“You well might fear, if Love’s sole claim
Were to be happy.”
A MARRIAGE in the desert! What pictures does it conjure up before the mental eye? A lone, secluded spot amongst the secret places of the hills? Or perhaps, a desolate plain strewn with rocks that have never yet echoed to the voice of human joy or woe? These are what we generally associate with the thought of a desert, and a marriage in such a place would be difficult, unusual, and romantic. But, in the France of which we write, and until a period much later than we write of, what were called “marriages in the desert,” though certainly “difficult,” were not by any means “unusual.” Whether they were “romantic” or no, depends entirely upon our definition of romance. Instead of desert sands, of mountains, or rocks, or caverns, we would often have to picture, as in the present case, a quiet room, perhaps in the street of some busy town.
Here it is the room we know, over the goldsmith’s shop, in the street of Montpellier called the Rue des Augustins. The room is lighted, somewhat dimly indeed, by a couple of bougies, placed upon a small table. The windows are closely shut and the curtains drawn, lest even a glimmer of light should be visible outside. Five persons are present—Dr Anastase aos Berbier, Jules Blanc, Henri Portal the pastor, and the two immediately concerned, Gaspard de Montausier and Elene de Fressinieres.
They had come together to commit a flagrant breach of the laws of their country—a breach that, if discovered, would consign the pastor to the gibbet, the bride and bridegroom, the one to the galleys, and the other to perpetual imprisonment, and the two witnesses to severe penalties. For a Protestant marriage, wherever it took place, was what was then styled both by friend and foe “a marriage in the desert”; and besides entailing all these punishments, was, in point of law, absolutely null and void.
Yet the thing was done, and so very, very often! Surely, if love and heroism and devotion are the core and heart of romance, and peril and adventure its outward signs and garments, such marriages have an overwhelming title to the epithet “romantic”! Henri Portal, in the disguise of a workman’s blouse, stood beside the little table, and repeated from memory the simple and solemn marriage service of his church. A man who had thought from his childhood, yet never learned to read till he was past twenty, was sure to have a retentive memory. In prayer or in exhortation, in question or in vow, he neither added nor omitted a single word.
To the two whose interest in the service was intimate and personal, it seemed like a strange and marvelous dream. Almost it might have been a part of the solemn wonders of the week, when
“Death was so near them, life cooled from its heat”
Yet not wholly so. For life—young, vigorous life—was throbbing in the two hands that clasped each other—the one firm and strong, the other no less strong perhaps for its very trembling—and in the two voices that spoke the vows which bound them together till death should part them. Not that death would part them, either—so they both believed.
Dreamlike as it seemed to them just then, the scene with all its accessories came often back to them in after years—the dimly lighted room; the pastor in his workman’s blouse, with the face and the hands of a peasant but the voice and air of a prophet; Berbier seated in his chair, looking on with an air of mild curiosity and benevolent interest; Jules Blanc standing near, alert and capable, ready to show the bride and bridegroom where to stand and what to say and do, as befitted the only member of the party except Portal who had ever witnessed a Protestant marriage.
Very soon all was over. Portal, after his farewell prayer and blessing, slipped out into the darkness, though not without Gaspard’s faltering but fervent thanks, and a cordial grasp from the hand of M. Berbier, which left in his two or three pieces of gold. “Glad to do it for him,” the doctor said to himself. “How is a man to live, who earns no pay for his work but a halter?”
The King William was to sail from Cette on the evening of the following day. When the dusk fell upon their wedding day, the bride and bridegroom set forth with Tardif to make their way to the coast.