Chapter XVI

----There
Shall sweet Bianca practise how to bride it.
SHAKSPEARE.

So this begins our happy honeymoon.

Honour, high honour, and renown to Hymen!

A Honeymoon! ’Tis a strange term!--an ambiguous definition of the period of time which it describes: a singular compound of two incongruous parts--honey and moon. What has the moon, “the inconstant moon,” to do with that whose “sweets do pall with sameness?” Is there any sly sarcasm conveyed in the term?--any lurking insinuation, that where a blessing has been “daily swallowed by men’s eyes, they surfeited with honey;” and that, as the match-making Friar Lawrence says, “is loathsome in its own deliciousness?” But, no--it cannot be. When at sea for a meaning, one seeks the aid of a Dictionary to pilot one back to sense, and Johnson defines a honeymoon as “the first month after marriage, when there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure;” and as this lexicographical lover had tried it himself, he must have spoken from an experience of his own sensations,--for, with all the merits of his laborious compilation, he is never known to have given a signification in direct opposition to his own feelings and prejudices. It is a curious image this raises to one’s mind--Doctor Johnson passing a whole month in which there was nothing but “tenderness and pleasure!”

For these sensations also must, to exist, have been reciprocal; he must have found another who would lavish similar tenderness on him,--derive parallel pleasure from him. And our wonderment increases that such should have been the impression which he chose to perpetuate in folio sheets for ever, when one recollects that he was married to a woman twice his own age; and as it is insinuated by one of his female gossips, he had begun by being in love with his future bride’s daughter. Add to this, that his own account of his ride to church does not accord with the immediate prelude to a honied sequel. Johnson, about to become a bridegroom, in love, and on horseback, at one and the same time, is an image almost to upset gravity. He states that on their ride from Birmingham to Derby, they quarrelled two or three times about the pace, and says, “I was not to be made the slave of caprice, and I resolved to begin as I meant to end; I therefore pushed on briskly till I was fairly out of her sight; I contrived that she should soon come up with me; when she did, I observed her to be in tears.”

Here does not seem to have been much tenderness on his part, or one would think much pleasure on hers: but there is no disputing about tastes; and even after this unpropitious beginning, Johnson, upon experience, defines the honey-moon as “a month in which there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure.” There have been, however, others not so well calculated to pamper themselves with such unalloyed lusciousness, who have found the taste of the honey infused with a well-known taint of bitterness; and others may have suspected that some of the wax had, in that honied space, somewhat clogged the wings of time. For, admitting to the fullest extent--

“Domestic happiness, the only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall;”

yet it is not the growth of an hour. It is not slipped on with the wedding-ring. At the altar the staple only is riveted, for which habit has yet to forge, link by link, those imperceptible bonds which chain the heart within the domestic circle. Mutual good understanding must be established by slow degrees. In the vegetable world a graft is an unsightly excrescence at first; and no more in temper and tastes, than in trees, is the fruit of such an experiment borne on the instant. How much tacit, perhaps unconscious, compromise must gradually be matured, before, as Thomson says--

“Thought meeting thought, and will preventing will,
With boundless confidence;”

he pronounces--

“Happy they the happiest of their kind.”

If, therefore, as I suspect, even amongst those who have afterwards experienced the most perfect domestic happiness, there have occasionally been in some of the four-and-twenty hours of some of the eight-and-twenty days of this mellifluous month some moments when slight restraint and transient disappointment have mixed themselves up with that tenderness and pleasure which are said to monopolise it; if it is a probationary period, which is not sufficient to establish the whole foundation of happiness for the future, it is sometimes quite sufficient to dispel some of the bright illusions of the past; this variegated month will sometimes make sad inroads into the permanence of that sort of love that--

“Is but a bright beguiling spell,
Which only lives whilst passion glows.”

The passion of love sometimes revels in contradiction. It gains strength by opposition; it attracts by separation; it smiles most upon its exacted sacrifices; it entrenches itself most behind broken duties; its fairest hopes are gathered in the wildest field of fear, but its vigour is apt to be lost in regular set garden culture; it pines upon stated indulgence; it dwindles when its shoots are in set form nailed to the wall; when its early blossom is success, its only fruit is satiety.

