BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
 '■.^.•-•-:S$sM^ ';w''?%»'-''^ *^ 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013478312 
 
i SS2-F;2-^ 
 
 liWpil'f 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 A SKETCH OF A TEMPERAMENT 
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 ' TKSS OF THE D'URBERVILLES " " JUDE THE OBSCURE ' 
 
 "FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD" 
 
 ' ' life's LITTLE IRONIES " ETC. 
 
 WITH AN ETCHING BY 
 
 H. MACBETH. RAEBURN 
 
 AND A MAP OF WESSEX 
 
 "One shape of many names" 
 P. B. Shelley 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE 
 1897 
 
'PR 
 4T50 
 
 h'\^']i%\ 
 
 .\S'1 
 
 Copyright, 1892, 1897, by Hakpbr & Brothers. 
 
 ^ii rights reserved. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The peninsula carved by time out of a single 
 stone, whereon most of the following scenes are 
 laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home 
 of a curious and almost distinctive people, cherish- 
 ing strange beliefs and singular customs, now for 
 the most part obsolescent. Fancies, like certain 
 soft -wooded plants which cannot bear the silent 
 inland frosts, but thrive by the sea in the roughest 
 of weather, seem to grow up naturally here, in par- 
 ticular among those natives who have no active 
 concern in the labors of the "isle." Hence it is a 
 spot apt to generate a type of personage like the 
 character imperfectly sketched in these pages — a 
 native of natives — whom some may choose to call 
 a fantast (if they honor him with their considera- 
 tion so far), but whom others may see only as one 
 that gave objective continuity and a name to a 
 delicate dream which in a vaguer form is more or 
 less common to all men, and is by no means new 
 to Platonic philosophers. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 To those who know the rocky coigne of England 
 here depicted — overlooking the great Channel 
 highway with all its suggestiveness, and standing 
 out so far into mid -sea that touches of the Gulf 
 Stream soften the air till February — it is matter of 
 surprise that the place has not been more frequent- 
 ly chosen as the retreat of artists and poets in 
 search of inspiration, for at least a month or two in 
 the year — the tempestuous rather than the fine sea- 
 sons by preference. To be sure, one nook therein is 
 the retreat, at their country's expense, of other gen- 
 iuses from a distance ; but their presence is hardly 
 discoverable. Yet perhaps it is as well that the 
 artistic visitors do not come, or no more would be 
 heard of little freehold houses being bought and 
 sold there for a couple of hundred pounds — ^built 
 of solid stone, and dating from the sixteenth centu- 
 ry and earlier, with mullions, copings, and corbels 
 complete. These transactions, by-the-way, are car- 
 ried out and covenanted, or were till lately, in the 
 parish church, in the face of the congregation, such 
 being the ancient custom of the "isle." 
 
 The present is the first publication of this tale 
 in an independent form ; and a few chapters have 
 been rewritten since it was issued in the periodical 
 press in 1892. 
 
 T. H. 
 
 January, 1897. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART FIRST 
 
 A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. A Supposititious Presentment of Her . . 3 
 
 II. The Incarnation is Assumed to be True . ii 
 
 III. The Appointment 22 
 
 IV. A Lonely Pedestrian ... .... 26 
 
 V. A Charge 33 
 
 VI. On the Brink 44 
 
 VII. Her Earlier Incarnations 51 
 
 VIII. "Too Like the Lightning" 62 
 
 IX. Familiar Phenomena in the Distance . . 74 
 
 PART SECOND 
 
 A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 I. The Old Phantom Becomes Distinct . . 83 
 
 II. She Draws Close and Satisfies .... 99 
 
 III. She Becomes an Inaccessible Ghost . . . 109 
 
 IV. She Threatens to Resume Corporeal Sub- 
 
 stance 122 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 V. The Resumption Takes Place . 
 
 VI. The Past Shines in the Present. 
 VII. The New Becomes Established 
 VIII. His Own Soul Confronts Him 
 
 IX. Juxtapositions 
 
 X. She Fails to Vanish Still . 
 XI. The Image Persists. . . . 
 XII. A Grille Descends Between 
 XIII. She is Enshrouded from Sight 
 
 PART THIRD 
 
 A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 I. She Returns for the New Season . 
 II. Misgivings on the Re-embodiment . 
 
 III. The Renewed Image Burns Itself In 
 
 IV. A Dash for the Last Incarnation . 
 V. On the Verge of Possession . . . 
 
 VI. The Well-Beloved is— Where? . . 
 VII. An Old Tabernacle in a New Aspect 
 VIII. "Alas for this Gray Shadow, Once a 
 Man!" 
 
 PAGE 
 130 
 
 148 
 
 167 
 180 
 
 igo 
 199 
 214 
 
 223 
 239 
 250 
 262 
 
 277 
 292 
 311 
 
 321 
 
PART FIRST 
 A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
" Now, if Time knows 
 That Her, whose radiant brows 
 Weave them a garland of my vows ; 
 
 Her that dares fie 
 
 What these lines wish to see : 
 
 I seek no further, it is She." 
 
 — R. Crashaw. 
 
THE WELL-BELOVEI!) 
 
 I 
 
 A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER 
 
 A Person who differed from the local way- 
 farers was climbing the steep road which leads 
 through the sea-skirted townlet definable as 
 the Street of Wells and forms a pass into 
 that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular penin- 
 sula once an island, and still called such, that 
 stretches out like the head of a bird into the 
 English Channel. It is connected with the 
 mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles " cast 
 up by rages of the se," and unparalleled in it's 
 kind in Europe. 
 
 The pedestrian was what he looked like — a 
 young man from London and the cities of the 
 Continent. Nobody could see at present that 
 his urbanism sat upon him only as a garment. 
 He was just recollecting with something of 
 3 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 self-reproach that a whole three years and 
 eight months had flown since he paid his 
 last visit to his father at this lonely rock of 
 his birthplace, the intervening time having 
 been spent amid many contrasting societies, 
 peoples, manners, and scenes. 
 
 What had seemed usual in the isle when he 
 lived there always looked quaint and odd after 
 his later impressions. More than ever the 
 spot seemed what it was said once to have 
 been, the ancient Vindilia Island, and the 
 Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, 
 the houses above houses, one man's doorstep 
 rising behind his neighbor's chimney, the 
 gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the 
 vegetables growing on apparently almost ver- 
 tical planes, the unity of the whole island as 
 a solid and single block of limestone four 
 miles long, were no longer familar and com- 
 monplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly 
 unique and white against the tinted sea, and 
 the sun flashed on infinitely stratified walls 
 
 of oolite, 
 
 "The melancholy ruins 
 Of cancelled cycles," . . . 
 
 with a distinctiveness that call the eyes to it 
 
 as strongly as any spectacle he had beheld afar. 
 
 4 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 After a laborious clamber he reached the 
 top, and walked along the plateau towards 
 the eastern village. The time being about 
 two o'clock, in the middle of the summer 
 season, the road was glaring and dusty, and 
 drawing near to his father's house he sat down 
 ih the sun. 
 
 He stretched out his hand upon the rock 
 beside him. It felt warm. That was the 
 island's personal temperature when in its 
 afternoon sleep, as now. He listened, and 
 heard sounds : whir-whir, saw-saw-saw. Those 
 were the island's snores — the noises of the 
 quarrymen and stone-sawyers. 
 
 Opposite to the spot on which he sat was a 
 roomy cottage or homestead. Like the island 
 it was all of stone, not only in walls but in 
 window-frames, roof, chimneys, fence, stile, 
 pigsty and stable, almost door. 
 
 He remembered who had used to live there 
 — and probably lived there now — the Caro fam- 
 ily ; the "roan-mare" Caros, as they were.called 
 to distinguish them from other branches of the 
 same pedigree, there being but half a dozen 
 Christian names and surnames in the whole 
 island. He crossed the road and looked in at 
 the open doorway. Yes, there they were stilL 
 5 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Mrs. Caro, who had seen him from the 
 window, met him in the entry, and an old- 
 fashioned greeting took place between them. 
 A moment after a door leading from the back 
 rooms -Was thrown open, and a young girl 
 about seventeen or eighteen came bounding 
 in. 
 
 " Why, 'tis dear Joce !" she burst out joy- 
 fully. And running up to the young man, 
 she kissed him. 
 
 The demonstration was sweet enough from 
 the owner of such an affectionate pair of 
 bright hazel eyes and brown tresses of hair. 
 But it was so sudden, so unexpected by a 
 man fresh from towns, that he winced for a 
 moment quite involuntarily ; and there was 
 some constraint in the manner in which he re- 
 turned her kiss, and said, " My pretty little 
 Avice, how do you do after so long ?" 
 
 For a few seconds her impulsive innocence 
 hardly noticed his start of surprise ; but Mrs. 
 Caro, the girl's mother, had observed it in- 
 stantly. With a pained flush she turned to 
 her daughter. 
 
 " Avice — my dear Avice ! Why — what are 
 you doing? Don't you know that you've 
 grown up to be a woman since Jocelyn — Mr. 
 
 6 
 
A YOUNG MAK OF TWKNTY 
 
 Pierston — was last down here? Of course 
 you mustn't do now as you used, to do three 
 or four years ago !" 
 
 The awkwardness which had arisen was 
 hardly removed by Pierston's assurance that 
 he quite expected her to ktep up the practice 
 of her childhood, followed by several minutes 
 of conversation on general subjects. He was 
 vexed from his soul that his unaware move- 
 ment should so have betrayed him. At his 
 leaving he repeated that if Avice regarded him 
 otherwise than as she used to do he would 
 never forgive her; but though they parted 
 good friends, her. regret at the incident was 
 visible in her face. Jocelyn passed out into 
 the road and onward to hisfatheris house hard 
 by. : The mother and daughter were left alone. 
 
 "I was quite amazed at 'ee, my child!" ex-' 
 claimed the elder. " A young man from Lon- 
 don and foreign cities, used now to the strictest 
 company manners, and ladies who almost think 
 it vulgar to smile broad ! How could ye. do it, 
 Avice?" 
 
 " I — I didn't think abouthow I was altered !" 
 said the conscience-stricken girl. ." I used to 
 kiss him, and he used to kiss, me before he 
 went away." 
 
 7 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " But that was years ago, my dear !" 
 
 " Oh yes, and for the moment I forgot ! He 
 seemed just the same to me as he used to be." 
 
 " Well, it can't be helped now. You must be 
 careful in the future. He's got lots of young 
 women, I'll warrant, and has few thoughts left 
 for you. He's what they call a sculptor, and 
 he means to be a great genius in that line some 
 day, they do say." 
 
 " Well, I've done it, and it can't be mended !" 
 moaned the girl. 
 
 Meanwhile Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor of 
 budding fame, had gone onward to the house 
 of his father, an inartistic man of trade and 
 conimerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, 
 Jocelyn accepted a yearly allowance pending 
 the famous days to come. But the elder, hav- 
 ing received no warning of his son's intended 
 visit, was not at home to receive him, Jocelyn 
 looked round the familiar premises, glanced 
 across the Common at the great yards, within 
 which eternal saws were going to and fro upoii 
 eternal blocks of stone — the very same saws 
 and the very same blocks that he had seen there 
 when last in the island, so it seemed to him — 
 ■and then passed through the dwelling into the 
 back garden. , 
 
 8 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 Like all the gardens in the isle it was sur- 
 rounded by a wall of dry-jointed spawls, and 
 at its farther extremity it ran out into a corner, 
 which adjoined the garden of the Caros. He 
 had no sooner reached this spot than he be- 
 came aware of a murmuring and sobbing on 
 the other side of the wall. The voice he recog- 
 nized in a moment as Avice's, and she seemed 
 to be confiding her trouble to some young 
 friend of her own sex. 
 
 " Oh, what shall I do ! what shall I do !" she 
 was saying bitterly. " So bold as it was — so 
 shameless! How could I think of such a 
 thing! He will never forgive me — never, 
 never like me again ! He'll think me a for- 
 ward hussy, and yet — and yet I quite forgot 
 how much I had grown. But that he'll never 
 believe !" The accents were those of one who 
 had for the first time become conscious of her 
 womanhood, as an unwonted possession which 
 shamed and frightened her. 
 
 " Did he seem angry at it ?" inquired the 
 friend. 
 
 "Oh no — not angry! Worse. Cold and 
 haughty. Oh, he''s such a fashionable person 
 now — not at all an island man. But there's 
 no use in talking of it. I wish I was dead !" 
 9 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Pierston retreated ■ as quickly as he could. 
 He grieved at the incident which had brought 
 such pain to this innocent soul ; and yet it was 
 beginning to be a source of vague pleasure to 
 him. He returned to the house, and when his 
 father had come back and welcomed him, and 
 they had shared a meal together, Jocelyn again 
 went out, full of an earnest desire to soothe 
 his young neighbor's sorrow in a way she little 
 expected; though, to tell the truth; his affec-: 
 tion for her was rather that of a friend than of 
 a lover, and he felt by no means sure that the 
 migratory, elusive idealization he called his 
 love, who, ever since his boyhood, had flittec^ 
 from human shell to human shell an indefinite 
 number of times, was going to take up her 
 abode in the body of Avice Caro. 
 
II 
 
 THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE 
 
 It was difficult to meet her again, even 
 though on this lump of rock the difficulty 
 lay as a rule rather in avoidance than in meet- 
 ing. But Avice had been transformed, into a 
 very different kind of young woman by the 
 self- consciousness engendered of her impul- 
 sive greeting, and, notwithstanding their near 
 neighborhood, he could not encounter her, try 
 as he would. No sooner did he appear an inch 
 beyond his father's door than she was to earth 
 like a fox ; she bolted up-stairs to her room. 
 
 Anxious to soothe her after his unintentional 
 slight, he could not stand these evasions long. 
 The manners of the isle were primitive and 
 straightforward, even among the well-to-do; 
 and noting her disappearance one day, he fol- 
 lowed her into the house and onward to the 
 foot of the stairs. 
 
 "Avice!" he called, 
 u 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " Yes, Mr. Pierston." 
 
 " Why do you run up-stairs like that ?" 
 
 "Oh — only because I wanted to come up 
 
 for something." 
 
 " Well, if you've got it, can't you come down 
 again ?" 
 
 " No, I can't very well." 
 
 " Come, dear Avice. That's what you are, 
 you know." 
 
 There was no response. 
 
 " Well, if you won't, you won't !" he con- 
 tinued. " I don't want to bother you." And 
 Pierston went away. 
 
 He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned 
 flowers under the garden walls when he heard 
 a voice behind him. 
 
 "Mr. Pierston — I wasn't angry with you. 
 When you were 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 immedi- 
 ately 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 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 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 immedi- 
 ate 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 treacher- 
 ous 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 com- 
 panion. 
 
 They rambled on to the light-house, where 
 they would have lingered longer if Avice had 
 not suddenly remembered an engagement to 
 recite poetry from a platform that veiy even- 
 ing at the Street of Wells, the village com- 
 manding the entrance to the island — the vil- 
 lage that has now advanced to be a town. 
 13 
 
THE WEtL-BELOVED 
 
 "Recite !"-said'he.. "Who'd liave thought 
 anybody or anything could recite down here, 
 except the -reciter we hear away there^-the 
 never speechless sea." 
 
 "Oh, 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 im- 
 
 14 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 pulse that morning rather' appalled him in its 
 consequences. Not that any of the more so- 
 phisticated and accompHshed 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 per- 
 haps 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 indescriba- 
 ble. 
 
 Never much considering that she was a sub- 
 jective phenomenon vivified by the weird in- 
 fluences of his descent and birthplace, the dis- 
 covery of her ghostliness, of her independence 
 15 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 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 hfe dreamed 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 
 before to-day, he had escaped a good deal of 
 ugly self-reproach. It was simply that she 
 who always attracted him, and led' him whither 
 she would as by a silken thread, had not re- 
 mained the occupant of the same fleshly taber- 
 nacle in her career so, far. Whether she would 
 ultimately settle down to one he could not 
 say. 
 
 Had he felt that she was becoming manifest 
 in Avice, he would have tried to believe that 
 
 i6 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 this was the terminal spot of her migrations, 
 and have been content to abide by his words. 
 But did he see the Well-Beloved in Avice at 
 all ? The question was somewhat disturbing. 
 
 He had reached the brow of the hill, and 
 despended towards the village, where in the 
 long, straight, Roman street he soon found the 
 lighted hall. The performance was not yet 
 over ; and by going round to the side of the 
 building and standing on a mound he could 
 see the interior as far down as the platform 
 level. Avice's turn, or second turn, came on 
 almost immediately. Her pretty embarrass- 
 ment on facing the audience rather won him 
 away from his doubts. She was, in truth,, 
 what is called a " nice " girl ; attractive, cer- 
 tainly, but above all things nice — one of. the 
 class with whom the risks of matrimony ap- 
 proximate most nearly to zero. Her intelli- 
 gent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful 
 carriage, insured one thing, that of all the 
 girls he had known he had never met one 
 with more charming and solid quaHties than 
 Avice Caro's. This was not a mere conjecture 
 — he had known her long and thoroughly; 
 her every mood and temper. 
 
 A heavy wagon passing without drowned 
 
 B 17 
 
THE WELL'BEI^OVED 
 
 her small, soft voieer-foi; him"; but the audience 
 were pleased,.. and. she- blushed at their ap- 
 .plause. . He now took hi$ .station at the door, 
 and when the people had done pouring out he 
 found her within awaiting him. 
 ' They climbed hotpeward slowly by the Old 
 Rijad, Pierston dragging himself up the steep 
 by- the- wayside hand-rail and pulling Avice 
 after him upon his arm. At the top they 
 turned and stood still. To the left of them 
 the sky was streaked like, a fan with the light- 
 house rays, and under their front, at periods 
 of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep, 
 hdllow stroke like the single beat of a drumj 
 the intervals , being filled with a long-drawn 
 rattling, as of boneS between huge canine 
 jaWs. It came from the: vast concave of Dead- 
 man's Bay, rising and "falling against the peb- 
 ble dike. , ; - 
 
 The evening and night winds here were, to 
 PJerston's mind, charged with a something 
 that did not burden them elsewhere. They 
 brought it up from that sinister bay to the 
 west, whose movement she and he were hear- 
 ing now. It was a presence — an imaginary 
 shape or essence from the human multitude 
 lying below : those who had gone down in 
 i8 
 
A YpUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 vessels of war, East-Indiamen, barges, brigs, 
 and ships of the Armada — select people, com- 
 mon, and debased, whose interests and hopes 
 had been as wide asunder as the poles, but 
 who had rolled each other to oneness on that 
 restless sea-bed. There could almost be felt 
 the brush of their huge composite ghost as it 
 ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking 
 for some good god who would disunite it 
 again. 
 
 The twain wandered a long way that night 
 amid these influences — so far as to the old Hope 
 Church-yard, which lay in a ravine formed by 
 a landslip ages ago. The church had slipped 
 down with the rest of" the cliff, and had long 
 been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this last 
 local stronghold of the pagan divinities, where 
 pagan customs lingered yet, Christianity had 
 established itself precariously at best. In that 
 solemn spot Pierston kissed her. 
 
 The kiss was by no means on Avice's initia- '• 
 tive this time. Her former demonstrativeness 
 seemed to have increased her present reserve. 
 
 That day was the beginning of a pleasant 
 month passed mainly in each other's society. 
 He found that she could not only recite poetry 
 19 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 at intellectual gatherings, but play the piano 
 fairly, and sing to her own accompaniment. 
 
 He observed that every aim of those who 
 had brought her up had been to get her away 
 mentally as far as possible from her natural 
 and individual life as an inhabitant of a pecul- 
 iar island ; to make her an exact copy of tens 
 of thousands of other people, in whose circum- 
 stances there was nothing special, distinctive, 
 or picturesque ; to teach her to forget all the 
 experiences of her ancestors ; to drown the 
 local ballads by songs purchased at the Bud- 
 mouth fashionable music-sellers', and the local 
 vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no coun- 
 try at all. She lived in a house that would 
 have been the fortune of an artist, and learned 
 to draw London suburban villas from printed 
 copies. 
 
 Avice had seen all this before he pointed it 
 out, but, with a girl's tractability, had acqui- 
 esced. By constitution she was local to the 
 bone, but she could not escape the tendency 
 of the age. 
 
 The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, 
 and she looked forward to it sadly, but serenely, 
 their engagement being now. a settled thing. 
 Pierston thought of the native custom on such 
 
 20 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 occasions, which had prevailed in his and her 
 family for centuries, both being of the old stock 
 of the isle. The influx of " kimberlins," or 
 " foreigners " (as strangers from the mainland 
 of Wessex were called), had led in a large 
 measure to its discontinuance; but underneath 
 the veneer of Avice's education many an old- 
 fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he won- 
 dered if, in her natural melancholy at his leav- 
 ing, she regretted the changing manners which 
 made unpopular the formal ratification of a 
 betrothal, according to the precedent of their 
 sires and grandsires. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE APPOINTMENT 
 
 " Well," said he, " here we are, a:rrived at 
 the fag-end of my holiday. What a pleasant: 
 surprise my old home, which I have not 
 thought worth coming to see for three or four 
 years, had in store for me !" 
 
 " You must go to-morrow ?" she asked, un- " 
 easily. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Something seemed to overweigh them ; some- 
 thing more than the natural sadness of a part- 
 ing which was not to be long ; and he decided 
 that instead of, leaving in the daytime as he 
 had intended, he would defer his departure till 
 night, and go by the mail-train from Budmouth. 
 This would give him time to look into his 
 father's quarries, and enable her, if she chose, 
 to walk with him along the beach as far as to 
 Henry the Eighth's Castle above the sands, 
 where they could hnger and watch the moon 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 rise over the sea. She said she thought she 
 could come. 
 
 So after spending the next day with his 
 father in the quarries, Jocelyn prepared to 
 leave, and at the time appointed set out from 
 the stone house of his birth in this stone isle 
 to walk to Budmouth-Regis by the. path along 
 the beach, Avice having some time earlier gone' 
 down to see some friends in the Street of Wells, 
 which was half-way towards the spot of their 
 tryst. The descent soon brought him to the 
 pebble bank, and leaving behind him the last 
 houses of the isle, and the ruins of the village 
 destroyed by the November gale of 1824; he 
 struck out along the narrow thread of land.. 
 When he had walked a hundred yards . he. 
 stopped, turned aside to the pebble ridge' 
 which walled out the sea, and sat down to wait 
 for her. 
 
 Between him and the lights of the ships rid- 
 ing at anchor in the roadstead two men passed 
 slowly in the direction he intended to pursue. 
 One of them recognized Jocelyn, and bade 
 hirn good-night, adding, "Wish you joy, sir, 
 of your choice, and hope the wedden will be 
 soon !" 
 
 "Thank you, Seaborn. Well— we. shall see 
 23 
 
 .:>^ 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 what Christmas will do towards bringing it 
 about." 
 
 " My wife opened upon it this mornen : 
 ' Please God, I'll up and see that there wed- 
 den,' says she, ' knowing 'em both from their 
 crawling-days.' " 
 
 The men moved on, and when they were 
 out of Pierston's hearing the one who had 
 not spoken said to his friend, " Who was that 
 young kimberlin ? He don't seem one o' we." 
 
 " Oh, he is, though, every inch o' en. He's 
 Mr. Jocelyn Pierston, the stwone-merchant's 
 only son up at East Quarriers. He's to be 
 married to a stylish young body ; her mother, 
 a widow woman, carries on the same business 
 as well as she can; but their trade is not a 
 twentieth part of Pierston's. He's worth thou- 
 sands and thousands, they say, though 'a do 
 live on in the same wold way up in the same 
 wold house. This son is doen great things in 
 London as 'a image-carver; and I can mind 
 when, as a boy, 'a first took to carving soldiers 
 out o' bits o' stwone from the soft-bed of his 
 father's quarries; and then 'a made a set o' 
 stwonen chess-men, and so 'a got on. He's 
 quite the gent in London, they tell me ; and 
 the wonder is that 'a cared to come back here 
 24 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 and pick up little Avice Caro — nice maid as 
 she is nothwithstanding. . . . Hullo! there's 
 to be a change in the weather soon." 
 
 Meanwhile the subject of their remarks 
 waited at the appointed place till seven o'clock, 
 the hour named between himself and his affi- 
 anced, had struck. Almost at the moment he 
 saw a figure coming forward from the last 
 lamp at the bottom of the hill. But the figure 
 speedily resolved itself into that of a boy, who, 
 advancing to Jocelyn, inquired if he were Mr. 
 Pierston, and handed him a note. 
 
IV 
 A LONELY PEDESTRIAN 
 
 When the boy had gone Jocelyn retraced 
 his steps to the last lamp, and read, in Avice's 
 hand: 
 
 " My Dearest,— I shall be sorry if I grieve you at 
 all in what I am going to say about our arrangement 
 to meet to night in the Sandsfoot ruin. But I have 
 fancied that my seeing you again and again lately is in- 
 clining your father to insist, and you as his heir to feel, 
 that we ought to carry out island custom in our court- 
 ing — ^your people being such old inhabitants in an 
 unbroken line. Truth to say, mother supposes that 
 your father, for natural reasons, may have hinted to 
 you that we ought. Now the thing is contrary to 
 my feelings ; it is nearly left off, and I do not think it 
 good, even where there is property, as in your case, 
 to justify it, in a measure. I would rather trust in 
 Providence. 
 
 " On the whole, therefore, it is best that I should 
 not come — if only for appearances — and meet you at 
 a time and place suggesting the custom, to others 
 than ourselves, at least, if known. 
 26 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " I am sure that this decision will not disturb you 
 much ; that you will understand my modern feelings, 
 and think no worse of me for them. And, dear, if it 
 were to be done, and we were unfortunate in it, we 
 might both have enough old family feeling to think, 
 like our forefathers, and possibly your father, that we 
 could not marry honorably ; and hence we might be 
 made unhappy. 
 
 " However, you will come again shortly, will you 
 not, dear Jocelyn ? — and then the time will soon draw 
 on when no more good-byes will be required. 
 " Always and ever yours, 
 
 '• AviCE." 
 
 Jocelyn, having read the letter, was sur- 
 prised at the naivete it showed, and at Avice 
 and her mother's antiquated simplicity in sup- 
 posing that to be still a grave and operating 
 principle which was a bygone barbarism to 
 himself and other absentees from the island. 
 His father, as a money - maker, might have 
 practical wishes on the matter of descendants 
 which lent plausibility to the conjecture of 
 Avice and her mother; but to Jocelyn he 
 had never expressed himself in favor of the 
 ancient ways, old-fashioned as he was. 
 
 Amused, therefore, at her regard of herself 
 as m.odern, Jocelyn was disappointed and a 
 little vexed that such an unforeseen reason 
 27 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 should have deprived him of her company. 
 How the old ideas survived under the new- 
 education ! 
 
 The reader is asked to remember that the 
 date, though recent in the history of the Isle 
 of Slingers, was more than forty years ago. 
 
 Finding that the evening seemed lowering, 
 yet indisposed to go back and hire a vehicle, 
 he went on quickly alone. In such an ex- 
 posed spot the night wind was gusty, and the 
 sea behind the pebble barrier kicked and 
 flounced in complex rhythms, which could 
 be translated equally well as shocks of battle 
 or shouts of thanksgiving. 
 
 Presently on the pale road before him he 
 discerned a figure, the figure of a woman. 
 He remembered that a woman passed him 
 while he was reading Avice's letter by the 
 last lamp, and now he was overtaking her. 
 
 He did hope for a moment that it might be 
 Avice, with a changed mind. But it was not 
 she, nor anybody like her. Is was a taller, 
 squarer form than that of his betrothed, and 
 although the season was only autumn she was 
 wrapped in furs, or in thick and heavy cloth- 
 ing of some kinc^. 
 
 28 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 He soon advanced abreast of her, and could 
 get glimpses of her profile against the road- 
 stead lights. It wias dignified, arresting — that 
 of a very Juno. Nothing more classical had 
 he ever seen. She walked at a swinging pace, 
 yet, with such ease and power that there was 
 but little difference in their rate of speed for 
 several minutes ; and during this time he re- 
 garded and conjectured. However, he was 
 about to pass her by when she suddenly 
 turned and addressed him. 
 
 "Mr. Pierston, I think, of East Quarriers?" 
 He assented, and could just discern what a 
 handsome, commanding, imperious face it was 
 — quite of a piece with the proud tones of her 
 voice. She was a new type altogether in his 
 experience ; and her accent was not so local as 
 Avice's. 
 
 " Can you tell me the time, please ?" 
 He looked at his watch by the aid of a light, 
 and in telling her that it was a quarter past 
 seven observed, by the momentary gleam of his 
 match, that her eyes looked a little red and 
 chafed, as if with weeping. 
 
 " Mr. Pierston, will you forgive what will ap- 
 pear very strange to you, I dare say ? That is, 
 may I ask you to lend me some money for a 
 29 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED * 
 
 day or two ? I "ha^e been "so foolish as to leave 
 my purse on the dressing-table." 
 
 It did appear strange; and yet there were 
 features in the young lady's personality which 
 assured him in a moment that she was not an 
 impostor. He yielded to her request, and put 
 his hand in his pocket. Here it remained for 
 a moment. How niuch did she mean by the 
 words "some money?" The Junonian quality 
 of her form and manner made him throw him- 
 self by an impulse into harmony with her, and 
 he responded iregally. He scented a romance. 
 He handed her five pounds. 
 
 His muriificehce, caused her no apparent sur- 
 prise. ■ " It is quite: enough, thank you," she re- 
 marked quietly, as he. announced the sum; lest 
 she should be unable to see it for herself. 
 
 While overtaking and conversing with her 
 he had not observed that the rising wind, which 
 had proceeded from puffing to growling and 
 from growling' to screeching, with the accus- 
 tomed suddenness of its changes here, had at 
 length brought' what it promised by these 
 vagaries — rain. The drops, which had at first 
 hit their left cheeks like the' pellets of a pbp- 
 gun, soon assumed the character of a rakirtg 
 fusillade from the bank adjoining, one shot of 
 30 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 •whicli was sufficiently smart to go through 
 Jocelyn's sleeve. The tall girl turned, and 
 seemed to be somewhat concerned at an onset 
 which she had plainly not foreseen before her 
 starting. 
 
 " We must take shelter," said Jocelyn. 
 
 " But where?" said she. 
 
 To windward was the long, monotonous 
 bank, too obtusely piled to afford a screen, 
 over which they could hear the canine crunch- 
 ing of pebbles by the sea without ; on their 
 right stretched the inner bay or roadstead, the' 
 distant riding-lights of the ships, now dim and 
 glimmering; behind them a faint spark here 
 and there in the lower sky showed where the 
 island rose ; before there was nothing definite, 
 and could be nothing, till they reached a pre- 
 carious wood bridge, a mile farther on, Henry 
 the Eighth's Castle being a little farther still. 
 
 But just within the summit of the bank, 
 whither it had apparently been hauled to be 
 out of the way of the waves, was one of the 
 local boats called lerrets, bottom upward. As 
 soon as they saw it the pair ran up the pebbly 
 slope towards it by a simultaneous impulse. 
 They then perceived that it had lain there a 
 long time, and were comforted to find it capa- 
 31 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ble of affording more protection than anybody 
 would have expected from a distant view. It 
 formed a shelter or store for the fishermen, the 
 boom of the lerret being tarred as a roof. By 
 creeping under the bows, which overhung the 
 bank on props to leeward, they made their way 
 within, where, upon some thwarts, oars, and 
 other fragmentary woodwork, lay a mass of 
 dry netting — a whole seine. Upon this they 
 scrambled and sat down, through inability to 
 stand upright. 
 
A CHARGE 
 
 The rain fell upon the keel of the old lerret 
 like corn thrown in handfuls by some colossal 
 sower, and darkness set in to its full shade. 
 
 They crouched so close to each other that 
 he could feel her furs against him. Neither 
 had spoken since they left the roadway till 
 she said, with attempted unconcern : " This is 
 unfortunate." 
 
 He admitted that it was, and found, after a 
 few further remarks had passed, that she cer- 
 tainly had been weeping, there being a sup- 
 pressed gasp of passionateness in her utterance 
 now and then. 
 
 " It is more unfortunate for you, perhaps, 
 than for me," he said, " and I am very sorry 
 that it should be so." 
 
 She replied nothing to this, and he added 
 that it was rather a desolate place for a woman, 
 alone and afoot. He hoped nothing serious 
 c 33 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 had happened to drag her out at such an un- 
 toward time. 
 
 At first she seemed not at all disposed to 
 show any candor on her own affairs, and he 
 was left to conjecture as to her history and 
 name, and how she could possibly have known 
 him. But, as the rain gave not the least sign 
 of cessation, he observed : " I think we shall 
 have to go back." 
 
 " Never !" said she, and the firmness with 
 which she closed her lips was audible in the 
 word. 
 
 " Why not ?" he inquired. 
 
 " There are good reasons." 
 
 " I cannot understand how you should know 
 me, while I have no knowledge of you." 
 
 " Oh, but you know me — about me, at least." 
 
 " Indeed I don't. How should I ? You are 
 a kimberlin." 
 
 " I am not. I am a real islander — or was, 
 rather. . . . Haven't you heard of the Best- 
 Bed Stone Company?" 
 
 " I should think so ! They tried to ruin my 
 father by getting away his trade — or, at least, 
 the founder of the company did — old Ben- 
 comb.'' 
 " He's my father !" 
 
 34 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " Indeed ! I am sorry I should have spoken 
 so disrespectfully of him, for I never knew him 
 personally. After making over his large busi- 
 ness to the company, he retired, I believe, to 
 London?" 
 
 " Yes. Our house, or rather his, not mine, 
 is at South Kensington. We have lived there 
 for years. But we have been tenants of Syl- 
 vania Castle, on the island here, this season. 
 We took it for a month or two of the owner, 
 who is away." 
 
 " Then I have been stayitig quite near you. 
 Miss Bencomb. My father's is a compara- 
 tively humble residence hard by." 
 
 " But he could afford a much bigger one if 
 he chose." 
 
 " You have heard so ? I don't know. He 
 doesn't tell me much of his affairs." 
 
 " My father," she burst out, suddenly, " is 
 always scolding me for my extravagance ! 
 And he has been doing it to-day more than 
 ever. He said I go shopping in town to 
 simply a diabolical extent, and exceed my 
 allowance !" 
 
 " Was that this evening?" 
 
 "Yes. And then it reached such a storm 
 of passion between us that I pretended to re- 
 35 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 tire to my room for the rest of the evening, 
 but I slipped out, and I am never going back 
 home again." 
 
 " What will you do ?" 
 
 " I shall go first to my aunt in London, and 
 if she won't have me, I'll work for a living. I 
 have left my father forever ! What I should 
 have done if I had not met you I cannot tell — 
 I must have walked all the way to London, I 
 suppose. Now I shall take the train as soon 
 as I reach the mainland." 
 
 " If you ever do in this hurricane." 
 
 " I must sit here till it stops." 
 
 And there on the nets they sat. Pierston 
 knew of old Bencomb as his father's bitterest 
 enemy, who had made a great fortune by swal- 
 lowing up the small stone-merchants, but had 
 found Jocelyn's sire a trifle too big to digest — 
 the latter being, in fact, the chief rival of the 
 Best- Bed Company to that day. Jocelyn 
 thought it strange that he should be thrown 
 by fate into a position to play the son of the 
 Montagues to this daughter of the Capulets. 
 
 As they talked there was a mutual instinct 
 
 to drop their voices, and on this account the 
 
 roar of the storm necessitated their drawing 
 
 quite close together. Something tender came 
 
 36 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 into their tones as quarter-hour after quarter- 
 hour went on, and they forgot the lapse of 
 time. It was quite late when she started up, 
 alarmed at her position. 
 
 " Rain or no rain, I can stay no longer," she 
 said. 
 
 " Do come back," said he, taking her hand. 
 " I'll return with you. My train has gone." 
 
 " No ; I shall go on, and get a lodging in 
 Budmouth town, if ever I reach it." 
 
 " It is so late that there will be no house 
 open, except a little place near the station, 
 where you won't care to stay. However, if 
 you are determined, I will show you the way. 
 I cannot leave you. It would be too awkward 
 for you to go there alone." 
 
 She persisted, and they started through the 
 twanging and spinning storm. The sea rolled 
 and rose so high on their left, and was so near 
 them on their right, that it seemed as if they 
 were traversing its bottom, like the Children 
 of Israel. Nothing but the frail bank of peb- 
 bles divided them from the raging gulf with- 
 out, and at eveiy bang of the tide against it 
 the ground shook, the shingle clashed, the 
 spray rose vertically and was blown over 
 their heads. Quantities of sea-water trickled 
 37 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 -through the pebble wall, and ran in rivulets 
 across their path to join the sea within. The 
 " island " was an island still. 
 
 They had not realized the force of the ele- 
 ments till now. Pedestrians had often been 
 blown into the sea hereabout and drowned, 
 owing to a sudden breach in the bank ; which, 
 however, had something of a supernatural 
 power in being able to close up and join 
 itself together again after such disruption, 
 like Satan's form when, cut in two by the 
 sword of Michael, 
 
 "The ethereal substance closed, 
 Not long divisible." 
 
 Her clothing offered more resistance to the 
 wind than his, and she was consequently in 
 the greater danger. It was impossible to re- 
 fuse his proffered aid. First he gave his arm, 
 but the wind tore them apart as easily as 
 coupled cherries. He steadied her bodily by 
 encircling her waist with his arm ; and she 
 made no objection. 
 
 Somewhere about this time — it might have 
 been sooner, it might have been later — he be- 
 came conscious of a sensation which, in its in- 
 
 38 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 cipient and unrecognized form, had lurked 
 within him from some unnoticed moment 
 when he was sitting close to his new friend 
 under the lerret. Though a young man, he 
 was too old a hand not to know what this 
 was, and felt alarmed — even dismayed. It 
 meant a possible migration of the Well-Be- 
 loved. The thing had not, however, taken 
 place ; and he went on thinking how soft and 
 warm the lady was in her fur covering, as he 
 held her so tightly; the only dry spots in the 
 clothing of either being her left side and. his 
 right, where they excluded the rain by their 
 mutual pressure. 
 
 As soon as they had crossed the ferry 
 bridge there was a little more shelter, but he 
 did not relinquish his hold till she requested 
 him. They passed the ruined castle, and, 
 having left the island far behind them, trod 
 mile after mile till they drew near to the out- 
 skirts of the neighboring watering-place. Into 
 it they plodded without pause, crossing the 
 harbor bridge about midnight, wet to the skin. 
 
 He pitied her, and, while he wondered at it, 
 admired her determination. The houses fac- 
 ing the bay now sheltered them completely, 
 and they reached the vicinity of the new rail- 
 39 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 way terminus (which the station was at this 
 date) without difficulty. As he had said, 
 there was only one house open hereabout, a 
 little temperance inn, where the people stayed 
 up for the arrival of the morning mail and 
 passengers from the Channel boats. Their 
 application for admission led to the with- 
 drawal of a bolt, and they stood within the 
 gaslight of the passage. 
 
 He could see now that though she was such 
 a fine figure, quite as tall as himself, she 
 was but in the bloom of young womanhood 
 in years. Her face was certainly striking, 
 though rather by its imperiousness than its 
 beauty; and the beating of the wind and 
 rain and spray had inflamed her cheeks to 
 peony hues. 
 
