Four Days | Page 5

she cried.
"Don't rub your head against my coat," murmured Leonard; "there's bugs in it."
They both laughed excitedly.

II
Two hours later the wedding took place in the church where Leonard had been baptized and confirmed. Little Herbert thought he had never been to such a strange party. He didn't care if he never went to one again. No one was dressed up but himself. His mother and father and Marjorie wore their everyday clothes, but their faces were different. He wouldn't have believed it was a party at all, except for their faces, which wore an expression he associated with Christmas and birthdays.
The church was dark, and it seemed to Herbert so vast and strange at this late hour. Candles gleamed on the altar, at the end of a long, shadowy aisle. Their footsteps made no sound on the velvet carpet as they walked under the dim arches to the front seat. His aunts and his uncles and his brother's big friends from the training camp seemed suddenly to appear out of the shadows and silently fill the front rows. In the queer light he kept recognizing familiar faces that smiled and nodded at him in the dimness. Even Miss Shake and Nannie looked queer in the pew behind. Nannie was dressed in her "day-off" clothes. She was crying. Herbert looked about him wonderingly: yes, Miss Shake was crying, too--and that lady in the black veil over there: oh, how she was crying! No; he didn't like this party.
Through a little space between his father's arm and a stone pillar he could see Leonard's back. Leonard was standing on the white stone steps, very straight. Then he kneeled down, and Herbert heard his sword click on the stone floor. The minister, dressed in a white and purple robe, with one arm out-stretched, was talking to him in a sing-song voice. Herbert couldn't see Marjorie, the pillar was in the way; but he felt that she was there. Leonard's voice sounded frightened and muffled, not a bit like himself, but he heard Marjorie's voice just as plain as anything--
"Till death us do part."
Presently the choir began to sing, and his mother found the place in the hymn-book. Herbert couldn't read, but he knew the hymn. Each verse ended,--
"Rejoice, rejoice, Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."
Herbert looked on the hymn-book and pretended he was reading. The book trembled. Leonard and Marjorie were passing close to the pew. They looked, oh, so pleased! Leonard smiled at his mother, and she smiled back. She lifted Herbert up on the seat and he watched them pass down the dark aisle together and out through the shadowy doorway at the very end. The little boy felt a vague sensation of distress. He looked up at his mother and the distress grew. She was still singing, but her mouth kept getting queerer and queerer as she came to the line,--
"--give thanks, and sing."
He had never seen his mother cry before. He didn't suppose she could cry. She was grown up. You don't expect grown-up people, like your mother, to cry--except, of course, Nannie and Miss Shake.
"Rejoice, rejoice, Rejoice, give thanks, and sing."
He sang it for her. The voices of the choir seemed suddenly to have traveled a long way off and the tones of the organ were hushed. He heard his own voice echoing in the silent church. The words seemed to come out all wrong. He felt a terrible sense of oppression in the region of his stomach, and he wondered if he were going to be ill. It was a relief to hear himself crying at the top of his lungs, and to have Nannie scolding him lovingly, and leading him out of the church. He drove home, sniffing but comforted, in his father's lap.
"He felt it," old Nannie said to Burns, as she lifted him out of the carriage. "The child understood, bless him!"
"There wasn't a dry eye come out 'f the church," said Burns, "except them two selves."
"I wonder where they've gone?" said Nannie, eyeing Burns jealously. "They must have took a train, I suppose?"
"That's telling," said the old man, whipping up the horses that were covered with foam.

III
Four days is a long, long time, Marjorie had said, for the hours that are breathlessly counted make long, long days; they are long as those of summer-childhood in passing. But ever, when it comes May, and the soft, chill breezes blow from the ocean across the sun-soaked sands, and the clouds run dazzling races with the sea gulls, Marjorie will feel herself running too, catching up breathless a few paces behind Leonard, as on that second afternoon on a wind-swept beach of the Kentish coast. Like mad things, their heads thrown back, hair flying, mouths open, the spray smiting their open eyes, with all the ecstasy of