“I won’t have you scold Benson,” remonstrated Eve; “it is my fault. She teased me to come home ever so long ago, and I wouldn’t. I wanted to stay with Peggy till the last moment. It was like bidding her goodbye again. And now I have left her lying in her quiet grave, near the poor mother whom she hardly knew. I didn’t know how late it was till we were in the carriage coming home, and I began to feel rather chilly.”
“You are shivering now, Eve. You should have remembered what Dr. Bright said about sunset.”
“Ah, that was on Peggy’s account. It is different for me.”
“Well, I won’t try to frighten you into a cold. Run to your mistress’s-room, Benson, and make a good fire. I ordered tea to be ready.”
He almost carried Eve upstairs, and with his own hands manipulated the olive logs, and set the merry pine cones blazing and crackling, while she lay on the sofa in front of the fireplace and watched the flames; but the shivering continued in spite of the cheery wood fire, and eiderdown coverlet, and hot tea; so Dr. Bright was sent for hurriedly, and came to find his patient with a temperature that indicated grave disturbance. He came, and left only to come back again, with another English doctor, who did not leave his patient all night; and between midnight and morning the young wife’s existence trembled in the balance, and the husband, pacing to and fro and in and out on the lower floor, ground his teeth and beat his head in a passion of self-reproach, hating himself for having allowed that perilous visit to the cemetery, cursing himself for his folly in not having gone with her if she must needs go.
“There is a blight upon us and upon our love,” he told himself in his despair. “Nemesis will have her due.”
His fondest hope was blighted—the hope of a living link which should bind him closer to his wife and make severance impossible—a child, whose innocent eyes should turn from father to mother, and plead to the mother for the father’s sin—the child who, in direct contingency, was to be his champion and his saviour. He passed through an ordeal of such agony and apprehension on his wife’s account as to make him for the time being comparatively indifferent to the loss of his son, who came upon this mortal scene only to vanish from it forever; but when at last, in mid-June, while Californie and her fir woods were baking under a tropical sun, his wife was restored to him, strong enough to travel to cooler regions in the shadow of the great Alps, there fell upon him the sense of an irreparable loss.
They went by easy stages to Courmayeur, and established themselves there for the rest of the summer, in a reposeful solitude, keeping aloof from the climbers and explorers and the race of tourists generally. They had their own rooms, in a Dépendance of the hotel, rooms whose windows commanded valley and mountain. Here Eve first felt the tranquillizing influence of Alpine scenery, and her quiet rambles with Vansittart soon brought back the bloom of her girlish beauty, and restored something of the frank gladness of those younger years when she and her sisters used to ramble over the undulating ridge of Bexley Hill, and think it a mountain.
“Dear old Bexley,” sighed Eve, with her eyes dreamily contemplating Mont Chetif; “I hope I shall never begin to despise you, even though you are a hill to put in one’s pocket as compared with these white giants.”
The peaceful days, the perfect union between husband and wife, revived Eve’s spirits and did much to restore her health, sorely shaken by the ordeal through which she had passed. Fever had raged fiercely in the battle between life and death, and the long bright hair, which had made so fair a diadem in the days of her poverty, had been shorn from the burning head. She looked quaintly pretty now, with her boyish crop, framing the broad white forehead with crisp short curls. She laughed when Vansittart talked of next season, when his mother was to lend them the house in Charles Street.
“You can never appear in society with a cropped head for your companion,” she said. “People will say you have married a lady doctor, or some other learned monstrosity from Girton. I shall be tabooed in the smart world where ignorance is de rigueur, and to know anything about books is a sign of inferiority.”
“What care I if they think my sweet love a senior wrangler disguised as a fine lady? You are pretty enough to set the fashion of cropped heads.”
They moved slowly homeward in the late autumn, loitering beside the great Swiss lakes till the October mists began to make Pilatus invisible and to hang low over the steep gables of Lucerne. They lingered under Mr. Hauser’s hospitable roof so long that the great black St. Bernard lifted his head and howled an agonizing farewell when the carriage drove off to the station with Eve and her husband. That leonine beast was sagacious enough to know that the trunks and travelling-bags and bustle of departure meant something more than the daily drive, and that he was to see these kind friends no more, and eat no more sweet biscuits out of Eve’s soft white hands.
It was late in October when they found themselves among the pine woods and hillocks of Hampshire, and insignificant as the hills were there was pleasure in feeling one’s self at home. Eve’s mother-in-law was at Merewood to receive them, and to make much of her son’s wife, whom she found thinner and more fragile-looking than when she left for the Riviera, but with all the beauty and brightness which had captivated her lover. Mrs. Vansittart’s welcome had in it more of affection than she had ever given her son’s
