Under the Country Sky Part 30

CHAPTER XXV

GREAT MUSIC

"Wull ye be comin' soon, Miss Warne?" said the voice of Mrs. MacFayden at her door. Georgiana opened it quickly, and the housekeeper entered, quietly resplendent in black silk with fine lace collar and cuffs, her hair in shining order, an expression of great solemnity on her face.

"Mr. and Mrs. Peter Brandt are here," she announced with impressiveness.

"Doctor Craig is doonstairs with them; he cam' ten minutes ago. He bade me say he wad coom for ye himself when ye were ready. It's a gled day for him, Miss Warne, an' for us a'."

Georgiana advanced, her heart very warm toward this good woman, who, as she well knew, was quite as much the friend of Jefferson Craig as his housekeeper, and well esteemed, even beloved by him. The girl came close.

"Mrs. MacFayden," she said, very low, "I have--no mother to kiss me before I go down. May I----"

The sentence was left unfinished, for with one step forward Mary MacFayden opened wide her arms, and for a long minute the two enfolded each other, while both hearts beat strongly.

Then Georgiana, suddenly mindful that she must not let go for an instant of her self-control, pressed a kiss upon the fair, smooth cheek of the Scotswoman, received one equally warm upon her own, and drew away smiling. "Thank you," she murmured uncertainly. "I couldn't go without it."

"Thet ye could na', la.s.sie," responded Mrs. MacFayden heartily.

"Noo--wull I send the doctor up?"

"Just in a minute--when I have seen my father----"

Georgiana ran into his room from her own. A deep embrace, a lingering kiss--while James Stuart looked out of the window, a lump suddenly appearing from nowhere in his st.u.r.dy throat.

Then Georgiana said softly at the young man's elbow: "Thank you again for coming, Jimps. It's such a comfort to have my brother here."

Before he could reply she was gone again.

He led Mr. Warne downstairs, where Doctor Craig presented them both to the Brandts--delightful people Stuart thought them, too--so simple and unaffected--almost like village people.

As he stood waiting with them, in the same dignified big room which he had been in before he went upstairs, he was conscious that in his brief absence its character had changed. Library though it still was, with its ma.s.sive bookcases filled with rows upon rows of finely bound books, it had taken on a festal air. Great bowls of roses, deep crimson, glowing pink, rich amber, had been brought in; they stood on table, chimney-piece, and floor; hundreds of them it seemed to him there must be. He realized that Georgiana herself could not have seen them; they would be a surprise to her. Evidently the simple little wedding was to have a character all its own.

With the quiet departure of Jefferson Craig from the room James Stuart was all eyes for an appearance at the door. How would Georgiana come to her marriage? In shimmering white, he supposed, for that was the traditional garb of all the brides he had ever seen--mostly village girls they were. Once, while at college, he had attended a city wedding, that of a cla.s.smate who had not been willing to wait till his college course was finished. Stuart remembered how pale the bride had been; she, had looked as if she were going to faint. He hoped Georgiana would not look like that: he could not conceive it.

The next moment he saw her, entering the wide door, on Doctor Craig's arm--the same Georgiana he had always known, as simply dressed, even more simply, he thought, though he had little time for looking at her dress, so held was his gaze by her face. Never could he have conceived so radiant a bride. And then he thought--Jefferson Craig had gone up alone to bring her down. Stuart wondered if he himself could make Jeannette look like that, at such a moment. He thought he could!

Georgiana looked into Father Davy's eyes as she stood before him. He was not tall; his face was almost on a level with her own. It seemed to her she had never seen eyes so clear, so blue, so comprehending. Her own never left them for a moment while the service lasted, until the closing prayer.

Father Davy's voice, at first very slightly tremulous, gathered force as he went on with the words he had spoken so many times, but never as he was speaking them now--to his child, to Phoebe's child, and to the man of her choice. A little flush crept into his thin cheeks. More than once his eyes rested on the dark-blue silk which covered his daughter's shoulders; the sight of it seemed to give him strength.

When the service ended, and his voice sank into the words of prayer, the hand of Mr. Peter Brandt went for a moment to his eyes; Mrs. MacFayden felt suddenly for her handkerchief; James Stuart softly cleared his throat, winking once or twice rather rapidly. Never had any of them heard just such a prayer as that. It was as if he who made it were very near the invisible Presence whom he so tenderly and trustingly addressed.

Stuart never forgot the moment when he looked for the first time into the eyes of Jefferson Craig's newly made wife. For one instant he suffered a pang of jealousy--a queer, irrational feeling. It was as if he had lost his friend, as if this star-eyed creature before him could never find room for him again in her full heart. But he knew better in the next breath, for she lifted her face, ever so little, and with a sense of deep relief he gave her the brotherly kiss she thus permitted.

When he looked at Jefferson Craig he found that the keen, fine eyes were regarding him with a very friendly intentness, and he wrung the hand offered him as he would have wrung the hand of a brother.

"You're the luckiest man in this whole big town," declared Stuart. His lips had been dumb before Georgiana, but now he turned to her again.

"George, there's no use trying to tell you how I feel about this. All I can say is that nothing's too good for you--or for him. That's pretty lame, but--whatever eloquence I'm capable of is tied up somewhere; I can't get it out."

"It's out, Jimps, dear," she a.s.sured him. "Isn't it--Jefferson?"

"It certainly is--Jimps," Craig answered heartily. "It was for just that genuine feeling that I sent for you. I knew we couldn't spare it."

