Well he knew the arrangement of those white teeth. In the junction of
two of the upper ones there was a slight irregularity; no stranger would
have noticed it, nor would he, but that he knew of the same mark in
her mother's mouth, and looked for it here. Till Avice the Second had
revealed it this moment by her smile, he had never beheld that mark
since the parting from Avice the First, when she had smiled under his
kiss as the copy had done now.
Next morning, when dressing, he heard her through the ricketty floor of
the building engaged in conversation with the other servants. Having
by this time regularly installed herself as the exponent of the
Long-pursued--as one who, by no initiative of his own, had been chosen
by some superior Power as the vehicle of her next debut, she attracted
him by the cadences of her voice; she would suddenly drop it to a rich
whisper of roguishness, when the slight rural monotony of its narrative
speech disappeared, and soul and heart--or what seemed soul and
heart--resounded. The charm lay in the intervals, using that word in its
musical sense. She would say a few syllables in one note, and end her
sentence in a soft modulation upwards, then downwards, then into her
own note again. The curve of sound was as artistic as any line of beauty
ever struck by his pencil--as satisfying as the curves of her who was
the World's Desire.
The subject of her discourse he cared nothing about--it was no more his
interest than his concern. He took special pains that in catching her
voice he might not comprehend her words. To the tones he had a right,
none to the articulations. By degrees he could not exist long without
this sound.
On Sunday evening he found that she went to church. He followed behind
her over the open road, keeping his eye on the little hat with its
bunch of cock's feathers as on a star. When she had passed in Pierston
observed her position and took a seat behind her.
Engaged in the study of her ear and the nape of her white neck, he
suddenly became aware of the presence of a lady still further ahead in
the aisle, whose attire, though of black materials in the quietest form,
was of a cut which rather suggested London than this Ultima Thule. For
the minute he forgot, in his curiosity, that Avice intervened. The
lady turned her head somewhat, and, though she was veiled with unusual
thickness for the season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine-Avon in
the form.
Why should Mrs. Pine-Avon be there? Pierston asked himself, if it
should, indeed, be she.
The end of the service saw his attention again concentrated on Avice to
such a degree that at the critical moment of moving out he forgot the
mysterious lady in front of her, and found that she had left the church
by the side-door. Supposing it to have been Mrs. Pine-Avon, she
would probably be discovered staying at one of the hotels at the
watering-place over the bay, and to have come along the Pebble-bank
to the island as so many did, for an evening drive. For the present,
however, the explanation was not forthcoming; and he did not seek it.
When he emerged from the church the great placid eye of the lighthouse
at the Beal Point was open, and he moved thitherward a few steps to
escape Nichola, or her double, and the rest of the congregation.
Turning at length, he hastened homeward along the now deserted trackway,
intending to overtake the revitalized Avice. But he could see nothing of
her, and concluded that she had walked too fast for him. Arrived at his
own gate he paused a moment, and perceived that Avice's little freehold
was still in darkness. She had not come.
He retraced his steps, but could not find her, the only persons on the
road being a man and his wife, as he knew them to be though he could not
see them, from the words of the man--
'If you had not a'ready married me, you'd cut my acquaintance! That's a
pretty thing for a wife to say!'
The remark struck his ear unpleasantly, and by-and-by he went back
again. Avice's cottage was now lighted: she must have come round by the
other road. Satisfied that she was safely domiciled for the night he
opened the gate of Sylvania Castle and retired to his room also.
* * *
Eastward from the grounds the cliffs were rugged and the view of the
opposite coast picturesque in the extreme. A little door from the lawn
gave him immediate access to the rocks and shore on this side. Without
the door was a dip-well of pure water, which possibly had supplied the
inmates of the adjoining and now ruinous Red King's castle at the time
of its erection. On a sunny morning he was meditating here when he
discerned a figure on the shore below spreading white linen upon the
pebbly strand.
Jocelyn descended. Avice, as he had supposed, had now returned to her
own occupation. Her shapely pink arms, though slight, were plump enough
to show dimples at the elbows, and were set off by her purple cotton
print, which the shore-breeze licked and tantalized. He stood near,
without speaking. The wind dragged a shirt-sleeve from the 'popple' or
pebble which held it down. Pierston stooped and put a heavier one in its
place.
