CHAPTER XIII.

‘AFTER MY MIGHT FUL FAYNE WOLD I YOU PLESE.’

The day after the family dinner was hopelessly wet; so the expedition to Shottery, proposed by Edgar Turchill and seconded by Daphne, was indefinitely postponed. The summer fleeted by, the beautiful bounteous summer, with her lap full of sweet-scented flowers; the corn grew tall, the hay was being carted in many a meadow within sound of Stratford bells; and the woods began to put on that look of dull uniform green which indicates the beginning of the end. For the sisters at South Hill, for Gerald Goring and Edgar Turchill, July and August had been one long holiday. There was so little in life for these young people to do except take their pleasure. Theirs was an existence of perpetual rose-gathering; and the roses of life budded and bloomed for them with an inexhaustible fertility. Perhaps Madoline was the only one among them who had any idea of duty. Edgar was an affectionate son, a good master, and a liberal landlord, but he had never been called upon to sacrifice his own inclinations for the welfare of others, and he had never given his mind to any of the graver questions of the day. To him it mattered very little how the labouring classes as a body were taught and housed, so long as the peasants on his own land had decent cottages, and were strangers to want. It irked him not whether the mass of mankind were Jews or Gentiles, Ritualists, Dissenters, or rank unbelievers, so long as he sat in the old cloth-lined family pew on Sunday morning assisting at the same service which had been all-sufficient for his father, and seeing his dependents deporting themselves discreetly in their places in the gallery. His life was a narrow life, travelling in a narrow path that had been worn for him by the footsteps of his ancestors. He was a good man in a limited way. But he had never read the modern gospel, according to Thomas Carlyle, which after all is but an expansion of the Parable of the Talents: and he knew not that every man must work after some fashion or other, and do something for the time in which he lives. He was so thoroughly honest and true-hearted, that if the narrowness and uselessness of his life had been revealed to him, he would assuredly have girded his loins and taken up the pilgrim’s staff. Never having had any such revelation he took his pleasure as innocently as a school-boy at home for the holidays, and had no idea that he was open to the same reproach which that man received who had buried the wealth entrusted to him.

He was as near happiness in this bright summer-tide as a mortal can hope to be. The greater part of his days were spent with Daphne, and Daphne was always delighted. True that she was changeable as the light July winds, and that there were times when she most unmercifully snubbed him. But to be snubbed by her was better than the smiles and blandishments of other women. She was given to that coyness and skittishness, the _grata protervitas_, which seems to have been the chief fascination of the professional beauty of the Augustan era. She was as coy as Chloe; coquettish as Glycera; fickle as Lydia, who, supposing there was only one lady of that name, and she a real personage, was rather too bad. Daphne was half-a-dozen girls is one; sometimes welcoming her swain so sweetly that he felt sure she loved him, and the next day turning from him with scornful impatience, as if his very presence were weariness to her.

He bore it all. ‘Being her slave what could he do,’ etc. He had Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and was somewhat of the slavish lover therein depictured. His Lydia might flout him to-day, and he was just as ready to fetch and carry for her on the morrow. She had changed, and for the worse, since the sweet fresh early summer-tide when they two had breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in the boat-house. She was not so even-tempered. She was ever so much more capricious and exacting; and she was prone to gloomy intervals which anyone other than a lover might have ascribed to sulks. Edgar wondered, not without sorrow, at the change; but it was not in him to blame her. He made all manner of excuses. Bad health was, perhaps, at the root of these discords. She might be a victim to obscure neuralgic pains and aches, which she heroically concealed from her friends—albeit her fair and fresh appearance belied the supposition. Perhaps it was the weather which made her occasionally cross. Who could go on in simpering placidity with the thermometer at ninety in the shade?

‘And then we spoil her,’ argued Edgar, urging his final plea. ‘She is so bewitching that one can’t help spoiling her. Madoline spoils her. I am an idiot about her; and even Goring, for all his contemptuous airs and graces, is almost as easily fooled by her as the rest of us. If we were more rational in our treatment of her, she would be less faulty. But then her very faults are charming.’

