NO TROUSSEAU.
Laura was utterly happy in the brief interval between her betrothal and
her wedding. She had given her love and trust unreservedly, feeling
that duty and love went hand in hand. In following the inclination of
her heart she was obeying the behest of her benefactor. She had been
very fond of Jasper Treverton, had loved him as truly as ever daughter
loved a father. It seemed the most natural process to transfer her love
from the adopted father to his young kinsman. The old man in his grave
was the bond of union between the girl and her lover.
‘How pleased papa would have been if he could have known that John and
I would be so fond of each other,’ she said to herself, innocently.
Celia Clare hurried back from Brighton, eager to assist her friend at
this momentous crisis of her life.
‘Brighton was quite too delightful,’ said Celia, ‘but not for worlds
would I be absent from you at such a time. Poor soul, what would you
have done without me?’
‘Dear Celia, you know how fond I am of you, but I think I could really
have managed to get married without your assistance.’
‘Get married! Yes, but how would you have done it?’ cried Celia, making
her eyes very round and big. ‘You would have made a most horrid muddle
of it. Now, what about your trousseau? I’ll wager you have hardly
thought of it.’
‘There you are wrong. I have ordered two travelling dresses, and a
handsome dinner dress.’
‘And your collars and cuffs, your handkerchiefs, your peignoirs, your
camisoles,’ pursued Celia, enumerating a string of articles.
‘My dear child, do you suppose I have lived all these years without
cuffs and collars, and handkerchiefs?’
‘Laura, unless you have everything new you might just as well not be
married at all.’
‘Then you may consider my marriage no marriage, for I am not troubling
myself about new things.’
‘Give me carte blanche and leave everything to me. What is the use of
my sacrificing Brighton just when it was more than too enchanting,
unless I can be of some use to you?’
‘Well, Celia, in order that you may not be unhappy, I will give you
permission to review my wardrobe, and if you find an alarming dearth
of collars and handkerchiefs I’ll drive you to Beechampton in the pony
carriage, and you shall buy whatever you think proper.’
‘Beechampton is hideously behind the age, disgustingly _démodé_,
and your things ought to be in the latest style. I’ll look through the
advertisements in the _Queen_, and send to London for patterns. It
is no use having new things if they are not in the newest fashion. One
does not wear out one’s cuffs and collars--they go out.’
‘You shall have carte blanche, dear, if it will atone for the loss of
Brighton.’
‘My dearest girl, you know I would not desert you at such a crisis
of your life for forty Brightons,’ cried Celia, who had lofty ideas
about friendship; ‘and now about your wedding gown? That is the most
important point of all.’
‘It is ordered.’
‘You did not mention it just now.’
‘Did I not? I am going to be married in one of the gowns I ordered for
travelling, a mixture of grey silk and velvet, the jacket trimmed with
chinchilla. I think it will be very handsome.’
Celia fell back in her chair as if she were going to faint.
‘No wedding gown!’ she cried; ‘no trousseau, and no wedding gown! This
is indeed an ill-omened marriage! Well may poor Edward talk.’
Laura flushed indignantly at this last sentence.
‘Pray what has your brother been saying against my marriage?’ she
asked, haughtily.
‘Well, dear, you cannot expect him to feel particularly pleasant about
it, knowing--as you must know--how he has gone on doting upon you, and
hoping against hope, for the last three years. I don’t want to make you
unhappy, but I must confess that Edward has a very bad opinion of Mr.
Treverton.’
‘I daresay Mr. Treverton will manage to exist without Edward’s good
opinion.’
‘He thinks there is something so utterly mysterious in his
conduct--something insulting to you in the fact of his holding himself
aloof so long, and then coming back at the last moment, just in time to
secure the estate!’
‘I am the best judge of Mr. Treverton’s conduct,’ answered Laura,
deeply wounded. ‘If I can trust him other people may spare themselves
the trouble of speculating upon his motives.’
‘And you can trust him?’ asked Celia, anxiously.
‘With all my heart and soul.’
‘Then have a proper wedding gown,’ exclaimed Celia, as if the whole
question of bliss or woe were involved in that one detail.
When next Miss Malcolm met Edward Clare there was a coolness in her
greeting which the young man could not mistake.
‘What have I done to offend you, Laura?’ he asked, piteously.
‘I am offended with everyone who doubts the honour of my future
husband,’ she answered.
‘I’m sorry for that,’ he said, gloomily. ‘A man cannot help his
thoughts.’
‘A man can hold his tongue,’ said Laura.
‘Well, I will be silent henceforth. Good-bye.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Anywhere, anywhere out of the world; that is to say out of this little
world of Hazlehurst. I think I am going to London. I shall take a
lodging close to the British Museum, and work hard at literature. It is
time I made my mark.’
Laura thought so too. Edward had been talking of making his mark for
the last five years, but the mark as yet was a very feeble one.
Next day he was gone, and Laura had a sense of relief in his absence.
Celia stayed at the Manor-house during the time before the wedding.
She was always in attendance upon the lovers, drove with them, walked
with them, sat by the fire with them at the cheery, dusky afternoon
tea time, when those mysterious shadows that looked like guardian
angels came and went upon the walls. John Treverton seemed to have no
objection to Celia’s company, he rather courted it, even. He was not an
ardent lover, Celia thought; and yet it would have been difficult to
doubt that he was deeply in love. Never since that first evening had
Laura’s head rested against his breast, never since then had he given
full and unrestrained utterance to his passion. His manner was full of
reverent affection; as if he respected his betrothed almost too deeply
to be lavish in the expression of warmer feeling; as if she stood so
high above him in his thoughts of her that love was a kind of worship.
