2. VI. THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT
It was the evening of Pierston's arrival at Sylvania Castle, a
dignified manor-house in a nook by the cliffs, with modern
castellations and battlements; and he had walked through the rooms,
about the lawn, and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on
this island of treeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure.
In name, nature, and accessories the property within the girdling wall
formed a complete antithesis to everything in its precincts. To find
other trees between Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a
little in time--to dig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-
beds, where a forest of conifers lay as petrifactions, their heads all
in one direction, as blown down by a gale in the Secondary geologic
epoch.
Dusk had closed in, and he now proceeded with what was, after all, the
real business of his sojourn. The two servants who had been left to
take care of the house were in their own quarters, and he went out
unobserved. Crossing a hollow overhung by the budding boughs he
approached an empty garden-house of Elizabethan design, which stood on
the outer wall of the grounds, and commanded by a window the fronts of
the nearest cottages. Among them was the home of the resuscitated
Avice.
He had chosen this moment for his outlook through knowing that the
villagers were in no hurry to pull down their blinds at nightfall.
And, as he had divined, the inside of the young woman's living-room was
visible to him as formerly, illuminated by the rays of its own lamp.
A subdued thumping came every now and then from the apartment. She was
ironing linen on a flannel table-cloth, a row of such apparel hanging
on a clothes-horse by the fire. Her face had been pale when he
encountered her, but now it was warm and pink with her exertions and
the heat of the stove. Yet it was in perfect and passionless repose,
which imparted a Minerva cast to the profile. When she glanced up, her
lineaments seemed to have all the soul and heart that had characterized
her mother's, and had been with her a true index of the spirit within.
Could it be possible that in this case the manifestation was
fictitious? He had met with many such examples of hereditary
persistence without the qualities signified by the traits. He
unconsciously hoped that it was at least not entirely so here.
The room was less furnished than when he had last beheld it. The 'bo-
fet,' or double corner-cupboard, where the china was formerly kept, had
disappeared, its place being taken by a plain board. The tall old
clock, with its ancient oak carcase, arched brow, and humorous mouth,
was also not to be seen, a cheap, white-dialled specimen doing its
work. What these displacements might betoken saddened his humanity
less than it cheered his primitive instinct in pointing out how her
necessities might bring them together.
Having fixed his residence near her for some lengthy time he felt in no
hurry to obtrude his presence just now, and went indoors. That this
girl's frame was doomed to be a real embodiment of that olden seductive
one--that Protean dream-creature, who had never seen fit to irradiate
the mother's image till it became a mere memory after dissolution--he
doubted less every moment.
There was an uneasiness in recognizing such. There was something
abnormal in his present proclivity. A certain sanity had, after all,
accompanied his former idealizing passions: the Beloved had seldom
informed a personality which, while enrapturing his soul,
simultaneously shocked his intellect. A change, perhaps, had come.
It was a fine morning on the morrow. Walking in the grounds towards
the gate he saw Avice entering his hired castle with a broad oval
wicker-basket covered with a white cloth, which burden she bore round
to the back door. Of course, she washed for his own household: he had
not thought of that. In the morning sunlight she appeared rather as a
sylph than as a washerwoman; and he could not but think that the
slightness of her figure was as ill adapted to this occupation as her
mother's had been.
But, after all, it was not the washerwoman that he saw now. In front
of her, on the surface of her, was shining out that more real, more
inter-penetrating being whom he knew so well! The occupation of the
subserving minion, the blemishes of the temporary creature who formed
the background, were of the same account in the presentation of the
indispensable one as the supporting posts and framework in a
pyrotechnic display.
She left the house and went homeward by a path of which he was not
aware, having probably changed her course because she had seen him
standing there. It meant nothing, for she had hardly become acquainted
with him; yet that she should have avoided him was a new experience.
He had no opportunity for a further study of her by distant
observation, and hit upon a pretext for bringing her face to face with
him. He found fault with his linen, and directed that the laundress
should be sent for.
'She is rather young, poor little thing,' said the housemaid
apologetically. 'But since her mother's death she has enough to do to
keep above water, and we make shift with her. But I'll tell her, sir.'
'I will see her myself. Send her in when she comes,' said Pierston.
One morning, accordingly, when he was answering a spiteful criticism of
a late work of his, he was told that she waited his pleasure in the
hall. He went out.
'About the washing,' said the sculptor stiffly. 'I am a very
particular person, and I wish no preparation of lime to be used.'
'I didn't know folks used it,' replied the maiden, in a scared and
reserved tone, without looking at him.
'That's all right. And then, the mangling smashes the buttons.'
'I haven't got a mangle, sir,' she murmured.
'Ah! that's satisfactory. And I object to so much borax in the
starch.'
'I don't put any,' Avice returned in the same close way; 'never heard
the name o't afore!'
'O I see.'
All this time Pierston was thinking of the girl--or as the scientific
might say, Nature was working her plans for the next generation under
the cloak of a dialogue on linen. He could not read her individual
character, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman
whom he had valued too late. He could not help seeing in her all that
he knew of another, and veiling in her all that did not harmonize with
his sense of metempsychosis.
