XL HAPPY POTTERS

To Ordham’s astonishment Bridgminster proffered the castle for the honeymoon. This graceful wedding-present was communicated by Lady Bridgminster soon after her return to London, and Mabel clapped her hands when told of it by her lover.

“It has been the dream of my life to see the inside of that heavenly castle,” she cried. “And now I am going to live there! I cannot believe it.”

“We can stay quite a month, I should think.” Ordham was smiling into her triumphant face and feeling inanely happy. “I have received private intimation that I can replace one of the secretaries in Rome—he cannot stand the climate—and put in my time at the Foreign Office later. No doubt I can get out of that altogether, especially as I have already served a year abroad. But I cannot express my delight at spending a month in that old place as if it really were my own—and with you! with you!”

Mabel did not give her usual ready response to his rare ebullitions. The more deeply he descended into the depths of sentimentality induced by this wondrous creature and his general good fortune, the more shy he became, and Mabel, who had her share of the feminine intuitions, divining when he was more than commonly surcharged with silent adoration, teased him into expression of it. This time, however, he had delivered himself without assistance, and to his surprise she flushed and bit her lip.

“Oh, do let us stay through the autumn! It is the ambition of my life to have a succession of house parties at Ordham.” Both eyes and voice pleaded. “Lady Bridgminster says that your brother doesn’t care how long we stay—mother had a note from her just before you came in. He never intends to live there again, and it is good for the house to keep it open.”

“I cannot imagine what induced this fit of generosity in Bridg. It must have been made in an exuberance of delight in turning his back on Ordham, which he has always hated. It never fitted him, somehow—”

“But it will us! Say you will stay through the autumn. Please! Please!”

“But—but—I cannot have my way with the Foreign Office forever. My mother has great influence at present, but a political earthquake and I am high and dry, unless established first. I might be sent to Persia or South America! My fate would be all the worse for the liberties I had taken under the present government.”

Mabel pouted and shook her head. “Don’t talk politics to me. Everybody says that I was born to be a diplomat’s wife, but thank heaven you are not in politics. Promise me that you will wait a little while—through the autumn.”

Ordham looked at her in dismay. Once or twice before a sudden unaccountable lack of comprehension had given him fleeting pause, but some new manifestation of charm had banished any inclination to dwell upon it. Her transitions from a dignified girl of the world to a spoilt child, even a magpie, were sometimes bewildering, but he always hastened to remind himself that she was most beautiful, high-bred, desirable, exquisite. On these gifts he could count even should she disappoint other hopes. But he was by no means convinced that she would disappoint him in anything. He believed in her brain, although she showed a strange determination to give it rest, and he would not have had her less adorably feminine. But he would have welcomed a trifle more reasonableness, if only for its convenience. He answered gently:

“But Mabel!” He longed to say “darling,” but starlight or moonlight was needful to work him up to that pitch; so he reiterated “Mabel” with increased tenderness of accent. “You are far more interested in my career than in giving house parties at Ordham, are you not?”

To his infinite delight Mabel leaned forward and gave him an impulsive little kiss, exclaiming with her grown-up air: “Indeed I am. We will go to Rome at once, if you wish. That was just an old dream of mine. I have cherished it since I first set eyes on Ordham three years ago. But if you want to go right away—”

“Not for worlds. A man is entitled to a month when he marries, and I shall show up at the Foreign Office every day or so until the ceremony. The place will be kept for me. How splendid you are!”

And Mabel began at once to speculate upon the vacant palaces in Rome. How perfectly heavenly it would be to transform some musty old historical hole, reeking with tragedy, into a nest for two happy little birds. Mabel’s phraseology was not always on a par with her lofty bearing and intellectual brow, but sometimes it was, and any man as much in love as Ordham would forget greater lapses still.

If Mrs. Cutting hastened the wedding that she might be present at the impending trial in New York, she was quite as determined to make it a distinguished function as if she had six months before her. And if few people were in London, nearly everybody was in England, and even Switzerland and the German baths were no great distance away. She received few regrets for the ceremony, which was to take place at St. George’s on the tenth of October. She was very busy and very happy. She thought it a great pity that her lovely flower should marry at all, for she was one of those American women that regard matrimony with refined distaste, an evil to be submitted to for the sake of fashion, position, protection, and, no doubt, the race. Moreover, with the inevitable inconsistency of her sex, she would not have liked her lovely flower to turn sere and yellow, Nature’s revenge on the mateless; but she sincerely hoped that after an heir had been presented to Ordham Castle, and, perchance, an understudy, Ordham’s youthful ardour would have evaporated, and her flower could settle down to the business of becoming a great lady, a woman of exceptional and undesecrated refinement; an easy achievement for one fastidiously reared by a fastidious mother. One reason for Mrs. Cutting’s spontaneous selection of Ordham, and her adherence, in spite of several brilliant offers, to her original decision, was because of his apparent lack of animalism, and she grew more and more convinced that only the wild confusion of first love had roused him from his lethargy. He would soon revert, and this fact, coupled with his incomparable manners, would make him the ideal husband for that rare fine type of womanhood which only her own country at its topmost civilization could produce. Mrs. Cutting was justly proud of Mabel, for the adaptable American girl was not only capable of learning a great many lessons, from a polonaise by Chopin to the tactful manipulation of a cross but important old dowager, but London society had pronounced her the one flawless American in its midst, and its midst was at that time unusually distended with charming and popular Americans. That she had become one of the belles of the season independently of the stamp of that Prince for whose favour all ambitious women, Americans as well as English, sought, but from whom she had been religiously barricaded, was in itself a stamp of original distinction. Mrs. Cutting was pronounced equally irreproachable, if somewhat chilly and invariable, and she too might have purchased a coronet had she chosen; but she had no taste for the man she must take with it, and left her daughter to make the marriage which should place her unassailably in the greatest society of the world.

