Part 48 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on, and that he and Helen would manage ”to get on”