John Strange Winter

The young rush along the pathway of life cheerfully surmounting or overturning every obstacle, while their more cautious elders look on aghast at their nerve.

When once Harry Marksby had taken the plunge and was accepted as a lover of Maudie’s, he was determined not to let the grass grow under his feet. May was then about three parts over, and Harry insisted that the wedding should be, as he called it, “pulled off” before the end of July.

“But why this hurry?” asked Regina, who, in spite of her modernity, still retained some traces of her aboriginal ways of thought.

“No hurry at all; but why waste time, Mrs. Whittaker?” said Harry. “What is there to wait for? We have plenty of money. I always go away for August, and, for an occasion like this, my father won’t think anything of it if I take a good share of September too. A man only gets married now and again, you know.”

“But why not leave it till the autumn?”

“Because I want to take Maudie for a good trip abroad. She wishes it—I wish it. What do you say? Clothes? Oh, surely we needn’t consider a few clothes. Get as little as she can do with for a continental trip—lay the wedding gown up in lavender, and let Maudie buy the rest of her things in Paris as we come home.”

“There’s reason in it,” said Alfred Whittaker, from the depths of his big chair.

“I don’t like my daughter being married in such a hurry as this,” said Regina, half hesitatingly.

“But why? Hurried marriages are the fashion nowadays. Royalty pulls it off in a couple of months or so—long engagements are out of date. I knew a man once,” Harry went on—“I didn’t know him very well, but I met him—who had been engaged to a girl for thirteen years, and they somehow or other didn’t altogether hit it off when they did get married. There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. You don’t really get to know one another until the knot is actually tied. I know Maudie as well now as I should know her if I was engaged to her for seven years.”

“I don’t want you to wait seven years,” said Regina.

“Well, I should hope not,” replied Harry.

“But as many months—” began Regina, when Harry Marksby impetuously interrupted her.

“Oh no, Mrs. Whittaker,” he exclaimed. “Maudie would be worn to fiddlestrings long before seven months were over. The end of July, if you please. I can work all my business up to that point—then everything’s slack, it’s a sort of off-time, so to speak—and I can go away with a clear conscience and give my wife a ripping honeymoon—get a ripping honeymoon myself, for the matter of that.”

“You have decided where you want to go?” Regina inquired.

“Yes, we’re going to Switzerland, taking the Rhine on our way and the Italian lakes as we come back; get a fortnight in Paris, or if we drive it too late for that, stay three or four days in Paris, and perhaps go back again for a few days in the early autumn—if Maudie wants clothes, that is to say.”

“I sha’n’t,” said Maudie. “I am not going to get my dresses in Paris. I’ve come to see now that we made fools of ourselves when we came home from school with everything Parisian. They were horrid, and were a full year in advance of the fashions here. I hate being a year ahead of the fashions—it’s quite as bad as being two years behind them. I would much rather not have all my things bought now, mother. I think Harry is quite right. A couple of good tailor-dresses, a few muslins, my wedding dress, and a tea-gown, and other things of that kind, are necessary, but I can get my further trousseau as I want it.”

“I call that a practical suggestion,” put in Alfred Whittaker.

“Most practical,” agreed Harry. “That was why I was fascinated in the first instance by Maudie—she is so practical.”

“Do you want a wife to be altogether practical?” demanded Julia, while Maudie looked up anxiously, as if her beloved Harry was about to find some flaw in her.

A most odd look flashed across the young man’s keen face. “You’ll understand one day,” he said, addressing Julia directly. “You’ll understand, and you’ll sympathize with me. A fellow likes a wife who knows how many beans make five. A fool has no charm for any man, except he’s too big a black-guard to want his wife to find him out. As regards frocks, and the spending of money, and the business side of life, a man does like his wife to be altogether practical.”

“That implies another side of the picture,” said Julia.

“Yes, it does. And the other side of the picture is me and those that may come after me; and if a man is a straight, clean wholesome man, he likes his wife to be altogether sentimental as regards him, and those that come after him. You will understand me some day, Julia, my dear.”

Maudie’s face dropped instantly, and something like the flash of diamonds came into her eyes. She heaved a great sigh, a tremulous sigh, not one of pain; and hearing it, Harry Marksby caught hold of her hand and tried to pull her ring off. And Maudie began to laugh with those tell-tale little twinkling drops bedewing her eyelashes, and Regina looked on, much as an elephant might regard her offspring at play, with a look which only required a little encouragement for her to put it into words. And if that look had been put into words, they would have been but three—“My noble boy!”

