A WEDDING-DAY—even a real wedding-day—leaves at best but a vague and incoherent memory. To the bridegroom it is a confused whirling recollection of white satin and tears and smiles and flowers and music—or perhaps a dingy1 room with a long table and an uninterested registrar2 at the end of it.
Edward Basingstoke thought with regret of the flowers and the white satin. If he had accepted her submission3, had consented to the real marriage, there should have been white roses by the hundred, and the softest lace and silk to set off her beauty. As it was—
"We shall have to go through some sort of form," he told her, "because of the clerks. If my friend were just to tear out a certificate and give it to us the people in the office. . . . You understand."
"Quite," she said.
"It'll be rather like a very dingy pretense4 at a marriage. You won't mind that?"
"Of course not. Why should I?"
"Then, if you're sure you really want to go through with it . . . shall we go to my friend's now, and get it over?"
"He doesn't mind?"
"Not a bit."
"He must be a very accommodating friend."
"He is," said Edward.
"Where did you leave the luggage?" she asked, suddenly. They were walking along the Embankment.
"At Charing5 Cross."
"Well, I'm going to get it. And I shall go to the Charing Cross Hotel with it, and you can meet me in three hours."
"But that'll only just give us time," he said. "Why not come with me now?"
"Because," she said, firmly, "I won't play at mock marriages unless I like, and I won't play at all unless you let me do as I like first."
"Won't you tell me why?"
"I'll tell you when I meet you again."
"Where?" he asked. And she stopped at the statue of Forster in the Embankment Gardens, and answered:
"Here."
Then she smiled at him so kindly6 that he asked no more questions, but just said:
"In three hours, then," and they walked on together to Charing Cross.
And after three hours, in which he had time to be at least six different Edwards, he met, by the statue of the estimable Mr. Forster, a lady all in fine white linen7, wearing a white hat with a wreath of white roses around it, and long white gloves, and little white shoes. And she had a white lace scarf and a live white rose at her waist.
"I thought I'd better dress the part," she said, a little nervously8, "for the sake of the clerks, you know."
"How beautiful you are," he said, becoming yet another kind of Edward at the sight of her, and looking at her as she stood in the afternoon sunshine. "Why didn't you tell me before how beautiful you were?"
"I. . . . How silly you are," was all she found to say.
"I wish, though," he said, as they walked together along the gravel9 of the garden, "that you'd done it for me, and not for those clerks, confound them!"
"I didn't really do it for them," she said. "Oh no—and not for you, either. I did it for myself. I couldn't even pretend to be married in anything but white. It would be so unlucky."
All that he remembered well. And what came afterward10—the dingy house with the grimy door-step, and the area where dust and torn paper lay, the bare room, the few words that were a mockery of what a marriage service should be, the policeman who met them as they went in, the charwoman who followed them as they went out, the man at the end of the long, leather-covered table—Edward's old acquaintance, but that seemed negligible—who who wished them joy with, as it were, his tongue in his cheek. And there was signing of names and dabbing11 of them with a little oblong of pink blotting-paper crisscrossed with the ghosts of the names of other brides and bridegrooms—real ones, these—and then they were walking down the sordid12 street, she rather pale and looking straight before her, and in her white-gloved hand the prize of the expedition, the marriage certificate, to gain which the mock marriage had been undertaken.