Ordham was somewhat amused at the renewed intimacy of his mother with Mrs. Cutting, but accepted her explanation that she was not the woman to waste her energies opposing the decrees of fate, that she was glad her son was happy, and that, after all, heiresses were heiresses. Besides, Rosamond’s front teeth had rather got on her nerves, and she had unaccountably refused to have her hair touched up. Mabel Cutting was a beauty and would do the family credit, oh, no doubt of that. So she and Mrs. Cutting might be seen any morning in Bond Street, shopping, and looking even more radiant than the young people, who saw little of one another in these busy last days.

That was a memorable wedding even in London. The church was a vast bower of maidenhair and orchids. (Nihilists in Russia gnashed their teeth when they read of it.) Ordham’s connection alone filled half the pews; many of them had ordered new gowns for the occasion in their amazement at the millions flowing toward the family coffers, and that the magnet should be the most indolent and least susceptible of them all. If it had been Stanley, that splendid type of the orthodox, handsome, athletic, sanguine Englishman (he supported his brother at the altar), they could have understood it. But while they impatiently admitted that John was clever, they resented his radical departure from the type, and his complete indifference to their disapproval.

The day was warm and mellow. Not a cloud threatened ruin to the fine costumes with which the church rustled. Royalty honoured the occasion and occupied the front row of chairs. The bridal party, which had rehearsed in the American fashion, advanced up the aisle with precisely the right spacing, that their gowns might be duly appreciated. Lady Bridgminster wore a small bonnet and a tight gown of pale grey shining stuff which made her look not unlike a silver poplar. Mrs. Cutting wore heliotrope velvet and point lace that looked as if it might dissolve before the end of the ceremony. Princess Nachmeister, in a new brocade from Paris, resembled a wicked fairy in a beneficent mood. Of the six bridesmaids, two were Americans, two were French girls who had been Mabel’s chosen friends in Paris, and two were Ordhams. Their gowns had been designed by Lady Bridgminster, and if Mrs. Cutting ran to orchids and ferns, her friend was faithful to the artistic movement to which she had so long lent the light of her ambitious countenance. These six graceful girls held up in front long clinging diaphanous gowns of gold tissue with one hand, and clasped to their bosoms immense sheaves of lilies with the other. Their sleeves were greatly puffed, and on their heads were charming caps shaped like sunflowers. The old duchess, examining them through her lorgnette, and herself apparelled in black moiré and a mantle trimmed with bugles and fringe, remarked audibly that they looked like chorus girls; but they received only a passing attention, for Mabel was as lovely a bride as ever triumphed over a pitiless noonday sun. Beneath a robe composed entirely of rose point, and once in the wardrobe of some unfortunate princess, there was a shimmer as of pale green waters. Mabel had rebelled at looking like a Morris stained-glass window with Wilde improvements, but had agreed with Lady Bridgminster that there was no objection to resembling Undine if she could still be smart. As she advanced up the aisle on the arm of the American Minister, people stood up to look at her and whispered that did she remain in London a year or two longer she would reign as a “professional beauty” and dim the halos of the celebrated group. Ordham, slinking in from the vestry, terribly frightened but magnificently dignified, almost lost his breath when he saw her. Oh, there was no doubt that she had the grand air as well as beauty; and as she walked down the aisle at the conclusion of the ceremony on the arm of her princely young husband, her veil thrown back, her cheeks stained an entrancing pink, her head very high, London set the final seal of its approval upon her, adopted her as its very own, and hastened enraptured to the great house in Grosvenor Square, where all, not merely the family, had been bidden for breakfast.

What a pity that he should take her out of England! Why the diplomatic service—which might take them to unheard-of places? London was for the beautiful, the fortunate. And London was the apex of Earth. The Continent was all very well for baths, and gowns, and scenery, for music and old masters, or alas! economy. London being the Mecca of the civilized world, why, in heaven’s name, did any one voluntarily live out of it? And with millions—

If Ordham heard these comments once, he heard them a dozen times, and was the more annoyed as he observed that Mabel was irrepressibly gratified. The chief of all the personages present, finding speech with her for the first time, went so far as to assure her that the crown of professional beautyship was hers to grasp, even hinted that she could count upon his distinguished support. She turned to Ordham with a little gurgle of sheer happiness; but when she saw the thunder-cloud on the brow of her lord, replied prettily that she was quite convinced Nature had not fitted her to fill so exacting a r?le, and that, much as she adored England, she was quite frantic for the excitement of diplomatic life. The personage bowed and withdrew.

But these were passing clouds. Ordham carried his bride off to the country house lent them for the first few days of the honeymoon and was quite the happiest man on earth.