CHAPTER XI.

‘YEVE ME MY DETH, OR THAT I HAVE A SHAME.’

Sir Vernon Lawford was sitting alone in his study on the morning after the visit to Goring Abbey, when the door opened suddenly with a sharp jerk, and his younger daughter stood before him. The very manner in which the door opened told him, before he looked up from his desk, that the intruder was Daphne, and not the always welcome Madoline.

He looked at his daughter with cold severe eyes, as at a person who had no right to be there. Ever since she could remember, Daphne had feared her father much more than she loved him; but never had he seemed to her so awful a being as he appeared this morning in his own room, surrounded by all the symbols of power—the bronze bust of Cicero looking down at him from the bookcase; his despatch-box open at his side, bristling with pen-knives and paper-knives, and stern official stationery; his ponderous silver inkstand, presented by the Warwickshire yeomanry in acknowledgment of his merits as colonel; his russia-leather bound dictionaries and directories, and brazen letter-weighing machine—and all the pomp and circumstance of his business life about him.

‘Well, Daphne, what do you want?’ he asked, looking at her without a ray of sympathetic feeling in his handsome gray eyes.

‘If you please, papa,’ she faltered, blushing deeply under that severe gaze, and pleating up the edge of her lawn-tennis pinafore in supreme nervousness, ‘I don’t think I’m really finished.’

‘Finished!’ he exclaimed, looking at her as if he thought she was an idiot. ‘Finished what? You never finish anything, or begin anything either, so far as I can hear, that is worth doing.’

‘My education, I mean, papa,’ she said, looking at him with eyes so lovely in hue and expression, so piteous in their timid pleading, that they ought to have touched him. ‘I know you sent me to Madame Tolmache to be finished, and that she was very expensive; but I’m afraid I came away horribly ignorant; and I begin to feel that a year or two more of schooling would be of very great value to me. I am older now, don’t you know, papa; and I should try more earnestly to improve myself. Indeed, indeed, papa, I would work very hard this time,’ urged Daphne, remorsefully remembering how little she had worked in the past. ‘I don’t care where you send me: to Asnières, or to Germany, or anywhere: so that I could only go on with my education.’

‘Go on with it at home,’ answered Sir Vernon contemptuously. ‘You can read, and write, and spell, I suppose. Yes; I have some of your letters asking me for different things in those pigeon-holes. Any woman who can do as much as that can improve herself. There are books enough on those shelves’—with a glance at his classical and correct collection—‘to make you wiser than any woman need be. But as for this freak of wanting to go back to school——’

‘It is no freak, papa. It is my most earnest desire. I feel it would be better—for all of us.’

She had changed from red to white by this time, and stood before her father like a culprit, downcast and deadly pale.

‘It would not be better for me who would have to pay the bills. I have paid a pretty penny already for your education; and you may suppose how vastly agreeable it is to me to hear your frank confession of ignorance.’

‘It is best for me to tell the truth, papa. Do not deny me this favour. It is the first great thing I have ever asked of you.’

‘It is a very foolish thing, and I should be a fool if I humoured your caprice.’

She gave a little cry of mental pain.

‘How can I convince you that it is no caprice?’ she asked despairingly. ‘I was lying awake all last night thinking about it. I am most thoroughly in earnest, papa.’

‘You were thoroughly in earnest about your boat; and now you are tired of it. You were intensely anxious to come home; and now you are tired of home. You are a creature of whims and fancies.’

‘No, I am not tired of my boat,’ she cried passionately. ‘I love it with all my heart, and the dear river, and this place, and Madoline—and you—if you would only let me love you. Father,’ she said in a low tremulous voice, coming hurriedly to her father and kneeling at his feet, with clasped hands uplifted beseechingly, ‘there are times in a woman’s life when a light shines suddenly upon her, showing her where her duty lies. I believe that it is my duty to go back to school, somewhere in France, or Germany, where I can get on with my education and grow serious and useful, as a woman ought to be. It will be very hard, it will be parting from all I love best in the world, but I feel and know that it is my duty. Let me go, dear father. The outlay of a few pounds cannot affect you.’

