Tom’s marriage was on the Thursday of Easter week. All the morning a soft teeming fog lay over the fields, drawing out scents of growth and warmth and life. Worge lay in the midst of it like the ghost of a farm, a dim grey shadow on the whiteness, and the voices of her men came muffled, as in dreams. Towards noon the sunshine had begun to eat away the mist—it grew yellower, streakier, and at last began to scatter, rolling up the fields in solemn clouds, balling and pilling itself against the hedges, melting into the April green of the woods; and then suddenly it was gone—sucked up into the sky, sucked down into the earth, living only in a few drops in the cups of violets.

The Bethel stared away across the fields to Puddledock. [138] For some time its roof, with the chipped Georgian pediment, had risen above the mist. Then the grim windows had come out to stare, and then the tombstones that grew round its feet, leaning and tottering among the chapel weed.

Tom and Thyrza were to be married at the Bethel. This had caused some surprise in the neighbourhood, as the Beatups had always been “Church”; but friendship and convenience had led to the decision—friendship for the Reverend Mr. Sumption, because Tom knew him better than Mr. Poullett-Smith, and was sorry for him on account of Jerry, convenience because the chapel was close at hand, and the makers of the wedding breakfast would have time to run across and witness the ceremony, which they could not have done had it taken place at Brownbread Street, two miles away.

The only one to whom these reasons seemed inadequate was Nell. To her the proceeding was not only heretical but mean—her affection for the Church had always been led by taste rather than belief, and her attitude, which she had considered (under instruction) as that of an orthodox Anglican, was in reality that of an Italian peasant, who looks upon his church as his drawing-room, a place of brightness to which he can go for refuge from the drabness of every day. Her opposition to the chapel marriage was based on an emotion similar to what she would have felt for the party who, with the chance of eating and drinking out of delicate china in the drawing-room, chose to devour their food out of broken pots in the scullery. She did not acknowledge this, any more than she acknowledged the motive which fed uneasily on Mr. Poullett-Smith’s inevitable disgust; she talked to Tom about his duty as a Baptized Churchman, and was both surprised and grieved to find that the [139] War seemed to have destroyed what little sense of this he had ever had.

“I tell you as it’s all different out there. There aun’t no church and chapel saum as there is here. You stick to church on Church Parade down at the base, but when you’re up in the firing line, there’s a queer kind of religion going around. You hear chaps praying as if they wur swearing and swearing as if they wur praying, and in the Y.M. plaace they have sort of holy sing-songs wud priests and ministers all mixed up; and I’ve heard a Catholic priest read the English funeral over one of us, and I’ve seen a rosary on a dead Baptist’s neck. Church and chapel may be all very good for civvies, but you can’t go vrothering about such things when you’re a soldier.”

Nell was hurt and frightened by these sayings. She had an idea that any danger or suffering would only make a man cling closer to the Sanctuary. It was terrible to think that at the first earthquake Peter’s Rock cracked to its foundations. A defiant loyalty inspired her, and at first she made up her mind not to go to the wedding, but she could not resist the temptation of asking Mr. Poullett-Smith’s advice, and he thought she had better attend, and pray for the backsliders. He also earnestly bade her distrust any appearance of cracks in Peter’s Rock, and she went away comforted, with shining eyes and burning cheeks, and her church standing firmer than ever on the rock which was neither Peter nor Christ, but her love for a very ordinary young man.

So all the Beatups went to the Bethel, leaving Worge locked up and the yard in charge of Elphick. Mrs. Beatup wore her Sunday bonnet, the wheat-crop having been superseded, contrary to all the laws of rotation, by one of small green grapes. Both Ivy and Nell had [140] new gowns, Ivy looking squeezed and unnatural in a sky-blue cloth, which together with a pair of straight-fronted corsets, she had bought at a Hastings dress agency—Nell pretty and demure in a grey coat and skirt, and one of those small towny-looking hats which seemed to find their way to her head alone in all Dallington. Mus’ Beatup, with Harry and Zacky, smelled strongly of hair-oil and moth-killer, and Harry had nearly scrubbed his skin off in his efforts to get out of it the earth of his new furrows. He was considered too young to be Tom’s best man, and the office had been at the last moment unexpectedly filled by Bill Putland. Bill, now a sergeant, was home on seven days’ leave, looking very brown and smart, and Polly Sinden, who, not having been invited with her parents to the breakfast, had vowed she would waste no time going to the chapel, suddenly changed her mind and appeared in her most ceremonial hat.

The chapel was packed with Sindens, Bourners, Putlands, Hubbles, Viners, Kadwells, Pixes. Mrs. Lamb of Bucksteep was there, with Miss Marian, but as she had not thought it necessary to put on the elegant clothes in which she was seen gliding into church on Sundays, her presence was regarded as an affront rather than an honour; Mrs. Beatup would have dressed herself in her best for any Bucksteep wedding, and thought that the squire’s wife might have done the same for her. Also, she came in very late, and her entrance was mistaken for that of the bride by many folk, who shot up out of the pew-boxes, only to be disappointed by the sight of Mrs. Lamb’s faded, powdered features behind a spotted veil, and Miss Marian swinging along after her with a tread like a policeman. “I reckon my feet are smaller than hers,” thought Nell, “for all that I’m only [141] a farmer’s daughter.”

Then Mr. Sumption came out of the vestry, and stood under the pulpit to wait for the bride. He looked more like a figure of cursing than of blessing—black as a rook, with his thick curly hair falling into his eyes, yet not quite hiding the furrows which the plough of care had dragged across his forehead. There was a rustle and a flutter and a turning of heads, as Thyrza came up the aisle on the arm of the bachelor cousin who was giving her away. She wore a grey gown like a March c............