Part 1 (2/2)
Immediately in the wake of the note arrived Dolly, in tears, and carrying a dressing-case.
”I have left mother!” she announced. ”And I have her car downstairs, and a clergyman in it, unless he has run away. He doesn't want to marry us, because he's afraid mother will stop supporting his flower mission. You get your hat and take me where he can marry us. No mother can talk about the man I love the way mother talked about you, and think I won't marry him the same day!”
Carter, with her mother's handwriting still red before his eyes, and his self-love shaken with rage flourished the letter.
”And no mother,” he shouted, ”can call ME a 'fortune-hunter' and a 'cradle-robber' and think I'll make good by marrying her daughter! Not until she BEGS me to!”
Dolly swept toward him like a summer storm. Her eyes were wet and flas.h.i.+ng. ”Until WHO begs you to?” she demanded. ”WHO are you marrying; mother or me?”
”If I marry you,” cried Carter, frightened but also greatly excited, ”your mother won't give you a penny!”
”And that,” taunted Dolly, perfectly aware that she was ridiculous, ”is why you won't marry me!”
For an instant, long enough to make her blush with shame and happiness, Carter grinned at her. ”Now, just for that,” he said, ”I won't kiss you, and I WILL marry you!” But, as a matter of fact, he DID kiss her. Then he gazed happily around his small sitting-room. ”Make yourself at home here,” he directed, ”while I pack my bag.”
”I MEAN to make myself very much at home here,” said Dolly joyfully, ”for the rest of my life.”
From the recesses of the flat Carter called: ”The rent's paid only till September. After that we live in a hall bedroom and cook on a gas-stove.
And that's no idle jest, either.”
Fearing the publicity of the City Hall license bureau, they released the clergyman, much to the relief of that gentleman, and told the chauffeur to drive across the State line into Connecticut.
”It's the last time we can borrow your mother's car,” said Carter, ”and we'd better make it go as far as we can.”
It was one of those days in May. Blue was the sky and suns.h.i.+ne was in the air, and in the park little girls from the tenements, in white, were playing they were queens. Dolly wanted to kidnap two of them for bridesmaids. In Harlem they stopped at a jeweler's shop, and Carter got out and bought a wedding-ring.
In the Bronx were dogwood blossoms and leaves of tender green and beds of tulips, and along the Boston Post Road, on their right, the Sound flashed in the sunlight; and on their left, gardens, lawns, and orchards ran with the road, and the apple trees were ma.s.ses of pink and white.
Whenever a car approached from the rear, Carter pretended it was Mrs.
Ingram coming to prevent the elopement, and Dolly clung to him. When the car had pa.s.sed, she forgot to stop clinging to him.
In Greenwich Village they procured a license, and a magistrate married them, and they were a little frightened and greatly happy and, they both discovered simultaneously, outrageously hungry. So they drove through Bedford Village to South Salem, and lunched at the Horse and Hounds Inn, on blue and white china, in the same room where Major Andre was once a prisoner. And they felt very sorry for Major Andre, and for everybody who had not been just married that morning. And after lunch they sat outside in the garden and fed lumps of sugar to a charming collie and cream to a fat gray cat.
They decided to start housekeeping in Carter's flat, and so turned back to New York, this time following the old coach road through North Castle to White Plains, across to Tarrytown, and along the bank of the Hudson into Riverside Drive. Millions and millions of friendly folk, chiefly nurse-maids and traffic policemen, waved to them, and for some reason smiled.
”The joke of it is,” declared Carter, ”they don't know! The most wonderful event of the century has just pa.s.sed into history. We are married, and n.o.body knows!”
But when the car drove away from in front of Carter's door, they saw on top of it two old shoes and a sign reading: ”We have just been married.”
While they had been at luncheon, the chauffeur had risen to the occasion.
”After all,” said Carter soothingly, ”he meant no harm. And it's the only thing about our wedding yet that seems legal.”
Three months later two very unhappy young people faced starvation in the sitting-room of Carter's flat. Gloom was written upon the countenance of each, and the heat and the care that comes when one desires to live, and lacks the wherewithal to fulfill that desire, had made them pallid and had drawn black lines under Dolly's eyes.
Mrs. Ingram had played her part exactly as her dearest friends had said she would. She had sent to Carter's flat, seven trunks filled with Dolly's clothes, eighteen hats, and another most unpleasant letter. In this, on the sole condition that Dolly would at once leave her husband, she offered to forgive and to support her.
To this Dolly composed eleven scornful answers, but finally decided that no answer at all was the most scornful.
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