by Thomas Hardy
‘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.
CHAPTER IX.
FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE
By degrees Pierston began to trace again the customary lines of his existence; and his profession occupied him much as of old. The next year or two only once brought him tidings, through some residents at his former home, of the movements of the Bencombs. The extended voyage of Marcia’s parents had given them quite a zest for other scenes and countries; and it was said that her father, a man still in vigorous health except at brief intervals, was utilizing the outlook which his cosmopolitanism afforded him by investing capital in foreign undertakings. What he had supposed turned out to be true; Marcia was with them; no necessity for joining him had arisen; and thus the separation of himself and his nearly married wife by common consent was likely to be a permanent one.
It seemed as if he would scarce ever again discover the carnate dwelling-place of the haunting minion of his imagination. Having gone so near to matrimony with Marcia as to apply for a licence, he had felt for a long while morally bound to her by the incipient contract, and would not intentionally look about him in search of the vanished Ideality. Thus during the first year of Miss Bencomb’s absence, when absolutely bound to keep faith with the elusive one’s late incarnation if she should return to claim him, this man of the odd fancy would sometimes tremble at the thought of what would become of his solemn intention if the Phantom were suddenly to disclose herself in an unexpected quarter, and seduce him before he was aware. Once or twice he imagined that he saw her in the distance — at the end of a street, on the far sands of a shore, in a window, in a meadow, at the opposite side of a railway station; but he determinedly turned on his heel, and walked the other way.
During the many uneventful seasons that followed Marcia’s stroke of independence (for which he was not without a secret admiration at times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards and ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this, certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for such a result, that he was successful in his art, successful by a seemingly sudden spurt, which carried him at one bound over the hindrances of years.
He prospered without effort. He was A.R.A.
But recognitions of this sort, social distinctions, which he had once coveted so keenly, seemed to have no utility for him now. By the accident of being a bachelor, he was floating in society without any soul-anchorage or shrine that he could call his own; and, for want of a domestic centre round which honours might crystallize, they dispersed impalpably without accumulating and adding weight to his material well-being.
He would have gone on working with his chisel with just as much zest if his creations had been doomed to meet no mortal eye but his own. This indifference to the popular reception of his dream-figures lent him a curious artistic aplomb that carried him through the gusts of opinion without suffering them to disturb his inherent bias.
The study of beauty was his only joy for years onward. In the streets he would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express to a hair’s-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums — mostly, when at close quarters, to be disappointed for his pains.
In these professional beauty-chases he sometimes cast his eye across the Thames to the wharves on the south side, and to that particular one whereat his father’s tons of freestone were daily landed from the ketches of the south coast. He could occasionally discern the white blocks lying there, vast cubes so persistently nibbled by his parent from his island rock in the English Channel, that it seemed as if in time it would be nibbled all away.
One thing it passed him to understand: on what field of observation the poets and philosophers based their assumption that the
passion of love was intensest in youth and burnt lower as maturity advanced. It was possibly because of his utter domestic loneliness that, during the productive interval which followed the first years of Marcia’s departure, when he was drifting along from five-and-twenty to eight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved with an ardour — though, it is true, also with a self-control — unknown to him when he was green in judgment.
* * *
His whimsical isle-bred fancy had grown to be such an emotion that the Well-Beloved — now again visible — was always existing somewhere near him. For months he would find her on the stage of a theatre: then she would flit away, leaving the poor, empty carcase that had lodged her to mumm on as best it could without her — a sorry lay figure to his eyes, heaped with imperfections and sullied with commonplace. She would reappear, it might be, in an at first unnoticed lady, met at some fashionable evening party, exhibition, bazaar, or dinner; to flit from her, in turn, after a few months, and stand as a graceful shop-girl at some large drapery warehouse into which he had strayed on an unaccustomed errand. Then she would forsake this figure and redisclose herself in the guise of some popular authoress, piano-player, or fiddleress, at whose shrine he would worship for perhaps a twelvemonth. Once she was a dancing-girl at the Royal Moorish Palace of Varieties, though during her whole continuance at that establishment he never once exchanged a word with her, nor did she first or last ever dream of his existence. He knew that a ten-minutes’ conversation in the wings with the substance would send the elusive haunter scurrying fearfully away into some other even less accessible mask-figure.
She was a blonde, a brunette, tall, petite, svelte, straight-featured, full, curvilinear. Only one quality remained unalterable: her instability of tenure. In Borne’s phrase, nothing was permanent in her but change.
