Then at last Concha and Rory were running and ducking and laughing under a shower of rice, and rose leaves. They looked very young and frail, both of them, blown out into the world, where God knew what awaited them.
“They are like Paulo and Francesca—two leaves clinging together, blown by the wind,” said Jollypot dreamily to Teresa.
We have already likened a wedding to a fall of snow; and as rapidly as a fall of snow it melts, disclosing underneath it just such a dingy world.
One by one the motley company drifted off in trains, and motors, their exit producing on Teresa the same impression that she always got from the end of _Twelfth Night_—that of a troupe of fairy mimes, laden with their tiffany, their pasteboard yew hedges, their stucco peacocks, slowly sailing away in a cloud out of sight, while the clown whom they have forgotten, sits down here on the earth singing _the rain it raineth every day_.
But, in spite of a dismantled drawing-room, a billiard-table covered with presents, a trampled lawn and a furious Parker and Rudge, life quickly re-adjusted itself.
The next day but one there was a rose show in the county town, and Rudge went to see it.
After dinner, Dick had him summoned to the drawing-room to discuss the roses with himself and the Doña.
His leathery cheeks were flushed, his hard eyes shone: “Oh ... it was grand, ma’am. I was saying to Mrs. Rudge, ‘Well, I said, one doesn’t often see a sight like that!’ I said. There was a new white rose, sir, well, I’ve never seen anything to beat it....”
“And what about the _Daily Clarion_ rose?”
“Well, sir, a very fine rose, certainly, but I’m not sure if it would do with us ... but that white rose, sir, I said to Mrs. Rudge, ‘you could almost say it was like the moon,’ I said.”
And what was Time but a gigantic rose, shedding, one by one, its petals? And then Jollypot gathered them up and made them into _pot-pourri_; but still the petals went on falling, silently, ceaselessly.
That year there was a marvellous harvest, and by the end of July the sun had burned the wheat into the very quintessence of gold, and every evening for a few moments the reflection of its dying rays transfigured it into a vision, so glorious, so radiant, that Dick, looking up from his fish, would exclaim to the dinner-table, “Good God! Look at the wheat!”