CECIL'S HONEYMOON.
Before the end of the year Cecil Chudleigh had become Cecil
O'Boyneville. The barrister was not a man to lose time in making
himself master of the citadel that had capitulated, and having once
obtained Cecil's consent to be his wife, he moved heaven and earth to
bring about a speedy marriage. The powers that be were in this instance
represented by Mrs. MacClaverhouse and the Mountjoys. The dowager was
delighted to marry her penniless niece to a man who confessed that
his professional income was over two thousand a-year, and that he had
invested between ten and fifteen thousand in certain very profitable
railway shares, the interest of which he was prepared to settle upon
Lady Cecil during his lifetime, while the principal would be hers at
his death. The Mountjoys and all the Nasedale visitors were delighted
by the idea of a wedding, and young ladies who had heard of Cecil's
engagement from Mrs. Mountjoy, and were anxious to disport themselves
as bridesmaids, besieged the poor girl with entreaties, and bewildered
her with their praises of Mr. O'Boyneville.
Against so much friendly persuasion, with the mighty O'Boyneville
swooping down upon her suddenly by all manner of express trains, and by
every complication of loop-line and junction, Cecil was powerless to
make any successful resistance. She had promised to be his wife. She
was grateful for his affection, and she looked forward with a sense
of relief to the marriage which was at least to be the end of her
dependence. And then Laurence O'Boyneville's influence was not without
its weight. From the hour in which Cecil had promised to be his wife,
his power over her had grown stronger with every moment she spent in
his society. The strength of will which had carried him triumphantly
over all the obstacles in his path sustained him here; the singleness
of his purpose, the depth of his feeling, invested him with a kind of
dignity. That combined force of a strong will and brilliant intellect
had an almost magnetic influence over Cecil. If she did not love her
future husband, she at least felt that it was something to be loved by
such a man, and the strong current of his will drifted her along with
it. Walking in the avenue of Nasedale, under a dull October sky, with
her hand under Laurence O'Boyneville's arm, and inspired with some
vague sense of protection by the stalwart figure that sheltered her
from the autumn wind, Cecil consented that the wedding should take
place early in November. She could not oppose her lover's wishes. From
the moment in which she had accepted his devotion, Mr. O'Boyneville
had in a manner taken possession of her judgment and her will; and it
mattered little when he claimed her entirely for his own.
"You are so good, Laurence," she said once, "and I have such a sense of
protection in your presence, that I sometimes fancy you are like a new
father to me. Indeed, you have more influence over me than my father
had, though I loved him very, very dearly. I suppose it is because your
will is so much stronger than his."
Mr. O'Boyneville nodded, and pressed the little hand resting on his
arm. Another man of forty engaged to a woman of twenty-two might have
been slightly disconcerted by Cecil's speech; but Laurence had implicit
faith in the divine right of honest love, and in his thoughts there was
no shadow of fear for the future.
"I must be a fool indeed if I can't teach her to love me, loving her as
I do," he thought.
Backwards and forwards, by loop-line and junction, by midnight express
and morning mail, rushing through the chill mists and fogs of autumnal
dawn, sped Mr. O'Boyneville, all through that bleak October. He
took his rest in snug corners of railway carriages, and lived upon
sandwiches, peppery soups, and adulterated coffee. His electioneering
business went on as smoothly as his love-suit, and provincial electors
yielded readily to the beguiling accents of the Hibernian candidate.
But the candidate's heart was at Nasedale, and he sacrificed his
parliamentary ambition to his love for Cecil. He made light of two or
three hundred miles of cross-country travelling, if thereby he could
obtain a quiet day with his future wife. To walk with her in the long
avenue; to stand with his back to the fire, talking to her as she bent
over her work; to drive her in a mail-phaeton, with a couple of merry
girls in the back seat, and a pair of the most unmanageable horses
in the judge's stables devouring the road before him,--these things
delighted the man who had spent the best years of his life amidst the
clamour of law courts, and in the dull quiet of dingy chambers. There
was very little in common between himself and the woman he loved. But
he had that dash of romance which the hardest friction of a practical
existence cannot entirely obliterate from the composition of an
Irishman; and he was really and truly in love.
