“Say ‘I will,’” murmured Maseden in her ear.
She turned slightly. At that instant their heads came close together, and the long, unfamiliar fragrance of a woman’s well-tended hair reached him.
It had an extraordinary effect. Memories of his mother, of a simple old-world dwelling in a Vermont village, rushed in on him with an almost overwhelming force.
His superb self-possession nearly gave way. He felt that he might break down under the intolerable strain.
He feared, during a few seconds of anguish, that he might reveal his heartache to these men of inferior races.
Then the pride of a regal birthright came to his aid, and a species of most vivid and poignant consciousness succeeded. He heard Steinbaum’s gruff sponsorship for the bride, obeyed smilingly when told to take her right hand in his right hand, and looked with singular intentness at the long, straight, artistic fingers which he held.
It was a beautifully modeled hand, well kept, but cold and tremulous. The queer conceit leaped up in him that though he might never look on the face of his wedded wife he would know that hand if they met again only at the Judgment Seat!
Then, in a dazed way which impressed the onlookers as the height of American nonchalance, he said, after the celebrant: “I, Philip Alexander, take thee, Madeleine—”
Madeleine! So that was the Christian name of the woman whom he was taking “till death do us part,” for the Spanish liturgy provided almost an exact equivalent of the English service. Madeleine! He had never even known any girl of the name. Somehow, he liked it. Outwardly so calm, he was inwardly aflame with a new longing for life and all that life meant.
His jumbled wits were peremptorily recalled to the demands of the moment by the would-be bride’s failure to repeat her share of the marriage vow, when it became her turn to take Maseden’s hand.