THE McLaughlin house shone ready for the guests the next evening. The light that glimmered out through the dusk came from as many new kerosene lamps as could be borrowed from the neighbors. Inside the house beds had been removed to make room for dancing, though Isobel McLaughlin sighed to remember that there would be at best an indifferent fiddler, not one with a rhythmic dancing soul—like her Allen. Indoors mosquitoes hummed through the light and odor of the lamps, and out of doors they attacked whoever turned away from the series of smudges the boys had built, and were carefully guarding from flame, between the house and the barn. Wagonloads of well-wishers came driving up as it grew dark, and with each arrival the pile of pieced quilts on the chairs in the bedroom grew higher, and the collection of wedding presents in the dooryard grew noisier, and broke loose, and ran, and was pursued with shouts by the assembled half-grown boys. Some guests brought ducks, and some hens with small chickens. Some gave maudlin geese, and some bewildered and protesting young pigs. The Squire gave a heifer calf. The Keiths, poor distracted Aunt Libby and Uncle John Keith,[71] brought two heavy chairs he had made the winter before from walnut. The bride was not visible. Wully had guarded her carefully, even from a minute alone with his mother, ever since he had arranged her wedding. He told his mother now that Chirstie had consented, she was worried about what her father would say when he heard about it. And because it was so soon after her mother’s death. Isobel McLaughlin reassured her. The wedding was the best possible solution of the situation. Let them just leave Chirstie’s father to her! She comforted the girl earnestly, being distressed by her face. She hoped in her heart that the marriage would put an end to the girl’s newly developed and stubborn depression. She couldn’t understand why now that the guests were arriving, the bride should still seem just terrified. No less word described her condition. Isobel McLaughlin could do nothing but leave her with Wully. In his room, where he sat holding her close against him, every time she said, “I can’t do this, Wully! I won’t!” he kissed her again, powerfully. She must go through with it now, he whispered to her. Even the minister was waiting for them now.
He led her forth, at last, into the parlor. She was wearing the white dress her mother had made for her the summer before, which Mrs. McLaughlin had ironed that day, and freshened with her daughter Mary’s cherry-colored ribbons. Wully, harassed by the trivial necessity for respectable[72] garments, was wearing the suit his mother had made for his brother John to wear to college in the fall. It didn’t fit Wully altogether, but then, it scarcely fitted John at all. In a space in the midst of their unsuspecting kinsmen they stood, the bride as pale as death, the groom nervously hiding his fear that at the critical minute his bride might altogether reject him.
He kept watching her covertly as the minister tried the patience of man and God by the length of his prayer. He tried to stand near enough her to support her. When the invocations ceased, everyone in the room lifted his head—except the bride. The minister explained interminably the nature of holy matrimony. He exhorted the pair to mutual faithfulness. Wully felt her tremble.
“Will you have this man to be your husband?” he asked at length.
She kept silent. She couldn’t raise her head. Wully felt his heart beginning to beat furiously. She was going to refuse him, in spite of all he had done.
There was an awful moment. The room seemed to be hushed and waiting. It was terrible, the length of that moment of silence. At last he spoke forth simply.
“You wouldn’t think she would. But she will. Won’t you, Chirstie?”
Those standing near heard his words, and as the outraged divine whispered sternly, “Answer!” he bent down and kissed her.
[73]She looked around like one in a nightmare. Her lips moved. The minister accepted the sign. He proceeded with the ceremony. The smile which Wully’s words had occasioned spread from those standing nearest even to those who were looking in at the windows—those who pretended to be leaving room for the rest, but were really thinking of their unsuitable bare feet.
The minister had made them man and wife.
The crowd gathered around them. The squire gave Chirstie a resounding smack on her cheek. Girls were pressing around her, the roomful was gathering near her. But she swayed, and fell against her husband, and fainted quite away.
Of course that fainting was altogether the smartest feature of the hurried wedding. Not many hard-working prairie women had bodies which permitted such gentility. It was a distinguished thing to do. The women who saw it forgot for a while to comment on the strange appearance of the bride, which they understood more fully later. At the time it seemed no more than a proper honor to pay Jeannie McNair’s memory. When she was herself again, Wully found a place for her out of doors. Planks laid on boxes and chairs made seats for supper out there where the smoke defended them, and since there was no back for her to lean against, she having just fainted and all, it was only proper that Wully’s arm do its duty around her. And it was necessary that it give her little strengthening messages, while inside the more zealous[74] young things danced to the fiddle that was not Allen’s. Out in the warm starlight and the smoke, the older guests talked to the bride and groom.
Aunt Libby joined them again, when by chance they were for a moment alone.
“Tell me again what it was Peter said, Wully!” she begged.
He felt Chirstie shrinking against him.
“He told me in the morning that he had decided to go this time for sure. I told him he was foolish. And I rode over again to give him some advice in the evening.”
Chirstie’s hand stirred nervously within his, and he held it more firmly.
“And did he not say where he was going?”
“He only said west.”
“That’s all he said in his note!” She sighed broken-heartedly. “It’s a strange thing he wouldn’t heed you, Wully!”
Wully gritted his teeth. “He certainly heeded me that time!” he thought grimly to himself. He had already told his aunt those nicely dovetailing lies half a dozen times, and each time he had felt them crushing his wife. He wished his aunt would go away and leave them in peace. After all, her cursed Peter hadn’t got a taste of what he deserved!
Finally the wedding was over. Time, however it drags, must eventually pass. They had driven away together, after he had changed John’s good clothes for a fresh hickory shirt and jeans, leaving[75] Dod at the McLaughlins’. They had had twenty-four hours of the unfathomable luxury of unhindered intimacy. The baby sister was asleep. It was bedtime again.
The new family sat down for prayers. Not that Wully was a man deeply religious. But, as far as he knew, daily family prayers was one of the things a decent man does for his family. They had read that morning, according to custom, the first chapter of Genesis, and that had been most satisfactory, even quite personally interesting now, all about male and female created He them. It had come over Wully with a chuckle that divine commands have seldom been as satisfactory to humans as that first one was. And now, in the evening, he had read the first chapter of the New Testament. He resented that. He wouldn’t have read it if he had remembered what was in it. That story of Mary’s humiliation might seem ever so slightly to reflect upon his wife. And that right he denied even to the Word of God.
They were sitting together on the doorstep, and his lips were not far from her ear.
“Yon was a strange man, now, Chirstie!” he began.
“What man?”
“That Joseph in Matthew. I fear he hadn’t very good sense.”
“Why, Wully! And him a man in the Bible!”
“I don’t care! He didn’t know much! He didn’t know enough to take his own lassie till an[76] angel told him! A man like that! He was daft. Or else——”
“I wonder at you, Wully! Or else what?”
“I doubt the lassie wasn’t really bonnie. Not like mine!”
A deeper embrace. More kisses.
“Oh, Wully!”