The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament

‘Where did that come from?’

‘We found it there, sir.’

‘Ah yes – I gave it to him. ‘Tis like me to play another’s game!’

It was the last spurt of bitterness that Jocelyn let escape him. He went on towards Mrs. Pierston’s room, preceded by the servant.

‘Mr. Pierston has come, ma’am,’ he heard her say to the invalid. But as the latter took no notice the woman rushed forward to the bed. ‘What has happened to her, Mr. Pierston? O what do it mean?’

Avice the Second was lying placidly in the position in which the nurse had left her; but no breath came from her lips, and a rigidity of feature was accompanied by the precise expression which had characterized her face when Pierston had her as a girl in his studio. He saw that it was death, though she appeared to have breathed her last only a few moments before.

Ruth Stockwool’s composure deserted her. ‘’Tis the shock of finding Miss Avice gone that has done it!’ she cried. ‘She has killed her mother!’

‘Don’t say such a terrible thing!’ exclaimed Jocelyn.

‘But she ought to have obeyed her mother – a good mother as she was! How she had set her heart upon the wedding, poor soul; and we couldn’t help her knowing what had happened! O how ungrateful young folk be! That girl will rue this morning’s work!’

‘We must get the doctor,’ said Pierston, mechanically, hastening from the room.

When the local practitioner came he merely confirmed their own verdict, and thought her death had undoubtedly been hastened by the shock of the ill news upon a feeble heart, following a long strain of anxiety about the wedding. He did not consider that an inquest would be necessary.

* * *

The two shadowy figures seen through the grey gauzes of the morning by Ruth, five hours before this time, had gone on to the open place by the north entrance of Sylvania Castle, where the lane to the ruins of the old castle branched off. A listener would not have gathered that a single word passed between them. The man walked with difficulty, supported by the woman. At this spot they stopped and kissed each other a long while.

‘We ought to walk all the way to Budmouth, if we wish not to be discovered,’ he said sadly. ‘And I can’t even get across the island, even by your help, darling. It is two miles to the foot of the hill.’

She, who was trembling, tried to speak consolingly:

‘If you could walk we should have to go down the Street of Wells, where perhaps somebody would know me? Now if we get below here to the Cove, can’t we push off one of the little boats I saw there last night, and paddle along close to the shore till we get to the north side? Then we can walk across to the station very well. It is quite calm, and as the tide sets in that direction, it will take us along of itself, without much rowing. I’ve often got round in a boat that way.’

This seemed to be the only plan that offered, and abandoning the straight road they wound down the defile spanned further on by the old castle arch, and forming the original fosse of the fortress.

The stroke of their own footsteps, lightly as these fell, was flapped back to them with impertinent gratuitousness by the vertical faces of the rock, so still was everything around. A little further, and they emerged upon the open ledge of the lower tier of cliffs, to the right being the sloping pathway leading down to the secluded creek at their base – the single practicable spot of exit from or entrance to the isle on this side by a seagoing craft; once an active wharf, whence many a fine public building had sailed – including Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

The timorous shadowy shapes descended the footway, one at least of them knowing the place so well that she found it scarcely necessary to guide herself down by touching the natural wall of stone on her right hand, as her companion did. Thus, with quick suspensive breathings they arrived at the bottom, and trod the few yards of shingle which, on the forbidding shore hereabout, could be found at this spot alone. It was so solitary as to be unvisited often for four-and-twenty hours by a living soul. Upon the confined beach were drawn up two or three fishing-lerrets, and a couple of smaller ones, beside them being a rough slipway for launching, and a boathouse of tarred boards. The two lovers united their strength to push the smallest of the boats down the slope, and floating it they scrambled in.

The girl broke the silence by asking, ‘Where are the oars?’

He felt about the boat, but could find none. ‘I forgot to look for the oars!’ he said.

‘They are locked in the boathouse, I suppose. Now we can only steer and trust to the current!’

The currents here were of a complicated kind. It was true, as the girl had said, that the tide ran round to the north, but at a special moment in every flood there set in along the shore a narrow reflux contrary to the general outer flow, called ‘The Southern’ by the local sailors. It was produced by the peculiar curves of coast lying east and west of the Beal; these bent southward in two back streams the up-Channel flow on each side of the peninsula, 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. The disturbed area, as is well known, is called the Race.

