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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 PA I R O F B L U E E Y E S

by Thomas Hardy

“A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.”

CONTENTS

PREFACE
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL

PREFACE

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks of
western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast had long
combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical
buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary discord all
architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a
mediævalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than
to set about renovating the adjoining crags themselves.
Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,
whose emotions were not without correspondence with these material
circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-renovations a
fitting frame for its presentation.
The shore and country about “Castle Boterel” is now getting well known,
and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add, the furthest
westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to erect
my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and passions;
and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex
kingdom on that side, which, like the westering verge of modern American
settlements, was progressive and uncertain.
This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre-eminently (for one
person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the
pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom
of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in
themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night
vision.
One enormous sea-bord cliff in particular figures in the narrative; and for
some forgotten reason or other this cliff was described in the story as being
without a name. Accuracy would require the statement to be that a

remarkable cliff which resembles in many points the cliff of the description
bears a name that no event has made famous.

T. H.

March 1899

THE PERSONS

ELFRIDE SWANCOURT a young Lady
CHRISTOPHER SWANCOURT a Clergyman
STEPHEN SMITH an Architect
HENRY KNIGHT a Reviewer and Essayist
CHARLOTTE TROYTON a rich Widow
GERTRUDE JETHWAY a poor Widow
SPENSER HUGO LUXELLIAN a Peer
LADY LUXELLIAN his Wife
MARY AND KATE two little Girls
WILLIAM WORM a dazed Factotum
JOHN SMITH a Master-mason
JANE SMITH his Wife
MARTIN CANNISTER a Sexton
UNITY a Maid-servant

Other servants, masons, labourers, grooms, nondescripts, etc., etc.

THE SCENE

Mostly on the outskirts of Lower Wessex.

Chapter I
“A fair vestal, throned in the west”

Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.
Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of time,
was known only to those who watched the circumstances of her history.
Personally, she was the combination of very interesting particulars,
whose rarity, however, lay in the combination itself rather than in the
individual elements combined. As a matter of fact, you did not see the form
and substance of her features when conversing with her; and this charming
power of preventing a material study of her lineaments by an interlocutor,
originated not in the cloaking effect of a well-formed manner (for her
manner was childish and scarcely formed), but in the attractive crudeness of
the remarks themselves. She had lived all her life in retirement—the
monstrari digito of idle men had not flattered her, and at the age of nineteen
or twenty she was no further on in social consciousness than an urban
young lady of fifteen.
One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In them was
seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to look further: there
she lived.
These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance—blue as the blue we see
between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny
September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or
surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.
As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women can
make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting hall;
Elfride’s was no more pervasive than that of a kitten.
Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of
the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit of the
type of woman’s feature most common to the beauties—mortal and

immortal—of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness. The characteristic
expression of the female faces of Correggio—that of the yearning human
thoughts that lie too deep for tears—was hers sometimes, but seldom under
ordinary conditions.
The point in Elfride Swancourt’s life at which a deeper current may be
said to have permanently set in, was one winter afternoon when she found
herself standing, in the character of hostess, face to face with a man she had
never seen before—moreover, looking at him with a Miranda-like curiosity
and interest that she had never yet bestowed on a mortal.
On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the sea-swept
outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering from an attack of
gout. After finishing her household supervisions Elfride became restless,
and several times left the room, ascended the staircase, and knocked at her
father’s chamber-door.
“Come in!” was always answered in a hearty out-of-door voice from the
inside.
“Papa,” she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man of
forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the bed
wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then enunciating, in spite
of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were almost oaths;
“papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?” She spoke distinctly: he
was rather deaf.
“Afraid not—eh-hh!—very much afraid I shall not, Elfride. Piph-ph-ph! I
can’t bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe of mine, much less a
stocking or slipper—piph-ph-ph! There ’tis again! No, I shan’t get up till to-
morrow.”
“Then I hope this London man won’t come; for I don’t know what I
should do, papa.”
“Well, it would be awkward, certainly.”
“I should hardly think he would come to-day.”
“Why?”
“Because the wind blows so.”
“Wind! What ideas you have, Elfride! Who ever heard of wind stopping a
man from doing his business? The idea of this toe of mine coming on so
suddenly!...If he should come, you must send him up to me, I suppose, and

then give him some food and put him to bed in some way. Dear me, what a
nuisance all this is!”
“Must he have dinner?”
“Too heavy for a tired man at the end of a tedious journey.”
“Tea, then?”
“Not substantial enough.”
“High tea, then? There is cold fowl, rabbit-pie, some pasties, and things
of that kind.”
“Yes, high tea.”
“Must I pour out his tea, papa?”
“Of course; you are the mistress of the house.”
“What! sit there all the time with a stranger, just as if I knew him, and not
anybody to introduce us?”
“Nonsense, child, about introducing; you know better than that. A
practical professional man, tired and hungry, who has been travelling ever
since daylight this morning, will hardly be inclined to talk and air courtesies
to-night. He wants food and shelter, and you must see that he has it, simply
because I am suddenly laid up and cannot. There is nothing so dreadful in
that, I hope? You get all kinds of stuff into your head from reading so many
of those novels.”
“Oh no; there is nothing dreadful in it when it becomes plainly a case of
necessity like this. But, you see, you are always there when people come to
dinner, even if we know them; and this is some strange London man of the
world, who will think it odd, perhaps.”
“Very well; let him.”
“Is he Mr. Hewby’s partner?”
“I should scarcely think so: he may be.”
“How old is he, I wonder?”
“That I cannot tell. You will find the copy of my letter to Mr. Hewby, and
his answer, upon the table in the study. You may read them, and then you’ll
know as much as I do about our visitor.”
“I have read them.”

“Well, what’s the use of asking questions, then? They contain all I know.
Ugh-h-h!...Od plague you, you young scamp! don’t put anything there! I
can’t bear the weight of a fly.”
“Oh, I am sorry, papa. I forgot; I thought you might be cold,” she said,
hastily removing the rug she had thrown upon the feet of the sufferer; and
waiting till she saw that consciousness of her offence had passed from his
face, she withdrew from the room, and retired again downstairs.

Chapter II
“’Twas on the evening of a winter’s day.”

When two or three additional hours had merged the same afternoon in
evening, some moving outlines might have been observed against the sky
on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district. They circumscribed two
men, having at present the aspect of silhouettes, sitting in a dog-cart and
pushing along in the teeth of the wind. Scarcely a solitary house or man had
been visible along the whole dreary distance of open country they were
traversing; and now that night had begun to fall, the faint twilight, which
still gave an idea of the landscape to their observation, was enlivened by the
quiet appearance of the planet Jupiter, momentarily gleaming in intenser
brilliancy in front of them, and by Sirius shedding his rays in rivalry from
his position over their shoulders. The only lights apparent on earth were
some spots of dull red, glowing here and there upon the distant hills, which,
as the driver of the vehicle gratuitously remarked to the hirer, were
smouldering fires for the consumption of peat and gorse-roots, where the
common was being broken up for agricultural purposes. The wind prevailed
with but little abatement from its daytime boisterousness, three or four
small clouds, delicate and pale, creeping along under the sky southward to
the Channel.
Fourteen of the sixteen miles intervening between the railway terminus
and the end of their journey had been gone over, when they began to pass
along the brink of a valley some miles in extent, wherein the wintry
skeletons of a more luxuriant vegetation than had hitherto surrounded them
proclaimed an increased richness of soil, which showed signs of far more
careful enclosure and management than had any slopes they had yet passed.
A little farther, and an opening in the elms stretching up from this fertile
valley revealed a mansion.
“That’s Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian’s,” said the driver.

“Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian’s,” repeated the other mechanically.
He then turned himself sideways, and keenly scrutinized the almost
invisible house with an interest which the indistinct picture itself seemed far
from adequate to create. “Yes, that’s Lord Luxellian’s,” he said yet again
after a while, as he still looked in the same direction.
“What, be we going there?”
“No; Endelstow Vicarage, as I have told you.”
“I thought you m’t have altered your mind, sir, as ye have stared that way
at nothing so long.”
“Oh no; I am interested in the house, that’s all.”
“Most people be, as the saying is.”
“Not in the sense that I am.”
“Oh!...Well, his family is no better than my own, ’a b’lieve.”
“How is that?”
“Hedgers and ditchers by rights. But once in ancient times one of ’em,
when he was at work, changed clothes with King Charles the Second, and
saved the king’s life. King Charles came up to him like a common man, and
said off-hand, ‘Man in the smock-frock, my name is Charles the Second,
and that’s the truth on’t. Will you lend me your clothes?’ ‘I don’t mind if I
do,’ said Hedger Luxellian; and they changed there and then. ‘Now mind
ye,’ King Charles the Second said, like a common man, as he rode away, ‘if
ever I come to the crown, you come to court, knock at the door, and say out
bold, “Is King Charles the Second at home?” Tell your name, and they shall
let you in, and you shall be made a lord.’ Now, that was very nice of Master
Charley?”
“Very nice indeed.”
“Well, as the story is, the king came to the throne; and some years after
that, away went Hedger Luxellian, knocked at the king’s door, and asked if
King Charles the Second was in. ‘No, he isn’t,’ they said. ‘Then, is Charles
the Third?’ said Hedger Luxellian. ‘Yes,’ said a young feller standing by
like a common man, only he had a crown on, ‘my name is Charles the
Third.’ And——”
“I really fancy that must be a mistake. I don’t recollect anything in
English history about Charles the Third,” said the other in a tone of mild

remonstrance.
“Oh, that’s right history enough, only ’twasn’t prented; he was rather a
queer-tempered man, if you remember.”
“Very well; go on.”
“And, by hook or by crook, Hedger Luxellian was made a lord, and
everything went on well till some time after, when he got into a most
terrible row with King Charles the Fourth.
“I can’t stand Charles the Fourth. Upon my word, that’s too much.”
“Why? There was a George the Fourth, wasn’t there?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, Charleses be as common as Georges. However I’ll say no more
about it....Ah, well! ’tis the funniest world ever I lived in—upon my life
’tis. Ah, that such should be!”
The dusk had thickened into darkness while they thus conversed, and the
outline and surface of the mansion gradually disappeared. The windows,
which had before been as black blots on a lighter expanse of wall, became
illuminated, and were transfigured to squares of light on the general dark
body of the night landscape as it absorbed the outlines of the edifice into its
gloomy monochrome.
Not another word was spoken for some time, and they climbed a hill,
then another hill piled on the summit of the first. An additional mile of
plateau followed, from which could be discerned two light-houses on the
coast they were nearing, reposing on the horizon with a calm lustre of
benignity. Another oasis was reached; a little dell lay like a nest at their feet,
towards which the driver pulled the horse at a sharp angle, and descended a
steep slope which dived under the trees like a rabbit’s burrow. They sank
lower and lower.
“Endelstow Vicarage is inside here,” continued the man with the reins.
“This part about here is West Endelstow; Lord Luxellian’s is East
Endelstow, and has a church to itself. Pa’son Swancourt is the pa’son of
both, and bobs backward and forward. Ah, well! ’tis a funny world. ’A
b’lieve there was once a quarry where this house stands. The man who built
it in past time scraped all the glebe for earth to put round the vicarage, and
laid out a little paradise of flowers and trees in the soil he had got together

in this way, whilst the fields he scraped have been good for nothing ever
since.”
“How long has the present incumbent been here?”
“Maybe about a year, or a year and half: ’tisn’t two years; for they don’t
scandalize him yet; and, as a rule, a parish begins to scandalize the pa’son at
the end of two years among ’em familiar. But he’s a very nice party. Ay,
Pa’son Swancourt knows me pretty well from often driving over; and I
know Pa’son Swancourt.”
They emerged from the bower, swept round in a curve, and the chimneys
and gables of the vicarage became darkly visible. Not a light showed
anywhere. They alighted; the man felt his way into the porch, and rang the
bell.
At the end of three or four minutes, spent in patient waiting without
hearing any sounds of a response, the stranger advanced and repeated the
call in a more decided manner. He then fancied he heard footsteps in the
hall, and sundry movements of the door-knob, but nobody appeared.
“Perhaps they beant at home,” sighed the driver. “And I promised myself
a bit of supper in Pa’son Swancourt’s kitchen. Sich lovely mate-pize and
figged keakes, and cider, and drops o’ cordial that they do keep here!”
“All right, naibours! Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye must
needs come to the world’s end at this time o’ night?” exclaimed a voice at
this instant; and, turning their heads, they saw a rickety individual
shambling round from the back door with a horn lantern dangling from his
hand.
“Time o’ night, ’a b’lieve! and the clock only gone seven of ’em. Show a
light, and let us in, William Worm.”
“Oh, that you, Robert Lickpan?”
“Nobody else, William Worm.”
“And is the visiting man a-come?”
“Yes,” said the stranger. “Is Mr. Swancourt at home?”
“That ’a is, sir. And would ye mind coming round by the back way? The
front door is got stuck wi’ the wet, as he will do sometimes; and the Turk
can’t open en. I know I am only a poor wambling man that “ill never pay
the Lord for my making, sir; but I can show the way in, sir.”

The new arrival followed his guide through a little door in a wall, and
then promenaded a scullery and a kitchen, along which he passed with eyes
rigidly fixed in advance, an inbred horror of prying forbidding him to gaze
around apartments that formed the back side of the household tapestry.
Entering the hall, he was about to be shown to his room, when from the
inner lobby of the front entrance, whither she had gone to learn the cause of
the delay, sailed forth the form of Elfride. Her start of amazement at the
sight of the visitor coming forth from under the stairs proved that she had
not been expecting this surprising flank movement, which had been
originated entirely by the ingenuity of William Worm.
She appeared in the prettiest of all feminine guises, that is to say, in
demi-toilette, with plenty of loose curly hair tumbling down about her
shoulders. An expression of uneasiness pervaded her countenance; and
altogether she scarcely appeared woman enough for the situation. The
visitor removed his hat, and the first words were spoken; Elfride prelusively
looking with a deal of interest, not unmixed with surprise, at the person
towards whom she was to do the duties of hospitality.
“I am Mr. Smith,” said the stranger in a musical voice.
“I am Miss Swancourt,” said Elfride.
Her constraint was over. The great contrast between the reality she beheld
before her, and the dark, taciturn, sharp, elderly man of business who had
lurked in her imagination—a man with clothes smelling of city smoke, skin
sallow from want of sun, and talk flavoured with epigram—was such a
relief to her that Elfride smiled, almost laughed, in the new-comer’s face.
Stephen Smith, who has hitherto been hidden from us by the darkness,
was at this time of his life but a youth in appearance, and barely a man in
years. Judging from his look, London was the last place in the world that
one would have imagined to be the scene of his activities: such a face surely
could not be nourished amid smoke and mud and fog and dust; such an
open countenance could never even have seen anything of “the weariness,
the fever, and the fret’ of Babylon the Second.
His complexion was as fine as Elfride’s own; the pink of his cheeks as
delicate. His mouth as perfect as Cupid’s bow in form, and as cherry-red in
colour as hers. Bright curly hair; bright sparkling blue-gray eyes; a boy’s
blush and manner; neither whisker nor moustache, unless a little light-
brown fur on his upper lip deserved the latter title: this composed the

London professional man, the prospect of whose advent had so troubled
Elfride.
Elfride hastened to say she was sorry to tell him that Mr. Swancourt was
not able to receive him that evening, and gave the reason why. Mr. Smith
replied, in a voice boyish by nature and manly by art, that he was very sorry
to hear this news; but that as far as his reception was concerned, it did not
matter in the least.
Stephen was shown up to his room. In his absence Elfride stealthily
glided into her father’s.
“He’s come, papa. Such a young man for a business man!”
“Oh, indeed!”
“His face is—well—PRETTY; just like mine.”
“H’m! what next?”
“Nothing; that’s all I know of him yet. It is rather nice, is it not?”
“Well, we shall see that when we know him better. Go down and give the
poor fellow something to eat and drink, for Heaven’s sake. And when he
has done eating, say I should like to have a few words with him, if he
doesn’t mind coming up here.”
The young lady glided downstairs again, and whilst she awaits young
Smith’s entry, the letters referring to his visit had better be given.
1.—MR. SWANCOURT TO MR. HEWBY.
“ENDELSTOW VICARAGE, Feb. 18, 18—.
“SIR,—We are thinking of restoring the tower and aisle of the church in
this parish; and Lord Luxellian, the patron of the living, has mentioned your
name as that of a trustworthy architect whom it would be desirable to ask to
superintend the work.
“I am exceedingly ignorant of the necessary preliminary steps. Probably,
however, the first is that (should you be, as Lord Luxellian says you are,
disposed to assist us) yourself or some member of your staff come and see
the building, and report thereupon for the satisfaction of parishioners and
others.
“The spot is a very remote one: we have no railway within fourteen
miles; and the nearest place for putting up at—called a town, though merely
a large village—is Castle Boterel, two miles further on; so that it would be

most convenient for you to stay at the vicarage—which I am glad to place
at your disposal—instead of pushing on to the hotel at Castle Boterel, and
coming back again in the morning.
“Any day of the next week that you like to name for the visit will find us
quite ready to receive you.—Yours very truly,
CHRISTOPHER SWANCOURT. 2.—MR. HEWBY TO MR.
SWANCOURT.
‘PERCY PLACE, CHARING CROSS, Feb. 20, 18—.
“DEAR SIR,—Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have
arranged to survey and make drawings of the aisle and tower of your parish
church, and of the dilapidations which have been suffered to accrue thereto,
with a view to its restoration.
“My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train
to-morrow morning for the purpose. Many thanks for your proposal to
accommodate him. He will take advantage of your offer, and will probably
reach your house at some hour of the evening. You may put every
confidence in him, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of
church architecture.
“Trusting that the plans for the restoration, which I shall prepare from the
details of his survey, will prove satisfactory to yourself and Lord Luxellian,
I am, dear sir, yours faithfully,
WALTER HEWBY.”

Chapter III
“Melodious birds sing madrigals”

That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one to
young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had suggested to her
father, with the materials for the heterogeneous meal called high tea—a
class of refection welcome to all when away from men and towns, and
particularly attractive to youthful palates. The table was prettily decked
with winter flowers and leaves, amid which the eye was greeted by chops,
chicken, pie, &c., and two huge pasties overhanging the sides of the dish
with a cheerful aspect of abundance.
At the end, towards the fireplace, appeared the tea-service, of old-
fashioned Worcester porcelain, and behind this arose the slight form of
Elfride, attempting to add matronly dignity to the movement of pouring out
tea, and to have a weighty and concerned look in matters of marmalade,
honey, and clotted cream. Having made her own meal before he arrived, she
found to her embarrassment that there was nothing left for her to do but talk
when not assisting him. She asked him if he would excuse her finishing a
letter she had been writing at a side-table, and, after sitting down to it,
tingled with a sense of being grossly rude. However, seeing that he noticed
nothing personally wrong in her, and that he too was embarrassed when she
attentively watched his cup to refill it, Elfride became better at ease; and
when furthermore he accidentally kicked the leg of the table, and then
nearly upset his tea-cup, just as schoolboys did, she felt herself mistress of
the situation, and could talk very well. In a few minutes ingenuousness and
a common term of years obliterated all recollection that they were strangers
just met. Stephen began to wax eloquent on extremely slight experiences
connected with his professional pursuits; and she, having no experiences to
fall back upon, recounted with much animation stories that had been related
to her by her father, which would have astonished him had he heard with
what fidelity of action and tone they were rendered. Upon the whole, a very

interesting picture of Sweet-and-Twenty was on view that evening in Mr.
Swancourt’s house.
Ultimately Stephen had to go upstairs and talk loud to the vicar, receiving
from him between his puffs a great many apologies for calling him so
unceremoniously to a stranger’s bedroom. “But,” continued Mr. Swancourt,
“I felt that I wanted to say a few words to you before the morning, on the
business of your visit. One’s patience gets exhausted by staying a prisoner
in bed all day through a sudden freak of one’s enemy—new to me, though
—for I have known very little of gout as yet. However, he’s gone to my
other toe in a very mild manner, and I expect he’ll slink off altogether by
the morning. I hope you have been well attended to downstairs?”
“Perfectly. And though it is unfortunate, and I am sorry to see you laid
up, I beg you will not take the slightest notice of my being in the house the
while.”
“I will not. But I shall be down to-morrow. My daughter is an excellent
doctor. A dose or two of her mild mixtures will fetch me round quicker than
all the drug stuff in the world. Well, now about the church business. Take a
seat, do. We can’t afford to stand upon ceremony in these parts as you see,
and for this reason, that a civilized human being seldom stays long with us;
and so we cannot waste time in approaching him, or he will be gone before
we have had the pleasure of close acquaintance. This tower of ours is, as
you will notice, entirely gone beyond the possibility of restoration; but the
church itself is well enough. You should see some of the churches in this
county. Floors rotten: ivy lining the walls.”
“Dear me!”
“Oh, that’s nothing. The congregation of a neighbour of mine, whenever
a storm of rain comes on during service, open their umbrellas and hold
them up till the dripping ceases from the roof. Now, if you will kindly bring
me those papers and letters you see lying on the table, I will show you how
far we have got.”
Stephen crossed the room to fetch them, and the vicar seemed to notice
more particularly the slim figure of his visitor.
“I suppose you are quite competent?” he said.
“Quite,” said the young man, colouring slightly.

“You are very young, I fancy—I should say you are not more than
nineteen?”
I am nearly twenty-one.”
“Exactly half my age; I am forty-two.”
“By the way,” said Mr. Swancourt, after some conversation, “you said
your whole name was Stephen Fitzmaurice, and that your grandfather came
originally from Caxbury. Since I have been speaking, it has occurred to me
that I know something of you. You belong to a well-known ancient county
family—not ordinary Smiths in the least.”
“I don’t think we have any of their blood in our veins.”
“Nonsense! you must. Hand me the ‘Landed Gentry.’ Now, let me see.
There, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith—he lies in St. Mary’s Church, doesn’t
he? Well, out of that family Sprang the Leaseworthy Smiths, and
collaterally came General Sir Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith of Caxbury——”
“Yes; I have seen his monument there,” shouted Stephen. “But there is no
connection between his family and mine: there cannot be.”
“There is none, possibly, to your knowledge. But look at this, my dear
sir,” said the vicar, striking his fist upon the bedpost for emphasis. “Here are
you, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith, living in London, but springing from
Caxbury. Here in this book is a genealogical tree of the Stephen Fitzmaurice
Smiths of Caxbury Manor. You may be only a family of professional men
now—I am not inquisitive: I don’t ask questions of that kind; it is not in me
to do so—but it is as plain as the nose in your face that there’s your origin!
And, Mr. Smith, I congratulate you upon your blood; blue blood, sir; and,
upon my life, a very desirable colour, as the world goes.”
“I wish you could congratulate me upon some more tangible quality,”
said the younger man, sadly no less than modestly.
“Nonsense! that will come with time. You are young: all your life is
before you. Now look—see how far back in the mists of antiquity my own
family of Swancourt have a root. Here, you see,” he continued, turning to
the page, “is Geoffrey, the one among my ancestors who lost a barony
because he would cut his joke. Ah, it’s the sort of us! But the story is too
long to tell now. Ay, I’m a poor man—a poor gentleman, in fact: those I
would be friends with, won’t be friends with me; those who are willing to
be friends with me, I am above being friends with. Beyond dining with a

neighbouring incumbent or two, and an occasional chat—sometimes dinner
—with Lord Luxellian, a connection of mine, I am in absolute solitude—
absolute.”
“You have your studies, your books, and your—daughter.”
“Oh yes, yes; and I don’t complain of poverty. Canto coram latrone. Well,
Mr. Smith, don’t let me detain you any longer in a sick room. Ha! that
reminds me of a story I once heard in my younger days.” Here the vicar
began a series of small private laughs, and Stephen looked inquiry. “Oh, no,
no! it is too bad—too bad to tell!” continued Mr. Swancourt in undertones
of grim mirth. “Well, go downstairs; my daughter must do the best she can
with you this evening. Ask her to sing to you—she plays and sings very
nicely. Good-night; I feel as if I had known you for five or six years. I’ll
ring for somebody to show you down.”
“Never mind,” said Stephen, “I can find the way.” And he went
downstairs, thinking of the delightful freedom of manner in the remoter
counties in comparison with the reserve of London.
“I forgot to tell you that my father was rather deaf,” said Elfride
anxiously, when Stephen entered the little drawing-room.
“Never mind; I know all about it, and we are great friends,” the man of
business replied enthusiastically. “And, Miss Swancourt, will you kindly
sing to me?”
To Miss Swancourt this request seemed, what in fact it was,
exceptionally point-blank; though she guessed that her father had some
hand in framing it, knowing, rather to her cost, of his unceremonious way
of utilizing her for the benefit of dull sojourners. At the same time, as Mr.
Smith’s manner was too frank to provoke criticism, and his age too little to
inspire fear, she was ready—not to say pleased—to accede. Selecting from
the canterbury some old family ditties, that in years gone by had been
played and sung by her mother, Elfride sat down to the pianoforte, and
began, “’Twas on the evening of a winter’s day,” in a pretty contralto voice.
“Do you like that old thing, Mr. Smith?” she said at the end.
“Yes, I do much,” said Stephen—words he would have uttered, and
sincerely, to anything on earth, from glee to requiem, that she might have
chosen.

“You shall have a little one by De Leyre, that was given me by a young
French lady who was staying at Endelstow House:
“‘Je l’ai planté, je l’ai vu naître,
Ce beau rosier où les oiseaux,’ &c.;

and then I shall want to give you my own favourite for the very last,
Shelley’s ‘When the lamp is shattered,’ as set to music by my poor mother. I
so much like singing to anybody who really cares to hear me.”
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is usually
recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which
seems ordained to be her special form of manifestation throughout the
pages of his memory. As the patron Saint has her attitude and accessories in
mediaeval illumination, so the sweetheart may be said to have hers upon the
table of her true Love’s fancy, without which she is rarely introduced there
except by effort; and this though she may, on further acquaintance, have
been observed in many other phases which one would imagine to be far
more appropriate to love’s young dream.
Miss Elfride’s image chose the form in which she was beheld during
these minutes of singing, for her permanent attitude of visitation to
Stephen’s eyes during his sleeping and waking hours in after days. The
profile is seen of a young woman in a pale gray silk dress with trimmings of
swan’s-down, and opening up from a point in front, like a waistcoat without
a shirt; the cool colour contrasting admirably with the warm bloom of her
neck and face. The furthermost candle on the piano comes immediately in a
line with her head, and half invisible itself, forms the accidentally frizzled
hair into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola.
Her hands are in their place on the keys, her lips parted, and trilling forth, in
a tender diminuendo, the closing words of the sad apostrophe:
“O Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier!”

Her head is forward a little, and her eyes directed keenly upward to the top
of the page of music confronting her. Then comes a rapid look into
Stephen’s face, and a still more rapid look back again to her business, her
face having dropped its sadness, and acquired a certain expression of

mischievous archness the while; which lingered there for some time, but
was never developed into a positive smile of flirtation.
Stephen suddenly shifted his position from her right hand to her left,
where there was just room enough for a small ottoman to stand between the
piano and the corner of the room. Into this nook he squeezed himself, and
gazed wistfully up into Elfride’s face. So long and so earnestly gazed he,
that her cheek deepened to a more and more crimson tint as each line was
added to her song. Concluding, and pausing motionless after the last word
for a minute or two, she ventured to look at him again. His features wore an
expression of unutterable heaviness.
“You don’t hear many songs, do you, Mr. Smith, to take so much notice
of these of mine?”
“Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was noticing: I
mean yourself,” he answered gently.
“Now, Mr. Smith!”
“It is perfectly true; I don’t hear much singing. You mistake what I am, I
fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded spot, you think I must
needs come from a life of bustle, and know the latest movements of the day.
But I don’t. My life is as quiet as yours, and more solitary; solitary as
death.”
“The death which comes from a plethora of life? But seriously, I can
quite see that you are not the least what I thought you would be before I
saw you. You are not critical, or experienced, or—much to mind. That’s
why I don’t mind singing airs to you that I only half know.” Finding that by
this confession she had vexed him in a way she did not intend, she added
naively, “I mean, Mr. Smith, that you are better, not worse, for being only
young and not very experienced. You don’t think my life here so very tame
and dull, I know.”
“I do not, indeed,” he said with fervour. “It must be delightfully poetical,
and sparkling, and fresh, and——”
“There you go, Mr. Smith! Well, men of another kind, when I get them to
be honest enough to own the truth, think just the reverse: that my life must
be a dreadful bore in its normal state, though pleasant for the exceptional
few days they pass here.”

“I could live here always!” he said, and with such a tone and look of
unconscious revelation that Elfride was startled to find that her harmonies
had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen’s heart. She said quickly:
“But you can’t live here always.”
“Oh no.” And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.
Elfride’s emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of
woman’s lesser infirmities—love of admiration—caused an inflammable
disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as
meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her.

Chapter IV
“Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap.”

For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after
dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first,
two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards the
bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small. On the
brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour, stood the
church which was to be the scene of his operations. The lonely edifice was
black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill. It had a
square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor pinnacle, and
seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance with the ridge, rather
than a structure raised thereon. Round the church ran a low wall; over-
topping the wall in general level was the graveyard; not as a graveyard
usually is, a fragment of landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but
a mere profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a
very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the
monotonous gray-green grass.
Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty,
and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.
At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on his first
rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he looked, after
that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph of its class. It
was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of William Pitt, as
represented in the well or little known bust by Nollekens—a mouth which
is in itself a young man’s fortune, if properly exercised. His round chin,
where its upper part turned inward, still continued its perfect and full curve,

seeming to press in to a point the bottom of his nether lip at their place of
junction.
Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the lawn
in a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy’s velocity,
superadded to a girl’s lightness, after a tame rabbit she was endeavouring to
capture, her strategic intonations of coaxing words alternating with
desperate rushes so much out of keeping with them, that the hollowness of
such expressions was but too evident to her pet, who darted and dodged in
carefully timed counterpart.
The scene down there was altogether different from that of the hills. A
thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot from the wilderness
without; even at this time of the year the grass was luxuriant there. No wind
blew inside the protecting belt of evergreens, wasting its force upon the
higher and stronger trees forming the outer margin of the grove.
Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and calling
“Mr. Smith!” Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr. Swancourt. The
young man expressed his gladness to see his host downstairs.
“Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the
acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally goes off the
second night. Well, where have you been this morning? I saw you come in
just now, I think!”
“Yes; I have been for a walk.”
“Start early?”
“Yes.”
“Very early, I think?”
“Yes, it was rather early.”
“Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes
seaward.”
“No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.”
“You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild place is a
novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?”
“Not altogether a novelty. I like it.”
The youth seemed averse to explanation.

“You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a journey of
fourteen or sixteen hours. But there’s no accounting for tastes, and I am
glad to see that yours are no meaner. After breakfast, but not before, I shall
be good for a ten miles’ walk, Master Smith.”
Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr.
Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common with
the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims to be
considered handsome,—handsome, that is, in the sense in which the moon
is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a close inspection, are seen to
diversify its surface being left out of the argument. His face was of a tint
that never deepened upon his cheeks nor lightened upon his forehead, but
remained uniform throughout; the usual neutral salmon-colour of a man
who feeds well—not to say too well—and does not think hard; every pore
being in visible working order. His tout ensemble was that of a highly
improved class of farmer, dressed up in the wrong clothes; that of a firm-
standing perpendicular man, whose fall would have been backwards in
direction if he had ever lost his balance.
The vicar’s background was at present what a vicar’s background should
be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the chimneypiece were
ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines, and against the wall was a
high table, made up of the fragments of an old oak Iychgate. Upon this
stood stuffed specimens of owls, divers, and gulls, and over them bunches
of wheat and barley ears, labelled with the date of the year that produced
them. Some cases and shelves, more or less laden with books, the
prominent titles of which were Dr. Brown’s “Notes on the Romans,” Dr.
Smith’s “Notes on the Corinthians,” and Dr. Robinson’s “Notes on the
Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,” just saved the character of the place,
in spite of a girl’s doll’s-house standing above them, a marine aquarium in
the window, and Elfride’s hat hanging on its corner.
“Business, business!” said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began to
find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the somewhat
irregular forces of his visitor.
They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts,
mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much at
starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him. “Worm!” the
vicar shouted.

A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the building,
mumbling, “Ah, I used to be strong enough, but ’tis altered now! Well,
there, I’m as independent as one here and there, even if they do write
“squire after their names.”
“What’s the matter?” said the vicar, as William Worm appeared; when the
remarks were repeated to him.
“Worm says some very true things sometimes,” Mr. Swancourt said,
turning to Stephen. “Now, as regards that word ‘esquire.’ Why, Mr. Smith,
that word ‘esquire’ is gone to the dogs,—used on the letters of every
jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else, Worm?”
“Ay, the folk have begun frying again!”
“Dear me! I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes,” Worm said groaningly to Stephen, “I’ve got such a noise in my
head that there’s no living night nor day. ’Tis just for all the world like
people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in my poor head, till I don’t
know whe’r I’m here or yonder. There, God A’mighty will find it out sooner
or later, I hope, and relieve me.”
“Now, my deafness,” said Mr. Swancourt impressively, “is a dead
silence; but William Worm’s is that of people frying fish in his head. Very
remarkable, isn’t it?”
“I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,” said Worm
corroboratively.
“Yes, it is remarkable,” said Mr. Smith.
“Very peculiar, very peculiar,” echoed the vicar; and they all then
followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a little stone wall,
from which gleamed fragments of quartz and blood-red marbles, apparently
of inestimable value, in their setting of brown alluvium. Stephen walked
with the dignity of a man close to the horse’s head, Worm stumbled along a
stone’s throw in the rear, and Elfride was nowhere in particular, yet
everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes at the sides,
hovering about the procession like a butterfly; not definitely engaged in
travelling, yet somehow chiming in at points with the general progress.
The vicar explained things as he went on: “The fact is, Mr. Smith, I
didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was necessary to

do something in self-defence, on account of those d——dissenters: I use the
word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not as an expletive.”
“How very odd!” said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious
friendliness.
“Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the
churchwardens are——; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk and
the sexton as well.”
“How very strange!” said Stephen.
“Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of
Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some
progress soon.”
“You must trust to circumstances.”
“There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in
Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it? But I
like it on such days as these.”
The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which
having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not being
so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open freedom. A
delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight can accompany a
man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was nothing horrible in
this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which
shout imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper rest; or trim garden-
flowers, which only raise images of people in new black crape and white
handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks, which remind us of
hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes, which make a parade of
sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying behind trees, showing that we are
only leaseholders of our graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass,
diversifying the forms of the mounds it covered,—themselves irregularly
shaped, with no eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain
that all this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside
were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive sea,
visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with the effect of
a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel. Detached rocks stood
upright afar, a collar of foam girding their bases, and repeating in its
whiteness the plumage of a countless multitude of gulls that restlessly
hovered about.

“Now, Worm!” said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself were
then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the afternoon,
when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen running up
the hill without a bonnet.
Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in the
afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during dinner.
She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came into the
old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by “the purple
light” in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by sending him to measure
the height of the tower.
What could she do but come close—so close that a minute arc of her skirt
touched his foot—and asked him how he was getting on with his sketches,
and set herself to learn the principles of practical mensuration as applied to
irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the pulpit to re-imagine for the
hundredth time how it would seem to be a preacher.
Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
“Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?” she
said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
“Oh no, that I won’t,” said he, staring up.
“Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them
better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and to
me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote it for
him. Isn’t it absurd?”
“How clever you must be!” said Stephen. “I couldn’t write a sermon for
the world.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough,” she said, descending from the pulpit and coming
close to him to explain more vividly. “You do it like this. Did you ever play
a game of forfeits called ‘When is it? where is it? what is it?’”
“No, never.”
“Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing
that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so on. You
put that down under ‘Generally.’ Then you proceed to the First, Secondly,
and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys—says they are all my eye. Then
you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being put in great black

brackets, writing opposite, ‘LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE FARMERS ARE
FALLING ASLEEP.’ Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few Words
And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of each page,
‘KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN’—I mean,” she added, correcting herself,
“that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he gets louder
and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up a-field. Oh, papa is so
funny in some things!”
Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as if
warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had outrun,
that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught
by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had the
motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the self-
consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two with her
father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to
Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the
glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched Elfride down the
hill with a smile.
“You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,” he said, and turned to
Stephen. “But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as you; and
that you are steady I see from your diligence here.”
“I think Miss Swancourt very clever,” Stephen observed.
“Yes, she is; certainly, she is,” said papa, turning his voice as much as
possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. “Now, Smith, I’ll tell
you something; but she mustn’t know it for the world—not for the world,
mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY
SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job she makes of them!”
“She can do anything.”
“She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade. But,
mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!”
“Not a word,” said Smith.
“Look there,” said Mr. Swancourt. “What do you think of my roofing?”
He pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,
“Did you do that, sir?”

“Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I pulled
down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens, slated the roof,
all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We worked like slaves,
didn’t we, Worm?”
“Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there—hee, hee!” said
William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. “Like slaves, ’a b’lieve—
hee, hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go
straight? Mighty I! There, ’tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to cuss and
let it out, is it, sir?”
“Well—why?”
“Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to cuss
in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.”
“I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.”
“Oh, doan’t I, sir—hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir,
and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there. Doan’t
ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the candle to ye
in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the chancel?”
“Yes; what of that?”
“I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ’twas only a
dog or cat—maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.”
“Ah, I remember.”
“No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ’A was very well to look at; but,
Lord!——”
“Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?”
“—’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow.
’Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat down upon
the chair. ‘Get up, Worm,’ says you, when you seed the chair go all a-sway
wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and brimstone to
t’other end of your shop—all in a passion. ‘Damn the chair!’ says I. ‘Just
what I was thinking,’ says you, sir. ‘I could see it in your face, sir,’ says I,
‘and I hope you and God will forgi’e me for saying what you wouldn’t.’ To
save your life you couldn’t help laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading
your thoughts so plain. Ay, I’m as wise as one here and there.”

“I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church and
tower with you,” Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following morning, “so
I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when you came. I told
him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very intelligent man, and he will tell
you all you want to know about the state of the walls. His name is John
Smith.”
Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I will
watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said laughingly.
“I shall see your figure against the sky.”
“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss
Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,”
he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for you.”
She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch
him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church
stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his working
clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they both
leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and remained
as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine of the twelve
minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of moving. More minutes
passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered. It was not till the end of
a quarter of an hour that they began to slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s
pace.
“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique.
“Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of
with——”
The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
She returned to the porch.
“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?” she
inquired of her father.
“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s
master-mason, John Smith.”
“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak station,
and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a childish thing—
looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But her new friend

had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect of a blow is as
proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to its own momentum;
and she had such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits
struck her hard.
It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen above the
parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a ruined mosque.
Even then Stephen was not true enough to perform what he was so
courteous to promise, and he vanished without making a sign.
He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that his
eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her attitude of
coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and she could no longer utter
feigned words of indifference.
“Ah, you weren’t kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break your
promise,” she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low for her father’s
powers of hearing.
“Forgive, forgive me!” said Stephen with dismay. “I had forgotten—quite
forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.”
“Any further explanation?” said Miss Capricious, pouting.
He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.
“None,” he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.

Chapter V
“Bosom’d high in tufted trees.”

