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Mr. Pinner was of opinion that the sooner they were married the better. There was that in Mr. Luke’s eye, he told himself, which could only be got rid of by marriage; nothing but the Church could make the sentiments the young gentleman appeared to entertain for Sally right ones.
Whipt by fear, he hurried things on as eagerly as Jocelyn himself. Suppose something happened before there was time to get them married, and Mr. Luke, as he understood easily occurred with gentlemen in such circumstances, cooled off? He didn’t leave them a moment alone together after that first outing in the car when Jocelyn asked Sally to marry him, and she, obedient and wishful of pleasing everybody, besides having been talked to by her father the night before and told she had his full consent and blessing, and that it was her duty anyhow, heaven having sent Mr. Luke on purpose, had remarked amiably that she didn’t mind if she did.
After this, Mr. Pinner’s one aim was to keep them from being by themselves till they were safely man and wife. He lived in a fever of watchfulness. He was obsessed by terror on behalf of Sally’s virginity. His days were infinitely more wearing than in the worst period of Islington. Mrs. Pinner was missed and mourned quite desperately. It almost broke his back, the hurry, the anxiety, the constant gnawing fear, and the secrecy his future son-in-law insisted on.
‘What you want to be so secret for, Mr. Luke?’ he asked, black suspicion, always on the alert where Sally was concerned, clouding his naturally mild and trustful eyes.
‘You don’t want a howling mob of undergraduates round, do you?’ retorted Jocelyn.
‘Goodness gracious, I should think I didn’t, Mr. Luke,’ said Mr. Pinner, holding up both his little hands in horror. ‘She’s got a reg’lar gift, that Sally ‘as, for collecting crowds.’
‘Well, then,’ said Jocelyn irritably, whose nerves were in shreds. And added, ‘Isn’t it our job to keep them off her?’
‘Your job now, sir—or will be soon,’ said Mr. Pinner, unable to refrain from rubbing his hands at the thought of his near release from responsibility.
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on calling me sir,’ snapped Jocelyn. ‘I’ve asked you not to. I keep on asking you not to.’
He was nearly in tears with strain and fatigue. Incredibly, he hadn’t once been able to kiss Sally,—not properly, not as a lover should. Always in the presence of that damned Pinner—such was the way he thought of his future father-in-law—what could he do? He couldn’t even talk to her; not really talk, not pour out the molten streams of adoration that were scalding him to death while that image of alertness sat unblinking by. What was the fellow afraid of? He had asked him at first straight out, on finding how he stuck, to leave them alone, and the answer he got was that courting should be fair and above board, and that he was obliged to be both father and mother to the poor girl.
‘Fair and above board! Good God,’ thought Jocelyn, driving himself back at a furious pace to Cambridge and throwing back his head in a fit of wild, nervous laughter. His father-in-law—that little man with trousers so much too long for him that they corkscrewed round his legs. His father-in-law....
But what was that in the way of grotesqueness compared to his being her father? There, indeed, was mystery: that loveliness beyond dreams should have sprung from Mr. Pinner’s little loins.