1

It was the eve of Concha’s wedding; the house was full, and overflowing into Rudge’s cottage, into Rendall’s cottage, and into the houses of neighbours: there were Guy and his parents, Sir Roger and Lady Cust, there was Colonel Dundas, there was “Crippin” Arbuthnot, Rory’s major who was to be best man, and Elfrida Penn, who was to be chief bridesmaid, and Harry Sinclair and his children, and Hugh Mallam and Dick’s cousin and partner, Edward Lane.

A wedding is a thing—as concrete and compact as a gold coin stamped with a date and a symbol; for, though of the substance of Time, it has the qualities of Matter; colour, shape, tangibleness. Or rather, perhaps it freezes Time into the semblance of Eternity, but does not rob it of its colours: these it keeps as Morris’s gods did theirs in the moonlight.

We have all awakened on a winter’s morning to the fantastic joke that during the night a heavy fall of snow has played on Space; just such a joke does a wedding play on Time.

And who can keep out the estantigua, the demon army of the restless dead, screaming in the wind and led by Hellequin?

Now Hellequin is the old romance form of Harlequin, and Harlequin leads the wedding revels. But it is in vain that, like Ophelia, he “turns life, death and fate into prettiness and favour”: we recognise the eyes behind the mask, we know of what army he is captain.

And the wedding guests themselves; though each, individually, was anodyne, even commonplace, yet, under that strange light, they were fantastic, sinister—they were folk.

In her childhood that word had always terrified Teresa—there was her old nightmare of the Canterbury Pilgrims, knight, franklin, wife of Bath, streaming down the chimney with strange mocking laughter to keep Walpurgis-night in a square tiled kitchen.... Bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, confessors, virgins, widows, and all the holy people of God.

Yes, they were folk.

How pawky Edward Lane was looking—uncannily humorous and shrewd! What six-plied, cynical thing was he about to say to Jasper?

However, what he did say was: “You don’t get cake like that at school—do you, young man?”

And Lady Cust, with her light rippling laugh and her observant eyes—noticing the cut of one’s skirt and whether one asked her if she took sugar in her tea—when her face was in repose it was sad, like that of a Christian slave in the land of the Saracens.

“Oh yes, when we were in Pau we motored over to Lourdes, when one of the pilgrimages was on. Some of them ... well, really, they were like goblins, poor creatures ... appalling!” and she actually smiled reminiscently.

Teresa remembered Guy’s having told her that the favourite amusement of his Brabazon uncles when they were drunk had been potting with their revolvers at the village idiot.

She looked at Colonel Dundas: solemn, heavy, with a walrus moustache, and big, owl-like spectacles, each glass bisected with a straight line; at Sir Roger Cust, a dapper “hard-bitten” little man, with small, sharp gray eyes—surely they were not sinister.

“Old Tommy Cunningham!” Sir Roger was saying; “that takes one a long way back. Wasn’t he Master at one time of the Linlithgowshire?”

“Yes ... from eighteen ... eighteen seventy-five, I think, to eighty ... eighty-six, I think. I couldn’t tell you for certain, off-hand, but I’ll look it up in my diary,” said Colonel Dundas; “he was a first-rate shot, too,” he added.

“Magnificent!” agreed Sir Roger, “Aye, Úhu, aye, Úhu. D’you remember how he used always to say that?”

“So he did! Picked it up from the keepers and gillies, I suppose.”

“He was the coolest chap I’ve ever known. Do you remember his mare White Heather?”

“Yes ... let me see ... she was out of Lady of the Lake, by ... by....”

“Yes, yes, that’s the one. Well, you know, he had thousands on her for the National, and I was standing near him, and when she came in ... third, I think it was....”

“Fourth I think, but....”

“Fourth, then. Well, old Tommy just shut up his glasses with a snap and said, ‘Aye, Úhu, well, poor lassie, I thought she’d win somehow.’ Didn’t turn a hair, and he’d thousands on her!”

