Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (673 page)

She found it was no use to disobey. Precisely at the moment appointed he met her there himself, burdened only with a valise and umbrella, she with a box and other things. Directing the porter to put Avice and her belongings into a four-wheeled cab for the railway-station, he walked onward from the door, and kept looking behind, till he saw the cab approaching. He then entered beside the astonished girl, and onward they went together.

They sat opposite each other in an empty compartment, and the tedious railway journey began. Regarding her closely now by the light of her revelation he wondered at himself for never divining her secret. Whenever he looked at her the girl’s eyes grew rebellious, and at last she wept.

‘I don’t want to go to him!’ she sobbed in a miserable voice.

Pierston was almost as much distressed as she. ‘Why did you put yourself and me in such a position?’ he said bitterly. ‘It is no use to regret it now! And I can’t say that I do. It affords me a way out of a trying position. Even if you had not been married to him you would not have married me!’

‘Yes, I would, sir.’

‘What! You would? You said you wouldn’t not long ago.’

‘I like you better now! I like you more and more!’

Pierston sighed, for emotionally he was not much older than she. That hitch in his development, rendering him the most lopsided of God’s creatures, was his standing misfortune. A proposal to her which crossed his mind was dismissed as disloyalty, particularly to an inexperienced fellow-islander and one who was by race and traditions almost a kinswoman.

Little more passed between the twain on that wretched, never-to-be-forgotten day. Aphrodite, Ashtaroth, Freyja, or whoever the love-queen of his isle might have been, was punishing him sharply, as she knew but too well how to punish her votaries when they reverted from the ephemeral to the stable mood. When was it to end — this curse of his heart not ageing while his frame moved naturally onward? Perhaps only with life.

His first act the day after depositing her in her own house was to go to the chapel where, by her statement, the marriage had been solemnized, and make sure of the fact. Perhaps he felt an illogical hope that she might be free, even then, in the tarnished condition which such freedom would have involved. However, there stood the words distinctly: Isaac Pierston, Ann Avice Caro, son and daughter of So-and-so, married on such a day, signed by the contracting parties, the officiating minister, and the two witnesses.

CHAPTER XIII.

SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

One evening in early winter, when the air was dry and gusty, the dark little lane which divided the grounds of Sylvania Castle from the cottage of Avice, and led down to the adjoining ruin of Red-King Castle, was paced by a solitary man. The cottage was the centre of his beat; its western limit being the gates of the former residence, its eastern the drawbridge of the ruin. The few other cottages thereabout — all as if carved from the solid rock — were in darkness, but from the upper window of Avice’s tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated from the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due position as balanced opposites.

The sea moaned — more than moaned — among the boulders below the ruins, a throe of its tide being timed to regular intervals. These sounds were accompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottage chamber; so that the articulate heave of water and the articulate heave of life seemed but differing utterances of the selfsame troubled terrestrial Being — which in one sense they were.

Pierston — for the man in the lane was he — would look from lightship to cottage window; then back again, as he waited there between the travail of the sea without, and the travail of the woman within. Soon an infant’s wail of the very feeblest was also audible in the house. He started from his easy pacing, and went again westward, standing at the elbow of the lane a long time. Then the peace of the sleeping village which lay that way was broken by light wheels and the trot of a horse. Pierston went back to the cottage gate and awaited the arrival of the vehicle.

It was a light cart, and a man jumped down as it stopped. He was in a broad-brimmed hat, under which no more of him could be perceived than that he wore a black beard clipped like a yew fence — a typical aspect in the island.

‘You are Avice’s husband?’ asked the sculptor quickly.

The man replied that he was, in the local accent. ‘I’ve just come in by to-day’s boat,’ he added. ‘I couldn’t git here avore. I had contracted for the job at Peter-Port, and had to see to’t to the end.’

‘Well,’ said Pierston, ‘your coming means that you are willing to make it up with her?’

‘Ay, I don’t know but I be,’ said the man. ‘Mid so well do that as anything else!’

‘If you do, thoroughly, a good business in your old line awaits you here in the island.’

‘Wi’ all my heart, then,’ said the man. His voice was energetic, and, though slightly touchy, it showed, on the whole, a disposition to set things right.

The driver of the trap was paid off, and Jocelyn and Isaac Pierston — undoubtedly scions of a common stock in this isle of intermarriages, though they had no proof of it — entered the house. Nobody was in the ground-floor room, in the centre of which stood a square table, in the centre of the table a little wool mat, and in the centre of the mat a lamp, the apartment having the appearance of being rigidly swept and set in order for an event of interest.

The woman who lived in the house with Avice now came downstairs, and to the inquiry of the comers she replied that matters were progressing favourably, but that nobody could be allowed to go upstairs just then. After placing chairs and viands for them she retreated, and they sat down, the lamp between them — the lover of the sufferer above, who had no right to her, and the man who had every right to her, but did not love her. Engaging in desultory and fragmentary conversation they listened to the trampling of feet on the floor-boards overhead — Pierston full of anxiety and attentiveness, Ike awaiting the course of nature calmly.

