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 homemade 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 anyone else that I wasn’t one of the elect. His friendliness was more humiliating than other people’s standoffishness. 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 anyone 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
