‘MARK WYLDER’
HOW MARK WYLDER’S DISAPPEARANCE AFFECTED HIS
FRIENDS.
Lady Chelford’s wrath was now turned anew upon
Wylder—and the inconvenience of having
no visible object on which to expend it was once more
painfully felt. Railing at Mark Wylder was, alas!
but beating the air. The most crushing invective
was—thanks to his adroit mystification—simply
a soliloquy. Poor Lady Chelford, who loved to
give the ingenious youngsters of both sexes, when
occasion invited, a piece of her mind, was here—in
the case of this vulgar and most provoking delinquent—absolutely
tongue-tied! If it had been possible to tell
Wylder what she thought of him it would, perhaps, have
made her more tolerable than she was for some days
after the arrival of that letter, to other members
of the family.
The idea of holding Miss Brandon to this engagement,
and proroguing her nuptials from day to day, to convenience
the bridegroom—absent without explanation—was
of course quite untenable. Fortunately, the marriage,
considering the antiquity and the territorial position
of the two families who were involved, was to have
been a very quiet affair indeed—no festivities—no
fire-works—nothing of the nature of a county
gala—no glare or thunder—no concussion
of society—a dignified but secluded marriage.
This divested the inevitable dissolution of these
high relations of a great deal of its eclat
and ridicule.
Of course there was abundance of talk. Scarce
a man or woman in the shire but had a theory or a
story—sometimes bearing hard on the lady,
sometimes on the gentleman; still it was an abstract
breach of promise, and would have much improved by
some outward and visible sign of disruption and disappointment.
Some concrete pageantries to be abolished and removed;
flag-staffs, for instance, and banners, marquees,
pyrotechnic machinery, and long tiers of rockets, festoons
of evergreens, triumphal arches with appropriate mottoes,
to come down and hide themselves away, would have
been pleasant to the many who like a joke, and to
the few, let us hope, who love a sneer.
But there were no such fopperies to hurry off the
stage disconcerted. In the autumnal sun, among
the embrowned and thinning foliage of the noble trees,
Brandon Hall looked solemn, sad and magnificent, as
usual, with a sort of retrospective serenity, buried
in old-world glories and sorrows, and heeding little
the follies and scandals of the hour.
In the same way Miss Brandon, with Lord and Lady Chelford,
was seen next Sunday, serene and unchanged, in the
great carved oak Brandon pew, raised like a dais two
feet at least above the level of mere Christians, who
frequented the family chapel. There, among old
Wylder and Brandon tombs—some painted stone
effigies of the period of Elizabeth and the first
James, and some much older—stone and marble
knights praying on their backs with their spurs on,
and said to have been removed nearly three hundred
years ago from the Abbey of Naunton Friars, when that
famous monastery began to lose its roof and turn into
a picturesque ruin, and by-gone generations of Wylders
and Brandons had offered up their conspicuous devotions,
with—judging from their heathen lives—I
fear no very remarkable efficacy.
