“SHE WAS MORE FAIR THAN WORDS CAN SAY.”
If Easter had been a time of happiness for Vansittart and Eve, bringing
with it the revelation of mutual love, Whitsuntide was no less happy;
happier, perhaps, in its serene security, and in the familiarity of a
love which seemed to have lasted for a long time.
“Only seven weeks!” exclaimed Eve, in one of their wanderings among
the many cattle-tracks on Bexley Hill, no sound of life or movement in
all the world around them save the hum of insects and the chime of cow
bells. “To think that we have been engaged only seven weeks! It seems a
lifetime.”
“Because you are so weary of me?” asked Vansittart, with a lover’s
fatuous smile.
“No; because our love is so colossal. How can it have grown so
tremendous in so short a time?”
“Romeo and Juliet’s love grew in a single night.”
“Ah, that was in Italy--and for stage effect. I don’t think much of a
passion that springs up in a night, like one of those great red fungi
which one sees in this wood on an October morning. I should like our
love to be as strong and as deep-rooted as that old oak over there,
with its rugged grey roots cleaving the ground.”
“Why, so it is; or it will be by the time we celebrate our golden
wedding.”
“Our golden wedding! Yes, if we go on living we must be old and grey
some day. It seems hard, doesn’t it? How happy those Greek gods and
goddesses were, to be for ever young! It seems hard that we must change
from what we are now. I cannot think of myself as an old woman, in a
black silk gown and a cap. A cap!” she interjected, with ineffable
disgust, and an involuntary movement of her ungloved hand to the coils
of bright hair which were shining uncovered in the sun. “And you
with grey hair and wrinkles! Wrinkles in _your_ face! That is what
your favourite Spencer calls ‘Unthinkable.’ Stay”--looking at him
searchingly in the merciless summer light. “Why, I declare there is
just one wrinkle already. Just one perpendicular wrinkle! That means
care, does it not?”
“What care can I have when I have you, except the fear of losing you?”
“Ah, you can have no such fear. I think, like Juliet, ‘I should have
had more cunning to be strange.’ I let you see too soon that I adored
you. I made myself too cheap.”
“No more than the stars are cheap. We may all see them and worship
them.”
“But that deep perpendicular line, Jack. It must mean something. I have
been reading Darwin on Expression, remember.”
“Spencer--Darwin. You are getting far too learned. I liked you better
in your ignorance.”
“How ignorant I was”--with a long-drawn sigh--“till you began to
educate me! Poor dear Mütterchen never taught us anything but the
multiplication table and a little French grammar. We used to devour
Scott, and Dickens, and Bulwer, and Thackeray. The books on our shelves
will tell you how they have been read. They have been done to rags
with reading. They are dropping to pieces like over-boiled fowls.
And we know our Shakespeare--we have learnt him by heart. We used
to make our winter nights merry acting Shakesperean scenes to Nancy
and the parlour-maid. They were our only audience. But, except those
dear novelists and Shakespeare, we read nothing. History was a blank;
philosophy a word without meaning. You introduced me to the world of
learned authors.”
“Was I wise? Was it not something like Satan’s introduction of Eve to
the apple?”
“Wise or foolish, you gave me Darwin. And now I want to know what kind
of trouble it was that made that line upon your forehead. Some foolish
love affair, perhaps. You were in love--ever so much deeper in love
than you are with me.”
“No, my dearest. All my earlier loves were lighter than vanity--no more
than Romeo’s boyish passion for Rosaline.”
“What other care, then? You, who are so rich, can have no money cares.”
“Can I not? Imprimis, I am not rich; and then what income I have is
derived chiefly from agricultural land cut up into smallish farms, with
homesteads, and barns, and cowhouses, that seem always ready to tumble
about the tenant’s ears, unless I spend half a year’s rent in repairs.”
“Dear, picturesque old homesteads, I’ve no doubt.”
“Eminently picturesque, but very troublesome to own.”
“And did repairs--the cost of roofs and drainpipes--write that deep
line on your brow?”
“Perhaps. Or it may be only a habit of frowning, and of trying to
emulate the eagles in looking at the sun.”
“Ah, you have been a wanderer in sunny lands--in Italy! And now we had
better go and look for the girls.”
