Part 16 (1/2)

'What is it, little Love?' asked Wemyss.

'Kiss me,' she said; and he laughed and kissed her, but hastily, because he wanted her to go on admiring the view.

She still, however, held up her face. 'Kiss my eyes,' she whispered, keeping them shut. 'They're tired----'

He laughed again, but with a slight impatience, and kissed her eyes; and then, suddenly struck by her little blind face so close to his, the strong light from the big window showing all its delicate curves and delicious softnesses, his Lucy's face, his own little wife's, he kissed her really, as she loved him to kiss her, becoming absorbed only in his love.

'Oh, I love you, love you----' murmured Lucy, clinging to him, making secret vows of sensibleness, of wholesomeness, of a determined, unfailing future simplicity.

'Aren't we happy,' he said, pausing in his kisses to gaze down at what was now his face, for was it not much more his than hers? Of course it was his. She never saw it, except when she specially went to look, but he saw it all the time; she only had duties in regard to it, but he was on the higher plane of only having joys. She washed it, but he kissed it. And he kissed it when he liked and as much as ever he liked. 'Isn't it wonderful being married,' he said, gazing down at this delightful thing that was his very own for ever.

'Oh--wonderful!' murmured Lucy, opening her eyes and gazing into his.

Her face broke into a charming smile. 'You have the dearest eyes,' she said, putting up her finger and gently tracing his eyebrows with it.

Wemyss's eyes, full at that moment of love and pride, were certainly dear eyes, but a noise at the other end of the room made Lucy jump so in his arms, gave her apparently such a fright, that when he turned his head to see who it was daring to interrupt them, daring to startle his little girl like that, and beheld the parlourmaid, his eyes weren't dear at all but very angry.

The parlourmaid had come in with the coffee; and seeing the two interlaced figures against the light of the big window had pulled up short, uncertain what to do. This pulling up had jerked a spoon off its saucer onto the floor with a loud rattle because of the floor not having a carpet on it and being of polished oak, and it was this noise that made Lucy jump so excessively that her jump actually made Wemyss jump too.

In the parlourmaid's untrained phraseology there had been a good deal of billing and cooing during luncheon, and even in the hall before luncheon there were examples of it, but what she found going on in the library was enough to make anybody stop dead and upset things,--it was such, she said afterwards in the kitchen, that if she didn't know for a fact that they were really married she wouldn't have believed it. Married people in the parlourmaid's experience didn't behave like that. What affection there was was exhibited before, and not after, marriage. And she went on to describe the way in which Wemyss--thus briefly and irreverently did they talk of their master in the kitchen--had flown at her for having come into the library. 'After telling me to,' she said. 'After saying, ”We'll 'ave coffee in the library.”' And they all agreed, as they had often before agreed, that if it weren't that he was in London half the time they wouldn't stay in the place five minutes.

Meanwhile Wemyss and Lucy were sitting side by side in two enormous chairs facing the unlit library fire drinking their coffee. The fire was only lit in the evenings, explained Wemyss, after the 1st of April; the weather ought to be warm enough by then to do without fires in the daytime, and if it wasn't it was its own look-out.

'Why did you jump so?' he asked. 'You gave me such a start. I couldn't think what was the matter.'

'I don't know,' said Lucy, faintly flus.h.i.+ng. 'Perhaps'--she smiled at him over the arm of the enormous chair in which she almost totally disappeared--'because the maid caught us.'

'Caught us?'

'Being so particularly affectionate.'

'I like that,' said Wemyss. 'Fancy feeling guilty because you're being affectionate to your own husband.'

'Oh, well,' laughed Lucy, 'don't forget I haven't had him long.'

'You're such a complicated little thing. I shall have to take you seriously in hand and teach you to be natural. I can't have you having all sorts of finicking ideas about not doing this and not doing the other before servants. Servants don't matter. I never consider them.'

'I wish you had considered the poor parlourmaid,' said Lucy, seeing that he was in an unoffended frame of mind. 'Why did you give her such a dreadful scolding?'

'Why? Because she made you jump so. You couldn't have jumped more if you had thought it was a ghost. I won't have your flesh being made to creep.'

'But it crept much worse when I heard the things you said to her.'

'Nonsense. These people have to be kept in order. What did the woman mean by coming in like that?'

'Why, you told her to bring us coffee.'

'But I didn't tell her to make an infernal noise by dropping spoons all over the place.'