CHAPTER XVIII.

‘LOVE WOL NOT BE CONSTREINED BY MAISTRIE.’

A man who lives within easy reach of two good packs of fox-hounds, and in a fair hunting country on the very edge of the shires, can hardly mope, albeit he may feel that, in a general way, his heart is broken. Thus it was with Edgar Turchill, who hunted four days a week, and came to South Hill on the off-days to suffer and enjoy all those hot fits and cold fits, those desperate delights plucked from the jaws of pain, which a man feels when he adores a girl who does not care a straw for him. He had been rejected, even with contumely, as it seemed to him: yet so dearly did he delight in Daphne’s society that if he were destined never to win her for his own, the next best blessing he asked from Fate was to be allowed to dangle about her for ever—to fetch and carry, to be snubbed, and laughed at, and patronised, as it pleased her wilful humour.

The autumn and early winter were mild—a capital season for hunting.

‘What selfish creatures you sporting men are!’ cried Daphne one morning, looking gloomily out at the gloomy November day; ‘so long as you can go galloping over the muggy fields after innocent foxes you don’t care how dreary the world is for other people. We want a hard frost, for then we might have some skating on the pond. I wish the Avon would freeze, so that we could skate to Tewkesbury.’

‘I daresay we shall have plenty of hard weather in January,’ said Edgar apologetically. It was one of his off-days, and he had ridden over to South Hill directly after luncheon. ‘You ought to hunt, Daphne.’

‘Of course I ought; but Sir Vernon does not see it in the same light. When I mildly suggested that I thought you wouldn’t mind lending me a horse—’

‘Mind!’ cried Edgar. ‘That little mare of mine would carry you to perfection; and she’s so clever you’d have nothing to do but to sit upon her.’

‘Exactly. It would be a foretaste of paradise. But at my hinting such a possibility my father gave me a look that almost annihilated me.’

‘You may be more independently situated next season,’ suggested Mr. Goring, looking up from the billiard-table, where he was amusing himself with a few random strokes while Madoline was putting on her hat and jacket for a rustic ramble. ‘You may have your own stable, perhaps, and a nice sporting husband to look after it for you.’

Daphne reddened angrily at the suggestion; while poor Edgar put on his sheepish look, and took refuge at the billiard-table.

‘Are you coming out for a walk, Empress?’ asked Gerald carelessly.

‘I don’t know. It’s such dreary work prowling about a wintry landscape. I think I shall stay at home and read.’

‘You’d better come,’ pleaded Edgar, feeling that he would not be allowed the perilous bliss of a _tête-à-tête_ afternoon with her, and that, if such bliss were permissible, the pleasure would be mixed with too deep a pain. Out in the fields and lanes, with Goring and Madoline, he might enjoy her society.

She half consented to go, and then, discovering that Madoline was going to make some calls, changed her mind.

‘I’ll go to my room and finish my third volume,’ she said.

‘What a misanthrope you are, Daphne—a female Timon! I think I shall call you Timonia henceforward,’ retorted Gerald.

‘When it is a question of making ceremonious afternoon visits, I rather hate my fellow-creatures,’ replied Daphne, with charming frankness. ‘The nicest people one knows are not half so nice as the figments of fancy one meets in a book; and if the book-person waxes stupid, we can shut him up—which one can’t do to a living friend.’

So Daphne wished Mr. Turchill good-day, and went off to her own den—the pretty chintz-draperied bedroom, with its frivolities and individualities in the way of furniture and ornament, and its privileged solitude.

Edgar, feeling that he might be a nuisance to the other two if he offered to accompany them, prepared to take his leave, yet with a lingering hope that Madoline would ask him to remain.

Her kindness divined his wish, and she asked him to stay to dinner.

‘You’re very kind,’ he faltered, having dined at South Hill once in the current week, and sorely afraid that he was degenerating into a sponge, ‘but I’ve got a fellow to see at Warwick; I shall have to dine with him. But if you’ll let me come back in the evening for a game at billiards?’

‘Let you? Why, Edgar, you know my father is always glad to see you.’

‘He is very good—only—I’m afraid of becoming a nuisance. I can’t help hanging about the place.’