 She persisted in the determination to go on 
 to London by an early morning train, and 
 he therefore offered advice on lesser matters 
 only. "In that case," he said, "you must go 
 up to your room and send down your things, 
 that they may be dried by the fire immediate- 
 ly, or they will not be ready. I will tell the 
 servant to do this, and send you up something 
 to eat." 
 
 She assented to his proposal, without, how- 
 40 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 ever, showing any marks of gratitude; and 
 when she had gone Pierston despatched her 
 the light supper promised by the sleepy girl 
 who was " night porter " at this establishment. 
 He felt ravenously hungry himself, and set 
 about drying his clothes as well as he could 
 and eating at the same time. 
 
 At first he was in doubt what to do, but 
 soon decided to stay where he was till the 
 morrow. By the aid of some temporary 
 wraps, and some slippers from the cupboard, 
 he was contriving to make himself comfortable 
 when the maid-servant came downstairs with 
 a damp armful of woman's raiment. 
 
 Pierston withdrew from the fire. The maid- 
 servant knelt down before the blaze and held 
 up with extended arms one of the habiliments 
 of the Juno upstairs, from which a cloud of 
 steam began to rise. As she knelt, the girl 
 nodded forward, recovered herself, and nod- 
 ded again. 
 
 " You are sleepy, my girl," said Pierston. 
 
 " Yes, sir ; I have been up a long time. 
 When nobody comes I lie down on the couch 
 in the other room." 
 
 " Then I'll relieve you of that ; go and lie 
 down in the other room, just as if we were not 
 41 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 here. I'll dry the clothing and put the articles 
 here in a heap, which you can take up to the 
 young lady in the morning." 
 
 The " night porter " thanked him and left 
 the room, and he soon heard her snoring from 
 the adjoining apartment. Then Jocelyn open- 
 ed proceedings, overhauling the robes and ex- 
 tending them one by one. As the steam 
 went up he fell into a reverie. He again be- 
 came conscious of the change which had been 
 initiated during the walk. The Well-Beloved 
 was moving house — had gone over to the 
 wearer of this attire. 
 
 In the course of ten minutes he adored 
 her. 
 
 And how about little Avice Caro? He did 
 not think of her as before. 
 
 He was not sure that he had ever seen the 
 real Beloved in that friend of his youth, so- 
 licitous as he was for her welfare. But, lov- 
 ing her or not, he perceived that the spirit, 
 emanation, idealism, which called itself his 
 Love was flitting stealthily from some re- 
 moter figure to the near one in the chamber 
 overhead. 
 
 Avice had not kept her engagement to meet 
 him in the lonely ruin, fearing her own im- 
 42 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 aginings. But he, in fact, more than she, had 
 been educated out of the island innocence 
 that had upheld old manners; and this was 
 the strange consequence of Avice's misappre- 
 hension. 
 
VI 
 
 ON THE BRINK 
 
 Miss Bencomb was leaving the hotel for 
 the railway, which was quite near at hand, 
 and had only recently been opened, as if on 
 purpose for this event. At Jocelyn's sugges- 
 tion she wrote a message to inform her father 
 that she had gone to her aunt's, with a view to 
 allaying anxiety and deterring pursuit. They 
 walked together to the platform and bade 
 each other good-bye ; each obtained a ticket 
 independently, and Jocelyn got his luggage 
 from the cloak-room. 
 
 On the platform they encountered each 
 other again, and there was a light in their 
 glances at each other which said, as by a 
 flash-telegraph, "We are bound for the same 
 town, why not enter the same compartment ?" 
 
 They did. 
 
 She took a corner seat, with her back to the 
 engine ; he sat opposite. The guard looked 
 44 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 in, thought they were lovers, and did not show- 
 other travellers into that compartment. They 
 talked on strictly ordinary matters — what she 
 thought he did not know — but at every stop- 
 ping station he dreaded intrusion. Before 
 they were half way to London the event he 
 had just begun to realize was a patent fact. 
 The Beloved was again embodied ; she filled 
 every fibre and curve of this woman's form. 
 
 Drawing near the great London station was 
 like drawing near doomsday. How should he 
 leave her in the turmoil of a crowded city 
 street ? She seemed quite unprepared for the 
 rattle of the scene. He asked her where her 
 aunt lived. 
 
 " Bayswater," said Miss Bencomb. 
 
 He called a cab and proposed that she 
 should share it till they arrived at her aunt's, 
 whose residence lay not much out of the way 
 to his own. Try as he would, he could not 
 ascertain if she understood his feelings, but 
 she assented to his offer and entered the ve- 
 hicle. 
 
 " We are old friends," he said, as they drove 
 onward. 
 
 "Indeed we are," she answered, without 
 smiling. 
 
 45 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "But hereditarily we are mortal enemies, 
 dear Juliet." 
 
 " Yes — What did you say ?" 
 
 " I said Juliet." 
 
 She laughed in a half-proud way, and mur- 
 mured : " Your father is my father's ene- 
 my, and my father is mine. Yes, it is so." 
 And then their eyes caught each other's 
 glance. 
 
 " My queenly darling !" he burst out ; " in- 
 stead of going to your aunt's, will you come 
 and marry me ?" 
 
 A flush covered her over, which seemed akin 
 to a flush of rage. It was not exactly that, 
 but she was excited. She' did not answer, and 
 he feared he had mortally offended her dig- 
 nity. Perhaps she had only made use of him 
 as a convenient aid to her intentions. How- 
 ever, he went on : 
 
 " Your father would not be able to reclaim 
 you then ! After all, this is not so precipitate 
 as it seems. You know all about me, my his- 
 tory, my prospects. I know all about you. 
 Our families have been neighbors on that isle 
 for hundreds of years, though you are now 
 such a London product." 
 
 " Will you ever be a Royal Academician ?" 
 46 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 she asked, musingly, her excitement having 
 calmed down. 
 
 " I hope to be — I will be, if you will be my 
 wife." 
 
 His companion looked at him long. 
 
 " Think what a short way out of your dif- 
 ficulty this would be," he continued. " No 
 bother about aunts, no fetching home by an 
 angry father." 
 
 It seemed to decide her. She yielded to his 
 embrace. 
 
 "How long will it take to marry?" Miss 
 Bencomb asked, by-and-by, with obvious self- 
 repression. 
 
 " We could do it to-morrow. I could get to 
 Doctors' Commons by noon to-day, and the li- 
 cense would be ready by to-morrow morning." 
 
 " I won't go to my aunt's, I will be an in- 
 dependent woman ! I have been reprimanded 
 as if I were a child of six. I'll be your wife 
 if it is as easy as you say." 
 
 They stopped the cab while they held a 
 consultation. Pierston had rooms and a studio 
 in the neighborhood of Campden Hill ; but it 
 would be hardly desirable to take her thither 
 till they were married. They decided to go 
 to a hotel. 
 
 47 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Changing their direction, therefore, they 
 went back to the Strand, and soon ensconced 
 themselves in one of the venerable old taverns 
 of Covent Garden, a precinct which in those 
 days was frequented by West-country people. 
 Jocelyn then left her and proceeded on his 
 errand eastward. 
 
 It was about three o'clock when, having ar- 
 ranged all preliminaries necessitated by this 
 sudden change of front, he began strolling 
 slowly back; he felt bewildered, and to walk 
 was a relief. Gazing occasionally into this 
 shop window and that, he called a hansom as 
 by an inspiration, and directed the driver to 
 " Mellstock Gardens." Arrived here, he rang 
 the bell of a studio, and in a minute or two it 
 was answered by a young man in shirt-sleeves, 
 about his own age, with a great smeared pal- 
 ette on his left thumb. 
 
 " Oh, you, Pierston ! I thought you were in 
 the country. Come in. I'm awfully glad of this. 
 I am here in town finishing off a painting for an 
 American, who wants to take it back with him." 
 
 Pierston followed his friend into the paint- 
 ing-room, where a pretty young woman was 
 sitting sewing. At a signal from the painter 
 she disappeared without speaking. 
 48 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " I can see from your face you have some- 
 thing to say ; so we'll have it all to ourselves. 
 You are in some trouble? What'llyou drink?" 
 
 " Oh ! it doesn't matter what, so that it is 
 alcohol in some shape or form. . . . Now, 
 Somers, you must just listen to me, for I have 
 something to tell." 
 
 Pierston had sat down in an arm-chair, and 
 Somers had resumed his painting. When a 
 servant had brought in brandy to soothe Pier- 
 ston's nerves, and soda to take off the injurious 
 effects of the brandy, and milk to take off the 
 depleting effects of the soda, Jocelyn began 
 his^narrative, addressing it rather to Somers's 
 Gothic thimneypiece, 4^3 "Somers's \ Gothic 
 clock, aiid Somers's Gothic rugs, than to 
 Somers himself, who stood'~at'' his picture a 
 little behind his friend. 
 
 " Before I tell you what has happened to 
 me," Pierston said, " I want to let you know 
 the manner of man I am." 
 
 " Lord — I know already !" 
 
 " No, you don't. It is a sort of thing one 
 doesn't hke to talk of. I lie awake at night 
 thinking about it." 
 
 " No !" said Somers, with more sympathy, 
 seeing that his friend was really troubled. 
 D 49 
 
^ THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " I am under a curious curse or influence. I 
 am posed, puzzled, and perplexed by the leger- 
 demain of a creature — a deity rather; by Aph- 
 rodite, as a poet would put it, as I should put 
 it myself in marble. . . . But I forget — this is 
 not to be a deprecatory wail, but a defence 
 ' — a sort of Apologia pro vitd med." 
 
 " That's better. Fire away!" 
 
VII 
 HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS 
 
 " You, Somers, are not, I know, one of those 
 who continue ^o indulge in the world-wide, 
 fond superstition that the Beloved One of any 
 man always, or even usually, cares to remain 
 in one corporeal nook or shell for any great 
 length of time, however much he may wish her 
 to do so. If I am wrong, and you do still hold 
 to that ancient error — well, my story will seem 
 rather queer." 
 
 " Suppose you say some men, not any man." 
 "All right — I'll say one man, this man only, 
 if you are so particular. We are a strange, 
 visionary race down where I come from, and 
 perhaps that accounts for it. The Beloved of 
 this one man, then, has had many incarnations 
 — too many to describe in detail. Each shape, 
 or embodiment, has been a temporaiy resi- 
 dence only, which she has entered, lived in a 
 while, and made her exit from, leaving the 
 51 
 
THK WELL-BELOVED 
 
 substance, so far as I have been concerned, a 
 corpse, .worse luck! Now, there is no spirit- 
 ualistic nonsense in this — it is simple fact, put 
 in the plain form that the conventional public 
 are afraid of. So much for the principle." 
 " Good. Go on." 
 
 ' " Well ; the first embodiment of her occurred, 
 so nearly as I can recollect, when I was about 
 the age of nine. Her vehicle was a little blue- 
 eyed girl of eight or so, one of a family of 
 eleven, with flaxen hair about her shoulders, 
 which attempted to curl, but ignominiously 
 failed, hanging like chimney-crooks only. This 
 defect used rather to trouble me ; and was, I 
 believe, one of the main reasons of my Be- 
 loved's departure from that tenement. I can- 
 not remember with any exactness when the de- 
 parture occurred. I know it was after I had 
 kissed my little friend in a garden-seat on a 
 hot noontide, under a blue gingham umbrella, 
 which we had opened over us as we sat, that 
 passers through East Quarriers might not ob- 
 serve our marks of affection, forgetting that 
 our screen must attract more attention than 
 our persons. 
 
 " When the whole dream came to an end 
 through her father leaving the island, I thought 
 52 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 my Well-Beloved had gone forever (being then 
 in the unpractised condition of Adam at sight 
 of the first sunset). But she had not. Laura 
 had gone forever, but not my Beloved. 
 
 " For some months after I had done crying 
 for the flaxen-haired edition of her, my Love 
 did not reappear. Then she came suddenly, 
 unexpectedly, in a situation I should never 
 have predicted. I was standing on the curb- 
 stone of the pavement in Budmouth-Regis, 
 outside the Preparatory School, looking across 
 towards the sea, when a middle-aged gentle- 
 man on horseback, and beside him a young 
 lady, also mounted, passed down the street. 
 The girl turned her head, and — possibly be- 
 cause I was gaping at her in awkward admira- 
 tion, or smiling myself— smiled at me. Hav- 
 ing ridden a few paces, she looked round again 
 and smiled. 
 
 " It was enough, more than enough, to set 
 me on fire. I understood in a moment the in- 
 formation conveyed to me by my emotion — 
 the Well-Beloved had reappeared. This sec- 
 ond form in which it had pleased her to take 
 up her abode was quite a grown young wom- 
 an's, darker in complexion than the first. 
 Her hair, also worn in a knot, was of an or- 
 
 53 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 dinary brown, and so, I think, were her eyes, 
 but the niceties of her features were not to be 
 gathered so cursorily. However, there sat my 
 coveted one, re-embodied ; and, bidding my 
 schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could 
 do so without suspicion, I hurried along the 
 Esplanade in the direction she and her father 
 had ridden. But they had put their horses to 
 a canter, and I could not see which way they 
 had gone. In the greatest misery I turned 
 down a side street, but was soon elevated to a 
 state of excitement by seeing the same pair 
 galloping towards me. Flushing up to my hair, 
 I stopped and heroically faced her as she 
 passed. She smiled again, but, alas ! upon my 
 Love's cheek there was no blush of passion 
 for me." 
 
 Pierston paused and drank from his glass 
 as he lived for a brief moment in the scene he 
 had conjured up. Somers reserved his com- 
 ments, and Jocelyn continued : 
 
 " That afternoon I idled about the streets, 
 looking for her in vain. When I next saw 
 one of the boys who had been with me at 
 her first passing I stealthily reminded him 
 of the incident, and asked if he knew the 
 riders. 
 
 54 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " ' Oh yes,' he said. ' That was Colonel 
 Targe and his daughter Elsie.' 
 
 " ' How old do you think she is?' said I, a 
 sense of disparity in our ages disturbing my 
 mind. 
 
 "'Oh — nineteen, I think they say. She's 
 going to be married the day after to-morrow 
 to Captain Popp, of the 501st, and they are 
 ordered off to India at once.' 
 
 " The grief which I experienced at this in- 
 telligence was such that at dusk I went away 
 to the edge of the harbor, intending to put 
 an end to myself there and then. But I had 
 been told that crabs had been found clinging 
 to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in 
 thereabout, leisurely eating them, and the idea 
 of such an unpleasant contingency deterred 
 me. I should state that the marriage of my 
 Beloved concerned me little ; it was her de- 
 parture that broke my heart. I never saw 
 her again. 
 
 " Though I had already learned that the 
 absence of the corporeal matter did not in- 
 volve the absence of the informing spirit, I 
 could scarce bring myself to believe that in 
 this case it was possible for her to return to my 
 view without the form she had last inhabited. 
 55 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " But she did. 
 
 " It was not, however, till after a good space 
 o£ time, during which I passed through that 
 bearish age in boys, their early teens, when 
 girls are their especial contempt. I was about 
 seventeen, and was sitting one evening over a 
 cup of tea in a confectioner's at the very same 
 watering-place, when opposite me a lady took 
 her seat with a little girl. We looked at each 
 other a while, the child made advances, till I 
 said, ' She's a good little thing.' 
 
 " The lady assented, and made a further re- 
 mark. 
 
 " ' She has the soft fine eyes of her mother,' 
 said I. 
 
 " ' Do you think her eyes are good ?' asks 
 the lady, as if she had not heard what she 
 had heard most — the last three words of my 
 opinion. 
 
 "'Yes — for copies,' said I, regarding her. 
 " After this we got on very well. She in- 
 formed me that her husband had gone out in 
 a yacht, and I said it was a pity he didn't take 
 her with him for the airing. She gradually 
 disclosed herself in the character of a deserted 
 young wife, and later on I met her in the 
 street without the child. She was going to 
 56 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 the landing-Stage to meet her husband, so she 
 told me ; but she did not know the way. 
 
 " I offered to show her, and did so. I will 
 not go into particulars, but I afterwards saw 
 her several times, and soon discovered that 
 the Beloved (as to whose whereabouts I had 
 been at fault so long) lurked here. Though 
 why she had chosen this tantalizing situation 
 of an inaccessible matron's form, when so 
 many others offered, it was beyond me to 
 discover. The whole affair ended innocently 
 enough, when the lady left the town with her 
 husband and child ; she seemed to regard our 
 acquaintance as a flirtation ; yet it was any- 
 thing but a flirtation for me ! 
 
 " Why should I tell the rest of the tantaliz- 
 ing tale! After this the Well-Beloved put 
 herself in evidence with greater and greater 
 frequency, and it would be impossible for me 
 to give you details of her various incarnations. 
 She came nine times in the course of the two 
 or three ensuing years. Four times she mas- 
 queraded as a brunette, twice as a pale-haired 
 creature, and two or three times under a com- 
 plexion neither light nor dark. Sometimes 
 she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I 
 
 57 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a 
 lithe, airy being, of no great stature. I grew 
 so accustomed to these exits and entrances 
 that I resigned myself to them quite passive- 
 ly, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded 
 with her, ached for her, in each of her several 
 guises. So it went on until a month ago. 
 And then for the first time I was puzzled. 
 She either had, or she had not, entered the 
 person of Avice Caro, a young girl I had 
 known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have 
 decided that, after all, she did not enter the 
 form of Avice Caro, because I retain so great 
 a respect for her still." 
 
 Pierston here gave in brief the history of 
 his revived comradeship with Avice, the verge 
 of the engagement to which they had reached, 
 and its unexpected rupture by him merely 
 through his meeting with a woman into whom 
 the Well- Beloved unmistakably moved under 
 his very eyes — by name Miss Marcia Ben- 
 comb. He described their spontaneous de- 
 cision to marry offhand; and then he put it 
 to Somers whether he ought to marry or 
 not — her or anybody else — in such circum- 
 stances. 
 
 " Certainly not," said Somers. " Though, if 
 
 S8 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 anybody, little Avice. But not even her. 
 You are like other men, only rather worse. 
 Essentially all men are fickle like you, but 
 not with such perceptiveness." 
 
 "Surely fickle is not the word? Fickle- 
 ness means getting weary of a thing while the 
 thing remains the same. But I have always 
 been faithful to the elusive creature whom I 
 have never been able to get a firm hold of, 
 unless I have done so now. And let me tell 
 you that her flitting from each to each in- 
 dividual has been anything but a pleasure for 
 me — certainly not a wanton game of my in- 
 stigation. To see the creature who has hith- 
 erto been perfect, divine, lose under your very 
 gaze the divinity which has informed her, 
 grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, 
 from a radiant vitality to a corpse, is anything 
 but a pleasure for any man, and has been 
 nothing less than a racking spectacle to my 
 sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands 
 ever after like the nest of some beautiful bird 
 from which the inhabitant has departed and 
 left it to fill with snow. I have been abso- 
 lutely miserable when I have looked in a face 
 for her I used to see there, and could see her 
 there no more." 
 
 59 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " You ought not to marry," repeated Som- 
 ers. 
 
 " Perhaps I oughtn't to ! Though poor Mar- 
 cia will be compromised, I'm afraid, if I don't. 
 . . . Was I not right in saying I am accursed 
 in this thing? Fortunately nobody but my- 
 self has suffered on account of it till now. 
 Knowing what to expect, I have seldom 
 ventured on a close acquaintance with any 
 woman, in fear of prematurely driving away 
 the dear one in her; who, however, has in 
 time gone off just the same." 
 
 Pierston . soon after took his leave. A 
 friend's advice on such a subject weighs lit- 
 tle. He quickly returned to Miss Bencomb. 
 
 She was different now. Anxiety had visi- 
 bly brought her down a notch or two, undone 
 a few degrees of- that haughty curl which her 
 lip could occasionally assume. " How long 
 you have been away!" she said, with a show 
 of impatience. 
 
 " Never mind, darling. It is all arranged," 
 said he. ■ " We shall be able to marry in a few 
 days." 
 
 " Not to-morrow ?" 
 
 " We can't to-morrow. We have not been 
 here quite long enough." 
 60 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " But how did the people at Doctors' Com- 
 mons know that ?" 
 
 "Well — I forgot that residence, real or as- 
 sumed, was necessary, and unfortunately ad- 
 mitted that we had only just arrived." 
 
 " Oh, how stupid ! But it can't be helped 
 now. I think, dear, I should have known 
 better, however." 
 
VIII 
 TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING 
 
 They lived on at the hotel some days long- 
 er, eyed curiously by the chambermaids, and 
 burst in upon every now and then by the 
 waiters as if accidentally. When they were 
 walking together, mostly in back streets for 
 fear of being recognized, Marcia was often 
 silent, and her imperious face looked gloomy. 
 
 " Dummy !" he said, playfully, on one of 
 these occasions. 
 
 "I am vexed that, by your admissions at 
 Doctors' Commons you prevented them giv- 
 ing you the license at once ! It is not nice, 
 my living on like this !" 
 
 " But we are going to marry, dear !" 
 
 " Yes," she murmured, and fell into reverie 
 again. " What a sudden resolve it was of 
 ours !" she continued. " I wish I could get 
 my father and mother's consent to our mar- 
 riage. ... As we can't complete it for another 
 62 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 day or two, a letter might be sent to them 
 and their answer received. I have a mind to 
 write." 
 
 .Pierston expressed his doubts of the wis- 
 dom of this course, which seemed to make 
 her desire it the more, and the result was a 
 tiff between them. " Since we are obliged to 
 delay it, I won't marry without their consent !" 
 she cried at last, passionately. 
 
 " Very well then, dear. Write," he said. 
 
 When they were again indoors she sat down 
 to a note, but after a while threw aside, her 
 pen despairingly. " No ; I cannot do it !" 
 she said. " I can't bend my pride to such a 
 job. Will j/oM write for me, Jocelyn ?" 
 
 " I ? I don't see why I should be the one, 
 particularly as I think it premature." 
 
 " But you have not quarrelled with my 
 father as I have done." 
 
 "Well, no. But there is a long-standing 
 antagonism, which would make it odd in me 
 to write. Wait till we are married, and then 
 I will write. ,Not till then." 
 
 " Then I suppose I must. You don't know 
 
 my father. He might forgive me marrying 
 
 into any other family without his knowledge, 
 
 but he thinks so meanly of yours on account 
 
 63 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 of the trade rivalry, that he would never par- 
 don till the day of his death my becoming a 
 Pierston secretly. I didn't see it at first." 
 
 This remark caused an unpleasant jar on 
 the mind of Pierston. Despite his indepen- 
 dent artistic position in London, he was 
 stanch to the simple old parent who had 
 stubbornly held out for so many years against 
 Bencomb's encroaching trade, and whose 
 money had educated and maintained Jocelyn 
 as an art-student in the best schools. So he 
 begged her to say no more about his family, 
 and she silently resumed her Jetter, giving 
 an address at a post-ofifice, that their quar- 
 ters might not be discovered, at least just 
 yet. 
 
 No reply came by return of post ; but, rath- 
 er ominously, some letters for Marcia that had 
 arrived at her father's since her departure were 
 sent on in silence to the address given. She 
 opened them one by one, till, on reading the 
 last, she exclaimed, " Good gracious !" and 
 burst into laughter. 
 
 " What is it ?" asked Pierston. 
 
 Marcia began to read the letter aloud. It 
 came from a faithful lover of hers, a youthful 
 Jersey gentleman, who stated that he was soon 
 64 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 going to Start for England to claim his dar- 
 ling, according to her plighted word. 
 
 She was half risible, half concerned. " What 
 shall I do ?" she said. 
 
 " Do ? My dear girl, it seems to me that 
 there is only one thing to do, and that a very 
 obvious thing. Tell him as soon as possible 
 that you are just on the point of marriage." 
 
 Marcia thereupon wrote out a reply to that 
 effect, Jocelyn helping her to shape the phrases 
 as gently as possible. 
 
 "I repeat" (her letter concluded) "that I 
 had quite forgotten ! I am deeply sorry ; but 
 that is the truth. I have told my intended 
 husband everything, and he is looking over 
 my shoulder as I write." 
 
 Said Jocelyn when he saw this set down: 
 " You might leave out the last few words. 
 They are rather an extra stab for the poor 
 boy." 
 
 " Stab ? It is not that, dear. Why does he 
 want to come bothering me? Jocelyn, you 
 ought to be very proud that I have put you 
 in my letter at all. You said yesterday that 
 I was conceited in declaring I might have 
 married that science-man I told you of. But 
 now you see there was yet another available." 
 E 65 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 He, gloomily : " Well, I don't care to hear 
 about that. To my mind this sort of thing is 
 decidedly unpleasant, though you treat it so 
 lightly." 
 
 "Well," she pouted, "I have only done half 
 what you have done !" 
 
 " What's that ?" 
 
 " I have only proved false through forgetful- 
 ness, but you have while remembering!" 
 
 "Oh yes; of course you can use Avice Caro 
 as a retort. But don't vex me about her, and 
 make me do such an unexpected thing as re- 
 gret the falseness." 
 
 She shut her mouth tight, and her face 
 flushed. 
 
 The next morning there did come an answer 
 to the ktter asking her parents' consent to her 
 union with him ; but, to Marcia's amazement, 
 her father took a line quite other than the one 
 she had expected him to take. Whether she 
 had compromised herself or whether she had 
 not seemed a question for the future rather 
 than the present with him, a native islander, 
 born when old island marriage views prevailed 
 in families ; he was fixed in his disapproval of 
 her marriage with a hated Pierston. He did 
 not consent ; he would not say more till he 
 
 66 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 could see her ; if she had any sense at all she 
 would, if still unmarried, return to the home 
 from which she had evidently been enticed. 
 He would then see what he could do for 
 her in the desperate circumstances she had 
 made for herself ; otherwise he would do 
 nothing. 
 
 Pierston could not help being sarcastic at 
 her father's evidently low estimate of him and 
 his belongings ; and Marcia took umbrage at 
 his sarcasms. 
 
 " I am the one deserving of satire if any- 
 body," she said. " I begin to feel I was a fool- 
 ish girl to run away from a father for such a 
 trumpery reason as a little scolding because I 
 had exceeded my allowance." 
 
 " I advised you to go back, Marcia." 
 
 "In a sort of way; not in the right tone. 
 You spoke most contemptuously of my father 
 as a merchant." 
 
 "I couldn't speak otherwise of him than I 
 did, I'm afraid, knowing what — " 
 
 " What have you to say against him ?" 
 
 " Nothing — to you, Marcia, beyond what is 
 matter of common notoriety. Everybody 
 knows that at one time he made it the busi- 
 ness of his life to ruin my father ; and the way 
 67 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 he alludes to me in that letter shows that his 
 enmity still continues." 
 
 " That miser ruined by an open-handed man 
 like my father !" said she. " It is like your 
 people's misrepresentations to say that." 
 
 Marcia's eyes flashed and her face burned 
 with an angry heat, the enhanced beauty which 
 this warmth might have brought being killed 
 by the rectilinear sternness of countenance 
 that came therewith. 
 
 " Marcia, this temper is too exasperating ! 
 I could give you every step of the proceeding 
 in detail — anybody could — the getting the 
 quarries one by one, and everything, my father 
 only holding his own by the most desperate 
 courage. There is no blinking facts. Our 
 parents' relations are an ugly fact in the cir- 
 cumstances of us two people who want to mar- 
 ry, and we are just beginning to. perceive it; 
 and how we are going to get over it I cannot 
 tell." 
 
 She said, steadily, " I don't think we shall 
 get over it at all !" 
 
 "We may not — we may not — altogether," 
 Pierston murmured, as he gazed at the fine 
 picture of scorn presented by his Juno's- classi- 
 cal face and dark eyes. 
 68 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 " Unless you beg my pardon for having be- 
 haved so !" 
 
 Pierston could not quite bring himself to see 
 that he had behaved badly to his too imperi- 
 ous lady, and declined to ask forgiveness for 
 what he had not done. 
 
 She thereupon left the room. Later in the 
 day she re-entered and broke a silence by say- 
 ing, bitterly : " I showed temper just now, as 
 you told me. But things have causes, and it 
 is perhaps a mistake that you should have de- 
 serted Avice for me. Instead of wedding 
 Rosaline, Romeo must needs go eloping with 
 Juliet. It was a fortunate thing for the affec- 
 tions of those two Veronese lovers that they 
 died when they did. In a short time the en- 
 mity of their families would have proved a 
 fruitful source of dissension ; Juliet would have 
 gone back to her people, he to his ; the sub- 
 ject would have split them as much as it splits 
 us. 
 
 Pierston laughed a little. But Marcia was 
 painfully serious, as he found at tea-time, when 
 she said that since his refusal to beg her par- 
 don she had been thinking over the matter 
 and had resolved to go to her aunt's, after all — 
 at any rate till her father could be induced to 
 69 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 agree to their union. Pierston was as chilled 
 by this resolve of hers as he was surprised 
 at her independence in circumstances which 
 usually make women the reverse. But he put 
 no obstacles in her way, and, with a kiss 
 strangely cold after their recent ardor, the 
 Romeo of the freestone Montagues went out 
 of the hotel, to avoid even the appearance of 
 coercing his Juliet of the rival house. When 
 he returned she was gone. 
 
 A correspondence began between these too 
 hastily pledged ones, and it was carried on in 
 terms of serious reasoning upon their awkward 
 situation on account of the family feud. They 
 saw their recent love as what it was : 
 
 "Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; 
 Too like the lightning" . . . 
 
 They saw it with an eye whose calmness, cold- 
 ness, and, it must be added, wisdom, did not 
 promise well for their reunion. 
 
 Their debates were clinched by a final letter 
 from Marcia, sent from no other place than 
 her recently left home in the isle. She in- 
 formed him that her father had appeared sud- 
 denly at her aunt's, and had induced her to 
 70 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 go home with him. She had told her father 
 all the circumstances of their elopement, and 
 what mere accidents had caused it ; he had 
 persuaded her on what she had almost been 
 convinced of by their disagreement, that all 
 thought of their marriage should be at least 
 postponed for the present; any awkwardness, 
 and even scandal, being better than that they 
 should immediately unite themselves for life 
 on the strength of a two or three days' pas- 
 sion, and be the wretched victims of a situa- 
 tion they could never change. 
 
 Pierston saw plainly enough that he owed it 
 to her father being a born islander, with all 
 the ancient island notions of the sexes lying 
 underneath his acquired conventions, that the 
 stone-merchant did not immediately insist upon 
 the usual remedy for a daughter's precipitancy 
 of action, but preferred to await issues. 
 
 But the young man still thought that Marcia 
 herself, when h'er temper had quite cooled 
 and she was more conscious of her real posi- 
 tion, would return to him in spite of the family 
 hostility. There was no social reason against 
 such a'step. In birth the pair were about on 
 one plane ; and though Marcia's family had 
 gained a start in the accumulation of wealth 
 71 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 and in the beginnings of social distinction, 
 which lent color to the feeling that the advan- 
 tages of the match would be mainly on one 
 side, Pierstoh was a sculptor who might rise to 
 fame; so that potentially their marriage could 
 not be considered inauspicious for a woman 
 who, beyond being the probable heiress to a 
 considerable fortune, had no exceptional op- 
 portunities. 
 
 Thus, though disillusioned, he felt bound in 
 honor to remain on call at his London address 
 as long as there was the slightest chance of 
 Marcia's reappearance, or of the arrival of 
 some message requesting him to join her, that 
 they might, after all, go to the altar together. 
 Yet in the night he seemed to hear sardonic 
 voices and laughter in the wind at this devel- 
 opment of his little romance, and during the 
 slow and colorless days he had to sit and be- 
 hold the mournful departure of his Well-Be- 
 loved from the form he had lately cherished, 
 till she had almost vanished away. The exact 
 moment of her complete withdrawal Pierston 
 knew not, but not many lines of her were 
 longer discernible in Marcia's remembered 
 contours, nor many sounds of her in Marcia's 
 recalled accents. Their acquaintance, though 
 72 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 SO fervid, had been too brief for such lin- 
 gering. 
 
 There came a time when he learned, through 
 a trustworthy channel, two pieces of news 
 affecting himself. One was the marriage of 
 Avice Caro with her cousin, the other that the 
 Bencombs had started on a tour round the 
 world, which was to include a visit to a rela- 
 tion of Mr. Bencomb's who was a banker in 
 San Francisco. Since retiring from his former 
 large business the stone -merchant had not 
 known what to do with his leisure, and finding 
 that travel benefited his health he had decided 
 to indulge himself thus. Although he was not 
 so informed, Pierston concluded that Marcia 
 had accompanied her parents, and he was more 
 than ever struck with what this signified — her 
 father's obstinate antagonism to her union 
 with one of his blood and name. 
 
IX 
 
 FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE 
 
 By degrees Pierston began to trace again 
 the customary lines of his existence; and his 
 profession occupied him much as of old. The 
 next year or two only once brought him ti- 
 dings, through some residents at his former 
 home, of the movements of the Bencombs. 
 The extended voyage of Marcia's parents had 
 given them quite a zest for other scenes and 
 countries ; and it was said that her father, a 
 man still in vigorous health except at brief 
 intervals, was utilizing the outlook which his 
 cosmopolitanism afforded him by investing 
 capital in foreign undertakings. What he had 
 supposed turned out to be true ; Marcia was 
 with them ; and thus the separation of himself 
 and his nearly married wife by common con- 
 sent was likely to be a permanent, one. 
 ' It seemed as if he would scarce ever again 
 discover the carnate dwelling-place of the 
 74 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 haunting minion of his imagination. Having 
 gone so near to matrimony with Marcia as 
 to apply for a license, he had felt for a long 
 while morally bound to her by the incipient 
 contract, and would not intentionally look 
 about him in search of the vanished Ideality. 
 Thus during the first year of Miss Bencomb's 
 absence, when absolutely bound to keep faith 
 with the elusive one's late incarnation if she 
 should return to claim him, this man of the" 
 odd fancy would sometimes tremble at the 
 thought of what would become of his solemn 
 intention if the Phantom were suddenly to 
 disclose herself in an unexpected quarter and 
 seduce him before he was aware. Once or 
 twice he imagined that he saw her in the dis- 
 tance — at the end of a street, on the far sands 
 of a shore, in a window, in a meadow, at the 
 opposite side of a railway station ; but he de- 
 terminedly turned on his heel and walked the 
 other way. 
 
 During the many uneventful seasons that 
 followed Marcia's stroke of independence (for 
 which he was not without a secret admiration 
 at times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations 
 that ever-bubbling spring, of emotion which, 
 without some conduit into space, will surge 
 75 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ( upward and ruin all but the greatest men. It 
 was probably owing to this, certainly not on 
 .account of any care or anxiety for such a re- 
 'sult, that he was successful in his art, success- 
 \ful by a seemingly sudden spurt, which carried 
 him at one bound over the hinderances of 
 years. 
 
 He prospered without effort. He was 
 A.R.A. 
 
 But recognitions of this sort, social distinc- 
 tions, which he had once coveted so keenly, 
 seemed to have no utility for him now. By 
 the accident of being a bachelor he was float- 
 ing in society without any soul-anchorage or 
 shrine that he could call his own ; and, for 
 want of a domestic centre round which honors 
 might crystallize, they dispersed impalpably, 
 without accumulating and adding weight to 
 his material well-being. 
 
 He would have gone on working with his 
 chisel with just as much zest if his creations 
 had been doomed to meet no mortal eye but 
 his own. This indifference to the popular re- 
 ception of his dream-figures lent him a curious 
 artistic aplomb that carried him through the 
 gusts of opinion without suffering them to dis- 
 turb his inherent bias.. 
 76 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 The study of beauty was his only joy for 
 years onward. In the streets he would ob- 
 serve a face, or a fraction of a face, which 
 seemed to express to a hair's-breadth in mu- 
 table flesh what he was at that moment wish- 
 ing to express in durable shape. He would 
 dodge and follow the owner like a detective ; 
 in omnibus, in cab, in steamboat, through 
 crowds, into shops, churches, theatres, public- 
 houses, and slums — mostly, when at close 
 quarters, to be disappointed for his pains. 
 
 In these professional beauty-chases he some- 
 times cast his eye across the Thames to the 
 wharves on the south side, and to that partic- 
 ular one whereat his father's tons of freestone 
 were daily landed from the ketches of the 
 south coast. He could occasionally discern 
 the white blocks lying there, vast cubes so 
 persistently nibbled by his parent from his 
 island rock in the English Channel that it 
 seemed as if in time it would be nibbled all 
 away. 
 
 One thing it passed him to understand — on 
 what field of observation the poets and philos- 
 ophers based their assumption that the pas- 
 sion of love was intensest in youth and burned 
 lower as maturity advanced. It was possibly 
 77 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 because of his utter domestic loneliness that, 
 during the productive interval which followed 
 the fiirst years of Marcia's departure, when he 
 was drifting along from five -and -twenty to 
 eight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved 
 with an ardor — though, it is true, also with 
 a self-control — unknown to him when he was 
 green in Judgment. 
 
 His whimsical isle -bred fancy had grown 
 to be such an emotion that the Well-Beloved 
 — now again visible — was always existing 
 somewhere near him. For months he would 
 find her on the stage of a theatre ; then she 
 would flit away, leaving the poor, empty car- 
 cass that had lodged her to mumm on as best 
 it could without her — a sorry lay figure to his 
 eyes, heaped with imperfections and sullied 
 with commonplace. She would reappear, it 
 might be, in an at first unnoticed lady — met 
 at some fashionable evening-party, exhibition, 
 bazaar, or dinner — to flit from her, in turn, 
 after a few months, and stand as a graceful 
 shop-girl at some large drapery warehouse 
 into which he had strayed on an unaccus- 
 tomed errand. Then she would forsake this 
 figure and redisclose herself in the guise of 
 78 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY 
 
 some popular authoress, piano-player, or fid- 
 dleress, at whose shrine he would worship for 
 perhaps a twelvemonth. Once she was a 
 dancing-girl at the Royal Moorish Palace of 
 Varieties, though during her whole continu- 
 ance at that establishment he never once ex- 
 changed a word with her, nor did she first or 
 last ever dream of his existence. He knew 
 that a ten minutes' conversation-in the wings 
 with the substance would send the elusive 
 haunter scurrying fearfully away into some 
 other even less accessible mask-figure. 
 
 She was a blonde, a brunette, tall, petite, 
 svelte, straight-featured, full, curvilinear. Only 
 one quality remained unalterable — her insta- 
 bility of tenure. In Home's phrase, nothing 
 was permanent in her but change. 
 
 " It is odd," he said to himself, " that this 
 experience of mine, or idiosyncrasy, or what- 
 ever it is, which would be sheer waste of time 
 for other men, creates sober business for me." 
 For all these dreams he translated into plas- 
 ter, and found that by them he was hitting a 
 public taste he had never deliberately aimed 
 at and mostly despised. He was, in short, in 
 danger of drifting away from a solid artistic 
 reputation to a popularity which might possi- 
 79 
 
THK WELL-BELOVED 
 
 bly be as brief as it would be brilliant and ex- 
 citing. 
 
 " You will be caught some day, my friend,' 
 Somers would occasionally observe to him. 
 " I don't mean to say entangled in anything 
 discreditable, for I admit that you are in prac- 
 tice as ideal as in theory. I mean the process 
 will be reversed. Some woman, whose Well- 
 Beloved flits about as yours does now, will 
 catch your eye, and you'll stick to her like a 
 limpet, while she follows her Phantom and 
 leaves you to ache as you will." 
 
