Twenty years had spread their films over the events which wound up with
the reunion of the second Avice and her husband; and the hoary peninsula
called an island looked just the same as before; though many who had
formerly projected their daily shadows upon its unrelieved summer
whiteness ceased now to disturb the colourless sunlight there.
The general change, nevertheless, was small. The silent ships came and
went from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file after
file of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfully
dragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvian
wooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from the
quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its
eye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank
had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained
undevoured.
Men drank, smoked, and spat in the inns with only a little more
adulteration in their refreshments and a trifle less dialect in their
speech than of yore. But one figure had never been seen on the Channel
rock in the interval, the form of Pierston the sculptor, whose first use
of the chisel that rock had instigated.
He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in fact, at this very date he was
staying at an hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set eyes on Avice
since parting from her in the room with her firstborn, he had managed to
obtain tidings of her from time to time during the interval. In this way
Pierston learnt that, shortly after their resumption of a common life in
her house, Ike had ill-used her, till fortunately, the business to which
Jocelyn had assisted him chancing to prosper, he became immersed in
its details, and allowed Avice to pursue her household courses without
interference, initiating that kind of domestic reconciliation which is
so calm and durable, having as its chief ingredient neither hate nor
love, but an all-embracing indifference.
At first Pierston had sent her sums of money privately, fearing lest
her husband should deny her material comforts; but he soon found, to his
great relief, that such help was unnecessary, social ambition prompting
Ike to set up as quite a gentleman-islander, and to allow Avice a scope
for show which he would never have allowed in mere kindness.
Being in Rome, as aforesaid, Pierston returned one evening to his
hotel to dine, after spending the afternoon among the busts in the long
gallery of the Vatican. The unconscious habit, common to so many people,
of tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to discern, or to fancy
he discerned, in the Roman atmosphere, in its lights and shades, and
particularly in its reflected or secondary lights, something resembling
the atmosphere of his native promontory. Perhaps it was that in each
case the eye was mostly resting on stone--that the quarries of ruins in
the Eternal City reminded him of the quarries of maiden rock at home.
This being in his mind when he sat down to dinner at the common table,
he was surprised to hear an American gentleman, who sat opposite,
mention the name of Pierston's birthplace. The American was talking to
a friend about a lady--an English widow, whose acquaintance they had
renewed somewhere in the Channel Islands during a recent tour, after
having known her as a young woman who came to San Francisco with her
father and mother many years before. Her father was then a rich man just
retired from the business of a stone-merchant in the Isle of Slingers;
but he had engaged in large speculations, and had lost nearly all his
fortune. Jocelyn further gathered that the widowed daughter's name was
Mrs. Leverre; that she had a step-son, her husband having been a Jersey
gentleman, a widower; and that the step-son seemed to be a promising and
interesting young man.
Pierston was instantly struck with the perception that these and other
allusions, though general, were in accord with the history of his
long-lost Marcia. He hardly felt any desire to hunt her up after nearly
two score years of separation, but he was impressed enough to resolve to
exchange a word with the strangers as soon as he could get opportunity.
He could not well attract their attention through the plants upon the
wide table, and even if he had been able he was disinclined to ask
questions in public. He waited on till dinner was over, and when the
strangers withdrew Pierston withdrew in their rear.
They were not in the drawing-room, and he found that they had gone
out. There was no chance of overtaking them, but Pierston, waked to
restlessness by their remarks, wandered up and down the adjoining Piazza
di Spagna, thinking they might return. The streets below were immersed
in shade, the front of the church of the Trinita de' Monti at the
top was flooded with orange light, the gloom of evening gradually
intensifying upon the broad, long flight of steps, which foot-passengers
incessantly ascended and descended with the insignificance of ants; the
dusk wrapped up the house to the left, in which Shelley had lived, and
that to the right, in which Keats had died.
Getting back to the hotel he learnt that the Americans had only dropped
in to dine, and were staying elsewhere. He saw no more of them; and on
reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going
off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would
care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were
to take the trouble to discover her.
* * *
Thus much Marcia. The other thread of his connection with the ancient
Isle of Slingers was stirred by a letter he received from Avice a little
after this date, in which she stated that her husband Ike had been
killed in his own quarry by an accident within the past year; that she
herself had been ill, and though well again, and left amply provided
for, she would like to see him if he ever came that way.
As she had not communicated for several long years, her expressed wish
to see him now was likely to be prompted by something more, something
newer, than memories of him. Yet the manner of her writing precluded all
suspicion that she was thinking of him as an old lover whose suit events
had now made practicable. He told her he was sorry to hear that she had
been ill, and that he would certainly take an early opportunity of going
down to her home on his next visit to England.
