“Would it not be very unbecoming for us to marry now, and your family not be present at the wedding?”
“Why shouldn't they be present? All would be but father, and in the furious state of his feelings he had better be away—a great deal better—far, far away.”
“Since he is so furious, I don't think he would like his wife and children to be at our wedding.”
“Mercedes, tell me frankly,” said he, resuming his place at her side: “tell me, has my father's outrageous conduct made me lose caste in your estimation? If so, I shall not blame you, because when a man acts so ungentlemanly, so ruffianly, it is fair to suppose that his sons might do the same.”
“Never! Such an idea never entered my mind. How could it?” said Mercedes, with great earnestness.
“If it did not, it is because you are good and generous. Still, perhaps, it is selfish in me to keep you to your engagement with the son of such a rough. I release you, Mercedes. You are free,” he said, and he closed his eyes and leaned his head again on the back of the sofa. A sensation of icy coldness came over him, and he thought that death must come like that. But for all that mental agony, he still thought Mercedes would be right in rejecting him.
The whole scene as described to him by Everett, when his father was uttering those low insults to Don Mariano, came vividly before him, and he thought it would be impossible for Mercedes not to feel a sense of humiliation in uniting herself to him—he, the son of that brutish fellow—that rough. He arose, and his pallor was so great that Mercedes thought he must be ill.
“Mercedes, we part now. Heaven bless you.”
“Clarence, you are ill. What do you mean? Will you not wait for papa?”
“No. I had better go now.”