It was breakfast time.
As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of light
from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have stereotyped
themselves in unrelieved shades of gray. The long-armed trees and shrubs
of juniper, cedar, and pine varieties, were grayish black; those of the broad-
leaved sort, together with the herbage, were grayish-green; the eternal hills
and tower behind them were grayish-brown; the sky, dropping behind all,
gray of the purest melancholy.
Yet in spite of this sombre artistic effect, the morning was not one which
tended to lower the spirits. It was even cheering. For it did not rain, nor was
rain likely to fall for many days to come.
Elfride had turned from the table towards the fire and was idly elevating
a hand-screen before her face, when she heard the click of a little gate
outside.
“Ah, here’s the postman!” she said, as a shuffling, active man came
through an opening in the shrubbery and across the lawn. She vanished, and
met him in the porch, afterwards coming in with her hands behind her back.
“How many are there? Three for papa, one for Mr. Smith, none for Miss
Swancourt. And, papa, look here, one of yours is from—whom do you
think?—Lord Luxellian. And it has something HARD in it—a lump of
something. I’ve been feeling it through the envelope, and can’t think what it
is.”
“What does Luxellian write for, I wonder?” Mr. Swancourt had said
simultaneously with her words. He handed Stephen his letter, and took his

own, putting on his countenance a higher class of look than was customary,
as became a poor gentleman who was going to read a letter from a peer.
Stephen read his missive with a countenance quite the reverse of the
vicar’s.

“PERCY PLACE, Thursday Evening.

‘DEAR SMITH,—Old H. is in a towering rage with you for
being so long about the church sketches. Swears you are
more trouble than you are worth. He says I am to write and
say you are to stay no longer on any consideration—that he
would have done it all in three hours very easily. I told him
that you were not like an experienced hand, which he
seemed to forget, but it did not make much difference.
However, between you and me privately, if I were you I
would not alarm myself for a day or so, if I were not
inclined to return. I would make out the week and finish my
spree. He will blow up just as much if you appear here on
Saturday as if you keep away till Monday morning.—Yours
very truly,

“SIMPKINS JENKINS.

“Dear me—very awkward!” said Stephen, rather en l’air, and confused
with the kind of confusion that assails an understrapper when he has been
enlarged by accident to the dimensions of a superior, and is somewhat
rudely pared down to his original size.
“What is awkward?” said Miss Swancourt.
Smith by this time recovered his equanimity, and with it the professional
dignity of an experienced architect.
“Important business demands my immediate presence in London, I regret
to say,” he replied.
“What! Must you go at once?” said Mr. Swancourt, looking over the edge
of his letter. “Important business? A young fellow like you to have
important business!”

“The truth is,” said Stephen blushing, and rather ashamed of having
pretended even so slightly to a consequence which did not belong to him,
—“the truth is, Mr. Hewby has sent to say I am to come home; and I must
obey him.”
“I see; I see. It is politic to do so, you mean. Now I can see more than
you think. You are to be his partner. I booked you for that directly I read his
letter to me the other day, and the way he spoke of you. He thinks a great
deal of you, Mr. Smith, or he wouldn’t be so anxious for your return.”
Unpleasant to Stephen such remarks as these could not sound; to have the
expectancy of partnership with one of the largest-practising architects in
London thrust upon him was cheering, however untenable he felt the idea to
be. He saw that, whatever Mr. Hewby might think, Mr. Swancourt certainly
thought much of him to entertain such an idea on such slender ground as to
be absolutely no ground at all. And then, unaccountably, his speaking face
exhibited a cloud of sadness, which a reflection on the remoteness of any
such contingency could hardly have sufficed to cause.
Elfride was struck with that look of his; even Mr. Swancourt noticed it.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “never mind that now. You must come again
on your own account; not on business. Come to see me as a visitor, you
know—say, in your holidays—all you town men have holidays like
schoolboys. When are they?”
“In August, I believe.”
“Very well; come in August; and then you need not hurry away so. I am
glad to get somebody decent to talk to, or at, in this outlandish ultima
Thule. But, by the bye, I have something to say—you won’t go to-day?”
“No; I need not,” said Stephen hesitatingly. “I am not obliged to get back
before Monday morning.”
“Very well, then, that brings me to what I am going to propose. This is a
letter from Lord Luxellian. I think you heard me speak of him as the
resident landowner in this district, and patron of this living?”
“I—know of him.”
“He is in London now. It seems that he has run up on business for a day
or two, and taken Lady Luxellian with him. He has written to ask me to go
to his house, and search for a paper among his private memoranda, which
he forgot to take with him.”

“What did he send in the letter?” inquired Elfride.
“The key of a private desk in which the papers are. He doesn’t like to
trust such a matter to any body else. I have done such things for him before.
And what I propose is, that we make an afternoon of it—all three of us. Go
for a drive to Targan Bay, come home by way of Endelstow House; and
whilst I am looking over the documents you can ramble about the rooms
where you like. I have the run of the house at any time, you know. The
building, though nothing but a mass of gables outside, has a splendid hall,
staircase, and gallery within; and there are a few good pictures.”
“Yes, there are,” said Stephen.
“Have you seen the place, then?
“I saw it as I came by,” he said hastily.
“Oh yes; but I was alluding to the interior. And the church—St. Eval’s—
is much older than our St. Agnes’ here. I do duty in that and this alternately,
you know. The fact is, I ought to have some help; riding across that park for
two miles on a wet morning is not at all the thing. If my constitution were
not well seasoned, as thank God it is,”—here Mr. Swancourt looked down
his front, as if his constitution were visible there,—“I should be coughing
and barking all the year round. And when the family goes away, there are
only about three servants to preach to when I get there. Well, that shall be
the arrangement, then. Elfride, you will like to go?”
Elfride assented; and the little breakfast-party separated. Stephen rose to
go and take a few final measurements at the church, the vicar following him
to the door with a mysterious expression of inquiry on his face.
“You’ll put up with our not having family prayer this morning, I hope?”
he whispered.
“Yes; quite so,” said Stephen.
“To tell you the truth,” he continued in the same undertone, “we don’t
make a regular thing of it; but when we have strangers visiting us, I am
strongly of opinion that it is the proper thing to do, and I always do it. I am
very strict on that point. But you, Smith, there is something in your face
which makes me feel quite at home; no nonsense about you, in short. Ah, it
reminds me of a splendid story I used to hear when I was a helter-skelter
young fellow—such a story! But”—here the vicar shook his head self-
forbiddingly, and grimly laughed.

“Was it a good story?” said young Smith, smiling too.
“Oh yes; but ’tis too bad—too bad! Couldn’t tell it to you for the world!”
Stephen went across the lawn, hearing the vicar chuckling privately at the
recollection as he withdrew.
They started at three o’clock. The gray morning had resolved itself into
an afternoon bright with a pale pervasive sunlight, without the sun itself
being visible. Lightly they trotted along—the wheels nearly silent, the
horse’s hoofs clapping, almost ringing, upon the hard, white, turnpike road
as it followed the level ridge in a perfectly straight line, seeming to be
absorbed ultimately by the white of the sky.
Targan Bay—which had the merit of being easily got at—was duly
visited. They then swept round by innumerable lanes, in which not twenty
consecutive yards were either straight or level, to the domain of Lord
Luxellian. A woman with a double chin and thick neck, like Queen Anne by
Dahl, threw open the lodge gate, a little boy standing behind her.
“I’ll give him something, poor little fellow,” said Elfride, pulling out her
purse and hastily opening it. From the interior of her purse a host of bits of
paper, like a flock of white birds, floated into the air, and were blown about
in all directions.
“Well, to be sure!” said Stephen with a slight laugh.
“What the dickens is all that?” said Mr. Swancourt. “Not halves of bank-
notes, Elfride?”
Elfride looked annoyed and guilty. “They are only something of mine,
papa,” she faltered, whilst Stephen leapt out, and, assisted by the lodge-
keeper’s little boy, crept about round the wheels and horse’s hoofs till the
papers were all gathered together again. He handed them back to her, and
remounted.
“I suppose you are wondering what those scraps were?” she said, as they
bowled along up the sycamore avenue. “And so I may as well tell you. They
are notes for a romance I am writing.”
She could not help colouring at the confession, much as she tried to avoid
it.
“A story, do you mean?” said Stephen, Mr. Swancourt half listening, and
catching a word of the conversation now and then.

“Yes; THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE; a romance of the fifteenth
century. Such writing is out of date now, I know; but I like doing it.”
“A romance carried in a purse! If a highwayman were to rob you, he
would be taken in.”
“Yes; that’s my way of carrying manuscript. The real reason is, that I
mostly write bits of it on scraps of paper when I am on horseback; and I put
them there for convenience.”
“What are you going to do with your romance when you have written it?”
said Stephen.
“I don’t know,” she replied, and turned her head to look at the prospect.
For by this time they had reached the precincts of Endelstow House.
Driving through an ancient gate-way of dun-coloured stone, spanned by the
high-shouldered Tudor arch, they found themselves in a spacious court,
closed by a facade on each of its three sides. The substantial portions of the
existing building dated from the reign of Henry VIII.; but the picturesque
and sheltered spot had been the site of an erection of a much earlier date. A
licence to crenellate mansum infra manerium suum was granted by Edward
II. to “Hugo Luxellen chivaler;” but though the faint outline of the ditch and
mound was visible at points, no sign of the original building remained.
The windows on all sides were long and many-mullioned; the roof lines
broken up by dormer lights of the same pattern. The apex stones of these
dormers, together with those of the gables, were surmounted by grotesque
figures in rampant, passant, and couchant variety. Tall octagonal and twisted
chimneys thrust themselves high up into the sky, surpassed in height,
however, by some poplars and sycamores at the back, which showed their
gently rocking summits over ridge and parapet. In the corners of the court
polygonal bays, whose surfaces were entirely occupied by buttresses and
windows, broke into the squareness of the enclosure; and a far-projecting
oriel, springing from a fantastic series of mouldings, overhung the archway
of the chief entrance to the house.
As Mr. Swancourt had remarked, he had the freedom of the mansion in
the absence of its owner. Upon a statement of his errand they were all
admitted to the library, and left entirely to themselves. Mr. Swancourt was
soon up to his eyes in the examination of a heap of papers he had taken
from the cabinet described by his correspondent. Stephen and Elfride had
nothing to do but to wander about till her father was ready.

Elfride entered the gallery, and Stephen followed her without seeming to
do so. It was a long sombre apartment, enriched with fittings a century or so
later in style than the walls of the mansion. Pilasters of Renaissance
workmanship supported a cornice from which sprang a curved ceiling,
panelled in the awkward twists and curls of the period. The old Gothic
quarries still remained in the upper portion of the large window at the end,
though they had made way for a more modern form of glazing elsewhere.
Stephen was at one end of the gallery looking towards Elfride, who stood
in the midst, beginning to feel somewhat depressed by the society of
Luxellian shades of cadaverous complexion fixed by Holbein, Kneller, and
Lely, and seeming to gaze at and through her in a moralizing mood. The
silence, which cast almost a spell upon them, was broken by the sudden
opening of a door at the far end.
Out bounded a pair of little girls, lightly yet warmly dressed. Their eyes
were sparkling; their hair swinging about and around; their red mouths
laughing with unalloyed gladness.
“Ah, Miss Swancourt: dearest Elfie! we heard you. Are you going to stay
here? You are our little mamma, are you not—our big mamma is gone to
London,” said one.
“Let me tiss you,” said the other, in appearance very much like the first,
but to a smaller pattern.
Their pink cheeks and yellow hair were speedily intermingled with the
folds of Elfride’s dress; she then stooped and tenderly embraced them both.
“Such an odd thing,” said Elfride, smiling, and turning to Stephen. “They
have taken it into their heads lately to call me ‘little mamma,’ because I am
very fond of them, and wore a dress the other day something like one of
Lady Luxellian’s.”
These two young creatures were the Honourable Mary and the
Honourable Kate—scarcely appearing large enough as yet to bear the
weight of such ponderous prefixes. They were the only two children of
Lord and Lady Luxellian, and, as it proved, had been left at home during
their parents’ temporary absence, in the custody of nurse and governess.
Lord Luxellian was dotingly fond of the children; rather indifferent towards
his wife, since she had begun to show an inclination not to please him by
giving him a boy.

All children instinctively ran after Elfride, looking upon her more as an
unusually nice large specimen of their own tribe than as a grown-up elder. It
had now become an established rule, that whenever she met them—indoors
or out-of-doors, weekdays or Sundays—they were to be severally pressed
against her face and bosom for the space of a quarter of a minute, and other-
wise made much of on the delightful system of cumulative epithet and
caress to which unpractised girls will occasionally abandon themselves.
A look of misgiving by the youngsters towards the door by which they
had entered directed attention to a maid-servant appearing from the same
quarter, to put an end to this sweet freedom of the poor Honourables Mary
and Kate.
“I wish you lived here, Miss Swancourt,” piped one like a melancholy
bullfinch.
“So do I,” piped the other like a rather more melancholy bullfinch.
“Mamma can’t play with us so nicely as you do. I don’t think she ever
learnt playing when she was little. When shall we come to see you?”
“As soon as you like, dears.”
“And sleep at your house all night? That’s what I mean by coming to see
you. I don’t care to see people with hats and bonnets on, and all standing up
and walking about.”
“As soon as we can get mamma’s permission you shall come and stay as
long as ever you like. Good-bye!”
The prisoners were then led off, Elfride again turning her attention to her
guest, whom she had left standing at the remote end of the gallery. On
looking around for him he was nowhere to be seen. Elfride stepped down to
the library, thinking he might have rejoined her father there. But Mr.
Swancourt, now cheerfully illuminated by a pair of candles, was still alone,
untying packets of letters and papers, and tying them up again.
As Elfride did not stand on a sufficiently intimate footing with the object
of her interest to justify her, as a proper young lady, to commence the active
search for him that youthful impulsiveness prompted, and as, nevertheless,
for a nascent reason connected with those divinely cut lips of his, she did
not like him to be absent from her side, she wandered desultorily back to
the oak staircase, pouting and casting her eyes about in hope of discerning
his boyish figure.

Though daylight still prevailed in the rooms, the corridors were in a
depth of shadow—chill, sad, and silent; and it was only by looking along
them towards light spaces beyond that anything or anybody could be
discerned therein. One of these light spots she found to be caused by a side-
door with glass panels in the upper part. Elfride opened it, and found herself
confronting a secondary or inner lawn, separated from the principal lawn
front by a shrubbery.
And now she saw a perplexing sight. At right angles to the face of the
wing she had emerged from, and within a few feet of the door, jutted out
another wing of the mansion, lower and with less architectural character.
Immediately opposite to her, in the wall of this wing, was a large broad
window, having its blind drawn down, and illuminated by a light in the
room it screened.
On the blind was a shadow from somebody close inside it—a person in
profile. The profile was unmistakably that of Stephen. It was just possible to
see that his arms were uplifted, and that his hands held an article of some
kind. Then another shadow appeared—also in profile—and came close to
him. This was the shadow of a woman. She turned her back towards
Stephen: he lifted and held out what now proved to be a shawl or mantle—
placed it carefully—so carefully—round the lady; disappeared; reappeared
in her front—fastened the mantle. Did he then kiss her? Surely not. Yet the
motion might have been a kiss. Then both shadows swelled to colossal
dimensions—grew distorted—vanished.
Two minutes elapsed.
“Ah, Miss Swancourt! I am so glad to find you. I was looking for you,”
said a voice at her elbow—Stephen’s voice. She stepped into the passage.
“Do you know any of the members of this establishment?” said she.
“Not a single one: how should I?” he replied.

Chapter VI
“Fare thee weel awhile!”

Simultaneously with the conclusion of Stephen’s remark, the sound of the
closing of an external door in their immediate neighbourhood reached
Elfride’s ears. It came from the further side of the wing containing the
illuminated room. She then discerned, by the aid of the dusky departing
light, a figure, whose sex was undistinguishable, walking down the
gravelled path by the parterre towards the river. The figure grew fainter, and
vanished under the trees.
Mr. Swancourt’s voice was heard calling out their names from a distant
corridor in the body of the building. They retraced their steps, and found
him with his coat buttoned up and his hat on, awaiting their advent in a
mood of self-satisfaction at having brought his search to a successful close.
The carriage was brought round, and without further delay the trio drove
away from the mansion, under the echoing gateway arch, and along by the
leafless sycamores, as the stars began to kindle their trembling lights behind
the maze of branches and twigs.
No words were spoken either by youth or maiden. Her unpractised mind
was completely occupied in fathoming its recent acquisition. The young
man who had inspired her with such novelty of feeling, who had come
directly from London on business to her father, having been brought by
chance to Endelstow House had, by some means or other, acquired the
privilege of approaching some lady he had found therein, and of honouring
her by petits soins of a marked kind,—all in the space of half an hour.
What room were they standing in? thought Elfride. As nearly as she
could guess, it was Lord Luxellian’s business-room, or office. What people
were in the house? None but the governess and servants, as far as she knew,

and of these he had professed a total ignorance. Had the person she had
indistinctly seen leaving the house anything to do with the performance? It
was impossible to say without appealing to the culprit himself, and that she
would never do. The more Elfride reflected, the more certain did it appear
that the meeting was a chance rencounter, and not an appointment. On the
ultimate inquiry as to the individuality of the woman, Elfride at once
assumed that she could not be an inferior. Stephen Smith was not the man to
care about passages-at-love with women beneath him. Though gentle,
ambition was visible in his kindling eyes; he evidently hoped for much;
hoped indefinitely, but extensively. Elfride was puzzled, and being puzzled,
was, by a natural sequence of girlish sensations, vexed with him. No more
pleasure came in recognizing that from liking to attract him she was getting
on to love him, boyish as he was and innocent as he had seemed.
They reached the bridge which formed a link between the eastern and
western halves of the parish. Situated in a valley that was bounded
outwardly by the sea, it formed a point of depression from which the road
ascended with great steepness to West Endelstow and the Vicarage. There
was no absolute necessity for either of them to alight, but as it was the
vicar’s custom after a long journey to humour the horse in making this
winding ascent, Elfride, moved by an imitative instinct, suddenly jumped
out when Pleasant had just begun to adopt the deliberate stalk he associated
with this portion of the road.
The young man seemed glad of any excuse for breaking the silence.
“Why, Miss Swancourt, what a risky thing to do!” he exclaimed,
immediately following her example by jumping down on the other side.
“Oh no, not at all,” replied she coldly; the shadow phenomenon at
Endelstow House still paramount within her.
Stephen walked along by himself for two or three minutes, wrapped in
the rigid reserve dictated by her tone. Then apparently thinking that it was
only for girls to pout, he came serenely round to her side, and offered his
arm with Castilian gallantry, to assist her in ascending the remaining three-
quarters of the steep.
Here was a temptation: it was the first time in her life that Elfride had
been treated as a grown-up woman in this way—offered an arm in a manner
implying that she had a right to refuse it. Till to-night she had never
received masculine attentions beyond those which might be contained in

such homely remarks as “Elfride, give me your hand;” “Elfride, take hold
of my arm,” from her father. Her callow heart made an epoch of the
incident; she considered her array of feelings, for and against. Collectively
they were for taking this offered arm; the single one of pique determined
her to punish Stephen by refusing.
“No, thank you, Mr. Smith; I can get along better by myself”
It was Elfride’s first fragile attempt at browbeating a lover. Fearing more
the issue of such an undertaking than what a gentle young man might think
of her waywardness, she immediately afterwards determined to please
herself by reversing her statement.
“On second thoughts, I will take it,” she said.
They slowly went their way up the hill, a few yards behind the carriage.
“How silent you are, Miss Swancourt!” Stephen observed.
“Perhaps I think you silent too,” she returned.
“I may have reason to be.”
“Scarcely; it is sadness that makes people silent, and you can have none.”
“You don’t know: I have a trouble; though some might think it less a
trouble than a dilemma.”
“What is it?” she asked impulsively.
Stephen hesitated. “I might tell,” he said; “at the same time, perhaps, it is
as well——”
She let go his arm and imperatively pushed it from her, tossing her head.
She had just learnt that a good deal of dignity is lost by asking a question to
which an answer is refused, even ever so politely; for though politeness
does good service in cases of requisition and compromise, it but little helps
a direct refusal. “I don’t wish to know anything of it; I don’t wish it,” she
went on. “The carriage is waiting for us at the top of the hill; we must get
in;” and Elfride flitted to the front. “Papa, here is your Elfride!” she
exclaimed to the dusky figure of the old gentleman, as she sprang up and
sank by his side without deigning to accept aid from Stephen.
“Ah, yes!” uttered the vicar in artificially alert tones, awaking from a
most profound sleep, and suddenly preparing to alight.
“Why, what are you doing, papa? We are not home yet.”

“Oh no, no; of course not; we are not at home yet,” Mr. Swancourt said
very hastily, endeavouring to dodge back to his original position with the air
of a man who had not moved at all. “The fact is I was so lost in deep
meditation that I forgot whereabouts we were.” And in a minute the vicar
was snoring again.
That evening, being the last, seemed to throw an exceptional shade of
sadness over Stephen Smith, and the repeated injunctions of the vicar, that
he was to come and revisit them in the summer, apparently tended less to
raise his spirits than to unearth some misgiving.
He left them in the gray light of dawn, whilst the colours of earth were
sombre, and the sun was yet hidden in the east. Elfride had fidgeted all
night in her little bed lest none of the household should be awake soon
enough to start him, and also lest she might miss seeing again the bright
eyes and curly hair, to which their owner’s possession of a hidden mystery
added a deeper tinge of romance. To some extent—so soon does womanly
interest take a solicitous turn—she felt herself responsible for his safe
conduct. They breakfasted before daylight; Mr. Swancourt, being more and
more taken with his guest’s ingenuous appearance, having determined to
rise early and bid him a friendly farewell. It was, however, rather to the
vicar’s astonishment, that he saw Elfride walk in to the breakfast-table,
candle in hand.
Whilst William Worm performed his toilet (during which performance
the inmates of the vicarage were always in the habit of waiting with
exemplary patience), Elfride wandered desultorily to the summer house.
Stephen followed her thither. The copse-covered valley was visible from
this position, a mist now lying all along its length, hiding the stream which
trickled through it, though the observers themselves were in clear air.
They stood close together, leaning over the rustic balustrading which
bounded the arbour on the outward side, and formed the crest of a steep
slope beneath Elfride constrainedly pointed out some features of the distant
uplands rising irregularly opposite. But the artistic eye was, either from
nature or circumstance, very faint in Stephen now, and he only half attended
to her description, as if he spared time from some other thought going on
within him.
“Well, good-bye,” he said suddenly; “I must never see you again, I
suppose, Miss Swancourt, in spite of invitations.”

His genuine tribulation played directly upon the delicate chords of her
nature. She could afford to forgive him for a concealment or two. Moreover,
the shyness which would not allow him to look her in the face lent bravery
to her own eyes and tongue.
“Oh, DO come again, Mr. Smith!” she said prettily.
“I should delight in it; but it will be better if I do not.”
“Why?”
“Certain circumstances in connection with me make it undesirable. Not
on my account; on yours.”
“Goodness! As if anything in connection with you could hurt me,” she
said with serene supremacy; but seeing that this plan of treatment was
inappropriate, she tuned a smaller note. “Ah, I know why you will not
come. You don’t want to. You’ll go home to London and to all the stirring
people there, and will never want to see us any more!”
“You know I have no such reason.”
“And go on writing letters to the lady you are engaged to, just as before.”
“What does that mean? I am not engaged.”
“You wrote a letter to a Miss Somebody; I saw it in the letter-rack.”
“Pooh! an elderly woman who keeps a stationer’s shop; and it was to tell
her to keep my newspapers till I get back.”
“You needn’t have explained: it was not my business at all.” Miss Elfride
was rather relieved to hear that statement, nevertheless. “And you won’t
come again to see my father?” she insisted.
“I should like to—and to see you again, but——”
“Will you reveal to me that matter you hide?” she interrupted petulantly.
“No; not now.”
She could not but go on, graceless as it might seem.
“Tell me this,” she importuned with a trembling mouth. “Does any
meeting of yours with a lady at Endelstow Vicarage clash with—any
interest you may take in me?”
He started a little. “It does not,” he said emphatically; and looked into the
pupils of her eyes with the confidence that only honesty can give, and even
that to youth alone.

The explanation had not come, but a gloom left her. She could not but
believe that utterance. Whatever enigma might lie in the shadow on the
blind, it was not an enigma of underhand passion.
She turned towards the house, entering it through the conservatory.
Stephen went round to the front door. Mr. Swancourt was standing on the
step in his slippers. Worm was adjusting a buckle in the harness, and
murmuring about his poor head; and everything was ready for Stephen’s
departure.
“You named August for your visit. August it shall be; that is, if you care
for the society of such a fossilized Tory,” said Mr. Swancourt.
Mr. Smith only responded hesitatingly, that he should like to come again.
“You said you would, and you must,” insisted Elfride, coming to the door
and speaking under her father’s arm.
Whatever reason the youth may have had for not wishing to enter the
house as a guest, it no longer predominated. He promised, and bade them
adieu, and got into the pony-carriage, which crept up the slope, and bore
him out of their sight.
“I never was so much taken with anybody in my life as I am with that
young fellow—never! I cannot understand it—can’t understand it anyhow,”
said Mr. Swancourt quite energetically to himself; and went indoors.

Chapter VII
“No more of me you knew, my love!”

Stephen Smith revisited Endelstow Vicarage, agreeably to his promise.
He had a genuine artistic reason for coming, though no such reason seemed
to be required. Six-and-thirty old seat ends, of exquisite fifteenth-century
workmanship, were rapidly decaying in an aisle of the church; and it
became politic to make drawings of their worm-eaten contours ere they
were battered past recognition in the turmoil of the so-called restoration.
He entered the house at sunset, and the world was pleasant again to the
two fair-haired ones. A momentary pang of disappointment had,
nevertheless, passed through Elfride when she casually discovered that he
had not come that minute post-haste from London, but had reached the
neighbourhood the previous evening. Surprise would have accompanied the
feeling, had she not remembered that several tourists were haunting the
coast at this season, and that Stephen might have chosen to do likewise.
They did little besides chat that evening, Mr. Swancourt beginning to
question his visitor, closely yet paternally, and in good part, on his hopes
and prospects from the profession he had embraced. Stephen gave vague
answers. The next day it rained. In the evening, when twenty-four hours of
Elfride had completely rekindled her admirer’s ardour, a game of chess was
proposed between them.
The game had its value in helping on the developments of their future.
Elfride soon perceived that her opponent was but a learner. She next
noticed that he had a very odd way of handling the pieces when castling or
taking a man. Antecedently she would have supposed that the same
performance must be gone through by all players in the same manner; she
was taught by his differing action that all ordinary players, who learn the

game by sight, unconsciously touch the men in a stereotyped way. This
impression of indescribable oddness in Stephen’s touch culminated in
speech when she saw him, at the taking of one of her bishops, push it aside
with the taking man instead of lifting it as a preliminary to the move.
“How strangely you handle the men, Mr. Smith!”
“Do I? I am sorry for that.”
“Oh no—don’t be sorry; it is not a matter great enough for sorrow. But
who taught you to play?”
“Nobody, Miss Swancourt,” he said. “I learnt from a book lent me by my
friend Mr. Knight, the noblest man in the world.”
“But you have seen people play?”
“I have never seen the playing of a single game. This is the first time I
ever had the opportunity of playing with a living opponent. I have worked
out many games from books, and studied the reasons of the different moves,
but that is all.”
This was a full explanation of his mannerism; but the fact that a man with
the desire for chess should have grown up without being able to see or
engage in a game astonished her not a little. She pondered on the
circumstance for some time, looking into vacancy and hindering the play.
Mr. Swancourt was sitting with his eyes fixed on the board, but
apparently thinking of other things. Half to himself he said, pending the
move of Elfride:
“‘Quae finis aut quod me manet stipendium?’”
Stephen replied instantly:
“‘Effare: jussas cum fide poenas luam.’”
“Excellent—prompt—gratifying!” said Mr. Swancourt with feeling,
bringing down his hand upon the table, and making three pawns and a
knight dance over their borders by the shaking. “I was musing on those
words as applicable to a strange course I am steering—but enough of that. I
am delighted with you, Mr. Smith, for it is so seldom in this desert that I
meet with a man who is gentleman and scholar enough to continue a
quotation, however trite it may be.”
“I also apply the words to myself,” said Stephen quietly.
“You? The last man in the world to do that, I should have thought.”

“Come,” murmured Elfride poutingly, and insinuating herself between
them, “tell me all about it. Come, construe, construe!”
Stephen looked steadfastly into her face, and said slowly, and in a voice
full of a far-off meaning that seemed quaintly premature in one so young:
“Quae finis WHAT WILL BE THE END, aut OR, quod stipendium
WHAT FINE, manet me AWAITS ME? Effare SPEAK OUT; luam I WILL
PAY, cum fide WITH FAITH, jussas poenas THE PENALTY REQUIRED.”
The vicar, who had listened with a critical compression of the lips to this
school-boy recitation, and by reason of his imperfect hearing had missed
the marked realism of Stephen’s tone in the English words, now said
hesitatingly: “By the bye, Mr. Smith (I know you’ll excuse my curiosity),
though your translation was unexceptionably correct and close, you have a
way of pronouncing your Latin which to me seems most peculiar. Not that
the pronunciation of a dead language is of much importance; yet your
accents and quantities have a grotesque sound to my ears. I thought first
that you had acquired your way of breathing the vowels from some of the
northern colleges; but it cannot be so with the quantities. What I was going
to ask was, if your instructor in the classics could possibly have been an
Oxford or Cambridge man?”
“Yes; he was an Oxford man—Fellow of St. Cyprian’s.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes; there’s no doubt about it.
“The oddest thing ever I heard of!” said Mr. Swancourt, starting with
astonishment. “That the pupil of such a man——”
“The best and cleverest man in England!” cried Stephen enthusiastically.
“That the pupil of such a man should pronounce Latin in the way you
pronounce it beats all I ever heard. How long did he instruct you?”
“Four years.”
“Four years!”
“It is not so strange when I explain,” Stephen hastened to say. “It was
done in this way—by letter. I sent him exercises and construing twice a
week, and twice a week he sent them back to me corrected, with marginal
notes of instruction. That is how I learnt my Latin and Greek, such as it is.
He is not responsible for my scanning. He has never heard me scan a line.”

“A novel case, and a singular instance of patience!” cried the vicar.
“On his part, not on mine. Ah, Henry Knight is one in a thousand! I
remember his speaking to me on this very subject of pronunciation. He says
that, much to his regret, he sees a time coming when every man will
pronounce even the common words of his own tongue as seems right in his
own ears, and be thought none the worse for it; that the speaking age is
passing away, to make room for the writing age.”
Both Elfride and her father had waited attentively to hear Stephen go on
to what would have been the most interesting part of the story, namely, what
circumstances could have necessitated such an unusual method of
education. But no further explanation was volunteered; and they saw, by the
young man’s manner of concentrating himself upon the chess-board, that he
was anxious to drop the subject.
The game proceeded. Elfride played by rote; Stephen by thought. It was
the cruellest thing to checkmate him after so much labour, she considered.
What was she dishonest enough to do in her compassion? To let him
checkmate her. A second game followed; and being herself absolutely
indifferent as to the result (her playing was above the average among
women, and she knew it), she allowed him to give checkmate again. A final
game, in which she adopted the Muzio gambit as her opening, was
terminated by Elfride’s victory at the twelfth move.
Stephen looked up suspiciously. His heart was throbbing even more
excitedly than was hers, which itself had quickened when she seriously set
to work on this last occasion. Mr. Swancourt had left the room.
“You have been trifling with me till now!” he exclaimed, his face
flushing. “You did not play your best in the first two games?”
Elfride’s guilt showed in her face. Stephen became the picture of
vexation and sadness, which, relishable for a moment, caused her the next
instant to regret the mistake she had made.
“Mr. Smith, forgive me!” she said sweetly. “I see now, though I did not at
first, that what I have done seems like contempt for your skill. But, indeed,
I did not mean it in that sense. I could not, upon my conscience, win a
victory in those first and second games over one who fought at such a
disadvantage and so manfully.”

He drew a long breath, and murmured bitterly, “Ah, you are cleverer than
I. You can do everything—I can do nothing! O Miss Swancourt!” he burst
out wildly, his heart swelling in his throat, “I must tell you how I love you!
All these months of my absence I have worshipped you.”
He leapt from his seat like the impulsive lad that he was, slid round to her
side, and almost before she suspected it his arm was round her waist, and
the two sets of curls intermingled.
So entirely new was full-blown love to Elfride, that she trembled as much
from the novelty of the emotion as from the emotion itself. Then she
suddenly withdrew herself and stood upright, vexed that she had submitted
unresistingly even to his momentary pressure. She resolved to consider this
demonstration as premature.
“You must not begin such things as those,” she said with coquettish
hauteur of a very transparent nature “And—you must not do so again—and
papa is coming.”
“Let me kiss you—only a little one,” he said with his usual delicacy, and
without reading the factitiousness of her manner.
“No; not one.”
“Only on your cheek?”
“No.”
“Forehead?”
“Certainly not.”
“You care for somebody else, then? Ah, I thought so!”
“I am sure I do not.”
“Nor for me either?”
“How can I tell?” she said simply, the simplicity lying merely in the
broad outlines of her manner and speech. There were the semitone of voice
and half-hidden expression of eyes which tell the initiated how very fragile
is the ice of reserve at these times.
Footsteps were heard. Mr. Swancourt then entered the room, and their
private colloquy ended.
The day after this partial revelation, Mr. Swancourt proposed a drive to
the cliffs beyond Targan Bay, a distance of three or four miles.

Half an hour before the time of departure a crash was heard in the back
yard, and presently Worm came in, saying partly to the world in general,
partly to himself, and slightly to his auditors:
“Ay, ay, sure! That frying of fish will be the end of William Worm. They
be at it again this morning—same as ever—fizz, fizz, fizz!”
“Your head bad again, Worm?” said Mr. Swancourt. “What was that
noise we heard in the yard?”
“Ay, sir, a weak wambling man am I; and the frying have been going on
in my poor head all through the long night and this morning as usual; and I
was so dazed wi’ it that down fell a piece of leg-wood across the shaft of the
pony-shay, and splintered it off. ‘Ay,’ says I, ‘I feel it as if ’twas my own
shay; and though I’ve done it, and parish pay is my lot if I go from here,
perhaps I am as independent as one here and there.’”
“Dear me, the shaft of the carriage broken!” cried Elfride. She was
disappointed: Stephen doubly so. The vicar showed more warmth of temper
than the accident seemed to demand, much to Stephen’s uneasiness and
rather to his surprise. He had not supposed so much latent sternness could
co-exist with Mr. Swancourt’s frankness and good-nature.
“You shall not be disappointed,” said the vicar at length. “It is almost too
long a distance for you to walk. Elfride can trot down on her pony, and you
shall have my old nag, Smith.”
Elfride exclaimed triumphantly, “You have never seen me on horseback
—Oh, you must!” She looked at Stephen and read his thoughts
immediately. “Ah, you don’t ride, Mr. Smith?”
“I am sorry to say I don’t.”
“Fancy a man not able to ride!” said she rather pertly.
The vicar came to his rescue. “That’s common enough; he has had other
lessons to learn. Now, I recommend this plan: let Elfride ride on horseback,
and you, Mr. Smith, walk beside her.”
The arrangement was welcomed with secret delight by Stephen. It
seemed to combine in itself all the advantages of a long slow ramble with
Elfride, without the contingent possibility of the enjoyment being spoilt by
her becoming weary. The pony was saddled and brought round.
“Now, Mr. Smith,” said the lady imperatively, coming downstairs, and
appearing in her riding-habit, as she always did in a change of dress, like a

new edition of a delightful volume, “you have a task to perform to-day.
These earrings are my very favourite darling ones; but the worst of it is that
they have such short hooks that they are liable to be dropped if I toss my
head about much, and when I am riding I can’t give my mind to them. It
would be doing me knight service if you keep your eyes fixed upon them,
and remember them every minute of the day, and tell me directly I drop one.
They have had such hairbreadth escapes, haven’t they, Unity?” she
continued to the parlour-maid who was standing at the door.
“Yes, miss, that they have!” said Unity with round-eyed commiseration.
“Once ’twas in the lane that I found one of them,” pursued Elfride
reflectively.
“And then ’twas by the gate into Eighteen Acres,” Unity chimed in.
“And then ’twas on the carpet in my own room,” rejoined Elfride merrily.
“And then ’twas dangling on the embroidery of your petticoat, miss; and
then ’twas down your back, miss, wasn’t it? And oh, what a way you was
in, miss, wasn’t you? my! until you found it!”
Stephen took Elfride’s slight foot upon his hand: “One, two, three, and
up!” she said.
Unfortunately not so. He staggered and lifted, and the horse edged round;
and Elfride was ultimately deposited upon the ground rather more forcibly
than was pleasant. Smith looked all contrition.
“Never mind,” said the vicar encouragingly; “try again! ’Tis a little
accomplishment that requires some practice, although it looks so easy.
Stand closer to the horse’s head, Mr. Smith.”
“Indeed, I shan’t let him try again,” said she with a microscopic look of
indignation. “Worm, come here, and help me to mount.” Worm stepped
forward, and she was in the saddle in a trice.
Then they moved on, going for some distance in silence, the hot air of the
valley being occasionally brushed from their faces by a cool breeze, which
wound its way along ravines leading up from the sea.
“I suppose,” said Stephen, “that a man who can neither sit in a saddle
himself nor help another person into one seems a useless incumbrance; but,
Miss Swancourt, I’ll learn to do it all for your sake; I will, indeed.”

“What is so unusual in you,” she said, in a didactic tone justifiable in a
horsewoman’s address to a benighted walker, “is that your knowledge of
certain things should be combined with your ignorance of certain other
things.”
Stephen lifted his eyes earnestly to hers.
“You know,” he said, “it is simply because there are so many other things
to be learnt in this wide world that I didn’t trouble about that particular bit
of knowledge. I thought it would be useless to me; but I don’t think so now.
I will learn riding, and all connected with it, because then you would like
me better. Do you like me much less for this?”
She looked sideways at him with critical meditation tenderly rendered.
“Do I seem like LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI?” she began
suddenly, without replying to his question. “Fancy yourself saying, Mr.
Smith:
‘I sat her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy’s song,
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;’

and that’s all she did.”
“No, no,” said the young man stilly, and with a rising colour.
“‘And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.’”

“Not at all,” she rejoined quickly. “See how I can gallop. Now, Pansy,
off!” And Elfride started; and Stephen beheld her light figure contracting to
the dimensions of a bird as she sank into the distance—her hair flowing.
He walked on in the same direction, and for a considerable time could
see no signs of her returning. Dull as a flower without the sun he sat down
upon a stone, and not for fifteen minutes was any sound of horse or rider to
be heard. Then Elfride and Pansy appeared on the hill in a round trot.
“Such a delightful scamper as we have had!” she said, her face flushed
and her eyes sparkling. She turned the horse’s head, Stephen arose, and they
went on again.
“Well, what have you to say to me, Mr. Smith, after my long absence?”

