Miss Ley took care to learn at which hotel Bella meant to stay in Milan, and when the pair arrived, at the beginning of their honeymoon, they found awaiting them in their friend’s neat and scholarly writing a little ironical letter, enclosing as wedding-present a cheque for five hundred pounds. This enabled them to travel more sumptuously than at first seemed possible, and meaning to spend the worst of the winter at Naples, without fearing the expense they could linger on their way in one charming town after another. Herbert was full of enthusiasm, and for a while seemed entirely to regain health. He forgot the disease which ate away silently his living tissue, and formed extravagant hopes for the future. His energy was such that Bella had much difficulty in restraining his eagerness to the sights of which for so many years he had vainly dreamed. His passion for the sunshine, the blue skies, and the flowers, was wonderful to see, yet Bella’s heart ached often, though with greatest care she trained her countenance to cheerfulness, because this singular capacity for life to her anxious mind seemed to forebode a short continuance. He was gathering into one feverish moment all that others spread over a generation.
In the constant companionship his character unfolded itself, and she learnt how charming was his disposition, how sweet and unselfish his temper. Admiring him each day more ardently, she enjoyed his little airs of masculine superiority, for he would not consent to be treated as an invalid, and somewhat resented her motherly care. On the contrary, he was full of solicitude for her comfort, and took upon himself all necessary arrangements, the ordering of details and so forth, of which she would most willingly have relieved him. He had ingenuous ideas about a husband’s authority, to which Bella, not without a sly amusement, delighted to submit. She knew herself stronger not only in health, but in character, yet it diverted her to fall in with his fancy that she was the weaker vessel. When she feared that Herbert would tire himself, simulated fatigue, and then his anxiety, his self-reproach were quite touching. He never forgot how great was his debt to Bella, and sometimes his gratitude brought to her eyes, so that she sought to persuade him nothing at all was due. Ignorant of the world, his behaviour formed chiefly on books, Herbert used his wife with the gallant courtesy of some Shakespearian lover, writing sonnets which to her mind rang with the very nobility of marital passion; and under the breath of his romantic devotion the dull years fell away from her heart, so that she felt younger and fairer and more gay. Her sobriety was coloured by a not unpleasing flippancy, and she leavened his strenuous enthusiasm with kindly banter. But as though the sun called out his own youth, dissipating the dark Northern humours, sometimes he was boyish as a lad of sixteen, and then, talking nonsense to one another, they shouted with laughter at their own facetiousness. The world, they say, is a mirror whereon, if you look smiling, joyous smiles are reflected; and thus it seemed to them as if the whole earth approved their felicity. The flowers bloomed to fit their happiness, and the loveliness of Nature was only a frame to their great content.
“D’you know, we began a conversation two months ago,” he said once, “and we’ve never come to an end yet. I find you more interesting every day.”
“I am a very good listener, I know,” she answered, laughing. “Nothing gives one a surer reputation for being a conversationalist.”
“It’s no good paying spiteful things to me when you look like that,” he cried, for her eyes rested on him with the most caressing tenderness.
“I think you’re growing very vain.”
“How can I help it when you’re my wedded wife? And you’re so absolutely beautiful.”
“What!” she exclaimed. “If you talk such rubbish to me, I’ll double your dose of cod-liver-oil.”
“But it’s true,” he said eagerly, so that Bella, though she knew her comeliness existed only in his imagination, flushed with delight. “I love your eyes, and when I look into them I feel I have no will of my own. The other day in Florence you called my attention to someone who was good-looking, and she wasn’t a patch on you!”
“Good heavens, I believe the boy’s serious!” she cried, but her eyes filled with tears and her voice broke into a sob.