initial commit of ebook 224HEADmain

1 files changed, 16721 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/224-0.txt b/224-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d345de9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/224-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16721 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: A Pair of Blue Eyes
+
+Author: Thomas Hardy
+
+Release Date: March, 1995 [eBook #224]
+[Most recently updated: April 11, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: John Hamm
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF BLUE EYES ***
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF BLUE EYES
+
+by Thomas Hardy
+
+
+
+
+“A violet in the youth of primy nature,
+Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting,
+The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
+No more.” 
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ PREFACE
+ Chapter I
+ Chapter II
+ Chapter III
+ Chapter IV
+ Chapter V
+ Chapter VI
+ Chapter VII
+ Chapter VIII
+ Chapter IX
+ Chapter X
+ Chapter XI
+ Chapter XII
+ Chapter XIII
+ Chapter XIV
+ Chapter XV
+ Chapter XVI
+ Chapter XVII
+ Chapter XVIII
+ Chapter XIX
+ Chapter XX
+ Chapter XXI
+ Chapter XXII
+ Chapter XXIII
+ Chapter XXIV
+ Chapter XXV
+ Chapter XXVI
+ Chapter XXVII
+ Chapter XXVIII
+ Chapter XXIX
+ Chapter XXX
+ Chapter XXXI
+ Chapter XXXII
+ Chapter XXXIII
+ Chapter XXXIV
+ Chapter XXXV
+ Chapter XXXVI
+ Chapter XXXVII
+ Chapter XXXVIII
+ Chapter XXXIX
+ Chapter XL
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
+indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks
+of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast had
+long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the
+ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into
+extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To
+restore the grey carcases of a mediævalism whose spirit had fled,
+seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the
+adjoining crags themselves.
+
+Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,
+whose emotions were not without correspondence with these material
+circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such
+church-renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.
+
+The shore and country about “Castle Boterel” is now getting well known,
+and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add, the furthest
+westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to
+erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and
+passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border
+of the Wessex kingdom on that side, which, like the westering verge of
+modern American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.
+
+This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre-eminently (for
+one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly
+birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the
+waters, the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the
+shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere
+like the twilight of a night vision.
+
+One enormous sea-bord cliff in particular figures in the narrative; and
+for some forgotten reason or other this cliff was described in the
+story as being without a name. Accuracy would require the statement to
+be that a remarkable cliff which resembles in many points the cliff of
+the description bears a name that no event has made famous.
+
+T. H.
+
+
+_March_ 1899
+
+
+
+
+THE PERSONS
+
+        ELFRIDE SWANCOURT            a young Lady
+        CHRISTOPHER SWANCOURT        a Clergyman
+        STEPHEN SMITH                an Architect
+        HENRY KNIGHT                 a Reviewer and Essayist
+        CHARLOTTE TROYTON            a rich Widow
+        GERTRUDE JETHWAY             a poor Widow
+        SPENSER HUGO LUXELLIAN       a Peer
+        LADY LUXELLIAN               his Wife
+        MARY AND KATE                two little Girls
+        WILLIAM WORM                 a dazed Factotum
+        JOHN SMITH                   a Master-mason
+        JANE SMITH                   his Wife
+        MARTIN CANNISTER             a Sexton
+        UNITY                        a Maid-servant
+
+Other servants, masons, labourers, grooms, nondescripts, etc., etc.
+
+
+THE SCENE
+ Mostly on the outskirts of Lower Wessex.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+“A fair vestal, throned in the west”
+
+
+Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.
+Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of
+time, was known only to those who watched the circumstances of her
+history.
+
+Personally, she was the combination of very interesting particulars,
+whose rarity, however, lay in the combination itself rather than in the
+individual elements combined. As a matter of fact, you did not see the
+form and substance of her features when conversing with her; and this
+charming power of preventing a material study of her lineaments by an
+interlocutor, originated not in the cloaking effect of a well-formed
+manner (for her manner was childish and scarcely formed), but in the
+attractive crudeness of the remarks themselves. She had lived all her
+life in retirement—the _monstrari digito_ of idle men had not flattered
+her, and at the age of nineteen or twenty she was no further on in
+social consciousness than an urban young lady of fifteen.
+
+One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In them
+was seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to look
+further: there she lived.
+
+These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance—blue as the blue we see
+between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny
+September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or
+surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.
+
+As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women can
+make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting
+hall; Elfride’s was no more pervasive than that of a kitten.
+
+Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of
+the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit of
+the type of woman’s feature most common to the beauties—mortal and
+immortal—of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness. The
+characteristic expression of the female faces of Correggio—that of the
+yearning human thoughts that lie too deep for tears—was hers sometimes,
+but seldom under ordinary conditions.
+
+The point in Elfride Swancourt’s life at which a deeper current may be
+said to have permanently set in, was one winter afternoon when she
+found herself standing, in the character of hostess, face to face with
+a man she had never seen before—moreover, looking at him with a
+Miranda-like curiosity and interest that she had never yet bestowed on
+a mortal.
+
+On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the
+sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering from
+an attack of gout. After finishing her household supervisions Elfride
+became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the
+staircase, and knocked at her father’s chamber-door.
+
+“Come in!” was always answered in a hearty out-of-door voice from the
+inside.
+
+“Papa,” she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man
+of forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the
+bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then enunciating, in
+spite of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were
+almost oaths; “papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?” She
+spoke distinctly: he was rather deaf.
+
+“Afraid not—eh-hh!—very much afraid I shall not, Elfride. Piph-ph-ph! I
+can’t bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe of mine, much less
+a stocking or slipper—piph-ph-ph! There ’tis again! No, I shan’t get up
+till to-morrow.”
+
+“Then I hope this London man won’t come; for I don’t know what I should
+do, papa.”
+
+“Well, it would be awkward, certainly.”
+
+“I should hardly think he would come to-day.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because the wind blows so.”
+
+“Wind! What ideas you have, Elfride! Who ever heard of wind stopping a
+man from doing his business? The idea of this toe of mine coming on so
+suddenly!...If he should come, you must send him up to me, I suppose,
+and then give him some food and put him to bed in some way. Dear me,
+what a nuisance all this is!”
+
+“Must he have dinner?”
+
+“Too heavy for a tired man at the end of a tedious journey.”
+
+“Tea, then?”
+
+“Not substantial enough.”
+
+“High tea, then? There is cold fowl, rabbit-pie, some pasties, and
+things of that kind.”
+
+“Yes, high tea.”
+
+“Must I pour out his tea, papa?”
+
+“Of course; you are the mistress of the house.”
+
+“What! sit there all the time with a stranger, just as if I knew him,
+and not anybody to introduce us?”
+
+“Nonsense, child, about introducing; you know better than that. A
+practical professional man, tired and hungry, who has been travelling
+ever since daylight this morning, will hardly be inclined to talk and
+air courtesies to-night. He wants food and shelter, and you must see
+that he has it, simply because I am suddenly laid up and cannot. There
+is nothing so dreadful in that, I hope? You get all kinds of stuff into
+your head from reading so many of those novels.”
+
+“Oh no; there is nothing dreadful in it when it becomes plainly a case
+of necessity like this. But, you see, you are always there when people
+come to dinner, even if we know them; and this is some strange London
+man of the world, who will think it odd, perhaps.”
+
+“Very well; let him.”
+
+“Is he Mr. Hewby’s partner?”
+
+“I should scarcely think so: he may be.”
+
+“How old is he, I wonder?”
+
+“That I cannot tell. You will find the copy of my letter to Mr. Hewby,
+and his answer, upon the table in the study. You may read them, and
+then you’ll know as much as I do about our visitor.”
+
+“I have read them.”
+
+“Well, what’s the use of asking questions, then? They contain all I
+know. Ugh-h-h!...Od plague you, you young scamp! don’t put anything
+there! I can’t bear the weight of a fly.”
+
+“Oh, I am sorry, papa. I forgot; I thought you might be cold,” she
+said, hastily removing the rug she had thrown upon the feet of the
+sufferer; and waiting till she saw that consciousness of her offence
+had passed from his face, she withdrew from the room, and retired again
+downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+“’Twas on the evening of a winter’s day.”
+
+
+When two or three additional hours had merged the same afternoon in
+evening, some moving outlines might have been observed against the sky
+on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district. They circumscribed
+two men, having at present the aspect of silhouettes, sitting in a
+dog-cart and pushing along in the teeth of the wind. Scarcely a
+solitary house or man had been visible along the whole dreary distance
+of open country they were traversing; and now that night had begun to
+fall, the faint twilight, which still gave an idea of the landscape to
+their observation, was enlivened by the quiet appearance of the planet
+Jupiter, momentarily gleaming in intenser brilliancy in front of them,
+and by Sirius shedding his rays in rivalry from his position over their
+shoulders. The only lights apparent on earth were some spots of dull
+red, glowing here and there upon the distant hills, which, as the
+driver of the vehicle gratuitously remarked to the hirer, were
+smouldering fires for the consumption of peat and gorse-roots, where
+the common was being broken up for agricultural purposes. The wind
+prevailed with but little abatement from its daytime boisterousness,
+three or four small clouds, delicate and pale, creeping along under the
+sky southward to the Channel.
+
+Fourteen of the sixteen miles intervening between the railway terminus
+and the end of their journey had been gone over, when they began to
+pass along the brink of a valley some miles in extent, wherein the
+wintry skeletons of a more luxuriant vegetation than had hitherto
+surrounded them proclaimed an increased richness of soil, which showed
+signs of far more careful enclosure and management than had any slopes
+they had yet passed. A little farther, and an opening in the elms
+stretching up from this fertile valley revealed a mansion.
+
+“That’s Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian’s,” said the driver.
+
+“Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian’s,” repeated the other mechanically.
+He then turned himself sideways, and keenly scrutinized the almost
+invisible house with an interest which the indistinct picture itself
+seemed far from adequate to create. “Yes, that’s Lord Luxellian’s,” he
+said yet again after a while, as he still looked in the same direction.
+
+“What, be we going there?”
+
+“No; Endelstow Vicarage, as I have told you.”
+
+“I thought you m’t have altered your mind, sir, as ye have stared that
+way at nothing so long.”
+
+“Oh no; I am interested in the house, that’s all.”
+
+“Most people be, as the saying is.”
+
+“Not in the sense that I am.”
+
+“Oh!...Well, his family is no better than my own, ’a b’lieve.”
+
+“How is that?”
+
+“Hedgers and ditchers by rights. But once in ancient times one of ’em,
+when he was at work, changed clothes with King Charles the Second, and
+saved the king’s life. King Charles came up to him like a common man,
+and said off-hand, ‘Man in the smock-frock, my name is Charles the
+Second, and that’s the truth on’t. Will you lend me your clothes?’ ‘I
+don’t mind if I do,’ said Hedger Luxellian; and they changed there and
+then. ‘Now mind ye,’ King Charles the Second said, like a common man,
+as he rode away, ‘if ever I come to the crown, you come to court, knock
+at the door, and say out bold, “Is King Charles the Second at home?”
+Tell your name, and they shall let you in, and you shall be made a
+lord.’ Now, that was very nice of Master Charley?”
+
+“Very nice indeed.”
+
+“Well, as the story is, the king came to the throne; and some years
+after that, away went Hedger Luxellian, knocked at the king’s door, and
+asked if King Charles the Second was in. ‘No, he isn’t,’ they said.
+‘Then, is Charles the Third?’ said Hedger Luxellian. ‘Yes,’ said a
+young feller standing by like a common man, only he had a crown on, ‘my
+name is Charles the Third.’ And——”
+
+“I really fancy that must be a mistake. I don’t recollect anything in
+English history about Charles the Third,” said the other in a tone of
+mild remonstrance.
+
+“Oh, that’s right history enough, only ’twasn’t prented; he was rather
+a queer-tempered man, if you remember.”
+
+“Very well; go on.”
+
+“And, by hook or by crook, Hedger Luxellian was made a lord, and
+everything went on well till some time after, when he got into a most
+terrible row with King Charles the Fourth.
+
+“I can’t stand Charles the Fourth. Upon my word, that’s too much.”
+
+“Why? There was a George the Fourth, wasn’t there?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+“Well, Charleses be as common as Georges. However I’ll say no more
+about it....Ah, well! ’tis the funniest world ever I lived in—upon my
+life ’tis. Ah, that such should be!”
+
+The dusk had thickened into darkness while they thus conversed, and the
+outline and surface of the mansion gradually disappeared. The windows,
+which had before been as black blots on a lighter expanse of wall,
+became illuminated, and were transfigured to squares of light on the
+general dark body of the night landscape as it absorbed the outlines of
+the edifice into its gloomy monochrome.
+
+Not another word was spoken for some time, and they climbed a hill,
+then another hill piled on the summit of the first. An additional mile
+of plateau followed, from which could be discerned two light-houses on
+the coast they were nearing, reposing on the horizon with a calm lustre
+of benignity. Another oasis was reached; a little dell lay like a nest
+at their feet, towards which the driver pulled the horse at a sharp
+angle, and descended a steep slope which dived under the trees like a
+rabbit’s burrow. They sank lower and lower.
+
+“Endelstow Vicarage is inside here,” continued the man with the reins.
+“This part about here is West Endelstow; Lord Luxellian’s is East
+Endelstow, and has a church to itself. Pa’son Swancourt is the pa’son
+of both, and bobs backward and forward. Ah, well! ’tis a funny world.
+’A b’lieve there was once a quarry where this house stands. The man who
+built it in past time scraped all the glebe for earth to put round the
+vicarage, and laid out a little paradise of flowers and trees in the
+soil he had got together in this way, whilst the fields he scraped have
+been good for nothing ever since.”
+
+“How long has the present incumbent been here?”
+
+“Maybe about a year, or a year and half: ’tisn’t two years; for they
+don’t scandalize him yet; and, as a rule, a parish begins to scandalize
+the pa’son at the end of two years among ’em familiar. But he’s a very
+nice party. Ay, Pa’son Swancourt knows me pretty well from often
+driving over; and I know Pa’son Swancourt.”
+
+They emerged from the bower, swept round in a curve, and the chimneys
+and gables of the vicarage became darkly visible. Not a light showed
+anywhere. They alighted; the man felt his way into the porch, and rang
+the bell.
+
+At the end of three or four minutes, spent in patient waiting without
+hearing any sounds of a response, the stranger advanced and repeated
+the call in a more decided manner. He then fancied he heard footsteps
+in the hall, and sundry movements of the door-knob, but nobody
+appeared.
+
+“Perhaps they beant at home,” sighed the driver. “And I promised myself
+a bit of supper in Pa’son Swancourt’s kitchen. Sich lovely mate-pize
+and figged keakes, and cider, and drops o’ cordial that they do keep
+here!”
+
+“All right, naibours! Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye must
+needs come to the world’s end at this time o’ night?” exclaimed a voice
+at this instant; and, turning their heads, they saw a rickety
+individual shambling round from the back door with a horn lantern
+dangling from his hand.
+
+“Time o’ night, ’a b’lieve! and the clock only gone seven of ’em. Show
+a light, and let us in, William Worm.”
+
+“Oh, that you, Robert Lickpan?”
+
+“Nobody else, William Worm.”
+
+“And is the visiting man a-come?”
+
+“Yes,” said the stranger. “Is Mr. Swancourt at home?”
+
+“That ’a is, sir. And would ye mind coming round by the back way? The
+front door is got stuck wi’ the wet, as he will do sometimes; and the
+Turk can’t open en. I know I am only a poor wambling man that “ill
+never pay the Lord for my making, sir; but I can show the way in, sir.”
+
+The new arrival followed his guide through a little door in a wall, and
+then promenaded a scullery and a kitchen, along which he passed with
+eyes rigidly fixed in advance, an inbred horror of prying forbidding
+him to gaze around apartments that formed the back side of the
+household tapestry. Entering the hall, he was about to be shown to his
+room, when from the inner lobby of the front entrance, whither she had
+gone to learn the cause of the delay, sailed forth the form of Elfride.
+Her start of amazement at the sight of the visitor coming forth from
+under the stairs proved that she had not been expecting this surprising
+flank movement, which had been originated entirely by the ingenuity of
+William Worm.
+
+She appeared in the prettiest of all feminine guises, that is to say,
+in demi-toilette, with plenty of loose curly hair tumbling down about
+her shoulders. An expression of uneasiness pervaded her countenance;
+and altogether she scarcely appeared woman enough for the situation.
+The visitor removed his hat, and the first words were spoken; Elfride
+prelusively looking with a deal of interest, not unmixed with surprise,
+at the person towards whom she was to do the duties of hospitality.
+
+“I am Mr. Smith,” said the stranger in a musical voice.
+
+“I am Miss Swancourt,” said Elfride.
+
+Her constraint was over. The great contrast between the reality she
+beheld before her, and the dark, taciturn, sharp, elderly man of
+business who had lurked in her imagination—a man with clothes smelling
+of city smoke, skin sallow from want of sun, and talk flavoured with
+epigram—was such a relief to her that Elfride smiled, almost laughed,
+in the new-comer’s face.
+
+Stephen Smith, who has hitherto been hidden from us by the darkness,
+was at this time of his life but a youth in appearance, and barely a
+man in years. Judging from his look, London was the last place in the
+world that one would have imagined to be the scene of his activities:
+such a face surely could not be nourished amid smoke and mud and fog
+and dust; such an open countenance could never even have seen anything
+of “the weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of Babylon the Second.
+
+His complexion was as fine as Elfride’s own; the pink of his cheeks as
+delicate. His mouth as perfect as Cupid’s bow in form, and as
+cherry-red in colour as hers. Bright curly hair; bright sparkling
+blue-gray eyes; a boy’s blush and manner; neither whisker nor
+moustache, unless a little light-brown fur on his upper lip deserved
+the latter title: this composed the London professional man, the
+prospect of whose advent had so troubled Elfride.
+
+Elfride hastened to say she was sorry to tell him that Mr. Swancourt
+was not able to receive him that evening, and gave the reason why. Mr.
+Smith replied, in a voice boyish by nature and manly by art, that he
+was very sorry to hear this news; but that as far as his reception was
+concerned, it did not matter in the least.
+
+Stephen was shown up to his room. In his absence Elfride stealthily
+glided into her father’s.
+
+“He’s come, papa. Such a young man for a business man!”
+
+“Oh, indeed!”
+
+“His face is—well—PRETTY; just like mine.”
+
+“H’m! what next?”
+
+“Nothing; that’s all I know of him yet. It is rather nice, is it not?”
+
+“Well, we shall see that when we know him better. Go down and give the
+poor fellow something to eat and drink, for Heaven’s sake. And when he
+has done eating, say I should like to have a few words with him, if he
+doesn’t mind coming up here.”
+
+The young lady glided downstairs again, and whilst she awaits young
+Smith’s entry, the letters referring to his visit had better be given.
+
+1.—MR. SWANCOURT TO MR. HEWBY.
+
+“ENDELSTOW VICARAGE, Feb. 18, 18—.
+
+“SIR,—We are thinking of restoring the tower and aisle of the church in
+this parish; and Lord Luxellian, the patron of the living, has
+mentioned your name as that of a trustworthy architect whom it would be
+desirable to ask to superintend the work.
+
+“I am exceedingly ignorant of the necessary preliminary steps.
+Probably, however, the first is that (should you be, as Lord Luxellian
+says you are, disposed to assist us) yourself or some member of your
+staff come and see the building, and report thereupon for the
+satisfaction of parishioners and others.
+
+“The spot is a very remote one: we have no railway within fourteen
+miles; and the nearest place for putting up at—called a town, though
+merely a large village—is Castle Boterel, two miles further on; so that
+it would be most convenient for you to stay at the vicarage—which I am
+glad to place at your disposal—instead of pushing on to the hotel at
+Castle Boterel, and coming back again in the morning.
+
+“Any day of the next week that you like to name for the visit will find
+us quite ready to receive you.—Yours very truly,
+
+CHRISTOPHER SWANCOURT. 2.—MR. HEWBY TO MR. SWANCOURT.
+
+‘PERCY PLACE, CHARING CROSS, Feb. 20, 18—.
+
+“DEAR SIR,—Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have
+arranged to survey and make drawings of the aisle and tower of your
+parish church, and of the dilapidations which have been suffered to
+accrue thereto, with a view to its restoration.
+
+“My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train
+to-morrow morning for the purpose. Many thanks for your proposal to
+accommodate him. He will take advantage of your offer, and will
+probably reach your house at some hour of the evening. You may put
+every confidence in him, and may rely upon his discernment in the
+matter of church architecture.
+
+“Trusting that the plans for the restoration, which I shall prepare
+from the details of his survey, will prove satisfactory to yourself and
+Lord Luxellian, I am, dear sir, yours faithfully,
+
+WALTER HEWBY.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+“Melodious birds sing madrigals”
+
+
+That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one to
+young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had suggested to
+her father, with the materials for the heterogeneous meal called high
+tea—a class of refection welcome to all when away from men and towns,
+and particularly attractive to youthful palates. The table was prettily
+decked with winter flowers and leaves, amid which the eye was greeted
+by chops, chicken, pie, &c., and two huge pasties overhanging the sides
+of the dish with a cheerful aspect of abundance.
+
+At the end, towards the fireplace, appeared the tea-service, of
+old-fashioned Worcester porcelain, and behind this arose the slight
+form of Elfride, attempting to add matronly dignity to the movement of
+pouring out tea, and to have a weighty and concerned look in matters of
+marmalade, honey, and clotted cream. Having made her own meal before he
+arrived, she found to her embarrassment that there was nothing left for
+her to do but talk when not assisting him. She asked him if he would
+excuse her finishing a letter she had been writing at a side-table,
+and, after sitting down to it, tingled with a sense of being grossly
+rude. However, seeing that he noticed nothing personally wrong in her,
+and that he too was embarrassed when she attentively watched his cup to
+refill it, Elfride became better at ease; and when furthermore he
+accidentally kicked the leg of the table, and then nearly upset his
+tea-cup, just as schoolboys did, she felt herself mistress of the
+situation, and could talk very well. In a few minutes ingenuousness and
+a common term of years obliterated all recollection that they were
+strangers just met. Stephen began to wax eloquent on extremely slight
+experiences connected with his professional pursuits; and she, having
+no experiences to fall back upon, recounted with much animation stories
+that had been related to her by her father, which would have astonished
+him had he heard with what fidelity of action and tone they were
+rendered. Upon the whole, a very interesting picture of
+Sweet-and-Twenty was on view that evening in Mr. Swancourt’s house.
+
+Ultimately Stephen had to go upstairs and talk loud to the vicar,
+receiving from him between his puffs a great many apologies for calling
+him so unceremoniously to a stranger’s bedroom. “But,” continued Mr.
+Swancourt, “I felt that I wanted to say a few words to you before the
+morning, on the business of your visit. One’s patience gets exhausted
+by staying a prisoner in bed all day through a sudden freak of one’s
+enemy—new to me, though—for I have known very little of gout as yet.
+However, he’s gone to my other toe in a very mild manner, and I expect
+he’ll slink off altogether by the morning. I hope you have been well
+attended to downstairs?”
+
+“Perfectly. And though it is unfortunate, and I am sorry to see you
+laid up, I beg you will not take the slightest notice of my being in
+the house the while.”
+
+“I will not. But I shall be down to-morrow. My daughter is an excellent
+doctor. A dose or two of her mild mixtures will fetch me round quicker
+than all the drug stuff in the world. Well, now about the church
+business. Take a seat, do. We can’t afford to stand upon ceremony in
+these parts as you see, and for this reason, that a civilized human
+being seldom stays long with us; and so we cannot waste time in
+approaching him, or he will be gone before we have had the pleasure of
+close acquaintance. This tower of ours is, as you will notice, entirely
+gone beyond the possibility of restoration; but the church itself is
+well enough. You should see some of the churches in this county. Floors
+rotten: ivy lining the walls.”
+
+“Dear me!”
+
+“Oh, that’s nothing. The congregation of a neighbour of mine, whenever
+a storm of rain comes on during service, open their umbrellas and hold
+them up till the dripping ceases from the roof. Now, if you will kindly
+bring me those papers and letters you see lying on the table, I will
+show you how far we have got.”
+
+Stephen crossed the room to fetch them, and the vicar seemed to notice
+more particularly the slim figure of his visitor.
+
+“I suppose you are quite competent?” he said.
+
+“Quite,” said the young man, colouring slightly.
+
+“You are very young, I fancy—I should say you are not more than
+nineteen?”
+
+I am nearly twenty-one.”
+
+“Exactly half my age; I am forty-two.”
+
+“By the way,” said Mr. Swancourt, after some conversation, “you said
+your whole name was Stephen Fitzmaurice, and that your grandfather came
+originally from Caxbury. Since I have been speaking, it has occurred to
+me that I know something of you. You belong to a well-known ancient
+county family—not ordinary Smiths in the least.”
+
+“I don’t think we have any of their blood in our veins.”
+
+“Nonsense! you must. Hand me the ‘Landed Gentry.’ Now, let me see.
+There, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith—he lies in St. Mary’s Church, doesn’t
+he? Well, out of that family Sprang the Leaseworthy Smiths, and
+collaterally came General Sir Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith of Caxbury——”
+
+“Yes; I have seen his monument there,” shouted Stephen. “But there is
+no connection between his family and mine: there cannot be.”
+
+“There is none, possibly, to your knowledge. But look at this, my dear
+sir,” said the vicar, striking his fist upon the bedpost for emphasis.
+“Here are you, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith, living in London, but
+springing from Caxbury. Here in this book is a genealogical tree of the
+Stephen Fitzmaurice Smiths of Caxbury Manor. You may be only a family
+of professional men now—I am not inquisitive: I don’t ask questions of
+that kind; it is not in me to do so—but it is as plain as the nose in
+your face that there’s your origin! And, Mr. Smith, I congratulate you
+upon your blood; blue blood, sir; and, upon my life, a very desirable
+colour, as the world goes.”
+
+“I wish you could congratulate me upon some more tangible quality,”
+said the younger man, sadly no less than modestly.
+
+“Nonsense! that will come with time. You are young: all your life is
+before you. Now look—see how far back in the mists of antiquity my own
+family of Swancourt have a root. Here, you see,” he continued, turning
+to the page, “is Geoffrey, the one among my ancestors who lost a barony
+because he would cut his joke. Ah, it’s the sort of us! But the story
+is too long to tell now. Ay, I’m a poor man—a poor gentleman, in fact:
+those I would be friends with, won’t be friends with me; those who are
+willing to be friends with me, I am above being friends with. Beyond
+dining with a neighbouring incumbent or two, and an occasional
+chat—sometimes dinner—with Lord Luxellian, a connection of mine, I am
+in absolute solitude—absolute.”
+
+“You have your studies, your books, and your—daughter.”
+
+“Oh yes, yes; and I don’t complain of poverty. Canto coram latrone.
+Well, Mr. Smith, don’t let me detain you any longer in a sick room. Ha!
+that reminds me of a story I once heard in my younger days.” Here the
+vicar began a series of small private laughs, and Stephen looked
+inquiry. “Oh, no, no! it is too bad—too bad to tell!” continued Mr.
+Swancourt in undertones of grim mirth. “Well, go downstairs; my
+daughter must do the best she can with you this evening. Ask her to
+sing to you—she plays and sings very nicely. Good-night; I feel as if I
+had known you for five or six years. I’ll ring for somebody to show you
+down.”
+
+“Never mind,” said Stephen, “I can find the way.” And he went
+downstairs, thinking of the delightful freedom of manner in the remoter
+counties in comparison with the reserve of London.
+
+“I forgot to tell you that my father was rather deaf,” said Elfride
+anxiously, when Stephen entered the little drawing-room.
+
+“Never mind; I know all about it, and we are great friends,” the man of
+business replied enthusiastically. “And, Miss Swancourt, will you
+kindly sing to me?”
+
+To Miss Swancourt this request seemed, what in fact it was,
+exceptionally point-blank; though she guessed that her father had some
+hand in framing it, knowing, rather to her cost, of his unceremonious
+way of utilizing her for the benefit of dull sojourners. At the same
+time, as Mr. Smith’s manner was too frank to provoke criticism, and his
+age too little to inspire fear, she was ready—not to say pleased—to
+accede. Selecting from the canterbury some old family ditties, that in
+years gone by had been played and sung by her mother, Elfride sat down
+to the pianoforte, and began, “’Twas on the evening of a winter’s day,”
+in a pretty contralto voice.
+
+“Do you like that old thing, Mr. Smith?” she said at the end.
+
+“Yes, I do much,” said Stephen—words he would have uttered, and
+sincerely, to anything on earth, from glee to requiem, that she might
+have chosen.
+
+“You shall have a little one by De Leyre, that was given me by a young
+French lady who was staying at Endelstow House:
+
+“‘Je l’ai planté, je l’ai vu naître,
+Ce beau rosier où les oiseaux,’ &c.;
+
+
+and then I shall want to give you my own favourite for the very last,
+Shelley’s ‘When the lamp is shattered,’ as set to music by my poor
+mother. I so much like singing to anybody who _really_ cares to hear
+me.”
+
+Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is usually
+recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene,
+which seems ordained to be her special form of manifestation throughout
+the pages of his memory. As the patron Saint has her attitude and
+accessories in mediaeval illumination, so the sweetheart may be said to
+have hers upon the table of her true Love’s fancy, without which she is
+rarely introduced there except by effort; and this though she may, on
+further acquaintance, have been observed in many other phases which one
+would imagine to be far more appropriate to love’s young dream.
+
+Miss Elfride’s image chose the form in which she was beheld during
+these minutes of singing, for her permanent attitude of visitation to
+Stephen’s eyes during his sleeping and waking hours in after days. The
+profile is seen of a young woman in a pale gray silk dress with
+trimmings of swan’s-down, and opening up from a point in front, like a
+waistcoat without a shirt; the cool colour contrasting admirably with
+the warm bloom of her neck and face. The furthermost candle on the
+piano comes immediately in a line with her head, and half invisible
+itself, forms the accidentally frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of
+light, surrounding her crown like an aureola. Her hands are in their
+place on the keys, her lips parted, and trilling forth, in a tender
+diminuendo, the closing words of the sad apostrophe:
+
+“O Love, who bewailest
+    The frailty of all things here,
+Why choose you the frailest
+    For your cradle, your home, and your bier!”
+
+
+Her head is forward a little, and her eyes directed keenly upward to
+the top of the page of music confronting her. Then comes a rapid look
+into Stephen’s face, and a still more rapid look back again to her
+business, her face having dropped its sadness, and acquired a certain
+expression of mischievous archness the while; which lingered there for
+some time, but was never developed into a positive smile of flirtation.
+
+Stephen suddenly shifted his position from her right hand to her left,
+where there was just room enough for a small ottoman to stand between
+the piano and the corner of the room. Into this nook he squeezed
+himself, and gazed wistfully up into Elfride’s face. So long and so
+earnestly gazed he, that her cheek deepened to a more and more crimson
+tint as each line was added to her song. Concluding, and pausing
+motionless after the last word for a minute or two, she ventured to
+look at him again. His features wore an expression of unutterable
+heaviness.
+
+“You don’t hear many songs, do you, Mr. Smith, to take so much notice
+of these of mine?”
+
+“Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was noticing:
+I mean yourself,” he answered gently.
+
+“Now, Mr. Smith!”
+
+“It is perfectly true; I don’t hear much singing. You mistake what I
+am, I fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded spot, you think
+I must needs come from a life of bustle, and know the latest movements
+of the day. But I don’t. My life is as quiet as yours, and more
+solitary; solitary as death.”
+
+“The death which comes from a plethora of life? But seriously, I can
+quite see that you are not the least what I thought you would be before
+I saw you. You are not critical, or experienced, or—much to mind.
+That’s why I don’t mind singing airs to you that I only half know.”
+Finding that by this confession she had vexed him in a way she did not
+intend, she added naively, “I mean, Mr. Smith, that you are better, not
+worse, for being only young and not very experienced. You don’t think
+my life here so very tame and dull, I know.”
+
+“I do not, indeed,” he said with fervour. “It must be delightfully
+poetical, and sparkling, and fresh, and——”
+
+“There you go, Mr. Smith! Well, men of another kind, when I get them to
+be honest enough to own the truth, think just the reverse: that my life
+must be a dreadful bore in its normal state, though pleasant for the
+exceptional few days they pass here.”
+
+“I could live here always!” he said, and with such a tone and look of
+unconscious revelation that Elfride was startled to find that her
+harmonies had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen’s heart. She
+said quickly:
+
+“But you can’t live here always.”
+
+“Oh no.” And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.
+
+Elfride’s emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of
+woman’s lesser infirmities—love of admiration—caused an inflammable
+disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as
+meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+“Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap.”
+
+
+For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after
+dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first,
+two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards
+the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small.
+On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour,
+stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations. The
+lonely edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the
+very tip of the hill. It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither
+battlement nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one
+substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round
+the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
+the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape
+with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the
+sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial
+stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous
+gray-green grass.
+
+Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty,
+and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.
+
+At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
+glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on his
+first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he
+looked, after that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph
+of its class. It was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of
+William Pitt, as represented in the well or little known bust by
+Nollekens—a mouth which is in itself a young man’s fortune, if properly
+exercised. His round chin, where its upper part turned inward, still
+continued its perfect and full curve, seeming to press in to a point
+the bottom of his nether lip at their place of junction.
+
+Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the lawn in
+a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy’s velocity,
+superadded to a girl’s lightness, after a tame rabbit she was
+endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of coaxing words
+alternating with desperate rushes so much out of keeping with them,
+that the hollowness of such expressions was but too evident to her pet,
+who darted and dodged in carefully timed counterpart.
+
+The scene down there was altogether different from that of the hills. A
+thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot from the
+wilderness without; even at this time of the year the grass was
+luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting belt of evergreens,
+wasting its force upon the higher and stronger trees forming the outer
+margin of the grove.
+
+Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and calling
+“Mr. Smith!” Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr. Swancourt. The
+young man expressed his gladness to see his host downstairs.
+
+“Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the
+acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally goes off
+the second night. Well, where have you been this morning? I saw you
+come in just now, I think!”
+
+“Yes; I have been for a walk.”
+
+“Start early?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Very early, I think?”
+
+“Yes, it was rather early.”
+
+“Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes seaward.”
+
+“No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.”
+
+“You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild place is
+a novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?”
+
+“Not altogether a novelty. I like it.”
+
+The youth seemed averse to explanation.
+
+“You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a journey of
+fourteen or sixteen hours. But there’s no accounting for tastes, and I
+am glad to see that yours are no meaner. After breakfast, but not
+before, I shall be good for a ten miles’ walk, Master Smith.”
+
+Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr.
+Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common with
+the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims to be
+considered handsome,—handsome, that is, in the sense in which the moon
+is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a close inspection, are
+seen to diversify its surface being left out of the argument. His face
+was of a tint that never deepened upon his cheeks nor lightened upon
+his forehead, but remained uniform throughout; the usual neutral
+salmon-colour of a man who feeds well—not to say too well—and does not
+think hard; every pore being in visible working order. His tout
+ensemble was that of a highly improved class of farmer, dressed up in
+the wrong clothes; that of a firm-standing perpendicular man, whose
+fall would have been backwards in direction if he had ever lost his
+balance.
+
+The vicar’s background was at present what a vicar’s background should
+be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the chimneypiece
+were ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines, and against the
+wall was a high table, made up of the fragments of an old oak Iychgate.
+Upon this stood stuffed specimens of owls, divers, and gulls, and over
+them bunches of wheat and barley ears, labelled with the date of the
+year that produced them. Some cases and shelves, more or less laden
+with books, the prominent titles of which were Dr. Brown’s “Notes on
+the Romans,” Dr. Smith’s “Notes on the Corinthians,” and Dr. Robinson’s
+“Notes on the Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,” just saved the
+character of the place, in spite of a girl’s doll’s-house standing
+above them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride’s hat hanging
+on its corner.
+
+“Business, business!” said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began to
+find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the somewhat
+irregular forces of his visitor.
+
+They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts,
+mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much at
+starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him. “Worm!” the
+vicar shouted.
+
+A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the
+building, mumbling, “Ah, I used to be strong enough, but ’tis altered
+now! Well, there, I’m as independent as one here and there, even if
+they do write “squire after their names.”
+
+“What’s the matter?” said the vicar, as William Worm appeared; when the
+remarks were repeated to him.
+
+“Worm says some very true things sometimes,” Mr. Swancourt said,
+turning to Stephen. “Now, as regards that word ‘esquire.’ Why, Mr.
+Smith, that word ‘esquire’ is gone to the dogs,—used on the letters of
+every jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else, Worm?”
+
+“Ay, the folk have begun frying again!”
+
+“Dear me! I’m sorry to hear that.”
+
+“Yes,” Worm said groaningly to Stephen, “I’ve got such a noise in my
+head that there’s no living night nor day. ’Tis just for all the world
+like people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in my poor head,
+till I don’t know whe’r I’m here or yonder. There, God A’mighty will
+find it out sooner or later, I hope, and relieve me.”
+
+“Now, my deafness,” said Mr. Swancourt impressively, “is a dead
+silence; but William Worm’s is that of people frying fish in his head.
+Very remarkable, isn’t it?”
+
+“I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,” said Worm
+corroboratively.
+
+“Yes, it is remarkable,” said Mr. Smith.
+
+“Very peculiar, very peculiar,” echoed the vicar; and they all then
+followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a little stone
+wall, from which gleamed fragments of quartz and blood-red marbles,
+apparently of inestimable value, in their setting of brown alluvium.
+Stephen walked with the dignity of a man close to the horse’s head,
+Worm stumbled along a stone’s throw in the rear, and Elfride was
+nowhere in particular, yet everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes
+behind, sometimes at the sides, hovering about the procession like a
+butterfly; not definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in
+at points with the general progress.
+
+The vicar explained things as he went on: “The fact is, Mr. Smith, I
+didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was
+necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those
+d——dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not
+as an expletive.”
+
+“How very odd!” said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious
+friendliness.
+
+“Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the
+churchwardens are——; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk
+and the sexton as well.”
+
+“How very strange!” said Stephen.
+
+“Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of
+Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some
+progress soon.”
+
+“You must trust to circumstances.”
+
+“There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in
+Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it?
+But I like it on such days as these.”
+
+The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which
+having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not
+being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open
+freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight
+can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was
+nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds
+bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than
+whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people
+in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or
+wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or
+cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and
+bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our
+graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the
+forms of the mounds it covered,—themselves irregularly shaped, with no
+eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain that all
+this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside
+were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive
+sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with
+the effect of a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel.
+Detached rocks stood upright afar, a collar of foam girding their
+bases, and repeating in its whiteness the plumage of a countless
+multitude of gulls that restlessly hovered about.
+
+“Now, Worm!” said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
+attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself
+were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the
+afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen
+running up the hill without a bonnet.
+
+Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in
+the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during
+dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came
+into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by
+“the purple light” in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by
+sending him to measure the height of the tower.
+
+What could she do but come close—so close that a minute arc of her
+skirt touched his foot—and asked him how he was getting on with his
+sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical
+mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the
+pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a
+preacher.
+
+Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
+
+“Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?”
+she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
+
+“Oh no, that I won’t,” said he, staring up.
+
+“Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them
+better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and
+to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote
+it for him. Isn’t it absurd?”
+
+“How clever you must be!” said Stephen. “I couldn’t write a sermon for
+the world.”
+
+“Oh, it’s easy enough,” she said, descending from the pulpit and coming
+close to him to explain more vividly. “You do it like this. Did you
+ever play a game of forfeits called ‘When is it? where is it? what is
+it?’”
+
+“No, never.”
+
+“Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing
+that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so
+on. You put that down under ‘Generally.’ Then you proceed to the First,
+Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys—says they are all my
+eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being
+put in great black brackets, writing opposite, ‘LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE
+FARMERS ARE FALLING ASLEEP.’ Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few
+Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of
+each page, ‘KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN’—I mean,” she added, correcting
+herself, “that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he
+gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up
+a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!”
+
+Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as
+if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had
+outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
+
+Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught
+by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had
+the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the
+self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two
+with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the
+church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it
+freshens the glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched
+Elfride down the hill with a smile.
+
+“You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,” he said, and turned to
+Stephen. “But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as
+you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.”
+
+“I think Miss Swancourt very clever,” Stephen observed.
+
+“Yes, she is; certainly, she is,” said papa, turning his voice as much
+as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. “Now,
+Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the
+world—not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead
+secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job
+she makes of them!”
+
+“She can do anything.”
+
+“She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade.
+But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!”
+
+“Not a word,” said Smith.
+
+“Look there,” said Mr. Swancourt. “What do you think of my roofing?” He
+pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,
+
+“Did you do that, sir?”
+
+“Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I
+pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens,
+slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We
+worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?”
+
+“Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there—hee, hee!” said
+William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. “Like slaves, ’a b’lieve—hee,
+hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go
+straight? Mighty I! There, ’tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to
+cuss and let it out, is it, sir?”
+
+“Well—why?”
+
+“Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to
+cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.”
+
+“I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.”
+
+“Oh, doan’t I, sir—hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir,
+and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there.
+Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the
+candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the
+chancel?”
+
+“Yes; what of that?”
+
+“I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ’twas only
+a dog or cat—maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.”
+
+“Ah, I remember.”
+
+“No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ’A was very well to look at; but,
+Lord!——”
+
+“Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?”
+
+“—’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow.
+’Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat
+down upon the chair. ‘Get up, Worm,’ says you, when you seed the chair
+go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and
+brimstone to t’other end of your shop—all in a passion. ‘Damn the
+chair!’ says I. ‘Just what I was thinking,’ says you, sir. ‘I could see
+it in your face, sir,’ says I, ‘and I hope you and God will forgi’e me
+for saying what you wouldn’t.’ To save your life you couldn’t help
+laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay,
+I’m as wise as one here and there.”
+
+“I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church
+and tower with you,” Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following
+morning, “so I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when
+you came. I told him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very
+intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to know about the
+state of the walls. His name is John Smith.”
+
+Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I
+will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said
+laughingly. “I shall see your figure against the sky.”
+
+“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss
+Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,”
+he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for
+you.”
+
+She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch
+him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church
+stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his
+working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
+
+To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they
+both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and
+remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine
+of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of
+moving. More minutes passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered.
+It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to
+slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.
+
+“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique.
+“Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of
+with——”
+
+The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
+
+She returned to the porch.
+
+“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?”
+she inquired of her father.
+
+“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s
+master-mason, John Smith.”
+
+“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak
+station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a
+childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But
+her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect
+of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to
+its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being
+wounded that little hits struck her hard.
+
+It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen
+above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a
+ruined mosque. Even then Stephen was not true enough to perform what he
+was so courteous to promise, and he vanished without making a sign.
+
+He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that his
+eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her attitude of
+coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and she could no longer
+utter feigned words of indifference.
+
+“Ah, you weren’t kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break your
+promise,” she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low for her
+father’s powers of hearing.
+
+“Forgive, forgive me!” said Stephen with dismay. “I had forgotten—quite
+forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.”
+
+“Any further explanation?” said Miss Capricious, pouting.
+
+He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.
+
+“None,” he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+“Bosom’d high in tufted trees.”
+
+
+It was breakfast time.
+
+As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of light
+from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have stereotyped
+themselves in unrelieved shades of gray. The long-armed trees and
+shrubs of juniper, cedar, and pine varieties, were grayish black; those
+of the broad-leaved sort, together with the herbage, were
+grayish-green; the eternal hills and tower behind them were
+grayish-brown; the sky, dropping behind all, gray of the purest
+melancholy.
+
+Yet in spite of this sombre artistic effect, the morning was not one
+which tended to lower the spirits. It was even cheering. For it did not
+rain, nor was rain likely to fall for many days to come.
+
+Elfride had turned from the table towards the fire and was idly
+elevating a hand-screen before her face, when she heard the click of a
+little gate outside.
+
+“Ah, here’s the postman!” she said, as a shuffling, active man came
+through an opening in the shrubbery and across the lawn. She vanished,
+and met him in the porch, afterwards coming in with her hands behind
+her back.
+
+“How many are there? Three for papa, one for Mr. Smith, none for Miss
+Swancourt. And, papa, look here, one of yours is from—whom do you
+think?—Lord Luxellian. And it has something HARD in it—a lump of
+something. I’ve been feeling it through the envelope, and can’t think
+what it is.”
+
+“What does Luxellian write for, I wonder?” Mr. Swancourt had said
+simultaneously with her words. He handed Stephen his letter, and took
+his own, putting on his countenance a higher class of look than was
+customary, as became a poor gentleman who was going to read a letter
+from a peer.
+
+Stephen read his missive with a countenance quite the reverse of the
+vicar’s.
+
+“PERCY PLACE, Thursday Evening.
+
+
+‘DEAR SMITH,—Old H. is in a towering rage with you for being so long
+about the church sketches. Swears you are more trouble than you are
+worth. He says I am to write and say you are to stay no longer on any
+consideration—that he would have done it all in three hours very
+easily. I told him that you were not like an experienced hand, which he
+seemed to forget, but it did not make much difference. However, between
+you and me privately, if I were you I would not alarm myself for a day
+or so, if I were not inclined to return. I would make out the week and
+finish my spree. He will blow up just as much if you appear here on
+Saturday as if you keep away till Monday morning.—Yours very truly,
+
+
+“SIMPKINS JENKINS.
+
+
+“Dear me—very awkward!” said Stephen, rather _en l’air_, and confused
+with the kind of confusion that assails an understrapper when he has
+been enlarged by accident to the dimensions of a superior, and is
+somewhat rudely pared down to his original size.
+
+“What is awkward?” said Miss Swancourt.
+
+Smith by this time recovered his equanimity, and with it the
+professional dignity of an experienced architect.
+
+“Important business demands my immediate presence in London, I regret
+to say,” he replied.
+
+“What! Must you go at once?” said Mr. Swancourt, looking over the edge
+of his letter. “Important business? A young fellow like you to have
+important business!”
+
+“The truth is,” said Stephen blushing, and rather ashamed of having
+pretended even so slightly to a consequence which did not belong to
+him,—“the truth is, Mr. Hewby has sent to say I am to come home; and I
+must obey him.”
+
+“I see; I see. It is politic to do so, you mean. Now I can see more
+than you think. You are to be his partner. I booked you for that
+directly I read his letter to me the other day, and the way he spoke of
+you. He thinks a great deal of you, Mr. Smith, or he wouldn’t be so
+anxious for your return.”
+
+Unpleasant to Stephen such remarks as these could not sound; to have
+the expectancy of partnership with one of the largest-practising
+architects in London thrust upon him was cheering, however untenable he
+felt the idea to be. He saw that, whatever Mr. Hewby might think, Mr.
+Swancourt certainly thought much of him to entertain such an idea on
+such slender ground as to be absolutely no ground at all. And then,
+unaccountably, his speaking face exhibited a cloud of sadness, which a
+reflection on the remoteness of any such contingency could hardly have
+sufficed to cause.
+
+Elfride was struck with that look of his; even Mr. Swancourt noticed
+it.
+
+“Well,” he said cheerfully, “never mind that now. You must come again
+on your own account; not on business. Come to see me as a visitor, you
+know—say, in your holidays—all you town men have holidays like
+schoolboys. When are they?”
+
+“In August, I believe.”
+
+“Very well; come in August; and then you need not hurry away so. I am
+glad to get somebody decent to talk to, or at, in this outlandish
+ultima Thule. But, by the bye, I have something to say—you won’t go
+to-day?”
+
+“No; I need not,” said Stephen hesitatingly. “I am not obliged to get
+back before Monday morning.”
+
+“Very well, then, that brings me to what I am going to propose. This is
+a letter from Lord Luxellian. I think you heard me speak of him as the
+resident landowner in this district, and patron of this living?”
+
+“I—know of him.”
+
+“He is in London now. It seems that he has run up on business for a day
+or two, and taken Lady Luxellian with him. He has written to ask me to
+go to his house, and search for a paper among his private memoranda,
+which he forgot to take with him.”
+
+“What did he send in the letter?” inquired Elfride.
+
+“The key of a private desk in which the papers are. He doesn’t like to
+trust such a matter to any body else. I have done such things for him
+before. And what I propose is, that we make an afternoon of it—all
+three of us. Go for a drive to Targan Bay, come home by way of
+Endelstow House; and whilst I am looking over the documents you can
+ramble about the rooms where you like. I have the run of the house at
+any time, you know. The building, though nothing but a mass of gables
+outside, has a splendid hall, staircase, and gallery within; and there
+are a few good pictures.”
+
+“Yes, there are,” said Stephen.
+
+“Have you seen the place, then?
+
+“I saw it as I came by,” he said hastily.
+
+“Oh yes; but I was alluding to the interior. And the church—St.
+Eval’s—is much older than our St. Agnes’ here. I do duty in that and
+this alternately, you know. The fact is, I ought to have some help;
+riding across that park for two miles on a wet morning is not at all
+the thing. If my constitution were not well seasoned, as thank God it
+is,”—here Mr. Swancourt looked down his front, as if his constitution
+were visible there,—“I should be coughing and barking all the year
+round. And when the family goes away, there are only about three
+servants to preach to when I get there. Well, that shall be the
+arrangement, then. Elfride, you will like to go?”
+
+Elfride assented; and the little breakfast-party separated. Stephen
+rose to go and take a few final measurements at the church, the vicar
+following him to the door with a mysterious expression of inquiry on
+his face.
+
+“You’ll put up with our not having family prayer this morning, I hope?”
+he whispered.
+
+“Yes; quite so,” said Stephen.
+
+“To tell you the truth,” he continued in the same undertone, “we don’t
+make a regular thing of it; but when we have strangers visiting us, I
+am strongly of opinion that it is the proper thing to do, and I always
+do it. I am very strict on that point. But you, Smith, there is
+something in your face which makes me feel quite at home; no nonsense
+about you, in short. Ah, it reminds me of a splendid story I used to
+hear when I was a helter-skelter young fellow—such a story! But”—here
+the vicar shook his head self-forbiddingly, and grimly laughed.
+
+“Was it a good story?” said young Smith, smiling too.
+
+“Oh yes; but ’tis too bad—too bad! Couldn’t tell it to you for the
+world!”
+
+Stephen went across the lawn, hearing the vicar chuckling privately at
+the recollection as he withdrew.
+
+They started at three o’clock. The gray morning had resolved itself
+into an afternoon bright with a pale pervasive sunlight, without the
+sun itself being visible. Lightly they trotted along—the wheels nearly
+silent, the horse’s hoofs clapping, almost ringing, upon the hard,
+white, turnpike road as it followed the level ridge in a perfectly
+straight line, seeming to be absorbed ultimately by the white of the
+sky.
+
+Targan Bay—which had the merit of being easily got at—was duly visited.
+They then swept round by innumerable lanes, in which not twenty
+consecutive yards were either straight or level, to the domain of Lord
+Luxellian. A woman with a double chin and thick neck, like Queen Anne
+by Dahl, threw open the lodge gate, a little boy standing behind her.
+
+“I’ll give him something, poor little fellow,” said Elfride, pulling
+out her purse and hastily opening it. From the interior of her purse a
+host of bits of paper, like a flock of white birds, floated into the
+air, and were blown about in all directions.
+
+“Well, to be sure!” said Stephen with a slight laugh.
+
+“What the dickens is all that?” said Mr. Swancourt. “Not halves of
+bank-notes, Elfride?”
+
+Elfride looked annoyed and guilty. “They are only something of mine,
+papa,” she faltered, whilst Stephen leapt out, and, assisted by the
+lodge-keeper’s little boy, crept about round the wheels and horse’s
+hoofs till the papers were all gathered together again. He handed them
+back to her, and remounted.
+
+“I suppose you are wondering what those scraps were?” she said, as they
+bowled along up the sycamore avenue. “And so I may as well tell you.
+They are notes for a romance I am writing.”
+
+She could not help colouring at the confession, much as she tried to
+avoid it.
+
+“A story, do you mean?” said Stephen, Mr. Swancourt half listening, and
+catching a word of the conversation now and then.
+
+“Yes; THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE; a romance of the fifteenth century.
+Such writing is out of date now, I know; but I like doing it.”
+
+“A romance carried in a purse! If a highwayman were to rob you, he
+would be taken in.”
+
+“Yes; that’s my way of carrying manuscript. The real reason is, that I
+mostly write bits of it on scraps of paper when I am on horseback; and
+I put them there for convenience.”
+
+“What are you going to do with your romance when you have written it?”
+said Stephen.
+
+“I don’t know,” she replied, and turned her head to look at the
+prospect.
+
+For by this time they had reached the precincts of Endelstow House.
+Driving through an ancient gate-way of dun-coloured stone, spanned by
+the high-shouldered Tudor arch, they found themselves in a spacious
+court, closed by a facade on each of its three sides. The substantial
+portions of the existing building dated from the reign of Henry VIII.;
+but the picturesque and sheltered spot had been the site of an erection
+of a much earlier date. A licence to crenellate mansum infra manerium
+suum was granted by Edward II. to “Hugo Luxellen chivaler;” but though
+the faint outline of the ditch and mound was visible at points, no sign
+of the original building remained.
+
+The windows on all sides were long and many-mullioned; the roof lines
+broken up by dormer lights of the same pattern. The apex stones of
+these dormers, together with those of the gables, were surmounted by
+grotesque figures in rampant, passant, and couchant variety. Tall
+octagonal and twisted chimneys thrust themselves high up into the sky,
+surpassed in height, however, by some poplars and sycamores at the
+back, which showed their gently rocking summits over ridge and parapet.
+In the corners of the court polygonal bays, whose surfaces were
+entirely occupied by buttresses and windows, broke into the squareness
+of the enclosure; and a far-projecting oriel, springing from a
+fantastic series of mouldings, overhung the archway of the chief
+entrance to the house.
+
+As Mr. Swancourt had remarked, he had the freedom of the mansion in the
+absence of its owner. Upon a statement of his errand they were all
+admitted to the library, and left entirely to themselves. Mr. Swancourt
+was soon up to his eyes in the examination of a heap of papers he had
+taken from the cabinet described by his correspondent. Stephen and
+Elfride had nothing to do but to wander about till her father was
+ready.
+
+Elfride entered the gallery, and Stephen followed her without seeming
+to do so. It was a long sombre apartment, enriched with fittings a
+century or so later in style than the walls of the mansion. Pilasters
+of Renaissance workmanship supported a cornice from which sprang a
+curved ceiling, panelled in the awkward twists and curls of the period.
+The old Gothic quarries still remained in the upper portion of the
+large window at the end, though they had made way for a more modern
+form of glazing elsewhere.
+
+Stephen was at one end of the gallery looking towards Elfride, who
+stood in the midst, beginning to feel somewhat depressed by the society
+of Luxellian shades of cadaverous complexion fixed by Holbein, Kneller,
+and Lely, and seeming to gaze at and through her in a moralizing mood.
+The silence, which cast almost a spell upon them, was broken by the
+sudden opening of a door at the far end.
+
+Out bounded a pair of little girls, lightly yet warmly dressed. Their
+eyes were sparkling; their hair swinging about and around; their red
+mouths laughing with unalloyed gladness.
+
+“Ah, Miss Swancourt: dearest Elfie! we heard you. Are you going to stay
+here? You are our little mamma, are you not—our big mamma is gone to
+London,” said one.
+
+“Let me tiss you,” said the other, in appearance very much like the
+first, but to a smaller pattern.
+
+Their pink cheeks and yellow hair were speedily intermingled with the
+folds of Elfride’s dress; she then stooped and tenderly embraced them
+both.
+
+“Such an odd thing,” said Elfride, smiling, and turning to Stephen.
+“They have taken it into their heads lately to call me ‘little mamma,’
+because I am very fond of them, and wore a dress the other day
+something like one of Lady Luxellian’s.”
+
+These two young creatures were the Honourable Mary and the Honourable
+Kate—scarcely appearing large enough as yet to bear the weight of such
+ponderous prefixes. They were the only two children of Lord and Lady
+Luxellian, and, as it proved, had been left at home during their
+parents’ temporary absence, in the custody of nurse and governess. Lord
+Luxellian was dotingly fond of the children; rather indifferent towards
+his wife, since she had begun to show an inclination not to please him
+by giving him a boy.
+
+All children instinctively ran after Elfride, looking upon her more as
+an unusually nice large specimen of their own tribe than as a grown-up
+elder. It had now become an established rule, that whenever she met
+them—indoors or out-of-doors, weekdays or Sundays—they were to be
+severally pressed against her face and bosom for the space of a quarter
+of a minute, and other-wise made much of on the delightful system of
+cumulative epithet and caress to which unpractised girls will
+occasionally abandon themselves.
+
+A look of misgiving by the youngsters towards the door by which they
+had entered directed attention to a maid-servant appearing from the
+same quarter, to put an end to this sweet freedom of the poor
+Honourables Mary and Kate.
+
+“I wish you lived here, Miss Swancourt,” piped one like a melancholy
+bullfinch.
+
+“So do I,” piped the other like a rather more melancholy bullfinch.
+“Mamma can’t play with us so nicely as you do. I don’t think she ever
+learnt playing when she was little. When shall we come to see you?”
+
+“As soon as you like, dears.”
+
+“And sleep at your house all night? That’s what I mean by coming to see
+you. I don’t care to see people with hats and bonnets on, and all
+standing up and walking about.”
+
+“As soon as we can get mamma’s permission you shall come and stay as
+long as ever you like. Good-bye!”
+
+The prisoners were then led off, Elfride again turning her attention to
+her guest, whom she had left standing at the remote end of the gallery.
+On looking around for him he was nowhere to be seen. Elfride stepped
+down to the library, thinking he might have rejoined her father there.
+But Mr. Swancourt, now cheerfully illuminated by a pair of candles, was
+still alone, untying packets of letters and papers, and tying them up
+again.
+
+As Elfride did not stand on a sufficiently intimate footing with the
+object of her interest to justify her, as a proper young lady, to
+commence the active search for him that youthful impulsiveness
+prompted, and as, nevertheless, for a nascent reason connected with
+those divinely cut lips of his, she did not like him to be absent from
+her side, she wandered desultorily back to the oak staircase, pouting
+and casting her eyes about in hope of discerning his boyish figure.
+
+Though daylight still prevailed in the rooms, the corridors were in a
+depth of shadow—chill, sad, and silent; and it was only by looking
+along them towards light spaces beyond that anything or anybody could
+be discerned therein. One of these light spots she found to be caused
+by a side-door with glass panels in the upper part. Elfride opened it,
+and found herself confronting a secondary or inner lawn, separated from
+the principal lawn front by a shrubbery.
+
+And now she saw a perplexing sight. At right angles to the face of the
+wing she had emerged from, and within a few feet of the door, jutted
+out another wing of the mansion, lower and with less architectural
+character. Immediately opposite to her, in the wall of this wing, was a
+large broad window, having its blind drawn down, and illuminated by a
+light in the room it screened.
+
+On the blind was a shadow from somebody close inside it—a person in
+profile. The profile was unmistakably that of Stephen. It was just
+possible to see that his arms were uplifted, and that his hands held an
+article of some kind. Then another shadow appeared—also in profile—and
+came close to him. This was the shadow of a woman. She turned her back
+towards Stephen: he lifted and held out what now proved to be a shawl
+or mantle—placed it carefully—so carefully—round the lady; disappeared;
+reappeared in her front—fastened the mantle. Did he then kiss her?
+Surely not. Yet the motion might have been a kiss. Then both shadows
+swelled to colossal dimensions—grew distorted—vanished.
+
+Two minutes elapsed.
+
+“Ah, Miss Swancourt! I am so glad to find you. I was looking for you,”
+said a voice at her elbow—Stephen’s voice. She stepped into the
+passage.
+
+“Do you know any of the members of this establishment?” said she.
+
+“Not a single one: how should I?” he replied.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+“Fare thee weel awhile!”
+
+
+Simultaneously with the conclusion of Stephen’s remark, the sound of
+the closing of an external door in their immediate neighbourhood
+reached Elfride’s ears. It came from the further side of the wing
+containing the illuminated room. She then discerned, by the aid of the
+dusky departing light, a figure, whose sex was undistinguishable,
+walking down the gravelled path by the parterre towards the river. The
+figure grew fainter, and vanished under the trees.
+
+Mr. Swancourt’s voice was heard calling out their names from a distant
+corridor in the body of the building. They retraced their steps, and
+found him with his coat buttoned up and his hat on, awaiting their
+advent in a mood of self-satisfaction at having brought his search to a
+successful close. The carriage was brought round, and without further
+delay the trio drove away from the mansion, under the echoing gateway
+arch, and along by the leafless sycamores, as the stars began to kindle
+their trembling lights behind the maze of branches and twigs.
+
+No words were spoken either by youth or maiden. Her unpractised mind
+was completely occupied in fathoming its recent acquisition. The young
+man who had inspired her with such novelty of feeling, who had come
+directly from London on business to her father, having been brought by
+chance to Endelstow House had, by some means or other, acquired the
+privilege of approaching some lady he had found therein, and of
+honouring her by petits soins of a marked kind,—all in the space of
+half an hour.
+
+What room were they standing in? thought Elfride. As nearly as she
+could guess, it was Lord Luxellian’s business-room, or office. What
+people were in the house? None but the governess and servants, as far
+as she knew, and of these he had professed a total ignorance. Had the
+person she had indistinctly seen leaving the house anything to do with
+the performance? It was impossible to say without appealing to the
+culprit himself, and that she would never do. The more Elfride
+reflected, the more certain did it appear that the meeting was a chance
+rencounter, and not an appointment. On the ultimate inquiry as to the
+individuality of the woman, Elfride at once assumed that she could not
+be an inferior. Stephen Smith was not the man to care about
+passages-at-love with women beneath him. Though gentle, ambition was
+visible in his kindling eyes; he evidently hoped for much; hoped
+indefinitely, but extensively. Elfride was puzzled, and being puzzled,
+was, by a natural sequence of girlish sensations, vexed with him. No
+more pleasure came in recognizing that from liking to attract him she
+was getting on to love him, boyish as he was and innocent as he had
+seemed.
+
+They reached the bridge which formed a link between the eastern and
+western halves of the parish. Situated in a valley that was bounded
+outwardly by the sea, it formed a point of depression from which the
+road ascended with great steepness to West Endelstow and the Vicarage.
+There was no absolute necessity for either of them to alight, but as it
+was the vicar’s custom after a long journey to humour the horse in
+making this winding ascent, Elfride, moved by an imitative instinct,
+suddenly jumped out when Pleasant had just begun to adopt the
+deliberate stalk he associated with this portion of the road.
+
+The young man seemed glad of any excuse for breaking the silence. “Why,
+Miss Swancourt, what a risky thing to do!” he exclaimed, immediately
+following her example by jumping down on the other side.
+
+“Oh no, not at all,” replied she coldly; the shadow phenomenon at
+Endelstow House still paramount within her.
+
+Stephen walked along by himself for two or three minutes, wrapped in
+the rigid reserve dictated by her tone. Then apparently thinking that
+it was only for girls to pout, he came serenely round to her side, and
+offered his arm with Castilian gallantry, to assist her in ascending
+the remaining three-quarters of the steep.
+
+Here was a temptation: it was the first time in her life that Elfride
+had been treated as a grown-up woman in this way—offered an arm in a
+manner implying that she had a right to refuse it. Till to-night she
+had never received masculine attentions beyond those which might be
+contained in such homely remarks as “Elfride, give me your hand;”
+“Elfride, take hold of my arm,” from her father. Her callow heart made
+an epoch of the incident; she considered her array of feelings, for and
+against. Collectively they were for taking this offered arm; the single
+one of pique determined her to punish Stephen by refusing.
+
+“No, thank you, Mr. Smith; I can get along better by myself”
+
+It was Elfride’s first fragile attempt at browbeating a lover. Fearing
+more the issue of such an undertaking than what a gentle young man
+might think of her waywardness, she immediately afterwards determined
+to please herself by reversing her statement.
+
+“On second thoughts, I will take it,” she said.
+
+They slowly went their way up the hill, a few yards behind the
+carriage.
+
+“How silent you are, Miss Swancourt!” Stephen observed.
+
+“Perhaps I think you silent too,” she returned.
+
+“I may have reason to be.”
+
+“Scarcely; it is sadness that makes people silent, and you can have
+none.”
+
+“You don’t know: I have a trouble; though some might think it less a
+trouble than a dilemma.”
+
+“What is it?” she asked impulsively.
+
+Stephen hesitated. “I might tell,” he said; “at the same time, perhaps,
+it is as well——”
+
+She let go his arm and imperatively pushed it from her, tossing her
+head. She had just learnt that a good deal of dignity is lost by asking
+a question to which an answer is refused, even ever so politely; for
+though politeness does good service in cases of requisition and
+compromise, it but little helps a direct refusal. “I don’t wish to know
+anything of it; I don’t wish it,” she went on. “The carriage is waiting
+for us at the top of the hill; we must get in;” and Elfride flitted to
+the front. “Papa, here is your Elfride!” she exclaimed to the dusky
+figure of the old gentleman, as she sprang up and sank by his side
+without deigning to accept aid from Stephen.
+
+“Ah, yes!” uttered the vicar in artificially alert tones, awaking from
+a most profound sleep, and suddenly preparing to alight.
+
+“Why, what are you doing, papa? We are not home yet.”
+
+“Oh no, no; of course not; we are not at home yet,” Mr. Swancourt said
+very hastily, endeavouring to dodge back to his original position with
+the air of a man who had not moved at all. “The fact is I was so lost
+in deep meditation that I forgot whereabouts we were.” And in a minute
+the vicar was snoring again.
+
+That evening, being the last, seemed to throw an exceptional shade of
+sadness over Stephen Smith, and the repeated injunctions of the vicar,
+that he was to come and revisit them in the summer, apparently tended
+less to raise his spirits than to unearth some misgiving.
+
+He left them in the gray light of dawn, whilst the colours of earth
+were sombre, and the sun was yet hidden in the east. Elfride had
+fidgeted all night in her little bed lest none of the household should
+be awake soon enough to start him, and also lest she might miss seeing
+again the bright eyes and curly hair, to which their owner’s possession
+of a hidden mystery added a deeper tinge of romance. To some extent—so
+soon does womanly interest take a solicitous turn—she felt herself
+responsible for his safe conduct. They breakfasted before daylight; Mr.
+Swancourt, being more and more taken with his guest’s ingenuous
+appearance, having determined to rise early and bid him a friendly
+farewell. It was, however, rather to the vicar’s astonishment, that he
+saw Elfride walk in to the breakfast-table, candle in hand.
+
+Whilst William Worm performed his toilet (during which performance the
+inmates of the vicarage were always in the habit of waiting with
+exemplary patience), Elfride wandered desultorily to the summer house.
+Stephen followed her thither. The copse-covered valley was visible from
+this position, a mist now lying all along its length, hiding the stream
+which trickled through it, though the observers themselves were in
+clear air.
+
+They stood close together, leaning over the rustic balustrading which
+bounded the arbour on the outward side, and formed the crest of a steep
+slope beneath Elfride constrainedly pointed out some features of the
+distant uplands rising irregularly opposite. But the artistic eye was,
+either from nature or circumstance, very faint in Stephen now, and he
+only half attended to her description, as if he spared time from some
+other thought going on within him.
+
+“Well, good-bye,” he said suddenly; “I must never see you again, I
+suppose, Miss Swancourt, in spite of invitations.”
+
+His genuine tribulation played directly upon the delicate chords of her
+nature. She could afford to forgive him for a concealment or two.
+Moreover, the shyness which would not allow him to look her in the face
+lent bravery to her own eyes and tongue.
+
+“Oh, DO come again, Mr. Smith!” she said prettily.
+
+“I should delight in it; but it will be better if I do not.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Certain circumstances in connection with me make it undesirable. Not
+on my account; on yours.”
+
+“Goodness! As if anything in connection with you could hurt me,” she
+said with serene supremacy; but seeing that this plan of treatment was
+inappropriate, she tuned a smaller note. “Ah, I know why you will not
+come. You don’t want to. You’ll go home to London and to all the
+stirring people there, and will never want to see us any more!”
+
+“You know I have no such reason.”
+
+“And go on writing letters to the lady you are engaged to, just as
+before.”
+
+“What does that mean? I am not engaged.”
+
+“You wrote a letter to a Miss Somebody; I saw it in the letter-rack.”
+
+“Pooh! an elderly woman who keeps a stationer’s shop; and it was to
+tell her to keep my newspapers till I get back.”
+
+“You needn’t have explained: it was not my business at all.” Miss
+Elfride was rather relieved to hear that statement, nevertheless. “And
+you won’t come again to see my father?” she insisted.
+
+“I should like to—and to see you again, but——”
+
+“Will you reveal to me that matter you hide?” she interrupted
+petulantly.
+
+“No; not now.”
+
+She could not but go on, graceless as it might seem.
+
+“Tell me this,” she importuned with a trembling mouth. “Does any
+meeting of yours with a lady at Endelstow Vicarage clash with—any
+interest you may take in me?”
+
+He started a little. “It does not,” he said emphatically; and looked
+into the pupils of her eyes with the confidence that only honesty can
+give, and even that to youth alone.
+
+The explanation had not come, but a gloom left her. She could not but
+believe that utterance. Whatever enigma might lie in the shadow on the
+blind, it was not an enigma of underhand passion.
+
+She turned towards the house, entering it through the conservatory.
+Stephen went round to the front door. Mr. Swancourt was standing on the
+step in his slippers. Worm was adjusting a buckle in the harness, and
+murmuring about his poor head; and everything was ready for Stephen’s
+departure.
+
+“You named August for your visit. August it shall be; that is, if you
+care for the society of such a fossilized Tory,” said Mr. Swancourt.
+
+Mr. Smith only responded hesitatingly, that he should like to come
+again.
+
+“You said you would, and you must,” insisted Elfride, coming to the
+door and speaking under her father’s arm.
+
+Whatever reason the youth may have had for not wishing to enter the
+house as a guest, it no longer predominated. He promised, and bade them
+adieu, and got into the pony-carriage, which crept up the slope, and
+bore him out of their sight.
+
+“I never was so much taken with anybody in my life as I am with that
+young fellow—never! I cannot understand it—can’t understand it anyhow,”
+said Mr. Swancourt quite energetically to himself; and went indoors.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+“No more of me you knew, my love!”
+
+
+Stephen Smith revisited Endelstow Vicarage, agreeably to his promise.
+He had a genuine artistic reason for coming, though no such reason
+seemed to be required. Six-and-thirty old seat ends, of exquisite
+fifteenth-century workmanship, were rapidly decaying in an aisle of the
+church; and it became politic to make drawings of their worm-eaten
+contours ere they were battered past recognition in the turmoil of the
+so-called restoration.
+
+He entered the house at sunset, and the world was pleasant again to the
+two fair-haired ones. A momentary pang of disappointment had,
+nevertheless, passed through Elfride when she casually discovered that
+he had not come that minute post-haste from London, but had reached the
+neighbourhood the previous evening. Surprise would have accompanied the
+feeling, had she not remembered that several tourists were haunting the
+coast at this season, and that Stephen might have chosen to do
+likewise.
+
+They did little besides chat that evening, Mr. Swancourt beginning to
+question his visitor, closely yet paternally, and in good part, on his
+hopes and prospects from the profession he had embraced. Stephen gave
+vague answers. The next day it rained. In the evening, when twenty-four
+hours of Elfride had completely rekindled her admirer’s ardour, a game
+of chess was proposed between them.
+
+The game had its value in helping on the developments of their future.
+
+Elfride soon perceived that her opponent was but a learner. She next
+noticed that he had a very odd way of handling the pieces when castling
+or taking a man. Antecedently she would have supposed that the same
+performance must be gone through by all players in the same manner; she
+was taught by his differing action that all ordinary players, who learn
+the game by sight, unconsciously touch the men in a stereotyped way.
+This impression of indescribable oddness in Stephen’s touch culminated
+in speech when she saw him, at the taking of one of her bishops, push
+it aside with the taking man instead of lifting it as a preliminary to
+the move.
+
+“How strangely you handle the men, Mr. Smith!”
+
+“Do I? I am sorry for that.”
+
+“Oh no—don’t be sorry; it is not a matter great enough for sorrow. But
+who taught you to play?”
+
+“Nobody, Miss Swancourt,” he said. “I learnt from a book lent me by my
+friend Mr. Knight, the noblest man in the world.”
+
+“But you have seen people play?”
+
+“I have never seen the playing of a single game. This is the first time
+I ever had the opportunity of playing with a living opponent. I have
+worked out many games from books, and studied the reasons of the
+different moves, but that is all.”
+
+This was a full explanation of his mannerism; but the fact that a man
+with the desire for chess should have grown up without being able to
+see or engage in a game astonished her not a little. She pondered on
+the circumstance for some time, looking into vacancy and hindering the
+play.
+
+Mr. Swancourt was sitting with his eyes fixed on the board, but
+apparently thinking of other things. Half to himself he said, pending
+the move of Elfride:
+
+“‘Quae finis aut quod me manet stipendium?’”
+
+Stephen replied instantly:
+
+“‘Effare: jussas cum fide poenas luam.’”
+
+“Excellent—prompt—gratifying!” said Mr. Swancourt with feeling,
+bringing down his hand upon the table, and making three pawns and a
+knight dance over their borders by the shaking. “I was musing on those
+words as applicable to a strange course I am steering—but enough of
+that. I am delighted with you, Mr. Smith, for it is so seldom in this
+desert that I meet with a man who is gentleman and scholar enough to
+continue a quotation, however trite it may be.”
+
+“I also apply the words to myself,” said Stephen quietly.
+
+“You? The last man in the world to do that, I should have thought.”
+
+“Come,” murmured Elfride poutingly, and insinuating herself between
+them, “tell me all about it. Come, construe, construe!”
+
+Stephen looked steadfastly into her face, and said slowly, and in a
+voice full of a far-off meaning that seemed quaintly premature in one
+so young:
+
+“Quae finis WHAT WILL BE THE END, aut OR, quod stipendium WHAT FINE,
+manet me AWAITS ME? Effare SPEAK OUT; luam I WILL PAY, cum fide WITH
+FAITH, jussas poenas THE PENALTY REQUIRED.”
+
+The vicar, who had listened with a critical compression of the lips to
+this school-boy recitation, and by reason of his imperfect hearing had
+missed the marked realism of Stephen’s tone in the English words, now
+said hesitatingly: “By the bye, Mr. Smith (I know you’ll excuse my
+curiosity), though your translation was unexceptionably correct and
+close, you have a way of pronouncing your Latin which to me seems most
+peculiar. Not that the pronunciation of a dead language is of much
+importance; yet your accents and quantities have a grotesque sound to
+my ears. I thought first that you had acquired your way of breathing
+the vowels from some of the northern colleges; but it cannot be so with
+the quantities. What I was going to ask was, if your instructor in the
+classics could possibly have been an Oxford or Cambridge man?”
+
+“Yes; he was an Oxford man—Fellow of St. Cyprian’s.”
+
+“Really?”
+
+“Oh yes; there’s no doubt about it.
+
+“The oddest thing ever I heard of!” said Mr. Swancourt, starting with
+astonishment. “That the pupil of such a man——”
+
+“The best and cleverest man in England!” cried Stephen
+enthusiastically.
+
+“That the pupil of such a man should pronounce Latin in the way you
+pronounce it beats all I ever heard. How long did he instruct you?”
+
+“Four years.”
+
+“Four years!”
+
+“It is not so strange when I explain,” Stephen hastened to say. “It was
+done in this way—by letter. I sent him exercises and construing twice a
+week, and twice a week he sent them back to me corrected, with marginal
+notes of instruction. That is how I learnt my Latin and Greek, such as
+it is. He is not responsible for my scanning. He has never heard me
+scan a line.”
+
+“A novel case, and a singular instance of patience!” cried the vicar.
+
+“On his part, not on mine. Ah, Henry Knight is one in a thousand! I
+remember his speaking to me on this very subject of pronunciation. He
+says that, much to his regret, he sees a time coming when every man
+will pronounce even the common words of his own tongue as seems right
+in his own ears, and be thought none the worse for it; that the
+speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age.”
+
+Both Elfride and her father had waited attentively to hear Stephen go
+on to what would have been the most interesting part of the story,
+namely, what circumstances could have necessitated such an unusual
+method of education. But no further explanation was volunteered; and
+they saw, by the young man’s manner of concentrating himself upon the
+chess-board, that he was anxious to drop the subject.
