“How do I look, darling?”
“You look lovely. Everyone who doesn’t know will think I’m your brother.”
For a moment united as one, each was silently begging the other, “Take it quickly, take it lightly, God forbid we should go through that again.”
Softly and musically, the clock in the hall struck two. Time is, time was, time is past.
“We must go.” She made a little movement toward her ivory-and-gold prayer-book.
“No,” he said. “You have to keep him waiting.”
Her hand in its pearl-gray glove, resting on his arm, looked small and naïvely formal, the hand of a Du Maurier child who has watched fans and trains from the top of the stairs.
“… not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly …”
Laurie gazed at the line of little gray buttons that ran down the back of his mother’s dress. He was glad, after all, that he had come, that circumstances had presented him with no excuse. She had needed him, a thing which in his hurt pride and abandonment he had forgotten to expect. He couldn’t think, indeed, how she would have managed without him.
“… and, forsaking all other, keep thee only to her, as long as ye both shall live?”
In a round, announcing voice, Mr. Straike said, “I will.”
The full realization of his physical presence hit Laurie like a blow. He stared at the floor and reminded himself that he was in church. But church had become a smell of hassocks and furnace coke and, ubiquitously, of Mr. Straike. It was an extension of him.
“Wilt thou obey and serve him, love, honor, and …”
Oh, God, make her say no.
“I will.”
He heard Aunt Olive behind him give a satisfied sigh.
“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”
“I do,” Laurie said. Now that it had come he could feel nothing at all, except a proud determination to do it properly. He took a measured pace forward and handed his mother to Canon Rosslow to hand to Mr. Straike. He fell a pace back again. With a dry, empty relief, he realized that this was all. He had spoken his line; he could get back into the chorus. There was his place ready for him, beside Aunt Olive in the corner of the front pew. He moved toward it.
Aunt Olive put away her handkerchief, and seemed to cross an invisible threshold to festivity. The moment the psalm had started she nudged him and whispered, “Beautiful.”
She had been very kind to his mother. He nodded sociably.
“You did very well, most correct and dignified.”
He made a deprecating face, and applied himself to his prayer-book; but she was touching his arm.
“Just look quickly, dear, and tell me who—”
He looked quickly, being sure that she wouldn’t let him alone till he did. It was a big church, and the bride’s friends sat with plenty of elbow-room. The parishioners, with the modesty of country people, had left several empty pews in the middle. Laurie had no trouble in following Aunt Olive’s eye to the stranger in the seventh row.
He was singing from the book, standing very straight and correctly, as if he were at ship’s prayers, and not looking about him. But he must have felt Laurie turn, for their eyes met at once. Ralph’s narrowed in a brief smile, then returned to the page. Laurie became aware of Aunt Olive’s expectancy; he whispered, “Friend of mine.”
“Very nice,” said Aunt Olive, nodding vigorously.
The psalm ended. Laurie, who would never pray on his knees again, leaned forward and covered his face.
“… and forgive us our trespasses,” muttered the congregation; a drowsy, absent-minded sound like the sound of scuffling feet. Laurie looked down through his fingers at a piece of oak smoothed by the hands of six generations, and, the terms of his self-deceit forgotten, thought, I ought not to have sent for him. He knew that he had refused to expect this result, only because that would permit him to make it certain.
Having accepted this knowledge, he allowed it almost at once to drift out of sight. There is much anodyne to a painful thought in mere lack of concentration. He said to himself, as far as he said anything plainly, that Ralph was here now, that it was more than kind of him to have come, that to be glad to see him was only common decency. Beyond this moment, the future was still free and undetermined.
Canon Rosslow had what is slanderously called the Oxford accent. He made the Homily sound like a piece of respectable cant. Laurie found it all slipping by him like Monday morning chapel at school. Everything he was capable of feeling about this event had been exhausted; he was empty, waiting only for something different to happen. He was, though he didn’t know this, in the state which at funerals inspires the wake.
It was over. The bride and groom were on their way to the vestry. Remembering his duty, he got up and followed them.
He signed the register and kissed his mother. As if she were covered with an impalpable veil, he could feel only that he was kissing a bride. He saw Mr. Straike advancing and wondered for one dislocated minute whether he would expect to be kissed too. But all was well, Mr. Straike gave him a manly handclasp, two hands to Laurie’s one. Soon they were all going back into the church again, and the organ was playing his mother and her husband down the aisle.
He knew he ought to follow, and did so at first; but the organist had set a good cracking pace, and Mr. Straike couldn’t be expected to remember. The best man, though thirty years Laurie’s senior, had a better turn of speed. People were coming out of the pews and he slid into the stream. He wasn’t much held up by civilities, for everyone was hurrying to see the departure outside. Ralph was waiting for him just inside the pew.
“Ralph! How did you manage it?” Admitting the wish but not the expectation, he struck a compromise by which Ralph would not be hurt, nor he himself wholly committed; but he did not think of it like this.
The bridal couple vanished through the west door. Ralph looked him in the eyes and smiled. Someone was here now for whom he came first: it was like a well in the desert.
“Don’t bother about me,” Ralph said, “you’ve got people to see to out there. Get along and get on with it. I’ll follow the crowd.”
“It’s only just down the road. I’ll walk with you.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Ralph briskly. “You’ve got to be there ahead; you’re the host, he isn’t. Get a move on, I’ll see you presently.”
There had been photographs outside for the county paper; so no one had missed him. When he walked into the village hall, he knew that his mother’s new life had begun already. If she had been marrying anyone else, the reception would have been at the George. The boards felt gritty underfoot, there were notices about the Guides and the Mothers’ Union. The venerable hired waiters looked like lay helpers at a Sunday-school tea. All this, of course, set the parochial note in which everything centered upon the vicar.
Some Straike relatives had arrived. They seemed to Laurie rather hard-eyed, the kind of people one envisages quarrelling over wills, and their overconventionality struck him as faintly vulgar. He stood close to his mother, observing how much bigger Mr. Straike’s family was than theirs. Seeing Aunt Olive appear in a travelling coat (he remembered now that she had to get an early train) he decided she was a great deal nicer than any of them. He fussed over her and found her food. In the midst of all this Ralph walked in.
He must have waited till now when the bride and groom had ceased to receive at the door, hoping to be inconspicuous; but in a gathering where the younger element was mostly in the forties, his entrance had drawn eyes from all over the room. He looked around for Laurie and went over to him at once. With the tail of his eye, Laurie saw that Mr. Straike had noticed.