CHAPTER XXIII.

‘AND COME AGEN, BE IT BY DAY OR NIGHT.’

The next three days passed somewhat slowly at South Hill. Unselfish as Madoline was, even her delight in Daphne’s engagement could not altogether compensate for Gerald’s absence. Life without him hung heavily. She missed him at all those accustomed hours which they had spent together. In the bright noontide, when he rode over fresh and full of vivacity after a late breakfast; in the afternoon dusk, when they had been wont to waste time so pleasantly beside the low wood fire; in the evening; always. He had been away for three days, and she had received only one shabby little letter—just a few feeble sentences explaining that he had been obliged to run up to London at an hour’s notice to see his lawyers upon some dry-as-dust business relating to his Stock Exchange investments. He hoped to settle it all speedily, and come back to Warwickshire. The letter gave her very little comfort.

‘I am afraid he is being worried,’ she said to Daphne, after she had read this brief communication two or three times over. ‘It is not like one of his letters.’

The week after the ball began with one of those dull Sundays which come down upon country life like an atmosphere of gloom, and seem to blot out all the pleasantness of creation. A drizzling Scotch-misty Sabbath, painfully suggestive of Glasgow and the Free Kirk. Madoline and Daphne walked to church, waterproofed to the eyes, and assisted sadly at a damp service; the whole congregation smelling of macintoshes; the drip drip from umbrellas on the encaustic pavement audible in the pauses of the Liturgy. It was a rule at South Hill that horses and coachmen should rest on the seventh day, save under direst pressure. Neither of the sisters objected to a wet walk. Edgar met them at church, having tramped over through mud and rain, much to the disgust of his mother, who deemed that to be absent from one’s parish church on a Sunday morning was a social misdemeanour not to be atoned for by the most fervent worship in a strange tabernacle. He joined Lina and her sister in the porch, and walked home with them by moist fields and a swollen Avon, whose fringe of willows never looked more funereal than on this dull wintry noontide, when the scant bare shoots stood straight up against a sky of level gray.

‘Any news from Goring?’ asked Edgar, by way of making himself agreeable.

‘Not since I saw you last. I fancy he must be very busy. He is usually such a good correspondent.’

‘Busy!’ cried Edgar, laughing heartily at the idea. ‘What can he have to be busy about?—unless it’s the fit of a new suit of clothes, or some original idea in shooting-boots which he wants carried out, or the choice of a new horse; but, for that matter, I believe he doesn’t seriously care what he rides. Busy, indeed! He can’t know what work means. His bread was buttered for him on both sides, before he was born.’

‘Isn’t that rather a juvenile notion of yours, Edgar?’ asked Madoline. ‘I believe the richest people are often the busiest. Property has its duties as well as its rights.’

‘No doubt. But a rich man can always take the rights for his own share, and pay somebody else to perform the duties,’ answered Edgar shrewdly. ‘And I should think Goring was about the last man to let his property be a source of care to him.’

‘In this instance I am afraid he is being worried about it,’ said Lina decisively; and with a look which seemed to say, ‘nobody has any right to have an opinion about my lover.’

The day was a long one, even with the assistance of Edgar in the task of getting through it. Daphne, considerably sobered by her engagement, behaved irreproachably all the afternoon and evening; but she stifled a good many yawns, until the effort made her eyes water.

Her father had been unusually kind to her since the announcement of her betrothal. All his anxieties about her—and it had been the habit of his mind to regard her as a source of trouble and difficulty, or even of future woe—were now set at rest. Married in the early bloom of her girlhood to such a man as Edgar, all her life to come would be so fenced round and protected, so sheltered and guarded by love and honour, that perversity itself could scarce go astray.

‘Daphne’s mother was spoiled before I married her,’ he told himself, remembering the misery of his second marriage. ‘If I had won her before her heart was corrupted our lives might have been different.’

It seemed to him, looking at the matter soberly, that there could be no better alliance for his younger daughter than this with Edgar Turchill. He had seen them together continually, in a companionship which seemed full of pleasure for both: boating together, at lawn-tennis, at billiards, sympathising, as it appeared to him from his superficial point of view, in every thought and feeling. It never occurred to him that this was a mere surface sympathy, and that the hidden deeps of Daphne’s mind and soul were far beyond the plummet-line of Edgar’s sympathy or comprehension. Sir Vernon had made up his mind that his younger daughter was a frivolous butterfly-being, who needed only frivolous pleasures and girlish amusements to make her happy.

