CHAPTER XXVI.

‘FORBID A LOVE AND IT IS TEN TIMES SO WODE.’

Sir Vernon showed himself especially gracious to his younger daughter and her lover next morning at breakfast, when the itinerary of their holiday was discussed. So far as his own pleasure was concerned, he would have liked nothing better than to go straight to Montreux, where a delightful villa, with a garden sloping to the lake, had been secured for his accommodation; but he did not forget that Daphne had seen nothing of Switzerland, and Edgar very little; and for their sakes he was ready to make considerable sacrifices.

‘I am a wretched traveller, and I detest sight-seeing,’ he said languidly; ‘but I don’t wish to spoil other people’s pleasure. Suppose we make a little round before we settle down in our villa by the lake? Let us go to Fribourg and hear the organ, and then on to Berne for a day or so, and then to Interlaken. There I can rest quietly in my own rooms at the Jungfraublich, while you young people drive to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, and do any little climbing in a mild way which is compatible with the safety of your necks and bones generally; and then we can come straight back to Montreux. How would you like that, Madoline?’

‘Very much, indeed, dear father. It will be a delight to me to go over the old ground with Daphne.’

‘And you, Goring?’

‘I am Lina’s slave—her shadow; true as the dial to the sun.’

‘Papa,’ said Daphne, drawing her chair nearer to him, and with a coaxing look which no man but a father could have resisted, ‘it is so good of you to propose such a charming trip, and I shall enjoy it immensely; but would it be any way possible, now we are so near, to go to Chamounix, and get to the top of Mont Blanc; or, at least, part of the way up?’

‘No, my dear. Quite out of the question.’

‘But it is only a drive to Chamounix; and there is a diligence goes every morning.’

‘Edgar can take you there next year, when you are married. I am too old for a drive of fourteen hours’ duration.’

Daphne looked miserable. Mont Blanc was the central point of all her desires. It irked her to be so near and not to reach the world-famous mountain. She looked at Edgar doubtfully. No; she could not realise the idea of coming back next year, alone with him. She had never been able to project her mind into that future in which they two should be one, bound by a sacred yoke, doomed to be for ever together. From any casual glance at such a future her mind always shrank away shudderingly, as from the dim memory of a bad dream.

‘I don’t believe I shall ever come to Switzerland again,’ she said discontentedly, when breakfast was finished and her father had retired to his own room to write letters.

Madoline was sitting at work by an open window, silken water-lilies and bulrushes developing themselves gradually under her skilful fingers, on a ground of sage-green cloth. The tables were covered with books and miniature stands; the room was bright with flowers, and looked almost as home-like as South Hill; but before the evening Mowser and Jinman would have packed all these things, and despatched the greater part of them to Montreux, while the travellers went on to Fribourg in light marching order, which in this case meant about three portmanteaux per head. Some books must, of course, be taken, and drawing materials, and fancy-work, and a writing-desk or two, and camp-stools for sitting about in romantic places, and a good deal more, which made a formidable array of luggage by-and-by when Sir Vernon and his family were assembled at the railway-station.

‘Do you mean to tell me that we require all these things for a week or ten days?’ he said, scowling at the patient Jinman, who was standing on guard over a compact pyramid of trunks, portmanteaux, and Gladstone bags, umbrellas, sunshades, and heterogeneous etceteras.

‘I don’t think there’s anything could have been dispensed with, Sir Vernon,’ answered Jinman. ‘The books and ornaments and most of the heavy luggage have gone on to Montrooks.’

‘Great Heaven, in the face of this would any man marry, and make himself responsible for feminine existences!’ exclaimed Sir Vernon, shrugging his shoulders disgustedly as he turned away; yet Jinman could have informed him that his own share of the luggage was quite equal to that of his daughters.

They were all established presently in a German railway compartment: Sir Vernon seated in his corner and absorbed in an English newspaper, whose ample sheet excluded every glimpse of lake and wooded slopes, Alps and Jura; while Edgar smoked on the platform outside, and Daphne stood at the open door, gazing at the changing landscape: the smiling lake below; the dark slopes and mountain range on the farther shore; the villages nestling in the valley on this nearer bank; the cosy little homesteads and bright gardens; the vine-clad terraces, divided by low gray walls; the quaint old churches, with tiled roofs and square clock-towers; and yonder, far away at the end of the lake, Chillon’s gloomy fortress, which she recognised with a cry of delight, having seen its presentment in engravings and photographs, and knowing Byron’s poem by heart.

She gave a sigh of regret as a curve of the line carried her away from the azure lake and its panorama of hills.

