From this moment Josephine showed herself in another light. She referred to the marriage as to a normal event of the near future, and addressed herself to the preparations in an open, kindly spirit, arranging for her staff to attend the ceremony, and organising a celebration for the school.
“We must celebrate the marriage of the son of the house. I want to feel that you are all rejoicing with us.”
When someone observed that it was not entirely an occasion for her to rejoice, she replied with an air of amused admission.
“Well, my nephew and I may stand a little aloof in our hearts. The force of advancing life has been too much for us, and deprived us of our bearings; and we find ourselves clinging to each other as the only rock left. But do not breathe a whisper, and you shall see that we shall not betray ourselves.”
On the day of the wedding, at breakfast with Gabriel for the last time, she studied some papers during the meal, looked up to speak as if for the sake of convention, rose prematurely from the table, and returning as though recollecting herself, laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Why, what an absent-minded woman, adopted mother, lifelong friend! Too many capacities to be absent-minded in, at our last breakfast! I ought to suffer a lifetime’s remorse.”147
“Don’t think that you will dispose of me at that light cost,” said Gabriel. “You will often have my wife and me seated at your board. Your house is the old home to us both.”
“Yes. What a way to celebrate our last experience of our real home life! What an unsentimental pair we are!”
Josephine conducted the early luncheon with liveliness and ease, appeared to eat herself with interest and appetite, admonished Gabriel of his duties as host, and talked on topics unconnected with the occasion. She had made no difference in her usual dress, and wore simply her better outfit of widow’s weeds. Her bonnet, with its crape and veil, lay ready at the side, indicating that her toilet was complete.
“Try to manage a little more, Mrs. Chattaway. I think we have plenty of time, and anyhow they would hardly begin without so many of us.”
“No, thank you, I could not, Mrs. Napier. I have had too much, and we must not delay the hero of the ceremony.”
“It is our safeguard, that we have him with us,” said Josephine, smiling at Gabriel. “There have been so many preparations unconnected with him, that we forget he has quite a prominent part to play.”
“We are hardly in danger of feeling that we are the protagonists,” said Miss Luke.
“I am not putting myself in Miss Giffard’s place,” said Miss Munday. “I do not mind if you cannot believe me.”
When the other women went to dress, Josephine moved to the side table, pushed aside the bonnet, and began to turn over her accounts.
“You are surely going to appear in something more festive than that?” said Gabriel.
“No, why should I, my dear? This is what I wear at this time of 148my life. What else should I wear? What else could I? I can put on my simpler things, if you would prefer them though I think they are a little soiled. This is my dress for occasions; and I thought you would wish me to appear in it. I can change it, if you would like.” Josephine took some steps towards the door, moving with deliberation, as if time were of no account.
“I did not know that people went to weddings, dressed so completely as widows.”
“I suppose widows dress as widows, just as bridegrooms dress as bridegrooms.”
“It is quite a long time, nearly six months, since Uncle Simon died.”
“Five months, twenty-three days and nineteen hours,” said Josephine, with her voice dying away and her eyes on space.
“Haven’t you anything less funereal? Surely you got something new for the occasion?”
“My dear, it was for you that I got things, not for myself. You are the instigating character of this festival, not I. And I had not personally thought of it as a festival, if you remember.”
“I took it for granted that you would dress in a suitable manner. You might be going to a burial in those garments.”
“Well, I might have gone to a burial in them. That was their purpose. I should have gone to one in them, if I had been equal to it, if you remember that, too. That is why they are suitable for me at this stage of my life. Not that I want to remind you of it, at this stage of yours. So if you have done advising a middle-aged widow on her apparel, suppose you go and brush your own! It is not too late for that improvement, and it is a distinctly more appropriate one. It is you who are to appear as the bridegroom, not I.”
“Well, I should soon be starting,” said Gabriel in an aloof tone. “I have to do some confabulation with Felix. And the other 149carriages will soon be here. You were to arrange with Mrs. Giffard about going up the aisle.”
“Yes, I believe something of the sort was planned,” said Josephine, moving to the table for her bonnet, and assuming it with simple regard to neatness, and with no attempt to suppress the veil. “You are a practical person to remind your aunt. It is encouraging to see that my training bears fruit, on the day when you are dispensing with it.”
Gabriel made a movement to embrace her before he left, but she raised her eyes from arranging her skirts, and parted from him simply with a nod and a smile.