Stuart watched the pair eagerly during the next hour--the hour during which the little party sat at the wedding breakfast which followed. The table was a round one, and his place was next the bride, so he missed nothing. He had never been present on such an occasion, nor could have guessed the beauty and charm of the setting wealth and art can give. It was perfection itself, arranged by whose hand he had no notion, but he understood well enough by whose order had been created all the simple elegance which so well suited the house and the people. And as he looked at Georgiana he said to himself:

"She fits into this as if she had been born to it. She _was_ born to it, for it's just the kind of thing she'd have made for herself if she'd had the means. No show, no fuss, just niceness! And it's the sort of thing my wife shall have, somehow, even in the country, before long. We'll _bring_ this there; she'll know how. There's no patent on it. Bless her--how George deserves this! If only Jean could have been here. But I'll tell her; I'll get it over to her. And she'll understand!"

At the end of the hour the car was at the door, and Georgiana was coming down the stairs in her traveling clothes, her bridal bouquet on her arm.

How those splendid roses had lighted up the little dark-blue frock!

"I've no bridesmaid to throw it to," she said, extending it toward Stuart. "Will you take it to Jeannette?"

"I should say I will. I'll be with her this evening; she made me promise." And Stuart received the offering with a glad hand.

A long, silent clinging to her father was the only parting embrace for this girl. If James Stuart longed for one of his own, after these years of friendship, he was obliged to be content with the l.u.s.trous look he had from eyes lifted for a moment to his as Georgiana took her place in the car, and with the lingering pressure her hand gave his, which spoke of love and loyalty.

Then she was gone, with Jefferson Craig sending back at Stuart a special brilliant smile of grat.i.tude for the office he had performed, that of taking the place of the whole group of young people usually present on such occasions, saying good-bye with bared head and face of ardent devotion, with the first light snowflakes of winter falling on his fair hair.

"I can't believe I'm quite awake," said Georgiana, by and by. She sat in one of the drawing-rooms of a fast train, the door closed, the curtains drawn between herself and the rest of the carful of pa.s.sengers, and only the flying landscape beyond the window to tell of the world outside.

Craig sat watching her; he seemed able to do nothing else. In his face was the most joyous content; there seemed almost a light behind it.

"Not awake?" was his amused comment. "I wonder why. Now I feel tremendously awake--after a long, uneasy sleep, in which I dreamed of losing what I most wanted."

"But it's not all strange to you as it is to me. I can't quite believe that there's nothing on my shoulders--no care, no anxiety, just--well, _your_ shoulders! Oh, but," she went on hastily, "don't think that means I want you to carry everything for me; indeed I don't. I want to carry--half!"

"Ah, but that's it," he answered. "My shoulders for your burdens, yours for mine. That way neither of us will feel half the weight of either.

I'm not pretending that I shall give you a life of wholly sheltered ease; it won't be that, and you don't want it, not in this burden-bearing world. But--you shall have some things that you have been denied, my brave girl! Georgiana, I can't tell you how it touched me--the dress you made to be married in."

Her eyes went down now before the look in his.

"I'll tell you fairly that I longed with all my heart to take you to some place worthy of your beauty and find a wedding gown for you--not necessarily a very costly one, but one that should bring out all you are capable of showing. But when I saw you, looking just yourself, in the silk that was like your mother's,"--he leaned forward, taking both her hands in his and looking straight into her face, compelling her gaze to lift to his lest she should miss what she knew was there,--"I felt something inside my heart break wide open--with worship for you, little, strong, splendid spirit that you are!"

He pressed the hands against his lips. Then he touched two rings upon her left hand: exquisite and rare jewels were set in both engagement and wedding rings, after the modern fashion. But there was a third ring there, guarding the others, a slender band of gold, worn thin by many years of hard, self-forgetting work--the ring which David Warne had placed twenty-seven years ago upon the hand of his bride. Jefferson Craig studied all three, turning them round and round upon the rosy finger they encircled.

Presently he spoke again, very gently: "My rings on your hand mean to me love and beauty, loyalty and truth. But her ring stands for all that and--service. We need it there, to remind us what we owe the world we live in. She paid her debt; we'll pay ours, in memory of her. Bless her for giving me her daughter!"

For a minute Georgiana could not speak. Then, with her dark eyes sparkling through the mist of tears which had taken her unawares, she seized his hand and lifted it to press her glowing cheek against it, saying pa.s.sionately: "Oh, _how_ you understand!"

They were silent for a long time after that, while the train flew on, through the gathering darkness of the late December afternoon, into the night....

Georgiana had supposed that they were to go at once to the old home, for she knew that Craig could not be long away at this time, and there was much to do there. But she found that instead of changing trains in the great city, sixty miles beyond which lay the home village, they were leaving the station to be conveyed in a waiting car to a hotel.

"If you had been spending all these years in cities," was Craig's explanation, "I should have felt like plunging at once with you into the solitude. But as it is--well, I wondered if we shouldn't like to hear some great music to-night. Do you feel as I do--that there are times when nothing but music can speak for you?"

"But you," she said, "who live in the rush all the time----"

"There's no rush here for me," he answered. "n.o.body is likely to know me here; I can forget the whole world in the midst of the crowd with you to-night. As for the music--I've been on short rations a good while myself. I think we can feast together, don't you?"

It was all a fairy tale to Georgiana, that evening in the city. Her college days had been spent in a small college town which, though it had lain not many miles away from this same great metropolis, had seldom seen her leave it for the privileges which richer girls enjoyed at every week-end.