_ CHAPTER XLVI. THE BRIDALS.--THE ACCIDENT.--THE FIRST LAWFUL POSSESSION OF LOVE
It was the morning on which Constance and Godolphin were to be married; it had been settled that they were to proceed the same day towards Florence; and Constance was at her toilette when her woman laid beside her a large bouquet of flowers.
"From Percy--from Mr. Godolphin, I mean?" she asked, taking them up.
"No, my lady; a young woman outside the palace gave them me, and bade me in such pretty English be sure to give them to your ladyship; and when I offered her money, she would not take anything, my lady."
"The Italians are a courteous people," replied Constance; and she placed the flowers in her bosom.
As, after the ceremony, Godolphin assisted his bride into the carriage, a girl, wrapped in a large cloak, pressed forward for a moment. Godolphin had in that moment turned his head to give some order to his servant, and with the next the girl had sunk back into the throng that was drawn around the carriage--yet not before Constance had heard her murmur in deep, admiring, yet sorrowful tone: "Beautiful! how beautiful!--Ah me!"
"Did you observe what beautiful eyes that young girl had?" asked Constance, as the carriage whirled off.
"What girl? I saw nothing but you!"
"Hark! there is a noise behind."
Godolphin looked out; the crowd seemed collected round one person.
"Only a young woman fainted, sir!" said his servant seated behind. "She fell down in a fit just before the horses; but they started aside, and did not hurt her."
"That is fortunate!" said Godolphin, reseating himself by his new bride; "drive on faster."
At Florence, Godolphin revealed to Constance the outline of Lucilla's history, and Constance shared somewhat of the feelings with which he told it.
"I left," said he, "in the hands of the abbess a sum to be entirely at Lucilla's control, whether she stay in the convent or not, and which will always secure to her an independence. But I confess I should like now, once more to visit the convent, and learn on what fate she has decided."
"You would do well, dear Percy," replied Constance, who from her high and starred sphere could stoop to no vulgar jealousy; "indeed, I think you could do no less."
And Godolphin covered those generous lips with the sweet kisses in which esteem begins to mingle with passion. What has the earth like that first fresh union of two hearts long separated, and now blended for ever? However close the sympathy between woman and her lover--however each thinks to have learned the other--what a world is there left un-learned, until marriage brings all those charming confidences, that holy and sweet intercourse, which leaves no separate interest, no undivided thought! But there is one thing that distinguishes the conversation of young married people from that of lovers on a less sacred footing--they talk of the future! Other lovers talk rather of the past; an uncertainty pervades their hereafter; they feel they recoil from, it; they are sensible that their plans are not one and indivisible.' But married people are always laying out the "to come;" always talking over their plans: this often takes something away from the tenderness of affection, but how much it adds to its enjoyment!
Seated by each other, and looking on the silver Arno, Godolphin and Constance, hand clasped in hand, surrendered themselves to the contemplation of their future happiness. "And what would be your favorite mode of life, dear Percy?"
"Why, I have now no schemings left me, Constance. With you obtained, I have grown a dullard, and left off dreaming. But let me see, a house in England--you like England--some ten or twenty miles from the great Babel: books, pictures, statues, and old trees that shall put us in mind of our Norman fathers who planted them; above all, a noisy, clear sunny stream gliding amidst them--deer on the opposite bank, half hidden amongst the fern; and rooks overhead: a privilege for eccentricity that would allow one to be social or solitary as one pleased; and a house so full of guests, that to shun them all now and then would be no affront to one."
"Well," said Constance, smiling, "go on."
"I have finished."
"Finished?"
"Yes, my fair Insatiable! What more would you have?"
"Why, this is but a country-life you have been talking of; very well in its way for three months in the year."
"Italy, then, for the other nine," returned Godolphin.
"Ah, Percy!--is pleasure, mere pleasure, vulgar pleasure,--to be really the sole end and aim of life?"
"Assuredly."
"And action, enterprise-are these as nothing?"
Godolphin was silent, but began absently to throw pebbles into the water. The action reminded Constance of the first time she had ever seen him among his ancestral groves; and she sighed as she now gazed on a brow from which the effeminacy and dreaming of his life had banished much of its early chivalric and earnest expression. _