It had been, or had seemed to be, an utterly happy summer for everybody at South Hill. Two months of splendid weather; two months wasted in picnicking, and excursionising, driving, boating, lawn-tennis, tea-drinking, journeying to and fro between South Hill and Goring Abbey to watch the progress of the hot-houses, which, despite the unlimited means of their proprietor, progressed with a provoking slowness.

For some little time after Gerald’s arrival Daphne had held herself as much as possible in the background. She had tried to keep aloof from the life of the two lovers; but this Madoline would not suffer.

‘You are to be in all our amusements, and to hear all our plans, dear,’ she told her sister one day. ‘I never meant that you and I should be less together, or less dear to each other, because of Gerald’s return. Do you think my heart is not big enough to hold you both?’

‘I know it is, Lina. But I fancy Mr. Goring would like to have it all to himself, and would soon get to look upon me as an intruder, if I were too much with you. You had better leave me at home to amuse myself on the river, or to play ball with Goldie, who is more than a person as to sense and sensibility.’

To this Madoline would not consent. Her love of her sister was so tempered with pity, so chastened and softened by her knowledge of the shadow that darkened the beginning of Daphne’s life, that it was much deeper and stronger than the affection common among sisters. She wanted to make up to Daphne for all she had lost; for the cruel mother who had deserted her in her cradle; for the father’s unjust resentment. And then there was the delightful idea that Edgar Turchill, that second best of men, whom she had rejected as a husband, would by-and-by be her brother; and that Daphne’s future, sheltered and cherished by a good man’s devoted love, would be as complete and perfect a life as the fairest and sweetest of women need desire to live. Madoline had quite made up her mind that Edgar was to marry Daphne. That he was passionately in love with her was obvious to the meanest capacity. Everybody at South Hill knew it except perhaps Daphne herself. That she liked him with placid sisterly regard was equally clear. And who could doubt that time would ripen this sisterly regard into that warmer feeling which could alone recompense him for his devotion? Thus, against the girl’s own better sense, it became an understood fact that Daphne was to be a third in all the lovers’ amusements and occupations, and that Mr. Turchill was very frequently to make a fourth in the same. To Gerald Goring the presence of these two seemed in no wise obnoxious. Daphne’s vivacity amused him, and he looked upon his old friend Turchill as a considerably inferior order of being, not altogether unamusing after his kind. He was not an exacting lover. He accepted his bliss as a settled thing; he knew that no rock on Cornwall’s rugged coast was more securely based than his hold on Madoline’s affection. He was troubled by no jealous doubts; his love knew no hot fits or cold fits, no quarrelling for the after bliss of reconciliation. There was nothing of the _grata protervitas_ in Madoline’s gentle nature. Her well-balanced mind could not have stooped to coquetry.

August was drawing to its close. It had been a month of glorious weather, such halcyon days as made the farmer’s occupation seem just the most delightful calling possible for man. There was not much arable land within ken of South Hill, but what cornfields there were promised abundant crops; and one of the magnates of the land—who, in his dudgeon against a revolutionary re-adjustment of the game-laws at that time looming in the dim future, had rough-ploughed a thousand acres or so of his best land rather than let it under obnoxious conditions—may have thought regretfully of the corn that might have been reaped off those breezy uplands and in those fertile valleys, where at his bidding sprang cockle instead of barley. It was a month of holiday-making for everybody—for even the labour of the fields, looked at from the outside, seemed like holiday-making. Quiet little Stratford, flushed with spasmodic life by the arrival of a corps of artillery, tootled on trumpets, and daddy-mammyed on drums; while the horn of the Leamington coach blew lustily every morning and afternoon, and the foxhound puppy at nurse at The Red Horse found the middle of the highway no longer a comfortable place for his after-dinner nap. It was the season of American tourists, doing Stratford and its environs, guide-book in hand, and crowding in to The Red Horse parlour, after luncheon, to see the veritable chair in which Washington Irving used to sit.

