2
While Clive and the newcomer talked for a moment in the hall, Felix stood frowning at the fire.... Clive, he felt, was becoming rather exasperating. Really, the unquestioning enthusiasm of Mrs. Cowan was preferable to such an inappropriately critical attitude as Clive’s. There was something deliberately malicious in it. That last remark about the “simple little country girl” was an attempt to shake his faith in this marriage. It was a damned mean trick!... And then he laughed at himself. For how could Clive possibly have guessed the effect of that remark? How could he know what a crazy fool he was talking to? “A simple country girl.” How could Clive know that there lurked in the back of Felix’s mind an absurd and impossible wish—a wish, long-forgotten, except in the most senseless of idle day-dreams, which these words of Clive’s made him remember, with an inexplicable pang! A wish for precisely what he ought never to have—. Marriage with the girl of that foolish day-dream would be, for such a person as himself, the most fantastic of tragedies: and it was doubtless its very impossibility that had made him conceive it as a romantic ideal. And that houseful of babies—for they too were a part of that foolish day-dream of his—why, that was madness. In actuality, he would have fled from the prospect of such a marriage. He really wanted—what he had so miraculously found in Rose-Ann: a companionship in the adventure and beauty of life.... And in an hour or two his choice would be confirmed—irrevocably. Marriage was just that—a definite decision among tangled and contradictory wishes....
He turned to face the girl whom Clive had led into the room. For an instant he was startled as by an apparition. Perhaps it was the effect of Clive’s words—this young woman seemed the very creature of his day-dreaming wish. Young, hardly more than nineteen, of slight but robust figure, with soft brown hair, dark quiet eyes and a serene mouth, she brought with her the fragrance of that fantasy which had only a moment ago disquieted him. She had a bundle in her arms, and for an instant the illusion was breathlessly complete—she was Rose-Ann’s phantom rival come to him in visible sweet flesh, bearing his baby at her bosom.
“The bridegroom!” Clive was saying. “The witness!—Miss Phyllis Nelson, Mr. Felix Fay.”
She smiled imperturbably and held out her hand, her eyes meeting his.
“And what have you in that bundle, Phyllis? Something without which no wedding would be complete, I suppose,” said Clive.
“Only some smilax,” she said. “And I know how many knives and forks you have, Clive, so I brought along some of my mother’s silver. But where is—”
Rose-Ann ran in just then, and the two girls, while Clive pronounced their names, shook hands, and then suddenly kissed each other, and with arms linked went out into the kitchen.
Clive followed with the bundle, asking Phyllis if by any chance it contained a veil for the bride. He and Felix were shooed back into the other room, and Rose-Ann and Phyllis reset the table. The three women could be heard talking together, with a kind of excited seriousness, as they worked. Felix’s last glimpse was of Phyllis arranging wreaths of smilax on the white tablecloth, and Rose-Ann, with an adorable gesture, lifting her arms to twine some of it about the low-hanging chandelier, while Mrs. Cowan, her hands on her hips, stood looking from one to the other with approval before dashing back to the kitchen.
“Womenfolk have an instinct for such things,” said Clive, sitting down beside the fire. “Even Rose-Ann appears domestic.”
Felix looked at Clive fretfully. “I don’t see anything terribly domestic about hanging up a wreath of flowers.”
“You are hard to suit,” Clive commented. “When I say she isn’t domestic, you look daggers at me, and when I say she is, you still object. What shall I say? I strive to please.”
“So it seems,” said Felix.
Clive smiled. “Since you’re so conventional, you ought not to complain. Nothing is more regular and old-fashioned than the effort to embarrass a bridegroom. You may interpret my remarks as a modern version of that ancient mode of licensed tribal merriment—an intellectualized kind of ‘shivaree.’ I am trying to make up for the absence of the traditional tin pans out by the front gate. After all, Felix, you are taking Rose-Ann away from all the rest of us, and you must expect to be made to suffer a little for your selfishness.”
“Dinner!” Phyllis called in to them.
They went into the dining-room.