'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.