There came a drowsy sunny noontide when the lovers had no particular employment for their day. They had been reduced to playing billiards directly after breakfast, until Gerald discovered that it was too warm for billiards, whereupon the four players—Lina, Daphne, Gerald, and Turchill—repaired to the garden in search of shade.

‘Shade!’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘Who wants shade? Who could ever have too much of Phœbus Apollo? Not I. We see too little of his godlike countenance, and I will never turn my back upon him.’

She seated herself on the burnt grass in the full blaze of the sun, while the other three sat in the shadow of an immense Spanish chestnut, which grew wide and low, making a leafy tent.

‘This is a horrid idle way of spending one’s day,’ said Daphne, jumping up with sudden impatience, after they had all sat for half an hour talking lazily of the weather and their neighbours. ‘Is there nothing for us to do?’

‘Yes, you excitable young person,’ answered Gerald; ‘since your restless temper won’t let us be comfortable here, we’ll make you exert yourself elsewhere. The river is the only place where life can be tolerable upon such a day as this. The nicest thing would be to be in it: the next best thing perhaps is to be on it. You shall row us to Stratford Weir, Miss Daphne.’

‘I should like it of all things. I am dying for something to do,’ responded Daphne, brightening. ‘You’ll take an oar, won’t you, Edgar?’

‘Of course, if you’d really like to go. By-the-by, suppose we improve the occasion by landing at Stratford, and walking Gerald over to Shottery to see Ann Hathaway’s cottage.’

‘Delicious,’ cried Daphne. ‘It shall be a regular Shakespearian pilgrimage. We’ll take tea and things, and have kettledrum in Mrs. Baker’s house-place. She’ll let me do what I like, I know. And Mr. Goring shall carry the basket, as a punishment for his hideous apathy. And we’ll talk to him about Shakespeare’s early life all the way.’

‘Shakespeare’s life, forsooth!’ cried Gerald scornfully. ‘Who is there that knows anything about it? Half-a-dozen entries in a parish register; a few traditional sayings of Ben Jonson’s; and a pack of sentimentalists—English and German—evolve out of their inner consciousness a sentimental biography. “We may picture him as a youth going across the fields to Shottery: because it is the shortest way, and a man of his Titanic mind would naturally have taken it: yes, over the same meadows we tread this day: on the same ground, if not actually on the same grass.” Or again: “Seeing that Apostle-spoons were still in common use in the reign of Elizabeth, it may be fairly concluded that the immortal poet used one for his bread and treacle: for who shall affirm that he did not eat bread and treacle, that the inspired lad of the Stratford grammar-school had not the same weaknesses and boyish affections as his schoolmates? Who would not love to possess Shakespeare’s spoon, or to eat out of Shakespeare’s porringer?” That is the kind of rot which clever men write about Shakespeare: and I think it is because I have been overdosed with such stuff that I have learned to detest the bard in his private character.’

‘You are a hardened infidel, and you shall certainly carry the basket.’

‘What, madam, would you degrade me to a hireling’s office? “Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.”’

‘There, you see,’ cried Daphne triumphantly, ‘you can’t live without quoting him. He has interwoven himself with our daily speech.’

‘Because we are parrots, without ideas of our own,’ answered Gerald.

‘Oh, I am proud of belonging to the soil on which he was reared. I wish there was one drop of his blood in my veins. I envy Edgar because his remote ancestry claim kin with the Ardens. I almost wish I were a Turchill.’

‘That would be so easy to accomplish,’ said Edgar softly, blushing at his own audacity.

Daphne noticed neither his speech nor his confusion. She was all excitement at the idea of an adventurous afternoon, were it only a visit to the familiar cottage.

‘Madoline, dearest, may I order them to pack us a really nice tea?’ she asked.

‘Yes, dear, if we are all decided upon going.’

‘It seems to me that the whole thing has been decided for us,’ said Gerald, smiling indulgently at the vivacious face, radiant in the broad noonday light, the willowy figure in a white gown flecked and chequered with sunshine.

