CHAPTER II.

‘AND THIS WAS GLADLY IN THE EVENTIDE.’

Daphne was as still as a statue, her vanity gratified by this homage to her charms. There had been nobody to admire her at Asnières but the old music-master, into whose hat she had sometimes put a little bouquet from the trim suburban garden, or a spray of acacia from the grove that screened the maiden meditations of Madame Tolmache’s pupils from the vulgar gaze of the outside world. She retained her recumbent attitude patiently for nearly an hour, half asleep in the balmy afternoon atmosphere, while the outraged Martha sat on her rock apart, digging her everlasting crochet-hook into the fluffy mass of wool, and saying never a word.

The stranger was nearly as silent as Martha. He was working industriously at his sketch, and smoking his cigar as he worked, having first ascertained that the ladies were tolerant of the weed. He painted in a large dashing style that got over the ground very quickly, and made a good effect. He had nearly finished his sketch of the figure on the rock—the indigo gown, scarlet ribbon, bright hair, and dark luminous eyes, when Daphne jumped up suddenly, and vowed that her every limb was an agony to her.

‘I couldn’t endure it an instant longer!’ she exclaimed. ‘I hope you’ve finished.’

‘Not quite; but you may change your attitude as much as you like if you’ll only keep your head the same way. I am working at the face now.’

‘What are you going to do with the picture when it’s finished?’

‘Keep it till my dying day.’

‘I thought you would perhaps give it—I mean sell it—to me. I could not afford a large price, for my people are very poor, but——’

‘Your looking-glass will show you a better portrait than this poor sketch of mine. And, in after years, even this libellous daub will serve to remind me of a happy hour in my life.’

‘I am glad you have enjoyed yourself,’ said Daphne; ‘but I really wish you had eaten that fowl. Have you far to go home to dinner?’

‘Only to Fontainebleau.’

‘You are living there?’

‘I am staying there. I may strike my tent and be across the Jura to-morrow night. I never live anywhere.’

‘But haven’t you a home and people?’

‘I have a kind of home, but no people.’

‘Poor fellow!’ murmured Daphne, with exquisite compassion. ‘Are you an orphan?’

‘Yes; my father died nine years ago, my mother last year.’

‘How awfully sad! No brothers or sisters?’

‘None. I am a crystallisation, the last of a vanishing race. And now I have done as much as I dare to your portrait. Any attempt at finish would result in failure. I am writing the place and the date in the corner of my sketch. May I write your name?’

‘My name!’ exclaimed Daphne, her eyes sparkling with mischief, her cheeks curving into dimples.

‘Yes; your name. You have a name, I suppose: unless you are the nameless spirit of sunlit woodlands, masquerading in a blue gown?’

‘My name—is—Poppæa,’ faltered Daphne, whose latest chapter of Roman history had been the story of Nero and his various crimes, toned down and expurgated to suit young ladies’ schools.

Poppæa Sabina, thus chastely handled, had appeared nothing worse than a dressy lady of extravagant tastes, who took elaborate care of her complexion, and had a fancy for shoeing her mules with gold.

‘Did you say Poppet?’ inquired the stranger.

‘No; Poppæa. You must have heard the name before, I should think. It is a Roman name. My father is a great classical scholar, and he chose it for me. And pray what is your name?’

‘Nero.’

The stranger pronounced the word without moving a muscle of his face, still intent upon his sketch; for it is vain for a man to say he has finished a thing of that kind; so long as his brushes are within reach, he will be putting in new touches. There was not a twinkle in those dubious eyes of his—not an upward move of those mobile lips. He was as grave as a judge.

‘I don’t believe it!’ cried Daphne, bouncing up from her rock.

‘Don’t believe what?’

‘That your name is Nero.’

‘Why not? Have I not as good a right to bear a Roman name as you have? Suppose I had a classical father as well as you. Why not?’

‘It is too absurd.’

‘Many things are absurd which yet are absolutely true.’

‘And you are really called Nero?’

‘As really as you are called Poppæa.’

‘It is so dreadfully like a dog’s name.’

‘It is a dog’s name. But you may call your dog Bill, or Joe, or Paul, or Peter. I don’t think that makes any difference. I would sooner have some dogs for my namesakes than some men.’

‘Dibb, dear,’ said Daphne, turning sharply upon the victim of her folly, the long-suffering, patient Martha. ‘What’s the time?’

She had a watch of her own, a neat little gold hunter; but it was rarely in going order for two consecutive days, and she was generally dependent on the methodical Dibb for all information as to the flight of time.

