"
The service was followed by the conventional wedding-breakfast; the
congratulations of friends, and the rattling away of the bridal-carriage
to the "hurrahing" of the servants and the villagers; and the
_tin-tin-tabula_ of the wedding-peals. Before four o'clock the last
guest had departed, and the squire stood with his wife and Charlotte
weary and disconsolate amid the remains of the feast and the dying
flowers; all of them distinctly sensitive to that mournful air which
accomplished pleasures leave behind them.
The squire could say nothing to dispel it. He took his rod as an excuse
for solitude, and went off to the fells. Mrs. Sandal was crying with
exhaustion, and was easily persuaded to go to her room, and sleep. Then
Charlotte called the servants, men and women, and removed every trace of
the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extravagant. She set the
simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the
worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment
were over for ever; and that his life was to fall back into a calm,
regular, economical groove.
He drank his tea and smoked his pipe to this sense, and was happier than
he had been for many a week.
"It is a middling good thing, Alice," he said, "that we have only one
more daughter to marry. I should think a matter of three or four would
ruin or kill a man, let alone a mother.
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