Vera Nevill Part 48

Vera felt convinced by this time that she had to do with a raving lunatic. After all, was it not better to do this small thing for him, and to get rid of him. She knew that, sooner or later, down at Sutton, or up in London, she and Maurice were likely to meet. It would not be much trouble to her to place the small parcel in his hands. Surely, to deliver herself from this man--to save Cissy's beloved china, and, perchance, her own throat--for what might he not take a fancy to next!--from the clutches of this madman, it would be easier to do what he wanted.

"Yes, I will give it to him. I promise you, if you will only put that vase down and go away."

"You will promise me faithfully?"

"Faithfully."

"On your word of honour, and as you hope for salvation?"

"Yes, yes. There is no need for oaths; if I have promised, I will do it."

"Very well." He placed the vase back upon the table and walked to the door. "Mademoiselle," he said, making her a low bow, "I am infinitely obliged to you;" and then, without another word, he opened the door and was gone.

Three minutes later Mrs. Hazeldine came in. She was just back from her drive. She found Vera lying back exhausted and breathless in an arm-chair.

"My dear, what have you done to Monsieur D'Arblet? I met him running out of the house like a madman, and laughing to himself like a little fiend.

He nearly knocked me down. What has happened! Have you accepted him?"

"No, I have refused him," gasped Vera; "but, thank G.o.d, I have saved your 'Long Eliza,' Cissy!"

Early the following morning one of Mrs. Hazeldine's servants was despatched in a hansom with a small brown paper parcel and a note to the Charing Cross Hotel.

During the night watches Miss Nevill had been seized with misgivings concerning the mysterious mission wherewith she had been charged.

But the servant, the parcel, and the note all returned together just as they had been sent.

"Monsieur D'Arblet has left town, Miss; he went by the tidal train last night on his way to the Continent, and has left no address."

So Vera tore up her own note, and locked up the offending parcel in her dressing-case.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A WEDDING TOUR.

Thus Grief still treads upon the heels of Pleasure; Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

Congreve.

We all know that weddings are as old as the world, but who is it that invented wedding tours? Owing to what delusion were they first inst.i.tuted?

For a wedding feast there is a reasonable cause, just as there is for a funeral luncheon, or a christening dinner. There has been in each instance a trying ordeal to be gone through in a public church. It is quite right that there should be eating and drinking, and a certain amount of jollification afterwards amongst the unoffending guests who have been dragged in as spectators on the occasion. But why on earth, when the day is over, cannot the unhappy couple be left alone to eat a Darby-and-Joan dinner together in the house in which they propose to live, and return peacefully on the morrow to the avocation of their daily lives? Why must they be sent off amid a shower of rice and shabby satin shoes into an enforced banishment from the society of their fellow-creatures, and so thrown upon each other that, in nine cases out of ten, for want of something better to do, they have learnt the way to quarrel, tooth and nail, before the week is out?

I believe that a great many marriages that are as likely as not to turn out in the end very happily are utterly prevented from doing so by that pernicious and utterly childish custom of keeping up the season known as the honeymoon. "Honey," by the way, is very sweet, doubtless; but there is nothing on earth which sensible people get sooner tired of. Three days of an exclusively saccharine diet is about as much as any grown man or woman can be reasonably expected to stand; after that period there comes upon the jaded appet.i.te unlawful longings after strong meats and anchovies, after turtle-soup and devilled bones, such as no sugar-fed couple has the poetic right to indulge in. Nevertheless, like a snake in the gra.s.s, the insidious desire will creep into the soul of one or other of the two. There will be, doubtless, a n.o.ble struggle to stifle the treacherous thought; a vigorous effort to bring back the wandering mind into the path of duty; a conscientious effort to go on enjoying honeycomb as though no flavour of richer viands had been wafted to the nostrils of the imagination. The sweet and poetical food will be lifted once more resolutely to the lips, but only to create a sickening satiety from which the nauseated victim finally revolts in desperation. Then come yearnings and weariness, loss of appet.i.te, and consequent loss of temper; tears on the one side, an oath or two on the other, and the "happy couple" come home eventually very much wiser, as a rule, than they started, and certainly in a position to understand several unpleasant truths concerning each other of which they had not a suspicion before they went away.

