Hasty Wedding
Authors: Mignon G. Eberhart
Mignon G. Eberhart
A MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM BOOK
To
ALAN
Who still listens
CHAPTER 1
H
ER OWN IMAGE ADVANCED
and retreated in the distant pier glass.
“Slower,” said Sophie. “Stop…Now turn again.”
“This way, if you please, Miss Whipple,” said the fitter.
That was in March.
In January Dorcas Whipple, with her mother and Sophie in Miami Beach, was all but engaged to Ronald. In February her mother roused to the state of affairs, came home to Chicago and rallied all her cohorts. On March eleventh Dorcas stood before the mirror and looked at herself in her wedding gown, mistily through the white veil, and the image it gave back to her was unreal and ethereal in quality—as Dorcas herself was not.
It was the final and last fitting. The wedding was at noon the next day and the man she was marrying was not Ronald Drew.
She hadn’t been really desperately unhappy, she thought, listening absently to the fitter and Sophie, who were rapidly reaching a point of agreement.
She had defended Ronald hotly all the way through the thing; had fought for him with increased zeal because they were all against him. Had given in finally because the proofs had to be admitted, because she could not fight against her mother’s weapons, because after all, as was pointed out to her, she was twenty-four, she had known the man she was to marry all her life, it was an eminently suitable marriage and it was time she married and took over her rightful responsibilities.
What Cary Whipple hadn’t said was that she wanted her daughter to be married and settled before she died but it didn’t need saying, for Cary’s gentleness and semi-invalidism said it for her. Only once had she come near bringing her strongest weapon into use and that was when she looked at Dorcas with her soft blue eyes and said: “I’m stronger than I look, my dear. I wouldn’t want you to hurry into marriage simply because it would be a satisfaction to me—it may be years yet.”
She had said no more. But it had actually, Dorcas supposed, decided the thing.
But even after her engagement had been announced Dorcas had to admit in all honesty she was not really terribly unhappy. Not, at least, until—well, when had thoughts of Ronald begun to haunt her so constantly? Just lately? When the marriage was, all at once, so near and so completely inevitable?
She looked at the slender white figure in the huge old pier glass and it seemed to look back at her enigmatically through the white veil. It was as if that distant reflection knew things Dorcas did not know—things about Dorcas Whipple, who was so soon to be Dorcas Locke.
Had she been, she wondered, quite fair to Ronald? The fitter murmured to Sophie.
“Turn again, will you, Dorcas?” said Sophie. “That back panel …”
Dorcas pivoted. The mysterious image in the mirror vanished. Opposite her now were windows and a leaden sky and bare, wet brown trees.
It was a dark, gusty day with a raw wind off the lake.
All the way home from rehearsal at St Chrystofer’s it had blown fine mist against the windows of the car and along the Drive you could see great, slate-gray waves breaking savagely in white foam against the breakwater. Dorcas had pulled her fur coat tighter about her throat and thought with incredulity of January; hot white sand, golden sun, blue sky and Ronald. They had danced such a lot, she had remembered suddenly, during those dark, tropical nights and Ronald danced as smoothly and gracefully as one of the professional adagio dancers they so often saw together at the casino.
There had been a hundred things to see to at the rehearsal; luckily all arrangements for the wedding had passed through Sophie’s capable, lovely hands. Dorcas had been preoccupied with walking with suitably measured tread down the dim church aisle and toward the altar. The bridesmaids had worn their yellow gowns and Dorcas herself, in her plain blue wool street dress had looked, she felt, remarkably unbride-like. And had felt, meeting Jevan Locke before that untenanted altar, suddenly a little frightened, as if, till that moment, she hadn’t comprehended the thing she was undertaking. It had made her silent; very cool and sober.
Sally Notten had ruffled her yellow chiffon train and pouted. “Dorcas is as cool as if she’d been married a dozen times. I’m lots more excited than she is right now,” and had looked appealingly at Jevan, who only laughed.
Then there had been photographers; were to be, the next morning, more photographers. Sophie’s account of the wedding, with all the names clearly and accurately typed, was already in the hands of the city’s society editors.
All the way home through the fine, slanting rain and wind and cold Dorcas had thought of Ronald and had fought an increasing sense of panic.