“Do you remember a question you could not exactly answer last night—
whether I was more to you than anybody else?” said he.
“I cannot exactly answer now, either.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because I don’t know if I am more to you than any one else.”
“Yes, indeed, you are!” he exclaimed in a voice of intensest appreciation,
at the same time gliding round and looking into her face.
“Eyes in eyes,” he murmured playfully; and she blushingly obeyed,
looking back into his.
“And why not lips on lips?” continued Stephen daringly.
“No, certainly not. Anybody might look; and it would be the death of me.
You may kiss my hand if you like.”
He expressed by a look that to kiss a hand through a glove, and that a
riding-glove, was not a great treat under the circumstances.
“There, then; I’ll take my glove off. Isn’t it a pretty white hand? Ah, you
don’t want to kiss it, and you shall not now!”
“If I do not, may I never kiss again, you severe Elfride! You know I think
more of you than I can tell; that you are my queen. I would die for you,
Elfride!”
A rapid red again filled her cheeks, and she looked at him meditatively.
What a proud moment it was for Elfride then! She was ruling a heart with
absolute despotism for the first time in her life.
Stephen stealthily pounced upon her hand.
“No; I won’t, I won’t!” she said intractably; “and you shouldn’t take me
by surprise.”
There ensued a mild form of tussle for absolute possession of the much-
coveted hand, in which the boisterousness of boy and girl was far more
prominent than the dignity of man and woman. Then Pansy became restless.
Elfride recovered her position and remembered herself.
“You make me behave in not a nice way at all!” she exclaimed, in a tone
neither of pleasure nor anger, but partaking of both. “I ought not to have
allowed such a romp! We are too old now for that sort of thing.”
“I hope you don’t think me too—too much of a creeping-round sort of
man,” said he in a penitent tone, conscious that he too had lost a little

dignity by the proceeding.
“You are too familiar; and I can’t have it! Considering the shortness of
the time we have known each other, Mr. Smith, you take too much upon
you. You think I am a country girl, and it doesn’t matter how you behave to
me!”
“I assure you, Miss Swancourt, that I had no idea of freak in my mind. I
wanted to imprint a sweet—serious kiss upon your hand; and that’s all.”
“Now, that’s creeping round again! And you mustn’t look into my eyes
so,” she said, shaking her head at him, and trotting on a few paces in
advance. Thus she led the way out of the lane and across some fields in the
direction of the cliffs. At the boundary of the fields nearest the sea she
expressed a wish to dismount. The horse was tied to a post, and they both
followed an irregular path, which ultimately terminated upon a flat ledge
passing round the face of the huge blue-black rock at a height about
midway between the sea and the topmost verge. There, far beneath and
before them, lay the everlasting stretch of ocean; there, upon detached
rocks, were the white screaming gulls, seeming ever intending to settle, and
yet always passing on. Right and left ranked the toothed and zigzag line of
storm-torn heights, forming the series which culminated in the one beneath
their feet.
Behind the youth and maiden was a tempting alcove and seat, formed
naturally in the beetling mass, and wide enough to admit two or three
persons. Elfride sat down, and Stephen sat beside her.
“I am afraid it is hardly proper of us to be here, either,” she said half
inquiringly. “We have not known each other long enough for this kind of
thing, have we!”
“Oh yes,” he replied judicially; “quite long enough.”
“How do you know?”
“It is not length of time, but the manner in which our minutes beat, that
makes enough or not enough in our acquaintanceship.”
“Yes, I see that. But I wish papa suspected or knew what a VERY NEW
THING I am doing. He does not think of it at all.”
“Darling Elfie, I wish we could be married! It is wrong for me to say it—
I know it is—before you know more; but I wish we might be, all the same.
Do you love me deeply, deeply?”

“No!” she said in a fluster.
At this point-blank denial, Stephen turned his face away decisively, and
preserved an ominous silence; the only objects of interest on earth for him
being apparently the three or four-score sea-birds circling in the air afar off.
“I didn’t mean to stop you quite,” she faltered with some alarm; and
seeing that he still remained silent, she added more anxiously, “If you say
that again, perhaps, I will not be quite—quite so obstinate—if—if you don’t
like me to be.”
“Oh, my Elfride!” he exclaimed, and kissed her.
It was Elfride’s first kiss. And so awkward and unused was she; full of
striving—no relenting. There was none of those apparent struggles to get
out of the trap which only results in getting further in: no final attitude of
receptivity: no easy close of shoulder to shoulder, hand upon hand, face
upon face, and, in spite of coyness, the lips in the right place at the supreme
moment. That graceful though apparently accidental falling into position,
which many have noticed as precipitating the end and making sweethearts
the sweeter, was not here. Why? Because experience was absent. A woman
must have had many kisses before she kisses well.
In fact, the art of tendering the lips for these amatory salutes follows the
principles laid down in treatises on legerdemain for performing the trick
called Forcing a Card. The card is to be shifted nimbly, withdrawn, edged
under, and withal not to be offered till the moment the unsuspecting
person’s hand reaches the pack; this forcing to be done so modestly and yet
so coaxingly, that the person trifled with imagines he is really choosing
what is in fact thrust into his hand.
Well, there were no such facilities now; and Stephen was conscious of it
—first with a momentary regret that his kiss should be spoilt by her
confused receipt of it, and then with the pleasant perception that her
awkwardness was her charm.
“And you do care for me and love me?” said he.
“Yes.”
“Very much?”
“Yes.”
“And I mustn’t ask you if you’ll wait for me, and be my wife some day?”

“Why not?” she said naively.
“There is a reason why, my Elfride.”
“Not any one that I know of.”
“Suppose there is something connected with me which makes it almost
impossible for you to agree to be my wife, or for your father to countenance
such an idea?”
“Nothing shall make me cease to love you: no blemish can be found upon
your personal nature. That is pure and generous, I know; and having that,
how can I be cold to you?”
“And shall nothing else affect us—shall nothing beyond my nature be a
part of my quality in your eyes, Elfie?”
“Nothing whatever,” she said with a breath of relief. “Is that all? Some
outside circumstance? What do I care?”
“You can hardly judge, dear, till you know what has to be judged. For
that, we will stop till we get home. I believe in you, but I cannot feel
bright.”
“Love is new, and fresh to us as the dew; and we are together. As the
lover’s world goes, this is a great deal. Stephen, I fancy I see the difference
between me and you—between men and women generally, perhaps. I am
content to build happiness on any accidental basis that may lie near at hand;
you are for making a world to suit your happiness.”
“Elfride, you sometimes say things which make you seem suddenly to
become five years older than you are, or than I am; and that remark is one. I
couldn’t think so OLD as that, try how I might....And no lover has ever
kissed you before?”
“Never.”
“I knew that; you were so unused. You ride well, but you don’t kiss
nicely at all; and I was told once, by my friend Knight, that that is an
excellent fault in woman.”
“Now, come; I must mount again, or we shall not be home by dinner-
time.” And they returned to where Pansy stood tethered. “Instead of
entrusting my weight to a young man’s unstable palm,” she continued gaily,
“I prefer a surer ‘upping-stock’ (as the villagers call it), in the form of a
gate. There—now I am myself again.”

They proceeded homeward at the same walking pace.
Her blitheness won Stephen out of his thoughtfulness, and each forgot
everything but the tone of the moment.
“What did you love me for?” she said, after a long musing look at a
flying bird.
“I don’t know,” he replied idly.
“Oh yes, you do,” insisted Elfride.
“Perhaps, for your eyes.”
“What of them?—now, don’t vex me by a light answer. What of my
eyes?”
“Oh, nothing to be mentioned. They are indifferently good.”
“Come, Stephen, I won’t have that. What did you love me for?”
“It might have been for your mouth?”
“Well, what about my mouth?”
“I thought it was a passable mouth enough——”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“With a pretty pout and sweet lips; but actually, nothing more than what
everybody has.”
“Don’t make up things out of your head as you go on, there’s a dear
Stephen. Now—what—did—you—love—me—for?”
“Perhaps, ’twas for your neck and hair; though I am not sure: or for your
idle blood, that did nothing but wander away from your cheeks and back
again; but I am not sure. Or your hands and arms, that they eclipsed all
other hands and arms; or your feet, that they played about under your dress
like little mice; or your tongue, that it was of a dear delicate tone. But I am
not altogether sure.”
“Ah, that’s pretty to say; but I don’t care for your love, if it made a mere
flat picture of me in that way, and not being sure, and such cold reasoning;
but what you FELT I was, you know, Stephen” (at this a stealthy laugh and
frisky look into his face), “when you said to yourself, ‘I’ll certainly love
that young lady.’”
“I never said it.”
“When you said to yourself, then, ‘I never will love that young lady.’”

“I didn’t say that, either.”
“Then was it, ‘I suppose I must love that young lady?’”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“’Twas much more fluctuating—not so definite.”
“Tell me; do, do.”
“It was that I ought not to think about you if I loved you truly.”
“Ah, that I don’t understand. There’s no getting it out of you. And I’ll not
ask you ever any more—never more—to say out of the deep reality of your
heart what you loved me for.”
“Sweet tantalizer, what’s the use? It comes to this sole simple thing: That
at one time I had never seen you, and I didn’t love you; that then I saw you,
and I did love you. Is that enough?”
“Yes; I will make it do....I know, I think, what I love you for. You are
nice-looking, of course; but I didn’t mean for that. It is because you are so
docile and gentle.”
“Those are not quite the correct qualities for a man to be loved for,” said
Stephen, in rather a dissatisfied tone of self-criticism. “Well, never mind. I
must ask your father to allow us to be engaged directly we get indoors. It
will be for a long time.”
“I like it the better....Stephen, don’t mention it till to-morrow.”
“Why?”
“Because, if he should object—I don’t think he will; but if he should—
we shall have a day longer of happiness from our ignorance....Well, what
are you thinking of so deeply?”
“I was thinking how my dear friend Knight would enjoy this scene. I
wish he could come here.”
“You seem very much engrossed with him,” she answered, with a jealous
little toss. “He must be an interesting man to take up so much of your
attention.”
“Interesting!” said Stephen, his face glowing with his fervour; “noble,
you ought to say.”

“Oh yes, yes; I forgot,” she said half satirically. “The noblest man in
England, as you told us last night.”
“He is a fine fellow, laugh as you will, Miss Elfie.”
“I know he is your hero. But what does he do? anything?”
“He writes.”
“What does he write? I have never heard of his name.”
“Because his personality, and that of several others like him, is absorbed
into a huge WE, namely, the impalpable entity called the PRESENT—a
social and literary Review.”
“Is he only a reviewer?”
“ONLY, Elfie! Why, I can tell you it is a fine thing to be on the staff of
the PRESENT. Finer than being a novelist considerably.”
“That’s a hit at me, and my poor COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE.”
“No, Elfride,” he whispered; “I didn’t mean that. I mean that he is really
a literary man of some eminence, and not altogether a reviewer. He writes
things of a higher class than reviews, though he reviews a book
occasionally. His ordinary productions are social and ethical essays—all
that the PRESENT contains which is not literary reviewing.”
“I admit he must be talented if he writes for the PRESENT. We have it
sent to us irregularly. I want papa to be a subscriber, but he’s so
conservative. Now the next point in this Mr. Knight—I suppose he is a very
good man.”
“An excellent man. I shall try to be his intimate friend some day.”
“But aren’t you now?”
“No; not so much as that,” replied Stephen, as if such a supposition were
extravagant. “You see, it was in this way—he came originally from the
same place as I, and taught me things; but I am not intimate with him.
Shan’t I be glad when I get richer and better known, and hob and nob with
him!” Stephen’s eyes sparkled.
A pout began to shape itself upon Elfride’s soft lips. “You think always of
him, and like him better than you do me!”
“No, indeed, Elfride. The feeling is different quite. But I do like him, and
he deserves even more affection from me than I give.”

“You are not nice now, and you make me as jealous as possible!” she
exclaimed perversely. “I know you will never speak to any third person of
me so warmly as you do to me of him.”
“But you don’t understand, Elfride,” he said with an anxious movement.
“You shall know him some day. He is so brilliant—no, it isn’t exactly
brilliant; so thoughtful—nor does thoughtful express him—that it would
charm you to talk to him. He’s a most desirable friend, and that isn’t half I
could say.”
“I don’t care how good he is; I don’t want to know him, because he
comes between me and you. You think of him night and day, ever so much
more than of anybody else; and when you are thinking of him, I am shut out
of your mind.”
“No, dear Elfride; I love you dearly.”
“And I don’t like you to tell me so warmly about him when you are in the
middle of loving me. Stephen, suppose that I and this man Knight of yours
were both drowning, and you could only save one of us——”
“Yes—the stupid old proposition—which would I save?
“Well, which? Not me.”
“Both of you,” he said, pressing her pendent hand.
“No, that won’t do; only one of us.”
“I cannot say; I don’t know. It is disagreeable—quite a horrid idea to
have to handle.”
“A-ha, I know. You would save him, and let me drown, drown, drown;
and I don’t care about your love!”
She had endeavoured to give a playful tone to her words, but the latter
speech was rather forced in its gaiety.
At this point in the discussion she trotted off to turn a corner which was
avoided by the footpath, the road and the path reuniting at a point a little
further on. On again making her appearance she continually managed to
look in a direction away from him, and left him in the cool shade of her
displeasure. Stephen was soon beaten at this game of indifference. He went
round and entered the range of her vision.
“Are you offended, Elfie? Why don’t you talk?”

“Save me, then, and let that Mr. Clever of yours drown. I hate him. Now,
which would you?”
“Really, Elfride, you should not press such a hard question. It is
ridiculous.”
“Then I won’t be alone with you any more. Unkind, to wound me so!”
She laughed at her own absurdity but persisted.
“Come, Elfie, let’s make it up and be friends.”
“Say you would save me, then, and let him drown.”
“I would save you—and him too.”
“And let him drown. Come, or you don’t love me!” she teasingly went
on.
“And let him drown,” he ejaculated despairingly.
“There; now I am yours!” she said, and a woman’s flush of triumph lit
her eyes.
“Only one earring, miss, as I’m alive,” said Unity on their entering the
hall.
With a face expressive of wretched misgiving, Elfride’s hand flew like an
arrow to her ear.
“There!” she exclaimed to Stephen, looking at him with eyes full of
reproach.
“I quite forgot, indeed. If I had only remembered!” he answered, with a
conscience-stricken face.
She wheeled herself round, and turned into the shrubbery. Stephen
followed.
“If you had told me to watch anything, Stephen, I should have religiously
done it,” she capriciously went on, as soon as she heard him behind her.
“Forgetting is forgivable.”
“Well, you will find it, if you want me to respect you and be engaged to
you when we have asked papa.” She considered a moment, and added more
seriously, “I know now where I dropped it, Stephen. It was on the cliff. I
remember a faint sensation of some change about me, but I was too absent
to think of it then. And that’s where it is now, and you must go and look
there.”

“I’ll go at once.”
And he strode away up the valley, under a broiling sun and amid the
deathlike silence of early afternoon. He ascended, with giddy-paced haste,
the windy range of rocks to where they had sat, felt and peered about the
stones and crannies, but Elfride’s stray jewel was nowhere to be seen. Next
Stephen slowly retraced his steps, and, pausing at a cross-road to reflect a
while, he left the plateau and struck downwards across some fields, in the
direction of Endelstow House.
He walked along the path by the river without the slightest hesitation as
to its bearing, apparently quite familiar with every inch of the ground. As
the shadows began to lengthen and the sunlight to mellow, he passed
through two wicket-gates, and drew near the outskirts of Endelstow Park.
The river now ran along under the park fence, previous to entering the
grove itself, a little further on.
Here stood a cottage, between the fence and the stream, on a slightly
elevated spot of ground, round which the river took a turn. The
characteristic feature of this snug habitation was its one chimney in the
gable end, its squareness of form disguised by a huge cloak of ivy, which
had grown so luxuriantly and extended so far from its base, as to increase
the apparent bulk of the chimney to the dimensions of a tower. Some little
distance from the back of the house rose the park boundary, and over this
were to be seen the sycamores of the grove, making slow inclinations to the
just-awakening air.
Stephen crossed the little wood bridge in front, went up to the cottage
door, and opened it without knock or signal of any kind.
Exclamations of welcome burst from some person or persons when the
door was thrust ajar, followed by the scrape of chairs on a stone floor, as if
pushed back by their occupiers in rising from a table. The door was closed
again, and nothing could now be heard from within, save a lively chatter
and the rattle of plates.

Chapter VIII
“Allen-a-Dale is no baron or lord.”

The mists were creeping out of pools and swamps for their pilgrimages
of the night when Stephen came up to the front door of the vicarage. Elfride
was standing on the step illuminated by a lemon-hued expanse of western
sky.
“You never have been all this time looking for that earring?” she said
anxiously.
“Oh no; and I have not found it.”
“Never mind. Though I am much vexed; they are my prettiest. But,
Stephen, what ever have you been doing—where have you been? I have
been so uneasy. I feared for you, knowing not an inch of the country. I
thought, suppose he has fallen over the cliff! But now I am inclined to scold
you for frightening me so.”
“I must speak to your father now,” he said rather abruptly; “I have so
much to say to him—and to you, Elfride.”
“Will what you have to say endanger this nice time of ours, and is it that
same shadowy secret you allude to so frequently, and will it make me
unhappy?”
“Possibly.”
She breathed heavily, and looked around as if for a prompter.
“Put it off till to-morrow,” she said.
He involuntarily sighed too.
“No; it must come to-night. Where is your father, Elfride?”
“Somewhere in the kitchen garden, I think,” she replied. “That is his
favourite evening retreat. I will leave you now. Say all that’s to be said—do

all there is to be done. Think of me waiting anxiously for the end.” And she
re-entered the house.
She waited in the drawing-room, watching the lights sink to shadows, the
shadows sink to darkness, until her impatience to know what had occurred
in the garden could no longer be controlled. She passed round the
shrubbery, unlatched the garden door, and skimmed with her keen eyes the
whole twilighted space that the four walls enclosed and sheltered: they were
not there. She mounted a little ladder, which had been used for gathering
fruit, and looked over the wall into the field. This field extended to the
limits of the glebe, which was enclosed on that side by a privet-hedge.
Under the hedge was Mr. Swancourt, walking up and down, and talking
aloud—to himself, as it sounded at first. No: another voice shouted
occasional replies; and this interlocutor seemed to be on the other side of
the hedge. The voice, though soft in quality, was not Stephen’s.
The second speaker must have been in the long-neglected garden of an
old manor-house hard by, which, together with a small estate attached, had
lately been purchased by a person named Troyton, whom Elfride had never
seen. Her father might have struck up an acquaintanceship with some
member of that family through the privet-hedge, or a stranger to the
neighbourhood might have wandered thither.
Well, there was no necessity for disturbing him.
And it seemed that, after all, Stephen had not yet made his desired
communication to her father. Again she went indoors, wondering where
Stephen could be. For want of something better to do, she went upstairs to
her own little room. Here she sat down at the open window, and, leaning
with her elbow on the table and her cheek upon her hand, she fell into
meditation.
It was a hot and still August night. Every disturbance of the silence which
rose to the dignity of a noise could be heard for miles, and the merest sound
for a long distance. So she remained, thinking of Stephen, and wishing he
had not deprived her of his company to no purpose, as it appeared. How
delicate and sensitive he was, she reflected; and yet he was man enough to
have a private mystery, which considerably elevated him in her eyes. Thus,
looking at things with an inward vision, she lost consciousness of the flight
of time.

Strange conjunctions of circumstances, particularly those of a trivial
everyday kind, are so frequent in an ordinary life, that we grow used to their
unaccountableness, and forget the question whether the very long odds
against such juxtaposition is not almost a disproof of it being a matter of
chance at all. What occurred to Elfride at this moment was a case in point.
She was vividly imagining, for the twentieth time, the kiss of the morning,
and putting her lips together in the position another such a one would
demand, when she heard the identical operation performed on the lawn,
immediately beneath her window.
A kiss—not of the quiet and stealthy kind, but decisive, loud, and smart.
Her face flushed and she looked out, but to no purpose. The dark rim of
the upland drew a keen sad line against the pale glow of the sky, unbroken
except where a young cedar on the lawn, that had outgrown its fellow trees,
shot its pointed head across the horizon, piercing the firmamental lustre like
a sting.
It was just possible that, had any persons been standing on the grassy
portions of the lawn, Elfride might have seen their dusky forms. But the
shrubs, which once had merely dotted the glade, had now grown bushy and
large, till they hid at least half the enclosure containing them. The kissing
pair might have been behind some of these; at any rate, nobody was in
sight.
Had no enigma ever been connected with her lover by his hints and
absences, Elfride would never have thought of admitting into her mind a
suspicion that he might be concerned in the foregoing enactment. But the
reservations he at present insisted on, while they added to the mystery
without which perhaps she would never have seriously loved him at all,
were calculated to nourish doubts of all kinds, and with a slow flush of
jealousy she asked herself, might he not be the culprit?
Elfride glided downstairs on tiptoe, and out to the precise spot on which
she had parted from Stephen to enable him to speak privately to her father.
Thence she wandered into all the nooks around the place from which the
sound seemed to proceed—among the huge laurestines, about the tufts of
pampas grasses, amid the variegated hollies, under the weeping wych-elm
—nobody was there. Returning indoors she called “Unity!”
“She is gone to her aunt’s, to spend the evening,” said Mr. Swancourt,
thrusting his head out of his study door, and letting the light of his candles

stream upon Elfride’s face—less revealing than, as it seemed to herself,
creating the blush of uneasy perplexity that was burning upon her cheek.
“I didn’t know you were indoors, papa,” she said with surprise. “Surely
no light was shining from the window when I was on the lawn?” and she
looked and saw that the shutters were still open.
“Oh yes, I am in,” he said indifferently. “What did you want Unity for? I
think she laid supper before she went out.”
“Did she?—I have not been to see—I didn’t want her for that.”
Elfride scarcely knew, now that a definite reason was required, what that
reason was. Her mind for a moment strayed to another subject, unimportant
as it seemed. The red ember of a match was lying inside the fender, which
explained that why she had seen no rays from the window was because the
candles had only just been lighted.
“I’ll come directly,” said the vicar. “I thought you were out somewhere
with Mr. Smith.”
Even the inexperienced Elfride could not help thinking that her father
must be wonderfully blind if he failed to perceive what was the nascent
consequence of herself and Stephen being so unceremoniously left together;
wonderfully careless, if he saw it and did not think about it; wonderfully
good, if, as seemed to her by far the most probable supposition, he saw it
and thought about it and approved of it. These reflections were cut short by
the appearance of Stephen just outside the porch, silvered about the head
and shoulders with touches of moonlight, that had begun to creep through
the trees.
“Has your trouble anything to do with a kiss on the lawn?” she asked
abruptly, almost passionately.
“Kiss on the lawn?”
“Yes!” she said, imperiously now.
“I didn’t comprehend your meaning, nor do I now exactly. I certainly
have kissed nobody on the lawn, if that is really what you want to know,
Elfride.”
“You know nothing about such a performance?”
“Nothing whatever. What makes you ask?”

“Don’t press me to tell; it is nothing of importance. And, Stephen, you
have not yet spoken to papa about our engagement?”
“No,” he said regretfully, “I could not find him directly; and then I went
on thinking so much of what you said about objections, refusals—bitter
words possibly—ending our happiness, that I resolved to put it off till to-
morrow; that gives us one more day of delight—delight of a tremulous
kind.”
“Yes; but it would be improper to be silent too long, I think,” she said in
a delicate voice, which implied that her face had grown warm. “I want him
to know we love, Stephen. Why did you adopt as your own my thought of
delay?”
“I will explain; but I want to tell you of my secret first—to tell you now.
It is two or three hours yet to bedtime. Let us walk up the hill to the
church.”
Elfride passively assented, and they went from the lawn by a side wicket,
and ascended into the open expanse of moonlight which streamed around
the lonely edifice on the summit of the hill.
The door was locked. They turned from the porch, and walked hand in
hand to find a resting-place in the churchyard. Stephen chose a flat tomb,
showing itself to be newer and whiter than those around it, and sitting down
himself, gently drew her hand towards him.
“No, not there,” she said.
“Why not here?”
“A mere fancy; but never mind.” And she sat down.
“Elfie, will you love me, in spite of everything that may be said against
me?”
“O Stephen, what makes you repeat that so continually and so sadly? You
know I will. Yes, indeed,” she said, drawing closer, “whatever may be said
of you—and nothing bad can be—I will cling to you just the same. Your
ways shall be my ways until I die.”
“Did you ever think what my parents might be, or what society I
originally moved in?”
“No, not particularly. I have observed one or two little points in your
manners which are rather quaint—no more. I suppose you have moved in

the ordinary society of professional people.”
“Supposing I have not—that none of my family have a profession except
me?”
“I don’t mind. What you are only concerns me.”
“Where do you think I went to school—I mean, to what kind of school?”
“Dr. Somebody’s academy,” she said simply.
“No. To a dame school originally, then to a national school.”
“Only to those! Well, I love you just as much, Stephen, dear Stephen,”
she murmured tenderly, “I do indeed. And why should you tell me these
things so impressively? What do they matter to me?”
He held her closer and proceeded:
“What do you think my father is—does for his living, that is to say?”
“He practises some profession or calling, I suppose.”
“No; he is a mason.”
“A Freemason?”
“No; a cottager and journeyman mason.”
Elfride said nothing at first. After a while she whispered:
“That is a strange idea to me. But never mind; what does it matter?”
“But aren’t you angry with me for not telling you before?”
“No, not at all. Is your mother alive?”
“Yes.”
“Is she a nice lady?”
“Very—the best mother in the world. Her people had been well-to-do
yeomen for centuries, but she was only a dairymaid.”
“O Stephen!” came from her in whispered exclamation.
“She continued to attend to a dairy long after my father married her,”
pursued Stephen, without further hesitation. “And I remember very well
how, when I was very young, I used to go to the milking, look on at the
skimming, sleep through the churning, and make believe I helped her. Ah,
that was a happy time enough!”
“No, never—not happy.”
“Yes, it was.”

“I don’t see how happiness could be where the drudgery of dairy-work
had to be done for a living—the hands red and chapped, and the shoes
clogged....Stephen, I do own that it seems odd to regard you in the light of
—of—having been so rough in your youth, and done menial things of that
kind.” (Stephen withdrew an inch or two from her side.) “But I DO LOVE
YOU just the same,” she continued, getting closer under his shoulder again,
“and I don’t care anything about the past; and I see that you are all the
worthier for having pushed on in the world in such a way.”
“It is not my worthiness; it is Knight’s, who pushed me.”
“Ah, always he—always he!”
“Yes, and properly so. Now, Elfride, you see the reason of his teaching
me by letter. I knew him years before he went to Oxford, but I had not got
far enough in my reading for him to entertain the idea of helping me in
classics till he left home. Then I was sent away from the village, and we
very seldom met; but he kept up this system of tuition by correspondence
with the greatest regularity. I will tell you all the story, but not now. There is
nothing more to say now, beyond giving places, persons, and dates.” His
voice became timidly slow at this point.
“No; don’t take trouble to say more. You are a dear honest fellow to say
so much as you have; and it is not so dreadful either. It has become a
normal thing that millionaires commence by going up to London with their
tools at their back, and half-a-crown in their pockets. That sort of origin is
getting so respected,” she continued cheerfully, “that it is acquiring some of
the odour of Norman ancestry.”
“Ah, if I had MADE my fortune, I shouldn’t mind. But I am only a
possible maker of it as yet.”
“It is quite enough. And so THIS is what your trouble was?”
“I thought I was doing wrong in letting you love me without telling you
my story; and yet I feared to do so, Elfie. I dreaded to lose you, and I was
cowardly on that account.”
“How plain everything about you seems after this explanation! Your
peculiarities in chess-playing, the pronunciation papa noticed in your Latin,
your odd mixture of book-knowledge with ignorance of ordinary social
accomplishments, are accounted for in a moment. And has this anything to
do with what I saw at Lord Luxellian’s?”

“What did you see?”
“I saw the shadow of yourself putting a cloak round a lady. I was at the
side door; you two were in a room with the window towards me. You came
to me a moment later.”
“She was my mother.”
“Your mother THERE!” She withdrew herself to look at him silently in
her interest.
“Elfride,” said Stephen, “I was going to tell you the remainder to-morrow
—I have been keeping it back—I must tell it now, after all. The remainder
of my revelation refers to where my parents are. Where do you think they
live? You know them—by sight at any rate.”
“I know them!” she said in suspended amazement.
“Yes. My father is John Smith, Lord Luxellian’s master-mason, who lives
under the park wall by the river.”
“O Stephen! can it be?”
“He built—or assisted at the building of the house you live in, years ago.
He put up those stone gate piers at the lodge entrance to Lord Luxellian’s
park. My grandfather planted the trees that belt in your lawn; my
grandmother—who worked in the fields with him—held each tree upright
whilst he filled in the earth: they told me so when I was a child. He was the
sexton, too, and dug many of the graves around us.”
“And was your unaccountable vanishing on the first morning of your
arrival, and again this afternoon, a run to see your father and mother?...I
understand now; no wonder you seemed to know your way about the
village!”
“No wonder. But remember, I have not lived here since I was nine years
old. I then went to live with my uncle, a blacksmith, near Exonbury, in
order to be able to attend a national school as a day scholar; there was none
on this remote coast then. It was there I met with my friend Knight. And
when I was fifteen and had been fairly educated by the school-master—and
more particularly by Knight—I was put as a pupil in an architect’s office in
that town, because I was skilful in the use of the pencil. A full premium was
paid by the efforts of my mother and father, rather against the wishes of
Lord Luxellian, who likes my father, however, and thinks a great deal of

him. There I stayed till six months ago, when I obtained a situation as
improver, as it is called, in a London office. That’s all of me.”
“To think YOU, the London visitor, the town man, should have been born
here, and have known this village so many years before I did. How strange
—how very strange it seems to me!” she murmured.
“My mother curtseyed to you and your father last Sunday,” said Stephen,
with a pained smile at the thought of the incongruity. “And your papa said
to her, ‘I am glad to see you so regular at church, JANE.’”
“I remember it, but I have never spoken to her. We have only been here
eighteen months, and the parish is so large.”
“Contrast with this,” said Stephen, with a miserable laugh, “your father’s
belief in my ‘blue blood,’ which is still prevalent in his mind. The first night
I came, he insisted upon proving my descent from one of the most ancient
west-county families, on account of my second Christian name; when the
truth is, it was given me because my grandfather was assistant gardener in
the Fitzmaurice-Smith family for thirty years. Having seen your face, my
darling, I had not heart to contradict him, and tell him what would have cut
me off from a friendly knowledge of you.”
She sighed deeply. “Yes, I see now how this inequality may be made to
trouble us,” she murmured, and continued in a low, sad whisper, “I
wouldn’t have minded if they had lived far away. Papa might have
consented to an engagement between us if your connection had been with
villagers a hundred miles off; remoteness softens family contrasts. But he
will not like—O Stephen, Stephen! what can I do?”
“Do?” he said tentatively, yet with heaviness. “Give me up; let me go
back to London, and think no more of me.”
“No, no; I cannot give you up! This hopelessness in our affairs makes me
care more for you....I see what did not strike me at first. Stephen, why do
we trouble? Why should papa object? An architect in London is an architect
in London. Who inquires there? Nobody. We shall live there, shall we not?
Why need we be so alarmed?”
“And Elfie,” said Stephen, his hopes kindling with hers, “Knight thinks
nothing of my being only a cottager’s son; he says I am as worthy of his
friendship as if I were a lord’s; and if I am worthy of his friendship, I am
worthy of you, am I not, Elfride?”

“I not only have never loved anybody but you,” she said, instead of
giving an answer, “but I have not even formed a strong friendship, such as
you have for Knight. I wish you hadn’t. It diminishes me.”
“Now, Elfride, you know better,” he said wooingly. “And had you really
never any sweetheart at all?”
“None that was ever recognized by me as such.”
“But did nobody ever love you?”
“Yes—a man did once; very much, he said.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh, a long time.”
“How long, dearest?
“A twelvemonth.”
“That’s not VERY long” (rather disappointedly).
“I said long, not very long.”
“And did he want to marry you?”
“I believe he did. But I didn’t see anything in him. He was not good
enough, even if I had loved him.”
“May I ask what he was?”
“A farmer.”
“A farmer not good enough—how much better than my family!” Stephen
murmured.
“Where is he now?” he continued to Elfride.
“HERE.”
“Here! what do you mean by that?”
“I mean that he is here.”
“Where here?”
“Under us. He is under this tomb. He is dead, and we are sitting on his
grave.”
“Elfie,” said the young man, standing up and looking at the tomb, “how
odd and sad that revelation seems! It quite depresses me for the moment.”
“Stephen! I didn’t wish to sit here; but you would do so.”
“You never encouraged him?”

“Never by look, word, or sign,” she said solemnly. “He died of
consumption, and was buried the day you first came.”
“Let us go away. I don’t like standing by HIM, even if you never loved
him. He was BEFORE me.”
“Worries make you unreasonable,” she half pouted, following Stephen at
the distance of a few steps. “Perhaps I ought to have told you before we sat
down. Yes; let us go.”

Chapter IX
“Her father did fume”

Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending
complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in hand. At
the door they paused wistfully, like children late at school.
Women accept their destiny more readily than men. Elfride had now
resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her lover’s sorry antecedents;
Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance that Elfride had known
earlier admiration than his own.
“What was that young man’s name?” he inquired.
“Felix Jethway; a widow’s only son.”
“I remember the family.”
“She hates me now. She says I killed him.”
Stephen mused, and they entered the porch.
“Stephen, I love only you,” she tremulously whispered. He pressed her
fingers, and the trifling shadow passed away, to admit again the mutual and
more tangible trouble.
The study appeared to be the only room lighted up. They entered, each
with a demeanour intended to conceal the inconcealable fact that reciprocal
love was their dominant chord. Elfride perceived a man, sitting with his
back towards herself, talking to her father. She would have retired, but Mr.
Swancourt had seen her.
“Come in,” he said; “it is only Martin Cannister, come for a copy of the
register for poor Mrs. Jethway.”
Martin Cannister, the sexton, was rather a favourite with Elfride. He used
to absorb her attention by telling her of his strange experiences in digging

up after long years the bodies of persons he had known, and recognizing
them by some little sign (though in reality he had never recognized any). He
had shrewd small eyes and a great wealth of double chin, which
compensated in some measure for considerable poverty of nose.
The appearance of a slip of paper in Cannister’s hand, and a few shillings
lying on the table in front of him, denoted that the business had been
transacted, and the tenor of their conversation went to show that a summary
of village news was now engaging the attention of parishioner and parson.
Mr. Cannister stood up and touched his forehead over his eye with his
finger, in respectful salutation of Elfride, gave half as much salute to
Stephen (whom he, in common with other villagers, had never for a
moment recognized), then sat down again and resumed his discourse.
“Where had I got on to, sir?”
“To driving the pile,” said Mr. Swancourt.
“The pile ’twas. So, as I was saying, Nat was driving the pile in this
manner, as I might say.” Here Mr. Cannister held his walking-stick
scrupulously vertical with his left hand, and struck a blow with great force
on the knob of the stick with his right. “John was steadying the pile so, as I
might say.” Here he gave the stick a slight shake, and looked firmly in the
various eyes around to see that before proceeding further his listeners well
grasped the subject at that stage. “Well, when Nat had struck some half-
dozen blows more upon the pile, ’a stopped for a second or two. John,
thinking he had done striking, put his hand upon the top o’ the pile to gie en
a pull, and see if ’a were firm in the ground.” Mr. Cannister spread his hand
over the top of the stick, completely covering it with his palm. “Well, so to
speak, Nat hadn’t maned to stop striking, and when John had put his hand
upon the pile, the beetle——”
“Oh dreadful!” said Elfride.
“The beetle was already coming down, you see, sir. Nat just caught sight
of his hand, but couldn’t stop the blow in time. Down came the beetle upon
poor John Smith’s hand, and squashed en to a pummy.”
“Dear me, dear me! poor fellow!” said the vicar, with an intonation like
the groans of the wounded in a pianoforte performance of the “Battle of
Prague.”
“John Smith, the master-mason?” cried Stephen hurriedly.

“Ay, no other; and a better-hearted man God A’mighty never made.”
“Is he so much hurt?”
“I have heard,” said Mr. Swancourt, not noticing Stephen, “that he has a
son in London, a very promising young fellow.”
“Oh, how he must be hurt!” repeated Stephen.
“A beetle couldn’t hurt very little. Well, sir, good-night t’ye; and ye, sir;
and you, miss, I’m sure.”
Mr. Cannister had been making unnoticeable motions of withdrawal, and
by the time this farewell remark came from his lips he was just outside the
door of the room. He tramped along the hall, stayed more than a minute
endeavouring to close the door properly, and then was lost to their hearing.
Stephen had meanwhile turned and said to the vicar:
“Please excuse me this evening! I must leave. John Smith is my father.”
The vicar did not comprehend at first.
“What did you say?” he inquired.
“John Smith is my father,” said Stephen deliberately.
A surplus tinge of redness rose from Mr. Swancourt’s neck, and came
round over his face, the lines of his features became more firmly defined,
and his lips seemed to get thinner. It was evident that a series of little
circumstances, hitherto unheeded, were now fitting themselves together,
and forming a lucid picture in Mr. Swancourt’s mind in such a manner as to
render useless further explanation on Stephen’s part.
“Indeed,” the vicar said, in a voice dry and without inflection.
This being a word which depends entirely upon its tone for its meaning,
Mr. Swancourt’s enunciation was equivalent to no expression at all.
“I have to go now,” said Stephen, with an agitated bearing, and a
movement as if he scarcely knew whether he ought to run off or stay longer.
“On my return, sir, will you kindly grant me a few minutes’ private
conversation?”
“Certainly. Though antecedently it does not seem possible that there can
be anything of the nature of private business between us.”
Mr. Swancourt put on his straw hat, crossed the drawing-room, into
which the moonlight was shining, and stepped out of the French window
into the verandah. It required no further effort to perceive what, indeed,

reasoning might have foretold as the natural colour of a mind whose
pleasures were taken amid genealogies, good dinners, and patrician
reminiscences, that Mr. Swancourt’s prejudices were too strong for his
generosity, and that Stephen’s moments as his friend and equal were
numbered, or had even now ceased.
Stephen moved forward as if he would follow the vicar, then as if he
would not, and in absolute perplexity whither to turn himself, went
awkwardly to the door. Elfride followed lingeringly behind him. Before he
had receded two yards from the doorstep, Unity and Ann the housemaid
came home from their visit to the village.
“Have you heard anything about John Smith? The accident is not so bad
as was reported, is it?” said Elfride intuitively.
“Oh no; the doctor says it is only a bad bruise.”
“I thought so!” cried Elfride gladly.
“He says that, although Nat believes he did not check the beetle as it
came down, he must have done so without knowing it—checked it very
considerably too; for the full blow would have knocked his hand abroad,
and in reality it is only made black-and-blue like.”
“How thankful I am!” said Stephen.
The perplexed Unity looked at him with her mouth rather than with her
eyes.
“That will do, Unity,” said Elfride magisterially; and the two maids
passed on.
“Elfride, do you forgive me?” said Stephen with a faint smile. “No man
is fair in love;” and he took her fingers lightly in his own.
With her head thrown sideways in the Greuze attitude, she looked a
tender reproach at his doubt and pressed his hand. Stephen returned the
pressure threefold, then hastily went off to his father’s cottage by the wall
of Endelstow Park.
“Elfride, what have you to say to this?” inquired her father, coming up
immediately Stephen had retired.
With feminine quickness she grasped at any straw that would enable her
to plead his cause. “He had told me of it,” she faltered; “so that it is not a
discovery in spite of him. He was just coming in to tell you.”

“COMING to tell! Why hadn’t he already told? I object as much, if not
more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the fact itself. It
looks very much like his making a fool of me, and of you too. You and he
have been about together, and corresponding together, in a way I don’t at all
approve of—in a most unseemly way. You should have known how
improper such conduct is. A woman can’t be too careful not to be seen
alone with I-don’t-know-whom.”
“You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.”
“My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be thinking of!
He, a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the Luxellians. We
have been coming to nothing for centuries, and now I believe we have got
there. What shall I next invite here, I wonder!”
Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs. “O papa,
papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one another, papa—O, so
much! And what he was going to ask you is, if you will allow of an
engagement between us till he is a gentleman as good as you. We are not in
a hurry, dear papa; we don’t want in the least to marry now; not until he is
richer. Only will you let us be engaged, because I love him so, and he loves
me?”
Mr. Swancourt’s feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and he was
annoyed that such should be the case. “Certainly not!” he replied. He
pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously, so that the “not”
sounded like “n-o-o-o-t!”
“No, no, no; don’t say it!”
“Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and
disgraced by having him here,—the son of one of my village peasants,—but
now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above us, are you mad,
Elfride?”
“You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit, papa, and
you knew they were a sort of—love-letters; and since he has been here you
have let him be alone with me almost entirely; and you guessed, you must
have guessed, what we were thinking of, and doing, and you didn’t stop
him. Next to love-making comes love-winning, and you knew it would
come to that, papa.”

