“It’s on account of the accident to my team that I’m forced to intrude at a time like this,” she apologized to Nicola. He was an old man, gaunt and bowed, and his festal trappings seemed rather incongruous decorations.
“But you bring my brother’s staff, and it makes you welcome for yourself and stands for him because he cannot come.”
He called, and a woman appeared. He gave directions, and the woman offered to conduct Lida to a room in the cottage.
“You are honored guest,” said the governor. “In an hour the wedding takes place in the church, and then the wedding supper!”
“To which I beg permission to escort you,” said the priest, bowing low as Lida went from the room.
She laid off her woods panoply of cap and jacket and made herself fit for the festival to such an extent as her scanty wardrobe would permit.
Before the wedding procession started for the church she was presented to the bride, Nicola’s youngest daughter. The woman who had shown Lida to her room had gossiped a bit. The bride was the fruit of the governor’s second marriage and had inherited her French Canadian mother’s beauty. And the groom was a French Canadian, a strapping chap, a riverman of repute.
Lida was told that the men of the river, the jacks of the driving crews far and near, were making much of the wedding on account of their liking for Felix Lapierre. She had looked from her window and had seen bateaus come sweeping down, loaded with shouting men, the oars flashing in the light of torches set in the bows of the big boats. She felt more confident in regard to the morrow; those bateaus would be going back to the north and she had determined to make her plea for passage. In her anxiety the halt for the night was irksome. But she concealed her feelings and took her place in the procession, a post of honor that was deferentially assigned to her by the chief.
The flares of moving torches lighted all and the smoke from them wavered above the plumes of the festal costumes and spread the illumination among the swaying boughs of the spruces and the pines.
An Indian brass band of pretensions rather more than modest led the way toward the church. The rear guard was made of rivermen who marched in ragged formation, scuffling, elbowing one another, shouting jokes, making merry after their manner. Their boots, spurred with drivers’ spikes, crunched into the hard earth and occasionally struck fire from an outcropping of ledge. They pulled off those boots at the door of the church and went into the place, tiptoeing in their stocking feet.