closed
the chapter of the wedding, introductory to the honeymoon at Esslemont,
seven miles distant by road, to the right of Lekkatts. It was out of
sight that the coach turned to the left, Northwestward.

CHAPTER XV. OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON

A famous maxim in the book of the Old Buccaneer, treating of PRECAUTION,
as 'The brave man's clean conscience,' with sound counsel to the
adventurous, has it:--

'Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe
wine.'

It should mean, that brave men entering the jaws of hurricanes are found
to have cheerful hearts in them when they know they have done their
best. But, touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous
Bacchic spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles, and you find comparison
neighbour closely between the sealed wine-flask and the bride, who is
being driven by her husband to the nest of the unknown on her marriage
morn.

Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange
land, travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale,
this Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness
exalted, virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled
the inanimate and most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past
memory, beyond the hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air,
since she laid her hand in this young man's. His not speaking to her
was accepted. Her blood rather than recollection revived their exchanges
during the dance at Baden, for assurance that their likings were one,
their aims rapturously one; that he was she, she he, the two hearts
making one soul.

Could she give as much as he? It was hardly asked. If we feel we can
give our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers. It
bubbles perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult. Two
hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts.

For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing
sentience of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that;
which were seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his
personality. Driving was the piece of skill she could not do. Her
husband's mastery of the reins endowed him with the beauty of those
harmonious trotters he guided and kept to their pace; and the humming
rush of the pace, the smooth torrent of the brown heath-knolls and
reddish pits and hedge-lines and grass-flats and copses pour