Meanwhile, the two lovers were very happy. Flossie allowed herself, by anticipation, a little more style in dress. She appeared with young Gower in his buggy in the park, radiant, and really very pretty. Lucie Gower’s friends congratulated him boisterously, and called her Flower-de-Luce—a name which persisted ten years or so, until some savage wit changed the Flower to Fruit. She was then still slight; and, for the first time, dared to show how pretty she was. “How she has come out since her engagement!” was the common remark. Indeed she had; she was very happy; she felt as if she had been born anew, into a world of which previously she had only seen the brown-stone front. Gower went to see her every day; and though these tête-à-têtes were rather long, she consoled herself with the idea that the marriage would soon be over. He, too, was impatient; and very proud of her. He secretly liked to have his friends dig him in the ribs—as they would do, with Gower. He had never possessed any girl, before, who had loved him solely for himself; for surely there was nothing else to attract Miss Starbuck?—he had little money. Lucie felt a flattering sense of ownership in this fair creature that was going to link her life with his. The simple fellow was touched by it; and he never really ceased to be in love with her, though too weak to resist temptation in any simple and attractive form. Si, too, was immensely delighted. He thought Lucie little better than a fool; but then, he was just the man to make a capital husband. And, on the whole, he would not be a disagreeable brother-in-law. However, after the first relief and contentment of the thing were over, and Flossie fairly disposed of, it no longer concerned Si very much.
Never was a marriage so happy, or the course of true love so smooth. There was a delicious excitement about it all to Gower; he felt as if he had multiplied himself by four. And Flossie—Flossie’s feelings were more complex. She obtained Miss Brevier’s services as a bridesmaid; and it was arranged that the newly-married couple should live on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Thirty-second Street. The old Starbuck house in Eighteenth Street was sold, and Si went into lodgings—as he had long desired.
The wedding-presents, though few in number, were very handsome; Flossie had the satisfaction of seeing her wedding under the head of “Fashionable Weddings” in the New York Herald; two clergymen performed the ceremony; and in the evening the bride and groom went to Boston. After a fortnight they returned and installed themselves in the Fifth Avenue house, which had been elaborately decorated and extravagantly furnished for their coming. Old Mrs. Gower gave a grand reception in their honor. And about the same time, young Gower began to find himself in his club-window, sucking his cane, and wondering what he should do with his afternoon, very much as usual. He puzzled much over a certain feeling he had, but was not clever enough at self-analysis to make it out. But it was as if the theatre had ended too early, and there were nothing to do with the rest of the evening.
Not so Mrs. Gower.
CHAPTER IV.
ARTHUR HOLYOKE’S DREAMS.
WHEN the living poet and the dead came out to see the stars once more, the Florentine found himself upon a grassy slope, alone in the early morning, with his silent guide. So, when Tannhäuser, after his ten years’ sojourn in the Venusberg, broke through the walls of the mountain in a rift made by a prayer, he too found himself on the brow of a green and sunny mountain valley, filled with the long-forgotten breath of morning; and, in place of the devil’s music, a shepherd piping to his sheep. So, reader, you in flesh and blood, as I hope, may follow me, in the story, to the time of dates and daylight, and a place—the time, September, 1883; the place, the village of Great Barrington, far down in Berkshire in old Massachusetts. The early morning shadows still reached long across the green carpet of meadow in the intervale; the shadows of the houses, and of the great masses of elm foliage, and of the tall spire of the meeting-house up on the hill; the undulating masses of greenery that robed the lower hills were striped here and there with autumn scarlet, like a blackbird’s wing; and the silver lace in the meadow grass, and the long silken cobwebs in the air, and the rich violet-blue sky, shading off to pink like an onyx near the horizon, were precursors of the coming glory of the day.
No one was stirring in the village. In the ploughed uplands a few farmers were idly walking, hither and thither like generals on the battlefield of their success, tightening a sheaf of fodder or replacing a yellow squash or two that had rolled off from a summit of the great golden pyramids standing, piled like cannon-balls, in the cornfields. But the day of sowing was over, and the day of reaping was over, and little remained but to sit and look at the crops and grow fat. Up on the hill, the roads were empty—who should travel when there was no need? Even the plodding oxen-teams were idle in their stalls, being fattened and coddled, perhaps, for the annual cattle show. So that Gracie Holyoke and Arthur had the beautiful Stockbridge road, and the morning look of the mountains, all to themselves. They rode at a sharp canter, but with little conversation; at least, so a groom might have thought riding behind them; as the two heads never seemed to turn inward. But there was no groom, and the chestnut horses had a way of riding so closely side by side (being in this constantly drilled) that to turn one’s head was hardly necessary.
Were these two in love? A city groom, used to ride behind many a preening pair in their smart T-cart, seasoned and wearied with his master’s catechism of flirtation, which he had so often overheard; being there in theory to play propriety, but in fact, as he well knew, only as a license to flirt, much as a policeman is stationed in the Park for the skating when the ice is thin—such a groom would have said No. For they hardly ever look at one another. But perhaps an older groom, good dan Cupid himself, the blind passenger who perches like dark care on so many a horse’s back, and drives dark care away—he might answer Yea: for they are not flirting.
Now, there are several legitimate states of being in love, as videlicet, to be in love and know it, to be in love and not know it, to know that she loves you and to think that you love her, to be in love, but with another person than the one you think:—but to know it and not be in love is but a modern and puerile intellectual trifling; this we call flirtation. And in that these two were surely not. Were they then simply indifferent to one another? Unlikely—so early in the morning. And surely, the cosmic chances are all in our favor: is it not the normal relation, to be in love? Given, a young man of twenty-one and a lovely girl some few months younger—and the uplands, and the forest, and the sun, moon, stars, storm and springtime—and show me one such younker not in love and you will show me a wretched fellow you had best avoid.