 " You may be right ; but I think you are 
 wrong," said Pierston. "As flesh she dies 
 daily, like the Apostle's corporeal self; be- 
 cause when I grapple with the reality she's no 
 longer in it, so that I cannot stick to one in- 
 carnation if I would." 
 
 " Wait till you are older," said Somers. 
 
PART SECOND 
 A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
' ' Sitice Love will needs that I shall love. 
 Of very force I must agree : 
 And since no chance may it remove, 
 III wealth and in adversity 
 I shall alway myself apply 
 To serve and suffer patiently." 
 
 —Sir T. Wyatt. 
 
THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT 
 
 In the course of these long years Pierston's 
 artistic emotions were abruptly suspended by 
 the news of his father's sudden death at Sand- 
 bourne, whither the stone-merchant had gone 
 for a change of air by the advice of his phy- 
 sician. 
 
 Mr. Pierston, senior, it must be admitted, 
 had been something miserly in his home life, 
 as Marcia had so rashly reminded his son. 
 But he had never stinted Jocelyn. He had 
 been rather a hard taskmaster, though as a 
 paymaster trustworthy ; a ready-money man, 
 just and ungenerous. To every one's sur- 
 prise, the capital he had accumulated in the 
 stone trade was of large amount for a busi- 
 ness so unostentatiously carried on — much 
 larger than Jocelyn had ever regarded as pos- 
 sible. While the son had been modelling and 
 chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial 
 83 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 shapes the father had been persistently chisel- 
 hng for half a century at the crude original 
 matter of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock 
 in the Channel ; and by the aid of his cranes 
 and pulleys, his trolleys and his boats, had 
 sent off his spoil to all parts of Great Britain. 
 When Jocelyn had wound up everything and 
 disposed of the business, as recommended by 
 his father's will, he found himself enabled to 
 add about eighty thousand pounds to the 
 twelve thousand which he already possessed 
 from professional and other sources. 
 
 After arranging, for the sale of some free- 
 hold properties in the island other than quar- 
 ries—for he did not intend to reside there — 
 he returned to town. He often wondered 
 what had become of Marcia. He had prom- 
 ised never to trouble her; nor for a whole 
 twenty years had he done so ; though he had 
 often sighed for her as a friend of sterling 
 common-sense in practical difficulties. 
 
 Her parents were, he believed, dead; and 
 she, he knew, had never gone back to the isle. 
 Possibly she had formed some new tie abroad, 
 and had made it next to impossible to dis- 
 cover her by her old name. 
 
 A reposeful time ensued. Almost his first 
 84 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 entry into society after his father's death oc- 
 curred one evening when, for want of knowing 
 wh^it letter to do, he responded to an invita- 
 tion sent by one of the few ladies of rank 
 I whom he numbered among his friends, and set 
 out 'in a cab for the square wherein she lived 
 during three or four months of the year. 
 
 The hansom turned the corner, and he ob- 
 tained a raking view of the houses along the 
 north side, of which hers was one, with the 
 familiar linkman at the door. There were 
 Chinese lanterns, too, on the balcony. He 
 perceived in a moment that the customary 
 " small and early " reception had resolved it- 
 self on this occasion into something very like 
 great and late. He remembered that there 
 had just been a political crisis, which account- 
 ed for the enlargement of the Countess of 
 Channelcliffe's assembly ; for hers was one of 
 the neutral or non-political houses at which 
 party politics are more freely agitated than at 
 the professedly party gatherings. 
 
 There was such a string of.fc.carriages that 
 Pierston did not wait to take his turn at the 
 door, but unobtrusively alighted some yards 
 off and walked forward. He had to pause a 
 moment behind the wall of spectators which 
 85 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 barred his way, and as he paused some ladies 
 in white cloaks crossed from their carriages to 
 the door on the carpet laid for the purpose. 
 He had not seen their faces, nothing of them 
 but vague forms, and yet he was suddenly 
 ' seized with a presentiment. Its gist was that 
 he might be going to re-encounter the Well- 
 Beloved that night ; after her recent long hid- 
 ing she meant to reappear and intoxicate him. 
 That liquid sparkle of her eye, that lingual 
 music, that turn of the head, how well he 
 knew it all, despite the many superficial 
 changes! and how instantly he would recog- 
 nize it under whatever complexion, contour, 
 accent, height, or carriage it might choose to 
 masquerade ! 
 
 Pierston's other conjecture, that the night 
 was to be a lively political one, received con- 
 firmation as soon as he reached the hall, 
 where a simmer of excitement was perceptible 
 as surplus or overflow from above down the 
 staircase — a feature which he had always no- 
 ticed to be present when any climax or sensa- 
 tion had been reached in the world of party 
 and faction. 
 r " And where have you been keeping your- 
 j self so long, young man ?" said his hostess, 
 ^- 85 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 archly, when he had shaken hands with her. 
 (Pierston was always regarded as a young 
 man, though he was now about forty.) " Oh 
 yes, of course, I remember," she added, look- 
 ing serious in a moment at thought of his loss. 
 The Countess was a woman with a good- 
 natured manner, verging on that oft-claimed 
 feminine quality, humor, and was quickly 
 sympathetic. 
 
 She then began to tell him of a scandal in 
 the political side to which she nominally be- 
 longed, one that had come out of the present 
 crisis; and that, as for herself, she had sworn 
 to abjure politics forever on account of it, so 
 that he was to regard her forthwith as a more 
 neutral householder than ever. By this time 
 some more people had surged upstairs, and 
 Pierston prepared to move on. 
 
 "You are looking for somebody — I can see 
 that," said she. 
 
 " Yes — a lady," said Pierston. 
 
 " Tell me her name, and I'll try to think if 
 she's here." 
 
 " I cannot ; I don't know it," he said. 
 
 " Indeed ! What is she like?" 
 
 " I cannot describe her, not even her com- 
 plexion or dress." 
 
 87 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Lady Channelcliffe looked a pout, as if she 
 thought he were teasing her, and he moved on 
 in the current. The fact was that, for a moment, 
 Pierston fancied he had made the sensational 
 discovery that the One he was in search of 
 lurked in the person of the very hostess he 
 had conversed with, who was charming always, 
 and particularly charming to-night; he was 
 just feeling an incipient consternation at the 
 possibility of such a jade's trick in his Beloved, 
 who had once before chosen to embody her- 
 self as a married woman, though happily at 
 that time with no serious results. However, 
 he felt that he had been mistaken, and that 
 the fancy had been solely owing to the highly 
 charged electric condition in which he had 
 arrived by reason of his recent isolation. 
 
 The whole set of rooms formed one great 
 utterance of the opinions of the hour. The 
 gods of party were present with their em- 
 battled seraphim, but the brilliancy of manner 
 and form in the handling of public questions 
 was only less conspicuous than the paucity of 
 original ideas. No principles of wise govern- 
 ment had place in any mind, a blunt and jolly 
 personalism as to the Ins and Outs animating 
 all. But Jocelyn's interest did not run in this 
 88 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 stream j he was like a stone in a purling brook, 
 waiting for some peculiar floating object to 
 be brought towards him and to stick upon his 
 mental surface. 
 
 Thus looking for the next new version of 
 the fair figure, he did not consider at . the 
 moment, though he had done so at other times, 
 that this presentiment of meeting her was, of 
 all presentiments, just the sort of one to work 
 out its own fulfilment. 
 
 He looked for her in the knot of persons 
 gathered round a past prime-minister, who was 
 standing in the middle of the largest room dis- 
 coursing in the genial, almost jovial, manner 
 natural to him at these times. The two or 
 three ladies forming his audience had been 
 joined by another in black and white, and it 
 was on her that Pierston's attention was di- 
 rected, as well as the great statesman's, whose 
 first sheer gaze at her, expressing " Who are 
 you ?" almost audibly, changed into an inter- 
 ested, listening look as the few words she 
 spoke were uttered — for the minister differed 
 from many of his standing in being extremely 
 careful not to interrupt a timid speaker, giving 
 way in an instant if anybody else began with 
 him. Nobody knew better than himself that 
 89 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 all may learn, and his manner was that of an 
 un conceited man who could catch an idea 
 readily, even if he could not undertake to 
 create one. 
 
 The lady told her little story — whatever it 
 was Jocelyn could not hear it — the statesman 
 laughed " Haugh-haugh-haugh !" 
 
 The lady blushed. Jocelyn, wrought up to 
 a high tension by the aforesaid presentiment 
 that his Shelleyan "One-shape-of-many-names" 
 was about to reappear, paid little heed to the 
 others, watching for a full view of the lady 
 who had won his attention. 
 
 That lady remained for the present partially 
 screened by her neighbors. A diversion was 
 caused by Lady ChannelcHffe bringing up 
 somebody to present to the ex-minister ; the 
 ladies got mixed, and Jocelyn lost sight of the 
 one whom he was beginning to suspect as the 
 stealthily returned absentee. 
 
 He looked for her in a kindly young lady of 
 the house, his hostess's relation, who appeared 
 to more advantage that night than she had 
 ever done before — in a sky-blue dress, which 
 had nothing between it and the fair skin of her 
 neck, lending her an unusually soft and sylph- 
 like aspect. She saw him, and they converged. 
 90 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 Her look of " What do you think of me noivf" 
 was suggested, he knew, by the thought that 
 the last time they met she had appeared un- 
 der the disadvantage of mourning clothes, on 
 a wet day, in a country-house where every- 
 body was cross. 
 
 " I have some new photographs, and I want 
 you to tell me whether they are good," she 
 said. " Mind, you are to tell me truly, and no 
 favor." 
 
 She produced the pictures from an adjoining 
 drawer, and they sat down together upon an 
 ottoman for the purpose of examination. The 
 portraits, taken by the last fashionable photog- 
 rapher, were very good, and he told her so ; 
 but as he spoke and compared them his mind 
 was fixed on something else than the mere 
 judgment. He wondered whether the elusive 
 one were indeed in the frame of this girl. 
 
 He looked up at her. To his surprise, her 
 mind, too, was on other things bent than on 
 the pictures. Her eyes were glancing away to 
 distant people ; she was apparently consider- 
 ing the effect she was producing upon them by 
 this cozy tete-k-tete with Pierston, and upon 
 one in particular, a man of thirty, of military 
 appearance, whom Pierston did not know. 
 91 
 
THE WELL-BKLOVED 
 
 Quite convinced now that no phantom belong- 
 ing to him was contained in the outlines of the 
 present young lady, he could coolly survey her 
 as he responded. They were both doing the 
 same thing — each was pretending to be deeply 
 interested in what the other was talking about, 
 the attention of the two alike flitting away to 
 other corners of the room even when the very 
 point of their discourse was pending. 
 
 No, he had not seen her yet. He was not 
 going to see her, apparently, to-night ; she was 
 scared away by the twanging political atmos- 
 phere. But he still moved on searchingly, 
 hardly heeding certain spectral, imps other than 
 Aphroditean who always haunted these places, 
 and jeeringly pointed out that under the white 
 hair of this or that ribboned old man, with a 
 forehead grown wrinkled over treaties which 
 had swayed the fortunes of Europe, with a 
 voice which had numbered sovereigns among 
 its respectful listeners, might be a heart that 
 would go inside a nutshell ; that beneath this 
 or that white rope of pearl and pink bosom 
 might lie the half-lung which had, by hook or 
 by crook, to sustain its possessor above ground 
 till the wedding-day. 
 
 At that moment he encountered his amiable 
 92 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 host, and almost simultaneously caught sight 
 of the lady who had at first attracted him and 
 then had disappeared. Their eyes met, far off 
 as they were from each other. Pierston laughed 
 inwardly; it was only in ticklish excitement 
 as to whether this was to prove a true trou- 
 vaille, and with no instinct to mirth ; for when 
 under the eyes of his Jill-o'-the-Wisp he was 
 more inclined to palpitate like a sheep in a fair. 
 
 However, for the minute he had to converse 
 with his host. Lord Channelcliffe, and almost 
 the first thing that friend said to him was, 
 " Who is that pretty woman in the black dress 
 with the white fluff about it and the pearl 
 necklace ?" 
 
 " I don't know," said Jocelyn, with incipient 
 jealousy ; " I was just going to ask the same 
 thing." 
 
 " Oh, we shall find out presently, I suppose. 
 I dare say my wife knows." They had parted, 
 when a hand came upon his shoulder. Lord 
 Channelcliffe had turned back for an instant : 
 " I find she is the granddaughter of my father's 
 old friend, the last Lord Hengistbury. Her 
 name is Mrs. — Mrs. Pine-Avon; she lost her 
 husband two or three years ago, very shortly 
 after their marriage." 
 
 93 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Lord Channelcliffe became absorbed into 
 some adjoining dignitary of the Church, and 
 Pierston was left to pursue his quest alone. A 
 young friend of his— the Lady Mabella But- 
 termead, who appeared in a cloud of muslin 
 and was going on to a ball — had been brought 
 against him by the tide. A warm-hearted, 
 emotional girl was Lady Mabella, who laughed 
 at the humorousness of being alive. She asked 
 him whither he was bent, and he told her. 
 
 " Oh yes, I know her very well !" said Lady 
 Mabella eagerly. " She told me one day that 
 she particularly wished to meet you. Poor 
 thing — so sad — she lost her husband. Well, it 
 was a long time ago now, certainly! Women 
 ought not to marry and lay themselves open to 
 such catastrophes, ought they, Mr. Pierston? 
 T never shall. I am determined never to run 
 such a risk ! Now, do you think I shall ?" 
 
 "Marry? Oh no; never," said Pierston, dryly. 
 
 " That's very comforting." But Mabella was 
 scarcely comfortable under the answer, even 
 though jestingly returned, and she added: 
 " But sometimes I think I may, just for the fun 
 of it. . . . Now we'll steer across to her and 
 catch her, and I'll introduce you. But we'shall 
 never get to her at this rate !" 
 94 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 " Never, unless we adopt ' the ugly rush,' 
 like the citizens who follow the Lord Mayor's 
 Show." 
 
 They talked, and inched towards the de- 
 sired one, who, as she discoursed with a neigh- 
 bor, seemed one of those 
 
 " Female forms, whose gestures beam with mind," 
 
 seen by the poet in his Vision of the Golden 
 City of Islam. 
 
 Their progress was continually checked. 
 Pierston was, as he had sometimes seemed 
 to be, in a dream, unable to advance towards 
 the object of pursuit unless he could have 
 gathered up his feet into the air. After ten 
 minutes given to a preoccupied regard of 
 shoulder-blades, back hair, glittering head- 
 gear, neck-napes, moles, hairpins, pearl-pow- 
 der, pimples, minerals cut into facets of many- 
 colored rays, necklace-clasps, fans, stays, the 
 seven styles ^ elbow and arm, the thirteen 
 varieties of e*, and by using the toes of his 
 dress-boots as colters, with which he ploughed 
 his way and that of Lady Mabella in the 
 direction they were aiming at, he drew near 
 to Mrs. Pine- Avon, who was drinking a cup 
 of tea in the back drawing-room. 
 95 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " My dear Nichola, we thought we should 
 never get to you, because it is worse to-night, 
 owing to these dreadful politics! But we've 
 done it." And she proceeded to tell her 
 friend of Pierston's existence hard by. 
 
 It seemed that the widow really did wish 
 to know him, and that Lady Mabella Butter- 
 mead had not indulged in one of the too fre- 
 quent inventions of that kind. When the 
 youngest of the trio had made the pair ac- 
 quainted with each other she left them to 
 talk to a younger man than the sculptor. 
 
 Mrs. Pine-Avon's black velvets and silks, 
 with their white accompaniments, finely set 
 off the exceeding fairness of her neck and 
 shoulders, which, though unwhitened artifi- 
 cially, were without a speck or blemish of the 
 least degree. The gentle, thoughtful creature 
 she had looked from a distance she now 
 proved herself to be; she held also sound 
 rather than current opinions on the plastic 
 arts, and was the first intellectual woman he 
 had seen there that night, except one or two 
 as aforesaid. 
 
 They soon became well acquainted, and at 
 a pause in their conversation noticed the new 
 excitement caused by the arrival of some late- 
 96 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 comers with more news. The latter had been 
 brought by a rippling, bright-eyed lady in 
 black, who made the men listen to her, 
 whether they would or no. 
 
 " I am glad I am an outsider," said Joce- 
 lyn's acquaintance, now seated on a sofa be- 
 side which he was standing. " I wouldn't be 
 like my cousin over there for the world. 
 She thinks her husband will be turned out 
 at the next election, and she's quite wild." 
 
 " Yes ; it is mostly the women who are the 
 gamesters ; the men only the cards. The pity 
 is that politics are looked on as being a game 
 for politicians, just as cricket is a game for 
 cricketers ; not as the serious duties of politi- 
 cal trustees." 
 
 " How few of us ever think or feel that 'the 
 nation of every country dwells in the cottage,' 
 as somebody says !" 
 
 " Yes ; though I wonder to hear you quote 
 that." 
 
 "Oh — I am of no party, though my relations 
 are. There can be only one best course at all 
 times, and the wisdom of the nation should be 
 directed to finding it, instead of zigzagging in 
 two courses, according to the will of the party 
 which happens to have the upper hand." 
 G 97 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Having started thus, they found no diffi- 
 culty in agreeing on many points. When 
 Pierston went down -stairs from that assem- 
 bly at a quarter to one, and passed under the 
 steaming nostrils of an ambassador's horses 
 to a hansom which waited for him against the 
 railing of the square, he had an impression 
 that the Beloved had re -emerged from the 
 shadows, without any hint or initiative from 
 him — to whom, indeed, such re-emergence 
 was an unquestionably awkward thing. 
 
 In this he was aware, however, that though 
 it might be now, as heretofore, the Loved who 
 danced before him, it was the goddess behind 
 her who pulled the string of that Jumping Jill. 
 
 He had lately been trying his artist hand 
 again on the Dea's form in every conceivable 
 phase and mood. He had become a one-part 
 man — a presenter of her only. But his efforts 
 had resulted in failures. In her implacable 
 vanity she might be punishing him anew for 
 presenting her so deplorably. 
 
II 
 
 SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES 
 
 He could not forget Mrs. Pine-Avon's eyes, 
 though he remembered nothing of her other 
 facial details. They were round, inquiring, 
 luminous. How that chestnut hair of hers 
 had shone ! It required no tiara to set it off, 
 like that of the dowager he had seen there, 
 who had put ten thousand pounds upon her 
 head to make herself look worse than she 
 would have appeared with the ninepenny mus- 
 lin cap of a servant-woman. 
 
 Now the question was, ought he to see her 
 again ? He had his doubts. But, unfortu- 
 nately for discretion, just when he was com- 
 ing, out of the rooms he had encountered an 
 old lady of seventy, his friend Mrs. Bright- 
 walton — the Honorable Mrs. Brightwalton — 
 and she had hastily asked him to dinner for 
 the day after the morrow, stating in the hon- 
 est way he knew so well that she had heard 
 99 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 he was out of town or she would have asked 
 him two or three weeks ago. Now, of all so- 
 cial things that Pierston liked it was ■ to be 
 asked to dinner offhand, as a stop-gap in place 
 of some bishop, lord, or under-secretary who 
 couldn't come ; and when the invitation was 
 supplemented by the tidings that the lady 
 who had so impressed him was to be one of 
 the guests, he had promised instantly. 
 
 At the dinner he took down Mrs. Pine-Avon 
 upon his arm, and talked to nobody else dur- 
 ing the meal. Afterwards they kept apart 
 awhile in the drawing-room for form's sake, 
 but eventually gravitated together again, and 
 finished the evening in each other's company. 
 When, shortly after eleven, he came away he 
 felt almost certain that within those luminous 
 gray eyes the One of his eternal fidehty had 
 verily taken lodgings — and for a long lease. 
 But this was not all. At parting he had, al- 
 most involuntarily, given her hand a pressure 
 of a pecuHar and indescribable kind ; a little 
 response from her, like a mere pulsation of the 
 same sort, told him that the impression she had 
 made upon him was reciprocated. She was, in 
 a word, willing to go on. 
 
 But was he able ? 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 There had not been much harm in the flirta- 
 tion thus far ; but did she know his history, 
 the curse upon his nature ? — that he was the 
 Wandering Jew of the love-world ; how rest- 
 lessly ideal his fancies were ; how the artist 
 in him had consumed the wooer ; how he was 
 in constant dread lest he should wrong some 
 woman twice as good as himself by seeming 
 to mean what he fain would mean but could 
 not ; how useless he was likely to be for prac- 
 tical steps towards householding, though he 
 was all the while pining for domestic life ? He 
 was now over forty, she was probably thirty ; 
 and he dared not make unmeaning love with 
 the careless selfishness of a younger man. It 
 was unfair to go further without telling her, 
 even though hitherto such explicitness had 
 not been absolutely demanded. 
 
 He determined to call immediately on the 
 New Incarnation. 
 
 She lived not far from the long- fashionable 
 Hamptonshire Square, and he went hither with 
 expectations of having a highly emotional 
 time, at least. But somehow the very bell- 
 pull seemed cold, although she had so ear- 
 nestly asked him to come. 
 
 As the house spoke, so spoke the occupant, 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 much to the astonishment of the sculptor. 
 The doors he passed through seemed as if 
 they had not been opened for a month; and, 
 entering the large drawing-room, he beheld, 
 in an easy- chair in the far distance, a lady 
 whom he journeyed across the carpet to reach, 
 and ultimately did reach. To be sure, it was 
 Mrs. Nichola Pine-Avon, but frosted over in- 
 describably. Raising her eyes in a slightly 
 inquiring manner from the book she was read- 
 ing, she leaned back in the chair, as if soaking 
 herself in luxurious sensations which had noth- 
 ing to do with him, and replied to his greet- 
 ing with a few commonplace words. 
 
 The unfortunate Jocelyn, though recupera- 
 tive to a degree, was at first terribly upset by 
 this reception. He had distinctly begun to 
 love Nichola, and he felt sick and almost re- 
 'sentful. But happily his affection was incip- 
 ient as yet, and a sudden sense of the ridicu- 
 lous in his own position carried him to the 
 verge of risibility during the scene. She sig- 
 nified a chair, and began the critical study of 
 some rings she wore. 
 
 They talked over the day's news, and then 
 an organ began to grind outside. The tune 
 was a rollicking air he had heard at some 
 
 102 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 music-hall ; and, by way of a diversion, he 
 asked her if she knew the composition. 
 
 "No, I don't," she replied. 
 
 "Now, I'll tell you all about it," said he, 
 gravely. " It is based on a sound old melo- 
 dy called 'The Jilt's Hornpipe.' Just as they 
 turn Madeira into port in the space of a single 
 night, so this old air hag been taken and doc- 
 tored and twisted about and brought out as 
 a new popular ditty." 
 
 " Indeed !" 
 
 " If you are in the habit of going much to 
 the music-halls or the burlesque theatres — " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 "You would find this is often done, with 
 excellent effect." 
 
 She thawed a little, and then they went on 
 to talk about her house, which had been new- 
 ly painted, and decorated with greenish-blue 
 satin up to the height of a person's head — 
 an arrangement that somewhat improved her 
 slightly faded, though still pretty, face, and 
 was helped by the awnings over the windows. 
 
 " Yes ; I have had my house some years," 
 she observed, complacently, " and I like it 
 better every year." 
 
 "Don't you feel lonely i|n it sometimes?" 
 103 
 
THE WELI^BELOVED 
 
 "Oh, never!" 
 
 However, before he rose she grew friendly 
 to some degree, and when he left, just after 
 the arrival of three opportune young ladies, 
 she seemed regretful. She asked him to come 
 again ; and he thought he would tell the truth. 
 " No ; I shall not care to come again," he an- 
 swered, in a tone inaudible to the young 
 ladies. 
 
 She followed him to the door. " What an 
 uncivil thing to say !" she murmured, in sur- 
 prise. 
 
 "It is rather uncivil. Good-bye," said 
 Pierston. 
 
 As a punishment she did not ring the bell, 
 but left him to find his way out as he could. 
 " Now what the devil this means I cannot tell," 
 he said to himself, reflecting stock-still for a 
 moment on the stairs. And yet the meaning 
 was staring him in the face. 
 
 Meanwhile one of the three young ladies 
 had said, "What interesting man was that, 
 with his lovely head of hair? I saw him at 
 Lady Channelcliffe's the other night." 
 
 " Jocelyn Pierston." 
 y " Oh, Nichola, that is too bad ! To let him 
 go in that shabby way, when I would have 
 104 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 given anything to know him ! I have wanted 
 to know him ever since I found out how much 
 his experiences had dictated his statuary, and 
 I discovered them by seeing in a Jersey paper 
 notice of the marriage of a person supposed to 
 be his wife, who ran off with him many years 
 ago, don't you know, and then wouldn't marry 
 him, in obedience to some novel social prin- 
 ciples she had invented for herself." 
 
 " Oh ! didn't he marry her?" said Mrs. Pine- 
 Avon, with a start. "Why, I heard only yes- 
 terday that he did, though they have liy§d 
 apart ever since." 
 
 " Quite a mistake," said the young lady. 
 " How I wish I could run after him !" 
 
 But Jocelyn was receding from the pretty 
 widow's house with long strides. He went 
 out very little during the next few days, but 
 about a week later he kept an engagement to 
 dine with Lady Iris Speedwell, whom he nev- 
 er neglected, because she was the brightest 
 hostess in London. 
 
 By some accident he arrived rather early. 
 Lady Iris had left the drawing-room for a mo- 
 ment to see that all was right in the dining- 
 room, and when he was shown in, there stood 
 alone in the lampHght Nichola Pine-Avon, 
 105 
 
THE WELL-BEUOVED 
 
 She had been the first arrival. He had not in 
 the least expected to meet her there, further 
 than that, in a general sense, at Lady Iris's 
 you expected to meet everybody. 
 
 She had just come out of the cloak-room, 
 and was so tender and even apologetic that he 
 had not the heart to be other than friendly. 
 As the other guests dropped in, the pair re- 
 treated into a shady corner, and she talked 
 beside him till all moved off for the eating and 
 drinking. 
 
 He had not been appointed to take her 
 across to the dining-room, but at the table 
 found her exactly opposite. She looked very 
 charming between the candles,. and then sud- 
 denly it dawned upon him that her previous 
 manner must have originated in some false 
 report about Marcia, of whose existence he 
 had not heard for years. Anyhow, he was 
 not disposed to resent an inexplicability in 
 womankind, having found that it usually arose 
 independently of fact, reason, probability, or 
 his own deserts. 
 
 So he dined on, catching her eyes and the 
 
 few pretty words she made opportunity to 
 
 project across the table to him now and then. 
 
 He was courteously responsive only, but Mrs. 
 
 io6 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 Pine-Avon herself distinctly made advances. 
 He readmired her, while at the same time her 
 conduct in her own house had been enough 
 to check his confidence — enough even to make 
 him doubt if the Well-Beloved really resided 
 within those contours, or had ever been more 
 than the most transitory passenger thvough 
 that interesting and accomplished soul. 
 
 He was pondering this question, yet growing 
 decidedly moved by the playful pathos of her 
 attitude, when, by chance searching his pocket 
 for his handkerchief, something crackled, and 
 he felt there an unopened letter, which had 
 arrived at the moment he was leaving his 
 house and he had slipped into his coat to read 
 in the cab as he drove along. Pierston drew it 
 sufficiently forth to observe by the post-mark 
 that it came from his natal isle. Having hardly 
 a correspondent in that part of the world, now 
 he began to conjecture on the possible sender. 
 
 The lady on his right, whom he had brought 
 in, was a leading actress of the town — indeed, 
 of the United Kingdom and America, for that 
 matter — a creature in airy clothing, trans- 
 lucent, like a balsam or sea-anemone, without 
 shadows, and in movement as responsive as 
 some highly lubricated, many-wired machine 
 ^ 107 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 which, if one presses a particular spring, flies 
 open and reveals its works. The spring in the 
 present case was the artistic commendation 
 she deserved. At this particular moment she 
 was engaged with the man on her right, a rep- 
 resentative of Family, who talked positively 
 and hollowly, as if shouting down a vista of 
 five hundred years from the feudal past. The 
 lady on Jocelyn's left, wife of a Lord Justice of 
 Appeal, was in like manner talking to her com- 
 panion on the outer side ; so that for the time 
 he was left to himself. He took advantage of 
 the opportunity, drew out his letter, and read 
 it as it lay upon his napkin, nobody observing 
 him, so far as he was aware. 
 
 It came from the wife of one of his father's 
 former workmen, and was concerning her son, 
 whom she begged Jocelyn to recommend as 
 candidate for some post in town that she 
 wished him to fill. But the end of the letter 
 was what arrested him : 
 
 " You will be sorry to hear, sir, that dear little Avice 
 Caro, as we used to call her in her maiden days, is 
 dead. She married her cousin, if you do mind, and 
 went away from here for a good few years, but was 
 left a widow, and came back a twelvemonth ago; since 
 when she faltered and faltered, and now she is gone." 
 io8 
 
in 
 
 SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST 
 
 By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene 
 at the dinner -table receded into the back- 
 ground, behind the vivid presentment of Avice 
 Caro and the old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia 
 which were inseparable from her personality. 
 The dining-room was real no more, dissolving 
 under the bold, stony promontory and the in- 
 coming West Sea. The handsome marchioness 
 in geranium-red and diamonds, who was visible 
 to him on his host's right hand opposite, be- 
 came one of the glowing vermilion sunsets 
 that he had watched so many times over 
 Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in the 
 foreground. Between his eyes and the judge 
 who sat next to Nichola, with a chin so raw 
 that he must have shaved every quarter of 
 an hour during the day, intruded the face of 
 Avice as she had glanced at him in their last 
 parting. The crannied features of the old so- 
 log 
 
THK WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ciety lady, who, if she had been a few years 
 older, would have been as old-fashioned as her 
 daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty 
 quarries of his and Avice's parents, down 
 which he had clambered with Avice hundreds 
 of times. The ivy trailing about the table- 
 cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks, and 
 the bunches of flowers were transmuted into 
 the ivies of the cliff-built castle, the tufts of 
 seaweed, and the lighthouses on the isle. The 
 salt airs of the ocean killed the smell of the 
 viands, and instead of the clatter of voices, 
 came the monologue of the tide off the Beal. 
 
 More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the 
 blooming radiance which she had latterly ac- 
 quired; she became a woman of his acquaint- 
 ance with no distinctive traits; she seemed to 
 grow material, a superficies of flesh and bone 
 merely, a person of lines and surfaces ; she was 
 a language in living cipher no more. 
 
 When the ladies had withdrawn it was just 
 the same. The soul of Avice — the only woman 
 he had never loved of those who had loved him 
 — surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew 
 near to him in the person of one of the most 
 distinguished of portrait -painters; but there 
 was only one painter for Jocelyn — his own 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 memory. All that was eminent in European 
 surgery addressed him in the person of that 
 harmless and unassuming fogy whose hands 
 had been inside the bodies of hundreds of 
 living men; but the Hly- white corpse of an 
 obscure country-girl chilled the interest of dis- 
 course with such a king of operators. 
 
 Reaching the drawing-room, he talked to 
 his hostess. Though she had entertained 
 twenty guests at her table that night she had 
 known not only what every one of them was 
 saying and doing throughout the repast, but 
 what every one was thinking. So, being an 
 old friend, she said, quietly, " What has been 
 troubling you? Something has, I know. I 
 have been travelling over your face and have 
 seen it there." 
 
 Nothing could less express the meaning his 
 recent news had for him than a statement of 
 its facts. He told of the opening ofcthe letter 
 and the discovery of the death of an old ac- 
 quaintance. 
 
 " The only woman whom I never valued, I 
 may almost say," he added ; " and therefore 
 the only one I shall ever regret." 
 
 Whether she considered it a sufficient ex- 
 planation or not, the woman of experiences 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 accepted it as such. She was the single lady 
 of his circle whom nothing erratic in his 
 doings could surprise, and he often gave her 
 stray ends of his confidence thus with perfect 
 safety. 
 
 He did not go near Mrs. Pine-Avon again ; 
 he could not ; and on leaving the house 
 walked abstractedly along the streets till he 
 found himself at his own door. In his own 
 room he sat down, and, placing his hands be- 
 hind his head, thought his thoughts anew. 
 
 At one side of the room stood an escritoire, 
 and from a lower drawer therein he took out 
 a small box tightly nailed down. He forced 
 the cover with the poker. The box contained 
 a variety of odds and ends, which Pierston 
 had thrown into it from time to time in past 
 years for future sorting — an intention that he 
 had never carried out. From the melancholy, 
 mass of papers — faded photographs, seals, di- 
 aries, withered flowers, and such hke — Joce- 
 lyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass 
 in the primitive days of photography, and 
 framed with tinsel in the commonest way. 
 
 It was Avice Caro, as she had appeared 
 during the summer month or two which he 
 had spent with her on the island twenty^ years 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 before this time, her young lips pursed up, her 
 hands meekly folded. The effect of the glass 
 was to "lend to the picture much of the soft- 
 ness characteristic of the original. He re- 
 membered when it was taken — during dne 
 afternoon they had spent together at a neigh- 
 boring watering-place, when he had suggested 
 her sitting to a touring artist on the sands, 
 there being nothing else for them to do. A 
 long contemplation of the likeness completed 
 in his emotions what the letter had begun. 
 He loved the woman dead and inaccessible 
 as he had never loved her in life. He had 
 thought of her but at distant intervals during 
 the twenty years since that parting occurred, 
 and only as somebody he could have : wed'- 
 ded. Yet now the times of youthful friend- 
 ship with her, in which he had learned every 
 note of her innocent nature, flamed up into 
 a yearning and passionate attachment, embit- 
 tered by regret beyond words. 
 
 That kiss which had offended his dignity, 
 which she had so childishly given him before 
 her consciousness of womanhood had been 
 awakened, what he would have offered to 
 have a quarter of it now ! 
 
 Pie»ston was almost angry with himself for 
 H 113 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 his feelings of. this night, so unreasonably, 
 motivelessly strong were they towards the 
 ^lost young playmate, " How senseless of me!" 
 he said, as he lay in his lonely bed. She had 
 been another man's wife almost the whole 
 time since he was estranged from her, and 
 now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did 
 not make his grief the less ; and the con- 
 sciousness of the intrinsic, almost radiant, 
 purity of this new-sprung affection for a flown 
 spirit forbade him to check it. The flesh was 
 absent altogether ; it was love rarefied and re- 
 fined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing 
 like it before. 
 
 The next afternoon he went down to the 
 club ; not his large club, where the men hard- 
 ly spoke to each other, but the homely one, 
 where they told stories of an afternoon, and 
 were not ashamed to confess among them- 
 selves to personal weaknesses and follies, 
 knowing well that such secrets would go no 
 farther. But he could not tell this. So 
 volatile and intangible was the story that to 
 convey it in words would have been as hard 
 as to cage a perfume. 
 
 They observed his altered manner and said 
 he was in love. Pierston admitted that he 
 114 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 was; and there it ended. When he reached 
 home he looked out of his bedroom window, 
 and began to consider in what direction from 
 where he stood that darling little figure lay. 
 It was straight across there, under the young 
 pale moon. The symbol signified well. The 
 divinity of the silver bow was not more ex- 
 cellently pure than she, the lost, had been. 
 Under that moon was the island of Ancient 
 Slingers, and on the island a house, framed 
 from mullions to chimney-top like the isle 
 itself, of stone. Inside the window, the moon- 
 light irradiating her winding-sheet, lay Avice, 
 reached only by the faint noises inherent in 
 the isle; the tink-tink of the chisels in the 
 quarries, the surging of the tides in the bay, 
 and the mufHed grumbling of the currents in 
 the never-pacified race. 
 
 He began to divine the truth. Avice, the 
 departed one, though she had come short, of 
 inspiring a passion, had yet possessed a ground- 
 quality absent from her rivals, without which 
 it seemed that a fixed and full-rounded con- 
 stancy to a woman could not flourish in him. 
 Like his own, her family had been islanders for 
 centuries — from Norman, Anglian, Roman, 
 Balearic-British times. Hence, in her nature, 
 "5 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 as in his, was some mysterious ingredient 
 sucked from the isle; otherwise a racial in- 
 stinct necessary to the absolute unison of a pair. 
 Thus, though he might never love a woman of 
 the island race, for lack in her of the desired 
 refinement, he could not love long a kimberlin 
 — a woman other than of the island race, for 
 her lack of this groundwork of character. 
 
 Such was Pierston's view of things. Another 
 fancy of his, an artist's superstition merely, 
 may be mentioned. The Caros, like some oth- 
 er local families, suggested a Roman lineage, 
 more or less grafted on the stock of the Sling- 
 ers. Their features recalled those of the Italian 
 peasantry to any one as familiar as he was with 
 them ; and there were evidences that the Ro- 
 man colonists had been populous and long- 
 abiding in and near this corner of Britain. 
 Tradition urged that a temple to Venus once 
 stood at the top of the Roman road leading up 
 into the isle; and possibly one to the love- 
 goddess of the Slingers antedated this. What 
 so natural as that the true star of his soul 
 would be found nowhere but in one of the old 
 island breed? 
 
 After dinner his old friend Somers came in 
 to smoke, and when they had talked a little 
 Ii6 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 while Somers alluded casually to some place at 
 which they would meet on the morrow. 
 
 " I sha'n't be there," said Pierston. 
 
 " But you promised!" 
 
 " Yes. But I shall be at the island — looking 
 at a dead woman's grave." As he spoke his 
 eyes turned and remained fixed on a table 
 near. Somers followed the direction of his 
 glaiice to a photograph on a stand. 
 
 " Is that she ?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Rather a bygone affair, then." 
 
 Pierston acknowledged it. " She's the only 
 sweetheart I ever slighted, Alfred," he said. 
 "Because she's the only one I ought to have 
 cared for. That's just the fool I have always 
 been." 
 
 " But if she's dead and buried you can go to 
 her grave at any time as well as now to keep 
 up the sentiment." 
 
 " I don't know that she's buried." 
 
 " But to-morrow — the Academy night ! Of 
 all days, why go then?" 
 
 " I don't care about the Academy." 
 
 " Pierston — you are our only inspired sculp- 
 tor. You are our Praxiteles, or rather our 
 Lysippus. You are almost the only man of 
 "7 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 this generation who has been able to mould 
 and chisel forms living enough to draw the 
 idle public away from the popular paintings 
 into the usually deserted lecture- room; and 
 people who have seen your last pieces of stuff 
 say there has been nothing like them since 
 sixteen hundred and — since the sculptors ' of 
 the great race ' lived and died, whenever that 
 was. Well, then, for the sake of others you 
 ought not to rush off to that God-forgotten 
 sea-rock just when you are wanted in town, all 
 for a woman you last saw a hundred years 
 ago." 
 
 " No — it was only nineteen and three quar- 
 ters," replied his friend, with abstracted literal- 
 ness. He went the next morning. 
 
 Since the days of his youth a railway had 
 been constructed along the pebble bank, so 
 that, except when the rails were washed away 
 by the tides, which was rather often, the pen- 
 insula was quickly accessible. At two o'clock 
 in the afternoon he was rattled along by this 
 new means of locomotion, under the familiar 
 monotonous line of bran-colored stones, and he 
 soon emerged from the station, standing as a 
 strange exotic among the black lerrets, the 
 ruins of the washed-away village, and the white 
 ii8 
 
A VOUNG MAN OF TORTY 
 
 cubes of oolite, just come to view after burial 
 through unreckonable geologic years. 
 