They were silent for a few seconds; then Sir Roger sighed and smiled: “Well, all that was a long time ago, Jimmy. Eheu fugaces, Posthume, Posthume.... Isn’t that how it goes, Guy? Funny how these old tags stick in one’s mind!” and he rubbed his chin and smiled complacently; and Teresa felt sure he would wake up in the night and chuckle with pride over the aptness of his Latin quotation.

Yes, but what was “old Tommy Cunningham” doing here? For he brought with him a rush of dreams and of old cold hopes, and a world as dead as the moon—dead men, dead horses, dead hounds.

Aye, Úhu, fugax es, Cunningham, Cunningham.

“Don’t you adore albinos?” shrilled Elfrida Penn in her peacock scream, while that intensely conventional little man, “Crippin” Arbuthnot grew crimson to the top of his bald head, and Lady Cust’s face began to twitch—clearly, she was seized by a violent desire to giggle.

“Perhaps you would like to go up to your room, Lady Cust? You must be tired,” said the DoÑa.

“Well, thank you very much, perhaps it would be a good plan; though it’s difficult to tear oneself away from this lovely garden—How you must love it!” and she turned to Teresa; then again to the DoÑa: “I have been envying you your delphiniums—they’re much finer than ours, ain’t they, Roger? Do you cinder them in the spring?” and they began walking towards the house, talking about gardens; but all the time they were watching each other, wary, alert, hostile.

“What a delicious room! And such roses!” Lady Cust exclaimed when they reached her bedroom.

Her maid had already unpacked; and on her dressing-table was unfurled one of these folding series of leather photograph frames, and each one contained a photograph of Francis, her eldest son, who had been killed in the War. There were several of him in the uniform of the Rifle Brigade; one of him in cricket flannels, one on a horse, two or three in khaki; a little caricature of him had also been unpacked, done by a girl in their neighbourhood, when he was a Sandhurst cadet; at the bottom of it was scrawled in a large, unsophisticated feminine hand: Wishing you a ripping Xmas, and then two or three marks of exclamation.

It belonged, that little inscription, to the good old days of the reign of King Edward, when girls wore sailor hats in the country, and shirts with stiff collars and ties, when every one, or so it seemed to Lady Cust, was normal and simple and comfortable, and had the same ambitions, namely, to hit hard at tennis, and to ride straight to hounds.

“Were you at Ascot this year?” “Have you been much to the Opera this season?” “What do you think of the mallet for this year? Seems to me it would take a crane to lift it!”

Such, in those days, had been the sensible conversational openings; while, recently, the man who had taken her into dinner had begun by asking her the name of her butcher; another by asking her if she liked string. Mad! Quite mad!

Of course, there were cultured people in those days too, but they were just as easy to talk to as the others. “Do you sing Guy d’Hardelot’s ‘I know a Lovely Garden?’ There’s really nothing to touch his songs.” “Have you been to the Academy yet? And oh, did you see that picture next to Sargeant’s portrait of Lady ——? It’s of Androcles taking a thorn out of such a jolly lion’s paw.” “Oh yes, of course, that’s from dear old Omar, isn’t it? There’s no one like him, is there? You know, I like the Rubaiyat really better than Tennyson.”

And now—there were strikes, and nearly all their neighbours had either let or sold their places; and Guy had the most idiotic ideas and the most extraordinary friends; and Francis....

The DoÑa’s eyes rested for a moment on the photographs; she was too short-sighted to be able to distinguish any details; but she could see that they were of a young man, and guessed that he was the son who had been killed.

“It’s much better for her,” she thought bitterly, “she hasn’t the fear for his soul to keep her awake.”

Lady Cust saw that she had noticed the photographs, and a dozen invisible spears flew out to guard her grief. Then she remembered having heard that the DoÑa had lost a daughter: “But that’s not the same as one’s eldest son—besides, she has grandchildren.”

Aloud she said, “One good thing about having no daughter, I always feel, is that one is saved having a wedding in the house. It must mean such endless organising and worry, and what with servants being so difficult nowadays.... But this is such a perfect house for a wedding—so gay! We are so shut in with trees. Dear old Rory, I’m so fond of him; he’s my only nephew, and ... er ... Concha is such a pretty thing.”

