“Of course not. Anyhow it’s too late to change now.”
“Don’t say that! As if I didn’t want to change before there was anything to change—oh, you know what I mean.”
“It’s too late now!” she repeated firmly. She stood over him, a stern-faced little monitor of duty. “Come along!”
“Go ahead—the rose-wreathed victim will be at the altar.”
They moved on a little. He paused as with sudden hopefulness. “You don’t happen to know if there’s a great oak chest with a spring lock in Foxearth Farm?”
“How should I know?” she murmured, apprehensive now for his reason.
He sighed. “Well, never mind—it’ll all be all right at night. And what’s it all for, anyhow? ‘Wife of the above,’ ” he read out weirdly. “How they cling on!”
But Jinny had gone off into a reverie of her own. The tombstone formula he had recited struck a long-buried memory, and in a flash she saw again a quiet graveyard and a stone behind a tumbledown tower, and Commander Dap’s black-gloved forefinger tracing out her mother’s epitaph to a strange solemn little girl. All the wonder and glamour of childhood was in that flash, all the strangeness of life and time, and her eyes filled with tears. When the mist cleared away, Mr. Flippance was gone. She ran frantically around among the tombs like a sheep-dog till at length the sound of Mr. Fallow’s ecclesiastical voice floated out to her, and hurrying back into the church, she felt foolish and tranquillized to find the service well forward.
XI
Jinny had misread Mr. Fallow’s look: it was not fear of dragging on beyond the legal hour—noon was still too remote—but impatience at being kept away from his antiquarian lore by such trifles as matrimony, especially matrimony which was no longer, as in pre-Reformation days, preceded by the Holy Communion and symbolic of the union of Christ and His Church. Had there been a care-cloth to be thrown over the couples’ heads, such as existed in Essex churches in 1550, even matrimony might have interested him. But as it was, his thoughts ran on old cheeses. He had been comparing his Latin edition of Camden’s “Britannia” (1590) with the two-volume folio translation, a century later, by a worthy bishop, and was half scandalized, half excited, to find that the translator had introduced a wealth of new matter. Incidentally Mr. Fallow had learned the Hundred was celebrated for its huge cheeses—inusitatæ magnitudinis—of ewes’ milk, and that to make them the men milked the ewes like women elsewhere. And these huge cheeses were consumed not only in England, but exported—ad saturandos agrestes et opifices—“to satisfie the coarse stomachs of husbandmen and labourers,” as the bishop put it. When had this manufacture of giant cheeses from ewes’ milk died out in Essex? Mr. Fallow had already seized the opportunity of interrogating Mrs. Purley, whose reputation as a cheesemaker had reached him. But appalled by the voluminousness of her ignorance, he had taken sanctuary in his church and was still brooding over the problem as his lips framed the more trivial interrogatories of the ceremony.