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Title: The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament

Author: Thomas Hardy

Release date: July 1, 2002 [eBook #3326]
                Most recently updated: September 8, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Les Bowler, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WELL-BELOVED: A SKETCH OF A TEMPERAMENT ***




Produced by Les Bowler





THE WELL-BELOVED

A SKETCH OF A TEMPERAMENT

By Thomas Hardy




PREFACE

The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of the
following scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home of
a curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs
and singular customs, now for the most part obsolescent. Fancies, like
certain soft-wooded plants which cannot bear the silent inland frosts,
but thrive by the sea in the roughest of weather, seem to grow up
naturally here, in particular amongst those natives who have no active
concern in the labours of the 'Isle.' Hence it is a spot apt to generate
a type of personage like the character imperfectly sketched in these
pages--a native of natives--whom some may choose to call a fantast (if
they honour him with their consideration so far), but whom others may
see only as one that gave objective continuity and a name to a delicate
dream which in a vaguer form is more or less common to all men, and is
by no means new to Platonic philosophers.

To those who know the rocky coign of England here depicted--overlooking
the great Channel Highway with all its suggestiveness, and standing out
so far into mid-sea that touches of the Gulf Stream soften the air till
February--it is matter of surprise that the place has not been more
frequently chosen as the retreat of artists and poets in search of
inspiration--for at least a month or two in the year, the tempestuous
rather than the fine seasons by preference. To be sure, one nook therein
is the retreat, at their country's expense, of other geniuses from a
distance; but their presence is hardly discoverable. Yet perhaps it
is as well that the artistic visitors do not come, or no more would be
heard of little freehold houses being bought and sold there for a couple
of hundred pounds--built of solid stone, and dating from the sixteenth
century and earlier, with mullions, copings, and corbels complete. These
transactions, by the way, are carried out and covenanted, or were till
lately, in the parish church, in the face of the congregation, such
being the ancient custom of the Isle.

As for the story itself, it may be worth while to remark that, differing
from all or most others of the series in that the interest aimed at
is of an ideal or subjective nature, and frankly imaginative,
verisimilitude in the sequence of events has been subordinated to the
said aim.

The first publication of this tale in an independent form was in 1897;
but it had appeared in the periodical press in 1892, under the title of
'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved.' A few chapters of that experimental
issue were rewritten for the present and final form of the narrative.

T. H. August 1912.



CONTENTS

     PART FIRST --  A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY.

     I.      A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER
     II.     THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE
     III.    THE APPOINTMENT
     IV.     A LONELY PEDESTRIAN
     V.      A CHARGE
     VI.     ON THE BRINK
     VII.    HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS
     VIII.   'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING'
     IX.     FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE


     PART SECOND  --  A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY.

     I.      THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT
     II.     SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES
     III.    SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST
     IV.     SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE
     V.      THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE
     VI.     THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT
     VII.    THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED
     VIII.   HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM
     IX.     JUXTAPOSITIONS
     X.      SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL
     XI.     THE IMAGE PERSISTS
     XII.    A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN
     XIII.   SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT


     PART THIRD  --  A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY.

     I.      SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON
     II.     MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMENT
     III.    THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN
     IV.     A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION
     V.      ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION
     VI.     THE WELL-BELOVED IS--WHERE?
     VII.    AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT
     VIII.   'ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!'





PART FIRST -- A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY.

     --'Now, if Time knows
     That Her, whose radiant brows
     Weave them a garland of my vows;

     Her that dares be
     What these lines wish to see:
     I seek no further, it is She.'
                                 --R. CRASHAW.




1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER

A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep
road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street
of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular
peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like
the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the
mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by rages of the se,'
and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.

The pedestrian was what he looked like--a young man from London and the
cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism
sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with something
of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months had flown
since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely rock of his
birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid many contrasting
societies, peoples, manners, and scenes.

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there always looked
quaint and odd after his later impressions. More than ever the spot
seemed what it was said once to have been, the ancient Vindilia Island,
and the Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, the houses above
houses, one man's doorstep rising behind his neighbour's chimney,
the gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on
apparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as
a solid and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longer
familiar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly unique
and white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely
stratified walls of oolite,

                The melancholy ruins
      Of cancelled cycles,...

with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any
spectacle he had beheld afar.

After a laborious clamber he reached the top, and walked along the
plateau towards the eastern village. The time being about two o'clock,
in the middle of the summer season, the road was glaring and dusty, and
drawing near to his father's house he sat down in the sun.

He stretched out his hand upon the rock beside him. It felt warm. That
was the island's personal temperature when in its afternoon sleep as
now. He listened, and heard sounds: whirr-whirr, saw-saw-saw. Those were
the island's snores--the noises of the quarrymen and stone-sawyers.

Opposite to the spot on which he sat was a roomy cottage or homestead.
Like the island it was all of stone, not only in walls but in
window-frames, roof, chimneys, fence, stile, pigsty and stable, almost
door.

He remembered who had used to live there--and probably lived there
now--the Caro family; the 'roan-mare' Caros, as they were called to
distinguish them from other branches of the same pedigree, there being
but half-a-dozen Christian and surnames in the whole island. He crossed
the road and looked in at the open doorway. Yes, there they were still.

Mrs. Caro, who had seen him from the window, met him in the entry, and
an old-fashioned greeting took place between them. A moment after a
door leading from the back rooms was thrown open, and a young girl about
seventeen or eighteen came bounding in.

'Why, 'TIS dear Joce!' she burst out joyfully. And running up to the
young man, she kissed him.

The demonstration was sweet enough from the owner of such an
affectionate pair of bright hazel eyes and brown tresses of hair. But it
was so sudden, so unexpected by a man fresh from towns, that he winced
for a moment quite involuntarily; and there was some constraint in the
manner in which he returned her kiss, and said, 'My pretty little Avice,
how do you do after so long?'

For a few seconds her impulsive innocence hardly noticed his start of
surprise; but Mrs. Caro, the girl's mother, had observed it instantly.
With a pained flush she turned to her daughter.

'Avice--my dear Avice! Why--what are you doing? Don't you know that
you've grown up to be a woman since Jocelyn--Mr. Pierston--was last down
here? Of course you mustn't do now as you used to do three or four years
ago!'

The awkwardness which had arisen was hardly removed by Pierston's
assurance that he quite expected her to keep up the practice of her
childhood, followed by several minutes of conversation on general
subjects. He was vexed from his soul that his unaware movement should so
have betrayed him. At his leaving he repeated that if Avice regarded him
otherwise than as she used to do he would never forgive her; but though
they parted good friends her regret at the incident was visible in her
face. Jocelyn passed out into the road and onward to his father's house
hard by. The mother and daughter were left alone.

'I was quite amazed at 'ee, my child!' exclaimed the elder. 'A young
man from London and foreign cities, used now to the strictest company
manners, and ladies who almost think it vulgar to smile broad! How could
ye do it, Avice?'

'I--I didn't think about how I was altered!' said the
conscience-stricken girl. 'I used to kiss him, and he used to kiss me
before he went away.'

'But that was years ago, my dear!'

'O yes, and for the moment I forgot! He seemed just the same to me as he
used to be.'

'Well, it can't be helped now. You must be careful in the future. He's
got lots of young women, I'll warrant, and has few thoughts left for
you. He's what they call a sculptor, and he means to be a great genius
in that line some day, they do say.'

'Well, I've done it; and it can't be mended!' moaned the girl.

Meanwhile Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor of budding fame, had gone
onward to the house of his father, an inartistic man of trade and
commerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, Jocelyn condescended to accept
a yearly allowance pending the famous days to come. But the elder,
having received no warning of his son's intended visit, was not at home
to receive him. Jocelyn looked round the familiar premises, glanced
across the Common at the great yards within which eternal saws were
going to and fro upon eternal blocks of stone--the very same saws and
the very same blocks that he had seen there when last in the island,
so it seemed to him--and then passed through the dwelling into the back
garden.

Like all the gardens in the isle it was surrounded by a wall of
dry-jointed spawls, and at its further extremity it ran out into a
corner, which adjoined the garden of the Caros. He had no sooner reached
this spot than he became aware of a murmuring and sobbing on the other
side of the wall. The voice he recognized in a moment as Avice's, and
she seemed to be confiding her trouble to some young friend of her own
sex.

'Oh, what shall I DO! what SHALL I do!' she was saying bitterly. 'So
bold as it was--so shameless! How could I think of such a thing! He will
never forgive me--never, never like me again! He'll think me a forward
hussy, and yet--and yet I quite forgot how much I had grown. But that
he'll never believe!' The accents were those of one who had for the
first time become conscious of her womanhood, as an unwonted possession
which shamed and frightened her.

'Did he seem angry at it?' inquired the friend.

'O no--not angry! Worse. Cold and haughty. O, he's such a fashionable
person now--not at all an island man. But there's no use in talking of
it. I wish I was dead!'

Pierston retreated as quickly as he could. He grieved at the incident
which had brought such pain to this innocent soul; and yet it was
beginning to be a source of vague pleasure to him. He returned to the
house, and when his father had come back and welcomed him, and they
had shared a meal together, Jocelyn again went out, full of an earnest
desire to soothe his young neighbour's sorrow in a way she little
expected; though, to tell the truth, his affection for her was rather
that of a friend than of a lover, and he felt by no means sure that the
migratory, elusive idealization he called his Love who, ever since
his boyhood, had flitted from human shell to human shell an indefinite
number of times, was going to take up her abode in the body of Avice
Caro.




1. II. THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE

It was difficult to meet her again, even though on this lump of rock the
difficulty lay as a rule rather in avoidance than in meeting. But Avice
had been transformed into a very different kind of young woman by
the self-consciousness engendered of her impulsive greeting, and,
notwithstanding their near neighbourhood, he could not encounter her,
try as he would. No sooner did he appear an inch beyond his father's
door than she was to earth like a fox; she bolted upstairs to her room.

Anxious to soothe her after his unintentional slight he could not
stand these evasions long. The manners of the isle were primitive and
straightforward, even among the well-to-do, and noting her disappearance
one day he followed her into the house and onward to the foot of the
stairs.

'Avice!' he called.

'Yes, Mr. Pierston.'

'Why do you run upstairs like that?'

'Oh--only because I wanted to come up for something.'

'Well, if you've got it, can't you come down again?'

'No, I can't very well.'

'Come, DEAR Avice. That's what you are, you know.'

There was no response.

'Well, if you won't, you won't!' he continued. 'I don't want to bother
you.' And Pierston went away.

He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned flowers under the garden
walls when he heard a voice behind him.

'Mr. Pierston--I wasn't angry with you. When you were gone I
thought--you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than come
and assure you of my friendship still.'

Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him.

'You are a good, dear girl!' said he, and, seizing her hand, set upon
her cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers on
the day of his coming.

'Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come,
now! And then I'll say to you what I have never said to any other woman,
living or dead: "Will you have me as your husband?"'

'Ah!--mother says I am only one of many!'

'You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn't.'

Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did not
give an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the afternoon,
when she walked with him to the southern point of the island called the
Beal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the treacherous cavern
known as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and splashed now as it had
done when they visited it together as children. To steady herself while
looking in he offered her his arm, and she took it, for the first time
as a woman, for the hundredth time as his companion.

They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered longer
if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite poetry
from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the village
commanding the entrance to the island--the village that has now advanced
to be a town.

'Recite!' said he. 'Who'd have thought anybody or anything could recite
down here except the reciter we hear away there--the never speechless
sea.'

'O but we are quite intellectual now. In the winter particularly. But,
Jocelyn--don't come to the recitation, will you? It would spoil my
performance if you were there, and I want to be as good as the rest.'

'I won't if you really wish me not to. But I shall meet you at the door
and bring you home.'

'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happy
now; she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his coming
that she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side of
the isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her place on
the platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was about the
hour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road northward
to the Street of Wells.

He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old that
his feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what he
had said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalled
him in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated and
accomplished women who had attracted him successively would be likely to
rise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused his mind
of the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral part of the
personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short while.


                    *          *          *


To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many
embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline,
or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not
recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact simply.
Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream,
a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye,
a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did
not. She was indescribable.

Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified by
the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of
her ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had
occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next
would be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant access
to all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night he
dreamt that she was 'the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person,
bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art--the
implacable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved the
masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes,
black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or
plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never
been in one place long.

By making this clear to his mind some time before to-day, he had escaped
a good deal of ugly self-reproach. It was simply that she who always
attracted him, and led him whither she would as by a silken thread, had
not remained the occupant of the same fleshly tabernacle in her career
so far. Whether she would ultimately settle down to one he could not
say.

Had he felt that she was becoming manifest in Avice, he would have tried
to believe that this was the terminal spot of her migrations, and have
been content to abide by his words. But did he see the Well-Beloved in
Avice at all? The question was somewhat disturbing.

He had reached the brow of the hill, and descended towards the village,
where in the long straight Roman street he soon found the lighted hall.
The performance was not yet over; and by going round to the side of the
building and standing on a mound he could see the interior as far down
as the platform level. Avice's turn, or second turn, came on almost
immediately. Her pretty embarrassment on facing the audience rather won
him away from his doubts. She was, in truth, what is called a 'nice'
girl; attractive, certainly, but above all things nice--one of the class
with whom the risks of matrimony approximate most nearly to zero. Her
intelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful carriage, ensured
one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one with
more charming and solid qualities than Avice Caro's. This was not a mere
conjecture--he had known her long and thoroughly; her every mood and
temper.

A heavy wagon passing without drowned her small soft voice for him; but
the audience were pleased, and she blushed at their applause. He now
took his station at the door, and when the people had done pouring out
he found her within awaiting him.

They climbed homeward slowly by the Old Road, Pierston dragging himself
up the steep by the wayside hand-rail and pulling Avice after him upon
his arm. At the top they turned and stood still. To the left of them the
sky was streaked like a fan with the lighthouse rays, and under their
front, at periods of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep, hollow
stroke like the single beat of a drum, the intervals being filled with a
long-drawn rattling, as of bones between huge canine jaws. It came from
the vast concave of Deadman's Bay, rising and falling against the pebble
dyke.

The evening and night winds here were, to Pierston's mind, charged with
a something that did not burden them elsewhere. They brought it up from
that sinister Bay to the west, whose movement she and he were hearing
now. It was a presence--an imaginary shape or essence from the human
multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of war, East
Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada--select people, common,
and debased, whose interests and hopes had been as wide asunder as
the poles, but who had rolled each other to oneness on that restless
sea-bed. There could almost be felt the brush of their huge composite
ghost as it ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking for some
good god who would disunite it again.

The twain wandered a long way that night amid these influences--so
far as to the old Hope Churchyard, which lay in a ravine formed by a
landslip ages ago. The church had slipped down with the rest of the
cliff, and had long been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this last
local stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingered
yet, Christianity had established itself precariously at best. In that
solemn spot Pierston kissed her.

The kiss was by no means on Avice's initiative this time. Her former
demonstrativeness seemed to have increased her present reserve.


                    *          *          *


That day was the beginning of a pleasant month passed mainly in each
other's society. He found that she could not only recite poetry at
intellectual gatherings, but play the piano fairly, and sing to her own
accompaniment.

He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been to
get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and individual
life as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an exact copy
of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there was
nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget all
the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs
purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the local
vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in a
house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to draw
London suburban villas from printed copies.

Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl's
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the bone,
but she could not escape the tendency of the age.

The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward to
it sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing.
Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had
prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old
stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as
strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large
measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's
education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered
if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing
manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal,
according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires.




1. III. THE APPOINTMENT

'Well,' said he, 'here we are, arrived at the fag-end of my holiday.
What a pleasant surprise my old home, which I have not thought worth
coming to see for three or four years, had in store for me!'

'You must go to-morrow?' she asked uneasily.

'Yes.'

Something seemed to overweigh them; something more than the natural
sadness of a parting which was not to be long; and he decided that
instead of leaving in the daytime as he had intended, he would defer his
departure till night, and go by the mail-train from Budmouth. This would
give him time to look into his father's quarries, and enable her, if she
chose, to walk with him along the beach as far as to Henry the Eighth's
Castle above the sands, where they could linger and watch the moon rise
over the sea. She said she thought she could come.

So after spending the next day with his father in the quarries Jocelyn
prepared to leave, and at the time appointed set out from the stone
house of his birth in this stone isle to walk to Budmouth-Regis by the
path along the beach, Avice having some time earlier gone down to see
some friends in the Street of Wells, which was halfway towards the spot
of their tryst. The descent soon brought him to the pebble bank, and
leaving behind him the last houses of the isle, and the ruins of the
village destroyed by the November gale of 1824, he struck out along the
narrow thread of land. When he had walked a hundred yards he stopped,
turned aside to the pebble ridge which walled out the sea, and sat down
to wait for her.

Between him and the lights of the ships riding at anchor in the
roadstead two men passed slowly in the direction he intended to pursue.
One of them recognized Jocelyn, and bade him good-night, adding, 'Wish
you joy, sir, of your choice, and hope the wedden will be soon!'

'Thank you, Seaborn. Well--we shall see what Christmas will do towards
bringing it about.'

'My wife opened upon it this mornen: "Please God, I'll up and see that
there wedden," says she, "knowing 'em both from their crawling days."'

The men moved on, and when they were out of Pierston's hearing the one
who had not spoken said to his friend, 'Who was that young kimberlin? He
don't seem one o' we.'

'Oh, he is, though, every inch o' en. He's Mr. Jocelyn Pierston, the
stwone-merchant's only son up at East Quarriers. He's to be married to
a stylish young body; her mother, a widow woman, carries on the same
business as well as she can; but their trade is not a twentieth part of
Pierston's. He's worth thousands and thousands, they say, though 'a do
live on in the same wold way up in the same wold house. This son is doen
great things in London as a' image-carver; and I can mind when, as a
boy, 'a first took to carving soldiers out o' bits o' stwone from the
soft-bed of his father's quarries; and then 'a made a set o' stwonen
chess-men, and so 'a got on. He's quite the gent in London, they tell
me; and the wonder is that 'a cared to come back here and pick up little
Avice Caro--nice maid as she is notwithstanding.... Hullo! there's to be
a change in the weather soon.'

Meanwhile the subject of their remarks waited at the appointed place
till seven o'clock, the hour named between himself and his affianced,
had struck. Almost at the moment he saw a figure coming forward from the
last lamp at the bottom of the hill. But the figure speedily resolved
itself into that of a boy, who, advancing to Jocelyn, inquired if he
were Mr. Pierston, and handed him a note.




1. IV. A LONELY PEDESTRIAN

When the boy had gone Jocelyn retraced his steps to the last lamp, and
read, in Avice's hand:

'MY DEAREST,--I shall be sorry if I grieve you at all in what I am going
to say about our arrangement to meet to-night in the Sandsfoot ruin. But
I have fancied that my seeing you again and again lately is inclining
your father to insist, and you as his heir to feel, that we ought to
carry out Island Custom in our courting--your people being such old
inhabitants in an unbroken line. Truth to say, mother supposes that your
father, for natural reasons, may have hinted to you that we ought. Now,
the thing is contrary to my feelings: it is nearly left off; and I do
not think it good, even where there is property, as in your case, to
justify it, in a measure. I would rather trust in Providence.

'On the whole, therefore, it is best that I should not come--if only for
appearances--and meet you at a time and place suggesting the custom, to
others than ourselves, at least, if known.

'I am sure that this decision will not disturb you much; that you will
understand my modern feelings, and think no worse of me for them. And
dear, if it were to be done, and we were unfortunate in it, we might
both have enough old family feeling to think, like our forefathers, and
possibly your father, that we could not marry honourably; and hence we
might be made unhappy.

'However, you will come again shortly, will you not, dear Jocelyn?--and
then the time will soon draw on when no more good-byes will be
required.--Always and ever yours,

'AVICE.'

Jocelyn, having read the letter, was surprised at the naivete it showed,
and at Avice and her mother's antiquated simplicity in supposing that to
be still a grave and operating principle which was a bygone barbarism
to himself and other absentees from the island. His father, as a
money-maker, might have practical wishes on the matter of descendants
which lent plausibility to the conjecture of Avice and her mother; but
to Jocelyn he had never expressed himself in favour of the ancient ways,
old-fashioned as he was.

Amused therefore at her regard of herself as modern, Jocelyn was
disappointed, and a little vexed, that such an unforeseen reason should
have deprived him of her company. How the old ideas survived under the
new education!

The reader is asked to remember that the date, though recent in the
history of the Isle of Slingers, was more than forty years ago.


                    *          *          *


Finding that the evening seemed louring, yet indisposed to go back and
hire a vehicle, he went on quickly alone. In such an exposed spot the
night wind was gusty, and the sea behind the pebble barrier kicked and
flounced in complex rhythms, which could be translated equally well as
shocks of battle or shouts of thanksgiving.

Presently on the pale road before him he discerned a figure, the figure
of a woman. He remembered that a woman passed him while he was reading
Avice's letter by the last lamp, and now he was overtaking her.

He did hope for a moment that it might be Avice, with a changed mind.
But it was not she, nor anybody like her. It was a taller, squarer form
than that of his betrothed, and although the season was only autumn she
was wrapped in furs, or in thick and heavy clothing of some kind.

He soon advanced abreast of her, and could get glimpses of her profile
against the roadstead lights. It was dignified, arresting, that of a
very Juno. Nothing more classical had he ever seen. She walked at a
swinging pace, yet with such ease and power that there was but little
difference in their rate of speed for several minutes; and during this
time he regarded and conjectured. However, he was about to pass her by
when she suddenly turned and addressed him.

'Mr Pierston, I think, of East Quarriers?'

He assented, and could just discern what a handsome, commanding,
imperious face it was--quite of a piece with the proud tones of her
voice. She was a new type altogether in his experience; and her accent
was not so local as Avice's.

'Can you tell me the time, please?'

He looked at his watch by the aid of a light, and in telling her that it
was a quarter past seven observed, by the momentary gleam of his match,
that her eyes looked a little red and chafed, as if with weeping.

'Mr. Pierston, will you forgive what will appear very strange to you, I
dare say? That is, may I ask you to lend me some money for a day or two?
I have been so foolish as to leave my purse on the dressing-table.'

It did appear strange: and yet there were features in the young lady's
personality which assured him in a moment that she was not an impostor.
He yielded to her request, and put his hand in his pocket. Here it
remained for a moment. How much did she mean by the words 'some money'?
The Junonian quality of her form and manner made him throw himself by
an impulse into harmony with her, and he responded regally. He scented a
romance. He handed her five pounds.

His munificence caused her no apparent surprise. 'It is quite enough,
thank you,' she remarked quietly, as he announced the sum, lest she
should be unable to see it for herself.

While overtaking and conversing with her he had not observed that the
rising wind, which had proceeded from puffing to growling, and from
growling to screeching, with the accustomed suddenness of its changes
here, had at length brought what it promised by these vagaries--rain.
The drops, which had at first hit their left cheeks like the pellets of
a popgun, soon assumed the character of a raking fusillade from the
bank adjoining, one shot of which was sufficiently smart to go through
Jocelyn's sleeve. The tall girl turned, and seemed to be somewhat
concerned at an onset which she had plainly not foreseen before her
starting.

'We must take shelter,' said Jocelyn.

'But where?' said she.

To windward was the long, monotonous bank, too obtusely piled to afford
a screen, over which they could hear the canine crunching of pebbles by
the sea without; on their right stretched the inner bay or roadstead,
the distant riding-lights of the ships now dim and glimmering; behind
them a faint spark here and there in the lower sky showed where the
island rose; before there was nothing definite, and could be nothing,
till they reached a precarious wood bridge, a mile further on, Henry the
Eighth's Castle being a little further still.

But just within the summit of the bank, whither it had apparently been
hauled to be out of the way of the waves, was one of the local boats
called lerrets, bottom upwards. As soon as they saw it the pair ran
up the pebbly slope towards it by a simultaneous impulse. They then
perceived that it had lain there a long time, and were comforted to find
it capable of affording more protection than anybody would have expected
from a distant view. It formed a shelter or store for the fishermen, the
bottom of the lerret being tarred as a roof. By creeping under the bows,
which overhung the bank on props to leeward, they made their way within,
where, upon some thwarts, oars, and other fragmentary woodwork, lay
a mass of dry netting--a whole sein. Upon this they scrambled and sat
down, through inability to stand upright.




1. V. A CHARGE

The rain fell upon the keel of the old lerret like corn thrown in
handfuls by some colossal sower, and darkness set in to its full shade.

They crouched so close to each other that he could feel her furs against
him. Neither had spoken since they left the roadway till she said, with
attempted unconcern: 'This is unfortunate.'

He admitted that it was, and found, after a few further remarks had
passed, that she certainly had been weeping, there being a suppressed
gasp of passionateness in her utterance now and then.

'It is more unfortunate for you, perhaps, than for me,' he said, 'and I
am very sorry that it should be so.'

She replied nothing to this, and he added that it was rather a desolate
place for a woman, alone and afoot. He hoped nothing serious had
happened to drag her out at such an untoward time.

At first she seemed not at all disposed to show any candour on her own
affairs, and he was left to conjecture as to her history and name, and
how she could possibly have known him. But, as the rain gave not the
least sign of cessation, he observed: 'I think we shall have to go
back.'

'Never!' said she, and the firmness with which she closed her lips was
audible in the word.

'Why not?' he inquired.

'There are good reasons.'

'I cannot understand how you should know me, while I have no knowledge
of you.'

'Oh, but you know me--about me, at least.'

'Indeed I don't. How should I? You are a kimberlin.'

'I am not. I am a real islander--or was, rather.... Haven't you heard of
the Best-Bed Stone Company?'

'I should think so! They tried to ruin my father by getting away his
trade--or, at least, the founder of the company did--old Bencomb.'

'He's my father!'

'Indeed. I am sorry I should have spoken so disrespectfully of him, for
I never knew him personally. After making over his large business to the
company, he retired, I believe, to London?'

'Yes. Our house, or rather his, not mine, is at South Kensington. We
have lived there for years. But we have been tenants of Sylvania Castle,
on the island here, this season. We took it for a month or two of the
owner, who is away.'

'Then I have been staying quite near you, Miss Bencomb. My father's is a
comparatively humble residence hard by.'

'But he could afford a much bigger one if he chose.'

'You have heard so? I don't know. He doesn't tell me much of his
affairs.'

'My father,' she burst out suddenly, 'is always scolding me for my
extravagance! And he has been doing it to-day more than ever. He said
I go shopping in town to simply a diabolical extent, and exceed my
allowance!'

'Was that this evening?'

'Yes. And then it reached such a storm of passion between us that
I pretended to retire to my room for the rest of the evening, but I
slipped out; and I am never going back home again.'

'What will you do?'

'I shall go first to my aunt in London; and if she won't have me, I'll
work for a living. I have left my father for ever! What I should have
done if I had not met you I cannot tell--I must have walked all the way
to London, I suppose. Now I shall take the train as soon as I reach the
mainland.'

'If you ever do in this hurricane.'

'I must sit here till it stops.'

And there on the nets they sat. Pierston knew of old Bencomb as his
father's bitterest enemy, who had made a great fortune by swallowing up
the small stone-merchants, but had found Jocelyn's sire a trifle too big
to digest--the latter being, in fact, the chief rival of the Best-Bed
Company to that day. Jocelyn thought it strange that he should be
thrown by fate into a position to play the son of the Montagues to this
daughter of the Capulets.

As they talked there was a mutual instinct to drop their voices, and
on this account the roar of the storm necessitated their drawing quite
close together. Something tender came into their tones as quarter-hour
after quarter-hour went on, and they forgot the lapse of time. It was
quite late when she started up, alarmed at her position.

'Rain or no rain, I can stay no longer,' she said.

'Do come back,' said he, taking her hand. 'I'll return with you. My
train has gone.'

'No; I shall go on, and get a lodging in Budmouth town, if ever I reach
it.'

'It is so late that there will be no house open, except a little place
near the station where you won't care to stay. However, if you are
determined I will show you the way. I cannot leave you. It would be too
awkward for you to go there alone.'

She persisted, and they started through the twanging and spinning storm.
The sea rolled and rose so high on their left, and was so near them on
their right, that it seemed as if they were traversing its bottom like
the Children of Israel. Nothing but the frail bank of pebbles divided
them from the raging gulf without, and at every bang of the tide against
it the ground shook, the shingle clashed, the spray rose vertically, and
was blown over their heads. Quantities of sea-water trickled through
the pebble wall, and ran in rivulets across their path to join the sea
within. The 'Island' was an island still.

They had not realized the force of the elements till now. Pedestrians
had often been blown into the sea hereabout, and drowned, owing to
a sudden breach in the bank; which, however, had something of a
supernatural power in being able to close up and join itself together
again after such disruption, like Satan's form when, cut in two by the
sword of Michael,

                'The ethereal substance closed,
     Not long divisible.'


Her clothing offered more resistance to the wind than his, and she was
consequently in the greater danger. It was impossible to refuse his
proffered aid. First he gave his arm, but the wind tore them apart as
easily as coupled cherries. He steadied her bodily by encircling her
waist with his arm; and she made no objection.


                    *          *          *


Somewhere about this time--it might have been sooner, it might have been
later--he became conscious of a sensation which, in its incipient and
unrecognized form, had lurked within him from some unnoticed moment when
he was sitting close to his new friend under the lerret. Though a
young man, he was too old a hand not to know what this was, and
felt alarmed--even dismayed. It meant a possible migration of the
Well-Beloved. The thing had not, however, taken place; and he went on
thinking how soft and warm the lady was in her fur covering, as he held
her so tightly; the only dry spots in the clothing of either being her
left side and his right, where they excluded the rain by their mutual
pressure.

As soon as they had crossed the ferry-bridge there was a little more
shelter, but he did not relinquish his hold till she requested him. They
passed the ruined castle, and having left the island far behind them
trod mile after mile till they drew near to the outskirts of the
neighbouring watering-place. Into it they plodded without pause,
crossing the harbour bridge about midnight, wet to the skin.

He pitied her, and, while he wondered at it, admired her determination.
The houses facing the bay now sheltered them completely, and they
reached the vicinity of the new railway terminus (which the station was
at this date) without difficulty. As he had said, there was only one
house open hereabout, a little temperance inn, where the people stayed
up for the arrival of the morning mail and passengers from the Channel
boats. Their application for admission led to the withdrawal of a bolt,
and they stood within the gaslight of the passage.

He could see now that though she was such a fine figure, quite as tall
as himself, she was but in the bloom of young womanhood. Her face was
certainly striking, though rather by its imperiousness than its beauty;
and the beating of the wind and rain and spray had inflamed her cheeks
to peony hues.

She persisted in the determination to go on to London by an early
morning train, and he therefore offered advice on lesser matters only.
'In that case,' he said, 'you must go up to your room and send down your
things, that they may be dried by the fire immediately, or they will not
be ready. I will tell the servant to do this, and send you up something
to eat.'

She assented to his proposal, without, however, showing any marks of
gratitude; and when she had gone Pierston despatched her the light
supper promised by the sleepy girl who was 'night porter' at this
establishment. He felt ravenously hungry himself, and set about drying
his clothes as well as he could, and eating at the same time.

At first he was in doubt what to do, but soon decided to stay where
he was till the morrow. By the aid of some temporary wraps, and
some slippers from the cupboard, he was contriving to make himself
comfortable when the maid-servant came downstairs with a damp armful of
woman's raiment.

Pierston withdrew from the fire. The maid-servant knelt down before the
blaze and held up with extended arms one of the habiliments of the Juno
upstairs, from which a cloud of steam began to rise. As she knelt, the
girl nodded forward, recovered herself, and nodded again.

'You are sleepy, my girl,' said Pierston.

'Yes, sir; I have been up a long time. When nobody comes I lie down on
the couch in the other room.'

'Then I'll relieve you of that; go and lie down in the other room, just
as if we were not here. I'll dry the clothing and put the articles here
in a heap, which you can take up to the young lady in the morning.'

The 'night porter' thanked him and left the room, and he soon heard her
snoring from the adjoining apartment. Then Jocelyn opened proceedings,
overhauling the robes and extending them one by one. As the steam went
up he fell into a reverie. He again became conscious of the change
which had been initiated during the walk. The Well-Beloved was moving
house--had gone over to the wearer of this attire.

In the course of ten minutes he adored her.

And how about little Avice Caro? He did not think of her as before.

He was not sure that he had ever seen the real Beloved in that friend of
his youth, solicitous as he was for her welfare. But, loving her or not,
he perceived that the spirit, emanation, idealism, which called itself
his Love was flitting stealthily from some remoter figure to the near
one in the chamber overhead.

Avice had not kept her engagement to meet him in the lonely ruin,
fearing her own imaginings. But he, in fact, more than she, had been
educated out of the island innocence that had upheld old manners; and
this was the strange consequence of Avice's misapprehension.




