Evelina made an impatient movement. “Of course I ain’t forgotten it. On’y it ain’t enough. It would all have to go into buying furniture, and if he was took sick and lost his place again we wouldn’t have a cent left. He says he’s got to lay by another hundred dollars before he’ll be willing to take me out there.”
For a while Ann Eliza pondered this surprising statement; then she ventured: “Seems to me he might have thought of it before.”
In an instant Evelina was aflame. “I guess he knows what’s right as well as you or me. I’d sooner die than be a burden to him.”
Ann Eliza made no answer. The clutch of an unformulated doubt had checked the words on her lips. She had meant, on the day of her sister’s marriage, to give Evelina the other half of their common savings; but something warned her not to say so now.
The sisters undressed without farther words. After they had gone to bed, and the light had been put out, the sound of Evelina’s weeping came to Ann Eliza in the darkness, but she lay motionless on her own side of the bed, out of contact with her sister’s shaken body. Never had she felt so coldly remote from Evelina.
The hours of the night moved slowly, ticked off with wearisome insistence by the clock which had played so prominent a part in their lives. Evelina’s sobs still stirred the bed at gradually lengthening intervals, till at length Ann Eliza thought she slept. But with the dawn the eyes of the sisters met, and Ann Eliza’s courage failed her as she looked in Evelina’s face.
She sat up in bed and put out a pleading hand.
“Don’t cry so, dearie. Don’t.”
“Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” Evelina moaned.
Ann Eliza stroked her quivering shoulder. “Don’t, don’t,” she repeated. “If you take the other hundred, won’t that be enough? I always meant to give it to you. On’y I didn’t want to tell you till your wedding day.”
Chapter IX
Evelina’s marriage took place on the appointed day. It was celebrated in the evening, in the chantry of the church which the sisters attended, and after it was over the few guests who had been present repaired to the Bunner Sisters’ basement, where a wedding supper awaited them. Ann Eliza, aided by Miss Mellins and Mrs. Hawkins, and consciously supported by the sentimental interest of the whole street, had expended her utmost energy on the decoration of the shop and the back room. On the table a vase of white chrysanthemums stood between a dish of oranges and bananas and an iced wedding-cake wreathed with orange-blossoms of the bride’s own making. Autumn leaves studded with paper roses festooned the what- not and the chromo of the Rock of Ages, and a wreath of yellow immortelles was twined about the clock which Evelina revered as the mysterious agent of her happiness.
At the table sat Miss Mellins, profusely spangled and bangled, her head sewing-girl, a pale young thing who had helped with Evelina’s outfit, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, with Johnny, their eldest boy, and Mrs. Hochmuller and her daughter.
Mrs. Hochmuller’s large blonde personality seemed to pervade the room to the effacement of the less amply-proportioned guests. It was rendered more impressive by a dress of crimson poplin that stood out from her in organ-like folds; and Linda, whom Ann Eliza had remembered as an uncouth child with a sly look about the eyes, surprised her by a sudden blossoming into feminine grace such as sometimes follows on a gawky girlhood. The Hochmullers, in fact, struck the dominant note in the entertainment. Beside them Evelina, unusually pale in her grey cashmere and white bonnet, looked like a faintly washed sketch beside a brilliant chromo; and Mr. Ramy, doomed to the traditional insignificance of the bridegroom’s part, made no attempt to rise above his situation. Even Miss Mellins sparkled and jingled in vain in the shadow of Mrs. Hochmuller’s crimson bulk; and Ann Eliza, with a sense of vague foreboding, saw that the wedding feast centred about the two guests she had most wished to exclude from it. What was said or done while they all sat about the table she never afterward recalled: the long hours remained in her memory as a whirl of high colours and loud voices, from which the pale presence of Evelina now and then emerged like a drowned face on a sunset-dabbled sea.