Thus although the outer sea was now running northward to the roadstead and the mainland of Wessex ‘The Southern’ ran in full force towards the Beal and the Race beyond. It caught the lovers’ hapless boat in a few moments, and, unable to row across it – mere river’s width that it was – they beheld the grey rocks near them, and the grim wrinkled forehead of the isle above, sliding away northwards.

They gazed helplessly at each other, though, in the long-living faith of youth, without distinct fear. The undulations increased in magnitude, and swung them higher and lower. The boat rocked, received a smart slap of the waves now and then, and wheeled round, so that the lightship which stolidly winked at them from the quicksand, the single object which told them of their bearings, was sometimes on their right hand and sometimes on their left. Nevertheless they could always discern from it that their course, whether stemwards or sternwards, was steadily south.

A bright idea occurred to the young man. He pulled out his handkerchief and, striking a light, set it on fire. She gave him hers, and he made that flare up also. The only available fuel left was the small umbrella the girl had brought; this was also kindled in an opened state, and he held it up by the stem till it was consumed.

The lightship had loomed quite large by this time, and a few minutes after they had burnt the handkerchiefs and umbrella a coloured flame replied to them from the vessel. They flung their arms round each other.

‘I knew we shouldn’t be drowned!’ said Avice hysterically.

‘I thought we shouldn’t too,’ said he.

With the appearance of day a boat put off to their assistance, and they were towed towards the heavy red hulk with the large white letters on its side.

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.’

VIII. ‘ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!’

In the month of November which followed Pierston was lying dangerously ill of a fever at his house in London.

The funeral of the second Avice had happened to be on one of those drenching afternoons of the autumn, when the raw rain flies level as the missiles of the ancient inhabitants across the beaked promontory which has formed the scene of this narrative, scarcely alighting except against the upright sides of things sturdy enough to stand erect. One person only followed the corpse into the church as chief mourner, Jocelyn Pierston – fickle lover in the brief, faithful friend in the long run. No means had been found of communicating with Avice before the interment, though the death had been advertised in the local and other papers in the hope that it might catch her eye.

So, when the pathetic procession came out of the church and moved round into the graveyard, a hired vehicle from Budmouth was seen coming at great speed along the open road from Top-o’-Hill. It stopped at the churchyard gate, and a young man and woman alighted and entered, the vehicle waiting. They glided along the path and reached Pierston’s side just as the body was deposited by the grave.

He did not turn his head. He knew it was Avice, with Henri Leverre – by this time, he supposed, her husband. Her remorseful grief, though silent, seemed to impregnate the atmosphere with its heaviness. Perceiving that they had not expected him to be there Pierston edged back; and when the service was over he kept still further aloof, an act of considerateness which she seemed to appreciate.

Thus, by his own contrivance, neither Avice nor the young man held communication with Jocelyn by word or by sign. After the burial they returned as they had come.

It was supposed that his exposure that day in the bleakest churchyard in Wessex, telling upon a distracted mental and bodily condition, had thrown Pierston into the chill and fever which held him swaying for weeks between life and death shortly after his return to town. When he had passed the crisis, and began to know again that there was such a state as mental equilibrium and physical calm, he heard a whispered conversation going on around him, and the touch of footsteps on the carpet. The light in the chamber was so subdued that nothing around him could be seen with any distinctness. Two living figures were present, a nurse moving about softly, and a visitor. He discerned that the latter was feminine, and for the time this was all.

He was recalled to his surroundings by a voice murmuring the inquiry: ‘Does the light try your eyes?’

The tones seemed familiar: they were spoken by the woman who was visiting him. He recollected them to be Marcia’s, and everything that had happened before he fell ill came back to his mind.

‘Are you helping to nurse me, Marcia?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I have come up to stay here till you are better, as you seem to have no other woman friend who cares whether you are dead or alive. I am living quite near. I am glad you have got round the corner. We have been very anxious.’

‘How good you are!.. And – have you heard of the others?’