Now, if this is too often the melancholy finale to a wedding trip, even with regard to persons who start forth on it full of hopes of happiness, of faith in each other, and of fervent affection on both sides, how much worse is not the case when there are small hopes of happiness, no faith whatever on one side, and of affection none at all on the other?

This was how it was with Captain and Mrs. Maurice Kynaston on their six weeks' wedding trip abroad. They went to a great many places they had neither of them seen before. They stayed a week in Paris, where Helen bought more dresses and declared herself supremely happy; they visited the falls of the Rhine, which Maurice said deafened him; and ran through Switzerland, which they both voted detestably uncomfortable and dirty--the hotels, _bien entendu_, not the mountains. They stopped a night on the St. Gothard, which was too cold for them, and a week or two at the Italian lakes, which were too hot. They sauntered through the picture-galleries of Milan and Turin, at which places Maurice's yawns became prolonged and audible; and they floated through the ca.n.a.ls of Venice in gondolas, which Helen a.s.serted to be more ragged and full of fleas than any London four-wheeler. And then they turned homewards, and by the time they neared the sh.o.r.es of the Channel once more they had had so many quarrels that they had forgotten to count them, and they had both privately discovered that matrimony is an egregious and, alas! an irreparable mistake. Such a discovery was possibly inevitable; perhaps they would have come in time to the same conclusion had they remained at home, but they certainly found it out all the quicker for having gone abroad.

Helen, perhaps, was the most to be pitied of the two. For Maurice there had been no illusions to dispel, no dreams to be dissipated, no castles built upon the sand to fall shattered into atoms; he had known very well what he had to expect; he did not love the wife he was marrying, and he did love somebody else. It had not, therefore, been a brilliant prospect of bliss. Nevertheless, he had certainly hoped, with that vague kind of hope in which Englishmen are p.r.o.ne to indulge, that things would "come right" in some fashion, and that he and Helen would manage "to get on"

together. That they did not do so was an annoyance, but hardly a surprise to him.

But to Helen there was a good deal of unexpected grief and mortification of soul. She, at all events, had loved him; it was her own strength of will, the fervour of her own lawless pa.s.sion for him that had carried the day, and had, in the end, made her his wife. And she had said to herself that, once married to him, she would make him love her.

Alas, in love there is no such thing as compulsion! The heart that loves, loves freely, spontaneously, unreasonably; and, where love is dead, there neither entreaties nor prayers, nor yet a whole ocean of tears can serve to re-awaken the frail blossom into life.

But Helen had made sure that, once absolutely her own, once irrevocably separated from the girl whom instinct had taught her to regard as her rival, Maurice would return to the old allegiance, and learn to love her once more, as in days now long gone by.

A very short experience served to convince her of the contrary. Maurice yawned too openly, was too evidently wearied and bored with her society, too utterly indifferent to her sayings and her doings, for her to delude herself long with the hope of regaining his affection. It was all the same to him whatever she did. If she showered caresses upon him, he submitted meekly, it is true, but with so evident a distaste to the operation that she learnt to discontinue the kisses he cared for so little; if she tried to amuse him with her conversation, he appeared to be thinking of other things; if she gave her opinion, he hardly seemed to listen to it. Only when they quarrelled did the slightest animation enter into their conjugal relations; and it was almost better to quarrel than to be at peace on such terms as these.

And then Helen got angry with him; angry and sore, wounded in her heart, and hurt in her vanity. She said to herself that she had been ready to become the best and most devoted of wives; to study his wishes, to defer to his opinion, to surround him with loving attentions; but since he would not have it so, then so much the worse for him. She would be no model wife; no meek slave, subservient to his caprices. She would go her own way, and follow her own will, and make him do what she liked, whether it pleased him or not.

Had Maurice cared to struggle with her for the mastery, things might have ended differently, but it did not seem worth his while to struggle; as long as she let him alone, and did not fret him with her incessant jealousies and suspicions, he was content to let her do as she liked.

Even in that matter of living at Kynaston he learnt, in the end, to give way to her. Sir John, who had already started for Australia, had particularly requested him to occupy the house. Lady Kynaston did nothing but urge it in every letter. Helen herself was bent upon it. There was no good reason that he could bring forward against so reasonable and sensible a plan. The house was all ready, newly decorated, and newly furnished; they had nothing to do but to walk into it. It would save all trouble in looking out for a country home elsewhere, and would, doubtless, be an infinitely pleasanter abode for them than any other house could be. It was the natural and rational thing for them to do.

