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Charlie was an exception—fair, blue-eyed, rosy, and with a soft feminine contour of visage, which had often drawn on him reproaches for not being really the daughter all his mother’s friends desired for her.
And Julius, with the outlines of the others, was Albino, with transparent skin mantling with colour that contrasted with his snowy hair, eyebrows, and the lashes, veiling eyes of a curious coral hue, really not unpleasing under their thick white fringes, but most inconveniently short of sight, although capable of much work; in fact, he was a curiously perfect pink-and-white edition of his dark and bronzed brother the sailor.
The dark eyes came from the father’s side; Cecil had them, and very observing orbs they seemed to be, travelling about from one face to another, and into every corner of the room, scrutinizing every picture or piece of plate, and trying to see into the conservatory, which had a glass door opening from one end of the room. She was the youngest of the brides, and her features and form seemed hardly developed, nor had she attained the air of a matron; her fashionable dress of crisp white worked muslin with blue trimmings, and blue ribbons in her brown hair, only gave her the air of a young girl at her first party, in spite of her freedom from all shyness as she sat at the head of the table in contented self-possession, her little slender figure as upright as a perfect spine could make it.
Very different was the bride on Raymond’s right hand. She was of middle height, soft, round, and plump, carrying her head a little tenderly on one side with a delightful dégagée kind of ease, and air of vivacious indolence. Her complexion was creamy and colourless, her nose rather retroussé, her lips full and parting in a delicious roguish smile, answering to the sleepily twinkling eyes, whose irides seemed to shade so imperceptibly into the palest gray, that there was no telling where the pupils ended, especially as the lids were habitually half closed, as if weighed down by the black length of their borders. The habit of arching up one or other of the eyebrows, in surprise or interrogation, gave a drollery to the otherwise nonchalant sweetness of the countenance. The mass of raven black hair was only adorned by a crimson ribbon, beneath which it had been thrust into a net, with a long thing that had once been a curl on the shoulder of the white tumbled bodice worn over a gray skirt which looked as if it had done solitary duty for the five weeks since the marriage, and was but slightly relieved by a crimson sash.
Rosamond made some apology when she saw Cecil’s dainty equipment. “Dressed, you correct little thing! You put me to shame; but I had no notion which box my evening things are in, and it would have been serious to irritate the whole concern.”
“And she was some time with Anne,” added Julius.
“Ah! with my good will Anne should not have been here!” rejoined Rosamond. “Didn’t I meet old Mrs. Nurse at your threshold, with an invitation from Mrs. Poynsett to dine with her in her room, and didn’t we find the bird flown at the first stroke of the gong?”
“Oh, I am very well!” repeated Anne.
Yet she was far more colourless than Julius, for her complexion was not only faded by sickness, but was naturally of the whitest blonde tint; the simple coils of her hair “lint white,” and her eyes of the lightest tint of pure blue. The features were of Scottish type, all the more so from being exaggerated by recent illness; but they were handsome enough to show that she must have been a bonnie lassie when her good looks were unimpaired. Her figure far surpassed in height that of both the other ladies, and was very slender, bending with languor and fatigue in spite of her strenuous attempts to straighten it. She was clad in a perfectly plain, almost quaker-looking light dove-coloured silk dress, fitting closely, and unrelieved by any ribbon or ornament of any description, so that her whole appearance suggested nothing but the words “washed out.”
It was clear that to let her alone was merciful, and there was no lack of mutual communications among the rest. Frank and Charlie gave their account of the condition of the game.
“Do you let your tenants shoot rabbits?” exclaimed Cecil, as if scandalized. “We never do at Dunstone.”
“It prevents an immense amount of discontent and ill-will and underhand work,” said Raymond.
“My father never will listen to any nonsense about rabbits,” proceeded Cecil. “If you once begin there is no end to it, they are sure to encroach. He just sends them a basket of game at the beginning and end of the season.”
“By the bye,” said Raymond, “I hope ours have all been sent out as usual.”
“I can answer for a splendid one at our wedding breakfast,” said Rosamond. “The mess-man who came to help was lost in admiration. Did you breakfast on ortolans, Cecil?”
“Or on nightingales’ tongues?” added Charlie.
“You might as well say fatted dormice and snails,” said Frank. “One would think the event had been eighteen hundred years ago.”
“Poor Frank! he’s stuffed so hard that it is bursting out at all his pores!” exclaimed Charlie.
“Ah! you have the advantage of your elder, Master Charles!” said Raymond, with a paternal sound of approbation.
“Till next time,” said Frank. “Now, thank goodness, mine is once for all!”
The conversation drifted away to Venice and the homeward journey, which Raymond and Cecil seemed to have spent in unremitting sight-seeing. The quantities of mountains, cathedrals, and pictures they had inspected was quite appalling.
“How hard you must have worked!” exclaimed Rosamond. “Had you never a day’s rest out of the thirty?”
“Had we, Cecil? I believe not,” said Raymond.
“Sundays?” gasped Anne’s low voice at his elbow.
“Indeed,” triumphantly returned Cecil, “between English service and High Mass, and Benediction, and the public gardens, and listening to the band, we had not a single blank Sunday.”
Anne started and looked aghast; and Raymond said, “The opportunity was not to be wasted, and Cecil enjoyed everything with unwearied vigour.”
“Why, what else should we have done? It would have been very dull and stupid to have stayed in together,” said Cecil, with a world of innocent wonder in her eyes. Then turning to her neighbour, “Surely, Julius, you went about and saw things!”
“The sea at Filey Bridge, and the Church Congress at Leeds,” he answered, smiling.
“Very shocking, is it not, Cecil?” said Rosamond, with mock gravity; “but he must be forgiven, for he was tired to death! I used to think, for my part, that lovers were a sort of mild lunatics, never to be troubled or trusted with any earthly thing; but that’s one of the things modern times have changed! As he was to be going, all the clerical staff of St. Awdry’s must needs have their holiday and leave him to do their work; indeed, one was sent off here. For six weeks I never saw him, except when he used to rush in to say he couldn’t stay; and when at last we were safe in the coupé, he fairly went to sleep before we got to the first station.—Hush! you know you did! And no wonder, for he had been up two nights with some sort of infidel who was supposed to be dying. Then that first week at Filey, he used to bring out his poetry books as the proper sort of thing, and try to read them to me on the sands: but by the time he had got to the bottom of a page, I used to hear the words dragging out slower and slower—
Whereon