From his roomy castle and its grounds and the cliffs hard by he could
command every move and aspect of her who was the rejuvenated Spirit
of the Past to him--in the effulgence of whom all sordid details were
disregarded.
Among other things he observed that she was often anxious when it
rained. If, after a wet day, a golden streak appeared in the sky over
Deadman's Bay, under a lid of cloud, her manner was joyous and her tread
light.
This puzzled him; and he found that if he endeavoured to encounter her
at these times she shunned him--stealthily and subtly, but unmistakably.
One evening, when she had left her cottage and tripped off in the
direction of the under-hill townlet, he set out by the same route,
resolved to await her return along the high roadway which stretched
between that place and East Quarriers.
He reached the top of the old road where it makes a sudden descent to
the townlet, but she did not appear. Turning back, he sauntered along
till he had nearly reached his own house again. Then he retraced his
steps, and in the dim night he walked backwards and forwards on the
bare and lofty convex of the isle; the stars above and around him, the
lighthouse on duty at the distant point, the lightship winking from
the sandbank, the combing of the pebble beach by the tide beneath, the
church away south-westward, where the island fathers lay.
He walked the wild summit till his legs ached, and his heart ached--till
he seemed to hear on the upper wind the stones of the slingers whizzing
past, and the voices of the invaders who annihilated them, and married
their wives and daughters, and produced Avice as the ultimate flower of
the combined stocks. Still she did not come. It was more than foolish to
wait, yet he could not help waiting. At length he discerned a dot of a
figure, which he knew to be hers rather by its motion than by its shape.
How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of
substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities--the
sky, the rock, and the ocean--the minute personality of this washer-girl
filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous
inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein.
But all at once the approaching figure had disappeared. He looked about;
she had certainly vanished. At one side of the road was a low wall, but
she could not have gone behind that without considerable trouble and
singular conduct. He looked behind him; she had reappeared further on
the road.
Jocelyn Pierston hurried after; and, discerning his movement, Avice
stood still. When he came up, she was slily shaking with restrained
laughter.
'Well, what does this mean, my dear girl?' he asked.
Her inner mirth escaping in spite of her she turned askance and said:
'When you was following me to Street o' Wells, two hours ago, I looked
round and saw you, and huddied behind a stone! You passed and brushed
my frock without seeing me. And when, on my way backalong, I saw you
waiting hereabout again, I slipped over the wall, and ran past you! If
I had not stopped and looked round at 'ee, you would never have catched
me!'
'What did you do that for, you elf!'
'That you shouldn't find me.'
'That's not exactly a reason. Give another, dear Avice,' he said, as he
turned and walked beside her homeward.
She hesitated. 'Come!' he urged again.
''Twas because I thought you wanted to be my young man,' she answered.
'What a wild thought of yours! Supposing I did, wouldn't you have me?'
'Not now.... And not for long, even if it had been sooner than now.'
'Why?'
'If I tell you, you won't laugh at me or let anybody else know?'
'Never.'
'Then I will tell you,' she said quite seriously. ''Tis because I get
tired o' my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in one
young man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder,
and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs up
somewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I have
loved FIFTEEN a'ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say,' she
repeated, laughing. 'I can't help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it
is really, to ME, the same one all through, on'y I can't catch him!' She
added anxiously, 'You won't tell anybody o' this in me, will you, sir?
Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me.'
Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here was this obscure and almost
illiterate girl engaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, just as
he had been himself doing for the last twenty years. She was doing it
quite involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her organization, puzzled all
the while at her own instinct. He suddenly thought of its bearing upon
himself, and said, with a sinking heart--
'Am I--one of them?'
She pondered critically.
'You was; for a week; when I first saw you.'
'Only a week?'
'About that.'
'What made the being of your fancy forsake my form and go elsewhere?'
'Well--though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first--'
'Yes?'
'I found you too old soon after.'
'You are a candid young person.'
'But you asked me, sir!' she expostulated.
'I did; and, having been answered, I won't intrude upon you longer. So
cut along home as fast as you can. It is getting late.'
When she had passed out of earshot he also followed homewards. This
seeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife which
could cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing: to be one of the
corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; and
this was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days.
The startling parallel in the idiosyncracies of Avice and
himself--evinced by the elusiveness of the Beloved with her as with
him--meant probably that there had been some remote ancestor common
to both families, from whom the trait had latently descended and
recrudesced. But the result was none the less disconcerting.
Drawing near his own gate he smelt tobacco, and could discern two
figures in the side lane leading past Avice's door. They did not,
however, enter her house, but strolled onward to the narrow pass
conducting to Red-King Castle and the sea. He was in momentary heaviness
at the thought that they might be Avice with a worthless lover, but a
faintly argumentative tone from the man informed him that they were the
same married couple going homeward whom he had encountered on a previous
occasion.
The next day he gave the servants a half-holiday to get the pretty Avice
into the castle again for a few hours, the better to observe her. While
she was pulling down the blinds at sunset a whistle of peculiar quality
came from some point on the cliffs outside the lawn. He observed that
her colour rose slightly, though she bustled about as if she had noticed
nothing.
Pierston suddenly suspected that she had not only fifteen past admirers
but a current one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimulated now by
ancient memories and present tenderness to use every effort to make her
his wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he strung himself up to
sift this mystery. If he could only win her--and how could a country
girl refuse such an opportunity?--he could pack her off to school for
two or three years, marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, and
take his chance of the rest. As to her want of ardour for him--so sadly
in contrast with her sainted mother's affection--a man twenty years
older than his bride could expect no better, and he would be well
content to put up with it in the pleasure of possessing one in whom
seemed to linger as an aroma all the charm of his youth and his early
home.