CHAPTER XIV.

‘LOVE IS A THING, AS ANY SPIRIT, FREE.’

Past a garden or two and a few cottages; a long garden wail with heavy coping, shutting in treasures of fruit and vegetables; an old inn; a new school-house, built at the corner of a lane shaded by as stately an avenue of elms as any nobleman need desire for the approach to his mansion. And yet mansion there is none at the end of this verdant aisle. The lane is only an accommodation road leading to somebody’s farm. A youthful monitor is trying to drill some small boys in front of the school-porch, and the small boys are defying him; whereat a shrill-voiced woman, unseen in the interior of the school, calls out an occasional word of reproof. All the houses in the little village belong to the past—they have the grace of a day that is dead. In a farm garden a buxom servant in a kilted petticoat is feeding a family of gigantic hens and chickens with something thick and slab out of an iron pot.

Daphne and her companions felt that there could have been little change since the old romantic Elizabethan time. The village lay off the beaten tracks. Three or four modern houses, scattered about here and there in spacious gardens, were the only addition time had made to Shottery.

They walked briskly along the narrow road, across the bridge where the shallow streamlet came tumbling picturesquely over gray stones. Then a few paces, and before them stood the little block of cottages which genius has transformed into a temple. Whether the building was originally one house, it were difficult to decide. The levels are different; but a variety in levels was the order of that day. The whole block is a timber-framed structure—a panelled house, the panels filled with dab and wattle. Jutting casements, diamond-paned, look out upon an ancient garden, and an ancient well. Beside the house and garden there is an old orchard, where on this day a couple of sheep are placidly nibbling the sweet grass. The cottage is almost smothered in greenery. Honeysuckle, jasmine, roses, hang about the walls as if they loved them. The old timber porch is curtained with flowers.

The South Hill carriage was waiting in the lane when Daphne and her companions arrived. The basket had been duly delivered over to Mrs. Baker. She was standing at the door awaiting them with a smiling welcome.

‘So glad to see you, ladies. The kettle’s on the boil, and you can have your tea as soon as you please.’

‘Thanks, you dear thing,’ cried Daphne; ‘but isn’t it almost sacrilege to drink tea in his room?’

‘It isn’t everybody I’d let do it, miss; not any of those Americans; though I must say they’re uncommonly civil, and know more about Shakespeare than the common run of English do, and are more liberal in their ways too,’ added Mrs. Baker, with a lively remembrance of half-crowns from Transatlantic visitors.

‘Mrs. Baker,’ began Daphne in a solemn tone, laying a little tawny-gloved hand lightly on the collar of Gerald’s coat, ‘you see this man?’

‘Yes, miss, and a very nice-looking gentleman he is for anybody to look at,’ answered Mrs. Baker smirkingly, making up her mind that the tall dark-eyed gentleman must belong to one or other of the two young ladies.

‘He may be nice to the outward eye,’ said Daphne gravely, ‘but he is dust and ashes inside. He is anathema maranatha, or he ought to be, if there were anybody in Warwickshire who knew how to anathematise him properly. He lives in this county—within twelve miles of this house—and he has never been to see the ingle-nook where Shakespeare courted his wife. I’m afraid it won’t make the faintest impression upon his callous mind when I tell him that you are a lineal descendant of the Hathaways, and that this house has never been out of a Hathaway’s possession since Shakespeare’s time.’

‘I appreciate the lady for her own sake, and don’t care a jot for her ancestry,’ answered Gerald, with a friendly air.

They followed Mrs. Baker into the house-place, where all was cool and shadowy after the glare of sunshine outside. It was a low but somewhat spacious room, with casements looking back and front; recessed casements, furnished with oaken seats, one of which was known as the lovers’ seat; for here, the lovers of the present day argued by analogy, William and Ann must have sat to watch many a sunset, and many a moonlit sky. Here they must have whispered their foolish lovers’ talk in the twilight, and shyly kissed at parting. The fire-place was in a deep recess, a roomy ingle-nook where half-a-dozen people could have gathered comfortably round the broad open hearth. On one side of the ingle-nook was a cupboard in the wall, known as the bacon-cupboard; on the other the high-backed settle. Opposite the fire-place there was a noble old dresser—polished oak or mahogany—with turned legs and a good deal of elaborate carpentry: a dresser which was supposed to be Elizabethan, but which was suggestive rather of the Carolian period. The dark brown panels made an effective background for an old willow dinner-service.

