第99章 Behind the Times(4)

"And don't be clever,"she said."Tell me what you have to say--if you're quite sure you'll not be sorry.""Quite sure.There's no reason--now that the untruth is properly and satisfactorily established--that one person should not know that John Mayrant broke that engagement."And I told her the whole of it."If I'm outrageous to share this secret with you,"I concluded,"I can only say that I couldn't stand the unfairness any longer.""He jumped straight in?"said Eliza.

"Oh,straight!"

"Of course,"she murmured.

"And just after declaring that he wouldn't."

"Of course,"she murmured again."And the current took them right away?""Instantly."

"Was he very tired when you got to him?"

I answered this question and a number of others,backward and forward,until she had led me to cover the whole incident about twice-and-a-half times.Then she had a silence,and after this a reflection.

"How well they managed it!"

"Managed what?"

"The accepted version."

"Oh,yes,indeed!"

"And you and I will not spoil it for them,"she declared.

As I took my final leave of her she put a flower in my buttonhole.My reflection was then,and is now,that if she already knew the truth from John himself,how well she managed it!

So that same night I took the lugubrious train which bore me with the grossest deliberation to the mountains;and among the mountains and their waterfalls I stayed and saw the rhododendrons,and was preparing to journey home when the invitation came from John and Eliza.

I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers.Kings Port by the war lost all material things,but not the others,among which precious privacy remains to her;and,O Kings Port,may you never lose your grasp of that treasure!May you never know the land where the reporter blooms,where if any joy or grief befall you,the public press rings your doorbell and demands the particulars,and if you deny it the particulars,it makes them up and says something scurrilous about you into the bargain.Therefore nothing was printed,morning or evening,about John and Eliza.Nor was the wedding service held in church to the accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers.No eye not tender with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza to his wedded wife,to live together after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony.

In Royal Street,not many steps from South Place,there stands a quiet house a little back,upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows,but made no deep wounds yet;no scorch from the fires of war is visible,arid the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly;but there hangs about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering much,and a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles and tears.

The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been broken and scattered,and the grandchildren look out of the same windows from which the grandsires gazed,whose faces now in picture frames still watch serenely the sad present from their happy past.Therefore the rooms lie in still depths of association,and from the walls,the stairs,the furniture,flows the benign influence of undispersed memories;it sheds its tempered radiance upon the old miniatures,and upon every fresh flower that comes in from the garden;it seems to pass through the open doors to and fro like a tranquil blessing;it is beyond joy and pain,because time has distilled it from both of these;it is the assembled essence of kinship and blood unity,enriched by each succeeding brood that is born,is married,is fruitful in its turn,and dies remembered;only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal;for that comes from heaven,while it is earth that gives us this;and the sacred cup of it which our native land once held is almost empty.

Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one,and the faces of the older generations grew soft beneath it,and pensive eyes became lustrous,and into pale cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back for a short hour.They made so little sound in their quiet happiness of con-gratulation that it might have been a dream;and they were so few that the house with the sense of its memories was not lost with the movement and crowding,but seemed still to preside over the whole,and send down its benediction.

When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and groom,John asked:--"What did your friend do with your advice?"

And I replied."He has taken it."

"Perhaps not that,"John returned,"but you must have helped him to see his way."When the bride came to cut the cake,she called me to her and fulfilled her promise.

"You have always liked my baking,"she said.

"Then you made it after all,"I answered.

"I would not have been married without doing so,"she declared sweetly.

When the time came for them to go away,they were surrounded with affectionate God-speeds;but Miss Josephine St.Michael waited to be the last,standing a little apart,her severe and chiselled face turned aside,and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was perched in his cage at a window halfway up the stairs.

"He is usually not so silent,"Miss Josephine said to me."I suppose we are too many visitors for him."Then I saw that the old lady,beneath her severity,was deeply moved;and almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs.Miss Josephine took each of them to her heart,but she did not trust herself to speak;and a single tear rolled down her face,as the boy and girl continued to the hall-door.There Daddy Ben stood,and John's gay good-by to him was the last word that I heard the bridegroom say.While we all stood silently watching them as they drove away from the tall iron gate,the mocking-bird on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song.