“Thanks to an informal rehearsal some days before, the ceremony went off
without a hitch. The officiating clergy were the Venerable Archdeacon
Wealthy, D. D., assisted by the Rev. Josiah Golightly and other members
of the numerous staff of All Saints'. The service, which was fully
choral, was under the able direction of the well-known organist and
choirmaster, Mr. Carl Koenig, F. R. C. O., and the choir consisted
of twenty adult and forty boy voices. On the arrival of the bride a
procession was formed at the west entrance and proceeded up to the
chancel, singing 'The voice that breathed o'er Eden----”
“Poor Polly!” thought Glory.
“The bride wore a duchess satin gown trimmed with chiffon and Brussels
lace, and having a long train hung from the shoulders. Her tulle veil
was fastened with a ruby brooch and with sprays of orange blossom sent
specially from the Riviera, and her necklace consisted of a rope of
graduated pearls fully a yard long, and understood to have belonged to
the jewel case of Catharine of Russia. She carried a bouquet of flowers
(the gift of the bridegroom) brought from Florida, the American home
of her family. The bride's mother wore---- The bridesmaids were
dressed----Mr. Horatio Drake acted as best man----”
Glory drew her breath as with a spasm and threw down the newspaper. How
blind she had been, how vain, how foolish! She had told John Storm that
Drake was only a good friend to her, meaning him to understand that thus
far she allowed him to go and no farther. But there was a whole realm of
his life into which he did not ask her to enter. The “notable persons in
politics and society,” “the bridesmaids,” these made up his real sphere,
his serious scene. Other women were his friends, companions, equals,
intimates, and when he stood in the eye of the world it was they who
stood beside him. And she? She was his hobby. He came to her in his off
hours. She filled up the under side of his life.
With a crushing sense of humiliation she was folding up the newspaper
to send it downstairs when her eye was arrested by a paragraph in small
type in the corner. It was headed “Shocking occurrence at a fashionable
wedding.”
“Oh, good gracious!” she cried. A glance had shown her what it was. It
was a report of Polly's suicide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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