Yet another twelve months had passed since Vane had taken his degree;
since Enid had seen him vanish like a spectre out of her life, and had
waited vainly for his coming, only to receive instead that letter of
farewell which, the instant she had read it, she knew to be final and
irrevocable.
In such a nature as hers the tenderest spot was her pride. She had been
his sweetheart since they were boy and girl together, and when the time
came they had become formally engaged. For nearly four years now she had
considered herself as half married to him. Other men attracted by her
physical beauty and her mental charm had approached her, as they had a
perfect right to do, in open and honest rivalry of Vane, but she had
given them one and all very clearly to understand that she had
definitely plighted her troth, and had no intention of breaking it. In
other words she had been absolutely faithful even in thought.
She had never considered his feelings as to what he called his inherited
alcoholism as anything else than the somewhat fine-drawn scruples of a
highly-strung, and rather romantic nature. She had not troubled herself
about the deadly scientific aspect of the matter. She knew perfectly
well that men got drunk sometimes and still made excellent husbands,
and, more than all, she firmly believed that, once Vane's wife, she
would speedily acquire sufficient influence over him to make anything
like a recurrence of what had happened quite impossible.
Even after his second and worst breakdown on the morning of
Commemoration Day she would still have received him as her lover and,
after a little friendly lecture which would, of course, have ended in
the usual way, she would have been perfect friends with him again on the
old footing.
But that letter had ended everything between them. Moreover, it had been
followed by one from Sir Arthur to her father expressing great regret at
the turn which matters had taken, but saying that, after repeated
conversations with Vane, he had been forced to the conclusion that his
resolve to enter the Church and devote himself to a life of celibacy and
mission work at home was really fixed and unalterable.
After that there was, of course, nothing more to be said or done. Enid,
being a natural, simple-hearted, healthy English girl, who enjoyed life
a great deal too well to worry about looking under the surface of
things, therefore came to the conclusion that she had been jilted for
the sake of a fine-drawn Quixotic idea. If she had been jilted for the
sake of another woman it would have been quite a different matter. Then
there would have been something tangible to hate bitterly for a season,
and then to get revenged on by making a much more brilliant marriage, as
she could easily have done. But it was infinitely worse, and more
humiliating to be thrown over like this by the man whom she had looked
upon as her future husband nearly all her life, whom she had played at
housekeeping with while they were children, and whom she had never
looked upon as anything else but a sweetheart or a lover--and yet it was
true, miserably true, and now, for the sake of a mere idea, she found
herself cast off, loverless and alone.
Then, after a few weeks of secret, but exceeding bitterness, she did
what nineteen out of every twenty girls would have done under the
circumstances. The twentieth girl would probably have considered her
life blighted for ever, and vowed the remainder of it to
single-blessedness, charity and good works as a Sister of something or
other. But Enid belonged to the practical majority, and so when the
breaking off of the engagement became an actual social fact, and
Reginald Garthorne came just at the psychological moment to tell her
that never since he had earned that boyish licking on the steamer by
kissing her, had he been able to look with love into the eyes of any
other woman, she had told him with perfect frankness that, as it was
quite impossible for her to marry Vane, and as she certainly liked him
next best, and had not the slightest intention of remaining single, she
was perfectly content to marry him. If he chose to take her on those
terms he might go and talk the matter over with Sir Godfrey, and if he
and her mother said "yes," she would say "yes," too.
It was a somewhat prosaic wooing, perhaps, but Reginald Garthorne had
been hungering for her in his heart for years. Outwardly he had been
friends with Vane, but in his soul he had hated him consistently as boy
and man ever since that scene behind the wheelhouse of the _Orient_. He
was, therefore, perfectly content. He had longed for her, and he didn't
care how he got her. The rest would come afterwards.
He was rich, far richer than Vane ever would be. He had inherited a
fortune of nearly two hundred thousand pounds from his mother's side of
the family when he came of age. On his father's death he would succeed
to the title and a fine old country house in the Midlands, with a
rent-roll and mining royalties worth over thirty thousand a year. He
would be able to make her life a continuous dream of pleasure, amidst
which she would very soon forget the visionary who was throwing away his
manhood and all the best years of his life just because he had learnt
that he was the son of a drunken and abandoned woman, and had himself
got drunk twice in his life.
The interview with Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh had been entirely
satisfactory. They both considered in their hearts that their daughter
had been very badly treated. From every social point of view this was a
match which left nothing to be desired, and so they said "yes," and
Garthorne went back to Enid, and said, triumphantly, as he kissed her
for the first time since that memorable kiss on the steamer:
"And so, you see, darling, I've won, after all!"
It was thus that it came about that, on the same day, as the Fates would
have it, two ceremonies were being performed at the same hour, one in
St. George's, Hanover Square, and one before the altar at Worcester
Cathedral.
The Bishop, in full canonicals, surrounded by his attendant clergy, sat
inside the altar rails in front of the Communion Table, and on the
topmost step before the rails knelt two young men wearing surplices and
the hoods of Bachelors of Arts of Oxford.
It was the Feast of St. James the Apostle, and in his exhortation the
Archdeacon, who was preacher for the day, had taken for his text the
collect:
"Grant, O merciful God, that, as Thine holy Apostle St. James,
leaving his father and all that he had without delay, was obedient
unto the call of Thy Son Jesus Christ and followed Him, so we,
forsaking all worldly and carnal affections, may be evermore ready
to follow Thy holy commandments, through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
One of the men kneeling at the altar rails was Mark Ernshaw, and the
other was Vane Maxwell.
