Chapter Sixteen

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THE wedding was fixed for the first week in June. As Lady Charmington said, there was no reason for delay, though it must be owned that neither of the young people seemed very eager to press on the date. Lady Eccleston could not have borne a wedding in Lent, and Lady Charmington had a lingering old Scottish superstition, of which she was heartily ashamed, against May marriages. All things considered, the beginning of June seemed plainly indicated. Everybody would be in town then, and it was to be a London wedding. Cissy grumbled a good deal at having to miss the season; but her mother affected to treat her lamentations as a joke.

"Of course she doesn't mean it," she said, in answer to Sainty's expression of his willingness to consult Cissy's wishes in everything. "You know how absurd my children are; they always must make a joke of everything, but it doesn't mean that their hearts are not in the right place; under all their nonsense, which I never check, for I do so love to see them merry, they have very serious feelings about all the big things of life."

A cousin of Lady Eccleston's, who was married to a newly-made peer with a large income, and who had never before shown the slightest inclination to do much for her poorer kinsfolk, expressed her approval of Cissy's brilliant match by offering the use of her house for the occasion.

"It is very good of dear Louisa," said Lady Eccleston, "and I must own we should have been sadly squashed in our little bicoque. Still, if we hadn't always been as sisters, I couldn't have taken it from her. Poor dear! It is such a bitter regret to her having no children of her own. Naturally mine are a great deal to her; and I can quite understand her pleasure in having Cissy married from her house. Don't think I'm ungrateful to the dear creature, Sainty, but I own in my heart I would rather have had the girl go to her bridal from her own and her mother's little home; but that is entre nous, my dear boy; I wouldn't hurt poor Louisa's feelings for worlds."

Sainty found being engaged very different from anything he had read of it. Things seemed so little changed with him, that he wondered at times if it could really be he who was to be married in a few weeks. Was it possible that at a date definitely fixed, and not very far distant, his whole being was to undergo this tremendous transformation, was henceforth to be linked in closest union with a creature of whom he knew practically nothing, and that not for a season, like any other circumstance in life, but as long "as they both should live," "till death did them part"? The prospect terrified rather than attracted him.

Sometimes he tried to feel elated at the thought that he was to join the ranks of normal happy people who love and are loved, was to lead about a wife like other men, and hold up his head among his fellows. He told himself that this supremest gift was far beyond anything he had dared to hope. It was to no purpose. He might be flattered, grateful, touched, but he was conscious of none of that blissful thrill that is said to transfigure existence and make a heaven on earth. Sometimes he wondered how it had all come about so suddenly. Everything he had done had seemed not only natural, but inevitable at the time. He had walked into the situation as simply as going in to dinner; yet now there were moments when the thought of what they had both undertaken appalled him. He was as frightened for Cissy as for himself. Did she know what she was doing, what it meant? A dozen times a day he recalled the scene in the library, her hard, unflinching gaze, the mocking tones of her voice. Was that the way that a woman made the "irrevocable sweet surrender" to a man who had won her heart? If she had made a mistake, if she did not love him, ought she not still to be saved from the fate she had accepted, even at the eleventh hour?

He saw extremely little of his betrothed. He had never had much to do with engaged couples, but he had an impression that they were generally left a good deal alone together, that people and things combined to respect the privacy of mutual love; yet from the day of his engagement it was no exaggeration to say that he had hardly seen Cissy alone for five minutes. It is true that she had not actually left Belchamber next morning; but after their surprising freedom from other claims, both she and her mother seemed now all impatience to be gone, and during the time that they remained, they were mostly shut up in their own rooms announcing the event to a hundred correspondents, or dashing off their thanks for the congratulations that arrived by every post. "She must really get home, and begin to see about some clothes; there was none too much time, and this was such a bad time of year; just when every one was busy." Cissy was sure, if she delayed another day, she "shouldn't have a decent rag to her back, and should have to be married in her petticoats."

From the day they went to town there began a round of shoppings and tryings-on, of scribbling notes, unpacking, cataloguing, and rapturously thanking for wedding-presents, which, as Cissy was marrying a rich man with a house full of beautiful things, were, of course, far more numerous and costly than if she had married a curate, or a captain in a marching regiment. Then the list of people to be invited to the wedding had to be discussed ad infinitum, at first with regard to the size of the house in Chester Square, and after the cousin's offer, to be enlarged, amended, and corrected. With every fresh batch of presents, the number swelled of those whom it was deemed indispensable to ask, till it seemed to Sainty that there was not a stranger in the whole great indifferent city who had not been called in to assist at his nuptials.