It was clear that at this point the DoÑa was expected to praise Rory; but she merely gave a vague, courteous smile.

“I have heard so much about you all from my Guy,” continued Lady Cust; “he is so devoted to you all, and you have been so good to him.”

“Oh! we are all very fond of Guy,” said the DoÑa stiffly.

“Well, it’s very nice of you to say so—he’s a dear old thing,” she paused, “and your other daughter, Teresa, she’s tremendously clever, isn’t she? I should so love to get to know her, but I’m afraid she’d despise me—I’m such a fool!” and she gave her rippling laugh.

The DoÑa, again, only smiled conventionally.

“Well, it’s all ...” and Lady Cust gave a little sigh. “You see, Rory was my only sister’s only child, and she died when he was seven, so he has been almost like my own son. I wonder ... don’t you think it’s ... it’s a little sudden?”

“What is?” asked the DoÑa icily.

“Well, they haven’t known each other very long, have they? I don’t know ... marriage ... is so ...”

So this foolish, giggling, pink and white woman was not pleased about the marriage! She probably thought Concha was not good enough for her nephew.

And the DoÑa who, for the last few days, had been half hoping that the Immaculate Conception herself, star-crowned, blue-robed, would to-morrow step down from the clouds to forbid the banns and save her namesake from perdition—the DoÑa actually found herself saying with some heat: “They’ve known each other for nearly a year; that is surely a long time, these days. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a most happy marriage.”

“Oh, I’m sure ... you know ... one always ...” murmured Lady Cust.

“Well, I must leave you to your rest. You have everything that you want?” and the DoÑa sailed out of the room.

Lady Cust smiled a little, and then sighed.

Dear old Rory! And what would Mab, her dead sister, think of it all? Oh, why had it not been she that had died in those old, happy days?

She went to her dressing-table and took up the folding leather frame. They were the photographs of a very beautiful young man, a true Brabazon—a longer limbed, merrier eyed Rory, with a full, rather insolent mouth.

Yes, it was funny—she had been apt to call him by the names of her dead brothers: “Jack! Geoffrey! Desmond! Francis, I mean.” She had never had any difficulty in understanding Francis—how they used to laugh together!

She remembered how she used to dread his marriage; jealously watching him with his favourite partners at tennis and at dances, and suspiciously scanning the photographs of unknown and improperly pretty young ladies in his bedroom: Best of luck! Rosie; Ever your chum, Vera—sick at the thought of perhaps having to welcome a musical-comedy actress as Francis’s wife.

If only she had known! For now, were she suddenly to wake up and find it was for Francis’s wedding that she was here—the bride Concha Lane, or that extraordinary Miss Penn, or, even, “Rosie” or “Vera,” her heart would burst, she would go mad with happiness.

And she had a friend who actually dared to be heartbroken because she had suddenly got a letter from her only son, telling her that he had been married at a registry to a war-widow, whom she knew to be a tenth-rate little minx with bobbed hair and the mind of a barmaid.

But Francis ... she would never be at his wedding. She would never hear his voice again—Francis was dead.

When, an hour later, Sir Roger looked in on his way to dress, he found her lying on the sofa, reading the Sketch, smiling and serene.

“Well, May,” he said, “I saw you! You were on the point of disgracing yourself just before you went upstairs. Extraordinary thing! Will you never get over this trick of giggling? You simply have no self-control, darling.”

“I know, isn’t it dreadful? Well, what do you think of ’em all?”

“Oh, they seem all right. Rory’s girl’s extraordinary pretty—pretty manners, too.”

“Charming! ‘I should lo-o-ove to,’” and she reproduced admirably Concha’s company voice. “However,” she went on, “we have a great deal to be thankful for—it might have been Miss Penn. ‘Don’t you ado-o-ore albinos?’ Oh, I shall never forget it ... and Major Arbuthnot’s face! Still, if it had been she, I must say I should have loved to see the sensation produced on Edinburgh by old Jimmy’s walking down Princes Street with her.”

Sir Roger gave a hoarse chuckle.

