It was difficult to meet her again, even though on this lump of rock the
difficulty lay as a rule rather in avoidance than in meeting. But Avice
had been transformed into a very different kind of young woman by
the self-consciousness engendered of her impulsive greeting, and,
notwithstanding their near neighbourhood, he could not encounter her,
try as he would. No sooner did he appear an inch beyond his father's
door than she was to earth like a fox; she bolted upstairs to her room.
Anxious to soothe her after his unintentional slight he could not
stand these evasions long. The manners of the isle were primitive and
straightforward, even among the well-to-do, and noting her disappearance
one day he followed her into the house and onward to the foot of the
stairs.
'Avice!' he called.
'Yes, Mr. Pierston.'
'Why do you run upstairs like that?'
'Oh--only because I wanted to come up for something.'
'Well, if you've got it, can't you come down again?'
'No, I can't very well.'
'Come, DEAR Avice. That's what you are, you know.'
There was no response.
'Well, if you won't, you won't!' he continued. 'I don't want to bother
you.' And Pierston went away.
He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned flowers under the garden
walls when he heard a voice behind him.
'Mr. Pierston--I wasn't angry with you. When you were gone I
thought--you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than come
and assure you of my friendship still.'
Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him.
'You are a good, dear girl!' said he, and, seizing her hand, set upon
her cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers on
the day of his coming.
'Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come,
now! And then I'll say to you what I have never said to any other woman,
living or dead: "Will you have me as your husband?"'
'Ah!--mother says I am only one of many!'
'You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn't.'
Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did not
give an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the afternoon,
when she walked with him to the southern point of the island called the
Beal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the treacherous cavern
known as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and splashed now as it had
done when they visited it together as children. To steady herself while
looking in he offered her his arm, and she took it, for the first time
as a woman, for the hundredth time as his companion.
They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered longer
if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite poetry
from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the village
commanding the entrance to the island--the village that has now advanced
to be a town.
'Recite!' said he. 'Who'd have thought anybody or anything could recite
down here except the reciter we hear away there--the never speechless
sea.'
'O but we are quite intellectual now. In the winter particularly. But,
Jocelyn--don't come to the recitation, will you? It would spoil my
performance if you were there, and I want to be as good as the rest.'
'I won't if you really wish me not to. But I shall meet you at the door
and bring you home.'
'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happy
now; she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his coming
that she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side of
the isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her place on
the platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was about the
hour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road northward
to the Street of Wells.
He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old that
his feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what he
had said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalled
him in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated and
accomplished women who had attracted him successively would be likely to
rise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused his mind
of the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral part of the
personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short while.
* * *
To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many
embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline,
or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not
recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact simply.
Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream,
a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye,
a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did
not. She was indescribable.
Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified by
the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of
her ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had
occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next
would be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant access
to all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night he
dreamt that she was 'the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person,
bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art--the
implacable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved the
masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes,
black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or
plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never
been in one place long.
By making this clear to his mind some time before to-day, he had escaped
a good deal of ugly self-reproach. It was simply that she who always
attracted him, and led him whither she would as by a silken thread, had
not remained the occupant of the same fleshly tabernacle in her career
so far. Whether she would ultimately settle down to one he could not
say.
Had he felt that she was becoming manifest in Avice, he would have tried
to believe that this was the terminal spot of her migrations, and have
been content to abide by his words. But did he see the Well-Beloved in
Avice at all? The question was somewhat disturbing.
He had reached the brow of the hill, and descended towards the village,
where in the long straight Roman street he soon found the lighted hall.
The performance was not yet over; and by going round to the side of the
building and standing on a mound he could see the interior as far down
as the platform level. Avice's turn, or second turn, came on almost
immediately. Her pretty embarrassment on facing the audience rather won
him away from his doubts. She was, in truth, what is called a 'nice'
girl; attractive, certainly, but above all things nice--one of the class
with whom the risks of matrimony approximate most nearly to zero. Her
intelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful carriage, ensured
one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one with
more charming and solid qualities than Avice Caro's. This was not a mere
conjecture--he had known her long and thoroughly; her every mood and
temper.
A heavy wagon passing without drowned her small soft voice for him; but
the audience were pleased, and she blushed at their applause. He now
took his station at the door, and when the people had done pouring out
he found her within awaiting him.
They climbed homeward slowly by the Old Road, Pierston dragging himself
up the steep by the wayside hand-rail and pulling Avice after him upon
his arm. At the top they turned and stood still. To the left of them the
sky was streaked like a fan with the lighthouse rays, and under their
front, at periods of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep, hollow
stroke like the single beat of a drum, the intervals being filled with a
long-drawn rattling, as of bones between huge canine jaws. It came from
the vast concave of Deadman's Bay, rising and falling against the pebble
dyke.
The evening and night winds here were, to Pierston's mind, charged with
a something that did not burden them elsewhere. They brought it up from
that sinister Bay to the west, whose movement she and he were hearing
now. It was a presence--an imaginary shape or essence from the human
multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of war, East
Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada--select people, common,
and debased, whose interests and hopes had been as wide asunder as
the poles, but who had rolled each other to oneness on that restless
sea-bed. There could almost be felt the brush of their huge composite
ghost as it ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking for some
good god who would disunite it again.
The twain wandered a long way that night amid these influences--so
far as to the old Hope Churchyard, which lay in a ravine formed by a
landslip ages ago. The church had slipped down with the rest of the
cliff, and had long been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this last
local stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingered
yet, Christianity had established itself precariously at best. In that
solemn spot Pierston kissed her.
The kiss was by no means on Avice's initiative this time. Her former
demonstrativeness seemed to have increased her present reserve.
* * *
That day was the beginning of a pleasant month passed mainly in each
other's society. He found that she could not only recite poetry at
intellectual gatherings, but play the piano fairly, and sing to her own
accompaniment.
He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been to
get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and individual
life as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an exact copy
of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there was
nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget all
the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs
purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the local
vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in a
house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to draw
London suburban villas from printed copies.
Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl's
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the bone,
but she could not escape the tendency of the age.
The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward to
it sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing.
Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had
prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old
stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as
strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large
measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's
education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered
if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing
manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal,
according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires.