All Story Magazine, December 1913 — page 135: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LOVE GOES “Observe the anxiety into which your wild words have thrown Tomasz —good Tomasz, who is to be your hus- band. Your outcry awoke us from sound sleep.” Vera stared dully down at her limbs and saw indeed the bridal dress, rumpled from her tossing about on the bed. Through the open door she noted that the oaken trestle still bore the re- mains of the wedding feast. Her senses reeled unsteadily, and she passed shaking hands slowly across her clam- nry forehead five or six times. *“ But, but—” she whispered. Sense was gradually coming back into her eyes. The old woman soothed her as one would an infant. Tomasz secured one of her hands and stroked it tenderly. He kissed it and said: *“T love you, Vera.” Red blood coursed through the girl’s veins again, and, pushing aside the watchers, she slid shakily to the floor. A sense of peace embalmed her soul, and she let Tomasz draw her slowly into the strong security of his embrace. ““T am so tired, dear Tomasz,” she sighed, “but I am ready to go now to Father Ivan, if you are. I am glad that it was only a dream.” Then everybody clapped their hands. “ This is as it should be!” they cried. “Let us be off! Hurry, good wife; come, brothers! Hey for the bride's candles and old Father Ivan!” So the wedding procession was formed and, with bright holiday rib- bons flaunting, the little company took the road to Scurocz. Most of the men walked, striding along in time to the music of an un- kempt fiddler who pranced in their lead. Occasionally they would burst into powerful, chesty song—plaintive folk- strains about the goodliness of hus- bandry or of the lusty sons that come to cheer declining years. The women of the cortége either rode bareback, astraddle of the shagg ponies, or sat up very prim and stiff in BLINDLY. 845 unaccustomed bodice lacings in the bullock-carts. Vera sat deep in the straw-bedded bottom of one of these with her mother, her two buxom sisters, and cousin Olga from Obtrusk, while Tomasz walked steadily alongside, his one hand on the edge of the cart and his eyes fixed on those of his betrothed. When their glances met, rosy blood would suffuse the girl’s face and neck and tingle down to her finger-tips. Her heart beat fast and irregularly through- out that long, jolting ride. All Scurocz turned out to welcome the bridal party with huzzas and the throwing of millet seeds, which is ac- counted a propitious thing in those parts. Decrepit Father Ivan met them, watery-eyed and vacuous-faced, in the doorway of the weatherbeaten little church, As they passed—two by two, each man ahold of his woman’s hand—be- neath the dingy gilt Greek cross above the doorway, all bobbed their heads and took on a solemn expression of face. High mass was celebrated, and the formule gone through that made one flesh of man and maid, even as the patriarchs had decreed those things centuries ago in the days of the great _schism. The names of ‘Tomasz and of Vera, his wife, were laboriously inscribed upon the parish register, and Father Ivan blessed them with the fervor of one to whom much largess had been promised. With the drone of the benediction in her ears and the ecstatic grip of her husband’s fingers on her hand, Vera’s thoughts strayed out over the eddies of candle-smoke on the altar and the bowed heads of her kneeling relatives. “A dream—they assured me that it was all but a dream,” she kept telling herself. “‘ dve Maria. Ave Maria. Yes, yes, it must have been a dream.” The wild music of the fiddler broke out again beyond the doorway; feet shuffled as the assemblage got stiffly on comicloooks.com