'You, Somers, are not, I know, one of those who continue to indulge
in the world-wide, fond superstition that the Beloved One of any man
always, or even usually, cares to remain in one corporeal nook or shell
for any great length of time, however much he may wish her to do so. If
I am wrong, and you do still hold to that ancient error--well, my story
will seem rather queer.'
'Suppose you say the Beloved of some men, not of any man.'
'All right--I'll say one man, this man only, if you are so particular.
We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhaps
that accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man, then, has had many
incarnations--too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment,
has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in
awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have
been concerned, a corpse, worse luck! Now, there is no spiritualistic
nonsense in this--it is simple fact, put in the plain form that the
conventional public are afraid of. So much for the principle.'
'Good. Go on.'
'Well; the first embodiment of her occurred, so nearly as I can
recollect, when I was about the age of nine. Her vehicle was a little
blue-eyed girl of eight or so, one of a family of eleven, with flaxen
hair about her shoulders, which attempted to curl, but ignominiously
failed, hanging like chimney-crooks only. This defect used rather to
trouble me; and was, I believe, one of the main reasons of my Beloved's
departure from that tenement. I cannot remember with any exactness
when the departure occurred. I know it was after I had kissed my
little friend in a garden-seat on a hot noontide, under a blue gingham
umbrella, which we had opened over us as we sat, that passers through
East Quarriers might not observe our marks of affection, forgetting that
our screen must attract more attention than our persons.
'When the whole dream came to an end through her father leaving the
island, I thought my Well-Beloved had gone for ever (being then in the
unpractised condition of Adam at sight of the first sunset). But she had
not. Laura had gone for ever, but not my Beloved.
'For some months after I had done crying for the flaxen-haired edition
of her, my Love did not reappear. Then she came suddenly, unexpectedly,
in a situation I should never have predicted. I was standing on the
kerbstone of the pavement in Budmouth-Regis, outside the Preparatory
School, looking across towards the sea, when a middle-aged gentleman on
horseback, and beside him a young lady, also mounted, passed down the
street. The girl turned her head, and--possibly because I was gaping
at her in awkward admiration, or smiling myself--smiled at me. Having
ridden a few paces, she looked round again and smiled.
'It was enough, more than enough, to set me on fire. I understood in a
moment the information conveyed to me by my emotion--the Well-Beloved
had reappeared. This second form in which it had pleased her to take up
her abode was quite a grown young woman's, darker in complexion than the
first. Her hair, also worn in a knot, was of an ordinary brown, and so,
I think, were her eyes, but the niceties of her features were not to be
gathered so cursorily. However, there sat my coveted one, re-embodied;
and, bidding my schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could do so
without suspicion, I hurried along the Esplanade in the direction she
and her father had ridden. But they had put their horses to a canter,
and I could not see which way they had gone. In the greatest misery
I turned down a side street, but was soon elevated to a state of
excitement by seeing the same pair galloping towards me. Flushing up to
my hair, I stopped and heroically faced her as she passed. She smiled
again, but, alas! upon my Love's cheek there was no blush of passion for
me.'
Pierston paused, and drank from his glass, as he lived for a brief
moment in the scene he had conjured up. Somers reserved his comments,
and Jocelyn continued--
'That afternoon I idled about the streets, looking for her in vain. When
I next saw one of the boys who had been with me at her first passing
I stealthily reminded him of the incident, and asked if he knew the
riders.
'"O yes," he said. "That was Colonel Targe and his daughter Elsie."
'"How old do you think she is?" said I, a sense of disparity in our ages
disturbing my mind.
'"O--nineteen, I think they say. She's going to be married the day after
to-morrow to Captain Popp, of the 501st, and they are ordered off to
India at once."
'The grief which I experienced at this intelligence was such that at
dusk I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an end
to myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been found
clinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout,
leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingency
deterred me. I should state that the marriage of my Beloved concerned me
little; it was her departure that broke my heart. I never saw her again.
