The Wedding That Wasn't — Far from the Madding Crowd

On a week-day morning a few women and girls rise from their knees in the mouldy nave of All Saints’, at the end of a service without a sermon. They are about to leave when a ring of spurs sounds in the porch, and a young cavalry sergeant in red strides up the aisle. His embarrassment shows most in the energy of his step and in the effort on his face to show none. A flush has climbed his cheek by the time he has run the gauntlet of the women. He stands alone at the altar rail until the curate comes, in his surplice, to whisper to him, and the clerk and his wife follow. “’Tis a wedding!” murmur the women, and settle down to wait.

Behind them a little figure on the clockwork, the quarter-jack, jerks out of its niche and strikes half-past eleven. “Where’s the woman?” somebody whispers. The sergeant stands as stiff as the pillars, facing the south-east, and the silence grows until it can be heard. The jack comes out again for three-quarters, and the congregation starts. Feet shift, coughs begin, then a titter. Hardy says the hideous puppet seems to leer, and the quarters seem to fly. The clock strikes twelve, and the women stop giggling. The curate glides into the vestry and the clerk vanishes. The sergeant turns at last, stalks down the nave with a compressed lip, and two old almsmen chuckle as he passes.

In the square outside he meets a little woman whose face drops from anxiety to terror at the sight of his. Fanny has been to the wrong church. She took the one with the spire for All Saints’, stood at its door by half-past eleven as he told her, and found at a quarter to twelve that it was All Souls’. “But I wasn’t much frightened,” she says, “for I thought it could be to-morrow as well.” He calls her a fool, laughs hoarsely at the word “to-morrow”, and says he will not go through that again for some time. She pleads that the mistake was not so terrible, and asks when it shall be. “Ah, when? God knows!” he says, and walks quickly away across the square.