A SEASIDE SYMPHONY

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 240, 30 December 1927, Page 4

A SEASIDE SYMPHONY

You would have noticed them anywhere. The tall, fair, bronzed, seafaring man just entering on early mid-dle-age. The slim, delicate-featured brunette at his side. The group of boys and girls who had inherited the dual dower of parental good looks. A queer alliance, you would have said. The mother, so obviously a gentlewoman in the sacrosanct social sense. The man, a simple gentleman outside the social code. Quiet, reserved, mutely adoring his wife and bairns. A fisherman in the exclusive seaside resort where his wife’s father was rector of the parish. One soon learned the story. A real love romance, if ever there was one. And stern, unrelenting unforgiveness on the part of the bride’s parents, even when the lovely children were born. In their little cottage bungalow, they lived their lives apart, the husband and wife who would be always lovers. She, accepting her parents* decree, and devoting herself utterly to her husband and children. He, worshipping at her shrine and forbidding all contact with his own people. Her children must be kept immune from any influence calculated to lower their maternal caste.

Just enough money to live in decent security in the spot where the husband and father had the elemental roots of his being; and where the wife and children had no roots at all save in the cottage hearthstone.

Inevitably, during a month’s sojourn in the little seaside village, one met

them frequently. And, also inevitably, one fell to studying the beautiful face of the young mother who had thought her world well lost for love. If she had any regrets, they were not visible. Seldom have I seen such concentrated sweetness in feminine eyes and lips; such gracious distinction of poise. Housewife, mother, and nur-sery-governess in one, it was apparent that the triple role held no boredom for her. She was serenely, superbly content. Nor was there any dim aura of matrimonial mesalliance round the radiant children. It was the man’s face, the face of the fisherfolk laddie who had “married above himself,” that reflected a shadowing sadness. Not his to share the sunlit faith of the woman who had renounced so much for womanhood’s fulfilment. To him were reserved the doubts for his children’s future that never assailed the maternal heart. Hers was the trust in that inheritance of spiritual independence she had handed on to her boys and girls, when she had played her age-old role without counting the cost. It was the father’s eyes that made one tenderly aware of a more poignant sacrifice on the altar of immortal love.