Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 9
IX
When she looked in again, Don was sitting on the edge of the sofa, in the dusk ; the girl was in his arms; she was crying on his shoulder. Mrs. McGahn smiled. "Well?"
Don looked around with a drawn face. "Is she back, Mrs. Richardson?"
"No, she ain't," she blustered exaggeratingly. "An' she won't be, till mornin'. I put her out o' the house, hot-foot. Persecutin' the child!"
"I told her I wouldn't go until the morning, until I had seen you," Margaret sobbed.
"That will give us plenty of time." He asked Mrs. McGahn shakily: "Do you know anyone—around here—who'll do to"
"Are yuh Cath'lics?"
"No. We're"
"Neither am I. If yuh'd been Cath'lics, I'll be danged if I know how they marry. I'm Orange meself, an' so's Dan. Who's yer min'ster?"
"I don't know. I haven't any." He shook his head, in a helpless perplexity.
She snorted. "Yuh young heathen! Yuh deserve no better than bein' married be an alderman. That'll teach yuh to go to church. It's well fer yuh that I'm a married woman—with daughters like me." She waved him to the door. "Go get a cab—an' a weddin' ring!" She wailed: "An' my dinner in the oven!" She stopped him: "Wait! Do yuh know the size? No! There's a man now! As helpless as the babe at a christ'nin'! Have y' even a bit o' string? No, not a bit!" She caught up Margaret's glove from the dresser. "Take that—to a jeweller's. Go on! Be off with yuh! Take yer hat, man!" She drove him out, and he went clutching the glove in one hand, his hat in the other. She called down the stairs after him: "It's a four wheeler yuh'll want, mind yuh!" She shrieked, at the next landing: "An' a witness! I'm one! Yuh'll want two!"
If Don had any clear idea of what he was doing at the time, certainly he had no clear recollection, afterwards, of how he had done it. He found what he supposed was a jeweller's shop—though subsequently, in pointing it out to Margaret, he saw that it was a pawnbroker's. He bought a ring—that must have been an "unredeemed pledge"—without knowing what he paid for it. The man behind the glass show-case called him back to give him the glove, which he had forgotten; and he drifted down the street, looking for a livery stable, holding the ring in his bare hand like a child with a penny, struggling absent-mindedly to put on the glove—which was Margaret's—and bewildered to find that his hand had grown too large for it. The hostler of a boarding-stable directed him to a livery near by, and he succeeded in hiring a cab, though he had the feeling that he was speaking a foreign language and had difficulty in finding his words. The livery man understood the situation when Don, trying to pay in advance, found that the money he had in his hand was a wedding ring. "That's all right," the man grinned. "I been there. Put that in yer vest pocket an' ferget where it is." And he and the driver, having sympathetically helped Don to remember the address of Walter Pittsey's hotel, shut him in the cab and started the horses.
That drive was to remain in his memory as a smell of mildewed leather cushions and a sea-sickening darkness of rocking pitches, with street lights swimming by on the shores. He disembarked at a blazing hotel front and walked wide to the desk, over the black and white marble squares of a tessellated floor. Walter Pittsey was nowhere to be found. The clerk, after answering several futile questions, edged away from him and pretended to be busy looking up nothing in the telephone directory. Don wandered back to his cab, remembered Bert Pittsey, and gave the address to the driver on the box. He stood beside the front wheels until the man said: "Yes'ur. Jus' get inside now an' we'll start. See yuh shut the door."
It followed, naturally, that Don held the door shut until the cab had stopped at Pittsey's number. Then, alighting from the door which he had been holding, he found himself in the middle of the street, and had difficulty in distinguishing the house.
Pittsey said afterwards: "He came in on me without knocking, and he looked as if he had just been wakened up and didn't quite know where he was." It struck Don at the time that Pittsey behaved as if he had been invited out to see a three-alarm fire; for, after his first staring amazement—half-risen from the dining-table, with a knife in his hand—he shouted and snatched at his overcoat and came laughing.
"Where's he? Conroy?" Don asked, in the carriage.
"He's running a quiet wedding of his own," Bert said; and because Don could not make sense of the reply, he did not ask any more questions.
