The Well-Beloved | Page 4

gone I
thought-- you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than come
and assure you of my friendship still.'
Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him.

'You are a good, dear girl!' said he, and, seizing her hand, set upon her
cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers on the
day of his coming.
'Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come,
now! And then I'll say to you what I have never said to any other
woman, living or dead: "Will you have me as your husband?"'
'Ah!--mother says I am only one of many!'
'You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn't.'
Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did not
give an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the afternoon,
when she walked with him to the southern point of the island called the
Beal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the treacherous cavern
known as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and splashed now as it
had done when they visited it together as children. To steady herself
while looking in he offered her his arm, and she took it, for the first
time as a woman, for the hundredth time as his companion.
They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered
longer if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite
poetry from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the
village commanding the entrance to the island--the village that has now
advanced to be a town.
'Recite!' said he. 'Who'd have thought anybody or anything could recite
down here except the reciter we hear away there--the never speechless
sea.'
'O but we are quite intellectual now. In the winter particularly. But,
Jocelyn--don't come to the recitation, will you? It would spoil my
performance if you were there, and I want to be as good as the rest.'
'I won't if you really wish me not to. But I shall meet you at the door
and bring you home.'

'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happy now;
she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his coming that
she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side of
the isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her place on
the platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was about the
hour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road
northward to the Street of Wells.
He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old that
his feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what he
had said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalled
him in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated and
accomplished women who had attracted him successively would be
likely to rise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused
his mind of the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral
part of the personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short
while.
* * *
To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had
many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora,
Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her.
He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact
simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a
dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of
the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was;
Pierston did not. She was indescribable.
Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified
by the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of
her ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had
occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next
would be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant access to
all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night he
dreamt that she was 'the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person,
bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art--the
implacable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved the

masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes,
black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or
plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never
been in one place long.
By making this clear to his mind some time