CHAPTER VI.

‘LOVE MAKETH ALL TO GONE MISWAY.’

Aunt Rhoda was not a person to be set at defiance, even by Daphne, who was by no means a tractable spirit. She had said, ‘Come to the Rectory,’ and had said it with such an air of offended dignity that Daphne felt she must obey, and promptly, lest a worse lecture should befall her. So directly after luncheon on the following day she changed her gown, and prepared herself for the distasteful visit. Madoline was going to drive to Warwick with her father, so Daphne would have to perform her penance alone.

It was a lovely afternoon in the first week of May, the air balmy and summer-like, the meadows looking their greenest before the golden glory of buttercup time. Yonder in the reedy hollows the first of the marsh marigolds were opening their yellow cups, and smiling up at the yellow sun. The walk to Arden Rectory was something over a mile, and it was as lovely a walk as any one need care to take; through meadows, beside flowery hedgerows, with the river flowing near, but almost hidden by a thick screen of willows; and then by one of the most delightful lanes in the county, a green arcade of old elms, with here a spreading oak, and there a mountain ash, to give variety to the foliage.

Daphne set out alone, as soon as she had seen the carriage drive away from the door; but she was not destined to go her way unaccompanied. Half way down the avenue she met Mr. Turchill, strolling at a lazy pace, a cigar in his mouth, and a red setter of Irish pedigree at his heels.

At sight of Daphne he threw away his cigar, and took his hands out of his pockets.

‘I was coming up to the Hill to ask somebody to play a game of billiards, and everybody seems going out,’ he said.

They had known him so long in an easy-going neighbourly way that he almost took rank as a relation. Daphne, who had spent so much of her life away from home, had naturally seen less of him than anybody else; but as she had been a child during the greater part of their acquaintance, he had fallen into the way of treating her as an elder brother might have done; and he had not yet become impressed with the dignity of her advancing years. For him she was still the Daphne he had romped with in the Christmas holidays, and whose very small pony it had been his particular care to get broken.

‘I met Madoline and Sir Vernon going to Warwick. Why go to Warwick? What is there for anyone but a Cook’s tourist to do in Warwick? But I thought you would be at home. You haven’t a bad notion of billiards, and you might have helped a fellow to while away an afternoon.’

‘You are like the idle boy in the spelling-book story, wanting someone to play with you,’ said Daphne, laughing at him. He had turned, and was walking beside her, the docile setter following meekly, like a dog who felt that he was of no consequence in the world now that the days of sport were done.

‘Well, the hunting’s all over, don’t you know, and there’s no more shooting, and I never cared much for fishing, and I’ve got such a confoundedly clever bailiff that he won’t let me open my mouth on the farm. So the days do hang rather heavy on a fellow’s hands.’

‘Why don’t you take to Alpine climbing?’ suggested Daphne. ‘I don’t mean Mont Blanc—everybody does that—but the Matterhorn, or Monte Rosa, or something. If I were a young man I should amuse myself in that way.’

‘I don’t set an exaggerated value on my life, but when I do make up my mind to throw it away, I think I’ll do the thing more comfortably,’ replied Edgar Turchill. ‘Don’t trouble yourself to suggest employment for me. I’m not complaining of my life. There’s a good deal of loafing in it, but I rather like loafing, especially when I can loaf in pleasant company. Where are you going, and may I go with you?’

‘I am going on a duty visit to Aunt Rhoda and my new uncle. Isn’t it rather dreadful to have an uncle thrust upon one in that way?’

‘Well,’ returned Edgar deliberately, ‘I must say if I had the choosing of my relations I should leave out the Rector. But you needn’t mind him. Practically he’s no more to you than he was before he married your aunt.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Daphne doubtfully. ‘He may take liberties. He was always a lecturing old thing, and he’ll lecture ever so much more now that he’s a relation.’

‘But you needn’t stand his lecturing. Just tell him quietly that you don’t hold with clerical interference in the affairs of the laity.’

‘He got me ready for my confirmation, and that gave him a kind of hold over me,’ said Daphne. ‘You see, he found out the depth of my ignorance.’

‘I’ll wager he’d be ploughed in a divinity exam, to-morrow,’ said Edgar. ‘These old heathens of village parsons got their degrees in a day when the dons were a set of sleepy-headed old duffers like themselves. But don’t let’s talk about him. What is Madoline going to do in Warwick?’