'Though I had already learnt that the absence of the corporeal matter
did not involve the absence of the informing spirit, I could scarce
bring myself to believe that in this case it was possible for her to
return to my view without the form she had last inhabited.
'But she did.
'It was not, however, till after a good space of time, during which I
passed through that bearish age in boys, their early teens, when girls
are their especial contempt. I was about seventeen, and was sitting
one evening over a cup of tea in a confectioner's at the very same
watering-place, when opposite me a lady took her seat with a little
girl. We looked at each other awhile, the child made advances, till I
said: "She's a good little thing."
'The lady assented, and made a further remark.
'"She has the soft fine eyes of her mother," said I.
'"Do you think her eyes are good?" asks the lady, as if she had not
heard what she had heard most--the last three words of my opinion.
'"Yes--for copies," said I, regarding her.
'After this we got on very well. She informed me that her husband had
gone out in a yacht, and I said it was a pity he didn't take her with
him for the airing. She gradually disclosed herself in the character of
a deserted young wife, and later on I met her in the street without the
child. She was going to the landing-stage to meet her husband, so she
told me; but she did not know the way.
'I offered to show her, and did so. I will not go into particulars, but
I afterwards saw her several times, and soon discovered that the Beloved
(as to whose whereabouts I had been at fault so long) lurked here.
Though why she had chosen this tantalizing situation of an inaccessible
matron's form when so many others offered, it was beyond me to discover.
The whole affair ended innocently enough, when the lady left the town
with her husband and child: she seemed to regard our acquaintance as a
flirtation; yet it was anything but a flirtation for me!
* * *
'Why should I tell the rest of the tantalizing tale! After this, the
Well-Beloved put herself in evidence with greater and greater frequency,
and it would be impossible for me to give you details of her various
incarnations. She came nine times in the course of the two or three
ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a
pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither
light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I
think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no
great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that
I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her,
corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. So
it went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled.
She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, a
young girl I had known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have decided
that, after all, she did not enter the form of Avice Caro, because I
retain so great a respect for her still.'
Pierston here gave in brief the history of his revived comradeship with
Avice, the verge of the engagement to which they had reached, and its
unexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman into
whom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes--by name
Miss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marry
offhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry or
not--her or anybody else--in such circumstances.
'Certainly not,' said Somers. 'Though, if anybody, little Avice. But not
even her. You are like other men, only rather worse. Essentially, all
men are fickle, like you; but not with such perceptiveness.'
'Surely fickle is not the word? Fickleness means getting weary of a
thing while the thing remains the same. But I have always been faithful
to the elusive creature whom I have never been able to get a firm hold
of, unless I have done so now. And let me tell you that her flitting
from each to each individual has been anything but a pleasure for
me--certainly not a wanton game of my instigation. To see the creature
who has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the
divinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to
ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure
for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my
sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of
some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it
to fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have looked
in a face for her I used to see there, and could see her there no more.'
'You ought not to marry,' repeated Somers.
'Perhaps I oughtn't to! Though poor Marcia will be compromised, I'm
afraid, if I don't.... Was I not right in saying I am accursed in this
thing? Fortunately nobody but myself has suffered on account of it
till now. Knowing what to expect, I have seldom ventured on a close
acquaintance with any woman, in fear of prematurely driving away the
dear one in her; who, however, has in time gone off just the same.'
Pierston soon after took his leave. A friend's advice on such a subject
weighs little. He quickly returned to Miss Bencomb.
She was different now. Anxiety had visibly brought her down a notch
or two, undone a few degrees of that haughty curl which her lip could
occasionally assume. 'How long you have been away!' she said with a show
of impatience.
'Never mind, darling. It is all arranged,' said he. 'We shall be able to
marry in a few days.'
'Not to-morrow?'
'We can't to-morrow. We have not been here quite long enough.'
'But how did the people at Doctors' Commons know that?'
'Well--I forgot that residence, real or assumed, was necessary, and
unfortunately admitted that we had only just arrived.'
'O how stupid! But it can't be helped now. I think, dear, I should have
known better, however!'