By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner-table receded
into the background, behind the vivid presentment of Avice Caro, and
the old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia which were inseparable from her
personality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the bold
stony promontory and the incoming West Sea. The handsome marchioness in
geranium-red and diamonds, who was visible to him on his host's right
hand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sunsets that he had
watched so many times over Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in the
foreground. Between his eyes and the judge who sat next to Nichola, with
a chin so raw that he must have shaved every quarter of an hour during
the day, intruded the face of Avice, as she had glanced at him in their
last parting. The crannied features of the evergreen society lady, who,
if she had been a few years older, would have been as old-fashioned as
her daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty quarries of his and Avice's
parents, down which he had clambered with Avice hundreds of times. The
ivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks,
and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of the
cliff-built Castle, the tufts of seaweed, and the lighthouses on the
isle. The salt airs of the ocean killed the smell of the viands, and
instead of the clatter of voices came the monologue of the tide off the
Beal.
More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance which she
had latterly acquired; she became a woman of his acquaintance with no
distinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies of flesh
and bone merely, a person of lines and surfaces; she was a language in
living cipher no more.
When the ladies had withdrawn it was just the same. The soul of
Avice--the only woman he had NEVER loved of those who had loved
him--surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew near to him in the person
of one of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there was
only one painter for Jocelyn--his own memory. All that was eminent
in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and
unassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds of
living men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilled
the interest of discourse with such a king of operators.
Reaching the drawing-room he talked to his hostess. Though she had
entertained three-and-twenty guests at her table that night she had
known not only what every one of them was saying and doing throughout
the repast, but what every one was thinking. So, being an old friend,
she said quietly, 'What has been troubling you? Something has, I know. I
have been travelling over your face and have seen it there.'
Nothing could less express the meaning his recent news had for him than
a statement of its facts. He told of the opening of the letter and the
discovery of the death of an old acquaintance.
'The only woman whom I never rightly valued, I may almost say!' he
added; 'and therefore the only one I shall ever regret!'
Whether she considered it a sufficient explanation or not the woman of
experiences accepted it as such. She was the single lady of his circle
whom nothing erratic in his doings could surprise, and he often gave her
stray ends of his confidence thus with perfect safety.
He did not go near Mrs. Pine-Avon again; he could not: and on leaving
the house walked abstractedly along the streets till he found himself at
his own door. In his room he sat down, and placing his hands behind his
head thought his thoughts anew.
At one side of the room stood an escritoire, and from a lower drawer
therein he took out a small box tightly nailed down. He forced the cover
with the poker. The box contained a variety of odds and ends, which
Pierston had thrown into it from time to time in past years for future
sorting--an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholy
mass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers,
and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in the
primitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in the commonest
way.
It was Avice Caro, as she had appeared during the summer month or two
which he had spent with her on the island twenty years before this time,
her young lips pursed up, her hands meekly folded. The effect of the
glass was to lend to the picture much of the softness characteristic of
the original. He remembered when it was taken--during one afternoon
they had spent together at a neighbouring watering-place, when he had
suggested her sitting to a touting artist on the sands, there being
nothing else for them to do. A long contemplation of the likeness
completed in his emotions what the letter had begun. He loved the woman
dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life. He had thought
of her but at distant intervals during the twenty years since that
parting occurred, and only as somebody he could have wedded. Yet now the
times of youthful friendship with her, in which he had learnt every
note of her innocent nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionate
attachment, embittered by regret beyond words.
That kiss which had offended his dignity, which she had so childishly
given him before her consciousness of womanhood had been awakened; what
he would have offered to have a quarter of it now!
Pierston was almost angry with himself for his feelings of this night,
so unreasonably, motivelessly strong were they towards the lost young
playmate. 'How senseless of me!' he said, as he lay in his lonely bed.
She had been another man's wife almost the whole time since he was
estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not
make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost
radiant, purity of this newsprung affection for a flown spirit forbade
him to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied
and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before.
The next afternoon he went down to the club; not his large club, where
the men hardly spoke to each other, but the homely one where they
told stories of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess among
themselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that such
secrets would go no further. But he could not tell this. So volatile and
intangible was the story that to convey it in words would have been as
hard as to cage a perfume.
They observed his altered manner, and said he was in love. Pierston
admitted that he was; and there it ended. When he reached home he looked
out of his bed-room window, and began to consider in what direction from
where he stood that darling little figure lay. It was straight across
there, under the young pale moon. The symbol signified well. The
divinity of the silver bow was not more excellently pure than she, the
lost, had been. Under that moon was the island of Ancient Slingers, and
on the island a house, framed from mullions to chimney-top like the
isle itself, of stone. Inside the window, the moonlight irradiating her
winding-sheet, lay Avice, reached only by the faint noises inherent in
the isle; the tink-tink of the chisels in the quarries, the surging of
the tides in the Bay, and the muffled grumbling of the currents in the
never-pacified Race.
He began to divine the truth. Avice, the departed one, though she had
come short of inspiring a passion, had yet possessed a ground-quality
absent from her rivals, without which it seemed that a fixed and
full-rounded constancy to a woman could not flourish in him. Like his
own, her family had been islanders for centuries--from Norman, Anglian,
Roman, Balearic-British times. Hence in her nature, as in his, was some
mysterious ingredient sucked from the isle; otherwise a racial instinct
necessary to the absolute unison of a pair. Thus, though he might
never love a woman of the island race, for lack in her of the desired
refinement, he could not love long a kimberlin--a woman other than of
the island race, for her lack of this groundwork of character.
