"All right, kiddy, I shan't report you. And one of these days you'll be able to ride astride. In my opinion they'll all be doing it one day. But at present we must do what we're told."
"Yes," murmured Daphne. "Thank you very much."
It became quite a custom for her to entertain the gymnasium girls with three or four guilty circles on the horizontal bar while Miss Vidella was descending the gallery stairs. Sometimes she managed six or seven of the forbidden things before rushing, red as a beet-root, to the dressing-room. Here she looked serene and innocent when the head mistress appeared and sounded some variant of "Come along, dears. I feel sure your healthy exercises have engendered an appetite for your dinners."
But one morning, by some failure in her swing, she did not complete her fifth backward circle, and was left hanging over the bar like a bolster thrown over a rail. Time was short; Miss Vidella's feet must be on the last few stairs; so she straightened her body on the bar, and was just about to drop behind it to her feet, when she saw Miss Vidella standing at the dressing-room door and watching her through her spectacles, chin slightly uptilted. The sight so unnerved her that instead of swinging backwards she swung forwards, her head falling like the clapper of a bell, and the weight of her body flinging her legs in an arc through the air. Her hands retained a panicky hold of the bar, but her feet struck the mattress and its coco-fibre mat with a jarring impact. A little giddily she stood on the mat and wondered what to do. If only Miss Vidella had not stood across the dressing-room door she would have flown through it and drowned her confusion in the business of unlacing her shoes. But now she could only stand on the mat beneath the bar and stare at the head mistress, while the head mistress stood in front of the dressing-room and stared at her. Girls peeped behind.
"What are you doing, Daphne?"
"Nothing."
"What were you doing on that bar?"
"I only just did a circle or two."
"And do you call that nothing?"
Clearly "Yes" was not the right answer, and "No" was incriminating, so Daphne stood on the mat and gave no answer at all.
"Come here."
She approached.
"Did you"—seemingly Miss Vidella could not bring herself to name the offence—"do that thing because it was against my express orders?"
The true answer, "Yes," was somewhat too dangerous to be employed, so Daphne said "No." Politeness required no less.
"Then why did you do that thing?"
In Daphne's head was a foggy conception of modern minds enfranchising themselves, and a phantasmagoria of related ideas, out of which came nothing more remarkable than:
"I thought I should like to."
(It was, perhaps, modernism in its simplest expression.)
"And why should you like to do it?"
"I don't know."
"I will tell you. It can only have been out of a spirit of deliberate evil-minded rebellion, or it was because you have a natural liking for the buffoonery of the uncivilised which you are too weak to suppress." It was humiliating to hear one's strength called weakness, and Daphne wished she had the courage to plead loudly that hers had been the evil-minded rebellion through and through. "You are one who must be trained, not by liberty and encouragement, but by restraint and correction. Get on your shoes. You shall not visit the gymnasium or the tennis field for a fortnight. Both places are too beset with opportunities for the outlandish contortions that so appeal to you. A walk each afternoon instead will perhaps teach you that it is perfectly possible to exercise every muscle of the body in the upright position, and all other contortions can be left to the jungle and——" Here Miss Vidella's sarcasm ran out. "Get changed. I fail to see why these dear girls here should be kept waiting for their lunches by you."
Daphne passed sullenly to her shoes and pulled them on viciously. She was being persecuted and enjoying it. And as she walked home with Trudy Wayne she was so ostentatiously noisy (this being her indirect claim to the "deliberate rebellion") that Miss Vidella called:
"Daphne, come back and walk alone behind me. You hardly seem to understand that you are in disgrace. Gertrude dear, I wonder at your encouraging her."
By this time, in Miss Vidella's mind, there was both a flabby dislike and a faint fear of the Bruno child. Recently she had acquainted herself with some of the father's books, and while wondering what much of them meant, grasped enough to feel uncomfortably that the great man probably ridiculed her ideas and her methods. And now, gnawed by the fear that Daphne Bruno might have heard and believed this ridicule, she determined to humiliate the child into a sense of her own simplicity and foolishness. The backwardness shown in Daphne's work on paper provided plenty of opportunities, though the child's quickness in viva voce work, and her skill and rushing imagination when anything had to be made—a poem, or a map, or a clay model—sometimes reminded Miss Vidella that her genuine opinion was very different. But for the good of all, and lest she spread her doctrines, Daphne Bruno must be discredited and kept down. She often came, therefore, into Miss Sims's class-room, and on examining the pupils' exercises, deplored the poverty of Daphne Bruno's.
"And this is the girl who thinks she knows better than any of us, and is so sure of her right judgment that she allows herself to do things just because she likes to. Go to your seat, child. When you can construe a simple piece of Latin we shall perhaps consider whether or not we will revise the rules of this school to suit your little fancies."
Daphne rather liked this bullying. It gave her the pleasure of mildly hating Miss Vidella as once she had hated Miss Durgon; and it enabled her to act in front of Miss Sims the tranquil resignation of a martyr, or in front of her class-fellows the fine, furious flash of a tragedienne. Also it justified and increased her love of the sympathetic governess; and she was keen on making a good thing of this.
Mr. Tenter Bruno, in these days, was prospering; and his mercury, though never free from fluctuations, was generally high. He was very satisfied, and something of radiance could be seen in his face and manner. In this, his fifty-third year, his brown beard was turning grey, and his hair receding from his fine forehead, but his figure in its grey suit was as neat as it had been at twenty. For some time he had considered that the house in Deseret Road lacked the necessary picturesqueness. It was a moot point whether one's books and fame were not injured by an address in the suburbs. His readers ought to be able to imagine him in some quaint old habitation, set down in green and lonely places. Besides, such a move from London into the quiet was always good copy for the paragraphists. And, to the delight of Daphne and Owen, when they returned from their schools, he suddenly announced, as a complete surprise, his purchase of Old Hall House, between Wivelsfield and Ditchling Common in Sussex. It was not far from their former cottage, and their old gardener Eadigo, still hearty, was coming into permanent residence.
"When shall we go? When shall we go?" demanded his daughter.
"These very holidays, of course," smiled Mr. Bruno, delighted at the success of his surprise.
And in August when they moved there, he was happy in watching Daphne as, excited to see what the house was like (though she had declared she could remember it), she hung out of the carriage that was rattling them to its gates. When the carriage stopped, he saw the house anew through her eyes: a rectangular place of two stories, roofed in Horsham stone, with a new wing jutting out at right angles towards the road. The whole place was perhaps disappointingly near the road, and the low railing that separated the lawns and drive from the travellers to Ditchling was a little—finicking. But this weakness could be forgiven, when you looked at Old Hall House itself, with its mossed roof, its disorderly outbuildings, and its setting of silent country, closed in the diminishing distance by blue and shadowed downs.
Within doors, round about a square hall, rather dark, were three large, low-ceiled sitting-rooms, and a red kitchen with an undulating floor. Above these, up an oak staircase, were seven or eight bedrooms; and in the new wing, a room for Daphne, and a room for Owen, with a great chamber underneath that should be their privy playground. The servants had a staircase of their own leading to bedrooms in the back parts.
