ENGLISH WEDDING BELLS
Basil Gregory’s wedding day was warm and clear. June and England were
at their best.
It was a sweetly pretty wedding. Every one said so.
And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding--prettier than
any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses
she wore, and very like them: pink and white, delicate, fair-haired,
violet-eyed Alice Lee, the motherless daughter of the incumbent of the
old gray vicarage in which Basil Gregory’s mother had been born.
Homesick for the old days and the old ways, Florence Gregory had gone
to Oxfordshire soon after their return to England, hoping to bathe
and to heal her stained and torn spirit in the quiet of old places,
the ointment of pure memories. She had failed. But she had made fast
friends with her dead father’s successor, and had gone back to the
cordial hospice of her old home again and again in the three years
that had elapsed since she had come from China. A year ago Basil had
accompanied her, none too willingly, for a week-end, had stayed a
month; hence these wedding bells!
Florence Gregory was an old woman now, old and limp. Robert Gregory was
no longer proud of his wife. Her white hair was very beautiful, but he
resented it, and it rasped and angered him that she had prematurely
aged. He had married her, as he had loved her, for her buoyant good
looks, and he felt that he was defrauded by the change in her--a change
so marked that even his careless and ledger-bound eyes could not fail
to see it. And secretly his poor mundane spirit groaned aloud that
_his_ missus--the best-dressed woman in Hong Kong three years
ago, and every bit as smart as her clothes--had degenerated into a
frumpish nobody, looked older than he did, by the Lord Harry, and
without an ounce of snap in her or a word to say to any one. Greatly
to his credit, he had kept all this to himself loyally. He had never
spoken of it, not even hinted at it, to any one, beyond plaintive and
repeated entreaties to Hilda to help him find some way to buck Mother
up. He had never been unkind to his wife. He still bought flowers for
her--the bouquet she carried at their son’s wedding had cost five
guineas--and burdened her with gifts of jewelry almost inappropriate
to his means. And Mr. Gregory was growing very rich indeed. The wounds
that “Mr. Wu” had dealt his fortune had soon healed, and left no scar.
He was still a faithful husband. Such pride and consolation as a woman
may take from the continence that is chiefly the outcome of a husband’s
indifference to her sex and of his absorption in business and in self
were Mrs. Gregory’s. And in all their married life they had had but one
quarrel--a unique quarrel, as husbands and wives go. It had occurred
two years ago, and had been over a dressmaker’s bill.
Such quarrels are common? They are scarcely uncommon--certainly not
unique. But this was one with a difference. Mr. Gregory had always
seen and paid his wife’s dressmakers’ bills. It had been one of his
greatest pleasures. Madame Eloise had taken less pleasure in concocting
those princely accounts, and in receipting them, than Robert Gregory
had taken in writing the cheques that had discharged them. Two years
ago a quarterly account had come in in two figures. That was too much.
Gregory raged at his wife, and after an impatient word or two, she had
bit her lip, smiled and promised reform. And she had kept her word; for
she had seen his point of view and the justice of his complaint. But
the latest fashions no longer suited her. Still less did she now suit
them. Wu Li Chang and Basil Gregory had sapped her of the courage and
the carriage to wear smart gowns. Her _beauté de diable_ was quite
gone--she had left it in a Chinese K’o-tang; and the finer beauty that
had replaced it this husband had no eyes to see.
But Hilda saw, and between the mother and daughter had grown a
tenderness and a friendship that had not been theirs before. “Your
mouth is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, Mother,” the girl said
sometimes. And it was very beautiful, with an exquisite loveliness that
only the lips that have been steeped in hyssop can ever show.
Hilda was the only bridesmaid to-day. She had none of the bride’s soft
prettiness, and only a fair amount of the splendid good looks that
her own mother had lost. But she had gained in charm, in tact, in
womanliness, and, too, even in girlishness.
Her engagement to Tom Carruthers was broken. The breaking had grieved
her--at the time. The day Carruthers had sailed for England to claim
Hilda and to take her back to China, a Chinese girl had thrown herself
into Hong Kong harbor. Oddly, the story had reached England--oddly,
because such stories are so common. But this one had in some way
trickled across the world, and to Hilda. Hilda had probed it, and had
given Tom back his ring. It had not been a very black case, as such
things go. The Chinese girl was nobody’s daughter. Carruthers had never
deceived her, and had promised her nothing that he had not given. But
she had grown to care for him. O curse of womanhood!
And Hilda had a sturdy, wholesome instinct of virtue, a
matter-of-course as towards herself, relentless towards others, that
she had inherited from her mother, but not from her mother alone; and
she also had a quick, curt, businesslike method of dealing with the
facts and incidents of life that she had inherited solely from Robert
Gregory. She considered her engagement to Tom Carruthers a bad debt;
and she wrote it off with a steady hand. Basil was angry with her, and
had upbraided her. “Girls don’t understand such things!” he told her
petulantly. “But I thought you had more sense.”
“I understand myself,” she had retorted haughtily.
Needless to say, Carruthers also was angry, and shared his anger with
generous, masculine impartiality between Hilda Gregory and I Matt So.
Mrs. Gregory was glad. And it was she who mentioned the news (but not
its circumstance) in her next letter to Hong Kong. Hilda’s father was
indifferent. There was time enough for so rich a man’s daughter, and
the finest girl in England, by the Lord Harry, any day; and as for Tom,
she might do worse, of course, but, on the other hand, she might do a
long sight better.
It was not Basil’s old misdemeanor that had so broken his mother,
nor was it her experience in the K’o-tang of Wu Li Chang. It was the
estrangement that had grown between her and her son--an estrangement
that had become almost a bitterness. At times it was a bitterness.
A great secret shared between two, and inviolably kept by both, must be
either a great bond or a great alienation. The terrific secret shared
by Florence Gregory and her boy proved both. They never spoke of it.
But, for that, it burdened and haunted them the more.
So far as she blamed him for his old fault his mother had quite
forgiven Basil.
But he could not forgive her.
It cut her to the quick. But she could not blame Basil for it. And she
sorrowed for him, more than she did for herself, that she was powerless
to give him conviction of the good truth that her forgiveness was
“perfect and entire, wanting nothing,” her love unchanged.
And sometimes when the soul-poison scummed thickest in him, because of
it, Basil Gregory loved his mother a little less. The high place to
which sons in their souls set mothers carries a great price.
But this was not the worst between them. At times--and these were his
blackest--Basil Gregory wondered if, at the absolute last, his mother
would have failed him, would have refused to spare, at her supremest
cost, the life she had given him. Would she at the last hideous resort
have grudged him her all? Sometimes he thought that she would. And when
he thought so he blamed her. And for that blame, his mother, who read
his very soul, a little despised him, and she could not forgive it.
Wu Li Chang had wreaked a vengeance more terrible than he had planned.
For when in a mother’s soul there is something that she cannot forgive
the son she has borne and nursed and still loves, human tragedy has
reached its depth.