Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event of which he was at all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever" from the Newberry home.
Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to wish Muriel well.
"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure." ("My dear, stop it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have ever since you set eyes on him?")
Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken, where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and asked and gave and demanded and grew.
She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was as if her material world had always been at twilight—a soft, luminous, fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless—and that now, without the intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.
For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it—his eyes shone and his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young—he was still young!
"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.
This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers, but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head, with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her arms about his waist.
"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our beginning."
He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him to a great tenderness.