What a marriage-day!
CHAPTER X.
“Are you quite warm there, Agatha?”
“Yes, thank you, quite warm,” she said, turning round a little, and then turning back. She sat working, or seeming to work, at a large bay window that fronted the sea at Brighton. Already there had come over her the slight but unmistakable change which indicates the wife—the girl no longer. She had been married just one week.
Her husband sat at a table writing, as was his habit during the middle of the day, in order that they might walk out in the evening. He had often been thus busy during the week, even though it was the first week of the honeymoon.
The honeymoon! How different the word now sounded to Agatha! Yet she had nothing to complain of. Mr. Harper was very kind; watchful and tender over her to a degree which she felt even more than she saw. In the mornings he read to her, or talked, chiefly upon subjects higher and withal pleasanter than Agatha had ever heard talked of before; in the evenings they drove out or walked, till far into the starry summer night. They were together constantly, there never passed between them a quick or harsh word, and yet—
Agatha vainly tried to solve the dim, cloudy “yet” which had no tangible form, and only arose now that the first bewilderment of her changed existence was settling into reality, and she was beginning to recognise herself as Agatha Harper, no longer a girl, but a married woman. The sole conclusion she could come to was, that she must be now learning what she supposed every one had to learn—that a honeymoon is not quite the dream of bliss which young people believe in, and that few married couples are quite happy during the first year of their union.
And Mrs. Harper (or Mrs. Locke Harper, as her husband had had printed on the cards, omitting the name which she had once stigmatised as “ugly,”) was probably not altogether wide of the truth, though in this case she judged from mistaken because individual evidence. It is next to impossible that two lives, unless assimilated by strong attachment and rare outward circumstances, if suddenly thrown together, should at once mingle and flow harmoniously on. It takes time, and the influence of perfect love, to melt and fuse the two currents into one beautiful whole. Perhaps, did all young lovers believe and prepare for this, there would be fewer disappointed and unhappy marriages.
Though sitting at the open window, with the sharp sea-breeze blowing in upon her—it happened to be a sunless and gloomy day—Agatha had answered that she was “quite warm.” Nevertheless her heart felt cold. Not positively sad, yet void. A great deal of passionate devotion is necessary to make two active human beings content with one another's sole company for eight entire days, having nothing to occupy them but each other.