She drove to the church in a carriage by herself, and walked to her place in a manner that somehow drew attention to her widow’s garb. She was calm as the ceremony proceeded; followed the words of the service; watched with interest as Elizabeth gave her daughter away; and at the significant moment turned her face to the kneeling figures in natural emotion, and openly wiping her eyes, returned to her book.
At the subsequent gathering she was a benevolent, dignified figure. She looked maternally at Gabriel’s wife, made a point of talking to her staff, and on passing Elizabeth in her place as hostess, went up to her with a friendly word.
“It is all so very, very nice. You will let me pay you a compliment? I don’t know why we should congratulate other people to-day, and not you.”
“Now it is you whom I am going to congratulate, Mrs. Napier,” said Fane. “Keeping a stiff upper lip, as you have! Well done!”
As he raised his hand to pat Josephine’s back, he found it turned towards him, and for some reason drew back and failed to avail himself of the convenience.150
“Ah, we must feel that Gabriel’s happiness makes up to us for our loss,” said Jonathan.
“When people are happy in leaving me, I do not admit that they are a loss,” said Felix.
“And all this business connected with them takes a good afternoon out of a good working day,” said Josephine in a hushed and rueful manner.
“Have you filled Ruth’s place?” said Jonathan. “It is strange to me that I have a daughter.”
“There is no place to fill,” said Josephine, in the same conspiratorial tone. “I have tried to make one, tried to keep it, tried to regard it as deserted; but I confess that on all those scores I have ignominiously failed.”
“Mrs. Giffard will miss the girl,” said Jonathan. “I almost feel that she and I are related. We must make a point of seeing each other.”
“Yes, she will miss her for a time,” said Josephine; “until the pendulum swings and the girl’s lifelong feelings reassert themselves. Gabriel will miss her then, if the same thing has not happened to him.”
“My son,” said Jonathan, approaching Gabriel, “my token to you has been in my mind. This is a great occasion for a father.”
“Then you are not guilty of the Titanic gift?”
“You are no nearer to the truth about that?”
“It is a condition of acceptance that we are never to be nearer to it.”
“Well, let us consider the sentimental token. In a way that is the significant thing.”
“Ah, you are the guilty one!” said Gabriel.
“Now we will leave impersonal things, if you please, to their proper fate. Anonymous people have a claim; there is a duty we owe to them.”151
“I suppose I must not utter gratitude?”
“How can you utter gratitude to a person or persons unknown? If you as much as harbour suspicions, you are guilty of a breach of faith. And ought you not to be standing by your bride, instead of trying to shock your father? I don’t grudge you to your wife to-day, my son.”
“Don’t you think that the bride’s appearance does us credit?” said Josephine, pausing by her mistresses.
“Indeed, yes; she could not look more charming,” said Mrs. Chattaway.
“Ah, youth and happiness and looking forward! the permeating things!” said Miss Luke. “We must not underrate them.”
“Are we inclined to underrate them?” said Miss Rosetti.
“I admit that it was clothes I was thinking of,” said Josephine, dropping her eyes in mock guilt. “I must be in a very unspiritual mood.”
“Ah, but the wedding-day is a great moment,” said Miss Luke, adhering to her stand against the natural opposition.
“It must be the climax, the coping stone, the peak of youthful experience.”
“Oh, don’t use the word ‘climax’,” said Josephine. “It has such a suggestion of anti-climax. And we hope that things are not over for them yet.”
The bridal pair were leaving by an early train, and the intimate group assembled to speed their departure. Josephine quietly stepped into a prominent place, and when Ruth’s farewells were accomplished, moved forward to Gabriel, in a manner of approaching the culminating moment of the day. She relinquished him with her eyes held from his face, and waved a perfunctory, cordial hand as the carriage drove away.
An hour later she stood at the door of the common room.152
“Have I given you time to change the charming dresses, that have been such an asset to the occasion? Being outside the necessity myself has perhaps made me unimaginative.”
“The time has sufficed for those who cared to avail themselves of it,” said Miss Luke, looking down at herself with a little laugh.
“You are very wise,” said Josephine.
“You are fortunate, Mrs. Napier, in being exempt from these exactions,” said Mrs. Chattaway in a rather artificial manner, keeping her eyes from her own dress.
“Fortunate?” said Josephine, looking up amusedly from under her brows. “I am not sure that that is quite the word.”