Daphne made Mr. Goring explore every inch of the house which Mrs. Baker was able conveniently to show. She led him up a breakneck little staircase, showed him lintels and doorposts, and locks and bolts, which had been extant in Shakespeare’s time; made him admire the queer little carved four-poster which was even older than the poet’s epoch; and the old fine linen sheet, richly worked by patient fingers, which had been in the family for centuries, only used at a birth or a death. She excused him from nothing; and he bore the infliction with calm resignation, and allowed her to lead him back to the house-place in triumph.

Madoline and Edgar Turchill were sitting in the lovers’ seat, talking, after having unpacked the basket, and made all preparation for tea, assisted by Mrs. Baker’s modest handmaiden.

‘Now, Mr. Goring,’ said Daphne, when she and Gerald and the old lady had rejoined the others, ‘how do you feel about that Channel Island cow?’

‘Oh, I am content,’ answered Gerald, laughing at her. ‘I submit to the extortion; you carry matters with such a high hand that if you were to demand all my flocks and herds I should hardly feel surprised.’

‘Mrs. Baker,’ said Daphne, with a businesslike air, ‘this gentleman is going to give you a cow.’

‘Oh, miss, you don’t mean it, surely!’ murmured Mrs. Baker, overcome with confusion.

‘Yes; a lovely fawn-coloured, hazel-eyed Alderney. Don’t refuse her. He can as well afford to give you a cow as I can to give you a neck-ribbon. When would you like the animal sent home? To-morrow morning? Yes, of course; to-morrow morning. You hear, Mr. Goring? And now you may consider yourself forgiven, and I’ll show you the visitors’-book and all the interesting autographs.’

They went over to the table near the window, and turned the leaves of that volume! Alas! how many a hand that had written in it was now dust. Here was the signature of Charles Dickens, nearly thirty years old, and pale with age. But the descendant of the Hathaways remembered the day when it was written, and recalled the visit with pride.

‘He took the book out into the garden, and sat on the stone slab over the well to write his name,’ she said. ‘I remember how full of life and fun he and Mr. Mark Lemon were; he was laughing as he wrote, and he looked at everything, and was so pleased and so pleasant.’

Sir Walter Scott’s name was in an older book. Both of these were as dead—and as undying—as Shakespeare. And compared with these two immortal names all the rest of the signatures in the big book were zero.

It was the merriest tea-party imaginable. Mrs. Baker’s best Pembroke table had been brought into the middle of the room; her best teapot and cups and saucers were set out upon it. Cakes and hot-house fruit had been liberally supplied by Mrs. Spicer. Daphne whispered in her sister’s ear a request that Mrs. Baker might be invited to join them, to which Madoline nodded a smiling assent. Was not the descendant of the Hathaways a lady by right of her gentle manners and ancient descent? She belonged to a class that is an honour to the land—the honest independent yeoman who tills the soil his forefathers cultivated before him. The birth and death sheet in the oak chest upstairs was like a patent of nobility. And yet perhaps not one of these agricultural Hathaways had ever enjoyed as large an income as a first-class mechanic in a manufacturing town—a man who dies and leaves not a rap behind him to show that he was once respectable. They had been upheld in their places by the pride of race, which the mechanic knows not.

Mrs. Baker was installed in the place of honour in front of the tea-tray, and asked everyone in her nice old-fashioned way whether their tea was to their liking. Upon being coaxed to talk she told stories about the defunct Hathaways, and explained how the house that had once been all one dwelling-place had come to be divided.

It was Daphne and she who supplied the conversation. The two young men looked on amused; Edgar openly admiring the bright changeful face under the little Swiss hat. Lina was pleased that her sister should be so innocently glad.

