Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (680 page)

‘I sat by him all night. He improved slowly, and we talked over what we had better do. I felt that, though I had intended to give him up, I could not now becomingly marry any other man, and that I ought to marry him. We decided to do it at once, before anybody could hinder us. So we came down before it was light, and have gone away to get the ceremony solemnized.

‘Tell Mr. Pierston it was not premeditated, but the result of an accident. I am sincerely sorry to have treated him with what he will think unfairness, but though I did not love him I meant to obey you and marry him. But God sent this necessity of my having to give shelter to my Love, to prevent, I think, my doing what I am now convinced would have been wrong — Ever your loving daughter, AVICE.’

The second was in a man’s hand:

‘DEAR MOTHER (as you will soon be to me), — Avice has clearly explained above how it happened that I have not been able to give her up to Mr. Pierston. I think I should have died if I had not accepted the hospitality of a room in your house this night, and your daughter’s tender nursing through the dark dreary hours. We love each other beyond expression, and it is obvious that, if we are human, we cannot resist marrying now, in spite of friends’ wishes. Will you please send the note lying beside this to my mother. It is merely to explain what I have done — Yours with warmest regard, HENRI LEVERRE.’

Jocelyn turned away and looked out of the window.

‘Mrs. Pierston thought she heard some talking in the night, but of course she put it down to fancy. And she remembers Miss Avice coming into her room at one o’clock in the morning, and going to the table where the medicine was standing. A sly girl — all the time her young man within a yard or two, in the very room, and a using the very clean sheets that you, sir, were to have used! They are our best linen ones, got up beautiful, and a kept wi’ rosemary. Really, sir, one would say you stayed out o’ your chammer o’ purpose to oblige the young man with a bed!’

‘Don’t blame them, don’t blame them!’ said Jocelyn in an even and characterless voice. ‘Don’t blame her, particularly. She didn’t make the circumstances. I did.... It was how I served her grandmother. ... Well, she’s gone! You needn’t make a mystery of it. Tell it to all the island: say that a man came to marry a wife, and didn’t find her at home. Tell everybody that she’s run away. It must be known sooner or later.’

One of the servants said, after waiting a few moments: ‘We shan’t do that, sir.’

‘Oh — Why won’t you?’

‘We liked her too well, with all her faults.’

‘Ah — did you,’ said he; and he sighed. He perceived that the younger maids were secretly on Avice’s side.

‘How does her mother bear it?’ Jocelyn asked. ‘Is she awake?’

Mrs. Pierston had hardly slept, and, having learnt the tidings inadvertently, became so distracted and incoherent as to be like a person in a delirium; till, a few moments before he arrived, all her excitement ceased, and she lay in a weak, quiet silence.

‘Let me go up,’ Pierston said. ‘And send for the doctor.’

Passing Avice’s chamber he perceived that the little bed had not been slept on. At the door of the spare room he looked in. In one corner stood a walking-stick — his own.

‘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.

CHAPTER 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 tantalising 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 idealised 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, tantalised, 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.