+
+The game proceeded. Elfride played by rote; Stephen by thought. It was
+the cruellest thing to checkmate him after so much labour, she
+considered. What was she dishonest enough to do in her compassion? To
+let him checkmate her. A second game followed; and being herself
+absolutely indifferent as to the result (her playing was above the
+average among women, and she knew it), she allowed him to give
+checkmate again. A final game, in which she adopted the Muzio gambit as
+her opening, was terminated by Elfride’s victory at the twelfth move.
+
+Stephen looked up suspiciously. His heart was throbbing even more
+excitedly than was hers, which itself had quickened when she seriously
+set to work on this last occasion. Mr. Swancourt had left the room.
+
+“You have been trifling with me till now!” he exclaimed, his face
+flushing. “You did not play your best in the first two games?”
+
+Elfride’s guilt showed in her face. Stephen became the picture of
+vexation and sadness, which, relishable for a moment, caused her the
+next instant to regret the mistake she had made.
+
+“Mr. Smith, forgive me!” she said sweetly. “I see now, though I did not
+at first, that what I have done seems like contempt for your skill.
+But, indeed, I did not mean it in that sense. I could not, upon my
+conscience, win a victory in those first and second games over one who
+fought at such a disadvantage and so manfully.”
+
+He drew a long breath, and murmured bitterly, “Ah, you are cleverer
+than I. You can do everything—I can do nothing! O Miss Swancourt!” he
+burst out wildly, his heart swelling in his throat, “I must tell you
+how I love you! All these months of my absence I have worshipped you.”
+
+He leapt from his seat like the impulsive lad that he was, slid round
+to her side, and almost before she suspected it his arm was round her
+waist, and the two sets of curls intermingled.
+
+So entirely new was full-blown love to Elfride, that she trembled as
+much from the novelty of the emotion as from the emotion itself. Then
+she suddenly withdrew herself and stood upright, vexed that she had
+submitted unresistingly even to his momentary pressure. She resolved to
+consider this demonstration as premature.
+
+“You must not begin such things as those,” she said with coquettish
+hauteur of a very transparent nature “And—you must not do so again—and
+papa is coming.”
+
+“Let me kiss you—only a little one,” he said with his usual delicacy,
+and without reading the factitiousness of her manner.
+
+“No; not one.”
+
+“Only on your cheek?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Forehead?”
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“You care for somebody else, then? Ah, I thought so!”
+
+“I am sure I do not.”
+
+“Nor for me either?”
+
+“How can I tell?” she said simply, the simplicity lying merely in the
+broad outlines of her manner and speech. There were the semitone of
+voice and half-hidden expression of eyes which tell the initiated how
+very fragile is the ice of reserve at these times.
+
+Footsteps were heard. Mr. Swancourt then entered the room, and their
+private colloquy ended.
+
+The day after this partial revelation, Mr. Swancourt proposed a drive
+to the cliffs beyond Targan Bay, a distance of three or four miles.
+
+Half an hour before the time of departure a crash was heard in the back
+yard, and presently Worm came in, saying partly to the world in
+general, partly to himself, and slightly to his auditors:
+
+“Ay, ay, sure! That frying of fish will be the end of William Worm.
+They be at it again this morning—same as ever—fizz, fizz, fizz!”
+
+“Your head bad again, Worm?” said Mr. Swancourt. “What was that noise
+we heard in the yard?”
+
+“Ay, sir, a weak wambling man am I; and the frying have been going on
+in my poor head all through the long night and this morning as usual;
+and I was so dazed wi’ it that down fell a piece of leg-wood across the
+shaft of the pony-shay, and splintered it off. ‘Ay,’ says I, ‘I feel it
+as if ’twas my own shay; and though I’ve done it, and parish pay is my
+lot if I go from here, perhaps I am as independent as one here and
+there.’”
+
+“Dear me, the shaft of the carriage broken!” cried Elfride. She was
+disappointed: Stephen doubly so. The vicar showed more warmth of temper
+than the accident seemed to demand, much to Stephen’s uneasiness and
+rather to his surprise. He had not supposed so much latent sternness
+could co-exist with Mr. Swancourt’s frankness and good-nature.
+
+“You shall not be disappointed,” said the vicar at length. “It is
+almost too long a distance for you to walk. Elfride can trot down on
+her pony, and you shall have my old nag, Smith.”
+
+Elfride exclaimed triumphantly, “You have never seen me on
+horseback—Oh, you must!” She looked at Stephen and read his thoughts
+immediately. “Ah, you don’t ride, Mr. Smith?”
+
+“I am sorry to say I don’t.”
+
+“Fancy a man not able to ride!” said she rather pertly.
+
+The vicar came to his rescue. “That’s common enough; he has had other
+lessons to learn. Now, I recommend this plan: let Elfride ride on
+horseback, and you, Mr. Smith, walk beside her.”
+
+The arrangement was welcomed with secret delight by Stephen. It seemed
+to combine in itself all the advantages of a long slow ramble with
+Elfride, without the contingent possibility of the enjoyment being
+spoilt by her becoming weary. The pony was saddled and brought round.
+
+“Now, Mr. Smith,” said the lady imperatively, coming downstairs, and
+appearing in her riding-habit, as she always did in a change of dress,
+like a new edition of a delightful volume, “you have a task to perform
+to-day. These earrings are my very favourite darling ones; but the
+worst of it is that they have such short hooks that they are liable to
+be dropped if I toss my head about much, and when I am riding I can’t
+give my mind to them. It would be doing me knight service if you keep
+your eyes fixed upon them, and remember them every minute of the day,
+and tell me directly I drop one. They have had such hairbreadth
+escapes, haven’t they, Unity?” she continued to the parlour-maid who
+was standing at the door.
+
+“Yes, miss, that they have!” said Unity with round-eyed commiseration.
+
+“Once ’twas in the lane that I found one of them,” pursued Elfride
+reflectively.
+
+“And then ’twas by the gate into Eighteen Acres,” Unity chimed in.
+
+“And then ’twas on the carpet in my own room,” rejoined Elfride
+merrily.
+
+“And then ’twas dangling on the embroidery of your petticoat, miss; and
+then ’twas down your back, miss, wasn’t it? And oh, what a way you was
+in, miss, wasn’t you? my! until you found it!”
+
+Stephen took Elfride’s slight foot upon his hand: “One, two, three, and
+up!” she said.
+
+Unfortunately not so. He staggered and lifted, and the horse edged
+round; and Elfride was ultimately deposited upon the ground rather more
+forcibly than was pleasant. Smith looked all contrition.
+
+“Never mind,” said the vicar encouragingly; “try again! ’Tis a little
+accomplishment that requires some practice, although it looks so easy.
+Stand closer to the horse’s head, Mr. Smith.”
+
+“Indeed, I shan’t let him try again,” said she with a microscopic look
+of indignation. “Worm, come here, and help me to mount.” Worm stepped
+forward, and she was in the saddle in a trice.
+
+Then they moved on, going for some distance in silence, the hot air of
+the valley being occasionally brushed from their faces by a cool
+breeze, which wound its way along ravines leading up from the sea.
+
+“I suppose,” said Stephen, “that a man who can neither sit in a saddle
+himself nor help another person into one seems a useless incumbrance;
+but, Miss Swancourt, I’ll learn to do it all for your sake; I will,
+indeed.”
+
+“What is so unusual in you,” she said, in a didactic tone justifiable
+in a horsewoman’s address to a benighted walker, “is that your
+knowledge of certain things should be combined with your ignorance of
+certain other things.”
+
+Stephen lifted his eyes earnestly to hers.
+
+“You know,” he said, “it is simply because there are so many other
+things to be learnt in this wide world that I didn’t trouble about that
+particular bit of knowledge. I thought it would be useless to me; but I
+don’t think so now. I will learn riding, and all connected with it,
+because then you would like me better. Do you like me much less for
+this?”
+
+She looked sideways at him with critical meditation tenderly rendered.
+
+“Do I seem like LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI?” she began suddenly, without
+replying to his question. “Fancy yourself saying, Mr. Smith:
+
+‘I sat her on my pacing steed,
+    And nothing else saw all day long,
+For sidelong would she bend, and sing
+            A fairy’s song,
+She found me roots of relish sweet,
+And honey wild, and manna dew;’
+
+
+and that’s all she did.”
+
+“No, no,” said the young man stilly, and with a rising colour.
+
+“‘And sure in language strange she said,
+            I love thee true.’”
+
+
+“Not at all,” she rejoined quickly. “See how I can gallop. Now, Pansy,
+off!” And Elfride started; and Stephen beheld her light figure
+contracting to the dimensions of a bird as she sank into the
+distance—her hair flowing.
+
+He walked on in the same direction, and for a considerable time could
+see no signs of her returning. Dull as a flower without the sun he sat
+down upon a stone, and not for fifteen minutes was any sound of horse
+or rider to be heard. Then Elfride and Pansy appeared on the hill in a
+round trot.
+
+“Such a delightful scamper as we have had!” she said, her face flushed
+and her eyes sparkling. She turned the horse’s head, Stephen arose, and
+they went on again.
+
+“Well, what have you to say to me, Mr. Smith, after my long absence?”
+
+“Do you remember a question you could not exactly answer last
+night—whether I was more to you than anybody else?” said he.
+
+“I cannot exactly answer now, either.”
+
+“Why can’t you?”
+
+“Because I don’t know if I am more to you than any one else.”
+
+“Yes, indeed, you are!” he exclaimed in a voice of intensest
+appreciation, at the same time gliding round and looking into her face.
+
+“Eyes in eyes,” he murmured playfully; and she blushingly obeyed,
+looking back into his.
+
+“And why not lips on lips?” continued Stephen daringly.
+
+“No, certainly not. Anybody might look; and it would be the death of
+me. You may kiss my hand if you like.”
+
+He expressed by a look that to kiss a hand through a glove, and that a
+riding-glove, was not a great treat under the circumstances.
+
+“There, then; I’ll take my glove off. Isn’t it a pretty white hand? Ah,
+you don’t want to kiss it, and you shall not now!”
+
+“If I do not, may I never kiss again, you severe Elfride! You know I
+think more of you than I can tell; that you are my queen. I would die
+for you, Elfride!”
+
+A rapid red again filled her cheeks, and she looked at him
+meditatively. What a proud moment it was for Elfride then! She was
+ruling a heart with absolute despotism for the first time in her life.
+
+Stephen stealthily pounced upon her hand.
+
+“No; I won’t, I won’t!” she said intractably; “and you shouldn’t take
+me by surprise.”
+
+There ensued a mild form of tussle for absolute possession of the
+much-coveted hand, in which the boisterousness of boy and girl was far
+more prominent than the dignity of man and woman. Then Pansy became
+restless. Elfride recovered her position and remembered herself.
+
+“You make me behave in not a nice way at all!” she exclaimed, in a tone
+neither of pleasure nor anger, but partaking of both. “I ought not to
+have allowed such a romp! We are too old now for that sort of thing.”
+
+“I hope you don’t think me too—too much of a creeping-round sort of
+man,” said he in a penitent tone, conscious that he too had lost a
+little dignity by the proceeding.
+
+“You are too familiar; and I can’t have it! Considering the shortness
+of the time we have known each other, Mr. Smith, you take too much upon
+you. You think I am a country girl, and it doesn’t matter how you
+behave to me!”
+
+“I assure you, Miss Swancourt, that I had no idea of freak in my mind.
+I wanted to imprint a sweet—serious kiss upon your hand; and that’s
+all.”
+
+“Now, that’s creeping round again! And you mustn’t look into my eyes
+so,” she said, shaking her head at him, and trotting on a few paces in
+advance. Thus she led the way out of the lane and across some fields in
+the direction of the cliffs. At the boundary of the fields nearest the
+sea she expressed a wish to dismount. The horse was tied to a post, and
+they both followed an irregular path, which ultimately terminated upon
+a flat ledge passing round the face of the huge blue-black rock at a
+height about midway between the sea and the topmost verge. There, far
+beneath and before them, lay the everlasting stretch of ocean; there,
+upon detached rocks, were the white screaming gulls, seeming ever
+intending to settle, and yet always passing on. Right and left ranked
+the toothed and zigzag line of storm-torn heights, forming the series
+which culminated in the one beneath their feet.
+
+Behind the youth and maiden was a tempting alcove and seat, formed
+naturally in the beetling mass, and wide enough to admit two or three
+persons. Elfride sat down, and Stephen sat beside her.
+
+“I am afraid it is hardly proper of us to be here, either,” she said
+half inquiringly. “We have not known each other long enough for this
+kind of thing, have we!”
+
+“Oh yes,” he replied judicially; “quite long enough.”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“It is not length of time, but the manner in which our minutes beat,
+that makes enough or not enough in our acquaintanceship.”
+
+“Yes, I see that. But I wish papa suspected or knew what a VERY NEW
+THING I am doing. He does not think of it at all.”
+
+“Darling Elfie, I wish we could be married! It is wrong for me to say
+it—I know it is—before you know more; but I wish we might be, all the
+same. Do you love me deeply, deeply?”
+
+“No!” she said in a fluster.
+
+At this point-blank denial, Stephen turned his face away decisively,
+and preserved an ominous silence; the only objects of interest on earth
+for him being apparently the three or four-score sea-birds circling in
+the air afar off.
+
+“I didn’t mean to stop you quite,” she faltered with some alarm; and
+seeing that he still remained silent, she added more anxiously, “If you
+say that again, perhaps, I will not be quite—quite so obstinate—if—if
+you don’t like me to be.”
+
+“Oh, my Elfride!” he exclaimed, and kissed her.
+
+It was Elfride’s first kiss. And so awkward and unused was she; full of
+striving—no relenting. There was none of those apparent struggles to
+get out of the trap which only results in getting further in: no final
+attitude of receptivity: no easy close of shoulder to shoulder, hand
+upon hand, face upon face, and, in spite of coyness, the lips in the
+right place at the supreme moment. That graceful though apparently
+accidental falling into position, which many have noticed as
+precipitating the end and making sweethearts the sweeter, was not here.
+Why? Because experience was absent. A woman must have had many kisses
+before she kisses well.
+
+In fact, the art of tendering the lips for these amatory salutes
+follows the principles laid down in treatises on legerdemain for
+performing the trick called Forcing a Card. The card is to be shifted
+nimbly, withdrawn, edged under, and withal not to be offered till the
+moment the unsuspecting person’s hand reaches the pack; this forcing to
+be done so modestly and yet so coaxingly, that the person trifled with
+imagines he is really choosing what is in fact thrust into his hand.
+
+Well, there were no such facilities now; and Stephen was conscious of
+it—first with a momentary regret that his kiss should be spoilt by her
+confused receipt of it, and then with the pleasant perception that her
+awkwardness was her charm.
+
+“And you do care for me and love me?” said he.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Very much?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And I mustn’t ask you if you’ll wait for me, and be my wife some day?”
+
+“Why not?” she said naively.
+
+“There is a reason why, my Elfride.”
+
+“Not any one that I know of.”
+
+“Suppose there is something connected with me which makes it almost
+impossible for you to agree to be my wife, or for your father to
+countenance such an idea?”
+
+“Nothing shall make me cease to love you: no blemish can be found upon
+your personal nature. That is pure and generous, I know; and having
+that, how can I be cold to you?”
+
+“And shall nothing else affect us—shall nothing beyond my nature be a
+part of my quality in your eyes, Elfie?”
+
+“Nothing whatever,” she said with a breath of relief. “Is that all?
+Some outside circumstance? What do I care?”
+
+“You can hardly judge, dear, till you know what has to be judged. For
+that, we will stop till we get home. I believe in you, but I cannot
+feel bright.”
+
+“Love is new, and fresh to us as the dew; and we are together. As the
+lover’s world goes, this is a great deal. Stephen, I fancy I see the
+difference between me and you—between men and women generally, perhaps.
+I am content to build happiness on any accidental basis that may lie
+near at hand; you are for making a world to suit your happiness.”
+
+“Elfride, you sometimes say things which make you seem suddenly to
+become five years older than you are, or than I am; and that remark is
+one. I couldn’t think so OLD as that, try how I might....And no lover
+has ever kissed you before?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“I knew that; you were so unused. You ride well, but you don’t kiss
+nicely at all; and I was told once, by my friend Knight, that that is
+an excellent fault in woman.”
+
+“Now, come; I must mount again, or we shall not be home by
+dinner-time.” And they returned to where Pansy stood tethered. “Instead
+of entrusting my weight to a young man’s unstable palm,” she continued
+gaily, “I prefer a surer ‘upping-stock’ (as the villagers call it), in
+the form of a gate. There—now I am myself again.”
+
+They proceeded homeward at the same walking pace.
+
+Her blitheness won Stephen out of his thoughtfulness, and each forgot
+everything but the tone of the moment.
+
+“What did you love me for?” she said, after a long musing look at a
+flying bird.
+
+“I don’t know,” he replied idly.
+
+“Oh yes, you do,” insisted Elfride.
+
+“Perhaps, for your eyes.”
+
+“What of them?—now, don’t vex me by a light answer. What of my eyes?”
+
+“Oh, nothing to be mentioned. They are indifferently good.”
+
+“Come, Stephen, I won’t have that. What did you love me for?”
+
+“It might have been for your mouth?”
+
+“Well, what about my mouth?”
+
+“I thought it was a passable mouth enough——”
+
+“That’s not very comforting.”
+
+“With a pretty pout and sweet lips; but actually, nothing more than
+what everybody has.”
+
+“Don’t make up things out of your head as you go on, there’s a dear
+Stephen. Now—what—did—you—love—me—for?”
+
+“Perhaps, ’twas for your neck and hair; though I am not sure: or for
+your idle blood, that did nothing but wander away from your cheeks and
+back again; but I am not sure. Or your hands and arms, that they
+eclipsed all other hands and arms; or your feet, that they played about
+under your dress like little mice; or your tongue, that it was of a
+dear delicate tone. But I am not altogether sure.”
+
+“Ah, that’s pretty to say; but I don’t care for your love, if it made a
+mere flat picture of me in that way, and not being sure, and such cold
+reasoning; but what you FELT I was, you know, Stephen” (at this a
+stealthy laugh and frisky look into his face), “when you said to
+yourself, ‘I’ll certainly love that young lady.’”
+
+“I never said it.”
+
+“When you said to yourself, then, ‘I never will love that young lady.’”
+
+“I didn’t say that, either.”
+
+“Then was it, ‘I suppose I must love that young lady?’”
+
+“No.”
+
+“What, then?”
+
+“’Twas much more fluctuating—not so definite.”
+
+“Tell me; do, do.”
+
+“It was that I ought not to think about you if I loved you truly.”
+
+“Ah, that I don’t understand. There’s no getting it out of you. And
+I’ll not ask you ever any more—never more—to say out of the deep
+reality of your heart what you loved me for.”
+
+“Sweet tantalizer, what’s the use? It comes to this sole simple thing:
+That at one time I had never seen you, and I didn’t love you; that then
+I saw you, and I did love you. Is that enough?”
+
+“Yes; I will make it do....I know, I think, what I love you for. You
+are nice-looking, of course; but I didn’t mean for that. It is because
+you are so docile and gentle.”
+
+“Those are not quite the correct qualities for a man to be loved for,”
+said Stephen, in rather a dissatisfied tone of self-criticism. “Well,
+never mind. I must ask your father to allow us to be engaged directly
+we get indoors. It will be for a long time.”
+
+“I like it the better....Stephen, don’t mention it till to-morrow.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because, if he should object—I don’t think he will; but if he
+should—we shall have a day longer of happiness from our
+ignorance....Well, what are you thinking of so deeply?”
+
+“I was thinking how my dear friend Knight would enjoy this scene. I
+wish he could come here.”
+
+“You seem very much engrossed with him,” she answered, with a jealous
+little toss. “He must be an interesting man to take up so much of your
+attention.”
+
+“Interesting!” said Stephen, his face glowing with his fervour; “noble,
+you ought to say.”
+
+“Oh yes, yes; I forgot,” she said half satirically. “The noblest man in
+England, as you told us last night.”
+
+“He is a fine fellow, laugh as you will, Miss Elfie.”
+
+“I know he is your hero. But what does he do? anything?”
+
+“He writes.”
+
+“What does he write? I have never heard of his name.”
+
+“Because his personality, and that of several others like him, is
+absorbed into a huge WE, namely, the impalpable entity called the
+PRESENT—a social and literary Review.”
+
+“Is he only a reviewer?”
+
+“ONLY, Elfie! Why, I can tell you it is a fine thing to be on the staff
+of the PRESENT. Finer than being a novelist considerably.”
+
+“That’s a hit at me, and my poor COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE.”
+
+“No, Elfride,” he whispered; “I didn’t mean that. I mean that he is
+really a literary man of some eminence, and not altogether a reviewer.
+He writes things of a higher class than reviews, though he reviews a
+book occasionally. His ordinary productions are social and ethical
+essays—all that the PRESENT contains which is not literary reviewing.”
+
+“I admit he must be talented if he writes for the PRESENT. We have it
+sent to us irregularly. I want papa to be a subscriber, but he’s so
+conservative. Now the next point in this Mr. Knight—I suppose he is a
+very good man.”
+
+“An excellent man. I shall try to be his intimate friend some day.”
+
+“But aren’t you now?”
+
+“No; not so much as that,” replied Stephen, as if such a supposition
+were extravagant. “You see, it was in this way—he came originally from
+the same place as I, and taught me things; but I am not intimate with
+him. Shan’t I be glad when I get richer and better known, and hob and
+nob with him!” Stephen’s eyes sparkled.
+
+A pout began to shape itself upon Elfride’s soft lips. “You think
+always of him, and like him better than you do me!”
+
+“No, indeed, Elfride. The feeling is different quite. But I do like
+him, and he deserves even more affection from me than I give.”
+
+“You are not nice now, and you make me as jealous as possible!” she
+exclaimed perversely. “I know you will never speak to any third person
+of me so warmly as you do to me of him.”
+
+“But you don’t understand, Elfride,” he said with an anxious movement.
+“You shall know him some day. He is so brilliant—no, it isn’t exactly
+brilliant; so thoughtful—nor does thoughtful express him—that it would
+charm you to talk to him. He’s a most desirable friend, and that isn’t
+half I could say.”
+
+“I don’t care how good he is; I don’t want to know him, because he
+comes between me and you. You think of him night and day, ever so much
+more than of anybody else; and when you are thinking of him, I am shut
+out of your mind.”
+
+“No, dear Elfride; I love you dearly.”
+
+“And I don’t like you to tell me so warmly about him when you are in
+the middle of loving me. Stephen, suppose that I and this man Knight of
+yours were both drowning, and you could only save one of us——”
+
+“Yes—the stupid old proposition—which would I save?
+
+“Well, which? Not me.”
+
+“Both of you,” he said, pressing her pendent hand.
+
+“No, that won’t do; only one of us.”
+
+“I cannot say; I don’t know. It is disagreeable—quite a horrid idea to
+have to handle.”
+
+“A-ha, I know. You would save him, and let me drown, drown, drown; and
+I don’t care about your love!”
+
+She had endeavoured to give a playful tone to her words, but the latter
+speech was rather forced in its gaiety.
+
+At this point in the discussion she trotted off to turn a corner which
+was avoided by the footpath, the road and the path reuniting at a point
+a little further on. On again making her appearance she continually
+managed to look in a direction away from him, and left him in the cool
+shade of her displeasure. Stephen was soon beaten at this game of
+indifference. He went round and entered the range of her vision.
+
+“Are you offended, Elfie? Why don’t you talk?”
+
+“Save me, then, and let that Mr. Clever of yours drown. I hate him.
+Now, which would you?”
+
+“Really, Elfride, you should not press such a hard question. It is
+ridiculous.”
+
+“Then I won’t be alone with you any more. Unkind, to wound me so!” She
+laughed at her own absurdity but persisted.
+
+“Come, Elfie, let’s make it up and be friends.”
+
+“Say you would save me, then, and let him drown.”
+
+“I would save you—and him too.”
+
+“And let him drown. Come, or you don’t love me!” she teasingly went on.
+
+“And let him drown,” he ejaculated despairingly.
+
+“There; now I am yours!” she said, and a woman’s flush of triumph lit
+her eyes.
+
+“Only one earring, miss, as I’m alive,” said Unity on their entering
+the hall.
+
+With a face expressive of wretched misgiving, Elfride’s hand flew like
+an arrow to her ear.
+
+“There!” she exclaimed to Stephen, looking at him with eyes full of
+reproach.
+
+“I quite forgot, indeed. If I had only remembered!” he answered, with a
+conscience-stricken face.
+
+She wheeled herself round, and turned into the shrubbery. Stephen
+followed.
+
+“If you had told me to watch anything, Stephen, I should have
+religiously done it,” she capriciously went on, as soon as she heard
+him behind her.
+
+“Forgetting is forgivable.”
+
+“Well, you will find it, if you want me to respect you and be engaged
+to you when we have asked papa.” She considered a moment, and added
+more seriously, “I know now where I dropped it, Stephen. It was on the
+cliff. I remember a faint sensation of some change about me, but I was
+too absent to think of it then. And that’s where it is now, and you
+must go and look there.”
+
+“I’ll go at once.”
+
+And he strode away up the valley, under a broiling sun and amid the
+deathlike silence of early afternoon. He ascended, with giddy-paced
+haste, the windy range of rocks to where they had sat, felt and peered
+about the stones and crannies, but Elfride’s stray jewel was nowhere to
+be seen. Next Stephen slowly retraced his steps, and, pausing at a
+cross-road to reflect a while, he left the plateau and struck downwards
+across some fields, in the direction of Endelstow House.
+
+He walked along the path by the river without the slightest hesitation
+as to its bearing, apparently quite familiar with every inch of the
+ground. As the shadows began to lengthen and the sunlight to mellow, he
+passed through two wicket-gates, and drew near the outskirts of
+Endelstow Park. The river now ran along under the park fence, previous
+to entering the grove itself, a little further on.
+
+Here stood a cottage, between the fence and the stream, on a slightly
+elevated spot of ground, round which the river took a turn. The
+characteristic feature of this snug habitation was its one chimney in
+the gable end, its squareness of form disguised by a huge cloak of ivy,
+which had grown so luxuriantly and extended so far from its base, as to
+increase the apparent bulk of the chimney to the dimensions of a tower.
+Some little distance from the back of the house rose the park boundary,
+and over this were to be seen the sycamores of the grove, making slow
+inclinations to the just-awakening air.
+
+Stephen crossed the little wood bridge in front, went up to the cottage
+door, and opened it without knock or signal of any kind.
+
+Exclamations of welcome burst from some person or persons when the door
+was thrust ajar, followed by the scrape of chairs on a stone floor, as
+if pushed back by their occupiers in rising from a table. The door was
+closed again, and nothing could now be heard from within, save a lively
+chatter and the rattle of plates.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+“Allen-a-Dale is no baron or lord.”
+
+
+The mists were creeping out of pools and swamps for their pilgrimages
+of the night when Stephen came up to the front door of the vicarage.
+Elfride was standing on the step illuminated by a lemon-hued expanse of
+western sky.
+
+“You never have been all this time looking for that earring?” she said
+anxiously.
+
+“Oh no; and I have not found it.”
+
+“Never mind. Though I am much vexed; they are my prettiest. But,
+Stephen, what ever have you been doing—where have you been? I have been
+so uneasy. I feared for you, knowing not an inch of the country. I
+thought, suppose he has fallen over the cliff! But now I am inclined to
+scold you for frightening me so.”
+
+“I must speak to your father now,” he said rather abruptly; “I have so
+much to say to him—and to you, Elfride.”
+
+“Will what you have to say endanger this nice time of ours, and is it
+that same shadowy secret you allude to so frequently, and will it make
+me unhappy?”
+
+“Possibly.”
+
+She breathed heavily, and looked around as if for a prompter.
+
+“Put it off till to-morrow,” she said.
+
+He involuntarily sighed too.
+
+“No; it must come to-night. Where is your father, Elfride?”
+
+“Somewhere in the kitchen garden, I think,” she replied. “That is his
+favourite evening retreat. I will leave you now. Say all that’s to be
+said—do all there is to be done. Think of me waiting anxiously for the
+end.” And she re-entered the house.
+
+She waited in the drawing-room, watching the lights sink to shadows,
+the shadows sink to darkness, until her impatience to know what had
+occurred in the garden could no longer be controlled. She passed round
+the shrubbery, unlatched the garden door, and skimmed with her keen
+eyes the whole twilighted space that the four walls enclosed and
+sheltered: they were not there. She mounted a little ladder, which had
+been used for gathering fruit, and looked over the wall into the field.
+This field extended to the limits of the glebe, which was enclosed on
+that side by a privet-hedge. Under the hedge was Mr. Swancourt, walking
+up and down, and talking aloud—to himself, as it sounded at first. No:
+another voice shouted occasional replies; and this interlocutor seemed
+to be on the other side of the hedge. The voice, though soft in
+quality, was not Stephen’s.
+
+The second speaker must have been in the long-neglected garden of an
+old manor-house hard by, which, together with a small estate attached,
+had lately been purchased by a person named Troyton, whom Elfride had
+never seen. Her father might have struck up an acquaintanceship with
+some member of that family through the privet-hedge, or a stranger to
+the neighbourhood might have wandered thither.
+
+Well, there was no necessity for disturbing him.
+
+And it seemed that, after all, Stephen had not yet made his desired
+communication to her father. Again she went indoors, wondering where
+Stephen could be. For want of something better to do, she went upstairs
+to her own little room. Here she sat down at the open window, and,
+leaning with her elbow on the table and her cheek upon her hand, she
+fell into meditation.
+
+It was a hot and still August night. Every disturbance of the silence
+which rose to the dignity of a noise could be heard for miles, and the
+merest sound for a long distance. So she remained, thinking of Stephen,
+and wishing he had not deprived her of his company to no purpose, as it
+appeared. How delicate and sensitive he was, she reflected; and yet he
+was man enough to have a private mystery, which considerably elevated
+him in her eyes. Thus, looking at things with an inward vision, she
+lost consciousness of the flight of time.
+
+Strange conjunctions of circumstances, particularly those of a trivial
+everyday kind, are so frequent in an ordinary life, that we grow used
+to their unaccountableness, and forget the question whether the very
+long odds against such juxtaposition is not almost a disproof of it
+being a matter of chance at all. What occurred to Elfride at this
+moment was a case in point. She was vividly imagining, for the
+twentieth time, the kiss of the morning, and putting her lips together
+in the position another such a one would demand, when she heard the
+identical operation performed on the lawn, immediately beneath her
+window.
+
+A kiss—not of the quiet and stealthy kind, but decisive, loud, and
+smart.
+
+Her face flushed and she looked out, but to no purpose. The dark rim of
+the upland drew a keen sad line against the pale glow of the sky,
+unbroken except where a young cedar on the lawn, that had outgrown its
+fellow trees, shot its pointed head across the horizon, piercing the
+firmamental lustre like a sting.
+
+It was just possible that, had any persons been standing on the grassy
+portions of the lawn, Elfride might have seen their dusky forms. But
+the shrubs, which once had merely dotted the glade, had now grown bushy
+and large, till they hid at least half the enclosure containing them.
+The kissing pair might have been behind some of these; at any rate,
+nobody was in sight.
+
+Had no enigma ever been connected with her lover by his hints and
+absences, Elfride would never have thought of admitting into her mind a
+suspicion that he might be concerned in the foregoing enactment. But
+the reservations he at present insisted on, while they added to the
+mystery without which perhaps she would never have seriously loved him
+at all, were calculated to nourish doubts of all kinds, and with a slow
+flush of jealousy she asked herself, might he not be the culprit?
+
+Elfride glided downstairs on tiptoe, and out to the precise spot on
+which she had parted from Stephen to enable him to speak privately to
+her father. Thence she wandered into all the nooks around the place
+from which the sound seemed to proceed—among the huge laurestines,
+about the tufts of pampas grasses, amid the variegated hollies, under
+the weeping wych-elm—nobody was there. Returning indoors she called
+“Unity!”
+
+“She is gone to her aunt’s, to spend the evening,” said Mr. Swancourt,
+thrusting his head out of his study door, and letting the light of his
+candles stream upon Elfride’s face—less revealing than, as it seemed to
+herself, creating the blush of uneasy perplexity that was burning upon
+her cheek.
+
+“I didn’t know you were indoors, papa,” she said with surprise. “Surely
+no light was shining from the window when I was on the lawn?” and she
+looked and saw that the shutters were still open.
+
+“Oh yes, I am in,” he said indifferently. “What did you want Unity for?
+I think she laid supper before she went out.”
+
+“Did she?—I have not been to see—I didn’t want her for that.”
+
+Elfride scarcely knew, now that a definite reason was required, what
+that reason was. Her mind for a moment strayed to another subject,
+unimportant as it seemed. The red ember of a match was lying inside the
+fender, which explained that why she had seen no rays from the window
+was because the candles had only just been lighted.
+
+“I’ll come directly,” said the vicar. “I thought you were out somewhere
+with Mr. Smith.”
+
+Even the inexperienced Elfride could not help thinking that her father
+must be wonderfully blind if he failed to perceive what was the nascent
+consequence of herself and Stephen being so unceremoniously left
+together; wonderfully careless, if he saw it and did not think about
+it; wonderfully good, if, as seemed to her by far the most probable
+supposition, he saw it and thought about it and approved of it. These
+reflections were cut short by the appearance of Stephen just outside
+the porch, silvered about the head and shoulders with touches of
+moonlight, that had begun to creep through the trees.
+
+“Has your trouble anything to do with a kiss on the lawn?” she asked
+abruptly, almost passionately.
+
+“Kiss on the lawn?”
+
+“Yes!” she said, imperiously now.
+
+“I didn’t comprehend your meaning, nor do I now exactly. I certainly
+have kissed nobody on the lawn, if that is really what you want to
+know, Elfride.”
+
+“You know nothing about such a performance?”
+
+“Nothing whatever. What makes you ask?”
+
+“Don’t press me to tell; it is nothing of importance. And, Stephen, you
+have not yet spoken to papa about our engagement?”
+
+“No,” he said regretfully, “I could not find him directly; and then I
+went on thinking so much of what you said about objections,
+refusals—bitter words possibly—ending our happiness, that I resolved to
+put it off till to-morrow; that gives us one more day of
+delight—delight of a tremulous kind.”
+
+“Yes; but it would be improper to be silent too long, I think,” she
+said in a delicate voice, which implied that her face had grown warm.
+“I want him to know we love, Stephen. Why did you adopt as your own my
+thought of delay?”
+
+“I will explain; but I want to tell you of my secret first—to tell you
+now. It is two or three hours yet to bedtime. Let us walk up the hill
+to the church.”
+
+Elfride passively assented, and they went from the lawn by a side
+wicket, and ascended into the open expanse of moonlight which streamed
+around the lonely edifice on the summit of the hill.
+
+The door was locked. They turned from the porch, and walked hand in
+hand to find a resting-place in the churchyard. Stephen chose a flat
+tomb, showing itself to be newer and whiter than those around it, and
+sitting down himself, gently drew her hand towards him.
+
+“No, not there,” she said.
+
+“Why not here?”
+
+“A mere fancy; but never mind.” And she sat down.
+
+“Elfie, will you love me, in spite of everything that may be said
+against me?”
+
+“O Stephen, what makes you repeat that so continually and so sadly? You
+know I will. Yes, indeed,” she said, drawing closer, “whatever may be
+said of you—and nothing bad can be—I will cling to you just the same.
+Your ways shall be my ways until I die.”
+
+“Did you ever think what my parents might be, or what society I
+originally moved in?”
+
+“No, not particularly. I have observed one or two little points in your
+manners which are rather quaint—no more. I suppose you have moved in
+the ordinary society of professional people.”
+
+“Supposing I have not—that none of my family have a profession except
+me?”
+
+“I don’t mind. What you are only concerns me.”
+
+“Where do you think I went to school—I mean, to what kind of school?”
+
+“Dr. Somebody’s academy,” she said simply.
+
+“No. To a dame school originally, then to a national school.”
+
+“Only to those! Well, I love you just as much, Stephen, dear Stephen,”
+she murmured tenderly, “I do indeed. And why should you tell me these
+things so impressively? What do they matter to me?”
+
+He held her closer and proceeded:
+
+“What do you think my father is—does for his living, that is to say?”
+
+“He practises some profession or calling, I suppose.”
+
+“No; he is a mason.”
+
+“A Freemason?”
+
+“No; a cottager and journeyman mason.”
+
+Elfride said nothing at first. After a while she whispered:
+
+“That is a strange idea to me. But never mind; what does it matter?”
+
+“But aren’t you angry with me for not telling you before?”
+
+“No, not at all. Is your mother alive?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Is she a nice lady?”
+
+“Very—the best mother in the world. Her people had been well-to-do
+yeomen for centuries, but she was only a dairymaid.”
+
+“O Stephen!” came from her in whispered exclamation.
+
+“She continued to attend to a dairy long after my father married her,”
+pursued Stephen, without further hesitation. “And I remember very well
+how, when I was very young, I used to go to the milking, look on at the
+skimming, sleep through the churning, and make believe I helped her.
+Ah, that was a happy time enough!”
+
+“No, never—not happy.”
+
+“Yes, it was.”
+
+“I don’t see how happiness could be where the drudgery of dairy-work
+had to be done for a living—the hands red and chapped, and the shoes
+clogged....Stephen, I do own that it seems odd to regard you in the
+light of—of—having been so rough in your youth, and done menial things
+of that kind.” (Stephen withdrew an inch or two from her side.) “But I
+DO LOVE YOU just the same,” she continued, getting closer under his
+shoulder again, “and I don’t care anything about the past; and I see
+that you are all the worthier for having pushed on in the world in such
+a way.”
+
+“It is not my worthiness; it is Knight’s, who pushed me.”
+
+“Ah, always he—always he!”
+
+“Yes, and properly so. Now, Elfride, you see the reason of his teaching
+me by letter. I knew him years before he went to Oxford, but I had not
+got far enough in my reading for him to entertain the idea of helping
+me in classics till he left home. Then I was sent away from the
+village, and we very seldom met; but he kept up this system of tuition
+by correspondence with the greatest regularity. I will tell you all the
+story, but not now. There is nothing more to say now, beyond giving
+places, persons, and dates.” His voice became timidly slow at this
+point.
+
+“No; don’t take trouble to say more. You are a dear honest fellow to
+say so much as you have; and it is not so dreadful either. It has
+become a normal thing that millionaires commence by going up to London
+with their tools at their back, and half-a-crown in their pockets. That
+sort of origin is getting so respected,” she continued cheerfully,
+“that it is acquiring some of the odour of Norman ancestry.”
+
+“Ah, if I had MADE my fortune, I shouldn’t mind. But I am only a
+possible maker of it as yet.”
+
+“It is quite enough. And so THIS is what your trouble was?”
+
+“I thought I was doing wrong in letting you love me without telling you
+my story; and yet I feared to do so, Elfie. I dreaded to lose you, and
+I was cowardly on that account.”
+
+“How plain everything about you seems after this explanation! Your
+peculiarities in chess-playing, the pronunciation papa noticed in your
+Latin, your odd mixture of book-knowledge with ignorance of ordinary
+social accomplishments, are accounted for in a moment. And has this
+anything to do with what I saw at Lord Luxellian’s?”
+
+“What did you see?”
+
+“I saw the shadow of yourself putting a cloak round a lady. I was at
+the side door; you two were in a room with the window towards me. You
+came to me a moment later.”
+
+“She was my mother.”
+
+“Your mother THERE!” She withdrew herself to look at him silently in
+her interest.
+
+“Elfride,” said Stephen, “I was going to tell you the remainder
+to-morrow—I have been keeping it back—I must tell it now, after all.
+The remainder of my revelation refers to where my parents are. Where do
+you think they live? You know them—by sight at any rate.”
+
+“I know them!” she said in suspended amazement.
+
+“Yes. My father is John Smith, Lord Luxellian’s master-mason, who lives
+under the park wall by the river.”
+
+“O Stephen! can it be?”
+
+“He built—or assisted at the building of the house you live in, years
+ago. He put up those stone gate piers at the lodge entrance to Lord
+Luxellian’s park. My grandfather planted the trees that belt in your
+lawn; my grandmother—who worked in the fields with him—held each tree
+upright whilst he filled in the earth: they told me so when I was a
+child. He was the sexton, too, and dug many of the graves around us.”
+
+“And was your unaccountable vanishing on the first morning of your
+arrival, and again this afternoon, a run to see your father and
+mother?...I understand now; no wonder you seemed to know your way about
+the village!”
+
+“No wonder. But remember, I have not lived here since I was nine years
+old. I then went to live with my uncle, a blacksmith, near Exonbury, in
+order to be able to attend a national school as a day scholar; there
+was none on this remote coast then. It was there I met with my friend
+Knight. And when I was fifteen and had been fairly educated by the
+school-master—and more particularly by Knight—I was put as a pupil in
+an architect’s office in that town, because I was skilful in the use of
+the pencil. A full premium was paid by the efforts of my mother and
+father, rather against the wishes of Lord Luxellian, who likes my
+father, however, and thinks a great deal of him. There I stayed till
+six months ago, when I obtained a situation as improver, as it is
+called, in a London office. That’s all of me.”
+
+“To think YOU, the London visitor, the town man, should have been born
+here, and have known this village so many years before I did. How
+strange—how very strange it seems to me!” she murmured.
+
+“My mother curtseyed to you and your father last Sunday,” said Stephen,
+with a pained smile at the thought of the incongruity. “And your papa
+said to her, ‘I am glad to see you so regular at church, JANE.’”
+
+“I remember it, but I have never spoken to her. We have only been here
+eighteen months, and the parish is so large.”
+
+“Contrast with this,” said Stephen, with a miserable laugh, “your
+father’s belief in my ‘blue blood,’ which is still prevalent in his
+mind. The first night I came, he insisted upon proving my descent from
+one of the most ancient west-county families, on account of my second
+Christian name; when the truth is, it was given me because my
+grandfather was assistant gardener in the Fitzmaurice-Smith family for
+thirty years. Having seen your face, my darling, I had not heart to
+contradict him, and tell him what would have cut me off from a friendly
+knowledge of you.”
+
+She sighed deeply. “Yes, I see now how this inequality may be made to
+trouble us,” she murmured, and continued in a low, sad whisper, “I
+wouldn’t have minded if they had lived far away. Papa might have
+consented to an engagement between us if your connection had been with
+villagers a hundred miles off; remoteness softens family contrasts. But
+he will not like—O Stephen, Stephen! what can I do?”
+
+“Do?” he said tentatively, yet with heaviness. “Give me up; let me go
+back to London, and think no more of me.”
+
+“No, no; I cannot give you up! This hopelessness in our affairs makes
+me care more for you....I see what did not strike me at first. Stephen,
+why do we trouble? Why should papa object? An architect in London is an
+architect in London. Who inquires there? Nobody. We shall live there,
+shall we not? Why need we be so alarmed?”
+
+“And Elfie,” said Stephen, his hopes kindling with hers, “Knight thinks
+nothing of my being only a cottager’s son; he says I am as worthy of
+his friendship as if I were a lord’s; and if I am worthy of his
+friendship, I am worthy of you, am I not, Elfride?”
+
+“I not only have never loved anybody but you,” she said, instead of
+giving an answer, “but I have not even formed a strong friendship, such
+as you have for Knight. I wish you hadn’t. It diminishes me.”
+
+“Now, Elfride, you know better,” he said wooingly. “And had you really
+never any sweetheart at all?”
+
+“None that was ever recognized by me as such.”
+
+“But did nobody ever love you?”
+
+“Yes—a man did once; very much, he said.”
+
+“How long ago?”
+
+“Oh, a long time.”
+
+“How long, dearest?
+
+“A twelvemonth.”
+
+“That’s not VERY long” (rather disappointedly).
+
+“I said long, not very long.”
+
+“And did he want to marry you?”
+
+“I believe he did. But I didn’t see anything in him. He was not good
+enough, even if I had loved him.”
+
+“May I ask what he was?”
+
+“A farmer.”
+
+“A farmer not good enough—how much better than my family!” Stephen
+murmured.
+
+“Where is he now?” he continued to Elfride.
+
+“HERE.”
+
+“Here! what do you mean by that?”
+
+“I mean that he is here.”
+
+“Where here?”
+
+“Under us. He is under this tomb. He is dead, and we are sitting on his
+grave.”
+
+“Elfie,” said the young man, standing up and looking at the tomb, “how
+odd and sad that revelation seems! It quite depresses me for the
+moment.”
+
+“Stephen! I didn’t wish to sit here; but you would do so.”
+
+“You never encouraged him?”
+
+“Never by look, word, or sign,” she said solemnly. “He died of
+consumption, and was buried the day you first came.”
+
+“Let us go away. I don’t like standing by HIM, even if you never loved
+him. He was BEFORE me.”
+
+“Worries make you unreasonable,” she half pouted, following Stephen at
+the distance of a few steps. “Perhaps I ought to have told you before
+we sat down. Yes; let us go.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+“Her father did fume”
+
+
+Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending
+complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in hand.
+At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at school.
+
+Women accept their destiny more readily than men. Elfride had now
+resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her lover’s sorry
+antecedents; Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance that
+Elfride had known earlier admiration than his own.
+
+“What was that young man’s name?” he inquired.
+
+“Felix Jethway; a widow’s only son.”
+
+“I remember the family.”
+
+“She hates me now. She says I killed him.”
+
+Stephen mused, and they entered the porch.
+
+“Stephen, I love only you,” she tremulously whispered. He pressed her
+fingers, and the trifling shadow passed away, to admit again the mutual
+and more tangible trouble.
+
+The study appeared to be the only room lighted up. They entered, each
+with a demeanour intended to conceal the inconcealable fact that
+reciprocal love was their dominant chord. Elfride perceived a man,
+sitting with his back towards herself, talking to her father. She would
+have retired, but Mr. Swancourt had seen her.
+
+“Come in,” he said; “it is only Martin Cannister, come for a copy of
+the register for poor Mrs. Jethway.”
+
+Martin Cannister, the sexton, was rather a favourite with Elfride. He
+used to absorb her attention by telling her of his strange experiences
+in digging up after long years the bodies of persons he had known, and
+recognizing them by some little sign (though in reality he had never
+recognized any). He had shrewd small eyes and a great wealth of double
+chin, which compensated in some measure for considerable poverty of
+nose.
+
+The appearance of a slip of paper in Cannister’s hand, and a few
+shillings lying on the table in front of him, denoted that the business
+had been transacted, and the tenor of their conversation went to show
+that a summary of village news was now engaging the attention of
+parishioner and parson.
+
+Mr. Cannister stood up and touched his forehead over his eye with his
+finger, in respectful salutation of Elfride, gave half as much salute
+to Stephen (whom he, in common with other villagers, had never for a
+moment recognized), then sat down again and resumed his discourse.
+
+“Where had I got on to, sir?”
+
+“To driving the pile,” said Mr. Swancourt.
+
+“The pile ’twas. So, as I was saying, Nat was driving the pile in this
+manner, as I might say.” Here Mr. Cannister held his walking-stick
+scrupulously vertical with his left hand, and struck a blow with great
+force on the knob of the stick with his right. “John was steadying the
+pile so, as I might say.” Here he gave the stick a slight shake, and
+looked firmly in the various eyes around to see that before proceeding
+further his listeners well grasped the subject at that stage. “Well,
+when Nat had struck some half-dozen blows more upon the pile, ’a
+stopped for a second or two. John, thinking he had done striking, put
+his hand upon the top o’ the pile to gie en a pull, and see if ’a were
+firm in the ground.” Mr. Cannister spread his hand over the top of the
+stick, completely covering it with his palm. “Well, so to speak, Nat
+hadn’t maned to stop striking, and when John had put his hand upon the
+pile, the beetle——”
+
+“Oh dreadful!” said Elfride.
+
+“The beetle was already coming down, you see, sir. Nat just caught
+sight of his hand, but couldn’t stop the blow in time. Down came the
+beetle upon poor John Smith’s hand, and squashed en to a pummy.”
+
+“Dear me, dear me! poor fellow!” said the vicar, with an intonation
+like the groans of the wounded in a pianoforte performance of the
+“Battle of Prague.”
+
+“John Smith, the master-mason?” cried Stephen hurriedly.
+
+“Ay, no other; and a better-hearted man God A’mighty never made.”
+
+“Is he so much hurt?”
+
+“I have heard,” said Mr. Swancourt, not noticing Stephen, “that he has
+a son in London, a very promising young fellow.”
+
+“Oh, how he must be hurt!” repeated Stephen.
+
+“A beetle couldn’t hurt very little. Well, sir, good-night t’ye; and
+ye, sir; and you, miss, I’m sure.”
+
+Mr. Cannister had been making unnoticeable motions of withdrawal, and
+by the time this farewell remark came from his lips he was just outside
+the door of the room. He tramped along the hall, stayed more than a
+minute endeavouring to close the door properly, and then was lost to
+their hearing.
+
+Stephen had meanwhile turned and said to the vicar:
+
+“Please excuse me this evening! I must leave. John Smith is my father.”
+
+The vicar did not comprehend at first.
+
+“What did you say?” he inquired.
+
+“John Smith is my father,” said Stephen deliberately.
+
+A surplus tinge of redness rose from Mr. Swancourt’s neck, and came
+round over his face, the lines of his features became more firmly
+defined, and his lips seemed to get thinner. It was evident that a
+series of little circumstances, hitherto unheeded, were now fitting
+themselves together, and forming a lucid picture in Mr. Swancourt’s
+mind in such a manner as to render useless further explanation on
+Stephen’s part.
+
+“Indeed,” the vicar said, in a voice dry and without inflection.
+
+This being a word which depends entirely upon its tone for its meaning,
+Mr. Swancourt’s enunciation was equivalent to no expression at all.
+
+“I have to go now,” said Stephen, with an agitated bearing, and a
+movement as if he scarcely knew whether he ought to run off or stay
+longer. “On my return, sir, will you kindly grant me a few minutes’
+private conversation?”
+
+“Certainly. Though antecedently it does not seem possible that there
+can be anything of the nature of private business between us.”
+
+Mr. Swancourt put on his straw hat, crossed the drawing-room, into
+which the moonlight was shining, and stepped out of the French window
+into the verandah. It required no further effort to perceive what,
+indeed, reasoning might have foretold as the natural colour of a mind
+whose pleasures were taken amid genealogies, good dinners, and
+patrician reminiscences, that Mr. Swancourt’s prejudices were too
+strong for his generosity, and that Stephen’s moments as his friend and
+equal were numbered, or had even now ceased.
+
+Stephen moved forward as if he would follow the vicar, then as if he
+would not, and in absolute perplexity whither to turn himself, went
+awkwardly to the door. Elfride followed lingeringly behind him. Before
+he had receded two yards from the doorstep, Unity and Ann the housemaid
+came home from their visit to the village.
+
+“Have you heard anything about John Smith? The accident is not so bad
+as was reported, is it?” said Elfride intuitively.
+
+“Oh no; the doctor says it is only a bad bruise.”
+
+“I thought so!” cried Elfride gladly.
+
+“He says that, although Nat believes he did not check the beetle as it
+came down, he must have done so without knowing it—checked it very
+considerably too; for the full blow would have knocked his hand abroad,
+and in reality it is only made black-and-blue like.”
+
+“How thankful I am!” said Stephen.
+
+The perplexed Unity looked at him with her mouth rather than with her
+eyes.
+
+“That will do, Unity,” said Elfride magisterially; and the two maids
+passed on.
+
+“Elfride, do you forgive me?” said Stephen with a faint smile. “No man
+is fair in love;” and he took her fingers lightly in his own.
+
+With her head thrown sideways in the Greuze attitude, she looked a
+tender reproach at his doubt and pressed his hand. Stephen returned the
+pressure threefold, then hastily went off to his father’s cottage by
+the wall of Endelstow Park.
+
+“Elfride, what have you to say to this?” inquired her father, coming up
+immediately Stephen had retired.
+
+With feminine quickness she grasped at any straw that would enable her
+to plead his cause. “He had told me of it,” she faltered; “so that it
+is not a discovery in spite of him. He was just coming in to tell you.”
+
+“COMING to tell! Why hadn’t he already told? I object as much, if not
+more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the fact
+itself. It looks very much like his making a fool of me, and of you
+too. You and he have been about together, and corresponding together,
+in a way I don’t at all approve of—in a most unseemly way. You should
+have known how improper such conduct is. A woman can’t be too careful
+not to be seen alone with I-don’t-know-whom.”
+
+“You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.”
+
+“My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be thinking of!
+He, a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the
+Luxellians. We have been coming to nothing for centuries, and now I
+believe we have got there. What shall I next invite here, I wonder!”
+
+Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs. “O
+papa, papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one another,
+papa—O, so much! And what he was going to ask you is, if you will allow
+of an engagement between us till he is a gentleman as good as you. We
+are not in a hurry, dear papa; we don’t want in the least to marry now;
+not until he is richer. Only will you let us be engaged, because I love
+him so, and he loves me?”
+
+Mr. Swancourt’s feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and he
+was annoyed that such should be the case. “Certainly not!” he replied.
+He pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously, so that the
+“not” sounded like “n-o-o-o-t!”
+
+“No, no, no; don’t say it!”
+
+“Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and
+disgraced by having him here,—the son of one of my village
+peasants,—but now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above us, are
+you mad, Elfride?”
+
+“You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit, papa,
+and you knew they were a sort of—love-letters; and since he has been
+here you have let him be alone with me almost entirely; and you
+guessed, you must have guessed, what we were thinking of, and doing,
+and you didn’t stop him. Next to love-making comes love-winning, and
+you knew it would come to that, papa.”
+
+The vicar parried this common-sense thrust. “I know—since you press me
+so—I know I did guess some childish attachment might arise between you;
+I own I did not take much trouble to prevent it; but I have not
+particularly countenanced it; and, Elfride, how can you expect that I
+should now? It is impossible; no father in England would hear of such a
+thing.”
+
+“But he is the same man, papa; the same in every particular; and how
+can he be less fit for me than he was before?”
+
+“He appeared a young man with well-to-do friends, and a little
+property; but having neither, he is another man.”
+
+“You inquired nothing about him?”
+
+“I went by Hewby’s introduction. He should have told me. So should the
+young man himself; of course he should. I consider it a most
+dishonourable thing to come into a man’s house like a treacherous
+I-don’t-know-what.”
+
+“But he was afraid to tell you, and so should I have been. He loved me
+too well to like to run the risk. And as to speaking of his friends on
+his first visit, I don’t see why he should have done so at all. He came
+here on business: it was no affair of ours who his parents were. And
+then he knew that if he told you he would never be asked here, and
+would perhaps never see me again. And he wanted to see me. Who can
+blame him for trying, by any means, to stay near me—the girl he loves?
+All is fair in love. I have heard you say so yourself, papa; and you
+yourself would have done just as he has—so would any man.”
+
+“And any man, on discovering what I have discovered, would also do as I
+do, and mend my mistake; that is, get shot of him again, as soon as the
+laws of hospitality will allow.” But Mr. Swancourt then remembered that
+he was a Christian. “I would not, for the world, seem to turn him out
+of doors,” he added; “but I think he will have the tact to see that he
+cannot stay long after this, with good taste.”
+
+“He will, because he’s a gentleman. See how graceful his manners are,”
+Elfride went on; though perhaps Stephen’s manners, like the feats of
+Euryalus, owed their attractiveness in her eyes rather to the
+attractiveness of his person than to their own excellence.
+
+“Ay; anybody can be what you call graceful, if he lives a little time
+in a city, and keeps his eyes open. And he might have picked up his
+gentlemanliness by going to the galleries of theatres, and watching
+stage drawing-room manners. He reminds me of one of the worst stories I
+ever heard in my life.”
+
+“What story was that?”
+
+“Oh no, thank you! I wouldn’t tell you such an improper matter for the
+world!”
+
+“If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of England,”
+gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to interrupt her
+articulation, “anywhere but here—you—would have—only regarded—HIM, and
+not THEM! His station—would have—been what—his profession makes it,—and
+not fixed by—his father’s humble position—at all; whom he never lives
+with—now. Though John Smith has saved lots of money, and is better off
+than we are, they say, or he couldn’t have put his son to such an
+expensive profession. And it is clever and—honourable—of Stephen, to be
+the best of his family.”
+
+“Yes. ‘Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the
+king’s mess.’”
+
+“You insult me, papa!” she burst out. “You do, you do! He is my own
+Stephen, he is!”
+
+“That may or may not be true, Elfride,” returned her father, again
+uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself “You confuse future
+probabilities with present facts,—what the young man may be with what
+he is. We must look at what he is, not what an improbable degree of
+success in his profession may make him. The case is this: the son of a
+working-man in my parish who may or may not be able to buy me up—a
+youth who has not yet advanced so far into life as to have any income
+of his own deserving the name, and therefore of his father’s degree as
+regards station—wants to be engaged to you. His family are living in
+precisely the same spot in England as yours, so throughout this
+county—which is the world to us—you would always be known as the wife
+of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under any circumstances as the
+wife of a London professional man. It is the drawback, not the
+compensating fact, that is talked of always. There, say no more. You
+may argue all night, and prove what you will; I’ll stick to my words.”
+
+Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with large
+heavy eyes and wet cheeks.
+
+“I call it great temerity—and long to call it audacity—in Hewby,”
+resumed her father. “I never heard such a thing—giving such a
+hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me as he did.
+Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don’t blame you at all,
+so far.” He went and searched for Mr. Hewby’s original letter. “Here’s
+what he said to me: ‘Dear Sir,—Agreeably to your request of the 18th
+instant, I have arranged to survey and make drawings,’ et cetera. ‘My
+assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,’—assistant, you see he called him, and
+naturally I understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn’t he say
+‘clerk’?”
+
+“They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do not
+write. Stephen—Mr. Smith—told me so. So that Mr. Hewby simply used the
+accepted word.”
+
+“Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will
+leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY THANKS FOR
+YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM,
+and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of church
+architecture.’ Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be ashamed of himself
+for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.”
+
+“Professional men in London,” Elfride argued, “don’t know anything
+about their clerks’ fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come
+to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they
+live. What they can do—what profits they can bring the firm—that’s all
+London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of
+being uniformly pleasant.”
+
+“Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that
+a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.”
+
+“It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim
+succession from directed.”
+
+“That’s some more of what he’s been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was
+inclined to suspect him, because he didn’t care about sauces of any
+kind. I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no
+acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot
+of the upstart. The idea of my bringing out a bottle of my “40
+Martinez—only eleven of them left now—to a man who didn’t know it from
+eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line he gave to my quotation; it was very
+cut-and-dried, very; or I, who haven’t looked into a classical author
+for the last eighteen years, shouldn’t have remembered it. Well,
+Elfride, you had better go to your room; you’ll get over this bit of
+tomfoolery in time.”
+
+“No, no, no, papa,” she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching to
+miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion
+which is the cause of them all may cease.
+
+“Elfride,” said her father with rough friendliness, “I have an
+excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A scheme to
+benefit you and me. It has been thrust upon me for some little
+time—yes, thrust upon me—but I didn’t dream of its value till this
+afternoon, when the revelation came. I should be most unwise to refuse
+to entertain it.”
+
+“I don’t like that word,” she returned wearily. “You have lost so much
+already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?”
+
+“No; not a mining scheme.”
+
+“Railways?”
+
+“Nor railways. It is like those mysterious offers we see advertised, by
+which any gentleman with no brains at all may make so much a week
+without risk, trouble, or soiling his fingers. However, I am intending
+to say nothing till it is settled, though I will just say this much,
+that you soon may have other fish to fry than to think of Stephen
+Smith. Remember, I wish, not to be angry, but friendly, to the young
+man; for your sake I’ll regard him as a friend in a certain sense. But
+this is enough; in a few days you will be quite my way of thinking.
+There, now, go to your bedroom. Unity shall bring you up some supper. I
+wish you not to be here when he comes back.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+“Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.”
+
+
+Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only two
+or three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich foliage
+growing about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty lights and
+shades from the shining moon maintaining a race over his head and down
+his back in an endless gambol. When he crossed the plank bridge and
+entered the garden-gate, he saw an illuminated figure coming from the
+enclosed plot towards the house on the other side. It was his father,
+with his hand in a sling, taking a general moonlight view of the
+garden, and particularly of a plot of the youngest of young turnips,
+previous to closing the cottage for the night.
+
+He saluted his son with customary force. “Hallo, Stephen! We should ha’
+been in bed in another ten minutes. Come to see what’s the matter wi’
+me, I suppose, my lad?”
+
+The doctor had come and gone, and the hand had been pronounced as
+injured but slightly, though it might possibly have been considered a
+far more serious case if Mr. Smith had been a more important man.
+Stephen’s anxious inquiry drew from his father words of regret at the
+inconvenience to the world of his doing nothing for the next two days,
+rather than of concern for the pain of the accident. Together they
+entered the house.
+
+John Smith—brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to
+clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone.
+In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to
+be a typical “working-man”—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition
+with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which
+metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class.
+
+There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the
+handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was
+not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a
+slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set
+in, and nobody was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two
+occasions in the depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all
+use of the trowel, making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and
+mortar to crumble, he had taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover,
+he had practised gardening in his own plot for so many years that, on
+an emergency, he might have made a living by that calling.
+
+Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in a
+particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in
+truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was
+despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much
+more the artist nevertheless.
+
+Appearing now, indoors, by the light of the candle, his stalwart
+healthiness was a sight to see. His beard was close and knotted as that
+of a chiselled Hercules; his shirt sleeves were partly rolled up, his
+waistcoat unbuttoned; the difference in hue between the snowy linen and
+the ruddy arms and face contrasting like the white of an egg and its
+yolk. Mrs. Smith, on hearing them enter, advanced from the pantry.
+
+Mrs. Smith was a matron whose countenance addressed itself to the mind
+rather than to the eye, though not exclusively. She retained her
+personal freshness even now, in the prosy afternoon-time of her life;
+but what her features were primarily indicative of was a sound common
+sense behind them; as a whole, appearing to carry with them a sort of
+argumentative commentary on the world in general.
+
+The details of the accident were then rehearsed by Stephen’s father, in
+the dramatic manner also common to Martin Cannister, other individuals
+of the neighbourhood, and the rural world generally. Mrs. Smith threw
+in her sentiments between the acts, as Coryphaeus of the tragedy, to
+make the description complete. The story at last came to an end, as the
+longest will, and Stephen directed the conversation into another
+channel.
+
+“Well, mother, they know everything about me now,” he said quietly.
+
+“Well done!” replied his father; “now my mind’s at peace.”
+
+“I blame myself—I never shall forgive myself—for not telling them
+before,” continued the young man.
+
+Mrs. Smith at this point abstracted her mind from the former subject.
+“I don’t see what you have to grieve about, Stephen,” she said. “People
+who accidentally get friends don’t, as a first stroke, tell the history
+of their families.”
+
+“Ye’ve done no wrong, certainly,” said his father.
+
+“No; but I should have spoken sooner. There’s more in this visit of
+mine than you think—a good deal more.”
+
+“Not more than I think,” Mrs. Smith replied, looking contemplatively at
+him. Stephen blushed; and his father looked from one to the other in a
+state of utter incomprehension.
+
+“She’s a pretty piece enough,” Mrs. Smith continued, “and very
+lady-like and clever too. But though she’s very well fit for you as far
+as that is, why, mercy “pon me, what ever do you want any woman at all
+for yet?”
+
+John made his naturally short mouth a long one, and wrinkled his
+forehead, “That’s the way the wind d’blow, is it?” he said.
+
+“Mother,” exclaimed Stephen, “how absurdly you speak! Criticizing
+whether she’s fit for me or no, as if there were room for doubt on the
+matter! Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my
+life—socially and practically, as well as in other respects. No such
+good fortune as that, I’m afraid; she’s too far above me. Her family
+doesn’t want such country lads as I in it.”
+
+“Then if they don’t want you, I’d see them dead corpses before I’d want
+them, and go to better families who do want you.”
+
+“Ah, yes; but I could never put up with the distaste of being welcomed
+among such people as you mean, whilst I could get indifference among
+such people as hers.”
+
+“What crazy twist o’ thinking will enter your head next?” said his
+mother. “And come to that, she’s not a bit too high for you, or you too
+low for her. See how careful I be to keep myself up. I’m sure I never
+stop for more than a minute together to talk to any journeymen people;
+and I never invite anybody to our party o’ Christmases who are not in
+business for themselves. And I talk to several toppermost carriage
+people that come to my lord’s without saying ma’am or sir to ’em, and
+they take it as quiet as lambs.”
+
+“You curtseyed to the vicar, mother; and I wish you hadn’t.”
+
+“But it was before he called me by my Christian name, or he would have
+got very little curtseying from me!” said Mrs. Smith, bridling and
+sparkling with vexation. “You go on at me, Stephen, as if I were your
+worst enemy! What else could I do with the man to get rid of him,
+banging it into me and your father by side and by seam, about his
+greatness, and what happened when he was a young fellow at college, and
+I don’t know what-all; the tongue o’ en flopping round his mouth like a
+mop-rag round a dairy. That ’a did, didn’t he, John?”
+
+“That’s about the size o’t,” replied her husband.
+
+“Every woman now-a-days,” resumed Mrs. Smith, “if she marry at all,
+must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father. The men
+have gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every man you meet is
+more the dand than his father; and you are just level wi’ her.”
+
+“That’s what she thinks herself.”
+
+“It only shows her sense. I knew she was after “ee, Stephen—I knew it.”
+
+“After me! Good Lord, what next!”
+
+“And I really must say again that you ought not to be in such a hurry,
+and wait for a few years. You might go higher than a bankrupt pa’son’s
+girl then.”
+
+“The fact is, mother,” said Stephen impatiently, “you don’t know
+anything about it. I shall never go higher, because I don’t want to,
+nor should I if I lived to be a hundred. As to you saying that she’s
+after me, I don’t like such a remark about her, for it implies a
+scheming woman, and a man worth scheming for, both of which are not
+only untrue, but ludicrously untrue, of this case. Isn’t it so,
+father?”
+
+“I’m afraid I don’t understand the matter well enough to gie my
+opinion,” said his father, in the tone of the fox who had a cold and
+could not smell.
+
+“She couldn’t have been very backward anyhow, considering the short
+time you have known her,” said his mother. “Well I think that five
+years hence you’ll be plenty young enough to think of such things. And
+really she can very well afford to wait, and will too, take my word.
+Living down in an out-step place like this, I am sure she ought to be
+very thankful that you took notice of her. She’d most likely have died
+an old maid if you hadn’t turned up.”
+
+“All nonsense,” said Stephen, but not aloud.
+
+“A nice little thing she is,” Mrs. Smith went on in a more complacent
+tone now that Stephen had been talked down; “there’s not a word to say
+against her, I’ll own. I see her sometimes decked out like a horse
+going to fair, and I admire her for’t. A perfect little lady. But
+people can’t help their thoughts, and if she’d learnt to make figures
+instead of letters when she was at school ’twould have been better for
+her pocket; for as I said, there never were worse times for such as she
+than now.”
+
+“Now, now, mother!” said Stephen with smiling deprecation.
+
+“But I will!” said his mother with asperity. “I don’t read the papers
+for nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by marriage. Men of her
+class, that is, parsons, marry squires’ daughters; squires marry lords’
+daughters; lords marry dukes’ daughters; dukes marry queens’ daughters.
+All stages of gentlemen mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of
+gentlewomen are left single, or marry out of their class.”
+
+“But you said just now, dear mother——” retorted Stephen, unable to
+resist the temptation of showing his mother her inconsistency. Then he
+paused.
+
+“Well, what did I say?” And Mrs. Smith prepared her lips for a new
+campaign.
+
+Stephen, regretting that he had begun, since a volcano might be the
+consequence, was obliged to go on.
+
+“You said I wasn’t out of her class just before.”
+
+“Yes, there, there! That’s you; that’s my own flesh and blood. I’ll
+warrant that you’ll pick holes in everything your mother says, if you
+can, Stephen. You are just like your father for that; take anybody’s
+part but mine. Whilst I am speaking and talking and trying and slaving
+away for your good, you are waiting to catch me out in that way. So you
+are in her class, but ’tis what HER people would CALL marrying out of
+her class. Don’t be so quarrelsome, Stephen!”
+
+Stephen preserved a discreet silence, in which he was imitated by his
+father, and for several minutes nothing was heard but the ticking of
+the green-faced case-clock against the wall.
+
+“I’m sure,” added Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a
+terminative speech, “if there’d been so much trouble to get a husband
+in my time as there is in these days—when you must make a god-almighty
+of a man to get en to hae ye—I’d have trod clay for bricks before I’d
+ever have lowered my dignity to marry, or there’s no bread in nine
+loaves.”
+
+The discussion now dropped, and as it was getting late, Stephen bade
+his parents farewell for the evening, his mother none the less warmly
+for their sparring; for although Mrs. Smith and Stephen were always
+contending, they were never at enmity.
+
+“And possibly,” said Stephen, “I may leave here altogether to-morrow; I
+don’t know. So that if I shouldn’t call again before returning to
+London, don’t be alarmed, will you?”
+
+“But didn’t you come for a fortnight?” said his mother. “And haven’t
+you a month’s holiday altogether? They are going to turn you out,
+then?”
+
+“Not at all. I may stay longer; I may go. If I go, you had better say
+nothing about my having been here, for her sake. At what time of the
+morning does the carrier pass Endelstow lane?”
+
+“Seven o’clock.”
+
+And then he left them. His thoughts were, that should the vicar permit
+him to become engaged, to hope for an engagement, or in any way to
+think of his beloved Elfride, he might stay longer. Should he be
+forbidden to think of any such thing, he resolved to go at once. And
+the latter, even to young hopefulness, seemed the more probable
+alternative.
+
+Stephen walked back to the vicarage through the meadows, as he had
+come, surrounded by the soft musical purl of the water through little
+weirs, the modest light of the moon, the freshening smell of the dews
+out-spread around. It was a time when mere seeing is meditation, and
+meditation peace. Stephen was hardly philosopher enough to avail
+himself of Nature’s offer. His constitution was made up of very simple
+particulars; was one which, rare in the spring-time of civilizations,
+seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and
+education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive
+powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of
+knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more
+common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the
+society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone.
+He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to
+which, under proper training, he could not have added a respectable
+co-ordinate.
+
+He saw nothing outside himself to-night; and what he saw within was a
+weariness to his flesh. Yet to a dispassionate observer, his
+pretensions to Elfride, though rather premature, were far from absurd
+as marriages go, unless the accidental proximity of simple but honest
+parents could be said to make them so.
+
+The clock struck eleven when he entered the house. Elfride had been
+waiting with scarcely a movement since he departed. Before he had
+spoken to her she caught sight of him passing into the study with her
+father. She saw that he had by some means obtained the private
+interview he desired.
+
+A nervous headache had been growing on the excitable girl during the
+absence of Stephen, and now she could do nothing beyond going up again
+to her room as she had done before. Instead of lying down she sat again
+in the darkness without closing the door, and listened with a beating
+heart to every sound from downstairs. The servants had gone to bed. She
+ultimately heard the two men come from the study and cross to the
+dining-room, where supper had been lingering for more than an hour. The
+door was left open, and she found that the meal, such as it was, passed
+off between her father and her lover without any remark, save
+commonplaces as to cucumbers and melons, their wholesomeness and
+culture, uttered in a stiff and formal way. It seemed to prefigure
+failure.
+
+Shortly afterwards Stephen came upstairs to his bedroom, and was almost
+immediately followed by her father, who also retired for the night. Not
+inclined to get a light, she partly undressed and sat on the bed, where
+she remained in pained thought for some time, possibly an hour. Then
+rising to close her door previously to fully unrobing, she saw a streak
+of light shining across the landing. Her father’s door was shut, and he
+could be heard snoring regularly. The light came from Stephen’s room,
+and the slight sounds also coming thence emphatically denoted what he
+was doing. In the perfect silence she could hear the closing of a lid
+and the clicking of a lock,—he was fastening his hat-box. Then the
+buckling of straps and the click of another key,—he was securing his
+portmanteau. With trebled foreboding she opened her door softly, and
+went towards his. One sensation pervaded her to distraction. Stephen,
+her handsome youth and darling, was going away, and she might never see
+him again except in secret and in sadness—perhaps never more. At any
+rate, she could no longer wait till the morning to hear the result of
+the interview, as she had intended. She flung her dressing-gown round
+her, tapped lightly at his door, and whispered “Stephen!” He came
+instantly, opened the door, and stepped out.
+
+“Tell me; are we to hope?”
+
+He replied in a disturbed whisper, and a tear approached its outlet,
+though none fell.
+
+“I am not to think of such a preposterous thing—that’s what he said.
+And I am going to-morrow. I should have called you up to bid you
+good-bye.”
+
+“But he didn’t say you were to go—O Stephen, he didn’t say that?”
+
+“No; not in words. But I cannot stay.”
+
+“Oh, don’t, don’t go! Do come and let us talk. Let us come down to the
+drawing-room for a few minutes; he will hear us here.”
+
+She preceded him down the staircase with the taper light in her hand,
+looking unnaturally tall and thin in the long dove-coloured
+dressing-gown she wore. She did not stop to think of the propriety or
+otherwise of this midnight interview under such circumstances. She
+thought that the tragedy of her life was beginning, and, for the first
+time almost, felt that her existence might have a grave side, the shade
+of which enveloped and rendered invisible the delicate gradations of
+custom and punctilio. Elfride softly opened the drawing-room door and
+they both went in. When she had placed the candle on the table, he
+enclosed her with his arms, dried her eyes with his handkerchief, and
+kissed their lids.
+
+“Stephen, it is over—happy love is over; and there is no more sunshine
+now!”
+
+“I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I will!”
+
+“Papa will never hear of it—never—never! You don’t know him. I do. He
+is either biassed in favour of a thing, or prejudiced against it.
+Argument is powerless against either feeling.”
+
+“No; I won’t think of him so,” said Stephen. “If I appear before him
+some time hence as a man of established name, he will accept me—I know
+he will. He is not a wicked man.”
+
+“No, he is not wicked. But you say ‘some time hence,’ as if it were no
+time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be comparatively a
+short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its real length trebled!
+Every summer will be a year—autumn a year—winter a year! O Stephen! and
+you may forget me!”
+
+Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-hearted
+woman. The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear. “You, too, may be
+persuaded to give me up, when time has made me fainter in your memory.
+For, remember, your love for me must be nourished in secret; there will
+be no long visits from me to support you. Circumstances will always
+tend to obliterate me.”
+
+“Stephen,” she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding his
+last words, “there are beautiful women where you live—of course I know
+there are—and they may win you away from me.” Her tears came visibly as
+she drew a mental picture of his faithlessness. “And it won’t be your
+fault,” she continued, looking into the candle with doleful eyes. “No!
+You will think that our family don’t want you, and get to include me
+with them. And there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others
+will be let in.”
+
+“I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of forebodings.”
+
+“Oh yes, they will,” she replied. “And you will look at them, not
+caring at first, and then you will look and be interested, and after a
+while you will think, ‘Ah, they know all about city life, and
+assemblies, and coteries, and the manners of the titled, and poor
+little Elfie, with all the fuss that’s made about her having me,
+doesn’t know about anything but a little house and a few cliffs and a
+space of sea, far away.’ And then you’ll be more interested in them,
+and they’ll make you have them instead of me, on purpose to be cruel to
+me because I am silly, and they are clever and hate me. And I hate
+them, too; yes, I do!”
+
+Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the
+recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished. And,
+worse than that general feeling, there of course remained the sadness
+which arose from the special features of his own case. However remote a
+desired issue may be, the mere fact of having entered the groove which
+leads to it, cheers to some extent with a sense of accomplishment. Had
+Mr. Swancourt consented to an engagement of no less length than ten
+years, Stephen would have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they
+would have felt that they were somewhere on the road to Cupid’s garden.
+But, with a possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any
+prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr.
+Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the waiting
+for marriage could even set in. And this was despair.
+
+“I wish we could marry now,” murmured Stephen, as an impossible fancy.
+
+“So do I,” said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. “’Tis the only
+thing that ever does sweethearts good!”
+
+“Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?”
+
+“Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,” she said, and
+went on reflectively: “All we want is to render it absolutely
+impossible for any future circumstance to upset our future intention of
+being happy together; not to begin being happy now.”
+
+“Exactly,” he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of hers.
