The last word has been spoken, the last look exchanged between the lovers, and the wrench of parting is over. Gustav declined to accompany Selaka back to Xinara; he was too shaken for society other than his own. Inarime had bent to her father’s decision, and had accepted the sundering of their lives. More than this he hardly knew.
When Selaka rode down the village, Gustav followed on foot, and knew not whither he went,—content to drift along without purpose or desire. Yet he dreaded the weakness of succumbing to a merely whimpering sorrow. That something had gone from him to which he clung with a kind of frenzied fervour he felt, but he was resolved that the sense of desolation should not conquer him. He had said that he would accept his fate at Inarime’s bidding; now, that that fate seemed harder than human endurance, it was not for him to rebel in impotent anguish, but to endeavour bravely to face the empty world.
As he entered the village of Steni, he saw a little band of villagers approach the Greek church, and, hardly knowing why, he followed them. The church was lit, and in the middle upon a table was a tray of sweets and two long candles, upon which rested two wreaths joined by a long white ribbon. Pricked by the dull curiosity of a man who no longer feels interested in himself, he pushed his way on up the church, lounged against the pillar and gazed with a strange calmness upon the ceremonial, that soon began. No one who saw him would interpret his impassivity of attitude and look as the despair of a suddenly wrecked life.
The man beside him, standing with his hat on his head, and wearing the preoccupied air with a visible nervousness that usually betokens the happy man upon the portals of marriage, was a mere village clod in an unpicturesque European garb, who stood beside his best man waiting for the bride. A stout, plain, village girl was ushered into the church in a whirlwind of excitement, surrounded by a circle of feminine satellites. She neither looked at the bridegroom, nor at any one else, but kept her eyes fixed in sullen acquiescence on the ground.
She wore a bright-coloured kerchief on her head, with a band of coins round her forehead; and a profusion of jewellery decked her muscular throat and arms. Very expensively and tastelessly was she arrayed, and most miserable did she look in her finery. The fixed misery of her face interested Gustav, who naturally thought it quite in keeping with the lesson of life, that every one should look wretched. Three priests advanced to wed this uncomely couple, and the evolutions that followed struck Gustav with astonishment. He listened to the priests as they droned out the wedding service, and held the Gospel now to the bridegroom’s lips and then to the bride’s; and so on, three times; watched them place the long lighted tapers in the hands of each; watched the pair give and accept rings, and passively submit to the decoration of the wreaths of artificial flowers, exchanged three times upon either head.
Involuntarily Gustav smiled at the grotesque sight presented by the village clod in his wreath of roses, and then marvelled when the priests and principal personages, with their attendant swains and nymphs, caught hands in a circle, and danced with inconceivable gravity round the table backwards and forwards three times, the bride and bridegroom still wearing their look of dull wretchedness. Good heavens! Was this the kind of ceremony he would have been bound to go through in his marriage with Inarime? to find himself hauled round a table, as sailors haul in the anchor, bound in that degrading fashion with roses! It was some slight salve for his wound to gaze in contempt at this pastoral introduction to marriage, and when a little mischievous boy upset the tray in order that he and his friends might taste of its contents in the scuffle that ensued, and was frantically cuffed and sworn at by the angry priests, Gustav burst out into gloomy laughter, and made his way as well as he could out of the church.
He walked down the darkened street heavy-hearted, thinking of Inarime; he dropped into the rough decline that leads to Xinara, and mingled with the sad images of the day were the cruel dulness of the bride’s face and the tame acceptance of the bridegroom. After all, perhaps it was so; this might be the symbol of marriage, and not the high ideal he yearned for.
Under a rocky projection he saw a man who had been pointed out to him as a semi-idiot. An ambitious mother had sent him as a lad to Marseilles; thence he had made his way up to Paris; and now this was his state. Three years of stormy life in that nefarious city had turned a bright lad into a bald, aged idiot, only twenty-five, looking more than fifty. He was staring stupidly down through the thickening shadows to where the sea beat against the distant shore: staring out from the barren island that oppressed him; living acutely and horribly in memory.
Comforted by the sight of a fellow-sufferer, Gustav stopped and said good-night. The wretched man glanced at him in dreary reproach.