CHAPTER XXXII
The Pursuit Abandoned

His return was delayed till eighteen or twenty days had passed, and on his way back over the isle to Avice’s house he drew up at Leverre’s lodgings as he had done on his departing journey. The young man was in the parlour reading. He appeared bright, and advanced in convalescence. After Pearston’s preliminary inquiries the young man with almost childish ingenuousness of motive said, “Have you heard, Sir, of”—

“I have still further evidence that Avice will soon be free.”

“A formal decree of nullity will be necessary to complete her freedom?”

“No, no. I think not – in this particular case. I don’t go back to her home to live any more. I stay in these lodgings for a day or two, and will have my things sent here. Your landlady has probably told you that I wrote to her, and that she has let to me the parlour opposite to this for the few days I shall be here in the isle before starting for good.”

“You have had more specific information, Sir?”

“I have almost indubitable proof that – Avice will be free before long. I shall rejoin my wife as soon as I reach my journey’s end. I know, beyond any moral doubt, where she is.”

“You do, Sir! Where?”

“I won’t say, for certain reasons. But I am going there.”

“Salt Lake City?”

“No – not Salt Lake City.… You know, Henri,” he continued after a pause, and his lower lip quivered as he spoke, “if Avice had loved me, as I foolishly thought she might get to do, I should have – turned up no old stones to hide under. But she loved you, I found; and to me healthy natural instinct is true law, and not an Act of Parliament. So I sheer off.”

Leverre looked anxious for clearer explanations, but he did not question further. Pearston – whose worn and dried-up face now fully indexed his age, and indeed more than his age, continued calmly –

“Henri – as I may call you – I wish, as you will believe, above all things that Avice may be happy in spite of this unfortunate marriage with me. She is the outcome of my own emotional life, as I may say. There is no doubt that it is within her power to be so. In addition to her own little competency, a large sum of money – a fortune, in short – has been settled upon her within the last few days, and upon any possible children of hers. With that, and her beauty, she’ll soon be snapped up by some worthy man who pities her abnormal position.”

“Sir, I love her – I love her dearly. Has she said anything to lead you to think her husband will be other than myself?”

“It depends upon you.”

“She will not desert me?”

“If she has promised not to. Haven’t you asked her?”

“Not as yet. She would not have listened if I had. She is nominally your wife as yet: and it seems premature – too venturesome, daring, to hope, to think, that this idea you have suggested to us will be borne out by fact. I have never known anything like it – can hardly believe it!”

“You will see,” said the now aged man. “Are you afraid to give an undertaking on the contingency? If she becomes free, you will be her husband if she consents?”

“I have said so,” he replied fervently.

“You may set about your preparations at once,” said Pearston, with forced gaiety. “I go to join my truant wife of thirty years ago.”

“O that you may find her!”

“That’s right. Express your feelings honestly. I like young men who do so.”

That night Pearston sat down and wrote a long letter to the only old friend he had in the world, among so many acquaintances – Alfred Somers, the landscape-painter –

“My dear Somers –

“You in your evenly flowing life will be surprised to hear of what has been taking place in my rugged one – inwardly rugged, I mean, which is the true ruggedness.”

He thereupon proceeded to give a succinct account of what had happened since his marriage with Avice, of which event Somers was aware, having, in fact, been invited to the ceremony, though he had not found it possible to come. First, the coldness of his young wife, which he had supposed it to be a mere question of time to displace; his lack of any suspicion that in such a remote and quiet existence she had learnt the trick of having a lover before she was eighteen years old; his discovery of his mistake through the return of the young man to claim her, and the whole incidents which followed.