+“To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living now; merely
+to put it out of anybody’s power to force you away from me, dearest.”
+
+“Or you away from me, Stephen.”
+
+“Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of circumstance
+strong enough to make any woman in the world marry against her will: no
+conceivable pressure, up to torture or starvation, can make a woman
+once married to her lover anybody else’s wife.”
+
+Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had been
+held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to beguile a
+miserable moment. During a pause which followed Stephen’s last remark,
+a fascinating perception, then an alluring conviction, flashed along
+the brain of both. The perception was that an immediate marriage COULD
+be contrived; the conviction that such an act, in spite of its daring,
+its fathomless results, its deceptiveness, would be preferred by each
+to the life they must lead under any other conditions.
+
+The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude of the
+conception he was cherishing. “How strong we should feel, Elfride!
+going on our separate courses as before, without the fear of ultimate
+separation! O Elfride! think of it; think of it!”
+
+It is certain that the young girl’s love for Stephen received a fanning
+from her father’s opposition which made it blaze with a dozen times the
+intensity it would have exhibited if left alone. Never were conditions
+more favourable for developing a girl’s first passing fancy for a
+handsome boyish face—a fancy rooted in inexperience and nourished by
+seclusion—into a wild unreflecting passion fervid enough for anything.
+All the elements of such a development were there, the chief one being
+hopelessness—a necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of
+feelings united under the name of loving to distraction.
+
+“We would tell papa soon, would we not?” she inquired timidly. “Nobody
+else need know. He would then be convinced that hearts cannot be played
+with; love encouraged be ready to grow, love discouraged be ready to
+die, at a moment’s notice. Stephen, do you not think that if marriages
+against a parent’s consent are ever justifiable, they are when young
+people have been favoured up to a point, as we have, and then have had
+that favour suddenly withdrawn?”
+
+“Yes. It is not as if we had from the beginning acted in opposition to
+your papa’s wishes. Only think, Elfie, how pleasant he was towards me
+but six hours ago! He liked me, praised me, never objected to my being
+alone with you.”
+
+“I believe he MUST like you now,” she cried. “And if he found that you
+irremediably belonged to me, he would own it and help you. “O Stephen,
+Stephen,” she burst out again, as the remembrance of his packing came
+afresh to her mind, “I cannot bear your going away like this! It is too
+dreadful. All I have been expecting miserably killed within me like
+this!”
+
+Stephen flushed hot with impulse. “I will not be a doubt to you—thought
+of you shall not be a misery to me!” he said. “We will be wife and
+husband before we part for long!”
+
+She hid her face on his shoulder. “Anything to make SURE!” she
+whispered.
+
+“I did not like to propose it immediately,” continued Stephen. “It
+seemed to me—it seems to me now—like trying to catch you—a girl better
+in the world than I.”
+
+“Not that, indeed! And am I better in worldly station? What’s the use
+of have beens? We may have been something once; we are nothing now.”
+
+Then they whispered long and earnestly together; Stephen hesitatingly
+proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them, with quick
+breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright eyes. It was two
+o’clock before an arrangement was finally concluded.
+
+She then told him to leave her, giving him his light to go up to his
+own room. They parted with an agreement not to meet again in the
+morning. After his door had been some time closed he heard her softly
+gliding into her chamber.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
+
+
+Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a monotonous
+parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that night.
+
+Early the next morning—that is to say, four hours after their stolen
+interview, and just as the earliest servant was heard moving
+about—Stephen Smith went downstairs, portmanteau in hand. Throughout
+the night he had intended to see Mr. Swancourt again, but the sharp
+rebuff of the previous evening rendered such an interview particularly
+distasteful. Perhaps there was another and less honest reason. He
+decided to put it off. Whatever of moral timidity or obliquity may have
+lain in such a decision, no perception of it was strong enough to
+detain him. He wrote a note in his room, which stated simply that he
+did not feel happy in the house after Mr. Swancourt’s sudden veto on
+what he had favoured a few hours before; but that he hoped a time would
+come, and that soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as Mr.
+Swancourt’s guest might be recovered.
+
+He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and cheerless
+aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the sun. He found
+in the dining room a breakfast laid, of which somebody had just
+partaken.
+
+Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that Mr.
+Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early breakfast. He
+was not going away that she knew of.
+
+Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and turned
+into the lane. It was so early that the shaded places still smelt like
+night time, and the sunny spots had hardly felt the sun. The horizontal
+rays made every shallow dip in the ground to show as a well-marked
+hollow. Even the channel of the path was enough to throw shade, and the
+very stones of the road cast tapering dashes of darkness westward, as
+long as Jael’s tent-nail.
+
+At a spot not more than a hundred yards from the vicar’s residence the
+lane leading thence crossed the high road. Stephen reached the point of
+intersection, stood still and listened. Nothing could be heard save the
+lengthy, murmuring line of the sea upon the adjacent shore. He looked
+at his watch, and then mounted a gate upon which he seated himself, to
+await the arrival of the carrier. Whilst he sat he heard wheels coming
+in two directions.
+
+The vehicle approaching on his right he soon recognized as the
+carrier’s. There were the accompanying sounds of the owner’s voice and
+the smack of his whip, distinct in the still morning air, by which he
+encouraged his horses up the hill.
+
+The other set of wheels sounded from the lane Stephen had just
+traversed. On closer observation, he perceived that they were moving
+from the precincts of the ancient manor-house adjoining the vicarage
+grounds. A carriage then left the entrance gates of the house, and
+wheeling round came fully in sight. It was a plain travelling carriage,
+with a small quantity of luggage, apparently a lady’s. The vehicle came
+to the junction of the four ways half-a-minute before the carrier
+reached the same spot, and crossed directly in his front, proceeding by
+the lane on the other side.
+
+Inside the carriage Stephen could just discern an elderly lady with a
+younger woman, who seemed to be her maid. The road they had taken led
+to Stratleigh, a small watering-place sixteen miles north.
+
+He heard the manor-house gates swing again, and looking up saw another
+person leaving them, and walking off in the direction of the parsonage.
+“Ah, how much I wish I were moving that way!” felt he parenthetically.
+The gentleman was tall, and resembled Mr. Swancourt in outline and
+attire. He opened the vicarage gate and went in. Mr. Swancourt, then,
+it certainly was. Instead of remaining in bed that morning Mr.
+Swancourt must have taken it into his head to see his new neighbour off
+on a journey. He must have been greatly interested in that neighbour to
+do such an unusual thing.
+
+The carrier’s conveyance had pulled up, and Stephen now handed in his
+portmanteau and mounted the shafts. “Who is that lady in the carriage?”
+he inquired indifferently of Lickpan the carrier.
+
+“That, sir, is Mrs. Troyton, a widder wi’ a mint o’ money. She’s the
+owner of all that part of Endelstow that is not Lord Luxellian’s. Only
+been here a short time; she came into it by law. The owner formerly was
+a terrible mysterious party—never lived here—hardly ever was seen here
+except in the month of September, as I might say.”
+
+The horses were started again, and noise rendered further discourse a
+matter of too great exertion. Stephen crept inside under the tilt, and
+was soon lost in reverie.
+
+Three hours and a half of straining up hills and jogging down brought
+them to St. Launce’s, the market town and railway station nearest to
+Endelstow, and the place from which Stephen Smith had journeyed over
+the downs on the, to him, memorable winter evening at the beginning of
+the same year. The carrier’s van was so timed as to meet a starting
+up-train, which Stephen entered. Two or three hours’ railway travel
+through vertical cuttings in metamorphic rock, through oak copses rich
+and green, stretching over slopes and down delightful valleys, glens,
+and ravines, sparkling with water like many-rilled Ida, and he plunged
+amid the hundred and fifty thousand people composing the town of
+Plymouth.
+
+There being some time upon his hands he left his luggage at the
+cloak-room, and went on foot along Bedford Street to the nearest
+church. Here Stephen wandered among the multifarious tombstones and
+looked in at the chancel window, dreaming of something that was likely
+to happen by the altar there in the course of the coming month. He
+turned away and ascended the Hoe, viewed the magnificent stretch of sea
+and massive promontories of land, but without particularly discerning
+one feature of the varied perspective. He still saw that inner
+prospect—the event he hoped for in yonder church. The wide Sound, the
+Breakwater, the light-house on far-off Eddystone, the dark steam
+vessels, brigs, barques, and schooners, either floating stilly, or
+gliding with tiniest motion, were as the dream, then; the dreamed-of
+event was as the reality.
+
+Soon Stephen went down from the Hoe, and returned to the railway
+station. He took his ticket, and entered the London train.
+
+That day was an irksome time at Endelstow vicarage. Neither father nor
+daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr. Swancourt’s manner
+towards her partook of the compunctious kindness that arises from a
+misgiving as to the justice of some previous act.
+
+Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d’oeil, or
+from a natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women are
+cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form. Probably,
+in Elfride’s case at least, it was blindness to the greater
+contingencies of the future she was preparing for herself, which
+enabled her to ask her father in a quiet voice if he could give her a
+holiday soon, to ride to St. Launce’s and go on to Plymouth.
+
+Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was in
+consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country girl, and a
+good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it had been her delight to canter,
+without the ghost of an attendant, over the fourteen or sixteen miles
+of hard road intervening between their home and the station at St.
+Launce’s, put up the horse, and go on the remainder of the distance by
+train, returning in the same manner in the evening. It was then
+resolved that, though she had successfully accomplished this journey
+once, it was not to be repeated without some attendance.
+
+But Elfride must not be confounded with ordinary young feminine
+equestrians. The circumstances of her lonely and narrow life made it
+imperative that in trotting about the neighbourhood she must trot alone
+or else not at all. Usage soon rendered this perfectly natural to
+herself. Her father, who had had other experiences, did not much like
+the idea of a Swancourt, whose pedigree could be as distinctly traced
+as a thread in a skein of silk, scampering over the hills like a
+farmer’s daughter, even though he could habitually neglect her. But
+what with his not being able to afford her a regular attendant, and his
+inveterate habit of letting anything be to save himself trouble, the
+circumstance grew customary. And so there arose a chronic notion in the
+villagers’ minds that all ladies rode without an attendant, like Miss
+Swancourt, except a few who were sometimes visiting at Lord
+Luxellian’s.
+
+“I don’t like your going to Plymouth alone, particularly going to St.
+Launce’s on horseback. Why not drive, and take the man?”
+
+“It is not nice to be so overlooked.” Worm’s company would not
+seriously have interfered with her plans, but it was her humour to go
+without him.
+
+“When do you want to go?” said her father.
+
+She only answered, “Soon.”
+
+“I will consider,” he said.
+
+Only a few days elapsed before she asked again. A letter had reached
+her from Stephen. It had been timed to come on that day by special
+arrangement between them. In it he named the earliest morning on which
+he could meet her at Plymouth. Her father had been on a journey to
+Stratleigh, and returned in unusual buoyancy of spirit. It was a good
+opportunity; and since the dismissal of Stephen her father had been
+generally in a mood to make small concessions, that he might steer
+clear of large ones connected with that outcast lover of hers.
+
+“Next Thursday week I am going from home in a different direction,”
+said her father. “In fact, I shall leave home the night before. You
+might choose the same day, for they wish to take up the carpets, or
+some such thing, I think. As I said, I don’t like you to be seen in a
+town on horseback alone; but go if you will.”
+
+Thursday week. Her father had named the very day that Stephen also had
+named that morning as the earliest on which it would be of any use to
+meet her; that was, about fifteen days from the day on which he had
+left Endelstow. Fifteen days—that fragment of duration which has
+acquired such an interesting individuality from its connection with the
+English marriage law.
+
+She involuntarily looked at her father so strangely, that on becoming
+conscious of the look she paled with embarrassment. Her father, too,
+looked confused. What was he thinking of?
+
+There seemed to be a special facility offered her by a power external
+to herself in the circumstance that Mr. Swancourt had proposed to leave
+home the night previous to her wished-for day. Her father seldom took
+long journeys; seldom slept from home except perhaps on the night
+following a remote Visitation. Well, she would not inquire too
+curiously into the reason of the opportunity, nor did he, as would have
+been natural, proceed to explain it of his own accord. In matters of
+fact there had hitherto been no reserve between them, though they were
+not usually confidential in its full sense. But the divergence of their
+emotions on Stephen’s account had produced an estrangement which just
+at present went even to the extent of reticence on the most ordinary
+household topics.
+
+Elfride was almost unconsciously relieved, persuading herself that her
+father’s reserve on his business justified her in secrecy as regarded
+her own—a secrecy which was necessarily a foregone decision with her.
+So anxious is a young conscience to discover a palliative, that the ex
+post facto nature of a reason is of no account in excluding it.
+
+The intervening fortnight was spent by her mostly in walking by herself
+among the shrubs and trees, indulging sometimes in sanguine
+anticipations; more, far more frequently, in misgivings. All her
+flowers seemed dull of hue; her pets seemed to look wistfully into her
+eyes, as if they no longer stood in the same friendly relation to her
+as formerly. She wore melancholy jewellery, gazed at sunsets, and
+talked to old men and women. It was the first time that she had had an
+inner and private world apart from the visible one about her. She
+wished that her father, instead of neglecting her even more than usual,
+would make some advance—just one word; she would then tell all, and
+risk Stephen’s displeasure. Thus brought round to the youth again, she
+saw him in her fancy, standing, touching her, his eyes full of sad
+affection, hopelessly renouncing his attempt because she had renounced
+hers; and she could not recede.
+
+On the Wednesday she was to receive another letter. She had resolved to
+let her father see the arrival of this one, be the consequences what
+they might: the dread of losing her lover by this deed of honesty
+prevented her acting upon the resolve. Five minutes before the
+postman’s expected arrival she slipped out, and down the lane to meet
+him. She met him immediately upon turning a sharp angle, which hid her
+from view in the direction of the vicarage. The man smilingly handed
+one missive, and was going on to hand another, a circular from some
+tradesman.
+
+“No,” she said; “take that on to the house.”
+
+“Why, miss, you are doing what your father has done for the last
+fortnight.”
+
+She did not comprehend.
+
+“Why, come to this corner, and take a letter of me every morning, all
+writ in the same handwriting, and letting any others for him go on to
+the house.” And on the postman went.
+
+No sooner had he turned the corner behind her back than she heard her
+father meet and address the man. She had saved her letter by two
+minutes. Her father audibly went through precisely the same performance
+as she had just been guilty of herself.
+
+This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.
+
+Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by
+her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to
+determine a resultant:
+
+First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its object:
+inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the above-named
+issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of ultimate exoneration:
+indignation at parental inconsistency in first encouraging, then
+forbidding: a chilling sense of disobedience, overpowered by a
+conscientious inability to brook a breaking of plighted faith with a
+man who, in essentials, had remained unaltered from the beginning: a
+blessed hope that opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a
+bright faith that things would mend thereby, and wind up well.
+
+Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
+following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
+
+Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
+stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
+surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have been
+drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:
+
+“If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been
+made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?”
+
+“Do you mean in the family by marriage?” he replied inattentively, and
+continuing to peel his egg.
+
+The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
+affirmative reply.
+
+“I should have put up with it, no doubt,” Mr. Swancourt observed.
+
+“So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy, but
+have made the best of him?”
+
+Elfride’s erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in
+the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on
+absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the
+mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of
+circumstances, he answered it with customary complacency.
+
+“If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any sensible
+man, should accept conditions that could not be altered; certainly not
+be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don’t believe anything in the
+world would make me hopelessly melancholy. And don’t let anything make
+you so, either.”
+
+“I won’t, papa,” she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased him.
+
+Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the
+brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no longer
+from the mad action she had planned.
+
+In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It was an
+unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again almost
+impelled by her feelings to pour out all.
+
+“Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?” she said, and looked at him
+longingly.
+
+“I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,” he said cheerily; “not
+before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and
+so far will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.”
+
+She was repressed and hurt.
+
+“I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,” she
+murmured.
+
+He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter, as
+his indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.
+
+It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud upon
+an orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to walk towards
+them, as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach. She went through
+the field to the privet hedge, clambered into the middle of it, and
+reclined upon the thick boughs. After looking westward for a
+considerable time, she blamed herself for not looking eastward to where
+Stephen was, and turned round. Ultimately her eyes fell upon the
+ground.
+
+A peculiarity was observable beneath her. A green field spread itself
+on each side of the hedge, one belonging to the glebe, the other being
+a part of the land attached to the manor-house adjoining. On the
+vicarage side she saw a little footpath, the distinctive and altogether
+exceptional feature of which consisted in its being only about ten
+yards long; it terminated abruptly at each end.
+
+A footpath, suddenly beginning and suddenly ending, coming from nowhere
+and leading nowhere, she had never seen before.
+
+Yes, she had, on second thoughts. She had seen exactly such a path
+trodden in the front of barracks by the sentry.
+
+And this recollection explained the origin of the path here. Her father
+had trodden it by pacing up and down, as she had once seen him doing.
+
+Sitting on the hedge as she sat now, her eyes commanded a view of both
+sides of it. And a few minutes later, Elfride looked over to the manor
+side.
+
+Here was another sentry path. It was like the first in length, and it
+began and ended exactly opposite the beginning and ending of its
+neighbour, but it was thinner, and less distinct.
+
+Two reasons existed for the difference. This one might have been
+trodden by a similar weight of tread to the other, exercised a less
+number of times; or it might have been walked just as frequently, but
+by lighter feet.
+
+Probably a gentleman from Scotland-yard, had he been passing at the
+time, might have considered the latter alternative as the more
+probable. Elfride thought otherwise, so far as she thought at all. But
+her own great To-Morrow was now imminent; all thoughts inspired by
+casual sights of the eye were only allowed to exercise themselves in
+inferior corners of her brain, previously to being banished altogether.
+
+Elfride was at length compelled to reason practically upon her
+undertaking. All her definite perceptions thereon, when the emotion
+accompanying them was abstracted, amounted to no more than these:
+
+“Say an hour and three-quarters to ride to St. Launce’s.
+
+“Say half an hour at the Falcon to change my dress.
+
+“Say two hours waiting for some train and getting to Plymouth.
+
+“Say an hour to spare before twelve o’clock.
+
+“Total time from leaving Endelstow till twelve o’clock, five hours.
+
+“Therefore I shall have to start at seven.”
+
+No surprise or sense of unwontedness entered the minds of the servants
+at her early ride. The monotony of life we associate with people of
+small incomes in districts out of the sound of the railway whistle, has
+one exception, which puts into shade the experience of dwellers about
+the great centres of population—that is, in travelling. Every journey
+there is more or less an adventure; adventurous hours are necessarily
+chosen for the most commonplace outing. Miss Elfride had to leave
+early—that was all.
+
+Elfride never went out on horseback but she brought home
+something—something found, or something bought. If she trotted to town
+or village, her burden was books. If to hills, woods, or the seashore,
+it was wonderful mosses, abnormal twigs, a handkerchief of wet shells
+or seaweed.
+
+Once, in muddy weather, when Pansy was walking with her down the street
+of Castle Boterel, on a fair-day, a packet in front of her and a packet
+under her arm, an accident befell the packets, and they slipped down.
+On one side of her, three volumes of fiction lay kissing the mud; on
+the other numerous skeins of polychromatic wools lay absorbing it.
+Unpleasant women smiled through windows at the mishap, the men all
+looked round, and a boy, who was minding a ginger-bread stall whilst
+the owner had gone to get drunk, laughed loudly. The blue eyes turned
+to sapphires, and the cheeks crimsoned with vexation.
+
+After that misadventure she set her wits to work, and was ingenious
+enough to invent an arrangement of small straps about the saddle, by
+which a great deal could be safely carried thereon, in a small compass.
+Here she now spread out and fastened a plain dark walking-dress and a
+few other trifles of apparel. Worm opened the gate for her, and she
+vanished away.
+
+One of the brightest mornings of late summer shone upon her. The
+heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the
+grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like
+little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon
+Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she looked
+what she felt. But the mercury of those days had a trick of falling
+unexpectedly. First, only for one minute in ten had she a sense of
+depression. Then a large cloud, that had been hanging in the north like
+a black fleece, came and placed itself between her and the sun. It
+helped on what was already inevitable, and she sank into a uniformity
+of sadness.
+
+She turned in the saddle and looked back. They were now on an open
+table-land, whose altitude still gave her a view of the sea by
+Endelstow. She looked longingly at that spot.
+
+During this little revulsion of feeling Pansy had been still advancing,
+and Elfride felt it would be absurd to turn her little mare’s head the
+other way. “Still,” she thought, “if I had a mamma at home I WOULD go
+back!”
+
+And making one of those stealthy movements by which women let their
+hearts juggle with their brains, she did put the horse’s head about, as
+if unconsciously, and went at a hand-gallop towards home for more than
+a mile. By this time, from the inveterate habit of valuing what we have
+renounced directly the alternative is chosen, the thought of her
+forsaken Stephen recalled her, and she turned about, and cantered on to
+St. Launce’s again.
+
+This miserable strife of thought now began to rage in all its wildness.
+Overwrought and trembling, she dropped the rein upon Pansy’s shoulders,
+and vowed she would be led whither the horse would take her.
+
+Pansy slackened her pace to a walk, and walked on with her agitated
+burden for three or four minutes. At the expiration of this time they
+had come to a little by-way on the right, leading down a slope to a
+pool of water. The pony stopped, looked towards the pool, and then
+advanced and stooped to drink.
+
+Elfride looked at her watch and discovered that if she were going to
+reach St. Launce’s early enough to change her dress at the Falcon, and
+get a chance of some early train to Plymouth—there were only two
+available—it was necessary to proceed at once.
+
+She was impatient. It seemed as if Pansy would never stop drinking; and
+the repose of the pool, the idle motions of the insects and flies upon
+it, the placid waving of the flags, the leaf-skeletons, like Genoese
+filigree, placidly sleeping at the bottom, by their contrast with her
+own turmoil made her impatience greater.
+
+Pansy did turn at last, and went up the slope again to the high-road.
+The pony came upon it, and stood cross-wise, looking up and down.
+Elfride’s heart throbbed erratically, and she thought, “Horses, if left
+to themselves, make for where they are best fed. Pansy will go home.”
+
+Pansy turned and walked on towards St. Launce’s
+
+Pansy at home, during summer, had little but grass to live on. After a
+run to St. Launce’s she always had a feed of corn to support her on the
+return journey. Therefore, being now more than half way, she preferred
+St. Launce’s.
+
+But Elfride did not remember this now. All she cared to recognize was a
+dreamy fancy that to-day’s rash action was not her own. She was
+disabled by her moods, and it seemed indispensable to adhere to the
+programme. So strangely involved are motives that, more than by her
+promise to Stephen, more even than by her love, she was forced on by a
+sense of the necessity of keeping faith with herself, as promised in
+the inane vow of ten minutes ago.
+
+She hesitated no longer. Pansy went, like the steed of Adonis, as if
+she told the steps. Presently the quaint gables and jumbled roofs of
+St. Launce’s were spread beneath her, and going down the hill she
+entered the courtyard of the Falcon. Mrs. Buckle, the landlady, came to
+the door to meet her.
+
+The Swancourts were well known here. The transition from equestrian to
+the ordinary guise of railway travellers had been more than once
+performed by father and daughter in this establishment.
+
+In less than a quarter of an hour Elfride emerged from the door in her
+walking dress, and went to the railway. She had not told Mrs. Buckle
+anything as to her intentions, and was supposed to have gone out
+shopping.
+
+An hour and forty minutes later, and she was in Stephen’s arms at the
+Plymouth station. Not upon the platform—in the secret retreat of a
+deserted waiting-room.
+
+Stephen’s face boded ill. He was pale and despondent.
+
+“What is the matter?” she asked.
+
+“We cannot be married here to-day, my Elfie! I ought to have known it
+and stayed here. In my ignorance I did not. I have the licence, but it
+can only be used in my parish in London. I only came down last night,
+as you know.”
+
+“What shall we do?” she said blankly.
+
+“There’s only one thing we can do, darling.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“Go on to London by a train just starting, and be married there
+to-morrow.”
+
+“Passengers for the 11.5 up-train take their seats!” said a guard’s
+voice on the platform.
+
+“Will you go, Elfride?”
+
+“I will.”
+
+In three minutes the train had moved off, bearing away with it Stephen
+and Elfride.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+
+“Adieu! she cries, and waved her lily hand.”
+
+
+The few tattered clouds of the morning enlarged and united, the sun
+withdrew behind them to emerge no more that day, and the evening drew
+to a close in drifts of rain. The water-drops beat like duck shot
+against the window of the railway-carriage containing Stephen and
+Elfride.
+
+The journey from Plymouth to Paddington, by even the most headlong
+express, allows quite enough leisure for passion of any sort to cool.
+Elfride’s excitement had passed off, and she sat in a kind of stupor
+during the latter half of the journey. She was aroused by the clanging
+of the maze of rails over which they traced their way at the entrance
+to the station.
+
+Is this London?” she said.
+
+“Yes, darling,” said Stephen in a tone of assurance he was far from
+feeling. To him, no less than to her, the reality so greatly differed
+from the prefiguring.
+
+She peered out as well as the window, beaded with drops, would allow
+her, and saw only the lamps, which had just been lit, blinking in the
+wet atmosphere, and rows of hideous zinc chimney-pipes in dim relief
+against the sky. She writhed uneasily, as when a thought is swelling in
+the mind which must cause much pain at its deliverance in words.
+Elfride had known no more about the stings of evil report than the
+native wild-fowl knew of the effects of Crusoe’s first shot. Now she
+saw a little further, and a little further still.
+
+The train stopped. Stephen relinquished the soft hand he had held all
+the day, and proceeded to assist her on to the platform.
+
+This act of alighting upon strange ground seemed all that was wanted to
+complete a resolution within her.
+
+She looked at her betrothed with despairing eyes.
+
+“O Stephen,” she exclaimed, “I am so miserable! I must go home again—I
+must—I must! Forgive my wretched vacillation. I don’t like it here—nor
+myself—nor you!”
+
+Stephen looked bewildered, and did not speak.
+
+“Will you allow me to go home?” she implored. “I won’t trouble you to
+go with me. I will not be any weight upon you; only say you will agree
+to my returning; that you will not hate me for it, Stephen! It is
+better that I should return again; indeed it is, Stephen.”
+
+“But we can’t return now,” he said in a deprecatory tone.
+
+“I must! I will!”
+
+“How? When do you want to go?”
+
+“Now. Can we go at once?”
+
+The lad looked hopelessly along the platform.
+
+“If you must go, and think it wrong to remain, dearest,” said he sadly,
+“you shall. You shall do whatever you like, my Elfride. But would you
+in reality rather go now than stay till to-morrow, and go as my wife?”
+
+“Yes, yes—much—anything to go now. I must; I must!” she cried.
+
+“We ought to have done one of two things,” he answered gloomily. “Never
+to have started, or not to have returned without being married. I don’t
+like to say it, Elfride—indeed I don’t; but you must be told this, that
+going back unmarried may compromise your good name in the eyes of
+people who may hear of it.”
+
+“They will not; and I must go.”
+
+“O Elfride! I am to blame for bringing you away.”
+
+“Not at all. I am the elder.”
+
+“By a month; and what’s that? But never mind that now.” He looked
+around. “Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?” he inquired of a
+guard. The guard passed on and did not speak.
+
+“Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?” said Elfride to another.
+
+“Yes, miss; the 8.10—leaves in ten minutes. You have come to the wrong
+platform; it is the other side. Change at Bristol into the night mail.
+Down that staircase, and under the line.”
+
+They ran down the staircase—Elfride first—to the booking-office, and
+into a carriage with an official standing beside the door. “Show your
+tickets, please.” They are locked in—men about the platform accelerate
+their velocities till they fly up and down like shuttles in a loom—a
+whistle—the waving of a flag—a human cry—a steam groan—and away they go
+to Plymouth again, just catching these words as they glide off:
+
+“Those two youngsters had a near run for it, and no mistake!”
+
+Elfride found her breath.
+
+“And have you come too, Stephen? Why did you?”
+
+“I shall not leave you till I see you safe at St. Launce’s. Do not
+think worse of me than I am, Elfride.”
+
+And then they rattled along through the night, back again by the way
+they had come. The weather cleared, and the stars shone in upon them.
+Their two or three fellow-passengers sat for most of the time with
+closed eyes. Stephen sometimes slept; Elfride alone was wakeful and
+palpitating hour after hour.
+
+The day began to break, and revealed that they were by the sea. Red
+rocks overhung them, and, receding into distance, grew livid in the
+blue grey atmosphere. The sun rose, and sent penetrating shafts of
+light in upon their weary faces. Another hour, and the world began to
+be busy. They waited yet a little, and the train slackened its speed in
+view of the platform at St. Launce’s.
+
+She shivered, and mused sadly.
+
+“I did not see all the consequences,” she said. “Appearances are
+wofully against me. If anybody finds me out, I am, I suppose,
+disgraced.”
+
+“Then appearances will speak falsely; and how can that matter, even if
+they do? I shall be your husband sooner or later, for certain, and so
+prove your purity.”
+
+“Stephen, once in London I ought to have married you,” she said firmly.
+“It was my only safe defence. I see more things now than I did
+yesterday. My only remaining chance is not to be discovered; and that
+we must fight for most desperately.”
+
+They stepped out. Elfride pulled a thick veil over her face.
+
+A woman with red and scaly eyelids and glistening eyes was sitting on a
+bench just inside the office-door. She fixed her eyes upon Elfride with
+an expression whose force it was impossible to doubt, but the meaning
+of which was not clear; then upon the carriage they had left. She
+seemed to read a sinister story in the scene.
+
+Elfride shrank back, and turned the other way.
+
+“Who is that woman?” said Stephen. “She looked hard at you.”
+
+“Mrs. Jethway—a widow, and mother of that young man whose tomb we sat
+on the other night. Stephen, she is my enemy. Would that God had had
+mercy enough upon me to have hidden this from HER!”
+
+“Do not talk so hopelessly,” he remonstrated. “I don’t think she
+recognized us.”
+
+“I pray that she did not.”
+
+He put on a more vigorous mood.
+
+“Now, we will go and get some breakfast.”
+
+“No, no!” she begged. “I cannot eat. I MUST get back to Endelstow.”
+
+Elfride was as if she had grown years older than Stephen now.
+
+“But you have had nothing since last night but that cup of tea at
+Bristol.”
+
+“I can’t eat, Stephen.”
+
+“Wine and biscuit?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Nor tea, nor coffee?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“A glass of water?”
+
+“No. I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the
+present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day—leaving
+to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take
+all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again
+now. Brandy, that’s what I want. That woman’s eyes have eaten my heart
+away!”
+
+“You are wild; and you grieve me, darling. Must it be brandy?”
+
+“Yes, if you please.”
+
+“How much?”
+
+“I don’t know. I have never drunk more than a teaspoonful at once. All
+I know is that I want it. Don’t get it at the Falcon.”
+
+He left her in the fields, and went to the nearest inn in that
+direction. Presently he returned with a small flask nearly full, and
+some slices of bread-and-butter, thin as wafers, in a paper-bag.
+Elfride took a sip or two.
+
+“It goes into my eyes,” she said wearily. “I can’t take any more. Yes,
+I will; I will close my eyes. Ah, it goes to them by an inside route. I
+don’t want it; throw it away.”
+
+However, she could eat, and did eat. Her chief attention was
+concentrated upon how to get the horse from the Falcon stables without
+suspicion. Stephen was not allowed to accompany her into the town. She
+acted now upon conclusions reached without any aid from him: his power
+over her seemed to have departed.
+
+“You had better not be seen with me, even here where I am so little
+known. We have begun stealthily as thieves, and we must end stealthily
+as thieves, at all hazards. Until papa has been told by me myself, a
+discovery would be terrible.”
+
+Walking and gloomily talking thus they waited till nearly nine o’clock,
+at which time Elfride thought she might call at the Falcon without
+creating much surprise. Behind the railway-station was the river,
+spanned by an old Tudor bridge, whence the road diverged in two
+directions, one skirting the suburbs of the town, and winding round
+again into the high-road to Endelstow. Beside this road Stephen sat,
+and awaited her return from the Falcon.
+
+He sat as one sitting for a portrait, motionless, watching the
+chequered lights and shades on the tree-trunks, the children playing
+opposite the school previous to entering for the morning lesson, the
+reapers in a field afar off. The certainty of possession had not come,
+and there was nothing to mitigate the youth’s gloom, that increased
+with the thought of the parting now so near.
+
+At length she came trotting round to him, in appearance much as on the
+romantic morning of their visit to the cliff, but shorn of the radiance
+which glistened about her then. However, her comparative immunity from
+further risk and trouble had considerably composed her. Elfride’s
+capacity for being wounded was only surpassed by her capacity for
+healing, which rightly or wrongly is by some considered an index of
+transientness of feeling in general.
+
+“Elfride, what did they say at the Falcon?”
+
+“Nothing. Nobody seemed curious about me. They knew I went to Plymouth,
+and I have stayed there a night now and then with Miss Bicknell. I
+rather calculated upon that.”
+
+And now parting arose like a death to these children, for it was
+imperative that she should start at once. Stephen walked beside her for
+nearly a mile. During the walk he said sadly:
+
+“Elfride, four-and-twenty hours have passed, and the thing is not
+done.”
+
+“But you have insured that it shall be done.”
+
+“How have I?”
+
+“O Stephen, you ask how! Do you think I could marry another man on
+earth after having gone thus far with you? Have I not shown beyond
+possibility of doubt that I can be nobody else’s? Have I not
+irretrievably committed myself?—pride has stood for nothing in the face
+of my great love. You misunderstood my turning back, and I cannot
+explain it. It was wrong to go with you at all; and though it would
+have been worse to go further, it would have been better policy,
+perhaps. Be assured of this, that whenever you have a home for
+me—however poor and humble—and come and claim me, I am ready.” She
+added bitterly, “When my father knows of this day’s work, he may be
+only too glad to let me go.”
+
+“Perhaps he may, then, insist upon our marriage at once!” Stephen
+answered, seeing a ray of hope in the very focus of her remorse. “I
+hope he may, even if we had still to part till I am ready for you, as
+we intended.”
+
+Elfride did not reply.
+
+“You don’t seem the same woman, Elfie, that you were yesterday.”
+
+“Nor am I. But good-bye. Go back now.” And she reined the horse for
+parting. “O Stephen,” she cried, “I feel so weak! I don’t know how to
+meet him. Cannot you, after all, come back with me?”
+
+“Shall I come?”
+
+Elfride paused to think.
+
+“No; it will not do. It is my utter foolishness that makes me say such
+words. But he will send for you.”
+
+“Say to him,” continued Stephen, “that we did this in the absolute
+despair of our minds. Tell him we don’t wish him to favour us—only to
+deal justly with us. If he says, marry now, so much the better. If not,
+say that all may be put right by his promise to allow me to have you
+when I am good enough for you—which may be soon. Say I have nothing to
+offer him in exchange for his treasure—the more sorry I; but all the
+love, and all the life, and all the labour of an honest man shall be
+yours. As to when this had better be told, I leave you to judge.”
+
+His words made her cheerful enough to toy with her position.
+
+“And if ill report should come, Stephen,” she said smiling, “why, the
+orange-tree must save me, as it saved virgins in St. George’s time from
+the poisonous breath of the dragon. There, forgive me for forwardness:
+I am going.”
+
+Then the boy and girl beguiled themselves with words of half-parting
+only.
+
+“Own wifie, God bless you till we meet again!”
+
+“Till we meet again, good-bye!”
+
+And the pony went on, and she spoke to him no more. He saw her figure
+diminish and her blue veil grow gray—saw it with the agonizing
+sensations of a slow death.
+
+After thus parting from a man than whom she had known none greater as
+yet, Elfride rode rapidly onwards, a tear being occasionally shaken
+from her eyes into the road. What yesterday had seemed so desirable, so
+promising, even trifling, had now acquired the complexion of a tragedy.
+
+She saw the rocks and sea in the neighbourhood of Endelstow, and heaved
+a sigh of relief.
+
+When she passed a field behind the vicarage she heard the voices of
+Unity and William Worm. They were hanging a carpet upon a line. Unity
+was uttering a sentence that concluded with “when Miss Elfride comes.”
+
+“When d’ye expect her?”
+
+“Not till evening now. She’s safe enough at Miss Bicknell’s, bless ye.”
+
+Elfride went round to the door. She did not knock or ring; and seeing
+nobody to take the horse, Elfride led her round to the yard, slipped
+off the bridle and saddle, drove her towards the paddock, and turned
+her in. Then Elfride crept indoors, and looked into all the
+ground-floor rooms. Her father was not there.
+
+On the mantelpiece of the drawing-room stood a letter addressed to her
+in his handwriting. She took it and read it as she went upstairs to
+change her habit.
+
+STRATLEIGH, Thursday.
+
+“DEAR ELFRIDE,—On second thoughts I will not return to-day, but only
+come as far as Wadcombe. I shall be at home by to-morrow afternoon, and
+bring a friend with me.—Yours, in haste,
+
+C. S.”
+
+After making a quick toilet she felt more revived, though still
+suffering from a headache. On going out of the door she met Unity at
+the top of the stair.
+
+“O Miss Elfride! I said to myself ’tis her sperrit! We didn’t dream o’
+you not coming home last night. You didn’t say anything about staying.”
+
+“I intended to come home the same evening, but altered my plan. I
+wished I hadn’t afterwards. Papa will be angry, I suppose?”
+
+“Better not tell him, miss,” said Unity.
+
+“I do fear to,” she murmured. “Unity, would you just begin telling him
+when he comes home?”
+
+“What! and get you into trouble?”
+
+“I deserve it.”
+
+“No, indeed, I won’t,” said Unity. “It is not such a mighty matter,
+Miss Elfride. I says to myself, master’s taking a hollerday, and
+because he’s not been kind lately to Miss Elfride, she——”
+
+“Is imitating him. Well, do as you like. And will you now bring me some
+luncheon?”
+
+After satisfying an appetite which the fresh marine air had given her
+in its victory over an agitated mind, she put on her hat and went to
+the garden and summer-house. She sat down, and leant with her head in a
+corner. Here she fell asleep.
+
+Half-awake, she hurriedly looked at the time. She had been there three
+hours. At the same moment she heard the outer gate swing together, and
+wheels sweep round the entrance; some prior noise from the same source
+having probably been the cause of her awaking. Next her father’s voice
+was heard calling to Worm.
+
+Elfride passed along a walk towards the house behind a belt of shrubs.
+She heard a tongue holding converse with her father, which was not that
+of either of the servants. Her father and the stranger were laughing
+together. Then there was a rustling of silk, and Mr. Swancourt and his
+companion, or companions, to all seeming entered the door of the house,
+for nothing more of them was audible. Elfride had turned back to
+meditate on what friends these could be, when she heard footsteps, and
+her father exclaiming behind her:
+
+“O Elfride, here you are! I hope you got on well?”
+
+Elfride’s heart smote her, and she did not speak.
+
+“Come back to the summer-house a minute,” continued Mr. Swancourt; “I
+have to tell you of that I promised to.”
+
+They entered the summer-house, and stood leaning over the knotty
+woodwork of the balustrade.
+
+“Now,” said her father radiantly, “guess what I have to say.” He seemed
+to be regarding his own existence so intently, that he took no interest
+in nor even saw the complexion of hers.
+
+“I cannot, papa,” she said sadly.
+
+“Try, dear.”
+
+“I would rather not, indeed.”
+
+“You are tired. You look worn. The ride was too much for you. Well,
+this is what I went away for. I went to be married!”
+
+“Married!” she faltered, and could hardly check an involuntary “So did
+I.” A moment after and her resolve to confess perished like a bubble.
+
+“Yes; to whom do you think? Mrs. Troyton, the new owner of the estate
+over the hedge, and of the old manor-house. It was only finally settled
+between us when I went to Stratleigh a few days ago.” He lowered his
+voice to a sly tone of merriment. “Now, as to your stepmother, you’ll
+find she is not much to look at, though a good deal to listen to. She
+is twenty years older than myself, for one thing.”
+
+“You forget that I know her. She called here once, after we had been,
+and found her away from home.”
+
+“Of course, of course. Well, whatever her looks are, she’s as excellent
+a woman as ever breathed. She has had lately left her as absolute
+property three thousand five hundred a year, besides the devise of this
+estate—and, by the way, a large legacy came to her in satisfaction of
+dower, as it is called.”
+
+“Three thousand five hundred a year!”
+
+“And a large—well, a fair-sized—mansion in town, and a pedigree as long
+as my walking-stick; though that bears evidence of being rather a
+raked-up affair—done since the family got rich—people do those things
+now as they build ruins on maiden estates and cast antiques at
+Birmingham.”
+
+Elfride merely listened and said nothing.
+
+He continued more quietly and impressively. “Yes, Elfride, she is
+wealthy in comparison with us, though with few connections. However,
+she will introduce you to the world a little. We are going to exchange
+her house in Baker Street for one at Kensington, for your sake.
+Everybody is going there now, she says. At Easters we shall fly to town
+for the usual three months—I shall have a curate of course by that
+time. Elfride, I am past love, you know, and I honestly confess that I
+married her for your sake. Why a woman of her standing should have
+thrown herself away upon me, God knows. But I suppose her age and
+plainness were too pronounced for a town man. With your good looks, if
+you now play your cards well, you may marry anybody. Of course, a
+little contrivance will be necessary; but there’s nothing to stand
+between you and a husband with a title, that I can see. Lady Luxellian
+was only a squire’s daughter. Now, don’t you see how foolish the old
+fancy was? But come, she is indoors waiting to see you. It is as good
+as a play, too,” continued the vicar, as they walked towards the house.
+“I courted her through the privet hedge yonder: not entirely, you know,
+but we used to walk there of an evening—nearly every evening at last.
+But I needn’t tell you details now; everything was terribly
+matter-of-fact, I assure you. At last, that day I saw her at
+Stratleigh, we determined to settle it off-hand.”
+
+“And you never said a word to me,” replied Elfride, not reproachfully
+either in tone or thought. Indeed, her feeling was the very reverse of
+reproachful. She felt relieved and even thankful. Where confidence had
+not been given, how could confidence be expected?
+
+Her father mistook her dispassionateness for a veil of politeness over
+a sense of ill-usage. “I am not altogether to blame,” he said. “There
+were two or three reasons for secrecy. One was the recent death of her
+relative the testator, though that did not apply to you. But remember,
+Elfride,” he continued in a stiffer tone, “you had mixed yourself up so
+foolishly with those low people, the Smiths—and it was just, too, when
+Mrs. Troyton and myself were beginning to understand each other—that I
+resolved to say nothing even to you. How did I know how far you had
+gone with them and their son? You might have made a point of taking tea
+with them every day, for all that I knew.”
+
+Elfride swallowed her feelings as she best could, and languidly though
+flatly asked a question.
+
+“Did you kiss Mrs. Troyton on the lawn about three weeks ago? That
+evening I came into the study and found you had just had candles in?”
+
+Mr. Swancourt looked rather red and abashed, as middle-aged lovers are
+apt to do when caught in the tricks of younger ones.
+
+“Well, yes; I think I did,” he stammered; “just to please her, you
+know.” And then recovering himself he laughed heartily.
+
+“And was this what your Horatian quotation referred to?”
+
+“It was, Elfride.”
+
+They stepped into the drawing-room from the verandah. At that moment
+Mrs. Swancourt came downstairs, and entered the same room by the door.
+
+“Here, Charlotte, is my little Elfride,” said Mr. Swancourt, with the
+increased affection of tone often adopted towards relations when newly
+produced.
+
+Poor Elfride, not knowing what to do, did nothing at all; but stood
+receptive of all that came to her by sight, hearing, and touch.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt moved forward, took her step-daughter’s hand, then
+kissed her.
+
+“Ah, darling!” she exclaimed good-humouredly, “you didn’t think when
+you showed a strange old woman over the conservatory a month or two
+ago, and explained the flowers to her so prettily, that she would so
+soon be here in new colours. Nor did she, I am sure.”
+
+The new mother had been truthfully enough described by Mr. Swancourt.
+She was not physically attractive. She was dark—very dark—in
+complexion, portly in figure, and with a plentiful residuum of hair in
+the proportion of half a dozen white ones to half a dozen black ones,
+though the latter were black indeed. No further observed, she was not a
+woman to like. But there was more to see. To the most superficial
+critic it was apparent that she made no attempt to disguise her age.
+She looked sixty at the first glance, and close acquaintanceship never
+proved her older.
+
+Another and still more winning trait was one attaching to the corners
+of her mouth. Before she made a remark these often twitched gently: not
+backwards and forwards, the index of nervousness; not down upon the
+jaw, the sign of determination; but palpably upwards, in precisely the
+curve adopted to represent mirth in the broad caricatures of
+schoolboys. Only this element in her face was expressive of anything
+within the woman, but it was unmistakable. It expressed humour
+subjective as well as objective—which could survey the peculiarities of
+self in as whimsical a light as those of other people.
+
+This is not all of Mrs. Swancourt. She had held out to Elfride hands
+whose fingers were literally stiff with rings, signis auroque rigentes,
+like Helen’s robe. These rows of rings were not worn in vanity
+apparently. They were mostly antique and dull, though a few were the
+reverse.
+
+RIGHT HAND.
+
+1st. Plainly set oval onyx, representing a devil’s head. 2nd. Green
+jasper intaglio, with red veins. 3rd. Entirely gold, bearing figure of
+a hideous griffin. 4th. A sea-green monster diamond, with small
+diamonds round it. 5th. Antique cornelian intaglio of dancing figure of
+a satyr. 6th. An angular band chased with dragons’ heads. 7th. A
+facetted carbuncle accompanied by ten little twinkling emeralds; &c.
+&c.
+
+LEFT HAND.
+
+1st. A reddish-yellow toadstone. 2nd. A heavy ring enamelled in
+colours, and bearing a jacynth. 3rd. An amethystine sapphire. 4th. A
+polished ruby, surrounded by diamonds. 5th. The engraved ring of an
+abbess. 6th. A gloomy intaglio; &c. &c.
+
+Beyond this rather quaint array of stone and metal Mrs. Swancourt wore
+no ornament whatever.
+
+Elfride had been favourably impressed with Mrs. Troyton at their
+meeting about two months earlier; but to be pleased with a woman as a
+momentary acquaintance was different from being taken with her as a
+stepmother. However, the suspension of feeling was but for a moment.
+Elfride decided to like her still.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt was a woman of the world as to knowledge, the reverse as
+to action, as her marriage suggested. Elfride and the lady were soon
+inextricably involved in conversation, and Mr. Swancourt left them to
+themselves.
+
+“And what do you find to do with yourself here?” Mrs. Swancourt said,
+after a few remarks about the wedding. “You ride, I know.”
+
+“Yes, I ride. But not much, because papa doesn’t like my going alone.”
+
+“You must have somebody to look after you.”
+
+“And I read, and write a little.”
+
+“You should write a novel. The regular resource of people who don’t go
+enough into the world to live a novel is to write one.”
+
+“I have done it,” said Elfride, looking dubiously at Mrs. Swancourt, as
+if in doubt whether she would meet with ridicule there.
+
+“That’s right. Now, then, what is it about, dear?”
+
+“About—well, it is a romance of the Middle Ages.”
+
+“Knowing nothing of the present age, which everybody knows about, for
+safety you chose an age known neither to you nor other people. That’s
+it, eh? No, no; I don’t mean it, dear.”
+
+“Well, I have had some opportunities of studying mediaeval art and
+manners in the library and private museum at Endelstow House, and I
+thought I should like to try my hand upon a fiction. I know the time
+for these tales is past; but I was interested in it, very much
+interested.”
+
+“When is it to appear?”
+
+“Oh, never, I suppose.”
+
+“Nonsense, my dear girl. Publish it, by all means. All ladies do that
+sort of thing now; not for profit, you know, but as a guarantee of
+mental respectability to their future husbands.”
+
+“An excellent idea of us ladies.”
+
+“Though I am afraid it rather resembles the melancholy ruse of throwing
+loaves over castle-walls at besiegers, and suggests desperation rather
+than plenty inside.”
+
+“Did you ever try it?”
+
+“No; I was too far gone even for that.”
+
+“Papa says no publisher will take my book.”
+
+“That remains to be proved. I’ll give my word, my dear, that by this
+time next year it shall be printed.”
+
+“Will you, indeed?” said Elfride, partially brightening with pleasure,
+though she was sad enough in her depths. “I thought brains were the
+indispensable, even if the only, qualification for admission to the
+republic of letters. A mere commonplace creature like me will soon be
+turned out again.”
+
+“Oh no; once you are there you’ll be like a drop of water in a piece of
+rock-crystal—your medium will dignify your commonness.”
+
+“It will be a great satisfaction,” Elfride murmured, and thought of
+Stephen, and wished she could make a great fortune by writing romances,
+and marry him and live happily.
+
+“And then we’ll go to London, and then to Paris,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
+“I have been talking to your father about it. But we have first to move
+into the manor-house, and we think of staying at Torquay whilst that is
+going on. Meanwhile, instead of going on a honeymoon scamper by
+ourselves, we have come home to fetch you, and go all together to Bath
+for two or three weeks.”
+
+Elfride assented pleasantly, even gladly; but she saw that, by this
+marriage, her father and herself had ceased for ever to be the close
+relations they had been up to a few weeks ago. It was impossible now to
+tell him the tale of her wild elopement with Stephen Smith.
+
+He was still snugly housed in her heart. His absence had regained for
+him much of that aureola of saintship which had been nearly abstracted
+during her reproachful mood on that miserable journey from London.
+Rapture is often cooled by contact with its cause, especially if under
+awkward conditions. And that last experience with Stephen had done
+anything but make him shine in her eyes. His very kindness in letting
+her return was his offence. Elfride had her sex’s love of sheer force
+in a man, however ill-directed; and at that critical juncture in London
+Stephen’s only chance of retaining the ascendancy over her that his
+face and not his parts had acquired for him, would have been by doing
+what, for one thing, he was too youthful to undertake—that was,
+dragging her by the wrist to the rails of some altar, and peremptorily
+marrying her. Decisive action is seen by appreciative minds to be
+frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but decision, however
+suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most unequivocal Fabian
+success.
+
+However, some of the unpleasant accessories of that occasion were now
+out of sight again, and Stephen had resumed not a few of his fancy
+colours.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+
+“He set in order many proverbs.”
+
+
+It is London in October—two months further on in the story.
+
+Bede’s Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and
+discharges into a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth and
+respectability, whilst its postern abuts on as crowded and
+poverty-stricken a network of alleys as are to be found anywhere in the
+metropolis. The moral consequences are, first, that those who occupy
+chambers in the Inn may see a great deal of shirtless humanity’s habits
+and enjoyments without doing more than look down from a back window;
+and second they may hear wholesome though unpleasant social reminders
+through the medium of a harsh voice, an unequal footstep, the echo of a
+blow or a fall, which originates in the person of some drunkard or
+wife-beater, as he crosses and interferes with the quiet of the square.
+Characters of this kind frequently pass through the Inn from a little
+foxhole of an alley at the back, but they never loiter there.
+
+It is hardly necessary to state that all the sights and movements
+proper to the Inn are most orderly. On the fine October evening on
+which we follow Stephen Smith to this place, a placid porter is sitting
+on a stool under a sycamore-tree in the midst, with a little cane in
+his hand. We notice the thick coat of soot upon the branches, hanging
+underneath them in flakes, as in a chimney. The blackness of these
+boughs does not at present improve the tree—nearly forsaken by its
+leaves as it is—but in the spring their green fresh beauty is made
+doubly beautiful by the contrast. Within the railings is a
+flower-garden of respectable dahlias and chrysanthemums, where a man is
+sweeping the leaves from the grass.
+
+Stephen selects a doorway, and ascends an old though wide wooden
+staircase, with moulded balusters and handrail, which in a country
+manor-house would be considered a noteworthy specimen of Renaissance
+workmanship. He reaches a door on the first floor, over which is
+painted, in black letters, “Mr. Henry Knight”—“Barrister-at-law” being
+understood but not expressed. The wall is thick, and there is a door at
+its outer and inner face. The outer one happens to be ajar: Stephen
+goes to the other, and taps.
+
+“Come in!” from distant penetralia.
+
+First was a small anteroom, divided from the inner apartment by a
+wainscoted archway two or three yards wide. Across this archway hung a
+pair of dark-green curtains, making a mystery of all within the arch
+except the spasmodic scratching of a quill pen. Here was grouped a
+chaotic assemblage of articles—mainly old framed prints and
+paintings—leaning edgewise against the wall, like roofing slates in a
+builder’s yard. All the books visible here were folios too big to be
+stolen—some lying on a heavy oak table in one corner, some on the floor
+among the pictures, the whole intermingled with old coats, hats,
+umbrellas, and walking-sticks.
+
+Stephen pushed aside the curtain, and before him sat a man writing away
+as if his life depended upon it—which it did.
+
+A man of thirty in a speckled coat, with dark brown hair, curly beard,
+and crisp moustache: the latter running into the beard on each side of
+the mouth, and, as usual, hiding the real expression of that organ
+under a chronic aspect of impassivity.
+
+“Ah, my dear fellow, I knew ’twas you,” said Knight, looking up with a
+smile, and holding out his hand.
+
+Knight’s mouth and eyes came to view now. Both features were good, and
+had the peculiarity of appearing younger and fresher than the brow and
+face they belonged to, which were getting sicklied o’er by the
+unmistakable pale cast. The mouth had not quite relinquished rotundity
+of curve for the firm angularities of middle life; and the eyes, though
+keen, permeated rather than penetrated: what they had lost of their
+boy-time brightness by a dozen years of hard reading lending a
+quietness to their gaze which suited them well.
+
+A lady would have said there was a smell of tobacco in the room: a man
+that there was not.
+
+Knight did not rise. He looked at a timepiece on the mantelshelf, then
+turned again to his letters, pointing to a chair.
+
+“Well, I am glad you have come. I only returned to town yesterday; now,
+don’t speak, Stephen, for ten minutes; I have just that time to the
+late post. At the eleventh minute, I’m your man.”
+
+Stephen sat down as if this kind of reception was by no means new, and
+away went Knight’s pen, beating up and down like a ship in a storm.
+
+Cicero called the library the soul of the house; here the house was all
+soul. Portions of the floor, and half the wall-space, were taken up by
+book-shelves ordinary and extraordinary; the remaining parts, together
+with brackets, side-tables, &c., being occupied by casts, statuettes,
+medallions, and plaques of various descriptions, picked up by the owner
+in his wanderings through France and Italy.
+
+One stream only of evening sunlight came into the room from a window
+quite in the corner, overlooking a court. An aquarium stood in the
+window. It was a dull parallelopipedon enough for living creatures at
+most hours of the day; but for a few minutes in the evening, as now, an
+errant, kindly ray lighted up and warmed the little world therein, when
+the many-coloured zoophytes opened and put forth their arms, the weeds
+acquired a rich transparency, the shells gleamed of a more golden
+yellow, and the timid community expressed gladness more plainly than in
+words.
+
+Within the prescribed ten minutes Knight flung down his pen, rang for
+the boy to take the letters to the post, and at the closing of the door
+exclaimed, “There; thank God, that’s done. Now, Stephen, pull your
+chair round, and tell me what you have been doing all this time. Have
+you kept up your Greek?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“How’s that?”
+
+“I haven’t enough spare time.”
+
+“That’s nonsense.”
+
+“Well, I have done a great many things, if not that. And I have done
+one extraordinary thing.”
+
+Knight turned full upon Stephen. “Ah-ha! Now, then, let me look into
+your face, put two and two together, and make a shrewd guess.”
+
+Stephen changed to a redder colour.
+
+“Why, Smith,” said Knight, after holding him rigidly by the shoulders,
+and keenly scrutinising his countenance for a minute in silence, “you
+have fallen in love.”
+
+“Well—the fact is——”
+
+“Now, out with it.” But seeing that Stephen looked rather distressed,
+he changed to a kindly tone. “Now Smith, my lad, you know me well
+enough by this time, or you ought to; and you know very well that if
+you choose to give me a detailed account of the phenomenon within you,
+I shall listen; if you don’t, I am the last man in the world to care to
+hear it.”
+
+“I’ll tell this much: I HAVE fallen in love, and I want to be MARRIED.”
+
+Knight looked ominous as this passed Stephen’s lips.
+
+“Don’t judge me before you have heard more,” cried Stephen anxiously,
+seeing the change in his friend’s countenance.
+
+“I don’t judge. Does your mother know about it?”
+
+“Nothing definite.”
+
+“Father?”
+
+“No. But I’ll tell you. The young person——”
+
+“Come, that’s dreadfully ungallant. But perhaps I understand the frame
+of mind a little, so go on. Your sweetheart——”
+
+“She is rather higher in the world than I am.”
+
+“As it should be.”
+
+“And her father won’t hear of it, as I now stand.”
+
+“Not an uncommon case.”
+
+“And now comes what I want your advice upon. Something has happened at
+her house which makes it out of the question for us to ask her father
+again now. So we are keeping silent. In the meantime an architect in
+India has just written to Mr. Hewby to ask whether he can find for him
+a young assistant willing to go over to Bombay to prepare drawings for
+work formerly done by the engineers. The salary he offers is 350 rupees
+a month, or about 35 Pounds. Hewby has mentioned it to me, and I have
+been to Dr. Wray, who says I shall acclimatise without much illness.
+Now, would you go?”
+
+“You mean to say, because it is a possible road to the young lady.”
+
+“Yes; I was thinking I could go over and make a little money, and then
+come back and ask for her. I have the option of practising for myself
+after a year.”
+
+“Would she be staunch?”
+
+“Oh yes! For ever—to the end of her life!”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“Why, how do people know? Of course, she will.”
+
+Knight leant back in his chair. “Now, though I know her thoroughly as
+she exists in your heart, Stephen, I don’t know her in the flesh. All I
+want to ask is, is this idea of going to India based entirely upon a
+belief in her fidelity?”
+
+“Yes; I should not go if it were not for her.”
+
+“Well, Stephen, you have put me in rather an awkward position. If I
+give my true sentiments, I shall hurt your feelings; if I don’t, I
+shall hurt my own judgment. And remember, I don’t know much about
+women.”
+
+“But you have had attachments, although you tell me very little about
+them.”
+
+“And I only hope you’ll continue to prosper till I tell you more.”
+
+Stephen winced at this rap. “I have never formed a deep attachment,”
+continued Knight. “I never have found a woman worth it. Nor have I been
+once engaged to be married.”
+
+“You write as if you had been engaged a hundred times, if I may be
+allowed to say so,” said Stephen in an injured tone.
+
+“Yes, that may be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who half know
+a thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don’t take
+the trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of
+generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the
+weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a
+crow might; no more.”
+
+Knight stopped as if he had fallen into a train of thought, and Stephen
+looked with affectionate awe at a master whose mind, he believed, could
+swallow up at one meal all that his own head contained.
+
+There was affective sympathy, but no great intellectual fellowship,
+between Knight and Stephen Smith. Knight had seen his young friend when
+the latter was a cherry-cheeked happy boy, had been interested in him,
+had kept his eye upon him, and generously helped the lad to books, till
+the mere connection of patronage grew to acquaintance, and that ripened
+to friendship. And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would
+have deliberately chosen as a friend—or even for one of a group of a
+dozen friends—he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it
+all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving
+alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have
+chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in
+human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all
+that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere
+physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our
+confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift.
+
+“And what do you think of her?” Stephen ventured to say, after a
+silence.
+
+“Taking her merits on trust from you,” said Knight, “as we do those of
+the Roman poets of whom we know nothing but that they lived, I still
+think she will not stick to you through, say, three years of absence in
+India.”
+
+“But she will!” cried Stephen desperately. “She is a girl all delicacy
+and honour. And no woman of that kind, who has committed herself so
+into a man’s hands as she has into mine, could possibly marry another.”
+
+“How has she committed herself?” asked Knight cunously.
+
+Stephen did not answer. Knight had looked on his love so sceptically
+that it would not do to say all that he had intended to say by any
+means.
+
+“Well, don’t tell,” said Knight. “But you are begging the question,
+which is, I suppose, inevitable in love.”
+
+“And I’ll tell you another thing,” the younger man pleaded. “You
+remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don’t
+you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their
+bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their
+confusion has any GRACE in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm
+of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a
+part with them.”
+
+“It is true, quite,” said Knight musingly.
+
+It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of the
+master long after the master himself had forgotten them.
+
+“Well, that was like her!” cried Stephen triumphantly. “She was in such
+a flurry that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
+
+“Splendid, splendid!” said Knight soothingly. “So that all I have to
+say is, that if you see a good opening in Bombay there’s no reason why
+you should not go without troubling to draw fine distinctions as to
+reasons. No man fully realizes what opinions he acts upon, or what his
+actions mean.”
+
+“Yes; I go to Bombay. I’ll write a note here, if you don’t mind.”
+
+“Sleep over it—it is the best plan—and write to-morrow. Meantime, go
+there to that window and sit down, and look at my Humanity Show. I am
+going to dine out this evening, and have to dress here out of my
+portmanteau. I bring up my things like this to save the trouble of
+going down to my place at Richmond and back again.”
+
+Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his
+portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of sunlight
+had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept: a
+dusky gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of light shone
+over the window.
+
+“There!” said Knight, “where is there in England a spectacle to equal
+that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go home. Softly
+open the sash.”
+
+Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence turning
+sideways and passing under an arch, so that Knight’s back window was
+immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the alley
+lengthwise. Crowds—mostly of women—were surging, bustling, and pacing
+up and down. Gaslights glared from butchers’ stalls, illuminating the
+lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild
+colouring of Turner’s later pictures, whilst the purl and babble of
+tongues of every pitch and mood was to this human wild-wood what the
+ripple of a brook is to the natural forest.
+
+Nearly ten minutes passed. Then Knight also came to the window.
+
+“Well, now, I call a cab and vanish down the street in the direction of
+Berkeley Square,” he said, buttoning his waistcoat and kicking his
+morning suit into a corner. Stephen rose to leave.
+
+“What a heap of literature!” remarked the young man, taking a final
+longing survey round the room, as if to abide there for ever would be
+the great pleasure of his life, yet feeling that he had almost
+outstayed his welcome-while. His eyes rested upon an arm-chair piled
+full of newspapers, magazines, and bright new volumes in green and red.
+
+“Yes,” said Knight, also looking at them and breathing a sigh of
+weariness; “something must be done with several of them soon, I
+suppose. Stephen, you needn’t hurry away for a few minutes, you know,
+if you want to stay; I am not quite ready. Overhaul those volumes
+whilst I put on my coat, and I’ll walk a little way with you.”
+
+Stephen sat down beside the arm-chair and began to tumble the books
+about. Among the rest he found a novelette in one volume, THE COURT OF
+KELLYON CASTLE. By Ernest Field.
+
+“Are you going to review this?” inquired Stephen with apparent
+unconcern, and holding up Elfride’s effusion.
+
+“Which? Oh, that! I may—though I don’t do much light reviewing now. But
+it is reviewable.”
+
+“How do you mean?”
+
+Knight never liked to be asked what he meant. “Mean! I mean that the
+majority of books published are neither good enough nor bad enough to
+provoke criticism, and that that book does provoke it.”
+
+“By its goodness or its badness?” Stephen said with some anxiety on
+poor little Elfride’s score.
+
+“Its badness. It seems to be written by some girl in her teens.”
+
+Stephen said not another word. He did not care to speak plainly of
+Elfride after that unfortunate slip his tongue had made in respect of
+her having committed herself; and, apart from that, Knight’s
+severe—almost dogged and self-willed—honesty in criticizing was
+unassailable by the humble wish of a youthful friend like Stephen.
+
+Knight was now ready. Turning off the gas, and slamming together the
+door, they went downstairs and into the street.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+
+“We frolic while ’tis May.”
+
+
+It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have
+passed away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to
+the previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms of summer in
+the year following.
+
+Stephen is in India, slaving away at an office in Bombay; occasionally
+going up the country on professional errands, and wondering why people
+who had been there longer than he complained so much of the effect of
+the climate upon their constitutions. Never had a young man a finer
+start than seemed now to present itself to Stephen. It was just in that
+exceptional heyday of prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years
+ago, that he arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of
+the general impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity
+every successive day, the only disagreeable contingency connected with
+it being the possibility of a collapse.
+
+Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours’
+escapade with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his ears
+by any other route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a
+short time, and Stephen’s departure was another ingredient in her
+sorrow. But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of
+trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a
+misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at
+a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and
+replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.
+
+And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was
+bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which,
+though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert
+her thoughts. The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more
+commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt’s, overlooking the same valley.
+Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to
+feminine soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of
+dignity reconciled him to the change. So there was a radical “move;”
+the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going
+to and fro.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride’s ideas in an aristocratic
+direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic
+marriage. Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at
+three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.
+
+The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
+
+The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked
+in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they
+were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for
+by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again
+the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six
+o’clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and
+beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low
+musical voice—the only beautiful point in the old woman—prevented from
+being wearisome.
+
+“Now,” she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full of
+admiration for the brilliant scene, “you will find that our
+companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an
+extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures
+here. I always am a listener in such places as these—not to the
+narratives told by my neighbours’ tongues, but by their faces—the
+advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or
+Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill
+in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many
+years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not
+consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,—how truly
+people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.”
+
+“Ay, that they will,” said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. “I have known
+labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete
+systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds,
+clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the
+crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people
+with watches in their pockets never know the existence of, they are
+able to pronounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required
+instant. That reminds me of an old story which I’m afraid is too
+bad—too bad to repeat.” Here the vicar shook his head and laughed
+inwardly.
+
+“Tell it—do!” said the ladies.
+
+“I mustn’t quite tell it.”
+
+“That’s absurd,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
+
+“It was only about a man who, by the same careful system of
+observation, was known to deceive persons for more than two years into
+the belief that he kept a barometer by stealth, so exactly did he
+foretell all changes in the weather by the braying of his ass and the
+temper of his wife.”
+
+Elfride laughed.
+
+“Exactly,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “And in just the way that those learnt
+the signs of nature, I have learnt the language of her illegitimate
+sister—artificiality; and the fibbing of eyes, the contempt of
+nose-tips, the indignation of back hair, the laughter of clothes, the
+cynicism of footsteps, and the various emotions lying in walking-stick
+twirls, hat-liftings, the elevation of parasols, the carriage of
+umbrellas, become as A B C to me.
+
+“Just look at that daughter’s sister class of mamma in the carriage
+across there,” she continued to Elfride, pointing with merely a turn of
+her eye. “The absorbing self-consciousness of her position that is
+shown by her countenance is most humiliating to a lover of one’s
+country. You would hardly believe, would you, that members of a
+Fashionable World, whose professed zero is far above the highest degree
+of the humble, could be so ignorant of the elementary instincts of
+reticence.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“Why, to bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the
+inscription, ‘Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels.’”
+
+“Really, Charlotte,” said the vicar, “you see as much in faces as Mr.
+Puff saw in Lord Burleigh’s nod.”
+
+Elfride could not but admire the beauty of her fellow countrywomen,
+especially since herself and her own few acquaintances had always been
+slightly sunburnt or marked on the back of the hands by a
+bramble-scratch at this time of the year.
+
+“And what lovely flowers and leaves they wear in their bonnets!” she
+exclaimed.
+
+“Oh yes,” returned Mrs. Swancourt. “Some of them are even more striking
+in colour than any real ones. Look at that beautiful rose worn by the
+lady inside the rails. Elegant vine-tendrils introduced upon the stem
+as an improvement upon prickles, and all growing so naturally just over
+her ear—I say growing advisedly, for the pink of the petals and the
+pink of her handsome cheeks are equally from Nature’s hand to the eyes
+of the most casual observer.”
+
+“But praise them a little, they do deserve it!” said generous Elfride.
+
+“Well, I do. See how the Duchess of——waves to and fro in her seat,
+utilizing the sway of her landau by looking around only when her head
+is swung forward, with a passive pride which forbids a resistance to
+the force of circumstance. Look at the pretty pout on the mouths of
+that family there, retaining no traces of being arranged beforehand, so
+well is it done. Look at the demure close of the little fists holding
+the parasols; the tiny alert thumb, sticking up erect against the ivory
+stem as knowing as can be, the satin of the parasol invariably matching
+the complexion of the face beneath it, yet seemingly by an accident,
+which makes the thing so attractive. There’s the red book lying on the
+opposite seat, bespeaking the vast numbers of their acquaintance. And I
+particularly admire the aspect of that abundantly daughtered woman on
+the other side—I mean her look of unconsciousness that the girls are
+stared at by the walkers, and above all the look of the girls
+themselves—losing their gaze in the depths of handsome men’s eyes
+without appearing to notice whether they are observing masculine eyes
+or the leaves of the trees. There’s praise for you. But I am only
+jesting, child—you know that.”
+
+“Piph-ph-ph—how warm it is, to be sure!” said Mr. Swancourt, as if his
+mind were a long distance from all he saw. “I declare that my watch is
+so hot that I can scarcely bear to touch it to see what the time is,
+and all the world smells like the inside of a hat.”
+
+“How the men stare at you, Elfride!” said the elder lady. “You will
+kill me quite, I am afraid.”
+
+“Kill you?”
+
+“As a diamond kills an opal in the same setting.”
+
+“I have noticed several ladies and gentlemen looking at me,” said
+Elfride artlessly, showing her pleasure at being observed.
+
+“My dear, you mustn’t say ‘gentlemen’ nowadays,” her stepmother
+answered in the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness.
+“We have handed over ‘gentlemen’ to the lower middle class, where the
+word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial
+tea-parties, I believe. It is done with here.”
+
+“What must I say, then?”
+
+“‘Ladies and MEN’ always.”
+
+At this moment appeared in the stream of vehicles moving in the
+contrary direction a chariot presenting in its general surface the rich
+indigo hue of a midnight sky, the wheels and margins being picked out
+in delicate lines of ultramarine; the servants’ liveries were dark-blue
+coats and silver lace, and breeches of neutral Indian red. The whole
+concern formed an organic whole, and moved along behind a pair of dark
+chestnut geldings, who advanced in an indifferently zealous trot, very
+daintily performed, and occasionally shrugged divers points of their
+veiny surface as if they were rather above the business.
+
+In this sat a gentleman with no decided characteristics more than that
+he somewhat resembled a good-natured commercial traveller of the
+superior class. Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and
+complexion, belonging to the ‘interesting’ class of women, where that
+class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to
+enjoy nothing. Opposite this pair sat two little girls in white hats
+and blue feathers.
+
+The lady saw Elfride, smiled and bowed, and touched her husband’s
+elbow, who turned and received Elfride’s movement of recognition with a
+gallant elevation of his hat. Then the two children held up their arms
+to Elfride, and laughed gleefully.
+
+“Who is that?”
+
+“Why, Lord Luxellian, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Swancourt, who with the
+vicar had been seated with her back towards them.
+
+“Yes,” replied Elfride. “He is the one man of those I have seen here
+whom I consider handsomer than papa.”
+
+“Thank you, dear,” said Mr. Swancourt.
+
+“Yes; but your father is so much older. When Lord Luxellian gets a
+little further on in life, he won’t be half so good-looking as our
+man.”
+
+“Thank you, dear, likewise,” said Mr. Swancourt.
+
+“See,” exclaimed Elfride, still looking towards them, “how those little
+dears want me! Actually one of them is crying for me to come.”
+
+“We were talking of bracelets just now. Look at Lady Luxellian’s,” said
+Mrs. Swancourt, as that baroness lifted up her arm to support one of
+the children. “It is slipping up her arm—too large by half. I hate to
+see daylight between a bracelet and a wrist; I wonder women haven’t
+better taste.”
+
+“It is not on that account, indeed,” Elfride expostulated. “It is that
+her arm has got thin, poor thing. You cannot think how much she has
+altered in this last twelvemonth.”
+
+The carriages were now nearer together, and there was an exchange of
+more familiar greetings between the two families. Then the Luxellians
+crossed over and drew up under the plane-trees, just in the rear of the
+Swancourts. Lord Luxellian alighted, and came forward with a musical
+laugh.
+
+It was his attraction as a man. People liked him for those tones, and
+forgot that he had no talents. Acquaintances remembered Mr. Swancourt
+by his manner; they remembered Stephen Smith by his face, Lord
+Luxellian by his laugh.
+
+Mr. Swancourt made some friendly remarks—among others things upon the
+heat.
+
+“Yes,” said Lord Luxellian, “we were driving by a furrier’s window this
+afternoon, and the sight filled us all with such a sense of suffocation
+that we were glad to get away. Ha-ha!” He turned to Elfride. “Miss
+Swancourt, I have hardly seen or spoken to you since your literary feat
+was made public. I had no idea a chiel was taking notes down at quiet
+Endelstow, or I should certainly have put myself and friends upon our
+best behaviour. Swancourt, why didn’t you give me a hint!”
+
+Elfride fluttered, blushed, laughed, said it was nothing to speak of,
+&c. &c.
+
+“Well, I think you were rather unfairly treated by the PRESENT, I
+certainly do. Writing a heavy review like that upon an elegant trifle
+like the COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE was absurd.”
+
+“What?” said Elfride, opening her eyes. “Was I reviewed in the
+PRESENT?”
+
+“Oh yes; didn’t you see it? Why, it was four or five months ago!”
+
+“No, I never saw it. How sorry I am! What a shame of my publishers!
+They promised to send me every notice that appeared.”
+
+“Ah, then, I am almost afraid I have been giving you disagreeable
+information, intentionally withheld out of courtesy. Depend upon it
+they thought no good would come of sending it, and so would not pain
+you unnecessarily.”
+
+“Oh no; I am indeed glad you have told me, Lord Luxellian. It is quite
+a mistaken kindness on their part. Is the review so much against me?”
+she inquired tremulously.
+
+“No, no; not that exactly—though I almost forget its exact purport now.
+It was merely—merely sharp, you know—ungenerous, I might say. But
+really my memory does not enable me to speak decidedly.”
+
+“We’ll drive to the PRESENT office, and get one directly; shall we,
+papa?”
+
+“If you are so anxious, dear, we will, or send. But to-morrow will do.”
+
+“And do oblige me in a little matter now, Elfride,” said Lord Luxellian
+warmly, and looking as if he were sorry he had brought news that
+disturbed her. “I am in reality sent here as a special messenger by my
+little Polly and Katie to ask you to come into our carriage with them
+for a short time. I am just going to walk across into Piccadilly, and
+my wife is left alone with them. I am afraid they are rather spoilt
+children; but I have half promised them you shall come.”
+
+The steps were let down, and Elfride was transferred—to the intense
+delight of the little girls, and to the mild interest of loungers with
+red skins and long necks, who cursorily eyed the performance with their
+walking-sticks to their lips, occasionally laughing from far down their
+throats and with their eyes, their mouths not being concerned in the
+operation at all. Lord Luxellian then told the coachman to drive on,
+lifted his hat, smiled a smile that missed its mark and alighted on a
+total stranger, who bowed in bewilderment. Lord Luxellian looked long
+at Elfride.
+
+The look was a manly, open, and genuine look of admiration; a momentary
+tribute of a kind which any honest Englishman might have paid to
+fairness without being ashamed of the feeling, or permitting it to
+encroach in the slightest degree upon his emotional obligations as a
+husband and head of a family. Then Lord Luxellian turned away, and
+walked musingly to the upper end of the promenade.
+
+Mr. Swancourt had alighted at the same time with Elfride, crossing over
+to the Row for a few minutes to speak to a friend he recognized there;
+and his wife was thus left sole tenant of the carriage.
+
+Now, whilst this little act had been in course of performance, there
+stood among the promenading spectators a man of somewhat different
+description from the rest. Behind the general throng, in the rear of
+the chairs, and leaning against the trunk of a tree, he looked at
+Elfride with quiet and critical interest.
+
+Three points about this unobtrusive person showed promptly to the
+exercised eye that he was not a Row man pur sang. First, an
+irrepressible wrinkle or two in the waist of his frock-coat—denoting
+that he had not damned his tailor sufficiently to drive that tradesman
+up to the orthodox high pressure of cunning workmanship. Second, a
+slight slovenliness of umbrella, occasioned by its owner’s habit of
+resting heavily upon it, and using it as a veritable walking-stick,
+instead of letting its point touch the ground in the most coquettish of
+kisses, as is the proper Row manner to do. Third, and chief reason,
+that try how you might, you could scarcely help supposing, on looking
+at his face, that your eyes were not far from a well-finished mind,
+instead of the well-finished skin et praeterea nihil, which is by
+rights the Mark of the Row.