This segregation of children in the north and servants in the east Mr. Bruno had imagined would secure for him that ideal silence which he had yet to find in this plane of existence. In the sitting-room to the left of the entrance-hall he arranged his study furniture and his unnumbered books. But it was a grievous blow, and one that shook his household for weeks, when he learned that there was not one of the sitting-rooms but heard every sound in the house. The movements in the hall came through the walls, the staircase squeaking like an animal when anybody walked on it; the noises in the kitchen came through the shrunk oak doors; and if the maids were cleaning the bedroom above, their sweepings and voices, even their actual words, came through the low-pitched ceiling to Mr. Bruno, and his groans and exclamations (he imagined and hoped) went up to them. It was damnable.
He didn't know what to do. The paying of the mountainous bills created by the purchase, the alterations and the move had resolved him to live quietly for some time, and save money on postage stamps and tobacco. He would not—though his own mind saw clearly and humorously the weak logic—he simply would not—spend another half-penny in making his study sound-proof. Instead, if there was a clatter in the kitchen, or a step, unmuted, on the vile staircase, he got up, opened his door, and put out his head with a diffident and over-courteous request that whatever was being done might be postponed till the afternoon; if the noise was in the bedroom above, he pushed back his chair that he might knock on the ceiling with a stick; till, at last (much to his amusement in the midst of his irritation), he would hear the scurry of the maids, or the guilty silence in the kitchen, directly his chair was pushed back. That push-back of his chair, if done viciously enough, could turn the house into a sepulchre.
After several weeks of encouraging economies, however, he decided that the young maids (who rather appealed to him) had a right to laugh and be noisy and even sing at their sweeping; and he spent fifty pounds on sound-proofing his room.
For Daphne the memorable thrill of this first summer holiday in Old Hall House was something quite independent of its fascinating rooms and the undiscovered country around. Or perhaps not so independent of their romance as she thought. In Owen's bedroom she learned that he had developed a taste for "penny dreadfuls." She saw a pile of the things, with their vivid picture-covers, on the top of his chest-of-drawers. The first of them, whose cover showed a gay highwayman in scarlet cape, three-cornered hat, and lace neckwear, firing a bell-mouthed pistol into the face of a black and bulbous Bow Street Runner, she read in her own room. From that day her imagination, like a city that had thrown open its gates, was yielded to Dick Turpin. Eagerly she selected all the rest that dealt with the handsome blade, and found twenty-three. She spent the best week of her life, up to that point, reading these twenty-three stories one after another.
She took all twenty-three and her inflated enthusiasm back to Hemans House, and introduced the enthusiasm and one of the books to Trudy Wayne. Trudy, having read one tale, borrowed the whole twenty-three, and succumbed to the highwayman.
This common interest strengthened the friendship of the two girls, and marked the moment when Daphne, though a year younger, began to dominate the partnership. From her imagination came the idea that, on their walks, they should be Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. Miss Vidella, with her black clothes and her corpulence and her piggish ways, was obviously the head of the Bow Street Runners—or a Bloody Assize judge. It was incumbent on Trudy and herself to organize into an Outlaw Society. This was to have been called a "Hate Society," but memories of Miss Sims's gentleness limited the name to "The Dislike Society." During riding lessons, Daphne on her mild bay pony trotting or cantering beside the troop of girls, was really galloping Black Bess, with the Runners hard behind. In gymnasium, when she ran and vaulted over the horse, she was really Dick Turpin leaping a hedge or a toll-gate to escape his pursuers. If she was kept in, the class-room became a Newgate cell anterior to Tyburn, and her dismissal after half an hour's detention was a dashing escape amid the cheers of her followers who were waiting at the prison gates. Beneath her sheet and blankets in the Eliza Cook room, she had really taken to the heather and was sleeping in a cloak under the stars.
"Wouldn't it be ripping," she exclaimed to Trudy one day, "if we could spend a holiday together, and play Dick Turpin on some real lonely road?"
And as she said that, there flashed into her mind the very scene where such a drama could be staged. Good heavens! It was perfect! Ditchling Common. Strangely, it spread itself before her, not as she had just left it, under summer, but as she had seen it in May one morning of her earliest childhood, when it must have hit her imagination far more vividly than she had known; Ditchling Common with a mauve haze of bluebells over its coarse grass, shot here and there with the yellow of buttercups; the ribbon of road switchbacking over the successive brows to the humpy bridge above the railway line; the wavy horizon of downs, bare save for two windmills on the west; a hawk—how well she remembered watching it—hovering above the common. There were dwarfed gorse bushes, like black patches on the stretching grass, and taller shrubs of entangled blackberry. And, most wonderful of all, at the entrance to the common was a white gate like a toll-gate, and just beyond it Jacob's Post. Jacob's Post was a real gibbet, with a cock at its top bearing the date 1734 to tell when last a man had hanged there.
"Coo, what a fool I am! Trudy, you should see Ditchling Common near me. It's absolutely the spot. Oh, you must come and stay with us next summer. I'm sure father'll agree, and we'll make Owen play too."
This plan, thenceforward, was a never-failing spring of conversation. For Trudy there was no taste of doubt in the merry cup. Daphne was just aware of a lurking anxiety lest, ten months hence, they would have forgotten all about Dick Turpin, or, alternatively, their undying friendship would have died.
CHAPTER IX
Daphne was right in fearing that the influence of the highwayman would abate with the months, but wrong in doubting the endurance of her friendship with Trudy Wayne. This didn't expire, for the simple reason that she set herself to keep it at a sufficient heat. And when the next summer term drew towards the golden August that was to bring Trudy to Old Hall House, she as deliberately exhumed Dick Turpin, guessing that, did they but read the old romances once more, their imaginations would be snatched up again by the inspiring highwayman.
A mellow evening, the fourth of August, she climbed into a trap, driven by Eadigo, and was taken to meet Trudy at Hayward's Heath station. Why her eager anticipations should make her a little afraid of meeting Trudy she didn't know, but it was a disturbing fact, as the train rolled in, that her heart was faintly answering its noise and speed. Only a few passengers alighted here, the most being travellers to Brighton; so Trudy was quickly seen. Daphne ran towards her, followed without enthusiasm by Eadigo. Trudy, too, one could see, was rather shy of the strange station and all her circumstances, but she cloaked it with an ostentatious self-possession, talking much as she mounted the trap. Eadigo drove off silently, and Daphne felt a pity for the old man because the six weeks in front of him were the same as the six weeks before. His silence and phlegm made her look at Trudy, after which they both had fits of giggling.
Miss Carrell welcomed the visitor in the dining-room.
"Well, I hope, Trudy—may I call you that?—you'll have a very happy holiday with us. I'm sorry Mr. Bruno is away.... It's very nice for Duffy to have you with her, I'm sure. Owen, come here and say how-do-you-do to Duffy's friend."