The vicar parried this common-sense thrust. “I know—since you press
me so—I know I did guess some childish attachment might arise between
you; I own I did not take much trouble to prevent it; but I have not
particularly countenanced it; and, Elfride, how can you expect that I should
now? It is impossible; no father in England would hear of such a thing.”
“But he is the same man, papa; the same in every particular; and how can
he be less fit for me than he was before?”
“He appeared a young man with well-to-do friends, and a little property;
but having neither, he is another man.”
“You inquired nothing about him?”
“I went by Hewby’s introduction. He should have told me. So should the
young man himself; of course he should. I consider it a most dishonourable
thing to come into a man’s house like a treacherous I-don’t-know-what.”
“But he was afraid to tell you, and so should I have been. He loved me
too well to like to run the risk. And as to speaking of his friends on his first
visit, I don’t see why he should have done so at all. He came here on
business: it was no affair of ours who his parents were. And then he knew
that if he told you he would never be asked here, and would perhaps never
see me again. And he wanted to see me. Who can blame him for trying, by
any means, to stay near me—the girl he loves? All is fair in love. I have
heard you say so yourself, papa; and you yourself would have done just as
he has—so would any man.”
“And any man, on discovering what I have discovered, would also do as I
do, and mend my mistake; that is, get shot of him again, as soon as the laws
of hospitality will allow.” But Mr. Swancourt then remembered that he was
a Christian. “I would not, for the world, seem to turn him out of doors,” he
added; “but I think he will have the tact to see that he cannot stay long after
this, with good taste.”
“He will, because he’s a gentleman. See how graceful his manners are,”
Elfride went on; though perhaps Stephen’s manners, like the feats of
Euryalus, owed their attractiveness in her eyes rather to the attractiveness of
his person than to their own excellence.
“Ay; anybody can be what you call graceful, if he lives a little time in a
city, and keeps his eyes open. And he might have picked up his
gentlemanliness by going to the galleries of theatres, and watching stage

drawing-room manners. He reminds me of one of the worst stories I ever
heard in my life.”
“What story was that?”
“Oh no, thank you! I wouldn’t tell you such an improper matter for the
world!”
“If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of England,”
gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to interrupt her
articulation, “anywhere but here—you—would have—only regarded—
HIM, and not THEM! His station—would have—been what—his
profession makes it,—and not fixed by—his father’s humble position—at
all; whom he never lives with—now. Though John Smith has saved lots of
money, and is better off than we are, they say, or he couldn’t have put his
son to such an expensive profession. And it is clever and—honourable—of
Stephen, to be the best of his family.”
“Yes. ‘Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s
mess.’”
“You insult me, papa!” she burst out. “You do, you do! He is my own
Stephen, he is!”
“That may or may not be true, Elfride,” returned her father, again
uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself “You confuse future probabilities
with present facts,—what the young man may be with what he is. We must
look at what he is, not what an improbable degree of success in his
profession may make him. The case is this: the son of a working-man in my
parish who may or may not be able to buy me up—a youth who has not yet
advanced so far into life as to have any income of his own deserving the
name, and therefore of his father’s degree as regards station—wants to be
engaged to you. His family are living in precisely the same spot in England
as yours, so throughout this county—which is the world to us—you would
always be known as the wife of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under
any circumstances as the wife of a London professional man. It is the
drawback, not the compensating fact, that is talked of always. There, say no
more. You may argue all night, and prove what you will; I’ll stick to my
words.”
Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with large
heavy eyes and wet cheeks.

“I call it great temerity—and long to call it audacity—in Hewby,”
resumed her father. “I never heard such a thing—giving such a hobbledehoy
native of this place such an introduction to me as he did. Naturally you were
deceived as well as I was. I don’t blame you at all, so far.” He went and
searched for Mr. Hewby’s original letter. “Here’s what he said to me: ‘Dear
Sir,—Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to
survey and make drawings,’ et cetera. ‘My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,’—
assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I understood him to mean a
sort of partner. Why didn’t he say ‘clerk’?”
“They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do not
write. Stephen—Mr. Smith—told me so. So that Mr. Hewby simply used
the accepted word.”
“Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will
leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY THANKS
FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT
EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the
matter of church architecture.’ Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be
ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.”
“Professional men in London,” Elfride argued, “don’t know anything
about their clerks’ fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to
their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live.
What they can do—what profits they can bring the firm—that’s all London
men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly
pleasant.”
“Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a
man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.”
“It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim
succession from directed.”
“That’s some more of what he’s been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was
inclined to suspect him, because he didn’t care about sauces of any kind. I
always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired
tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The
idea of my bringing out a bottle of my “40 Martinez—only eleven of them
left now—to a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin
line he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I, who
haven’t looked into a classical author for the last eighteen years, shouldn’t

have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had better go to your room; you’ll
get over this bit of tomfoolery in time.”
“No, no, no, papa,” she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching to
miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is
the cause of them all may cease.
“Elfride,” said her father with rough friendliness, “I have an excellent
scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A scheme to benefit you
and me. It has been thrust upon me for some little time—yes, thrust upon
me—but I didn’t dream of its value till this afternoon, when the revelation
came. I should be most unwise to refuse to entertain it.”
“I don’t like that word,” she returned wearily. “You have lost so much
already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?”
“No; not a mining scheme.”
“Railways?”
“Nor railways. It is like those mysterious offers we see advertised, by
which any gentleman with no brains at all may make so much a week
without risk, trouble, or soiling his fingers. However, I am intending to say
nothing till it is settled, though I will just say this much, that you soon may
have other fish to fry than to think of Stephen Smith. Remember, I wish, not
to be angry, but friendly, to the young man; for your sake I’ll regard him as
a friend in a certain sense. But this is enough; in a few days you will be
quite my way of thinking. There, now, go to your bedroom. Unity shall
bring you up some supper. I wish you not to be here when he comes back.”

Chapter X
“Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.”

Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only two or
three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich foliage growing
about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty lights and shades from the
shining moon maintaining a race over his head and down his back in an
endless gambol. When he crossed the plank bridge and entered the garden-
gate, he saw an illuminated figure coming from the enclosed plot towards
the house on the other side. It was his father, with his hand in a sling, taking
a general moonlight view of the garden, and particularly of a plot of the
youngest of young turnips, previous to closing the cottage for the night.
He saluted his son with customary force. “Hallo, Stephen! We should ha’
been in bed in another ten minutes. Come to see what’s the matter wi’ me, I
suppose, my lad?”
The doctor had come and gone, and the hand had been pronounced as
injured but slightly, though it might possibly have been considered a far
more serious case if Mr. Smith had been a more important man. Stephen’s
anxious inquiry drew from his father words of regret at the inconvenience
to the world of his doing nothing for the next two days, rather than of
concern for the pain of the accident. Together they entered the house.
John Smith—brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—
was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common
with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical
“working-man”—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind
only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self
into a fraction of the unit Class.

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the
handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was
not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a slate or
tile, if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody
was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two occasions in the
depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel,
making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had
taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in
his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might have made
a living by that calling.
Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in a
particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in truth,
like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised
by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much more the
artist nevertheless.
Appearing now, indoors, by the light of the candle, his stalwart
healthiness was a sight to see. His beard was close and knotted as that of a
chiselled Hercules; his shirt sleeves were partly rolled up, his waistcoat
unbuttoned; the difference in hue between the snowy linen and the ruddy
arms and face contrasting like the white of an egg and its yolk. Mrs. Smith,
on hearing them enter, advanced from the pantry.
Mrs. Smith was a matron whose countenance addressed itself to the mind
rather than to the eye, though not exclusively. She retained her personal
freshness even now, in the prosy afternoon-time of her life; but what her
features were primarily indicative of was a sound common sense behind
them; as a whole, appearing to carry with them a sort of argumentative
commentary on the world in general.
The details of the accident were then rehearsed by Stephen’s father, in the
dramatic manner also common to Martin Cannister, other individuals of the
neighbourhood, and the rural world generally. Mrs. Smith threw in her
sentiments between the acts, as Coryphaeus of the tragedy, to make the
description complete. The story at last came to an end, as the longest will,
and Stephen directed the conversation into another channel.
“Well, mother, they know everything about me now,” he said quietly.
“Well done!” replied his father; “now my mind’s at peace.”

“I blame myself—I never shall forgive myself—for not telling them
before,” continued the young man.
Mrs. Smith at this point abstracted her mind from the former subject. “I
don’t see what you have to grieve about, Stephen,” she said. “People who
accidentally get friends don’t, as a first stroke, tell the history of their
families.”
“Ye’ve done no wrong, certainly,” said his father.
“No; but I should have spoken sooner. There’s more in this visit of mine
than you think—a good deal more.”
“Not more than I think,” Mrs. Smith replied, looking contemplatively at
him. Stephen blushed; and his father looked from one to the other in a state
of utter incomprehension.
“She’s a pretty piece enough,” Mrs. Smith continued, “and very lady-like
and clever too. But though she’s very well fit for you as far as that is, why,
mercy “pon me, what ever do you want any woman at all for yet?”
John made his naturally short mouth a long one, and wrinkled his
forehead, “That’s the way the wind d’blow, is it?” he said.
“Mother,” exclaimed Stephen, “how absurdly you speak! Criticizing
whether she’s fit for me or no, as if there were room for doubt on the
matter! Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my life—socially
and practically, as well as in other respects. No such good fortune as that,
I’m afraid; she’s too far above me. Her family doesn’t want such country
lads as I in it.”
“Then if they don’t want you, I’d see them dead corpses before I’d want
them, and go to better families who do want you.”
“Ah, yes; but I could never put up with the distaste of being welcomed
among such people as you mean, whilst I could get indifference among
such people as hers.”
“What crazy twist o’ thinking will enter your head next?” said his mother.
“And come to that, she’s not a bit too high for you, or you too low for her.
See how careful I be to keep myself up. I’m sure I never stop for more than
a minute together to talk to any journeymen people; and I never invite
anybody to our party o’ Christmases who are not in business for themselves.
And I talk to several toppermost carriage people that come to my lord’s
without saying ma’am or sir to ’em, and they take it as quiet as lambs.”

“You curtseyed to the vicar, mother; and I wish you hadn’t.”
“But it was before he called me by my Christian name, or he would have
got very little curtseying from me!” said Mrs. Smith, bridling and sparkling
with vexation. “You go on at me, Stephen, as if I were your worst enemy!
What else could I do with the man to get rid of him, banging it into me and
your father by side and by seam, about his greatness, and what happened
when he was a young fellow at college, and I don’t know what-all; the
tongue o’ en flopping round his mouth like a mop-rag round a dairy. That ’a
did, didn’t he, John?”
“That’s about the size o’t,” replied her husband.
“Every woman now-a-days,” resumed Mrs. Smith, “if she marry at all,
must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father. The men have
gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every man you meet is more
the dand than his father; and you are just level wi’ her.”
“That’s what she thinks herself.”
“It only shows her sense. I knew she was after “ee, Stephen—I knew it.”
“After me! Good Lord, what next!”
“And I really must say again that you ought not to be in such a hurry, and
wait for a few years. You might go higher than a bankrupt pa’son’s girl
then.”
“The fact is, mother,” said Stephen impatiently, “you don’t know
anything about it. I shall never go higher, because I don’t want to, nor
should I if I lived to be a hundred. As to you saying that she’s after me, I
don’t like such a remark about her, for it implies a scheming woman, and a
man worth scheming for, both of which are not only untrue, but ludicrously
untrue, of this case. Isn’t it so, father?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the matter well enough to gie my opinion,”
said his father, in the tone of the fox who had a cold and could not smell.
“She couldn’t have been very backward anyhow, considering the short
time you have known her,” said his mother. “Well I think that five years
hence you’ll be plenty young enough to think of such things. And really she
can very well afford to wait, and will too, take my word. Living down in an
out-step place like this, I am sure she ought to be very thankful that you
took notice of her. She’d most likely have died an old maid if you hadn’t
turned up.”

“All nonsense,” said Stephen, but not aloud.
“A nice little thing she is,” Mrs. Smith went on in a more complacent
tone now that Stephen had been talked down; “there’s not a word to say
against her, I’ll own. I see her sometimes decked out like a horse going to
fair, and I admire her for’t. A perfect little lady. But people can’t help their
thoughts, and if she’d learnt to make figures instead of letters when she was
at school ’twould have been better for her pocket; for as I said, there never
were worse times for such as she than now.”
“Now, now, mother!” said Stephen with smiling deprecation.
“But I will!” said his mother with asperity. “I don’t read the papers for
nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by marriage. Men of her class,
that is, parsons, marry squires’ daughters; squires marry lords’ daughters;
lords marry dukes’ daughters; dukes marry queens’ daughters. All stages of
gentlemen mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of gentlewomen are
left single, or marry out of their class.”
“But you said just now, dear mother——” retorted Stephen, unable to
resist the temptation of showing his mother her inconsistency. Then he
paused.
“Well, what did I say?” And Mrs. Smith prepared her lips for a new
campaign.
Stephen, regretting that he had begun, since a volcano might be the
consequence, was obliged to go on.
“You said I wasn’t out of her class just before.”
“Yes, there, there! That’s you; that’s my own flesh and blood. I’ll warrant
that you’ll pick holes in everything your mother says, if you can, Stephen.
You are just like your father for that; take anybody’s part but mine. Whilst I
am speaking and talking and trying and slaving away for your good, you are
waiting to catch me out in that way. So you are in her class, but ’tis what
HER people would CALL marrying out of her class. Don’t be so
quarrelsome, Stephen!”
Stephen preserved a discreet silence, in which he was imitated by his
father, and for several minutes nothing was heard but the ticking of the
green-faced case-clock against the wall.
“I’m sure,” added Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a
terminative speech, “if there’d been so much trouble to get a husband in my

time as there is in these days—when you must make a god-almighty of a
man to get en to hae ye—I’d have trod clay for bricks before I’d ever have
lowered my dignity to marry, or there’s no bread in nine loaves.”
The discussion now dropped, and as it was getting late, Stephen bade his
parents farewell for the evening, his mother none the less warmly for their
sparring; for although Mrs. Smith and Stephen were always contending,
they were never at enmity.
“And possibly,” said Stephen, “I may leave here altogether to-morrow; I
don’t know. So that if I shouldn’t call again before returning to London,
don’t be alarmed, will you?”
“But didn’t you come for a fortnight?” said his mother. “And haven’t you
a month’s holiday altogether? They are going to turn you out, then?”
“Not at all. I may stay longer; I may go. If I go, you had better say
nothing about my having been here, for her sake. At what time of the
morning does the carrier pass Endelstow lane?”
“Seven o’clock.”
And then he left them. His thoughts were, that should the vicar permit
him to become engaged, to hope for an engagement, or in any way to think
of his beloved Elfride, he might stay longer. Should he be forbidden to think
of any such thing, he resolved to go at once. And the latter, even to young
hopefulness, seemed the more probable alternative.
Stephen walked back to the vicarage through the meadows, as he had
come, surrounded by the soft musical purl of the water through little weirs,
the modest light of the moon, the freshening smell of the dews out-spread
around. It was a time when mere seeing is meditation, and meditation
peace. Stephen was hardly philosopher enough to avail himself of Nature’s
offer. His constitution was made up of very simple particulars; was one
which, rare in the spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a
nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his
brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness.
Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a
plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed
colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher
and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was
scarcely an idea to which, under proper training, he could not have added a
respectable co-ordinate.

He saw nothing outside himself to-night; and what he saw within was a
weariness to his flesh. Yet to a dispassionate observer, his pretensions to
Elfride, though rather premature, were far from absurd as marriages go,
unless the accidental proximity of simple but honest parents could be said
to make them so.
The clock struck eleven when he entered the house. Elfride had been
waiting with scarcely a movement since he departed. Before he had spoken
to her she caught sight of him passing into the study with her father. She
saw that he had by some means obtained the private interview he desired.
A nervous headache had been growing on the excitable girl during the
absence of Stephen, and now she could do nothing beyond going up again
to her room as she had done before. Instead of lying down she sat again in
the darkness without closing the door, and listened with a beating heart to
every sound from downstairs. The servants had gone to bed. She ultimately
heard the two men come from the study and cross to the dining-room,
where supper had been lingering for more than an hour. The door was left
open, and she found that the meal, such as it was, passed off between her
father and her lover without any remark, save commonplaces as to
cucumbers and melons, their wholesomeness and culture, uttered in a stiff
and formal way. It seemed to prefigure failure.
Shortly afterwards Stephen came upstairs to his bedroom, and was almost
immediately followed by her father, who also retired for the night. Not
inclined to get a light, she partly undressed and sat on the bed, where she
remained in pained thought for some time, possibly an hour. Then rising to
close her door previously to fully unrobing, she saw a streak of light shining
across the landing. Her father’s door was shut, and he could be heard
snoring regularly. The light came from Stephen’s room, and the slight
sounds also coming thence emphatically denoted what he was doing. In the
perfect silence she could hear the closing of a lid and the clicking of a lock,
—he was fastening his hat-box. Then the buckling of straps and the click of
another key,—he was securing his portmanteau. With trebled foreboding
she opened her door softly, and went towards his. One sensation pervaded
her to distraction. Stephen, her handsome youth and darling, was going
away, and she might never see him again except in secret and in sadness—
perhaps never more. At any rate, she could no longer wait till the morning
to hear the result of the interview, as she had intended. She flung her

dressing-gown round her, tapped lightly at his door, and whispered
“Stephen!” He came instantly, opened the door, and stepped out.
“Tell me; are we to hope?”
He replied in a disturbed whisper, and a tear approached its outlet, though
none fell.
“I am not to think of such a preposterous thing—that’s what he said. And
I am going to-morrow. I should have called you up to bid you good-bye.”
“But he didn’t say you were to go—O Stephen, he didn’t say that?”
“No; not in words. But I cannot stay.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t go! Do come and let us talk. Let us come down to the
drawing-room for a few minutes; he will hear us here.”
She preceded him down the staircase with the taper light in her hand,
looking unnaturally tall and thin in the long dove-coloured dressing-gown
she wore. She did not stop to think of the propriety or otherwise of this
midnight interview under such circumstances. She thought that the tragedy
of her life was beginning, and, for the first time almost, felt that her
existence might have a grave side, the shade of which enveloped and
rendered invisible the delicate gradations of custom and punctilio. Elfride
softly opened the drawing-room door and they both went in. When she had
placed the candle on the table, he enclosed her with his arms, dried her eyes
with his handkerchief, and kissed their lids.
“Stephen, it is over—happy love is over; and there is no more sunshine
now!”
“I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I will!”
“Papa will never hear of it—never—never! You don’t know him. I do. He
is either biassed in favour of a thing, or prejudiced against it. Argument is
powerless against either feeling.”
“No; I won’t think of him so,” said Stephen. “If I appear before him some
time hence as a man of established name, he will accept me—I know he
will. He is not a wicked man.”
“No, he is not wicked. But you say ‘some time hence,’ as if it were no
time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be comparatively a short
time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its real length trebled! Every summer

will be a year—autumn a year—winter a year! O Stephen! and you may
forget me!”
Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-hearted woman.
The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear. “You, too, may be
persuaded to give me up, when time has made me fainter in your memory.
For, remember, your love for me must be nourished in secret; there will be
no long visits from me to support you. Circumstances will always tend to
obliterate me.”
“Stephen,” she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding his
last words, “there are beautiful women where you live—of course I know
there are—and they may win you away from me.” Her tears came visibly as
she drew a mental picture of his faithlessness. “And it won’t be your fault,”
she continued, looking into the candle with doleful eyes. “No! You will
think that our family don’t want you, and get to include me with them. And
there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others will be let in.”
“I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of forebodings.”
“Oh yes, they will,” she replied. “And you will look at them, not caring
at first, and then you will look and be interested, and after a while you will
think, ‘Ah, they know all about city life, and assemblies, and coteries, and
the manners of the titled, and poor little Elfie, with all the fuss that’s made
about her having me, doesn’t know about anything but a little house and a
few cliffs and a space of sea, far away.’ And then you’ll be more interested
in them, and they’ll make you have them instead of me, on purpose to be
cruel to me because I am silly, and they are clever and hate me. And I hate
them, too; yes, I do!”
Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the
recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished. And, worse
than that general feeling, there of course remained the sadness which arose
from the special features of his own case. However remote a desired issue
may be, the mere fact of having entered the groove which leads to it, cheers
to some extent with a sense of accomplishment. Had Mr. Swancourt
consented to an engagement of no less length than ten years, Stephen would
have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that they
were somewhere on the road to Cupid’s garden. But, with a possibility of a
shorter probation, they had not as yet any prospect of the beginning; the
zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his

formidable words before the waiting for marriage could even set in. And
this was despair.
“I wish we could marry now,” murmured Stephen, as an impossible
fancy.
“So do I,” said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. “’Tis the only
thing that ever does sweethearts good!”
“Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?”
“Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,” she said, and
went on reflectively: “All we want is to render it absolutely impossible for
any future circumstance to upset our future intention of being happy
together; not to begin being happy now.”
“Exactly,” he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of hers.
“To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living now; merely to put
it out of anybody’s power to force you away from me, dearest.”
“Or you away from me, Stephen.”
“Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of circumstance
strong enough to make any woman in the world marry against her will: no
conceivable pressure, up to torture or starvation, can make a woman once
married to her lover anybody else’s wife.”
Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had been
held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to beguile a
miserable moment. During a pause which followed Stephen’s last remark, a
fascinating perception, then an alluring conviction, flashed along the brain
of both. The perception was that an immediate marriage COULD be
contrived; the conviction that such an act, in spite of its daring, its
fathomless results, its deceptiveness, would be preferred by each to the life
they must lead under any other conditions.
The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude of the
conception he was cherishing. “How strong we should feel, Elfride! going
on our separate courses as before, without the fear of ultimate separation! O
Elfride! think of it; think of it!”
It is certain that the young girl’s love for Stephen received a fanning from
her father’s opposition which made it blaze with a dozen times the intensity
it would have exhibited if left alone. Never were conditions more
favourable for developing a girl’s first passing fancy for a handsome boyish

face—a fancy rooted in inexperience and nourished by seclusion—into a
wild unreflecting passion fervid enough for anything. All the elements of
such a development were there, the chief one being hopelessness—a
necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of feelings united under
the name of loving to distraction.
“We would tell papa soon, would we not?” she inquired timidly.
“Nobody else need know. He would then be convinced that hearts cannot be
played with; love encouraged be ready to grow, love discouraged be ready
to die, at a moment’s notice. Stephen, do you not think that if marriages
against a parent’s consent are ever justifiable, they are when young people
have been favoured up to a point, as we have, and then have had that favour
suddenly withdrawn?”
“Yes. It is not as if we had from the beginning acted in opposition to your
papa’s wishes. Only think, Elfie, how pleasant he was towards me but six
hours ago! He liked me, praised me, never objected to my being alone with
you.”
“I believe he MUST like you now,” she cried. “And if he found that you
irremediably belonged to me, he would own it and help you. “O Stephen,
Stephen,” she burst out again, as the remembrance of his packing came
afresh to her mind, “I cannot bear your going away like this! It is too
dreadful. All I have been expecting miserably killed within me like this!”
Stephen flushed hot with impulse. “I will not be a doubt to you—thought
of you shall not be a misery to me!” he said. “We will be wife and husband
before we part for long!”
She hid her face on his shoulder. “Anything to make SURE!” she
whispered.
“I did not like to propose it immediately,” continued Stephen. “It seemed
to me—it seems to me now—like trying to catch you—a girl better in the
world than I.”
“Not that, indeed! And am I better in worldly station? What’s the use of
have beens? We may have been something once; we are nothing now.”
Then they whispered long and earnestly together; Stephen hesitatingly
proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them, with quick breathings,
and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright eyes. It was two o’clock before an
arrangement was finally concluded.

She then told him to leave her, giving him his light to go up to his own
room. They parted with an agreement not to meet again in the morning.
After his door had been some time closed he heard her softly gliding into
her chamber.

Chapter XI
“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a
monotonous parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that night.
Early the next morning—that is to say, four hours after their stolen
interview, and just as the earliest servant was heard moving about—Stephen
Smith went downstairs, portmanteau in hand. Throughout the night he had
intended to see Mr. Swancourt again, but the sharp rebuff of the previous
evening rendered such an interview particularly distasteful. Perhaps there
was another and less honest reason. He decided to put it off. Whatever of
moral timidity or obliquity may have lain in such a decision, no perception
of it was strong enough to detain him. He wrote a note in his room, which
stated simply that he did not feel happy in the house after Mr. Swancourt’s
sudden veto on what he had favoured a few hours before; but that he hoped
a time would come, and that soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as
Mr. Swancourt’s guest might be recovered.
He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and cheerless
aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the sun. He found in the
dining room a breakfast laid, of which somebody had just partaken.
Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that Mr.
Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early breakfast. He
was not going away that she knew of.
Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and turned into
the lane. It was so early that the shaded places still smelt like night time,
and the sunny spots had hardly felt the sun. The horizontal rays made every
shallow dip in the ground to show as a well-marked hollow. Even the

channel of the path was enough to throw shade, and the very stones of the
road cast tapering dashes of darkness westward, as long as Jael’s tent-nail.
At a spot not more than a hundred yards from the vicar’s residence the
lane leading thence crossed the high road. Stephen reached the point of
intersection, stood still and listened. Nothing could be heard save the
lengthy, murmuring line of the sea upon the adjacent shore. He looked at his
watch, and then mounted a gate upon which he seated himself, to await the
arrival of the carrier. Whilst he sat he heard wheels coming in two
directions.
The vehicle approaching on his right he soon recognized as the carrier’s.
There were the accompanying sounds of the owner’s voice and the smack
of his whip, distinct in the still morning air, by which he encouraged his
horses up the hill.
The other set of wheels sounded from the lane Stephen had just traversed.
On closer observation, he perceived that they were moving from the
precincts of the ancient manor-house adjoining the vicarage grounds. A
carriage then left the entrance gates of the house, and wheeling round came
fully in sight. It was a plain travelling carriage, with a small quantity of
luggage, apparently a lady’s. The vehicle came to the junction of the four
ways half-a-minute before the carrier reached the same spot, and crossed
directly in his front, proceeding by the lane on the other side.
Inside the carriage Stephen could just discern an elderly lady with a
younger woman, who seemed to be her maid. The road they had taken led
to Stratleigh, a small watering-place sixteen miles north.
He heard the manor-house gates swing again, and looking up saw another
person leaving them, and walking off in the direction of the parsonage. “Ah,
how much I wish I were moving that way!” felt he parenthetically. The
gentleman was tall, and resembled Mr. Swancourt in outline and attire. He
opened the vicarage gate and went in. Mr. Swancourt, then, it certainly was.
Instead of remaining in bed that morning Mr. Swancourt must have taken it
into his head to see his new neighbour off on a journey. He must have been
greatly interested in that neighbour to do such an unusual thing.
The carrier’s conveyance had pulled up, and Stephen now handed in his
portmanteau and mounted the shafts. “Who is that lady in the carriage?” he
inquired indifferently of Lickpan the carrier.

“That, sir, is Mrs. Troyton, a widder wi’ a mint o’ money. She’s the owner
of all that part of Endelstow that is not Lord Luxellian’s. Only been here a
short time; she came into it by law. The owner formerly was a terrible
mysterious party—never lived here—hardly ever was seen here except in
the month of September, as I might say.”
The horses were started again, and noise rendered further discourse a
matter of too great exertion. Stephen crept inside under the tilt, and was
soon lost in reverie.
Three hours and a half of straining up hills and jogging down brought
them to St. Launce’s, the market town and railway station nearest to
Endelstow, and the place from which Stephen Smith had journeyed over the
downs on the, to him, memorable winter evening at the beginning of the
same year. The carrier’s van was so timed as to meet a starting up-train,
which Stephen entered. Two or three hours’ railway travel through vertical
cuttings in metamorphic rock, through oak copses rich and green, stretching
over slopes and down delightful valleys, glens, and ravines, sparkling with
water like many-rilled Ida, and he plunged amid the hundred and fifty
thousand people composing the town of Plymouth.
There being some time upon his hands he left his luggage at the cloak-
room, and went on foot along Bedford Street to the nearest church. Here
Stephen wandered among the multifarious tombstones and looked in at the
chancel window, dreaming of something that was likely to happen by the
altar there in the course of the coming month. He turned away and ascended
the Hoe, viewed the magnificent stretch of sea and massive promontories of
land, but without particularly discerning one feature of the varied
perspective. He still saw that inner prospect—the event he hoped for in
yonder church. The wide Sound, the Breakwater, the light-house on far-off
Eddystone, the dark steam vessels, brigs, barques, and schooners, either
floating stilly, or gliding with tiniest motion, were as the dream, then; the
dreamed-of event was as the reality.
Soon Stephen went down from the Hoe, and returned to the railway
station. He took his ticket, and entered the London train.
That day was an irksome time at Endelstow vicarage. Neither father nor
daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr. Swancourt’s manner
towards her partook of the compunctious kindness that arises from a
misgiving as to the justice of some previous act.

Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d’oeil, or from a
natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women are cooler than
men in critical situations of the passive form. Probably, in Elfride’s case at
least, it was blindness to the greater contingencies of the future she was
preparing for herself, which enabled her to ask her father in a quiet voice if
he could give her a holiday soon, to ride to St. Launce’s and go on to
Plymouth.
Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was in
consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country girl, and a
good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it had been her delight to canter,
without the ghost of an attendant, over the fourteen or sixteen miles of hard
road intervening between their home and the station at St. Launce’s, put up
the horse, and go on the remainder of the distance by train, returning in the
same manner in the evening. It was then resolved that, though she had
successfully accomplished this journey once, it was not to be repeated
without some attendance.
But Elfride must not be confounded with ordinary young feminine
equestrians. The circumstances of her lonely and narrow life made it
imperative that in trotting about the neighbourhood she must trot alone or
else not at all. Usage soon rendered this perfectly natural to herself. Her
father, who had had other experiences, did not much like the idea of a
Swancourt, whose pedigree could be as distinctly traced as a thread in a
skein of silk, scampering over the hills like a farmer’s daughter, even
though he could habitually neglect her. But what with his not being able to
afford her a regular attendant, and his inveterate habit of letting anything be
to save himself trouble, the circumstance grew customary. And so there
arose a chronic notion in the villagers’ minds that all ladies rode without an
attendant, like Miss Swancourt, except a few who were sometimes visiting
at Lord Luxellian’s.
“I don’t like your going to Plymouth alone, particularly going to St.
Launce’s on horseback. Why not drive, and take the man?”
“It is not nice to be so overlooked.” Worm’s company would not
seriously have interfered with her plans, but it was her humour to go
without him.
“When do you want to go?” said her father.
She only answered, “Soon.”

“I will consider,” he said.
Only a few days elapsed before she asked again. A letter had reached her
from Stephen. It had been timed to come on that day by special
arrangement between them. In it he named the earliest morning on which he
could meet her at Plymouth. Her father had been on a journey to Stratleigh,
and returned in unusual buoyancy of spirit. It was a good opportunity; and
since the dismissal of Stephen her father had been generally in a mood to
make small concessions, that he might steer clear of large ones connected
with that outcast lover of hers.
“Next Thursday week I am going from home in a different direction,”
said her father. “In fact, I shall leave home the night before. You might
choose the same day, for they wish to take up the carpets, or some such
thing, I think. As I said, I don’t like you to be seen in a town on horseback
alone; but go if you will.”
Thursday week. Her father had named the very day that Stephen also had
named that morning as the earliest on which it would be of any use to meet
her; that was, about fifteen days from the day on which he had left
Endelstow. Fifteen days—that fragment of duration which has acquired
such an interesting individuality from its connection with the English
marriage law.
She involuntarily looked at her father so strangely, that on becoming
conscious of the look she paled with embarrassment. Her father, too, looked
confused. What was he thinking of?
There seemed to be a special facility offered her by a power external to
herself in the circumstance that Mr. Swancourt had proposed to leave home
the night previous to her wished-for day. Her father seldom took long
journeys; seldom slept from home except perhaps on the night following a
remote Visitation. Well, she would not inquire too curiously into the reason
of the opportunity, nor did he, as would have been natural, proceed to
explain it of his own accord. In matters of fact there had hitherto been no
reserve between them, though they were not usually confidential in its full
sense. But the divergence of their emotions on Stephen’s account had
produced an estrangement which just at present went even to the extent of
reticence on the most ordinary household topics.
Elfride was almost unconsciously relieved, persuading herself that her
father’s reserve on his business justified her in secrecy as regarded her own

—a secrecy which was necessarily a foregone decision with her. So anxious
is a young conscience to discover a palliative, that the ex post facto nature
of a reason is of no account in excluding it.
The intervening fortnight was spent by her mostly in walking by herself
among the shrubs and trees, indulging sometimes in sanguine anticipations;
more, far more frequently, in misgivings. All her flowers seemed dull of
hue; her pets seemed to look wistfully into her eyes, as if they no longer
stood in the same friendly relation to her as formerly. She wore melancholy
jewellery, gazed at sunsets, and talked to old men and women. It was the
first time that she had had an inner and private world apart from the visible
one about her. She wished that her father, instead of neglecting her even
more than usual, would make some advance—just one word; she would
then tell all, and risk Stephen’s displeasure. Thus brought round to the youth
again, she saw him in her fancy, standing, touching her, his eyes full of sad
affection, hopelessly renouncing his attempt because she had renounced
hers; and she could not recede.
On the Wednesday she was to receive another letter. She had resolved to
let her father see the arrival of this one, be the consequences what they
might: the dread of losing her lover by this deed of honesty prevented her
acting upon the resolve. Five minutes before the postman’s expected arrival
she slipped out, and down the lane to meet him. She met him immediately
upon turning a sharp angle, which hid her from view in the direction of the
vicarage. The man smilingly handed one missive, and was going on to hand
another, a circular from some tradesman.
“No,” she said; “take that on to the house.”
“Why, miss, you are doing what your father has done for the last
fortnight.”
She did not comprehend.
“Why, come to this corner, and take a letter of me every morning, all writ
in the same handwriting, and letting any others for him go on to the house.”
And on the postman went.
No sooner had he turned the corner behind her back than she heard her
father meet and address the man. She had saved her letter by two minutes.
Her father audibly went through precisely the same performance as she had
just been guilty of herself.

This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.
Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by
her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to determine a
resultant:
First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its object:
inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the above-named
issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of ultimate exoneration:
indignation at parental inconsistency in first encouraging, then forbidding: a
chilling sense of disobedience, overpowered by a conscientious inability to
brook a breaking of plighted faith with a man who, in essentials, had
remained unaltered from the beginning: a blessed hope that opposition
would turn an erroneous judgement: a bright faith that things would mend
thereby, and wind up well.
Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the following
few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at stories too
bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for surreptitiously preserving
some blind kittens that ought to have been drowned. After this expression,
she said to him suddenly:
“If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been
made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?”
“Do you mean in the family by marriage?” he replied inattentively, and
continuing to peel his egg.
The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.
“I should have put up with it, no doubt,” Mr. Swancourt observed.
“So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy, but
have made the best of him?”
Elfride’s erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in the
habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on absurd
conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the mould of
previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of circumstances, he
answered it with customary complacency.
“If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any sensible man,
should accept conditions that could not be altered; certainly not be

hopelessly melancholy about it. I don’t believe anything in the world would
make me hopelessly melancholy. And don’t let anything make you so,
either.”
“I won’t, papa,” she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased him.
Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the
brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no longer from
the mad action she had planned.
In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It was an
unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again almost impelled
by her feelings to pour out all.
“Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?” she said, and looked at him
longingly.
“I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,” he said cheerily; “not
before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and so far
will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.”
She was repressed and hurt.
“I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,” she
murmured.
He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter, as his
indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.
It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud upon an
orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to walk towards them,
as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach. She went through the field to
the privet hedge, clambered into the middle of it, and reclined upon the
thick boughs. After looking westward for a considerable time, she blamed
herself for not looking eastward to where Stephen was, and turned round.
Ultimately her eyes fell upon the ground.
A peculiarity was observable beneath her. A green field spread itself on
each side of the hedge, one belonging to the glebe, the other being a part of
the land attached to the manor-house adjoining. On the vicarage side she
saw a little footpath, the distinctive and altogether exceptional feature of
which consisted in its being only about ten yards long; it terminated
abruptly at each end.
A footpath, suddenly beginning and suddenly ending, coming from
nowhere and leading nowhere, she had never seen before.

Yes, she had, on second thoughts. She had seen exactly such a path
trodden in the front of barracks by the sentry.
And this recollection explained the origin of the path here. Her father had
trodden it by pacing up and down, as she had once seen him doing.
Sitting on the hedge as she sat now, her eyes commanded a view of both
sides of it. And a few minutes later, Elfride looked over to the manor side.
Here was another sentry path. It was like the first in length, and it began
and ended exactly opposite the beginning and ending of its neighbour, but it
was thinner, and less distinct.
Two reasons existed for the difference. This one might have been trodden
by a similar weight of tread to the other, exercised a less number of times;
or it might have been walked just as frequently, but by lighter feet.
Probably a gentleman from Scotland-yard, had he been passing at the
time, might have considered the latter alternative as the more probable.
Elfride thought otherwise, so far as she thought at all. But her own great To-
Morrow was now imminent; all thoughts inspired by casual sights of the
eye were only allowed to exercise themselves in inferior corners of her
brain, previously to being banished altogether.
Elfride was at length compelled to reason practically upon her
undertaking. All her definite perceptions thereon, when the emotion
accompanying them was abstracted, amounted to no more than these:
“Say an hour and three-quarters to ride to St. Launce’s.
“Say half an hour at the Falcon to change my dress.
“Say two hours waiting for some train and getting to Plymouth.
“Say an hour to spare before twelve o’clock.
“Total time from leaving Endelstow till twelve o’clock, five hours.
“Therefore I shall have to start at seven.”
No surprise or sense of unwontedness entered the minds of the servants
at her early ride. The monotony of life we associate with people of small
incomes in districts out of the sound of the railway whistle, has one
exception, which puts into shade the experience of dwellers about the great
centres of population—that is, in travelling. Every journey there is more or
less an adventure; adventurous hours are necessarily chosen for the most
commonplace outing. Miss Elfride had to leave early—that was all.

