‘We’ll have the wedding very quiet, my darling,’ he said. ‘I won’t have a best man. Gertie can be your bridesmaid, and with your father to give you away, and your mother to say the responses loud, that’s all the company we shall want. We shall be happy enough by ourselves.’
Ruth was quite willing. But there was one point which Marston didn’t care about, but on which Mrs. Adrian was firm. He wanted to be married by license, but Mrs. Adrian insisted that they should be asked in church, and Marston could not offer any determined opposition.
On the first Sunday that the banns were published, Ruth made Marston promise to go to church with her.
He went.
As he passed into the sacred edifice a strange chill came to his heart—a sensation of dread stole over him.
He could not account for it. Something in the quiet of the place, in the reverent attitude of the worshippers, in the sonorous and musical voice of the officiating priest, pleading to an unseen power in the poetic and soul-stirring language of the Prayer-book; indeed, the whole service impressed and pained him.
He had been a scoffer all his life. He had lived in an atmosphere not so much of unbelief as of indifference. Sitting by the side of Ruth Adrian, bowing his head mechanically with the rest, he found himself repeating the cry for mercy of the Litany, ‘Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners,’ and he felt awe-stricken as he thought of the ghastly reality of such a prayer upon his lips.
He sat dreamily and moodily through the after part of the service. He heard his name given out coupled with Ruth’s, and he almost expected some one to leap up from among the congregation and cry aloud that there was indeed just cause and impediment why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony.
He would have rushed out of the building had he dared, for he felt that he was challenging Heaven.
When the clergyman ascended the pulpit and gave out the text for the sermon, he singled out Marston by the merest accident in the world, and preached straight at him. The text was from Proverbs, ‘The way of transgressors is hard.’