So one misty morning in November the bells pealed gaily from the
village church, whose Norman tower loomed dark above the leafless woods
of Nasedale Park; and the Nasedale servants were gay and busy. It was
to be a quiet wedding. Cecil had been earnest in her entreaties that
there might be no unnecessary trouble incurred by her cordial friends;
but the childless Mountjoys were as pleased as if they had been
arranging a daughter's marriage ceremonial.
"I shall be quite angry if you talk about trouble, my dear Cecil,"
said the kind-hearted hostess. "Here have Horatio and I been puzzling
our brains to find out something or other to enliven the house in this
wretched weather; and just at the very time when we were most at a loss
for amusement and occupation, this marriage of yours happens to afford
us both. You don't know what it is, my dear, to have nine marriageable
girls in a house, with only three unmarried men, and those three more
listless, and lazy, and stupid than words can describe, or you wouldn't
talk of giving trouble. All I dread is the reaction which we shall
suffer when it's all over, and you and Mr. O'Boyneville have gone to
Ireland."
Thus it happened, that although it had been promised that the wedding
should be a private one, the programme of the day grew to an alarming
extent before the day arrived. The officers who had assisted at the
archery meeting were invited to the breakfast, much to the delight
of the nine young ladies, and much to the aggravation of the three
listless young gentlemen, who gave utterance to the most crushing
sarcasms when the martial visitors were alluded to, and affected to
consider the profession of arms entirely incompatible with the faintest
scintillation of intelligence, or the smallest modicum of education.
"Yes," drawled the most listless of the listless ones, "Captain
Harduppe is a remarkably fine fellow. Of course it's a great merit in a
man to be six foot two and three-quarters, and a merit which society is
bound to recognise. But did any body ever hear the captain read? or did
any body ever see the captain write? It's my belief that the greatest
pull the Jew-bill-discounters have over their military customers lies
in the fact that they witness the agonies which the martial mind
experiences in the process of signing its name; and it's also my belief
that when a cavalry officer takes up the _Times_ and throws it down
again, exclaiming, 'Haw! nothing in the papaws to-day, I s'ppose,' he
does so simply because he can't read."
Of course Mr. O'Boyneville, happening to overhear some such speech as
this, arose in his might and crushed the scorner, proving that from the
days of Cæsar, whom in the excitement of argument he called "Sayzer,"
to the time of the conqueror of Waterloo, soldiers had been even more
renowned for the power of their intellect than for the prowess of their
arms, and that the helmet and buckler of Minerva were only typical of
the fact that from the earliest period of history, wisdom and valour
had gone hand-in-hand.
Through the misty November morning went the train of carriages to the
little church where Mr. O'Boyneville awaited his bride, after spending
the night on loop-line and at junction, and after making a hurried
toilet at the village inn.
There was no rain, only a soft autumnal mist, which took the fresh
crispness out of tulle bonnets, and the artificial undulations out
of feminine _bandeaux_. But the wedding was a success in spite of
the weather. There was no weeping during the ceremonial, and it
was only when the dowager kissed her niece in the vestry that one
solitary teardrop glittered in each of that matron's piercing eyes.
The bridegroom was in the highest spirits, though in the midst of his
gaiety a very close observer--if such people ever were to be found in a
wedding-party--might have detected an under current of deeper feeling
near akin to tears.
There was the usual monument of crystallised sugar, and silver foliage,
and artificial orange-blossom; the usual combination of the savoury
solidity of Fortnum and Mason, with the airy frivolity and bilious
sweetness of Gunter; the usual popping of corks, and pleasant sound
of frozen liquids trickling into cool, fragile glasses; the usual
protestations from young ladies who infinitely preferred tea or
coffee to sparkling hock or moselle, but who, overcome by masculine
persuasion, generally ended by drinking the latter; the usual open
renunciation of her sex from the one fast young lady generally to be
found in every party, who always happens to sit next an officer, and
who tells him confidentially that she likes sparkling moselle, and
doesn't believe in the girls who pretend not to like it.
Nor could the breakfast reasonably be expected to come to an end
without a little speechifying. The judge, in a few appropriate,
well-rounded sentences, invoked for his guests all those impossible
blessings which it is the fashion to pray for at a wedding-breakfast;
while, in the heat of returning thanks for these good wishes, Mr.
