1. VIII. 'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING'
They lived on at the hotel some days longer, eyed curiously by the
chambermaids, and burst in upon every now and then by the waiters as if
accidentally. When they were walking together, mostly in back streets
for fear of being recognized, Marcia was often silent, and her
imperious face looked gloomy.
'Dummy!' he said playfully, on one of these occasions.
'I am vexed that by your admissions at Doctors' Commons you prevented
them giving you the licence at once! It is not nice, my living on with
you like this!'
'But we are going to marry, dear!'
'Yes,' she murmured, and fell into reverie again. 'What a sudden
resolve it was of ours!' she continued. 'I wish I could get my father
and mother's consent to our marriage. . . . As we can't complete it
for another day or two, a letter might be sent to them and their answer
received? I have a mind to write.'
Pierston expressed his doubts of the wisdom of this course, which
seemed to make her desire it the more, and the result was a tiff
between them. 'Since we are obliged to delay it, I won't marry without
their consent!' she cried at last passionately.
'Very well then, dear. Write,' he said.
When they were again indoors, she sat down to a note, but after a while
threw aside her pen despairingly. 'No: I cannot do it!' she said. 'I
can't bend my pride to such a job. Will YOU write for me, Jocelyn?'
'I? I don't see why I should be the one, particularly as I think it
premature.'
'But you have not quarrelled with my father as I have done.'
'Well no. But there is a long-standing antagonism, which would make it
odd in me to be the writer. Wait till we are married, and then I will
write. Not till then.'
'Then I suppose I must. You don't know my father. He might forgive me
marrying into any other family without his knowledge, but he thinks
yours such a mean one, and so resents the trade rivalry, that he would
never pardon till the day of his death my becoming a Pierston secretly.
I didn't see it at first.'
This remark caused an unpleasant jar on the mind of Pierston. Despite
his independent artistic position in London, he was staunch to the
simple old parent who had stubbornly held out for so many years against
Bencomb's encroaching trade, and whose money had educated and
maintained Jocelyn as an art-student in the best schools. So he begged
her to say no more about his mean family, and she silently resumed her
letter, giving an address at a post-office that their quarters might
not be discovered, at least just yet.
No reply came by return of post; but, rather ominously, some letters
for Marcia that had arrived at her father's since her departure were
sent on in silence to the address given. She opened them one by one,
till on reading the last, she exclaimed, 'Good gracious!' and burst
into laughter.
'What is it?' asked Pierston.
Marcia began to read the letter aloud. It came from a faithful lover
of hers, a youthful Jersey gentleman, who stated that he was soon going
to start for England to claim his darling, according to her plighted
word.
She was half risible, half concerned. 'What shall I do?' she said.
'Do? My dear girl, it seems to me that there is only one thing to do,
and that a very obvious thing. Tell him as soon as possible that you
are just on the point of marriage.'
Marcia thereupon wrote out a reply to that effect, Jocelyn helping her
to shape the phrases as gently as possible.
'I repeat' (her letter concluded) 'that I had quite forgotten! I am
deeply sorry; but that is the truth. I have told my intended husband
everything, and he is looking over my shoulder as I write.'
Said Jocelyn when he saw this set down: 'You might leave out the last
few words. They are rather an extra stab for the poor boy.'
'Stab? It is not that, dear. Why does he want to come bothering me?
Jocelyn, you ought to be very proud that I have put you in my letter at
all. You said yesterday that I was conceited in declaring I might have
married that science-man I told you of. But now you see there was yet
another available.'
He, gloomily: 'Well, I don't care to hear about that. To my mind this
sort of thing is decidedly unpleasant, though you treat it so lightly.'
'Well,' she pouted, 'I have only done half what you have done!'
'What's that?'
'I have only proved false through forgetfulness, but you have while
remembering!'
'O yes; of course you can use Avice Caro as a retort. But don't vex me
about her, and make me do such an unexpected thing as regret the
falseness.'
She shut her mouth tight, and her face flushed.
The next morning there did come an answer to the letter asking her
parents' consent to her union with him; but to Marcia's amazement her
father took a line quite other than the one she had expected him to
take. Whether she had compromised herself or whether she had not
seemed a question for the future rather than the present with him, a
native islander, born when old island marriage views prevailed in
families; he was fixed in his disapproval of her marriage with a hated
Pierston. He did not consent; he would not say more till he could see
her: if she had any sense at all she would, if still unmarried, return
to the home from which she had evidently been enticed. He would then
see what he could do for her in the desperate circumstances she had
made for herself; otherwise he would do nothing.
Pierston could not help being sarcastic at her father's evidently low
estimate of him and his belongings; and Marcia took umbrage at his
sarcasms.
'I am the one deserving of satire if anybody!' she said. 'I begin to
feel I was a foolish girl to run away from a father for such a trumpery
reason as a little scolding because I had exceeded my allowance.'
'I advised you to go back, Marcie.'
'In a sort of way: not in the right tone. You spoke most
contemptuously of my father's honesty as a merchant.'
'I couldn't speak otherwise of him than I did, I'm afraid, knowing
what--'.
'What have you to say against him?'
'Nothing--to you, Marcie, beyond what is matter of common notoriety.
