thing it passed him to understand: on what field of observation the poets and philosophers based their assumption that the passion of love was intensest in youth and burnt lower as maturity advanced. It was possibly because of his utter domestic loneliness that, during the productive interval which followed the first years of Marcia’s departure, when he was drifting along from five-and-twenty to eight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved with an ardour – 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 carcase 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 unaccustomed errand. Then she would forsake this figure and redisclose herself in the guise of some popular authoress, piano-player, or fiddleress, 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 continuance at that establishment he never once exchanged 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 instability of tenure. In Borne’s phrase, nothing was permanent in her but change.
‘It is odd,’ he said to himself, ‘that this experience of mine, or idiosyncrasy, or whatever it is, which would be sheer waste of time for other men, creates sober business for me.’ For all these dreams he translated into plaster, 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 possibly be as brief as it would be brilliant and exciting.
‘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 practice 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; because when I grapple with the reality she’s no longer in it, so that I cannot stick to one incarnation if I would.’
‘Wait till you are older,’ said Somers.
PART SECOND – A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY
‘Since Love will needs that I shall love,
Of very force I must agree:
And since no chance may it remove
In wealth and in adversity
I shall alway myself apply
To serve and suffer patiently.’
I. 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 Sandbourne, whither the stone-merchant had gone for a change of air by the advice of his physician.
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 surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on – much larger than Jocelyn had ever regarded as possible. While the son had been modelling and chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial shapes, the father had been persistently chiselling 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 freehold properties in the island other than quarries – for he did not intend to reside there – he returned to town. He often wondered what had become of Marcia. He had promised 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 discover her by her old name.
A reposeful time ensued. Almost his first entry into society after his father’s death occurred one evening, when, for want of knowing what better to do, he responded to an invitation sent by one of the few ladies of rank 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 obtained 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 itself on this occasion into something very like great and late. He remembered that there had just been a political crisis, which accounted 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 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 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 hiding 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 recognize it under whatever complexion, contour, accent, height, or carriage that it might choose to masquerade!
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