But now everything was merged in this great ordeal of love and grief they were battling through together—secure from the unwanted presence of others as they had not been since he had last felt her heart fluttering beneath his, in the porch of the cathedral.
“Oh, Rose,” he whispered at last, “you don’t know what a difference having you makes to me! If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know how I could face it.”
For a moment she clung a little closer to him. He felt her trembling with a wave of emotion to which he had no present clue. “Oh, Jervis—dear Jervis, is that true?” she asked piteously.
“Do you doubt it?” he whispered.
“Then there’s something I want you to do for me.”
“You know that there isn’t anything in the world you could ask me to do that I wouldn’t do, Rose.”
“I want you to marry me to-morrow,” she said. And then, as for a moment he remained silent, she began to cry. “Oh, Jervis, do say yes—unless you very, very much want to say no!”
During the next forty-eight hours Sir Jacques Robey settled what was to be done, when it should be done, and how it was to be done.
Of the people concerned, it was perhaps Lady Blake who seemed the most under his influence. She submitted without a word to his accompanying her into her son’s bedroom, and it was in response to his insistent command—for it was no less—that instead of alluding to the tragic thing which filled all her thoughts, she only spoke of the morrow’s wedding, and of her happiness in the daughter her son was giving her.
It was Sir Jacques, too, who persuaded Mrs. Otway to agree that an immediate marriage was the best of all possible solutions for Rose as well as for Jervis; and it was he, also, who suggested that Sir John Blake should go over to the Deanery and make all the necessary arrangements with Dr. Haworth. But perhaps the most striking example of Sir Jacques’s good sense and thoroughness occurred after Sir John had been to the Deanery.