‘Can it not? That shows how little you know of the world. When a man is overweighted as I am in this place, living up to every sixpence of his income, and so fettered that he cannot realise an acre of his estate, every hundred he has to spend is of moment. Your education has been a costly business already; and I distinctly refuse to spend another sixpence on it. If you have not profited by my outlay, so much the worse for you. Get up, child.’ She was still on her knees, looking at him in blank despair. ‘This melo-dramatic fooling is the very last thing to succeed with a man of my stamp. I detest heroics.’

‘Very well, father,’ she answered in a subdued tone, strangling her sobs and standing straight and tall before him. ‘I hope if you should ever have cause to blame me for anything in the future you will remember this refusal to-day.’

‘I shall blame you if you deserve blame, you may be sure of that,’ he answered harshly.

‘And never praise me when I deserve praise, and never love me, or sympathise with me, or be a father to me—except in name.’

‘Precisely,’ he said, looking downward with a gloomy brow. ‘Except in name. And now be kind enough to leave me. I have a good many letters to write.’

Daphne obeyed without a word. When she was in the corridor outside, and had shut the door behind her, she stopped for a few moments leaning against the wall, looking straight before her with a countenance of inexpressible sadness.

‘It was the only thing I could do,’ she murmured with a heavy sigh.

Sir Vernon told his elder daughter that afternoon of Daphne’s absurd fancy about going back to school.

‘Did you ever hear of such a mass of inconsistency?’ he exclaimed angrily. ‘After worrying you continually with appealing letters to be brought home, she is tired of us all and wants to be off again in less than six months.’

‘It is strange, papa, especially in one who is so thoroughly sweet and loving,’ said Madoline thoughtfully. ‘Do you know I’m afraid it must be my fault.’

‘In what way?’

‘I have been urging her to continue her education; and perhaps I may have inadvertently given her the idea that she ought to go back to school.’

‘That is simply to suppose her an idiot, and unable to comprehend plain English,’ retorted Sir Vernon testily. ‘You are always making excuses for her. Hark!’ he cried, as a bright girlish laugh came ringing across the summer air. ‘There she is, playing tennis with Turchill. Would you suppose that two hours ago she was kneeling to me like a tragedy queen, her eyes streaming with tears, entreating to be sent back to school?’

‘I’ll reason her out of her fancy, dear father. She always gives way to me when I wish it.’

‘I am glad she has just sense enough to understand your superiority.’

‘Dearest father, if you would be a little more affectionate to her—in your manner, I mean—I believe she would be a great deal happier.’

Another ringing laugh from Daphne.

‘She is monstrously unhappy, is she not?’ exclaimed Sir Vernon. ‘My dear Lina, that girl is a born _comédienne_. She will always be acting tragedy or comedy all her life through. This morning it was tragedy; this afternoon it is comedy. Do not let yourself be duped by her.’

‘Believe me, papa, you misjudge her.’

‘I hope it may be so.’

* * * * *

‘Daphne, what is this fancy of yours about going back to school?’ asked Madoline, when she and her sister were sitting in the conservatory that evening in the sultry summer dusk, while Sir Vernon and the two young men were talking politics over their claret. ‘I was quite grieved to hear of it, believing, as I did, that you were very happy at home.’

‘Why, so I am—intensely happy—with you, darling,’ answered Daphne, taking her sister’s hand, and twisting the old-fashioned brilliant hoops, which Lina had inherited from her grandmother, round and round upon the slender finger. ‘So I am, dear, utterly happy. But happiness is not the be-all and end-all of this life, is it, Lina? The Rector is continually telling us that it isn’t, in those prosy port-winey old sermons of his; but if he were only candid about his feelings he would say that the end and aim of this life was dinner. I don’t suppose I was born only to be happy, was I, Lina? We unfortunate mortals are supposed to belong to the silkworm rather than to the butterfly species, and to work out a career of usefulness in the grub and worm stages, before we earn the right to flutter feebly for a little while as elderly moths. Youth, from a Christian point of view, is meant for work and self-abnegation, and duty, and all that kind of thing; isn’t it, Lina?’

