Then Van Zandt said, sternly:
"I will have no one say that I was paid to take the girl of my choice.
I am not rich, as you know, but I will toil harder now that I have such
an object in life. She shall not go shabby or hungry, I promise you."
His voice was so full of feeling, despite its sternness, that
Carmontelle was puzzled. He exclaimed:
"Your pride does you honor, Van Zandt. But--you said--the girl of your
choice. I do not understand!"
Van Zandt hesitated, then said reluctantly:
"Believe me, I do not want to make you feel your loss more keenly by
what I must now admit; but, Carmontelle, the reparation I must make
to Ma'amselle Marie is not such that I need money to condone the
sacrifice. I--I love her, although I have never dared own the truth to
my own heart until this hour."
Through the breast of the elder man there went a pang of jealous pain,
as he repeated, hoarsely:
"You love her?"
"Yes, since the first night I met her. But I scarcely dared own the
truth to my own heart. What had I, the poor journalist, to do with that
fair creature, whose beauty in itself was a rich dower? But now, when
fate itself has given her to me, I can only rejoice."
"Rejoice, yes, that is best--much best," Carmontelle said, after a
long, constrained pause. "It is best," he repeated again, more firmly.
"It was fate itself that gave her to me," Van Zandt said, solemnly; and
in a burst of emotion he made clear the mystery of the wounded arm that
had so puzzled his friend.
"She was dying, and I gave my own blood to save her life. It is my own
life that leaps through her veins, that sends the light to her eyes,
the color to her cheek. But it is my secret. She must never know."
"No, never; but by that noble sacrifice her life belongs to you, and I
can be unselfish enough, Van Zandt, in my own disappointment, to wish
that you may win her whole young heart!" Carmontelle exclaimed, lifted
out of all selfish regrets by this strange revelation.
And then they planned it all out before Van Zandt lay down to rest,
taking Marie's consent for granted--Marie, the simple, ignorant girl
who could not have told you to save her life what those two words, love
and marriage, meant.
She was as innocent as a babe over many things, poor Little Nobody!
And, to do Van Zandt justice, he revolted at the thought of taking her,
as it seemed, willy-nilly; but the world, the great wicked world, left
him, as Carmontelle said, no other way.
"I should have liked to woo and win my bride in the sweet old
fashion," he thought, regretfully; then, with a new idea: "And what
is there to hinder? The words of the marriage service will be almost
meaningless terms to her untutored mind. I will take no advantage of
the claims it will give me. I will hold her as sacred as an angel until
I shall win her heart as well as her hand. At home I will place her in
the school-room with my sisters. She shall have culture equal to her
beauty, and I will work for her and worship her in silence until the
child becomes a woman and her heart awakes from sleep."
The very next day he said to her gently:
"Ma'amselle Marie, I shall be going home to Boston in two more days."
She cried out regretfully:
"Oh, I am sorry; I am afraid I shall never see you any more!"
"Will you go with me, dear, and be my little wife?"
"I will go with you, yes; but--your wife--I do not understand," she
said, in a puzzled tone, just as he had expected she would.
"You would live with me always," he began. "You would belong to me, you
would bear my name, you would do as I wished you, perhaps, and--"
"Ah, your slave?" she interrupted, intelligently.
Serious as he felt, he could not forbear a laugh; but he said, gently:
"Not my slave, but my love, my darling, my treasure. I would never beat
you, nor scold you, nor make your life sad, as Madame Lorraine did. I
would be very kind to you always. Now, will you be my wife?"
She replied, with childish frankness:
"Yes, I will be your wife and go with you to your home. Then, perhaps,
I will understand better your word, 'wife.'"
He smiled and stooped to kiss her, but she drew back quickly, her
innate shyness taking alarm. He did not press her, only said to himself:
"My shy little wild bird, her heart is yet to win."
It seemed to him the strangest thing he had ever heard of, this taking
for a wife a young, untutored creature who actually did not understand
what the words love, marriage, and wife meant.
He told Carmontelle later of his thought. The Southerner was amused at
the ignorance of the lovely girl--amused and sorry in one breath, and
with a sigh of regret, he said:
"Happy is he who shall have the pleasure of teaching her the meaning of
those tender words."
It was arranged that the marriage should take place just prior to Van
Zandt's departure from New Orleans. Van Zandt himself undertook to make
Marie understand the necessity for the marriage service that would make
her his wife. She acquiesced readily, and asked that Father Quentin,
the old priest at Le Bon Berger, be permitted to perform the ceremony.
Her romantic fancy immediately invested the affair with a halo of
romance.
"I shall be a bride," she said, naïvely. "In madame's fashion books
there are brides all in white, with veils on their heads. I shall be
dressed like that, and the marriage shall be out in madame's garden by
moonlight. All the Jockey Club shall come to see, and the nuns from the
convent, too, if they choose."
Van Zandt said it should be just as she liked. He employed Marie's good
nurse to buy the simple white India muslin dress and tulle veil. Also a
pretty gray serge dress and straw hat for traveling.
Carmontelle presented her with a full set of large, lustrous pearls
to be worn at the ceremony, and the rest of the Jockey Club, who
had, since the day of Marie's splendid riding, felt almost a proud
proprietorship in her, contributed a great box full of costly
wedding-gifts--jewels, costly dressing-cases, perfume sets, glove-boxes
full of tiny kid gloves--everything, in short, that they could think of
on the spur of the moment, even adding a big photograph-album in ivory
and silver containing fac-similes of their familiar faces.
Father Quentin, only too glad to be forgiven for his treachery to
Carmontelle, came to perform the ceremony and bless the wedded pair.
But before this auspicious event a difficulty had arisen.
A marriage license must be procured; but what name should be written in
it for the nameless girl, Mme. Lorraine's Little Nobody?
Pierre Carmontelle came quickly to the rescue.
"I adopt Marie as my daughter. I am quite old enough to be her father.
Let the name be written Marie Carmontelle," he said.
And so as Marie Carmontelle she was given into the keeping of her
handsome young husband.
Everything was arranged as she wished. The priest grumbled at the
oddity of the whole thing, but she was married, all the same, out in
the beautiful garden, by moonlight, with the sweet scent of flowers
all about her, and her young face pale with excitement and strange
emotion. The Jockey Club came in a body to witness the wedding, and
some brought sisters and friends, who were all agog over the romance of
the affair, and said that the bride was as lovely as a dream, and that
that wicked Mme. Lorraine ought to have been ashamed of herself for
her cruel treatment of one so beautiful and innocent. The girl who but
a little while ago had been friendless and nameless had suddenly come
into a heritage of hosts of friends and one of the proudest names of
New England.
There was no wedding banquet. When the bride had been congratulated
by everybody, and even kissed by some of the beautiful, warm-hearted
ladies who had come to witness her strange marriage, her female
attendant whisked her off upstairs to change her white dress for a
traveling one; then, in a few more minutes, and with the sound of kind
adieus in her ears, she was in a carriage riding away from all that her
old life had ever known, except Eliot Van Zandt, who sat by her side,
her shy little hand in his, and called her his wife.
Soon they were on board the steamer that rocked at the wharf, soon
they were sailing away on the breast of the broad Mississippi, leaving
behind the glimmering lights and busy life of the quaint Crescent
City, homeward bound, and Eliot Van Zandt, who little more than two
months since had entered the harbor of New Orleans, careless, gay, and
fancy-free, was taking home a bride to his ancestral home. He had asked
himself rather nervously several times what his brother and sisters
would say.