1. VI. ON THE BRINK

Miss Bencomb was leaving the hotel for the railway, which was quite near
at hand, and had only recently been opened, as if on purpose for this
event. At Jocelyn's suggestion she wrote a message to inform her father
that she had gone to her aunt's, with a view to allaying anxiety and
deterring pursuit. They walked together to the platform and bade each
other good-bye; each obtained a ticket independently, and Jocelyn got
his luggage from the cloak-room.

On the platform they encountered each other again, and there was a light
in their glances at each other which said, as by a flash-telegraph: 'We
are bound for the same town, why not enter the same compartment?'

They did.

She took a corner seat, with her back to the engine; he sat opposite.
The guard looked in, thought they were lovers, and did not show other
travellers into that compartment. They talked on strictly ordinary
matters; what she thought he did not know, but at every stopping station
he dreaded intrusion. Before they were halfway to London the event
he had just begun to realize was a patent fact. The Beloved was again
embodied; she filled every fibre and curve of this woman's form.

Drawing near the great London station was like drawing near Doomsday.
How should he leave her in the turmoil of a crowded city street? She
seemed quite unprepared for the rattle of the scene. He asked her where
her aunt lived.

'Bayswater,' said Miss Bencomb.

He called a cab, and proposed that she should share it till they arrived
at her aunt's, whose residence lay not much out of the way to his own.
Try as he would he could not ascertain if she understood his feelings,
but she assented to his offer and entered the vehicle.

'We are old friends,' he said, as they drove onward.

'Indeed, we are,' she answered, without smiling.

'But hereditarily we are mortal enemies, dear Juliet.'

'Yes--What did you say?'

'I said Juliet.'

She laughed in a half-proud way, and murmured: 'Your father is my
father's enemy, and my father is mine. Yes, it is so.' And then their
eyes caught each other's glance. 'My queenly darling!' he burst out;
'instead of going to your aunt's, will you come and marry me?'

A flush covered her over, which seemed akin to a flush of rage. It was
not exactly that, but she was excited. She did not answer, and he feared
he had mortally offended her dignity. Perhaps she had only made use of
him as a convenient aid to her intentions. However, he went on-- 'Your
father would not be able to reclaim you then! After all, this is not
so precipitate as it seems. You know all about me, my history, my
prospects. I know all about you. Our families have been neighbours
on that isle for hundreds of years, though you are now such a London
product.'

'Will you ever be a Royal Academician?' she asked musingly, her
excitement having calmed down.

'I hope to be--I WILL be, if you will be my wife.'

His companion looked at him long.

'Think what a short way out of your difficulty this would be,' he
continued. 'No bother about aunts, no fetching home by an angry father.'

It seemed to decide her. She yielded to his embrace.

'How long will it take to marry?' Miss Bencomb asked by-and-by, with
obvious self-repression.

'We could do it to-morrow. I could get to Doctors' Commons by noon
to-day, and the licence would be ready by to-morrow morning.'

'I won't go to my aunt's, I will be an independent woman! I have been
reprimanded as if I were a child of six. I'll be your wife if it is as
easy as you say.'

They stopped the cab while they held a consultation. Pierston had rooms
and a studio in the neighbourhood of Campden Hill; but it would be
hardly desirable to take her thither till they were married. They
decided to go to an hotel.

Changing their direction, therefore, they went back to the Strand, and
soon ensconced themselves in one of the venerable old taverns of Covent
Garden, a precinct which in those days was frequented by West-country
people. Jocelyn then left her and proceeded on his errand eastward.

It was about three o'clock when, having arranged all preliminaries
necessitated by this sudden change of front, he began strolling slowly
back; he felt bewildered, and to walk was a relief. Gazing occasionally
into this shop window and that, he called a hansom as by an inspiration,
and directed the driver to 'Mellstock Gardens.' Arrived here, he rang
the bell of a studio, and in a minute or two it was answered by a young
man in shirt-sleeves, about his own age, with a great smeared palette on
his left thumb.

'O, you, Pierston! I thought you were in the country. Come in. I'm
awfully glad of this. I am here in town finishing off a painting for an
American, who wants to take it back with him.'

Pierston followed his friend into the painting-room, where a pretty
young woman was sitting sewing. At a signal from the painter she
disappeared without speaking.

'I can see from your face you have something to say; so we'll have it
all to ourselves. You are in some trouble? What'll you drink?'

'Oh! it doesn't matter what, so that it is alcohol in some shape or
form.... Now, Somers, you must just listen to me, for I HAVE something
to tell.'

Pierston had sat down in an arm-chair, and Somers had resumed his
painting. When a servant had brought in brandy to soothe Pierston's
nerves, and soda to take off the injurious effects of the brandy, and
milk to take off the depleting effects of the soda, Jocelyn began his
narrative, addressing it rather to Somers's Gothic chimneypiece, and
Somers's Gothic clock, and Somers's Gothic rugs, than to Somers himself,
who stood at his picture a little behind his friend.

'Before I tell you what has happened to me,' Pierston said, 'I want to
let you know the manner of man I am.'

'Lord--I know already.'

'No, you don't. It is a sort of thing one doesn't like to talk of. I lie
awake at night thinking about it.'

'No!' said Somers, with more sympathy, seeing that his friend was really
troubled.

'I am under a curious curse, or influence. I am posed, puzzled
and perplexed by the legerdemain of a creature--a deity rather; by
Aphrodite, as a poet would put it, as I should put it myself in marble.
... But I forget--this is not to be a deprecatory wail, but a defence--a
sort of Apologia pro vita mea.'

'That's better. Fire away!'




1. VII. HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS

'You, Somers, are not, I know, one of those who continue to indulge
in the world-wide, fond superstition that the Beloved One of any man
always, or even usually, cares to remain in one corporeal nook or shell
for any great length of time, however much he may wish her to do so. If
I am wrong, and you do still hold to that ancient error--well, my story
will seem rather queer.'

'Suppose you say the Beloved of some men, not of any man.'

'All right--I'll say one man, this man only, if you are so particular.
We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhaps
that accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man, then, has had many
incarnations--too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment,
has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in
awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have
been concerned, a corpse, worse luck! Now, there is no spiritualistic
nonsense in this--it is simple fact, put in the plain form that the
conventional public are afraid of. So much for the principle.'

'Good. Go on.'

'Well; the first embodiment of her occurred, so nearly as I can
recollect, when I was about the age of nine. Her vehicle was a little
blue-eyed girl of eight or so, one of a family of eleven, with flaxen
hair about her shoulders, which attempted to curl, but ignominiously
failed, hanging like chimney-crooks only. This defect used rather to
trouble me; and was, I believe, one of the main reasons of my Beloved's
departure from that tenement. I cannot remember with any exactness
when the departure occurred. I know it was after I had kissed my
little friend in a garden-seat on a hot noontide, under a blue gingham
umbrella, which we had opened over us as we sat, that passers through
East Quarriers might not observe our marks of affection, forgetting that
our screen must attract more attention than our persons.

'When the whole dream came to an end through her father leaving the
island, I thought my Well-Beloved had gone for ever (being then in the
unpractised condition of Adam at sight of the first sunset). But she had
not. Laura had gone for ever, but not my Beloved.

'For some months after I had done crying for the flaxen-haired edition
of her, my Love did not reappear. Then she came suddenly, unexpectedly,
in a situation I should never have predicted. I was standing on the
kerbstone of the pavement in Budmouth-Regis, outside the Preparatory
School, looking across towards the sea, when a middle-aged gentleman on
horseback, and beside him a young lady, also mounted, passed down the
street. The girl turned her head, and--possibly because I was gaping
at her in awkward admiration, or smiling myself--smiled at me. Having
ridden a few paces, she looked round again and smiled.

'It was enough, more than enough, to set me on fire. I understood in a
moment the information conveyed to me by my emotion--the Well-Beloved
had reappeared. This second form in which it had pleased her to take up
her abode was quite a grown young woman's, darker in complexion than the
first. Her hair, also worn in a knot, was of an ordinary brown, and so,
I think, were her eyes, but the niceties of her features were not to be
gathered so cursorily. However, there sat my coveted one, re-embodied;
and, bidding my schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could do so
without suspicion, I hurried along the Esplanade in the direction she
and her father had ridden. But they had put their horses to a canter,
and I could not see which way they had gone. In the greatest misery
I turned down a side street, but was soon elevated to a state of
excitement by seeing the same pair galloping towards me. Flushing up to
my hair, I stopped and heroically faced her as she passed. She smiled
again, but, alas! upon my Love's cheek there was no blush of passion for
me.'

Pierston paused, and drank from his glass, as he lived for a brief
moment in the scene he had conjured up. Somers reserved his comments,
and Jocelyn continued--

'That afternoon I idled about the streets, looking for her in vain. When
I next saw one of the boys who had been with me at her first passing
I stealthily reminded him of the incident, and asked if he knew the
riders.

'"O yes," he said. "That was Colonel Targe and his daughter Elsie."

'"How old do you think she is?" said I, a sense of disparity in our ages
disturbing my mind.

'"O--nineteen, I think they say. She's going to be married the day after
to-morrow to Captain Popp, of the 501st, and they are ordered off to
India at once."

'The grief which I experienced at this intelligence was such that at
dusk I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an end
to myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been found
clinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout,
leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingency
deterred me. I should state that the marriage of my Beloved concerned me
little; it was her departure that broke my heart. I never saw her again.

'Though I had already learnt that the absence of the corporeal matter
did not involve the absence of the informing spirit, I could scarce
bring myself to believe that in this case it was possible for her to
return to my view without the form she had last inhabited.

'But she did.

'It was not, however, till after a good space of time, during which I
passed through that bearish age in boys, their early teens, when girls
are their especial contempt. I was about seventeen, and was sitting
one evening over a cup of tea in a confectioner's at the very same
watering-place, when opposite me a lady took her seat with a little
girl. We looked at each other awhile, the child made advances, till I
said: "She's a good little thing."

'The lady assented, and made a further remark.

'"She has the soft fine eyes of her mother," said I.

'"Do you think her eyes are good?" asks the lady, as if she had not
heard what she had heard most--the last three words of my opinion.

'"Yes--for copies," said I, regarding her.

'After this we got on very well. She informed me that her husband had
gone out in a yacht, and I said it was a pity he didn't take her with
him for the airing. She gradually disclosed herself in the character of
a deserted young wife, and later on I met her in the street without the
child. She was going to the landing-stage to meet her husband, so she
told me; but she did not know the way.

'I offered to show her, and did so. I will not go into particulars, but
I afterwards saw her several times, and soon discovered that the Beloved
(as to whose whereabouts I had been at fault so long) lurked here.
Though why she had chosen this tantalizing situation of an inaccessible
matron's form when so many others offered, it was beyond me to discover.
The whole affair ended innocently enough, when the lady left the town
with her husband and child: she seemed to regard our acquaintance as a
flirtation; yet it was anything but a flirtation for me!


                    *          *          *


'Why should I tell the rest of the tantalizing tale! After this, the
Well-Beloved put herself in evidence with greater and greater frequency,
and it would be impossible for me to give you details of her various
incarnations. She came nine times in the course of the two or three
ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a
pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither
light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I
think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no
great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that
I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her,
corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. So
it went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled.
She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, a
young girl I had known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have decided
that, after all, she did not enter the form of Avice Caro, because I
retain so great a respect for her still.'

Pierston here gave in brief the history of his revived comradeship with
Avice, the verge of the engagement to which they had reached, and its
unexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman into
whom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes--by name
Miss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marry
offhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry or
not--her or anybody else--in such circumstances.

'Certainly not,' said Somers. 'Though, if anybody, little Avice. But not
even her. You are like other men, only rather worse. Essentially, all
men are fickle, like you; but not with such perceptiveness.'

'Surely fickle is not the word? Fickleness means getting weary of a
thing while the thing remains the same. But I have always been faithful
to the elusive creature whom I have never been able to get a firm hold
of, unless I have done so now. And let me tell you that her flitting
from each to each individual has been anything but a pleasure for
me--certainly not a wanton game of my instigation. To see the creature
who has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the
divinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to
ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure
for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my
sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of
some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it
to fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have looked
in a face for her I used to see there, and could see her there no more.'

'You ought not to marry,' repeated Somers.

'Perhaps I oughtn't to! Though poor Marcia will be compromised, I'm
afraid, if I don't.... Was I not right in saying I am accursed in this
thing? Fortunately nobody but myself has suffered on account of it
till now. Knowing what to expect, I have seldom ventured on a close
acquaintance with any woman, in fear of prematurely driving away the
dear one in her; who, however, has in time gone off just the same.'

Pierston soon after took his leave. A friend's advice on such a subject
weighs little. He quickly returned to Miss Bencomb.

She was different now. Anxiety had visibly brought her down a notch
or two, undone a few degrees of that haughty curl which her lip could
occasionally assume. 'How long you have been away!' she said with a show
of impatience.

'Never mind, darling. It is all arranged,' said he. 'We shall be able to
marry in a few days.'

'Not to-morrow?'

'We can't to-morrow. We have not been here quite long enough.'

'But how did the people at Doctors' Commons know that?'

'Well--I forgot that residence, real or assumed, was necessary, and
unfortunately admitted that we had only just arrived.'

'O how stupid! But it can't be helped now. I think, dear, I should have
known better, however!'




1. VIII. 'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING'

They lived on at the hotel some days longer, eyed curiously by the
chambermaids, and burst in upon every now and then by the waiters as if
accidentally. When they were walking together, mostly in back streets
for fear of being recognized, Marcia was often silent, and her imperious
face looked gloomy.

'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.




1. 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.

'It is odd,' he said to himself, 'that this experience of mine, or
idiosyncrasy, or whatever it is, which would be sheer waste of time
for other men, creates sober business for me.' For all these dreams he
translated into plaster, and found that by them he was hitting a public
taste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised. He was,
in short, in danger of drifting away from a solid artistic reputation to
a popularity which might possibly be as brief as it would be brilliant
and exciting.

'You will be caught some day, my friend,' Somers would occasionally
observe to him. 'I don't mean to say entangled in anything
discreditable, for I admit that you are in practice as ideal as
in theory. I mean the process will be reversed. Some woman, whose
Well-Beloved flits about as yours does now, will catch your eye, and
you'll stick to her like a limpet, while she follows her Phantom and
leaves you to ache as you will.'

'You may be right; but I think you are wrong,' said Pierston. 'As
flesh she dies daily, like the Apostle's corporeal self; because when I
grapple with the reality she's no longer in it, so that I cannot stick
to one incarnation if I would.'

'Wait till you are older,' said Somers.




PART SECOND -- A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY


     'Since Love will needs that I shall love,
      Of very force I must agree:
      And since no chance may it remove
      In wealth and in adversity
      I shall alway myself apply
      To serve and suffer patiently.'
                                 --Sir T. Wyatt.




2. I. THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT

In the course of these long years Pierston's artistic emotions
were abruptly suspended by the news of his father's sudden death at
Sandbourne, whither the stone-merchant had gone for a change of air by
the advice of his physician.

Mr. Pierston, senior, it must be admitted, had been something miserly
in his home life, as Marcia had so rashly reminded his son. But he had
never stinted Jocelyn. He had been rather a hard taskmaster, though as a
paymaster trustworthy; a ready-money man, just and ungenerous. To every
one's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of
large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on--much larger
than Jocelyn had ever regarded as possible. While the son had been
modelling and chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial shapes, the
father had been persistently chiselling for half a century at the
crude original matter of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock in the
Channel; and by the aid of his cranes and pulleys, his trolleys and
his boats, had sent off his spoil to all parts of Great Britain.
When Jocelyn had wound up everything and disposed of the business, as
recommended by his father's will, he found himself enabled to add about
eighty thousand pounds to the twelve thousand which he already possessed
from professional and other sources.

After arranging for the sale of some freehold properties in the island
other than quarries--for he did not intend to reside there--he returned
to town. He often wondered what had become of Marcia. He had promised
never to trouble her; nor for a whole twenty years had he done so;
though he had often sighed for her as a friend of sterling common sense
in practical difficulties.

Her parents were, he believed, dead; and she, he knew, had never gone
back to the isle. Possibly she had formed some new tie abroad, and had
made it next to impossible to discover her by her old name.

A reposeful time ensued. Almost his first entry into society after his
father's death occurred one evening, when, for want of knowing what
better to do, he responded to an invitation sent by one of the few
ladies of rank whom he numbered among his friends, and set out in a
cab for the square wherein she lived during three or four months of the
year.

The hansom turned the corner, and he obtained a raking view of the
houses along the north side, of which hers was one, with the familiar
linkman at the door. There were Chinese lanterns, too, on the balcony.
He perceived in a moment that the customary 'small and early' reception
had resolved itself on this occasion into something very like great and
late. He remembered that there had just been a political crisis,
which accounted for the enlargement of the Countess of Channelcliffe's
assembly; for hers was one of the neutral or non-political houses at
which party politics are more freely agitated than at the professedly
party gatherings.

There was such a string of carriages that Pierston did not wait to take
his turn at the door, but unobtrusively alighted some yards off and
walked forward. He had to pause a moment behind the wall of spectators
which barred his way, and as he paused some ladies in white cloaks
crossed from their carriages to the door on the carpet laid for the
purpose. He had not seen their faces, nothing of them but vague forms,
and yet he was suddenly seized with a presentiment. Its gist was that
he might be going to re-encounter the Well-Beloved that night: after her
recent long hiding she meant to reappear and intoxicate him. That liquid
sparkle of her eye, that lingual music, that turn of the head, how well
he knew it all, despite the many superficial changes, and how instantly
he would recognize it under whatever complexion, contour, accent,
height, or carriage that it might choose to masquerade!

Pierston's other conjecture, that the night was to be a lively political
one, received confirmation as soon as he reached the hall, where a
simmer of excitement was perceptible as surplus or overflow from above
down the staircase--a feature which he had always noticed to be present
when any climax or sensation had been reached in the world of party and
faction.

'And where have you been keeping yourself so long, young man?' said his
hostess archly, when he had shaken hands with her. (Pierston was always
regarded as a young man, though he was now about forty.) 'O yes, of
course, I remember,' she added, looking serious in a moment at thought
of his loss. The Countess was a woman with a good-natured manner
verging on that oft-claimed feminine quality, humour, and was quickly
sympathetic.

She then began to tell him of a scandal in the political side to which
she nominally belonged, one that had come out of the present crisis;
and that, as for herself, she had sworn to abjure politics for ever on
account of it, so that he was to regard her forthwith as a more
neutral householder than ever. By this time some more people had surged
upstairs, and Pierston prepared to move on.

'You are looking for somebody--I can see that,' said she.

'Yes--a lady,' said Pierston.

'Tell me her name, and I'll try to think if she's here.'

'I cannot; I don't know it,' he said.

'Indeed! What is she like?'

'I cannot describe her, not even her complexion or dress.'

Lady Channelcliffe looked a pout, as if she thought he were teasing
her, and he moved on in the current. The fact was that, for a moment,
Pierston fancied he had made the sensational discovery that the One
he was in search of lurked in the person of the very hostess he had
conversed with, who was charming always, and particularly charming
to-night; he was just feeling an incipient consternation at the
possibility of such a jade's trick in his Beloved, who had once before
chosen to embody herself as a married woman, though, happily, at
that time with no serious results. However, he felt that he had been
mistaken, and that the fancy had been solely owing to the highly charged
electric condition in which he had arrived by reason of his recent
isolation.

The whole set of rooms formed one great utterance of the opinions of the
hour. The gods of party were present with their embattled seraphim, but
the brilliancy of manner and form in the handling of public questions
was only less conspicuous than the paucity of original ideas. No
principles of wise government had place in any mind, a blunt and jolly
personalism as to the Ins and Outs animating all. But Jocelyn's interest
did not run in this stream: he was like a stone in a purling brook,
waiting for some peculiar floating object to be brought towards him and
to stick upon his mental surface.

Thus looking for the next new version of the fair figure, he did not
consider at the moment, though he had done so at other times, that this
presentiment of meeting her was, of all presentiments, just the sort of
one to work out its own fulfilment.

He looked for her in the knot of persons gathered round a past Prime
Minister who was standing in the middle of the largest room discoursing
in the genial, almost jovial, manner natural to him at these times. The
two or three ladies forming his audience had been joined by another
in black and white, and it was on her that Pierston's attention was
directed, as well as the great statesman's, whose first sheer gaze
at her, expressing 'Who are you?' almost audibly, changed into an
interested, listening look as the few words she spoke were uttered--for
the Minister differed from many of his standing in being extremely
careful not to interrupt a timid speaker, giving way in an instant if
anybody else began with him. Nobody knew better than himself that all
may learn, and his manner was that of an unconceited man who could catch
an idea readily, even if he could not undertake to create one.

The lady told her little story--whatever it was Jocelyn could not hear
it--the statesman laughed: 'Haugh-haugh-haugh!'

The lady blushed. Jocelyn, wrought up to a high tension by the aforesaid
presentiment that his Shelleyan 'One-shape-of-many-names' was about to
reappear, paid little heed to the others, watching for a full view of
the lady who had won his attention.

That lady remained for the present partially screened by her neighbours.
A diversion was caused by Lady Channelcliffe bringing up somebody to
present to the ex-Minister; the ladies got mixed, and Jocelyn lost sight
of the one whom he was beginning to suspect as the stealthily returned
absentee.

He looked for her in a kindly young lady of the house, his hostess's
relation, who appeared to more advantage that night than she had ever
done before--in a sky-blue dress, which had nothing between it and the
fair skin of her neck, lending her an unusually soft and sylph-like
aspect. She saw him, and they converged. Her look of 'What do you think
of me NOW?' was suggested, he knew, by the thought that the last time
they met she had appeared under the disadvantage of mourning clothes, on
a wet day in a country-house, where everybody was cross.

'I have some new photographs, and I want you to tell me whether they are
good,' she said. 'Mind you are to tell me truly, and no favour.'

She produced the pictures from an adjoining drawer, and they sat down
together upon an ottoman for the purpose of examination. The portraits,
taken by the last fashionable photographer, were very good, and he
told her so; but as he spoke and compared them his mind was fixed on
something else than the mere judgment. He wondered whether the elusive
one were indeed in the frame of this girl.

He looked up at her. To his surprise, her mind, too, was on other
things bent than on the pictures. Her eyes were glancing away to distant
people, she was apparently considering the effect she was producing upon
them by this cosy tete-a-tete with Pierston, and upon one in particular,
a man of thirty, of military appearance, whom Pierston did not know.
Quite convinced now that no phantom belonging to him was contained in
the outlines of the present young lady, he could coolly survey her as he
responded. They were both doing the same thing--each was pretending to
be deeply interested in what the other was talking about, the attention
of the two alike flitting away to other corners of the room even when
the very point of their discourse was pending.

No, he had not seen Her yet. He was not going to see her, apparently,
to-night; she was scared away by the twanging political atmosphere.
But he still moved on searchingly, hardly heeding certain spectral imps
other than Aphroditean, who always haunted these places, and jeeringly
pointed out that under the white hair of this or that ribanded old
man, with a forehead grown wrinkled over treaties which had swayed the
fortunes of Europe, with a voice which had numbered sovereigns among its
respectful listeners, might be a heart that would go inside a nut-shell;
that beneath this or that white rope of pearl and pink bosom, might lie
the half-lung which had, by hook or by crook, to sustain its possessor
above-ground till the wedding-day.

At that moment he encountered his amiable host, and almost
simultaneously caught sight of the lady who had at first attracted him
and then had disappeared. Their eyes met, far off as they were from each
other. Pierston laughed inwardly: it was only in ticklish excitement as
to whether this was to prove a true trouvaille, and with no instinct
to mirth; for when under the eyes of his Jill-o'-the-Wisp he was more
inclined to palpitate like a sheep in a fair.

However, for the minute he had to converse with his host, Lord
Channelcliffe, and almost the first thing that friend said to him was:
'Who is that pretty woman in the black dress with the white fluff about
it and the pearl necklace?'

'I don't know,' said Jocelyn, with incipient jealousy: 'I was just going
to ask the same thing.'

'O, we shall find out presently, I suppose. I daresay my wife knows.'
They had parted, when a hand came upon his shoulder. Lord Channelcliffe
had turned back for an instant: 'I find she is the granddaughter of my
father's old friend, the last Lord Hengistbury. Her name is Mrs.--Mrs.
Pine-Avon; she lost her husband two or three years ago, very shortly
after their marriage.'

Lord Channelcliffe became absorbed into some adjoining dignitary of the
Church, and Pierston was left to pursue his quest alone. A young friend
of his--the Lady Mabella Buttermead, who appeared in a cloud of muslin
and was going on to a ball--had been brought against him by the tide.
A warm-hearted, emotional girl was Lady Mabella, who laughed at the
humorousness of being alive. She asked him whither he was bent, and he
told her.

'O yes, I know her very well!' said Lady Mabella eagerly. 'She told
me one day that she particularly wished to meet you. Poor thing--so
sad--she lost her husband. Well, it was a long time ago now, certainly.
Women ought not to marry and lay themselves open to such catastrophes,
ought they, Mr. Pierston? _I_ never shall. I am determined never to run
such a risk! Now, do you think I shall?'

'Marry? O no; never,' said Pierston drily.

'That's very satisfying.' But Mabella was scarcely comfortable under his
answer, even though jestingly returned, and she added: 'But sometimes I
think I may, just for the fun of it. Now we'll steer across to her, and
catch her, and I'll introduce you. But we shall never get to her at this
rate!'

'Never, unless we adopt "the ugly rush," like the citizens who follow
the Lord Mayor's Show.'

They talked, and inched towards the desired one, who, as she discoursed
with a neighbour, seemed to be of those--

     'Female forms, whose gestures beam with mind,'

seen by the poet in his Vision of the Golden City of Islam.

Their progress was continually checked. Pierston was as he had sometimes
seemed to be in a dream, unable to advance towards the object of pursuit
unless he could have gathered up his feet into the air. After ten
minutes given to a preoccupied regard of shoulder-blades, back hair,
glittering headgear, neck-napes, moles, hairpins, pearl-powder, pimples,
minerals cut into facets of many-coloured rays, necklace-clasps, fans,
stays, the seven styles of elbow and arm, the thirteen varieties of
ear; and by using the toes of his dress-boots as coulters with which
he ploughed his way and that of Lady Mabella in the direction they were
aiming at, he drew near to Mrs. Pine-Avon, who was drinking a cup of tea
in the back drawing-room.

'My dear Nichola, we thought we should never get to you, because it is
worse to-night, owing to these dreadful politics! But we've done it.'
And she proceeded to tell her friend of Pierston's existence hard by.

It seemed that the widow really did wish to know him, and that
Lady Mabella Buttermead had not indulged in one of the too frequent
inventions in that kind. When the youngest of the trio had made the pair
acquainted with each other she left them to talk to a younger man than
the sculptor.

Mrs. Pine-Avon's black velvets and silks, with their white
accompaniments, finely set off the exceeding fairness of her neck and
shoulders, which, though unwhitened artificially, were without a speck
or blemish of the least degree. The gentle, thoughtful creature she had
looked from a distance she now proved herself to be; she held also sound
rather than current opinions on the plastic arts, and was the first
intellectual woman he had seen there that night, except one or two as
aforesaid.

They soon became well acquainted, and at a pause in their conversation
noticed the fresh excitement caused by the arrival of some late comers
with more news. The latter had been brought by a rippling, bright-eyed
lady in black, who made the men listen to her, whether they would or no.

'I am glad I am an outsider,' said Jocelyn's acquaintance, now seated on
a sofa beside which he was standing. 'I wouldn't be like my cousin, over
there, for the world. She thinks her husband will be turned out at the
next election, and she's quite wild.'

'Yes; it is mostly the women who are the gamesters; the men only the
cards. The pity is that politics are looked on as being a game for
politicians, just as cricket is a game for cricketers; not as the
serious duties of political trustees.'

'How few of us ever think or feel that "the nation of every country
dwells in the cottage," as somebody says!'

'Yes. Though I wonder to hear you quote that.'

'O--I am of no party, though my relations are. There can be only
one best course at all times, and the wisdom of the nation should be
directed to finding it, instead of zigzagging in two courses, according
to the will of the party which happens to have the upper hand.'

Having started thus, they found no difficulty in agreeing on many
points. When Pierston went downstairs from that assembly at a quarter to
one, and passed under the steaming nostrils of an ambassador's horses to
a hansom which waited for him against the railing of the square, he had
an impression that the Beloved had re-emerged from the shadows, without
any hint or initiative from him--to whom, indeed, such re-emergence was
an unquestionably awkward thing.

In this he was aware, however, that though it might be now, as
heretofore, the Loved who danced before him, it was the Goddess behind
her who pulled the string of that Jumping Jill. He had lately been
trying his artist hand again on the Dea's form in every conceivable
phase and mood. He had become a one-part man--a presenter of her only.
But his efforts had resulted in failures. In her implacable vanity she
might be punishing him anew for presenting her so deplorably.




2. II. SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES

He could not forget Mrs. Pine-Avon's eyes, though he remembered nothing
of her other facial details. They were round, inquiring, luminous. How
that chestnut hair of hers had shone: it required no tiara to set
it off, like that of the dowager he had seen there, who had put ten
thousand pounds upon her head to make herself look worse than she would
have appeared with the ninepenny muslin cap of a servant woman.

Now the question was, ought he to see her again? He had his doubts. But,
unfortunately for discretion, just when he was coming out of the
rooms he had encountered an old lady of seventy, his friend Mrs.
Brightwalton--the Honourable Mrs. Brightwalton--and she had hastily
asked him to dinner for the day after the morrow, stating in the honest
way he knew so well that she had heard he was out of town, or she would
have asked him two or three weeks ago. Now, of all social things that
Pierston liked it was to be asked to dinner off-hand, as a stopgap in
place of some bishop, earl, or Under-Secretary who couldn't come, and
when the invitation was supplemented by the tidings that the lady
who had so impressed him was to be one of the guests, he had promised
instantly.

At the dinner, he took down Mrs. Pine-Avon upon his arm and talked to
nobody else during the meal. Afterwards they kept apart awhile in the
drawing-room for form's sake; but eventually gravitated together again,
and finished the evening in each other's company. When, shortly after
eleven, he came away, he felt almost certain that within those luminous
grey eyes the One of his eternal fidelity had verily taken lodgings--and
for a long lease. But this was not all. At parting, he had, almost
involuntarily, given her hand a pressure of a peculiar and indescribable
kind; a little response from her, like a mere pulsation, of the
same sort, told him that the impression she had made upon him was
reciprocated. She was, in a word, willing to go on.

But was he able?

There had not been much harm in the flirtation thus far; but did she
know his history, the curse upon his nature?--that he was the Wandering
Jew of the love-world, how restlessly ideal his fancies were, how the
artist in him had consumed the wooer, how he was in constant dread lest
he should wrong some woman twice as good as himself by seeming to mean
what he fain would mean but could not, how useless he was likely to be
for practical steps towards householding, though he was all the while
pining for domestic life. He was now over forty, she was probably
thirty; and he dared not make unmeaning love with the careless
selfishness of a younger man. It was unfair to go further without
telling her, even though, hitherto, such explicitness had not been
absolutely demanded.

He determined to call immediately on the New Incarnation.

She lived not far from the long, fashionable Hamptonshire Square, and
he went thither with expectations of having a highly emotional time, at
least. But somehow the very bell-pull seemed cold, although she had so
earnestly asked him to come.

As the house spoke, so spoke the occupant, much to the astonishment of
the sculptor. The doors he passed through seemed as if they had not been
opened for a month; and entering the large drawing-room, he beheld, in
an arm-chair, in the far distance, a lady whom he journeyed across
the carpet to reach, and ultimately did reach. To be sure it was Mrs.
Nichola Pine-Avon, but frosted over indescribably. Raising her eyes in a
slightly inquiring manner from the book she was reading, she leant back
in the chair, as if soaking herself in luxurious sensations which
had nothing to do with him, and replied to his greeting with a few
commonplace words.

The unfortunate Jocelyn, though recuperative to a degree, was at first
terribly upset by this reception. He had distinctly begun to love
Nichola, and he felt sick and almost resentful. But happily his
affection was incipient as yet, and a sudden sense of the ridiculous
in his own position carried him to the verge of risibility during the
scene. She signified a chair, and began the critical study of some rings
she wore.

They talked over the day's news, and then an organ began to grind
outside. The tune was a rollicking air he had heard at some music-hall;
and, by way of a diversion, he asked her if she knew the composition.

'No, I don't!' she replied.

'Now, I'll tell you all about it,' said he gravely. 'It is based on a
sound old melody called "The Jilt's Hornpipe." Just as they turn Madeira
into port in the space of a single night, so this old air has been
taken and doctored, and twisted about, and brought out as a new popular
ditty.'

'Indeed!'

'If you are in the habit of going much to the music-halls or the
burlesque theatres--'

'Yes?'