They roamed over Bexley Hill or Blackdown during that happy
Whitsuntide, favoured with weather that made these Sussex hills a
paradise. It was the season of hawthorn blossom, and an undulating
line of white may bushes came dancing down the hill like a bridal
procession. It was the season of bluebells; and all the woodland
hollows trembled with azure bloom, luminous in sunlight, darkly purple
in shadow; the season of blossoming trees in cottage gardens, of the
laburnum’s golden rain, the acacia’s perfumed whiteness, the tossing
balls of the guelder rose, the mauve blossoms of wistaria glorifying
the humblest walls, the small white woodbine scenting the warm air.
It was a season that seemed especially invented for youth and love;
for the young foals sporting in the meadow; for the young lambs on the
grassy hills; and for Eve and Vansittart.
They almost lived out of doors in this delicious weather. The four
sisters were always ready to bear them company, and were always
discreet enough to leave them alone for the greater part of every
rambling expedition. Mr. Tivett had reappeared on the scene. He had
been particularly useful in London, where he was full of information
about the very best places for buying everything, from a diamond
bracelet to a tooth-brush, and had insisted upon taking Eve and Lady
Hartley to some of his favourite shops, and upon having a voice in
a great many of their purchases. He took as much interest in Eve’s
trousseau as if he had been her maiden aunt.
The wedding was to be the simplest ceremonial possible. Neither
Vansittart nor Eve wished to parade their bliss before a light-minded
multitude. The Homestead was not a house in which to entertain a large
assembly; and Colonel Marchant was not a man to make a fuss about
anything in life except his own comfort. He ordered a frock-coat and a
new hat for the occasion; and the faithful Nancy, cook, housekeeper,
and general manager, toiled for a week of industrious days in order
that the house might be in faultless order, and the light collation
worthy of the chosen few who were invited to the wedding. There were to
be no hired waiters, no stereotyped banquet from the confectioner’s,
only tea and coffee, champagne of a famous brand--upon this the
Colonel insisted--and such cakes and biscuits and delicate sandwiches
as Nancy knew well how to prepare. For bridesmaids, Eve had her four
sisters, all in white frocks, and carrying big bunches of Maréchal Niel
roses. Hetty and Peggy had been in ecstatic expectation of the day
for a month, and full of speculation as to what manner of present the
bridegroom would give them. They squabbled about this question almost
every night at bedtime, under the sloping roof of the attic which they
occupied together, close to the overhanging thatch where there was such
a humming and buzzing of summer insects in the June mornings.
“He is bound to give us a present,” said Peggy. “It’s etiquette”--
accentuating the first syllable.
“You should say eti_quette_,” reproved Hetty. “Lady Hartley lays a
stress upon the kett.”
“Don’t bother about pronounciation,” muttered Peggy; “one can never get
on with one’s talk when you’re so fine-ladyfied.”
“Pronounciation!” cried Hetty. “You pick up your language from Susan.
No wonder Sophy is horrified at you.”
“Sophy is too fine for anything. Mr. Vansittart said so yesterday
when she gave herself airs at the picnic, because there were no table
napkins. I wonder what the present will be! He’s so rich, he’s sure to
give us something pretty. Suppose he gives us watches?”
A watch was the dream of Peggy’s life. She thought the difference
between no watch and watch was the difference between a humdrum
existence and a life of exquisite bliss.
“Suppose he doesn’t,” exclaimed her sister, contemptuously. “Did you
ever hear of a bridegroom giving watches? Of course, the bridesmaids
are supposed to have watches. Their fathers give them watches directly
they are in their teens, unless they are hard-up, like our father. I
shouldn’t wonder if he were to give us diamond arrow brooches.”
Hetty had seen a diamond arrow in Lady Hartley’s bonnet-strings, and
had conceived a passion for that ornament.
“What do you bet that it will be diamond arrows?”
“There’s no use in betting. If you lose, one never gets paid.”
“I don’t often have any money,” Peggy replied naively; and then came
a knocking at the lath and plaster partition, and Sophy’s sharp voice
remonstrating--
“Are you children never going to leave off chattering? You are worse
than the swallows in the morning.”
