The honeymoon : remembrance of a bridal tour through Scotland

Front matter

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Chapter I. The Marriage

The second of July 18 — was the happiest day of my life, for on that day I was united for ever to the purest and loveliest woman that has ever existed in this world.

Concepcion Vargas was in truth one of those angels that heaven sends sometimes upon earth to console men, and help them to bear their cross. Born under the bright sun of Andalusia, and educated in a con¬ vent at Seville, the young girl to whom I can now give the sweet name of wife, was the realisation of the ideal of perfection that I so often had dreamt about, and that I had almost given up the hope of finding in this world, where vanity and selfishness seem almost to rule.

An orphan at the age of twenty-one, when I had but just come into possession of the large fortune that, by the death of my father, Lord Carlton, belonged to

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The Honeymoon.

me, T found myself alone in that immense and over-populated desert called London. I did not know of a friend on whom to rely in my sorrow; for although many of the college companions of my youth called themselves my friends, they were as foreign to my heart as the undertakers who had just borne from my sight the cold body that had once been my mother.

My sorrow was intense : my mother had been, till then, the only friend I had known ; and in her alone I had placed all my love, all my interest. I loved her more than a mother; for since my father's death, that had taken place several years before, when I was but a boy, she had been to me father, mother, sister, friend; for we two had been left alone in the world together.

While she was by my side, I never felt the want of a family, for she filled the whole of my existence with that love that only a mother can give ; but I suppose God had only been preparing and educating her sw T eet spirit for a higher and a better life; and He who had given her to me took her away when the purpose of her earth-life had been accomplished.

Oh, that mine had but finished at the same time !

Lady Carlton had been a model of women, of daufditers, of wives, and of mothers ; and so her fate gave me but little anxiety. I had too much confidence in the Supreme Being who so admirably and wisely rules our steps, to doubt of His justice and of His mercy. I know that the good actions of my mother and her exemplary life could but be rewarded as they should by that All-powerful Being to whom men have given the name of God; and this conviction consoled me, mitigating my sorrow, and soothing my grief.

Death ! I tried to make myself believe is but a word, in reality it does not exist; the same as birth, they are but words made by men to express ideas which they scarcely understand. Man has never seen a being born or die : he has seen a spirit appear under the form of a germ, in an embryotic existence ; some time after he has seen this spirit disappear, and his body dissolve into its component material substances ; but as for the principle which gave life to this form, it has always escaped his comprehension. Yet it continues to exist. I am sure of that. My mother’s love for me was more than human—it was more than a mere material passion. She had a pure and noble spirit that gave life to her fair form, but from whence it came and whither it has gone are both mysteries to me, for, as Boucher de Perthes remarked with so much reason, “ Everything changes, but nothing dies.” If the decomposition of the body were the end of man’s life, we should have to admit a creator who unmakes with one hand what he makes with the other, or two rival powers, two powerful beings, one creative and the other destructive. The ancient Brahmins must have believed this when they esta¬ blished the worship of the two Gods, Brahma and Siva, the first the almighty creator, the second the destroyer, both of whom, gifted with equal power, ruled according to their creed, the universe under the protection of the god Brahm.

The Honeymoon.

In this way, thousands of years ago, did the ancient Hindoos solve the problem that now, as then, puzzled the human understanding.

But if these phenomena of nature seem to us so contradictory, is it because they are so, or is it not rather because we are ignorant of their laws \ Yet men will believe in anything rather than in their own ignorance: We have only one thing to guide us in this, as in every problem, Reason—and reason condemns this theory. Oh ! let us beware of believ¬ ing anything that stands against reason; God did not give us this great blessing in order that we might believe unreasonable doctrines. The order of nature is one , because God the universal Father is one, and and for this reason is his work called the Universe ,

It is, therefore, impossible to admit two such powers, for, according to this doctrine, that destroys the unity of action, and changes the equilibrium that rules the universe, there would be left in the world nothing but death and desolation. This would be less than nothing, it is the dissolution of matter and the annihilation of spirit, it is chaos.

But it is enough to cast one look over the wonderful universe that surrounds us, in order to see the falsity of this doctrine, everything there lives, everything participates in that divine breath that gives life to matter; everything in the universe lives, and yet they would have us believe that death alone rules in it ! The very bodies of those we have so loved and that are no more, are, at this moment, full of life,

The Marriage.

full of animation. And this is only the house—can its inhabitant have perished ?

