The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament - Thomas Hardy

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ensured one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one with more charming and solid qualities 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 her small soft voice for him; but the audience were pleased, and she blushed at their applause. He now took his station at the door, and when the people had done pouring out he found her within awaiting him.

      They climbed homeward slowly by the Old Road, 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 lighthouse rays, and under their front, at periods of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep, hollow stroke like the single beat of a drum, the intervals being filled with a long-drawn rattling, as of bones between huge canine jaws. It came from the vast concave of Deadman’s Bay, rising and falling against the pebble dyke.

      The evening and night winds here were, to Pierston’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 hearing now. It was a presence—an imaginary shape or essence from the human multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of war, East Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada—select people, common, 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 Churchyard, 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 initiative 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 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 peculiar island: to make her an exact copy of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances 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 Budmouth fashionable music-sellers’, and the local vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in a house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt 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 acquiesced. 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 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 wondered if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires.

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      ‘Well,’ said he, ‘here we are, arrived 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 uneasily.

      ‘Yes.’

      Something seemed to overweigh them; something more than the natural sadness of a parting 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 linger and watch the moon 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 halfway 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 riding at anchor in the roadstead two men passed slowly in the direction he intended to pursue. One of them recognized Jocelyn, and bade him good-night, adding, ‘Wish you joy, sir, of your choice, and hope the wedden will be soon!’

      ‘Thank you, Seaborn. Well—we shall see what Christmas will do towards bringing it about.’

      ‘My wife opened upon it this mornen: “Please God, I’ll up and see that there wedden,” 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 thousands 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 and pick up little Avice Caro—nice maid as she is notwithstanding. … 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 affianced, 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.

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      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

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