'You would find this is often done, with excellent effect.'

She thawed a little, and then they went on to talk about her house,
which had been newly painted, and decorated with greenish-blue satin up
to the height of a person's head--an arrangement that somewhat improved
her slightly faded, though still pretty, face, and was helped by the
awnings over the windows.

'Yes; I have had my house some years,' she observed complacently, 'and I
like it better every year.'

'Don't you feel lonely in it sometimes?'

'O never!'

However, before he rose she grew friendly to some degree, and when he
left, just after the arrival of three opportune young ladies she seemed
regretful. She asked him to come again; and he thought he would tell
the truth. 'No: I shall not care to come again,' he answered, in a tone
inaudible to the young ladies.

She followed him to the door. 'What an uncivil thing to say!' she
murmured in surprise.

'It is rather uncivil. Good-bye,' said Pierston.

As a punishment she did not ring the bell, but left him to find his way
out as he could. 'Now what the devil this means I cannot tell,' he said
to himself, reflecting stock-still for a moment on the stairs. And yet
the meaning was staring him in the face.

Meanwhile one of the three young ladies had said, 'What interesting
man was that, with his lovely head of hair? I saw him at Lady
Channelcliffe's the other night.'

'Jocelyn Pierston.'

'O, Nichola, that IS too bad! To let him go in that shabby way, when I
would have given anything to know him! I have wanted to know him ever
since I found out how much his experiences had dictated his statuary,
and I discovered them by seeing in a Jersey paper of the marriage of
a person supposed to be his wife, who ran off with him many years ago,
don't you know, and then wouldn't marry him, in obedience to some novel
social principles she had invented for herself.'

'O! didn't he marry her?' said Mrs. Pine-Avon, with a start. 'Why, I
heard only yesterday that he did, though they have lived apart ever
since.'

'Quite a mistake,' said the young lady. 'How I wish I could run after
him!'

But Jocelyn was receding from the pretty widow's house with long
strides. He went out very little during the next few days, but about a
week later he kept an engagement to dine with Lady Iris Speedwell, whom
he never neglected, because she was the brightest hostess in London.

By some accident he arrived rather early. Lady Iris had left the
drawing-room for a moment to see that all was right in the dining-room,
and when he was shown in there stood alone in the lamplight Nichola
Pine-Avon. She had been the first arrival. He had not in the least
expected to meet her there, further than that, in a general sense, at
Lady Iris's you expected to meet everybody.

She had just come out of the cloak-room, and was so tender and even
apologetic that he had not the heart to be other than friendly. As the
other guests dropped in, the pair retreated into a shady corner, and she
talked beside him till all moved off for the eating and drinking.

He had not been appointed to take her across to the dining-room, but at
the table found her exactly opposite. She looked very charming between
the candles, and then suddenly it dawned upon him that her previous
manner must have originated in some false report about Marcia, of whose
existence he had not heard for years. Anyhow, he was not disposed to
resent an inexplicability in womankind, having found that it usually
arose independently of fact, reason, probability, or his own deserts.

So he dined on, catching her eyes and the few pretty words she made
opportunity to project across the table to him now and then. He was
courteously responsive only, but Mrs. Pine-Avon herself distinctly made
advances. He re-admired her, while at the same time her conduct in her
own house had been enough to check his confidence--enough even to make
him doubt if the Well-Beloved really resided within those contours,
or had ever been more than the most transitory passenger through that
interesting and accomplished soul.

He was pondering this question, yet growing decidedly moved by the
playful pathos of her attitude when, by chance, searching his pocket
for his handkerchief, something crackled, and he felt there an unopened
letter, which had arrived at the moment he was leaving his house, and he
had slipped into his coat to read in the cab as he drove along. Pierston
drew it sufficiently forth to observe by the post-mark that it came from
his natal isle. Having hardly a correspondent in that part of the world
now he began to conjecture on the possible sender.

The lady on his right, whom he had brought in, was a leading actress of
the town--indeed, of the United Kingdom and America, for that matter--a
creature in airy clothing, translucent, like a balsam or sea-anemone,
without shadows, and in movement as responsive as some highly
lubricated, many-wired machine, which, if one presses a particular
spring, flies open and reveals its works. The spring in the present
case was the artistic commendation she deserved and craved. At this
particular moment she was engaged with the man on her own right, a
representative of Family, who talked positively and hollowly, as if
shouting down a vista of five hundred years from the Feudal past. The
lady on Jocelyn's left, wife of a Lord Justice of Appeal, was in like
manner talking to her companion on the outer side; so that, for the
time, he was left to himself. He took advantage of the opportunity, drew
out his letter, and read it as it lay upon his napkin, nobody observing
him, so far as he was aware.

It came from the wife of one of his father's former workmen, and was
concerning her son, whom she begged Jocelyn to recommend as candidate
for some post in town that she wished him to fill. But the end of the
letter was what arrested him--

'You will be sorry to hear, Sir, that dear little Avice Caro, as we used
to call her in her maiden days, is dead. She married her cousin, if you
do mind, and went away from here for a good-few years, but was left
a widow, and came back a twelvemonth ago; since when she faltered and
faltered, and now she is gone.'




2. III. SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST

By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner-table receded
into the background, behind the vivid presentment of Avice Caro, and
the old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia which were inseparable from her
personality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the bold
stony promontory and the incoming West Sea. The handsome marchioness in
geranium-red and diamonds, who was visible to him on his host's right
hand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sunsets that he had
watched so many times over Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in the
foreground. Between his eyes and the judge who sat next to Nichola, with
a chin so raw that he must have shaved every quarter of an hour during
the day, intruded the face of Avice, as she had glanced at him in their
last parting. The crannied features of the evergreen society lady, who,
if she had been a few years older, would have been as old-fashioned as
her daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty quarries of his and Avice's
parents, down which he had clambered with Avice hundreds of times. The
ivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks,
and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of the
cliff-built Castle, the tufts of seaweed, and the lighthouses on the
isle. The salt airs of the ocean killed the smell of the viands, and
instead of the clatter of voices came the monologue of the tide off the
Beal.

More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance which she
had latterly acquired; she became a woman of his acquaintance with no
distinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies of flesh
and bone merely, a person of lines and surfaces; she was a language in
living cipher no more.

When the ladies had withdrawn it was just the same. The soul of
Avice--the only woman he had NEVER loved of those who had loved
him--surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew near to him in the person
of one of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there was
only one painter for Jocelyn--his own memory. All that was eminent
in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and
unassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds of
living men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilled
the interest of discourse with such a king of operators.

Reaching the drawing-room he talked to his hostess. Though she had
entertained three-and-twenty guests at her table that night she had
known not only what every one of them was saying and doing throughout
the repast, but what every one was thinking. So, being an old friend,
she said quietly, 'What has been troubling you? Something has, I know. I
have been travelling over your face and have seen it there.'

Nothing could less express the meaning his recent news had for him than
a statement of its facts. He told of the opening of the letter and the
discovery of the death of an old acquaintance.

'The only woman whom I never rightly valued, I may almost say!' he
added; 'and therefore the only one I shall ever regret!'

Whether she considered it a sufficient explanation or not the woman of
experiences accepted it as such. She was the single lady of his circle
whom nothing erratic in his doings could surprise, and he often gave her
stray ends of his confidence thus with perfect safety.

He did not go near Mrs. Pine-Avon again; he could not: and on leaving
the house walked abstractedly along the streets till he found himself at
his own door. In his room he sat down, and placing his hands behind his
head thought his thoughts anew.

At one side of the room stood an escritoire, and from a lower drawer
therein he took out a small box tightly nailed down. He forced the cover
with the poker. The box contained a variety of odds and ends, which
Pierston had thrown into it from time to time in past years for future
sorting--an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholy
mass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers,
and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in the
primitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in the commonest
way.

It was Avice Caro, as she had appeared during the summer month or two
which he had spent with her on the island twenty years before this time,
her young lips pursed up, her hands meekly folded. The effect of the
glass was to lend to the picture much of the softness characteristic of
the original. He remembered when it was taken--during one afternoon
they had spent together at a neighbouring watering-place, when he had
suggested her sitting to a touting artist on the sands, there being
nothing else for them to do. A long contemplation of the likeness
completed in his emotions what the letter had begun. He loved the woman
dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life. He had thought
of her but at distant intervals during the twenty years since that
parting occurred, and only as somebody he could have wedded. Yet now the
times of youthful friendship with her, in which he had learnt every
note of her innocent nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionate
attachment, embittered by regret beyond words.

That kiss which had offended his dignity, which she had so childishly
given him before her consciousness of womanhood had been awakened; what
he would have offered to have a quarter of it now!

Pierston was almost angry with himself for his feelings of this night,
so unreasonably, motivelessly strong were they towards the lost young
playmate. 'How senseless of me!' he said, as he lay in his lonely bed.
She had been another man's wife almost the whole time since he was
estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not
make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost
radiant, purity of this newsprung affection for a flown spirit forbade
him to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied
and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before.

The next afternoon he went down to the club; not his large club, where
the men hardly spoke to each other, but the homely one where they
told stories of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess among
themselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that such
secrets would go no further. But he could not tell this. So volatile and
intangible was the story that to convey it in words would have been as
hard as to cage a perfume.

They observed his altered manner, and said he was in love. Pierston
admitted that he was; and there it ended. When he reached home he looked
out of his bed-room window, and began to consider in what direction from
where he stood that darling little figure lay. It was straight across
there, under the young pale moon. The symbol signified well. The
divinity of the silver bow was not more excellently pure than she, the
lost, had been. Under that moon was the island of Ancient Slingers, and
on the island a house, framed from mullions to chimney-top like the
isle itself, of stone. Inside the window, the moonlight irradiating her
winding-sheet, lay Avice, reached only by the faint noises inherent in
the isle; the tink-tink of the chisels in the quarries, the surging of
the tides in the Bay, and the muffled grumbling of the currents in the
never-pacified Race.

He began to divine the truth. Avice, the departed one, though she had
come short of inspiring a passion, had yet possessed a ground-quality
absent from her rivals, without which it seemed that a fixed and
full-rounded constancy to a woman could not flourish in him. Like his
own, her family had been islanders for centuries--from Norman, Anglian,
Roman, Balearic-British times. Hence in her nature, as in his, was some
mysterious ingredient sucked from the isle; otherwise a racial instinct
necessary to the absolute unison of a pair. Thus, though he might
never love a woman of the island race, for lack in her of the desired
refinement, he could not love long a kimberlin--a woman other than of
the island race, for her lack of this groundwork of character.

Such was Pierston's view of things. Another fancy of his, an artist's
superstition merely, may be mentioned. The Caros, like some other local
families, suggested a Roman lineage, more or less grafted on the stock
of the Slingers. Their features recalled those of the Italian peasantry
to any one as familiar as he was with them; and there were evidences
that the Roman colonists had been populous and long-abiding in and near
this corner of Britain. Tradition urged that a temple to Venus once
stood at the top of the Roman road leading up into the isle; and
possibly one to the love-goddess of the Slingers antedated this. What so
natural as that the true star of his soul would be found nowhere but in
one of the old island breed?

After dinner his old friend Somers came in to smoke, and when they had
talked a little while Somers alluded casually to some place at which
they would meet on the morrow.

'I sha'n't be there,' said Pierston.

'But you promised?'

'Yes. But I shall be at the island--looking at a dead woman's grave.'
As he spoke his eyes turned, and remained fixed on a table near. Somers
followed the direction of his glance to a photograph on a stand.

'Is that she?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'Rather a bygone affair, then?'

Pierston acknowledged it. 'She's the only sweetheart I ever slighted,
Alfred,' he said. 'Because she's the only one I ought to have cared for.
That's just the fool I have always been.'

'But if she's dead and buried, you can go to her grave at any time as
well as now, to keep up the sentiment.'

'I don't know that she's buried.'

'But to-morrow--the Academy night! Of all days why go then?'

'I don't care about the Academy.'

'Pierston--you are our only inspired sculptor. You are our Praxiteles,
or rather our Lysippus. You are almost the only man of this generation
who has been able to mould and chisel forms living enough to draw the
idle public away from the popular paintings into the usually deserted
Lecture-room, and people who have seen your last pieces of stuff say
there has been nothing like them since sixteen hundred and--since the
sculptors 'of the great race' lived and died--whenever that was.
Well, then, for the sake of others you ought not to rush off to that
God-forgotten sea-rock just when you are wanted in town, all for a woman
you last saw a hundred years ago.'

'No--it was only nineteen and three quarters,' replied his friend, with
abstracted literalness. He went the next morning.

Since the days of his youth a railway had been constructed along the
pebble bank, so that, except when the rails were washed away by the
tides, which was rather often, the peninsula was quickly accessible. At
two o'clock in the afternoon he was rattled along by this new means of
locomotion, under the familiar monotonous line of bran-coloured stones,
and he soon emerged from the station, which stood as a strange exotic
among the black lerrets, the ruins of the washed-away village, and
the white cubes of oolite, just come to view after burial through
unreckonable geologic years.

In entering upon the pebble beach the train had passed close to the
ruins of Henry the Eighth's or Sandsfoot Castle, whither Avice was to
have accompanied him on the night of his departure. Had she appeared the
primitive betrothal, with its natural result, would probably have taken
place; and, as no islander had ever been known to break that compact,
she would have become his wife.

Ascending the steep incline to where the quarrymen were chipping just
as they had formerly done, and within sound of the great stone saws, he
looked southward towards the Beal.

The level line of the sea horizon rose above the surface of the isle, a
ruffled patch in mid-distance as usual marking the Race, whence many a
Lycidas had gone

     'Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world;'

but had not been blest with a poet as a friend. Against the stretch of
water, where a school of mackerel twinkled in the afternoon light, was
defined, in addition to the distant lighthouse, a church with its tower,
standing about a quarter of a mile off, near the edge of the cliff. The
churchyard gravestones could be seen in profile against the same vast
spread of watery babble and unrest.

Among the graves moved the form of a man clothed in a white sheet, which
the wind blew and flapped coldly every now and then. Near him moved six
men bearing a long box, and two or three persons in black followed. The
coffin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the isle, while around and
beneath it the flashing lights from the sea and the school of
mackerel were reflected; a fishing-boat, far out in the Channel, being
momentarily discernible under the coffin also.

The procession wandered round to a particular corner, and halted, and
paused there a long while in the wind, the sea behind them, the surplice
of the priest still blowing. Jocelyn stood with his hat off: he was
present, though he was a quarter of a mile off; and he seemed to hear
the words that were being said, though nothing but the wind was audible.

He instinctively knew that it was none other than Avice whom he was
seeing interred; HIS Avice, as he now began presumptuously to call
her. Presently the little group withdrew from before the sea-shine, and
disappeared.

He felt himself unable to go further in that direction, and turning
aside went aimlessly across the open land, visiting the various spots
that he had formerly visited with her. But, as if tethered to the
churchyard by a cord, he was still conscious of being at the end of
a radius whose pivot was the grave of Avice Caro; and as the dusk
thickened he closed upon his centre and entered the churchyard gate.

Not a soul was now within the precincts. The grave, newly shaped, was
easily discoverable behind the church, and when the same young moon
arose which he had observed the previous evening from his window
in London he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the mourners and
bearers. The breeze had fallen to a calm with the setting of the sun:
the lighthouse had opened its glaring eye, and, disinclined to leave
a spot sublimed both by early association and present regret, he moved
back to the church-wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upon
a window-sill facing the grave.




2. IV. SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE

The lispings of the sea beneath the cliffs were all the sounds that
reached him, for the quarries were silent now. How long he sat here
lonely and thinking he did not know. Neither did he know, though he felt
drowsy, whether inexpectant sadness--that gentle soporific--lulled him
into a short sleep, so that he lost count of time and consciousness of
incident. But during some minute or minutes he seemed to see Avice Caro
herself, bending over and then withdrawing from her grave in the light
of the moon.

She seemed not a year older, not a digit less slender, not a line more
angular than when he had parted from her twenty years earlier, in the
lane hard by. A renascent reasoning on the impossibility of such a
phenomenon as this being more than a dream-fancy roused him with a start
from his heaviness.

'I must have been asleep,' he said.

Yet she had seemed so real. Pierston however dismissed the strange
impression, arguing that even if the information sent him of Avice's
death should be false--a thing incredible--that sweet friend of his
youth, despite the transfiguring effects of moonlight, would not now
look the same as she had appeared nineteen or twenty years ago. Were
what he saw substantial flesh, it must have been some other person than
Avice Caro.

Having satisfied his sentiment by coming to the graveside there was
nothing more for him to do in the island, and he decided to return to
London that night. But some time remaining still on his hands,
Jocelyn by a natural instinct turned his feet in the direction of
East Quarriers, the village of his birth and of hers. Passing the
market-square he pursued the arm of road to 'Sylvania Castle,' a private
mansion of comparatively modern date, in whose grounds stood the single
plantation of trees of which the isle could boast. The cottages extended
close to the walls of the enclosure, and one of the last of these
dwellings had been Avice's, in which, as it was her freehold, she
possibly had died.

To reach it he passed the gates of 'Sylvania,' and observed above the
lawn wall a board announcing that the house was to be let furnished. A
few steps further revealed the cottage which with its quaint and massive
stone features of two or three centuries' antiquity, was capable
even now of longer resistance to the rasp of Time than ordinary new
erections. His attention was drawn to the window, still unblinded,
though a lamp lit the room. He stepped back against the wall opposite,
and gazed in.

At a table covered with a white cloth a young woman stood putting
tea-things away into a corner-cupboard. She was in all respects the
Avice he had lost, the girl he had seen in the churchyard and had
fancied to be the illusion of a dream. And though there was this time
no doubt about her reality, the isolation of her position in the silent
house lent her a curiously startling aspect. Divining the explanation he
waited for footsteps, and in a few moments a quarryman passed him on his
journey home. Pierston inquired of the man concerning the spectacle.

'O yes, sir; that's poor Mrs. Caro's only daughter, and it must be
lonely for her there to-night, poor maid! Yes, good-now; she's the very
daps of her mother--that's what everybody says.'

'But how does she come to be so lonely?'

'One of her brothers went to sea and was drowned, and t'other is in
America.'

'They were quarryowners at one time?'

The quarryman 'pitched his nitch,' and explained to the seeming stranger
that there had been three families thereabouts in the stone trade, who
had got much involved with each other in the last generation. They were
the Bencombs, the Pierstons, and the Caros. The Bencombs strained their
utmost to outlift the other two, and partially succeeded. They grew
enormously rich, sold out, and disappeared altogether from the island
which had been their making. The Pierstons kept a dogged middle course,
throve without show or noise, and also retired in their turn. The Caros
were pulled completely down in the competition with the other two, and
when Widow Caro's daughter married her cousin Jim Caro, he tried to
regain for the family its original place in the three-cornered struggle.
He took contracts at less than he could profit by, speculated more and
more, till at last the crash came; he was sold up, went away, and later
on came back to live in this little cottage, which was his wife's by
inheritance. There he remained till his death; and now his widow was
gone. Hardships had helped on her end.

The quarryman proceeded on his way, and Pierston, deeply remorseful,
knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it,
lamp in hand.

'Avice!' he said tenderly; 'Avice Caro!' even now unable to get over the
strange feeling that he was twenty years younger, addressing Avice the
forsaken.

'Ann, sir,' said she.

'Ah, your name is not the same as your mother's!'

'My second name is. And my surname. Poor mother married her cousin.'

'As everybody does here.... Well, Ann or otherwise, you are Avice to me.
And you have lost her now?'

'I have, sir.'

She spoke in the very same sweet voice that he had listened to a score
of years before, and bent eyes of the same familiar hazel inquiringly
upon him.

'I knew your mother at one time,' he said; 'and learning of her death
and burial I took the liberty of calling upon you. You will forgive a
stranger doing that?'

'Yes,' she said dispassionately, and glancing round the room: 'This was
mother's own house, and now it is mine. I am sorry not to be in mourning
on the night of her funeral, but I have just been to put some flowers on
her grave, and I took it off afore going that the damp mid not spoil the
crape. You see, she was bad a long time, and I have to be careful, and
do washing and ironing for a living. She hurt her side with wringing up
the large sheets she had to wash for the Castle folks here.'

'I hope you won't hurt yourself doing it, my dear.'

'O no, that I sha'n't! There's Charl Woollat, and Sammy Scribben, and
Ted Gibsey, and lots o' young chaps; they'll wring anything for me if
they happen to come along. But I can hardly trust 'em. Sam Scribben
t'other day twisted a linen tablecloth into two pieces, for all the
world as if it had been a pipe-light. They never know when to stop in
their wringing.'

The voice truly was his Avice's; but Avice the Second was clearly more
matter-of-fact, unreflecting, less cultivated than her mother had been.
This Avice would never recite poetry from any platform, local or other,
with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. There was a disappointment
in his recognition of this; yet she touched him as few had done: he
could not bear to go away. 'How old are you?' he asked.

'Going in nineteen.'

It was about the age of her double, Avice the First, when he and she had
strolled together over the cliffs during the engagement. But he was now
forty, if a day. She before him was an uneducated laundress, and he was
a sculptor and a Royal Academician, with a fortune and a reputation. Yet
why was it an unpleasant sensation to him just then to recollect that he
was two score?

He could find no further excuse for remaining, and having still
half-an-hour to spare he went round by the road to the other or west
side of the last-century 'Sylvania Castle,' and came to the furthest
house out there on the cliff. It was his early home. Used in the summer
as a lodging-house for visitors, it now stood empty and silent, the
evening wind swaying the euonymus and tamarisk boughs in the front--the
only evergreen shrubs that could weather the whipping salt gales which
sped past the walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the familiar
lightship winked from the sandbank, and all at once there came to him a
wild wish--that, instead of having an artist's reputation, he could be
living here an illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a fair way of
winning, the pretty laundress in the cottage hard by.




2. V. THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE

Having returned to London he mechanically resumed his customary life;
but he was not really living there. The phantom of Avice, now grown to
be warm flesh and blood, held his mind afar. He thought of nothing
but the isle, and Avice the Second dwelling therein--inhaling its salt
breath, stroked by its singing rains and by the haunted atmosphere of
Roman Venus about and around the site of her perished temple there. The
very defects in the country girl became charms as viewed from town.

Nothing now pleased him so much as to spend that portion of the
afternoon which he devoted to out-door exercise, in haunting the
purlieus of the wharves along the Thames, where the stone of his native
rock was unshipped from the coasting-craft that had brought it thither.
He would pass inside the great gates of these landing-places on the
right or left bank, contemplate the white cubes and oblongs, imbibe
their associations, call up the genius loci whence they came, and almost
forget that he was in London.

One afternoon he was walking away from the mud-splashed entrance to one
of the wharves, when his attention was drawn to a female form on the
opposite side of the way, going towards the spot he had just left. She
was somewhat small, slight, and graceful; her attire alone would
have been enough to attract him, being simple and countrified
to picturesqueness; but he was more than attracted by her strong
resemblance to Avice Caro the younger--Ann Avice, as she had said she
was called.

Before she had receded a hundred yards he felt certain that it was Avice
indeed; and his unifying mood of the afternoon was now so intense that
the lost and the found Avice seemed essentially the same person. Their
external likeness to each other--probably owing to the cousinship
between the elder and her husband--went far to nourish the fantasy. He
hastily turned, and rediscovered the girl among the pedestrians. She
kept on her way to the wharf, where, looking inquiringly around her for
a few seconds, with the manner of one unaccustomed to the locality, she
opened the gate and disappeared.

Pierston also went up to the gate and entered. She had crossed to the
landing-place, beyond which a lumpy craft lay moored. Drawing nearer,
he discovered her to be engaged in conversation with the skipper and an
elderly woman--both come straight from the oolitic isle, as was apparent
in a moment from their accent. Pierston felt no hesitation in making
himself known as a native, the ruptured engagement between Avice's
mother and himself twenty years before having been known to few or none
now living.

The present embodiment of Avice recognized him, and with the artless
candour of her race and years explained the situation, though that was
rather his duty as an intruder than hers.

'This is Cap'n Kibbs, sir, a distant relation of father's,' she said.
'And this is Mrs. Kibbs. We've come up from the island wi'en just for a
trip, and are going to sail back wi'en Wednesday.'

'O, I see. And where are you staying?'

'Here--on board.'

'What, you live on board entirely?'

'Yes.'

'Lord, sir,' broke in Mrs. Kibbs, 'I should be afeard o' my life to tine
my eyes among these here kimberlins at night-time; and even by day, if
so be I venture into the streets, I nowhen forget how many turnings to
the right and to the left 'tis to get back to Job's vessel--do I, Job?'

The skipper nodded confirmation.

'You are safer ashore than afloat,' said Pierston, 'especially in the
Channel, with these winds and those heavy blocks of stone.'

'Well,' said Cap'n Kibbs, after privately clearing something from his
mouth, 'as to the winds, there idden much danger in them at this time
o' year. 'Tis the ocean-bound steamers that make the risk to craft like
ours. If you happen to be in their course, under you go--cut clane in
two pieces, and they never lying-to to haul in your carcases, and nobody
to tell the tale.'

Pierston turned to Avice, wanting to say much to her, yet not knowing
what to say. He lamely remarked at last: 'You go back the same way,
Avice?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, take care of yourself afloat.'

'O yes.'

'I hope--I may see you again soon--and talk to you.'

'I hope so, sir.'

He could not get further, and after a while Pierston left them, and went
away thinking of Avice more than ever.

The next day he mentally timed them down the river, allowing for the
pause to take in ballast, and on the Wednesday pictured the sail down
the open sea. That night he thought of the little craft under the bows
of the huge steam-vessels, powerless to make itself seen or heard, and
Avice, now growing inexpressibly dear, sleeping in her little berth at
the mercy of a thousand chance catastrophes.

Honest perception had told him that this Avice, fairer than her mother
in face and form, was her inferior in soul and understanding. Yet the
fervour which the first could never kindle in him was, almost to his
alarm, burning up now. He began to have misgivings as to some queer
trick that his migratory Beloved was about to play him, or rather the
capricious Divinity behind that ideal lady.

A gigantic satire upon the mutations of his nymph during the past twenty
years seemed looming in the distance. A forsaking of the accomplished
and well-connected Mrs. Pine-Avon for the little laundress, under
the traction of some mystic magnet which had nothing to do with
reason--surely that was the form of the satire.

But it was recklessly pleasant to leave the suspicion unrecognized as
yet, and follow the lead.

In thinking how best to do this Pierston recollected that, as was
customary when the summer-time approached, Sylvania Castle had been
advertised for letting furnished. A solitary dreamer like himself, whose
wants all lay in an artistic and ideal direction, did not require such
gaunt accommodation as the aforesaid residence offered; but the spot was
all, and the expenses of a few months of tenancy therein he could well
afford. A letter to the agent was dispatched that night, and in a few
days Jocelyn found himself the temporary possessor of a place which he
had never seen the inside of since his childhood, and had then deemed
the abode of unpleasant ghosts.




2. VI. THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT

It was the evening of Pierston's arrival at Sylvania Castle, a dignified
manor-house in a nook by the cliffs, with modern castellations and
battlements; and he had walked through the rooms, about the lawn,
and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island of
treeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure. In name, nature,
and accessories the property within the girdling wall formed a complete
antithesis to everything in its precincts. To find other trees between
Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a little in time--to
dig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forest
of conifers lay as petrifactions, their heads all in one direction, as
blown down by a gale in the Secondary geologic epoch.

Dusk had closed in, and he now proceeded with what was, after all, the
real business of his sojourn. The two servants who had been left to
take care of the house were in their own quarters, and he went out
unobserved. Crossing a hollow overhung by the budding boughs he
approached an empty garden-house of Elizabethan design, which stood on
the outer wall of the grounds, and commanded by a window the fronts of
the nearest cottages. Among them was the home of the resuscitated Avice.

He had chosen this moment for his outlook through knowing that the
villagers were in no hurry to pull down their blinds at nightfall.
And, as he had divined, the inside of the young woman's living-room was
visible to him as formerly, illuminated by the rays of its own lamp.

A subdued thumping came every now and then from the apartment. She was
ironing linen on a flannel table-cloth, a row of such apparel hanging on
a clothes-horse by the fire. Her face had been pale when he encountered
her, but now it was warm and pink with her exertions and the heat of the
stove. Yet it was in perfect and passionless repose, which imparted a
Minerva cast to the profile. When she glanced up, her lineaments seemed
to have all the soul and heart that had characterized her mother's,
and had been with her a true index of the spirit within. Could it be
possible that in this case the manifestation was fictitious? He had met
with many such examples of hereditary persistence without the qualities
signified by the traits. He unconsciously hoped that it was at least not
entirely so here.

The room was less furnished than when he had last beheld it. The
'bo-fet,' or double corner-cupboard, where the china was formerly kept,
had disappeared, its place being taken by a plain board. The tall old
clock, with its ancient oak carcase, arched brow, and humorous mouth,
was also not to be seen, a cheap, white-dialled specimen doing its work.
What these displacements might betoken saddened his humanity less than
it cheered his primitive instinct in pointing out how her necessities
might bring them together.

Having fixed his residence near her for some lengthy time he felt in
no hurry to obtrude his presence just now, and went indoors. That this
girl's frame was doomed to be a real embodiment of that olden seductive
one--that Protean dream-creature, who had never seen fit to irradiate
the mother's image till it became a mere memory after dissolution--he
doubted less every moment.

There was an uneasiness in recognizing such. There was something
abnormal in his present proclivity. A certain sanity had, after all,
accompanied his former idealizing passions: the Beloved had seldom
informed a personality which, while enrapturing his soul, simultaneously
shocked his intellect. A change, perhaps, had come.

It was a fine morning on the morrow. Walking in the grounds towards
the gate he saw Avice entering his hired castle with a broad oval
wicker-basket covered with a white cloth, which burden she bore round to
the back door. Of course, she washed for his own household: he had not
thought of that. In the morning sunlight she appeared rather as a sylph
than as a washerwoman; and he could not but think that the slightness
of her figure was as ill adapted to this occupation as her mother's had
been.

But, after all, it was not the washerwoman that he saw now. In front
of her, on the surface of her, was shining out that more real, more
inter-penetrating being whom he knew so well! The occupation of the
subserving minion, the blemishes of the temporary creature who formed
the background, were of the same account in the presentation of the
indispensable one as the supporting posts and framework in a pyrotechnic
display.

She left the house and went homeward by a path of which he was not
aware, having probably changed her course because she had seen him
standing there. It meant nothing, for she had hardly become acquainted
with him; yet that she should have avoided him was a new experience. He
had no opportunity for a further study of her by distant observation,
and hit upon a pretext for bringing her face to face with him. He found
fault with his linen, and directed that the laundress should be sent
for.

'She is rather young, poor little thing,' said the housemaid
apologetically. 'But since her mother's death she has enough to do to
keep above water, and we make shift with her. But I'll tell her, sir.'

'I will see her myself. Send her in when she comes,' said Pierston.

One morning, accordingly, when he was answering a spiteful criticism
of a late work of his, he was told that she waited his pleasure in the
hall. He went out.

'About the washing,' said the sculptor stiffly. 'I am a very particular
person, and I wish no preparation of lime to be used.'

'I didn't know folks used it,' replied the maiden, in a scared and
reserved tone, without looking at him.

'That's all right. And then, the mangling smashes the buttons.'

'I haven't got a mangle, sir,' she murmured.

'Ah! that's satisfactory. And I object to so much borax in the starch.'

'I don't put any,' Avice returned in the same close way; 'never heard
the name o't afore!'

'O I see.'

All this time Pierston was thinking of the girl--or as the scientific
might say, Nature was working her plans for the next generation under
the cloak of a dialogue on linen. He could not read her individual
character, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whom
he had valued too late. He could not help seeing in her all that he knew
of another, and veiling in her all that did not harmonize with his sense
of metempsychosis.

The girl seemed to think of nothing but the business in hand. She had
answered to the point, and was hardly aware of his sex or of his shape.

'I knew your mother, Avice,' he said. 'You remember my telling you so?'

'Yes.'

'Well--I have taken this house for two or three months, and you will be
very useful to me. You still live just outside the wall?'

'Yes, sir,' said the self-contained girl.

Demurely and dispassionately she turned to leave--this pretty creature
with features so still. There was something strange in seeing move
off thus that form which he knew passing well, she who was once so
throbbingly alive to his presence that, not many yards from this spot,
she had flung her arms round him and given him a kiss which, despised
in its freshness, had revived in him latterly as the dearest kiss of all
his life. And now this 'daps' of her mother (as they called her in the
dialect here), this perfect copy, why did she turn away?

'Your mother was a refined and well-informed woman, I think I remember?'

'She was, sir; everybody said so.'

'I hope you resemble her.'

She archly shook her head, and drew warily away.

'O! one thing more, Avice. I have not brought much linen, so you must
come to the house every day.'

'Very good, sir.'

'You won't forget that?'

