Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 561 pages of information about Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete.

Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 561 pages of information about Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete.
much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it.  He knew that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them.  With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.  Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

“That is all?” he asked of the spectral sacristan.

“That is all,” the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something handsome.

“No, no,” said Stoller, detecting his gesture.  “Your money a’n’t good.”

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.  In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered a sad “Danke.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

“Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

“Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamy entreated.

“Well,” she consented, and she added, “If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence:  some men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand.  He came back directly, saying, “No, he didn’t find it.”

She laughed, and held both gloves up.  “No wonder!  I had it all the time.  Thank you ever so much.”

“How are we going to ride back?” asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably.  No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, “Oh, I think the way we came, is best.”

“Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at Pupp’s, “think I was going to let him drive back with Agatha?”

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Project Gutenberg
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.