Chapter XXV

When Anthony informed Henry of his impending marriage over the telephone, Henry exclaimed, “Good God!” but he was very useful afterward. He gave Anthony the address of a house in Duke Lane that belonged to friends of his who wanted to go abroad immediately and were willing to let it as it stood; and he volunteered to go down to Pannell for Anthony to break the news to his parents.

Henry knew that a great deal of manipulation was necessary if the marriage was to be accepted by the family, and he thought it had better be accepted, because, after a talk with Hilton Laurence, he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t prove Anthony mad, and that the marriage wasn’t a permanent disaster.

“Insane acts are seldom certifiable,” Hilton Laurence explained rather dryly to Henry, “and in any case you won’t have long to put up with it.”

Henry felt very strongly that a thing that couldn’t be stopped and wouldn’t last long had better not be looked into at all.

It was unfortunate that Anthony insisted his parents should be told the truth before they decided whether they would receive Kitty or not, but Henry, in whose hands the truth had been deposited, felt that it was open to him to deal with it economically.

Powder in sufficient quantities may destroy an empire, but readjusted, and with the explosive elements left out, it is said to give a beneficial appearance to overheated complexions.

Henry told his father that he probably wouldn’t consider the marriage suitable. Miss Costrelle came from a good old Essex family, but she was poor and had lived a long time abroad. She hadn’t any particular home, and Anthony was marrying her before the operation in order to look after her himself.

“Of course it’s quixotic,” Henry continued swiftly before Mr. Arden was fairly launched upon his first negative. “Poor old Tony has had a bee in his bonnet ever since he returned to England. It isn’t an ordinary marriage, and you know I feel with you, sir, that ordinary marriages are always the best; but I do think he might have done worse. If the girl recovers, which is, I fear, extremely improbable, she’ll make him more normal; and if she doesn’t, he’ll have had his head, and be free again, without much damage done.”

Mr. Arden listened to Henry with some consideration. He knew that Henry, with very little help from him, had carved out a successful legal career. His father appreciated success and respected the law. It was true the law was not always amenable to force, but on the whole it usually protected the rights of those who had most of them, and you could not override it when it went against you. Mr. Arden listened to Henry, even when he differed from him, with more patience than he usually found convenient.

“If she comes from a good family, she must have relatives,” he said severely; “all good families have relatives. It’s pure nonsense for Tony to make himself responsible for an invalid bride. I don’t approve of it at all. You may tell him so from me. I sha’n’t accept it. Why should I? It’s not the kind of thing an eldest son should do. What’s to become of the place? Tony is as selfish as if he were a scatter-brained young fool, and he hasn’t the excuse of being one. Doesn’t he know at his age he ought to have children?”

“But Henry says, dear,” interposed Mrs. Arden, gently, “that it’s a really dangerous operation and that it is not likely that Miss Costrelle will live long after it, and then dear Anthony could marry again.”

“That makes it worse,” declared Mr. Arden. “It sounds to me like adding murder to matrimony. I don’t want to sit and wish for a poor girl to die, and I don’t like re-marriages. The whole thing is both silly and shocking. I shall have no hand in it.”

“You hear what your father says, Henry,” said Mrs. Arden, with an air of finality, which always soothed her husband. “I shouldn’t say any more about it until after tea.”

But when tea-time came Mr. Arden had had a further conversation with his wife—a conversation in which, after a good deal of heated repetition, on Mr. Arden’s part, a few suggestions on Mrs. Arden’s, which he had come to feel were his own, had softly permeated the repetitions. They ran as follows: Anthony was of age, he could really do what he liked; therefore opposition was useless, particularly as it had never been known to answer with Anthony. It was almost certain the girl would die, and dead girls are not aggressive. They need not say anything very definite until after the operation. If it was successful, and the girl got better, she did belong to a good family; if she didn’t get better, she wouldn’t belong to any family at all.

Anthony was not asking them for money. He had said nothing about settlements. The squire hated settlements. You had to tie up your money and then keep your hands off it. He wouldn’t have to do this in the circumstances, and he couldn’t have got out of doing it in any other. A message founded on these facts was produced at tea-time, which could easily be presented to Anthony in the light of acquiescence.

“He’s of age,” Mr. Arden said reluctantly, “and I can’t stop him making a fool of himself. Tell him from me that we sha’n’t come to the marriage—the whole thing is very disagreeable and odd—but if the girl gets better, she can come here to convalesce. Pannell’s his home, and I sha’n’t keep him or his wife out of it.”

Mrs. Arden hid in the shrubbery and preceded Henry to the steps of the dog-cart.

“I remember Miss Costrelle quite well,” she said, with a curious little flush on her face; “I thought her quite fascinating. Of course I know she’s not suitable for Tony’s wife, poor dear. It’s a pity she is so—so French, but I can’t help feeling sorry she is ill. Give them _both_ my love, Henry.”

Henry did not give the whole of this message, either; he thought it was rash. He seldom gave the whole of any message.

He offered to write to Daphne, but Anthony had done this for himself. He wrote:

I know you once understood and loved Kitty. I didn’t when I was
with you; I only saw what the world had done to her and I blamed
her for it. It’s so hard not to blame people for their scars.
Anyway, you’ll forgive her now if she hurt you, for she is under
the harrow. I can’t lift it off; I can stand by her, that is
all.

