CHAPTER XXIV
Misgivings on this Unexpected Re-embodiment

Jocelyn and the second Avice continued to gaze ardently at her.

“Ah! she is not coming in now; she hasn’t time,” said the mother, with some disappointment. “She means to run across in the evening.”

The girl, in fact, went past and on till she was out of sight. Pearston stood as in a dream. It was the very girl, in all essential particulars, and without the absence of a single charm, who had kissed him forty years before. When he turned his head from the window his eyes fell again upon the old 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.

Pearston, who had been about to leave, sat down again on being timidly asked if he would stay and have a cup of tea. He hardly knew what he did for a moment; a dim thought that Avice – the renewed Avice – might come into the house after all made his reseating himself an act of spontaneity.

How he contrived to attenuate and disperse the subject he had opened up with the new Avice’s mother, Pearston never exactly knew. Perhaps she saw more than he thought she saw – read something in his face – knew that about his nature which he gave her no credit for knowing. Anyhow, the conversation took the form of a friendly gossip from that minute, his remarks being often given while his mind was turned elsewhere.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a chill passed through Jocelyn when there had been time for reflection. The sedulous study of his art without any counterbalancing practical pursuit had nourished and developed his natural responsiveness to impressions; he now felt that his old trouble, his doom – his curse, indeed, he had sometimes called it – was come back again. Aphrodite¹ was not yet propitiated for that original sin against her image in the person of Avice the First, and now, at the age of nine-and-fifty, he was urged on and on like the Jew Ahasuerus² – or, in the phrase of the islanders themselves, like a blind ram.

The Goddess, an abstraction to the general,³ was a very real personage indeed to Pearston. He had watched the marble image of her which stood in his working-room under all changes of light and shade – in the brightening of morning, in the blackening of eve, in moonlight, in lamplight; every line and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he; and, though not quite a belief, it was a fancy, a superstition, that the three Avices were somehow interpenetrated with her essence.

“And the next Avice – your daughter,” he said stumblingly; “she is, you say, a governess at the castle opposite.”

Mrs. Pearston reaffirmed the fact, adding that the girl often slept at home because she (the speaker) was so lonely. She often thought she would like to keep her daughter at home altogether.

“She plays that instrument, I suppose?” said Pearston, regarding the piano.

“Yes, she plays beautifully; she had the best instruction that masters could give her. She was educated at Sandbourne.”

“Which room does she sleep in when at home?” he asked curiously.

“The little one over this.”

It had been his own. “Strange,” he murmured.

He finished tea, and sat after tea, but the youthful Avice did not arrive. With the Avice present he conversed as the old friend – no more. At last it grew dusk, and Pearston could not possibly find an excuse for staying longer.

“I hope to make the acquaintance – of your daughter,” he said in leaving, knowing that he might have said with equal truth, “of my new tenderly beloved.”

“I hope you will,” she said simply. “This evening she evidently has gone for a walk instead of coming here.”

He went out of the house, but felt in no mood just then to get back to his lodgings, in the town on the mainland. He lingered about upon the undulating ground for a long while, thinking of the extraordinary reproduction of the original girl in this new form he had seen, and of himself as of a foolish dreamer in being so suddenly fascinated by the renewed image in a personality not one-third his age. As a physical fact, no doubt, the preservation of the likeness was no uncommon thing here, but it helped the dream.

Passing round the walls of the new castle, he deviated from his homeward track by turning down the familiar little lane which led to the ruined castle of the Red King. It took him past the cottage in which the new Avice was born, from whose precincts he had heard her first infantine cry. Pausing, he saw in the west behind him the new moon growing distinct upon the glow.

He was subject to gigantic superstitions. In spite of himself, the sight of the new moon, his chosen tutelary goddess, as representing, by her so-called inconstancy,⁴ his own idea of a migratory Well-Beloved, made him start as if his sweetheart in the flesh had suddenly looked over the horizon at him. In a crowd secretly, or in solitude boldly, he ever bowed the knee three times to this divinity on her first appearance monthly, and directed a soft kiss towards her shining shape. He feared Aphrodite, but Selene he cherished.⁵ All this did he, a man of fifty-nine! Truly the curse (if it were not a blessing) was far from having spent itself yet.

In the other direction the castle ruins rose against the sea. He went on towards these, around which he had played as a boy, and stood by the walls at the edge of the cliff pondering. There was no wind and but little tide, and he thought he could hear from years ago a voice that he knew. It certainly was a voice, but it came from the rocks beneath the castle ruin.

“Mrs. Atway!”