‘A quarter to five.’

‘Then we must be going home instantly. How could you let me stay so long, you foolish girl? I am sure it must be more than an hour’s walk to the town, and we promised poor dear Toby to be home by six.’

‘It isn’t my fault,’ remarked Miss Dibb; ‘I should have been glad to go ever so long ago, if you had thought fit.’

‘Hurry up, then, Dibb dear. Put away your crochet. Have you quite done with my block?’ to the unknown. ‘Thank you muchly. And now my box? Those go into the basket. Thanks, awfully,’ as he helped her to pack the tumblers, corkscrew, plates, and knives, which had served for their primitive repast. ‘And now we will wish you good-day—Mr.—Nero.’

‘On no account. I am going to carry that basket back to Fontainebleau for you.’

‘All along that dusty high road. We couldn’t think of such a thing; could we, Martha?’

‘I don’t know that my opinion is of much account,’ said Martha stiffly.

‘Don’t, you dear creature!’ cried Daphne, darting at her, and hugging her affectionately. ‘Don’t try to be ill-tempered, for you can’t do it. The thing is an ignominious failure. You were created to be good-natured, and nice, and devoted—especially to me.’

‘You know how fond I am of you,’ murmured Martha reproachfully; ‘and you take a mean advantage of me when you go on so.’

‘How am I going on? Is it very dreadful to let a gentleman carry a heavy basket for me?’

‘A gentleman!’ muttered Martha, with a supercilious glance at the stranger’s well-worn velveteen.

He was standing a little way off, out of hearing, taking a last long look at the valley.

‘Yes; and every inch a gentleman, though his coat is shabby, and though he may be as poor as Job, and though he makes game of me!’ protested Daphne with conviction.

‘Have your own way,’ replied Martha.

‘I generally do,’ answered Daphne.

And so they went slowly winding downhill in the westering sunshine, all among the gray rocks on which the purple shadows were deepening, the warm umber lights glowing, while the rosy evening light came creeping up in the distant west, and the voice of an occasional bird, so rare in this Gallic wood, took a vesper sound in the summer stillness.

The holiday makers had all gone home. The French matron who had taken her rest so luxuriously, surrounded by her olivebranches, had put on her boots and departed. The women who sold cakes and fruit, and wooden paper-knives, had packed up their wares and gone away. All was silence and loneliness; and for a little while Daphne and her companions wandered on in quiet enjoyment of the scene and the atmosphere, treading the mossy, sandy path that wound in and out among the big rocks, sometimes nearly losing themselves, and anon following the blue arrow points which a careful hand had painted on the rocks to show them which way they should go.

But Daphne was not given to silence. She found something to talk about before they had gone very far.

‘You have travelled immensely, I suppose?’ she said to the stranger.

‘I don’t know exactly what significance you attach to the word. Young ladies use such large words nowadays for such very small things. From a scientific explorer’s point of view, my wanderings have been very limited, but I daresay one of Cook’s tourists would consider me a respectable traveller. I have never seen the buried cities of Central America, nor surveyed the world from the top of Mount Everest, nor even climbed the Caucasus, nor wandered by stormy Hydaspes: but I have done Egypt, and Algeria, and Greece, and all that is tolerably worth seeing in Southern Europe, and have tried my hand, or rather my legs, at Alpine climbing, and have come to the conclusion that, although Nature is mountainous, life is everywhere more or less flat, stale, and unprofitable.’

‘I’m sure I shouldn’t feel that if I were free to roam the world, and could paint as sweetly as you do.’

‘I had a sweet subject, remember.’

‘Please don’t,’ cried Daphne; ‘I rather like you when you are rude, but if you flatter I shall hate you.’

‘Then I’ll be rude. To win your liking I would be more uncivil than Petruchio.’

‘Katharine was a fool!’ exclaimed Daphne, skipping up the craggy side of one of the biggest rocks. ‘I have always despised her. To begin so well, and end so tamely.’

‘If you don’t take care you’ll end by slipping off that rock, and spraining an ankle or two,’ said Nero warningly.

‘Not I,’ answered Daphne confidently; ‘you don’t know how used I am to climbing. Oh, look at that too delicious lizard!’

She was on her knees admiring the emerald-hued changeful creature. She touched it only with her breath, and it flashed away from her and vanished in some crevice of the rock.

‘Silly thing, did it think I wanted to hurt it, when I was only worshipping its beauty?’ she cried.