‘We are always pleased to have you here—all of us.’

Edgar thanked her warmly. He had fallen into a dejected condition; fancying himself of less account than the rest of men since Daphne had spurned him; a creature to be scorned and trampled under foot. Nor did Daphne’s easy kindness give him any comfort. She had resumed her tone of sisterly friendship. She seemed to forget that he had ever proposed to her. She was serenely unconscious that he was breaking his heart for her. Why could he not get himself killed, or desperately hurt in the hunting-field, so that she might be sorry for him? He was almost angry with his horses for being such clever jumpers, and never putting his neck in peril. A purl across a bullfinch, a broken collar-bone, might melt that obdurate heart. And a man may get through life very well with a damaged collar-bone.

‘I’m afraid the collar-bone wouldn’t be enough,’ mused Edgar. ‘It doesn’t sound romantic. A broken arm, worn in a sling, might be of some use.’

He would have suffered anything, hazarded anything, to improve his chances. He tried to lure Daphne to Hawksyard again; tempting her with the stables, the dogs, the poultry-yard; but it was no use. She had always some excuse for declining his or his mother’s invitations. She would not even accompany Lina when she went to call upon Mrs. Turchill. She had an idea that Edgar was in the habit of offering his hand and heart to every young lady visitor.

‘He made such an utter idiot of himself the night we dined there,’ she said to Lina. ‘I shall never again trust myself upon his patrimonial estate. On neutral ground I haven’t the least objection to him.’

‘Daphne, is it kind to speak of him like that, when you know that he was thoroughly in earnest?’

‘He was thoroughly in earnest about you before. True love cannot change like that.’

‘Yet I am convinced that he is true, Daphne,’ Lina answered seriously.

Autumn slipped into winter. There was a light frost every night, and in the misty mornings the low meadows glittered whitely with a thin coating of rime, which vanished with those early mists. There was no weather cold enough to curdle the water in the shallow pond yonder by the plantation, or to stop Lord Willoughby’s hounds. Daphne sighed in vain for the delight of skating.

Christmas at South Hill was not a period of exuberant mirth. Ever since his second wife’s death Sir Vernon Lawford had held himself as much aloof from county society as he conveniently could, without being considered either inhospitable or eccentric. There was a good deal done for the poor, in a very quiet way, by Madoline, and the servants were allowed to enjoy themselves; but of old-fashioned festivity there was none. Mr. and Mrs. Ferrers were asked to dine on Christmas Day. Aunt Rhoda suggested that they should be asked, and accepted the invitation in advance; in order, as she observed, that the bond of family union might be strengthened by genial intercourse upon that sacred anniversary. Gerald was of course to be at South Hill, where at all times he spent more of his waking hours than at Goring Abbey. Edgar had spoken so dolefully of the dulness of a Christmas Day at Hawksyard that Madoline had been moved by pity to suggest that Mrs. Turchill and her son might be invited to the family feast.

‘That will make it a party,’ said Sir Vernon, when his daughter pleaded for this grace, ‘and I am not well enough to stand a party.’

He was not well. Of that fact there could be no doubt. He had been given to hypochondriacal fancies for the last five years, but there was a certain amount of fact underlying these fancies. The effeminately white hand was growing more transparent; the capricious appetite was more difficult to tempt; the slow promenade on the garden terrace was growing slower; the thin face was more drawn; the aquiline nose was sharper in outline. There was a chronic complaint of some obscure kind, vaguely described by a London specialist, and dimly understood by the family doctor, which must eventually shorten the baronet’s life; but his mind was so vigorous and unbending, his countenance so stern, his manner so uncompromising, that it was difficult to believe that Death had set his mark upon him. To his elder daughter alone he revealed the one tender feeling left in him—and that was his very real affection for herself; a love that was chastened and poetised by his reverent and regretful memory of her mother.

‘Dear father, it need not be a party because of the Turchills. Edgar is like one of ourselves, and Mrs. Turchill is so very quiet.’

‘Ask them, Lina, ask them, if it will be any pleasure to you.’

‘I think it will please Edgar. He says Hawksyard is so dreary at Christmas.’