If there ever was a blissful honey-moon! If?--There have been myriads; those of a mixed character, for which I have been endeavouring to account, are but the exceptions. In the very first class of blissful honey-moons, was that of Castleton and Lucy;--most happy positively, in its exemptions from any of the causes which I have mentioned as occasionally chequering that happiness: and most happy comparatively, with their mutual experience of the past: and I fear I must forestall so far as to add, also comparatively with their future wedded life. Here there was no unsettled compromise of tastes, no gradual adaptation of former habits; for the companion was no more new to Lucy, than was the existence to which she had been transferred. The very atmosphere she breathed was strange to her; and in entering upon that new existence, she had but one all-engrossing object--to study in her own manner the happiness of him to whose destiny she was united.

Castleton was by nature affectionate; but he must have been insensible indeed, if he had not shared with more fervour, and almost equal freshness, every feeling of one so beautiful and so gracious, so tender and so devoted, as his gentle bride. Besides, he had another security against her fondness palling upon possession, if such a thing could otherwise have been possible. It was an original experiment he had attempted, so far successful, whose future progress he had to watch; and this blended occupation with his enjoyment. And there was certainly occupation enough in explaining many rudiments of conduct in her present sphere, of which Lucy was completely ignorant. Anxious as she was to learn, and eager as she was to adopt, any suggestion of his, in spite of her natural quickness, he sometimes found it difficult to make her comprehend his meaning, from some ideas being perfectly new to her, which were so interwoven with his early nature that he could not recollect and identify their first impression. Castleton being, himself, a person of very cultivated mind, and having been much in a society famed for ready memory and apt illustration, had adopted, perhaps more than any one else, a sort of shorthand turn of conversation, a comprehensive cypher, known only to the initiated; in which a half-hinted allusion, or trite quotation, was often meant to awaken a whole train of ideas: such an inclination he was, of course, obliged to check in all his communications with Lucy. This made his instructions often much more circumlocutory, and consequently protracted, than they would otherwise have been; and though it was impossible to imagine a more gentle tutor, or a more docile pupil, yet even blended as it was with the soft dalliance of those first days of exclusive devotion, there was something irksome to both parties, in the perpetual recurrence of such topics.

Instruction, however mildly conveyed, infallibly destroys that feeling of equality, in exact proportion to which confidence is generally found to exist. Every day Castleton felt more and more how impossible it would be to ask Lucy’s opinion on any of those subjects on which she was profoundly ignorant; and every day Lucy became more aware of her deficiencies, and more anxious therefore to conceal them from him; and that she could only do by acquiescing in her ignorance, for there was no one else from whom she could seek information. There were some points on which she would even have endeavoured to extract knowledge from the servants; but dreading, from her former habits, nothing so much as too great a familiarity in this respect, Castleton had made it one of his first desires to her, that she would confine her communications with them, to asking for what she wanted. To this, as to every other desire of his, she yielded, as far as she could, implicit obedience; but it was often a great exertion on her part to do so. Of her own maid she had felt from the first a considerable awe; and to such a degree did this continue, that she could not conceive any fatigue from labour equal to the burthen of her assistance. Being naturally of a disposition both active and obliging, it was quite new to her to have any thing done for her which she could do for herself. For some time she had as great a horror of touching a bell-rope, as others have in touching the string of a shower-bath; and when services were obtruded on her by the domestics as a matter of course, she had much difficulty in checking the exuberance of her gratitude.

At home, Big Betsey, mentioned above as the maid of all work, never considered as any part of her multitudinous duties the waiting on Miss Lucy, who she not only said “mought moind herself,” but sometimes called to her, almost authoritatively, to “lend a hauping haund.” It was, probably, in consequence of the habit thus engendered, that Lady Castleton was one day caught “lending a helping hand” to an overloaded under laundry-maid, who had been sent by her superior with a wicker-bound snowy freight of her Ladyship’s own superfine linen. But of all the irksome feelings caused by Lucy’s new position, there was none from which she suffered more, than _waiting_ to be _waited on_. And it was hinted in the hall, that when my Lord was not in the room, my Lady got up to help herself to what she wanted from the sideboard!! And it was whispered in the female conclave of the housekeeper’s room, that her Ladyship seemed even to like to--lace her own stays!!