+
+The probability is that, had not Mrs. Swancourt been left alone in her
+carriage under the tree, this man would have remained in his unobserved
+seclusion. But seeing her thus, he came round to the front, stooped
+under the rail, and stood beside the carriage-door.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt looked reflectively at him for a quarter of a minute,
+then held out her hand laughingly:
+
+“Why, Henry Knight—of course it is! My—second—third—fourth cousin—what
+shall I say? At any rate, my kinsman.”
+
+“Yes, one of a remnant not yet cut off. I scarcely was certain of you,
+either, from where I was standing.”
+
+“I have not seen you since you first went to Oxford; consider the
+number of years! You know, I suppose, of my marriage?”
+
+And there sprang up a dialogue concerning family matters of birth,
+death, and marriage, which it is not necessary to detail. Knight
+presently inquired:
+
+“The young lady who changed into the other carriage is, then, your
+stepdaughter?”
+
+“Yes, Elfride. You must know her.”
+
+“And who was the lady in the carriage Elfride entered; who had an
+ill-defined and watery look, as if she were only the reflection of
+herself in a pool?”
+
+“Lady Luxellian; very weakly, Elfride says. My husband is remotely
+connected with them; but there is not much intimacy on account of——.
+However, Henry, you’ll come and see us, of course. 24 Chevron Square.
+Come this week. We shall only be in town a week or two longer.”
+
+“Let me see. I’ve got to run up to Oxford to-morrow, where I shall be
+for several days; so that I must, I fear, lose the pleasure of seeing
+you in London this year.”
+
+“Then come to Endelstow; why not return with us?”
+
+“I am afraid if I were to come before August I should have to leave
+again in a day or two. I should be delighted to be with you at the
+beginning of that month; and I could stay a nice long time. I have
+thought of going westward all the summer.”
+
+“Very well. Now remember that’s a compact. And won’t you wait now and
+see Mr. Swancourt? He will not be away ten minutes longer.”
+
+“No; I’ll beg to be excused; for I must get to my chambers again this
+evening before I go home; indeed, I ought to have been there now—I have
+such a press of matters to attend to just at present. You will explain
+to him, please. Good-bye.”
+
+“And let us know the day of your appearance as soon as you can.”
+
+“I will”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+“A wandering voice.”
+
+
+Though sheer and intelligible griefs are not charmed away by being
+confided to mere acquaintances, the process is a palliative to certain
+ill-humours. Among these, perplexed vexation is one—a species of
+trouble which, like a stream, gets shallower by the simple operation of
+widening it in any quarter.
+
+On the evening of the day succeeding that of the meeting in the Park,
+Elfride and Mrs. Swancourt were engaged in conversation in the
+dressing-room of the latter. Such a treatment of such a case was in
+course of adoption here.
+
+Elfride had just before received an affectionate letter from Stephen
+Smith in Bombay, which had been forwarded to her from Endelstow. But
+since this is not the case referred to, it is not worth while to pry
+further into the contents of the letter than to discover that, with
+rash though pardonable confidence in coming times, he addressed her in
+high spirits as his darling future wife. Probably there cannot be
+instanced a briefer and surer rule-of-thumb test of a man’s
+temperament—sanguine or cautious—than this: did he or does he ante-date
+the word wife in corresponding with a sweet-heart he honestly loves?
+
+She had taken this epistle into her own room, read a little of it, then
+SAVED the rest for to-morrow, not wishing to be so extravagant as to
+consume the pleasure all at once. Nevertheless, she could not resist
+the wish to enjoy yet a little more, so out came the letter again, and
+in spite of misgivings as to prodigality the whole was devoured. The
+letter was finally reperused and placed in her pocket.
+
+What was this? Also a newspaper for Elfride, which she had overlooked
+in her hurry to open the letter. It was the old number of the PRESENT,
+containing the article upon her book, forwarded as had been requested.
+
+Elfride had hastily read it through, shrunk perceptibly smaller, and
+had then gone with the paper in her hand to Mrs. Swancourt’s
+dressing-room, to lighten or at least modify her vexation by a
+discriminating estimate from her stepmother.
+
+She was now looking disconsolately out of the window.
+
+“Never mind, my child,” said Mrs. Swancourt after a careful perusal of
+the matter indicated. “I don’t see that the review is such a terrible
+one, after all. Besides, everybody has forgotten about it by this time.
+I’m sure the opening is good enough for any book ever written. Just
+listen—it sounds better read aloud than when you pore over it silently:
+‘THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE. A ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. BY ERNEST
+FIELD. In the belief that we were for a while escaping the monotonous
+repetition of wearisome details in modern social scenery, analyses of
+uninteresting character, or the unnatural unfoldings of a sensation
+plot, we took this volume into our hands with a feeling of pleasure. We
+were disposed to beguile ourselves with the fancy that some new change
+might possibly be rung upon donjon keeps, chain and plate armour,
+deeply scarred cheeks, tender maidens disguised as pages, to which we
+had not listened long ago.’ Now, that’s a very good beginning, in my
+opinion, and one to be proud of having brought out of a man who has
+never seen you.”
+
+“Ah, yes,” murmured Elfride wofully. “But, then, see further on!”
+
+“Well the next bit is rather unkind, I must own,” said Mrs. Swancourt,
+and read on. “‘Instead of this we found ourselves in the hands of some
+young lady, hardly arrived at years of discretion, to judge by the
+silly device it has been thought worth while to adopt on the
+title-page, with the idea of disguising her sex.’”
+
+“I am not ‘silly’!” said Elfride indignantly. “He might have called me
+anything but that.”
+
+“You are not, indeed. Well:—‘Hands of a young lady...whose chapters are
+simply devoted to impossible tournaments, towers, and escapades, which
+read like flat copies of like scenes in the stories of Mr. G. P. R.
+James, and the most unreal portions of IVANHOE. The bait is so palpably
+artificial that the most credulous gudgeon turns away.’ Now, my dear, I
+don’t see overmuch to complain of in that. It proves that you were
+clever enough to make him think of Sir Walter Scott, which is a great
+deal.”
+
+“Oh yes; though I cannot romance myself, I am able to remind him of
+those who can!” Elfride intended to hurl these words sarcastically at
+her invisible enemy, but as she had no more satirical power than a
+wood-pigeon, they merely fell in a pretty murmur from lips shaped to a
+pout.
+
+“Certainly: and that’s something. Your book is good enough to be bad in
+an ordinary literary manner, and doesn’t stand by itself in a
+melancholy position altogether worse than assailable.—‘That interest in
+an historical romance may nowadays have any chance of being sustained,
+it is indispensable that the reader find himself under the guidance of
+some nearly extinct species of legendary, who, in addition to an
+impulse towards antiquarian research and an unweakened faith in the
+mediaeval halo, shall possess an inventive faculty in which delicacy of
+sentiment is far overtopped by a power of welding to stirring incident
+a spirited variety of the elementary human passions.’ Well, that
+long-winded effusion doesn’t refer to you at all, Elfride, merely
+something put in to fill up. Let me see, when does he come to you
+again;...not till the very end, actually. Here you are finally polished
+off:
+
+“‘But to return to the little work we have used as the text of this
+article. We are far from altogether disparaging the author’s powers.
+She has a certain versatility that enables her to use with effect a
+style of narration peculiar to herself, which may be called a murmuring
+of delicate emotional trifles, the particular gift of those to whom the
+social sympathies of a peaceful time are as daily food. Hence, where
+matters of domestic experience, and the natural touches which make
+people real, can be introduced without anachronisms too striking, she
+is occasionally felicitous; and upon the whole we feel justified in
+saying that the book will bear looking into for the sake of those
+portions which have nothing whatever to do with the story.’
+
+“Well, I suppose it is intended for satire; but don’t think anything
+more of it now, my dear. It is seven o’clock.” And Mrs. Swancourt rang
+for her maid.
+
+Attack is more piquant than concord. Stephen’s letter was concerning
+nothing but oneness with her: the review was the very reverse. And a
+stranger with neither name nor shape, age nor appearance, but a mighty
+voice, is naturally rather an interesting novelty to a lady he chooses
+to address. When Elfride fell asleep that night she was loving the
+writer of the letter, but thinking of the writer of that article.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+“Then fancy shapes—as fancy can.”
+
+
+On a day about three weeks later, the Swancourt trio were sitting
+quietly in the drawing-room of The Crags, Mrs. Swancourt’s house at
+Endelstow, chatting, and taking easeful survey of their previous month
+or two of town—a tangible weariness even to people whose acquaintances
+there might be counted on the fingers.
+
+A mere season in London with her practised step-mother had so advanced
+Elfride’s perceptions, that her courtship by Stephen seemed emotionally
+meagre, and to have drifted back several years into a childish past. In
+regarding our mental experiences, as in visual observation, our own
+progress reads like a dwindling of that we progress from.
+
+She was seated on a low chair, looking over her romance with melancholy
+interest for the first time since she had become acquainted with the
+remarks of the PRESENT thereupon.
+
+“Still thinking of that reviewer, Elfie?”
+
+“Not of him personally; but I am thinking of his opinion. Really, on
+looking into the volume after this long time has elapsed, he seems to
+have estimated one part of it fairly enough.”
+
+“No, no; I wouldn’t show the white feather now! Fancy that of all
+people in the world the writer herself should go over to the enemy. How
+shall Monmouth’s men fight when Monmouth runs away?”
+
+“I don’t do that. But I think he is right in some of his arguments,
+though wrong in others. And because he has some claim to my respect I
+regret all the more that he should think so mistakenly of my motives in
+one or two instances. It is more vexing to be misunderstood than to be
+misrepresented; and he misunderstands me. I cannot be easy whilst a
+person goes to rest night after night attributing to me intentions I
+never had.”
+
+“He doesn’t know your name, or anything about you. And he has doubtless
+forgotten there is such a book in existence by this time.”
+
+“I myself should certainly like him to be put right upon one or two
+matters,” said the vicar, who had hitherto been silent. “You see,
+critics go on writing, and are never corrected or argued with, and
+therefore are never improved.”
+
+“Papa,” said Elfride brightening, “write to him!”
+
+“I would as soon write to him as look at him, for the matter of that,”
+said Mr. Swancourt.
+
+“Do! And say, the young person who wrote the book did not adopt a
+masculine pseudonym in vanity or conceit, but because she was afraid it
+would be thought presumptuous to publish her name, and that she did not
+mean the story for such as he, but as a sweetener of history for young
+people, who might thereby acquire a taste for what went on in their own
+country hundreds of years ago, and be tempted to dive deeper into the
+subject. Oh, there is so much to explain; I wish I might write myself!”
+
+“Now, Elfie, I’ll tell you what we will do,” answered Mr. Swancourt,
+tickled with a sort of bucolic humour at the idea of criticizing the
+critic. “You shall write a clear account of what he is wrong in, and I
+will copy it and send it as mine.”
+
+“Yes, now, directly!” said Elfride, jumping up. “When will you send it,
+papa?”
+
+“Oh, in a day or two, I suppose,” he returned. Then the vicar paused
+and slightly yawned, and in the manner of elderly people began to cool
+from his ardour for the undertaking now that it came to the point.
+“But, really, it is hardly worth while,” he said.
+
+“O papa!” said Elfride, with much disappointment. “You said you would,
+and now you won’t. That is not fair!”
+
+“But how can we send it if we don’t know whom to send it to?”
+
+“If you really want to send such a thing it can easily be done,” said
+Mrs. Swancourt, coming to her step-daughter’s rescue. “An envelope
+addressed, ‘To the Critic of THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE, care of the
+Editor of the PRESENT,’ would find him.”
+
+“Yes, I suppose it would.”
+
+“Why not write your answer yourself, Elfride?” Mrs. Swancourt inquired.
+
+“I might,” she said hesitatingly; “and send it anonymously: that would
+be treating him as he has treated me.”
+
+“No use in the world!”
+
+“But I don’t like to let him know my exact name. Suppose I put my
+initials only? The less you are known the more you are thought of.”
+
+“Yes; you might do that.”
+
+Elfride set to work there and then. Her one desire for the last
+fortnight seemed likely to be realized. As happens with sensitive and
+secluded minds, a continual dwelling upon the subject had magnified to
+colossal proportions the space she assumed herself to occupy or to have
+occupied in the occult critic’s mind. At noon and at night she had been
+pestering herself with endeavours to perceive more distinctly his
+conception of her as a woman apart from an author: whether he really
+despised her; whether he thought more or less of her than of ordinary
+young women who never ventured into the fire of criticism at all. Now
+she would have the satisfaction of feeling that at any rate he knew her
+true intent in crossing his path, and annoying him so by her
+performance, and be taught perhaps to despise it a little less.
+
+Four days later an envelope, directed to Miss Swancourt in a strange
+hand, made its appearance from the post-bag.
+
+“Oh,” said Elfride, her heart sinking within her. “Can it be from that
+man—a lecture for impertinence? And actually one for Mrs. Swancourt in
+the same hand-writing!” She feared to open hers. “Yet how can he know
+my name? No; it is somebody else.”
+
+“Nonsense!” said her father grimly. “You sent your initials, and the
+Directory was available. Though he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to
+look there unless he had been thoroughly savage with you. I thought you
+wrote with rather more asperity than simple literary discussion
+required.” This timely clause was introduced to save the character of
+the vicar’s judgment under any issue of affairs.
+
+“Well, here I go,” said Elfride, desperately tearing open the seal.
+
+“To be sure, of course,” exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt; and looking up from
+her own letter. “Christopher, I quite forgot to tell you, when I
+mentioned that I had seen my distant relative, Harry Knight, that I
+invited him here for whatever length of time he could spare. And now he
+says he can come any day in August.”
+
+“Write, and say the first of the month,” replied the indiscriminate
+vicar.
+
+She read on, “Goodness me—and that isn’t all. He is actually the
+reviewer of Elfride’s book. How absurd, to be sure! I had no idea he
+reviewed novels or had anything to do with the PRESENT. He is a
+barrister—and I thought he only wrote in the Quarterlies. Why, Elfride,
+you have brought about an odd entanglement! What does he say to you?”
+
+Elfride had put down her letter with a dissatisfied flush on her face.
+“I don’t know. The idea of his knowing my name and all about me!...Why,
+he says nothing particular, only this—
+
+“‘MY DEAR MADAM,—Though I am sorry that my remarks should have seemed
+harsh to you, it is a pleasure to find that they have been the means of
+bringing forth such an ingeniously argued reply. Unfortunately, it is
+so long since I wrote my review, that my memory does not serve me
+sufficiently to say a single word in my defence, even supposing there
+remains one to be said, which is doubtful. You will find from a letter
+I have written to Mrs. Swancourt, that we are not such strangers to
+each other as we have been imagining. Possibly, I may have the pleasure
+of seeing you soon, when any argument you choose to advance shall
+receive all the attention it deserves.’
+
+“That is dim sarcasm—I know it is.”
+
+“Oh no, Elfride.”
+
+“And then, his remarks didn’t seem harsh—I mean I did not say so.”
+
+“He thinks you are in a frightful temper,” said Mr. Swancourt,
+chuckling in undertones.
+
+“And he will come and see me, and find the authoress as contemptible in
+speech as she has been impertinent in manner. I do heartily wish I had
+never written a word to him!”
+
+“Never mind,” said Mrs. Swancourt, also laughing in low quiet jerks;
+“it will make the meeting such a comical affair, and afford splendid
+by-play for your father and myself. The idea of our running our heads
+against Harry Knight all the time! I cannot get over that.”
+
+The vicar had immediately remembered the name to be that of Stephen
+Smith’s preceptor and friend; but having ceased to concern himself in
+the matter he made no remark to that effect, consistently forbearing to
+allude to anything which could restore recollection of the (to him)
+disagreeable mistake with regard to poor Stephen’s lineage and
+position. Elfride had of course perceived the same thing, which added
+to the complication of relationship a mesh that her stepmother knew
+nothing of.
+
+The identification scarcely heightened Knight’s attractions now, though
+a twelvemonth ago she would only have cared to see him for the interest
+he possessed as Stephen’s friend. Fortunately for Knight’s advent, such
+a reason for welcome had only begun to be awkward to her at a time when
+the interest he had acquired on his own account made it no longer
+necessary.
+
+These coincidences, in common with all relating to him, tended to keep
+Elfride’s mind upon the stretch concerning Knight. As was her custom
+when upon the horns of a dilemma, she walked off by herself among the
+laurel bushes, and there, standing still and splitting up a leaf
+without removing it from its stalk, fetched back recollections of
+Stephen’s frequent words in praise of his friend, and wished she had
+listened more attentively. Then, still pulling the leaf, she would
+blush at some fancied mortification that would accrue to her from his
+words when they met, in consequence of her intrusiveness, as she now
+considered it, in writing to him.
+
+The next development of her meditations was the subject of what this
+man’s personal appearance might be—was he tall or short, dark or fair,
+gay or grim? She would have asked Mrs. Swancourt but for the risk she
+might thereby incur of some teasing remark being returned. Ultimately
+Elfride would say, “Oh, what a plague that reviewer is to me!” and turn
+her face to where she imagined India lay, and murmur to herself, “Ah,
+my little husband, what are you doing now? Let me see, where are
+you—south, east, where? Behind that hill, ever so far behind!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+“Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase.”
+
+
+“There is Henry Knight, I declare!” said Mrs. Swancourt one day.
+
+They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not far
+from The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already described as
+leading up from the sea and little port of Castle Boterel. The stony
+escarpment upon which they stood had the contour of a man’s face, and
+it was covered with furze as with a beard. People in the field above
+were preserved from an accidental roll down these prominences and
+hollows by a hedge on the very crest, which was doing that kindly
+service for Elfride and her mother now.
+
+Scrambling higher into the hedge and stretching her neck further over
+the furze, Elfride beheld the individual signified. He was walking
+leisurely along the little green path at the bottom, beside the stream,
+a satchel slung upon his left hip, a stout walking-stick in his hand,
+and a brown-holland sun-hat upon his head. The satchel was worn and
+old, and the outer polished surface of the leather was cracked and
+peeling off.
+
+Knight having arrived over the hills to Castle Boterel upon the top of
+a crazy omnibus, preferred to walk the remaining two miles up the
+valley, leaving his luggage to be brought on.
+
+Behind him wandered, helter-skelter, a boy of whom Knight had briefly
+inquired the way to Endelstow; and by that natural law of physics which
+causes lesser bodies to gravitate towards the greater, this boy had
+kept near to Knight, and trotted like a little dog close at his heels,
+whistling as he went, with his eyes fixed upon Knight’s boots as they
+rose and fell.
+
+When they had reached a point precisely opposite that in which Mrs. and
+Miss Swancourt lay in ambush, Knight stopped and turned round.
+
+“Look here, my boy,” he said.
+
+The boy parted his lips, opened his eyes, and answered nothing.
+
+“Here’s sixpence for you, on condition that you don’t again come within
+twenty yards of my heels, all the way up the valley.”
+
+The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at Knight’s
+heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight went on again,
+wrapt in meditation.
+
+“A nice voice,” Elfride thought; “but what a singular temper!”
+
+“Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,” said Mrs.
+Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a stile,
+entering the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.
+
+Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and Elfride
+felt too nervous to await their visitor’s arrival in the drawing-room
+with Mrs. Swancourt. So that when the elder lady entered, Elfride made
+some pretence of perceiving a new variety of crimson geranium, and
+lingered behind among the flower beds.
+
+There was nothing gained by this, after all, she thought; and a few
+minutes after boldly came into the house by the glass side-door. She
+walked along the corridor, and entered the drawing-room. Nobody was
+there.
+
+A window at the angle of the room opened directly into an octagonal
+conservatory, enclosing the corner of the building. From the
+conservatory came voices in conversation—Mrs. Swancourt’s and the
+stranger’s.
+
+She had expected him to talk brilliantly. To her surprise he was asking
+questions in quite a learner’s manner, on subjects connected with the
+flowers and shrubs that she had known for years. When after the lapse
+of a few minutes he spoke at some length, she considered there was a
+hard square decisiveness in the shape of his sentences, as if, unlike
+her own and Stephen’s, they were not there and then newly constructed,
+but were drawn forth from a large store ready-made. They were now
+approaching the window to come in again.
+
+“That is a flesh-coloured variety,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “But
+oleanders, though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily
+wounded as to be unprunable—giants with the sensitiveness of young
+ladies. Oh, here is Elfride!”
+
+Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the dropping
+of the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half comically, and Knight
+in a minute or two placed himself beside the young lady.
+
+A complexity of instincts checked Elfride’s conventional smiles of
+complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less comfortable,
+Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them together to seek her
+husband. Mr. Knight, however, did not seem at all incommoded by his
+feelings, and he said with light easefulness:
+
+“So, Miss Swancourt, I have met you at last. You escaped me by a few
+minutes only when we were in London.”
+
+“Yes. I found that you had seen Mrs. Swancourt.”
+
+“And now reviewer and reviewed are face to face,” he added
+unconcernedly.
+
+“Yes: though the fact of your being a relation of Mrs. Swancourt’s
+takes off the edge of it. It was strange that you should be one of her
+family all the time.” Elfride began to recover herself now, and to look
+into Knight’s face. “I was merely anxious to let you know my REAL
+meaning in writing the book—extremely anxious.”
+
+“I can quite understand the wish; and I was gratified that my remarks
+should have reached home. They very seldom do, I am afraid.”
+
+Elfride drew herself in. Here he was, sticking to his opinions as
+firmly as if friendship and politeness did not in the least require an
+immediate renunciation of them.
+
+“You made me very uneasy and sorry by writing such things!” she
+murmured, suddenly dropping the mere cacueterie of a fashionable first
+introduction, and speaking with some of the dudgeon of a child towards
+a severe schoolmaster.
+
+“That is rather the object of honest critics in such a case. Not to
+cause unnecessary sorrow, but: ‘To make you sorry after a proper
+manner, that ye may receive damage by us in nothing,’ as a powerful pen
+once wrote to the Gentiles. Are you going to write another romance?”
+
+“Write another?” she said. “That somebody may pen a condemnation and
+‘nail’t wi’ Scripture’ again, as you do now, Mr. Knight?”
+
+“You may do better next time,” he said placidly: “I think you will. But
+I would advise you to confine yourself to domestic scenes.”
+
+“Thank you. But never again!”
+
+“Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing is not
+by any means the best thing to hear about her.”
+
+“What is the best?”
+
+“I prefer not to say.”
+
+“Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.”
+
+“Well”—(Knight was evidently changing his meaning)—“I suppose to hear
+that she has married.”
+
+Elfride hesitated. “And what when she has been married?” she said at
+last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the argument.
+
+“Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his
+lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her
+inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to keep the talk of
+her alive.”
+
+“Yes, I see,” said Elfride softly and thoughtfully. “But of course it
+is different quite with men. Why don’t you write novels, Mr. Knight?”
+
+“Because I couldn’t write one that would interest anybody.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“For several reasons. It requires a judicious omission of your real
+thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.”
+
+“Is that really necessary? Well, I am sure you could learn to do that
+with practice,” said Elfride with an ex-cathedra air, as became a
+person who spoke from experience in the art. “You would make a great
+name for certain,” she continued.
+
+“So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to
+remain in obscurity.”
+
+“Tell me seriously—apart from the subject—why don’t you write a volume
+instead of loose articles?” she insisted.
+
+“Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you
+seriously,” said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his young
+friend than he was interested in her appearance. “As I have implied, I
+have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not now concentrate
+sufficiently. We all have only our one cruse of energy given us to make
+the best of. And where that energy has been leaked away week by week,
+quarter by quarter, as mine has for the last nine or ten years, there
+is not enough dammed back behind the mill at any given period to supply
+the force a complete book on any subject requires. Then there is the
+self-confidence and waiting power. Where quick results have grown
+customary, they are fatal to a lively faith in the future.”
+
+“Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?”
+
+“No, I don’t choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from a
+whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of
+accident merely. Not that I object to the accident.”
+
+“Why don’t you object—I mean, why do you feel so quiet about things?”
+Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her intense curiosity
+to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight was like, kept her going
+on.
+
+Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of this
+trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent from habit,
+may be recalled by all of us. When they find a listener who can by no
+possibility make use of them, rival them, or condemn them, reserved and
+even suspicious men of the world become frank, keenly enjoying the
+inner side of their frankness.
+
+“Why I don’t mind the accidental constraint,” he replied, “is because,
+in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is often better
+than absolute freedom.”
+
+“I see—that is, I should if I quite understood what all those
+generalities mean.”
+
+“Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one’s work, which no
+length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix itself on
+the work itself, and make the best of it.”
+
+“Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that
+tongue,” she said mischievously. “And I suppose where no limit exists,
+as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants to do
+something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously than to
+have none.”
+
+“Yes,” he said meditatively. “I can go as far as that.”
+
+“Well,” resumed Elfride, “I think it better for a man’s nature if he
+does nothing in particular.”
+
+“There is such a case as being obliged to.”
+
+“Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any other
+reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought many times
+lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing now, and of a piece
+with the days of your life, is preferable to an anticipated heap far
+away in the future, and none now.”
+
+“Why, that’s the very thing I said just now as being the principle of
+all ephemeral doers like myself.”
+
+“Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,” she said with some confusion.
+“Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.”
+And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her
+mind: “There is much littleness in trying to be great. A man must think
+a good deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself,
+before he tries at all.”
+
+“But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man’s thinking a good
+deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong, and too
+soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that a man who
+strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own
+merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his
+motive may be his very humility.”
+
+This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she
+agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other
+side. “Ah,” she thought inwardly, “I shall have nothing to do with a
+man of this kind, though he is our visitor.”
+
+“I think you will find,” resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more
+for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for
+engaging her attention, “that in actual life it is merely a matter of
+instinct with men—this trying to push on. They awake to a recognition
+that they have, without premeditation, begun to try a little, and they
+say to themselves, ‘Since I have tried thus much, I will try a little
+more.’ They go on because they have begun.”
+
+Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words at
+this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of seizing any
+point in the remarks of an interlocutor which interested her, and
+dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her own thereupon, totally
+oblivious of all that he might say in continuation. On such occasions
+she artlessly surveyed the person speaking; and then there was a time
+for a painter. Her eyes seemed to look at you, and past you, as you
+were then, into your future; and past your future into your
+eternity—not reading it, but gazing in an unused, unconscious way—her
+mind still clinging to its original thought.
+
+This is how she was looking at Knight.
+
+Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was
+painfully confused.
+
+“What were you so intent upon in me?” he inquired.
+
+“As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever you
+are,” she said, with a want of premeditation that was startling in its
+honesty and simplicity.
+
+Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose and
+stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father and Mrs.
+Swancourt coming up below the terrace. “Here they are,” she said, going
+out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her. She stood upon the
+edge of the terrace, close to the stone balustrade, and looked towards
+the sun, hanging over a glade just now fair as Tempe’s vale, up which
+her father was walking.
+
+Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten degrees of
+the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and heightened the
+bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion red, their moderate
+pink hue being only seen in its natural tone where the cheek curved
+round into shadow. The ends of her hanging hair softly dragged
+themselves backwards and forwards upon her shoulder as each faint
+breeze thrust against or relinquished it. Fringes and ribbons of her
+dress, moved by the same breeze, licked like tongues upon the parts
+around them, and fluttering forward from shady folds caught likewise
+their share of the lustrous orange glow.
+
+Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of about
+thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to a
+conversation of deep earnestness on Knight’s fine old family name, and
+theories as to lineage and intermarriage connected therewith. Knight’s
+portmanteau having in the meantime arrived, they soon retired to
+prepare for dinner, which had been postponed two hours later than the
+usual time of that meal.
+
+An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were
+again in the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing one.
+And that evening she went to bed for the first time without thinking of
+Stephen at all.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+“He heard her musical pants.”
+
+
+The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks of
+its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the designs of
+Mr. Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen. Planks and poles
+had arrived in the churchyard, iron bars had been thrust into the
+venerable crack extending down the belfry wall to the foundation, the
+bells had been taken down, the owls had forsaken this home of their
+forefathers, and six iconoclasts in white fustian, to whom a cracked
+edifice was a species of Mumbo Jumbo, had taken lodgings in the village
+previous to beginning the actual removal of the stones.
+
+This was the day after Knight’s arrival. To enjoy for the last time the
+prospect seaward from the summit, the vicar, Mrs. Swancourt, Knight,
+and Elfride, all ascended the winding turret—Mr. Swancourt stepping
+forward with many loud breaths, his wife struggling along silently, but
+suffering none the less. They had hardly reached the top when a large
+lurid cloud, palpably a reservoir of rain, thunder, and lightning, was
+seen to be advancing overhead from the north.
+
+The two cautious elders suggested an immediate return, and proceeded to
+put it in practice as regarded themselves.
+
+“Dear me, I wish I had not come up,” exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt.
+
+“We shall be slower than you two in going down,” the vicar said over
+his shoulder, “and so, don’t you start till we are nearly at the
+bottom, or you will run over us and break our necks somewhere in the
+darkness of the turret.”
+
+Accordingly Elfride and Knight waited on the leads till the staircase
+should be clear. Knight was not in a talkative mood that morning.
+Elfride was rather wilful, by reason of his inattention, which she
+privately set down to his thinking her not worth talking to. Whilst
+Knight stood watching the rise of the cloud, she sauntered to the other
+side of the tower, and there remembered a giddy feat she had performed
+the year before. It was to walk round upon the parapet of the
+tower—which was quite without battlement or pinnacle, and presented a
+smooth flat surface about two feet wide, forming a pathway on all the
+four sides. Without reflecting in the least upon what she was doing she
+now stepped upon the parapet in the old way, and began walking along.
+
+“We are down, cousin Henry,” cried Mrs. Swancourt up the turret.
+“Follow us when you like.”
+
+Knight turned and saw Elfride beginning her elevated promenade. His
+face flushed with mingled concern and anger at her rashness.
+
+“I certainly gave you credit for more common sense,” he said.
+
+She reddened a little and walked on.
+
+“Miss Swancourt, I insist upon your coming down,” he exclaimed.
+
+“I will in a minute. I am safe enough. I have done it often.”
+
+At that moment, by reason of a slight perturbation his words had caused
+in her, Elfride’s foot caught itself in a little tuft of grass growing
+in a joint of the stone-work, and she almost lost her balance. Knight
+sprang forward with a face of horror. By what seemed the special
+interposition of a considerate Providence she tottered to the inner
+edge of the parapet instead of to the outer, and reeled over upon the
+lead roof two or three feet below the wall.
+
+Knight seized her as in a vice, and he said, panting, “That ever I
+should have met a woman fool enough to do a thing of that kind! Good
+God, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
+
+The close proximity of the Shadow of Death had made her sick and pale
+as a corpse before he spoke. Already lowered to that state, his words
+completely over-powered her, and she swooned away as he held her.
+
+Elfride’s eyes were not closed for more than forty seconds. She opened
+them, and remembered the position instantly. His face had altered its
+expression from stern anger to pity. But his severe remarks had rather
+frightened her, and she struggled to be free.
+
+“If you can stand, of course you may,” he said, and loosened his arms.
+“I hardly know whether most to laugh at your freak or to chide you for
+its folly.”
+
+She immediately sank upon the lead-work. Knight lifted her again. “Are
+you hurt?” he said.
+
+She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying, with
+a fitful aversion of her face, “I am only frightened. Put me down, do
+put me down!”
+
+“But you can’t walk,” said Knight.
+
+“You don’t know that; how can you? I am only frightened, I tell you,”
+she answered petulantly, and raised her hand to her forehead. Knight
+then saw that she was bleeding from a severe cut in her wrist,
+apparently where it had descended upon a salient corner of the
+lead-work. Elfride, too, seemed to perceive and feel this now for the
+first time, and for a minute nearly lost consciousness again. Knight
+rapidly bound his handkerchief round the place, and to add to the
+complication, the thundercloud he had been watching began to shed some
+heavy drops of rain. Knight looked up and saw the vicar striding
+towards the house, and Mrs. Swancourt waddling beside him like a
+hard-driven duck.
+
+“As you are so faint, it will be much better to let me carry you down,”
+said Knight; “or at any rate inside out of the rain.” But her objection
+to be lifted made it impossible for him to support her for more than
+five steps.
+
+“This is folly, great folly,” he exclaimed, setting her down.
+
+“Indeed!” she murmured, with tears in her eyes. “I say I will not be
+carried, and you say this is folly!”
+
+“So it is.”
+
+“No, it isn’t!”
+
+“It is folly, I think. At any rate, the origin of it all is.”
+
+“I don’t agree to it. And you needn’t get so angry with me; I am not
+worth it.”
+
+“Indeed you are. You are worth the enmity of princes, as was said of
+such another. Now, then, will you clasp your hands behind my neck, that
+I may carry you down without hurting you?”
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“You had better, or I shall foreclose.”
+
+“What’s that!”
+
+“Deprive you of your chance.”
+
+Elfride gave a little toss.
+
+“Now, don’t writhe so when I attempt to carry you.”
+
+“I can’t help it.”
+
+“Then submit quietly.”
+
+“I don’t care. I don’t care,” she murmured in languid tones and with
+closed eyes.
+
+He took her into his arms, entered the turret, and with slow and
+cautious steps descended round and round. Then, with the gentleness of
+a nursing mother, he attended to the cut on her arm. During his
+progress through the operations of wiping it and binding it up anew,
+her face changed its aspect from pained indifference to something like
+bashful interest, interspersed with small tremors and shudders of a
+trifling kind.
+
+In the centre of each pale cheek a small red spot the size of a wafer
+had now made its appearance, and continued to grow larger. Elfride
+momentarily expected a recurrence to the lecture on her foolishness,
+but Knight said no more than this—
+
+“Promise me NEVER to walk on that parapet again.”
+
+“It will be pulled down soon: so I do.” In a few minutes she continued
+in a lower tone, and seriously, “You are familiar of course, as
+everybody is, with those strange sensations we sometimes have, that our
+life for the moment exists in duplicate.”
+
+“That we have lived through that moment before?”
+
+“Or shall again. Well, I felt on the tower that something similar to
+that scene is again to be common to us both.”
+
+“God forbid!” said Knight. “Promise me that you will never again walk
+on any such place on any consideration.”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“That such a thing has not been before, we know. That it shall not be
+again, you vow. Therefore think no more of such a foolish fancy.”
+
+There had fallen a great deal of rain, but unaccompanied by lightning.
+A few minutes longer, and the storm had ceased.
+
+“Now, take my arm, please.”
+
+“Oh no, it is not necessary.” This relapse into wilfulness was because
+he had again connected the epithet foolish with her.
+
+“Nonsense: it is quite necessary; it will rain again directly, and you
+are not half recovered.” And without more ado Knight took her hand,
+drew it under his arm, and held it there so firmly that she could not
+have removed it without a struggle. Feeling like a colt in a halter for
+the first time, at thus being led along, yet afraid to be angry, it was
+to her great relief that she saw the carriage coming round the corner
+to fetch them.
+
+Her fall upon the roof was necessarily explained to some extent upon
+their entering the house; but both forbore to mention a word of what
+she had been doing to cause such an accident. During the remainder of
+the afternoon Elfride was invisible; but at dinner-time she appeared as
+bright as ever.
+
+In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with Mr. and
+Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again found himself
+thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a chess problem in one
+of the illustrated periodicals.
+
+“You like chess, Miss Swancourt?”
+
+“Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every other.
+Do you play?”
+
+“I have played; though not lately.”
+
+“Challenge him, Elfride,” said the vicar heartily. “She plays very well
+for a lady, Mr. Knight.”
+
+“Shall we play?” asked Elfride tentatively.
+
+“Oh, certainly. I shall be delighted.”
+
+The game began. Mr. Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance with
+Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had begun to
+take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity of continuing
+faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a fickle behaviour
+almost as imperatively as fickleness itself; a fact, however, which
+would give a startling advantage to the latter quality should it ever
+appear.
+
+Knight, by one of those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes
+afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her
+pawns. It was her first advantage. She looked triumphant—even ruthless.
+
+“By George! what was I thinking of?” said Knight quietly; and then
+dismissed all concern at his accident.
+
+“Club laws we’ll have, won’t we, Mr. Knight?” said Elfride suasively.
+
+“Oh yes, certainly,” said Mr. Knight, a thought, however, just
+occurring to his mind, that he had two or three times allowed her to
+replace a man on her religiously assuring him that such a move was an
+absolute blunder.
+
+She immediately took up the unfortunate rook and the contest proceeded,
+Elfride having now rather the better of the game. Then he won the
+exchange, regained his position, and began to press her hard. Elfride
+grew flurried, and placed her queen on his remaining rook’s file.
+
+“There—how stupid! Upon my word, I did not see your rook. Of course
+nobody but a fool would have put a queen there knowingly!”
+
+She spoke excitedly, half expecting her antagonist to give her back the
+move.
+
+“Nobody, of course,” said Knight serenely, and stretched out his hand
+towards his royal victim.
+
+“It is not very pleasant to have it taken advantage of, then,” she said
+with some vexation.
+
+“Club laws, I think you said?” returned Knight blandly, and mercilessly
+appropriating the queen.
+
+She was on the brink of pouting, but was ashamed to show it; tears
+almost stood in her eyes. She had been trying so hard—so very
+hard—thinking and thinking till her brain was in a whirl; and it seemed
+so heartless of him to treat her so, after all.
+
+“I think it is——” she began.
+
+“What?”
+
+—“Unkind to take advantage of a pure mistake I make in that way.”
+
+“I lost my rook by even a purer mistake,” said the enemy in an
+inexorable tone, without lifting his eyes.
+
+“Yes, but——” However, as his logic was absolutely unanswerable, she
+merely registered a protest. “I cannot endure those cold-blooded ways
+of clubs and professional players, like Staunton and Morphy. Just as if
+it really mattered whether you have raised your fingers from a man or
+no!”
+
+Knight smiled as pitilessly as before, and they went on in silence.
+
+“Checkmate,” said Knight.
+
+“Another game,” said Elfride peremptorily, and looking very warm.
+
+“With all my heart,” said Knight.
+
+“Checkmate,” said Knight again at the end of forty minutes.
+
+“Another game,” she returned resolutely.
+
+“I’ll give you the odds of a bishop,” Knight said to her kindly.
+
+“No, thank you,” Elfride replied in a tone intended for courteous
+indifference; but, as a fact, very cavalier indeed.
+
+“Checkmate,” said her opponent without the least emotion.
+
+Oh, the difference between Elfride’s condition of mind now, and when
+she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!
+
+It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb itself out
+of her head, she went off to her chamber, full of mortification at
+being beaten time after time when she herself was the aggressor. Having
+for two or three years enjoyed the reputation throughout the globe of
+her father’s brain—which almost constituted her entire world—of being
+an excellent player, this fiasco was intolerable; for unfortunately the
+person most dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that
+one, the possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not
+true.
+
+In bed no sleep came to soothe her; that gentle thing being the very
+middle-of-summer friend in this respect of flying away at the merest
+troublous cloud. After lying awake till two o’clock an idea seemed to
+strike her. She softly arose, got a light, and fetched a Chess Praxis
+from the library. Returning and sitting up in bed, she diligently
+studied the volume till the clock struck five, and her eyelids felt
+thick and heavy. She then extinguished the light and lay down again.
+
+“You look pale, Elfride,” said Mrs. Swancourt the next morning at
+breakfast. “Isn’t she, cousin Harry?”
+
+A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming so
+when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table in
+obedience to some remark. Everybody looked at Elfride. She certainly
+was pale.
+
+“Am I pale?” she said with a faint smile. “I did not sleep much. I
+could not get rid of armies of bishops and knights, try how I would.”
+
+“Chess is a bad thing just before bedtime; especially for excitable
+people like yourself, dear. Don’t ever play late again.”
+
+“I’ll play early instead. Cousin Knight,” she said in imitation of Mrs.
+Swancourt, “will you oblige me in something?”
+
+“Even to half my kingdom.”
+
+“Well, it is to play one game more.”
+
+“When?”
+
+“Now, instantly; the moment we have breakfasted.”
+
+“Nonsense, Elfride,” said her father. “Making yourself a slave to the
+game like that.”
+
+“But I want to, papa! Honestly, I am restless at having been so
+ignominiously overcome. And Mr. Knight doesn’t mind. So what harm can
+there be?”
+
+“Let us play, by all means, if you wish it,” said Knight.
+
+So, when breakfast was over, the combatants withdrew to the quiet of
+the library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have an idea
+that her conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly free from
+conventional restraint. And worse, she fancied upon Knight’s face a
+slightly amused look at her proceedings.
+
+“You think me foolish, I suppose,” she said recklessly; “but I want to
+do my very best just once, and see whether I can overcome you.”
+
+“Certainly: nothing more natural. Though I am afraid it is not the plan
+adopted by women of the world after a defeat.”
+
+“Why, pray?”
+
+“Because they know that as good as overcoming is skill in effacing
+recollection of being overcome, and turn their attention to that
+entirely.”
+
+“I am wrong again, of course.”
+
+“Perhaps your wrong is more pleasing than their right.”
+
+“I don’t quite know whether you mean that, or whether you are laughing
+at me,” she said, looking doubtingly at him, yet inclining to accept
+the more flattering interpretation. “I am almost sure you think it
+vanity in me to think I am a match for you. Well, if you do, I say that
+vanity is no crime in such a case.”
+
+“Well, perhaps not. Though it is hardly a virtue.”
+
+“Oh yes, in battle! Nelson’s bravery lay in his vanity.”
+
+“Indeed! Then so did his death.”
+
+Oh no, no! For it is written in the book of the prophet Shakespeare—
+
+‘Fear and be slain? no worse can come to fight;
+And fight and die, is death destroying death!’
+
+
+And down they sat, and the contest began, Elfride having the first
+move. The game progressed. Elfride’s heart beat so violently that she
+could not sit still. Her dread was lest he should hear it. And he did
+discover it at last—some flowers upon the table being set throbbing by
+its pulsations.
+
+“I think we had better give over,” said Knight, looking at her gently.
+“It is too much for you, I know. Let us write down the position, and
+finish another time.”
+
+“No, please not,” she implored. “I should not rest if I did not know
+the result at once. It is your move.”
+
+Ten minutes passed.
+
+She started up suddenly. “I know what you are doing?” she cried, an
+angry colour upon her cheeks, and her eyes indignant. “You were
+thinking of letting me win to please me!”
+
+“I don’t mind owning that I was,” Knight responded phlegmatically, and
+appearing all the more so by contrast with her own turmoil.
+
+“But you must not! I won’t have it.”
+
+“Very well.”
+
+“No, that will not do; I insist that you promise not to do any such
+absurd thing. It is insulting me!”
+
+“Very well, madam. I won’t do any such absurd thing. You shall not
+win.”
+
+“That is to be proved!” she returned proudly; and the play went on.
+
+Nothing is now heard but the ticking of a quaint old timepiece on the
+summit of a bookcase. Ten minutes pass; he captures her knight; she
+takes his knight, and looks a very Rhadamanthus.
+
+More minutes tick away; she takes his pawn and has the advantage,
+showing her sense of it rather prominently.
+
+Five minutes more: he takes her bishop: she brings things even by
+taking his knight.
+
+Three minutes: she looks bold, and takes his queen: he looks placid,
+and takes hers.
+
+Eight or ten minutes pass: he takes a pawn; she utters a little pooh!
+but not the ghost of a pawn can she take in retaliation.
+
+Ten minutes pass: he takes another pawn and says, “Check!” She flushes,
+extricates herself by capturing his bishop, and looks triumphant. He
+immediately takes her bishop: she looks surprised.
+
+Five minutes longer: she makes a dash and takes his only remaining
+bishop; he replies by taking her only remaining knight.
+
+Two minutes: he gives check; her mind is now in a painful state of
+tension, and she shades her face with her hand.
+
+Yet a few minutes more: he takes her rook and checks again. She
+literally trembles now lest an artful surprise she has in store for him
+shall be anticipated by the artful surprise he evidently has in store
+for her.
+
+Five minutes: “Checkmate in two moves!” exclaims Elfride.
+
+“If you can,” says Knight.
+
+“Oh, I have miscalculated; that is cruel!”
+
+“Checkmate,” says Knight; and the victory is won.
+
+Elfride arose and turned away without letting him see her face. Once in
+the hall she ran upstairs and into her room, and flung herself down
+upon her bed, weeping bitterly.
+
+“Where is Elfride?” said her father at luncheon.
+
+Knight listened anxiously for the answer. He had been hoping to see her
+again before this time.
+
+“She isn’t well, sir,” was the reply.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt rose and left the room, going upstairs to Elfride’s
+apartment.
+
+At the door was Unity, who occupied in the new establishment a position
+between young lady’s maid and middle-housemaid.
+
+“She is sound asleep, ma’am,” Unity whispered.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt opened the door. Elfride was lying full-dressed on the
+bed, her face hot and red, her arms thrown abroad. At intervals of a
+minute she tossed restlessly from side to side, and indistinctly moaned
+words used in the game of chess.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt had a turn for doctoring, and felt her pulse. It was
+twanging like a harp-string, at the rate of nearly a hundred and fifty
+a minute. Softly moving the sleeping girl to a little less cramped
+position, she went downstairs again.
+
+“She is asleep now,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “She does not seem very well.
+Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain won’t bear
+cudgelling like your great head. You should have strictly forbidden her
+to play again.”
+
+In truth, the essayist’s experience of the nature of young women was
+far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and
+others to believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman,
+but practically was nowhere.
+
+“I am indeed sorry,” said Knight, feeling even more than he expressed.
+“But surely, the young lady knows best what is good for her!”
+
+“Bless you, that’s just what she doesn’t know. She never thinks of such
+things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to command her and
+keep her in order, as you would a child. She will say things worthy of
+a French epigrammatist, and act like a robin in a greenhouse. But I
+think we will send for Dr. Granson—there can be no harm.”
+
+A man was straightway despatched on horseback to Castle Boterel, and
+the gentleman known as Dr. Granson came in the course of the afternoon.
+He pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided state of disorder;
+forwarded some soothing draught, and gave orders that on no account
+whatever was she to play chess again.
+
+The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a
+curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The women
+servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as each
+entered, he could not, to save his life, avoid turning his head with
+the hope that she might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began reading without
+waiting for her. Then somebody glided in noiselessly; Knight softly
+glanced up: it was only the little kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading
+prayers a bore.
+
+He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to recognize
+that holding converse with Nature’s charms was not solitude. On nearing
+the house again he perceived his young friend crossing a slope by a
+path which ran into the one he was following in the angle of the field.
+Here they met. Elfride was at once exultant and abashed: coming into
+his presence had upon her the effect of entering a cathedral.
+
+Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in the
+very act of writing therein when they came in view of each other. He
+left off in the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to inquire warmly
+concerning her state of health. She said she was perfectly well, and
+indeed had never looked better. Her health was as inconsequent as her
+actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and
+their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line,
+which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as
+the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess,
+because too ephemeral-looking to play one.
+
+“Are you taking notes?” she inquired with an alacrity plainly arising
+less from interest in the subject than from a wish to divert his
+thoughts from herself.
+
+“Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will complete
+it.” Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained beside him a
+moment, and afterwards walked on.
+
+“I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,” she gaily
+flung back to him over her shoulder.
+
+“I don’t think you would find much to interest you.”
+
+“I know I should.”
+
+“Then of course I have no more to say.”
+
+“But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts
+concerning journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of thoughts?”
+
+“Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists for the
+most part of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed and
+disconnected, of no possible interest to anybody but myself.”
+
+“It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article, what
+must they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified spirit, above
+proof; before it is lowered to be fit for human consumption: ‘words
+that burn’ indeed.”
+
+“Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless, dead.
+You could hardly read them.”
+
+“May I try?” she said coaxingly. “I wrote my poor romance in that way—I
+mean in bits, out of doors—and I should like to see whether your way of
+entering things is the same as mine.”
+
+“Really, that’s rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly
+refuse now you have asked so directly; but——”
+
+“You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify me—your
+writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon your book by
+chance, it would have been different; but you stand before me, and say,
+‘Excuse me,’ without caring whether I do or not, and write on, and then
+tell me they are not private facts but public ideas.”
+
+“Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the consequences be
+upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is to leave my book
+alone.”
+
+“But with that caution I have your permission?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book, then
+laughed, and saying, “I must see it,” withdrew it from his fingers.
+
+Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the path
+turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the wicket-gate he
+saw that she had moved, and waited till she came up.
+
+Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully by
+the corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a nettled look.
+She silently extended the volume towards him, raising her eyes no
+higher than her hand was lifted.
+
+“Take it,” said Elfride quickly. “I don’t want to read it.”
+
+“Could you understand it?” said Knight.
+
+“As far as I looked. But I didn’t care to read much.”
+
+“Why, Miss Swancourt?”
+
+“Only because I didn’t wish to—that’s all.”
+
+“I warned you that you might not.”
+
+“Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.”
+
+“Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.”
+
+“Not my name—I know that.”
+
+“Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would recognize
+you.”
+
+“Except myself. For what is this?” she exclaimed, taking it from him
+and opening a page. “August 7. That’s the day before yesterday. But I
+won’t read it,” Elfride said, closing the book again with pretty
+hauteur. “Why should I? I had no business to ask to see your book, and
+it serves me right.”
+
+Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the book
+to see. He came to this:
+
+“Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born.
+After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness it begins to
+act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first. Persons of observation
+can tell to a nicety how old this consciousness is by the skill it has
+acquired in the art necessary to its success—the art of hiding itself.
+Generally begins career by actions which are popularly termed
+showing-off. Method adopted depends in each case upon the disposition,
+rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will
+utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the
+more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making
+your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On Endelstow
+Tower.)
+
+“An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays. ‘Look at
+me,’ say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice, without
+reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show so very much
+of themselves. (Amplify and correct for paper on Artless Arts.)”
+
+“Yes, I remember now,” said Knight. “The notes were certainly suggested
+by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not think too much
+of such random observations,” he continued encouragingly, as he noticed
+her injured looks. “A mere fancy passing through my head assumes a
+factitious importance to you, because it has been made permanent by
+being written down. All mankind think thoughts as bad as those of
+people they most love on earth, but such thoughts never getting
+embodied on paper, it becomes assumed that they never existed. I
+daresay that you yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other
+of me, which would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge
+you, now, to tell me.”
+
+“The worst thing I have thought of you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I must not.”
+
+“Oh yes.”
+
+“I thought you were rather round-shouldered.”
+
+Knight looked slightly redder.
+
+“And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.”
+
+“Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,” said Knight, there being a faint
+ghastliness discernible in his laugh. “They are much worse in a lady’s
+eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.”
+
+“Ah, that’s very fine,” she said, too inexperienced to perceive her
+hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. “You alluded to
+me in that entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I
+cannot understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you
+think I am?”
+
+“How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.”
+
+“You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like
+best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?”
+
+“Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.”
+
+So it was not Elfride’s class.
+
+“But it is well known,” she said eagerly, and there was something
+touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she
+revealed by her words, “that the slower a nature is to develop, the
+richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women before they
+come of age are nobodies by the time that backward people have shown
+their full compass.”
+
+“Yes,” said Knight thoughtfully. “There is really something in that
+remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there
+take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has
+not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because
+she is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for
+developing.”
+
+Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs.
+Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat and drink,
+had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The
+morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the
+old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it by the second door as
+they entered by the first.
+
+Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two portraits
+on ivory.
+
+“Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging by
+what I see here,” he observed, “they had unquestionably beautiful heads
+of hair.”
+
+“Yes; and that is everything,” said Elfride, possibly conscious of her
+own, possibly not.
+
+“Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.”
+
+“Which colour do you like best?” she ventured to ask.
+
+“More depends on its abundance than on its colour.”
+
+“Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?”
+
+“Dark.”
+
+“I mean for women,” she said, with the minutest fall of countenance,
+and a hope that she had been misunderstood.
+
+“So do I,” Knight replied.
+
+It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride’s hair.
+In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be overlooked by men
+not given to ocular intentness. But hers was always in the way. You saw
+her hair as far as you could see her sex, and knew that it was the
+palest brown. She knew instantly that Knight, being perfectly aware of
+this, had an independent standard of admiration in the matter.
+
+Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with the
+honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the more they
+went against her, the more she respected them. And now, like a reckless
+gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure. Her eyes: they were
+her all now.
+
+“What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?” she said slowly.
+
+“Honestly, or as a compliment?”
+
+“Of course honestly; I don’t want anybody’s compliment!”
+
+And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of approval
+from that man then would have been like a well to a famished Arab.
+
+“I prefer hazel,” he said serenely.
+
+She had played and lost again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+
+“Love was in the next degree.”
+
+
+Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by
+judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s
+recollection of the speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said by
+either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development. Elfride’s mind had
+been impregnated with sentiments of her own smallness to an
+uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her discomfort was visible in
+her face. The whole tendency of the conversation latterly had been to
+quietly but surely disparage her; and she was fain to take Stephen into
+favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said,
+as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True,
+Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything
+of the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of
+her smallness in Knight’s eyes still remained. Had the position been
+reversed—had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing taste, and had
+Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance to his ideal, it
+would have engendered far happier thoughts. As matters stood, Stephen’s
+admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of passion.
+Perhaps any keen man’s judgment was condemnatory of her.
+
+During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with
+their seniors, and no conversation arose which was exclusively their
+own. When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the
+same subject. At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him
+to speak so decisively as he had done; the next, that it was sterling
+honesty.
+
+“Ah, what a poor nobody I am!” she said, sighing. “People like him, who
+go about the great world, don’t care in the least what I am like either
+in mood or feature.”
+
+Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman’s mind in this
+manner, is half way to her heart; the distance between those two
+stations is proverbially short.
+
+“And are you really going away this week?” said Mrs. Swancourt to
+Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.
+
+They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a last
+service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening
+instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of the ruinous
+portions.
+
+“I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,” returned Knight; “and
+then I go on to Dublin.”
+
+“Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,” said the vicar. “A
+week is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize your presence yet.
+I remember a story which——”
+
+The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and would
+probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had not a turn in
+the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown within the range of his
+vision, and so reminded him. He at once diverted the current of his
+narrative with the dexterity the occasion demanded.
+
+“The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from which I
+took my text the Sunday before last, is quite to the point,” he
+continued, with the pronunciation of a man who, far from having
+intended to tell a week-day story a moment earlier, had thought of
+nothing but Sabbath matters for several weeks. “What did he gain after
+all by his restlessness? Had he remained in the city of the Jebusites,
+and not been so anxious for Gibeah, none of his troubles would have
+arisen.”
+
+“But he had wasted five days already,” said Knight, closing his eyes to
+the vicar’s commendable diversion. “His fault lay in beginning the
+tarrying system originally.”
+
+“True, true; my illustration fails.”
+
+“But not the hospitality which prompted the story.”
+
+“So you are to come just the same,” urged Mrs. Swancourt, for she had
+seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her stepdaughter at
+Knight’s announcement.
+
+Knight half promised to call on his return journey; but the uncertainty
+with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride with a regretful
+interest in all he did during the few remaining hours. The curate
+having already officiated twice that day in the two churches, Mr.
+Swancourt had undertaken the whole of the evening service, and Knight
+read the lessons for him. The sun streamed across from the dilapidated
+west window, and lighted all the assembled worshippers with a golden
+glow, Knight as he read being illuminated by the same mellow lustre.
+Elfride at the organ regarded him with a throbbing sadness of mood
+which was fed by a sense of being far removed from his sphere. As he
+went deliberately through the chapter appointed—a portion of the
+history of Elijah—and ascended that magnificent climax of the wind, the
+earthquake, the fire, and the still small voice, his deep tones echoed
+past with such apparent disregard of her existence, that his presence
+inspired her with a forlorn sense of unapproachableness, which his
+absence would hardly have been able to cause.
+
+At the same time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of
+the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by the
+shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the bleak
+barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had not seen much
+of since the morning of her return with Stephen Smith. Possessing the
+smallest of competencies, this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life
+in journeyings between Endelstow Churchyard and that of a village near
+Southampton, where her father and mother were laid.
+
+She had not attended the service here for a considerable time, and she
+now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat. From the gallery
+window the tomb of her son was plainly visible—standing as the nearest
+object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by the changeless
+horizon of the sea.
+
+The streaming rays, too, flooded her face, now bent towards Elfride
+with a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of the place
+raised to a tragic dignity it did not intrinsically possess. The girl
+resumed her normal attitude with an added disquiet.
+
+Elfride’s emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert itself
+on a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free—a poem, a sunset,
+a cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague imagining, being the
+usual accidents of its exhibition. The longing for Knight’s respect,
+which was leading up to an incipient yearning for his love, made the
+present conjuncture a sufficient one. Whilst kneeling down previous to
+leaving, when the sunny streaks had gone upward to the roof, and the
+lower part of the church was in soft shadow, she could not help
+thinking of Coleridge’s morbid poem “The Three Graves,” and shuddering
+as she wondered if Mrs. Jethway were cursing her, she wept as if her
+heart would break.
+
+They came out of church just as the sun went down, leaving the
+landscape like a platform from which an eloquent speaker has retired,
+and nothing remains for the audience to do but to rise and go home. Mr.
+and Mrs. Swancourt went off in the carriage, Knight and Elfride
+preferring to walk, as the skilful old matchmaker had imagined. They
+descended the hill together.
+
+“I liked your reading, Mr. Knight,” Elfride presently found herself
+saying. “You read better than papa.”
+
+“I will praise anybody that will praise me. You played excellently,
+Miss Swancourt, and very correctly.”
+
+“Correctly—yes.”
+
+“It must be a great pleasure to you to take an active part in the
+service.”
+
+“I want to be able to play with more feeling. But I have not a good
+selection of music, sacred or secular. I wish I had a nice little
+music-library—well chosen, and that the only new pieces sent me were
+those of genuine merit.”
+
+“I am glad to hear such a wish from you. It is extraordinary how many
+women have no honest love of music as an end and not as a means, even
+leaving out those who have nothing in them. They mostly like it for its
+accessories. I have never met a woman who loves music as do ten or a
+dozen men I know.”
+
+“How would you draw the line between women with something and women
+with nothing in them?”
+
+“Well,” said Knight, reflecting a moment, “I mean by nothing in them
+those who don’t care about anything solid. This is an instance: I knew
+a man who had a young friend in whom he was much interested; in fact,
+they were going to be married. She was seemingly poetical, and he
+offered her a choice of two editions of the British poets, which she
+pretended to want badly. He said, ‘Which of them would you like best
+for me to send?’ She said, ‘A pair of the prettiest earrings in Bond
+Street, if you don’t mind, would be nicer than either.’ Now I call her
+a girl with not much in her but vanity; and so do you, I daresay.”
+
+“Oh yes,” replied Elfride with an effort.
+
+Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and
+noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure, he
+appeared to have misgivings.
+
+“You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have
+preferred the nicknacks?”
+
+“No, I don’t think I should, indeed,” she stammered.
+
+“I’ll put it to you,” said the inflexible Knight. “Which will you have
+of these two things of about equal value—the well-chosen little library
+of the best music you spoke of—bound in morocco, walnut case, lock and
+key—or a pair of the very prettiest earrings in Bond Street windows?”
+
+“Of course the music,” Elfride replied with forced earnestness.
+
+“You are quite certain?” he said emphatically.
+
+“Quite,” she faltered; “if I could for certain buy the earrings
+afterwards.”
+
+Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the palpitating
+mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such thing a species
+of cruelty.
+
+He looked at her rather oddly, and said, “Fie!”
+
+“Forgive me,” she said, laughing a little, a little frightened, and
+blushing very deeply.
+
+“Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn’t you say at first, as any firm woman would
+have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Elfride wofully, and with a distressful smile.
+
+“I thought you were exceptionally musical?”
+
+“So I am, I think. But the test is so severe—quite painful.”
+
+“I don’t understand.”
+
+“Music doesn’t do any real good, or rather——”
+
+“That IS a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what——”
+
+“You don’t understand! you don’t understand!”
+
+“Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?”
+
+“No, no, no, no!” she cried petulantly; “I didn’t mean what you think.
+I like the music best, only I like——”
+
+“Earrings better—own it!” he said in a teasing tone. “Well, I think I
+should have had the moral courage to own it at once, without pretending
+to an elevation I could not reach.”
+
+Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the defensive.
+So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she answered desperately:
+
+“My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost one
+of my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy any
+more, or allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I wish I
+had some like them—that’s what my meaning is—indeed it is, Mr. Knight.”
+
+“I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,” said Knight, with a look
+of regret at seeing how disturbed she was. “But seriously, if women
+only knew how they ruin their good looks by such appurtenances, I am
+sure they would never want them.”
+
+“They were lovely, and became me so!”
+
+“Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff their
+ears with nowadays—like the governor of a steam-engine, or a pair of
+scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists’ palettes, and
+compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what besides.”
+
+“No; they were not one of those things. So pretty—like this,” she said
+with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her parasol an
+enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a scale that would
+have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
+
+“Yes, very pretty—very,” said Knight dryly. “How did you come to lose
+such a precious pair of articles?”
+
+“I only lost one—nobody ever loses both at the same time.”
+
+She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of the
+fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith was
+attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her confusion
+was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been awkward, and
+received no direct answer.
+
+Knight seemed not to notice her manner.
+
+“Oh, nobody ever loses both—I see. And certainly the fact that it was a
+case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your choice.”
+
+“As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don’t now,” she said,
+looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And coming
+gallantly to her own rescue, “If I really seem vain, it is that I am
+only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in
+their hearts, and not in their ways.”
+
+“An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more objectionable
+of the two,” said Knight.
+
+“Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell me.”
+
+“I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of life is
+too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through
+it.”
+
+“Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to make her
+life, in its higher sense, a failure?”
+
+“Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.”
+
+“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected
+and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “Because I utter commonplace
+words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor
+stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast
+all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the
+substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”
+
+“Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the
+subject in hand—lives which are failures—you need not trouble yourself.
+Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if
+he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that
+the last chapter is wanting in the story. If a man of power tries to do
+a great deed, and just falls short of it by an accident not his fault,
+up to that time his history had as much in it as that of a great man
+who has done his great deed. It is whimsical of the world to hold that
+particulars of how a lad went to school and so on should be as an
+interesting romance or as nothing to them, precisely in proportion to
+his after renown.”
+
+They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
+dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself. Their
+shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of becoming
+obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the opposite direction
+which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
+
+“I consider my life to some extent a failure,” said Knight again after
+a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic shadows.
+
+“You! How?”
+
+“I don’t precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.”
+
+“Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel that
+you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?”
+
+“Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
+experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are conscious
+of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it seems, there is
+nothing truer than that people who have always gone right don’t know
+half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who
+have gone wrong. However, it is not desirable for me to chill your
+summer-time by going into this.”
+
+“You have not told me even now if I am really vain.”
+
+“If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you’ll think I don’t
+mean it,” he replied, looking curiously into her face.
+
+“Ah, well,” she replied, with a little breath of distress, “‘That which
+is exceeding deep, who will find it out?’ I suppose I must take you as
+I do the Bible—find out and understand all I can; and on the strength
+of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple faith. Think me vain, if
+you will. Worldly greatness requires so much littleness to grow up in,
+that an infirmity more or less is not a matter for regret.”
+
+“As regards women, I can’t say,” answered Knight carelessly; “but it is
+without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be
+born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the
+workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for vanity.”
+
+“No, no, I don’t do that,” she said regretfully.
+
+Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
+written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you have
+lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true self—the
+cynic you have been this evening, or the nice philosopher you were up
+to to-night?”
+
+“Ah, which? You know as well as I.”
+
+Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico till
+the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said idly—
+
+“There’s a bright star exactly over me.”
+
+“Each bright star is overhead somewhere.”
+
+“Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?” and she pointed with her
+finger.
+
+“That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde Islands.”
+
+“And that?”
+
+“Looking down upon the source of the Nile.”
+
+“And that lonely quiet-looking one?”
+
+“He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator for
+his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have
+almost rolled away from, is in India—over the head of a young friend of
+mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs
+low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as marking where his true love
+dwells.”
+
+Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She could
+not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show unconsciousness.
+
+“The star is over MY head,” she said with hesitation.
+
+“Or anybody else’s in England.”
+
+“Oh yes, I see:” she breathed her relief.
+
+“His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don’t know them,
+though I have been in correspondence with him for many years till
+lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in love, and then
+went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very little of him.”
+
+Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though Elfride
+at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in honesty he had
+just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the intention dispersed
+into silence. There seemed a reproach in Knight’s blind words, and yet
+she was not able to clearly define any disloyalty that she had been
+guilty of.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+
+“A distant dearness in the hill.”
+
+
+Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed over
+to Cork.
+
+One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and proportionately
+weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of Killarney, rambled
+amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the infinite variety of island,
+hill, and dale there to be found, listened to the marvellous echoes of
+that romantic spot; but altogether missed the glory and the dream he
+formerly found in such favoured regions.
+
+Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not
+perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious that
+her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but now that
+she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal being
+abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and Knight was in
+love.
+
+Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing
+to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew not: certain
+he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he had felt none of
+that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural to such severances,
+seeing how delightful a subject of contemplation Elfride had been ever
+since. Had he begun to love her when she met his eye after her mishap
+on the tower? He had simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her
+whilst standing on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He
+had thought her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that
+had sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
+creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-playing
+anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her at that time
+a rather conceited child.
+
+Knight’s experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that love
+always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the
+fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the moment of
+generation. Not till they were parted, and she had become sublimated in
+his memory, could he be said to have even attentively regarded her.
+
+Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not
+act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him, he appeared
+to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which had temporarily
+assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.
+
+She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to analysis,
+he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this
+new force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life. He
+became restless: then he forgot all collateral subjects in the pleasure
+of thinking about her.
+
+Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than with
+romance.
+
+He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on coquetry.
+Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible translation of favour
+into suspicion was able to uphold such a theory. The performance had
+been too well done to be anything but real. It had the defects without
+which nothing is genuine. No actress of twenty years’ standing, no
+bald-necked lady whose earliest season “out” was lost in the discreet
+mist of evasive talk, could have played before him the part of
+ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways
+which partly make up ingenuousness.
+
+There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance: spinsters
+there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some think only those of
+the latter. However, Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by
+nature. What was he coming to? It was very odd to himself to look at
+his theories on the subject of love, and reading them now by the full
+light of a new experience, to see how much more his sentences meant
+than he had felt them to mean when they were written. People often
+discover the real force of a trite old maxim only when it is thrust
+upon them by a chance adventure; but Knight had never before known the
+case of a man who learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such
+means.
+
+He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred in him
+was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer in a woman’s
+heart. He had discovered within himself the condition that if ever he
+did make up his mind to marry, it must be on the certainty that no
+cropping out of inconvenient old letters, no bow and blush to a
+mysterious stranger casually met, should be a possible source of
+discomposure. Knight’s sentiments were only the ordinary ones of a man
+of his age who loves genuinely, perhaps exaggerated a little by his
+pursuits. When men first love as lads, it is with the very centre of
+their hearts, nothing else being concerned in the operation. With added
+years, more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till
+at Knight’s age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it. It may
+as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains as a gauge of
+his position is as one determining a ship’s longitude from a light at
+the mast-head.
+
+Knight argued from Elfride’s unwontedness of manner, which was matter
+of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of inference
+only. Incredules les plus credules. “Elfride,” he said, “had hardly
+looked upon a man till she saw me.”
+
+He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
+ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times by
+thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and how
+necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to complete the
+delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind. So at the end of the
+week’s absence, which had brought him as far as Dublin, he resolved to
+curtail his tour, return to Endelstow, and commit himself by making a
+reality of the hypothetical offer of that Sunday evening.
+
+Notwithstanding that he had concocted a great deal of paper theory on
+social amenities and modern manners generally, the special ounce of
+practice was wanting, and now for his life Knight could not recollect
+whether it was considered correct to give a young lady personal
+ornaments before a regular engagement to marry had been initiated. But
+the day before leaving Dublin he looked around anxiously for a
+high-class jewellery establishment, in which he purchased what he
+considered would suit her best.
+
+It was with a most awkward and unwonted feeling that after entering and
+closing the door of his room he sat down, opened the morocco case, and
+held up each of the fragile bits of gold-work before his eyes. Many
+things had become old to the solitary man of letters, but these were
+new, and he handled like a child an outcome of civilization which had
+never before been touched by his fingers. A sudden fastidious decision
+that the pattern chosen would not suit her after all caused him to rise
+in a flurry and tear down the street to change them for others. After a
+great deal of trouble in reselecting, during which his mind became so
+bewildered that the critical faculty on objects of art seemed to have
+vacated his person altogether, Knight carried off another pair of
+ear-rings. These remained in his possession till the afternoon, when,
+after contemplating them fifty times with a growing misgiving that the
+last choice was worse than the first, he felt that no sleep would visit
+his pillow till he had improved upon his previous purchases yet again.
+In a perfect heat of vexation with himself for such tergiversation, he
+went anew to the shop-door, was absolutely ashamed to enter and give
+further trouble, went to another shop, bought a pair at an enormously
+increased price, because they seemed the very thing, asked the
+goldsmiths if they would take the other pair in exchange, was told that
+they could not exchange articles bought of another maker, paid down the
+money, and went off with the two pairs in his possession, wondering
+what on earth to do with the superfluous pair. He almost wished he
+could lose them, or that somebody would steal them, and was burdened
+with an interposing sense that, as a capable man, with true ideas of
+economy, he must necessarily sell them somewhere, which he did at last
+for a mere song. Mingled with a blank feeling of a whole day being lost
+to him in running about the city on this new and extraordinary class of
+errand, and of several pounds being lost through his bungling, was a
+slight sense of satisfaction that he had emerged for ever from his
+antediluvian ignorance on the subject of ladies’ jewellery, as well as
+secured a truly artistic production at last. During the remainder of
+that day he scanned the ornaments of every lady he met with the
+profoundly experienced eye of an appraiser.
+
+Next morning Knight was again crossing St. George’s Channel—not
+returning to London by the Holyhead route as he had originally
+intended, but towards Bristol—availing himself of Mr. and Mrs.
+Swancourt’s invitation to revisit them on his homeward journey.
+
+We flit forward to Elfride.
+
+Woman’s ruling passion—to fascinate and influence those more powerful
+than she—though operant in Elfride, was decidedly purposeless. She had
+wanted her friend Knight’s good opinion from the first: how much more
+than that elementary ingredient of friendship she now desired, her
+fears would hardly allow her to think. In originally wishing to please
+the highest class of man she had ever intimately known, there was no
+disloyalty to Stephen Smith. She could not—and few women can—realize
+the possible vastness of an issue which has only an insignificant
+begetting.
+
+Her letters from Stephen were necessarily few, and her sense of
+fidelity clung to the last she had received as a wrecked mariner clings
+to flotsam. The young girl persuaded herself that she was glad Stephen
+had such a right to her hand as he had acquired (in her eyes) by the
+elopement. She beguiled herself by saying, “Perhaps if I had not so
+committed myself I might fall in love with Mr. Knight.”
+
+All this made the week of Knight’s absence very gloomy and distasteful
+to her. She retained Stephen in her prayers, and his old letters were
+re-read—as a medicine in reality, though she deceived herself into the
+belief that it was as a pleasure.
+
+These letters had grown more and more hopeful. He told her that he
+finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of having
+removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them. Then he
+drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some day. People
+would turn their heads and say, “What a prize he has won!” She was not
+to be sad about that wild runaway attempt of theirs (Elfride had
+repeatedly said that it grieved her). Whatever any other person who
+knew of it might think, he knew well enough the modesty of her nature.
+The only reproach was a gentle one for not having written quite so
+devotedly during her visit to London. Her letter had seemed to have a
+liveliness derived from other thoughts than thoughts of him.
+
+Knight’s intention of an early return to Endelstow having originally
+been faint, his promise to do so had been fainter. He was a man who
+kept his words well to the rear of his possible actions. The vicar was
+rather surprised to see him again so soon: Mrs. Swancourt was not.
+Knight found, on meeting them all, after his arrival had been
+announced, that they had formed an intention to go to St. Leonards for
+a few days at the end of the month.
+
+No satisfactory conjuncture offered itself on this first evening of his
+return for presenting Elfride with what he had been at such pains to
+procure. He was fastidious in his reading of opportunities for such an
+intended act. The next morning chancing to break fine after a week of
+cloudy weather, it was proposed and decided that they should all drive
+to Barwith Strand, a local lion which neither Mrs. Swancourt nor Knight
+had seen. Knight scented romantic occasions from afar, and foresaw that
+such a one might be expected before the coming night.
+
+The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which
+hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these uplands
+revealed the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white and a
+solitary white sail, the whole brimming up to a keen horizon which lay
+like a line ruled from hillside to hillside. Then they rolled down a
+pass, the chocolate-toned rocks forming a wall on both sides, from one
+of which fell a heavy jagged shade over half the roadway. A spout of
+fresh water burst from an occasional crevice, and pattering down upon
+broad green leaves, ran along as a rivulet at the bottom. Unkempt locks
+of heather overhung the brow of each steep, whence at divers points a
+bramble swung forth into mid-air, snatching at their head-dresses like
+a claw.
+
+They mounted the last crest, and the bay which was to be the end of
+their pilgrimage burst upon them. The ocean blueness deepened its
+colour as it stretched to the foot of the crags, where it terminated in
+a fringe of white—silent at this distance, though moving and heaving
+like a counterpane upon a restless sleeper. The shadowed hollows of the
+purple and brown rocks would have been called blue had not that tint
+been so entirely appropriated by the water beside them.
+
+The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached, and
+an ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions down to the
+shore.
+
+Knight found his opportunity. “I did not forget your wish,” he began,
+when they were apart from their friends.
+
+Elfride looked as if she did not understand.
+
+“And I have brought you these,” he continued, awkwardly pulling out the
+case, and opening it while holding it towards her.
+
+“O Mr. Knight!” said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively red;
+“I didn’t know you had any intention or meaning in what you said. I
+thought it a mere supposition. I don’t want them.”
+
+A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater
+decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. To-morrow was the
+day for Stephen’s letter.
+
+“But will you not accept them?” Knight returned, feeling less her
+master than heretofore.
+
+“I would rather not. They are beautiful—more beautiful than any I have
+ever seen,” she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully at the
+temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. “But I don’t want to
+have them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr. Knight.”
+
+“No kindness at all,” said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at this
+unexpected turn of events.
+
+A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather wofully
+at the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to procure; turning
+it about and holding it up as if, feeling his gift to be slighted by
+her, he were endeavouring to admire it very much himself.
+
+“Shut them up, and don’t let me see them any longer—do!” she said
+laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.
+
+“Why, Elfie?”
+
+“Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them. There, I
+am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for not taking
+them—now.” She kept in the last word for a moment, intending to imply
+that her refusal was finite, but somehow the word slipped out, and
+undid all the rest.
+
+“You will take them some day?”
+
+“I don’t want to.”
+
+“Why don’t you want to, Elfride Swancourt?”
+
+“Because I don’t. I don’t like to take them.”
+
+“I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,” said Knight.
+“Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be towards me?”
+
+“No, it isn’t.”
+
+“What, then? Do you like me?”
+
+Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with features
+shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as regarded her answer.
+
+“I like you pretty well,” she at length murmured mildly.
+
+“Not very much?”
+
+“You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?” she
+replied evasively.
+
+“You think me a fogey, I suppose?”
+
+“No, I don’t—I mean I do—I don’t know what I think you, I mean. Let us
+go to papa,” responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried delivery.
+
+“Well, I’ll tell you my object in getting the present,” said Knight,
+with a composure intended to remove from her mind any possible
+impression of his being what he was—her lover. “You see it was the very
+least I could do in common civility.”
+
+Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.
+
+Knight continued, putting away the case: “I felt as anybody naturally
+would have, you know, that my words on your choice the other day were
+invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should take a practical
+shape.”
+
+“Oh yes.”
+
+Elfride was sorry—she could not tell why—that he gave such a legitimate
+reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the time a cool motive,
+which might be stated to anybody without raising a smile. Had she known
+they were offered in that spirit, she would certainly have accepted the
+seductive gift. And the tantalizing feature was that perhaps he
+suspected her to imagine them offered as a lover’s token, which was
+mortifying enough if they were not.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a flat
+boulder for spreading their table-cloth upon, and, amid the discussion
+on that subject, the matter pending between Knight and Elfride was
+shelved for a while. He read her refusal so certainly as the
+bashfulness of a girl in a novel position, that, upon the whole, he
+could tolerate such a beginning. Could Knight have been told that it
+was a sense of fidelity struggling against new love, whilst no less
+assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might have entirely abstracted
+the wish to secure it.
