“Buy us pots and pans, mamma,” said Gussy, laughing; “though perhaps earthen pipkins would do just as well in Italy. We shall not be such a credit to you, but we shall be much cheaper. There is always something in that.”
“Ah! Gussy, it is easy to speak now; but wait till you are buried in the cares of life,” said her mother, going away to superintend the arrangements for the ball in the evening. So grand a wedding was certainly very expensive; she never liked to tell anyone how much that great ceremonial cost.
A little later, the little church dressed itself in a few modest spring flowers, and the school-children, with baskets full of primroses—the last primroses of the season—made a carpet under Gussy’s feet as she, in her turn, went along the familiar path between the village gravestones, a bride. There were not more than a dozen people at the breakfast, and Lady Augusta’s little brougham took them to the station afterwards, where they set out quite humbly and cheerily by an ordinary train.
“Quite good enough for a Consul,” Gussy said, always the first to laugh at her own humbleness. She wore a grey gown to go away in, which did not cost a tenth part so much as Lady Granton’s, and the Post took no notice of them. They wandered about their own country for a week or two, like the Babes in the Wood, Gussy said, expected in no great country house, retiring into no stately seclusion, but into the far more complete retirement of common life and common ways. Gussy, as she was proud to tell, had learned to do many things in her apprenticeship to the sisters of the Charity-house as associate of the order; and I think the pleasure to her of this going forth unattended, unsuspected, in the freedom of a young wife—the first smack of absolute freedom which women ever taste—had something far more exquisite in it to Gussy than any delight her sister could have in her more splendid honeymoon. Lord and Lady Granton were limited, and kept in curb by their own very greatness; they were watched over by their servants, and kept by public opinion in the right way; but Edgar and Gassy went where they would, as free as the winds, and thought of nobody’s opinion. The Consul in this had an unspeakable advantage over the Earl.
They got to their home at last on a May evening, when Italy is indeed Paradise; they had driven all day long from the Genoa side along the lovely Riviera di Levante, tracing the gracious curves from village to village along that enchanting way. The sun was setting when they came in sight of Spezzia, and before they reached the house which had been taken for them, the Angelus was sounding from the church, and the soft dilating stars of Italian skies had come out to hear the homely litany sung shrilly in side-chapels, and out of doors, among the old nooks of the town, of the angelic song, “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” The women were singing in an old three-cornered piazzetta, close under the loggia of the Consul’s house, which looked upon the sea. On the sea itself the magical sky was shining with all those listening stars. In Italy the stars take more interest in human life than they do in this colder sphere. Those that were proper to that space of heaven, crowded together, Edgar thought to himself, to see his bride. On the horizon the sea and sky blended in one infinite softness and blueness; the lights began to twinkle in the harbour and in its ships; the far-off villages among the woods lent other starry tapers to make the whole landscape kind and human. Heaven and earth were softly illuminated, not for them—for the dear common uses and ends of existence; yet unconsciously with a softer and fuller lustre, because of the eyes that looked upon them so newly, as if earth and heaven, and the kindly light, and all the tender bonds of humanity, had been created fresh that very day.
THE END.
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