“And warm and light I felt her clasping hand
When twined in mine; she followed where I went.”
There is a touch of childishness in all honeymoon couples, a
something which suggests the Babes in the Wood, left to play together
by the Arch-Deceiver, Fate; wandering hand in hand in the morning
sunshine, gathering flowers, pleased with the mossy banks and leafy
glades, like those children of the old familiar story, before ever
hunger or cold or fear came upon them, before the shadow of night
and death stole darkly on their path. Even Godfrey Carmichael, a
sensible, highly educated young man, whose pride it was to march in
the van of progress and enlightenment, even he had that touch of
childishness which is adorable in a lover, and which lasts, oh, so
short a time; transient as the bloom on the peach, the down on the
butterfly’s wing, the morning dew on a rose.
He had loved her all his life, as it seemed to him. They had been
companions, friends, lovers, for longer than either could remember,
so gradual had been the growth of love. Yet the privilege of
belonging to each other was not the less sweet because of this old
familiarity.
“Are we really married—really husband and wife—Godfrey?” asked
Juanita, nestling to his side as they stood together in the wide
verandah where they breakfasted on these July mornings among climbing
roses and clematis. “Husband and wife—such prosaic words. I heard you
speak of me to the Vicar yesterday as ‘my wife.’ It gave me quite a
shock.”
“Were you sorry to think it was true?”
“Sorry—no! But ‘wife.’ The word has such a matter-of-fact sound. It
means a person who writes cheques for the house accounts, revises the
bill of fare, and takes all the blame when the servants do wrong.”
“Shall I call you my idol, then, my goddess—the enchantress whose
magic wand wafts gladness and sunshine over my existence?”
“No, call me wife. It is a good word, after all, Godfrey—a good
serviceable word, a word that will stand wear and tear. It means for
ever.”
They breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in their bower of roses; they wandered
about the Chase or sat in the garden all day long. They led an idle
desultory life like little children, and wondered that evening
came so soon, and stayed up late into the summer night, steeping
themselves in the starshine and silence which seemed new to them in
their mutual delight.
There was a lovely view from that broad terrace, with its Italian
balustrade and statues, its triple flight of marble steps descending
to an Italian garden, which had been laid out in the Augustan age
of Pope and Addison, when the distinctive feature of a great man’s
garden was stateliness. Here was the lovers’ favourite loitering
place when the night grew late, Juanita looking like Juliet in her
loose white silk tea-gown, with its Venetian amplitude of sleeve and
its mediæval gold embroidery. The fashionable dressmaker who made
that gown had known how to adapt her art to Miss Dalbrook’s beauty.
The long straight folds accentuated every line of the finely moulded
figure, fuller than the average girlish figure, suggestive of Juno
rather than Psyche. She was two inches taller than the average girl,
and looked almost as tall as her lover as she stood beside him in the
moonlight, gazing dreamily at the landscape.
This hushed and solemn hour on the verge of midnight was their
favourite time. Then only were they really alone, secure in the
knowledge that all the household was sleeping, and that they had
their world verily to themselves, and might be as foolish as they
liked. Once, at sight of a shooting star, Juanita flung herself upon
her lover’s breast and sobbed aloud. It was some minutes before he
could soothe her.
“My love, my love, what does it mean?” he asked, perplexed by her
agitation.
“I saw the star, and I prayed that we might never be parted; and
then it flashed upon me that we _might_, and I could not bear the
thought,” she sobbed, clinging to him like a frightened child.
“My dear one, what should part us, except death?”
“Ah, Godfrey, death is everywhere. How could a good God make His
creatures so fond of each other and yet part them so cruelly as He
does sometimes?”
“Only to unite them again in another world, Nita. I feel as if our
two lives must go on in an endless chain, circling among those stars
yonder, which could not have been made to be for ever unpeopled.
There are happy lovers there at this instant, I am convinced—lovers
who have lived before us here, and have been translated to a higher
life yonder; lovers who have felt the pangs of parting, the ecstasy
of reunion.”
He glanced vaguely towards that starry heaven, while he fondly
smoothed the dark hair upon Juanita’s brow. It was not easy to win
her back to cheerfulness. That vision of possible grief had too
completely possessed her. Godfrey was fain to be serious, finding her
spirits so shaken; so they talked together gravely of that unknown
hereafter which philosophy or religion may map out with mathematical
distinctness, but which remains to the individual soul for ever
mysterious and awful.
Her husband found it wiser to talk of solemn things, finding her so
sad, and she took comfort from that serious conversation.
“Let us lead good lives, dear, and hope for the best in other
worlds,” he said. “There is sound sense in the Buddhist theory, that
we are the makers of our own spiritual destiny, and that a man may be
in advance of his fellow men, even in getting to Heaven.”
Those grave thoughts had little place in Juanita’s mind next day,
which was the first day the lovers devoted to practical things.
They started directly after breakfast for a _tête-à-tête_ drive to
Milbrook Priory, where certain alterations and improvements were
contemplated in the rooms which were to be Juanita’s. Godfrey’s
widowed mother, Lady Jane Carmichael, had transferred herself and
her belongings to a villa at Swanage, where she was devoting herself
to the creation of a garden, which was, on a small scale, to repeat
the beauties of her flat old-fashioned flower garden at the Priory.
It irked her somewhat to think how long the hedges of yew and holly
would take to grow; but there was a certain pleasure in creation. She
was a mild, loving creature, with an aristocratic profile, silvery
grey hair, and a small fragile figure; a woman who looked a patrician
to her finger tips, and whom everybody imposed upon. Her blue blood
had not endowed her with the power to rule. She adored her son, was
very fond of Juanita, and resigned her place in her old home without
a sigh.
“The Priory was a great deal too big for me,” she told her particular
friends. “I used to feel very dreary there when Godfrey was at
Oxford, and afterwards, for of course he was often away. It was only
in the shooting season that the house looked cheerful. I hope they
will soon have a family, and then that will enliven the place a
little.”
Milbrook Village and Milbrook Priory lay twelve miles nearer
Dorchester than Cheriton Chase. Juanita enjoyed the long drive in the
fresh morning air through a region of marsh and watery meadow, where
the cattle gave charm and variety to a landscape which would have
been barren and monotonous without them, a place of winding streams
on which the summer sunlight was shining.
The Priory was by no means so fine a place as Cheriton, but it was
old, and not without interest, and Lady Jane was justified in the
assertion that it was too large for her. It would be too small
perhaps for Sir Godfrey and his wife in the days to come, when in the
natural course of events James Dalbrook would be at rest after his
life labour, and Cheriton would belong to Juanita.
“No doubt they will like Cheriton better than the Priory when we are
all dead and gone,” said Lady Jane, with her plaintive air. “I only
hope they will have a family. Big houses are so dismal without little
people.”
This idea of a family was almost a craze with Lady Jane Carmichael.
She had idolized her only son, had been miserable at every parting,
and it had seemed a hard thing to her that there was not more of him,
as she had herself expressed it.
“Godfrey has been the dearest boy. I only wish I had six of him,”
she would say piteously; and now her mind projected itself into the
future, and she pictured a bevy of grandchildren—numerous as a covey
of partridges in the upland fields of the home farm at Cheriton—and
fancied herself lavishing her hoarded treasures of love upon them.
She had grandchildren already, and to spare, the offspring of her two
daughters, but these did not bear the honoured name of Carmichael,
and, though they were very dear to her maternal heart, they were not
what Godfrey’s children would be to her.
She would be gone, she told herself, before they would be old enough
to forsake her. She would be gone before those young birds grew too
strong upon the wing. A blessed spell of golden years lay before her;
a nursery, and then a schoolroom; and then, perhaps, before the last
dim closing scene, a bridal, a granddaughter clinging to her in the
sweet sadness of leave-taking, a fair young face crowned with orange
flowers pressed against her own in the bride’s happy kiss—and then
she would say _Nunc dimittis_, and feel that her cup of gladness had
been filled to the brim.
