Yet there was more happiness in store for them that afternoon.
IV
The Theddon drawing-room was opened to its fullest and banked with more flowers. The motors which had followed began to empty bridesmaids, ushers and invited guests. Bride and groom stood before a solid screen of cut flowers with Gracia Theddon in silver-gray.
And almost the first person to appear with congratulations and good wishes was—old Caleb Gridley!
If Nathan lost his head that day, it was when he recognized Caleb and blinked at him stupidly. It was their first meeting in two years. Gridley had been “out west” on farm mortgage business for the People’s Bank and as usual had barely arrived in time for the ceremony. But it was because old Caleb had changed that Nathan stared in stupefaction. Was this—could it be—old Gridley of the tannery office?
Caleb was clean-shaven and dressed in afternoon clothes which the most fastidious authority on male attire could not criticize. His iron hair was no longer a wiry, unruly mass. A heroic barber had conquered it and old Caleb with his ponderous size, big shoulders, flawless clothes, was the most distinguished man in that drawing-room, not excepting the groom himself. He still had the paving-block jaw. But his ugly, tobacco-stained incisors were gone. He displayed two rows of fine, even teeth, though he did remove them at night “to get some mouth comfort in his sleep” as he expressed it afterward.
Old Caleb had suddenly emerged from a chrysalis of small-town mediocrity into a gentleman of the world. He had left backwater and stroked out into strong, main current. He was a personage of parts.
But still more than his altered appearance was making Nathan stare. It was the tableau occurring near the door. Old Caleb had come face to face with Gracia Theddon. And Madelaine’s foster-mother was very near to fainting. She had one hand at her heart and the other was clutching the edge of a table behind her.
“Caleb!” she cried hoarsely.
“B’damn!” was all Caleb could articulate. Showing that in a flower-banked drawing-room amid bevies of ladies, there were still a few trifling irregularities in his culture that left room for improvement.