Engrossed in meditations such as these, I was fetched earthward by the
clicking of a lock, and, turning, saw the door beneath her balcony unclose
and afford egress to a slender and hooded figure. My amazement was
considerable and my felicity beyond rhetoric.
"Dorothy--!" I whispered.
"Come!" was her response; and her finger-tips rested upon my arm the while
that she guided me toward the gateway opening into Jervis Lane. I followed
with a trepidation you may not easily conceive; nor was this diminished
when I found awaiting us a post-chaise, into which my angel hastily
tripped.
I babbled I know not what inarticulate nonsense. But, "Heavens!" she
retorted, "d'ye mean to keep the parson waiting all night?"
This was her answer, then. Well, 'twas more than I could have hoped for,
though to a man of any sensibility this summary disposal of our love-affair
could not but vaguely smack of the distasteful. Say what you will, every
gentleman has about him somewhere a tincture of that venerable and artless
age when wives were taken by capture and were retained by force; he
prefers to have the lady hold off until the very last; and properly, her
tongue must sound defiance long after melting eyes have signalled that the
traitorous heart of her, like an anatomical Tarpeia, is ready to betray the
citadel and yield the treasury of her charms.
Nevertheless, I stepped into the vehicle. The postilion was off in
a twinkling, as the saying is, over the roughest road in England.
Conversation was impossible, for Dorothy and I were jostling like two pills
in a box; and as the first observation I attempted resulted in a badly
bitten tongue, I prudently held my peace.
This endured for, perhaps, a quarter of an hour, at the end of which period
the post-chaise on a sudden stopped, and I assisted my companion to alight.
Before us was a villa of considerable dimension, and situate, so far as I
could immediately detect, in the midst of a vast and desolate moor; there
was no trace of human habitation within the radius of the eye; and the
house itself presented not a glimpse of tenancy or illumination.
"O Lord, madam--" I began.
"Hasten!" spoke a voice from within the Parsonage. And Dorothy drew me
toward a side door, overhung with ivy, where, sure enough, a dim light
burned, 'Twas but a solitary candle stuck upon a dresser at the remoter end
of a large and low-ceiled apartment; and in this flickering obscurity we
found a tremulous parson in full canonicals, who had united our hands and
gabbled half-way through the marriage service before I had the slightest
notion of what was befalling me.
And such is the unreasonable disposition of mankind that the attainment
of my most ardent desires aroused a feeling not altogether unakin to
irritation. This skulking celerity, this hole-and-corner business, I
thought, was in ill-accord with the respect due to a sacrament; and I could
have wished my marriage to have borne a less striking resemblance to the
conference of three thieves in a cellar. But 'twas over in two twos. Within
scantier time than it takes to tell of it, Francis and Dorothy were made
one, and I had turned to salute my wife.
She gave a shriek of intolerable anguish. "Heavens!" said she, "I have
married the wrong man!"