Punctual to his word, Bill Dennant called for Shelton at one o'clock. “I bet old Benjy's feeling a bit cheap,” said he, as they got out of their cab at the church door and passed between the crowded files of unelect, whose eyes, so curious and pitiful, devoured them from the pavement.
The ashen face of a woman, with a baby in her arms and two more by her side, looked as eager as if she had never experienced the pangs of ragged matrimony. Shelton went in inexplicably uneasy; the price of his tie was their board and lodging for a week. He followed his future brother-in-law to a pew on the bridegroom's side, for, with intuitive perception of the sexes' endless warfare, each of the opposing parties to this contract had its serried battalion, the arrows of whose suspicion kept glancing across and across the central aisle.
Bill Dennant's eyes began to twinkle.
“There's old Benjy!” he whispered; and Shelton looked at the hero of the day. A subdued pallor was traceable under the weathered uniformity of his shaven face; but the well-bred, artificial smile he bent upon the guests had its wonted steely suavity. About his dress and his neat figure was that studied ease which lifts men from the ruck of common bridegrooms. There were no holes in his armour through which the impertinent might pry.
“Good old Benjy!” whispered young Dennant; “I say, they look a bit short of class, those Casserols.”
Shelton, who was acquainted with this family, smiled. The sensuous sanctity all round had begun to influence him. A perfume of flowers and dresses fought with the natural odour of the church; the rustle of whisperings and skirts struck through the native silence of the aisles, and Shelton idly fixed his eyes on a lady in the pew in front; without in the least desiring to make a speculation of this sort, he wondered whether her face was as charming as the lines of her back in their delicate, skin-tight setting of pearl grey; his glance wandered to the chancel with its stacks of flowers, to the grave, business faces of the presiding priests, till the organ began rolling out the wedding march.
“They're off!” whispered young Dermant.
Shelton was conscious of a shiver running through the audience which reminded him of a bullfight he had seen in Spain. The bride came slowly up the aisle. “Antonia will look like that,” he thought, “and the church will be filled with people like this . . . . She'll be a show to them!” The bride was opposite him now, and by an instinct of common chivalry he turned away his eyes; it seemed to him a shame to look at that downcast head above the silver mystery of her perfect raiment; the modest head full, doubtless, of devotion and pure yearnings; the stately head where no such thought as “How am I looking, this day of all days, before all London?” had ever entered; the proud head, which no such fear as “How am I carrying it off?” could surely be besmirching.
He saw below the surface of this drama played before his eyes, and set his face, as a man might who found himself assisting at a sacrifice. The words fell, unrelenting, on his ears: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health—” and opening the Prayer Book he found the Marriage Service, which he had not looked at since he was a boy, and as he read he had some very curious sensations.
All this would soon be happening to himself! He went on reading in a kind of stupor, until aroused by his companion whispering, “No luck!&rdqu............