MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In
the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as bringing
together the father and daughter, and hovering in an attitude of
benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did not very
distinctly figure.
But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing
through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the
meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any
kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the
appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be left
alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett conveyed
it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of understanding. As
for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the nuptial preparations
to give her husband another thought. She had gained her point, she had
disarmed her foes, and in the first flush of success she had no time to
remember by what means her victory had been won. Even Garnett's
services received little recognition, unless he found them sufficiently
compensated by the new look in Hermione's eyes.
The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey
Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly
consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the importance
of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage," and dazzled by
the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the Almanach de Gotha.
In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard evidently felt that she
had penetrated to the sacred precincts where "the right thing"
flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione, her look of happiness
had returned, but with an undertint of melancholy, visible perhaps only
to Garnett, but to him always hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank
back into her passive self, resigned to serve as the brilliant
lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell hung the trophies of conquest.
Preparations for the wedding were zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew
the danger of giving people time to think things over, and her fears
about her husband being allayed, she began to dread a new attempt
at evasion on the part of the bridegroom's family.
"The sooner it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to
Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that
she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments,
indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her
daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she
must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of safety.
But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her
husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what she
wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown by the
way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she bloomed out
in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering sense of the
ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.
The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented itself
punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it and drove to
the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back street, with lean
old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of pit-life gardens,
black and sunless, between walls bristling with iron spikes. On the
narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led by a red-eyed poodle: a
little farther on a dishevelled woman sat grinding coffee on the
threshold of a _buvette_. The bridal carriage stopped before one of the
doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and harness which drew the
neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett started to mount the
ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on which he learned from the
_concierge_ that Mr. Newell lodged. But half-way up he met the latter
descending, and they turned and went down together.
Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye seemed
as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there was
something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as though he
had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last hypothesis
Garnett paused--for it became evident to him that Mr. Newell had hired
his dress-suit.
Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained
silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the
net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only once
he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe: "Is this
Mrs. Newell's carriage?"
"I believe so--yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in
defining that lady's possessions it was impossible not to trespass on
those of her friends.
Mr. Newell made no farther comment, but presently requested his
companion to rehearse to him once more the exact duties which were to
devolve on him during the coming ceremony. Having mastered these he
remained silent, fixing a dry speculative eye on the panorama of the
brilliant streets, till the carriage drew up at the entrance of Saint
Philippe du Roule.
With the same air of composure he followed his guide through the mob of
spectators, and up the crimson velvet steps, at the head of which, but
for a word from Garnett, a formidable Suisse, glittering with cocked
hat and mace, would have checked the advance of the small crumpled
figure so oddly out of keeping with the magnificence of the bridal
party. The French fashion prescribing that the family _cortege_ shall
follow the bride to the altar, the vestibule of the church was thronged
with the participatore in the coming procession; but if Mr. Newell felt
any nervousness at his sudden projection into this unfamiliar group,
nothing in his look or manner betrayed it. He stood beside Garnett till
a white-favoured carriage, dashing up to the church with a superlative
glitter of highly groomed horseflesh and silver-plated harness,
deposited the snowy apparition of the bride, supported by her mother;
then, as Hermione entered the vestibule, he went forward quietly to
meet her.
The girl, wrapped in the haze of her bridal veil, and a little
confused, perhaps, by the anticipation of the meeting, paused a moment,
as if in doubt, before the small oddly-clad figure which blocked her
path--a horrible moment to Garnett, who felt a pang of misery at this
satire on the infallibility of the filial instinct. He longed to make
some sign, to break in some way the pause of uncertainty; but before he
could move he saw Mrs. Newell give her daughter a sharp push, he saw a
blush of compunction flood Hermione's face, and the girl, throwing back
her veil, bent her tall head and flung her arms about her father.
Mr. Newell emerged unshaken from the embrace: it seemed to have no
effect beyond giving an odder twist to his tie. He stood beside his
daughter till the church doors were thrown open; then, at a sign from
the verger, he gave her his arm, and the strange couple, with the long
train of fashion and finery behind them, started on their march to the
altar.
Garnett had already slipped into the church and secured a post of
vantage which gave him a side-view over the assemblage. The building
was thronged--Mrs. Newell had attained her ambition and given Hermione
a smart wedding. Garnett's eye travelled curiously from one group to
another--from the numerous representatives of the bridegroom's family,
all stamped with the same air of somewhat dowdy distinction, the air of
having had their thinking done for them for so long that they could no
longer perform the act individually, and the heterogeneous company of
Mrs. Newell's friends, who presented, on the opposite side of the nave,
every variety of individual conviction in dress and conduct. Of the two
groups the latter was decidedly the more interesting to Garnett, who
observed that it comprised not only such recent acquisitions as the
Woolsey Hubbards and the Baron, but also sundry more important figures
which of late had faded to the verse of Mrs. Newell's horizon.
Hermione's marriage had drawn them back, had once more made her mother
a social entity, had in short already accomplished the object for which
it had been planned and executed.
And as he looked about him Garnett saw that all the other actors in the
show faded into insignificance beside the dominant figure of Mrs.
Newell, became mere marionettes pulled hither and thither by the hidden
wires of her intention. One and all they were there to serve her ends
and accomplish her purpose: Schenkelderff and the Hubbards to pay for
the show, the bride and bridegroom to seal and symbolize her social
rehabilitation, Garnett himself as the humble instrument adjusting the
different parts of the complicated machinery, and her husband, finally,
as the last stake in her game, the last asset on which she could draw
to rebuild her fallen fortunes. At the thought Garnett was filled with
a deep disgust for what the scene signified, and for his own share in
it. He had been her tool and dupe like the others; if he imagined that
he was serving Hermione, it was for her mother's ends that he had
worked. What right had he to sentimentalise a marriage founded on such
base connivances, and how could he have imagined that in so doing he
was acting a disinterested part?
While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had
already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged
before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the
foreground of a Catholic marriage. Through the glow of lights and the
perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett's eyes rested on the central
figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared from his
view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schemes nor his own
share in them could ever unsanctify Hermione's marriage. It was one
more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to nature's secret of
drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his eyes turned from the
girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and stoical figure sunk in
the adjoining chair, it occured to him that he had perhaps worked
better than he knew in placing them, if only for a moment, side by side.