The Daughter Pays

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

Except for a silver cream-jug from Mr. Askew, these were the only presents the girl received. Tony and Pansy almost broke their hearts at being unable to give anything, until Mrs. Mynors, roused to most unexpected generosity, allowed them to go shares with her in pressing upon Virgie's acceptance some articles of her mother's silver toilet set—brush, comb, and so on.

Small time had the bride for reflection, until the dawn of the fatal day.

The rain had changed the weather. The heat was no longer great—in fact, the day was chilly and grey, with a gusty little wind which blew up the dust in sudden puffs.

The bride's toilette, of pale blue over white, was extremely pretty. As she stood in the drawing-room awaiting the fly which would drive her, her mother and Tony to the church, Mrs. Mynors thought she had never seen a more perfect picture of girlish fairness. Excitement and nervous trepidation had chased the pallor with which a sleepless night had invested her. Up to the last moment she had been at work upon this and that—rearranging her own room to accommodate the professional nurse who would be in charge of Pansy during her treatment, trying to think out and plan everything so exactly that her mother would not be able to upset it afterwards. It was not until nearly two o'clock in the morning that she finished her own packing, and lay down to the thoughts of unspeakable dread with which she now knew that she regarded her approaching marriage.

Since the day of Gaunt's visit her mother had hardly spoken to her. Her silence was not exactly hostile, but it was very wounding. It was as though she had suddenly discovered that her daughter was not the girl she took her to be; as if the poor child was abandoning her home and duties to make a rich marriage—leaving her mother to pine in the little villa, cut off from all her own set. There was nothing to take hold of, nothing that Virginia could plead against; it was just an atmosphere of coldness, of pained surprise, but it seemed to the depressed girl to be the last straw.

With her usual patience she shouldered the burden and bore it. She guessed, with her quick, sensitive sympathy, that perhaps it hurt mamma less to adopt this attitude. Her daughter was sacrificing herself to her family. To admit this stunning weight of obligation must, of course, be painful. Mamma always shrank from painful things. She had discovered this pose of hers as a kind of refuge from humiliation. Virgie accepted it meekly. Nevertheless, the tears which it wrung from her in the darkness of her last night at home were bitter, and could not be checked for a long time.

The knowledge that Gaunt was in the town, that he had arrived by the last train the previous night, and was putting up at the Ducal Arms near the station, seemed to render sleep impossible. She could not tell why. Not till five o'clock had struck was she compelled by mere exhaustion to close her eyes.

All her life Virginia had been a poor eater, and the least excitement was wont to deprive her of appetite. As a result of this, she had eaten, during the past ten days, barely enough to keep her alive. There was nobody to notice what she ate, or whether she took a sufficient quantity. As she had been under-nourished for the last two years, with the sole exception of her fortnight with the Rosenbergs, during great part of which mental agitation had made it difficult for her to eat, she was in a state of real debility. Wholly inadequate did she feel for what lay before her—the new beginning, the effort to understand the unknown being whom she was to marry, the settling into strange surroundings. Her weakness and discouragement were so profound that, by the time she had arisen, dressed for church, and passed through the sharp and biting agony of her parting from Pansy, she was reduced to a state of passive endurance.

All the way to church she talked feverishly, eagerly to Tony of what they would do in the future. She would pay his pocket money out of her own allowance. He was to join the school O.T.C. at once, so that he might go into camp at the end of term....

In such plans as these lay her only anodyne.