“Ah, I see! That is a reason. I wouldn’t for the world do anything to make Lady Hartley uncomfortable. He might go to her and tax her with having an unmannerly young woman for a sister-in-law. So I suppose I must write a pretty little formal letter to thank him for his most exquisite gift, the perfect taste of which is only equalled by his condescension in remembering such an outsider as Colonel Marchant’s daughter. Something to that effect, but not quite in those words.”
She broke into gay laughter, the business being settled, and stood on tiptoe to offer her rosy lips to Vansittart’s kiss; and all the invisible fairies in the peaseblossom, and all the microscopic Cupids lurking among the rose leaves, beheld that innocent kiss and laughed their noiseless laugh in sympathy with these true lovers.
“I have a good mind,” said Eve, as she ran back to the house, “to give Peggy the blue crescent to fasten her pinafore.”
The wedding at Fernhurst Church was as pretty a wedding as any one need care to see, although it was a ceremony curtailed of all those surroundings which make weddings worthy to be recorded in the Society papers. There was no crowd of smart people, no assemblage of smart gowns stamped with the mantua-maker’s cachet, and marking the latest development of fashion. No long train of carriages choked the rural road, or filled the little valley with clouds of summer dust. Only the kindred of bride and bridegroom were present; but even these made a gracious group in the chancel, while the music of the rustic choir and the school children with their baskets of roses were enough to give a bridal aspect to the scene.
Eve, in her severely simple gown, with no ornaments save the string of pearls round her full firm throat, and the natural orange blossoms in her bright hair, was a vision of youthful grace and beauty that satisfied every eye, and made the handsome bridegroom in all his height, and breadth, and manly strength, a mere accessory, hardly worth notice. The four sisters, in their gauzy white frocks and Gainsborough hats, when clustered in a group at the church door, might have suggested four cherubic heads looking out of a fleecy cloud, so fresh and bright were the young faces, in the unalloyed happiness of the occasion—happiness almost supernal, for, regardless of precedent, and mysteriously divining Peggy’s desire, the bridegroom had given them watches, dainty little watches, with an “E” in brilliants upon each golden back—E, for Eve; E, for Ecstasy; E, for Everlasting bliss! Peggy felt she had nothing more to ask of life. And for spectators, who need have wished a friendlier audience than honest Yorkshire Nancy, and the cottagers who had seen Eve Marchant grow up in their midst, and had experienced many kindnesses from her—the cottagers whose children she had taught in the Sunday-school, whose old people she had comforted on their death-beds, and for whose sake she had often stinted herself in order to take a jug of good soup, or a milk pudding, to a sick child?
Colonel Marchant made a dignified figure at the altar, in a frock-coat extorted from the reviving confidence of a tailor, who saw hope in Miss Marchant’s marriage. He did all that was required of him with the grace of a man who had not forgotten the habits of good society. The modest collation at the Homestead was a success; for everybody was in good spirits and good appetite. Even Mrs. Vansittart was reconciled to a marriage which gave her son so fair a bride, content to believe that, whatever evil Harold Marchant might have done upon the earth, no shadow from his dark past need ever fall across his sister’s pathway.
And so in a clash of joy-bells, and in a shower of rice from girlish hands, Eve and Vansittart ran down the steep garden path to the carriage which was to take them to Haslemere, whence they were going to Salisbury, on the first stage of their journey to that rock-bound coast
“Where that great vision of the guarded mount
Looks o’er Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”