Four Days | Page 5

to-night you're an
Englishwoman. You can't be a little American mongrel any more; not
until I'm dead, anyway. Now I've got you, I'll never let you go!" He
showed his teeth in a fierce, defiant smile, in which there was pathos.
He knew what a life in the Dardanelles was worth. He put his cropped
head close to Marjorie's. "Do you hate me for that, Marjie?"
Marjorie, pressing against him, felt the strength of his gaunt shoulder
through his coat. A sense of delicious fear stole over her, and the
savage which lies close to the surface in every woman leaped within
her.

"I love you for it!" 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,