 Chapter 8 of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Braddon 8. Daisy's Honeymoon Diary How strange life is! The change that has come in my life came so suddenly that I fancied I should never be accustomed to the new state of things, yet after a little more than a month I feel as if Uncle Ambrose had lived with us for years and as if I had always been one of a united family of four instead of the other half of my mother's soul. In my thoughts of her I have always called her what Horace called Virgil, and you may a demedium maya. Have I lost her now that she is Ambrose Arden's wife, or rather how much of her love and her sweet companionship have I lost? Naturally there is a loss. I cannot be to her quite what I was before she gave herself to a husband who worships her, who seems jealous of every thought and every moment she gives to anyone but himself. We can no longer live like Hermia and Helena before Puck set them by the ears. We are no longer more like sisters than mother and daughter, as people used to say we were in the old days which began to look so far away. No, it must be owned there is a loss, and a loss that I shall feel all my life, but it is not so great a loss as to make me unhappy, for I know my mother loves me as truly and fondly as ever, and that she would not part with me for anything in the world. I know that Uncle Ambrose thoroughly deserves her love, and that he is doing his utmost to win it. I know that to me he is a good and true friend, and that I am never tired of his society. I know that the atmosphere of love in which I have lived all my life has lost none of its warmth and brightness. I know I am a girl in a thousand for good fortune, and that I ought to be very grateful to Providence for all my blessings. As I have failed in my attempts to write a novel, I mean to make this journal, The Book of My Life, and to put all of my thoughts and all my fancies into it. I shall describe things as vividly as ever I can, so that when I am an old woman I can look back upon the history of my life and find my youth still fresh and bright in these pages. Let me record the great event which has made so marked a change in my mother's life, her second marriage. It is a very curious sensation for a girl to stand by and see her mother married. It seemed to me always as if time had gone backwards, and mother were a girl again standing on the threshold of life. Uncle Ambrose was a most devoted lover and would hardly let my mother out of his sight during their very short courtship. When mother accepted him I knew that a short engagement was very far from her thoughts. Gratitude prevailed with her, and rather than lose so valued a friend she consented to take him as a husband, but when she gave that consent last July she certainly had no idea of marrying him early in September. However, those serious and placid people are much more persistent than impetuous characters, like my beloved father, for instance, and Uncle Ambrose contrived to talk my dear mother into an almost immediate marriage. Of course there was not the least reason why they should delay their wedding, for as both are rich there could be no question of ways and means, and as neither of them is young it might seem a pity to lose time. Nor is mother the kind of person to waste six months upon the preparation of a true so. She is always charmingly dressed, though it is only within the last year or two that she has consented to wear anything but black, and her wardrobe is full of beautiful things, so it would be idle vanity to wait for a heap of new clothes to be made, and during that delay to lose the beauty of the autumn for her honeymoon tour. It was decided at the very first discussion of the honeymoon that I was to travel with them after the first week, which they were to spend very quietly together at Folkstone, just to get used to the idea of being all in all to each other. A great many places were proposed and discussed, and finally it was settled that we should spend the autumn in Switzerland and go on to Italy in the beginning of the winter. Where do you think we are going to spend the winter, dear diary? In what particular city among all the cities of the world is our home to be? It is like a dream. I turn giddy at the very thought of it. We are to winter in Venice. We are to live within a stone's throw of the doge's palace and the lion's mouth. I am to see the bridge of size so often, going backwards and forwards in my gondola, that I shall get to think no more of it than I do of Lamford Leek. Yes, it is enough to turn any girl giddy. I want to preserve all the details of that wonderful day, my mother's wedding day. It was a perfect morning, as lovely a day as there has been all through the summer which ought to have been over, but which was just then in its prime for that first week of September was hotter and brighter than July. The dear old church and the graveyard were fatherlies and the village and the river were basking in a faint haze of heat which hung over all things like a bridal veil. Mother and I drove to church together, she very pale and with a distressed look about her beautiful mouth which made me feel sorry that I had not begged and prayed her not to marry again, for I felt that her heart was with her first love lying in his grave under the willow and not with the man who was so soon to be called her husband. She looked lovely in spite of her marble whiteness, lovely, but not like a bride. Her soft, fawn-colored silk gown harmonized with her rich brown hair and became her admirably. So did the little fawn-colored bonnet with a bunch of corn flowers. She was dressed for the journey to Folkstone where they were to arrive in time for dinner. There were no wedding guests except Aunt Emily and her husband, my cousins, the Reardon girls, the rector and his wife, and good old Mr. Mellidoo, my father's lawyer. I carried Mother's son shade and I was told to hold her gloves while she was being married. Everything had been kept so quiet, thanks to the rector, that very few people in the neighborhood knew that Mother and Mr. Arden were going to be married and only about half a dozen knew that this was their wedding day. So the church was almost empty. There were no schoolchildren to strew flowers. There was nothing in their pathway as they left the church but the sunshine and the shadows of the old U-branches that laid darkly across the path. I think I like that utter simplicity better than what people call a picturesque wedding. There was just one thing out of the common in the whole ceremony. We have a fine old organ at Lamford, an organ built in the reign of George II, but we have a very poor organist. Great therefore was my amazement to hear a gloria of Mozart's played by a master hand as we walked up the nave. And when Mother and her new husband came out of the vestry arm in arm, the same master hand attacked the opening course of Mendelssohn's wedding march with a power which must have startled and thrilled everybody in the church as it startled and thrilled me. Whoever that was, it wasn't Mr. Parkins, I said to Cyril as he handed me into the second carriage, Mr. and Mrs. Arden. Oh, how strange it seems to write it! Having gone away in the first. It was not Mr. Parkins. It was Mr. Daventry, the organist of New, an old friend of my father's. What brought him to Lamford? Friendship. My father asked him to give us a touch of his quality upon this particular day. He knows your mother is fanatica per la musica and he wanted to please her. I call that a very delicate attention, said I, delighted. New you, child, exclaimed Cyril in a scornful way. Perhaps you don't know that if it would please your mother for him to cut his heart out, he would pay her that delicate attention just as willingly as this. You are not jealous, are you, Cyril? We had the carriage to ourselves by an accident. Beatrice was to have gone with us but had arrived at the church in a state of bewilderment and had gotten into the Orlando with Aunt Emily, Mrs. Reardon and my cousin Flora, who grumbled all the rest of the day at having her frock crushed by overcrowding. Jealous, exclaimed Cyril. No, I am not jealous and I admire my new mother. How ready he was with that sacred name. Almost as much as my father does. But I can't help pitying any man as deep in love as my father. It is a spectacle of human weakness which, being human, one must pity and deplore, lest the same thing should happen to oneself. I hope they will both be happy, said I. I adore my mother and I love Uncle Ambrose, but I would rather have gone on caring for him in the old quiet way and have kept my mother all to myself. Egotistical puss, said Cyril, do you know, Daisy, that you have the egotistical nose, not a bad nose in its way, but speaking volumes for the character of the nose. A pert nose, straight and delicate in line, but with just that upward tilt which means vanity and self-consciousness. I suppose now you are a kind of brother you are going to be rude to me, said I. Decidedly, I mean to take every fraternal privilege, answered he. And then, without a word of warning, he kissed me. I was desperately angry. That is a fraternal privilege which you will please to forego in the future, I said. I adopted your father from my uncle when you were a small schoolboy, but I never adopted you. And in our enlightened age no one supposes that you are any more my brother because your father has married my mother than you were yesterday when they were only engaged. But just now you said I was your brother. What an inconsistent girl you are. I said a kind of brother. Not the real thing. Very well, Daisy, I hope you may never want to put me upon the fraternal level. I assure you that I don't desire it. This was so rude on his part that I lost my temper altogether. You are a smug, I said. I trembled when I uttered that awful word expecting that he would want to annihilate me, but he only laughed which was worse. I am getting behind the scenes, he said, and my first discovery is a vixen in the family. We were at home by this time and went in to luncheon. It was not a very gay feast though Uncle Ambrose looked intensely happy. I had been surprised by his appearance as he stood beside my mother at the altar. He had been gradually changing for the better in his looks and bearing ever since he was engaged, but on his wedding day the transformation seemed to have completed itself. He who used to stoop now carried himself with an erect and noble air. His clear blue eyes seemed to have more color in them, and oh, there was such a look of happiness in every line of his face. Then as for his clothes, he who used to wear a coat that was almost