The girl seemed to think of nothing but the business in hand. She had
answered to the point, and was hardly aware of his sex or of his shape.
'I knew your mother, Avice,' he said. 'You remember my telling you
so?'
'Yes.'
'Well--I have taken this house for two or three months, and you will be
very useful to me. You still live just outside the wall?'
'Yes, sir,' said the self-contained girl.
Demurely and dispassionately she turned to leave--this pretty creature
with features so still. There was something strange in seeing move off
thus that form which he knew passing well, she who was once so
throbbingly alive to his presence that, not many yards from this spot,
she had flung her arms round him and given him a kiss which, despised
in its freshness, had revived in him latterly as the dearest kiss of
all his life. And now this 'daps' of her mother (as they called her in
the dialect here), this perfect copy, why did she turn away?
'Your mother was a refined and well-informed woman, I think I
remember?'
'She was, sir; everybody said so.'
'I hope you resemble her.'
She archly shook her head, and drew warily away.
'O! one thing more, Avice. I have not brought much linen, so you must
come to the house every day.'
'Very good, sir.'
'You won't forget that?'
'O no.'
Then he let her go. He was a town man, and she an artless islander,
yet he had opened himself out, like a sea-anemone, without disturbing
the epiderm of her nature. It was monstrous that a maiden who had
assumed the personality of her of his tenderest memory should be so
impervious. Perhaps it was he who was wanting. Avice might be Passion
masking as Indifference, because he was so many years older in outward
show.
This brought him to the root of it. In his heart he was not a day
older than when he had wooed the mother at the daughter's present age.
His record moved on with the years, his sentiments stood still.
When he beheld those of his fellows who were defined as buffers and
fogeys--imperturbable, matter-of-fact, slightly ridiculous beings, past
masters in the art of populating homes, schools, and colleges, and
present adepts in the science of giving away brides--how he envied
them, assuming them to feel as they appeared to feel, with their
commerce and their politics, their glasses and their pipes. They had
got past the distracting currents of passionateness, and were in the
calm waters of middle-aged philosophy. But he, their contemporary, was
tossed like a cork hither and thither upon the crest of every fancy,
precisely as he had been tossed when he was half his present age, with
the burden now of double pain to himself in his growing vision of all
as vanity.
Avice had gone, and he saw her no more that day. Since he could not
again call upon her, she was as inaccessible as if she had entered the
military citadel on the hill-top beyond them.
In the evening he went out and paced down the lane to the Red King's
castle overhanging the cliff, beside whose age the castle he occupied
was but a thing of yesterday. Below the castle precipice lay enormous
blocks, which had fallen from it, and several of them were carved over
with names and initials. He knew the spot and the old trick well, and
by searching in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names which, as
a boy, he himself had cut. They were 'AVICE' and 'JOCELYN'--Avice
Caro's and his own. The letters were now nearly worn away by the
weather and the brine. But close by, in quite fresh letters, stood
'ANN AVICE,' coupled with the name 'ISAAC.' They could not have been
there more than two or three years, and the 'Ann Avice' was probably
Avice the Second. Who was Isaac? Some boy admirer of her child-time
doubtless.
He retraced his steps, and passed the Caros' house towards his own.
The revivified Avice animated the dwelling, and the light within the
room fell upon the window. She was just inside that blind.
* * *
Whenever she unexpectedly came to the castle he started, and lost
placidity. It was not at her presence as such, but at the new
condition, which seemed to have something sinister in it. On the other
hand, the most abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it
had moved her prototype in the old days. She was indifferent to,
almost unconscious of, his propinquity. He was no more than a statue
to her; she was a growing fire to him.
A sudden Sapphic terror of love would ever and anon come upon the
sculptor, when his matured reflecting powers would insist upon
informing him of the fearful lapse from reasonableness that lay in this
infatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he were
doomed to do penance for his past emotional wanderings (in a material
sense) by being chained in fatal fidelity to an object that his
intellect despised? One night he dreamt that he saw dimly masking
behind that young countenance 'the Weaver of Wiles' herself, 'with all
her subtle face laughing aloud.'
However, the Well-Beloved was alive again, had been lost and was found.
He was amazed at the change of front in himself. She had worn the
guise of strange women; she had been a woman of every class, from the
dignified daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a Nubian Almeh with
her handkerchief, undulating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all these
embodiments had been endowed with a certain smartness, either of the
flesh or spirit: some with wit, a few with talent, and even genius.
But the new impersonation had apparently nothing beyond sex and
prettiness. She knew not how to sport a fan or handkerchief, hardly
how to pull on a glove.
But her limited life was innocent, and that went far. Poor little
Avice! her mother's image: there it all lay. After all, her parentage
was as good as his own; it was misfortune that had sent her down to
this. Odd as it seemed to him, her limitations were largely what he
loved her for. Her rejuvenating power over him had ineffable charm.
He felt as he had felt when standing beside her predecessor; but, alas!
he was twenty years further on towards the shade.
