East Angels Part 67

This was true. But the very truth of it made the Doctor more angry. "I shall take her back with me," he said.

"She doesn't wish to go."

"That makes no difference."

And then Sally "supposed" that it was not his intention to drag her back "in chains?" Mrs. Lowndes was evidently much displeased with Cousin Reginald.

The Doctor took Garda to a remote part of the garden. Here he placed before her in serious words the strong wish he had that she should return with him to Gracias.

Garda laughed out merrily. Then she came and kissed him. "Don't ask me to do anything so horribly disagreeable," she said, coaxingly.

"Would it be disagreeable?" asked the Doctor, his voice changing to pathos.

"Of course. For you're not nice to Lucian, you know you're not; how can I like that?"

"I will be--nice," said the Doctor, borrowing her word, though the use of it in that sense was to him like turning a somersault.

"Would you really try?" said Garda. She came behind him, putting her arms round his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. "You never could," she said, fondly. And then, as though he were some big good-natured animal, a magnanimous elephant or bear, she let him feel the weight of her little dimpled chin.

"I am weak because I have loved you so long, my child. I might insist; you are my ward. But it seems to me that you ought to care more about doing a little as we wish, Mrs. Harold agrees with me in thinking this."

"Margaret is _sweet_; I love her dearly. But, do you know"--here she disengaged herself, and began with a sudden inconsequent industry to gather flowers--"it's so funny to me that you should think, either of you, for one moment, that I would leave Lucian now."

"He could come too. A little later." The Doctor was driven to this concession.

"But I shouldn't see him as I do here, you know I shouldn't. Here we do quite as we please; no one ever comes to this part of the garden but ourselves; we might be on a desert island--only it would have to be an island of flowers."

"And you care more for this than for our wishes?" began the Doctor. Then he took a lighter tone. "Of course you don't; you will come home with me, my child; we will start this afternoon." Watching her move about among the bushes as she gathered her roses, he had fallen back into his old belief; this young face where to him were still so plainly visible the childish outlines of the little girl he had been used to lead about by the hand--even of the dimpled baby he remembered so well--he could not bring himself to realize that it had gained older expressions, expressions he did not know.

"I'm very sorry, dear," Garda answered, generally. And then she knelt down to peer through a bush which might perhaps be holding its best buds hidden.

The Doctor, completely routed by the word which she had without the least effort used--the maturity of that "dear," addressed her at last, though unconscious that he was doing so, in the tone of equality. "It isn't as though you had anything to bear, like the prospect of a long engagement, as though there were any difficulties in the way; your marriage is to come so soon," he pleaded.

"Soon?" said Garda. "Six long months! Do you call that 'soon?'" She stopped gathering roses, and sat down on a garden bench. "Six months! I must see him every day, and for a long while every day; that will be the _only_ way to bear it." Then her words ceased; but her splendid eyes, meeting the Doctor's (she had forgotten that he was there), grew fuller and fuller of the loveliest dreaming expression, until the poor guardian--he realized that she would not perceive his departure--could not stand there and watch it any longer. He turned abruptly and went away.

"DEAR MARGARET,--The Doctor has gone" (Garda wrote the next day).

"And I am afraid he is displeased. Apparently we please no one but ourselves and Sally Lowndes! Margaret, when my wedding-day really comes at last, n.o.body must touch me but you; you must dress me, and you must put on my veil, and the orange-blossoms (from the old East Angels grove--I won't have any others). And then, just before we go down-stairs, you must say you are _pleased_. And you must forgive me all I have done--and been too--because I _couldn't_ help it. I shall come over from Gracias, and go down on my knees to Mr. Harold to beg him to let me be with you, or rather to let _you_; he must, he shall say yes."

But Lanse was not called upon to go through this ordeal.

He had already said, "_You_ go!" in rather a high-noted tone of surprised remonstrance when Margaret suggested, some time before, that she should go herself to Charleston and bring Garda back. "And leave me shut up alone here!" he added, as if to bring home to her the barbarity of her proposal.

"The servants do very well at present."

"They don't look as you do," Lanse answered, gallantly. "I must have something to look at."

"But I think I ought to go."