He did more. Her request had revived thoughts of his old home and its
associations, and instead of awaiting other reasons for a return he made
her the operating one. About a week later he stood once again at the
foot of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the entrance to the
Isle were perched like grey pigeons on a roof-side.
At Top-o'-Hill--as the summit of the rock was mostly called--he stood
looking at the busy doings in the quarries beyond, where the numerous
black hoisting-cranes scattered over the central plateau had the
appearance of a swarm of crane-flies resting there. He went a little
further, made some general inquiries about the accident which had
carried off Avice's husband in the previous year, and learnt that though
now a widow, she had plenty of friends and sympathizers about her,
which rendered any immediate attention to her on his part unnecessary.
Considering, therefore, that there was no great reason why he should
call on her so soon, and without warning, he turned back. Perhaps after
all her request had been dictated by a momentary feeling only, and a
considerable strangeness to each other must naturally be the result of
a score of dividing years. Descending to the bottom he took his seat in
the train on the shore, which soon carried him along the Bank, and
round to the watering-place five miles off, at which he had taken up his
quarters for a few days.
Here, as he stayed on, his local interests revived. Whenever he went out
he could see the island that was once his home lying like a great
snail upon the sea across the bay. It was the spring of the year; local
steamers had begun to run, and he was never tired of standing on the
thinly occupied deck of one of these as it skirted the island and
revealed to him on the cliffs far up its height the ruins of Red-King
Castle, behind which the little village of East Quarriers lay.
Thus matters went on, if they did not rather stand still, for several
days before Pierston redeemed his vague promise to seek Avice out. And
in the meantime he was surprised by the arrival of another letter from
her by a roundabout route. She had heard, she said, that he had been on
the island, and imagined him therefore to be staying somewhere near. Why
did he not call as he had told her he would do? She was always thinking
of him, and wishing to see him.
Her tone was anxious, and there was no doubt that she really had
something to say which she did not want to write. He wondered what it
could be, and started the same afternoon.
Avice, who had been little in his mind of late years, began to renew for
herself a distinct position therein. He was fully aware that since his
earlier manhood a change had come over his regard of womankind. Once the
individual had been nothing more to him than the temporary abiding-place
of the typical or ideal; now his heart showed its bent to be a growing
fidelity to the specimen, with all her pathetic flaws of detail; which
flaws, so far from sending him further, increased his tenderness. This
maturer feeling, if finer and higher, was less convenient than the old.
Ardours of passion could be felt as in youth without the recuperative
intervals which had accompanied evanescence.
The first sensation was to find that she had long ceased to live in
the little freehold cottage she had occupied of old. In answer to his
inquiries he was directed along the road to the west of the modern
castle, past the entrance on that side, and onward to the very house
that had once been his own home. There it stood as of yore, facing
up the Channel, a comfortable roomy structure, the euonymus and other
shrubs, which alone would stand in the teeth of the salt wind, living
on at about the same stature in front of it; but the paint-work much
renewed. A thriving man had resided there of late, evidently.
The widow in mourning who received him in the front parlour was, alas!
but the sorry shadow of Avice the Second. How could he have fancied
otherwise after twenty years? Yet he had been led to fancy otherwise,
almost without knowing it, by feeling himself unaltered. Indeed,
curiously enough, nearly the first words she said to him were: 'Why--you
are just the same!'
'Just the same. Yes, I am, Avice,' he answered sadly; for this inability
to ossify with the rest of his generation threw him out of proportion
with the time. Moreover, while wearing the aspect of comedy, it was of
the nature of tragedy.
'It is well to be you, sir,' she went on. 'I have had troubles to take
the bloom off me!'
'Yes; I have been sorry for you.'
She continued to regard him curiously, with humorous interest; and
he knew what was passing in her mind: that this man, to whom she had
formerly looked up as to a person far in advance of her along the lane
of life, seemed now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the pair of them
observing the world with fairly level eyes.
He had come to her with warmth for a vision which, on reaching her,
he found to have departed; and, though fairly weaned by the natural
reality, he was so far staunch as to linger hankeringly. They talked of
past days, his old attachment, which she had then despised, being now
far more absorbing and present to her than to himself.
She unmistakably won upon him as he sat on. A curious closeness between
them had been produced in his imagination by the discovery that she
was passing her life within the house of his own childhood. Her similar
surname meant little here; but it was also his, and, added to the
identity of domicile, lent a strong suggestiveness to the accident.