‘She and my father are going to make some calls in the neighbourhood, and I believe she has a little shopping to do.’

‘Why didn’t you go with them?’

‘Papa does not like to have three people in the barouche. Besides, I had promised to call on my aunt. She talked to me quite awfully last night about my want of proper feeling in never having visited her in her new house.’

‘Why didn’t you wait till she asked you to dinner? They give capital dinners at the Rectory, but their feeds are few and far between. I don’t want to say anything rude about your aunt, but she strikes me as a lady who has too keen an appreciation of the value of money to fritter it away upon other people.’

‘Why don’t you say at once that she’s horribly stingy?’ said the outspoken Daphne. ‘I don’t think she ever spent sixpence, except upon her own clothes, all the time she lived in my father’s house, and I know she was always getting gowns and bonnets out of Madoline. I’ve seen her do it. But please don’t let’s talk of her any more. It’s rather worse than talking of him. I shall have to kiss her, and call her dear aunt presently, and I shall detest myself for being such a hypocrite.’

They had gone out by the lodge-gate by this time, the lodge with its thatched roof and dormer window, like a big eye looking out under a shaggy pent-house eyebrow; the lodge by which there grew one of those tall deodaras which were the chief glory of the grounds at South Hill. They crossed the high road, and entered the meadow-path which led towards Arden Rectory; and the setter finding himself at large in a field, frisked about a little as if with a faint suspicion of partridges.

‘Oh, by-the-by,’ began Daphne, in quite a new tone, ‘now that we are alone, I want you to tell me all about Lina’s engagement. Is he nice?’

Edgar Turchill’s face clouded over so darkly that the look seemed a sufficient answer to her question.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You don’t like him.’

‘I can’t say that. He’s an old acquaintance—a friend—a kind of family connection even, for his mother’s grandmother was a Turchill. But to be candid, I don’t like the engagement.’

‘Why not, unless you know something against him?’

‘I know nothing against him. He is a gentleman. He is ten times cleverer than I, ten times richer, a great deal handsomer—my superior in every way. I should be a mean cad if I couldn’t acknowledge as much as that. But——’

‘You think Lina ought to have accepted him.’

‘I think the match in every way suitable, natural, inevitable. How could he help falling in love with her? Why should she refuse him?’

‘You are talking in riddles,’ said Daphne. ‘You say it is a suitable match, and a minute ago you said you did not like the engagement.’

‘I say so still. Can’t you imagine a reason for my feelings?’

Daphne contemplated him thoughtfully for a few moments as they walked on. His frank English face looked graver than she ever remembered to have seen it—grave to mournfulness.

‘I am very sorry,’ she faltered. ‘I see. You are fond of her yourself. I am desperately sorry. I should have liked you ever so much better for a brother.’

‘Don’t say that till you have seen Gerald. He has wonderful powers of fascination. He paints and poetises, and all that kind of thing, don’t you know; the sort of thing that pleases women. He can’t ride a little bit—no seat—no hands.’

‘How dreadful!’ cried Daphne, aghast. ‘Does he tumble off?’

‘I don’t mean that. He can stick in his saddle somehow; and he hunts when he’s at home in the season; but he can’t ride.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne, as if she were trying to understand this distinction.

‘Yes, Daphne. I don’t mind your knowing it—now it’s all over and done with,’ pursued Edgar, glad to pour his griefs into a friendly ear. ‘You’re my old playfellow—almost like a little sister—and I don’t think you’ll laugh at me, will you, dear?’

‘Laugh at you!’ cried Daphne. ‘If I do may I never be able to smile again.’

‘I asked your sister to marry me. I had gone on loving her for I don’t know how long, before I could pluck up courage to ask the question, I was so afraid of being refused. And I knew if she would only say “Yes,” that my mother would be the proudest woman in the county, for she positively adores Madoline. And I knew Lina liked Hawksyard; and that was encouraging. So one day, about four years ago, I got desperate, and asked the plain question in a plain way. Heaven knows how much of my happiness hung on the answer; but I couldn’t have screwed any poetry out of myself to save my life. I could only tell her the honest truth—that I loved her as well as man ever loved woman.’

‘Well?’ asked Daphne.

‘It was no use. She said “No,” so kindly, so sweetly, so affectionately—for she really likes me, you know, in a sisterly way—that she made me cry like a child. Yes, Daphne, I made a miserable ass of myself. She must have despised such unmanly weakness. And then in a few minutes it was all over. All my hopes were extinguished like a candle blown out by the wind, and all my future life was dark. And I had to go back and tell the poor mother that the daughter she wanted was never to come to Hawksyard.’

