Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; City and town life -- Fiction
There was nothing indefinite about Bingham, thought poor Brower; there
was no doubt as to where _he_ would continue to exist. "You mean to say
it isn't decided yet where they are going to live?" Brewer's inquiry was
prompted by civility rather than by interest. It was the first
observation of any length that he had made for some time. Jane, who had
been straining her ears during the last ten minutes for the mere sound of
his voice, leaned back in her chair with an approximate comfort.
"I don't know, just exactly," replied Marshall, rather dismally. His tone
made him say that he did not know at all. "I've talked with Rosy and I've
talked with Arthur...." He lapsed into a comfortless silence, and ran his
thin old hand over his blanched and furrowed forehead.
"When are they going to be married?" asked Brower. His eyes were on the
bay-window, through whose curtains there showed the face of Bingham, his
own look anxiously fixed on Marshall.
Jane caught indistinctly the muffled tone of these few syllables.
She made them mean a dozen different things and finally nothing at all,
but she was glad of the opportunity to do even that.
"In a month," answered Marshall; "early in October. Rosy lays great
stress on an October wedding--that's the only right sort, it seems." He
sighed with a full sense of the imminence of the inevitable. The voice of
Bingham came with a slow, deep gravity from the bay-window, and Jane's
voice, responding, mingled nervously with her father's sigh.
"Not from the new house?" said Brower.
"Hardly. It will be almost finished, but far from furnished. Perhaps they
will have their receptions there, if they decide to--to come back."
"Come back?" Brower spoke up loudly; a jangling freight train had paused
opposite, and the locomotive was blowing off steam.
"To America," the old man explained. He laid his hands to his temples.
"Do you sleep well?"
"Always."
"Rosy thinks the new house ought to be hurried more. But why should she
object to being married from the old house she was born in? Most girls
would be pleased with such a thought as that." He placed his hand over
his weary old eyes. "You do, do you--always? I don't; I can't. These
trains--they keep me awake. I slept hardly half an hour last night, and
none at all the night before. Do you know anything about chloral?"
The voice of Bingham came to a pause, and that of Jane was presently
distinguished in response--trembling, apprehensive, lapsing away into
little breaks and pauses.
"I know it's dangerous," replied Brower. "And morphine, too. And all such
things; they're not to be used except in the last extremity. So they are
going to England for their wedding-trip, then?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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