CHAPTER IV.

‘CURTEIS SHE WAS, DISCRETE, AND DEBONAIRE.’

The world was nine months older since Daphne picnicked in the park at Fontainebleau, and the scenery of her life was changed to a fair English landscape in one of the fairest of English shires. Here, in fertile Warwickshire, within three miles of Shakespeare’s birthplace, within a drive of Warwick and Leamington, and Kenilworth, and Stoneleigh Park, to say nothing of ribbon-weaving, watch-making Coventry, Daphne wandered in happy idleness through the low-lying water-meadows, which bounded the sloping lawns and shady gardens of South Hill.

South Hill was a gentle elevation in the midst of a pastoral valley. A long, low, white house, which had been added to from time to time, crowned the grassy slope, and from its balconied windows commanded one of the prettiest views in England—a landscape purely pastoral and rustic; low meadows through which the Avon wound his silvery way between sedgy banks, with here a willowy islet, and there a flowery creek. On one side the distant roofs and gables and tall spire of Stratford, seen above intervening wood and water; on the other a gentle undulating landscape, bounded by a range of hills purple with distance.

It was not an old house. There was nothing historical about it; though South Hill, with between three and four hundred acres, had belonged to Sir Vernon Lawford’s family since the reign of Elizabeth. There had been an ancient mansion; but the ancient mansion, being an unhealthy barrack of small low rooms, and requiring the expenditure of five thousand pounds to make it healthy and habitable, Sir Vernon’s father had conceived the idea that he could make a better use of his money if he pulled down the old house and built himself a new one: whereupon the venerable pile was demolished, much to the disgust of archæologists, and an Italian villa rose from its ashes: a house with wide French windows opening into broad verandahs, delicious places in which to waste a summer morning, or the idle after-dinner hour watching the sunset. All the best rooms at South Hill faced the south-west, and the sunsets there seemed to Madoline Lawford more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. It was a house of the simplest form, built for ease and comfort rather than for architectural display. There were long cool corridors, lofty rooms below and above stairs, a roomy hall, a broad shallow staircase, and at one end of the house a spacious conservatory which had been added by Sir Vernon soon after his marriage. This conservatory was the great feature of South Hill. It was a lofty stone building, with a double flight of marble steps descending from the drawing-room to the billiard-room below. Thus drawing-room and billiard-room both commanded a full view of the conservatory through wide glass doors.

There were melancholy associations for Sir Vernon Lawford in this wing which he had added to South Hill. He had built it to give pleasure to his first wife, an heiress, and the most amiable of women: but before the building was finished the first Lady Lawford was in her grave, leaving a baby girl of two months old behind her. The widower grieved intensely; but he proved no exception to the general rule that the more intense the sorrow of the bereaved the more speedily does he or she seek consolation in new ties. Sir Vernon married again within two years of his wife’s death; and, this time, instead of giving satisfaction to the county by choosing one of the best born and wealthiest ladies within its length and breadth, he picked up his wife somewhere on the Continent—a fact which in the opinion of the county was much in her disfavour—and when he brought her home and introduced her to his friends, he was singularly reticent as to her previous history.

The county people shrugged their shoulders, and doubted if this marriage would end well. They had some years later the morbid satisfaction of being able to say that they had prophesied aright. The second Lady Lawford bore her husband two children, a boy and a girl, and within a year of her daughter’s birth mysteriously disappeared. She went to the South of France, it was said, for her lungs; though everybody’s latest recollection of her was of a young woman in the heyday of health, strength, and beauty; somewhat self-willed, very extravagant, inordinately fond of pleasure, and governing her husband with the insolence of conscious beauty.