‘They are married. They have been here to see you, and are very sorry. She sat by you, but you did not know her. She was broken down when she discovered her mother’s death, which had never once occurred to her as being imminent. They have gone away again. I thought it best she should leave, now that you are out of danger. Now you must be quiet till I come and talk again.’

Pierston was conscious of a singular change in himself, which had been revealed by this slight discourse. He was no longer the same man that he had hitherto been. The malignant fever, or his experiences, or both, had taken away something from him, and put something else in its place.

During the next days, with further intellectual expansion, he became clearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itself only on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice’s good qualities alone had any effect on his mind; of her appearance none at all.

At first he was appalled; and then he said, ‘Thank God!’

Marcia, who, with something of her old absolutism, came to his house continually to inquire and give orders, and to his room to see him every afternoon, found out for herself in the course of his convalescence this strange death of the sensuous side of Jocelyn’s nature. She had said that Avice was getting extraordinarily handsome, and that she did not wonder her stepson lost his heart to her – an inadvertent remark which she immediately regretted, in fear lest it should agitate him. He merely answered, however, ‘Yes; I suppose she is handsome. She’s more – a wise girl who will make a good housewife in time… I wish you were not handsome, Marcia.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t quite know why. Well – it seems a stupid quality to me. I can’t understand what it is good for any more.’

‘O – I as a woman think there’s good in it.’

‘Is there? Then I have lost all conception of it. I don’t know what has happened to me. I only know I don’t regret it. Robinson Crusoe lost a day in his illness: I have lost a faculty, for which loss Heaven be praised!’

There was something pathetic in this announcement, and Marcia sighed as she said, ‘Perhaps when you get strong it will come back to you.’

Pierston shook his head. It then occurred to him that never since the reappearance of Marcia had he seen her in full daylight, or without a bonnet and thick veil, which she always retained on these frequent visits, and that he had been unconsciously regarding her as the Marcia of their early time, a fancy which the small change in her voice well sustained. The stately figure, the good colour, the classical profile, the rather large handsome nose and somewhat prominent, regular teeth, the full dark eye, formed still the Marcia of his imagination; the queenly creature who had infatuated him when the first Avice was despised and her successors unknown. It was this old idea which, in his revolt from beauty, had led to his regret at her assumed handsomeness. He began wondering now how much remained of that presentation after forty years.

‘Why don’t you ever let me see you, Marcia?’ he asked.

‘O, I don’t know. You mean without my bonnet? You have never asked me to, and I am obliged to wrap up my face with this wool veil because I suffer so from aches in these cold winter winds, though a thick veil is awkward for any one whose sight is not so good as it was.’

The impregnable Marcia’s sight not so good as it was, and her face in the aching stage of life: these simple things came as sermons to Jocelyn.

‘But certainly I will gratify your curiosity,’ she resumed good-naturedly. ‘It is really a compliment that you should still take that sort of interest in me.’

She had moved round from the dark side of the room to the lamp – for the daylight had gone – and she now suddenly took off the bonnet, veil and all. She stood revealed to his eyes as remarkably good-looking, considering the lapse of years.

‘I am – vexed!’ he said, turning his head aside impatiently. ‘You are fair and five-and-thirty – not a day more. You still suggest beauty. YOU won’t do as a chastisement, Marcia!’

‘Ah, but I may! To think that you know woman no better after all this time!’

‘How?’

‘To be so easily deceived. Think: it is lamplight; and your sight is weak at present; and… Well, I have no reason for being anything but candid now, God knows! So I will tell you… My husband was younger than myself; and he had an absurd wish to make people think he had married a young and fresh-looking woman. To fall in with his vanity I tried to look it. We were often in Paris, and I became as skilled in beautifying artifices as any passee wife of the Faubourg St. Germain. Since his death I have kept up the practice, partly because the vice is almost ineradicable, and partly because I found that it helped me with men in bringing up his boy on small means. At this moment I am frightfully made up. But I can cure that. I’ll come in to-morrow morning, if it is bright, just as I really am; you’ll find that Time has not disappointed you. Remember I am as old as yourself; and I look it.’

The morrow came, and with it Marcia, quite early, as she had promised. It happened to be sunny, and shutting the bedroom door she went round to the window, where she uncovered immediately, in his full view, and said, ‘See if I am satisfactory now – to you who think beauty vain. The rest of me – and it is a good deal – lies on my dressing-table at home. I shall never put it on again – never!’