The lovers’ talk was all of that shadowy future, as the pair of
greys bowled gaily along the level road. The horses were Godfrey’s
favourite pair, and belonged to a team of chestnuts and greys which
had won him some distinction last season in Hyde Park, when the
coaches met at the corner by the Magazine, and when the handsome Miss
Dalbrook, Lord Cheriton’s heiress, was the cynosure of many eyes.
The thoughts of Sir Godfrey and his wife were far from Hyde Park and
the Four-in-Hand Club this morning. Their minds were filled with
simple rural anticipations, and had almost a patriarchal turn, as of
an Arcadian pair whose wealth was all in flocks and herds, and green
pastures like these by which they were driving.
The Priory stood on low ground between Wareham and Wimbourne,
sheltered from the north by a bold ridge of heath, screened on the
east by a little wood of oaks and chestnuts, Spanish chestnuts, with
graceful drooping branches, whose glossy leaves contrasted with the
closer foliage of the rugged old oaks. The house was built of Purbeck
stone, and its bluish grey was touched with shades of gold and
silvery green where the lichens and mosses crept over it, while one
long southern wall was clothed with trumpet-ash and magnolia, myrtle
and rose, as with a closely interwoven curtain of greenery, from
which the small latticed windows flashed back the sunshine.
Nothing at the Priory was so stately as its counterpart at Cheriton.
There were marble balustrades and rural gods there on the terrace;
here there was only a broad gravel walk along the southern front,
with a little old shabby stone temple at each end. At Cheriton three
flights of marble steps led from the terrace to the Italian garden,
and then again three more flights led to a garden on a lower level,
and so by studied gradations to the bottom of the slope on which the
mansion was built. Here house and garden were on the same level, and
those gardens which Lady Jane had so cherished were distinguished
only by an elegant simplicity. Between the garden and a park of less
than fifty acres there was only a sunk fence, and the sole glory of
that modest domain lay in a herd of choice Channel Island cows, which
had been Lady Jane’s pride. She had resigned them to Juanita without
a sigh, although each particular beast had been to her as a friend.
“My dear, what could I do with cows in a villa?” she said, when
Juanita suggested that she should at least keep her favourites,
Beauty, and Maydew, and Coquette. “Of course, as you say, I could
rent a couple of paddocks; but I should not like to see the herd
divided. Besides, you will want them all by-and-by, when you have a
family.”
Nita stepped lightly across the threshold of her future home. The
old grey porch was embedded in roses and trailing passion-flowers.
Everything had a shabby, old-world look compared with Cheriton. Here
there had been no improvement for over a century; all things had been
quiescent as in the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty.
“What a dear old house it is, Godfrey, and how everything in it
speaks to me of your ancestors—your own ancestors—not other people’s!
That makes all the difference. At Cheriton I feel always as if I were
surrounded by malevolent ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they
are there. Those poor Strangways, how they must hate me.”
“If there are any living Strangways knocking about the world
houseless, or at any rate landless, I don’t suppose they feel over
kindly disposed to you,” said Godfrey; “but the ghosts have done with
human habitations. It can matter very little to them who lives in the
rooms where they were once happy or miserable, as the case may be.
Has your father ever heard anything of the old family?”
“Never. He says there are no Strangways left on this hemisphere.
There may be a remnant of the race in Australia,” he says, “for he
heard of a cousin of Reginald Strangway’s who went out to Brisbane
years ago to work with a sheep farmer on the Darling Downs. There
is no one else of the old race and the old name that he can tell
me about. I take a morbid interest in the subject, you know. If I
were to meet a very evil-looking tramp in the woods and he were to
threaten me, I should suspect him of being a Strangway. They all
_must_ hate us.”