"You can dismiss that 'ought' from your mind, there are other 'oughts'

that come nearer. In fact, viewing the matter impartially, you should never have consented in the beginning, Madge, to take charge of that girl, without first consulting me." Lanse brought out this last touch with much judicial gravity. "Fortunately your guardians.h.i.+p, such as it is, will soon be over," he went on; "she will have a husband to see to her. Apparently she needs one."

"That won't be for six months yet."

"Call it two; as I understand it, there's nothing but dogmatic custom between them, and as Florida isn't the land of custom--"

"Yes, it is."

"Well, even grant that; the girl is, from all accounts, a rich specimen of wilfulness--"

"Of naturalness."

"Oh, if they're guided by naturalness," said Lanse, "they won't even wait two."

And it was not two, when early one morning, in old St. Michael's Church in Charleston, with Sally Lowndes, excited and tearful, as witness--their only one save an ancient little uncle of hers, who had come in from his rice plantation to do them the favor of giving the bride (whom he had never seen before) away, Edgarda Thorne and Lucian Spenser were married.

The Rev. Batton Habersham, as he came robed in his surplice from the vestry-room, could not help being conscious, even then and there, that he had never seen so beautiful a girl as the one who now stood waiting at the chancel-rail--not in the veil she had written about, or the orange-blossoms from East Angels, but in an every-day white frock, and garden hat covered with roses. The bridegroom was very handsome also.

But naturally the clergyman was not so much impressed by Lucian's good points as by Garda's lovely ones. Sally Lowndes was impressed by Lucian, she gazed at him as one gazes at a portrait; Lucian looked very handsome, very manly, and very much in love--a happy combination, Sally thought. And then, with fresh sweet tears welling in her eyes, she knelt down for the benediction (though it was not given to her), and thought of "Roger," and the day when she should see him again in paradise.

The Rev. Batton Habersham, who was officiating in St. Michael's for a week only, during the absence of the rector, was a man unknown to fame even in his own diocese. But it is possible to do a great deal of good in the world without fame, and Batton Habersham did it; his little mission chapel was on one of the sea islands. Always thereafter he remembered the early morning marriage of that beautiful girl in the dim, empty old Charleston church as the most romantic episode of his life.

Fervently he hoped that she would be happy; for even so good a man is more earnest (unconsciously) in his hopes for the happiness of a bride with eyes and hair like Garda's than he is for that of one with tints less striking. Though the relation, all the same, between the amount of coloring matter in the visual orbs or capillary glands, and the degree of sweetness and womanly goodness in the heart beneath, has never yet been satisfactorily determined.

An hour later the northward-bound train was carrying two supremely happy persons across the Carolinas towards New York--the Narrows--Italy.

"Well, we have all been young once, Sally," the little old rice planter had said to his weeping niece, as the carriage drove away from the hospitable old mansion of the Lowndes'. Garda had almost forgotten that they were there, Sally and himself, as they had stood for a moment at the carriage door; but she had looked so lovely in her absorbed felicity that he forgave her on the spot, though of course he wondered over her choice, and "couldn't imagine" what she could see in that "ordinary young fellow." He went back to his plantation. But he was restless all the evening. At last, about midnight, he got out an old miniature and some letters; and any one who could have looked into the silent room later in the night would have seen the little old man still in his arm-chair, his face hidden in his hand, the faded pages beside him.

"It is perhaps as well," said Margaret Harold. She was trying to administer some comfort to Dr. Kirby, when, two days later, he sat, a flaccid parcel of clothes, on the edge of a chair in her parlor, staring at the floor.

Mrs. Rutherford was triumphant. "A runaway match! And _that_ is the girl you would have married, Evert. What an escape!"

"_She_ has escaped," Winthrop answered, smiling.

"What do you mean? Escaped?--escaped from what?"

"From all of us here."

"Not from me," answered Aunt Katrina, with dignity. "_I_ never tried to keep her, _I_ always saw through her perfectly from the very first. Do you mean to say that you understand that girl even now?" she added, with some contradiction.

"Yes, I think I do--_now_," Winthrop answered.

"I don't envy you your knowledge! _Poor_ Lucian Spenser--what could have possessed him?"

"He? He's madly in love with her, of course."

"I'm glad at least you think he's a fool," said Aunt Katrina, applying her vinaigrette disdainfully to her well-shaped nose.

"Fool? Not at all; he's only tremendously happy."

"The same thing--in such a case."