'O no.'

Then he let her go. He was a town man, and she an artless islander, yet
he had opened himself out, like a sea-anemone, without disturbing the
epiderm of her nature. It was monstrous that a maiden who had assumed
the personality of her of his tenderest memory should be so impervious.
Perhaps it was he who was wanting. Avice might be Passion masking as
Indifference, because he was so many years older in outward show.

This brought him to the root of it. In his heart he was not a day older
than when he had wooed the mother at the daughter's present age. His
record moved on with the years, his sentiments stood still.

When he beheld those of his fellows who were defined as buffers and
fogeys--imperturbable, matter-of-fact, slightly ridiculous beings,
past masters in the art of populating homes, schools, and colleges, and
present adepts in the science of giving away brides--how he envied them,
assuming them to feel as they appeared to feel, with their commerce and
their politics, their glasses and their pipes. They had got past the
distracting currents of passionateness, and were in the calm waters of
middle-aged philosophy. But he, their contemporary, was tossed like a
cork hither and thither upon the crest of every fancy, precisely as he
had been tossed when he was half his present age, with the burden now of
double pain to himself in his growing vision of all as vanity.

Avice had gone, and he saw her no more that day. Since he could not
again call upon her, she was as inaccessible as if she had entered the
military citadel on the hill-top beyond them.

In the evening he went out and paced down the lane to the Red King's
castle overhanging the cliff, beside whose age the castle he occupied
was but a thing of yesterday. Below the castle precipice lay enormous
blocks, which had fallen from it, and several of them were carved over
with names and initials. He knew the spot and the old trick well, and
by searching in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names which, as
a boy, he himself had cut. They were 'AVICE' and 'JOCELYN'--Avice Caro's
and his own. The letters were now nearly worn away by the weather and
the brine. But close by, in quite fresh letters, stood 'ANN AVICE,'
coupled with the name 'ISAAC.' They could not have been there more than
two or three years, and the 'Ann Avice' was probably Avice the Second.
Who was Isaac? Some boy admirer of her child-time doubtless.

He retraced his steps, and passed the Caros' house towards his own. The
revivified Avice animated the dwelling, and the light within the room
fell upon the window. She was just inside that blind.


                    *          *          *


Whenever she unexpectedly came to the castle he started, and lost
placidity. It was not at her presence as such, but at the new condition,
which seemed to have something sinister in it. On the other hand, the
most abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it had
moved her prototype in the old days. She was indifferent to, almost
unconscious of, his propinquity. He was no more than a statue to her;
she was a growing fire to him.

A sudden Sapphic terror of love would ever and anon come upon the
sculptor, when his matured reflecting powers would insist upon
informing him of the fearful lapse from reasonableness that lay in this
infatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he were
doomed to do penance for his past emotional wanderings (in a material
sense) by being chained in fatal fidelity to an object that his
intellect despised? One night he dreamt that he saw dimly masking behind
that young countenance 'the Weaver of Wiles' herself, 'with all her
subtle face laughing aloud.'

However, the Well-Beloved was alive again, had been lost and was found.
He was amazed at the change of front in himself. She had worn the
guise of strange women; she had been a woman of every class, from the
dignified daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a Nubian Almeh with
her handkerchief, undulating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all these
embodiments had been endowed with a certain smartness, either of the
flesh or spirit: some with wit, a few with talent, and even genius. But
the new impersonation had apparently nothing beyond sex and prettiness.
She knew not how to sport a fan or handkerchief, hardly how to pull on a
glove.

But her limited life was innocent, and that went far. Poor little Avice!
her mother's image: there it all lay. After all, her parentage was as
good as his own; it was misfortune that had sent her down to this. Odd
as it seemed to him, her limitations were largely what he loved her for.
Her rejuvenating power over him had ineffable charm. He felt as he had
felt when standing beside her predecessor; but, alas! he was twenty
years further on towards the shade.




2. VII. THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED

A few mornings later he was looking through an upper back window over a
screened part of the garden. The door beneath him opened, and a figure
appeared tripping forth. She went round out of sight to where the
gardener was at work, and presently returned with a bunch of green stuff
fluttering in each hand. It was Avice, her dark hair now braided up
snugly under a cap. She sailed on with a rapt and unconscious face, her
thoughts a thousand removes from him.

How she had suddenly come to be an inmate of his own house he could
not understand, till he recalled the fact that he had given the castle
servants a whole holiday to attend a review of the yeomanry in the
watering-place over the bay, on their stating that they could provide a
temporary substitute to stay in the house. They had evidently called
in Avice. To his great pleasure he discovered their opinion of his
requirements to be such a mean one that they had called in no one else.

The Spirit, as she seemed to him, brought his lunch into the room where
he was writing, and he beheld her uncover it. She went to the window to
adjust a blind which had slipped, and he had a good view of her profile.
It was not unlike that of one of the three goddesses in Rubens's
'Judgment of Paris,' and in contour was nigh perfection. But it was in
her full face that the vision of her mother was most apparent.

'Did you cook all this, Avice?' he asked, arousing himself.

She turned and half-smiled, merely murmuring, 'Yes, sir.'

Well he knew the arrangement of those white teeth. In the junction of
two of the upper ones there was a slight irregularity; no stranger would
have noticed it, nor would he, but that he knew of the same mark in
her mother's mouth, and looked for it here. Till Avice the Second had
revealed it this moment by her smile, he had never beheld that mark
since the parting from Avice the First, when she had smiled under his
kiss as the copy had done now.

Next morning, when dressing, he heard her through the ricketty floor of
the building engaged in conversation with the other servants. Having
by this time regularly installed herself as the exponent of the
Long-pursued--as one who, by no initiative of his own, had been chosen
by some superior Power as the vehicle of her next debut, she attracted
him by the cadences of her voice; she would suddenly drop it to a rich
whisper of roguishness, when the slight rural monotony of its narrative
speech disappeared, and soul and heart--or what seemed soul and
heart--resounded. The charm lay in the intervals, using that word in its
musical sense. She would say a few syllables in one note, and end her
sentence in a soft modulation upwards, then downwards, then into her
own note again. The curve of sound was as artistic as any line of beauty
ever struck by his pencil--as satisfying as the curves of her who was
the World's Desire.

The subject of her discourse he cared nothing about--it was no more his
interest than his concern. He took special pains that in catching her
voice he might not comprehend her words. To the tones he had a right,
none to the articulations. By degrees he could not exist long without
this sound.

On Sunday evening he found that she went to church. He followed behind
her over the open road, keeping his eye on the little hat with its
bunch of cock's feathers as on a star. When she had passed in Pierston
observed her position and took a seat behind her.

Engaged in the study of her ear and the nape of her white neck, he
suddenly became aware of the presence of a lady still further ahead in
the aisle, whose attire, though of black materials in the quietest form,
was of a cut which rather suggested London than this Ultima Thule. For
the minute he forgot, in his curiosity, that Avice intervened. The
lady turned her head somewhat, and, though she was veiled with unusual
thickness for the season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine-Avon in
the form.

Why should Mrs. Pine-Avon be there? Pierston asked himself, if it
should, indeed, be she.

The end of the service saw his attention again concentrated on Avice to
such a degree that at the critical moment of moving out he forgot the
mysterious lady in front of her, and found that she had left the church
by the side-door. Supposing it to have been Mrs. Pine-Avon, she
would probably be discovered staying at one of the hotels at the
watering-place over the bay, and to have come along the Pebble-bank
to the island as so many did, for an evening drive. For the present,
however, the explanation was not forthcoming; and he did not seek it.

When he emerged from the church the great placid eye of the lighthouse
at the Beal Point was open, and he moved thitherward a few steps to
escape Nichola, or her double, and the rest of the congregation.
Turning at length, he hastened homeward along the now deserted trackway,
intending to overtake the revitalized Avice. But he could see nothing of
her, and concluded that she had walked too fast for him. Arrived at his
own gate he paused a moment, and perceived that Avice's little freehold
was still in darkness. She had not come.

He retraced his steps, but could not find her, the only persons on the
road being a man and his wife, as he knew them to be though he could not
see them, from the words of the man--

'If you had not a'ready married me, you'd cut my acquaintance! That's a
pretty thing for a wife to say!'

The remark struck his ear unpleasantly, and by-and-by he went back
again. Avice's cottage was now lighted: she must have come round by the
other road. Satisfied that she was safely domiciled for the night he
opened the gate of Sylvania Castle and retired to his room also.


                    *          *          *


Eastward from the grounds the cliffs were rugged and the view of the
opposite coast picturesque in the extreme. A little door from the lawn
gave him immediate access to the rocks and shore on this side. Without
the door was a dip-well of pure water, which possibly had supplied the
inmates of the adjoining and now ruinous Red King's castle at the time
of its erection. On a sunny morning he was meditating here when he
discerned a figure on the shore below spreading white linen upon the
pebbly strand.

Jocelyn descended. Avice, as he had supposed, had now returned to her
own occupation. Her shapely pink arms, though slight, were plump enough
to show dimples at the elbows, and were set off by her purple cotton
print, which the shore-breeze licked and tantalized. He stood near,
without speaking. The wind dragged a shirt-sleeve from the 'popple' or
pebble which held it down. Pierston stooped and put a heavier one in its
place.

'Thank you,' she said quietly. She turned up her hazel eyes, and seemed
gratified to perceive that her assistant was Pierston. She had
plainly been so wrapped in her own thoughts--gloomy thoughts, by their
signs--that she had not considered him till then.

The young girl continued to converse with him in friendly frankness,
showing neither ardour nor shyness. As for love--it was evidently
further from her mind than even death and dissolution.

When one of the sheets became intractable Jocelyn said, 'Do you hold it
down, and I'll put the popples.'

She acquiesced, and in placing a pebble his hand touched hers.

It was a young hand, rather long and thin, a little damp and coddled
from her slopping. In setting down the last stone he laid it, by a pure
accident, rather heavily on her fingers.

'I am very, very sorry!' Jocelyn exclaimed. 'O, I have bruised the skin,
Avice!' He seized her fingers to examine the damage done.

'No, sir, you haven't!' she cried luminously, allowing him to retain her
hand without the least objection. 'Why--that's where I scratched it this
morning with a pin. You didn't hurt me a bit with the popple-stone!'

Although her gown was purple, there was a little black crape bow upon
each arm. He knew what it meant, and it saddened him. 'Do you ever visit
your mother's grave?' he asked.

'Yes, sir, sometimes. I am going there tonight to water the daisies.'

She had now finished here, and they parted. That evening, when the sky
was red, he emerged by the garden-door and passed her house. The blinds
were not down, and he could see her sewing within. While he paused
she sprang up as if she had forgotten the hour, and tossed on her
hat. Jocelyn strode ahead and round the corner, and was halfway up the
straggling street before he discerned her little figure behind him.

He hastened past the lads and young women with clinking buckets who were
drawing water from the fountains by the wayside, and took the direction
of the church. With the disappearance of the sun the lighthouse had
again set up its flame against the sky, the dark church rising in the
foreground. Here he allowed her to overtake him.

'You loved your mother much?' said Jocelyn.

'I did, sir; of course I did,' said the girl, who tripped so lightly
that it seemed he might have carried her on his hand.

Pierston wished to say, 'So did I,' but did not like to disclose events
which she, apparently, never guessed. Avice fell into thought, and
continued--

'Mother had a very sad life for some time when she was about as old as
I. I should not like mine to be as hers. Her young man proved false to
her because she wouldn't agree to meet him one night, and it grieved
mother almost all her life. I wouldn't ha' fretted about him, if I'd
been she. She would never name his name, but I know he was a wicked,
cruel man; and I hate to think of him.'

After this he could not go into the churchyard with her, and walked
onward alone to the south of the isle. He was wretched for hours. Yet he
would not have stood where he did stand in the ranks of an imaginative
profession if he had not been at the mercy of every haunting of the
fancy that can beset man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen and
a national-unit that his strength lay as an artist, and he felt it
childish to complain of susceptibilities not only innate but cultivated.

But he was paying dearly enough for his Liliths. He saw a terrible
vengeance ahead. What had he done to be tormented like this? The
Beloved, after flitting from Nichola Pine-Avon to the phantom of a dead
woman whom he never adored in her lifetime, had taken up her abode in
the living representative of the dead, with a permanence of hold which
the absolute indifference of that little brown-eyed representative only
seemed to intensify.

Did he really wish to proceed to marriage with this chit of a girl? He
did: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied her
he saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment,
hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commoner
in character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First.
But twenty years make a difference in ideals, and the added demands of
middle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessions
as to the spiritual content. He looked at himself in the glass, and
felt glad at those inner deficiencies in Avice which formerly would have
impelled him to reject her.

There was a strange difference in his regard of his present folly and of
his love in his youthful time. Now he could be mad with method, knowing
it to be madness: then he was compelled to make believe his madness
wisdom. In those days any flash of reason upon his loved one's
imperfections was blurred over hastily and with fear. Such penetrative
vision now did not cool him. He knew he was the creature of a tendency;
and passively acquiesced.

To use a practical eye, it appeared that, as he had once thought, this
Caro family--though it might not for centuries, or ever, furbish up
an individual nature which would exactly, ideally, supplement his own
imperfect one and round with it the perfect whole--was yet the only
family he had ever met, or was likely to meet, which possessed the
materials for her making. It was as if the Caros had found the clay but
not the potter, while other families whose daughters might attract him
had found the potter but not the clay.




2. VIII. HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM

From his roomy castle and its grounds and the cliffs hard by he could
command every move and aspect of her who was the rejuvenated Spirit
of the Past to him--in the effulgence of whom all sordid details were
disregarded.

Among other things he observed that she was often anxious when it
rained. If, after a wet day, a golden streak appeared in the sky over
Deadman's Bay, under a lid of cloud, her manner was joyous and her tread
light.

This puzzled him; and he found that if he endeavoured to encounter her
at these times she shunned him--stealthily and subtly, but unmistakably.
One evening, when she had left her cottage and tripped off in the
direction of the under-hill townlet, he set out by the same route,
resolved to await her return along the high roadway which stretched
between that place and East Quarriers.

He reached the top of the old road where it makes a sudden descent to
the townlet, but she did not appear. Turning back, he sauntered along
till he had nearly reached his own house again. Then he retraced his
steps, and in the dim night he walked backwards and forwards on the
bare and lofty convex of the isle; the stars above and around him, the
lighthouse on duty at the distant point, the lightship winking from
the sandbank, the combing of the pebble beach by the tide beneath, the
church away south-westward, where the island fathers lay.

He walked the wild summit till his legs ached, and his heart ached--till
he seemed to hear on the upper wind the stones of the slingers whizzing
past, and the voices of the invaders who annihilated them, and married
their wives and daughters, and produced Avice as the ultimate flower of
the combined stocks. Still she did not come. It was more than foolish to
wait, yet he could not help waiting. At length he discerned a dot of a
figure, which he knew to be hers rather by its motion than by its shape.

How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of
substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities--the
sky, the rock, and the ocean--the minute personality of this washer-girl
filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous
inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein.

But all at once the approaching figure had disappeared. He looked about;
she had certainly vanished. At one side of the road was a low wall, but
she could not have gone behind that without considerable trouble and
singular conduct. He looked behind him; she had reappeared further on
the road.

Jocelyn Pierston hurried after; and, discerning his movement, Avice
stood still. When he came up, she was slily shaking with restrained
laughter.

'Well, what does this mean, my dear girl?' he asked.

Her inner mirth escaping in spite of her she turned askance and said:
'When you was following me to Street o' Wells, two hours ago, I looked
round and saw you, and huddied behind a stone! You passed and brushed
my frock without seeing me. And when, on my way backalong, I saw you
waiting hereabout again, I slipped over the wall, and ran past you! If
I had not stopped and looked round at 'ee, you would never have catched
me!'

'What did you do that for, you elf!'

'That you shouldn't find me.'

'That's not exactly a reason. Give another, dear Avice,' he said, as he
turned and walked beside her homeward.

She hesitated. 'Come!' he urged again.

''Twas because I thought you wanted to be my young man,' she answered.

'What a wild thought of yours! Supposing I did, wouldn't you have me?'

'Not now.... And not for long, even if it had been sooner than now.'

'Why?'

'If I tell you, you won't laugh at me or let anybody else know?'

'Never.'

'Then I will tell you,' she said quite seriously. ''Tis because I get
tired o' my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in one
young man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder,
and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs up
somewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I have
loved FIFTEEN a'ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say,' she
repeated, laughing. 'I can't help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it
is really, to ME, the same one all through, on'y I can't catch him!' She
added anxiously, 'You won't tell anybody o' this in me, will you, sir?
Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me.'

Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here was this obscure and almost
illiterate girl engaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, just as
he had been himself doing for the last twenty years. She was doing it
quite involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her organization, puzzled all
the while at her own instinct. He suddenly thought of its bearing upon
himself, and said, with a sinking heart--

'Am I--one of them?'

She pondered critically.

'You was; for a week; when I first saw you.'

'Only a week?'

'About that.'

'What made the being of your fancy forsake my form and go elsewhere?'

'Well--though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first--'

'Yes?'

'I found you too old soon after.'

'You are a candid young person.'

'But you asked me, sir!' she expostulated.

'I did; and, having been answered, I won't intrude upon you longer. So
cut along home as fast as you can. It is getting late.'

When she had passed out of earshot he also followed homewards. This
seeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife which
could cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing: to be one of the
corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; and
this was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days.

The startling parallel in the idiosyncracies of Avice and
himself--evinced by the elusiveness of the Beloved with her as with
him--meant probably that there had been some remote ancestor common
to both families, from whom the trait had latently descended and
recrudesced. But the result was none the less disconcerting.

Drawing near his own gate he smelt tobacco, and could discern two
figures in the side lane leading past Avice's door. They did not,
however, enter her house, but strolled onward to the narrow pass
conducting to Red-King Castle and the sea. He was in momentary heaviness
at the thought that they might be Avice with a worthless lover, but a
faintly argumentative tone from the man informed him that they were the
same married couple going homeward whom he had encountered on a previous
occasion.

The next day he gave the servants a half-holiday to get the pretty Avice
into the castle again for a few hours, the better to observe her. While
she was pulling down the blinds at sunset a whistle of peculiar quality
came from some point on the cliffs outside the lawn. He observed that
her colour rose slightly, though she bustled about as if she had noticed
nothing.

Pierston suddenly suspected that she had not only fifteen past admirers
but a current one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimulated now by
ancient memories and present tenderness to use every effort to make her
his wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he strung himself up to
sift this mystery. If he could only win her--and how could a country
girl refuse such an opportunity?--he could pack her off to school for
two or three years, marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, and
take his chance of the rest. As to her want of ardour for him--so sadly
in contrast with her sainted mother's affection--a man twenty years
older than his bride could expect no better, and he would be well
content to put up with it in the pleasure of possessing one in whom
seemed to linger as an aroma all the charm of his youth and his early
home.




2. IX. JUXTAPOSITIONS

It was a sad and leaden afternoon, and Pierston paced up the long, steep
pass or street of the Wells. On either side of the road young girls
stood with pitchers at the fountains which bubbled there, and behind the
houses forming the propylaea of the rock rose the massive forehead of
the Isle--crested at this part with its enormous ramparts as with a
mural crown.

As you approach the upper end of the street all progress seems about to
be checked by the almost vertical face of the escarpment. Into it your
track apparently runs point-blank: a confronting mass which, if it were
to slip down, would overwhelm the whole town. But in a moment you find
that the road, the old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns at a
sharp angle when it reaches the base of the scarp, and ascends in the
stiffest of inclines to the right. To the left there is also another
ascending road, modern, almost as steep as the first, and perfectly
straight. This is the road to the forts.

Pierston arrived at the forking of the ways, and paused for breath.
Before turning to the right, his proper and picturesque course, he
looked up the uninteresting left road to the fortifications. It was new,
long, white, regular, tapering to a vanishing point, like a lesson in
perspective. About a quarter of the way up a girl was resting beside a
basket of white linen: and by the shape of her hat and the nature of her
burden he recognized her.

She did not see him, and abandoning the right-hand course he slowly
ascended the incline she had taken. He observed that her attention was
absorbed by something aloft. He followed the direction of her gaze.
Above them towered the green-grey mountain of grassy stone, here
levelled at the top by military art. The skyline was broken every now
and then by a little peg-like object--a sentry-box; and near one of
these a small red spot kept creeping backwards and forwards monotonously
against the heavy sky.

Then he divined that she had a soldier-lover.

She turned her head, saw him, and took up her clothes-basket to continue
the ascent. The steepness was such that to climb it unencumbered was a
breathless business; the linen made her task a cruelty to her. 'You'll
never get to the forts with that weight,' he said. 'Give it to me.'

But she would not, and he stood still, watching her as she panted up the
way; for the moment an irradiated being, the epitome of a whole sex: by
the beams of his own infatuation

     '....... robed in such exceeding glory
      That he beheld her not;'

beheld her not as she really was, as she was even to himself sometimes.
But to the soldier what was she? Smaller and smaller she waned up the
rigid mathematical road, still gazing at the soldier aloft, as Pierston
gazed at her. He could just discern sentinels springing up at the
different coigns of vantage that she passed, but seeing who she was they
did not intercept her; and presently she crossed the drawbridge over the
enormous chasm surrounding the forts, passed the sentries there also,
and disappeared through the arch into the interior. Pierston could not
see the sentry now, and there occurred to him the hateful idea that this
scarlet rival was meeting and talking freely to her, the unprotected
orphan girl of his sweet original Avice; perhaps, relieved of duty,
escorting her across the interior, carrying her basket, her tender body
encircled by his arm.

'What the devil are you staring at, as if you were in a trance?'

Pierston turned his head: and there stood his old friend Somers--still
looking the long-leased bachelor that he was.

'I might say what the devil do you do here? if I weren't so glad to see
you.'

Somers said that he had come to see what was detaining his friend in
such an out-of-the-way place at that time of year, and incidentally to
get some fresh air into his own lungs. Pierston made him welcome, and
they went towards Sylvania Castle.

'You were staring, as far as I could see, at a pretty little washerwoman
with a basket of clothes?' resumed the painter.

'Yes; it was that to you, but not to me. Behind the mere pretty
island-girl (to the world) is, in my eye, the Idea, in Platonic
phraseology--the essence and epitome of all that is desirable in this
existence.... I am under a doom, Somers. Yes, I am under a doom. To have
been always following a phantom whom I saw in woman after woman while
she was at a distance, but vanishing away on close approach, was bad
enough; but now the terrible thing is that the phantom does NOT vanish,
but stays to tantalize me even when I am near enough to see what it is!
That girl holds me, THOUGH my eyes are open, and THOUGH I see that I am
a fool!'

Somers regarded the visionary look of his friend, which rather
intensified than decreased as his years wore on, but made no further
remark. When they reached the castle Somers gazed round upon the
scenery, and Pierston, signifying the quaint little Elizabethan cottage,
said: 'That's where she lives.'

'What a romantic place!--and this island altogether. A man might love a
scarecrow or turnip-lantern here.'

'But a woman mightn't. Scenery doesn't impress them, though they pretend
it does. This girl is as fickle as--'

'You once were.'

'Exactly--from your point of view. She has told me so--candidly. And it
hits me hard.'

Somers stood still in sudden thought. 'Well--that IS a strange turning
of the tables!' he said. 'But you wouldn't really marry her, Pierston?'

'I would--to-morrow. Why shouldn't I? What are fame and name and society
to me--a descendant of wreckers and smugglers, like her. Besides, I know
what she's made of, my boy, to her innermost fibre; I know the perfect
and pure quarry she was dug from: and that gives a man confidence.'

'Then you'll win.'


                    *          *          *


While they were sitting after dinner that evening their quiet discourse
was interrupted by the long low whistle from the cliffs without. Somers
took no notice, but Pierston marked it. That whistle always occurred
at the same time in the evening when Avice was helping in the house. He
excused himself for a moment to his visitor and went out upon the dark
lawn. A crunching of feet upon the gravel mixed in with the articulation
of the sea--steps light as if they were winged. And he supposed, two
minutes later, that the mouth of some hulking fellow was upon hers,
which he himself hardly ventured to look at, so touching was its young
beauty.

Hearing people about--among others the before-mentioned married couple
quarrelling, the woman's tones having a kinship to Avice's own--he
returned to the house. Next day Somers roamed abroad to look for scenery
for a marine painting, and, going out to seek him, Pierston met Avice.

'So you have a lover, my lady!' he said severely. She admitted that it
was the fact. 'You won't stick to him,' he continued.

'I think I may to THIS one,' said she, in a meaning tone that he failed
to fathom then. 'He deserted me once, but he won't again.'

'I suppose he's a wonderful sort of fellow?'

'He's good enough for me.'

'So handsome, no doubt.'

'Handsome enough for me.'

'So refined and respectable.'

'Refined and respectable enough for me.'

He could not disturb her equanimity, and let her pass. The next day
was Sunday, and Somers having chosen his view at the other end of the
island, Pierston determined in the afternoon to see Avice's lover. He
found that she had left her cottage stronghold, and went on towards the
lighthouses at the Beal. Turning back when he had reached the nearest,
he saw on the lonely road between the quarries a young man evidently
connected with the stone trade, with Avice the Second upon his arm.

She looked prettily guilty and blushed a little under his glance.
The man's was one of the typical island physiognomies--his features
energetic and wary in their expression, and half covered with a close,
crisp black beard. Pierston fancied that out of his keen dark eyes there
glimmered a dry sense of humour at the situation.

If so, Avice must have told him of Pierston's symptoms of tenderness.
This girl, whom, for her dear mother's sake more than for her own
unquestionable attractiveness, he would have guarded as the apple of his
eye, how could she estimate him so flippantly!

The mortification of having brought himself to this position with the
antitype, by his early slight of the type, blinded him for the moment to
what struck him a short time after. The man upon whose arm she hung was
not a soldier. What, then, became of her entranced gaze at the sentinel?
She could hardly have transferred her affections so promptly; or, to
give her the benefit of his own theory, her Beloved could scarcely have
flitted from frame to frame in so very brief an interval. And which of
them had been he who whistled softly in the dusk to her?

Without further attempt to find Alfred Somers Pierston walked homeward,
moodily thinking that the desire to make reparation to the original
woman by wedding and enriching the copy--which lent such an
unprecedented permanence to his new love--was thwarted, as if by set
intention of his destiny.

At the door of the grounds about the castle there stood a carriage.
He observed that it was not one of the homely flys from the under-hill
town, but apparently from the popular resort across the bay.
Wondering why the visitor had not driven in he entered, to find in the
drawing-room Nichola Pine-Avon.

At his first glance upon her, fashionably dressed and graceful in
movement, she seemed beautiful; at the second, when he observed that her
face was pale and agitated, she seemed pathetic likewise. Altogether,
she was now a very different figure from her who, sitting in her chair
with such finished composure, had snubbed him in her drawing-room in
Hamptonshire Square.

'You are surprised at this? Of course you are!' she said, in a low,
pleading voice, languidly lifting her heavy eyelids, while he was
holding her hand. 'But I couldn't help it! I know I have done something
to offend you--have I not? O! what can it be, that you have come away to
this outlandish rock, to live with barbarians in the midst of the London
season?'

'You have not offended me, dear Mrs. Pine-Avon,' he said. 'How sorry I
am that you should have supposed it! Yet I am glad, too, that your fancy
should have done me the good turn of bringing you here to see me.'

'I am staying at Budmouth-Regis,' she explained.

'Then I did see you at a church-service here a little while back?'

She blushed faintly upon her pallor, and she sighed. Their eyes met.
'Well,' she said at last, 'I don't know why I shouldn't show the virtue
of candour. You know what it means. I was the stronger once; now I am
the weaker. Whatever pain I may have given you in the ups and downs of
our acquaintance I am sorry for, and would willingly repair all errors
of the past by--being amenable to reason in the future.'

It was impossible that Jocelyn should not feel a tender impulsion
towards this attractive and once independent woman, who from every
worldly point of view was an excellent match for him--a superior match,
indeed, except in money. He took her hand again and held it awhile, and
a faint wave of gladness seemed to flow through her. But no--he could go
no further. That island girl, in her coquettish Sunday frock and little
hat with its bunch of cock's feathers held him as by strands of Manila
rope. He dropped Nichola's hand.

'I am leaving Budmouth to-morrow,' she said. 'That was why I felt I
must call. You did not know I had been there all through the Whitsun
holidays?'

'I did not, indeed; or I should have come to see you.'.

'I didn't like to write. I wish I had, now!'

'I wish you had, too, dear Mrs. Pine-Avon.'

But it was 'Nichola' that she wanted to be. As they reached the landau
he told her that he should be back in town himself again soon, and would
call immediately. At the moment of his words Avice Caro, now alone,
passed close along by the carriage on the other side, towards her house
hard at hand. She did not turn head or eye to the pair: they seemed to
be in her view objects of indifference.

Pierston became cold as a stone. The chill towards Nichola that the
presence of the girl,--sprite, witch, troll that she was--brought with
it came like a doom. He knew what a fool he was, as he had said. But he
was powerless in the grasp of the idealizing passion. He cared more for
Avice's finger-tips than for Mrs. Pine-Avon's whole personality.

Perhaps Nichola saw it, for she said mournfully: 'Now I have done all
I could! I felt that the only counterpoise to my cruelty to you in my
drawing-room would be to come as a suppliant to yours.'

'It is most handsome and noble of you, my very dear friend!' said he,
with an emotion of courtesy rather than of enthusiasm.

Then adieux were spoken, and she drove away. But Pierston saw only the
retreating Avice, and knew that he was helpless in her hands. The church
of the island had risen near the foundations of the Pagan temple, and
a Christian emanation from the former might be wrathfully torturing him
through the very false gods to whom he had devoted himself both in
his craft, like Demetrius of Ephesus, and in his heart. Perhaps Divine
punishment for his idolatries had come.




2. X. SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL

Pierston had not turned far back towards the castle when he was
overtaken by Somers and the man who carried his painting lumber. They
paced together to the door; the man deposited the articles and went
away, and the two walked up and down before entering.

'I met an extremely interesting woman in the road out there,' said the
painter.

'Ah, she is! A sprite, a sylph; Psyche indeed!'

'I was struck with her.'

'It shows how beauty will out through the homeliest guise.'

'Yes, it will; though not always. And this case doesn't prove it, for
the lady's attire was in the latest and most approved taste.'

'Oh, you mean the lady who was driving?'

'Of course. What, were you thinking of the pretty little cottage-girl
outside here? I did meet her, but what's she? Very well for one's
picture, though hardly for one's fireside. This lady--'

'Is Mrs. Pine-Avon. A kind, proud woman, who'll do what people with
no pride would not condescend to think of. She is leaving Budmouth
to-morrow, and she drove across to see me. You know how things seemed to
be going with us at one time? But I am no good to any woman. She's
been very generous towards me, which I've not been to her.... She'll
ultimately throw herself away upon some wretch unworthy of her, no
doubt.'

'Do you think so?' murmured Somers. After a while he said abruptly,
'I'll marry her myself, if she'll have me. I like the look of her.'

'I wish you would, Alfred, or rather could! She has long had an idea
of slipping out of the world of fashion into the world of art. She is a
woman of individuality and earnest instincts. I am in real trouble about
her. I won't say she can be won--it would be ungenerous of me to say
that. But try. I can bring you together easily.'

'I'll marry her, if she's willing!' With the phlegmatic dogmatism that
was part of him, Somers added: 'When you have decided to marry, take the
first nice woman you meet. They are all alike.'

'Well--you don't know her yet,' replied Jocelyn, who could give praise
where he could not give love.

'But you do, and I'll take her on the strength of your judgment. Is she
really handsome?--I had but the merest glance. But I know she is, or she
wouldn't have caught your discriminating eye.'

'You may take my word for it; she looks as well at hand as afar.'

'What colour are her eyes?'

'Her eyes? I don't go much in for colour, being professionally sworn to
form. But, let me see--grey; and her hair rather light than dark brown.'

'I wanted something darker,' said Somers airily. 'There are so many fair
models among native Englishwomen. Still, blondes are useful property!...
Well, well; this is flippancy. But I liked the look of her.'


                    *          *          *


Somers had gone back to town. It was a wet day on the little peninsula:
but Pierston walked out as far as the garden-house of his hired castle,
where he sat down and smoked. This erection being on the boundary-wall
of his property his ear could now and then catch the tones of Avice's
voice from her open-doored cottage in the lane which skirted his fence;
and he noticed that there were no modulations in it. He knew why that
was. She wished to go out, and could not. He had observed before that
when she was planning an outing a particular note would come into her
voice during the preceding hours: a dove's roundness of sound; no doubt
the effect upon her voice of her thoughts of her lover, or lovers. Yet
the latter it could not be. She was pure and singlehearted: half an eye
could see that. Whence, then, the two men? Possibly the quarrier was a
relation.

