Lucian,” she said, half shocked, “but you shouldn’t think about me in church!”
“Yes, I should,” said Lucian. “I shall think about you everywhere. Besides, we shall go to church together all our lives, you know, at Toppings. Then we’ll remember to-day.”
“As if we could ever forget it!” said Amethyst dreamily, while her heart beat, and her eyes shone.
“I never shall, as long as I live,” said Lucian. “Look there, look at those long-tailed tits swinging in the hedge. Do you know they grow those long tails quite smooth and straight in a little round nest? How do they manage it?”
Lucian made his profession of life-long remembrance, and called her attention to the tits, much in the same tone of voice. He was not an emotional person, and his talk was mostly of what passed before his observant eyes.
But fate did not intend that either of them should forget that summer Sunday when “all in the blue unclouded weather” they looked forward to the life that they were beginning together, in a world that seemed to them both very good, with the Heavenly City in a rainbow-tinted mist, far – far ahead of them.
Chapter Nine
Tony
The wedding was fixed for the middle of July, and, in the middle of June, Lucian went to Toppings to arrange for having it prepared for the reception of his bride. His long minority had left him with plenty of ready money; but neither he nor Amethyst had grown-up sufficiently to have much desire for house-decoration of an aesthetic kind. They were much more full of the long foreign tour, which was to follow their marriage, than of the details of their future house-keeping. He was also obliged to pay a visit to some elderly relations in his own county, so that he was absent from Cleverley for nearly a fortnight.
Amethyst meanwhile was free to give her mind to her wedding garments, which delighted Lady Haredale even more than the bride herself. Money or credit had been found for the trousseau, and Amethyst was too inexperienced to know that it was both very costly, and rather inadequate.
A visit, in the course of the wedding tour, was to be paid to Miss Haredale at Lausanne, where she was spending the summer, and Amethyst had few anticipations more delightful than that of showing her Lucian to “auntie,” whose congratulations had been full of incredulous pleasure.
In the meantime, Lady Haredale had been as sympathetic as a girl, promoting the love-idyll in every possible way, and devising the loveliest and most original costumes for her daughter. Amethyst set her own girlish fancy on an “amethyst” velvet, which she considered suitable to a young married lady, and felt would be becoming to herself; but she cared most to have her riding habit exactly what Lucian thought correct, and to choose hats of the shapes and colours which he admired.
She went to London with Lady Haredale for a few days during his absence, to complete these arrangements, and there, in the brief intervals when her mind was not taken up with her lover’s letters, or with the engrossing business of the trousseau, she fancied that Lady Haredale was less cheery and light-hearted than usual. Her father, who was very little at Cleverley, met them in London, and disappointed her by his want of interest in her prospects, and by the captious, irritable annoyance with which he turned off any mention of the wedding. She returned to Cleverley with her mother, while Lucian was still absent, and found there Major Fowler, who had, he said, “been backwards and forwards” during Lady Haredale’s absence. Amethyst’s first view of the great “Tony” had been that he was a middle-aged gentleman, an uninteresting but worthy family friend.
Therefore it appeared to her quite natural that the girls should be “very fond of him,” as Tory, with a wicked twinkle in her eye, declared herself to be. Amethyst herself behaved to him graciously, as a person that she expected to know and like, but rather respectfully, as belonging to her elders.
She thought so little about him, that it was not until Lucian expressed a dislike to him, that she realised that there was something about him that she did not like herself. She was not shy; but he had a way sometimes of staring at her that made her uncomfortable, and, almost unconsciously, she held him at a distance and did not fall into the free intercourse with him practised by her sisters. Her mother called him “poor Tony,” and had explained him in the following manner some time before.
“You see, my dear, the poor fellow has been very unlucky. Of course I don’t enter into the questions between him and Mrs Fowler; she wasn’t a pleasant woman, and she is dead now. I’m sure he had his excuses. Besides, that is all over and done with, and I hate picking holes in people, one should take them as one finds them. This is his refuge; he is very domestic. Men are quite lost without a woman to turn to.”
“I suppose he is a very old friend,” said Amethyst, quite simply.
“Oh yes, darling; six or seven years I’ve known him. He was at Nice once with us, and he used to run down to Twickenham. But you know, as my lord is so much away, I always make a point of having the children about. That is why they have been so much in the drawing-room, and lost their schooling, poor dears!”
Amethyst blushed with a confused sense of misgiving, as her mother fixed her sweet, shallow eyes upon her. The apologetic tone seemed out of place.
Her time had been, however, too much taken up by Lucian for Major Fowler to come much in her way, though she was glad when now, on their return from London, after an hour’s chat with Lady Haredale, he went off by the train, without any definite promise of an immediate return.
Lady Haredale drew a long sigh as she watched him go.
“Things come to an end!” she said sentimentally. “Who would have thought it of poor Tony?”
“Thought what, mother?” said Amethyst.
“Ah, that’s a secret! Well, it’s all for the best. Nothing can go on for ever. But I don’t know. – Well! I never look forward. There’s a way out of everything. I never knew a bother, that I didn’t see round the corner of it soon!”
Lady Haredale laughed, and Amethyst looked at her, admiring her cheery sweetness; but presently the mother’s brows drew together, and she bit her lip sharply, then smiled suddenly, and, with the confidential air, which yet bestowed no confidence, said, —
“Men never believe that one has any tact at all!” and walked away.
Amethyst was puzzled; sometimes she felt as if, in addition to all other blessings, her marriage would be a refuge from a home that might have many perplexities. Her mother was occasionally mysterious. Tory threw out hints, which Amethyst did not choose to follow up. Una was ill and miserable, giving way to unexplained fits of crying, and angry when Amethyst tried to laugh her out of them.
The time of Lucian’s absence seemed endless, and, on the afternoon of his return, Amethyst’s spirits rose to rapturous pitch.
It was a lovely summer day, tea was laid out on the terrace. Over the grave, old-fashioned garden was a blaze of joyous sunlight, giving it a cheerfulness that it sometimes lacked. For the high, broad cypress hedges in front of the house were continued behind it, and enclosed the garden in a square of sombre green. These living walls were as firm and regular as if they had been built of brick.
Here and there recesses were cut in them, in which benches were placed, and at intervals, and at the corners, the cypresses grew to a great height, and were cut into all sorts of fantastic shapes – pyramids, peacocks, and lyres, the pride of the old gardener, who regarded himself as their owner in a much more real sense than either tenants or landlord.
They were certainly
