The letter dropped in Anna’s lap, and covering her face with both hands, she burst into passionate tears. Her old life, in all its homely, simple sweetness called her mightily, and the sharp sense of her own separation from it now and forever tore her heart. Her mother’s inability to comprehend the new conditions, the eager self-sacrifice which had gladly shorn her own poor life bare of every lingering superfluity of possession that she might equip her child with such small dower as was attainable, had to Anna a pathos which seemed almost too poignant to endure. How well, oh, how well she understood the planning and contriving, the simple joy in each small new object gained; the delight which her mother and Lucia had shared in picturing to themselves her own grateful surprise in the manifold treasures stored in the dear old chest, itself an heirloom of impressive value in the Mallison family. And she was grateful beyond words to tell, and pleased and proud to come thus set out to her husband; and yet, these possessions, so unspeakably precious to her, would, she knew only too well, wear a rustic and incongruous aspect in the Burgess household. She knew that Keith and his mother would be gentle and respectful in thought as in word, but she knew the faint embarrassment which they would try to conceal in receiving gifts for which they would have no use; she knew the delicate, half-pitying, well-meaning sympathy, which could never understand, try as it would.
On Sunday morning, Anna attended church with her husband and his mother for the first time, the latter making a great effort, since church-going was far beyond her usual invalid routine. When Anna presented herself in the hall ready to start, Mrs. Burgess, or Madam Burgess as she was generally styled after this time, had bit her lip and almost gasped, such was her amazement and dismay. However, she had said nothing, the situation being plainly hopeless, and she sat in the carriage in speechless anxiety, while Keith’s face reflected the same emotion. He had felt it impossible to interfere with Anna’s arraying herself as she had for church, seeing with his sensitive perception that the garments fashioned and sent her from her home by the hands of her mother and sister, for such a time as this, were in her eyes sacredly beyond criticism or cavil.
Anna now preceded him, following his mother, down the broad aisle of the stately and well-filled church, drawing to herself unconsciously the attention of many eyes. She wore over the soft overshot silk gown the brown camlet cloak which had formed in her mother’s eyes the chief glory of her simple trousseau. It was a long, circular cape, falling to the hem of her dress, drawn up about the throat and shoulders with quaint smocking after a forgotten art, and tied with a long, loose bow of changeable brown ribbon. The outlines of this garment were so simple and so natural that it could never, at any period or by any shift of fashion, become awkward, but it had at that time an effect of Puritan-like quaintness. She wore a dark, broad-brimmed hat with falling plumes, according well in simplicity as in colour with her cloak.
As she passed down to the Burgess pew, her height and bearing, the flowing outline of her costume, the purity and unconscious, childlike seriousness of her face with its clear brune pallor, the steady light of her hazel eyes, the lustreless masses of her dark hair, all combined to make a singular impression of mediæval loveliness, of something rare and fine and wholly distinct from the prevalent type of women in the ambitious little city. There were some who, seeing her, smiled and whispered at the quaintness of her dress; there were others who found their eyes irresistibly drawn again and again by the picturesque harmony of her figure; there were one or two persons who, watching the proud, pure severity of her face as she sat with her soul lifted to God and heedless of outward things, saw in her a woman fit for reverence and wonder, one whose spirit had been most evidently nourished on the greatness and simplicity of spiritual realities, and who was yet untouched by “the world’s slow stain.”
And so it came about that Keith Burgess and his mother, who had been dismayed at the lack of conformity to fashion in Anna’s dress at this first appearance in their world, found themselves met, the service over, by men and women who had admiration and interest, sober and sincere, to express, and much to say aside of the singular distinction, the aristocratic dignity and charm, of the bride. Madam Burgess was not slow to produce the good points of Anna’s ancestry of which she had quickly possessed herself, thus enhancing the favourable impression, and she was ready to accept Anna, cloak and all, herself, when the son of one of Fulham’s leading men, Pierce Everett, an artist newly returned from Paris, came to her with a respectful but eager wish that Mrs. Keith Burgess would at some future day grant him the notable favour of sitting to him for some saint’s face and figure.
There was a little crowd about them as they passed out to their carriage, and much kind and deferential courtesy pressing upon Anna’s notice. A group of young girls on the church steps watched her with shy, awed glances, and murmured to each other that they adored her, she was so different from any bride they had ever seen; she was grave and quiet, and something of pathos and mystery seemed to remove her far from the conscious, fluttering pink-and-white brides of their experience.
The young artist, Pierce Everett, joined a friend, a professor of literature in the local university, Nathan Ward, as he walked away from the church.
“What a study for a saint!” he exclaimed, with enthusiasm. “I did not suppose there was such a woman left in the world. Where can she have been saved up to keep that super-earthly look?”
Professor Ward smiled. After a silence he said,—
“Here’s a conundrum, if it is Sunday: Why is Keith Burgess like St. Francis of Assisi?”