Years of Grace · Part II · IV · Chapter 2 4 4 (1/2)

IV

Jane stood before her mirror, gazing incredulously through her snowy veil at the slim white reflection that was herself. Fancy dress, it seemed to her, this paraphernalia of bridal finery. Isabel stood at her side, holding her shower bouquet of lilies of the valley. Her mother was leaning against the bureau, looking her up and down and softly crying. Isabel’s eyes were full of tears. Minnie, standing admiringly at the bedroom door, was pressing a mussy handkerchief to trembling lips.

After the past two weeks, however, Jane was quite accustomed to being cried over. She was a hero’s bride, dedicated to a romantic destiny that had not left a dry eye in her little circle. Even Muriel had cried, and Mrs. Lester, of course, and Rosalie. Jane wondered if Agnes and Marion had wept a little in Bryn Mawr and Flora and Mr. Furness in London. Flora had cabled and Agnes and Marion had written her lovely letters. Jane had glimpsed in Agnes’s a tacit attempt to retract that unfortunate, unspoken verdict of “cotillion partner,” that Jane had read, last December, in her candid eyes. It was quite all right with Jane, “Cotillion partners” didn’t go to war. Agnes must understand, now.

Her mother had cried almost continuously ever since Jane had told her of the engagement. She had cried most terribly during that one awful interview with Stephen when she tried to persuade him that if he married Jane he shouldn’t enlist. Mr. Ward had cried, too, but only once and very furtively, making no capital out of his tears. And yesterday, when Stephen’s family arrived from Boston, Stephen’s mother, in the railroad station, had cried most of all.

Jane had been terribly afraid to meet Stephen’s family. They had been very much surprised at the news of the engagement. But when they came, they proved to be very nice. They really didn’t seem to bother about Jane at all. They were mainly preoccupied with Stephen’s enlistment. The wedding was, in their eyes, a mere preliminary, a curtain raiser, to the great drama of the war. Jane was the leading lady, to be sure, but she played a conventional role. The hero’s bride again, dedicated, this time, to the romantic destiny of making Stephen happy for a week before he went away to fight the Spaniards. Jane, facing the disquieting group of future relatives-in-law, was profoundly relieved that nothing more complicated was required of her.

There were six of them and all very friendly, indeed. Except for their short, clipped accent and a certain funny something that they did, or rather did not do, to their r’s, they might have been born and bred on Pine Street. Stephen’s mother, whom Jane had, of course, dreaded the most of all, proved to have a very reassuring resemblance to her brother, Mr. Furness. She was short and plump, with the same pale, protruding eyes and iron grey hair. Like Mr. Furness she had very little to say. This deficiency was more than made up for by the fact that Stephen’s father had a great deal. Mr. Alden Carver was a very impressive gentleman. He was grey-haired, too, and he had a close-clipped grey Vandyke beard and moustache, and shrewd light-blue eyes that peered out from under his grey eyebrows with an uncanny resemblance to Stephen’s. His cheeks looked very soft and pink above the close-clipped grey beard. His collar and cuffs were very white and glossy and his grey sack suit was in perfect press. Jane thought him a very dapper old gentleman.

Alden Carver, Junior, looked just like his mother. He was four years older than Stephen and he had never married. He had told Jane, immediately, on the platform of the train shed, with the air of placing himself for her, once for all, that he was in the Class of ’88, at Harvard. Jane had received that biographical item with a very polite little smile. It didn’t help her much, however, in her estimate of her new brother-in-law.

Stephen’s sister, Silly, was easier to talk to. She talked a great deal herself and always amusingly, about horses and dogs and sailboats. Silly’s real name was Cicily, after Stephen’s mother. She was older than Stephen, but younger than Alden. Silly was thirty-one and Jane had never met any other girl just like her. Silly, it seemed, kept a cocker-spaniel kennel and hunted with the Myopia hounds and sailed a catboat at the Seaconsit races. Jane had thought she was perfectly stunning when she saw her get off the train in her blue serge suit and crisp white shirt waist and small black sailor. A perfect Gibson girl. Slim and distinguished. But that night at dinner on Pine Street she had not looked nearly as well in evening dress. Somehow lank and mannish, in spite of blue taffeta, long-limbed and angular, and, yes, distinctly, old.

She didn’t seem like a sister at all to Stephen. More like an aunt.

Stephen had an aunt, who had come too, with his uncle who was his father’s brother. The Stephen Carver for whom Stephen had been named. He was nice, Jane thought. He was a college professor in Cambridge. He lived on Brattle Street, Alden said, and his field was Restoration Drama. Jane knew all about Restoration Drama and she knew all about college professors. It made her remember Bryn Mawr very vividly, just to see his wrinkled brown tweed suit and gold-bowed spectacles. His dinner coat was just a little shiny. Jane knew she would like her Uncle Stephen. He got on famously with her father. It seemed that they had been at Harvard together. That fact seemed to help the bridal dinner a great deal.

