3. IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION
This desultory courtship of a young girl which had been brought about
by her mother's contrivance was interrupted by the appearance of Somers
and his wife and family on the Budmouth Esplanade. Alfred Somers, once
the youthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was now a middle-aged
family man with spectacles--spectacles worn, too, with the single
object of seeing through them--and a row of daughters tailing off to
infancy, who at present added appreciably to the income of the bathing-
machine women established along the sands.
Mrs. Somers--once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs. Pine-Avon--had now
retrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother and
grandmother, giving sharp, strict regard to the current literature and
art that reached the innocent presence of her long perspective of
girls, with the view of hiding every skull and skeleton of life from
their dear eyes. She was another illustration of the rule that
succeeding generations of women are seldom marked by cumulative
progress, their advance as girls being lost in their recession as
matrons; so that they move up and down the stream of intellectual
development like flotsam in a tidal estuary. And this perhaps not by
reason of their faults as individuals, but of their misfortune as
child-rearers.
The landscape-painter, now an Academician like Pierston himself--rather
popular than distinguished--had given up that peculiar and personal
taste in subjects which had marked him in times past, executing instead
many pleasing aspects of nature addressed to the furnishing householder
through the middling critic, and really very good of their kind. In
this way he received many large cheques from persons of wealth in
England and America, out of which he built himself a sumptuous studio
and an awkward house around it, and paid for the education of the
growing maidens.
The vision of Somers's humble position as jackal to this lion of a
family and house and studio and social reputation--Somers, to whom
strange conceits and wild imaginings were departed joys never to
return--led Pierston, as the painter's contemporary, to feel that he
ought to be one of the bygones likewise, and to put on an air of
unromantic bufferism. He refrained from entering Avice's peninsula for
the whole fortnight of Somers's stay in the neighbouring town, although
its grey poetical outline--'throned along the sea'--greeted his eyes
every morn and eve across the roadstead.
When the painter and his family had gone back from their bathing
holiday, he thought that he, too, would leave the neighbourhood. To do
so, however, without wishing at least the elder Avice good-bye would be
unfriendly, considering the extent of their acquaintance. One evening,
knowing this time of day to suit her best, he took the few-minutes'
journey to the rock along the thin connecting string of junction, and
arrived at Mrs. Pierston's door just after dark.
A light shone from an upper chamber. On asking for his widowed
acquaintance he was informed that she was ill, seriously, though not
dangerously. While learning that her daughter was with her, and
further particulars, and doubting if he should go in, a message was
sent down to ask him to enter. His voice had been heard, and Mrs.
Pierston would like to see him.
He could not with any humanity refuse, but there flashed across his
mind the recollection that Avice the youngest had never yet really seen
him, had seen nothing more of him than an outline, which might have
appertained as easily to a man thirty years his junior as to himself,
and a countenance so renovated by faint moonlight as fairly to
correspond. It was with misgiving, therefore, that the sculptor
ascended the staircase and entered the little upper sitting-room, now
arranged as a sick-chamber.
Mrs. Pierston reclined on a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising
thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come
in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand.
'Don't let me frighten you.'
Avice was seated beside her, reading. The girl jumped up, hardly
seeming to recognize him. 'O! it's Mr. Pierston,' she said in a
moment, adding quickly, with evident surprise and off her guard: 'I
thought Mr. Pierston was--'
What she had thought he was did not pass her lips, and it remained a
riddle for Jocelyn until a new departure in her manner towards him
showed that the words 'much younger' would have accurately ended the
sentence. Had Pierston not now confronted her anew, he might have
endured philosophically her changed opinion of him. But he was seeing
her again, and a rooted feeling was revived.
Pierston now learnt for the first time that the widow had been visited
by sudden attacks of this sort not infrequently of late years. They
were said to be due to angina pectoris, the latter paroxysms having
been the most severe. She was at the present moment out of pain,
though weak, exhausted, and nervous. She would not, however, converse
about herself, but took advantage of her daughter's absence from the
room to broach the subject most in her thoughts.
No compunctions had stirred her as they had her visitor on the
expediency of his suit in view of his years. Her fever of anxiety lest
after all he should not come to see Avice again had been not without an
effect upon her health; and it made her more candid than she had
intended to be.
'Troubles and sickness raise all sorts of fears, Mr. Pierston,' she
said. 'What I felt only a wish for, when you first named it, I have
hoped for a good deal since; and I have been so anxious that--that it
should come to something! I am glad indeed that you are come.'