'This is where I used to sit when my parents occupied the house,'
he said, placing himself beside that corner of the fireplace which
commanded a view through the window. 'I could see a bough of tamarisk
wave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassy
waste towards the sea, and at night the same old lightship blinking far
out there. Place yourself on the spot, to please me.'
She set her chair where he indicated, and Pierston stood close beside
her, directing her gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded thence
as a boy. Her head and face--the latter thoughtful and worn enough, poor
thing, to suggest a married life none too comfortable--were close to his
breast, and, with a few inches further incline, would have touched it.
'And now you are the inhabitant; I the visitor,' he said. 'I am glad to
see you here--so glad, Avice! You are fairly well provided for--I think
I may assume that?' He looked round the room at the solid mahogany
furniture, and at the modern piano and show bookcase.
'Yes, Ike left me comfortable. 'Twas he who thought of moving from my
cottage to this larger house. He bought it, and I can live here as long
as I choose to.'
Apart from the decline of his adoration to friendship, there seemed to
be a general convergence of positions which suggested that he might make
amends for the desertion of Avice the First by proposing to this Avice
when a meet time should arrive. If he did not love her as he had done
when she was a slim thing catching mice in his rooms in London, he could
surely be content at his age with comradeship. After all she was only
forty to his sixty. The feeling that he really could be thus content
was so convincing that he almost believed the luxury of getting old and
reposeful was coming to his restless, wandering heart at last.
'Well, you have come at last, sir,' she went on; 'and I am grateful to
you. I did not like writing, and yet I wanted to be straightforward.
Have you guessed at all why I wished to see you so much that I could not
help sending twice to you?'
'I have tried, but cannot.'
'Try again. It is a pretty reason, which I hope you'll forgive.'
'I am sure I sha'n't unriddle it. But I'll say this on my own account
before you tell me. I have always taken a lingering interest in you,
which you must value for what it is worth. It originated, so far as it
concerns you personally, with the sight of you in that cottage round the
corner, nineteen or twenty years ago, when I became tenant of the castle
opposite. But that was not the very beginning. The very beginning was
a score of years before that, when I, a young fellow of one-and-twenty,
coming home here, from London, to see my father, encountered a tender
woman as like you as your double; was much attracted by her as I saw
her day after day flit past this window; till I made it my business to
accompany her in her walks awhile. I, as you know, was not a staunch
fellow, and it all ended badly. But, at any rate you, her daughter, and
I are friends.'
'Ah! there she is!' suddenly exclaimed Avice, whose attention had
wandered somewhat from his retrospective discourse. She was looking from
the window towards the cliffs, where, upon the open ground quite near at
hand, a slender female form was seen rambling along. 'She is out for
a walk,' Avice continued. 'I wonder if she is going to call here this
afternoon? She is living at the castle opposite as governess.'
'O, she's--'
'Yes. Her education was very thorough--better even than her
grandmother's. I was the neglected one, and her father and myself both
vowed that there should be no complaint on that score about her. We
christened her Avice, to keep up the name, as you requested. I wish you
could speak to her--I am sure you would like her.'
'Is that the baby?' faltered Jocelyn.
'Yes, the baby.'
The person signified, now much nearer, was a still more modernized,
up-to-date edition of the two Avices of that blood with whom he had been
involved more or less for the last forty years. A ladylike creature was
she--almost elegant. She was altogether finer in figure than her
mother or grandmother had ever been, which made her more of a woman in
appearance than in years. She wore a large-disked sun-hat, with a brim
like a wheel whose spokes were radiating folds of muslin lining the
brim, a black margin beyond the muslin being the felloe. Beneath this
brim her hair was massed low upon her brow, the colour of the thick
tresses being probably, from her complexion, repeated in the irises of
her large, deep eyes. Her rather nervous lips were thin and closed, so
that they only appeared as a delicate red line. A changeable temperament
was shown by that mouth--quick transitions from affection to aversion,
from a pout to a smile.
It was Avice the Third.
Jocelyn and the second Avice continued to gaze ardently at her.
'Ah! she is not coming in now; she hasn't time,' murmured the mother,
with some disappointment. 'Perhaps she means to run across in the
evening.'
The tall girl, in fact, went past and on till she was out of sight.
Pierston stood as in a dream. It was the very she, in all essential
particulars, and with an intensification of general charm, who had
kissed him forty years before. When he turned his head from the window
his eyes fell again upon the intermediate Avice at his side. Before but
the relic of the Well-Beloved, she had now become its empty shrine. Warm
friendship, indeed, he felt for her; but whatever that might have done
towards the instauration of a former dream was now hopelessly barred by
the rivalry of the thing itself in the guise of a lineal successor.