disgracefully shabby was now dressed to perfection in a style that was neither too young nor too old. I really felt proud of Uncle Ambrose as I watched him leave the church with my mother on his arm, and later, when we were all clustered at the gate to see them start for their honeymoon. And then, as he bade me good-bye, I could but think of that other parting seven years ago, the parting which meant forever. The carriage drove away with one of my shoes flying after it, thrown by Cyril, who has a great reputation for throwing the hammer and who threw my poor little bronze slipper so as to lodge it between the carriage and the lamp like a decoration. I had to hop back to the hall which seemed so ridiculous that, while I was ready to cry at parting with my mother, the absurdity of the thing made me laugh instead, and then three minutes afterwards the laughter and tears got mixed and I was sobbing hysterically on Cyril's shoulder. Aunt Emily took me away from him and scolded me for being so foolish as to make such a fuss about such a brief parting. "'You will see your mother again in a week, you silly child,' she said. One would think she was going to Australia. Why, my girls and I are sometimes parted for six or eight weeks at a time.' "'But they are used to it,' I answered, as indeed they are, poor things, and have been from their infancy. It's different with mother and me. We have never lived apart.' I ran upstairs as soon as I could slip away from the family party and had a comfortable cry in my own room while Flora and Dora played tennis with Cyril and Beatrice. They were all very noisy, so I suppose they were enjoying themselves. Even though I was so miserable, I couldn't help noticing the difference between Beatrice's country noise and Flo and Doe's London noise. My cousins are what people call stylish girls and have a dashing off-hand way of talking and doing everything. Beatrice, on the other hand, has a kind of lumbering vivacity, which I hope it is not ill-natured to compare with her Brewer's horse in high spirits. Aunt Emily and the cousins were installed at River Lawn for a week, and at the end of that week Aunt was to take me to Folkstone to join mother and her new husband, and from Folkstone we were to start for Switzerland. Oh, how I counted the hours in that week, and how it seemed to me as if those seven days and nights would never come to an end. How I sickened of tennis and boating and of all the things which amused my cousins. How I sickened even of Cyril, who used to come across the cottage at all hours, and who devoted himself to Flora and Dora, and was very kind in asking me to join in their boating excursions up or down the river. They used to start soon after breakfast with a well-filled picnic basket and land at any spot they fancied and eat their lunch in some picturesque corner, and they came home to afternoon tea sunburned to a degree that horrified Aunt Emily. Are you aware that your complexions will never recover from such treatment as this? She asked them solemnly. Cyril was to start for his travels on the day I set out upon mine. He was going to the Norwegian fjords to fish for salmon. I cannot understand the rage some people have for chilly half-civilized countries, where there are all the glories and grandeur of the south waiting to be looked at. Isn't anybody preferring Norway to Venice? Cyril does. Venice is so trist, he said. And then he promised me that if I were a very good little girl and sent him a nice long, gossiping letter every week, he would join us at Venice for a week or so, just to see if I were dying of too much palverinese. You would be dosed with that fellow and his school, he said, made to look up at ceilings till your eyes and your neck ache. If people would only let one alone in foreign cities, sailing would not be half such a trial as it is, but there is always the intelligent companion bent upon improving one's mind. Cyril had grown blasé from having been allowed to go wherever he chose. He has seen all that is best worth seeing in Europe and a sunny corner of Africa into the bargain. He has traveled all through Greece and thinks no more of marathon than I do of maidenhead. I sometimes think it has been a disadvantage for him to have so much money and that he would be ever so much nicer if Uncle Ambrose had never come into his fortune. He is kind and generous and high-spirited, but he values himself just a little too much, and he seems to think the world is hardly good enough for him to live in. Mother was at the station to meet me when the train went slowly over the house-stops into Folkstone. How young and handsome she looked in her dark brown-tailor gown and neat brown hat, and what a moment of bliss it was for me when she clasped my hands and gave me one discreet little kiss. Are you happy, mother, and are you still fond of me? I asked in a breath. Yes, to both foolish questions. See, Daisy, have you not a word for her? She stopped, embarrassed, looking at her husband, who came up at this moment after having sent off his servant to help my maid with the baggage. Yes, I have plenty of words for Uncle Ambrose, I said giving him both my hands. Gracious, what a grand person you have grown and ever so many years younger. I think you must have concocted one of those wonderful filters that I have read about in Horace. Yes, Daisy, I have drunk of a filter, but not one of those nasty mixtures which wicked witches brew. My filter has been happiness. I really have suspect you are a second Dr. Faustus, and that you have made a bargain with the fiend, said I. If I had, Daisy, I don't think my consciousness of the compact would prevent my being happy. He answered smiling at me. We went straight from the station to the boat, only a few yards, and then we sailed across a summary sea, and then came a long, hot journey. For though we had left cool weather in England, there was a sultry atmosphere on the other side of the channel. We were in Paris in time for a 8 o'clock dinner, and I sat between Mother and Uncle Ambrose in one of the prettiest private sitting rooms in the Continental Hotel, with open windows facing the big lamp lit square, and the fountains and statues and the Champs-Élysées in a glittering haze of summer mist mixed with lamp light, and, overall, the great purple sky flashing with stars so brilliant and so large that they seemed hanging just above our heads. They both seemed glad to have me with them. They both seemed fond of me. After dinner Uncle Ambrose took me for a walk and showed me Paris by lamp light, while Mother sat and dressed it, and read the last new book which he had bought for her at the station. There never was a happier girl than I was that balmy September night, hanging on to Uncle Ambrose's arm and devouring Paris with my eyes. We walked as far as Notre-Dame and stood in the quiet open space looking up at the great dusky towers so grand, so old, so rich and saintly and historical images. He told me all about the building of that mighty cathedral and how it had slowly risen from its foundations and grown and ripened into beauty, like a great oak in the heart of the forest almost as gradually, almost as quietly. And then we looked at the river and then we walked slowly back to the hotel. I felt so happy when I went in, but one look at my mother's face as she sat staring straight before her in the lamp light dashed all my happiness. Clara, cried Uncle Ambrose, what is the matter? She pointed to the novel she had been reading which lay open on the table. How could you choose such a book as that for me? She asked reproachfully. I chose the book because it has made a great success in Paris. See, ninety-ninth thousand. Isn't that a guarantee that the story is worth reading? It is a revolting story, the story of a murder in a low lodging-house in the cité, a murder that was never avenged. Don't you like murder stories? I asked. I enjoy a murder if it is a really good one, a mysterious murder which keeps the reader wondering all through the book. You're talking that strange, Daisy, unless you want to disgust me, answered Mother more sternly than I ever remembered her to have spoken to me in her life. Do you think a crime which desolates a home and directs a life or many lives is a thing to be talked of in that spirit? Oh, but poets and dramatists would be poor creatures unless they were able to describe great criminals. Look at Macbeth, for instance. Some critics call Macbeth the finest of all Shakespeare's plays, and I really think it is my first favourite among them all. Stop, Daisy, said Uncle Ambrose, with his hand upon my shoulder. Don't you see that your mother is tired and nervous? It is past eleven, and we are to do a great deal of sightseeing tomorrow. You had better bid us good night. I kissed the poor pale face which had changed so sadly since dinnertime and went off to my room where my maid was waiting for me. I had shared Mother's maid until now, but now I have the undivided service of my good nurse Broomfield, a buxom person of eight and thirty, who has been gradually educating herself into a lady's maid, and who has nothing to do except look after my wardrobe and brush my hair and walk out with me sometimes when I cannot have Mother's company. My head was a little troubled as I laid it on my strange pillow, troubled about my Mother's trouble which seemed more than the occasion accounted for. If I had known then what I know now, I should have understood that look of horror in her eyes as she lifted them to her husband's face while she pointed to the open book. Oh, what a blessing it was not to know, and how I wish Providence had suffered me to remain in happy ignorance as my mother wished. But there are always officious people in the world to take things out of the hands of Providence, or at least it seems so. We had been nearly a month in Switzerland moving quietly from place to place and thoroughly enjoying the beauty of everything, all the more because of Uncle Ambrose, who was like a walking encyclopedia, telling me all I wanted to know about everything and everybody, talking most delightfully about Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, and all the Lake Lehman poets and philosophers, and quoting whole pages of Tyndall on the Ops and glaciers. My mother had no more nervous fits after that night in Paris. She seemed thoroughly happy and pleased with my enjoyment of everything. Sometimes a shade of melancholy would creep over her at the thought of years ago when she had been in these places with my father, and there were days when she had a listless air as if she were weary of life in spite of the love that watched her footsteps and wrapped her round like an