“Oh! convince me of this,” I cried, “and it will be enough to make me die too, Tell me that my mother has died, and that she is lost to me now and for ever; prove it, and you will find me a cold corpse a moment afterwards. Our life depends, a great deal more than we allow ourselves to think, on that of those who have gone before us to the other side of the grave. Somebody has said we live with the dead; yes, we live with them, for what is our existence but a succession of remembrances and hopes ? The past and the future ! And both are based upon one ideal which we shall never be able to realise in this world. The present is nothing to us, it is but an instant, and we very seldom appreciate its importance, but the past and the future are an eternity-—an eternity that is equalty dear to us, and this eternity can it not be, even as Bulwer suggested, “ a succession of those transitions that men have called life and death ? ” Some years previously I had heard Victor Hugo pronounce, over the grave of a young girl that death had just taken from her parents, a discourse that will never fade away from my mind.*

“ In a few weeks we have been occupied with two sisters ; we have married the one, and we are now burying the other. Such are the perpetual changes of life. Let us bow, my friends, before its severe

destinjr.

* It was in Guernsey during the year 1865.

“ Let us bow with hope. Our eyes were not made for weeping, but in order that we might see ; our hearts were not made for suffering, but in order that we might believe. The faith in another existence proceeds from the faculty of Joving. Do not forget this, in this incon¬ stant life of ours, it is the heart that believes. The son believes that he will again find his father, and the mother never consents to lose her son forever. This faith that makes us refuse the idea of annihilation is the greatness of man.

“ The heart cannot mislead us. Flesh is but a dream, it soon passes away. If this decomposition were to be the end of man, it would take away from our life all its pleasure and object ; we cannot be satisfied with vapour ; we want a certainty. In spite of being loved, man feels that not one of the points on which he rests is on this earth. To love is to live beyond this world. Without this faith, none of the perfect gifts of the heart would be possible ; to love, which is the object of man’s existence, would be a torment. This paradise would turn into a hell. No, let us say with a loud voice, the being who loves needs immortality. The heart needs the soul.

“ There is a heart in this coffin, and this heart lives, and at this moment is listening to our words.

“ Emily de Putron was the pride of a loving and united family. Her smiles were sunshine to her parents. She was a flower of beauty in her paternal home. From her cradle, every tenderness surrounded her; she had grown up happy ; and receiving happiness, she gave it to others ; fondly loved, she loved in return. She has just gone.

“Where?—To darkness? No; it is we who are in the dark. She is in the light of heaven, receiving her recompense. Those young girls who have done no evil during their lives, are the holy ones of the grave, and their heads rise slowly out of the tomb towards a mysterious crown that awaits them.

“ Emily de Putron has gone to find there supreme serenity, the completion of her innocent existence. She has gone away! Youth, towards eternity; beauty, towards the ideal ; hope, towards certainty ; love, towards the infinite ; pearl, towards the ocean ; spirit, towards God.

“ The wonderful part of this great celestial journey that is called death, is that those who go away do not leave us. They are in a world of light, but they visit, although unknown to us, our world of dark¬ ness. They are at once above us and at our side.

“ Oh thou, whoever thou art, who hast seen the body of a beloved being disappear in the darkness of the grave, do not make yourself unhappy. He is always there. He is at your side, closer even than he was while on earth. The beauty of death is the presence, the indescribable presence, of the souls we love smiling at our tearful eyes. The being we mourn has disappeared, he has not gone away, we no

longer see its sweet face.the dead are the

invisible, they are not the absent.

“ Let us give full justice to death. Ho not let us be

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ungrateful to it. Death is not, as it is so often said, a separation and a forgetfulness. It is a mistake to believe that here, in the obscurity of this open grave, everything is lost. Here everything is found anew.

“ The grave is a place of restitution. Here the soul gains back the infinite ; here it finds its full powers; here it comes into possession of its mysterious nature ; free from the body, free from wants and pains, free from burden, free from everything. Death is the greatest of liberators. It also is the greatest of progressors. Death is the augmentation of all that has arrived to the superior degree of all the superior qualities. Every one receives therefrom his augmen¬ tation. Everything is transfigured in the light and by the light. He who has been honest on earth becomes beautiful; he who has been beautiful be¬ comes sublime ; he who has been sublime becomes good.”