'My wanting to marry Avice, you mean, dear Mrs. Pierston?'
'Yes--that's it. I wonder if you are still in the same mind? You are?
Then I wish something could be done--to make her agree to it--so as to
get it settled. I dread otherwise what will become of her. She is not
a practical girl as I was--she would hardly like now to settle down as
an islander's wife; and to leave her living here alone would trouble
me.'
'Nothing will happen to you yet, I hope, my dear old friend.'
'Well, it is a risky complaint; and the attacks, when they come, are so
agonizing that to endure them I ought to get rid of all outside
anxieties, folk say. Now--do you want her, sir?'
'With all my soul! But she doesn't want me.'
'I don't think she is so against you as you imagine. I fancy if it
were put to her plainly, now I am in this state, it might be done.'
They lapsed into conversation on the early days of their acquaintance,
until Mrs. Pierston's daughter re-entered the room.
'Avice,' said her mother, when the girl had been with them a few
minutes. 'About this matter that I have talked over with you so many
times since my attack. Here is Mr. Pierston, and he wishes to be your
husband. He is much older than you; but, in spite of it, that you will
ever get a better husband I don't believe. Now, will you take him,
seeing the state I am in, and how naturally anxious I am to see you
settled before I die?'
'But you won't die, mother! You are getting better!'
'Just for the present only. Come, he is a good man and a clever man,
and a rich man. I want you, O so much, to be his wife! I can say no
more.'
Avice looked appealingly at the sculptor, and then on the floor. 'Does
he really wish me to?' she asked almost inaudibly, turning as she spoke
to Pierston. 'He has never quite said so to me.'
'My dear one, how can you doubt it?' said Jocelyn quickly. 'But I
won't press you to marry me as a favour, against your feelings.'
'I thought Mr. Pierston was younger!' she murmured to her mother.
'That counts for little, when you think how much there is on the other
side. Think of our position, and of his--a sculptor, with a mansion,
and a studio full of busts and statues that I have dusted in my time,
and of the beautiful studies you would be able to take up. Surely the
life would just suit you? Your expensive education is wasted down
here!'
Avice did not care to argue. She was outwardly gentle as her
grandmother had been, and it seemed just a question with her of whether
she must or must not. 'Very well--I feel I ought to agree to marry
him, since you tell me to,' she answered quietly, after some thought.
'I see that it would be a wise thing to do, and that you wish it, and
that Mr. Pierston really does--like me. So--so that--'
Pierston was not backward at this critical juncture, despite unpleasant
sensations. But it was the historic ingredient in this genealogical
passion--if its continuity through three generations may be so
described--which appealed to his perseverance at the expense of his
wisdom. The mother was holding the daughter's hand; she took
Pierston's, and laid Avice's in it.
No more was said in argument, and the thing was regarded as determined.
Afterwards a noise was heard upon the window-panes, as of fine sand
thrown; and, lifting the blind, Pierston saw that the distant lightship
winked with a bleared and indistinct eye. A drizzling rain had come on
with the dark, and it was striking the window in handfuls. He had
intended to walk the two miles back to the station, but it meant a
drenching to do it now. He waited and had supper; and, finding the
weather no better, accepted Mrs. Pierston's invitation to stay over the
night.
Thus it fell out that again he lodged in the house he had been
accustomed to live in as a boy, before his father had made his fortune,
and before his own name had been heard of outside the boundaries of the
isle.
He slept but little, and in the first movement of the dawn sat up in
bed. Why should he ever live in London or any other fashionable city
if this plan of marriage could be carried out? Surely, with this young
wife, the island would be the best place for him. It might be possible
to rent Sylvania Castle as he had formerly done--better still to buy
it. If life could offer him anything worth having it would be a home
with Avice there on his native cliffs to the end of his days.
As he sat thus thinking, and the daylight increased, he discerned, a
short distance before him, a movement of something ghostly. His
position was facing the window, and he found that by chance the
looking-glass had swung itself vertical, so that what he saw was his
own shape. The recognition startled him. The person he appeared was
too grievously far, chronologically, in advance of the person he felt
himself to be. Pierston did not care to regard the figure confronting
him so mockingly. Its voice seemed to say 'There's tragedy hanging on
to this!' But the question of age being pertinent he could not give
the spectre up, and ultimately got out of bed under the weird
fascination of the reflection. Whether he had overwalked himself
lately, or what he had done, he knew not; but never had he seemed so
aged by a score of years as he was represented in the glass in that
cold grey morning light. While his soul was what it was, why should he
have been encumbered with that withering carcase, without the ability
to shift it off for another, as his ideal Beloved had so frequently
done?
