He also agreed to meet our wishes as to the character of the ceremony. "I'll make it as short as you like," he said. "I'll reduce it to its lowest legal terms," and with this understanding I procured my license and returned to Hanover.
In spite of all these practical details the whole adventure seemed curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been concerned as witness, and I suspect that Zulime was almost equally unconvinced of its reality. Poor girl! It was all as far from the wedding of her girlish dreams as her bridegroom fell short of the silver-clad knight of romance, but I promised her that she would find something grandiose and colorful in our wedding journey. "Our wedding will be prosaic, but wait until you see the sunset light on the Crestones! Our week in the High Country shall be a poem."
This was a characteristic attitude with me. I was always saying, "Wait! These flowers are lovely, but those just ahead of us are more beautiful still." Zulime's attitude, as I soon discovered, was precisely opposite: "Let us make the most of the flowers at our hand," was her motto.
The Taft home had something of the same unesthetic quality which marked Neshonoc. It was simple, comfortable, and entirely New England. Throughout the stern vicissitudes of his life on the Middle Border, Don Carlos Taft had carried the memories and the accents of his New Hampshire town. His beginnings had been as laboriously difficult as those of my father. In many ways they were alike; that is to say, they were both Yankee in training and tradition.
At last the epoch-marking day came marching across the eastern plain. The inevitable bustle began with the dawn. I packed my trunk and dispatched it to the station in confident expectation of our mid-afternoon departure, and Zulime did the same, although it must have seemed more illusory to her than to me. The Judge arrived precisely at noon, and at half-past twelve the family solemnly gathered in the living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of sorrow and regret.
The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn tones, pronounced us man and wife.
Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty, while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast" was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles.
If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the campaigns of Cyrus—or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.
At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"