CHAPTER XVII.

‘AND IN MY HERTE WONDREN I BEGAN.’

For a man to waltz in the gloaming with a girl whom he passionately loves, and who has contemptuously rejected him, is a kind of pleasure too near the edge of pain to be altogether blissful. Yet Edgar came every non-hunting day to South Hill, and was always ready to dance to Daphne’s piping. He was her first partner since the little crabbed old French master at Asnières, who had taken a few turns with her now and then, fiddling all the time, in order to show his other pupils what dancing meant. He declared that Daphne was the only one of them all who had the soul of a dancer.

‘_Elle est née sylphide._ She moves in harmony with the music; she is a part of the melody,’ he said, as he scraped away at the languishing Duc de Reichstadt valse, the tune to which our grandmothers used to revolve in the days when the newly imported waltz was denounced as an iniquity.

The grand Hunt Ball, which took place only once in two years at Stratford Town Hall, was to be held in the coming January, and Sir Vernon had consented that Daphne should appear at this festivity, chaperoned by her aunt and accompanied by her elder sister. It was an assembly so thoroughly local that Mrs. Ferrers felt it a solemn duty to be present: even her parochial character, which to the narrow-minded might seem incongruous, made it, she asserted, all the more incumbent upon her to be there.

‘A clergyman’s wife ought to show her interest in all innocent amusements,’ she said. ‘If there were any fear of doubtful people getting admitted, of course I would sooner cut off my feet than cross the threshold; but where the voucher system is so thoroughly carried out——’

‘There are sure to be plenty of pretty girls,’ said the Rector, ‘and I believe there’s a capital card-room. I’ve a good mind to go with you.’

‘If it were in summer, Duke, I should urge it on you as a duty; but in this severe weather the change from a hot room——’

‘Might bring on my bronchitis. I think you’re right, Rhoda. And the champagne at these places is generally a doubtful brand, while of all earthly delusions and snares a ball-supper is the most hollow. But I should like to have seen Daphne at her first ball. I am very fond of little Daphne.’

‘I am always pleased for you to be interested in my relations,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, with a sour look; ‘but I must say, of all the young people I ever had anything to do with, Daphne is the most unsatisfactory.’

‘In what way?’ asked Mr. Ferrers, looking lazily up from his tea-cup.

It was afternoon tea-time, and the husband and wife were sitting _tête-à-tête_ before the fire in the Rector’s snug study, where the old black oak shelves were full of the most delightful books, which he was proud to possess but rarely looked at—inside. The outsides, beautiful in tawny and crimson leather, tooled and gilded and labelled and lettered, regaled his eye in many a lazy reverie, when he reposed in his armchair, and watched the firelight winking and blinking at those treasuries of wit and wisdom.

‘In what way is Daphne troublesome, my dear?’ repeated the Rector. ‘I am interested in the puss. I taught her her Catechism.’

‘I wish you had taught her the spirit as well as the letter,’ retorted Mrs. Ferrers tartly. ‘The girl is an absolute pagan. After flirting with Edgar Turchill in a manner that would have endangered her reputation had she belonged to people of inferior position, she has the supreme folly to refuse him.’

‘What you call folly may be her idea of wisdom,’ answered the Rector. ‘She may do better than Turchill—a young man of excellent family, but with very humdrum surroundings, and a frightful dead-weight in that mother, who I believe has a life-interest in the estate which would prevent his striking out in any way till she is under the turf. Such a girl as Daphne should do better than Edgar Turchill. She is wise to wait for her chances.’

‘How worldly you are, Marmaduke! It shocks me to hear such sentiments from a minister of the gospel.’

‘My dear, he who was in every attribute a model for ministers of the gospel boasted that he was all things to all men. When I discuss worldly matters I talk as a man of the world. I think Daphne ought to make a brilliant marriage. She has the finest eyes I have seen for a long time—always excepting those which illuminate my own fireside,’ he added, smiling benignly on his wife.

‘Oh, pray make no exception,’ she answered snappishly. ‘I never pretended to be a beauty; though my features are certainly more regular than Daphne’s. I am a genuine Lawford, and the Lawfords have had straight noses from time immemorial. Daphne takes after her unhappy mother.’