Such was Pierston's view of things. Another fancy of his, an artist's
superstition merely, may be mentioned. The Caros, like some other local
families, suggested a Roman lineage, more or less grafted on the stock
of the Slingers. Their features recalled those of the Italian peasantry
to any one as familiar as he was with them; and there were evidences
that the Roman colonists had been populous and long-abiding in and near
this corner of Britain. Tradition urged that a temple to Venus once
stood at the top of the Roman road leading up into the isle; and
possibly one to the love-goddess of the Slingers antedated this. What so
natural as that the true star of his soul would be found nowhere but in
one of the old island breed?
After dinner his old friend Somers came in to smoke, and when they had
talked a little while Somers alluded casually to some place at which
they would meet on the morrow.
'I sha'n't be there,' said Pierston.
'But you promised?'
'Yes. But I shall be at the island--looking at a dead woman's grave.'
As he spoke his eyes turned, and remained fixed on a table near. Somers
followed the direction of his glance to a photograph on a stand.
'Is that she?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'Rather a bygone affair, then?'
Pierston acknowledged it. 'She's the only sweetheart I ever slighted,
Alfred,' he said. 'Because she's the only one I ought to have cared for.
That's just the fool I have always been.'
'But if she's dead and buried, you can go to her grave at any time as
well as now, to keep up the sentiment.'
'I don't know that she's buried.'
'But to-morrow--the Academy night! Of all days why go then?'
'I don't care about the Academy.'
'Pierston--you are our only inspired sculptor. You are our Praxiteles,
or rather our Lysippus. You are almost the only man of this generation
who has been able to mould and chisel forms living enough to draw the
idle public away from the popular paintings into the usually deserted
Lecture-room, and people who have seen your last pieces of stuff say
there has been nothing like them since sixteen hundred and--since the
sculptors 'of the great race' lived and died--whenever that was.
Well, then, for the sake of others you ought not to rush off to that
God-forgotten sea-rock just when you are wanted in town, all for a woman
you last saw a hundred years ago.'
'No--it was only nineteen and three quarters,' replied his friend, with
abstracted literalness. He went the next morning.
Since the days of his youth a railway had been constructed along the
pebble bank, so that, except when the rails were washed away by the
tides, which was rather often, the peninsula was quickly accessible. At
two o'clock in the afternoon he was rattled along by this new means of
locomotion, under the familiar monotonous line of bran-coloured stones,
and he soon emerged from the station, which stood as a strange exotic
among the black lerrets, the ruins of the washed-away village, and
the white cubes of oolite, just come to view after burial through
unreckonable geologic years.
In entering upon the pebble beach the train had passed close to the
ruins of Henry the Eighth's or Sandsfoot Castle, whither Avice was to
have accompanied him on the night of his departure. Had she appeared the
primitive betrothal, with its natural result, would probably have taken
place; and, as no islander had ever been known to break that compact,
she would have become his wife.
Ascending the steep incline to where the quarrymen were chipping just
as they had formerly done, and within sound of the great stone saws, he
looked southward towards the Beal.
The level line of the sea horizon rose above the surface of the isle, a
ruffled patch in mid-distance as usual marking the Race, whence many a
Lycidas had gone
'Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world;'
but had not been blest with a poet as a friend. Against the stretch of
water, where a school of mackerel twinkled in the afternoon light, was
defined, in addition to the distant lighthouse, a church with its tower,
standing about a quarter of a mile off, near the edge of the cliff. The
churchyard gravestones could be seen in profile against the same vast
spread of watery babble and unrest.
Among the graves moved the form of a man clothed in a white sheet, which
the wind blew and flapped coldly every now and then. Near him moved six
men bearing a long box, and two or three persons in black followed. The
coffin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the isle, while around and
beneath it the flashing lights from the sea and the school of
mackerel were reflected; a fishing-boat, far out in the Channel, being
momentarily discernible under the coffin also.
The procession wandered round to a particular corner, and halted, and
paused there a long while in the wind, the sea behind them, the surplice
of the priest still blowing. Jocelyn stood with his hat off: he was
present, though he was a quarter of a mile off; and he seemed to hear
the words that were being said, though nothing but the wind was audible.
He instinctively knew that it was none other than Avice whom he was
seeing interred; HIS Avice, as he now began presumptuously to call
her. Presently the little group withdrew from before the sea-shine, and
disappeared.
He felt himself unable to go further in that direction, and turning
aside went aimlessly across the open land, visiting the various spots
that he had formerly visited with her. But, as if tethered to the
churchyard by a cord, he was still conscious of being at the end of
a radius whose pivot was the grave of Avice Caro; and as the dusk
thickened he closed upon his centre and entered the churchyard gate.
Not a soul was now within the precincts. The grave, newly shaped, was
easily discoverable behind the church, and when the same young moon
arose which he had observed the previous evening from his window
in London he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the mourners and
bearers. The breeze had fallen to a calm with the setting of the sun:
the lighthouse had opened its glaring eye, and, disinclined to leave
a spot sublimed both by early association and present regret, he moved
back to the church-wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upon
a window-sill facing the grave.