CHAPTER IX
Robert and Brigit were silent with happiness on their way to Southampton. Side by side they watched the country through the carriage windows. There had been a fog in London when they left, and the sun, at intervals, shone out like a live coal among dying embers. All was obscured; the foot-passengers and passing vehicles seemed black straying shadows in the atmosphere. But the express emerged at last from the clinging darkness into autumnal fields, some brown after the harvest, others studded with hay-ricks. At one point in the landscape they noticed a flock of sheep drinking at a stream. The boy who guarded them waved his cap at the train, and this little signal, coming, as it were, from human nature, gave them a reassurance of the day's reality. Near Bishopstoke the clouds were white and dense, but, rippling in places, they disclosed blue stretches of the heaven which, in their masses, they concealed. Southampton began with small houses. One had a tattered garden, where a stone copy of the Medicean Venus stood on a patch of squalid turf near a clothes' line and against an ivy-grown wall. Then the green sands were reached. The sea, like liquid granite, sparkled in the distance. Rows of dull dwellings, shops, public-houses, and hotels came next. The train, with a shriek, rushed into the station. It was still too early for lunch, so they walked down to the pier, where they saw several yachts and pleasure-boats at anchor in the harbour, and the New Forest greenly outlined in the distance. These were the things which engraved themselves on Brigit's mind. The impressibility of youth is retentive for outward objects, but the inner mood—the sensation and idea which make the mental state—lives unconsciously, and is recognised only in the long process of time. Brigit could have described the scene, but her emotions did not seem to her, emotions. Absorbed by them, and in them, she neither abandoned herself to the hour nor asked herself what the hour held. She and the hour were one—a single note; and the joy she felt at being with Robert, leaning on his arm and hearing his voice, was so simple that, even if a psychologist of the deepest experience had been able to probe into the workings of her mind, he would have found nothing there to analyse. Hers was a child's affection—the first love of a heart still immature, and not yet made suspicious of itself by contact with others less innocent. Parflete had been too worldly-wise not to guard and value—at its true price—a disposition so graceful in its very essence. She had a knowledge of affairs beyond her years, yet her own instincts, her education, her few friendships, had kept her curiously ignorant of evil, of much also that is neither good nor evil, but merely human. The sombre sentimentality which lurks in most young girls of seventeen was not in her character at all, and in its stead she possessed the gaiety and carelessness of feeling which belongs to imaginative rather than to sensuous natures. A boy-like spirit showed itself in all her words, movements, moods; her womanhood still slept, and thus, while her intelligence made her an unusual companion and her beauty presented a constant appeal to all that is romantic, it was inevitable that melancholy and reserve should enter largely into the passionate love which Robert felt for her. He told himself that he would not have her different. The glance of her eyes, which stirred him strangely to the very depths of his being, never varied in its sweetness nor its calm. When her lightest touch could sway his body and spirit, she, unconscious of her power, would press his hand against her cheek and talk about the geraniums in the convent garden or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was the indefinable, indispensable feeling absent?
“Do you remember our journey from Catesby?” she asked suddenly. “I slept. Wasn't I dull? Did you mind?”
No one could see them. He stooped and kissed her fragrant, animated face. “I wish,” said he, “I wish that you were not quite such a child.”
The feeling of solitariness weighed upon his soul with a crushing weight unknown until that day—the day of days, his wedding day. Heretofore he had craved for solitude because it had been full of her imagined companionship. Now that she actually lived and talked by his side, the fancied image of her paled, vanished. The real creature was adorable, but, for some reason, maddening, and not, at all events, the being of his fancy. Their old relations—ethereal and exquisite, no doubt—now seemed an empty mockery, self-deluding foolishness. He coloured at the remembrance of all that Disraeli had hinted, and Reckage had brutally declared, on the large topic of idealism in passion. A man, in spite of all determinations to be uncomplaining, knows the How much and How little that he may demand, merely as a man, from any given advantage or disadvantage in existence. Robert, hating himself, condemning himself, was conscious, in spite of himself, that Brigit's affection for him was not love in the full human sense of the word. He had exchanged an ordinary self-restraint for an impossibly false position. She could inspire his life, but could she enter into it, be it, live it with him daily? Would there not have to be great reservations, half statements, and, worst of all, a subtle kind of hypocrisy? He reproached himself for selfishness, yet the fear came and it remained. He had captured the rainbow and married the goddess. Were there not many legends illustrating this folly?—stories of men who had married divinities and perished, not because the divinities were at fault, but because mortals must wed with mortals. The sight of his wife's beauty caused a sudden, violent irritation. He wished she had none, for then, perhaps, he thought he would have been satisfied, more than content, in the placid consideration of her charms of character. He found himself reduced to the absurd predicament of deciding to banish her from his thoughts—a last sophism which showed him, all too clearly, how wretched he was. Their silence, which had been due in the first instance to the sufficient delight of being in each other's company, became that long pause which arises from an unutterable embarrassment. Brigit felt by instinct some change in Robert's mood, but as she could not account for it then, her sympathy failed. The keen salt air filled her with its own free buoyancy; her delicate skin flushed in the wind; she forgot the nervous strain of the morning, the awfulness of the grey chapel, the new state of things, griefs that were past, responsibilities that were to come. She turned to Orange as a child would turn to its inseparable comrade, and clapped her hands with amusement at an organ-grinder with a monkey and a dog whom she noticed sitting at the end of the pier, waiting, apparently, for one of the excursion steamers bound for the Isle of Wight.
“Pennies for the monkey, Robert,” she cried; “a lot of pennies! And then we must have our lunch. May I have some chicken and one of those very droll, very stupid, English rice puddings? Please let me have one.... And may I kiss the dog? It is a nice little dog—quite as nice as Pensée's Fidelio. Now I am going to talk to the monkey.”
She ran toward the little animal, who was shivering, pathetic and grotesque, in a military cap and red petticoat trimmed with yellow braid. The dog, which was a young pug with excellent points, gave Brigit, after many entreaties, his paw. She addressed the monkey in Italian, and laughed till she cried at its absurdities. Robert looked on, consumed by a sensation which he recognised, with much shame, as jealousy. He thought the pug dull and the monkey revolting. Yet she kissed one, and showered heavenly smiles on both.
“I did not know that you were so fond of animals,” he said, as they walked to the hotel for lunch.
“I am not,” she answered frankly, “as a rule. But when I am with you I feel so happy that I want to kiss everything—the ground, and the trees, and chairs, and poodle dogs, and the whole world!”
“Then why not—me?”