was to me! The expression in that
flabby woman’s face, leading her
on to give herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would,
but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul––to escape a
nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her character,
degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who
scorned her––a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of
salvation. . . . This is our parish church isn’t it? This is where it
would have to be, if we did it in the usual way? A service or
something seems to be going on.’
Jude went up and looked in at the door. ‘Why––it is a wedding
here too,’ he said. ‘Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.’
Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when
there was always a crowd of marriages. ‘Let us listen,’ she said, ‘and
find how it feels to us when performed in a church.’
They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the pro-
ceedings at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to
the well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of
ordinary prettiness and interest. They could see the
flowers tremble
in the bride’s hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mech-
anical murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather
not at all under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude
listened, and severally saw themselves in time past going through the
same form of self-committal.
‘It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it
over again with my present knowledge,’ Sue whispered. ‘You see,
they are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course.
But having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at
least as I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings
perhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and
undertake the same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and
seeing this has frightened me from a church wedding as much as the
other did from a registry one. We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude,
and what others may feel con
fident in I feel doubts of––my being
proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!’
Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were
both too thin-skinned––that they ought never to have been born––
much less have come together for the most preposterous of all
joint-ventures for
them––matrimony.
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