XVI
It was always felt that the great disappointment in connection with Iris Easter's wedding was the shock unconsciously caused by Mr. Douglas Garrett's father.
The representative of the Clan appeared in the guise of a stout, handsome old man with waxed moustache, in rather smart, tight, black clothes, wearing a top-hat, a white carnation buttonhole, and white spats, and speaking with an accent that, though exceedingly pronounced, was not to be recognised as that of any known part of Scotland.
The conviction gradually filtered through the assembled guests that Mr. Garrett senior spoke with the tongue of Swindon. The blurred vowels and resonantrwere unmistakable.
But old Mr. Garrett made no pretence at the Keltic atmosphere so fondly affected by his son.
"My dearr boy," he affectionately apostrophised the bridegroom, "I've left the business to take cayurr of itself, for the first time in nearly twenty years. You don't know what business is, loafing about London doing a little scribbling heerr and therre the way you do, otherwise you'd appreciate my presence heerr to-day at its full value."
Douglas Garrett made no audible response that could be interpreted into the required assurance, but old Mr. Garrett spoke so loudly and confidently that it was almost impossible to believe his observation to be anything but a sort of impromptu rehearsal of the speech that he would deliver at the wedding-breakfast.
The interval of waiting in the church appeared likely to be of indefinite duration, and everybody heard old Mr. Garrett express to his son the hope that the "gurrel" hadn't thought better of it at the last minute.
"Therre have been such cases known, my dearr boy," he dispassionately remarked, "and your I-ris looked to me a highly nervous sort of gurrel."
Lady Rossiter, in the front bench, sank onto her knees, less from a sudden access of prayerfulness than from a very obvious desire to make evident the unsuitability of old Mr. Garrett's behaviour to his surroundings.
"You'renot feeling hysterical, are you?" suspiciously demanded Mr. Garrett, whisking round on the instant at this demonstration. "I know what you ladies are. It's a very trying wait for all of us, and I'm afraid my poorr boy may break down if it goes on much longer. Don't let yourself get upset on any account."
At last the sounds of arrival made themselves heard without the church, the bridegroom's expression relaxed, and his father gave a loud gasp of relief.
An explanatory murmur, of the kind that has an origin destined to remain for ever unknown, pervaded the church.
"She's been crying—dreadfully upset—no mother—poor little thing. All right now."
"I said the gurrel looked to me nervous," remarked the elder Mr. Garrett, with conscious triumph in his own omniscience.
"How like Auntie Iris!" thought Julian, for the hundredth time.
At all events, the bride's pretty little face showed no trace of tears now, as she came slowly up the aisle on her brother's arm.
Following her, and casting triumphant and self-satisfied glances from left to right, was the solitary bridesmaid.
Ruthie was a plain little girl, and it was impossible not to feel that attempt at embellishment had done much towards making her still plainer.
Her short white skirts stuck out to ungraceful dimensions above brown-stockinged legs and strapped shoes that, to Julian's disgusted perceptions, had never appeared of more solid proportions, and the broad sash tied firmly round her person was of a disastrous shade of salmon pink.
A second edition of the sash reappeared round the wide straw hat that Ruthie,more suâ, wore upon the extreme back of her head.
Her thick, stiff brown hair showed only too evident manifestations of having been severely treated by Sarah, in the manner known as "damp-plaiting" on the previous evening.
The whole effect was rather that of a young South Sea Islander introduced for the first time into European garb and aware of novelty.
The College staff was sufficiently well represented. Iris had expressed a sort of whole-hearted wish to see "allthe dear people from Culmouth College" in the church, and this rather reckless aspiration had not been left without response.
Cooper was prominent in immaculate gloves, with Miss Sandiloe beside him, coy and alert both at once and poised first on one foot and then on the other, as though her shoes hurt her feet. Julian saw Miss Marchrose, looking better than he had ever seen her, in a bench at the bottom of the church. She wore a soft felt hat that became her, and her changeful face was full of colour.
"She looks happier," thought Julian, and immediately felt a doubtful foreboding as to the source of that look.
He remembered that Miss Marchrose, on the day before the wedding, had officiated at a small ceremony at Culmouth College, when she had presented to Iris, on behalf of the staff, a silver mirror.
Neither Sir Julian nor Lady Rossiter had been present, but Mark had described the occasion afterwards to Sir Julian alone.
"Fuller did all the speaking, and did it uncommonly well, too. I didn't know he had it in him, but it was just right—awfully good little speech. Miss Marchrose presented the thing, and looked very pretty. Blushed like anything, too, when Fuller began something about her having been chosen to represent the staff. Fuller thinks she's his discovery, you know, and he's no end proud of her."
