"As Heaven sees us, I did not dream it. I heard a mass sung, and,
Jasper, it was a mass for the dead. I followed the office. You are not a
Catholic, but I thought--I feared--oh, I don't know what I thought. I am
thankful there is nothing wrong with you."
I felt a sudden certainty, and complete sense of power possess me. Now,
in this her moment of weakness, while she was so completely under the
influence of a strong emotion, I could and would save her from Benoliel,
and myself from life-long pain.
"Kate," I said, "I believe it is a warning. You shall not marry this
man. You shall marry me, and none other."
She leaned her head against my shoulder; she seemed to have forgotten
her father and all the reasons for her marriage with Benoliel.
"You don't think I'm mad? No? Then take care of me; take me away; I
feel safe with you."
Thus all obstacles vanished in less time than the length of a lover's
kiss. I dared not stop to consider the coincidence of supernatural
warning--nor what it might mean. Face to face with crowned hope, I am
proud to remember that common sense held her own. The room in which we
were had a French window. I fetched her garden hat and a shawl from the
hall, and we went out through the still, white garden. We did not meet a
soul. When we reached my father's garden I took her in by the back way,
to the summer-house, and left her, though I was half afraid to leave
her, while I went into the house. I snatched my violin and cheque book,
took all my spare money, scrawled a line to my father and rejoined her.
Still no one had seen us.
We walked to a station five miles away; and by the time Benoliel would
reach the church, I was leaving Doctors' Commons with a special licence
in my pocket. Two hours later Kate was my wife, and we were quietly and
prosaically eating our wedding-breakfast in the dining-room of the Grand
Hotel.
"And where shall we go?" I said.
"I don't know," she answered, smiling; "you have not much money, have
you?"
"Oh dear me, yes. I'm not rich, but I'm not absolutely a church mouse."
"Could we go to Devonshire?" she asked, twisting her new ring round and
round.
"Devonshire! Why, that is where----"
"Yes, I know: Benoliel arranged to go there. Jasper, I am afraid of
Benoliel."
"Then why----"
"Foolish person," she answered. "Do you think that Benoliel will be
likely to go to Devonshire _now_?"
We went to Devonshire--I had had a small legacy a few months earlier,
and I did not permit money cares to trouble my new and beautiful
happiness. My only fear was that she would be saddened by thoughts of
her father; but I am thankful to remember that in those first days she,
too, was happy--so happy that there seemed to be hardly room in her
mind for any thought but of me. And every hour of every day I said to my
soul--
"But for that portent, whatever it boded, she might have been not my
wife but his."
The first four or five days of our marriage are flowers that memory
keeps always fresh. Kate's face had recovered its wild-rose bloom, and
she laughed and sang and jested and enjoyed all our little daily
adventures with the fullest, freest-hearted gaiety. Then I committed the
supreme imbecility of my life--one of those acts of folly on which one
looks back all one's life with a half stamp of the foot, and the
unanswerable question, "How on earth could I have been such a fool?"
We were sitting in a little sitting-room, hideous in intention, but
redeemed by blazing fire and the fact that two were there, sitting
hand-in-hand, gazing into the fire and talking of their future and of
their love. There was nothing to trouble us; no one had discovered our
whereabouts, and my wife's fear of Benoliel's revenge seemed to have
dissolved before the flame of our happiness.
And as we sat there, peaceful and untroubled, the Imp of the Perverse
jogged my elbow, as, alas! he does so often, and I was moved to tell my
wife that I, too, had heard that unearthly midnight music--that her
hearing of it was not, as she had grown to think, a mere nightmare--a
strange dream--but something more strange, more significant. I told her
how I had heard the mass for the dead, and all the tale of that night.
She listened silently, and I thought her strangely indifferent. When I
had finished, she took her hand from mine and covered her face.
"I believe it was a warning to us to flee temptation. We ought never to
have married. Oh, my poor father!"
Her tone was one that I had never heard before. Its hopeless misery
appalled me. And justly. For no arguments, no entreaties, no caresses,
could win my wife back to the mood of an hour before.
She tried to be cheerful, but her gaiety was forced, and her laughter
stung my heart.
She spoke no more about the music, and when I tried to reason with her
about it she smiled a gloomy little smile, and said--
"I cannot be happy. I will not be happy. It is wrong. I have been very
selfish and wicked. You think me very idiotic, I know, but I believe
there is a curse on us. We shall never be happy again."
"Don't you love me any more?" I asked like a fool.
"Love you?" She only repeated my words, but I was satisfied on that
score. But those were miserable days. We loved each other passionately,
yet our hours were spent like those of lovers on the eve of parting.
Long, long silences took the place of foolish little jokes and childish
talk which happy lovers know. And more than once, waking in the night, I
heard my wife sobbing, and feigned sleep, with the bitter knowledge that
I had no power to comfort her. I knew that the thought of her father
was with her always, and that her anxiety about him grew, day by day. I
wore myself out in trying to think of some way to divert her thoughts
from him. I could not, indeed, pay his debts, but I could have him to
live with us, a much greater sacrifice; and having a good connection,
both as a musician and composer, I did not doubt that I could support
her and him in comfort.
But Kate had made up her mind that the disgrace of bankruptcy would
break her father's heart; and my Kate is not easy to convince or
persuade.
At Torquay it occurred to me that perhaps it would be well for her to
see a priest. True, Father Fabian had counselled her to marry Benoliel,
but I could hardly believe that most priests would advise a girl to
marry a bad man, whom she did not love, for the sake of any worldly gain
whatsoever.
She received the suggestion with favour, but without enthusiasm, and we
sought out a Catholic church to make inquiries. As we opened the outer
door of the church we heard music, and as we stood in the entrance and
I laid my hand on the heavy inner door, my other hand was caught by
Kate.
"Jasper," she whispered, "it is the same!"
Some person opening the door behind us compelled us to move forward. In
another moment we stood in the dusky church--stood hand-in-hand in dim
daylight, listening to the same music that each had heard in the lonely
night on the eve of our wedding.