‘I am so sorry for you,’ faltered Daphne.

‘Thank you, dear. I knew you would be sympathetic. The blow was a crusher, I assure you. I went away for a few months deer-stalking in the Highlands; but lying on a mountain side in a gray mist for hours on end, not daring to move an eyelash, gives a fellow too much time for thought. I was always thinking of Madoline, and my thoughts were just two hundred and fifty miles due south of the stag when he came across, so I generally shot wild, and felt myself altogether a failure. Then I tried a month in Normandy and Brittany with a knapsack, thinking I might walk down my trouble. But I found that tramping from one badly-drained town to another badly-drained town—all infected with garlic—and looking at churches I didn’t particularly want to see, was a sham kind of consolation for a very real disappointment; so I made up my mind to come back to Hawksyard and live it down. And I have lived it down,’ concluded Edgar exultantly.

‘You don’t care for Madoline any longer?’

‘Not care for her! I shall worship her as long as I have breath in my body. But I have resigned myself to the idea that somebody else is going to marry her—that the most I can ever be to her is a good, useful, humdrum kind of friend, who will be godfather to one of her boys by-and-by; ready to ride helter-skelter for the doctor if any of her children show symptoms of measles or whooping-cough; glad to take dummy of an evening when she and her husband want to play whist; or to entertain the boys at Hawksyard for their summer holidays while she and he are enjoying a _tête-à-tête_ ramble in the Engadine. That is the sort of man I shall be.’

‘How good you are!’ said Daphne, slipping her hand through his arm with an affectionate impulse.

‘Ah, my little Daphne, it will be your turn to full in love some of these days; put it off as long as you can, dear, for there’s more pain than pleasure in it at best.’ Daphne gave an involuntary sigh. ‘And then I hope you’ll confide in me just as freely as I have confided in you. I may be useful as an adviser, you know, having had my own troubles.’

‘You could only advise me to be patient, and give up all hope,’ said Daphne, drawing her hand from his arm. ‘What would be the good of such advice? But I shall never trouble you. I am not going to fall in love—ever.’

She gave the last word an almost angry emphasis.

‘Poor little Daphne! as if you could know anything about it,’ exclaimed Edgar, smiling incredulously at her. ‘That kind of thing comes upon one unawares. You talk as if you could choose whether you would fall in love or not—like Hercules between his two roads, deliberating whether he should go to the right or the left. Ah, my dear, when we come to that stage of our journey there is but one road for us: and whether it lead to the Garden of Eden or the Slough of Despond, we must travel over it.’

‘You are getting poetical,’ exclaimed Daphne scornfully; ‘I didn’t know that was in your line. But please tell me about Gerald. I have never seen him, you know. He was always at Oxford, or roaming about the world somewhere, when I was at home for the holidays. I have been at home so little, you see,’ she interjected with a piteous air. ‘I used to hear a great deal about a very wonderful personage, enormously rich, fabulously clever, and accomplished, and handsome; and I grew rather to hate him, as one is apt to hate such perfection; and then one day I got a letter from Lina—a letter brimming over with happiness—to say that she and this demigod were engaged to be married, but it was to be a long engagement, because the other demigod—my father—wished for delay. So you see I know very little about my future brother.’

‘You are sure to like him,’ said Edgar with a somewhat regretful air. ‘He has all the qualities which please women. Another man might be as handsome, or even handsomer, yet not half so sure of winning a woman’s love. There is something languid, lackadaisical—poetical, I suppose Madoline would call it—in his appearance and manner which women admire.’

‘I hope he is not effeminate,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I hate a womanish man.’

‘No; I don’t think anyone could call him effeminate; but he is dreamy, bookish, fond of lolling about under trees, smoking cigarettes and reading verses.’

‘I’m certain I shall detest him,’ said Daphne with conviction, ‘and it will be very dreadful, since I must pretend to like him for Lina’s sake. You must stand by me, Edgar, when he is at the Hill. You and I can chum together, and leave the lovers to spoon by themselves. Oh, by-the-by, of course you haven’t lived on the Avon all your life without being able to row a boat?’

‘No; I can row pretty well.’

‘Then you must teach me, please. I am going to have a boat, my very own. It is being built for me. You’ll teach me to row, won’t you, Edgar?’ she asked with a pleading smile.

