THE WEDDING
Toward the end of July we found that the lodge at Little Rosemont was to be vacant for a month or two and Pelleas rented it, furnished, from the agent; and we took Nichola and moved down the length of the gravel to the littlest house in the world, set in the littlest garden. There we were established three days and more before Avis and Lawrence were expected home.
We had merely crossed the garden from the great house, and yet life in the little house seemed another matter, as if a harp were heard in a room instead of in an open field. We felt less professionally alive and more free to live. It was as if, Pelleas said, we were reading a poem rather for the exquisite meaning than for the exquisite rhythm.
There was another reason why the lodge invited us. Though it was nearly August, its tiny garden, walled round with a half-moon of hedge, was rich with roses as if, Pelleas said, for an after-meeting of certain Junes. For the lodge garden had been set with monthly roses, those prodigals of giving, and there Chinese roses, Bengal roses, Giant of Battles and Cloth of Gold rioted about a Hundred-leaved rose from the Caucasus and that week they were all ripe with bloom.
That first morning as we stepped on the porch was a kind of greeting, as intimate and personal as a nod. Pelleas and I stood in the garden with the sun, as I believe, slanting madly in every direction and butterflies vanishing against the blue. At all events, that is as I soberly recall the day; and yet it is the day which we remember as our one offence against love. It was the one time in our life that we said of two lovers in whom we believed: “Are we sure that they are right?” instead of our usual: “Let them be married to-day!” I can hardly credit my own feint at heartlessness.
We went across the strip of terrace with a pleasure that was like the pleasure of beginnings. In the center of the garden was a little pool for water flowers and there we set the fountain free in the sheer delight of bringing about all the liberty possible; and we watched the scarlet tanagers bathing in the trickling outlet beside the Hundred-leaved rose. And so we came at last to the arbour in a green corner of the wall, and in its doorway we stood still with the reasonable impression that we were thinking what we seemed to see.
On a bench beneath a window where the roses made an oval open to the garden sat a girl. At first, save the shining of her hair, I saw only that she had beside her a little traveling bag and, also beside her, a fine, manly boy of not a day more than twenty-two. She was crying a little and he was attempting with adorable awkwardness to comfort her. At first glance the most rational explanation was that they were run-away sprites from some neighbouring goblin settlement, and Pelleas and I were making a sympathetic effort to withdraw when they looked up and saw us.
Lo, with a little traveling bag between them, there were Lisa and Eric.
Almost before I grasped the import of this I hurried forward and took Lisa in my arms. In all possible affairs I firmly believe that the kiss should come first and the explanation afterward.
“But it is Lisa!” I cried. “Pelleas, it is Lisa and Eric. Wherever have you come from, dear heart?”
The story was out in one burst of courage with the tears so near, so near.
“I came from Chynmere,” she said; “Uncle Dudley and I are still at the Wortleys’, you know—that is, Uncle Dudley is there. I—I ran away from the Hall this m-morning. I—I eloped. I—Eric—we are going to be—”
Of course the rest was luminously clear.
“Dear heart,” I cried, “then what in this world are you crying for?”
Crying. In the midst of one’s elopement on a glad morning with the sun slanting in every direction and butterflies vanishing against the blue.
“At all events,” said young Eric Chartres, with the most charmingly abashed smile, “I’m not crying.”
Bit by bit this logical climax of the Summer’s situation was imparted to us—indeed, Pelleas and I had already secretly prophesied it. For Dudley Manners to have charge of little Lisa at all was sufficiently absurd; but for him with his middle-aged worldliness to have in keeping her love story was not to be borne. Lisa and Eric had been betrothed since Spring and in those two months Dudley Manners’ objection on the score of their youth had not been to any extent outgrown. Moreover, Lisa explained tremulously, Uncle Dudley had lately given out that she had not yet “seen the world.” Therefore he had taken passage for her and a Miss Constance Wortley, a governess cousin at Chynmere Hall—elderly and an authority on plant life in Alaska—and they were to go abroad to see the world for two years; and Eric was of course to be left behind.
“Two years,” Lisa said impressively, with the usual accent of two eternities; “we were to go to the north of Africa to watch the musk roses bloom and to the Mediterranean to look for rosemary. Uncle Dudley thinks that would be seeing the world. So Eric came this morning early and I slipped down and met him before any one was up. And we came here. I told Eric,” Lisa confessed, “what you told me about Cornelia Emmeline Ayres’ elopement. And we knew you would both understand.”
Pelleas and I looked at each other swiftly. Nature is very just.