“I was not speaking in jest,” said Mrs. Chattaway vaguely.
“It is I who was doing that,” said Josephine. “Though the question of dress has been little enough of a jest for me to-day. If I had known the fuss there was going to be, I should have done something else than follow my instincts. I see it was a selfish line to take, but I honestly had not meant it so. It was more that I had not thought of my appearance at all, than that I was self-indulgent over it.”
“Your brother was anxious for you to do him credit?” said Miss Rosetti.
“My brother! It was my nephew! It was he who fussed and fumed, and almost forgot to go to his own wedding, because his adopted mother and best friend—they are his words; I am not originating them; occasions of emotion loosen the tongues of the reticent—had omitted to drape her mature form in a manner he approved. I might have been the bride instead of her imminent aunt-in-law. Well, I am cured of taking the line of least resistance as regards my apparel. And here is Mr. Bacon, come to complete the lesson with an illustration.”153
“I am proud of being able to enter this room without knocking,” said Felix. “I have only just brought myself to do it.”
“It must be a pleasant privilege,” said Josephine. “I happen to be the only person here without it.”
“I hope you are not hinting for it.”
“I am not indeed; I have no claim.”
“We have been talking about the clothes we wore for the wedding, Mr. Bacon,” said Miss Luke. “I already speak of them in the past tense.”
“I am glad you did not wear those you have on,” said Felix. “We should not have liked to say anything about them. I think you carry off changing them. I should feel a little uncomfortable if I had done it.”
“Oh, pray let us drop this subject of clothes,” said Josephine.
“You will miss your companion, Mrs. Napier,” said Mrs. Chattaway.
“Oh, we do not lose the people whose lives take a different turn from ours,” said Miss Luke, quickly and slightly averting her eyes.
“Well, I have not lost Gabriel,” said Josephine in an almost comfortable tone. “I must take myself to task, and remind myself how much I have in the concentration of his feeling; and not fret about his having had to tear himself away in the flesh. But poor boy! His face at parting does come back to me; it will. I am not one to make a fuss about nothing; but this is not quite nothing.”
“A wedding upsets me,” said Miss Munday. “I am very sentimental.”
“So it does me,” said Felix.
“Well, do you know, so it does me,” said Josephine. “I cannot explain it, but there it is.”
“I can explain it,” said Felix; “but I do not think I will.”154
“I explained it,” said Miss Munday.
“We feel that the bride and bridegroom care more for each other, than anyone cares for us,” said Helen.
“I do not feel that,” said Josephine. “You must find some other explanation for me.”
“I suppose that Gabriel and Ruth are very devoted?” said Mrs. Chattaway.
“Devoted?” said Josephine raising her brows. “Ask me another. I am not in a position to give you an account of their feelings. They draw the modern veil over them too successfully.”
“Gabriel does not confide in you?” said Miss Rosetti.
“Oh, I have had it all,” said Josephine, almost airily. “How hard it is to throw oneself into a new life, when the old is tugging from the past—that was the word, tugging; not elegant, is it?—and how long it will seem before the upheaval is over, and the old peace returns. Oh yes, I have had it.”
“It does not sound the deepest devotion,” said Mrs. Chattaway.
“Well, I think hardly any modern young people’s relation sounds like that,” said Josephine leniently. “But I have seen cases that suggest that things may be more often than we think, the same at bottom. We must hope this is one of them; I indeed have reason to hope it.”
“Do you find Ruth a confiding daughter-in-law?” said Miss Rosetti.
“No, I do not. She has honoured me so far only with plain, laconic statements about her material future. But I daresay she found me a great rock to come up against; a formidable bulwark, built out of lifelong feelings; offered to her as an allurement, poor child, when she could only see it as a menace. I was obliged to put the question of ways and means too; and that was not a popular measure, until I added an item of my own to one side of 155the account; when they liked my exposition better; both of them; not only Ruth; and I admit with reason.”
“You are a very unselfish aunt, Mrs. Napier,” said Mrs. Chattaway.
“Yes, I have been unselfish,” said Josephine, without emphasis. “There is not much temptation to be anything else, when you are considered harsh for doing what you may not leave undone. If you can do something to balance things, you find yourself simply doing it. And I have little use for material things. In other words, I have not been unselfish.”
“Many people would have a use for them.”
“Then they would be unselfish.”