‘Every stage of life has its obligations, dearest; but your duties are very easy ones,’ answered Madoline gently. ‘You have only to be respectful and obedient to your father, and to do as much good as you can to those who need your kindness, and to be grateful to God for the many good gifts He has lavished upon you.’

‘Yes; I suppose that upon the whole I am a very fortunate young person, although I am a pauper,’ said Daphne sententiously. ‘I have youth, and the use of all my faculties, and a ridiculously good constitution. I know I can walk knee-deep in wet grass and never catch cold, and drink quarts of iced water when I am in a fever of heat, and do all manner of things that people consider tantamount to suicide, and be none the worse for my folly. And then I have a fine house to live in; though I have the sense that I am nobody in it; and I have a very aristocratic father—to look at. Yes, Madoline, I have all these things, and they are of no account to me; but I have your love, and that is worth them all a hundred times over.’

The sisters sat with clasped hands, Madoline touched by the wayward girl’s affection. The moon was shining above the deodaras; the last of the nightingales was singing amidst the darkness of the shrubbery.

‘Why do you want to go back to school, Daphne?’ asked Lina again, coaxingly.

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘But this morning you were begging papa to send you back.’

‘Yes; I had an idea that I ought to improve myself—this morning. But as papa refused to grant my request in a very decisive manner, I have put the notion out of my head. I thought that another year with Madame Tolmache might have improved my French, and reconciled me to the necessity for a subjunctive mood, which I never could see while I was at Asnières; or that a twelvemonth in Germany might have enabled me to distinguish the verbs that require the dative case after them, from the verbs that are satisfied with the accusative, which at present is a thing utterly beyond me. But papa says no, and, as I am much fonder of boating and tennis and billiards than of study, I am not going to find fault with papa’s decision.’

This was all said so lightly, with so much of the natural recklessness of a high-spirited girl who has never had a secret in her life, that Madoline had not a moment’s doubt of her sister’s candour. Yet there was a hardness in Daphne’s tone to-night that grieved her.

‘Who is fond of billiards?’ asked Gerald’s lazy tones, a little way above them, and, looking up, they saw him leaning with folded arms upon the broad marble balustrade. ‘Are you coming up to the drawing-room to give us some music, or are we coming down to the billiard-room to play a match with you?’ he inquired.

‘Whichever my father likes,’ answered Madoline.

‘Sir Vernon will not play this evening. He has gone to his room to read the evening papers. I think he has not forgiven Turchill for the series of flukes by which he won that game last night. Edgar and I will have a clear stage and no favour this evening, and we mean to give you two young ladies a tremendous licking.’

‘You will have an easy victim in me,’ said Madoline. ‘I have not played half-a-dozen times since you left home.’

‘Devotion surpassing Penelope’s. And Daphne, I suppose, is still a tyro at the game. We must give you seventy-five out of a hundred.’

‘You are vastly condescending,’ exclaimed Daphne, drawing herself up. ‘You will give me nothing! I don’t care how ignominiously I am beaten; but I will not be treated like a baby.’

‘_Und etwas schnïppish doch zugleich_,’ quoted Mr. Goring, smiling to himself in the darkness.

And now Edgar Turchill came out of the drawing-room, and the two young men went down the shallow flight of steps to the conservatory, where Madoline and her sister were still seated in their wicker-work chairs in front of the open door, through which the moonlit garden looked so fair a scene of silent peace.

‘Daphne is quite right to reject your humiliating concessions,’ said Edgar. ‘She and I will play against you and Madoline, and beat you.’

‘Easily done, my worthy Saxon,’ answered Gerald, who was apt to make light of his friend’s ancient lineage, in a good-natured easy-going way. ‘I have never given more than a fraction of my mind to billiards.’

