MY WEDDING.
I confess the first thing I did when I knew myself the next morning was
to have a good cry. To leave the place where I had been born was like
forsaking the laws and order of the Nature I knew, for some other Nature it
might be, but not known to me as such. How, for instance, could one who has
been used to our bright white sun, and our pale modest moon, with our soft
twilights, and far, mysterious skies of night, be willing to fall in with
the order of things in a planet, such as I have read of somewhere, with
three or four suns, one red and another green and another yellow? Only
perhaps I've taken it all up wrong, and I do like looking at a landscape
for a minute or so through a colored glass; and if it be so, of course it
all blends, and all we want is harmony. What I mean is, that I found it
a great wrench to leave the dear old place, and of course loved it more
than I had ever loved it. But I would get all my crying about that over
beforehand. It would be bad enough afterwards to have to part with my
father and mother and Connie, and the rest of them. Only it wasn't like
leaving them. You can't leave hearts as you do rooms. You can't leave
thoughts as you do books. Those you love only come nearer to you when you
go away from them. The same rules don't hold with _thinks_ and _things_, as
my eldest boy distinguished them the other day.
But somehow I couldn't get up and dress. I seemed to have got very fond of
my own bed, and the queer old crows, as I had called them from babyhood, on
the chintz curtains, and the Chinese paper on the wall with the strangest
birds and creeping things on it. It was a lovely spring morning, and the
sun was shining gloriously. I knew that the rain of the last night must be
glittering on the grass and the young leaves; and I heard the birds singing
as if they knew far more than mere human beings, and believed a great deal
more than they knew. Nobody will persuade me that the birds don't mean it;
that they sing from any thing else than gladness of heart. And if they
don't think about cats and guns, why should they? Even when they fall on
the ground, it is not without our Father. How horridly dull and stupid it
seems to say that "without your Father" means without _his knowing it_. The
Father's mere _knowledge_ of a thing--if that could be, which my father
says can't--is not the Father. The Father's tenderness and care and love of
it all the time, that is the not falling without him. When the cat kills
the bird, as I have seen happen so often in our poor little London garden,
God yet saves his bird from his cat. There is nothing so bad as it looks to
our half-sight, our blinding perceptions. My father used to say we are all
walking in a spiritual twilight, and are all more or less affected with
twilight blindness, as some people are physically. Percivale, for one, who
is as brave as any wife could wish, is far more timid than I am in crossing
a London street in the twilight; he can't see what is coming, and fancies
he sees what is not coming. But then he has faith in me, and never starts
when I am leading him.
Well, the birds were singing, and Dora and the boys were making a great
chatter, like a whole colony of sparrows, under my window. Still I felt as
if I had twenty questions to settle before I could get up comfortably, and
so lay on and on till the breakfast-bell rang: and I was not more than half
dressed when my mother came to see why I was late; for I had not been late
forever so long before.
She comforted me as nobody but a mother can comfort. Oh, I do hope I shall
be to my children what my mother has been to me! It would be such a blessed
thing to be a well of water whence they may be sure of drawing comfort. And
all she said to me has come true.
Of course, my father gave me away, and Mr. Weir married us.
It had been before agreed that we should have no wedding journey. We all
liked the old-fashioned plan of the bride going straight from her father's
house to her husband's. The other way seemed a poor invention, just for the
sake of something different. So after the wedding, we spent the time as we
should have done any other day, wandering about in groups, or sitting and
reading, only that we were all more smartly dressed; until it was time for
an early dinner, after which we drove to the station, accompanied only
by my father and mother. After they left us, or rather we left them, my
husband did not speak to me for nearly an hour: I knew why, and was very
grateful. He would not show his new face in the midst of my old loves and
their sorrows, but would give me time to re-arrange the grouping so as
myself to bring him in when all was ready for him. I know that was what he
was thinking, or feeling rather; and I understood him perfectly. At last,
when I had got things a little tidier inside me, and had got my eyes to
stop, I held out my hand to him, and then--knew that I was his wife.
This is all I have got to tell, though I have plenty more to keep, till we
get to London. There, instead of my father's nice carriage, we got into a
jolting, lumbering, horrid cab, with my five boxes and Percivale's little
portmanteau on the top of it, and drove away to Camden Town. It _was_
to a part of it near the Regent's Park; and so our letters were always,
according to the divisions of the post-office, addressed to Regent's Park,
but for all practical intents we were in Camden Town. It was indeed a
change from a fine old house in the country; but the street wasn't much
uglier than Belgrave Square, or any other of those heaps of uglinesses,
called squares, in the West End; and, after what I had been told to expect,
I was surprised at the prettiness of the little house, when I stepped out
of the cab and looked about me. It was stuck on like a swallow's nest to
the end of a great row of commonplace houses, nearly a quarter of a mile in
length, but itself was not the work of one of those wretched builders who
care no more for beauty in what they build than a scavenger in the heap of
mud he scrapes from the street. It had been built by a painter for himself,
in the Tudor style; and though Percivale says the idea is not very well
carried out, I like it much.