* * * * *
There was one blissfullest of days for Peggy during the week before the
wedding, a balmy June morning on which Vansittart came in a dog-cart
to take Eve and her youngest sister to Haslemere station, whence the
train carried them through a smiling land, perfumed with bean blossoms
and those fragrant spices which pine woods exhale under the summer sun,
to Liss, where another dog-cart was waiting for them, and whence they
drove past copse and common to Merewood, Vansittart’s very own house,
to which he brought his future wife on a visit of inspection--“to see
if she would like any alterations,” he said.
“As if any one could want to alter such a lovely house,” exclaimed
Peggy, who was allowed to run about and pry into every hole and corner,
and open all the wardrobes and drawers, except in Mrs. Vansittart’s
rooms, where everything was looked at with almost religious reverence.
There were boxes packed already in this lady’s dressing-room, the note
of departure already sounded.
“My mother talks of a house at Brighton,” said Vansittart. “She has a
good many friends settled there, and the winter climate suits her.”
“I am sorry she should feel constrained to go away,” said Eve, looking
ruefully round the spacious morning-room, with its three French windows
opening on to a wide balcony, a room which could have swallowed up half
the Homestead. “It seems as if I were turning her out. And I am sure
there would have been ample room for both of us in this big house.”
“So I told her, love; but English mothers don’t take kindly to the idea
of a joint ménage. She will come to us often as our guest, I have no
doubt, but she insists upon giving up possession to you and me.”
They loitered in all the lower rooms, drawing-room and anteroom,
library, billiard-room--an unpretentious country house, spread over a
good deal of ground, roomy, airy, beautifully lighted, but boasting
no art collections, no treasures of old books, unpretentiously
furnished after the fashion of a century ago, and with only such modern
additions as comfort required. The drawing-room would have appeared
shabby to eyes fresh from London drawing-rooms; but the colouring was
harmonious, and the room was made beautiful by the flowers on tables,
chimney-piece, and cabinets.
“I dare say you would like to refurnish this room by-and-by,” said
Vansittart.
“Not for worlds. I would not change one detail that can remind you
of your childhood. I remember the drawing-room in Yorkshire, and how
dearly I loved the sofas and easy-chairs--the glass cabinets of old
blue china. It would grieve me to go back and see strange furniture in
that dear old room; and I love to think that your eyes looked at these
things when they were only on a level with that table”--pointing to a
low table with a great bowl of roses upon it.
“Not my eyes alone, but my father’s and grandfather’s eyes have looked
from yonder low level. I am glad you don’t mind the shabby furniture. I
confess to a weakness for the old sticks.”
“Shabby furniture!” repeated Eve. “One would think you were going
to marry a princess. Why, this house is a palace compared with the
Homestead; and yet I have contrived to be happy at the Homestead.”
“Because Heaven has given you one of its choicest gifts--a happy
disposition,” said Vansittart. “It is that sunny temperament which
irradiates your beauty. It is not that tip-tilted little nose, so
slender in the bridge, so ethereal in its upward curve, nor yet those
violet eyes, which make you so lovely. It is the happy soul for ever
singing to itself, like the lark up yonder in the fathomless blue.”
“I shouldn’t think you cared for me, if you didn’t talk nonsense
sometimes,” answered Eve, gaily; “but it _is_ a privilege to be happy,
isn’t it? Sophy and I have had the same troubles to bear, but they have
hurt her ever so much more than they hurt me. Jenny and I sometimes
call her Mrs. Gummidge. I think it is because she has never left off
struggling to be smart, never left off thinking that we ought to be on
the same level as the county families; while Jenny and I gave up the
battle at once, and confessed to each other frankly that we were poor
and shabby, and the daughters of a scampish father. And so we have
managed to be happy. I love to think that I am like Beatrice, and that
I was born under a star that danced.”
“You were born under a star that brought me good luck.”
They were in the flower-garden, a delightful old garden of velvet turf
and herbaceous borders, a garden brimful of roses, standard roses and
climbing roses and dwarf roses, arches of roses that made the blue
sky beyond look bluer, alleys shaded with roses, like the vine-clad
berceaux of Italy. It was a garden shut in by walls of ilex and yew,
and so secluded as to make an _al fresco_ saloon for summer habitation;
a saloon in which one could breakfast or dine, without fear of being
espied by any one approaching the hall door.
