“And I’m determined that you shall keep on loving me.”
“I can see that you are getting ready to lead me a wild life.” There was foreboding as well as jest in his tone.
CHAPTER XIV.
“EVERYTHING AWAITS MADAME.”
FRANK wished to see Theresa well provided for—he was most amiable and generous where serving a friend cost him nothing and agreeably filled a few of his many vacant hours. He cast shrewdly about among the susceptible and eligible widowers and bachelors of his club and fixed upon Edgar Wayland’s father. The old General and “cotton baron” was growing lonelier and lonelier. He was too rich to afford the luxury of friendship. He suspected and shunned sycophants. He dreaded being married for his money, yet longed for a home with some one therein who would make him comfortable, would listen patiently to his reminiscences and moralisings. He had led an anything but exemplary life, but having reached the age and condition where his kinds of self-indulgence are either highly dangerous or impossible, he wished to become a bulwark of the church and the social order.
“He needs me even more than I need him,” said Theresa, when she disclosed her scheme to Emily, “and that’s saying a good deal. He thinks I’ve been living in Blue Mountain, thinks I’m simple and guileless—and I am, in comparison with him. I’ll make a new and better man of him. If he got the sort of woman he thinks he wants, he’d be miserable. As it is, he’ll be happy.”
Theresa offered to introduce the General to Emily, but she refused, much to Theresa’s relief. “It’s just as well,” she said, with the candour that was the chief charm of her character. “You’re entirely too fascinating with your violet eyes and your wonderful complexion, my dear. But after he’s safe, you must visit us.”
When the time came for Theresa to go to Blue Mountain for her marriage, she begged Emily to go with her. “I didn’t know how fond I was of you,” she said, “until now that we’re separating. And when I look at you, and forget for the moment what a sensible, self-reliant girl you are, it seems to me that you can’t possibly get along without me to protect you.”
But Emily could not go to the wedding. She was moving into an apartment in Irving Place which she and Joan had taken. Also she was marrying.
The wedding was set for a Thursday, but Marlowe found that he must leave town on Wednesday night to go with the President on a short “swing round the circle.” So on Wednesday afternoon he and Emily went to a notary in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth street and were married by certificate.
“Certainly the modern improvements do go far toward making marriage painless,” said Marlowe as they left with the certificates. “I haven’t felt it at all. Have you?” And he stopped at a letter box to mail the duplicate for the Board of Health. As he balanced it on the movable shelf, he looked at her with a queer expression in his eyes. “You can still draw back,” he said. “If we tear up the papers, we’re not married. If I mail this one we are.”