CHAPTER XV.

‘NOT FOR YOUR LINAGE, NE FOR YOUR RICHESSE.’

The two young men walked up and down under the walnut-trees for nearly an hour, Gerald Goring playing the unaccustomed part of consoler. He liked Edgar Turchill with an honest liking. There was a shade of condescension, of unconscious patronage, in the feeling; but it was thoroughly sincere. The Saxon squire was of course distinctly on a lower intellectual level than the man of mixed race—the man whose father had thrust himself into the front ranks of life by the sheer force of will and brains, unaided by conventional training of any kind; whose mother had been the last development of a family reared in courts and palaces. Compared with the quicksilver that flowed in his own veins, Edgar Turchill’s blood was a fluid that smacked of the vegetable kingdom—watery stuff such as oozes out of a turnip or a cabbage when the cook-maid cuts it. Yet the man could feel, and so keenly, that Gerald was touched with tender pity.

‘Don’t be down-hearted, old fellow,’ he said, walking slowly under the spreading boughs, with his hand resting affectionately upon Turchill’s shoulder. ‘Be sure things will work round in time. She is a pert capricious minx; but she cannot help being fond of you, if you are only patient.’

‘I would wait for her as Jacob waited for Rachel, if I were as sure of winning her,’ answered Edgar; ‘but I am afraid there’s no chance. If she detested me; if the very sight of me were odious to her; there might be some hope. But she likes me—she is even fond of me; in a calm sisterly way. If you knew how sweet she was to me in the spring before you came—she had no fits of temper then—when I taught her sculling; how she used to boil a kettle down in the boat-house and——’

‘Yes; it was awfully nice of her,’ interjected Gerald somewhat impatiently, having heard the story of these boat-house breakfasts several times before.

‘If she were less kind I should have more hope,’ pursued Edgar. ‘I think I shall go away—out of the country—where I shall never see her lovely face. I have a great mind to go to India and shoot big game.’

‘And stick pigs?—a curious cure for the heart-ache. No, old fellow; stay at home and bide your time. That’s your game.’

‘I could never look her in the face after to-night,’ said Edgar.

‘Nonsense, man! Treat this capricious minx as coolly as if nothing had ever been said about love and despair. Let her think to-night’s avowal the consequence of too much wine—a mere after-dinner outburst of sentiment. Look her in the face, forsooth! If you are a wise man, you may make her ashamed to look you in the face before she is six months older. You have spoilt her by your flatteries and footings and compliances. Give her a little of the rough side of your bark. She professes to care for you as a brother, quotha! Treat her with brotherly discourtesy—brotherly indifference. Be as candid about her faults and follies as if you were her very brother. When she finds you can live without her she will begin to languish for the old adulation.’

‘I love her too well to be such a Jesuit,’ said Edgar.

‘Pshaw! do you suppose Petruchio did not love Kate? He knew there was but one way of taming his fair shrew, and he used the wisdom Heaven had given him.’

‘I couldn’t act a part where she is concerned,’ argued Edgar. ‘She would find me out in a moment.’

They talked for a long time upon the same subject, wearing the theme threadbare; travelling backwards and forwards over the same line of argument, while the moon climbed higher and higher in the cloudless blue; and in the end Edgar acknowledged that it would be a foolish thing to leave his farm before the harvest was all in; or his mother, before she had enjoyed her annual fortnight at the sea-side; or to uproot himself violently from his native soil in the vain hope of curing his heart-wound. He had tried foreign air for his malady before, and foreign air had done nothing for him; and this time he believed the wound to be ever so much deeper. A lifetime in a strange country would hardly heal it.

At last Edgar consented to be led despondently back to the house, which he had left a little while ago with his heart beating high, full of hope and delight. They found the three ladies seated in the quaint old drawing-room, dimly lighted by a dozen or so of candles in the silver sconces against the wall. There was nothing so distinctly modern as a moderator-lamp at Hawksyard.

Mrs. Turchill was enlarging mildly in a lowered voice upon the various shortcomings of her servants, who, although old servants and infinitely better than other people’s, were yet so far human in their faultiness as to afford food for conversation. Madoline was listening with polite interest, throwing in an encouraging word now and then, which was hardly needed, for Mrs. Turchill’s monologue would have gone on just the same without it. Daphne, exhausted by a long day’s vivacity, had fallen asleep, bolt erect in a straight-backed cherry-wood chair.

Gerald Goring remembered that day at Fontainebleau when he had told himself that Daphne asleep would be a very commonplace young person; yet, as he looked at her to-night, he was fain to own that even in slumber she was lovely. Was it some trick of candle-light and shadow which gave such piquancy to the delicate features, which gave such expression to the dark-pencilled brows and drooping eyelids? The bright hair, the pale yellow gown, the exquisite fairness of the complexion, gave a lily-like loveliness to the whole figure. So pale; so pure; so little earthly.

