Saint Saviour’s Church was by many sizes too large for the party—a modern edifice in the Gothic taste, carried out in pink brick with white facings. It was large and smelt of damp. The bridegroom wore his overcoat throughout the ceremony. It was distinctly high, and Mrs. James’s hands were many times up, and her eyes all about for witness of the “frippery” they beheld. Stations of the Cross were affixed to the pillars of the nave, lamps twinkled in the sanctuary; dimly in an aisle she made out the plaster effigy of a beardless young man in the Capuchin habit, pink cheeks, and a fringe, who carried lilies in a sheaf. “The hermaphrodite,” Mrs. James did not scruple to call him for his pains. “Can we not have some of these things taken out?” she had asked her lord; but the Rector was precise that they must have a faculty, and that they were ten minutes late as it was. He was to officiate, that was one comfort; but it diminished the bridegroom’s party by one. That occupied, barely, the front pew on the right; the bride’s company that of the left. Mrs. James, Lady Barbara Rewish, an old friend, Miss Germain, a pale sister, Mr. Gradeley, Q.C., who was best man, and smiled at his own thoughts, and the Right Hon. Constantine Jess, like a large comfortable cat, who had been President of the Board of Trade and hoped to be again; that was all—but it was too much for the Middleham connexion, which shrank into a row of ciphers as the rite proceeded.
Jinny Middleham, whose shyness was taken for impudence, would have made a very handsome appearance if she had not been so painfully aware of it; the bride, shorter by a head, looked like a child. She wore pale grey cloth and feathers, and had a black hat. All that art could do for her had been done; her slight figure was enhanced, her little feet seemed smaller, her gloves were perfect—and yet, as Mrs. James recognized with lead in the heart, if John had picked her up in her poppies and white muslin, and married her then and there one could have understood it. A man might love a milkmaid—but a little doll in a smart frock, a suburban miss in masquerade—ah, the pity of it! And yet the girl’s eyes were like stars, and her face, if it was pale, was serious enough. “It won’t do—it will not do,” said Mrs. James to herself—“I despair.” She despaired from the moment of the bride’s entry upon the arm of her little anxious whiskered father—when she saw old Lady Barbara raise her lorgnette upon the group for one minute—and drop it again, and snuggle into her lace. “There’s nothing in it—not even romance,” that look told Mrs. James. “It’s ridiculous—it's rather low—but here I am. And Germain’s an old friend.” Lady Barbara Rewish, alone among his equals, sometimes called Mr. Germain Jack.
That anything possibly low could be set beside Mr. Germain seemed incredible—but, if credible, then tragic. He wore race in every span of his tall, thin figure, in every line of his fastidious, patient face. His simplicity was manifest, his courtesy never at fault. The slight stoop towards her which he gave his bride as she drew level with him—the humble appeal, the hope and the asking—should have struck the word from his old friend’s mind. Thus a man defers to a queen, she might have said—and yet in that she did not she was wiser, perhaps, in her generation than the children of light. Germain was really, now and throughout the ceremony, revelling in the ?sthetic. The position, in its pathos and its triviality at once, appealed to the sensual in him. How lovely her humility, how exquisite, how pure his pride! Benevolence! Behold, I stoop and pick for my breast this hedgerow thing! See it for what it is in all this state—see it trembling here upon the edge of a new world! Is not this to be loved indeed—where I only give, and she must look to me alone? To be sought as a mother by a frightened child, to be source and fountain of all, to give—this is to be happy. And, incapable of expressing it by a sign, he was at this moment supremely happy, and, though he would have been aghast at the thought, supremely luxurious. He was, in fact, indulging appetite in the only way possible to him.
The Rector of Misperton, safe behind his panoply of shrugging eyebrows, hardened, too, by use and wont, administered the rite with calm precision. The words were said:—“I, John, take thee, Mary Susan,” “I, Mary Susan, take thee, John”—how she murmured them and how he loved her!—the book was signed—but Mr. Gradeley, Q.C., had no pleasantries at his command, and Mr. Constantine Jess had never had any. Old Lady Barbara kissed the cold bride, and hoped she would be happy. “I’m sure he’s in love with you,” she said, “and you must be good to him. I’ve been in love with him myself any time these ten years. But he wouldn’t look at me—and I don’t wonder. I’m such a wicked old woman.” She told the tale on the way to the Wheatsheaf Hotel, where the bride was to be sped, of how poor old Lord Morfiter had married his cook—“She was a Viennese—and, of course, they are wonderful—such tact! Or is it the stays? There’s a place in Wigmore-street. At any rate, it worked very well, and really there was nothing else to be done. No one understood him so well as she had—no one! She always cooked for him when they were alone—or had one or two people dining. Perhaps it’ll be all right here.”
Mr. Jess bowed. “I sincerely hope so. But—forgive me—do I understand—? Was Mrs. Germain——.”
“Lord bless us, no!” cried Lady Barbara. “I don’t suppose she ever saw a cutlet, off a dish. A Bath bun and a cup of coffee is her standard, you may be sure. Of course, she’ll be different in a year, you know. She’ll drop her people and all that.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Jess. “And get what you call ‘tact’——.”
“Oh, she’s dressed herself beautifully—or Ninon’s done it for her. She’ll pay for dressing. I call it a pretty figure. Charming. And she’s got fine eyes,” Lady Barbara replied. “That’s what did it, no doubt. Constantia tells me that Tristram Duplessis—.” Mr. Jess grew animated.
“A clever young fellow, Duplessis. I have had him under observation lately. My secretary is leaving me, and there has been talk—I hear, by the way, that the Cabinet is hopelessly divided: breaking up,—really, you know, on the rocks.”
“So poor Lord Quantock was telling me last night, with tears in his eyes. Then you come in, it seems.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Jess soothingly, “we shall see what we shall see.”
“No doubt,” said Lady Barbara, bored with Mr. Jess.
The reception was rather ghastly. Lady Barbara supposed “we ought to mingle,” and gallantly tried it upon Mrs. Middleham, who had her daughter Mary’s fine eyes crystallized, as it were, in her head, stiffened into glass and intensely polished! Mr. Germain, seconding his friend’s effort while rigidly ignoring that an effort was to be made, performed the introduction—“Ah—do you know Lady Barbara Rewish? Mrs. Middleham,” and departed, not without hearing Mrs. Middleham say that she did not know her ladyship.
“Such a pretty wedding,” said Lady Barbara; “she looked del............