Every one was worn out before July, and every one felt it to be a relief when the wedding-day came. It was ushered in with the chiming of bells, and the singing of bride-songs by the village children. The village itself was turned upside down, and the house inside out. As for the gloomy old church, it looked like a festal place, with flowers and gay clothing and smiling faces. It was the express wish of Sophia that none of the company should wear white. "That distinction," she said, "ought to be reserved for the bride;" and among the maids in pink and blue and primrose, she stood a very lily of womanhood. Her diaphanous, floating robe of Dacca muslin; her Indian veil of silver tissue, filmy as light; her gleaming pearls and feathery fan, made her
"A sight to dream of, not to tell."
The service was followed by the conventional wedding-breakfast; the congratulations of friends, and the rattling away of the bridal-carriage to the "hurrahing" of the servants and the villagers; and the tin-tin-tabula of the wedding-peals. Before four o'clock the last guest had departed, and the squire stood with his wife and Charlotte weary and disconsolate amid the remains of the feast and the dying flowers; all of them distinctly sensitive to that mournful air which accomplished pleasures leave behind them.
The squire could say nothing to dispel it. He took his rod as an excuse for solitude, and went off to the fells. Mrs. Sandal was crying with exhaustion, and was easily persuaded to go to her room, and sleep. Then Charlotte called the servants, men and women, and removed every trace of the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extravagant. She set the simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment were over for ever; and that his life was to fall back into a calm, regular, economical groove.
He drank his tea and smoked his pipe to this sense, and was happier than he had been for many a week.
"It is a middling good thing, Alice," he said, "that we have only one more daughter to marry. I should think a matter of three or four would ruin or kill a man, let alone a mother. Eh? What?"
"That is the blessed truth, William. And yet it is the pride of my heart to say that there never was such a bride or such a bridal in Sandal-Side before. Still, I am tired, and I feel just as if I had had a trouble. Come day, go day; at the long end, life is no better than the preacher called it—vanity."
"To be sure it is not. We laugh at a wedding, we cry at a burying, a christening brings us a feast. On the Sabbath we say our litany; and as for the rest of the year, one day marrows another."