“It must have happened in that hateful Bay of Biscay!” said Helen, with an inclination to tears.
“Oh, never mind!” Mrs. Macdonald put in airily, as if it were a trifle. “It’s easy enough to get another. I’ll send a chit to Peliti’s this very afternoon. You can use up this one for five o’clock tea afterwards.”
“But do you think it won’t do at all, Mrs. Macdonald?” Helen begged. “You see the lower tier isn’t much damaged, and it came all the way from home, you know.”
“I think it ought to do,” remarked young Browne.
“My dear!” cried her hostess, “think of how it would look! In the midst of everything! It would quite spoil your wedding! Oh, no—we’ll have another from Peliti’s.”
“What could one do?” confided Mrs. Browne to me afterwards. “It was her affair—not ours in the least. We were getting married, don’t you see, for her amusement!” But that was in one of Mrs. Browne’s ungrateful moments. And was private to me. Generally speaking, Mrs. Browne said she thought the Macdonalds arranged everything charmingly. The Canbury cake went, however, to the later suburban residence of the Brownes, and was there consumed by them in the reckless moments of the next six months.
I was one of the people Mrs. Macdonald knew the Brownes ought to have, and I went to the wedding, in a new heliotrope silk. I remember that also came out by the Khedive. It was in the Cathedral, at four o’clock in the afternoon, full choral service, quantities of flowers, and two heads of departments in the company, one ex-Commissioner, and a Member of Council. None of them were people the Brownes were likely to see much of afterward, in my opinion, and I wondered at Mrs. Macdonald’s asking them; but the gown she graced the occasion in would have justified an invitation to the Viceroy—pale green poplin with silver embroidery.
The bride came very bravely up the aisle upon the arm of her host, all in the white China silk, a little crushed in places, which the Canbury dressmaker had been reluctantly persuaded to make unostentatiously. The bridegroom stood consciously ready with his supporter; we all listened to the nervous vows, sympathetically thinking back; the little Eurasian choir-boys sang lustily over the pair. Two inquisitive black crows perched in the open window and surveyed the ceremony, flying off with hoarse caws at the point of the blessing; from the world outside came the hot bright glare of the afternoon sun upon the Maidan, and the creaking of the ox-gharries,[[1]] and the chatting of the mynas in the casuerina[[2]] trees, and the scent of some waxy heavy-smelling thing of the country—how like it was to every other Indian wedding where a maid comes trippingly from over seas to live in a long chair under a punkah, and be a law unto kitmutgars!
[1]. Native ox-carts.
[2]. Australian fir.