A pair of blue eyes
by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #224 · 753,046 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A pair of blue eyes
Author: Thomas Hardy
Release date: July 11, 2008 [eBook #224]
Most recently updated: April 11, 2023
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/224
Credits: 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
he
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