WHAT CAME OF A WEDDING
The white house in the aspens was in gala attire. Flowers--great banks
of bloom--were massed in the hall, along the stairway and in the
window-seats, and wreaths of delicate fern trembled on the prim-hung
chandeliers. Over all breathed the sweet fragrance of jasmin. Musicians
sat behind a screen of palms in a corridor, and a long scarlet carpet
strip ran down the front steps to the driveway, up which passed bravely
dressed folk, arriving in carriages and on foot, to witness the
completion of a much-booted romance.
For a fortnight this afternoon's event had been the chat of the town,
for David Stires, who to-day retired from active business, was its
magnate, the owner of its finest single estate and of its most important
bank. From his scapegrace boyhood Hugh Stires had made himself the
subject of uncomfortable discussion. His sudden disappearance after the
rumored quarrel with his father, and the advent of Jessica Holme, had
furnished the community sufficient material for gossip. The wedding had
capped this gossip with an appropriate climax. Tongues had wagged over
its pros and cons--for Hugh's past had induced a wholesome skepticism of
his future. But the carping were willing to let bygones be bygones, and
the wiseacres, to whose experience marriage stood as a sedative for the
harum-scarum, augured well.
There was an additional element of romance, too, in the situation; for
Jessica, who had never yet seen her lover, would see her husband. The
great surgeon on whose prognostication she had built so much, had
arrived and had operated. He was not alone an eminent consultant in
diagnosis, but an operator of masterly precision, whose daring of
scalpel had made him well-nigh a last resort in the delicate
adventurings of eye surgery. The experiment had been completely
successful, and Jessica's hope of vision had become a sure and certain
promise.
To see once again! To walk free and careless! To mold the plastic clay
into the shapes that thronged her brain! To finish the statue which she
had never yet shown to any one, in the great sky-lighted attic! To see
flowers, and the sunset, the new green of the trees in spring, and the
sparkle of the snow in winter, and people's faces!--to see Hugh! That
had been at the core of her thought when it reeled dizzily back from
the merciful oblivion of the anesthetic, to touch the strange gauze
wrappings on her eyes--the tight bandage that must stay for so long,
while nature plied her silent medicaments of healing.
Meanwhile the accepted lover had become the importunate one. The
operation over, there had remained many days before the bandages could
be removed--before Jessica could be given her first glimpse of the world
for nearly three years. Hugh had urged against delay. If he had
stringent reasons of his own, he was silent concerning them. And
Jessica, steeped in the delicious wonder of new and inchoate sensations,
had yielded.
So it had come about that the wedding was to be on this hot August
afternoon, although it would be yet some time before the eye-bandages
might be laid aside, save in a darkened room. In her girlish, passionate
ideality, Jessica had offered a sacrifice to her sentiment. She had
promised herself that the first form her new sight should behold should
be, not her lover, but her husband! The idea pleased her sense of
romance. So, hugging the fancy, she had denied herself. She was to see
Hugh for the first time in a shaded room, after the glare and nervous
excitement of the ceremony.
Gossip had heard and had seized upon this tidbit with relish. The blind
marriage--a bride with hoodwinked eyes, who had never seen the man she
was to marry--the moment's imperfect vision of him, a poor dole for
memory to carry into the honeymoon--these ingredients had given the
occasion a titillating sense of the extraordinary and romantic, and
sharpened the buzz of the waiting guests, as they whiled away the
irksome minutes.
It was a sweltering afternoon, and in the wide east parlor, limp
handkerchiefs and energetic fans fought vainly against the intolerable
heat. There, as the clock struck six, a hundred pairs of eyes galloped
between two centers of interest: the door at which the bride would
enter, and the raised platform at the other end of the room where,
prayer-book in hand, in his wide robes and flowing sleeves, Harry
Sanderson had just taken his stand. Perhaps more looked at Harry than at
the door.
He seemed his usual magnetic self as he stood there, backed by the
flowers, his waving brown hair unsmoothed, the ruby-ring glowing
dull-red against the dark leather of the book he held. Few felt it much
a matter of regret that the humdrum and less personable Bishop of the
Diocese should be away at convocation, since the young rector furnished
the final esthetic touch to a perfectly appointed function. But Harry
Sanderson was far from feeling the grave, alien, figure he appeared. In
the past weeks he had waged a silent warfare with himself, bitterer
because repressed. The strange new thing that had sprung up in him he
had trampled mercilessly under. From the thought that he loved the
promised wife of another, a quick, fastidious sense in him recoiled
abashed. This painful struggle had been sharpened by his sense of Hugh's
utter worthlessness. To that rustling assemblage, the man who was to
make those solemn promises was David Stires' son, who had had his fling,
turned over his new leaf becomingly, and was now offering substantial
hostages to good repute. To him, Harry Sanderson, he was a _flaneur_, a
marginless gambler in the futures of his father's favor and a woman's
heart. He had shrunk from the ceremony, but circumstances had
constrained him. There had been choice only between an evasion--to which
he would not stoop--and a flat refusal, the result of which would have
been a footless scandal--ugly town-talk--a sneer at himself and his
motives--a quietus, possibly, to his whole career.
