“It’s our certificate,” he said, quietly. “Katharine’s and mine. We were married last winter.”
And he took the paper from the hands of the wondering lawyer, and held it in his own.
“Katharine!” cried Mrs. Lauderdale, when she had realized the meaning of Ralston’s words.
“Katharine!” cried Alexander Junior, almost at the same moment.
At any other time some one of all those present might have smiled at the difference in intonation between Mrs. Lauderdale’s cry of unmixed astonishment, and her husband’s deprecatory but forgiving utterance of his daughter’s name. Both conveyed, in widely differing ways, as much as whole phrases could have told, namely, that Mrs. Lauderdale was sincerely pleased, in spite of all her former opposition to the marriage, and that her husband, while he would much rather have his daughter married to Ralston secretly than not at all, felt that his dignity and parental authority had been outraged, and that he would be glad to have an apology, if any were to be had, of which condition his voice also expressed a doubt.
“I’ll tell you all about it, from the beginning,” said John Ralston.
He told the story in as few words as he could, omitting, as he had done in telling his mother, to give Katharine her full share of responsibility. She bent far forward in her seat while he was speaking, and leaned upon the back of Mr. Allen’s chair, never taking her eyes from her husband’s face. More than once her eyes brightened with a sort of affectionate indignation, and her lips parted as though she would speak. But she did not interrupt him. When he had finished he stood still in his place, looking at his father-in-law, and still holding the certificate of his marriage in his hand.
Alexander Junior would have found it hard to be angry just at that moment. He had his desire. In the course of five minutes he had been cast down from a position of enormous wealth and power, since there could be no question but that the half of the great estate would really be in his control if there were no will; he had been plunged into such a depth of despair as only the real miser can understand when his hundreds or his millions, as the case may be, are swept out of sight and out of reach by a breath; and he had been restored to the pinnacle of happiness again, almost before there had been time to make his suffering seem more than the passing vision of a hideous dream. Moreover, the marriage being already accomplished and a matter of fact, made it a positive certainty that all that part of the fortune which belonged to the Ralstons would return to his own grandchildren. His outraged sense of parental importance was virtuously, but silently, indignant, and he admitted that, on the whole, the causes of satisfaction outnumbered any reasons there might be for displeasure. Something, however, must be done to propitiate the prejudices of the world, which had much force with him.
“I think we’d better all go into the country as soon as possible,” he observed, thinking aloud.
But no one heard him, for Katharine had risen and come forward and stood beside her husband, slipping her arm through his, and invisibly pressing him to her—unconsciously, too, perhaps—whenever she wished to emphasize a word in what she said.