It had become more and more poignant, so by the time they had turned off the South Shore Drive and wound through a gray, desolate park and reached at last, after passing glimpses of a storm-shrouded Midway, their own street, Dorcas was oddly apprehensive. Almost as if some climax, some crisis of which she had been up till then unaware, now threatened her.
They had reached the Whipple house and the car had turned in at the drive.
It was a large, ugly house built long before the North Shore became fashionable and Pennyforth Whipple had remained there along with a few others during the rapid hegira northward of the war period. During the 1920s his widow did not dream of selling the house as so many others did. It was built of red brick, huge and solid, with plate-glass windows and a black slate roof and somber chimneys hovering above it; there was a great deal of wood used in its wide ornamented doors and stairways and the cavernous central hall was paneled in wood. The rooms were large and high ceilinged and there were a great many of them. Pennyforth Whipple must have had a large and increasing family in mind when he built the house and married a young wife, but there was only Dorcas and Cary’s semi-invalidism which made her in many ways so like another child to her elderly husband. Yet Cary had been thirty, fragile, and appealing in her gentle fragility, when Dorcas was born. She was now fifty-four and still rather childish and still fragile and gentle. Her eyes had faded a little; her hair was a softly waved gray; her fine skin looked a little powdery and very soft where it had lost some of its firmness. Her small hands, usually jeweled, showed blue veins; her mouth had changed a little in shape where she wore an artificial denture. Otherwise, since the years had treated her kindly, she looked very much as she had looked when Pennyforth Whipple was alive.
People always indulged Cary; always took care of her. Even her money had been left to her as an allowance from Dorcas’ fortune in order to protect her. It was a large allowance, fifteen hundred a month, out of which she paid only for her own clothing and charities, gifts and theater tickets. All the household expenses—for the Chicago home and for the Lake Geneva summer place—all the travel expenses, all the taxes and incidentals were paid out of the bulk of her husband’s money, which was left in trusteeship for Dorcas.
It had been Pennyforth Whipple’s way of protecting Cary against fortune hunters and at the same time of insuring her comfort. It was a wise provision and it relieved Cary of responsibility for a really sizable fortune which thus belonged unconditionally to Dorcas—or would belong to her unconditionally as soon as she married, when the trusteeship would automatically dissolve. That, Dorcas thought dryly, was one of their reasons for wanting her to marry Jevan. He could manage the money. But Ronald hadn’t been, as they had openly said at the last, a fortune hunter.
Ronald.
The car had rolled gently under the ornamented porte-cochere and stopped. Rain had whirled gustily against her cheeks as she followed her mother in at the side door.
It had then been about five o’clock and growing dark, so that lights were on here and there.
They had gone along the side hall, past the door of the room that had been Penn Whipple’s study and into the main hall, its marquetry floors spacious and darkly glistening where they were not covered with long, thin oriental rugs. There was a bronze boy holding a flowered lamp at the stairway. There was a marble head of a woman—Dorcas had never known just what woman—in a niche beside the door. It was all, probably, in bad taste but it was splendidly, robustly Victorian and achieved a kind of harmony. Cary would have changed nothing. When it was built and furnished it was considered one of the most elegant homes in Chicago. It had, all of it, suited Pennyforth Whipple and the period when it was built and nothing in the Whipple house ever wore out, thus why should it be replaced?
Since Pennyforth Whipple’s death the house had been closed a great deal, for Cary and Dorcas, and usually Sophie, traveled; stopped here and there for Dorcas to go to school, traveled again. They came back at intervals and opened the Chicago house and renewed their social connections. There had been no question but that the wedding should take place there, for Chicago was home. Their dearest, oldest ties were in Chicago. Their best and oldest friends.
A middle-aged maid with a full skirt which came exactly to her ankles had taken Dorcas’ coat and told her the wedding dress was ready for the last fitting. It was Sophie who had been dissatisfied with the fit of the sheathlike white satin gown; Sophie who had insisted on a last alteration. Sophie had a flair for clothes; she often took things Dorcas had used, dresses that had proved to be unbecoming, chiffons that had been worn a few times, and made them over for herself and did it, with a little help for the fittings, expertly, because she so loved clothes.