ESPOUSALS.
It was winter, but the heavens were bright--a halcyon day among the
December glooms. All the winds lay still among the withered ferns,
making a sighing chorus in the underground of Badgeley Wood; but the
white clouds, thinner than the clouds of summer, lay becalmed upon the
chill blue sky, and the sun shone warm under the hedgerows, and deluded
birds were perching out upon the hawthorn bows; the green grass
brightened under the morning light; the wan waters shone; the trees
which had no leaves clustered their branches together, with a certain
pathos in their nakedness, and made a trellised shadow here and there
over the wintry stream; and, noble as in the broadest summer, in the
sheen of the December sunshine lay Oxford, jewelled like a bride,
gleaming out upon the tower of Maudlin, flashing abroad into the
firmament from fair St Mary, twinkling with innumerable gem-points from
all the lesser cupolas and spires. In the midst of all, this sunshine
retreated in pure defeat and failure, from that sombre old heathen, with
his heavy dome--but only brightened all the more upon those responsive
and human inhabitants dwelling there from the olden ages, and native to
the soil. There was a fresh breath from the broad country, a hum of life
in the air, a twitter of hardy birds among the trees. It was one of
those days which belong to no season, but come, like single blessings,
one by one, throwing a gleam across the darker half of the year. Though
it was in December instead of May, it was as fair “a bridal of the earth
and sky” as poet could have wished to see; but the season yielded no
flowers to strew upon the grassy footpath between the Old Wood Lodge and
the little church of Winterbourne; they did not need them who trod that
road to-day.
Hush, they are coming home--seeing nothing but an indefinite splendour
in the earth and in the sky--sweet in the dews of their youth--touched
to the heart--to that very depth and centre where lie all ecstasies and
tears. Walking together arm in arm, in their young humility--scarcely
aware of the bridal train behind them--in an enchantment of their own;
now coming back to that old little room, with its pensive old memories
of hermit life and solitude--this quiet old place, which never before
was lighted up with such a gleam of splendid fortune and happy hope.
You would say it was Marian Atheling, “with the smile on her lip, and
the tear in her eye”--the very same lovely vision whom the lad Louis saw
some eighteen months ago at the garden gate. But you would be mistaken;
for it is not Marian--it is the young Lady Winterbourne. This one is
quite as beautiful for a consolation--almost more so in her bridal
blush, and sunshine, and tears--and for a whole hour by the village
clock has been a peeress of the realm.
This is what it has come to, after all--what they must all come to,
those innocent young people--even Rachel, who is as wild as a child, in
her first genuine and unalarmed outburst of youthful jubilation--even
Agnes, who through all this joy carries a certain thoughtful remembrance
in her dark eyes--possibly even Charlie, who fears no man, but is a
little shy of every womankind younger than Miss Anastasia. There are
only one or two strangers; but the party almost overflows Miss Bridget’s
parlour, where the old walls smile with flowers, and the old apartment,
like an ancient handmaid, receives them with a prim and antique grace--a
little doubtful, yet half hysterical with joy.
But it does not last very long, this crowning festival. By-and-by the
hero and the heroine go away; then the guests one by one; then the
family, a little languid, a little moved with the first inroad among
them, disperse to their own apartments, or to a meditative ramble out of
doors; and when the twilight falls, you could almost suppose Miss
Bridget, musing too over the story of another generation, sitting before
the fire in her great old chair, with no companion but the flowers.
This new event seemed somehow to consolidate and make certain that
wonderful fortune of Louis, which until then had looked almost too much
like a romance to be realised. His uncle had made various efforts to
question and set aside the verdict which transferred to the true heir
his name and inheritance--efforts in which even the lawyers whom he had
employed at the trial, and who were not over-scrupulous, had refused any
share. The attempt was entirely fruitless--an insane resistance to the
law, which was irresistible; and the Honourable Reginald Rivers, whom
some old sycophants who came in his way still flattered with his old
title, was now at Baden, a great man enough in his own circle, rich in
the allowance from his nephew, which he was no longer too proud to
accept. He alone of all men expressed any disapprobation of Louis’s
marriage--he whose high sense of family honour revolted from the idea of
a _mesalliance_--and one other individual, who had something of a more
reasonable argument. We hasten to extract, according to a former
promise, the following pathetic paragraph from the pages of the
_Mississippi Gazette_:--
“I have just heard of the marriage of the young Lord W---- with the
beautiful M---- A----. Well!--is that so wonderful? Oh, visionary dream!
That thou shouldst pause to comment upon a common British bargain--the
most ordinary arrangement of this conventional and rotten life? What is
a heart in comparison with a title?--true love in the balance of a
coronet? Oh, my country, _thou_ hast not come to this! But for these
mercenary and heartless parents--but for the young mind dazzled with the
splendid cheat of rank--oh heaven, what true felicity--what poetic
rapture--what a home thou mightst have seen! For she was beautiful as
the day when it breaks upon the rivers and the mountains of my native
land! It is enough--a poet’s fate would have been all incomplete without
this fiery trial. Farewell, M----! Farewell, lovely deluded victim of a
false society! Some time out of your hollow splendour you will think of
a true heart and weep!”