+
+At the same time a slight constraint of manner was visible between them
+for the remainder of the afternoon. The tide turned, and they were
+obliged to ascend to higher ground. The day glided on to its end with
+the usual quiet dreamy passivity of such occasions—when every deed done
+and thing thought is in endeavouring to avoid doing and thinking more.
+Looking idly over the verge of a crag, they beheld their stone
+dining-table gradually being splashed upon and their crumbs and
+fragments all washed away by the incoming sea. The vicar drew a moral
+lesson from the scene; Knight replied in the same satisfied strain. And
+then the waves rolled in furiously—the neutral green-and-blue tongues
+of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into foam by a
+careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving trailing
+followers behind.
+
+The passing of a heavy shower was the next scene—driving them to
+shelter in a shallow cave—after which the horses were put in, and they
+started to return homeward. By the time they reached the higher levels
+the sky had again cleared, and the sunset rays glanced directly upon
+the wet uphill road they had climbed. The ruts formed by their
+carriage-wheels on the ascent—a pair of Liliputian canals—were as
+shining bars of gold, tapering to nothing in the distance. Upon this
+also they turned their backs, and night spread over the sea.
+
+The evening was chilly, and there was no moon. Knight sat close to
+Elfride, and, when the darkness rendered the position of a person a
+matter of uncertainty, particularly close. Elfride edged away.
+
+“I hope you allow me my place ungrudgingly?” he whispered.
+
+“Oh yes; ’tis the least I can do in common civility,” she said,
+accenting the words so that he might recognize them as his own
+returned.
+
+Both of them felt delicately balanced between two possibilities. Thus
+they reached home.
+
+To Knight this mild experience was delightful. It was to him a gentle
+innocent time—a time which, though there may not be much in it, seldom
+repeats itself in a man’s life, and has a peculiar dearness when
+glanced at retrospectively. He is not inconveniently deep in love, and
+is lulled by a peaceful sense of being able to enjoy the most trivial
+thing with a childlike enjoyment. The movement of a wave, the colour of
+a stone, anything, was enough for Knight’s drowsy thoughts of that day
+to precipitate themselves upon. Even the sermonizing platitudes the
+vicar had delivered himself of—chiefly because something seemed to be
+professionally required of him in the presence of a man of Knight’s
+proclivities—were swallowed whole. The presence of Elfride led him not
+merely to tolerate that kind of talk from the necessities of ordinary
+courtesy; but he listened to it—took in the ideas with an enjoyable
+make-believe that they were proper and necessary, and indulged in a
+conservative feeling that the face of things was complete.
+
+Entering her room that evening Elfride found a packet for herself on
+the dressing-table. How it came there she did not know. She tremblingly
+undid the folds of white paper that covered it. Yes; it was the
+treasure of a morocco case, containing those treasures of ornament she
+had refused in the daytime.
+
+Elfride dressed herself in them for a moment, looked at herself in the
+glass, blushed red, and put them away. They filled her dreams all that
+night. Never had she seen anything so lovely, and never was it more
+clear that as an honest woman she was in duty bound to refuse them. Why
+it was not equally clear to her that duty required more vigorous
+co-ordinate conduct as well, let those who dissect her say.
+
+The next morning glared in like a spectre upon her. It was Stephen’s
+letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman—to stealthily do a
+deed she had never liked, to secure an end she now had ceased to
+desire.
+
+But she went.
+
+There were two letters.
+
+One was from the bank at St. Launce’s, in which she had a small private
+deposit—probably something about interest. She put that in her pocket
+for a moment, and going indoors and upstairs to be safer from
+observation, tremblingly opened Stephen’s.
+
+What was this he said to her?
+
+She was to go to the St. Launce’s Bank and take a sum of money which
+they had received private advices to pay her.
+
+The sum was two hundred pounds.
+
+There was no check, order, or anything of the nature of guarantee. In
+fact the information amounted to this: the money was now in the St.
+Launce’s Bank, standing in her name.
+
+She instantly opened the other letter. It contained a deposit-note from
+the bank for the sum of two hundred pounds which had that day been
+added to her account. Stephen’s information, then, was correct, and the
+transfer made.
+
+“I have saved this in one year,” Stephen’s letter went on to say, “and
+what so proper as well as pleasant for me to do as to hand it over to
+you to keep for your use? I have plenty for myself, independently of
+this. Should you not be disposed to let it lie idle in the bank, get
+your father to invest it in your name on good security. It is a little
+present to you from your more than betrothed. He will, I think,
+Elfride, feel now that my pretensions to your hand are anything but the
+dream of a silly boy not worth rational consideration.”
+
+With a natural delicacy, Elfride, in mentioning her father’s marriage,
+had refrained from all allusion to the pecuniary resources of the lady.
+
+Leaving this matter-of-fact subject, he went on, somewhat after his
+boyish manner:
+
+“Do you remember, darling, that first morning of my arrival at your
+house, when your father read at prayers the miracle of healing the sick
+of the palsy—where he is told to take up his bed and walk? I do, and I
+can now so well realize the force of that passage. The smallest piece
+of mat is the bed of the Oriental, and yesterday I saw a native perform
+the very action, which reminded me to mention it. But you are better
+read than I, and perhaps you knew all this long ago....One day I bought
+some small native idols to send home to you as curiosities, but
+afterwards finding they had been cast in England, made to look old, and
+shipped over, I threw them away in disgust.
+
+“Speaking of this reminds me that we are obliged to import all our
+house-building ironwork from England. Never was such foresight required
+to be exercised in building houses as here. Before we begin, we have to
+order every column, lock, hinge, and screw that will be required. We
+cannot go into the next street, as in London, and get them cast at a
+minute’s notice. Mr. L. says somebody will have to go to England very
+soon and superintend the selection of a large order of this kind. I
+only wish I may be the man.”
+
+There before her lay the deposit-receipt for the two hundred pounds,
+and beside it the elegant present of Knight. Elfride grew cold—then her
+cheeks felt heated by beating blood. If by destroying the piece of
+paper the whole transaction could have been withdrawn from her
+experience, she would willingly have sacrificed the money it
+represented. She did not know what to do in either case. She almost
+feared to let the two articles lie in juxtaposition: so antagonistic
+were the interests they represented that a miraculous repulsion of one
+by the other was almost to be expected.
+
+That day she was seen little of. By the evening she had come to a
+resolution, and acted upon it. The packet was sealed up—with a tear of
+regret as she closed the case upon the pretty forms it
+contained—directed, and placed upon the writing-table in Knight’s room.
+And a letter was written to Stephen, stating that as yet she hardly
+understood her position with regard to the money sent; but declaring
+that she was ready to fulfil her promise to marry him. After this
+letter had been written she delayed posting it—although never ceasing
+to feel strenuously that the deed must be done.
+
+Several days passed. There was another Indian letter for Elfride.
+Coming unexpectedly, her father saw it, but made no remark—why, she
+could not tell. The news this time was absolutely overwhelming.
+Stephen, as he had wished, had been actually chosen as the most fitting
+to execute the iron-work commission he had alluded to as impending.
+This duty completed he would have three months’ leave. His letter
+continued that he should follow it in a week, and should take the
+opportunity to plainly ask her father to permit the engagement. Then
+came a page expressive of his delight and hers at the reunion; and
+finally, the information that he would write to the shipping agents,
+asking them to telegraph and tell her when the ship bringing him home
+should be in sight—knowing how acceptable such information would be.
+
+Elfride lived and moved now as in a dream. Knight had at first become
+almost angry at her persistent refusal of his offering—and no less with
+the manner than the fact of it. But he saw that she began to look worn
+and ill—and his vexation lessened to simple perplexity.
+
+He ceased now to remain in the house for long hours together as before,
+but made it a mere centre for antiquarian and geological excursions in
+the neighbourhood. Throw up his cards and go away he fain would have
+done, but could not. And, thus, availing himself of the privileges of a
+relative, he went in and out the premises as fancy led him—but still
+lingered on.
+
+“I don’t wish to stay here another day if my presence is distasteful,”
+he said one afternoon. “At first you used to imply that I was severe
+with you; and when I am kind you treat me unfairly.”
+
+“No, no. Don’t say so.”
+
+The origin of their acquaintanceship had been such as to render their
+manner towards each other peculiar and uncommon. It was of a kind to
+cause them to speak out their minds on any feelings of objection and
+difference: to be reticent on gentler matters.
+
+“I have a good mind to go away and never trouble you again,” continued
+Knight.
+
+She said nothing, but the eloquent expression of her eyes and wan face
+was enough to reproach him for harshness.
+
+“Do you like me to be here, then?” inquired Knight gently.
+
+“Yes,” she said. Fidelity to the old love and truth to the new were
+ranged on opposite sides, and truth virtuelessly prevailed.
+
+“Then I’ll stay a little longer,” said Knight.
+
+“Don’t be vexed if I keep by myself a good deal, will you? Perhaps
+something may happen, and I may tell you something.”
+
+“Mere coyness,” said Knight to himself; and went away with a lighter
+heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces at work in
+women at given times, which with some men is an unerring instinct, is
+peculiar to minds less direct and honest than Knight’s.
+
+The next evening, about five o’clock, before Knight had returned from a
+pilgrimage along the shore, a man walked up to the house. He was a
+messenger from Camelton, a town a few miles off, to which place the
+railway had been advanced during the summer.
+
+“A telegram for Miss Swancourt, and three and sixpence to pay for the
+special messenger.” Miss Swancourt sent out the money, signed the
+paper, and opened her letter with a trembling hand. She read:
+
+“Johnson, Liverpool, to Miss Swancourt, Endelstow, near Castle Boterel.
+
+“Amaryllis telegraphed off Holyhead, four o’clock. Expect will dock and
+land passengers at Canning’s Basin ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”
+
+Her father called her into the study.
+
+“Elfride, who sent you that message?” he asked suspiciously.
+
+“Johnson.” “Who is Johnson, for Heaven’s sake?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“The deuce you don’t! Who is to know, then?”
+
+“I have never heard of him till now.”
+
+“That’s a singular story, isn’t it.”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“Come, come, miss! What was the telegram?”
+
+“Do you really wish to know, papa?”
+
+“Well, I do.”
+
+“Remember, I am a full-grown woman now.”
+
+“Well, what then?”
+
+“Being a woman, and not a child, I may, I think, have a secret or two.”
+
+“You will, it seems.”
+
+“Women have, as a rule.”
+
+“But don’t keep them. So speak out.”
+
+“If you will not press me now, I give my word to tell you the meaning
+of all this before the week is past.”
+
+“On your honour?”
+
+“On my honour.”
+
+“Very well. I have had a certain suspicion, you know; and I shall be
+glad to find it false. I don’t like your manner lately.”
+
+“At the end of the week, I said, papa.”
+
+Her father did not reply, and Elfride left the room.
+
+She began to look out for the postman again. Three mornings later he
+brought an inland letter from Stephen. It contained very little matter,
+having been written in haste; but the meaning was bulky enough. Stephen
+said that, having executed a commission in Liverpool, he should arrive
+at his father’s house, East Endelstow, at five or six o’clock that same
+evening; that he would after dusk walk on to the next village, and meet
+her, if she would, in the church porch, as in the old time. He proposed
+this plan because he thought it unadvisable to call formally at her
+house so late in the evening; yet he could not sleep without having
+seen her. The minutes would seem hours till he clasped her in his arms.
+
+Elfride was still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled her to
+meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent additional weight
+to the conviction; for she was markedly one of those who sigh for the
+unattainable—to whom, superlatively, a hope is pleasing because not a
+possession. And she knew it so well that her intellect was inclined to
+exaggerate this defect in herself.
+
+So during the day she looked her duty steadfastly in the face; read
+Wordsworth’s astringent yet depressing ode to that Deity; committed
+herself to her guidance; and still felt the weight of chance desires.
+
+But she began to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the
+sacrifice of herself to the man whom a maidenly sense of propriety
+compelled her to regard as her only possible husband. She would meet
+him, and do all that lay in her power to marry him. To guard against a
+relapse, a note was at once despatched to his father’s cottage for
+Stephen on his arrival, fixing an hour for the interview.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+
+“On thy cold grey stones, O sea!”
+
+
+Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence by a
+steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey over the
+hills from St. Launce’s. He did not know of the extension of the
+railway to Camelton.
+
+During the afternoon a thought occurred to Elfride, that from any cliff
+along the shore it would be possible to see the steamer some hours
+before its arrival.
+
+She had accumulated religious force enough to do an act of
+supererogation. The act was this—to go to some point of land and watch
+for the ship that brought her future husband home.
+
+It was a cloudy afternoon. Elfride was often diverted from a purpose by
+a dull sky; and though she used to persuade herself that the weather
+was as fine as possible on the other side of the clouds, she could not
+bring about any practical result from this fancy. Now, her mood was
+such that the humid sky harmonized with it.
+
+Having ascended and passed over a hill behind the house, Elfride came
+to a small stream. She used it as a guide to the coast. It was smaller
+than that in her own valley, and flowed altogether at a higher level.
+Bushes lined the slopes of its shallow trough; but at the bottom, where
+the water ran, was a soft green carpet, in a strip two or three yards
+wide.
+
+In winter, the water flowed over the grass; in summer, as now, it
+trickled along a channel in the midst.
+
+Elfride had a sensation of eyes regarding her from somewhere. She
+turned, and there was Mr. Knight. He had dropped into the valley from
+the side of the hill. She felt a thrill of pleasure, and rebelliously
+allowed it to exist.
+
+“What utter loneliness to find you in!”
+
+“I am going to the shore by tracking the stream. I believe it empties
+itself not far off, in a silver thread of water, over a cascade of
+great height.”
+
+“Why do you load yourself with that heavy telescope?”
+
+“To look over the sea with it,” she said faintly.
+
+“I’ll carry it for you to your journey’s end.” And he took the glass
+from her unresisting hands. “It cannot be half a mile further. See,
+there is the water.” He pointed to a short fragment of level muddy-gray
+colour, cutting against the sky.
+
+Elfride had already scanned the small surface of ocean visible, and had
+seen no ship.
+
+They walked along in company, sometimes with the brook between them—for
+it was no wider than a man’s stride—sometimes close together. The green
+carpet grew swampy, and they kept higher up.
+
+One of the two ridges between which they walked dwindled lower and
+became insignificant. That on the right hand rose with their advance,
+and terminated in a clearly defined edge against the light, as if it
+were abruptly sawn off. A little further, and the bed of the rivulet
+ended in the same fashion.
+
+They had come to a bank breast-high, and over it the valley was no
+longer to be seen. It was withdrawn cleanly and completely. In its
+place was sky and boundless atmosphere; and perpendicularly down
+beneath them—small and far off—lay the corrugated surface of the
+Atlantic.
+
+The small stream here found its death. Running over the precipice it
+was dispersed in spray before it was half-way down, and falling like
+rain upon projecting ledges, made minute grassy meadows of them. At the
+bottom the water-drops soaked away amid the debris of the cliff. This
+was the inglorious end of the river.
+
+“What are you looking for? said Knight, following the direction of her
+eyes.
+
+She was gazing hard at a black object—nearer to the shore than to the
+horizon—from the summit of which came a nebulous haze, stretching like
+gauze over the sea.
+
+“The Puffin, a little summer steamboat—from Bristol to Castle Boterel,”
+she said. “I think that is it—look. Will you give me the glass?”
+
+Knight pulled open the old-fashioned but powerful telescope, and handed
+it to Elfride, who had looked on with heavy eyes.
+
+“I can’t keep it up now,” she said.
+
+“Rest it on my shoulder.”
+
+“It is too high.”
+
+“Under my arm.”
+
+“Too low. You may look instead,” she murmured weakly.
+
+Knight raised the glass to his eye, and swept the sea till the Puffin
+entered its field.
+
+“Yes, it is the Puffin—a tiny craft. I can see her figure-head
+distinctly—a bird with a beak as big as its head.”
+
+“Can you see the deck?”
+
+“Wait a minute; yes, pretty clearly. And I can see the black forms of
+the passengers against its white surface. One of them has taken
+something from another—a glass, I think—yes, it is—and he is levelling
+it in this direction. Depend upon it we are conspicuous objects against
+the sky to them. Now, it seems to rain upon them, and they put on
+overcoats and open umbrellas. They vanish and go below—all but that one
+who has borrowed the glass. He is a slim young fellow, and still
+watches us.”
+
+Elfride grew pale, and shifted her little feet uneasily.
+
+Knight lowered the glass.
+
+“I think we had better return,” he said. “That cloud which is raining
+on them may soon reach us. Why, you look ill. How is that?”
+
+“Something in the air affects my face.”
+
+“Those fair cheeks are very fastidious, I fear,” returned Knight
+tenderly. “This air would make those rosy that were never so before,
+one would think—eh, Nature’s spoilt child?”
+
+Elfride’s colour returned again.
+
+“There is more to see behind us, after all,” said Knight.
+
+She turned her back upon the boat and Stephen Smith, and saw, towering
+still higher than themselves, the vertical face of the hill on the
+right, which did not project seaward so far as the bed of the valley,
+but formed the back of a small cove, and so was visible like a concave
+wall, bending round from their position towards the left.
+
+The composition of the huge hill was revealed to its backbone and
+marrow here at its rent extremity. It consisted of a vast
+stratification of blackish-gray slate, unvaried in its whole height by
+a single change of shade.
+
+It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is
+called a presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their
+actual bulk. A little cliff will impress you powerfully; a great one
+not at all. It depends, as with man, upon the countenance of the cliff.
+
+“I cannot bear to look at that cliff,” said Elfride. “It has a horrid
+personality, and makes me shudder. We will go.”
+
+“Can you climb?” said Knight. “If so, we will ascend by that path over
+the grim old fellow’s brow.”
+
+“Try me,” said Elfride disdainfully. “I have ascended steeper slopes
+than that.”
+
+From where they had been loitering, a grassy path wound along inside a
+bank, placed as a safeguard for unwary pedestrians, to the top of the
+precipice, and over it along the hill in an inland direction.
+
+“Take my arm, Miss Swancourt,” said Knight.
+
+“I can get on better without it, thank you.”
+
+When they were one quarter of the way up, Elfride stopped to take
+breath. Knight stretched out his hand.
+
+She took it, and they ascended the remaining slope together. Reaching
+the very top, they sat down to rest by mutual consent.
+
+“Heavens, what an altitude!” said Knight between his pants, and looking
+far over the sea. The cascade at the bottom of the slope appeared a
+mere span in height from where they were now.
+
+Elfride was looking to the left. The steamboat was in full view again,
+and by reason of the vast surface of sea their higher position
+uncovered it seemed almost close to the shore.
+
+“Over that edge,” said Knight, “where nothing but vacancy appears, is a
+moving compact mass. The wind strikes the face of the rock, runs up it,
+rises like a fountain to a height far above our heads, curls over us in
+an arch, and disperses behind us. In fact, an inverted cascade is
+there—as perfect as the Niagara Falls—but rising instead of falling,
+and air instead of water. Now look here.”
+
+Knight threw a stone over the bank, aiming it as if to go onward over
+the cliff. Reaching the verge, it towered into the air like a bird,
+turned back, and alighted on the ground behind them. They themselves
+were in a dead calm.
+
+“A boat crosses Niagara immediately at the foot of the falls, where the
+water is quite still, the fallen mass curving under it. We are in
+precisely the same position with regard to our atmospheric cataract
+here. If you run back from the cliff fifty yards, you will be in a
+brisk wind. Now I daresay over the bank is a little backward current.”
+
+Knight rose and leant over the bank. No sooner was his head above it
+than his hat appeared to be sucked from his head—slipping over his
+forehead in a seaward direction.
+
+“That’s the backward eddy, as I told you,” he cried, and vanished over
+the little bank after his hat.
+
+Elfride waited one minute; he did not return. She waited another, and
+there was no sign of him.
+
+A few drops of rain fell, then a sudden shower.
+
+She arose, and looked over the bank. On the other side were two or
+three yards of level ground—then a short steep preparatory slope—then
+the verge of the precipice.
+
+On the slope was Knight, his hat on his head. He was on his hands and
+knees, trying to climb back to the level ground. The rain had wetted
+the shaly surface of the incline. A slight superficial wetting of the
+soil hereabout made it far more slippery to stand on than the same soil
+thoroughly drenched. The inner substance was still hard, and was
+lubricated by the moistened film.
+
+“I find a difficulty in getting back,” said Knight.
+
+Elfride’s heart fell like lead.
+
+“But you can get back?” she wildly inquired.
+
+Knight strove with all his might for two or three minutes, and the
+drops of perspiration began to bead his brow.
+
+“No, I am unable to do it,” he answered.
+
+Elfride, by a wrench of thought, forced away from her mind the
+sensation that Knight was in bodily danger. But attempt to help him she
+must. She ventured upon the treacherous incline, propped herself with
+the closed telescope, and gave him her hand before he saw her
+movements.
+
+“O Elfride! why did you?” said he. “I am afraid you have only
+endangered yourself.”
+
+And as if to prove his statement, in making an endeavour by her
+assistance they both slipped lower, and then he was again stayed. His
+foot was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the verge of
+the precipice. Fixed by this, he steadied her, her head being about a
+foot below the beginning of the slope. Elfride had dropped the glass;
+it rolled to the edge and vanished over it into a nether sky.
+
+“Hold tightly to me,” he said.
+
+She flung her arms round his neck with such a firm grasp that whilst he
+remained it was impossible for her to fall.
+
+“Don’t be flurried,” Knight continued. “So long as we stay above this
+block we are perfectly safe. Wait a moment whilst I consider what we
+had better do.”
+
+He turned his eyes to the dizzy depths beneath them, and surveyed the
+position of affairs.
+
+Two glances told him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was that,
+unless they performed their feat of getting up the slope with the
+precision of machines, they were over the edge and whirling in mid-air.
+
+For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the breath and
+strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So he still waited,
+and looked in the face of the enemy.
+
+The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the neighbouring
+inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the water it overhung. It
+had been proved by actual measurement to be not a foot less than six
+hundred and fifty.
+
+That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of Flamborough,
+half as high again as the South Foreland, a hundred feet higher than
+Beachy Head—the loftiest promontory on the east or south side of this
+island—twice the height of St. Aldhelm’s, thrice as high as the Lizard,
+and just double the height of St. Bee’s. One sea-bord point on the
+western coast is known to surpass it in altitude, but only by a few
+feet. This is Great Orme’s Head, in Caernarvonshire.
+
+And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying
+feature which some of those are without—sheer perpendicularity from the
+half-tide level.
+
+Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in an
+inlet—the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far from
+being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling
+direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into
+the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in
+the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill,
+chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the
+precipice the Cliff without a Name.*
+
+* See Preface
+
+
+What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And upon
+this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had formed a kind
+of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that of a Hambro’ grape.
+Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror
+through the lungs.
+
+“This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of the
+cliff,” said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid stoical
+meditation. “Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up my body till
+your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be
+able to climb on to level ground.”
+
+“What will you do?”
+
+“Wait whilst you run for assistance.”
+
+“I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?”
+
+“I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-point
+without your weight, in all probability. But don’t let us talk. Be
+brave, Elfride, and climb.”
+
+She prepared to ascend, saying, “This is the moment I anticipated when
+on the tower. I thought it would come!”
+
+“This is not a time for superstition,” said Knight. “Dismiss all that.”
+
+“I will,” she said humbly.
+
+“Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That’s good—well done.
+Hold to my shoulder.”
+
+She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was high
+enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over the bank.
+
+“Can you now climb on to level ground?”
+
+“I am afraid not. I will try.”
+
+“What can you see?”
+
+“The sloping common.”
+
+“What upon it?”
+
+“Purple heather and some grass.”
+
+“Nothing more—no man or human being of any kind?”
+
+“Nobody.”
+
+“Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink above
+you. Get that well into your hand, but don’t trust to it entirely. Then
+step upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach the top.”
+
+With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The preternatural
+quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon herself, and gave her
+a courage not her own. She made a spring from the top of his shoulder,
+and was up.
+
+Then she turned to look at him.
+
+By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
+weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his feet
+depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion into the
+enormous masses of black strata, which had since been worn away from
+the sides of the alien fragment by centuries of frost and rain, and now
+left it without much support.
+
+It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.
+
+The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than useless
+now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same nether sky
+that had engulfed the telescope.
+
+One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight
+began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride uttered a
+low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her face with her
+hands.
+
+Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
+intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet
+steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon
+these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of
+vegetation—the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock
+appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight
+was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow
+being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was
+sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but was very
+far from offering an adequately flat face to support him.
+
+In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found time
+for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.
+
+She lay on her side above him—her fingers clasped. Seeing him again
+steady, she jumped upon her feet.
+
+“Now, if I can only save you by running for help!” she cried. “Oh, I
+would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver me?” And
+she turned away wildly to run for assistance.
+
+“Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?”
+
+“Three-quarters of an hour.”
+
+“That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there
+nobody nearer?”
+
+“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”
+
+“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or
+stick of any kind on the common?”
+
+She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and
+grass.
+
+A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a
+sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over
+the bank from his sight.
+
+Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+
+“A woman’s way.”
+
+
+Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
+the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked
+and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are
+not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of
+air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his dismay.
+
+He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold
+of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his
+every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to
+Elfride’s intentions, whatever they might be.
+
+He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade,
+not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the
+past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all
+strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the
+paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost
+ledges.
+
+Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride’s hasty disappearance, but
+could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a
+doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of
+deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and
+this possibility was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was
+left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles, except by a
+casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose of
+collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of
+subsistence thereon.
+
+At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
+him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected
+with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature’s treacherous
+attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
+
+From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a
+huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which
+enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see
+the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down
+the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.
+Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical
+shape was desolation.
+
+By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
+world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
+opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low
+relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
+turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
+crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
+lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
+was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
+ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
+
+The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never
+in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless
+slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name.
+Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those
+ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented
+had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but
+they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with
+the small in his death.
+
+Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
+occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful
+juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the
+varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and
+his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home
+such imaginings as these.
+
+Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
+of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
+centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts,
+and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears,
+rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They
+lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the
+neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was
+there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the
+tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the
+myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and
+overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish
+creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister
+crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating
+in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms
+and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of
+lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil
+confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. These
+images passed before Knight’s inner eye in less than half a minute, and
+he was again considering the actual present. Was he to die? The mental
+picture of Elfride in the world, without himself to cherish her, smote
+his heart like a whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a
+girl do? He dared not move an inch. Was Death really stretching out his
+hand? The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die, was
+fainter now.
+
+However, Knight still clung to the cliff.
+
+To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater
+part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems to have moods
+in other than a poetical sense: predilections for certain deeds at
+certain times, without any apparent law to govern or season to account
+for them. She is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who
+does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and
+in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in
+lawless caprice. Man’s case is always that of the prodigal’s favourite
+or the miser’s pensioner. In her unfriendly moments there seems a
+feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in
+swallowing the victim.
+
+Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to adopt
+it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures followed. The
+rain increased, and persecuted him with an exceptional persistency
+which he was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in
+such a wretched state already. An entirely new order of things could be
+observed in this introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards
+instead of down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with
+it in its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that
+they stuck into his flesh like cold needles. Each drop was virtually a
+shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-shafts seemed to lift
+him on their points: no downward rain ever had such a torturing effect.
+In a brief space he was drenched, except in two places. These were on
+the top of his shoulders and on the crown of his hat.
+
+The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here. It
+tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon
+all opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable
+hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the
+strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and
+sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for
+conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in the way.
+
+Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were getting
+weak already. “She will never come again; she has been gone ten
+minutes,” he said to himself.
+
+This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just
+now: she had really been gone but three.
+
+“As many more minutes will be my end,” he thought.
+
+Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
+comparisons at such times.
+
+“This is a summer afternoon,” he said, “and there can never have been
+such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.”
+
+He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity; the air
+in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing attitude in which
+they approached him that magnified their powers.
+
+He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
+lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids, and
+into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of the
+sea—visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
+one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them. We
+colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea would have
+been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer it
+was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow
+white border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so
+distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely
+audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall and its edging.
+
+The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain descended
+from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown; above
+him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.
+
+Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was the
+voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and
+thrust him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the moan of
+that unplummetted ocean below and afar—rubbing its restless flank
+against the Cliff without a Name.
+
+Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride? Perhaps.
+Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live
+on.
+
+Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this.
+Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its natural golden
+fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape, not with the
+strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative
+to colour, but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red
+face looking on with a drunken leer.
+
+Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to disguise
+this fact from themselves or others, even though an ostentatious
+display may be called self-conceit. Knight, without showing it much,
+knew that his intellect was above the average. And he thought—he could
+not help thinking—that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of
+good material; that such an experiment in killing might have been
+practised upon some less developed life.
+
+A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that inexorable
+circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts. Renounce
+a desire for a long-contested position, and go on another tack, and
+after a while the prize is thrown at you, seemingly in disappointment
+that no more tantalizing is possible.
+
+Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned to
+contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond. Into the
+shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him. Let it
+suffice to state what ensued.
+
+At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
+disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It was
+the head of Elfride.
+
+Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.
+
+The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend
+first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to
+a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where, without any immediate
+terror of death, the inmates experience the gloom of monotonous
+seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their countenances at the
+greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the visit, is enough to stir
+the emotions of the most careless observer.
+
+Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
+transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had
+deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His
+lips moved to the word “Elfride,” though the emotion evolved no sound.
+His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole
+diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude
+for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.
+
+Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She
+could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and
+not deserted him utterly, and it was much.
+
+It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride
+was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who
+mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance,
+thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her
+face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.
+
+“How calm he is!” she thought. “How great and noble he is to be so
+calm!” She would have died ten times for him then.
+
+The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
+longer.
+
+“How much longer can you wait?” came from her pale lips and along the
+wind to his position.
+
+“Four minutes,” said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.
+
+“But with a good hope of being saved?”
+
+“Seven or eight.”
+
+He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and
+that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and
+flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under
+the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and
+bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a
+thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but
+Elfride’s seemed to cling to her like a glove.
+
+Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her
+hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more
+particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending
+the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards
+twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she
+had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long.
+
+“Can you wait while I bind it?” she said, anxiously extending her gaze
+down to him.
+
+“Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of
+strength.”
+
+Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow
+tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller
+scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round
+the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread
+abroad.
+
+“Now,” said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this
+time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, “I can hold
+three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the
+strength of the knots, one by one.”
+
+She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope
+between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots
+slipped.
+
+“Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,” Elfride
+exclaimed apprehensively.
+
+She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.
+
+“When you have let it down,” said Knight, already resuming his position
+of ruling power, “go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank
+as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end
+with both hands.”
+
+He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it
+involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.
+
+“I have tied it round my waist,” she cried, “and I will lean directly
+upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.”
+
+It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.
+
+“I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,” she
+continued, “to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the
+greatest care, I beg you!”
+
+She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would
+be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and
+disappeared as she had done before.
+
+The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it
+twitched three times.
+
+He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.
+
+The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only
+of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now.
+Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half
+a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures
+of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
+
+He was saved, and by Elfride.
+
+He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over
+the bank.
+
+At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
+Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each
+told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved
+by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each
+other’s arms.
+
+At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed
+towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no
+longer to be seen.
+
+An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
+revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle
+girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to
+Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of
+her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a
+guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now,
+encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious
+crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and
+did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the
+slave of the greater than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as
+this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along
+the impressionable soul of Elfride.
+
+Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
+nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of
+impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s
+peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow him to take
+advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.
+
+Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
+
+He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to
+toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had
+obtained the rope.
+
+“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
+
+“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an
+expression between gladness and shame “You follow me, but at some
+distance.”
+
+“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God
+bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”
+
+“No; I shall get warm running.”
+
+Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
+exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit,
+and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined
+upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole
+clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of
+the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton
+rope.
+
+“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on
+Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right
+minds, by the fireside at home!”
+
+She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more
+like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a
+mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
+
+Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour
+nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in
+refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that
+necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most
+grievous loss to him.
+
+He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
+embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground
+an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its
+proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had
+contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand.
+It was blown to the right, blown to the left—it floated to the edge of
+the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in
+the air, and then flew back over his head.
+
+Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to
+discover if it had been worth securing.
+
+The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds,
+placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had
+totally forgotten she carried with her.
+
+Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put
+it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+
+“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”
+
+
+By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle
+Boterel, and breathed his native air.
+
+A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard,
+were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.
+
+In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a
+small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at
+the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a
+vale of its own, further inland than the west village, and though so
+near it, had little of physical feature in common with the latter. East
+Endelstow was more wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s
+mansion and park, and was free from those bleak open uplands which lent
+such an air of desolation to the vicinage of the coast—always excepting
+the small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old
+house, The Crags.
+
+Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain
+again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter,
+he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the
+lower part of its course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge
+immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by an overhanging
+face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a reason of his own he made
+this spot his refuge from the storm, and turning his face to the left,
+conned the landscape as a book.
+
+He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.
+
+From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity
+of being either brilliant foreground or the subdued tone of distance, a
+sudden dip in the surface of the country lowering out of sight all the
+intermediate prospect. In apparent contact with the trees and bushes
+growing close beside him appeared the distant tract, terminated
+suddenly by the brink of the series of cliffs which culminated in the
+tall giant without a name—small and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf
+on a bough at Stephen’s elbow blotted out a whole hill in the
+contrasting district far away; a green bunch of nuts covered a complete
+upland there, and the great cliff itself was outvied by a pigmy crag in
+the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these things hundreds of
+times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with such tenderness
+as now.
+
+Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see
+the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his
+Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the
+hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a
+sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure,
+running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain
+which had caused Stephen’s halt in this place, dropped down the
+heathery hill, entered the vale, and was out of sight.
+
+Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was
+surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of departure
+another moving speck, as different from the first as well could be,
+insomuch that it was perceptible only by its blackness. Slowly and
+regularly it took the same course, and there was not much doubt that
+this was the form of a man. He, too, gradually descended from the upper
+levels, and was lost in the valley below.
+
+The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to the
+road. Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were soon obscured
+by the intervention of a high hedge. Just before they emerged again he
+heard voices in conversation.
+
+“’A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he’s a-coming,” said
+a tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin
+Cannister’s.
+
+“’A must ’a b’lieve,” said another voice—that of Stephen’s father.
+
+Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His father
+and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best suits, and beside
+them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly painted spring-cart.
+
+“All right, Mr. Cannister; here’s the lost man!” exclaimed young Smith,
+entering at once upon the old style of greeting. “Father, here I am.”
+
+“All right, my sonny; and glad I be for’t!” returned John Smith,
+overjoyed to see the young man. “How be ye? Well, come along home, and
+don’t let’s bide out here in the damp. Such weather must be terrible
+bad for a young chap just come from a fiery nation like Indy; hey,
+naibour Cannister?”
+
+“Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous bales,
+and noble packages of foreign description, I make no doubt?”
+
+“Hardly all that,” said Stephen laughing.
+
+“We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel afore ye
+landed,” said his father. “‘Put in the horse,’ says Martin. ‘Ay,’ says
+I, ‘so we will;’ and did it straightway. Now, maybe, Martin had better
+go on wi’ the cart for the things, and you and I walk home-along.”
+
+“And I shall be back a’most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty step
+still, though time d’ begin to tell upon her as upon the rest o’ us.”
+
+Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued his
+journey homeward in the company of his father.
+
+“Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,” said John,
+“you’ll find us in a turk of a mess, sir—‘sir,’ says I to my own son!
+but ye’ve gone up so, Stephen. We’ve killed the pig this morning for
+ye, thinking ye’d be hungry, and glad of a morsel of fresh mate. And ’a
+won’t be cut up till to-night. However, we can make ye a good supper of
+fry, which will chaw up well wi’ a dab o’ mustard and a few nice new
+taters, and a drop of shilling ale to wash it down. Your mother have
+scrubbed the house through because ye were coming, and dusted all the
+chimmer furniture, and bought a new basin and jug of a travelling
+crockery-woman that came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks,
+and claned the winders! Ay, I don’t know what ’a ha’n’t a done. Never
+were such a steer, ’a b’lieve.”
+
+Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his mother’s
+wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey. When they
+drew near the river, and the cottage behind it, they could hear the
+master-mason’s clock striking off the bygone hours of the day at
+intervals of a quarter of a minute, during which intervals Stephen’s
+imagination readily pictured his mother’s forefinger wandering round
+the dial in company with the minute-hand.
+
+“The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en right
+seemingly,” said his father in an explanatory tone; and they went up
+the garden to the door.
+
+When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly greeted his
+mother—who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue ground, covered
+broadcast with a multitude of new and full moons, stars, and planets,
+with an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect to diversify the
+scene—the crackle of cart-wheels was heard outside, and Martin
+Cannister stamped in at the doorway, in the form of a pair of legs
+beneath a great box, his body being nowhere visible. When the luggage
+had been all taken down, and Stephen had gone upstairs to change his
+clothes, Mrs. Smith’s mind seemed to recover a lost thread.
+
+“Really our clock is not worth a penny,” she said, turning to it and
+attempting to start the pendulum.
+
+“Stopped again?” inquired Martin with commiseration.
+
+“Yes, sure,” replied Mrs. Smith; and continued after the manner of
+certain matrons, to whose tongues the harmony of a subject with a
+casual mood is a greater recommendation than its pertinence to the
+occasion, “John would spend pounds a year upon the jimcrack old thing,
+if he might, in having it claned, when at the same time you may doctor
+it yourself as well. ‘The clock’s stopped again, John,’ I say to him.
+‘Better have en claned,’ says he. There’s five shillings. ‘That clock
+grinds again,’ I say to en. ‘Better have en claned,’ ’a says again.
+‘That clock strikes wrong, John,’ says I. ‘Better have en claned,’ he
+goes on. The wheels would have been polished to skeletons by this time
+if I had listened to en, and I assure you we could have bought a
+chainey-faced beauty wi’ the good money we’ve flung away these last ten
+years upon this old green-faced mortal. And, Martin, you must be wet.
+My son is gone up to change. John is damper than I should like to be,
+but ’a calls it nothing. Some of Mrs. Swancourt’s servants have been
+here—they ran in out of the rain when going for a walk—and I assure you
+the state of their bonnets was frightful.”
+
+“How’s the folks? We’ve been over to Castle Boterel, and what wi’
+running and stopping out of the storms, my poor head is beyond
+everything! fizz, fizz fizz; ’tis frying o’ fish from morning to
+night,” said a cracked voice in the doorway at this instant.
+
+“Lord so’s, who’s that?” said Mrs. Smith, in a private exclamation, and
+turning round saw William Worm, endeavouring to make himself look
+passing civil and friendly by overspreading his face with a large smile
+that seemed to have no connection with the humour he was in. Behind him
+stood a woman about twice his size, with a large umbrella over her
+head. This was Mrs. Worm, William’s wife.
+
+“Come in, William,” said John Smith. “We don’t kill a pig every day.
+And you, likewise, Mrs. Worm. I make ye welcome. Since ye left Parson
+Swancourt, William, I don’t see much of “ee.”
+
+“No, for to tell the truth, since I took to the turn-pike-gate line,
+I’ve been out but little, coming to church o’ Sundays not being my duty
+now, as ’twas in a parson’s family, you see. However, our boy is able
+to mind the gate now, and I said, says I, ‘Barbara, let’s call and see
+John Smith.’”
+
+“I am sorry to hear yer pore head is so bad still.”
+
+“Ay, I assure you that frying o’ fish is going on for nights and days.
+And, you know, sometimes ’tisn’t only fish, but rashers o’ bacon and
+inions. Ay, I can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral as life; can’t
+I, Barbara?”
+
+Mrs. Worm, who had been all this time engaged in closing her umbrella,
+corroborated this statement, and now, coming indoors, showed herself to
+be a wide-faced, comfortable-looking woman, with a wart upon her cheek,
+bearing a small tuft of hair in its centre.
+
+“Have ye ever tried anything to cure yer noise, Maister Worm?” inquired
+Martin Cannister.
+
+“Oh ay; bless ye, I’ve tried everything. Ay, Providence is a merciful
+man, and I have hoped He’d have found it out by this time, living so
+many years in a parson’s family, too, as I have, but ’a don’t seem to
+relieve me. Ay, I be a poor wambling man, and life’s a mint o’
+trouble!”
+
+“True, mournful true, William Worm. ’Tis so. The world wants looking
+to, or ’tis all sixes and sevens wi’ us.”
+
+“Take your things off, Mrs. Worm,” said Mrs. Smith. “We be rather in a
+muddle, to tell the truth, for my son is just dropped in from Indy a
+day sooner than we expected, and the pig-killer is coming presently to
+cut up.”
+
+Mrs. Barbara Worm, not wishing to take any mean advantage of persons in
+a muddle by observing them, removed her bonnet and mantle with eyes
+fixed upon the flowers in the plot outside the door.
+
+“What beautiful tiger-lilies!” said Mrs. Worm.
+
+“Yes, they be very well, but such a trouble to me on account of the
+children that come here. They will go eating the berries on the stem,
+and call ’em currants. Taste wi’ junivals is quite fancy, really.”
+
+“And your snapdragons look as fierce as ever.”
+
+“Well, really,” answered Mrs. Smith, entering didactically into the
+subject, “they are more like Christians than flowers. But they make up
+well enough wi’ the rest, and don’t require much tending. And the same
+can be said o’ these miller’s wheels. ’Tis a flower I like very much,
+though so simple. John says he never cares about the flowers o’ ’em,
+but men have no eye for anything neat. He says his favourite flower is
+a cauliflower. And I assure you I tremble in the springtime, for ’tis
+perfect murder.”
+
+“You don’t say so, Mrs. Smith!”
+
+“John digs round the roots, you know. In goes his blundering spade,
+through roots, bulbs, everything that hasn’t got a good show above
+ground, turning ’em up cut all to slices. Only the very last fall I
+went to move some tulips, when I found every bulb upside down, and the
+stems crooked round. He had turned ’em over in the spring, and the
+cunning creatures had soon found that heaven was not where it used to
+be.”
+
+“What’s that long-favoured flower under the hedge?”
+
+“They? O Lord, they are the horrid Jacob’s ladders! Instead of praising
+’em, I be mad wi’ ’em for being so ready to bide where they are not
+wanted. They be very well in their way, but I do not care for things
+that neglect won’t kill. Do what I will, dig, drag, scrap, pull, I get
+too many of ’em. I chop the roots: up they’ll come, treble strong.
+Throw ’em over hedge; there they’ll grow, staring me in the face like a
+hungry dog driven away, and creep back again in a week or two the same
+as before. ’Tis Jacob’s ladder here, Jacob’s ladder there, and plant
+’em where nothing in the world will grow, you get crowds of ’em in a
+month or two. John made a new manure mixen last summer, and he said,
+‘Maria, now if you’ve got any flowers or such like, that you don’t
+want, you may plant ’em round my mixen so as to hide it a bit, though
+’tis not likely anything of much value will grow there.’ I thought,
+‘There’s them Jacob’s ladders; I’ll put them there, since they can’t do
+harm in such a place;’ and I planted the Jacob’s ladders sure enough.
+They growed, and they growed, in the mixen and out of the mixen, all
+over the litter, covering it quite up. When John wanted to use it about
+the garden, ’a said, ‘Nation seize them Jacob’s ladders of yours,
+Maria! They’ve eat the goodness out of every morsel of my manure, so
+that ’tis no better than sand itself!’ Sure enough the hungry mortals
+had. ’Tis my belief that in the secret souls o’ ’em, Jacob’s ladders be
+weeds, and not flowers at all, if the truth was known.”
+
+Robert Lickpan, pig-killer and carrier, arrived at this moment. The
+fatted animal hanging in the back kitchen was cleft down the middle of
+its backbone, Mrs. Smith being meanwhile engaged in cooking supper.
+
+Between the cutting and chopping, ale was handed round, and Worm and
+the pig-killer listened to John Smith’s description of the meeting with
+Stephen, with eyes blankly fixed upon the table-cloth, in order that
+nothing in the external world should interrupt their efforts to conjure
+up the scene correctly.
+
+Stephen came downstairs in the middle of the story, and after the
+little interruption occasioned by his entrance and welcome, the
+narrative was again continued, precisely as if he had not been there at
+all, and was told inclusively to him, as to somebody who knew nothing
+about the matter.
+
+“‘Ay,’ I said, as I catched sight o’ en through the brimbles, ‘that’s
+the lad, for I d’ know en by his grand-father’s walk;’ for ’a stapped
+out like poor father for all the world. Still there was a touch o’ the
+frisky that set me wondering. ’A got closer, and I said, ‘That’s the
+lad, for I d’ know en by his carrying a black case like a travelling
+man.’ Still, a road is common to all the world, and there be more
+travelling men than one. But I kept my eye cocked, and I said to
+Martin, ‘’Tis the boy, now, for I d’ know en by the wold twirl o’ the
+stick and the family step.’ Then ’a come closer, and a’ said, ‘All
+right.’ I could swear to en then.”
+
+Stephen’s personal appearance was next criticised.
+
+“He d’ look a deal thinner in face, surely, than when I seed en at the
+parson’s, and never knowed en, if ye’ll believe me,” said Martin.
+
+“Ay, there,” said another, without removing his eyes from Stephen’s
+face, “I should ha’ knowed en anywhere. ’Tis his father’s nose to a T.”
+
+“It has been often remarked,” said Stephen modestly.
+
+“And he’s certainly taller,” said Martin, letting his glance run over
+Stephen’s form from bottom to top.
+
+“I was thinking ’a was exactly the same height,” Worm replied.
+
+“Bless thy soul, that’s because he’s bigger round likewise.” And the
+united eyes all moved to Stephen’s waist.
+
+“I be a poor wambling man, but I can make allowances,” said William
+Worm. “Ah, sure, and how he came as a stranger and pilgrim to Parson
+Swancourt’s that time, not a soul knowing en after so many years! Ay,
+life’s a strange picter, Stephen: but I suppose I must say Sir to ye?”
+
+“Oh, it is not necessary at present,” Stephen replied, though mentally
+resolving to avoid the vicinity of that familiar friend as soon as he
+had made pretensions to the hand of Elfride.
+
+“Ah, well,” said Worm musingly, “some would have looked for no less
+than a Sir. There’s a sight of difference in people.”
+
+“And in pigs likewise,” observed John Smith, looking at the halved
+carcass of his own.
+
+Robert Lickpan, the pig-killer, here seemed called upon to enter the
+lists of conversation.
+
+“Yes, they’ve got their particular naters good-now,” he remarked
+initially. “Many’s the rum-tempered pig I’ve knowed.”
+
+“I don’t doubt it, Master Lickpan,” answered Martin, in a tone
+expressing that his convictions, no less than good manners, demanded
+the reply.
+
+“Yes,” continued the pig-killer, as one accustomed to be heard. “One
+that I knowed was deaf and dumb, and we couldn’t make out what was the
+matter wi’ the pig. ’A would eat well enough when ’a seed the trough,
+but when his back was turned, you might a-rattled the bucket all day,
+the poor soul never heard ye. Ye could play tricks upon en behind his
+back, and a’ wouldn’t find it out no quicker than poor deaf Grammer
+Cates. But a’ fatted well, and I never seed a pig open better when a’
+was killed, and ’a was very tender eating, very; as pretty a bit of
+mate as ever you see; you could suck that mate through a quill.
+
+“And another I knowed,” resumed the killer, after quietly letting a
+pint of ale run down his throat of its own accord, and setting down the
+cup with mathematical exactness upon the spot from which he had raised
+it—“another went out of his mind.”
+
+“How very mournful!” murmured Mrs. Worm.
+
+“Ay, poor thing, ’a did! As clean out of his mind as the cleverest
+Christian could go. In early life ’a was very melancholy, and never
+seemed a hopeful pig by no means. ’Twas Andrew Stainer’s pig—that’s
+whose pig ’twas.”
+
+“I can mind the pig well enough,” attested John Smith.
+
+“And a pretty little porker ’a was. And you all know Farmer Buckle’s
+sort? Every jack o’ em suffer from the rheumatism to this day, owing to
+a damp sty they lived in when they were striplings, as ’twere.”
+
+“Well, now we’ll weigh,” said John.
+
+“If so be he were not so fine, we’d weigh en whole: but as he is, we’ll
+take a side at a time. John, you can mind my old joke, ey?”
+
+“I do so; though ’twas a good few years ago I first heard en.”
+
+“Yes,” said Lickpan, “that there old familiar joke have been in our
+family for generations, I may say. My father used that joke regular at
+pig-killings for more than five and forty years—the time he followed
+the calling. And ’a told me that ’a had it from his father when he was
+quite a chiel, who made use o’ en just the same at every killing more
+or less; and pig-killings were pig-killings in those days.”
+
+“Trewly they were.”
+
+“I’ve never heard the joke,” said Mrs. Smith tentatively.
+
+“Nor I,” chimed in Mrs. Worm, who, being the only other lady in the
+room, felt bound by the laws of courtesy to feel like Mrs. Smith in
+everything.
+
+“Surely, surely you have,” said the killer, looking sceptically at the
+benighted females. “However, ’tisn’t much—I don’t wish to say it is. It
+commences like this: ‘Bob will tell the weight of your pig, ’a
+b’lieve,’ says I. The congregation of neighbours think I mane my son
+Bob, naturally; but the secret is that I mane the bob o’ the steelyard.
+Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Martin Cannister, who had heard the
+explanation of this striking story for the hundredth time.
+
+“Huh, huh, huh!” laughed John Smith, who had heard it for the
+thousandth.
+
+“Hee, hee, hee!” laughed William Worm, who had never heard it at all,
+but was afraid to say so.
+
+“Thy grandfather, Robert, must have been a wide-awake chap to make that
+story,” said Martin Cannister, subsiding to a placid aspect of
+delighted criticism.
+
+“He had a head, by all account. And, you see, as the first-born of the
+Lickpans have all been Roberts, they’ve all been Bobs, so the story was
+handed down to the present day.”
+
+“Poor Joseph, your second boy, will never be able to bring it out in
+company, which is rather unfortunate,” said Mrs. Worm thoughtfully.
+
+“’A won’t. Yes, grandfer was a clever chap, as ye say; but I knowed a
+cleverer. ’Twas my uncle Levi. Uncle Levi made a snuff-box that should
+be a puzzle to his friends to open. He used to hand en round at wedding
+parties, christenings, funerals, and in other jolly company, and let
+’em try their skill. This extraordinary snuff-box had a spring behind
+that would push in and out—a hinge where seemed to be the cover; a
+slide at the end, a screw in front, and knobs and queer notches
+everywhere. One man would try the spring, another would try the screw,
+another would try the slide; but try as they would, the box wouldn’t
+open. And they couldn’t open en, and they didn’t open en. Now what
+might you think was the secret of that box?”
+
+All put on an expression that their united thoughts were inadequate to
+the occasion.
+
+“Why the box wouldn’t open at all. ’A were made not to open, and ye
+might have tried till the end of Revelations, ’twould have been as
+naught, for the box were glued all round.”
+
+“A very deep man to have made such a box.”
+
+“Yes. ’Twas like uncle Levi all over.”
+
+“’Twas. I can mind the man very well. Tallest man ever I seed.”
+
+“’A was so. He never slept upon a bedstead after he growed up a hard
+boy-chap—never could get one long enough. When ’a lived in that little
+small house by the pond, he used to have to leave open his chamber door
+every night at going to his bed, and let his feet poke out upon the
+landing.”
+
+“He’s dead and gone now, nevertheless, poor man, as we all shall,”
+observed Worm, to fill the pause which followed the conclusion of
+Robert Lickpan’s speech.
+
+The weighing and cutting up was pursued amid an animated discourse on
+Stephen’s travels; and at the finish, the first-fruits of the day’s
+slaughter, fried in onions, were then turned from the pan into a dish
+on the table, each piece steaming and hissing till it reached their
+very mouths.
+
+It must be owned that the gentlemanly son of the house looked rather
+out of place in the course of this operation. Nor was his mind quite
+philosophic enough to allow him to be comfortable with these
+old-established persons, his father’s friends. He had never lived long
+at home—scarcely at all since his childhood. The presence of William
+Worm was the most awkward feature of the case, for, though Worm had
+left the house of Mr. Swancourt, the being hand-in-glove with a
+ci-devant servitor reminded Stephen too forcibly of the vicar’s
+classification of himself before he went from England. Mrs. Smith was
+conscious of the defect in her arrangements which had brought about the
+undesired conjunction. She spoke to Stephen privately.
+
+“I am above having such people here, Stephen; but what could I do? And
+your father is so rough in his nature that he’s more mixed up with them
+than need be.”
+
+“Never mind, mother,” said Stephen; “I’ll put up with it now.”
+
+“When we leave my lord’s service, and get further up the country—as I
+hope we shall soon—it will be different. We shall be among fresh
+people, and in a larger house, and shall keep ourselves up a bit, I
+hope.”
+
+“Is Miss Swancourt at home, do you know?” Stephen inquired
+
+“Yes, your father saw her this morning.”
+
+“Do you often see her?”
+
+“Scarcely ever. Mr. Glim, the curate, calls occasionally, but the
+Swancourts don’t come into the village now any more than to drive
+through it. They dine at my lord’s oftener than they used. Ah, here’s a
+note was brought this morning for you by a boy.”
+
+Stephen eagerly took the note and opened it, his mother watching him.
+He read what Elfride had written and sent before she started for the
+cliff that afternoon:
+
+“Yes; I will meet you in the church at nine to-night.—E. S.”
+
+“I don’t know, Stephen,” his mother said meaningly, “whe’r you still
+think about Miss Elfride, but if I were you I wouldn’t concern about
+her. They say that none of old Mrs. Swancourt’s money will come to her
+step-daughter.”
+
+“I see the evening has turned out fine; I am going out for a little
+while to look round the place,” he said, evading the direct query.
+“Probably by the time I return our visitors will be gone, and we’ll
+have a more confidential talk.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+
+“Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour.”
+
+
+The rain had ceased since the sunset, but it was a cloudy night; and
+the light of the moon, softened and dispersed by its misty veil, was
+distributed over the land in pale gray.
+
+A dark figure stepped from the doorway of John Smith’s river-side
+cottage, and strode rapidly towards West Endelstow with a light
+footstep. Soon ascending from the lower levels he turned a corner,
+followed a cart-track, and saw the tower of the church he was in quest
+of distinctly shaped forth against the sky. In less than half an hour
+from the time of starting he swung himself over the churchyard stile.
+
+The wild irregular enclosure was as much as ever an integral part of
+the old hill. The grass was still long, the graves were shaped
+precisely as passing years chose to alter them from their orthodox form
+as laid down by Martin Cannister, and by Stephen’s own grandfather
+before him.
+
+A sound sped into the air from the direction in which Castle Boterel
+lay. It was the striking of the church clock, distinct in the still
+atmosphere as if it had come from the tower hard by, which, wrapt in
+its solitary silentness, gave out no such sounds of life.
+
+“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.” Stephen
+carefully counted the strokes, though he well knew their number
+beforehand. Nine o’clock. It was the hour Elfride had herself named as
+the most convenient for meeting him.
+
+Stephen stood at the door of the porch and listened. He could have
+heard the softest breathing of any person within the porch; nobody was
+there. He went inside the doorway, sat down upon the stone bench, and
+waited with a beating heart.
+
+The faint sounds heard only accentuated the silence. The rising and
+falling of the sea, far away along the coast, was the most important. A
+minor sound was the scurr of a distant night-hawk. Among the minutest
+where all were minute were the light settlement of gossamer fragments
+floating in the air, a toad humbly labouring along through the grass
+near the entrance, the crackle of a dead leaf which a worm was
+endeavouring to pull into the earth, a waft of air, getting nearer and
+nearer, and expiring at his feet under the burden of a winged seed.
+
+Among all these soft sounds came not the only soft sound he cared to
+hear—the footfall of Elfride.
+
+For a whole quarter of an hour Stephen sat thus intent, without moving
+a muscle. At the end of that time he walked to the west front of the
+church. Turning the corner of the tower, a white form stared him in the
+face. He started back, and recovered himself. It was the tomb of young
+farmer Jethway, looking still as fresh and as new as when it was first
+erected, the white stone in which it was hewn having a singular
+weirdness amid the dark blue slabs from local quarries, of which the
+whole remaining gravestones were formed.
+
+He thought of the night when he had sat thereon with Elfride as his
+companion, and well remembered his regret that she had received, even
+unwillingly, earlier homage than his own. But his present tangible
+anxiety reduced such a feeling to sentimental nonsense in comparison;
+and he strolled on over the graves to the border of the churchyard,
+whence in the daytime could be clearly seen the vicarage and the
+present residence of the Swancourts. No footstep was discernible upon
+the path up the hill, but a light was shining from a window in the
+last-named house.
+
+Stephen knew there could be no mistake about the time or place, and no
+difficulty about keeping the engagement. He waited yet longer, passing
+from impatience into a mood which failed to take any account of the
+lapse of time. He was awakened from his reverie by Castle Boterel
+clock.
+
+One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, TEN.
+
+One little fall of the hammer in addition to the number it had been
+sharp pleasure to hear, and what a difference to him!
+
+He left the churchyard on the side opposite to his point of entrance,
+and went down the hill. Slowly he drew near the gate of her house. This
+he softly opened, and walked up the gravel drive to the door. Here he
+paused for several minutes.
+
+At the expiration of that time the murmured speech of a manly voice
+came out to his ears through an open window behind the corner of the
+house. This was responded to by a clear soft laugh. It was the laugh of
+Elfride.
+
+Stephen was conscious of a gnawing pain at his heart. He retreated as
+he had come. There are disappointments which wring us, and there are
+those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are
+so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever
+obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of
+happiness. Such a one was Stephen’s now: the crowning aureola of the
+dream had been the meeting here by stealth; and if Elfride had come to
+him only ten minutes after he had turned away, the disappointment would
+have been recognizable still.
+
+When the young man reached home he found there a letter which had
+arrived in his absence. Believing it to contain some reason for her
+non-appearance, yet unable to imagine one that could justify her, he
+hastily tore open the envelope.
+
+The paper contained not a word from Elfride. It was the deposit-note
+for his two hundred pounds. On the back was the form of a cheque, and
+this she had filled up with the same sum, payable to the bearer.
+
+Stephen was confounded. He attempted to divine her motive. Considering
+how limited was his knowledge of her later actions, he guessed rather
+shrewdly that, between the time of her sending the note in the morning
+and the evening’s silent refusal of his gift, something had occurred
+which had caused a total change in her attitude towards him.
+
+He knew not what to do. It seemed absurd now to go to her father next
+morning, as he had purposed, and ask for an engagement with her, a
+possibility impending all the while that Elfride herself would not be
+on his side. Only one course recommended itself as wise. To wait and
+see what the days would bring forth; to go and execute his commissions
+in Birmingham; then to return, learn if anything had happened, and try
+what a meeting might do; perhaps her surprise at his backwardness would
+bring her forward to show latent warmth as decidedly as in old times.
+
+This act of patience was in keeping only with the nature of a man
+precisely of Stephen’s constitution. Nine men out of ten would perhaps
+have rushed off, got into her presence, by fair means or foul, and
+provoked a catastrophe of some sort. Possibly for the better, probably
+for the worse.
+
+He started for Birmingham the next morning. A day’s delay would have
+made no difference; but he could not rest until he had begun and ended
+the programme proposed to himself. Bodily activity will sometimes take
+the sting out of anxiety as completely as assurance itself.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+
+“Mine own familiar friend.”
+
+
+During these days of absence Stephen lived under alternate conditions.
+Whenever his emotions were active, he was in agony. Whenever he was not
+in agony, the business in hand had driven out of his mind by sheer
+force all deep reflection on the subject of Elfride and love.
+
+By the time he took his return journey at the week’s end, Stephen had
+very nearly worked himself up to an intention to call and see her face
+to face. On this occasion also he adopted his favourite route—by the
+little summer steamer from Bristol to Castle Boterel; the time saved by
+speed on the railway being wasted at junctions, and in following a
+devious course.
+
+It was a bright silent evening at the beginning of September when Smith
+again set foot in the little town. He felt inclined to linger awhile
+upon the quay before ascending the hills, having formed a romantic
+intention to go home by way of her house, yet not wishing to wander in
+its neighbourhood till the evening shades should sufficiently screen
+him from observation.
+
+And thus waiting for night’s nearer approach, he watched the placid
+scene, over which the pale luminosity of the west cast a sorrowful
+monochrome, that became slowly embrowned by the dusk. A star appeared,
+and another, and another. They sparkled amid the yards and rigging of
+the two coal brigs lying alangside, as if they had been tiny lamps
+suspended in the ropes. The masts rocked sleepily to the infinitesimal
+flux of the tide, which clucked and gurgled with idle regularity in
+nooks and holes of the harbour wall.
+
+The twilight was now quite pronounced enough for his purpose; and as,
+rather sad at heart, he was about to move on, a little boat containing
+two persons glided up the middle of the harbour with the lightness of a
+shadow. The boat came opposite him, passed on, and touched the
+landing-steps at the further end. One of its occupants was a man, as
+Stephen had known by the easy stroke of the oars. When the pair
+ascended the steps, and came into greater prominence, he was enabled to
+discern that the second personage was a woman; also that she wore a
+white decoration—apparently a feather—in her hat or bonnet, which spot
+of white was the only distinctly visible portion of her clothing.
+
+Stephen remained a moment in their rear, and they passed on, when he
+pursued his way also, and soon forgot the circumstance. Having crossed
+a bridge, forsaken the high road, and entered the footpath which led up
+the vale to West Endelstow, he heard a little wicket click softly
+together some yards ahead. By the time that Stephen had reached the
+wicket and passed it, he heard another click of precisely the same
+nature from another gate yet further on. Clearly some person or persons
+were preceding him along the path, their footsteps being rendered
+noiseless by the soft carpet of turf. Stephen now walked a little
+quicker, and perceived two forms. One of them bore aloft the white
+feather he had noticed in the woman’s hat on the quay: they were the
+couple he had seen in the boat. Stephen dropped a little further to the
+rear.
+
+From the bottom of the valley, along which the path had hitherto lain,
+beside the margin of the trickling streamlet, another path now
+diverged, and ascended the slope of the left-hand hill. This footway
+led only to the residence of Mrs. Swancourt and a cottage or two in its
+vicinity. No grass covered this diverging path in portions of its
+length, and Stephen was reminded that the pair in front of him had
+taken this route by the occasional rattle of loose stones under their
+feet. Stephen climbed in the same direction, but for some undefined
+reason he trod more softly than did those preceding him. His mind was
+unconsciously in exercise upon whom the woman might be—whether a
+visitor to The Crags, a servant, or Elfride. He put it to himself yet
+more forcibly; could the lady be Elfride? A possible reason for her
+unaccountable failure to keep the appointment with him returned with
+painful force.
+
+They entered the grounds of the house by the side wicket, whence the
+path, now wide and well trimmed, wound fantastically through the
+shrubbery to an octagonal pavilion called the Belvedere, by reason of
+the comprehensive view over the adjacent district that its green seats
+afforded. The path passed this erection and went on to the house as
+well as to the gardener’s cottage on the other side, straggling thence
+to East Endelstow; so that Stephen felt no hesitation in entering a
+promenade which could scarcely be called private.
+
+He fancied that he heard the gate open and swing together again behind
+him. Turning, he saw nobody.
+
+The people of the boat came to the summer-house. One of them spoke.
+
+“I am afraid we shall get a scolding for being so late.”
+
+Stephen instantly recognised the familiar voice, richer and fuller now
+than it used to be. “Elfride!” he whispered to himself, and held fast
+by a sapling, to steady himself under the agitation her presence caused
+him. His heart swerved from its beat; he shunned receiving the meaning
+he sought.
+
+“A breeze is rising again; how the ash tree rustles!” said Elfride.
+“Don’t you hear it? I wonder what the time is.”
+
+Stephen relinquished the sapling.
+
+“I will get a light and tell you. Step into the summer-house; the air
+is quiet there.”
+
+The cadence of that voice—its peculiarity seemed to come home to him
+like that of some notes of the northern birds on his return to his
+native clime, as an old natural thing renewed, yet not particularly
+noticed as natural before that renewal.
+
+They entered the Belvedere. In the lower part it was formed of close
+wood-work nailed crosswise, and had openings in the upper by way of
+windows.
+
+The scratch of a striking light was heard, and a bright glow radiated
+from the interior of the building. The light gave birth to dancing
+leaf-shadows, stem-shadows, lustrous streaks, dots, sparkles, and
+threads of silver sheen of all imaginable variety and transience. It
+awakened gnats, which flew towards it, revealed shiny gossamer threads,
+disturbed earthworms. Stephen gave but little attention to these
+phenomena, and less time. He saw in the summer-house a strongly
+illuminated picture.
+
+First, the face of his friend and preceptor Henry Knight, between whom
+and himself an estrangement had arisen, not from any definite causes
+beyond those of absence, increasing age, and diverging sympathies.
+
+Next, his bright particular star, Elfride. The face of Elfride was more
+womanly than when she had called herself his, but as clear and healthy
+as ever. Her plenteous twines of beautiful hair were looking much as
+usual, with the exception of a slight modification in their arrangement
+in deference to the changes of fashion.
+
+Their two foreheads were close together, almost touching, and both were
+looking down. Elfride was holding her watch, Knight was holding the
+light with one hand, his left arm being round her waist. Part of the
+scene reached Stephen’s eyes through the horizontal bars of woodwork,
+which crossed their forms like the ribs of a skeleton.
+
+Knight’s arm stole still further round the waist of Elfride.
+
+“It is half-past eight,” she said in a low voice, which had a peculiar
+music in it, seemingly born of a thrill of pleasure at the new proof
+that she was beloved.
+
+The flame dwindled down, died away, and all was wrapped in a darkness
+to which the gloom before the illumination bore no comparison in
+apparent density. Stephen, shattered in spirit and sick to his heart’s
+centre, turned away. In turning, he saw a shadowy outline behind the
+summer-house on the other side. His eyes grew accustomed to the
+darkness. Was the form a human form, or was it an opaque bush of
+juniper?
+
+The lovers arose, brushed against the laurestines, and pursued their
+way to the house. The indistinct figure had moved, and now passed
+across Smith’s front. So completely enveloped was the person, that it
+was impossible to discern him or her any more than as a shape. The
+shape glided noiselessly on.
+
+Stephen stepped forward, fearing any mischief was intended to the other
+two. “Who are you?” he said.
+
+“Never mind who I am,” answered a weak whisper from the enveloping
+folds. “WHAT I am, may she be! Perhaps I knew well—ah, so well!—a youth
+whose place you took, as he there now takes yours. Will you let her
+break your heart, and bring you to an untimely grave, as she did the
+one before you?”
+
+“You are Mrs. Jethway, I think. What do you do here? And why do you
+talk so wildly?”
+
+“Because my heart is desolate, and nobody cares about it. May hers be
+so that brought trouble upon me!”
+
+“Silence!” said Stephen, staunch to Elfride in spite of himself. “She
+would harm nobody wilfully, never would she! How do you come here?”
+
+“I saw the two coming up the path, and wanted to learn if she were not
+one of them. Can I help disliking her if I think of the past? Can I
+help watching her if I remember my boy? Can I help ill-wishing her if I
+well-wish him?”
+
+The bowed form went on, passed through the wicket, and was enveloped by
+the shadows of the field.
+
+Stephen had heard that Mrs. Jethway, since the death of her son, had
+become a crazed, forlorn woman; and bestowing a pitying thought upon
+her, he dismissed her fancied wrongs from his mind, but not her
+condemnation of Elfride’s faithlessness. That entered into and mingled
+with the sensations his new experience had begotten. The tale told by
+the little scene he had witnessed ran parallel with the unhappy woman’s
+opinion, which, however baseless it might have been antecedently, had
+become true enough as regarded himself.
+
+A slow weight of despair, as distinct from a violent paroxysm as
+starvation from a mortal shot, filled him and wrung him body and soul.
+The discovery had not been altogether unexpected, for throughout his
+anxiety of the last few days since the night in the churchyard, he had
+been inclined to construe the uncertainty unfavourably for himself. His
+hopes for the best had been but periodic interruptions to a chronic
+fear of the worst.
+
+A strange concomitant of his misery was the singularity of its form.
+That his rival should be Knight, whom once upon a time he had adored as
+a man is very rarely adored by another in modern times, and whom he
+loved now, added deprecation to sorrow, and cynicism to both. Henry
+Knight, whose praises he had so frequently trumpeted in her ears, of
+whom she had actually been jealous, lest she herself should be lessened
+in Stephen’s love on account of him, had probably won her the more
+easily by reason of those very praises which he had only ceased to
+utter by her command. She had ruled him like a queen in that matter, as
+in all others. Stephen could tell by her manner, brief as had been his
+observation of it, and by her words, few as they were, that her
+position was far different with Knight. That she looked up at and
+adored her new lover from below his pedestal, was even more perceptible
+than that she had smiled down upon Stephen from a height above him.
+
+The suddenness of Elfride’s renunciation of himself was food for more
+torture. To an unimpassioned outsider, it admitted of at least two
+interpretations—it might either have proceeded from an endeavour to be
+faithful to her first choice, till the lover seen absolutely
+overpowered the lover remembered, or from a wish not to lose his love
+till sure of the love of another. But to Stephen Smith the motive
+involved in the latter alternative made it untenable where Elfride was
+the actor.
+
+He mused on her letters to him, in which she had never mentioned a
+syllable concerning Knight. It is desirable, however, to observe that
+only in two letters could she possibly have done so. One was written
+about a week before Knight’s arrival, when, though she did not mention
+his promised coming to Stephen, she had hardly a definite reason in her
+mind for neglecting to do it. In the next she did casually allude to
+Knight. But Stephen had left Bombay long before that letter arrived.
+
+Stephen looked at the black form of the adjacent house, where it cut a
+dark polygonal notch out of the sky, and felt that he hated the spot.
+He did not know many facts of the case, but could not help
+instinctively associating Elfride’s fickleness with the marriage of her
+father, and their introduction to London society. He closed the iron
+gate bounding the shrubbery as noiselessly as he had opened it, and
+went into the grassy field. Here he could see the old vicarage, the
+house alone that was associated with the sweet pleasant time of his
+incipient love for Elfride. Turning sadly from the place that was no
+longer a nook in which his thoughts might nestle when he was far away,
+he wandered in the direction of the east village, to reach his father’s
+house before they retired to rest.
+
+The nearest way to the cottage was by crossing the park. He did not
+hurry. Happiness frequently has reason for haste, but it is seldom that
+desolation need scramble or strain. Sometimes he paused under the
+low-hanging arms of the trees, looking vacantly on the ground.
+
+Stephen was standing thus, scarcely less crippled in thought than he
+was blank in vision, when a clear sound permeated the quiet air about
+him, and spread on far beyond. The sound was the stroke of a bell from
+the tower of East Endelstow Church, which stood in a dell not forty
+yards from Lord Luxellian’s mansion, and within the park enclosure.
+Another stroke greeted his ear, and gave character to both: then came a
+slow succession of them.
+
+“Somebody is dead,” he said aloud.
+
+The death-knell of an inhabitant of the eastern parish was being
+tolled.
+
+An unusual feature in the tolling was that it had not been begun
+according to the custom in Endelstow and other parishes in the
+neighbourhood. At every death the sex and age of the deceased were
+announced by a system of changes. Three times three strokes signified
+that the departed one was a man; three times two, a woman; twice three,
+a boy; twice two, a girl. The regular continuity of the tolling
+suggested that it was the resumption rather than the beginning of a
+knell—the opening portion of which Stephen had not been near enough to
+hear.
+
+The momentary anxiety he had felt with regard to his parents passed
+away. He had left them in perfect health, and had any serious illness
+seized either, a communication would have reached him ere this. At the
+same time, since his way homeward lay under the churchyard yews, he
+resolved to look into the belfry in passing by, and speak a word to
+Martin Cannister, who would be there.
+
+Stephen reached the brow of the hill, and felt inclined to renounce his
+idea. His mood was such that talking to any person to whom he could not
+unburden himself would be wearisome. However, before he could put any
+inclination into effect, the young man saw from amid the trees a bright
+light shining, the rays from which radiated like needles through the
+sad plumy foliage of the yews. Its direction was from the centre of the
+churchyard.
+
+Stephen mechanically went forward. Never could there be a greater
+contrast between two places of like purpose than between this graveyard
+and that of the further village. Here the grass was carefully tended,
+and formed virtually a part of the manor-house lawn; flowers and shrubs
+being planted indiscriminately over both, whilst the few graves visible
+were mathematically exact in shape and smoothness, appearing in the
+daytime like chins newly shaven. There was no wall, the division
+between God’s Acre and Lord Luxellian’s being marked only by a few
+square stones set at equidistant points. Among those persons who have
+romantic sentiments on the subject of their last dwelling-place,
+probably the greater number would have chosen such a spot as this in
+preference to any other: a few would have fancied a constraint in its
+trim neatness, and would have preferred the wild hill-top of the
+neighbouring site, with Nature in her most negligent attire.
+
+The light in the churchyard he next discovered to have its source in a
+point very near the ground, and Stephen imagined it might come from a
+lantern in the interior of a partly-dug grave. But a nearer approach
+showed him that its position was immediately under the wall of the
+aisle, and within the mouth of an archway. He could now hear voices,
+and the truth of the whole matter began to dawn upon him. Walking on
+towards the opening, Smith discerned on his left hand a heap of earth,
+and before him a flight of stone steps which the removed earth had
+uncovered, leading down under the edifice. It was the entrance to a
+large family vault, extending under the north aisle.
+
+Stephen had never before seen it open, and descending one or two steps
+stooped to look under the arch. The vault appeared to be crowded with
+coffins, with the exception of an open central space, which had been
+necessarily kept free for ingress and access to the sides, round three
+of which the coffins were stacked in stone bins or niches.
+
+The place was well lighted with candles stuck in slips of wood that
+were fastened to the wall. On making the descent of another step the
+living inhabitants of the vault were recognizable. They were his father
+the master-mason, an under-mason, Martin Cannister, and two or three
+young and old labouring-men. Crowbars and workmen’s hammers were
+scattered about. The whole company, sitting round on coffins which had
+been removed from their places, apparently for some alteration or
+enlargement of the vault, were eating bread and cheese, and drinking
+ale from a cup with two handles, passed round from each to each.
+
+“Who is dead?” Stephen inquired, stepping down.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+
+“To that last nothing under earth.”
+
+
+All eyes were turned to the entrance as Stephen spoke, and the
+ancient-mannered conclave scrutinized him inquiringly.
+
+“Why, ’tis our Stephen!” said his father, rising from his seat; and,
+still retaining the frothy mug in his left hand, he swung forward his
+right for a grasp. “Your mother is expecting ye—thought you would have
+come afore dark. But you’ll wait and go home with me? I have all but
+done for the day, and was going directly.”
+
+“Yes, ’tis Master Stephy, sure enough. Glad to see you so soon again,
+Master Smith,” said Martin Cannister, chastening the gladness expressed
+in his words by a strict neutrality of countenance, in order to
+harmonize the feeling as much as possible with the solemnity of a
+family vault.
+
+“The same to you, Martin; and you, William,” said Stephen, nodding
+around to the rest, who, having their mouths full of bread and cheese,
+were of necessity compelled to reply merely by compressing their eyes
+to friendly lines and wrinkles.
+
+“And who is dead?” Stephen repeated.
+
+“Lady Luxellian, poor gentlewoman, as we all shall, said the
+under-mason. “Ay, and we be going to enlarge the vault to make room for
+her.”
+
+“When did she die?”
+
+“Early this morning,” his father replied, with an appearance of
+recurring to a chronic thought. “Yes, this morning. Martin hev been
+tolling ever since, almost. There, ’twas expected. She was very
+limber.”
+
+“Ay, poor soul, this morning,” resumed the under-mason, a marvellously
+old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would
+not stay in position. “She must know by this time whether she’s to go
+up or down, poor woman.”
+
+“What was her age?”
+
+“Not more than seven or eight and twenty by candlelight. But, Lord! by
+day ’a was forty if ’a were an hour.”