atmosphere. I wonder if all husbands are like Uncle Ambrose. There is an intensity in his devotion to my mother which shows itself in every act of his daily life, and yet his affection is never intrusive, it never touches the ridiculous. I think very few people at the hotels where we stopped guessed that they were a honeymoon couple. My mother is silent and reserved among strangers, and Uncle Ambrose has always the thoughtful air of a student. At the National at Geneva there were some Oxford men who were very much impressed when they found out who he was. I heard them talking about his books one evening in the reading room when I was looking through the Tauhounet's novels. I felt quite proud to think that the man they were praising was the man who had stooped from his highest state to educate me. I wonder whether it was for mother's sake, whether he worshipped her from the very beginning, even in my dear father's lifetime, with the same worship that he has for her now, a hopeless, distant love in those days without expectation or thought of reward. I can but think that it may have been so that no lesser feeling would have induced so learned a man to devote himself to the training of a ignorant little girl. It was at Lucerne that the secret of my father's death was revealed to me. It happened only the day before yesterday, and yet I feel as if it was ages ago. I was so occupied with the novelty and delight of this beautiful country until then that I had not found time to open my diary after I left England, but now I come to the book for relief from my pent-up agony. I have not had one happy moment since that revelation, and yet I have been obliged to appear as happy as ever for fear my mother should find out what I am brooding upon and be reminded of the one great sorrow of her life. Oh, what a sorrow it must have been! What an awful haunting memory! It is wonderful to me that she could ever smile again or take any pleasure of life or think of anything except that one dreadful fact. I know now how my father died, why he was snatched away from us without an hour's warning. I know that he was cruelly murdered by an unknown hand, and that his murderer is walking about the earth at this day, undiscovered and unpunished, unless God's vengeance has fallen upon the wretch in some mysterious way that we know not. We were at the Schweitzerhof at Lucerne. The weather was lovely and we had spent the day on the lake, and in the evening, after dinner, we all went out to the portico in front of the hotel. There were some Tyrely's musicians playing under the trees by the lake, and I thought of that curious story of tostois, of the poor wandering musician and the cruel people at the Schweitzerhof who listened and applauded but never gave him a sue. And then the poor creature went strolling about the town where the teller of the story followed him to take him back to the Schweitzerhof and treat him to champagne, much through the indignation of the company in the coffee room. I reminded Uncle Ambrose of tostois's story which we had read together. We were sitting in the deep shadow of the portico looking out at the moonlit key and listening to the Tyrely's musicians, one of them playing upon the Streis-Zither while the other sang. Presently, Uncle Ambrose and my mother went for a turn on the key, leaving me sitting in my dark corner at the back of the colonnade. They asked me to go with them, but I had walked and run about a good deal in the afternoon at Altdorf and Flu-Ellen, and I told mother I was tired and would rather stay where I was. I was sitting in a dark corner enjoying the music in unobserved by anybody. There were two rows of people in front of me. Do you know who she is? Asked a man sitting very near me as my mother moved slowly away on her husband's arm. Her name is Arden, a very attractive woman, is she not? Returned his companion. Decidedly handsome, but don't you know who she is? I only know that the man she is walking with is her husband and that their name is Arden. I saw it in the visitor's book this morning. Didn't you notice another name bracketed with it? I did. What name? Miss Hattrell, the lady's daughter. She is travelling with her mother and her stepfather. Mother and Mrs. Arden have only been married a month. I saw the marriage in the times. But what about Miss Hattrell? Do you mean to say the name has no association in your mind? Not the slightest. I never knew any Hattrell so far as I can remember. Perhaps not, but I don't think you can have forgotten the mysterious murder in Denmark Street, St. Giles, which everybody talked about six or seven years ago. The man murdered was a country gentleman who had gone up to London to cash a big cheque in order to pay for an estate he was buying. He cashed the cheque in Paul Mall, but he never reached Lincoln's infields with the money. He was intercepted on his way and lured to a lodging-house in Denmark Street where he was found the next day stabbed and plundered by an unknown hand. It was one of those murders which baffle all the endeavours of the police and bring discredit upon the force. Yes, I have a faint recollection of the affair. The Denmark Street mystery, I think they called it? I had utterly forgotten the man's name. Do you say that this Miss Hattrell is a relation of the murdered man? Only his daughter, Mrs. Arden, was his widow until a month ago when she married the man who was walking with her over there in the moonlight. I have some friends at Henley who talk about her. She has a place on the banks of the Thames where she has lived in retirement since her husband's murder. Was it never known who murdered him? Never. The motive was plunder, of course. The murderer got clean off with his booty in the form of Bank of England notes which were cashed in the south of France before the bankers in that part of the world had heard of the crime. The murderer got a start of eighteen hours or so before the crime was discovered, just margin enough to allow of his turning the notes into hard cash. Were there any arrests made or was anybody suspected? Oh, as far as that goes there is no doubt that the man who committed the murder was a foreigner who took a room in the Denmark Street lodging-house for the express purpose of murder. He lured his victim there by the use of a woman's name, the name of some French woman of whom Hattrell had once been pawned. He did the deed unaided in the broad light of day, and then he locked the door of his room and went downstairs and out of the house as coolly as if he had gone home to fetch some implement of his trade and were only going back to his workshop. This I believe is the last that was ever seen of him. No doubt he is knocking about Europe somewhere," answered the other man. Who knows, he may be here to-night. The Schweitzerhof would be a capital resort for a man who was wanted by the police. The very publicity of the hotel would be his safeguard. I sat there, cold and trembling while they talked. Oh, with such callous indifference, as if it mattered nothing that an adored husband and father should be lured away to some horrid den and cruelly murdered. And then the dear face came back to me in all its brightness, the happy smile, the candid gray eyes. The loved voice sounded again in my ears just as if my father had that instant called to me from the garden. Oh, how could my mother get over such a blow as that? The wonder was not that she had grieved dreadfully but that she had ever ceased to grieve. And nothing had been done. His death was unevented. His murderer was walking about the world unbunished. Yes, as that man said, he might be in Lucerne to-night. I did not cry out or faint or do anything to create a disturbance. For a minute or so there was a rushing in my ears and the pillars of the portico seemed to rock, and then my head grew cool and clear again. But I felt that I could not go on sitting quietly there, and I started up and asked one of the men who had talked about my father to make way for me, and I broke through the double range of sitters somehow and ran down the steps and away towards the cathedral and then up the hill at the back of the hotel. I wanted to get away from the crowd, from my mother and Uncle Ambrose, from everyone and everything, just to be alone with my thoughts of my dear, dead father. The narrow path up which I went to the top of the hill was quite deserted at this time. I stood on the hilltop alone, looking down at the lighted city, so picturesque in its stillness, the quaint old roofs and gables, and market squares and narrow streets which it had been such a delight to explore with Uncle Ambrose only yesterday, but which I looked at now with dull, unseeing eyes. Pilatus lifted a snow-crowned head above the further shore of the lake, and overall there was the clear light of the moon, clear yet soft, leaving great gaps of dense strato, black depths where the lamps twinkled here and there, singly or in clusters of warm red light which seemed a relief after the coldness of the moon and stars. I had noticed all these things the night before when I stood in the same spot with Uncle Ambrose. I noticed them mechanically tonight while my heart beat loud and fast with a passionate longing to do something, weak, inexperienced girl as I was, that should slowly, laboriously, surely lead to the punishment of my father's murderer. How is it, I asked myself, that one murderer escapes and that another, who seems to leave but the slightest indications to lead to discovery, is arrested within a week of his crime. What is it that makes the chances of criminals so uneven, and how is it that the police, who in some cases seem to exercise a super human intelligence, seem in other cases helpless and blundering almost to the verge of idiocy? I had heard this question discussed within the last few weeks in relation to a mysterious murder in Liverpool and I had taken an intense interest in the subject, a morbid interest, Uncle Ambrose told me when I talked to him about it. He reproved me for occupying my mind with a ghastly story. I reminded him that the story of this murder was no more ghastly than the story of Agamemnon's murder or of the string of murders in Macbeth and that one might as well be interested in real horrors as in fiction. Little did I think then that there would come a day when I should have a stronger reason for brooding upon this ghastly subject. I stayed on the hill a long time, forgetting everything except the horror that had been made known to me that night, forgetting most of all that my absence would alarm my mother. I was startled at last by the cathedral clock which began to strike the hour. I counted the strokes and found that it was