Everybody, or almost everybody, approved of Daphne’s engagement. It was pleasant to the girl to live for a little while in an atmosphere of praise. Even Aunt Rhoda, upon whose being Daphne had exercised the kind of influence which some people feel when there is a cat in the room, even Aunt Rhoda professed herself delighted. She came over between the showers and the church services upon this particular Sunday, on purpose to tell Daphne how very heartily she approved of her conduct.

‘You have acted wisely for once in your life,’ she said sententiously; ‘I hope it is the beginning of many wise acts. I suppose you will be married at the same time as Lina. The double wedding will have a very brilliant effect, and will save your father ever so much trouble and expense.’

‘Oh no; I should not like that,’ cried Daphne hurriedly.

‘You wouldn’t like a double wedding!’ ejaculated Mrs. Ferrers indignantly. ‘Why, what a vain, arrogant little person you must be. I suppose you fancy your own importance would be lessened if you were married at the same time as your elder sister?’

‘No, no, Aunt; indeed, it is not that. I am quite content to seem of no account beside Lina. I love her far too dearly to envy her superiority. But—if—when—I am married I should like it to be very quietly—no people looking on—no fuss—no fine gowns. When my father and Edgar have made up their minds that the proper time has come, I should like just to walk into my uncle’s church early some morning, with papa and Lina, and for Edgar to meet us there, just as quietly as if we were poor people, and for no one to be told anything about it.’

‘What a romantic schoolgirlish notion!’ said Mrs. Ferrers contemptuously. ‘Such a marriage would be a discredit to your family; and I should think it most unlikely my brother would ever give his consent to such a hole-and-corner way of doing things.’

The one person at South Hill who absolutely refused to smile upon Daphne’s engagement was Madoline’s faithful Mowser. That devoted female received the announcement with shrugs and ominous shakings of a head which carried itself as if it were the living temple of wisdom, and in a manner incomplete without that helmet of Minerva which obviously of right belonged to it.

‘You don’t seem as pleased as the rest of us at the notion of this second marriage,’ said good-tempered Mrs. Spicer, housekeeper and cook, to whom ‘the family’ was the central point of the universe; sun, moon, and stars, earth and ocean, and the residue of mankind, being merely so much furniture created to make ‘the family’ comfortable.

‘I hear and see and say nothing,’ answered Mowser, as oracular in most of her utterances as Friar Bacon’s brazen head. ‘Time will show.’

‘Well, all I can say is,’ said Jinman, ‘that our Miss Daphne is an uncommon pretty girl, and deserves a good husband. She has just that spice of devilry in her which I like in a woman. Your even-tempered girls are too insipid for my taste.’

‘I suppose you would have admired the spice of devilry in Miss Daphne’s mar,’ retorted Mowser venomously, ‘which made her run away from her husband.’

‘No, Mrs. Mowser; I draw the line at that. A man may want to get rid of his wife, but he don’t like her to take the initial’—Mr. Jinman meant initiative—‘and bolt. A spice of devilry is all very well, but one doesn’t want the entire animal. I like a shake of the grater in my negus, but I don’t desire the whole nutmeg. But I do think that it’s a low-minded thing to cast up Miss Daphne’s mar whenever the young lady’s talked about. Every tub must stand on its own bottom.’

‘Well, Mr. Jinman,’ said Mowser, ‘all I hope is, that Miss Daphne will carry through her engagement now she’s made it. She’s welcome to her own sweetheart, as far as I am concerned, so long as she doesn’t hanker after other people’s.’

The phrase sounded vague, and neither Mr. Jinman, nor Mrs. Spicer, nor the coachman (who had dropped in to tea and toast and a poached egg or two in the housekeeper’s room) had any clear idea of what Mowser meant, except that it was something ill-natured. On that point there was no room to doubt.

