'Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff
their ears with nowadays - like the governor of a steam-engine, or
a pair of scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists'
palettes, and compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what
besides.'
'No; they were not one of those things. So pretty - like this,'
she said with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her
parasol an enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a
scale that would have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
'Yes, very pretty - very,' said Knight dryly. 'How did you come to
lose such a precious pair of articles?'
'I only lost one - nobody ever loses both at the same time.'
She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of
the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith
was attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her
confusion was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been
awkward, and received no direct answer.
Knight seemed not to notice her manner.
'Oh, nobody ever loses both - I see. And certainly the fact that
it was a case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your
choice.'
'As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don't now,' she
said, looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And
coming gallantly to her own rescue, 'If I really seem vain, it is
that I am only vain in my ways - not in my heart. The worst women
are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.'
'An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more
objectionable of the two,' said Knight.
'Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell
me.'
'I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of
life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of
passing through it.'
'Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to
make her life, in its higher sense, a failure?'
'Nobody's life is altogether a failure.'
'Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly
selected and commonplace,' she said impatiently. 'Because I utter
commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace
thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of
rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and
the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the
coarse triteness of the form.'
'Very well; I'll believe that ingenious representation. As to the
subject in hand - lives which are failures - you need not trouble
yourself. Anybody's life may be just as romantic and strange and
interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the
difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If
a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of
it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had
as much in it as that of a great man who has done his great deed.
It is whimsical of the world to hold that particulars of how a lad
went to school and so on should be as an interesting romance or as
nothing to them, precisely in proportion to his after renown.'
They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself.
Their shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of
becoming obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the
opposite direction which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
'I consider my life to some extent a failure,' said Knight again
after a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic
shadows.
'You! How?'
'I don't precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.'
'Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel
that you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?'
'Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are
conscious of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it
seems, there is nothing truer than that people who have always
gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of
going right as those do who have gone wrong. However, it is not
desirable for me to chill your summer-time by going into this.'
'You have not told me even now if I am really vain.'
'If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you'll think I
don't mean it,' he replied, looking curiously into her face.
'Ah, well,' she replied, with a little breath of distress, '"That
which is exceeding deep, who will find it out?" I suppose I must
take you as I do the Bible - find out and understand all I can; and
on the strength of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple
faith. Think me vain, if you will. Worldly greatness requires so
much littleness to grow up in, that an infirmity more or less is
not a matter for regret.'
'As regards women, I can't say,' answered Knight carelessly; 'but
it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to
get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a
man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for
vanity.'
'No, no, I don't do that,' she said regretfully.
Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you
have lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true
self - the cynic you have been this evening, or the nice
philosopher you were up to to-night?'
'Ah, which? You know as well as I.'
Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico
till the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said
idly -
'There's a bright star exactly over me.'
'Each bright star is overhead somewhere.'
'Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?' and she pointed
with her finger.
'That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde
Islands.'
'And that?'
'Looking down upon the source of the Nile.'
'And that lonely quiet-looking one?'
'He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator
for his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that
we have almost rolled away from, is in India - over the head of a
young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our
zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as
marking where his true love dwells.'
Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She
could not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show
unconsciousness.
'The star is over MY head,' she said with hesitation.
'Or anybody else's in England.'
'Oh yes, I see:' she breathed her relief.
'His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don't know
them, though I have been in correspondence with him for many years
till lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in
love, and then went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very
little of him.'
Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though
Elfride at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in
honesty he had just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the
intention dispersed into silence. There seemed a reproach in
Knight's blind words, and yet she was not able to clearly define
any disloyalty that she had been guilty of.
Chapter XX
'A distant dearness in the hill.'
Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed
over to Cork.
One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and
proportionately weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of
Killarney, rambled amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the
infinite variety of island, hill, and dale there to be found,
listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot; but
altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in
such favoured regions.
Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not
perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious
that her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but
now that she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal
being abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and
Knight was in love.
Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by
ceasing to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew
not: certain he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he
had felt none of that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural
to such severances, seeing how delightful a subject of
contemplation Elfride had been ever since. Had he begun to love
her when she met his eye after her mishap on the tower? He had
simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her whilst standing
on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He had thought
her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that had
sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-
playing anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her
at that time a rather conceited child.
Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that
love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of
the fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the
moment of generation. Not till they were parted, and she had
become sublimated in his memory, could he be said to have even
attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind
did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him,
he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which
had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his
way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to
analysis, he almost trembled at the possible result of the
introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of
his ordinary life. He became restless: then he forgot all
collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking about her.
Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than
with romance.
He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on
coquetry. Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible
translation of favour into suspicion was able to uphold such a
theory. The performance had been too well done to be anything but
real. It had the defects without which nothing is genuine. No
actress of twenty years' standing, no bald-necked lady whose
earliest season 'out' was lost in the discreet mist of evasive
talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as
Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly
make up ingenuousness.
There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance:
spinsters there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some
think only those of the latter. However, Knight had been looked
upon as a bachelor by nature. What was he coming to? It was very
odd to himself to look at his theories on the subject of love, and
reading them now by the full light of a new experience, to see how
much more his sentences meant than he had felt them to mean when
they were written. People often discover the real force of a
trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a chance
adventure; but Knight had never before known the case of a man who
learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.
He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred
in him was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer
in a woman's heart. He had discovered within himself the
condition that if ever he did make up his mind to marry, it must
be on the certainty that no cropping out of inconvenient old
letters, no bow and blush to a mysterious stranger casually met,
should be a possible source of discomposure. Knight's sentiments
were only the ordinary ones of a man of his age who loves
genuinely, perhaps exaggerated a little by his pursuits. When men
first love as lads, it is with the very centre of their hearts,
nothing else being concerned in the operation. With added years,
more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till
at Knight's age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it.
It may as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains
as a gauge of his position is as one determining a ship's
longitude from a light at the mast-head.
Knight argued from Elfride's unwontedness of manner, which was
matter of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of
inference only. Incredules les plus credules. 'Elfride,' he
said, 'had hardly looked upon a man till she saw me.'
He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times
by thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and
how necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to
complete the delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind.
So at the end of the week's absence, which had brought him as far
as Dublin, he resolved to curtail his tour, return to Endelstow,
and commit himself by making a reality of the hypothetical offer
of that Sunday evening.
Notwithstanding that he had concocted a great deal of paper theory
on social amenities and modern manners generally, the special
ounce of practice was wanting, and now for his life Knight could
not recollect whether it was considered correct to give a young
lady personal ornaments before a regular engagement to marry had
been initiated. But the day before leaving Dublin he looked
around anxiously for a high-class jewellery establishment, in
which he purchased what he considered would suit her best.
It was with a most awkward and unwonted feeling that after
entering and closing the door of his room he sat down, opened the
morocco case, and held up each of the fragile bits of gold-work
before his eyes. Many things had become old to the solitary man
of letters, but these were new, and he handled like a child an
outcome of civilization which had never before been touched by his
fingers. A sudden fastidious decision that the pattern chosen
would not suit her after all caused him to rise in a flurry and
tear down the street to change them for others. After a great
deal of trouble in reselecting, during which his mind became so
bewildered that the critical faculty on objects of art seemed to
have vacated his person altogether, Knight carried off another
pair of ear-rings. These remained in his possession till the
afternoon, when, after contemplating them fifty times with a
growing misgiving that the last choice was worse than the first,
he felt that no sleep would visit his pillow till he had improved
upon his previous purchases yet again. In a perfect heat of
vexation with himself for such tergiversation, he went anew to the
shop-door, was absolutely ashamed to enter and give further
trouble, went to another shop, bought a pair at an enormously
increased price, because they seemed the very thing, asked the
goldsmiths if they would take the other pair in exchange, was told
that they could not exchange articles bought of another maker,
paid down the money, and went off with the two pairs in his
possession, wondering what on earth to do with the superfluous
pair. He almost wished he could lose them, or that somebody would
steal them, and was burdened with an interposing sense that, as a
capable man, with true ideas of economy, he must necessarily sell
them somewhere, which he did at last for a mere song. Mingled
with a blank feeling of a whole day being lost to him in running
about the city on this new and extraordinary class of errand, and
of several pounds being lost through his bungling, was a slight
sense of satisfaction that he had emerged for ever from his
antediluvian ignorance on the subject of ladies' jewellery, as
well as secured a truly artistic production at last. During the
remainder of that day he scanned the ornaments of every lady he
met with the profoundly experienced eye of an appraiser.
Next morning Knight was again crossing St. George's Channel - not
returning to London by the Holyhead route as he had originally
intended, but towards Bristol - availing himself of Mr. and Mrs.
Swancourt's invitation to revisit them on his homeward journey.
We flit forward to Elfride.