“But what are you crying for, dear?” I puzzled then; “you are never sorry you came?”
“Ah, but,” said Lisa sadly, “I think that Miss Wortley really wants to go to Europe and wait about for things to bloom. And now of course she can’t. And then they say—Uncle Dudley says—that I can’t make Eric happy until I know something of life.”
“My dear,” said I from the superiority of my seventy years, “I don’t know about the rest. But that much I am positive is nonsense.”
“Isn’t loving somebody knowing all about life?” Lisa asked simply.
“It is,” Pelleas and I answered together.
“Ah,” Lisa cried, brightening, “I said you would understand. Didn’t I, Eric?”
Eric raptly assented. I had always liked the boy. His whole mind was on Lisa and yet, though from the edges of his consciousness, he had an exquisite manner.
“At all events,” said I when presently I left Lisa in the flowered chintz guest room, “let us lunch first and be married afterward. Whatever happens you must have one of Nichola’s salads.”
I hurried downstairs longing to find Pelleas and to plan with him how we were to bring it all about; but Pelleas was still in conference with that young lover and they were walking up and down the path, heads bent, brows grave, as if the matter were actually one requiring the weightiest consideration. I stood for a moment at the hall window to watch them, with all my heart longing to cry out: Never mind the reasons. Look at the roses. It is perfectly easy to see what they think.
Instead I went to the kitchen to say a word about luncheon. And the day was so sunny and the guests at luncheon were so to my liking and my heart was so full of their story that, as well as for a more practical reason, I was obliged to tell something of it to Nichola.
Nichola was washing green leaves, and these, tender and curled in her withered hands, were as incongruous as a flush I had once detected on her withered cheek. In her starched print gown Nichola looked that morning like some one cut from stiff paper.
“Nichola,” said I, “I think we may have a wedding here this afternoon.”
Instantly her little deep-set eyes became quick-lidded with disapproval.
“It is by no means certain,” I pursued, “but we hope to have it here. And,” I advanced delicately, “could you possibly have ready for us something frozen and delicious, Nichola? With little cakes? Then you need make no dessert at all for dinner.”
Nichola looked at me doubtfully, pulling down her brown print sleeves over her brown wrists.
“Che!” said she, “if it is a runaway match I cannot do this.”
I looked at Nichola in amazement. I was used to her denials; these were merely the form that her emotion took. I was used to her prejudices; these were her only pastime. But I had never before heard her offer an objection which seemed to have a reason.
“Why not—but why not, Nichola?” I cried.
“I had a sister,” Nichola explained unexpectedly; and in all these forty years and more I had never before heard her sister’s name upon her lips. “She went quietly, quietly to San Rafael an’ a priest married her to Beppo an’ they came home for supper. But no good came. Beppo was drown’ from his boat within the year an’ with him a net full of fine fish. If it is a runaway match I cannot do this. No good will come.”
“But, Nichola,” I urged reasonably, “you would not be blamed. Though to be sure I may ask you to telephone to Mr. Didbin, that young rector at Inglese. But you would not be blamed. And to make cream sherbet, that would be no part of the ceremony. And little cakes—”
“No good will come!” cried Nichola shrilly; “for the love of heaven, have I not said how Beppo was drown’ with all his fish? It is not holy.”
“Nichola,” I asked with dignity, “will you be sure to have a particularly delicious luncheon to-day? And will you make for dessert to-night a sherbet, with little cakes, and have it ready in the afternoon?”
I went away with a false majesty covering my certainty that Nichola would pay not the slightest heed to my injunction. Nichola is in everything a frightful nonconformist, from habit; if to this were really superadded a reason I could not tell what might happen, but I felt sadly sure that Lisa and Eric would have for their wedding feast afternoon tea and nothing more.
“Nichola!” said I from the doorway, “what made you think that they had run away?”
“Che!” said Nichola grimly, “I saw them come in the gate. Have I lived these seventy years always, always with my two eyes shut?”
As I hurried away I marveled at that. Once Nichola had unexpectedly proved to me that she has wishes and even dreams. Was it possible that she knew a lover when she saw one? After all, that is a rare gift.
At the foot of the stairs Pelleas met me with a manner of nothing but gravity.
“Pelleas!” I cried, “isn’t it delightful? Wasn’t it providential that they came to us?”
“Etarre,” said Pelleas solemnly, “I’m not at all sure that we oughtn’t to send them straight back to Chynmere Hall.”
