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 thick veil, which she always retained on these frequent visits, and that he had been unconsciously regarding her as the Marcia of their early time, a fancy which the small change in her voice well sustained. The stately figure, the good colour, the classical profile, the rather large handsome nose and somewhat prominent, regular teeth, the full dark eye, formed still the Marcia of his imagination; the queenly creature who had infatuated 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 regret at her assumed handsomeness. He began wondering now how much remained of that presentation after forty years.
'Why don't you ever let me see you, Marcia?' he asked.
'O, 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 awkward 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 Jocelyn.
'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, considering 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 chastisement, Marcia!'
'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 anything 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 in with his vanity I tried to look it. We were often in Paris, and I became as skilled in beautifying artifices as any passee 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; you'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 went round to the window, where she uncovered 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 quivered, 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 colour and shade, the thin remains of what had once been Marcia's majestic bloom. She stood the image and superion 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 invidious 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 frets the garment somewhat in such an interval.'
'Yes--yes! . . . Marcia, you are a brave woman. 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 begun 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 carriage. 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 matured, 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.'
'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 Freyjas, 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 afternoon 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.