‘O, how happy I am,’ cried Daphne suddenly, in a pause of the talk, clasping her hands above her head in a kind of ecstasy. ‘If it could only last!’

‘Why should it not last?’ asked Edgar, in his matter-of-fact way.

Gerald looked at her gravely, with a puzzled look. Yes; this was the girl who had stood in the dazzling sunshine beside the lake at Fontainebleau, in whose hand he had read the forecast of an evil fate.

‘God help her!’ he thought, ‘she is so impulsive—such a creature of the moment. How is such an one to travel safely through the thorny ways of life? Happily there seems little fear of thorniness for her footsteps. Here is my honest Turchill dying for her—and just the kind of man to make her an excellent husband, and give the lie to palmistry. Yet it seems a common place fate; almost as vulgar as the Italian warehouse in Oxford Street.’

He sat musing thus in the lazy afternoon atmosphere, and watching Daphne with something of an artistic rather than an actually friendly interest. It seemed a shallow nature that must be always expressing itself in speech or movement. There could be no depth of thought allied with such vivacity—keenness of feeling, perhaps, but for the moment only.

Nobody was in a hurry to leave the cottage. Tea-drinking is of all sensualities the most intellectual. The mind is refreshed rather than the body. There was nothing coarse in the meal. The golden tinge of the almond pound-cake—a master work of Mrs. Spicer’s—contrasted with the purple bloom of grapes and blue-gages, the olive tint of ripe figs.

‘We are making such a tremendous meal that I’m afraid we shall none of us do justice to my mother’s dinner,’ remonstrated Edgar at last, ‘and that will make her miserable.’

‘A quarter to seven,’ said Gerald, stealing a glance at a little effeminate watch. ‘Don’t you think it is time we should descend from this Shakespearian empyrean to common earth?’

This was the signal for a general move. The heavy, comfortable-looking old carriage-horses had been walked up and down in shady places, while the portly coachman dozed on his box, and the more vivacious footman execrated the flies. And now the landau bowled briskly along the smooth high road to Hawksyard, containing as cheerful a quartette as ever went out to dinner.

Madoline was delighted to see her sister so happy, delighted at Edgar’s obvious devotion. She had no doubt that his love would be rewarded in due course. It is in a woman’s nature to be grateful for such honest affection, to be won by such disinterested fidelity.

The brazen hands of the old clock at Hawksyard indicated a quarter to eight, as the carriage drove across the bridge, and under the arched gateway into the quadrangular garden, with its sunk pathways, and shallow steps, and border-lines of crumbling old stone. Mrs. Turchill was standing on the threshold—a dignified figure in a gray poplin gown and old thread-lace cap and ruffles—ready to receive them. She gave Madoline her blandest smile, and was tolerably gracious to the rival who had spoiled her son’s chances; but she could not bring herself to be cordial to Daphne. Her silk bodice became as rigid as an Elizabethan corset when she greeted that obnoxious damsel. She had a shrewd suspicion that it was for her sake the fatted calf had been killed, and all the available cream in the dairy squandered upon sweets and made dishes, with a reckless disregard of next Saturday’s butter-making. Yet as Daphne shyly put out her hand to accept that cold greeting, too sensitive not to perceive the matron’s unfriendliness, Mrs. Turchill could but own to herself that the minx was passing lovely. The brilliant gray eyes, shadowed with dark lashes; the dark brows and golden hair; the complexion of lilies and roses; the sensitive mouth; the play of life and colour in a face that varied with every thought—yes; this made beauty which even Mrs. Turchill could not deny.

‘Handsome is that handsome does,’ thought the dowager. ‘God forbid that my boy should trust the happiness of his life to such a butterfly.’

Inwardly rebellious, she had nevertheless done her duty as a good housekeeper. The old oak-dadoed drawing-room was looking its prettiest, brightened by oriental jars and bowls of scarlet geraniums and creamy roses, lavender and honeysuckle. The silver chandelier and fire-irons were resplendent with recent polishing. The diamond-paned lattices were opened to admit the scent of heliotrope and mignonette from the garden on the other side of the moat; while one deeply-recessed window looking into the quadrangle let in the perfume of the old-world flowers Francis Bacon loved.