Owen these holidays had brought back from his preparatory school a new and (one would have thought) quite uncharacteristic tendency to laborious humour. It involved his addressing of Hollins as "Herbert," and his sister as "Casabianca." And now he bowed till his head was aligned with his waist, and extended a hand. Trudy took it, and inquired:
"How do you do?"
"I don't," answered Owen.
This strange new growth in her brother was in the process of being discouraged by Daphne.
"It's not funny," she said.
"Sorry. Heaps of ajoppolies," answered Owen.
"Daphne wanted you to share her bedroom," interrupted Miss Carrell, "so I've arranged it for you both."
"Oh, how ripping!" exclaimed Trudy.
"That'll be monstrous fine," said Owen.
In their beds that night the two girls arranged plans for the next day till the clock on the stairs sounded midnight.
"Coo, you wait till I show you Ditchling Common," Daphne rattled on. "The road lies like a white ribbon, all up and down, from the Toll-gate to Ditchling. There's one big clump of blackberry that I call the Observation Post, because it's at the top of a brow, and you can see all the way to the next brow and beyond that to the railway bridge. So you could see any one approaching half a mile away, and give warning to your confederates hidden lower down the road."
The clock struck midnight, and the conversation swung suitably to the age of the house in which they slept, and whether it was haunted. It had not occurred to Daphne that it was till this moment, but now she romanced about eerie noises and panels that rang hollow.
Immediately after breakfast the next day all three hurried to the common. Daphne as guide, walked importantly ahead, leading the others through the white gate, and longing for the moment when Trudy should see the gibbet. The common lay before them in summer dress: the thistles high by the flying road, the grass tall and bearded where it mingled with bracken and rushes, and over the dusty highway and the disorderly herbage the sunlight quivering in a diaphanous haze. A few slow cows pastured in a hollow, and cocks and hens picked the green about Jacob's Post.
Trudy's interest in this gibbet was even more than one desired; in fact, there was some difficulty in getting her away till she had properly fixed upon her imagination the picture of a felon suspended there. It was already nine o'clock.
"Come on," said Owen. "We dine at half-past one."
The games were conducted just as Daphne had planned them. Owen was sent away to reappear as a traveller a quarter of a mile up the road; the girls put on black masks and held six-penny pistols; and Daphne went and lay behind the tall clump of blackberry called the Observation Post, while Trudy threw herself under some gorse lower down the highway. It was for Daphne to signal Owen's appearance in the distance. While she waited for him she selected any blackberries that showed a trace of ripeness, and ate the trace. Also she sucked and chewed grass, for Owen did not appear for a long time; there was nothing but a cart coming from Ditchling. She did not guess that Owen had been seized by the ingenious idea of approaching under the lee of the cart—such a thing was against the whole spirit of the game. Nevertheless, when the cart had passed in front of her he emerged from his cover with a shriek of triumph and raced down the hill towards Trudy. Leaping up angrily, she gave the pre-arranged signal, which meant that Owen had been spotted in the distance—and followed him as he ran past Trudy.
"Oh, the fool!" she grumbled, and called after him: "It's not funny, if you think it is." And to Trudy, before whom she stopped with this news of Owen's appearance: "He always must show off."
Owen turned round and came back with a victor's smile.
"You'll spoil it all if you want to be cocky," she grumbled. "Why can't you ever play sensibly?"
Having treated himself to one whimsical effort, Owen promised to play sensibly, and for the rest of the morning the games unrolled as they should. The walk home was a-clatter with tongues.
By early afternoon they were standing again on the road by the Observation Post, and deliberating how to vary the play, when Owen said: "Hist! Wait!" He had seen two specks coming with a curious velocity over the crown of the railway bridge. Two men—or two boys, since they were probably racing, and men didn't do such things.
"Hist! Hist! Sister Anne, sister Anne, I see some one coming."
"It's not funny.... Who are they?"
"I see two men running, and a cloud of dust."
With imaginations pleasantly troubled the girls looked towards the far-off but quickly approaching figures.
"Let's stop 'em, whoever they are," suggested Owen.
"Don't be an ass. We can't if we don't know them."
"Why not? If they're boys they won't mind. And we're three to their two."
"It would be rather ripping," reflected Daphne, while the others watched for her to give the last word. "I tell you what. You wait here behind the Observation Post, Owen, and as soon as they come near enough for you to see if they're boys and attackable, you signal 'Yes'—make a Y with your arms—and then come and join us lower down behind the gorse. Then we really will hold them up."
Daphne and Trudy ran to the gorse and fell prone behind it. This real holding up of unknown wayfarers on the high road was a completer thrill than any of the mock adventures. It affected Daphne with an emptying sensation below the waist, and shook the hand with which she was hurrying on her mask and cocking her pistol. And when Owen made a Y of his body and arms, and she knew that they were committed to the deed, and that the moments before its accomplishment were fast escaping, her heart began to pound with a delicious fear. Breathlessly Owen joined them, falling to his stomach with the announcement: "Two boys. One rather big." All watched the brow for the first of the boys to appear.
"I'll leap out," whispered Owen, who seemed to have none of that faint anxiety to be quit of the business that was troubling Daphne, "and you'd better follow me.... Look alive! Here's Number One."
Daphne looked up from her ground level and saw a figure on the brow outlined against the glazed sky. As he came down the slope she saw with surprise that he was in just such running attire as the competitors wore in the University Sports at Queen's Club: white vest with coloured ribbon edging the sleevelets and the button-opening; very short white shorts edged with the same ribbon; white socks and black rubber shoes. His fists were at his breast, and his dark hair blowing untidily. The figure, while clearly a young boy's, was tall and beautifully shaped—from the shoulder-line to the rounded thighs with their muscles astir. In the few seconds of his coming Daphne felt that vague agitation which beauty gave; it was but the germ of the pleasure felt by adults in the presence of a Praxitelean statue, and as unmindful of sex, and it was not only the lines of his body that had disturbed her, but the way he had come over the brow in the sun's light.
"Now!" cried Owen.
All three leapt out and stood across the road. The tall boy was so startled at this apparition of three masked bravoes in his path that he stopped suddenly, and, slipping on one foot, nearly fell.
"Damn and blast!" he muttered. "What the deuce are you playing at?"
"Your money or your life," said Daphne.
He was looking at her; first at her mouth and chin, then at the eyes that were staring at him through the mask; then at her disarrayed hair; then up and down her body. He smiled grimly, and as if it were impossible to insult a girl, turned towards Owen and said:
"Look here, I'm going to give you a lamming."
A younger boy, also in running clothes, had now come up and stopped.
Owen retreated a step or two, but the bigger boy seized his wrist and twisted it right round.
"Don't!" commanded Daphne, pleased with this opportunity of being heroic.
Taking no notice of her orders, the boy twisted her brother's arm again, and Daphne promptly hit him a heavy blow with the butt of her pistol on the bone of his wrist.
"God——!" he began, but controlled the curse, and out of respect for the girl dropped Owen.
"It's a game," explained Daphne. "We thought you'd see the joke."
