to love her personally when in her company. My Lady, pettish and tiresome, but clever. Miss Milbanke, dressed in a muslin gown trimmed with lace, with nothing on her head, was quite composed, and during the whole ceremony looked steadily at Byron. Byron, when he came to the words, ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow,' looked at me with a half smile." Hobhouse handed my Lady Byron into the carriage for the honeymoon trip to Halnaby and congratulated her once more. The girl looked up in his face. "If I am not happy it will be my own fault," she said. How otherwise? She had won the world's prize. CHAPTER XII MARRIAGE "How then should sound upon the darkening slope -DANTE ROSSETTI. WHEN the young bride stepped into that carriage, she stepped into a misery so strange and terrifying that it has remained a perplexity until a very few years ago. Partly owing to her devoted love for her husband, partly to her evident inability to comprehend the immense misfortune that had befallen her, even she herself cannot, to lookers on, make very clear the history of the ruin which overtook them both. The carriage door was shut upon their happiness and the long avenue of Seaham Hall was unrolling behind them, the welcome of the Halnaby tenants before them. She seemed to herself to move between two worlds, belonging to neither; the one of the past, the other the glad, untried future. He sat beside her looking out of the window with a strange, fixed expression which she could not decipher. She ventured to lay her little hand, with its shining gold wedding ring, on his-a small, wifely action of trust, inviting and beseeching its reward. Did it break some tension of hard silence in him? Suddenly and furiously he turned upon her. "You might have saved me once, Madam. You had all in your power when I offered myself to you first. Then you might have made me what you pleased. Now you will find you have married a devil." The revulsion was so horrible that she flung herself back against the side of the carriage in an almost hysterical terror, staring at him with lips apart. What could she have saved him from? What dreadful thing had taken place in those two unhappy years? What thought was tearing his heart? She was too confused with fright for anything but question. He saw her alarm and in a second the glare, the tone, were gone, he was smilingstrangely, but smiling. "Bell, you little goose, you child! Can't you understand a joke? A joke, I tell you! I wanted to see how you would look with your little round face all pale and startled. Very pretty! It suits you. I believe I shall call you Pippin, round little face!" He touched it with a shaking finger as if he had meant a caress, but she could not gather herself together. Some cold chill ran through her body, colder than any January frost outside that blurred their breath on the window. She tried for a smile, tried to speak, faltered and broke down in tears. Natural enough in a bride leaving a happy home where she had been the centre of all the joy-but neither the husband nor wife set it down to that most obvious cause. They both knew better. A dead silence fell between them. He picked up a book and sat reading for the rest of the way. A welcome had been prepared by the tenants at Halnaby, and a bride and bridegroom must respond with the expected smiles and gestures of happiness. That effort she made. When the carriage stopped, he sprang out and walked moodily away, leaving her to climb the stately steps alone, smiling and waving her hands in answer to the acclamations of the kind people who had known her from a child and must have their share in her bridal joy. She reached her room too bewildered to think. It was beyond all comprehension, but whatever she or Byron might say or do now that one terrible moment in the carriage and the sad journey had opened a gulf between them. Her faint doubts and girl's fears had been struck, as by a sudden shock, into a sharp and definite dread. There was something, something lurking in the dark, awake, alive, stealthily moving, which he shrank from, defied with a wild defiance—she dared not ask even herself what it might be. And they were alone at Halnaby, but for her faithful maid. Father, mother, had faded like shadows into the past. There was Caroline Lamb, nursing her sullen wrath in London. There was Lady Melbourne, who had pressed and planned their marriage, whom nothing could shock or alarm. And there were herself and Byron face to face at last with the irretrievable. These were the facts she must face. Again and again she took herself to task. Of course she was mistaken, foolish, risking her own and his happiness with these dangerous doubts. He meant no harm. If he wandered away into the woods of Halnaby and she sat alone hour after hour with Mrs. Minns's round, amazed eyes watching her young Ladyship and this surprising bridegroom, that was only because he was unlike other men-and must be. Some beautiful world's wonder of verse would be the result of those lonely wanderings and ponderings. Surely every one knew that the wife of a genius must pay her share for her husband's laurels? Mrs. Minns was not to be silenced, however. She claimed all the privileges of a trusted servant. "Your Ladyship, if you're not happy-and I have my thoughts on that-won't you write and tell your papa? You never kept a thought from them and this isn't the time to begin, or I'm much mistook. You're too lonely. "Tis a thing you was never used to at home” "Nonsense, Minns." She drew herself up in a gallant effort for the dignity of the married woman. "What should I tell my father? I have my husband to think of now, and if I were uneasy in any way I should tell him, not any one else." "Yes, my lady." A silence, and Minns burst unaccountably into tears. She loved her mistress, she dreaded the indeterminate eclipse which shadowed that waning moon of bliss, and Halnaby had taken on a ghastly quality it had never known before. The old familiar house seemed changed. Things mended, darkened, vacillated, as such things do, but Anne Byron held bravely on her way. Life is like that. Already she was asking herself the question of disenchanted middle age: Why should we expect happiness from life, who experience how little it really has to give? And she but twenty-two! Yet she had hopes in Augusta Leigh, his half-sister. She was known and liked at Melbourne House, and a great favourite with many of the people who would form her society in London. Easy, amiable, good-natured, that was the picture she had formed of the woman of whom he spoke so little. Augusta had written her a kindly letter on her engagement and Byron had given her, accidentally, a fluffy, babyish epistle from her a day or two before their marriage, with a bundle of others. She read it, a little in surprise at such a childish note in the letter of a married woman of twenty-nine-it seemed more like a schoolgirl's. "MY DEAREST B.: "As usual I have but a short allowance of time to reply to your tendresses, but a few lines, I know, will be better than none at least I find them so. It was very, very good of you to think of me amidst all the visitors, etc. I have scarcely recovered mine of yesterday-La Dame did talk so-oh, my stars! But at least it saved me a world of trouble. Oh, she has found out a likeness in your pic |