“No. I’m not altogether tired,” he answered. “But a change is beneficial to us all, you know. I suppose my wire surprised you?”
“Yes, and no. Of course I heard three weeks ago that the Morinis were returning to Orton for the wedding, and I naturally expected you to put in an appearance. What a lucky dog you are to have got such an appointment! And yet you grumble at your bread and cheese. Look at me! Two sermons, Sunday school, religious instruction, mothers’ meeting, coal club—same thing each week, year in, year out—and can’t afford to do the swagger and keep a curate! I never get a change, except now and then a day with the hounds or a dinner from some charitably disposed person. But what about the marriage? We all thought it was to be in Italy. He’s French and she’s Italian, so to be married in England they must have had no end of formalities.”
“Mary is a Protestant, remember—and a Cabinet Minister can do anything—so they are to be married in Orton church,” he added in a strange tone, his eyes turned towards the sunlit lawn, over which old Hayes, the groom-gardener, was running the machine.
“I ought to have called to congratulate her, but as you know I only returned last night from doing duty over at Eye. I ought to drive over after tea. Is the count there?”
“No. When we left Rome I came straight to London on some urgent private business of His Excellency’s, and they remained a week in Paris, where Dubard was—to complete the trousseau, I suppose.”
“It is one of Mary’s whims to be married by special licence by the Canon at Orton, I’ve heard. Is that so?” asked Sinclair.
The young man nodded. He had no desire to discuss the tragedy, for he knew well that the marriage was a loveless one, and although his own affection had been unspoken, he was beside himself with grief and despair. He, who knew the truth, yet dare not utter one single word to save her!
For ten days he had been in London, staying at his old chambers with Billy Grenfell, and transacting business at the Italian Consulate-General connected with the formalities of the marriage, formalities which were expedited because his employer was Minister of War. Paragraphs had crept into the press, the ladies’ papers had published Mary’s portrait, and the marriage, because it was to take place in a village church, was called a “romantic” one.
George Macbean smiled bitterly when he recollected how much more of tragedy than romance there was in it. He adored her; for months her face had been the very sun of his existence, and in those recent weeks they had become so closely associated that even her mother had looked somewhat askance at the secretary’s attentions, to which she had seemed in no way averse. A bond of sincerest sympathy had drawn them together. She was in no way given to flirtation; not even her bitterest enemies, those jealous women who were always ready to create scandal and invent untruths about her, could charge her with that. No. She had accepted George’s warm, platonic friendship in the spirit it was given, at the same time ever struggling to stifle down that strange and startling allegation which Felice Solaro had made against him.
The very world seemed united against her, for even in George Macbean, the man whom she had believed to be the ideal of honesty and uprightness, she dared not put her absolute trust.