Читать книгу My Friend Pasquale, and Other Stories - James Selwin Tait - Страница 3

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“Do you think it unlucky, then, to take off one’s wedding-ring?”

The inquiry sprang with a half-startled air of surprise and alarm from a pair of pretty half-parted lips, and still more eagerly from two heavily-fringed and expressive gray eyes.

“Yes, dear, very unlucky; you ought to leave it where your husband placed it; it is like undoing the ceremony to take it off.”

This most depressing reply was made with an air of conviction which greatly disturbed the fair questioner—the bride of a month—who had in a childish fit of restlessness removed her wedding-ring and was engaged testing the stupendousness of its avoirdupois on the coral tips of her dainty fingers.

Slowly, and as if it were something uncanny, the truant hoop was slipped back to its place, as the delicate flush on the young wife’s cheek deepened with the dawning consciousness of a hitherto unknown crime.

“I wish you would tell me why you think so, grandma,” was the somewhat timid rejoinder.

The elder lady’s busy hands had dropped on her knees, and her face wore the absent-minded expression which told that “her eyes were with her heart, and that was far away.”

The question was evidently unheard, and it was presently amended.

“Grandma, dear, has your wedding-ring never been off your finger since grandpa placed it there?”

The second question recalled the old lady’s wandering thoughts, and she replied with a falter in her voice which heightened the look of alarm on her grand-daughter’s face.

“Yes, dear, once.”

“Oh! did anything happen?”

“Yes, love, something which I will never forget as long as I live.”

As the elder lady spoke, the color faded slowly from the cheeks of the youthful bride, leaving the glowing eyes doubly dark by contrast with their pallor.

“Don’t you think that it is growing cold, grandma?”

This was said with a little shiver, and looking up, the latter recognized for the first time that her remarks had startled and alarmed her grand-daughter.

“Mind you, Alice,” she added hastily, “I do not mean to say that misfortune always follows, for of course a very great many people take off their wedding-rings sooner or later, apparently without any serious consequences, and I don’t think that anything really threatens the happiness of a married couple unless the ring is actually lost; still, my dear——”

The sound of a rapid, manly tread advancing on the arbor where the two were seated caused the bride to spring to her feet with a glad cry.

For a moment the husband caught a glimpse of a pair of swimming gray eyes with a world of woe reflected in their shadowy depths; the next a trembling pliant figure was nestling in his arms, and trying to explain amid tearful sobs about the bad luck coming to them both through the removal of the wedding-ring.

As soon as the astonished husband could frame an intelligible meaning out of the story, told with many interruptions of sobs and kisses and passionate hugs, he burst into a merry laugh.

“Why, you little silly!” he began, but his voice melted to a tenderness inarticulate in words, although mutually intelligible in love’s rich vocabulary.

“Dear, dear, dear! to think what a sweet little goose it is after all,” commenced the husband, after love’s exactions had been religiously complied with. “Why, I know ladies who are continually losing their wedding-rings. There is Mrs. North for instance——”

“O, George!!”

“Well,” resumed the husband a little confusedly, “I know, of course, that she and her husband do not get on very well together, but there are others. There is—let me see—but never mind—I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will take the ring off your finger myself and put it on again, then that will make everything just as it was,” and with this pleasing little sophistry both bride and groom were made happy once more.

As the youthful pair left the arbor, the old lady, whose loving heart was wont to grow young again as she contemplated the happiness of the others, softly rubbed the mists from her glasses as she said with a sigh, “O, I wish Alice had not taken off her wedding-ring!”