eleven o'clock. I had been away from the hotel more than an hour. I hurried back and on the way met Uncle Ambrose who scolded me for going out alone at such a late hour. Your mother has been anxious and agitated about you, Daisy, he said. How came so wise a person to do such a foolish thing? I don't know, I forgot, I said. Where have you been all this time? On the hill up there, looking down at the town. My dear Daisy, how could you forget that your mother would be alarmed at your disappearance? I forgot everything. And then I told him what I had heard an hour ago in the particle. I asked him why the cruel truth had been kept from me during all those years. I looked at his face in the moonlight and saw more trouble there than I had ever seen in my life before. It would have been cruel to tell you the truth, Daisy. The greatest curse of life is the existence of idle chatterers who must always be babbling about other people's business. If wishes could bear fruit it would be bad for those men you overheard tonight. I had never heard such anger in his voice as I heard then. God only knows the pains your mother and I have taken to keep this sorrow from you, he said. We have pledged all who knew you and were about you to silence. We have hedged you round with precautions. And yet in one unlucky minute the prurient gossip of a wondermonger frustrates all our care. I am glad I know, I answered. Do you think I wanted to live in a false paradise, to believe that my father died peacefully in the arms of a friend when he was brutally murdered? You don't know how I loved him or you would know better than that. I was angry in my turn and now tears came, the first which I had shed since I heard the story of my father's death, tears of mingled anger and grief. I seized Uncle Ambrose by the arm. I was almost beside myself. You were his friend, I said, his closest friend, almost like a brother. Did you do nothing to avenge his death? Nothing, nothing. I did all that mortal man could do, Daisy. I stimulated the police to action by every means in my power. I did not rest till all that could be done had been done. It was in concert with me that your mother offered a reward large enough to set all Scotland Yard on the alert. If the murderer escaped, be assured it was not because his pursuers were careless or indifferent. Had he been a prince of the blood royal, the endeavour to solve the mystery of his death could not have been more intense than it was. What idiots the detective police must be, I exclaimed. No, they are not idiots, Daisy, though it is the fashion to call them so whenever a notorious criminal evades pursuit. There are some uncommonly clever men among them and there are some uncommonly clever captures and discoveries made by them. But now and then they have to deal with a criminal who is both clever and lucky and that was the case with their wretch who murdered your father. Tell me all about his death every detail, I said. What good will it do for you to know, Daisy? He asked in his pleading voice, just as he used to talk to me years ago when I was a child and inclined to be naughty. For God's sake, my dear girl, try to forget all you heard tonight. Think of your father only as you have thought of him hitherto as one who was taken from you in the flower of his ears and who sleeps quietly in his grave, honored, loved and lamented. The manner of his death makes little difference. It was swift and sudden, a merciful death without death bed-horrors or prolonged pain. It must have been an almost instantaneous death. You know all about it and I want to know too, I answered. If you won't tell me I shall find out the truth for myself. I know the date of my father's death and I have only to get the newspapers for the following days and I shall learn all that can be learned about his murderer and the circumstances of his death. You are obstinate and foolish, Daisy, he said. It would be far wiser to blot the horror of the past out of your mind forever. Your father's sleep is just as sweet as if he had perished by the slow and painful decay which darkens the end of life when men live to what is called the good old age. A good old age as if age and decay could ever be good. I wonder at your want of philosophy. I thought I had trained my pupil better and that whenever you should come to know the worst your own calm reason would show you that death by assassination is no more dreadful than any other form of death. It is more dreadful, infinitely more dreadful, for it robbed me of my beloved father. He would be with us now, he might be with us for long years to come, but for the wretch who killed him it is easy for you to preach resignation for you have been the gainer by his death. I was too angry to think of the cruelty of my words or of my base in gratitude towards the truest friend I have in the world after my mother. I could think of nothing but my father's hard fate and my own bitter loss. That will do, Daisy, said Uncle Ambrose in a voice that sounded like a stranger's. So long as you and I live you can never say anything more cruel than that. Or more ungrateful, I cried throwing myself into his arms. I am a wretch, a thankless wretch. He soothed and comforted me assuring me of his forgiveness. He could make every allowance for a heart so tried as mine. Yes, it was a hard thing to have lost so dear a father, so good a man. For God's sake, don't think I failed in regard for your father, he said. Although our ideas of life were so different, he, all action and vivacity, I dreamy and self-contained. He was the best friend I ever had, the man I liked best in the world. Yes, I have gained by his untimely death, gained a pearl beyond price, the one dream and desire of my life. I can never paltre with facts there, Daisy. You and I must understand each other and believe in each other, if I am to stand in a parent's place for my dear pupil and friend. There shall be no sophistication on my part. I have told you why your mother and I have labored to keep the manner of your father's death hidden from you. But now you have discovered so much I will not stand in the way of your knowing all, since it is your wish. It is my wish, my most ardent wish. Very well. When we go back to England, I will give you the report of the inquest, which will tell you every detail. I will give you a collection of leading articles, which will show you how easy it is to speculate and conjecture and theorize about a crime and how very difficult it may be to find the criminal. I have all these papers for you to read and you shall be allowed to read them but under protest. I know that it is not well for you to brood upon that sad event. I shall brood less perhaps when I know more, I told him. And then he implored me to say nothing to my mother about this dreadful past which had tried her so terribly. God knows what would happen if her sorrow were to be brought too vividly back to her by any display of emotion upon your part, he said. She must never be allowed to talk about that dreadful time. Her life and her reason were both in danger. Child, as you were, you must have seen what a wreck she was when you went home from Westgate. You must have known how slow she was to recover health and spirits. I promised him that come what might I would never afflict my mother by any allusion to my father's death and then once more I pleaded for pardon for my foolish and thankless speech. My child, how can I be angry with you? He said in his grave and gentle voice, the voice I have loved from my babyhood almost. What could be more natural than that you should love your father and regret him passionately and fondly? Only tell me, dear, honestly, are you sorry that your mother has made my life happy? Are you sorry that she has allowed me to stand in the place of the father you have lost? I told him no a thousand times no. Next to my father and mother he was the person I loved best upon this earth and I was very glad to have him bound to me for all my life as my guardian and friend. There shall be no one ever nearer or dearer to me, I told him. But you must be Uncle Ambrose to the end. I cannot call you father. End of Chapter 8 Chapters 9 and 10 of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Bratton. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 9 Daisy's Diary in Milan Lucerne was very gray and dim when we batted goodbye yesterday morning the last day of November, but when we had climbed nearer the snow peaks the sun shone out over the beautiful white world above us and the dark lake below and the rest of the journey to the mouth of the great tunnel was like a journey in fairyland. What could be more exquisite than to go winding upward and upward into the great heart of the mountain and to look down on village roofs and winding streamlets and bridges and rocky gorges and vineyards and gardens and church towers even so far below the wonderful iron road that was taking us towards the skies? I felt so sorry when that part of the journey was over and though I longed to find out what Italy was like I felt very sad as I sat at the snug round table in the little station, the last Swiss station and sipped a farewell cup of coffee with mother and uncle Ambrose. It was a disappointment after leaving sunshine and blue skies above the Swiss snow peaks to find Italy gray and rainy with just that incessant drizzling rain which one has known from one's childhood as the mark of a hopeless wet day and which has been politely called a scotch mist. Of all the things I had thought to meet with in Italy a scotch mist was the last but there it was and nothing would have reconciled me to the grayness and the rain except the red cotton umbrellas which were delightful and which made me feel I was in Italy. Next to the red umbrella as an Italian institution came the Bersù, the verdant colonnade made by vines trained over cane or wire, leafy arcades which I saw in every garden and in front of the humblest houses, sometimes on the tops of the houses, sometimes forming a lodger on the upper story. The vine leaves were turning yellow and red with a touch of autumn but they were still green enough for beauty. The bell tower in every village church was another sign that we were in Italy and then by and by we came upon the great dark blue lake lying in the bosom of mist-wreathed hills and mother and I agreed that for all the bell towers the Bersù and the red umbrellas of the peasantry we might have fancied we were in the trossucks. And so as Mr. Pépé says to Milan where we steamed into a great metropolitan looking terminus and saw Cyril waiting for us on the platform in the glare of the electric light, he had grown tired of the north and had written