§ 8

The wedding had always been planned to take place in London, so it was merely the time that was being altered. Both Gervase and Jenny had seen, and Ben Godfrey had been brought reluctantly to see, that to be married at home would double the risks; so a room had been taken and a bag of Godfrey’s clothes deposited in a Paddington parish, where the Vicar was liberal in his interpretation of the laws of residence, and an ordinary licence procured. The change of plans necessitated a special licence, and Jenny had to wait till Gervase came home the next evening to know if all was in order. However, after the shock of its inception, the new scheme worked smoothly. Jenny came down early the next morning and breakfasted with Gervase, then drove off in Henry Ford, leaving a message with Wills that she had gone to London for the day, and her brother was driving her as far as Ashford.

Everything was so quiet and matter-of-fact as to seem to her almost normal—she could not quite realise that she had left her old life behind her at Conster, even more completely than most brides leaving their father’s house; that ahead of her was not only all the difference between single and married, but all the difference between Alard and Godfrey, Conster and Fourhouses. She was not only leaving her home, but her class, her customs, her acquaintance. It was not till she was standing beside Godfrey in a strange, dark church, before a strange clergyman, that she realised the full strangeness of it all. For a moment her head swam with terror—she found herself full of a desperate longing to wake up in her bed at Conster and find it was a dream—she thought of the catastrophe of Mary’s marriage, and she knew that she was taking far bigger risks than Mary.... And through all this turmoil she could hear herself saying quite calmly—“I, Janet Christine, take thee, Benjamin, to be my wedded husband.” Some mechanical part of her was going on with the business, while her emotions cowered and swooned. Now she was signing her name in the register—Janet Christine Godfrey—now she was shaking hands with the clergyman and answering his inane remarks with inanities of her own. It was too late to draw back—she had plunged—Jenny Alard was dead.

They had lunch at a restaurant in Praed Street, and afterwards Gervase went with them to Paddington Station and saw them off to Cornwall. They were not going to be away long, partly on account of Godfrey’s spring sowings, and partly because Jenny felt that she could not leave her brother any length of time to stand the racket. She would still have liked to suppress his share in the business, but Gervase was firm—“It’s treating them better,” he said, “and, besides, it will help them a lot to have a scapegoat on the premises.”

Jenny felt almost sentimental in parting from the little brother, who had helped her so much in the path she had chosen, and who had taken for himself so rough and ridiculous a road. She kissed him in the carriage doorway, made him promise to write to her, and then did her best to put him out of her head for the first happy hours of the honeymoon.

Circumstances made this fairly easy. By the time they were at Mullion, watching the low lamps of the stars hanging over the violet mists that veiled Poldhu, even Gervase seemed very far away, and the household and life of Conster Manor almost as if they had never been. Nothing was real but herself and Ben, alone together in the midst of life, each most completely the other’s desire and possession. When she looked into his eyes, full of their new joy and trouble, the husband’s eyes which held also the tenderness of the father and the simplicity of the child, there was no longer any past or future, but only the present—“I love.”

The next day, however, recalled her rather abruptly to thoughts of her scapegoat. She received a telegram—

“Father kicked me out address Church Cottage Vinehall don’t worry Gervase.”

Jenny was conscience-stricken, though she knew that Gervase would not be much hurt by his exile. But she was anxious to hear what had happened, and waited restlessly for a letter. None came, but the next morning another telegram.

“Father had stroke please come home Gervase.”

So Jenny Godfrey packed up her things and came home after two days’ honeymoon. Happiness is supposed to make time short, but those two days had seemed like twenty years.