"No. Be hanged if I can... I don't know what the times be coming
to! Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one
really do feel afeard to move in it at all. In my time we took it
more careless; and I don't know that we was any the worse for it!
When I and my poor man were jined in it we kept up the junketing all
the week, and drunk the parish dry, and had to borrow half a crown
to begin housekeeping!"
When Mrs. Edlin had gone back to her cottage Phillotson spoke
moodily. "I don't know whether I ought to do it--at any rate quite
so rapidly."
"Why?"
"If she is really compelling herself to this against her
instincts--merely from this new sense of duty or religion--I ought
perhaps to let her wait a bit."
"Now you've got so far you ought not to back out of it. That's my
opinion."
"I can't very well put it off now; that's true. But I had a qualm
when she gave that little cry at sight of the licence."
"Now, never you have qualms, old boy. I mean to give her away
to-morrow morning, and you mean to take her. It has always been on
my conscience that I didn't urge more objections to your letting her
go, and now we've got to this stage I shan't be content if I don't
help you to set the matter right."
Phillotson nodded, and seeing how staunch his friend was, became
more frank. "No doubt when it gets known what I've done I shall
be thought a soft fool by many. But they don't know Sue as I do.
Though so elusive, hers is such an honest nature at bottom that I
don't think she has ever done anything against her conscience. The
fact of her having lived with Fawley goes for nothing. At the time
she left me for him she thought she was quite within her right. Now
she thinks otherwise."
The next morning came, and the self-sacrifice of the woman on the
altar of what she was pleased to call her principles was acquiesced
in by these two friends, each from his own point of view. Phillotson
went across to the Widow Edlin's to fetch Sue a few minutes after
eight o'clock. The fog of the previous day or two on the low-lands
had travelled up here by now, and the trees on the green caught
armfuls, and turned them into showers of big drops. The bride was
waiting, ready; bonnet and all on. She had never in her life looked
so much like the lily her name connoted as she did in that pallid
morning light. Chastened, world-weary, remorseful, the strain on her
nerves had preyed upon her flesh and bones, and she appeared smaller
in outline than she had formerly done, though Sue had not been a
large woman in her days of rudest health.