Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him,
she is lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow
considerably smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any
rate, he will never leave his wife a pauper."
Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! I _always_ knew you'd come to
see." ... And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that
there existed no Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last
moment.
Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes
out with envy, Old Thing."
Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was
Meant."
While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come
round in the end. I know women!"
And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less
inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might
think.
Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously
busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have
imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how
interested he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."
Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little
disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so
soon to wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this
complete aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed
wooden cases was almost irritating. People were constantly coming up
to the scratch, too, and relations who, in the event of the
prospective bridegroom's comparative penury, would have considered
pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of life unto which it had
pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present circumstances, producing
eight-day clocks and jewellery.
Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives
who would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over
the girl destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.
"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to
congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as
high as the Greville-Mainwarings in _that_ respect." She trusted
Lady Cardew had rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a
first cousin of Clifford's father, emerged presently, from the mist
of introductions, as an untidy, acidly cheerful old lady, much more
interested in horse-racing than in Clifford; though she had been
overheard to express a hope that his fiancée had not bitten off more
than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced Ferlie's mother
that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by the
front door.
The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though
Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to
come in default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.
There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding. The doctors had
not made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation
and the sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this
decision the better.
Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection
that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a
matrimonially-inclined mind. Had she imparted this news to Ferlie
the latter might have insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian
should be completely out of her range, in Burma. As it was, he
received a silver-edged invitation to the wedding with everybody
else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him to understand quite
clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met face to face on
the Day.
He had decided--nearly--to refuse it.
He had decided--nearly--that Ferlie could never have meant anything
at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.
He had decided--nearly--that he had done Right.
But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its
own reward.
He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an
explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.
He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation
anything but stereotyped. Cyprian was not good at expressing himself
except in reports where exhaustive information was required in
condensed form. It would be more than necessary for him to send
Ferlie a wedding present.
Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of
Mainwaring. Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that
Ferlie would be likely to welcome from him at the moment. A younger
man had felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short
intimate moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not
confided in him her intention of marrying this man. Cyprian was,
himself, incapable of resentment against her, however well-deserved.
By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which
attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple
attached to a slender gold chain. By means of a catch, cunningly
concealed under the leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny
magnifying mirror and a minute powder-puff. Round the mirror was
engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."
Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and
wrote the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie,
omitting even to enclose his card.
She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.
* * * * * *
With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon
his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently
through.
On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception
were to be comparatively "quiet." But when Cyprian arrived, in
response to exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence
a strip of red carpet protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled
senses perceived quite a formidable array of guests in
wedding-garments who ostensibly came to pray and remained to stare.
An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords
suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on
the side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an
inarticulate reply, pushed him into the end of the last pew and left
him to his own devices with a hymn-book.
The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the
torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting
the pews.
Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the
illustrated papers.
Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the
lily-scented air.
"The mother really landed him, I believe."
"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."
"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"
"Wild oats. What young man doesn't... No. The Vane girl was older
than he was. The attraction at _that_ establishment was the
Samaritan Actress."
"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of
Abraham described as a Samaritan."
"You don't understand. Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."
Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random. Did he feel
things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be
thin-skinned?
Muriel, and now ... Ferlie. "The One before the Last." But Muriel
had figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat
here watching for Ferlie. If intense desire could be construed by
the high gods and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire
Ferlie to be happy.
The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died. The
bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in
a front pew.
Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding
March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to
bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round
someone in white.
From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more
than that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on
turning his head now, his eyes encountered hers fully. He was
startled by the impression that he was staring into the face of a
perfect stranger. How ghastly white she looked! The fraction of a
moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own had dropped before hers
the night she had wished to keep him at her side.
She was passing by on Peter's arm. The pair of them looked as if
they ought still to be going to school.
Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned
it when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form
"Bloods."
The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.
Everybody was standing. Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all
craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie
... Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments.... He
would wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter
from the Thing which had whitened her face with terror....
"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..."
Ah, well, if the man thought so.
Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of
Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.
Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a glimpse
of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token
that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will.
At intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her
duty.
Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.
The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had
escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the
wake of the chief actors in this religious farce. Or was it tragedy?
While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his
mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn
the choir was singing to fill in time:
"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!
Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."
But--Good Gracious!--thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding
revelation, he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one.
They had always known that they were one, united by some mystic Force
which had its roots in a Far Beginning and its branches in the
Eternities.
Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them
and their united freedom?
"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."
He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a
perfect description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract.
(The woman in front of him would not stop sniffing.)
"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,
Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life...."
It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing
neither to the left nor to the right, but this time she was not
clinging to Peter.
With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound.
The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his
fingers could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn
carpet, and so to his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the
silence of catacombs.
The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night
were no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he
remembered, experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The
knowledge formed another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one
another.
In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands with
her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter.
Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped
into an ante-room in search of whisky and soda.
He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd. He could not.
From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl
of goldfish. He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs. If
she passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably
expect to have her for a moment to himself. He waited for a long
while, watching the goldfish go round and round in circles. They
roused misty recollections of Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the
general imprisonment of human spirits.
When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her
white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward
from that sheltered corner by the bookcase.
"Ferlie!"
She started violently and swung round.
"Oh! It's you, is it?"
She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note. Naturally, people were
agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this
marriage.
Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.
"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian. The Apple of Discord.
Clever of you to think of that. Not that I needed a material
reminder of the fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall
we call it a misunderstanding?"
The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of
shrill laughter. He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.
The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at
her with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child. Shaded them with
his hand against the pain as he replied:
"You know that is neither fair nor true."
"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.
Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her
wrists and held them.
"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future,
is it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which
stretches out a hand to you from the past?"
A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of
anger and intense pain.
"Mock? No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane--kind to men in order to be
cruel. If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it
is because I know of no other way to be kind ... now."
He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds
of transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a
visible string of pearls--"the gift of the Bridegroom."
Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring
uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.