If Pelleas had proposed persuading Lisa and Eric to forget each other I could have been no more amazed. Pelleas, who always pretends enormous unconcern in all romance and secretly works with all his might on the side of the adventure, Pelleas, to speak in austere fashion of sending two lovers home. What did he mean? And did he think that a course in the flora of Europe would make anybody any happier whatever?
“Pelleas,” I cried, “how can you? When we are so happy?”
“But you know we didn’t elope,” Pelleas argued.
“Wouldn’t you have loved me if we had?” I inquired reasonably.
“Of course I would,” cried Pelleas, “but—”
“Ah, well, then,” I finished triumphantly, “it’s the same way with them.”
I recall a distinct impression that I had the better of the argument.
“But you see,” Pelleas persisted gently, “after all they are so appallingly young, Etarre. And if Dudley Manners were to be angry and if he were to disinherit Lisa, and so on—”
“As for things going wrong,” said I, “can anything be so wrong as for two who love each other to be separated?”
“No,” Pelleas admitted justly, “nothing can be. All the same—”
“Pelleas!” I cried in despair, “we could have that young rector over here, and they could be married in the little round drawing-room—or in the rose arbour—or in the garden at large. Think of it—cream sherbet and little cakes afterward and us for parents and wedding party and all. Then you and I could go straight to Dudley Manners at Chynmere and tell him how it was, and I know he would forgive them. Pelleas! Can you really think of that dear child spending two years with an authority on plant life in Alaska?”
“Instead of going to him afterward,” said Pelleas boldly then, “suppose you and I leave here after luncheon and drive to Chynmere and make Dudley Manners consent? And bring him and Miss Constance Wortley back to the wedding!” he finished with triumphant daring.
“And not be married secretly?” I said lingeringly, as if the secret wedding were our own.
“Ah, well,” said Pelleas, “at all events we won’t tell him on any account where they are.”
So it was settled, and when presently we four went out to our tiny dining-room courage and gayety were in the air. Our dining-room was white and dull blue with a wreath of roses outside every window and a bowl of roses on the table. And if Nichola considered it reprehensible to assist at a “runaway match” she manifestly had no such scruple about the luncheon to precede it for she set before us the daintiest dishes. I could see the while how her little, quick-lidded eyes were fixed disapprovingly on the young lovers; but then Nichola’s eyes disapprove of the very moon in the sky. I wondered, as I looked at Lisa in the noon of her fresh young beauty, and at Eric, so adoringly in love, how Nichola could even pretend to disapproval at sight of them; and if she had been any one but Nichola I would have suspected her conversion, for of her own will she served our coffee in the rose arbour. Whereupon Pelleas and I became absorbingly interested in the progress of some slips which had been in the ground about six hours and we wandered away to look at them, cups in hand, and left those two to take their coffee in the arbour—in memory of a certain day when we had been left to drink our coffee alone. And when we came back we scrupulously refrained from looking whether they had so much as sipped a thimbleful.
Then, feeling deliciously guilty, we announced to our guests that we had an errand which would keep us away for an hour. And that if it should seem best there would be ample time for the wedding on our return. And that at all events they must decide whether they would be married in the round drawing-room, or in the rose arbour, or in the garden at large. Also, not knowing what warning or summons we might wish hurriedly to send, I added to Lisa:—
“And if the telephone rings, dear, you would better answer it yourself. For it may be Cupid and ministers of grace. No one can tell.”
“O, Aunt Etarre,” said Lisa prettily, “this is perfect of you. Isn’t it, Eric?”
The way that Eric shook the hand of Pelleas three times on the way to the gate might have indicated to some that he thought it was.
Yet there we were, hastening out in the world to find a possible obstacle to all that innocent joy. Never before had we been guilty of such disaffection or even of prudence in such a cause.
“Pelleas, O Pelleas,” I said as we hurried down the lane for a carriage, “but suppose it doesn’t turn out as we think? Suppose Dudley Manners is furious, suppose he guesses where they are and suppose—?”
“Pooh,” said Pelleas in splendid disdain. “Dudley Manners. Thirty years ago I took a polo championship away from him when he was looking directly at me.”
And it needed no more than this and the sun in the lane to reassure me.
From a warlike-looking farmer, a friend of ours living at the lane’s end, we got a low phaeton and a tall horse which we had made occasion to use before. The drive to Chynmere occupied hardly half an hour, and when we saw the tower of the Hall above the chestnuts and before us the high English wall of the park cutting the roadside sward we looked at each other in sudden breathless abashment. After all, Lisa was Dudley Manners’ ward, not ours. After all, two years in Europe are commonly accepted as desirable for a girl of twenty. In that black hour as we drew rein at the lordly entrance of Chynmere Hall itself I felt myself obliged to call up the essential horror of the situation.
