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 protege’, 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 yon 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