Maurice knew of only one argument against it, and that one was in his own heart, and he could speak of it to no one.

And yet, after all, what did it matter, what difference would it make? A little nearer, a little further, how could it alter things for either of them? How lessen the impa.s.sable gulf between her and him? It was in the natural course of things that he must meet her at times; there would be the stereotyped greeting, the averted glance, the cold shake of hands that could never hope to meet without a pang; these things were almost inevitable for them. A little oftener or a little seldomer, would it matter very much then?

Maurice did not think it would; bound as he was to the woman whom he had made his wife--tied to her by every law of G.o.d and of man, of honour, and of manly feeling--that there should be any actual danger to be run by the near proximity of the woman he had loved, did not even enter into his head. If he had known how to do his duty towards Helen before he had married her, would he not tenfold know how to do so now? Possibly he over-rated his own strength; for, however high are our principles, however exalted is our sense of honour--after all, we are but mortals, and unspeakably weak at the very best.

It did not in any case occur to him to look at the question from Vera's point of view. It is never easy for a man to put himself into a woman's place, or to enter into the extra sensitiveness of soul with which she is endowed.

So it was that he agreed to go straight back to Kynaston, and to make the old house his permanent home according to his wife's wishes.

It was whilst the newly-married couple were pa.s.sing through Switzerland on their homeward journey that they suddenly came across Mr. Herbert Pryme, who had been performing a melancholy and solitary pilgrimage in the land of tourists.

It was at the table d'hote at Vevay, upon coming down to that lengthy and untempting repast, chiefly composed of aged goats and stringy hens, which the inventive Swiss waiter exalts, with the effort of a soaring imagination, into "Chamois," and "Salmi de Poulet," that Captain and Mrs.

Kynaston, who had scarcely recovered from a pa.s.sage of arms in the seclusion of their bed-chamber, suddenly descried a familiar face amongst the long array of uncongenial people ranged down either side of the table.

What the print of a hob-nailed boot must be to the lonely traveller across the desert, what the sight of a man from one's own club going down Pall Mall is in mid-September, or as a draught of Giesler's '68 to an epicure who has been about to perish on ginger-beer--so did Herbert Pryme's face shine upon Maurice Kynaston out of the arid waste of that Vevay _salle-a-manger_.

In England he had been only an acquaintance--at Vevay he became his most intimate friend. The delight of having a man to speak to, and a man who knew others of his friends, was almost intoxicating. To think of getting one evening--nay, one hour of liberty from that ever-present chain of matrimonial intercourse which was galling him so sorely, was a bliss for which he could hardly find words to express his grat.i.tude.

Herbert, who could not quite understand the reason of it, was almost overpowered by the warmth of Captain Kynaston's greeting. To have his place removed next to his own, and to grasp him heartily by both hands, wringing them with affectionate fervour, was the work of a few seconds.

And then, who so lively, so full of anecdote and laughter, so interested in all that could be said to him, as Maurice Kynaston during that dinner?

It made Helen angry to hear him. He could be agreeable enough, she thought, bitterly, to a chance acquaintance, picked up n.o.body knew where; he could find plenty of conversation for this almost unknown young man; it was only when they were alone together that he sat by glumly and silently, without a smile and without a word!

She did not take it into account how surfeited the man was with his honeycomb. Herbert Pryme, individually, was nothing much to him; but he came as the sight of a distant sail is to a shipwrecked mariner. It is doubtful, indeed, whether, under the circ.u.mstances, Maurice would not have been equally delighted to have met his tailor or his bootmaker.

After dinner was over the two men went out and smoked their cigars together. This was a fresh offence to Mrs. Kynaston; usually she enjoyed an evening stroll with her husband after dinner, but when he asked her to come out with him on this occasion, she refused, shortly and ungraciously.

"No, thank you; if you and Mr. Pryme are going to smoke, I could not possibly come; you know that I hate smoke."

Poor Herbert was about to protest that nothing would induce him to smoke; but Maurice pa.s.sed his arm hurriedly through his.