“Miss Janie—ma blessed baby!” she whispered. “I is suttenly glad to see dis here day! Heaven is a-smilin’ on yo’. And here is one o’ ma birfday cakes yo’ liked so mighty well. Mammy Rose done make it for her chile—de las’ she ever will make yo’ now yo’ is goin’ to foreign paths.”
Another girl than Jennie might have been confused, or even angered, by the interruption of the procession. But Jennie could be nothing if not kind. Her own hands were filled with her bouquet—it was enormous. She stopped, however, before the old woman.
“As thoughtful for me as ever, Mammy Rose, aren’t you?” she said pleasantly. “And you know all my little failings. Henri,” she said to her husband.
But the courtly young Frenchman had quite as great a sense of noblesse oblige as his bride. He bowed to the black woman as though she was the highest lady in the land and accepted the parcel, tied clumsily with baby ribbon by the gnarled fingers of Mammy Rose.
They moved on and the smiling, yet tearful, old woman, sank back into her seat. If there was anything needed to make this a perfect occasion, it was this little incident. The bride and groom came out into the smiling sunshine with sunshine in their hearts as well as on their faces.
“I knew,” whispered Helen Cameron to Ann Hicks, who stalked beside her in rather a mannish way, “that Heavy Stone could not even be married without something ridiculous happening.”
“‘Ridiculous’?” repeated the Western girl, with something like a catch in her throat.
“Well, it might have been ridiculous,” admitted Helen. “Only, after all, Jennie is real—and so is Major Marchand. You couldn’t feaze him, not even if a bomb had been dropped in the church vestibule.”
They were crowding into the motor-cars then, and merrily the wedding party sped back to the big house on Madison Avenue, which had been garnished for the occasion with the same taste that marked the color-scheme of the bride’s attendants. The canopied steps and walk, the footmen in line to receive the party, and the banked flowers in the reception hall were all impressive.
“My!” whispered the irrepressible Jennie to Henri, “I feel like a prima donna.”