VIII
Three days later, when Jane entered Flora’s drawing-room with Stephen, she had no particular sense that she was going to witness the consecration of a marriage. The civil rites of France that they had all subscribed to that morning had made Cicily, she conceded, Albert’s lawful wife. This blessing of the Church seemed but an irrelevant afterthought. Cicily had set her heart on it, however. It was part of the party. It all went to prove that this was a very usual situation, a very gay situation, a very happy situation. It was the consummation of the friendly conspiracy of chatter.
Flora’s beautiful formal room was swept and garnished for the ceremony. It was always a little bare. The polished floor was sparsely adorned with three small rugs. The furniture was clustered in little social groups of chairs and sofas and small convenient tables. A Renoir hung over the fireplace—it was the only picture in the room—the portrait of a plump dark lady in a red velvet gown with a shirred bustle and a fair-haired child in a white muslin frock with a blue sash. The room was filled with vases of white lilies and curtained against the crude glare of the July sunshine. The perfume of the flowers, the subdued light, the faint gleam, here and there, of glass and gilt and parquet, the tranquillity of the Victorian lady over the fireplace, all subtly contributed to the sense of space and serenity that was the room’s distinguishing characteristic. The windows were open, their silken hangings moving a little in the gentle July breeze. The uproar of the Paris traffic was hushed in Flora’s neighbourhood. The tiny, rippling plash of some fountain in an outer court could be distinctly heard above the voices of Flora’s guests.
Flora’s guests were very few in number. Jane’s eyes found Cicily at once. She was at Albert’s side, smiling up into the face of a rather more than middle-aged gentleman, who was standing, when Jane entered the drawing-room, with his back to the door. Her gown was charming—a daffodil yellow chiffon. A great straw shade hat hid her golden hair. She was carrying a sheaf of yellow calla lilies. The three children were being restrained by Molly in a distant corner of the room. Robin Redbreast was scuffling on the shiny floor. To judge by their rosy, excited faces they had no sense of the solemnity of the occasion. Flora, in a frock of pale grey taffeta, was talking to Ed Brown on the hearth beneath the Renoir. Ed Brown looked very cheerful. He had a gardenia in the buttonhole of his cutaway. Muriel, in a striking new costume of black-and-white satin, was chatting very pleasantly with the Church of England clergyman. He was a very callow young clergyman, and he did not look entirely at his ease with Muriel. She was doing her best for him, however. She had turned the full battery of her deeply shaded, bright blue eyes upon his embarrassed countenance. Her carmined lips were smiling.
“Here you are, Jane!” cried Flora.
Cicily waved her yellow lilies. The more than middle-aged gentleman at whom she had been smiling turned as she did so. Across the slippery expanse of polished floor, Jane stared at him, astounded. She suffered a distinct sense of shock. She was back, instantly, in Chicago in the early nineties. She was back in the Duroys’ little crowded living-room in the Saint James Apartments. She had two thin pigtails and a sense of social inadequacy and she was staring at Mr. Duroy! He had come! It was André! But how exactly like his father! The greying beard, the beribboned eyeglasses, the shred of scarlet silk run through the buttonhole! The wise, sophisticated gleam in the shrewd brown eyes!
The eyes were not sufficiently sophisticated, however, to veil their expression of complete astonishment. André stared at Jane. She saw the glint of amazement fade quickly from his face. A broad smile of pleasure supplanted it. It had struck her like lightning, however. She knew what it meant. She was fifty-one years old. Then André was holding both her hands in his own.
“Jane!” he was crying. “It is really you!” Looking up at the bearded face, meeting the wise, sophisticated gleam behind the beribboned eyeglasses, Jane was desperately trying to realize that it was really André.
“And this is Stephen,” she said confusedly.
The men shook hands. Cicily kissed her prettily over the yellow lilies. Albert tore his eyes from his bride to smile happily, reassuringly at Jane. The clergyman slipped away to get into his vestments. Cicily was taking command of the situation.
“I’ll stand here near the windows,” she was saying gaily. “I want the children near me, Molly! And you, too, Mumsy!”
André was staring at Jane. She still felt he must be Mr. Duroy. Cicily slipped her arm around her waist.
“Have you heard from Aunt Isabel?” she asked. “Albert had a cable from Belle this noon. She was married yesterday to Billy Winter.” Her blue eyes, meeting Jane’s, were twinkling with tranquil amusement. “She wouldn’t let me get ahead of her! But isn’t it nice?”
The clergyman had returned. His vested figure looked strangely out of place in Flora’s drawing-room.
“Come, Dad!” cried Cicily. “You know your place by this time!”
The little company had gathered in an informal semicircle. Stephen looked very grim as he took his stand by Cicily. Ed Brown was beaming, in step-paternal solicitude, at the ardent young face of Albert. Robin Redbreast was clinging to Molly’s hand. Jane moved to put her arms around the twins. Little John Ward smiled happily up at her. André was covertly watching her, all the time, from his stand between Flora and Muriel. The Church of England clergyman opened his prayer book.
“Dearly beloved brethren,” he said, “we are met together in the sight of God and this company to join together this man and this woman—”
Jane turned her eyes from the flushed and radiant face of her recalcitrant daughter. She would not look at it. She could not look at it. This was worse than any wedding. This was worse than all the weddings. The measured tones of the clergyman’s voice recalled with frightful vividness the ceremony in her little Lakewood garden. Was she the only wedding guest, Jane wondered dumbly, that saw so plainly the pleasant, snub-nosed, twinkle-eyed ghost of Jack, standing at Cicily’s side?