'In more trouble than you suppose, I remain, dear Chelford, yours, whatever you may think, faithfully,
'MARK WYLDER'
CHAPTER XXIX.
HOW MARK WYLDER'S DISAPPEARANCE AFFECTED HIS FRIENDS.
Lady Chelford's wrath was now turned anew upon Wylder—and the inconvenience of having no visible object on which to expend it was once more painfully felt. Railing at Mark Wylder was, alas! but beating the air. The most crushing invective was—thanks to his adroit mystification—simply a soliloquy. Poor Lady Chelford, who loved to give the ingenious youngsters of both sexes, when occasion invited, a piece of her mind, was here—in the case of this vulgar and most provoking delinquent—absolutely tongue-tied! If it had been possible to tell Wylder what she thought of him it would, perhaps, have made her more tolerable than she was for some days after the arrival of that letter, to other members of the family.
The idea of holding Miss Brandon to this engagement, and proroguing her nuptials from day to day, to convenience the bridegroom—absent without explanation—was of course quite untenable. Fortunately, the marriage, considering the antiquity and the territorial position of the two families who were involved, was to have been a very quiet affair indeed—no festivities—no fire-works—nothing of the nature of a county gala—no glare or thunder—no concussion of society—a dignified but secluded marriage.
This divested the inevitable dissolution of these high relations of a great deal of its éclat and ridicule.
Of course there was abundance of talk. Scarce a man or woman in the shire but had a theory or a story—sometimes bearing hard on the lady, sometimes on the gentleman; still it was an abstract breach of promise, and would have much improved by some outward and visible sign of disruption and disappointment. Some concrete pageantries to be abolished and removed; flag-staffs, for instance, and banners, marquees, pyrotechnic machinery, and long tiers of rockets, festoons of evergreens, triumphal arches with appropriate mottoes, to come down and hide themselves away, would have been pleasant to the many who like a joke, and to the few, let us hope, who love a sneer.
But there were no such fopperies to hurry off the stage disconcerted. In the autumnal sun, among the embrowned and thinning foliage of the noble trees, Brandon Hall looked solemn, sad and magnificent, as usual, with a sort of retrospective serenity, buried in old-world glories and sorrows, and heeding little the follies and scandals of the hour.
In the same way Miss Brandon, with Lord and Lady Chelford, was seen next Sunday, serene and unchanged, in the great carved oak Brandon pew, raised like a dais two feet at least above the level of mere Christians, who frequented the family chapel. There, among old Wylder and Brandon tombs—some painted stone effigies of the period of Elizabeth and the first James, and some much older—stone and marble knights praying on their backs with their spurs on, and said to have been removed nearly three hundred years ago from the Abbey of Naunton Friars, when that famous monastery began to lose its roof and turn into a picturesque ruin, and by-gone generations of Wylders and Brandons had offered up their conspicuous devotions, with—judging from their heathen lives—I fear no very remarkable efficacy.