‘I can hardly bear to leave it,’ she said; ‘but, thank Heaven, we are coming back to it soon.’

‘You are reconciled to Switzerland, then, in spite of your disillusions,’ said Gerald.

‘Reconciled! I should like to live and die here.’

‘What! abandon your beloved Shakespeare’s country?’

‘I am heartily sick of Shakespeare’s country.’

‘Daphne,’ cried Edgar, with a look of deepest mortification, ‘that is a bad look-out for poor old Hawksyard.’

‘Hawksyard is a dear old place, but I don’t want to be reminded of it—or of anything else in Warwickshire—now I am in Switzerland. I want to soar, if I can. I am in Byron’s country. He lived there,’ pointing downwards to where they had left Lausanne and Ouchy. ‘He wrote some of his loveliest poetry there; his genius is for ever associated with these scenes. Sad, unsatisfied spirit!’

Her eyes filled with sudden tears at the thought of that disappointed life, seeking solace from all that is loveliest in Nature, shunning the beaten tracks, yet never finding peace.

‘If you are very good,’ said Gerald gravely, ‘within the next ten minutes I will show you something you are anxious to see.’

‘What is that?’

‘Mont Blanc. Get your glass ready.’

‘Why, we left him behind us, across the lake, sulkily veiled in impenetrable cloud.’

‘He will show himself more amiable presently. You will get a good view of him in five minutes if you focus your glass properly and don’t chatter.’

Daphne spoke never a word, but stood motionless, with her landscape glass glued to her eyes, and waited, as for a divine revelation.

Yes, yonder it arose, white and cloudlike on the edge of the blue summer sky, the mighty snow-clad range, of which Mont Blanc is but a detail—the grand inaccessible region; mountain-top beyond mountain-top; peak above peak; everlasting, untrodden hills, producing nothing, pasturing nothing, stupendous and ghastly as the polar seas; a world apart from all other worlds; a spectacle to awe the dullest soul and thrill the coldest heart; a revelation of Nature’s Titanic beauty.

‘Oh, it must have been such mountains as those that the Titans hurled about them when they fought with Zeus,’ cried Daphne when she had gazed and gazed till the last gleam of those white crests vanished in the distance.

‘Do you feel better?’ asked Gerald, with his mocking smile.

‘I feel as if I had seen the world that we are to know after death,’ answered Daphne.

‘Would you be surprised to hear that these excrescences, which you think so grand, are but modern incidents in the history of the earth? Time was when Switzerland was one vast ice-field: nay, if we can believe Lyell, the clay of London was in course of accumulation as marine mud at a time when the ocean still rolled its waves over the space now occupied by some of the loftiest Alpine summits.’

‘Please don’t be instructive,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I want to know nothing about them, except that they are there, and that they are beautiful.’

At Fribourg they drove down the narrow street to the Zähringer Hof, the hotel by the suspension bridge, where from a balcony they looked down a sheer descent to the river, and to the roofs and chimneys of the old town lying in a cleft of the hills, while yonder, suspended in mid-air, a mere spider-thread across the sky, stretched the upper and loftier bridge. It was nearly dinner-time when they arrived. There were dark clouds on the horizon, and only gleams of watery sunshine behind the gray old watch-towers on the crest of the hill across the river.

‘I’m afraid we are going to have another storm,’ said Gerald, lounging against the embrasure of a window, and looking as if Fribourg, with its modern suspension bridges and mediæval watch-towers, were just the most uninteresting place in the world.

He looked thoroughly worn-out and weary, as if he had been labouring hard with body and mind all day, instead of lolling in a railway-carriage, staring listlessly at the landscape. Sir Vernon, the ostensible invalid, was not more languid.

‘Let it come down,’ cried Daphne; ‘but whatever the weather may be, I shall go and hear the organ after dinner. There is the bell for vespers. How nice it is to find oneself in a Roman Catholic town, with vesper-bells ringing, and dear old priests and nuns and all sorts of picturesque creatures walking about the streets!’

They dined in their own sitting-room, Sir Vernon having a good old English dislike to any intercourse with unintroduced fellow-creatures. To sit at a _table-d’hôte_ with the Tom, Dick, and Harry of cockney Switzerland would have been abhorrent to him.

‘We may get a worse dinner in our own room,’ he said, looking doubtfully at some unknown spoon-food offered to him by way of an _entrée_, ‘but we avoid rubbing shoulders with the kind of people who travel nowadays.’

‘Are they so much worse than the people who used to travel——’

‘When I was a young man? Yes, Daphne, quite a different race,’ said Sir Vernon with authority. ‘Gerald was right. We are in for another storm.’

