There was an almost imperceptible rustling of distant skirts on marble floors, and Mabel floated down the long vista while he stood and gazed upon her in expectation of new raptures. But to his surprise he experienced a shock of disappointment. Mabel was enchantingly dressed as ever. Her white train followed her like a cloud, and her slender neck was almost hidden under ropes of pearls; a little wreath of diamonds rested in the yellow fluff of her hair. But she looked unaccountably small, out of place, insignificant, in these dim, stately, historical rooms. The white and gold spaces of Grosvenor Square, light, French, extravagant, gay, not too large, and with ceilings artfully lowered, might have been designed to frame her ethereal loveliness, and the idea crossed Ordham’s mind that perchance they had.
But no misgivings beset Mabel, and as her husband suddenly advanced to meet her, she cried out, “Isn’t this too lovely, Jackie?” (This fond nickname was, so far, her only indiscretion in his adoring regard.) “I feel like an ancient Lady Ordham come to life; and as for this immense castle, or palace, or whatever you call it,—isn’t it exactly like those old things in Italy?—I had to send for a footman to pilot me. I never was so happy in all my life.”
“You should be,” said Ordham, gallantly. “Your capacity for conferring happiness passes belief.”
Dinner was announced, and to his surprise they were conducted to the banqueting hall instead of to the dining room.
“This is my first order,” said Mabel, smiling playfully, as they entered the vast room, whose panels were set with bygone Ordhams, and whose ceiling, frescoed on wood, panelled and gilded, was in the most elaborate Italian style. Ordham was amused at his wife’s childishness, but nothing averse, for the dining room might have revived hideous memories he chose to forget. In this superb hall there were no memories for him but of great dinners to the county, hunt breakfasts, house parties numbering many Englishmen already passed into history. Now it must always be associated with his first dinner, in the company of his bride, in this splendid castle of his race.
Mabel, who seemed excited to the point of exhilaration, chattered incessantly.
“Oh, Jackie! Jackie!” she cried, as the servants finally left the room, “how simply wonderful this castle must be when it is full of guests. Your mother says she has had more than a hundred people here at once. If you won’t stay here, we must return some fall and have a regular traditional house party—royalties and all the rest of it. It would be exactly like living in one of Scott’s novels, and as the castle is Renaissance instead of Elizabethan, we could have a fancy dress ball and make believe we were in Italy.”
“The Renaissance reached England before Elizabeth,” replied Ordham, diplomatically. “It is too good of you to feel that you will not have tired of Italy before we can return here.”
“Oh, I love Italy, although I have malaria in Rome, and there are so many beggars, and my governess made me look at so many pictures. I am sure I can’t see what good those miles and miles of tramping through dark stuffy galleries full of madonnas and saints did me, for I only remember about three pictures in all Italy. I remember my headaches much better.”
“If you had a guide-book mind, there would be no room in it for anything else.” Ordham was very indulgent to this bride of nineteen short years who so often shot him a glance of sweet appeal, or prettily begged him not to be severe if he discovered that she did not know as much as he did. “How could a girl just out of school compete with quite the cleverest young man on earth?” He had already begun to wonder how he could have expected her to know anything, and still oftener how any woman could look such unutterable wisdom out of an apparently empty skull. That bony structure, which included a high intellectual brow, width between the eyes, and a fine decided nose, was merely the shell inherited from a long line of able Americans who had made history, political and financial. It was a perfect and a very roomy shell. He had also begun to ask himself how long it would take to furnish it, and if the process would be as interesting as he had fancied. But what mystified him more than all was that during those weeks of his courtship, conscious and unconscious, he should have believed her to be serious, studious, remote, vastly above her sex and age in all respects. Of course, he reflected, he was in love all the time—no doubt—and blind from the moment her beauty and grace had dazzled him in that incomparable setting. He knew now that Mabel had not progressed in her literary drudgeries beyond Scott and Macaulay, and had by no means exhausted those prolific authors; indeed, she openly yearned for abridged editions.