He was worried by a sinking sensation in his stomach which had made it difficult for him to judge the length and reach of his legs, particularly in going up or coming down stairs. For that reason he left it to Pittsey to tell Mrs. McGahn that the cab was at the door; and when the voluble landlady appeared, behind her voice—like an actor who is heard shouting in the wings before he makes his entrance on the stage—Don sank back against the cushions, under cover of her garrulity, in a personal silence that was aware of Margaret at his side in every tingling nerve.
He lost her again when he came on the confusing necessity of remembering his name, his age, his colour and the number of times that he had been married before—filling out the document required by law. He signed it laboriously and gave up the pen to Pittsey, after trying to put it in his pencil pocket. He moved like a dummy to his place before a table in the minister's parlour, being divided against himself by the fact that the affair reminded him of his first rehearsal in "The Rajah's Ruby"—until he was asked to repeat, after the clergyman, the words of the service, and then he stood, with Margaret, as if in the infant class at Sabbath school, shakily reciting verses which he did not understand. He put the ring on her finger as clumsily as if he were trying to thread a needle; and when Mrs. McGahn whispered loudly, "Salute yer bride! Kiss yer wife!" he kissed her beside the nose, stiff with an intensity of emotion, the tears in his eyes.
Pittsey wrung his hand. "Good boy!" he said. "You did it well." And Don smiled the foolish smile of bridegrooms.
"Now," Mrs. McGahn announced, "yuh'll all come back an' have yer weddin' supper with me—if that woman hasn't burnt it to flitters." Pittsey was paying the minister. Margaret was looking, a little frightened, at her husband as if she did not quite recognise him. "Come along with yuh! All of yuh! Will yuh come, Mr. Cobbett!" The Reverend J. Sanderson Cobbett excused himself in a low voice that contrasted with her excited pitch of hospitality. She was not discouraged. "Come along, Mr. Pitty. I can't offer yuh weddin' cake an' wine"—Pittsey saw the desire of escape in Don's look of misery—but Dan 'll make y' a punch that'll keep yuh grinnin' fer a whole honeymoon"
"I'm afraid you'll have to make it a wedding breakfast, Mrs. McGowan," he excused them. "I ordered supper for them at their hotel."
"There!" she said. "I knowed I'd be disappointed some way. Never mind! I've had a weddin' anyway." She cuddled Margaret. "Yuh spoke up like a trump, girl. Come along. Drive me home, now. Sure I'm an ol' fool." She had suddenly been overtaken in her turn by the usual desire to weep. "I s'pose Dan 'll be growlin' fer his grub like a bear with a sore ear. Yuh're young yet. God give yuh happiness. Yuh'll be good to her, Mr. Gregg, now. She's give yuh all she's got."
She crammed with good advice the few minutes of the drive back to her home; and she kissed Margaret at the cab-door, and ran upstairs for the girl's valise—which she had packed ready—and kissed her again when she came back with it. When she saw that Don had not his bag, she lost her tender emotion in the scolding haste of helping him to get it. By this time her husband was at the door and all the lodgers were in the windows; and when Pittsey at last got the cab under way, she threw an old slipper after them, and hit one of the gaping street-children on the head with it. They escaped while she was trying to comfort the injured youngster.
"A worthy woman," Pittsey said. "Next to a wake, they do enjoy a wedding. Where am I taking you now?"
They did not know. Don explained, rather uncertainly, that he had not made any arrangements of any sort. "Mrs. McGahn"
"Enough said," Pittsey interrupted. "Let me dispose of you. Your cousin has divorced me—for a handsomer girl—and I have a flat on my hands. I'm giving up housekeeping, and I'll sell the outfit. Or if you don't want to buy, I'll give it to you. Anyway, take it for the time being, until you find a better place. I'm going to join Walt. You get your suppers, and by the time you arrive at my former rooms you'll find them ready for you and the key of the dining-room under the door-mat. Turn it to your left and walk in. The rent won't be due for a week."
Don was as incapable of argument as he was of suggesting any better plan; and Pittsey, having stopped the cab at a street corner, shook hands with them smilingly, gave directions to the cabman and watched them drive off.
They went in darkness, in silence, side by side. At the the turning of a corner, Don said, out of an emotion that had evidently been throttling him: "We're—we're married!"
"Oh, Don," she cried, "we shouldn't have! We shouldn't have done it!"
He put an arm about her. "Wait!" he exulted.
"Just wait till I show you. Just you—just you wait! We'll be the happiest!"