‘You order me to row you down the Avon,’ said Daphne, ‘and I condemn you to a penitential walk to Shottery. You ought by rights to go barefoot, dressed in a white sheet; only I don’t think it would become you.’

‘It might be too suggestive of the Turkish bath,’ said Gerald. ‘Well, I submit, and if needs be I’ll carry the basket, provided you don’t plague me too much about your poet.’

‘I move an amendment,’ interposed Edgar. ‘Sir Vernon is to take the chair at Warwick at the Yeomanry dinner, so Miss Lawford is off duty. Let us all go on to Hawksyard and dine with the old mother. It’ll delight her, and it won’t be half bad fun for us. There’ll be the harvest moon to light you home, Madoline, and the drive will be delicious in the cool of the——’

‘Cockchafers,’ cried Gerald. ‘They are particularly cool at that hour—come banging against one’s nose with ineffable assurance.’

‘Say you’ll come, Lina,’ pleaded Edgar, ‘and I’ll send one of Sir Vernon’s stable-boys to Hawksyard on my horse with a line to the mater, if I may.’

‘I should enjoy it immensely—if Gerald likes, and if you are sure Mrs. Turchill would like to have us.’

‘I think I’d better be out of it. I’m not a favourite with Mrs. Turchill,’ said Daphne bluntly.

‘Oh, Daphne!’ cried Turchill ruefully.

‘Oh, Edgar!’ cried Daphne, mocking him. ‘Can you lay your hand upon your heart, and declare, as an honest man, that your mother likes me?’

‘Perhaps not quite so much as she will when she knows more of you,’ answers the Squire of Hawksyard, as red as a turkey-cock. ‘The fact is, she so worships Madoline that you are a little thrown into the shade.’

‘Of course. How could anyone who likes Madoline care about me? It isn’t possible,’ retorted Daphne, with a somewhat bitter laugh. ‘If I were one of a boisterous brood of underbred girls I might have a chance of being considered just endurable; but as Lina’s sister I am as the shadow to the sunlight; I am like the back of a beautiful picture—a square of dirty canvas.’

‘If you are fishing for compliments, you are wasting trouble,’ said Gerald. ‘It is not a day on which any man will rack his brains in the composition of pretty speeches.’

‘May I write the note? May I send the boy?’ asked Edgar.

Lina looked at her lover, and finding him consentient, consented; whereupon Edgar hurried off, intensely pleased, to make his arrangements.

So far, he had been disappointed in the hope of seeing Daphne a frequent guest at Hawksyard, the petted companion and plaything of his mother. He had made for himself an almost Arcadian picture: Daphne basking on the stone bench in the Baconian garden; amusing herself with the poultry; even milking a cow on occasion; and making junkets in the picturesque old dairy. He had fancied her upstairs and downstairs, in my lady’s chamber; unearthing all Mrs. Turchill’s long-hoarded treasures of laces and ribbons, kept to be looked at rather than to be worn; sorting the house-linen, which would have stocked a Swiss hotel, and which ran the risk of perishing by slow decay upon its shelves or ever it was worn by usage. He had pictured her accepted as the daughter of the house; waking the solemn old echoes with her glad young voice; fondling his dogs; riding his hunters in the green lanes, and across the level fields. She was pining to ride; but of the six horses at South Hill there was not one which Sir Vernon would allow her to mount.

The pleasant picture was as yet only a phantasm of the mind. Mrs. Turchill had not yet taken to Daphne. She was a good woman—truthful, honest, kindhearted—but she had her prejudices, and was passing obstinate.

‘I don’t deny her prettiness,’ she said, when Edgar tried to convince her that not to admire Daphne was a fault in herself, ‘but she is not a girl that I could ever make a friend of.’

‘That’s because you don’t take the trouble to know her, mother. If you would ask her here oftener——’

‘I hope I know my place, Edgar,’ said the mistress of the Grange stiffly. ‘If Miss Daphne Lawford wishes to improve my acquaintance she knows where to find me.’

