It was the eve of Concha’s wedding; the house was full, and overflowing into Rudge’s cottage, into Rendall’s cottage, and into the houses of neighbours: there were Guy and his parents, Sir Roger and Lady Cust, there was Colonel Dundas, there was “Crippin” Arbuthnot, Rory’s major who was to be best man, and Elfrida Penn, who was to be chief bridesmaid, and Harry Sinclair and his children, and Hugh Mallam and Dick’s cousin and partner, Edward Lane.
A wedding is a thing—as concrete and compact as a gold coin stamped with a date and a symbol; for, though of the substance of Time, it has the qualities of Matter; colour, shape, tangibleness. Or rather, perhaps it freezes Time into the semblance of Eternity, but does not rob it of its colours: these it keeps as Morris’s gods did theirs in the moonlight.
We have all awakened on a winter’s morning to the fantastic joke that during the night a heavy fall of snow has played on Space; just such a joke does a wedding play on Time.
And who can keep out the estantigua, the demon army of the restless dead, screaming in the wind and led by Hellequin?
Now Hellequin is the old romance form of Harlequin, and Harlequin leads the wedding revels. But it is in vain that, like Ophelia, he “turns life, death and fate into prettiness and favour”: we recognise the eyes behind the mask, we know of what army he is captain.
And the wedding guests themselves; though each, individually, was anodyne, even commonplace, yet, under that strange light, they were fantastic, sinister—they were folk.
In her childhood that word had always terrified Teresa—there was her old nightmare of the Canterbury Pilgrims, knight, franklin, wife of Bath, streaming down the chimney with strange mocking laughter to keep Walpurgis-night in a square tiled kitchen.... Bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, confessors, virgins, widows, and all the holy people of God.
Yes, they were folk.
How pawky Edward Lane was looking—uncannily humorous and shrewd! What six-plied, cynical thing was he about to say to Jasper?