“The very best reasons, my dear Felix—reasons certain to prove satisfactory,” said the count, in English.
“Good God!” said Kendrick again. “I never heard of such a thing. Married, and then go home coolly to your bachelor quarters!” This was spoken in a very incredulous style.
“Even so,” replied the count, throwing back his head and laughing at the inordinate excitement caused by a simple event. “We have not yet completed our domestic arrangements; but to save my honor in your eyes, Kendrick, I should add that my leaving was at the desire of the bride, whose wishes, according to my code, should be the law of a gallant man.”
“I like that, Paul,” said Charlotte, not daring to look at Felix, but meaning her approbation to be a lesson for him. Paul’s answer to Felix’s question had convinced her that the marriage was an impromptu one; therefore her heart lost all its hardness towards Clara, and she added, “I will call on the Countess von Frauenstein this morning.” Paul thanked her with his lips, but still more cordially with his eyes.
“I shall do no such thing,” said Mrs. Kendrick, whose face had been flushed ever since the reading of the marriage announcement. “I think, when people marry, they should show decent respect to——”
“To their friends, madam,” said the count, rising from the table. “Are you so unquestionably a friend of my wife that she has wronged you by not asking your presence at the ceremony? Did you give her your womanly sympathy when your ridiculous Oakdale aristocracy frowned upon her, in her days of sorrow?”
All this was said in a very low, quiet tone, but it cut Mrs. Kendrick like a two-edged sword. She saw she had been too hasty, and a glance at Kendrick, who seemed ready to faint, terrified her, recalling, as it did, the fact that he had told her the bank could not tide over its present crisis without the aid of the count.
“Pardon me, count,” she said, rising. “This was so unexpected, so alarming, I may say, in the way it burst upon me—of course I know you will do things differently from other people. I shall, of course, be happy to call on your wife. I will go with Miss Charlotte and your cousin. Do you forgive me?” she asked, offering him her hand. The count had noted well Kendrick’s anxious look at his wife, and though he despised the policy of Mrs. Kendrick, which forbade her the pleasure of enjoying her spleen, he answered, urbanely,
“Certainly, madam. Excuse me, also, for alluding to an unfortunate omission on your part, which I am sure you regret; but I beg you to not call on my wife as a concession. If you do that, our friendship ends there.”
Before Miss Charlotte and the Kendrick party set out for their call on Clara, Miss Charlotte took care to post a copy of the paper to her brother, with the marriage notice duly and conspicuously marked. It reached him the next morning. His surprise was great, and his feelings of a very mixed character. He naturally thought that, in justification to himself, Clara should have married some very common kind of man; and then her winning the love of one so high in the social scale was balm to his vanity, and a just punishment to Ella, who hated Clara, as little minds do hate those they have wronged. He had come to despise Ella for her mean spite against Clara, shown unqualifiedly whenever he had spoken a word in praise of her; and his home was anything but a happy one. He found out, as many a man has done before, that Ella having become his wife, considered him her inalienable property, and only a subject for consideration when there was no other man about upon whom to lavish her smiles and pretty coquetries. Why should she dress for him, or practice her winning graces on one who was hers already, and that forever? In short, he learned by bitter experience the difference between a true, loving, devoted woman, whose sweetest smiles and gentlest words were ever for him, and a mere thing of fashion and convention called a wife, but no more a real wife than the first eye-winking doll in a shop-window. If any power on earth could have annulled the past, and given back Clara to his arms, after six months of Ella Wills, he would have been a happy man; but he made the best he could of his life, and was not unreasonable over Ella’s faults, except when she spoke ill of Clara, as she did on the occasion of his reading the notice of her marriage. Not knowing of Ella’s former flirtation with the count at Newport, and her extreme vexation at that time over her signal failure, he set down everything she said to her spite against Clara.