‘If people had not set up a fictitious idea of Christmas gaiety, they would not complain of the season being dull,’ said Sir Vernon somewhat impatiently. ‘That notion of unlimited junketing doesn’t come from any real religious feeling. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men doesn’t mean snapdragon and childish foolery. It is a silly myth of the Middle Ages, which sticks like a burr to the modern mind.’

‘It is a pleasant idea that kindred and old friends should meet at that sacred time,’ argued Lina gently.

‘Yes, if kindred in a general way could meet without quarrelling. That there should be a good deal done for the poor at Christmas I can understand and approve. It is the central point of winter; and then there is the Divine association which beautifies every gift. And that children should look forward to Christmas as an extra birthday in every nursery is a pretty fancy enough. But that men and women of the world should foregather and pretend to be fonder of one another on that day than at any other season is too hollow a sham for my patience.’

Madoline wrote a friendly invitation to Mrs. Turchill, and gave her note to Edgar to carry home that evening.

‘It’s awfully good of you,’ he said ruefully, when she told him the purport of her letter, ‘but I’m afraid it won’t answer. Mother stands on her dignity about Christmas Day; and I don’t think wild horses would drag her away from her own dining-room. I shall have to dine _tête-à-tête_ with her, poor old dear; and we shall sit staring at the oak panelling, and pretending to enjoy the plum-pudding made according to the old lady’s own particular recipe handed down by her grandmother. There has been an agreeable sameness about our Christmas dinner for the last ten years. It is as solemn as a Druidical sacrifice. I could almost fancy that mother had been out in the woods at daybreak cutting mistletoe with a golden sickle.’

Edgar was correct in his idea of his mother’s reply. Mrs. Turchill wrote with much ceremony and politeness that, delighted as she and her son would have been to accept so gratifying an invitation, she must on principle reluctantly decline it. She never had dined away from her own house on Christmas Day, and she never would. She considered it a day upon which families should gather round their own firesides, etc., etc., etc., and remained, with affectionate regards, etc.

‘How can a family of two gather round the fireside?’ asked Edgar dolefully. ‘The dear old mother writes rank nonsense.’

‘Don’t be down-hearted, Turchill,’ said Gerald. ‘Perhaps by Christmas twelvemonth you may be a family of three; and the year after that a family of four; and the year after that, five. Who knows? Time brings all good things.’

‘I am just as grateful to you, Madoline, as if mother had accepted,’ said Edgar, ignoring his friend’s speech, though he blushed at its meaning. ‘It will be ineffably dreary. If the old lady should go to bed extra early—she sometimes does on Christmas Day—I might ride over, just—just——’

‘In time for a rattling good game of billiards,’ interjected Gerald. ‘Lina and I are improving. You and Daphne needn’t give us more than twenty-five in fifty.’

‘I’ll have a horse ready saddled. Mother likes me to read some of the verses in the “Christian Year” to her after tea. I’m afraid I’m not a good reader, for Keble and I always send her to sleep.’

‘Be particularly monotonous on this occasion,’ said Daphne, ‘and come over in time for a match.’

‘You wouldn’t be shocked if I came in as late as ten o’clock?’

‘I mean to sit up till two,’ protested Daphne. ‘It is my first Christmas at home, since I was in the nursery. It must be a Shakespearian Christmas. We’ll have a wassail bowl: roasted apples bobbing about in warm negus, or something of that kind. I shall copy out some mediæval recipes for Spicer. Come as late as you like, Edgar. Papa is sure to go to bed early. Christmas will have a soporific effect upon him, as well as upon Mrs. Turchill, no doubt; and the Ferrers people will go when he retires; and we can have no end of fun in the billiard-room, where not a mortal can hear us.’

‘You seem to be providing for a night of riot—a regular orgy—something almost as dissipated as Nero’s banquet on the lake of Agrippa,’ said Gerald, laughing at her earnestness.

‘Why should not one be merry for once in one’s life?’

‘Why indeed?’ cried Gerald, ‘_Vogue la galère_.

“Forget me not, en _vogant la galère_.”

There’s a line from an early English poet for you, my Shakespearian student.’

