semi-recumbent position will do beautifully.’

He sketched in rock and figure as he spoke, with a free facile touch that showed a practised hand.

‘I’m sure you can paint beautifully,’ said Daphne, watching his pencil as he sat a little way off, glancing up at her every now and then.

‘Wait till you see how I shall interpret your lilies and roses. I ought to be as good a colourist as Rubens or John Phillip to do you justice.’

She had fallen into a reposeful attitude after finishing her meal, her arms folded on the rock, her head resting on the folded arms, her eyes gazing sleepily at the sunlit valley in front of her, one little foot pendent from the edge of the greenish gray stone, the other tucked under her dark blue skirt, a mass of yellow tresses falling over one dark blue shoulder, and a scarlet ribbon fluttering on the other.

Martha Dibb looked more and more horrified. Could there be a lower deep than this? To sit for one’s portrait to an unknown artist in a shabby coat. The man was unquestionably a vagabond, although he did not make havoc of his aspirates like poor dear papa; and Daphne was bringing disgrace on Madame Tolmache’s whole establishment.

‘Suppose I should meet him in Regent Street one day after I leave school, and he were to speak to me, what would mamma and Jane say?’ thought Miss Dibb.