“With a very unreasonable hatred, then, Nita, for it was no fault
of your father’s that the family went to the bad. I have heard my
father talk of the Strangways many a time over his wine. They had
been a reckless, improvident race for ever so many generations, men
who lived only for the pleasure of the hour, whose motto was ‘_Carpe
diem_’ in the worst sense of the words. There was a Strangway who
was the fashion for a short time during the Regency, wore a hat of
his own invention, and got himself entangled with a popular actress,
who sued him for breach of promise. _He_ dipped the property.
There was a racing Strangway who kept a stable at Newmarket and
married—well—never mind how. _He_ dipped the property. There was
Georgiana Strangway, an heiress and a famous beauty, in the Sailor
King’s reign. Two of the Royal Dukes wanted to marry her; but she
ran away with a bandmaster in the Blues. She used to ride in Hyde
Park at nine o’clock every morning in a green cloth spencer trimmed
with sable, at a time when very few women rode in London. She saw the
bandmaster, fell over head and ears in love with him, and bolted.
They were married at Gretna. He spent as much of her fortune as he
could get at, and was reported to have thrashed her before they
parted. She set up a boarding-house at Ostend, gambled, drank cheap
brandy, and died at five-and-forty.”
“What a dreadful ghost _she_ would be to meet,” said Nita, with a
shudder.
“From first to last they have been a bad lot,” concluded Sir Godfrey,
“and the Isle of Purbeck was a prodigious gainer when your father
became master of Cheriton Chase and Baron Cheriton of Cheriton.”
“_That_ is what they must feel worst of all,” said Nita, speaking of
the dead and the living as if they were one group of banished shades.
“It must be hard for them to think that a stranger takes his title
from the land that was once theirs, from the house in which they were
born. Poor ill-behaved things, I can’t help being sorry for them.”
“My fanciful Nita, they do not deserve your pity. They make their own
lives, love. They have only suffered the result of their own Karma.”
“I only hope they will be better off in their next incarnations,
and that they won’t get to that dreadful eighth world which leads
nowhere,” said Juanita.
She made this light allusion to a creed which she and her lover had
discussed seriously many a time in their graver moods. They had read
Mr. Sinnett’s books together, and had given themselves up in somewise
to the fascinating theories of Esoteric Buddhism, and had been
impressed by the curious parallel between that semi-fabulous Reformer
of the East and the Teacher and Redeemer in whom they both believed.
They went about the house together, Nita admiring everything, as if
she were seeing those old rooms for the first time. The alterations
to be made were of the smallest. Nita would allow scarcely any
change.
“Whatever was nice enough for Lady Jane must be good enough for
me,” she said, decisively, when Godfrey proposed improvements which
would have changed the character of his mother’s morning room, a
conservatory, and a large bay window opposite the fireplace, for
instance.
“But it is such a shabby old hole, compared with your room at
Cheriton.”
“It is a dear old hole, sir, and I won’t have it altered in
the smallest detail. I adore those deep-set windows and wide
window-seats; and this apple-blossom chintz is simply delicious.
Faded, sir? What of that? One can’t buy such patterns nowadays, for
love or money. And that old Chinese screen must have belonged to a
mandarin of the highest rank. My only feeling will be that I am a
wretch in appropriating dear Lady Jane’s surroundings. This room
fitted her like a glove.”
“She is charmed to surrender it to you, love; and your forbearance in
the matter of improvement will delight her.”
“Your improvements would have been destruction. A conservatory
opening out of that window would suggest a city man’s drawing-room
at Tulse Hill. I have seen such in my childhood, when mother used to
visit odd people on the Surrey side of the river.”
“Loveliest insolence!”
“Oh, I am obliged to cultivate insolence. It is a parvenu’s only
defensive weapon. We new-made people always give ourselves more airs
than you who were born in the purple.”
She roamed from room to room, expatiating upon everything with a
childlike pleasure, delighted at the idea of this her new kingdom,
over which she was to reign with undivided sovereignty. Cheriton was
ever so much grander; but at Cheriton she had only been the daughter
of the house; indulged in every fancy, yet in somewise in a state of
subjection. Here she was to be sole mistress, with Godfrey for her
obedient slave.