Then she rose suddenly, and stood on the rock, a slim girlish figure, with flattering drapery, poised as lightly as Mercury, gazing round her, admiring the tall slim stems of the beeches growing in groups like clustered columns, the long vista of rocks, the dark wall of fir-trees, mounting up and up to the edge of a saffron-tinted sky—for these loiterers had lost count of time since steady-going Martha looked at her reliable watch, and the last of the finches had sung his lullaby to his wife and family, and the golden ship called Sol had gone down to Night’s dark sea.

‘Come down, you absurd creature!’ exclaimed Nero, with a peremptory voice, winding one arm about the light figure, and lifting the girl off the rock as easily as if she had been a feather-weight.

‘You are very horrid!’ protested Daphne indignantly. ‘You are ever so much ruder than Petruchio. Why shouldn’t I stand on that rock? I was only admiring the landscape!’

‘No doubt, and two minutes hence you would be calling upon us to admire a fine example of a sprained ankle.’

‘I’m sure if your namesake was ever as unkind to my namesake, it’s no wonder she died young,’ said Daphne, pouting.

‘I believe he was occasionally a little rough upon her,’ answered the artist with his imperturbable air. ‘But of course you have read your Tacitus and your Suetonius in the original. Young ladies know everything nowadays.’

‘The Roman history we read is by a clergyman, written expressly for ladies’ schools,’ said Miss Dibb demurely.

‘How intensely graphic and interesting that chronicle must be!’ retorted the stranger.

They had come to the end of the winding path among the rocks by this time, and were in a long, straight road, cut through the heart of the forest, between tall trees that seemed to have outgrown their strength—weedy-looking trees, planted too thickly, and only able to push their feeble growth up towards the sun, with no room for spreading boughs or interlacing roots. The evening light was growing grave and gray. Bats were skimming across the path, uncomfortably near Daphne’s flowing hair. Miss Dibb began to grumble.

‘How dreadfully we have loitered!’ she cried, looking at her watch. ‘It is nearly eight, and we have so far to go. What will Miss Toby say?’

‘Well, she will moan a little, no doubt,’ answered Daphne lightly, ‘and will tell us that her heart has been in her mouth for the last hour, which need not distress us much, as we know it’s a physical impossibility; and that anyone might knock her down with a feather—another obvious impossibility, seeing that poor Toby weighs eleven stone—and then I shall kiss her and make much of her, and give her the packet of nougat I mean to buy on the way home, and all will be sunshine. She takes a sticky delight in nougat And now please talk and amuse us,’ said Daphne, turning to the artist with an authoritative air. ‘Tell us about some of your travels, or tell us where you live when you’re at home.’

‘I think I’d rather talk of my travels. I’ve just come from Italy.’

‘Where you have been painting prodigiously, of course. It is a land of pictures, is it not?’

‘Yes; but Nature’s pictures are even better than the treasures of art.’

‘If ever I should marry,’ said Daphne with a dreamy look, as if she were contemplating an event far off in the dimness of twenty years hence, ‘I should insist upon my husband taking me to Italy.’

‘Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to afford the expense,’ suggested the practical Martha.

‘Then I wouldn’t marry him,’ Daphne retorted decisively.

‘Isn’t that rather a mercenary notion?’ asked the gentleman with the basket.

‘Not at all. Do you suppose I should marry just for the sake of having a husband? If ever I do marry—which I think is more than doubtful—it will be, first and foremost, in order that I may do everything I wish to do, and have everything I want to have. Is there anything singular in that?’

‘No; I suppose it is a young beauty’s innate idea of marriage. She sees herself in a glass, and recognises perfection, and knows her own value.’

‘Are you married?’ asked Daphne abruptly, eager to change the conversation when the stranger became complimentary.

‘No.’

‘Engaged?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is she like?’ inquired Daphne eagerly. ‘Please tell us about her. It will be ever so much more interesting than Italy; for, after all, when one hasn’t seen a country description goes for so little. What is she like?’

‘I could best answer that question in one word if I were to say she is perfection.’

‘You called me perfection just now,’said Daphne pettishly.

‘I was talking of your face. She is perfection in all things. Perfectly pure, and true, and good, and noble. She is handsome, highly accomplished, rich.’

‘And yet you go wandering about the world in that coat,’ exclaimed Daphne, too impulsive to be polite.

‘It is shabby, is it not? But if you knew how comfortable it is you wouldn’t wonder that I have an affection for it.’

‘Go on about the young lady, please. Have you been long engaged to her?’

