In the excitement of meeting, appreciating and marrying Stubbo, she forgot that she had had a great pity and tenderness and admiration for her shy and impulsive cousin, Oswald Sydenham, with the glass eye and cruelly scarred face, who had won the V.C. before he was twenty at the bombardment of Alexandria, and who had since done the most remarkable things in Nyasaland. It had been quite typical heroism that had won him the V.C. He had thrown a shell overboard, and it had burst in the air as he threw it and pulped one side of his face. But when she married, she had temporarily forgotten Cousin Oswald. She was just carried away by Arthur Stubland’s profile, and the wave in his hair, and—life.
Arthur was Stubbo’s Christian name because he had been born under the spell of “The Idylls of the King.”
Afterwards when Oswald came home again, she thought the good side of his face, the side of his face that hadn’t been so seriously damaged by the Egyptian shell, looked at her rather queerly. But the wounded side remained a Sphinx-like mask.
“Congratulations!” said Oswald, fumbling with the word. “Congratulations! I hope you’ll be happy, Dolly.”...
She was far gone in rationalism before she met Arthur, and he completed her emancipation. Their ideas ran closely together. They projected some years of travel before they settled down. He wanted to see mediaeval Italy “thoroughly,” and she longed for Imperial Rome. They took just a couple of rooms in South Kensington and spent all the rest of their income in long stretches of holiday. They honeymooned in pleasant inns in South Germany; they did some climbing in the Tyrol and the Dolomites—she had a good head—they had a summer holiday on the Adriatic coast, and she learnt to swim and dive well, and they did one long knapsack tramp round and along the Swiss Italian frontier and then another through the Apennines to Florence.
It was a perfectly lovely time. Everything was bright and happy, and they got on wonderfully together, except that——There was a shadow for her. She found it difficult to say exactly what the shadow was, and it is still more difficult for the historian to define it. She dismissed the idea that it had anything to do with Cousin Oswald’s one reproachful eye. She sometimes had a faint suspicion that it was her jilted Cæsar asking for at least a Rubicon to cross, but it is doubtful if she ever had any suspicion of Peter, waiting outside the doors of life. Yet the feeling of something forgotten, of something left out, grew throughout those sunny days. It was in some sweet meadows high up on the great hill above Fiesole, that she tried to tell Arthur of this vexatious feeling of deficiency.
Manifestly she puzzled him, which was not to be wondered at since the feeling puzzled her. But it also had a queer effect of irritating him.
“Arthur, if you always say I don’t love you,” she said, “when I tell you anything, then how can I tell you anything at all?”
“Aren’t we having the loveliest times?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said without complete conviction. “It isn’t that.”