But Daphne had taken no pains to secure to herself the advantages of Mrs. Turchill’s friendship. There was no particular reason why she should go to Hawksyard: so, after one solemn afternoon call with Madoline—on which occasion they were received with chilling formality in the best drawing-room: an apartment with an eight-foot oak dado, deeply-recessed mullioned windows, and a state bedroom adjoining—Daphne went there no more. And now here was a splendid opportunity of making her at home in the dear old house, and of showing her all the surroundings which its master loved and cherished.

‘BEST OF MOTHERS,’ wrote Edgar, ‘I am going to take you by storm this afternoon. We—Lina, Daphne, Mr. Goring, and I—are going to Shottery, and propose driving on to Hawksyard afterwards. Get up the best dinner you can at so short a notice, and give us your warmest welcome. You had better put out some of Hirsch’s Liebfraumilch and a little dry cham. for Goring. The girls drink only water. Let there be syllabubs and junkets and everything pastoral. Don’t ask anyone to meet them,’ added Edgar, with a dread of having the local parson projected on his love-feast; ‘we want a jolly, free-and-easy evening. Dinner at eight.—Your loving

TED.’

This brief epistle was handed to Mrs. Turchill just as she was sitting down to luncheon. Her first idea was to strike. Her son might have brought home half-a-dozen of his bachelor friends, and it would have been a pleasure to her to kill fatted calves and put out expensive wines. She would have racked her brain to produce an attractive _menu_, and taxed the resources of poultry-yard and dairy to the uttermost. But to be bidden to prepare a feast for Madoline, who had rejected her paragon son, for the rival who had supplanted him, and for Daphne, whom she most cordially disliked, was something too much. She sat at her simple meal bridling and murmuring to herself in subdued revolt. She was tempted to ring for Deborah and confide her wrongs to that sympathetic ear; but discretion and her very genuine love for her son prevailed; and instead of summoning Deborah, she sent for the cook, and announced the dinner party as cheerfully as if it were the fulfilment of a long-cherished desire.

Daphne ran down to the boat-house before the others had finished luncheon, and with Bink’s assistance made her boat a picture of comfort. Gerald was excused from the burden of the basket, as that could be conveyed in the carriage which was to pick up the party at Shottery and take them on to Hawksyard. The old name of the boat had been erased for ever by workmanlike hands the day after Daphne’s futile attempt to obliterate it. ‘Nora Creina’ now appeared in fresh gilding above the deposed emperor.

‘You ought not to have altered it,’ said Gerald. ‘There was something original in calling your boat after a bloodthirsty lunatic. “Nora Creina” is the essence of Cockneyism.’

‘It was the boat-builder’s suggestion,’ Daphne answered indifferently. ‘What’s in a name?’

‘True! Your boat by any other name would go as fast.’

Daphne had to wait some time by the water’s edge before the other three came quietly strolling across the meadow. She had been sculling gently up and down under the willows while she waited.

‘Now then, Empress,’ said Gerald, when he had arranged Lina’s shawls, and settled her comfortably in her place, ‘you are to sit beside your sister. Edgar and I will take an oar apiece, while you and Lina amuse ur conversation.’

This nickname of Empress was a reminiscence of Daphne’s adventure in Fontainebleau Forest. It matched very well with her occasional imperiousness, and the association was known only to Gerald Goring and herself. It amused him when he was in a mischievous humour to call her by a name which she never heard without a blush.

‘I thought I was to row you,’ said Daphne.

‘No, Empress; as it’s all down stream we of the sterner sex will relieve you of the duty. Besides, you could never row comfortably in that go-to-meeting get-up,’ said Gerald, looking critically at Daphne’s straw-coloured Indian silk, embroidered with scarlet poppies and amber wheat-ears, and fluffy with soft lace about the neck and arms, and the Swiss milkmaid’s hat with its wreath of cornflowers.

‘I could not wear a boating-dress, as we are to dine with Mrs. Turchill,’ said Daphne.

