CHAPTER XIV.
“EVERYTHING AWAITS MADAME.”
FRANK wished to see Theresa well provided for—he was most amiable and generous where serving a friend cost him nothing and agreeably filled a few of his many vacant hours. He cast shrewdly about among the susceptible and eligible widowers and bachelors of his club and fixed upon Edgar Wayland’s father. The old General and “cotton baron” was growing lonelier and lonelier. He was too rich to afford the luxury of friendship. He suspected and shunned sycophants. He dreaded being married for his money, yet longed for a home with some one therein who would make him comfortable, would listen patiently to his reminiscences and moralisings. He had led an anything but exemplary life, but having reached the age and condition where his kinds of self-indulgence are either highly dangerous or impossible, he wished to become a bulwark of the church and the social order.
“He needs me even more than I need him,” said Theresa, when she disclosed her scheme to Emily, “and that’s saying a good deal. He thinks I’ve been living in Blue Mountain, thinks I’m simple and guileless—and I am, in comparison with him. I’ll make a new and better man of him. If he got the sort of woman he thinks he wants, he’d be miserable. As it is, he’ll be happy.”
Theresa offered to introduce the General to Emily, but she refused, much to Theresa’s relief. “It’s just as well,” she said, with the candour that was the chief charm of her character. “You’re entirely too fascinating with your violet eyes and your wonderful complexion, my dear. But after he’s safe, you must visit us.”
When the time came for Theresa to go to Blue Mountain for her marriage, she begged Emily to go with her. “I didn’t know how fond I was of you,” she said, “until now that we’re separating. And when I look at you, and forget for the moment what a sensible, self-reliant girl you are, it seems to me that you can’t possibly get along without me to protect you.”
But Emily could not go to the wedding. She was moving into an apartment in Irving Place which she and Joan had taken. Also she was marrying.
The wedding was set for a Thursday, but Marlowe found that he must leave town on Wednesday night to go with the President on a short “swing round the circle.” So on Wednesday afternoon he and Emily went to a notary in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth street and were married by certificate.
“Certainly the modern improvements do go far toward making marriage painless,” said Marlowe as they left with the certificates. “I haven’t felt it at all. Have you?” And he stopped at a letter box to mail the duplicate for the Board of Health. As he balanced it on the movable shelf, he looked at her with a queer expression in his eyes. “You can still draw back,” he said. “If we tear up the papers, we’re not married. If I mail this one we are.”
She made a movement toward the balancing letter and he hastily let it drop into the box. “Too late,” he said, in a mock tragic tone. “We are married—tied—bound!”
“And now let us forget it,” was Emily’s reply. “No one knows it except us; and we need never think of it.”
They were silent on the journey downtown, and her slight depression seemed to infect him deeply. Two hours after the ceremony he was dining alone in the Washington express, and she and Joan were having their first dinner in their first “home.”
Two weeks later—in the last week of September—she took the four o’clock boat for Atlantic Highlands and the train there for Seabright. At the edge of the platform of the deserted station she found the yellow trap with stripes of red on the body and shafts—the trap he had described in his letter.
“For Germain’s?” she asked the driver, after she had looked round carefully, as if she were not going to meet her husband.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “They’re expecting you.”
Her trunk and bag were put on the seat with the driver and they were soon in the Rumson road, gorgeous with autumn finery. There were the odours of the sea and the woods, and the air was tranquil yet exhilarating. The trim waggon, the brilliant trees arching overhead, the attractive houses and lawns on either side—it seemed to her that she was in a dream. They turned down a lane to the right. It led through a thick grove of maples, its foliage a tremulous curtain of scarlet and brown lit by the declining sun. Another turn and they were at the side entrance to an old-fashioned brick house with creepers screening verandas and balconies. There were tables on the verandas, and tables out in the garden under the trees. She could hear only the birds and the faint sigh of the distant surf.
Rapid footsteps, and a small, fat, smooth man appeared and bowed profoundly. “Monsieur has not arrived yet,” he said. “Madame Marlowe, is it not?”
She blushed and answered nervously, “Yes—that is—yes.” It was the first time she had heard her legal name, or even had definitely recognised its existence.
“Monsieur telegraphed for madame”—He had a way of saying madame which suggested that it was a politeness rather than an actuality—“to order dinner, and that he will presently come to arrive by the Little Silver station from which he will drive. He missed his train unhappily. But madame need not derange herself. Monsieur comes to arrive now.”
Emily seated herself on the veranda at its farthest table from the entrance. “How guilty and queer and—happy I feel,” she thought.
Monsieur Germain brought the dinner card. “I’m sure we can trust to you for the dinner,” she said.
“Bien, madame. It will be a pleasure. And will madame have a refreshing drink while she passes the time?”
“Yes—a little—perhaps—a little brandy?” she said tentatively.
“Excellent.” And Germain himself brought a “pony” of brandy, a tall empty glass and a bottle of soda. He opened the soda and went away. She drank the brandy from the little glass, and then some of the soda. Almost instantly she felt her timidity flying before a warm courage that spread through her veins and sparkled in her eyes. “It is even more beautiful here than I imagined it would be,” she thought, as she looked round. “And I’m glad I got here first and had a chance to get—the brandy.”
When her husband came he found her leaning against a pillar of the veranda looking out into space, an attitude that was characteristic of her. She greeted him with a blush, with downcast eyes, with mischievous radiance.
“I just saw my first star,” she said, “and I made a wish.”
He put his arm round her and his head against hers. “Don’t tell me what you wished,” he said, “for—I—we—want it to come true. It must come true. And it will, won’t it?”
“I’m very, very happy—thus far,” she answered.
They stood in silence, watching Germain and the waiter set a table under the trees—the linen, the silver and glass and china, the candlesticks. And then Germain came to the walk below them and beamed up at them.
“Everything awaits madame,” he said.