‘Then you must be a deuced bad player,’ said Edgar bluntly. They all went down into the billiard-room, where Daphne’s eyes sparkled with unaccustomed fire in the lamplight, as if the mere notion of the coming contest had fevered her excitable brain. Turchill, who was thoroughly earnest in his amusements, took off his coat with the air of a man who meant business. Gerald Goring slipped out of his as if he were going to lie down for an after-dinner nap on one of the broad morocco-covered divans.

And now began the fight. Gerald and Madoline were obviously nowhere, from the very beginning. Daphne had a firmness of wrist, a hawklike keenness of eye, an audacity of purpose that accomplished miracles. The more difficult the position the better her stroke. Her boldness conquered where a more cautious player must have failed. She sent her adversaries’ ball rattling into the pockets with a dash that even stimulated Gerald Goring to applaud his antagonist. And while she swelled the score by the most startling strokes, Edgar crept quietly after her with his judicious and careful play—doing wonderful things with his arms behind his back, in the easiest manner.

‘I throw up the sponge,’ cried Gerald, after struggling feebly against his fate. ‘Lina, dearest, forgive me for my candour, but you are playing almost as wretchedly as I. We are both out of it. You two young gladiators had better finish the game by playing against each other up to a hundred, while Lina and I look on and applaud you. I like to see youth energetic, even if its energies are misdirected.’

He seated himself languidly on the divan which commanded the best view of the table. Lina sat by his side, her white hands moving with an almost rhythmical regularity as she knitted a soft woollen comforter for one of her numerous pensioners.

‘My busy Penelope, don’t you think you night rest from your labours now that Ulysses is safe at home, and the suitors are all put to flight?’ asked Gerald, looking admiringly at the industrious hands. ‘You have no idea how horribly idle you make me feel.’

‘I think idleness is the privilege of your sex, Gerald; but it would be the penalty of ours. I am wretched without some kind of work.’

‘Another case of misdirected energy,’ sighed Gerald, throwing himself lazily back against the India-matting dado, and clasping his hands above his head, as he watched the antagonists.

Daphne was playing as if her life depended on her victory. Her slim figure was braced like a young athlete’s, every muscle of the round white arm defined under her muslin sleeve—the bare supple wrist and delicate hand looking as strong as steel. She moved round the table with the swift lightness of some wild thing of the woods—graceful, shy, untamable, half savage, yet wholly beautiful.

Edgar Turchill went on all the while in his businesslike way, playing with either hand, and behaving just as coolly as if he had been playing against Sir Vernon. Yet every now and then, when it was Daphne’s turn to play, he fell into a dreamy contemplative mood, and stood on one side watching her as if she were something too wonderful to be quite human.

‘There’s a stroke!’ he cried, as she left him tight under the cushion, with nothing to play for. ‘I taught her. Oughtn’t I to be proud of such a pupil?’

‘You taught me sculling, and lawn-tennis, and billiards,’ said Daphne, considering what she should do next. ‘All I have ever learnt worth knowing.’

‘Daphne!’ murmured Madoline, looking up reproachfully from her ivory needles.

‘I say it advisedly,’ argued Daphne, making another score. ‘Edgar, I am not at all sure you are marking honestly. Mr. Goring would mark for us if he were not too lazy.’

‘Not too lazy,’ murmured Gerald languidly, ‘but too delightfully occupied in watching you. I would not spoil my pleasure by mixing it with business for the world.’

‘What is the use of book-learning?’ continued Daphne, going on with her argument. ‘I maintain that Edgar has taught me all I know worth knowing, for he has taught me how to be happy. I adore the river; I doat upon billiards; and next best after billiards I like lawn-tennis. Do you suppose I shall ever be happier for having learnt French grammar, or the Rule of Three!’

‘Daphne, you are the most inconsistent person I ever met with,’ said Madoline, almost angry. ‘Only this morning you wanted to go back to school to finish your education.’

‘Did she?’ asked Gerald, suddenly attentive.

‘That was all nonsense,’ exclaimed Daphne, colouring violently.

Mr. Turchill laughed heartily at the idea.