2

As it was too large a party to get comfortably into the dining-room, a big tent had been pitched on the lawn, and several long narrow tables joined together, and there they dined, an ill-assorted company.

At one end Dr. Sinclair was shouting to Lady Cust, “Well, I’d send him to that co-education place, but, unfortunately, they don’t ... er ... learn anything there. They make the fourth form read Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which is not ... er ... only the most ... er ... trashy of all the works of genius, but the only ... er ... lesson to be learned from it is the ... er ... inadvisability of ... er ... seducing a Russian peasant girl, and ... er ... unfortunately, an ... er ... er ... English schoolboy hasn’t many opportunities of doing that ... er ... er....”

He looked at her, slightly puzzled—her face was pink with suppressed laughter; but, as she was meant to laugh, why suppress it?

Elfrida Penn was terrifying “Crippin” Arbuthnot by searching questions as to whether the erotic adventures of his schooldays had been similar to those described in a recent novel about life at a public school.

Edward Lane was saying to Jollypot, “Yes, before my niece—Olive Jackson, you know—went to school, I said to her, ‘my advice to you is: keep your hands clean.’ I always....”

“Oh, Mr. Lane, that was beautiful!” cried Jollypot.

“Yes, I always say a lady can be known by the way she keeps her hands.”

Jollypot’s face fell.

But Dick and Hugh, at any rate, yelling at each other across the intervening forms of Concha and Rory, were in perfect harmony. “I say, Dick, do you remember old Bright, the butler at your father’s? And how angry he used to be when we asked him if he was any relation of John Bright?”

“Yes, rather; and do you remember how he used to say, ‘Port, claret, sherry, madeira, sir?’ always in that order.”

“Yes, and how he used to puff it down one’s neck? And the severe way your mother used to say, ‘Neither, thank you, Bright’!”

Then, from the other end, they would catch sight of the DoÑa glaring at them indignantly through her lorgnette, and Dick would turn hurriedly to Lady Cust.

As to Teresa, she was indulging in that form of intoxication that has been described before—that of Æsthetically withdrawing herself from a large, chattering company. Once when she was doing it David had guessed, and had whispered to her, “The laird’s been deed these twa hoors, but I wisna for spoiling guid company,” in reference to a host who had inconspicuously died, sitting bolt upright at the head of his table, at about the third round of port.

A branch, or something, outside was casting a shadow on the tent’s canvas wall—as usual, it was in the form of Dante’s profile. She had seen it in patches of damp on ceilings, in burning coals, in the clouds, in shadows cast on the white walls of the bath-room.

Perhaps he had not really looked like that at all, and the famous fresco portrait had been originally merely a patch of damp, elaborated into the outline of a human profile by some wag of the fourteenth century, and called Dante; and perhaps the Dante he meant was not the poet at all, but some popular buffoon, Pantaloon or Harlequin, in the comedies at street corners—the Charlie Chaplin, in fact, of his age....

But for some time Colonel Dundas had been booming away in her right ear, and it was high time she should listen.

“... always a note-book on the links, and every shot recorded—it’s a golden rule. I’ve advised more than one Amateur Champion to follow it. You see my point, don’t you? The next time you play on the same links you whip out your note-book and say, ‘Let me see—Muirfield, sixth hole, Sept. 5, 1920: hit apparently good drive down centre of the course, found almost impossible approach shot owing to cross bunkers. N.B. Keep to the left at the sixth hole.’ You see my point, don’t you?”

Opposite to them, Guy was screaming excitedly to Elfrida Penn, who seemed to be sucking in his words through her thick lips: “Of course, there’s nothing so beautiful and significant, from the point of view of composition, as a lot of people sitting at a narrow table—it’s the making of the Christian religion. Aubrey Beardsley ought to have done a Cena: the Apostles, in curly white wigs like these little tight clustering roses—Dorothy Perkins, or whatever they’re called—and black masks, sitting down one side of a narrow refectory table with plates piled up with round fruits, the wall behind them fluted and garlanded in stucco, St. John, his periwigged head on Jesus’ shoulder, leering up at him, and Judas, sitting a little apart, a white Pierrot, one finger pressed against his button mouth, his eyes round with horror and glee....”

