Mrs Markes bounced out in disgust.
“How she do hate to hear the soldiers mentioned, surely,” chuckled Buddy. “Why, she can’t abear ’em. But she needn’t be so hard about a fellow getting a drop; it’s a great comfort. She don’t know what it is, and never got to that stage, Joe, when everything about you as you taste and touch and smell feels as if it was soft and nice, and as if you’d tumbled into a place as was nothing else but welwet.”
The result was that Buddy’s hat and coat were thoroughly taken in hand by Markes and furbished up, the overcoat having to be rubbed and turpentined and brushed till it was more in keeping with the style of a wedding garment, while the hat was ‘gone over’ with a sponge and flat-iron, to the production of a most unearthly gloss, anent which Buddy chaffed the new driver. But of course that was on account of jealousy, that he, the regular ladies’ coachman, and his musty-smelling, jangling fly and meagrimed horse should be set aside upon an occasion when there would have been “a bite to get and a sup o’ suthin’ just to wash out a fellow’s mouth,” For Buddy had a laudable desire to keep his mouth clean by washing it out; and he resented the insult to his dignity upon this occasion by going to the Mitre Tap, and washing out his mouth till he was unable to take this clean mouth home.
As the Dymcoxes sported so dashing a turn-out, and Joseph handed in the bride and took her to church, what he wanted to know was why Elbraham should take her back in his four-horse chariot. Of course he would take her away in it afterwards; but according to Joseph’s idea it would have been far more respectful to the Honourable Dymcoxes if Elbraham had come with his young wife in the hired carriage along with him.
This was a trouble to Joseph, which he objected to largely, wearing a soured and ill-used look on the way back from Hampton Church; and he was not a great deal better when, meeting Elbraham on the staircase, that gentleman slipped a five-pound note in his hand.
The bride looked very beautiful, and Joseph heard that she wore real lace, and it covered her nearly from top to toe. The white satin dress, too, was wonderfully stiff and good, while her bouquet, sent, with those for the bridesmaids, in so many neat wooden boxes from the central avenue of Covent Garden, was “quite a picter,” so Joseph said.
But somehow it was all a muddle, and Joseph could make neither head nor tail of it. He felt as if he must seize and ring the dinner-bell, or carry in the form for prayers. For instance, there was that Lord Henry Moorpark there, and Captain Glen and Mr Richard Millet, who had tipped him over and over again, and ought to have married the ladies. They were there, and so was that tall, dark Major Malpas, who always “looked at him as if he had been a dorg; and lots more people crowding into the rooms, and a-eating and drinking and talking till the place was a regular bubble.”
Joseph either meant Babel or a state of effervescence, both similes being applicable to the condition of the private apartments on the auspicious day, as it was called by Lord Henry, who played the part of “heavy father” in the genteel comedy in course of enactment.
Then Joseph—who told himself he had never seen such a set-out since he came, a hungry page from the orphan school—wanted to know why Captain Glen, who had been so huffed about Miss Clotilde’s marriage, should be there, and look so jolly, and propose the health of the bride. “It seemed rum,” Joseph said, “though certainly him and Miss Marie looked pretty thick now, while little Mr Millet sat next to Miss Ruth,” who, to the man’s notions, was “the prettiest of the lot.”
Joseph saw and heard a good deal. He saw Major Malpas place his glass in his dark eye, and, bringing the thick brow over it, stare very hard at the bride, who did not seem to mind it in the least—a fact which made the philosopher declare that “Miss Clo had got face enough for anything.”