 In entering upon the pebble beach the train 
 had passed close to the ruins of Henry the 
 Eighth's or Sandsfoot Castle, whither Avice 
 was to have accompanied him on the night of 
 his departure. Had she appeared the primi- 
 tive betrothal would probably have taken 
 place ; and, as no islander had ever been known 
 to break that compact, she would have become 
 his wife. 
 
 Ascending the steep incline to where the 
 quarrymen were chipping, just as they had 
 formerly done, and within sound of the great 
 stone saws, he looked southward towards the 
 Beal. 
 
 The level line of the sea horizon rose above 
 the surface of the isle, a rufHed patch in mid- 
 distance as usual marking the race, whence 
 many a Lycidas had gone 
 
 "Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world," 
 
 but had not been blessed with a poet as a 
 friend. Against the stretch of water, -where a 
 school of mackerel twinkled in the afternoon 
 light, was defined, in addition to the distant 
 lighthouse, a church with its tower, standing 
 iig 
 
■ THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 about a quarter of a mile off, near the edge of 
 the cliff. The church-yard gravestones could 
 be seen in profile against the same vast spread 
 of watery babble and unrest. 
 
 Among the graves moved the form of a man 
 clothed in a white sheet, which the wind blew 
 and flapped sadly every now and then. Near 
 him moved six men bearing a long box, and 
 two or three persons in black followed. The 
 cofifin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the 
 isle, while around and beneath it the flashing 
 lights from the sea and the school of mackerel 
 were reflected ; a fishing-boat, far out in the 
 Channel, being momentarily discernible under 
 the coffin also. 
 
 The procession wandered round to a partic- 
 ular corner and halted, and paused there a 
 long while iii the wind, the sea behind them, 
 the surplice of the priest still blowing. Joce- 
 lyn stood with his hat off: he was present, 
 though he was a quarter of a mile off ; and he 
 seemed to hear the words that were being 
 said, though nothing but the wind was au- 
 dible. 
 
 He instinctively knew that it was none other 
 than Avice whom he was seeing interred ; his 
 Avice, as he now began presumptuously to call 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 her. Presently the little group withdrew from 
 before the sea-shine and disappeared. 
 
 He felt himself unable to go farther in that 
 direction, and turning aside went aimlessly 
 across the open land, visiting the various spots 
 that he had formerly visited with her. But, as 
 if tethered to the -Krhurch-yard by a cord, he 
 was still conscious of being at the end of a 
 radius whose pivot was the grave of Avice 
 Caro; and as the dusk thickened he closed 
 upon his centre and entered the church-yard 
 gate. 
 
 Not a soul was now within the precincts. 
 The grave, newly shaped, was easily discover- 
 able behind the church, and when the same 
 young moon arose which he had observed the 
 previous evening from his window in London 
 he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the 
 mourners and bearers. The breeze had fallen 
 to a calm with the setting of the sun : the light- 
 house had opened its glaring eye, and, disin- 
 clined to leave a spot sublimed both by early 
 association and present regret, he moved back 
 to the church-wall, warm from the afternoon 
 sun, and sat down upon a window-sill facing 
 the grave. 
 
IV 
 
 SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE 
 
 The lispings of the sea beneath the cliffs 
 were all the sounds that reached him, for the 
 quarries were silent now* How long he sat 
 here lonely and thinking he did not know. 
 Neither did he know, though he felt drowsy, 
 whether inexpectant sadness — that gentle sop- 
 orific — lulled him into a short sleep, so that 
 he lost count of time and consciousness of in- 
 cident. But during some minute or minutes he 
 seemed to see Avice Caro herself bending over 
 and then withdrawing from her grave in the 
 light of the moon. 
 
 She seemed not a year older, not a digit less 
 slender, not a line more angular, than when he 
 had parted from her twenty years earlier in 
 the lane hard by. A renascent reasoning on 
 the impossibility of such a phenomenon as 
 this being more than a dream -fancy roused 
 him with a start from his heaviness. 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 " I must have been asleep," he said. 
 
 Yet she had seemed so real. Pierston, how- 
 ever, dismissed the strange impression, arguing 
 that even if the information sent him of Avice's 
 death should be false — a thing incredible — 
 that sweet friend of his youth, despite the 
 transfiguring effects of moonlight, would not 
 now look the same as she had appeared nine- 
 teen or twenty years ago. Were what he saw 
 substantial flesh, it must have been some other 
 person than Avice Caro. 
 
 Having satisfied his sentiment by coming to 
 the graveside, there was nothing more for him 
 to do in the island, and he decided to return 
 to London that night. But, some time remain- 
 ing still on his hands, Jocelyn by a natural in- 
 stinct turned his feet in the direction of East 
 Quarriers, the village of his birth and of hers. 
 Passing the market-square, he pursued the arm 
 of road to Sylvania Castle, a private man- 
 sion of comparatively modern date, in whose 
 grounds stood the single plantation of trees of 
 which the isle could boast. The cottages ex- 
 tended close to the walls of the enclosure, and 
 one of the last of these dwellings had been 
 Avice's, in which, as it was her freehold, she 
 possibly had died. 
 
 123 
 
THK WELL-BELOVED 
 
 To reach it he passed the gates of Sylva- 
 nia, and observed above the lawn wall a board 
 announcing that the house was to be let fur- 
 nished. A few steps farther revealed the cot- 
 tage which, with its quaint and massive stone 
 features of two or three centuries' aptiquity, 
 was capable even now of longer resistance to 
 the rasp of time than ordinary new erections. 
 His attention was drawn to the window, still 
 unblinded, though a lamp lit the room. He 
 stepped back against the wall opposite and 
 gazed in. 
 
 At a table covered with a white cloth a young 
 woman stood putting tea-things away into a 
 corner cupboard. She was in all respects the 
 Avice he had lost, the girl he had seen in the 
 church-yard and had fancied to be the illusion 
 of a dream. And though there was this time 
 no doubt about her reality, the isolation of her 
 position in the silent house lent her a curiously 
 startling aspect. Divining the explanation, he 
 waited for footsteps, and in a few moments a 
 quarryman passed him on his journey home. 
 Pierston inquired of the man concerning the 
 spectacle. 
 
 "Oh yes, sir; that's poor Mrs. Caro's only 
 daughter, and it must be lonely for her there 
 124 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 to-night, poor maid ! Yes, good-now ; she's the 
 very daps of her mother-^that's what every- 
 body says." 
 
 "But how does she come to be so lonely?" 
 " One of her brothers went to sea and was 
 drowned, and t'other is in America." 
 
 " They were quarry-owners at one time ?" 
 The quarryman "pitched his knitch," and ex- 
 plained to the seeming stranger that there had 
 been three families thereabouts in the stone 
 trade, who had got much involved with each 
 other in the last generation. They were the 
 Bencombs,. the Pierstons, and the Caros. The 
 Bencombs strained their utmost to outlift the 
 other two, and partially succeeded. They grew 
 enormously rich, sold out, and disappeared al- 
 together from the island which had been their 
 making. The Pierstons kept a dogged middle 
 course, throve without show or noise, and also 
 retired in their turn. The Caros were pulled 
 completely down in the competition with the 
 other two, and when Widow Caro's daughter 
 married her cousin Jim Caro,he tried to regain 
 for the family its original place in the three- 
 cornered struggle. He took contracts at less 
 than he could profit by, speculated more and 
 more, till at last the crash came ; he was sold 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 up, went away, and later on came back to live 
 in this little cottage, which was his wife's by in- 
 heritance. There he remained till his death ; 
 and now his widow was gone. Hardships had 
 helped on her end. 
 
 The quarryman proceeded on his way, and 
 Pierston, deeply remorseful, knocked at the 
 door of the minute freehold. The girl herself 
 opened it, lamp in hand. 
 
 " Avice !" he said, tenderly ; " Avice Caro !'' 
 even now unable to get over the strange feel- 
 ing that he was twenty years younger, ad- 
 dressing Avice the forsaken. 
 
 " Ann, sir," said she. 
 
 "Ah, your name is not the same as your 
 mother's !" 
 
 "My second name is. And my surname. 
 Poor mother married her cousin." 
 
 " As everybody does here. . . . Well, Ann 
 or otherwise, you are Avice to me. And you 
 have lost her now ?" 
 
 " I have, sir." 
 
 She spoke in the very same sweet voice that 
 he had listened to a score of years before, and 
 bent eyes of the same familiar hazel inquiring- 
 ly upon him. 
 
 " I knew your mother at one time," he said ; 
 126 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 " and, learning of her death and burial, I took 
 the liberty of calling upon you. You will for- 
 give a stranger doing that ?" 
 
 "Yes," she said, dispassionately; and, glanc- 
 ing round the room : " This was mother's own 
 house, and now it is mine. I am sorry not to 
 be in mourning on the night of her funeral, 
 but I have just been to put some flowers on 
 her grave, and I took it off afore going, that 
 the damp mid not spoil the crape. You see, 
 she was bad a long time, and I have to be 
 careful, and do washing and ironing for a liv- 
 ing. She hurt her side with wringing up the 
 large sheets she had to wash for the Castle 
 folks here." 
 
 " I hope you won't hurt yourself doing it, 
 my dear." 
 
 " Oh no, that I sha'n't! There's Charl Wool- 
 lat, and Sammy Scribben, and Ted Gibsey, and 
 lots o' young chaps ; they'll wring anything 
 for me if they happen to come along. But I 
 can hardly trust 'em. Sam Scribben t'other 
 day twisted a linen table-cloth into two pieces, 
 for all the world as if it had been a pipe-light. 
 They never know when to stop in their 
 wringing." 
 
 The voice truly was his Avice's ; but 
 127 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Avice the Second was clearly more matter- 
 of-fact, unreflecting, less cultivated than her 
 mother had been. This Avice would never 
 recite poetry from any platform, local or 
 other, with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. 
 There was a disappointment in his recognition 
 of this ; yet she touched him as few had done ; 
 he could not bear to go away. " How old are 
 you ?" he asked. 
 
 "Going in nineteen." 
 
 It was about the age of her double, Avice 
 the First, when he and she had strolled to- 
 gether over the cliffs during the engagement. 
 But he was now forty, if a day. She before 
 him was an uneducated laundress, and he was 
 a sculptor and a Royal Academician, with a 
 fortune and a reputation. Yet why was it an 
 unpleasant sensation to him just then to recol- 
 lect that he was two-score? 
 
 He could find no further excuse for remain- 
 ing, and, having still half an hour to spare, he 
 went round by the road to the other or west 
 side of the last-century Sylvania Castle, and 
 came to the farthest house out there on the 
 cliff. It was his early home. Used in the 
 summer as a lodging-house for visitors, it now 
 stood empty and silent, the evening wind 
 
 1 23 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 swaying the euonymus and tamarisk boughs 
 in the front — the only evergreen shrubs that 
 could weather the whipping salt gales which 
 sped past the walls. Opposite the house, far 
 out at sea, the familiar light-ship winked from 
 the sand-bank, and all at once there came to 
 him a wild wish— that, instead of having an 
 artist's reputation, he could be living here an 
 illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a 
 fair way of winning, the pretty laundress in 
 the cottage hard by. 
 
THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE 
 
 Having returned to London, he mechani- 
 cally resumed his customary life ; but he was 
 not really living there. The phantom of 
 Avice, now grown to be warm flesh and 
 blood, held his mind afar. He thought of 
 nothing but the isle, and Avice the Second 
 dwelling therein — inhaling its salt breath, 
 stroked by its singing rains and by the 
 haunted atmosphere of Roman Venus about 
 and around the site of her perished temple 
 there. The very defects in the country girl 
 became charms as viewed from town. 
 
 Nothing now pleased him so much as to 
 spend that portion of the afternoon which he 
 devoted to outdoor exercise in haunting the 
 purlieus of the wharves along the Thames, 
 where the stone of his native rock was un- 
 shipped from the coasting - craft that had 
 brought it thither. He would pass inside 
 130 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 the great gates of these landing-places on the 
 right or left bank, contemplate the white cubes 
 and oblongs, imbibe their associations, call up 
 the genius loci whence they came, and almost 
 forget that he was in London. 
 
 One afternoon he was walking away from 
 the mud -splashed entrance to one of the 
 wharves, when his attention was drawn to a 
 female form on the opposite side of the way, 
 going towards the spot he had just left. She 
 was somewhat small, slight, and graceful ; her 
 attire alone would have been enough to at- 
 tract him, being simple and countrified to 
 picturesqueness ; but he was more than at- 
 tracted by her s|^ng resemblance to Avice 
 Caro the younger — Ann Avice, as she had 
 said she was called. 
 
 Before she had receded a hundred yards he 
 felt certain that it was Avice, indeed ; and his 
 unifying mood of the afternoon was now so 
 intense that the lost and the found Avice 
 seemed essentially the same person. Their 
 external likeness to each other — probably 
 owing to the cousinship between the elder 
 and her husband — went far to nourish the 
 fantasy. He hastily turned, and rediscovered 
 the girl among the pedestrians. She kept on 
 131 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 her way to the wharf, where, looking inquir- 
 ingly around her for a few seconds, with the 
 manner of one unaccustomed to the locality, 
 she opened the gate and disappeared. 
 
 Pierston also went up to the gate and en- 
 tered. She had crossed to the landing-place, 
 beyond which a lumpy craft lay moored. Draw- 
 ing nearer, he discovered her to be engaged in 
 conversation with the skipper and an elderly 
 woman — both come straight from the oolitic 
 isle, as was apparent in a moment from their 
 accent. Pierston felt no hesitation in making 
 himself known as a native, the ruptured en- 
 gagement between Avice's mother and him- 
 self twenty years before having been known 
 to few or none now living. 
 
 The present embodiment of Avice recog- 
 nized him, and with the artless candor of her 
 race and years explained the situation, though 
 that was rather his duty as an intruder than 
 hers. 
 
 " This is Cap'n Kibbs, sir, a distant relation 
 of father's," she said. "And this is Mrs. 
 Kibbs. We've come up from the island 
 wi'en just for a trip, and are going to sail 
 back wi'en Wednesday." 
 
 " Oh, I see. And where are you staying?" 
 132 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 " Here — on board." 
 
 "What — you live on board entirely?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Lord, sir," broke in Mrs. Kibbs, " I should 
 be afeard o* my life to tine my eyes among 
 these here kimberlins at night-time ; and even 
 by day, if so be I venture into the streets, I 
 nowhen forget how many turnings to the 
 right and to the left 'tis to get back to Job's 
 vessel — do I, Job?" 
 
 The skipper nodded confirmation. 
 
 "You are safer ashore than afloat," said 
 Pierston, "especially in the Channel, with these 
 winds and those heavy blocks of stone." 
 
 " Weil," said Cap'n Kibbs, after privately 
 clearing something from his mouth, "as to 
 the winds, there idden much danger in them 
 at this time o' year. 'Tis the ocean-bound 
 steamers that make the risk to craft like ours. 
 If you happen to be in their course, under 
 you go — cut clane in two pieces, and they 
 never lying to to haul in your carcasses, and 
 nobody to tell the tale." 
 
 Pierston turned to Avice, wanting to say 
 much to her, yet not knowing what to say. 
 He lamely remarked at last, "You go back 
 the same way, Avice ?" 
 133 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " Yes, sir." 
 
 " Well, take care of yourself afloat." 
 
 " Oh yes." 
 
 " I hope — I may see you again soon — and 
 talk to you." 
 
 " I hope so, sir." 
 
 He could not get further, and after a while 
 Pierston left them, and went away thinking of 
 Avice more than ever. 
 
 The next day he mentally timed them 
 down the river, allowing for the pause to take 
 in ballast, and on the Wednesday pictured 
 the sail down the open sea. That night he 
 thought of the little craft under the bows 
 of the huge steam-vessels, powerless to make 
 itself seen or heard, and Avice, now growing 
 inexpressibly dear, sleeping in her little berth 
 at the mercy of a thousand chance catastrophes. 
 
 Honest perception had told him that this 
 Avice, fairer than her mother in face and 
 form, was her inferior in soul and understand- 
 ing. Yet the fervor which the first could 
 never kindle in him was, almost to his alarm, 
 burning up now. He began to have misgiv- 
 ings as to some queer trick that his migratory 
 Beloved was about to play him, or rather the 
 capricious divinity behind that ideal lady. 
 134 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 A gigantic satire upon the mutations of his 
 nymph during the past twenty years seemed 
 looming in the distance. A forsaking of the 
 accomplished and well-connected Mrs. Pine- 
 Avon for the little laundress, under the trac- 
 tion of some mystic magnet which had noth- 
 ing to do with reason — surely that was the 
 form of the satire. 
 
 But it was recklessly pleasant to leave the 
 suspicion unrecognized as yet and follow the 
 lead. 
 
 In, thinking how best to do this Pierston 
 recollected that, as was customary when the 
 summer-time approached, Sylvania Castle had 
 been advertised for letting furnished. A soli- 
 tary dreamer like himself, whose wants all lay 
 in an, artistic and ideal direction, did not re- 
 quire such gaunt accommodation as the afore- 
 said residence offered ; but the spot was all, 
 and the expenses of a few months of tenancy 
 therein he could well aiJord. A letter to the 
 agent was despatched that night, and in a fe.w 
 days.: Jocelyn found himself the temporary 
 possessor of a place which he had never seen 
 the inside of since his childhood, and had then 
 deemed the abode of unpleasant ghosts. 
 135 
 
VI 
 
 THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT 
 
 It was the evening of Pierston's arrival at 
 Sylvania Castle, an ordinary manor-house on 
 the brink of the cliffs ; and he • had walked 
 through the rooms, about the lawn, and into 
 the surrounding plantation of elms, which on 
 this island of treeless rock lent a unique char- 
 acter to the enclosure. In name, nature, and 
 accessories the property within the girdling 
 wall formed a complete antithesis to every- 
 thing in its precincts. To find other trees 
 between Pebble-bank and Beal it was neces- 
 sary to recede a little in time — to dig down to 
 a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, 
 where a forest of conifers lay as petrifactions, 
 their heads all in one direction, as blown down 
 by a gale in the Secondary geologic epoch. 
 
 Dusk had closed in, and he now proceeded 
 with what was, after all, the real business of 
 his sojourn. The two servants who had been 
 136 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 left to take care of the house were in their 
 own quarters, and he went out unobserved. 
 Crossing a hollow overhung by the budding 
 boughs, he approached an empty garden-house 
 of Elizabethan design, which stood on the 
 outer wall of the grounds, and commanded 
 by a window the fronts of the nearest cot-' 
 tages. Among them was the home of the 
 resuscitated^ Avice. 
 
 He had chosen this moment for his outlook 
 through knowing that the villagers were in no 
 hurry to pull down their blinds at nightfall. 
 And, as he had divined, the inside of the 
 young woman's living-room was visible to him 
 as formerly, illuminated by the rays of its 
 own lamp. 
 
 A subdued thumping came every now and 
 then from the apartment. She was ironing 
 linen on a flannel table-cloth, a row of such 
 apparel hanging on a clothes-horse by the fire. 
 Her face had been pale when he encountered 
 her, but now it was warm and pink with her 
 exertions and the heat of the stove. Yet it 
 was in periect_and passionless repose, which 
 imparted aMinervalsast to the profile. When 
 she glanced upvber-li-neaments seemed to have 
 all the soul and heart that had characterized 
 137 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 her mother's, and had been with her a true 
 index of the spirit within. Could it be pos- 
 sible that in this case the manifestation was 
 fictitious? He had met with many such ex- 
 amples of hereditary persistence without the 
 qualities signified by the traits. He uncon- 
 sciously hoped that it was at least not entirely 
 so here. 
 
 The room was less furnished than when he 
 had last beheld it. The " bo-fet," or double 
 corner cupboard, where the china was formerly 
 kept, had disappeared, its place being taken 
 by a plain board. ■ The tall old clock, with its 
 ancient oak carcass, arched brow, and humor- 
 ous mouth, was also not to be seen, a cheap 
 white-dialled specimen doing its work. What 
 these displacements might betoken saddened 
 his humanity less than it cheered his primitive 
 instinct in pointing out how her necessities 
 might bring them together. 
 
 Having fixed his residence near her for some 
 lengthy time, he felt in no hurry to obtrude 
 his presence just now, and went indoors. That 
 this girl's frame was doomed to be a real em- 
 bodiment of that olden seductive one — that 
 protean dream-creature, who had never seen 
 fit to irradiate the mother's image till it be- 
 X38 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 came a mere memory after dissolution — he 
 doubted less every moment. 
 
 There was an uneasiness in recognizing such. 
 There was something abnormal in his present 
 proclivity., A certain sanity had, after all, ac- 
 companied his former idealizing passions ; the 
 Beloved had seldom informed a personality 
 which, while enrapturing his soul, simultane- 
 ously . shocked his intellect. A change, per- 
 haps, had come. 
 
 It was a fine morning on the morrow. 
 Walking in the grounds towards the gate, he 
 saw . Avice entering his - hired castle with a 
 broad oval wicker-basket covered with a white 
 cloth, which burden she bore round to the 
 back door. Of course, she washed for his own 
 household ; he had not thought of that. In 
 the morning, sunlight she appeared rather as a 
 sylph than as a washerwoman ; and he could 
 not but think that the slightness of her figure 
 was as ill adapted to this occupation as her 
 mother's had been. 
 
 But, after all, it was not the washerwoman 
 that he saw now. In front of her, on the sur- 
 face • of her, was shining out that more real, 
 more , interpenetrating being whom he knew 
 so well! The occupation of the subserving 
 139 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ' minion, the blemishes <D.f the temporary creat- 
 ure who formed the background, were of the 
 same account in the presentation of the indis- 
 pensable one as the supporting posts and 
 framework in a pyrotechnic display. 
 
 She left the house and went homeward by a 
 path of which he was not aware, having prob- 
 ably changed her course because she had seen 
 him standing there. It meant nothing, for she 
 had hardly become acquainted with him ; yet 
 that she should have avoided him was a new 
 experience. He had no opportunity for a fur- 
 ther study of her by distant observation, and 
 hit upon a pretext for bringing her face to face 
 with him. He found fault with his linen, and 
 directed that the laundress should be sent for. 
 
 " She is rather young, poor little thing," said 
 the housemaid, apologetically. " But since her 
 mother's death she has enough to do to keep 
 above water, and we make shift with her. But 
 I'll tell her, sir." 
 
 " I will see her myself. Send her in when 
 she comes," said Pierston. 
 
 One morning, accordingly, when he was 
 answering a spiteful criticism of a late work of 
 his, he was told that she waited his pleasure 
 in the hall. He went out. 
 140 
 
A VOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 "About the washing," said the sculptor, 
 stiffly. " I am a very particular person, and I 
 wish no preparation of lime to be used." 
 
 " I didn't know folks used it," replied the 
 maiden, in a scared and reserved tone, without 
 looking at him. 
 
 " That's all right. And then, the mangling 
 smashes the buttons." 
 
 " I haven't got a mangle, sir," she murmured. 
 
 "Ah, that's satisfactory. And I object to 
 so much borax in the starch." 
 
 " I don't put any," Avice returned in the 
 same close way; " never heard the name o't 
 afore !" 
 
 "Oh, I see!" 
 
 All this time Pierston was thinking of the 
 girl — or, as the scientific might say. Nature 
 was working her plans for the next generation 
 under the cloak of a dialogue on linen. He 
 could not read her individual character, owing 
 to the confusing effect of her likeness to a 
 woman whom he had valued too late. He 
 could not help seeing in her all that he knew 
 of another, and veiling in her all that did not 
 harmonize with his sense of metempsychosis. 
 
 The girl seemed to think of nothing but the 
 business in hand. She had answered to the 
 141 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 point, and was hardly aware of his sex or of 
 his shape. 
 
 " I knew your mother, Avice," he said. 
 " You remember my telling you so ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well — I have taken this house for two 
 or three months, and you will be very use- 
 ful to me. You still live just outside the 
 wall?" 
 
 " Yes, sir," said the self-contained girl. 
 
 Demurely and dispassionately she turned to 
 leave — this pretty creature with features so 
 still. There was something strange in seeing 
 move off thus that form which he knew pass- 
 ing well, she who was once so throbbingly 
 alive to his presence that, not many yards 
 from this spot, she had flung her arms round 
 him and given him a kiss which, despised in 
 its freshness, had revived in him latterly as 
 the dearest kiss of all his life. And now this 
 "daps" of her mother (as they called her in 
 the dialect here), this perfect copy, why did 
 she turn away? 
 
 "Your mother was a refined and well-in- 
 fgrmed woman, I think I remember?" 
 
 " She was, sir ; everybody said so." 
 
 " I hope you resemble her." 
 142 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 She archly shook her head and drew warily 
 away. 
 
 " Oh ! one thing more, Avice. I have not 
 brought much linen, so you must come to the 
 house every day." 
 
 " Very good, sir." 
 
 "You won't forget that?" 
 
 " Oh no." 
 
 Then he let her go. He was a town man, 
 and she an artless islander, yet he had opened 
 himself out like a sea-anemone without dis- 
 turbing the epiderm of her nature. It was 
 monstrous that a maiden who had assumed the 
 personality of her of his tenderest memory 
 should be so impervious. Perhaps it was he 
 who was wanting. Avice might be Passion 
 masking as Indifference, because he was so 
 many years older in outward show. 
 
 This brought him to the root of it. In his 
 heart he was not a day older than when he had 
 wooed the mother at the daughter's present 
 age. His record moved on with the years ; his 
 sentiments stood still. 
 
 When he beheld those of his fellows who 
 were defined as buffers and fogies — imper- 
 turbable, matter-of-fact, slightly ridiculous 
 beings, past -masters in the art of populat- 
 143 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ing homes, schools, and colleges, and present 
 adepts in the science of giving -away brides— r 
 how he envied them, assuming them to feel as 
 they appeared to feel, with their commerce and 
 their politics, their glasses and their pipes! 
 They had got past the distracting currents of 
 passionateness, and were in the calm waters of 
 middle-aged philosophy. But he, their con- 
 temporary, was tossed like a cork hith&r and 
 thither upon the crest of every fancy, precisely 
 as he had been tossed when he was half his 
 present age, with the burden now of double 
 pain to himself in his growing vision of all as 
 vanity. 
 
 Avice had gone, and he saw her no more 
 that day. Since he could not again call upon 
 her, she was as inaccessible as if she had en- 
 tered the military citadel on the hilltop be- 
 yond them. 
 
 In the evening he went out and paced down 
 the lane to the Red King's castle overhanging 
 the cliff, beside whose age the castle he occu- 
 pied was but a thing of yesterday. Below the 
 castle precipice lay enormous blocks, which had 
 fallen from it, and several of them were carved 
 over with names and initials. He knew the 
 spot and the old trick well, and by searching 
 144 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names 
 which, as a boy, he himself had cut. They 
 were " AviCE " and " JOCELYN " — A vice Caro's 
 and his own. The letters were now nearly 
 worn away by the weather and the brine. But 
 close by, in quite fresh letters, stood "Ann 
 AviCE," coupled with the name " ISAAC." 
 They could not have been there more than 
 two or three years, and the " Ann Avice " was 
 probably Avice the Second. Who was Isaac? 
 Some boy admirer of her child-time, doubt- 
 less. 
 
 He retraced his steps, and passed the Caros' 
 house towards his own. The revivified Avice 
 animated the dwelling, and the light within 
 the room fell upon the window. She was just 
 inside that blind. 
 
 Whenever she unexpectedly came to the 
 castle he started and lost placidity. It was 
 not at her presence as such, but at the new 
 condition, which seemed to have something 
 sinister in it. On the other hand, the most 
 abrupt encounter with him moved her to no 
 emotion as it had moved her prototype in the 
 old days. She was indifferent to, almost un- 
 conscious of, his propinquity. He was no more 
 K 145 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 than a statue to her; she was a growing fire to 
 him. 
 
 A sudden Sapphic terror of love would ever 
 and anon come upon the sculptor when his 
 matured reflecting powers would insist upon 
 informing him of the fearful lapse from reason- 
 ableness that lay in this infatuation. It threw 
 him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he 
 were doomed to do penance for his past emo- 
 tional wanderings (in a material sense) by being 
 chained in fatal fidelity to an object that his 
 intellect despised ? One night he dreamed that 
 he saw dimly masking behind that young 
 countenance " the Weaver of Wiles " herself, 
 "with all her subtle face laughing aloud." 
 
 However, the Well-Beloved was alive again — 
 had been lost and was found. He was amazed 
 at the change of front in himself. She had 
 worn the guise of strange women; she had 
 been a woman of every class, from the dignified 
 daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a 
 Nubian almeh with her handkerchief, undu- 
 lating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all 
 these embodiments had been endowed with a 
 certain smartness, either of the flesh or spirit : 
 some with wit, a few with talent, and even 
 genius. But the. new impersonation had ap- 
 146 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 patently nothing beyond sex and prettiness. 
 She knew not how to sport a fan or handker- 
 chief, hardly how to pull on a glove. 
 
 But her limited life was innocent, and that 
 went far. Poor little Avice! her mother's 
 image : there it all lay. After all, her parent- 
 age was as good as his own ; it was misfortune 
 that had sent her down to this. Odd as it 
 seemed to him, her limitations were largely 
 what he loved her for. Her rejuvenating 
 power over him had ineffable charm. He felt 
 as he had felt when standing beside her prede- 
 cessor ; but, alas ! he was twenty years farther 
 onward into the shade. 
 
yii 
 
 THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED 
 
 A FEW mornings later he was looking through 
 an upper back window over a screened part of 
 the garden. The door beneath him opened, 
 and a figure appeared tripping forth. She 
 went round out of sight to where the gardener 
 was at work, and presently returned with a 
 bunch of green stuff fluttering in each hand. 
 It was Avice, her dark hair now braided up 
 snugly under a cap. She sailed on with a rapt 
 and unconscious face, her thoughts a thousand 
 removes from him. 
 
 How she had suddenly come to be an inmate 
 of his own house he could not understand, till 
 he recalled the fact that he had given the castle 
 servants a whole holiday to attend a review of 
 the yeomanry in the watering-place over the 
 bay, on their stating that they could provide a 
 temporary substitute to stay in the house. 
 They had evidently called in Avice. To his 
 148 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 great pleasure he discovered their opinion of 
 his requirements to be such a mean one that 
 they had called in no one else. 
 
 The Spirit, as she seemed to him, brought 
 his lunch into the room where he was writing, 
 and he beheld her uncover it. She went to the 
 window to adjust a blind which had slipped, 
 and he had a good view of her profile. It was 
 not unlike that of one of the three goddesses 
 in Rubens's " Judgment of Paris," and in con- 
 tour was nigh perfection. But it was in her. 
 full face that the vision of her mother was 
 most apparent. " Did you cook all this, Avice ?' ' 
 he asked, arousing himself. 
 
 She turned and half smiled, merely murmur- 
 ing, "Yes, sir." 
 
 Well he knew the arrangement of those 
 white teeth. In the junction of two of the 
 upper ones there was a slight irregularity ; 
 no stranger would have noticed it, nor would 
 he, but that he knew of the same mark in her 
 mother's mouth, and looked for it here. Till 
 Avice the Second had revealed it this moment 
 by her smile he had never beheld that mark 
 since the parting from Avice the First, when 
 she had smiled under his kiss as the copy had 
 done now. 
 
 149 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Next morning, when dressing, he heard her 
 through the rickety floor of the building en- 
 gaged in conversation with the other servants. 
 Having by this time regularly installed herself 
 as the exponent of the Long-pursued — as one 
 who, by no initiative of his own, had been 
 chosen by some superior power as the vehicle 
 of her next ddbut, she attracted him by the 
 cadences of her voice ; she would suddenly 
 drop it to a rich whisper of roguishness, when 
 the slight rural monotony of its narrative 
 speech disappeared, and soul and heart— or 
 what seemed soul and heart — resounded. The 
 charm lay in the intervals, using that word in 
 its musical sense. She would say a few sylla- 
 bles in one note, and end her sentence in a 
 soft modulation upwards, then downwards, 
 then into her own note again. The curve of 
 sound was as artistic as any line of beauty 
 ever struck by his pencil — as satisfying as 
 the curves of her who was the World's De- 
 sire. 
 
 The subject of her discourse he cared noth- 
 ing about — it was no more his interest than 
 his concern. He took special pains that in 
 catching her voice he might not comprehend 
 her words. To the tones he had a right, none 
 150 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 to the articulations. By degrees he could not 
 exist long without this sound. 
 
 On Sunday evening he found that she went 
 to church. He followed behind her over the 
 open road, keeping his eye on the little hat 
 with its bunch of cock's feathers as on a star. 
 When she had passed in, Pierston observed 
 her position and took a seat behind her. 
 
 Engaged in the study of her ear and the 
 nape of her white neck, he suddenly became 
 aware of the presence of a lady still farther 
 ahead in the aisle, whose attire, though of 
 black materials in the quietest form, was of a 
 cut which rather suggested London than this 
 Ultima Thule. For the minute he forgot, in 
 his curiosity, that Avice intervened. The lady 
 turned her head somewhat, and, though she 
 was veiled with unusual thickness for the 
 season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine- 
 Avon in the form. 
 
 Why should Mrs. Pine- Avon be there? Pier- 
 ston asked himself, if it should, indeed, be she. 
 
 The end of the service saw his attention 
 again concentrated on Avice to such a degree 
 that at the critical moment of moving out he 
 forgot the mysterious lady in front of her, and 
 found that she had left the church by the side- 
 ^51 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 door. Supposing it to have been Mrs. Pine- 
 Avon, she would probably be discovered stay- 
 ing at one of the hotels at the watering-place 
 over the bay, and to have come along the 
 Pebble-bank to the island, as so many did, for 
 an evening drive. For the present, however, 
 the explanation was not forthcoming ; and he 
 did not seek it. 
 
 When he emerged from the church the great 
 placid eye of the lighthouse at the Beal Point 
 was open, and he moved thitherward a few 
 steps to escape Nichola, or her double, and the 
 rest of the congregation. Turning at length, 
 he hastened homeward along the now deserted 
 - trackway, intending to overtake the revitalized 
 Avice. But he could see nothing of her, and 
 concluded that she had walked too fast for 
 him. Arrived at his own gate, he paused a 
 moment, and perceived that Avice's little free- 
 hold was still in darkness. .She had not 
 come. 
 
 He retraced his steps, but could not find her, 
 the only persons on the road being a man and 
 his wife, as he knew them to be, though he 
 could not see them, from the words of the 
 man: 
 
 " If you had not already married me, you'd 
 152 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 cut my acquaintance ! That's a pretty thing 
 for a wife to say !" 
 
 The remark struck his ear unpleasantly, and 
 by-and-by he went back again. Avice's cottage 
 was now lighted : she must have come round 
 by the other road. Satisfied that she was 
 safely domiciled for the night, he opened the 
 gate of Sylvania Castle and retired to his room 
 also. 
 
 Eastward from the grounds the cliffs were 
 rugged and the view of the opposite coast 
 picturesque in the extreme. A little door 
 from the lawn gave him immediate access to 
 the rocks and shore on this side. Without the 
 door was a dip-well of pure water, which pos- 
 sibly had supplied the inmates of the adjoining 
 and now ruinous Red King's castle at the time 
 of its erection. On a sunny morning he was 
 meditating here when he discerned a figure on 
 the shore below spreading white linen upon 
 the pebbly strand. 
 
 Jocelyn descended. Avice, as he had sup- 
 posed, had now returned to her own occupa- 
 tion. Her shapely pink arms, though slight, 
 were plump enough to show dimples at the 
 elbows, and were set off by her purple cotton 
 153 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 print, which the shore breeze licked and tanta- 
 lized. He stood near, without speaking. The 
 wind dragged a shirt-sleeve from the " popple," 
 or pebble, which held it down. Pierston stoop- 
 ed and put a heavier one in its place. 
 
 " Thank you," she said, quietly. She turned 
 up her hazel eyes, and seemed gratified to per- 
 ceive that her assistant was Pierston. She had 
 plainly been so wrapped in her own thoughts 
 — gloomy thoughts, by their signs — that she 
 had not considered him till then. 
 
 The young girl continued to converse with 
 him in friendly frankness, showing neither 
 ardor nor shyness. As for love — it was evi- 
 dently farther from her mind than even death 
 and dissolution. 
 
 When one of the sheets became intractable 
 Jocelyn said, " Do you hold it down and I'll 
 put the popples." 
 
 She acquiesced, and in placing a pebble his 
 hand touched hers. 
 
 It was a young hand, rather long and thin, a 
 little damp and coddled from her slopping. In 
 setting down the last stone he laid it, by a 
 pure accident, rather heavily on her fingers. 
 
 " I am very, very sorry !" Jocelyn exclaimed. 
 " Oh, J have bruised the skin, Avice !" He 
 154 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 seized her fingers to examine the damage 
 done. 
 
 "No, sir, you haven't!" she cried, lumi- 
 nously, allowing him to retain her hand with- 
 out the least objection. " Why — that's where 
 I scratched it this morning with a pin. You 
 didn't hurt me a bit with the popple-stone !" 
 
 Although her gown was purple, there was a 
 little black crape bow upon each arm. He 
 knew what it medht, and it saddened him. " Do 
 you ever visit ydtff mother's grave?" he asked. 
 
 " Yes, sir, sometimes. I am going there to- 
 night to water the daisies." 
 
 She had now finished here, and they part- 
 ed. That evening, when the sky was red, he 
 emerged by the garden-door and passed her 
 house. The blinds were not down, and he 
 could see her sewing within. While he 
 paused she sprang up as if she had forgotten 
 the hour, and tossed on her hat. Jocelyn 
 strode ahead and round the corner, and was 
 half way up the straggling street before he 
 discerned her little figure behind him. 
 
 He hastened past the lads and young wom- 
 en with clinking buckets who were drawing 
 water from the fountains by the wayside, and 
 took the direction of the church. With the 
 155 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 disappearance of the sun the lighthouse had 
 again set up its flame against the sky, the 
 dark church rising in the foreground. Here 
 he allowed her to overtake him. 
 
 "You loved your mother much?" said Joce- 
 lyn. 
 
 "I did, sir; of course, I did,!' said the girl, 
 who tripped so lightly that it seemed he 
 might have carried her on his hand. 
 
 Pierston wished to say, " So did I," but did 
 not like to disclose events which she, appar- 
 ently, did not guess. Avice fell into thought, 
 and continued : 
 
 " Mother had a very sad life for some time 
 when she was about as old as I. I should not 
 like mine to be as hers. Her young man 
 proved false to her because she wouldn't 
 agree to meet him one night, and it grieved 
 mother almost all her life. I wouldn't ha' 
 fretted about him, if I'd been she. She would 
 never name his name, but I think he was a 
 wicked, cruel man ; and I hate to think of him." 
 
 After this he could not go into the church- 
 yard with her, and walked onward alone to 
 the south of the isle. He was wretched all 
 night. Yet he would not have stood where 
 he did stand in the ranks of an imaginative 
 156 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 profession if he had not been at the mercy of 
 every succubus of the fancy that can beset 
 man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen 
 and a national unit that his strength lay as an 
 artist, and he felt it childish to complain of 
 susceptibilities not only innate but cultivated. 
 ^ But he was paying dearly enough for his 
 Liliths. He saw a terrible vengeance ahead. 
 What had he done to be tormented like this? 
 The Beloved, after flitting from Nichola Pine- 
 Avon to the phantom of a dead woman whom 
 he never adored in her lifetime, had taken up 
 her abode in the living representative of the 
 dead, with a permanence of hold which the 
 absolute indifference of that little brown-eyed 
 representative only seemed to intensify. 
 