“Yes, every year I was in India I read it through, from cover to cover,” boomed Colonel Dundas proudly. (Oh yes, of course, Dobbin and the History of the Punjab!) “It’s a wonderful style. He comes next to Shakespeare, in my estimation.” (Not Dobbin and the History of the Punjab, then!) “Yes, every year I read the whole of the French Revolution through from cover to cover—a very great book. And when, by mistake, John Stuart Mill burned the manuscript, what do you think Carlyle did?”

“I don’t know. What did he do?”

“He sat down and read through all the works of Fenimore Cooper—read ’em through from beginning to end,” and he stared at her in solemn triumph.

“Really?” she gasped, “I don’t quite understand. Fenimore Cooper—he wrote about Red Indians, didn’t he? Why did he read him?”

“Why? To distract his mind, of course. Extraordinary pluck!” and he glared at her angrily.

At this point Sir Roger, who had not been making much way with the DoÑa, leaned across the table, and said, “I say, Jimmy, Mrs. Lane and I have been talking about Gib.—did I ever tell you about the time I dined with your old Mess there? Owing to my being a connection of yours the Colonel asked me to choose a tune for the pipes;” then, turning to the DoÑa, he said in parenthesis, “I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard the bagpipes, but—don’t tell Colonel Dundas—we don’t think much of ’em this side of the border.” Then again to Colonel Dundas, “Well, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of a tune, and then suddenly the Deil amang the Tailors came into my head, so out I came with it, as pleased as Punch. Well, I thought the Colonel looked a bit grim, and I saw ’em all looking at each other, but the order was given to the piper, and he got going, and, by gad, it was a tune—nearly took the roof off the place! I thought I should be deaf for life—turned out to be the loudest tune they’d got;” then, again to the extremely bored DoÑa, “but it’s a glorious place, old Gib. I remember in the eighties....”

Lady Cust, watching from the other end of the table, was much amused by the engouement her husband had developed, since arriving at Plasencia, for the society of Jimmy Dundas; it was clearly a case of “better the bore I know....”

“Yes, these were great days,” Colonel Dundas was saying; “we’re the oldest regiment of the line, you know—Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard; that’s what we call ourselves—Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard!” and he chuckled proudly.

And this from a pillar of the Scottish Episcopal Church!... Oh pale Galilean, hast thou conquered?

Then a loving-cup filled with punch began to go the round and they all drank from it in turn, rising to their feet as they did so, and saying, “Concha! Rory!”

When every one had had a sip, Rory, rather pale, got up to return thanks.

“Ladies and Gentlemen!... (pause) ... I do think it’s extraordinary kind of you to drink our health in this very nice way. We are most awfully grateful ... (pause) ... I’m afraid I’m not a Cicero or a Lloyd George, or anything like that ... (Laughter) ... old Crippin there will tell you speeches ain’t much in my line....” Then he had a sudden brilliant idea: “But there’s one thing I should like to ask you all to do. You see, I’m awfully grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Lane for giving me Concha, and my uncle has always been most awfully good to me, and I’d like to ask you all to drink their health ... and if my mother is anywhere about ... and others ... I know they’ll join in the toast, in nectar, or whatever they drink up there,” and he ended with an apologetic little laugh.

The company was very much touched; Edward Lane blew his nose violently, and muttered to Jollypot that young Dundas was evidently a very nice-feeling young fellow.

The atmosphere having become emotional, the ghosts walked.

Colonel Dundas had a vision of Rory’s mother—lovely Mab Brabazon—as he had first seen her, radiant and laughing at the Northern Meeting of twenty-nine years ago; but then, ever since, he had so often had that vision: at Church Parade, at polo in India, playing golf in Scotland, playing Bridge in any of his ten clubs—anywhere, everywhere, he might see Mab Brabazon. And little had Teresa guessed that as Carlyle read Fenimore Cooper, so he had read the French Revolution—“to distract his mind.”