A quiver of livid light, a crash of thunder, and black darkness yonder behind the hills gave emphasis to his statement. Daphne flew to the window to look at the bridges and the towers, which were almost expunged from the face of creation by a thick blinding rain. A waggon was crawling across the nearer and lower bridge, and the whole fabric rocked under its weight.

‘Nobody will dream of going to the cathedral to-night,’ said Sir Vernon.

But the waiter in attendance declared that everyone would go. There would be a concert on the great organ from eight to nine. The cathedral was close by; there would be a carriage in waiting at ten minutes to eight to convey those guests who graciously deigned to patronise the concert, for which the waiter was privileged to dispose of tickets. Furthermore, the storm would assuredly abate before long. It was but a thunder-shower.

Daphne stood at the window watching the thunder-shower, which seemed to be drowning the lower town and flooding the river. The rain came down in torrents; the thunder roared and bellowed over the hills; the chainwork of the suspension bridge creaked and groaned.

Sir Vernon protested that the storm made him nervous, and retired to his room, leaving the young people to do as they pleased.

They sat in the stormy dusk sipping their coffee, ready to put on their hats and be off the minute the carriage was announced. Daphne wore a gown of some creamy-white material, which gave her a ghostly look in the gloom.

‘You have heard this famous organ, Lina,’ she said. ‘Is it really worth stopping at Fribourg on purpose to hear it when, with a little more time and trouble, one might get half-way up Mont Blanc?’

‘It is a wonderful organ; but you will be able to judge for yourself in a few minutes.’

‘We should have been getting near Chamounix by this time, if we had started by this morning’s diligence,’ sighed Daphne.

‘Restless, unsatisfied soul! still harping on the mountain,’ said Gerald.

‘I have seen him, at least,’ exclaimed Daphne, clasping her hands; ‘that is something. Far, far away, like a glimpse of another world: but still I have seen him. Shall we see him again to-morrow, do you think, on the way to Interlaken?’

‘I’m afraid not. To-morrow I shall have the honour to introduce you to the Jungfrau.’

‘I don t care a straw for her,’ exclaimed Daphne contemptuously.

‘What, not for Manfred’s mountain? Can you, who have so devoured your Byron, be indifferent to the background of that gloomy individual’s existence?’

‘There is an interest in that, certainly; but Mont Blanc is my beau-ideal of a mountain.’

Here the carriage was announced. The two girls put on their hats and wraps, soft China crape and gray camel’s-hair shawls, and hurried down to the hall. The rain was still falling, the thunder still grumbling amidst distant hills. They crowded into the fly, and were jolted over stony and uneven ways to the cathedral.

They went in at a narrow little door to a great dark church, with solitary lamps dotted about here and there in the gloom. Everything had a mysterious look; the richly-carved oak, the shrines, the chapels, the shrouded altar far away at the end.

There were, perhaps, a hundred people sitting about in high narrow pews with massive carved oak seats, sitting here and there in a scattered way, all wrapped in shadow and gloom, silent, overawed, expectant.

Madoline and Daphne walked side by side up the long nave, between two lines of oaken seats, the two men following; then midway between the organ and the altar, they went into one of the pews—Lina first, then Daphne. She had been sitting there a minute or so looking about the dim dark church before she discovered that it was Gerald, and not Edgar, who sat by her side. Edgar had taken the seat behind them.

They sat there for five or ten minutes, hushed and listening; the rain splashing on the roof, the distant thunder reverberating; nothing to be seen in the vast building but those yellow lamps gleaming here and there, and patching with faint light an isolated statue, or a pulpit, or a clustered column.

At last, when the silence, broken only by faintest whisperings among the expectant audience, had endured for what seemed a weary while, the organ pealed forth in a grand burst of sound, which swept along the arched roof, and filled the church with music. Then after that crash of mighty chords came tenderest phrases, a flowing melody that sank low as a whisper, and then that strain of almost supernatural likeness to the human voice rose up above the legato arpeggios of the accompaniment, and thrilled every ear—tender, angelic, a divine whisper of love and melancholy. Daphne had risen from her seat, and stood with her arms resting upon the massive woodwork in front of her, gazing up through the darkness towards that glimmering spot of light yonder, near the arch of the roof, which showed where the organ was, far away, mysterious.

Oh, that heavenly voice, with its soul-moving sadness! A rush of tears streamed from her eyes; she stretched out her hands unconsciously, as if yearning for some human touch to break the mournful spell of that divine sorrow, and the hand nearest Gerald was clasped in the darkness; clasped by a warm strong hand which held it and kept it—kept it without a struggle, for, alas! it lay unresistingly in his. They drew a little nearer to each other involuntarily, shudderingly happy—with the deep sense of an unpardonable guilt, a shameful treason; yet forgetting everything except that vain foolish love against which both had fought long and valiantly.