Another week wore on, the second after the ball, and Gerald Goring had not yet returned. He wrote every other day, telling Madoline all he had been doing; the picture-galleries and theatres he had visited, the clubs at which he had dined; yet in all these letters of his, affectionate as they were, there was a tone which sustained in Lina’s mind the idea that her lover was in some way troubled or worried. The few words which gave rise to this impression were slight enough; she hardly knew how or why the notion had entered her mind, but it was there, and remained there, and it increased her anxiety for his return to an almost painful degree. While she was expecting him daily and hourly, a much longer letter arrived, which on the first reading almost broke her heart:

‘MY DEAR ONE,—I write in tremendous excitement and flurry of mind to tell you something which I fear may displease you; yet at the very beginning I will disarm your wrath by saying that if you put a veto upon this intention of mine it shall be instantly abandoned. Subject to this, dear love, I am going, in hot haste, to Canada. Don’t be startled, Lina. It is no more nowadays than going to Scotland. Men I know go across for the salmon-fishing every autumn, and are absent so short a time that their friends hardly miss them from the beaten tracks at home.

‘And now I will tell you what has put this Canadian idea into my head. I have for some time been feeling a little below par—mopish, lymphatic, disinclined for exertion of any kind. My holiday in the Orkneys was a _dolce far niente_ business, which did me no real good. I went the other day to a famous doctor in Cavendish Square, a man who puts our prime ministers on their legs when they are inclined to drop, like tired cab horses, under the burden of the public weal. He ausculted me carefully, found me sound in wind and limb, but nerves and muscles alike in need of bracing. “You want change of scene and occupation,” he said, “and a climate that will make you exert yourself. Go to Vienna and skate.” I daresay this would have been good advice for a man who had never seen Vienna; but as I know that brilliant capital by heart, with all its virtues, and a few of its vices, I rejected it. “Please yourself,” said my physician, pocketing his fee; “but I recommend complete change, and the hardest climate you can bear.” I do not feel sure that I intended to take his advice, or should have thought any more about it; but I happened to meet Lord Loftus Berwick, the Duke of Bamborough’s youngest son, and an old Eton chum of mine, in the smoking-room at the Reform that very evening, and he told me he was just off to Canada, dilated enthusiastically upon the delights of that wintry region, and the various sports congenial to the month of February. He goes _viâ_ New York, Delaware and Hudson Railway to Montreal, thence to Quebec, and from Quebec by the Intercolonial Railway to Rimouski, where he is to charter a small schooner and cross the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Natashquan River, which river belongs to two particular friends of his, both distinguished comedians, and men of unbounded popularity on each side of the Atlantic. Here Loftus proposes to hunt cariboo, moose, elk, and I don’t know what else. But before he puts on his snow-shoes, loads his sledges, and harnesses his dogs for those happy hunting-grounds, he is going to revel in the more civilised and sophisticated pleasures of a Canadian winter, curling-clubs, sleigh-rides around the mountain at Montreal, tobogganing at the Falls of Montmorenci, near Quebec, and so on. Just the thing for me, thought I—a hard climate, only about eight days’ voyage—if my dearest did not object to my being away from my natural place at her feet for five or six weeks. At my hinting a wish to accompany him Loftus became still more enthusiastic, and was eager to have the whole thing settled that moment. And now, love, it is for you to decide. I think the run would do me good; but perish the thought of benefit to me if it must be bought at the price of pain to you. Loftus is going in the Cunard, which leaves Liverpool the day after to-morrow. Telegraph your wishes, and be assured beforehand of obedience from your devoted slave,

‘GERALD GORING.’

Madoline’s first thoughts were of the pain of being parted from her lover, whose presence had for so long been the sunshine of her days, and so much a part of her life, that she seemed scarcely to live while he was away from her. Existence was reduced to a mere mechanical moving about, and doing duties which had lost all their savour. But these first thoughts, being selfish, were swiftly succeeded in a mind so entirely unselfish by other considerations. If it were for Gerald’s good that he should go to the other end of the world, that they should be parted for much longer than the five or six weeks of which he spoke so lightly, it would not have been in Madoline’s nature to desire him to forego even a possible advantage. She had fancied sometimes of late that he was occasionally dull and low-spirited; and now this letter explained all. He was out of health. He had been leading too quiet and womanish a life, no doubt, in his willingness to spend his days in her society. He had foregone all those hardy exercises and field sports which are so necessary to a man who has no serious work in life. Madoline’s telegram ran thus:

‘Go by all means, if you think the change will do you good. I tremble at the idea of your crossing the sea at this time of the year. Let me see you before you go. If you cannot come here, I will ask my aunt to go to London with me that I may at least bid you good-bye.’

