VII
MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In
the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as
bringing together the father and daughter, and hovering in an
attitude of benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did
not very distinctly figure.
But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing
through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the
meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of
any kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the
appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be
left alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett
conveyed it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of
understanding. As for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the
nuptial preparations to give her husband another thought. She had
gained her point, she had disarmed her foes, and in the first flush
of success she had no time to remember by what means her victory had
been won. Even Garnett's services received little recognition,
unless he found them sufficiently compensated by the new look in
Hermione's eyes.
The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey
Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly
consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the
importance of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage,"
and dazzled by the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the
Almanach de Gotha. In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard
evidently felt that she had penetrated to the sacred precincts where
"the right thing" flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione,
her look of happiness had returned, but with an undertint of
melancholy, visible perhaps only to Garnett, but to him always
hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank back into her passive self,
resigned to serve as the brilliant lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell
hung the trophies of conquest. Preparations for the wedding were
zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew the danger of giving people time
to think things over, and her fears about her husband being allayed,
she began to [87] dread a new attempt at evasion on the part of the
bridegroom's family.
"The sooner it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to
Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact
that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were
moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or
her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into
which she must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of
safety.
But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her
husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what
she wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown
by the way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she
bloomed out in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering
sense of the ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.
The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented
itself punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it
and drove to the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back
street, with lean old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of
pit-life gardens, black and sunless, between walls bristling with
iron spikes. On the narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led
by a red-eyed poodle: a little farther on a dishevelled woman sat
grinding coffee on the threshold of a _buvette_. The bridal carriage
stopped before one of the doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and
harness which drew the neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett
started to mount the ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on
which he learned from the _concierge _that Mr. Newell lodged. But
half-way up he met the latter descending, and they turned and went
down together.
Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye
seemed as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there
was something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as
though he had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last
hypothesis Garnett paused--for it became evident to him that Mr.
Newell had hired his dress-suit.
Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained
silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the
net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only
once he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe:
"Is this Mrs. Newell's carriage?"
"I believe so--yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in
defining that lady's possessions it was impossible not to trespass
on those of her friends.
Mr. Newell made no farther comment, but presently requested his
companion to rehearse to him once more the exact duties which were
to devolve on him during the coming ceremony. Having mastered these
he remained silent, fixing a dry speculative eye on the panorama of
the brilliant streets, till the carriage drew up at the entrance of
Saint Philippe du Roule.
With the same air of composure he followed his guide through the mob
of spectators, and up the crimson velvet steps, at the head of
which, but for a word from Garnett, a formidable Suisse, glittering
with cocked hat and mace, would have checked the advance of the
small crumpled figure so oddly out of keeping with the magnificence
of the bridal party. The French fashion prescribing that the family
_cortege _shall follow the bride to the altar, the vestibule of the
church was thronged with the participatore in the coming procession;
but if Mr. Newell felt any nervousness at his sudden projection into
this unfamiliar group, nothing in his look or manner betrayed it. He
stood beside Garnett till a white-favoured carriage, dashing up to
the church with a superlative glitter of highly groomed horseflesh
and silver-plated harness, deposited the snowy apparition of the
bride, supported by her mother; then, as Hermione entered the
vestibule, he went forward quietly to meet her.
The girl, wrapped in the haze of her bridal veil, and a little
confused, perhaps, by the anticipation of the meeting, paused a
moment, as if in doubt, before the small oddly-clad figure which
blocked her path--a horrible moment to Garnett, who felt a pang of
misery at this satire on the infallibility of the filial instinct.
He longed to make some sign, to break in some way the pause of
uncertainty; but before he could move he saw Mrs. Newell give her
daughter a sharp push, he saw a blush of compunction flood
Hermione's face, and the girl, throwing back her veil, bent her tall
head and flung her arms about her father.
Mr. Newell emerged unshaken from the embrace: it seemed to have no
effect beyond giving an odder twist to his tie. He stood beside his
daughter till the church doors were thrown open; then, at a sign
from the verger, he gave her his arm, and the strange couple, with
the long train of fashion and finery behind them, started on their
march to the altar.
Garnett had already slipped into the church and secured a post of
vantage which gave him a side-view over the assemblage. The building
was thronged--Mrs. Newell had attained her ambition and given
Hermione a smart wedding. Garnett's eye travelled curiously from one
group to another--from the numerous representatives of the
bridegroom's family, all stamped with the same air of somewhat dowdy
distinction, the air of having had their thinking done for them for
so long that they could no longer perform the act individually, and
the heterogeneous company of Mrs. Newell's friends, who presented,
on the opposite side of the nave, every variety of individual
conviction in dress and conduct. Of the two groups the latter was
decidedly the more interesting to Garnett, who observed that it
comprised not only such recent acquisitions as the Woolsey Hubbards
and the Baron, but also sundry more important figures which of late
had faded to the verse of Mrs. Newell's horizon. Hermione's marriage
had drawn them back, bad once more made her mother a social entity,
had in short already accomplished the object for which it had been
planned and executed.
And as he looked about him Garnett saw that all the other actors in
the show faded into insignificance beside the dominant figure of
Mrs. Newell, became mere marionettes pulled hither and thither by
the hidden wires of her intention. One and all they were there to
serve her ends and accomplish her purpose: Schenkelderff and the
Hubbards to pay for the show, the bride and bridegroom to seal and
symbolize her social rehabilitation, Garnett himself as the humble
instrument adjusting the different parts of the complicated
machinery, and her husband, finally, as the last stake in her game,
the last asset on which she could draw to rebuild her fallen
fortunes. At the thought Garnett was filled with a deep disgust for
what the scene signified, and for his own share in it. He had been
her tool and dupe like the others; if he imagined that he was
serving Hermione, it was for her mother's ends that he had worked.
What right had he to sentimentalise a marriage founded on such base
connivances, and how could he have imagined that in so doing he was
acting a disinterested part?
While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had
already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged
before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the
foreground of a Catholic marriage. Through the glow of lights and
the perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett's eyes rested on the
central figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared
from his view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schmes
nor his own share in them could ever unsanctify hermione's marriage.
It was one more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to
nature's secret of drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his
eyes turned from the girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and
stoical figure sunk in the adjoining chair, it occured to him that
he had perhaps worked better than he knew in placing them, if only
for a moment, side by side.