+
+“Ay, night-time or day-time makes a difference of twenty years to rich
+feymels,” observed Martin.
+
+“She was one and thirty really,” said John Smith. “I had it from them
+that know.”
+
+“Not more than that!”
+
+“’A looked very bad, poor lady. In faith, ye might say she was dead for
+years afore ’a would own it.”
+
+“As my old father used to say, ‘dead, but wouldn’t drop down.’”
+
+“I seed her, poor soul,” said a labourer from behind some removed
+coffins, “only but last Valentine’s-day of all the world. ’A was arm in
+crook wi’ my lord. I says to myself, ‘You be ticketed Churchyard, my
+noble lady, although you don’t dream on’t.’”
+
+“I suppose my lord will write to all the other lords anointed in the
+nation, to let ’em know that she that was is now no more?”
+
+“’Tis done and past. I see a bundle of letters go off an hour after the
+death. Sich wonderful black rims as they letters had—half-an-inch wide,
+at the very least.”
+
+“Too much,” observed Martin. “In short, ’tis out of the question that a
+human being can be so mournful as black edges half-an-inch wide. I’m
+sure people don’t feel more than a very narrow border when they feels
+most of all.”
+
+“And there are two little girls, are there not?” said Stephen.
+
+“Nice clane little faces!—left motherless now.”
+
+“They used to come to Parson Swancourt’s to play with Miss Elfride when
+I were there,” said William Worm. “Ah, they did so’s!” The latter
+sentence was introduced to add the necessary melancholy to a remark
+which, intrinsically, could hardly be made to possess enough for the
+occasion. “Yes,” continued Worm, “they’d run upstairs, they’d run down;
+flitting about with her everywhere. Very fond of her, they were. Ah,
+well!”
+
+“Fonder than ever they were of their mother, so ’tis said here and
+there,” added a labourer.
+
+“Well, you see, ’tis natural. Lady Luxellian stood aloof from ’em
+so—was so drowsy-like, that they couldn’t love her in the
+jolly-companion way children want to like folks. Only last winter I
+seed Miss Elfride talking to my lady and the two children, and Miss
+Elfride wiped their noses for em’ SO careful—my lady never once seeing
+that it wanted doing; and, naturally, children take to people that’s
+their best friend.”
+
+“Be as ’twill, the woman is dead and gone, and we must make a place for
+her,” said John. “Come, lads, drink up your ale, and we’ll just rid
+this corner, so as to have all clear for beginning at the wall, as soon
+as ’tis light to-morrow.”
+
+Stephen then asked where Lady Luxellian was to lie.
+
+“Here,” said his father. “We are going to set back this wall and make a
+recess; and ’tis enough for us to do before the funeral. When my lord’s
+mother died, she said, ‘John, the place must be enlarged before another
+can be put in.’ But ’a never expected ’twould be wanted so soon. Better
+move Lord George first, I suppose, Simeon?”
+
+He pointed with his foot to a heavy coffin, covered with what had
+originally been red velvet, the colour of which could only just be
+distinguished now.
+
+“Just as ye think best, Master John,” replied the shrivelled mason.
+“Ah, poor Lord George!” he continued, looking contemplatively at the
+huge coffin; “he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when
+one is a lord and t’other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He’d clap his
+hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familial and neighbourly as if
+he’d been a common chap. Ay, ’a cussed me up hill and ’a cussed me
+down; and then ’a would rave out again, and the goold clamps of his
+fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while I,
+being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a
+strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liked en
+sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height,
+I’d think in my inside, ‘What a weight you’ll be, my lord, for our arms
+to lower under the aisle of Endelstow Church some day!’”
+
+“And was he?” inquired a young labourer.
+
+“He was. He was five hundredweight if ’a were a pound. What with his
+lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t’other”—here
+the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that
+caused a rattle among the bones inside—“he half broke my back when I
+took his feet to lower en down the steps there. ‘Ah,’ saith I to John
+there—didn’t I, John?—‘that ever one man’s glory should be such a
+weight upon another man!’ But there, I liked my lord George sometimes.”
+
+“’Tis a strange thought,” said another, “that while they be all here
+under one roof, a snug united family o’ Luxellians, they be really
+scattered miles away from one another in the form of good sheep and
+wicked goats, isn’t it?”
+
+“True; ’tis a thought to look at.”
+
+“And that one, if he’s gone upward, don’t know what his wife is doing
+no more than the man in the moon if she’s gone downward. And that some
+unfortunate one in the hot place is a-hollering across to a lucky one
+up in the clouds, and quite forgetting their bodies be boxed close
+together all the time.”
+
+“Ay, ’tis a thought to look at, too, that I can say ‘Hullo!’ close to
+fiery Lord George, and ’a can’t hear me.”
+
+“And that I be eating my onion close to dainty Lady Jane’s nose, and
+she can’t smell me.”
+
+“What do ’em put all their heads one way for?” inquired a young man.
+
+“Because ’tis churchyard law, you simple. The law of the living is,
+that a man shall be upright and down-right, and the law of the dead is,
+that a man shall be east and west. Every state of society have its
+laws.”
+
+“We must break the law wi’ a few of the poor souls, however. Come,
+buckle to,” said the master-mason.
+
+And they set to work anew.
+
+The order of interment could be distinctly traced by observing the
+appearance of the coffins as they lay piled around. On those which had
+been standing there but a generation or two the trappings still
+remained. Those of an earlier period showed bare wood, with a few
+tattered rags dangling therefrom. Earlier still, the wood lay in
+fragments on the floor of the niche, and the coffin consisted of naked
+lead alone; whilst in the case of the very oldest, even the lead was
+bulging and cracking in pieces, revealing to the curious eye a heap of
+dust within. The shields upon many were quite loose, and removable by
+the hand, their lustreless surfaces still indistinctly exhibiting the
+name and title of the deceased.
+
+Overhead the groins and concavities of the arches curved in all
+directions, dropping low towards the walls, where the height was no
+more than sufficient to enable a person to stand upright.
+
+The body of George the fourteenth baron, together with two or three
+others, all of more recent date than the great bulk of coffins piled
+there, had, for want of room, been placed at the end of the vault on
+tressels, and not in niches like the others. These it was necessary to
+remove, to form behind them the chamber in which they were ultimately
+to be deposited. Stephen, finding the place and proceedings in keeping
+with the sombre colours of his mind, waited there still.
+
+“Simeon, I suppose you can mind poor Lady Elfride, and how she ran away
+with the actor?” said John Smith, after awhile. “I think it fell upon
+the time my father was sexton here. Let us see—where is she?”
+
+“Here somewhere,” returned Simeon, looking round him.
+
+“Why, I’ve got my arms round the very gentlewoman at this moment.” He
+lowered the end of the coffin he was holding, wiped his face, and
+throwing a morsel of rotten wood upon another as an indicator,
+continued: “That’s her husband there. They was as fair a couple as you
+should see anywhere round about; and a good-hearted pair likewise. Ay,
+I can mind it, though I was but a chiel at the time. She fell in love
+with this young man of hers, and their banns were asked in some church
+in London; and the old lord her father actually heard ’em asked the
+three times, and didn’t notice her name, being gabbled on wi’ a host of
+others. When she had married she told her father, and ’a fleed into a
+monstrous rage, and said she shouldn’ hae a farthing. Lady Elfride said
+she didn’t think of wishing it; if he’d forgie her ’twas all she asked,
+and as for a living, she was content to play plays with her husband.
+This frightened the old lord, and ’a gie’d ’em a house to live in, and
+a great garden, and a little field or two, and a carriage, and a good
+few guineas. Well, the poor thing died at her first gossiping, and her
+husband—who was as tender-hearted a man as ever eat meat, and would
+have died for her—went wild in his mind, and broke his heart (so ’twas
+said). Anyhow, they were buried the same day—father and mother—but the
+baby lived. Ay, my lord’s family made much of that man then, and put
+him here with his wife, and there in the corner the man is now. The
+Sunday after there was a funeral sermon: the text was, ‘Or ever the
+silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken;’ and when ’twas
+preaching the men drew their hands across their eyes several times, and
+every woman cried out loud.”
+
+“And what became of the baby?” said Stephen, who had frequently heard
+portions of the story.
+
+“She was brought up by her grandmother, and a pretty maid she were. And
+she must needs run away with the curate—Parson Swancourt that is now.
+Then her grandmother died, and the title and everything went away to
+another branch of the family altogether. Parson Swancourt wasted a good
+deal of his wife’s money, and she left him Miss Elfride. That trick of
+running away seems to be handed down in families, like craziness or
+gout. And they two women be alike as peas.”
+
+“Which two?”
+
+“Lady Elfride and young Miss that’s alive now. The same hair and eyes:
+but Miss Elfride’s mother was darker a good deal.”
+
+“Life’s a strangle bubble, ye see,” said William Worm musingly. “For if
+the Lord’s anointment had descended upon women instead of men, Miss
+Elfride would be Lord Luxellian—Lady, I mane. But as it is, the blood
+is run out, and she’s nothing to the Luxellian family by law, whatever
+she may be by gospel.”
+
+“I used to fancy,” said Simeon, “when I seed Miss Elfride hugging the
+little ladyships, that there was a likeness; but I suppose ’twas only
+my dream, for years must have altered the old family shape.”
+
+“And now we’ll move these two, and home-along,” interposed John Smith,
+reviving, as became a master, the spirit of labour, which had showed
+unmistakable signs of being nearly vanquished by the spirit of chat,
+“The flagon of ale we don’t want we’ll let bide here till to-morrow;
+none of the poor souls will touch it ’a b’lieve.”
+
+So the evening’s work was concluded, and the party drew from the abode
+of the quiet dead, closing the old iron door, and shooting the lock
+loudly into the huge copper staple—an incongruous act of imprisonment
+towards those who had no dreams of escape.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+
+“How should I greet thee?”
+
+
+Love frequently dies of time alone—much more frequently of
+displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the
+displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a greater
+man than the first. By the side of the instructive and piquant
+snubbings she received from Knight, Stephen’s general agreeableness
+seemed watery; by the side of Knight’s spare love-making, Stephen’s
+continual outflow seemed lackadaisical. She had begun to sigh for
+somebody further on in manhood. Stephen was hardly enough of a man.
+
+Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to
+those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that
+inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready
+sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen’s failure to make his hold on her
+heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself
+beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a
+kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave
+untouched, but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to
+undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering ceases in the
+man, snubbing begins in the woman; the trite but no less unfortunate
+fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to
+appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement. The abiding
+perception of the position of Stephen’s parents had, of course, a
+little to do with Elfride’s renunciation. To such girls poverty may not
+be, as to the more worldly masses of humanity, a sin in itself; but it
+is a sin, because graceful and dainty manners seldom exist in such an
+atmosphere. Few women of old family can be thoroughly taught that a
+fine soul may wear a smock-frock, and an admittedly common man in one
+is but a worm in their eyes. John Smith’s rough hands and clothes, his
+wife’s dialect, the necessary narrowness of their ways, being
+constantly under Elfride’s notice, were not without their deflecting
+influence.
+
+On reaching home after the perilous adventure by the sea-shore, Knight
+had felt unwell, and retired almost immediately. The young lady who had
+so materially assisted him had done the same, but she reappeared,
+properly clothed, about five o’clock. She wandered restlessly about the
+house, but not on account of their joint narrow escape from death. The
+storm which had torn the tree had merely bowed the reed, and with the
+deliverance of Knight all deep thought of the accident had left her.
+The mutual avowal which it had been the means of precipitating occupied
+a far longer length of her meditations.
+
+Elfride’s disquiet now was on account of that miserable promise to meet
+Stephen, which returned like a spectre again and again. The perception
+of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly. She now
+thought how sound had been her father’s advice to her to give him up,
+and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto
+been averse. Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of
+young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest
+wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of
+some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.
+
+The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis
+a collapse.
+
+“God forgive me—I can’t meet Stephen!” she exclaimed to herself. “I
+don’t love him less, but I love Mr. Knight more!”
+
+Yes: she would save herself from a man not fit for her—in spite of
+vows. She would obey her father, and have no more to do with Stephen
+Smith. Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion
+of a virtue.
+
+The following days were passed without any definite avowal from
+Knight’s lips. Such solitary walks and scenes as that witnessed by
+Smith in the summer-house were frequent, but he courted her so
+intangibly that to any but such a delicate perception as Elfride’s it
+would have appeared no courtship at all. The time now really began to
+be sweet with her. She dismissed the sense of sin in her past actions,
+and was automatic in the intoxication of the moment. The fact that
+Knight made no actual declaration was no drawback. Knowing since the
+betrayal of his sentiments that love for her really existed, she
+preferred it for the present in its form of essence, and was willing to
+avoid for awhile the grosser medium of words. Their feelings having
+been forced to a rather premature demonstration, a reaction was
+indulged in by both.
+
+But no sooner had she got rid of her troubled conscience on the matter
+of faithlessness than a new anxiety confronted her. It was lest Knight
+should accidentally meet Stephen in the parish, and that herself should
+be the subject of discourse.
+
+Elfride, learning Knight more thoroughly, perceived that, far from
+having a notion of Stephen’s precedence, he had no idea that she had
+ever been wooed before by anybody. On ordinary occasions she had a
+tongue so frank as to show her whole mind, and a mind so
+straightforward as to reveal her heart to its innermost shrine. But the
+time for a change had come. She never alluded to even a knowledge of
+Knight’s friend. When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more
+often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second
+lover.
+
+The elopement was now a spectre worse than the first, and, like the
+Spirit in Glenfinlas, it waxed taller with every attempt to lay it. Her
+natural honesty invited her to confide in Knight, and trust to his
+generosity for forgiveness: she knew also that as mere policy it would
+be better to tell him early if he was to be told at all. The longer her
+concealment the more difficult would be the revelation. But she put it
+off. The intense fear which accompanies intense love in young women was
+too strong to allow the exercise of a moral quality antagonistic to
+itself:
+
+“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
+Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”
+
+
+The match was looked upon as made by her father and mother. The vicar
+remembered her promise to reveal the meaning of the telegram she had
+received, and two days after the scene in the summer-house, asked her
+pointedly. She was frank with him now.
+
+“I had been corresponding with Stephen Smith ever since he left
+England, till lately,” she calmly said.
+
+“What!” cried the vicar aghast; “under the eyes of Mr. Knight, too?”
+
+“No; when I found I cared most for Mr. Knight, I obeyed you.”
+
+“You were very kind, I’m sure. When did you begin to like Mr. Knight?”
+
+“I don’t see that that is a pertinent question, papa; the telegram was
+from the shipping agent, and was not sent at my request. It announced
+the arrival of the vessel bringing him home.”
+
+“Home! What, is he here?”
+
+“Yes; in the village, I believe.”
+
+“Has he tried to see you?”
+
+“Only by fair means. But don’t, papa, question me so! It is torture.”
+
+“I will only say one word more,” he replied. “Have you met him?”
+
+“I have not. I can assure you that at the present moment there is no
+more of an understanding between me and the young man you so much
+disliked than between him and you. You told me to forget him; and I
+have forgotten him.”
+
+“Oh, well; though you did not obey me in the beginning, you are a good
+girl, Elfride, in obeying me at last.”
+
+“Don’t call me ‘good,’ papa,” she said bitterly; “you don’t know—and
+the less said about some things the better. Remember, Mr. Knight knows
+nothing about the other. Oh, how wrong it all is! I don’t know what I
+am coming to.”
+
+“As matters stand, I should be inclined to tell him; or, at any rate, I
+should not alarm myself about his knowing. He found out the other day
+that this was the parish young Smith’s father lives in—what puts you in
+such a flurry?”
+
+“I can’t say; but promise—pray don’t let him know! It would be my
+ruin!”
+
+“Pooh, child. Knight is a good fellow and a clever man; but at the same
+time it does not escape my perceptions that he is no great catch for
+you. Men of his turn of mind are nothing so wonderful in the way of
+husbands. If you had chosen to wait, you might have mated with a much
+wealthier man. But remember, I have not a word to say against your
+having him, if you like him. Charlotte is delighted, as you know.”
+
+“Well, papa,” she said, smiling hopefully through a sigh, “it is nice
+to feel that in giving way to—to caring for him, I have pleased my
+family. But I am not good; oh no, I am very far from that!”
+
+“None of us are good, I am sorry to say,” said her father blandly; “but
+girls have a chartered right to change their minds, you know. It has
+been recognized by poets from time immemorial. Catullus says, ‘Mulier
+cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento—’ What a memory mine is! However,
+the passage is, that a woman’s words to a lover are as a matter of
+course written only on wind and water. Now don’t be troubled about
+that, Elfride.”
+
+“Ah, you don’t know!”
+
+They had been standing on the lawn, and Knight was now seen lingering
+some way down a winding walk. When Elfride met him, it was with a much
+greater lightness of heart; things were more straightforward now. The
+responsibility of her fickleness seemed partly shifted from her own
+shoulders to her father’s. Still, there were shadows.
+
+“Ah, could he have known how far I went with Stephen, and yet have said
+the same, how much happier I should be!” That was her prevailing
+thought.
+
+In the afternoon the lovers went out together on horseback for an hour
+or two; and though not wishing to be observed, by reason of the late
+death of Lady Luxellian, whose funeral had taken place very privately
+on the previous day, they yet found it necessary to pass East Endelstow
+Church.
+
+The steps to the vault, as has been stated, were on the outside of the
+building, immediately under the aisle wall. Being on horseback, both
+Knight and Elfride could overlook the shrubs which screened the
+church-yard.
+
+“Look, the vault seems still to be open,” said Knight.
+
+“Yes, it is open,” she answered
+
+“Who is that man close by it? The mason, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I wonder if it is John Smith, Stephen’s father?”
+
+“I believe it is,” said Elfride, with apprehension.
+
+“Ah, and can it be? I should like to inquire how his son, my truant
+protegé, is going on. And from your father’s description of the vault,
+the interior must be interesting. Suppose we go in.”
+
+“Had we better, do you think? May not Lord Luxellian be there?”
+
+“It is not at all likely.”
+
+Elfride then assented, since she could do nothing else. Her heart,
+which at first had quailed in consternation, recovered itself when she
+considered the character of John Smith. A quiet unassuming man, he
+would be sure to act towards her as before those love passages with his
+son, which might have given a more pretentious mechanic airs. So
+without much alarm she took Knight’s arm after dismounting, and went
+with him between and over the graves. The master-mason recognized her
+as she approached, and, as usual, lifted his hat respectfully.
+
+“I know you to be Mr. Smith, my former friend Stephen’s father,” said
+Knight, directly he had scanned the embrowned and ruddy features of
+John.
+
+“Yes, sir, I b’lieve I be.”
+
+“How is your son now? I have only once heard from him since he went to
+India. I daresay you have heard him speak of me—Mr. Knight, who became
+acquainted with him some years ago in Exonbury.”
+
+“Ay, that I have. Stephen is very well, thank you, sir, and he’s in
+England; in fact, he’s at home. In short, sir, he’s down in the vault
+there, a-looking at the departed coffins.”
+
+Elfride’s heart fluttered like a butterfly.
+
+Knight looked amazed. “Well, that is extraordinary.” he murmured. “Did
+he know I was in the parish?”
+
+“I really can’t say, sir,” said John, wishing himself out of the
+entanglement he rather suspected than thoroughly understood.
+
+“Would it be considered an intrusion by the family if we went into the
+vault?”
+
+“Oh, bless ye, no, sir; scores of folk have been stepping down. ’Tis
+left open a-purpose.”
+
+“We will go down, Elfride.”
+
+“I am afraid the air is close,” she said appealingly.
+
+“Oh no, ma’am,” said John. “We white-limed the walls and arches the day
+’twas opened, as we always do, and again on the morning of the funeral;
+the place is as sweet as a granary.
+
+“Then I should like you to accompany me, Elfie; having originally
+sprung from the family too.”
+
+“I don’t like going where death is so emphatically present. I’ll stay
+by the horses whilst you go in; they may get loose.”
+
+“What nonsense! I had no idea your sentiments were so flimsily formed
+as to be perturbed by a few remnants of mortality; but stay out, if you
+are so afraid, by all means.”
+
+“Oh no, I am not afraid; don’t say that.”
+
+She held miserably to his arm, thinking that, perhaps, the revelation
+might as well come at once as ten minutes later, for Stephen would be
+sure to accompany his friend to his horse.
+
+At first, the gloom of the vault, which was lighted only by a couple of
+candles, was too great to admit of their seeing anything distinctly;
+but with a further advance Knight discerned, in front of the black
+masses lining the walls, a young man standing, and writing in a
+pocket-book.
+
+Knight said one word: “Stephen!”
+
+Stephen Smith, not being in such absolute ignorance of Knight’s
+whereabouts as Knight had been of Smith’s instantly recognized his
+friend, and knew by rote the outlines of the fair woman standing behind
+him.
+
+Stephen came forward and shook him by the hand, without speaking.
+
+“Why have you not written, my boy?” said Knight, without in any way
+signifying Elfride’s presence to Stephen. To the essayist, Smith was
+still the country lad whom he had patronized and tended; one to whom
+the formal presentation of a lady betrothed to himself would have
+seemed incongruous and absurd.
+
+“Why haven’t you written to me?” said Stephen.
+
+“Ah, yes. Why haven’t I? why haven’t we? That’s always the query which
+we cannot clearly answer without an unsatisfactory sense of our
+inadequacies. However, I have not forgotten you, Smith. And now we have
+met; and we must meet again, and have a longer chat than this can
+conveniently be. I must know all you have been doing. That you have
+thriven, I know, and you must teach me the way.”
+
+Elfride stood in the background. Stephen had read the position at a
+glance, and immediately guessed that she had never mentioned his name
+to Knight. His tact in avoiding catastrophes was the chief quality
+which made him intellectually respectable, in which quality he far
+transcended Knight; and he decided that a tranquil issue out of the
+encounter, without any harrowing of the feelings of either Knight or
+Elfride, was to be attempted if possible. His old sense of indebtedness
+to Knight had never wholly forsaken him; his love for Elfride was
+generous now.
+
+As far as he dared look at her movements he saw that her bearing
+towards him would be dictated by his own towards her; and if he acted
+as a stranger she would do likewise as a means of deliverance.
+Circumstances favouring this course, it was desirable also to be rather
+reserved towards Knight, to shorten the meeting as much as possible.
+
+“I am afraid that my time is almost too short to allow even of such a
+pleasure,” he said. “I leave here to-morrow. And until I start for the
+Continent and India, which will be in a fortnight, I shall have hardly
+a moment to spare.”
+
+Knight’s disappointment and dissatisfied looks at this reply sent a
+pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of
+Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true, but
+their tone was far from being so. He would have been gratified to talk
+with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead loss to himself that,
+to save the woman who cared nothing for him, he was deliberately
+throwing away his friend.
+
+“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” said Knight, in a changed tone. “But of
+course, if you have weighty concerns to attend to, they must not be
+neglected. And if this is to be our first and last meeting, let me say
+that I wish you success with all my heart!” Knight’s warmth revived
+towards the end; the solemn impressions he was beginning to receive
+from the scene around them abstracting from his heart as a puerility
+any momentary vexation at words. “It is a strange place for us to meet
+in,” he continued, looking round the vault.
+
+Stephen briefly assented, and there was a silence. The blackened
+coffins were now revealed more clearly than at first, the whitened
+walls and arches throwing them forward in strong relief. It was a scene
+which was remembered by all three as an indelible mark in their
+history. Knight, with an abstracted face, was standing between his
+companions, though a little in advance of them, Elfride being on his
+right hand, and Stephen Smith on his left. The white daylight on his
+right side gleamed faintly in, and was toned to a blueness by contrast
+with the yellow rays from the candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly
+shrinking back, and nearest the entrance, received most of the light
+therefrom, whilst Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the
+spot of outer sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch,
+and nothing more.
+
+“I have been here two or three times since it was opened,” said
+Stephen. “My father was engaged in the work, you know.”
+
+“Yes. What are you doing?” Knight inquired, looking at the note-book
+and pencil Stephen held in his hand.
+
+“I have been sketching a few details in the church, and since then I
+have been copying the names from some of the coffins here. Before I
+left England I used to do a good deal of this sort of thing.”
+
+“Yes; of course. Ah, that’s poor Lady Luxellian, I suppose.” Knight
+pointed to a coffin of light satin-wood, which stood on the stone
+sleepers in the new niche. “And the remainder of the family are on this
+side. Who are those two, so snug and close together?”
+
+Stephen’s voice altered slightly as he replied “That’s Lady Elfride
+Kingsmore—born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her husband. I have heard
+my father say that they—he—ran away with her, and married her against
+the wish of her parents.”
+
+“Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss
+Swancourt?” said Knight, turning to her. “I think you told me it was
+three or four generations ago that your family branched off from the
+Luxellians?”
+
+“She was my grandmother,” said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to moisten
+her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the conscience-stricken
+look of Guido’s Magdalen, rendered upon a more childlike form. She kept
+her face partially away from Knight and Stephen, and set her eyes upon
+the sky visible outside, as if her salvation depended upon quickly
+reaching it. Her left hand rested lightly within Knight’s arm, half
+withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover,
+yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched his
+sleeve. “‘Can one be pardoned, and retain the offence?’” quoted
+Elfride’s heart then.
+
+Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in
+the shape of disjointed remarks. “One’s mind gets thronged with
+thoughts while standing so solemnly here,” Knight said, in a measured
+quiet voice. “How much has been said on death from time to time! how
+much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy each of these who lie
+here saying:
+
+“For Thou, to make my fall more great,
+        Didst lift me up on high.”
+
+
+What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
+thinking of.”
+
+“Yes, I know it,” she murmured, and went on in a still lower voice,
+seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of her nature to
+reach Stephen:
+
+“‘My days, just hastening to their end,
+    Are like an evening shade;
+My beauty doth, like wither’d grass,
+    With waning lustre fade.’”
+
+
+“Well,” said Knight musingly, “let us leave them. Such occasions as
+these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the
+fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so
+vast that our physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We
+look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant growth
+depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a
+foundation so small? Must I again return to my daily walk in that
+narrow cell, a human body, where worldly thoughts can torture me? Do we
+not?”
+
+“Yes,” said Stephen and Elfride.
+
+“One has a sense of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a
+sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a
+body. What weakens one’s intentions regarding the future like the
+thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful
+chord, for there’s a great deal to be done yet by us all.”
+
+As Knight meditatively addressed his juniors thus, unconscious of the
+deception practised, for different reasons, by the severed hearts at
+his side, and of the scenes that had in earlier days united them, each
+one felt that he and she did not gain by contrast with their musing
+mentor. Physically not so handsome as either the youthful architect or
+the vicar’s daughter, the thoroughness and integrity of Knight
+illuminated his features with a dignity not even incipient in the other
+two. It is difficult to frame rules which shall apply to both sexes,
+and Elfride, an undeveloped girl, must, perhaps, hardly be laden with
+the moral responsibilities which attach to a man in like circumstances.
+The charm of woman, too, lies partly in her subtleness in matters of
+love. But if honesty is a virtue in itself, Elfride, having none of it
+now, seemed, being for being, scarcely good enough for Knight. Stephen,
+though deceptive for no unworthy purpose, was deceptive after all; and
+whatever good results grace such strategy if it succeed, it seldom
+draws admiration, especially when it fails.
+
+On an ordinary occasion, had Knight been even quite alone with Stephen,
+he would hardly have alluded to his possible relationship to Elfride.
+But moved by attendant circumstances Knight was impelled to be
+confiding.
+
+“Stephen,” he said, “this lady is Miss Swancourt. I am staying at her
+father’s house, as you probably know.” He stepped a few paces nearer to
+Smith, and said in a lower tone: “I may as well tell you that we are
+engaged to be married.”
+
+Low as the words had been spoken, Elfride had heard them, and awaited
+Stephen’s reply in breathless silence, if that could be called silence
+where Elfride’s dress, at each throb of her heart, shook and indicated
+it like a pulse-glass, rustling also against the wall in reply to the
+same throbbing. The ray of daylight which reached her face lent it a
+blue pallor in comparison with those of the other two.
+
+“I congratulate you,” Stephen whispered; and said aloud, “I know Miss
+Swancourt—a little. You must remember that my father is a parishioner
+of Mr. Swancourt’s.”
+
+“I thought you might possibly not have lived at home since they have
+been here.”
+
+“I have never lived at home, certainly, since that time.”
+
+“I have seen Mr. Smith,” faltered Elfride.
+
+“Well, there is no excuse for me. As strangers to each other I ought, I
+suppose, to have introduced you: as acquaintances, I should not have
+stood so persistently between you. But the fact is, Smith, you seem a
+boy to me, even now.”
+
+Stephen appeared to have a more than previous consciousness of the
+intense cruelty of his fate at the present moment. He could not repress
+the words, uttered with a dim bitterness:
+
+“You should have said that I seemed still the rural mechanic’s son I
+am, and hence an unfit subject for the ceremony of introductions.”
+
+“Oh, no, no! I won’t have that.” Knight endeavoured to give his reply a
+laughing tone in Elfride’s ears, and an earnestness in Stephen’s: in
+both which efforts he signally failed, and produced a forced speech
+pleasant to neither. “Well, let us go into the open air again; Miss
+Swancourt, you are particularly silent. You mustn’t mind Smith. I have
+known him for years, as I have told you.”
+
+“Yes, you have,” she said.
+
+“To think she has never mentioned her knowledge of me!” Smith murmured,
+and thought with some remorse how much her conduct resembled his own on
+his first arrival at her house as a stranger to the place.
+
+They ascended to the daylight, Knight taking no further notice of
+Elfride’s manner, which, as usual, he attributed to the natural shyness
+of a young woman at being discovered walking with him on terms which
+left not much doubt of their meaning. Elfride stepped a little in
+advance, and passed through the churchyard.
+
+“You are changed very considerably, Smith,” said Knight, “and I suppose
+it is no more than was to be expected. However, don’t imagine that I
+shall feel any the less interest in you and your fortunes whenever you
+care to confide them to me. I have not forgotten the attachment you
+spoke of as your reason for going away to India. A London young lady,
+was it not? I hope all is prosperous?”
+
+“No: the match is broken off.”
+
+It being always difficult to know whether to express sorrow or gladness
+under such circumstances—all depending upon the character of the
+match—Knight took shelter in the safe words: “I trust it was for the
+best.”
+
+“I hope it was. But I beg that you will not press me further: no, you
+have not pressed me—I don’t mean that—but I would rather not speak upon
+the subject.”
+
+Stephen’s words were hurried.
+
+Knight said no more, and they followed in the footsteps of Elfride, who
+still kept some paces in advance, and had not heard Knight’s
+unconscious allusion to her. Stephen bade him adieu at the
+churchyard-gate without going outside, and watched whilst he and his
+sweetheart mounted their horses.
+
+“Good heavens, Elfride,” Knight exclaimed, “how pale you are! I suppose
+I ought not to have taken you into that vault. What is the matter?”
+
+“Nothing,” said Elfride faintly. “I shall be myself in a moment. All
+was so strange and unexpected down there, that it made me unwell.”
+
+“I thought you said very little. Shall I get some water?”
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“Do you think it is safe for you to mount?”
+
+“Quite—indeed it is,” she said, with a look of appeal.
+
+“Now then—up she goes!” whispered Knight, and lifted her tenderly into
+the saddle.
+
+Her old lover still looked on at the performance as he leant over the
+gate a dozen yards off. Once in the saddle, and having a firm grip of
+the reins, she turned her head as if by a resistless fascination, and
+for the first time since that memorable parting on the moor outside St.
+Launce’s after the passionate attempt at marriage with him, Elfride
+looked in the face of the young man she first had loved. He was the
+youth who had called her his inseparable wife many a time, and whom she
+had even addressed as her husband. Their eyes met. Measurement of life
+should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than
+to its actual length. Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a
+season in their history. To Elfride the intense agony of reproach in
+Stephen’s eye was a nail piercing her heart with a deadliness no words
+can describe. With a spasmodic effort she withdrew her eyes, urged on
+the horse, and in the chaos of perturbed memories was oblivious of any
+presence beside her. The deed of deception was complete.
+
+Gaining a knoll on which the park transformed itself into wood and
+copse, Knight came still closer to her side, and said, “Are you better
+now, dearest?”
+
+“Oh yes.” She pressed a hand to her eyes, as if to blot out the image
+of Stephen. A vivid scarlet spot now shone with preternatural
+brightness in the centre of each cheek, leaving the remainder of her
+face lily-white as before.
+
+“Elfride,” said Knight, rather in his old tone of mentor, “you know I
+don’t for a moment chide you, but is there not a great deal of
+unwomanly weakness in your allowing yourself to be so overwhelmed by
+the sight of what, after all, is no novelty? Every woman worthy of the
+name should, I think, be able to look upon death with something like
+composure. Surely you think so too?”
+
+“Yes; I own it.”
+
+His obtuseness to the cause of her indisposition, by evidencing his
+entire freedom from the suspicion of anything behind the scenes, showed
+how incapable Knight was of deception himself, rather than any inherent
+dulness in him regarding human nature. This, clearly perceived by
+Elfride, added poignancy to her self-reproach, and she idolized him the
+more because of their difference. Even the recent sight of Stephen’s
+face and the sound of his voice, which for a moment had stirred a chord
+or two of ancient kindness, were unable to keep down the adoration
+re-existent now that he was again out of view.
+
+She had replied to Knight’s question hastily, and immediately went on
+to speak of indifferent subjects. After they had reached home she was
+apart from him till dinner-time. When dinner was over, and they were
+watching the dusk in the drawing-room, Knight stepped out upon the
+terrace. Elfride went after him very decisively, on the spur of a
+virtuous intention.
+
+“Mr. Knight, I want to tell you something,” she said, with quiet
+firmness.
+
+“And what is it about?” gaily returned her lover. “Happiness, I hope.
+Do not let anything keep you so sad as you seem to have been to-day.”
+
+“I cannot mention the matter until I tell you the whole substance of
+it,” she said. “And that I will do to-morrow. I have been reminded of
+it to-day. It is about something I once did, and don’t think I ought to
+have done.”
+
+This, it must be said, was rather a mild way of referring to a frantic
+passion and flight, which, much or little in itself, only accident had
+saved from being a scandal in the public eye.
+
+Knight thought the matter some trifle, and said pleasantly:
+
+“Then I am not to hear the dreadful confession now?”
+
+“No, not now. I did not mean to-night,” Elfride responded, with a
+slight decline in the firmness of her voice. “It is not light as you
+think it—it troubles me a great deal.” Fearing now the effect of her
+own earnestness, she added forcedly, “Though, perhaps, you may think it
+light after all.”
+
+“But you have not said when it is to be?”
+
+“To-morrow morning. Name a time, will you, and bind me to it? I want
+you to fix an hour, because I am weak, and may otherwise try to get out
+of it.” She added a little artificial laugh, which showed how timorous
+her resolution was still.
+
+“Well, say after breakfast—at eleven o’clock.”
+
+“Yes, eleven o’clock. I promise you. Bind me strictly to my word.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+
+
+“I lull a fancy, trouble-tost.”
+
+
+Miss Swancourt, it is eleven o’clock.”
+
+She was looking out of her dressing-room window on the first floor, and
+Knight was regarding her from the terrace balustrade, upon which he had
+been idly sitting for some time—dividing the glances of his eye between
+the pages of a book in his hand, the brilliant hues of the geraniums
+and calceolarias, and the open window above-mentioned.
+
+“Yes, it is, I know. I am coming.”
+
+He drew closer, and under the window.
+
+“How are you this morning, Elfride? You look no better for your long
+night’s rest.”
+
+She appeared at the door shortly after, took his offered arm, and
+together they walked slowly down the gravel path leading to the river
+and away under the trees.
+
+Her resolution, sustained during the last fifteen hours, had been to
+tell the whole truth, and now the moment had come.
+
+Step by step they advanced, and still she did not speak. They were
+nearly at the end of the walk, when Knight broke the silence.
+
+“Well, what is the confession, Elfride?”
+
+She paused a moment, drew a long breath; and this is what she said:
+
+“I told you one day—or rather I gave you to understand—what was not
+true. I fancy you thought me to mean I was nineteen my next birthday,
+but it was my last I was nineteen.”
+
+The moment had been too much for her. Now that the crisis had come, no
+qualms of conscience, no love of honesty, no yearning to make a
+confidence and obtain forgiveness with a kiss, could string Elfride up
+to the venture. Her dread lest he should be unforgiving was heightened
+by the thought of yesterday’s artifice, which might possibly add
+disgust to his disappointment. The certainty of one more day’s
+affection, which she gained by silence, outvalued the hope of a
+perpetuity combined with the risk of all.
+
+The trepidation caused by these thoughts on what she had intended to
+say shook so naturally the words she did say, that Knight never for a
+moment suspected them to be a last moment’s substitution. He smiled and
+pressed her hand warmly.
+
+“My dear Elfie—yes, you are now—no protestation—what a winning little
+woman you are, to be so absurdly scrupulous about a mere iota! Really,
+I never once have thought whether your nineteenth year was the last or
+the present. And, by George, well I may not; for it would never do for
+a staid fogey a dozen years older to stand upon such a trifle as that.”
+
+“Don’t praise me—don’t praise me! Though I prize it from your lips, I
+don’t deserve it now.”
+
+But Knight, being in an exceptionally genial mood, merely saw this
+distressful exclamation as modesty. “Well,” he added, after a minute,
+“I like you all the better, you know, for such moral precision,
+although I called it absurd.” He went on with tender earnestness: “For,
+Elfride, there is one thing I do love to see in a woman—that is, a soul
+truthful and clear as heaven’s light. I could put up with anything if I
+had that—forgive nothing if I had it not. Elfride, you have such a
+soul, if ever woman had; and having it, retain it, and don’t ever
+listen to the fashionable theories of the day about a woman’s
+privileges and natural right to practise wiles. Depend upon it, my dear
+girl, that a noble woman must be as honest as a noble man. I specially
+mean by honesty, fairness not only in matters of business and social
+detail, but in all the delicate dealings of love, to which the licence
+given to your sex particularly refers.”
+
+Elfride looked troublously at the trees.
+
+“Now let us go on to the river, Elfie.”
+
+“I would if I had a hat on,” she said with a sort of suppressed woe.
+
+“I will get it for you,” said Knight, very willing to purchase her
+companionship at so cheap a price. “You sit down there a minute.” And
+he turned and walked rapidly back to the house for the article in
+question.
+
+Elfride sat down upon one of the rustic benches which adorned this
+portion of the grounds, and remained with her eyes upon the grass. She
+was induced to lift them by hearing the brush of light and irregular
+footsteps hard by. Passing along the path which intersected the one she
+was in and traversed the outer shrubberies, Elfride beheld the farmer’s
+widow, Mrs. Jethway. Before she noticed Elfride, she paused to look at
+the house, portions of which were visible through the bushes. Elfride,
+shrinking back, hoped the unpleasant woman might go on without seeing
+her. But Mrs. Jethway, silently apostrophizing the house, with actions
+which seemed dictated by a half-overturned reason, had discerned the
+girl, and immediately came up and stood in front of her.
+
+“Ah, Miss Swancourt! Why did you disturb me? Mustn’t I trespass here?”
+
+“You may walk here if you like, Mrs. Jethway. I do not disturb you.”
+
+“You disturb my mind, and my mind is my whole life; for my boy is there
+still, and he is gone from my body.”
+
+“Yes, poor young man. I was sorry when he died.”
+
+“Do you know what he died of?”
+
+“Consumption.”
+
+“Oh no, no!” said the widow. “That word ‘consumption’ covers a good
+deal. He died because you were his own well-agreed sweetheart, and then
+proved false—and it killed him. Yes, Miss Swancourt,” she said in an
+excited whisper, “you killed my son!”
+
+“How can you be so wicked and foolish!” replied Elfride, rising
+indignantly. But indignation was not natural to her, and having been so
+worn and harrowed by late events, she lost any powers of defence that
+mood might have lent her. “I could not help his loving me, Mrs.
+Jethway!”
+
+“That’s just what you could have helped. You know how it began, Miss
+Elfride. Yes: you said you liked the name of Felix better than any
+other name in the parish, and you knew it was his name, and that those
+you said it to would report it to him.”
+
+“I knew it was his name—of course I did; but I am sure, Mrs. Jethway, I
+did not intend anybody to tell him.”
+
+“But you knew they would.”
+
+“No, I didn’t.”
+
+“And then, after that, when you were riding on Revels-day by our house,
+and the lads were gathered there, and you wanted to dismount, when Jim
+Drake and George Upway and three or four more ran forward to hold your
+pony, and Felix stood back timid, why did you beckon to him, and say
+you would rather he held it?”
+
+“O Mrs. Jethway, you do think so mistakenly! I liked him best—that’s
+why I wanted him to do it. He was gentle and nice—I always thought him
+so—and I liked him.”
+
+“Then why did you let him kiss you?”
+
+“It is a falsehood; oh, it is, it is!” said Elfride, weeping with
+desperation. “He came behind me, and attempted to kiss me; and that was
+why I told him never to let me see him again.”
+
+“But you did not tell your father or anybody, as you would have if you
+had looked upon it then as the insult you now pretend it was.”
+
+“He begged me not to tell, and foolishly enough I did not. And I wish I
+had now. I little expected to be scourged with my own kindness. Pray
+leave me, Mrs. Jethway.” The girl only expostulated now.
+
+“Well, you harshly dismissed him, and he died. And before his body was
+cold, you took another to your heart. Then as carelessly sent him about
+his business, and took a third. And if you consider that nothing, Miss
+Swancourt,” she continued, drawing closer; “it led on to what was very
+serious indeed. Have you forgotten the would-be runaway marriage? The
+journey to London, and the return the next day without being married,
+and that there’s enough disgrace in that to ruin a woman’s good name
+far less light than yours? You may have: I have not. Fickleness towards
+a lover is bad, but fickleness after playing the wife is wantonness.”
+
+“Oh, it’s a wicked cruel lie! Do not say it; oh, do not!”
+
+“Does your new man know of it? I think not, or he would be no man of
+yours! As much of the story as was known is creeping about the
+neighbourhood even now; but I know more than any of them, and why
+should I respect your love?”
+
+“I defy you!” cried Elfride tempestuously. “Do and say all you can to
+ruin me; try; put your tongue at work; I invite it! I defy you as a
+slanderous woman! Look, there he comes.” And her voice trembled greatly
+as she saw through the leaves the beloved form of Knight coming from
+the door with her hat in his hand. “Tell him at once; I can bear it.”
+
+“Not now,” said the woman, and disappeared down the path.
+
+The excitement of her latter words had restored colour to Elfride’s
+cheeks; and hastily wiping her eyes, she walked farther on, so that by
+the time her lover had overtaken her the traces of emotion had nearly
+disappeared from her face. Knight put the hat upon her head, took her
+hand, and drew it within his arm.
+
+It was the last day but one previous to their departure for St.
+Leonards; and Knight seemed to have a purpose in being much in her
+company that day. They rambled along the valley. The season was that
+period in the autumn when the foliage alone of an ordinary plantation
+is rich enough in hues to exhaust the chromatic combinations of an
+artist’s palette. Most lustrous of all are the beeches, graduating from
+bright rusty red at the extremity of the boughs to a bright yellow at
+their inner parts; young oaks are still of a neutral green; Scotch firs
+and hollies are nearly blue; whilst occasional dottings of other
+varieties give maroons and purples of every tinge.
+
+The river—such as it was—here pursued its course amid flagstones as
+level as a pavement, but divided by crevices of irregular width. With
+the summer drought the torrent had narrowed till it was now but a
+thread of crystal clearness, meandering along a central channel in the
+rocky bed of the winter current. Knight scrambled through the bushes
+which at this point nearly covered the brook from sight, and leapt down
+upon the dry portion of the river bottom.
+
+“Elfride, I never saw such a sight!” he exclaimed. “The hazels overhang
+the river’s course in a perfect arch, and the floor is beautifully
+paved. The place reminds one of the passages of a cloister. Let me help
+you down.”
+
+He assisted her through the marginal underwood and down to the stones.
+They walked on together to a tiny cascade about a foot wide and high,
+and sat down beside it on the flags that for nine months in the year
+were submerged beneath a gushing bourne. From their feet trickled the
+attenuated thread of water which alone remained to tell the intent and
+reason of this leaf-covered aisle, and journeyed on in a zigzag line
+till lost in the shade.
+
+Knight, leaning on his elbow, after contemplating all this, looked
+critically at Elfride.
+
+“Does not such a luxuriant head of hair exhaust itself and get thin as
+the years go on from eighteen to eight-and-twenty?” he asked at length.
+
+“Oh no!” she said quickly, with a visible disinclination to harbour
+such a thought, which came upon her with an unpleasantness whose force
+it would be difficult for men to understand. She added afterwards, with
+smouldering uneasiness, “Do you really think that a great abundance of
+hair is more likely to get thin than a moderate quantity?”
+
+“Yes, I really do. I believe—am almost sure, in fact—that if statistics
+could be obtained on the subject, you would find the persons with thin
+hair were those who had a superabundance originally, and that those who
+start with a moderate quantity retain it without much loss.”
+
+Elfride’s troubles sat upon her face as well as in her heart. Perhaps
+to a woman it is almost as dreadful to think of losing her beauty as of
+losing her reputation. At any rate, she looked quite as gloomy as she
+had looked at any minute that day.
+
+“You shouldn’t be so troubled about a mere personal adornment,” said
+Knight, with some of the severity of tone that had been customary
+before she had beguiled him into softness.
+
+“I think it is a woman’s duty to be as beautiful as she can. If I were
+a scholar, I would give you chapter and verse for it from one of your
+own Latin authors. I know there is such a passage, for papa has alluded
+to it.”
+
+‘“Munditiae, et ornatus, et cultus,’ &c.—is that it? A passage in Livy
+which is no defence at all.”
+
+“No, it is not that.”
+
+“Never mind, then; for I have a reason for not taking up my old cudgels
+against you, Elfie. Can you guess what the reason is?”
+
+“No; but I am glad to hear it,” she said thankfully. “For it is
+dreadful when you talk so. For whatever dreadful name the weakness may
+deserve, I must candidly own that I am terrified to think my hair may
+ever get thin.”
+
+“Of course; a sensible woman would rather lose her wits than her
+beauty.”
+
+“I don’t care if you do say satire and judge me cruelly. I know my hair
+is beautiful; everybody says so.”
+
+“Why, my dear Miss Swancourt,” he tenderly replied, “I have not said
+anything against it. But you know what is said about handsome being and
+handsome doing.”
+
+“Poor Miss Handsome-does cuts but a sorry figure beside Miss
+Handsome-is in every man’s eyes, your own not excepted, Mr. Knight,
+though it pleases you to throw off so,” said Elfride saucily. And
+lowering her voice: “You ought not to have taken so much trouble to
+save me from falling over the cliff, for you don’t think mine a life
+worth much trouble evidently.”
+
+“Perhaps you think mine was not worth yours.”
+
+“It was worth anybody’s!”
+
+Her hand was plashing in the little waterfall, and her eyes were bent
+the same way.
+
+“You talk about my severity with you, Elfride. You are unkind to me,
+you know.”
+
+“How?” she asked, looking up from her idle occupation.
+
+“After my taking trouble to get jewellery to please you, you wouldn’t
+accept it.”
+
+“Perhaps I would now; perhaps I want to.”
+
+“Do!” said Knight.
+
+And the packet was withdrawn from his pocket and presented the third
+time. Elfride took it with delight. The obstacle was rent in twain, and
+the significant gift was hers.
+
+“I’ll take out these ugly ones at once,” she exclaimed, “and I’ll wear
+yours—shall I?”
+
+“I should be gratified.”
+
+Now, though it may seem unlikely, considering how far the two had gone
+in converse, Knight had never yet ventured to kiss Elfride. Far slower
+was he than Stephen Smith in matters like that. The utmost advance he
+had made in such demonstrations had been to the degree witnessed by
+Stephen in the summer-house. So Elfride’s cheek being still forbidden
+fruit to him, he said impulsively.
+
+“Elfie, I should like to touch that seductive ear of yours. Those are
+my gifts; so let me dress you in them.”
+
+She hesitated with a stimulating hesitation.
+
+“Let me put just one in its place, then?”
+
+Her face grew much warmer.
+
+“I don’t think it would be quite the usual or proper course,” she said,
+suddenly turning and resuming her operation of plashing in the
+miniature cataract.
+
+The stillness of things was disturbed by a bird coming to the streamlet
+to drink. After watching him dip his bill, sprinkle himself, and fly
+into a tree, Knight replied, with the courteous brusqueness she so much
+liked to hear—
+
+“Elfride, now you may as well be fair. You would mind my doing it but
+little, I think; so give me leave, do.”
+
+“I will be fair, then,” she said confidingly, and looking him full in
+the face. It was a particular pleasure to her to be able to do a little
+honesty without fear. “I should not mind your doing so—I should like
+such an attention. My thought was, would it be right to let you?”
+
+“Then I will!” he rejoined, with that singular earnestness about a
+small matter—in the eyes of a ladies’ man but a momentary peg for
+flirtation or jest—which is only found in deep natures who have been
+wholly unused to toying with womankind, and which, from its
+unwontedness, is in itself a tribute the most precious that can be
+rendered, and homage the most exquisite to be received.
+
+“And you shall,” she whispered, without reserve, and no longer mistress
+of the ceremonies. And then Elfride inclined herself towards him,
+thrust back her hair, and poised her head sideways. In doing this her
+arm and shoulder necessarily rested against his breast.
+
+At the touch, the sensation of both seemed to be concentrated at the
+point of contact. All the time he was performing the delicate manoeuvre
+Knight trembled like a young surgeon in his first operation.
+
+“Now the other,” said Knight in a whisper.
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“I don’t know exactly.”
+
+“You must know.”
+
+“Your touch agitates me so. Let us go home.”
+
+“Don’t say that, Elfride. What is it, after all? A mere nothing. Now
+turn round, dearest.”
+
+She was powerless to disobey, and turned forthwith; and then, without
+any defined intention in either’s mind, his face and hers drew closer
+together; and he supported her there, and kissed her.
+
+Knight was at once the most ardent and the coolest man alive. When his
+emotions slumbered he appeared almost phlegmatic; when they were moved
+he was no less than passionate. And now, without having quite intended
+an early marriage, he put the question plainly. It came with all the
+ardour which was the accumulation of long years behind a natural
+reserve.
+
+“Elfride, when shall we be married?”
+
+The words were sweet to her; but there was a bitter in the sweet. These
+newly-overt acts of his, which had culminated in this plain question,
+coming on the very day of Mrs. Jethway’s blasting reproaches, painted
+distinctly her fickleness as an enormity. Loving him in secret had not
+seemed such thorough-going inconstancy as the same love recognized and
+acted upon in the face of threats. Her distraction was interpreted by
+him at her side as the outward signs of an unwonted experience.
+
+“I don’t press you for an answer now, darling,” he said, seeing she was
+not likely to give a lucid reply. “Take your time.”
+
+Knight was as honourable a man as was ever loved and deluded by woman.
+It may be said that his blindness in love proved the point, for
+shrewdness in love usually goes with meanness in general. Once the
+passion had mastered him, the intellect had gone for naught. Knight, as
+a lover, was more single-minded and far simpler than his friend
+Stephen, who in other capacities was shallow beside him.
+
+Without saying more on the subject of their marriage, Knight held her
+at arm’s length, as if she had been a large bouquet, and looked at her
+with critical affection.
+
+“Does your pretty gift become me?” she inquired, with tears of
+excitement on the fringes of her eyes.
+
+“Undoubtedly, perfectly!” said her lover, adopting a lighter tone to
+put her at her ease. “Ah, you should see them; you look shinier than
+ever. Fancy that I have been able to improve you!”
+
+“Am I really so nice? I am glad for your sake. I wish I could see
+myself.”
+
+“You can’t. You must wait till we get home.”
+
+“I shall never be able,” she said, laughing. “Look: here’s a way.”
+
+“So there is. Well done, woman’s wit!”
+
+“Hold me steady!”
+
+“Oh yes.”
+
+“And don’t let me fall, will you?”
+
+“By no means.”
+
+Below their seat the thread of water paused to spread out into a smooth
+small pool. Knight supported her whilst she knelt down and leant over
+it.
+
+“I can see myself. Really, try as religiously as I will, I cannot help
+admiring my appearance in them.”
+
+“Doubtless. How can you be so fond of finery? I believe you are
+corrupting me into a taste for it. I used to hate every such thing
+before I knew you.”
+
+“I like ornaments, because I want people to admire what you possess,
+and envy you, and say, ‘I wish I was he.’”
+
+“I suppose I ought not to object after that. And how much longer are
+you going to look in there at yourself?”
+
+“Until you are tired of holding me? Oh, I want to ask you something.”
+And she turned round. “Now tell truly, won’t you? What colour of hair
+do you like best now?”
+
+Knight did not answer at the moment.
+
+“Say light, do!” she whispered coaxingly. “Don’t say dark, as you did
+that time.”
+
+“Light-brown, then. Exactly the colour of my sweetheart’s.”
+
+“Really?” said Elfride, enjoying as truth what she knew to be flattery.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And blue eyes, too, not hazel? Say yes, say yes!”
+
+“One recantation is enough for to-day.”
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“Very well, blue eyes.” And Knight laughed, and drew her close and
+kissed her the second time, which operations he performed with the
+carefulness of a fruiterer touching a bunch of grapes so as not to
+disturb their bloom.
+
+Elfride objected to a second, and flung away her face, the movement
+causing a slight disarrangement of hat and hair. Hardly thinking what
+she said in the trepidation of the moment, she exclaimed, clapping her
+hand to her ear—
+
+“Ah, we must be careful! I lost the other earring doing like this.”
+
+No sooner did she realise the significant words than a troubled look
+passed across her face, and she shut her lips as if to keep them back.
+
+“Doing like what?” said Knight, perplexed.
+
+“Oh, sitting down out of doors,” she replied hastily.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIX
+
+
+“Care, thou canker.”
+
+
+It is an evening at the beginning of October, and the mellowest of
+autumn sunsets irradiates London, even to its uttermost eastern end.
+Between the eye and the flaming West, columns of smoke stand up in the
+still air like tall trees. Everything in the shade is rich and misty
+blue.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt and Elfride are looking at these lustrous and
+lurid contrasts from the window of a large hotel near London Bridge.
+The visit to their friends at St. Leonards is over, and they are
+staying a day or two in the metropolis on their way home.
+
+Knight spent the same interval of time in crossing over to Brittany by
+way of Jersey and St. Malo. He then passed through Normandy, and
+returned to London also, his arrival there having been two days later
+than that of Elfride and her parents.
+
+So the evening of this October day saw them all meeting at the
+above-mentioned hotel, where they had previously engaged apartments.
+During the afternoon Knight had been to his lodgings at Richmond to
+make a little change in the nature of his baggage; and on coming up
+again there was never ushered by a bland waiter into a comfortable room
+a happier man than Knight when shown to where Elfride and her
+step-mother were sitting after a fatiguing day of shopping.
+
+Elfride looked none the better for her change: Knight was as brown as a
+nut. They were soon engaged by themselves in a corner of the room. Now
+that the precious words of promise had been spoken, the young girl had
+no idea of keeping up her price by the system of reserve which other
+more accomplished maidens use. Her lover was with her again, and it was
+enough: she made her heart over to him entirely.
+
+Dinner was soon despatched. And when a preliminary round of
+conversation concerning their doings since the last parting had been
+concluded, they reverted to the subject of to-morrow’s journey home.
+
+“That enervating ride through the myrtle climate of South Devon—how I
+dread it to-morrow!” Mrs. Swancourt was saying. “I had hoped the
+weather would have been cooler by this time.”
+
+“Did you ever go by water?” said Knight.
+
+“Never—by never, I mean not since the time of railways.”
+
+“Then if you can afford an additional day, I propose that we do it,”
+said Knight. “The Channel is like a lake just now. We should reach
+Plymouth in about forty hours, I think, and the boats start from just
+below the bridge here” (pointing over his shoulder eastward).
+
+“Hear, hear!” said the vicar.
+
+“It’s an idea, certainly,” said his wife.
+
+“Of course these coasters are rather tubby,” said Knight. “But you
+wouldn’t mind that?”
+
+“No: we wouldn’t mind.”
+
+“And the saloon is a place like the fishmarket of a ninth-rate country
+town, but that wouldn’t matter?”
+
+“Oh dear, no. If we had only thought of it soon enough, we might have
+had the use of Lord Luxellian’s yacht. But never mind, we’ll go. We
+shall escape the worrying rattle through the whole length of London
+to-morrow morning—not to mention the risk of being killed by excursion
+trains, which is not a little one at this time of the year, if the
+papers are true.”
+
+Elfride, too, thought the arrangement delightful; and accordingly, ten
+o’clock the following morning saw two cabs crawling round by the Mint,
+and between the preternaturally high walls of Nightingale Lane towards
+the river side.
+
+The first vehicle was occupied by the travellers in person, and the
+second brought up the luggage, under the supervision of Mrs. Snewson,
+Mrs. Swancourt’s maid—and for the last fortnight Elfride’s also; for
+although the younger lady had never been accustomed to any such
+attendant at robing times, her stepmother forced her into a semblance
+of familiarity with one when they were away from home.
+
+Presently waggons, bales, and smells of all descriptions increased to
+such an extent that the advance of the cabs was at the slowest possible
+rate. At intervals it was necessary to halt entirely, that the heavy
+vehicles unloading in front might be moved aside, a feat which was not
+accomplished without a deal of swearing and noise. The vicar put his
+head out of the window.
+
+“Surely there must be some mistake in the way,” he said with great
+concern, drawing in his head again. “There’s not a respectable
+conveyance to be seen here except ours. I’ve heard that there are
+strange dens in this part of London, into which people have been
+entrapped and murdered—surely there is no conspiracy on the part of the
+cabman?”
+
+“Oh no, no. It is all right,” said Mr. Knight, who was as placid as
+dewy eve by the side of Elfride.
+
+“But what I argue from,” said the vicar, with a greater emphasis of
+uneasiness, “are plain appearances. This can’t be the highway from
+London to Plymouth by water, because it is no way at all to any place.
+We shall miss our steamer and our train too—that’s what I think.”
+
+“Depend upon it we are right. In fact, here we are.”
+
+“Trimmer’s Wharf,” said the cabman, opening the door.
+
+No sooner had they alighted than they perceived a tussle going on
+between the hindmost cabman and a crowd of light porters who had
+charged him in column, to obtain possession of the bags and boxes, Mrs.
+Snewson’s hands being seen stretched towards heaven in the midst of the
+melee. Knight advanced gallantly, and after a hard struggle reduced the
+crowd to two, upon whose shoulders and trucks the goods vanished away
+in the direction of the water’s edge with startling rapidity.
+
+Then more of the same tribe, who had run on ahead, were heard shouting
+to boatmen, three of whom pulled alongside, and two being vanquished,
+the luggage went tumbling into the remaining one.
+
+“Never saw such a dreadful scene in my life—never!” said Mr. Swancourt,
+floundering into the boat. “Worse than Famine and Sword upon one. I
+thought such customs were confined to continental ports. Aren’t you
+astonished, Elfride?”
+
+“Oh no,” said Elfride, appearing amid the dingy scene like a rainbow in
+a murky sky. “It is a pleasant novelty, I think.”
+
+“Where in the wide ocean is our steamer?” the vicar inquired. “I can
+see nothing but old hulks, for the life of me.”
+
+“Just behind that one,” said Knight; “we shall soon be round under
+her.”
+
+The object of their search was soon after disclosed to view—a great
+lumbering form of inky blackness, which looked as if it had never known
+the touch of a paint-brush for fifty years. It was lying beside just
+such another, and the way on board was down a narrow lane of water
+between the two, about a yard and a half wide at one end, and gradually
+converging to a point. At the moment of their entry into this narrow
+passage, a brilliantly painted rival paddled down the river like a
+trotting steed, creating such a series of waves and splashes that their
+frail wherry was tossed like a teacup, and the vicar and his wife
+slanted this way and that, inclining their heads into contact with a
+Punch-and-Judy air and countenance, the wavelets striking the sides of
+the two hulls, and flapping back into their laps.
+
+“Dreadful! horrible!” Mr. Swancourt murmured privately; and said aloud,
+I thought we walked on board. I don’t think really I should have come,
+if I had known this trouble was attached to it.”
+
+“If they must splash, I wish they would splash us with clean water,”
+said the old lady, wiping her dress with her handkerchief.
+
+“I hope it is perfectly safe,” continued the vicar.
+
+“O papa! you are not very brave,” cried Elfride merrily.
+
+“Bravery is only obtuseness to the perception of contingencies,” Mr.
+Swancourt severely answered.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt laughed, and Elfride laughed, and Knight laughed, in the
+midst of which pleasantness a man shouted to them from some position
+between their heads and the sky, and they found they were close to the
+Juliet, into which they quiveringly ascended.
+
+It having been found that the lowness of the tide would prevent their
+getting off for an hour, the Swancourts, having nothing else to do,
+allowed their eyes to idle upon men in blue jerseys performing
+mysterious mending operations with tar-twine; they turned to look at
+the dashes of lurid sunlight, like burnished copper stars afloat on the
+ripples, which danced into and tantalized their vision; or listened to
+the loud music of a steam-crane at work close by; or to sighing sounds
+from the funnels of passing steamers, getting dead as they grew more
+distant; or to shouts from the decks of different craft in their
+vicinity, all of them assuming the form of “Ah-he-hay!”
+
+Half-past ten: not yet off. Mr. Swancourt breathed a breath of
+weariness, and looked at his fellow-travellers in general. Their faces
+were certainly not worth looking at. The expression “Waiting” was
+written upon them so absolutely that nothing more could be discerned
+there. All animation was suspended till Providence should raise the
+water and let them go.
+
+“I have been thinking,” said Knight, “that we have come amongst the
+rarest class of people in the kingdom. Of all human characteristics, a
+low opinion of the value of his own time by an individual must be among
+the strangest to find. Here we see numbers of that patient and happy
+species. Rovers, as distinct from travellers.”
+
+“But they are pleasure-seekers, to whom time is of no importance.”
+
+“Oh no. The pleasure-seekers we meet on the grand routes are more
+anxious than commercial travellers to rush on. And added to the loss of
+time in getting to their journey’s end, these exceptional people take
+their chance of sea-sickness by coming this way.”
+
+“Can it be?” inquired the vicar with apprehension. “Surely not, Mr.
+Knight, just here in our English Channel—close at our doors, as I may
+say.”
+
+“Entrance passages are very draughty places, and the Channel is like
+the rest. It ruins the temper of sailors. It has been calculated by
+philosophers that more damns go up to heaven from the Channel, in the
+course of a year, than from all the five oceans put together.”
+
+They really start now, and the dead looks of all the throng come to
+life immediately. The man who has been frantically hauling in a rope
+that bade fair to have no end ceases his labours, and they glide down
+the serpentine bends of the Thames.
+
+Anything anywhere was a mine of interest to Elfride, and so was this.
+
+“It is well enough now,” said Mrs. Swancourt, after they had passed the
+Nore, “but I can’t say I have cared for my voyage hitherto.” For being
+now in the open sea a slight breeze had sprung up, which cheered her as
+well as her two younger companions. But unfortunately it had a reverse
+effect upon the vicar, who, after turning a sort of apricot jam colour,
+interspersed with dashes of raspberry, pleaded indisposition, and
+vanished from their sight.
+
+The afternoon wore on. Mrs. Swancourt kindly sat apart by herself
+reading, and the betrothed pair were left to themselves. Elfride clung
+trustingly to Knight’s arm, and proud was she to walk with him up and
+down the deck, or to go forward, and leaning with him against the
+forecastle rails, watch the setting sun gradually withdrawing itself
+over their stern into a huge bank of livid cloud with golden edges that
+rose to meet it.
+
+She was childishly full of life and spirits, though in walking up and
+down with him before the other passengers, and getting noticed by them,
+she was at starting rather confused, it being the first time she had
+shown herself so openly under that kind of protection. “I expect they
+are envious and saying things about us, don’t you?” she would whisper
+to Knight with a stealthy smile.
+
+“Oh no,” he would answer unconcernedly. “Why should they envy us, and
+what can they say?”
+
+“Not any harm, of course,” Elfride replied, “except such as this: ‘How
+happy those two are! she is proud enough now.’ What makes it worse,”
+she continued in the extremity of confidence, “I heard those two
+cricketing men say just now, ‘She’s the nobbiest girl on the boat.’ But
+I don’t mind it, you know, Harry.”
+
+“I should hardly have supposed you did, even if you had not told me,”
+said Knight with great blandness.
+
+She was never tired of asking her lover questions and admiring his
+answers, good, bad, or indifferent as they might be. The evening grew
+dark and night came on, and lights shone upon them from the horizon and
+from the sky.
+
+“Now look there ahead of us, at that halo in the air, of silvery
+brightness. Watch it, and you will see what it comes to.”
+
+She watched for a few minutes, when two white lights emerged from the
+side of a hill, and showed themselves to be the origin of the halo.
+
+“What a dazzling brilliance! What do they mark?”
+
+“The South Foreland: they were previously covered by the cliff.”
+
+“What is that level line of little sparkles—a town, I suppose?”
+
+“That’s Dover.”
+
+All this time, and later, soft sheet lightning expanded from a cloud in
+their path, enkindling their faces as they paced up and down, shining
+over the water, and, for a moment, showing the horizon as a keen line.
+
+Elfride slept soundly that night. Her first thought the next morning
+was the thrilling one that Knight was as close at hand as when they
+were at home at Endelstow, and her first sight, on looking out of the
+cabin window, was the perpendicular face of Beachy Head, gleaming white
+in a brilliant six-o’clock-in-the-morning sun. This fair daybreak,
+however, soon changed its aspect. A cold wind and a pale mist descended
+upon the sea, and seemed to threaten a dreary day.
+
+When they were nearing Southampton, Mrs. Swancourt came to say that her
+husband was so ill that he wished to be put on shore here, and left to
+do the remainder of the journey by land. “He will be perfectly well
+directly he treads firm ground again. Which shall we do—go with him, or
+finish our voyage as we intended?”
+
+Elfride was comfortably housed under an umbrella which Knight was
+holding over her to keep off the wind. “Oh, don’t let us go on shore!”
+she said with dismay. “It would be such a pity!”
+
+“That’s very fine,” said Mrs. Swancourt archly, as to a child. “See,
+the wind has increased her colour, the sea her appetite and spirits,
+and somebody her happiness. Yes, it would be a pity, certainly.”
+
+“’Tis my misfortune to be always spoken to from a pedestal,” sighed
+Elfride.
+
+“Well, we will do as you like, Mrs. Swancourt,” said Knight, “but——”
+
+“I myself would rather remain on board,” interrupted the elder lady.
+“And Mr. Swancourt particularly wishes to go by himself. So that shall
+settle the matter.”
+
+The vicar, now a drab colour, was put ashore, and became as well as
+ever forthwith.
+
+Elfride, sitting alone in a retired part of the vessel, saw a veiled
+woman walk aboard among the very latest arrivals at this port. She was
+clothed in black silk, and carried a dark shawl upon her arm. The
+woman, without looking around her, turned to the quarter allotted to
+the second-cabin passengers. All the carnation Mrs. Swancourt had
+complimented her step-daughter upon possessing left Elfride’s cheeks,
+and she trembled visibly.
+
+She ran to the other side of the boat, where Mrs. Swancourt was
+standing.
+
+“Let us go home by railway with papa, after all,” she pleaded
+earnestly. “I would rather go with him—shall we?”
+
+Mrs. Swancourt looked around for a moment, as if unable to decide.
+“Ah,” she exclaimed, “it is too late now. Why did not you say so
+before, when we had plenty of time?”
+
+The Juliet had at that minute let go, the engines had started, and they
+were gliding slowly away from the quay. There was no help for it but to
+remain, unless the Juliet could be made to put back, and that would
+create a great disturbance. Elfride gave up the idea and submitted
+quietly. Her happiness was sadly mutilated now.
+
+The woman whose presence had so disturbed her was exactly like Mrs.
+Jethway. She seemed to haunt Elfride like a shadow. After several
+minutes’ vain endeavour to account for any design Mrs. Jethway could
+have in watching her, Elfride decided to think that, if it were the
+widow, the encounter was accidental. She remembered that the widow in
+her restlessness was often visiting the village near Southampton, which
+was her original home, and it was possible that she chose water-transit
+with the idea of saving expense.
+
+“What is the matter, Elfride?” Knight inquired, standing before her.
+
+“Nothing more than that I am rather depressed.”
+
+“I don’t much wonder at it; that wharf was depressing. We seemed
+underneath and inferior to everything around us. But we shall be in the
+sea breeze again soon, and that will freshen you, dear.”
+
+The evening closed in and dusk increased as they made way down
+Southampton Water and through the Solent. Elfride’s disturbance of mind
+was such that her light spirits of the foregoing four and twenty hours
+had entirely deserted her. The weather too had grown more gloomy, for
+though the showers of the morning had ceased, the sky was covered more
+closely than ever with dense leaden clouds. How beautiful was the
+sunset when they rounded the North Foreland the previous evening! now
+it was impossible to tell within half an hour the time of the
+luminary’s going down. Knight led her about, and being by this time
+accustomed to her sudden changes of mood, overlooked the necessity of a
+cause in regarding the conditions—impressionableness and elasticity.
+
+Elfride looked stealthily to the other end of the vessel. Mrs. Jethway,
+or her double, was sitting at the stern—her eye steadily regarding
+Elfride.
+
+“Let us go to the forepart,” she said quickly to Knight. “See there—the
+man is fixing the lights for the night.”
+
+Knight assented, and after watching the operation of fixing the red and
+the green lights on the port and starboard bows, and the hoisting of
+the white light to the masthead, he walked up and down with her till
+the increase of wind rendered promenading difficult. Elfride’s eyes
+were occasionally to be found furtively gazing abaft, to learn if her
+enemy were really there. Nobody was visible now.
+
+“Shall we go below?” said Knight, seeing that the deck was nearly
+deserted.
+
+“No,” she said. “If you will kindly get me a rug from Mrs. Swancourt, I
+should like, if you don’t mind, to stay here.” She had recently fancied
+the assumed Mrs. Jethway might be a first-class passenger, and dreaded
+meeting her by accident.
+
+Knight appeared with the rug, and they sat down behind a weather-cloth
+on the windward side, just as the two red eyes of the Needles glared
+upon them from the gloom, their pointed summits rising like shadowy
+phantom figures against the sky. It became necessary to go below to an
+eight-o’clock meal of nondescript kind, and Elfride was immensely
+relieved at finding no sign of Mrs. Jethway there. They again ascended,
+and remained above till Mrs. Snewson staggered up to them with the
+message that Mrs. Swancourt thought it was time for Elfride to come
+below. Knight accompanied her down, and returned again to pass a little
+more time on deck.
+
+Elfride partly undressed herself and lay down, and soon became
+unconscious, though her sleep was light. How long she had lain, she
+knew not, when by slow degrees she became cognizant of a whispering in
+her ear.
+
+“You are well on with him, I can see. Well, provoke me now, but my day
+will come, you will find.” That seemed to be the utterance, or words to
+that effect.
+
+Elfride became broad awake and terrified. She knew the words, if real,
+could be only those of one person, and that person the widow Jethway.
+
+The lamp had gone out and the place was in darkness. In the next berth
+she could hear her stepmother breathing heavily, further on Snewson
+breathing more heavily still. These were the only other legitimate
+occupants of the cabin, and Mrs. Jethway must have stealthily come in
+by some means and retreated again, or else she had entered an empty
+berth next Snewson’s. The fear that this was the case increased
+Elfride’s perturbation, till it assumed the dimensions of a certainty,
+for how could a stranger from the other end of the ship possibly
+contrive to get in? Could it have been a dream?
+
+Elfride raised herself higher and looked out of the window. There was
+the sea, floundering and rushing against the ship’s side just by her
+head, and thence stretching away, dim and moaning, into an expanse of
+indistinctness; and far beyond all this two placid lights like rayless
+stars. Now almost fearing to turn her face inwards again, lest Mrs.
+Jethway should appear at her elbow, Elfride meditated upon whether to
+call Snewson to keep her company. “Four bells” sounded, and she heard
+voices, which gave her a little courage. It was not worth while to call
+Snewson.
+
+At any rate Elfride could not stay there panting longer, at the risk of
+being again disturbed by that dreadful whispering. So wrapping herself
+up hurriedly she emerged into the passage, and by the aid of a faint
+light burning at the entrance to the saloon found the foot of the
+stairs, and ascended to the deck. Dreary the place was in the extreme.
+It seemed a new spot altogether in contrast with its daytime self. She
+could see the glowworm light from the binnacle, and the dim outline of
+the man at the wheel; also a form at the bows. Not another soul was
+apparent from stem to stern.
+
+Yes, there were two more—by the bulwarks. One proved to be her Harry,
+the other the mate. She was glad indeed, and on drawing closer found
+they were holding a low slow chat about nautical affairs. She ran up
+and slipped her hand through Knight’s arm, partly for love, partly for
+stability.
+
+“Elfie! not asleep?” said Knight, after moving a few steps aside with
+her.
+
+“No: I cannot sleep. May I stay here? It is so dismal down there,
+and—and I was afraid. Where are we now?”
+
+“Due south of Portland Bill. Those are the lights abeam of us: look. A
+terrible spot, that, on a stormy night. And do you see a very small
+light that dips and rises to the right? That’s a light-ship on the
+dangerous shoal called the Shambles, where many a good vessel has gone
+to pieces. Between it and ourselves is the Race—a place where
+antagonistic currents meet and form whirlpools—a spot which is rough in
+the smoothest weather, and terrific in a wind. That dark, dreary
+horizon we just discern to the left is the West Bay, terminated
+landwards by the Chesil Beach.”
+
+“What time is it, Harry?”
+
+“Just past two.”
+
+“Are you going below?”
+
+“Oh no; not to-night. I prefer pure air.”
+
+She fancied he might be displeased with her for coming to him at this
+unearthly hour. “I should like to stay here too, if you will allow me,”
+she said timidly.
+
+“I want to ask you things.”
+
+“Allow you, Elfie!” said Knight, putting his arm round her and drawing
+her closer. “I am twice as happy with you by my side. Yes: we will
+stay, and watch the approach of day.”
+
+So they again sought out the sheltered nook, and sitting down wrapped
+themselves in the rug as before.
+
+“What were you going to ask me?” he inquired, as they undulated up and
+down.
+
+“Oh, it was not much—perhaps a thing I ought not to ask,” she said
+hesitatingly. Her sudden wish had really been to discover at once
+whether he had ever before been engaged to be married. If he had, she
+would make that a ground for telling him a little of her conduct with
+Stephen. Mrs. Jethway’s seeming words had so depressed the girl that
+she herself now painted her flight in the darkest colours, and longed
+to ease her burdened mind by an instant confession. If Knight had ever
+been imprudent himself, he might, she hoped, forgive all.
+
+“I wanted to ask you,” she went on, “if—you had ever been engaged
+before.” She added tremulously, “I hope you have—I mean, I don’t mind
+at all if you have.”
+
+“No, I never was,” Knight instantly and heartily replied. “Elfride”—and
+there was a certain happy pride in his tone—“I am twelve years older
+than you, and I have been about the world, and, in a way, into society,
+and you have not. And yet I am not so unfit for you as strict-thinking
+people might imagine, who would assume the difference in age to signify
+most surely an equal addition to my practice in love-making.”
+
+Elfride shivered.
+
+“You are cold—is the wind too much for you?”
+
+“No,” she said gloomily. The belief which had been her sheet-anchor in
+hoping for forgiveness had proved false. This account of the
+exceptional nature of his experience, a matter which would have set her
+rejoicing two years ago, chilled her now like a frost.
+
+“You don’t mind my asking you?” she continued.
+
+“Oh no—not at all.”
+
+“And have you never kissed many ladies?” she whispered, hoping he would
+say a hundred at the least.
+
+The time, the circumstances, and the scene were such as to draw
+confidences from the most reserved. “Elfride,” whispered Knight in
+reply, “it is strange you should have asked that question. But I’ll
+answer it, though I have never told such a thing before. I have been
+rather absurd in my avoidance of women. I have never given a woman a
+kiss in my life, except yourself and my mother.” The man of two and
+thirty with the experienced mind warmed all over with a boy’s ingenuous
+shame as he made the confession.