Uncle Stephen’s wife was Aunt Marie. She looked like the wives of all college professors, thought Jane. Nice and bright and friendly and not too careful about how she did her hair. She was “Nielson’s daughter,” Alden had said, adding as Jane stared up at him uncomprehendingly, “the great Nielson.” Considering the tone in which those three words were uttered, Jane didn’t dare to inquire further. She smiled, very politely. Then she met her father’s quizzical gaze from across the room. He saw her difficulty immediately.

“Geology,” he had breathed, over the heads of their guests. And then Jane remembered. Six fat volumes, bound in brown cloth, in her father’s library. Nielsen’s Ice Age. She had never read them but she “placed” Aunt Marie, at once.

The bridal dinner, Jane had thought, had proved just a trifle disappointing. It was to be a very small house wedding, so only the two families were there. You couldn’t, somehow, be awfully gay with just two families that had never seen each other until that afternoon. Mr. Alden Carver, however, talked very steadily and informingly, to Jane’s mother and Mr. Ward chatted very pleasantly with Mrs. Carver about how much everyone in the West had come to think of Stephen. Jane, herself, had sat in frozen silence between Stephen and his father, watching Isabel trying to talk to Alden about the last Yale-Harvard football game, which she hadn’t seen, and Robin’s cheerful attempts to interest Aunt Marie in anecdotes of his career in Cambridge. Jane couldn’t think of a single thing to say, even to Stephen, in such a solemn setting. Not on the very last night before they were to be married. Stephen was silent, too. He had held her hand very tightly, under the tablecloth, and had smiled, encouragingly, every time she glanced at him. It wasn’t until the guests were all leaving to walk over to their rooms in the Virginia Hotel, three blocks away, that Jane had a moment alone with him.

They were standing in the hall together, at the foot of the staircase. Stephen’s mother and sister and aunt were upstairs in the guestroom, putting on their party coats. Jane’s mother had gone up with them. The other men were all talking to Isabel at the front door.

“Don’t let them worry you,” said Stephen very tenderly, “You won’t have to live with them.”

“They don’t worry me,” said Jane promptly. “I like them. I like your uncle a lot.”

Stephen looked very much pleased.

“Uncle Stephen’s all right,” he said warmly. “They’re all all right, really, but I thought they seemed a little fishy this evening. A little of Alden will go a long way, of course.”

“Your mother,” said Jane hesitantly, “was very sweet to me.”

“Mother’s a dear,” said Stephen, “when you get to know her. She’s awfully domestic and rather shy.”

Jane would never have thought of that for herself. Shyness, she reflected, was a very endearing trait in a mother-in-law.

“I know I’ll love her,” said Jane. As she spoke Mrs. Carver and her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. They all trooped together to the front door. Stephen lingered a moment to say goodbye to her in the vestibule. Jane smiled up at him, very calmly.

“Jane,” said Stephen a little wistfully, “do you really love me?”

“Of course I do,” said Jane simply. That point, she felt, was settled at last. She was never going to worry about it any more. Stephen took her in his arms.

“Are you happy, Jane?” he asked.

“Except for the war,” said Jane. He kissed her very gently, very unalarmingly. It was peaceful, thought Jane, to have all her dreadful indecision over forever.

But now, as Jane stood facing her slim white reflection in her mirror, she really couldn’t realize that she was getting married. Where were the thoughts, she wondered, that she had always imagined such a portentous occasion would engender? Where were the thoughts, for instance, that she had had at Muriel’s wedding? Jane felt she should have reserved them for her own. She stretched out her hand for her shower bouquet.

“Well, I’m ready,” she said.

Isabel kissed her tenderly and turned to run downstairs to say that Jane was coming. Mrs. Ward, still crying, took her in her arms.

“Mamma,” said Jane smiling, “it isn’t a funeral.”

Mrs. Ward tried to dry her tears.

“I want Minnie to see the ceremony,” said Jane.

They all left; the room together. At the head of the stairs Mr. Ward was waiting. He watched Jane’s approach down the darkened corridor with a very tender smile. She slipped her hand through his arm. Jane’s mother went down the stairs, followed by Minnie.

“Kid,” said Mr. Ward, “you look perfectly lovely.”

Jane smiled up at him through the tulle.

“Kid,” said Mr. Ward again, “it will be a naval war. I doubt if the land forces ever reach Cuba. Cervera will blockade the ports.”

Jane smiled again, this time a little tremulously. She was trying to forget the war.

The little stringed orchestra under the stairs struck up the Lohengrin wedding march. Jane was glad she wasn’t going to be married to those doomful premonitory notes of an organ. The violins made even Lohengrin sound gay. She walked slowly down the stairs on her father’s arm.