But she was a woman; and her lips quivered, and there was a tear in her eye, as she exposed the ruthless treatment to which she had subjected herself. The cruel morning rays – as with Jocelyn under Avice’s scrutiny – showed in their full bareness, unenriched by addition, undisguised by the arts of colour and shade, the thin remains of what had once been Marcia’s majestic bloom. She stood the image and superscription of Age – an old woman, pale and shrivelled, her forehead ploughed, her cheek hollow, her hair white as snow. To this the face he once kissed had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, scourgings, bakings, freezings of forty invidious years – by the thinkings of more than half a lifetime.

‘I am sorry if I shock you,’ she went on huskily but firmly, as he did not speak. ‘But the moth frets the garment somewhat in such an interval.’

‘Yes – yes!.. Marcia, you are a brave woman. You have the courage of the great women of history. I can no longer love; but I admire you from my soul!’

‘Don’t say I am great. Say I have begun to be passably honest. It is more than enough.’

‘Well – I’ll say nothing then, more than how wonderful it is that a woman should have been able to put back the clock of Time thirty years!’

‘It shames me now, Jocelyn. I shall never do it any more!’

* * *

As soon as he was strong enough he got her to take him round to his studio in a carriage. The place had been kept aired, but the shutters were shut, and they opened them themselves. He looked round upon the familiar objects – some complete and matured, the main of them seedlings, grafts, and scions of beauty, waiting for a mind to grow to perfection in.

‘No – I don’t like them!’ he said, turning away. ‘They are as ugliness to me! I don’t feel a single touch of kin with or interest in any one of them whatever.’

‘Jocelyn – this is sad.’

‘No – not at all.’ He went again towards the door. ‘Now let me look round.’ He looked back, Marcia remaining silent. ‘The Aphrodites – how I insulted her fair form by those failures! – the Freyjas, the Nymphs and Fauns, Eves, Avices, and other innumerable Well-Beloveds – I want to see them never any more!.. “Instead of sweet smell there shall be stink, and there shall be burning instead of beauty,” said the prophet.’

And they came away. On another afternoon they went to the National Gallery, to test his taste in paintings, which had formerly been good. As she had expected, it was just the same with him there. He saw no more to move him, he declared, in the time-defying presentations of Perugino, Titian, Sebastiano, and other statuesque creators than in the work of the pavement artist they had passed on their way.

‘It is strange!’ said she.

‘I don’t regret it. That fever has killed a faculty which has, after all, brought me my greatest sorrows, if a few little pleasures. Let us be gone.’

He was now so well advanced in convalescence that it was deemed a most desirable thing to take him down into his native air. Marcia agreed to accompany him. ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t,’ said she. ‘An old friendless woman like me, and you an old friendless man.’

‘Yes. Thank Heaven I am old at last. The curse is removed.’

It may be shortly stated here that after his departure for the isle Pierston never again saw his studio or its contents. He had been down there but a brief while when, finding his sense of beauty in art and nature absolutely extinct, he directed his agent in town to disperse the whole collection; which was done. His lease of the building was sold, and in the course of time another sculptor won admiration there from those who knew not Joseph. The next year his name figured on the retired list of Academicians.

* * *

As time went on he grew as well as one of his age could expect to be after such a blasting illness, but remained on the isle, in the only house he now possessed, a comparatively small one at the top of the Street of Wells. A growing sense of friendship which it would be foolish to interrupt led him to take a somewhat similar house for Marcia quite near, and remove her furniture thither from Sandbourne. Whenever the afternoon was fine he would call for her and they would take a stroll together towards the Beal, or the ancient Castle, seldom going the whole way, his sciatica and her rheumatism effectually preventing them, except in the driest atmospheres. He had now changed his style of dress entirely, appearing always in a homely suit of local make, and of the fashion of thirty years before, the achievement of a tailoress at East Quarriers. He also let his iron-grey beard grow as it would, and what little hair he had left from the baldness which had followed the fever. And thus, numbering in years but two-and-sixty, he might have passed for seventy-five.