Christmas Day was not joyless. Daphne, so fitful in her mirth, so sudden in her intervals of gloom—periods of depression which Sir Vernon, Aunt Rhoda, and Madoline’s confidential maid and umquhile nurse Mowser, stigmatised as sulks—was on this occasion all sunshine.

‘I have made up my mind to be happy,’ she said at breakfast; which meal she and Madoline were enjoying alone in the bright cheery room, the table gay with winter flowers and old silver, a wood fire burning merrily in the bright brass grate. ‘Even my father’s coldness shall not freeze me. Last Christmas Day I was eating my heart at Asnières, and envying that vulgar Dibb, whose people had had her sent home, and hoping savagely that she would be ever so sick in crossing the Channel. There I was in that dreary tawdry school-room, with half-a-dozen mahogany-coloured girls from Toulon, and Toulouse, and Carcassonne; and now I am at home and with you, and I mean to be happy. Discontent shall not come near me to-day. And you will taste my wassail bowl, won’t you, Lina?’

‘Yes, dear, if it isn’t quite too nasty.’

Lina had given her younger sister license for any kind of mediæval experiments, in conjunction with Mrs. Spicer; and there had been much consultation of authorities—Knight, and Timbs, and Washington Irving—and a good deal of messing in the spacious still-room, with a profligate consumption of lemons and sherry, and spices and russet apples. With the dinner at which her father and the Rectory people were to assist, Daphne ventured no interference; but she had planned a Shakespearian refection in the billiard-room at midnight—if they could only get rid of Aunt Rhoda, whose sense of propriety was so strong that she might perhaps insist upon staying till the two young men had taken their departure.

‘I wish we could have old Spicer in to matronise the party,’ said Daphne. ‘She looks lovely in her Sunday evening gown. She would sit smiling benevolently at us till she dropped asleep; instead of contemplating us as if she thought the next stage of our existence would be a lunatic asylum, as Aunt Rhoda generally does when we are cheerful.’

‘I’m afraid you must put up with Aunt Rhoda to-night, Daphne,’ answered Madoline. ‘She has suggested that she and the Rector should have the Blue Room, as the drive home might bring on his bronchitis.’

‘His bronchitis, indeed!’ cried Daphne. ‘He appropriates the complaint as if nobody else had ever had it. So they are going to stay the night! Of all the cool proceedings I ever heard of that is about the coolest. And Aunt Rhoda is one of those people who are never sleepy. She will sit us out, however late we are. Never mind. The banquet will be all the more classical and complete. Aunt Rhoda will be the skeleton.’

Daphne contrived to be happy all day, in spite of Mrs. Ferrers, who was particularly ungracious to her younger niece, while she was lavish of compliments and pretty speeches to the elder. The faithful slave Edgar was absent on duty—going to church twice with his mother; dining with her; devoted to her altogether, or as much as he could be with a heart that longed to be elsewhere. But Daphne hardly missed him. Gerald Goring was in high spirits, full of life and talk and fun, as if he too had made up his mind that this great day in the Christian calendar should be a day of rejoicing for him. They all went to church together in the morning, and admired the decorations, which owed all their artistic beauty to Madoline’s taste, and were in a large measure the work of her own industrious fingers. They joined reverently in the Liturgy, and listened patiently to the Rector’s sermon, in which he aired a few of those good old orthodox truisms which have been repeated time out of mind by rural incumbents upon Christmas mornings.

After luncheon they all three went on a round of visits to Madoline’s cottagers—those special, old-established families to whose various needs, intellectual and corporeal, she had ministered from her early girlhood, and who esteemed a Christmas visit from Miss Lawford as the highest honour and privilege of the year. It was pleasant to look in at the tidy little keeping-rooms, where the dressers shone with a bright array of crockery, and the hearths were so neatly swept, and the pots and pans and brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, and the little black-framed scriptural pictures, were all decorated with sprigs of ivy and holly. Pleasant the air of dinner and dessert which pervaded every house. Daphne had a basket of toys for the children; a basket which Gerald insisted upon carrying, looking into it every now and then, and affecting an intense curiosity as to the contents. The sky was dark, save for one low red streak above the ragged edge of the wooded lane, when they went back to afternoon tea: and what a comfortable change it was from the wintry world outside to Madoline’s flowery morning-room, heavy with the scent of hyacinths and Parma violets, and bright with blazing logs! The low Japanese tea-table was drawn in front of the fire, and the basket-chairs stood ready for the tea-drinkers.

