Chapter VIII

Daphne soon became used to Hemans House, its population and its practices, and could look back with wonder at the first days of fear. More than that, the life, for a particular reason, had become flushed with colour and richness. The one thing needed to lift her hatred from the school-rooms and the Windsor streets and to throw a glamour over them had happened: she was possessed by a romantic attachment for some one whose background they were. Before half-term had signalised to the girls that the top of the slope had been reached, and they could now go quickly down hill to the holidays, she knew that she adored Miss Sims. It had taken some five weeks of the alternate caresses and punishments, warm intimacy and stern aloofness, to betray their meaning to Daphne; but once it had broken on her that she was the object of a popular mistress's favouritism, she was flattered into reciprocation. The slide from fondness to love was easy and quick. As with her affection for Miss Carrell, so now with her adoration of Miss Sims: she loved to think that she loved. But the later attachment was as much stronger than the earlier, as Daphne was older, warmer, and more conscious of her sex. It was an emotion too strong for reticence--except in words; on walks she fought to be at Miss Sims's side; sometimes she threaded her arm into the mistress's; and once, when they were right behind all the others, she rested her head against her shoulder. At gymnasium every exercise she performed on parallel bars, horizontal bar, or bridge ladder was done with an eye on the gallery in the hope of impressing Miss Sims. She suffered the pains of jealousy when Miss Sims (deliberately) made much of another girl. And her letters home to Miss Carrell were enthusiastically full of her form mistress. There was pleasure in writing about her.

But her pains and pleasures were weak compared with those hidden behind Miss Sims's indulgent smile. As Miss Sims assured herself: "The child is fond of me--very fond--really devoted, I think. But it must inevitably be a small return for what I am giving to her. It is always so with children.... Still, it is happiness to give." She made a resolution that her influence must be a power for good. She must be associated in the memory of Daphne Bruno, when that beloved girl should have grown tall and given herself to a man, with all that was best in her childhood. She must be the person of whom Daphne would say: "I really owe everything to her."

And a salient truth of Daphne's schooldays was this, that Miss Sims--Miss Sims, with her thirty pounds a year and her cubicle with an iron bed and tin wash-stand; Miss Sims with her high-coloured make-believes, of which she was half ashamed; Miss Sims with her thirst for emotion and her squeezing of pupils like sponges for its sating--_was_ the most of what she resolved to be. Every one is an expert in the hobby that fills his dreams, and Miss Sims had seen exactly how her influence could be this "power for good." Her little worshipper would most surely model herself on her idol, and so Miss Sims must appear to embody in her own nature all the noble qualities she would give to Daphne. She created a character in her imagination, and always acted it before the eyes of her pupil. And this was the Character: great gentleness masking concealed strength; a perfect feminine sympathy mingled with a capacity to be stern; remarkable sensibility to beauty wherever it was to be found, and thus a passionate love for all the arts, with a predilection for literature; a taste in dress, and a beautiful serenity in manner.

As a background to the Character, she hinted in her talks with Daphne at a collateral relationship to a very old family; at reasonable private means, her present work being done for the love of it, there being no nobler task; at holidays in romantic places abroad; and, of course, at a love story of which one did not speak.

In her first holidays Daphne returned home, full of the importance of a school girl, and talked incessantly of the customs at Hemans House to Owen, who was not interested, and to her father, who was quite amused--at least, till he took up his book again. It was his daughter's tales and imitations of the head mistress that pleased him--"By Jove! she can see, that child!" Miss Vidella appealed to the dramatist in him, both as a picturesque character and as a type.

"She belongs to a type that is doomed to pass, Duffy mia. There is pathos as well as humour in her posing and her prudery. I always think it's rather sad the way such people imagine they are being applauded, while all the time they are being laughed at by modern minds.... However, you'll understand these things later."

One result of this ridicule was that his daughter saw how much better it was to be on the laughing, rather than the laughable, side of a dividing line, and that she must therefore join the moderns who always did the laughing. She was modern. She saw Miss Vidella from a new angle, and much more clearly, and she determined to carry this interesting viewpoint back to Hemans House. As a viewpoint it had much to recommend it: it meant that when Miss Vidella prohibited this and that--circling over the horizontal bar, or any display of the feminine leg above the lower calf--she was probably out of date, and the best way to express one's advance from such rulings was to glory in their breach.

The only conflict in her mind was how far this healthy insurgence, imitated from her father, clashed with the obedience and serenity imitated from Miss Sims. And when she was again under the roof of Hemans House and the influence of Miss Sims, a settlement of the conflict was found to be very necessary. So on a walk to the tennis fields, when the mistress and her favourite had dropped behind the girls, she sidled up to the subject.

"Father says Miss Vidella is out of date, and so are all her ideas."