Woman's ruling passion - to fascinate and influence those more
powerful than she - though operant in Elfride, was decidedly
purposeless. She had wanted her friend Knight's good opinion from
the first: how much more than that elementary ingredient of
friendship she now desired, her fears would hardly allow her to
think. In originally wishing to please the highest class of man
she had ever intimately known, there was no disloyalty to Stephen
Smith. She could not - and few women can - realize the possible
vastness of an issue which has only an insignificant begetting.
Her letters from Stephen were necessarily few, and her sense of
fidelity clung to the last she had received as a wrecked mariner
clings to flotsam. The young girl persuaded herself that she was
glad Stephen had such a right to her hand as he had acquired (in
her eyes) by the elopement. She beguiled herself by saying,
'Perhaps if I had not so committed myself I might fall in love
with Mr. Knight.'
All this made the week of Knight's absence very gloomy and
distasteful to her. She retained Stephen in her prayers, and his
old letters were re-read - as a medicine in reality, though she
deceived herself into the belief that it was as a pleasure.
These letters had grown more and more hopeful. He told her that
he finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of
having removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them.
Then he drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some
day. People would turn their heads and say, 'What a prize he has
won!' She was not to be sad about that wild runaway attempt of
theirs (Elfride had repeatedly said that it grieved her).
Whatever any other person who knew of it might think, he knew well
enough the modesty of her nature. The only reproach was a gentle
one for not having written quite so devotedly during her visit to
London. Her letter had seemed to have a liveliness derived from
other thoughts than thoughts of him.
Knight's intention of an early return to Endelstow having
originally been faint, his promise to do so had been fainter. He
was a man who kept his words well to the rear of his possible
actions. The vicar was rather surprised to see him again so soon:
Mrs. Swancourt was not. Knight found, on meeting them all, after
his arrival had been announced, that they had formed an intention
to go to St. Leonards for a few days at the end of the month.
No satisfactory conjuncture offered itself on this first evening
of his return for presenting Elfride with what he had been at such
pains to procure. He was fastidious in his reading of
opportunities for such an intended act. The next morning chancing
to break fine after a week of cloudy weather, it was proposed and
decided that they should all drive to Barwith Strand, a local lion
which neither Mrs. Swancourt nor Knight had seen. Knight scented
romantic occasions from afar, and foresaw that such a one might be
expected before the coming night.
The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which
hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these
uplands revealed the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white
and a solitary white sail, the whole brimming up to a keen horizon
which lay like a line ruled from hillside to hillside. Then they
rolled down a pass, the chocolate-toned rocks forming a wall on
both sides, from one of which fell a heavy jagged shade over half
the roadway. A spout of fresh water burst from an occasional
crevice, and pattering down upon broad green leaves, ran along as
a rivulet at the bottom. Unkempt locks of heather overhung the
brow of each steep, whence at divers points a bramble swung forth
into mid-air, snatching at their head-dresses like a claw.
They mounted the last crest, and the bay which was to be the end
of their pilgrimage burst upon them. The ocean blueness deepened
its colour as it stretched to the foot of the crags, where it
terminated in a fringe of white - silent at this distance, though
moving and heaving like a counterpane upon a restless sleeper.
The shadowed hollows of the purple and brown rocks would have been
called blue had not that tint been so entirely appropriated by the
water beside them.
The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached,
and an ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions
down to the shore.
Knight found his opportunity. 'I did not forget your wish,' he
began, when they were apart from their friends.
Elfride looked as if she did not understand.
'And I have brought you these,' he continued, awkwardly pulling
out the case, and opening it while holding it towards her.
'O Mr. Knight!' said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively
red; 'I didn't know you had any intention or meaning in what you
said. I thought it a mere supposition. I don't want them.'
A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater
decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. To-morrow
was the day for Stephen's letter.
'But will you not accept them?' Knight returned, feeling less her
master than heretofore.
'I would rather not. They are beautiful - more beautiful than any
I have ever seen,' she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully
at the temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. 'But I
don't want to have them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr.
Knight.'
'No kindness at all,' said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at
this unexpected turn of events.
A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather
wofully at the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to
procure; turning it about and holding it up as if, feeling his
gift to be slighted by her, he were endeavouring to admire it very
much himself.
'Shut them up, and don't let me see them any longer - do!' she said
laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.
'Why, Elfie?'
'Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them.
There, I am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for
not taking them - now.' She kept in the last word for a moment,
intending to imply that her refusal was finite, but somehow the
word slipped out, and undid all the rest.
'You will take them some day?'