to his father to propose joining us on our journey to Venice and with this intention he had made his way to Milan amusing himself here and there as he came exploring odd nooks and out of the way spots. He was looking in high health and very happy I thought as he stood smiling at us in the electric light. Well, we modest flower. He said addressing me in his usual grand manner after he had shaken hands with mother and uncle Ambrose. Welcome to the ancient kingdom of Lombardy. I wonder if you are as enraptured with Italy as you were before your foot had ever touched the soil. I'm afraid upon such an evening as this you'll find Milan uncommonly like Glasgow. He took us to a fine roomilando which he had engaged for us and we left the man and the maids to look after the luggage and drove off to the Hotel de la Ville in a narrowish busy looking street that might have been Fleet Street or the Strand for anything distinctive that I could see in it under that gray rainy atmosphere. Yes, there was one superiority over Fleet Street in spite of the rain and the mud and that was the electric light which filled all the city of Milan with its silvery radiance so that the night was like on to the day. The head waiter at the hotel told us that there had been three weeks rain and I found afterwards that this fertile plain of Lombardy which I am told is very lovely in spring owes its chief beauty to the damp and cloudy winter climate. At any rate I was in Italy and the very idea was full of delight. I kept telling myself that this was Italy and trying to cheat myself into brief forgetfulness of the dreadful story on which my mind had been fixed ever since that night at Lucerne. It was to be only brief forgetfulness for I had resolved to confide all my troubles to Cyril to whom I could talk freely. Oh, what a painful effort it had cost me to keep my feeling sitting from the dear mother with whom till now I had shared every thought and every fancy. In spite of my endeavour to seem happy and untroubled she discovered that there was something wrong and I had to pretend that young ladylike ailment neuralgia from which I am thankful to say I have never suffered. I was conscious-stricken at the thought of my own falsehood when I saw mother's anxiety. She almost insisted upon calling in a doctor so I had to reassure her by a prompt recovery. I told her the pain was quite gone but that the climate had rather a depressing effect upon my spirits. This accounted for my talking very little instead of talking almost incessantly and this accounted for my sitting in my corner of the carriage, thinking, thinking, thinking, all through that long railroad journey. I have always liked Cyril but I never felt so glad to see him as I felt that night at Milan. I wanted so much to talk to a man who knew the world and a man to whom I could express myself freely without any fear of inflicting an unpremeditated wound as I had done in the case of Uncle Ambrose. So after dinner I asked Cyril if he would take me for a walk and show me the outside of the cathedral to which request he assented very good-naturedly only bargaining for a cigarette in the hall before we started. We had dined in our sitting-room on the first floor and we all went down into the gay-looking vestibule after dinner and took our coffee at a little table in a corner where we could look on at the people coming in and going out. Was mother happier than I? Had she forgotten the dead? Those were two questions which I could not refrain from asking myself as I sat by her side that evening, our first evening in Italy. She looked so young and so beautiful that night in her calm reposeful attitude as she sat slowly fanning herself and idly watching the shifting groups in the spacious vestibule. Her brown-brocade gown with its sable collar and bordering made her look like an old picture. The aristocratic-looking head with its crown of dark alburn hair rose out of the deep soft fur like a lily out of a cluster of leaves. Her hazel eyes seemed to have sunlight in their clear darkness. She looked utterly calm and happy and assuredly if a husband's devotion could make a wife happy her happiness was well-founded. Such gentle deference, such chivalrous affection must be very rare in the history of men and women if I may judge by the stories of domestic misery that I have heard and by the few married couples I have known. There is the dear old rector, for instance, a delightful being for all the world outside the rector, but a pestilence to his wife. There is Dr. Tysol, always grumbling about his dinner and wanting to have the cook discharged instantly if a joint is not roasted to a turn. Then there is Dr. Talbot, a man in whom society delights but who is always irritable or out of spirits at home, whose sudden appearance in the drying room casts a cloud over his family and seems popably to chill the atmosphere. No, in my brief experience I never saw the perfect and ideal husband whom we occasionally meet in a novel till I saw my mother's husband, Uncle Ambrose. He is not a bit like Rochester, though he has Rochester's commanding intellect. He is more like a spiritualized John Halifax, and I who have known him all my life know that his placid temper is no honeymoon garb to be put off by and by. I, who have known him all my life, know that he is the most delightful companion, the most unselfish and sympathetic friend, a man always abreast with every intellectual movement of the age, a man rich in resources, keenly interested in art and science as well as in dry learning. There never was a son less like his father than Cyril. He is as much unlike in temperament as he is in person. Uncle Ambrose is all thought, Cyril is all action. He is like my own dear father in his energy and movement as full of life and activity as if there were quicksilver in his veins. He is eager for knowledge, but he loves best the knowledge that comes to him from the lips of men, the knowledge that can be gained amidst the life and movement of the big busy world. Cyril is not the least like anybody's ideal. He would never serve as a model for the hero of a novel. Yet, in spite of the absence of the poetic element, Cyril is very nice and one cannot help liking him. He sings delightfully. He is always gay and bright, although he affects to have exhausted every pleasure. He is the most inquisitive person I have ever met with, always wanting to know everything about everybody. He is generally considered good-looking, indeed some people insist upon calling him handsome. He has gray eyes in which the light sparkles and dances when he is amused at anything. He has curly brown hair, hair which curls obstinately, however closely it is cropped, very pretty hair, hair which suggests the poetical temperament, a suggestion which Cyril certainly does not realize. He has a sharp inquisitive nose. He calls mine tip-tilted and I am sure he has the same upward inclination, but it is a very nice nose all the same and it has no affinity to the snub or the pug. He is tall and slim, with moderately broad shoulders and quick active movements and he always dresses well. I believe he considers himself an authority upon dress and he is certainly very severe upon other people. I took his arm and we went out into the drizzling rain. There were a great many shops open late as it was and they looked lovely, but my mind was too full of serious things for me to be easily distracted. Take me first to look at the cathedral, I said, and then take me to some solitary place where we can talk quietly. Gracious madam, what an alarming request! He cried. I think we had better get the sacristan and his keys and go down into the crypt where St. Charles Baromio lies in his silver shrine. I cannot conceive any other place solemn enough to match the solemnity of your tone. Don't laugh at me, Cyril, I am very serious. He looked down at me with a startled inquisitive air. What is it, Daisy? He said very sharply, almost angrily, a love affair. No, no, no! There is nothing further from my thoughts tonight than love. I am glad to hear it. When a young lady is an heiress and something of a feather-head into the bargain one is easily alarmed. You have no right to call me a feather-head when your father, one of the cleverest men in Europe, has educated me, I said indignantly. My dearest child, book-learning is not wisdom, he answered, and a grain of worldly knowledge is sometimes more useful than a pound of book knowledge. I know that you are far in advance of the average girl in your acquaintance with European literature. I know that you have read more than some college dons and that you are an excellent linguist and altogether deeply, darkly, beautifully blue. But all the same you have not learnt the alphabet of the world in which you live. All that kind of knowledge has yet to come. It is a hateful kind of knowledge, I said angrily. My child, you can't get on without it, he answered with his superior air. We were in the great open place in front of the Cathedral by this time and I stood breathless with wonder looking up at that matchless building. I have been told since that the exterior which looked so lovely in the bright white light against a background of dull gray is over-rich in decoration that those innumerable statues of saints and martyrs, angels and archangels, priests and prophets are a waste of power. But to my uneducated eye there was not a touch of the chisel that seemed superfluous, not a niche or pinnacle that did not seem a necessary part of the vast scheme of splendor. I told Cyril what I thought as we walked slowly up and down, surveying the mighty church from different points of view, and then we crossed the square and he took me through the lofty bright-looking arcade and then into a quieter part of the city beyond the great opera house and Leonardo statue. Here the houses were large and palatial and there were no more shops and very few people walking about. Now, Daisy, for this confidence of yours which is not about love, he said kindly, I want you to tell me all you know and all you think about my father's murder, I said. What? They have told you then. Nobody has told me. I heard two men talking about my mother and her first husband and their talk revealed a secret that had been kept from you so carefully, hard lines. I am glad I know. It was hateful to be kept in the dark, loving my father as I did. Dear child, what good can it do you to know? Only this good that I can look forward to the day when his murderer will be discovered and punished. I am afraid that day will never come, Daisy, a pursuit that failed seven years ago is not likely to succeed hereafter. Your mother offered first five hundred and