“You mustn’t deny me the pleasure of doing my best, at such a time,” urged the faithful servant. “I should feel it a reproach to me all the rest of my life, if I didn’t. There shan’t be no extravagance, Miss, but I must put a pretty breakfast on the table. I’m so glad our barberry bushes bore well this year. The berries make such a tasty garnish for cold dishes.”
Mrs. Trimmer was roasting herself and her poultry in the spacious old kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, while John and Laura were coming from the vicarage, arm in arm, Laura strangely glad to have him all to herself for one little half hour, he vexatiously silent. Celia was at the Manor House, laid up with a headache and a new novel. She had excused herself from the dinner in her usual flippant style.
“Give them my love, and say I was too seedy to come,” she said. “Going to dine with one’s parent’s is quite too slow. I dined with them on Christmas day, you know; and Christmas day at the vicarage has always been the quintessence of dullness. The thing I wondered at most, when I came of age, was how I ever could have lived through twenty-one of our Christmases.”
They were thus, by happy accident, as Laura thought, alone together; and, behold! the lover, the bridegroom of tomorrow, had not a word to say.
“John,” Laura began softly at last, almost afraid to break this gloomy silence, “there is one thing you have not told me, and yet it is what most girls in my position would call a very important matter.”
“What is that, dearest?”
“You have never told me where we are to spend our honeymoon. Celia has been worrying me with questions about our plans, and I have found it difficult to evade her. I did not like to confess my ignorance.”
A simple and a natural question surely, yet John Treverton started, as at the sharpest thrust that Fate could have at him.
“My dearest love—I—I have really not thought about it,” he answered, stumblingly. “We will go anywhere you like. We will decide tomorrow, after the wedding.
“Is not that a rather unusual mode of proceeding,” asked Laura, with a faint laugh.
She was somewhat wounded by this show of indifference as to the very first stage in their journey through life. She would have liked her lover to be full of wild schemes, to be eager to take her everywhere—to the Engadine, the Black Forest, the English Lakes, Killarney, the Trossachs—all in a breath.
“Are not all the circumstances of our marriage unusual,” he replied gravely. “There is only one thing certain, there is only one thing sweet and sacred in the whole business—we love each other truly and dearly. That is certain, is it not, Laura?”
“On my side quite certain.”
“And on my side quite as certain as that I live and that I shall die. Our love is deep and fixed, rooted in the very ground of our lives, is it not, Laura? Nothing, no stroke of time or fate can change it.”
“No stroke of time or fate can change my love for you,” she said, solemnly.
“That is all I want to know. That is the certainty which makes my soul glad and hopeful.”
“Why should it be otherwise? Were there ever two people more fortunate than you and I. My dear adopted father dies, leaving a will that might have made us both wretched, that might have tempted you to pretend a love you could not feel, me to give myself to a man I could not love. But instead of any such misery as that, we fall in love with each other, almost at first sight, and feel that Providence meant us for each other, and that we could be happy together in the deepest poverty?”
“Yes,” said John, meditatively, “it is odd that my cousin Jasper should have been so sure we should suit each other.”
“There is a Providence in these things,” murmured Laura.
“If I could but think so,” said her lover, rather to himself than to her.
XII
An Ill-Omened Wedding
The last day of the year, nature’s dullest, dreariest interval between the richness of autumn and the fresh young beauty of spring. Not a flower in the prim old Manor House garden, save a melancholy tea-rose, that looked white and wan under the dull grey sky, and a few pallid chrysanthemums, with ragged petals and generally deplorable aspect.
“What a miserable morning!” exclaimed Celia, shivering, as she looked out of Laura’s dressing-room window at the sodden lawn and the glistening yew-tree hedge, beyond which stretched a dismal perspective of leafless apple-trees, and the tall black poplars that marked the boundary of the home pastures, where the pretty grey Jersey cows had such a happy time in spring and summer.
Laura and her companion were taking an early breakfast—a meal at which neither could eat—by the dressing-room fire. Both young women were in a state of nervous agitation, but while one was restless and full of talk, the other sat pale and silent, too deeply moved for any show of emotion.
“Drip, drip, drip,” cried Celia, pettishly, “one of those odious Scotch mists, that is as likely to last for a week as for an hour. Nice draggle-tail creatures we shall look after we have walked up that long churchyard path under such rain as this. Well, really, Laura, don’t think me unkind for saying so, but I do call this an