Edgar insisted upon showing Daphne the house during the ten minutes before dinner.

‘You have only been here once,’ he said, ‘and my mother did not show you anything.’

After the two girls had taken off their hats in the state bed-chamber next the drawing-room—a room whose walls were panelled with needlework executed by an ancestress of Edgar’s in the reign of Charles the First—they all went off to explore the house; ascending a steep secret stair which they entered from a door in the panelling of the dining-room; exploring long slippery corridors and queer little rooms that opened mysteriously out of other rooms; and triangular dressing-closets squeezed into a corner between a chimney and an outer-wall; laughing at the old furniture: the tall toppling four-post bed-steads; the sage-green tapestry; the capacious old grates, or still older brazen dogs; the inimitable Dutch tiles.

‘It must be heavenly to live in such a funny old house,’ cried Daphne, as they came cautiously down the black oak staircase, slippery as glass, pausing to admire a ramshackle collection of Indian curios and Japanese pottery on the broad window-ledge half-way down.

‘If you would only try it,’ murmured Edgar close in her ear, and looking ineffably sheepish as he spoke.

Again the all-significant words fell unheeded. She skipped lightly down the remaining stairs, protesting she could get accustomed to them in no time.

‘“So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint,”’ said Gerald.

‘Didn’t I tell you so? You can’t live without quoting him,’ cried Daphne triumphantly.

The dinner went off merrily. It was a capital dinner in a good old English style, ponderous but excellent. There were none of those refinements which distinguished the board over which Mrs. Ferrers presided. The attempts at elegance smacked of a banished era. A turbot decorated with sliced lemon and barberries; a befrilled haunch, exhibiting its noble proportions in a heavy silver dish; a superabundance of creams and jellies and trifles and syllabubs; an elaborate dessert lying in state on the sideboard, to be slowly and laboriously transferred to the polished oak after the cloth was drawn; and the coachman to help wait at table. The whole thing was rustic and old-fashioned, and Edgar was afraid Daphne was secretly turning it all into ridicule. Yet she seemed happy, and she said so much in praise of Hawksyard and of the perfect order in which the house was kept, that Mrs. Turchill’s heart began to soften towards her.

‘You seem fond of the country, and of countrified ways, Miss Daphne,’ said the matron relentingly. ‘Yet I should have thought a young lady like you would have been pining for London, and balls and theatres.’

‘I never was at a dance in my life,’ answered Daphne, ‘and only once at a theatre, and that was the great opera-house in Paris. I don’t think I should ever care to go to a meaner theatre. My thoughts went up so high that night, I shouldn’t like to let them down again by seeing trumpery.’

‘The London theatres are very nice,’ said Mrs. Turchill, not quite following Daphne’s idea. ‘But they are rather warm in summer. Yet one likes to go up to town in the height of the season. There is so much to see.’

‘Mother’s constitution is cast-iron when she gets to London,’ said Edgar. ‘She is up at six every morning, and goes to the picture-galleries as soon as the doors are opened; and does her morning in Hyde Park, and her afternoon in Regent Street, shopping, or staring in at the shop-windows; and eats her dinner at the most crowded restaurant I can take her to; and winds up at the theatre. I believe she’d accept a lobster-supper in the Haymarket if I were to offer one.’

‘Has Miss Daphne Lawford never been in London?’ asked Mrs. Turchill.

‘Oh, please don’t call me miss. I am never anything but Daphne to my friends.’

‘You are very kind,’ answered Mrs. Turchill, stiffening; ‘but I don’t think I could take so great a liberty with you on such a short acquaintance.’

‘Short acquaintance!’ echoed Daphne, laughing. ‘Why, you must have known me when I was in my cradle.’

Mrs. Turchill grew suddenly red, as if the idea were embarrassing.

‘I was invited to your christening,’ she said; ‘but—afterwards—there were circumstances—Sir Vernon was so often abroad. We did not see much of you.’