“Pelleas,” I said, “remember: they love each other as much as ever we did. And remember: two years with an authority on plant life in Alaska.”
“Monstrous,” said Pelleas firmly.
On which we went bravely up the steps.
Our enterprise was doomed to receive a blow, crushing and apparently mortal. Neither Mr. Dudley Manners nor Miss Constance Wortley was at home. They had gone away in different directions, the man thought, immediately after luncheon.
We went back tremblingly to the low phaeton and the tall horse.
“O, Pelleas,” I said in despair. “And whatever shall we do now? Those poor little people.”
Pelleas looked at his watch.
“We can take an hour,” he said. “We’ll give Dudley Manners or the botanical lady an hour to get back, and we’ll call again.”
“O, Pelleas,” I said, “and if they aren’t there then let us go home and be married anyway—” quite as if the wedding were our own.
But Pelleas shook his head.
“Dear,” he said, “we mustn’t, you know. We really mustn’t. It wouldn’t do in the very least.”
“Pelleas,” said I irrelevantly, “we were just their age when we were married.”
“So we were,” said Pelleas, and drew the tall horse to a walk in the sun of the long green road, and we fell to remembering.
Any one who has ever by any chance remembered knows how sweet the pastime may be. Sometimes I think that heaven must be a place where some of the things that have been will be again. No wonder that as we drove on our delayed mission for those two who sat expectant and adoring in our rose garden, a throng of phantoms of delight came about us and held us very near. No wonder that the tall horse, obeying his own will, took this road and that road, leading us farther and farther in those fragrant ways until at last where the highway ran through a little hollow at the foot of a forbidding hill he stopped altogether, minded to take the tops of some tender green, cool in the shade. I recall the ditches of yellow sweet clover and the drone of the honeybees.
The hollow was on the edge of Chynmere village. Across the green we saw the parish church, white in its elms and alders. I noted absently that a smart trap and a satin horse waited outside the iron fence and that several figures were emerging from the chapel door where the white-haired rector lingered.
“We can ask those people,” suggested Pelleas, “for the shortest cut back to the Hall. I’m afraid the time is getting on.”
He gathered up the lines and drove leisurely across the springing turf. A song sparrow was pouring out its little heart from the marsh land beyond the church and the sounds of the afternoon were growing every moment more beloved. Everything was luring to delight, and here were Pelleas and I alone of all the world—save Dudley Manners and this Miss Wortley—seeking to postpone a great happiness.
“Dudley Manners,” said I out of the fullness of my heart, “must be a kind of ogre. And as for this Miss Wortley, I dare say she is a regular Nichola.”
At this Pelleas said something so softly that I did not hear and drew rein beside the smart trap in which a man and a woman coming from the church had just taken their places. And when I looked up I saw the man turning toward us a face so smiling and so deliciously abashed that it bewildered my recognition, until—
“Dudley Manners!” cried Pelleas. “The very man I am searching the county for.”
And to this Dudley Manners said:—
“I say, Pelleas—you’re a bit late—but how in the world did you guess?”
“Guess?” said Pelleas, puzzled. “Guess you?”
“Guess where—I should say guess what. Did you know I telephoned?” said Dudley Manners all at once; and then having leaped from the trap and bent above my hand he turned to the lady who had sat beside him, an exquisite elderly woman with a lapful of fresia. “This is Mrs. Manners,” he said with charming pride. “The fact is, we’ve just been married in the chapel there.”
At this my heart leaped to a thousand tunes all carrying one happy air.
“You see,” he was explaining, looking up at us with an eagerness almost boyish in his transfigured face, “we—we decided rather suddenly. And we telephoned over to you an hour ago to get you to come and stand by us—”
“Telephoned to us—at the lodge?” I cried in dismay. “O, who came to the telephone?”
Dudley Manners looked as if he wondered what that had to do with his happiness.
“I really don’t know,” he said. “The voice was familiar. I thought at first it might have been you, Etarre. And then they cut us off; and then a terrible voice thundered that neither of you was there. How did you know what we wanted?” he went back to his text.
But as for me I could think only of the terror of those poor little people, and I could guess that Nichola must some way have come to the rescue. I knew her voice over the telephone, like all three voices of Cerberus, saying, “Not at home.”
“Dudley,” said I faintly, “Pelleas—tell him. Ask him.”