‘Ah, poor thing!’ sighed the Rector. ‘She was a lovely young creature when Lawford brought her home.’

‘Daphne resembles her to a most unfortunate degree,’ said Aunt Rhoda.

‘A sad story,’ sighed the Rector; ‘a sad story.’

‘I think it would better become us to forget it,’ said his wife.

‘My love it was you who spoke of poor Lady Lawford.’

‘Marmaduke, I am disgusted at the tone you take about her. Poor Lady Lawford indeed! I consider her quite the most execrable woman I ever heard of.’

‘She was beautiful; men told her so, and she believed them. She was tempted; and she was weak. Execrable is a hard word, Rhoda. She never injured you.’

‘She blighted my brother’s life. Do you suppose I can easily forgive that? You men are always ready to make excuses for a pretty woman. I heard of Colonel Kirkbank, the other day. Lady Hetheridge met him at Baden—a wreck. They say he is immensely rich. He has never married, it seems.’

‘That at least is a grace in him. “His honour rooted in dishonour stood; and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”’

‘You are in a sentimental mood this evening, Marmaduke,’ sneered Rhoda. ‘One would suppose that you had been in love with my brother’s second wife.’

‘She has been so long in her grave that I don’t think you and I need quarrel if I confess that I admired her. There is a look in Daphne’s face now she has grown up that recalls her mother almost painfully. I hope Todd won’t burn that pheasant, Rhoda. I’m afraid she is getting a little careless. The last was as dry as a stick.’

* * * * *

Scotland made up for a chilly and inferior summer by an altogether superior autumn. The days were ever so much fairer and longer on that wild north coast than they were in Warwickshire; and tempted by the beauty of sky and sea, backed by the urgent desire of his bachelor friend, the skipper of the smart schooner-rigged yacht _Kelpie_, Gerald Goring stayed much longer than he had intended to stay; atoning, so far as he could atone, for his prolonged absence, by writing his betrothed the most delightful letters, and sending a weekly packet of sepia sketches, which reflected every phase of sea and sky, rock and hill. To describe these things with his brush was as easy to Gerald as it is to other men to describe with their pens.

‘It is an idle dreamy life,’ he wrote. ‘When I am not shooting land-fowl on the hills, or water-fowl from my dingey, I sit on the deck and sketch, till I grow almost into a seavegetable—a zoophyte which contracts and expands with a faintly pleasurable sensation—and calls that life. I read no end of poetry—Byron, Shelley, Keats—and that book whose wisdom and whose beauty no amount of reading can ever dry up—Goethe’s “Faust.” I want no new books—the old ones are inexhaustible. Curiosity may tempt me to look at a new writer; but in an age of literary mediocrity I go back for choice to the Titans of the past. Do you think I am scornful of your favourites, Tennyson and Browning? No, love. They, too, are Titans; but we shall value them more when they have received the divine honours that can only come after death.

‘I am longing to be with you, and yet I feel that I am doing myself a world of good in this rough open-air life. I was getting a little moped at the Abbey. The place is so big, and so dreary, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty—waiting to wake into life and brightness at the coming of love and you. The lonely rooms are haunted by my dear mother’s image, and by the sense of my loss. When you come I shall be so happy in the present that the pain of past sorrow will be softened.

‘I sit sketching these romantic caves—where we earn our dinner by shooting the innocent rock-pigeons—and thinking of you, and of my delight in showing you this coast next autumn.

‘Yes, love, we will have a yacht. I know you are fond of the sea. Your sister is a fanatic in her love of the water. How she will delight in these islands!’

He thought of Daphne sometimes, as he sat in the bow of the boat, lulled almost to slumber by the rise and fall of the waves gently lapping the hull. His brush fell idle across the little tin colour-box, and he gave himself up to listless reverie. How Daphne would love this free unfettered life: a life in which there were no formalities; no sitting prim and straight at an orderly dinner-table; no conventional sequence of everyday ceremonies in a hideous monotony. It was a roving gipsy life which must needs please that erratic soul.

