“Endless, and without limits, like Eternity,” said Vansittart, smiling at her, unconscious that Eve’s head was bending lower and lower over her work to hide the streaming tears. “A pretty fancy. But that boundless-seeming sea is only a big round pool after all; and think how clever it was of Columbus to find his way across the great ocean, and what rapture for Cortez to discover a second ocean, bigger than the first. And yet this earth of ours is only like a grain of sand in the multitude of worlds.”
“Don’t,” cried Peggy, with her fingers in her ears. “You make my head ache. I can’t bear to think of the universe. It’s much too big. Mütterchen used to tell me about it when I was a small child. She made me dream bad dreams. Why isn’t there one nice, comfortable world for us to live in, and one lovely heaven for us to go to after we are dead, and one horrid hell for the very bad people, just to prevent their mixing with the good ones? That’s what the Bible means, doesn’t it? I can’t bear to think of anything more than that.”
“Don’t think, darling,” said Eve, sitting down on the grass beside her, and drawing the fragile form close against her own—“don’t think. Only be happy. Breathe this delicious air, bask in this delightful sun, be happy, and get well.”
“Oh, I am getting well as fast as ever I can. Except for my tiresome cough, I am as well as anybody can be. I wonder what they are doing at Fernhurst. Skating on Farmer Green’s pond, perhaps, or crouching over the fire. You know how Hetty would always sit with her head hanging over the coals, in spite of all you could say about spoiling her complexion. And here we spoil our complexions in the sun. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Everything in our lives is wonderful, Peggy. Most of all, that I should have such a husband as Jack.”
Eve held out her hand to that model husband, smiling at him, with eyes that were veiled in tears, more grateful for his goodness to this ailing child than for all the love that he had lavished upon herself.
What a happy season this would have been on the lovely hill beside the tideless sea, if hope had never been dashed with fear! But, alas! there were moments, even at Peggy’s best, when the shadow of doom fell dark across the summer glory of a land that knows not winter. Sometimes, in the midst of her joyous delight in the things around her, a sudden paroxysm of coughing would surprise the poor child, shaking her as if some invisible demon had seized the wasted form by the narrow shoulders, and were trying to tear it piecemeal.
“My enemy has been very cruel to me today,” Peggy would say afterwards, with a seriocomic smile. “I thought Dr. Bright would get the better of him.”
At first she used to call that wearing cough her enemy, as she had heard old people talk of their gout or their rheumatism. Later, she talked of her cough as the dragon, and of Dr. Bright as St. George; but although the medical champion might get the better of the dragon now and again, he was a sturdy monster, and harder to kill than the toughest crocodile along the sandy shores of old Nile. Peggy was wonderfully patient, wonderfully hopeful about herself, even when hope began to wax faint in the hearts of her companions, when the trained attendant could tell of sorely troubled nights, and when Eve, creeping in from her adjoining bedchamber half a dozen times between night and morning, was saddened at finding the fevered head tossing unquietly upon the heaped-up pillows, the blue eyes wide open, and the parched lips uttering speech that told of semi-delirium.
However bad Peggy’s nights were, her days were generally cheerful. She was never tired of the hillside paths, the luxury of ferns, and palms, and aloes, the glory of the golden-tufted mimosas, the peach blossom, the anemones, the silvery threads of water creeping down the rocky gorges, such narrow streamlets, cleaving Titanic rocks. To Peggy these things brought no satiety; while the more earthly enjoyment of afternoon tea at Rumpelmeyer’s, sitting out of doors, and eating as many cakes and bonbons as ever she liked, was only a lesser revelation of a world where all was beauty. Eve and her husband saw the crowds at Rumpelmeyer’s with an amused interest. They looked on at this curiously blended smart world, this odd mixture of Royal Duchesses and Liverpool merchants, millionaires and impecunious cavalière servente, Parisian celebrities, the old nobility of France and England—old as the Angevin kings, when England and France were one monarchy—and the newly-gotten wealth of New York and Chicago. Eve and Vansittart looked on and were amused, and then drove back to the villa on the hill, and rejoiced in the seclusion of their own garden, which it had been their delight to improve and beautify. Everything grew so quickly—the rose-trees they planted throve so well that it was like gardening in fairyland.
They were not intruded upon by that smart world which they saw at the teashop on the Croisette. At Cannes two things only count as worthy of regard or reverence—the first, fashion; the second, money. Eve and her husband had neither one nor the other. A Hampshire squire, with three thousand a year and a young wife, was a person who could interest nobody. Had he been a bachelor and a dancing man, he would have been eligible and even courted; for dancing men are in a minority, and a ball at the Cercle Nautique is apt to recall Edwin Long’s famous picture of the Babylonian Marriage Market, women of all nationalities waiting to be asked to dance. A Hampshire squire, living quietly
