“But I do wonder my eyes were traitors. How would they betray me so? but I only saw him from a distance, and to-night my distress—”
Here Mrs. Oakley knocked at the door, interrupting them.
“Come,” she said, “the people below are getting impatient. I want my bridesmaid. Louis is waiting for you in the other room, Mr. De Marke.”
George De Marke went out, obediently, and then Mrs. Judson’s maid commenced a second toilet, to which Catharine submitted without protest; she was far too happy for anything like that.
The bridal ceremony was delayed a little; and that was all the guests knew of the scene we have just described. Half an hour later there came forth from that chamber four persons so radiant with happiness, so grandly beautiful, that curiosity, if any had existed, was swallowed up in admiration. A murmur of surprise ran from lip to lip, for the moonlight beauty of the bride was exquisitely contrasted by the radiant loveliness of her bridesmaid, who was, it began to be whispered about, already married to the elder brother of the bridegroom, excellent matches both, for Madame De Marke, the mother, had left an immense fortune, which would be divided equally between the young men.
The guests also observed that Mrs. Judson, the stately mother of the bride, lost somewhat of her queenly self-possession that night. She kept aloof from the wedding-party, and seemed shy of addressing the bridesmaid, while giving congratulations to her daughter and the newly married husband. But these things were only matters of passing comment, and no one guessed how deep a current of human joy was swelling beneath the commonplaces of this wedding.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
ABOUT THE LITTLE BOY.
Three weeks after the wedding, George De Marke and his wife were established in the home that had been his father’s. For the first time in his life, he had learned the particulars of a domestic drama, which had cast his infancy under the influence of that miserable Frenchwoman, whose sins had at last centred into the meanest and most grinding of all vices.
A little week before, this man had deemed himself an isolated being, with no one to love or cling to, except the brother, whose happiness he had resolved to witness, and then become a wanderer again. Now he was at home, settled for life under the roof of ancestors whose very existence had been unknown to him. His mother, whose insanity had taken a gentle and more poetic turn since the death of her enemy, as if even from the distance she had felt the atmosphere of her life relieved of its poison, hovered around him caressingly and with pleasant smiles, for she fancied the husband of her youth had come back again. She no longer shrunk from the picture, which had been returned to its old place on the wall; but would talk to it for hours, evidently substituting its inanimate features for those of her son when he was away.
But there was still a shadow upon the life of that young couple: the memory of a child, that had perished, and for which there was forever an unsilenced yearning in the mother’s heart. The proof of its death was so vague, that sometimes wild dreams of its existence forced themselves upon her; and these feelings she had imparted to her husband.