“I am aware of it, so I have made up my mind to marry without his knowledge.”
“Without his knowledge! But who will marry you?”
“But,” went on Jedediah, after a moment’s consideration, “even if I were weak enough to consent to so culpable an action, such a union would not be valid in the eye of the law. Not being a member of the Established Church, I cannot celebrate a civil marriage. You must go before the Registrar; and, as you are both under age, this official will not marry you without your father’s authorisation in writing.”
“What would you say if I undertook to get this authorisation for you?”
“I should say that you are our good angel.”
I held out my hand and he kissed it. His glasses were moist with tears.
Three days later, he brought me the document which I required. He was very pale. I would have asked questions, but he let me understand that he would not answer. “I have done wrong for your sake, Miss Lilian,” he said.
I learned afterwards that he had procured my father’s _blanc-seing_ under pretext of a petition addressed to the Government against the Ritualists, and especially against the use of surplices, baldaquins over altars, and confessionals.
I do not know to what stratagems Harry had recourse for obtaining the necessary papers. What is certain is that we were married on Easter Tuesday, before the Registrar of the county, after which Jedediah gave us the nuptial benediction in a little chapel of the Baptist communion situated in the environs of Plymouth (_Portsmouth_). He married us without looking at us. I have never seen a scene more strange, nor a man more unfortunate.
He refused to come and share the wedding-cake with us, which we ate at my sister’s.
But those English love-marriages between rash young people by no mean always end in living happily all the rest of their days; and the story soon turns tragic, its scene shifting from the Island. After that secret wedding, Harry returns to London, leaving his wife in an awkward position, where Jedediah is her only comfort. Love still blinds her eyes to the selfishness of Harry; but the reader sees how she might have been better off with poor Jedediah, who is not such a villain after all, but only the Dobbin or Seth Bede of the tale. The time comes when her marriage can no longer be hidden. Harry takes lodgings for her in London at the house of a Mrs Benson, whose husband, being employed at the Bricklayers’ Arms Goods Station, finds it convenient to live in a four-roomed house in Shoreditch, too large for a quiet couple.