Elfride never went out on horseback but she brought home something—
something found, or something bought. If she trotted to town or village, her
burden was books. If to hills, woods, or the seashore, it was wonderful
mosses, abnormal twigs, a handkerchief of wet shells or seaweed.
Once, in muddy weather, when Pansy was walking with her down the
street of Castle Boterel, on a fair-day, a packet in front of her and a packet
under her arm, an accident befell the packets, and they slipped down. On
one side of her, three volumes of fiction lay kissing the mud; on the other
numerous skeins of polychromatic wools lay absorbing it. Unpleasant
women smiled through windows at the mishap, the men all looked round,
and a boy, who was minding a ginger-bread stall whilst the owner had gone
to get drunk, laughed loudly. The blue eyes turned to sapphires, and the
cheeks crimsoned with vexation.
After that misadventure she set her wits to work, and was ingenious
enough to invent an arrangement of small straps about the saddle, by which
a great deal could be safely carried thereon, in a small compass. Here she
now spread out and fastened a plain dark walking-dress and a few other
trifles of apparel. Worm opened the gate for her, and she vanished away.
One of the brightest mornings of late summer shone upon her. The
heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the grasshoppers
chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like little engines, and
Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon Pansy, in her orthodox riding-
habit and nondescript hat, she looked what she felt. But the mercury of
those days had a trick of falling unexpectedly. First, only for one minute in
ten had she a sense of depression. Then a large cloud, that had been hanging
in the north like a black fleece, came and placed itself between her and the
sun. It helped on what was already inevitable, and she sank into a
uniformity of sadness.
She turned in the saddle and looked back. They were now on an open
table-land, whose altitude still gave her a view of the sea by Endelstow. She
looked longingly at that spot.
During this little revulsion of feeling Pansy had been still advancing, and
Elfride felt it would be absurd to turn her little mare’s head the other way.
“Still,” she thought, “if I had a mamma at home I WOULD go back!”
And making one of those stealthy movements by which women let their
hearts juggle with their brains, she did put the horse’s head about, as if

unconsciously, and went at a hand-gallop towards home for more than a
mile. By this time, from the inveterate habit of valuing what we have
renounced directly the alternative is chosen, the thought of her forsaken
Stephen recalled her, and she turned about, and cantered on to St. Launce’s
again.
This miserable strife of thought now began to rage in all its wildness.
Overwrought and trembling, she dropped the rein upon Pansy’s shoulders,
and vowed she would be led whither the horse would take her.
Pansy slackened her pace to a walk, and walked on with her agitated
burden for three or four minutes. At the expiration of this time they had
come to a little by-way on the right, leading down a slope to a pool of
water. The pony stopped, looked towards the pool, and then advanced and
stooped to drink.
Elfride looked at her watch and discovered that if she were going to reach
St. Launce’s early enough to change her dress at the Falcon, and get a
chance of some early train to Plymouth—there were only two available—it
was necessary to proceed at once.
She was impatient. It seemed as if Pansy would never stop drinking; and
the repose of the pool, the idle motions of the insects and flies upon it, the
placid waving of the flags, the leaf-skeletons, like Genoese filigree, placidly
sleeping at the bottom, by their contrast with her own turmoil made her
impatience greater.
Pansy did turn at last, and went up the slope again to the high-road. The
pony came upon it, and stood cross-wise, looking up and down. Elfride’s
heart throbbed erratically, and she thought, “Horses, if left to themselves,
make for where they are best fed. Pansy will go home.”
Pansy turned and walked on towards St. Launce’s
Pansy at home, during summer, had little but grass to live on. After a run
to St. Launce’s she always had a feed of corn to support her on the return
journey. Therefore, being now more than half way, she preferred St.
Launce’s.
But Elfride did not remember this now. All she cared to recognize was a
dreamy fancy that to-day’s rash action was not her own. She was disabled
by her moods, and it seemed indispensable to adhere to the programme. So
strangely involved are motives that, more than by her promise to Stephen,

more even than by her love, she was forced on by a sense of the necessity of
keeping faith with herself, as promised in the inane vow of ten minutes ago.
She hesitated no longer. Pansy went, like the steed of Adonis, as if she
told the steps. Presently the quaint gables and jumbled roofs of St. Launce’s
were spread beneath her, and going down the hill she entered the courtyard
of the Falcon. Mrs. Buckle, the landlady, came to the door to meet her.
The Swancourts were well known here. The transition from equestrian to
the ordinary guise of railway travellers had been more than once performed
by father and daughter in this establishment.
In less than a quarter of an hour Elfride emerged from the door in her
walking dress, and went to the railway. She had not told Mrs. Buckle
anything as to her intentions, and was supposed to have gone out shopping.
An hour and forty minutes later, and she was in Stephen’s arms at the
Plymouth station. Not upon the platform—in the secret retreat of a deserted
waiting-room.
Stephen’s face boded ill. He was pale and despondent.
“What is the matter?” she asked.
“We cannot be married here to-day, my Elfie! I ought to have known it
and stayed here. In my ignorance I did not. I have the licence, but it can
only be used in my parish in London. I only came down last night, as you
know.”
“What shall we do?” she said blankly.
“There’s only one thing we can do, darling.”
“What’s that?”
“Go on to London by a train just starting, and be married there to-
morrow.”
“Passengers for the 11.5 up-train take their seats!” said a guard’s voice on
the platform.
“Will you go, Elfride?”
“I will.”
In three minutes the train had moved off, bearing away with it Stephen
and Elfride.

Chapter XII
“Adieu! she cries, and waved her lily hand.”

The few tattered clouds of the morning enlarged and united, the sun
withdrew behind them to emerge no more that day, and the evening drew to
a close in drifts of rain. The water-drops beat like duck shot against the
window of the railway-carriage containing Stephen and Elfride.
The journey from Plymouth to Paddington, by even the most headlong
express, allows quite enough leisure for passion of any sort to cool.
Elfride’s excitement had passed off, and she sat in a kind of stupor during
the latter half of the journey. She was aroused by the clanging of the maze
of rails over which they traced their way at the entrance to the station.
Is this London?” she said.
“Yes, darling,” said Stephen in a tone of assurance he was far from
feeling. To him, no less than to her, the reality so greatly differed from the
prefiguring.
She peered out as well as the window, beaded with drops, would allow
her, and saw only the lamps, which had just been lit, blinking in the wet
atmosphere, and rows of hideous zinc chimney-pipes in dim relief against
the sky. She writhed uneasily, as when a thought is swelling in the mind
which must cause much pain at its deliverance in words. Elfride had known
no more about the stings of evil report than the native wild-fowl knew of
the effects of Crusoe’s first shot. Now she saw a little further, and a little
further still.
The train stopped. Stephen relinquished the soft hand he had held all the
day, and proceeded to assist her on to the platform.
This act of alighting upon strange ground seemed all that was wanted to
complete a resolution within her.

She looked at her betrothed with despairing eyes.
“O Stephen,” she exclaimed, “I am so miserable! I must go home again
—I must—I must! Forgive my wretched vacillation. I don’t like it here—
nor myself—nor you!”
Stephen looked bewildered, and did not speak.
“Will you allow me to go home?” she implored. “I won’t trouble you to
go with me. I will not be any weight upon you; only say you will agree to
my returning; that you will not hate me for it, Stephen! It is better that I
should return again; indeed it is, Stephen.”
“But we can’t return now,” he said in a deprecatory tone.
“I must! I will!”
“How? When do you want to go?”
“Now. Can we go at once?”
The lad looked hopelessly along the platform.
“If you must go, and think it wrong to remain, dearest,” said he sadly,
“you shall. You shall do whatever you like, my Elfride. But would you in
reality rather go now than stay till to-morrow, and go as my wife?”
“Yes, yes—much—anything to go now. I must; I must!” she cried.
“We ought to have done one of two things,” he answered gloomily.
“Never to have started, or not to have returned without being married. I
don’t like to say it, Elfride—indeed I don’t; but you must be told this, that
going back unmarried may compromise your good name in the eyes of
people who may hear of it.”
“They will not; and I must go.”
“O Elfride! I am to blame for bringing you away.”
“Not at all. I am the elder.”
“By a month; and what’s that? But never mind that now.” He looked
around. “Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?” he inquired of a guard. The
guard passed on and did not speak.
“Is there a train for Plymouth to-night?” said Elfride to another.
“Yes, miss; the 8.10—leaves in ten minutes. You have come to the wrong
platform; it is the other side. Change at Bristol into the night mail. Down
that staircase, and under the line.”

They ran down the staircase—Elfride first—to the booking-office, and
into a carriage with an official standing beside the door. “Show your tickets,
please.” They are locked in—men about the platform accelerate their
velocities till they fly up and down like shuttles in a loom—a whistle—the
waving of a flag—a human cry—a steam groan—and away they go to
Plymouth again, just catching these words as they glide off:
“Those two youngsters had a near run for it, and no mistake!”
Elfride found her breath.
“And have you come too, Stephen? Why did you?”
“I shall not leave you till I see you safe at St. Launce’s. Do not think
worse of me than I am, Elfride.”
And then they rattled along through the night, back again by the way they
had come. The weather cleared, and the stars shone in upon them. Their two
or three fellow-passengers sat for most of the time with closed eyes.
Stephen sometimes slept; Elfride alone was wakeful and palpitating hour
after hour.
The day began to break, and revealed that they were by the sea. Red
rocks overhung them, and, receding into distance, grew livid in the blue
grey atmosphere. The sun rose, and sent penetrating shafts of light in upon
their weary faces. Another hour, and the world began to be busy. They
waited yet a little, and the train slackened its speed in view of the platform
at St. Launce’s.
She shivered, and mused sadly.
“I did not see all the consequences,” she said. “Appearances are wofully
against me. If anybody finds me out, I am, I suppose, disgraced.”
“Then appearances will speak falsely; and how can that matter, even if
they do? I shall be your husband sooner or later, for certain, and so prove
your purity.”
“Stephen, once in London I ought to have married you,” she said firmly.
“It was my only safe defence. I see more things now than I did yesterday.
My only remaining chance is not to be discovered; and that we must fight
for most desperately.”
They stepped out. Elfride pulled a thick veil over her face.

A woman with red and scaly eyelids and glistening eyes was sitting on a
bench just inside the office-door. She fixed her eyes upon Elfride with an
expression whose force it was impossible to doubt, but the meaning of
which was not clear; then upon the carriage they had left. She seemed to
read a sinister story in the scene.
Elfride shrank back, and turned the other way.
“Who is that woman?” said Stephen. “She looked hard at you.”
“Mrs. Jethway—a widow, and mother of that young man whose tomb we
sat on the other night. Stephen, she is my enemy. Would that God had had
mercy enough upon me to have hidden this from HER!”
“Do not talk so hopelessly,” he remonstrated. “I don’t think she
recognized us.”
“I pray that she did not.”
He put on a more vigorous mood.
“Now, we will go and get some breakfast.”
“No, no!” she begged. “I cannot eat. I MUST get back to Endelstow.”
Elfride was as if she had grown years older than Stephen now.
“But you have had nothing since last night but that cup of tea at Bristol.”
“I can’t eat, Stephen.”
“Wine and biscuit?”
“No.”
“Nor tea, nor coffee?”
“No.”
“A glass of water?”
“No. I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the
present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day—leaving to-
morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take all life
away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now. Brandy,
that’s what I want. That woman’s eyes have eaten my heart away!”
“You are wild; and you grieve me, darling. Must it be brandy?”
“Yes, if you please.”
“How much?”

“I don’t know. I have never drunk more than a teaspoonful at once. All I
know is that I want it. Don’t get it at the Falcon.”
He left her in the fields, and went to the nearest inn in that direction.
Presently he returned with a small flask nearly full, and some slices of
bread-and-butter, thin as wafers, in a paper-bag. Elfride took a sip or two.
“It goes into my eyes,” she said wearily. “I can’t take any more. Yes, I
will; I will close my eyes. Ah, it goes to them by an inside route. I don’t
want it; throw it away.”
However, she could eat, and did eat. Her chief attention was concentrated
upon how to get the horse from the Falcon stables without suspicion.
Stephen was not allowed to accompany her into the town. She acted now
upon conclusions reached without any aid from him: his power over her
seemed to have departed.
“You had better not be seen with me, even here where I am so little
known. We have begun stealthily as thieves, and we must end stealthily as
thieves, at all hazards. Until papa has been told by me myself, a discovery
would be terrible.”
Walking and gloomily talking thus they waited till nearly nine o’clock, at
which time Elfride thought she might call at the Falcon without creating
much surprise. Behind the railway-station was the river, spanned by an old
Tudor bridge, whence the road diverged in two directions, one skirting the
suburbs of the town, and winding round again into the high-road to
Endelstow. Beside this road Stephen sat, and awaited her return from the
Falcon.
He sat as one sitting for a portrait, motionless, watching the chequered
lights and shades on the tree-trunks, the children playing opposite the
school previous to entering for the morning lesson, the reapers in a field
afar off. The certainty of possession had not come, and there was nothing to
mitigate the youth’s gloom, that increased with the thought of the parting
now so near.
At length she came trotting round to him, in appearance much as on the
romantic morning of their visit to the cliff, but shorn of the radiance which
glistened about her then. However, her comparative immunity from further
risk and trouble had considerably composed her. Elfride’s capacity for being
wounded was only surpassed by her capacity for healing, which rightly or

wrongly is by some considered an index of transientness of feeling in
general.
“Elfride, what did they say at the Falcon?”
“Nothing. Nobody seemed curious about me. They knew I went to
Plymouth, and I have stayed there a night now and then with Miss Bicknell.
I rather calculated upon that.”
And now parting arose like a death to these children, for it was
imperative that she should start at once. Stephen walked beside her for
nearly a mile. During the walk he said sadly:
“Elfride, four-and-twenty hours have passed, and the thing is not done.”
“But you have insured that it shall be done.”
“How have I?”
“O Stephen, you ask how! Do you think I could marry another man on
earth after having gone thus far with you? Have I not shown beyond
possibility of doubt that I can be nobody else’s? Have I not irretrievably
committed myself?—pride has stood for nothing in the face of my great
love. You misunderstood my turning back, and I cannot explain it. It was
wrong to go with you at all; and though it would have been worse to go
further, it would have been better policy, perhaps. Be assured of this, that
whenever you have a home for me—however poor and humble—and come
and claim me, I am ready.” She added bitterly, “When my father knows of
this day’s work, he may be only too glad to let me go.”
“Perhaps he may, then, insist upon our marriage at once!” Stephen
answered, seeing a ray of hope in the very focus of her remorse. “I hope he
may, even if we had still to part till I am ready for you, as we intended.”
Elfride did not reply.
“You don’t seem the same woman, Elfie, that you were yesterday.”
“Nor am I. But good-bye. Go back now.” And she reined the horse for
parting. “O Stephen,” she cried, “I feel so weak! I don’t know how to meet
him. Cannot you, after all, come back with me?”
“Shall I come?”
Elfride paused to think.
“No; it will not do. It is my utter foolishness that makes me say such
words. But he will send for you.”

“Say to him,” continued Stephen, “that we did this in the absolute despair
of our minds. Tell him we don’t wish him to favour us—only to deal justly
with us. If he says, marry now, so much the better. If not, say that all may
be put right by his promise to allow me to have you when I am good
enough for you—which may be soon. Say I have nothing to offer him in
exchange for his treasure—the more sorry I; but all the love, and all the life,
and all the labour of an honest man shall be yours. As to when this had
better be told, I leave you to judge.”
His words made her cheerful enough to toy with her position.
“And if ill report should come, Stephen,” she said smiling, “why, the
orange-tree must save me, as it saved virgins in St. George’s time from the
poisonous breath of the dragon. There, forgive me for forwardness: I am
going.”
Then the boy and girl beguiled themselves with words of half-parting
only.
“Own wifie, God bless you till we meet again!”
“Till we meet again, good-bye!”
And the pony went on, and she spoke to him no more. He saw her figure
diminish and her blue veil grow gray—saw it with the agonizing sensations
of a slow death.
After thus parting from a man than whom she had known none greater as
yet, Elfride rode rapidly onwards, a tear being occasionally shaken from her
eyes into the road. What yesterday had seemed so desirable, so promising,
even trifling, had now acquired the complexion of a tragedy.
She saw the rocks and sea in the neighbourhood of Endelstow, and
heaved a sigh of relief.
When she passed a field behind the vicarage she heard the voices of
Unity and William Worm. They were hanging a carpet upon a line. Unity
was uttering a sentence that concluded with “when Miss Elfride comes.”
“When d’ye expect her?”
“Not till evening now. She’s safe enough at Miss Bicknell’s, bless ye.”
Elfride went round to the door. She did not knock or ring; and seeing
nobody to take the horse, Elfride led her round to the yard, slipped off the
bridle and saddle, drove her towards the paddock, and turned her in. Then

Elfride crept indoors, and looked into all the ground-floor rooms. Her father
was not there.
On the mantelpiece of the drawing-room stood a letter addressed to her in
his handwriting. She took it and read it as she went upstairs to change her
habit.
STRATLEIGH, Thursday.
“DEAR ELFRIDE,—On second thoughts I will not return to-day, but
only come as far as Wadcombe. I shall be at home by to-morrow afternoon,
and bring a friend with me.—Yours, in haste,
C. S.”
After making a quick toilet she felt more revived, though still suffering
from a headache. On going out of the door she met Unity at the top of the
stair.
“O Miss Elfride! I said to myself ’tis her sperrit! We didn’t dream o’ you
not coming home last night. You didn’t say anything about staying.”
“I intended to come home the same evening, but altered my plan. I
wished I hadn’t afterwards. Papa will be angry, I suppose?”
“Better not tell him, miss,” said Unity.
“I do fear to,” she murmured. “Unity, would you just begin telling him
when he comes home?”
“What! and get you into trouble?”
“I deserve it.”
“No, indeed, I won’t,” said Unity. “It is not such a mighty matter, Miss
Elfride. I says to myself, master’s taking a hollerday, and because he’s not
been kind lately to Miss Elfride, she——”
“Is imitating him. Well, do as you like. And will you now bring me some
luncheon?”
After satisfying an appetite which the fresh marine air had given her in its
victory over an agitated mind, she put on her hat and went to the garden and
summer-house. She sat down, and leant with her head in a corner. Here she
fell asleep.
Half-awake, she hurriedly looked at the time. She had been there three
hours. At the same moment she heard the outer gate swing together, and
wheels sweep round the entrance; some prior noise from the same source

having probably been the cause of her awaking. Next her father’s voice was
heard calling to Worm.
Elfride passed along a walk towards the house behind a belt of shrubs.
She heard a tongue holding converse with her father, which was not that of
either of the servants. Her father and the stranger were laughing together.
Then there was a rustling of silk, and Mr. Swancourt and his companion, or
companions, to all seeming entered the door of the house, for nothing more
of them was audible. Elfride had turned back to meditate on what friends
these could be, when she heard footsteps, and her father exclaiming behind
her:
“O Elfride, here you are! I hope you got on well?”
Elfride’s heart smote her, and she did not speak.
“Come back to the summer-house a minute,” continued Mr. Swancourt;
“I have to tell you of that I promised to.”
They entered the summer-house, and stood leaning over the knotty
woodwork of the balustrade.
“Now,” said her father radiantly, “guess what I have to say.” He seemed
to be regarding his own existence so intently, that he took no interest in nor
even saw the complexion of hers.
“I cannot, papa,” she said sadly.
“Try, dear.”
“I would rather not, indeed.”
“You are tired. You look worn. The ride was too much for you. Well, this
is what I went away for. I went to be married!”
“Married!” she faltered, and could hardly check an involuntary “So did
I.” A moment after and her resolve to confess perished like a bubble.
“Yes; to whom do you think? Mrs. Troyton, the new owner of the estate
over the hedge, and of the old manor-house. It was only finally settled
between us when I went to Stratleigh a few days ago.” He lowered his voice
to a sly tone of merriment. “Now, as to your stepmother, you’ll find she is
not much to look at, though a good deal to listen to. She is twenty years
older than myself, for one thing.”
“You forget that I know her. She called here once, after we had been, and
found her away from home.”

“Of course, of course. Well, whatever her looks are, she’s as excellent a
woman as ever breathed. She has had lately left her as absolute property
three thousand five hundred a year, besides the devise of this estate—and,
by the way, a large legacy came to her in satisfaction of dower, as it is
called.”
“Three thousand five hundred a year!”
“And a large—well, a fair-sized—mansion in town, and a pedigree as
long as my walking-stick; though that bears evidence of being rather a
raked-up affair—done since the family got rich—people do those things
now as they build ruins on maiden estates and cast antiques at
Birmingham.”
Elfride merely listened and said nothing.
He continued more quietly and impressively. “Yes, Elfride, she is wealthy
in comparison with us, though with few connections. However, she will
introduce you to the world a little. We are going to exchange her house in
Baker Street for one at Kensington, for your sake. Everybody is going there
now, she says. At Easters we shall fly to town for the usual three months—I
shall have a curate of course by that time. Elfride, I am past love, you know,
and I honestly confess that I married her for your sake. Why a woman of
her standing should have thrown herself away upon me, God knows. But I
suppose her age and plainness were too pronounced for a town man. With
your good looks, if you now play your cards well, you may marry anybody.
Of course, a little contrivance will be necessary; but there’s nothing to stand
between you and a husband with a title, that I can see. Lady Luxellian was
only a squire’s daughter. Now, don’t you see how foolish the old fancy was?
But come, she is indoors waiting to see you. It is as good as a play, too,”
continued the vicar, as they walked towards the house. “I courted her
through the privet hedge yonder: not entirely, you know, but we used to
walk there of an evening—nearly every evening at last. But I needn’t tell
you details now; everything was terribly matter-of-fact, I assure you. At
last, that day I saw her at Stratleigh, we determined to settle it off-hand.”
“And you never said a word to me,” replied Elfride, not reproachfully
either in tone or thought. Indeed, her feeling was the very reverse of
reproachful. She felt relieved and even thankful. Where confidence had not
been given, how could confidence be expected?

Her father mistook her dispassionateness for a veil of politeness over a
sense of ill-usage. “I am not altogether to blame,” he said. “There were two
or three reasons for secrecy. One was the recent death of her relative the
testator, though that did not apply to you. But remember, Elfride,” he
continued in a stiffer tone, “you had mixed yourself up so foolishly with
those low people, the Smiths—and it was just, too, when Mrs. Troyton and
myself were beginning to understand each other—that I resolved to say
nothing even to you. How did I know how far you had gone with them and
their son? You might have made a point of taking tea with them every day,
for all that I knew.”
Elfride swallowed her feelings as she best could, and languidly though
flatly asked a question.
“Did you kiss Mrs. Troyton on the lawn about three weeks ago? That
evening I came into the study and found you had just had candles in?”
Mr. Swancourt looked rather red and abashed, as middle-aged lovers are
apt to do when caught in the tricks of younger ones.
“Well, yes; I think I did,” he stammered; “just to please her, you know.”
And then recovering himself he laughed heartily.
“And was this what your Horatian quotation referred to?”
“It was, Elfride.”
They stepped into the drawing-room from the verandah. At that moment
Mrs. Swancourt came downstairs, and entered the same room by the door.
“Here, Charlotte, is my little Elfride,” said Mr. Swancourt, with the
increased affection of tone often adopted towards relations when newly
produced.
Poor Elfride, not knowing what to do, did nothing at all; but stood
receptive of all that came to her by sight, hearing, and touch.
Mrs. Swancourt moved forward, took her step-daughter’s hand, then
kissed her.
“Ah, darling!” she exclaimed good-humouredly, “you didn’t think when
you showed a strange old woman over the conservatory a month or two
ago, and explained the flowers to her so prettily, that she would so soon be
here in new colours. Nor did she, I am sure.”

The new mother had been truthfully enough described by Mr. Swancourt.
She was not physically attractive. She was dark—very dark—in
complexion, portly in figure, and with a plentiful residuum of hair in the
proportion of half a dozen white ones to half a dozen black ones, though the
latter were black indeed. No further observed, she was not a woman to like.
But there was more to see. To the most superficial critic it was apparent that
she made no attempt to disguise her age. She looked sixty at the first
glance, and close acquaintanceship never proved her older.
Another and still more winning trait was one attaching to the corners of
her mouth. Before she made a remark these often twitched gently: not
backwards and forwards, the index of nervousness; not down upon the jaw,
the sign of determination; but palpably upwards, in precisely the curve
adopted to represent mirth in the broad caricatures of schoolboys. Only this
element in her face was expressive of anything within the woman, but it
was unmistakable. It expressed humour subjective as well as objective—
which could survey the peculiarities of self in as whimsical a light as those
of other people.
This is not all of Mrs. Swancourt. She had held out to Elfride hands
whose fingers were literally stiff with rings, signis auroque rigentes, like
Helen’s robe. These rows of rings were not worn in vanity apparently. They
were mostly antique and dull, though a few were the reverse.
RIGHT HAND.
1st. Plainly set oval onyx, representing a devil’s head. 2nd. Green jasper
intaglio, with red veins. 3rd. Entirely gold, bearing figure of a hideous
griffin. 4th. A sea-green monster diamond, with small diamonds round it.
5th. Antique cornelian intaglio of dancing figure of a satyr. 6th. An angular
band chased with dragons’ heads. 7th. A facetted carbuncle accompanied by
ten little twinkling emeralds; &c. &c.
LEFT HAND.
1st. A reddish-yellow toadstone. 2nd. A heavy ring enamelled in colours,
and bearing a jacynth. 3rd. An amethystine sapphire. 4th. A polished ruby,
surrounded by diamonds. 5th. The engraved ring of an abbess. 6th. A
gloomy intaglio; &c. &c.
Beyond this rather quaint array of stone and metal Mrs. Swancourt wore
no ornament whatever.

Elfride had been favourably impressed with Mrs. Troyton at their
meeting about two months earlier; but to be pleased with a woman as a
momentary acquaintance was different from being taken with her as a
stepmother. However, the suspension of feeling was but for a moment.
Elfride decided to like her still.
Mrs. Swancourt was a woman of the world as to knowledge, the reverse
as to action, as her marriage suggested. Elfride and the lady were soon
inextricably involved in conversation, and Mr. Swancourt left them to
themselves.
“And what do you find to do with yourself here?” Mrs. Swancourt said,
after a few remarks about the wedding. “You ride, I know.”
“Yes, I ride. But not much, because papa doesn’t like my going alone.”
“You must have somebody to look after you.”
“And I read, and write a little.”
“You should write a novel. The regular resource of people who don’t go
enough into the world to live a novel is to write one.”
“I have done it,” said Elfride, looking dubiously at Mrs. Swancourt, as if
in doubt whether she would meet with ridicule there.
“That’s right. Now, then, what is it about, dear?”
“About—well, it is a romance of the Middle Ages.”
“Knowing nothing of the present age, which everybody knows about, for
safety you chose an age known neither to you nor other people. That’s it,
eh? No, no; I don’t mean it, dear.”
“Well, I have had some opportunities of studying mediaeval art and
manners in the library and private museum at Endelstow House, and I
thought I should like to try my hand upon a fiction. I know the time for
these tales is past; but I was interested in it, very much interested.”
“When is it to appear?”
“Oh, never, I suppose.”
“Nonsense, my dear girl. Publish it, by all means. All ladies do that sort
of thing now; not for profit, you know, but as a guarantee of mental
respectability to their future husbands.”
“An excellent idea of us ladies.”

“Though I am afraid it rather resembles the melancholy ruse of throwing
loaves over castle-walls at besiegers, and suggests desperation rather than
plenty inside.”
“Did you ever try it?”
“No; I was too far gone even for that.”
“Papa says no publisher will take my book.”
“That remains to be proved. I’ll give my word, my dear, that by this time
next year it shall be printed.”
“Will you, indeed?” said Elfride, partially brightening with pleasure,
though she was sad enough in her depths. “I thought brains were the
indispensable, even if the only, qualification for admission to the republic of
letters. A mere commonplace creature like me will soon be turned out
again.”
“Oh no; once you are there you’ll be like a drop of water in a piece of
rock-crystal—your medium will dignify your commonness.”
“It will be a great satisfaction,” Elfride murmured, and thought of
Stephen, and wished she could make a great fortune by writing romances,
and marry him and live happily.
“And then we’ll go to London, and then to Paris,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
“I have been talking to your father about it. But we have first to move into
the manor-house, and we think of staying at Torquay whilst that is going on.
Meanwhile, instead of going on a honeymoon scamper by ourselves, we
have come home to fetch you, and go all together to Bath for two or three
weeks.”
Elfride assented pleasantly, even gladly; but she saw that, by this
marriage, her father and herself had ceased for ever to be the close relations
they had been up to a few weeks ago. It was impossible now to tell him the
tale of her wild elopement with Stephen Smith.
He was still snugly housed in her heart. His absence had regained for him
much of that aureola of saintship which had been nearly abstracted during
her reproachful mood on that miserable journey from London. Rapture is
often cooled by contact with its cause, especially if under awkward
conditions. And that last experience with Stephen had done anything but
make him shine in her eyes. His very kindness in letting her return was his
offence. Elfride had her sex’s love of sheer force in a man, however ill-

directed; and at that critical juncture in London Stephen’s only chance of
retaining the ascendancy over her that his face and not his parts had
acquired for him, would have been by doing what, for one thing, he was too
youthful to undertake—that was, dragging her by the wrist to the rails of
some altar, and peremptorily marrying her. Decisive action is seen by
appreciative minds to be frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but
decision, however suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most
unequivocal Fabian success.
However, some of the unpleasant accessories of that occasion were now
out of sight again, and Stephen had resumed not a few of his fancy colours.

Chapter XIII
“He set in order many proverbs.”

It is London in October—two months further on in the story.
Bede’s Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and discharges
into a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth and respectability,
whilst its postern abuts on as crowded and poverty-stricken a network of
alleys as are to be found anywhere in the metropolis. The moral
consequences are, first, that those who occupy chambers in the Inn may see
a great deal of shirtless humanity’s habits and enjoyments without doing
more than look down from a back window; and second they may hear
wholesome though unpleasant social reminders through the medium of a
harsh voice, an unequal footstep, the echo of a blow or a fall, which
originates in the person of some drunkard or wife-beater, as he crosses and
interferes with the quiet of the square. Characters of this kind frequently
pass through the Inn from a little foxhole of an alley at the back, but they
never loiter there.
It is hardly necessary to state that all the sights and movements proper to
the Inn are most orderly. On the fine October evening on which we follow
Stephen Smith to this place, a placid porter is sitting on a stool under a
sycamore-tree in the midst, with a little cane in his hand. We notice the
thick coat of soot upon the branches, hanging underneath them in flakes, as
in a chimney. The blackness of these boughs does not at present improve
the tree—nearly forsaken by its leaves as it is—but in the spring their green
fresh beauty is made doubly beautiful by the contrast. Within the railings is
a flower-garden of respectable dahlias and chrysanthemums, where a man is
sweeping the leaves from the grass.

Stephen selects a doorway, and ascends an old though wide wooden
staircase, with moulded balusters and handrail, which in a country manor-
house would be considered a noteworthy specimen of Renaissance
workmanship. He reaches a door on the first floor, over which is painted, in
black letters, “Mr. Henry Knight”—“Barrister-at-law” being understood but
not expressed. The wall is thick, and there is a door at its outer and inner
face. The outer one happens to be ajar: Stephen goes to the other, and taps.
“Come in!” from distant penetralia.
First was a small anteroom, divided from the inner apartment by a
wainscoted archway two or three yards wide. Across this archway hung a
pair of dark-green curtains, making a mystery of all within the arch except
the spasmodic scratching of a quill pen. Here was grouped a chaotic
assemblage of articles—mainly old framed prints and paintings—leaning
edgewise against the wall, like roofing slates in a builder’s yard. All the
books visible here were folios too big to be stolen—some lying on a heavy
oak table in one corner, some on the floor among the pictures, the whole
intermingled with old coats, hats, umbrellas, and walking-sticks.
Stephen pushed aside the curtain, and before him sat a man writing away
as if his life depended upon it—which it did.
A man of thirty in a speckled coat, with dark brown hair, curly beard, and
crisp moustache: the latter running into the beard on each side of the mouth,
and, as usual, hiding the real expression of that organ under a chronic aspect
of impassivity.
“Ah, my dear fellow, I knew ’twas you,” said Knight, looking up with a
smile, and holding out his hand.
Knight’s mouth and eyes came to view now. Both features were good,
and had the peculiarity of appearing younger and fresher than the brow and
face they belonged to, which were getting sicklied o’er by the unmistakable
pale cast. The mouth had not quite relinquished rotundity of curve for the
firm angularities of middle life; and the eyes, though keen, permeated rather
than penetrated: what they had lost of their boy-time brightness by a dozen
years of hard reading lending a quietness to their gaze which suited them
well.
A lady would have said there was a smell of tobacco in the room: a man
that there was not.

Knight did not rise. He looked at a timepiece on the mantelshelf, then
turned again to his letters, pointing to a chair.
“Well, I am glad you have come. I only returned to town yesterday; now,
don’t speak, Stephen, for ten minutes; I have just that time to the late post.
At the eleventh minute, I’m your man.”
Stephen sat down as if this kind of reception was by no means new, and
away went Knight’s pen, beating up and down like a ship in a storm.
Cicero called the library the soul of the house; here the house was all
soul. Portions of the floor, and half the wall-space, were taken up by book-
shelves ordinary and extraordinary; the remaining parts, together with
brackets, side-tables, &c., being occupied by casts, statuettes, medallions,
and plaques of various descriptions, picked up by the owner in his
wanderings through France and Italy.
One stream only of evening sunlight came into the room from a window
quite in the corner, overlooking a court. An aquarium stood in the window.
It was a dull parallelopipedon enough for living creatures at most hours of
the day; but for a few minutes in the evening, as now, an errant, kindly ray
lighted up and warmed the little world therein, when the many-coloured
zoophytes opened and put forth their arms, the weeds acquired a rich
transparency, the shells gleamed of a more golden yellow, and the timid
community expressed gladness more plainly than in words.
Within the prescribed ten minutes Knight flung down his pen, rang for
the boy to take the letters to the post, and at the closing of the door
exclaimed, “There; thank God, that’s done. Now, Stephen, pull your chair
round, and tell me what you have been doing all this time. Have you kept
up your Greek?”
“No.”
“How’s that?”
“I haven’t enough spare time.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Well, I have done a great many things, if not that. And I have done one
extraordinary thing.”
Knight turned full upon Stephen. “Ah-ha! Now, then, let me look into
your face, put two and two together, and make a shrewd guess.”

Stephen changed to a redder colour.
“Why, Smith,” said Knight, after holding him rigidly by the shoulders,
and keenly scrutinising his countenance for a minute in silence, “you have
fallen in love.”
“Well—the fact is——”
“Now, out with it.” But seeing that Stephen looked rather distressed, he
changed to a kindly tone. “Now Smith, my lad, you know me well enough
by this time, or you ought to; and you know very well that if you choose to
give me a detailed account of the phenomenon within you, I shall listen; if
you don’t, I am the last man in the world to care to hear it.”
“I’ll tell this much: I HAVE fallen in love, and I want to be MARRIED.”
Knight looked ominous as this passed Stephen’s lips.
“Don’t judge me before you have heard more,” cried Stephen anxiously,
seeing the change in his friend’s countenance.
“I don’t judge. Does your mother know about it?”
“Nothing definite.”
“Father?”
“No. But I’ll tell you. The young person——”
“Come, that’s dreadfully ungallant. But perhaps I understand the frame of
mind a little, so go on. Your sweetheart——”
“She is rather higher in the world than I am.”
“As it should be.”
“And her father won’t hear of it, as I now stand.”
“Not an uncommon case.”
“And now comes what I want your advice upon. Something has
happened at her house which makes it out of the question for us to ask her
father again now. So we are keeping silent. In the meantime an architect in
India has just written to Mr. Hewby to ask whether he can find for him a
young assistant willing to go over to Bombay to prepare drawings for work
formerly done by the engineers. The salary he offers is 350 rupees a month,
or about 35 Pounds. Hewby has mentioned it to me, and I have been to Dr.
Wray, who says I shall acclimatise without much illness. Now, would you
go?”

“You mean to say, because it is a possible road to the young lady.”
“Yes; I was thinking I could go over and make a little money, and then
come back and ask for her. I have the option of practising for myself after a
year.”
“Would she be staunch?”
“Oh yes! For ever—to the end of her life!”
“How do you know?”
“Why, how do people know? Of course, she will.”
Knight leant back in his chair. “Now, though I know her thoroughly as
she exists in your heart, Stephen, I don’t know her in the flesh. All I want to
ask is, is this idea of going to India based entirely upon a belief in her
fidelity?”
“Yes; I should not go if it were not for her.”
“Well, Stephen, you have put me in rather an awkward position. If I give
my true sentiments, I shall hurt your feelings; if I don’t, I shall hurt my own
judgment. And remember, I don’t know much about women.”
“But you have had attachments, although you tell me very little about
them.”
“And I only hope you’ll continue to prosper till I tell you more.”
Stephen winced at this rap. “I have never formed a deep attachment,”
continued Knight. “I never have found a woman worth it. Nor have I been
once engaged to be married.”
“You write as if you had been engaged a hundred times, if I may be
allowed to say so,” said Stephen in an injured tone.
“Yes, that may be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who half know a
thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don’t take the
trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I
plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of
mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more.”
Knight stopped as if he had fallen into a train of thought, and Stephen
looked with affectionate awe at a master whose mind, he believed, could
swallow up at one meal all that his own head contained.
There was affective sympathy, but no great intellectual fellowship,
between Knight and Stephen Smith. Knight had seen his young friend when

the latter was a cherry-cheeked happy boy, had been interested in him, had
kept his eye upon him, and generously helped the lad to books, till the mere
connection of patronage grew to acquaintance, and that ripened to
friendship. And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have
deliberately chosen as a friend—or even for one of a group of a dozen
friends—he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all.
How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone
friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as
embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that
we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man
is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long
maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a
makeshift.
“And what do you think of her?” Stephen ventured to say, after a silence.
“Taking her merits on trust from you,” said Knight, “as we do those of
the Roman poets of whom we know nothing but that they lived, I still think
she will not stick to you through, say, three years of absence in India.”
“But she will!” cried Stephen desperately. “She is a girl all delicacy and
honour. And no woman of that kind, who has committed herself so into a
man’s hands as she has into mine, could possibly marry another.”
“How has she committed herself?” asked Knight cunously.
Stephen did not answer. Knight had looked on his love so sceptically that
it would not do to say all that he had intended to say by any means.
“Well, don’t tell,” said Knight. “But you are begging the question, which
is, I suppose, inevitable in love.”
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” the younger man pleaded. “You
remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don’t
you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their
bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion
has any GRACE in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm of the
occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a part with
them.”
“It is true, quite,” said Knight musingly.
It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of the
master long after the master himself had forgotten them.

“Well, that was like her!” cried Stephen triumphantly. “She was in such a
flurry that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Splendid, splendid!” said Knight soothingly. “So that all I have to say is,
that if you see a good opening in Bombay there’s no reason why you should
not go without troubling to draw fine distinctions as to reasons. No man
fully realizes what opinions he acts upon, or what his actions mean.”
“Yes; I go to Bombay. I’ll write a note here, if you don’t mind.”
“Sleep over it—it is the best plan—and write to-morrow. Meantime, go
there to that window and sit down, and look at my Humanity Show. I am
going to dine out this evening, and have to dress here out of my
portmanteau. I bring up my things like this to save the trouble of going
down to my place at Richmond and back again.”
Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his
portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of sunlight had
crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept: a dusky
gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of light shone over the
window.
“There!” said Knight, “where is there in England a spectacle to equal
that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go home. Softly open
the sash.”
Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence turning
sideways and passing under an arch, so that Knight’s back window was
immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the alley lengthwise.
Crowds—mostly of women—were surging, bustling, and pacing up and
down. Gaslights glared from butchers’ stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh
to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild colouring of Turner’s
later pictures, whilst the purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and
mood was to this human wild-wood what the ripple of a brook is to the
natural forest.
Nearly ten minutes passed. Then Knight also came to the window.
“Well, now, I call a cab and vanish down the street in the direction of
Berkeley Square,” he said, buttoning his waistcoat and kicking his morning
suit into a corner. Stephen rose to leave.
“What a heap of literature!” remarked the young man, taking a final
longing survey round the room, as if to abide there for ever would be the

great pleasure of his life, yet feeling that he had almost outstayed his
welcome-while. His eyes rested upon an arm-chair piled full of newspapers,
magazines, and bright new volumes in green and red.
“Yes,” said Knight, also looking at them and breathing a sigh of
weariness; “something must be done with several of them soon, I suppose.
Stephen, you needn’t hurry away for a few minutes, you know, if you want
to stay; I am not quite ready. Overhaul those volumes whilst I put on my
coat, and I’ll walk a little way with you.”
Stephen sat down beside the arm-chair and began to tumble the books
about. Among the rest he found a novelette in one volume, THE COURT
OF KELLYON CASTLE. By Ernest Field.
“Are you going to review this?” inquired Stephen with apparent
unconcern, and holding up Elfride’s effusion.
“Which? Oh, that! I may—though I don’t do much light reviewing now.
But it is reviewable.”
“How do you mean?”
Knight never liked to be asked what he meant. “Mean! I mean that the
majority of books published are neither good enough nor bad enough to
provoke criticism, and that that book does provoke it.”
“By its goodness or its badness?” Stephen said with some anxiety on
poor little Elfride’s score.
“Its badness. It seems to be written by some girl in her teens.”
Stephen said not another word. He did not care to speak plainly of Elfride
after that unfortunate slip his tongue had made in respect of her having
committed herself; and, apart from that, Knight’s severe—almost dogged
and self-willed—honesty in criticizing was unassailable by the humble wish
of a youthful friend like Stephen.
Knight was now ready. Turning off the gas, and slamming together the
door, they went downstairs and into the street.

