Their Wedding Journey | Page 4

JOURNEY
By William Dean Howells
1871

CONTENTS: The Outset A Midsummer-day's Dream The Night Boat
A Day's Railroading The Enchanted City, and Beyond Niagara Down
the St. Lawrence The Sentiment of Montreal Homeward and Home
Niagara Revisited Twelve Years after Their Wedding

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.
I. THE OUTSET
They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where
they afterwards saw each other; whither, indeed, he followed her; and
there the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it
was renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story,
which I do not think myself qualified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness
for a sustained or involved narration; though I am persuaded that a
skillful romancer could turn the courtship of Basil. and Isabel March to
excellent account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempting to tell the
reader of the wedding-journey of a newly married couple, no longer
very young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall
have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary traits of American life
as these appeared to them, to speak a little of well-known and easily
accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of
character.
They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in the simplest and
quietest way, and as it did not take place at once after their marriage,
but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the
outset.
"How much better," said Isabel, "to go now, when nobody cares
whether you go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched
wedding-breakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting to
see you aboard the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of
honey-moonshine about us; we shall go just like anybody else,--with a
difference, dear, with a difference!" and she took Basil's cheeks
between her hands. In order to do this, she had to ran round the table;
for they were at dinner, and Isabel's aunt, with whom they had begun
married life, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish thing
for Isabel, and she added, with a conscious blush, "We are past our first
youth, you know; and we shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we?
My one horror in life is an evident bride."

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be
taken for a bride; and for my part I do not object to a woman's being of
Isabel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been
very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has
lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met
first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring with an
inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engagement,
which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined,
in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or less;
it was part of his love; the loss accounted irreparable really enriched the
final gain.
"I don't know," he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can
whose cheeks are clasped between a lady's hands, "you don't begin very
well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this
way, they will put us into the 'bridal chambers' at all the hotels. And the
cars--they're beginning to have them on the palace-cars."
Just then a shadow fell into the room.
"Wasn't that thunder, Isabel?" asked her aunt, who had been
contentedly surveying the tender spectacle before her. "O dear! you'll
never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It 's actually
raining now!"
In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All in
a moment, out of the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before we
quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the
clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible
violence. In the square upon which our friends looked out of their
dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in
the driving floods of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest
bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder
rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail
mingled with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the
storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where
the lightning played like flames burning