Asphodel

It was a day on which common mortals were almost fainting with the heat, puffing and blowing and complaining—a blazing midsummer-day; and even here, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where the mere idea of innumerable trees was suggestive of shadow and coolness, the heat was barely supportable—a heavy slumberous heat, loud with the hum of millions of insects, perfumed with the breath of a thousand pines.

Daphne revelled in the fierce sunshine—she threw back her crest of waving hair, bright as yellow gold, she smiled up at the cloudless blue, she looked unwinkingly even at Sol himself, the mighty unquenchable king of the sky, glorious yonder in his highest heaven.

She was lying at full length on a moss-grown block of stone at the top of a hill, which was one of the highest points in the forest, a hill-top overlooking on one side a fair sweep of champagne country, fertile valleys, church steeples, village roofs, vineyards and rose gardens, and winding streams; and on the other side, woodlands stretching away into infinite distance, darkly purple.

It was the choicest spot in a forest which, at its best, is a poor thing compared with the immemorial growth of an old English wood. Here there are no such oaks and beeches as our Hampshire forest can show—no such lovely mystical glades—no such richness of undergrowth. Everything seems of yesterday, save here and there a tree that looks as if he had seen something of bygone generations, and here and there a wreck of an ancient oak, proudly labelled ‘The Great Pharamond,’ or ‘Le Chêne de Henri IV.,’ with a placard hung round his poor old neck to say that he is not to be damaged ‘on pain of amend.’ Such Pharamonds and Henris abound in the forest where Rufus was killed, and nobody heeds them. The owls build in them, the field-mice find shelter in them, the woodpecker taps at them, unscared by placards or the threat of an amend.

But in the Fontainebleau woods there are rocky glades which English forests cannot boast—wild walks between walls of gigantic granite boulders—queer shapes of monsters and animals in gray stone, which seem to leap out at one from the shadows as one passes; innumerable pine-trees; hills and hollows; pathways carpeted with red fir-needles, mosses, ferns, and wild-flowers; and a bluer brighter sky than the heaven which roofs an English landscape.

‘Isn’t this worlds better than Asnières?’ asked Daphne of her companion; ‘and aren’t you ever so grateful to those poor girls for catching scarlet-fever?’

Asnières was school and constraint, Fontainebleau was liberty; so if the forest had been a poorer place, Daphne, who hated all restraints, would have loved it.

‘Poor girls!’ sighed Martha Dibb, a stupid, honest-minded young person, whose father kept an Italian warehouse in New Oxford street, and whose mother had been seized with the aspiration to have her daughters finished at Continental schools; whereby one Miss Dibb was being half-starved upon sausage and cabbage at Hanover, while the other grew fat upon croûte au pot and bouilli in the neighbourhood of Paris, and was supposed to be acquiring the true Parisian accent. ‘Poor girls; it was very bad for them,’ sighed Martha.

‘Yes; but it was very good for us,’ answered Daphne lightly; ‘and if it was a part of their destiny to have scarlet-fever, how very nice of them to have it in the term instead of in the holidays, when we shouldn’t have profited by it.’

‘And how lucky that we had that good-natured Miss Toby sent with us instead of one of the French governesses.’