"Miss Julia?" he invited.
This was the moment of ultimate romance, its quintessence. The betrothal.
She shifted her parasol to the opposite shoulder. Her hand curled about his arm like a friendly sun-warmed tendril. She gathered up the bottom of her skirt to reticent walking-level.
"Mr. Durand," she accepted, addressing him by surname only, in keeping with the seemly propriety of the still-unmarried young woman that made her drop her eyes fetchingly at the same time.
4
The interior of the Dryades German Methodist Church at sundown. Fulminating orange haze from without blurring its leaded windows into swollen shapelessness; its arched apse disappearing upward into cobwebby blue twilight. Grave, peaceful, empty but for five persons.
Five persons gathered in a solemn little conclave about the pulpit. Four facing it, the fifth occupying it. Four silent, the fifth speaking low. The first two of the four, side by side; the second two flanking them. Outside, barely audible, as if filtered through a heavy screen, the sounds of the city, muffled, dreamy, faraway. The occasional clop of a horse's hoof on cobbles, the creaking protest of a sharply curving wheel, the voice of an itinerant hawker crying his wares, the bark of a dog.
Inside, stately phrases of the marriage service, echoing serenely in the spacious stillness. The Reverend Edward A. Clay the officiant, Louis Durand and Julia Russell the principals. Allan Jardine and Sophie Tadoussac, housekeeper to the Reverend Clay, the witnesses.
"And do you, Julia Russell, take this man, Louis Durand, to be your lawful wedded husband--
"To cleave to, forsaking all others--
"To love, honor and obey--
"For better or for worse--
"For richer or for poorer--
"In sickness and in health--
"Until death do ye part?"
Silence.
Then like a tiny bell, no bigger than a thimble in all the vastness of that church, but clear and silver-pure--
"I do."
"Now the ring, please. Place it upon the bride's finger."
Durand reaches behind him. Jardine produces it, puts it in his blindly questing hand. Durand brings it to the tapered point of her finger.
There is a momentary awkwardness. Her finger measurement was taken by a string, knotted at the proper place and sent enclosed in a letter. But there must have been an error, either in the knotting or on the jeweler's part. It balks, won't go on.
He tried a second, a third time, clasping her hand tighter. Still it resists.
Quickly she flicks her finger past her lips, returns it to him, edge moistened. The ring goes on, ebbs down it now to base.
"I now pronounce you man and wife."
Then, with a professional smile to encourage the age-old shyness of lovers when on public view, for the greater the secret love, the greater the public shyness: "You may kiss the bride."
Their faces turn slowly toward one another. Their eyes meet. Their heads draw together. The lips of Louis Durand blend with those of Julia, his wife, in sacramental pledge.
5
Antoine's, rushing all alight toward its nightly rendezvous with midnight;' glittering, glowing, mirrored; crowded with celebrants, singing with laughter, sizzling with champagne; sparkling with half -athousand jeweled gas flames all over its ceilings and walls, in bowers of crystal; the gayest and best-known restaurant on this side of the ocean; the soul of Paris springing enchanted from the Delta mud.
The wedding table stretched lengthwise along one entire side of it, the guests occupying one side only, so that the outer side might be left clear for their view of the rest of the room--and the rest of the room's view of them.
It was by now eleven and after, a disheveled mass of tortured napkins, sprawled flowers, glassware tinged with repeated refills of red wines and white; champagne and kirsch and little upright thimbles of benedictine for the ladies, no two alike at the same level of consumption. And in the center, dominating the table, a miracle of a cake, snow-white, sugar-spun, rising tier upon tier; badly eaten away by erosion now, so that one entire side was gone. But atop its highest pinnacle, still preserved intact, a little bride and groom in doll form, he in a thumbnail suit of black broadcloth, she with a wisp of tulle streaming from her head.
And opposite them, the two originals, in life-size; sitting shoulder pressed to shoulder, hands secretively clasped below the table, listening to some long-winded speech of eulogy. His head still held upright in polite pretense at attention; her head nestled dreamy-eyed against his shoulder.
He was in suitable evening garb now, and a quick trip to a dressshop (first at her mention, but then at his insistence) before coming on here had changed her from her costume of arrival to a glorious creation of shimmering white satin, gardenias in her hair and at her throat. On the third finger of her left hand the new gold weddingband; on the fourth, a solitaire diamond, a husband's wedding gift to his wife, token of an engagement contract fulifiled rather than of one entered into before the event.
And her eyes, like any new wearer's, stray over and over to these new adornments. But whether they go more often to the third finger or to the fourth, who is to detect and who is to say?
Flowers, wine, friendly laughing faces, toasts and wishes of wellbeing. The beginning of two lives. Or rather, the ending of two, the beginning of one.
"Shall we slip away now ?" he whispers to her. "It's getting on to twelve."
"Yes. One more dance together first. Ask them to play again. And then we'll lose ourselves, without coming back to the table."
"As soon as Allan finishes speaking," he assents. "If he's ever going to."
Allan Jardine, his business partner, has become so involved in the mazes of a congratulatory speech that he cannot seem to find his way out of it again. It has been going on for ten minutes; ten minutes that seem like forty.
Jardine's wife, sitting beside him, and present only because of an unguessed but very strenuous domestic tug-of-war, has a dour, disapproving look on her face. Disapproving something, but doing her best to seem amiable, for the sake of her own husband's business interests. Disapproving the good looks of the bride, or her youth, or perhaps the unorthodox circumstances of the preceding courtship. Or perhaps the fact that Durand has married at all, after having waited so many years already, without waiting a few years more for her own underage daughter to grow up. A favorite project which even her own husband has had no inkling of so far. And now will never have.
Durand took out a small card, wrote on it "Play another waltz." Then he folded a currency note around it, motioned to a waiter, handed it to him to be taken to the musicians.
Jardine's wife was surreptitiously tugging at the hem of his coat now, to get him to bring his oration to a conclusion.
"Allan," she hissed. "Enough is enough. This is a wedding-supper, not a rally."
"I'm nearly through," he promised in an aside.
"You're through now," was the edict, delivered with a guillotinelike sweep of her hand.
"And so I give you the two newest apprentices to this great and happy profession of marriage. Julia (May I?" with a bow toward her) "and Louis."
Glasses went up, down again. Jardine at last sat down, mopping his brow. His wife, for her part, fanned herself by hand, holding her mouth open as she did so, as if to get rid of a bad taste.
A chord of music sounded.
Durand and Julia rose; their alacrity would have been highly uncomplimentary if it had not been so understandable.
"Excuse us, we want to dance this together."
And Durand solemnly winked at Jardine, to show him that he must not expect to see them back at their places again.
A fact which Jardine immediately imparted to his wife behind the back of his hand the moment they had left the table. Whereupon she seemed to disapprove that, too, in addition to everything else that she already disapproved about this affair, and took a prudish, astringent sip from her wineglass with a puckered mouth.