Sir Roger and Lady Cust thought of Francis; more than one of Pepa. But Dick thought of his sallow puritanic sister Joannah, who had been so much older than himself that their interests had never clashed, and all his memories of her were of petting and spoiling—“Little Dickie doesn’t take spoiling, his temper is so sweet,” she used to say—his eyes began to smart. And Hugh Mallam, too, thought of poor old Joannah Lane, and he remembered how, in the days when his ambition had been to be a painter, he used to wonder whether, if offered the certainty of becoming as great a one as Sir Frederick Leighton, on condition of marrying Joannah, he would be able to bring himself to do it.

3

After dinner they went into the garden; some of them sitting on the lawn, some of them wandering about among the flowers.

The border was in the summer prime of lilies and peonies and anchusa and delphiniums; to its right was a great clump of lavender nearly ripe, and at the stage when it looks like veins of porphyry running through a rock of jade; a little to its left was a stiff row of hollyhocks.

“An amazingly distinguished flower, hollyhock!” said Guy, “it always gives a cachet to its surroundings, so different from sweetpeas, which look sordid in a dusty station garden, and fragrantly bourgeois beside the suburban lawn on which Miss Smith is playing tennis in lavender muslin....”

“Guy!” cried Lady Cust, looking round anxiously at the company, and laughing apologetically; Guy, however, went on undaunted; “but hollyhock is like the signature of a great painter, it testifies that any subject can be turned into art—or, rather, into that domain which lies between painting and poetry, where damoizelles, dressed in quaintly damasked brocades, talk of friendship and death and the stars in curious stiff conceits.”

“Guy! You are a duffer,” laughed Lady Cust again.

“Well, here come some of these damoizelles in their quaint brocades—do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?

“Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars? Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?” said Hugh Mallam with his jolly laugh, and he nodded towards Concha and Elfrida Penn and Lettice Moore and Winifred Norton, who, dressed in a variety of pale colours, were walking arm in arm up the border.

Sainte-Beuve in a fine passage describes the moment in a journey south when “en descendant le fleuve, on a passÉ une de ces lignes par delÀ lesquelles le soleil et le ciel sont plus beaux.”

Such a line—beyond which “the sun and the sky are more beautiful”—cuts across the range of every one’s vision; and the group of flower-bordered girls were certainly beyond that line for all who were watching them. Once again Teresa felt as if she were suddenly seeing the present as the past; and as long as she lived it would always be as that picture that she would see Concha’s wedding.

“Vera incessu patuit dea,” murmured Hugh, and then he added, a little wistfully, “they do look jolly!”

“You’d look just as jolly far off, in that light, Hugh,” said Dick, who was sitting blinking at his flowers, like a large, contented tom-cat.

The younger men who, with the exception of Guy, had been walking up and down between the hawthorn hedge, smoking cigars and deep in talk—probably about the War—went and joined the four girls; and after a few moments of general chatter Arnold flung his arm round Concha’s shoulder and Teresa could hear him saying: “Come on, Conch,” and they wandered off by themselves. She was glad; for she knew that Concha had felt acutely the estrangement from Arnold caused by his jealousy at her engagement.

Then Rory came and joined the party on the lawn, and sat down on the grass at the feet of Lady Cust.

“Well, what about a little Bridge?” said Dick, and he, Hugh, Sir Roger, and Colonel Dundas, went indoors for a rubber.

Shortly afterwards Lady Cust and Rory wandered off together in the direction of the lavender.

“Well, Rorrocks, so you’re really going to do it?”

“Yes, Aunt May, I’m in for it this time ... the great adventure!” and he laughed a little nervously, “Concha ... she ... don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“Awfully pretty, Rory, I do really ... a dear thing!”

They felt that there were many things they wanted to say to each other, these two; but, apart from reserve and false shame, they would have found it hard to express these things in words.

“Well, time does fly! It seems just the other day that I was scurrying up to Edinburgh for your christening ... and Fran ... Guy was only a year old.”

“Yes, ... I can hardly believe it myself,” and again he gave a little nervous laugh.

“Well, dear old thing,” and she laid a hand on his arm, “I’m your godmother, you know, and your mother and I ... I don’t believe we were ever away from each other till I married ... you’re sure ... it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Aunt May, it’s going to be all right.... I’m sure,” and again he laughed; and although he was very pale, his eyes were bright and happy.