"That bally thing of yours hurts. I don't see why you should hit me with it just because, being a girl, you know I shan't give you a lamming. Others would."
This angered Daphne. It was the unfairest accusation that she had taken cover behind her sex. The thought had not been in her mind at all, and the suggestion of it made her pluck look like cowardice.
"Oh, I never thought of that at all," she protested. "You can have a shot at giving me a lamming if you like."
With his grim smile the boy seized her wrist and turned it strongly—but not too strongly. Daphne set her teeth and deliberately looked defiance into his eyes. He stared commandingly into hers. And holding her thus captive, though still with a hint of gentleness, he suddenly whipped off her mask and put it behind his back.
"Don't!" she shouted. "Give that back to me. It's mine."
"No, I shan't!"
With her spare arm she reached round him to recover her property. Her arm was now about his waist, but the feel of his body, thinly covered by the vest, neither raised a blush nor intruded diffidence. She only fumbled for her mask while the boy looked down upon her, grinning confidently and enigmatically.
"Rescue!" shouted Owen, and he and Trudy rushed for his sister.
"Get away, you little worm!" said the tall boy, letting go of his captive—while Owen got away. The boy seemed to give himself to thought, looking now at Daphne and now at the mask, which he drew away as she tried to snatch it. Then he turned to his companion. "I say, Cyril, we might get these kids to join us.... We were training when you barged in. But we've an idea to start paper-chasing or something." He looked at Owen. "I say, Face-ache, what are you called, and what are your sisters' names? You do look a guy in that mask."
"They're not my sisters," answered Owen, a thought over-awed, and removing his mask. "At least, only one of them."
"Well, which one, fool? Introduce us properly."
"This one."
The tall boy looked a little shyly at the girl whose wrist he had twisted and whose arm had held him tight about the waist.
"And what's her name?"
"Duffy—or Daphne—Daphne Bruno."
"Comic names. Still"—he bowed gallantly though yet shyly—"very happy to make your acquaintance.... Now the other one, Fifth of November."
"Trudy Wayne, who's staying with Duffy for the hols."
"That's like Cyril.... Where's Cyril? Come here, man. This is Cyril Evans. He's my cousin, and he's coming up to Sillborough next term.... Now we all know where we are."
"But you haven't told us your name yet," pointed out Daphne, not the least shyly, and sucking the wrist he had twisted.
"Nor I have. It's Muirhead—Roger Muirhead.... However, that'll do for that. Let's get on with this game you're playing.... Cyril, look here man, we'll pick sides, and as I'm the biggest, I'll only have one of these people, and you can have the other two. And, as I'm only to have one, I'll pick first."
He went through an elaborate pantomime of indecision, looking each of them up and down, as if appraising their adroitness or speed. And, rather casually, he smiled his decision at Daphne.
"I'll have this one. I forget your name—Duffy Something, wasn't it?"
"Bruno."
"Of course.... Righto! The Bruno-Muirhead Combine against the world. Cyril, you take your crowd a half a mile or so back along the road, and I bet none of you get through us two. If a single one of you gets as far as Jacob's Post, your side's won. D'you see?"
"Yes, man."
"Well, nip off your way, and we'll go ours. Come on—Duffy." He coloured as he used the name.
Roger and she stepped off the roadway on to the grass, and they were about to cross a stretch made dirty with the large droppings of kine, when Cyril called out: "Mind the cowslips!"
Trudy giggled; Owen too, for it was humour after his heart, if a trifle daring; but Roger, to every one's surprise, swung round and, running after Cyril, who immediately began to escape, tried to give him a punitive kick.
"You know you don't talk like that in front of girls," he muttered breathlessly.
"It was nothing much," Cyril grumbled.
"Well, much or not, don't say that sort of thing in front of girls unless you want your behind kicked. Now clear out.... Come on, Duffy." And he led her away with the silence of a man who has just shown his chivalry and his power. No heed gave he, though undoubtedly hearing Cyril's "Sidey swine!" and Daphne felt she must suggest, "But supposing your cousin won't play now?"
"He'll play if he's told to," said Roger.
Roger, now that he was alone in a wilderness with his partner, appeared a little awkward. He had difficulty in finding anything to say; and Daphne, to ease him, ran merrily to the gorse screen and flung herself prone upon the ground behind it. Roger stood for a minute and looked down upon her.
"You're longer than I thought when you lie like that.... How old are you?"
He sat down.
"Thirteen!"
"Is that all? I should have, thought you were fourteen at least. I'm—I'm fifteen. We're both on the long side, aren't we?"
"You look quite sixteen."
"Do I? Yes, people generally think I'm older than I am." He lay down on his arm beside her. "Do you live near here?"
Daphne answered this and several other questions, while Roger listened, masticating one blade of grass after another and throwing them away as they were drained of their pleasure. He seemed given to thinking long on all he heard. In his turn he explained that he was the only son of Sir Roger Muirhead, "of the Muirhead Traders, you know," and that they had just bought the Downway House on the Plumpton side of the common, "partly for holidays, and partly as a spec." When Daphne asked if he would one day be "Sir Roger," he replied vaguely, "I daresay."
"And did you say Sillborough was your school? I think Owen's supposed to be going there."
"Yes, I've been there over a year." And rather pretentiously he added, "I must show your brother round when he comes, and look after him a bit."
The talk failing here, Daphne pretended to look for signs of Cyril and his party, but Roger, apparently anxious that she should not elude his conversation, said: "Oh, they won't be in sight for some time yet.... Look here, here's your mask. I'm sorry I took it."
"No, you can have it," demurred Daphne, touched by his apology. "I can easily make another."
"Oh, well. Perhaps I'll keep it, then.... I hope I didn't hurt you when I twisted your arm like that, but you dared me to, didn't you?"
"Oh, not a bit."
When the words had left her she knew, somehow, that she had said them wrong; with too much contempt, or with insufficient appreciation of his courtesy. She had very slightly bruised his self-esteem. There was no doubt that, if he was very chivalrous, he was also rather conceited and pompous.
"I could have done so, of course," he explained, "but I didn't want to. I was only shamming."
By now his manner had stirred the suspicion, and it was accompanied by just such a pleasant emptying sensation as she had experienced when awaiting the adventure, that he was attracted by her. She looked for a swift second at his face, hoping he would not trap the glance, but his eyes were towards her, and she swept hers past his. His were brown eyes, rather small, perhaps, but when the enigmatic grin was at his lips, they twinkled mischievously. This moment, as she took them in her sweep, they were thoughtful. She continued the motion of her head, pretending that it had all been done to ease her neck. Her eyes fell upon his extended legs, of which the left was crossed over the right. They were bare—bare and very shapely. With a laugh she turned her face back to his and asked: "Aren't you awfully cold?"
"No, I never feel the cold much. I've purposely inured myself to it, like the Spartans, you know.... I'm awfully keen on the Greeks, and their ideas about athletics, and so on.... Look here, we'd better arrange our plan of campaign. You'll catch your school-friend and I'll have young Cyril in two twos, and then I'll chase after your kiddy brother."