then a thousand pounds reward for the conviction of the murderer and some of the sharpest brains in London were engaged in the attempt to find him. They failed ignominiously and I take it there is only one chance of his being brought to book and that is his being arrested for some new crime. The cool deliberation with which the deed was done, the quiet way in which the man got off and disposed of his plunder argues the professional murderer. He may commit more murders in the course of his professional career and sooner or later his work may be clumsily done or his luck may change and then perhaps when the rope is round his neck he may confess himself the murderer of your father. Tell me all you know about the man and the crime. My dear is child I know very little, he said. Seven years ago I was at Winchester a careless young scoundrel thinking more of cricket and football and of my chances of a scholarship than of my friends. Although I think you must know that I loved your mother and your father next in this world to my own father and the dear old granddad and radnisher. Seven years ago my father was a poor man and I was ever so much more ambitious and ever so much more willing to work than I have been since he came into his fortune. I'm afraid I was a selfish young beggar in those days but I felt the shock of your father's death very deeply in spite of my egotism. I was mentally stunned by the blow when I took up the London paper and saw that my father's friend had been murdered and thought of the desolation in that happy home, the misery of that once happy wife. River Lawn was my ideal home, Daisy. I had never been able to picture to myself a fairer domestic life than that of your father and mother with my sweet brown eyed Daisy flitting about in the foreground like a ray of sunshine incarnate. If you had changed into anything it would have been into a sun ray. I felt the full force of the catastrophe Daisy and I devoured the account of the inquest but the details have grown dim in my memory. I only know that your father was lured into a shabby lodging upon some shallow pretense and there murdered and robbed of nearly four thousand pounds. And then he argued with me as my stepfather had argued. He tried to make me think that the history of my father's death was a history which I ought to forget. He used almost the same words that Uncle Ambrose had used at Lucerne when my heart was bursting with grief and indignation. Nothing that either could say had any power to alter my feelings. Cyril and I walked for a long time in those narrow streets of tall stone houses with great sculptured doorways and here and there the glimpse of a garden seemed dimly through a vaulted arch. I shall never think of the city of Milan as long as I live without thinking of my father's ghastly death or without recalling the dreary sense of helplessness that came upon me last night as I walked by Cyril's side and heard his sofistical arguments in favour of oblivion. Tomorrow we go to Verona, city of many memories and after a day or two devoted to medieval architecture we go on to Venice, the dream city. Uncle Ambrose has given me half a dozen books about the city of the doges to read at my leisure and he is always ready with his own storehouse of information which seems to me to hold more than all the books that were ever written. He has a memory equal to Lord Macaulay's I verily believe. 10. Daisy's Diary in Venice. Charles Dickens' unfailing artistic instinct was never truer than when he described this city as a dream. It is a dream, a dream in marble and precious stones and gold, a dream lying on the bosom of the blue bright sea, a dream of shadowy streets where every glimpse of garden seen above a decaying wall which once was splendid as a look of fairyland. Oh, those little bits of greenery, an orange tree, an aloe or two, how they tell were all the chief beauty of the places in marble. Uncle Ambrose laughed at me once because I screamed with delight at the vision of a bowy orange tree nodding over an angle of wall in one of those narrow canals where the sun hardly enters. The green leaves and waving branches seemed strangely beautiful amidst that wonder-world of stone. We stayed for a week at Danieli's and now we are in an apartment of our own on the first floor of a palace which is next door but one to Desdemona's house, the house in which she was born and reared, I suppose, and from which she fled with her tawny warrior. She was about my age, I believe, but much simpler and more confiding than I am. I don't think I should ever fall in love with a famous soldier for telling long stories about his fights and his travels unless he were of a fairly presentable complexion. Poor little Desdemona, I gaze up at her windows every day from my gondola and wonder which was her nursery window and which her school room and whether her mother was a more agreeable person than her father. I wonder by the way what kind of father Shakespeare had. Judging by old Capulet, Brabencio, and one or two other specimens, I should conclude that the wool stapler, glover, or butcher of Stratford on Ebon was not the most indulgent or amiable of parents. The Shakespearean idea of paternal government is not alluring. We have been nearly four months in Venice and have seen the city under many and widely different aspects. We have had days and weeks of almost summer brightness. We have had intervals of wind and rain and wintry gloom. We have visited every nook and corner of the city, have seen every picture and every shrine, have read and re-read and in some instances understood our Ruskin. We have explored the neighboring islands, we have dawdled away sunny days on the Lido, we know the Armenian convent by heart, and Cyril has reproached me with having established what he calls a system of flirtage with the dearest old monk in the world. How full this region is of memories of Byron and how prodigious an influence of poet can exercise over the minds of men when he has been lying half a century in his grave. We think and talk of Byron at every turn. In the Doge's palace on the bridge of size, on the Lido where he used to take his morning ride, on the staircase where Marino Fagliero's noble head rolled down the blood-stained marble to testify for all time to the ingratitude of nations, in the convent where he spent such happy innocent hours learning the Armenian language, everywhere one finds the traces of his footsteps or the shadows which his genius clothed with beauty. Mother is growing tired of Venice. No, that is impossible. Nobody could ever weary of a place so full of loveliness, a place whose every face is poetry incarnate and marble. She is not tired of Venice, but she begins to weary for home, the familiar house and gardens she loves so well where every room and every pathway and tree and shrub are interwoven with the history of her happy married life, the days before Calamity came upon us. I think I can understand her feelings almost as well as if she and I were indeed what we have sometimes been taken to be. I think I can read my mother's heart as well as if she were my sister. I believe she is happy with Uncle Ambrose. I believe that his society is as delightful to her as it is to me that his chivalrous devotion gratifies her as it would any woman upon earth. I believe that she is grateful to him and fond of him and that she has never repented and is never likely to repent her second marriage. But all the same do I know that her heart goes back to the old love. I found her a few days ago sitting with my father's photograph on the table before her. She was sitting, looking at it, with clasped pants and tears streaming down her cheeks. She was so absorbed in sad thoughts that she did not hear me enter the room or leave it. She was talking of River Lawn in the evening and I fancied that her mind had been dwelling on the old happy days and that even in the midst of this beautiful city she felt sad and lonely. She has seemed all at once to grow languid and listless and to feel no more interest in scenes and buildings whose interest seems inexhaustible to me. I only hope she is not ill. I have questioned her but she assures me there is nothing the matter. She never was in better health but she is haunted by visions of the old home where so much of her life has been spent. I dreamt of your father's grave last night, Daisy, she said. I dream of it so often, so often. I could not tell her that I too had had my dreams, not of the grave but of my father himself. Horrible dreams sometimes, filled with vague shapes and unknown faces. I had seen my father struggling with his murderer. I had seen the cruel blow struck but I had never been able to remember the murderer's face when I awoke, though it seemed sometimes in my dream to be a face well known to me. I can see that Uncle Ambrose is perplexed and uneasy about my mother and he too seems to have become indifferent to Titian and Paul Veronaise. This being so I am thrown upon Cyril for society in my rambles and explorations and he and I go roaming about these delicious waters in our gondola, our own gondola built on purpose for us and to be sent to England after our return. How surprised Beatrice Reardon and all the rest of them will be to see us in this mysterious-looking boat with its swan-like prow and black curtains, a boat which seems to have been designed on purpose for mystery and romance. My good old Berkshire nurse and maid goes everywhere with me as a kind of duena and exists in a perpetual state of wonder. I doubt if she is altogether awakened to the loveliness of Venice and indeed she told me the other day that she could not think much of a city which had not one broad street in it. Milan, she admitted, was a fine town, but Verona she considered a whole and she considers Venice decidedly inferior to Henley. I like the Rialto Bridge, Miss Daisy, she said, because there's a bit of life there with the shops and the people, and I like the shops in St. Mark's Square, though I should like them better if the shopkeepers didn't stand at their doors and tout for customers, which is an annoyance when one wants to look at things in peace and hasn't no thought of buying anything. But even that isn't up to the Palais Royal in Paris. It will be seen, therefore, that Broomfield's tastes are essentially modern. Poor Zoll, she is so patient and so good tempered in going about with me to churches and odd out-of-the-way corners that haven't the faintest interest for her. She stands smiling blandly at the pictures and statues while Cyril and I are deep in our hair or our Ruskin peering into every detail. Cyril is capital. He has an ardent love of art and indeed he seems to