‘I shall be delighted.’

‘Thanks tremendously. That will be ever so much better than learning of Bink.’

‘Indeed! And who is Bink?’ asked Edgar, somewhat dashed.

‘One of the under gardeners. Such an honest creature, and devoted to me.’

‘I see: and your first idea was to have been taught by Bink?’

‘If there had been no one else,’ she admitted apologetically. ‘You see, having ordered a boat, it is essential that I should learn to row.’

‘Naturally.’

They had arrived at the last field by this time. The village lay before them in the sunlight: an old gray church in an old churchyard on the edge of the river, a cluster of half-timbered cottages, with walls of wattle and dab, a homestead dwarfed by rick-yard and barns, and finally the Rectory, a low, many-gabled house, half-timbered, like the cottages, a regular sixteenth-century house, with clustered chimneys of massive ruddy-brown brickwork, finished by a stone coping, in which the martens had built from time immemorial.

‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you with me,’ said Daphne as they came near the stile. ‘It will take the edge off my visit.’

‘Oh, but I did not mean to go in with you. I only walked with you for the pleasure of being your escort.’

‘Nonsense; you are going in, and you are going to stay till I go home, and you are going back with me to dinner. I’m sure you must owe Aunt Rhoda a call. Just consider now if you don’t.’

Edgar, who had a guilty memory of being a guest at one of the Rector’s rare but admirable dinners, just five weeks ago, blushed as he admitted his indebtedness.

‘I certainly haven’t called since I dined there,’ he said; ‘but the fact is, I don’t get on very fast with your aunt, although I’ve known her so long.’

‘Of course not. I never knew any one who could get on with her, except Lina, and she’s an angel.’

They came to the stile, which was what the country people call a tumble-down stile, all the timbers of the gate sliding down with a clatter when a handle is moved, and leaving space for the pedestrian to step over. The Rectory gate stood before them, a low wide gate, standing open to admit the entrance of a carriage. The garden was lovely, even before the season of bedding-out plants and carpet horticulture. For the last twenty years the Rector had annually imported a choice selection of Dutch bulbs, whereby his flower-beds and borders on this May afternoon were a blaze of colour—tulip, hyacinth, ranunculus, polyanthus—each and every flower that blooms in the sweet youth of the year; and as a background for the level lawn with its many flower-beds, there was a belt of such timber and an inner circle of such shrubs as are only to be found in a garden that has been cultivated and improved for a century or so. Copper beeches, Spanish chestnuts, curious specimens of the oak tribe, the feathery foliage of acacia and mountain ash, the pink bloom of the wild plum, and the snowy clusters of the American crab, deodara, cypress, yew, and in the foreground arbutus and seringa, lilac, laburnum, guelder rose, with all the family of laurel, laurustinus, and bay; a shrubbery so exquisitely kept, that not a blighted branch or withered leaf was to be seen in the spacious circle which fenced and protected that smiling lawn from all the outer world.

The house was, in its way, as perfect as the garden. There were many rooms, but none large or lofty. The Rectory had all the shortcomings and all the fascinations of an old house: wide hearths and dog-stoves, high mantelpieces, deep-recessed casements, diamond panes, leaden lattices, massive roughly-hewn beams supporting the ceilings, a wide shallow staircase, rooms opening one out of another, irregular levels, dark oak floors, a little stained glass here and there—real old glass, of rich dark red, or sombre green, or deep dull topaz.

The house was delightfully furnished, though Mr. Ferrers had never taken any trouble about it. Many a collector, worn out before his time by the fever and anxiety of long summer afternoons at Christie’s, would have envied Marmaduke Ferrers the treasures which had fallen to him without the trouble of collecting. Residuary legatee to all his aunts and uncles, he had taken to himself the things that were worth having among their goods and chattels, and had sold all the rubbish.

The aunts and uncles had been old-fashioned non-locomotive people, hoarding up and garnering the furniture of past generations. Thus had the Rector acquired Chippendale chairs and tables, old Dutch tulip-wood cabinets and bureaus, Louis Quinze commodes, Elizabethan clocks, Derby and Worcester, Bow, Bristol, Leeds, and Swansea crockery, with a sprinkling of those dubious jugs and bowls that are generally fathered on Lowestoft. Past generations had amassed and hoarded in order that the Rector might be rich in art treasures without ever putting his hand in his pocket. Furniture that had cost a few pounds when it was bought was now worth hundreds, and the Rector had it all for nothing, just because he came of a selfish celibate race. The Chippendale furniture, the Dutch marqueterie work, old china, and old plate had all been in Miss Lawford’s mind when she took the Rector in hand and brought him to see her fitness for his wife.