'I don't want to.'
'Why don't you want to, Elfride Swancourt?'
'Because I don't. I don't like to take them.'
'I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,' said
Knight. 'Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be
towards me?'
'No, it isn't.'
'What, then? Do you like me?'
Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with
features shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as
regarded her answer.
'I like you pretty well,' she at length murmured mildly.
'Not very much?'
'You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?'
she replied evasively.
'You think me a fogey, I suppose?'
'No, I don't - I mean I do - I don't know what I think you, I mean.
Let us go to papa,' responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried
delivery.
'Well, I'll tell you my object in getting the present,' said
Knight, with a composure intended to remove from her mind any
possible impression of his being what he was - her lover. 'You see
it was the very least I could do in common civility.'
Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.
Knight continued, putting away the case: 'I felt as anybody
naturally would have, you know, that my words on your choice the
other day were invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should
take a practical shape.'
'Oh yes.'
Elfride was sorry - she could not tell why - that he gave such a
legitimate reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the
time a cool motive, which might be stated to anybody without
raising a smile. Had she known they were offered in that spirit,
she would certainly have accepted the seductive gift. And the
tantalizing feature was that perhaps he suspected her to imagine
them offered as a lover's token, which was mortifying enough if
they were not.
Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a
flat boulder for spreading their table-cloth upon, and, amid the
discussion on that subject, the matter pending between Knight and
Elfride was shelved for a while. He read her refusal so certainly
as the bashfulness of a girl in a novel position, that, upon the
whole, he could tolerate such a beginning. Could Knight have been
told that it was a sense of fidelity struggling against new love,
whilst no less assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might have
entirely abstracted the wish to secure it.
At the same time a slight constraint of manner was visible between
them for the remainder of the afternoon. The tide turned, and
they were obliged to ascend to higher ground. The day glided on
to its end with the usual quiet dreamy passivity of such
occasions - when every deed done and thing thought is in
endeavouring to avoid doing and thinking more. Looking idly over
the verge of a crag, they beheld their stone dining-table
gradually being splashed upon and their crumbs and fragments all
washed away by the incoming sea. The vicar drew a moral lesson
from the scene; Knight replied in the same satisfied strain. And
then the waves rolled in furiously - the neutral green-and-blue
tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into
foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving
trailing followers behind.
The passing of a heavy shower was the next scene - driving them to
shelter in a shallow cave - after which the horses were put in, and
they started to return homeward. By the time they reached the
higher levels the sky had again cleared, and the sunset rays
glanced directly upon the wet uphill road they had climbed. The
ruts formed by their carriage-wheels on the ascent - a pair of
Liliputian canals - were as shining bars of gold, tapering to
nothing in the distance. Upon this also they turned their backs,
and night spread over the sea.
The evening was chilly, and there was no moon. Knight sat close
to Elfride, and, when the darkness rendered the position of a
person a matter of uncertainty, particularly close. Elfride edged
away.
'I hope you allow me my place ungrudgingly?' he whispered.
'Oh yes; 'tis the least I can do in common civility,' she said,
accenting the words so that he might recognize them as his own
returned.
Both of them felt delicately balanced between two possibilities.
Thus they reached home.
To Knight this mild experience was delightful. It was to him a
gentle innocent time - a time which, though there may not be much
in it, seldom repeats itself in a man's life, and has a peculiar
dearness when glanced at retrospectively. He is not
inconveniently deep in love, and is lulled by a peaceful sense of
being able to enjoy the most trivial thing with a childlike
enjoyment. The movement of a wave, the colour of a stone,
anything, was enough for Knight's drowsy thoughts of that day to
precipitate themselves upon. Even the sermonizing platitudes the
vicar had delivered himself of - chiefly because something seemed
to be professionally required of him in the presence of a man of
Knight's proclivities - were swallowed whole. The presence of
Elfride led him not merely to tolerate that kind of talk from the
necessities of ordinary courtesy; but he listened to it - took in
the ideas with an enjoyable make-believe that they were proper and
necessary, and indulged in a conservative feeling that the face of
things was complete.
Entering her room that evening Elfride found a packet for herself
on the dressing-table. How it came there she did not know. She
tremblingly undid the folds of white paper that covered it. Yes;
it was the treasure of a morocco case, containing those treasures
of ornament she had refused in the daytime.
Elfride dressed herself in them for a moment, looked at herself in
the glass, blushed red, and put them away. They filled her dreams
all that night. Never had she seen anything so lovely, and never
was it more clear that as an honest woman she was in duty bound to
refuse them. Why it was not equally clear to her that duty
required more vigorous co-ordinate conduct as well, let those who
dissect her say.