A peal of thunder on the organ within, an answering peal from the storm without. The mimic tempest blended itself with heaven’s own artillery; and at the terrible sound those guilty creatures in the church let go each other’s hands. Daphne clasped hers before her face, and sank on her knees.

‘Pity me and help me, O God!’ she prayed, and looking up she saw just above her in a marble niche the image of the Mother of God; and in this moment of temptation and self-abandonment, it seemed to her a natural thing that women should ask a woman’s mediation in their hour of sorrow.

A funeral hymn of Sebastian Bach’s pealed from the organ with an awful grandeur which thrilled every listener; and then came a silence, and after that the low murmur of the storm dying away in the distance, from the overture to ‘William Tell,’ the flutelike tones of the ‘_Ranz des Vaches_,’ telling of pastoral valleys and solemn mountains, a life of Arcadian innocence and peace.

With those lighter, gayer strains the concert ended, and they all went slowly and silently out of the church. The storm was over, and the moon was breaking through dark clouds.

‘Don’t let us go back in that jingling abomination of a fly,’ said Gerald, striding on over the wet pavement, leaving the two girls to follow with Edgar Turchill.

They picked their way through the streets. The town was all dark and quiet, save for a glimmering yellow candle here and there under a gable; there was none of the brightness and out-of-door life of a French town. A couple of omnibuses and a fly or two carried off the people who had been in the cathedral to their several hotels.

Gerald Goring was waiting for them in front of the Zähringer.

‘What made you hurry on so?’ asked Madoline wonderingly.

‘Did I hurry? I think it was you others who crawled. That music irritated my nerves a little. It is full of studied effects; the organist has trained himself to play upon the emotions of his audience, now soaring to the seraph choir, now going down to the depths of Pandemonium. The thunderstorm and the organ together would have been too much for anybody. Oh, pray don’t go indoors yet,’ he exclaimed, as they were all three moving towards the entrance of the hotel. ‘Let us go for a walk on the bridge. Don’t you know that after the organ the great feature of Fribourg is the bridge?’

‘If we are to be on our way to Interlaken to-morrow, we had better see all we can to-night,’ said the practical Edgar.

They went on the bridge; Gerald still walking ahead, and keeping in some wise aloof from them. Daphne had not spoken since they left the cathedral.

‘Had the music an unpleasant effect upon you too, dear, that you are so silent?’ Madoline asked, as they two walked side by side.

‘It was only too beautiful,’ answered Daphne.

‘And you are glad we came here.’

‘No. Yes. I would rather have been half-way up Mont Blanc.’

‘Poor child! But that is a pleasure in reserve for another holiday. I know Edgar will take you wherever you like to go.’

‘Do you think so? What a dance I shall lead him!’ cried Daphne with a mocking laugh. ‘I shall not be content with Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn. I shall insist upon seeing all the extinct volcanoes, the wonderful fiery mountains that have burned themselves out. Cotopaxi is about the mildest hill he will be invited to climb.’

Mr. Turchill had dropped into the background, and was quietly enjoying his cigar, unaware of the pleasures in store for him. Gerald walked ever so far ahead, cigarless, a gloomy figure.

‘I’m afraid either the thunder or the organ has given Gerald one of his nervous headaches,’ said Lina anxiously.

The moon showed herself fitfully athwart hurrying clouds, now lighting up hills and watch-towers, river and rugged ravine, with a wild Salvator-Rosa-esque effect, now hidden altogether, and leaving all in gloom. Midway upon the bridge Madoline and Daphne stopped, and stood looking down into the hollow below, where the quiet sleeping town was dimly visible, with its quaint street lamps, and rare gleams of light from narrow casements, and stony ways shining after the rain. Here, when they had stood for some minutes, Edgar joined them, having finished his cigar, and he and Madoline began to talk about the place; he questioning, she expounding its features.

While they two were talking, Gerald came slowly back, and stood by Daphne’s side, a few paces apart from the others. She said never a word. They stood side by side for some minutes like statues. She was wondering if he could hear the passionate throbbing of her heart, which would not be stilled.

They were standing thus, as if bound by a spell, when a heavy waggon came creeping slowly along the bridge, making the spot on which they stood tremble and sway under their feet.

‘We are hanging by a thread between time and eternity,’ said Gerald, drawing closer to her. ‘What if the thread were to snap, and drop us, hand in hand, into the black gulf of death?’

She did not shudder at the thought, but turned and looked at him in the moonlight, with a strange sad smile.