‘Poor Edgar!’ sighed Mr. Goring. ‘He is very much to be pitied. How desperately I could have loved such a girl, if I had not already adored her opposite. And how I would have made her love me,’ he added, remembering all their foolish talk, and how easy it had seemed to him to play upon that sensitive nature.

‘I am afraid the tea is cold,’ said Mrs. Turchill. ‘You gentlemen have been enjoying your cigars in the walnut walk, I suppose.’

The clatter of cups and saucers startled Daphne. She opened her eyes, and saw Edgar looking at her with piteous reproachfulness. She could calmly sleep just after giving him his death-wound. There was a refinement of cruelty in such indifference. Then he suddenly remembered Gerald’s advice, and tried to seem equally at his ease.

‘I’ll wager mother has been bemoaning the vices of the new dairymaid, and the ingratitude of the old one in going away to be married,’ said he. ‘That’s what sent you to sleep, wasn’t it, Daphne?’

‘I was tired. We had such a long afternoon,’ she answered wearily.

‘The carriage has been waiting half an hour,’ said Madoline. ‘I think we had better put on our hats, and then say good-night.’

‘Mr. Goring will drive home with you, of course,’ said Mrs. Turchill.

‘Yes; I am going to see them safe home, Mrs. Turchill,’ answered Gerald. ‘I am to stay at South Hill to-night, and hear Sir Vernon’s account of the Yeomanry dinner.’

Edgar, who had just been talking of eternal banishment, was longing to ask for the fourth seat in the landau. The walk home between midnight and morning would be delightful.

‘I should have liked to hear about the dinner,’ he began dubiously; and then meeting Gerald’s eye, quailed beneath its friendly ridicule, and said no more.

He escorted Daphne to the carriage, helped to arrange her wraps with a steady hand, though his heart beat passionately all the time; and bade her good-night in so thoroughly cheery a voice, that she wondered a little to find how easily he had taken her rejection of him.

‘Poor dear Edgar!’ she said to herself as they drove along the shadowy Warwickshire lane, through the calm beauty of the summer night, ‘I daresay it was only an impulse of the moment—or perhaps it was the moon—that made him propose to me. Yet he seemed awfully in earnest, and I was afraid I might have offended him by laughing. But, after being devoted to Lina, and making me the confidante of his grief, it was certainly rather impertinent to offer himself to me. But he is a dear good-natured creature all the same, and I should be sorry to offend him.’

She was silent all the way home; sitting in her comfortable corner of the carriage, wrapped to her chin in her soft white shawl, to all appearance asleep. Yet not once did her senses lose themselves in slumber. She was listening to the happy lovers, as they talked of the past—that part of the past which they had spent asunder. Gerald had been talking of a long mule-ride in Switzerland under just such a moonlit sky. It was no tremendous mountain ascent, only a ride from Evian up to a village at the foot of the Dent d’Oche, to look down upon Lake Leman and its lovely shores bathed in moonlight; the long dark range of the Jura rising like a wall on the western side; picturesque villages on the banks gleaming in the silver light, with their old church towers half hidden by masses of dark foliage; one lonely boat with its twin sails skimming like a swallow across the moonlit water.

‘It must have been delicious,’ said Lina.

‘It was very nice—except that you were not there. “But one thing want these banks of Rhine.”’

‘And did you really miss me at such moments, Gerald? When you were looking at some especially lovely scene, had you really and truly a feeling that I ought to have been by your side?’

‘Really and truly; the better half of myself was missing. Pleasure was only a one-sided affair, as that moon will appear next week—an uncomfortable-looking fragmentary kind of planet.’

‘I love to hear of your travels, Gerald,’ said Lina softly. ‘Have you told me all about them, do you think?’

‘All that’s worth telling, I fancy,’ he answered lightly, with an involuntary glance at Daphne to see if she were really asleep.

There was no quiver of the dark lashes, no movement in the restful figure. Her face had that pale unearthly look which all faces have in the moonlight. A pain shot through his heart as he thought that it was thus she would look in death. It was one of those involuntary flashes of thought which sometimes flit across a mind unacquainted with actual sorrow—the phantom of a grief that might be.

When they arrived at South Hill Daphne wished her sister and Mr. Goring a brief good-night, and went straight to her room. She had no motive for awaiting her father’s home-coming. He would have nothing to say to her. His only greeting would be a look which seemed to ask what business she had there. It was on the stroke of eleven. Madoline and Gerald walked up and down the gravel drive in front of the house, waiting for the carriage from Warwick; and during this interval Mr. Goring told his sweetheart how Edgar Turchill had been rejected by Daphne. Madoline was deeply distressed by this news. She had made up her mind that her sister’s life was to be made happy in this particular way. She had imagined a fair and peaceful future in which she would be living at the Abbey, and Daphne at Hawksyard—not a dozen miles apart. And now this wilful Daphne had rejected the moated grange and its owner, and that fair picture of the future had no more reality in it than a mirage city seen from the dreary sands of a desert.