"Oh, you'll catch Owen all right——"
"By Jove, here they are!"
He slipped into a position ready to run.
"Now!" commanded he.
Out he shot, and with his fine strides soon ran Cyril down. Daphne took longer to secure Trudy. Owen rushed past and ran delightedly towards the gibbet. Roger set off in pursuit with a long, unworrying, relentless pace that was probably intended for the gaze of Daphne. Daphne watched him with that partiality which comes from the prospect of seeing the humiliation of a relative, especially one who tries to be clever. It was quickly over. Roger brought back his prey after the fashion of a policeman, one hand holding his collar, the other his wrist.
In all the games that filled that afternoon save one, Roger contrived to secure Daphne for his partner. The exception was when Daphne said, "No, I'm going with Cyril now," and Roger looking nonplussed—even hurt, as at the shattering of a dream—refused, of his courtesy, to force Daphne against her will. Of his courtesy, too, he was gracious and gay with his new partner, Trudy. At the afternoon's close, they agreed to meet early the following morning. The last game was spread all over the western side of the common, for Daphne, with Roger to chivy every one off, had to reach Jacob's Post without being so much as touched by Cyril, Trudy or Owen. She ran diagonally and zigzag, and Roger with his long legs ran all round her, intercepting any who threatened her. They could not pass him and abandoned hope.
Throughout the evening, when they were playing table-games in the great play-room at Old Hall House, she was as noisy and skilful as Owen or Trudy, but she had moments of wool-gathering when she wondered about many things. She would have liked to escape to an empty room, there to walk up and down with her friendly questions. The once or twice that they played a guessing game and she was outside the closed door, she let her thoughts run to the subject that called them. Yes, for a little while he had been—he was—— But why? She felt like a child—of a different order, almost, from him. He was so mature and majestic (these were not Daphne's words, who had less words than blindfolded thoughts), and strong and proficient. But he was, for a little. She could not doubt it. Incredible. Nothing would come of it, nothing could come of it. It had only been a momentary attraction. Still, she could—oh, yes, it gave her that curious, delightful emptying when she imagined it—she could love him very much. He was, of course, the very perfection of her idea of a lover; not faultless, but exactly what she would like. Every one else she could think of seemed less than he. But it wouldn't be ... it wouldn't be.... She would hold herself in and wait on the future.
Soon after nine the next morning they were waiting by the Observation Post and looking down the Plumpton Road for Roger and Cyril. A hooded cart rumbled towards them, and when it passed their gathering, dropped from its tailboard, as it might have been two bundles, Roger and Cyril. They were very differently dressed from yesterday. Roger wore a suit of grey flannel, apparently new-bought for the holidays, royal blue socks and brown shoes, a plum-coloured tie, and his dark hair plastered down. Though still a comely boy, he looked rather more ordinary than he had done in his running kit.
"We'll toss for partners to-day," said he hurriedly, lest any one suggested something else. "Cyril and I being the two eldest males had better pick." Tossing up a coin he turned to Cyril. "You call, man."
Cyril won, and chose Trudy. And throughout the day it so fell that, whenever they tossed, Daphne always fell to Roger's share. The first time he won he paraded doubt before choosing her, and the second time said casually: "Ah, well, best stick to the old firm." They played all the morning and all the afternoon, having tea as guests of a rather lordly Roger at the Royal Oak, and when the glamour of evening was over the common, and their ravenous appetites cried to them that it must be supper-time, Roger said mysteriously:
"Look here. Gather round, all. An idea's been festering in my mind all the afternoon. Sit down. In a ring. This is a bally conspiracy.... The first fine night we'll all meet on the common at midnight. Don't be alarmed. It'll be topping."
"Oh, let's," agreed Cyril.
"We'll meet at Jacob's Post at half-past midnight, and bring food."
"Oh, rather," suddenly said Daphne.
"Well, when shall it be?"
"To-night," said all.
"No, father isn't back yet. And it'll be no fun escaping if there's no one dangerous to escape from."
"Is your father dangerous?" inquired Daphne.
"Oh, he's all right, only he thinks he's a deuce of a disciplinarian."
"Would he whack you if he caught you?"
"Well, hardly," Roger grinned. "However, to-morrow night's the night, if fine. Especially as we shan't have many more nights——"
"What?" exclaimed Trudy.
Daphne, who had been fiddling with something on the ground, looked up quickly and caught Roger's eye watching for her.
"Oh, are you going away, then?" she grumbled.
"Yes. Father joins us to-morrow, and in a few days we all go off to Cornwall. Cyril and I were keen on it, but I'm not so keen now. However, there it is." There was a fine Roman note in his acceptance of adversity. "We won't meet at all to-morrow afternoon, so as to be fresh for the night. If it's fine, which it will be, and Cyril and I decide we can do it, we'll come outside your house some time between six and eight o'clock, and fire two shots in rapid succession."
"I say!" ejaculated Trudy, and an alarmed thumb-nail shot to her teeth.
"No, it'll be all right, I promise you. Everything the whole night. I'll guarantee no harm of any kind comes to you. I shall regard it as my personal responsibility."
In imitation of this grandiloquence Owen drawled: "Wow-wow-wow."
Roger turned sharply on him. If he were elaborately courteous to girls that was no reason why he should stand any lip from prep. schoolboys.
"What did you say, Stinkpot?"
"Nothing," answered Owen, subdued by so sudden an approach.
"Well, don't say it again. If you can't keep your mouth shut, put a sock in it. Well, now we all know the programme...."
When Daphne, Trudy and Owen were littering the walk home with their chatter, it gradually emerged that every one of Trudy's remarks held a sly under-meaning. Daphne refused to perceive it, though a rising colour betrayed her pleasure; Trudy shaded off her remarks into the less and less equivocal, but still Daphne saw them only as innocent, and at last Trudy was forced to say outright:
"Of course, it's perfectly obvious that Roger's gone cracked on you."
"What?"
"Of course, it is perfectly obvious that Roger has gone cracked on you."
"'Course it's perfectly obvious he hasn't!" protested Daphne, the blood now flooding her face.
Hearing the word spoken aloud and deliberately like that had set her heart beating quickly and irregularly.
"Well, at any rate, you're blushing."
"At any rate, I'm not!"
"All right. If you say you can't see that Roger's silly about you, you must be either a fool or a liar."
"I don't think it's obvious at all."
Here Owen unadvisedly stepped into the discussion.
"It's obvious to the meanest intelligence."
"Lot you know about it, copy-cat."
"Thank you. I do know a lot. My experience is extensive."
"It's not at all funny.... Besides, I was talking to Trudy. What makes you think so?"
"I can always tell," Trudy explained.
