CHAPTER XXIX
On the following afternoon Frances Candler and Durkin were quietly married.
It was a whim of Durkin’s that the ceremony should take place on Broadway, “on the old alley,” as he put it, “where I’ve had so many ups and downs.” So, his arm in a black silk sling, and she in a gown of sober black velvet, with only a bunch of violets bought from an Italian boy on a street corner, they rode together in a taxi-cab to the rectory of Grace Church.
To the silent disappointment of each of them the rector was not at home. They were told, indeed, that it would be impossible for a marriage service to be held at the church that afternoon. A little depressed, inwardly, at this first accidental cross-thread of fate, they at once made their way up Fifth Avenue to the Church of the Transfiguration.
“The way we ought to do it,” said Frances, as they rode up the undulating line of the Avenue, “would be to have it all carried on over a long-distance telephone. We should have had some justice of the peace in Jersey City ring us up at a certain time, and send the words of the service over the wire. That would have been more in the picture. Then you should have twisted up an emergency wedding ring of KK wire, and slipped it on my finger, and then cut in on a Postal-Union or an Associated Press wire and announced the happy event to the world!”
She rattled bravely on in this key, for she had noticed, in the strong sidelight of the taxi-window, that he looked pale and worn and old, seeming, as he sat there at her side, only a shadow of the buoyant, resilient, old-time Durkin that she had once known.
The service was read in the chapel, by a hurried and deep-voiced English curate, who shook hands with them crisply but genially, before unceremoniously slipping off his surplice. He wished them much happiness. Then he told them that the full names would have to be signed in the register, as a report of the service must be sent to the Board of Health, and that it was customary to give the sexton and his assistant two dollars each for acting as witnesses.
Frances noticed Durkin’s little wince at the obtrusion of this unlooked-for sordidness, though he glanced up and smiled at her reassuringly as he wrote in the register, “James Altman Durkin,” and waited for her to sign “Frances Edith Candler.”
The service, in some way, had utterly failed to impress Durkin as it ought. The empty seats of the chapel, with only one pew crowded with a little line of tittering, whispering schoolgirls, who had wandered in out of idle curiosity, the hurriedly mumbled words of the curate—he afterward confessed to them that this was his third service since luncheon—the unexpected briefness of the ceremony itself, the absence of those emblems and rituals which from time immemorial had been associated with marriage in his mind—these had combined to attach to the scene a teasing sense of unreality.
It was only when the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” were repeated that he smiled and looked down at the woman beside him. She caught his eye and laughed a little, as she turned hurriedly away, though he could see the tear-drops glistening on her eyelashes.
She held his hand fiercely in her own, as they rode from the little ivy-covered church, each wondering at the mood of ineloquence weighing down the other.
“Do you know,” she said, musingly, “I feel as though I had been bought and sold, that I had been tied up and given to you, that—oh, that I had been nailed on to you with horseshoe nails! Do you feel any difference?”
“I feel as though I had been cheated out of something—it’s so hard to express!—that I ought to have found another You when I turned away from the railing; that I ought to be carrying off a different You altogether—and yet—yet here you are, the same old adorable You, with not a particle of change!”
“After all, what is it? Why, Jim dear, we were married, in reality, that afternoon I opened the door to MacNutt’s ring and saw you standing there looking in at me as though you had seen a ghost!”
“No, my own, we were joined together and made one a million years ago, you and I, in some unknown star a million million miles away from this old earth; and through all those years we have only wandered and drifted about, looking for each other!”
“Silly!” she said happily, with her slow, English smile.
In the gloom of the taxi-cab, with a sudden impulsive little movement of the body, she leaned over and kissed him.
“You forgot that,” she said joyously, from the pillow of his shoulder. “You forgot about that in the chapel!”
They drifted down through what seemed a shadowy and far-away city, threading their course past phantasmal carriages and spectral crowds engrossed in their foolish little ghost-like businesses of buying and selling, of coming and going.
“You’re all I’ve got now,” she murmured again, with irrelevant dolefulness.
Her head still rested on the hollow of his shoulder. His only answer was to draw the warmth and clinging weight of her body closer to him.
“And you’ll have to die some day!” she wailed in sudden misery. And though he laughingly protested that she was screwing him down a little too early in the game, she reached up with her ineffectual arms and flung them passionately about him, much as she had done before, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him from both life and death itself, for all time to come.