‘Ever since I can remember, in my heart of hearts: she was my bright particular star when I was a boy at school: she was my sole incentive to work, or decent behaviour, when I was at the University. And now I am not going to say any more about her. I think I have told you enough to gratify any reasonable curiosity. Ask me conundrums, young ladies, if you please, or do something to amuse me. Remember, I am carrying the basket, and a man is something more than a beast of burden. My mind requires relaxation.’

Martha Dibb grinned all over broad frank face. Riddles were her delight. She had little manuscript books filled with them in her scrawly, pointed writing. She began at once, like a musical-box that has been wound up, and did not leave off asking conundrums till they were half-way down the long street leading to the palace, near which Miss Toby and her pupils had their lodging.

But Daphne had no intention that the stranger should learn exactly where she lived. Reckless as she was, mirthful and mischievous as Puck or Robin Goodfellow, she had still a dim idea that her conduct was not exactly correct, or would not be correct in England. On the Continent, of course, there must be a certain license. English travellers dined at public tables, and gamed in public rooms—were altogether more sociable and open to approach than on their native soil. It was only a chosen few—the peculiarly gifted in stiffness—who retained their glacial crust through every change of scene and climate, and who would perish rather than cross the street ungloved, or discourse familiarly with an unaccredited stranger. But, even with due allowance for Continental laxity, Daphne felt that she had gone a little too far. So she pulled up suddenly at the corner of a side street, and demanded her basket.

‘What does that mean?’ asked the painter, with a look of lazy surprise.

‘Only that this is our way home, and that we won’t trouble you to carry the basket any further, thanks intensely.’

‘But I am going to carry it to your door.’

‘It’s awfully good of you to propose it, but our governess would be angry with us for imposing on the kindness of a stranger, and I am afraid we should get into trouble.’

‘Then I haven’t a word to say,’ answered the painter, smiling at her blushing eloquent face. Verily a speaking face—beautiful just as a sunlit meadow is beautiful, because of the lights and shadows that flit and play perpetually across it.

‘Do you live in this street?’ he asked.

‘No; our house is in the second turning to the right, seven doors from the corner,’ said Daphne, who had obtained possession of the basket. ‘Good-bye.’

She ran off with light swift foot, followed lumpishly and breathlessly by the scandalised Martha.

‘Daphne, how could you tell him such an outrageous story?’ she exclaimed.

‘Do you think I was going to tell him the truth?’ asked Daphne, still fluttering on, light as a lapwing. ‘We should have had him calling on Miss Toby to-morrow morning to ask if we were fatigued by our walk, or perhaps singing the serenade from Don Giovanni under our windows to-night. Now, Martha dearest, don’t say one word; I know I have behaved shamefully, but it has been awful fun, hasn’t it?’

‘I’m sure I felt ready to sink through the ground all the time,’ panted Martha.

‘Darling, the ground and you are both too solid for there to be any fear of that.’

They had turned a corner by this time, and doubling and winding, always at a run, they came very speedily to the quiet spot near the palace, where their governess had lodged them in a low blind-looking white house, with only one window that commanded a view of the street.

They had been so fleet of foot, and had so doubled on the unknown, that, from this upper window, they had presently the satisfaction of seeing him come sauntering along the empty street, careless, indifferent, with dreamy eyes looking forward into vacancy, a man without a care.

‘He doesn’t look as if he minded our having given him the slip one little bit,’ said Daphne.

‘Why should he?’ asked the matter-of-fact Martha. ‘I daresay he was tired of carrying the basket.’

‘Go your ways,’ said Daphne with a faint sigh, waving her hand at the vanishing figure. ‘Go your ways over mountain and sea, through wood and valley. This world is a big place, and it isn’t likely you and I will ever meet again.’ Then, turning to her companion with a sudden change of manner, she exclaimed: ‘Martha, I believe we have both made a monstrous mistake.’

‘As how?’ asked Miss Dibb stupidly.

‘In taking him for a poor artist.’

‘He looks like one.’

‘Not he. There is nothing about him but his coat that looks poor, and he wears that as if it were purple and ermine. Did you notice his eye when he ordered us to change the conversation, an eye accustomed to look at inferiors? And there is a careless pride in his manner, like a man who believes that the world was made on purpose for him, yet doesn’t want to make any fuss about it. Then he is engaged to a rich lady, and he has been at a university. No, Martha, I am sure he is no wandering artist living on his pencil.’

‘Then he must think all the worse of us,’ said Martha, solemnly.

‘What does it matter?’ asked Daphne, with a careless shrug. ‘We have seen the last of each other.’

‘We can never be sure of that. One might meet him at a party.’

