Following hard upon the interrupted wedding came other events that not only helped to hush matters up, but gave the world a plausible reason why the ceremony did not come off as soon as the groom was convalescent from what was reported in the papers to be an attack of acute indigestion, easily accounted for by the round of banquets and entertainments which usually precede a society wedding.
During that eventful night while Starr still lay like a crushed lily torn rudely from its stem, her mother, after a stormy scene with her husband, in which he made it plain to her just what kind of a man she was wanting her daughter to marry, and during which she saw the fall of her greatest social ambitions, was suddenly stricken with apoplexy.
The papers next morning told the news as sympathetically as a paper can tell one’s innermost secrets. It praised the wonderful ability of the woman who had so successfully completed all the unique arrangements for what had promised to be the greatest wedding of the season, if not of all seasons; and upon whose overtaxed strength, the last straw had been laid in the illness of the bridegroom. It stated that now of course the wedding would be put off indefinitely, as nothing could be thought of while the bride’s mother lay in so critical a state.
For a week there were daily bulletins of her condition published always in more and more remote corners of the paper, until the little ripple that had been made in the stream of life passed; and no further mention was made of the matter save occasionally when they sent for some famous specialist: when they took her to the shore to try what sea air might do; or when they brought her home again.
But all the time the woman lay locked in rigid silence. Only her cold eyes followed whoever came into her room. She gave no sign of knowing what they said, or of caring who came near her. Her husband’s earnest pleas, Starr’s tears, drew from her no faintest expression that might have been even imagined from a fluttering eyelash. There was nothing but that stony stare, that almost unseeing gaze, that yet followed, followed wherever one would move. It was a living death.
And when one day the release came and the eyes were closed forever from the scenes of this world, it was a sad relief to both husband and daughter. Starr and her father stole away to an old New England farm-house where Mr. Endicott’s elderly maiden sister still lived in the old family homestead; a mild-eyed, low-voiced woman with plain gray frocks and soft white laces at wrists and neck and ruched about her sweet old face above the silver of her hair.
Starr had not been there since she was a little child, and her sad heart found her aunt’s home restful. She stayed there through the fall and until after the first of the year; while her father came and went as business dictated; and the Endicott home on Madison Avenue remained closed except for the caretakers.
Meanwhile young Carter had discreetly escorted his mother to Europe, and was supposed by the papers to be going to return almost immediately. Not a breath of gossip, strange to say, stole forth. Everything seemed arranged to quiet any suspicion that might arise.
Early in the fall he returned to town but Starr was still in New England. No one knew of the estrangement between them. Their immediate friends were away from town still, and everything seemed perfectly natural in the order of decency. Of course people could not be married at once when there had been a death in the family.
No one but the two families knew of Carter’s repeated attempts to be reconciled to Starr; of his feeble endeavor at explanation; of her continued refusal even to see him; and the decided letter she wrote him after he had written her the most abject apology he knew how to frame; nor of her father’s interview with the young man wherein he was told some facts about himself more plainly than anyone, even in his babyhood, had ever dared to tell him. Mr. Endicott agreed to keep silence for Starr’s sake, provided the young man would do nothing to create any gossip about the matter, until the intended wedding had been forgotten, and other events should have taken the minds of society, from their particular case. Carter, for his own sake, had not cared to have the story get abroad and had sullenly acceded to the command. He had not, however, thought it necessary to make himself entirely miserable while abroad; and there were those who more than once spoke his name in company with that of a young and dashing divorcée. Some even thought he returned to America sooner than he intended in order to travel on the same steamer that she was to take. However, those whispers had not as yet crossed the water; and even if they had, such things were too common to cause much comment.