This philosophical and spiritual discourse had made an extraordinary impression upon my heart, but I did not arrive at its full meaning, I did not com¬ prehend nor understand all its beauties to their full extent, till the moment when my mother’s death came to plunge me, in my turn, into the deepest grief.

In spite of this, hope, that ministering angel that God sends to console and sustain man in his deepest sorrows, came to my rescue, and I tried to convince myself that my grief, after all, was only selfishness, and that I ought instead to be glad that my mother had at last quitted this miserable world, and taken her place among the angels in heaven.

Such was the train of thought that occupied my mind; my sorrow was not so much caused by her absence as by the solitude in which her death had left me. I saw myself alone in the world where I had been so happy in her company. I did not dare to weep for her death—such a thing seemed to me a sacrilege, an open opposition to God’s law. Moreover, her happiness did not make me in the least uneasy, the same faith that prevented my shedding tears upon her grave assured me of that. But mine ? What was going to become of me \ Alone ! I who had never left her side for a single day !

One day, soon after her death, I received the fol¬ lowing letter, and this short epistle restored to me by slow degrees my spiritual strength. It ran thus :—

“ My Dear Walter,— A great blow has fallen upon you. I must see you, and console you. I appreciated the one you so loved. But I do not grieve for her. You also, my friend, ought to see farther than the horizon, and then you would believe, as I do, in the reality of the future life. But it is not to you to whom I should say hope. You are a philosopher, and what is more, a man with a heart.

“ You should not grieve for the death of your mother. Do you think for a moment that she has left you ? No, I at least am sure that she is always at your side, guarding and guiding you—invisible to your eyes, but not so to your heart. You have lost io The Honeymoon.

tlie outward form of the mother, it is true, hut not the mother’s love and guiding care.”

After reading this consoling, manly, and feeling letter several times, I resolved to go and see this friend. A man who could write with so much convic¬ tion and earnestness about immortality, must have at least sure proofs of its truth. Not that I doubted it for a moment, but that in my anxiety, and in my present frame of mind, I wanted some one with whom I could converse freely upon this, the most important, in my case, of all questions.

I therefore went to my country-house in the north of England, near which this friend resided. But the sight of the ancient mansion of my fathers only made the few days that I spent there sadder still. The sight of those deserted drawing-rooms, that I so often had seen full of friends in my past happy and joyous days, that immense hall, where my mother had so often played with me when a child, filled my heart with the most profound grief, and not even the consoling words of my friend, nor my philosophical speculations, could divert my mind from the dread¬ ful contrast of the present with the past.

Allen Adare, this was the name of my friend, seeing me in such a state, and observing that my health was also becoming affected by my long meditations and inaction, resolved on taking me awav from those sad remembrances of the past.

I, in my turn, was only too glad to quit England. Its damp climate, and its dull and heavy atmosphere

i had, 1 thought, a great deal to do with my illness. Could I but see the sun, breathe the fresh air of heaven, I thought I should soon recover and master my sadness.

Allen Adare and I started, therefore, on a journey that we meant at the time to last at least a year, at the end of which some new train of ideas, (such was his language,) would make me forget the shock that at present was only too fresh in my mind.

France was the first country we visited.

We spent at least a month in Paris, but this gay city, that I had so much admired when I saw it for the first time with my mother a few years previously, could not on this occasion dissipate the grief that consumed me by slow degrees. I wanted something new, new places and new people. It was the month of November, and the winter was just beginning, accompanied with all its miseries. We proceeded then south to Spain, and after visiting Madrid, and two or three other towns, we determined to spend the winter in Seville.

It was there I found the angel that was to console me at last, and that was to change the whole of my ex¬ istence, restoring to my heart the happiness I had lost.

It seems so strange to talk of sorrow and grief, now that I am so happy ! but the remembrance of the sad past seems to make my present only the brighter.

Surely, surely, my friend was right, and my angel mothers watchful love had guided me to happiness a^ain.

O

During my stay in the ancient capital of the Moors,

I frequented the tertulias of the Countess de Fuencarral; these kind of receptions, only known in Spain, brought me into frequent contact with several persons whom otherwise I should have utterly ignored.