By reason of her mother's illness Avice was now living in the house,
and, on going downstairs, he found that they were to breakfast en tete-
a-tete. She was not then in the room, but she entered in the course of
a few minutes. Pierston had already heard that the widow felt better
this morning, and elated by the prospect of sitting with Avice at this
meal he went forward to her joyously. As soon as she saw him in the
full stroke of day from the window she started; and he then remembered
that it was their first meeting under the solar rays.
She was so overcome that she turned and left the room as if she had
forgotten something; when she re-entered she was visibly pale. She
recovered herself, and apologized. She had been sitting up the night
before the last, she said, and was not quite so well as usual.
There may have been some truth in this; but Pierston could not get over
that first scared look of hers. It was enough to give daytime
stability to his night views of a possible tragedy lurking in this
wedding project. He determined that, at any cost to his heart, there
should be no misapprehension about him from this moment.
'Miss Pierston,' he said as they sat down, 'since it is well you should
know all the truth before we go any further, that there may be no
awkward discoveries afterwards, I am going to tell you something about
myself--if you are not too distressed to hear it?'
'No--let me hear it.'
'I was once the lover of your mother, and wanted to marry her, only she
wouldn't, or rather couldn't, marry me.'
'O how strange!' said the girl, looking from him to the breakfast
things, and from the breakfast things to him. 'Mother has never told
me that. Yet of course, you might have been. I mean, you are old
enough.'
He took the remark as a satire she had not intended. 'O yes--quite old
enough,' he said grimly. 'Almost too old.'
'Too old for mother? How's that?'
'Because I belonged to your grandmother.'
'No? How can that be?'
'I was her lover likewise. I should have married her if I had gone
straight on instead of round the corner.'
'But you couldn't have been, Mr. Pierston! You are not old enough?
Why, how old are you?--you have never told me.'
'I am very old.'
'My mother's, and my grandmother's,' said she, looking at him no longer
as at a possible husband, but as a strange fossilized relic in human
form. Pierston saw it, but meaning to give up the game he did not care
to spare himself.
'Your mother's and your grandmother's young man,' he repeated.
'And were you my great-grandmother's too?' she asked, with an expectant
interest in his case as a drama that overcame her personal
considerations for a moment.
'No--not your great-grandmother's. Your imagination beats even my
confessions!. . . But I am VERY old, as you see.'
'I did not know it!' said she in an appalled murmur. 'You do not look
so; and I thought that what you looked you were.'
'And you--you are very young,' he continued.
A stillness followed, during which she sat in a troubled constraint,
regarding him now and then with something in her open eyes and large
pupils that might have been sympathy or nervousness. Pierston ate
scarce any breakfast, and rising abruptly from the table said he would
take a walk on the cliffs as the morning was fine.
He did so, proceeding along the north-east heights for nearly a mile.
He had virtually given Avice up, but not formally. His intention had
been to go back to the house in half-an-hour and pay a morning visit to
the invalid; but by not returning the plans of the previous evening
might be allowed to lapse silently, as mere pourparlers that had come
to nothing in the face of Avice's want of love for him. Pierston
accordingly went straight along, and in the course of an hour was at
his Budmouth lodgings.
Nothing occurred till the evening to inform him how his absence had
been taken. Then a note arrived from Mrs. Pierston; it was written in
pencil, evidently as she lay.
'I am alarmed,' she said, 'at your going so suddenly. Avice seems to
think she has offended you. She did not mean to do that, I am sure.
It makes me dreadfully anxious! Will you send a line? Surely you will
not desert us now--my heart is so set on my child's welfare!'
'Desert you I won't,' said Jocelyn. 'It is too much like the original
case. But I must let her desert me!'
On his return, with no other object than that of wishing Mrs. Pierston
good-bye, he found her painfully agitated. She clasped his hand and
wetted it with her tears.
'O don't be offended with her!' she cried. 'She's young. We are one
people--don't marry a kimberlin! It will break my heart if you forsake
her now! Avice!'
The girl came. 'My manner was hasty and thoughtless this morning,' she
said in a low voice. 'Please pardon me. I wish to abide by my
promise.'
Her mother, still tearful, again joined their hands; and the engagement
stood as before.
Pierston went back to Budmouth, but dimly seeing how curiously, through
his being a rich suitor, ideas of beneficence and reparation were
retaining him in the course arranged by her mother, and urged by his
own desire in the face of his understanding.