From that southern journey she never came back. Nobody ever heard any explicit account of her death; yet after two or three years it became an accepted fact that she was dead. Sir Vernon travelled a good deal, while his maiden sister kept house for him at South Hill, and superintended the rearing of his children. Madoline, daughter and heiress of the first Lady Lawford, was brought up and educated at home. Loftus, the boy, went to a private tutor at Stratford, and thence to Rugby, where he fell ill and died. Daphne’s childhood and early girlhood were spent almost entirely at school. Only a week ago she was still at Asnières, grinding away at the everlasting prosy old books, reciting Lafontaine’s fables, droning out long singsong speeches from Athalie or Iphigénie, teasing poor patient Miss Toby, domineering over Martha Dibb. And now her education was supposed to be finished, and she was free—free to roam like a wild thing about the lovely grounds at South Hill, in the water-meadows where the daffodils grew in such rank luxuriance; and where, years ago, when she was a little child, and had crowned herself with a chaplet of those yellow flowers, scarcely brighter than her hair, a painter-friend of her father’s had called her Asphodel.

How well she remembered that sunny morning in early April—ages ago! Childhood seems so far off at seventeen. How distinctly she remembered the artist whose refined and gentle manners had won her childish heart! She had been so little praised at South Hill that her pulses thrilled with pleasure when her father’s friend smiled at her flower-crowned head and cried: ‘What a lovely picture! Look, Lawford, would not you like me to paint her just as she is at this moment, with her hair flying in the wind, and that background of rushes and blue water?’ But Sir Vernon turned on his heel with a curt half-muttered answer, and the two men walked on and left her, smoking their cigarettes as they went. She remembered how, in a blind childish fury, scarce knowing why she was angry, she tore the daffodil crown from her hair and trampled it under foot.

To the end of his visit the painter called her Asphodel, and one morning finding her alone in the garden, he carried her off to the billiard-room and made a sketch of her head with its loose tangled hair: a head which appeared next year on the line at the Royal Academy and was raved about by all artistic London.

And now it was early April again, and she was a girl in the fair dawn of womanhood, free to do what she liked with her life, and there were many things that she was beginning to understand, things not altogether pleasant to her womanly pride. She was beginning to perceive very clearly that her father did not love her, and was never likely to love her, that her presence in his home gave him no pleasure, that he simply endured her as part of the burden of life, while to her sister he gave love without stint or measure. True that he was by nature and habit selfish and self-indulgent, and that the love of such a man is at best hardly worth having. But Daphne would have been glad of her father’s love, were the affection of ever so poor a quality. His indifference chilled her soul. She had been accustomed to command affection; to be petted and praised and bowed down to for her pretty looks and pretty ways; to take a leading position with her schoolfellows, partly because she was Sir Vernon Lawford’s daughter, and partly for those subtle charms and graces which made her superior to the rank and file of school-girls.

Yet, though Sir Vernon was wanting in affection for his younger daughter, Daphne was not unloved at South Hill. Her sister Madoline loved her dearly, had so loved her ever since those unforgotten summer days when the grave girl of nine and the toddling two-year-old baby wandered hand-in-hand in shrubberies and gardens, and seemed to have the whole domain of South Hill to themselves, Sir Vernon and Lady Lawford being somewhere on the Continent, and the maiden aunt being a lady very much in request in the best society in the neighbourhood, and very willing to take the utmost enjoyment out of life, and to delegate her duties to nurses and maids. The love that had grown up in those days between the sisters had been in no wise lessened by severance. They were as devoted to each other now as they had been in the dawn of life: Madoline loving Daphne with a proud protecting love; Daphne looking up to Madoline with intense respect, and believing in her as the most perfect of women.

‘I’m afraid I shall never be able to leave off talking,’ said Daphne upon this particular April morning, when she had come in from a long ramble by the Avon, with her apron full of daffodils; ‘I seem to have such a world of things to tell you.’

‘Don’t put any check upon your eloquence, darling. You won’t tire me,’ said Madoline in her low gentle voice.

She had a very soft voice, and a slow calm way of speaking, which seemed to most people to be the true patrician tone. She spoke like a person who had never been in a hurry, and had never been in a passion.