‘I was afraid Aunt Rhoda would be here to tea,’ said Daphne, sinking into her favourite seat on the fender-stool, in the shadow of the draped mantelpiece. ‘Is it not delicious to have this firelight hour all to ourselves? I always feel that just this time—this changeful light—stands apart from the rest of our lives. Our thoughts and fancies are all different somehow. They seem to take the rosy colour out of the fire; they are dim and dreamy and full of change, like the shadows on the wall. _We_ are different. Just now I feel as if I had not a care.’

‘And have you many cares at other times?’ asked Gerald scoffingly.

‘A few.’

‘The fear that your ball-dress may not fit; or that some clumsy fox-hunting partner may smash the ivory fan which Lina gave you yesterday.’

‘Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward,’ answered Daphne sententiously. ‘Do you think, because I live in a fine house, and have food and raiment found for me, that I do not know the meaning of care?’

‘Well, I should fancy there is a long way between your comprehension of the word and that of a Whitechapel seamstress: a widow, with five small children to keep, and a lodging to pay, upon the produce of her needle, with famine or the workhouse staring her in the face.’

‘It is the hour for telling ghost-stories,’ exclaimed Daphne, kneeling at her sister’s side to receive her cup and saucer, and trifling daintily with the miniature Queen Anne tongs as she helped herself to sugar. ‘Lina, tell us the story of this house. It ought to be haunted.’

‘I am thankful to say I have never heard of any ghosts,’ answered Madoline. ‘Every house that has been lived in fifty years must have some sad memories; but our dead do not come back to us, except in our dreams.’

‘Mr. Goring, I insist upon a ghost-story,’ said Daphne. ‘On this particular day—at this particular hour—in this delicious half-light, a story of some kind must be told.’

‘I delight in ghost-stories—good grim old German legends,’ answered Gerald languidly, looking deliciously comfortable in the depths of an immense armchair, so low that it needed the dexterity of a gymnast to enable man or woman to get in or out of it gracefully—a downy-cushioned nest when one was there. ‘I adore phantoms, and fiends, and the whole shopful; but I never could remember a story in my life.’

‘You must tell one to-night,’ cried Daphne eagerly. ‘It need not be ghostly. A nice murder would do—a grisly murder. My blood begins to turn cold in advance.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you,’ said Gerald; ‘but although I have made a careful study of all the interesting murders of my age I could never distinctly remember details. I should get hideously mixed if I tried to relate the circumstances of a famous crime. I should confound Rush with Palmer, the Mannings with the Greenacres; put the pistol into the hand that used the knife; give the dagger to the man who pinned his faith on the bowl. Not to be done, Daphne. I am no _raconteur_. You or Lina had better amuse me. One of you can tell me a story—something classical—John Gilpin, or the Old Woman with her Pig.’

‘John Gilpin! a horridly cheerful singsong ballad—and in such a fantastic dreamy light as this! I wonder you have not more sense of the fitness of things. Besides, it is your duty to amuse us. A story of some kind we must have, mustn’t we, Lina dearest?’

‘It would be very pleasant in this half-light,’ answered Lina softly, quite happy, sitting silently between those two whom she loved so dearly, pleased especially at Daphne’s brightness and good-humour, and apparently friendly feeling for Gerald.

‘You hear,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘Your liege lady commands you.’

‘A story,’ mused Gerald in his laziest tone, with his head lying back on the cushions, and his eyes looking dreamily up at the ceiling, where the lights and shadows came and went so fantastically. ‘A story, ghostly or murderous, tragical, comical, amorous, sentimental—well, suppose now I were to tell you a classical story, as old as the hills, or as the laurel-bushes in your garden, the story of your namesake Daphne.’

‘Namesake!’ echoed the girl, with her golden head resting against the arm of her sister’s chair, her eyes gravely contemplative of the fire. ‘Had I ever a namesake? Could there be another set of godfathers and godmothers in the world stupid enough, or hard-hearted enough, to give an unconscious innocent such a name as mine?’