+
+“What, not one?” she faltered.
+
+“No; not one.”
+
+“How very strange!”
+
+“Yes, the reverse experience may be commoner. And yet, to those who
+have observed their own sex, as I have, my case is not remarkable. Men
+about town are women’s favourites—that’s the postulate—and superficial
+people don’t think far enough to see that there may be reserved, lonely
+exceptions.”
+
+“Are you proud of it, Harry?”
+
+“No, indeed. Of late years I have wished I had gone my ways and trod
+out my measure like lighter-hearted men. I have thought of how many
+happy experiences I may have lost through never going to woo.”
+
+“Then why did you hold aloof?”
+
+“I cannot say. I don’t think it was my nature to: circumstance hindered
+me, perhaps. I have regretted it for another reason. This great
+remissness of mine has had its effect upon me. The older I have grown,
+the more distinctly have I perceived that it was absolutely preventing
+me from liking any woman who was not as unpractised as I; and I gave up
+the expectation of finding a nineteenth-century young lady in my own
+raw state. Then I found you, Elfride, and I felt for the first time
+that my fastidiousness was a blessing. And it helped to make me worthy
+of you. I felt at once that, differing as we did in other experiences,
+in this matter I resembled you. Well, aren’t you glad to hear it,
+Elfride?”
+
+“Yes, I am,” she answered in a forced voice. “But I always had thought
+that men made lots of engagements before they married—especially if
+they don’t marry very young.”
+
+“So all women think, I suppose—and rightly, indeed, of the majority of
+bachelors, as I said before. But an appreciable minority of slow-coach
+men do not—and it makes them very awkward when they do come to the
+point. However, it didn’t matter in my case.”
+
+“Why?” she asked uneasily.
+
+“Because you know even less of love-making and matrimonial
+prearrangement than I, and so you can’t draw invidious comparisons if I
+do my engaging improperly.”
+
+“I think you do it beautifully!”
+
+“Thank you, dear. But,” continued Knight laughingly, “your opinion is
+not that of an expert, which alone is of value.”
+
+Had she answered, “Yes, it is,” half as strongly as she felt it, Knight
+might have been a little astonished.
+
+“If you had ever been engaged to be married before,” he went on, “I
+expect your opinion of my addresses would be different. But then, I
+should not——”
+
+“Should not what, Harry?”
+
+“Oh, I was merely going to say that in that case I should never have
+given myself the pleasure of proposing to you, since your freedom from
+that experience was your attraction, darling.”
+
+“You are severe on women, are you not?”
+
+“No, I think not. I had a right to please my taste, and that was for
+untried lips. Other men than those of my sort acquire the taste as they
+get older—but don’t find an Elfride——”
+
+“What horrid sound is that we hear when we pitch forward?”
+
+“Only the screw—don’t find an Elfride as I did. To think that I should
+have discovered such an unseen flower down there in the West—to whom a
+man is as much as a multitude to some women, and a trip down the
+English Channel like a voyage round the world!”
+
+“And would you,” she said, and her voice was tremulous, “have given up
+a lady—if you had become engaged to her—and then found she had had ONE
+kiss before yours—and would you have—gone away and left her?”
+
+“One kiss,—no, hardly for that.”
+
+“Two?”
+
+“Well—I could hardly say inventorially like that. Too much of that sort
+of thing certainly would make me dislike a woman. But let us confine
+our attention to ourselves, not go thinking of might have beens.”
+
+So Elfride had allowed her thoughts to “dally with false surmise,” and
+every one of Knight’s words fell upon her like a weight. After this
+they were silent for a long time, gazing upon the black mysterious sea,
+and hearing the strange voice of the restless wind. A rocking to and
+fro on the waves, when the breeze is not too violent and cold, produces
+a soothing effect even upon the most highly-wrought mind. Elfride
+slowly sank against Knight, and looking down, he found by her soft
+regular breathing that she had fallen asleep. Not wishing to disturb
+her, he continued still, and took an intense pleasure in supporting her
+warm young form as it rose and fell with her every breath.
+
+Knight fell to dreaming too, though he continued wide awake. It was
+pleasant to realize the implicit trust she placed in him, and to think
+of the charming innocence of one who could sink to sleep in so simple
+and unceremonious a manner. More than all, the musing unpractical
+student felt the immense responsibility he was taking upon himself by
+becoming the protector and guide of such a trusting creature. The quiet
+slumber of her soul lent a quietness to his own. Then she moaned, and
+turned herself restlessly. Presently her mutterings became distinct:
+
+“Don’t tell him—he will not love me....I did not mean any
+disgrace—indeed I did not, so don’t tell Harry. We were going to be
+married—that was why I ran away....And he says he will not have a
+kissed woman....And if you tell him he will go away, and I shall die. I
+pray have mercy—Oh!”
+
+Elfride started up wildly.
+
+The previous moment a musical ding-dong had spread into the air from
+their right hand, and awakened her.
+
+“What is it?” she exclaimed in terror.
+
+“Only ‘eight bells,’” said Knight soothingly. “Don’t be frightened,
+little bird, you are safe. What have you been dreaming about?”
+
+“I can’t tell, I can’t tell!” she said with a shudder. “Oh, I don’t
+know what to do!”
+
+“Stay quietly with me. We shall soon see the dawn now. Look, the
+morning star is lovely over there. The clouds have completely cleared
+off whilst you have been sleeping. What have you been dreaming of?”
+
+“A woman in our parish.”
+
+“Don’t you like her?”
+
+“I don’t. She doesn’t like me. Where are we?”
+
+“About south of the Exe.”
+
+Knight said no more on the words of her dream. They watched the sky
+till Elfride grew calm, and the dawn appeared. It was mere wan
+lightness first. Then the wind blew in a changed spirit, and died away
+to a zephyr. The star dissolved into the day.
+
+“That’s how I should like to die,” said Elfride, rising from her seat
+and leaning over the bulwark to watch the star’s last expiring gleam.
+
+“As the lines say,” Knight replied——
+
+“‘To set as sets the morning star, which goes
+Not down behind the darken’d west, nor hides
+Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
+But melts away into the light of heaven.’”
+
+
+“Oh, other people have thought the same thing, have they? That’s always
+the case with my originalities—they are original to nobody but myself.”
+
+“Not only the case with yours. When I was a young hand at reviewing I
+used to find that a frightful pitfall—dilating upon subjects I met
+with, which were novelties to me, and finding afterwards they had been
+exhausted by the thinking world when I was in pinafores.”
+
+“That is delightful. Whenever I find you have done a foolish thing I am
+glad, because it seems to bring you a little nearer to me, who have
+done many.” And Elfride thought again of her enemy asleep under the
+deck they trod.
+
+All up the coast, prominences singled themselves out from recesses.
+Then a rosy sky spread over the eastern sea and behind the low line of
+land, flinging its livery in dashes upon the thin airy clouds in that
+direction. Every projection on the land seemed now so many fingers
+anxious to catch a little of the liquid light thrown so prodigally over
+the sky, and after a fantastic time of lustrous yellows in the east,
+the higher elevations along the shore were flooded with the same hues.
+The bluff and bare contours of Start Point caught the brightest,
+earliest glow of all, and so also did the sides of its white
+lighthouse, perched upon a shelf in its precipitous front like a
+mediaeval saint in a niche. Their lofty neighbour Bolt Head on the left
+remained as yet ungilded, and retained its gray.
+
+Then up came the sun, as it were in jerks, just to seaward of the
+easternmost point of land, flinging out a Jacob’s-ladder path of light
+from itself to Elfride and Knight, and coating them with rays in a few
+minutes. The inferior dignitaries of the shore—Froward Point, Berry
+Head, and Prawle—all had acquired their share of the illumination ere
+this, and at length the very smallest protuberance of wave, cliff, or
+inlet, even to the innermost recesses of the lovely valley of the Dart,
+had its portion; and sunlight, now the common possession of all, ceased
+to be the wonderful and coveted thing it had been a short half hour
+before.
+
+After breakfast, Plymouth arose into view, and grew distincter to their
+nearing vision, the Breakwater appearing like a streak of phosphoric
+light upon the surface of the sea. Elfride looked furtively around for
+Mrs. Jethway, but could discern no shape like hers. Afterwards, in the
+bustle of landing, she looked again with the same result, by which time
+the woman had probably glided upon the quay unobserved. Expanding with
+a sense of relief, Elfride waited whilst Knight looked to their
+luggage, and then saw her father approaching through the crowd,
+twirling his walking-stick to catch their attention. Elbowing their way
+to him they all entered the town, which smiled as sunny a smile upon
+Elfride as it had done between one and two years earlier, when she had
+entered it at precisely the same hour as the bride-elect of Stephen
+Smith.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXX
+
+
+“Vassal unto Love.”
+
+
+Elfride clung closer to Knight as day succeeded day. Whatever else
+might admit of question, there could be no dispute that the allegiance
+she bore him absorbed her whole soul and existence. A greater than
+Stephen had arisen, and she had left all to follow him.
+
+The unreserved girl was never chary of letting her lover discover how
+much she admired him. She never once held an idea in opposition to any
+one of his, or insisted on any point with him, or showed any
+independence, or held her own on any subject. His lightest whim she
+respected and obeyed as law, and if, expressing her opinion on a
+matter, he took up the subject and differed from her, she instantly
+threw down her own opinion as wrong and untenable. Even her ambiguities
+and espieglerie were but media of the same manifestation; acted
+charades, embodying the words of her prototype, the tender and
+susceptible daughter-in-law of Naomi: “Let me find favour in thy sight,
+my lord; for that thou hast comforted me, and for that thou hast spoken
+friendly unto thine handmaid.”
+
+She was syringing the plants one wet day in the greenhouse. Knight was
+sitting under a great passion-flower observing the scene. Sometimes he
+looked out at the rain from the sky, and then at Elfride’s inner rain
+of larger drops, which fell from trees and shrubs, after having
+previously hung from the twigs like small silver fruit.
+
+“I must give you something to make you think of me during this autumn
+at your chambers,” she was saying. “What shall it be? Portraits do more
+harm than good, by selecting the worst expression of which your face is
+capable. Hair is unlucky. And you don’t like jewellery.”
+
+“Something which shall bring back to my mind the many scenes we have
+enacted in this conservatory. I see what I should prize very much. That
+dwarf myrtle tree in the pot, which you have been so carefully
+tending.”
+
+Elfride looked thoughtfully at the myrtle.
+
+“I can carry it comfortably in my hat box,” said Knight. “And I will
+put it in my window, and so, it being always before my eyes, I shall
+think of you continually.”
+
+It so happened that the myrtle which Knight had singled out had a
+peculiar beginning and history. It had originally been a twig worn in
+Stephen Smith’s button-hole, and he had taken it thence, stuck it into
+the pot, and told her that if it grew, she was to take care of it, and
+keep it in remembrance of him when he was far away.
+
+She looked wistfully at the plant, and a sense of fairness to Smith’s
+memory caused her a pang of regret that Knight should have asked for
+that very one. It seemed exceeding a common heartlessness to let it go.
+
+“Is there not anything you like better?” she said sadly. “That is only
+an ordinary myrtle.”
+
+“No: I am fond of myrtle.” Seeing that she did not take kindly to the
+idea, he said again, “Why do you object to my having that?”
+
+“Oh no—I don’t object precisely—it was a feeling.—Ah, here’s another
+cutting lately struck, and just as small—of a better kind, and with
+prettier leaves—myrtus microphylla.”
+
+“That will do nicely. Let it be put in my room, that I may not forget
+it. What romance attaches to the other?”
+
+“It was a gift to me.”
+
+The subject then dropped. Knight thought no more of the matter till, on
+entering his bedroom in the evening, he found the second myrtle placed
+upon his dressing-table as he had directed. He stood for a moment
+admiring the fresh appearance of the leaves by candlelight, and then he
+thought of the transaction of the day.
+
+Male lovers as well as female can be spoilt by too much kindness, and
+Elfride’s uniform submissiveness had given Knight a rather exacting
+manner at crises, attached to her as he was. “Why should she have
+refused the one I first chose?” he now asked himself. Even such slight
+opposition as she had shown then was exceptional enough to make itself
+noticeable. He was not vexed with her in the least: the mere variation
+of her way to-day from her usual ways kept him musing on the subject,
+because it perplexed him. “It was a gift”—those were her words.
+Admitting it to be a gift, he thought she could hardly value a mere
+friend more than she valued him as a lover, and giving the plant into
+his charge would have made no difference. “Except, indeed, it was the
+gift of a lover,” he murmured.
+
+“I wonder if Elfride has ever had a lover before?” he said aloud, as a
+new idea, quite. This and companion thoughts were enough to occupy him
+completely till he fell asleep—rather later than usual.
+
+The next day, when they were again alone, he said to her rather
+suddenly—
+
+“Do you love me more or less, Elfie, for what I told you on board the
+steamer?”
+
+“You told me so many things,” she returned, lifting her eyes to his and
+smiling.
+
+“I mean the confession you coaxed out of me—that I had never been in
+the position of lover before.”
+
+“It is a satisfaction, I suppose, to be the first in your heart,” she
+said to him, with an attempt to continue her smiling.
+
+“I am going to ask you a question now,” said Knight, somewhat
+awkwardly. “I only ask it in a whimsical way, you know: not with great
+seriousness, Elfride. You may think it odd, perhaps.”
+
+Elfride tried desperately to keep the colour in her face. She could
+not, though distressed to think that getting pale showed consciousness
+of deeper guilt than merely getting red.
+
+“Oh no—I shall not think that,” she said, because obliged to say
+something to fill the pause which followed her questioner’s remark.
+
+“It is this: have you ever had a lover? I am almost sure you have not;
+but, have you?”
+
+“Not, as it were, a lover; I mean, not worth mentioning, Harry,” she
+faltered.
+
+Knight, overstrained in sentiment as he knew the feeling to be, felt
+some sickness of heart.
+
+“Still, he was a lover?”
+
+“Well, a sort of lover, I suppose,” she responded tardily.
+
+“A man, I mean, you know.”
+
+“Yes; but only a mere person, and——”
+
+“But truly your lover?”
+
+“Yes; a lover certainly—he was that. Yes, he might have been called my
+lover.”
+
+Knight said nothing to this for a minute or more, and kept silent time
+with his finger to the tick of the old library clock, in which room the
+colloquy was going on.
+
+“You don’t mind, Harry, do you?” she said anxiously, nestling close to
+him, and watching his face.
+
+“Of course, I don’t seriously mind. In reason, a man cannot object to
+such a trifle. I only thought you hadn’t—that was all.”
+
+However, one ray was abstracted from the glory about her head. But
+afterwards, when Knight was wandering by himself over the bare and
+breezy hills, and meditating on the subject, that ray suddenly
+returned. For she might have had a lover, and never have cared in the
+least for him. She might have used the word improperly, and meant
+“admirer” all the time. Of course she had been admired; and one man
+might have made his admiration more prominent than that of the rest—a
+very natural case.
+
+They were sitting on one of the garden seats when he found occasion to
+put the supposition to the test. “Did you love that lover or admirer of
+yours ever so little, Elfie?”
+
+She murmured reluctantly, “Yes, I think I did.”
+
+Knight felt the same faint touch of misery. “Only a very little?” he
+said.
+
+“I am not sure how much.”
+
+“But you are sure, darling, you loved him a little?”
+
+“I think I am sure I loved him a little.”
+
+“And not a great deal, Elfie?”
+
+“My love was not supported by reverence for his powers.”
+
+“But, Elfride, did you love him deeply?” said Knight restlessly.
+
+“I don’t exactly know how deep you mean by deeply.”
+
+“That’s nonsense.”
+
+“You misapprehend; and you have let go my hand!” she cried, her eyes
+filling with tears. “Harry, don’t be severe with me, and don’t question
+me. I did not love him as I do you. And could it be deeply if I did not
+think him cleverer than myself? For I did not. You grieve me so
+much—you can’t think.”
+
+“I will not say another word about it.”
+
+“And you will not think about it, either, will you? I know you think of
+weaknesses in me after I am out of your sight; and not knowing what
+they are, I cannot combat them. I almost wish you were of a grosser
+nature, Harry; in truth I do! Or rather, I wish I could have the
+advantages such a nature in you would afford me, and yet have you as
+you are.”
+
+“What advantages would they be?”
+
+“Less anxiety, and more security. Ordinary men are not so delicate in
+their tastes as you; and where the lover or husband is not fastidious,
+and refined, and of a deep nature, things seem to go on better, I
+fancy—as far as I have been able to observe the world.”
+
+“Yes; I suppose it is right. Shallowness has this advantage, that you
+can’t be drowned there.”
+
+“But I think I’ll have you as you are; yes, I will!” she said
+winsomely. “The practical husbands and wives who take things
+philosophically are very humdrum, are they not? Yes, it would kill me
+quite. You please me best as you are.”
+
+“Even though I wish you had never cared for one before me?”
+
+“Yes. And you must not wish it. Don’t!”
+
+“I’ll try not to, Elfride.”
+
+So she hoped, but her heart was troubled. If he felt so deeply on this
+point, what would he say did he know all, and see it as Mrs. Jethway
+saw it? He would never make her the happiest girl in the world by
+taking her to be his own for aye. The thought enclosed her as a tomb
+whenever it presented itself to her perturbed brain. She tried to
+believe that Mrs. Jethway would never do her such a cruel wrong as to
+increase the bad appearance of her folly by innuendoes; and concluded
+that concealment, having been begun, must be persisted in, if possible.
+For what he might consider as bad as the fact, was her previous
+concealment of it by strategy.
+
+But Elfride knew Mrs. Jethway to be her enemy, and to hate her. It was
+possible she would do her worst. And should she do it, all might be
+over.
+
+Would the woman listen to reason, and be persuaded not to ruin one who
+had never intentionally harmed her?
+
+It was night in the valley between Endelstow Crags and the shore. The
+brook which trickled that way to the sea was distinct in its murmurs
+now, and over the line of its course there began to hang a white riband
+of fog. Against the sky, on the left hand of the vale, the black form
+of the church could be seen. On the other rose hazel-bushes, a few
+trees, and where these were absent, furze tufts—as tall as men—on stems
+nearly as stout as timber. The shriek of some bird was occasionally
+heard, as it flew terror-stricken from its first roost, to seek a new
+sleeping-place, where it might pass the night unmolested.
+
+In the evening shade, some way down the valley, and under a row of
+scrubby oaks, a cottage could still be discerned. It stood absolutely
+alone. The house was rather large, and the windows of some of the rooms
+were nailed up with boards on the outside, which gave a particularly
+deserted appearance to the whole erection. From the front door an
+irregular series of rough and misshapen steps, cut in the solid rock,
+led down to the edge of the streamlet, which, at their extremity, was
+hollowed into a basin through which the water trickled. This was
+evidently the means of water supply to the dweller or dwellers in the
+cottage.
+
+A light footstep was heard descending from the higher slopes of the
+hillside. Indistinct in the pathway appeared a moving female shape, who
+advanced and knocked timidly at the door. No answer being returned the
+knock was repeated, with the same result, and it was then repeated a
+third time. This also was unsuccessful.
+
+From one of the only two windows on the ground floor which were not
+boarded up came rays of light, no shutter or curtain obscuring the room
+from the eyes of a passer on the outside. So few walked that way after
+nightfall that any such means to secure secrecy were probably deemed
+unnecessary.
+
+The inequality of the rays falling upon the trees outside told that the
+light had its origin in a flickering fire only. The visitor, after the
+third knocking, stepped a little to the left in order to gain a view of
+the interior, and threw back the hood from her face. The dancing yellow
+sheen revealed the fair and anxious countenance of Elfride.
+
+Inside the house this firelight was enough to illumine the room
+distinctly, and to show that the furniture of the cottage was superior
+to what might have been expected from so unpromising an exterior. It
+also showed to Elfride that the room was empty. Beyond the light quiver
+and flap of the flames nothing moved or was audible therein.
+
+She turned the handle and entered, throwing off the cloak which
+enveloped her, under which she appeared without hat or bonnet, and in
+the sort of half-toilette country people ordinarily dine in. Then
+advancing to the foot of the staircase she called distinctly, but
+somewhat fearfully, “Mrs. Jethway!”
+
+No answer.
+
+With a look of relief and regret combined, denoting that ease came to
+the heart and disappointment to the brain, Elfride paused for several
+minutes, as if undecided how to act. Determining to wait, she sat down
+on a chair. The minutes drew on, and after sitting on the thorns of
+impatience for half an hour, she searched her pocket, took therefrom a
+letter, and tore off the blank leaf. Then taking out a pencil she wrote
+upon the paper:
+
+“DEAR MRS. JETHWAY,—I have been to visit you. I wanted much to see you,
+but I cannot wait any longer. I came to beg you not to execute the
+threats you have repeated to me. Do not, I beseech you, Mrs. Jethway,
+let any one know I ran away from home! It would ruin me with him, and
+break my heart. I will do anything for you, if you will be kind to me.
+In the name of our common womanhood, do not, I implore you, make a
+scandal of me.—Yours, E. SWANCOURT.”
+
+She folded the note cornerwise, directed it, and placed it on the
+table. Then again drawing the hood over her curly head she emerged
+silently as she had come.
+
+Whilst this episode had been in action at Mrs. Jethway’s cottage,
+Knight had gone from the dining-room into the drawing-room, and found
+Mrs. Swancourt there alone.
+
+“Elfride has vanished upstairs or somewhere,” she said.
+
+“And I have been reading an article in an old number of the PRESENT
+that I lighted on by chance a short time ago; it is an article you once
+told us was yours. Well, Harry, with due deference to your literary
+powers, allow me to say that this effusion is all nonsense, in my
+opinion.”
+
+“What is it about?” said Knight, taking up the paper and reading.
+
+“There: don’t get red about it. Own that experience has taught you to
+be more charitable. I have never read such unchivalrous sentiments in
+my life—from a man, I mean. There, I forgive you; it was before you
+knew Elfride.”
+
+“Oh yes,” said Knight, looking up. “I remember now. The text of that
+sermon was not my own at all, but was suggested to me by a young man
+named Smith—the same whom I have mentioned to you as coming from this
+parish. I thought the idea rather ingenious at the time, and enlarged
+it to the weight of a few guineas, because I had nothing else in my
+head.”
+
+“Which idea do you call the text? I am curious to know that.”
+
+“Well, this,” said Knight, somewhat unwillingly. “That experience
+teaches, and your sweetheart, no less than your tailor, is necessarily
+very imperfect in her duties, if you are her first patron: and
+conversely, the sweetheart who is graceful under the initial kiss must
+be supposed to have had some practice in the trade.”
+
+“And do you mean to say that you wrote that upon the strength of
+another man’s remark, without having tested it by practice?”
+
+“Yes—indeed I do.”
+
+“Then I think it was uncalled for and unfair. And how do you know it is
+true? I expect you regret it now.”
+
+“Since you bring me into a serious mood, I will speak candidly. I do
+believe that remark to be perfectly true, and, having written it, I
+would defend it anywhere. But I do often regret having ever written it,
+as well as others of the sort. I have grown older since, and I find
+such a tone of writing is calculated to do harm in the world. Every
+literary Jack becomes a gentleman if he can only pen a few indifferent
+satires upon womankind: women themselves, too, have taken to the trick;
+and so, upon the whole, I begin to be rather ashamed of my companions.”
+
+“Ah, Henry, you have fallen in love since and it makes a difference,”
+said Mrs. Swancourt with a faint tone of banter.
+
+“That’s true; but that is not my reason.”
+
+“Having found that, in a case of your own experience, a so-called goose
+was a swan, it seems absurd to deny such a possibility in other men’s
+experiences.”
+
+“You can hit palpably, cousin Charlotte,” said Knight. “You are like
+the boy who puts a stone inside his snowball, and I shall play with you
+no longer. Excuse me—I am going for my evening stroll.”
+
+Though Knight had spoken jestingly, this incident and conversation had
+caused him a sudden depression. Coming, rather singularly, just after
+his discovery that Elfride had known what it was to love warmly before
+she had known him, his mind dwelt upon the subject, and the familiar
+pipe he smoked, whilst pacing up and down the shrubbery-path, failed to
+be a solace. He thought again of those idle words—hitherto quite
+forgotten—about the first kiss of a girl, and the theory seemed more
+than reasonable. Of course their sting now lay in their bearing on
+Elfride.
+
+Elfride, under Knight’s kiss, had certainly been a very different woman
+from herself under Stephen’s. Whether for good or for ill, she had
+marvellously well learnt a betrothed lady’s part; and the fascinating
+finish of her deportment in this second campaign did probably arise
+from her unreserved encouragement of Stephen. Knight, with all the
+rapidity of jealous sensitiveness, pounced upon some words she had
+inadvertently let fall about an earring, which he had only partially
+understood at the time. It was during that “initial kiss” by the little
+waterfall:
+
+“We must be careful. I lost the other by doing this!”
+
+A flush which had in it as much of wounded pride as of sorrow, passed
+over Knight as he thought of what he had so frequently said to her in
+his simplicity. “I always meant to be the first comer in a woman’s
+heart, fresh lips or none for me.” How childishly blind he must have
+seemed to this mere girl! How she must have laughed at him inwardly! He
+absolutely writhed as he thought of the confession she had wrung from
+him on the boat in the darkness of night. The one conception which had
+sustained his dignity when drawn out of his shell on that occasion—that
+of her charming ignorance of all such matters—how absurd it was!
+
+This man, whose imagination had been fed up to preternatural size by
+lonely study and silent observations of his kind—whose emotions had
+been drawn out long and delicate by his seclusion, like plants in a
+cellar—was now absolutely in pain. Moreover, several years of poetic
+study, and, if the truth must be told, poetic efforts, had tended to
+develop the affective side of his constitution still further, in
+proportion to his active faculties. It was his belief in the absolute
+newness of blandishment to Elfride which had constituted her primary
+charm. He began to think it was as hard to be earliest in a woman’s
+heart as it was to be first in the Pool of Bethesda.
+
+That Knight should have been thus constituted: that Elfride’s second
+lover should not have been one of the great mass of bustling mankind,
+little given to introspection, whose good-nature might have compensated
+for any lack of appreciativeness, was the chance of things. That her
+throbbing, self-confounding, indiscreet heart should have to defend
+itself unaided against the keen scrutiny and logical power which
+Knight, now that his suspicions were awakened, would sooner or later be
+sure to exercise against her, was her misfortune. A miserable
+incongruity was apparent in the circumstance of a strong mind
+practising its unerring archery upon a heart which the owner of that
+mind loved better than his own.
+
+Elfride’s docile devotion to Knight was now its own enemy. Clinging to
+him so dependently, she taught him in time to presume upon that
+devotion—a lesson men are not slow to learn. A slight rebelliousness
+occasionally would have done him no harm, and would have been a world
+of advantage to her. But she idolized him, and was proud to be his
+bond-servant.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXI
+
+
+“A worm i’ the bud.”
+
+
+One day the reviewer said, “Let us go to the cliffs again, Elfride;”
+and, without consulting her wishes, he moved as if to start at once.
+
+“The cliff of our dreadful adventure?” she inquired, with a shudder.
+“Death stares me in the face in the person of that cliff.”
+
+Nevertheless, so entirely had she sunk her individuality in his that
+the remark was not uttered as an expostulation, and she immediately
+prepared to accompany him.
+
+“No, not that place,” said Knight. “It is ghastly to me, too. That
+other, I mean; what is its name?—Windy Beak.”
+
+Windy Beak was the second cliff in height along that coast, and, as is
+frequently the case with the natural features of the globe no less than
+with the intellectual features of men, it enjoyed the reputation of
+being the first. Moreover, it was the cliff to which Elfride had ridden
+with Stephen Smith, on a well-remembered morning of his summer visit.
+
+So, though thought of the former cliff had caused her to shudder at the
+perils to which her lover and herself had there been exposed, by being
+associated with Knight only it was not so objectionable as Windy Beak.
+That place was worse than gloomy, it was a perpetual reproach to her.
+
+But not liking to refuse, she said, “It is further than the other
+cliff.”
+
+“Yes; but you can ride.”
+
+“And will you too?”
+
+“No, I’ll walk.”
+
+A duplicate of her original arrangement with Stephen. Some fatality
+must be hanging over her head. But she ceased objecting.
+
+“Very well, Harry, I’ll ride,” she said meekly.
+
+A quarter of an hour later she was in the saddle. But how different the
+mood from that of the former time. She had, indeed, given up her
+position as queen of the less to be vassal of the greater. Here was no
+showing off now; no scampering out of sight with Pansy, to perplex and
+tire her companion; no saucy remarks on LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
+Elfride was burdened with the very intensity of her love.
+
+Knight did most of the talking along the journey. Elfride silently
+listened, and entirely resigned herself to the motions of the ambling
+horse upon which she sat, alternately rising and sinking gently, like a
+sea bird upon a sea wave.
+
+When they had reached the limit of a quadruped’s possibilities in
+walking, Knight tenderly lifted her from the saddle, tied the horse,
+and rambled on with her to the seat in the rock. Knight sat down, and
+drew Elfride deftly beside him, and they looked over the sea.
+
+Two or three degrees above that melancholy and eternally level line,
+the ocean horizon, hung a sun of brass, with no visible rays, in a sky
+of ashen hue. It was a sky the sun did not illuminate or enkindle, as
+is usual at sunsets. This sheet of sky was met by the salt mass of gray
+water, flecked here and there with white. A waft of dampness
+occasionally rose to their faces, which was probably rarefied spray
+from the blows of the sea upon the foot of the cliff.
+
+Elfride wished it could be a longer time ago that she had sat there
+with Stephen as her lover, and agreed to be his wife. The significant
+closeness of that time to the present was another item to add to the
+list of passionate fears which were chronic with her now.
+
+Yet Knight was very tender this evening, and sustained her close to him
+as they sat.
+
+Not a word had been uttered by either since sitting down, when Knight
+said musingly, looking still afar—
+
+“I wonder if any lovers in past years ever sat here with arms locked,
+as we do now. Probably they have, for the place seems formed for a
+seat.”
+
+Her recollection of a well-known pair who had, and the much-talked-of
+loss which had ensued therefrom, and how the young man had been sent
+back to look for the missing article, led Elfride to glance down to her
+side, and behind her back. Many people who lose a trinket involuntarily
+give a momentary look for it in passing the spot ever so long
+afterwards. They do not often find it. Elfride, in turning her head,
+saw something shine weakly from a crevice in the rocky sedile. Only for
+a few minutes during the day did the sun light the alcove to its
+innermost rifts and slits, but these were the minutes now, and its
+level rays did Elfride the good or evil turn of revealing the lost
+ornament.
+
+Elfride’s thoughts instantly reverted to the words she had
+unintentionally uttered upon what had been going on when the earring
+was lost. And she was immediately seized with a misgiving that Knight,
+on seeing the object, would be reminded of her words. Her instinctive
+act therefore was to secure it privately.
+
+It was so deep in the crack that Elfride could not pull it out with her
+hand, though she made several surreptitious trials.
+
+“What are you doing, Elfie?” said Knight, noticing her attempts, and
+looking behind him likewise.
+
+She had relinquished the endeavour, but too late.
+
+Knight peered into the joint from which her hand had been withdrawn,
+and saw what she had seen. He instantly took a penknife from his
+pocket, and by dint of probing and scraping brought the earring out
+upon open ground.
+
+“It is not yours, surely?” he inquired.
+
+“Yes, it is,” she said quietly.
+
+“Well, that is a most extraordinary thing, that we should find it like
+this!” Knight then remembered more circumstances; “What, is it the one
+you have told me of?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The unfortunate remark of hers at the kiss came into his mind, if eyes
+were ever an index to be trusted. Trying to repress the words he yet
+spoke on the subject, more to obtain assurance that what it had seemed
+to imply was not true than from a wish to pry into bygones.
+
+“Were you really engaged to be married to that lover?” he said, looking
+straight forward at the sea again.
+
+“Yes—but not exactly. Yet I think I was.”
+
+“O Elfride, engaged to be married!” he murmured.
+
+“It would have been called a—secret engagement, I suppose. But don’t
+look so disappointed; don’t blame me.”
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“Why do you say ‘No, no,’ in such a way? Sweetly enough, but so
+barely?”
+
+Knight made no direct reply to this. “Elfride, I told you once,” he
+said, following out his thoughts, “that I never kissed a woman as a
+sweetheart until I kissed you. A kiss is not much, I suppose, and it
+happens to few young people to be able to avoid all blandishments and
+attentions except from the one they afterwards marry. But I have
+peculiar weaknesses, Elfride; and because I have led a peculiar life, I
+must suffer for it, I suppose. I had hoped—well, what I had no right to
+hope in connection with you. You naturally granted your former lover
+the privileges you grant me.”
+
+A “yes” came from her like the last sad whisper of a breeze.
+
+“And he used to kiss you—of course he did.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And perhaps you allowed him a more free manner in his love-making than
+I have shown in mine.”
+
+“No, I did not.” This was rather more alertly spoken.
+
+“But he adopted it without being allowed?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“How much I have made of you, Elfride, and how I have kept aloof!” said
+Knight in deep and shaken tones. “So many days and hours as I have
+hoped in you—I have feared to kiss you more than those two times. And
+he made no scruples to...”
+
+She crept closer to him and trembled as if with cold. Her dread that
+the whole story, with random additions, would become known to him,
+caused her manner to be so agitated that Knight was alarmed and
+perplexed into stillness. The actual innocence which made her think so
+fearfully of what, as the world goes, was not a great matter, magnified
+her apparent guilt. It may have said to Knight that a woman who was so
+flurried in the preliminaries must have a dreadful sequel to her tale.
+
+“I know,” continued Knight, with an indescribable drag of manner and
+intonation,—“I know I am absurdly scrupulous about you—that I want you
+too exclusively mine. In your past before you knew me—from your very
+cradle—I wanted to think you had been mine. I would make you mine by
+main force. Elfride,” he went on vehemently, “I can’t help this
+jealousy over you! It is my nature, and must be so, and I HATE the fact
+that you have been caressed before: yes hate it!”
+
+She drew a long deep breath, which was half a sob. Knight’s face was
+hard, and he never looked at her at all, still fixing his gaze far out
+to sea, which the sun had now resigned to the shade. In high places it
+is not long from sunset to night, dusk being in a measure banished, and
+though only evening where they sat, it had been twilight in the valleys
+for half an hour. Upon the dull expanse of sea there gradually
+intensified itself into existence the gleam of a distant light-ship.
+
+“When that lover first kissed you, Elfride was it in such a place as
+this?”
+
+“Yes, it was.”
+
+“You don’t tell me anything but what I wring out of you. Why is that?
+Why have you suppressed all mention of this when casual confidences of
+mine should have suggested confidence in return? On board the Juliet,
+why were you so secret? It seems like being made a fool of, Elfride, to
+think that, when I was teaching you how desirable it was that we should
+have no secrets from each other, you were assenting in words, but in
+act contradicting me. Confidence would have been so much more promising
+for our happiness. If you had had confidence in me, and told me
+willingly, I should—be different. But you suppress everything, and I
+shall question you. Did you live at Endelstow at that time?”
+
+“Yes,” she said faintly.
+
+“Where were you when he first kissed you?”
+
+“Sitting in this seat.”
+
+“Ah, I thought so!” said Knight, rising and facing her.
+
+“And that accounts for everything—the exclamation which you explained
+deceitfully, and all! Forgive the harsh word, Elfride—forgive it.” He
+smiled a surface smile as he continued: “What a poor mortal I am to
+play second fiddle in everything and to be deluded by fibs!”
+
+“Oh, don’t say it; don’t, Harry!”
+
+“Where did he kiss you besides here?”
+
+“Sitting on—a tomb in the—churchyard—and other places,” she answered
+with slow recklessness.
+
+“Never mind, never mind,” he exclaimed, on seeing her tears and
+perturbation. “I don’t want to grieve you. I don’t care.”
+
+But Knight did care.
+
+“It makes no difference, you know,” he continued, seeing she did not
+reply.
+
+“I feel cold,” said Elfride. “Shall we go home?”
+
+“Yes; it is late in the year to sit long out of doors: we ought to be
+off this ledge before it gets too dark to let us see our footing. I
+daresay the horse is impatient.”
+
+Knight spoke the merest commonplace to her now. He had hoped to the
+last moment that she would have volunteered the whole story of her
+first attachment. It grew more and more distasteful to him that she
+should have a secret of this nature. Such entire confidence as he had
+pictured as about to exist between himself and the innocent young wife
+who had known no lover’s tones save his—was this its beginning? He
+lifted her upon the horse, and they went along constrainedly. The
+poison of suspicion was doing its work well.
+
+An incident occurred on this homeward journey which was long remembered
+by both, as adding shade to shadow. Knight could not keep from his mind
+the words of Adam’s reproach to Eve in PARADISE LOST, and at last
+whispered them to himself—
+
+“Fool’d and beguiled: by him thou, I by thee!”
+
+
+“What did you say?” Elfride inquired timorously.
+
+“It was only a quotation.”
+
+They had now dropped into a hollow, and the church tower made its
+appearance against the pale evening sky, its lower part being hidden by
+some intervening trees. Elfride, being denied an answer, was looking at
+the tower and trying to think of some contrasting quotation she might
+use to regain his tenderness. After a little thought she said in
+winning tones—
+
+‘Thou hast been my hope, and a strong tower for me against the enemy.’”
+
+They passed on. A few minutes later three or four birds were seen to
+fly out of the tower.
+
+“The strong tower moves,” said Knight, with surprise.
+
+A corner of the square mass swayed forward, sank, and vanished. A loud
+rumble followed, and a cloud of dust arose where all had previously
+been so clear.
+
+“The church restorers have done it!” said Elfride.
+
+At this minute Mr. Swancourt was seen approaching them. He came up with
+a bustling demeanour, apparently much engrossed by some business in
+hand.
+
+“We have got the tower down!” he exclaimed. “It came rather quicker
+than we intended it should. The first idea was to take it down stone by
+stone, you know. In doing this the crack widened considerably, and it
+was not believed safe for the men to stand upon the walls any longer.
+Then we decided to undermine it, and three men set to work at the
+weakest corner this afternoon. They had left off for the evening,
+intending to give the final blow to-morrow morning, and had been home
+about half an hour, when down it came. A very successful job—a very
+fine job indeed. But he was a tough old fellow in spite of the crack.”
+Here Mr. Swancourt wiped from his face the perspiration his excitement
+had caused him.
+
+“Poor old tower!” said Elfride.
+
+“Yes, I am sorry for it,” said Knight. “It was an interesting piece of
+antiquity—a local record of local art.”
+
+“Ah, but my dear sir, we shall have a new one, expostulated Mr.
+Swancourt; “a splendid tower—designed by a first-rate London man—in the
+newest style of Gothic art, and full of Christian feeling.”
+
+“Indeed!” said Knight.
+
+“Oh yes. Not in the barbarous clumsy architecture of this
+neighbourhood; you see nothing so rough and pagan anywhere else in
+England. When the men are gone, I would advise you to go and see the
+church before anything further is done to it. You can now sit in the
+chancel, and look down the nave through the west arch, and through that
+far out to sea. In fact,” said Mr. Swancourt significantly, “if a
+wedding were performed at the altar to-morrow morning, it might be
+witnessed from the deck of a ship on a voyage to the South Seas, with a
+good glass. However, after dinner, when the moon has risen, go up and
+see for yourselves.”
+
+Knight assented with feverish readiness. He had decided within the last
+few minutes that he could not rest another night without further talk
+with Elfride upon the subject which now divided them: he was determined
+to know all, and relieve his disquiet in some way. Elfride would gladly
+have escaped further converse alone with him that night, but it seemed
+inevitable.
+
+Just after moonrise they left the house. How little any expectation of
+the moonlight prospect—which was the ostensible reason of their
+pilgrimage—had to do with Knight’s real motive in getting the gentle
+girl again upon his arm, Elfride no less than himself well knew.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXII
+
+
+“Had I wist before I kist”
+
+
+It was now October, and the night air was chill. After looking to see
+that she was well wrapped up, Knight took her along the hillside path
+they had ascended so many times in each other’s company, when doubt was
+a thing unknown. On reaching the church they found that one side of the
+tower was, as the vicar had stated, entirely removed, and lying in the
+shape of rubbish at their feet. The tower on its eastern side still was
+firm, and might have withstood the shock of storms and the siege of
+battering years for many a generation even now. They entered by the
+side-door, went eastward, and sat down by the altar-steps.
+
+The heavy arch spanning the junction of tower and nave formed to-night
+a black frame to a distant misty view, stretching far westward. Just
+outside the arch came the heap of fallen stones, then a portion of
+moonlit churchyard, then the wide and convex sea behind. It was a
+coup-d’oeil which had never been possible since the mediaeval masons
+first attached the old tower to the older church it dignified, and
+hence must be supposed to have had an interest apart from that of
+simple moonlight on ancient wall and sea and shore—any mention of which
+has by this time, it is to be feared, become one of the cuckoo-cries
+which are heard but not regarded. Rays of crimson, blue, and purple
+shone upon the twain from the east window behind them, wherein saints
+and angels vied with each other in primitive surroundings of landscape
+and sky, and threw upon the pavement at the sitters’ feet a softer
+reproduction of the same translucent hues, amid which the shadows of
+the two living heads of Knight and Elfride were opaque and prominent
+blots. Presently the moon became covered by a cloud, and the
+iridescence died away.
+
+“There, it is gone!” said Knight. “I’ve been thinking, Elfride, that
+this place we sit on is where we may hope to kneel together soon. But I
+am restless and uneasy, and you know why.”
+
+Before she replied the moonlight returned again, irradiating that
+portion of churchyard within their view. It brightened the near part
+first, and against the background which the cloud-shadow had not yet
+uncovered stood, brightest of all, a white tomb—the tomb of young
+Jethway.
+
+Knight, still alive on the subject of Elfride’s secret, thought of her
+words concerning the kiss that it once had occurred on a tomb in this
+churchyard.
+
+“Elfride,” he said, with a superficial archness which did not half
+cover an undercurrent of reproach, “do you know, I think you might have
+told me voluntarily about that past—of kisses and betrothing—without
+giving me so much uneasiness and trouble. Was that the tomb you alluded
+to as having sat on with him?”
+
+She waited an instant. “Yes,” she said.
+
+The correctness of his random shot startled Knight; though, considering
+that almost all the other memorials in the churchyard were upright
+headstones upon which nobody could possibly sit, it was not so
+wonderful.
+
+Elfride did not even now go on with the explanation her exacting lover
+wished to have, and her reticence began to irritate him as before. He
+was inclined to read her a lecture.
+
+“Why don’t you tell me all?” he said somewhat indignantly. “Elfride,
+there is not a single subject upon which I feel more strongly than upon
+this—that everything ought to be cleared up between two persons before
+they become husband and wife. See how desirable and wise such a course
+is, in order to avoid disagreeable contingencies in the form of
+discoveries afterwards. For, Elfride, a secret of no importance at all
+may be made the basis of some fatal misunderstanding only because it is
+discovered, and not confessed. They say there never was a couple of
+whom one had not some secret the other never knew or was intended to
+know. This may or may not be true; but if it be true, some have been
+happy in spite rather than in consequence of it. If a man were to see
+another man looking significantly at his wife, and she were blushing
+crimson and appearing startled, do you think he would be so well
+satisfied with, for instance, her truthful explanation that once, to
+her great annoyance, she accidentally fainted into his arms, as if she
+had said it voluntarily long ago, before the circumstance occurred
+which forced it from her? Suppose that admirer you spoke of in
+connection with the tomb yonder should turn up, and bother me. It would
+embitter our lives, if I were then half in the dark, as I am now!”
+
+Knight spoke the latter sentences with growing force.
+
+“It cannot be,” she said.
+
+“Why not?” he asked sharply.
+
+Elfride was distressed to find him in so stern a mood, and she
+trembled. In a confusion of ideas, probably not intending a wilful
+prevarication, she answered hurriedly—
+
+“If he’s dead, how can you meet him?”
+
+“Is he dead? Oh, that’s different altogether!” said Knight, immensely
+relieved. “But, let me see—what did you say about that tomb and him?”
+
+“That’s his tomb,” she continued faintly.
+
+“What! was he who lies buried there the man who was your lover?” Knight
+asked in a distinct voice.
+
+“Yes; and I didn’t love him or encourage him.”
+
+“But you let him kiss you—you said so, you know, Elfride.”
+
+She made no reply.
+
+“Why,” said Knight, recollecting circumstances by degrees, “you surely
+said you were in some degree engaged to him—and of course you were if
+he kissed you. And now you say you never encouraged him. And I have
+been fancying you said—I am almost sure you did—that you were sitting
+with him ON that tomb. Good God!” he cried, suddenly starting up in
+anger, “are you telling me untruths? Why should you play with me like
+this? I’ll have the right of it. Elfride, we shall never be happy!
+There’s a blight upon us, or me, or you, and it must be cleared off
+before we marry.” Knight moved away impetuously as if to leave her.
+
+She jumped up and clutched his arm
+
+“Don’t go, Harry—don’t!
+
+“Tell me, then,” said Knight sternly. “And remember this, no more fibs,
+or, upon my soul, I shall hate you. Heavens! that I should come to
+this, to be made a fool of by a girl’s untruths——”
+
+“Don’t, don’t treat me so cruelly! O Harry, Harry, have pity, and
+withdraw those dreadful words! I am truthful by nature—I am—and I don’t
+know how I came to make you misunderstand! But I was frightened!” She
+quivered so in her perturbation that she shook him with her {Note:
+sentence incomplete in text.}
+
+“Did you say you were sitting on that tomb?” he asked moodily.
+
+“Yes; and it was true.”
+
+“Then how, in the name of Heaven, can a man sit upon his own tomb?”
+
+“That was another man. Forgive me, Harry, won’t you?”
+
+“What, a lover in the tomb and a lover on it?”
+
+“Oh—Oh—yes!”
+
+“Then there were two before me?
+
+“I—suppose so.”
+
+“Now, don’t be a silly woman with your supposing—I hate all that,” said
+Knight contemptuously almost. “Well, we learn strange things. I don’t
+know what I might have done—no man can say into what shape
+circumstances may warp him—but I hardly think I should have had the
+conscience to accept the favours of a new lover whilst sitting over the
+poor remains of the old one; upon my soul, I don’t.” Knight, in moody
+meditation, continued looking towards the tomb, which stood staring
+them in the face like an avenging ghost.
+
+“But you wrong me—Oh, so grievously!” she cried. “I did not meditate
+any such thing: believe me, Harry, I did not. It only happened so—quite
+of itself.”
+
+“Well, I suppose you didn’t INTEND such a thing,” he said. “Nobody ever
+does,” he sadly continued.
+
+“And him in the grave I never once loved.”
+
+“I suppose the second lover and you, as you sat there, vowed to be
+faithful to each other for ever?”
+
+Elfride only replied by quick heavy breaths, showing she was on the
+brink of a sob.
+
+“You don’t choose to be anything but reserved, then?” he said
+imperatively.
+
+“Of course we did,” she responded.
+
+“‘Of course!’ You seem to treat the subject very lightly?”
+
+“It is past, and is nothing to us now.”
+
+“Elfride, it is a nothing which, though it may make a careless man
+laugh, cannot but make a genuine one grieve. It is a very gnawing pain.
+Tell me straight through—all of it.”
+
+“Never. O Harry! how can you expect it when so little of it makes you
+so harsh with me?”
+
+“Now, Elfride, listen to this. You know that what you have told only
+jars the subtler fancies in one, after all. The feeling I have about it
+would be called, and is, mere sentimentality; and I don’t want you to
+suppose that an ordinary previous engagement of a straightforward kind
+would make any practical difference in my love, or my wish to make you
+my wife. But you seem to have more to tell, and that’s where the wrong
+is. Is there more?”
+
+“Not much more,” she wearily answered.
+
+Knight preserved a grave silence for a minute. “‘Not much more,’” he
+said at last. “I should think not, indeed!” His voice assumed a low and
+steady pitch. “Elfride, you must not mind my saying a strange-sounding
+thing, for say it I shall. It is this: that if there WERE much more to
+add to an account which already includes all the particulars that a
+broken marriage engagement could possibly include with propriety, it
+must be some exceptional thing which might make it impossible for me or
+any one else to love you and marry you.”
+
+Knight’s disturbed mood led him much further than he would have gone in
+a quieter moment. And, even as it was, had she been assertive to any
+degree he would not have been so peremptory; and had she been a
+stronger character—more practical and less imaginative—she would have
+made more use of her position in his heart to influence him. But the
+confiding tenderness which had won him is ever accompanied by a sort of
+self-committal to the stream of events, leading every such woman to
+trust more to the kindness of fate for good results than to any
+argument of her own.
+
+“Well, well,” he murmured cynically; “I won’t say it is your fault: it
+is my ill-luck, I suppose. I had no real right to question
+you—everybody would say it was presuming. But when we have
+misunderstood, we feel injured by the subject of our misunderstanding.
+You never said you had had nobody else here making love to you, so why
+should I blame you? Elfride, I beg your pardon.”
+
+“No, no! I would rather have your anger than that cool aggrieved
+politeness. Do drop that, Harry! Why should you inflict that upon me?
+It reduces me to the level of a mere acquaintance.”
+
+“You do that with me. Why not confidence for confidence?”
+
+“Yes; but I didn’t ask you a single question with regard to your past:
+I didn’t wish to know about it. All I cared for was that, wherever you
+came from, whatever you had done, whoever you had loved, you were mine
+at last. Harry, if originally you had known I had loved, would you
+never have cared for me?”
+
+“I won’t quite say that. Though I own that the idea of your
+inexperienced state had a great charm for me. But I think this: that if
+I had known there was any phase of your past love you would refuse to
+reveal if I asked to know it, I should never have loved you.”
+
+Elfride sobbed bitterly. “Am I such a—mere characterless toy—as to have
+no attrac—tion in me, apart from—freshness? Haven’t I brains? You
+said—I was clever and ingenious in my thoughts, and—isn’t that
+anything? Have I not some beauty? I think I have a little—and I know I
+have—yes, I do! You have praised my voice, and my manner, and my
+accomplishments. Yet all these together are so much rubbish because
+I—accidentally saw a man before you!”
+
+“Oh, come, Elfride. ‘Accidentally saw a man’ is very cool. You loved
+him, remember.”
+
+—“And loved him a little!”
+
+“And refuse now to answer the simple question how it ended. Do you
+refuse still, Elfride?”
+
+“You have no right to question me so—you said so. It is unfair. Trust
+me as I trust you.”
+
+“That’s not at all.”
+
+“I shall not love you if you are so cruel. It is cruel to me to argue
+like this.”
+
+“Perhaps it is. Yes, it is. I was carried away by my feeling for you.
+Heaven knows that I didn’t mean to; but I have loved you so that I have
+used you badly.”
+
+“I don’t mind it, Harry!” she instantly answered, creeping up and
+nestling against him; “and I will not think at all that you used me
+harshly if you will forgive me, and not be vexed with me any more? I do
+wish I had been exactly as you thought I was, but I could not help it,
+you know. If I had only known you had been coming, what a nunnery I
+would have lived in to have been good enough for you!”
+
+“Well, never mind,” said Knight; and he turned to go. He endeavoured to
+speak sportively as they went on. “Diogenes Laertius says that
+philosophers used voluntarily to deprive themselves of sight to be
+uninterrupted in their meditations. Men, becoming lovers, ought to do
+the same thing.”
+
+“Why?—but never mind—I don’t want to know. Don’t speak laconically to
+me,” she said with deprecation.
+
+“Why? Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their
+idol was second-hand.”
+
+She looked down and sighed; and they passed out of the crumbling old
+place, and slowly crossed to the churchyard entrance. Knight was not
+himself, and he could not pretend to be. She had not told all.
+
+He supported her lightly over the stile, and was practically as
+attentive as a lover could be. But there had passed away a glory, and
+the dream was not as it had been of yore. Perhaps Knight was not shaped
+by Nature for a marrying man. Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards
+women, which he had attributed to accident, was not chance after all,
+but the natural result of instinctive acts so minute as to be
+undiscernible even by himself. Or whether the rough dispelling of any
+bright illusion, however imaginative, depreciates the real and
+unexaggerated brightness which appertains to its basis, one cannot say.
+Certain it was that Knight’s disappointment at finding himself second
+or third in the field, at Elfride’s momentary equivoque, and at her
+reluctance to be candid, brought him to the verge of cynicism.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIII
+
+
+“O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery.”
+
+
+A habit of Knight’s, when not immediately occupied with Elfride—to walk
+by himself for half an hour or so between dinner and bedtime—had become
+familiar to his friends at Endelstow, Elfride herself among them. When
+he had helped her over the stile, she said gently, “If you wish to take
+your usual turn on the hill, Harry, I can run down to the house alone.”
+
+“Thank you, Elfie; then I think I will.”
+
+Her form diminished to blackness in the moonlight, and Knight, after
+remaining upon the churchyard stile a few minutes longer, turned back
+again towards the building. His usual course was now to light a cigar
+or pipe, and indulge in a quiet meditation. But to-night his mind was
+too tense to bethink itself of such a solace. He merely walked round to
+the site of the fallen tower, and sat himself down upon some of the
+large stones which had composed it until this day, when the chain of
+circumstance originated by Stephen Smith, while in the employ of Mr.
+Hewby, the London man of art, had brought about its overthrow.
+
+Pondering on the possible episodes of Elfride’s past life, and on how
+he had supposed her to have had no past justifying the name, he sat and
+regarded the white tomb of young Jethway, now close in front of him.
+The sea, though comparatively placid, could as usual be heard from this
+point along the whole distance between promontories to the right and
+left, floundering and entangling itself among the insulated stacks of
+rock which dotted the water’s edge—the miserable skeletons of tortured
+old cliffs that would not even yet succumb to the wear and tear of the
+tides.
+
+As a change from thoughts not of a very cheerful kind, Knight attempted
+exertion. He stood up, and prepared to ascend to the summit of the
+ruinous heap of stones, from which a more extended outlook was
+obtainable than from the ground. He stretched out his arm to seize the
+projecting arris of a larger block than ordinary, and so help himself
+up, when his hand lighted plump upon a substance differing in the
+greatest possible degree from what he had expected to seize—hard stone.
+It was stringy and entangled, and trailed upon the stone. The deep
+shadow from the aisle wall prevented his seeing anything here
+distinctly, and he began guessing as a necessity. “It is a tressy
+species of moss or lichen,” he said to himself.
+
+But it lay loosely over the stone.
+
+“It is a tuft of grass,” he said.
+
+But it lacked the roughness and humidity of the finest grass.
+
+“It is a mason’s whitewash-brush.”
+
+Such brushes, he remembered, were more bristly; and however much used
+in repairing a structure, would not be required in pulling one down.
+
+He said, “It must be a thready silk fringe.”
+
+He felt further in. It was somewhat warm. Knight instantly felt
+somewhat cold.
+
+To find the coldness of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is
+startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being
+rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly
+conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter
+frigidity is anticipated.
+
+“God only knows what it is,” he said.
+
+He felt further, and in the course of a minute put his hand upon a
+human head. The head was warm, but motionless. The thready mass was the
+hair of the head—long and straggling, showing that the head was a
+woman’s.
+
+Knight in his perplexity stood still for a moment, and collected his
+thoughts. The vicar’s account of the fall of the tower was that the
+workmen had been undermining it all the day, and had left in the
+evening intending to give the finishing stroke the next morning. Half
+an hour after they had gone the undermined angle came down. The woman
+who was half buried, as it seemed, must have been beneath it at the
+moment of the fall.
+
+Knight leapt up and began endeavouring to remove the rubbish with his
+hands. The heap overlying the body was for the most part fine and
+dusty, but in immense quantity. It would be a saving of time to run for
+assistance. He crossed to the churchyard wall, and hastened down the
+hill.
+
+A little way down an intersecting road passed over a small ridge, which
+now showed up darkly against the moon, and this road here formed a kind
+of notch in the sky-line. At the moment that Knight arrived at the
+crossing he beheld a man on this eminence, coming towards him. Knight
+turned aside and met the stranger.
+
+“There has been an accident at the church,” said Knight, without
+preface. “The tower has fallen on somebody, who has been lying there
+ever since. Will you come and help?”
+
+“That I will,” said the man.
+
+“It is a woman,” said Knight, as they hurried back, “and I think we two
+are enough to extricate her. Do you know of a shovel?”
+
+“The grave-digging shovels are about somewhere. They used to stay in
+the tower.”
+
+“And there must be some belonging to the workmen.”
+
+They searched about, and in an angle of the porch found three carefully
+stowed away. Going round to the west end Knight signified the spot of
+the tragedy.
+
+“We ought to have brought a lantern,” he exclaimed. “But we may be able
+to do without.” He set to work removing the superincumbent mass.
+
+The other man, who looked on somewhat helplessly at first, now followed
+the example of Knight’s activity, and removed the larger stones which
+were mingled with the rubbish. But with all their efforts it was quite
+ten minutes before the body of the unfortunate creature could be
+extricated. They lifted her as carefully as they could, breathlessly
+carried her to Felix Jethway’s tomb, which was only a few steps
+westward, and laid her thereon.
+
+“Is she dead indeed?” said the stranger.
+
+“She appears to be,” said Knight. “Which is the nearest house? The
+vicarage, I suppose.”
+
+“Yes; but since we shall have to call a surgeon from Castle Boterel, I
+think it would be better to carry her in that direction, instead of
+away from the town.”
+
+“And is it not much further to the first house we come to going that
+way, than to the vicarage or to The Crags?”
+
+“Not much,” the stranger replied.
+
+“Suppose we take her there, then. And I think the best way to do it
+would be thus, if you don’t mind joining hands with me.”
+
+“Not in the least; I am glad to assist.”
+
+Making a kind of cradle, by clasping their hands crosswise under the
+inanimate woman, they lifted her, and walked on side by side down a
+path indicated by the stranger, who appeared to know the locality well.
+
+“I had been sitting in the church for nearly an hour,” Knight resumed,
+when they were out of the churchyard. “Afterwards I walked round to the
+site of the fallen tower, and so found her. It is painful to think I
+unconsciously wasted so much time in the very presence of a perishing,
+flying soul.”
+
+“The tower fell at dusk, did it not? quite two hours ago, I think?”
+
+“Yes. She must have been there alone. What could have been her object
+in visiting the churchyard then?
+
+“It is difficult to say.” The stranger looked inquiringly into the
+reclining face of the motionless form they bore. “Would you turn her
+round for a moment, so that the light shines on her face?” he said.
+
+They turned her face to the moon, and the man looked closer into her
+features. “Why, I know her!” he exclaimed.
+
+“Who is she?”
+
+“Mrs. Jethway. And the cottage we are taking her to is her own. She is
+a widow; and I was speaking to her only this afternoon. I was at Castle
+Boterel post-office, and she came there to post a letter. Poor soul!
+Let us hurry on.”
+
+“Hold my wrist a little tighter. Was not that tomb we laid her on the
+tomb of her only son?”
+
+“Yes, it was. Yes, I see it now. She was there to visit the tomb. Since
+the death of that son she has been a desolate, desponding woman, always
+bewailing him. She was a farmer’s wife, very well educated—a governess
+originally, I believe.”
+
+Knight’s heart was moved to sympathy. His own fortunes seemed in some
+strange way to be interwoven with those of this Jethway family, through
+the influence of Elfride over himself and the unfortunate son of that
+house. He made no reply, and they still walked on.
+
+“She begins to feel heavy,” said the stranger, breaking the silence.
+
+“Yes, she does,” said Knight; and after another pause added, “I think I
+have met you before, though where I cannot recollect. May I ask who you
+are?”
+
+“Oh yes. I am Lord Luxellian. Who are you?”
+
+“I am a visitor at The Crags—Mr. Knight.”
+
+“I have heard of you, Mr. Knight.”
+
+“And I of you, Lord Luxellian. I am glad to meet you.”
+
+“I may say the same. I am familiar with your name in print.”
+
+“And I with yours. Is this the house?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The door was locked. Knight, reflecting a moment, searched the pocket
+of the lifeless woman, and found therein a large key which, on being
+applied to the door, opened it easily. The fire was out, but the
+moonlight entered the quarried window, and made patterns upon the
+floor. The rays enabled them to see that the room into which they had
+entered was pretty well furnished, it being the same room that Elfride
+had visited alone two or three evenings earlier. They deposited their
+still burden on an old-fashioned couch which stood against the wall,
+and Knight searched about for a lamp or candle. He found a candle on a
+shelf, lighted it, and placed it on the table.
+
+Both Knight and Lord Luxellian examined the pale countenance
+attentively, and both were nearly convinced that there was no hope. No
+marks of violence were visible in the casual examination they made.
+
+“I think that as I know where Doctor Granson lives,” said Lord
+Luxellian, “I had better run for him whilst you stay here.”
+
+Knight agreed to this. Lord Luxellian then went off, and his hurrying
+footsteps died away. Knight continued bending over the body, and a few
+minutes longer of careful scrutiny perfectly satisfied him that the
+woman was far beyond the reach of the lancet and the drug. Her
+extremities were already beginning to get stiff and cold. Knight
+covered her face, and sat down.
+
+The minutes went by. The essayist remained musing on all the
+occurrences of the night. His eyes were directed upon the table, and he
+had seen for some time that writing-materials were spread upon it. He
+now noticed these more particularly: there were an inkstand, pen,
+blotting-book, and note-paper. Several sheets of paper were thrust
+aside from the rest, upon which letters had been begun and
+relinquished, as if their form had not been satisfactory to the writer.
+A stick of black sealing-wax and seal were there too, as if the
+ordinary fastening had not been considered sufficiently secure. The
+abandoned sheets of paper lying as they did open upon the table, made
+it possible, as he sat, to read the few words written on each. One ran
+thus:
+
+“SIR,—As a woman who was once blest with a dear son of her own, I
+implore you to accept a warning——”
+
+Another:
+
+“SIR,—If you will deign to receive warning from a stranger before it is
+too late to alter your course, listen to——”
+
+The third:
+
+“SIR,—With this letter I enclose to you another which, unaided by any
+explanation from me, tells a startling tale. I wish, however, to add a
+few words to make your delusion yet more clear to you——”
+
+It was plain that, after these renounced beginnings, a fourth letter
+had been written and despatched, which had been deemed a proper one.
+Upon the table were two drops of sealing-wax, the stick from which they
+were taken having been laid down overhanging the edge of the table; the
+end of it drooped, showing that the wax was placed there whilst warm.
+There was the chair in which the writer had sat, the impression of the
+letter’s address upon the blotting-paper, and the poor widow who had
+caused these results lying dead hard by. Knight had seen enough to lead
+him to the conclusion that Mrs. Jethway, having matter of great
+importance to communicate to some friend or acquaintance, had written
+him a very careful letter, and gone herself to post it; that she had
+not returned to the house from that time of leaving it till Lord
+Luxellian and himself had brought her back dead.
+
+The unutterable melancholy of the whole scene, as he waited on, silent
+and alone, did not altogether clash with the mood of Knight, even
+though he was the affianced of a fair and winning girl, and though so
+lately he had been in her company. Whilst sitting on the remains of the
+demolished tower he had defined a new sensation; that the lengthened
+course of inaction he had lately been indulging in on Elfride’s account
+might probably not be good for him as a man who had work to do. It
+could quickly be put an end to by hastening on his marriage with her.
+
+Knight, in his own opinion, was one who had missed his mark by
+excessive aiming. Having now, to a great extent, given up ideal
+ambitions, he wished earnestly to direct his powers into a more
+practical channel, and thus correct the introspective tendencies which
+had never brought himself much happiness, or done his fellow-creatures
+any great good. To make a start in this new direction by marriage,
+which, since knowing Elfride, had been so entrancing an idea, was less
+exquisite to-night. That the curtailment of his illusion regarding her
+had something to do with the reaction, and with the return of his old
+sentiments on wasting time, is more than probable. Though Knight’s
+heart had so greatly mastered him, the mastery was not so complete as
+to be easily maintained in the face of a moderate intellectual revival.
+
+His reverie was broken by the sound of wheels, and a horse’s tramp. The
+door opened to admit the surgeon, Lord Luxellian, and a Mr. Coole,
+coroner for the division (who had been attending at Castle Boterel that
+very day, and was having an after-dinner chat with the doctor when Lord
+Luxellian arrived); next came two female nurses and some idlers.
+
+Mr. Granson, after a cursory examination, pronounced the woman dead
+from suffocation, induced by intense pressure on the respiratory
+organs; and arrangements were made that the inquiry should take place
+on the following morning, before the return of the coroner to St.
+Launce’s.
+
+Shortly afterwards the house of the widow was deserted by all its
+living occupants, and she abode in death, as she had in her life during
+the past two years, entirely alone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIV
+
+
+“Yea, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.”
+
+
+Sixteen hours had passed. Knight was entering the ladies’ boudoir at
+The Crags, upon his return from attending the inquest touching the
+death of Mrs. Jethway. Elfride was not in the apartment.
+
+Mrs. Swancourt made a few inquiries concerning the verdict and
+collateral circumstances. Then she said—
+
+“The postman came this morning the minute after you left the house.
+There was only one letter for you, and I have it here.”
+
+She took a letter from the lid of her workbox, and handed it to him.
+Knight took the missive abstractedly, but struck by its appearance
+murmured a few words and left the room.
+
+The letter was fastened with a black seal, and the handwriting in which
+it was addressed had lain under his eyes, long and prominently, only
+the evening before.
+
+Knight was greatly agitated, and looked about for a spot where he might
+be secure from interruption. It was the season of heavy dews, which lay
+on the herbage in shady places all the day long; nevertheless, he
+entered a small patch of neglected grass-plat enclosed by the
+shrubbery, and there perused the letter, which he had opened on his way
+thither.
+
+The handwriting, the seal, the paper, the introductory words, all had
+told on the instant that the letter had come to him from the hands of
+the widow Jethway, now dead and cold. He had instantly understood that
+the unfinished notes which caught his eye yesternight were intended for
+nobody but himself. He had remembered some of the words of Elfride in
+her sleep on the steamer, that somebody was not to tell him of
+something, or it would be her ruin—a circumstance hitherto deemed so
+trivial and meaningless that he had well-nigh forgotten it. All these
+things infused into him an emotion intense in power and supremely
+distressing in quality. The paper in his hand quivered as he read:
+
+“THE VALLEY, ENDELSTOW.
+
+“SIR,—A woman who has not much in the world to lose by any censure this
+act may bring upon her, wishes to give you some hints concerning a lady
+you love. If you will deign to accept a warning before it is too late,
+you will notice what your correspondent has to say.
+
+“You are deceived. Can such a woman as this be worthy?
+
+“One who encouraged an honest youth to love her, then slighted him, so
+that he died.
+
+“One who next took a man of no birth as a lover, who was forbidden the
+house by her father.
+
+“One who secretly left her home to be married to that man, met him, and
+went with him to London.
+
+“One who, for some reason or other, returned again unmarried.
+
+“One who, in her after-correspondence with him, went so far as to
+address him as her husband.
+
+“One who wrote the enclosed letter to ask me, who better than anybody
+else knows the story, to keep the scandal a secret.
+
+“I hope soon to be beyond the reach of either blame or praise. But
+before removing me God has put it in my power to avenge the death of my
+son.
+
+“GERTRUDE JETHWAY.”
+
+The letter enclosed was the note in pencil that Elfride had written in
+Mrs. Jethway’s cottage:
+
+“DEAR MRS. JETHWAY,—I have been to visit you. I wanted much to see you,
+but I cannot wait any longer. I came to beg you not to execute the
+threats you have repeated to me. Do not, I beseech you, Mrs. Jethway,
+let any one know I ran away from home! It would ruin me with him, and
+break my heart. I will do anything for you, if you will be kind to me.
+In the name of our common womanhood, do not, I implore you, make a
+scandal of me.—Yours,
+
+“E. SWANCOURT.
+
+Knight turned his head wearily towards the house. The ground rose
+rapidly on nearing the shrubbery in which he stood, raising it almost
+to a level with the first floor of The Crags. Elfride’s dressing-room
+lay in the salient angle in this direction, and it was lighted by two
+windows in such a position that, from Knight’s standing-place, his
+sight passed through both windows, and raked the room. Elfride was
+there; she was pausing between the two windows, looking at her figure
+in the cheval-glass. She regarded herself long and attentively in
+front; turned, flung back her head, and observed the reflection over
+her shoulder.
+
+Nobody can predicate as to her object or fancy; she may have done the
+deed in the very abstraction of deep sadness. She may have been moaning
+from the bottom of her heart, “How unhappy am I!” But the impression
+produced on Knight was not a good one. He dropped his eyes moodily. The
+dead woman’s letter had a virtue in the accident of its juncture far
+beyond any it intrinsically exhibited. Circumstance lent to evil words
+a ring of pitiless justice echoing from the grave. Knight could not
+endure their possession. He tore the letter into fragments.
+
+He heard a brushing among the bushes behind, and turning his head he
+saw Elfride following him. The fair girl looked in his face with a
+wistful smile of hope, too forcedly hopeful to displace the firmly
+established dread beneath it. His severe words of the previous night
+still sat heavy upon her.
+
+“I saw you from my window, Harry,” she said timidly.
+
+“The dew will make your feet wet,” he observed, as one deaf.
+
+“I don’t mind it.”
+
+“There is danger in getting wet feet.”
+
+“Yes...Harry, what is the matter?”
+
+“Oh, nothing. Shall I resume the serious conversation I had with you
+last night? No, perhaps not; perhaps I had better not.”
+
+“Oh, I cannot tell! How wretched it all is! Ah, I wish you were your
+own dear self again, and had kissed me when I came up! Why didn’t you
+ask me for one? why don’t you now?”
+
+“Too free in manner by half,” he heard murmur the voice within him.
+
+“It was that hateful conversation last night,” she went on. “Oh, those
+words! Last night was a black night for me.”
+
+“Kiss!—I hate that word! Don’t talk of kissing, for God’s sake! I
+should think you might with advantage have shown tact enough to keep
+back that word ‘kiss,’ considering those you have accepted.”
+
+She became very pale, and a rigid and desolate charactery took
+possession of her face. That face was so delicate and tender in
+appearance now, that one could fancy the pressure of a finger upon it
+would cause a livid spot.
+
+Knight walked on, and Elfride with him, silent and unopposing. He
+opened a gate, and they entered a path across a stubble-field.
+
+“Perhaps I intrude upon you?” she said as he closed the gate. “Shall I
+go away?”
+
+“No. Listen to me, Elfride.” Knight’s voice was low and unequal. “I
+have been honest with you: will you be so with me? If
+any—strange—connection has existed between yourself and a predecessor
+of mine, tell it now. It is better that I know it now, even though the
+knowledge should part us, than that I should discover it in time to
+come. And suspicions have been awakened in me. I think I will not say
+how, because I despise the means. A discovery of any mystery of your
+past would embitter our lives.”
+
+Knight waited with a slow manner of calmness. His eyes were sad and
+imperative. They went farther along the path.
+
+“Will you forgive me if I tell you all?” she exclaimed entreatingly.
+
+“I can’t promise; so much depends upon what you have to tell.”
+
+Elfride could not endure the silence which followed.
+
+“Are you not going to love me?” she burst out. “Harry, Harry, love me,
+and speak as usual! Do; I beseech you, Harry!”
+
+“Are you going to act fairly by me?” said Knight, with rising anger;
+“or are you not? What have I done to you that I should be put off like
+this? Be caught like a bird in a springe; everything intended to be
+hidden from me! Why is it, Elfride? That’s what I ask you.”
+
+In their agitation they had left the path, and were wandering among the
+wet and obstructive stubble, without knowing or heeding it.
+
+“What have I done?” she faltered.
+
+“What? How can you ask what, when you know so well? You KNOW that I
+have designedly been kept in ignorance of something attaching to you,
+which, had I known of it, might have altered all my conduct; and yet
+you say, what?”
+
+She drooped visibly, and made no answer.
+
+“Not that I believe in malicious letter-writers and whisperers; not I.
+I don’t know whether I do or don’t: upon my soul, I can’t tell. I know
+this: a religion was building itself upon you in my heart. I looked
+into your eyes, and thought I saw there truth and innocence as pure and
+perfect as ever embodied by God in the flesh of woman. Perfect truth is
+too much to expect, but ordinary truth I WILL HAVE or nothing at all.
+Just say, then; is the matter you keep back of the gravest importance,
+or is it not?”
+
+“I don’t understand all your meaning. If I have hidden anything from
+you, it has been because I loved you so, and I feared—feared—to lose
+you.”
+
+“Since you are not given to confidence, I want to ask you some plain
+questions. Have I your permission?”
+
+“Yes,” she said, and there came over her face a weary resignation. “Say
+the harshest words you can; I will bear them!”
+
+“There is a scandal in the air concerning you, Elfride; and I cannot
+even combat it without knowing definitely what it is. It may not refer
+to you entirely, or even at all.” Knight trifled in the very bitterness
+of his feeling. “In the time of the French Revolution, Pariseau, a
+ballet-master, was beheaded by mistake for Parisot, a captain of the
+King’s Guard. I wish there was another ‘E. Swancourt’ in the
+neighbourhood. Look at this.”
+
+He handed her the letter she had written and left on the table at Mrs.
+Jethway’s. She looked over it vacantly.
+
+“It is not so much as it seems!” she pleaded. “It seems wickedly
+deceptive to look at now, but it had a much more natural origin than
+you think. My sole wish was not to endanger our love. O Harry! that was
+all my idea. It was not much harm.”
+
+“Yes, yes; but independently of the poor miserable creature’s remarks,
+it seems to imply—something wrong.”
+
+“What remarks?”
+
+“Those she wrote me—now torn to pieces. Elfride, DID you run away with
+a man you loved?—that was the damnable statement. Has such an
+accusation life in it—really, truly, Elfride?”
+
+“Yes,” she whispered.
+
+Knight’s countenance sank. “To be married to him?” came huskily from
+his lips.
+
+“Yes. Oh, forgive me! I had never seen you, Harry.”
+
+“To London?”
+
+“Yes; but I——”
+
+“Answer my questions; say nothing else, Elfride Did you ever
+deliberately try to marry him in secret?”
+
+“No; not deliberately.”
+
+“But did you do it?”
+
+A feeble red passed over her face.
+
+“Yes,” she said.
+
+“And after that—did you—write to him as your husband; and did he
+address you as his wife?”
+
+“Listen, listen! It was——”
+
+“Do answer me; only answer me!”
+
+“Then, yes, we did.” Her lips shook; but it was with some little
+dignity that she continued: “I would gladly have told you; for I knew
+and know I had done wrong. But I dared not; I loved you too well. Oh,
+so well! You have been everything in the world to me—and you are now.
+Will you not forgive me?”
+
+It is a melancholy thought, that men who at first will not allow the
+verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts or wives to
+be disturbed by God’s own testimony to the contrary, will, once
+suspecting their purity, morally hang them upon evidence they would be
+ashamed to admit in judging a dog.
+
+The reluctance to tell, which arose from Elfride’s simplicity in
+thinking herself so much more culpable than she really was, had been
+doing fatal work in Knight’s mind. The man of many ideas, now that his
+first dream of impossible things was over, vibrated too far in the
+contrary direction; and her every movement of feature—every
+tremor—every confused word—was taken as so much proof of her
+unworthiness.
+
+“Elfride, we must bid good-bye to compliment,” said Knight: “we must do
+without politeness now. Look in my face, and as you believe in God
+above, tell me truly one thing more. Were you away alone with him?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Did you return home the same day on which you left it?”
+
+“No.”
+
+The word fell like a bolt, and the very land and sky seemed to suffer.
+Knight turned aside. Meantime Elfride’s countenance wore a look
+indicating utter despair of being able to explain matters so that they
+would seem no more than they really were,—a despair which not only
+relinquishes the hope of direct explanation, but wearily gives up all
+collateral chances of extenuation.
+
+The scene was engraved for years on the retina of Knight’s eye: the
+dead and brown stubble, the weeds among it, the distant belt of beeches
+shutting out the view of the house, the leaves of which were now red
+and sick to death.
+
+“You must forget me,” he said. “We shall not marry, Elfride.”
+
+How much anguish passed into her soul at those words from him was told
+by the look of supreme torture she wore.
+
+“What meaning have you, Harry? You only say so, do you?”
+
+She looked doubtingly up at him, and tried to laugh, as if the
+unreality of his words must be unquestionable.