‘Go back to school!’ he exclaimed. ‘What, after having tasted liberty, and learnt to shoot Stratford bridge, and to beat her master at billiards—for that last cannon makes the hundred, Daphne! Back to school, indeed! What a little humbug you must be to talk of such a thing!’

‘Yes,’ answered Daphne coolly, as she put away her cue, and came quietly round to her sister’s side; ‘I am a little bit of a humbug. I think I try to humbug myself sometimes. I persuaded myself this morning that I really thirsted for knowledge; but my father contrived to quench that righteous thirst with a very big dose of cold water—so henceforth I renounce all attempts to improve myself.’

The clock on the chimney-piece struck the half-hour after ten.

‘I ordered my dog-cart for ten,’ said Gerald; ‘I hope we have not transgressed, Lina, by staying so late?’

‘I am not going till eleven, unless Miss Lawford sends me away,’ said Turchill. ‘Eleven is the mystic hour at which Sir Vernon usually tells me to go about my business. I know the ways and manners of the house better than a wretched wanderer like you, whose last idea of time is derived from some wretched old Dalecarlian town-clock.’

‘We had better go back to the drawing-room,’ suggested Madoline. ‘My father has finished his letters by this time, I daresay.’

‘Then good-night everybody,’ said Daphne. ‘I’m going into the garden to cool myself after that fearful struggle, and then to bed.’

She ran off through the conservatory while Gerald was opening the opposite door for Madoline to go up to the drawing-room by the indoor staircase.

Daphne stopped to draw breath on the moonlit terrace.

‘How ridiculously I have been gabbling!’ she said to herself, with her hands clasping her burning forehead. ‘Why can’t I hold my tongue? I am detestable to myself and everybody.’

‘Daphne,’ said someone close at her side, in a tone of friendliest concern, ‘I’m afraid you’re really tired.’

It was Edgar Turchill, who had followed her through the conservatory.

‘Tired! Not at all. I would play against you again to-night—and beat you—if it were not too late.’

‘But I am sure you are tired; there is a something in your voice—strained, unnatural. Have you been vexed to-day? My poor little Daphne,’ he went on tenderly, taking her hand, ‘something has gone wrong with you, I am sure. Has your aunt been lecturing?’

‘No. My father was unkind to me this morning; and I was weak enough to take his unkindness to heart; which I ought not to have done, being so well broken in to it.’

‘And did you really and truly wish to go back to school?’

‘I really and truly felt that I was an ignoramus, and that I had better go on with my education while I was young enough to learn.’

‘Daphne, if you had all the knowledge of all the girls in Girton screwed into that little golden head of yours, you wouldn’t be one whit more charming than you are now.’

‘I daresay the effect would be the other way; but I might be a great deal more useful. I might teach in a poor school, or nurse the sick, or do something in some way to help my fellow-creatures. But sculling, and billiard-playing, and lawn-tennis—isn’t it a horridly empty life?’

‘If there were not birds and butterflies, and many bright useless things, this world wouldn’t be half so beautiful as it is, Daphne.’

‘Oh, now you are dropping into poetry, like Mr. Wegg, and I must go to bed,’ she retorted, with good-humoured petulance, cheered by his kindness. ‘Good-night, Edgar. You are always good to me. I shall always like you,’ she said gently.

‘Always like me. Yes, I hope so, Daphne. And do you still think that you would rather have had me than Gerald Goring for your brother?’

‘Ten thousand times.’

‘Yet he is a thoroughly amiable fellow, kind to everyone, generous to a fault.’

‘A man with a million of money can’t be generous,’ answered Daphne; ‘he can never give anything that he wants for himself. Generosity means self-sacrifice, doesn’t it? It was generous of you to leave Hawksyard at six in the morning in order to teach me to scull.’

‘I would do a great deal more than that to please you, and count it no sacrifice,’ said Edgar gravely.

‘I am sure you would,’ answered Daphne, with easy frankness.

She was so thoroughly convinced that he would never leave off caring for Madoline, and would go down to his grave fondly faithful to his first misplaced affection, that no word or tone or look of his, however significant, suggested to her any other feeling on his part than an honest brotherly regard for herself.

