CHAPTER XV
EPITHALAMIUM
Our marriage day! Oh, day of days! Dawn of a new existence! All nature seemed to sympathise with us in our supernal joy. For us, for us alone in all the world the streamlets murmured, the breezes whispered together, the wavelets plashed musically, the blue sky glowed, the sun shone goldingly. The venerable pastor of the community—he who had watched over every man and woman present from infancy, who had christened, and married, and buried the whole population of the island as they require these offices—read the time-honoured service of the Church of England, which was followed with deepest reverential attention by all present. When he blessed our union in the solemn language of the ritual familiar to me in the days of my childhood, every head was bowed, each woman's eye was wet with heart-felt sympathy and warmest affection for their erst-while playmate.
The day was cloudless, a breeze at times sighed through the fragrant foliage of the grove wherein the little church had been built. The wavelets murmured on the beach, and the unresting surges seemed but to exchange loving memories of coral islands and crystal seas, of waving palms and the green gladness of tropic forests, of maidens, feather-crowned and flower-bejewelled, dancing on silver strands beneath the full-orbed midnight moon, or gliding, a laughing bevy of syrens, beneath the translucent wave. No sullen, dirge-like refrain on that paradisal day brought from the ocean voices the memory of drifting wrecks, of stormy seas, of drowned seamen—no hint of danger, of despair, of pestilence, and death; and yet all these phases of experience I had known and reckoned with even in my short life.
No; these and kindred ills were forgotten, banished from earth and sea. On this blissful morn the golden age of the earth seemed to have returned. Recalling the half-forgotten classics of my boyhood, I could fancy that I saw fauns peeping through the leaves of the orange grove, that the ages had reverted to the freshness of the elder world, when the flush of the fair Arcadian life informed all things with divinity.
And Miranda, my bride of brides! what words can describe her as she stood, with an expression half-timid, half-rapt, and inspired, before the humble altar that day? Her simple dress of virgin white which but slightly concealed while it outlined the curves of her statuesque form; her large dark eyes, which had often appeared to me to hold a shade of melancholy, were now irradiated by the love-light which she, in the purity and innocence of her heart, made no attempt to conceal. Her soft, abundant tresses had been gathered up into becoming form and classic simplicity, and, save a wreath of scarlet berries and the traditional orange blossom, she wore no ornament. As all unconscious of her maiden loveliness she stood beside me, with her head raised and an expectant smile which disclosed her pearly teeth, she seemed to my enraptured gaze a daughter of the wave,—no mortal maiden, but a being compact of air and sea and sky, visible but beneath the moonbeams, and unrevealed to the dwellers of the garish day.
We had been but a month wedded; our simple home, our tiny domain, our forest rambles, our sea-baths at dawn and eve, as yet contented us—filled us with all fullest delight in which mortal beings can revel beneath this ethereal dome. And yet the spirit of unrest, the veritable serpent of the world's fairest Aidenns, gradually found means to discover himself.
Miranda and I had, indeed, begun to discuss our projected voyage to Sydney, and I had many times described to her an ideal home on one of the thousand and one bays which render the northern shore of the unrivalled Sydney harbour matchless in beauty and convenience for those who, like myself, have salt water in their blood. She agreed with me, that with a boat, a garden, a bath-house, and a cottage built of the beautiful white, pink-veined sandstone, which is so abundant beneath and around Sydney, existence might be endured away from her island home, with the aid of books and the inspiring idea of the coming fortune.
"And even if we do not make money," she said, "as people call it—what a strange idea it seems to me, who have hardly ever seen any—we shall be happy. I can't imagine people who are married and love each other ever being unhappy. Then your mother and sisters—I am so much afraid of them. They will regard me as a kind of savage, I am sure; and, indeed, compared with them, or real civilised people, I am afraid that I shall feel like one. And, oh! shall we ever be happier than we are now? Why should we change? Do you think we can come back now and then and visit my people? I should break my heart if I thought I should see them no more!"