“I wonder if Rose would like a broad or narrow wedding ring?” said Lady Blake thoughtfully. “I’m afraid there won’t be very much choice in a place like Witanbury.”
Sir Jacques looked after the couple for a few moments, then he turned and went into the Trellis House, and so into the drawing-room.
“Bachelors,” he said meditatively, “sometimes have a way of playing the very mischief between married couples—eh, Mrs. Otway? So it’s only fair that now and again a bachelor should do something towards bringing a couple together again.”
She looked at him, surprised. What odd—and yes, rather improper things—Sir Jacques sometimes said! But—but he was a very kind man. Mrs. Otway was a simple woman, though she would have felt a good deal nettled had anyone told her so.
“I rather wonder,” she said impulsively, “why you never married. You seem to approve of marriage, Sir Jacques?” She was looking into his face with an eager, kindly look.
“If you look at me long enough,” he said slowly, “I think you’ll be able to answer that question for yourself. The women I wanted—there were three of them——” and then, as he saw that she again looked slightly shocked, he added, “Not altogether, but consecutively, you understand—well, not one of them would have me! The women who might have put up with me—well, I didn’t seem to want them! But I should like to say one thing to you, Mrs. Otway. This particular affair in which you and I are interested does seem to me, if you’ll allow me to say so, ‘a marriage of true minds——’” He stopped abruptly, and to her great surprise left the room without finishing his sentence.
Such trifling, and at the time such seemingly unimportant, little happenings are often those which long afterwards leap out from the past, bringing with them poignant memories of joy, of sorrow, of pain, and of happiness.
Rose Blake will always remember that it was her poor old German nurse, Anna Bauer, who, on her wedding day, made her wear a white dress and a veil. She had meant to be married, in so far as she had given any thought to the matter at all, in her ordinary blue serge skirt and a clean blouse.
Those about her might be able to forget, for a few merciful hours, what lay before Jervis; but she, Rose Otway, could not forget it. She knew that she was marrying him now, not in order that she might be even closer to him than she felt herself to be—that seemed to her impossible—but in order that others might think so. She would have preferred the ceremony to take place only in the presence of his parents and of her mother. But as to that she had been given no say; Sir Jacques and Mr. and Mrs. Robey had announced as a matter of course that they would be present, and so she had assented to her mother’s suggestion that Miss Forsyth should be asked. If Mr. and Mrs. Robey and Sir Jacques were to be there, then she did not mind Miss Forsyth, her kind old friend, being there too.
Anna had protested with tearful vehemence against the blue serge skirt and the pretty blouse—nay, more, she had already taken the white gown she intended that her beloved nursling should wear, out of the bag which she, Anna, had made for it last year. It was a very charming frock, a fine exquisitely embroidered India muslin, the only really beautiful day-dress Rose had ever had in her young life. And oddly enough it had been a present from Miss Forsyth.