CHAPTER VII
Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him, she is lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow considerably smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any rate, he will never leave his wife a pauper."
Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! I always knew you'd come to see." ... And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that there existed no Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last moment.
Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes out with envy, Old Thing."
Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was Meant."
While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come round in the end. I know women!"
And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might think.
Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how interested he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."
Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so soon to wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this complete aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed wooden cases was almost irritating. People were constantly coming up to the scratch, too, and relations who, in the event of the prospective bridegroom's comparative penury, would have considered pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of life unto which it had pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present circumstances, producing eight-day clocks and jewellery.
Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives who would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over the girl destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.
"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as high as the Greville-Mainwarings in that respect." She trusted Lady Cardew had rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a first cousin of Clifford's father, emerged presently, from the mist of introductions, as an untidy, acidly cheerful old lady, much more interested in horse-racing than in Clifford; though she had been overheard to express a hope that his fiancée had not bitten off more than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced Ferlie's mother that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by the front door.
The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to come in default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.
There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding. The doctors had not made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation and the sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this decision the better.
Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a matrimonially-inclined mind. Had she imparted this news to Ferlie the latter might have insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian should be completely out of her range, in Burma. As it was, he received a silver-edged invitation to the wedding with everybody else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him to understand quite clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met face to face on the Day.
He had decided—nearly—to refuse it.
He had decided—nearly—that Ferlie could never have meant anything at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.
He had decided—nearly—that he had done Right.
But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its own reward.
He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.
He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation anything but stereotyped. Cyprian was not good at expressing himself except in reports where exhaustive information was required in condensed form. It would be more than necessary for him to send Ferlie a wedding present.
Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of Mainwaring. Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that Ferlie would be likely to welcome from him at the moment. A younger man had felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short intimate moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not confided in him her intention of marrying this man. Cyprian was, himself, incapable of resentment against her, however well-deserved.
By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple attached to a slender gold chain. By means of a catch, cunningly concealed under the leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny magnifying mirror and a minute powder-puff. Round the mirror was engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."
Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and wrote the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie, omitting even to enclose his card.
She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.
* * * * * *
With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently through.
On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception were to be comparatively "quiet." But when Cyprian arrived, in response to exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence a strip of red carpet protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled senses perceived quite a formidable array of guests in wedding-garments who ostensibly came to pray and remained to stare.
An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on the side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an inarticulate reply, pushed him into the end of the last pew and left him to his own devices with a hymn-book.
The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting the pews.
Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the illustrated papers.
Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the lily-scented air.
"The mother really landed him, I believe."
"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."
"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"
"Wild oats. What young man doesn't... No. The Vane girl was older than he was. The attraction at that establishment was the Samaritan Actress."
"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of Abraham described as a Samaritan."
"You don't understand. Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."
Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random. Did he feel things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be thin-skinned?
Muriel, and now ... Ferlie. "The One before the Last." But Muriel had figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat here watching for Ferlie. If intense desire could be construed by the high gods and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire Ferlie to be happy.
The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died. The bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in a front pew.
Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round someone in white.
From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more than that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on turning his head now, his eyes encountered hers fully. He was startled by the impression that he was staring into the face of a perfect stranger. How ghastly white she looked! The fraction of a moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own had dropped before hers the night she had wished to keep him at her side.
She was passing by on Peter's arm. The pair of them looked as if they ought still to be going to school.
Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned it when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form "Bloods."
The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.
Everybody was standing. Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie ... Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments.... He would wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter from the Thing which had whitened her face with terror....
"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..." Ah, well, if the man thought so.
Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.
Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a glimpse of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will. At intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her duty.
Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.
The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the wake of the chief actors in this religious farce. Or was it tragedy?
While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn the choir was singing to fill in time:
"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!
Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."
But—Good Gracious!—thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding revelation, he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one. They had always known that they were one, united by some mystic Force which had its roots in a Far Beginning and its branches in the Eternities.
Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them and their united freedom?
"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."
He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a perfect description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract. (The woman in front of him would not stop sniffing.)
"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,
Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life...."
It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing neither to the left nor to the right, but this time she was not clinging to Peter.
With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound. The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his fingers could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn carpet, and so to his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the silence of catacombs.
The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night were no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he remembered, experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The knowledge formed another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one another.
In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands with her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter. Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped into an ante-room in search of whisky and soda.
He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd. He could not.
From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl of goldfish. He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs. If she passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably expect to have her for a moment to himself. He waited for a long while, watching the goldfish go round and round in circles. They roused misty recollections of Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the general imprisonment of human spirits.
When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward from that sheltered corner by the bookcase.
"Ferlie!"
She started violently and swung round.
"Oh! It's you, is it?"
She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note. Naturally, people were agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this marriage.
Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.
"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian. The Apple of Discord. Clever of you to think of that. Not that I needed a material reminder of the fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall we call it a misunderstanding?"
The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of shrill laughter. He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.
The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at her with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child. Shaded them with his hand against the pain as he replied:
"You know that is neither fair nor true."
"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.
Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her wrists and held them.
"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future, is it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which stretches out a hand to you from the past?"
A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of anger and intense pain.
"Mock? No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane—kind to men in order to be cruel. If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it is because I know of no other way to be kind ... now."
He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds of transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a visible string of pearls—"the gift of the Bridegroom."
Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.