The overlooked cart proved a blessing, not a calamity, for the operation of padlocking the stable-door before the horse was stolen so absorbed the Gaffer that Jinny found it possible, after all, to don her finery and slip off to the wedding unseen even of Nip, who was supervising the new measures for Methusalem’s safety. Curiosity to see Miss Gentry’s creation in action had combined with the pangs of appetite and her acceptance of the invitation to make temptation irresistible, and she calculated that she could be back by noon, and that, pottering over his vegetable patch or his Bible, the old man would scarcely notice her absence.
When she reached the church, she found the coach stationed outside, and though the liveried guard was lacking to-day, the black horses looked handsomer than ever with their red wedding-favours, while the pea-green polish of the vehicle reduced her to a worm-like humility at the thought of the impossibility of her cart taking part in to-day’s display. Evidently Will had brought the bridegroom from Frog Farm. Out of the corner of her eye she espied Will himself, sunning himself on his box, and her heart thumped, though all she was conscious of was the insolent incongruity of his pipe with the occasion, the edifice, his new frock-coat, and the posy in its buttonhole. Fearing she was late, she hurried into the church. But nothing was going on, though the size of the congregation—far larger than usual—was an exciting surprise. There was no sign of any of the wedding-party, not even Mr. Flippance, and after imperceptibly saluting her Angel-Mother, she sank back into a rear pew, half pleased to have missed nothing, half uneasy lest there be a delay. Turning over a Prayer Book in search of the Wedding Service, she came for the first time, and not without surprise, on the Fifth of November Thanksgiving “for the happy deliverance of King James I and the Three Estates of England from the most traitorous and bloody-intended massacre by Gunpowder: And also for the happy Arrival of King William on this Day, for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation.” King William’s arrival struck her as providential but confusing—for though he had apparently detected the Popish barrels in the nick of time, how came there to be two kings at once? Suddenly she was aware, by some tingling telegraphy, that the bride and bridesmaid had arrived outside in a grand open carriage. Mr. Fallow in his surplice came in at the clerk’s intimation and took up his position at the altar rails, the musicians struck up “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” and then there was a sudden faltering, and a whispering took place ’twixt parson and clerk, and Mr. Fallow was swallowed again by his vestry, while the clerk disappeared through the church door. It was realized that Mr. Flippance was not in the church, and it was understood that the bride’s face was being saved in the vestry, where, however, as time passed, the agitated congregation divined hysterics.
Jinny—thinking of her neglected grandfather—was what he called “on canterhooks.” Had Mr. Flippance not then come in the coach, had he been carelessly left in bed as usual? Catching her Angel-Mother’s eye, she received a distinct injunction to go out in search of him, but she was too shy to move in the presence of all those people, though she had a vision of herself frantically harnessing Methusalem and carting the bridegroom to church in his dressing-gown—would carpet slippers be an impediment to matrimony, she wondered. Mr. Fallow came in again, looking so worried that she recalled an ecclesiastical experience he had related to her: how one of his parishioners, nowadays a notorious Hot Gospeller, had “found religion” on the very verge of setting out to be married, and had passed so much time on his knees, absorbed in the newly felt truth, that it was only through his friend the bell-ringer stopping the church clock that he was married by noon; if indeed—a doubt which ever after weighed on Mr. Fallow—he was legally married at all. What if at this solemn moment of his life Mr. Flippance should similarly find religion! She devoutly hoped the discovery would be at least delayed till he was safely married. Good heavens! perhaps the Bible she had given him was in fault! Perhaps she was responsible for his rapt remissness. Disregarding the congregation’s eyes, she went boldly into the vestry.
Here, sure enough, she found the heroine of the day supported by a trio of ladies. The outstanding absence of Mr. Flippance left Jinny but a phantasmagoric sense of a bride, still composed indeed, but so ghastly that despite her glamour of veil-folds and orange-blossom she scarcely looked golden-haired; of a bridesmaid hardly recognizable as Miss Gentry, for the opposite reason that it was she with her swarthy splendour, opulent bosom, and glory of silk and flowers who seemed the Cleopatra; of a Blanche so appallingly queenly in her creamier fashion under the art of the rival dressmaker, that her own cleaned gown seemed but to emphasize her shabbiness and dowdiness. Acoustically the voice of Mrs. Purley expatiating on the situation was the dominant note, but through and beneath the cascade Jinny was aware of Miss Gentry explaining to the bride that the horses which had brought the bridegroom were not responsible for his disappearance. Not unpropitious, but of the finest augury were these sable animals, omens going by contraries. So they had brought Mr. Flippance!
They were tossing their bepranked heads, Jinny found, and champing their bits, as if sharing in the human unrest. Will was no longer smoking placidly on his box, but in agitated parley with Barnaby and his father. She heard the inn suggested, and saw the Purleys posting towards it. She herself ran round to the tower, fantastically figuring Mr. Flippance on his knees on the belfry floor amid the ropes and the cobwebs, but even the one bell-ringer seemed to have sallied in search of the bridegroom, or at least of the inn.
The churchyard was large and rambling and thickly populated—pathetic proof there had been life in the church once—and it was in a sequestered corner behind a tall monument that Jinny with a great upleap of the heart at last espied the object of her quest, though he seemed even more unreal than Miss Gentry in his narrow-brimmed top-hat, satin stock with horseshoe pin, and swallowtail coat, while his face was as white as his waistcoat.
“What are you doing?” came involuntarily to her lips.
“Reading the tombstones,” he said wistfully. “So peaceful!”
“But they’re waiting for you!”
“They’re waiting for everybody. That’s the joke of it all.”