'Delicia!' he whispered—'Delicia, I love you!'
There was no audible answer. Sarasate's violin discoursed suitable love-passages, and the moon smiled as if she would have spoken, but Delicia was silent. She had no need of speech—her eyes were sufficiently eloquent. She felt herself drawn with a passionate force into her lover's strong arms, and clasped firmly, even jealously, to his broad breast; and like a dove, which after long journeyings finds its home at last, she thought she had found hers, and folding her spirit-wings, she nestled in and was content.
Clinging to this great and generous protector who thus assumed the guardianship of her life, she marvelled innocently at her own good fortune, and asked herself what she had done to deserve such ineffable happiness. And he? He too, at this particular juncture, may be given credit for nobler emotions than those which ordinarily swayed him. He was really very much in love; and Love, for the time being, governed his nature and made him a less selfish man than usual. When he held Delicia in his arms, and kissed her dewy lips and fragrant hair for the first time, he was filled with a strange ecstasy, such as might have moved the soul of Adam when, on rising from deep sleep, he found embodied Beauty by his side as 'help-meet' through his life for ever. He was conscious that in Delicia he had won not only a sweet woman, but a rare intelligence; a spirit far above the average,—a character tempered and trained to finest issues,—and from day to day he studied the grace of her form, the fairness of her skin, the lustre of her eyes, with an ever-deepening intensity of delight which imparted a burning, masterful ardour to the manner of his wooing, and brought her whole nature into a half-timid, half-joyous subjection—the kind of subjection which might impel a great queen to take off her crown and lay it at the feet of some splendid warrior, in order that he might share her throne and kingdom. And in this case the splendid warrior was only too ready to accept the offered sovereignty. Certainly he loved Delicia; loved her with very real and almost fierce passion,—the passion that leaps up like a tall, bright flame, and dies down to a dull ember; but he could hardly be altogether insensible to the advantages he personally gained by loving her. He could not but exult at the thought that he, with nothing but his handsome appearance and good birth to recommend him, had won this woman whose very name was a lode-star of intellectual attraction over half the habitable globe, and, in the very midst of the ardent caresses he lavished upon her, he was unable to entirely forget the fortune she had made, and which she was adding to every day. Then she was charming in herself, too—lovely, though not at all so according to the accepted 'music-hall' standard of height and fleshy prominence; she was more like the poet's dream of 'Kilmeny in Fairyland' than the 'beauty' of eighteenpenny-photograph fame; but she was, as Carlyon himself said, 'as natural as a rose—no paint, no dye, no purchased hair cut from the heads of female convicts, no sickly perfumes, no padding, nothing in the least artificial about her.' And hearing this, his particular 'chum' in the Guards Club said,—
'Lucky dog! You don't deserve such a "draw" in the matrimonial lottery!'
And Carlyon, smiling a superior smile, looked in a conveniently near mirror, and replied,—
'Perhaps not! But—'
A flash of the fine eyes, and a touch of the Beautiful Sullenness manner finished the sentence. It was evident that the gallant officer was not at all in doubt as to his own value, however much other folks might be disposed to consider the pecuniary and other advantages of his marriage as altogether exceeding his merits.
Yet, on the whole, most people, with that idiotic inconsistency which characterises the general social swarm, actually pitied him when they heard what was going to happen. They made round eyes of astonishment, shook their heads and said, 'Poor Carlyon!' Why they made round eyes or shook their heads, they could not themselves have explained, but they did so. 'Poor,' Carlyon certainly was; and his tailor's bill was an appalling one. But 'they,'—the five-o'clock-tea gossips, knew nothing about the tailor's bill—that was a private affair,—one of those indecent commonplaces of life which are more or less offensive to persons of high distinction, who always find something curiously degrading in paying their tradesmen. 'They' saw Carlyon as he appeared to them—superb of stature, proud of bearing, and Greekly 'god-like' of feature—and that he was always irreproachably dressed was sufficient for them, though not for the unpaid tailor who fitted him so admirably. Looking at him in all his glory, 'they' shuddered at the thought that he—this splendid specimen of manhood—was actually going to marry a—what?
'A novelist, my dear! just think of it!' feebly screamed Mrs Tooksey over her Queen Anne silver teapot. 'Poor Wilfred Carlyon! Such a picturesque figure of a man! How awful for him!'
And Mrs Snooksey, grabbing viciously at muffin, chorused, 'Dreadful, isn't it! A female authoress!'—this, with a fine disregard of the fact that an authoress is generally a female. 'No doubt steeped in ink and immorality! Poor Carlyon! My mother knew his father!'