The little library seemed very full of people. Mrs. Ward had thought the ceremony should be in the yellow parlour. But Jane had never liked the parlour. She had declared in favour of her father’s room. Old Dr. Winter from Saint James’s was standing in snowy vestments in front of the mantelpiece. A little aisle led straight from the door to the hearth. The empty fireplace was filled with smilax. Two great vases of white roses were placed on the mantelpiece. The flowers met over the bald wooden head of the bust of Shakespeare. Jane’s mother had wanted to take it down for the ceremony. But Jane had thought that Shakespeare was a very appropriate genius to preside over a wedding. Shakespeare had known all about weddings, Romeo and Juliet. Jane remembered the friar’s solemn words as she stepped over the threshold and met the Bard of Avon’s wise mahogany eye.

“So smile the heavens upon this holy act

That after hours with sorrow chide us not.”

The library, filled with softly smiling, softly stirring people, was very little like a friar’s cell. Still Jane had an almost irresistible impulse to jar the solemnity of the occasion by greeting old Dr. Winter with Juliet’s sprightly opening line, “Good even to my ghostly confessor!”

What would he do, thought Jane, if she did? What would Stephen? Stephen would think she was mad. Stephen had never even read Romeo and Juliet. He had told her so, months ago, and she had marvelled, at the time, that a Harvard degree could crown an education so singularly deficient!

Stephen was standing with Alden, embowered in smilax, at the left hand of the clergyman, both fearfully correct in new frock coats and boutonnieres of lilies of the valley. Stephen looked very charming and serious and distinctly nervous. Jane smiled reassuringly up at him, as she relinquished her father’s arm. The music died away into silence.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” began Dr. Winter.

Jane looked up, very calmly, at Stephen’s set young profile. How young he was, she thought! How terribly young to be going to war! Her fingers tightened slightly on his broadcloth sleeve. He looked down at her and smiled reassuringly in his turn. She stared up into his eyes. She was marrying Stephen. Her father’s voice aroused her. It was very clear and firm.

“I do,” he said. Jane could hear him behind her, stepping back beside her mother. Then Dr. Winter took up his part, again, sonorously. Presently there was a barely perceptible pause in the familiar cadence of the ritual.

“I, Stephen, take thee, Jane,” said Stephen hastily.

Jane felt herself smiling. She was sorry for Stephen. When her turn came she was quite collected.

“I, Jane, take thee, Stephen, for my wedded husband,” the words were devoid of meaning. She could have said them all, unprompted by the clergyman. She had an odd sensation of playing a role. Dr. Winter was blessing the ring. They were putting it on her finger. Stephen was speaking again.

“With this ring I thee wed⁠—” It stuck a bit, over the last knuckle. Stephen was still nervous. Dr. Winter had resumed. Suddenly the stringed orchestra swelled out into Mendelssohn. Jane’s main feeling was that it had all been over in a moment⁠—this ceremony that everyone had been talking about for two weeks. Why⁠—it was nothing. Stephen stooped to kiss her⁠—a self-conscious little kiss⁠—barely brushing her cheek. He became entangled in the tulle veil. Jane laughed up at him. She felt her mother’s arms about her. Then she was looking up into her father’s eyes.

“Kid, be happy,” he said, as he kissed her.

Everyone was around her then. Stephen’s mother was crying. Mr. Carver’s beard felt very bristly. Muriel’s cheek smelled of French toilet water. Freddy Waters’s hair of bay rum. Rosalie was saying “What a lovely dress!” Alden surprisingly kissed her. Silly was laughing at Stephen.

“Your form’s not up to par in the ring,” she was crying. “All right in the paddock, old boy, but you fell down in the show! Jane’s the prize entry. She gets the blue ribbon!”

“Come cut the cake!” cried Isabel. Everyone was kissed by now.

“Carry my train!” cried Jane to Stephen. She felt very lighthearted. He picked it up, laughing. He looked awfully happy. They led the crowd to the dining-room. Minnie handed Jane the knife, festooned with white satin. Jane dug into the bride’s cake, just under the sugar cupid. Everyone was applauding. The orchestra in the hall was playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The groom’s cake was decorated with a little silken flag.

Jane sank down in her mother’s armchair at one end of the room. Stephen was standing beside her. People began to bring them food. Dr. Winter, with vestments removed, showed up to wish them happiness. She must go upstairs, soon, and change her dress. They were taking a six o’clock train. They were going up to The Dells, in northern Wisconsin. They had only a week before Stephen left for San Antonio. People were singing now. Alden had started “Fair Harvard.” All the men, old and young, knew the words. The male chorus swelled out very bravely, the orchestra accompanying softly:

“Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng,

And with blessings surrender thee o’er,

By these festival rites from the age that is past

To the age that is waiting before⁠—”