The Indifference of Juliet

by Grace S. Richmond

Mrs. Dingley and Mr. Horatio Marcy—a pair whose presence anywhere would have been a voucher for the decorum of the most unconventional proceedings—welcomed the party upon the wide, uncovered porch.

“We’re going to be married very soon, to have it over,” called Anthony. “But you may explore the house first, so your minds shall be at rest during the crisis. Just don’t wander too far away in examining this ancestral mansion. There are six rooms. I should advise your going in line, otherwise complications may occur in the upper hall. Please don’t all try to get into the kitchen at once; it can’t be done. It will hold Juliet and me at the same time—all the rooms have been stretched to do that—they had to be; but I’m not sure as to their capacity for more. Now make yourselves absolutely at home. The place is yours—for a few hours. After that it’s mine—and Juliet’s.”

He glanced, laughing, at his bride, as he spoke from where he stood in the doorway. She was on the little landing of the staircase, at the opposite end of the living-room. She looked down and across at him, and nearly everybody in the room—they were thronging through at the moment—caught that glance. She was smiling back at him, and her eyes lingered only an instant after they met his, but her friends all saw. There could be no question that the Juliet Marcy who, since she had laid aside her pinafores, had kept many men at bay, had at last surrendered. As for Anthony——

“Why, he’s always been in love with her,” said the Bishop’s son in the ear of the best man, as in accordance with their host’s permission they peeped admiringly in at the little kitchen, “but any idiot can see that he’s fairly off his feet now. Ideal condition—eh? Say, this dining-room’s great—Jove, it is. I’m going to get asked out here to dinner as soon as they are back. Let’s go upstairs. The girls are just coming down—hear ’em gurgling over what they saw?”

Upstairs the best man looked in at the blue-and-white room with eyes which one with penetration might have said were envious. Indeed, he stared at everything with much the same expression. He was the soberest man present. Ordinarily he could be counted on to enliven such occasions, but to-day his fits of hilarity were only momentary, and during the intervals he was observed by the Bishop’s son to be gazing somewhat yearningly into space with an abstraction new to him.

Nobody knew just how the moment for the ceremony arrived. But when the survey of the house was over and everybody had instinctively come back to the living-room, the affair was brought about most naturally. The Bishop, at a word from the best man, took his place in the doorway opening upon the porch, which had been set in a great nodding border of goldenrod. Anthony, making his way among his guests, came with a quiet face up to Juliet and, bending, said softly, “Now, dear?” A hush followed instantly, and the guests fell back to places at the sides of the room. Anthony’s best man was at his elbow, and the two went over to the Bishop, to stand by his side. Mr. Marcy moved quietly into his place. Juliet, with Judith, who had kept beside her, walked across the floor, and Anthony, meeting her, led her a step farther to face the Bishop. It was but a suggestion of the usual convention, and Anthony, in his white clothes, surrounded as he was by men in frock-coats, was assuredly the most unconventional bridegroom that had ever been seen. Juliet, too, wore the simplest of white gowns, with no other adornment than that of her own beauty. Yet, somehow, as the guests, grown sober in an instant, looked on and noted these things, there was not one who felt that either grace or dignity was lacking. The rich voice of the Bishop was as impressive as it had ever been in chancel or at altar; the look on Anthony’s face was one which fitted the tone in which he spoke his vows; and Juliet, giving herself to the man whose altered fortunes she was agreeing to share, bore a loveliness which made her a bride one would remember long—and envy.

“There, that’s done,” said the Bishop’s son with a gusty sigh of relief, which brought the laugh so necessary to the relaxing of the tension which accompanies such scenes. “Jove, it’s a good thing to see a fellow like Robeson safely tied up at last. You never can tell where these quixotic ideas about houses and hay-wagons and weddings may lead. It’s a terrible strain, though, to see people married. I always tremble like a leaf—I weigh only a hundred and ninety-eight now, and these things affect me. It’s so frightful to think what might happen if they should trip up on their specifications.”

There was a simple wedding breakfast served—by whom nobody could tell. It was eaten out in the orchard—a pleasant place, for the neglected grass had been close cut, and an old-fashioned garden at one side perfumed the air with late September flowers. The trim little country maids who brought the plates came from a willow-bordered path which led presumably to the next house, some distance down the road. There were several innovations in the various dishes, delicious to taste. Altogether it was a little feast which everybody enjoyed with unusual zest. And the life of the party was the bridegroom.

“I never saw a fellow able to scintillate like that at his own wedding,” remarked the son of the Bishop to the best man’s sister. “Usually they are so completely dashed by their own temerity in getting into such an irretrievable situation that they sit with their ears drooping and their eyes bleared. Do you suppose it’s getting married in tennis clothes that’s done it?”

“Tennis clothes!” cried the best man’s sister with a merry laugh. “If you realised how much handsomer he looks than you men in your frock-coats you would not make fun.”