For thirty-six hours he had become a young man again, treading on air, hurrying on events with a lover’s impatience. And now the crash had come. He was an old man. He sat by his untasted breakfast, and covered his face in his hands. His life rose up before him, self-complacent, dignified, immaculate. Yet, somehow, he felt like a Pharisee. He was a Churchman first, a Christian afterwards. His religion had given him very little comfort. It had taken Yvonne from him once, at a time when he might have won her to him forever, and it had brought him no consolation. A man does not often get a glimpse at his own soul; when he does, he finds it rather a pitiable sight. The Bishop saw in its depths poignant regret that he then had not loved the woman enough to sin for her sake. And there, too, was revealed to him miserably that outraged pride, disillusion, the traditions of social morality, the authority of the Church’s ordinances--all externals--had been the leading factors of his life’s undoing. A great wish rose amid the bitterness of his heart that he had been, like Stephen, one of the publicans and sinners, upon whom could shine the Light of the World.
Joyce and Yvonne were married one morning quietly at a registrar’s, and came back to continue the day’s routine. The old bookseller did not appear astonished when Joyce informed him of the unusual change of relationship.
“You have both had your troubles,” he said, shrewdly, looking up over his spectacles, and keeping his thumb in the volume of Origen he was reading. “Any one can see that. You would n’t be here otherwise. And I’m not enquiring into them. But I hope they’re ended. And now,” he continued, rising with an old man’s stiffness, “I ’ve got some old Madeira that I bought thirty years ago with a job-lot of things out of a gentleman’s chambers, and I’d like to open a bottle in your honour.”
Joyce brought Yvonne down to the back-parlour. The wine came out of the dirt-encrusted bottle like sunshine breaking through a cloud, and gladdened their hearts. And that was their marriage feast. Thus began the wedded life of these two. Years of struggle, poverty, and ostracism lay before them. They faced it all fearlessly. To each of them the long-denied love had come, at last, new and vivifying, changing the meaning of existence. Yet the final word of mutual revelation awaited the loosening touch. It came with tragic unexpectedness.