Among the somewhat scanty congregation which had remained after the
usual morning service, sat Sir Arthur Maxwell. A year ago he would have
been inclined to laugh at the idea of his son sacrificing all his
brilliant worldly prospects to enter the Church. He was, as has already
been said, a deeply religious man himself, but still, he was a man of
the world, a man who had made his own way through the world, and won by
sheer hard work some of the prizes which it has to give, and, like many
others of his class, he had come to look upon the clerical profession
somewhat as the refuge of the intellectually destitute.
But as the time had gone on since that scene in his son's rooms at
Oxford, he had come to believe that with Vane it was not a mere
question, as it is with too many other men, of taking Orders to secure a
profession and a position. He was entering the Church as the men of more
earnest and more faithful ages had done; because he believed that he had
a duty to do, a mission to perform, a sacrifice to make, and, above all,
an enemy to fight which was God's enemy as well as his own.
Therefore the words "leaving his father and all that he had," awakened
no bitter echoes in his soul. True it was a sacrifice for him as well as
for Vane; but for Vane's sake he had made it willingly and cheerfully,
and he was able now to look forward with perfect contentment to the
triumphs which, in his father's pride, he could not help believing his
son would win in that higher and holier sphere of life which he had
chosen.
The presentation being made and the questions as to "crime or
impediment" being duly asked and answered, the Litany and Suffrages
began, and every note and word of the solemn intonation, ringing through
the silence of the great Cathedral, found an echo which rang true in
three souls at least among the congregation:
"O God the Father of Heaven: have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.
"O God the Son, Redeemer of the world: have mercy upon us,
miserable sinners.
"O God the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son: have
mercy upon us, miserable sinners.
"O Holy blessed and glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God:
have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.
"Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our
forefathers: neither take thou vengeance on our sins: spare us,
good Lord, spare thy people whom thou hast redeemed with Thy most
precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.
"From all evil and mischief: from sin, from the crafts and assaults
of the devil: from Thy wrath and from everlasting damnation.
"From all blindness of heart: from pride, vain-glory and
hypocrisy: from envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness.
"From fornication, and all other deadly sin: and from all the
deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil.
"Good Lord deliver us!"
"Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers:
neither take thou vengeance on our sins."
These, of all the words which he heard spoken on that fateful day, the
day which marked for him the passing of the line which divides the World
of the Flesh from the World of the Spirit--the frontier of the kingdom
of this world separating it from that other Kingdom which, though
worldwide, yet owns but a single Lord--seemed to fall with greater
weight into Vane's soul than any others of the service. As he heard them
he raised his bent head, threw it back and, with wide open eyes, looked
up over the Bishop's head and the reredos behind the altar to the
central section of the great stained glass window containing the figure
of the Godhead crucified in the flesh, with the two Marys, Mary the
Mother and Mary Magdalene, kneeling at the foot of the Cross.
Like a quiver of summer lightning across the horizon of an August sky,
there came to him the thought of that mother of his whom he had never
known, and of that girl who was almost his sister, long ago lost in the
great wilderness of London. They were not likenesses, only the faintest
of suggestions, and yet the mere recollection seemed to lend an added
solemnity to the vows which he was about to take.
"I will do so, the Lord being my helper!"
As he uttered the words there was not the faintest doubt in his soul
that for the rest of his life he would be able to keep both the letter
and the spirit of the oath unbroken to the end of his days. Many a man
and woman has rashly wished that it were possible to look into the
future. Such a thought had more than once crossed Vane Maxwell's mind,
but could he, in that solemn moment, have looked into the future and
seen what lay before him, he would have been well content with the high
destiny to which his great renunciation was to lead him.
* * * * *
And now the scene changes from Gloucester Cathedral, to St. George's,
Hanover Square.
It was the smartest wedding of the year, and, apart from all its social
brilliance, even the most rigid critics admitted that London had not
seen a lovelier bride or a handsomer bridegroom than Enid Raleigh and
Reginald Garthorne. The church was thronged by an audience made up of
the friendly, the sympathetic, the sentimental, and the merely curious,
as is usual on such occasions.
Carol Vane and Dora Russel, who had come provided with tickets
indirectly supplied by the bridegroom himself, occupied seats in the
left-hand gallery at the front. In consequence of the crowd, they only
got into their places just as the bridal procession was moving up the
central aisle. There was the bride with her attendant bridesmaids, six
little maidens dressed in pure white, the bridegroom with his pages, six
counterparts dressed in the style of Charles I. Then Sir Godfrey and
Lady Raleigh, and then a tall, grizzled, soldierly-looking man, and
beside him a white-haired old lady, who might have stepped straight out
of one of Gainsborough's pictures.
As Carol caught sight of the man beside her, she leant half her body
over the front of the gallery, and stared with straining eyes down at
the slowly moving procession. Dora caught her by the arm and pulled her
back, saying, in a whisper:
"Don't do that; you might fall over."
Carol turned a white face and a pair of blankly staring eyes upon her,
caught her by the arm with one hand and pointing downwards with the
other, said in a whisper that seemed to rattle in her throat:
"See that man, there--that tall one with the old lady on his arm? That's
the man who did all the ruin! That's my father--and my mother was Vane's
mother, and that's his son, going to marry Vane's sweetheart. No, by
God, he shan't! I'll tell the whole church full, first."
She tore herself free from Dora's hold and struggled to her feet, her
lips were opened to utter words which would have instantly turned the
wedding into a tragedy; but the rush of thoughts which came surging into
her brain was too much for her. The swift revelation of an almost
unbelievable life-tragedy struck her like a lightning-stroke; she
uttered a few incoherent sounds, and then dropped back fainting into
Dora's arms.
"Another of life's little tragedies, I suppose," whispered a
well-dressed matron just behind her, to a companion at her side, "a
_petite maitresse_, no doubt. It's a curious thing; they always come to
see their lovers married."