They were standing in the hall together, at the foot of the staircase. Stephen’s mother and sister and aunt were upstairs in the guestroom, putting on their party coats. Jane’s mother had gone up with them. The other men were all talking to Isabel at the front door.
“Don’t let them worry you,” said Stephen very tenderly, “You won’t have to live with them.”
“They don’t worry me,” said Jane promptly. “I like them. I like your uncle a lot.”
Stephen looked very much pleased.
“Uncle Stephen’s all right,” he said warmly. “They’re all all right, really, but I thought they seemed a little fishy this evening. A little of Alden will go a long way, of course.”
“Your mother,” said Jane hesitantly, “was very sweet to me.”
“Mother’s a dear,” said Stephen, “when you get to know her. She’s awfully domestic and rather shy.”
Jane would never have thought of that for herself. Shyness, she reflected, was a very endearing trait in a mother-in-law.
“I know I’ll love her,” said Jane. As she spoke Mrs. Carver and her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. They all trooped together to the front door. Stephen lingered a moment to say goodbye to her in the vestibule. Jane smiled up at him, very calmly.
“Jane,” said Stephen a little wistfully, “do you really love me?”
“Of course I do,” said Jane simply. That point, she felt, was settled at last. She was never going to worry about it any more. Stephen took her in his arms.
“Are you happy, Jane?” he asked.
“Except for the war,” said Jane. He kissed her very gently, very unalarmingly. It was peaceful, thought Jane, to have all her dreadful indecision over forever.
But now, as Jane stood facing her slim white reflection in her mirror, she really couldn’t realize that she was getting married. Where were the thoughts, she wondered, that she had always imagined such a portentous occasion would engender? Where were the thoughts, for instance, that she had had at Muriel’s wedding? Jane felt she should have reserved them for her own. She stretched out her hand for her shower bouquet.
“Well, I’m ready,” she said.
Isabel kissed her tenderly and turned to run downstairs to say that Jane was coming. Mrs. Ward, still crying, took her in her arms.
“Mamma,” said Jane smiling, “it isn’t a funeral.”
Mrs. Ward tried to dry her tears.
“I want Minnie to see the ceremony,” said Jane.
They all left; the room together. At the head of the stairs Mr. Ward was waiting. He watched Jane’s approach down the darkened corridor with a very tender smile. She slipped her hand through his arm. Jane’s mother went down the stairs, followed by Minnie.
“Kid,” said Mr. Ward, “you look perfectly lovely.”
Jane smiled up at him through the tulle.
“Kid,” said Mr. Ward again, “it will be a naval war. I doubt if the land forces ever reach Cuba. Cervera will blockade the ports.”
Jane smiled again, this time a little tremulously. She was trying to forget the war.
The little stringed orchestra under the stairs struck up the Lohengrin wedding march. Jane was glad she wasn’t going to be married to those doomful premonitory notes of an organ. The violins made even Lohengrin sound gay. She walked slowly down the stairs on her father’s arm.
The little library seemed very full of people. Mrs. Ward had thought the ceremony should be in the yellow parlour. But Jane had never liked the parlour. She had declared in favour of her father’s room. Old Dr. Winter from Saint James’s was standing in snowy vestments in front of the mantelpiece. A little aisle led straight from the door to the hearth. The empty fireplace was filled with smilax. Two great vases of white roses were placed on the mantelpiece. The flowers met over the bald wooden head of the bust of Shakespeare. Jane’s mother had wanted to take it down for the ceremony. But Jane had thought that Shakespeare was a very appropriate genius to preside over a wedding. Shakespeare had known all about weddings, Romeo and Juliet. Jane remembered the friar’s solemn words as she stepped over the threshold and met the Bard of Avon’s wise mahogany eye.
“So smile the heavens upon this holy act
That after hours with sorrow chide us not.”
The library, filled with softly smiling, softly stirring people, was very little like a friar’s cell. Still Jane had an almost irresistible impulse to jar the solemnity of the occasion by greeting old Dr. Winter with Juliet’s sprightly opening line, “Good even to my ghostly confessor!”
What would he do, thought Jane, if she did? What would Stephen? Stephen would think she was mad. Stephen had never even read Romeo and Juliet. He had told her so, months ago, and she had marvelled, at the time, that a Harvard degree could crown an education so singularly deficient!
Stephen was standing with Alden, embowered in smilax, at the left hand of the clergyman, both fearfully correct in new frock coats and boutonnieres of lilies of the valley. Stephen looked very charming and serious and distinctly nervous. Jane smiled reassuringly up at him, as she relinquished her father’s arm. The music died away into silence.
“Dearly beloved brethren,” began Dr. Winter.
Jane looked up, very