‘Would you be glad?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes,’ she answered, between a sigh and a whisper, still looking up at him with that pathetic smile; and his eyes looked fondly down into hers, losing themselves in the depth of a fathomless mystery.

‘Do you know that this bridge is the second longest in the world, three hundred yards long, and a hundred and sixty-eight feet above the river?’ asked Edgar Turchill’s matter-of-fact tones, as he walked towards them, cheerful, contented, pleased with himself and all the world.

‘For God’s sake spare us a gush of second-hand Baedeker,’ cried Gerald with intense irritation. ‘As if any living soul, except a Cook’s tourist, could care how many feet or how many yards long a bridge is. It is the effect one values, the general idea that one is on that very bridge of Al Sirât, laid over the midst of hell, and finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which the righteous must pass to Mahomet’s paradise. It is the notion of man’s audacity in making perilous ways that is really delightful. When that waggon went across just now, I thought the last straw was being laid, and we were all going.’

Edgar came round to Daphne with a calm air of proprietorship which made her shudder.

‘What an interesting evening we have had!’ he said.

‘Very.’

‘You look pale and tired. Has it all been too much for you?’ he asked tenderly.

‘I think that organ would be too much for anyone.’

‘Do you know—I am no judge, and you mustn’t laugh at me for expressing an opinion—I hardly thought it equal, as an organ, to the one at St. Paul’s. I took my mother there once when all the charity children were assembled. I can’t tell you what a grand sight it was, the dome crowded with their fresh young faces.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake don’t talk about it,’ cried Daphne, almost hysterically. ‘To compare that dark solemn cathedral, with just a few people dotted about among the shadows, and the thunder pealing over the roof—to compare such a scene with that pagan St. Paul’s, and the dome crowded with rosy-cheeked children, all white caps and pinafores and yellow worsted stockings!’

‘I was talking of the organ,’ replied Edgar, somewhat offended.

‘Then why introduce the charity children? Oh, please let my thoughts dwell upon that dark church to-night; let me remember the music, the darkness.’

‘Daphne, dearest one, you are crying,’ exclaimed Edgar, startled at the sound of a stifled sob.

‘Who would not cry at such music?’

‘But so long after. You are nervous and hysterical.’

‘I am only tired. Please don’t worry me,’ retorted Daphne fretfully, wrapping herself tightly in her soft gray shawl, and quickening her pace.

She said not a word more till they were inside the Zähringer Hof, when she wished the other three a brief good-night, declaring herself utterly worn out, and tripped lightly upstairs to her room on the second storey. Madoline’s room was next her sister’s, and when she went up a few minutes later, and knocked at the door of communication between the two rooms, Daphne excused herself from opening it.

‘I’m dreadfully sleepy, dear,’ she said; ‘please leave me alone for to-night!’

‘Willingly, dearest, if you are sure you are not ill.’

‘Not the least in the world.’

‘And there is nothing you want Mowser to do for you?’

‘Nothing. She has unpacked my things. I have everything I want.’

‘Then good-night, and God bless you.’

‘Good-night,’ answered Daphne, but invoked no blessing upon the sister she loved so well. Prayer breathed from such a guilty heart would be almost blasphemy.

She walked up and down the room for a long time, up and down, up and down, her soul filled with ineffable joy. Yes; guilty, treacherous, vile, ungrateful as she knew herself to be, she could not stifle that wild sense of happiness, the rapture of knowing herself beloved by the man she loved. Nothing but evil could ever come out of that love; nothing but struggle, and sorrow, and pain; yet it was deep delight to have been loved, the one perfect joy that was possible for her upon this earth. To have missed it would have been never to have lived: and now death might come when it would. She had lived her life; she had had her day.

That this love was a thing of guilt, a scorpion to be crushed and trodden under her foot, she never questioned. Not for an instant did it enter into her mind that she could profit by Gerald Goring’s inconstancy, that she was to take to herself the lover whose faith had been violated by to-night’s revelation. Never did it occur to her that any alteration in his future or hers was involved in the admissions which each had made to the other.

‘He knows that I love him; he knows how weak and vile I am,’ she said to herself. ‘If Lina were to know too? If she were to see me with the mask off my face, what a monster of perfidy and ingratitude I should seem to her! Oh, I should die of shame. I could never endure the discovery. And to make her unhappy—her to whom I owe so much, my dearest, my best, the guardian angel of my life. Oh, Lina, Lina, if you knew!’

She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, and, with hands clasped above her head, breathed her passionate prayer:

‘Let me die to-night. Oh, Thou who knowest how sinful and weak I am, let me die to-night!’