The practical, broad-shouldered, common-sense children of this world would have weighed many things one against the other. They would have taken into account sentimentally, morally, pharisaically, or cynically, according to their various att.i.tudes towards life, the relations between Emmy and Mordaunt Prince which had led to this tragic situation. But for Septimus her sin scarcely existed. When a man is touched by an angel's feather he takes an angel's view of mortal frailties.

He danced his jostled way up Holborn till the City Temple loomed through the brown air. It struck a chord of a.s.sociation. He halted on the edge of the curb and regarded it across the road, with a forefinger held up before his nose as if to a.s.sist memory. It was a church. People were apt to be married in churches. Sometimes by special license. That was it! A special license. He had come out to get one. But where were they to be obtained? In a properly civilized country, doubtless they would be sold in shops, like boots and hair-brushes, or even in post-offices, like dog licenses. But Septimus, aware of the deficiencies of an incomplete social organization, could do no better than look wistfully up and down the stream of traffic, as it roared and flashed and lumbered past. A policeman stopped beside him.

He appeared so lost, he met the man's eyes with a gaze so questioning, that the policeman paused.

"Want to go anywhere, sir?"

"Yes," said Septimus. "I want to go where I can get a special license to be married."

"Don't you know?"

"No. You see," said Septimus confidentially, "marriage has been out of my line. But perhaps you have been married, and might be able to tell me."

"Look here, sir," said the policeman, eyeing him kindly, but officially.

"Take my advice, sir; don't think of getting married. You go home to your friends."

The policeman nodded knowingly and stalked away, leaving Septimus perplexed by his utterance. Was he a Socrates of a constable with a Xantippe at home, or did he regard him as a mild lunatic at large? Either solution was discouraging. He turned and walked back down Holborn somewhat dejected.

Somewhere in London the air was thick with special licenses, but who would direct his steps to the desired spot? On pa.s.sing Gray's Inn one of his brilliant ideas occurred to him. The Inn suggested law; the law, solicitors, who knew even more about licenses than Hall Porters and Policemen. A man he once knew had left him one day after lunch to consult his solicitors in Gray's Inn. He entered the low, gloomy gateway and accosted the porter.

"Are there any solicitors living in the Inn?"

"Not so many as there was. They're mostly architects. But still there's heaps."

"Will you kindly direct me to one?"

The man gave him two or three addresses, and he went comforted across the square to the east wing, whose Georgian ma.s.s merged without skyline into the fuliginous vapor which Londoners call the sky. The lights behind the blindless windows illuminated interiors and showed men bending over desks and drawing-boards, some near the windows with their faces sharply cut in profile. Septimus wondered vaguely whether any one of those visible would be his solicitor.

A member of the first firm he sought happened to be disengaged, a benevolent young man wearing gold spectacles, who received his request for guidance with sympathetic interest and unfolded to him the divers methods whereby British subjects could get married all over the world, including the High Seas on board one of His Majesty's ships of the Mercantile Marine.

Solicitors are generally bursting with irrelevant information. When, however, he elicited the fact that one of the parties had a flat in London which would technically prove the fifteen days' residence, he opened his eyes.

"But, my dear sir, unless you are bent on a religious ceremony, why not get married at once before the registrar of the Chelsea district? There are two ways of getting married before the registrar--one by certificate and one by license. By license you can get married after the expiration of one whole day next after the day of the entry of the notice of marriage. That is to say, if you give notice to-morrow you can get married not the next day, but the day after. In this way you save the heavy special license fee. How does it strike you?"

It struck Septimus as a remarkable suggestion, and he admired the lawyer exceedingly.

"I suppose it's really a good and proper marriage?" he asked.

The benevolent young man rea.s.sured him; it would take all the majesty of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty division of the High Court of Justice to dissolve it. Septimus agreed that in these circ.u.mstances it must be a capital marriage. Then the solicitor offered to see the whole matter through and get him married in the course of a day or two. After which he dismissed him with a professional blessing which cheered Septimus all the way to the Ravenswood Hotel.

CHAPTER XI

"Good heavens, mother, they're married!" cried Zora, staring at a telegram she had just received.

Mrs. Oldrieve woke with a start from her after-luncheon nap.

"Who, dear?"

"Why, Emmy and Septimus Dix. Read it."

Mrs. Oldrieve put on her gla.s.ses with faltering fingers, and read aloud the words as if they had been in a foreign language: "Septimus and I were married this morning at the Chelsea Registrar's. We start for Paris by the 2.30. Will let you know our plans. Love to mother from us both. Emmy."

"What does this mean, dear?"

"It means, my dear mother, that they're married," said Zora; "but why they should have thought it necessary to run away to do it in this hole-and-corner fashion I can't imagine."

"It's very terrible," said Mrs. Oldrieve.

"It's worse than terrible. It's idiotic," said Zora.

She was mystified, and being a woman who hated mystification, was angry.

Her mother began to cry. It was a disgraceful thing; before a registrar, too.

"As soon as I let her go on the stage, I knew something dreadful would happen to her," she wailed. "Of course Mr. Dix is foolish and eccentric, but I never thought he could do anything so irregular."

"I have no patience with him!" cried Zora. "I told him only a short while ago that both of us would be delighted if he married Emmy."