Julian was not a little inclined to wonder whether Fairfax Fuller, emphasising the claims of the Lady Superintendent, had not taken his stand upon the lines of championship. Nor did he care to dwell upon the actual or threatened attacks which should have aroused the never very deeply dormant combative instincts of Mr. Fuller. If Miss Marchrose should need an ally, she had at all events assured herself of one to whom half-measures were unknown. Julian only returned to the present when the bridegroom, in a voice which seemed full of deep protest against the archaic formula required of him, repeated after the clergyman the vows appointed to him. Iris was inaudible.
The exodus to the vestry, and the usual rapturous displays of enthusiasm therein, duly took place, and Mr. Garrett gave his arm to his bride and conducted her down the aisle to the triumphant strains of the wedding-march fromLohengrin—the characteristic selection made by Iris on the grounds of originality.
There was to be no reception, and it was undeniable that a certain sense of anti-climax pervaded the villa when old Mr. Garrett, Sir Julian and Lady Rossiter, accompanied by Ruthie and Ambrose, found themselves at the gates, over which a slightly perilous triumphal arch wavered in the cold wind.
"Mr. and Mrs. Garrett is in the drawing-room!" quoth Sarah excitedly at the entrance.
"My dearr children!" exclaimed Mr. Garrett senior, and thereafter carried off the whole situation with a high hand.
He kissed Iris, clapped his son on the back, and stood for some time with his large old hand kindly and weightily gripping the younger man's shoulder; he made jokes about "giving away the bride" that had no merit save that of extreme antiquity, he became exceedingly solemn and alluded to Douglas' sainted mother, and then by a natural transition to Douglas' probable offspring, which discomposed Iris to the extent of sending her into the dining-room forthwith where luncheon awaited the party.
"That dearr child is the least little bit nervous, rushing away like that," Mr. Garrett remarked in an explanatory way, and paternally ushered them all out of the room.
The wedding-breakfast in no way defeated him. Mark, in something less than his usual radiant good spirits, yet muttered to Julian under his breath, with a laugh in his eyes:
"Ain't I volatile?"
Volatile Mr. Garrett certainly was. He made two speeches, one when Iris tremulously cut her wedding-cake, and another at a later stage of the proceedings, when he judged the drinking of healths to be apropos.
"I am nearly seventy," he earnestly told them, with a good deal of emphasis, "and the day may be with us before some of us look for it, when my boy here, and his wife and—shall I say, I hope otherrs as well?—will step into my shoes. And those shoes—I say it in all seriousness, although my speech may be a jesting one, as it were—those shoes, I hope, will not be the proverbial shoes that pinch."
Mr. Garrett paused for a more lengthy appreciation of his own humour, while everyone made polite and rather mirthless sounds of amusement, with the exception of Iris, still blushing, and Douglas, wrapt in impenetrable gloom. Ruthie and Ambrose, indeed, laughed loudly, and at sufficient length to draw down upon themselves a reprehensive glance from Lady Rossiter and a murderous one from the bridegroom.
"The fact is, my dear son and daughter," said old Mr. Garrett impressively, "that there is a future before you. Not only that future of domestic joy and happiness which we see foreshadowed to-day—that circle of home faces"—everybody looked apprehensive—"which I hope will gather round your hearth as the yearrs go on, but also a future in business. Of that future,Ihave laid the foundations for you. Douglas, my dearr boy, you have seen the business at Swindon?"
Douglas looked infinitely depressed.
"That business," said his undaunted parent, "I have built up from the very beginning. You will have nothing to do but follow the lines I have laid down. There's the old home waiting for you, the dear little old house in Cambridge Road West that you know so well, and that I hope that pretty creature here will soon know as well as you do."
Sir Julian, aware that everyone in the room was by this time obsessed by a vivid recollection of the flight of imagination which had led Iris' husband to date his ancestral reminiscences from Scotland, avoided meeting the eye of anyone present.
This exercise, indeed, was freely indulged in by the majority of those who sat and listened to the eloquent speech of Mr. Garrett senior.
It came to an end at last, and Iris ran away to change her dress, a sudden access of skittishness superimposed upon her shyness.
Douglas simultaneously took the opportunity of disappearing, and Sir Julian found himself enabled to put the question that had been making its way to his mind almost irresistibly all the morning.
"What does your business in Swindon consist of, Mr. Garrett?"
"Printing and stationery, Sir Julian," said the old man, proudly and simply. "A go-ahead little concern on the small scale, though I say it that shouldn't. It's enabled me to give my only son an allowance, so that he could see life in London for a while before settling down in Swindon like his father and grandfather before him."
"Your family has an old connection with Swindon, then?"
Sir Julian, interested, had forgotten the Keltic aspirations of Douglas until they were recalled by Mr. Garrett's answer.
