“I’m sorry, Father. I apologize.”
George Lockwood carried his father’s lie back to Theron Wynne, who could be counted on to relay it to Tom Wynne; and such candor on George’s part, which implicitly included candor on the part of Abraham Lockwood, effectively disarmed Tom Wynne. He withdrew his objections to the marriage, and gained a new respect for the Lockwoods. At his insistence (over no strong protests by Theron and Bessie Wynne) the wedding took place at Lake Wynne, and it was a tremendous social event. Not a man in the entire coal industry of the rank of superintendent and above was left off the invitation list, regardless of corporate affiliation. Coal men, railroad men, lumber and powder men, financial men and lawyers, the higher Protestant clergy, two Protestant bishops, one Roman Catholic bishop and two of the monsignori, the governor of the Commonwealth, three state senators and one United States senator, were among the men on Tom Wynne’s list. It was tacitly understood that this might be the last opportunity to pay homage to Tom Wynne during his lifetime, and the invitations had the force of a command. On the evening before the wedding there were nine private or chartered Pullman cars in the yards near Lake Wynne, and on the day of the wedding all Wynne workmen, from breaker-boys to colliery superintendents, were given the day off with pay. Nothing to compare with it had ever been seen in the coal region, and Tom Wynne was making certain that any future social event would have Agnes Wynne’s wedding to contend with. It was somewhat confusing to the guests on the Lockwood family list to discover, individually, that the elderly, square-jawed, iron-faced gentleman who greeted everyone was not Theron Wynne, the bride’s father; but they quickly found out what was what and who was who. If the bride’s father could not afford such a display, at least he, or his daughter, stood in well enough with the money branch, and that was the next best thing.
“Do you wish we were being married in the church in Hilltop, without all this fuss?” said George Lockwood the day before the wedding.
“Truthfully, no. He has all that money, Cousin Tom, and all the fuss doesn’t bother me. I feel as thought I were just going to a big wedding, instead of being the bride.”
“You don’t feel like a bride?”
“No. Tomorrow I will, I’ll have to act the part and I’m not very good at acting. He’ll want me to be pretty, and modest, all the things the bride should be. But all this other business might as well be happening to someone else. How do you feel?”
“Probably like your father must feel. That we have to be here, but only out of courtesy. Not to you, but to your cousin. The one that’s most pleased, next to Mr. Wynne, is my father. He and my mother had a big wedding, too, for those tunes.”
“I wish your mother could have been here.”
“Yes,” said George Lockwood, but in truth he had not previously given any thought to his mother.
The Presbyterian Wynnes and the Lutheran Lockwoods agreed that the only nearby churches—the Methodist of the Welsh and the Roman Catholic of the Irish—were not suitable, and Tom Wynne’s wish to have the religious ceremony in his house was complied with more or less automatically. The decision limited the number of persons who could attend the ceremony, but in Tom Wynne’s words, it meant fewer weeping women. It also restricted the number of young people in the bridal party, a fact which Abraham Lockwood did not find to his liking. “I wish you could have had more ushers,” he told his son.
“Why? Four’s enough, with Pen.”
“Oh, it’s nice to have a lot of ushers,” said Abraham Lockwood, thinking of the Lockwood Concern.
“Why?” said George Lockwood. “It’d be different if it were a big church wedding, but with so few at the ceremony it’d be ostentatious of me to surround myself with ten or fifteen friends of mine.”
“Ostentatious. You are quite right,” said Abraham Lockwood. The boy pleased him; he was that much more alert to the rules of good form, thus already habituated to one of the essentials of the Concern.
The bride and groom marched and stood and waltzed through the ceremonies, religious and secular; briefly touching and being touched by a thousand men and women; saying a word, uttering a name, smiling when they did not know or could not remember a face in the brigade of guests. Late in the reception there was a shower of rain, and in the confusion of guests hurrying from tent to tent, George and Agnes Lockwood sneaked up to the mansion and changed into their traveling clothes. Inexplicably the cry, “They’re leaving,” went around and became a solid chorus, and the crowd pushed inside the mansion and blocked the main stairway. Standing on the first landing, Agnes looked down at the crowd and then in dismay at George.
“They’ll let us through, don’t worry,” he said.
“Where’s your bouquet? You haven’t thrown your bouquet!” someone called to her.
“I don’t know what I did with it,” said Agnes to her husband.
“Never mind,” he said, and then, to the crowd: “Will you let us through, please?”
“Your bouquet! Your bouquet!” It became a chant, and now for the first time Agnes lost her poise. The mass of humanity, the half but only half humorous demand for her bouquet, and then, at the far edge of the crowd, the sight of her father helpless to reach her to say goodbye—were all too much for her. “I’m frightened,” she said to her husband, and seized his arm.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” he said, roughly. “They’ll throw a little rice, that’s all.”
“I can’t go down these stairs. I can’t move. Take me around the back stairs,” she said. “Please!”
“Oh, Christ. All right.”
A Brewster landau with a pair of cobs and Tom Wynne’s coach-maa on the box was waiting as a decoy at the foot of the porch steps. Its purpose was to mislead the guests while the bride and groom slipped out a side door and eluded the more exuberant merrymakers by riding off in a mule-drawn ambulance.
“We can go out the kitchen door and make a run for it,” said George Lockwood.
The maneuver was successful, and the bride and groom drove away unnoticed while the clamor continued inside the mansion and on the porch and lawn. They sat on folded blankets inside the meat-wagon, as the miners called it, and the mules proceeded at a dainty trot to the railway siding. It was about three miles from the mansion to the waiting locomotive and coach that would take them to Mauch Chunk. Agnes was still shaking and out of breath when they reached the siding.
“Now don’t have hysterics,” said George Lockwood.
“That’s what I’ve been fighting. I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to say a word.”
“That’s all right. Just try to calm down.”
They were alone in the coach. “Nobody’s going to bother you now,” said George Lockwood. “We’ll be at Mauch Chunk in plenty of time for the New York train, and nobody’s going to know us. We’ll be in New York City before eleven o’clock.”
Once aboard the New York train Agnes Wynne Lockwood relaxed with an audible sigh. “Everything went well right up to the end, and then something happened to me. I did everything wrong. I never said goodbye to Cousin Tom. I didn’t throw my bouquet, and Ruth Hagenbeck was so counting on it. And then those people packed in there, and poor Father. You didn’t see him, did you?”