‘I don’t think you will,’ said Daphne, faintly supercilious, ‘and the chances are ever so many to one against even my meeting him anywhere.’

Here Miss Toby burst into the room. She had been lying down in an adjacent chamber, resting her poor bilious head, when the girls came softly in, and had only just heard their voices.

‘Oh, you dreadful girls, what hours of torture you have caused me!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought something must have happened.’

‘Something did happen,’ said Daphne; whereupon Martha thought she was going to confess everything.

‘What?’

‘A lizard.’

‘Did it sting you?’

‘No; it darted away when I looked at it. A lovely glittering green thing. I wish I could tame one and wear it for a necklace. And I nearly fell off a rock; and I tried hard to paint the valley, and made a most dismal failure. But the view from the hill is positively delicious, Toby dear, and the rocks are wonderful; huge masses of granite tumbled about among the trees anyhow, as if Titans had been pelting one another. It’s altogether lovely. You must go with us to-morrow, Toby love.’

Miss Toby, diverted from her intention to scold, shook her head despondingly.

‘I should like it of all things,’ she sighed. ‘But I am such a bad walker, and the heat always affects my head. Besides, I think we ought to go over the palace to-morrow. There is so much instruction to be derived from a place so full of historical associations.’

‘No doubt,’ answered the flippant Daphne, ‘though if you were to tell me that it had been built by Julius Cæsar or Alfred the Great, I should hardly be wise enough to contradict you.’

‘My dear Daphne, after you have been so carefully grounded in history,’ remonstrated Miss Toby.

‘I know, dear; but then you see I have never built anything on the ground. It’s all very well to dig out foundations, but if one never gets any further than that! But we’ll see the palace to-morrow, and you shall teach me no end of history while we are looking at pictures and things.’

‘If my poor head be well enough,’ sighed Miss Toby, and then she began to move languidly to and fro, arranging for the refreshment of her pupils, who wanted their supper.

When the supper was ready, Daphne could eat nothing although five minutes before she had declared herself ravenous. She was too excited to eat. She talked of the forest, the view, the heat, the sky, everything except the stranger, and his name was trembling on her lips perpetually. Every now and then she pulled herself up abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and flashed a vivid glance at stolid Martha, her dark gray eyes shining like stars, full of mischievous light. She would have liked to tell Miss Toby everything, but to do so might be to surrender all future liberty. Headache or no headache, the honest little governess would never have allowed her pupils to wander about alone again, could she have beheld them, in her mind’s eye, picnicking with a nameless stranger.

There was a little bit of garden at the back of the low, white house, hardly more than a green courtyard, with a square grass plot and a few shrubs, into which enclosure the windows all looked, save that one peep-hole towards the street. Above the white wall that shut in the bit of green rose the foliage of a much larger garden—acacias shedding their delicate perfume on the cool night, limes just breaking into flower, dark-leaved magnolias, tulip-trees, birch and aspen—a lovely variety of verdure. And over all this shone the broad disk of a ripening moon, flooding the world with light.

When supper was over, Daphne bounded out into the moonlit garden, and began to play at battledore and shuttlecock. She was all life and fire and movement, and could not have sat still for the world.

‘Come,’ she cried to Martha; ‘bring your battledore. A match for a franc’s worth of nougat.’

Miss Dibb had settled herself to her everlasting crochet by the light of two tall candles. Miss Toby was reading a Tauchnitz novel.

‘I’m tired to death,’ grumbled Martha. ‘I’m sure we must have walked miles upon miles. How can you be so restless?’

‘How can you mope indoors on such an exquisite night?’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I feel as if I could send my shuttlecock up to the moon. Come out and be beaten! No; you are too wise. You know that I should win to-night.’

The little toy of cork and feathers quivered high up in the bright air; the slender, swaying figure bent back like a reed as the girl looked upward; the fair golden head moved with every motion of the battledore as the player bent or rose to anticipate the flying cork.

She was glad to be out there alone. She was thinking of the unknown all the time. She could not get him out of her mind. She had a vague unreasonable idea that he must be near her; that he saw her as she played; that he was hiding somewhere in the shadow yonder, peeping over the wall; that he was in the moon—in the night—everywhere; that it was his breath which flattered those leaves trembling above the wall; that it was his footfall which she heard rustling among the shrubs—a stealthy, mysterious sound mingling with the plish-plash of the fountain in the next garden. She had talked lightly enough a little while ago of having seen the last of him: yet now, alone with her thoughts in the moonlit garden, it seemed as if this nameless stranger were interwoven with the fabric of her life, a part of her destiny for evermore.