O'Boyneville was betrayed into speaking of his host as "his ludship,"
and on more than one occasion addressed his audience as "ladies and
gentlemen of the jury." And by-and-by appeared the traditional chariot
and post-horses, driven by that blue and antique postillion who seems
to emerge from the shadows of the past only on such occasions. And
then there was a little animated flirtation in the hall among the nine
unmarried young ladies and the cavalry officers; while the listless
young gentlemen looked on with countenances expressive of unutterable
scorn; and elderly Anglo-Indian merchants and lawyers, and red-faced
Anglo-Indian colonels and majors gathered comfortably round their
host at one end of the long table in the dining-room, telling old
Anglo-Indian stories, and laughing at old Anglo-Indian jokes.
In due time Lady Cecil came down the broad old-fashioned staircase,
dressed in pale-grey silk, and wearing an airy bonnet that seemed
constructed soley with a grey feather and a large full-blown
blush-rose, while the handsomest of her aunt's Indian shawls draped
her slender figure like a classic mantle of scarlet and gold. Mrs.
MacClaverhouse had insisted upon her niece wearing this shawl and no
other.
"It's the last but one that stupid extravagant Hector sent me, and if
I know _any thing_ about Indian shawls, I know that this one must have
cost him something like a hundred guineas; and as I'm not rich enough
to buy you a wedding-present, you must take this, Cecil,--though why
the fact of a person being married should oblige other people to half
ruin themselves in the purchase of bracelets and dressing-cases is
more than I can understand. However, that has nothing to do with you
and me, Cecil. I'm your aunt, and your nearest living relative, so
it would be hard indeed if I couldn't give you something; and if you
don't take Hector's shawl I shall be very much offended: and mind you
don't go wasting your husband's money on trumpery Dresden china; for
when I'm dead and gone you'll have more mandarin jars, and carved ivory
chessmen, and inlaid caskets, and envelope-boxes, than you'll know what
to do with."
Whereupon Mrs. MacClaverhouse kissed her niece, shed one more solitary
tear, which she brushed away sharply, and followed the bride down the
staircase. And so it happened that Cecil went to her husband wrapped in
the shawl which Hector Gordon had chosen in Calcutta three years before.
The traditionary chariot and post-horses drove away amidst a volley
of cheers; and the very fast young lady, who was rather proud of
her foot, launched a fairy bronze boot into the air as the bridal
chariot departed, the heel of which fairy boot coming in contact with
the eyebrow of one of the listless gentlemen, inflicted a blow that
ultimately resulted in that vulgar appearance of mingled blues and
greens which is popularly described as a black eye.
The last which the Nasedale party saw of the bride and bridegroom
was Mr. O'Boyneville's radiant face at the carriage-window, and Mr.
O'Boyneville's big white hand waving a parting salutation. And then the
Irishman realised the fondest desire of his later years. He went back
to the land of his youth, and with his young wife by his side trod once
more the country of his birth. He had consulted Cecil's wishes as to
that honeymoon tour; but as he had previously revealed his own yearning
for a glimpse of his native town, the river and mountains so familiar
to his childhood, she set aside all thought of her own inclination.
"Let us go to Ireland," she said; "I know you wish to see your own
country once more, and it will be all new ground to me."
"You really wish to see Ireland?"
"Really."
"Then we will go there--but only on one condition. There is a place in
Devonshire I have heard you talk of--the place where your childhood was
spent. We will get across country somehow or other from Holyhead, and
we will visit it together, Cecil."
She looked up at her lover, and smiled. Of all pleasures that he could
have offered to her this was the sweetest. The thought was one of the
inspirations of love.
