“Stephen, it is over—happy love is over; and there is no more sunshine now!”
“I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I will!”
“Papa will never hear of it—never—never! You don’t know him. I do. He is either biased in favour of a thing, or prejudiced against it. Argument is powerless against either feeling.”
“No; I won’t think of him so,” said Stephen. “If I appear before him some time hence as a man of established name, he will accept me—I know he will. He is not a wicked man.”
“No, he is not wicked. But you say ‘some time hence,’ as if it were no time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be comparatively a short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its real length trebled! Every summer will be a year—autumn a year—winter a year! O Stephen! and you may forget me!”
Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-hearted woman. The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear. “You, too, may be persuaded to give me up, when time has made me fainter in your memory. For, remember, your love for me must be nourished in secret; there will be no long visits from me to support you. Circumstances will always tend to obliterate me.”
“Stephen,” she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding his last words, “there are beautiful women where you live—of course I know there are—and they may win you away from me.” Her tears came visibly as she drew a mental picture of his faithlessness. “And it won’t be your fault,” she continued, looking into the candle with doleful eyes. “No! You will think that our family don’t want you, and get to include me with them. And there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others will be let in.”
“I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of forebodings.”
“Oh yes, they will,” she replied. “And you will look at them, not caring at first, and then you will look and be interested, and after a while you will think, ‘Ah, they know all about city life, and assemblies, and coteries, and the manners of the titled, and poor little Elfie, with all the fuss that’s made about her having me, doesn’t know about anything but a little house and a few cliffs and a space of sea, far away.’ And then you’ll be more interested in them, and they’ll make you have them instead of me, on purpose to be cruel to me because I am silly, and they are clever and hate me. And I hate them, too; yes, I do!”
Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished. And, worse than that general feeling, there of course remained the sadness which arose from the special features of his own case. However remote a desired issue may be, the mere fact of having entered the groove which leads to it, cheers to some extent with a sense of accomplishment. Had Mr. Swancourt consented to an engagement of no less length than ten years, Stephen would have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that they were somewhere on the road to Cupid’s garden. But, with a possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the waiting for marriage could even set in. And this was despair.
“I wish we could marry now,” murmured Stephen, as an impossible fancy.
“So do I,” said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. “ ’Tis the only thing that ever does sweethearts good!”
“Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?”
“Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,” she said, and went on reflectively: “All we want is to render it absolutely impossible for any future circumstance to upset our future intention of being happy together; not to begin being happy now.”
“Exactly,” he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of hers. “To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living now; merely to put it out of anybody’s power to force you away from me, dearest.”
“Or you away from me, Stephen.”
“Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of circumstance strong enough to make any woman in the world marry against her will: no conceivable pressure, up to torture or starvation, can make a woman once married to her lover anybody else’s wife.”
Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had been held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to beguile a miserable moment. During a pause which followed Stephen’s last remark, a fascinating perception, then an alluring conviction, flashed along the brain of both. The perception was that an immediate marriage could be contrived; the conviction that such an act, in spite of its daring, its fathomless results, its deceptiveness, would be preferred by each to the life they must lead under any other conditions.
The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude of the conception he was cherishing. “How strong we should feel, Elfride! going on our separate courses as before, without the fear of ultimate separation! O Elfride! think of it; think of it!”
It is certain that the young girl’s love for Stephen received a fanning from her father’s opposition which made it blaze with a dozen times the intensity it would have exhibited if left alone. Never
