I glanced in the direction he indicated and beheld the porch of the church crowded with women with here and there a man among them; while several females had pushed their way into the pews and were watching us with profound interest.
“I feared, I feared we should never be able to keep this a secret,” whispered my uncle, “but why weren’t the doors shut?”
The doors shut! what manner of woodwork, what manner of brickwork, would keep women away from a marriage? I believe were a wedding to be celebrated at the bottom of a well, two or three ladies would be found swinging in or holding on to the bucket, watching the proceedings. What, my dears, what is there in the spectacle of half a dozen or more or less people standing before a clergyman so astounding, so novel, so exciting as to cause you to abandon your babies, your wash-tubs, your lodgers, your cooking, to witness it? Positively this hungry and piercing curiosity fully justifies the remark my friend Adolphe Beau once made to me: “Either weddings in England are exceedingly rare, monsieur, or else they symbolise some hideous sacrifice compared to which the African celebration of their King’s nuptials are innocent childplay: or whence comes your morbid national love of witnessing these sights?”
“Well, thank God, this is over,” exclaimed my uncle, receiving Conny from her blubbering mamma, and kissing her.
Poor Conny! was she so perfectly satisfied with her husband that she could think without regret upon the breakfast she had missed, the speeches, the congratulations, the blonde and the tulle, the bouquets, the presents, and the triumphal drive to the railway station, she had forfeited? Ah, miss, you who are reading this, see what you will be infallibly deprived of if ever you dare to run away with a young man unknown to your parents. A midnight excursion may be romantic: but, take my word for it, a noontide festival, of which you are the heroine, is a great deal more comfortable. Don’t believe your Edward, who tells you that he despises the flummery of the marriage-show; that a registrar in his sight is as good as a parson; that friends are a nuisance, and speeches detestable. It is true that veils and champagne don’t make happiness; but they leave a good impression, which he for one won’t forget. Bridesmaids and flowers won’t prevent you from quarrelling; but they will put it out of his power to say several unpleasant things when you and he do quarrel. A wedding is a launch; and, depend upon it, there is no better way to slip into the ocean of life than with streamers flying, bands playing, and kindly hands to chase our flying feet with wine.
Conny and her husband returned to their lodgings with my uncle, who desired me to escort the ladies home. The first thing that I did after we were out of the town was to tell my aunt that Theresa had accepted me. She received the intelligence without an ejaculation. All she did was to force a smile and say,
“I expected it would come to that. I am very pleased. Thomas will be delighted. Poor, poor Conny!”
Seeing how utterly engrossed she was by her daughter’s fate, I squeezed Theresa’s hand by way of apologising to her for dropping the subject of our engagement, and began a long and vigorous appeal for Curling. I think I must have grown warm; for I have a recollection of reproaching her for her behaviour, which, I pointed out, was not only calculated to make her daughter miserable, but to excite her contempt for her husband, and so create feelings which would result in rendering the elopement calamitous in a very different and sterner sense than it now was.
“I daresay I am wrong. I daresay I am to blame,” she kept on saying.