He also had come to town, as in duty bound, and was staying with his uncle Firth, but though he spent several hours a day in Chester Square, he found himself horribly in the way there. Lady Eccleston and Cissy sat squashed sideways by the open drawers of their respective writing-tables, like people playing a perpetual duet on two organs with all the stops pulled out. The absurdly inadequate pieces of furniture on which women transact business became so littered with lists, letters, acceptances, refusals, the drawers so bulged with stacks of silver-printed invitations and stamped envelopes, that the little hands with the scratching pens seemed by their perpetual movement to be feverishly preserving an ever narrowing space for themselves, as ducks keep a hole open in a rapidly freezing pond.

Of happy interchange of rapturous feelings, murmured talks in quiet corners, or those long; palpitating silences that lovers know, too blissful to be marred by talk, our engaged couple had no experience. Though Sainty was far too delicate-minded for the mere physical aspects of courtship to appeal strongly to his imagination, it did occur to him that an occasional embrace was not inappropriate between people about to be married; but on the one occasion when he attempted anything of the sort, he had been repulsed with such energy and decision that he had immediately desisted. He had a conviction that Cissy thought him a fool for accepting defeat so easily, but to struggle for a kiss like an enamoured costermonger was repugnant to all his ideas. So he continued to meet and greet his promised bride as though she were the most indifferent of strangers.

One morning at breakfast he asked his uncle if he ought not to make his betrothed a present. Lord Firth came out from behind the morning paper with a bound.

"My dear boy! do you mean to say you haven't done so?"

"Not yet," said Sainty; "but I supposed, of course, I should have to."

"Not even a ring?" asked Lord Firth. Sainty was forced to admit it.

"Why, the very day she accepted you, you ought to have given her a ring; if you hadn't got one fit to offer her, you should have telegraphed to town at once for some. You must get one at once and take it to her; and, of course, you must give her other things too, a tiara or necklace or something really handsome, and a bag or dressing-case. You know the kind of thing. Find out from her mother what she's got, and which she would like, and get the duchess to help you choose things; she knows what's what. They must think it very odd that you haven't done it already."

"There are the emeralds," said Sainty.

"Of course she'll have them to wear," said his uncle, "but you can't give them to her, because they are heirlooms. As it happens, the one thing you are rather poor in is jewellery. Your grandmother had a lot, but it was her own, and you may believe she didn't leave any behind her; your mother never cared for it, and never had much. She will probably give your wife, or leave her, what she has; but of course you must see that she has the proper things, and do the thing well. Don't be stingy about it."

The duchess was delighted to help, and echoed Lord Firth's astonishment at Sainty's dilatoriness in the matter.

"You really are the most extraordinary boy," she said. "I'm just going for my walk; we'll go round to Rumond's at once and see what he's got."

"We've been expecting a visit from your lordship," said the great jeweller unctuously, "ever since we heard the happy news. May I be permitted to offer my congratulations on the event? We have always had the honour of supplying your family, and hoped that on such an occasion you would not desert us. I was remarking to Mr. Diby only the other day that I had been wondering we did not get a telegram to go down to Belchamber---either he or I would have been delighted; but you preferred to wait till you came to town: quite right, quite right."

They were ushered into a little sanctum, where presently on a mat of dark blue velvet were displayed treasures which made Sainty blink, and of which the prices gave him cold shivers down his back. The duchess handled and appraised the gems with the sangfroid of long habit; but her grandson had never in his life had occasion to buy any jewellery, and had not the faintest idea of what such things were worth. To deck the bright curls of a woman with the cost of a hospital, or hang the price of a working-men's college round her neck, seemed to him absolutely vicious; it had a horrible flavour of that life into which he had obtained his only glimpse at Arthur's supper-party---poor Arthur, whom almost alone he would have cared to have near him on his wedding-day, and who he knew would not be there, because his wife could not be asked.

He left the shop with a horrible sense of guilt, and a feeling that the act which in him would be applauded as a fitting generosity was very much in the same category with his brother's prodigalities, not differing in kind, but only so much more blameworthy as it was so much greater in degree. Arthur, he felt sure, would not have hesitated to hang the girl of his heart in jewels, nor have wasted a thought on what it cost, and again he wondered whether his qualms were the result of his well-known parsimony, or one more proof that he was not really in love with her who was to be his wife.

