The McLaughlin house shone ready for the guests the next evening.
The light that glimmered out through the dusk came from as many
new kerosene lamps as could be borrowed from the neighbors. Inside
the house beds had been removed to make room for dancing, though
Isobel McLaughlin sighed to remember that there would be at best
an indifferent fiddler, not one with a rhythmic dancing soul--like
her Allen. Indoors mosquitoes hummed through the light and odor
of the lamps, and out of doors they attacked whoever turned away
from the series of smudges the boys had built, and were carefully
guarding from flame, between the house and the barn. Wagonloads
of well-wishers came driving up as it grew dark, and with each
arrival the pile of pieced quilts on the chairs in the bedroom grew
higher, and the collection of wedding presents in the dooryard grew
noisier, and broke loose, and ran, and was pursued with shouts by the
assembled half-grown boys. Some guests brought ducks, and some hens
with small chickens. Some gave maudlin geese, and some bewildered and
protesting young pigs. The Squire gave a heifer calf. The Keiths,
poor distracted Aunt Libby and Uncle John Keith, brought two heavy
chairs he had made the winter before from walnut.
The bride was not visible. Wully had guarded her carefully, even
from a minute alone with his mother, ever since he had arranged her
wedding. He told his mother now that Chirstie had consented, she
was worried about what her father would say when he heard about
it. And because it was so soon after her mother’s death. Isobel
McLaughlin reassured her. The wedding was the best possible solution
of the situation. Let them just leave Chirstie’s father to her! She
comforted the girl earnestly, being distressed by her face. She
hoped in her heart that the marriage would put an end to the girl’s
newly developed and stubborn depression. She couldn’t understand why
now that the guests were arriving, the bride should still seem just
terrified. No less word described her condition. Isobel McLaughlin
could do nothing but leave her with Wully. In his room, where he sat
holding her close against him, every time she said, “I can’t do this,
Wully! I won’t!” he kissed her again, powerfully. She must go through
with it now, he whispered to her. Even the minister was waiting for
them now.
He led her forth, at last, into the parlor. She was wearing the
white dress her mother had made for her the summer before, which
Mrs. McLaughlin had ironed that day, and freshened with her daughter
Mary’s cherry-colored ribbons. Wully, harassed by the trivial
necessity for respectable garments, was wearing the suit his mother
had made for his brother John to wear to college in the fall. It
didn’t fit Wully altogether, but then, it scarcely fitted John at
all. In a space in the midst of their unsuspecting kinsmen they
stood, the bride as pale as death, the groom nervously hiding his
fear that at the critical minute his bride might altogether reject
him.
He kept watching her covertly as the minister tried the patience
of man and God by the length of his prayer. He tried to stand near
enough her to support her. When the invocations ceased, everyone in
the room lifted his head--except the bride. The minister explained
interminably the nature of holy matrimony. He exhorted the pair to
mutual faithfulness. Wully felt her tremble.
“Will you have this man to be your husband?” he asked at length.
She kept silent. She couldn’t raise her head. Wully felt his heart
beginning to beat furiously. She was going to refuse him, in spite of
all he had done.
There was an awful moment. The room seemed to be hushed and waiting.
It was terrible, the length of that moment of silence. At last he
spoke forth simply.
“You wouldn’t think she would. But she will. Won’t you, Chirstie?”
Those standing near heard his words, and as the outraged divine
whispered sternly, “Answer!” he bent down and kissed her.
She looked around like one in a nightmare. Her lips moved. The
minister accepted the sign. He proceeded with the ceremony. The smile
which Wully’s words had occasioned spread from those standing nearest
even to those who were looking in at the windows--those who pretended
to be leaving room for the rest, but were really thinking of their
unsuitable bare feet.
The minister had made them man and wife.
The crowd gathered around them. The squire gave Chirstie a resounding
smack on her cheek. Girls were pressing around her, the roomful was
gathering near her. But she swayed, and fell against her husband, and
fainted quite away.
Of course that fainting was altogether the smartest feature of the
hurried wedding. Not many hard-working prairie women had bodies
which permitted such gentility. It was a distinguished thing to do.
The women who saw it forgot for a while to comment on the strange
appearance of the bride, which they understood more fully later.
At the time it seemed no more than a proper honor to pay Jeannie
McNair’s memory. When she was herself again, Wully found a place for
her out of doors. Planks laid on boxes and chairs made seats for
supper out there where the smoke defended them, and since there was
no back for her to lean against, she having just fainted and all,
it was only proper that Wully’s arm do its duty around her. And it
was necessary that it give her little strengthening messages, while
inside the more zealous young things danced to the fiddle that was
not Allen’s. Out in the warm starlight and the smoke, the older
guests talked to the bride and groom.
Aunt Libby joined them again, when by chance they were for a moment
alone.
“Tell me again what it was Peter said, Wully!” she begged.
He felt Chirstie shrinking against him.
“He told me in the morning that he had decided to go this time for
sure. I told him he was foolish. And I rode over again to give him
some advice in the evening.”
Chirstie’s hand stirred nervously within his, and he held it more
firmly.
“And did he not say where he was going?”
“He only said west.”
“That’s all he said in his note!” She sighed broken-heartedly. “It’s
a strange thing he wouldn’t heed you, Wully!”
Wully gritted his teeth. “He certainly heeded me that time!” he
thought grimly to himself. He had already told his aunt those nicely
dovetailing lies half a dozen times, and each time he had felt them
crushing his wife. He wished his aunt would go away and leave them
in peace. After all, her cursed Peter hadn’t got a taste of what he
deserved!
Finally the wedding was over. Time, however it drags, must eventually
pass. They had driven away together, after he had changed John’s
good clothes for a fresh hickory shirt and jeans, leaving Dod at
the McLaughlins’. They had had twenty-four hours of the unfathomable
luxury of unhindered intimacy. The baby sister was asleep. It was
bedtime again.
The new family sat down for prayers. Not that Wully was a man deeply
religious. But, as far as he knew, daily family prayers was one of
the things a decent man does for his family. They had read that
morning, according to custom, the first chapter of Genesis, and that
had been most satisfactory, even quite personally interesting now,
all about male and female created He them. It had come over Wully
with a chuckle that divine commands have seldom been as satisfactory
to humans as that first one was. And now, in the evening, he had
read the first chapter of the New Testament. He resented that. He
wouldn’t have read it if he had remembered what was in it. That story
of Mary’s humiliation might seem ever so slightly to reflect upon his
wife. And that right he denied even to the Word of God.
They were sitting together on the doorstep, and his lips were not far
from her ear.
“Yon was a strange man, now, Chirstie!” he began.
“What man?”
“That Joseph in Matthew. I fear he hadn’t very good sense.”
“Why, Wully! And him a man in the Bible!”
“I don’t care! He didn’t know much! He didn’t know enough to take his
own lassie till an angel told him! A man like that! He was daft. Or
else----”
“I wonder at you, Wully! Or else what?”
“I doubt the lassie wasn’t really bonnie. Not like mine!”
A deeper embrace. More kisses.
“Oh, _Wully_!”