WHEN Gwen was dressing for her wedding, it never somehow struck her
mother to go to her room, and Gwen had herself given an absolute command
that no one should ask her to do so. She made no remark at all on the
subject when she did not come, but she insisted on going to the church
in the carriage with Mrs. Fellowes.
It was useless to oppose her, she was like adamant on this point, which
set Dacre swearing like mad. She was white and silent as they drove off.
Mrs. Fellowes was silent too, and rather whiter, but she daren’t show
any feeling; they were on the brink of a general upheaval, and her whole
energy must be concentrated to ward it off.
Gwen felt her situation with such cruel intensity, that even to herself
she had to pretend to a total stony indifference, but when they got to
the gates she sighed and stirred softly and put out her hand with
unaccustomed wistfulness and laid it on Mrs. Fellowes. It was cold and
stiff. Mrs. Fellowes rubbed it gently between hers and laid it lovingly
against her cheek, and kept in her tears, she dared not speak.
“God help her, God help her, and God help Humphrey!” she kept repeating
to herself in a sort of childish entreaty.
“Gwen,” she said at last, “you must not look like this when Humphrey
sees you. Gwen, my darling, you have nothing to fear with such a man!”
“Do you think I fear him? I thought you would have known better, it is
myself I fear.”
“Yourself is a bogie you have set up, Gwen, Humphrey will soon demolish
that!”
“I wish I felt sure of it. I wish I felt sure of anything. Upon my word,
Mrs. Fellowes, upon my word, I wish from the bottom of my soul I could
say with any decent show of honesty, God help us, Humphrey and me! But
God never felt so unreal, such a mere bubble to please fools, as He does
at this minute—Don’t, don’t exclaim, or protest, or be shocked—not
to-day, my wedding day, and such a brilliant match, too!” she added
laughing. “Ah, well! I won’t hurt you, we’ll leave that part.—My father
is to go through the farce of bringing me up to the altar, is he not?”
she asked, thrusting all trace of emotion from her face and sitting up
straight.
“If you don’t keep a very sharp eye on him he is sure to do something
quite unique. If one could only wind him up and touch springs at
intervals! one can’t unfortunately, and I feel sure I shall be made
ridiculous. Your eye must get off him now and again, so I suppose I may
as well accustom myself to the thought,” she went on with a shrug, “and
resolve to swallow the whole hog without grimacing, but I do so loathe
being made to look like a fool. Are we here? Oh, my flowers! The
children have them perhaps? Yes, look!”
As she walked up the church, just touching her father’s arm, with Mrs.
Fellowes’ two little nieces in white gauze and water lilies, looking
like a pair of lilies themselves for softness and cool creaminess,
trotting after her, her mother from her chancel pew caught sight of her
for the first time.
For a minute she looked dazed and frightened, then suddenly with a
broken smothered cry, she leaned forward and threw out both her hands to
her daughter, two big tears in her eyes, and her face tremulous with a
great joy that was pain.
Mrs. Fellowes saw it, it was intensely pathetic to her and a revelation.
She had at last, at the end of all these years, seen a glimpse of this
small, golden-headed creature’s motherhood—after all she was really
human! She hurried up, sat down beside her, and gently brought her back
to herself. Then with one of Mrs. Waring’s hands caught in hers, as if
she had been a child, she looked at Gwen, and wondered how on earth any
girl with a stone for a heart could look as divine as she did. She
looked round the church, and every man, woman, and child was worshipping
her in audible silence. There was not a whisper, not a joke, not a
smile.
As soon as the cake was cut, Gwen went away to dress. As she passed Mrs.
Fellowes she whispered,
“Will you help me? I want to speak to you.—Mary, Mrs. Fellowes will help
me to dress, and please don’t cry,” she said wearily, “I shall see you
often, and—really, I have given you no very special reason to cry for
me.”
She half laughed, then she stooped and kissed the old woman’s cheek.
“You have always been so good to me, come and see me before I go.”
When Mary had disappeared, choking, Gwen turned to the glass and began
to take off her bracelets.
“Sit down and let me take off your wreath,” said Mrs. Fellowes.
“I wish I had done as Mr. Fellowes suggested,” said Gwen at last,
playing with a diamond dagger that Strange had given her, “and looked
through that marriage service; it is a degrading thing to lie as I have
done to-day. I might have been any common-minded vulgar woman perjuring
myself for a settlement. You see, I am marrying as a sort of
experiment!—Oh, don’t, you gave my hair an awful pull!—Humphrey knows
it, but I didn’t realize that I should actually have to swear to a
lie—no experiment is worth that. I have put myself in a false position,”
she continued, stirring irritably, “from having told those miserable
blatant lies. I was never at a wedding in my life in the church, I
always managed to escape that part, and I really never thought of the
words, ‘love, honour, and obey,’ in any solemn, binding, personal
connection. On the whole, it is a pity for women not to have been reared
on Bibles and Prayer-books, it might keep them from some pitfalls, and
no doubt the ordinary mother is useful too, in such cases.”
