3. VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT
The October day thickened into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside the
corpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither,
he had acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well
as he could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease.
It was doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so.
Of Avice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and
the other had emigrated, while her only child besides the present Avice
had died in infancy. As for her friends, she had become so absorbed in
her ambitious and nearly accomplished design of marrying her daughter
to Jocelyn, that she had gradually completed that estrangement between
herself and the other islanders which had been begun so long ago as
when, a young woman, she had herself been asked by Pierston to marry
him. On her tantalizing inability to accept the honour offered, she
and her husband had been set up in a matter-of-fact business in the
stone trade by her patron, but that unforgettable request in the London
studio had made her feel ever since a refined kinship with sculpture,
and a proportionate aloofness from mere quarrying, which was, perhaps,
no more than a venial weakness in Avice the Second. Her daughter's
objection to Jocelyn she could never understand. To her own eye he was
no older than when he had proposed to her.
As he sat darkling here the ghostly outlines of former shapes taken by
his Love came round their sister the unconscious corpse, confronting
him from the wall in sad array, like the pictured Trojan women beheld
by AEneas on the walls of Carthage. Many of them he had idealized in
bust and in figure from time to time, but it was not as such that he
remembered and reanimated them now; rather was it in all their natural
circumstances, weaknesses, and stains. And then as he came to himself
their voices grew fainter; they had all gone off on their different
careers, and he was left here alone.
The probable ridicule that would result to him from the events of the
day he did not mind in itself at all. But he would fain have removed
the misapprehensions on which it would be based. That, however, was
impossible. Nobody would ever know the truth about him; what it was he
had sought that had so eluded, tantalized, and escaped him; what it was
that had led him such a dance, and had at last, as he believed just now
in the freshness of his loss, been discovered in the girl who had left
him. It was not the flesh; he had never knelt low to that. Not a
woman in the world had been wrecked by him, though he had been
impassioned by so many. Nobody would guess the further sentiment--the
cordial loving-kindness--which had lain behind what had seemed to him
the enraptured fulfilment of a pleasing destiny postponed for forty
years. His attraction to the third Avice would be regarded by the
world as the selfish designs of an elderly man on a maid.
His life seemed no longer a professional man's experience, but a ghost
story; and he would fain have vanished from his haunts on this critical
afternoon, as the rest had done. He desired to sleep away his
tendencies, to make something happen which would put an end to his
bondage to beauty in the ideal.
So he sat on till it was quite dark, and a light was brought. There
was a chilly wind blowing outside, and the lightship on the quicksand
afar looked harassed and forlorn. The haggard solitude was broken by a
ring at the door.
Pierston heard a voice below, the accents of a woman. They had a
ground quality of familiarity, a superficial articulation of
strangeness. Only one person in all his experience had ever possessed
precisely those tones; rich, as if they had once been powerful.
Explanations seemed to be asked for and given, and in a minute he was
informed that a lady was downstairs whom perhaps he would like to see.
'Who is the lady?' Jocelyn asked.
The servant hesitated a little. 'Mrs. Leverre--the mother of the--
young gentleman Miss Avice has run off with.'
'Yes--I'll see her,' said Pierston.
He covered the face of the dead Avice, and descended. 'Leverre,' he
said to himself. His ears had known that name before to-day. It was
the name those travelling Americans he had met in Rome gave the woman
he supposed might be Marcia Bencomb.
A sudden adjusting light burst upon many familiar things at that
moment. He found the visitor in the drawing-room, standing up veiled,
the carriage which had brought her being in waiting at the door. By
the dim light he could see nothing of her features in such
circumstances.
'Mr. Pierston?'
'I am Mr. Pierston.'
'You represent the late Mrs. Pierston?'
'I do--though I am not one of the family.'
'I know it. . . . I am Marcia--after forty years.'
'I was divining as much, Marcia. May the lines have fallen to you in
pleasant places since we last met! But, of all moments of my life, why
do you choose to hunt me up now?'
'Why--I am the step-mother and only relation of the young man your
bride eloped with this morning.'
