‘I took it so well that I did not hurry in the matter,’ laughed Sebastian.
He laughed himself down-stairs, laughed his adieus to Emma, and swaggered off down the street with his fine swinging gait, as gay and hearty a man as you might see in all England.
But oh, inscrutable heart of man! what were these curious old words that so rang in his ears? He seemed to be walking to the tune of them.
‘If I forget thee,’ said the voice of the heart that speaks ever whitest truth,—‘If I forget thee, let my right hand forget its cunning.’
And he shook his head and smiled, and looked down at his clever right hand.
CHAPTER XI
Sebastian and Emma Shepley began their married life in a little house in Jermyn Street—‘small,’ as Emma would have described it, ‘but genteel.’ It would be impossible to exaggerate the pride and pleasure which Emma had in the arrangements of her house, and in the fact that she was married to the (to her) finest and dearest of men; but to Sebastian marriage appeared in a very different light. For him it showed as the end of Youth, the voluntary rejection of romance, the light of common day. He had reasoned himself into it; acknowledging (and the man who does this need never call himself young again) that he had better take what he could get and be thankful for it. He had laid Passion in the grave; and, turning away, he met Life with her resolute face waiting for him inexorable as of old. Marriage was probably the first and most prudent step he could take, and Emma was fond of him, and Emma, after all, was pretty. A home, a wife, children—these solid anchors of the soul, presented themselves almost invitingly to his fancy after a time—and farewell to Love and Youth!
In these curiously differing moods of mind Emma and Sebastian entered into the estate of matrimony—Sebastian with his eyes open, Emma with hers firmly shut.
‘Can two walk together except they be agreed?’ asks that eternally unanswerable book the Bible. Not comfortably, certainly, but they can halt along somehow, far out of step it may be, yet on the same road. I am afraid that when all was said and done the walk of Emma and Sebastian was somewhat after this halting kind. For Emma had not been married for many weeks before she began to see how curiously she disagreed from Sebastian on almost every point. Strange is the glamour of love that she had not found this out sooner! It said something for both of them that after having made the discovery Emma continued to love her husband as much as ever—only, the glamour was gone now. He had been to her a faultless romantic hero, she found him to be a man with several pronounced faults, who frequently offended her taste, who constantly opposed her, who plainly told her that he had once loved another woman, and loved her memory still.
Sebastian on his part owned that Emma was occasionally quite exasperating to him; but he also acknowledged her entire goodness of heart and the excellence of her housekeeping. Their marriage in fact was just one of the ordinary ruck of marriages; not unhappy, not ideal—merely a little disappointing to Emma, a little hardening and coarsening to Sebastian. The great bone of contention was of a social nature. For gentility was dear as life itself to Emma, while to Sebastian all the little affectations and conventions which his wife valued so highly were the merest moonshine. He submitted graciously enough to correction in matters of etiquette, and laughed with imperturbable good humour when Emma called him to task for eating with his knife and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. But when it came to the question of friends and acquaintances matters were more complicated.