Eve was enchanted with her new home. She poured out her confidence
to him who was so soon to be her husband, with the right to know her
inmost thoughts, her every impulse or fancy. It was not often that she
talked of herself; but to-day she was full of personal reminiscences,
and Vansittart encouraged her innocent egotism.
“I don’t think you realize that you are playing the part of King
Cophetua, and marrying a beggar-maiden,” she said. “I don’t think you
can have any idea what a struggle my life has been since I was twelve
years old--how that dear Nancy and I have had to scheme and manage,
in order to feed four hungry girls. You remember how Hetty and Peggy
giggled when you talked about dinner. We scarcely ever had a meal
which you and Lady Hartley would call dinner. We were vegetarians half
our time--we abstained when it wasn’t Lent. We had our Ember days all
the year round. Oh, pray don’t look so horrified. We had the kind
of food we liked. Vegetable soups, and savoury messes, salads and
cheese, cakes and buns, bread and jam. We had meals that we all enjoyed
tremendously--only we could not have asked a dropper-in to stay and
lunch or dine--could we? So it was lucky people took so little notice
of us.”
“My darling, you were the pearls, and your neighbours were the swine.”
“And then our dress. How could we be neat tailor-made girls when a
ten-pound note once in a way was all we could extort from father for
the whole flock? Ten pounds! Lady Hartley would pay as much for a
bonnet as would buy gowns for all five of us. And then you bring me
to this delicious old house--so spacious, so dignified, with such
a settled air of wealth and comfort--and you ask if I can suggest
improvement in things which to my mind are perfect.”
“My dearest, I want you to be happy, and very happy; and to feel that
this house is your house, to deal with as you please.”
“I only want to live in it, with you,” she answered shyly, “and not to
disappoint you. What should I do if King Cophetua were to repent his
romantic marriage, and were to think of all the brilliant matches he
might have made?”
“When we are settled here I will show you the girls my mother would
have liked me to marry, and you will see that they are not particularly
brilliant. And I do not even know if any of them would have accepted
me, had I been minded to offer myself.”
“They could not have refused you. No one could. To know you is to adore
you. Come, Jack, you have been talking rodomontade to me. It is my
turn now. You are not extraordinarily handsome. I suppose, as a sober
matter of fact, Mr. Sefton is handsomer. Don’t wince at the sound of
his name. You know I have always detested him. I doubt if you are even
exceptionally clever--but you have a kind of charm--you creep into a
girl’s heart unawares. I pity the woman who loved you, and whom you did
not love.”
Vansittart thought of Fiordelisa. Perhaps in every man’s life there
comes one such ordeal as that--love cast at his feet, love worthless to
him; but true love all the same, and priceless.
* * * * *
Eve Marchant’s wedding gifts were few but costly. She had no wide
circle of acquaintances to shower feather fans and ivory paper-knives,
standard lamps and silver boxes, teapots and cream-jugs, fruit spoons
and carriage clocks upon her, till she sat among her treasures,
bewildered and oppressed, like Tarpeia under the iron rain from warrior
hands. Neighbours had stood aloof from the family at the Homestead, and
could hardly come with gifts in their hands, now that the slighted girl
was going to marry a man of some standing in an adjoining county, and
to take her place among the respectabilities. The givers therefore were
few, but the gifts were worthy. Mrs. Vansittart gave the pearl necklace
which she had worn at her own bridal--a single string of perfect
pearls, with a diamond clasp that had been in the family for a century
and a half. Lady Hartley gave a set of diamond stars worthy to blaze
in the fashionable firmament on a Drawing-Room day. Sir Hubert gave a
three-quarter bred mare of splendid shape and remarkable power, perfect
as hack or hunter, on whose back Eve had already taken her first
lessons in equitation. And for the bridegroom! His gifts were of the
choicest and the best considered; jewels, toilet nécessaire, travelling
bag, books innumerable. He watched for every want, anticipated every
fancy.
“Pray, pray don’t spoil me,” cried Eve. “You make me feel so horribly
selfish. You load me with gifts, and you say you are not rich. You are
ruining yourself for me.”
“A man can afford to ruin himself once in his life for his nearest and
dearest,” he answered gaily. “Besides, if I give you all you want now,
I shall cure you of any incipient tendency to extravagance.”
“I have no such tendency. My nose has been kept too close to the
grindstone of poverty.”