 Did he really wish to proceed to marriage 
 with this chit of a girl? He did; the wish 
 had come at last. It was true that as he 
 studied her he saw defects in addition to her 
 social insufificiencies. Judgment, hoodwinked 
 as it was, told him that she was colder in 
 nature, commoner in character, than that well- 
 read, bright little woman, Avice the First. 
 But twenty years make a difference in ideals, 
 and the added demands of middle -age in 
 physical form are more than balanced by its 
 157 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 concessions as to the spiritual content. He 
 looked at himself in the glass, and felt glad 
 at those inner deficiencies in Avice which for- 
 merly would have impelled him to reject her. 
 
 There was a strange difference in his regard 
 of his present folly and of his love in his 
 youthful time. Now he could be mad with 
 method, knowing it to be madness ; then he 
 was compelled to make believe his madness 
 wisdom. In those days any flash of reason 
 upon his loved one's imperfections was blurred 
 over hastily and with fear. Such penetrative 
 vision now did not cool him. He knew he 
 was the creature of a tendency ; and passively 
 acquiesced. 
 
 To use a practical eye, it appeared that, as 
 he had once thought, this Caro family — 
 though it might not for centuries, or ever, 
 furbish up an individual nature which would 
 exactly, ideally, supplement his own imper- 
 fect one and round with it the perfect whole 
 — was yet the only family he had ever met, or 
 was likely to meet, which possessed the materi- 
 als for her making. It was as if the Caros had 
 found the clay but not the potter, while other 
 families whose daughters might attract him 
 had found the potter but not the clay. 
 158 
 
VIII 
 HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM 
 
 From his roomy castle, and its grounds and 
 the cliffs hard by, he could command every 
 move and aspect of her who was the rejuve- 
 nated Spirit of the Past to him — in the efful- 
 gence of whom all sordid details were disre- 
 garded. 
 
 Among other things, he observed that she 
 was often anxious when it rained. If, af- 
 ter a wet day, a golden streak appeared in ■ 
 the sky over Deadman's Bay, under a lid of 
 cloud, her manner was joyous and her tread 
 light. 
 
 This puzzled him ; and he found that if he 
 endeavored to encounter her at these times 
 she shunned him — stealthily and subtly, but 
 unmistakably. One evening, when she had left 
 her cottage and tripped off in the direction of 
 the under-hill townlet, he set out by the same 
 route, resolved to await her return along the 
 159 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 high roadway which stretched between that 
 place and East Quarriers. 
 
 He reached the top of the old road, where 
 it makes a sudden descent to the townlet, but 
 she did not appear. Turning back, he saun- 
 tered along till he had nearly reached his own 
 house again. Then he retraced his steps, and 
 in the dim night he walked backward and 
 forward on the bare and lofty convex of the 
 isle; the stars above and around' him, the 
 lighthouse on duty at the distant point, the 
 light -ship winking from the sand -bank, the 
 combing of the pebble-beach by the tide be- 
 neath, the church away southwestward, where 
 the island fathers lay. 
 
 He walked the wild summit till his legs 
 ached and his heart ached — till he seemed 
 to hear on the upper wind the stones of the 
 Slingers whizzing past, and the voices of the 
 invaders who annihilated them and married 
 their wives and daughters, and produced Avice 
 as the ultimate flower of the combined stocks. 
 Still she did not come. It was more than 
 foolish to wait, yet he could not help waiting. 
 At length he discerned a dot of a figure, which 
 he knew to be hers rather by its motion than 
 by its shape. 
 
 1 60 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 How incomparably the immaterial dream 
 dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, 
 when here, between those three sublimities — 
 the sky, the rock, and the ocean — the minute 
 personality of this washer-girl filled his con- 
 sciousness to its extremest boundary, and the 
 stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a corner 
 therein ! 
 
 But all at once the approaching figure had 
 disappeared. He looked about ; she had cer- 
 tainly vanished. At one side of the road was 
 a low wall, but she could not have gone be- 
 hind that without considerable trouble and 
 singular conduct. He looked behind him ; 
 she had reappeared farther on the road. 
 
 Jocelyn Pierston hurried after ; and, discern- 
 ing his movement, Avice stood still. When 
 he came up, she was slyly shaking with re- 
 strained laughter. 
 
 " Well, what does this mean, my dear girl ?" 
 he asked. 
 
 Her inner mirth escaping in spite of her, she 
 turned askance and said : " When you was 
 following me to Street o' Wells two hours 
 ago, I looked round and saw you, and huddled 
 behind a stone. You passed and brushed my 
 frock without seeing me. And when, on my 
 
 L l6l 
 
THE- WELL-BELOVED 
 
 way backalong, I saw you waiting hereabout 
 again, I slipped over the wall, and ran past 
 you. If I had not stopped and looked round 
 at 'ee, you would never have catched me." 
 
 " What did you do that f9r, you elf ?" 
 
 " That you shouldn't find me." 
 
 " That's not exactly a reason. Give another, 
 dear Avice," he said, as he turned and walked 
 ■beside her homeward. 
 
 She hesitated. " Come !" he urged again. 
 
 " 'Twas because I thought you wanted to 
 be my young man," she answered. 
 
 " What a wild thought of yours ! Suppos- 
 ing I did, wouldn't you have me ?" 
 
 " Not now. . . . And not for long, even if it 
 had been sooner than now." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " If I tell you, you won't laugh at me or let 
 anybody else know ?" 
 
 "Never." ... 
 " " Then I will tell you," she said, quite seri- 
 ously. " 'Tis because I get tired o' my lovers 
 , as soon as I get- to know them well. What I 
 see in one young man for a while soon leaves 
 him and goes into another yonder, and I fol- 
 low, and then what I admire fades out of him 
 and springs up somewhere else ; and so I fol- 
 162 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 low on, and never fix to one. I have loved 
 fifteen a'ready ! Yes, fifteen; I am almost 
 ashamed to say," she repeated, laughing. " I 
 can't help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it is 
 really, to me, the same one all through, on'y 
 I can't catch him!" She added, anxiously, 
 "You won't tell anybody o' this in me, will 
 you, sir? Because if it were known I am 
 afraid no man would like me." 
 
 Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here 
 was this obscure and almost illiterate girl en- 
 gaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, 
 just as he had been himself doing for the 
 last twenty years. She was doing it quite 
 involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her or- 
 ganization, puzzled all the while at her own 
 instinct. He suddenly thought of its .bear- 
 ing upon himself, and said, with a sinking 
 heart : 
 
 "Am I — one of them?" 
 
 She pondered critically. 
 
 "You was — for a week — when I first saw 
 you." 
 
 "Only a week?" 
 
 " About that." 
 
 " What made the being of your fancy for- 
 sake my form and go elsewhere ?" 
 163 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ' " Well — though you seemed handsome and 
 gentlemanly at first — " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " I found 'ee too old soon after." 
 
 " You are a candid young person." 
 
 " But you asked me, sir !" she expostu- 
 lated. 
 
 " I did ; and, having been answered, I won't 
 intrude upon you longer. So cut along home 
 as fast as you can. It is getting late." 
 
 When she had passed out of earshot he also 
 followed homeward. This seeking of the 
 Well -Beloved was, then, of the nature of a 
 knife which could cut two ways. To be the 
 seeker was one thing; to be one of the 
 ' corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had 
 departed was another; and this was what he 
 had become now, in the mockery of new 
 Days. 
 
 Drawing near his own gate he smelled to- 
 bacco, and could discern two figures in the 
 side lane leading past Avice's door. They did 
 not, however, enter her house, but strolled on- 
 ward to the narrow pass conducting to Red. 
 King's castle and the sea. He was in momen- 
 tary heaviness at the thought that they might 
 be Avice with a worthless lover, but a faintly 
 164 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 argumentative tone from the man informed 
 him that they were the same married couple 
 going homeward whom he had encountered 
 on a previous occasion. 
 
 The next day he gave the servants a half- 
 holiday to get the jJretty Avice into the castle 
 again for a few hours, the better to observe 
 her. While she was pulling down the blinds- 
 at sunset a whistle of peculiar quality came 
 from some point on the cliffs outside the 
 lawn. He observed that her color rose slight- 
 ly, though she bustled about as if she had 
 noticed nothing. 
 
 Pierston suddenly suspected that she had 
 not only fifteen past admirers, but a current 
 one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimu- 
 lated now by ancient memories and present 
 tenderness to use every effort to make her his 
 wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he 
 strung himself up to sift this mystery. If he' 
 could only win her — and how could a country 
 girl refuse such an opportunity? — he could 
 pack her off to school for two or three years, 
 marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, 
 and take his chance of the rest. As to her 
 want of ardor for him — so sadly in contrast 
 with her sainted mother's affection — a man 
 165 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 twenty years older than his bride could expect 
 no better, and he would be well content to put 
 up with it in the pleasure of possessing one in 
 whom seemed to linger as an aroma all the 
 charm of his youth and his early home. 
 
JUXTAPOSITIONS 
 
 It was a sad and leaden afternoon, and 
 Pierston paced up the long, steep pass, or. 
 Street of Wells. On either side of the 
 road young girls stood with pitchers at the 
 fountains which bubbled there, and behind 
 the houses forming the propylsea of the rock, 
 rose the massive forehead of the isle — crested 
 at this part with its enormous ramparts as 
 with a mural crown. 
 
 As you approach the upper end of the 
 street all progress seems about to be checked, 
 ^y the almost vertical face of the escarpment. 
 Into it your track apparently runs point- 
 blank : a confronting mass which, if it were to 
 slip down, would overwhelm the whole town. 
 But in a moment you find that the i-oad, the 
 old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns 
 at a sharp angle when it reaches the base of 
 the scrap, and ascends in the stiffest of in- 
 167 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 dines to the right. To the left there is also 
 another ascending road, modern, almost as 
 steep as the first, and perfectly straight. 
 This is the road to the forts. 
 
 Pierston arrived at the forking of the ways, 
 and paused for breath. Before turning to the 
 right, his proper and picturesque course, he 
 looked up the uninteresting left road to the 
 fortifications. It was new, long, white, regu- 
 lar, tapering to a vanishing point, like a les- 
 son in perspective. About a quarter of the 
 way up a girl was resting beside a basket of 
 white linen; and 'by the shape of her hat 
 and the nature of her burden he recognizfed 
 her. 
 
 She did not see him, and, abandoning the 
 right-hand course, he slowly ascended the in- 
 cline she had taken. He observed that her 
 attention was absorbed by something aloft. 
 He followed the direction of her gaze. Above 
 them towered the green- gray mountain of 
 grassy stone, here levelled at the top by 
 military art. The skyline was broken every 
 now and then by a little peg-like object — a 
 sentry-box ; and near one of these a small red 
 spot kept creeping backward and forward 
 monotonously against the heavy sky. 
 1 68 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 Then he divined that she had a soldier- 
 lover. 
 
 She turned her head, saw him, and took up 
 her clothes-basket to continue the ascent. 
 The steepness was such that to climb it unen- 
 cumbered was a breathless business ; the lin- 
 en made her task a cruelty to her. "You'll 
 never get to the forts with that weight," he 
 said. "Give it to me." 
 
 But she would not, and he stood still, 
 watching her as she panted up the way ; for 
 the moment an irradiated being, the epitome 
 of a whole sex ; by the beams of his own in- 
 fatuation 
 
 ..." robed in such exceeding glory 
 That he beheld her not ;" 
 
 beheld her not as she really was, as she was 
 even to himself sometimes. But to the 
 soldier what was she? Smaller and smaller 
 she waned up the rigid mathematical road, 
 still gazing at the soldier aloft, as Pierston 
 gazed at her. He could just discern sentinels 
 springing up at the different coigns of vantage 
 that she passed, but, seeing who she was, they 
 did not intercept her ; and presently she 
 crossed the drawbridge over the enormous 
 169 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 chasm surrounding the forts, passed', the sen- 
 tries there also, and disappeared through the 
 arch into the interior. Pierston could not 
 see the sentry now, and there occurred to him 
 the hateful idea that this scarlet rival was 
 meeting and talking freely to her, the unpro- 
 tected orphan girl of his sweet original Avice; 
 perhaps, relieved of duty, escorting her across 
 the interior, carrying her basket, her tender 
 body encircled by his arm. 
 
 " What the devil are you staring at, as if 
 you were in a trance?" 
 
 Pierston turned his head, and there stood 
 his old friend Somers — still looking the long- 
 leased bachelor that he was. 
 
 " I might say what the devil do you do 
 here? if I weren't so glad to see you." 
 
 Somers said that he had come to see what 
 was detaining his friend in. such an out-of-the- 
 way place at that time of year, and incident- 
 ally to get some fresh aiir into his own lungs. 
 Pierston made him welcome, and they went 
 towards Sylvania Castle. 
 
 " You were staring, as far as I could see, at 
 a pretty little washerwoman with a basket of, 
 clothes," resumed the painter. 
 
 "Yes; it was that to you, but not to me. 
 170 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 Behind the mere pretty island girl (to the 
 world) is, in my eye, the Idea, in Platonic 
 phraseology — the essence and epitome of all 
 that is desirable in this existence. ... I am 
 under a doom, Somers. Yes, I am under a 
 doonii. To "have been always following a 
 phantom whom I. saw in woman after woman 
 while she was at a distance, but vanishing 
 away on close approach, was bad enough ; but 
 now the terrible thing is that the phantom 
 does not vanish, but stays to tantalize me 
 even .when I am near enough to see what it 
 is! That girl holds me, though my eyes are 
 open, and though I see that I am a fool !" 
 
 Somers regarded the visionary look of his 
 friend, which rather intensified than decreased 
 as his years wore on, but made no further re- 
 mark. When they reached the castle Somers 
 gazed round upon the scenery, and Pierston, 
 signifying the quaint little Elizabethan cot- 
 tage, said, " That's where she lives." 
 
 "What a romantic place! — and this island 
 altogether. A man might love a scarecrow or 
 turnip-lantern here." 
 
 "But a woman mightn't. ; Scenery doesn't 
 impress them, though they pretend it does. 
 This girl is as fickle as — " 
 171 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " You once were." 
 
 " Exactly — from your point of view. She 
 has told me so — candidly. And it hits me 
 hard." 
 
 Somers stood still in sudden thought. " Well 
 — that is a strange turning of the tables !" he 
 said. " But you wouldn't really marry her, 
 Pierston ?" 
 
 " I would — to-morrow. Why shouldn't I ? 
 What are fame and nanje and society to me — 
 a descendant of wreckers and smugglers, like 
 her. Besides, I know what she's made of, 
 my boy, to her innermost fibre ; I know the 
 perfect and pure quarry she was dug from, 
 and that gives a man confidence." 
 
 "Then you'll win." 
 
 While they were sitting after dinner that 
 evening their quiet discourse was interrupted 
 by the long low whistle from the cliffs with- 
 out. Somers took no notice, but Pierston 
 marked it. That whistle always occurred at 
 the same time in the evening when Avice was 
 helping in the house. He excused himself 
 for a moment to his visitor and went out 
 upon the dark lawn. A crunching of feet 
 upon the gravel mixed in with the articula- 
 172 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 tion of the sea— steps light as if they were 
 winged. And he supposed, two minutes 
 later, that the mouth of some hulking fellow 
 was upon hers, which he himself hardly vent- 
 ured to look at, so touching was its young 
 beauty. 
 
 Hearing people about — among others a 
 couple quarrelling, for there were rough as 
 well as gentle people here in the island — he 
 returned to the house. Next day Somers 
 roamed abroad to look for scenery for a 
 marine painting, and, going out to seek him, 
 Pierston met Avice. 
 
 " So you have a lover, my lady !" he said, 
 severely. She admitted that it was the fact. 
 " You won't stick to him," he continued. 
 
 " I think I may this one," said she, in a 
 meaning tone that he failed to fathom. " He 
 deserted me once, but he won't again." 
 
 " I suppose he's a wonderful sort of fellow." 
 
 " He's good enough for me«" 
 
 " So handsome, no doubt." 
 
 " Handsome enough for me." 
 
 "So refined and respectable." 
 
 " Refined and respectable enough for me." 
 
 He could not disturb her equanimity, and 
 let her pass. The next day was Sunday, and, 
 173 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Somers having chosen his view. at the other 
 end of the island, Pierston determined in the 
 afternoon to see Avice's lover. He found that 
 she had left her cottage stronghold, and went 
 on towards the lighthouses at the Beal. Turn- 
 ing back when he had reached the nearest, he 
 saw on the lonely road between the quarries a 
 young man evidently connected with the stone, 
 trade, with Avice the Second upon his arm. 
 
 She looked prettily guilty and blushed a lit- 
 tle under his glance. The man's was one of 
 the typical island physiognomies — his features 
 energetic and wary in their expression, and 
 half covered with a close, crisp, black beard. 
 Pierston fancied that out of his keen dark eyes 
 there glimmered a dry sense of humor at the 
 situation. 
 
 If so, Avice must have told him of Pierston's 
 symptoms of tenderness. This girl whom, for 
 her dear mother's sake more than for her own 
 unquestionable attractiveness, he would have 
 guarded as the apple of his eye, how could she 
 estimate him so flippantly ? 
 
 The mortifica.tion of having brought himself 
 
 to this position with the antitype by his early 
 
 slight of the type blinded him for the moment 
 
 to what struck him a short time after. The 
 
 174 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 man upon whose arm she hung was not a sol- 
 dier. What, then, became of her entranced 
 gaze at the sentinel ? She could hardly have 
 transferred her affections so promptly ; or, to 
 give her the benefit of his own theory, her 
 Beloved could scarcely have flitted from frame 
 to frame in so very brief an interval. And 
 which of them had been he who whistled soft- 
 ly in the dusk to her? 
 
 Without further attempt to find Alfred 
 Somers, Pierston walked homeward, moodily 
 thinking that the desire to make reparation to 
 the original woman by wedding and enriching 
 the copy — which lent such an unprecedented 
 permanence to his new love — was thwarted, 
 as if by set intention of his destiny. 
 
 At the door of the grounds about the castle 
 there stood a carriage. He observed that it 
 was not one of the homely flys from the un- 
 der-hill town, but apparently from the fashion- 
 able town across the bay. Wondering why 
 the visitor had not driven in, he entered, to 
 find in the drawing-room Nichola Pine-Avon. 
 
 At his first glance upon her, fashionably 
 
 dressed and graceful in movement, she seemed 
 
 beautiful ; at the second, when he observed 
 
 that her face was pale and agitated, she 
 
 175 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 seemed pathetic likewise. Altogether, she 
 was now a very different figure from her who, 
 sitting in her chair with such finished compos- 
 ure, had snubbed him in her drawing-room in 
 Hamptonshire Square. 
 
 " You are surprised at this ? Of course you 
 are," she said, in a low, pleading voice, lan- 
 guidly lifting her heavy eyelids, while he was 
 holding her hand. " But I couldn't help it. I 
 know I have done something to offend you — 
 have I not? Oh, what can it be, that you 
 have come away to this outlandish rock, to 
 live with barbarians in the midst of the Lon- 
 don season?" 
 
 "You have not offended me, dear Mrs. Pine- 
 Avon," he said. " How sorry I am that you 
 should have supposed it ! Yet I am glad, too, 
 that your fancy should have done me the good 
 turn of bringing you here to see me." 
 
 " I am staying at Budmouth-Regis," she ex- 
 plained. 
 
 " Then I did see you at a church-service 
 here a little while back?" 
 
 She blushed faintly upon her pallor, and she 
 
 sighed. Their eyes met. " Well," she said, at 
 
 last, " I don't know why I shouldn't show the 
 
 virtue of candor. You know what it means. 
 
 176 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 I was the stronger once ; now I am the weak- 
 er. Whatever pain I may have given you in 
 the ups and downs of our acquaintance I am 
 sorry for, and would wiUingly repair all errors 
 of the past by — being amenable to reason in 
 the future." ' 
 
 It was impossible that Jocelyn should not 
 feel a tender impulsion towards this attractive 
 and once independent woman, who from every 
 worldly point of view was an excellent match 
 for him — a superior match, indeed, except in 
 money. He took her hand again and held it 
 awhile, and a faint wave of gladness seemed 
 to flow through her. But no — he could go no 
 further. That island girl, in her coquettish 
 Sunday frock and little hat with its bunch of 
 cock's feathers, held him as by strands of 
 Manila rope. He dropped Nichola's hand. 
 
 " I am leaving Budmouth to-morrow," she 
 said. "That was why I felt I must call. You 
 did not know I had been there all through the 
 Whitsun holidays?" 
 
 " I did not, indeed, or I should have come 
 to see you." 
 " I didn't like to write. I wish I had, now !" 
 " I wish you had, too, dear Mrs. Pine-Avon." 
 But it was "Nichola" that she wanted to be. 
 M 177 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 As they reached the landau he told her that 
 he should be back in town himself again soon, 
 and would call immediately. At the moment 
 of his words Avice Caro, now alone, passed 
 close along by the carriage on the other side 
 towards her house hard at hand.' She did not 
 turn head or eye to the pair; they seemed to 
 be in her view objects of indifference. 
 
 Pierston became cold as a stone. The chill 
 towards Nichola that the presence of the girl 
 — sprite, witch, troll that she was — brought 
 with it came like a doom. He knew what a 
 fool he was, as he had .said. But he was power- 
 less in the grasp of the idealizing passion. He 
 cared more for Avice's finger-tips than for Mrs. 
 Pine-Avon's whole personality. 
 
 Perhaps Nichola saw it, for she said, mourn- 
 fully : " Now I have done all I could ! I felt 
 that the only counterpoise to my cruelty to 
 you in my drawing-room would be to come as 
 a suppliant to yours." 
 
 " It is most handsome and noble of you, my 
 very dear friend !" said he, with an emotion 
 of courtesy rather than of enthusiasm. 
 
 Then adieux were spoken, and she drove 
 away. But Pierston saw only the retreating 
 Avice, and knew that he was helpless in her 
 178 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 hands. The church of the island had risen 
 near the foundations of the Pagan temple, and 
 a Christian emanation from the former might 
 be wrathfully torturing him through the very 
 false gods to whom he had devoted himself 
 both in his craft, like Demetrius of Ephesus, 
 and in his heart. Perhaps divine punishment 
 for his idolatries had come. 
 
SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL 
 
 PlERSTON had not turned far back towards 
 the castle when he was overtaken by Somers 
 and the man who carried his painting lumber. 
 They paced' together to the door ; the man 
 deposited the articles and went away, and the 
 two walked up and down before entering. 
 
 " I met an extremely interesting woman in 
 the road out there," said the painter. 
 
 " Ah, she is ! A sprite, a sylph ; Psyche in- 
 deed !" 
 
 " I was struck with her." 
 
 " It shows how beauty will out through the 
 homeliest guise." 
 
 " Yes, it will ; though not always. And this 
 case doesn't prove it, for the lady's attire was 
 in the latest and most approved taste." 
 
 " Oh, you mean the lady who was driv- 
 ing?" 
 
 " Of course. What I were you thinking of 
 1 80 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 the pretty little cottage-girl outside here ? I 
 
 did meet her, but what's she? Very well for 
 
 one's picture, though hardly for one's fireside. 
 
 This lady—" 
 
 " Is Mrs. Pine-Avon. A kind, proud wom- 
 
 » 
 an, who'll do what people with no pride 
 
 would not condescend to think of. She is 
 leaving Budmouth to-morrow, and she drove 
 across to see me. You know how things 
 seemed to be going with us at one time? But 
 I am no good to any woman. She's been 
 very generous towards me, which I've not 
 been to her. . . . She'll ultimately throw her- 
 self away upon some wretch, unworthy of her, 
 no doubt." 
 
 "Do you think so?" murmured Somers. 
 After a while he said, abruptly, " I'll marry 
 her myself, if she'll have me. I like the look 
 of her." 
 
 " I wish you would, Alfred, or rather could. 
 She has long had an idea of slipping out of 
 the world of fashion into the world of art. 
 She is a woman of individuality and earnest 
 instincts. I am in real trouble about her. I 
 won't say she can be won — it would be un- 
 generous of me to say that. But try. I can 
 bring you together easily." 
 i8i 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " I'll marry her, if she's willing !" With 
 the phlegmatic dogmatism that was part of 
 him, Somers added, " When you have decid- 
 ed to marry, take the first nice woman you 
 meet. They are all alike." 
 
 "Well — you don't know her yet," replied 
 Jocelyn, who could give praise where he could 
 not give love. 
 
 " But you do, and I'll take her on the 
 strength of your judgment. Is she really 
 handsome? — I had but the merest glance. 
 But I know she is, or she wouldn't have 
 caught your discriminating eye." 
 
 " You may take my word for it ; she looks 
 as well at hand as afar." 
 
 " What color are her eyes ?" 
 
 "Her eyes? I don't go much into color, 
 being professionally sworn to form. But, let 
 me see — gray ; and her hair rather light than 
 dark brown." 
 
 " I wanted something darker," said Somers, 
 airily. " There are so many fair models among 
 native Englishwomen. Still, blondes are use- 
 ful property! . . . Well, well; this is flippancy. 
 But I liked the look of her." 
 
 Somers had gone back to town. It was a 
 
 182 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 wet day on the little peninsula, but Pierston 
 walked out as far as the garden-house of his 
 hired castle, where he sat down and smoked. 
 This erection being on the boundary-wall of 
 his property, his ear could now and then catch 
 the tones of Avice's voice from her open- 
 doored cottage in the lane which skirted his 
 fence ; and he noticed that there were no 
 modulations in it. He knew why that was. 
 She wished to go out, and could not. He 
 had observed before that when she was plan- 
 ning an outing a particular note would come 
 into her voice during the preceding hours — a 
 dove's roundness of sound ; no doubt the ef- 
 fect upon her voice of her thoughts of her 
 lover, or lovers. Yet the latter it could not 
 be. She was pure and single-hearted ; half an 
 eye could see that. Whence, then, the two 
 men ? Possibly the quarrier was a relation. 
 
 There seemed reason in this when, going 
 out into the lane, he encountered one of the 
 red-jackets he had been thinking of. Soldiers 
 were seldom seen in this outer part of the 
 isle ; their beat from the forts, when on pleas- 
 ure, was in the opposite direction, and this 
 man must have had a special reason for com- 
 ing hither. Pierston surveyed him. He was 
 183 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 a round-faced, good-humored fellow to look 
 at, having two little pieces of mustache on 
 his upper lip, like a pair of minnows ram- 
 pant, and small black eyes, over which the 
 Glengarry cap straddled fiat. It was a hate- 
 ful idea that her tender cheek should be 
 kissed by the lips of this heavy young man, 
 who had never been sublimed by a single bat- 
 tle,, even with defenceless savages. 
 
 The soldier went before her house, looked 
 at the door, and moved on down the crooked 
 way to the cliffs, where there was a path back 
 to the forts. But he did not adopt it, return- 
 ing by the way he had come. This showed 
 his wish to pass the house again. She, gave 
 no sign, however, and the soldier disappeared. 
 
 Pierston could not be satisfied that Avice 
 was in the house, and he crossed over to the 
 front of her little freehold and tapped at the 
 door, which stood ajar. 
 
 Nobody came ; hearing a slight movement 
 within, he crossed the threshold. Avice was 
 there alone, sitting on a low stool in a dark 
 corner, as though she wished to be unob- 
 served by any casual passer-by. She looked 
 up >at him without emotion or apparent sur- 
 prise; but he could then see that she was 
 184 
 
A YOUNG Man of forty 
 
 ccying. The view, for the first time, of dis- 
 tress in an unprotected young girl, towards 
 whom he. felt drawn by ties of extraordinary 
 delicacy and tenderness, moved Pierston be- 
 yond measure. He entered without cere- 
 mony. 
 
 " Avice, my dear girl !" he said. " Some- 
 thing is the matter !" 
 
 She looked assent, and he went on : " Now 
 tell me all about it. Perhaps I can help you. 
 Come, tell me." 
 
 " I can't," she murmured. " Gammer Stock- 
 wool is upstairs, and she'll hear !" Mrs. Stock- 
 wool was the old woman who had come to 
 live with the girl for company since her 
 mother's death. 
 
 " Then come into my garden opposite. 
 There we shall be quite private." 
 
 She rose, put on her hat, and accompanied 
 him to the door. Here she asked him if the 
 lane were empty, and on his assuring her that 
 it was she crossed over and entered with him 
 through the garden-wall. 
 
 The place was a shady and secluded one, 
 
 though through the boughs the sea could be 
 
 seen quite near at hand, its moanings being 
 
 distinctly audible. A water-drop from a, tree 
 
 185 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 fell here and there, but the fain was not 
 enough to hurt them. 
 
 " Now let me hear it," he said, soothingly. 
 " You may tell me with the greatest freedom. 
 I was a friend of your mother's, you know. 
 That is, I knew her; and I'll be a friend of 
 yours." 
 
 The statement was risky, if he wished her 
 not to suspect him of being her mother's false 
 one. But that lover's name appeared to be 
 unknown to the present Avice. 
 
 " I can't tell you, sir," she replied, unwilling- 
 ly ; " except that it has to do with my own 
 changeableness. The rest is the secret of 
 somebody else." 
 
 " I am sorry for that," said he. 
 
 " I am getting to care for one I ought not 
 to think of, and it means ruin. I ought to get 
 away !" 
 
 "You mean from the island?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Pierston reflected. His presence in London 
 had been desired for some time; yet he had 
 delayed going because of his new solicitudes 
 here. But to go and take her with him would 
 afford him opportunity of watching over her, 
 tending her mind, and developing it ; while it 
 iS6 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 might remove her from some looming danger. 
 It was a somewhat awkward guardianship for 
 him, as a lonely man, to carry out ; still, it 
 could be done. He asked her abruptly if she 
 would really like to go away for a while. 
 
 " I like best to stay here," she answered. 
 " Still, I should not mind going somewhere, 
 because I think I ought to." 
 
 " Would you like London ?" 
 
 Avice's face lost its weeping shape. " How 
 could that be ?" she said. 
 
 " I have been thinking that you could come 
 to my house and make yourself useful in some 
 way. I rent Just now one of those new places 
 called flats, which you may have heard of, and 
 I have a studio at the back." 
 
 " I haven't heard of 'em," she said, without 
 interest. 
 
 " Well, I have two servants there, and, as 
 my man has a holiday, you can help them for 
 a month or two." 
 
 "Would polishing furniture be any good? 
 I can do that." 
 
 " I haven't much furniture that requires 
 
 polishing. But you can clear away plaster 
 
 and clay messes in the studio, and chippings 
 
 of stone, and help me in modelling, and dust 
 
 187 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 all my Venus failures, and hands and heads 
 and feet and bones and other objects." 
 
 She was startled, yet attracted by the novel- 
 ty of the proposal. 
 
 " Only for a time," she said. 
 
 " Only for a time. As short as you like, and 
 as long." 
 
 The deliberate manner in which, after the 
 first surprise, Avice discussed the arrange- 
 ments that he suggested might have told him 
 how far was any feeling for himself, beyond 
 friendship, and possibly gratitude, from agitat- 
 ing her breast. Yet there was nothing ex- 
 travagant in the discrepancy between their 
 ages, and he hoped, after shaping her to him- 
 self, to win her. What had grieved her to 
 tears she would not more particularly tell. 
 
 She had naturally not much need of prepa- 
 ration, but she made even less preparation 
 than he would have expected her to require. 
 She seemed eager to be off immediately, and 
 not a soul was to know of her departure. 
 Why, if she were in love and at first averse to 
 leave the island, she should be so precipitate 
 now he failed to understand. 
 
 But he took great care to compromise in no 
 way a girl in whom his interest was as pro- 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 tective as it was passionate. He accordingly 
 left her to get out of the island alone, await- 
 ing her at a station a few miles up the railway, 
 where, discovering himself to her through the 
 carriage window, he entered the next compart- 
 ment, his frame pervaded by a glow which was 
 almost joy at having for the first time in his 
 charge one who inherited the flesh and bore 
 the name so early associated with his own, and 
 at the prospect of putting things right which 
 had been wrong through many years. 
 
XI 
 
 THE IMAGE PERSISTS 
 
 It was dark when the four-wheeled cab 
 wherein he had brought Avice from the sta- 
 tion stood at the entrance to the pile of flats 
 of which Pierston occupied one floor — rarer 
 then as residences in London than they are 
 now. Leaving Avice to alight and get the 
 luggage taken in by the porter, Pierston went 
 up-stairs. To his surprise his floor was silent, 
 and, on entering with a latch-key, the rooms 
 were all in darkness. He descended to the 
 hall, where Avice was standing helpless beside 
 the luggage, while the porter was outside with 
 the cabman. 
 
 " Do you know what has become of my ser- 
 vants?" asked Jocelyn. 
 
 "What — and ain't they there, saur? Ah, 
 then, my belief is. that what I suspected is 
 thrue ! You didn't leave your wine-cellar un- 
 locked, did you, saur, by no mistake ?" 
 igo 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 Pierston considered. He thought he might 
 have left the key with his elder servant, whom 
 he had believed he could trust, especially as 
 the cellar was not well stocked. 
 
 "Ah, then, it was so! She's been very 
 queer, saur, this last week or two. "Oh yes, 
 sending messages down the spakin'-tube 
 which were like madness itself, and ordering 
 us this and that, till we would take no notice 
 at all. I see them both go out last night, and 
 possibly they went for a holiday, not expect- 
 ing ye, or maybe for good! Shure, if ye'd 
 written, saur, I'd ha' got the place ready, ye 
 being out of a man, too, though it's not me 
 duty at all !" 
 
 When Pierston got to his floor again he 
 found that the cellar door was open; some 
 bottles were standing empty that had been 
 full, and many abstracted altogether. All 
 other articles in the house, however, appeared 
 to be intact. His letter to his housekeeper 
 lay in the box as the postman had left it. 
 
 By this time the luggage had been sent up 
 in the lift ; and Avice, like so much more lug- 
 gage, stood at the door, the hall-porter behind 
 offering his assistance. 
 
 "Come here, Avice," said the sculptor, 
 igr 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "What shall we do now? Here's a pretty- 
 state of affairs !" 
 
 Avice could suggest nothing, till she was 
 struck with the bright thought that she 
 should light a fire. 
 
 " Light a fire? Ah, yes. ... I wonder if we 
 could manage. This is an odd coincidence — 
 and awkward!" he murmured. "Very well-, 
 light a fire." 
 
 " Is this the kitchen, sir, all mixed up with 
 the parlors?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Then I think I can do all that's wanted 
 Jiere for a bit ; at any rate, till you can get 
 help, sir. At least, I could if I could find 
 the fuel-house. 'Tis no such big place as I 
 thought !" 
 
 " That's right — take courage !" said he, with 
 a tender smile. " Now, I'll dine out this even- 
 ing, and leave the place for you to arrange as 
 best you can with the help of the porter's wife 
 down-stairs." 
 
 This Pierston accordingly did, and so their 
 common residence began. Feeling more and 
 more strongly that some danger awaited her 
 in her native island, he determined not to send 
 her back till the lover or lovers who seemed 
 ig2 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 to trouble her should have cooled off. He 
 was quite willing to take the risk of his action 
 thus far in his solicitous regard for her. 
 
 It was a dual solitude, indeed; for, though 
 Pierston and Avice were the only two people 
 in the flat, they did not keep each other com- 
 pany, the former being as scrupulously fearful 
 of going near her now that he had the oppor- 
 tunity as he had been prompt to seek her 
 when he had none. They lived in silence, his 
 messages to her being frequently written on 
 scraps of paper deposited where she could see 
 them. It was not without a pang that he noted 
 her unconsciousness of their isolated position 
 — a position to which; had she experienced 
 any reciprocity of sentiment, she would read- 
 ily have been alive. 
 
 Considering that, though not profound, she 
 was hardly a matter-of-fact girl, as that phrase 
 is commonly understood, she was exasperating 
 in the matter-of-fact quality of her responses 
 to the friendly remarks which would escape 
 him in spite of himself, as well as in her gen- 
 eral conduct. Whenever he formed some culi- 
 nary excuse for walking across the few yards 
 of tessellated hall which separated his room 
 
 N 193 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 from the kitchen and spoke through the door- 
 way to her, she answered, "Yes, sir," or " No, 
 sir," without turning her eyes from the partic- 
 ular work that she was engaged in. 
 
 In the usual course, he would have obtained 
 a couple of properly qualified servants immedi- 
 ately ; but he lived on with the one, or rather 
 the less than one, that this cottage-girl af- 
 forded. It had been his almost invariable cus- 
 tom to dine at one of his clubs. Now he sat 
 at home over the miserable chop or steak, to 
 which he limited himself, in dread lest she 
 should complain of there being too much work 
 for one person and demand to be sent home. 
 A charwoman came every two or three days, 
 effecting an extraordinary consumption of food 
 and alcoholic liquids: yet it was not for this 
 that Pierston dreaded her presence, but lest, in 
 conversing with Avice, she should open the 
 girl's eyes to the oddity of her situation. Avice 
 could see for herself that there must have been 
 two or three servants in the flat during his for- 
 mer residence there ; but his reasons for doing 
 without them seemed never to strike her. 
 
 His intention had been to keep her occupied 
 exclusively at the studio, but accident had 
 modified this. However, he sent her round 
 194 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 one morning, and, entering himself shortly 
 after, found her engaged in wiping the layers 
 of dust from the casts and models. 
 
 The color of the dust never ceased to amaze 
 her. " It is like the hold of a Budmouth col- 
 lier," she said, "and the beautiful faces of these 
 clay people are quite spoiled by it." 
 
 " I suppose you'll marry, some day, Avice ?" 
 remarked Pierston, as he regarded her thought- 
 fully. 
 
 " Some do and some don't," she said, with a 
 reserved smile, still attending to the casts. 
 
 " You are very offhand," said he. 
 
 She archly weighed that remark without 
 further speech. It was tantalizing conduct in 
 the face of his instinct to cherish her ; espe- 
 cially when he regarded the. charm of her bend- 
 ing profile, the well-characterized though softly 
 lined nose, the round chin, with, as it were, a 
 second leap in its curve to the throat, and the 
 swfeep of the eyelashes over the rosy cheek 
 during the sedulously lowered glance. How 
 futilely he had labored to express the character 
 of that face in clay, and, while catching it in 
 substance, had yet lost something that was es- 
 sential ! 
 
 That evening, at dusk, in the stress of writing 
 195 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 letters, he sent her out for stamps. She had 
 been absent some quarter of an hour when, sud- 
 denly drawing himself up from over his writing- 
 table, it flashed upon him that he had absolutely 
 forgotten her total ignorance of London. 
 
 The head post-office, to which he had sent 
 her because it was late, was two or three streets 
 off, and he had made his request in the most 
 general manner, which she had acceded to 
 with alacrity enough. How could he have 
 done such an unreflecting thing? 
 
 Pierston went to the window. It was about 
 nine o'clock, and owing to her absence the 
 blinds were not down. He opened the case- 
 ment and stepped out upon the balcony. The 
 green shade of his lamp screened its rays from 
 the gloom without. Over the opposite square 
 the moon hung, and to the right there stretched 
 a long street, filled with a diminishing array of 
 lamps, some single, some in clusters, among 
 them an occasional blue or red one. From a 
 corner came the notes of a piano-organ strum- 
 ming out a stirring march of Rossini's. The 
 shadowy black figures of pedestrians moved 
 up, down, and across the embrowned roadway. 
 Above the roofs was a bank of livid mist, and 
 higher a greenish-blue sky, in which stars were 
 196 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 visible, though its lower part was still pale with 
 daylight, against which rose chimney-pots in 
 the form of elbows, prongs, and fists. 
 