There seemed reason in this when, going out into the lane, he
encountered one of the red jackets he had been thinking of. Soldiers
were seldom seen in this outer part of the isle: their beat from the
forts, when on pleasure, was in the opposite direction, and this man
must have had a special reason for coming hither. Pierston surveyed him.
He was a round-faced, good-humoured fellow to look at, having two little
pieces of moustache on his upper lip, like a pair of minnows rampant,
and small black eyes, over which the Glengarry cap straddled flat. It
was a hateful idea that her tender cheek should be kissed by the lips
of this heavy young man, who had never been sublimed by a single battle,
even with defenceless savages.

The soldier went before her house, looked at the door, and moved on down
the crooked way to the cliffs, where there was a path back to the forts.
But he did not adopt it, returning by the way he had come. This showed
his wish to pass the house again. She gave no sign, however, and the
soldier disappeared.

Pierston could not be satisfied that Avice was in the house, and he
crossed over to the front of her little freehold and tapped at the door,
which stood ajar.

Nobody came: hearing a slight movement within he crossed the threshold.
Avice was there alone, sitting on a low stool in a dark corner, as
though she wished to be unobserved by any casual passer-by. She looked
up at him without emotion or apparent surprise; but he could then see
that she was crying. The view, for the first time, of distress in
an unprotected young girl towards whom he felt drawn by ties of
extraordinary delicacy and tenderness, moved Pierston beyond measure. He
entered without ceremony.

'Avice, my dear girl!' he said. 'Something is the matter!'

She looked assent, and he went on: 'Now tell me all about it. Perhaps I
can help you. Come, tell me.'

'I can't!' she murmured. 'Grammer Stockwool is upstairs, and she'll
hear!' Mrs. Stockwool was the old woman who had come to live with the
girl for company since her mother's death.

'Then come into my garden opposite. There we shall be quite private.'

She rose, put on her hat, and accompanied him to the door. Here she
asked him if the lane were empty, and on his assuring her that it was
she crossed over and entered with him through the garden-wall.

The place was a shady and secluded one, though through the boughs the
sea could be seen quite near at hand, its moanings being distinctly
audible. A water-drop from a tree fell here and there, but the rain was
not enough to hurt them.

'Now let me hear it,' he said soothingly. 'You may tell me with the
greatest freedom. I was a friend of your mother's, you know. That is, I
knew her; and I'll be a friend of yours.'

The statement was risky, if he wished her not to suspect him of being
her mother's false one. But that lover's name appeared to be unknown to
the present Avice.

'I can't tell you, sir,' she replied unwillingly; 'except that it has to
do with my own changeableness. The rest is the secret of somebody else.'

'I am sorry for that,' said he.

'I am getting to care for one I ought not to think of, and it means
ruin. I ought to get away!'.

'You mean from the island?'

'Yes.'

Pierston reflected. His presence in London had been desired for some
time; yet he had delayed going because of his new solicitudes here. But
to go and take her with him would afford him opportunity of watching
over her, tending her mind, and developing it; while it might remove
her from some looming danger. It was a somewhat awkward guardianship for
him, as a lonely man, to carry out; still, it could be done. He asked
her abruptly if she would really like to go away for a while.

'I like best to stay here,' she answered. 'Still, I should not mind
going somewhere, because I think I ought to.'

'Would you like London?'

Avice's face lost its weeping shape. 'How could that be?' she said.

'I have been thinking that you could come to my house and make yourself
useful in some way. I rent just now one of those new places called
flats, which you may have heard of; and I have a studio at the back.'

'I haven't heard of 'em,' she said without interest.

'Well, I have two servants there, and as my man has a holiday you can
help them for a month or two.'

'Would polishing furniture be any good? I can do that.'

'I haven't much furniture that requires polishing. But you can clear
away plaster and clay messes in the studio, and chippings of stone,
and help me in modelling, and dust all my Venus failures, and hands and
heads and feet and bones, and other objects.'

She was startled, yet attracted by the novelty of the proposal.

'Only for a time?' she said.

'Only for a time. As short as you like, and as long.'

The deliberate manner in which, after the first surprise, Avice
discussed the arrangements that he suggested, might have told him
how far was any feeling for himself beyond friendship, and possibly
gratitude, from agitating her breast. Yet there was nothing extravagant
in the discrepancy between their ages, and he hoped, after shaping her
to himself, to win her. What had grieved her to tears she would not more
particularly tell.

She had naturally not much need of preparation, but she made even less
preparation than he would have expected her to require. She seemed eager
to be off immediately, and not a soul was to know of her departure. Why,
if she were in love and at first averse to leave the island, she should
be so precipitate now he failed to understand.

But he took great care to compromise in no way a girl in whom his
interest was as protective as it was passionate. He accordingly left her
to get out of the island alone, awaiting her at a station a few miles
up the railway, where, discovering himself to her through the
carriage-window, he entered the next compartment, his frame pervaded by
a glow which was almost joy at having for the first time in his charge
one who inherited the flesh and bore the name so early associated with
his own, and at the prospect of putting things right which had been
wrong through many years.




2. XI. THE IMAGE PERSISTS

It was dark when the four-wheeled cab wherein he had brought Avice from
the station stood at the entrance to the pile of flats of which Pierston
occupied one floor--rarer then as residences in London than they are
now. Leaving Avice to alight and get the luggage taken in by the porter
Pierston went upstairs. To his surprise his floor was silent, and on
entering with a latchkey the rooms were all in darkness. He descended
to the hall, where Avice was standing helpless beside the luggage, while
the porter was outside with the cabman.

'Do you know what has become of my servants?' asked Jocelyn.

'What--and ain't they there, saur? Ah, then my belief is that what I
suspected is thrue! You didn't leave your wine-cellar unlocked, did you,
saur, by no mistake?'

Pierston considered. He thought he might have left the key with his
elder servant, whom he had believed he could trust, especially as the
cellar was not well stocked.

'Ah, then it was so! She's been very queer, saur, this last week or two.
O yes, sending messages down the spakin'-tube which were like madness
itself, and ordering us this and that, till we would take no notice at
all. I see them both go out last night, and possibly they went for a
holiday not expecting ye, or maybe for good! Shure, if ye'd written,
saur, I'd ha' got the place ready, ye being out of a man, too, though
it's not me duty at all!'

When Pierston got to his floor again he found that the cellar door was
open; some bottles were standing empty that had been full, and many
abstracted altogether. All other articles in the house, however,
appeared to be intact. His letter to his housekeeper lay in the box as
the postman had left it.

By this time the luggage had been sent up in the lift; and Avice, like
so much more luggage, stood at the door, the hall-porter behind offering
his assistance.

'Come here, Avice,' said the sculptor. 'What shall we do now? Here's a
pretty state of affairs!'

Avice could suggest nothing, till she was struck with the bright thought
that she should light a fire.

'Light a fire?--ah, yes.... I wonder if we could manage. This is an odd
coincidence--and awkward!' he murmured. 'Very well, light a fire.'

'Is this the kitchen, sir, all mixed up with the parlours?'

'Yes.'

'Then I think I can do all that's wanted here for a bit; at any rate,
till you can get help, sir. At least, I could if I could find the
fuel-house. 'Tis no such big place as I thought!'

'That's right: take courage!' said he with a tender smile. 'Now, I'll
dine out this evening, and leave the place for you to arrange as best
you can with the help of the porter's wife downstairs.'

This Pierston accordingly did, and so their common residence began.
Feeling more and more strongly that some danger awaited her in her
native island he determined not to send her back till the lover or
lovers who seemed to trouble her should have cooled off. He was quite
willing to take the risk of his action thus far in his solicitous regard
for her.


                    *          *           *


It was a dual solitude, indeed; for, though Pierston and Avice were the
only two people in the flat, they did not keep each other company, the
former being as scrupulously fearful of going near her now that he had
the opportunity as he had been prompt to seek her when he had none. They
lived in silence, his messages to her being frequently written on scraps
of paper deposited where she could see them. It was not without a pang
that he noted her unconsciousness of their isolated position--a position
to which, had she experienced any reciprocity of sentiment, she would
readily have been alive.

Considering that, though not profound, she was hardly a matter-of-fact
girl as that phrase is commonly understood, she was exasperating in the
matter-of-fact quality of her responses to the friendly remarks which
would escape him in spite of himself, as well as in her general conduct.
Whenever he formed some culinary excuse for walking across the few yards
of tessellated hall which separated his room from the kitchen, and spoke
through the doorway to her, she answered, 'Yes, sir,' or 'No, sir,'
without turning her eyes from the particular work that she was engaged
in.

In the usual course he would have obtained a couple of properly
qualified servants immediately; but he lived on with the one, or rather
the less than one, that this cottage-girl afforded. It had been his
almost invariable custom to dine at one of his clubs. Now he sat at home
over the miserable chop or steak to which he limited himself in dread
lest she should complain of there being too much work for one person,
and demand to be sent home. A charwoman came every two or three days,
effecting an extraordinary consumption of food and alcoholic liquids:
yet it was not for this that Pierston dreaded her presence, but lest, in
conversing with Avice, she should open the girl's eyes to the oddity of
her situation. Avice could see for herself that there must have been two
or three servants in the flat during his former residence there: but his
reasons for doing without them seemed never to strike her.

His intention had been to keep her occupied exclusively at the studio,
but accident had modified this. However, he sent her round one morning,
and entering himself shortly after found her engaged in wiping the
layers of dust from the casts and models.

The colour of the dust never ceased to amaze her. 'It is like the hold
of a Budmouth collier,' she said, 'and the beautiful faces of these clay
people are quite spoilt by it.'

'I suppose you'll marry some day, Avice?' remarked Pierston, as he
regarded her thoughtfully.

'Some do and some don't,' she said, with a reserved smile, still
attending to the casts.'

'You are very offhand,' said he.

She archly weighed that remark without further speech. It was
tantalizing conduct in the face of his instinct to cherish her;
especially when he regarded the charm of her bending profile; the
well-characterized though softly lined nose, the round chin with, as
it were, a second leap in its curve to the throat, and the sweep of the
eyelashes over the rosy cheek during the sedulously lowered glance. How
futilely he had laboured to express the character of that face in clay,
and, while catching it in substance, had yet lost something that was
essential!

That evening after dusk, in the stress of writing letters, he sent
her out for stamps. She had been absent some quarter of an hour when,
suddenly drawing himself up from over his writing-table, it flashed upon
him that he had absolutely forgotten her total ignorance of London.

The head post-office, to which he had sent her because it was late,
was two or three streets off, and he had made his request in the most
general manner, which she had acceded to with alacrity enough. How could
he have done such an unreflecting thing?

Pierston went to the window. It was half-past nine o'clock, and owing to
her absence the blinds were not down. He opened the casement and stepped
out upon the balcony. The green shade of his lamp screened its rays from
the gloom without. Over the opposite square the moon hung, and to the
right there stretched a long street, filled with a diminishing array of
lamps, some single, some in clusters, among them an occasional blue or
red one. From a corner came the notes of a piano-organ strumming out a
stirring march of Rossini's. The shadowy black figures of pedestrians
moved up, down, and across the embrowned roadway. Above the roofs was a
bank of livid mist, and higher a greenish-blue sky, in which stars were
visible, though its lower part was still pale with daylight, against
which rose chimney-pots in the form of elbows, prongs, and fists.

From the whole scene proceeded a ground rumble, miles in extent, upon
which individual rattles, voices, a tin whistle, the bark of a dog, rode
like bubbles on a sea. The whole noise impressed him with the sense that
no one in its enormous mass ever required rest.

In this illimitable ocean of humanity there was a unit of existence, his
Avice, wandering alone.

Pierston looked at his watch. She had been gone half an hour. It was
impossible to distinguish her at this distance, even if she approached.
He came inside, and putting on his hat determined to go out and seek
her. He reached the end of the street, and there was nothing of her to
be seen. She had the option of two or three routes from this point to
the post-office; yet he plunged at random into one, till he reached the
office to find it quite deserted. Almost distracted now by his anxiety
for her he retreated as rapidly as he had come, regaining home only to
find that she had not returned.

He recollected telling her that if she should ever lose her way she must
call a cab and drive home. It occurred to him that this was what she
would do now. He again went out upon the balcony; the dignified street
in which he lived was almost vacant, and the lamps stood like placed
sentinels awaiting some procession which tarried long. At a point under
him where the road was torn up there stood a red light, and at
the corner two men were talking in leisurely repose, as if sunning
themselves at noonday. Lovers of a feline disposition, who were never
seen by daylight, joked and darted at each other in and out of area
gates.

His attention was fixed on the cabs, and he held his breath as the
hollow clap of each horse's hoofs drew near the front of the house, only
to go onward into the square. The two lamps of each vehicle afar dilated
with its near approach, and seemed to swerve towards him. It was Avice
surely? No, it passed by.

Almost frantic he again descended and let himself out of the house,
moving towards a more central part, where the roar still continued.
Before emerging into the noisy thoroughfare he observed a small figure
approaching leisurely along the opposite side, and hastened across to
find it was she.




2. XII. A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN

'O Avice!' he cried, with the tenderly subdued scolding of a mother.
'What is this you have done to alarm me so!'

She seemed unconscious of having done anything, and was altogether
surprised at his anxiety. In his relief he did not speak further till he
asked her suddenly if she would take his arm since she must be tired.

'O no, sir!' she assured him, 'I am not a bit tired, and I don't require
any help at all, thank you.'

They went upstairs without using the lift, and he let her and himself in
with his latchkey. She entered the kitchen, and he, following, sat down
in a chair there.

'Where have you been?' he said, with almost angered concern on his face.
'You ought not to have been absent more than ten minutes.'

'I knew there was nothing for me to do, and thought I should like to see
a little of London,' she replied naively. 'So when I had got the stamps
I went on into the fashionable streets, where ladies are all walking
about just as if it were daytime! 'Twas for all the world like coming
home by night from Martinmas Fair at the Street o' Wells, only more
genteel.'

'O Avice, Avice, you must not go out like this! Don't you know that I am
responsible for your safety? I am your--well, guardian, in fact, and am
bound by law and morals, and I don't know what-all, to deliver you up to
your native island without a scratch or blemish. And yet you indulge in
such a midnight vagary as this!'

'But I am sure, sir, the gentlemen in the street were more respectable
than they are anywhere at home! They were dressed in the latest fashion,
and would have scorned to do me any harm; and as to their love-making, I
never heard anything so polite before.'

'Well, you must not do it again. I'll tell you some day why. What's that
you have in your hand?'

'A mouse-trap. There are lots of mice in this kitchen--sooty mice, not
clean like ours--and I thought I'd try to catch them. That was what I
went so far to buy, as there were no shops open just about here. I'll
set it now.'

She proceeded at once to do so, and Pierston remained in his seat
regarding the operation, which seemed entirely to engross her. It
was extraordinary, indeed, to observe how she wilfully limited her
interests; with what content she received the ordinary things that life
offered, and persistently refused to behold what an infinitely extended
life lay open to her through him. If she had only said the word he would
have got a licence and married her the next morning. Was it possible
that she did not perceive this tendency in him? She could hardly be a
woman if she did not; and in her airy, elusive, offhand demeanour she
was very much of a woman indeed.

'It only holds one mouse,' he said absently.

'But I shall hear it throw in the night, and set it again.'

He sighed and left her to her own resources and retired to rest, though
he felt no tendency to sleep. At some small hour of the darkness,
owing, possibly, to some intervening door being left open, he heard
the mouse-trap click. Another light sleeper must have heard it too, for
almost immediately after the pit-pat of naked feet, accompanied by the
brushing of drapery, was audible along the passage towards the kitchen.
After her absence in that apartment long enough to reset the trap, he
was startled by a scream from the same quarter. Pierston sprang out of
bed, jumped into his dressing-gown, and hastened in the direction of the
cry.

Avice, barefooted and wrapped in a shawl, was standing in a chair; the
mouse-trap lay on the floor, the mouse running round and round in its
neighbourhood.

'I was trying to take en out,' said she excitedly, 'and he got away from
me!'

Pierston secured the mouse while she remained standing on the chair.
Then, having set the trap anew, his feeling burst out petulantly--

'A girl like you to throw yourself away upon such a commonplace fellow
as that quarryman! Why do you do it!'

Her mind was so intently fixed upon the matter in hand that it was
some moments before she caught his irrelevant subject. 'Because I am a
foolish girl,' she said quietly.

'What! Don't you love him?' said Jocelyn, with a surprised stare up at
her as she stood, in her concern appearing the very Avice who had kissed
him twenty years earlier.

'It is not much use to talk about that,' said she.

'Then, is it the soldier?'

'Yes, though I have never spoken to him.'

'Never spoken to the soldier?'

'Never.'

'Has either one treated you badly--deceived you?'

'No. Certainly not.'

'Well, I can't make you out; and I don't wish to know more than you
choose to tell me. Come, Avice, why not tell me exactly how things are?'

'Not now, sir!' she said, her pretty pink face and brown eyes turned in
simple appeal to him from her pedestal. 'I will tell you all to-morrow;
an that I will!'

He retreated to his own room and lay down meditating. Some quarter of an
hour after she had retreated to hers the mouse-trap clicked again, and
Pierston raised himself on his elbow to listen. The place was so still
and the jerry-built door-panels so thin that he could hear the mouse
jumping about inside the wires of the trap. But he heard no footstep
this time. As he was wakeful and restless he again arose, proceeded
to the kitchen with a light, and removing the mouse reset the trap.
Returning he listened once more. He could see in the far distance the
door of Avice's room; but that thoughtful housewife had not heard the
second capture. From the room came a soft breathing like that of an
infant.

He entered his own chamber and reclined himself gloomily enough. Her
lack of all consciousness of him, the aspect of the deserted kitchen,
the cold grate, impressed him with a deeper sense of loneliness than he
had ever felt before.

Foolish he was, indeed, to be so devoted to this young woman. Her
defencelessness, her freedom from the least thought that there lurked a
danger in their propinquity, were in fact secondary safeguards, not much
less strong than that of her being her mother's image, against risk to
her from him. Yet it was out of this that his depression came.

At sight of her the next morning Pierston felt that he must put an end
to such a state of things. He sent Avice off to the studio, wrote to an
agent for a couple of servants, and then went round to his work. Avice
was busy righting all that she was allowed to touch. It was the girl's
delight to be occupied among the models and casts, which for the first
time she regarded with the wistful interest of a soul struggling to
receive ideas of beauty vaguely discerned yet ever eluding her. That
brightness in her mother's mind which might have descended to the second
Avice with the maternal face and form, had been dimmed by admixture with
the mediocrity of her father's, and by one who remembered like Pierston
the dual organization the opposites could be often seen wrestling
internally.

They were alone in the studio, and his feelings found vent. Putting his
arms round her he said, 'My darling, sweet little Avice! I want to ask
you something--surely you guess what? I want to know this: will you be
married to me, and live here with me always and ever?'

'O, Mr. Pierston, what nonsense!'

'Nonsense?' said he, shrinking somewhat.

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, why? Am I too old? Surely there's no serious difference?'

'O no--I should not mind that if it came to marrying. The difference
is not much for husband and wife, though it is rather much for keeping
company.'

She struggled to get free, and when in the movement she knocked down the
Empress Faustina's head he did not try to retain her. He saw that she
was not only surprised but a little alarmed.

'You haven't said why it is nonsense!' he remarked tartly.

'Why, I didn't know you was thinking of me like that. I hadn't any
thought of it! And all alone here! What shall I do?'

'Say yes, my pretty Avice! We'll then go out and be married at once, and
nobody be any the wiser.'

She shook her head. 'I couldn't, sir.'

'It would be well for you. You don't like me, perhaps?'

'Yes I do--very much. But not in that sort of way--quite. Still, I might
have got to love you in time, if--'

'Well, then, try,' he said warmly. 'Your mother did!'

No sooner had the words slipped out than Pierston would have recalled
them. He had felt in a moment that they jeopardized his cause.

'Mother loved you?' said Avice, incredulously gazing at him.

'Yes,' he murmured.

'You were not her false young man, surely? That one who--'

'Yes, yes! Say no more about it.'

'Who ran away from her?'

'Almost.'

'Then I can NEVER, NEVER like you again! I didn't know it was a
gentleman--I--I thought--'

'It wasn't a gentleman, then.'

'O, sir, please go away! I can't bear the sight of 'ee at this moment!
Perhaps I shall get to--to like you as I did; but--'

'No; I'm d----d if I'll go away!' said Pierston, thoroughly irritated.
'I have been candid with you; you ought to be the same with me!'

'What do you want me to tell?'

'Enough to make it clear to me why you don't accept this offer.
Everything you have said yet is a reason for the reverse. Now, my dear,
I am not angry.'

'Yes you are.'

'No I'm not. Now what is your reason?'

'The name of it is Isaac Pierston, down home.'

'How?'

'I mean he courted me, and led me on to island custom, and then I went
to chapel one morning and married him in secret, because mother didn't
care about him; and I didn't either by that time. And then he quarrelled
with me; and just before you and I came to London he went away to
Guernsey. Then I saw a soldier; I never knew his name, but I fell in
love with him because I am so quick at that! Still, as it was wrong, I
tried not to think of him, and wouldn't look at him when he passed. But
it made me cry very much that I mustn't. I was then very miserable, and
you asked me to come to London. I didn't care what I did with myself,
and I came.'

'Heaven above us!' said Pierston, his pale and distressed face showing
with what a shock this announcement had come. 'Why have you done such
extraordinary things? Or, rather, why didn't you tell me of this
before? Then, at the present moment you are the wife of a man who is in
Guernsey, whom you do not love at all; but instead of him love a soldier
whom you have never spoken to; while I have nearly brought scandal
upon us both by your letting me love you. Really, you are a very wicked
woman!'

'No, I am not!' she pouted.

Still, Avice looked pale and rather frightened, and did not lift her
eyes from the floor. 'I said it was nonsense in you to want to have me!'
she went on, 'and, even if I hadn't been married to that horrid Isaac
Pierston, I couldn't have married you after you told me that you was the
man who ran away from my mother.'

'I have paid the penalty!' he said sadly. 'Men of my sort always get
the worst of it somehow. Though I never did your mother any harm. Now,
Avice--I'll call you dear Avice for your mother's sake and not for your
own--I must see what I can do to help you out of the difficulty that
unquestionably you are in. Why can't you love your husband now you have
married him?'

Avice looked aside at the statuary as if the subtleties of her
organization were not very easy to define.

'Was he that black-bearded typical local character I saw you walking
with one Sunday? The same surname as mine; though, of course, you don't
notice that in a place where there are only half-a-dozen surnames?'

'Yes, that was Ike. It was that evening we disagreed. He scolded me, and
I answered him (you must have heard us); and the next day he went away.'

'Well, as I say, I must consider what it will be best to do for you
in this. The first thing, it seems to me, will be to get your husband
home.'

She impatiently shrugged her shoulders. 'I don't like him!'

'Then why did you marry him?'

'I was obliged to, after we'd proved each other by island custom.'

'You shouldn't have thought of such a thing. It is ridiculous and out of
date nowadays.'

'Ah, he's so old-fashioned in his notions that he doesn't think like
that. However, he's gone.'

'Ah--it is only a tiff between you, I dare say. I'll start him in
business if he'll come.... Is the cottage at home still in your hands?'

'Yes, it is my freehold. Grammer Stockwool is taking care o' it for me.'

'Good. And back there you go straightway, my pretty madam, and wait till
your husband comes to make it up with you.'

'I won't go!--I don't want him to come!' she sobbed. 'I want to stay
here with you, or anywhere, except where he can come!'

'You will get over that. Now, go back to the flat, there's a dear Avice,
and be ready in one hour, waiting in the hall for me.'

'I don't want to!'

'But I say you shall!'

She found it was no use to disobey. Precisely at the moment appointed
he met her there himself, burdened only with a valise and umbrella, she
with a box and other things. Directing the porter to put Avice and her
belongings into a four-wheeled cab for the railway-station, he walked
onward from the door, and kept looking behind, till he saw the cab
approaching. He then entered beside the astonished girl, and onward they
went together.

They sat opposite each other in an empty compartment, and the tedious
railway journey began. Regarding her closely now by the light of
her revelation he wondered at himself for never divining her secret.
Whenever he looked at her the girl's eyes grew rebellious, and at last
she wept.

'I don't want to go to him!' she sobbed in a miserable voice.

Pierston was almost as much distressed as she. 'Why did you put yourself
and me in such a position?' he said bitterly. 'It is no use to regret
it now! And I can't say that I do. It affords me a way out of a trying
position. Even if you had not been married to him you would not have
married me!'

'Yes, I would, sir.'

'What! You would? You said you wouldn't not long ago.'

'I like you better now! I like you more and more!'

Pierston sighed, for emotionally he was not much older than she. That
hitch in his development, rendering him the most lopsided of God's
creatures, was his standing misfortune. A proposal to her which crossed
his mind was dismissed as disloyalty, particularly to an inexperienced
fellow-islander and one who was by race and traditions almost a
kinswoman.

Little more passed between the twain on that wretched,
never-to-be-forgotten day. Aphrodite, Ashtaroth, Freyja, or whoever the
love-queen of his isle might have been, was punishing him sharply, as
she knew but too well how to punish her votaries when they reverted from
the ephemeral to the stable mood. When was it to end--this curse of his
heart not ageing while his frame moved naturally onward? Perhaps only
with life.

His first act the day after depositing her in her own house was to go
to the chapel where, by her statement, the marriage had been solemnized,
and make sure of the fact. Perhaps he felt an illogical hope that she
might be free, even then, in the tarnished condition which such freedom
would have involved. However, there stood the words distinctly: Isaac
Pierston, Ann Avice Caro, son and daughter of So-and-so, married on such
a day, signed by the contracting parties, the officiating minister, and
the two witnesses.




2. XIII. SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

One evening in early winter, when the air was dry and gusty, the dark
little lane which divided the grounds of Sylvania Castle from the
cottage of Avice, and led down to the adjoining ruin of Red-King Castle,
was paced by a solitary man. The cottage was the centre of his beat; its
western limit being the gates of the former residence, its eastern the
drawbridge of the ruin. The few other cottages thereabout--all as if
carved from the solid rock--were in darkness, but from the upper window
of Avice's tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated from
the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious
Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due
position as balanced opposites.

The sea moaned--more than moaned--among the boulders below the ruins,
a throe of its tide being timed to regular intervals. These sounds were
accompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottage
chamber; so that the articulate heave of water and the articulate
heave of life seemed but differing utterances of the selfsame troubled
terrestrial Being--which in one sense they were.

Pierston--for the man in the lane was he--would look from lightship to
cottage window; then back again, as he waited there between the travail
of the sea without, and the travail of the woman within. Soon an
infant's wail of the very feeblest was also audible in the house. He
started from his easy pacing, and went again westward, standing at the
elbow of the lane a long time. Then the peace of the sleeping village
which lay that way was broken by light wheels and the trot of a horse.
Pierston went back to the cottage gate and awaited the arrival of the
vehicle.

It was a light cart, and a man jumped down as it stopped. He was in a
broad-brimmed hat, under which no more of him could be perceived than
that he wore a black beard clipped like a yew fence--a typical aspect in
the island.

'You are Avice's husband?' asked the sculptor quickly.

The man replied that he was, in the local accent. 'I've just come in by
to-day's boat,' he added. 'I couldn't git here avore. I had contracted
for the job at Peter-Port, and had to see to't to the end.'

'Well,' said Pierston, 'your coming means that you are willing to make
it up with her?'

'Ay, I don't know but I be,' said the man. 'Mid so well do that as
anything else!'

'If you do, thoroughly, a good business in your old line awaits you here
in the island.'

'Wi' all my heart, then,' said the man. His voice was energetic, and,
though slightly touchy, it showed, on the whole, a disposition to set
things right.

The driver of the trap was paid off, and Jocelyn and Isaac
Pierston--undoubtedly scions of a common stock in this isle of
intermarriages, though they had no proof of it--entered the house.
Nobody was in the ground-floor room, in the centre of which stood a
square table, in the centre of the table a little wool mat, and in the
centre of the mat a lamp, the apartment having the appearance of being
rigidly swept and set in order for an event of interest.

The woman who lived in the house with Avice now came downstairs, and
to the inquiry of the comers she replied that matters were progressing
favourably, but that nobody could be allowed to go upstairs just then.
After placing chairs and viands for them she retreated, and they sat
down, the lamp between them--the lover of the sufferer above, who had no
right to her, and the man who had every right to her, but did not love
her. Engaging in desultory and fragmentary conversation they listened
to the trampling of feet on the floor-boards overhead--Pierston full of
anxiety and attentiveness, Ike awaiting the course of nature calmly.

Soon they heard the feeble bleats repeated, and then the local
practitioner descended and entered the room.

'How is she now?' said Pierston, the more taciturn Ike looking up with
him for the answer that he felt would serve for two as well as for one.

'Doing well, remarkably well,' replied the professional gentleman, with
a manner of having said it in other places; and his vehicle not being at
the door he sat down and shared some refreshment with the others. When
he had departed Mrs. Stockwool again stepped down, and informed them
that Ike's presence had been made known to his wife.

The truant quarrier seemed rather inclined to stay where he was and
finish the mug of ale, but Pierston quickened him, and he ascended the
staircase. As soon as the lower room was empty Pierston leant with his
elbows on the table, and covered his face with his hands.

Ike was absent no great time. Descending with a proprietary mien that
had been lacking before, he invited Jocelyn to ascend likewise, since
she had stated that she would like to see him. Jocelyn went up the
crooked old steps, the husband remaining below.

Avice, though white as the sheets, looked brighter and happier than he
had expected to find her, and was apparently very much fortified by the
pink little lump at her side. She held out her hand to him.

'I just wanted to tell 'ee,' she said, striving against her feebleness,
'I thought it would be no harm to see you, though 'tis rather soon--to
tell 'ee how very much I thank you for getting me settled again with
Ike. He is very glad to come home again, too, he says. Yes, you've done
a good many kind things for me, sir.'

Whether she were really glad, or whether the words were expressed as a
matter of duty, Pierston did not attempt to learn.

He merely said that he valued her thanks. 'Now, Avice,' he added
tenderly, 'I resign my guardianship of you. I hope to see your husband
in a sound little business here in a very short time.'

'I hope so--for baby's sake,' she said, with a bright sigh. 'Would
you--like to see her, sir?'

'The baby? O yes--YOUR baby! You must christen her Avice.'

'Yes--so I will!' she murmured readily, and disclosed the infant
with some timidity. 'I hope you forgive me, sir, for concealing my
thoughtless marriage!'

'If you forgive me for making love to you.'

'Yes. How were you to know! I wish--'

Pierston bade her good-bye, kissing her hand; turned from her and the
incipient being whom he was to meet again under very altered conditions,
and left the bed-chamber with a tear in his eye.

'Here endeth that dream!' said he.


                    *****


Hymen, in secret or overt guise, seemed to haunt Pierston just at this
time with undignified mockery which savoured rather of Harlequin than of
the torch-bearer. Two days after parting in a lone island from the girl
he had so disinterestedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers,
wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with a preoccupied face.

'My dear fellow,' said Somers, 'what do you think! I was charged not to
tell you, but, hang it! I may just as well make a clean breast of it now
as later.'

'What--you are not going to...' began Pierston, with divination.

'Yes. What I said on impulse six months back I am about to carry out
in cold blood. Nichola and I began in jest and ended in earnest. We are
going to take one another next month for good and all.'




PART THIRD -- A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY

     'In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
      That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
      As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
      Consumed with that which it was nourished by.'
                                    --W. SHAKESPEARE.




3. I. SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON

Twenty years had spread their films over the events which wound up with
the reunion of the second Avice and her husband; and the hoary peninsula
called an island looked just the same as before; though many who had
formerly projected their daily shadows upon its unrelieved summer
whiteness ceased now to disturb the colourless sunlight there.

The general change, nevertheless, was small. The silent ships came and
went from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file after
file of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfully
dragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvian
wooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from the
quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its
eye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank
had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained
undevoured.

Men drank, smoked, and spat in the inns with only a little more
adulteration in their refreshments and a trifle less dialect in their
speech than of yore. But one figure had never been seen on the Channel
rock in the interval, the form of Pierston the sculptor, whose first use
of the chisel that rock had instigated.

He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in fact, at this very date he was
staying at an hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set eyes on Avice
since parting from her in the room with her firstborn, he had managed to
obtain tidings of her from time to time during the interval. In this way
Pierston learnt that, shortly after their resumption of a common life in
her house, Ike had ill-used her, till fortunately, the business to which
Jocelyn had assisted him chancing to prosper, he became immersed in
its details, and allowed Avice to pursue her household courses without
interference, initiating that kind of domestic reconciliation which is
so calm and durable, having as its chief ingredient neither hate nor
love, but an all-embracing indifference.

At first Pierston had sent her sums of money privately, fearing lest
her husband should deny her material comforts; but he soon found, to his
great relief, that such help was unnecessary, social ambition prompting
Ike to set up as quite a gentleman-islander, and to allow Avice a scope
for show which he would never have allowed in mere kindness.

