Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (681 page)

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.’

CHAPTER 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.