‘Poor little Daphne! It is strange that she and I don’t get on better,’ he said to himself. ‘We were such capital friends at Fontainebleau. Perhaps the recollection of that day is in some way disagreeable to her. She has been very stand-offish to me ever since—except by fits and starts. There are times when she forgets to be formal; and then she is charming.’

Yes; there had been times—times when all that was picturesque and poetical in her nature asserted itself, and when her future brother-in-law succumbed to the spell, and admired her just a little more warmly than he felt to be altogether well for his peace, or perchance for hers.

Perhaps he, too, had been somewhat formal—had fenced himself round with forms and ceremonies—lest some lurking sentiment which he had never dared to analyse, or even to think about, should grow stronger. He wanted to be honest; he wanted to be true and loyal. But the lovely young face, so piquant, so entrancing in its exquisite girlishness, came across his fancies too often for perfect repose of conscience. The memory of those two summer days at Fontainebleau—idle, foolish, unconsidered hours—was an ever-present part of his mind. It was so small a thing; yet it haunted him. How much better it would have been, he thought, if Daphne had been more candid, had allowed him to speak freely of that innocent adventure! Concealment gave it a flavour of guilt. A hundred times he had been on the point of letting out the secret by this or that allusion, when Daphne’s blush and the quiver of Daphne’s lip had startled him into caution. This made a secret understanding between them in spite of his own desire to be honest; and it worried him to think that there should be any such hidden bond.

Madoline was the love of his life, the hope and glory of his days. He had no doubt as to his feelings about her. From his boyhood he had admired, revered, and loved her. He was only three years her senior, and in their early youth the delicately-nurtured, carefully-educated girl, reared among grown-up people, and far in advance of her years, had seemed in all intellectual things the boy’s superior. Lady Geraldine was idle and self-indulgent; she petted and spoiled her son, but she taught him nothing. Had he not a private tutor—a young clergyman who preferred the luxurious leisure of the Abbey to the hard work of a curacy—and was not his education sufficiently provided for when this well-recommended young Oxonian had been engaged at a munificent salary? The young Oxonian was as fond of shooting, billiards, cricket, and boating as his pupil; so the greater part of Gerald’s early youth was devoted to these accomplishments; and it was only the boy’s natural aptitude for learning whatever he wished to learn which saved him from being a dunce. At fifteen he was transferred to Eton, where he found better cricketing and a better river than in Warwickshire.

From Lady Geraldine the boy had received no bent towards high thoughts or a noble ambition. She loved him passionately, but with a love that was both weak and selfish. She would have had him educated at home, a boudoir sybarite, to lie on the Persian rug at her feet and read frivolous books in fine bindings; to sit by her side when she drove; to be pampered and idolised and ruined in body and soul. The father’s strong sense interfered to prevent this. Mr. Giles-Goring was no classic, and he was a self-taught mathematician, while the boy’s tutor had taken honours in both branches of learning; but he was clever enough to see that this luxurious home-education was a mockery, that the lad was being flattered by an obsequious tutor, and spoiled by a foolish mother. He sent the Oxonian about his business, and took the boy to Eton, not before Lady Geraldine had done him as much harm as a doting mother can do to a beloved son. She had taught him, unintentionally and unconsciously, perhaps, to despise his father. She had taught him to consider himself, by right of his likeness to her and his keen sympathy with all her thoughts and fancies and prejudices—a sympathy to which she had, as unconsciously, trained and schooled him—belonging to her class and not to his father’s. The low-born father was an accident in his life—a good endurable man, and to be respected (after a fashion) for his lowly worth, but spiritually, eclectically, æsthetically, of no kin with the son who bore his name, and who was to inherit, and perhaps waste, his hard-won wealth.

