The newly married pair had determined to spend
their honeymoon in Italy, and left for the Continent in the forenoon. Mrs. Temple invited me to remain with her for the present at Royston,
which I was very glad to do, feeling deeply the loss of a favourite
brother, and looking forward with dismay to six weeks of loneliness
which must elapse before I should again see him and my dearest
Constance. We received news of our travellers about a fortnight afterwards, and
then heard from them at frequent intervals. Constance wrote in the best
of spirits, and with the keenest appreciation. She had never travelled
in Switzerland or Italy before and all was enchantingly novel to her. They had journeyed through Basle to Lucerne, spending a few days in that
delightful spot, and thence proceeding by the Simplon Pass to Lugano and
the Italian lakes. Then we heard that they had gone further south than
had been at first contemplated; they had reached Rome, and were
intending to go on to Naples. After the first few weeks we neither of us received any more letters
from John. It was always Constance who wrote, and even her letters
grew very much less frequent than had at first been the case. This was
perhaps natural, as the business of travel no doubt engrossed their
thoughts. But ere long we both perceived that the letters of our dear
girl were more constrained and formal than before. It was as if she was
writing now rather to comply with a sense of duty than to give vent to
the light-hearted gaiety and naïve enjoyment which breathed in every
line of her earlier communications. So at least it seemed to us, and
again the old suspicion presented itself to my mind, and I feared that
all was not as it should be. Naples was to be the turning-point of their travels, and we expected
them to return to England by the end of October. November had arrived,
however, and we still had no intimation that their return journey had
commenced or was even decided on. From John there was no word, and
Constance wrote less often than ever. John, she said, was enraptured
with Naples and its surroundings; he devoted himself much to the violin,
and though she did not say so, this meant, I knew, that she was often
left alone. For her own part, she did not think that a continued
residence in Italy would suit her health; the sudden changes of
temperature tried her, and people said that the airs rising in the
evening from the bay were unwholesome. Then we received a letter from her which much alarmed us. It was written
from Naples and dated October 25. John, she said, had been ailing of
late with nervousness and insomnia. On Wednesday, two days before the
date of her letter, he had suffered all day from a strange restlessness,
which increased after they had retired for the evening. He could not
sleep and had dressed again, telling her he would walk a little in the
night air to compose himself. He had not returned till near six in the
morning, and then was so deadly pale and seemed so exhausted that she
insisted on his keeping to his bed till she could get medical advice. The doctors feared that he had been attacked by some strange form of
malarial fever, and said he needed much care. Our anxiety was, however,
at least temporarily relieved by the receipt of later tidings which
spoke of John's recovery; but November drew to a close without any
definite mention of their return having reached us. That month is always, I think, a dreary one in the country. It has
neither the brilliant tints of October, nor the cosy jollity of
mid-winter with its Christmas joys to alleviate it. This year it was
more gloomy than usual. Incessant rain had marked its close, and the
Roy, a little brook which skirted the gardens not far from the house,
had swollen to unusual proportions. At last one wild night the flood
rose so high as to completely cover the garden terraces, working havoc
in the parterres, and covering the lawns with a thick coat of mud. Perhaps this gloominess of nature's outer face impressed itself in a
sense of apprehension on our spirits, and it was with a feeling of more
than ordinary pleasure and relief that early in December we received a
letter dated from Laon, saying that our travellers were already well
advanced on their return journey, and expected to be in England a week
after the receipt by us of this advice. It was, as usual, Constance who
wrote. John begged, she said, that Christmas might be spent at Worth
Maltravers, and that we would at once proceed thither to see that all
was in order against their return. They reached Worth about the middle
of the month, and were, I need not say, received with the utmost
affection by Mrs. Temple and myself. In reply to our inquiries John professed that his health was completely
restored; but though we could indeed discern no other signs of any
special weakness, we were much shocked by his changed appearance. He had
completely lost his old healthy and sunburnt complexion, and his face,
though not thin or sunken, was strangely pale. Constance assured us
that though in other respects he had apparently recovered, he had never
regained his old colour from the night of his attack of fever at Naples. I soon perceived that her own spirits were not so bright as was
ordinarily the case with her; and she exhibited none of the eagerness to
narrate to others the incidents of travel which is generally observable
in those who have recently returned from a journey. The cause of this
depression was, alas! not difficult to discover, for John's former
abstraction and moodiness seemed to have returned with an increased
force. It was a source of infinite pain to Mrs. Temple, and perhaps
even more so to me, to observe this sad state of things. Constance
never complained, and her affection towards her husband seemed only to
increase in the face of difficulties. Yet the matter was one which could
not be hid from the anxious eyes of loving kinswomen, and I believe that
it was the consciousness that these altered circumstances could not
but force themselves upon our notice that added poignancy to my poor
sister's grief. While not markedly neglecting her, my brother had
evidently ceased to take that pleasure in her company which might
reasonably have been expected in any case under the circumstances of
a recent marriage, and a thousand times more so when his wife was so
loving and beautiful a creature as Constance Temple. He appeared little
except at meals, and not even always at lunch, shutting himself up for
the most part in his morning-room or study and playing continually on
the violin. It was in vain that we attempted even by means of his music
to win him back to a sweeter mood. Again and again I begged him to allow
me to accompany him on the pianoforte, but he would never do so, always
putting me off with some excuse. Even when he sat with us in the
evening, he spoke little, devoting himself for the most part to reading.