Chapter XIV
“We frolic while ’tis May.”

It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have passed
away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to the
previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms of summer in the
year following.
Stephen is in India, slaving away at an office in Bombay; occasionally
going up the country on professional errands, and wondering why people
who had been there longer than he complained so much of the effect of the
climate upon their constitutions. Never had a young man a finer start than
seemed now to present itself to Stephen. It was just in that exceptional
heyday of prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years ago, that
he arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of the general
impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity every successive
day, the only disagreeable contingency connected with it being the
possibility of a collapse.
Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours’ escapade
with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his ears by any other
route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a short time, and
Stephen’s departure was another ingredient in her sorrow. But Elfride
possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval.
Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had
swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again.
She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard
renews a diseased limb.
And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was
bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which,

though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert her
thoughts. The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more
commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt’s, overlooking the same valley.
Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to feminine
soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled
him to the change. So there was a radical “move;” the two ladies staying at
Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to and fro.
Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride’s ideas in an aristocratic
direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage.
Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at three-and-forty had never
served a man in better stead.
The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked
in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were
suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the
easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove
of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o’clock on this
midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet
sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low
musical voice—the only beautiful point in the old woman—prevented from
being wearisome.
“Now,” she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full of
admiration for the brilliant scene, “you will find that our companionless
state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading
the features of our fellow-creatures here. I always am a listener in such
places as these—not to the narratives told by my neighbours’ tongues, but
by their faces—the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row,
Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have
acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely
woman for so many years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you
will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,—how
truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.”
“Ay, that they will,” said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. “I have known
labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete
systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds,

clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the crowing
of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches
in their pockets never know the existence of, they are able to pronounce
within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required instant. That reminds
me of an old story which I’m afraid is too bad—too bad to repeat.” Here the
vicar shook his head and laughed inwardly.
“Tell it—do!” said the ladies.
“I mustn’t quite tell it.”
“That’s absurd,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
“It was only about a man who, by the same careful system of
observation, was known to deceive persons for more than two years into the
belief that he kept a barometer by stealth, so exactly did he foretell all
changes in the weather by the braying of his ass and the temper of his
wife.”
Elfride laughed.
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “And in just the way that those learnt the
signs of nature, I have learnt the language of her illegitimate sister—
artificiality; and the fibbing of eyes, the contempt of nose-tips, the
indignation of back hair, the laughter of clothes, the cynicism of footsteps,
and the various emotions lying in walking-stick twirls, hat-liftings, the
elevation of parasols, the carriage of umbrellas, become as A B C to me.
“Just look at that daughter’s sister class of mamma in the carriage across
there,” she continued to Elfride, pointing with merely a turn of her eye.
“The absorbing self-consciousness of her position that is shown by her
countenance is most humiliating to a lover of one’s country. You would
hardly believe, would you, that members of a Fashionable World, whose
professed zero is far above the highest degree of the humble, could be so
ignorant of the elementary instincts of reticence.”
“How?”
“Why, to bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the inscription,
‘Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels.’”
“Really, Charlotte,” said the vicar, “you see as much in faces as Mr. Puff
saw in Lord Burleigh’s nod.”
Elfride could not but admire the beauty of her fellow countrywomen,
especially since herself and her own few acquaintances had always been

slightly sunburnt or marked on the back of the hands by a bramble-scratch
at this time of the year.
“And what lovely flowers and leaves they wear in their bonnets!” she
exclaimed.
“Oh yes,” returned Mrs. Swancourt. “Some of them are even more
striking in colour than any real ones. Look at that beautiful rose worn by the
lady inside the rails. Elegant vine-tendrils introduced upon the stem as an
improvement upon prickles, and all growing so naturally just over her ear—
I say growing advisedly, for the pink of the petals and the pink of her
handsome cheeks are equally from Nature’s hand to the eyes of the most
casual observer.”
“But praise them a little, they do deserve it!” said generous Elfride.
“Well, I do. See how the Duchess of——waves to and fro in her seat,
utilizing the sway of her landau by looking around only when her head is
swung forward, with a passive pride which forbids a resistance to the force
of circumstance. Look at the pretty pout on the mouths of that family there,
retaining no traces of being arranged beforehand, so well is it done. Look at
the demure close of the little fists holding the parasols; the tiny alert thumb,
sticking up erect against the ivory stem as knowing as can be, the satin of
the parasol invariably matching the complexion of the face beneath it, yet
seemingly by an accident, which makes the thing so attractive. There’s the
red book lying on the opposite seat, bespeaking the vast numbers of their
acquaintance. And I particularly admire the aspect of that abundantly
daughtered woman on the other side—I mean her look of unconsciousness
that the girls are stared at by the walkers, and above all the look of the girls
themselves—losing their gaze in the depths of handsome men’s eyes
without appearing to notice whether they are observing masculine eyes or
the leaves of the trees. There’s praise for you. But I am only jesting, child—
you know that.”
“Piph-ph-ph—how warm it is, to be sure!” said Mr. Swancourt, as if his
mind were a long distance from all he saw. “I declare that my watch is so
hot that I can scarcely bear to touch it to see what the time is, and all the
world smells like the inside of a hat.”
“How the men stare at you, Elfride!” said the elder lady. “You will kill
me quite, I am afraid.”
“Kill you?”

“As a diamond kills an opal in the same setting.”
“I have noticed several ladies and gentlemen looking at me,” said Elfride
artlessly, showing her pleasure at being observed.
“My dear, you mustn’t say ‘gentlemen’ nowadays,” her stepmother
answered in the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness.
“We have handed over ‘gentlemen’ to the lower middle class, where the
word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial tea-parties, I
believe. It is done with here.”
“What must I say, then?”
“‘Ladies and MEN’ always.”
At this moment appeared in the stream of vehicles moving in the contrary
direction a chariot presenting in its general surface the rich indigo hue of a
midnight sky, the wheels and margins being picked out in delicate lines of
ultramarine; the servants’ liveries were dark-blue coats and silver lace, and
breeches of neutral Indian red. The whole concern formed an organic
whole, and moved along behind a pair of dark chestnut geldings, who
advanced in an indifferently zealous trot, very daintily performed, and
occasionally shrugged divers points of their veiny surface as if they were
rather above the business.
In this sat a gentleman with no decided characteristics more than that he
somewhat resembled a good-natured commercial traveller of the superior
class. Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and complexion,
belonging to the ‘interesting’ class of women, where that class merges in
the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to enjoy nothing. Opposite
this pair sat two little girls in white hats and blue feathers.
The lady saw Elfride, smiled and bowed, and touched her husband’s
elbow, who turned and received Elfride’s movement of recognition with a
gallant elevation of his hat. Then the two children held up their arms to
Elfride, and laughed gleefully.
“Who is that?”
“Why, Lord Luxellian, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Swancourt, who with the vicar
had been seated with her back towards them.
“Yes,” replied Elfride. “He is the one man of those I have seen here
whom I consider handsomer than papa.”
“Thank you, dear,” said Mr. Swancourt.

“Yes; but your father is so much older. When Lord Luxellian gets a little
further on in life, he won’t be half so good-looking as our man.”
“Thank you, dear, likewise,” said Mr. Swancourt.
“See,” exclaimed Elfride, still looking towards them, “how those little
dears want me! Actually one of them is crying for me to come.”
“We were talking of bracelets just now. Look at Lady Luxellian’s,” said
Mrs. Swancourt, as that baroness lifted up her arm to support one of the
children. “It is slipping up her arm—too large by half. I hate to see daylight
between a bracelet and a wrist; I wonder women haven’t better taste.”
“It is not on that account, indeed,” Elfride expostulated. “It is that her
arm has got thin, poor thing. You cannot think how much she has altered in
this last twelvemonth.”
The carriages were now nearer together, and there was an exchange of
more familiar greetings between the two families. Then the Luxellians
crossed over and drew up under the plane-trees, just in the rear of the
Swancourts. Lord Luxellian alighted, and came forward with a musical
laugh.
It was his attraction as a man. People liked him for those tones, and
forgot that he had no talents. Acquaintances remembered Mr. Swancourt by
his manner; they remembered Stephen Smith by his face, Lord Luxellian by
his laugh.
Mr. Swancourt made some friendly remarks—among others things upon
the heat.
“Yes,” said Lord Luxellian, “we were driving by a furrier’s window this
afternoon, and the sight filled us all with such a sense of suffocation that we
were glad to get away. Ha-ha!” He turned to Elfride. “Miss Swancourt, I
have hardly seen or spoken to you since your literary feat was made public.
I had no idea a chiel was taking notes down at quiet Endelstow, or I should
certainly have put myself and friends upon our best behaviour. Swancourt,
why didn’t you give me a hint!”
Elfride fluttered, blushed, laughed, said it was nothing to speak of, &c.
&c.
“Well, I think you were rather unfairly treated by the PRESENT, I
certainly do. Writing a heavy review like that upon an elegant trifle like the
COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE was absurd.”

“What?” said Elfride, opening her eyes. “Was I reviewed in the
PRESENT?”
“Oh yes; didn’t you see it? Why, it was four or five months ago!”
“No, I never saw it. How sorry I am! What a shame of my publishers!
They promised to send me every notice that appeared.”
“Ah, then, I am almost afraid I have been giving you disagreeable
information, intentionally withheld out of courtesy. Depend upon it they
thought no good would come of sending it, and so would not pain you
unnecessarily.”
“Oh no; I am indeed glad you have told me, Lord Luxellian. It is quite a
mistaken kindness on their part. Is the review so much against me?” she
inquired tremulously.
“No, no; not that exactly—though I almost forget its exact purport now. It
was merely—merely sharp, you know—ungenerous, I might say. But really
my memory does not enable me to speak decidedly.”
“We’ll drive to the PRESENT office, and get one directly; shall we,
papa?”
“If you are so anxious, dear, we will, or send. But to-morrow will do.”
“And do oblige me in a little matter now, Elfride,” said Lord Luxellian
warmly, and looking as if he were sorry he had brought news that disturbed
her. “I am in reality sent here as a special messenger by my little Polly and
Katie to ask you to come into our carriage with them for a short time. I am
just going to walk across into Piccadilly, and my wife is left alone with
them. I am afraid they are rather spoilt children; but I have half promised
them you shall come.”
The steps were let down, and Elfride was transferred—to the intense
delight of the little girls, and to the mild interest of loungers with red skins
and long necks, who cursorily eyed the performance with their walking-
sticks to their lips, occasionally laughing from far down their throats and
with their eyes, their mouths not being concerned in the operation at all.
Lord Luxellian then told the coachman to drive on, lifted his hat, smiled a
smile that missed its mark and alighted on a total stranger, who bowed in
bewilderment. Lord Luxellian looked long at Elfride.
The look was a manly, open, and genuine look of admiration; a
momentary tribute of a kind which any honest Englishman might have paid

to fairness without being ashamed of the feeling, or permitting it to
encroach in the slightest degree upon his emotional obligations as a
husband and head of a family. Then Lord Luxellian turned away, and
walked musingly to the upper end of the promenade.
Mr. Swancourt had alighted at the same time with Elfride, crossing over
to the Row for a few minutes to speak to a friend he recognized there; and
his wife was thus left sole tenant of the carriage.
Now, whilst this little act had been in course of performance, there stood
among the promenading spectators a man of somewhat different description
from the rest. Behind the general throng, in the rear of the chairs, and
leaning against the trunk of a tree, he looked at Elfride with quiet and
critical interest.
Three points about this unobtrusive person showed promptly to the
exercised eye that he was not a Row man pur sang. First, an irrepressible
wrinkle or two in the waist of his frock-coat—denoting that he had not
damned his tailor sufficiently to drive that tradesman up to the orthodox
high pressure of cunning workmanship. Second, a slight slovenliness of
umbrella, occasioned by its owner’s habit of resting heavily upon it, and
using it as a veritable walking-stick, instead of letting its point touch the
ground in the most coquettish of kisses, as is the proper Row manner to do.
Third, and chief reason, that try how you might, you could scarcely help
supposing, on looking at his face, that your eyes were not far from a well-
finished mind, instead of the well-finished skin et praeterea nihil, which is
by rights the Mark of the Row.
The probability is that, had not Mrs. Swancourt been left alone in her
carriage under the tree, this man would have remained in his unobserved
seclusion. But seeing her thus, he came round to the front, stooped under
the rail, and stood beside the carriage-door.
Mrs. Swancourt looked reflectively at him for a quarter of a minute, then
held out her hand laughingly:
“Why, Henry Knight—of course it is! My—second—third—fourth
cousin—what shall I say? At any rate, my kinsman.”
“Yes, one of a remnant not yet cut off. I scarcely was certain of you,
either, from where I was standing.”

“I have not seen you since you first went to Oxford; consider the number
of years! You know, I suppose, of my marriage?”
And there sprang up a dialogue concerning family matters of birth, death,
and marriage, which it is not necessary to detail. Knight presently inquired:
“The young lady who changed into the other carriage is, then, your
stepdaughter?”
“Yes, Elfride. You must know her.”
“And who was the lady in the carriage Elfride entered; who had an ill-
defined and watery look, as if she were only the reflection of herself in a
pool?”
“Lady Luxellian; very weakly, Elfride says. My husband is remotely
connected with them; but there is not much intimacy on account of——.
However, Henry, you’ll come and see us, of course. 24 Chevron Square.
Come this week. We shall only be in town a week or two longer.”
“Let me see. I’ve got to run up to Oxford to-morrow, where I shall be for
several days; so that I must, I fear, lose the pleasure of seeing you in
London this year.”
“Then come to Endelstow; why not return with us?”
“I am afraid if I were to come before August I should have to leave again
in a day or two. I should be delighted to be with you at the beginning of that
month; and I could stay a nice long time. I have thought of going westward
all the summer.”
“Very well. Now remember that’s a compact. And won’t you wait now
and see Mr. Swancourt? He will not be away ten minutes longer.”
“No; I’ll beg to be excused; for I must get to my chambers again this
evening before I go home; indeed, I ought to have been there now—I have
such a press of matters to attend to just at present. You will explain to him,
please. Good-bye.”
“And let us know the day of your appearance as soon as you can.”
“I will”

Chapter XV
“A wandering voice.”

Though sheer and intelligible griefs are not charmed away by being
confided to mere acquaintances, the process is a palliative to certain ill-
humours. Among these, perplexed vexation is one—a species of trouble
which, like a stream, gets shallower by the simple operation of widening it
in any quarter.
On the evening of the day succeeding that of the meeting in the Park,
Elfride and Mrs. Swancourt were engaged in conversation in the dressing-
room of the latter. Such a treatment of such a case was in course of adoption
here.
Elfride had just before received an affectionate letter from Stephen Smith
in Bombay, which had been forwarded to her from Endelstow. But since
this is not the case referred to, it is not worth while to pry further into the
contents of the letter than to discover that, with rash though pardonable
confidence in coming times, he addressed her in high spirits as his darling
future wife. Probably there cannot be instanced a briefer and surer rule-of-
thumb test of a man’s temperament—sanguine or cautious—than this: did
he or does he ante-date the word wife in corresponding with a sweet-heart
he honestly loves?
She had taken this epistle into her own room, read a little of it, then
SAVED the rest for to-morrow, not wishing to be so extravagant as to
consume the pleasure all at once. Nevertheless, she could not resist the wish
to enjoy yet a little more, so out came the letter again, and in spite of
misgivings as to prodigality the whole was devoured. The letter was finally
reperused and placed in her pocket.

What was this? Also a newspaper for Elfride, which she had overlooked
in her hurry to open the letter. It was the old number of the PRESENT,
containing the article upon her book, forwarded as had been requested.
Elfride had hastily read it through, shrunk perceptibly smaller, and had
then gone with the paper in her hand to Mrs. Swancourt’s dressing-room, to
lighten or at least modify her vexation by a discriminating estimate from
her stepmother.
She was now looking disconsolately out of the window.
“Never mind, my child,” said Mrs. Swancourt after a careful perusal of
the matter indicated. “I don’t see that the review is such a terrible one, after
all. Besides, everybody has forgotten about it by this time. I’m sure the
opening is good enough for any book ever written. Just listen—it sounds
better read aloud than when you pore over it silently: ‘THE COURT OF
KELLYON CASTLE. A ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. BY
ERNEST FIELD. In the belief that we were for a while escaping the
monotonous repetition of wearisome details in modern social scenery,
analyses of uninteresting character, or the unnatural unfoldings of a
sensation plot, we took this volume into our hands with a feeling of
pleasure. We were disposed to beguile ourselves with the fancy that some
new change might possibly be rung upon donjon keeps, chain and plate
armour, deeply scarred cheeks, tender maidens disguised as pages, to which
we had not listened long ago.’ Now, that’s a very good beginning, in my
opinion, and one to be proud of having brought out of a man who has never
seen you.”
“Ah, yes,” murmured Elfride wofully. “But, then, see further on!”
“Well the next bit is rather unkind, I must own,” said Mrs. Swancourt,
and read on. “‘Instead of this we found ourselves in the hands of some
young lady, hardly arrived at years of discretion, to judge by the silly device
it has been thought worth while to adopt on the title-page, with the idea of
disguising her sex.’”
“I am not ‘silly’!” said Elfride indignantly. “He might have called me
anything but that.”
“You are not, indeed. Well:—‘Hands of a young lady...whose chapters are
simply devoted to impossible tournaments, towers, and escapades, which
read like flat copies of like scenes in the stories of Mr. G. P. R. James, and
the most unreal portions of IVANHOE. The bait is so palpably artificial that

the most credulous gudgeon turns away.’ Now, my dear, I don’t see
overmuch to complain of in that. It proves that you were clever enough to
make him think of Sir Walter Scott, which is a great deal.”
“Oh yes; though I cannot romance myself, I am able to remind him of
those who can!” Elfride intended to hurl these words sarcastically at her
invisible enemy, but as she had no more satirical power than a wood-
pigeon, they merely fell in a pretty murmur from lips shaped to a pout.
“Certainly: and that’s something. Your book is good enough to be bad in
an ordinary literary manner, and doesn’t stand by itself in a melancholy
position altogether worse than assailable.—‘That interest in an historical
romance may nowadays have any chance of being sustained, it is
indispensable that the reader find himself under the guidance of some
nearly extinct species of legendary, who, in addition to an impulse towards
antiquarian research and an unweakened faith in the mediaeval halo, shall
possess an inventive faculty in which delicacy of sentiment is far
overtopped by a power of welding to stirring incident a spirited variety of
the elementary human passions.’ Well, that long-winded effusion doesn’t
refer to you at all, Elfride, merely something put in to fill up. Let me see,
when does he come to you again;...not till the very end, actually. Here you
are finally polished off:
“‘But to return to the little work we have used as the text of this article.
We are far from altogether disparaging the author’s powers. She has a
certain versatility that enables her to use with effect a style of narration
peculiar to herself, which may be called a murmuring of delicate emotional
trifles, the particular gift of those to whom the social sympathies of a
peaceful time are as daily food. Hence, where matters of domestic
experience, and the natural touches which make people real, can be
introduced without anachronisms too striking, she is occasionally felicitous;
and upon the whole we feel justified in saying that the book will bear
looking into for the sake of those portions which have nothing whatever to
do with the story.’
“Well, I suppose it is intended for satire; but don’t think anything more of
it now, my dear. It is seven o’clock.” And Mrs. Swancourt rang for her
maid.
Attack is more piquant than concord. Stephen’s letter was concerning
nothing but oneness with her: the review was the very reverse. And a

stranger with neither name nor shape, age nor appearance, but a mighty
voice, is naturally rather an interesting novelty to a lady he chooses to
address. When Elfride fell asleep that night she was loving the writer of the
letter, but thinking of the writer of that article.

Chapter XVI
“Then fancy shapes—as fancy can.”

On a day about three weeks later, the Swancourt trio were sitting quietly
in the drawing-room of The Crags, Mrs. Swancourt’s house at Endelstow,
chatting, and taking easeful survey of their previous month or two of town
—a tangible weariness even to people whose acquaintances there might be
counted on the fingers.
A mere season in London with her practised step-mother had so advanced
Elfride’s perceptions, that her courtship by Stephen seemed emotionally
meagre, and to have drifted back several years into a childish past. In
regarding our mental experiences, as in visual observation, our own
progress reads like a dwindling of that we progress from.
She was seated on a low chair, looking over her romance with
melancholy interest for the first time since she had become acquainted with
the remarks of the PRESENT thereupon.
“Still thinking of that reviewer, Elfie?”
“Not of him personally; but I am thinking of his opinion. Really, on
looking into the volume after this long time has elapsed, he seems to have
estimated one part of it fairly enough.”
“No, no; I wouldn’t show the white feather now! Fancy that of all people
in the world the writer herself should go over to the enemy. How shall
Monmouth’s men fight when Monmouth runs away?”
“I don’t do that. But I think he is right in some of his arguments, though
wrong in others. And because he has some claim to my respect I regret all
the more that he should think so mistakenly of my motives in one or two
instances. It is more vexing to be misunderstood than to be misrepresented;

and he misunderstands me. I cannot be easy whilst a person goes to rest
night after night attributing to me intentions I never had.”
“He doesn’t know your name, or anything about you. And he has
doubtless forgotten there is such a book in existence by this time.”
“I myself should certainly like him to be put right upon one or two
matters,” said the vicar, who had hitherto been silent. “You see, critics go
on writing, and are never corrected or argued with, and therefore are never
improved.”
“Papa,” said Elfride brightening, “write to him!”
“I would as soon write to him as look at him, for the matter of that,” said
Mr. Swancourt.
“Do! And say, the young person who wrote the book did not adopt a
masculine pseudonym in vanity or conceit, but because she was afraid it
would be thought presumptuous to publish her name, and that she did not
mean the story for such as he, but as a sweetener of history for young
people, who might thereby acquire a taste for what went on in their own
country hundreds of years ago, and be tempted to dive deeper into the
subject. Oh, there is so much to explain; I wish I might write myself!”
“Now, Elfie, I’ll tell you what we will do,” answered Mr. Swancourt,
tickled with a sort of bucolic humour at the idea of criticizing the critic.
“You shall write a clear account of what he is wrong in, and I will copy it
and send it as mine.”
“Yes, now, directly!” said Elfride, jumping up. “When will you send it,
papa?”
“Oh, in a day or two, I suppose,” he returned. Then the vicar paused and
slightly yawned, and in the manner of elderly people began to cool from his
ardour for the undertaking now that it came to the point. “But, really, it is
hardly worth while,” he said.
“O papa!” said Elfride, with much disappointment. “You said you would,
and now you won’t. That is not fair!”
“But how can we send it if we don’t know whom to send it to?”
“If you really want to send such a thing it can easily be done,” said Mrs.
Swancourt, coming to her step-daughter’s rescue. “An envelope addressed,
‘To the Critic of THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE, care of the Editor
of the PRESENT,’ would find him.”

“Yes, I suppose it would.”
“Why not write your answer yourself, Elfride?” Mrs. Swancourt
inquired.
“I might,” she said hesitatingly; “and send it anonymously: that would be
treating him as he has treated me.”
“No use in the world!”
“But I don’t like to let him know my exact name. Suppose I put my
initials only? The less you are known the more you are thought of.”
“Yes; you might do that.”
Elfride set to work there and then. Her one desire for the last fortnight
seemed likely to be realized. As happens with sensitive and secluded minds,
a continual dwelling upon the subject had magnified to colossal proportions
the space she assumed herself to occupy or to have occupied in the occult
critic’s mind. At noon and at night she had been pestering herself with
endeavours to perceive more distinctly his conception of her as a woman
apart from an author: whether he really despised her; whether he thought
more or less of her than of ordinary young women who never ventured into
the fire of criticism at all. Now she would have the satisfaction of feeling
that at any rate he knew her true intent in crossing his path, and annoying
him so by her performance, and be taught perhaps to despise it a little less.
Four days later an envelope, directed to Miss Swancourt in a strange
hand, made its appearance from the post-bag.
“Oh,” said Elfride, her heart sinking within her. “Can it be from that man
—a lecture for impertinence? And actually one for Mrs. Swancourt in the
same hand-writing!” She feared to open hers. “Yet how can he know my
name? No; it is somebody else.”
“Nonsense!” said her father grimly. “You sent your initials, and the
Directory was available. Though he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to look
there unless he had been thoroughly savage with you. I thought you wrote
with rather more asperity than simple literary discussion required.” This
timely clause was introduced to save the character of the vicar’s judgment
under any issue of affairs.
“Well, here I go,” said Elfride, desperately tearing open the seal.
“To be sure, of course,” exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt; and looking up from
her own letter. “Christopher, I quite forgot to tell you, when I mentioned

that I had seen my distant relative, Harry Knight, that I invited him here for
whatever length of time he could spare. And now he says he can come any
day in August.”
“Write, and say the first of the month,” replied the indiscriminate vicar.
She read on, “Goodness me—and that isn’t all. He is actually the
reviewer of Elfride’s book. How absurd, to be sure! I had no idea he
reviewed novels or had anything to do with the PRESENT. He is a barrister
—and I thought he only wrote in the Quarterlies. Why, Elfride, you have
brought about an odd entanglement! What does he say to you?”
Elfride had put down her letter with a dissatisfied flush on her face. “I
don’t know. The idea of his knowing my name and all about me!...Why, he
says nothing particular, only this—
“‘MY DEAR MADAM,—Though I am sorry that my remarks should
have seemed harsh to you, it is a pleasure to find that they have been the
means of bringing forth such an ingeniously argued reply. Unfortunately, it
is so long since I wrote my review, that my memory does not serve me
sufficiently to say a single word in my defence, even supposing there
remains one to be said, which is doubtful. You will find from a letter I have
written to Mrs. Swancourt, that we are not such strangers to each other as
we have been imagining. Possibly, I may have the pleasure of seeing you
soon, when any argument you choose to advance shall receive all the
attention it deserves.’
“That is dim sarcasm—I know it is.”
“Oh no, Elfride.”
“And then, his remarks didn’t seem harsh—I mean I did not say so.”
“He thinks you are in a frightful temper,” said Mr. Swancourt, chuckling
in undertones.
“And he will come and see me, and find the authoress as contemptible in
speech as she has been impertinent in manner. I do heartily wish I had never
written a word to him!”
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Swancourt, also laughing in low quiet jerks; “it
will make the meeting such a comical affair, and afford splendid by-play for
your father and myself. The idea of our running our heads against Harry
Knight all the time! I cannot get over that.”

The vicar had immediately remembered the name to be that of Stephen
Smith’s preceptor and friend; but having ceased to concern himself in the
matter he made no remark to that effect, consistently forbearing to allude to
anything which could restore recollection of the (to him) disagreeable
mistake with regard to poor Stephen’s lineage and position. Elfride had of
course perceived the same thing, which added to the complication of
relationship a mesh that her stepmother knew nothing of.
The identification scarcely heightened Knight’s attractions now, though a
twelvemonth ago she would only have cared to see him for the interest he
possessed as Stephen’s friend. Fortunately for Knight’s advent, such a
reason for welcome had only begun to be awkward to her at a time when
the interest he had acquired on his own account made it no longer
necessary.
These coincidences, in common with all relating to him, tended to keep
Elfride’s mind upon the stretch concerning Knight. As was her custom
when upon the horns of a dilemma, she walked off by herself among the
laurel bushes, and there, standing still and splitting up a leaf without
removing it from its stalk, fetched back recollections of Stephen’s frequent
words in praise of his friend, and wished she had listened more attentively.
Then, still pulling the leaf, she would blush at some fancied mortification
that would accrue to her from his words when they met, in consequence of
her intrusiveness, as she now considered it, in writing to him.
The next development of her meditations was the subject of what this
man’s personal appearance might be—was he tall or short, dark or fair, gay
or grim? She would have asked Mrs. Swancourt but for the risk she might
thereby incur of some teasing remark being returned. Ultimately Elfride
would say, “Oh, what a plague that reviewer is to me!” and turn her face to
where she imagined India lay, and murmur to herself, “Ah, my little
husband, what are you doing now? Let me see, where are you—south, east,
where? Behind that hill, ever so far behind!”

Chapter XVII
“Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase.”

“There is Henry Knight, I declare!” said Mrs. Swancourt one day.
They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not far from
The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already described as leading
up from the sea and little port of Castle Boterel. The stony escarpment upon
which they stood had the contour of a man’s face, and it was covered with
furze as with a beard. People in the field above were preserved from an
accidental roll down these prominences and hollows by a hedge on the very
crest, which was doing that kindly service for Elfride and her mother now.
Scrambling higher into the hedge and stretching her neck further over the
furze, Elfride beheld the individual signified. He was walking leisurely
along the little green path at the bottom, beside the stream, a satchel slung
upon his left hip, a stout walking-stick in his hand, and a brown-holland
sun-hat upon his head. The satchel was worn and old, and the outer polished
surface of the leather was cracked and peeling off.
Knight having arrived over the hills to Castle Boterel upon the top of a
crazy omnibus, preferred to walk the remaining two miles up the valley,
leaving his luggage to be brought on.
Behind him wandered, helter-skelter, a boy of whom Knight had briefly
inquired the way to Endelstow; and by that natural law of physics which
causes lesser bodies to gravitate towards the greater, this boy had kept near
to Knight, and trotted like a little dog close at his heels, whistling as he
went, with his eyes fixed upon Knight’s boots as they rose and fell.
When they had reached a point precisely opposite that in which Mrs. and
Miss Swancourt lay in ambush, Knight stopped and turned round.
“Look here, my boy,” he said.

The boy parted his lips, opened his eyes, and answered nothing.
“Here’s sixpence for you, on condition that you don’t again come within
twenty yards of my heels, all the way up the valley.”
The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at Knight’s
heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight went on again,
wrapt in meditation.
“A nice voice,” Elfride thought; “but what a singular temper!”
“Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,” said Mrs.
Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a stile, entering
the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.
Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and Elfride felt
too nervous to await their visitor’s arrival in the drawing-room with Mrs.
Swancourt. So that when the elder lady entered, Elfride made some
pretence of perceiving a new variety of crimson geranium, and lingered
behind among the flower beds.
There was nothing gained by this, after all, she thought; and a few
minutes after boldly came into the house by the glass side-door. She walked
along the corridor, and entered the drawing-room. Nobody was there.
A window at the angle of the room opened directly into an octagonal
conservatory, enclosing the corner of the building. From the conservatory
came voices in conversation—Mrs. Swancourt’s and the stranger’s.
She had expected him to talk brilliantly. To her surprise he was asking
questions in quite a learner’s manner, on subjects connected with the
flowers and shrubs that she had known for years. When after the lapse of a
few minutes he spoke at some length, she considered there was a hard
square decisiveness in the shape of his sentences, as if, unlike her own and
Stephen’s, they were not there and then newly constructed, but were drawn
forth from a large store ready-made. They were now approaching the
window to come in again.
“That is a flesh-coloured variety,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “But oleanders,
though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily wounded as to be
unprunable—giants with the sensitiveness of young ladies. Oh, here is
Elfride!”
Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the dropping of
the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half comically, and Knight in a

minute or two placed himself beside the young lady.
A complexity of instincts checked Elfride’s conventional smiles of
complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less comfortable, Mrs.
Swancourt immediately afterwards left them together to seek her husband.
Mr. Knight, however, did not seem at all incommoded by his feelings, and
he said with light easefulness:
“So, Miss Swancourt, I have met you at last. You escaped me by a few
minutes only when we were in London.”
“Yes. I found that you had seen Mrs. Swancourt.”
“And now reviewer and reviewed are face to face,” he added
unconcernedly.
“Yes: though the fact of your being a relation of Mrs. Swancourt’s takes
off the edge of it. It was strange that you should be one of her family all the
time.” Elfride began to recover herself now, and to look into Knight’s face.
“I was merely anxious to let you know my REAL meaning in writing the
book—extremely anxious.”
“I can quite understand the wish; and I was gratified that my remarks
should have reached home. They very seldom do, I am afraid.”
Elfride drew herself in. Here he was, sticking to his opinions as firmly as
if friendship and politeness did not in the least require an immediate
renunciation of them.
“You made me very uneasy and sorry by writing such things!” she
murmured, suddenly dropping the mere cacueterie of a fashionable first
introduction, and speaking with some of the dudgeon of a child towards a
severe schoolmaster.
“That is rather the object of honest critics in such a case. Not to cause
unnecessary sorrow, but: ‘To make you sorry after a proper manner, that ye
may receive damage by us in nothing,’ as a powerful pen once wrote to the
Gentiles. Are you going to write another romance?”
“Write another?” she said. “That somebody may pen a condemnation and
‘nail’t wi’ Scripture’ again, as you do now, Mr. Knight?”
“You may do better next time,” he said placidly: “I think you will. But I
would advise you to confine yourself to domestic scenes.”
“Thank you. But never again!”

“Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing is not
by any means the best thing to hear about her.”
“What is the best?”
“I prefer not to say.”
“Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.”
“Well”—(Knight was evidently changing his meaning)—“I suppose to
hear that she has married.”
Elfride hesitated. “And what when she has been married?” she said at
last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the argument.
“Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his lighthouse:
her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her inauguration has worn off,
is that nothing happens to keep the talk of her alive.”
“Yes, I see,” said Elfride softly and thoughtfully. “But of course it is
different quite with men. Why don’t you write novels, Mr. Knight?”
“Because I couldn’t write one that would interest anybody.”
“Why?”
“For several reasons. It requires a judicious omission of your real
thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.”
“Is that really necessary? Well, I am sure you could learn to do that with
practice,” said Elfride with an ex-cathedra air, as became a person who
spoke from experience in the art. “You would make a great name for
certain,” she continued.
“So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to
remain in obscurity.”
“Tell me seriously—apart from the subject—why don’t you write a
volume instead of loose articles?” she insisted.
“Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you
seriously,” said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his young
friend than he was interested in her appearance. “As I have implied, I have
not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not now concentrate sufficiently.
We all have only our one cruse of energy given us to make the best of. And
where that energy has been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter,
as mine has for the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back
behind the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book on

any subject requires. Then there is the self-confidence and waiting power.
Where quick results have grown customary, they are fatal to a lively faith in
the future.”
“Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?”
“No, I don’t choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from a
whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accident
merely. Not that I object to the accident.”
“Why don’t you object—I mean, why do you feel so quiet about things?”
Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her intense curiosity to see
what the inside of literary Mr. Knight was like, kept her going on.
Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of this trait
in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent from habit, may be
recalled by all of us. When they find a listener who can by no possibility
make use of them, rival them, or condemn them, reserved and even
suspicious men of the world become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side
of their frankness.
“Why I don’t mind the accidental constraint,” he replied, “is because, in
making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is often better than
absolute freedom.”
“I see—that is, I should if I quite understood what all those generalities
mean.”
“Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one’s work, which no length
of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix itself on the work itself,
and make the best of it.”
“Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that tongue,”
she said mischievously. “And I suppose where no limit exists, as in the case
of a rich man with a wide taste who wants to do something, it will be better
to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.”
“Yes,” he said meditatively. “I can go as far as that.”
“Well,” resumed Elfride, “I think it better for a man’s nature if he does
nothing in particular.”
“There is such a case as being obliged to.”
“Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any other
reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought many times

lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing now, and of a piece
with the days of your life, is preferable to an anticipated heap far away in
the future, and none now.”
“Why, that’s the very thing I said just now as being the principle of all
ephemeral doers like myself.”
“Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,” she said with some confusion.
“Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.”
And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her mind:
“There is much littleness in trying to be great. A man must think a good
deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he
tries at all.”
“But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man’s thinking a good
deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong, and too soon
then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that a man who strives
earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may
see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very
humility.”
This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she
agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other side.
“Ah,” she thought inwardly, “I shall have nothing to do with a man of this
kind, though he is our visitor.”
“I think you will find,” resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more
for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for engaging
her attention, “that in actual life it is merely a matter of instinct with men—
this trying to push on. They awake to a recognition that they have, without
premeditation, begun to try a little, and they say to themselves, ‘Since I
have tried thus much, I will try a little more.’ They go on because they have
begun.”
Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words at this
moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of seizing any point in
the remarks of an interlocutor which interested her, and dwelling upon it,
and thinking thoughts of her own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he
might say in continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the
person speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes seemed
to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your future; and past

your future into your eternity—not reading it, but gazing in an unused,
unconscious way—her mind still clinging to its original thought.
This is how she was looking at Knight.
Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was
painfully confused.
“What were you so intent upon in me?” he inquired.
“As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever you
are,” she said, with a want of premeditation that was startling in its honesty
and simplicity.
Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose and
stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father and Mrs.
Swancourt coming up below the terrace. “Here they are,” she said, going
out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her. She stood upon the edge
of the terrace, close to the stone balustrade, and looked towards the sun,
hanging over a glade just now fair as Tempe’s vale, up which her father was
walking.
Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten degrees of
the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and heightened the bright
rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion red, their moderate pink hue being
only seen in its natural tone where the cheek curved round into shadow. The
ends of her hanging hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards
upon her shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it.
Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked like
tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward from shady
folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous orange glow.
Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of about
thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to a conversation
of deep earnestness on Knight’s fine old family name, and theories as to
lineage and intermarriage connected therewith. Knight’s portmanteau
having in the meantime arrived, they soon retired to prepare for dinner,
which had been postponed two hours later than the usual time of that meal.
An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were again in
the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing one. And that
evening she went to bed for the first time without thinking of Stephen at all.

Chapter XVIII
“He heard her musical pants.”

The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks of
its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the designs of Mr.
Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen. Planks and poles had
arrived in the churchyard, iron bars had been thrust into the venerable crack
extending down the belfry wall to the foundation, the bells had been taken
down, the owls had forsaken this home of their forefathers, and six
iconoclasts in white fustian, to whom a cracked edifice was a species of
Mumbo Jumbo, had taken lodgings in the village previous to beginning the
actual removal of the stones.
This was the day after Knight’s arrival. To enjoy for the last time the
prospect seaward from the summit, the vicar, Mrs. Swancourt, Knight, and
Elfride, all ascended the winding turret—Mr. Swancourt stepping forward
with many loud breaths, his wife struggling along silently, but suffering
none the less. They had hardly reached the top when a large lurid cloud,
palpably a reservoir of rain, thunder, and lightning, was seen to be
advancing overhead from the north.
The two cautious elders suggested an immediate return, and proceeded to
put it in practice as regarded themselves.
“Dear me, I wish I had not come up,” exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt.
“We shall be slower than you two in going down,” the vicar said over his
shoulder, “and so, don’t you start till we are nearly at the bottom, or you
will run over us and break our necks somewhere in the darkness of the
turret.”
Accordingly Elfride and Knight waited on the leads till the staircase
should be clear. Knight was not in a talkative mood that morning. Elfride

was rather wilful, by reason of his inattention, which she privately set down
to his thinking her not worth talking to. Whilst Knight stood watching the
rise of the cloud, she sauntered to the other side of the tower, and there
remembered a giddy feat she had performed the year before. It was to walk
round upon the parapet of the tower—which was quite without battlement
or pinnacle, and presented a smooth flat surface about two feet wide,
forming a pathway on all the four sides. Without reflecting in the least upon
what she was doing she now stepped upon the parapet in the old way, and
began walking along.
“We are down, cousin Henry,” cried Mrs. Swancourt up the turret.
“Follow us when you like.”
Knight turned and saw Elfride beginning her elevated promenade. His
face flushed with mingled concern and anger at her rashness.
“I certainly gave you credit for more common sense,” he said.
She reddened a little and walked on.
“Miss Swancourt, I insist upon your coming down,” he exclaimed.
“I will in a minute. I am safe enough. I have done it often.”
At that moment, by reason of a slight perturbation his words had caused
in her, Elfride’s foot caught itself in a little tuft of grass growing in a joint
of the stone-work, and she almost lost her balance. Knight sprang forward
with a face of horror. By what seemed the special interposition of a
considerate Providence she tottered to the inner edge of the parapet instead
of to the outer, and reeled over upon the lead roof two or three feet below
the wall.
Knight seized her as in a vice, and he said, panting, “That ever I should
have met a woman fool enough to do a thing of that kind! Good God, you
ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
The close proximity of the Shadow of Death had made her sick and pale
as a corpse before he spoke. Already lowered to that state, his words
completely over-powered her, and she swooned away as he held her.
Elfride’s eyes were not closed for more than forty seconds. She opened
them, and remembered the position instantly. His face had altered its
expression from stern anger to pity. But his severe remarks had rather
frightened her, and she struggled to be free.