And suddenly the romantic exaltation of the day yielded to deepest depression, and Edward Basingstoke, earnestly and from the heart, wished the day's work undone13. It was all very well to talk about mock marriages, but he knew well enough that his honor was as deeply engaged as though he had been well and truly married in Westminster Abbey by His Grace of York assisted by His Grace of Canterbury. Freedom was over, independence was over, and all his life lay at the mercy of a girl—the girl who, a week ago, had no existence for him. The whole adventure, from his first sight of her among dewy grass and trees, had been like a fairy-tale, like a romance of old chivalry15. He had played his part handsomely, but with the underlying16 consciousness that it was a part—a part sympathetic to his inclinations17, but a part, none the less. The whole thing had been veiled in the mists of poetry, illuminated18 by the glow of adventure. And now it seemed as though he had thoughtlessly plucked the flower of romance which, with patience and careful tending, would have turned to the fruit of happiness. He had plucked the flower, and all he had gained was the power to keep a beautiful stranger with him—on false pretenses19. He wished that she, at least, had not so gaily20 entered on the path of deception21. Never a scruple22 had disturbed her—the idea of deceiving an aunt who loved her had been less to her than—than what? Less, at least, than the pain of losing him forever, he reminded himself. He tried to be just—to be generous. But at the back of his mind, and not so very far back, either, Iago's words echoed, "She did deceive her father,and may thee." His part of the deception now seemed to him the blackest deed of his life, and he could not undo14 it. It was impossible to turn to this white shape, moving so quietly beside him, with:
"Let's burn the certificate. Deceit is dishonorable."
If she did not think so . . . well, women's code of honor was different from men's. And she had been willing to marry him in earnest, with no deceptions23 or reservations. This mock business had been, in the end, his doing, not hers. And now they had gone through with it, and here he was walking beside her, silent, like a resentful accomplice24. They had walked the street's length, its whole dingy length, in silence. The light of life had, once more, for Mr. Basingstoke, absolutely gone out. They turned the corner, and still he could find nothing to say; nor, it appeared, could she. The hand with the paper hung loosely. The other hand was busy at her belt—and now the white rose fell on the dusty pavement, between a banana-skin and a bit of torn printed paper. He stooped, automatically, to pick up the rose.
"Don't," she said. "It's faded."
It so manifestly wasn't that he looked at her, and on the instant the light of life began to be again visible to him, very faint and far, like the pin-point of daylight at the end of a long tunnel, but still visible. For he now perceived that for her, too, the light had gone out—blown out, most likely, by the same breath of remorse25. Sublime26 egoist! He was to have the monopoly of fine sentiments and regretful indecisions, was he? Not a thought for her, and what she must have been feeling. But perhaps what she had felt had not been that at all; yet something she had felt, something not happy—something that led to the throwing away of white roses.
"I can't let it lie there," he said, holding it in his hand. "I should like to think," he added, madly trying to find some words to break the spell that, he now felt, held them both—"I should like to think it would never fade."
She smiled at that—a small and pitiful smile.
"Cheer up," she said; "lots of people have got really married and then parted, as they say, at the church door. This is a perfect spot for a parting," she added, a little wildly, waving toward a corn-chandler's and a tobacconist's; "or, if your chivalry won't let you desert me in this desolate27 neighborhood . . . let me tell you something, something to remember; you'll find it wonderfully soothing28 and helpful. From this moment henceforth, forever, every place in the world where we are will be the best place for parting—if we want to part. Isn't that almost as good as the freedom you're crying your eyes out for?"
"I'm not," he said, absurdly; but she went on.
"Do you think I don't understand? Do you think I don't know how you feel twenty times more bound to me than if we were really married? Perhaps it's only because everything's so new and nasty. Perhaps you won't feel like that when you get used to things. But if you do—if you don't get over it then—it's all been for nothing, and we might as well have parted among the pigeons."
She walked faster and faster.
"What we have to remember—oh yes, it's for me as well as you—what we've got to remember is that we're to be perfectly29 free. We needn't stay with each other an instant after we wish not to stay. Doesn't that help?"
"You're a witch," he said, keeping pace with her quickened steps, "but you don't know everything. And you're tired and—"
"I know quite enough," she said.
Never had he felt more helpless. Their aimless walking was leading them into narrower and poorer streets where her bridal whiteness caught the eye and turned the head of every passer-by. The pavements were choked with slow passengers and playing children, small, dirty, pale, with the anxious expression of little old men and women.
"Do you like deer?" he asked, suddenly.
"Deer?"
"Yes—fawns, does, stags, antlers?"
"Of course I do."
"Then let's go to Richmond Park. Let's get out of this."
The points of her white shoes showed like stars among the
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