I found it a little dreary when I entered though,--from its emptiness.
The only sitting-room at all prepared had just a table and two or three
old-fashioned chairs in it; not even a carpet on the floor. The bedroom and
dressing-room were also as scantily furnished as they well could be.
"Don't be dismayed, my darling," said my husband.
"Look here,"--showing me a bunch of notes,--"we shall go out to-morrow and
buy all we want,--as far as this will go,--and then wait for the rest. It
will be such a pleasure to buy the things with you, and see them come home,
and have you appoint their places. You and Sarah will make the carpets;
won't you? And I will put them down, and we shall be like birds building
their nest."
"We have only to line it; the nest is built already."
"Well, neither do the birds build the tree. I wonder if they ever sit in
their old summer nests in the winter nights."
"I am afraid not," I answered; "but I'm ashamed to say I can't tell."
"It is the only pretty house I know in all London," he went on, "with a
studio at the back of it. I have had my eye on it for a long time, but
there seemed no sign of a migratory disposition in the bird who had
occupied it for three years past. All at once he spread his wings and flew.
I count myself very fortunate."
"So do I. But now you must let me see your study," I said. "I hope I may
sit in it when you've got nobody there."
"As much as ever you like, my love," he answered. "Only I don't want to
make all my women like you, as I've been doing for the last two years. You
must get me out of that somehow."
"Easily. I shall be so cross and disagreeable that you will get tired of
me, and find no more difficulty in keeping me out of your pictures."
But he got me out of his pictures without that; for when he had me always
before him he didn't want to be always producing me.
He led me into the little hall,--made lovely by a cast of an unfinished
Madonna of Michael Angelo's let into the wall,--and then to the back of it,
where he opened a small cloth-covered door, when there yawned before me,
below me, and above me, a great wide lofty room. Down into it led an almost
perpendicular stair.
"So you keep a little private precipice here," I said.
"No, my dear," he returned; "you mistake. It is a Jacob's ladder,--or will
be in one moment more."
He gave me his hand, and led me down.
"This is quite a banqueting-hall, Percivale!" I cried, looking round me.
"It shall be, the first time I get a thousand pounds for a picture," he
returned.
"How grand you talk!" I said, looking up at him with some wonder; for big
words rarely came out of his mouth.
"Well," he answered merrily, "I had two hundred and seventy-five for the
last."
"That's a long way off a thousand," I returned, with a silly sigh.
"Quite right; and, therefore, this study is a long way off a
banqueting-hall."
There was literally nothing inside the seventeen feet cube except one
chair, one easel, a horrible thing like a huge doll, with no end of joints,
called a lay figure, but Percivale called it his bishop; a number of
pictures leaning their faces against the walls in attitudes of grief that
their beauty was despised and no man would buy them; a few casts of legs
and arms and faces, half a dozen murderous-looking weapons, and a couple of
yards square of the most exquisite tapestry I ever saw.
"Do you like being read to when you are at work?" I asked him.
"Sometimes,--at certain kinds of work, but not by any means always," he
answered. "Will you shut your eyes for one minute," he went on, "and,
whatever I do, not open them till I tell you?"
"You mustn't hurt me, then, or I may open them without being able to help
it, you know," I said, closing my eyes tight.
"Hurt you!" he repeated, with a tone I would not put on paper if I could,
and the same moment I found myself in his arms, carried like a baby, for
Percivale is one of the strongest of men.
It was only for a few yards, however. He laid me down somewhere, and told
me to open my eyes.
I could scarcely believe them when I did. I was lying on a couch in a
room,--small, indeed, but beyond exception the loveliest I had ever seen.
At first I was only aware of an exquisite harmony of color, and could not
have told of what it was composed. The place was lighted by a soft lamp
that hung in the middle; and when my eyes went up to see where it was
fastened, I found the ceiling marvellous in deep blue, with a suspicion
of green, just like some of the shades of a peacock's feathers, with a
multitude of gold and red stars upon it. What the walls were I could not
for some time tell, they were so covered with pictures and sketches;
against one was a lovely little set of book-shelves filled with books, and
on a little carved table stood a vase of white hot-house flowers, with one
red camellia. One picture had a curtain of green silk before it, and by its
side hung the wounded knight whom his friends were carrying home to die.
"O my Percivale!" I cried, and could say no more.
"Do you like it?" he asked quietly, but with shining eyes.
"Like it?" I repeated. "Shall I like Paradise when I get there? But what a
lot of money it must have cost you!"
"Not much," he answered; "not more than thirty pounds or so. Every spot of
paint there is from my own brush."
"O Percivale!"
I must make a conversation of it to tell it at all; but what I really did
say I know no more than the man in the moon.
