‘Dear boy,’ said Mary, gathering the shells up tenderly; ‘wherever he is, I shall never cease to love him; it makes me feel sad to see this come down; but it is only an accident; nothing of him will ever fail out of my heart.’
Mrs. Marvyn clasped Mary closer to her, with tears in her eyes.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mary; it must have been the moths did that,’ said Miss Prissy, who had been standing, unobserved, at the door for a moment back; ‘moths will eat away strings just so. Last week Mrs. Vernon’s great family picture fell down because the moths eat through the cord; people ought to use twine or cotton string always. But I came to tell you that the supper is all set, and the Doctor out of his study, and all the people are wondering where you are.’
Mary and Mrs. Marvyn gave a hasty glance at themselves in the glass, to be assured of their good keeping, and went into the great kitchen, where a long table stood exhibiting all that plenitude of provision which the immortal description of Washington Irving has saved us the trouble of representing in detail.
The husbands, brothers, and lovers had come in, and the scene was redolent of gaiety. When Mary made her appearance, there was a moment’s pause, till she was conducted to the side of the Doctor; when, raising his hand, he invoked a grace upon the loaded board.
Unrestrained gaieties followed. Groups of young men and maidens chatted together, and all the gallantries of the times were enacted. Serious matrons commented on the cake, and told each other high and particular secrets in the culinary art, which they drew from remote family archives. One might have learned in that instructive assembly how best to keep moths out of blankets, how to make fritters of Indian corn undistinguishable from oysters: how to bring up babies by hand, and how to mend a cracked teapot, and how to take out grease from a brocade, and how to reconcile absolute decrees with free will, and how to make five yards of cloth answer the purpose of six, and how to put down the democratic party. All were busy, earnest, and certain, just as a swarm of men and women, old and young, are in 1859.
Miss Prissy was in her glory; every bow of her best cap was alive with excitement, and she presented to the eyes of astonished Newport gentry an animated receipt-book. Some of the information she communicated, indeed, was so valuable and important, that she could not trust the air with it, but whispered the most important portions in a confidential tone. Among the crowd Cerinthy Ann’s theological admirer was observed in deeply reflective attitude; and that high-spirited young lady added further to his convictions of the total depravity of the species, by vexing and discomposing him in those thousand ways in which a lively, ill-conditioned young woman will put to rout a serious, well-disposed young man, comforting herself with the reflection that by-and-by she would repent of all her sins in a lump together.
Vain, transitory splendours! Even this evening, so glorious, so heart-cheering, so fruitful in instruction and amusement, could not last for ever. Gradually the company broke up; the matrons mounted soberly on horseback behind their spouses; and Cerinthy consoled her clerical friend by giving him an opportunity to read her a lecture on the way home, if he found the courage to do so.
Mr. and Mrs. Marvyn and Candace wound their way soberly homeward; the Doctor returned to his study for nightly devotions; and before long, sleep settled down on the brown cottage.
‘I’ll tell you what, Cato,’ said Candace, before composing herself to sleep, ‘I can’t feel it in my bones dat dis yer wedding is going to come off yet.’