‘I think I should like a more demonstrative lover,’ said Celia, with a
critical air. ‘Mr. Treverton is so awfully serious.’
‘And now that you have seen more of him, Celia, are you still inclined
to think that he is mercenary; that it is the estate and not me he
cares for?’ asked Laura, with no fear as to the answer.
‘No, dear, I honestly believe that he adores you, that he is
dreadfully, desperately, almost despairingly, in love with you,’
answered Celia, very seriously, ‘but still he is not my style of lover.
He is too melancholy.’
Laura had no answer to this objection. As the days had hurried on
towards the end of this eventful year her lover’s spirits had assuredly
not grown lighter. He was full of thought, curiously absent-minded at
times. She, too, grew grave in sympathy with him.
‘It is such a solemn crisis of our lives,’ she thought. ‘Sometimes I
feel as if all things could not go happily to the end, as if something
must happen to part us, at the very last, on the eve of our wedding
day.’
The eve of the wedding came, and brought no calamity. It was a very
quiet evening. The lovers dined together at the vicarage, and walked to
the Manor-house afterwards, alone with each other, almost for the first
time since the night of their betrothal. Everything had been arranged
for to-morrow’s wedding! Such a quiet wedding! No one had been invited
except Mr. Sampson and his sister. The vicar’s wife was to be present,
of course. She would in a manner represent the bride’s mother. Celia
was to be the only bridesmaid. They were to be married by licence, and
no one in the village had as yet any inkling of the event. The servants
at the Manor-house had only been told the date of the marriage within
the last two days, and had been forbidden to talk about it; and as they
were old servants, who had long learned to identify themselves with
‘the family,’ they were not likely to disobey Miss Malcolm’s orders.
The house, always the perfection of neatness, had been swept and
garnished for this important occasion. The chintz covers had been
taken off the chairs and sofas in the drawing-room, revealing tapestry
wreaths and clusters of flowers, worked by Jasper Treverton’s mother
and aunts in a period of almost awful remoteness. The housekeeper had
been baking her honest old face in front of a huge kitchen fire, while
she stirred her jellies, and watched her custards, and turned her game
pie. There was to be a breakfast fit for the grandest wedding, though
Miss Malcolm had told Mrs. Trimmer that a very simple meal would be
wanted.
‘You mustn’t deny me the pleasure of doing my best, at such a time,’
urged the faithful servant. ‘I should feel it a reproach to me all the
rest of my life if I didn’t. There shan’t be no extravagance, Miss, but
I must put a pretty breakfast on the table. I’m so glad our barberry
bushes bore well this year. The berries make such a tasty garnish for
cold dishes.’
Mrs. Trimmer was roasting herself and her poultry in the spacious old
kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, while John and Laura were coming
from the vicarage, arm in arm, Laura strangely glad to have him all
to herself for one little half hour, he vexatiously silent. Celia was
at the Manor-house, laid up with a headache and a new novel. She had
excused herself from the dinner in her usual flippant style.
‘Give them my love, and say I was too seedy to come,’ she said. ‘Going
to dine with one’s parents is quite too slow. I dined with them on
Christmas Day, you know; and Christmas Day at the vicarage has always
been the quintessence of dulness. The thing I wondered at most, when I
came of age, was how I ever could have lived through twenty-one of our
Christmases.’
They were thus, by happy accident, as Laura thought, alone together;
and, behold! the lover, the bridegroom of to-morrow, had not a word to
say.
‘John,’ Laura began softly at last, almost afraid to break this gloomy
silence, ‘there is one thing you have not told me, and yet it is what
most girls in my position would call a very important matter.’
‘What is that, dearest?’
‘You have never told me where we are to spend our honeymoon. Celia has
been worrying me with questions about our plans, and I have found it
difficult to evade her. I did not like to confess my ignorance.’
A simple and a natural question surely, yet John Treverton started, as
at the sharpest thrust that Fate could have at him.
‘My dearest love--I--I have really not thought about it,’ he answered,
stumblingly. ‘We will go anywhere you like. We will decide to-morrow,
after the wedding.’
‘Is not that a rather unusual mode of proceeding?’ asked Laura, with a
faint laugh.
She was somewhat wounded by this show of indifference as to the
very first stage in their journey through life. She would have
liked her lover to be full of wild schemes, to be eager to take her
everywhere--to the Engadine, the Black Forest, the English Lakes,
Killarney, the Trossachs--all in a breath.
‘Are not all the circumstances of our marriage unusual?’ he replied
gravely. ‘There is only one thing certain, there is only one thing
sweet and sacred in the whole business--we love each other truly and
dearly. That is certain, is it not, Laura?’
‘On my side quite certain.’
‘And on my side quite as certain as that I live and that I shall die.
Our love is deep and fixed, rooted in the very ground of our lives, is
it not, Laura? Nothing, no stroke of time or fate can change it.’
‘No stroke of time or fate can change my love for you,’ she said,
solemnly.
‘That is all I want to know. That is the certainty which makes my soul
glad and hopeful.’
‘Why should it be otherwise? Were there ever two people more fortunate
than you and I. My dear adopted father dies, leaving a will that might
have made us both wretched, that might have tempted you to pretend a
love you could not feel, me to give myself to a man I could not love.
But instead of any such misery as that, we fall in love with each
other, almost at first sight, and feel that Providence meant us for
each other, and that we could be happy together in the deepest poverty?’
‘Yes,’ said John, meditatively, ‘it is odd that my cousin Jasper should
have been so sure we should suit each other.’
‘There is a Providence in these things,’ murmured Laura.
‘If I could but think so,’ said her lover, rather to himself than to
her.