The sisters were in Madoline’s morning-room, sometimes called the old drawing-room, as it had been the chief reception-room at South Hill before Sir Vernon built the west wing. It was a large airy room, painted white, with chintz draperies of the lightest and most delicate tints—apple-blossoms on a creamy ground; the furniture all of light woods; the china celadon or turquoise; but the chief beauty of the room, its hot-house flowers—tulips, gardenias, arums, hyacinths, pansies, grouped with exquisite taste on tables and in jardinières, on brackets and mantelpiece. The love of flowers was almost a passion with Madoline Lawford, and she was rich enough to indulge this inclination to her heart’s content. She had built a long line of hot-houses in one of the lower gardens, and kept a small regiment of gardeners and boys. She could afford to do this, and yet to be Lady Bountiful in all the district round about South Hill; so nobody ventured to blame her for the money she spent upon horticulture.

She was a very handsome woman—handsome in that perfectly regular style about which there can be no difference of opinion. Some might call her beauty cold, but all must own she was beautiful. Her profile was strongly marked, the forehead high and broad, the nose somewhat aquiline; the mouth proud, calm, resolute, yet infinitely sweet when she smiled; the eyes almost black, with long dark lashes, sculptured eyelids, and delicately-pencilled brows. She wore her hair as she might have worn it had she lived in the days of Pericles and Aspasia—simply drawn back from her forehead, and twisted in a heavy Greek knot at the back of her head; no fringed locks or fluffiness gave their factitious charm to her face. Her beauty was of that calm statuesque type which has nothing to do with chic, piquancy, dash, audacity, or any of those qualities which go such a long way in the composition of modern loveliness.

All her tastes were artistic; but her love of art showed itself rather in the details of daily life than in any actual achievement with brush or pencil. She worked exquisitely in crewels and silks, drew her own designs from natural flowers, and produced embroideries on linen or satin which were worthy to be hung in a picture-gallery. She had a truly feminine love of needlework, and was never idle—in this the very reverse of Daphne, who loved to loll at ease, looking lazily at the sky or the landscape, and making up her mind to be tremendously busy by-and-by Daphne was always beginning work, and never finishing anything; while every task undertaken by Madoline was carried on to completion. The very essence of her own character was completeness—fulfilling every duty to the uttermost, satisfying in fullest measure every demand which home or society could make upon her.

‘I’m sure you’ll be tired of me, Lina,’ protested Daphne, kneeling on the fender-stool, while Madoline sat at work in her accustomed place, with a Japanese bamboo table at her side for the accommodation of her crewels. ‘You can’t imagine what a capacity I have for talking.’

‘Then I must be very dull,’ murmured Madoline, smiling at her. ‘You have been home a week.’

‘Well, certainly, you have had some experience of me; but you might think my loquacity a temporary affliction, and that when I had said my say after nearly two years of separation—oh, Lina, how horrid it was spending all my holidays at Asnières!—I should subside into comparative silence. But I shall always have worlds to tell you. It is my nature to say everything that comes into my mind. That’s why I got on so well with Dibb.’

‘Was Dibb a dog, dear?’

‘A dog!’ cried Daphne, with a sparkling smile. ‘No, Dibb was my schoolfellow—a dear good thing—stupid, clumsy, innately vulgar, but devoted to me. “A poor thing, but mine own,” as Touchstone says. We were tremendous chums.’

‘I am sorry you should make a friend of any innately vulgar girl, Daphne dear,’ said Madoline gravely; ‘and don’t you think it rather vulgar to talk of your friend as Dibb?’

‘We all did it,’ answered Daphne with a shrug; ‘I was always called Lawford. It saves trouble, and sounds friendly. You talk about Disraeli and Gladstone; why not Dibb and Lawford?’

‘I think there’s a difference, Daphne. If you were very friendly with this Miss Dibb, why not speak of her by her Christian name?’

‘So be it, my dearest. In future she shall be Martha, to please you. She really is a good inoffensive soul. Her father keeps a big shop in Oxford Street; but the family live in a palace on Clapham Common, with gardens, and vineries, and pineries, and goodness knows what. When I call her vulgar it is because she and all her people are so proud of their money, and measure everything by the standard of money. Martha was very inquisitive about my means. She wanted to know whether I was rich or poor, and I really couldn’t inform her. Which am I, Lina?’

Daphne looked up at her sister as if it were a question about which she was slightly curious, but not a matter of supreme moment. A faint flush mounted to Madoline’s calm brow. The soft dark eyes looked tenderly at Daphne’s eager face.

