Then I heard her feet go down the aisle, the door open and close, and we were left alone. In the silence of the church—the most poverty-stricken and desolate, the most miserable, the most ruined to be yet used as the House of God, I think I had ever entered—at the foot of the altar of my faith, a sudden misgiving seized upon me. How would all this end? I was going to bind myself for life with the most solemn vows. Would all the honour and glory of the alliance compensate me for the loss of my liberty?
I was only twenty-six, and I knew of her who was henceforth to be my second self no more, rather less, than I knew of any of the barefooted maids that slipped grinning about the passages of Tollendhal. To be frank with myself, the glamour of gratified vanity once stripped from before the eye of my inmost soul, what was the naked, hideous truth? I had no more love for her—man for woman—than for rosy Kathi or black-browed Sarolta!
Here my reflections were broken in upon by that very patter of naked soles that had been in my thoughts, and a little ragged boy, in a dilapidated surplice, ran round the sanctuary from some back door, and fell to lighting a pair of candles on the altar, a proceeding which only seemed once more to heighten the darkness. Presently, in a surplice and cassock as tattered as his acolyte’s, with long white hair lying unkempt upon his shoulders, an old priest—in sooth, the oldest man I have ever seen alive, I believe—came forth with tottering steps; before him the tattered urchin, behind him a sacristan well-nigh as antique as himself, and as utterly pauperised.
These were to be the ministers of my grand marriage!
But almost immediately a fresh clamour of opening doors, and a light, sedate footfall, struck my ear, and all doubt and dismay disappeared like magic. Closely enveloped in the folds of a voluminous dark velvet cloak, with its hood drawn forward over her head, and beneath this shade her face muffled in the gathers of a white lace veil, I knew the stately height of my bride as she advanced towards me—and the sight of her, the sound of her brave step, set my heart dancing with the old triumph.
She stood beside me, and as the words were spoken I thought no more of the mean surroundings, of the evil omens, of the responsibilities and consequences of my act. It was nothing to me now that the old priest who wedded us, and his companion who ministered to him, should look more like mouldering corpses than living men—that the nurse’s burning eyes should still seek my face with evil look. I had no thought to spare for the position of my bride herself—her filial disobedience, her loneliness—no feeling of tenderness for the touching character of her confidence in me—no doubt as to her future happiness as my wife, nor as to my capacity for compensating her for the sacrifice of so much. I did not wonder at, nay, notice even, the absence of the lady-in-waiting—that moving spirit of our courtship. My whole soul was possessed with triumph. I was self-centred on my own success. The words were spoken; my voice rang out boldly, but hers was the barest breath of speech behind her muffling drapery. I slipped the ring (it had been my aunt’s), with a passing wonder that it should prove so much too large, upon the slender finger, that hardly protruded from a fall of enveloping lace.
We were drenched with a perfect shower of holy water out of a tin bucket; and then, man and wife, we went to the sacristy to sign our names by the light of one smoking tallow candle.
I dashed mine forth with splendid flourish—the good old name of Jennico of Farringdon Dane and Tollendhal, all my qualifications, territorial, military, and inherited. And she penned hers in the flowing handwriting I already knew, Marie Ottilie: the lofty, simple signature, as I thought with swelling heart, of sovereigns!
I pressed into the old priest’s cold fingers, as he peered at us from the book, right and left, with dull, bewildered eyes, in which I thought to see the dawn of a vague misgiving, a purse bulging with notes to the value of double the sum promised; and then, with her hand upon my arm, I led her to my carriage.
The rain had begun again and the wind was storming when we drove off, my wife and I. And for a little while—a long time it seemed to me—there was silence between us, broken only by the beating of the drops against the panes of the carriage, and the steady tramp of my horses’ hoofs on the wet road. Now that I had accomplished my wish, a strange embarrassment fell upon me. I had no desire to speak of love to the woman I had won. I had won her, I had triumphed—that was sufficient. I would not have undone my deed for the world; but none the less the man who finds himself the husband and has never been the lover is placed in a singular position.