“If you can stand, of course you may,” he said, and loosened his arms. “I
hardly know whether most to laugh at your freak or to chide you for its
folly.”
She immediately sank upon the lead-work. Knight lifted her again. “Are
you hurt?” he said.
She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying, with
a fitful aversion of her face, “I am only frightened. Put me down, do put me
down!”
“But you can’t walk,” said Knight.
“You don’t know that; how can you? I am only frightened, I tell you,”
she answered petulantly, and raised her hand to her forehead. Knight then
saw that she was bleeding from a severe cut in her wrist, apparently where
it had descended upon a salient corner of the lead-work. Elfride, too,
seemed to perceive and feel this now for the first time, and for a minute
nearly lost consciousness again. Knight rapidly bound his handkerchief
round the place, and to add to the complication, the thundercloud he had
been watching began to shed some heavy drops of rain. Knight looked up
and saw the vicar striding towards the house, and Mrs. Swancourt waddling
beside him like a hard-driven duck.
“As you are so faint, it will be much better to let me carry you down,”
said Knight; “or at any rate inside out of the rain.” But her objection to be
lifted made it impossible for him to support her for more than five steps.
“This is folly, great folly,” he exclaimed, setting her down.
“Indeed!” she murmured, with tears in her eyes. “I say I will not be
carried, and you say this is folly!”
“So it is.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“It is folly, I think. At any rate, the origin of it all is.”
“I don’t agree to it. And you needn’t get so angry with me; I am not
worth it.”
“Indeed you are. You are worth the enmity of princes, as was said of such
another. Now, then, will you clasp your hands behind my neck, that I may
carry you down without hurting you?”
“No, no.”

“You had better, or I shall foreclose.”
“What’s that!”
“Deprive you of your chance.”
Elfride gave a little toss.
“Now, don’t writhe so when I attempt to carry you.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Then submit quietly.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care,” she murmured in languid tones and with
closed eyes.
He took her into his arms, entered the turret, and with slow and cautious
steps descended round and round. Then, with the gentleness of a nursing
mother, he attended to the cut on her arm. During his progress through the
operations of wiping it and binding it up anew, her face changed its aspect
from pained indifference to something like bashful interest, interspersed
with small tremors and shudders of a trifling kind.
In the centre of each pale cheek a small red spot the size of a wafer had
now made its appearance, and continued to grow larger. Elfride
momentarily expected a recurrence to the lecture on her foolishness, but
Knight said no more than this—
“Promise me NEVER to walk on that parapet again.”
“It will be pulled down soon: so I do.” In a few minutes she continued in
a lower tone, and seriously, “You are familiar of course, as everybody is,
with those strange sensations we sometimes have, that our life for the
moment exists in duplicate.”
“That we have lived through that moment before?”
“Or shall again. Well, I felt on the tower that something similar to that
scene is again to be common to us both.”
“God forbid!” said Knight. “Promise me that you will never again walk
on any such place on any consideration.”
“I do.”
“That such a thing has not been before, we know. That it shall not be
again, you vow. Therefore think no more of such a foolish fancy.”

There had fallen a great deal of rain, but unaccompanied by lightning. A
few minutes longer, and the storm had ceased.
“Now, take my arm, please.”
“Oh no, it is not necessary.” This relapse into wilfulness was because he
had again connected the epithet foolish with her.
“Nonsense: it is quite necessary; it will rain again directly, and you are
not half recovered.” And without more ado Knight took her hand, drew it
under his arm, and held it there so firmly that she could not have removed it
without a struggle. Feeling like a colt in a halter for the first time, at thus
being led along, yet afraid to be angry, it was to her great relief that she saw
the carriage coming round the corner to fetch them.
Her fall upon the roof was necessarily explained to some extent upon
their entering the house; but both forbore to mention a word of what she
had been doing to cause such an accident. During the remainder of the
afternoon Elfride was invisible; but at dinner-time she appeared as bright as
ever.
In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with Mr. and
Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again found himself
thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a chess problem in one of
the illustrated periodicals.
“You like chess, Miss Swancourt?”
“Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every other. Do
you play?”
“I have played; though not lately.”
“Challenge him, Elfride,” said the vicar heartily. “She plays very well for
a lady, Mr. Knight.”
“Shall we play?” asked Elfride tentatively.
“Oh, certainly. I shall be delighted.”
The game began. Mr. Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance
with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had begun to
take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity of continuing
faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a fickle behaviour almost as
imperatively as fickleness itself; a fact, however, which would give a
startling advantage to the latter quality should it ever appear.

Knight, by one of those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes
afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her pawns. It
was her first advantage. She looked triumphant—even ruthless.
“By George! what was I thinking of?” said Knight quietly; and then
dismissed all concern at his accident.
“Club laws we’ll have, won’t we, Mr. Knight?” said Elfride suasively.
“Oh yes, certainly,” said Mr. Knight, a thought, however, just occurring
to his mind, that he had two or three times allowed her to replace a man on
her religiously assuring him that such a move was an absolute blunder.
She immediately took up the unfortunate rook and the contest proceeded,
Elfride having now rather the better of the game. Then he won the
exchange, regained his position, and began to press her hard. Elfride grew
flurried, and placed her queen on his remaining rook’s file.
“There—how stupid! Upon my word, I did not see your rook. Of course
nobody but a fool would have put a queen there knowingly!”
She spoke excitedly, half expecting her antagonist to give her back the
move.
“Nobody, of course,” said Knight serenely, and stretched out his hand
towards his royal victim.
“It is not very pleasant to have it taken advantage of, then,” she said with
some vexation.
“Club laws, I think you said?” returned Knight blandly, and mercilessly
appropriating the queen.
She was on the brink of pouting, but was ashamed to show it; tears
almost stood in her eyes. She had been trying so hard—so very hard—
thinking and thinking till her brain was in a whirl; and it seemed so
heartless of him to treat her so, after all.
“I think it is——” she began.
“What?”
—“Unkind to take advantage of a pure mistake I make in that way.”
“I lost my rook by even a purer mistake,” said the enemy in an inexorable
tone, without lifting his eyes.
“Yes, but——” However, as his logic was absolutely unanswerable, she
merely registered a protest. “I cannot endure those cold-blooded ways of

clubs and professional players, like Staunton and Morphy. Just as if it really
mattered whether you have raised your fingers from a man or no!”
Knight smiled as pitilessly as before, and they went on in silence.
“Checkmate,” said Knight.
“Another game,” said Elfride peremptorily, and looking very warm.
“With all my heart,” said Knight.
“Checkmate,” said Knight again at the end of forty minutes.
“Another game,” she returned resolutely.
“I’ll give you the odds of a bishop,” Knight said to her kindly.
“No, thank you,” Elfride replied in a tone intended for courteous
indifference; but, as a fact, very cavalier indeed.
“Checkmate,” said her opponent without the least emotion.
Oh, the difference between Elfride’s condition of mind now, and when
she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!
It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb itself out of
her head, she went off to her chamber, full of mortification at being beaten
time after time when she herself was the aggressor. Having for two or three
years enjoyed the reputation throughout the globe of her father’s brain—
which almost constituted her entire world—of being an excellent player,
this fiasco was intolerable; for unfortunately the person most dogged in the
belief in a false reputation is always that one, the possessor, who has the
best means of knowing that it is not true.
In bed no sleep came to soothe her; that gentle thing being the very
middle-of-summer friend in this respect of flying away at the merest
troublous cloud. After lying awake till two o’clock an idea seemed to strike
her. She softly arose, got a light, and fetched a Chess Praxis from the
library. Returning and sitting up in bed, she diligently studied the volume
till the clock struck five, and her eyelids felt thick and heavy. She then
extinguished the light and lay down again.
“You look pale, Elfride,” said Mrs. Swancourt the next morning at
breakfast. “Isn’t she, cousin Harry?”
A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming so when
regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table in obedience to
some remark. Everybody looked at Elfride. She certainly was pale.

“Am I pale?” she said with a faint smile. “I did not sleep much. I could
not get rid of armies of bishops and knights, try how I would.”
“Chess is a bad thing just before bedtime; especially for excitable people
like yourself, dear. Don’t ever play late again.”
“I’ll play early instead. Cousin Knight,” she said in imitation of Mrs.
Swancourt, “will you oblige me in something?”
“Even to half my kingdom.”
“Well, it is to play one game more.”
“When?”
“Now, instantly; the moment we have breakfasted.”
“Nonsense, Elfride,” said her father. “Making yourself a slave to the
game like that.”
“But I want to, papa! Honestly, I am restless at having been so
ignominiously overcome. And Mr. Knight doesn’t mind. So what harm can
there be?”
“Let us play, by all means, if you wish it,” said Knight.
So, when breakfast was over, the combatants withdrew to the quiet of the
library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have an idea that her
conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly free from conventional
restraint. And worse, she fancied upon Knight’s face a slightly amused look
at her proceedings.
“You think me foolish, I suppose,” she said recklessly; “but I want to do
my very best just once, and see whether I can overcome you.”
“Certainly: nothing more natural. Though I am afraid it is not the plan
adopted by women of the world after a defeat.”
“Why, pray?”
“Because they know that as good as overcoming is skill in effacing
recollection of being overcome, and turn their attention to that entirely.”
“I am wrong again, of course.”
“Perhaps your wrong is more pleasing than their right.”
“I don’t quite know whether you mean that, or whether you are laughing
at me,” she said, looking doubtingly at him, yet inclining to accept the more
flattering interpretation. “I am almost sure you think it vanity in me to think

I am a match for you. Well, if you do, I say that vanity is no crime in such a
case.”
“Well, perhaps not. Though it is hardly a virtue.”
“Oh yes, in battle! Nelson’s bravery lay in his vanity.”
“Indeed! Then so did his death.”
Oh no, no! For it is written in the book of the prophet Shakespeare—
‘Fear and be slain? no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die, is death destroying death!’

And down they sat, and the contest began, Elfride having the first move.
The game progressed. Elfride’s heart beat so violently that she could not sit
still. Her dread was lest he should hear it. And he did discover it at last—
some flowers upon the table being set throbbing by its pulsations.
“I think we had better give over,” said Knight, looking at her gently. “It is
too much for you, I know. Let us write down the position, and finish
another time.”
“No, please not,” she implored. “I should not rest if I did not know the
result at once. It is your move.”
Ten minutes passed.
She started up suddenly. “I know what you are doing?” she cried, an
angry colour upon her cheeks, and her eyes indignant. “You were thinking
of letting me win to please me!”
“I don’t mind owning that I was,” Knight responded phlegmatically, and
appearing all the more so by contrast with her own turmoil.
“But you must not! I won’t have it.”
“Very well.”
“No, that will not do; I insist that you promise not to do any such absurd
thing. It is insulting me!”
“Very well, madam. I won’t do any such absurd thing. You shall not
win.”
“That is to be proved!” she returned proudly; and the play went on.
Nothing is now heard but the ticking of a quaint old timepiece on the
summit of a bookcase. Ten minutes pass; he captures her knight; she takes
his knight, and looks a very Rhadamanthus.

More minutes tick away; she takes his pawn and has the advantage,
showing her sense of it rather prominently.
Five minutes more: he takes her bishop: she brings things even by taking
his knight.
Three minutes: she looks bold, and takes his queen: he looks placid, and
takes hers.
Eight or ten minutes pass: he takes a pawn; she utters a little pooh! but
not the ghost of a pawn can she take in retaliation.
Ten minutes pass: he takes another pawn and says, “Check!” She flushes,
extricates herself by capturing his bishop, and looks triumphant. He
immediately takes her bishop: she looks surprised.
Five minutes longer: she makes a dash and takes his only remaining
bishop; he replies by taking her only remaining knight.
Two minutes: he gives check; her mind is now in a painful state of
tension, and she shades her face with her hand.
Yet a few minutes more: he takes her rook and checks again. She literally
trembles now lest an artful surprise she has in store for him shall be
anticipated by the artful surprise he evidently has in store for her.
Five minutes: “Checkmate in two moves!” exclaims Elfride.
“If you can,” says Knight.
“Oh, I have miscalculated; that is cruel!”
“Checkmate,” says Knight; and the victory is won.
Elfride arose and turned away without letting him see her face. Once in
the hall she ran upstairs and into her room, and flung herself down upon her
bed, weeping bitterly.
“Where is Elfride?” said her father at luncheon.
Knight listened anxiously for the answer. He had been hoping to see her
again before this time.
“She isn’t well, sir,” was the reply.
Mrs. Swancourt rose and left the room, going upstairs to Elfride’s
apartment.
At the door was Unity, who occupied in the new establishment a position
between young lady’s maid and middle-housemaid.

“She is sound asleep, ma’am,” Unity whispered.
Mrs. Swancourt opened the door. Elfride was lying full-dressed on the
bed, her face hot and red, her arms thrown abroad. At intervals of a minute
she tossed restlessly from side to side, and indistinctly moaned words used
in the game of chess.
Mrs. Swancourt had a turn for doctoring, and felt her pulse. It was
twanging like a harp-string, at the rate of nearly a hundred and fifty a
minute. Softly moving the sleeping girl to a little less cramped position, she
went downstairs again.
“She is asleep now,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “She does not seem very well.
Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain won’t bear
cudgelling like your great head. You should have strictly forbidden her to
play again.”
In truth, the essayist’s experience of the nature of young women was far
less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and others to
believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, but practically
was nowhere.
“I am indeed sorry,” said Knight, feeling even more than he expressed.
“But surely, the young lady knows best what is good for her!”
“Bless you, that’s just what she doesn’t know. She never thinks of such
things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to command her and
keep her in order, as you would a child. She will say things worthy of a
French epigrammatist, and act like a robin in a greenhouse. But I think we
will send for Dr. Granson—there can be no harm.”
A man was straightway despatched on horseback to Castle Boterel, and
the gentleman known as Dr. Granson came in the course of the afternoon.
He pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided state of disorder;
forwarded some soothing draught, and gave orders that on no account
whatever was she to play chess again.
The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a
curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The women
servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as each entered, he
could not, to save his life, avoid turning his head with the hope that she
might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began reading without waiting for her.

Then somebody glided in noiselessly; Knight softly glanced up: it was only
the little kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading prayers a bore.
He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to recognize that
holding converse with Nature’s charms was not solitude. On nearing the
house again he perceived his young friend crossing a slope by a path which
ran into the one he was following in the angle of the field. Here they met.
Elfride was at once exultant and abashed: coming into his presence had
upon her the effect of entering a cathedral.
Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in the very
act of writing therein when they came in view of each other. He left off in
the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to inquire warmly concerning her
state of health. She said she was perfectly well, and indeed had never
looked better. Her health was as inconsequent as her actions. Her lips were
red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined
with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged
confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be
knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to play
one.
“Are you taking notes?” she inquired with an alacrity plainly arising less
from interest in the subject than from a wish to divert his thoughts from
herself.
“Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will complete
it.” Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained beside him a
moment, and afterwards walked on.
“I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,” she gaily flung
back to him over her shoulder.
“I don’t think you would find much to interest you.”
“I know I should.”
“Then of course I have no more to say.”
“But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts concerning
journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of thoughts?”
“Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists for the most part
of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed and disconnected, of no
possible interest to anybody but myself.”
“It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?”

“Yes.”
“If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article, what must
they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified spirit, above proof; before
it is lowered to be fit for human consumption: ‘words that burn’ indeed.”
“Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless, dead. You
could hardly read them.”
“May I try?” she said coaxingly. “I wrote my poor romance in that way—
I mean in bits, out of doors—and I should like to see whether your way of
entering things is the same as mine.”
“Really, that’s rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly refuse
now you have asked so directly; but——”
“You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify me—your
writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon your book by
chance, it would have been different; but you stand before me, and say,
‘Excuse me,’ without caring whether I do or not, and write on, and then tell
me they are not private facts but public ideas.”
“Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the consequences be
upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is to leave my book
alone.”
“But with that caution I have your permission?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book, then
laughed, and saying, “I must see it,” withdrew it from his fingers.
Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the path
turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the wicket-gate he saw
that she had moved, and waited till she came up.
Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully by the
corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a nettled look. She
silently extended the volume towards him, raising her eyes no higher than
her hand was lifted.
“Take it,” said Elfride quickly. “I don’t want to read it.”
“Could you understand it?” said Knight.
“As far as I looked. But I didn’t care to read much.”
“Why, Miss Swancourt?”

“Only because I didn’t wish to—that’s all.”
“I warned you that you might not.”
“Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.”
“Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.”
“Not my name—I know that.”
“Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would recognize
you.”
“Except myself. For what is this?” she exclaimed, taking it from him and
opening a page. “August 7. That’s the day before yesterday. But I won’t
read it,” Elfride said, closing the book again with pretty hauteur. “Why
should I? I had no business to ask to see your book, and it serves me right.”
Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the book
to see. He came to this:
“Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born. After
a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness it begins to act. Simple,
young, and inexperienced at first. Persons of observation can tell to a nicety
how old this consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary
to its success—the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career by actions
which are popularly termed showing-off. Method adopted depends in each
case upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it.
Town-bred girl will utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country
miss adopts the more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or
making your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On
Endelstow Tower.)
“An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays. ‘Look at
me,’ say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice, without reflecting
whether or not it be to their advantage to show so very much of themselves.
(Amplify and correct for paper on Artless Arts.)”
“Yes, I remember now,” said Knight. “The notes were certainly suggested
by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not think too much
of such random observations,” he continued encouragingly, as he noticed
her injured looks. “A mere fancy passing through my head assumes a
factitious importance to you, because it has been made permanent by being
written down. All mankind think thoughts as bad as those of people they
most love on earth, but such thoughts never getting embodied on paper, it

becomes assumed that they never existed. I daresay that you yourself have
thought some disagreeable thing or other of me, which would seem just as
bad as this if written. I challenge you, now, to tell me.”
“The worst thing I have thought of you?”
“Yes.”
“I must not.”
“Oh yes.”
“I thought you were rather round-shouldered.”
Knight looked slightly redder.
“And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.”
“Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,” said Knight, there being a faint
ghastliness discernible in his laugh. “They are much worse in a lady’s eye
than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.”
“Ah, that’s very fine,” she said, too inexperienced to perceive her hit, and
hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. “You alluded to me in that
entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I cannot
understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you think I am?”
“How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.”
“You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like
best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?”
“Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.”
So it was not Elfride’s class.
“But it is well known,” she said eagerly, and there was something
touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she revealed by
her words, “that the slower a nature is to develop, the richer the nature.
Youths and girls who are men and women before they come of age are
nobodies by the time that backward people have shown their full compass.”
“Yes,” said Knight thoughtfully. “There is really something in that
remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there take it
for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has not reached
the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because she is slow to
develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for developing.”
Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs.
Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat and

drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The
morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the old
lady having, for the above reason, vacated it by the second door as they
entered by the first.
Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two portraits
on ivory.
“Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging by
what I see here,” he observed, “they had unquestionably beautiful heads of
hair.”
“Yes; and that is everything,” said Elfride, possibly conscious of her own,
possibly not.
“Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.”
“Which colour do you like best?” she ventured to ask.
“More depends on its abundance than on its colour.”
“Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?”
“Dark.”
“I mean for women,” she said, with the minutest fall of countenance, and
a hope that she had been misunderstood.
“So do I,” Knight replied.
It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride’s hair. In
women who wear it plainly such a feature may be overlooked by men not
given to ocular intentness. But hers was always in the way. You saw her hair
as far as you could see her sex, and knew that it was the palest brown. She
knew instantly that Knight, being perfectly aware of this, had an
independent standard of admiration in the matter.
Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with the
honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the more they went
against her, the more she respected them. And now, like a reckless gambler,
she hazarded her last and best treasure. Her eyes: they were her all now.
“What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?” she said slowly.
“Honestly, or as a compliment?”
“Of course honestly; I don’t want anybody’s compliment!”
And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of approval
from that man then would have been like a well to a famished Arab.

“I prefer hazel,” he said serenely.
She had played and lost again.

Chapter XIX
“Love was in the next degree.”

Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by judicious
touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s recollection of the
speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said by either on the subject of
hair, eyes, or development. Elfride’s mind had been impregnated with
sentiments of her own smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness,
and her discomfort was visible in her face. The whole tendency of the
conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage her; and she
was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence. He would not have
been so unloving, she said, as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features
different from her own. True, Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr.
Knight had never done anything of the sort. Somehow this did not mend
matters, and the sensation of her smallness in Knight’s eyes still remained.
Had the position been reversed—had Stephen loved her in spite of a
differing taste, and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance
to his ideal, it would have engendered far happier thoughts. As matters
stood, Stephen’s admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of
passion. Perhaps any keen man’s judgment was condemnatory of her.
During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with
their seniors, and no conversation arose which was exclusively their own.
When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the same
subject. At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him to speak
so decisively as he had done; the next, that it was sterling honesty.
“Ah, what a poor nobody I am!” she said, sighing. “People like him, who
go about the great world, don’t care in the least what I am like either in
mood or feature.”

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman’s mind in this
manner, is half way to her heart; the distance between those two stations is
proverbially short.
“And are you really going away this week?” said Mrs. Swancourt to
Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.
They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a last
service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening instead
of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of the ruinous portions.
“I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,” returned Knight; “and
then I go on to Dublin.”
“Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,” said the vicar. “A week
is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize your presence yet. I
remember a story which——”
The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and would
probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had not a turn in
the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown within the range of his
vision, and so reminded him. He at once diverted the current of his narrative
with the dexterity the occasion demanded.
“The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from which
I took my text the Sunday before last, is quite to the point,” he continued,
with the pronunciation of a man who, far from having intended to tell a
week-day story a moment earlier, had thought of nothing but Sabbath
matters for several weeks. “What did he gain after all by his restlessness?
Had he remained in the city of the Jebusites, and not been so anxious for
Gibeah, none of his troubles would have arisen.”
“But he had wasted five days already,” said Knight, closing his eyes to
the vicar’s commendable diversion. “His fault lay in beginning the tarrying
system originally.”
“True, true; my illustration fails.”
“But not the hospitality which prompted the story.”
“So you are to come just the same,” urged Mrs. Swancourt, for she had
seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her stepdaughter at
Knight’s announcement.
Knight half promised to call on his return journey; but the uncertainty
with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride with a regretful

interest in all he did during the few remaining hours. The curate having
already officiated twice that day in the two churches, Mr. Swancourt had
undertaken the whole of the evening service, and Knight read the lessons
for him. The sun streamed across from the dilapidated west window, and
lighted all the assembled worshippers with a golden glow, Knight as he read
being illuminated by the same mellow lustre. Elfride at the organ regarded
him with a throbbing sadness of mood which was fed by a sense of being
far removed from his sphere. As he went deliberately through the chapter
appointed—a portion of the history of Elijah—and ascended that
magnificent climax of the wind, the earthquake, the fire, and the still small
voice, his deep tones echoed past with such apparent disregard of her
existence, that his presence inspired her with a forlorn sense of
unapproachableness, which his absence would hardly have been able to
cause.
At the same time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of the
dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by the shape and
aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the bleak barren countenance
of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had not seen much of since the
morning of her return with Stephen Smith. Possessing the smallest of
competencies, this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life in
journeyings between Endelstow Churchyard and that of a village near
Southampton, where her father and mother were laid.
She had not attended the service here for a considerable time, and she
now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat. From the gallery
window the tomb of her son was plainly visible—standing as the nearest
object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by the changeless horizon
of the sea.
The streaming rays, too, flooded her face, now bent towards Elfride with
a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of the place raised to a tragic
dignity it did not intrinsically possess. The girl resumed her normal attitude
with an added disquiet.
Elfride’s emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert itself on
a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free—a poem, a sunset, a
cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague imagining, being the usual
accidents of its exhibition. The longing for Knight’s respect, which was
leading up to an incipient yearning for his love, made the present

conjuncture a sufficient one. Whilst kneeling down previous to leaving,
when the sunny streaks had gone upward to the roof, and the lower part of
the church was in soft shadow, she could not help thinking of Coleridge’s
morbid poem “The Three Graves,” and shuddering as she wondered if Mrs.
Jethway were cursing her, she wept as if her heart would break.
They came out of church just as the sun went down, leaving the
landscape like a platform from which an eloquent speaker has retired, and
nothing remains for the audience to do but to rise and go home. Mr. and
Mrs. Swancourt went off in the carriage, Knight and Elfride preferring to
walk, as the skilful old matchmaker had imagined. They descended the hill
together.
“I liked your reading, Mr. Knight,” Elfride presently found herself
saying. “You read better than papa.”
“I will praise anybody that will praise me. You played excellently, Miss
Swancourt, and very correctly.”
“Correctly—yes.”
“It must be a great pleasure to you to take an active part in the service.”
“I want to be able to play with more feeling. But I have not a good
selection of music, sacred or secular. I wish I had a nice little music-library
—well chosen, and that the only new pieces sent me were those of genuine
merit.”
“I am glad to hear such a wish from you. It is extraordinary how many
women have no honest love of music as an end and not as a means, even
leaving out those who have nothing in them. They mostly like it for its
accessories. I have never met a woman who loves music as do ten or a
dozen men I know.”
“How would you draw the line between women with something and
women with nothing in them?”
“Well,” said Knight, reflecting a moment, “I mean by nothing in them
those who don’t care about anything solid. This is an instance: I knew a
man who had a young friend in whom he was much interested; in fact, they
were going to be married. She was seemingly poetical, and he offered her a
choice of two editions of the British poets, which she pretended to want
badly. He said, ‘Which of them would you like best for me to send?’ She
said, ‘A pair of the prettiest earrings in Bond Street, if you don’t mind,

would be nicer than either.’ Now I call her a girl with not much in her but
vanity; and so do you, I daresay.”
“Oh yes,” replied Elfride with an effort.
Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and
noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure, he appeared
to have misgivings.
“You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have
preferred the nicknacks?”
“No, I don’t think I should, indeed,” she stammered.
“I’ll put it to you,” said the inflexible Knight. “Which will you have of
these two things of about equal value—the well-chosen little library of the
best music you spoke of—bound in morocco, walnut case, lock and key—
or a pair of the very prettiest earrings in Bond Street windows?”
“Of course the music,” Elfride replied with forced earnestness.
“You are quite certain?” he said emphatically.
“Quite,” she faltered; “if I could for certain buy the earrings afterwards.”
Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the palpitating
mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such thing a species of
cruelty.
He looked at her rather oddly, and said, “Fie!”
“Forgive me,” she said, laughing a little, a little frightened, and blushing
very deeply.
“Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn’t you say at first, as any firm woman would
have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?”
“I don’t know,” said Elfride wofully, and with a distressful smile.
“I thought you were exceptionally musical?”
“So I am, I think. But the test is so severe—quite painful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Music doesn’t do any real good, or rather——”
“That IS a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what——”
“You don’t understand! you don’t understand!”
“Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?”

“No, no, no, no!” she cried petulantly; “I didn’t mean what you think. I
like the music best, only I like——”
“Earrings better—own it!” he said in a teasing tone. “Well, I think I
should have had the moral courage to own it at once, without pretending to
an elevation I could not reach.”
Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the defensive.
So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she answered desperately:
“My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost one of
my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy any more, or
allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I wish I had some like
them—that’s what my meaning is—indeed it is, Mr. Knight.”
“I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,” said Knight, with a look of
regret at seeing how disturbed she was. “But seriously, if women only knew
how they ruin their good looks by such appurtenances, I am sure they
would never want them.”
“They were lovely, and became me so!”
“Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff their ears
with nowadays—like the governor of a steam-engine, or a pair of scales, or
gold gibbets and chains, and artists’ palettes, and compensation pendulums,
and Heaven knows what besides.”
“No; they were not one of those things. So pretty—like this,” she said
with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her parasol an
enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a scale that would have
suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
“Yes, very pretty—very,” said Knight dryly. “How did you come to lose
such a precious pair of articles?”
“I only lost one—nobody ever loses both at the same time.”
She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of
the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith was
attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her confusion was
hardly to be wondered at. The question had been awkward, and received no
direct answer.
Knight seemed not to notice her manner.

“Oh, nobody ever loses both—I see. And certainly the fact that it was a
case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your choice.”
“As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don’t now,” she said,
looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And coming gallantly
to her own rescue, “If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my
ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and
not in their ways.”
“An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more objectionable of
the two,” said Knight.
“Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell me.”
“I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of life is too
large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.”
“Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to make her
life, in its higher sense, a failure?”
“Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.”
“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected
and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “Because I utter commonplace
words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor
stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast all
my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the substance
is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”
“Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the subject in
hand—lives which are failures—you need not trouble yourself. Anybody’s
life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if he or she fails as
if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in
the story. If a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of it
by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had as much in it as
that of a great man who has done his great deed. It is whimsical of the
world to hold that particulars of how a lad went to school and so on should
be as an interesting romance or as nothing to them, precisely in proportion
to his after renown.”
They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself. Their
shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of becoming

obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the opposite direction which the
moon was bringing to distinctness.
“I consider my life to some extent a failure,” said Knight again after a
pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic shadows.
“You! How?”
“I don’t precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.”
“Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel that you
have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?”
“Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are conscious of
having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it seems, there is nothing
truer than that people who have always gone right don’t know half as much
about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.
However, it is not desirable for me to chill your summer-time by going into
this.”
“You have not told me even now if I am really vain.”
“If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you’ll think I don’t mean it,”
he replied, looking curiously into her face.
“Ah, well,” she replied, with a little breath of distress, “‘That which is
exceeding deep, who will find it out?’ I suppose I must take you as I do the
Bible—find out and understand all I can; and on the strength of that,
swallow the rest in a lump, by simple faith. Think me vain, if you will.
Worldly greatness requires so much littleness to grow up in, that an
infirmity more or less is not a matter for regret.”
“As regards women, I can’t say,” answered Knight carelessly; “but it is
without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of
a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse; so you
may be right in sticking up for vanity.”
“No, no, I don’t do that,” she said regretfully.
Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you have lately
spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true self—the cynic you have
been this evening, or the nice philosopher you were up to to-night?”
“Ah, which? You know as well as I.”

Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico till the
stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said idly—
“There’s a bright star exactly over me.”
“Each bright star is overhead somewhere.”
“Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?” and she pointed with her
finger.
“That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde Islands.”
“And that?”
“Looking down upon the source of the Nile.”
“And that lonely quiet-looking one?”
“He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator for
his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have
almost rolled away from, is in India—over the head of a young friend of
mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs low upon
his horizon, and thinks of it as marking where his true love dwells.”
Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She could
not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show unconsciousness.
“The star is over MY head,” she said with hesitation.
“Or anybody else’s in England.”
“Oh yes, I see:” she breathed her relief.
“His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don’t know them,
though I have been in correspondence with him for many years till lately.
Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in love, and then went to
Bombay. Since that time I have heard very little of him.”
Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though Elfride
at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in honesty he had just
been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the intention dispersed into
silence. There seemed a reproach in Knight’s blind words, and yet she was
not able to clearly define any disloyalty that she had been guilty of.

Chapter XX
“A distant dearness in the hill.”

Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed over to
Cork.
One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and proportionately
weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of Killarney, rambled amid
their luxuriant woods, surveyed the infinite variety of island, hill, and dale
there to be found, listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot;
but altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in such
favoured regions.
Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not perceptibly
affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious that her entry into his
sphere had added anything to himself; but now that she was taken away he
was very conscious of a great deal being abstracted. The superfluity had
become a necessity, and Knight was in love.
Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing to
do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew not: certain he was
that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he had felt none of that
exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural to such severances, seeing how
delightful a subject of contemplation Elfride had been ever since. Had he
begun to love her when she met his eye after her mishap on the tower? He
had simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her whilst standing on
the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He had thought her
complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that had sown the seed?
He had thought her words ingenious, and very creditable to a young
woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-playing anything to do with it?
Certainly not: he had thought her at that time a rather conceited child.

Knight’s experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that love
always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the fingers:
that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the moment of generation. Not
till they were parted, and she had become sublimated in his memory, could
he be said to have even attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not
act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him, he appeared to
himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which had temporarily assumed
its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to analysis,
he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this new
force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life. He became
restless: then he forgot all collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking
about her.
Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than with
romance.
He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on coquetry.
Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible translation of favour into
suspicion was able to uphold such a theory. The performance had been too
well done to be anything but real. It had the defects without which nothing
is genuine. No actress of twenty years’ standing, no bald-necked lady whose
earliest season “out” was lost in the discreet mist of evasive talk, could have
played before him the part of ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it. She had the
little artful ways which partly make up ingenuousness.
There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance: spinsters
there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some think only those of the
latter. However, Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by nature.
What was he coming to? It was very odd to himself to look at his theories
on the subject of love, and reading them now by the full light of a new
experience, to see how much more his sentences meant than he had felt
them to mean when they were written. People often discover the real force
of a trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a chance
adventure; but Knight had never before known the case of a man who learnt
the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.
He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred in him was
an invincible objection to be any but the first comer in a woman’s heart. He

had discovered within himself the condition that if ever he did make up his
mind to marry, it must be on the certainty that no cropping out of
inconvenient old letters, no bow and blush to a mysterious stranger casually
met, should be a possible source of discomposure. Knight’s sentiments were
only the ordinary ones of a man of his age who loves genuinely, perhaps
exaggerated a little by his pursuits. When men first love as lads, it is with
the very centre of their hearts, nothing else being concerned in the
operation. With added years, more of the faculties attempt a partnership in
the passion, till at Knight’s age the understanding is fain to have a hand in
it. It may as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains as a gauge
of his position is as one determining a ship’s longitude from a light at the
mast-head.
Knight argued from Elfride’s unwontedness of manner, which was matter
of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of inference only.
Incredules les plus credules. “Elfride,” he said, “had hardly looked upon a
man till she saw me.”
He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times by
thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and how
necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to complete the
delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind. So at the end of the
week’s absence, which had brought him as far as Dublin, he resolved to
curtail his tour, return to Endelstow, and commit himself by making a
reality of the hypothetical offer of that Sunday evening.
Notwithstanding that he had concocted a great deal of paper theory on
social amenities and modern manners generally, the special ounce of
practice was wanting, and now for his life Knight could not recollect
whether it was considered correct to give a young lady personal ornaments
before a regular engagement to marry had been initiated. But the day before
leaving Dublin he looked around anxiously for a high-class jewellery
establishment, in which he purchased what he considered would suit her
best.
It was with a most awkward and unwonted feeling that after entering and
closing the door of his room he sat down, opened the morocco case, and
held up each of the fragile bits of gold-work before his eyes. Many things
had become old to the solitary man of letters, but these were new, and he

handled like a child an outcome of civilization which had never before been
touched by his fingers. A sudden fastidious decision that the pattern chosen
would not suit her after all caused him to rise in a flurry and tear down the
street to change them for others. After a great deal of trouble in reselecting,
during which his mind became so bewildered that the critical faculty on
objects of art seemed to have vacated his person altogether, Knight carried
off another pair of ear-rings. These remained in his possession till the
afternoon, when, after contemplating them fifty times with a growing
misgiving that the last choice was worse than the first, he felt that no sleep
would visit his pillow till he had improved upon his previous purchases yet
again. In a perfect heat of vexation with himself for such tergiversation, he
went anew to the shop-door, was absolutely ashamed to enter and give
further trouble, went to another shop, bought a pair at an enormously
increased price, because they seemed the very thing, asked the goldsmiths if
they would take the other pair in exchange, was told that they could not
exchange articles bought of another maker, paid down the money, and went
off with the two pairs in his possession, wondering what on earth to do with
the superfluous pair. He almost wished he could lose them, or that
somebody would steal them, and was burdened with an interposing sense
that, as a capable man, with true ideas of economy, he must necessarily sell
them somewhere, which he did at last for a mere song. Mingled with a
blank feeling of a whole day being lost to him in running about the city on
this new and extraordinary class of errand, and of several pounds being lost
through his bungling, was a slight sense of satisfaction that he had emerged
for ever from his antediluvian ignorance on the subject of ladies’ jewellery,
as well as secured a truly artistic production at last. During the remainder of
that day he scanned the ornaments of every lady he met with the profoundly
experienced eye of an appraiser.
Next morning Knight was again crossing St. George’s Channel—not
returning to London by the Holyhead route as he had originally intended,
but towards Bristol—availing himself of Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt’s
invitation to revisit them on his homeward journey.
We flit forward to Elfride.
Woman’s ruling passion—to fascinate and influence those more powerful
than she—though operant in Elfride, was decidedly purposeless. She had
wanted her friend Knight’s good opinion from the first: how much more

than that elementary ingredient of friendship she now desired, her fears
would hardly allow her to think. In originally wishing to please the highest
class of man she had ever intimately known, there was no disloyalty to
Stephen Smith. She could not—and few women can—realize the possible
vastness of an issue which has only an insignificant begetting.
Her letters from Stephen were necessarily few, and her sense of fidelity
clung to the last she had received as a wrecked mariner clings to flotsam.
The young girl persuaded herself that she was glad Stephen had such a right
to her hand as he had acquired (in her eyes) by the elopement. She beguiled
herself by saying, “Perhaps if I had not so committed myself I might fall in
love with Mr. Knight.”
All this made the week of Knight’s absence very gloomy and distasteful
to her. She retained Stephen in her prayers, and his old letters were re-read
—as a medicine in reality, though she deceived herself into the belief that it
was as a pleasure.
These letters had grown more and more hopeful. He told her that he
finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of having
removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them. Then he
drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some day. People
would turn their heads and say, “What a prize he has won!” She was not to
be sad about that wild runaway attempt of theirs (Elfride had repeatedly
said that it grieved her). Whatever any other person who knew of it might
think, he knew well enough the modesty of her nature. The only reproach
was a gentle one for not having written quite so devotedly during her visit
to London. Her letter had seemed to have a liveliness derived from other
thoughts than thoughts of him.
Knight’s intention of an early return to Endelstow having originally been
faint, his promise to do so had been fainter. He was a man who kept his
words well to the rear of his possible actions. The vicar was rather surprised
to see him again so soon: Mrs. Swancourt was not. Knight found, on
meeting them all, after his arrival had been announced, that they had
formed an intention to go to St. Leonards for a few days at the end of the
month.
No satisfactory conjuncture offered itself on this first evening of his
return for presenting Elfride with what he had been at such pains to procure.
He was fastidious in his reading of opportunities for such an intended act.

