The wedding-breakfast in no way defeated him. Mark, in something less than his usual radiant good spirits, yet muttered to Julian under his breath, with a laugh in his eyes:
"Ain't I volatile?"
Volatile Mr. Garrett certainly was. He made two speeches, one when Iris tremulously cut her wedding-cake, and another at a later stage of the proceedings, when he judged the drinking of healths to be apropos.
"I am nearly seventy," he earnestly told them, with a good deal of emphasis, "and the day may be with us before some of us look for it, when my boy here, and his wife and—shall I say, I hope otherrs as well?—will step into my shoes. And those shoes—I say it in all seriousness, although my speech may be a jesting one, as it were—those shoes, I hope, will not be the proverbial shoes that pinch."
Mr. Garrett paused for a more lengthy appreciation of his own humour, while everyone made polite and rather mirthless sounds of amusement, with the exception of Iris, still blushing, and Douglas, wrapt in impenetrable gloom. Ruthie and Ambrose, indeed, laughed loudly, and at sufficient length to draw down upon themselves a reprehensive glance from Lady Rossiter and a murderous one from the bridegroom.
"The fact is, my dear son and daughter," said old Mr. Garrett impressively, "that there is a future before you. Not only that future of domestic joy and happiness which we see foreshadowed to-day—that circle of home faces"—everybody looked apprehensive—"which I hope will gather round your hearth as the yearrs go on, but also a future in business. Of that future, I have laid the foundations for you. Douglas, my dearr boy, you have seen the business at Swindon?"
Douglas looked infinitely depressed.
"That business," said his undaunted parent, "I have built up from the very beginning. You will have nothing to do but follow the lines I have laid down. There's the old home waiting for you, the dear little old house in Cambridge Road West that you know so well, and that I hope that pretty creature here will soon know as well as you do."
Sir Julian, aware that everyone in the room was by this time obsessed by a vivid recollection of the flight of imagination which had led Iris' husband to date his ancestral reminiscences from Scotland, avoided meeting the eye of anyone present.
This exercise, indeed, was freely indulged in by the majority of those who sat and listened to the eloquent speech of Mr. Garrett senior.