“I should say that you are our good angel.”
“Then, let me manage.”
I held out my hand and he kissed it. His glasses were moist with tears.
Three days later, he brought me the document which I required. He was very pale. I would have asked questions, but he let me understand that he would not answer. “I have done wrong for your sake, Miss Lilian,” he said.
I learned afterwards that he had procured my father’s blanc-seing under pretext of a petition addressed to the Government against the Ritualists, and especially against the use of surplices, baldaquins over altars, and confessionals.
I do not know to what stratagems Harry had recourse for obtaining the necessary papers. What is certain is that we were married on Easter Tuesday, before the Registrar of the county, after which Jedediah gave us the nuptial benediction in a little chapel of the Baptist communion situated in the environs of Plymouth (Portsmouth). He married us without looking at us. I have never seen a scene more strange, nor a man more unfortunate.
He refused to come and share the wedding-cake with us, which we ate at my sister’s.
But those English love-marriages between rash young people by no mean always end in living happily all the rest of their days; and the story soon turns tragic, its scene shifting from the Island. After that secret wedding, Harry returns to London, leaving his wife in an awkward position, where Jedediah is her only comfort. Love still blinds her eyes to the selfishness of Harry; but the reader sees how she might have been better off with poor Jedediah, who is not such a villain after all, but only the Dobbin or Seth Bede of the tale. The time comes when her marriage can no longer be hidden. Harry takes lodgings for her in London at the house of a Mrs Benson, whose husband, being employed at the Bricklayers’ Arms Goods Station, finds it convenient to live in a four-roomed house in Shoreditch, too large for a quiet couple.
To this sympathetic landlady, Lilian relates the foregoing story, with many tears and gulps of tisane, a refreshment, it seems, known to Shoreditch sickbeds. Her child is born dead. The young mother in her feverish weakness fancies that Jedediah has revengefully contrived some defect in the ceremony, and cries out to have her marriage made legally complete at the parish church. Harry, moved by her delirium, writes to both parents, confessing the truth. A curate is sent for, who politely but hastily says a few prayers at the sick-bed, then hurries off to a tea-party at the West-end. Lilian dies the same night. Harry weeps, to be sure, but soon grows tired of sitting up with the dead, and comes down to smoke a pipe with the landlord.
Next day Gordon père arrives in a great rage, but, at the sight of his dead daughter-in-law, he is touched to the point of taking off his hat, as English gentlemen, it appears, will do on such special occasions. Mr North, on his arrival, shows natural grief, which is soon turned to wrath by the sight of a crucifix laid on his daughter’s breast, contrary to “the statute of the fifteenth year of Elizabeth,” as he knows well; and he gives up all hope of her eternal welfare, on hearing how her last moments had been corrupted by the prayers of an Anglican priest. Mrs Benson, who takes that wide view of religion spread in France by such divines as the Savoyard Vicar and such poets as Beranger, in vain tries to comfort him.