As weeds of the sea loosened by one current, stayed by another, mount slowly yet surely before achieving their gradual yet certain ascent, so did these avowals, arrested now by query, again by an objection, rise from the depths of their being and mount to their lips.
From avowals to action no appreciable time is required. In a moment they were in each other’s arms; in a week they were engaged; in a month they were married. In fairyland lovers don’t dillydally.
It was not, though, of course, at Monte Carlo that the marriage took place. Against its taking place at all Mrs. Verelst protested vehemently. She had an ardent desire to be the mother of a duchess, and the Duca di Cherella, a young Neapolitan, whom Trella treated as part of the landscape, had, in that desire, collaborated as ardently as she. Failing him, there were others. Besides, Mrs. Verelst, who, as the phrase is, had her police, knew that Wyvill’s uncle was capable of living forever. In accordance with a good old American custom, she wanted her money’s worth, and a title in futuro did not in the least satisfy her ideas of What’s What. As a consequence, she protested vehemently. She might just as well have held her tongue. Trella paid not the slightest attention to her. Seeing which, after another American fashion, Mrs. Verelst gave in. The marriage took place in Paris, and after the ceremony, through the scented streets, the bride and groom who had met in fairyland set out for paradise.
III
Love is a fever. Marriage is a febrifuge. That is the rule. This marriage was not an exception. Only its antipyretic effects were not immediately observable. At stations along the route the fever lifted them to chimerical altitudes, sank them to spaceless depths, lowered them deeper, lifted them vertiginously, caught and carried them beyond the earth, beyond the horizons of the known, beyond the confines of the real, disclosing through vistas undivined, those mysterious affinities that similarize the flesh and spirit. In fresh ascensions, the fair, illusory promises of love and life were uttered by them both. In new descents the vain, yet lovely vows, Forever, Never, were interchanged again. And so it went.
The duo is very archaic, but to them it seemed highly original, essentially unique, entirely their own composition. It seemed too capable of infinite variations. Through its interludes the memory of a murmur of other songs once filtered in on Wyvill, and jarred him as an oath will jar. Trella’s memories were less resonant. They were pages that girlhood had left quite blank, and at which along the route now and then she stopped and mused. With the refrain of that duo shaking constant stars in her ears it seemed inconceivable to her that such blankness there could be. Whereupon, after considering the past, she contemplated the future. The perspectives looked very spacious.
Meanwhile, impeded by nothing more than a maid and a valet, and delayed solely by a courier and a cargo of boxes, they journeyed circuitously from the scented Bois to the pink and crocus of Seville, and on through the ghosts and treasuries of Spain to its summer court at San Sebastian.
During the journey wherever Trella had shown herself admiration had been ambient. She had trailed it as a torch trails smoke. To that she had been always more or less accustomed. But in Seville, after the good old Andalusian custom, it was manifested vociferously, in open compliments of her mother’s handiwork, in shouts of Olle tu madre—hurrahs for that absent lady, which infuriated Wyvill, but which, through their fascinating indirection, delighted Trella, as, indeed, every novelty did.
In Castile, the admiration, while quite as fervent, became less noisy, and at San Sebastian so sedate that it would have been colorless had not chance—a function at the palace aiding—embodied it in the Duke of Thule.
The duke, who had an amiable, aimless way, made up in guile what he lacked in sense. Seen across the room, you would have taken him for Teuton; close to, for a fool. Trella saw but the royal. Barring the Regent to whom she had just been presented, she had never met one before. The encounter seemed to her uplifting. It heightened her in her own esteem.
It was at that juncture that she contemplated the future. The more she considered it the more spacious it grew. Then presently, little by little, one after another the delayed effects of the febrifuge appeared. The duo rang less starlike in her ears. The heights began to assume the aspect of the déjà vu, the ascensions to horizons beyond the known acquired the proportions of undertakings, and the affinities, similarizing sufficiently, had nothing more to say.
Everything being possible, it may be that, in the course of time, Wyvill also would have experienced the premonitory effects of the antipyretic, but Trella’s symptoms, at first unnoticed, then misinterpreted, subsequently evident, yet wholly enigmatic, left him perplexed.
Where is the Vandal that invented marriage? Wyvill put to himself some such question, but long after, when San Sebastian was but a halt in the trip and they were back in Paris again.
This occurred in the autumn. At that time, pending the termination of touches on a house which the girl’s mother had bought, Wyvill and Trella were lodged at the Bristol. There, one noon, the duke breakfasted with them. Afterward, Wyvill, with the purchase of some horses in view, joined their owner, the Vicomte de Chose, at a neighboring club, and, by virtue of a previous arrangement, drove with him, at three o’clock, to Saint
