His reserve, and his artistic hesitation to work until he felt able to
do good work, held Mark's imagination in check as a dam holds water in
check. He sometimes wrote, but nobody knew that he wrote except one
friend, Frederic Berrand. And Berrand could be a silent man. Even to
Catherine, when he fell in love with her and wooed her, Mark did not
reveal his desire for fame, or his intention to win it. The girl loved
her lover for what he was, but not for all he was. Of the still water
that ran deep she as yet knew nothing. She thought her husband, who was
rich, who appeared gay, who had lived so far, as it seemed, idly enough,
would continue to live with her, as he had apparently lived without her,
brightly, honestly, a little thoughtlessly, a little vainly.
She had no sort of suspicion that she had married that very curious
phenomenon--a born artist. Had her mother suspected it she would have
been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted.
And Catherine herself? well, she was still a child at this time.
She and Mark went to Spain for their honeymoon, and lived in a tiny
white villa at Granada. It stood on the edge of the hill whose crown is
the exquisite and dream-like Alhambra. Its long and narrow garden ran
along the hillside, a slope of roses and of orange flowers, of thick,
hot grass and of tangled green shrubs. The garden wall was white and
uneven, and almost hidden by wild, pink flowers. Beneath was spread the
plain in which lies the City, bounded by the mountains over which, each
evening, the sun sets. And every day the drowsy air hummed in answer to
the huge and drowsy voice of the wonderful Cathedral bell, which struck
the hours and filled this lovely world with almost terrible vibrations
of romance. In the thick woods that steal to the feet of the ethereal
Palace the murmur of the streams was ever heard, and the white snows of
the Sierra Nevada stared over the yellow and russet plain, and were
touched with a blue blush as the night came on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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