Suzanne, who was one of the witnesses, trembled, and moved her full lips
nervously. She disapproved utterly of her mistress' wedding, and still
more of a honeymoon in the desert. For herself she did not care, very
shortly she was going to marry Monsieur Helmuth, the important person in
livery who accompanied the hotel omnibus to the station, and meanwhile
she was to remain at Beni-Mora under the chaperonage of Madame Armande,
the proprietor of the hotel. But it shocked her that a mistress of hers,
and a member of the English aristocracy, should be married in a costume
suitable for a camel ride, and should start off to go to _le Bon Dieu_
alone knew where, shut up in a palanquin like any black woman covered
with lumps of coral and bracelets like handcuffs.
The other witnesses were the mayor of Beni-Mora, a middle-aged doctor,
who wore the conventional evening-dress of French ceremony, and
looked as if the wind had made him as sleepy as a bear on the point of
hibernating, and the son of Madame Armande, a lively young man, with a
bullet head and eager, black eyes. The latter took a keen interest
in the ceremony, but the mayor blinked pathetically, and occasionally
rubbed his large hooked nose as if imploring it to keep his whole person
from drooping down into a heavy doze.
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