'O Avice!' he cried, with the tenderly subdued scolding of a mother.
'What is this you have done to alarm me so!'
She seemed unconscious of having done anything, and was altogether
surprised at his anxiety. In his relief he did not speak further till he
asked her suddenly if she would take his arm since she must be tired.
'O no, sir!' she assured him, 'I am not a bit tired, and I don't require
any help at all, thank you.'
They went upstairs without using the lift, and he let her and himself in
with his latchkey. She entered the kitchen, and he, following, sat down
in a chair there.
'Where have you been?' he said, with almost angered concern on his face.
'You ought not to have been absent more than ten minutes.'
'I knew there was nothing for me to do, and thought I should like to see
a little of London,' she replied naively. 'So when I had got the stamps
I went on into the fashionable streets, where ladies are all walking
about just as if it were daytime! 'Twas for all the world like coming
home by night from Martinmas Fair at the Street o' Wells, only more
genteel.'
'O Avice, Avice, you must not go out like this! Don't you know that I am
responsible for your safety? I am your--well, guardian, in fact, and am
bound by law and morals, and I don't know what-all, to deliver you up to
your native island without a scratch or blemish. And yet you indulge in
such a midnight vagary as this!'
'But I am sure, sir, the gentlemen in the street were more respectable
than they are anywhere at home! They were dressed in the latest fashion,
and would have scorned to do me any harm; and as to their love-making, I
never heard anything so polite before.'
'Well, you must not do it again. I'll tell you some day why. What's that
you have in your hand?'
'A mouse-trap. There are lots of mice in this kitchen--sooty mice, not
clean like ours--and I thought I'd try to catch them. That was what I
went so far to buy, as there were no shops open just about here. I'll
set it now.'
She proceeded at once to do so, and Pierston remained in his seat
regarding the operation, which seemed entirely to engross her. It
was extraordinary, indeed, to observe how she wilfully limited her
interests; with what content she received the ordinary things that life
offered, and persistently refused to behold what an infinitely extended
life lay open to her through him. If she had only said the word he would
have got a licence and married her the next morning. Was it possible
that she did not perceive this tendency in him? She could hardly be a
woman if she did not; and in her airy, elusive, offhand demeanour she
was very much of a woman indeed.
'It only holds one mouse,' he said absently.
'But I shall hear it throw in the night, and set it again.'
He sighed and left her to her own resources and retired to rest, though
he felt no tendency to sleep. At some small hour of the darkness,
owing, possibly, to some intervening door being left open, he heard
the mouse-trap click. Another light sleeper must have heard it too, for
almost immediately after the pit-pat of naked feet, accompanied by the
brushing of drapery, was audible along the passage towards the kitchen.
After her absence in that apartment long enough to reset the trap, he
was startled by a scream from the same quarter. Pierston sprang out of
bed, jumped into his dressing-gown, and hastened in the direction of the
cry.
Avice, barefooted and wrapped in a shawl, was standing in a chair; the
mouse-trap lay on the floor, the mouse running round and round in its
neighbourhood.
'I was trying to take en out,' said she excitedly, 'and he got away from
me!'
Pierston secured the mouse while she remained standing on the chair.
Then, having set the trap anew, his feeling burst out petulantly--
'A girl like you to throw yourself away upon such a commonplace fellow
as that quarryman! Why do you do it!'
Her mind was so intently fixed upon the matter in hand that it was
some moments before she caught his irrelevant subject. 'Because I am a
foolish girl,' she said quietly.
'What! Don't you love him?' said Jocelyn, with a surprised stare up at
her as she stood, in her concern appearing the very Avice who had kissed
him twenty years earlier.
'It is not much use to talk about that,' said she.
'Then, is it the soldier?'
'Yes, though I have never spoken to him.'
'Never spoken to the soldier?'
'Never.'
'Has either one treated you badly--deceived you?'
'No. Certainly not.'
'Well, I can't make you out; and I don't wish to know more than you
choose to tell me. Come, Avice, why not tell me exactly how things are?'
'Not now, sir!' she said, her pretty pink face and brown eyes turned in
simple appeal to him from her pedestal. 'I will tell you all to-morrow;
an that I will!'
He retreated to his own room and lay down meditating. Some quarter of an
hour after she had retreated to hers the mouse-trap clicked again, and
Pierston raised himself on his elbow to listen. The place was so still
and the jerry-built door-panels so thin that he could hear the mouse
jumping about inside the wires of the trap. But he heard no footstep
this time. As he was wakeful and restless he again arose, proceeded
to the kitchen with a light, and removing the mouse reset the trap.
Returning he listened once more. He could see in the far distance the
door of Avice's room; but that thoughtful housewife had not heard the
second capture. From the room came a soft breathing like that of an
infant.
He entered his own chamber and reclined himself gloomily enough. Her
lack of all consciousness of him, the aspect of the deserted kitchen,
the cold grate, impressed him with a deeper sense of loneliness than he
had ever felt before.
Foolish he was, indeed, to be so devoted to this young woman. Her
defencelessness, her freedom from the least thought that there lurked a
danger in their propinquity, were in fact secondary safeguards, not much
less strong than that of her being her mother's image, against risk to
her from him. Yet it was out of this that his depression came.
At sight of her the next morning Pierston felt that he must put an end
to such a state of things. He sent Avice off to the studio, wrote to an
agent for a couple of servants, and then went round to his work. Avice
was busy righting all that she was allowed to touch. It was the girl's
delight to be occupied among the models and casts, which for the first
time she regarded with the wistful interest of a soul struggling to
receive ideas of beauty vaguely discerned yet ever eluding her. That
brightness in her mother's mind which might have descended to the second
Avice with the maternal face and form, had been dimmed by admixture with
the mediocrity of her father's, and by one who remembered like Pierston
the dual organization the opposites could be often seen wrestling
internally.
They were alone in the studio, and his feelings found vent. Putting his
arms round her he said, 'My darling, sweet little Avice! I want to ask
you something--surely you guess what? I want to know this: will you be
married to me, and live here with me always and ever?'
'O, Mr. Pierston, what nonsense!'
'Nonsense?' said he, shrinking somewhat.
'Yes, sir.'
'Well, why? Am I too old? Surely there's no serious difference?'
'O no--I should not mind that if it came to marrying. The difference
is not much for husband and wife, though it is rather much for keeping
company.'
She struggled to get free, and when in the movement she knocked down the
Empress Faustina's head he did not try to retain her. He saw that she
was not only surprised but a little alarmed.
'You haven't said why it is nonsense!' he remarked tartly.
'Why, I didn't know you was thinking of me like that. I hadn't any
thought of it! And all alone here! What shall I do?'
'Say yes, my pretty Avice! We'll then go out and be married at once, and
nobody be any the wiser.'