 From the whole scene proceeded a ground 
 rumble, miles in extent, upon which individual 
 rattles, voices, a tin whistle, the bark of a dog, 
 rode like bubbles on a sea. The whole noise 
 impressed him with the sense that no one in 
 its enormous mass ever required rest. 
 
 In this illimitable ocean of humanity there 
 was a unit of existence, his Avice, wandering 
 alone. 
 
 Pierston looked at his watch. She had been 
 gone half an hour. It was impossible to dis- 
 tinguish her at this distance, even if she ap- 
 proached. He came inside, and, putting on his 
 hat, determined to go out and s.eek her. He 
 reached the end of the street, and there was 
 nothing of her to be seen. She had the option 
 of two or three routes from this point to the 
 post-office ; yet he plunged at random into one, 
 till he reached the office, to find it quite de- 
 serted. Almost distracted now by his anxiety 
 for her, he retreated as rapidly as he had come, 
 regaining home only to find that she had not 
 returned. 
 
 He recollected telling her that if she should 
 197 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 ever lose her way she must call a cab and drive 
 home. It occurred to him that this was what 
 she would do now. He again went out upon 
 the balcony; the dignified street in which he 
 lived was almost vacant, and the lamps stood 
 like placed sentinels awaiting some procession 
 which tarried long. At a point under him 
 where the road was torn up there stood a red 
 light, and at the corner two men were talking 
 in leisurely repose, as if sunning themselves at 
 noonday. Lovers of a feline disposition, who 
 were never seen by daylight, joked and darted 
 at each other in and out of area gates. 
 
 His attention was fixed on the cabs, and he 
 held his breath as the hollow clap of each 
 horse's hoofs drew near the front of the house 
 only to go onward into the square. The two 
 lamps of each vehicle afar dilated with its near 
 approach, and seemed to swerve towards him. 
 It was Avice surely? No, it passed by. 
 
 Almost frantic, he again descended and let 
 himself out of the house, moving towards a 
 more central part, where the roar still con- 
 tinued. Before emerging into the noisy thor- 
 oughfare he observed a small figure approach- 
 ing leisurely along the opposite side, and hast- 
 ened across to. find it was she. 
 198 
 
XII 
 
 A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN 
 
 " Oh, Avice !" he cried, with the tenderly- 
 subdued scolding of a mother. " What is this 
 you have done to alarm me so?" 
 
 She seemed unconscious of having done any- 
 thing, and was altogether surprised at his 
 anxiety. In his relief he did not speak further 
 till he asked her suddenly if she would take 
 his arm, since she must be tired. 
 
 " Oh no, sir," she assured him, " I am not a 
 bit tired, and I don't require any help at all, 
 thank you!" 
 
 They went up-stairs without using the lift, 
 and he let her and himself in with his latch-key. 
 She entered the kitchen, and he, following, sat 
 down in a chair there. 
 
 " Where have you been ?" he said, with al- 
 most angered concern on his face. " You ought 
 not to have been absent more than ten min- 
 utes." 
 
 199 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " I knew there was nothing for me to do, 
 and thought I should like to see a little of 
 London," she replied, naively. " So when I 
 had got the stamps I went on into the fashion- 
 able streets, where folks are all walking about 
 just as if it were daytime ! 'Twas- for all the 
 world like coming home by night from Mar- 
 tinmas Fair at the Street o' Wells, only more 
 genteel!" 
 
 " Oh, Avice, Avice, you must not go out like 
 this! Don't you know that I am responsible 
 for your safety? I am your — well, guardian, 
 in fact, and am bound by law and morals, and 
 I don't know what-all, to deliver you up to 
 your native island without a scratch or blem- 
 ish. And yet you indulge in such a mid- 
 night vagary as this !" 
 
 " But I am sure, sir, the people in the street 
 were more respectable than they are anywhere 
 at home! They were dressed in the latest 
 fashion, and would have scorned to do me any 
 harm ; and as to their love-making, I never 
 heard anything so polite before." 
 
 "Well, you must not do it again. I'll tell 
 you some day why. What's that you have in 
 your hand ?" 
 
 "A mouse-trap. There are lots of mice in 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 this kitchen — sooty micf , not clean like ours — . 
 and I thought I'd try to catch them. That 
 was what I went so far to buy, as there were 
 no shops open just about here. I'll set it now." 
 
 She proceeded at once to do so, and Pier- 
 ston remained in his seat regarding the opera- 
 tion which seemed entirely to engross her. 
 It was extraordinary, indeed, to observe how 
 she wilfully, limited her interests ; with what 
 content she received the ordinary things that 
 life offered, and persistently refused to behold 
 what an infinitely extended life lay open to 
 her through him. If she had only said the 
 word he would have got a license and married 
 her the next morning. Was it possible that 
 she did not perceive this tendency in him ? 
 She could hardly be a woman if she. did not ; 
 and in her airy, elusive, offhand demeanor she 
 was very much of a woman indeed. 
 
 " It only holds one mouse," he said, absently. 
 
 " But I shall hear it throw in the night, and 
 set it again." 
 
 He sighed, and left her to her own resources 
 and retired to rest, though he felt no tendency 
 to sleep. At some small hour of the darkness, 
 owing, possibly, to some intervening door being 
 left open, he heard the mouse -trap click. 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Another light sleeper must have heard it too, 
 for almost immediately after the pit-pat of 
 naked feet, accompanied by the brushing of 
 drapery, was audible along the passage tow- 
 ards the kitchen. After her absence in that 
 apartment long enough to reset the trap, he 
 was startled by a scream from the same quar- 
 ter. Pierston sprang out of bed, jumped into 
 his dressing-gown, and hastened in the direc- 
 tion of the cry. 
 
 Avice, barefooted and wrapped in a shawl, 
 was standing on a chair ; the mouse-trap lay on 
 the floor, the mouse running round and round 
 in its neighborhood. 
 
 " I was trying to take en out," said she, ex- 
 citedly, " and he got away from me !" 
 
 Pierston secured the mouse while she re- 
 mained standing on the chair. Then, having 
 set the trap anew, his feeling burst out, petu- 
 lantly : 
 
 "A girl like you to throw yourself away 
 upon such a commonplace fellow as that quar- 
 ryman ! Why do you do it ?" 
 
 Her mind was so intently fixed upon the 
 matter in hand that it was some moments be- 
 fore she caught his irrelevant subject. " Be- 
 cause I am a foolish girl," she said, quietly. 
 
 202 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 "What! Don't you love him?" said Joce- 
 lyn, with a surprised stare up at her as she 
 stood, in her concern appearing the very Avice 
 who had kissed him twenty years earlier. 
 
 " It is not much use to talk about that," 
 said she. 
 
 "Then is it the soldier?" 
 
 "Yes, though I have never spoken to him." 
 
 " Never spoken to the soldier?" 
 
 " Never." 
 
 "Has either one treated you badly — de- 
 ceived you?" 
 
 " No. Certainly not." 
 
 " Well, I can't make you out ; and I don't 
 wish to know more than you choose to tell 
 me. Come, Avice, why not tell me exactly 
 how things are ?" 
 
 " Not now, sir !" she said, her pretty pink 
 face and brown eyes turned in simple appeal 
 to him from her pedestal. " I will tell you all 
 to-morrow ; an' that I will !" 
 
 He retreated to his own room and lay down 
 meditating. Some quarter of an hour after 
 she had retreated to hers the mouse -trap 
 clicked again, and Pierston raised himself on 
 his elbow to listen. The place was so still and 
 the jerry-built door-panels so thin that he could 
 203 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 hear the mouse jumping about inside the wires 
 of the trap. But he heard no footstep . this 
 time. As he was wakeful and restless he again 
 arose, proceeded to the kitchen with a light, 
 and, removing the mouse, reset the trap. Re- 
 turning he listened once more. He could see 
 in the far distance the door of Avice's room ; 
 but that thoughtful housewife had not heard 
 the second capture. From the room came a 
 soft breathing like that of an infant. 
 
 He entered his own chamber and reclined 
 himself gloomily enough. Her lack of all 
 consciousness of him, the aspect of the de- 
 serted kitchen, the cold grate, irnpressed him 
 with a deeper sense of lonehness than he had 
 ever felt before. 
 
 Foolish he was, indeed, to be so devoted to 
 this young woman. Her defencelessness, her 
 freedom from the least thought that there 
 lurked a danger in their propinquity, were in 
 fact secondary safeguards, not much less strong 
 than that of her being her mother's image, 
 against risk to her from him. Yet it was out 
 of this that his depression came. 
 
 At sight of her the next morning Pierston 
 felt that he must put an end to such a state of 
 things. He sent Avice off to the studio, wrote 
 204 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 to an agent for a couple of servants, and then 
 went round to his work. Avice was busy 
 righting all that she was allowed to touch. It 
 was the girl's delight to be occupied among 
 the models and casts, which for the first time 
 she regarded with the wistful interest of a soul 
 struggling to receive ideas of beauty vaguely 
 discerned yet ever eluding her. That bright- 
 ness in her mother's mind which might have 
 descended to the second Avice with the ma- 
 ternal face and form had been dimmed by ad- 
 mixture with the mediocrity of her father's; 
 and by one who remembered, like Pierston, the 
 dual organization, the opposites could be often 
 seen wrestling internally. 
 
 They were alone in the studio, and his feel- 
 ings found vent. Putting his arms round her 
 he said, " My darling, sweet little Avice ! I 
 want to ask you something — surely you guess 
 what ? I want you to know this : will you be 
 married to me, and live here with me always 
 and ever ?" 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Pierston, what nonsense !" 
 
 " Nonsense?" said he, shrinking somewhat. 
 
 " Yes, sir." 
 
 " Well, why ? Am I too old ? Surely there's 
 no serious difference?" 
 203 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " Oh no — I should not mind that if it came 
 to marrying. The difference is not much for 
 husband and wife, though it is rather much for 
 keeping company." 
 
 She struggled to get free, and when in the 
 movement she knocked down the Empress 
 Faustina's head he did not try to retain her. 
 He saw that she was not only surprised, but a 
 little alarmed. 
 
 " You haven't said why it is nonsense !" he 
 remarked, tartly. 
 
 " Why, I didn't know you was thinking of 
 me like that. I hadn't any thought of it. 
 And all alone here ! What shall I do ?" 
 
 " Say yes, my pretty Avice ! We'll then go 
 out and be married at once, and nobody be 
 any the wiser." 
 
 She shook her head. " I couldn't, sir." 
 
 " It would be well for you. You don't like 
 me, perhaps?" 
 
 "Yes, I do — very much. But not in that 
 sort of way — quite. Still, I might have got to 
 love you in time, if — " 
 
 " Well, then, try," he said, warmly. "Your 
 mother did !" 
 
 No sooner had the words slipped out than 
 Pierston would have recalled them. He had 
 sot 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 felt in a moment that they jeopardized his 
 cause. 
 
 " Mother loved you ?" said Avice, incredu- 
 lously gazing at him. 
 
 "Yes," he murmured. 
 
 "You were not her false young man, sure- 
 ly? That one who — " 
 
 " Yes, yes ! Say no more about it." 
 
 " Who ran away from her?" 
 
 " Almost." 
 
 " Then I can never, never like you again ! 
 I didn't know it was a gentleman — I — I 
 thought — " 
 
 " It wasn't a gentleman, then." 
 
 " Oh, sir, please go away ! I can't bear the 
 sight of 'ee at this moment ! Perhaps I shall 
 get to — to like you as I did ; but — " 
 
 "No; I'm d— d if I'll go away!" said Pier- 
 ston, thoroughly irritated. " I have been can- 
 did with you ; you ought to be the same with 
 me!" 
 
 " What do you want me to tell ?" 
 
 " Enough to make it clear to me why you 
 don't accept this offer. Everything you have 
 said yet is a reason for the reverse. Now, my 
 dear, I am not angry." 
 
 " Yes, you are." 
 
 207 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " No, I'm not. Now, what is your reason ?" 
 
 "The name of it is Isaac Pierston, down 
 home." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " I mean he courted me, and led me on to 
 island custom, and then I went to chapel one 
 morning and married him in secret, because 
 mother didn't care about him ; and I didn't 
 either by that time. And then he quarrelled 
 with me ; and just before you and I came to 
 London he went away to Guernsey. Then I 
 saw a soldier; I never knew his name, but I 
 fell in love with him because I am so quick at 
 that! Still, as it was wrong, I .tried not to 
 think of him, and wouldn't look at him when 
 he passed. But it made me cry very much 
 that I mustn't. I was then very miserable,, 
 and you asked me to come to London. I 
 didn't care what I did with myself, and I 
 came." 
 
 " Heaven above us !" said Pierston, his pale 
 and distressed face showing with what a shock 
 this announcement had come. "Why have 
 you done such extraordinary, things? Or, 
 rather, why didn't you tell me of this before ? 
 Then, at the present moment you are the wife 
 of a man who is in Guernsey, whom you do 
 
 20S 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 not love at all, but instead of him love a sol- 
 dier whom you have never spoken to, while I 
 have nearly brought scandal upon us both by 
 your letting me love you. Really, you are a 
 very wicked woman !" 
 
 " No, I am not !" she pouted. 
 Still, Avice looked pale and rather fright- 
 ened, and did not lift her eyes from the floor. 
 " I said it was nonsense in you to want to 
 have me !" she went on, " and even if I hadn't 
 been married to that horrid Isaac Pierston I 
 couldn't have married you after you told me 
 that you was the man who ran away from my 
 mother." 
 
 " I have paid the penalty !" he said, sadly. 
 " Men of my sort always get the worst of it 
 somehow. Now, Avice — I'll call you dear 
 Avice for your mother's sake and not for your 
 own^^I must see what I can do to help you 
 out of the difficulty that unquestionably you 
 are in. Why can't you love your husband, 
 now you have married him ?" 
 
 Avice looked aside at the statuary as if the 
 subtleties of her organization were not very 
 easy to define. 
 
 "Was he that black-bearded typical local 
 character I saw you walking with one Sun- 
 o 209 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 day? The same surname as mine; though, 
 of course, you don't notice that in a place 
 where there are only half a dozen surnames?" 
 
 " Yes, that was Ike. It was that evening we 
 disagreed. He scolded me again, and I an- 
 swered him, and the next day he went away." 
 
 "Well, as I say, I must consider what it will 
 be best to do for you in this. The first thing, 
 it seems to me, will be to get your husband 
 home." 
 
 She impatiently shrugged her shoulders. 
 " I don't like him !" 
 
 " Then why did you marry him ?" 
 
 " I was obliged to, after we'd proved each 
 other." 
 
 "You shouldn't have thought of such a 
 thing. It is ridiculous, and out of date nowa- 
 days." 
 
 "Ah, he's so old-fashioned in his notions 
 that he doesn't think like that. However, 
 he's gone." 
 
 " Ah — it is only a tiff between you, I dare 
 say. I'll start him in business if he'll come. 
 ... Is the cottage at home still in your 
 hands?" 
 
 "Yes, it is my freehold. Gammer Stock- 
 wool is taking care o' it for me." 
 
 2IO 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 " Good. And back there you go straight- 
 way, my pretty madam, and wait till your 
 husband comes to make it up with you." 
 
 "I won't go! I don't want him to come!" 
 she sobbed. I want to stay here, or anywhere, 
 except where he can come !" 
 
 "You will get over that. Now go back to 
 the flat, there's a dear Avice, and be ready in 
 one hour, waiting in the hall for me." 
 
 "I don't want to!" 
 
 " But I say you shall !" 
 
 She found it was no use to disobey. Pre- 
 cisely 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 out of the door, 
 and kept looking behind till he saw the cab 
 approaching. He then entered beside the 
 astonished girl, and onward they went to- 
 gether. 
 
 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 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 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 repressed 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 posi- 
 tion. 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 devel- 
 opment, 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 inex- 
 perienced 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 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 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 aging 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 sol- 
 emnized, 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 offici- 
 ating minister, and the two witnesses. 
 
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 ad- 
 joining ruin of Red King's 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 draw- 
 bridge 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 light-ship 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 
 214 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 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 wa- 
 ter and the articulate heave of life seemed 
 but differing utterances of the self-same trou- 
 bled terrestrial Being — which in one sense 
 they were. 
 
 Pierston — for the man in the lane was he — 
 would look from light-ship 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. 
 
 ai5 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " 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 
 yourold lihe awaits you here in the island." 
 
 " Wi' all my heart, then," said the man. 
 His voice was energetic, and, though slightly 
 tou'chy, 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 sci- 
 ons of a common stock in this isle of inter- 
 marriages, 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 ta- 
 ble a little wool mat, and in the centre of the 
 mat a lamp, the apartment having the appear- 
 216 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 ance of being rigidly swept and set in order 
 for an event of interest. 
 
 The woman who lived in the house with 
 Avice now came down-stairs, and to the inquiry 
 of the comers she replied that matters were 
 progressing favorably, but that nobody could 
 be allowed to go up-stairs just then. After 
 placing chairs and viands for them she re- 
 treated, 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. Engag- 
 ing in desultory and fragmentary conversa- 
 tion, they listened to the trampling of feet on 
 the floor-boards overhead — Pierston full of anx- 
 iety 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 an- 
 swer that he felt would serve for two as well as 
 for one. 
 
 " Doing well — remarkably well," replied the 
 professional gentleman, with a manner of hav- 
 ing said it in other places; and, his vehicle not 
 217 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 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 as- 
 cended the staircase. As soon as the lower 
 room was empty Pierston leaned with his el- 
 bows 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 forti- 
 fied 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 get- 
 
 218 
 
A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY 
 
 ting 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? Oh 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 
 219 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 conditions, and left the bedchamber 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 undigni- 
 fied mockery, which savored rather of Harle- 
 quin 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 TURNED SIXTY 
 
" In vie than sccst JJie glowing of suck fire. 
 That on the. ashes of his youth doth lie 
 As the death-bed whereon it Must expire, 
 Consuin'd with that tuhich, it was notirish'd by." 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
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 colorless 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 whity-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 light-ship 
 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 
 223 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 repeated ever since at each tide, but the peb- 
 bles 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 in- 
 stigated. 
 
 He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in 
 fact, at this very date he was staying at a 
 hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set 
 eyes on Avice since parting from her in the 
 room with her first-born, he had managed to 
 obtain tidings of her from time to time during 
 the interval. In this way Pierston learned 
 that, shortly after their resumption of a com- 
 mon life in her house, Ike had ill-used her, till, 
 fortunately, the business to which Jocelyn 
 had assisted him chancing to prosper, he be- 
 came 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. 
 224 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 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 re- 
 turned one evening to his hotel to dine, after 
 spending the afternoon among the busts in 
 the long gallery of the Vatican. The uncon- 
 scious habit, common to so many people, of 
 tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to 
 discern, or to fancy he discerned, in the Ro- 
 man 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. 
 
 This being in his mind when he sat down to 
 dinner at the common table, he was surprised 
 to hear an American gentleman who sat op- 
 posite mention the name of Pierston's birth- 
 p 225 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 place. The American was talking to a friend 
 about a lady — an English widow, whose ac- 
 quaintance they had renewed somewhere in 
 the Channel Islands during a recent tour, af- 
 ter having known her as a young woman who 
 came to San Francisco with her father and 
 mother many years before. Her father was 
 then a rich man, just retired from the business 
 of a stone-merchant in England ; but he had 
 engaged in large speculations, and had lost 
 nearly all his fortune. Jocelyn further gath- 
 ered that the widowed daughter's name was 
 Mrs. Leverre ; that she had a stepson — her 
 husband having been a Jersey gentleman, a 
 widower — and that the stepson seemed to be 
 a promising and interesting young man. 
 
 Pierston was instantly struck with the per- 
 ception that these and other allusions, though 
 general, were in accord with the history of his 
 long-lost Marcia. He hardly felt any desire to 
 hunt her up after nearly two- score years of 
 separation, but- hi*- was impressed enough to 
 resolve to exchange a word with the strangers 
 as soon as he could get opportunity. 
 
 He could not well attract their attention 
 through the plants upon the wide table, and, 
 even if he had been able, he was disinclined to 
 
 226 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 ask questions in public. He waited on till 
 dinner was over, and when the strangers with- 
 drew Pierston withdrew in their rear. 
 
 They were not in the drawing-room, and he 
 found that they had gone out. There was no 
 chance of overtaking them, but Pierston, waked 
 to restlessness by their remarks, wandered up 
 and down the adjoining Piazza di Spagna, 
 thinking they might return. The streets be- 
 low were immersed in shade, the front of the 
 church at the top was flooded with orange 
 light, the gloom of evening gradually intensi- 
 fying upon the broad, long flight of steps, 
 which foot-passengers incessantly ascended and 
 descended with the insignificance of ants; the 
 dusk wrapped up the house to the left, in which 
 Shelley had lived, and that to the right, in 
 which Keats had died. 
 
 Getting back to the hotel, he learned that the 
 Americans had only dropped in to dine, and 
 were staying elsewhere. He saw no more of 
 them ; and on reflection he' was not deeply 
 concerned, for what earthly woman, going off 
 in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping 
 silence so long, would care for a belated friend- 
 ship with him, now in the sere, even if he were 
 to take the trouble to discover her ? 
 227 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Thus much Marcia. The other thread of his 
 connection with the ancient Isle of Slingers 
 was stirred by a letter he received from Avice 
 a little after this date, in which she stated that 
 her husband Ike had been killed in his own 
 quarry by an accident within the past year; 
 that she herself had been ill, and though 
 well again, and left amply provided for, she 
 would like to see him if he ever came that 
 way. 
 
 As she had not communicated for several 
 long years, her expressed wish to see him now 
 was likely to be prompted by something more, 
 something newer, than memories of him. Yet 
 the manner of her writing precluded all sus- 
 picion that she was thinking of him as an old 
 lover whose suit events had now made practi- 
 cable. He told her he was sorry to hear that 
 she had been ill, and that he would certainly 
 take an early opportunity of going down to 
 her home on his next visit to England. 
 
 He did more. Her request had revived 
 thoughts of his old home and its associations, 
 and instead of awaiting other reasons for a re- 
 turn he made her the operating one. About 
 a week later he stood once again at the foot 
 of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the 
 228 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 entrance to the isle were perched like gray 
 pigeons on a roof-side. 
 
 At Top-o'-Hill — as the summit of the rock 
 was mostly called — he stood looking at the 
 busy doings in the quarries beyond, where the 
 numerous black hoisting-cranes scattered over 
 the central plateau had the appearance of a 
 swarm of crane-flies resting there. He went a 
 little farther, made some general inquiries 
 about the accident which had carried off 
 Avice's husband in the previous year, and 
 learned that, though now a widow, she had 
 plenty of friends and sympathizers about her, 
 which rendered any immediate attention to 
 her on his part unnecessary. Considering, 
 therefore, that there was no great reason why 
 he should call on her so soon, and without 
 warning, he turned back. Perhaps, after all, 
 her request had been dictated by a momentary 
 feeling only, and a considerable strangeness to 
 each other must naturally be the result of a 
 score of dividing years. Descending to the 
 bottom, he took his seat in the train on the 
 shore, which soon carried him along the Bank 
 a^^-round to the watering-place five miles off, 
 at which he had taken up his quarters for a 
 few days. 
 
 229 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Here, as he stayed on, his local interests re- 
 vived. Whenever he went out he could see 
 the island that was once his home lying like 
 a great snail upon the sea across the bay. It 
 was the spring of the year ; local steamers had 
 begun to run, and he was never tired of stand- 
 ing on the thinly occupied deck of one of these 
 as it skirted the island and revealed to him on 
 the cliffs far up its height the ruins of Red 
 King's castle, behind which the little village 
 of East Quarriers lay. 
 
 Thus matters went on, if they did not rather 
 stand still, for several days before Pierston re- 
 deemed his vague promise to seek Avice out. 
 And in the meantime he was surprised by the 
 arrival of another letter from her by a round- 
 about route. She had heard, she said, that he 
 had been on the island, and imagined him 
 therefore to be staying somewhere near. Why 
 did he not call, as he had told her he would 
 do? She was always thinking of him and 
 wishing to see him. 
 
 Her tone was anxious, and there was no 
 doubt that she really had something to say 
 which she did not wish to write. He won- 
 dered what it could be, and started the same 
 afternoon. 
 
 230 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 Avice, who had been little in his mind of 
 late years, began to renew for herself a dis- 
 tinct position therein. He was fully aware 
 that since his earlier manhood a change had 
 come over his regard of womankind. Once 
 the individual had been nothing more to him 
 than the temporary abiding-place of the typi- 
 cal or ideal ; now his heart showed its bent to 
 be a growing fidelity to the specimen, with all 
 her pathetic flaws of detail ; which flaws, so 
 far from sending him farther, increased his 
 tenderness. This maturer feeling, if finer and 
 higher, was less convenient than the old. Ar- 
 dors of passion could be felt as in youth with- 
 out the recuperative intervals which had ac- 
 companied evanescence. 
 
 The first sensation was to find that she had 
 long ceased to live in the little freehold cot- 
 tage she had occupied of old. In answer to 
 his inquiries he was directed along the road to 
 the west of the modern castle, past the en- 
 trance on that side, and onward to the very 
 house that had once been his own home. 
 There it .stood, as of j'ore, facing up the Chan- 
 nel, a comfortable roomy structure, the euony- 
 mus and other shrubs, which alone would 
 stand in the teeth of the salt wind, living on 
 231 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 at about the same stature in front of it, but 
 the paint-work much renewed. A thriving 
 man had resided there of late, evidently. 
 
 The widow in mourning who received him 
 in the front parlor was, alas! but the sorry 
 shadow of Avice the Second. How could he 
 have fancied otherwise after twenty years? 
 Yet he had been led to fancy otherwise, al- 
 most without knowing it, by feeling himself 
 unaltered. Indeed, curiously enough, nearly 
 the first words she said to him were, " Why, 
 you are just the same !" 
 
 "Just the same. Yes, I am/ Avice," he an- 
 swered, sadly ; for this inability to ossify with 
 the rest of his generation threw him out of pro- 
 portion with the time. Moreover, while wear- 
 ing the aspect of comedy, it was of the nature 
 of tragedy. 
 
 " It is well to be you, sir," she went on. 
 " I have had troubles to take the bloom off 
 me!" 
 
 "Yes; I have been sorry for you." 
 
 She continued to regard him curiously, with 
 humorous interest ; and he knew what was 
 passing in her mind : that this man, to whom 
 she had formerly looked up as to a person far 
 in advance of her along the lane of life, seemed 
 232 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the 
 pair of them observing the world with fairly 
 level eyes. 
 
 He had come to her with warmth for a vis- 
 ion which, on reaching her, he found to have 
 departed ; and, though fairly weaned by the 
 natural reality, he was so far stanch as to lin- 
 ger hankeringly. They talked of past days — 
 his old attachment, which she had then de- 
 spised, being now far more absorbing and 
 present to her than to himself. 
 
 She unmistakably won upon him as he sat 
 on. A curious closeness between them had 
 been produced in his imagination by the dis- 
 covery that she was passing her life within 
 the house of his own childhood. Her similar 
 surname meant little here ; but it was also his, 
 and, added to the identity of domicile, lent a 
 strong suggestiveness to the accident. 
 • " This is where I used to sit when my par- 
 ents occupied the house," he said, placing him- 
 self beside that corner of the fireplace which 
 commanded a view through the window. " I 
 could see a bough of tamarisk wave outside at 
 that time, and, beyond the bough, the same 
 abrupt grassy waste towards the sea, and at 
 night the same old light-ship blinking far out 
 233 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 there. Place yourself on the spot, to please 
 me. 
 
 She set her chair where he indicated, and 
 Pierston stood close beside her, directing her 
 gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded 
 thence as a boy. Her head and face — the lat- 
 ter thoughtful and worn enough, poor thing, 
 to suggest a married life none too comforta- 
 ble — were close to his breast, and with a few 
 inches further incline would have touched it. 
 
 "And now you are the inhabitant, I the 
 visitor," he said. " I am glad to see you here 
 — so glad, Avice ! You are fairly well pro- 
 vided for — I think I may assume that?" He 
 looked round the room at the solid mahogany 
 furniture and at the modern piano and show- 
 bookcase. 
 
 "Yes, Ike left me comfortable. 'Twas he 
 who thought of moving from my cottage to 
 this larger house. He bought it, and I can 
 live here as long as I choose to." 
 
 Apart from the decline of his adoration to 
 friendship, there seemed to be a general con- 
 vergence of positions which suggested that he 
 might make amends for the original desertion 
 by proposing to this Avice when a meet time 
 should arrive. If he did not love her as he 
 234 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 had done when she was a slim thing catching 
 mice in his rooms in London, he could surely 
 be content at his age with comradeship. Af- 
 ter all, she was only forty to his sixty. The 
 feeling that he really could be thus content 
 was so convincing that he almost believed the 
 luxury of getting old and reposeful was com- 
 ing to his restless, wandering heart at last. 
 
 " Well, you have come at last, sir," she went 
 on ; " and I am grateful to you. I did not like 
 writing, and yet I wanted to be straightfor- 
 ward. Have you guessed at all why I wished 
 to see you so much that I could not help send- 
 ing twice to you ?" 
 
 " I have tried, but cannot." 
 
 " Try again. It is a pretty reason, which I 
 hope you'll forgive." 
 
 " I am sure I sha'n't unriddle it. But I'll 
 say this on my own account before you tell 
 me : I have always taken a lingering interest 
 in you, which you must value for what it is 
 worth. It originated. So far as it concerns you 
 personally, with the sight of you in that cottage 
 round the corner, nineteen or twenty years 
 ago, when I became tenant of the castle 
 opposite. But that was not the very begin- 
 ning. The very beginning was a score of years 
 235 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 before that, when I, a young fellow of one-and- 
 twenty, coming home here from London to 
 see my father, encountered a tender woman as 
 like you as your double ; was much attracted 
 by her, as I saw her day after day flit past this 
 window, till I made it my business to accom- 
 pany her in her walks awhile. I, as you know, 
 was not a stanch fellow, and it all ended bad- 
 ly. But, at any rate, her daughter and I are 
 friends." 
 
 "Ah, there she is!" suddenly exclaimed 
 Avice, whose attention had wandered some- 
 what from his retrospective discourse. She 
 was looking from the window towards the 
 cliffs, where, upon the open ground quite near 
 at hand, a slender female form was seen ram- 
 bling along. " She is out for a walk," Avice 
 continued. " I wonder if she is going to call 
 here this afternoon ? She is living at the cas- 
 tle opposite as governess." 
 
 " Oh, she's—" 
 
 " Yes. Her education was very thorough — 
 better even than her grandmother's. I was 
 the neglected one, and Isaac and myself both 
 vowed that there should be no complaint on 
 that score about her. We christened her Avice, 
 to keep up the name, as you requested. I wish 
 236 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 you could speak to her ; I am sure you would 
 like her." 
 
 "Is that the baby?" faltered Jocelyn. 
 ' " Yes, the baby." 
 
 The person signified, now much nearer, was 
 a still more modernized, up-to-date edition of 
 the two Avices of that blood with whom he 
 had been involved more or less for the last 
 forty years. A ladylike creature was she — 
 almost elegant. She was altogether finer in 
 figure than her mother or grandmother had 
 ever been, which made her more of a woman 
 in appearance than in years. She wore a large- 
 disked sun-hat, with a brim like a wheel whose 
 spokes were radiating folds of muslin lining 
 the brim, a black margin beyond the muslin 
 being the felloe. Beneath this brim her hair 
 was massed low upon her brow, the color of 
 the thick tresses being obviously, from her 
 complexion, repeated in the irises of her large, 
 deep eyes. Her rather nervous lips were thin 
 and closed, so that they only appeared as a 
 delicate red line. A changeable temperament 
 was shown by that mouth — quick transitions 
 from affection to aversion, from a pout to a 
 smile. 
 
 It was Avice the Third. 
 237 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Jocelyn and the second Avice continued to 
 gaze ardently at her. 
 
 "Ah, she is not coming in now; she hasn't 
 time," murmured the mother, with some dis- 
 appointment. " Perhaps she means to run 
 across in the evening." 
 
 The tall girl, in fact, went past and on till 
 she was out of sight. Pierston stood as in a 
 dream. It was the very she, in all essential 
 particulars, and with an intensification of gen- 
 eral charm, who had kissed him forty years 
 before. When he turned his head from the 
 window his eyes fell again upon the inter- 
 ■ mediate Avice at his side. Before but the relic 
 of the Well-Beloved, she had now become its 
 empty shrine. Warm friendship, indeed, he 
 felt for her; but whatever that might have 
 done towards the instauration of a former 
 dream was now hopelessly barred by the ri- 
 valry of the thing itself in the guise of a lin- 
 eal successor. 
 
II 
 
 MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMKNT 
 
 PlERSTON had been about to leave, but he 
 sat down again on being asked if he would 
 stay and have a cup of tea. He hardly knew 
 for a moment what he did; a dim thought 
 that Avice — the renewed Avice — might come 
 into the house made his reseating himself an 
 act of spontaneity. 
 
 He forgot that twenty years earlier he had 
 called the now Mrs. Pierston an elf, a witch ; 
 and that lapse of time had probably not di- 
 lAinished the subtleties implied by those epi- 
 thets. He did not know that she had noted 
 every impression that her daughter had made 
 upon him. 
 
 How he contrived to attenuate and disperse 
 the rather tender personalities he had opened 
 up with the new Avice's mother, Pierston 
 never exactly defined. Perhaps she saw more 
 than he thought she saw — read something in 
 239 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 his face — knew that about his nature which he 
 gave her no credit for knowing. Anyhow, the 
 conversation took the form of a friendly gos- 
 sip from that minute, his remarks being often 
 given while his mind was turned elsewhere. 
 
 But a chill passed through Jocelyn when 
 there had been time for reflection. The re- 
 newed study of his art in Rome, without any 
 counterbalancing practical pursuit, had nour- 
 ished and developed his natural responsive- 
 ness to impressions ; he now felt that his old 
 trouble, his doom — his curse, indeed, he had 
 sometimes called it — was come back again. 
 His divinity was not yet propitiated for that 
 original sin against her image in the person of 
 Avice the First ; and now, at the age of one- 
 and- sixty, he was urged on and on like the 
 Jew Ahasuerus — or, in the phrase of the isl- 
 anders themselves, like a blind ram. 
 
 The Goddess, an abstraction to the general, 
 was a fairly real personage to Pierston. He 
 had watched the marble images of her which 
 stood in his working-room, under all changes 
 of light and shade — in the brightening of 
 morning, in the blackening of eve, in moon- 
 light, in lampHght. Every line and curve of 
 her body none, naturally, knew better than 
 240 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 he ; and, though not a belief, it was, as has 
 been stated, a formula, a superstition, that the 
 three Avices were interpenetrated with her 
 essence. ^ 
 
 "And the next^vice — your daughter," he 
 said, stumblingly ; " she is, you say, a govern- 
 ess at the castle opposite?" 
 
 Mrs. Pierston reaffirmed the fact, adding 
 that the girl often slept at home because she, 
 her mother, was so lonely. She often thought 
 she would like to keep her daughter at home 
 altogether. 
 
 "She plays that instrument, I suppose?" 
 said Pierston, regarding the piano. 
 
 "Yes, she plays beautifully; she had the 
 best instruction that masters could give her. 
 She was educated at Sandbourne." 
 
 " Which room does she call hers when at 
 home ?" he asked, curiously. 
 
 " The little one over this." 
 
 It had been his own. " Strange," he mur- 
 mured. 
 
 He finished tea, and sat after tea, but the 
 youthful Avice did not arrive. With the 
 Avice present he conversed as the old friend 
 — no more. At last it grew dusk, and Pierston 
 could not find an excuse for staying longer. 
 Q 241 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "I hope to make the acquaintance — of 
 your daughter," he said, in leaving, knowing 
 that he might have added with predestinate 
 truth, "of my new tenderly beloved." 
 
 " I hope you will," she answered. " This 
 evening she evidently has gone for a walk in- 
 stead of coming here." 
 
 "And, by- the -bye, you have not told me 
 what you especially wanted to see me for ?" 
 
 " Ah, no. I will put it off." 
 
 " Very well. I don't pretend to guess." 
 
 " I must tell you another time." 
 
 " If it is any little business in connection 
 with your late husband's affairs, do command 
 me. I'll do anything I can." 
 
 "Thank you. And I shall see you again 
 soon ?" 
 
 " Certainly. Quite soon." 
 
 When he was gone she looked reflectively 
 at the spot where he had been standing, and 
 said : " Best hold my tongue. It will work of 
 itself, without my telling." 
 
 Jocelyn went from the house, but as the 
 white road passed under his feet he felt in no 
 mood to get back to his lodgings in the town 
 on the mainland. He lingered about upon 
 the undulating ground for a long while, think- 
 242 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 ing of the extraordinary reproduction of the ^ 
 original girl in this new form he had seen, and 
 of himself as of a foolish dreamer in being so 
 suddenly fascinated by the renewed image in 
 a personality not one -third his age. As a 
 physical fact, no doubt, the preservation of 
 the likeness was no uncommon thing here, 
 but it helped the dream. 
 
 Passing round the walls of the new castle, 
 he deviated from his homeward track by turn- 
 ing down the familiar little lane which led to 
 the ruined castle of the Red King. It took 
 him past the cottage in which the new Avice 
 was born, from whose precincts he had heard 
 her first infantine cry. Pausing, he saw near 
 the west, behind him, the new moon growing 
 distinct upon the glow. 
 
 He was subject to gigantic fantasies still. 
 In spite of himself, the sight of the new moon, 
 as representing one who, by her so-called in- 
 constancy, acted up to his own idea of a mi- 
 gratory Well-Beloved, made him feel as if his 
 wraith, in a changed sex, had suddenly looked 
 over the horizon at him. In a crowd secretly, 
 or in solitude boldly, he had often bowed the 
 knee three times to this sisterly divinity on 
 her first appearaftce monthly, and directed a 
 243 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 kiss towards her shining shape. The curse of 
 his qualities (if it were not a blessing) was far 
 from having spent itself yet. 
 
 In the other direction the castle ruins rose 
 square and dusky against the sea. He went 
 on towards these, around which he had played 
 as a boy, and stood by the walls at the edge 
 of the cliff pondering. There was no wind 
 and but little tide, and he thought he could 
 hear from years ago a voice that he knew. It 
 certainly was a voice, but it came from the 
 rocks beneath the castle ruin. 
 
 " Mrs. Atway !" 
 
 A silence followed, and nobody came. The 
 voice spoke again : " John Stoney !" 
 
 Neither was this summons attended to. The 
 cry continued, with more entreaty : " William 
 Scribben !" 
 
 The voice was that of a Pierston — there 
 could be no doubt of it — young Avice's, sure- 
 ly. Something or other seemed to be detain- 
 ing her down there against her will. A sloping 
 path beneath the beetling cliff and the castle 
 walls rising sheer from its summit led down 
 to the lower level whence the voice proceeded. 
 Pierston followed the pathway, and soon be- 
 held a girl in light clothing — the same he had 
 244 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 seen through the window — standing upon one 
 of the rocks, apparently unable to move. Pier- 
 ston hastened across to her. 
 
