Are you really sure that you have love enough and courage enough to be my wife?”
She rested her head caressingly on his shoulder, and looked up at him with her charming smile.
“How many times must I say it,” she asked, “before you will believe me?
Once more—I have love enough and courage enough to be your wife; and I knew it, Lewis, the first time I saw you!
Will that confession satisfy your scruples? And will you promise never again to doubt yourself or me?”
Romayne promised, and sealed the promise—unresisted this time—with a kiss.
“When are we to be married?” he whispered.
She lifted her head from his shoulder with a sigh.
“If I am to answer you honestly,” she replied, “I must speak of my mother, before I speak of myself.”
Romayne submitted to the duties of his new position, as well as he understood them.
“Do you mean that you have told your mother of our engagement?” he said.
“In that case, is it my duty or yours—I am very ignorant in these matters—to consult her wishes?
My own idea is, that I ought to ask her if she approves of me as her son-in-law, and that you might then speak to her of the marriage.”
Stella thought of Romayne’s tastes, all in favor of modest retirement, and of her mother’s tastes, all in favor of ostentation and display.
She frankly owned the result produced in her own mind.
“I am afraid to consult my mother about our marriage,” she said.
Romayne looked astonished.
“Do you think Mrs. Eyrecourt will disapprove of it?” he asked.
Stella was equally astonished on her side.
“Disapprove of it?” she repeated.
“I know for certain that my mother will be delighted.”
“Then where is the difficulty?”
There was but one way of definitely answering that question.
Stella boldly described her mother’s idea of a wedding—including the Archbishop, the twelve bridesmaids in green and gold, and the hundred guests at breakfast in Lord Loring’s picture gallery.
Romayne’s consternation literally deprived him, for the moment, of the power of speech.
To say that he looked at Stella, as a prisoner in “the condemned cell” might have looked at the sheriff, announcing the morning of his execution, would be to do injustice to the prisoner.
He receives his shock without flinching; and, in proof of his composure, celebrates his wedding with the gallows by a breakfast which he will not live to digest.
“If you think as your mother does,” Romayne began, as soon as he had recovered his self-possession, “no opinion of mine shall stand in the way—” He could get no further.
His vivid imagination saw the Archbishop and the bridesmaids, heard the hundred guests and their dreadful speeches: his voice faltered, in spite of himself.
Stella eagerly relieved him.
“My darling, I don’t think as my mother does,” she interposed, tenderly.
“I am sorry to say we have very few sympathies in common.
Marriages, as I think, ought to be celebrated as privately as possible—the near and dear relations present, and no one else.
If there must be rejoicings and banquets, and hundreds of invitations, let them come when the wedded pair are at home after the honeymoon, beginning life in earnest.
These are odd ideas for a woman to have—but they are my ideas, for all that.”
Romayne’s face brightened.
“How few women possess your fine sense and your delicacy of feeling!” he exclaimed
“Surely your mother must give way, when she hears we are both of one mind about our marriage.”
Stella knew her mother too well to share the opinion thus expressed.
Mrs. Eyrecourt’s capacity for holding to her own little ideas, and for persisting (where her social interests were concerned) in trying to insinuate those ideas into the minds of other persons, was a capacity which no resistance, short of absolute brutality, could overcome.
She was perfectly capable of worrying Romayne (as well as her daughter) to the utmost limits of human endurance, in the firm conviction that she was bound to convert all heretics, of their way of thinking, to the orthodox faith in the matter of weddings.
Putting this view of the case with all possible delicacy, in speaking of her mother, Stella expressed herself plainly enough, nevertheless, to enlighten Romayne.
He made another suggestion.
“Can we marry privately,” he said, “and tell Mrs. Eyrecourt of it afterward?”
This essentially masculine solution of the difficulty was at once rejected.
Stella was too good a daughter to suffer her mother to be treated with even the appearance of disrespect.
“Oh,” she said, “think how mortified and distressed my mother would be!
She must be present at my marriage.”
An idea of a compromise occurred to Romayne.
“What do you say,” he proposed, “to arranging for the marriage privately—and then telling Mrs. Eyrecourt only a day or two beforehand, when it would be too late to send out invitations?