THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (6 Titles in One Edition). E. M. Delafield
awfully good-looking," instantly replied Zella, instinctively adapting her vocabulary to Muriel's.
"Isn't he? and am I not frightfully?" lucky said Muriel earnestly. "I simply can't believe it sometimes—to think that only a year ago I was pegging away at that beastly old fiddle in Germany, and now here I am, simply too happy for words, going to marry Chumps in a fortnight!"
The ecstatic contemplation of this climax reduced her to a moment's silence.
Then Zella said sympathetically:
"Do tell me how it all happened—when you first fell in love, and everything- about it."
"Oh, my dear, it was awful! I simply didn't care about dances and things unless he was there, after we'd really got to know each other, staying in the same country-houses for shoots, don't you know."
"You met at a shooting-party, didn't you?"
"Yes, last November, at Lady Newlyne's—the mother of that girl who was here to-day, you know. That's why I had to ask her to be a bridesmaid, though, as a matter of fact, I simply loathe red hair, and it made it awfully difficult to choose the colour for the dresses. Any way, it was at her house we first met. It was ripping! Everybody was in frightful spirits, and we knew each other awfully well, and we all ragged like anything, don't you know. One evening some of the men pretended they couldn't talk anything but broken English, and Chumps took me in to dinner, and was perfectly killing, talking pigeon English all the time."
Muriel paused to laugh whole-heartedly at the recollection, but, perhaps perceiving some lack of response in Zella's perfunctory smile, added apologetically:
"Of course it was absolutely idiotic of him, but I must say I do like people to have a sense of the ridiculous, and that Chumps certainly has got."
Zella felt ho doubt of it, as Muriel continued to give her further details of Chumps's progress through life as a humorist. These bore a strange resemblance to one another, and at last Zella said:
"And when did you first know that he was in love with you?"
"Oh," said Muriel, "that was the awful part of it! I wasn't a bit sure whether he really did care, you know, until the night of our dance. Of course we were great chums and all that, but I couldn't believe he really cared— simply couldn't believe it! Well, at the dance he did say something, when we were sitting out—the sort of thing that might or might not mean anything, don't you know." She paused.
"I know," said Zella sympathetically, wondering what on earth she meant.
"But he didn't absolutely propose till the next Saturday afternoon, when he came to Hurlingham with us. I can remember the very date," said Muriel impressively. "It was the 20th of April; and the wedding-day will be exactly three months afterwards. Isn't it weird?"
Zella was spared the necessity of agreeing by a series of taps on the adjoining wall, which Muriel interpreted as a signal from Mrs. Lloyd-Evans that Zella should be left to rest.
"I must go, I suppose," Muriel said. "You are a dear, Zella, to be so nice and sympathetic. I expect next year you'll be getting ready for your own wedding. I do hope so."
"What does it feel like?" inquired Zella of her departing cousin, in the desperate hope of extracting a definition of the undefinable.
"What, to be going to be married!" laughed Muriel, blushing perceptibly for the first time.
"Yes."
"Oh!"—she paused a moment at the door—" it's a weird sort of feeling, but perfectly lovely when you get the right person."
XX
"MARRIAGE is a Sacrament," thought Zella, fresh from the Catéchisme de Trente as expounded by Reverend Mother, and unaware that the particular Bishop conducting the ceremony did not regard it as anything of the sort.
She stood in the blue and white cloud of tulle and flowers and shaded azure feathers that represented Muriel's bridesmaids, at the end of the long aisle.
They were waiting for the bride.
Chumps, erect, scarlet, immaculate, was hovering between the chancel steps and the front row of reserved prie-dieus—had, indeed, been hovering there for some time, exchanging a furtive grin every now and then with the humorously inclined best man, who made facetious remarks in an undertone of the "This won't be the last time you'll be kept waiting, my boy " type.
The church was full, and James had ceased to pilot elaborate women and black-coated men into their seats.
The organ was being tempestuously played, and did not succeed in drowning the ceaseless rustle and murmur all along the church.
The bridesmaids were whispering together, and examining the expensive sapphire and diamond brooches that interlaced the initials of the bride and bridegroom in a conventional cipher.
Zella, who scarcely knew any of them, stood slightly apart, feeling weary already, and trying to think that her isolation, which she supposed as patent to everyone else as she felt it to be, was due to her superior sense of the solemnity of the occasion, which these other girls regarded merely as a slightly hushed social function.
From the cool darkness of the aisle she could just see a corner of the pavement, a broad strip of red carpet, and the feet of a rapidly collecting crowd.
Then there was a sudden stir outside.
The bride had come.
She was in the church now, and Zella caught her breath.
Was it Muriel? that white, veiled figure, bearing a great sheaf of lilies, standing there a moment against the great dark doors that had closed behind her?
She was the Bride, aloof, mysterious, symbolical of eternal union.
A real silence had fallen suddenly, instantly, upon the church.
The white slender figure moved slowly forward, the crown of golden hair bent under the falling veil. Her long heavy train lay on the ground, and was skilfully flung into position by unseen hands.
The organ was pealing triumphantly now.
Zella felt a sudden tightening of her throat, and her heart was hammering. And this time it was not the accessories only that had moved her ready emotionalism, but the sudden vision of a strangely familiar symbol that yet symbolized she knew not what.
But as they moved in procession slowly up the aisle, she resumed the consciousness of her own identity. Muriel became a misty figure at the chancel steps, separated from the bridesmaids by the immense length of her own train, and Zella shifted the bouquet, which she had unconsciously been grasping, to a more graceful angle.
The responses were more or less audible; Uncle Henry's bald head moved forward at the moment when "Who giveth this woman?" was asked; the Bishop gave an address in the course of which he apostrophized the bride and bridegroom a number of times as " Muriel and Archibald," with sonorous distinctness; the choir burst into "O perfect Love "; and there was a slow movement into the vestry, followed by a sort of civilized rush from the occupants of the first half-dozen seats, anxious to show that they had every right to witness the bride's signature in preference to anybody else.
Muriel's veil was flung back, and she was paler than usual, but laughing and saying "Thanks awfully!" to the many kind, smiling ladies pressing round her, each striving with shrill good wishes to attract attention to herself and her intimacy with the bride.
Presently there was a murmur that the Bishop seemed to think, as everything was signed, hadn't we better make a move? and everyone filtered back into the church, smiling violently at less favoured guests who had been obliged to remain there.
The organ crashed into Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," blatantly hackneyed, and the procession reformed.
This time, however, Muriel