The mother and son had a code of signals, little looks and subtle smiles, with which they communicated their ideas before the blunt plain-spoken father. Lady Geraldine never spoke against her husband: nor did she descend even in moments of confidence to vulgar ridicule. ‘So like your father,’ she would say, with her languid smile, of any honest unconventional act or speech of Mr. Giles-Goring’s; and it must be confessed that Mr. Giles-Goring was one of those impulsive outspoken men who do somewhat exercise a wife’s patience. Lady Geraldine never lost her temper with him; she was never rude; she never overtly thwarted his wishes, or opposed his plans; but she shrugged her graceful shoulders, and lifted her delicately-pencilled eyebrows, and allowed her son to understand what an impassable gulf yawned between her, the daughter of a hundred earls—or at least half-a-dozen—and the self-made millionaire.

Escaping from the stifling moral atmosphere of his mother’s boudoir, Gerald found his first ideas of a higher and a nobler life at South Hill. At the Abbey he had been taught to believe that there were two good things in the world, rank and money; but that even rank, the very flower of life, must droop and fade if not manured with gold. At South Hill he learned to think lightly of both, and to aspire to something better than either. For the sake of being praised and admired by Madoline he worked, almost honestly, at Eton and Oxford. She kindled his ambition, and, inspired by her, his youth and talent blossomed into poetry. He sat up late at nights writing impassioned verse. He dashed off wild stanzas in the ‘To Thyrza’ style, when his brain was fired by the mild orgies of a modern wine, and the fiercer rapture of a modern bear-fight. And Madoline was his only Thyrza. He was not a man who can find his Egeria in every street. For a little while he fancied that it was in him to be a second Byron; that the divine breath inflated his lungs; that he had but to strike on the cithara for the divine accords to come. He strummed cleverly enough upon the sacred strings, spoiled a good deal of clean paper, and amused himself considerably. Then, failing—in consequence of an utter absence of the critical faculty—to win the prize for English verse, he turned his back upon the Muses, and henceforward spoke with ridicule of his poetic adolescence. Still the Muse had exercised her elevating influence; and, inspired by her and by Madoline, Gerald Goring had learned to despise those lesser aims which his mother had held before him as the sublimities of life.

He was fond of art, and had a marked talent for painting; but as he never extended his labours or his studies beyond the amateur’s easy course, he was not likely to rise above the amateur’s level. Why should a man who is sure to inherit a million submit to the drudgery of severe technical training in order to take the bread out of the mouths of painters who must needs live by their art? Gerald painted a little, now landscape, now figure, as the spirit moved him; sculptured a little; poetised a little; set a little song of his own to music now and then to please Lina; and was altogether accomplished and interesting. But he would have liked to be great, to have had his name bandied about for praise or blame upon the lips of men; and it irked him somewhat to know and feel that he was not of the stuff which makes great men; or, in other words, that he entirely lacked that power of sustained industry which can alone achieve greatness. For his own inward satisfaction, and for Lina’s sake, he would have liked to distinguish himself. But the pathway of life had been made fatally smooth for him; it lay through a land of flowery pastures and running brooks, a happy valley of all earthly delights; and how could any man be resolute enough to turn aside from all sensuous pleasures to climb rugged rocky hills in pursuit of some perchance unattainable spiritual delight? There was so much that wealth could give him, that it would have been hardly natural for Gerald Goring to live laborious days for the sake of the one thing which wealth could not give. He had just that dreamy poetic temperament which can clothe sensual joys with the glory and radiance of the intellectual. Politics, statecraft, he frankly detested; science he considered an insult to poetry. He would have liked the stir and excitement, the fever and glory of war; but not the daily dry-as-dust work of a soldier’s life, or the hardships of campaigning. He was not an unbeliever, but his religious belief was too vague for a Churchman. Having failed to distinguish himself as a poet, and being too idle to succeed as a painter, he saw no royal road to fame open to him; and so was content to fall back from the race, and enjoy the delicious repose of an utterly aimless life. He pictured to himself a future in which there should be no crumpled rose-leaf; a wife in all things perfect, fondly loved, admired, respected; children as lovely as a poet’s dream of childhood; an existence passed amidst the fairest scenes of earth, with such endless variety of background as unlimited wealth can give. He would not, like Tiberius, build himself a dozen villas upon one rock-bound island; but he would make his temporary nest in every valley and by every lake, striking his tents before ever satiety could dull the keen edge of enjoyment.

