The Wayfarers

by J. C. Snaith

With these panegyrics we ultimately got us to church. Now it is not to be expected, I hope, that a man should describe his own nuptials. If there are three acts in his life on which he is the least qualified to speak, are not those his birth, his marriage, and his burial? For in not one of them can he testify with any certainty as to whether he went through them on his heels or his head. Besides, I am one who holds that there should be a becoming reticence in these things.

I can recall perhaps an empty, musty-smelling church, and the clerk, a solemn, unctuous man, with a graveyard cough. Some little wind of the affair had evidently got abroad in the village, owing to the exertions of Mrs. Blodgett in quest of the wedding-ring. Thus the ceremony was not so entirely private as we could have wished. A few women in aprons, and some with babes in their arms kept the porch and the immediate interior of the church. It seemed that they did not venture to go further owing to their awe of the clerk. Various ragamuffin children of tender years played hide-and-seek round the gravestones and their mothers' gowns. When however the wedding party came along in a kind of little procession, they desisted for a minute, and having safely seen the parson precede us into the sacred edifice, they put out their tongues at Cynthia and myself, and made several references of a nature uncomplimentary to us couched in the form of rustic wit.

Mrs. Blodgett had undertaken the office of chief bridesmaid. She would have undertaken that of groomsman too, had I given her the least encouragement. She made an impressive figure at the altar rails, clad in a severe black hood; whilst she was quite conscious of her conspicuous position, and stood calm and erect in the dignity of her infinite experience. What whispered but animated counsel she proffered to Cynthia during the brief period in which we waited for the parson to emerge from the vestry, I know not, but I would have given a good deal to have been a party to it, for I am sure that if the look on Mrs. Cynthia's countenance was any index to its character, it would well have been worth setting down in this place.

At the last moment when the tension of our minds was very great, the clerk became obstreperous. He asked parson Scriven in a significant undertone for the special licence that was to marry us, as the banns had not been put up and cried in church. Of course we were not furnished with anything of the kind.

Parson Scriven, as became his amiable casual character, was not at all disconcerted by such an informality.

"Pooh and faugh!" says he. "Banns and licence, John, stuff and nonsense! Why should an honest couple be hedged about in this way? If they have no licence, upon my soul I will marry them without."

The clerk was scandalized. The parson, however, would hear no argument. He was not the person to allow his head to interfere with the dictates of his heart.

"Parson's main obstinate," said the clerk, scratching his head. "And I do believe he cares no more for law an' regulation than the gypsies on the common. It won't be legal, this won't, but bless you what'll parson care!"

So long as we could get this awkward business over we cared as little for law and regulation as this singular old clergyman. Therefore, when he disdained the opinions of the clerk, and reiterated his intention to marry us, we breathed again.

At last all was ready, and the parson came out of the vestry with his book and his gown, and smiled upon us with benevolent self-possession. We strung ourselves for the great ordeal. Yet as a preliminary we were confronted with one that we found vastly the more awkward of the two, and one that we had not anticipated either. How we both came to overlook it, I know not, unless the palpitation that our minds were in was the secret of it. It had never occurred to us that the parson could not marry us unless he was informed of our names. But when he made that very obvious and natural stipulation it came upon us as a thunderbolt. What a pair of arrant fools we were, not to have thought of that contingency, and to have provided for it!