When they entered the house, Daphne, whose cheeks were still flushed and her heart still delightfully irregular, wanted to get away alone, far more urgently than last night, so as to think about it all. But supper detained her, and then Trudy would keep her talking; and what was annoying about Trudy's talk was that she had apparently forgotten the one interesting topic, as if, after all, it were nothing very impressive. Daphne answered her frequently enough to maintain a show of interest, though really she missed large chunks of what Trudy was saying. And as soon as possible she invented an excuse and ran away to some place where she might be private. An old habit sent her to the bathroom, where there was a bolt on the door. There she leapt on to the mahogany framework of the bath, and, sitting sideways, stared out at the dark orchard and the brick walk that ran by the kitchen door.
Then he did. He, so much older (somehow), so much more important, did love her. She saw him again—tall, dark, wide-breasted, his eyes sparkling when excited with plans; twinkling mischievously—almost possessively—when she struggled with him; frowning angrily when he insulted Cyril or Owen. He had twisted her wrist sharply, and to remember it was delicious, and she, struggling for her mask, had had her arm tight about his waist. The thought disturbed her internally, and she moved a little as she sat on the side of the bath. She liked the disturbance, and sought it by returning to the memory again and again.
In her bed that night, when Trudy had talked herself to sleep, she turned on her side and directed her will to thinking only of Roger, in the hope that this would bring him into her dreams and carry her into his. She struggled to keep her erratic mind's-eye playing on the figure of Roger; Roger coming over the brow in white running kit, wrestling with her for her mask (her body straightened in bed as she remembered it), choosing her for his partner, running about her and fighting her battle. Surely this hard thinking would propel her soul over the dark common to the Downway House where Roger slept.
But this sunlight in the room, and the white and twisty singing of birds! It was morning, and she hadn't dreamt at all. She stared at the clock on the mantelpiece. Only twenty past five. A dead silence in the house, and a perfect stillness in the garden, except for the birds. Twenty past five.... Let her spend the next hour thinking of Roger. To enjoy the thinking, she pulled the clothes warmly about her.
When, after breakfast, the two parties met again on the common, Roger was still shy and awkwardly imperious, and Daphne studied to be natural and lively as if unaware that love was in any one's mind. Now and then, when Roger and she, in hiding from the others, lolled under the gorse, she languished a little before him, but it was more unconscious than deliberate. Her face she kept averted, giving him only an occasional glance, which she hoped he would not see. If they had long to wait, she lay backward so that her head rested on her interlaced fingers and her eyes dreamed at the sky. The glare tiring them, she let her lids fall, after which a hundred noises of the common seemed to become audible: birds, a cow's bell, a dog barking far away, the breeze in the tree-branches, and the distant suggestion of a cart with a trotting horse. Roger would be extraordinarily silent at her side.
During the morning his nearness, though so desired, became almost oppressive. She could scarcely answer him now, if he spoke to her, and her part in the games was formal and remote—she carried too pleasing a burden of thoughts. When they returned to lunch, she carried them with her in silence. As companions they were easier than Roger; and she was not unhappy that the afternoon and evening were to be spent at home, before the adventure of midnight. Trudy spent the afternoon reading; Owen drawing. In Daphne the emotion that was causing her heart to flutter or her voice to shake funnily, began to press on her old vent—the desire to write. This brought direction to her thoughts, and a rest in moving with them. She dreamed out a story, in which two people met while children, as Roger and she had done, and after being parted for many years, both remaining faithful and both imagining themselves forgotten, met again in middle age, to pass the evening of their lives in a sheltered and fragrant calm. "Coo, it'd make a beautiful story," thought Daphne, a contemplative thumb arrested at her lips. Her imagination, playing on it, teemed with ideas; and as, one after another, they came to her, the story that should contain them all seemed so good that its early publication was placed beyond doubt. Already she saw it in book form. By tea-time she had completed a scenario on a sheet of foolscap, and was writing the first paragraphs. But the actual writing was a laborious exercise, and a drag on her impatient thoughts; only dreaming could keep pace with thoughts. No, by her fine afternoon's work on the scenario she had earned the right to sit and think about it. And she spent an enchanted evening in this service of her compulsion to write—wonderfully oblivious of the outside world, and at rest. Always its service was perfect freedom.
They were sitting at supper, with Miss Carrell at the table's head, when suddenly a loud report was heard in the road.
"Good heavens! What's that?" exclaimed Miss Carrell.
There was another shot, but farther away.
Daphne felt that everybody in the cottages round must be rushing into the road to see if murder had been done.
"Oh, it's some one killing rabbits, I expect," said Owen.
She found herself admiring her brother's composure. Owen was not an easy mixture to analyse. Though often timid, he showed flashes of daring, and would be quite undisturbed by circumstances that started uncomfortable fears in her. To-night, for instance, in this period between the half-light and bedtime, when both girls had begun to be afraid of the secret conspiracy, Owen had assumed an ascendancy.
"I'll come and collect you two as soon as the clock strikes midnight," said he.
Trudy yawned. Her enthusiasm was at its lowest.
"But suppose we all drop off to sleep, and wake to find it's morning."
"We must divide the night into three watches," Owen decided. "We can go to bed at nine. There'll be three watches of one hour. Trudy can take the first as she's tired, then Duffy, then me.... I think I shall turn in soon, as we have a long and dirty night's work in front of us."
In their bedroom Trudy lightened her watch by talking with Daphne, and at ten o'clock said: "Now it's you on duty," and, turning over, was soon asleep. Daphne lay awake, staring into the darkness and listening to the last sounds in the household below. In an hour she would see Roger again. But what then? They would only be awkward with each other. They found it so difficult to talk. The only perfect satisfaction—and this was an impossible dream—would be to hold each other close and long and in silence....
Thinking thus was such a restful happiness that she could only keep awake by forcing open her eyes and staring at the light on the blind or trying to distinguish the outlines of the fire-place. A few times she did doze and was obliged to pull herself back to watchfulness. Suddenly she heard a step outside her door, and a creaking board. Her heart stopped. There was a tickling knock, which nearly drove her under the sheets.
"Duffy! Duffy!"
"Yes?"
"It's eleven o'clock. You should have called me."
"Oh, you might have given me time."
"I'll take on now."
"All right...."
She turned over and remembered nothing more till she awoke with another heart-leap at the sound of some one moving outside her door.
"I say.... I say.... It's just on twelve."
Daphne sat up in bed. The memory that in half an hour she would be with Roger had strengthened her to overcome sleepiness.
"Trudy! Trudy!"
Something about the darkness forbade more than a strong whisper.
But Trudy was heartily asleep.
"Trudy!"
She said it aloud, and coughed when she heard how loud it sounded.
Getting up quickly, for she was half-afraid of the whole room, she crossed to Trudy's bed and shook her shoulder.
"Trudy, it's midnight."
Trudy turned over resentfully.
"No, get up. Don't spoil it all. Owen and I are up." Trudy threw off the clothes.
"Ooo! it's cold! I didn't think it'd be as cold as this."
A whisper came through the door.
"Aren't you two nearly ready. I've been ready for a long time."
"Well, don't show off about it," enjoined Daphne.