‘If you wish me to feel at home at Hawksyard you must call me Daphne, please,’ said the girl gently.

Mrs. Turchill did not wish her to feel at home at Hawksyard; yet she could not refuse compliance with so gracious a request.

The ladies rose to retire, Edgar opening the door for them.

‘Do you want any more wine, Turchill?’ asked Gerald.

‘No, not particularly; but you’ll try that other claret, won’t you?’

‘Not a drop of it. I vote we all adjourn to the garden.’

So they all went out together into the twilit quadrangle, where the old-fashioned flowers were folding their petals for night and slumber, while the moon was rising above a cluster of stone chimneys. Mrs. Turchill walked once round the little enclosure, discoursing graciously with Madoline, and then confessed to feeling chilly, and being afraid of the night air; although a very clever doctor, with somewhat new-fangled ideas, had told her that the air was as good by night as by day, provided the weather were dry.

‘I think I’ll go indoors and sit in the drawing-room till you come in to tea,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t think me rude.’

Madoline offered to go with her, but this Mrs. Turchill would not allow.

‘Young people enjoy a moonlight stroll,’ she said; ‘I liked it myself when I was your age. There’s no occasion for any of you to hurry. I shall amuse myself with _The Times_. I haven’t looked at it yet.’

The four being left together naturally divided themselves into two couples. Gerald and Lina seemed fascinated by the flowery quadrangle, with its narrow walks, and ancient dial, on which the moon was now shining. They strolled slowly up and down the paths; or lingered beside the dial; or stood looking down at the fish-pond. Daphne’s restless spirit soon tired of these narrow bounds.

‘Is there nothing else to look at?’ she asked.

‘There are the stables, and the dairy, and the farm-yard. But you must see those by daylight; you must come here for a long day,’ said Edgar eagerly. ‘Would you like to see the garden on the other side of the moat?’

‘Above all things.’

‘It is very flat,’ said Edgar apologetically.

‘All the better for tennis.’

‘Yes, the lawn would make a magnificent tennis-ground. We might have eight courts if we liked. But it is a very commonplace garden after South Hill.’

‘Don’t apologise. I am sure it is nice; a dear old-fashioned sort of garden—hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and things.’

‘My old gardener is rather proud of his hollyhocks.’

‘Precisely; I knew he would be. And that horrid MacCloskie will hear of nothing but the newest inventions in flowers. He gives us floral figures in Euclid; floral hearthrugs sprawling over the lawn, as if one of the housemaids had taken out a Persian rug to dust it, and had forgotten to take it in again. He takes tremendous pains to build up beds like supper-dishes—ornamental salads, don’t you know—and calls that high-art gardening. I would rather have your hollyhocks and sunflowers, and the old-fashioned scented clematis climbing about everywhere in a tangled mass of sweetness.’

‘I’m glad you like antiquated gardens,’ said Edgar.

They went under the archway, which echoed the sound of their footsteps, and round by a gravel walk to the spacious lawn, and the long border which was the despair of the gardeners when they tried to fill it, and which yet provided flowers enough to keep all the sitting-rooms bright and sweet with summer bloom. The moon was high above Hawksyard by this time: a glorious harvest moon, pouring down her golden light upon tree and flower, and giving intensity to the shadows under the wall. The waters of the moat looked black, save where the moonbeams touched them; and yonder under the tall spreading walnut boughs the gravel walk was all in shadow.

Daphne paced the lawn, disputing as to how many tennis-courts one might have on such on extensive parallelogram. She admired the height of the hollyhocks, and regretted that their colour did not show by moonlight. The sunflowers appeared to better advantage.

‘What awful stories poets tell about them!’ said Daphne. ‘Just look at that brazen-faced creature, smirking at the moon; just as if she had never turned her head sunwards in her life.’

Edgar was in a sentimental mood, and inclined to see things from a sentimental point of view

‘It mayn’t be botanically true,’ he said, ‘but it’s a pretty idea all the same;’ and then he trolled out in a fine baritone:

‘No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets, But as truly loves on to the close; As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets, The same look which she turned when he rose.’