Everybody knows that at one time he made it the business of his life to
ruin my father; and the way he alludes to me in that letter shows that
his enmity still continues.'
'That miser ruined by an open-handed man like my father!' said she.
'It is like your people's misrepresentations to say that!'
Marcia's eyes flashed, and her face burnt with an angry heat, the
enhanced beauty which this warmth might have brought being killed by
the rectilinear sternness of countenance that came therewith.
'Marcia--this temper is too exasperating! I could give you every step
of the proceeding in detail--anybody could--the getting the quarries
one by one, and everything, my father only holding his own by the most
desperate courage. There is no blinking facts. Our parents' relations
are an ugly fact in the circumstances of us two people who want to
marry, and we are just beginning to perceive it; and how we are going
to get over it I cannot tell.'
She said steadily: 'I don't think we shall get over it at all!'
'We may not--we may not--altogether,' Pierston murmured, as he gazed at
the fine picture of scorn presented by his Juno's classical face and
dark eyes.
'Unless you beg my pardon for having behaved so!'
Pierston could not quite bring himself to see that he had behaved badly
to his too imperious lady, and declined to ask forgiveness for what he
had not done.
She thereupon left the room. Later in the day she re-entered and broke
a silence by saying bitterly: 'I showed temper just now, as you told
me. But things have causes, and it is perhaps a mistake that you
should have deserted Avice for me. Instead of wedding Rosaline, Romeo
must needs go eloping with Juliet. It was a fortunate thing for the
affections of those two Veronese lovers that they died when they did.
In a short time the enmity of their families would have proved a
fruitful source of dissension; Juliet would have gone back to her
people, he to his; the subject would have split them as much as it
splits us.'
Pierston laughed a little. But Marcia was painfully serious, as he
found at tea-time, when she said that since his refusal to beg her
pardon she had been thinking over the matter, and had resolved to go to
her aunt's after all--at any rate till her father could be induced to
agree to their union. Pierston was as chilled by this resolve of hers
as he was surprised at her independence in circumstances which usually
make women the reverse. But he put no obstacles in her way, and, with
a kiss strangely cold after their recent ardour, the Romeo of the
freestone Montagues went out of the hotel, to avoid even the appearance
of coercing his Juliet of the rival house. When he returned she was
gone.
* * *
A correspondence began between these too-hastily pledged ones; and it
was carried on in terms of serious reasoning upon their awkward
situation on account of the family feud. They saw their recent love as
what it was:
'Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning. . .'
They saw it with an eye whose calmness, coldness, and, it must be
added, wisdom, did not promise well for their reunion.
Their debates were clinched by a final letter from Marcia, sent from no
other place than her recently left home in the Isle. She informed him
that her father had appeared suddenly at her aunt's, and had induced
her to go home with him. She had told her father all the circumstances
of their elopement, and what mere accidents had caused it: he had
persuaded her on what she had almost been convinced of by their
disagreement, that all thought of their marriage should be at least
postponed for the present; any awkwardness and even scandal being
better than that they should immediately unite themselves for life on
the strength of a two or three days' resultless passion, and be the
wretched victims of a situation they could never change.
Pierston saw plainly enough that he owed it to her father being a born
islander, with all the ancient island notions of matrimony lying
underneath his acquired conventions, that the stone-merchant did not
immediately insist upon the usual remedy for a daughter's precipitancy
in such cases, but preferred to await issues.
But the young man still thought that Marcia herself, when her temper
had quite cooled, and she was more conscious of her real position,
would return to him, in spite of the family hostility. There was no
social reason against such a step. In birth the pair were about on one
plane; and though Marcia's family had gained a start in the
accumulation of wealth, and in the beginnings of social distinction,
which lent colour to the feeling that the advantages of the match would
be mainly on one side, Pierston was a sculptor who might rise to fame;
so that potentially their marriage could not be considered inauspicious
for a woman who, beyond being the probable heiress to a considerable
fortune, had no exceptional opportunities.
Thus, though disillusioned, he felt bound in honour to remain on call
at his London address as long as there was the slightest chance of
Marcia's reappearance, or of the arrival of some message requesting him
to join her, that they might, after all, go to the altar together. Yet
in the night he seemed to hear sardonic voices, and laughter in the
wind at this development of his little romance, and during the slow and
colourless days he had to sit and behold the mournful departure of his
Well-Beloved from the form he had lately cherished, till she had almost
vanished away. The exact moment of her complete withdrawal Pierston
knew not, but not many lines of her were longer discernible in Marcia's
remembered contours, nor many sounds of her in Marcia's recalled
accents. Their acquaintance, though so fervid, had been too brief for
such lingering.
There came a time when he learnt, through a trustworthy channel, two
pieces of news affecting himself. One was the marriage of Avice Caro
with her cousin, the other that the Bencombs had started on a tour
round the world, which was to include a visit to a relation of Mr.
Bencomb's who was a banker in San Francisco. Since retiring from his
former large business the stone merchant had not known what to do with
his leisure, and finding that travel benefited his health he had
decided to indulge himself thus. Although he was not so informed,
Pierston concluded that Marcia had discovered that nothing was likely
to happen as a consequence of their elopement, and that she had
accompanied her parents. He was more than ever struck with what this
signified--her father's obstinate antagonism to her union with one of
his blood and name.