“Ah, well,” said Julia, now busy a few yards away, “you are not half good enough for our Maudie, Harry. You are taking away the biggest part of my life, and of course you are very cock o’ whoop about it; but if you’re not good to her, Harry, you will have to reckon with me.”

“All right, I’ll be there when you want me,” Harry replied. “Then we may take it, Mrs. Whittaker,” he continued, with a change of tone, “that the end of July will be the date to work to?”

“I suppose so,” said Regina, “if her father has no objection.”

“I detest long engagements myself,” said Alfred Whittaker. “I never could see the good of them. I was engaged much too long to you, my dear.”

“It was the happiest time of my life—” Regina began, somewhat wistfully.

“Oh, don’t say that,” her husband interrupted, “don’t say that. It might have been happier than any time that went before—I know it was for me—but at best it is only a foreshadowing, it’s only like water to wine, like moonlight to sunlight. There, there, children,” he said, flinging out his hands with a deprecating gesture, “there, there, your old dad doesn’t often get so sentimental as that. The end of July let it be, and after that we shall all go away and breathe freely.”

As a matter of fact, after that Ye Dene became like a seething whirlpool. Such a coming and going, such a dumping of parcels and patterns and presents, such sending out of invitations and receiving of congratulations there was, that more than once even Regina herself admitted that two months was quite long enough for a young couple to be engaged in these modern days.

The Marksby family were frankly and undeniably delighted and overjoyed at the new state of affairs. They received Maudie with wide-open arms, lavished their love and admiration and gifts upon her. Papa Marksby came across to Ye Dene one evening, and was solemnly closeted with Alfred Whittaker for the space of a whole hour, during which time they smoked extremely long cigars, drank whisky-and-soda out of extremely long tumblers, and went solemnly, although in very friendly fashion, into extremely long figures.

And then Alfred Whittaker introduced his future son-in-law’s father into the circle in the drawing-room, and Papa Marksby informed Regina in a voice of much satisfaction and some oiliness, that he and his good friend and neighbor had settled all the little details of future ways and means for the young couple.

“Fifty thousand pounds, my dear Queenie,” said Alfred Whittaker, when he found himself once more alone with his wife.

“Fifty thousand pounds, Alfie? What do you mean?”

“Fifty thousand pounds, as our neighbor across the road puts it, ‘to be tied to Maudie’s tail!’”

“You mean to say he’s going to settle fifty thousand pounds upon her?”

“I do. Papa Marksby isn’t the man to do things by halves. He puts it very clearly and in a very business-like manner, that he has set aside the sum of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to be divided equally, on their marriage, between his two daughters and his prospective daughter-in-law. He says he can well afford it, that it won’t affect the business the least little bit in the world, and, whatever happens, the three girls will always be safe, they and their children after them. It’s a wonderful thing,” he went on, “that two girls like Rachel and Emmeline Marksby, with fifty thousand pounds apiece to their fortune—to their immediate fortune, one may say—should remain unmarried, and our little Maudie, who hasn’t and never will have, more than a third of that sum, should snap up a big prize as she has done.”

“I knew they were well off,” said Regina, “I knew it in many ways as soon as they came here, but I am not surprised that Maudie has made this wealthy marriage. She is very beautiful—very beautiful. What surprises me is that the Marksbys should turn out to have so much money. He gave over a hundred pounds for her engagement ring, and next week he’s going to buy her a diamond necklace. Think of my daughter with a diamond necklace.”

“That is as it should be,” said Alfred, complacently. “Even when it is made out of sausages.”

“Dear, dear, Alfie, how you do harp on those sausages!”

“My dear, I went and lunched on them the other day—excellent, excellent! Don’t know how they do it for the money. I saw the whole process—went over the factory. Everything as clean as a new pin; you could eat your dinner off the floor.”

“I—I—don’t know,” said Regina. “It seems a little.—However, having put my hand to the plough, I am not one to look back. Once my daughter has married sausages, I will honor sausages!”

“You will certainly be able to honor a good deal that sausages will give her,” said Alfred Whittaker. “And now, Queenie, there’s a subject on which I have been trying to get a word with you for the last week or more. What are we going to give, Queenie, for our wedding present?”

But that was not a question to be answered off-hand. It was a matter requiring much consideration, consultation—divination, I might say. The major points of the coming ceremony were all arranged; the bride’s dress, the costumes of the maids, the favors for the men, and the wording of the invitations. It was the last and greatest, and perhaps the least easy to decide—what should be the present of the father and mother of the bride.