“How can I forgive myself?” he cried. “I have allowed you to be insulted—I, who would not let the wind blow on you if I had my will.”
She remembered this after, and his agitated look, but did not see them then.
“Oh, it is not that,” she said. “It does not matter, as she told me. But oh, Arthur! he does not belong to us any longer, he cares nothing about us!” cried Lucy, with the shock of discovery which no previous preparation in the mind can lessen.
She had said, as she came, that her brother was severed from his family; but now she saw it with her eyes, and felt the sharpness of the fact, so different from anticipation. Durant was full of a hundred compunctions, as if he had been the cause. He would have said philosophically enough to his own sister that it was the course of nature; but it seemed horrible, unnatural, that such a thing should happen to Lucy. The little suppressed sobs that came from her at intervals as they went back to the train, seemed to rend his own heart.
CHAPTER XII.
THOUGH it was his wedding-day, and though he was an impassioned lover, it would be impossible to describe the sensation of despair with which Arthur saw his sister and his friend hurry out of the church. His bride had left him on the other side, turning her back upon him. He was left there, with Mrs. Bates and old Davies! There was a tragical-ludicrous air about the group which seemed the very culmination of that squalor of the weather and the surroundings, which not even Nancy’s bridal-wreath, and Sarah Jane’s pink muslin could counteract. Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Davies were fitly matched. They were ready to fly at each other’s throats, metaphorically, as they stood there, confronting each other: Mrs. Bates red with confusion and wrath to think that she should have called this person my lady, and Davies dissolved in tears and speechless with indignation. What had young Arthur to do between them? They seemed like symbolical emblems of his fate. No longer to have to do with the beautiful things of this earth, grace, cultivation, loveliness; but with the meaner conditions, the bare, unattractive prose of existence. Everything that was shabby and rusty and poor had taken the place of all that was lovely and pleasant and of good report. Beauty and youth were evanescent qualities; they would flit away even from his bride; and what had he to look forward to but another Mrs. Bates as his final companion? This horrible idea did not communicate itself in so many words, but it flitted vaguely upon the air, giving Arthur a sudden horror of Mrs. Bates, who had taken the place of his mother, as it seemed. He turned away to follow Nancy, but was stopped by old Davies, who called out a despairing “Oh, Master Arthur!” and put a letter, wet with unnecessary tears, into his hand.
“Is it from my mother, Davies?” he said.
“I don’t know, Sir, if it’s my lady or Miss Lucy. I was to have took it; I wasn’t to have seen you; but now as I have seen you—oh, Master Arthur, Master Arthur, how could you, Sir?” cried Davies, with streaming eyes and uplifted hands.
He turned away with rage in his heart, clenching his hand involuntarily; but at that moment Mrs. Bates interfered, and changed the current of Arthur’s feelings.
“You are a most impertinent person,” said Mrs. Bates. “How dare you speak to my son-in-law so? And in church, too! Though you are only a servant, you ought to know better.”