Nor should this ideal life, though aimless, be empty of good works. Madoline should have _carte blanche_ for the gratification of her benevolent schemes, great or small, and he would be ready to help her with counsel and sympathy; provided always that he were not called upon to work, or to put himself _en rapport_ with professional philanthropists—a most useful class, no doubt, but obnoxious to him as a lover of ease and pleasure.

He had looked forward with placid self-satisfaction to this life ever since his engagement—and indeed for some time before that solemn betrothal. From his boyhood he had loved Madoline, and had believed himself beloved by her. Betrothal followed almost as a matter of course. Lady Geraldine had spoken of the engagement as a settled thing, ever so long before the lovers had bound themselves each to each. She had told Lina that she was to be her daughter, the only girl she could love as her son’s wife; and when Gerald was away at Oxford, Lina had spent half her life at Goring with his mother, talking about him, worshipping him, as men are worshipped sometimes by women infinitely above them.

From the time of his engagement—nay, from the time when first his boyish heart recognised a mistress—Gerald’s affection for Madoline had known no change or diminution. Never had his soul wavered. Nor did it waver in his regard and reverence for her now, as he sat on the sunlit deck of the _Kelpie_ in this fair autumn weather, his brush lying idle by his side, his thoughts perplexed and wandering. Yet there was a jar in the harmony of his life; a dissonant interval somewhere in the music. The thought of Daphne troubled him. He had a suspicion that she was not happy. Gay and sparkling as she was at times, she was prone to fits of silence and sullenness unaccountable in so young a creature: unless it were that she cherished some secret grief, and that the hidden fox so many of us carry had his tooth in her young breast.

He was no coxcomb, not in the least degree inclined to suppose that women had a natural bent towards falling in love with him: yet in this case he was troubled by the suspicion that Daphne’s stand-offishness was not so much a token of indifference or dislike, as the sign of a deeper feeling. She had been so variable in her manner to him. Now all sweet, and anon all sour; now avoiding him, now showing but too plainly her intense delight in his presence—by subtlest signs; by sudden blushes; by loveliest looks; by faintly quivering lip of trembling hand; by the swift lighting up of her whole face at his coming; by the low veiled tones of her soft sweet voice. Yes; by too many a sign and token—fighting her hardest to hide her secret all the time—she had given him ground for suspecting that she loved him.

He recalled, with unspeakable pain, her pale distressed face that day of their first meeting at South Hill; the absolute horror in her widely-opened eyes; the deadly coldness of her trembling hand. Why had she called her boat by that ridiculous name: and why had she been so anxious to cancel it? The thought of those things disturbed his peace. She was so lovely, so innocent, so wild, so wilful.

‘My bright spirit of the woods,’ he said to himself, ‘I should like your fate to be happy. And yet—and yet—’

He dared not shape his thought further, but the question was in his mind: ‘Would I like her fate to be far apart from mine?’

Why had she rejected Edgar Turchill, a man so honestly, so obviously devoted to her?—able, one might suppose, to sympathise with all her girlish fancies, to gratify every whim.

‘She ought to like him; she must be made to like him,’ he said to himself, his heart suddenly aglow with virtuous, almost heroical resolve.

His heart had thrilled that night in the shadow of the walnut boughs when he heard Daphne’s contemptuous rejection of her lover. He had been guiltily glad. And yet he was ready to do his duty: he was eager to play the mediator, and win the girl for that true-hearted lover. He meant to be loyal.

‘Poor Daphne!’ he sighed. ‘Her cradle was shadowed by a guilty mother’s folly. She had been cheated out of her father’s love. She need have something good in this life to make amends for all she has lost. Edgar would make an admirable husband.’

The _Kelpie_ turned her nose towards home next day; and soon Gerald was dreamily watching the play of sunbeam and shadow on the heathery slopes above the Kyles of Bute, very near Greenock, and the station and the express train that was to carry him home. He turned his back almost reluctantly on the sea life, the unfettered bachelor habits. Though he longed to see Madoline again, almost as fondly as he had longed for her four months ago when he was leaving Bergen, yet there was a curious indefinable pain mingled with the lover’s yearning. An image thrust itself between him and his own true love; a haunting shape was mingled with all his dreams of the future.