'Thank you,' she said quietly. She turned up her hazel eyes, and seemed
gratified to perceive that her assistant was Pierston. She had
plainly been so wrapped in her own thoughts--gloomy thoughts, by their
signs--that she had not considered him till then.
The young girl continued to converse with him in friendly frankness,
showing neither ardour nor shyness. As for love--it was evidently
further from her mind than even death and dissolution.
When one of the sheets became intractable Jocelyn said, 'Do you hold it
down, and I'll put the popples.'
She acquiesced, and in placing a pebble his hand touched hers.
It was a young hand, rather long and thin, a little damp and coddled
from her slopping. In setting down the last stone he laid it, by a pure
accident, rather heavily on her fingers.
'I am very, very sorry!' Jocelyn exclaimed. 'O, I have bruised the skin,
Avice!' He seized her fingers to examine the damage done.
'No, sir, you haven't!' she cried luminously, allowing him to retain her
hand without the least objection. 'Why--that's where I scratched it this
morning with a pin. You didn't hurt me a bit with the popple-stone!'
Although her gown was purple, there was a little black crape bow upon
each arm. He knew what it meant, and it saddened him. 'Do you ever visit
your mother's grave?' he asked.
'Yes, sir, sometimes. I am going there tonight to water the daisies.'
She had now finished here, and they parted. That evening, when the sky
was red, he emerged by the garden-door and passed her house. The blinds
were not down, and he could see her sewing within. While he paused
she sprang up as if she had forgotten the hour, and tossed on her
hat. Jocelyn strode ahead and round the corner, and was halfway up the
straggling street before he discerned her little figure behind him.
He hastened past the lads and young women with clinking buckets who were
drawing water from the fountains by the wayside, and took the direction
of the church. With the disappearance of the sun the lighthouse had
again set up its flame against the sky, the dark church rising in the
foreground. Here he allowed her to overtake him.
'You loved your mother much?' said Jocelyn.
'I did, sir; of course I did,' said the girl, who tripped so lightly
that it seemed he might have carried her on his hand.
Pierston wished to say, 'So did I,' but did not like to disclose events
which she, apparently, never guessed. Avice fell into thought, and
continued--
'Mother had a very sad life for some time when she was about as old as
I. I should not like mine to be as hers. Her young man proved false to
her because she wouldn't agree to meet him one night, and it grieved
mother almost all her life. I wouldn't ha' fretted about him, if I'd
been she. She would never name his name, but I know he was a wicked,
cruel man; and I hate to think of him.'
After this he could not go into the churchyard with her, and walked
onward alone to the south of the isle. He was wretched for hours. Yet he
would not have stood where he did stand in the ranks of an imaginative
profession if he had not been at the mercy of every haunting of the
fancy that can beset man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen and
a national-unit that his strength lay as an artist, and he felt it
childish to complain of susceptibilities not only innate but cultivated.
But he was paying dearly enough for his Liliths. He saw a terrible
vengeance ahead. What had he done to be tormented like this? The
Beloved, after flitting from Nichola Pine-Avon to the phantom of a dead
woman whom he never adored in her lifetime, had taken up her abode in
the living representative of the dead, with a permanence of hold which
the absolute indifference of that little brown-eyed representative only
seemed to intensify.
Did he really wish to proceed to marriage with this chit of a girl? He
did: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied her
he saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment,
hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commoner
in character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First.
But twenty years make a difference in ideals, and the added demands of
middle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessions
as to the spiritual content. He looked at himself in the glass, and
felt glad at those inner deficiencies in Avice which formerly would have
impelled him to reject her.
There was a strange difference in his regard of his present folly and of
his love in his youthful time. Now he could be mad with method, knowing
it to be madness: then he was compelled to make believe his madness
wisdom. In those days any flash of reason upon his loved one's
imperfections was blurred over hastily and with fear. Such penetrative
vision now did not cool him. He knew he was the creature of a tendency;
and passively acquiesced.
To use a practical eye, it appeared that, as he had once thought, this
Caro family--though it might not for centuries, or ever, furbish up
an individual nature which would exactly, ideally, supplement his own
imperfect one and round with it the perfect whole--was yet the only
family he had ever met, or was likely to meet, which possessed the
materials for her making. It was as if the Caros had found the clay but
not the potter, while other families whose daughters might attract him
had found the potter but not the clay.