like everything that I like. We have long confidential talks about ourselves and other people, about the past and the future. How strange that one so rarely talks of the present, as we sit in our gondola lazily gliding over the sunlit water scarcely conscious of the movement of the boat. Sometimes we talk French, sometimes Italian, in which I am anxious to attain facility. It is one thing to be able to read Dante, I find, and another to express one's own thoughts easily. The language we talk makes very little difference to Broomfield who sits pouring over her daily telegraph or knitting one of those everlasting woollen comforters which she provides for her numerous nephews and nieces. Cyril and I are as much by ourselves as if Broomfield were one of those sculptured seraphim which the Israelites used to have in their houses to symbolize the deity they worshiped. Cyril's ox for days are over. He has taken his degree and has, I believe, done very well, though he has not swept the board, he tells me, like Mr Gladstone or Mr. Goldwyn Smith as he intended to do when he was at Winchester. And now he has to think of what he shall do with his life. I think I shall go to the bar, he said, because a man ought to have a profession of some kind and I rather like the idea of the bar, followed in due course by the bench. And the bar has advantages for a man who does not want to be a slave in the golden years of youth. The bar is a profession in which a man can take it easy. I am afraid Cyril has a slight inclination to idleness, or rather, perhaps, that he has a distaste for any systematic and monotonous work. He is far too active and energetic to waste his days in laziness, but he likes to occupy himself according to the caprice of the hour, and then, no doubt, he is influenced by the knowledge that his father is a rich man and he an only child. We were talking the other day about Uncle Ambrose's fortune and his most eccentric indifference to wealth, which would have been such a delightful surprise to most men in his position. I found out a most extraordinary fact connected with my father's inheritance, said Cyril, a fact which reveals an indifference that is really abnormal. An American I met at Oxford got into conversation with me about my connection with America through my father's kinsmen. He told me that old Matthew Arden of Chicago died early in April 1972, and that as his property was all of a most simple and obvious character, my father must have passed into possession of it within a month or two after his death. Now I distinctly remember that the first I heard of the change in our circumstances was an all Saints' Day when I went home from Winchester for twenty-four hours holiday. My father told me then that a great uncle with whom he had kept up an occasional correspondence had lately died in America, an old bachelor, and a man of considerable wealth accumulated in trade and that he had appointed my father the Residuary Legality. I was a great deal more excited by the change from poverty to wealth than he was. I never saw a man so unmoved by the idea of large means or so indifferent to the things that money can buy. That indifference has never been lessened, but I believe now that he has a wife and daughter to think about he will take more pleasure out of his wealth and spend money royally. I hear of a house in Grovner Square which has been bought and is being renovated in the Adam Esk style we are all so fond of. A house in town would be rather nice, I said, but I hope Uncle Ambrose does not mean to take us too much away from Lamford. That is the home I love. In spite of its sorrowful associations? Yes. I don't want to forget my father. I think to try and forget the loss of one we love is only a selfish way of pleasing ourselves at the cost of our dead. We owe a duty to our beloved dead. The duty of long remembrance. I had heard a good deal about the house in Grovner Square and had seen sketches of the rooms and their decoration. There were to be occasional departures from the Adam Esk character, notably in the hall and the staircase and the room on the half-flight. These were to be moreish with a good deal of perforated sandalwood and oriental drapery. I heard my mother discussing the coloring and decoration with Uncle Ambrose and I was often called into council, but I was just now to completely steeped in the loveliness of Venice to take a very warm interest in any London house. What I sighed for was one of those fifteenth-century palaces which I saw given over to business purposes, manufacturers for carved furniture or Venetian glass, storehouses, showrooms, workshops. Palaces in which painters like Titian had lived and worked, palaces where the walls still show the armorial bearings of historic families. Oh, to think that their roof which once sheltered a dode should ever be vulgarized by trade. Cyril laughs at my horror of trade and reminds me that Venice, in the days of her greatest splendor, was a city of traders, and that now she is dependent on reviving commerce for her resurrection from poverty and decay. Yesterday Cyril and I had a grand excursion all to ourselves or with only my duena Broomfield to make a third. Dear old Broomfield, who always looks the other way when we are talking confidentially, I dare say she wonders what we can find to talk about, first in one language and then in another. Cyril's Italian is of the poorest quality, by the way, and very limited in quantity, but he pretends that he likes to hear me talk and he pretends to understand me. Our chief confidences, however, are in French, a language in which he is quite at home. Indeed, here it is I who am at fault, for to tease me he often persists in talking Parisian which is quite a different tongue to the French in which Racine and Boileau wrote. We started early on a morning that was more like June than February. We had our own gondola and our two men, looking deliciously picturesque in their black livery and yellow silk scarves. They are both dear creatures and have become a part of our family. Paolo is a bachelor and he is to accompany the gondola to Lamford and live and die in our service, but Giovanni has a wife and two babies so we do not import him. It will be an agonizing moment when I have to bid him good-bye. I save my dessert every night after dinner and give it to him next morning for his bambini and his face becomes one broad grin of delight when I hand him my little offering. One could not venture upon such childishness with a Thames waterman whose only idea of kindness from his superiors begins and ends with beer. We had a most delightful picnic basket enough for the whole party and we were to go to Torcello and to be free till sunset. Oh, how like a fairy tale it was to go gliding over that blue lagoon passing Miorano and its chimneys and Miorano and its lace factory and gliding on and on by willow-shaded banks till we came to all that is left of the mother city of Venice. We landed in a narrow creek among sedges and alders and long rank grass and I could have almost thought I was in a backwater at home, but within a few paces of our landing place stood the octagonal church of Santa Fosca and the museum which calls itself a municipal palace and just behind them the cathedral, very plain of aspect outside but grand and beautiful within. After a very conscientious visitation of the two churches and a rather superficial examination of the marble relics in the museum we went in quest of a picturesque spot for our picnic and having found a bower of alders on the edge of the meadows where the cattle were feeding quietly in the sweet flowery grass on ground that was once the city of Torcello we lunched as it were tete-tete with the Adriatic for in front of us we could see nothing but the bright blue waters and the painted sails of some fishing boats shining crimson and purple and orange in the noon daylight. We lingered long over the delicious meal in air that was far more exhilarating than the champagne which Cyril persuaded me to taste in which he himself drank with much gusto. I told him that I thought it a horrid thing to see a young man drinking champagne and pretending to be a severe judge of the particular vintage. I considered such a taste odiously suggestive of some overfed alderman feasting in the city. You will be talking turtle next, I said. Why, you silly puss, we often have turtle at our lunches in Tom Quad, said he. Do you suppose we wait for gray hairs and red roses before we learn to appreciate the good things of this life? An undergrad is as good a judge of turtle and champagne as any alderman who ever passed to the luxuries of the mansion house through a long apprenticeship to boil beef and beer. We sent Broomfield off to find our gondoliers while we too wandered along the edge of that verdant shore with our feet almost in the sea. Now we have lost sight of the churches we might almost fancy ourselves on a desert island, said I. I only wish the fancy were true, said he. I should revel in a spell of summer idleness on a desert island if we had only enough to eat. That last condition takes the poetry out of the whole thing, answered I. Oh, but you would not have us left to starve until we began to look at each other and wonder which bit was the nicest. Or the least nasty. No, that idea is too awful. It is one of the dreadful mysteries of human degradation that we can never understand till we are brought face to face with death. Oh, it is so dreadful to think that the mere blind clinging to life can change men into wild beasts, and yet the thing happens. You have filled me with horror by the mere suggestion. Daisy, you have too vivid an imagination. You look at me as if you saw the potentiality of cannibalism depicted in my countenance. You and I will visit no island more savage than Prospero's, and there it seems there was always enough to eat. Prospero was an enchanter, sir. And Miranda was an enchantress, for Ferdinand at least. Over him she flung earth's most potent spell. Will you be my Miranda, Daisy? We were standing on that quiet shore, the waves curling, azure and emerald and silvery bright up to our very feet. We were as much alone as Ferdinand and Miranda can ever have been on their enchanted isle, and he had the supreme impertinence to put his arm around my waist. I believe that kind of thing has happened to be at risk-reared and almost as often as the toothache, and my cousin Flora has told me that it is sometimes done at dances in a conservatory where there are palms and tree-ferns after supper, but such a thing has never occurred to me and it took my breath away. Be my Miranda, Daisy! He went on, in such a charming voice that I forgot to be