“Now,” proceeded Pearston, “some husbands, I suppose, would have sent the young man about his business and put the young woman under lock-and-key till she came to her senses. This was what I could not do. At first I felt it to be a state of things for which there was no remedy. But I considered that to allow everything to remain in statu quo was inanimate, unhuman conduct, worthy only of a vegetable. It was not only being indifferent to my own poor scrap of future happiness, which mattered little, but to hers. And I soon entered with interest, and even with zest, into an apparently, though not really, wild scheme, which has recommended itself to me. This is no less than assuming the existence of my wife Marcia, of whose death, as you know, there has never been absolute proof, unless you consider that not having heard her voice for more than thirty years to be absolute proof of the death of a termagant spouse. Cases of this kind, if you analyse them, turn on very curious points. My marriage with Avice is valid if I have a reasonable belief in my first wife’s death. Now, what man’s belief is fixed, and who shall enter into my mind and say what my belief is at any particular time? The moment I have a reasonable belief that Marcia lives Avice is not my wife, it seems to me. I have only therefore to assume that belief and disappear, and she is free. That is what I have decided to do.

“Don’t attack me for casuistry,¹ artifice, for contumelious treatment of the laws of my country. A law which, in a particular instance, results in physical cruelty to the innocent deserves to be evaded in that instance if it can be done without injury to anyone. I want the last of the three women, the last embodiment of Avice, to be happy at any cost, and this is the only way of making her so, that I can see. The only detail in my plan that I feel sorry for having been compelled to adopt is the sending of bogus telegrams and advertisements, to prevent my darling’s suspicion of unreality. Poor child! but it is for her good.

“During the last three weeks I have been arranging my affairs, and shall now disappear for ever from England. My life probably will not be long anywhere, it cannot be very long in the nature of things, and it matters very little where I say my Nunc Dimittis.

“I shall probably find some kind and simple old nurse body or housekeeper on the other side of the Atlantic, whom I can ask to share my home, and call her Marcia, so as to make it all seem right if any intelligence of my state of existence should be wafted across to this side. To clinch the pious fraud I may think it worth while to send the child Avice a cabinet photograph of this old soul and myself in one picture, in which I appear standing behind her chair with my hand on her shoulder, in the orthodox fashion of the irrevocably united.

“Destroy this document, for Avice’s sake.

“My sincere regard and affection to you and all your household.

“J. P.”

This was duly posted by himself that evening in the little letter-box in the village square.

He went home to bed. Everything was done, even to the packing of his portmanteau. Nothing remained for him but to depart – to an exile on one of the four quarters of the globe, telegraph that he had found the lost one, and be heard of in this isle no more.

But as he lay he asked himself, did he care for the additional score of years which might, at the outside, be yet owing to him from Nature on such conditions as these? The tœdium vitœ – formerly such a stranger to him, latterly grown familiar – seemed to intensify to violent disgust. Such an ending to his little drama as he had ostensibly sketched on Avice’s behalf – was there not too distinct an attempt in it to save his useless self as well as to save her?

His heaviness endured far into the night, and there was no sign of “joy coming in the morning.”² At two o’clock he arose and dressed himself. Then, sitting down, he penned a second letter to the same friend.

“My dear Somers –

“When I posted to you the letter I wrote a few hours ago, I assumed that I had the spirit and strength and desire to carry through an ingenious device for human happiness, which I would have entered on with the lightest of hearts forty years ago, or even twenty. But my assumption turns out to be, after all, erroneous. I am no longer spirited: I am weak. My youth, so faithful to me, so enduring, so long regarded as my curse, has incontinently departed within the last few weeks. I do not care for my scheme, which, in my distaste for it, now appears as foolishly artificial as before it seemed simple and effective.

“I abandon it for a better and a grander one – one more worthy of my age, my outlook, and my opportunities. What that is you will know in a few hours.

“J. P.”

It was now half-past two. Pearston’s next action was to search his pocket and open his card-case; but finding no card therein he wrote his name and address on the first piece of paper that came to hand, and put it in the case. Next, taking out his purse, he emptied some portion of its contents into another piece of paper, which he folded round the money, and placed on the table, directing it to his landlady, with the words, “For rent and small bills.” The remainder he rolled up in yet another piece of paper, and directed that to a local charitable institution.