‘You might have worn what you liked,’ protested Edgar eagerly, ‘but you look so lovely in that yellow gown that I shall be pleased for my mother to see you in it. She is weak about gowns. I believe she has a wardrobe full of gorgeous attire, which she and Deborah review once a week, but which nobody ever wears.’

‘The gowns will do for the chair-covers of a future generation,’ said Gerald; ‘all the chair-covers in my mother’s morning-room are made out of the Court trains of her grandmothers and great-aunts. I believe a Court mantle in those days consumed two yards and a half of stuff.’

He had taken off his coat, and bared his arms to above the elbow.

‘What a splendid stroke you pull still, Goring!’ said Edgar admiringly, ‘and you have the wrist of a navvy.’

‘One of my paternal inheritances,’ answered Gerald coolly; ‘you know my father was a navvy.’

At which frank speech everybody in the boat blushed except the speaker.

‘He must have been a glorious fellow,’ faltered Edgar, after an awkward pause.

‘Any man who can make a million of money, and keep it without leaving speck or flaw upon his good name, must be a glorious fellow,’ answered Gerald, with more heartiness than was usual to him. ‘My father lived to do good to others as well as to himself, and went down to his grave honoured and beloved. I wish I were more like him.’

‘That’s the nicest thing I ever heard you say,’ exclaimed Daphne.

‘Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley——,’ murmured Gerald; ‘I am beginning to feel proud of myself.’

They landed at the boat-builder’s below the bridge, hard by that decayed old inn which must have seen courtlier company than the waggoners and wayfarers who drink there now. Then they crossed Sir Hugh Clopton’s granite bridge, and walked through the quiet town to the meadows that lead to Shottery. It is but a mile from the town to the village, a mile of meadow pathway, every step of which is haunted by ghostly footsteps—the Sacred Way of English literature.

‘It’s no use telling me not to talk about him,’ cried Daphne, as she jumped lightly from the top of a stile, the ascent whereof tested the capacity of a fashionable frock; ‘I cannot tread this ground without thinking of him. I am positively bursting with the idea of him.’

‘Which is the fortunate he whose image haunts you?’ asked Gerald, with that languid upward twitch of his dark brows which gracefully expressed a mild drawing-room cynicism. ‘Do these fields suggest grave thoughts about tenant-right or game-laws, or the land question generally? Is it Beaconsfield or Gladstone whose _eidolon_ pursues you?’

‘Please don’t be disgusting,’ cried Daphne. ‘_Can_ one think of anybody in these meadows except——’

‘The inevitable William. A man does not live near Stratford with impunity. He must be dosed. Well, child, what are you bursting to say?’

‘I have been thinking what a happiness it is to know that the dear creature travelled so little,’ responded Daphne; ‘and that whether he talks of Bohemia, or France, or Germany, Rome, Verona, Elsinore, or Inverness——’

‘Somebody wrote a treatise an inch thick to show that Shakespeare may have gone to Scotland with the king’s players, but I fancy he left his case as hypothetical as he found it,’ interjected Gerald.

‘Whether he talks of Athens—or Africa—he really means Warwickshire,’ pursued Daphne. ‘It is his own native county that is always present to his mind. Florizel and Perdita make love in our meadows. There is the catalogue of flowers just as they bloom to-day. And Rosalind’s cottage was in a lane near the few old oaks which still remain to show where Arden Forest once stood. And poor Ophelia drowned herself in one of the backwaters of our Avon. I can show you the very willow growing aslant the brook.’

‘A backwater isn’t a brook,’ murmured Edgar mildly.

‘I allow that local colour is not our William’s strong point,’ answered Gerald. ‘Not being a traveller, he would have done better had he never ventured beyond the limits of his Warwickshire experience; for in that case he would not have imagined lions in the streets of Rome, or a sea-coast in Bohemia.’

‘Wait till you write a play or a novel,’ retorted Daphne, ‘and you’ll find you’ll have to adapt yourself to circumstances.’

‘That’s exactly what your divine bard did not do. He adapted circumstances to suit his plays.’