“Will you convert your nephew’s room into an extra classroom?” said Miss Rosetti.
“No, I shall not. There would be a fine to-do, if I did. I am not courting such a shindy. It is to be left as it is, with the adventure books by the window, and the photograph of myself by the bed. I repudiate that version of myself; I would gladly throw it on the fire; but I am taking no liberties with my instructions. When young master comes home he is to find things as he left them.”
“I did not know he was masterful,” said Miss Rosetti.
“Oh, well, this is a matter of his private and precious feelings. He is not in a general way. I am the only person who has been shown his masterful side. I am sure he will make a most amenable husband.”
Josephine took her leave with a somehow fallen face, as if baffled by something she had looked for. As Felix’s step sounded behind her, she turned to meet him.
“I could not stay with the women who have no sorrow to hide, and not enough to hide of anything else. I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book. There is so much in 156me, that must at all costs be hidden. Jonathan and I were coming to dinner; so may I stay and not go home to dress? My wedding clothes are nearly as becoming as my evening ones.”
“Stay by all means. Your clothes do not matter at all.”
“I noticed that you thought that about clothes; and I see that your clothes did not matter; but I don’t think mine can be dismissed like that.”
“I am sure your clothes are admirable. I cannot imagine you without them—without your own kind of them, I mean.”
“I don’t think it matters which you meant, as you cannot imagine it.”
“I admit I was ashamed of my clothes to-day,” said Josephine. “I see I should have thought of Gabriel.”
“I am coming into the library to gossip about Gabriel. Do you think that Ruth is worthy of him?”
“We may be pardoned for thinking she is not.”
“I don’t think we ought to be pardoned. My feelings, when I think it, are quite unpardonable.”
“We may surely hold unbiased opinions on occasions.”
“I don’t think ever on occasions.”
“Ruth looked very pretty to-day. You will say that there is an example of the importance of clothes.”
“No. I certainly shall not. I cannot consent to be dragged down too far.”
“Did you not think that she looked particularly well?”
“Yes, but I did not know it was clothes. I was afraid it was happiness.”
“Well, you need not accuse me of dragging you down,” said Josephine.
“We are always hard on our faults in others; we know how inexcusable they are. I have never met any of those faults that are 157almost lovable. I have been more unlovable on Gabriel’s wedding day than ever before.”
“I have not been at my best,” said Jonathan, coming into the room. “I feel the loss of my son more than I have any right to.”
“You have come to his help with great munificence,” said Josephine. “But I don’t know why an allowance is better for being anonymous.”
“I do,” said Felix.
“I mean a father’s allowance to a son.”
“So do I,” said Felix.
“It is not for me to say anything about it, one way or the other,” said Jonathan.
“There is the reason illustrated,” said Felix.
“Well, I did not see any reason for not admitting my quota,” said Josephine. “I simply acknowledged it, as I do most of my actions. It seemed such a natural, inevitable thing.”
“Then there was no reason for not admitting it,” said Felix.
“An allowance from oneself hardly seems to me a natural thing,” said Jonathan, with a laugh. “But we are talking about what has to be a mystery. I have been remembering, Josephine, that you will be alone after to-night. It goes to my heart to think of it.”
“Alone? In a house of a hundred and eighty people?”
“Well, well, essentially alone.”
“Well, actually alone very little. I hope I shall snatch a few moments to myself sometimes.”
“I mean you will be alone at meals. That seems to me the dividing line.”
“Well, I must try to get time for those, certainly. The interruptions get more and more continuous.”
“I wonder Gabriel put up with it,” said Felix.158
“He did not put up with it. He guarded our tête-à-tête most jealously. But lately we have had the Giffards with us sometimes, and he seemed to think that a larger party justified intrusions. I shall have to cope with the precedent.”
“Will you see much of Mrs. Giffard now?” said Jonathan.
“I shall see her daily. The running of the house depends on my seeing her.”
“Can Gabriel love his wife as much as he loves us?” said Felix.
“She fulfils a relation to him that none of us can fulfil,” said Josephine, with full concession. “It is not a question of comparative affection. That may be why we feel a faint resentment over people’s marriages. Because I think there is no doubt that we do.”
“Well, we must become more to each other,” said Jonathan.
“We can hardly fail to become so in a way,” said Josephine. “Gaps must close up; and any closing up involves a coming together.”
“I think we are becoming more to each other already,” said Felix.