Read "The Venetians" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
What a happy honeymoon it was, along the porphyry walls of Western England; what joyous days that were so long and seemed so short! There never was a less costly honeymoon, for the bride's tastes were simple to childishness, and the bridegroom was too deeply in love to care for anything she did not desire. To ramble in that romantic land, staying here a few days, and there a week, all along the wild north coast, from Tintagel to St. Ives, southward then to Penzance, and Falmouth, and Fowey, was more than enough for bliss. And yet in all Eve's childish talk with her sisters of what she would do if ever she married a rich man, the honeymoon tour in Italy had been a leading feature in her programme; but in those girlish visions beside the schoolroom fire the husband had been a nonentity, a mere purse-bearer, and all her talk had been of the places she was to see. Now, with this very real husband, all earth was paradisaic, and Sorrento could not have seemed more like a dream of beauty than Penzance. She was exquisitely happy; and what can the human mind require beyond perfect bliss?
These wedded lovers lingered long over that summer holiday. It was an ideal summer -- a summer of sunshine and cloudless skies, varied only by an occasional thunderstorm -- tempest enjoyed by Vansittart and Eve, who loved Nature in her grand and awful as well as in her milder aspects -- and a tempest from the heights above Boscastle, or from the grassy cliffs of the Lizard, is a spectacle to remember. They spun out the pleasures of that simple Cornish tour. There was nothing to call them home -- no tie, no duty, only their own inclination; for the dowager Mrs. Vansittart was staying at Redwold, absorbed in worship of the third generation, and was to go from Redwold to Ireland for a round of visits to the friends of her early married life. The lovers were therefore free to prolong their wanderings, and it was only when the shortening days suggested fireside pleasures that Vansittart proposed going home.