John Charrington's Wedding
John is determined to marry May Foster, no matter what obstacles are placed in his way.
Context
This story was published in 1893. The author is Edith Nesbit, famous for her book ‘The Railway Children’. Short stories published in newspapers and magazines were very popular in the 19th century. There were a variety of reasons for this, including the limited home entertainment options (no radio or TV), the increased literacy of the population1, and the rising wages of workers in the new industrialised society, which meant they could afford to buy magazines and papers.
John Charrington's Wedding
No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington, but he thought differently. And things which John Charrington wanted had a strange way of coming to pass. John asked May to marry him before he went to Oxford University. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again the next time he came home. Again, she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever.
John was not the only man who wanted to marry May Foster. She was the belle of our village, and we were all in love with her more or less. It was a sort of fashion, like Inverness capes2. Therefore, we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into the little local Men’s Club that we held it in a loft over the saddler's shop, and invited us all to his wedding.
“Your wedding?”
"You don't mean it?"
"Who's the happy lady? When's it to be?"
John Charrington filled his pipe and lit it before he replied. Then he said, "I'm sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke, but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September."
"You don't mean it?"
"He's been refused again, and it's turned his head." said another.
"No," I said, rising, "I see it's true. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in a twenty-mile radius. Was it hypnotism, or a love-potion, Jack?"
"Neither, sir, but a gift you'll never have, perseverance, and the best luck a man ever had in this world." There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all the joking of the other fellows failed to draw him further.
The odd thing about it, was that when we congratulated Miss Forster she blushed and smiled, for all the world as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Women are strange creatures.
We were all asked to the wedding. In our village everyone who was anybody knew everybody else who was anyone. My sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the wedding dress than the bride herself. I was to be best man.
The coming marriage was much talked about at afternoon tea-tables and at our little Club, with the question always asked, "Does she care for him?"
I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one's footsteps are noiseless.
Therefore, I made no sound as I jumped over the low lichened wall, and threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John’s voice and saw May. She was sitting on a low flat gravestone, her face illuminated by the full splendour of the setting sun. Her expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of her love for him. She was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that lovely face. John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden evening. "My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!"
I slipped back into the shadows fully enlightened.
The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to go up to town on business. The train was late, of course, and as I stood grumbling, whom should I see but John and May. They were walking up and down the quieter end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into each other's eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.
Of course, to give them privacy I went to wait in the booking-office, and it was not until the train drew up at the platform that I obtrusively passed the pair, and took the corner seat in a first-class carriage. I did this with as good an air of not seeing them as I could assume. I pride myself on my discretion, but if John were travelling alone, I wanted his company.
"Hello, old man”, came his cheery voice as John climbed into my carriage, "here's luck, I was expecting a dull journey!"
"Where are you off to?" I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my eyes away although I saw, without looking, that May had been crying.
"To old Branbridge's”, he answered, shutting the train door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.
"Oh, I wish you wouldn't go, John," she was saying in a low, earnest voice. "I feel certain something will happen."
"Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me there, when the day after to-morrow is our wedding-day?" soothed John.
"Don't go,” she repeated, with a pleading intensity.
He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the train door. "I must, May. Mr. Branbridge has been awfully good to me, and now he's dying I must go and see him. But I shall come home in time for …" the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper, and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.
"You're sure to come back in time?" she spoke as the train moved.
"Nothing shall keep me," he answered, and we steamed out3.
After John had seen the last of the little figure on the platform, he leaned back in his corner and kept silent for a minute. When he spoke, it was to explain to me that his godfather Mr. Branbridge, whose heir he was, lay dying at his house some fifty miles away. He had sent for John, and he had felt obliged to go. "I shall surely be back to-morrow," he said, "or if not the day after, in plenty of time”.
"And suppose Mr. Branbridge dies?" I asked.
"Alive or dead, I mean to be married on Thursday!" John answered, lighting a cigar and unfolding his newspaper. We arrived at the station for Mr. Branbridge’s house, and John got out. I went on to London where I stayed the night.
When I arrived home the next afternoon, a very wet one by the way, my sister greeted me with, “Where’s Mr. Charrington?"
"Goodness knows," I answered testily. My sister Fanny has a power of annoying me in a way which no other human being possesses. "Isn't he back?" I asked, for I had expected to find him at home.
"No, Geoffrey." My sister Fanny also has a way of jumping to conclusions, especially when such conclusions are not favourable about her fellow-creatures. “He has not returned, and what is more, you may depend upon it he won't,” she said. “You mark my words, there'll be no wedding to-morrow.”
“You mark my words,” I retorted sharply, "you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. John will ensure that there is a wedding tomorrow.”
But although I could confidently snarl at my sister, I did not feel so comfortable when, late that night, standing on the doorstep of John's house I heard that he had not returned. I went home gloomily through the rain.
The next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, with a softness of air and a beauty of cloud that makes a perfect day. I woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather reluctant to face my anxiety in the light of full wakefulness.
But as I took breakfast there came a note from John which relieved my mind, and sent me up to the Forster’s house with a light heart. May was in the garden. I saw her behind the hollyhocks as the lodge gates swung closed behind me. Therefore, I did not go up to the house, but turned aside down the turfed path.
"He's written to you too," she said, without preliminary greeting, when I reached her side.
"Yes, I'm to meet him at the station at three, and come straight on to the church."
Her face looked pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes, and a small smile that spoke of renewed happiness. “Mr. Branbridge begged him to stay another night, and he had not the heart to refuse,” she went on. "He is so kind, but I wish he hadn't stayed."
