“Too delicious for words. But there is a tea-party in Berkeley Square, and another at Hyde Park Gardens. I promised to go to both.”
“Then you will go to neither. You can send telegrams from Moulsey to say you are seedy, and your doctor ordered a quiet day in the country—I being your doctor for the nonce. We’ll steep ourselves in the mild beauty of Old Father Thames, a poor little river when one remembers Danube and Rhine; but he will serve for our holiday.”
He rang for a timetable, found a train that was to leave Waterloo at eleven, and ordered the victoria to take them to the station.
“Now, Eve, your coolest frock, and your favourite poet to read in your luxurious seat in the stern, while I toil at the oar. Be sure you will not read a page during the whole afternoon! The willows and rushes, the villa gardens dipping to the water’s edge, the people in the passing boats, the patient horses on the towpath—those will be your books, living, moving, changing things, compared with which Keats and Musset are trash, Endymion colourless, La Carmago a phantom.”
“I’ll take Musset,” said Eve, pouncing upon a vellum-bound duodecimo—a chef d’oeuvre of Zaehnsdorf’s, which was one of Vansittart’s latest gifts. “He has opened a new world to me.”
“A very wicked world for your young innocence to explore; a world of midnight rendezvous and early morning assassinations; a world of unholy loves and savage revenges—the dagger, the bowl, the suicide’s despair, the satiated worldling’s vacuity. Yet he is a poet—ain’t he, Eve?—the greatest France ever produced. Compared with that fiery genius Hugo is but a rhetorician.”
They were at Hampton before noon, and on the river in the fierce golden sunlight, when Hampton Church clock struck the hour, Eve leaning back in her cushioned seat, gazing dreamily at the lazy rower midships. They had the current to help them, so there was no need for strenuous toil. The oars dipped gently; the church and village, Garrick’s Temple, the gaily decked houseboats with gardens on their roofs and bright striped awnings, barracks, bridge, old Tudor Palace, drifted by like shadows in a dream. Eve did not open De Musset, though the ribbon marked a page where passion hung suspended in tragic possibilities; a crisis which might well have stimulated curiosity. She was too happy to be curious about anything. It was her first holiday on the river, they two alone.
“If this is your idea of resting let us rest very often,” said Eve.
She would not hear of landing at Kingston for luncheon. She wanted nothing but the river, and the sunshine, and his company, all to herself. She would have some tea, if he liked, later; and seeing an open-air teahouse a little lower down the river, and a garden where at this early hour there were no visitors, Vansittart pushed the nozzle of his skiff in among the reeds, and they landed, and ordered tea and eggs and bread and butter to be served in a rustic arbour close by the glancing tide.
“I dare say there are water-rats about,” said Eve, gathering her pale pink frock daintily round her ankles, “but I feel as if I should hardly mind one today.”
They both enjoyed this humble substitute for their customary luncheon. It was a relief to escape the conventional menu—the everlasting mayonnaise, the cutlets hot or cold, the too familiar chicken and lamb. The tea and eggs in this vine-curtained bower had the most exquisite of all flavours—novelty.
“I am so happy,” cried Eve, “that I think, like Miss de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, I could sing—if I had learnt.”
“Your face is my music,” said her husband, his face reflecting her happy smile; “your laughter is better than singing.”
“Oh, you mustn’t, you really mustn’t talk like that; at least, not till our silver wedding,” protested Eve. “You will have to make a speech, perhaps, on that anniversary, and you might incorporate that idea in it. ‘What, ladies and gentlemen, in returning thanks for your kind compliments and this truly magnificent epergne, can I say of my wife of five and twenty blissful years, except that I love her, I love her, I love her? Her face is my music; her laughter is better than singing.’ How would that do, Jack?”
Her clear laugh rang out in the still summer air. No female of the great Bounder tribe could have enjoyed herself more frankly. Vansittart would hardly have been surprised if she had offered to exchange hats with him.
“Five and twenty years! A quarter of a century,” she said musingly. “I wonder what we shall be like, three and twenty years hence—what the world will be like—what kind of frocks will be worn?”
“Will the cylinder hat be abolished?”
“Shall we still travel by steam, or only by electricity?”
“What gun-maker will be in vogue?”
“What kind of lapdog will be the rage?”
In this wise they dawdled an hour away, having garden and arbour all to themselves, till after three o’clock, when a couple of Bounder-laden boats came noisily to the reedy bank, and their human cargo landed, scrambling upon shore, hilarious, exploding into joyous cockney jests, with the true South London twang.
“Come,” said Vansittart, “it is time we were off.”
“Are you sure you have rested?”
“From my Herculean labours? Yes.”
They drifted down the river, praising or dispraising the villas on the Middlesex shore, inhaling the sweetness of flowering clover from the Surrey fields; he leaning lazily on his sculls, she prattling to him, as much lovers as in the outset of their wooing; and so to Teddington Lock, where they had to wait for a boat to come out, before their boat went in.
It was the laziest hour of the day, and scarcely