The next morning glared in like a spectre upon her. It was
Stephen's letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman - to
stealthily do a deed she had never liked, to secure an end she now
had ceased to desire.
But she went.
There were two letters.
One was from the bank at St. Launce's, in which she had a small
private deposit - probably something about interest. She put that
in her pocket for a moment, and going indoors and upstairs to be
safer from observation, tremblingly opened Stephen's.
What was this he said to her?
She was to go to the St. Launce's Bank and take a sum of money
which they had received private advices to pay her.
The sum was two hundred pounds.
There was no check, order, or anything of the nature of guarantee.
In fact the information amounted to this: the money was now in the
St. Launce's Bank, standing in her name.
She instantly opened the other letter. It contained a deposit-
note from the bank for the sum of two hundred pounds which had
that day been added to her account. Stephen's information, then,
was correct, and the transfer made.
'I have saved this in one year,' Stephen's letter went on to say,
'and what so proper as well as pleasant for me to do as to hand it
over to you to keep for your use? I have plenty for myself,
independently of this. Should you not be disposed to let it lie
idle in the bank, get your father to invest it in your name on
good security. It is a little present to you from your more than
betrothed. He will, I think, Elfride, feel now that my
pretensions to your hand are anything but the dream of a silly boy
not worth rational consideration.'
With a natural delicacy, Elfride, in mentioning her father's
marriage, had refrained from all allusion to the pecuniary
resources of the lady.
Leaving this matter-of-fact subject, he went on, somewhat after
his boyish manner:
'Do you remember, darling, that first morning of my arrival at
your house, when your father read at prayers the miracle of
healing the sick of the palsy - where he is told to take up his bed
and walk? I do, and I can now so well realize the force of that
passage. The smallest piece of mat is the bed of the Oriental,
and yesterday I saw a native perform the very action, which
reminded me to mention it. But you are better read than I, and
perhaps you knew all this long ago....One day I bought some small
native idols to send home to you as curiosities, but afterwards
finding they had been cast in England, made to look old, and
shipped over, I threw them away in disgust.
'Speaking of this reminds me that we are obliged to import all our
house-building ironwork from England. Never was such foresight
required to be exercised in building houses as here. Before we
begin, we have to order every column, lock, hinge, and screw that
will be required. We cannot go into the next street, as in
London, and get them cast at a minute's notice. Mr. L. says
somebody will have to go to England very soon and superintend the
selection of a large order of this kind. I only wish I may be the
man.'
There before her lay the deposit-receipt for the two hundred
pounds, and beside it the elegant present of Knight. Elfride grew
cold - then her cheeks felt heated by beating blood. If by
destroying the piece of paper the whole transaction could have
been withdrawn from her experience, she would willingly have
sacrificed the money it represented. She did not know what to do
in either case. She almost feared to let the two articles lie in
juxtaposition: so antagonistic were the interests they represented
that a miraculous repulsion of one by the other was almost to be
expected.
That day she was seen little of. By the evening she had come to a
resolution, and acted upon it. The packet was sealed up - with a
tear of regret as she closed the case upon the pretty forms it
contained - directed, and placed upon the writing-table in Knight's
room. And a letter was written to Stephen, stating that as yet
she hardly understood her position with regard to the money sent;
but declaring that she was ready to fulfil her promise to marry
him. After this letter had been written she delayed posting it -
although never ceasing to feel strenuously that the deed must be
done.
Several days passed. There was another Indian letter for Elfride.
Coming unexpectedly, her father saw it, but made no remark - why,
she could not tell. The news this time was absolutely
overwhelming. Stephen, as he had wished, had been actually chosen
as the most fitting to execute the iron-work commission he had
alluded to as impending. This duty completed he would have three
months' leave. His letter continued that he should follow it in a
week, and should take the opportunity to plainly ask her father to
permit the engagement. Then came a page expressive of his delight
and hers at the reunion; and finally, the information that he
would write to the shipping agents, asking them to telegraph and
tell her when the ship bringing him home should be in sight -
knowing how acceptable such information would be.
Elfride lived and moved now as in a dream. Knight had at first
become almost angry at her persistent refusal of his offering - and
no less with the manner than the fact of it. But he saw that she
began to look worn and ill - and his vexation lessened to simple
perplexity.