“Shall we go and walk down the border and look beautiful too?” said Guy to Teresa.

“Well, and what about the play?” he asked, when they were out of ear-shot.

“It’s finished at last ... so I can breathe again. While I was writing I felt rather like a sort of Thomas the Rhymer, a thrall to ghosts and fairies; and I got half to hate the whole thing, as one is always inclined to hate a master.”

She was trying to be friendly, and thought it would please him if she told him about such intimate things; but he was not pleased.

Though he had never written anything long enough to give him at first hand the feeling she had described, yet he realised it was what certainly would be felt by a genuine dramatist or novelist; and it was not in his picture that Teresa should be either—Sophocles may have led his own choruses, but he did not lead those of Euripides.

“The play’s finished, and yet all this,” and she waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the house and garden and all the groups of people, “and yet all this goes on just the same.”

4

Next day came the queer dislocated morning—every one either at a loose end or frantically busy,—the arrival of Dr. Nigel Dundas, Bishop of Dunfermline, Colonel Dundas’s first cousin, who had travelled all night from Scotland, to be there to marry Rory; the hurried cold luncheon; the getting the Custs and people off to the church; then Parker’s and Teresa’s fingers fumbling with hooks and eyes and arranging the veil.

When the bride was dressed, and ready to go downstairs, the DoÑa, who had not appeared all morning, and was not, of course, going to the church ceremony, walked into the room, pale and heavy-eyed.

She held out her arms, “Come to me, my Concha!” she said.

“Oh, DoÑa ... if only ... I couldn’t ... it’ll be all right,” Concha whispered between little sobs, “and anyway, your baby will always love you ... and ...”

“The Purissima and all the Saints bless you, my child,” said the DoÑa in a stifled voice, and she made the sign of the Cross on her forehead, “but you mustn’t cry on your wedding day. Come, let me put your veil straight.”

Teresa, watching this little scene, felt a sudden pang of remorse—why had she not more control over her imagination? Why had she allowed her mother to turn, in the play, into such a sinister and shameless figure?

Then they went down to the hall, where Dick was contemplating in a pier-glass, with considerable complacency, the reflection of his stout morning-coated person.

“Well, it’s quite time we were starting, Concha,” he called out; and with that amazing ignoring of the emotional conventions by which men are continually hurting the feelings of women, it was not till he and Concha were well on their way to church, that he remembered to congratulate her on her appearance.

Teresa, Jollypot, and the children, had gone on ahead in the open car—past hens, past hedges, past motor-bicycles, past cottage gardens; past fields of light feathery oats, so thickly sown with poppies that they seemed to flicker together into one fabric; past fields of barley that had swallowed the wind, which bent and ruffled the ductile imprisoning substance that it informed; past fields of half-ripe wheat, around the stalks of which Teresa, who, since she had been writing, had fallen into an almost exhausting habit of automatic observation, noticed the light tightly twisting itself in strands of greenish lavender. And there was a field from which the hay had been carried long enough to have allowed a fresh crop of poppies to spring up; to see them thus alone and unhampered gave one such a stab of joyous relief that one could almost believe the hay to have been but a parasite scum drained away to reveal this red substratum of beauty. All these things, as they rushed past, were remarked by Teresa’s weary, active eyes till they had reached the church and deposited Anna and Jasper with the bridesmaids, waiting in the porch, and at last they were walking up the aisle and being ushered into their places by Bob Norton.

There stood Major Arbuthnot, whispering and giggling with Rory, who was looking very white and bright-eyed. After all, he was not lower than the birds—he, too, felt the thrill of mating-time.

Then the opening bars of the Voice that Breathed o’er Eden, and a stiffening to attention of Major Arbuthnot, and a sudden smile from Rory, and all eyes turning to the door—Concha was entering on her father’s arm, her train held up by Jasper.