True that her home at South Hill was as elegant, and in all things as desirable; but there was a wide difference between living under the roof of her brother, more or less on sufferance, and being mistress of her own house. Thus the humbler charms of the Rectory impressed her more than the dignity of the Hill. Sir Vernon Lawford was not a pleasant man to whom to be beholden. His daughters were now grown up. Madoline was sovereign mistress of the house which must one day be her own; and Rhoda Lawford felt that to stay at the Hill would be to sink to the humdrum position of a maiden aunt, for whom nobody cared very much.

Mrs. Ferrers was sitting in a Japanese chair on the lawn, in front of the drawing-room windows, nursing a black and white Japanese pug, and rather yearning for someone from the outer world, even in that earthy paradise where the guelder roses were all in bloom and the air was heavy with the odour of hawthorn-blossom.

‘At last!’ she exclaimed, as Daphne and her companion made their timorous advance across the velvet turf, mown twice a week in the growing season. ‘You too, Mr. Turchill; I thought you were never coming to see me.’

‘After that delightful evening with the Mowbrays and the people from Liddington! It was too ungrateful of me,’ said Edgar. ‘If you call me Mr. Turchill I shall think I am never to be forgiven.’

‘Well, then, it shall be Edgar, as it was in the old days,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, with a faint suspicion of sentiment.

There had been a time when it had seemed to her not altogether impossible that she should become Mrs. Turchill. Hawksyard Grange was such a delicious old place; and Edgar was her junior by only fourteen years.

‘I don’t want you to make ceremonious calls just because you happen to have dined here; but I want you to drop in often because you like us. I want you to bring me breathings of the outside world. The life of a clergyman’s wife in a country parish is so narrow. I feel hourly becoming a vegetable.’

Mrs. Ferrers looked complacently down at her tea-gown of soft creamy Indian silk, copiously trimmed with softer Breton lace, and felt that at least she was a very well-dressed vegetable. Knots of palest blue satin nestled here and there among the lace; a cluster of hot-house roses—large velvety yellow roses—reposed on Mrs. Ferrers’s shoulder, and agreeably contrasted with her dark, smoothly-banded hair. She prided herself on the classic form of her small head, and the classic simplicity of her coiffure.

‘I think we all belong, more or less, to the vegetable tribe about here,’ said Mr. Turchill. ‘There is something sleepy in the very air of our pastoral valleys. I sometimes long to get away to the stone-wall country yonder, on the Cotswolds, to breathe a freer, more wakeful air.’

‘I can’t say that I languish for the Cotswolds,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, ‘but I should very much like a fortnight in Mayfair. Do you know if your father and Madoline are going to London this season, Daphne?’

‘I think not. Papa fancies himself not quite well enough for the fatigue of London, and Lina does not care about going.’

It had been Sir Vernon’s habit to take a furnished house at the West End for part of May and June, in order to see all the picture-galleries, and hear all the operas that were worth being heard, and to do a little visiting among his very select circle of acquaintance. He was not a man who made new acquaintances if he could help it, or who went to people because they lived in big houses and gave big dinners. He was exclusive to a fault, detested crowds, and had a rooted conviction that every new man was a swindler, who was destined to end his career in ignominious bankruptcy. It had gone hard with him to consent to his daughter’s engagement with a man who on the father’s side was a parvenu; but he had consoled himself as best he might with the idea of Lady Geraldine’s blue blood, and Mr. Goring’s very substantial fortune.

‘And so you are no longer a school-girl, Daphne, and have come home for good,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, dropping her elegant society manner and putting on a sententious air, which Daphne knew too well. ‘I hope you are going to try to improve yourself—for what girls learn at school is a mere smattering—and that you are aware how much room there is for improvement—in your carriage, for instance.’

‘I haven’t any carriage, aunt, but papa is going to let me keep a boat,’ said Daphne, who had been absently watching the little yellow butterflies skimming above the flame-coloured tulips.

‘My dear, I am talking of your deportment. You are sitting most awkwardly at this moment, one shoulder at least three inches higher than the other.’

‘Don’t worry about it, aunt,’ said Daphne indifferently; ‘perhaps it’s a natural deformity.’

