But a chill passed through Jocelyn when there had been time for reflection. The renewed study of his art in Rome without any counterbalancing practical pursuit had nourished and developed his natural responsiveness 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 islanders 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 moonlight, in lamplight. Every line and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he; and, though not a belief, it was, as has been stated, a formula, a superstition, that the three Avices were inter-penetrated with her essence.
‘And the next Avice—your daughter,’ he said stumblingly; ‘she is, you say, a governess 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 murmured.
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.