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 deathbeds, 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 rockbound coast
“Where that great vision of the guarded mount
Looks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
XVIII
“The Shadow Passeth When the Tree Shall Fall”
What a happy honeymoon it was, along the porphyry walls of Western England; what joyous days that were so long and seemed so short! There never was a less costly honeymoon, for the bride’s tastes were simple to childishness, and the bridegroom was too deeply in love to care for anything she did not desire. To ramble in that romantic land, staying here a few days, and there a week, all along the wild north coast, from Tintagel to St. Ives, southward then to Penzance, and Falmouth, and Fowey, was more than enough for bliss. And yet in all Eve’s childish talk with her sisters of what she would do if ever she married a rich man, the honeymoon tour in Italy had been a leading feature in her programme; but in those girlish visions beside the schoolroom fire the husband had been a nonentity, a mere purse-bearer, and all her talk had been of the places she was to see. Now, with this very real husband, all earth was paradisaic, and Sorrento could not have seemed more like a dream of beauty than Penzance. She was exquisitely happy; and what can the human mind require beyond perfect bliss?
These wedded lovers lingered long over that summer holiday. It was an ideal summer—a summer of sunshine and cloudless skies, varied only by an occasional thunderstorm—tempest enjoyed by Vansittart and Eve, who loved Nature in her grand and awful as well as in her milder aspects—and a tempest from the heights above Boscastle, or from the grassy cliffs of the Lizard, is a spectacle to remember. They spun out the pleasures of that simple Cornish tour. There was nothing to call them home—no tie, no duty, only their own inclination; for the dowager Mrs. Vansittart was staying at Redwold, absorbed in worship of the third generation, and was to go from Redwold to Ireland for a round of visits to the friends of her early married life. The lovers were therefore free to prolong their wanderings, and it was only when the shortening days suggested fireside pleasures that Vansittart proposed going home.
“Going home,” cried Eve; “how sweet that sounds! To think that your home is to be my home forevermore; and the servants, your old, well-trained servants, will be bobbing to me as their mistress—I who never had any servant but dear old motherly Nancy, who treats me as if I were her own flesh and blood, and an untaught chit for a parlourmaid, a girl who was always dropping knives off her tray, or smashing the crockery, in a most distracting manner. We had only the cheapest things we could buy at Whiteley’s sales, with a few relics of former splendour; and it was generally the relics that suffered. I cannot imagine myself the mistress of a fine house, with a staff of capable servants. What an insignificant creature I shall seem among them!”
“You will seem a queen—a queen out of the great kingdom of poetry—a queen like Tennyson’s Maud, in a white frock, with roses in your hair, and an ostrich fan for a sceptre. Don’t