Then the Oxford voice of Dr. Nigel Dundas, droning on, droning on, till it reached the low antiphon with Rory:

Then Concha’s turn and then more prayers; and before long they were all laughing and chattering and wiping away tears in the vestry; while in the church the band was playing shamelessly secular tunes, though Mr. Moore had stipulated that there should be “no vaudeville music.”

“Why are people crying? A wedding isn’t a sad thing,” said Anna, in a loud and argumentative voice.

Then down the aisle and down the path between a double hedge of Girl Guides, and whirling back to the Plasencia garden and masses and masses of people.

Teresa was immediately sucked into a vortex of activities—elbowing her way through the crowd with a cup of tea for one old lady and an ice for another; steering a third to one of the tents, to choose for herself what she wanted; making suitable rejoinders to such questions and exclamations as: “How charming dear Concha looks, I really think she’s the prettiest bride I’ve ever seen.” “Do tell me what the red ribbon is that Captain Dundas is wearing—the one that isn’t the M.C.? Some one said they thought it was a Belgian order.” “Tell me dear; it was the Scottish Church Service, wasn’t it? I mean, the Scotch Church that’s like ours? I did so like it ... so much more ... well, delicate than ours.” “Oh, just look at those masses of white butterflies on the lavender! What a splendid crop you’ll have! Do you send it up to London?”

Then, as in a nightmare, she heard Anna proclaiming proudly that she had eaten eight ices, and Jasper ten; well, it was too late now to take any measures.

Also, she had time to be amused at noticing that Mrs. Moore had managed to get introduced to Lady Cust, and was talking to her eagerly.

Later on she heard Lettice Moore saying to another bridesmaid, “Poor old Eben! He was frightfully cut up when he heard about the engagement,” and, in the foolish way one has of moving indifferently among the world’s great tragedies—earthquakes, famines, wars—and suddenly feeling a tightening of the throat, and a smarting of the eyes as one realises that at that moment a bullfinch is probably dying in China, Teresa suddenly felt a wave of pity and tenderness sweep over her for Eben, sitting in his cabin (did senior “snotties” have a cabin to themselves? Well, it didn’t really matter), so poorly furnished in comparison with the gramophones and silver photograph frames, and gorgeous cushions of his mates, his arms, with the red hands whose fingers had never recovered their shape from the chilblains of the Baltic, dangling limply down at either side of him, and perhaps tears in his round china-blue eyes.

Then at last Concha and Rory were running and ducking and laughing under a shower of rice, and rose leaves. They looked very young and frail, both of them, blown out into the world, where God knew what awaited them.

“They are like Paulo and Francesca—two leaves clinging together, blown by the wind,” said Jollypot dreamily to Teresa.

5

We have already likened a wedding to a fall of snow; and as rapidly as a fall of snow it melts, disclosing underneath it just such a dingy world.

One by one the motley company drifted off in trains, and motors, their exit producing on Teresa the same impression that she always got from the end of Twelfth Night—that of a troupe of fairy mimes, laden with their tiffany, their pasteboard yew hedges, their stucco peacocks, slowly sailing away in a cloud out of sight, while the clown whom they have forgotten, sits down here on the earth singing the rain it raineth every day.

But, in spite of a dismantled drawing-room, a billiard-table covered with presents, a trampled lawn and a furious Parker and Rudge, life quickly re-adjusted itself.

The next day but one there was a rose show in the county town, and Rudge went to see it.

After dinner, Dick had him summoned to the drawing-room to discuss the roses with himself and the DoÑa.

His leathery cheeks were flushed, his hard eyes shone: “Oh ... it was grand, ma’am. I was saying to Mrs. Rudge, ‘Well, I said, one doesn’t often see a sight like that!’ I said. There was a new white rose, sir, well, I’ve never seen anything to beat it....”

“And what about the Daily Clarion rose?”

“Well, sir, a very fine rose, certainly, but I’m not sure if it would do with us ... but that white rose, sir, I said to Mrs. Rudge, ‘you could almost say it was like the moon,’ I said.”

And what was Time but a gigantic rose, shedding, one by one, its petals? And then Jollypot gathered them up and made them into pot-pourri; but still the petals went on falling, silently, ceaselessly.