Whispers, murmurs, policemen backing the crowd with commanding gestures. There was the bridal carriage. She saw Vansittart's horses; they were plunging a little. What a monster bouquet the coachman had! She was passing down the carpeted steps, she was about to halt to step into the landau, when someone came right in front of her, offering her some flowers.
Flowers! Those horribly white, thick-scented blossoms! She recoiled for an instant, then, remembering she must appear gratified, she took them, vaguely seeing a ghastly face, blazing blue eyes, a figure in deep black, a figure she did not know.
In another moment she was in the carriage; they drove off. "Horrible things; throw them out of window," she faintly said, recognizing the hideous fact that the posy was of the very flower Victor had worn when he died.
"Presently, dearest; we cannot let the girl see us do it," he gravely said. He was examining a label attached. In sudden terror she flung down her bouquet, snatched the posy from him, and stared wildly at the written words--
"In memory of Victor. 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.'"
CHAPTER XXXIII
"Joan! What does it mean?" asked the bridegroom, white, stern, after the shock, still seeming to see those awful words, "Vengeance is Mine!" dancing before his dazed eyes in letters of blood.
"Mean? That I am hunted down--that they are after me, cruel creatures, for an act you yourself said was only childish folly!" She writhed, and gave a mad, wild laugh which seemed to freeze him. But her explanation--her allusion to that which she had told him--that wretched affair in which she had innocently helped to ally her school friend to an utterly worthless scamp--brought instantaneous relief from his sudden, over mastering terror that the label hinted at some unknown horror.
"That was your poor friend, then, dearest, that you unwittingly helped to injure!" He detached the label with the Scriptural quotation from the bunch of flowers, pocketed it, and flung them out of the carriage window. "But I thought she was quit of him? Why should she persecute you, now? When all is over?"
She gave him a desperate glance, and shrank away into the corner of the carriage. White, her eyes ablaze--even in his miserable dread, his anxiety, she reminded him of a celebrated singer he had seen at the opera a few weeks ago in "Lucia." Why, why was her agony so intense about a mere secondary trouble?