Of those the one with whom I was most intimate was Doha Manuela Vargas, a lady of middle age, widow of a colonel in the Spanish army, who had died in the seven years’ war against the Carlists. This lady was one of those few women who bring life and animation wherever they go ; her wit was great, and her accomplishments, although she did not in the least make a show of them, were brilliant and numerous.

She offered me her house, according to the old Spanish fashion, and I lost no time in going to see her. Our friendship grew deeper every day, and the more I saw of her the more I liked her.

One day she told me that she had a daughter of nineteen in a convent near the town in Friana, and that she wanted her to come and live with her ; for although she was very happy with the nuns, she was almost too old to be with them as a school-girl, and she would never consent to her taking the veil, and thus to lose her only child for ever.

I naturally approved of this decision, in spite of being a Roman Catholic. I did not at all like the idea of a young girl shutting herself up for ever in a convent. This seemed to me against all the laws of God and nature.

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The Marriage.

La Seiiora de Vargas and myself drove down that afternoon to see her daughter at the Carmelite con¬ vent, on the other side of the bright Guadalquivir.

We were shown first into a dark, half-Moorish, half- Gothic cell, and afterwards we passed into that myste¬ rious room where the world ends and the seclusion of the monastery begins. The iron gate was opened by some unseen nun, and out of the darkness of the inner cell there came into the old Moorish apartment a per¬ fect vision of light, the most beautiful creature that I had ever beheld.

It would be impossible to paint her beauty, for it was felt rather than seen. It would be impossible to describe those bright yet dreamy eyes, half hidden by long and dark lashes. Her hair was of the bright¬ est gold, and as glittering. At that moment, illumin¬ ated by the rich full colours of the old painted windows, she looked like a Conception of Murillo’s stepping out of her frame—a blonde aux yeux noirs such as we only see in the ideal pictures of the saints.

Her dress was the plain blue serge worn by the school-girls of the convent, and her head was covered by the whitest cap of French muslin, open at the back to allow two long and abundant golden tresses to escape, which nearly touched the ground.

Her dress, her figure, her face, the dark back-ground aoninst which she stood, the surrounding pictures and coloured windows, the entire aspect of the apartment, made such an impression upon me, that when Doha Manuela said, “ Concepcion ven d mi corazon,” I really thought that I beheld the Virgin herself coming from the interior of the holy church in her most beautiful and divine of impersonations, as we see her represented in the famous pictures of the Conception both at Madrid, at Seville, and at the Louvre.

The impression was so great, that I nearly fell at her feet, as if bending my knees before the mother of God.

But this was only for a moment, for the next found her in the arms of her mother; and there, warmed by the maternal heart, her cheeks bloomed with the freshest and most delicate of rose tints.

In this position, that aroused her earthly love and affections, she looked scarcely less lovely, per¬ haps more so to me, as she seemed more within my reach.

The happiness that the beautiful Concepcion showed when she saw her mother made me almost forget my sorrows ; and the day that I passed by the side of this innocent and bright angel was the first happy one that I had experienced since the death of my mother.

She heard the news of her leaving the convent with tears in her eyes. “ Don’t you like the idea, Senorita,'of leaving the college ? ” I asked her.

“ Yes,” she answered, in the rich language of Cer¬ vantes, “ I like it because it is the will of my mother, but I am afraid I shall never be so happy in the world as I have been here amongst my flowers and my books, beloved by the nuns and by my com¬ panions.”

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The Marriage.

There was so much innocence, so much feeling, in those few words, that my heart nearly burst when they were uttered. “ Poor young girl! ” I thought, “ how many wrong notions those ignorant old women must have given her about the world and its inhabi¬ tants ! ”

When we were returning in the carriage from the convent, I could not restrain myself from giving ex¬ pression to what my heart was so full of. “ What a beautiful daughter you have, Dona Manuela,” I said ; “ she is indeed a Concepcion, and a real conception ! ”

“We all call her Concha or Conchita,” said the over-joyed mother, “ we think it is shorter and prettier.” Then, changing her bright smile for a more serious look, she continued, “ I am sorry to be obliged to take her away from that convent, there she is happy, and she is well cared for by the sisters. Who knows, as she herself said, if she will be the same in the world ? The countess has promised to present her to the Infanta, the Duchess de Montpensier, that will, perhaps, bring her into notice.”

