CHAPTER XVIII.
“THE SHADOW PASSETH WHEN THE TREE SHALL FALL.”
What a happy honeymoon it was, along the porphyry walls of Western England; what joyous days that were so long and seemed so short! There never was a less costly honeymoon, for the bride’s tastes were simple to childishness, and the bridegroom was too deeply in love to care for anything she did not desire. To ramble in that romantic land, staying here a few days, and there a week, all along the wild north coast, from Tintagel to St. Ives, southward then to Penzance, and Falmouth, and Fowey, was more than enough for bliss. And yet in all Eve’s childish talk with her sisters of what she would do if ever she married a rich man, the honeymoon tour in Italy had been a leading feature in her programme; but in those girlish visions beside the schoolroom fire the husband had been a nonentity, a mere purse-bearer, and all her talk had been of the places she was to see. Now, with this very real husband, all earth was paradisaic, and Sorrento could not have seemed more like a dream of beauty than Penzance. She was exquisitely happy; and what can the human mind require beyond perfect bliss?
These wedded lovers lingered long over that summer holiday. It was an ideal summer—a summer of sunshine and cloudless skies, varied only by an occasional thunderstorm—tempest enjoyed by Vansittart and Eve, who loved Nature in her grand and awful as well as in her milder aspects—and a tempest from the heights above Boscastle, or from the grassy cliffs of the Lizard, is a spectacle to remember. They spun out the pleasures of that simple Cornish tour. There was nothing to call them home—no tie, no duty, only their own inclination; for the dowager Mrs. Vansittart was staying at Redwold, absorbed in worship of the third generation, and was to go from Redwold to Ireland for a round of visits to the friends of her early married life. The lovers were therefore free to prolong their wanderings, and it was only when the shortening days suggested fireside pleasures that Vansittart proposed going home.
“Going home,” cried Eve; “how sweet that sounds! To think that your home is to be my home for evermore; and the servants, your old, well-trained servants, will be bobbing to me as their mistress—I who never had any servant but dear old motherly Nancy, who treats me as if I were her own flesh and blood, and an untaught chit for a parlour-maid, a girl who was always dropping knives off her tray, or smashing the crockery, in a most distracting manner. We had only the cheapest things we could buy at Whiteley’s sales, with a few relics of former splendour; and it was generally the relics that suffered. I cannot imagine myself the mistress of a fine house, with a staff of capable servants. What an insignificant creature I shall seem among them!”
“You will seem a queen—a queen out of the great kingdom of poetry—a queen like Tennyson’s Maud, in a white frock, with roses in your hair, and an ostrich fan for a sceptre. Don’t worry about the house, Eve. It will govern itself. The servants are all old servants, and have been trained by my mother, whose laws are the laws of Draco. Everything will work by machinery, and you and I can live in the same happy idleness we have tasted here.”
“Can we? May we, do you think? Is it not a wicked life? We care only for ourselves; we think only of ourselves.”
“Oh, we can mend that in some wise. I’ll introduce you to all my cottage tenants; and you will find plenty of scope for your benevolence in helping them through their troubles and sicknesses. You can start a village reading-room; you can start—or revive—a working man’s club. You shall be Lady Bountiful—a young and blooming Bountiful—not dealing in herbs and medicines, but in tea, and wine, and sago puddings, and chicken broth; finding frocks for the children, and Sunday bonnets for the mothers—flashing across poverty’s threshold like a ray of sunshine.”
Life that seems like a happy dream seldom lasts very long. There is generally a rough awakening. Fate comes, like the servant bidden to call us of a morning, and shakes the sleeper by the shoulder. The dream vanishes through the ivory gate, and the waking world in all its harsh reality is there.