Two hours later the wedding took place in the church where Leonard had
been baptized and confirmed. Little Herbert thought he had never been to
such a strange party. He didn't care if he never went to one again. No
one was dressed up but himself. His mother and father and Marjorie wore
their everyday clothes, but their faces were different. He wouldn't have
believed it was a party at all, except for their faces, which wore an
expression he associated with Christmas and birthdays.
The church was dark, and it seemed to Herbert so vast and strange at
this late hour. Candles gleamed on the altar, at the end of a long,
shadowy aisle. Their footsteps made no sound on the velvet carpet as
they walked under the dim arches to the front seat. His aunts and his
uncles and his brother's big friends from the training camp seemed
suddenly to appear out of the shadows and silently fill the front rows.
In the queer light he kept recognizing familiar faces that smiled and
nodded at him in the dimness. Even Miss Shake and Nannie looked queer in
the pew behind. Nannie was dressed in her "day-off" clothes. She was
crying. Herbert looked about him wonderingly: yes, Miss Shake was
crying, too--and that lady in the black veil over there: oh, how she was
crying! No; he didn't like this party.
Through a little space between his father's arm and a stone pillar he
could see Leonard's back. Leonard was standing on the white stone steps,
very straight. Then he kneeled down, and Herbert heard his sword click
on the stone floor. The minister, dressed in a white and purple robe,
with one arm out-stretched, was talking to him in a sing-song voice.
Herbert couldn't see Marjorie, the pillar was in the way; but he felt
that she was there. Leonard's voice sounded frightened and muffled, not
a bit like himself, but he heard Marjorie's voice just as plain as
anything--
"Till death us do part."
Presently the choir began to sing, and his mother found the place in the
hymn-book. Herbert couldn't read, but he knew the hymn. Each verse
ended,--
"Rejoice, rejoice,
Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."
Herbert looked on the hymn-book and pretended he was reading. The book
trembled. Leonard and Marjorie were passing close to the pew. They
looked, oh, so pleased! Leonard smiled at his mother, and she smiled
back. She lifted Herbert up on the seat and he watched them pass down
the dark aisle together and out through the shadowy doorway at the very
end. The little boy felt a vague sensation of distress. He looked up at
his mother and the distress grew. She was still singing, but her mouth
kept getting queerer and queerer as she came to the line,--
"--give thanks, and sing."
He had never seen his mother cry before. He didn't suppose she could
cry. She was grown up. You don't expect grown-up people, like your
mother, to cry--except, of course, Nannie and Miss Shake.
"Rejoice, rejoice,
Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."
He sang it for her. The voices of the choir seemed suddenly to have
traveled a long way off and the tones of the organ were hushed. He heard
his own voice echoing in the silent church. The words seemed to come out
all wrong. He felt a terrible sense of oppression in the region of his
stomach, and he wondered if he were going to be ill. It was a relief to
hear himself crying at the top of his lungs, and to have Nannie scolding
him lovingly, and leading him out of the church. He drove home, sniffing
but comforted, in his father's lap.
"He felt it," old Nannie said to Burns, as she lifted him out of the
carriage. "The child understood, bless him!"
"There wasn't a dry eye come out 'f the church," said Burns, "except
them two selves."
"I wonder where they've gone?" said Nannie, eyeing Burns jealously.
"They must have took a train, I suppose?"
"That's telling," said the old man, whipping up the horses that were
covered with foam.