Soon they heard the feeble bleats repeated, and then the local practitioner descended and entered the room.

‘How is she now?’ said Pierston, the more taciturn Ike looking up with him for the answer that he felt would serve for two as well as for one.

‘Doing well, remarkably well,’ replied the professional gentleman, with a manner of having said it in other places; and his vehicle not being at the door he sat down and shared some refreshment with the others. When he had departed Mrs. Stockwool again stepped down, and informed them that Ike’s presence had been made known to his wife.

The truant quarrier seemed rather inclined to stay where he was and finish the mug of ale, but Pierston quickened him, and he ascended the staircase. As soon as the lower room was empty Pierston leant with his elbows on the table, and covered his face with his hands.

Ike was absent no great time. Descending with a proprietary mien that had been lacking before, he invited Jocelyn to ascend likewise, since she had stated that she would like to see him. Jocelyn went up the crooked old steps, the husband remaining below.

Avice, though white as the sheets, looked brighter and happier than he had expected to find her, and was apparently very much fortified by the pink little lump at her side. She held out her hand to him.

‘I just wanted to tell ‘ee,’ she said, striving against her feebleness, ‘I thought it would be no harm to see you, though ‘tis rather soon — to tell ‘ee how very much I thank you for getting me settled again with Ike. He is very glad to come home again, too, he says. Yes, you’ve done a good many kind things for me, sir.’

Whether she were really glad, or whether the words were expressed as a matter of duty, Pierston did not attempt to learn.

He merely said that he valued her thanks. ‘Now, Avice,’ he added tenderly, ‘I resign my guardianship of you. I hope to see your husband in a sound little business here in a very short time.’

‘I hope so — for baby’s sake,’ she said, with a bright sigh. ‘Would you — like to see her, sir?’

‘The baby? O yes — YOUR baby! You must christen her Avice.’

‘Yes — so I will!’ she murmured readily, and disclosed the infant with some timidity. ‘I hope you forgive me, sir, for concealing my thoughtless marriage!’

‘If you forgive me for making love to you.’

‘Yes. How were you to know! I wish — ’

Pierston bade her good-bye, kissing her hand; turned from her and the incipient being whom he was to meet again under very altered conditions, and left the bed-chamber with a tear in his eye.

‘Here endeth that dream!’ said he.

Hymen, in secret or overt guise, seemed to haunt Pierston just at this time with undignified mockery which savoured rather of Harlequin than of the torch-bearer. Two days after parting in a lone island from the girl he had so disinterestedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers, wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with a preoccupied face.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Somers, ‘what do you think! I was charged not to tell you, but, hang it! I may just as well make a clean breast of it now as later.’

‘What — you are not going to...’ began Pierston, with divination.

‘Yes. What I said on impulse six months back I am about to carry out in cold blood. Nichola and I began in jest and ended in earnest. We are going to take one another next month for good and all.’

PART THIRD — A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY

     ‘In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,

      That on the ashes of his youth doth lie

      As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

      Consumed with that which it was nourished by.’

                                    — W. SHAKESPEARE.

CHAPTER I.

SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON

Twenty years had spread their films over the events which wound up with the reunion of the second Avice and her husband; and the hoary peninsula called an island looked just the same as before; though many who had formerly projected their daily shadows upon its unrelieved summer whiteness ceased now to disturb the colourless sunlight there.

The general change, nevertheless, was small. The silent ships came and went from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file after file of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfully dragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvian wooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from the quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its eye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained undevoured.

Men drank, smoked, and spat in the inns with only a little more adulteration in their refreshments and a trifle less dialect in their speech than of yore. But one figure had never been seen on the Channel rock in the interval, the form of Pierston the sculptor, whose first use of the chisel that rock had instigated.

He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in fact, at this very date he was staying at an hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set eyes on Avice since parting from her in the room with her firstborn, he had managed to obtain tidings of her from time to time during the interval. In this way Pierston learnt that, shortly after their resumption of a common life in her house, Ike had ill-used her, till fortunately, the business to which Jocelyn had assisted him chancing to prosper, he became immersed in its details, and allowed Avice to pursue her household courses without interference, initiating that kind of domestic reconciliation which is so calm and durable, having as its chief ingredient neither hate nor love, but an all-embracing indifference.

At first Pierston had sent her sums of money privately, fearing lest her husband should deny her material comforts; but he soon found, to his great relief, that such help was unnecessary, social ambition prompting Ike to set up as quite a gentleman-islander, and to allow Avice a scope for show which he would never have allowed in mere kindness.

Being in Rome, as aforesaid, Pierston returned one evening to his hotel to dine, after spending the afternoon among the busts in the long gallery of the Vatican. The unconscious habit, common to so many people, of tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to discern, or to fancy he discerned, in the Roman atmosphere, in its lights and shades, and particularly in its reflected or secondary lights, something resembling the atmosphere of his native promontory. Perhaps it was that in each case the eye was mostly resting on stone — that the quarries of ruins in the Eternal City reminded him of the quarries of maiden rock at home.