As Minna had taken care to have completed the fifteen days’ residence required of one of the parties for a marriage by license, it was she who, accompanied by Hugh, gave the necessary notice the next day. On the Tuesday in Whitsun week they were married, taking with them, as one witness, Anna Cassaba, whose Jewish conscience Minna had wheedled into complicity. The old woman, bent and thin, her swarthy face wrinkled with a myriad lines, fastened eyes upon them that still glowed with unquenched fires. Her darling’s prince had come. A handsome prince, indeed, for which she pardoned him his Gentile birth. But it took all her love for Minna to reconcile her to the non-religious ceremony. Its bareness shocked her.
The Registrar was an old man in a skull cap, with long, white beard and lack-lustre eyes. He took but indifferent interest in the pair. A wearied resignation showed itself in his manner, as he administered the customary declarations, and pointed with shrivelled finger to the spaces wherein they should sign their names. He reminded one of an old scholar serving out trumpery fiction to the subscribers of a circulating library. A sorry book he was delivering up to them. A trivial pair were they for desiring it. He wished them good luck in a mechanical, far off tone. If they had put the fees in the slot of an automatic machine and drawn out a marriage certificate, the business could not have been more impersonally concluded.
Out in the street again they parted from the old woman, who stood for some time watching them as they went in the direction of the new lodgings that Hugh had engaged on the Parade. She would dearly have loved to shelter them like love-birds in her own nest. But prudence forbade Minna to reveal her secret to Anna’s servants. She sighed as soon as they had disappeared, and turning her slow steps homewards, thought in her old woman’s way of the beautiful children that would be.
The newly wedded pair walked on for a long while in silence. Minna pressed her husband’s arm tightly, waiting for him to speak, half afraid of breaking in upon his thoughts, which she instinctively felt must be deeper than her own. Besides, the bareness of the ceremony had left her with a vague depression. It was a cold, grim episode in the heart of her romance. The walk grew hateful. She longed for the shelter of four walls and the dearer, warming shelter of his arms. Until they were about her, life was a limbo where nothing was defined. She glanced up at him timidly, to see him looking straight before him, his shoulders square, his head thrown back defiantly. Now that she had won him, she faltered over her victory. A sudden dismay depressed her further. His present attitude was an impenetrable wall closing round the inner man. What did she know of him? For a sickening moment her brain was confused by the illusion that he was a total stranger whom some nightmare freak had made master of her destiny. It vanished quickly, but an after-sensation of fear remained. It was so different from the joyous glow that she had anticipated. She felt herself upon the verge of tears. Resentment against him, as if to justify her depression, began to spread like a dull pain around her heart. It was cruel of him to walk as he was doing, in other spheres, apart from her whom he had just made his wife. She withdrew her hand from his arm. He started, caught her hand and replaced it, pressed it closely to him and looked down upon the trouble of her face.
“Poor child,” he said, “you are shaken. Thank goodness it is over.”
The tears began to gather in her eyes. “It was horrid,” she said.
“Well, it will never happen again, sweetheart. Let us forget the dismal old man and think of what lies before us. You must be bright and happy on your wedding day.”
“If you would let me,” said Minna.
“I, dearest?” he exclaimed, with some prickings of self-reproach.
“Yes. Why have you walked all this time without speaking a word to me?”