A noble wedding! All the cookery skill of Kate and her mistress was expended on it, and discretion, for the sake of the incredulous, forbids enumeration of the roasted hens. Chanticleers in the town crowed roupily and ruefully for months thereafter. The bridegroom might have stepped over the wall to the wedding chamber or walked to it in a hundred paces up the lane; he rode instead in a carriage that made a stately and circuitous approach round John Turner's corner, and wished the distance had been twenty times as long. “It's not that I'm feared,” said he, “or that I've rued the gyurl, but—but it's kind of sudden!”—a curious estimate of a courtship that had started in the burial-ground of Colonsay so many years before!
A noble wedding!—its revelry kept the town awake till morning; from the open windows the night was filled with dancing times and songs and laughter; boys cried “Fab, fab!” in the street, and a fairy lady—really a lady all grown up, alas!—stood at a window and showered pence among them.
Long before the wedding party ended, Bud went up to bed, but she lay for hours awake in the camceil-room hearing the revelry of the kitchen. She had said goodbye to the blissful pair whose wedding was the consequence of her own daft pranks as letter-writer; she would miss the maid of Colonsay. The knowledge that 'tis an uncertain world, a place of change and partings, comes to us all sooner or later in one flash of apprehension and of grief; for the first time Bud felt the irrevocable nature of the past, and that her happy world under this roof was, someway, crumbling, and the tears came to her eyes.
A hurried footstep sounded on the stairs, a rap came to the door, and the bride came in, unbidrin the darkness, whispering Lennox's name.
Her only answer was a sob from the girl in bed.
“Miss Lennox!” said the bride, distressed, “what ails you? I've come up to say good-bye; it wasn't a right good-bye at all with yon folk looking. Oh, Lennox, Lennox! ghaol mo chridhe! my heart is sore to be leaving you, for the two of us were so merry! Now I have a man, and a good man, too; it was you that gave me him, but I have lost my loving friend.” She threw herself on the bed, regardless of her finery, and the Celtic fount of her swelled over in sobs and tears.
CHAPTER XXXII
IT took two maids to fill Kate's place in the Dyces' household—one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued, and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell called their breaking in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone; she must sit in the parlor strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain's Broadwood, taming her heart of fire. It was as a voice from Heaven's lift there came one day a letter from London in which Mrs. Molyneux invited her and one of her aunts for an Easter holiday.