I gave Dudley Manners my hand and got to the ground, trembling, and crossed to the trap where the lady was so tranquilly seated, with the fresia in her lap. I said insane, unremembered vagaries to her, all the time listening to that murmur beside the phaeton and knowing that the fate of our little lovers was being decided then and there. And suddenly it came to me that the face in which I was looking was uncommonly sweet and kindly and that inasmuch as she was Mrs. Manners and a bride I might give her my confidence and win her heart for my hope. But when I turned boldly to tell her something of the charming case she was holding out to me some sprays of her fresia.
“Won’t you have this?” she said. “It is a very rare species.”
And then I knew her and I marveled that I had not understood at once. This—this would be no other than Miss Constance Wortley, the botanical lady herself. And in the same instant to quicken my assurance Dudley Manners, laughing deliciously, called softly to her:—
“Constance—Constance. It’s all right. Lisa and Eric are bound to be married to-day and I fancy you’ll have to take me to Europe alone!”
Ah, such a moment of tender, abashed laughter and open rejoicing. And of course Pelleas and I opened our hearts and told them where the lovers were, and who had doubtless answered the telephone at the lodge. And forthwith we invited them to drive with us to the wedding, and to have tea in the garden. And so it was settled, and away we went down the golden road dipping between deep, deep green, and boldly past the tower of Chynmere Hall and through the gracious land of afternoon back to Little Rosemont lodge, bearing the glad tidings to usher in the glad event. Tea or cream sherbet, what a world this is always turning out to be.
“We will go in and explain,” I cried—how I love to explain when best things are true—“and then, Pelleas, you must hurry over in the phaeton for Mr. Didbin, and bring him back with you, no matter what. And then we will be married—in the drawing-room or the rose arbour or the garden at large.”
I love to recall the pleasure of that alighting at the lodge gates, of going within, of looking across the roses for the two whom we were to surprise. I caught a flutter of white in the arbour and, palpitating, I led the way past the pool and the fountain and the trickling outlet where a scarlet wing flashed into flight and past the Hundred-leaved rose, to the turn in the path that led to the arbour.
Then without warning, outside the arbour entrance there seemed to rise from the gravel the amazing figure of Nichola—Nichola in her best black gown and embroidered white apron and an unmistakable manner of threatening us with folded arms. She stood squarely before us, looking at Pelleas and me with all the disapproval of those little, deep-set, quick-lidded eyes.
“Now, then,” she said grimly, “go back. The weddin’s on.”
In the same instant, through the low-arched doorway of the arbour, I saw Lisa and Eric and the questioning, distressed face of the Reverend Arthur Didbin.
Nichola followed my glance.
“It’s none o’ his doin’,” she explained shrilly. “It’s my doin’. We knew who was on the telephone, well enough. She answered it herself,” she explained, with a jerk of her shoulders toward the arbour, “an’ near fainted in my arms. She knew him. An’ we knew what was like to happen when he got here. I went quickly, quickly for the minister an’ here he is. You must not interfere. It is not holy!”
Nichola, that grim old woman, as the ally and not the adversary of Love! But I had no time to marvel at the death of either prejudice or reason.
“Nichola—but Nichola!” I cried breathlessly, “we haven’t come to interfere. We don’t want to interfere. We were going to send for Mr. Didbin ourselves.”
At that Nichola drew back, but doubtfully, with mutterings. And she did not disappear until little Lisa, having seen the radiant faces of our bride and groom, suddenly understood and ran to them. And as for Dudley Manners, one would have said that his dearest wish had been to see Lisa married to Eric Chartres; and as for Mrs. Manners, with her kind eyes, all her fresia scattered in the path as she kissed Lisa, I think that she cannot even have noticed our Hundred-leaved rose or cared whether it had come to us from its native Caucasus or her own Alaska.
I protest that I cannot now remember whether Lisa and Eric were married by the fountain or in the rose arbour or in the garden at large. But I know that it must have been out of doors, for I remember the roses and how the sun was slanting madly in every direction and butterflies were vanishing against the blue.
And when it was over and we sat in the gracious afternoon talking joyously of what had happened and of how strangely it was come about and of how heavenly sweet the world is, there came Nichola from the house bearing to the table in the little arbour a tray unmistakably laden with her cream sherbet and with mounds of her delicate cake.
“Nichola!” I cried as I hurried to her. “You did make it?”
Nichola looked at me from her little deep eyes.
“I made it, yes,” she said, “an’ that was why I went for the minister. I’d begun it, an’ I wasn’t going to have it wasted. It would not be holy.”
It is true that Nichola can use the same argument on both sides of a question. But I have never been able to see the slightest objection to that if only the question is settled properly at last.