A silence followed, and nobody came. The voice spoke again; “John Bencomb!”

Neither was this summons attended to. The cry continued, with more entreaty: “William Scribben!”

The voice was that of a Pearston – there could be no doubt of it – Avice’s, probably. Something or other seemed to be detaining her down there, against her will. A sloping path beneath the beetling cliff and the castle walls rising sheer from its summit led down to the lower level whence the voice proceeded. Pearston followed the pathway, and soon beheld a girl in light clothing – the same he had seen through the window – standing upon one of the rocks, apparently unable to move. Pearston hastened across to her.

“O, thank you for coming!” she murmured with some timidity. “I have met with an awkward mishap. I live near here, and am not frightened really. My foot has become jammed in a crevice of the rock, and I cannot get it out, try how I will. What shall I do!”

Pearston stooped and examined the cause of discomfiture. “I think if you can take your boot off,” he said, “your foot might slip out, leaving the boot behind.”

She tried to act upon this advice, but could not do so effectually. Pearston then experimented by slipping his hand into the crevice till he could just reach the buttons of her boot, which, however, he could not unfasten any more than she. Taking his penknife from his pocket, he tried again, and cut off the buttons one by one. The boot unfastened, and out slipped the foot.

“O, how glad I am!” she cried joyfully. “I was fearing I should have to stay here all night. How can I thank you enough?”

Pearston was tugging to withdraw the boot, but no force that he could exercise would move it. At last she said: “Don’t try any longer. It is not far to the house. I can walk in my stocking.”

“I’ll assist you in,” he said gallantly.

She said she did not want help, nevertheless allowed him to help her on the unshod side. As they moved on she explained that she had come out through the garden door, had been standing on the boulders to look at something out at sea just discernible in the evening light as assisted by the moon, and, in jumping down, had wedged her foot as he had found it.

Whatever Pearston’s years might have made him look by day, in the dusk of evening he was fairly presentable as a pleasing man of no marked antiquity, his outline differing but little from what it had been when he was half his years. He was well preserved, still upright, trimly shaven, agile in movement; wore a tightly buttoned suit which set off a naturally slight figure; in brief, he might have been of any age as he appeared to her at this moment. She talked to him with the co-equality of one who assumed him to be not far ahead of her own generation; and, as the growing darkness obscured him more and more, he adopted her assumption of his age with increasing boldness of tone.

The flippant, harmless freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avice had plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helped Pearston considerably in this rôle of jeune premier,⁶ which he was only too ready to play at any time. Not a word did he say about being a native of the island; still more carefully did he conceal the fact of his having courted her grandmother, and engaged himself to marry that attractive lady.

He found that she had come out upon the rocks through the same little private door from the lawn of the modern castle which had frequently afforded him egress to the same spot in years long past. Pearston accompanied her across the grounds almost to the entrance of the mansion – the place being now far better kept and planted than when he had rented it as a lonely tenant; almost, indeed, restored to the order and neatness which had characterised it when he was a boy.

She was too inexperienced to be reserved, and during this little climb, leaning upon his arm, there was time for a great deal of confidence. When he had bidden her farewell, and she had entered, leaving him in the dark, a rush of sadness through Pearston’s soul swept down all the temporary pleasure he had found in the charming girl’s company. Had Mephistopheles sprung from the ground there and then with an offer to Jocelyn of restoration to youth on the usual terms of his firm,⁷ the sculptor certainly might have consented to sell that part of himself of which he felt less immediate need than of a ruddy lip and cheek and an unmarked brow.

But what could only have been treated as a folly by outsiders was almost a sorrow for him. Why was he born with such a temperament? And this concatenated interest could hardly have arisen, even with Pearston, but for a conflux of circumstances only possible here. The three Avices, the second much like the first, the third actually a double of the first, were the outcome of the immemorial island customs of intermarriage and of prenuptial union, under which conditions the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through generations; so that, till quite latterly, to have seen one native man and woman was to have seen the whole population of that isolated rock, so nearly cut off from the mainland. His own predisposition and the consciousness of his early faithlessness did all the rest.

He turned gloomily away, and let himself out of the precincts. Before walking along the couple of miles of road which would conduct him to the little station at Slopeway Well, he redescended to the rocks whereon he had found her, and searched about for the fissure which had made a prisoner of this belated edition of the Well-Beloved. Kneeling down beside the spot, he inserted his hand, and ultimately, by much wriggling, withdrew the little boot. He examined it thoughtfully – by touch rather than by sight – put it in his pocket, and followed the stony route to Slopeway Well.