"What's this? the license?" said Yorke.
"No. You will have to swear this. I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the next office, to a solicitor. You have to swear that the parties are of age, and that one of you has resided in the parish fifteen days. You are prepared to do so, I presume?"
It is to be feared that Yorke was prepared to do anything to obtain his Leslie, and he was led off—he felt like a criminal of the deepest dye—to another dingy office, and there repeated the oath gabbled out by the solicitor. Then he returned to the proctor's office, and, after waiting a quarter of an hour, the clerk handed him a document.
"What have I got to pay?" asked Yorke, prepared for a demand, say, of fifty pounds. "Only two pounds two and sixpence!" he said, with a surprise that made even that solemn clerk smile.
Only two pounds two and sixpence for the privilege of marrying Leslie! He stood and gazed at the mystic document, and laughed aloud, so that the seedy man who had conducted him to the office eyed him rather fearfully, and pocketing the half-sovereign Yorke gave him, scrambled off, fully convinced that the young man was mad.
And indeed he could scarcely be considered in full possession of his senses that day. Nearly every hour he took out that precious license and read it through or gazed at the imposing coat of arms at the top, and the Archbishop's signature at the bottom; and every time put it away again in his breast coat pocket. He patted the coat to feel that the document was there safe and sound.
From Doctors' Commons he walked to the Dorchester Club.
Everybody knows that aristocratic institution. It is not so magnificent as some of the modern political clubs; some of them are palaces compared with which those of the Caesars were very small potatoes; it had no marble entrance hall and oak-paneled dining-room, and its smoking-room was not as vast as a church; but it was snug and comfortable, and excellent to a degree. You had to have your name down on the list of candidates full fifteen or twenty years before you could hope to be balloted in, and some fathers put their sons down when they were eighteen months old.
Yorke was well known at the club, and the hall porter in his glass box bowed to him with a mixture of respect and recognition which he accorded to a very few of the members.
"There are no letters for me, Stephens, I suppose?" said Yorke.