A HOME-COMING
“’Tis May without and May within!” might well have been Sydney’s song, as
she literally danced along the Park on a perfect afternoon a few weeks
later.
Though she and Miss Osric had been up since seven o’clock, the day had
seemed all too short for everything she wanted to crowd into it.
“No one should do the flowers but herself,” she declared, and Mackintosh
groaned over the ravages she made in “his conservatories” and “his
gardens.” But Miss Lisle was a privileged person in his eyes, so his
groans were only inward, and he actually went so far as to walk round
the conservatories with her, cutting what she wanted, with the face of a
martyr at the stake!
“Not that I grudge flowers in reason to her ladyship,” he explained, “but
what’s to become of my flower-show next month, miss, I ask you?”
“Indeed, I won’t take all your flowers,” said Sydney; “but surely,
Mackintosh, you want the Castle to be gay as much as I do when Lord St.
Quentin is bringing home his bride at last!”
“Well, miss, I’ll not say but that I do rejoice with all my heart,”
the old man said. “And a fine upstanding ladyship we shall have, says
I! I mind her well enough when she come here first with the Dean, and
looked at my flowers for all the world as if they were Christians, and
understood what she said to ’em. ‘Oh, you beauties! you lovely things!’
she cried as she comes into the conservatories, as his lordship he was
showing to her. No, miss, I don’t grudge my flowers, in reason—not to you
or to her ladyship!”
The wedding had taken place very quietly a fortnight ago. Both Katharine
and St. Quentin felt that they had waited long enough for the happiness
that had so nearly never come at all. They were married early one
morning, in one of the little side chapels of the great cathedral, by
Katharine’s white-haired father, with only Sydney and the little cousin
Sylvia present, and old Dr. Lorry, who insisted upon coming, to see
how his patient got through the ceremony. There were so few relations
upon either side to come, even if the health of the bridegroom had been
fit for anything but the quietest of weddings. St. Quentin asked Lady
Frederica to be present from a sense of duty, but was neither surprised
nor disappointed when she wrote to explain it was impossible to expect
her to attend a wedding which was fixed for so unconscionably early an
hour, but she sent her best wishes to them both. She also sent a handsome
wedding present, for which the bill came in afterwards to St. Quentin.
So there were only those few there to hear the words that made Katharine
and St. Quentin man and wife at last. The honeymoon had been passed in a
health-giving cruise on the Mediterranean, and now they were to come home.
Lady Frederica had never returned to the Castle after St. Quentin’s
operation, and it cannot be said that her nephew missed her. He invited
Mrs. Chichester to come and stay with Sydney during the period of his
convalescence, and inwardly determined, as he saw the delight with which
the girl showed all her favourite haunts to “mother,” that she should
have at least the female portion of the house of Chichester to stay with
her as often as she liked. In fact, Katharine had already expressed her
intention of being great friends with them all.
But Mrs. Chichester had gone back to London now, and for the fortnight
of the honeymoon Miss Osric and Sydney had been alone, and had certainly
made good use of their time in the business of arranging a welcome for
St. Quentin and his bride.
The Castle was ablaze with flowers and the air ablaze with sunshine, as
Sydney, her labours finished, but too excited to sit still and wait,
went dancing onward through the Park and out into the village, where the
hedges were fast breaking into the bridal white of hawthorn blossom.
Miss Osric, as soon as all the work was finished, had discreetly betaken
herself to the Vicarage, leaving the girl to welcome Katharine and her
cousin alone.
It was four o’clock: they would hardly be here for another quarter of an
hour, Sydney thought to herself, and she slackened her pace and looked
upward at the gorgeous decorations with which the little village was
aflame.
The children were all drawn up in a body on the village green, under
the charge of the schoolmistress, and armed with little, tight, hard
bunches of flowers, to cast before the happy pair. Most of the tenantry,
the farmers on horseback, were waiting at the top of the village at the
turning on the Dacreshaw road. Some few of the women, however, were
remaining quietly at the cottage doors, satisfied without that first view
of the bride and bridegroom which the others seemed to think so desirable.
Among the number of these last was Mrs. Sawyer, who, with a healthy
colour in the face that used to look so sickly, was standing smiling at
the neat white gate of her new cottage.
Sydney paused to shake hands with her and ask if everything in the new
cottage were entirely satisfactory.
“Why, that it is, miss,” was the hearty response, “if it weren’t for
just a little leakage in the boiler. But there, miss, I’ve no call to
complain, for indeed I scarcely know myself with my beautiful tiled
kitchen, as is almost too good to use, and my back-kitchen as is fit for
duchesses to work in, and all the rest as ’is lordship ’as done for me.
Reckon that there boiler is my crumpled rose-leaf, miss!”
Mrs. Sawyer was so serious that Sydney felt it would not do to laugh,
though the description of the large black boiler as “a rose-leaf” made
the corners of the mouth twitch ominously.
She volunteered to come and look at it, and was bending down to examine
the defective tap, when a roar of distant cheering made both forget the
leaking boiler and rush wildly to the door. “They are coming!”
Round the bend in the road, under the great arch wreathed with flowers
and bearing the inscription, “Welcome to the bride and bridegroom,”
bowled the carriage. There they were!
St. Quentin, still very thin, but upright, hat in hand, smiling and
nodding to his tenants as they roared their welcome, and by his side
Katharine, fair and stately, unchanged, except that the sadness had
passed from her eyes.
Sydney ran forward, and the carriage stopped.
“Hullo! what are you doing wandering about alone?” St. Quentin asked,
laughing, when they had exchanged greetings. “Lucky for you Aunt Rica
isn’t here! What is it?”
“I am trying to make out what is wrong with Mrs. Sawyer’s boiler,” she
explained; “it leaks.”
The marquess said something in a low tone to his wife, jumped down,
handed her from the carriage, and turned to Greaves, wooden with surprise
upon the box, at this extraordinary conduct on the part of the bride and
bridegroom.
“Drive on, Greaves; we’ll walk up presently. Now, Mrs. Sawyer, let’s have
a look at the boiler.”
“You could have knocked me down with a feather!” Mrs. Sawyer was wont
to say when dilating on the story afterwards. “For in they all come, as
sure as I’m a living woman! and down goes his lordship on his knees,
as interested in that boiler as if it was a newspaper full of the
quarrellings of that there silly Parliament, and turns the tap about,
and then jumps up and looks about to see if the workmen had left any
putty, and as pleased as may be when he finds it, and down on his knees
again—and thankful I was as I’d scrubbed the floor only that morning—and
makes as neat a job of it as may be, just to last till the plumber comes
to do it proper, he says; and full of jokes all the time he was, as made
me laugh till I cried nearly!
“And her ladyship sitting by, in my best chair, and nursing Liza’s baby,
as though she fair loved to have it on her knee; and our young lady,
bless her! looking as bright and happy as though her world was just made
of spring and sunshine, as I hopes it may be!
“And his lordship made a rare good job of the boiler too,” she would add,
as though anybody had presumed to doubt his powers as a plumber, “and
washed his hands in the back kitchen when he finished, and dried ’em on
the round towel, not a bit proud, and when he knocks his ’ead against the
lintel going out, he laughs again, and says, says he—‘Fane must make my
tenants’ doors a little higher,’ says he, ‘for I mean there to be room
for me to come in,’ he says.”
The three walked together through the Park with the late afternoon
sunshine glittering on the glory of fresh green beneath and overhead, and
up the marble steps to the splendid castle towering above them.
As they reached the top, St. Quentin raised his hat, and took a hand of
each.
“Welcome home!” he said.