Next day came the queer dislocated morning—every one either at a loose end or frantically busy,—the arrival of Dr. Nigel Dundas, Bishop of Dunfermline, Colonel Dundas’s first cousin, who had travelled all night from Scotland, to be there to marry Rory; the hurried cold luncheon; the getting the Custs and people off to the church; then Parker’s and Teresa’s fingers fumbling with hooks and eyes and arranging the veil.
When the bride was dressed, and ready to go downstairs, the Doña, who had not appeared all morning, and was not, of course, going to the church ceremony, walked into the room, pale and heavy-eyed.
She held out her arms, “Come to me, my Concha!” she said.
“Oh, Doña ... if only ... I couldn’t ... it’ll be all right,” Concha whispered between little sobs, “and anyway, your baby will always love you ... and ...”
“The Purissima and all the Saints bless you, my child,” said the Doña in a stifled voice, and she made the sign of the Cross on her forehead, “but you mustn’t cry on your wedding day. Come, let me put your veil straight.”
Teresa, watching this little scene, felt a sudden pang of remorse—why had she not more control over her imagination? Why had she allowed her mother to turn, in the play, into such a sinister and shameless figure?
Then they went down to the hall, where Dick was contemplating in a pier-glass, with considerable complacency, the reflection of his stout morning-coated person.
“Well, it’s quite time we were starting, Concha,” he called out; and with that amazing ignoring of the emotional conventions by which men are continually hurting the feelings of women, it was not till he and Concha were well on their way to church, that he remembered to congratulate her on her appearance.
Teresa, Jollypot, and the children, had gone on ahead in the open car—past hens, past hedges, past motor-bicycles, past cottage gardens; past fields of light feathery oats, so thickly sown with poppies that they seemed to flicker together into one fabric; past fields of barley that had swallowed the wind, which bent and ruffled the ductile imprisoning substance that it informed; past fields of half-ripe wheat, around the stalks of which Teresa, who, since she had been writing, had fallen into an almost exhausting habit of automatic observation, noticed the light tightly twisting itself in strands of greenish lavender. And there was a field from which the hay had been carried long enough to have allowed a fresh crop of poppies to spring up; to see them thus alone and unhampered gave one such a stab of joyous relief that one could almost believe the hay to have been but a parasite scum drained away to reveal this red substratum of beauty. All these things, as they rushed past, were remarked by Teresa’s weary, active eyes till they had reached the church and deposited Anna and Jasper with the bridesmaids, waiting in the porch, and at last they were walking up the aisle and being ushered into their places by Bob Norton.