Mrs. Fellowes’ heart quivered painfully, and her hands trembled as she
twisted up a coil of Gwen’s hair that had come loose. She had suspected
the truth very early in the day, but all through her short engagement
Gwen had kept both her and the Rector at arm’s length.
“When I found out what I really was in for,” went on Gwen, “it was too
late to draw back—no, it wasn’t!” she cried, “the habit of lies is
growing on me, but then I was ashamed, too much of a coward.”
“This is very sad,” said Mrs. Fellowes at last, “it is so sad, dear,
that one can hardly speak of it. No woman has the right to try
experiments, to play pranks with hearts and souls. You deserve—ah, what
a brute I am! I have no right to scold you, my poor Gwen, you’ll have to
pay dearly enough for your play. You will know some day what you have
done,” said she, laying her soft warm cheek down on the girl’s head in
the caressing way she had when Gwen was a child, “then you will suffer,
ah, child, how you will suffer! But it is Humphrey one feels for now.
Gwen, you must not let him feel you are so far from loving him.”
“He knows. You don’t suppose I lied to him?”
“He knows in a way, but he doesn’t realize the knowledge, nor does he
quite know the material he has to work on, or how the twist came into
the warp and woof of it. Gwen, don’t let your horrid truthfulness make
you cruel, be patient, dearest, be patient, this love won’t come like a
shock, it will steal in on you, and I am perfectly convinced your first
impulse will be to kick it out.”
Gwen gave a little laugh.
Mrs. Fellowes dropped the brooch with which she was going to fasten
Gwen’s collar, went a few steps away, and looked at her.
“Humphrey knows precious little about you,” she cried, with some natural
irritation, “he is dazed, small blame to him! so am I, so is John, we
are all dazed.”
Her eyes filled suddenly with tears.
“We all pour out our love on you, and—and for what? Just for a cold
ghost of a thing, for mere hope—hope, what good is that to any man? Now,
look here, Gwen, don’t let Humphrey know this, naked truth though it be.
There is no lie in the matter, you can love, darling, you can, ’tis only
the learning that is the trouble for you, but I have a horrid hateful
presentiment, in spite of all I can say, that your most objectionable
direct methods will run you into deplorable difficulties.”
“Truth is tangible, even if it is brutal,” said Gwen, “but
love—love—love, this intangible vague horror, why should I be persecuted
with it, why should I realize now that, vague as the thing is, it is
sacred, and a sort of crime of a very low order to be incapable of it? I
got as far as that in church to-day with all those glaring faces on me,
and Mr. Fellowes’ eyes—he has no right to look through people like
that!”
She turned away to hide the crimson in her cheeks.
“Then this one-flesh business, this is a horrid thing.”
She squeezed her hands into her eyes.
“This is maddening!” she cried, and sprang up and stood looking out of
the window.
“One flesh!” she murmured breathlessly, “One flesh!”
Presently she shook herself, and with a long sigh brought the calmness
back into her face, then she went and put her two hands on Mrs.
Fellowes’ shoulders and looked down on the sad face with a little laugh.
“Look here!” she said, “advise every girl you care about not to try
experiments in marriage, and to read the marriage service with the man
she is engaged to standing opposite to her, before she dares to quote
from it in church before all the rag-tag and bobtail of society. And
now, give me my hat and kiss me, you don’t know how much a part of my
life your love for me is, even though it is fed on hope only, and—I
shall try to be honest to myself without any flagrant brutality to
Humphrey,” she said laughing, “I think that is all I can promise just
yet. Ah, what a lovely scheme of colour!” she cried, looking at her
superb figure, in its dusty-amethyst gown with the flashes of
lemon-yellow in it.
“Do you think my father and mother are awake to the fact that I am
married to-day?” she demanded.
“If you had heard your mother’s cry when she saw you go up the aisle,
and had seen her face—as long as I live I shall never forget either!—you
would have no need to ask such a question,” said Mrs. Fellowes, with
gentle gravity.
“I thought she looked rather different from usual, and I fancied my
father’s arm trembled when I held it. So—so!” she said with a
half-mocking smile as she fastened the top button of her glove, “so
marriage is so solemn and sacred a subject that it has actually touched
the human part of those two people! Ah, Mary, here I am, ready for my
new life—do you like me? The outside is satisfactory, is it not? It is
quite pleasant to feel so like a whited sepulchre!” she said to Mrs.
Fellowes as they went down the stairs, “it excites me.”