CHAPTER XXVIII
He Possesses it: He Possesses it Not

Pearston did not see Avice again till dinner-time. Then, as he observed her nervously presiding over their limited table, he was tempted to say, “Why are you troubled, my little dearest?” in tones which disclosed that he was as troubled as she.

“Am I troubled?” she said, with a start, turning her gentle hazel eyes upon him. “Yes, I suppose I am. It is because I have received a letter – from an old friend – a person who used to be friendly.”

“You didn’t show it to me.”

“No – I tore it up.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t care to have it – I didn’t like it, so I destroyed it.”

Pearston did not press her further on the subject, and she showed no disposition to continue it. Avice retired rather early that evening, and her husband went along the passage to the studio, ostensibly to consider further how the fittings should be arranged. There he remained pacing up and down a long while, musing deeply on many things, not the least being the perception that to wed a woman is by no means the same as to be united with her. His wife’s corporeal frame was upstairs: where her spiritual part lurked he could not tell.

At eleven o’clock he ascended also, and softly opened the chamber door. Within he paused a moment. Avice was asleep, and his intent ear caught a sound of a little gasping sigh every now and then between her breathings. When he moved forward his light awoke her; she started up as if from a troublous dream, and regarded him with something in her open eye and large pupils that was not unlike dread. It was so unmistakable that Pearston felt half paralysed, coming, as it did, after thoughts not too assuring; and, placing his candle on the table, he sat down on the couch at the foot of the bed. All of a sudden he felt that he had no moral right to go further.¹ He had no business there.

He stayed and stayed, sitting there in his dressing-gown till the candle had burnt low; she became conscious of his silence, and said, “You rather startled me when you came in.”

“I am sorry,” said Pearston, “you looked as if you didn’t like my coming.”

“Did I? I didn’t know that.”

“Avice, I am going to tell you something, if you are not too sleepy.”

“O, no, I am not sleepy.”

“I was once your mother’s lover, and wanted to marry her – only she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, marry me.”

“How very strange!” said Avice, now thoroughly awake. “Mother has never told me that. Yet, of course you might have been – you are quite old enough.”

“O, yes, quite old enough!” he said grimly. “Almost too old.”

“Too old for poor mother?” she said musingly. “How’s that?”

“Because I rightly 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, Jocelyn? 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 husband, or even a friend; but as at a strange fossilised relic in human form. Pearston saw this; but he did not mean to spare himself. In a sudden access of remorse he was determined to pursue this to the bitter end – carried on by a wave of revolt against the curse of never being allowed to grow old.

“Your mother’s and your grandmother’s lover,” he repeated.

“And were you my great-grandmother’s too?” she asked, with an expectant interest that had overcome her personal feeling as his wife.

“No; not your great-grandmother’s.” He winced at that question, unreflectingly as it had been put, perceiving that his information, superadded to her previous sentiments, had already operated damagingly. He went on, however, to repeat with a dogged calm: “But I am very old.”

“I did not know it was so much!” she said, in an appalled murmur. “You do not look so, and I thought that what you looked you were.”

“No; I am very old,” he unnecessarily reiterated. “And you – you are very young.”

A silence followed, his candle burnt still lower; he was waiting for her to sleep, but she did not. Amid so much difference in their accidents there was much resemblance in their essentials; he was as sympathetically nervous as she, and the mere air itself seemed to bring him the knowledge that she lay in a state of tension which was indescribably more distressing than pain.

He knew that his cause was lost with her by his exaggerating their contrasts. The verge of division, on which they long had trembled, she had at last crossed. Pearston noiselessly arose, took up his candle, and went out of the room. He had an impression that he might never again enter that chamber.

He lay down in an adjoining room, and instead of sleeping tried again to conjecture what had disturbed Avice, and, through her, himself, so much as to drive him to court disaster. There seemed to be something uncanny about London in its effect upon his marriage. He began to hate the grimy city and his new house and his new studio, and to wish he had not re-established himself so elaborately there. The momentary defiance of his matrimonial fate which had led him to speak as he had done in his wife’s room now passed away, and he hoped again.