I have found a way of doing it which perhaps even you won’t
understand; but if anybody can understand, you will. I daren’t
look ahead at any future, but I suppose instinct, or whatever it
is that pushes us forward to help each other, will keep me up to
the mark. Laurence operates on Friday; I shall assist.

Don’t bother to come even if you want to; only think of her with
kindness. For your sake she would not have married me if she had
not known that it was only for a little time. Do you remember
how happy you were when I came back from prison? I like to
remember your happiness; only I think it is true that one loves
even more when one is unhappy.

ANTHONY.

Henry settled all the details of the marriage. Bishops and chaplains in his hands were as malleable as butter. There were no impediments.

Kitty had been so exhausted after her day at Kew that Anthony had insisted on her remaining in bed until the morning of her marriage. He had succeeded in keeping her out of pain.

Kitty enjoyed the rest of lying in bed and looking at her new room. It was a quiet, pretty room. The windows overlooked the Carmelites’ garden on the other side of the narrow street.

It was not a large garden, but there were trees in it, and Kitty took a great interest in the Carmelites.

“Monks are the kind of men I don’t know,” she explained to Anthony. “I do so wish I could have one to talk to! I want to ask them what it feels like to live all day long under a rule and never to know what God made the world for. For I suppose He did rather mean it for men and women to live in, didn’t He? And yet I admire them; it’s rather fine to shut yourself behind a wall into a stone church because you think it pleases anybody, even God.

“I wonder if there’s some kind of trick about prayer. Do you think there is, and that’s why they can go on for such an awfully long time and not mind being bored? Peckham prays, too; but she takes off her stays first, and prays in her dressing-gown. Do you think God hears her and the monks as well? It must be rather nice for Him, I should think, that some people don’t pray. Peckham expects to get answers. Do the monks?”

Anthony said he thought they did, but probably not the same kind of answers. He told Kitty his own theories about auto-suggestion, but Kitty only said:

“I don’t think that makes it any easier. Where does the auto-suggestion come from? There’s always an outside as well as an inside, isn’t there? And if God made the outside, He could put the idea into you from it, couldn’t He? You must start a ball of wool somewhere.”

Anthony wanted to go on with the subject, for it surprised him to see that Kitty had lit on a connected form of reasoning. But she broke off immediately, as if she was afraid of anything deeper than a chance question.

“I’m so glad you like Peckham,” she said softly. “I think I’ve got an awfully nice family now—you and Peckham and Henry. Henry came to ask me this morning if I wanted a red carpet. He said I couldn’t have a carpet without a carriage or a carriage without a carpet. I do like Henry’s mind. I told him we were going to walk down the little alley to the church, so he said we couldn’t have a carpet; but we might have bells afterward, if we liked.”

The walk to St. Mary Abbot’s was a mere stone’s-throw from Duke Lane, but Kitty’s strength was only in her mind. Her eyes laughed, and she pretended that when she paused to look into the tiny square or at the quaint shop-windows of Church Walk she was doing it for fun and not because her breath had failed her.

She had wanted to walk, because she said it would seem more like the country. She lingered as they came to the open doorway of the church beneath the trees. They could look up the long nave of the church toward the altar.

Henry had had it beautifully decorated with lilies and white lilac. Kitty had not thought of the actual marriage before; she had thought of her dress, which was the color of autumn leaves, of lunch at the Carlton, and the fun of the way Henry had dealt with the bishop; but the grave service under its white shrine of flowers came to her unexpectedly. She had a wave of sudden fear; her face remained impassive, and the gravity that settled down upon her seemed merely appropriate to the hour, but her heart beat against her side like an imprisoned bird.

It was the emptiness of the church which disconcerted Kitty. There was no one there but Peckham and Henry in a seat in front of the altar. A verger with a duster stood in a distant corner, and an expectant curate put his head round the door from the vestry to see if they had arrived.

Peckham was on her knees, and her black bonnet, with its single red rose, looked as if it were being shaken by concealed emotion. Henry’s face was a blank. He was prepared for anything, and his entire consciousness rose to hide the signs of his preparation. Kitty might faint, Anthony might start some dreadful skeptical fad. They might be late; they ought not to have walked in together. The situation bristled with irregularities, and it depended upon Henry’s face to make it look as regular as possible.

Anthony was entirely preoccupied with how much Kitty could stand and whether he couldn’t persuade her afterward to give up lunching at the Carlton. The service passed over his head without any significance whatever, except that of length.

As Kitty turned toward him to make her answering troth, her eyes widened a little, and her lips stiffened. She had forgotten the great words, but they raised suddenly in her heart a storm of memory. Dick had said them to her, long ago, by the bridge he had built across their gardens: “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.”

Anthony wavered and disappeared before her eyes, and Dick came in his place—Dick, who was all her early life—and held in his hands her rich, untouched, and perfect memories.

Anthony stood only for broken things, for hours of pain and indecision, for her incomplete and torturing emergencies, and for her blind hours of shame. She laid her small hand firmly on the rails until the pain shot up her arm into her shoulder. The pain brought back the figure of Anthony. He stood looking down at her with reassuring, watchful eyes.

Death and innocence and Dick took no part in this marriage, but a love that was stronger than youth and innocence stood by her and would stand by her to the end.