‘I hope not. I think it rests with yourself to become a very decent figure,’ replied Mrs. Ferrers, straightening her own slim waist. ‘Here comes your uncle, returning from his round of duty in time to enjoy his afternoon tea.’

The Rector drove up to the gate in a low park-phaeton, drawn by a sleek bay cob; a cob too well fed and lazy to think of running away, but a little apt to become what the groom called ‘a bit above himself,’ and to prance and toss his head in an arrogant manner, or even to shy at a stray rabbit, as if he had never seen such a creature before, and hadn’t the least idea what the apparition meant. The Rector’s round of duty had been a quiet drive through elm-shadowed lanes, and rustic occupation roads, with an occasional pull-up before the door of a cottage, or a farm-house, where, without alighting, he would inquire in a fat pompous voice after the welfare, spiritual and temporal, of his parishioners, and then shedding on them the light of a benignant smile, or a few solemn words of clerical patronage, he would give the reins a gentle shake and drive off again. This kind of parochial visitation, lasting for about two hours, the Rector performed twice or three times a week, always selecting a fine afternoon. It kept him in the fresh air, gave him an appetite for his dinner, and maintained pleasant relations between the pastor and his flock.

Mr. Ferrers flung the reins to his groom, a man of middle age, in sober dark livery, and got himself ponderously out of his carriage on to the gravel drive. He was a large man, tall and broad, with a high bald head, red-brown eyes of the protuberant order, a florid complexion, pendulous cheeks and chin, and mutton-chop whiskers of a warm chestnut. He was a man whose appearance, even to the stranger, suggested a life devoted to dining; a man to whom dinner was the one abiding reality of life, the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow—a memory, an actuality, a hope. He was the man for whom asparagus and peas are forced into untimely perfection—the man who eats poached salmon in January, and gives a fabulous price for the first of the grouse—the man for whom green geese are roasted in June, and who requires immature turkeys to be fatted for him in October; who can enjoy oysters at fourpence a piece; who thinks ninety shillings a dozen a reasonable price for dry champagne, and would drive thirty miles to secure a few dozen of the late Colonel Somebody’s famous East India sherry.

Rhoda had married the Reverend Marmaduke with her eyes fully opened to the materialistic side of his character. She knew that if she wanted to live happily with him and to exercise that gentle and imperceptible sway, which vulgar people call hen-pecking, she must make dinner the chief study of her life. So long as she gave full satisfaction upon this point; so long as she could maintain a table, in which the homely English virtue of substantial abundance was combined with the artistic variety of French cooking; so long as she anticipated the Rector’s fancies, and forestalled the seasons, she would be sure to please. But an hour’s forgetfulness of his tastes or prejudices, a single failure, an experimental dish, would shatter for the time being the whole fabric of domestic bliss, and weaken her hold of the matrimonial sceptre. The Rector’s wife had considered all this before she took upon herself the responsibilities of married life. Supremely indifferent herself to the pleasures of the table, she had to devote one thoughtful hour of every day to the consideration of what her husband would like to eat, drink, and avoid. She had to project her mind into the future to secure for him novelty of diet. Todd, the housekeeper, had ministered to him for many years, and knew all his tastes: but Mrs. Ferrers wanted to do better than Todd had done, and to prove to the Rector that he had acted wisely in committing himself to the dulcet bondage of matrimony. She was a clever woman—not bookish or highly cultured—but skilled in all the small arts and devices of daily life; and so far she had succeeded admirably. The Rector, granted the supreme indulgence of all his desires, was his wife’s admiring slave. He flattered her, he deferred to her, he praised her, he boasted of her to all his acquaintance as the most perfect thing in wives, just as he boasted of the sleek bay as the paragon of cobs, and his garden as the archetype of gardens.

And now for the first time Daphne had to salute this great man in his new character of an uncle. She went up to him timidly; a graceful, gracious figure in a pale yellow batiste gown, a knot of straw-coloured Marguerites shining on her breast, her lovely liquid eyes darkened by the shadow of her Tuscan hat.

‘How do you do, uncle?’ she said, holding out a slender hand, in a long loose Swedish glove.

The Rector started, and stared at her dumbly, whether bewildered by so fair a vision, or taken aback by the unexpected assertion of kinsmanship, only he himself knew.

