He followed Lansing over to the table, bringing the bottle.
Drinking this, he thought nauseatedly, Drinking this, after her body had been coddling it.
Lansing uncorked the bottle, and poured.
Lansing handed him his glass.
“Drink up, boy,” he invited. “Last drink as a free man.” Then he backed his head, drank. Then he righted it again, winked, saw fit to remark: “The condemned man drank hearty.”
Marshall didn’t think that was funny. “Condemned”; what a grisly expression to use. He contorted his face and emptied the liquor into his mouth.
Suddenly Lansing was holding a lighted cigarette in his hand; he hadn’t had one a moment ago, as far as Marshall could recall. He was offering it to Marshall, mouth-part foremost.
“This yours?”
“No, throw it away!” he said with sudden stridency. It had been there on the edge of the table the whole time. From... from before.
“Well, you don’t need to look so bilious about it.” Lansing was looking at him askance. Humorously askance, but still askance, and he saw that he’d made a slip there. “What do you mean, no? It’s here in the room with you. It’s got to be yours, who else’s could it be?”
“I meant... I meant, throw it away. I don’t want it after it’s been standing there on the edge of the table like that.”
“Aw, don’t be so fancy!” Lansing said with gruff raillery.
Before Marshall could guess the direction of his hand, it had speared forward, thrust the cigarette between his lips, left it there clinging to them of its own adhesion.
Fumes of death seemed to go up into his brain.
He retched violently, all but vomited. His hand flew to his stomach, to curb the inclination. The cigarette sprang to the floor, and he trapped it with his foot almost as though it were something alive, crushed it unmercifully.
“Well, for the love of...” the astounded Lansing cried, watching him incredulously.
“Caught my windpipe,” Marshall said, backing his hand to his forehead.
Suddenly he pulled himself together with an excess of nervous energy, bunched his shoulders defensively, began to edge Lansing before him toward the door.
“Come on, let’s go! Let’s get out of here, will you? We’ll be late. Let’s get started, let’s get over there.”
“We’re not late, we’ll make it,” Lansing tried to calm him. He gave him a whimsical look. “First you’re in no kind of a hurry at all, you keep me standing outside the door ten whole minutes before you even let me in. Then all of a sudden you’re in such a hurry you can’t get out of the place fast enough!” He chuckled. “They talk about the bride being nervous. I think they’ve got the wrong party.” He tried to dig his heels in, hold his ground against Marshall’s jerky propulsion, even at the threshold.
“Well, what about the ring? Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to take it with us, or are you going to leave it there on the table?”
Marshall turned back, scooped it up, came forward, jammed it into Lansing’s pocket. “Come on. Let’s go. Come on.”
They were both on the outside of the door by now. He’d maneuvered Lansing to the outside of the door at last. He clawed at it to bring it closed after them. Lansing, perhaps because he was in the nearer position, finally was the one to close it, with a good plump impact.
“Close it good,” Marshall pleaded harriedly. “Good and tight.”
Lansing smiled, gave the knob an extra twist to test it. “What, are you afraid somebody’ll get in?”
No, echoed Marshall in horror-stifled silence as he started down the stairs, I’m afraid somebody’ll get out.
11
He followed Lansing out of the vestry room. Moving close behind him, almost treading on his heels, the way some helpless, frightened, lost soul clings to the only familiar person, the only point of support, in a terrifying situation.
He even wanted to reach out and keep his hand firmly on Lansing’s shoulder as they moved along, but he refrained with an effort.
They were in the chapel now. All those people seated out there. All staring his way. Row upon row of faces.
Lansing took up his stance. Marshall stopped behind him, wanted to stand there protectedly behind him, sheltered. Lansing had to motion unobtrusively to him, where to stand. They’d rehearsed all this yesterday, positions and all. But yesterday he wasn’t a murderer.
He shifted over and stood there alongside Lansing.
Music swelled out. Hollowly, sepulchrally, he thought, echoing dismally within the cavernous interior of the church. It had never occurred to him before how similar the wedding march and the funeral march were. There was as much reason, today, for the one as for the other to be played. He winced at the horrid thought that this was a double ceremony, not just a single one.
Beautiful girls were coming down the aisle toward him, by twos, with slow, stately grace. Dwelling on each step, balancing on it a moment before taking the next. Almost as in those musical shows that were becoming popular, the Ziegfeld Follies and the Winter Garden Passing Shows.
The first pair in lilac, the second in pink, the last in azure. They fanned out and became motionless, in a graceful half-circle.
She was coming down the aisle now, on her father’s arm. A snatch of ghostly tune seemed to lace through the stately, sonorous music of actuality for an instant, that strain that Lansing had been whistling in the cab coming over, and he himself had been humming before that. “Come be my own, come make your home in my heart.” Then it whisked itself away again, like the interloper it was.
Satin white as new-fallen snow, a little girl behind her to bear her long train. Veiling gossamer as mist. Orange blossoms for purity, and a tiara of pearls no more lustrous than all the rest of her.
His heart was wrung. We don’t marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again.
How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.
And I’m so unclean. I have blood on me.
A shudder coursed through him.
She’s coming toward a killer, step by step. She’s about to join herself in wedlock to a murderer. Oh, somebody warn her while there’s time, somebody stop her—
A knife-edged cry rang through the church.
“Marjorie! Don’t! Turn around and go the other way, quick!”
Who had screamed out like that? Who had cried that terrible warning? His eyes darted this way and that. But step by unmoved step, she came on, steadily on.
No one had. His heart had, but not his lips. No one but he had heard it.
Lansing nudged him slightly. He moved forward mechanically, took her fathers place at her side.
Those beautiful eyes, that even the veiling couldn’t quench. Like topazes burning through snow.
She cast them down. The sonorous words began, the stately age-old words, bringing peace, bringing God’s consent and blessing.
But they are not meant for me. I have no right to be here, let them be spoken over me. I killed a woman just now, but no one knows it but me. No one in the whole world knows it but me. But God knows it. I can fool my fellow men, but I can’t fool God. I have no right to accept this sacrament before Him.
Too late. She sank to her knees beside him. Lansing tugged at his sleeve. He sank to his, beside her.
The sign of the cross was made over them. It seemed to leave a trace of fire in the air, and almost he quailed, almost he cringed away from it.
The crucifix was being offered to him. And as his lips touched it, a burning sensation seemed to course through them and run down into his heart.