"They must come back, dear, and be married properly. Do make them," urged Mrs. Oldrieve. "The Vicar will be so shocked and hurt--and what Cousin Jane will say when she hears of it--"

She raised her mittened hands and let them fall into her lap. The awfulness of Cousin Jane's indignation transcended the poor lady's powers of description. Zora dismissed the Vicar and Cousin Jane as persons of no account. The silly pair were legally married, and she would see that there was a proper notice put in _The Times_. As for bringing them back--she looked at the clock.

"They are on their way now to Folkestone."

"It wouldn't be any good telegraphing them to come back and be properly married in church?"

"Not the slightest," said Zora; "but I'll do it if you like."

So the telegram was dispatched to "Septimus Dix, Boulogne Boat, Folkestone," and Mrs. Oldrieve took a brighter view of the situation.

"We have done what we can, at any rate," she said by way of self-consolation.

Now it so happened that Emmy, like many another person at their wits' end, had given herself an amazing amount of unnecessary trouble. Her flight had not been noticed till the maid had entered her room at half-past eight. She had obviously packed up some things in a handbag. Obviously again she had caught the eight-fifteen train from Ripstead, as she had done once or twice before when rehearsals or other theatrical business had required an early arrival in London. Septimus's telegram had not only allayed no apprehension, but it had aroused a mild curiosity. Septimus was master of his own actions. His going up to London was no one's concern. If he were starting for the Equator a telegram would have been a courtesy. But why announce his arrival in London? Why couple it with Emmy's? And why in the name of guns and musical comedies should Zora worry? But when she reflected that Septimus did nothing according to the orthodox ways of men, she attributed the superfluous message to his general infirmity of character, smiled indulgently, and dismissed the matter from her mind. Mrs. Oldrieve had nothing to dismiss, as she had been led to believe that Emmy had gone up to London by the morning train. She only bewailed the flighty inconsequence of modern young women, until she reflected that Emmy's father had gone and come with disconcerting unexpectedness from the day of their wedding to that of his death on the horns of a buffalo; whereupon she fatalistically attributed her daughter's ways to heredity. So while the two incapables were sedulously covering up their tracks, the most placid indifference as to their whereabouts reigned in Nunsmere.

The telegram, therefore, announcing their marriage found Zora entirely unprepared for the news it contained. What a pitiful tragedy lay behind the words she was a million miles from suspecting. She walked with her head above such clouds, her eyes on the stars, taking little heed of the happenings around her feet--and, if the truth is to be known, finding mighty little instruction or entertainment in the firmament. The elopement, for it was nothing more, brought her eyes, however, earthwards. "Why?" she asked, not realizing it to be the most futile of questions when applied to human actions. To every such "Why?" there are a myriad answers. When a mysterious murder is committed, everyone seeks the motive. Unless circ.u.mstance unquestionably provides the key of the enigma, who can tell?

It may be revenge for the foulest of wrongs. It may be that the a.s.sa.s.sin objected to the wart on the other man's nose--and there are men to whom a wart is a Pelion of rank offense, and who believe themselves heaven-appointed to cut it off. It may be for worldly gain. It may be merely for amus.e.m.e.nt. There is nothing so outrageous, so grotesque, which, if the human brain has conceived it, the human hand has not done. Many a man has taken a cab, on a sudden shower, merely to avoid the trouble of unrolling his umbrella, and the sanest of women has been known to cheat a 'bus conductor of a penny, so as to wallow in the gratification of a crossing-sweeper's blessing. When the philosopher asks the Everlasting Why, he knows, if he be a sound philosopher--and a sound philosopher is he who is not led into the grievous error of taking his philosophy seriously--that the question is but the starting point of the entertaining game of Speculation.

To this effect spake the Literary Man from London, when next he met Zora.

Nunsmere was in a swarm of excitement and the alien bee had, perforce, to buzz with the rest.

"The interesting thing is," said he, "that the thing has happened. That while the inhabitants of this smug village kept one dull eye on the decalogue and another on their neighbors, Romance on its rosy pinions was hovering over it. Two people have gone the right old way of man and maid.

They have defied the paralyzing conventions of the engagement. Oh! the unutterable, humiliating, deadening period! When each young person has to pa.s.s the inspection of the other's relations. When simpering friends maddeningly leave them alone in drawing-rooms and conservatories so that they can hold each other's hands. When they are on probation _coram publico_. Our friends have defied all this. They have defied the orange blossoms, the rice, the wedding presents, the unpleasant public affidavits, the whole indecent paraphernalia of an orthodox wedding--the bridal veil--a survival from the barbaric days when a woman was bought and paid for and a man didn't know what he had got until he had married her and taken her home--the senseless new clothes which brand them immodestly wherever they go. Two people have had the courage to avoid all this, to treat marriage as if it really concerned themselves and not Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry. They've done it. Why, doesn't matter. All honor to them."

He waved his stick in the air--they had met on the common--and the lame donkey, who had strayed companionably near them, took to his heels in fright.

"Even the donkey," said Zora, "Mr. Dix's most intimate friend, doesn't agree with you."

"The a.s.s will agree with the sage only in the millennium," said Rattenden.