“Poor, pretty little nose! Happily the grindstone has not hurt it.”
“And as for wants, who said I wanted Tennyson and Browning bound in
vellum, or a travelling bag as big as a house? I have no wants, or they
are all centred upon one object, which isn’t to be bought with money. I
want you and your love.”
“I and my love are yours--have been yours since that night in the snowy
road, when you entered into my life at a flash, like the sunlight
through Newton’s shutter, like Undine, like Titania.”
* * * * *
One of the few wedding presents was embarrassing alike to bride and
bridegroom, for it came from a man whom both disliked, but whom one of
the two would rather not offend.
Eve’s appearance in the family sitting-room just a little later than
usual one morning was loudly hailed by Hetty and Peggy, who were
squabbling over a small parcel which had arrived, registered and
insured, by the morning post.
“It is a jeweller’s box in the shape of a crescent,” cried Peggy. “It
must be a crescent brooch. How too utterly lovely! But it is not from
Mr. Vansittart.”
They called him Mr. Vansittart still, although he had begged them to
call him Jack.
“It would be too awfully free and easy to call so superb a gentleman by
such a vulgar name,” Hetty said, when the subject came under discussion.
“I say it is from Mr. Vansittart,” protested Hetty. “Who else would
send her a diamond crescent?”
“How do you know it’s diamonds?”
“Oh, of course. Bridegrooms always give diamonds. Did you ever see
anything else in the weddings in the _Lady’s Pictorial_?”
“Bother the _Lady’s Pictorial_! it ain’t his handwriting.”
“Ain’t it, stupid? Who said it was? It’s the jeweller’s writing, of
course--with Mr. Vansittart’s card inside.”
“Perhaps you will allow me to open the parcel, and see what it all
means,” said Eve, with the eldest sister’s dignity.
The two young barbarians had had the breakfast-table to themselves,
Sophy and Jenny not having appeared. There were certain operations with
spirit-lamp and tongs which made these young ladies later than the
unsophisticated juniors.
“I shall scold him savagely for sending me this, after what I told him
yesterday,” said Eve, as she tore open the carefully sealed parcel.
She was of Hetty’s opinion. The gift could be from none but her lover.
“Oh, oh, oh!” they cried, all three of them, in a chorus of rapture, as
the box was opened.
The crescent was of sapphires, deeply, darkly, beautifully blue,
without flaw or feather. Small brilliants filled in the corners between
the stones, but these hardly showed in that blue depth and darkness.
The effect was of a solemn, almost mysterious splendour.
“Oh, how wicked, how wilful of him, to waste such a fortune upon me!”
cried Eve, taking the crescent out of its velvet bed.
Under the jewel, like the asp under the fig-leaves, there lay a
visiting-card.
“From Mr. Sefton, with all best wishes.”
Eve dropped the brooch as if it had stung her.
“From him?” she cried. “How horrid!”
“I call it utterly charming of him,” protested Hetty, who had adopted
as many of Lady Hartley’s phrases as her memory would hold. “We all
know that he admired you, and I think it too sweet of him to show that
he bears no malice now that you are marrying somebody else. Had he sent
you anything paltry I should have loathed him. But such a present as
this, so simple yet so _distingué_, in such perfect taste----”
“Cease your raptures, Hetty, for mercy’s sake!” cried Eve, wrapping the
jewel-box in the crumpled paper, and tying the string round it rather
roughly. “Would you accept any gift from a man you hate?”
“It would depend upon the gift. I wouldn’t advise my worst enemy to try
me with a sapphire crescent--such sapphires as those!”
“You are a mighty judge of sapphires!” said Eve, contemptuously; after
which unkind remark she ate her breakfast of bread and butter and
home-made marmalade in moody silence. And it was a rare thing for Eve
to be silent or moody.
Vansittart’s step was heard upon the gravel before the curling-tongs
were done with in the upper story, and Eve ran out to the porch to
meet him, with the jeweller’s parcel in her hand. They walked about
the garden together, between rows of blossoming peas and feathery
asparagus, by borders of roses and pinks, talking of Sefton and his
gift. Eve wanted to send it back to the giver.
“I can decline it upon the ground that I don’t approve of wedding
presents except from one’s own and one’s bridegroom’s kindred,” she
said. “I won’t be uncivil.”