‘Pray God she may marry soon, and have children, and get matronly and dull and stupid!’ he said to himself savagely; ‘and then I shall forget the dryad of Fontainebleau.’

He travelled all night and got to Stratford early in the afternoon. He had given no notice of his coming, either at the Abbey or South Hill, and his first visit was naturally to the house that held his betrothed. His limbs were cramped and stiffened by the long journey, and he despatched his valet and his portmanteau to Goring in a fly, and walked across the fields to South Hill. It was a long walk and he took his time about it, stopping now and then to look somewhat wistfully at the brown river, on whose breast the scattered leaves were drifting. The sky was dull and gray, with only faint patches of wintry sunlight in the west; the atmosphere was heavy; and the year seemed ever so much older here than in Scotland.

He passed Baddesley and Arden, with only a glance across the smooth lawn at the Rectory, where the china-asters were in their glory, and the majolica vases under the rustic verandah made bright spots of colour in the autumn gloom. Then, instead of taking the meadow-path to South Hill, he chose the longer way, and followed the windings of the Avon, intending to let himself into the South Hill grounds by the little gate near Daphne’s boat-house.

He was within about a quarter of a mile of the boat-house when he saw a spot of scarlet gleaming amidst the shadows of the rustic roof. The boat-house was a thatched erection of the Noah’s Ark pattern, and the front was open to the water. Below this thatched gable-end, and on a level with the river, showed the vivid spot of red. Gerald quickened his pace unconsciously, with a curious eagerness to solve the mystery of that bit of colour.

Yes; it was as he had fancied. It was Daphne, seated alone and dejected on the keel of her upturned boat. The yellow collie darted out and leapt up at him, growling and snapping, as he drew near her. Daphne looked at him—or he so fancied—with a piteous half-beseeching gaze. She was very pale, and he thought she looked wretchedly ill.

‘Have you been ill?’ he asked eagerly, as they shook hands. ‘Quiet, you mongrel!’ to the suspicious Goldie.

‘Never was better in my life,’ she answered briskly.

‘Then your looks belie you. I was afraid you had been seriously ill.’

‘Don’t you think if I had Lina would have mentioned it to you in a postscript, or a _nota bene_, or something?’

‘Of course.’

‘I detest cold weather, and I am chilled to the bone, in spite of this thick shawl,’ she answered lightly, glancing at the scarlet wrap which had caught Gerald’s eye from afar.

‘I wonder you choose such a spot as this for your afternoon meditations. It is certainly about the dampest and chilliest place you could find.’

‘I did not come here to meditate, but to read,’ answered Daphne. ‘I have got Browning’s new poem, and it requires a great deal of hard thinking before one can quite appreciate it; and if I tell you that Aunt Rhoda is in the drawing-room, and means to stick there till dinner-time, you will not require any further reason for my being here.’

‘That’s dreadful. Yet I must face the gorgon. I am dying to see Lina.’

‘Naturally; and she will be enraptured at your return,’ answered Daphne in her most natural manner. ‘She has been expecting you every day i’ the hour.’

‘“For in a minute there are many days”—Shakespeare.’

‘Thank God! I don’t object to the bard of Avon half so strongly now. I have been in a country where everybody quotes an uncouth rhymester whom they call Bobbie Bairrns. Shakespeare seems almost civilised in comparison. Will you walk up to the house with me?’

She looked down at her open book. She had not been reading when he came unawares upon her solitude. He had seen that; just as surely as he had seen the faint convulsive movement of her throat, the start, the pallor that marked her surprise at his approach. He had acquired a fatal habit of watching and analysing her emotions; and it seemed to him that she had brightened since his coming, that new light and colour had returned to her face; almost as you may see the revival of a flower that has drooped in the drought, and which revivifies under the gentle summer rain.

She looked at her book doubtfully, as if she would like to say no.

‘You had better come with me. It is nearly tea-time, and I know you are dying for a cup of tea. I never knew a woman that wasn’t.’

‘Exhausted nature tells me that it is tea-time. Yes; I suppose I had better come.’