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.'