The bows of the violinists all rose together, fell together, and they swept into the waltz from Romeo and Juliet.
They stood facing one another for a moment, he and she, in the usual formal preliminary. Then she bent to pick up the loop of her furbelowed dress, he opened his arms, and she stepped into his embrace.
The waltz began, the swiftest of all paired dances. Around and around and around, then reversing, and around and around once more, the new way. The tables and the faces swept around them, as if they were standing still in the middle of a whirlpool, and the gaslights flashed by on the walls and ceilings like comets.
She held her neck arched, her head slightly back, looking straight upward into his eyes, as if to say "I am in your hands. Do with me as you will. Where you go, I will go. Where you turn, I will follow."
"Are you happy, Julia?"
"Doesn't my face tell you ?"
"Do you regret coming down to New Orleans now?"
"Is there any other place but New Orleans now ?" she asked with charming intensity.
Around and around and around; alone together, though there was a flurry of other skirts all around them.
"Our life together is going to be like this waltz, Julia. As sleek, as smooth, as harmonious. Never a wrong turn, never a jarring note. Together as close as this. One mind, one heart, one body."
"A waltz for life," she whispered raptly. "A waltz with wings. A waltz never ending. A waltz in the sunlight, a waltz in azure, in gold--and in spotless white."
She closed her eyes, as if in ecstasy.
"Here's the side way out. And no one's watching."
They came to a deft, toe-gliding halt, such as skaters use. They separated, and gave a quick look over at the oblivious wedding party table, half-screened from them by the dancers in between. Then he guided her before him, around palms, and a bronze statuette of a nymph, and a fluted column, out of the main dining room and into a scullery passage, redolent of steamy food and loud with unseen voices somewhere near at hand. She giggled as a small cat, coming their way, stopped to eye them amazed.
He took her by the hand now, and took the lead, and drew her after him, on quick-running joyous little steps, out to an outside alleyway that ran beside the building. And from here they emerged to the street at last. He threw up his arm at a carriage, and a moment later was sitting beside her in it, his arm protectively about her.
"St. Louis Street," he ordered proudly. "I'll show you where to stop."
And as the bells of St. Louis Cathedral near by began their slow tolling of midnight, Louis Durand and his bride drove rapidly away toward their new home.
6
The house was empty, waiting. Waiting to begin its history, which, for a house, is that of its occupants. Oil lamps had been left lighted, one to a room, by someone, most likely Aunt Sarah, before leaving, their little beaded flames, safe within glass chimneys, winking just high enough to disperse the darkness and cast an amber glow. The same blend of wood shavings, paint, and putty, spiced with a dash of floor varnish, was still in evidence, but to a far lesser degree now, for carpets had been laid over the raw floors, drapes hung athwart the window casings.
Someone had brought flowers into the parlor, not costly store flowers but wildflowers, cheery, colorful, winning nonetheless; a generous spray of them smothering a widemouthed bowl set on the parlor center table, with spears of pussywillow sticking out all over like the quills of a hedgehog's back.
A clock had even been wound up and started on its course, a new clock on the mantelpiece, imported from France, its face set in a block of green onyx, a little bronze cupid with moth wings clambering up a chain of bronze roses at each side of its centerpiece. Its diligent, newly practised ticking added a note of reassuring, homely tranquility to what otherwise would have been a stony-cold silence.
Everything was ready, all that was lacking were the dwellers.
A house, waiting for a man and his wife to come and claim it.
The resonant, cuplike sound of a horse's hoofs drew near in the stillness outside, came to a halt on a double down-beat. Axles creaked with a shift of weight, then settled again. A human tongue clucked professionally, then the hoofs recommenced, thinned away into silence once more.
There was a slight scrape of leather on paving stone, a mischievous little whisper, like a secret told by one foot to another.
A moment afterward a key turned in the outside of the door.
They stood there revealed in the opening, Durand and she. Limned amber by the light before them in the house, framed by a panel of night sky sanded with stars behind them and over their heads. They were motionless, as oblivious of what lay before them as of what lay behind them. Face turned to meet face, his arms about her, her hands on his shoulders.
Nothing moved, neither they nor the stars at their back nor the open-doored house waiting to receive them. It was one of those moments never to be captured again. The kiss at the threshold of marriage.
It ended. A moment cannot last beyond itself. They stirred at last and drew apart, and he said softly: "Welcome to your new home, Mrs. Durand. May you find as much happiness here as you bring to it."
"Thank you," she murmured, eyes downcast. for a second. "And may you as well."
He lifted her bodily in his arms. She came clear of the ground with a little foamy rustle of skirt bottoms. Moving sideward so that his shoulder might ward off the loose-swinging door, he carried her over the sill and in. Then dipped again and set her back on her feet, in a little froth of lacy hems.
He stepped aside, closed the door, and bolted it.
She was looking around, standing in one place but moving her body in a half-circle from there, to take in everything.
"Like it?" he asked.
He went to a lamp, turned the little wheel, heightening its flame to a yellow stalagmite. Then to another, and another, wherever they had been left. The walls brightened from dull ivory to purest white. The newness of everything became doubly conspicuous.
"Like it?" he beamed, as though the reward for it all lay in hearing her say that.
Her hands were clasped, and elevated upward to height of her face; held that way in a sort of stylized rhapsody.
"Oh, Louis," she breathed. "It's ideal. It's exquisite."
"It's yours," he said, and the way he dropped his voice showed the gratitude he felt at her appreciation.
She moved her hands out to one side of her face now, still clasped, and nestled her cheek against them slantwise. Then across to the other side, and repeated it there.
"Oh, Louis," was all she seemed capable of saying. "Oh, Louis."
They moved around then on a brief tour, from room to room, and he showed her the parlor, the dining room, the others. And for each room she had an expiring "Oh, Louis," until at last, it seemed, breath had left her altogether, and she could only sigh "Oh."
They came back to the hall at last, and he said somewhat diffidently that he would lock up.
"Will you be able to find our room ?" he added, as she turned toward the stairs. "Or shall I come up with you?"
She dropped her eyes for a moment before his. "I think I shall know it," she said chastely.
He placed one of the smaller lamps in her hands. "Better take this with you to make sure. She probably left lights up there, but she may not have."
With the light brought close to her like that, raying upward into her face from the glowing core held at about the height of her heart, there was to him something madonna-like about her countenance. She was like some inexpressibly beautiful image in an old cathedral of Europe come to life before the eyes of a single devotee, rewarded for his faith. A miracle of love.
She rose a step. She rose another. An angel leaving the earthly plane, but turned backward in regretful farewell.