‘Dearest, why trouble yourself about the money question? Have you ever felt the inconvenience of poverty?’

‘Never. You sent me everything I could possibly wish for; and I always had more pocket-money than any girl in the school, not excepting Martha; though she took care to inform me that her father could have allowed her ten times as much if he had chosen. No, dear; I don’t know what poverty means; but I should like to understand my own position very precisely, now that I am a woman, don’t you know? I am quite aware that you are an heiress; everybody at South Hill has taken pains to impress that fact upon my mind. Please, dear, what am I?’

‘Darling, papa is not a rich man, but he——’ Madoline paled a little as she spoke, knowing that South Hill had been settled on her mother, and her mother’s children after her, and that, in all probability, Sir Vernon had hardly any other property in the world. ‘He will provide for you, no doubt. And if he were unable to leave you much by-and-by, I have plenty for both.’

‘I understand,’ said Daphne, growing pale in her turn; ‘I am a pauper.’

‘Daphne!’

‘My mother had not a sixpence, I suppose; and that is why nobody ever speaks of her; and that is why there is not a portrait of her in this house, where she lived, and was admired, and loved. I was wrong to call Dibb vulgar for measuring all things by a money standard. It is other people’s measure, as well as hers.’

‘Daphne, how can you say such things?’

‘Didn’t I tell you that I say everything that comes into my head? Oh, Madoline, don’t for pity’s sake think that I envy you your wealth—you who have been so good to me, you who are all I have to love in this world! It is not the money I care for. I think I would just as soon be poor as rich, if I could be free to roam the world, like a man. But to live in a great house, waited on by an army of servants, and to know that I am nobody, of no account, a mere waif, the penniless daughter of a penniless mother—that wounds me to the quick.’

‘My dearest, my pet, what a false, foolish notion! Do you think anybody in this house values you less because I have a fortune tied to me by all manner of parchment deeds, and you have no particular settlement, and have only expectations from a not over-rich father? Do you think you are not admired for your grace and pretty looks, and that by-and-by there will not come the best substitute which modern life can give for the prince of our dear old fairy tales—a good husband, who will be wealthy enough to give my darling all she can desire in this world?’

‘I’m sure I shall hate him, whoever he may be,’ said Daphne, with a short, impatient sigh.

Madoline looked at her earnestly, with the tender motherly look which came naturally to the beautiful face when the elder sister looked at the younger. She had put aside her crewel-work at the beginning of this conversation, and had given all her attention to Daphne.

‘Why do you say that, dearest?’ she asked gravely.

‘Oh, I don’t know, really. But I’m sure I shall never marry.’

‘Isn’t it rather early to make up your mind on that point?’

‘Why should it be? Hasn’t one a mind and a heart at seventeen as well as at seven-and-twenty? I should like well enough to have a very rich husband by-and-by, so that, instead of being Daphne, the pauper, I might be Mrs. Somebody, with ever so much a year settled upon me for ever and ever. But I don’t believe I shall ever see anybody I shall be able to care for.’

‘I hope, darling, you haven’t taken it into your foolish head that you care for some one already. School-girls are so silly.’

‘And generally fall in love with the dancing-master,’ said Daphne, with a laugh. ‘I think I tried rather hard to do that, but I couldn’t succeed. The poor man wore a wig; a dreadfully natural, dreadfully curly wig; like the pictures of Lord Byron. No, Lina; I pledge you my word that no dancing-master’s image occupies my breast.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ answered Madoline. ‘I hope there is no one else.’

Daphne blushed rosy red. She took a gardenia from the low glass vase on her sister’s work-table, where the white waxen flowers were clustered in the centre of a circle of purple pansies, and began to pick the petals off slowly, one by one.

‘He loves me—loves me not,’ she whispered softly, smiling all the while at her own foolishness, till the smile faded slowly at sight of the barren stem.

‘Loves me not,’ she sighed. ‘You see, Fate is against me, Lina. I am doomed to die unmarried.’

‘Daphne, do you mean that there is someone?’ faltered Madoline, more in earnest than it might seem needful to be with a creature so utterly childlike.