“And now show me your rooms, sir,” she exclaimed, with pretty
authority. “I may wish to make some improvements _there_.”
“You shall work your will with them, dearest, as you have done with
their master.”
He led her to his study and general den, a fine old room looking into
the stable-yard, capacious, but gloomy.
“This is dreadful,” she cried, “no view, and ever so far from _me_!
You must have the room next the morning-room, so that we can run in
to each other, and talk at any moment.”
“That is one of the best bedrooms.”
“What of that! We can do without superfluous bedrooms; but I cannot
do without you. This room of yours will make a visitor’s bedroom.
If he or she doesn’t like it, he or she can go away, and leave us
to ourselves, which _we_ shall like ever so much better, shan’t
we?” she asked, caressingly, as if life were going to be one long
honeymoon.
Of course he assented, kissed the red frank lips, and assured her
that for him bliss meant a perpetual _tête-à-tête_. Yes, his study
should be next her boudoir; so that even in his busiest hours he
should be able to turn to her for gladness—refreshing himself with
her smiles after a troublesome interview with his bailiff—taking
counsel with her about every change in his stable, sharing her
interest in every new book.
“I will give orders about the change at once,” he said, “so that
everything may be ready for us when you are tired of Cheriton.”
They lunched gaily in the garden. Nita hated eating indoors when the
weather was good enough for an _al fresco_ meal. They lunched under a
Spanish chestnut that made a tent of foliage on the lawn in front of
the house. They lingered over the meal, full of talk, finding a new
world of conversation suggested by their surroundings; and then the
greys were brought round to the hall door, and they started on the
return journey.
It began to rain before they reached Cheriton, and the afternoon
clouded over with a look of premature winter. No saunterings on the
terrace this evening; no midnight meanderings among the cypresses and
yews, the gleaming statues and dense green walls; as if they had been
Romeo and Juliet, wedded and happy, in the garden at Verona. For the
first time since the beginning of their honeymoon they were obliged
to stay indoors.
“It is positively chilly,” exclaimed Juanita, as her maid carried off
her damp mantle.
“My dearest love, I’m afraid you’ve caught cold,” said Godfrey, with
apprehension.
“Do I ever catch cold, Godfrey?” Nita cried, scornfully; and indeed
her splendid physique seemed to negative the idea as she stood before
him, tall and buoyant, with the carnation of health upon cheek and
lips, her eyes sparkling, her head erect.
“Well, no, my Juno, I believe you are as free from all such weakness
as human nature can be; but I shall order fires all the same, and I
implore you to put on a warm gown.”
“I will,” she answered, gaily. “You shall see me in my copper plush.”
“Thanks, love. That is a vision to live for.”
“Shall we have tea in my dressing-room—or in yours?”
“In mine. I think we have taken tea in almost every other room in the
house, as well as in every corner of the garden.”
It had been one of her girlish caprices to devise new places for
their afternoon tea. Whether it had been as keen a delight to the
footmen to carry Japanese tables and bamboo chairs from pillar to
post was open to question; but Juanita loved to colonize, as she
called it.
“I feel that wherever we establish our teapot we invest the spot with
the sanctity of home,” she said.
Fires were ordered, and tea in Sir Godfrey’s dressing-room.
It was Lord Dalbrook’s dressing-room actually, and altogether a
sacred chamber. It had been one of the best bedrooms in the days of
the Strangways; but his Lordship liked space, and had chosen this
room for his den—a fine old room, with full length portraits of the
Sir Joshua period let into the panelling. The furniture was of the
plainest, and very different from the luxurious appointments of the
other rooms, for these very chairs and tables, and yonder substantial
mahogany desk, had done duty in James Dalbrook’s chambers in the
Temple thirty years before. So had the heavy-looking clock on the
chimney-piece, surmounted by a bronze Saturn leaning upon his scythe.