In five minutes the two girls and Owen were creeping down the stairs, stopping whenever they heard a distant door shaking or a stair squeaking under their feet. On the road, the air freshened them and the quick walking awakened them, and they began really to enjoy themselves. The blind houses that looked at them through the darkness, the sleeping Royal Oak Hotel, the closed cattle gate at the entrance to the common, by increasing their sense of guilt, gave a pungency to the adventure. The empty common was, perhaps, almost too like a desert; and all were feeling the eerieness of Jacob's Post, seen through the night, when two figures leapt into their path, their arms shooting to the sky in a demoniac gesture.
"Sorry," apologized Roger. "Cyril insisted on us doing that."
But this lively item barely concealed that they were all rather shy of one another; and Roger, determining, as the originator of the conspiracy, to save it from awkwardness, said cheerily:
"We'll grub first. I want you all to come right to the centre of the common.... So come along. Squad, march."
They followed him to the heart of the common, where he led them to a stretch of low gorse, and unshouldered his haversack, bidding Cyril do the same. From these they produced five bottles of ginger beer, some buns and bananas, and a lantern.
"Strike a light, my son," said Roger, addressing himself. "See, it's a dark lantern.... Now we sit down and gorge."
None of them was hungry, and the buns were hardly a success, but bananas were things you could eat at any time of the day, or with a stomach in any state. And when the last of them had been finished, Roger issued orders:
"This is the game. As there are five of us we divide into two sides of two each. The fifth person must hide on the common. Whichever of the two sides finds him first wins. It'll have to be Cyril or me who hides, as Owen is too young and foolish."
"I beg your pardon," said Owen.
"What?" asked Roger.
"I beg your pardon, I said."
"Oh, well, that's granted.... So Cyril——"
"But I mean I didn't gather the full purport of your last remark."
"Well, wash your ears out next time.... Here, Cyril, we'll toss who hides."
They tossed, and Cyril won.
"Oh, I'll take the lantern and do the hiding, you bet," said he.
"All right," permitted Roger; "and as I lost the toss, I'll have first pick.... Well, may as well stick to the old firm. Duffy and I will be on one side, and Trudy and Owen the other."
"But we'll never find Cyril in the darkness," said Trudy.
"You haven't heard all yet. Cyril takes the lantern, and if we're nowhere near him, he shows its light on the common. He may then darken it and move away. If he's slick, he'll move in the opposite direction to the one you're expecting. (I half wish I had the lantern.) But as sure as he finds you're going all wrong, he's got to show a light again."
"Oh, how topping!" agreed Trudy.
"Right! Streak away, Cyril. Take to the heather, my bonnie lad. Any direction you like. We'll count a hundred before we raise the highlands and pour down after you."
Aloud, monotonously, automatically, Roger counted one hundred.
"——ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred! Now, you and your party, Owen, had better trickle southward towards Brighton, and I and Duffy'll prospect the common northward towards York."
A few uncomfortable seconds, and Daphne and Roger were walking alone through the night. Her heart began to race. She walked unspeaking beside him, aware of his equal discomfort. They struck across the grass, sometimes tripped by the branching bracken or a rush-crowned tussock, when Roger would extend to her help a gentle hand. His talk about the search for Cyril was so empty of conviction that she guessed he was summing up courage to say something else. They reached a clump of bramble, and Daphne, after stupidly looking behind it, moved on.
"No, don't go on," stuttered Roger. "I've something to say to you. Let's sit down." She obeyed him without speaking. "When do you and Trudy go back to school?"
"September 14th."
"There! I knew it. I guessed it. Fate's against us. We shan't return from Cornwall till two days after that. Heaven knows if I shall ever meet you again. We were destined to see each other in a flash and no more."
These words, so picturesque and sad, amounted to an avowal of tenderness; wherefore Daphne could only keep silence, pulling up blades of grass.
"Duffy, let me kiss you, may I?"
The words had, beyond doubt, come out of the darkness.
"Of course not."
"Duffy, don't be a rotter. Can't you see that any other fellow'd have taken you, now he'd got you here, and kissed you whether you let him or not. But I've never been rude to you, have I? I have my own ideas about how you ought to treat women. I reverence them. Duffy, I'm madly in love with you—I am, really. You're—you're like a magnet to me." He took her hand gently. "All this business to-night, and all its beastly expense, I've engineered simply because I was determined to have you for half an hour to myself, and in complete privacy—out of the beastly daylight. Those kids are just being used to serve our ends." He was obviously proud of his manœuvring. "Duffy, I'm not a flirt. I've never flirted with a girl in my life, not because I thought it wrong—that wouldn't have worried me, for I'm afraid I generally do what I like—but just because they've never interested me. I didn't want to fall in love with you. But from the moment you jumped out of that hedge at me you diverted the course of my life." She guessed this had been rehearsed, for a similar sentence had presented itself to her. "You may not remember, but you flung yourself down on your face at my feet."
"Oh, I didn't."
"Well, behind a hedge, I mean. Let me finish. And the minute you did that I was metaphorically at your feet.... Duffy, do you love me, too?"
To this she preferred to give no direct answer, and he repeated:
"Do you love me, too?"
"I like you."
"Well, let me kiss you. I shan't if you won't let me. But if you don't I vow I'll never see you again. And I don't go back on a vow.... And hang it, Duffy, I'm going in less than a week."
"Oh, can't you get out of going?"
"No. Father's one of those who never changes his mind. We're exactly like each other in that way, so I can't complain. Duffy, are you sorry I'm going?"
"Yes, of course I am."
"Well, does that mean you do more than like me?"
The "Yes" would not leave her lips.
"Duffy, I believe you love me, do you?"
No answer.
"Do you?"
After a long silence she answered by resting her body against his.
"Duffy!" He had immediately drawn her closer. "You—you lovely wild flower on the heath."
And he kissed her—awkwardly rather than rapturously, as if uncertain how such things were done, and the kiss was only in the full of her cheek. The taking of her lips was an impertinence that chivalry did not sanction.
But he kept her long in his pressure, and under the silence she was trying to realize that these were Roger's arms. It was so wonderful a thought that she feared lest her imagination missed its fullness. And in the effort to keep her imagination up to pitch, she probably did fall short of any complete rapture. Roger seemed lost in his happiness, and it was she who first drew away.
"I say, we're forgetting the others. They may be near."
Roger laughed significantly, and jumped up.
"I don't think so. Come this way, and I'll show you something."
He led her to the nearest rise, where, after sweeping the whole common to the south, he suddenly pointed and said: "Look!"
A tiny light twinkled—it seemed miles away—and went out, leaving nothing but darkness on the common. Then again it pricked the night, and one could imagine voices.
"Coo!" exclaimed Daphne in admiration.
Roger gave a grim, self-satisfied laugh.
"Cyril has his orders. Jove! he's a faithful henchman. Rather a nice piece of generalship, that! I don't fancy he'll let himself be caught by that wretched little brother of yours or that girl. He has his orders where to hold them, and for how long."
"Does he know then what—what you were going to do to me?"
