“After all,” she added, “when all’s said and done, we are no worse off than our neighbours. None of us, it seems to me, get any more than the rags and fragments of their hearts’ desires, and yet we all manage to make life jolly on them. We do, John,” she said, with a gay little laugh.—It was wonderful how she managed it with her heart quivering.—“Look in my face and say we do!”
He looked in her face, and he kissed her.
CHAPTER XXV.
When Strange set out on his honeymoon, it was with a distinct project simmering in his brain. He meditated a good three months’ loiter through the byways of the Tyrol, on into Switzerland, and then home through the towns of the Netherlands, and all by routes best known to himself.
It becomes, however, a moral impossibility for a man to loiter with any comfort by the side of a new-made wife, into whose very bones and marrow the spirit of unrest has crept, and so, by intangible gradations the loiter had developed into a tumultuous forging on.
Gwen seemed possessed by a very dignified and quite calm-seeming devil; he was a gentlemanly creature and made no untoward fuss or excitement, but movement he must have, he dared not rest.
In spite of herself, Gwen found growing in her from the very day of her marriage, a craving, full of subdued fierceness, to be in the very middle of the hurly-burly, no matter whether it raged in a fashionable hotel, or, in the market-place of a country town. She had, besides, other uncomfortable ways. In valleys, where the sun shone and the wind rested, and where ordinary mortals were bathed in a soft entrancement of delight, she seemed to lose half her life.
On the contrary, she lived, her voice regained its timbre, her eyes shone, her mouth laughed, her very hair sparkled with vitality, as soon as ever she got high on a mountain—the bleaker and harsher the better.
One day they had climbed to the top of the D’Auburg, a dour-looking mountain in the Tyrol generally avoided of tourists, but for some reason Gwen took it into her head to ascend it.
She now sat glowing and tingling with radiant health, leaning up against a rock that sheltered her from the blast that was screeching across the ledge of the mountain. She looked as cool, and as beautiful and unruffled, as if she had just dropped from the clouds, instead of climbing up to them by a most villainous path. There was always a sort of exotic splendour about her, and yet she never seemed out of place.