It was soon clear that Cissy did not share his views on these subjects; the evening on which his presents arrived in Chester Square was the only occasion since their betrothal on which she expressed anything resembling affection for him. Her eyes sparkled like the diamonds in her little crown as she tried the things on, and pirouetted about the room with them. She waltzed up to Sainty and dropped him a deep curtsey. "How does my lord and master think I look?" she said coquettishly; and then in a sudden gust of gratitude she caught his hands in hers, and for the first time bent forward and kissed him. Sainty blushed hotly; this kiss, which spontaneously given would have meant so much to him, was like the stamp on a receipt for cash value received; and it was the last, as it had been the first, of their singular courtship.

As the weeks passed, Cissy grew stranger and more unlike herself. The intervals of feverish gaiety, which had marked the earlier stages of her engagement, became rarer, and were succeeded by fits of gloom and depression that seemed utterly foreign to her nature. Whatever she might be at other times, that came to be the mood in which she invariably received Belchamber. She never willingly addressed him, and there were days when it seemed beyond her power to speak peaceably to him. Sometimes she was so rude that Lady Eccleston would playfully remonstrate, or Tommy would burst out with, "Hang it all, Cissy, you've no right to speak to Sainty like that. If I was him, I'm jiggered if I'd stand it."

They had never from the first been allowed many unwitnessed interviews, but now it seemed to Sainty that it was Cissy herself who carefully avoided any occasion of finding herself alone with him, and if ever she could by no means escape, she would take refuge from his attempts at conversation in sullen monosyllables, and sometimes even in absolute silence.

One day he asked her in desperation if she felt she had made a mistake---if she wanted to be released. "It is not too late," he said, "but it soon will be; if you repent of what you have done, if you want me to give you back your freedom, in mercy to yourself, to me, speak while there is yet time."

"Cissy," he pleaded, after waiting in vain for any answer, "if you don't feel that you love me enough, don't do a thing that will ruin both our lives."

"Do I seem as if I loved you?" she asked brutally.

"So little, that I can't help feeling that the idea of marrying me is repugnant to you. If so, never mind me; have the courage to put a stop to the whole thing; a word from you will do it."

"Oh! will it? It is not as simple as all that."

"I will help you in any way I can; I will do anything you want."

Cissy continued to stare into the fire in silence; she had never once looked at him. "I don't know what I do want," she said at last, hopelessly.

Sainty was about to say more, but at that moment, with a great admonitory rattling of the door-handle, Lady Eccleston hurried in, with her arms full of parcels.

"More presents, children," she cried gaily; "here, Sainty, come and take this top one off, or I shall drop it. That makes three hundred and seventy-nine. Ouf! I'm glad I've no more daughters to marry."

"Listening! I thought so," cried Cissy, starting up, and without a glance at the gifts from which her mother was beginning to remove the wrappings she left the room. At No. 379, fans and smelling-bottles, and even small articles of jewellery, were becoming a drug in the market. Lady Eccleston got very red, but took no notice, affecting to be absorbed in undoing a bit of ribbon that had got into a knot. "'With best wishes, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter,'" she read; "really very good of them. We hardly know them, and I hadn't meant to ask them. It is the seventeenth pair of paste buckles, but they are pretty though not old, and they come in for shoes. Who's this? 'Every good wish, Mr. Austin Pryor.' What a beauty! It is the prettiest fan she has had; really charming! What can this be? A pincushion! 'Fondest love from Miss Henrietta Massinger.' What rubbish. I wish people wouldn't send all this trash. Give me the green book on my writing-table, Sainty, and let's enter them before I forget it. Three more notes for that poor child to write, and she's tired out; any one can see it."

"Lady Eccleston,"said Sainty, "do you think Cissy's only tired? To me she seems very unhappy----"

"Tired, my dear boy, worn out; her nerves are in fiddle-strings; I shall be thankful for her sake when it's all over," and she murmured as she wrote, "Pair of paste buckles, Mr. and Mrs. Bonham Trotter, 377. Tortoiseshell fan, Watteau subject, Mr. Austin Pryor, 378. Embroidered velvet horseshoe pincush----"

"Do stop writing a minute and listen to me," said Sainty. "It's your daughter's happiness that is at stake. Tell me, truly, do you think she loves me?"

"Loves you! My dear Sainty, what a question! Of course she loves you," cried Lady Eccleston. "Miss H. Massinger, No. 379," and she looked up with a bright smile, as she rubbed energetically on the blotting-paper. "Have you been having a lovers' quarrel?" she asked.