"I told him I jolly well wanted you to myself, and intended having you. It's nothing new to have a squire in these matters."
"But he may tell some one."
"Not he. He knows what he'd get if he did."
They were walking unthinkingly back to the clump.
"I'm awfully tired," she said.
He sat down and patted the grass.
"Lie there, then, and rest against me."
She obeyed, putting an arm about his waist and laying her head on his coat. He patted it lovingly, and occasionally kissed her hair, to which she would respond with a little hug. Once he said: "Are you sure you're not cold?" and later, after a long kiss on her forehead upturned: "My God, I'm glad I was born."
CHAPTER X
In the morning she told Trudy. This had been Roger's advice, and she was not at all averse to acting on it. "Cyril knows, and Trudy and the young brother must know," he had said. "Otherwise we shan't be able to escape away alone." And Trudy, after an annoying "What did I say?" was magnificent, showing a deep interest in the romance, and out-talking Daphne with plans for the next few days. Owen said, "I protest it shocks me," and did what he could to help.
There were three days before Roger left. The first two, as was right for lovers, they wandered together along country roads or up on to the downs. Often they were at a loss for conversation, but always Roger embraced happiness, and Daphne lost herself in it, when the time came for her to sink into his arms. She discovered, too, that he could always be given conversational facility, and the desirable mental ease, if he were encouraged to talk about himself. She learned then that unless he did something big he would not really be Sir Roger Muirhead, because his father was only a knight, but that he intended to do some very big things, and preferably in the field of politics. Herself talked little; she did not want to talk; the love affair was a dream—a dream like that one in which she was tried for murder before a watching world and unjustly condemned—but a dream that had solidified. Here in undeniable fact at her side was Roger, splendid to look at, clever, dominant, strangely older than she, and yet so deferential to her, so chivalrous. She was immensely proud of him; no grown-up girl with a lover had more than she, and of girls her own age who had such a one as this?
The third day, being the last before Roger's departure, a great scheme of his was carried through. Under cover of a few fabrications he and she escaped to Brighton, as other illicit lovers have done before and since. They lay on the shingle, each very proud of the other. They bathed, and afterwards stretched white, firm limbs to dry in the sun. They were photographed by a beach photographer that Roger might have her image in his breast pocket; but so revolting was the likeness that she begged him to smash it, and had a presentiment of disaster when it went with a strong man's finality into his breast. There were also in his pocket a big supply of envelopes addressed to her in Owen's handwriting, by means of which he intended to get his letters through the protective barriers at Hemans House. A brilliant stratagem! They had lunch on a restaurant balcony overlooking the sea, and tea at the end of the pier. With the falling of the sun the melancholy that had been with them all day took on a likeness of pain. He told her the train that they were taking to-morrow, and reminded her that it would run along the side of Ditchling Common.
"You must be on the common and wave to me, and I will see you the whole length of that bit. You must stand on one of the higher parts and I'll see you as long as I can. After that—well, I simply don't care to think what'll happen after that."
She said nothing in reply, so he repeated:
"Will you be there, Duffy?"
Her face turned towards him, and her eyes sought his. As if he didn't know she'd be there!
"Roger, I believe you think you love me more than I love you."
"Well, you never say much."
"I don't want you to go."
"Say, 'I love you better than all the world, darling."
"I love you better than all the world, darling."
That little sceptic who always crouched in a corner of Daphne's mind—that little sceptic who had enabled her to question Hollins's nursery rhymes, to see that Miss Vidella acted up to a part, or to suspect the ephemeral quality of the friendship with Trudy—had not been unheard during these rose-flushed days. It had whispered to her what grown-ups would say of the whole affair: that it was the veriest calf-love and the breath of a moment, and if there were pain in parting, three weeks would heal the wound. It had whispered that, of course the grown-ups were right. And yet the fact remained that she had so worked on her imagination, so lost herself in her dream, that now she suffered, and in her suffering, these thoughts could only peep and run.
She cried when she left Roger that night, and the cries became sobs, and her dreams when at last she slept were troubled with his presence. "I shan't see him any more," was her first thought on waking. "I know I shan't." As soon as possible she fled. Half an hour too early she was standing on the highest ridge of the undulating common, waiting for the distant smoke of Roger's train. Except for a cart trundling to Ditchling the ribbon of highway on which he had first appeared was deserted. A few cows cropped the grass near the western hedges. The cocks and hens, like the care-free creatures they were, pecked at the ground by Jacob's Post. As she waited she fiddled with her fingers, or nibbled at unripe blackberries, or looked around in search of the gorse bushes under which they had lain together. The action of her heart had sickly moments. She dreaded the coming of the train, and yet longed for it. Would it never come? Surely she had been waiting a long time. It would be better if it came soon and got its sharp moment over.
It was a relief when she caught her first glimpse of it—but a shock as well, for she had been in a brown study. It rushed on and past. She thought she distinguished Roger at a window, but could not be sure. But he at least must have seen her, for she had stood on her hill and waved her handkerchief in the same arc again and again, till the train was out of sight and there was nothing left but a broken puff of smoke in the sky.
Not three weeks, but three months were required for her cure. And even after that—for long after that—the memory of Roger, so handsome and so courteous, could give her a pleasant melancholy.
At first, however, she had been surprised to find that the rest of the holiday was anything but empty and dull. She was able to enjoy herself with Trudy and Owen, melancholy only adding a charm. Laughter came as easily as before, though sometimes she arrested it. She and Trudy would stare out of the window at old Eadigo in the garden, watching him as he bent low in his too-tight trousers, and hoping for the best. "Now—this time!" she would say, as he stooped to remove a weed—"it must happen soon," and she would wonder if such humour were consonant with Roger's absence. But he had written to her, and though his letters were infrequent, they were couched in the correctest language of a lover.
This was more than she had hoped, and she was very proud. When she went back to school, and Miss Vidella came fussing into the dining-room to welcome back her dear girls, Daphne felt sorry for her as an old maid who had never known the sensation of being loved. In her pride she felt the other girls ought to know about her romance, and in order that they might at least suspect, she encouraged their chaff when they found her in a deserted class-room writing to a secret correspondent. She liked to have this privacy disturbed by some inquisitive girl and to snatch her letter guiltily away. She was even tempted by the shameful idea of losing a letter of Roger's that it might be found and read.
But she was saved from this by the failing character of Roger's letters. Only the first two or three had been really passionate. And only two had come to Hemans House in the carefully prepared envelopes, and they had been little more than a résumé of his doings.
"He won't write again now. He'll never write again."
And he didn't. All the rest of those envelopes must have been destroyed.
After two months without a letter, she grew used to the pain, and gradually lost it. She no longer, when lying in bed, projected herself to Roger, but imagined instead their meeting one day when he would plead for forgiveness, and she would be too indifferent to cut or punish him; or, as a variant of this, the announcement in a paper which he would see: "A marriage has been arranged between Miss Daphne Deirdre Tenter Bruno, the celebrated daughter of an equally celebrated parent, and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu"—for this title had always fascinated her.