Part 16 (1/2)
When Leone expressed any anxiety or sorrow over his separation from his parents, he would laugh and answer:
”Never mind, my darling, it will be all right when I am of age. Never mind, darling, you will have my mother asking for the pleasure of knowing you then--the tables will be turned; let the great world once see you, and you will be wors.h.i.+ped for your beauty, your grace, and your talent.”
She looked wistfully at him.
”Do they love beauty so much in your world, Lance?” she asked.
”Yes, as a rule, a beautiful face has a wonderful influence. I have known women without a t.i.the of your beauty, Leone, rise from quite third-rate society to find a place among the most exclusive and n.o.blest people in the land. Your face would win for you, darling, an entrance anywhere.”
”The only thing I want my face to do,” she said, ”is to please your mother.”
”And that, when she sees it, it is quite sure to do,” replied the lover-husband.
”Lance,” said Lady Chandos, ”what shall we do if your parents will neither forgive us nor see us?”
”It will be very uncomfortable,” said Lord Chandos; ”but we shall have to bear it. It will not much matter so far as worldly matters are concerned; when I am of age I shall have a separate and very handsome fortune of my own. My mother will soon want to know you when you become the fas.h.i.+on--as you will, Leone.”
So she dismissed the future from her mind. She would not think of it.
She had blind reliance, blind confidence in her husband; he seemed so carelessly happy and indifferent she could not think there was anything vitally wrong. She was so unutterably happy, so wonderfully, thoroughly happy. Her life was a poem, the sweetest love-story ever written or sung.
”Why am I so happy?” she would ask herself at times; ”why has Heaven given me so much? all I ever asked for--love and happiness?”
She did not know how to be grateful enough.
One morning in autumn, a warm, beautiful morning, when the sun shone on the rich red and brown foliage--they were out together on the fair river--the tide was rising and the boat floated lazily on the stream.
Lady Chandos wore a beautiful dress of amber and black that suited her dark, brilliant beauty to perfection. She lay back among the velvet cus.h.i.+ons, smiling as her eyes lingered on the sky, the trees, the stream.
”You look very happy, Leone,” said Lord Chandos.
”I am very happy,” she replied. ”I wrote to my uncle yesterday, Lance. I should like to send him a box filled with everything he likes best.”
”You shall, if it pleases you, my darling,” he answered.
She leaned over the side of the boat watching the water, drawing her hand through the clear stream.
”Happy,” she repeated, rather to herself than to him; ”I can safely say this, that I have had so much happiness since I have been here that if I were wretched all my life afterward I should still have had far more happiness than falls to the lot of many people.”
She remembered those words in after years; and she owned to herself that they had been most perfectly true.
The few months pa.s.sed at River View had been most perfectly happy--no shade of care had come over her, no doubt, no fear--nothing that chilled the warmth of her love, nothing that marred its perfect trust. In some lives there comes a pause of silent, intense bliss just before the storm, even as the wind rests before the hurricane.
”You make me very proud, Leone,” said Lord Chandos, ”when you tell me of your happiness; I can only say may it be like the light of heaven, eternal.”
CHAPTER XIV.
”TRUE UNTIL DEATH.”
For some long months that case stood on the records. Every paper in England had some mention of it; as a rule people laughed when they read anything about it. They said it was a case of Corydon and Phyllis, a dairy-maid's love, a farce, a piece of romantic nonsense on the part of a young n.o.bleman who ought to know better. It created no sensation; the papers did not make much of it; they simply reported a pet.i.tion on the part of the Right Honorable the Earl of Lanswell and Lucia, his wife, that the so-called marriage contracted by their son, Lancelot, Lord Chandos, should be set aside as illegal, on account of his being a minor, and having married without their consent.