I took a carriage to the station at half-past two. I felt rather annoyed with John. It seemed insulting to the beautiful girl who loved him, that he should arrive at the last minute. He would be covered with the dust of travel upon him when he took her hand, which some of us would have given the best years of our lives to take.
But when the three o'clock train came in and went out again, having brought no passengers to our little station, I was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes. I calculated that if John arrived on that train, and if we hurried, we might just get to the church in time for the ceremony. But, oh, what a fool John was to miss that first train!
That thirty-five minutes seemed to last a year. I wandered around the station reading the advertisements, time-tables, and the train company's bye-laws. I was getting more and more angry with John Charrington. His confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted, the minute he wanted it, was leading him too far. I hate waiting. Everyone does, but I believe I hate it more than anyone else.
The three thirty-five train was late, of course. I ground my pipe between my teeth and stamped with impatience as I watched the signals. Click. The signal went down and the train arrived. Five minutes later I flung myself back into my carriage. "Drive to the church!" I shouted, as I slammed the door shut. "Mr. Charrington hasn't come by this train."
Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he suddenly have been taken ill? I had never known him have a day's illness in his life. And even so he might have sent a telegram. Some awful accident must have happened to him. The thought that John had deserted May never, no, not for a moment, entered my head. Yes, something terrible had happened to him, and to me lay the task of telling his bride. I almost wished the carriage would overturn and break my head so that someone else might tell her, not I, who - but that's nothing to do with his story.
It was five minutes to four as we drew up at the churchyard gate. A double row of eager on-lookers lined the path from the church. I sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. Our gardener Byles had a good front place near the door, and I stopped.
"Are they still waiting, Byles?" I asked, simply to gain time, for of course I knew they were by the crowd's attentive attitude.
"Waiting, sir? No, no, sir. Why, the service must be over by now."
"Over! Then Mr. Charrington's arrived?"
"Yes sir. He must have missed you somehow. I say, sir," he said lowering his voice, "in my opinion is he's been drinking pretty heavily. His clothes was all dusty and his face white like a sheet. I tell you I didn't like the looks of him at all, and the folks inside are saying all sorts of things. You'll see, something's gone very wrong with Mr. John. He looks like a ghost, and in he went with his eyes straight before him, with never a look or a word for none of us. Him that was always such a gentleman!"
I had never heard Byles make so long a speech. The crowd in the churchyard were talking in whispers, and getting rice ready to throw at the bride & bridegroom. The ringers in the bell tower were standing with their hands on the ropes, ready to ring out a merry peal of bells when the bride and bridegroom came out.
A murmur from the church announced them, and they appeared. Byles was right. John Charrington did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, and his hair was a mess. He seemed to have been in a fight, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. But his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory, dress, veil, face and all.
As they walked down the path the six ringers bent over, pulling on the bell ropes. But instead of the cheerful wedding peal, there came the slow tolling of the funeral bell.
A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through us all. But the ringers themselves dropped their ropes and fled like rabbits out into the sunlight. The bride shuddered, and became paler still.
In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake but they protested, with many whispered expletives, that they would never touch the ropes again.
However, the bridegroom just led May down the path, past the people who stood with handfuls of rice that was never thrown, and the wedding-bells that never rang. In a hush like the quiet in a chamber of death, the bridal pair passed and got into their carriage, its door slammed behind them. Then the tongues were unleashed in a babel of anger, wonder, and speculation from the guests and spectators.
"If I'd seen his condition before the wedding, sir," said May’s father to me as we drove off in his carriage, "I'd never have let him marry my daughter!" Then he put his head out of the window. "Drive like hell," he shouted to the coachman, "and don't spare the horses". He was obeyed. We overtook the bride's carriage, and reached the house before it.
We stood waiting for them in the front doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun. In a few minutes we heard wheels crunching the gravel of the driveway. Then the carriage stopped in front of the steps, and May’s father and I started forward. I had the door open in a minute.
There was no sign of John in the carriage. Only May, his wife, a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage, and half on the seat.
"I drove straight here, sir," cried the coachman, as the bride's father lifted her out, "and I'll swear no one got out of the carriage."
We carried her into the house in her bridal dress and drew back her veil. I saw her face. Shall I ever forget it? White and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror that I have never seen since, except in nightmares. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, I tell you it was white like snow.
As we stood, her father and I, half mad with the horror and mystery of it, a telegraph boy came up the avenue. He gave the telegram to me. I tore it open and read, ‘Mr. Charrington was thrown from the carriage on his way to the station, at half-past one. He was killed on the spot.’
John Charrington was married to May Forster in our parish church at half-past three, in the presence of half the parish. What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive? No one knows - no one will ever know.
Oh, May! Oh, my dear! Before a week was over, they laid her beside her husband in our little churchyard on the thyme-covered hill. The same churchyard where they had been so happy, and where John had told May, "My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!"
Thus was the story of John Charrington's wedding.
This story was written by Edith Nesbit, and originally published in 1893. It was revised and updated by K.J. Wilsdon in 2025.
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The Elementary Education Act of 1870 legislated that all children aged between 5 and 13 years old should attend school. It did not make all education free or compulsory but did order, for the first time, that a school be placed in reach of every child.
The Inverness Cape was a waterproof cape, popular in the late 19th century. It was made of was one cape on top of another, so you did not need sleeves. Sherlock Holmes wore one.
“And we steamed out”, trains at this time ran on coal fires, which created the steam.