 " Oh, thank you for coming!" she murmured, 
 with some timidity. " I have met with an 
 awkward mishap. I live near here, and am 
 not frightened really. My foot has become 
 jammed in a crevice of the rock, and I can- 
 not get it out, try how I will. What shall 
 I do!" 
 
 Jocelyn stooped and examined the cause of 
 discomfiture. " I think if you can take your 
 boot off," he said, " your foot might slip out, 
 leaving the boot behind." 
 
 She tried to act upon this advice, but could 
 not do so effectually. Pierston then experi- 
 mented by slipping his hand into the crevice 
 till he could just reach the buttons of her boot, 
 which, however, he could not unfasten any 
 more than she. Taking his penknife from his 
 pocket, he tried again, and cut off the buttons 
 one by one. The boot unfastened, and out 
 slipped the foot. 
 
 " Oh, how glad I am !" she cried, joyfully. 
 " I was fearing I should have to stay here all 
 night. How can I thank you enough ?" 
 
 He was tugging to withdraw the boot, but 
 245 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 no force that he could exercise would move it. 
 At last she said : " Don't try any longer. It 
 is not far to the house. I can walk in my 
 stocking." 
 
 " I'll assist you in," he said. 
 
 She said she did not want help, nevertheless 
 allowed him to help her on the unshod side. 
 As they moved on she explained that she had 
 come out through the garden door; had been 
 standing on the boulders to look at something 
 out at sea, just discernible in the evening light 
 as assisted by the moon, and, in jumping down, 
 had wedged her foot as he had found it. 
 
 Whatever Pierston's years might have made 
 him look by day, in the dusk of evening he 
 was fairly presentable as a pleasing man of no 
 marked antiquity, his outline differing but lit- 
 tle from what it had been when he was half 
 his years. He was well preserved, still up- 
 right, trimly shaven, agile in movement ; wore 
 a tightly buttoned suit, which set off a natu- 
 rally slight figure ; in brief, he might have been 
 of any age as he appeared to her at this mo- 
 ment. She talked to him with the coequality 
 of one who assumed him to be not far ahead 
 of her own generation; and, as the growing 
 darkness obscured him more and more, he 
 246 , 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 adopted her assumption of his age with in- 
 creasing boldness of tone. 
 
 The flippant, harmless freedom of the water- 
 ing-place miss, which Avice had plainly ac- 
 quired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne 
 school, helped Pierston greatly in this r61e of 
 jeune premier which he was not unready to 
 play. Not a word did he say about being a 
 native of the island; still more carefully did 
 he conceal the fact of his having courted her 
 grandmother and engaged himself to marry 
 that attractive lady. 
 
 He found that she had come out upon the 
 rocks through the same little private door from 
 the lawn of the modern castle which had fre- 
 quently afforded him egress to the same spot 
 in years long past. Pierston accompanied her 
 across the grounds almost to the entrance of 
 the mansion — the place being now far better 
 kept and planted than when he had rented it 
 as a lonely tenant ; almost, indeed, restored to 
 the order and neatness which had characterized 
 it when he was a boy. 
 
 Like her granny, she was too inexperienced 
 
 to be reserved, and during this little climb, 
 
 leaning upon his arm, there was time for a 
 
 great deal of confidence. When he had bidden 
 
 247 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 her farewell and she had entered, leaving him 
 in the dark, a rush of sadness through Pier- 
 ston's soul swept down all the temporary pleas- 
 ure he had found in the charming girl's com- 
 pany. Had Mephistopheles sprung from the 
 ground there and then with an offer to Jocelyn 
 of restoration to youth on the usual terms of 
 his firm, the sculptor might have consented to 
 sell a part of himself which he felt less imme- 
 diate need of than of a ruddy lip and cheek 
 and an unploughed brow. 
 
 But what could only have been treated as a 
 folly by outsiders was almost a sorrow for him. 
 Why was he born with such a temperament? 
 And this concatenated interest could hardly 
 have arisen, even with Pierston, but for a con- 
 flux of circumstances only possible here. The 
 three Avices, the second something like the 
 first, the third a glorification of the first, at all 
 events externally, were the outcome of the 
 immemorial island customs of intermarriage 
 and of prenuptial union, under which condi- 
 tions the type of feature was almost uniform . 
 from parent to child through generations: so 
 that, till quite latterly, to have seen one native 
 man and woman was to have seen the whole 
 population of that isolated rock, so nearly cut 
 248 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 off from the mainland. His own predisposi- 
 tion and the sense of his early faithlessness did 
 all the rest. 
 
 He turned gloomily away, and let himself 
 out of the precincts. Before walking along the 
 couple of miles of road which would conduct 
 him to the little station on the shore, he rede- 
 scended to the rocks whereon he had found 
 her, and searched about for the fissure which 
 had made a prisoner of this terribly belated 
 edition of the Beloved. Kneeling down beside 
 the spot, he inserted his hand, and ultimately, 
 by much wriggling, withdrew the little boot. 
 He mused over it for a moment, put it in his 
 pocket, and followed the stony route to the 
 Street of Wells, 
 
Ill 
 
 THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN 
 
 There was nothing to hinder Pierston in 
 calHng upon the new Avice's mother as often 
 as he should choose, beyond the five miles of 
 intervening railway and additional mile or two 
 of clambering over the heights of the island. 
 Two days later, therefore, he repeated his jour- 
 ney and knocked about tea-time at the wid- 
 ow's door. 
 
 As he had feared, the daughter was not at 
 home. He sat down beside the old sweetheart 
 who, having eclipsed her mother in past days, 
 had now eclipsed herself in her child. Jocelyn 
 produced the girl's boot from his pocket. 
 
 " Then, 'tis you who helped Avice out of her 
 predicament'?" said Mrs. Pierston, with surprise.^ 
 
 " Yes, my dear friend ; and perhaps I shall 
 ask you to help me out of mine before I have 
 done. But never mind that now. What did 
 she tell you about the adventure ?" 
 250 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 Mrs. Pierston was looking thoughtfully upon 
 him. " Well, 'tis rather strange it should have 
 been you, sir," she replied. She seemed to be 
 a good deal interested. " I thought it might 
 have been a younger man — a much younger 
 man." 
 
 " It might have been, as far as feelings were 
 concerned. . . . Now, Avice, I'll to the point 
 at once. Virtually, I have known your daugh- 
 ter any number of years. When I talk to her 
 I can anticipate every turn of her thought, 
 every sentiment, every act, so long did I 
 study those things in your mother and in 
 you. Therefore, I do not require to learn her ; 
 she was learned by me in her previous exist- 
 ences. Now, don't be shocked; I am willing 
 to marry her — I should be overjoyed to do it, 
 if there would be nothing preposterous about 
 it, or that would seem like a man making him- 
 self too much of a fool, and so degrading her 
 in consenting. I can make her comparatively 
 rich, as you know, and I would indulge her 
 every whim. There is the idea, bluntly put. 
 It would set right something in my mind that 
 has been wrong for forty years. After my 
 death she would have plenty of freedom and 
 plenty of means to enjoy it." 
 251 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Mrs. Isaac Pierston seemed only a little sur- 
 prised ; certainly not shocked. 
 
 " Well, if I didn't think you might be a bit 
 taken with her!" she said, with an arch sim- 
 plicity which could hardly be called unaf- 
 fected. " Knowing the set of your mind, 
 from my little time with you years ago, noth- 
 ing you could do in this way would astonish 
 me." 
 
 " But you don't think badly of me for it?" 
 
 " Not at all. . . . By-the-bye, did you ever 
 guess why I asked you to come? . . . But 
 never mind it now ; the matter is past. ... Of 
 course, it would depend upon what Avice felt. 
 . . . Perhaps she would rather marry a younger 
 man." 
 
 " And suppose a satisfactory younger man 
 should not appear?" 
 
 Mrs. Pierston showed in her face that she 
 fully recognized the difference between a rich 
 bird in hand and a young bird in the bush. 
 She looked him curiously up and down. 
 
 " I know you would make anybody a very 
 nice husband," she said. " I know that you 
 would be nicer than many men half your age ; 
 and, though there is a great deal of difference 
 between you and her, there have been more 
 252 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 unequal marriages, that's true. Speaking as 
 her mother, I can say that I shouldn't object 
 to you, sir, for her, provided she liked you. 
 That is where the difficulty will lie." 
 
 " I wish you would help me to get over that 
 difficulty," he said, gently. "Remember, I 
 brought back a truant husband to you twenty 
 years ago." 
 
 " Yes, you did," she assented, " and, though 
 I may say no great things as to happiness 
 came of it, I've always seen that your inten- 
 tions towards me were none the less noble on 
 that account. I would do for you what I 
 would do for no other man, and there is one 
 reason in particular which inclines me to help 
 you with Avice — that I should feel absolutely 
 certain I was helping her to a kind husband." 
 
 "Well, that would remain to be seen. I 
 would, at any rate, try to be worthy of your 
 opinion. Come, Avice, for old times' sake, 
 you must help me. You never felt anything 
 but friendship in those days, you know, and 
 that makes it easy and proper for you to do 
 me a good turn now." 
 
 After a little more conversation his old 
 friend promised that she really would do 
 everything that lay in her power. She did 
 253 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 not say how simple she thought him not to 
 perceive that she had already, by writing to 
 him, been doing everything that lay in her 
 power ; had created the feeling which prompt- 
 ed his entreaty. And to show her good faith 
 in this promise she asked him to wait till later 
 in the evening, when Avice might possibly 
 run across to see her. 
 
 Pierston, who fancied he had won the 
 younger Avice's interest, at least, by the part 
 he had played upon the rocks the week be- 
 fore, had a dread of encountering her in full 
 light till he should have advanced a little fur- 
 ther in her regard. He accordingly was per- 
 plexed at this proposal, and, seeing his hesita- 
 tion, Mrs. Pierston suggested that they should 
 walk together in the direction whence Avice 
 would come, if she came at all. 
 
 He welcomed the idea, and in a few min- 
 utes they started, strolling along under the 
 now strong moonlight, and when they reached 
 the gates of Sylvania Castle turning back 
 again towards the house. After two or three 
 such walks up and down, the gate of the castle 
 grounds clicked, and a form came forth which 
 proved to be the expected one. 
 
 As soon as they met, the girl recognized in 
 254 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 her mother's companion the gentleman who 
 had helped her on the shore ; and she seemed 
 really glad to find that her chivalrous assistant 
 was claimed by her parent as an old friend. 
 She remembered hearing at divers times about 
 this worthy London man of talent and posi- 
 tion, whose ancestry were people of her own 
 isle, and possibly, from the name, of a com- 
 mon stock with her own. 
 
 "And you have actually lived in Sylvania 
 Castle yourself, Mr. Pierston?" asked Avice 
 the daughter, with her innocent young voice. 
 " Was it long ago ?" 
 
 "Yes, it was some time ago," replied the 
 sculptor, with a sinking at his heart lest she 
 should say how long. 
 
 " It must have been when I was away — or 
 when I was very little." 
 
 " I don't think you were away." 
 
 " But I don't think I could have been here ?" 
 
 " No, perhaps you couldn't have been here." 
 
 " I think she was hiding herself in the pars- 
 ley-bed," said Avice's mother, blandly. 
 
 They, talked in this general way till they 
 
 reached Mrs. Pierston's house ; but Jocelyn 
 
 resisted both the widow's invitation and the 
 
 desire of his own heart, and went away with- 
 
 255 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 out entering. To risk, by visibly confronting 
 her, the advantage that he had aheady gained, 
 or fancied he had gained, with the reincarnate 
 Avice required more courage than he could 
 claim in his present mood. 
 
 Such evening promenades as these were fre- 
 quent during the waxing of that summer 
 moon. On one occasion, as they were all 
 good walkers, it was arranged that they 
 should meet half way between the island and 
 the town in which Pierston had lodgings. It 
 was impossible that by this time the pretty 
 young governess should not have guessed the 
 ultimate reason of these rambles to be a mat- 
 rimonial intention ; but she inclined to the be- 
 lief that the widow, rather than herself, was the 
 object of Pierston's regard ; though why this 
 educated and apparently wealthy man should 
 be attracted by her mother — whose homeliness 
 was apparent enough to the girl's more mod- 
 ern training — she could not comprehend. 
 
 They met accordingly in the middle of the 
 Pebble-bank, Pierston coming from the main- 
 land, and the women from the peninsular 
 rock. Crossing the wooden bridge which 
 connected the bank with the shore proper, 
 256 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 they moved in the direction of Henry the 
 Eighth's Castle, on the verge of the ragstone 
 cliff. Like the Red King's castle on the 
 island, the interior was open to the sky, and 
 when they entered and the full moon streamed 
 down upon them over the edge of the enclos- 
 ing masonry, the whole present reality faded 
 from Jocelyn's mind under the press of mem- 
 ories. Neither of his companions guessed 
 what Pierston was thinking of. It was in this 
 very spot that he was to have met the grand- 
 mother of the girl at his side, and in which he 
 would have met her had she chosen to keep 
 the appointment; a meeting which might — 
 nay, must — have changed the whole current 
 of his life. 
 
 Instead of that, forty years had passed — 
 forty years of severance from Avice, till a 
 secondly renewed copy of his sweetheart had 
 arisen to fill her place. But he, alas ! was not 
 renewed. And of all this the pretty young 
 thing at his side knew nothing. 
 
 Taking advantage of the younger woman's 
 retreat to view the sea through an opening 
 of the walls, Pierston appealed to her mother 
 in a whisper: "Have you ever given her a 
 hint of what my meaning is? No? Then I 
 R 257 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 think you might, if you really have no ob- 
 jection." 
 
 Mrs. Pierston, as the widow, was far from 
 being so coldly disposed in her own person 
 towards her friend as in the days when he 
 wanted to marry her. Had she now been the 
 object of his wishes he would not have needed 
 to ask her twice. But like a good mother she 
 stifled all this, and said she would sound Avice 
 there and then. 
 
 "Avice, my dear," she said, advancing to 
 where the girl mused in the window -gap, 
 "what do you think of Mr. Pierston paying 
 his addresses to you — coming courting, as / 
 call it in my old-fashioned way? Supposing 
 he were to, would you encourage him ?" 
 
 "To me, mother?" said Avice, with an in- 
 quiring laugh. " I thought — he meant you !" 
 
 " Oh no, he doesn't mean me !" said her 
 mother, hastily. " He is nothing more than 
 my friend." 
 
 " I don't want any addresses," said the 
 daughter. 
 
 "He is a man in society, and would take 
 you to an elegant house in London, suited to 
 your education, instead of leaving you to 
 mope here." 
 
 358 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 " I should like that well enough," replied 
 Avice, carelessly. 
 
 " Then give him some encouragement." 
 
 " I don't care enough about him to do any 
 encouraging. It is his business, I should 
 think, to do all." 
 
 She spoke in her lightest vein ; but the result 
 was that when Pierston, who had discreetly 
 withdrawn, returned to them, she walked doc- 
 ilely, though perhaps gloomily, beside him, 
 her mother dropping to the rear. They came 
 to a rugged descent, and Pierston took her 
 hand to help her. She allowed him to retain 
 it when they arrived on level ground. 
 
 Altogether it was not an unsuccessful even- 
 ing for the man with the unanchored heart, 
 though possibly initial success meant worse 
 for him in the long run than initial failure. 
 There was nothing marvellous in the fact of 
 her tractability thus far. In his modern dress 
 and style, under the rays of the moon, he 
 looked a very presentable gentleman indeed, 
 while his knowledge of art and his travelled 
 manners were not without their attractions for 
 a girl who with one hand touched the educated 
 middle class and with the other the rude and 
 simple inhabitants of the isle. Her intensely 
 259 
 
THK WELL-BELOVED 
 
 modern sympathies were quickened by her 
 peculiar outlook. 
 
 Pierston would have regarded his interest in 
 her as overmuch selfish if there had not existed 
 a redeeming quality in the substratum of old 
 pathetic memory by which such love had been 
 created — which still permeated it, rendering it 
 the tenderest, most anxious, most protective 
 instinct he had ever known. It may have had 
 in its composition too much of the boyish 
 fervor that had characterized such affection 
 when he was cherry-cheeked and light in the 
 foot as a girl; but if it was all this feeling of 
 youth, it was more. 
 
 Mrs. Pierston, in fearing to be frank lest she 
 ];night seem to be angling for his fortune", did 
 not fully divine his cheerful readiness to offer 
 it, if by so doing he could make amends for 
 his infidelity to her family forty years back in 
 the past. Time had not made him mercenary, 
 and it had quenched his ambitions ; and though 
 his wish to wed Avice was not entirely a wish 
 to enrich her, the knowledge that she would 
 be enriched beyond anything that she could 
 have anticipated was what allowed him to in- 
 dulge his love. 
 
 He was not exactly old, he said to himself 
 260 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 the next morning as he beheld his face in the 
 glass. And he looked considerably younger 
 than he was. But there was history in his face 
 — distinct chapters of it ; his brow was not that 
 blank page it once had been. He knew the 
 origin of that line in his forehead ; it had been 
 traced in the course of a month or two by past 
 troubles. He remembered the coming of this 
 pale wiry hair; it had been brought by the ill- 
 ness in Rome, when he had wished each 
 night that he might never wake again. This 
 wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin — they 
 had resulted from those months of despond- 
 ency when all seemed going against his art, 
 his strength, his happiness. " You cannot live 
 your life and keep it, Jocelyn," he said. Time 
 was against him and love, and time would 
 probably win. 
 
 " When I went away from the first Avice," 
 he continued, with whimsical misery, " I had 
 a presentiment that I should ache for it some 
 day. And I am aching — have ached ever since 
 this jade of an Ideal learned the unconscion- 
 able trick of inhabiting one image only." 
 
 Upon the whole, he was not without a bode- 
 ment that it would be folly to press on. 
 261 
 
IV 
 A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION 
 
 This desultory courtship of a young girl, 
 which had been brought about by her mother's 
 contrivance, was interrupted by the appearance 
 of Somers and his wife and family on the Bud- 
 mouth Esplanade. Alfred Somers, once the 
 youthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was 
 now a middle-aged. family man with spectacles 
 — spectacles worn, too, with the single object of 
 seeing through them — and a row of daughters 
 taihng off to infancy, who at present added 
 appreciably to the income of the bathing- 
 machine women established along the sands. 
 
 Mrs. Somers — once the intellectual, emanci- 
 pated Mrs. Pine-Avon — had now retrograded 
 to the petty and timid mental position of her 
 mother and grandmother, giving sharp, strict 
 regard to the current literature and art that 
 reached the innocent presence of her long per- 
 spective of girls, with the view of hiding every 
 262 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 skull and skeleton of life from their dear eyes. 
 She was another illustration of the rule that 
 succeeding generations of women are seldom 
 marked by cumulative progress, their advance 
 as girls being lost in their recession as matrons ; 
 so that they move up and down the stream of 
 intellectual development like flotsam in a tidal 
 estuary. And this perhaps not by reason of 
 their faults as individuals, but of their misfort- 
 une as child-rearers. 
 
 The landscape-painter, now an Academician 
 like Pierston himself — rather popular than dis- 
 tinguished t— had given up that peculiar and 
 personal taste in subjects which had marked 
 hina in times past, executing instead many 
 pleasing aspects of nature addressed to the 
 furnishing householder through the middhng 
 critic, and really very good of their kind. In 
 this way he received many large checks from 
 persons of wealth in England and America, 
 out of which he built himself a sumptuous 
 studio and an awkward house around it, and 
 paid for the education of the growing maid- 
 ens. 
 
 The vision of Somers's humble position as 
 jackal to this lion of a family and house and 
 studio and social reputation — Somers, to 
 263 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 whom strange conceits and wild imaginings 
 were departed joys never to return — led Pier- 
 ston, as the painter's contemporary, to feel 
 that he ought to be one of the bygones like- 
 wise, and to put on an air of unromantic buf- 
 ferism. He refrained from entering Avice's 
 peninsula for the whole fortnight of Somers's 
 '''istay in the neighboring town, although- its 
 gray poetical outline — "throned along the 
 sea " — greeted his eyes every morn and eve 
 across the roadstead. 
 
 When the painter and his family had gone 
 back' from their bathing holiday, he thought 
 that he, too,' would leave the neighborhood. 
 To do so, however, without wishing at least 
 the elder Avice good-bye would be unfriendly, 
 considering the extent of their acquaintance. 
 One evening, knowing this time of day to suit 
 her best, he took the few minutes' journey to 
 the rock along the thin connecting string of 
 junction, and arrived at Mrs. Pierston's door 
 just after dark. 
 
 A light shone from an upper chamber. On 
 asking for his widowed acquaintance he was 
 informed that she was ill, seriously, though 
 not dangerously. While learning that her 
 daughter was with her, and further particu- 
 864 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 lars, and doubting if he should go in, a mes- 
 sage was sent down to ask him to enter. His 
 voice had been heard, and Mrs. Pierston would 
 like to see him. 
 
 He could not with any humanity refuse, but 
 there flashed across his mind the recollection 
 that Avice the youngest had never yet really 
 seen him, had seen nothing more of him than 
 an outline, which might have appertained as 
 easily to a man thirty years his junior as to 
 himself, and a countenance so renovated by 
 faint moonlight as to fairly correspond. It was 
 with misgivingj therefore, that the sculptor 
 ascended the staircase and entered the little 
 upper sitting-room, now arranged as a sick- 
 chamber. 
 
 Mrs. Pierston reclined on a sofa, her face 
 emaciated to a surprising thinness for the 
 comparatively short interval since her attack. 
 " Come in, sir," she said, as soon as she saw 
 him, holding out her hand. " Don't let me 
 frighten you." 
 
 Avice was seated beside her, reading. The 
 girl jumped up, hardly seeming to recognize 
 him. " Oh, it's Mr. Pierston !" she said, in a mo- 
 ment, adding quickly, with evident surprise and 
 off her guard, " I thought Mr. Pierston was — " 
 265 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 What she had thought he was did not pass 
 her lips, and it remained a riddle for Jocelyn 
 until a new departure in her manner towards 
 him showed that the words "much younger" 
 would have accurately ended the sentence. 
 Had Pierston not now confronted her anew, 
 he might have endured philosophically her 
 changed opinion of him. But he was seeing 
 her again, and a rooted feeling was, revived. 
 
 Pierston now learned for the first time that 
 the widow had been visited by sudden attacks 
 of this, sort not infrequently of late years. 
 They were said to be due to angina pectoris, 
 the latter paroxysms having been the most 
 severe. She was at the present moment out 
 of pain, though weak, exhausted, and nervous. 
 She would not, however, converse about her- 
 self, but took advantage of her daughter's 
 absence from the room to broach the subject 
 most in her thoughts. 
 
 No compunctions had stirred her as they 
 had her visitor on the expediency of his suit 
 in view of his years. Her fever of anxiety lest, 
 after all, he should not come to see Avice again 
 had been not without an effect upon her health ; 
 and it made her more candid than she had in- 
 tended to be. 
 
 266 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 "Troubles and sickness raise all sorts of 
 fears, Mr. Pierston," she said. "What I felt 
 only a wish for, when you first named it, I have 
 hoped, for a good deal since; and I have been 
 so anxious that^that it should come to some- 
 thing! I am glad indeed that you are come." 
 
 " My wanting to marry Avice, you mean, 
 dear Mrs. Pierston?" 
 
 " Yes — that's it. I wonder if you are still in 
 the same mind ? You are ? Then I wish some- 
 thing could be done — to make her agree to it 
 — so as to get it settled. I dread otherwise 
 what will become of her. She is not a practi- 
 cal girl, as I was — she would hardly like now 
 to settle down as an islander's wife; and to 
 leave her living here alone would trouble 
 me." 
 
 "Nothing^will happen to you yet, I hope, 
 my dear old friend." 
 
 "Well, it is a risky complaint; and the at- 
 tacks, when they come, are so agonizing that 
 to endure them I ought to get rid of all out- 
 side anxieties, folk say. Now— do you want 
 her, sir?" 
 
 "With all my soul! But she doesn't want 
 me." 
 
 " I don't think she is so against you as you 
 267 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 imagine. I fancy if it were put to her plainly, 
 now I am in this state, it might be done." 
 
 They lapsed into conversation on the early 
 days of their acquaintance, until Mrs. Pier- 
 ston's daughter re-entered the room. 
 
 " Avice," said her mother, when the girl had 
 been with them a few minutes. " About this 
 matter that I have talked over with you so 
 many times since my attack. Here is Mr. 
 Pierston, and he wishes to be your husband. 
 He is much older than you ; but, in spite of it, 
 that you will ever get a better husband I don't 
 believe. Now, will you take him, seeing the 
 state I am in, and how naturally anxious I am 
 to see you settled before I die ?" 
 
 "But you won't die, mother! You are get- 
 ting better !" 
 
 " Just for the present only. Come, he is a 
 good man and a clever man and a rich man. 
 I want you, oh, so much! to be his wife. I 
 can say no more." 
 
 Avice looked appealingly at the sculptor 
 and then on the floor. "Does he really wish 
 me to ?" she asked, almost inaudibly, turning as 
 she spoke to Pierston. " He has never quite 
 said so to me." 
 
 " My dear one, how can you doubt it ?" said 
 268 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 Jocelyn, quickly. " But I won't press you to 
 marry me as a favor, against your feelings." 
 
 " I thought Mr. Pierston was younger !" she 
 murmured to her mother. 
 
 " That counts for little when you think how 
 much there is on the other side. Think of our 
 position, and of his — a sculptor, with a man- 
 sion, and a studio full of busts and statues that 
 I have dusted in my time, and of the beautiful 
 studies you would be able to take up. Surdy 
 the life would just suit you ? Your expensive 
 education is wasted down here !" 
 
 Avice did not care to argue. She was out- 
 wardly gentle as her grandmother had been, 
 and it seemed just a question with her of 
 whether she must or must not. " Very well — 
 I feel I pught to agree to marry him, since 
 you teli me to," she answered, quietly, after 
 some tlioiight. " I see that it would be a wise 
 thing to. do, and that you wish it, and that Mr. 
 Pierston really does — like me. So — so that — " 
 
 Pierston was not backward at this critical 
 juncture, despite unpleasant sensations. But 
 it was the historic ingredient in this genealog- 
 ical passion — if its continuity through three 
 generations may be so described — which ap- 
 pealed to his perseverance at the expense of 
 269 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 his wisdom. The mother was holding the 
 daughter's hand ; she took Pierston's, and laid 
 Avice's in it. 
 
 No more was said in argument, and the 
 thing was regarded as determined. Afterwards 
 a noise was heard upon the window-panes, as 
 of fine sand thrown; and, lifting the blind, 
 Pierston saw that the distant light-ship winked 
 with a bleared and indistinct eye. A drizzling 
 rain had come on with the dark, and it was 
 striking the window in handfuls. He had in- 
 tended to walk the two miles back to the sta- 
 tion, but it meant a drenching to do it now. 
 He waited and had supper; and, finding the 
 weather no better, accepted Mrs. Pierston's in- 
 vitation to stay over the night. 
 
 Thus it fell out that again he lodged in the 
 house he had been accustomed to live in as a 
 boy, before his father had made his fortune, 
 and before his own name had been heard of 
 outside the boundaries of the isle. 
 
 He slept but little, and in the first move- 
 ment of the dawn sat up in bed. Why should 
 he ever live in London, or any other fashiona- 
 ble city, if this plan of marriage could be car- 
 ried out? Surely, with this young wife, the 
 island would be the best place for him. It 
 270 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 might be possible to rent Sylvanla Castle as he 
 had formerly done — better still, to buy it. If 
 life could offer him anything worth having it 
 would be a home with Avice there on his 
 native cliffs to the end of his days. 
 
 As he sat thus thinking, and the daylight 
 increased, he discerned, a short distance before 
 him, a movement of something ghostly. His 
 position was facing the window, and he found 
 that by chance the looking-glass had swung 
 itself vertical, so that what he saw was his own 
 shape. The recognition startled him. The 
 person he appeared was too grievously far, 
 chronologically, in advance of the person he 
 felt himself to be. Pierston did not care to 
 regard the figure confronting him so mocking- 
 ly. Its voice seemed to say, " There's tragedy 
 hanging on to this 1" But the question of age 
 being pertinent he could not give the spectre 
 up, and ultimately got out of bed under the 
 weird fascination of the reflection. Whether 
 he had overwalked himself lately, or what he 
 had done, he knew not ; but never had he 
 seemed so aged, by a score of years, as he was 
 represented in the glass in that cold gray morn- 
 ing light. While his soul was what it was, 
 why should he have been encumbered with 
 271 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 that withering carcass, without the ability to 
 shift it off for another, as his ideal Beloved 
 had so frequently done ? 
 
 By reason of her mother's illness Avice was 
 now living in the house, and, on going down- 
 stairs, he found that they were to breakfast 
 en tite-h-tite. She was not then in the room, 
 but she entered in the course of a few minutes. 
 Pierston had already heard that the widow felt 
 better this morning, and, elated by the pros- 
 pect of sitting with Avice at this meal, he went 
 forward to her joyously. As soon as she saw 
 him in the full stroke of day from -the window 
 she started ; and he then remembered that it 
 was their first meeting under the solar rays. 
 
 She was so overcome that she turned and 
 left the room as if she had forgotten some- 
 thing; when she re-entered she was visibly 
 pale. She recovered herself, and apologized. 
 She had been sitting up the night before the 
 last, she said, and was not quite so well as 
 usual. 
 
 There may have been some truth in this ; 
 but Pierston could not get over that first 
 scared look of hers. It was enough to give 
 daytime stability to his night views of a pos- 
 sible tragedy lurking in this wedding project. 
 272 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 He determined that, at any cost to his heart, 
 there should be no misapprehension about him 
 from this moment. 
 
 " Miss Pierston," he said, as they sat down, 
 " since it is well you should know all the truth 
 before we go any further, that there may be 
 no awkward discoveries afterwards, I am going 
 to tell you something about myself — if you 
 are not too distressed to hear it ?" 
 
 " No— let me hear it." ^ 
 
 " I was once the lover of your mother, and 
 wanted to marry her ; only she wouldn't, or 
 rather couldn't, marry me." 
 
 " Oh, how strange !" said the girl, looking 
 from him to the breakfast things, and from the 
 breakfast things to him. " Mother has never 
 told me that. Yet, of course, you might have 
 been. I mean, you are old enough." 
 
 He took the remark as a satire she had not 
 intended. " Oh yes — quite old enough," he 
 said, grimly. " Almost too old." 
 
 " Too old for mother ? How's that ?*' 
 
 " Because I belonged to your grandmother." 
 
 " No ! How can that be ?" 
 
 " I was her lover likewise. I should have 
 married her if I had g^pe straight on instead 
 of round the corner." 
 s 273 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " But you couldn't have been, Mr. Pierston ! 
 You are not old enough ! Why, how old are 
 you ? You have never told me." 
 
 " I am very old." 
 
 "My mother's and my grandmother's!" said 
 she, looking at him no longer as at a possible 
 husband, but as a strange fossilized relic in 
 human form. Pierston saw it, but, meaning 
 to give up the game, he did not care to spare 
 himself. ^ 
 
 " Your mother's and your grandmother's 
 young man," he repeated. 
 
 "And were you my great -grandmother's 
 too?" she asked, with an expectant interest 
 ^>;,in his case as a drama that overcame her per- 
 sonal considerations for a moment. 
 
 " No — not your great-grandmother's. Your 
 imagination beats even my confessions! . . . 
 But I am very old, as you see." 
 
 " I did not know it !" said she, in an appalled 
 murmur. " You do not look so ; and I thought 
 that what you looked you were." 
 
 "And you — you are very young," he con- 
 tinued. 
 
 A stillness followed, during which she sat in 
 a troubled constraintfliregarding him now and 
 then with something in her open eyes and 
 274 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 large pupils that might have been sympathy 
 or nervousness. Pierston ate scarce any break- 
 fast, and, rising abruptly from the table, said 
 he would take a walk on the cliffs, as the 
 morning was fine. 
 
 He did so, proceeding along the northeast 
 heights for nearly a mile. He had virtually 
 given Avice up, but not formally. His in- 
 tention had been to go back to the house in 
 half an hour and pay a morning visit to the 
 invalid ; but by not returning the plans of the 
 previous evening might be allowed to lapse 
 silently, as mere pourparlers that had come to 
 nothing in the face of Avice's want of love 
 for him. Pierston accordingly went straight 
 along, and in the course of an hour was at his 
 Budmouth lodgings. 
 
 Nothing occurred till the evening to in- 
 form him how his absence had been taken. 
 Then a note arrived from Mrs. Pierston; 
 it was written in pencil, evidently as she 
 lay. 
 
 " I am alarmed," she said, " at your going 
 so suddenly. Avice seems to think she has 
 offended you. She did not mean to do that, 
 I am sure. It makes me dreadfully anxious ! 
 Will you send a line? Surely you will not 
 275 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 desert us now — my heart is so set on my 
 child's welfare ?" 
 
 " Desert you I won't," said Jocelyn. " It is 
 too much like the original case. But I must 
 let her desert me." 
 
 On his return, with no other object than 
 that of wishing Mrs. Pierston good-bye, he 
 found her painfully agitated. She clasped his 
 hand and wetted it with her tears. 
 
 " Oh, don't be offended with her !" she cried. 
 "She's young. We are one people — don't 
 marry a kimberlin ! It will break my heart if 
 you forsake her now ! Avice !" 
 
 The girl came. " My manner was hasty 
 and thoughtless this morning," she said, in a 
 low voice. " Please pardon me. I wish to 
 abide by my promise." 
 
 Her mother, still tearful, again joined their 
 hands ; and the engagement stood as before. 
 
 Pierston went back to Budmouth, but dimly 
 seeing how curiously, through his being a rich 
 suitor, ideas of beneficence and reparation 
 were retaining him in the course arranged by 
 her mother, and urged by his own desire in 
 the face of his understanding. 
 276 
 
V 
 
 ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION 
 
 In anticipation of his marriage Pierston had 
 taken a new red house of J:he approved Ken- 
 sington pattern, with a new studio at the 
 back as large as a mediaeval barn. Hither, in 
 collusion with the elder Avice — whose health 
 had mended somewhat — he invited mother 
 and daughter to spend a week or two with 
 him, thinking thereby to exercise on the lat- 
 ter's imagination an influence which was not 
 practicable while he was a guest at their 
 house, and, by interesting his betrothed in 
 the fitting and furnishing of this residence, to 
 create in her an ambition to be its mistress. 
 
 It was a pleasant, reposeful time to be in 
 town. There was nobody to interrupt them 
 in their proceedings, and, it being out of the 
 season, the largest tradesmen were as atten- 
 tive to their wants as if those firms had never 
 before been honored with a single customer 
 277 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 whom they really liked. Pierston and his 
 guests, almost equally inexperienced — for the 
 sculptor had nearly forgotten what knowledge 
 of householding he had acquired earlier in life 
 — could consider and practise thoroughly a 
 species of skeleton - drill in receiving visitors 
 when the pair should announce themselves as 
 married and at home in the coming winter 
 season. 
 
 Avice was charming, even if a little cold. 
 He congratulated himself yet again that time 
 should have reserved for him this final chance 
 for one of the line. She was somewhat like 
 her mother, whom he had loved in the flesh, 
 but she had the soul of her grandmother, 
 whom he had loved in the spirit — and, for 
 that matter, loved now. Only one criticism 
 had he to pass upon his choice; though in 
 outward semblance her grandam idealized, she 
 had not the first Avice's candor, but rather 
 her mother's closeness. He never knew ex- 
 actly what she was thinking and feeling. Yet 
 he seemed to have such prescriptive rights in 
 women of her blood that her occasional want 
 of confidence did not deeply trouble him. 
 
 It was one of those ripe and mellow after- 
 noons that sometimes color' London with their 
 *7f 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 golden light at this time of the year, and pro- 
 duce those marvellous sunset effects which, if 
 they were not known to be made up of kitch- 
 en coal-smoke and animal exhalations, would 
 be rapturously applauded. Behind the per- 
 pendicular, oblique, zigzagged, and curved 
 zinc "tall-boys," that formed a gray pattern 
 not unlike early Gothic numerals against the 
 sky, the men and women on tops of omni- 
 buses saw an irradiation of topaz hues, dark- 
 ened here and there into richest russet. 
 
 There had been a sharp shower during the 
 afternoon, and Pierston — who had to take care 
 of himself — had worn a pair of galoshes on his 
 short walk in the street. He noiselessly en- 
 tered the studio, inside which some gleams of 
 the same mellow light had managed to creep, 
 and where he guessed he should find his pro- 
 spective wife and mother-in-law awaiting him 
 with tea. But only Avice was there, seated 
 beside the teapot of brown delf, which, as 
 artists, they affected, her back being towards 
 him. She was holding her handkerchief to 
 her eyes, and he saw that she was weeping 
 silently. 
 
 In another moment he perceived that she 
 was weeping over a book. By this time she 
 279 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 had heard him, and came forward. He made 
 it appear that he had not noticed her distress, 
 and they discussed some arrangements of fur- 
 niture. When he had taken a cup of tea she 
 went away, leaving the book behind her. 
 
 Pierston took it up. The volume was an 
 old school-book — Stievenard's Lectures Fran- 
 qaises — with her name in it as a pupil at 
 Sandbourne High-school, and date-markings 
 denoting lessons taken at a comparatively re- 
 cent time, for Avice had been but a novice 
 as governess when he discovered her. 
 
 For a school-girl — which she virtually was 
 — to weep over a school-book was strange. 
 Could she have been affected by some subject 
 in the readings? Impossible. Pierston fell 
 to thinking, and zest died for the process of 
 furnishing, which he had undertaken so gayly. 
 Somehow, the bloom was again disappearing 
 from his approaching marriage. Yet he loved 
 Avice more and more tenderly ; he feared 
 sometimes that in the solicitousness of his 
 affection he was spoiling her by indulging 
 her every whim. 
 
 He looked round the large and ambitious 
 apartment, now becoming clouded with shades, 
 out of which the white and cadaverous coun- 
 280 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 tenances of his studies, casts, and other lum- 
 ber peered meditatively at him, as if tliey 
 were saying, " What are you going to do now, 
 old boy ?" They had never looked like that 
 while standing in his past homely workshop, 
 where all the real labors of his life had been 
 carried out. What should a man of his age, 
 who had not for years done anything to speak 
 of — certainly not to add to his reputation as 
 an artist — want with a new place like this? 
 It was all because of the elect lady, and she 
 apparently did not want him. 
 
 Pierston did not observe anything further 
 in Avice to cause him misgiving till one din- 
 ner-time, a week later, towards the end of the 
 visit. Then, as he sat himself between her 
 and her mother at their limited table, he was 
 struck with her nervousness, and was tempted 
 to say, " Why are you troubled, my little dear- 
 est ?" in tones which disclosed that he was as 
 troubled as she. 
 
 "Am I troubled?" she said, with a start, 
 turning her gentle hazel eyes upon him. 
 "Yes, I suppose I am. It is because I have 
 received a letter — from an old friend." 
 
 " You didn't show it to me," said her mother. 
 
 " No— I tore it up." 
 281 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " It was not necessary to keep it, so I de- 
 stroyed it." 
 
