Laura had no answer to this objection. As the days had hurried on towards the end of this eventful year her lover’s spirits had assuredly not grown lighter. He was full of thought, curiously absent-minded at times. She, too, grew grave in sympathy with him.
‘It is such a solemn crisis of our lives,’ she thought. ‘Sometimes I feel as if all things could not go happily to the end, as if something must happen to part us, at the very last, on the eve of our wedding day.’
The eve of the wedding came, and brought no calamity. It was a very quiet evening. The lovers dined together at the vicarage, and walked to the Manor-house afterwards, alone with each other, almost for the first time since the night of their betrothal. Everything had been arranged for to-morrow’s wedding! Such a quiet wedding! No one had been invited except Mr. Sampson and his sister. The vicar’s wife was to be present, of course. She would in a manner represent the bride’s mother. Celia was to be the only bridesmaid. They were to be married by licence, and no one in the village had as yet any inkling of the event. The servants at the Manor-house had only been told the date of the marriage within the last two days, and had been forbidden to talk about it; and as they were old servants, who had long learned to identify themselves with ‘the family,’ they were not likely to disobey Miss Malcolm’s orders.
The house, always the perfection of neatness, had been swept and garnished for this important occasion. The chintz covers had been taken off the chairs and sofas in the drawing-room, revealing tapestry wreaths and clusters of flowers, worked by Jasper Treverton’s mother and aunts in a period of almost awful remoteness. The housekeeper had been baking her honest old face in front of a huge kitchen fire, while she stirred her jellies, and watched her custards, and turned her game pie. There was to be a breakfast fit for the grandest wedding, though Miss Malcolm had told Mrs. Trimmer that a very simple meal would be wanted.
‘You mustn’t deny me the pleasure of doing my best, at such a time,’ urged the faithful servant. ‘I should feel it a reproach to me all the rest of my life if I didn’t. There shan’t be no extravagance, Miss, but I must put a pretty breakfast on the table. I’m so glad our barberry bushes bore well this year. The berries make such a tasty garnish for cold dishes.’
Mrs. Trimmer was roasting herself and her poultry in the spacious old kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, while John and Laura were coming from the vicarage, arm in arm, Laura strangely glad to have him all to herself for one little half hour, he vexatiously silent. Celia was at the Manor-house, laid up with a headache and a new novel. She had excused herself from the dinner in her usual flippant style.
‘Give them my love, and say I was too seedy to come,’ she said. ‘Going to dine with one’s parents is quite too slow. I dined with them on Christmas Day, you know; and Christmas Day at the vicarage has always been the quintessence of dulness. The thing I wondered at most, when I came of age, was how I ever could have lived through twenty-one of our Christmases.’
They were thus, by happy accident, as Laura thought, alone together; and, behold! the lover, the bridegroom of to-morrow, had not a word to say.
‘John,’ Laura began softly at last, almost afraid to break this gloomy silence, ‘there is one thing you have not told me, and yet it is what most girls in my position would call a very important matter.’
‘What is that, dearest?’