‘There was a man once in a wood,’ said Daphne, with crimson cheeks and downcast eyelids, yet with an arch smile curling her lips all the while. ‘There was a man whom Dibb—I beg your pardon, Martha—and I once met in a wood in our holidays—papa would have me spend my holidays at school, you see—and I have thought since, sometimes—mere idle fancy, no doubt—that he is the only man I should ever care to marry; and that is impossible, for he is engaged to someone else. So you see I am fated to die a spinster.’

‘Daphne, what do you mean? A man whom you met in a wood, and he was engaged—and——! You don’t mean that you and your friend Miss Dibb made the acquaintance of a strange man whom you met when you were out walking,’ exclaimed Madoline, aghast at the idea. ‘Surely you were too well looked after for that! You never went out walking alone, did you? I thought Frenchwomen were so extremely particular.’

‘Of course they are,’ replied Daphne, laughing. ‘I was only drawing on my imagination, dearest, just to see that solemn face of yours. It was worth the trouble. No, Lina dear, there is no one. My heart is as free as my shuttlecock, when I send it flying over the roof scaring the swallows. And now, let us talk about your dear self. I want you to tell me all about Mr. Goring; about Gerald. I suppose I may call him by his christian name, as he is to be my brother-in-law by-and-by.’

‘Your brother, dear.’

‘Thank you, Lina. That sounds ever so much nicer. I am so short of relations. Then I shall always call him Gerald. What a pretty name!’

‘He was called after his mother, Lady Geraldine.’

‘I see. She represented the patrician half of his family, and his father the plebeian half, I believe? The father was a Dibb, was he not—a money-grubber?’

‘His father was a very worthy man, who rose from the ranks, and made his fortune as a contractor.’

‘And Lady Geraldine married him for the sake of his worthiness; and you and Gerald are going to spend his money.’

‘Mr. Goring and his wife were a very united couple, I believe, Daphne. There is no reason why you should laugh at them.’

‘Except my natural malice, which makes me inclined to ridicule good people. You should have said that, Madoline; for you look as if you meant it. Was the contractor’s name always Goring?’

‘No; he was originally a Mr. Giles, but he changed his name soon after his marriage, and took the name of his wife’s maternal grandfather, a Warwickshire squire.’

‘What a clever way of hooking himself on to the landed gentry!’ said Daphne. ‘And now, please tell me all about Gerald. Is he very nice?’

‘You may suppose that I think him so,’ answered Madoline, going on with the fashioning of a water-lily on a ground of soft gray cloth. ‘I can hardly trust myself to praise him, for fear I should say too much.’

‘How is it that I have seen no photograph of him? I expected to see half-a-dozen portraits of him in this room alone; but I suppose you have an album crammed with his photos somewhere under lock and key.’

‘He has not been photographed since he was a school-boy. He detests photography; and though he has often promised me that he would sacrifice his own feelings so far as to be photographed, he has never kept his word.’

‘That is very bad of him,’ said Daphne. ‘I am bursting with curiosity about his looks. But—perhaps,’ she faltered, with a deprecating air, ‘the poor thing is rather plain, and that is why he does not care to be photographed.’

‘No,’ replied Madoline, with her gentle smile; ‘I do not think his worst enemy could call him plain—not that I should love him less if he were the plainest of mankind.’

‘Yes, you would,’ exclaimed Daphne, with conviction. ‘It is all very well to talk about loving a man for his mind, or his heart, and all that kind of thing. You wouldn’t love a man with a potato-nose or a pimply complexion, if he were morally the most perfect creature in the universe. I am very glad my future brother is handsome.’

‘That is a matter of opinion—I don’t know your idea of a handsome man.’

‘Let me see,’ paid Daphne, clasping her bands above her head, in a charmingly listless attitude, and giving herself up to thought. ‘My idea of good looks in a man? The subject requires deliberation. What do you say to a pale complexion, inclining to sallowness; dreamy eyes, under dark straight brows; forehead low, yet broad enough to give room for plenty of brains; mouth grave, and even mournful in expression, except when he smiles—the whole face must light up like a god’s when he smiles; hair darkest brown, short, straight, silky?’