He ceased now to remain in the house for long hours together as
before, but made it a mere centre for antiquarian and geological
excursions in the neighbourhood. Throw up his cards and go away
he fain would have done, but could not. And, thus, availing
himself of the privileges of a relative, he went in and out the
premises as fancy led him - but still lingered on.
'I don't wish to stay here another day if my presence is
distasteful,' he said one afternoon. 'At first you used to imply
that I was severe with you; and when I am kind you treat me
unfairly.'
'No, no. Don't say so.'
The origin of their acquaintanceship had been such as to render
their manner towards each other peculiar and uncommon. It was of
a kind to cause them to speak out their minds on any feelings of
objection and difference: to be reticent on gentler matters.
'I have a good mind to go away and never trouble you again,'
continued Knight.
She said nothing, but the eloquent expression of her eyes and wan
face was enough to reproach him for harshness.
'Do you like me to be here, then?' inquired Knight gently.
'Yes,' she said. Fidelity to the old love and truth to the new
were ranged on opposite sides, and truth virtuelessly prevailed.
'Then I'll stay a little longer,' said Knight.
'Don't be vexed if I keep by myself a good deal, will you? Perhaps
something may happen, and I may tell you something.'
'Mere coyness,' said Knight to himself; and went away with a
lighter heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces
at work in women at given times, which with some men is an
unerring instinct, is peculiar to minds less direct and honest
than Knight's.
The next evening, about five o'clock, before Knight had returned
from a pilgrimage along the shore, a man walked up to the house.
He was a messenger from Camelton, a town a few miles off, to which
place the railway had been advanced during the summer.
'A telegram for Miss Swancourt, and three and sixpence to pay for
the special messenger.' Miss Swancourt sent out the money, signed
the paper, and opened her letter with a trembling hand. She read:
'Johnson, Liverpool, to Miss Swancourt, Endelstow, near Castle
Boterel.
'Amaryllis telegraphed off Holyhead, four o'clock. Expect will
dock and land passengers at Canning's Basin ten o'clock to-morrow
morning.'
Her father called her into the study.
'Elfride, who sent you that message?' he asked suspiciously.
'Johnson.'
'Who is Johnson, for Heaven's sake?'
'I don't know.'
'The deuce you don't! Who is to know, then?'
'I have never heard of him till now.'
'That's a singular story, isn't it.'
'I don't know.'
'Come, come, miss! What was the telegram?'
'Do you really wish to know, papa?'
'Well, I do.'
'Remember, I am a full-grown woman now.'
'Well, what then?'
'Being a woman, and not a child, I may, I think, have a secret or
two.'
'You will, it seems.'
'Women have, as a rule.'
'But don't keep them. So speak out.'
'If you will not press me now, I give my word to tell you the
meaning of all this before the week is past.'
'On your honour?'
'On my honour.'
'Very well. I have had a certain suspicion, you know; and I shall
be glad to find it false. I don't like your manner lately.'
'At the end of the week, I said, papa.'
Her father did not reply, and Elfride left the room.
She began to look out for the postman again. Three mornings later
he brought an inland letter from Stephen. It contained very
little matter, having been written in haste; but the meaning was
bulky enough. Stephen said that, having executed a commission in
Liverpool, he should arrive at his father's house, East Endelstow,
at five or six o'clock that same evening; that he would after dusk
walk on to the next village, and meet her, if she would, in the
church porch, as in the old time. He proposed this plan because
he thought it unadvisable to call formally at her house so late in
the evening; yet he could not sleep without having seen her. The
minutes would seem hours till he clasped her in his arms.
Elfride was still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled
her to meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent
additional weight to the conviction; for she was markedly one of
those who sigh for the unattainable - to whom, superlatively, a
hope is pleasing because not a possession. And she knew it so
well that her intellect was inclined to exaggerate this defect in
herself.
So during the day she looked her duty steadfastly in the face;
read Wordsworth's astringent yet depressing ode to that Deity;
committed herself to her guidance; and still felt the weight of
chance desires.
But she began to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the
sacrifice of herself to the man whom a maidenly sense of propriety
compelled her to regard as her only possible husband. She would
meet him, and do all that lay in her power to marry him. To guard
against a relapse, a note was at once despatched to his father's
cottage for Stephen on his arrival, fixing an hour for the
interview.
Chapter XXI
'On thy cold grey stones, O sea!'
Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence
by a steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey
over the hills from St. Launce's. He did not know of the
extension of the railway to Camelton.
During the afternoon a thought occurred to Elfride, that from any