‘Bless my soul!’ he cried. ‘Is this Daphne? Why the child has grown out of all knowledge. How d’ye do, my dear? Very glad to see you. You’ll stop to dinner, of course. You and Turchill. How d’ye do, Turchill?’

The Rector had a troublesome trick of asking everybody who crossed his threshold in the afternoon to dinner. He had an abiding idea that his friends wanted to be fed; that they would rather dine with him than go home; and that if they refused, their refusal was mere modesty and self-denial, and ought not to be accepted. Vainly had Rhoda lectured her spouse upon this evil habit, vainly had she tried to demonstrate to him that an afternoon visit should be received as such, and need not degenerate into a dinner-party. The Rector was incorrigible. Hospitality was his redeeming virtue.

‘Thanks awfully,’ replied Daphne; ‘but I must go home to dinner. Papa and Lina expect me. Of course Mr. Turchill can do as he likes.’

‘Then Turchill will stay,’ said the Rector.

‘My dear Rector, you are very kind, but I must go home with Daphne. I brought her, don’t you see, and I’m bound to take her back. There might be a bull, or something.’

‘Do you think I am afraid of bulls?’ cried Daphne; ‘why I love the whole cow tribe. If I saw a bull in one of our meadows, I should walk up to him and make friends.’

The Rector surveyed the yellow damsel with an unctuous smile.

‘It would be dangerous,’ he said in his fat voice, ‘if I were the bull.’

‘Why?’

‘I should be tempted to imitate an animal famous in classic story, and swim the Avon with you on my back,’ replied the Rector.

‘Duke,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, with her blandest smile, ‘don’t you think you had better rest yourself in your cool study while we take our tea? I’m sure you must be tired after your long drive. These first warm days are so exhausting. I’ll bring you your cup of tea.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself, my love,’ replied the Rector; ‘Daphne can wait upon me. Her legs are younger than yours.’

This unflattering comparison, to say nothing of the vulgar allusion to ‘legs,’ was too much for Rhoda’s carefully educated temper. She gave her Marmaduke a glance of undisguised displeasure.

‘I am not so ancient or infirm as to find my duties irksome,’ she said severely; ‘I shall certainly bring you your tea.’

The Rector had a weakness about pretty girls. There was no harm in it. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of beauty, and no scandal had ever arisen about peeress or peasant. He happened to possess an artistic appreciation of female loveliness, and he took no trouble to disguise the fact. Youth and beauty and freshness were to him as the very wine of life—second only to actual Cliquot, or Roederer, Clos Vougeot, or Marcobrünner. His wife was too well acquainted with this weakness. She had known it years before she had secured Marmaduke for her own; and she had flattered herself that she could cure him of this inclination to philander; but so far the curative process had been a failure.

But Marmaduke, though inclined to folly, was not rebellious. He loved a gentle doze in the cool shade of his study, where there were old-fashioned easy-chairs of a shape more comfortable than has ever revealed itself to the mind of modern upholsterer. The brief slumber gave him strength to support the fatigue of dressing for dinner, for the Reverend Marmaduke was as careful of the outward man as of the inner, and had never been seen in slovenly attire, or with unshaven visage.

Mrs. Ferrers sank into her chair with a sigh of relief as the Rector disappeared through the deep rustic porch. The irreproachable butler, who had grown gray in Mr. Ferrers’s service, brought the tea-tray, with its Japanese cups and saucers. Edgar Turchill subsided upon a low rustic stool at Daphne’s feet, just where his length of arm would enable him to wait upon the two ladies. They made a pretty domestic group: the westering sun shining upon them, the Japanese pug fawning at their feet, flowers and foliage surrounding them, birds singing, bees humming, cattle lowing in the neighbouring fields.

Edgar looked up admiringly at the bright young face above him: eyes so darkly luminous, a complexion of lilies and roses, that exquisite creamy whiteness which goes with pale auburn hair, that lovely varying bloom which seems a beauty of the mind rather than of the person, so subtly does it indicate every emotion and follow the phases of thought. Yes; the face was full of charm, though it was not the face of his dreams—not the face he had worshipped for years before he presumed to reveal his love for the owner. If a man cannot win the woman he loves it were better surely that he should teach himself to love one who seems more easily attainable. The bright particular star shines afar off in an inaccessible heaven; but lovely humanity is here at his side, smiling on him, ready to be wooed and won.

Edgar’s reflections did not go quite so far as this, but he felt that he was spending his afternoon pleasantly, and he looked forward with complacency to the homeward walk through the meadows.