‘One would think you had seen Mr. Goring, and were describing him,’ said Madoline.

‘What, Lina, is he like that?’

‘It is so difficult to realise a description, but really yours might do for Gerald. Yet, I daresay, the image in your mind is totally different from that in mine.’

‘No doubt,’ answered Daphne, and then, with a half-breathed sigh, she quoted her favourite Tennyson. ‘No two dreams are alike.’

‘You will be able to judge for yourself before long,’ said Madoline; ‘Gerald is coming home in the autumn.’

‘The autumn!’ cried Daphne. ‘That is an age to wait. And then, I suppose, you are to be married immediately?’

‘Not till next spring, That is my father’s wish. You see, I don’t come of age till I’m twenty-five, and there are settlements and technical difficulties. Papa thought it best for us to wait, and I did not wish to oppose him.’

‘I believe it is all my father’s selfishness. He can’t bear to lose you.’

‘Can I be angry with him for that?’ asked Madoline, smiling tenderly at the thought of her father’s love. ‘I am proud to think that I am necessary to his happiness.’

‘But there is your happiness—and Mr. Goring’s—to be considered. It has been such a long engagement, and you have been kept so much apart. It must have been a dreary time for you. If ever I am engaged I hope my young man will always be dancing attendance upon me.’

‘My father thought it best that we should not be too much together, for fear we should get tired of each other,’ said Madoline, with an incredulous smile; ‘and as Gerald is very fond of travelling, and wanted change after the shock of his mother’s death, papa proposed that he should spend the greater part of his life abroad until my twenty-fifth birthday. The separation would be a test for us both, my father thought.’

‘A most cruel, unjustifiable test,’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘Your twenty-fifth birthday, forsooth! Why, you will be an old woman before you are married. In all the novels I ever read, the heroine married before she was twenty, and even then she seemed sometimes quite an old thing. Eighteen is the proper age for orange-blossoms and a Brussels veil.’

‘That is all a matter of opinion, pet. I don’t think young lady novelists of seventeen and eighteen have always the wisest views of life. You must not say a word against your father, Daphne. He always acts for the best.’

‘I never heard of a domestic tyrant yet of whom that could not be said,’ retorted Daphne. ‘However, darling, if you are satisfied, I am content; and I shall look forward impatiently to the autumn, and to the pleasure of making my new brother’s acquaintance. I hope he will like me.’

‘No fear of that, Daphne.’

‘I am not at all sure of winning his regard. Look at my father! I would give a great deal to be loved by him, yet he detests me.’

‘Daphne! How can you say such a thing?’

‘It is the truth. Why should I not say it? Do you suppose I don’t know the signs or aversion as well as the signs of love? I know that you love me. You have no need to tell me so. I do not even want the evidence of your kind acts. I am assured of your love. I can see it in your face; I can hear it in every tone of your voice. And I know just as well that my father dislikes me. He kept me at a distance as long as ever he could, and now that duty—or his regard for other people’s opinion—obliges him to have me at home, he avoids me as if I were a roaring lion, or something equally unpleasant.’

‘Only be patient, dear. You will win his heart in time,’ said Madoline soothingly. She had put aside the water-lily, and had drawn her sister’s fair head upon her shoulder with caressing fondness. ‘He cannot fail to love my sweet Daphne when he knows her better,’ she said.

‘I don’t know that. I fancy he was prejudiced against me when I was a little thing and could scarcely have offended him; unless it were by cutting my teeth disgustingly, or having nettlerash, or something of that kind. Lina, do you think he hated my mother?’

Madoline started, and flushed crimson.

‘Daphne! what a question! Why, my father’s second marriage was a love-match, like his first.’

‘Yes, I suppose he was in love with her, or he would hardly have married a nobody,’ said Daphne, in a musing tone; ‘but he might have got to hate her afterwards.’

At this moment the door was opened, and a voice, full, round, manly in tone, said: ‘Madoline, I want you.’

Lina rose hastily, letting her work fall out of her lap, kissed Daphne, and hurried from the room at her father’s summons.