So now he stood to face a task which was doubly painful, but which he
would go through with to the bitter end!
Only a moment Harry stood waiting; then the palm-screened musicians
began the march, and Hugh took his place, animated and assured, looking
the flushed and expectant bridegroom. At the same instant the
chattering and hubbub ceased; Jessica, on the arm of the old man, erect
but walking feebly with his cane, was advancing down the roped lane.
She was in simple white, the point-lace on the frock an heirloom. Her
bronze hair was drawn low, hiding much of the disfiguring bandage, under
which her lips were parted in a half-smile, human, intimate and eager,
full of the hope and intoxication of living.
Harry's eyes dropped to the opened book, though he knew the office by
heart. He spoke the time-worn adjuration with clear enunciation, with
almost perfunctory distinctness. He did not look at Hugh.
"_If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined
together, let him speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace._" In
the pause--the slightest pause--that turned the page, he felt an insane
prompting to tear off his robes, to proclaim to this roomful of heated,
gaping, fan-fluttering humanity, that he himself, a minister of the
gospel, the celebrant of the rite, knew "just cause"!
The choking impulse passed. The periods rolled on--the long white glove
was slipped from the hand, the ring put on the finger, and the pair,
whom God and Harry Sanderson had joined together, were kneeling on the
white satin prie-dieu with bowed heads under the final invocation. As
they knelt, choir voices rose:
"O perfect love, all human thought transcending,
Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy throne--"
Then, while the music lingered, the hush of the room broke in a confused
murmur; the white ribbon-wound ropes were let down, and a voluble wave
of congratulators swept over the spot. In a moment more Harry found
himself laying off his robes in the next room.
With a sigh of relief, he stepped through the wide French window into
the garden, fresh with the scent of growing things and the humid odors
of the soil. The twitter and bustle he had left came painfully out to
him, and a whiff of evening coolness breathed through the oppressive
air. The strain over, he longed for the solitude of his study. But David
Stires had asked him to remain for a final word, since bride and groom
were to leave on an early evening train; the old man was to accompany
them a part of the journey, and "the Stires place" was to be closed for
an indefinite period. Harry found a bench and sat down, where camelias
dropped like blood.
What would Jessica suffer in the inevitable awakening, when the tinted
petals of her dreams were shattered and strewn? For the first time he
looked down through his sore sense of outrage and protest to deeps in
himself--as a diver peers through a water-glass to the depths of a river
troubled and opaque, dimly descrying vague shapes of ill. Poetry,
passion and dreams had been his also, but he had dreamed too late!
It was not long before the sound of gay voices and of carriage-wheels
came around the corner of the house, for the reception was to be
curtailed. There had been neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen, and there
was no skylarking on the cards; the guests, who on lesser occasions
would have lingered to throw rice and old shoes, departed from the house
in the aspens with primness and dignity.
One by one he heard the carriages roll down the graveled driveway. A
bicycle careened across the lawn from a side-gate, carrying a bank
messenger--the last shaft of commerce before old David Stires washed his
tenacious mind of business. A few moments later the messenger reappeared
and rode away whistling. A last chime of voices talking together--Harry
could distinguish Hugh's voice now--and at length quiet told him the
last of the guests were gone. Thinking that he would now see his old
friends for a last farewell, he rose and went slowly back through the
French window.
The east room was empty, save for servants who were gathering some of
the cut flowers for themselves. He stood aimlessly for a few moments
looking about him. A white carnation lay at the foot of the dais, fallen
from Jessica's shower-bouquet. He picked this up, abstractedly smelled
its perfume, and drew the stem through his buttonhole. Then, passing
into the next room, he found his robes leisurely and laid them by--he
had now only to embellish the sham with his best wishes!
All at once he heard voices in the library. He opened the door and
entered.
Harry Sanderson stopped stock-still. In the room sat old David Stires in
his wheel-chair opposite his son. He was deadly pale, and his fierce
eyes blazed like fire in tinder. And what a Hugh! Not the indolently gay
prodigal Harry had known in the past, nor the flushed bridegroom of a
half-hour ago! It was a cringing, a hang-dog Hugh now; with a slinking
dread in the face--a trembling of the hands--a tense expectation in the
posture. The thin line across his brow was a livid pallor. His eyes
lifted to Harry's for an instant, then returned in a kind of fascination
to a slip of paper on the desk, on which his father's forefinger rested,
like a nail transfixing an animate infamy.
"Sanderson," said the old man in a low, hoarse, unnatural voice, "come
in and shut the door. God forgive us--we have married Jessica to a
common thief! Hugh--my son, my only child, whom I have forgiven beyond
all reckoning--has forged my name to a draft for five thousand dollars!"