“I wonder if Mr. Liscomb suggested that our marrying in such haste—within a few months of the news reaching me—would prejudice a judge.”
“Of course he did; it was stupid of me to forget that,” replied Jack; “very stupid, considering that I was thinking of it in the train on my way home. He made a remark about the haste—indecent haste, he called it.”
“And he gave it its right name,” said she. “That was a mistake on my part, Jack; but don’t think that I’m sorry for it, or that I wouldn’t do it again. Where should I be to-day if I had waited?”
“Would your father have insisted on your going to that man?”
“He would have tried to compel me—I am sure of that. In his eyes a marriage is a marriage—for worse as well as better—it makes no difference.”
“I’m glad that you think so. It lets me know that I did not make a mistake in what I said to Liscomb on that point. But with reference to the indecent haste point, surely any judge that is worth his salt will see that nowadays and in certain circumstances three months are as long as a year was in the old days—the Prayer-book days! It was in the fellow’s power to send you a cablegram letting you know that he was safe long before you had a chance of seeing a newspaper with the account of the wreck and his heroic conduct. ‘Heroic conduct’ was in the heading, I remember.”
“Yes; he’ll have to reply to the judge on that point. By the time Sir Edward has done with him he’ll have to make a good many replies. Well, we shall wait for the next move. But three months—if the people are nasty to us it will seem a long time, Jack; you are right there.”
“You’ll not find that the law errs on the side of indecent haste. We shall soon see how the people behave.”
He was quite right. The next day he glanced at the local paper, thinking that it was quite possible the man might have gone without the delay of an hour to make his statement public; but the paper contained no such interesting item of news. The man was plainly still in consultation with his solicitor.
In the course of the afternoon the road to the Manor was crowded with vehicles bearing card-leavers for Mrs. Jack Wingfield. The two livery stables at Framsby found the strain on their resources so severe as to necessitate their collecting the fragments of their most ancient vehicles and glueing them together in haste to respond to the demand for carriages from people who had never been otherwise than impolite, if not actually insolent, to Miss Wadhurst, but who now had a feeling that Mrs. Jack Wingfield would make her husband’s money fly in fêtes. It would never do for them to miss invitations to whatever festivities were in the air through neglect on their part to take every reasonable precaution to secure their being invited.