"No, no, nothing of that sort; but you yourself must have seen how oddly she behaves. She never will be alone with me for a minute if she can help it; she hardly ever speaks to me, and if I speak to her, as often as not she doesn't answer me. It is the queerest way of showing love."

Lady Eccleston smiled again, a little indulgent smile full of finesse.

"My dear child," she said, "is that all? How little you know girls. Can't you understand that to a girl of Cissy's temperament, so absolutely pure and modest, marriage represents the unknown, the terrible; the prospect of it fills her with a thousand tremors and apprehensions. Believe me, a girl who can approach her wedding-day with calm nerves and a cheerful, smiling face, is either a cow, and has no sensibilities, or else she knows a great deal too much."

"But she looks at me really as if she hated me," Sainty persisted. "If she has mistaken her feelings, if the idea is repugnant to her, if she feels that, having once given her word, she is bound, either out of consideration for me, or fear of all the talk, to go through with things, is it not our duty, yours and mine before all others, to save her from herself while there is yet time?"

"Dear modest fellow! Every word you say makes me love you more, and convinces me how exactly you are suited to such a nature as Cissy's; I see how well you will understand her; how patient, how gentle you will be with her. As to her behaviour to you, I know; I feel for you a dozen times a day; but you must not doubt her affection. Good gracious! I treated my poor dear husband a thousand times worse when we were engaged. My mother used to say she didn't see how he stood it; but the dear man had endless patience; he never doubted; and he soon succeeded in reconciling me to my fate," added the lady, with a modest simper, "when once we were married."

"Maidenly tremors are all very well," said Sainty, "but Cissy's behaviour gives me the impression of a much deeper-seated repugnance. Don't, for pity's sake, let her wreck her life if she isn't sure she cares enough for me to marry me."

"You are generous, considerate, unselfish as ever," cried Lady Eccleston. "But trust me who know her so well. My dear Sainty, do you suppose if I were not absolutely sure this marriage was for my child's happiness, that I, her mother, who must have her welfare at heart, should not be the first to oppose it?"

After that there seemed nothing more to be said. Still Sainty was not satisfied, and he determined to carry his perplexities to his uncle, on whose sterling commonsense he had often leaned comfortably in boyhood.

Lord Firth looked grave, and pursed up his mouth judicially. "This is awkward," he said, "infernally awkward. Do you mean to say you want to get out of it?"

"Oh no! not for myself at all. I don't say I'm desperately in love; but I don't know that I ever should be. As long as I thought Cissy cared for me, I was very much honoured, and ready to devote my life to making her happy; but as the time comes nearer, I am more and more convinced that she does not love me. She may have felt sorry for me; she may have let herself be dazzled by what she would gain in a worldly way. I don't pretend to understand why she took me; but I am sure she repents what she has done, that, if it could be managed for her, she would be glad to be released."

"Have you told her so? Have you offered to release her?"

"Yes."

"Well, what did she say?"

"She said nothing. When I pressed her she said she didn't know what she wanted. Then her mother came in, and Cissy went out of the room."

"Did you say anything about it to the old woman?"

"Yes; I said what I've just told you."

"And what did she say?"

"Oh, she said girls were always like that, that I didn't understand them---which God knows I don't---that a modest girl was always in a funk before marriage, and that she would be all right afterwards."

"Hm," said Lord Firth. "Well, I'm an old bachelor, and don't know much about them either; they're queer creatures. I always vaguely distrust that Eccleston woman; but I've no reason for supposing she would sell her daughter, and I must say the girl has never struck me as being particularly under her mother's thumb. On the contrary, she's always been rather pert to her when I've seen her."

"I can't make it out; it all seems a hopeless tangle," said poor Sainty.

"The whole business struck me, when I heard of it, as being rather rash and ill-advised," said his uncle. "If I had been consulted, I should have suggested you had better both have been a little surer of your own feelings before announcing the engagement. I suspected your mother and Lady Eccleston of cooking up the affair when I heard of the Ecclestons being so much at Belchamber, but I didn't feel called upon to interfere. It was obviously desirable that you should marry, and if you fancied Miss Cissy, I knew nothing against the girl, though I don't much care for the mother. Besides, you are of age, and capable of arranging your own life without the interference of a guardian."

"Then you think there is nothing to be done?"

