"I hope you won"t mind such a quiet wedding, my dear child." Miss Chester said anxiously to Marie. "But if one starts to invite people, Chris has so many friends, it will be difficult to know where to stop. So I thought if Mr. Knight and Dorothy came, and just your father"s lawyer and myself ..."
"I don"t mind--arrange it as you like," Marie said. She would not have minded going off with Chris alone to church in her oldest frock if it had to come to that. There was not a cloud in her sky.
The wedding was fixed for a Friday.
"Oh, not Friday," Miss Chester demurred. "It"s such an unlucky day!
Surely Thursday will do just as well."
"I"m not superst.i.tious," Chris answered. "Are you, Marie Celeste? I think Friday is a good day. We can get away then for the week-end."
Marie laughed. She thought Friday was the best day in all the week she said--of course, she was not superst.i.tious!
But his Friday proved unkind, for, though it was the end of July, it rained hard when Marie woke in the morning and there was a chill wind blowing.
She sat up in bed and stared at the window, down which the raindrops were pouring, with incredulous eyes.
How could the weather possibly be so bad on such a day! It was the first faint shadow across her happiness.
The second came in the shape of a wire from Dorothy Webber, to say she could not possibly come after all. Her mother was ill, and she was wanted at home. Marie was bitterly disappointed, but she was young and in love; the world lay at her feet, and long before she was dressed to go to church her spirits had risen again and she was ready to laugh at Aunt Madge, who showed signs of tears.
"If you cry I shall take it as a bad omen," she told the old lady, kissing her. "What is there to cry for, when I am going to be so happy?"
Miss Chester put her arms round the girl and looked into her face with misty eyes.
"Darling--are you sure, quite sure, that you love Chris?"
"Do I love him?" The brown eyes opened wide with amazement. "Why, I have always loved him," she said simply.
But she held Miss Chester"s hand very tightly as they drove to church in the closed car, and for the first time her child"s face was a little grave. Perhaps it was the dismal day that oppressed her, or perhaps at last she was beginning to realize that she was taking a serious step by her marriage with Chris.
"It"s for all your life, remember," a little warning voice seemed to whisper, and she raised her head proudly a her heart made answer: "I know--and there could be no greater happiness."
It was raining still when they reached the church, and the chauffeur held an umbrella over Marie as she stepped from the car into the porch. She wore a little traveling frock of palest gray, and little gray shoes and stockings, and a wide-brimmed hat with a sweeping feather.
Though she had never felt more grown-up in her life, she had never looked such a child, and for a moment a queer pang touched the heart of young Lawless as he turned at the chancel steps and looked at her as she came up the aisle with Miss Chester.
But Marie"s face was quite happy beneath the wide-brimmed hat, and her brown eyes met his with such complete love and trust that for a moment he wavered, and the color rushed to his cheeks.
But the parson was already there, and the service had begun, and in less than ten minutes little Marie Celeste was the wife of the man she had adored all her life, and was signing her maiden name for the last time with a trembling hand.
And then they were driving away together in the car, to which Aston Knight, with a sentimental remembrance of other weddings, had tied an old shoe, and it flopped and dangled dejectedly in the mud and rain behind as the car sped homewards.
And Christopher looked at his wife and said:
"Well, we couldn"t have had a worse day, could we?"
Marie smiled. "What does it matter about the Weather?"
Christopher thought it mattered the deuce of a lot, but then he was a man, and a man--even a bridegroom--never sees things through the same rose-colored gla.s.ses as a woman.
It was such a little way from the church to the house that there was no time to say much more, and then they were home, and Miss Chester, who had followed hard on their heels in another car, was crying over Marie and kissing her again, and Marie woke to the fact that she was really a married woman!
There was a sumptuous lunch, to which n.o.body but Aston Knight and the lawyer did justice, and then Marie went upstairs and changed her frock, because it was still pouring with rain, and wrapped her small self into a warm coat, and there were many kisses and good-byes, and at last it was all over and she and Chris were speeding away together.
Perhaps it is sometimes a merciful dispensation of Providence that the eyes of love are blind, for Marie never saw the strained look on Christopher"s face or the way in which his eyes avoided hers.
She never thought it odd when in the train he provided her with a heap of magazines and the largest box of chocolates she had ever seen in her life, and unfolded a newspaper for his own amus.e.m.e.nt.
She ate a chocolate and looked at him with shy adoration. He was her husband--she was to live with him for the rest of her life!
There would be no more partings--no more dreary months and weeks during which she would never see him. He was her very own--forever!
He seemed conscious of her gaze, for he looked up.
"Tired?" he asked
"No."
"Hungry, then? You ate no lunch."
"Oh, I did. I had ever such a lot."
"We"ll have a good dinner to-night, and some champagne." he said.
"Yes." Marie had never tasted champagne until her wedding lunch to-day, and she did not like it, but to please Chris she would have drunk a whole bottleful uncomplainingly.
For their honeymoon they were going to a seaside town on the East Coast.
"Wouldn"t it be nicer in Devonshire or at the lakes, Chris?" Miss Chester had asked timidly, but Chris had answered:
"Good lord, no! There"s nothing to do there. We must go somewhere lively."
So he had chosen the liveliest town on the East Coast and the liveliest hotel in the town--a hotel at which he had stayed many times before, and was well known.
He was the kind of man who knew scores of people wherever he went, and in his heart he was hoping that he would meet scores of them now.
He gave an unconscious sigh of relief when, later, he saw Marie carried up to her room in the lift in the company of an attentive chambermaid, who knew that they were newly married. He went off to the buffet and ordered himself the strongest brandy he could get; while upstairs Marie was looking out her prettiest dinner frock and trembling with excitement at the thought of this new life into which she had so suddenly been plunged.
She was just ready when Chris came knocking at her door. He had changed into evening clothes, and was very immaculate altogether.
"Ready?" he asked. His blue eyes wandered over her dainty person.
"You look like a fairy," he said.
"Do I?" she smiled happily. "Do you like my frock?"
She turned and twisted for his admiration.
Chris said it was topping. They went downstairs together, the best of friends.