'I was just guessing that, too, as I came downstairs. But--'
'And I am naturally making inquiries.'
'Yes. Let us take it quietly, and shut the door.'
Marcia sat down. And he learnt that the conjunction of old things and
new was no accident. What Mrs. Pierston had discussed with her nurse
and neighbour as vague intelligence, was now revealed to Jocelyn at
first hand by Marcia herself; how, many years after their separation,
and when she was left poor by the death of her impoverished father, she
had become the wife of that bygone Jersey lover of hers, who wanted a
tender nurse and mother for the infant left him by his first wife
recently deceased; how he had died a few years later, leaving her with
the boy, whom she had brought up at St. Heliers and in Paris, educating
him as well as she could with her limited means, till he became the
French master at a school in Sandbourne; and how, a year ago, she and
her son had got to know Mrs. Pierston and her daughter on their visit
to the island, 'to ascertain,' she added, more deliberately, 'not
entirely for sentimental reasons, what had become of the man with whom
I eloped in the first flush of my young womanhood, and only missed
marrying by my own will.'
Pierston bowed.
'Well, that was how the acquaintance between the children began, and
their passionate attachment to each other.' She detailed how Avice had
induced her mother to let her take lessons in French of young Leverre,
rendering their meetings easy. Marcia had never thought of hindering
their intimacy, for in her recent years of affliction she had acquired
a new interest in the name she had refused to take in her purse-proud
young womanhood; and it was not until she knew how determined Mrs.
Pierston was to make her daughter Jocelyn's wife that she had objected
to her son's acquaintance with Avice. But it was too late to hinder
what had been begun. He had lately been ill, and she had been
frightened by his not returning home the night before. The note she
had received from him that day had only informed her that Avice and
himself had gone to be married immediately--whither she did not know.
'What do you mean to do?' she asked.
'I do nothing: there is nothing to be done. . . . It is how I served
her grandmother--one of Time's revenges.'
'Served her so for me.'
'Yes. Now she me for your son.'
Marcia paused a long while thinking that over, till arousing herself
she resumed: 'But can't we inquire which way they went out of the
island, or gather some particulars about them?'
'Aye--yes. We will.'
And Pierston found himself as in a dream walking beside Marcia along
the road in their common quest. He discovered that almost every one of
the neighbouring inhabitants knew more about the lovers than he did
himself.
At the corner some men were engaged in conversation on the occurrence.
It was allusive only, but knowing the dialect, Pierston and Marcia
gathered its import easily. As soon as it had got light that morning
one of the boats was discovered missing from the creek below, and when
the flight of the lovers was made known it was inferred that they were
the culprits.
Unconsciously Pierston turned in the direction of the creek, without
regarding whether Marcia followed him, and though it was darker than
when Avice and Leverre had descended in the morning he pursued his way
down the incline till he reached the water-side.
'Is that you, Jocelyn?'
The inquiry came from Marcia. She was behind him, about half-way down.
'Yes,' he said, noticing that it was the first time she had called him
by his Christian name.
'I can't see where you are, and I am afraid to follow.'
Afraid to follow. How strangely that altered his conception of her.
Till this moment she had stood in his mind as the imperious, invincible
Marcia of old. There was a strange pathos in this revelation. He went
back and felt for her hand. 'I'll lead you down,' he said. And he did
so.
They looked out upon the sea, and the lightship shining as if it had
quite forgotten all about the fugitives. 'I am so uneasy,' said
Marcia. 'Do you think they got safely to land?'
'Yes,' replied some one other than Jocelyn. It was a boatman smoking
in the shadow of the boathouse. He informed her that they were picked
up by the lightship men, and afterwards, at their request, taken across
to the opposite shore, where they landed, proceeding thence on foot to
the nearest railway station and entering the train for London. This
intelligence had reached the island about an hour before.
'They'll be married to-morrow morning!' said Marcia.
'So much the better. Don't regret it, Marcia. He shall not lose by
it. I have no relation in the world except some twentieth cousins in
the isle, of whom her father was one, and I'll take steps at once to
make her a good match for him. As for me. . . I have lived a day too
long.'