“I fear he would think the return of his gift uncivil, however sweetly
you might word your refusal. Wedding gifts are such a customary
business; it is an unheard-of act to send one back. No, Eve, I fear you
must keep the thing,” with a tone of disgust; “but you need not wear
it.”
“Wear it! I should think not! Of course I shall obey you; but I hate
the idea of being under an obligation to Mr. Sefton, who--well, who
always made me feel more than any one else that I wasn’t one of the
elect. His friendliness was more humiliating than other people’s
stand-offishness. I wonder you mind offending him, Jack. I know you
don’t like him.”
“No; but he is my sister’s neighbour; and he and the Hartleys are by
way of being friendly.”
“Ah, I see! That is a reason. I wouldn’t for the world do anything to
make Lady Hartley uncomfortable. He might go to her and tax her with
having an unmannerly young woman for a sister-in-law. So I suppose I
must write a pretty little formal letter to thank him for his most
exquisite gift, the perfect taste of which is only equalled by his
condescension in remembering such an outsider as Colonel Marchant’s
daughter. Something to that effect, but not quite in those words.”
She broke into gay laughter, the business being settled, and stood
on tiptoe to offer her rosy lips to Vansittart’s kiss; and all the
invisible fairies in the peaseblossom, and all the microscopic Cupids
lurking among the rose leaves, beheld that innocent kiss and laughed
their noiseless laugh in sympathy with these true lovers.
“I have a good mind,” said Eve, as she ran back to the house, “to give
Peggy the blue crescent to fasten her pinafore.”
* * * * *
The wedding at Fernhurst Church was as pretty a wedding as any one
need care to see, although it was a ceremony curtailed of all those
surroundings which make weddings worthy to be recorded in the Society
papers. There was no crowd of smart people, no assemblage of smart
gowns stamped with the mantua-maker’s cachet, and marking the latest
development of fashion. No long train of carriages choked the rural
road, or filled the little valley with clouds of summer dust. Only the
kindred of bride and bridegroom were present; but even these made a
gracious group in the chancel, while the music of the rustic choir and
the school children with their baskets of roses were enough to give a
bridal aspect to the scene.
Eve, in her severely simple gown, with no ornaments save the string
of pearls round her full firm throat, and the natural orange blossoms
in her bright hair, was a vision of youthful grace and beauty that
satisfied every eye, and made the handsome bridegroom in all his
height, and breadth, and manly strength, a mere accessory, hardly
worth notice. The four sisters, in their gauzy white frocks and
Gainsborough hats, when clustered in a group at the church door, might
have suggested four cherubic heads looking out of a fleecy cloud, so
fresh and bright were the young faces, in the unalloyed happiness of
the occasion--happiness almost supernal, for, regardless of precedent,
and mysteriously divining Peggy’s desire, the bridegroom had given them
watches, dainty little watches, with an “E” in brilliants upon each
golden back--E, for Eve; E, for Ecstasy; E, for Everlasting bliss!
Peggy felt she had nothing more to ask of life. And for spectators, who
need have wished a friendlier audience than honest Yorkshire Nancy, and
the cottagers who had seen Eve Marchant grow up in their midst, and had
experienced many kindnesses from her--the cottagers whose children she
had taught in the Sunday-school, whose old people she had comforted on
their death-beds, and for whose sake she had often stinted herself in
order to take a jug of good soup, or a milk pudding, to a sick child?
Colonel Marchant made a dignified figure at the altar, in a frock-coat
extorted from the reviving confidence of a tailor, who saw hope in Miss
Marchant’s marriage. He did all that was required of him with the grace
of a man who had not forgotten the habits of good society. The modest
collation at the Homestead was a success; for everybody was in good
spirits and good appetite. Even Mrs. Vansittart was reconciled to a
marriage which gave her son so fair a bride, content to believe that,
whatever evil Harold Marchant might have done upon the earth, no shadow
from his dark past need ever fall across his sister’s pathway.
And so in a clash of joy-bells, and in a shower of rice from girlish
hands, Eve and Vansittart ran down the steep garden path to the
carriage which was to take them to Haslemere, whence they were going to
Salisbury, on the first stage of their journey to that rock-bound coast
“Where that great vision of the guarded mount
Looks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”