angry with him, or at any rate forgot to express my indignation. Let me be your Ferdinand and all the world will be my enchanted island. It is the fairy who makes the spell. I don't quite follow your meaning, I said, stupefied by amazement at his audacity. Oh, Daisy, what a horrid thing to say! He exclaimed evidently hurt. I thought you were romantic and full of poetry, and you answer me as if you were made of wood. He took his arm away from my waist in a huff. I believe if he had left it there any longer he would have given me an angry pinch. His whole countenance changed. I can't quite understand you, Cyril, I said very meekly. I thought you and I were to be brother and sister. You know you thought nothing of the kind, Miss. You refused to accept my father as a father to call him by that name. You told me very distinctly on the wedding day that I was not to have the privileges of a brother, and I replied that I had no desire to stand upon that footing. And now that the happiest months of my life have been spent with you. Now that I am overhead and ears in love, you pretend not to understand, you make believe to be stupid and apathetic. It is very cruel. More cruel than words can say, if you have been fooling me all this time. I don't know exactly what I said after this. I think I must have apologized for my stupidity, for he certainly forgave me, and put his arm round my waist again and kissed me, not in the boisterous sort of way that he kissed me in the carriage after mother's wedding, but gently and even timidly, so that I could not find it in my heart to be angry. Are these my Miranda's lips, he asked, and I think I said that it might be so if he pleased. And then we went slowly, slowly, slowly back to the creek where we had left the gondola, and I believe we were engaged. Broomfield looked at us in a most extraordinary way when we took our seats opposite her, as if she really guessed what had happened which was hardly possible. Our dear good men had eaten an enormous luncheon and they sang their delightful songs all the way back to Venice. The sun soon began to steep everything in gold, islands, water, distant mountains, and the wonderful city towards which we were going, and the painted sails of the fishing boats, and the clouds floating in the azure sky, azure that changed into opal, gold that changed to crimson, as the bell tower of St. George the Greater rose out of the level tide, and the lamps on the piazza began to gleam like a string of diamonds. Cyril is a very impetuous person, and before we sat down to dinner he had told Uncle Ambrose and Mother that he and I were engaged, that he would not forfeit that privilege to be the doge if the ducal power of Venice were to be revived tomorrow. Late in the evening Mother came into my room and sat with me for nearly an hour by the wood fire. She told me that nothing would please her better than that Cyril and I should love each other well enough to take upon ourselves the most solemn tie this earth knows. Her seriousness made me very serious and almost frightened me. I am pleased that you should be engaged even earlier than I was, Daisy, she said, and that you should not be hardened and spoiled by the experience of the world where girls learn to be selfish and vain and self-seeking. I am pleased that you should be engaged to your first lover in the very freshness and dawn of your life. It is too early to think about marrying, but a year or two hence. Oh, not for ever so many years! I cried. Pray, don't talk about getting rid of me. I want to stay with you, Mother. You are all in all to me. You are not tired of me, are you? Tired? No, my darling. It will be a sad day for me when my bright bird leaves the home nest, but I married very young Daisy and my wedded life was all gladness. An engagement should not last too long, even when the lovers are as young as you and Sarah. Two years will be quite long enough. In two years you will be nearly twenty. That sounds dreadfully ancient, said I, for indeed it seems that one has done with youth when one is out of one's teens. Mother gave me her small pearl necklace on my thirteenth birthday and I was so proud of myself and thought myself quite a personage because I was in my teens, and now here she was talking coolly about my soon being twenty and old enough to be turned out of doors. Two years will be no time, I told her. I would rather be engaged for ten so that I may stay at River Lawn with you. Who knows, dearest, if you need ever leave River Lawn, she answered sweetly. I have always thought the French much wiser than we in their domestic arrangements because they are not afraid to keep their children under the family roof when they are married, and thus the bond of parentage grows stronger instead of weaker and the little children of the third generation grow up at the feet of the old people. I have heard Englishmen say that this plan can never succeed with us, and if so one cannot help thinking that there must be some wad of affection in the English heart. Now in your case, Daisy, there is every reason that your married life should be spent in your mother's home since you are to marry my stepson. Dearest, dearest mother, I exclaimed, giving her a hug which would have done credit to a young she-bear, how sweet and how wise you are. I am very glad I accepted Cyril. I see now that he is just the very best husband I could have chosen. My darling, how lightly you talk, said mother almost reproachfully. Your stepfather and I are naturally pleased that you and Cyril should have chosen each other, but that is not enough, not nearly enough. Nothing is enough unless you love him truly and devotedly with your whole heart and mind as I loved your father. I suppose I like him as well as I could like anybody, I answered, rather frightened at her grave looks and earnest words. Liking is not enough. Well, perhaps I love him. I know I have been very happy with him ever since we came here, so happy as to forget every idea of sorrow or trouble in the world. I said, checking myself, confusedly, for the thing that I had forgotten more than I ever thought I could forget was the dark story of my father's death. I have been quite abandoned to happiness, but I don't know how much Venice may have had to do with that and whether I shall care quite as much for Cyril when we get back to Lampford. My love, be serious, urged mother looking painfully grave. Seriously, then I believe I love him as well as I shall ever love anybody. Daisy, you talk like a coquette and not like an earnest woman. Dearest, don't be shocked with me. It all seemed like a dream or a fairytale today when Cyril and I stood on the beach in the sunshine with the waves making music at our feet. If you had heard how lightly he asked me to be his wife, indeed he never once mentioned the word. You would not wonder that I am inclined to speak half in jest about this solemn business. Let us take the situation lightly, mother, and if after a year or two we should happen to grow tired of each other, why, we can apologize and drop back into the position of brother and sister. No Daisy that will not do. There must be no engagement. There must be no semblance of a bond between you unless you and he are both sure of your hearts. No he bullahs gone el amor. Good night, dear. Pray to God for guidance. Remember marriage means forever. As a bond or as a stigma it marks a woman's life to the end. I felt miserable after she had left me, but I did what she told me to do. I knelt down and prayed to be guided and led in the right way, led to choose the faith that should be best for my own happiness and for my mother's. The thought that I need never leave home if Cyril were my husband made him seem to me the most perfect husband I could have. Scarcely had I risen from my knees when I heard the distant dip of oars and the music of a guitar and a couple of mandolins accompanying the song Cyril and I are so fond of. The sounds came near, slowly growing out of the still night, the melodious splish splash of the oars, the silvery tinkling of the mandolins, the deeper tones of the guitar, and a fine baritone voice which I fancied I knew. Will they pass? Will they stay? I asked myself, throwing open my window and hiding myself behind the velvet curtain where I could see without fear of being seen. The moon was near the foal and all the palaces upon the opposite bank were bathed in silvery light and along the broad open canal a gondola came gliding, lit with colored lanterns, which danced and trembled in the soft breeze. It came nearer and nearer till it stopped under my window and then the mandolins and guitar played a familiar symphony and the voice I knew very well began Schubert's Gutt Nacht. He, it was Cyril, of course, sang the serenade beautifully. Music is one of his greatest talents inherited from his mother, for I doubt if Uncle Ambrose could distinguish God Save the Queen from Robin Adair. He sang that lovely melody to perfection or it seemed perfection on the moonlit canal with those fantastic Chinese lanterns trembling in the soft sweet wind. I feel assured it was on just such a night as this that Desdemona eloped with her more. When he had sung the last notes and the mandolins had tinkled into silence he stood looking up at my window as if he were waiting for some token of approval. What Desdemona would have done under the same circumstances floated upon me in an instant. I crept to the mantelpiece and chose a lily from the vase of flowers and, still hidden by the curtain, flung it out of the window. He caught it very cleverly and then, after a pause, the oars dipped and the mandolins began to play the serenade from Don Pasquale and the gondola moved slowly, slowly down the canal, he singing as it went. I wonder if the other inhabitants of Venice considered him a nuisance. There was a man at the tabla doted Danielles who called Venice a smelly place, that was all he had to say about the most enchanting city in the world. Such a man as that would be sure to object to a serenade. Cyril and I were solemnly engaged this morning. We were plighted and pledged to each other for life, and when we marry we are to have our own suite of rooms in Grovener Square, the whole of the third floor which is to be decorated and furnished according to my taste. This means that Cyril and I are to choose everything, for, of course, I should not be such a selfish wretch as to choose without deferring to him. At River Lawn we are to have the East Wing, and Mother will build more rooms if we ever fancy we want them. And the gondola is to be ours, the gondola in which Cyril sang last night. I feel as if the gondola were a personal friend. of chapters 9 and 10.