A WEDDING TRIP
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A WEDDING TRIP
BY
EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN
TRANSLATED BY
MARY J. SERRANO
TRANSLATOR OF “MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF, THE JOURNAL
OF A YOUNG ARTIST,” ETC.
————
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
104 & 106 Fourth Avenue
Copyright, 1891, by
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY.
All rights reserved.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
RAHWAY, N. J.
A WEDDING TRIP.
Chapter I., II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XI., XII., XIII., XIV.
CHAPTER I.
That the wedding was not a fashionable one was to be seen at a glance.The bride and groom, indeed, so far as could be judged from externals,might mix in the most select society, but the greater number of theguests—the chorus, so to say—belonged to that portion of the middleclass which merges into and is scarcely to be distinguished from themass of the people. Among them were some curious and picturesque groups,the platform of the railway station at Leon presenting a scene thatwould have greatly interested a genre painter.
Just as in the ideal bridal scenes that we see painted on fans, it wasnoticeable here that the train of the bride was composed exclusively ofthe gentler, that of the bridegroom of the sterner sex. There was alsonoticeable a striking difference between the social conditions of thetwo parties. The bride’s escort, much the more numerous of the two,looked like a populous ant-hill. The women, both young and{2} old, worethe traditional black woolen dress, which, for the women of the lowerclasses who have some pretentions to gentility, has almost come to bethe prescribed costume of ceremony; for the people still retain theprivilege of donning gay colored garments on festive and joyousoccasions. Among these human ants were several who were young andpretty, some of them joyous and excited with thoughts of the wedding,others lugubrious looking, their eyes red with weeping, thinking of theapproaching parting. They were marshaled by half a dozen duennas ofmature years who, from out the folds of their manto, cast around themon all sides sharp and suspicious glances. The whole troop of femalefriends flocked around the newly made bride, manifesting the puerile andeager curiosity which the spectacle of the supreme situations of life isapt to awaken in the breasts of the multitude. They devoured with theireyes the girl they had seen a thousand times before, whose every featurethey knew by heart—the bride who, arrayed in her traveling dress,seemed to them a different being from the girl they had hitherto known.
The heroine of the occasion might be some eighteen years old; she mightbe thought younger, if o