CHAPTER XV.

The wedding was over. Jane might have looked still prettier but for an unmistakable expression of gratified vanity; Mr. Durham might have borne himself still more pompously but for a deep-seated, wordless conviction, that his bride and her family looked down upon him. Months of scheming and weeks of fuss had ended in a marriage, to which the one party brought neither refinement nor tact, and the other neither respect nor affection.

Wedding guests, however, do not assemble to witness exhibitions of respect or affection, and may well dispense with tact and refinement when delicacies not in season are provided; therefore, the party on the Esplanade waxed gay as befitted the occasion, and expressed itself in toasts of highly improbable import.

The going off was, perhaps, the least successful point of the show. Catherine viewed flinging shoes as superstitious, Jane as vulgar; therefore no shoes were to be flung. Mr. Durham might have made head against ‘superstitious,’ but dared not brave ‘vulgar;’ so he kept to himself the fact that he should hardly feel thoroughly married without a tributary shoe, and meanly echoed Jane’s scorn. But Stella, who knew her father’s genuine sentiment, chose to ignore ‘superstition’ and ‘vulgarity’ alike; so, at the last moment, she snatched off her own slipper, and dexterously hurled it over the carriage, to Jane’s disgust (no love was lost between the two young ladies), and to Mr. Durham’s inward satisfaction.

Lucy had not joined the wedding party, not caring overmuch to see Jane marry the man who served her as a butt; but she peeped wistfully at the going off, with forebodings in her heart, which turned naturally into prayers, for the ill-matched couple. In the evening, however, when many of the party had returned to London, the few real friends and familiar acquaintances who reassembled as Miss Charlmont’s guests found Lucy in the drawing-room, wrapped up in something gauzily becoming to indicate that she had been ill, and looking thin under her wraps.

In Miss Charlmont’s idea a wedding-party should be at once mirthful and grave, neither dull nor frivolous. Dancing and cards were frivolous, conversation might prove dull; games were all frivolous except chess, which, being exclusive, favoured general dulness. These points she had impressed several times on Lucy, who was suspected of an inopportune hankering after bagatelle; and who now sat in the snuggest corner of the sofa, feeling shy, and at a loss what topic to start that should appear neither dull nor frivolous.

Dr. Tyke relieved her by turning her embarrassment into a fresh channel: what had she been doing to make herself ‘look like a turnip-ghost before its candle is lighted?’

‘My dear Lucy!’ cried Mrs. Tyke, loud enough for everybody to hear her, ‘you really do look dreadful, as if you were moped to death. You had much better come with the Doctor and me to the Lakes. Now I beg you to say yes, and come.’

Alan heard with good-natured concern; Arthur Tresham heard as if he heard not. But the first greeting had been very cordial between him and Lucy, and he had not seemed to remark her faded face.

‘Yes,’ resumed Dr. Tyke. ‘Now that’s settled. You pack up to-night and start with us to-morrow, and you shall be doctored with the cream of drugs for nothing.’

But Lucy said the plan was preposterous, and she felt old and lazy.

Mrs. Tyke caught her up: ‘Old? my dear child! and I feeling young to this day!’

And the Doctor added: ‘Why not be preposterous and happy? “Quel che piace giova,” as our sunny neighbours say. Besides, your excuses are incredible: “Not at home,” as the snail answered to the woodpecker’s rap.’

Lucy laughed, but stood firm; Catherine protesting that she should please herself. At last a compromise was struck: Lucy, on her cousins’ return from their tour, should go to Notting Hill, and winter there if the change did her good. ‘If not,’ said she, wearily, ‘I shall come home again, to be nursed by Catherine.’

‘If not,’ said Dr. Tyke, gravely for once, ‘we may think about our all seeing Naples together.’

Edith Sims, her hair and complexion toned down by candlelight, sat wishing Mr. Ballantyne would come and talk to her; and Mr. Ballantyne, unmindful of Edith at the other end of the room, sat making up his mind. Before the accident in the Drumble he had thought of Lucy with a certain distinction, since that accident he had felt uncomfortably in her debt, and now he sat reflecting that, once gone for the winter, she might be gone for good so far as himself was concerned. She was nice-looking and amiable; she was tender towards little motherless Frank; her fortune stood above rather than below what he had proposed to himself in a second wife:—if Edith could have read his thoughts, she would have smiled less complacently when at last he crossed over to talk to her of Brunette and investments, and when later still he handed her in to supper. As it was, candlelight and content became her, and she looked her best.

Mrs. Gawkins Drum, beaming with good will, and harmonious in silver-grey moire under old point lace, contrasted favourably with her angular sister-in-law, whose strict truthfulness forbade her looking congratulatory: for now that she had seen the ‘elegant man of talent’ of her previsions, she could not but think that Jane had married his money-bags rather than himself: therefore Miss Drum looked severe, and when viewed in the light of a wedding guest, ominous.

Catherine, no less conscientious than her old friend, took an opposite line, and laboured her very utmost to hide mortification and misgivings, and to show forth that cheerful hospitality which befitted the occasion when contemplated from an ideal point of view; but ease was not amongst her natural gifts, and she failed to acquire it on the spur of an uneasy moment. ‘Manners make the Man,’ ‘Morals make the Man,’ kept running obstinately in her head, and she could not fit Mr. Durham to either sentence. In all Brompton-on-Sea there was no heavier heart that night than Catherine Charlmont’s.