‘I thought she was attached to him,’ said Madoline, when she had been told the whole story. ‘She has encouraged him to come here; she has always seemed happy in his company. Half her life, since she came from school, has been spent with him.’

‘In sober earnest, darling, I’m afraid this fascinating little sister of yours is an arrant coquette. She has flirted with Edgar because there was no one else to flirt with.’

‘Please don’t say that, Gerald, for I know you are mistaken,’ answered Madoline eagerly. ‘Daphne is no flirt. She looks upon Edgar as a kind of adopted brother. I have always known that, but I fancied that this friendly trustful feeling of hers would lead in time to a warmer attachment. As to coquetry, she does not know what it means. She is thoroughly childlike and innocent.’

‘Possibly, dearest. Yet in her childishness she knows how to fool a man as thoroughly as Ninon de l’Enclos could have done after half a century’s practice. However, I hope Edgar will stand his ground and bring this wayward puss to her senses.’

‘I cannot understand how she can help liking him,’ mused Madoline. ‘He is so good, so frank, and brave, and true.’

‘All noble qualities, and deserving a woman’s affection. Yet the sentimental history of the human race tends to show that a man endowed with all those virtues is not the most dangerous to the fair sex.’

‘Gerald,’ said Lina, ‘I have an idea that pride is at the bottom of Daphne’s refusal.’

‘Why pride? What kind of pride?’

‘She has harped a good deal, at different times, upon her penniless position; has called herself a pauper, half in joke, half in earnest, but with a bitterness of tone that wounded me. She may think that as Edgar is well off, and she has no fortune, she ought not to accept him.’

‘My dearest love, what an utterly quixotic idea. The only thought a pretty young woman ever has about a man’s wealth is that when she shall be his wife she can have more frocks than the common run of women. There is no sense of obligation. She is so conscious of the boon she bestows that she accepts his filthy lucre as a matter of course.’

‘I don’t think that would be Daphne’s way of thinking.’

‘Dearest, if she were wholly your sister I should say not. But as she is only your half-sister, I can suppose her only about half as good again as the ruck of womankind.’

‘You are very rich, are you not, Gerald?’

‘Well, yes; it would take a large amount of idiocy on my part to spoil the income my father left me. It might be done, no doubt, if I went into the right circles. My ruin would be only a question of so many years and so many racehorses. But while I live as I am living now, there is very little chance of my becoming acquainted with want.’

‘I know, dear; and I don’t think it was for the sake of my fortune you chose me, was it, Gerald?’

‘My dearest love, I only wish some old nurse would turn up on your wedding morning and tell you that you are not the Lady Clare, so that I might prove to you how little wealth or position influenced my choice. I think I know what you are going to say, Lina. As I have more money than you and I together—indulge our caprices as we may—are ever likely to spend, why not give your fortune to Daphne?’

‘Dear Gerald, how good of you to guess my wish! I should like to divide my fortune with my sister when I come of age. I don’t want to give her all, for half would be ample. And I am so accustomed to the idea of independence, that I should hardly like to be a pensioner even upon you. Will you speak to the lawyers, Gerald, and find out how the gift had better be made?’

‘Yes, dear; I’ll settle everything with the men of law. It seems to me that you can do just what you like, as soon as you come of age. But you’ll have to wait till then.’

‘Only ascertain that it can be done, Gerald, and then I can tell Daphne, and she will no longer fancy herself a pauper. It may influence her in her conduct to Edgar.’

‘It may,’ answered Gerald dubiously; ‘but somehow I don’t think it will. Edgar must win the game off his own bat.’

* * * * *

The sisters were alone together in Madoline’s morning-room after breakfast next day. Gerald had gone to the Abbey to look after the builders, and settle various matters with his steward. Daphne was sitting half in and half out of the balcony, idle as was natural to her, but listless and discontented-looking, which was a state of mind she did not often exhibit.

There was no Edgar this morning, and she missed her faithful slave.

Perhaps he meant never to come to South Hill any more; in which case it would be difficult for her to get rid of her life.

‘Daphne,’ began Madoline gravely, ‘I have heard something which has made me very unhappy; which has altogether surprised and disappointed me. I am told that Edgar proposed to you last night, and that you refused him.’

‘Did he send you the news in a telegram?’ asked Daphne, flaming red. ‘I don’t see how else you could have heard it.’

‘No matter how I heard it, dear. It is the truth, I suppose.’

‘Yes; it is the truth. But I despise him for telling you,’ answered Daphne angrily.