The answer came as quickly as electricity could bring it, and although laconic, was satisfactory: ‘I will be with you about five o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Dear fellow, how little he thinks of the trouble of travelling so many miles to please me,’ thought Madoline; and the idea of her lover’s affection sustained her against the pain of parting.

‘Next year I shall have the right to go wherever he goes,’ she told herself.

Daphne heard of the Canadian expedition, but said so little about it that Lina wondered at her coolness.

‘I thought you would have been more surprised,’ she said.

‘Did you? Why, there is really nothing startling or uncommon in the idea,’ answered Daphne smilingly. ‘This rushing about the world for sport seems the most fashionable thing among young men with plenty of money. The Society Journals are always telling us how Lord This or Sir John That has gone to the Rockies to shoot wild sheep, or to the North Pole for bears, or to Hungary or Wallachia, or the Balkan range. The beaten tracks count for nothing nowadays.’

When the afternoon came, Lina was alone to receive her lover. Daphne had been seized with a dutiful impulse towards her aunt, and had gone to drink tea at the Rectory, with Edgar in attendance upon her.

‘Won’t you defer your duty-visit till to-morrow, and wish Gerald good-bye?’ asked Lina, when Daphne proposed the expedition.

‘No, dear; you can do that for me. This is an occasion on which you ought to have him all to yourself. You will have so much to say to each other.’

‘If it were mother, she would occupy all the time in begging him to wear flannels, put cork soles in all his boots, and avoid damp beds,’ said Edgar laughing. ‘Now, Daphne, put on your hat as quick as you can. It’s a lovely afternoon for a walk across the fields. If this frost continues we shall have skating presently.’

The daylight faded slowly; a bright frosty day, a clear and rosy sunset. Lina sat by the pretty hearth in her morning-room, and exactly as the clock struck five the footman brought in her dainty little tea-tray, set out the table before the fire, and lighted three or four wax-candles in the old Sèvres candelabra on the mantelpiece. Here she and her lover would be secure from the interruption of callers, which they could not be if in the drawing-room.

Five minutes after the hour there came the sound of wheels upon the gravel drive, a loud ring at the bell, and in the next instant the door of the morning-room was opened, and Gerald came in, looking bulkier than usual in his furred travelling coat.

‘Dear Gerald, this is so good of you!’ said Madoline, rising to welcome him.

‘Dearest!’ he took both her hands, and stood looking at her in the firelight, with a countenance full of tenderness—a mournful tenderness—as if he were saddened by the thought of parting. ‘You are not angry with me for leaving you for a few weeks?’

‘Angry, when you are told the change is necessary for your health! How could you think me so selfish? Let me look at you. Yes; you are looking ill—pale and wan. Gerald, you have been ill, seriously ill, perhaps, since you left here, and you would not tell me for fear of alarming me. I am sure that it is so. Your letters were so hurried, so different from——’

‘My dear girl, you are mistaken. I told you the exact truth about myself when I owned to feeling mopish and depressed. I have had no actual illness; but I feel that a run across the Atlantic will revive and invigorate me.’

‘And it is quite right of you to go, if the voyage is not dangerous in this weather.’

‘Dear love, it is no more dangerous than calling a hansom to take one down Regent Street. The hansom may come to grief somehow, or there may be a gale between Liverpool and New York; but there is hardly any safer way a man can dispose of his life than to trust himself to a Cunard steamer.’

‘And do you think you will enjoy yourself in Canada?’

‘As much as I can enjoy myself anywhere, away from you. According to my friend Loftus, a Canadian winter is the acme of bliss; and if the winter should break up early, we may contrive to get a little run into the Hudson’s Bay country, and a glimpse of the Rockies before we come home.’

‘That sounds as if you meant to stay rather a long time,’ said Lina, with a touch of anxiety.

‘Indeed, no, dear. At latest I shall be with you before April is half over. Think what is to happen early in May.’

‘My coming of age. It seems so absurd to come of age at twenty-five, when one is almost an old woman.’

‘An old woman verily. A girl as fresh in youthful purity as if her cheek still wore the baby-bloom of seventeen summers! But have you forgotten something else that is to happen next May, Lina—our wedding?’