‘What’s the use of singing that when you know it isn’t true?’ cried Daphne contemptuously. ‘Do you suppose a stiff-necked thing like that, with a stalk a quarter of an inch in diameter, could turn and twist from east to west every day, without wringing its head off? The idea is obviously absurd. What lovely old walnut-trees!’ she exclaimed, looking across the lawn. ‘Centuries upon centuries old, are they not?’

‘I believe they were planted soon after George the Third came to the throne.’

‘Is that all? They look as old as the Wrekin.’

They strolled across the wide lawn, and in among the shadows of the old trees. The cows were moving stealthily about in the meadow on the other side of the fence, as if sleep were the last thing they ever thought of.

‘And you really like Hawksyard?’ demanded Edgar earnestly.

‘Like it! I think it is quite the most delicious place I ever saw. Those high dadoes; these deep-set stone-mullioned windows; those eccentric little bedrooms; that secret staircase, so sweetly suggestive of murder and treason. The whole place is so thoroughly original.’

‘It is one of the few moated granges left in England,’ said Edgar with an air of conscious merit.

‘It is quite too lovely.’

‘Daphne, do you really mean what you say?’ he asked with sudden intensity. ‘Are you only talking like this to please me—out of kindness?’

‘If I have a fault it is a habit of blurting out what I think, without reference to other people’s feelings. I am thoroughly in earnest about Hawksyard.’

‘Then be its mistress,’ exclaimed Edgar, taking her hand, and trying to draw her towards him; ‘be queen of my house, darling, as you have long been sovereign of my heart. Make me the happiest man that ever yonder old roof sheltered—the proudest, the most entirely blest. Daphne, I am not poetical, or clever. I can’t find many words, but—I love you—I love you.’

She laughed in his face, a clear and silvery peal—laughed him to absolute scorn; yet without a touch of ill-nature.

‘My dear Edgar, this is too much,’ she cried. ‘A few months ago you were fondly, devotedly, irrevocably in love with Lina. Don’t you remember how we sympathised that afternoon in the meadows? This is the sunflower over again: first to the sun and then to the moon. No, dear Edgar, never talk to me of love. I have a real honest regard for you. I respect you. I trust you as my very brother. It would spoil all if you were to persist in talking nonsense of this kind.’

She left him, planted there—mute as a statue—frozen with mortification, humiliation, despair.

‘He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch, To win or lose it all.’

He had tried his fate—hopefully, confidently even—lured on by her deceptive sweetness; and all was lost.

She had run lightly off. She was on the other side of the lawn before he stirred from the attitude in which she left him; his hands clenched, his head bent, his eyes staring stupidly at the gravel walk.

‘She does not care a straw for me,’ he said to himself, ‘not a straw. And I thought she had grown fond of me. I thought I had but to speak.’

A friendly hand touched him lightly on the shoulder. It was Gerald, the man for whom Fate had reserved all good things—unbounded talents, unbounded wealth, the love of a perfect woman.

‘Cheer up, old fellow,’ said Gerald heartily. ‘Forgive me if I heard more than you intended me to hear. Mrs. Turchill sent me in quest of you and Daphne, and I came up—just as you—’

‘Just as I made an ass of myself,’ interrupted Edgar. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t a bit mind your knowing. I have no pride of that kind. I am proud of loving her, even in vain.’

‘Don’t be down-hearted, man. A girl of that kind must be played as an expert angler plays a frisky young salmon. She has refused you to-night; she may accept you three months hence.’

‘She laughed at me,’ said Edgar, with deepest despondency.

‘It is her disposition to laugh at all things. You must have patience, man; patience and persistence. “My love is but a lassie yet.” Thy beloved one still delights in the green fields; her tender neck cannot bear the yoke. Wait, and she will turn to thee—as—as the sunflower turns to the sun,’ concluded Gerald, having vainly sought a better comparison.

‘It doesn’t,’ cried Edgar dejectedly. ‘That is what we have just been talking about. The sunflower is a stiff-necked impostor.’