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.

The next summer, when the meeting might just possibly happen, she learned towards the term's end that they were to be whipped away to Devonshire for a long holiday by the sea. This was excellent. Roger, if he came to the common, would learn that the Brunos were away, on dignified travels in the west. The day before they left Sussex she dared to walk past the Muirheads' house. As she hurried along its frontage expedited by the sight of people in the garden, the side of her eye perceived that they were strange children with a nurse in uniform. This made her halt round a bend. After a moment of deliberation, she walked back towards the house, and asked of a gardener who was trimming a hedge of thuja: "Can you tell me, does a Lady Muirhead live here?"

"No, miss," said the gardener. "Least, it's their house, I believe, but it's let now to my boss, Mr. Bradlaugh."

"Oh!" exclaimed Daphne, conscious of a sharp disappointment. "Have you been here long?"

"We come here last spring, miss?"

"And how--how long will you be staying?"

"I don't know, miss. Two or three years, I reckon."

"Oh--well, thank you. Thanks awfully."

She walked back. The blow had been to learn that Roger wouldn't after all be humiliated and saddened by the sight of Old Hall House empty and frowning, nor by the gorse and brambles on Ditchling Common.