CHAPTER XVII.
“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 inyourface! 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 bridalprocession. 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 etiquette,” 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 itisa privilege to behappy, 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 anal frescosaloon 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 wouldpay 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 takenher 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 theLady’s Pictorial?”
“Bother theLady’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 sodistingué, 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. Theywalked 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 childrenwith 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 mountLooks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
“Where that great vision of the guarded mountLooks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
“Where that great vision of the guarded mountLooks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
“Where that great vision of the guarded mount
Looks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”