So Mr. O'Boyneville took his wife to Ireland in the dull November
weather. There are autumnal seasons in which "the rain it raineth every
day" in this green isle encircled by the sea; and it seemed to Cecil as
if a new deluge were about to blot fair Hibernia from the universe. It
was no fitting season, nor had the barrister sufficient leisure for the
ordinary pleasure-seeker's tour. The newly-wedded pair spent a few wet
days in Dublin, driving in the Phœnix Park, where the autumn sunsets
were very beautiful to behold in the brief intervals of the rain;
and then one bleak early morning an express train bore Cecil and her
husband southward to Shannonville, and under the cloudy November skies
Laurence O'Boyneville once more beheld the city of his youth. He had
looked forward with such a fond yearning to the day in which he should
tread those familiar streets once more; and now the day had come, and
the long dreamed-of pleasure was a very sad sensation after all. The
glory of Shannonville had fled since the Irishman last had looked
upon it, and the sight of its decay smote him to the heart. Modern
civilisation and the mighty steam demon who makes naught of distance,
and but little of time, had left Shannonville far behind. Commerce had
no longer need of that far southern port; and where rich granaries had
stored the wealth of southern Ireland, empty storehouses looked blankly
on a deserted quay. There, where the vessels of many traders had
jostled one another in the crowded docks, a fisherman's _Briccawn_ was
slackly moored by a rotting rope. The broad streets were standing yet,
but the crowd that had once made them gay had vanished. The club-house
was still called a club-house; but where were the noisy revellers who
had once made its walls resonant with their boisterous laughter? And
the dashing young men, and the lovely blue-eyed maidens, whoso presence
had rendered the chief thoroughfare of Shannonville so delightful a
promenade--where were they? Gone--gone! Only pinched faces looked up
at the hotel-windows where Cecil gazed sadly out upon her husband's
native city. Only squalor and misery, ruin and decay, greeted Laurence
O'Boyneville as he walked slowly along the deserted quays, looking for
the vanished brightness of his youth. He went back to his wife sick at
heart.
"The place is as dreary as a city of the dead, Cecil," he said. "I
have brought you to desolation and ruin, my darling. We'll leave
Shannonville by the first train to-morrow morning. The sight of the old
place cuts me to the heart."
But Mr. O'Boyneville grew tolerably cheerful by-and-by, and took his
wife to dine with the oldest friends he had--the oldest surviving
friends, for there was a sad list of the dead whom he had known and
loved in Shannonville. Lady Cecil was pleased with the kind simple
people, who received her with open arms, and were unceasing in their
praises of her husband's youthful virtues. The twenty years of his
professional career seemed to melt away like a dream as he sat in that
Shannonville drawing-room, where tall young ladies whom he had dandled
in his strong arms looked at him wonderingly, and where youthful
matrons, whom he remembered as tiny toddling children, brought their
tiny toddling children to his middle-aged knees.
People talked as if events of a quarter of a century back had been
the events of yesterday. "And don't you remember the picnic at
Nikdeilslootheram, Laurence?" "And I'm sure you've not forgotten the
dance at Mr. O'Hennesy's, when Patrick MacShindy proposed to Flora
Machrae in the little back-parlour, and old Mr. O'Kelly caught him on
his knees?" "And don't you remember the murder at Castle Sloggerom,
and Major O'Wokes riding fifty miles across country on his chestnut
mare, Devil's-hoof, to take the scoundrel that did it? Ah, Laurence,
Shannonville's but a quiet place now, and you'd scarcely know it if you
came back amongst us again."
But even that genial evening amongst old friends could not quite
restore Mr. O'Boyneville's spirits.
"I'm sure you won't care to stay here, Cecil," he said, as they drove
home to the hotel; "and I think my heart would break if I spent a week
in the place."
So in the bleak November, under another cloudy sky, and with another
day's ceaseless rain pattering against the windows of the railway
carriage, Cecil and her husband went back to Dublin, and from Dublin
to Holyhead, and thence across country to Exeter, and then to
Chudleigh Combe. Here there was no sign of decay, save the beautiful
decay of nature. Commercial civilisation had never approached within
twenty miles of the secluded old mansion half buried in the woods;
and the eternal loveliness of nature is subject to no changes, save
those gradual transitions through which she passes for ever and ever,
serenely beautiful in every phase.
The old woman who had charge of the deserted mansion was very glad to
admit Mr. O'Boyneville and his wife; for the portly presence of the
barrister, and the carriage and pair that had brought them from the
nearest post-town, augured a handsome recompense for her trouble. She
led the visitors through the empty rooms, where the atmosphere was
chill and musty, and where the mice behind the wainscot scampered away
at the sound of the intruders' footfall. The old-fashioned furniture
had a wasted, half-starved look to modern eyes. It seemed as if the
chairs and tables had been sentient things, and were slowly perishing
from inanition. As the aspect of Shannonville had depressed Mr.