So had the brass candlesticks, and the ink-stained red morocco
blotter on the desk. He had fallen asleep in that capacious arm-chair
many a time in the small hours, after struggling with the intricacies
of a railway bill or poring over a volume of precedents.
The thick Persian carpet, the velvet window-curtains, panelled walls,
and fine old fireplace gave a look of subdued splendour to the room,
in spite of the dark and heavy furniture. There was a large vase of
roses on the desk, where Lord Cheriton never tolerated a flower; and
there were more roses on the chimney-piece; and some smart bamboo
chairs, many coloured, like Joseph’s coat, had been brought from
Nita’s morning room—and so, with logs blazing on the floriated iron
dogs, and a scarlet tea-table set out with blue and gold china, and
a Moorish copper kettle swinging over a lamp, the room had as gay an
aspect as any one could desire.
Juanita had made her toilet by the time the tea-table was ready,
and came in from her room next door, a radiant figure in a gleaming
copper-coloured gown, flowing loose from throat to foot, and with
no adornment except a broad collar and cuffs of old Venice point.
Her brilliant complexion and southern eyes and ebon hair triumphed
over the vivid hue of the gown, and it was at her Sir Godfrey
looked as she came beaming towards him, and not at the dressmaker’s
master-piece.
“How do you like it?” she asked, with childlike pleasure in her fine
raiment. “I ought to have kept it till October, but I couldn’t resist
putting it on, just to see what you think of it. I hope you won’t say
it’s gaudy.”
“My dearest, you might be clad in a russet cloud for anything I
should know to the contrary. A quarter of a century hence, when you
are beginning to fancy yourself _passée_, we will talk about gowns.
It will be of some consequence then how you dress. It can be none
now.”
“That is just a man’s ignorance, Godfrey,” she said, shaking her
finger at him, as she seated herself in one of the bamboo chairs, a
dazzling figure in the light of the blazing logs, which danced about
her eyes and hair and copper-coloured gown in a bewildering manner.
“You think me handsome, I suppose?”
“Eminently so.”
“And you think I should be just as handsome if I dressed anyhow—in a
badly-fitting Tussore, for instance, made last year and cleaned this
year, and with a hat of my own trimming, eh, Godfrey?”
“Every bit as handsome.”
“That shows what an ignoramus a University education can leave a man.
My dearest boy, half my good looks depend upon my dressmaker. Not
for worlds would I have you see me a dowdy, if only for a quarter of
an hour. The disillusion might last a lifetime. I dress to please
you, remember, sir. It was of you I thought when I was choosing my
trousseau. I want to be lovely in your eyes always, always, always.”
“You need make no effort to attain your wish. You have put so strong
a spell upon my eyes that with me at least you are independent of the
dressmaker’s art.”
“Again I say you don’t know what you are talking about. But frankly
now, do you think this gown too gaudy?”
“That coppery background to my Murillo Madonna. No, love; the colour
suits you to perfection.”
She poured out the tea, and then sank back in her comfortable chair,
in a reverie, languid after her explorations at the Priory, full of a
dreamlike happiness as she basked in the glow of the fire, welcome as
a novel indulgence at this time of the year.
“There is nothing more delightful than a fire in July,” she said.
Her eyes wandered about the room idly.
“Do you call them handsome?” she asked presently.
Godfrey looked puzzled. Was she still harping on the dress question,
or was she challenging his admiration for those glorious eyes which
he had been watching in their rovings for a lazy five minutes.
“I mean the Strangways. That is their famous beauty—the girl in the
scanty white satin petticoat, with the goat. Imagine any one walking
about a wood, with a goat, in white satin. What queer ideas portrait
painters must have had in those days. She is very lovely though,
isn’t she?”
“She is not my ideal. I don’t admire that narrow Cupid’s-bow mouth,
the lips pinched up as if they were pronouncing ‘prunes and prism.’
The eyes are large and handsome, but too round; the complexion is
wax-dollish. No, she is not _my_ ideal.”
