The Combined Maze

by May Sinclair

He wanted to put Violet right at once, before a suspicion of that possibility should have crossed her mind. It would have seemed to him abominable to risk it, to wait on, as fellows did, on the off-chance of a reprieve, till she came to him, poor child, with her whispered tale. That, to Ranny's mind, was where the shame came in; not in the fact, but in the compulsion of the fact. It was intolerable that any man should have the right to say of his own wife that he had been forced to marry her. Hence his desperate haste.

Violet couldn't understand it. She didn't want to be married all at once. She said there was no hurry; that he couldn't afford it; that there was no rime nor reason in it; let them go on as they were a bit; let them wait and see.

In all this Ranny saw only a tenderness and a desire to spare him. But he stood firm. He was not concerned with reasons and with rimes; he wouldn't wait, he wouldn't see; and (this astonished Violet and secretly enraged her) he absolutely refused to go on as they were.

For his fear was always before him.

It was no doubt to that refusal of his that he owed Violet's consent.

His family were appalled at the news of Ranny's engagement. It was so unexpected, so unlike him; and how it had happened Ranny's mother couldn't think. She knew all his comings and goings for the last year. His temperance and discretion had given her a sense of imperishable security. She had made up her mind that Ranny wasn't one to be in a hurry; and now she had been right only in her prophecy that when his time came there would be no holding him.

And there was no holding him.

They had all tried it. They had all been at him; his Uncle Randall and his Aunt Randall, and his mother and his father. For the first time in his life Mr. Ransome was roused to take an interest in his son, to acknowledge him as an adult, capable of formidably adult things. And though they all told him that he was too young to know his own mind, that he was doing foolish, and behaving silly, under the show of disapproval and disparagement it was clear that they respected him, that they realized his manhood, and that he was somehow important to them as he had never been important in his life before.

What was more, rage as they would at it, they were impressed by Ranny's firmness, his unalterable and imperturbable determination to marry, and to marry the unknown Violet Usher.

And on the main issue they gave way. They owned that it was natural that the boy should want to marry; they saw that he would have to marry some day; and his mother went so far as to say she wanted him to marry and to settle down. What they did not understand, and most certainly did not approve of, what they did their best to talk him out of, was the awful hurry he was in. There wasn't any hurry, they said, there shouldn't be, when he was so young. He couldn't afford to marry now, but he could afford it very well in two years' time. Why, he was only twenty-three, and in two years' time he'd have got his next rise, and he'd have saved more money.