Being in Rome, as aforesaid, Pierston returned one evening to his
hotel to dine, after spending the afternoon among the busts in the long
gallery of the Vatican. The unconscious habit, common to so many people,
of tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to discern, or to fancy
he discerned, in the Roman atmosphere, in its lights and shades, and
particularly in its reflected or secondary lights, something resembling
the atmosphere of his native promontory. Perhaps it was that in each
case the eye was mostly resting on stone--that the quarries of ruins in
the Eternal City reminded him of the quarries of maiden rock at home.

This being in his mind when he sat down to dinner at the common table,
he was surprised to hear an American gentleman, who sat opposite,
mention the name of Pierston's birthplace. The American was talking to
a friend about a lady--an English widow, whose acquaintance they had
renewed somewhere in the Channel Islands during a recent tour, after
having known her as a young woman who came to San Francisco with her
father and mother many years before. Her father was then a rich man just
retired from the business of a stone-merchant in the Isle of Slingers;
but he had engaged in large speculations, and had lost nearly all his
fortune. Jocelyn further gathered that the widowed daughter's name was
Mrs. Leverre; that she had a step-son, her husband having been a Jersey
gentleman, a widower; and that the step-son seemed to be a promising and
interesting young man.

Pierston was instantly struck with the perception that these and other
allusions, though general, were in accord with the history of his
long-lost Marcia. He hardly felt any desire to hunt her up after nearly
two score years of separation, but he was impressed enough to resolve to
exchange a word with the strangers as soon as he could get opportunity.

He could not well attract their attention through the plants upon the
wide table, and even if he had been able he was disinclined to ask
questions in public. He waited on till dinner was over, and when the
strangers withdrew Pierston withdrew in their rear.

They were not in the drawing-room, and he found that they had gone
out. There was no chance of overtaking them, but Pierston, waked to
restlessness by their remarks, wandered up and down the adjoining Piazza
di Spagna, thinking they might return. The streets below were immersed
in shade, the front of the church of the Trinita de' Monti at the
top was flooded with orange light, the gloom of evening gradually
intensifying upon the broad, long flight of steps, which foot-passengers
incessantly ascended and descended with the insignificance of ants; the
dusk wrapped up the house to the left, in which Shelley had lived, and
that to the right, in which Keats had died.

Getting back to the hotel he learnt that the Americans had only dropped
in to dine, and were staying elsewhere. He saw no more of them; and on
reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going
off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would
care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were
to take the trouble to discover her.


                    *          *          *


Thus much Marcia. The other thread of his connection with the ancient
Isle of Slingers was stirred by a letter he received from Avice a little
after this date, in which she stated that her husband Ike had been
killed in his own quarry by an accident within the past year; that she
herself had been ill, and though well again, and left amply provided
for, she would like to see him if he ever came that way.

As she had not communicated for several long years, her expressed wish
to see him now was likely to be prompted by something more, something
newer, than memories of him. Yet the manner of her writing precluded all
suspicion that she was thinking of him as an old lover whose suit events
had now made practicable. He told her he was sorry to hear that she had
been ill, and that he would certainly take an early opportunity of going
down to her home on his next visit to England.

He did more. Her request had revived thoughts of his old home and its
associations, and instead of awaiting other reasons for a return he made
her the operating one. About a week later he stood once again at the
foot of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the entrance to the
Isle were perched like grey pigeons on a roof-side.

At Top-o'-Hill--as the summit of the rock was mostly called--he stood
looking at the busy doings in the quarries beyond, where the numerous
black hoisting-cranes scattered over the central plateau had the
appearance of a swarm of crane-flies resting there. He went a little
further, made some general inquiries about the accident which had
carried off Avice's husband in the previous year, and learnt that though
now a widow, she had plenty of friends and sympathizers about her,
which rendered any immediate attention to her on his part unnecessary.
Considering, therefore, that there was no great reason why he should
call on her so soon, and without warning, he turned back. Perhaps after
all her request had been dictated by a momentary feeling only, and a
considerable strangeness to each other must naturally be the result of
a score of dividing years. Descending to the bottom he took his seat in
the train on the shore, which soon carried him along the Bank, and
round to the watering-place five miles off, at which he had taken up his
quarters for a few days.

Here, as he stayed on, his local interests revived. Whenever he went out
he could see the island that was once his home lying like a great
snail upon the sea across the bay. It was the spring of the year; local
steamers had begun to run, and he was never tired of standing on the
thinly occupied deck of one of these as it skirted the island and
revealed to him on the cliffs far up its height the ruins of Red-King
Castle, behind which the little village of East Quarriers lay.

Thus matters went on, if they did not rather stand still, for several
days before Pierston redeemed his vague promise to seek Avice out. And
in the meantime he was surprised by the arrival of another letter from
her by a roundabout route. She had heard, she said, that he had been on
the island, and imagined him therefore to be staying somewhere near. Why
did he not call as he had told her he would do? She was always thinking
of him, and wishing to see him.

Her tone was anxious, and there was no doubt that she really had
something to say which she did not want to write. He wondered what it
could be, and started the same afternoon.

Avice, who had been little in his mind of late years, began to renew for
herself a distinct position therein. He was fully aware that since his
earlier manhood a change had come over his regard of womankind. Once the
individual had been nothing more to him than the temporary abiding-place
of the typical or ideal; now his heart showed its bent to be a growing
fidelity to the specimen, with all her pathetic flaws of detail; which
flaws, so far from sending him further, increased his tenderness. This
maturer feeling, if finer and higher, was less convenient than the old.
Ardours of passion could be felt as in youth without the recuperative
intervals which had accompanied evanescence.

The first sensation was to find that she had long ceased to live in
the little freehold cottage she had occupied of old. In answer to his
inquiries he was directed along the road to the west of the modern
castle, past the entrance on that side, and onward to the very house
that had once been his own home. There it stood as of yore, facing
up the Channel, a comfortable roomy structure, the euonymus and other
shrubs, which alone would stand in the teeth of the salt wind, living
on at about the same stature in front of it; but the paint-work much
renewed. A thriving man had resided there of late, evidently.

The widow in mourning who received him in the front parlour was, alas!
but the sorry shadow of Avice the Second. How could he have fancied
otherwise after twenty years? Yet he had been led to fancy otherwise,
almost without knowing it, by feeling himself unaltered. Indeed,
curiously enough, nearly the first words she said to him were: 'Why--you
are just the same!'

'Just the same. Yes, I am, Avice,' he answered sadly; for this inability
to ossify with the rest of his generation threw him out of proportion
with the time. Moreover, while wearing the aspect of comedy, it was of
the nature of tragedy.

'It is well to be you, sir,' she went on. 'I have had troubles to take
the bloom off me!'

'Yes; I have been sorry for you.'

She continued to regard him curiously, with humorous interest; and
he knew what was passing in her mind: that this man, to whom she had
formerly looked up as to a person far in advance of her along the lane
of life, seemed now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the pair of them
observing the world with fairly level eyes.

He had come to her with warmth for a vision which, on reaching her,
he found to have departed; and, though fairly weaned by the natural
reality, he was so far staunch as to linger hankeringly. They talked of
past days, his old attachment, which she had then despised, being now
far more absorbing and present to her than to himself.

She unmistakably won upon him as he sat on. A curious closeness between
them had been produced in his imagination by the discovery that she
was passing her life within the house of his own childhood. Her similar
surname meant little here; but it was also his, and, added to the
identity of domicile, lent a strong suggestiveness to the accident.

'This is where I used to sit when my parents occupied the house,'
he said, placing himself beside that corner of the fireplace which
commanded a view through the window. 'I could see a bough of tamarisk
wave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassy
waste towards the sea, and at night the same old lightship blinking far
out there. Place yourself on the spot, to please me.'

She set her chair where he indicated, and Pierston stood close beside
her, directing her gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded thence
as a boy. Her head and face--the latter thoughtful and worn enough, poor
thing, to suggest a married life none too comfortable--were close to his
breast, and, with a few inches further incline, would have touched it.

'And now you are the inhabitant; I the visitor,' he said. 'I am glad to
see you here--so glad, Avice! You are fairly well provided for--I think
I may assume that?' He looked round the room at the solid mahogany
furniture, and at the modern piano and show bookcase.

'Yes, Ike left me comfortable. 'Twas he who thought of moving from my
cottage to this larger house. He bought it, and I can live here as long
as I choose to.'

Apart from the decline of his adoration to friendship, there seemed to
be a general convergence of positions which suggested that he might make
amends for the desertion of Avice the First by proposing to this Avice
when a meet time should arrive. If he did not love her as he had done
when she was a slim thing catching mice in his rooms in London, he could
surely be content at his age with comradeship. After all she was only
forty to his sixty. The feeling that he really could be thus content
was so convincing that he almost believed the luxury of getting old and
reposeful was coming to his restless, wandering heart at last.

'Well, you have come at last, sir,' she went on; 'and I am grateful to
you. I did not like writing, and yet I wanted to be straightforward.
Have you guessed at all why I wished to see you so much that I could not
help sending twice to you?'

'I have tried, but cannot.'

'Try again. It is a pretty reason, which I hope you'll forgive.'

'I am sure I sha'n't unriddle it. But I'll say this on my own account
before you tell me. I have always taken a lingering interest in you,
which you must value for what it is worth. It originated, so far as it
concerns you personally, with the sight of you in that cottage round the
corner, nineteen or twenty years ago, when I became tenant of the castle
opposite. But that was not the very beginning. The very beginning was
a score of years before that, when I, a young fellow of one-and-twenty,
coming home here, from London, to see my father, encountered a tender
woman as like you as your double; was much attracted by her as I saw
her day after day flit past this window; till I made it my business to
accompany her in her walks awhile. I, as you know, was not a staunch
fellow, and it all ended badly. But, at any rate you, her daughter, and
I are friends.'

'Ah! there she is!' suddenly exclaimed Avice, whose attention had
wandered somewhat from his retrospective discourse. She was looking from
the window towards the cliffs, where, upon the open ground quite near at
hand, a slender female form was seen rambling along. 'She is out for
a walk,' Avice continued. 'I wonder if she is going to call here this
afternoon? She is living at the castle opposite as governess.'

'O, she's--'

'Yes. Her education was very thorough--better even than her
grandmother's. I was the neglected one, and her father and myself both
vowed that there should be no complaint on that score about her. We
christened her Avice, to keep up the name, as you requested. I wish you
could speak to her--I am sure you would like her.'

'Is that the baby?' faltered Jocelyn.

'Yes, the baby.'

The person signified, now much nearer, was a still more modernized,
up-to-date edition of the two Avices of that blood with whom he had been
involved more or less for the last forty years. A ladylike creature was
she--almost elegant. She was altogether finer in figure than her
mother or grandmother had ever been, which made her more of a woman in
appearance than in years. She wore a large-disked sun-hat, with a brim
like a wheel whose spokes were radiating folds of muslin lining the
brim, a black margin beyond the muslin being the felloe. Beneath this
brim her hair was massed low upon her brow, the colour of the thick
tresses being probably, from her complexion, repeated in the irises of
her large, deep eyes. Her rather nervous lips were thin and closed, so
that they only appeared as a delicate red line. A changeable temperament
was shown by that mouth--quick transitions from affection to aversion,
from a pout to a smile.

It was Avice the Third.

Jocelyn and the second Avice continued to gaze ardently at her.

'Ah! she is not coming in now; she hasn't time,' murmured the mother,
with some disappointment. 'Perhaps she means to run across in the
evening.'

The tall girl, in fact, went past and on till she was out of sight.
Pierston stood as in a dream. It was the very she, in all essential
particulars, and with an intensification of general charm, who had
kissed him forty years before. When he turned his head from the window
his eyes fell again upon the intermediate Avice at his side. Before but
the relic of the Well-Beloved, she had now become its empty shrine. Warm
friendship, indeed, he felt for her; but whatever that might have done
towards the instauration of a former dream was now hopelessly barred by
the rivalry of the thing itself in the guise of a lineal successor.




3. II. MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMENT

Pierston had been about to leave, but he sat down again on being asked
if he would stay and have a cup of tea. He hardly knew for a moment what
he did; a dim thought that Avice--the renewed Avice--might come into the
house made his reseating himself an act of spontaneity.

He forgot that twenty years earlier he had called the now Mrs. Pierston
an elf, a witch; and that lapse of time had probably not diminished the
subtleties implied by those epithets. He did not know that she had noted
every impression that her daughter had made upon him.

How he contrived to attenuate and disperse the rather tender
personalities he had opened up with the new Avice's mother, Pierston
never exactly defined. Perhaps she saw more than he thought she
saw--read something in his face--knew that about his nature which he
gave her no credit for knowing. Anyhow, the conversation took the form
of a friendly gossip from that minute, his remarks being often given
while his mind was turned elsewhere.

But a chill passed through Jocelyn when there had been time for
reflection. The renewed study of his art in Rome without any
counterbalancing practical pursuit had nourished and developed his
natural responsiveness to impressions; he now felt that his old trouble,
his doom--his curse, indeed, he had sometimes called it--was come
back again. His divinity was not yet propitiated for that original sin
against her image in the person of Avice the First, and now, at the age
of one-and-sixty, he was urged on and on like the Jew Ahasuerus--or, in
the phrase of the islanders themselves, like a blind ram.

The Goddess, an abstraction to the general, was a fairly real personage
to Pierston. He had watched the marble images of her which stood in his
working-room, under all changes of light and shade in the brightening
of morning, in the blackening of eve, in moonlight, in lamplight. Every
line and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he;
and, though not a belief, it was, as has been stated, a formula, a
superstition, that the three Avices were inter-penetrated with her
essence.

'And the next Avice--your daughter,' he said stumblingly; 'she is, you
say, a governess at the castle opposite?'

Mrs. Pierston reaffirmed the fact, adding that the girl often slept at
home because she, her mother, was so lonely. She often thought she would
like to keep her daughter at home altogether.

'She plays that instrument, I suppose?' said Pierston, regarding the
piano.

'Yes, she plays beautifully; she had the best instruction that masters
could give her. She was educated at Sandbourne.'

'Which room does she call hers when at home?' he asked curiously.

'The little one over this.'

It had been his own. 'Strange,' he murmured.

He finished tea, and sat after tea, but the youthful Avice did not
arrive. With the Avice present he conversed as the old friend--no more.
At last it grew dusk, and Pierston could not find an excuse for staying
longer.

'I hope to make the acquaintance--of your daughter,' he said in leaving,
knowing that he might have added with predestinate truth, 'of my new
tenderly-beloved.'

'I hope you will,' she answered. 'This evening she evidently has gone
for a walk instead of coming here.'

'And, by-the-bye, you have not told me what you especially wanted to see
me for?'

'Ah, no. I will put it off.'

'Very well. I don't pretend to guess.'

'I must tell you another time.'

'If it is any little business in connection with your late husband's
affairs, do command me. I'll do anything I can.'

'Thank you. And I shall see you again soon?'

'Certainly. Quite soon.'

When he was gone she looked reflectively at the spot where he had
been standing, and said: 'Best hold my tongue. It will work of itself,
without my telling.'

Jocelyn went from the house, but as the white road passed under his
feet he felt in no mood to get back to his lodgings in the town on the
mainland. He lingered about upon the rugged ground for a long while,
thinking of the extraordinary reproduction of the original girl in this
new form he had seen, and of himself as of a foolish dreamer in being so
suddenly fascinated by the renewed image in a personality not one-third
of his age. As a physical fact, no doubt, the preservation of the
likeness was no uncommon thing here, but it helped the dream.

Passing round the walls of the new castle he deviated from his homeward
track by turning down the familiar little lane which led to the ruined
castle of the Red King. It took him past the cottage in which the new
Avice was born, from whose precincts he had heard her first infantine
cry. Pausing he saw near the west behind him the new moon growing
distinct upon the glow.

He was subject to gigantic fantasies still. In spite of himself,
the sight of the new moon, as representing one who, by her so-called
inconstancy, acted up to his own idea of a migratory Well-Beloved, made
him feel as if his wraith in a changed sex had suddenly looked over the
horizon at him. In a crowd secretly, or in solitude boldly, he had
often bowed the knee three times to this sisterly divinity on her first
appearance monthly, and directed a kiss towards her shining shape. The
curse of his qualities (if it were not a blessing) was far from having
spent itself yet.

In the other direction the castle ruins rose square and dusky against
the sea. He went on towards these, around which he had played as a boy,
and stood by the walls at the edge of the cliff pondering. There was no
wind and but little tide, and he thought he could hear from years ago a
voice that he knew. It certainly was a voice, but it came from the rocks
beneath the castle ruin.

'Mrs. Atway!'

A silence followed, and nobody came. The voice spoke again; 'John
Stoney!'

Neither was this summons attended to. The cry continued, with more
entreaty: 'William Scribben!'

The voice was that of a Pierston--there could be no doubt of it--young
Avice's, surely? Something or other seemed to be detaining her down
there against her will. A sloping path beneath the beetling cliff and
the castle walls rising sheer from its summit, led down to the lower
level whence the voice proceeded. Pierston followed the pathway, and
soon beheld a girl in light clothing--the same he had seen through
the window--standing upon one of the rocks, apparently unable to move.
Pierston hastened across to her.

'O, thank you for coming!' she murmured with some timidity. 'I have met
with an awkward mishap. I live near here, and am not frightened really.
My foot has become jammed in a crevice of the rock, and I cannot get it
out, try how I will. What SHALL I do!'

Jocelyn stooped and examined the cause of discomfiture. 'I think if you
can take your boot off,' he said, 'your foot might slip out, leaving the
boot behind.'

She tried to act upon this advice, but could not do so effectually.
Pierston then experimented by slipping his hand into the crevice till he
could just reach the buttons of her boot, which, however, he could not
unfasten any more than she. Taking his penknife from his pocket he tried
again, and cut off the buttons one by one. The boot unfastened, and out
slipped the foot.

'O, how glad I am!' she cried joyfully. 'I was fearing I should have to
stay here all night. How can I thank you enough?'

He was tugging to withdraw the boot, but no skill that he could exercise
would move it without tearing. At last she said: 'Don't try any longer.
It is not far to the house. I can walk in my stocking.'

'I'll assist you in,' he said.

She said she did not want help, nevertheless allowed him to help her on
the unshod side. As they moved on she explained that she had come out
through the garden door; had been standing on the boulders to look at
something out at sea just discernible in the evening light as assisted
by the moon, and, in jumping down, had wedged her foot as he had found
it.

Whatever Pierston's years might have made him look by day, in the dusk
of evening he was fairly presentable as a pleasing man of no marked
antiquity, his outline differing but little from what it had been when
he was half his years. He was well preserved, still upright, trimly
shaven, agile in movement; wore a tightly buttoned suit which set off a
naturally slight figure; in brief, he might have been of any age as he
appeared to her at this moment. She talked to him with the co-equality
of one who assumed him to be not far ahead of her own generation; and,
as the growing darkness obscured him more and more, he adopted her
assumption of his age with increasing boldness of tone.

The flippant, harmless freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avice
had plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helped
Pierston greatly in this role of jeune premier which he was not unready
to play. Not a word did he say about being a native of the island;
still more carefully did he conceal the fact of his having courted her
grandmother, and engaged himself to marry that attractive lady.

He found that she had come out upon the rocks through the same little
private door from the lawn of the modern castle which had frequently
afforded him egress to the same spot in years long past. Pierston
accompanied her across the grounds almost to the entrance of the
mansion--the place being now far better kept and planted than when he
had rented it as a lonely tenant; almost, indeed, restored to the order
and neatness which had characterized it when he was a boy.

Like her granny she was too inexperienced to be reserved, and during
this little climb, leaning upon his arm, there was time for a great deal
of confidence. When he had bidden her farewell, and she had entered,
leaving him in the dark, a rush of sadness through Pierston's soul swept
down all the temporary pleasure he had found in the charming girl's
company. Had Mephistopheles sprung from the ground there and then with
an offer to Jocelyn of restoration to youth on the usual terms of his
firm, the sculptor might have consented to sell a part of himself which
he felt less immediate need of than of a ruddy lip and cheek and an
unploughed brow.

But what could only have been treated as a folly by outsiders was almost
a sorrow for him. Why was he born with such a temperament? And this
concatenated interest could hardly have arisen, even with Pierston, but
for a conflux of circumstances only possible here. The three Avices, the
second something like the first, the third a glorification of the first,
at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial island
customs of intermarriage and of prenuptial union, under which conditions
the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through
generations: so that, till quite latterly, to have seen one native man
and woman was to have seen the whole population of that isolated rock,
so nearly cut off from the mainland. His own predisposition and the
sense of his early faithlessness did all the rest.

He turned gloomily away, and let himself out of the precincts. Before
walking along the couple of miles of road which would conduct him to the
little station on the shore, he redescended to the rocks whereon he had
found her, and searched about for the fissure which had made a prisoner
of this terribly belated edition of the Beloved. Kneeling down beside
the spot he inserted his hand, and ultimately, by much wriggling,
withdrew the pretty boot. He mused over it for a moment, put it in his
pocket, and followed the stony route to the Street of Wells.




3. III. THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN

There was nothing to hinder Pierston in calling upon the new Avice's
mother as often as he should choose, beyond the five miles of
intervening railway and additional mile or two of clambering over
the heights of the island. Two days later, therefore, he repeated his
journey and knocked about tea-time at the widow's door.

As he had feared, the daughter was not at home. He sat down beside the
old sweetheart who, having eclipsed her mother in past days, had now
eclipsed herself in her child. Jocelyn produced the girl's boot from his
pocket.

'Then, 'tis YOU who helped Avice out of her predicament?' said Mrs.
Pierston, with surprise.

'Yes, my dear friend; and perhaps I shall ask you to help me out of mine
before I have done. But never mind that now. What did she tell you about
the adventure?'

Mrs. Pierston was looking thoughtfully upon him. 'Well, 'tis rather
strange it should have been you, sir,' she replied. She seemed to be
a good deal interested. 'I thought it might have been a younger man--a
much younger man.'

'It might have been as far as feelings were concerned.... Now, Avice,
I'll to the point at once. Virtually I have known your daughter any
number of years. When I talk to her I can anticipate every turn of her
thought, every sentiment, every act, so long did I study those things in
your mother and in you. Therefore I do not require to learn her; she
was learnt by me in her previous existences. Now, don't be shocked: I am
willing to marry her--I should be overjoyed to do it, if there would
be nothing preposterous about it, or that would seem like a man making
himself too much of a fool, and so degrading her in consenting. I can
make her comparatively rich, as you know, and I would indulge her every
whim. There is the idea, bluntly put. It would set right something in my
mind that has been wrong for forty years. After my death she would have
plenty of freedom and plenty of means to enjoy it.'

Mrs. Isaac Pierston seemed only a little surprised; certainly not
shocked.

'Well, if I didn't think you might be a bit taken with her!' she
said with an arch simplicity which could hardly be called unaffected.
'Knowing the set of your mind, from my little time with you years ago,
nothing you could do in this way would astonish me.'

'But you don't think badly of me for it?'

'Not at all.... By-the-bye, did you ever guess why I asked you to
come?... But never mind it now: the matter is past.... Of course, it
would depend upon what Avice felt.... Perhaps she would rather marry a
younger man.'

'And suppose a satisfactory younger man should not appear?'

Mrs. Pierston showed in her face that she fully recognized the
difference between a rich bird in hand and a young bird in the bush. She
looked him curiously up and down.

'I know you would make anybody a very nice husband,' she said. 'I know
that you would be nicer than many men half your age; and, though there
is a great deal of difference between you and her, there have been more
unequal marriages, that's true. Speaking as her mother, I can say that
I shouldn't object to you, sir, for her, provided she liked you. That is
where the difficulty will lie.'

'I wish you would help me to get over that difficulty,' he said gently.
'Remember, I brought back a truant husband to you twenty years ago.'

'Yes, you did,' she assented; 'and, though I may say no great things as
to happiness came of it, I've always seen that your intentions towards
me were none the less noble on that account. I would do for you what I
would do for no other man, and there is one reason in particular which
inclines me to help you with Avice--that I should feel absolutely
certain I was helping her to a kind husband.'

'Well, that would remain to be seen. I would, at any rate, try to be
worthy of your opinion. Come, Avice, for old times' sake, you must help
me. You never felt anything but friendship in those days, you know, and
that makes it easy and proper for you to do me a good turn now.'

After a little more conversation his old friend promised that she really
would do everything that lay in her power. She did not say how simple
she thought him not to perceive that she had already, by writing to him,
been doing everything that lay in her power; had created the feeling
which prompted his entreaty. And to show her good faith in this promise
she asked him to wait till later in the evening, when Avice might
possibly run across to see her.

Pierston, who fancied he had won the younger Avice's interest, at least,
by the part he had played upon the rocks the week before, had a dread
of encountering her in full light till he should have advanced a little
further in her regard. He accordingly was perplexed at this proposal,
and, seeing his hesitation, Mrs. Pierston suggested that they should
walk together in the direction whence Avice would come, if she came at
all.

He welcomed the idea, and in a few minutes they started, strolling
along under the now strong moonlight, and when they reached the gates of
Sylvania Castle turning back again towards the house. After two or three
such walks up and down the gate of the castle grounds clicked, and a
form came forth which proved to be the expected one.

As soon as they met the girl recognized in her mother's companion the
gentleman who had helped her on the shore; and she seemed really glad to
find that her chivalrous assistant was claimed by her parent as an old
friend. She remembered hearing at divers times about this worthy London
man of talent and position, whose ancestry were people of her own isle,
and possibly, from the name, of a common stock with her own.

'And you have actually lived in Sylvania Castle yourself, Mr. Pierston?'
asked Avice the daughter, with her innocent young voice. 'Was it long
ago?'

'Yes, it was some time ago,' replied the sculptor, with a sinking at his
heart lest she should ask how long.

'It must have been when I was away--or when I was very little?'

'I don't think you were away.'

'But I don't think I could have been here?'

'No, perhaps you couldn't have been here.'

'I think she was hiding herself in the parsley-bed,' said Avice's mother
blandly.

They talked in this general way till they reached Mrs. Pierston's house;
but Jocelyn resisted both the widow's invitation and the desire of
his own heart, and went away without entering. To risk, by visibly
confronting her, the advantage that he had already gained, or fancied
he had gained, with the re-incarnate Avice required more courage than he
could claim in his present mood.


                    *          *          *


Such evening promenades as these were frequent during the waxing of
that summer moon. On one occasion, as they were all good walkers, it was
arranged that they should meet halfway between the island and the town
in which Pierston had lodgings. It was impossible that by this time the
pretty young governess should not have guessed the ultimate reason of
these rambles to be a matrimonial intention; but she inclined to the
belief that the widow rather than herself was the object of Pierston's
regard; though why this educated and apparently wealthy man should be
attracted by her mother--whose homeliness was apparent enough to the
girl's more modern training--she could not comprehend.

They met accordingly in the middle of the Pebble-bank, Pierston coming
from the mainland, and the women from the peninsular rock. Crossing the
wooden bridge which connected the bank with the shore proper they moved
in the direction of Henry the Eighth's Castle, on the verge of the
rag-stone cliff. Like the Red King's Castle on the island, the interior
was open to the sky, and when they entered and the full moon streamed
down upon them over the edge of the enclosing masonry, the whole present
reality faded from Jocelyn's mind under the press of memories. Neither
of his companions guessed what Pierston was thinking of. It was in this
very spot that he was to have met the grandmother of the girl at his
side, and in which he would have met her had she chosen to keep the
appointment, a meeting which might--nay, must--have changed the whole
current of his life.

Instead of that, forty years had passed--forty years of severance from
Avice, till a secondly renewed copy of his sweetheart had arisen to fill
her place. But he, alas, was not renewed. And of all this the pretty
young thing at his side knew nothing.

Taking advantage of the younger woman's retreat to view the sea through
an opening of the walls, Pierston appealed to her mother in a whisper:
'Have you ever given her a hint of what my meaning is? No? Then I think
you might, if you really have no objection.'

Mrs. Pierston, as the widow, was far from being so coldly disposed in
her own person towards her friend as in the days when he wanted to marry
her. Had she now been the object of his wishes he would not have needed
to ask her twice. But like a good mother she stifled all this, and said
she would sound Avice there and then.

'Avice, my dear,' she said, advancing to where the girl mused in the
window-gap, 'what do you think of Mr. Pierston paying his addresses to
you--coming courting, as _I_ call it in my old-fashioned way. Supposing
he were to, would you encourage him?'

'To ME, mother?' said Avice, with an inquiring laugh. 'I thought--he
meant you!'

'O no, he doesn't mean me,' said her mother hastily. 'He is nothing more
than my friend.'

'I don't want any addresses,' said the daughter.

'He is a man in society, and would take you to an elegant house in
London suited to your education, instead of leaving you to mope here.'

'I should like that well enough,' replied Avice carelessly.

'Then give him some encouragement.'

'I don't care enough about him to do any encouraging. It is his
business, I should think, to do all.'

She spoke in her lightest vein; but the result was that when Pierston,
who had discreetly withdrawn, returned to them, she walked docilely,
though perhaps gloomily, beside him, her mother dropping to the rear.
They came to a rugged descent, and Pierston took her hand to help her.
She allowed him to retain it when they arrived on level ground.

Altogether it was not an unsuccessful evening for the man with the
unanchored heart, though possibly initial success meant worse for him in
the long run than initial failure. There was nothing marvellous in the
fact of her tractability thus far. In his modern dress and style, under
the rays of the moon, he looked a very presentable gentleman indeed,
while his knowledge of art and his travelled manners were not without
their attractions for a girl who with one hand touched the educated
middle-class and with the other the rude and simple inhabitants of the
isle. Her intensely modern sympathies were quickened by her peculiar
outlook.

Pierston would have regarded his interest in her as overmuch selfish
if there had not existed a redeeming quality in the substratum of
old pathetic memory by which such love had been created--which still
permeated it, rendering it the tenderest, most anxious, most protective
instinct he had ever known. It may have had in its composition too much
of the boyish fervour that had characterized such affection when he was
cherry-cheeked, and light in the foot as a girl; but, if it was all this
feeling of youth, it was more.

Mrs. Pierston, in fearing to be frank, lest she might seem to be angling
for his fortune, did not fully divine his cheerful readiness to offer
it, if by so doing he could make amends for his infidelity to her family
forty years back in the past. Time had not made him mercenary, and it
had quenched his ambitions; and though his wish to wed Avice was not
entirely a wish to enrich her, the knowledge that she would be enriched
beyond anything that she could have anticipated was what allowed him to
indulge his love.

He was not exactly old he said to himself the next morning as he beheld
his face in the glass. And he looked considerably younger than he was.
But there was history in his face--distinct chapters of it; his brow was
not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in
his forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past
troubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had been
brought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that he
might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin,
they had resulted from those months of despondency when all seemed going
against his art, his strength, his happiness. 'You cannot live your life
and keep it, Jocelyn,' he said. Time was against him and love, and time
would probably win.

'When I went away from the first Avice,' he continued with whimsical
misery, 'I had a presentiment that I should ache for it some day. And
I am aching--have ached ever since this jade of an Ideal learnt the
unconscionable trick of inhabiting one image only.'

Upon the whole he was not without a bodement that it would be folly to
press on.




3. IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION

This desultory courtship of a young girl which had been brought about by
her mother's contrivance was interrupted by the appearance of Somers and
his wife and family on the Budmouth Esplanade. Alfred Somers, once the
youthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was now a middle-aged family
man with spectacles--spectacles worn, too, with the single object of
seeing through them--and a row of daughters tailing off to infancy, who
at present added appreciably to the income of the bathing-machine women
established along the sands.

Mrs. Somers--once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs. Pine-Avon--had now
retrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother and
grandmother, giving sharp, strict regard to the current literature and
art that reached the innocent presence of her long perspective of girls,
with the view of hiding every skull and skeleton of life from their
dear eyes. She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding
generations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, their
advance as girls being lost in their recession as matrons; so that they
move up and down the stream of intellectual development like flotsam
in a tidal estuary. And this perhaps not by reason of their faults as
individuals, but of their misfortune as child-rearers.

The landscape-painter, now an Academician like Pierston himself--rather
popular than distinguished--had given up that peculiar and personal
taste in subjects which had marked him in times past, executing instead
many pleasing aspects of nature addressed to the furnishing householder
through the middling critic, and really very good of their kind. In this
way he received many large cheques from persons of wealth in England and
America, out of which he built himself a sumptuous studio and an awkward
house around it, and paid for the education of the growing maidens.

The vision of Somers's humble position as jackal to this lion of a
family and house and studio and social reputation--Somers, to whom
strange conceits and wild imaginings were departed joys never to
return--led Pierston, as the painter's contemporary, to feel that
he ought to be one of the bygones likewise, and to put on an air of
unromantic bufferism. He refrained from entering Avice's peninsula for
the whole fortnight of Somers's stay in the neighbouring town, although
its grey poetical outline--'throned along the sea'--greeted his eyes
every morn and eve across the roadstead.

