"We may regard the matter as settled now," whispered Francesca comfortably. "Anybody would ask anybody else to marry him, whether he was in love with her or not. If it weren't so beautiful and so touching, wouldn't it be amusing? Isn't the organist a darling, and doesn't he enter into the spirit of it? See him shaking with sympathetic laughter, and yet he never lets a smile creep into the music; it is all earnestness and majesty. May I peep now and see how they are getting on?"
"Certainly not! What are you thinking of, Francesca? Our only justification in this whole matter is that we are absolutely serious about it. We shall say good-bye to the organist, wring his hand gratefully, and steal with him through the little door. Then in a half-hour we shall know the worst or the best; and we must remember to send him cards and a marked copy of the newspaper containing the marriage notice."
Salemina told me all about it that night, but she never suspected the interference of any deus ex machina save that of the traditional God of Love, who, it seems to me, has not kept up with the requirements of the age in all respects, and leaves a good deal for us women to do nowadays.
"Would that you had come up this aisle to meet me, Salemina, and that you were walking down again as my wife!" This was what Dr.
Gerald had surprised her by saying, when the wedding music had finally entered into his soul, driving away for the moment his doubt and fear and self-distrust; and I can well believe that the hopelessness of his tone stirred her tender heart to its very depths.
"What did you answer?" I asked breathlessly, on the impulse of the moment.
We were talking by the light of a single candle. Salemina turned her head a little aside, but there was a look on her face that repaid me for all my labour and anxiety, a look in which her forty years melted away and became as twenty, a look that was the outward and visible expression of the inward and spiritual youth that has always been hers; then she replied simply--"I told him what is true: that my life had been one long coming to meet him, and that I was quite ready to walk with him to the end of the world."
. . . . . .
I left her to her thoughts, which I well knew were more precious than my words, and went across the hall, where Benella was packing Francesca's last purchases. Ordinarily one of us manages to superintend such operations, as the Derelict's principal aim is to make two garments go where only one went before. Nature in her wildest moments never abhorred a vacuum in her dominion as Miss Dusenberry resents it in a trunk.
"Benella," I said, in that mysterious whisper which one uses for such communications, "Dr. La Touche has asked Miss Peabody to marry him, and she has consented."
"It was full time!" the Derelict responded, with a deep sigh of relief, "but better late than never! Men folks are so queer, I don't hardly know how a merciful Providence ever came to invent 'em!
Either they're so bold they'd propose to the Queen o' Sheba without mindin' it a mite, or else they're such scare-cats you 'bout have to ask 'em yourself, and then lug 'em to the minister's afterwards--there don't seem to be no halfway with 'em. Well, I'm glad you're all settled; it must be nice to have folks!"
It was a pathetic little phrase, and I fancied I detected a tear in her usually cheerful and decided voice. Acting on the suspicion, I said hurriedly, "You have already had a share of Miss Monroe's 'folks' and mine offered you, and now Miss Peabody will be sure to add hers to the number. Your only difficulty will be to attend to them all impartially, and keep them from quarrelling as to which shall have you next."
She brightened visibly. "Yes," she assented, without any superfluous modesty,--squeezing as she spoke a pair of bronze slippers into the crown of Francesca's favourite hat--"yes, that part'll be hard on all of us; but I want you to know that I belong to you this winter, any way; Miss Peabody can get along without me better'n you can."
Her glance was freighted with a kind of evasive, half-embarrassed affection; shy, unobtrusive, respectful it was, but altogether friendly and helpful.
That the relations between us have ever quite been those of mistress and maid, I cannot affirm. We have tried to persuade ourselves that they were at least an imitation of the proper thing, just to maintain our self-respect while travelling in a country of monarchical institutions, but we have always tacitly understood the real situation and accepted its piquant incongruities.
So when I met Benella Dusenberry's wistful, sympathetic eye, my republican head, reckless of British conventions, found the maternal hollow in her spinster shoulder as I said, "Dear old Derelict! it was a good day for us when you drifted into our harbour!"