‘The namesake I am thinking of lived before the days of godfathers and godmothers,’ answered Gerald, still looking up at the ceiling, with a dreamy smile on his face; ‘she was the daughter of a river-god and a naiad, a wild, free-born, untamable creature, beautiful as a dream, variable as the winds that rippled the stream from which her father took his name. Wooers had sought her, but in vain. She loved the wood and the chase, all free and sylvan delights—the unfettered life of a virgin. She emulated the fame of Diana. She desired to live and die apart from the rude race of men—a woodland goddess among her maidens. Often her father said: “Daughter, thou owest me a son.” Often her father said: “Child, thou owest me grandchildren.” She, with blushing cheeks, hung on her father’s neck, and repulsed the torch of Hymen, as if it were a crime to love. “Let me, like Diana, live unwedded,” she pleaded. “Grant me the same boon Jove gave his daughter.” “Sweet one,” said the father, “thy duty forbids the destiny thy soul desires. Love will find thee out.” The river-god spoke words of fatal truth. Love sought Daphne, and he came in a godlike form. Phœbus Apollo was the lover. Phœbus, the spirit of light, and music, and beauty. He saw her, and all his soul was on fire with love. The dupe of his own oracles, he hoped for victory. He saw Daphne’s hair floating carelessly upon the wind; the eyes, like shining stars; the sweet lips, which it was pain to see and not to kiss. But lighter than the wind the cruel nymph fled from him. In vain he called her, in vain he tried to stop her. “Stay, sweet one,” he cried, “it is no enemy who pursues thee. So flies the lamb the wolf, the hind the lion, the trembling dove from the strong-winged eagle. But ’tis love bids me follow. Stay thy steps, suspend thy flight, and I will slacken my pursuit. Foolish one, thou knowest not whom thou fliest. No rude mountaineer, or ungainly shepherd pursues thee, but a god before whose law Delphos, Claros, and Tenedos obey; the son of high Jove himself; the deity who reveals the past, the present, and the future; who first wedded song to the stringed lyre. My arrows are deadly, but a deadlier shaft has pierced my heart.” Thus and much more he pleaded, yet Daphne still fled from him, heedless of the briers that wounded her naked feet, the winds that lifted her flowing hair. The breathless god could no longer find words of entreaty. Maddened by love he followed in feverish haste; he gained on her; his breath touched her floating tresses. The inexorable nymph felt her strength failing; with outstretched arms, with beseeching eyes, she appealed to the river: “Oh, father, if thy waves have power to save me, come to my aid! Oh, mother earth, open and fold me in thine arms, or by some sudden change destroy the beauty that subjects me to outrage.” Scarcely was the prayer spoken when a heavy torpor crept over her limbs; the nymph’s lovely shoulders covered themselves with a smooth bark; her hair changed to leaves; her arms to branches; her feet, a moment before so agile, became rooted to the ground. Yet Phœbus still loved. He felt beneath the bark of the tree the heart beat of the nymph he adored; he covered the senseless tree with his despairing kisses; and then, when he knew that the nymph was lost to him for ever, he cried: “If thou canst not be my wife, thou shalt be at least Apollo’s sacred tree. Laurel, thou shalt for ever wreathe my hair, my lyre, my quiver. Thou shalt crown Rome’s heroes; thy sacred branches shall shelter and guard the palace of her Cæsars; and as the god, thy lover, shines with the lustre of eternal youth, so, too, shalt thou preserve thy beauty and freshness to the end of time.”’

‘Poor Daphne,’ sighed Lina.

‘Poor Apollo, I think,’ said Gerald; ‘he was the loser. What do you think of my story, Mistress Daphne?’

‘I rather like my namesake,’ answered Daphne deliberately. ‘She was thorough. When she pretended to mean a thing she really did mean it. There is a virtue in sincerity.’

‘And obstinacy is a vice,’ said Gerald. ‘I consider the river-god’s daughter a pig-headed young person, whose natural coldness of heart predisposed her to transformation into a vegetable. Apollo made too much of her.’