When the painter and his family had gone back from their bathing
holiday, he thought that he, too, would leave the neighbourhood. To do
so, however, without wishing at least the elder Avice good-bye would be
unfriendly, considering the extent of their acquaintance. One evening,
knowing this time of day to suit her best, he took the few-minutes'
journey to the rock along the thin connecting string of junction, and
arrived at Mrs. Pierston's door just after dark.

A light shone from an upper chamber. On asking for his widowed
acquaintance he was informed that she was ill, seriously, though not
dangerously. While learning that her daughter was with her, and further
particulars, and doubting if he should go in, a message was sent down to
ask him to enter. His voice had been heard, and Mrs. Pierston would like
to see him.

He could not with any humanity refuse, but there flashed across his mind
the recollection that Avice the youngest had never yet really seen
him, had seen nothing more of him than an outline, which might have
appertained as easily to a man thirty years his junior as to himself,
and a countenance so renovated by faint moonlight as fairly to
correspond. It was with misgiving, therefore, that the sculptor ascended
the staircase and entered the little upper sitting-room, now arranged as
a sick-chamber.

Mrs. Pierston reclined on a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising
thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come
in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don't
let me frighten you.'

Avice was seated beside her, reading. The girl jumped up, hardly seeming
to recognize him. 'O! it's Mr. Pierston,' she said in a moment, adding
quickly, with evident surprise and off her guard: 'I thought Mr.
Pierston was--'

What she had thought he was did not pass her lips, and it remained
a riddle for Jocelyn until a new departure in her manner towards him
showed that the words 'much younger' would have accurately ended the
sentence. Had Pierston not now confronted her anew, he might have
endured philosophically her changed opinion of him. But he was seeing
her again, and a rooted feeling was revived.

Pierston now learnt for the first time that the widow had been visited
by sudden attacks of this sort not infrequently of late years. They were
said to be due to angina pectoris, the latter paroxysms having been the
most severe. She was at the present moment out of pain, though weak,
exhausted, and nervous. She would not, however, converse about herself,
but took advantage of her daughter's absence from the room to broach the
subject most in her thoughts.

No compunctions had stirred her as they had her visitor on the
expediency of his suit in view of his years. Her fever of anxiety lest
after all he should not come to see Avice again had been not without
an effect upon her health; and it made her more candid than she had
intended to be.

'Troubles and sickness raise all sorts of fears, Mr. Pierston,' she
said. 'What I felt only a wish for, when you first named it, I have
hoped for a good deal since; and I have been so anxious that--that it
should come to something! I am glad indeed that you are come.'

'My wanting to marry Avice, you mean, dear Mrs. Pierston?'

'Yes--that's it. I wonder if you are still in the same mind? You are?
Then I wish something could be done--to make her agree to it--so as to
get it settled. I dread otherwise what will become of her. She is not a
practical girl as I was--she would hardly like now to settle down as an
islander's wife; and to leave her living here alone would trouble me.'

'Nothing will happen to you yet, I hope, my dear old friend.'

'Well, it is a risky complaint; and the attacks, when they come, are
so agonizing that to endure them I ought to get rid of all outside
anxieties, folk say. Now--do you want her, sir?'

'With all my soul! But she doesn't want me.'

'I don't think she is so against you as you imagine. I fancy if it were
put to her plainly, now I am in this state, it might be done.'

They lapsed into conversation on the early days of their acquaintance,
until Mrs. Pierston's daughter re-entered the room.

'Avice,' said her mother, when the girl had been with them a few
minutes. 'About this matter that I have talked over with you so many
times since my attack. Here is Mr. Pierston, and he wishes to be your
husband. He is much older than you; but, in spite of it, that you will
ever get a better husband I don't believe. Now, will you take him,
seeing the state I am in, and how naturally anxious I am to see you
settled before I die?'

'But you won't die, mother! You are getting better!'

'Just for the present only. Come, he is a good man and a clever man, and
a rich man. I want you, O so much, to be his wife! I can say no more.'

Avice looked appealingly at the sculptor, and then on the floor. 'Does
he really wish me to?' she asked almost inaudibly, turning as she spoke
to Pierston. 'He has never quite said so to me.'

'My dear one, how can you doubt it?' said Jocelyn quickly. 'But I won't
press you to marry me as a favour, against your feelings.'

'I thought Mr. Pierston was younger!' she murmured to her mother.

'That counts for little, when you think how much there is on the other
side. Think of our position, and of his--a sculptor, with a mansion, and
a studio full of busts and statues that I have dusted in my time, and
of the beautiful studies you would be able to take up. Surely the life
would just suit you? Your expensive education is wasted down here!'

Avice did not care to argue. She was outwardly gentle as her grandmother
had been, and it seemed just a question with her of whether she must or
must not. 'Very well--I feel I ought to agree to marry him, since you
tell me to,' she answered quietly, after some thought. 'I see that it
would be a wise thing to do, and that you wish it, and that Mr. Pierston
really does--like me. So--so that--'

Pierston was not backward at this critical juncture, despite unpleasant
sensations. But it was the historic ingredient in this genealogical
passion--if its continuity through three generations may be so
described--which appealed to his perseverance at the expense of his
wisdom. The mother was holding the daughter's hand; she took Pierston's,
and laid Avice's in it.

No more was said in argument, and the thing was regarded as determined.
Afterwards a noise was heard upon the window-panes, as of fine sand
thrown; and, lifting the blind, Pierston saw that the distant lightship
winked with a bleared and indistinct eye. A drizzling rain had come
on with the dark, and it was striking the window in handfuls. He had
intended to walk the two miles back to the station, but it meant a
drenching to do it now. He waited and had supper; and, finding the
weather no better, accepted Mrs. Pierston's invitation to stay over the
night.

Thus it fell out that again he lodged in the house he had been
accustomed to live in as a boy, before his father had made his fortune,
and before his own name had been heard of outside the boundaries of the
isle.

He slept but little, and in the first movement of the dawn sat up in
bed. Why should he ever live in London or any other fashionable city
if this plan of marriage could be carried out? Surely, with this young
wife, the island would be the best place for him. It might be possible
to rent Sylvania Castle as he had formerly done--better still to buy it.
If life could offer him anything worth having it would be a home with
Avice there on his native cliffs to the end of his days.

As he sat thus thinking, and the daylight increased, he discerned, a
short distance before him, a movement of something ghostly. His position
was facing the window, and he found that by chance the looking-glass
had swung itself vertical, so that what he saw was his own shape. The
recognition startled him. The person he appeared was too grievously
far, chronologically, in advance of the person he felt himself to be.
Pierston did not care to regard the figure confronting him so mockingly.
Its voice seemed to say 'There's tragedy hanging on to this!' But the
question of age being pertinent he could not give the spectre up, and
ultimately got out of bed under the weird fascination of the reflection.
Whether he had overwalked himself lately, or what he had done, he knew
not; but never had he seemed so aged by a score of years as he was
represented in the glass in that cold grey morning light. While his soul
was what it was, why should he have been encumbered with that withering
carcase, without the ability to shift it off for another, as his ideal
Beloved had so frequently done?

By reason of her mother's illness Avice was now living in the house,
and, on going downstairs, he found that they were to breakfast en
tete-a-tete. She was not then in the room, but she entered in the course
of a few minutes. Pierston had already heard that the widow felt better
this morning, and elated by the prospect of sitting with Avice at this
meal he went forward to her joyously. As soon as she saw him in the full
stroke of day from the window she started; and he then remembered that
it was their first meeting under the solar rays.

She was so overcome that she turned and left the room as if she had
forgotten something; when she re-entered she was visibly pale. She
recovered herself, and apologized. She had been sitting up the night
before the last, she said, and was not quite so well as usual.

There may have been some truth in this; but Pierston could not get over
that first scared look of hers. It was enough to give daytime stability
to his night views of a possible tragedy lurking in this wedding
project. He determined that, at any cost to his heart, there should be
no misapprehension about him from this moment.

'Miss Pierston,' he said as they sat down, 'since it is well you should
know all the truth before we go any further, that there may be no
awkward discoveries afterwards, I am going to tell you something about
myself--if you are not too distressed to hear it?'

'No--let me hear it.'

'I was once the lover of your mother, and wanted to marry her, only she
wouldn't, or rather couldn't, marry me.'

'O how strange!' said the girl, looking from him to the breakfast
things, and from the breakfast things to him. 'Mother has never told me
that. Yet of course, you might have been. I mean, you are old enough.'

He took the remark as a satire she had not intended. 'O yes--quite old
enough,' he said grimly. 'Almost too old.'

'Too old for mother? How's that?'

'Because I belonged to your grandmother.'

'No? How can that be?'

'I was her lover likewise. I should have married her if I had gone
straight on instead of round the corner.'

'But you couldn't have been, Mr. Pierston! You are not old enough? Why,
how old are you?--you have never told me.'

'I am very old.'

'My mother's, and my grandmother's,' said she, looking at him no longer
as at a possible husband, but as a strange fossilized relic in human
form. Pierston saw it, but meaning to give up the game he did not care
to spare himself.

'Your mother's and your grandmother's young man,' he repeated.

'And were you my great-grandmother's too?' she asked, with an
expectant interest in his case as a drama that overcame her personal
considerations for a moment.

'No--not your great-grandmother's. Your imagination beats even my
confessions!... But I am VERY old, as you see.'

'I did not know it!' said she in an appalled murmur. 'You do not look
so; and I thought that what you looked you were.'

'And you--you are very young,' he continued.

A stillness followed, during which she sat in a troubled constraint,
regarding him now and then with something in her open eyes and large
pupils that might have been sympathy or nervousness. Pierston ate scarce
any breakfast, and rising abruptly from the table said he would take a
walk on the cliffs as the morning was fine.

He did so, proceeding along the north-east heights for nearly a mile. He
had virtually given Avice up, but not formally. His intention had been
to go back to the house in half-an-hour and pay a morning visit to the
invalid; but by not returning the plans of the previous evening might be
allowed to lapse silently, as mere pourparlers that had come to nothing
in the face of Avice's want of love for him. Pierston accordingly
went straight along, and in the course of an hour was at his Budmouth
lodgings.

Nothing occurred till the evening to inform him how his absence had been
taken. Then a note arrived from Mrs. Pierston; it was written in pencil,
evidently as she lay.

'I am alarmed,' she said, 'at your going so suddenly. Avice seems to
think she has offended you. She did not mean to do that, I am sure. It
makes me dreadfully anxious! Will you send a line? Surely you will not
desert us now--my heart is so set on my child's welfare!'

'Desert you I won't,' said Jocelyn. 'It is too much like the original
case. But I must let her desert me!'

On his return, with no other object than that of wishing Mrs. Pierston
good-bye, he found her painfully agitated. She clasped his hand and
wetted it with her tears.

'O don't be offended with her!' she cried. 'She's young. We are one
people--don't marry a kimberlin! It will break my heart if you forsake
her now! Avice!'

The girl came. 'My manner was hasty and thoughtless this morning,' she
said in a low voice. 'Please pardon me. I wish to abide by my promise.'

Her mother, still tearful, again joined their hands; and the engagement
stood as before.

Pierston went back to Budmouth, but dimly seeing how curiously, through
his being a rich suitor, ideas of beneficence and reparation were
retaining him in the course arranged by her mother, and urged by his own
desire in the face of his understanding.




3. V. ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION

In anticipation of his marriage Pierston had taken a new red house of
the approved Kensington pattern, with a new studio at the back as large
as a mediaeval barn. Hither, in collusion with the elder Avice--whose
health had mended somewhat--he invited mother and daughter to spend
a week or two with him, thinking thereby to exercise on the latter's
imagination an influence which was not practicable while he was a guest
at their house; and by interesting his betrothed in the fitting and
furnishing of this residence to create in her an ambition to be its
mistress.

It was a pleasant, reposeful time to be in town. There was nobody to
interrupt them in their proceedings, and, it being out of the season,
the largest tradesmen were as attentive to their wants as if those firms
had never before been honoured with a single customer whom they really
liked. Pierston and his guests, almost equally inexperienced--for the
sculptor had nearly forgotten what knowledge of householding he had
acquired earlier in life--could consider and practise thoroughly a
species of skeleton-drill in receiving visitors when the pair should
announce themselves as married and at home in the coming winter season.

Avice was charming, even if a little cold. He congratulated himself yet
again that time should have reserved for him this final chance for one
of the line. She was somewhat like her mother, whom he had loved in the
flesh, but she had the soul of her grandmother, whom he had loved in the
spirit--and, for that matter, loved now. Only one criticism had he to
pass upon his choice: though in outward semblance her grandam idealized,
she had not the first Avice's candour, but rather her mother's
closeness. He never knew exactly what she was thinking and feeling. Yet
he seemed to have such prescriptive rights in women of her blood that
her occasional want of confidence did not deeply trouble him.

It was one of those ripe and mellow afternoons that sometimes colour
London with their golden light at this time of the year, and produce
those marvellous sunset effects which, if they were not known to be made
up of kitchen coal-smoke and animal exhalations, would be rapturously
applauded. Behind the perpendicular, oblique, zigzagged, and curved zinc
'tall-boys,' that formed a grey pattern not unlike early Gothic numerals
against the sky, the men and women on the tops of the omnibuses saw an
irradiation of topaz hues, darkened here and there into richest russet.

There had been a sharp shower during the afternoon, and Pierston--who
had to take care of himself--had worn a pair of goloshes on his short
walk in the street. He noiselessly entered the studio, inside which
some gleams of the same mellow light had managed to creep, and where he
guessed he should find his prospective wife and mother-in-law awaiting
him with tea. But only Avice was there, seated beside the teapot of
brown delf, which, as artists, they affected, her back being toward him.
She was holding her handkerchief to her eyes, and he saw that she was
weeping silently.

In another moment he perceived that she was weeping over a book. By this
time she had heard him, and came forward. He made it appear that he
had not noticed her distress, and they discussed some arrangements of
furniture. When he had taken a cup of tea she went away, leaving the
book behind her.

Pierston took it up. The volume was an old school-book; Stievenard's
'Lectures Francaises,' with her name in it as a pupil at Sandbourne
High School, and date-markings denoting lessons taken at a comparatively
recent time, for Avice had been but a novice as governess when he
discovered her.

For a school-girl--which she virtually was--to weep over a school-book
was strange. Could she have been affected by some subject in the
readings? Impossible. Pierston fell to thinking, and zest died for the
process of furnishing, which he had undertaken so gaily. Somehow, the
bloom was again disappearing from his approaching marriage. Yet he
loved Avice more and more tenderly; he feared sometimes that in the
solicitousness of his affection he was spoiling her by indulging her
every whim.

He looked round the large and ambitious apartment, now becoming clouded
with shades, out of which the white and cadaverous countenances of his
studies, casts, and other lumber peered meditatively at him, as if they
were saying, 'What are you going to do now, old boy?' They had never
looked like that while standing in his past homely workshop, where all
the real labours of his life had been carried out. What should a man of
his age, who had not for years done anything to speak of--certainly not
to add to his reputation as an artist--want with a new place like this?
It was all because of the elect lady, and she apparently did not want
him.

Pierston did not observe anything further in Avice to cause him
misgiving till one dinner-time, a week later, towards the end of the
visit. Then, as he sat himself between her and her mother at their
limited table, he was struck with her nervousness, and was tempted to
say, 'Why are you troubled, my little dearest?' in tones which disclosed
that he was as troubled as she.

'Am I troubled?' she said with a start, turning her gentle hazel
eyes upon him. 'Yes, I suppose I am. It is because I have received a
letter--from an old friend.'

'You didn't show it to me,' said her mother.

'No--I tore it up.'

'Why?'

'It was not necessary to keep it, so I destroyed it.'

Mrs. Pierston did not press her further on the subject, and Avice showed
no disposition to continue it. They retired rather early, as they always
did, but Pierston remained pacing about his studio a long while, musing
on many things, not the least being the perception that to wed a woman
may be by no means the same thing as to be united with her. The 'old
friend' of Avice's remark had sounded very much like 'lover.' Otherwise
why should the letter have so greatly disturbed her?

There seemed to be something uncanny, after all, about London, in its
relation to his contemplated marriage. When she had first come up she
was easier with him than now. And yet his bringing her there had helped
his cause; the house had decidedly impressed her--almost overawed her,
and though he owned that by no law of nature or reason had her mother
or himself any right to urge on Avice partnership with him against
her inclination, he resolved to make the most of having her under his
influence by getting the wedding details settled before she and her
mother left.

The next morning he proceeded to do this. When he encountered Avice
there was a trace of apprehension on her face; but he set that down to
a fear that she had offended him the night before by her taciturnity.
Directly he requested her mother, in Avice's presence, to get her to
fix the day quite early, Mrs. Pierston became brighter and brisker. She,
too, plainly had doubts about the wisdom of delay, and turning to her
daughter said, 'Now, my dear, do you hear?'

It was ultimately agreed that the widow and her daughter should go
back in a day or two, to await Pierston's arrival on the wedding-eve,
immediately after their return.


                    *          *          *


In pursuance of the arrangement Pierston found himself on the south
shore of England in the gloom of the aforesaid evening, the isle, as
he looked across at it with his approach, being just discernible as a
moping countenance, a creature sullen with a sense that he was about to
withdraw from its keeping the rarest object it had ever owned. He had
come alone, not to embarrass them, and had intended to halt a couple of
hours in the neighbouring seaport to give some orders relating to the
wedding, but the little railway train being in waiting to take him on,
he proceeded with a natural impatience, resolving to do his business
here by messenger from the isle.

He passed the ruins of the Tudor castle and the long featureless rib of
grinding pebbles that screened off the outer sea, which could be heard
lifting and dipping rhythmically in the wide vagueness of the Bay.
At the under-hill island townlet of the Wells there were no flys, and
leaving his things to be brought on, as he often did, he climbed the
eminence on foot.

Half-way up the steepest part of the pass he saw in the dusk a figure
pausing--the single person on the incline. Though it was too dark to
identify faces, Pierston gathered from the way in which the halting
stranger was supporting himself by the handrail, which here bordered the
road to assist climbers, that the person was exhausted.

'Anything the matter?' he said.

'O no--not much,' was returned by the other. 'But it is steep just
here.'

The accent was not quite that of an Englishman, and struck him as
hailing from one of the Channel Islands. 'Can't I help you up to the
top?' he said, for the voice, though that of a young man, seemed faint
and shaken.

'No, thank you. I have been ill; but I thought I was all right again;
and as the night was fine I walked into the island by the road. It
turned out to be rather too much for me, as there is some weakness left
still; and this stiff incline brought it out.'

'Naturally. You'd better take hold of my arm--at any rate to the brow
here.'

Thus pressed the stranger did so, and they went on towards the ridge,
till, reaching the lime-kiln standing there the stranger abandoned his
hold, saying: 'Thank you for your assistance, sir. Good-night.'

'I don't think I recognize your voice as a native's?'

'No, it is not. I am a Jersey man. Goodnight, sir.'

'Good-night, if you are sure you can get on. Here, take this stick--it
is no use to me.' Saying which, Pierston put his walking-stick into the
young man's hand.

'Thank you again. I shall be quite recovered when I have rested a minute
or two. Don't let me detain you, please.'

The stranger as he spoke turned his face towards the south, where the
Beal light had just come into view, and stood regarding it with an
obstinate fixity. As he evidently wished to be left to himself Jocelyn
went on, and troubled no more about him, though the desire of the young
man to be rid of his company, after accepting his walking-stick and
his arm, had come with a suddenness that was almost emotional; and
impressionable as Jocelyn was, no less now than in youth, he was
saddened for a minute by the sense that there were people in the world
who did not like even his sympathy.

However, a pleasure which obliterated all this arose when Pierston drew
near to the house that was likely to be his dear home on all future
visits to the isle, perhaps even his permanent home as he grew older and
the associations of his youth re-asserted themselves. It had been, too,
his father's house, the house in which he was born, and he amused his
fancy with plans for its enlargement under the supervision of Avice and
himself. It was a still greater pleasure to behold a tall and shapely
figure standing against the light of the open door and presumably
awaiting him.

Avice, who it was, gave a little jump when she recognized him, but
dutifully allowed him to kiss her when he reached her side; though her
nervousness was only too apparent, and was like a child's towards a
parent who may prove stern.

'How dear of you to guess that I might come on at once instead of
later!' said Jocelyn. 'Well, if I had stayed in the town to go to the
shops and so on, I could not have got here till the last train. How is
mother?--our mother, as I shall call her soon.'

Avice said that her mother had not been so well--she feared not nearly
so well since her return from London, so that she was obliged to keep
her room. The visit had perhaps been too much for her. 'But she will
not acknowledge that she is much weaker, because she will not disturb my
happiness.'

Jocelyn was in a mood to let trifles of manner pass, and he took no
notice of the effort which had accompanied the last word. They went
upstairs to Mrs. Pierston, whose obvious relief and thankfulness at
sight of him was grateful to her visitor.

'I am so, O so glad you are come!' she said huskily, as she held out her
thin hand and stifled a sob. 'I have been so--'

She could get no further for a moment, and Avice turned away weeping,
and abruptly left the room.

'I have so set my heart on this,' Mrs. Pierston went on, 'that I have
not been able to sleep of late, for I have feared I might drop off
suddenly before she is yours, and lose the comfort of seeing you
actually united. Your being so kind to me in old times has made me so
sure that she will find a good husband in you, that I am over anxious, I
know. Indeed, I have not liked to let her know quite how anxious I am.'

Thus they talked till Jocelyn bade her goodnight, it being noticeable
that Mrs. Pierston, chastened by her illnesses, maintained no longer
any reserve on her gladness to acquire him as her son-in-law; and
her feelings destroyed any remaining scruples he might have had from
perceiving that Avice's consent was rather an obedience than a desire.
As he went downstairs, and found Avice awaiting his descent, he wondered
if anything had occurred here during his absence to give Mrs. Pierston
new uneasiness about the marriage, but it was an inquiry he could
not address to a girl whose actions could alone be the cause of such
uneasiness.

He looked round for her as he supped, but though she had come into the
room with him she was not there now. He remembered her telling him that
she had had supper with her mother, and Jocelyn sat on quietly musing
and sipping his wine for something near half-an-hour. Wondering then
for the first time what had become of her, he rose and went to the door.
Avice was quite near him after all--only standing at the front door
as she had been doing when he came, looking into the light of the full
moon, which had risen since his arrival. His sudden opening of the
dining-room door seemed to agitate her.

'What is it, dear?' he asked.

'As mother is much better and doesn't want me, I ought to go and see
somebody I promised to take a parcel to--I feel I ought. And yet, as you
have just come to see me--I suppose you don't approve of my going out
while you are here?'

'Who is the person?'

'Somebody down that way,' she said indefinitely. 'It is not very far
off. I am not afraid--I go out often by myself at night hereabout.'

He reassured her good-humouredly. 'If you really wish to go, my dear, of
course I don't object. I have no authority to do that till tomorrow, and
you know that if I had it I shouldn't use it.'

'O but you have! Mother being an invalid, you are in her place, apart
from--to-morrow.'

'Nonsense, darling. Run across to your friend's house by all means if
you want to.'

'And you'll be here when I come in?'

'No, I am going down to the inn to see if my things are brought up.'

'But hasn't mother asked you to stay here? The spare room was got ready
for you.... Dear me, I am afraid I ought to have told you.'

'She did ask me. But I have some things coming, directed to the inn,
and I had better be there. So I'll wish you good-night, though it is not
late. I will come in quite early to-morrow, to inquire how your mother
is going on, and to wish you good-morning. You will be back again
quickly this evening?'

'O yes.'

'And I needn't go with you for company?'

'O no, thank you. It is no distance.'

Pierston then departed, thinking how entirely her manner was that of one
to whom a question of doing anything was a question of permission and
not of judgment. He had no sooner gone than Avice took a parcel from
a cupboard, put on her hat and cloak, and following by the way he had
taken till she reached the entrance to Sylvania Castle, there stood
still. She could hear Pierston's footsteps passing down East Quarriers
to the inn; but she went no further in that direction. Turning into the
lane on the right, of which mention has so often been made, she went
quickly past the last cottage, and having entered the gorge beyond
she clambered into the ruin of the Red King's or Bow-and-Arrow Castle,
standing as a square black mass against the moonlit, indefinite sea.




3. VI. THE WELL-BELOVED IS--WHERE?

Mrs. Pierston passed a restless night, but this she let nobody know;
nor, what was painfully evident to herself, that her prostration was
increased by anxiety and suspense about the wedding on which she had too
much set her heart.

During the very brief space in which she dozed Avice came into her room.
As it was not infrequent for her daughter to look in upon her thus she
took little notice, merely saying to assure the girl: 'I am better,
dear. Don't come in again. Get to sleep yourself.'

The mother, however, went thinking anew. She had no apprehensions about
this marriage. She felt perfectly sure that it was the best thing she
could do for her girl. Not a young woman on the island but was envying
Avice at that moment; for Jocelyn was absurdly young for three score,
a good-looking man, one whose history was generally known here; as also
were the exact figures of the fortune he had inherited from his father,
and the social standing he could claim--a standing, however, which that
fortune would not have been large enough to procure unassisted by his
reputation in his art.

But Avice had been weak enough, as her mother knew, to indulge in
fancies for local youths from time to time, and Mrs. Pierston could not
help congratulating herself that her daughter had been so docile in the
circumstances. Yet to every one except, perhaps, Avice herself, Jocelyn
was the most romantic of lovers. Indeed was there ever such a romance
as that man embodied in his relations to her house? Rejecting the first
Avice, the second had rejected him, and to rally to the third with final
achievement was an artistic and tender finish to which it was ungrateful
in anybody to be blind.

The widow thought that the second Avice might probably not have rejected
Pierston on that occasion in the London studio so many years ago if
destiny had not arranged that she should have been secretly united to
another when the proposing moment came.

But what had come was best. 'My God,' she said at times that night, 'to
think my aim in writing to him should be fulfilling itself like this!'

When all was right and done, what a success upon the whole her life
would have been. She who had begun her career as a cottage-girl, a
small quarry-owner's daughter, had sunk so low as to the position
of laundress, had engaged in various menial occupations, had made an
unhappy marriage for love which had, however, in the long run, thanks to
Jocelyn's management, much improved her position, was at last to see
her daughter secure what she herself had just missed securing, and
established in a home of affluence and refinement.

Thus the sick woman excited herself as the hours went on. At last, in
her tenseness it seemed to her that the time had already come at which
the household was stirring, and she fancied she heard conversation in
her daughter's room. But she found that it was only five o'clock, and
not yet daylight. Her state was such that she could see the hangings of
the bed tremble with her tremors. She had declared overnight that she
did not require any one to sit up with her, but she now rang a little
handbell, and in a few minutes a nurse appeared; Ruth Stockwool, an
island woman and neighbour, whom Mrs. Pierston knew well, and who knew
all Mrs. Pierston's history.

'I am so nervous that I can't stay by myself,' said the widow. 'And I
thought I heard Becky dressing Miss Avice in her wedding things.'

'O no--not yet, ma'am. There's nobody up. But I'll get you something.'

When Mrs. Pierston had taken a little nourishment she went on: 'I can't
help frightening myself with thoughts that she won't marry him. You see
he is older than Avice.'

'Yes, he is,' said her neighbour. 'But I don't see how anything can
hender the wedden now.'

'Avice, you know, had fancies; at least one fancy for another man; a
young fellow of five-and-twenty. And she's been very secret and odd
about it. I wish she had raved and cried and had it out; but she's been
quite the other way. I know she's fond of him still.'

'What--that young Frenchman, Mr. Leverre o' Sandbourne? I've heard a
little of it. But I should say there wadden much between 'em.'

'I don't think there was. But I've a sort of conviction that she saw him
last night. I believe it was only to bid him good-bye, and return him
some books he had given her; but I wish she had never known him; he is
rather an excitable, impulsive young man, and he might make mischief.
He isn't a Frenchman, though he has lived in France. His father was a
Jersey gentleman, and on his becoming a widower he married as his second
wife a native of this very island. That's mainly why the young man is so
at home in these parts.'

'Ah--now I follow 'ee. She was a Bencomb, his stepmother: I heard
something about her years ago.'

'Yes; her father had the biggest stone-trade on the island at one time;
but the name is forgotten here now. He retired years before I was born.
However, mother used to tell me that she was a handsome young woman,
who tried to catch Mr. Pierston when he was a young man, and scandalized
herself a bit with him. She went off abroad with her father, who had
made a fortune here; but when he got over there he lost it nearly all in
some way. Years after she married this Jerseyman, Mr. Leverre, who had
been fond of her as a girl, and she brought up his child as her own.'

Mrs. Pierston paused, but as Ruth did not ask any question she presently
resumed her self-relieving murmur:

'How Miss Avice got to know the young man was in this way. When Mrs.
Leverre's husband died she came from Jersey to live at Sandbourne;
and made it her business one day to cross over to this place to make
inquiries about Mr. Jocelyn Pierston. As my name was Pierston she called
upon me with her son, and so Avice and he got acquainted. When Avice
went back to Sandbourne to the finishing school they kept up the
acquaintance in secret. He taught French somewhere there, and does
still, I believe.'

'Well, I hope she'll forget en. He idden good enough.'

'I hope so--I hope so.... Now I'll try to get a little nap.'

Ruth Stockwool went back to her room, where, finding it would not be
necessary to get up for another hour, she lay down again and soon slept.
Her bed was close to the staircase, from which it was divided by a lath
partition only, and her consciousness either was or seemed to be aroused
by light brushing touches on the outside of the partition, as of fingers
feeling the way downstairs in the dark. The slight noise passed, and in
a few seconds she dreamt or fancied she could hear the unfastening of
the back door.

She had nearly sunk into another sound sleep when precisely the same
phenomena were repeated; fingers brushing along the wall close to her
head, down, downward, the soft opening of the door, its close, and
silence again.

She now became clearly awake. The repetition of the process had made the
whole matter a singular one. Early as it was the first sounds might have
been those of the housemaid descending, though why she should have come
down so stealthily and in the dark did not make itself clear. But the
second performance was inexplicable. Ruth got out of bed and lifted her
blind. The dawn was hardly yet pink, and the light from the sandbank
was not yet extinguished. But the bushes of euonymus against the white
palings of the front garden could be seen, also the light surface of
the road winding away like a riband to the north entrance of Sylvania
Castle, thence round to the village, the cliffs, and the Cove behind.
Upon the road two dark figures could just be discerned, one a little
way behind the other, but overtaking and joining the foremost as Ruth
looked. After all they might be quarriers or lighthouse-keepers from the
south of the island, or fishermen just landed from a night's work. There
being nothing to connect them with the noises she had heard indoors she
dismissed the whole subject, and went to bed again.


                    *          *          *


Jocelyn had promised to pay an early visit to ascertain the state of
Mrs. Pierston's health after her night's rest, her precarious condition
being more obvious to him than to Avice, and making him a little
anxious. Subsequent events caused him to remember that while he was
dressing he casually observed two or three boatmen standing near the
cliff beyond the village, and apparently watching with deep interest
what seemed to be a boat far away towards the opposite shore of South
Wessex. At half-past eight he came from the door of the inn and went
straight to Mrs. Pierston's. On approaching he discovered that a strange
expression which seemed to hang about the house-front that morning was
more than a fancy, the gate, door, and two windows being open, though
the blinds of other windows were not drawn up, the whole lending a
vacant, dazed look to the domicile, as of a person gaping in sudden
stultification. Nobody answered his knock, and walking into the
dining-room he found that no breakfast had been laid. His flashing
thought was, 'Mrs. Pierston is dead.'

While standing in the room somebody came downstairs, and Jocelyn
encountered Ruth Stockwool, an open letter fluttering in her hand.

'O Mr. Pierston, Mr. Pierston! The Lord-a-Lord!'

'What? Mrs. Pierston--'

'No, no! Miss Avice! She is gone!--yes--gone! Read ye this, sir. It was
left in her bedroom, and we be fairly gallied out of our senses!'

He took the letter and confusedly beheld that it was in two
handwritings, the first section being in Avice's:

'MY DEAR MOTHER,--How ever will you forgive me for what I have done!
So deceitful as it seems. And yet till this night I had no idea of
deceiving either you or Mr. Pierston.