"Two generations, Sir Julian. My grandfather came from the North, I believe, but he married a London gurrel, and they settled in Swindon after a year or two. Swindon is a fascinating town, I can assure you, and if ever you make a visit there I shall be happy to show you some of the glories of the dear old place."
Mr. Garrett wiped his glasses and walked about the room, talking gaily and persistently to while away the time of waiting for the bride's reappearance.
"And what's your opinion of a wedding, my dearr little fellow?" he genially enquired of Ambrose, who wore a rather forlorn aspect.
"Eh?" said Ambrose, with more dejection than usual in the delivery of his objectionable exclamation.
"What do you think of a wedding, now you've seen one? This is your first experience, I presume?"
Ambrose looked absent-minded, gazed up enquiringly through his spectacles for a moment, and then said, "Eh?" all over again.
"My dearr child, don't say 'eh,' like that!" rather testily exclaimed the old man, a prey to the universal impulse of annoyance which almost invariably assailed everyone entering into conversation with the unfortunate Ambrose.
"What does your little sister say?"
"I like being bridesmaid," Ruthie announced in self-satisfied tones. "Uncle Douglas gave me a bangle." She thrust the trinket forward for inspection, and old Mr. Garrett admired it gravely.
"I suppose that's what you call a sweet thing? Isn't that the great word? Well, my dearr child, I'm glad you're satisfied."
Ruthie looked at him intelligently.
"I only hope that Auntie Iris will have a baby soon, because then Sarah says it will be my first cousin, and I haven't got any."
On this delicate aspiration of Miss Easter's the conversation came to a rather abrupt conclusion.
"Iris ought to be ready now," said Mark; "they won't have too much time to get to the station."
He went upstairs.
Presently the bridegroom wandered into the drawing-room again, evidently self-conscious, and endeavouring to conceal it by an excessive display of anxiety as to the probability of missing the train.
"Here she is!"
"The car is waiting," proclaimed Ruthie.
Old Mr. Garrett gazed at the white favours adorning the motor.
"Isn't there a shoe tied on behind?" he demanded sharply.
"I—I don't see one," said Sir Julian, rather feebly, and with an unaccountable sense of having been remiss in omitting to provide this emblem of good fortune.
"Don't let them drive away without an old shoe!" pleaded Mr. Garrett. "My dearr child—Ruth, if that's your name—run up to the bedrooms and see what you can find. I couldn't let my boy go off on his wedding trip without a shoe for good luck."
In eager obedience to this flight of sentiment, Ruthie triumphantly rushed upstairs, the successive sounds of burst-open doors, hasty explorations, and triumphant pouncings conveying the rate of her progress with great accuracy to those in the drawing-room below.
In the excitement which Mr. Garrett diffused round the whole question, there was no possibility of an emotional farewell.
Mark put Iris into the motor—a radiantly pretty bride—and Douglas got in beside her, after muttering something about the old man being in extraordinarily good form to-day and inclined to get above his boots.
"We of the younger generation——" began Mr. Douglas Garrett, quite in his old manner, and then looked as though he had suddenly recollected the advanced years of Sir Julian himself, and subsided into the shelter of the motor without another word.
His father, having already hurried to the back of the car and affixed there a white satin shoe and a bedroom slipper, with much boisterous assistance from Ruthie, proceeded to deliver a valedictory harangue from the step.
"God bless you, my two dearr children, and shower upon you all the blessing of the married state. Send the old man a postcard from your first stopping-place, and, Iris, my dearr new daughter, you'll keep my son up to writing, and I shall be ready for you both in the dearr little house at home, whenever you like to come there. Also," said Mr. Garrett hopefully, "we shall meet in London. I think nothing of running up there. Good-bye—good-bye—bless you both."
He stood at the door waving a large clean handkerchief delicately scented with eau-de-Cologne, his shiny top-hat rather to one side and the ends of his beautifully waxed moustaches standing out stiffly. His kind old eyes shone with emotion.
"Yourr loss," he remarked, with simple sententiousness, to Mark Easter, "your loss is ourr gain. That's a pretty gurrel and a good gurrel, I feel sure. I appreciate my boy's good fortune, I assure you."
He shook hands with them all, begged them to visit Swindon, thanked them again and again for their kindness to himself and his dearr boy Douglas, and took his leave.
"I will not intrude upon you any further," was all his reply to Mark's cordial invitation to remain. "You have been goodness itself to an old man. Good-bye to you all, good-bye."
"I think, in Auntie Iris' place, I should have preferred the father to the son," said Julian, as he went homeward with his wife.
"Poor old man! There's something very genuine about him, in spite of his vulgarity," replied Lady Rossiter, with that leniency of tone that most successfully drapes a rather disparaging utterance.
"I wonder," observed Julian, for once in a loquacious mood, "what the next production will be from Auntie Iris' pen? And whether the influence of Mr. Douglas Garrett will be very obvious."
