The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy (page 3)

‘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 of 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