+
+“You are not in earnest, I know—I hope you are not? Surely I belong to
+you, and you are going to keep me for yours?”
+
+“Elfride, I have been speaking too roughly to you; I have said what I
+ought only to have thought. I like you; and let me give you a word of
+advice. Marry your man as soon as you can. However weary of each other
+you may feel, you belong to each other, and I am not going to step
+between you. Do you think I would—do you think I could for a moment? If
+you cannot marry him now, and another makes you his wife, do not reveal
+this secret to him after marriage, if you do not before. Honesty would
+be damnation then.”
+
+Bewildered by his expressions, she exclaimed—
+
+“No, no; I will not be a wife unless I am yours; and I must be yours!”
+
+“If we had married——”
+
+“But you don’t MEAN—that—that—you will go away and leave me, and not be
+anything more to me—oh, you don’t!”
+
+Convulsive sobs took all nerve out of her utterance. She checked them,
+and continued to look in his face for the ray of hope that was not to
+be found there.
+
+“I am going indoors,” said Knight. “You will not follow me, Elfride; I
+wish you not to.”
+
+“Oh no; indeed, I will not.”
+
+“And then I am going to Castle Boterel. Good-bye.”
+
+He spoke the farewell as if it were but for the day—lightly, as he had
+spoken such temporary farewells many times before—and she seemed to
+understand it as such. Knight had not the power to tell her plainly
+that he was going for ever; he hardly knew for certain that he was:
+whether he should rush back again upon the current of an irresistible
+emotion, or whether he could sufficiently conquer himself, and her in
+him, to establish that parting as a supreme farewell, and present
+himself to the world again as no woman’s.
+
+Ten minutes later he had left the house, leaving directions that if he
+did not return in the evening his luggage was to be sent to his
+chambers in London, whence he intended to write to Mr. Swancourt as to
+the reasons of his sudden departure. He descended the valley, and could
+not forbear turning his head. He saw the stubble-field, and a slight
+girlish figure in the midst of it—up against the sky. Elfride, docile
+as ever, had hardly moved a step, for he had said, Remain. He looked
+and saw her again—he saw her for weeks and months. He withdrew his eyes
+from the scene, swept his hand across them, as if to brush away the
+sight, breathed a low groan, and went on.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXV
+
+
+“And wilt thou leave me thus?—say nay—say nay!”
+
+
+The scene shifts to Knight’s chambers in Bede’s Inn. It was late in the
+evening of the day following his departure from Endelstow. A drizzling
+rain descended upon London, forming a humid and dreary halo over every
+well-lighted street. The rain had not yet been prevalent long enough to
+give to rapid vehicles that clear and distinct rattle which follows the
+thorough washing of the stones by a drenching rain, but was just
+sufficient to make footway and roadway slippery, adhesive, and clogging
+to both feet and wheels.
+
+Knight was standing by the fire, looking into its expiring embers,
+previously to emerging from his door for a dreary journey home to
+Richmond. His hat was on, and the gas turned off. The blind of the
+window overlooking the alley was not drawn down; and with the light
+from beneath, which shone over the ceiling of the room, came, in place
+of the usual babble, only the reduced clatter and quick speech which
+were the result of necessity rather than choice.
+
+Whilst he thus stood, waiting for the expiration of the few minutes
+that were wanting to the time for his catching the train, a light
+tapping upon the door mingled with the other sounds that reached his
+ears. It was so faint at first that the outer noises were almost
+sufficient to drown it. Finding it repeated Knight crossed the lobby,
+crowded with books and rubbish, and opened the door.
+
+A woman, closely muffled up, but visibly of fragile build, was standing
+on the landing under the gaslight. She sprang forward, flung her arms
+round Knight’s neck, and uttered a low cry—
+
+“O Harry, Harry, you are killing me! I could not help coming. Don’t
+send me away—don’t! Forgive your Elfride for coming—I love you so!”
+
+Knight’s agitation and astonishment mastered him for a few moments.
+
+“Elfride!” he cried, “what does this mean? What have you done?”
+
+“Do not hurt me and punish me—Oh, do not! I couldn’t help coming; it
+was killing me. Last night, when you did not come back, I could not
+bear it—I could not! Only let me be with you, and see your face, Harry;
+I don’t ask for more.”
+
+Her eyelids were hot, heavy, and thick with excessive weeping, and the
+delicate rose-red of her cheeks was disfigured and inflamed by the
+constant chafing of the handkerchief in wiping her many tears.
+
+“Who is with you? Have you come alone?” he hurriedly inquired.
+
+“Yes. When you did not come last night, I sat up hoping you would
+come—and the night was all agony—and I waited on and on, and you did
+not come! Then when it was morning, and your letter said you were gone,
+I could not endure it; and I ran away from them to St. Launce’s, and
+came by the train. And I have been all day travelling to you, and you
+won’t make me go away again, will you, Harry, because I shall always
+love you till I die?”
+
+“Yet it is wrong for you to stay. O Elfride! what have you committed
+yourself to? It is ruin to your good name to run to me like this! Has
+not your first experience been sufficient to keep you from these
+things?”
+
+“My name! Harry, I shall soon die, and what good will my name be to me
+then? Oh, could I but be the man and you the woman, I would not leave
+you for such a little fault as mine! Do not think it was so vile a
+thing in me to run away with him. Ah, how I wish you could have run
+away with twenty women before you knew me, that I might show you I
+would think it no fault, but be glad to get you after them all, so that
+I had you! If you only knew me through and through, how true I am,
+Harry. Cannot I be yours? Say you love me just the same, and don’t let
+me be separated from you again, will you? I cannot bear it—all the long
+hours and days and nights going on, and you not there, but away because
+you hate me!”
+
+“Not hate you, Elfride,” he said gently, and supported her with his
+arm. “But you cannot stay here now—just at present, I mean.”
+
+“I suppose I must not—I wish I might. I am afraid that if—you lose
+sight of me—something dark will happen, and we shall not meet again.
+Harry, if I am not good enough to be your wife, I wish I could be your
+servant and live with you, and not be sent away never to see you again.
+I don’t mind what it is except that!”
+
+“No, I cannot send you away: I cannot. God knows what dark future may
+arise out of this evening’s work; but I cannot send you away! You must
+sit down, and I will endeavour to collect my thoughts and see what had
+better be done.
+
+At that moment a loud knocking at the house door was heard by both,
+accompanied by a hurried ringing of the bell that echoed from attic to
+basement. The door was quickly opened, and after a few hasty words of
+converse in the hall, heavy footsteps ascended the stairs.
+
+The face of Mr. Swancourt, flushed, grieved, and stern, appeared round
+the landing of the staircase. He came higher up, and stood beside them.
+Glancing over and past Knight with silent indignation, he turned to the
+trembling girl.
+
+“O Elfride! and have I found you at last? Are these your tricks, madam?
+When will you get rid of your idiocies, and conduct yourself like a
+decent woman? Is my family name and house to be disgraced by acts that
+would be a scandal to a washerwoman’s daughter? Come along, madam;
+come!”
+
+“She is so weary!” said Knight, in a voice of intensest anguish. “Mr.
+Swancourt, don’t be harsh with her—let me beg of you to be tender with
+her, and love her!”
+
+“To you, sir,” said Mr. Swancourt, turning to him as if by the sheer
+pressure of circumstances, “I have little to say. I can only remark,
+that the sooner I can retire from your presence the better I shall be
+pleased. Why you could not conduct your courtship of my daughter like
+an honest man, I do not know. Why she—a foolish inexperienced
+girl—should have been tempted to this piece of folly, I do not know.
+Even if she had not known better than to leave her home, you might
+have, I should think.”
+
+“It is not his fault: he did not tempt me, papa! I came.”
+
+“If you wished the marriage broken off, why didn’t you say so plainly?
+If you never intended to marry, why could you not leave her alone? Upon
+my soul, it grates me to the heart to be obliged to think so ill of a
+man I thought my friend!”
+
+Knight, soul-sick and weary of his life, did not arouse himself to
+utter a word in reply. How should he defend himself when his defence
+was the accusation of Elfride? On that account he felt a miserable
+satisfaction in letting her father go on thinking and speaking
+wrongfully. It was a faint ray of pleasure straying into the great
+gloominess of his brain to think that the vicar might never know but
+that he, as her lover, tempted her away, which seemed to be the form
+Mr. Swancourt’s misapprehension had taken.
+
+“Now, are you coming?” said Mr. Swancourt to her again. He took her
+unresisting hand, drew it within his arm, and led her down the stairs.
+Knight’s eyes followed her, the last moment begetting in him a frantic
+hope that she would turn her head. She passed on, and never looked
+back.
+
+He heard the door open—close again. The wheels of a cab grazed the
+kerbstone, a murmured direction followed. The door was slammed
+together, the wheels moved, and they rolled away.
+
+From that hour of her reappearance a dreadful conflict raged within the
+breast of Henry Knight. His instinct, emotion, affectiveness—or
+whatever it may be called—urged him to stand forward, seize upon
+Elfride, and be her cherisher and protector through life. Then came the
+devastating thought that Elfride’s childlike, unreasoning, and
+indiscreet act in flying to him only proved that the proprieties must
+be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve, which was really
+artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so
+likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to
+himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: “The suspicious discreet
+woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is
+far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are
+the women who fall.”
+
+Hours and days went by, and Knight remained inactive. Lengthening time,
+which made fainter the heart-awakening power of her presence,
+strengthened the mental ability to reason her down. Elfride loved him,
+he knew, and he could not leave off loving her but marry her he would
+not. If she could but be again his own Elfride—the woman she had seemed
+to be—but that woman was dead and buried, and he knew her no more! And
+how could he marry this Elfride, one who, if he had originally seen her
+as she was, would have been barely an interesting pitiable acquaintance
+in his eyes—no more?
+
+It cankered his heart to think he was confronted by the closest
+instance of a worse state of things than any he had assumed in the
+pleasant social philosophy and satire of his essays.
+
+The moral rightness of this man’s life was worthy of all praise; but in
+spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that
+wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people.
+With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an abstraction to be so
+hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it. Having
+now seen himself mistaken in supposing Elfride to be peerless, nothing
+on earth could make him believe she was not so very bad after all.
+
+He lingered in town a fortnight, doing little else than vibrate between
+passion and opinions. One idea remained intact—that it was better
+Elfride and himself should not meet.
+
+When he surveyed the volumes on his shelves—few of which had been
+opened since Elfride first took possession of his heart—their untouched
+and orderly arrangement reproached him as an apostate from the old
+faith of his youth and early manhood. He had deserted those
+never-failing friends, so they seemed to say, for an unstable delight
+in a ductile woman, which had ended all in bitterness. The spirit of
+self-denial, verging on asceticism, which had ever animated Knight in
+old times, announced itself as having departed with the birth of love,
+with it having gone the self-respect which had compensated for the lack
+of self-gratification. Poor little Elfride, instead of holding, as
+formerly, a place in his religion, began to assume the hue of a
+temptation. Perhaps it was human and correctly natural that Knight
+never once thought whether he did not owe her a little sacrifice for
+her unchary devotion in saving his life.
+
+With a consciousness of having thus, like Antony, kissed away kingdoms
+and provinces, he next considered how he had revealed his higher
+secrets and intentions to her, an unreserve he would never have allowed
+himself with any man living. How was it that he had not been able to
+refrain from telling her of adumbrations heretofore locked in the
+closest strongholds of his mind?
+
+Knight’s was a robust intellect, which could escape outside the
+atmosphere of heart, and perceive that his own love, as well as other
+people’s, could be reduced by change of scene and circumstances. At the
+same time the perception was a superimposed sorrow:
+
+“O last regret, regret can die!”
+
+
+But being convinced that the death of this regret was the best thing
+for him, he did not long shrink from attempting it. He closed his
+chambers, suspended his connection with editors, and left London for
+the Continent. Here we will leave him to wander without purpose, beyond
+the nominal one of encouraging obliviousness of Elfride.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVI
+
+
+“The pennie’s the jewel that beautifies a’.”
+
+
+“I can’t think what’s coming to these St. Launce’s people at all at
+all.”
+
+“With their ‘How-d’ye-do’s,’ do you mean?”
+
+“Ay, with their ‘How-d’ye-do’s,’ and shaking of hands, asking me in,
+and tender inquiries for you, John.”
+
+These words formed part of a conversation between John Smith and his
+wife on a Saturday evening in the spring which followed Knight’s
+departure from England. Stephen had long since returned to India; and
+the persevering couple themselves had migrated from Lord Luxellian’s
+park at Endelstow to a comfortable roadside dwelling about a mile out
+of St. Launce’s, where John had opened a small stone and slate yard in
+his own name.
+
+“When we came here six months ago,” continued Mrs. Smith, “though I had
+paid ready money so many years in the town, my friskier shopkeepers
+would only speak over the counter. Meet ’em in the street half-an-hour
+after, and they’d treat me with staring ignorance of my face.”
+
+“Look through ye as through a glass winder?”
+
+“Yes, the brazen ones would. The quiet and cool ones would glance over
+the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my
+eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming
+east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with
+them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks;
+the butcher’s daughters; the upholsterer’s young men. Hand in glove
+when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a’
+old woman when playing the genteel away from all signs of their trade.”
+
+“True enough, Maria.”
+
+“Well, to-day ’tis all different. I’d no sooner got to market than Mrs.
+Joakes rushed up to me in the eyes of the town and said, ‘My dear Mrs.
+Smith, now you must be tired with your walk! Come in and have some
+lunch! I insist upon it; knowing you so many years as I have! Don’t you
+remember when we used to go looking for owls’ feathers together in the
+Castle ruins?’ There’s no knowing what you may need, so I answered the
+woman civilly. I hadn’t got to the corner before that thriving young
+lawyer, Sweet, who’s quite the dandy, ran after me out of breath. ‘Mrs.
+Smith,’ he says, ‘excuse my rudeness, but there’s a bramble on the tail
+of your dress, which you’ve dragged in from the country; allow me to
+pull it off for you.’ If you’ll believe me, this was in the very front
+of the Town Hall. What’s the meaning of such sudden love for a’ old
+woman?”
+
+“Can’t say; unless ’tis repentance.”
+
+“Repentance! was there ever such a fool as you. John? Did anybody ever
+repent with money in’s pocket and fifty years to live?”
+
+“Now, I’ve been thinking too,” said John, passing over the query as
+hardly pertinent, “that I’ve had more loving-kindness from folks to-day
+than I ever have before since we moved here. Why, old Alderman Tope
+walked out to the middle of the street where I was, to shake hands with
+me—so ’a did. Having on my working clothes, I thought ’twas odd. Ay,
+and there was young Werrington.”
+
+“Who’s he?”
+
+“Why, the man in Hill Street, who plays and sells flutes, trumpets, and
+fiddles, and grand pehanners. He was talking to Egloskerry, that very
+small bachelor-man with money in the funds. I was going by, I’m sure,
+without thinking or expecting a nod from men of that glib kidney when
+in my working clothes——”
+
+“You always will go poking into town in your working clothes. Beg you
+to change how I will, ’tis no use.”
+
+“Well, however, I was in my working clothes. Werrington saw me. ‘Ah,
+Mr. Smith! a fine morning; excellent weather for building,’ says he,
+out as loud and friendly as if I’d met him in some deep hollow, where
+he could get nobody else to speak to at all. ’Twas odd: for Werrington
+is one of the very ringleaders of the fast class.”
+
+At that moment a tap came to the door. The door was immediately opened
+by Mrs. Smith in person.
+
+“You’ll excuse us, I’m sure, Mrs. Smith, but this beautiful spring
+weather was too much for us. Yes, and we could stay in no longer; and I
+took Mrs. Trewen upon my arm directly we’d had a cup of tea, and out we
+came. And seeing your beautiful crocuses in such a bloom, we’ve taken
+the liberty to enter. We’ll step round the garden, if you don’t mind.”
+
+“Not at all,” said Mrs. Smith; and they walked round the garden. She
+lifted her hands in amazement directly their backs were turned.
+“Goodness send us grace!”
+
+“Who be they?” said her husband.
+
+“Actually Mr. Trewen, the bank-manager, and his wife.”
+
+John Smith, staggered in mind, went out of doors and looked over the
+garden gate, to collect his ideas. He had not been there two minutes
+when wheels were heard, and a carriage and pair rolled along the road.
+A distinguished-looking lady, with the demeanour of a duchess, reclined
+within. When opposite Smith’s gate she turned her head, and instantly
+commanded the coachman to stop.
+
+“Ah, Mr. Smith, I am glad to see you looking so well. I could not help
+stopping a moment to congratulate you and Mrs. Smith upon the happiness
+you must enjoy. Joseph, you may drive on.”
+
+And the carriage rolled away towards St. Launce’s.
+
+Out rushed Mrs. Smith from behind a laurel-bush, where she had stood
+pondering.
+
+“Just going to touch my hat to her,” said John; “just for all the world
+as I would have to poor Lady Luxellian years ago.”
+
+“Lord! who is she?”
+
+“The public-house woman—what’s her name? Mrs.—Mrs.—at the Falcon.”
+
+“Public-house woman. The clumsiness of the Smith family! You MIGHT say
+the landlady of the Falcon Hotel, since we are in for politeness. The
+people are ridiculous enough, but give them their due.”
+
+The possibility is that Mrs. Smith was getting mollified, in spite of
+herself, by these remarkably friendly phenomena among the people of St.
+Launce’s. And in justice to them it was quite desirable that she should
+do so. The interest which the unpractised ones of this town expressed
+so grotesquely was genuine of its kind, and equal in intrinsic worth to
+the more polished smiles of larger communities.
+
+By this time Mr. and Mrs. Trewen were returning from the garden.
+
+“I’ll ask ’em flat,” whispered John to his wife. “I’ll say, ‘We be in a
+fog—you’ll excuse my asking a question, Mr. and Mrs. Trewen. How is it
+you all be so friendly to-day?’ Hey? ’Twould sound right and sensible,
+wouldn’t it?”
+
+“Not a word! Good mercy, when will the man have manners!”
+
+“It must be a proud moment for you, I am sure, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, to
+have a son so celebrated,” said the bank-manager advancing.
+
+“Ah, ’tis Stephen—I knew it!” said Mrs. Smith triumphantly to herself.
+
+“We don’t know particulars,” said John.
+
+“Not know!”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Why, ’tis all over town. Our worthy Mayor alluded to it in a speech at
+the dinner last night of the Every-Man-his-own-Maker Club.”
+
+“And what about Stephen?” urged Mrs. Smith.
+
+“Why, your son has been feted by deputy-governors and Parsee princes
+and nobody-knows-who in India; is hand in glove with nabobs, and is to
+design a large palace, and cathedral, and hospitals, colleges, halls,
+and fortifications, by the general consent of the ruling powers,
+Christian and Pagan alike.”
+
+“’Twas sure to come to the boy,” said Mr. Smith unassumingly.
+
+“’Tis in yesterday’s St. Launce’s Chronicle; and our worthy Mayor in
+the chair introduced the subject into his speech last night in a
+masterly manner.”
+
+“’Twas very good of the worthy Mayor in the chair I’m sure,” said
+Stephen’s mother. “I hope the boy will have the sense to keep what he’s
+got; but as for men, they are a simple sex. Some woman will hook him.”
+
+“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the evening closes in, and we must be going;
+and remember this, that every Saturday when you come in to market, you
+are to make our house as your own. There will be always a tea-cup and
+saucer for you, as you know there has been for months, though you may
+have forgotten it. I’m a plain-speaking woman, and what I say I mean.”
+
+When the visitors were gone, and the sun had set, and the moon’s rays
+were just beginning to assert themselves upon the walls of the
+dwelling, John Smith and his wife sat dawn to the newspaper they had
+hastily procured from the town. And when the reading was done, they
+considered how best to meet the new social requirements settling upon
+them, which Mrs. Smith considered could be done by new furniture and
+house enlargement alone.
+
+“And, John, mind one thing,” she said in conclusion. “In writing to
+Stephen, never by any means mention the name of Elfride Swancourt
+again. We’ve left the place, and know no more about her except by
+hearsay. He seems to be getting free of her, and glad am I for it. It
+was a cloudy hour for him when he first set eyes upon the girl. That
+family’s been no good to him, first or last; so let them keep their
+blood to themselves if they want to. He thinks of her, I know, but not
+so hopelessly. So don’t try to know anything about her, and we can’t
+answer his questions. She may die out of his mind then.”
+
+“That shall be it,” said John.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVII
+
+
+“After many days.”
+
+
+Knight roamed south, under colour of studying Continental antiquities.
+
+He paced the lofty aisles of Amiens, loitered by Ardennes Abbey,
+climbed into the strange towers of Laon, analyzed Noyon and Rheims.
+Then he went to Chartres, and examined its scaly spires and quaint
+carving then he idled about Coutances. He rowed beneath the base of
+Mont St. Michel, and caught the varied skyline of the crumbling
+edifices encrusting it. St. Ouen’s, Rouen, knew him for days; so did
+Vezelay, Sens, and many a hallowed monument besides. Abandoning the
+inspection of early French art with the same purposeless haste as he
+had shown in undertaking it, he went further, and lingered about
+Ferrara, Padua, and Pisa. Satiated with mediævalism, he tried the Roman
+Forum. Next he observed moonlight and starlight effects by the bay of
+Naples. He turned to Austria, became enervated and depressed on
+Hungarian and Bohemian plains, and was refreshed again by breezes on
+the declivities of the Carpathians.
+
+Then he found himself in Greece. He visited the plain of Marathon, and
+strove to imagine the Persian defeat; to Mars Hill, to picture St. Paul
+addressing the ancient Athenians; to Thermopylae and Salamis, to run
+through the facts and traditions of the Second Invasion—the result of
+his endeavours being more or less chaotic. Knight grew as weary of
+these places as of all others. Then he felt the shock of an earthquake
+in the Ionian Islands, and went to Venice. Here he shot in gondolas up
+and down the winding thoroughfare of the Grand Canal, and loitered on
+calle and piazza at night, when the lagunes were undisturbed by a
+ripple, and no sound was to be heard but the stroke of the midnight
+clock. Afterwards he remained for weeks in the museums, galleries, and
+libraries of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris; and thence came home.
+
+Time thus rolls us on to a February afternoon, divided by fifteen
+months from the parting of Elfride and her lover in the brown stubble
+field towards the sea.
+
+Two men obviously not Londoners, and with a touch of foreignness in
+their look, met by accident on one of the gravel walks leading across
+Hyde Park. The younger, more given to looking about him than his
+fellow, saw and noticed the approach of his senior some time before the
+latter had raised his eyes from the ground, upon which they were bent
+in an abstracted gaze that seemed habitual with him.
+
+“Mr. Knight—indeed it is!” exclaimed the younger man.
+
+“Ah, Stephen Smith!” said Knight.
+
+Simultaneous operations might now have been observed progressing in
+both, the result being that an expression less frank and impulsive than
+the first took possession of their features. It was manifest that the
+next words uttered were a superficial covering to constraint on both
+sides.
+
+“Have you been in England long?” said Knight.
+
+“Only two days,” said Smith.
+
+“India ever since?”
+
+“Nearly ever since.”
+
+“They were making a fuss about you at St. Launce’s last year. I fancy I
+saw something of the sort in the papers.”
+
+“Yes; I believe something was said about me.”
+
+“I must congratulate you on your achievements.”
+
+“Thanks, but they are nothing very extraordinary. A natural
+professional progress where there was no opposition.”
+
+There followed that want of words which will always assert itself
+between nominal friends who find they have ceased to be real ones, and
+have not yet sunk to the level of mere acquaintance. Each looked up and
+down the Park. Knight may possibly have borne in mind during the
+intervening months Stephen’s manner towards him the last time they had
+met, and may have encouraged his former interest in Stephen’s welfare
+to die out of him as misplaced. Stephen certainly was full of the
+feelings begotten by the belief that Knight had taken away the woman he
+loved so well.
+
+Stephen Smith then asked a question, adopting a certain recklessness of
+manner and tone to hide, if possible, the fact that the subject was a
+much greater one to him than his friend had ever supposed.
+
+“Are you married?”
+
+“I am not.”
+
+Knight spoke in an indescribable tone of bitterness that was almost
+moroseness.
+
+“And I never shall be,” he added decisively. “Are you?”
+
+“No,” said Stephen, sadly and quietly, like a man in a sick-room.
+Totally ignorant whether or not Knight knew of his own previous claims
+upon Elfride, he yet resolved to hazard a few more words upon the topic
+which had an aching fascination for him even now.
+
+“Then your engagement to Miss Swancourt came to nothing,” he said. “You
+remember I met you with her once?”
+
+Stephen’s voice gave way a little here, in defiance of his firmest will
+to the contrary. Indian affairs had not yet lowered those emotions down
+to the point of control.
+
+“It was broken off,” came quickly from Knight. “Engagements to marry
+often end like that—for better or for worse.”
+
+“Yes; so they do. And what have you been doing lately?”
+
+“Doing? Nothing.”
+
+“Where have you been?”
+
+“I can hardly tell you. In the main, going about Europe; and it may
+perhaps interest you to know that I have been attempting the serious
+study of Continental art of the Middle Ages. My notes on each example I
+visited are at your service. They are of no use to me.”
+
+“I shall be glad with them....Oh, travelling far and near!”
+
+“Not far,” said Knight, with moody carelessness. “You know, I daresay,
+that sheep occasionally become giddy—hydatids in the head, ’tis called,
+in which their brains become eaten up, and the animal exhibits the
+strange peculiarity of walking round and round in a circle continually.
+I have travelled just in the same way—round and round like a giddy
+ram.”
+
+The reckless, bitter, and rambling style in which Knight talked, as if
+rather to vent his images than to convey any ideas to Stephen, struck
+the young man painfully. His former friend’s days had become cankered
+in some way: Knight was a changed man. He himself had changed much, but
+not as Knight had changed.
+
+“Yesterday I came home,” continued Knight, “without having, to the best
+of my belief, imbibed half-a-dozen ideas worth retaining.”
+
+“You out-Hamlet Hamlet in morbidness of mood,” said Stephen, with
+regretful frankness.
+
+Knight made no reply.
+
+“Do you know,” Stephen continued, “I could almost have sworn that you
+would be married before this time, from what I saw?”
+
+Knight’s face grew harder. “Could you?” he said.
+
+Stephen was powerless to forsake the depressing, luring subject.
+
+“Yes; and I simply wonder at it.”
+
+“Whom did you expect me to marry?”
+
+“Her I saw you with.”
+
+“Thank you for that wonder.”
+
+“Did she jilt you?”
+
+“Smith, now one word to you,” Knight returned steadily. “Don’t you ever
+question me on that subject. I have a reason for making this request,
+mind. And if you do question me, you will not get an answer.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t for a moment wish to ask what is unpleasant to you—not I.
+I had a momentary feeling that I should like to explain something on my
+side, and hear a similar explanation on yours. But let it go, let it
+go, by all means.”
+
+“What would you explain?”
+
+“I lost the woman I was going to marry: you have not married as you
+intended. We might have compared notes.”
+
+“I have never asked you a word about your case.”
+
+“I know that.”
+
+“And the inference is obvious.”
+
+“Quite so.”
+
+“The truth is, Stephen, I have doggedly resolved never to allude to the
+matter—for which I have a very good reason.”
+
+“Doubtless. As good a reason as you had for not marrying her.”
+
+“You talk insidiously. I had a good one—a miserably good one!”
+
+Smith’s anxiety urged him to venture one more question.
+
+“Did she not love you enough?” He drew his breath in a slow and
+attenuated stream, as he waited in timorous hope for the answer.
+
+“Stephen, you rather strain ordinary courtesy in pressing questions of
+that kind after what I have said. I cannot understand you at all. I
+must go on now.”
+
+“Why, good God!” exclaimed Stephen passionately, “you talk as if you
+hadn’t at all taken her away from anybody who had better claims to her
+than you!”
+
+“What do you mean by that?” said Knight, with a puzzled air. “What have
+you heard?”
+
+“Nothing. I too must go on. Good-day.”
+
+“If you will go,” said Knight, reluctantly now, “you must, I suppose. I
+am sure I cannot understand why you behave so.”
+
+“Nor I why you do. I have always been grateful to you, and as far as I
+am concerned we need never have become so estranged as we have.”
+
+“And have I ever been anything but well-disposed towards you, Stephen?
+Surely you know that I have not! The system of reserve began with you:
+you know that.”
+
+“No, no! You altogether mistake our position. You were always from the
+first reserved to me, though I was confidential to you. That was, I
+suppose, the natural issue of our differing positions in life. And when
+I, the pupil, became reserved like you, the master, you did not like
+it. However, I was going to ask you to come round and see me.”
+
+“Where are you staying?”
+
+“At the Grosvenor Hotel, Pimlico.”
+
+“So am I.”
+
+“That’s convenient, not to say odd. Well, I am detained in London for a
+day or two; then I am going down to see my father and mother, who live
+at St. Launce’s now. Will you see me this evening?”
+
+“I may; but I will not promise. I was wishing to be alone for an hour
+or two; but I shall know where to find you, at any rate. Good-bye.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVIII
+
+
+“Jealousy is cruel as the grave.”
+
+
+Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and
+once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the distractions of
+his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight had lingered
+on in him. Perhaps this staunchness was because Knight ever treated him
+as a mere disciple—even to snubbing him sometimes; and had at last,
+though unwittingly, inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all, that
+of taking away his sweetheart. The emotional side of his constitution
+was built rather after a feminine than a male model; and that
+tremendous wound from Knight’s hand may have tended to keep alive a
+warmth which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.
+
+Knight, on his part, was vexed, after they had parted, that he had not
+taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner. Those words which
+Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior claim to Elfride,
+would, if uttered when the man was younger, have provoked such a query
+as, “Come, tell me all about it, my lad,” from Knight, and Stephen
+would straightway have delivered himself of all he knew on the subject.
+
+Stephen the ingenuous boy, though now obliterated externally by Stephen
+the contriving man, returned to Knight’s memory vividly that afternoon.
+He was at present but a sojourner in London; and after attending to the
+two or three matters of business which remained to be done that day, he
+walked abstractedly into the gloomy corridors of the British Museum for
+the half-hour previous to their closing. That meeting with Smith had
+reunited the present with the past, closing up the chasm of his absence
+from England as if it had never existed, until the final circumstances
+of his previous time of residence in London formed but a yesterday to
+the circumstances now. The conflict that then had raged in him
+concerning Elfride Swancourt revived, strengthened by its sleep.
+Indeed, in those many months of absence, though quelling the intention
+to make her his wife, he had never forgotten that she was the type of
+woman adapted to his nature; and instead of trying to obliterate
+thoughts of her altogether, he had grown to regard them as an infirmity
+it was necessary to tolerate.
+
+Knight returned to his hotel much earlier in the evening than he would
+have done in the ordinary course of things. He did not care to think
+whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had
+slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance, or
+from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen
+had hastily pronounced, betokening that he knew something more of
+Elfride than Knight had supposed.
+
+He made a hasty dinner, inquired for Smith, and soon was ushered into
+the young man’s presence, whom he found sitting in front of a
+comfortable fire, beside a table spread with a few scientific
+periodicals and art reviews.
+
+“I have come to you, after all,” said Knight. “My manner was odd this
+morning, and it seemed desirable to call; but that you had too much
+sense to notice, Stephen, I know. Put it down to my wanderings in
+France and Italy.”
+
+“Don’t say another word, but sit down. I am only too glad to see you
+again.”
+
+Stephen would hardly have cared to tell Knight just then that the
+minute before Knight was announced he had been reading over some old
+letters of Elfride’s. They were not many; and until to-night had been
+sealed up, and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk, with a few
+other mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels.
+The familiar sights and sounds of London, the meeting with his friend,
+had with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard
+to Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world
+had to some extent suspended, though never ruptured. He at first
+intended only to look over these letters on the outside; then he read
+one; then another; until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to
+sad memories. He folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and
+instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic
+world, had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had
+returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.
+
+The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of
+its necessity. Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more
+intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his
+life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his
+Maker.
+
+They sat by the fire, chatting on external and random subjects, neither
+caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed to
+discuss. On the table with the periodicals lay two or three
+pocket-books, one of them being open. Knight seeing from the exposed
+page that the contents were sketches only, began turning the leaves
+over carelessly with his finger. When, some time later, Stephen was out
+of the room, Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the
+sketches more carefully.
+
+The first crude ideas, pertaining to dwellings of all kinds, were
+roughly outlined on the different pages. Antiquities had been copied;
+fragments of Indian columns, colossal statues, and outlandish ornament
+from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri, were carelessly intruded
+upon by outlines of modern doors, windows, roofs, cooking-stoves, and
+household furniture; everything, in short, which comes within the range
+of a practising architect’s experience, who travels with his eyes open.
+Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval
+subjects for carving or illumination—heads of Virgins, Saints, and
+Prophets.
+
+Stephen was not professedly a free-hand draughtsman, but he drew the
+human figure with correctness and skill. In its numerous repetitions on
+the sides and edges of the leaves, Knight began to notice a
+peculiarity. All the feminine saints had one type of feature. There
+were large nimbi and small nimbi about their drooping heads, but the
+face was always the same. That profile—how well Knight knew that
+profile!
+
+Had there been but one specimen of the familiar countenance, he might
+have passed over the resemblance as accidental; but a repetition meant
+more. Knight thought anew of Smith’s hasty words earlier in the day,
+and looked at the sketches again and again.
+
+On the young man’s entry, Knight said with palpable agitation—
+
+“Stephen, who are those intended for?”
+
+Stephen looked over the book with utter unconcern, “Saints and angels,
+done in my leisure moments. They were intended as designs for the
+stained glass of an English church.”
+
+“But whom do you idealize by that type of woman you always adopt for
+the Virgin?”
+
+“Nobody.”
+
+And then a thought raced along Stephen’s mind and he looked up at his
+friend.
+
+The truth is, Stephen’s introduction of Elfride’s lineaments had been
+so unconscious that he had not at first understood his companion’s
+drift. The hand, like the tongue, easily acquires the trick of
+repetition by rote, without calling in the mind to assist at all; and
+this had been the case here. Young men who cannot write verses about
+their Loves generally take to portraying them, and in the early days of
+his attachment Smith had never been weary of outlining Elfride. The
+lay-figure of Stephen’s sketches now initiated an adjustment of many
+things. Knight had recognized her. The opportunity of comparing notes
+had come unsought.
+
+“Elfride Swancourt, to whom I was engaged,” he said quietly.
+
+“Stephen!”
+
+“I know what you mean by speaking like that.”
+
+“Was it Elfride? YOU the man, Stephen?”
+
+“Yes; and you are thinking why did I conceal the fact from you that
+time at Endelstow, are you not?”
+
+“Yes, and more—more.”
+
+“I did it for the best; blame me if you will; I did it for the best.
+And now say how could I be with you afterwards as I had been before?”
+
+“I don’t know at all; I can’t say.”
+
+Knight remained fixed in thought, and once he murmured—
+
+“I had a suspicion this afternoon that there might be some such meaning
+in your words about my taking her away. But I dismissed it. How came
+you to know her?” he presently asked, in almost a peremptory tone.
+
+“I went down about the church; years ago now.”
+
+“When you were with Hewby, of course, of course. Well, I can’t
+understand it.” His tones rose. “I don’t know what to say, your
+hoodwinking me like this for so long!”
+
+“I don’t see that I have hoodwinked you at all.”
+
+“Yes, yes, but”——
+
+Knight arose from his seat, and began pacing up and down the room. His
+face was markedly pale, and his voice perturbed, as he said—
+
+“You did not act as I should have acted towards you under those
+circumstances. I feel it deeply; and I tell you plainly, I shall never
+forget it!”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Your behaviour at that meeting in the family vault, when I told you we
+were going to be married. Deception, dishonesty, everywhere; all the
+world’s of a piece!”
+
+Stephen did not much like this misconstruction of his motives, even
+though it was but the hasty conclusion of a friend disturbed by
+emotion.
+
+“I could do no otherwise than I did, with due regard to her,” he said
+stiffly.
+
+“Indeed!” said Knight, in the bitterest tone of reproach. “Nor could
+you with due regard to her have married her, I suppose! I have
+hoped—longed—that HE, who turns out to be YOU, would ultimately have
+done that.”
+
+“I am much obliged to you for that hope. But you talk very
+mysteriously. I think I had about the best reason anybody could have
+had for not doing that.”
+
+“Oh, what reason was it?”
+
+“That I could not.”
+
+“You ought to have made an opportunity; you ought to do so now, in bare
+justice to her, Stephen!” cried Knight, carried beyond himself. “That
+you know very well, and it hurts and wounds me more than you dream to
+find you never have tried to make any reparation to a woman of that
+kind—so trusting, so apt to be run away with by her feelings—poor
+little fool, so much the worse for her!”
+
+“Why, you talk like a madman! You took her away from me, did you not?”
+
+“Picking up what another throws down can scarcely be called ‘taking
+away.’ However, we shall not agree too well upon that subject, so we
+had better part.”
+
+“But I am quite certain you misapprehend something most grievously,”
+said Stephen, shaken to the bottom of his heart. “What have I done;
+tell me? I have lost Elfride, but is that such a sin?”
+
+“Was it her doing, or yours?”
+
+“Was what?”
+
+“That you parted.”
+
+“I will tell you honestly. It was hers entirely, entirely.”
+
+“What was her reason?”
+
+“I can hardly say. But I’ll tell the story without reserve.”
+
+Stephen until to-day had unhesitatingly held that she grew tired of him
+and turned to Knight; but he did not like to advance the statement now,
+or even to think the thought. To fancy otherwise accorded better with
+the hope to which Knight’s estrangement had given birth: that love for
+his friend was not the direct cause, but a result of her suspension of
+love for himself.
+
+“Such a matter must not be allowed to breed discord between us,” Knight
+returned, relapsing into a manner which concealed all his true feeling,
+as if confidence now was intolerable. “I do see that your reticence
+towards me in the vault may have been dictated by prudential
+considerations.” He concluded artificially, “It was a strange thing
+altogether; but not of much importance, I suppose, at this distance of
+time; and it does not concern me now, though I don’t mind hearing your
+story.”
+
+These words from Knight, uttered with such an air of renunciation and
+apparent indifference, prompted Smith to speak on—perhaps with a little
+complacency—of his old secret engagement to Elfride. He told the
+details of its origin, and the peremptory words and actions of her
+father to extinguish their love.
+
+Knight persevered in the tone and manner of a disinterested outsider.
+It had become more than ever imperative to screen his emotions from
+Stephen’s eye; the young man would otherwise be less frank, and their
+meeting would be again embittered. What was the use of untoward
+candour?
+
+Stephen had now arrived at the point in his ingenuous narrative where
+he left the vicarage because of her father’s manner. Knight’s interest
+increased. Their love seemed so innocent and childlike thus far.
+
+“It is a nice point in casuistry,” he observed, “to decide whether you
+were culpable or not in not telling Swancourt that your friends were
+parishioners of his. It was only human nature to hold your tongue under
+the circumstances. Well, what was the result of your dismissal by him?”
+
+“That we agreed to be secretly faithful. And to insure this we thought
+we would marry.”
+
+Knight’s suspense and agitation rose higher when Stephen entered upon
+this phase of the subject.
+
+“Do you mind telling on?” he said, steadying his manner of speech.
+
+“Oh, not at all.”
+
+Then Stephen gave in full the particulars of the meeting with Elfride
+at the railway station; the necessity they were under of going to
+London, unless the ceremony were to be postponed. The long journey of
+the afternoon and evening; her timidity and revulsion of feeling; its
+culmination on reaching London; the crossing over to the down-platform
+and their immediate departure again, solely in obedience to her wish;
+the journey all night; their anxious watching for the dawn; their
+arrival at St. Launce’s at last—were detailed. And he told how a
+village woman named Jethway was the only person who recognized them,
+either going or coming; and how dreadfully this terrified Elfride. He
+told how he waited in the fields whilst this then reproachful
+sweetheart went for her pony, and how the last kiss he ever gave her
+was given a mile out of the town, on the way to Endelstow.
+
+These things Stephen related with a will. He believed that in doing so
+he established word by word the reasonableness of his claim to Elfride.
+
+“Curse her! curse that woman!—that miserable letter that parted us! O
+God!”
+
+Knight began pacing the room again, and uttered this at further end.
+
+“What did you say?” said Stephen, turning round.
+
+“Say? Did I say anything? Oh, I was merely thinking about your story,
+and the oddness of my having a fancy for the same woman afterwards. And
+that now I—I have forgotten her almost; and neither of us care about
+her, except just as a friend, you know, eh?”
+
+Knight still continued at the further end of the room, somewhat in
+shadow.
+
+“Exactly,” said Stephen, inwardly exultant, for he was really deceived
+by Knight’s off-hand manner.
+
+Yet he was deceived less by the completeness of Knight’s disguise than
+by the persuasive power which lay in the fact that Knight had never
+before deceived him in anything. So this supposition that his companion
+had ceased to love Elfride was an enormous lightening of the weight
+which had turned the scale against him.
+
+“Admitting that Elfride COULD love another man after you,” said the
+elder, under the same varnish of careless criticism, “she was none the
+worse for that experience.”
+
+“The worse? Of course she was none the worse.”
+
+“Did you ever think it a wild and thoughtless thing for her to do?”
+
+“Indeed, I never did,” said Stephen. “I persuaded her. She saw no harm
+in it until she decided to return, nor did I; nor was there, except to
+the extent of indiscretion.”
+
+“Directly she thought it was wrong she would go no further?”
+
+“That was it. I had just begun to think it wrong too.”
+
+“Such a childish escapade might have been misrepresented by any
+evil-disposed person, might it not?”
+
+“It might; but I never heard that it was. Nobody who really knew all
+the circumstances would have done otherwise than smile. If all the
+world had known it, Elfride would still have remained the only one who
+thought her action a sin. Poor child, she always persisted in thinking
+so, and was frightened more than enough.”
+
+“Stephen, do you love her now?”
+
+“Well, I like her; I always shall, you know,” he said evasively, and
+with all the strategy love suggested. “But I have not seen her for so
+long that I can hardly be expected to love her. Do you love her still?”
+
+“How shall I answer without being ashamed? What fickle beings we men
+are, Stephen! Men may love strongest for a while, but women love
+longest. I used to love her—in my way, you know.”
+
+“Yes, I understand. Ah, and I used to love her in my way. In fact, I
+loved her a good deal at one time; but travel has a tendency to
+obliterate early fancies.”
+
+“It has—it has, truly.”
+
+Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in this conversation was the
+circumstance that, though each interlocutor had at first his suspicions
+of the other’s abiding passion awakened by several little acts, neither
+would allow himself to see that his friend might now be speaking
+deceitfully as well as he.
+
+“Stephen.” resumed Knight, “now that matters are smooth between us, I
+think I must leave you. You won’t mind my hurrying off to my quarters?”
+
+“You’ll stay to some sort of supper surely? didn’t you come to dinner!”
+
+“You must really excuse me this once.”
+
+“Then you’ll drop in to breakfast to-morrow.”
+
+“I shall be rather pressed for time.”
+
+“An early breakfast, which shall interfere with nothing?”
+
+“I’ll come,” said Knight, with as much readiness as it was possible to
+graft upon a huge stock of reluctance. “Yes, early; eight o’clock say,
+as we are under the same roof.”
+
+“Any time you like. Eight it shall be.”
+
+And Knight left him. To wear a mask, to dissemble his feelings as he
+had in their late miserable conversation, was such torture that he
+could support it no longer. It was the first time in Knight’s life that
+he had ever been so entirely the player of a part. And the man he had
+thus deceived was Stephen, who had docilely looked up to him from youth
+as a superior of unblemished integrity.
+
+He went to bed, and allowed the fever of his excitement to rage
+uncontrolled. Stephen—it was only he who was the rival—only Stephen!
+There was an anti-climax of absurdity which Knight, wretched and
+conscience-stricken as he was, could not help recognizing. Stephen was
+but a boy to him. Where the great grief lay was in perceiving that the
+very innocence of Elfride in reading her little fault as one so grave
+was what had fatally misled him. Had Elfride, with any degree of
+coolness, asserted that she had done no harm, the poisonous breath of
+the dead Mrs. Jethway would have been inoperative. Why did he not make
+his little docile girl tell more? If on that subject he had only
+exercised the imperativeness customary with him on others, all might
+have been revealed. It smote his heart like a switch when he remembered
+how gently she had borne his scourging speeches, never answering him
+with a single reproach, only assuring him of her unbounded love.
+
+Knight blessed Elfride for her sweetness, and forgot her fault. He
+pictured with a vivid fancy those fair summer scenes with her. He again
+saw her as at their first meeting, timid at speaking, yet in her
+eagerness to be explanatory borne forward almost against her will. How
+she would wait for him in green places, without showing any of the
+ordinary womanly affectations of indifference! How proud she was to be
+seen walking with him, bearing legibly in her eyes the thought that he
+was the greatest genius in the world!
+
+He formed a resolution; and after that could make pretence of slumber
+no longer. Rising and dressing himself, he sat down and waited for day.
+
+That night Stephen was restless too. Not because of the unwontedness of
+a return to English scenery; not because he was about to meet his
+parents, and settle down for awhile to English cottage life. He was
+indulging in dreams, and for the nonce the warehouses of Bombay and the
+plains and forts of Poonah were but a shadow’s shadow. His dream was
+based on this one atom of fact: Elfride and Knight had become
+separated, and their engagement was as if it had never been. Their
+rupture must have occurred soon after Stephen’s discovery of the fact
+of their union; and, Stephen went on to think, what so probable as that
+a return of her errant affection to himself was the cause?
+
+Stephen’s opinions in this matter were those of a lover, and not the
+balanced judgment of an unbiassed spectator. His naturally sanguine
+spirit built hope upon hope, till scarcely a doubt remained in his mind
+that her lingering tenderness for him had in some way been perceived by
+Knight, and had provoked their parting.
+
+To go and see Elfride was the suggestion of impulses it was impossible
+to withstand. At any rate, to run down from St. Launce’s to Castle
+Poterel, a distance of less than twenty miles, and glide like a ghost
+about their old haunts, making stealthy inquiries about her, would be a
+fascinating way of passing the first spare hours after reaching home on
+the day after the morrow.
+
+He was now a richer man than heretofore, standing on his own bottom;
+and the definite position in which he had rooted himself nullified old
+local distinctions. He had become illustrious, even sanguine clarus,
+judging from the tone of the worthy Mayor of St. Launce’s.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIX
+
+
+“Each to the loved one’s side.”
+
+
+The friends and rivals breakfasted together the next morning. Not a
+word was said on either side upon the matter discussed the previous
+evening so glibly and so hollowly. Stephen was absorbed the greater
+part of the time in wishing he were not forced to stay in town yet
+another day.
+
+“I don’t intend to leave for St. Launce’s till to-morrow, as you know,”
+he said to Knight at the end of the meal. “What are you going to do
+with yourself to-day?”
+
+“I have an engagement just before ten,” said Knight deliberately; “and
+after that time I must call upon two or three people.”
+
+“I’ll look for you this evening,” said Stephen.
+
+“Yes, do. You may as well come and dine with me; that is, if we can
+meet. I may not sleep in London to-night; in fact, I am absolutely
+unsettled as to my movements yet. However, the first thing I am going
+to do is to get my baggage shifted from this place to Bede’s Inn.
+Good-bye for the present. I’ll write, you know, if I can’t meet you.”
+
+It now wanted a quarter to nine o’clock. When Knight was gone, Stephen
+felt yet more impatient of the circumstance that another day would have
+to drag itself away wearily before he could set out for that spot of
+earth whereon a soft thought of him might perhaps be nourished still.
+On a sudden he admitted to his mind the possibility that the engagement
+he was waiting in town to keep might be postponed without much harm.
+
+It was no sooner perceived than attempted. Looking at his watch, he
+found it wanted forty minutes to the departure of the ten o’clock train
+from Paddington, which left him a surplus quarter of an hour before it
+would be necessary to start for the station.
+
+Scribbling a hasty note or two—one putting off the business meeting,
+another to Knight apologizing for not being able to see him in the
+evening—paying his bill, and leaving his heavier luggage to follow him
+by goods-train, he jumped into a cab and rattled off to the Great
+Western Station.
+
+Shortly afterwards he took his seat in the railway carriage.
+
+The guard paused on his whistle, to let into the next compartment to
+Smith’s a man of whom Stephen had caught but a hasty glimpse as he ran
+across the platform at the last moment.
+
+Smith sank back into the carriage, stilled by perplexity. The man was
+like Knight—astonishingly like him. Was it possible it could be he? To
+have got there he must have driven like the wind to Bede’s Inn, and
+hardly have alighted before starting again. No, it could not be he;
+that was not his way of doing things.
+
+During the early part of the journey Stephen Smith’s thoughts busied
+themselves till his brain seemed swollen. One subject was concerning
+his own approaching actions. He was a day earlier than his letter to
+his parents had stated, and his arrangement with them had been that
+they should meet him at Plymouth; a plan which pleased the worthy
+couple beyond expression. Once before the same engagement had been
+made, which he had then quashed by ante-dating his arrival. This time
+he would go right on to Castle Boterel; ramble in that well-known
+neighbourhood during the evening and next morning, making inquiries;
+and return to Plymouth to meet them as arranged—a contrivance which
+would leave their cherished project undisturbed, relieving his own
+impatience also.
+
+At Chippenham there was a little waiting, and some loosening and
+attaching of carriages.
+
+Stephen looked out. At the same moment another man’s head emerged from
+the adjoining window. Each looked in the other’s face.
+
+Knight and Stephen confronted one another.
+
+“You here!” said the younger man.
+
+“Yes. It seems that you are too,” said Knight, strangely.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The selfishness of love and the cruelty of jealousy were fairly
+exemplified at this moment. Each of the two men looked at his friend as
+he had never looked at him before. Each was TROUBLED at the other’s
+presence.
+
+“I thought you said you were not coming till to-morrow,” remarked
+Knight.
+
+“I did. It was an afterthought to come to-day. This journey was your
+engagement, then?”
+
+“No, it was not. This is an afterthought of mine too. I left a note to
+explain it, and account for my not being able to meet you this evening
+as we arranged.”
+
+“So did I for you.”
+
+“You don’t look well: you did not this morning.”
+
+“I have a headache. You are paler to-day than you were.”
+
+“I, too, have been suffering from headache. We have to wait here a few
+minutes, I think.”
+
+They walked up and down the platform, each one more and more
+embarrassingly concerned with the awkwardness of his friend’s presence.
+They reached the end of the footway, and paused in sheer
+absent-mindedness. Stephen’s vacant eyes rested upon the operations of
+some porters, who were shifting a dark and curious-looking van from the
+rear of the train, to shunt another which was between it and the fore
+part of the train. This operation having been concluded, the two
+friends returned to the side of their carriage.
+
+“Will you come in here?” said Knight, not very warmly.
+
+“I have my rug and portmanteau and umbrella with me: it is rather
+bothering to move now,” said Stephen reluctantly. “Why not you come
+here?”
+
+“I have my traps too. It is hardly worth while to shift them, for I
+shall see you again, you know.”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+And each got into his own place. Just at starting, a man on the
+platform held up his hands and stopped the train.
+
+Stephen looked out to see what was the matter.
+
+One of the officials was exclaiming to another, “That carriage should
+have been attached again. Can’t you see it is for the main line? Quick!
+What fools there are in the world!”
+
+“What a confounded nuisance these stoppages are!” exclaimed Knight
+impatiently, looking out from his compartment. “What is it?”
+
+“That singular carriage we saw has been unfastened from our train by
+mistake, it seems,” said Stephen.
+
+He was watching the process of attaching it. The van or carriage, which
+he now recognized as having seen at Paddington before they started, was
+rich and solemn rather than gloomy in aspect. It seemed to be quite
+new, and of modern design, and its impressive personality attracted the
+notice of others beside himself. He beheld it gradually wheeled forward
+by two men on each side: slower and more sadly it seemed to approach:
+then a slight concussion, and they were connected with it, and off
+again.
+
+Stephen sat all the afternoon pondering upon the reason of Knight’s
+unexpected reappearance. Was he going as far as Castle Boterel? If so,
+he could only have one object in view—a visit to Elfride. And what an
+idea it seemed!
+
+At Plymouth Smith partook of a little refreshment, and then went round
+to the side from which the train started for Camelton, the new station
+near Castle Boterel and Endelstow.
+
+Knight was already there.
+
+Stephen walked up and stood beside him without speaking. Two men at
+this moment crept out from among the wheels of the waiting train.
+
+“The carriage is light enough,” said one in a grim tone. “Light as
+vanity; full of nothing.”
+
+“Nothing in size, but a good deal in signification,” said the other, a
+man of brighter mind and manners.
+
+Smith then perceived that to their train was attached that same
+carriage of grand and dark aspect which had haunted them all the way
+from London.
+
+“You are going on, I suppose?” said Knight, turning to Stephen, after
+idly looking at the same object.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“We may as well travel together for the remaining distance, may we
+not?”
+
+“Certainly we will;” and they both entered the same door.
+
+Evening drew on apace. It chanced to be the eve of St. Valentine’s—that
+bishop of blessed memory to youthful lovers—and the sun shone low under
+the rim of a thick hard cloud, decorating the eminences of the
+landscape with crowns of orange fire. As the train changed its
+direction on a curve, the same rays stretched in through the window,
+and coaxed open Knight’s half-closed eyes.
+
+“You will get out at St. Launce’s, I suppose?” he murmured.
+
+“No,” said Stephen, “I am not expected till to-morrow.” Knight was
+silent.
+
+“And you—are you going to Endelstow?” said the younger man pointedly.
+
+“Since you ask, I can do no less than say I am, Stephen,” continued
+Knight slowly, and with more resolution of manner than he had shown all
+the day. “I am going to Endelstow to see if Elfride Swancourt is still
+free; and if so, to ask her to be my wife.”
+
+“So am I,” said Stephen Smith.
+
+“I think you’ll lose your labour,” Knight returned with decision.
+
+“Naturally you do.” There was a strong accent of bitterness in
+Stephen’s voice. “You might have said HOPE instead of THINK,” he added.
+
+“I might have done no such thing. I gave you my opinion. Elfride
+Swancourt may have loved you once, no doubt, but it was when she was so
+young that she hardly knew her own mind.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Stephen laconically. “She knew her mind as well as I
+did. We are the same age. If you hadn’t interfered——”
+
+“Don’t say that—don’t say it, Stephen! How can you make out that I
+interfered? Be just, please!”
+
+“Well,” said his friend, “she was mine before she was yours—you know
+that! And it seemed a hard thing to find you had got her, and that if
+it had not been for you, all might have turned out well for me.”
+Stephen spoke with a swelling heart, and looked out of the window to
+hide the emotion that would make itself visible upon his face.
+
+“It is absurd,” said Knight in a kinder tone, “for you to look at the
+matter in that light. What I tell you is for your good. You naturally
+do not like to realize the truth—that her liking for you was only a
+girl’s first fancy, which has no root ever.”
+
+“It is not true!” said Stephen passionately. “It was you put me out.
+And now you’ll be pushing in again between us, and depriving me of my
+chance again! My right, that’s what it is! How ungenerous of you to
+come anew and try to take her away from me! When you had won her, I did
+not interfere; and you might, I think, Mr. Knight, do by me as I did by
+you!”
+
+“Don’t ‘Mr.’ me; you are as well in the world as I am now.”
+
+“First love is deepest; and that was mine.”
+
+“Who told you that?” said Knight superciliously.
+
+“I had her first love. And it was through me that you and she parted. I
+can guess that well enough.”
+
+“It was. And if I were to explain to you in what way that operated in
+parting us, I should convince you that you do quite wrong in intruding
+upon her—that, as I said at first, your labour will be lost. I don’t
+choose to explain, because the particulars are painful. But if you
+won’t listen to me, go on, for Heaven’s sake. I don’t care what you do,
+my boy.”
+
+“You have no right to domineer over me as you do. Just because, when I
+was a lad, I was accustomed to look up to you as a master, and you
+helped me a little, for which I was grateful to you and have loved you,
+you assume too much now, and step in before me. It is cruel—it is
+unjust—of you to injure me so!”
+
+Knight showed himself keenly hurt at this. “Stephen, those words are
+untrue and unworthy of any man, and they are unworthy of you. You know
+you wrong me. If you have ever profited by any instruction of mine, I
+am only too glad to know it. You know it was given ungrudgingly, and
+that I have never once looked upon it as making you in any way a debtor
+to me.”
+
+Stephen’s naturally gentle nature was touched, and it was in a troubled
+voice that he said, “Yes, yes. I am unjust in that—I own it.”
+
+“This is St. Launce’s Station, I think. Are you going to get out?”
+
+Knight’s manner of returning to the matter in hand drew Stephen again
+into himself. “No; I told you I was going to Endelstow,” he resolutely
+replied.
+
+Knight’s features became impassive, and he said no more. The train
+continued rattling on, and Stephen leant back in his corner and closed
+his eyes. The yellows of evening had turned to browns, the dusky shades
+thickened, and a flying cloud of dust occasionally stroked the
+window—borne upon a chilling breeze which blew from the north-east. The
+previously gilded but now dreary hills began to lose their daylight
+aspects of rotundity, and to become black discs vandyked against the
+sky, all nature wearing the cloak that six o’clock casts over the
+landscape at this time of the year.
+
+Stephen started up in bewilderment after a long stillness, and it was
+some time before he recollected himself.
+
+“Well, how real, how real!” he exclaimed, brushing his hand across his
+eyes.
+
+“What is?” said Knight.
+
+“That dream. I fell asleep for a few minutes, and have had a dream—the
+most vivid I ever remember.”
+
+He wearily looked out into the gloom. They were now drawing near to
+Camelton. The lighting of the lamps was perceptible through the veil of
+evening—each flame starting into existence at intervals, and blinking
+weakly against the gusts of wind.
+
+“What did you dream?” said Knight moodily.
+
+“Oh, nothing to be told. ’Twas a sort of incubus. There is never
+anything in dreams.”
+
+“I hardly supposed there was.”
+
+“I know that. However, what I so vividly dreamt was this, since you
+would like to hear. It was the brightest of bright mornings at East
+Endelstow Church, and you and I stood by the font. Far away in the
+chancel Lord Luxellian was standing alone, cold and impassive, and
+utterly unlike his usual self: but I knew it was he. Inside the altar
+rail stood a strange clergyman with his book open. He looked up and
+said to Lord Luxellian, ‘Where’s the bride?’ Lord Luxellian said,
+‘There’s no bride.’ At that moment somebody came in at the door, and I
+knew her to be Lady Luxellian who died. He turned and said to her, ‘I
+thought you were in the vault below us; but that could have only been a
+dream of mine. Come on.’ Then she came on. And in brushing between us
+she chilled me so with cold that I exclaimed, ‘The life is gone out of
+me!’ and, in the way of dreams, I awoke. But here we are at Camelton.”
+
+They were slowly entering the station.
+
+“What are you going to do?” said Knight. “Do you really intend to call
+on the Swancourts?”
+
+“By no means. I am going to make inquiries first. I shall stay at the
+Luxellian Arms to-night. You will go right on to Endelstow, I suppose,
+at once?”
+
+“I can hardly do that at this time of the day. Perhaps you are not
+aware that the family—her father, at any rate—is at variance with me as
+much as with you.
+
+“I didn’t know it.”
+
+“And that I cannot rush into the house as an old friend any more than
+you can. Certainly I have the privileges of a distant relationship,
+whatever they may be.”
+
+Knight let down the window, and looked ahead. “There are a great many
+people at the station,” he said. “They seem all to be on the look-out
+for us.”
+
+When the train stopped, the half-estranged friends could perceive by
+the lamplight that the assemblage of idlers enclosed as a kernel a
+group of men in black cloaks. A side gate in the platform railing was
+open, and outside this stood a dark vehicle, which they could not at
+first characterize. Then Knight saw on its upper part forms against the
+sky like cedars by night, and knew the vehicle to be a hearse. Few
+people were at the carriage doors to meet the passengers—the majority
+had congregated at this upper end. Knight and Stephen alighted, and
+turned for a moment in the same direction.
+
+The sombre van, which had accompanied them all day from London, now
+began to reveal that their destination was also its own. It had been
+drawn up exactly opposite the open gate. The bystanders all fell back,
+forming a clear lane from the gateway to the van, and the men in cloaks
+entered the latter conveyance.
+
+“They are labourers, I fancy,” said Stephen. “Ah, it is strange; but I
+recognize three of them as Endelstow men. Rather remarkable this.”
+
+Presently they began to come out, two and two; and under the rays of
+the lamp they were seen to bear between them a light-coloured coffin of
+satin-wood, brightly polished, and without a nail. The eight men took
+the burden upon their shoulders, and slowly crossed with it over to the
+gate.
+
+Knight and Stephen went outside, and came close to the procession as it
+moved off. A carriage belonging to the cortege turned round close to a
+lamp. The rays shone in upon the face of the vicar of Endelstow, Mr.
+Swancourt—looking many years older than when they had last seen him.
+Knight and Stephen involuntarily drew back.
+
+Knight spoke to a bystander. “What has Mr. Swancourt to do with that
+funeral?”
+
+“He is the lady’s father,” said the bystander.
+
+“What lady’s father?” said Knight, in a voice so hollow that the man
+stared at him.
+
+“The father of the lady in the coffin. She died in London, you know,
+and has been brought here by this train. She is to be taken home
+to-night, and buried to-morrow.”
+
+Knight stood staring blindly at where the hearse had been; as if he saw
+it, or some one, there. Then he turned, and beheld the lithe form of
+Stephen bowed down like that of an old man. He took his young friend’s
+arm, and led him away from the light.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XL
+
+
+“Welcome, proud lady.”
+
+
+Half an hour has passed. Two miserable men are wandering in the
+darkness up the miles of road from Camelton to Endelstow.
+
+“Has she broken her heart?” said Henry Knight. “Can it be that I have
+killed her? I was bitter with her, Stephen, and she has died! And may
+God have NO mercy upon me!”
+
+“How can you have killed her more than I?”
+
+“Why, I went away from her—stole away almost—and didn’t tell her I
+should not come again; and at that last meeting I did not kiss her
+once, but let her miserably go. I have been a fool—a fool! I wish the
+most abject confession of it before crowds of my countrymen could in
+any way make amends to my darling for the intense cruelty I have shown
+her!”
+
+“YOUR darling!” said Stephen, with a sort of laugh. “Any man can say
+that, I suppose; any man can. I know this, she was MY darling before
+she was yours; and after too. If anybody has a right to call her his
+own, it is I.”
+
+“You talk like a man in the dark; which is what you are. Did she ever
+do anything for you? Risk her name, for instance, for you?”
+
+Yes, she did,” said Stephen emphatically.
+
+“Not entirely. Did she ever live for you—prove she could not live
+without you—laugh and weep for you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Never! Did she ever risk her life for you—no! My darling did for me.”
+
+“Then it was in kindness only. When did she risk her life for you?”
+
+“To save mine on the cliff yonder. The poor child was with me looking
+at the approach of the Puffin steamboat, and I slipped down. We both
+had a narrow escape. I wish we had died there!”
+
+“Ah, but wait,” Stephen pleaded with wet eyes. “She went on that cliff
+to see me arrive home: she had promised it. She told me she would
+months before. And would she have gone there if she had not cared for
+me at all?”
+
+“You have an idea that Elfride died for you, no doubt,” said Knight,
+with a mournful sarcasm too nerveless to support itself.
+
+“Never mind. If we find that—that she died yours, I’ll say no more
+ever.”
+
+“And if we find she died yours, I’ll say no more.”
+
+“Very well—so it shall be.”
+
+The dark clouds into which the sun had sunk had begun to drop rain in
+an increasing volume.
+
+“Can we wait somewhere here till this shower is over?” said Stephen
+desultorily.
+
+“As you will. But it is not worth while. We’ll hear the particulars,
+and return. Don’t let people know who we are. I am not much now.”
+
+They had reached a point at which the road branched into two—just
+outside the west village, one fork of the diverging routes passing into
+the latter place, the other stretching on to East Endelstow. Having
+come some of the distance by the footpath, they now found that the
+hearse was only a little in advance of them.
+
+“I fancy it has turned off to East Endelstow. Can you see?”
+
+“I cannot. You must be mistaken.”
+
+Knight and Stephen entered the village. A bar of fiery light lay across
+the road, proceeding from the half-open door of a smithy, in which
+bellows were heard blowing and a hammer ringing. The rain had
+increased, and they mechanically turned for shelter towards the warm
+and cosy scene.
+
+Close at their heels came another man, without over-coat or umbrella,
+and with a parcel under his arm.
+
+“A wet evening,” he said to the two friends, and passed by them. They
+stood in the outer penthouse, but the man went in to the fire.
+
+The smith ceased his blowing, and began talking to the man who had
+entered.
+
+“I have walked all the way from Camelton,” said the latter. “Was
+obliged to come to-night, you know.”
+
+He held the parcel, which was a flat one, towards the firelight, to
+learn if the rain had penetrated it. Resting it edgewise on the forge,
+he supported it perpendicularly with one hand, wiping his face with the
+handkerchief he held in the other.
+
+“I suppose you know what I’ve got here?” he observed to the smith.
+
+“No, I don’t,” said the smith, pausing again on his bellows.
+
+“As the rain’s not over, I’ll show you,” said the bearer.
+
+He laid the thin and broad package, which had acute angles in different
+directions, flat upon the anvil, and the smith blew up the fire to give
+him more light. First, after untying the package, a sheet of brown
+paper was removed: this was laid flat. Then he unfolded a piece of
+baize: this also he spread flat on the paper. The third covering was a
+wrapper of tissue paper, which was spread out in its turn. The
+enclosure was revealed, and he held it up for the smith’s inspection.
+
+“Oh—I see!” said the smith, kindling with a chastened interest, and
+drawing close. “Poor young lady—ah, terrible melancholy thing—so soon
+too!”
+
+Knight and Stephen turned their heads and looked.
+
+“And what’s that?” continued the smith.
+
+“That’s the coronet—beautifully finished, isn’t it? Ah, that cost some
+money!”
+
+“’Tis as fine a bit of metal work as ever I see—that ’tis.”
+
+“It came from the same people as the coffin, you know, but was not
+ready soon enough to be sent round to the house in London yesterday.
+I’ve got to fix it on this very night.”
+
+The carefully-packed articles were a coffin-plate and coronet.
+
+Knight and Stephen came forward. The undertaker’s man, on seeing them
+look for the inscription, civilly turned it round towards them, and
+each read, almost at one moment, by the ruddy light of the coals:
+
+E L F R I D E,
+Wife of Spenser Hugo Luxellian,
+Fifteenth Baron Luxellian:
+Died February 10, 18—.
+
+
+They read it, and read it, and read it again—Stephen and Knight—as if
+animated by one soul. Then Stephen put his hand upon Knight’s arm, and
+they retired from the yellow glow, further, further, till the chill
+darkness enclosed them round, and the quiet sky asserted its presence
+overhead as a dim grey sheet of blank monotony.
+
+“Where shall we go?” said Stephen.
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+A long silence ensued....“Elfride married!” said Stephen then in a thin
+whisper, as if he feared to let the assertion loose on the world.
+
+“False,” whispered Knight.
+
+“And dead. Denied us both. I hate ‘false’—I hate it!”
+
+Knight made no answer.
+
+Nothing was heard by them now save the slow measurement of time by
+their beating pulses, the soft touch of the dribbling rain upon their
+clothes, and the low purr of the blacksmith’s bellows hard by.
+
+“Shall we follow Elfie any further?” Stephen said.
+
+“No: let us leave her alone. She is beyond our love, and let her be
+beyond our reproach. Since we don’t know half the reasons that made her
+do as she did, Stephen, how can we say, even now, that she was not pure
+and true in heart?” Knight’s voice had now become mild and gentle as a
+child’s. He went on: “Can we call her ambitious? No. Circumstance has,
+as usual, overpowered her purposes—fragile and delicate as she—liable
+to be overthrown in a moment by the coarse elements of accident. I know
+that’s it,—don’t you?”
+
+“It may be—it must be. Let us go on.”
+
+They began to bend their steps towards Castle Boterel, whither they had
+sent their bags from Camelton. They wandered on in silence for many
+minutes. Stephen then paused, and lightly put his hand within Knight’s
+arm.
+
+“I wonder how she came to die,” he said in a broken whisper. “Shall we
+return and learn a little more?”
+
+They turned back again, and entering Endelstow a second time, came to a
+door which was standing open. It was that of an inn called the Welcome
+Home, and the house appeared to have been recently repaired and
+entirely modernized. The name too was not that of the same landlord as
+formerly, but Martin Cannister’s.
+
+Knight and Smith entered. The inn was quite silent, and they followed
+the passage till they reached the kitchen, where a huge fire was
+burning, which roared up the chimney, and sent over the floor, ceiling,
+and newly-whitened walls a glare so intense as to make the candle quite
+a secondary light. A woman in a white apron and black gown was standing
+there alone behind a cleanly-scrubbed deal table. Stephen first, and
+Knight afterwards, recognized her as Unity, who had been parlour-maid
+at the vicarage and young lady’s-maid at the Crags.
+
+“Unity,” said Stephen softly, “don’t you know me?”
+
+She looked inquiringly a moment, and her face cleared up.
+
+“Mr. Smith—ay, that it is!” she said. “And that’s Mr. Knight. I beg you
+to sit down. Perhaps you know that since I saw you last I have married
+Martin Cannister.”
+
+“How long have you been married?”
+
+“About five months. We were married the same day that my dear Miss
+Elfie became Lady Luxellian.” Tears appeared in Unity’s eyes, and
+filled them, and fell down her cheek, in spite of efforts to the
+contrary.
+
+The pain of the two men in resolutely controlling themselves when thus
+exampled to admit relief of the same kind was distressing. They both
+turned their backs and walked a few steps away.
+
+Then Unity said, “Will you go into the parlour, gentlemen?”
+
+“Let us stay here with her,” Knight whispered, and turning said, “No;
+we will sit here. We want to rest and dry ourselves here for a time, if
+you please.”
+
+That evening the sorrowing friends sat with their hostess beside the
+large fire, Knight in the recess formed by the chimney breast, where he
+was in shade. And by showing a little confidence they won hers, and she
+told them what they had stayed to hear—the latter history of poor
+Elfride.
+
+“One day—after you, Mr. Knight, left us for the last time—she was
+missed from the Crags, and her father went after her, and brought her
+home ill. Where she went to, I never knew—but she was very unwell for
+weeks afterwards. And she said to me that she didn’t care what became
+of her, and she wished she could die. When she was better, I said she
+would live to be married yet, and she said then, ‘Yes; I’ll do anything
+for the benefit of my family, so as to turn my useless life to some
+practical account.’ Well, it began like this about Lord Luxellian
+courting her. The first Lady Luxellian had died, and he was in great
+trouble because the little girls were left motherless. After a while
+they used to come and see her in their little black frocks, for they
+liked her as well or better than their own mother—-that’s true. They
+used to call her ‘little mamma.’ These children made her a shade
+livelier, but she was not the girl she had been—I could see that—and
+she grew thinner a good deal. Well, my lord got to ask the Swancourts
+oftener and oftener to dinner—nobody else of his acquaintance—and at
+last the vicar’s family were backwards and forwards at all hours of the
+day. Well, people say that the little girls asked their father to let
+Miss Elfride come and live with them, and that he said perhaps he would
+if they were good children. However, the time went on, and one day I
+said, ‘Miss Elfride, you don’t look so well as you used to; and though
+nobody else seems to notice it I do.’ She laughed a little, and said,
+‘I shall live to be married yet, as you told me.’
+
+“‘Shall you, miss? I am glad to hear that,’ I said.
+
+“‘Whom do you think I am going to be married to?’ she said again.
+
+“‘Mr. Knight, I suppose,’ said I.
+
+“‘Oh!’ she cried, and turned off so white, and afore I could get to her
+she had sunk down like a heap of clothes, and fainted away. Well, then,
+she came to herself after a time, and said, ‘Unity, now we’ll go on
+with our conversation.’
+
+“‘Better not to-day, miss,’ I said.
+
+“‘Yes, we will,’ she said. ‘Whom do you think I am going to be married
+to?’
+
+“‘I don’t know,’ I said this time.
+
+“‘Guess,’ she said.
+
+“‘’Tisn’t my lord, is it?’ says I.
+
+“‘Yes, ’tis,’ says she, in a sick wild way.
+
+“‘But he don’t come courting much,’ I said.
+
+‘“Ah! you don’t know,’ she said, and told me ’twas going to be in
+October. After that she freshened up a bit—whether ’twas with the
+thought of getting away from home or not, I don’t know. For, perhaps, I
+may as well speak plainly, and tell you that her home was no home to
+her now. Her father was bitter to her and harsh upon her; and though
+Mrs. Swancourt was well enough in her way, ’twas a sort of cold
+politeness that was not worth much, and the little thing had a worrying
+time of it altogether. About a month before the wedding, she and my
+lord and the two children used to ride about together upon horseback,
+and a very pretty sight they were; and if you’ll believe me, I never
+saw him once with her unless the children were with her too—which made
+the courting so strange-looking. Ay, and my lord is so handsome, you
+know, so that at last I think she rather liked him; and I have seen her
+smile and blush a bit at things he said. He wanted her the more because
+the children did, for everybody could see that she would be a most
+tender mother to them, and friend and playmate too. And my lord is not
+only handsome, but a splendid courter, and up to all the ways o’t. So
+he made her the beautifullest presents; ah, one I can mind—a lovely
+bracelet, with diamonds and emeralds. Oh, how red her face came when
+she saw it! The old roses came back to her cheeks for a minute or two
+then. I helped dress her the day we both were married—it was the last
+service I did her, poor child! When she was ready, I ran upstairs and
+slipped on my own wedding gown, and away they went, and away went
+Martin and I; and no sooner had my lord and my lady been married than
+the parson married us. It was a very quiet pair of weddings—hardly
+anybody knew it. Well, hope will hold its own in a young heart, if so
+be it can; and my lady freshened up a bit, for my lord was SO handsome
+and kind.”
+
+“How came she to die—and away from home?” murmured Knight.
+
+“Don’t you see, sir, she fell off again afore they’d been married long,
+and my lord took her abroad for change of scene. They were coming home,
+and had got as far as London, when she was taken very ill and couldn’t
+be moved, and there she died.”
+
+“Was he very fond of her?”
+
+“What, my lord? Oh, he was!”
+
+“VERY fond of her?”
+
+“VERY, beyond everything. Not suddenly, but by slow degrees. ’Twas her
+nature to win people more when they knew her well. He’d have died for
+her, I believe. Poor my lord, he’s heart-broken now!”
+
+“The funeral is to-morrow?”
+
+“Yes; my husband is now at the vault with the masons, opening the steps
+and cleaning down the walls.”
+
+The next day two men walked up the familiar valley from Castle Boterel
+to East Endelstow Church. And when the funeral was over, and every one
+had left the lawn-like churchyard, the pair went softly down the steps
+of the Luxellian vault, and under the low-groined arches they had
+beheld once before, lit up then as now. In the new niche of the crypt
+lay a rather new coffin, which had lost some of its lustre, and a newer
+coffin still, bright and untarnished in the slightest degree.
+
+Beside the latter was the dark form of a man, kneeling on the damp
+floor, his body flung across the coffin, his hands clasped, and his
+whole frame seemingly given up in utter abandonment to grief. He was
+still young—younger, perhaps, than Knight—and even now showed how
+graceful was his figure and symmetrical his build. He murmured a prayer
+half aloud, and was quite unconscious that two others were standing
+within a few yards of him.
+
+Knight and Stephen had advanced to where they once stood beside Elfride
+on the day all three had met there, before she had herself gone down
+into silence like her ancestors, and shut her bright blue eyes for
+ever. Not until then did they see the kneeling figure in the dim light.
+Knight instantly recognized the mourner as Lord Luxellian, the bereaved
+husband of Elfride.
+
+They felt themselves to be intruders. Knight pressed Stephen back, and
+they silently withdrew as they had entered.
+
+“Come away,” he said, in a broken voice. “We have no right to be there.
+Another stands before us—nearer to her than we!”
+
+And side by side they both retraced their steps down the grey still
+valley to Castle Boterel.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF BLUE EYES ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
+Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
+on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg™ License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
+other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
+Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
+provided that:
+
+• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
+  works.
+
+• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you “AS-IS”, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
+
+Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™'s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+