It was a sad and leaden afternoon, and Pierston paced up the long, steep pass or street of the Wells. On either side of the road young girls stood with pitchers at the fountains which bubbled there, and behind the houses forming the propylaea 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 by 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 road, the old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns at a sharp angle when it reaches the base of the scarp, and ascends in the stiffest of inclines 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, regular, tapering to a vanishing point, like a lesson 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 recognized her.
She did not see him, and abandoning the right-hand course he slowly ascended the incline 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-grey 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 backwards and forwards monotonously against the heavy sky.
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 unencumbered was a breathless business; the linen 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 infatuation '. . . . . . . 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 chasm surrounding the forts, passed the sentries 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 unprotected 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 incidentally to get some fresh air 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. 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 doom.
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 remark. When they reached the castle Somers gazed round upon the scenery, and Pierston, signifying the quaint little Elizabethan cottage, 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--'
'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 name 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 without.