"H'm. Your father is doubtless a representative of extremely modern minds."

"So'm I."

Miss Sims laughed, provoking Daphne to defend herself.

"Well, she is rather absurd."

"Hush, dear," said Miss Sims, for the Character was nothing if not loyal. "Miss Vidella's aims are of the highest, and there's a lot to be said for the kind of woman she tries to produce--modest, controlled, and quiet.... But I do think that perhaps she doesn't make sufficient allowance for the heyday in the blood of youth. Probably the animal spirits ought to express themselves sometimes in a little wildness and tomboyishness--so long as these things go with affectionateness--and with high ideals. Later, when one has experienced the disillusions of life, it will be time to acquire a tranquil resignation."

This was an excellent verdict. For sympathy and sense there had been no one before quite like Miss Sims. Everything had now fallen into place. Daphne saw that she could postpone the final serenity till she had grown up and passed through the fire. She was thus at liberty to express the modernity of her intellect, as compared with Miss Vidella's, by flagrant breaches of Miss Vidella's rules.

The first time she displayed it was at the gymnasium. She hung it out, so to speak, on the horizontal bar.

It was a morning when the head mistress herself was in the gallery watching carefully through her spectacles. The girls had been vaulting backwards over the parallel bars, and Daphne, when her turn came, had swung herself with such ardour that the oblique line of her body was rather from her legs down to her head than from her head down to her legs--a position which Miss Vidella stipulated must be guarded against in this dangerous exercise. Her legs had just swung down again on to the mat when she heard the high-pitched voice coming from the gallery top like the voice of a bird from a tree. All eyes had turned towards it.

"Instructor! Instructor!"

The instructor made a grimace, seen only of the girls, and called back: "Yes, madam."

Miss Vidella made her favourite point.

"Instructor, I take it this is a place for teaching young ladies a becoming deportment, and not for training circus clowns."

"Yes, madam," agreed the instructor.

"Well, will you kindly correct them when they forget it? ... Daphne dear, come here." Daphne approached a little way, and Miss Vidella, leaning forward with her hands on the balustrade, like some preacher who must deliver his sermon sitting, explained to her: "You must remember, dear, that it is the glory of human beings that their head is usually above their feet. With cows, and ruminant animals generally, the head is often on the same level as the hoofs. But it is only serpents and apes in the trees, I take it, which have a tendency to progress with their heads in a lower sphere than their other members. Now go back and remember that. All right, dears, you can resume your exercises."

The public rebuke rankled in Daphne; so the minute the lesson was over, and the girls were trooping to the dressing-room to change their rubber shoes, and Miss Vidella was managing with some difficulty the little hidden staircase from the gallery to the ground, she ran to the horizontal bar and circled it four or five times. Having thus liberated her resentment and proclaimed her faith before the other girls, she ran, very red and breathless, to the dressing-room.

It was uncommonly pleasant, this feeling of emancipation and this expressing of it before her schoolfellows. Her riding lesson gave her another opportunity. One day when their horses were gathered outside the gates of Hemans House, and the girls were mounting, she tried for a second to sit astride her horse, that she might see what it felt like and appear daring. But it was surprisingly difficult, with her skirt, to change from the side-saddle position to the astride. As she got her leg over the horse's withers the skirt went right above her knees, and she was in these difficulties when Miss Vidella came out on to the pavement to review the parade.

"Daphne! What _are_ you doing?"

"Mounting, Miss Vidella," stuttered Daphne, who had struggled back to the correct position.

"Do you generally climb over the horse to mount it? Or are you up to some of your monkey tricks again? Riding master, have you observed that Miss Bruno is mountaineering on her horse in the public street? But, of course, I know you cannot have done so, for you are always so careful with your pupils. Please keep Miss Bruno in front of you all the way, or there's no knowing what strange contortions she may not attempt."

The riding master, annoyed, said nothing, but examined the riders, touched his horse and led the cavalcade away. Daphne was just in front of him, and immediately they were out of the head mistress's view she pretended to scream with laughter, thinking this would divert the riding master, who, like all the outside instructors, was inclined to make fun of Miss Vidella. But, to her surprise, he called out:

"Come on, Miss Bruno! Sit properly at once. You've been foolish enough already to-day. I'm not taking out a chain of Margate donkeys; and I shall report you to Miss Vidella. Come here and ride beside me."

Daphne felt foolish at the failure of her jest, and, very flushed, came and rode by the master's side with a beating heart. With all her fancied insurgence she was still a little afraid of Miss Vidella and her black-rimmed spectacles and whining sarcasm. When the horses arrived back at Hemans House gates she watched the movements of the riding master, whether he would go in and see Miss Vidella or wait for her to emerge from the garden wall. But he only turned towards herself, and, as though softened by her long silence, smiled.

"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.