“I should have been miserable if you had admired her.”
“There is a face in the hall which I like ever so much better, and
yet I doubt if it is a good face.”
“Which is that?”
“The face of the girl in that group of John Strangway’s three
children.”
“That girl with the towsled hair and bright blue eyes. Yes, she must
have been handsome—but she looks—I hope you won’t be shocked, but I
really can’t help saying it—that girl looks a devil.”
“Poor soul! Her temper did not do much good for her. I believe she
came to a melancholy end.”
“How was that?”
“She eloped from a school in Switzerland with an officer in a line
regiment—a love match; but she went wrong a few years afterwards,
left her husband, and died in poverty at Boulogne, I believe.”
“Another ghost!” exclaimed Juanita, dolefully. “Poor, lost soul, she
_must_ walk. I can’t help feeling sorry for her—married to a man
who was unkind to her, perhaps, and whom she discovered unworthy of
her love. And then years afterwards meeting some one worthier and
better, whom she loved passionately. That is dreadful! Oh, Godfrey!
if I had been married before I saw you—and we had met—and you had
cared for me—God knows what kind of woman I should have been. Perhaps
I should have been one of those poor souls who have a history, the
women mother and her friends stare at and whisper about in the Park.
Why are people so keenly interested in them, I wonder? Why can’t they
leave them alone?”
“It would be charity to do so.”
“No one is charitable—in London.”
“Do you think people are more indulgent in the country?”
“I suppose not. I’m afraid English people keep all their charity for
the Continent. I shall never look at the girl in that group without
thinking of her sad story. She looks hardly fifteen in the picture.
Poor thing! She did not know what was coming.”
They loitered over their tea-table, making the most of their
happiness. The sweetness of their dual life had not begun to pall. It
was still new and wonderful to be together thus, unrestrained by any
other presence.
In the midst of their gay talk Juanita’s eyes wandered to the bronze
Time upon the chimney-piece, and the familiar figure suggested gloomy
ideas.
“Oh, Godfrey! look at that grim old man with his scythe, mowing down
our happy moments so fast that we can hardly taste their sweetness
before they speed away. To think that our lives are hurrying past
us like a rapid river, and that we shall be like him” (pointing
distastefully to the type of old age—the wrinkled brow and flowing
beard) “before we know that we have lived.”
“It is a pity, sweet, that life should be so short.”
Her glance wandered to the dark oak panel above the clock, and she
started up from her low chair with a faint scream, stood on tiptoe
before the fireplace, snatched half a dozen scraggy peacock’s
feathers from the panel, and threw them at her husband’s feet.
“Look at those,” she exclaimed, pointing to them as they lay there.
“Peacock’s feathers! What have they done that you should use them so?”
“Oh, Godfrey, don’t you know?” she asked, earnestly.
“Don’t I know what?”
“That peacock’s feathers bring ill luck. It is fatal to take them
into a house. They are an evil omen. And father _will_ pick them up
when he is strolling about the lawn, and _will_ bring them indoors;
though I am always scolding him for his obstinate folly, and always
throwing the horrid things away.”
“And this kind of thing has been going on for some years, I suppose?”
asked Godfrey, smiling at her intensity.
“Ever since I can remember.”
“And have the peacock’s feathers brought you misfortune?”
She looked at him gravely for a few moments, and then burst into a
joyous laugh.
“No, no, no, no,” she said, “Fate has been over kind to me. I have
never known sorrow. Fate has given me _you_. I am the happiest woman
in the world—for there can’t be another _you_, and you are mine. It
is like owning the Kohinoor diamond; one knows that one stands alone.
Still, all the same, peacock’s feathers are unlucky, and I will not
suffer them in your room.”
She picked up the offending feathers, twisted them into a ball,
and flung them at the back of the deep old chimney, behind the
smouldering logs; and then she produced a chess board, and she and
Godfrey began a game with the board on their knees, and played for an
hour by firelight.