"I don't see what. You say you've offered the girl to break it off, and she didn't seem to wish it, or at least wasn't sure, and that her mother assured you she was only shy. What more can you do? If you want to back out, it's another matter. Though it would look very bad so near the time, I suppose it might be done."

As a last resort Sainty wrote to his mother, though he felt sure what her answer would be; and sure enough Lady Charmington wrote with no uncertain pen. "If you had any misgivings you had better not have been in such a hurry to propose. Now it is altogether too late to go back on your word. I consider that you are bound in honour almost as if you were already married. It would be abominable to throw the girl over at the eleventh hour, when she has got her things, and all the invitations are out for the wedding. Think of the mortification to her, of the scandal it would cause. People might even say you had found out something against her. It would be enough to prevent her making another match, for every one would know of it, and talk about it."

Sainty was struck for the hundredth time with the inevitability of his mother's misapprehension. She passed over in silence all question of Cissy not caring for him, which was the one point on which he had insisted, and instantly assumed that his misgivings arose from nothing but the fatal weakness of his character, which made flight his one impulse in face of any decisive act.

Sainty had made his last effort, and proceeded to drift resignedly with the stream. There was just one other person to whom he had momentarily thought of applying for counsel and help, and that was his old friend Mrs. de Lissac; but Alice had behaved rather strangely, he thought, about the whole matter. On first coming to London, he had gone to see her as a matter of course; but though she had made a grand dinner for him and Cissy in honour of the engagement, and had showered magnificent presents on them both, the old cordial welcome was somehow lacking. She seemed ill at ease with him, and had fluttered hastily away from all attempts on his part to talk about Cissy, displaying positive terror if he showed any disposition to become confidential.

Nothing was easier than to discourage Sainty from talking about himself. If his confidences were not met, as Alice de Lissac had always hitherto met them, more than half-way, they died a natural death.

The day of Belchamber's nuptials dawned inevitably in its turn. No convulsion of nature destroyed Lord Firth's comfortable bachelor quarters, or buried the north side of Chester Square in ruins. Sainty got through the morning somehow, in a sort of waking dream, listening abstractedly to Gerald Newby, who had come up from Cambridge at his request to act as his "best man," and had much to say on many subjects, from the marriage-service of the Church of England---of some parts of which he strongly disapproved---to the tyranny of custom which imposed the high hat and frock coat, garments neither comfortable, convenient, nor æsthetically beautiful.

Lady Charmington, who was staying at Roehampton with old Lady Firth, brought her mother in for an early lunch as the wedding was fixed for half-past two.

At the appointed time Sainty found himself planted by a great bank of palms and heavy-scented white flowers that made him feel sick. From where he stood the whole great church was visible. Dimly, as through a mist, he could descry his mother, straight and stern, in puritanical drab, beside the huddled white chuddah and nodding plumes of his grandmother, the duchess strapped into a petunia velvet, with a silver bonnet whose aigrette seemed to sweep the skies, his Aunt Eva in a Gainsborough hat, taking rapid notes for the Looking-glass, and Claude, slim, cool, and elegant, his beautifully gloved, pearl-grey hands crossed upon his cane, which he had rested on the seat beside him as he stood sideways looking for the bride. Behind them a sea of faces, mostly unknown, of light colours and black coats, of feathers, flowers, and laces, stretched back to where, in a cloud of pink and white, the bridesmaids clustered round the door, holding the great bouquets of roses he had so nearly forgotten to order for them.

The organ boomed, and the knowing-looking little choristers in their stiff surplices went clattering down the aisle followed by a perfect procession of smug ecclesiastics, among whom Sainty caught a fleeting glimpse of dear old Meakins from Great Charmington. Lady Eccleston, emotional, devotional, and gorgeous as the morning, rustled hastily to her place in the front pew where George and Randolph were already nudging each other and giggling. Then the little white-robed boys began to come back, shrilly chanting, and as the choir separated to right and left Sainty could see Tommy, very solemn and as red as the carnation in his buttonhole, and on his arm a vision of soft shrouded loveliness, coming slowly towards him. All the riddle of the future was hid in that veiled figure. How little he really knew what was in the little head and heart under all that whiteness; was it happiness or misery she was bringing him? an honoured, dignified married life, an equal share of joys and sorrows, "the children like the olive branches round about their table"? or a loveless existence, the straining bonds of those unequally yoked, the little sordid daily squabbles that eat the heart, perhaps even shame, dishonour. . . .? What thoughts for a bridegroom stepping forward to meet his bride at the altar! But who is master of his thoughts?