O'Boyneville, so the cold dampness of this untenanted mansion depressed
Cecil.
"I can't bear to see the dear old rooms looking so cold and cheerless,"
she said. "I can show you the very chair in which grandmamma used to
sit; the little table on which I used to write."
She opened an old-fashioned square piano, and ran her fingers gently
along the keys; but, tenderly as she touched the notes, the instrument
gave out a shrill discordant wail that was almost like the shriek of
a banshee. But if the aspect of the place saddened Mr. O'Boyneville's
young wife, her sadness was not all pain: there was a tender pleasure
mingled with her regret.
"You could never guess how often I have seen the old place in
my dreams, Laurence," she said, "amidst all the confusion, and
contradiction, and absurdity that make dreams so bewildering. I have
seen dead people restored to life, and have felt no surprise in seeing
them. In a dream one always seems to forget that there is any such
thing as death. I thank you a thousand times for bringing me here,
Laurence. You could never believe how much I have wished to see the
dear old home again."
"And now you see it in the hands of a stranger, and going to ruin,
Cecil," said Mr. O'Boyneville. "The water comes through all the
ceilings up stairs; and if the man who owns the place doesn't take care
what he's about, there'll be a new roof wanted before very long."
But the old woman hereupon explained that the ownership was at present
vested in the Court of Chancery. A suit was in progress, and had been
in progress for the last three years, on settlement of which the entire
property was to be realised for the benefit of the disputants.
"And if the place is to be worth any body's buying, it had need be sold
soon," said the old woman, "for the rain do come in here and the rain
do come in there, and the wind do come in everywhere, and the rats gnaw
holes in the wainscot, and eat their way through the flooring, and the
windows rattle of a winter's night to that degree, that the house isn't
fit for a Christian to live in."
"A few hundreds laid out upon it would make it comfortable enough,"
said the practical Mr. O'Boyneville; "but I don't see how the place
could ever be worth more than a hundred a-year at this distance from
London; and it must sell as cheap as rags to give you five per cent.
for your money."
Oh, if I had only been rich enough to buy it! she thought. She did not
know any thing about percentages or profitable investments; but if she
had been free to do her own will, she would have given every sixpence
she possessed in the world to be owner of Chudleigh Combe.
And yet she never thought of asking Mr. O'Boyneville to purchase the
dwelling-place she loved with some portion of the money he had settled
upon her. She had tried with all her might to prevent the making of
that settlement, and had told her lover that under no circumstances
could she ever bring herself to look upon the money as her own.
"I have very little use for what people call pin-money," she said,
"for you know, Laurence, that I have been accustomed all my life to be
economical. Let me have fifty or sixty pounds a-year for my clothes if
you like, and I will dress as well as I have ever been used to dress.
But I don't want to be extravagant because you are generous."
The barrister kissed his affianced bride, and told her that she was
an angel, and that she dressed exquisitely; but the settlement was
made nevertheless, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse declared that Laurence
O'Boyneville had acted nobly.
And during the visit to Chudleigh Combe he was very kind and very
patient; though he examined the window-sashes, and sounded the
partitions, and rattled the locks, and poked the ceilings, and peered
up the chimneys, and jumped upon the floors with a view to testing the
strength of the timbers, and altogether behaved in a more practical
way than quite harmonised with Cecil's pensive spirit: but he gave her
plenty of time for tender meditations while he prowled amongst stables
and offices, tasted the water from a couple of pumps in a long stone
courtyard, and measured the length and breadth of the grounds with a
surveyor's accurate three-foot stride It was only when the autumn
afternoon was deepening into evening that he swooped down upon Cecil,
as she stood on the lawn by a rustic basket--that had once held such a
wealth of geraniums, and in which now only a few straggling sprigs of
mignonette lingered amid a wilderness of weeds--and asked her sharply
if she was ready to go away.
"Yes, Laurence," she said, "quite ready."
And then, as they walked back to the carriage, she said, rather to
herself than to her husband:
"I wonder who will buy Chudleigh Combe?"
"Ah, so do I," cried Mr. O'Boyneville, swinging his stick, "he'll have
to spend something like a thousand pounds upon the place before he
makes it habitable, whoever he is."