By degrees Pierston began to trace again the customary lines of his
existence; and his profession occupied him much as of old. The next
year or two only once brought him tidings, through some residents at his
former home, of the movements of the Bencombs. The extended voyage
of Marcia's parents had given them quite a zest for other scenes and
countries; and it was said that her father, a man still in vigorous
health except at brief intervals, was utilizing the outlook which
his cosmopolitanism afforded him by investing capital in foreign
undertakings. What he had supposed turned out to be true; Marcia
was with them; no necessity for joining him had arisen; and thus the
separation of himself and his nearly married wife by common consent was
likely to be a permanent one.
It seemed as if he would scarce ever again discover the carnate
dwelling-place of the haunting minion of his imagination. Having gone so
near to matrimony with Marcia as to apply for a licence, he had felt for
a long while morally bound to her by the incipient contract, and would
not intentionally look about him in search of the vanished Ideality.
Thus during the first year of Miss Bencomb's absence, when absolutely
bound to keep faith with the elusive one's late incarnation if she
should return to claim him, this man of the odd fancy would sometimes
tremble at the thought of what would become of his solemn intention if
the Phantom were suddenly to disclose herself in an unexpected quarter,
and seduce him before he was aware. Once or twice he imagined that he
saw her in the distance--at the end of a street, on the far sands of
a shore, in a window, in a meadow, at the opposite side of a railway
station; but he determinedly turned on his heel, and walked the other
way.
During the many uneventful seasons that followed Marcia's stroke of
independence (for which he was not without a secret admiration at
times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring
of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards
and ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this,
certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for such a result, that
he was successful in his art, successful by a seemingly sudden spurt,
which carried him at one bound over the hindrances of years.
He prospered without effort. He was A.R.A.
But recognitions of this sort, social distinctions, which he had
once coveted so keenly, seemed to have no utility for him now. By the
accident of being a bachelor, he was floating in society without any
soul-anchorage or shrine that he could call his own; and, for want of
a domestic centre round which honours might crystallize, they dispersed
impalpably without accumulating and adding weight to his material
well-being.
He would have gone on working with his chisel with just as much zest if
his creations had been doomed to meet no mortal eye but his own. This
indifference to the popular reception of his dream-figures lent him a
curious artistic aplomb that carried him through the gusts of opinion
without suffering them to disturb his inherent bias.
The study of beauty was his only joy for years onward. In the streets he
would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express
to a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing
to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like
a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into
shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums--mostly, when at
close quarters, to be disappointed for his pains.
In these professional beauty-chases he sometimes cast his eye across
the Thames to the wharves on the south side, and to that particular
one whereat his father's tons of freestone were daily landed from the
ketches of the south coast. He could occasionally discern the white
blocks lying there, vast cubes so persistently nibbled by his parent
from his island rock in the English Channel, that it seemed as if in
time it would be nibbled all away.
One thing it passed him to understand: on what field of observation the
poets and philosophers based their assumption that the passion of love
was intensest in youth and burnt lower as maturity advanced. It was
possibly because of his utter domestic loneliness that, during
the productive interval which followed the first years of Marcia's
departure, when he was drifting along from five-and-twenty to
eight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved with an ardour--though, it
is true, also with a self-control--unknown to him when he was green in
judgment.
* * *
His whimsical isle-bred fancy had grown to be such an emotion that the
Well-Beloved--now again visible--was always existing somewhere near him.
For months he would find her on the stage of a theatre: then she would
flit away, leaving the poor, empty carcase that had lodged her to mumm
on as best it could without her--a sorry lay figure to his eyes, heaped
with imperfections and sullied with commonplace. She would reappear, it
might be, in an at first unnoticed lady, met at some fashionable evening
party, exhibition, bazaar, or dinner; to flit from her, in turn, after
a few months, and stand as a graceful shop-girl at some large drapery
warehouse into which he had strayed on an unaccustomed errand. Then she
would forsake this figure and redisclose herself in the guise of some
popular authoress, piano-player, or fiddleress, at whose shrine he would
worship for perhaps a twelvemonth. Once she was a dancing-girl at the
Royal Moorish Palace of Varieties, though during her whole continuance
at that establishment he never once exchanged a word with her, nor
did she first or last ever dream of his existence. He knew that a
ten-minutes' conversation in the wings with the substance would send
the elusive haunter scurrying fearfully away into some other even less
accessible mask-figure.
She was a blonde, a brunette, tall, petite, svelte, straight-featured,
full, curvilinear. Only one quality remained unalterable: her
instability of tenure. In Borne's phrase, nothing was permanent in her
but change.
'It is odd,' he said to himself, 'that this experience of mine, or
idiosyncrasy, or whatever it is, which would be sheer waste of time
for other men, creates sober business for me.' For all these dreams he
translated into plaster, and found that by them he was hitting a public
taste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised. He was,
in short, in danger of drifting away from a solid artistic reputation to
a popularity which might possibly be as brief as it would be brilliant
and exciting.
'You will be caught some day, my friend,' Somers would occasionally
observe to him. 'I don't mean to say entangled in anything
discreditable, for I admit that you are in practice as ideal as
in theory. I mean the process will be reversed. Some woman, whose
Well-Beloved flits about as yours does now, will catch your eye, and
you'll stick to her like a limpet, while she follows her Phantom and
leaves you to ache as you will.'
'You may be right; but I think you are wrong,' said Pierston. 'As
flesh she dies daily, like the Apostle's corporeal self; because when I
grapple with the reality she's no longer in it, so that I cannot stick
to one incarnation if I would.'
'Wait till you are older,' said Somers.