Good Old Anna

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Rose looked up, and as her eyes met the loving, agitated glance of her nurse, she felt a sudden thrill of warm gratitude to good old Anna, for Jervis had whispered, “How lovely you look, darling! Somehow I thought you would wear an everyday dress—but this is much, much nicer!”

Those present followed the order of the marriage service with very varying emotions, and never had the Dean delivered the familiar, awesome words with more feeling and more grace of diction.

But the only two people in that room whose breasts were stirred to really happy memories were Mr. and Mrs. Robey. They, standing together a little in the background, almost unconsciously clasped each other’s hands.

Across the mind of Sir John Blake there flashed a vivid memory of his own wedding day. The marriage had been celebrated in the cantonment church of an up-country station, where, after a long, wearying engagement, and a good deal of what he had even then called “shilly-shallying,” his betrothed had come out from England to marry him. He remembered, in a queer jumble of retrospective gratitude and impatience, how certain of the wives of his brother officers had decorated the little plain church; and the mingled scents of the flowers now massed about him recalled that of the orange blossoms and the tuberoses at his own wedding.

But real as that long-vanished scene still was to Jervis’s father, what he now remembered best of all the emotions which had filled his heart as he had stood waiting at the chancel steps for his pretty, nervous bride were the good resolutions he had made—made and so soon broken....

As for Sir Jacques, he had never been to a wedding since he had been last forced to do so as a boy by his determined mother. The refusal of all marriage invitations was an eccentricity which friends and patients easily pardoned to the successful and popular surgeon, and so the present ceremony had the curious interest of complete novelty. He had meant to read over the service to see what part he himself had to play, but the morning had slipped away and he had not had time.

Jervis, in answer to perhaps the most solemn and awful question ever put to man, had just answered fervently “I will,” and Rose’s response had also been uttered very clearly, when suddenly someone gave Sir Jacques a little prod, and the Dean, with the words, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” made him a quiet sign.

Sir Jacques came forward, and in answer, said “I do,” in a loud tone. And then he saw the Dean take Jervis’s right hand and place it in Rose’s left, and utter the solemn words with which even he was acquainted.

“I, Jervis, take thee, Rose, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

A series of tremendous promises to make and to keep! But for the moment cynicism had fallen away from Sir Jacques’s heart, and somehow he felt sure that, at any rate in this case, those tremendous promises would be kept.