“ Oh ! ” I answered impatiently, “ I am sure she will make a great sensation in the palace of San Telmo. I am only afraid that you wont have her with you long after she comes out.”

“ Do you think so, Lord Carlton ? I fear, on the contrary, that she will pass unnoticed, and that she will at last have to return as a nun to the convent that now she quits as a girl. You see we are poor, and we have no name. She is beautiful, I can not deny that, but wliat is the use of beauty ? She is too natural, too innocent, too retiring to attract the attention of the world/’

A week after, a great ball took place in the palace of the Countess de Fuencarral, to celebrate the coming out of Concha Vargas.

I had the pleasure of dancing with her, as a foreigner, her first valse, and if I had thought her beautiful in the dark cell of the monastery, when dressed as a school girl, how splendid and dazzling did I not think her now, enveloped in clouds of white tulle, and in a brilliantly lighted room !

From that instant the young men of Seville almost abandoned the former belles, and dedicated all their attentions to the new beauty that had appeared amongst them, for, even in the luxurious saloons of the ancient capital of Andalusia, so proverbial for the witching beauty and loveliness of its dark eyed daughters, Conchita was the most beautiful, the most lovely, the most attractive of them all.

Her pearly white skin, and the profusion of golden tresses that fell over her shoulders, made, I think, a great impression, contrasting with the dark haired and proud Spanish beauties.

I observed her during all the rest of the season, and I saw, with great pleasure to myself, though I could not then tell why, that she received the courtesy and flattery of the aristocratic youths of Seville with the greatest indifference.

From the night of that first ball I managed to l 7

The Marriage.

see her every day, sometimes I met her with her mother in the cloisters of the cathedral, sometimes I saw her in the saloons of the ducal palace of the Montpensiers or in the gardens of the Moorish Alcazar; frequently I met her at friends’ houses. She attracted me in a manner most inexplicable to me, but that always compelled me to follow her. At first it was her face that seemed to fascinate me, but soon I found that her soul had even greater power over my heart.

Her conversation was so agreeable, so full of senti¬ ment, so interesting. She alone had been able to make me forget my great loss, for which I was still in the deepest mourning. Life had been as a blank to me before I had met her, but now she filled the empty space that another love had so recently left in my heart, for, as La Rochefoucauld said ,—“ In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.”

When I compared her with the other young ladies of my acquaintance, her charms seemed to grow greater and greater. What a difference between her and the English girls that are either so cold or so fast, and all, more or less, modelled after one pattern, or the Spanish beauties, so proud, so passionate, so jealous of their beauty. In her, everything was natural, sympathetic, pure.

The day that I ventured to declare my love, I thought I should have died, fearing she would answer I." B i8

The Honeymoon.

me that she loved another. But it was not so, and I soon found that she loved me as much as I loved her.

I asked her hand of her mother, and la Sehora cle Vargas answered me with tears in her eyes, that she only wanted to insure the happiness of her daughter, and that if she loved me, our union would be blessed by her with all her heart.

On the morrow our engagement was in everybody’s mouth. With what pride did I not receive the con¬ gratulations and good wishes of my friends !

We decided that Madame Vargas and Conchita should come with me to England in order to accustom her to the new country, and to the new society in which she was to live and move in the future, and so as not to separate her all at once from her mother.

We left Seville early in April en route for London. Allen Adare accompanied us as far as Paris, where he left us on his. way to Baden.

I shall always remember with pleasure my stay in Spain. I had arrived there the most miserable of men, and lo ! I returned from thence the happiest of lovers.

Such are the changes of life. One day the sun may shine upon our sorrows, and the next it may dawn upon our happiness, everything in this world is so uncertain. But we should not complain, for this very uncertainty is, perhaps, its greatest charm.

On the second of July took place the ceremony that united our destinies for ever. “ Those whom God hath joined together , let no man put asunder.”

The Marriage.

That same afternoon we left London by the express train for Scotland with the intention of spending there our honeymoon.

This trip, that will always be associated in my heart with the dearest remembrances of my life, is the subject of this book. It may seem strange to begin a book with a marriage ceremony, but how often does not man’s life in reality begin with one ?

In this book I will try to paint some of the happiest hours of my life.