On the following afternoon Frances Candler and Durkin were quietly
married.
It was a whim of Durkin’s that the ceremony should take place on
Broadway, “on the old alley,” as he put it, “where I’ve had so many ups
and downs.” So, his arm in a black silk sling, and she in a gown of
sober black velvet, with only a bunch of violets bought from an Italian
boy on a street corner, they rode together in a taxi-cab to the rectory
of Grace Church.
To the silent disappointment of each of them the rector was not at home.
They were told, indeed, that it would be impossible for a marriage
service to be held at the church that afternoon. A little depressed,
inwardly, at this first accidental cross-thread of fate, they at once
made their way up Fifth Avenue to the Church of the Transfiguration.
“The way we ought to do it,” said Frances, as they rode up the
undulating line of the Avenue, “would be to have it all carried on over
a long-distance telephone. We should have had some justice of the peace
in Jersey City ring us up at a certain time, and send the words of the
service over the wire. That would have been more in the picture. Then
you should have twisted up an emergency wedding ring of KK wire, and
slipped it on my finger, and then cut in on a Postal-Union or an
Associated Press wire and announced the happy event to the world!”
She rattled bravely on in this key, for she had noticed, in the strong
sidelight of the taxi-window, that he looked pale and worn and old,
seeming, as he sat there at her side, only a shadow of the buoyant,
resilient, old-time Durkin that she had once known.
The service was read in the chapel, by a hurried and deep-voiced English
curate, who shook hands with them crisply but genially, before
unceremoniously slipping off his surplice. He wished them much
happiness. Then he told them that the full names would have to be signed
in the register, as a report of the service must be sent to the Board of
Health, and that it was customary to give the sexton and his assistant
two dollars each for acting as witnesses.
Frances noticed Durkin’s little wince at the obtrusion of this
unlooked-for sordidness, though he glanced up and smiled at her
reassuringly as he wrote in the register, “James Altman Durkin,” and
waited for her to sign “Frances Edith Candler.”
The service, in some way, had utterly failed to impress Durkin as it
ought. The empty seats of the chapel, with only one pew crowded with a
little line of tittering, whispering schoolgirls, who had wandered in
out of idle curiosity, the hurriedly mumbled words of the curate—he
afterward confessed to them that this was his third service since
luncheon—the unexpected briefness of the ceremony itself, the absence
of those emblems and rituals which from time immemorial had been
associated with marriage in his mind—these had combined to attach to
the scene a teasing sense of unreality.
It was only when the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,”
were repeated that he smiled and looked down at the woman beside him.
She caught his eye and laughed a little, as she turned hurriedly away,
though he could see the tear-drops glistening on her eyelashes.
She held his hand fiercely in her own, as they rode from the little
ivy-covered church, each wondering at the mood of ineloquence weighing
down the other.
“Do you know,” she said, musingly, “I feel as though I had been bought
and sold, that I had been tied up and given to you, that—oh, that I had
been nailed on to you with horseshoe nails! Do you feel any difference?”
“I feel as though I had been cheated out of something—it’s so hard to
express!—that I ought to have found another You when I turned away from
the railing; that I ought to be carrying off a different You
altogether—and yet—yet here you are, the same old adorable You, with
not a particle of change!”
“After all, what is it? Why, Jim dear, we were married, in reality, that
afternoon I opened the door to MacNutt’s ring and saw you standing there
looking in at me as though you had seen a ghost!”
“No, my own, we were joined together and made one a million years ago,
you and I, in some unknown star a million million miles away from this
old earth; and through all those years we have only wandered and drifted
about, looking for each other!”
“Silly!” she said happily, with her slow, English smile.
In the gloom of the taxi-cab, with a sudden impulsive little movement of
the body, she leaned over and kissed him.
“You forgot that,” she said joyously, from the pillow of his shoulder.
“You forgot about that in the chapel!”
They drifted down through what seemed a shadowy and far-away city,
threading their course past phantasmal carriages and spectral crowds
engrossed in their foolish little ghost-like businesses of buying and
selling, of coming and going.
“You’re all I’ve got now,” she murmured again, with irrelevant
dolefulness.
Her head still rested on the hollow of his shoulder. His only answer was
to draw the warmth and clinging weight of her body closer to him.
“And you’ll have to die some day!” she wailed in sudden misery. And
though he laughingly protested that she was screwing him down a little
too early in the game, she reached up with her ineffectual arms and
flung them passionately about him, much as she had done before, as
though such momentary guardianship might shield him from both life and
death itself, for all time to come.