"The carpet was the only expensive thing. That must be as thick as I could
get it; for the floor is of stone, and must not come near your pretty feet.
Guess what the place was before."
"I should say, the flower of a prickly-pear cactus, full of sunlight from
behind, which a fairy took the fancy to swell into a room."
"It was a shed, in which the sculptor who occupied the place before me used
to keep his wet clay and blocks of marble."
"Seeing is hardly believing," I said. "Is it to be my room? I know you mean
it for my room, where I can ask you to come when I please, and where I can
hide when any one comes you don't want me to see."
"That is just what I meant it for, my Ethelwyn,--and to let you know what I
_would_ do for you if I could."
"I hate the place, Percivale," I said. "What right has it to come poking
in between you and me, telling me what I know and have known--for, well, I
won't say how long--far better than even you can tell me?"
He looked a little troubled.
"Ah, my dear!" I said, "let my foolish words breathe and die."
I wonder sometimes to think how seldom I am in that room now. But there it
is; and somehow I seem to know it all the time I am busy elsewhere.
He made me shut my eyes again, and carried me into the study.
"Now," he said, "find your way to your own room."
I looked about me, but could see no sign of door. He took up a tall
stretcher with a canvas on it, and revealed the door, at the same time
showing a likeness of myself,--at the top of the Jacob's ladder, as he
called it, with me foot on the first step, and the other half way to the
second. The light came from the window on my left, which he had turned into
a western window, in order to get certain effects from a supposed sunset. I
was represented in a white dress, tinged with the rose of the west; and he
had managed, attributing the phenomenon to the inequalities of the glass in
the window, to suggest one rosy wing behind me, with just the shoulder-roof
of another visible.
"There!" he said. "It is not finished yet, but that is how I saw you one
evening as I was sitting here all alone in the twilight."
"But you didn't really see me like that!" I said.
"I hardly know," he answered. "I had been forgetting every thing else in
dreaming about you, and--how it was I cannot tell, but either in the body
or out of the body there I saw you, standing just so at the top of the
stair, smiling to me as much as to say, 'Have patience. My foot is on the
first step. I'm coming.' I turned at once to my easel, and before the
twilight was gone had sketched the vision. To-morrow, you must sit to me
for an hour or so; for I will do nothing else till I have finished it, and
sent it off to your father and mother."
I may just add that I hear it is considered a very fine painting. It hangs
in the great dining-room at home. I wish I were as good as he has made it
look.
The next morning, after I had given him the sitting he wanted, we set out
on our furniture hunt; when, having keen enough eyes, I caught sight of
this and of that and of twenty different things in the brokers' shops. We
did not agree about the merits of everything by which one or the other was
attracted; but an objection by the one always turned the other, a little at
least, and we bought nothing we were not agreed about. Yet that evening the
hall was piled with things sent home to line our nest. Percivale, as I have
said, had saved up some money for the purpose, and I had a hundred pounds
my father had given me before we started, which, never having had more than
ten of my own at a time, I was eager enough to spend. So we found plenty
to do for the fortnight during which time my mother had promised to say
nothing to her friends in London of our arrival. Percivale also keeping
out of the way of his friends, everybody thought we were on the Continent,
or somewhere else, and left us to ourselves. And as he had sent in his
pictures to the Academy, he was able to take a rest, which rest consisted
in working hard at all sorts of upholstery, not to mention painters' and
carpenters' work; so that we soon got the little house made into a very
warm and very pretty nest. I may mention that Percivale was particularly
pleased with a cabinet I bought for him on the sly, to stand in his study,
and hold his paints and brushes and sketches; for there were all sorts of
drawers in it, and some that it took us a good deal of trouble to find out,
though he was clever enough to suspect them from the first, when I hadn't a
thought of such a thing; and I have often fancied since that that cabinet
was just like himself, for I have been going on finding out things in
him that I had no idea were there when I married him. I had no idea that
he was a poet, for instance. I wonder to this day why he never showed me
any of his verses before we were married. He writes better poetry than
my father,--at least my father says so. Indeed, I soon came to feel very
ignorant and stupid beside him; he could tell me so many things, and
especially in art (for he had thought about all kinds of it), making me
understand that there is no end to it, any more than to the Nature which
sets it going, and that the more we see into Nature, and try to represent
it, the more ignorant and helpless we find ourselves, until at length I
began to wonder whether God might not have made the world so rich and full
just to teach his children humility. For a while I felt quite stunned.
He very much wanted me to draw; but I thought it was no use trying, and,
indeed, had no heart for it. I spoke to my father about it. He said it was
indeed of no use, if my object was to be able to think much of myself, for
no one could ever succeed in that in the long run; but if my object was to
reap the delight of the truth, it was worth while to spend hours and hours
on trying to draw a single tree-leaf, or paint the wing of a moth.