To take her back to his and her own native spot for a few weeks seemed the most promising course for shaking off this nightmare which sat upon them here. Her mother’s persuasive powers might reconcile Avice to her new position when nothing else would, notwithstanding the unfortunate indiscretion of which in his despair he had been guilty, that of revealing his past attachments. A good practical reason for their return thither existed in the incomplete condition of their house-furnishing here, and in the still unmending state of his mother-in-law. Dell-i’-th’-rock Castle was now, unfortunately, occupied by a permanent tenant, but there were some lodgings near which he thought he might easily obtain.

When he encountered Avice the next morning there was a trace of surprise in her face, but the distant, apprehensive look had not altogether departed. Yet he would have sacrificed everything – his artistic reputation itself – to give her pleasure. He feared that the conversation of the previous night had established her to regard him as a fearful curiosity; but regrets were too late now. He disclosed his proposition to run down to their old place.

“When?” she asked.

“Soon. Say to-day. I don’t like being here among these packing-cases, and the quicker we get away the better.”

“I shall be glad to go,” she said. “Perhaps mother is not so well, and I should like to be near her.”

Whatever had upset her, then, it had nothing to do with locality. Pearston thereupon gave sufficient directions for the further garnishing of his town house, and in the afternoon they set out for the south-west by the familiar railway. Pearston stopped at Budmouth for that night, sending on his wife to her mother’s home in the isle, where he promised to join her the next day.

(To be continued.)

It was the first time they had slept under different roofs since their marriage; and when she was gone, and the charm of her personality was idealised by lack of the substance, he felt himself far less able to bear the thought of an estrangement than when her corporeal presence afforded trifling marks for criticism. And yet, concurrently, the conviction grew that, whatever the rights with which the civil law had empowered him, by no law of nature, of reason, had he any right to partnership with Avice against her evident will.

The next day he set out for the island, longing, yet dreading, to see her again. No sooner had he reached the top of the hill and passed the forking of the ways than he discerned in the distance, on the way he had not taken, a form which was unmistakably that of his wife, apparently out on some trifling errand. To go back, take the other road, and join her lest she should miss him, was the obvious thing to do; yet he stood like one enervated, will-bereft, and ashamed. As he stood a man came up, and, noticing his fixity, regarded him with attention.

“A tidy little figure-of-fun that, Sir,” said the man.

“Yes. A dainty little creature, like a fairy…. Now, would you assert, my friend, that a man has a right to force himself into her presence at all times and seasons, to sit down at her table, to take her hither and thither – all against her liking?”

“No, sure.”

“I thought so. And yet a man does it; for he has married her.”

“Oh! She’s his wife! That’s a hoss of another colour. Ha, ha, ha!”

“I don’t think it is,” said Pearston.

The pedestrian disappeared, and Pearston, still glancing across the quarries at the diverging road, saw that Avice had perceived him, and was standing still, expecting his approach. He climbed over the low side-wall and traversed the open ground to her side. Her young face showed anxiety, and he knew that something had happened.

“I have been looking for you,” she said. “I didn’t exactly know the time you were coming, or I should have sent somebody to meet the train. Mother has suddenly got so much worse: it seems almost as though my coming had caused it, but it cannot be that, of course, because she is so glad. I am afraid – I am so much afraid she may not live! The change in her has quite shocked me. You would hardly know her. And she has kept it from us that she was not so well, because she would not disturb our happiness. Happiness!”

The last word might have been construed in its relation to her mother or to herself. Pearston was in a mood to suffer anything now, and he did not mind which way she had intended it. They hastened onward together – that is, side by side – with a lineal yard between them, for she was never too ready to take his arm; and soon reached the house at East Wake.

Mrs. Pearston the elder was evidently sinking. The hand she gave him, which had formerly been as thin as a leaf, was now but a cobweb. She was mentally quite at ease, and murmured to him that it was her great comfort and thankfulness to feel that her child was well provided for in the possession of such a good and kind husband.

Avice, her daughter, could not leave the house at night in such circumstances, and, no room being ready for the reception of them as a couple, Pearston left his wife by her mother’s side and went out to a lodging near at hand; accident thus making easy of continuance the constraint in their relations which had begun in London.