He smiled sadly. She might need her mother and her brother; but in the mood in which she had been for the last few months, they certainly did not need her. "Adelaide," said he, with that firmness which he knew so well how to combine with gentleness, without weakening it, "our whole future depends on this. If our lives are to grow together, we must begin. This is our opportunity."
She knew that Dory was not a man she could play fast and loose with, even had she been so disposed. Clearly, she must decide whether she intended to marry him, to make his life hers and her life his. She looked helplessly round. What but him was there to build on? Without him—She broke the long silence with, "That is true. We must begin." Then, after a pause during which she tried to think and found she couldn't, "Make up my mind for me."
"Let us be married day after to-morrow," said he. "We can leave for New
York on the one o'clock train and sail on Thursday."
"You had it planned!"
"I had several plans," he answered. "That's the best one."
What should she do? Impulsively—why, she did not know—she gave Dory her answer: "Yes, that is the best plan. I must begin—at once." And she started up, in a fever to be doing.
Dory, dazed by his unexpected, complete victory, went immediately, lest he should say or do something that would break or weaken the current of her aroused energy. He went without as much as touching her hand. Certainly, if ever man tempted fate to snatch from him the woman he loved, Dory did then; and at that time Del must, indeed, have been strongly drawn to him, or she would have been unable to persist.
The problem of the trousseau was almost as simple for her as for him. She had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without a maid could take care of. The fact that she had not had a maid was in part responsible for this superfluity. She had neither the time nor the patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to look well. So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she had to buy profusely. As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly, flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress. Within two hours of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her mother were at work. There was no necessity to bother about new dresses. She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she would then need.
In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think of anything but the material side of the wedding—the preparations for the journey and for the long absence. She was half an hour late in getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it—perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word "obey" left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of repeating "obey" after the preacher. Adelaide was thinking of her trunks, was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her eyes, was fretting about the train—Del's tardiness had not been in the calculations. Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses. Adelaide's mother was hearing the trunks going down to the van, and was impatient to be where she could superintend—there was a very important small trunk, full of underclothes, which she was sure they were overlooking. Arthur was gloomily abstracted, was in fierce combat with the bitter and melancholy thoughts which arose from the contrast he could not but make—this simple wedding, with Dory Hargrave as her groom, when in other circumstances there would have been such pomp and grandeur. He and Mary the cook and Ellen the upstairs girl and old Miss Skeffington, generalissimo of the Hargrave household, were the only persons present keenly conscious that there was in progress a wedding, a supposedly irrevocable union of a man and woman for life and for death and for posterity. Even old Dr. Hargrave was thinking of what Dory was to do on the other side, was mentally going over the elaborate scheme for his son's guidance which he had drawn up and committed to paper. Judge Torrey, the only outsider, was putting into form the speech he intended to make at the wedding breakfast.
But there was no wedding breakfast—at least, none for bride and groom.
The instant the ceremony was over, Mary the cook whispered to Mrs.
Ranger: "Mike says they've just got time to miss the train."