At first Brodrick was more than ever enraged with Prothero for tampering with other people's families like that. Jane had to go very near to death before his will was broken. It broke, though, at the touch of her weak arms round his neck, at the sight of her tortured body, and at her voice, sounding from the doors of death and birth, imploring him to do something for Owen Prothero.
Jane had hardly had time to recover before Prothero got work again on Brodrick's paper. Laura said they owed that to Jinny's baby.
They were married in November before Jinny's baby could be christened. It was a rather sad and strange little wedding, in the parish church of Camden Town, with Brodrick to give away the bride, and Caro Bickersteth for bridesmaid, and Tanqueray for best man. Nina was not there. She had sent Laura a cheque for two hundred pounds two months ago—the half of her savings—and told her to go and marry Owen with it at once, and she had torn it up in a fury when Laura sent it back. She could do all that; but she could not go and see Laura and Owen getting married.
The two had found a lodging in an old house in Hampstead, not far from the Consumption Hospital. Laura had objected to the hospital, but Owen refused to recognize it as a thing of fear. He had fallen in love with the house. It topped a rise, at the end of the precipitous lane that curls out of the great modern High Street. It stood back in its garden, its narrow, flat-eyed windows staring over the wall down the lane.
Laura wasn't sure that she quite liked it.
"What are you looking at?" she said, as he paused before this house.
"I'm looking at that," said Prothero.
He pointed to an old, disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed, in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. Insubstantial as lace-work against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust, consumed in a delicate decay. A stout iron railing guarded this miracle of art and time. Thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave to the place an air of almost unbearable mystery and isolation; it stirred the sense of mortality, of things that having passed through that doorway would not return.
"That house looks and feels as if it had ghosts in it," she said.
"So it has. Not the ghosts of people who have died. The ghosts of people who have never been born. The people," he said, "who come through the iron gate."