‘It was not he who told me. It was Gerald, who by accident overheard the end of your conversation with Edgar, and who——’

‘What! he has been interfering, has he?’ cried Daphne, looking still more angry. ‘It is supremely impertinent of him to busy himself about my affairs.’

‘Daphne! Is that the way you speak of my future husband—your future brother?’

‘He has no right to dictate whom I am to accept or reject. What can it matter to him?’

‘He does not presume to dictate: but it does matter a great deal to him that my sister should choose the path in life which is most likely to lead to happiness.’

‘How can he tell which path will lead me to happiness? Does he suppose that I am going to have a husband chosen for me—as if I were a wretched French girl educated in a convent?’

‘He thought—just as I thought—that you could hardly help liking such a thoroughly good fellow as Edgar; a man so devoted to you; so unselfish; such a good son.’

‘What have I to do with his virtues? I don’t care a straw for him, except as a friendly sort of creature who will do anything I ask him, and who is very nice to play tennis or billiards with. He ought not to be offended at my refusing him. It would have been all the same had he been anyone else. I shall never marry.’

‘But why not, Daphne?’

‘Oh, for no particular reason: except perhaps that I am too fond of my own way, and shouldn’t like a master.’

‘Daphne, there is something in your tone that alarms me. It is so unnatural in a girl of your age. While you were at Asnières, did you ever see anyone—you were such a child, that it seems foolish to ask such a question—but was there anyone at Asnières whom——’

‘Whom I fell in love with? No, dearest, there was no one at Asnières. Madame Tolmache was most judicious in her selection of masters. I don’t think the most romantic school-girl, fed upon three-volume novels, could have fancied herself in love even with the best-looking of them.’

‘I can’t make you out, Daphne. Yet I think you might be very happy as Edgar Turchill’s wife. It would be so nice for us to be living in the same county, within a few miles of each other.’

‘Yes, that would be nice; and it would be nicer to be at Hawksyard than to stay at South Hill when you are gone. Yet you see I have too much self-respect to perjure myself, and pretend to return poor Edgar’s affection.’

‘I have been thinking, Daphne, that perhaps some sense of mistaken pride may stand between you and Edgar.’

And then, falteringly, ashamed of her own generosity, Madoline told her sister how she meant to divide her fortune.

‘What!’ cried Daphne, turning pale; ‘take his money? Not a sixpence. Never speak of it—never think of such a thing again.’

‘Whose money, dear? It is mine, and mine alone. I have the right to do what I like with it.’

‘Would you dispose of it without asking Mr. Goring’s leave—without consulting him?’

‘Hardly, because I love him too well to take any step in life without asking his advice—without confiding fully in him. But he goes with me in this heart and soul, Daphne; he most thoroughly approves my plan.’

‘You are very good—he is very generous—but I will never consent to accept sixpence out of your fortune. You may be as generous to me as you like—as you have always been, darling. You may give me gloves and frocks and pocket-money, while you are Miss Lawford: but to rob you of your rights; to lessen your importance as Mrs. Goring; to feel myself under an obligation to your husband—not for all this wide world. Not if money could make me happy—which it could not,’ she added with a stifled sob.

‘Daphne, are you not happy?’ questioned Lina, looking at her with sudden distress. ‘My bright one, I thought your life here was all gladness and pleasure. You have seemed so happy with Edgar, so thoroughly at your ease with him, that I fancied you must be fond of him.’

‘Should I be thoroughly at my ease with a man I loved, unless—unless our attachment were an old story—a settled business—like yours and Mr. Goring’s?’

‘Why will you persist in calling him Mr. Goring?’

‘Oh, he is such a grand personage—the owner of an abbey, with cloisters, and half a mile of hot-houses—I could not bring myself to call him by his christian-name.’

‘As if the abbey and the hot-houses made any difference! Well, darling, I am not going to worry you about poor Edgar. You must choose your own way of being happy. I would not for all the world that you should marry a man you did not love; but I should have been so glad if you could have loved Edgar. And I think, dear, that unintentionally—unconsciously even—you have done him a wrong. You have led him to believe you like him.’

‘And so I do like him, better than anyone in the world—after my own flesh and blood.’

‘Yes, dear. But he has been led to hope something more than that. I fear he will feel his disappointment keenly.’

‘Nonsense, Lina. Don’t you know that six months ago he was still suffering from his disappointment about you? and now you imagine he is going to break his heart for me. A heart so easily transferred cannot be easily broken. It is a portable article. No doubt he will carry it somewhere else.’

She kissed her sister and ran out of the room, leaving Madoline anxious and perplexed, yet not the less resolved to endow Daphne with half her wealth as soon as she came of age.

‘Providence never intended that two sisters should be so unequally circumstanced,’ she said to herself. ‘Willy-nilly, Daphne must accept what I am determined to give her. The lawyers will find out a way.’