'Last night at ten o'clock I went out, as you may have guessed, to see
Mr. Leverre for the last time, and to give him back his books, letters,
and little presents to me. I went only a few steps--to Bow-and-Arrow
Castle, where we met as we had agreed to do, since he could not call.
When I reached the place I found him there waiting, but quite ill.
He had been unwell at his mother's house for some days, and had been
obliged to stay in bed, but he had got up on purpose to come and bid
me good-bye. The over-exertion of the journey upset him, and though we
stayed and stayed till twelve o'clock he felt quite unable to go back
home--unable, indeed, to move more than a few yards. I had tried so
hard not to love him any longer, but I loved him so now that I could
not desert him and leave him out there to catch his death. So I helped
him--nearly carrying him--on and on to our door, and then round to the
back. Here he got a little better, and as he could not stay there, and
everybody was now asleep, I helped him upstairs into the room we had
prepared for Mr. Pierston if he should have wanted one. I got him into
bed, and then fetched some brandy and a little of your tonic. Did you
see me come into your room for it, or were you asleep?

'I sat by him all night. He improved slowly, and we talked over what
we had better do. I felt that, though I had intended to give him up, I
could not now becomingly marry any other man, and that I ought to marry
him. We decided to do it at once, before anybody could hinder us. So we
came down before it was light, and have gone away to get the ceremony
solemnized.

'Tell Mr. Pierston it was not premeditated, but the result of an
accident. I am sincerely sorry to have treated him with what he will
think unfairness, but though I did not love him I meant to obey you and
marry him. But God sent this necessity of my having to give shelter to
my Love, to prevent, I think, my doing what I am now convinced would
have been wrong--Ever your loving daughter, AVICE.'

The second was in a man's hand:

'DEAR MOTHER (as you will soon be to me),--Avice has clearly explained
above how it happened that I have not been able to give her up to
Mr. Pierston. I think I should have died if I had not accepted the
hospitality of a room in your house this night, and your daughter's
tender nursing through the dark dreary hours. We love each other beyond
expression, and it is obvious that, if we are human, we cannot resist
marrying now, in spite of friends' wishes. Will you please send the
note lying beside this to my mother. It is merely to explain what I have
done--Yours with warmest regard, HENRI LEVERRE.'

Jocelyn turned away and looked out of the window.

'Mrs. Pierston thought she heard some talking in the night, but of
course she put it down to fancy. And she remembers Miss Avice coming
into her room at one o'clock in the morning, and going to the table
where the medicine was standing. A sly girl--all the time her young
man within a yard or two, in the very room, and a using the very clean
sheets that you, sir, were to have used! They are our best linen ones,
got up beautiful, and a kept wi' rosemary. Really, sir, one would say
you stayed out o' your chammer o' purpose to oblige the young man with a
bed!'

'Don't blame them, don't blame them!' said Jocelyn in an even and
characterless voice. 'Don't blame her, particularly. She didn't make the
circumstances. I did.... It was how I served her grandmother. ... Well,
she's gone! You needn't make a mystery of it. Tell it to all the island:
say that a man came to marry a wife, and didn't find her at home. Tell
everybody that she's run away. It must be known sooner or later.'

One of the servants said, after waiting a few moments: 'We shan't do
that, sir.'

'Oh--Why won't you?'

'We liked her too well, with all her faults.'

'Ah--did you,' said he; and he sighed. He perceived that the younger
maids were secretly on Avice's side.

'How does her mother bear it?' Jocelyn asked. 'Is she awake?'

Mrs. Pierston had hardly slept, and, having learnt the tidings
inadvertently, became so distracted and incoherent as to be like a
person in a delirium; till, a few moments before he arrived, all her
excitement ceased, and she lay in a weak, quiet silence.

'Let me go up,' Pierston said. 'And send for the doctor.'

Passing Avice's chamber he perceived that the little bed had not been
slept on. At the door of the spare room he looked in. In one corner
stood a walking-stick--his own.

'Where did that come from?'

'We found it there, sir.'

'Ah yes--I gave it to him. 'Tis like me to play another's game!'

It was the last spurt of bitterness that Jocelyn let escape him. He went
on towards Mrs. Pierston's room, preceded by the servant.

'Mr. Pierston has come, ma'am,' he heard her say to the invalid. But as
the latter took no notice the woman rushed forward to the bed. 'What has
happened to her, Mr. Pierston? O what do it mean?'

Avice the Second was lying placidly in the position in which the nurse
had left her; but no breath came from her lips, and a rigidity
of feature was accompanied by the precise expression which had
characterized her face when Pierston had her as a girl in his studio.
He saw that it was death, though she appeared to have breathed her last
only a few moments before.

Ruth Stockwool's composure deserted her. ''Tis the shock of finding Miss
Avice gone that has done it!' she cried. 'She has killed her mother!'

'Don't say such a terrible thing!' exclaimed Jocelyn.

'But she ought to have obeyed her mother--a good mother as she was! How
she had set her heart upon the wedding, poor soul; and we couldn't help
her knowing what had happened! O how ungrateful young folk be! That girl
will rue this morning's work!'

'We must get the doctor,' said Pierston, mechanically, hastening from
the room.

When the local practitioner came he merely confirmed their own verdict,
and thought her death had undoubtedly been hastened by the shock of the
ill news upon a feeble heart, following a long strain of anxiety about
the wedding. He did not consider that an inquest would be necessary.


                    *          *          *


The two shadowy figures seen through the grey gauzes of the morning by
Ruth, five hours before this time, had gone on to the open place by the
north entrance of Sylvania Castle, where the lane to the ruins of the
old castle branched off. A listener would not have gathered that
a single word passed between them. The man walked with difficulty,
supported by the woman. At this spot they stopped and kissed each other
a long while.

'We ought to walk all the way to Budmouth, if we wish not to be
discovered,' he said sadly. 'And I can't even get across the island,
even by your help, darling. It is two miles to the foot of the hill.'

She, who was trembling, tried to speak consolingly:

'If you could walk we should have to go down the Street of Wells, where
perhaps somebody would know me? Now if we get below here to the Cove,
can't we push off one of the little boats I saw there last night, and
paddle along close to the shore till we get to the north side? Then we
can walk across to the station very well. It is quite calm, and as the
tide sets in that direction, it will take us along of itself, without
much rowing. I've often got round in a boat that way.'

This seemed to be the only plan that offered, and abandoning the
straight road they wound down the defile spanned further on by the old
castle arch, and forming the original fosse of the fortress.

The stroke of their own footsteps, lightly as these fell, was flapped
back to them with impertinent gratuitousness by the vertical faces of
the rock, so still was everything around. A little further, and they
emerged upon the open ledge of the lower tier of cliffs, to the right
being the sloping pathway leading down to the secluded creek at their
base--the single practicable spot of exit from or entrance to the isle
on this side by a seagoing craft; once an active wharf, whence many a
fine public building had sailed--including Saint Paul's Cathedral.

The timorous shadowy shapes descended the footway, one at least of them
knowing the place so well that she found it scarcely necessary to guide
herself down by touching the natural wall of stone on her right hand, as
her companion did. Thus, with quick suspensive breathings they
arrived at the bottom, and trod the few yards of shingle which, on the
forbidding shore hereabout, could be found at this spot alone. It was so
solitary as to be unvisited often for four-and-twenty hours by a
living soul. Upon the confined beach were drawn up two or three
fishing-lerrets, and a couple of smaller ones, beside them being a rough
slipway for launching, and a boathouse of tarred boards. The two lovers
united their strength to push the smallest of the boats down the slope,
and floating it they scrambled in.

The girl broke the silence by asking, 'Where are the oars?'

He felt about the boat, but could find none. 'I forgot to look for the
oars!' he said.

'They are locked in the boathouse, I suppose. Now we can only steer and
trust to the current!'

The currents here were of a complicated kind. It was true, as the girl
had said, that the tide ran round to the north, but at a special moment
in every flood there set in along the shore a narrow reflux contrary to
the general outer flow, called 'The Southern' by the local sailors. It
was produced by the peculiar curves of coast lying east and west of the
Beal; these bent southward in two back streams the up-Channel flow on
each side of the peninsula, which two streams united outside the
Beal, and there met the direct tidal flow, the confluence of the three
currents making the surface of the sea at this point to boil like a pot,
even in calmest weather. The disturbed area, as is well known, is called
the Race.

Thus although the outer sea was now running northward to the roadstead
and the mainland of Wessex 'The Southern' ran in full force towards the
Beal and the Race beyond. It caught the lovers' hapless boat in a
few moments, and, unable to row across it--mere river's width that
it was--they beheld the grey rocks near them, and the grim wrinkled
forehead of the isle above, sliding away northwards.

They gazed helplessly at each other, though, in the long-living faith
of youth, without distinct fear. The undulations increased in magnitude,
and swung them higher and lower. The boat rocked, received a smart slap
of the waves now and then, and wheeled round, so that the lightship
which stolidly winked at them from the quicksand, the single object
which told them of their bearings, was sometimes on their right hand and
sometimes on their left. Nevertheless they could always discern from it
that their course, whether stemwards or sternwards, was steadily south.

A bright idea occurred to the young man. He pulled out his handkerchief
and, striking a light, set it on fire. She gave him hers, and he made
that flare up also. The only available fuel left was the small umbrella
the girl had brought; this was also kindled in an opened state, and he
held it up by the stem till it was consumed.

The lightship had loomed quite large by this time, and a few minutes
after they had burnt the handkerchiefs and umbrella a coloured flame
replied to them from the vessel. They flung their arms round each other.

'I knew we shouldn't be drowned!' said Avice hysterically.

'I thought we shouldn't too,' said he.

With the appearance of day a boat put off to their assistance, and they
were towed towards the heavy red hulk with the large white letters on
its side.




3. VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT

The October day thickened into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside the
corpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither, he
had acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well as
he could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease. It
was doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so. Of
Avice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and the
other had emigrated, while her only child besides the present Avice had
died in infancy. As for her friends, she had become so absorbed in her
ambitious and nearly accomplished design of marrying her daughter to
Jocelyn, that she had gradually completed that estrangement between
herself and the other islanders which had been begun so long ago as
when, a young woman, she had herself been asked by Pierston to marry
him. On her tantalizing inability to accept the honour offered, she and
her husband had been set up in a matter-of-fact business in the stone
trade by her patron, but that unforgettable request in the London studio
had made her feel ever since a refined kinship with sculpture, and a
proportionate aloofness from mere quarrying, which was, perhaps, no more
than a venial weakness in Avice the Second. Her daughter's objection to
Jocelyn she could never understand. To her own eye he was no older than
when he had proposed to her.

As he sat darkling here the ghostly outlines of former shapes taken by
his Love came round their sister the unconscious corpse, confronting
him from the wall in sad array, like the pictured Trojan women beheld by
AEneas on the walls of Carthage. Many of them he had idealized in
bust and in figure from time to time, but it was not as such that he
remembered and reanimated them now; rather was it in all their natural
circumstances, weaknesses, and stains. And then as he came to himself
their voices grew fainter; they had all gone off on their different
careers, and he was left here alone.

The probable ridicule that would result to him from the events of the
day he did not mind in itself at all. But he would fain have removed
the misapprehensions on which it would be based. That, however, was
impossible. Nobody would ever know the truth about him; what it was he
had sought that had so eluded, tantalized, and escaped him; what it was
that had led him such a dance, and had at last, as he believed just now
in the freshness of his loss, been discovered in the girl who had left
him. It was not the flesh; he had never knelt low to that. Not a woman
in the world had been wrecked by him, though he had been impassioned
by so many. Nobody would guess the further sentiment--the cordial
loving-kindness--which had lain behind what had seemed to him the
enraptured fulfilment of a pleasing destiny postponed for forty years.
His attraction to the third Avice would be regarded by the world as the
selfish designs of an elderly man on a maid.

His life seemed no longer a professional man's experience, but a ghost
story; and he would fain have vanished from his haunts on this
critical afternoon, as the rest had done. He desired to sleep away
his tendencies, to make something happen which would put an end to his
bondage to beauty in the ideal.

So he sat on till it was quite dark, and a light was brought. There was
a chilly wind blowing outside, and the lightship on the quicksand afar
looked harassed and forlorn. The haggard solitude was broken by a ring
at the door.

Pierston heard a voice below, the accents of a woman. They had a ground
quality of familiarity, a superficial articulation of strangeness. Only
one person in all his experience had ever possessed precisely those
tones; rich, as if they had once been powerful. Explanations seemed to
be asked for and given, and in a minute he was informed that a lady was
downstairs whom perhaps he would like to see.

'Who is the lady?' Jocelyn asked.

The servant hesitated a little. 'Mrs. Leverre--the mother of the--young
gentleman Miss Avice has run off with.'

'Yes--I'll see her,' said Pierston.

He covered the face of the dead Avice, and descended. 'Leverre,' he said
to himself. His ears had known that name before to-day. It was the name
those travelling Americans he had met in Rome gave the woman he supposed
might be Marcia Bencomb.

A sudden adjusting light burst upon many familiar things at that moment.
He found the visitor in the drawing-room, standing up veiled, the
carriage which had brought her being in waiting at the door. By the dim
light he could see nothing of her features in such circumstances.

'Mr. Pierston?'

'I am Mr. Pierston.'

'You represent the late Mrs. Pierston?'

'I do--though I am not one of the family.'

'I know it.... I am Marcia--after forty years.'

'I was divining as much, Marcia. May the lines have fallen to you in
pleasant places since we last met! But, of all moments of my life, why
do you choose to hunt me up now?'

'Why--I am the step-mother and only relation of the young man your bride
eloped with this morning.'

'I was just guessing that, too, as I came downstairs. But--'

'And I am naturally making inquiries.'

'Yes. Let us take it quietly, and shut the door.'

Marcia sat down. And he learnt that the conjunction of old things and
new was no accident. What Mrs. Pierston had discussed with her nurse and
neighbour as vague intelligence, was now revealed to Jocelyn at first
hand by Marcia herself; how, many years after their separation, and
when she was left poor by the death of her impoverished father, she had
become the wife of that bygone Jersey lover of hers, who wanted a tender
nurse and mother for the infant left him by his first wife recently
deceased; how he had died a few years later, leaving her with the boy,
whom she had brought up at St. Heliers and in Paris, educating him as
well as she could with her limited means, till he became the French
master at a school in Sandbourne; and how, a year ago, she and her son
had got to know Mrs. Pierston and her daughter on their visit to the
island, 'to ascertain,' she added, more deliberately, 'not entirely for
sentimental reasons, what had become of the man with whom I eloped in
the first flush of my young womanhood, and only missed marrying by my
own will.'

Pierston bowed.

'Well, that was how the acquaintance between the children began, and
their passionate attachment to each other.' She detailed how Avice had
induced her mother to let her take lessons in French of young Leverre,
rendering their meetings easy. Marcia had never thought of hindering
their intimacy, for in her recent years of affliction she had acquired
a new interest in the name she had refused to take in her purse-proud
young womanhood; and it was not until she knew how determined Mrs.
Pierston was to make her daughter Jocelyn's wife that she had objected
to her son's acquaintance with Avice. But it was too late to hinder what
had been begun. He had lately been ill, and she had been frightened by
his not returning home the night before. The note she had received from
him that day had only informed her that Avice and himself had gone to be
married immediately--whither she did not know.

'What do you mean to do?' she asked.

'I do nothing: there is nothing to be done.... It is how I served her
grandmother--one of Time's revenges.'

'Served her so for me.'

'Yes. Now she me for your son.'

Marcia paused a long while thinking that over, till arousing herself she
resumed: 'But can't we inquire which way they went out of the island, or
gather some particulars about them?'

'Aye--yes. We will.'

And Pierston found himself as in a dream walking beside Marcia along the
road in their common quest. He discovered that almost every one of the
neighbouring inhabitants knew more about the lovers than he did himself.

At the corner some men were engaged in conversation on the occurrence.
It was allusive only, but knowing the dialect, Pierston and Marcia
gathered its import easily. As soon as it had got light that morning one
of the boats was discovered missing from the creek below, and when the
flight of the lovers was made known it was inferred that they were the
culprits.

Unconsciously Pierston turned in the direction of the creek, without
regarding whether Marcia followed him, and though it was darker than
when Avice and Leverre had descended in the morning he pursued his way
down the incline till he reached the water-side.

'Is that you, Jocelyn?'

The inquiry came from Marcia. She was behind him, about half-way down.

'Yes,' he said, noticing that it was the first time she had called him
by his Christian name.

'I can't see where you are, and I am afraid to follow.'

Afraid to follow. How strangely that altered his conception of her.
Till this moment she had stood in his mind as the imperious, invincible
Marcia of old. There was a strange pathos in this revelation. He went
back and felt for her hand. 'I'll lead you down,' he said. And he did
so.

They looked out upon the sea, and the lightship shining as if it had
quite forgotten all about the fugitives. 'I am so uneasy,' said Marcia.
'Do you think they got safely to land?'

'Yes,' replied some one other than Jocelyn. It was a boatman smoking in
the shadow of the boathouse. He informed her that they were picked up by
the lightship men, and afterwards, at their request, taken across to
the opposite shore, where they landed, proceeding thence on foot to
the nearest railway station and entering the train for London. This
intelligence had reached the island about an hour before.

'They'll be married to-morrow morning!' said Marcia.

'So much the better. Don't regret it, Marcia. He shall not lose by it. I
have no relation in the world except some twentieth cousins in the isle,
of whom her father was one, and I'll take steps at once to make her a
good match for him. As for me... I have lived a day too long.'




3. VIII. 'ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!'

In the month of November which followed Pierston was lying dangerously
ill of a fever at his house in London.

The funeral of the second Avice had happened to be on one of those
drenching afternoons of the autumn, when the raw rain flies level as the
missiles of the ancient inhabitants across the beaked promontory which
has formed the scene of this narrative, scarcely alighting except
against the upright sides of things sturdy enough to stand erect.
One person only followed the corpse into the church as chief mourner,
Jocelyn Pierston--fickle lover in the brief, faithful friend in the
long run. No means had been found of communicating with Avice before the
interment, though the death had been advertised in the local and other
papers in the hope that it might catch her eye.

So, when the pathetic procession came out of the church and moved round
into the graveyard, a hired vehicle from Budmouth was seen coming at
great speed along the open road from Top-o'-Hill. It stopped at the
churchyard gate, and a young man and woman alighted and entered, the
vehicle waiting. They glided along the path and reached Pierston's side
just as the body was deposited by the grave.

He did not turn his head. He knew it was Avice, with Henri Leverre--by
this time, he supposed, her husband. Her remorseful grief, though
silent, seemed to impregnate the atmosphere with its heaviness.
Perceiving that they had not expected him to be there Pierston edged
back; and when the service was over he kept still further aloof, an act
of considerateness which she seemed to appreciate.

Thus, by his own contrivance, neither Avice nor the young man held
communication with Jocelyn by word or by sign. After the burial they
returned as they had come.

It was supposed that his exposure that day in the bleakest churchyard
in Wessex, telling upon a distracted mental and bodily condition, had
thrown Pierston into the chill and fever which held him swaying for
weeks between life and death shortly after his return to town. When he
had passed the crisis, and began to know again that there was such a
state as mental equilibrium and physical calm, he heard a whispered
conversation going on around him, and the touch of footsteps on the
carpet. The light in the chamber was so subdued that nothing around him
could be seen with any distinctness. Two living figures were present, a
nurse moving about softly, and a visitor. He discerned that the latter
was feminine, and for the time this was all.

He was recalled to his surroundings by a voice murmuring the inquiry:
'Does the light try your eyes?'

The tones seemed familiar: they were spoken by the woman who was
visiting him. He recollected them to be Marcia's, and everything that
had happened before he fell ill came back to his mind.

'Are you helping to nurse me, Marcia?' he asked.

'Yes. I have come up to stay here till you are better, as you seem to
have no other woman friend who cares whether you are dead or alive. I am
living quite near. I am glad you have got round the corner. We have been
very anxious.'

'How good you are!... And--have you heard of the others?'

'They are married. They have been here to see you, and are very sorry.
She sat by you, but you did not know her. She was broken down when she
discovered her mother's death, which had never once occurred to her as
being imminent. They have gone away again. I thought it best she should
leave, now that you are out of danger. Now you must be quiet till I come
and talk again.'

Pierston was conscious of a singular change in himself, which had been
revealed by this slight discourse. He was no longer the same man that he
had hitherto been. The malignant fever, or his experiences, or both, had
taken away something from him, and put something else in its place.

During the next days, with further intellectual expansion, he became
clearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he
could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled
from the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itself
only on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice's good qualities
alone had any effect on his mind; of her appearance none at all.

At first he was appalled; and then he said, 'Thank God!'

Marcia, who, with something of her old absolutism, came to his house
continually to inquire and give orders, and to his room to see him every
afternoon, found out for herself in the course of his convalescence this
strange death of the sensuous side of Jocelyn's nature. She had said
that Avice was getting extraordinarily handsome, and that she did not
wonder her stepson lost his heart to her--an inadvertent remark which
she immediately regretted, in fear lest it should agitate him. He merely
answered, however, 'Yes; I suppose she is handsome. She's more--a wise
girl who will make a good housewife in time.... I wish you were not
handsome, Marcia.'

'Why?'

'I don't quite know why. Well--it seems a stupid quality to me. I can't
understand what it is good for any more.'

'O--I as a woman think there's good in it.'

'Is there? Then I have lost all conception of it. I don't know what has
happened to me. I only know I don't regret it. Robinson Crusoe lost
a day in his illness: I have lost a faculty, for which loss Heaven be
praised!'

There was something pathetic in this announcement, and Marcia sighed as
she said, 'Perhaps when you get strong it will come back to you.'

Pierston shook his head. It then occurred to him that never since the
reappearance of Marcia had he seen her in full daylight, or without
a bonnet and thick veil, which she always retained on these frequent
visits, and that he had been unconsciously regarding her as the Marcia
of their early time, a fancy which the small change in her voice well
sustained. The stately figure, the good colour, the classical profile,
the rather large handsome nose and somewhat prominent, regular teeth,
the full dark eye, formed still the Marcia of his imagination; the
queenly creature who had infatuated him when the first Avice was
despised and her successors unknown. It was this old idea which, in his
revolt from beauty, had led to his regret at her assumed handsomeness.
He began wondering now how much remained of that presentation after
forty years.

'Why don't you ever let me see you, Marcia?' he asked.

'O, I don't know. You mean without my bonnet? You have never asked me
to, and I am obliged to wrap up my face with this wool veil because I
suffer so from aches in these cold winter winds, though a thick veil is
awkward for any one whose sight is not so good as it was.'

The impregnable Marcia's sight not so good as it was, and her face
in the aching stage of life: these simple things came as sermons to
Jocelyn.

'But certainly I will gratify your curiosity,' she resumed
good-naturedly. 'It is really a compliment that you should still take
that sort of interest in me.'

She had moved round from the dark side of the room to the lamp--for the
daylight had gone--and she now suddenly took off the bonnet, veil
and all. She stood revealed to his eyes as remarkably good-looking,
considering the lapse of years.

'I am--vexed!' he said, turning his head aside impatiently. 'You are
fair and five-and-thirty--not a day more. You still suggest beauty. YOU
won't do as a chastisement, Marcia!'

'Ah, but I may! To think that you know woman no better after all this
time!'

'How?'

'To be so easily deceived. Think: it is lamplight; and your sight is
weak at present; and... Well, I have no reason for being anything but
candid now, God knows! So I will tell you.... My husband was younger
than myself; and he had an absurd wish to make people think he had
married a young and fresh-looking woman. To fall in with his vanity I
tried to look it. We were often in Paris, and I became as skilled in
beautifying artifices as any passee wife of the Faubourg St. Germain.
Since his death I have kept up the practice, partly because the vice is
almost ineradicable, and partly because I found that it helped me
with men in bringing up his boy on small means. At this moment I
am frightfully made up. But I can cure that. I'll come in to-morrow
morning, if it is bright, just as I really am; you'll find that Time has
not disappointed you. Remember I am as old as yourself; and I look it.'

The morrow came, and with it Marcia, quite early, as she had promised.
It happened to be sunny, and shutting the bedroom door she went round to
the window, where she uncovered immediately, in his full view, and said,
'See if I am satisfactory now--to you who think beauty vain. The rest
of me--and it is a good deal--lies on my dressing-table at home. I shall
never put it on again--never!'

But she was a woman; and her lips quivered, and there was a tear in her
eye, as she exposed the ruthless treatment to which she had subjected
herself. The cruel morning rays--as with Jocelyn under Avice's
scrutiny--showed in their full bareness, unenriched by addition,
undisguised by the arts of colour and shade, the thin remains of
what had once been Marcia's majestic bloom. She stood the image and
superscription of Age--an old woman, pale and shrivelled, her forehead
ploughed, her cheek hollow, her hair white as snow. To this the face he
once kissed had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, scourgings,
bakings, freezings of forty invidious years--by the thinkings of more
than half a lifetime.

'I am sorry if I shock you,' she went on huskily but firmly, as he
did not speak. 'But the moth frets the garment somewhat in such an
interval.'

'Yes--yes!... Marcia, you are a brave woman. You have the courage of the
great women of history. I can no longer love; but I admire you from my
soul!'

'Don't say I am great. Say I have begun to be passably honest. It is
more than enough.'

'Well--I'll say nothing then, more than how wonderful it is that a woman
should have been able to put back the clock of Time thirty years!'

'It shames me now, Jocelyn. I shall never do it any more!'


                    *          *          *


As soon as he was strong enough he got her to take him round to his
studio in a carriage. The place had been kept aired, but the shutters
were shut, and they opened them themselves. He looked round upon the
familiar objects--some complete and matured, the main of them seedlings,
grafts, and scions of beauty, waiting for a mind to grow to perfection
in.

'No--I don't like them!' he said, turning away. 'They are as ugliness
to me! I don't feel a single touch of kin with or interest in any one of
them whatever.'

'Jocelyn--this is sad.'

'No--not at all.' He went again towards the door. 'Now let me look
round.' He looked back, Marcia remaining silent. 'The Aphrodites--how I
insulted her fair form by those failures!--the Freyjas, the Nymphs and
Fauns, Eves, Avices, and other innumerable Well-Beloveds--I want to see
them never any more!... "Instead of sweet smell there shall be stink,
and there shall be burning instead of beauty," said the prophet.'

And they came away. On another afternoon they went to the National
Gallery, to test his taste in paintings, which had formerly been good.
As she had expected, it was just the same with him there. He saw no more
to move him, he declared, in the time-defying presentations of Perugino,
Titian, Sebastiano, and other statuesque creators than in the work of
the pavement artist they had passed on their way.

'It is strange!' said she.

'I don't regret it. That fever has killed a faculty which has, after
all, brought me my greatest sorrows, if a few little pleasures. Let us
be gone.'

He was now so well advanced in convalescence that it was deemed a most
desirable thing to take him down into his native air. Marcia agreed
to accompany him. 'I don't see why I shouldn't,' said she. 'An old
friendless woman like me, and you an old friendless man.'

'Yes. Thank Heaven I am old at last. The curse is removed.'

It may be shortly stated here that after his departure for the isle
Pierston never again saw his studio or its contents. He had been down
there but a brief while when, finding his sense of beauty in art and
nature absolutely extinct, he directed his agent in town to disperse the
whole collection; which was done. His lease of the building was sold,
and in the course of time another sculptor won admiration there from
those who knew not Joseph. The next year his name figured on the retired
list of Academicians.


                    *          *          *


As time went on he grew as well as one of his age could expect to be
after such a blasting illness, but remained on the isle, in the only
house he now possessed, a comparatively small one at the top of the
Street of Wells. A growing sense of friendship which it would be foolish
to interrupt led him to take a somewhat similar house for Marcia quite
near, and remove her furniture thither from Sandbourne. Whenever the
afternoon was fine he would call for her and they would take a stroll
together towards the Beal, or the ancient Castle, seldom going the whole
way, his sciatica and her rheumatism effectually preventing them,
except in the driest atmospheres. He had now changed his style of dress
entirely, appearing always in a homely suit of local make, and of the
fashion of thirty years before, the achievement of a tailoress at East
Quarriers. He also let his iron-grey beard grow as it would, and what
little hair he had left from the baldness which had followed the fever.
And thus, numbering in years but two-and-sixty, he might have passed for
seventy-five.

Though their early adventure as lovers had happened so long ago, its
history had become known in the isle with mysterious rapidity and
fulness of detail. The gossip to which its bearing on their present
friendship gave rise was the subject of their conversation on one of
these walks along the cliffs.

'It is extraordinary what an interest our neighbours take in our
affairs,' he observed. 'They say "those old folk ought to marry; better
late than never." That's how people are--wanting to round off other
people's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner.'

'Yes. They keep on about it to me, too, indirectly.'

'Do they! I believe a deputation will wait upon us some morning,
requesting in the interests of matchmaking that we will please to get
married as soon as possible.... How near we were to doing it forty years
ago, only you were so independent! I thought you would have come back
and was much surprised that you didn't.'

'My independent ideas were not blameworthy in me, as an islander, though
as a kimberlin young lady perhaps they would have been. There was simply
no reason from an islander's point of view why I should come back, since
no result threatened from our union; and I didn't. My father kept that
view before me, and I bowed to his judgment.'

'And so the island ruled our destinies, though we were not on it.
Yes--we are in hands not our own.... Did you ever tell your husband?'

'No.'

'Did he ever hear anything?'

'Not that I am aware.'

Calling upon her one day, he found her in a state of great discomfort.
In certain gusty winds the chimneys of the little house she had taken
here smoked intolerably, and one of these winds was blowing then. Her
drawing-room fire could not be kept burning, and rather than let a woman
who suffered from rheumatism shiver fireless he asked her to come
round and lunch with him as she had often done before. As they went he
thought, not for the first time, how needless it was that she should be
put to this inconvenience by their occupying two houses, when one would
better suit their now constant companionship, and disembarrass her
of the objectionable chimneys. Moreover, by marrying Marcia, and
establishing a parental relation with the young people, the rather
delicate business of his making them a regular allowance would become a
natural proceeding.

And so the zealous wishes of the neighbours to give a geometrical shape
to their story were fulfilled almost in spite of the chief parties
themselves. When he put the question to her distinctly, Marcia admitted
that she had always regretted the imperious decision of her youth; and
she made no ado about accepting him.

'I have no love to give, you know, Marcia,' he said. 'But such
friendship as I am capable of is yours till the end.'

'It is nearly the same with me--perhaps not quite. But, like the other
people, I have somehow felt, and you will understand why, that I ought
to be your wife before I die.'

It chanced that a day or two before the ceremony, which was fixed to
take place very shortly after the foregoing conversation, Marcia's
rheumatism suddenly became acute. The attack promised, however, to be
only temporary, owing to some accidental exposure of herself in making
preparations for removal, and as they thought it undesirable to postpone
their union for such a reason, Marcia, after being well wrapped up, was
wheeled into the church in a chair.


                    *          *          *


A month thereafter, when they were sitting at breakfast one morning,
Marcia exclaimed 'Well--good heavens!' while reading a letter she had
just received from Avice, who was living with her husband in a house
Pierston had bought for them at Sandbourne.

Jocelyn looked up.

'Why--Avice says she wants to be separated from Henri! Did you ever hear
of such a thing! She's coming here about it to-day.'

'Separated? What does the child mean!' Pierston read the letter.
'Ridiculous nonsense!' he continued. 'She doesn't know what she wants.
I say she sha'n't be separated! Tell her so, and there's an end of it.
Why--how long have they been married? Not twelve months. What will she
say when they have been married twenty years!'

Marcia remained reflecting. 'I think that remorseful feeling she
unluckily has at times, of having disobeyed her mother, and caused her
death, makes her irritable,' she murmured. 'Poor child!'

Lunch-time had hardly come when Avice arrived, looking very tearful and
excited. Marcia took her into an inner room, had a conversation with
her, and they came out together.

'O it's nothing,' said Marcia. 'I tell her she must go back directly she
has had some luncheon.'

'Ah, that's all very well!' sobbed Avice. 'B-b-but if you had been
m-married so long as I have, y-you wouldn't say go back like that!'

'What is it all about?' inquired Pierston.

'He said that if he were to die I--I--should be looking out for somebody
with fair hair and grey eyes, just--just to spite him in his grave,
because he's dark, and he's quite sure I don't like dark people! And
then he said--But I won't be so treacherous as to tell any more about
him! I wish--'

'Avice, your mother did this very thing. And she went back to her
husband. Now you are to do the same. Let me see; there is a train--'

'She must have something to eat first. Sit down, dear.'

The question was settled by the arrival of Henri himself at the end
of luncheon, with a very anxious and pale face. Pierston went off to a
business meeting, and left the young couple to adjust their differences
in their own way.

His business was, among kindred undertakings which followed the
extinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals, to advance a scheme for
the closing of the old natural fountains in the Street of Wells, because
of their possible contamination, and supplying the townlet with water
from pipes, a scheme that was carried out at his expense, as is well
known. He was also engaged in acquiring some old moss-grown, mullioned
Elizabethan cottages, for the purpose of pulling them down because
they were damp; which he afterwards did, and built new ones with hollow
walls, and full of ventilators.

At present he is sometimes mentioned as 'the late Mr. Pierston' by
gourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his productions are
alluded to as those of a man not without genius, whose powers were
insufficiently recognized in his lifetime.







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