The Upper Housemaid was rash in thus giving her opinion. Larry's fancy was far from bright, but he was of those unfortunates who, when obsessed by a tune, must yield to its importunity, even though it followed him to the steps of the scaffold.
It is not insinuated that Larry was now, metaphorically, or otherwise, in such a case. He was, as he told himself, quite prepared to go through with the job, but, he likewise told himself, it was a rotten sort of business dressing for your wedding with not a soul, bar the servants, to say good morning to, and even they looked as sour as lemons and hadn't a smile among the lot of them. Larry drank some coffee, and crumbled some toast, and brutally and wastefully broke into a poached egg, turning what had been a triumph of snow, into a yellow peril, and gave its attendant bacon to Aunt Freddy's old Pomeranian, and found that he had finished his breakfast, and that it was no more than ten o'clock. The rain was coming down in torrents; he could not go out, not even to the stables. What on earth was he to do from now till one o'clock? The blooming wedding was at two.
He thought of it as some one else's, and realised that he so thought of it, and then just tripped himself up in the middle of the further reflection that he wished it were.
"Probably getting married is always a bore," he said to himself, consolingly. "'E's all right when you know 'im, but you've got to know 'im fust'! Why do these rotten old songs stick in my head like this? Because I'm a fool, no doubt, and always was!"
He walked into the hall, and there surveyed his luggage, packed and ready, and appallingly new.
"It'll give the show away, even if they let us off confetti," he thought.
He wished he hadn't given in to this High Nuptial Mass business, and a big wedding, and all the rest of it, but the Doctor and Tishy were dead keen on it, and he had been sat on.
He and Tishy were going to London, and if this gale lasted, they would have a devil of a crossing. He wondered if Tishy were a good sailor. He wasn't, anyhow. He would warn her that he would be no more use to her than a sick headache, which she would probably have, to start with, and she wouldn't want another. The Mount Music people were across the Channel by this time, ahead of the gale too. Luck for them! Old Mrs. Twomey had told him they were gone, and she said they would never come back again. Silly old ass, what did she know about it?
He had wandered into his studio; now, without his own volition, almost as if he were hypnotised, he took the canvas on which he had painted Christian, from where it was leaning, face inwards, against the wall, and put it on an easel. He had not looked at it since the day of conflict, and he told himself that he was now regarding it with the frigid rye of the art critic.
Yes, it was good. Better than he thought. The technique was jolly good, slick, and unworried, and the likeness was all right too. He had somehow just got hold of that ethereal look she always had had. She was hearing those voices they used to chaff her about. How she had gone for John one day, when he began ragging her about that old hymn! She always had the pluck of the devil! He frowned. She hadn't had pluck enough to stand up to her father! He would look at her picture no longer. He wouldn't think of her. She had chucked him. But his eyes were held by the eyes that he had painted; with a rush, the thought of her possessed him. She was everywhere, penetrating his very being, "his heart in her hands"; he shook in the grip of remembrance, almost of realisation, of her presence. For a moment, Time stood still for him; he hung, like a ship that has been flung up into the wind, trembling. Then the sails filled, the present re-asserted itself. He was going to marry Tishy Mangan, and Christian had chucked him. He turned the canvas again.