He passed on to the wedding. All the time between seemed to be spent
in his fond entreaties to hasten the longed-for day. How radiant she
looked in her bridal gown! "Oh, beautiful one, are you really mine?
Oh, world, pause for a moment and look at the woman who has given
herself to me!"
"My wife--this is my wife!" They were in London now; he was showing
her to London. How he swaggered! There was a perpetual apology on her
face; it begged people to excuse him for looking so proudly at her. It
was a crooked apology, and he hurried her into dark places and kissed
it.
Do you see that Tommy was doing all this for Grizel and pretending to
her that it was for himself? He was passionately desirous of making
amends, and he was to do it in the most generous way. Perhaps he
believed when he seemed to enter her room saying, "Grizel, I have come
back," that she loved him still; perhaps he knew that he did not love
in the way he said; perhaps he saw a remorseful man making splendid
atonement: but never should she know these things; tenderly as he had
begun he would go on to the end. Here at last is a Tommy worth looking
at, and he looked.
Yet as he drew near Thrums, after almost exactly two days of
continuous travel, many a shiver went down his back, for he could not
be sure that he should find Grizel here; he sometimes seemed to see
her lying ill at some wayside station in Switzerland, in France;
everything that could have happened to her he conceived, and he moved
restlessly in the carriage.
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