"Don't be a brain-case, Dr. Conrad. What would your patients say if they heard you go on like that?" Sally said this, of course. Her mother thought to herself that perhaps the patients would send for a married doctor.
But her mind was taking no strong hold on the current of events, considering what a very vital human interest was afloat on them. It was wandering back to another wedding-day—her own first wedding-day of twenty years ago. As she looked at this bridegroom—all his upspring of hope making light of such fears as needs must be in like case all the world over—he brought back to her vividly, for all he was so unlike him, the face of the much younger man who had met her that day at Umballa, whose utter freedom from suspicion as he welcomed her almost made her able to forget the weeks gone by—the more so that they were like a dream in Hell, and their sequel like an awakening in Paradise. Well, at any rate, she had recaptured this man from Chaos, and he was hers again. And she had Sally. But at the word the whole world reeled and her feet were on quicksands. What and whence was Sally?
At least this was true—there was no taint of her father there! Sally wasn't an angel—not a bit of it—no such embarrassment to a merely human family. But her mother could see her truth, honour, purity—call it what you will—in every feature, every movement. As she stood there, giving injunctions to Vereker to look alive or he'd be late, her huge coil of sea-soaked black hair making her white neck look whiter, and her white hands reestablishing hair-pins in the depths of it, she seemed the very incarnation of non-inheritance. Not a trace of the sire her mother shuddered to think of in the music of her voice, in the laughter all who knew her felt in the mirth of her eyebrows and the sparkle of her pearly teeth. All her identity was her own. If only it could have been known then that she was going to be Sally!... But how fruitless all speculation was!
"Perhaps mother knows. Chemical oatmeal, mother, for invalids and persons of delicate digestion? They haven't got it at Pemberton's." The eyes and the teeth flash round on her mother,
and in a twinkling the unhallowed shadow of the past is gone. It was only a moment in all, though it takes more to record it. Rosalind came back to the life of the present, but she knew nothing about chemical oatmeal. Never mind. The doctor would find out. And he would be sure to be in time.
He was in time—plenty of time, said public opinion. And the couple were duly married, and went away in Padlock's omnibus to catch the train for Dover in time for the boat. And Dr. Conrad's eyes were on the eldest bridesmaid. For, after all, two others were obtained—jury-bridesmaids they might be called—in the persons of Miss Gwendolen Arkwright and an even smaller sister, who were somehow commandeered by Sally's enterprise, and bribed with promises of refreshment. But the smaller sister was an erring sister, for having been told she was on no account to speak during the service, she was suddenly struck with the unfairness of the whole thing, and, pointing at St. Sennans' arch-priest, said very audibly that he was "peatin'," so why wasn't she to "peat"? However, it was a very good wedding, and there was no doubt the principals had really become the Julius Bradshaws. They started from Dover on a sea that looked like a mill-pond; but Tishy's husband afterwards reported that the bride sat with her eyes shut the last half of the trajet, and said, "Don't speak to me, and I shall be all right."
That summer night Rosalind and her daughter were looking out over the reputed mill-pond at the silver dazzle with the elves in it. The moon had come to the scratch later than last night, from a feeling of what was due to the almanac, which may (or must) account for an otherwise enigmatical remark of Sally's, who, when her mother wondered what time it was, replied: "I don't know—it's later than it was yesterday." But did that matter, when it was the sort of night you stopped out all night on, according to Sally. They came to an anchor on a seat facing the sea, and adjourned human obligation sine die.
"I wonder if they've done wisely." Rosalind represents married thoughtfulness.
Sally shelves misgivings of this sort by reflections on the common lot of humanity, and considers that it will be the same for them as every one else.