‘There has been nothing fixed about that,’ faltered Madoline ‘except, perhaps, that it is to be this year. My father has not said a word as to the actual time, and I know that he wants to keep me as long as he can.’

‘And I think you know that I want to have you at the Abbey as soon as I can. I am getting to loathe that big house, for lack of your presence to transform it into a home. We must be married in May, dearest. Remember we have only been waiting for you to come of age, and for all dry-as-dust questions of property to be settled. If we had been Darby the gardener and Joan the dairymaid, we should have been married four years ago, shouldn’t we, Lina?’

‘I suppose so,’ she answered, blushing, and taking refuge in the occupation of pouring out the tea, adjusting the egg-shell cups and saucers, the slender little rat-tailed spoons, all the dainty affectations and quaintnesses of high-art tea-drinking, ‘Darby and Joan are always so imprudent.’

‘Yes, but they are often happy. They marry foolishly, and perhaps starve a little after marriage; but they wed while the first bloom is on their love. Come, Lina, say that we shall be married early in May.’

‘I can promise nothing without my father’s consent. My aunt was suggesting that Daphne and I should be married on the same day.’

‘Did she?’ asked Gerald, his head bent, his hands engaged with his cup and saucer. ‘Two victims led to the altar: Iphigenia and Polyxena, and no likelihood of a hind being substituted for either young lady. Don’t you think there is a dash of vulgarity in a double wedding: a desire to make the very most of the event, to intensify the parade: two sets of bridesmaids, two displays of presents, two honeymoon departures: all the tawdriness and show and artificiality of a modern wedding exaggerated by duplication?’

‘I think that is rather Daphne’s idea. She begs that she and Edgar may be married very quietly, without fuss of any kind.’

‘I had no idea that Daphne was capable of such wisdom. I thought she would have asked for four-and-twenty bridesmaids,’ said Gerald with a cynical laugh.

‘She is much more sensible than you have ever given her credit for being,’ answered Madoline, a little offended at his tone. ‘She has behaved sweetly since her engagement.’

‘And—you—think—she—is—happy?’

How slowly he said this, stirring his tea all the while, as if the words were spoken mechanically, his thoughts being wide-away from them.

‘Do you suppose I should be satisfied if I were not sure, in my own mind, of her happiness? How can she fail to be happy? She is engaged to a thoroughly good man, who adores her; and if—if she is not quite as deep in love with him as he is with her, there is no doubt that her affection for him will increase and strengthen every day.’

‘Naturally. He will flatter and fool her till—were it only from sheer vanity—she will ultimately find him necessary to her existence. I knew he had only to persevere in order to win her. I told him so last summer.’

‘And Edgar is grateful to you for encouraging him when he was inclined to despair. He told me so yesterday. But do not let us talk of Daphne all the time. I want you to tell me about yourself. How good it was of you to come down to say good-bye!’

‘Could I do less, dearest? Good-byes are always painful, even when the parting is to be of the briefest, as in this case: but from the moment I knew you wished to see me it was my duty to come.’

‘Can you stay here to-night?’

‘I can stay exactly ten minutes, and no more. I have to catch the half-past six express.’

‘You are not going to the Abbey?’

‘No. I have written to my steward, and I am such a _roi fainéant_ at the best of times that my coming or going makes very little difference. I leave the new hot-houses under your care and governance, subject to MacCloskie, who governs you. All their contents are to be for the separate use and maintenance of your rooms while I am away.’

‘I shall be smothered with flowers.’

‘May there be never a thorn among them! And now, love, adieu. This time to-morrow I shall be steaming out of the Mersey. I have to see that Dickson has not come to grief in the preparation of my outfit. A man wants a world of strange things for Canada, according to the outfitters. My own love, good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, Gerald dearest, best, good-bye. Every wind that blows will make me miserable while you are on the sea. You’ll let me know directly you arrive, won’t you? You’ll put me out of my misery as soon as you can?’

‘I’ll cable the hour I land.’

‘That will be so good of you,’ she said, going with him to the door.

How calm and clear the frosty evening looked! how vivid the steely stars up yonder above the feathery tree-tops! how peaceful and happy all the world!

‘God bless you, dear one!’ said each to each, as they kissed their parting kiss—both hearts so heavy; but one so pure and free from guile; the other so weighed down by secret cares that could not be told.