Mr. Furnival opened his book and read. Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God. His voice, which had been wavering, steadied as the old words took hold of it. Ivo heard them as if from a long way off. Not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly. He was aware of the woman beside him only as a column of black at the edge of his vision and the faint, bitter smell of crape.
"Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace."
The silence stretched. Somewhere at the back a pew creaked. Ivo did not turn his head, but he heard Sir Digby Rendell rise in the Ellerholt pew, heard the breath drawn for speech—and then heard it let go again, unspent. There was nothing to say that the law would hear, and Sir Digby was a magistrate. Instead there came the scrape of boots on stone, the heavy unhurried tread of a man walking down a nave, and the bang of the west door.
Cordelia did not follow him. When Ivo glanced at last toward the Ellerholt pew, she was sitting alone in it, crying quietly into her glove.
"Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?"
"I will," said Ivo.
"Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health—"
"I will," said Rosamund Quarrie, before he had quite finished. She said it clearly, to the east window. Her voice did not shake on obey. He noticed that.
There was no ring. He had not thought of it until Mr. Furnival held out the book to receive one and looked at him with mild despair. Ivo pulled from his little finger the signet he had worn since he was twenty-one—his grandfather's, a plain gold bezel cut with the Ferrand boar—and set it on the page. When he took it up again and put it on the fourth finger of her left hand, over the black kid, it hung there loose as a curtain ring. She closed her hand round it hard to keep it from falling.
"With this ring I thee wed," said Ivo, "with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow." The worldly goods sounded like an insult, when the only goods in question had been put so carefully beyond his reach; he saw her mouth move very slightly, as though she had thought the same.
Till death us do part.