 Mrs. Pierston did not press her further on 
 the subject, and Avice showed no disposition 
 to continue it. They retired rather early, as 
 they always did, but Pierston remained pacing 
 about his studio a long while, musing on many 
 things, not the least being the perception that 
 to wed a woman may be by no means the 
 same thing as to be united with her. The 
 " old friend " of Avice's remark had sound- 
 ed very much like " lover." Otherwise why 
 should the letter have so greatly disturbed 
 her? 
 
 There seemed to be something uncanny, 
 after all, about London 4n its relation to his 
 contemplated marriage. When she had first 
 come up she was easier with him than now. 
 And yet his bringing her there had helped his 
 cause ; the house had decidedly impressed her 
 — almost overawed her ; and though he owned 
 that by no law of nature or reason had her 
 mother or himself any right to urge on Avice 
 partnership with him against her inclination, 
 he resolved to make the most of having her 
 under his influence by getting the wedding 
 282 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 details settled before she and her mother 
 left. 
 
 The next morning he proceeded to do this. 
 When he encountered Avice there was a trace 
 of apprehension on her face ; but he set that 
 down to a fear that she had offended him the 
 night before by her taciturnity. Directly he 
 requested her mother, in Avice's presence, to 
 get her to fix the day quite early, Mrs. Pier- 
 ston became brighter and brisker. She, too, 
 plainly had doubts about the wisdom of delays 
 and turning to her daughter said, " Now, my 
 dear, do you hear ?" 
 
 It was ultimately agreed that the widow 
 and her daughter should go back in a day or 
 two, to await Pierston's arrival on the wed- 
 ding-eve, immediately after their return. 
 
 In pursuance of the arrangement, Pierston 
 found himself on the south shore of England 
 in the gloom of the aforesaid evening, the isle, 
 as he looked across at it with his approach, 
 being just discernible as a moping counte- 
 nance, a creature sullen with a sense that he 
 was about to withdraw from its keeping the 
 rarest object it had ever owned. He had 
 come alone, not to embarrass them, and had 
 283 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 intended to halt a couple of hours in the 
 neighboring seaport to give some orders relat- 
 ing to the wedding, but the little railway train 
 being in waiting to take him on, he proceeded 
 with a natural impatience, resolving to do his 
 business here by messenger from the isle. 
 
 He passed the ruins of the Tudor castle and 
 the long, featureless rib of grinding pebbles 
 that screened off the outer sea, which could 
 be heard lifting and dipping rhythmically in 
 the wide vagueness of the Bay. At the un- 
 der-hill island townlet of the Wells there were 
 no flys, and, leaving his things to be brought 
 on, as he often did, he climbed the eminence 
 on foot. 
 
 Half-way up the steepest part of the pass 
 he saw in the dusk a figure pausing — the 
 single person on the incline. Though it was 
 too dark to identify faces, Pierston gathered 
 from the way in which the halting stranger 
 was supporting himself by the hand-rail, which 
 here bordered the road to assist climbers, that 
 the person was exhausted. 
 
 "Anything the matter?" he said. 
 
 "Oh no — not much," was returned by the 
 other. " But it is steep just here." 
 
 The accent was not quite that of an Eng- 
 284 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 lishman, and struck him as hailing from one 
 of the Channel Islands. " Can't I help you 
 up to the top?" he said, for the voice, though 
 that of a young man, seemed faint and 
 shaken. 
 
 " No, thank you. I have been ill ; but I 
 thought I. was all right again, and, as the night 
 was fine, I walked into the island by the road. 
 It turned out to be rather too much for me, 
 as there is some weakness left still, and this 
 stiff incline brought it out." 
 
 " Naturally. You'd better take hold of my 
 arm — at any rate, to the brow here." 
 
 Thus pressed, the stranger did so, and they 
 went . on towards the ridge, till, reaching the 
 lime -kiln standing there, the stranger aban- 
 doned his hold, saying, " Thank you for your 
 assistance, sir. Good-night." 
 
 " I don't think I recognize your voice as a 
 native's ?" 
 
 " No, it is not. I am a Jersey man. Good- 
 night, sir." 
 
 " Good-night, if you are sure you can get on. 
 Here, take this stick — it is no use to me." 
 Saying which, Pierston put his walking-stick 
 into the young man's hand. 
 
 "Thank you again. I shall be quite re- 
 385 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 covered when I have rested a minute or two. 
 Don't let me detain you, please." 
 
 The stranger, as he spoke, turned his face 
 towards the south, where the Beal light had 
 just come into view, and stood regarding it 
 with an obstinate fixity. As he evidently 
 wished to be left to himself, Jocelyn went on, 
 and troubled no more about him, though the 
 desire of the young man to be rid of his com- 
 pany, after accepting his walking-stick and his 
 arm, had come with a suddenness that was 
 almost emotional ; and impressionable as Joce- 
 lyn was, no less now than in youth, he was 
 saddened for a minute by the sense that there 
 were people in the world who did not like 
 even his sympathy. 
 
 However, a pleasure which obliterated all 
 this arose when Pierston drew near to the 
 house that was likely to be his dear home on 
 all future visits to the isle, perhaps even his 
 permanent home as he grew older and the as- 
 sociations of his youth reasserted themselves. 
 It had been, too, his father's house, the house 
 in which he was born, and he amused his fancy 
 with plans for its enlargement under the super- 
 vision of Avice and himself. It was a still 
 greater pleasure to behold a tall and shapely 
 286 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 figure standing against the light of the open 
 door and presumably awaiting him. 
 
 Avice, who it was, gave a little jump when 
 she recognized him, but dutifully allowed him 
 to kiss her when he reached her side ; though 
 her nervousness was only too apparent, and 
 was like a child's towards a parent who may 
 prove stern. 
 
 " How dear of you to guess that I might 
 come on at once instead of later !" says Joce- 
 lyn. " Well, if I had stayed in the town to 
 go to the shops, and so on, I could not have 
 got here till the last train. How is mother — 
 our mother, as I shall call her soon ?" 
 
 Avice said that her mother had not been so 
 well, she feared not nearly so well, since her 
 return from London, so that she was obliged 
 to keep her room. The visit had perhaps 
 been too much for her. "But she will not 
 acknowledge that she is much weaker, because 
 she will not disturb my happiness." 
 
 Jocelyn was in a mood to let trifles of man- 
 ner pass, and he took no notice of the effort 
 which had accompanied the last word. They 
 went up-stairs to Mrs. Pierston, whose obvious 
 relief and thankfulness at sight of him were 
 grateful to her visitor. 
 
 287 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 " I am SO, oh, so glad you are come !" she 
 said, huskily, as she held out her thin hand 
 and stifled a sob. " I have been so—" 
 
 She could get no further for a moment, and 
 Avice turned away weeping, and abruptly left 
 the room. 
 
 " I have so set my heart on this," Mrs. Pier- 
 ston went on, " that I have not been able to 
 sleep of late, for I have feared I might drop 
 off suddenly before she is yours, and lose the 
 comfort of seeing you actually united. Your 
 being so kind to me in old times has made me 
 so sure that she will find a good husband in 
 you that I am over-anxious, I know. Indeed, 
 I have not liked to let her know quite how 
 anxious I am." 
 
 Thus they talked till Jocelyn bade her 
 good-night, it being noticeable that Mrs. Pier- 
 ston, chastened by her illness, maintained no 
 longer any reserve on her gladness to acquire 
 him as her son-in-law; and her feelings de- 
 stroyed any remaining scruples he might have 
 had from perceiving that Avice's consent was 
 rather an obedience than a desire. As he 
 went down -stairs, and found Avice awaiting 
 his descent, he wondered if anything had oc- 
 curred here during his absence to give Mrs. 
 288 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 Pierston new uneasiness about the marriage, 
 but it was an inquiry he could not address to 
 a girl whose actions could alone be the cause 
 of such uneasiness. 
 
 He looked round for her as he supped, but 
 though she had come into the room with him 
 she was not there now. He remembered her 
 telling him that she had had supper with her 
 mother, and Jocelyn sat on quietly musing 
 and sipping his wine for something near half 
 an hour. Wondering then for the first time 
 what had become of her, he rose and went to 
 the door. Avice was quite near him, after all 
 — only standing at the front door, as she had 
 been doing when he came, looking into the 
 light of the full moon which had risen since 
 his arrival. His sudden opening of the dining- 
 room door seemed to agitate her. 
 
 " What is it, dear ?" he asked. 
 
 "As moljier is much better and doesn't 
 want me, I ought to go and see somebody I 
 promised to take a parcel to — I feel I ought. 
 And yet, as you have just come to see me — I 
 suppose you don't approve of my going out 
 while you are here ?" 
 
 " Who is the person ?" 
 
 " Somebody down that way," she said, in- 
 T 289 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 definitely. It is not very far off. I am not 
 afraid — I go out often by myself at night 
 hereabout." 
 
 He reassured her good-humoredly. " If you 
 really wish to go, my dear, of course I don't 
 object. I have no authority to do that till 
 to-morrow, and you know that if I had it I 
 shouldn't use it." 
 
 " Oh, but you have ! Mother being an in- 
 valid, you are in her place, apart from — to- 
 morrow." 
 
 "Nonsense, darling. Run across to your 
 friend's house by all means if you want to." 
 
 "And you'll be here when I come in ?" 
 
 " No, I am going down to the inn to see if 
 my things are brought up." 
 
 " But hasn't mother asked you to stay 
 here ? The spare room was got ready for 
 you. . . . Dear me, I am afraid I ought to 
 have told you !" 
 
 " She did ask me. But I have some things 
 coming, directed to the inn, and I had better 
 be there. So I'll wish you good-night, though 
 it is not late. I will come in quite early to- 
 morrow, to inquire how your mother is going 
 on and to wish you good-morning. You will 
 be back again quickly this evening?" 
 
 2Q0 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 " Oh yes." 
 
 "And I needn't go with you for com- 
 pany ?" 
 
 " Oh no, thank you. It is no distance." 
 
 Pierston then departed, thinking how en- 
 tirely her manner was that of one to whom a 
 question of doing anything was a question of 
 permission and not of judgment. He had no 
 sooner gone than Avice took a parcel from a 
 cupboard, put on her hat and cloak, and follow- 
 ing by the way he had taken till she reached 
 the entrance to Sylvania Castle, there stood 
 still. She could hear Pierston's footsteps pass- 
 ing down East Quarriers to the inn ; but she 
 went no farther in that direction. Turning 
 into the lane on the right, of which mention 
 has so often been made, she went quickly past 
 the last cottage, and, having entered the gorge 
 beyond, she clambered into the ruin of the Red 
 King's or Bow-and-Arrow Castle, standing as a 
 square black mass against the moonlit, indefi- 
 nite sea. 
 
VI 
 
 THE WELL-BELOVED IS — WHERE? 
 
 Mrs. Pierston passed a restless night, but 
 this she let nobody know; nor, what was pain- 
 fully evident to herself, that her prostration 
 was increased by anxiety and suspense about 
 the wedding on which she had too much set 
 her heart. 
 
 During the very brief space in which she 
 dozed Avice came into her room. As it was 
 not infrequent for her daughter to look in 
 upon her thus, she took little notice, merely 
 saying, to assure the girl, " I am better, dear. 
 Don't come in again. Get to sleep yourself." 
 
 The mother, however, went thinking anew. 
 She had no apprehensions about this mar- 
 riage. She felt perfectly sure that it was the 
 best thing she could do for her girl. Not a 
 young woman on the island but was envying 
 Avice at that moment ; for Jocelyn was ab- 
 surdly young for three-score, a good-looking 
 292 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 man, one whose history was generally known 
 here; as also were the exact figures of the fort- 
 une he had inherited from his father, and the 
 social standing he could claim — a standing, 
 however, which that fortune would not have 
 been large enough to procure unassisted by 
 his reputation in his art. 
 
 But Avice had been weak enough, as her 
 mother knew, to indulge in fancies for local 
 youths from time to time, and Mrs. Pierston 
 could not help congratulating herself that her 
 daughter had been so docile in the circum- 
 stances. Yet to every one, except, perhaps, 
 Avice herself, Jocelyn was the most romantic 
 of lovers. Indeed, was there ever such a ro- 
 mance as that man embodied in his relations 
 to her house ? Rejecting the first Avice, the 
 second had rejected him, and to rally to the 
 third with final achievement was an artistic 
 and tender finish to which it was ungrateful 
 in anybody to be blind. 
 
 The widow thought that the second Avice 
 might probably not have rejected Pierston on 
 that occasion in the London studio so many 
 years ago if destiny had not arranged that she 
 should have been secretly united to another 
 when the proposing moment came. 
 293 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 But what had come was best. "My God!" 
 she said at times that night, " to think my 
 aim in writing to him should be fulfiUing it- 
 self like this !" 
 
 When all was right and done, what a success 
 upon the whole her life would have been ! She 
 who had begun her career as a cottage-girl, a 
 small quarry-owner's daughter, had sunk so 
 low as to the position of laundress, had en- 
 gaged in various menial occupations, had made 
 an unhappy marriage for love — which had, how- 
 ever, in the long run, thanks to Jocelyn's man- 
 agement, much improved her position — was at 
 last to see her daughter secure what she herself 
 had just missed securing, and established in a 
 home of affluence and refinement. 
 
 Thus the sick woman excited herself as 
 the hours went on. At , last, in her tense- 
 ness, it seemed to her that the time had 
 already come at which the household was 
 stirring, and fancied she heard conversation 
 in her daughter's room. But she found that 
 it was only five o'clock, and not yet daylight. 
 Her state was such that she could see the 
 hangings of the bed tremble with her tremors. 
 She had declared overnight that she did not 
 require any one to sit up with her, but she 
 294 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 now rang a little hand-bell, and in a few min- 
 utes a nurse appeared — Ruth Stockwool, an 
 island woman and a neighbor, whom Mrs. 
 Pierston knew well, and who knew all Mrs. 
 Pierston's history. 
 
 " I am so nervous that I can't stay by my- 
 self," said the widow. " And I thought I 
 heard Becky dressing Miss Avice in her wed- 
 ding things." 
 
 " Oh no — not yet, ma'am. There's nobody 
 up. But I'll get you something." 
 
 When Mrs. Pierston had taken a little nour- 
 ishment she went on : "I can't help frighten- 
 ing myself with thoughts that she won't marry 
 him. You see, he is older than Avice." 
 
 " Yes, he is," said her neighbor. " But I 
 don't see how anything can bender the wed- 
 den now." 
 
 "Avice, you know, had fancies; at least 
 one fancy for another man — a young fellow 
 of five -and -twenty. And she's been very 
 secret and odd about it. I wish she. had 
 raved and cried and had it out; but she's 
 been quite the other way. I know she's fond 
 of him still." 
 
 "What — that young Frenchman, Mr. Le- 
 verre o' Sandbourne? I've heard a little of it. 
 295 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 But I should say there wadden much between 
 'em." 
 
 " I don't think there was. But I've a sort 
 of conviction that she saw him last night. I 
 believe it was only to bid him good-bye and 
 return him some books he had given her ; but 
 I wish she had never known him ; he is rather 
 an excitable, impulsive young man, and he 
 might make mischief. He isn't a Frenchman, 
 though he has lived in France. His father 
 was a Jersey gentleman, and on his becoming 
 a widower he married as his second wife a na- 
 tive of this very island. That's mainly why 
 the young man is so at home in these parts." 
 
 "Ah — now I follow 'ee. She was a Ben- 
 comb — his stepmother; I heard something 
 about her years ago." 
 
 " Yes ; her father had the biggest stone- 
 trade on the island at one time ; but the name 
 is forgotten here now. He retired years be- 
 fore I was born. However, mother used to 
 tell me that she was a handsome young wom- 
 an, who tried to catch Mr. Pierston when he 
 was a young man, and scandalized herself a 
 bit with him. She went ofl abroad with her 
 father, who had made a fortune here ; but 
 when he got over there he lost it nearly all in 
 2g6 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 some way. Years after she married this Jer- 
 sey man, Mr. Leverre, who had been fond of 
 her as a girl, and she brought up his child as 
 her own." 
 
 Mrs. Pierston paused, but as Ruth did not 
 ask any question she presently resumed her 
 self-relieving murmur: 
 
 " How Miss Avice got to know the young 
 man was in this way: When Mrs. Leverre's 
 husband died she came from Jersey to live at 
 Sandbourne, and made it her business one 
 day to cross over to this place to make in- 
 quiries about Mr. Jocelyn Pierston. As my 
 name was Pierston, she called upon me with 
 her son, and so Avice and he got acquainted. 
 When she went back to Sandbourne to the 
 finishing -school they kept up the acquaint- 
 ance in secret. He taught French somewhere 
 there, and does still, I believe." 
 
 " Well, I hope she'll forget en. He idden 
 good enough." 
 
 " I hope so — I hope so. . . . N6w, I'll try to 
 get a little nap." 
 
 Ruth Stockwool went back to her room, 
 where, finding it would not be necessary to 
 get up for another hour, she lay down again 
 and soon slept. Her bed was close to the 
 
 297 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 staircase, from which it was divided by a lath 
 partition only, and her consciousness either 
 was or seemed to be aroused by light brush- 
 ing touches on the outside of the partition, as 
 of fingers feeling the way down-stairs in the 
 dark. The slight noise passed, and in a few 
 seconds she dreamed, or fancied she could 
 hear, the unfastening of the back door. 
 
 She had nearly sunk into another sound 
 sleep when precisely the same phenomena 
 were repeated — fingers brushing along the 
 wall close to her head, down, downward, the 
 soft opening of the door, its close, and silence 
 again. 
 
 She now became clearly awake. The repe- 
 tition of the process had made the whole mat- 
 ter a singular one. Early as it was, the first 
 sounds might have been those of the house- 
 maid descending, though why she should have 
 come down so stealthily and in the dark did 
 not make itself clear. But the second per- 
 formance was inexplicable. Ruth got out of 
 bed and lifted her blind. The dawn was 
 hardly yet pink, and the light from the sand- 
 bank was not yet extinguished. But the 
 bushes of euonymus against the white palings 
 of the front garden could be seen, also the 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 light surface of the road winding away like a 
 ribbon to the north entrance of Sylvania Cas- 
 tle, thence round to the village, the cliffs, and 
 the cove behind. Upon the road two dark 
 figures could just be discerned, one a little 
 way behind the other, but overtaking and 
 joining the foremost as Ruth looked. Af- 
 ter all, they might be quarriers or lighthouse- 
 keepers from the south of the island, or fisher- 
 men just landed from a night's work. There 
 being nothing to connect them with the noises 
 she had heard indoors, she dismissed the whole 
 subject, and went to bed again. 
 
 Jocelyn had promised to pay an early visit 
 to ascertain the state of Mrs. Pierston's health 
 after her night's rest, her precarious condition 
 being more obvious to him than to Avice, and 
 making him a little anxious. Subsequent 
 events caused him to remember that while he 
 was dressing he casually observed two or three 
 boatmen standing near the cliff beyond the 
 village, and apparently watching with deep 
 interest what seemed to be a boat far away 
 towards the opposite shore of South Wessex. 
 At half-past eight he came from the door of 
 the inn and went straight to Mrs. Pierston's. 
 299 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 On approaching, he discovered that a strange 
 expression which seemed to hang about the 
 house-front that morning was more than a 
 fancy, the gate, door, and two windows being 
 open, though the blinds of other windows were 
 not drawn up, the whole lending a vacant, 
 dazed look to the domicile, as of a person gap- 
 ing in sudden stultification. Nobody answered 
 his knock, and walking into the dining-room 
 he found that no breakfast had been laid. His 
 flashing thought was, " Mrs. Pierston is dead." 
 
 While standing in the room somebody came 
 down-stairs, and Jocelyn encountered Ruth 
 Stockwool, an open letter fluttering in her 
 hand. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Pierston, Mr. Pierston ! The Lord- 
 a-Lord !" 
 
 " What ? Mrs. Pierston—" 
 
 " No, no ! Miss Avice ! She is gone ! — ^yes 
 — gone ! Read ye this, sir. It was left in her 
 bedroom, and we be fairly gallied out of our 
 senses !" 
 
 He took the letter and confusedly beheld 
 that It was in two handwritings, the first sec- 
 tion being in Avice's : 
 
 " My dear Mother,— How ever will you forgive 
 me for what I have done ! So deceitful as it seems. 
 300 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 And yet till this night I had no idea of deceiving either 
 you or Mr. Pierston. 
 
 " Last night at ten o'clock I went out, as you may 
 have guessed, to see Mr. Leverre for the last time, 
 and to give him back his books, letters, and little 
 presents to me. I went only a few steps — to Bow- 
 and-Arrow Castle, where we met, as we had agreed to 
 do, since he could not call. When I reached the place 
 I found him there waiting, but quite ill. He had 
 been unwell at his mother's house for some days, and 
 had been obliged to stay in bed, but he had got up 
 on purpose to come and bid me good-bye. The over- 
 exertion of the journey upset him, and though we 
 stayed and stayed till twelve o'clock, he felt quite 
 unable to go back home — unable, indeed, to move 
 more than a few yards. I had tried so hard not to 
 love him any longer, but I loved him so now that I 
 could not desert him and leave him out there to catch 
 his death. So I helped him — nearly carrying him — 
 on and on to our door, and then round to the back. 
 Here he got a little better, and as he could not stay 
 there, and everybody was now asleep, I helped him 
 up-stairs into the room we had prepared for Mr. Pier- 
 ston if he should have wanted one. I got him into 
 bed, and then fetched some brandy and a little of 
 your tonic. Did you see me come into your room 
 for it, or were you asleep ? 
 
 " 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 
 
 301 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 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 hav- 
 ing 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 expres- 
 sion, and it is obvious that, if we are human, we can- 
 not 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. 
 
 302 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 " Mrs. Pierston thought she heard some talk- 
 ing 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' pur- 
 pose 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 mys- 
 tery of it. Tell it to all the island ; say that 
 a man came to marry a wife, and didn't find 
 her at homS. 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 sha'n't do that, sir." 
 
 " Oh ! Why won't you ?" 
 
 " We liked her too well, with all her faults." 
 303 
 
THE WELL-EELOVED 
 
 " 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 
 learned the tidings inadvertently, became so 
 distracted and incoherent as to be like a per- 
 son 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. "lis like me 
 to play another's game!" 
 
 It was the last spurt of bitterness that Joce- 
 lyn 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 
 304 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 bed. " What has happened to her, Mr, Pier- 
 ston ? Oh, 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 stu- 
 dio. 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 !" ex- 
 claimed 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 ! Oh, 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 
 u 305 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 death had undoubtedly been hastened by the 
 shock of the ill news upon a feeble heart, fol- 
 lowing a long strain of anxiety about the wed- 
 ding. He did not consider that an inquest 
 would be necessary. 
 
 The two shadowy figures seen through the 
 gray 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 be- 
 tween them. The man walked with difificulty, 
 supported by the woman. At this spot they 
 stopped and kissed each other a long while. 
 
 "We ought to walk all the way to Bud- 
 mouth, 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 con- 
 solingly : 
 
 " 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 
 
 306 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 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 farther 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 im- 
 pertinent gratuitousness by the vertical faces 
 of the rock, so still was everything around. A 
 little farther, and they emerged upon the open 
 ledge of the lower tier of cliffs, to the right be- 
 ing the sloping pathway leading down to the 
 secluded creek at their base^the single prac- 
 ticable spot of exit from or entrance to the 
 isle on this side by a sea-going craft, once an 
 active wharf, whence many a fine public build- 
 ing had sailed — including St. 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 neces-. 
 307 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 sary 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 boat-house 
 of tarred boards. The two lovers united their 
 strength to push the smallest of the boats 
 down the slbpe, 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 boat-house, I sup- 
 pose. 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 the north, but at a special mo- 
 ment in every flood there set in along the 
 308 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 shore a narrow reflux, contrary to the general 
 outer flow, called "The Southern" by the 
 local sailors. It was produced by the pecul- 
 iar 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 run- 
 ning northward to the roadstead and the main- 
 land of Wessex, " The Southern " ran in full 
 force towards the Beal and the Race beyond. 
 It caught the lovers' hapless boat in a few mo- 
 ments, and, unable to row across it — mere riv- 
 er's width that it was — they beheld the gray 
 rocks near them, and the grim wrinkled fore- 
 head of the isle above, sliding away northward. 
 
 They gazed helplessly at each other, though, 
 in the long-living faith of youth, without dis- 
 tinct fear. The undulations increased in mag- 
 nitude and swung them higher and lower. 
 The boat rocked, received a smart slap of the 
 waves now and then, and wheeled round, so 
 309 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 that the light-ship which stolidly winked at 
 them from the quicksand, the single object 
 which told them of their bearings, was some- 
 times on their right hand and sometimes on 
 their left. ^ Nevertheless, they could always 
 discern from it that their course, . whether 
 stemward or sternward, 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 avail- 
 able fuel left was the small umbrella the girl 
 had brought ; this was also kindled, in an open- 
 ed state, and he held it up by the stem till it 
 was consumed. 
 
 The light-ship had loomed quite large by 
 this time, and a few minutes after they had 
 burned the handkerchiefs and umbrella a col- 
 ored -flame replied to them from the vessel. 
 They flung their arms around 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 tow- 
 ards the heavy red hulk with the large white 
 letters on its side. 
 
 310 
 
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 emi- 
 grated, 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. 
 311 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 On her tantalizing inability to accept the 
 honor 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 quar- 
 rying, 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, con- 
 fronting him from the wall in sad array, like 
 the pictured Trojan women beheld by .^neas 
 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 remem- 
 bered 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 
 312 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 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 impos- 
 sible. Nobody would ever know the truth 
 about him — tvhat 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 fresh- 
 ness 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 re- 
 garded 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 tenden- 
 cies, to make something happen which would 
 313 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 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 light -ship 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 strange- 
 ness. Only one person in all his experience 
 had ever possessed precisely those tones ; . rich, 
 as if they had once been powerful. Explana- 
 tions seemed to be asked for and given, and 
 in a minute he was informed that a lady was 
 down-stairs whom perhaps he would like to 
 see. 
 
 "Who is the lady?" Jocelyn asked. 
 
 The servant hesitated a little. "Mrs. Le- 
 verre — 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 
 
 314 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 had met in Rome gave the woman he supposed 
 might be Marcia Benconib. 
 
 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 be- 
 ing 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 stepmother arid only rela- 
 tion of the young man your bride eloped with 
 this morning." 
 
 , "I was just guessing that, too, as I came 
 down-stairs. But — " 
 
 " And I am naturally making inquiries." 
 
 " Yes. Let us take it quietly and shut the 
 door." 
 
 315 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 Marcia sat down. And he learned that the 
 conjunction of old things and new was no acci- 
 dent. What Mrs. Pierston had discussed with 
 her nurse and neighbor 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 be- 
 come 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, educat- 
 ing 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 be- 
 tween the children began, and their passionate 
 316 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED. SIXTY 
 
 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 in- 
 terest 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 ac- 
 quaintance 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 
 317 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 can't we inquire wKich way they went out of 
 the island, or gather some particulars about 
 them?" 
 
 " Ay— 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 neighboring, inhabitants knew 
 more about the lovers than he did himself.' 
 
 At the corner some men were engaged' in 
 conversation .on. the occurrence. It was allu- 
 sive only, but, knowing the' dialect, Pierston 
 and Marcia gathered its import 'ieasily. 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 direc- 
 tion 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. 
 318 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 "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, in- 
 vincible 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 light- 
 ship, 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 boat-house. He informed her that they 
 were picked up by the light -ship men, and 
 afterwards, at their request, taken across to 
 the opposite shore, where they landed, pro- 
 ceeding thence on foot to the nearest railway 
 station and entering the train for London. 
 This intelligence had reached the island about 
 an hour before. 
 
 319 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "They'll be married to-morrow morning!" 
 said Marcia. 
 
 "So much the better. Don't regret it, 
 Mafcia. He shall not lose by it. I have no 
 relation in the world except some twentieth 
 cousins in this 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 gray 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 hap- 
 pened to be on one of those drenching after- 
 noons of the autumn when the raw .rain flies 
 level as the missiles of the ancient inhabi- 
 tants across the beaked promontory which has 
 formed the scene of this , narratiye, 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 com- 
 municating 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. 
 
 X 321 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 So, when the pathetic procession came out 
 of the porch and moved round into the grave- 
 yard, a hired vehicle from Budmouth was seen 
 coming at great speed along the open road 
 from Top-o'-Hill. It stopped at the church- 
 yard gate, and a young man and woman 
 alighted, and, entered, the, vehicle waiting. 
 They glided along the path and reached Pier- 
 ston'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 at- 
 mosphere 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 farther aloof, an act of considerate- 
 ness 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 church-yard in Wessex, telling 
 
 upon a distracted mental and bodily condition, 
 
 had thrown Pierston into the chill and fever 
 
 322 
 
A YOUNC^ MAN- TURNED SIXTY 
 
 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 oh 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 spo- 
 ken by the woman who was visiting him. He 
 recollected them to be Marcia's, and every- 
 thing 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 wom- 
 an friend who cares whether you are dead or 
 alive. I am living quite near. I am glad you 
 323 
 
THE WELL-EElSvED 
 
 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 moth- 
 er'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 malig- 
 nant 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 intellect- 
 ual expansion, he became clearly aware of 
 what this was. The artistic sense had left 
 him, and he could no longer attach a definite 
 sentiinent to images of beauty recalled from 
 the past. His appreciativeness was capable 
 of exercising itself only on utilitarian matters, 
 324 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 and recollections of Avice's good qualities 
 alone had any effect on his mind ; of her ap- 
 pearance none at all. 
 
 At first he was appalled; and then he said, 
 " Thank God !" 
 
 Marcia, who, with something of her old ab- 
 solutism, came to his house continually to in- 
 quire 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 extraor- 
 dinarily handsome, and that she did not won- 
 der 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 sup- 
 pose 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." 
 
 "Oh — I, as a woman, think there's good 
 in it." 
 
 " Is there ? Then I have lost all conception 
 32s 
 
THE WELL'BELOVED 
 
 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 an- 
 nouncement, 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 veil, which she always 
 retained on these frequent visits, and that he 
 had been unconsciously Tegarding her as the 
 Marcia of their early timej a fancy, which the 
 small change in her voice well sustained. The 
 stately figure, the good qolor, the classical pro- 
 file, the rather large handsome nose and some- 
 what prominent, regular teeth, the full dark 
 eye, formed still the Marcia of his imagina- 
 tion — the queenly creature who had infatu- 
 ated 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 words on her handsomeness. He began 
 wondering now how much remained of that 
 presentation after forty years. 
 326 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 " Why don't you ever let me see you, Mar- 
 cia?" he asked. 
 
 " Oh, 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 awk- 
 ward 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 J ocelyn. 
 
 " 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, consid- 
 ering 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 cha.stisenient, 
 Marcia!" 
 
 327 
 
THE WELI^BELOVED 
 
 "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 any- 
 thing 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 irt with his van- 
 ity,' I tried to look it. We Were, often in 
 Paris, and I became as skilled in beautifying 
 artifices as any pass^e 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; yoju'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 
 328 
 
A YOUNG MAN. TURNED SIXTY 
 
 went round to the window, where she uncov- 
 ered 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 quiv- 
 ered, 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 color 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 invidi- 
 ous 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 eats the garment somewhat in such 
 an interval." 
 
 329 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 "Yes — yes! . . . Marcia, you are a brave 
 viroman. 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 be- 
 gun 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 car- 
 riage. 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 ma- 
 tured, 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." 
 330 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 " 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 Freyas, 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 after- 
 noon 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. I have lost 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 convales' 
 33? 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 cence 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 blast- 
 ing 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 
 332 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 be foolish to interrupt led him to take a some- 
 what similar house for Marcia quite near, and 
 remove her furniture thither from Sand- 
 bourne. Whenever the afternoon was fine he 
 would call for her, and they would take a 
 stroll together towards the Beal, or. the an- 
 cient castle, seldom going the whole way, his 
 sciatica and her rheumatism effectually pre- 
 venting them, except in the driest atmos- 
 pheres. 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-gray 
 beard grow as it would, and what little- hair 
 he had left from the baldness which had fol- 
 lowed the fever. And thus, numbering in 
 years but two-and-sixty, he might have passed 
 for seventy-five. 
 
 Though their early adventure as lovers had 
 happened so long ago, its history had be- 
 come known in the isle with mysterious ra- 
 pidity and fulness of detail. The gossip to 
 which its bearing on their present friendship 
 gave rise was the subject of their conversation 
 on one of these walks along the cliffs. 
 
 " It is extraordinary what an interest our 
 333 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 -neighbors take in our affairs," he observed. 
 " They say, ' those old folk ought to marry ; 
 better late than never.' That's how people 
 are — wanting to round off other people's his- 
 tories in the best machine-made conventional 
 manner." 
 
 ".Yes. They keep on about it to me, too, 
 indirectly." 
 
 " Do they ! I believe a deputation will wait 
 upon us some morning, requesting, in the in- 
 terests of match-making, that we will please to 
 get married as soon as possible. . . . How near 
 we were to doing it forty years ago — only you 
 were so independent ! I thought you would 
 have come back, and was much surprised that 
 you didn't." 
 
 " My independent ideas were not blame- 
 worthy in me, as an islander, though as a 
 kimberlin young lady perhaps they would 
 have been. There was simply no reason, from 
 an islander's point of view, why I should come 
 back, and I didn't. My father kept that view 
 before me, arid I bowed to his judgment."' 
 
 "And so the island ruled our destinies 
 though we were not on it. Yes — we are in 
 hands riot our own. . . . Did you ever tell your 
 husband?" 
 
 334 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED . SIXTY 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Did he ever hear anything?" 
 
 " Not that I am aware." 
 
 Calling upon her one day, he found her in a 
 state of great discomfort. In certain gusty 
 winds the' chimneys of the little house she 
 had taken here smoked intolerably,- and one 
 of these winds was blowing theii. Her dra\y- 
 ing-room fire could not be kept burning, and, 
 rather than let a woman who suffered from 
 rheumatism shiver fireless, he asked her to 
 come round and lunch with him as she had 
 often done before. As they went he thought, 
 not for the first time, how needless it was that 
 she should be put to this inconvenience by 
 their occupying two houses when one would 
 better suit their now constant companionship, 
 and disembarrass her of the objectionable 
 chimneys. Moreover, by marrying Marcia, 
 and establishing a parental relation with the 
 young people, the rather delicate business of 
 his making them a regular allowance would 
 become a natural proceeding. 
 
 And so the zealous wishes of the neighbors 
 to give a geometrical shape to their story were 
 fulfilled almost in spite of the chief parties 
 themselves. When he put the question to her 
 
 335 
 
THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 distinctly, Marcia admitted that she had al- 
 ways regretted the imperious decision of her 
 youth ; and she made no ado about accepting 
 him. 
 
 " I have no love to give, you know, Marcia," 
 he said. "But such friendship as I am capa- 
 ble of is yours till the end." 
 
 " It is nearly the same with me — perhaps 
 not quite. But, like the other people, I have 
 somehow felt, and you wilL understand, why, 
 that I ought to be your wife before I die." 
 
 It chanced that a day or. two before the 
 ceremony, which was fixed to take place very 
 shortly after the foregoing conversation, Mar- 
 cia's rheumatism suddenly became acute. .The 
 attack promised, however, to be only tempo- 
 rary, owing to some accidental exposure of 
 herself in making preparations for removal, 
 and as they thought it undesirable to postpone 
 ^their union for such a reason, Marcia, after 
 being well wrapped up, was wheeled into the 
 ^church in a chair. 
 
 A month thereafter, when they were sitting 
 
 at breakfast one morning, Marcia exclaimed, 
 
 " Well — good heavens !" while reading a letter 
 
 she had just received from Avice, who was 
 
 336 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 living with her husband in a house Pierston 
 had bought for them at Sandbourne. 
 
 Jocelyn looked up. 
 
 "Why, Avice says she wants to be sepa- 
 rated from Henri ! Did you ever hear of such 
 a thing? She's coming here about it to-day." 
 
 " Separated ? What does the child mean ?" 
 Pierston read the letter. " Ridiculous non- 
 sense !" he continued. " She doesn't know 
 what she wants. I say she sha'n't be sepa- 
 rated.! Tell her so, and there's an end of it. 
 Why, how long have they been married? 
 Not twelve months. What will she say when 
 they have been married twenty years !" 
 
 Marcia remained reflecting. " I think that 
 remorseful feeling she unluckily has at times, 
 of having disobeyed her mother and caused 
 her death, makes her irritable," she murmured. 
 " Poor child !" 
 
 Lunch-time had hardly come when Avice 
 arrived, looking very tearful and excited. Mar- 
 cia took her into an inner room, had a conver- 
 sation with her, and they came out together. 
 
 " Oh, it's nothing," said Marcia. " I tell her 
 she must go back directly she has had some 
 luncheon." 
 
 " Ah, that's all very well !" sobbed Avice. 
 y 337 
 
THE WELL-PELOVED 
 
 "B-b-but if you two had been m-married so 
 long as I have, y-you wouldn't say go back 
 like that!" 
 
 " What is it all about ?" inquired Pierston, 
 
 " He said that if he were to die I — I — should 
 be looking out for somebody with fair hair and 
 gray eyes, just — just to spite him in his grave, 
 because he's dark, and he's quite sure I don't 
 like dark people ! And then he said — ' But I 
 won't be so treacherous as to tell any more 
 about him I I wish — " 
 
 "Avice, your mother did this very thing. 
 And she went back. Now you are to do the 
 same. Let me see ; there's a train^ — " 
 
 " She must have something to eat first. Sit 
 down, dear." 
 
 The question was settled by the arrival of 
 Henri himself at the end of luncheon, with a 
 very anxious and pale face. Pierston went 
 off to a business meeting, and left the young 
 couple to adjust their differences in their own 
 way. 
 
 His business was, among kindred under- 
 takings which followed the extinction of the 
 Well-Beloved and other ideals, to advance a 
 scheme for the closing of the old natural 
 fountains in the Street of Wells, because of 
 ■338 
 
A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY 
 
 their possible contamination, and supplying 
 the townlet with water from pipes — a scheme 
 that was carried out at his expense, as is well 
 known. He was also engaged in acquiring 
 some old moss-grown, muUioned Elizabethan 
 cottages, for the purpose of pulling them down 
 because they were damp ; which he afterwards 
 did, and built new ones, with hollow walls and 
 full of ventilators. 
 
 At present he is. sometimes mentioned as 
 " the late Mr. Pierston " by gourd-like young 
 art critics ; and his productions are alluded to 
 as those of a man not without genius, whose 
 powers were insufificiently recognized in his 
 lifetime. 
 
 THE END 
 
By THOMA.S HAEDY 
 
 Hardy has an exquisite vein of liumor. His st.vle is so lucid 
 tliat tlie outlines'of a cliaraoter in one of his books are unmis- 
 takable from first to last. He has a reserve force, so to spe.ili, 
 of imagination^ ot invention, whicli keeps the interest undim- 
 inished always, though the personages intlie drama may be 
 few and their adventures unremarkable. But most of all he 
 has shown the pity and the beauty of human life, most of all 
 he has enlarged the boundaries of sympathy and charity. — 
 Jf. Y. Tribune. 
 
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 SI 50. 
 
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 Life's Little Ironies. A Set of Tales ; with some 
 Colloquial Sketches entitled A Pew Crusted Characters. 
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By GEOEGE DU MAUKIEK 
 
 ENGLISH SOCIETY. Sketched by George dtj 
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 running so brislily in' exquisite English, and with such vivid 
 
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