“A hundred and forty rooms, Nichola,” I said, “and you shall be my lady’s maid.”
“Yah!” Nichola rejoined, interrupting her song rather to attend to pricking the pie-crust with a fork than to reply to us; “don’t look for no lady-maiding from me, mem. I’ll be kep’ busy countin’ up the windows, me. When do we start off?” she wanted to know.
Nichola evidently believed us to be jesting. Later when she found that our extravagant proposition was the truth she pretended to have known from the first.
We were in the midst of our simple preparations, when a wonderful thing occurred to Pelleas. I was folding my gown of heliotrope silk in its tissues, the gown with the collar of Mechlin which is now my chief finery, when Pelleas came in our room.
“Etarre,” he said, “you know what day comes next week. And now we shall spend it at Little Rosemont, alone!”
I knew what he meant. Had we not previously talked of it and mourned that it was not possible to us to celebrate that day alone, as we had always dreamed that one’s golden-wedding day should be spent?
“Our wedding day—our golden-wedding day,” I said.
Pelleas nodded. “As if they have not all been golden,” he observed simply.
There was in every fern a nod for our good fortune as on that next afternoon Pelleas and Nichola and I drove up the avenue at Little Rosemont. And at the very park entrance, though of course we did not know that at the time, a part of our adventure began when the gate was opened by that brown, smiling young under-gardener Karl, with honest man’s eyes and a boy’s dimples, who bowed us into the place like a good genie. As we returned his greeting we felt that he was in a manner ringing up the curtain on the spectacle but we did not forecast that he was also to play a most important part.
In the great hall all the servants were gathered to welcome us, an ensemble of liveries and courtesies in which I distinguished only Mrs. Woods, the housekeeper, very grave, a little hoarse, and clothed on with black satin. We escaped as soon as possible, Pelleas and I not having been formed by heaven to play the important squire and his lady arriving home to bonfires and village bells and a chorus of our rent roll. But once safely in the lordly sitting room of our suite, with its canopies and a dais, and epergnes filled with orchids, I had but to look at Pelleas to feel wonderfully at home. It is a blessed thing to love some one so much that you feel at home together in any place of deserts or perils or even lordly rooms filled with orchids.