"That might not be a bad thing."
"It couldn't be a much worse thing than 'Why, Ben!' was."
"Silly little girl! I wish she would stop writing altogether. I have locked up my copy of 'Why, Ben!' on account of the servants. I always hold that one is so wholly responsible for the books one leaves about, with either children or uneducated people in the house, to whom they might do so much harm."
"I shouldn't have thought that Mason's head was very easily turned," thoughtfully rejoined Sir Julian, who was aware of his wife's protracted and unsuccessful wrestlings with the recalcitrant spirit of Mason.
"I sometimes think that I shall have to get another maid," sighed Edna. "One goes on so gladly and willingly from day to day when there is the least little sign of any response, but Mason is at a very, very elementary stage. Of course it's all a question of soul-growth—hers is just a young, blind, struggling soul, and there is only the most pitying tenderness to be felt for that, but I suppose poor human nature is impatient, and longs to see a little dawning of that Divine Spark which one knows so well is there all the time."
But to this gently-spoken plaint Sir Julian, suddenly become silent, made no reply whatever.
Edna went into the morning-room rather dejectedly. An unsympathetic atmosphere, she often felt, wearied her more than any physical strain. She was unaware that this conviction is a singularly widespread one amongst those who have never been called upon for any excess of bodily toil.
Iris was married. There was no further occasion for matronly tact and tenderness, nor for the beautiful tolerance of maturity towards the crudities of youth.
Douglas Garrett had achieved his object, and returned to London with his bride. The necessity therefore no longer existed either for overlooking and graciously ignoring his many shortcomings, or for dropping those little kindly sayings that should serve to remind others, too rashly condemning Mr. Garrett, of that great question, "Is it kind—is it wise—is it true?"
Mr. Garrett's father, who might certainly have served as a substantial peg upon which to hang many a word of gentle forbearance, had gone away, and even the most determined philanthropy could see no hopeful outlet in the direction of Ruthie and Ambrose Easter.
Lady Rossiter began to think of Mark. This she did almost instinctively whenever her sense of the need for "giving out" was at a loss for an object. The situation of Mark Easter was one of such obvious tragedy, and daily reiterated pathos, that the consideration of it could minimise the rather incongruous light-heartedness with which he himself faced it. One could always help Mark.
His children needed help.
His whole household required the supervision of a feminine eye at the shortest possible intervals, and Edna had for years regarded herself as the only woman with eyes available for the purpose. Yet when, on leaving the villa after the wedding, she had suggested, with a very gentle hint of compassionate understanding in her voice, that Mark should come and dine at Culmhayes that night, he had replied, without confusion, that he was going straight up to the College and should remain there late.
It was tragically inevitable, Edna told herself, that one should realise what this implied.
Edna sat in reflection for some time, her face shadowed and saddened, but with that absence of mobility of expression that had left her smooth skin almost altogether unlined throughout her life.
At dinner that night, notwithstanding, she met Sir Julian with an unclouded brow. She often said that part of her rule of life was to leave all her cares locked up in her own room, so that she might always diffuse serenity when with others.
By some perversity of fate, however, Edna's effect upon her husband was never the one at which she so carefully aimed. On this occasion the diffusion of serenity engineered by Lady Rossiter appeared only to leave Sir Julian rather more satirically ill-tempered than it found him.
"Julian, you've thought about the question of sending someone from the staff here to Gloucester, haven't you? It will be rather a big responsibility."
"For Gloucester?"
"For the representative of our College," said Edna, with a little low laugh, quite obviously meant to imply that she thought it best to look upon Sir Julian's captiousness as having been humorously intended.
"There won't be very much in it. Only a question of looking at the buildings, and answering anything the local authorities may want to ask."
"Would that young Mr. Cooper be competent?"
"Anyone would be competent."
An all but imperceptible smile hovered on Lady Rossiter's lips.
"Then, Julian, why don't you send that unfortunate Miss Marchrose? If a break is made, easily and naturally, she can begin again at the College on a different footing. You know there's a certain amount of talk going on there?"
There was a long pause. Sir Julian did not ask, "What about?"
Finally he said: "It's Fuller's business to decide who's going to Gloucester. I'm not responsible for the details of running the staff there in any way. Nor is the question an important one."
"Ah," breathed Edna, "you know that I can't quite think with you there, Julian. To me, they are all immortal souls."
"How will Gloucester affect the immortality of their souls?" Sir Julian enquired.
But his wife gazed at him very earnestly.
"A woman's instinct is not very often wrong. There's tension in the air, and—why shouldn't I speak out?—I want to put out a helping hand—to save Mark, before things come to a head and he is faced with a crisis."
"In that case," said her husband blandly, "I had better arrange that Mark should be the person who goes to Gloucester."