He referred to an almanac, examining the tide-table. From this he gathered that the tide was now at about the half-flow, and it suited him fairly well.

Then he went out of the room, listening at his neighbour’s door as he passed. The young man was sleeping peacefully. Pearston descended the stairs and went out, closing the door softly behind him.

The night was not so dark as he had expected it to be, and the unresting and troubled being went along the road without hesitation till he reached a well-known lonely house on the right hand beyond the new castle – the farthest that way. This house contained the form which was the last, most permanent, and sweetest incarnation of the Well-Beloved.

There was no light or sound to be recognised. Pearston paused before the railing with his head bent upon his hand. Time was having his turn of revenge now. Of all the shapes into which the Beloved one had entered she had chosen to remain in this, whose owner was utterly averse to him.

The place and these thoughts quickened his determination; he paused no longer, but turned back by the way he had come, till he reached the point near the north gate of the new castle, where the lane to the ruin of the old castle branched off. This he followed as it wound down the narrow defile spanned by the castle arch, a portion of which defile was, doubtless, the original fosse of the fortress.

The sound of his own footsteps flapped back to him from the vertical faces of the rock. A little farther and he emerged upon the open summit of the lower cliffs, to his right being the sloping pathway leading down to the little creek at their base.

Pearston descended, knowing the place so well that he found it scarcely necessary to guide himself down by touching the vertical face of stone on his right hand. Thus proceeding he arrived at the bottom, and trod the few yards of shingle which here alone could be found on this side of the island. Upon this confined beach there were drawn up two or three fishing-boats and a few skiffs, beside them being a rough slipway for launching. One of the latter he pushed down the slope, floated it, and jumped into it without an oar.

The currents hereabout were strong and complicated. At a specific moment in every flood tide there set in along the shore a reflux contrary to the outer flow, called “the Southern” by the local sailors. It was produced by the peculiar curves of the coast lying east and west of the Beal: these bent southward in two back streams the up-Channel flow on each side of the isle, which two streams united outside the Beal and there met the direct tidal flow, the confluence of the three currents making the surface of the sea at this point to boil like a pot, even in calmest weather. It is called the Race.

Although the outer tide, therefore, was running towards the mainland, the “Southern” ran in full force towards the Beal and the Race beyond. Pearston’s boat was caught by it in a few moments, as he had known it would be; and thereupon the grey rocks rising near him, and the grim stone forehead of the isle above, just discernible against the sky, slid away from Pearston northwards.

He lay down in the bottom of the frail craft, gazing at the sky above. The undulations increased in magnitude, and swung him higher and lower. The boat rocked, received a smart slap of the waves now and then, gyrated; so that the lightship, which stolidly winked at him from the quicksand – the single object which told him his bearings – was sometimes on his right hand and sometimes on his left. Nevertheless, he could always discern from it that his course, whether stemwards or sternwards, was steadily south, towards the Race.

The waves seemed to toss him roughly about, though there was really but little lop on the sea. Presently he heard, or fancied he heard, a new murmur from the distance, above the babble of waters immediately about his cockleshell. It was the nearing voice of the Race. “Thank God, I am near my journey’s end,”³ he said.

Yet he was not quite sure about its being the Race. But it did not matter: the Race was sure to come, sooner or later: everything tended thither. He now began to close his eyes. The boat soon shipped larger and larger volumes of spray, and often a pailful came flat upon his face. But he did not mind.

How long this state of jeopardy lasted Pearston hardly knew. It was ended by a sudden crash, which threw him against some hard body, striking his head. He was fully prepared for a liquid death, but a death by concussion was so entirely unanticipated that the shock made him cry out in a fierce resentment at the interruption to his design.

A bright light thereupon shone over him, and some voices shouted out in the island dialect. He knew that the speakers were the lightship men, and felt warm blood running down his head where it had been struck. Then he found himself in the water grasping something; then he was seized in turn, and hauled up. Then he saw faces, and bird-cages, and rabbit-hutches, on a deck – a sort of floating menagerie; and then he remembered no more.