‘Tell me what you think of Goring, now that you have had time to form an opinion about him.’

‘I think that he is devoted to Lina, and that is all I want to know about him,’ answered Daphne decisively.

‘And do you think him worthy of her?’

‘Oh, that is a wide question. There was never a man living except King Arthur that I should think absolutely worthy of my sister Madoline; but as he is lying in Glastonbury Abbey, I think Mr. Goring will do as well as anyone else. I hope Lina will govern him, for his own sake as well as hers.’

‘You think him weak, then?’

‘I think him self-indulgent; and a self-indulgent man is always a weak man, isn’t he? Look at Gladstone now, a man of surpassing energy, of illimitable industry, a man who will eat a snack of cold beef and drink a glass of cold water for his luncheon, at his desk, in the midst of his work, anyhow. Mr. Lampton, the new member who went up to see him, gave us a sketch of him in his study, living so simply and working so hard, so thoroughly homely and unaffected.’

‘Daphne, I thought you were a hardened little Tory!’

‘So I am; but I can admire the individual though I may detest his politics. That is the kind of man I should like Lina to marry: a man without a selfish thought, a man made of iron.’

‘Don’t you think a wife might hurt herself now and then against the rough edges of the iron? Those unselfish men are apt to demand a good deal of self-sacrifice from others.’

‘And you think Lina was made to sit in a drawing-room all her life, among hot-house flowers. Well, I believe she will be very happy at Goring Abbey. She likes a quiet domestic life, and to live among the people she loves. And Mr. Goring’s selfishness will hardly trouble her. She has had such splendid training with papa.’

‘Daphne, do you think it is quite right to speak of your father in that way?’ asked Edgar reproachfully.

He was wounded by her flippant tone, hurt by every evidence of faultiness in one whom he hoped the future would develop into perfect woman and perfect wife.

‘Would you like me to be a hypocrite?’

‘No, Daphne. But if you can’t speak of Sir Vernon as he ought to be spoken of, don’t you think it would be better to say nothing at all?’

‘For the future I shall be dumb, in deference to Mr. Turchill—and the proprieties. But it was nice to have one friend in the world with whom I could be thoroughly confidential,’ she added coaxingly.

‘Pray be confidential with me.’

‘I can’t, if you once begin to lecture. I have a horror of people who talk to me for my own good. That is Aunt Rhoda’s line. She is never tired of preaching to me for my good, and I never feel so utterly bad as I do after one of her preachments. And now I really must say good-night. Don’t forget that you are engaged to dine at the Rectory to-morrow.’

‘Are not you and Lina going?’

‘Yes, and Mr. Goring. It is to be a regular family gathering. Papa is asked, but I cherish a faint hope that he may not feel in the humour for going. I beg your pardon,’ exclaimed Daphne, making him a ceremonious curtsy. ‘My honoured parent has been invited, and wherever he is his children must be happy. Is that the kind of thing you like?’ she asked tripping away to the little half-glass door at the other end of the terrace.

Edgar ran after her to open the door for her; but she was fleet as Atalanta, and there was nobody to distract her with golden apples. She shut the door and drew the bolt, just as Edgar reached it, and nodded a smiling good-night to him through the glass. He stopped to see the white frock vanish from the lamp-lit lobby, and then turned away to light a cigarette and take a solitary turn on the terrace before going back to the drawing-room to make his adieux.

It was a spot where a man might love to linger on such a night as this. The winding river, showing in fitful glimpses between its shadowy willows; the distant woods; the dim lights of the little quiet town; the tall spire rising above the trees; made up a landscape dearer to Edgar Turchill’s honest English heart than all the blue mountains and vine-clad valleys of the Sunny South. He was a son of the soil, with all his desires and prejudices and affections rooted in the land on which he had been born. ‘How sweet—how completely lovable she is,’ he said to himself, meditating over that final cigarette, ‘and how thoroughly she trusts me! Her mind is as clear as a rivulet, through which one can count every pebble and every grain of golden sand.’