The next morning chancing to break fine after a week of cloudy weather, it
was proposed and decided that they should all drive to Barwith Strand, a
local lion which neither Mrs. Swancourt nor Knight had seen. Knight
scented romantic occasions from afar, and foresaw that such a one might be
expected before the coming night.
The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which
hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these uplands revealed
the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white and a solitary white sail,
the whole brimming up to a keen horizon which lay like a line ruled from
hillside to hillside. Then they rolled down a pass, the chocolate-toned rocks
forming a wall on both sides, from one of which fell a heavy jagged shade
over half the roadway. A spout of fresh water burst from an occasional
crevice, and pattering down upon broad green leaves, ran along as a rivulet
at the bottom. Unkempt locks of heather overhung the brow of each steep,
whence at divers points a bramble swung forth into mid-air, snatching at
their head-dresses like a claw.
They mounted the last crest, and the bay which was to be the end of their
pilgrimage burst upon them. The ocean blueness deepened its colour as it
stretched to the foot of the crags, where it terminated in a fringe of white—
silent at this distance, though moving and heaving like a counterpane upon
a restless sleeper. The shadowed hollows of the purple and brown rocks
would have been called blue had not that tint been so entirely appropriated
by the water beside them.
The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached, and an
ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions down to the
shore.
Knight found his opportunity. “I did not forget your wish,” he began,
when they were apart from their friends.
Elfride looked as if she did not understand.
“And I have brought you these,” he continued, awkwardly pulling out the
case, and opening it while holding it towards her.
“O Mr. Knight!” said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively red; “I
didn’t know you had any intention or meaning in what you said. I thought it
a mere supposition. I don’t want them.”

A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater
decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. To-morrow was the
day for Stephen’s letter.
“But will you not accept them?” Knight returned, feeling less her master
than heretofore.
“I would rather not. They are beautiful—more beautiful than any I have
ever seen,” she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully at the
temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. “But I don’t want to have
them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr. Knight.”
“No kindness at all,” said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at this
unexpected turn of events.
A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather wofully at
the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to procure; turning it about
and holding it up as if, feeling his gift to be slighted by her, he were
endeavouring to admire it very much himself.
“Shut them up, and don’t let me see them any longer—do!” she said
laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.
“Why, Elfie?”
“Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them. There, I am
silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for not taking them—now.”
She kept in the last word for a moment, intending to imply that her refusal
was finite, but somehow the word slipped out, and undid all the rest.
“You will take them some day?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why don’t you want to, Elfride Swancourt?”
“Because I don’t. I don’t like to take them.”
“I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,” said Knight.
“Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be towards me?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What, then? Do you like me?”
Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with features
shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as regarded her answer.
“I like you pretty well,” she at length murmured mildly.

“Not very much?”
“You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?” she
replied evasively.
“You think me a fogey, I suppose?”
“No, I don’t—I mean I do—I don’t know what I think you, I mean. Let
us go to papa,” responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried delivery.
“Well, I’ll tell you my object in getting the present,” said Knight, with a
composure intended to remove from her mind any possible impression of
his being what he was—her lover. “You see it was the very least I could do
in common civility.”
Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.
Knight continued, putting away the case: “I felt as anybody naturally
would have, you know, that my words on your choice the other day were
invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should take a practical shape.”
“Oh yes.”
Elfride was sorry—she could not tell why—that he gave such a
legitimate reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the time a cool
motive, which might be stated to anybody without raising a smile. Had she
known they were offered in that spirit, she would certainly have accepted
the seductive gift. And the tantalizing feature was that perhaps he suspected
her to imagine them offered as a lover’s token, which was mortifying
enough if they were not.
Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a flat
boulder for spreading their table-cloth upon, and, amid the discussion on
that subject, the matter pending between Knight and Elfride was shelved for
a while. He read her refusal so certainly as the bashfulness of a girl in a
novel position, that, upon the whole, he could tolerate such a beginning.
Could Knight have been told that it was a sense of fidelity struggling
against new love, whilst no less assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might
have entirely abstracted the wish to secure it.
At the same time a slight constraint of manner was visible between them
for the remainder of the afternoon. The tide turned, and they were obliged
to ascend to higher ground. The day glided on to its end with the usual quiet
dreamy passivity of such occasions—when every deed done and thing
thought is in endeavouring to avoid doing and thinking more. Looking idly

over the verge of a crag, they beheld their stone dining-table gradually
being splashed upon and their crumbs and fragments all washed away by
the incoming sea. The vicar drew a moral lesson from the scene; Knight
replied in the same satisfied strain. And then the waves rolled in furiously—
the neutral green-and-blue tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were
metamorphosed into foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint,
and leaving trailing followers behind.
The passing of a heavy shower was the next scene—driving them to
shelter in a shallow cave—after which the horses were put in, and they
started to return homeward. By the time they reached the higher levels the
sky had again cleared, and the sunset rays glanced directly upon the wet
uphill road they had climbed. The ruts formed by their carriage-wheels on
the ascent—a pair of Liliputian canals—were as shining bars of gold,
tapering to nothing in the distance. Upon this also they turned their backs,
and night spread over the sea.
The evening was chilly, and there was no moon. Knight sat close to
Elfride, and, when the darkness rendered the position of a person a matter
of uncertainty, particularly close. Elfride edged away.
“I hope you allow me my place ungrudgingly?” he whispered.
“Oh yes; ’tis the least I can do in common civility,” she said, accenting
the words so that he might recognize them as his own returned.
Both of them felt delicately balanced between two possibilities. Thus
they reached home.
To Knight this mild experience was delightful. It was to him a gentle
innocent time—a time which, though there may not be much in it, seldom
repeats itself in a man’s life, and has a peculiar dearness when glanced at
retrospectively. He is not inconveniently deep in love, and is lulled by a
peaceful sense of being able to enjoy the most trivial thing with a childlike
enjoyment. The movement of a wave, the colour of a stone, anything, was
enough for Knight’s drowsy thoughts of that day to precipitate themselves
upon. Even the sermonizing platitudes the vicar had delivered himself of—
chiefly because something seemed to be professionally required of him in
the presence of a man of Knight’s proclivities—were swallowed whole. The
presence of Elfride led him not merely to tolerate that kind of talk from the
necessities of ordinary courtesy; but he listened to it—took in the ideas with

an enjoyable make-believe that they were proper and necessary, and
indulged in a conservative feeling that the face of things was complete.
Entering her room that evening Elfride found a packet for herself on the
dressing-table. How it came there she did not know. She tremblingly undid
the folds of white paper that covered it. Yes; it was the treasure of a
morocco case, containing those treasures of ornament she had refused in the
daytime.
Elfride dressed herself in them for a moment, looked at herself in the
glass, blushed red, and put them away. They filled her dreams all that night.
Never had she seen anything so lovely, and never was it more clear that as
an honest woman she was in duty bound to refuse them. Why it was not
equally clear to her that duty required more vigorous co-ordinate conduct as
well, let those who dissect her say.
The next morning glared in like a spectre upon her. It was Stephen’s
letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman—to stealthily do a deed
she had never liked, to secure an end she now had ceased to desire.
But she went.
There were two letters.
One was from the bank at St. Launce’s, in which she had a small private
deposit—probably something about interest. She put that in her pocket for a
moment, and going indoors and upstairs to be safer from observation,
tremblingly opened Stephen’s.
What was this he said to her?
She was to go to the St. Launce’s Bank and take a sum of money which
they had received private advices to pay her.
The sum was two hundred pounds.
There was no check, order, or anything of the nature of guarantee. In fact
the information amounted to this: the money was now in the St. Launce’s
Bank, standing in her name.
She instantly opened the other letter. It contained a deposit-note from the
bank for the sum of two hundred pounds which had that day been added to
her account. Stephen’s information, then, was correct, and the transfer
made.

“I have saved this in one year,” Stephen’s letter went on to say, “and what
so proper as well as pleasant for me to do as to hand it over to you to keep
for your use? I have plenty for myself, independently of this. Should you
not be disposed to let it lie idle in the bank, get your father to invest it in
your name on good security. It is a little present to you from your more than
betrothed. He will, I think, Elfride, feel now that my pretensions to your
hand are anything but the dream of a silly boy not worth rational
consideration.”
With a natural delicacy, Elfride, in mentioning her father’s marriage, had
refrained from all allusion to the pecuniary resources of the lady.
Leaving this matter-of-fact subject, he went on, somewhat after his
boyish manner:
“Do you remember, darling, that first morning of my arrival at your
house, when your father read at prayers the miracle of healing the sick of
the palsy—where he is told to take up his bed and walk? I do, and I can
now so well realize the force of that passage. The smallest piece of mat is
the bed of the Oriental, and yesterday I saw a native perform the very
action, which reminded me to mention it. But you are better read than I, and
perhaps you knew all this long ago....One day I bought some small native
idols to send home to you as curiosities, but afterwards finding they had
been cast in England, made to look old, and shipped over, I threw them
away in disgust.
“Speaking of this reminds me that we are obliged to import all our house-
building ironwork from England. Never was such foresight required to be
exercised in building houses as here. Before we begin, we have to order
every column, lock, hinge, and screw that will be required. We cannot go
into the next street, as in London, and get them cast at a minute’s notice.
Mr. L. says somebody will have to go to England very soon and superintend
the selection of a large order of this kind. I only wish I may be the man.”
There before her lay the deposit-receipt for the two hundred pounds, and
beside it the elegant present of Knight. Elfride grew cold—then her cheeks
felt heated by beating blood. If by destroying the piece of paper the whole
transaction could have been withdrawn from her experience, she would
willingly have sacrificed the money it represented. She did not know what
to do in either case. She almost feared to let the two articles lie in

juxtaposition: so antagonistic were the interests they represented that a
miraculous repulsion of one by the other was almost to be expected.
That day she was seen little of. By the evening she had come to a
resolution, and acted upon it. The packet was sealed up—with a tear of
regret as she closed the case upon the pretty forms it contained—directed,
and placed upon the writing-table in Knight’s room. And a letter was
written to Stephen, stating that as yet she hardly understood her position
with regard to the money sent; but declaring that she was ready to fulfil her
promise to marry him. After this letter had been written she delayed posting
it—although never ceasing to feel strenuously that the deed must be done.
Several days passed. There was another Indian letter for Elfride. Coming
unexpectedly, her father saw it, but made no remark—why, she could not
tell. The news this time was absolutely overwhelming. Stephen, as he had
wished, had been actually chosen as the most fitting to execute the iron-
work commission he had alluded to as impending. This duty completed he
would have three months’ leave. His letter continued that he should follow
it in a week, and should take the opportunity to plainly ask her father to
permit the engagement. Then came a page expressive of his delight and hers
at the reunion; and finally, the information that he would write to the
shipping agents, asking them to telegraph and tell her when the ship
bringing him home should be in sight—knowing how acceptable such
information would be.
Elfride lived and moved now as in a dream. Knight had at first become
almost angry at her persistent refusal of his offering—and no less with the
manner than the fact of it. But he saw that she began to look worn and ill—
and his vexation lessened to simple perplexity.
He ceased now to remain in the house for long hours together as before,
but made it a mere centre for antiquarian and geological excursions in the
neighbourhood. Throw up his cards and go away he fain would have done,
but could not. And, thus, availing himself of the privileges of a relative, he
went in and out the premises as fancy led him—but still lingered on.
“I don’t wish to stay here another day if my presence is distasteful,” he
said one afternoon. “At first you used to imply that I was severe with you;
and when I am kind you treat me unfairly.”
“No, no. Don’t say so.”

The origin of their acquaintanceship had been such as to render their
manner towards each other peculiar and uncommon. It was of a kind to
cause them to speak out their minds on any feelings of objection and
difference: to be reticent on gentler matters.
“I have a good mind to go away and never trouble you again,” continued
Knight.
She said nothing, but the eloquent expression of her eyes and wan face
was enough to reproach him for harshness.
“Do you like me to be here, then?” inquired Knight gently.
“Yes,” she said. Fidelity to the old love and truth to the new were ranged
on opposite sides, and truth virtuelessly prevailed.
“Then I’ll stay a little longer,” said Knight.
“Don’t be vexed if I keep by myself a good deal, will you? Perhaps
something may happen, and I may tell you something.”
“Mere coyness,” said Knight to himself; and went away with a lighter
heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces at work in women at
given times, which with some men is an unerring instinct, is peculiar to
minds less direct and honest than Knight’s.
The next evening, about five o’clock, before Knight had returned from a
pilgrimage along the shore, a man walked up to the house. He was a
messenger from Camelton, a town a few miles off, to which place the
railway had been advanced during the summer.
“A telegram for Miss Swancourt, and three and sixpence to pay for the
special messenger.” Miss Swancourt sent out the money, signed the paper,
and opened her letter with a trembling hand. She read:
“Johnson, Liverpool, to Miss Swancourt, Endelstow, near Castle Boterel.
“Amaryllis telegraphed off Holyhead, four o’clock. Expect will dock and
land passengers at Canning’s Basin ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”
Her father called her into the study.
“Elfride, who sent you that message?” he asked suspiciously.
“Johnson.” “Who is Johnson, for Heaven’s sake?”
“I don’t know.”
“The deuce you don’t! Who is to know, then?”

“I have never heard of him till now.”
“That’s a singular story, isn’t it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come, come, miss! What was the telegram?”
“Do you really wish to know, papa?”
“Well, I do.”
“Remember, I am a full-grown woman now.”
“Well, what then?”
“Being a woman, and not a child, I may, I think, have a secret or two.”
“You will, it seems.”
“Women have, as a rule.”
“But don’t keep them. So speak out.”
“If you will not press me now, I give my word to tell you the meaning of
all this before the week is past.”
“On your honour?”
“On my honour.”
“Very well. I have had a certain suspicion, you know; and I shall be glad
to find it false. I don’t like your manner lately.”
“At the end of the week, I said, papa.”
Her father did not reply, and Elfride left the room.
She began to look out for the postman again. Three mornings later he
brought an inland letter from Stephen. It contained very little matter, having
been written in haste; but the meaning was bulky enough. Stephen said that,
having executed a commission in Liverpool, he should arrive at his father’s
house, East Endelstow, at five or six o’clock that same evening; that he
would after dusk walk on to the next village, and meet her, if she would, in
the church porch, as in the old time. He proposed this plan because he
thought it unadvisable to call formally at her house so late in the evening;
yet he could not sleep without having seen her. The minutes would seem
hours till he clasped her in his arms.
Elfride was still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled her to
meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent additional weight to
the conviction; for she was markedly one of those who sigh for the

unattainable—to whom, superlatively, a hope is pleasing because not a
possession. And she knew it so well that her intellect was inclined to
exaggerate this defect in herself.
So during the day she looked her duty steadfastly in the face; read
Wordsworth’s astringent yet depressing ode to that Deity; committed herself
to her guidance; and still felt the weight of chance desires.
But she began to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the
sacrifice of herself to the man whom a maidenly sense of propriety
compelled her to regard as her only possible husband. She would meet him,
and do all that lay in her power to marry him. To guard against a relapse, a
note was at once despatched to his father’s cottage for Stephen on his
arrival, fixing an hour for the interview.

Chapter XXI
“On thy cold grey stones, O sea!”

Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence by a
steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey over the hills
from St. Launce’s. He did not know of the extension of the railway to
Camelton.
During the afternoon a thought occurred to Elfride, that from any cliff
along the shore it would be possible to see the steamer some hours before
its arrival.
She had accumulated religious force enough to do an act of
supererogation. The act was this—to go to some point of land and watch for
the ship that brought her future husband home.
It was a cloudy afternoon. Elfride was often diverted from a purpose by a
dull sky; and though she used to persuade herself that the weather was as
fine as possible on the other side of the clouds, she could not bring about
any practical result from this fancy. Now, her mood was such that the humid
sky harmonized with it.
Having ascended and passed over a hill behind the house, Elfride came to
a small stream. She used it as a guide to the coast. It was smaller than that
in her own valley, and flowed altogether at a higher level. Bushes lined the
slopes of its shallow trough; but at the bottom, where the water ran, was a
soft green carpet, in a strip two or three yards wide.
In winter, the water flowed over the grass; in summer, as now, it trickled
along a channel in the midst.
Elfride had a sensation of eyes regarding her from somewhere. She
turned, and there was Mr. Knight. He had dropped into the valley from the

side of the hill. She felt a thrill of pleasure, and rebelliously allowed it to
exist.
“What utter loneliness to find you in!”
“I am going to the shore by tracking the stream. I believe it empties itself
not far off, in a silver thread of water, over a cascade of great height.”
“Why do you load yourself with that heavy telescope?”
“To look over the sea with it,” she said faintly.
“I’ll carry it for you to your journey’s end.” And he took the glass from
her unresisting hands. “It cannot be half a mile further. See, there is the
water.” He pointed to a short fragment of level muddy-gray colour, cutting
against the sky.
Elfride had already scanned the small surface of ocean visible, and had
seen no ship.
They walked along in company, sometimes with the brook between them
—for it was no wider than a man’s stride—sometimes close together. The
green carpet grew swampy, and they kept higher up.
One of the two ridges between which they walked dwindled lower and
became insignificant. That on the right hand rose with their advance, and
terminated in a clearly defined edge against the light, as if it were abruptly
sawn off. A little further, and the bed of the rivulet ended in the same
fashion.
They had come to a bank breast-high, and over it the valley was no
longer to be seen. It was withdrawn cleanly and completely. In its place was
sky and boundless atmosphere; and perpendicularly down beneath them—
small and far off—lay the corrugated surface of the Atlantic.
The small stream here found its death. Running over the precipice it was
dispersed in spray before it was half-way down, and falling like rain upon
projecting ledges, made minute grassy meadows of them. At the bottom the
water-drops soaked away amid the debris of the cliff. This was the
inglorious end of the river.
“What are you looking for? said Knight, following the direction of her
eyes.
She was gazing hard at a black object—nearer to the shore than to the
horizon—from the summit of which came a nebulous haze, stretching like

gauze over the sea.
“The Puffin, a little summer steamboat—from Bristol to Castle Boterel,”
she said. “I think that is it—look. Will you give me the glass?”
Knight pulled open the old-fashioned but powerful telescope, and handed
it to Elfride, who had looked on with heavy eyes.
“I can’t keep it up now,” she said.
“Rest it on my shoulder.”
“It is too high.”
“Under my arm.”
“Too low. You may look instead,” she murmured weakly.
Knight raised the glass to his eye, and swept the sea till the Puffin entered
its field.
“Yes, it is the Puffin—a tiny craft. I can see her figure-head distinctly—a
bird with a beak as big as its head.”
“Can you see the deck?”
“Wait a minute; yes, pretty clearly. And I can see the black forms of the
passengers against its white surface. One of them has taken something from
another—a glass, I think—yes, it is—and he is levelling it in this direction.
Depend upon it we are conspicuous objects against the sky to them. Now, it
seems to rain upon them, and they put on overcoats and open umbrellas.
They vanish and go below—all but that one who has borrowed the glass.
He is a slim young fellow, and still watches us.”
Elfride grew pale, and shifted her little feet uneasily.
Knight lowered the glass.
“I think we had better return,” he said. “That cloud which is raining on
them may soon reach us. Why, you look ill. How is that?”
“Something in the air affects my face.”
“Those fair cheeks are very fastidious, I fear,” returned Knight tenderly.
“This air would make those rosy that were never so before, one would think
—eh, Nature’s spoilt child?”
Elfride’s colour returned again.
“There is more to see behind us, after all,” said Knight.

She turned her back upon the boat and Stephen Smith, and saw, towering
still higher than themselves, the vertical face of the hill on the right, which
did not project seaward so far as the bed of the valley, but formed the back
of a small cove, and so was visible like a concave wall, bending round from
their position towards the left.
The composition of the huge hill was revealed to its backbone and
marrow here at its rent extremity. It consisted of a vast stratification of
blackish-gray slate, unvaried in its whole height by a single change of
shade.
It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is called a
presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their actual bulk. A little
cliff will impress you powerfully; a great one not at all. It depends, as with
man, upon the countenance of the cliff.
“I cannot bear to look at that cliff,” said Elfride. “It has a horrid
personality, and makes me shudder. We will go.”
“Can you climb?” said Knight. “If so, we will ascend by that path over
the grim old fellow’s brow.”
“Try me,” said Elfride disdainfully. “I have ascended steeper slopes than
that.”
From where they had been loitering, a grassy path wound along inside a
bank, placed as a safeguard for unwary pedestrians, to the top of the
precipice, and over it along the hill in an inland direction.
“Take my arm, Miss Swancourt,” said Knight.
“I can get on better without it, thank you.”
When they were one quarter of the way up, Elfride stopped to take
breath. Knight stretched out his hand.
She took it, and they ascended the remaining slope together. Reaching the
very top, they sat down to rest by mutual consent.
“Heavens, what an altitude!” said Knight between his pants, and looking
far over the sea. The cascade at the bottom of the slope appeared a mere
span in height from where they were now.
Elfride was looking to the left. The steamboat was in full view again, and
by reason of the vast surface of sea their higher position uncovered it
seemed almost close to the shore.

“Over that edge,” said Knight, “where nothing but vacancy appears, is a
moving compact mass. The wind strikes the face of the rock, runs up it,
rises like a fountain to a height far above our heads, curls over us in an arch,
and disperses behind us. In fact, an inverted cascade is there—as perfect as
the Niagara Falls—but rising instead of falling, and air instead of water.
Now look here.”
Knight threw a stone over the bank, aiming it as if to go onward over the
cliff. Reaching the verge, it towered into the air like a bird, turned back, and
alighted on the ground behind them. They themselves were in a dead calm.
“A boat crosses Niagara immediately at the foot of the falls, where the
water is quite still, the fallen mass curving under it. We are in precisely the
same position with regard to our atmospheric cataract here. If you run back
from the cliff fifty yards, you will be in a brisk wind. Now I daresay over
the bank is a little backward current.”
Knight rose and leant over the bank. No sooner was his head above it
than his hat appeared to be sucked from his head—slipping over his
forehead in a seaward direction.
“That’s the backward eddy, as I told you,” he cried, and vanished over
the little bank after his hat.
Elfride waited one minute; he did not return. She waited another, and
there was no sign of him.
A few drops of rain fell, then a sudden shower.
She arose, and looked over the bank. On the other side were two or three
yards of level ground—then a short steep preparatory slope—then the verge
of the precipice.
On the slope was Knight, his hat on his head. He was on his hands and
knees, trying to climb back to the level ground. The rain had wetted the
shaly surface of the incline. A slight superficial wetting of the soil hereabout
made it far more slippery to stand on than the same soil thoroughly
drenched. The inner substance was still hard, and was lubricated by the
moistened film.
“I find a difficulty in getting back,” said Knight.
Elfride’s heart fell like lead.
“But you can get back?” she wildly inquired.

Knight strove with all his might for two or three minutes, and the drops
of perspiration began to bead his brow.
“No, I am unable to do it,” he answered.
Elfride, by a wrench of thought, forced away from her mind the sensation
that Knight was in bodily danger. But attempt to help him she must. She
ventured upon the treacherous incline, propped herself with the closed
telescope, and gave him her hand before he saw her movements.
“O Elfride! why did you?” said he. “I am afraid you have only
endangered yourself.”
And as if to prove his statement, in making an endeavour by her
assistance they both slipped lower, and then he was again stayed. His foot
was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the verge of the
precipice. Fixed by this, he steadied her, her head being about a foot below
the beginning of the slope. Elfride had dropped the glass; it rolled to the
edge and vanished over it into a nether sky.
“Hold tightly to me,” he said.
She flung her arms round his neck with such a firm grasp that whilst he
remained it was impossible for her to fall.
“Don’t be flurried,” Knight continued. “So long as we stay above this
block we are perfectly safe. Wait a moment whilst I consider what we had
better do.”
He turned his eyes to the dizzy depths beneath them, and surveyed the
position of affairs.
Two glances told him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was that, unless
they performed their feat of getting up the slope with the precision of
machines, they were over the edge and whirling in mid-air.
For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the breath and
strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So he still waited, and
looked in the face of the enemy.
The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the neighbouring
inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the water it overhung. It had
been proved by actual measurement to be not a foot less than six hundred
and fifty.

That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of Flamborough, half as
high again as the South Foreland, a hundred feet higher than Beachy Head
—the loftiest promontory on the east or south side of this island—twice the
height of St. Aldhelm’s, thrice as high as the Lizard, and just double the
height of St. Bee’s. One sea-bord point on the western coast is known to
surpass it in altitude, but only by a few feet. This is Great Orme’s Head, in
Caernarvonshire.
And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying feature
which some of those are without—sheer perpendicularity from the half-tide
level.
Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in an inlet
—the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far from being
salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the
shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill,
and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy
supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a
name. On this account I will call the precipice the Cliff without a Name.*
* See Preface

What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And upon this
dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had formed a kind of
bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that of a Hambro’ grape.
Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror
through the lungs.
“This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of the
cliff,” said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid stoical meditation.
“Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up my body till your feet are on
my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be able to climb on to
level ground.”
“What will you do?”
“Wait whilst you run for assistance.”
“I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?”
“I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-point
without your weight, in all probability. But don’t let us talk. Be brave,
Elfride, and climb.”

She prepared to ascend, saying, “This is the moment I anticipated when
on the tower. I thought it would come!”
“This is not a time for superstition,” said Knight. “Dismiss all that.”
“I will,” she said humbly.
“Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That’s good—well
done. Hold to my shoulder.”
She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was high
enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over the bank.
“Can you now climb on to level ground?”
“I am afraid not. I will try.”
“What can you see?”
“The sloping common.”
“What upon it?”
“Purple heather and some grass.”
“Nothing more—no man or human being of any kind?”
“Nobody.”
“Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink above
you. Get that well into your hand, but don’t trust to it entirely. Then step
upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach the top.”
With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The preternatural
quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon herself, and gave her a
courage not her own. She made a spring from the top of his shoulder, and
was up.
Then she turned to look at him.
By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his feet
depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion into the
enormous masses of black strata, which had since been worn away from the
sides of the alien fragment by centuries of frost and rain, and now left it
without much support.
It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.
The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than useless
now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same nether sky that had

engulfed the telescope.
One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight began
to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride uttered a low wild
wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her face with her hands.
Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet
steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon these,
Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of vegetation—the last
outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock appeared in all its bareness. It
arrested his further descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his
arms; but the incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a
quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his
weight, but was very far from offering an adequately flat face to support
him.
In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found time for
a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.
She lay on her side above him—her fingers clasped. Seeing him again
steady, she jumped upon her feet.
“Now, if I can only save you by running for help!” she cried. “Oh, I
would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver me?” And she
turned away wildly to run for assistance.
“Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?”
“Three-quarters of an hour.”
“That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there
nobody nearer?”
“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”
“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or
stick of any kind on the common?”
She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and
grass.
A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On
a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the
bank from his sight.
Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

Chapter XXII
“A woman’s way.”

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked and
encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are not
safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of air-currents, as
Knight had now found, to his dismay.
He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold
of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his every
jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to Elfride’s
intentions, whatever they might be.
He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade, not
an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the past. The
inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all strugglers for life is in
no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts of grass,
lichens, or confervae on their outermost ledges.
Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride’s hasty disappearance, but
could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a doubtful
hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of deliverance lay in
the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and this possibility was
remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was left so untended that
they were unenclosed for miles, except by a casual bank or dry wall, and
were rarely visited but for the purpose of collecting or counting the flock
which found a scanty means of subsistence thereon.
At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected with

his past. He could only look sternly at Nature’s treacherous attempt to put
an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge
cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed
the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see the vertical
face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the facade, and
realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every
feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief
from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to
stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans
called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and
this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance
within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a
body to save, as he himself had now.
The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never in
their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers
been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name. Zoophytes, mollusca,
shell-fish, were the highest developments of those ancient dates. The
immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of
the dignity of man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too,
and mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death.
Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture
his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes
that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and his own. There is
no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of
the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries
simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for
defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like
the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods,
and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them
stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the

mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the
megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition.
Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and
swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister
crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in
the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and
clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower
development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him
were a present and modern condition of things. These images passed before
Knight’s inner eye in less than half a minute, and he was again considering
the actual present. Was he to die? The mental picture of Elfride in the
world, without himself to cherish her, smote his heart like a whip. He had
hoped for deliverance, but what could a girl do? He dared not move an inch.
Was Death really stretching out his hand? The previous sensation, that it
was improbable he would die, was fainter now.
However, Knight still clung to the cliff.
To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater
part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems to have moods in
other than a poetical sense: predilections for certain deeds at certain times,
without any apparent law to govern or season to account for them. She is
read as a person with a curious temper; as one who does not scatter
kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless
severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice. Man’s case is
always that of the prodigal’s favourite or the miser’s pensioner. In her
unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a
foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing the victim.
Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to adopt
it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures followed. The rain
increased, and persecuted him with an exceptional persistency which he
was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in such a
wretched state already. An entirely new order of things could be observed in
this introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards instead of down.
The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with it in its race up the
escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that they stuck into his flesh
like cold needles. Each drop was virtually a shaft, and it pierced him to his
skin. The water-shafts seemed to lift him on their points: no downward rain

ever had such a torturing effect. In a brief space he was drenched, except in
two places. These were on the top of his shoulders and on the crown of his
hat.
The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here. It
tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon all
opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable hand of
indifference, which wears out the patience more than the strength. Here, at
any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a
cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for conquest: determination; not an
insensate standing in the way.
Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were getting
weak already. “She will never come again; she has been gone ten minutes,”
he said to himself.
This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just
now: she had really been gone but three.
“As many more minutes will be my end,” he thought.
Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.
“This is a summer afternoon,” he said, “and there can never have been
such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.”
He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity; the air in
temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing attitude in which they
approached him that magnified their powers.
He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids, and into
his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of the sea—visually
just past his toes, and under his feet; actually one-eighth of a mile, or more
than two hundred yards, below them. We colour according to our moods the
objects we survey. The sea would have been a deep neutral blue, had
happier auspices attended the gazer it was now no otherwise than distinctly
black to his vision. That narrow white border was foam, he knew well; but
its boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its
plashing was barely audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall
and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain
descended from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown;
above him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.
Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was the
voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and thrust him
hard or softly. The second and distant one was the moan of that
unplummetted ocean below and afar—rubbing its restless flank against the
Cliff without a Name.
Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride? Perhaps.
Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live on.
Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this.
Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its natural golden fringe,
sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape, not with the strange glare of
whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour, but as a
splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red face looking on with
a drunken leer.
Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to disguise
this fact from themselves or others, even though an ostentatious display
may be called self-conceit. Knight, without showing it much, knew that his
intellect was above the average. And he thought—he could not help
thinking—that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of good
material; that such an experiment in killing might have been practised upon
some less developed life.
A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that inexorable
circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts. Renounce a
desire for a long-contested position, and go on another tack, and after a
while the prize is thrown at you, seemingly in disappointment that no more
tantalizing is possible.
Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned to
contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond. Into the
shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him. Let it suffice
to state what ensued.
At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It was the
head of Elfride.

Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.
The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend first
looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to a light-ship
or sea-girt lighthouse, where, without any immediate terror of death, the
inmates experience the gloom of monotonous seclusion, the grateful
eloquence of their countenances at the greeting, expressive of thankfulness
for the visit, is enough to stir the emotions of the most careless observer.
Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had deepened to
furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His lips moved to the
word “Elfride,” though the emotion evolved no sound. His eyes passed all
description in their combination of the whole diapason of eloquence, from
lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude for a token of remembrance
from one of his kind.
Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She
could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and not
deserted him utterly, and it was much.
It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride was
but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who mastered
her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance, thus
thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her face
glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.
“How calm he is!” she thought. “How great and noble he is to be so
calm!” She would have died ten times for him then.
The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.
“How much longer can you wait?” came from her pale lips and along the
wind to his position.
“Four minutes,” said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.
“But with a good hope of being saved?”
“Seven or eight.”
He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and
that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible
was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the light blows
of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered

into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough drenching for
reducing the protuberances of clothes, but Elfride’s seemed to cling to her
like a glove.
Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her hand
and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more particularly into
her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into strips.
These she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like the strands
of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this
means, six or seven yards long.
“Can you wait while I bind it?” she said, anxiously extending her gaze
down to him.
“Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of
strength.”
Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow
tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller scale,
and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round the
linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread abroad.
“Now,” said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this
time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, “I can hold three
minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the strength of the
knots, one by one.”
She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope
between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots slipped.
“Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,” Elfride
exclaimed apprehensively.
She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.
“When you have let it down,” said Knight, already resuming his position
of ruling power, “go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank as
far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end with both
hands.”
He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it
involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.
“I have tied it round my waist,” she cried, “and I will lean directly upon
the bank, holding with my hands as well.”

It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.
“I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,” she
continued, “to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the greatest care, I
beg you!”
She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would
be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and disappeared
as she had done before.
The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it
twitched three times.
He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.
The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only of a
few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now. Not more
than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half a dozen
extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope
with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
He was saved, and by Elfride.
He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang
over the bank.
At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy. Knight’s
eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each told a long-
concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved by an impulse
neither could resist, they ran together and into each other’s arms.
At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed towards
the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no longer to be
seen.
An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle girl
to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a
total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in
entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a guiding power had forsaken
her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a
sufficiently complete result—a glorious crown to all the years of her life.
Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No matter: it was
infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater than the queen of the less.

Some such sensation as this, though it was not recognized as a finished
thought, raced along the impressionable soul of Elfride.
Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go nearer to
a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of impulsive
embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s peculiarity of
nature was such that it would not allow him to take advantage of the
unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.
Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to toe.
She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had obtained
the rope.
“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an
expression between gladness and shame “You follow me, but at some
distance.”
“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God bless
you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”
“No; I shall get warm running.”
Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit,
and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined upon
the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole clothing, and
replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of the remainder lay
upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton rope.
“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on
Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right
minds, by the fireside at home!”
She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more
like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to
fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour
nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in refusing his
escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that necessary
abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most grievous loss to him.

He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground an
envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its proper shape,
he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had contained, which was
seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand. It was blown to the right,
blown to the left—it floated to the edge of the cliff and over the sea, where
it was hurled aloft. It twirled in the air, and then flew back over his head.
Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to
discover if it had been worth securing.
The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds,
placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had
totally forgotten she carried with her.
Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put it in
his pocket, and followed Elfride.

Chapter XXIII
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”

By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle
Boterel, and breathed his native air.
A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard,
were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.
In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a small
valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at the inn,
ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a vale of its
own, further inland than the west village, and though so near it, had little of
physical feature in common with the latter. East Endelstow was more
wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s mansion and park, and
was free from those bleak open uplands which lent such an air of desolation
to the vicinage of the coast—always excepting the small valley in which
stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old house, The Crags.
Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain again
increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter, he ascended
a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the lower part of its
course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge immediately over the turnpike-
road, and sheltered by an overhanging face of rubble rock, with bushes
above. For a reason of his own he made this spot his refuge from the storm,
and turning his face to the left, conned the landscape as a book.
He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.
From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity of
being either brilliant foreground or the subdued tone of distance, a sudden
dip in the surface of the country lowering out of sight all the intermediate
prospect. In apparent contact with the trees and bushes growing close

beside him appeared the distant tract, terminated suddenly by the brink of
the series of cliffs which culminated in the tall giant without a name—small
and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf on a bough at Stephen’s elbow
blotted out a whole hill in the contrasting district far away; a green bunch of
nuts covered a complete upland there, and the great cliff itself was outvied
by a pigmy crag in the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these
things hundreds of times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with
such tenderness as now.
Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see the
tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his Elfride
that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the hill from the
cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a sea-gull flying low,
but ultimately proved to be a human figure, running with great rapidity. The
form flitted on, heedless of the rain which had caused Stephen’s halt in this
place, dropped down the heathery hill, entered the vale, and was out of
sight.
Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was
surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of departure another
moving speck, as different from the first as well could be, insomuch that it
was perceptible only by its blackness. Slowly and regularly it took the same
course, and there was not much doubt that this was the form of a man. He,
too, gradually descended from the upper levels, and was lost in the valley
below.
The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to the road.
Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were soon obscured by the
intervention of a high hedge. Just before they emerged again he heard
voices in conversation.
“’A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he’s a-coming,” said a
tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin Cannister’s.
“’A must ’a b’lieve,” said another voice—that of Stephen’s father.
Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His father
and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best suits, and beside
them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly painted spring-cart.
“All right, Mr. Cannister; here’s the lost man!” exclaimed young Smith,
entering at once upon the old style of greeting. “Father, here I am.”

“All right, my sonny; and glad I be for’t!” returned John Smith,
overjoyed to see the young man. “How be ye? Well, come along home, and
don’t let’s bide out here in the damp. Such weather must be terrible bad for
a young chap just come from a fiery nation like Indy; hey, naibour
Cannister?”
“Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous bales,
and noble packages of foreign description, I make no doubt?”
“Hardly all that,” said Stephen laughing.
“We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel afore ye
landed,” said his father. “‘Put in the horse,’ says Martin. ‘Ay,’ says I, ‘so we
will;’ and did it straightway. Now, maybe, Martin had better go on wi’ the
cart for the things, and you and I walk home-along.”
“And I shall be back a’most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty step still,
though time d’ begin to tell upon her as upon the rest o’ us.”
Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued his
journey homeward in the company of his father.
“Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,” said John,
“you’ll find us in a turk of a mess, sir—‘sir,’ says I to my own son! but
ye’ve gone up so, Stephen. We’ve killed the pig this morning for ye,
thinking ye’d be hungry, and glad of a morsel of fresh mate. And ’a won’t
be cut up till to-night. However, we can make ye a good supper of fry,
which will chaw up well wi’ a dab o’ mustard and a few nice new taters,
and a drop of shilling ale to wash it down. Your mother have scrubbed the
house through because ye were coming, and dusted all the chimmer
furniture, and bought a new basin and jug of a travelling crockery-woman
that came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks, and claned the
winders! Ay, I don’t know what ’a ha’n’t a done. Never were such a steer, ’a
b’lieve.”
Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his mother’s
wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey. When they drew
near the river, and the cottage behind it, they could hear the master-mason’s
clock striking off the bygone hours of the day at intervals of a quarter of a
minute, during which intervals Stephen’s imagination readily pictured his
mother’s forefinger wandering round the dial in company with the minute-
hand.

“The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en right
seemingly,” said his father in an explanatory tone; and they went up the
garden to the door.
When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly greeted
his mother—who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue ground, covered
broadcast with a multitude of new and full moons, stars, and planets, with
an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect to diversify the scene—the
crackle of cart-wheels was heard outside, and Martin Cannister stamped in
at the doorway, in the form of a pair of legs beneath a great box, his body
being nowhere visible. When the luggage had been all taken down, and
Stephen had gone upstairs to change his clothes, Mrs. Smith’s mind seemed
to recover a lost thread.
“Really our clock is not worth a penny,” she said, turning to it and
attempting to start the pendulum.
“Stopped again?” inquired Martin with commiseration.
“Yes, sure,” replied Mrs. Smith; and continued after the manner of
certain matrons, to whose tongues the harmony of a subject with a casual
mood is a greater recommendation than its pertinence to the occasion,
“John would spend pounds a year upon the jimcrack old thing, if he might,
in having it claned, when at the same time you may doctor it yourself as
well. ‘The clock’s stopped again, John,’ I say to him. ‘Better have en
claned,’ says he. There’s five shillings. ‘That clock grinds again,’ I say to
en. ‘Better have en claned,’ ’a says again. ‘That clock strikes wrong, John,’
says I. ‘Better have en claned,’ he goes on. The wheels would have been
polished to skeletons by this time if I had listened to en, and I assure you we
could have bought a chainey-faced beauty wi’ the good money we’ve flung
away these last ten years upon this old green-faced mortal. And, Martin,
you must be wet. My son is gone up to change. John is damper than I
should like to be, but ’a calls it nothing. Some of Mrs. Swancourt’s servants
have been here—they ran in out of the rain when going for a walk—and I
assure you the state of their bonnets was frightful.”
“How’s the folks? We’ve been over to Castle Boterel, and what wi’
running and stopping out of the storms, my poor head is beyond everything!
fizz, fizz fizz; ’tis frying o’ fish from morning to night,” said a cracked
voice in the doorway at this instant.

“Lord so’s, who’s that?” said Mrs. Smith, in a private exclamation, and
turning round saw William Worm, endeavouring to make himself look
passing civil and friendly by overspreading his face with a large smile that
seemed to have no connection with the humour he was in. Behind him
stood a woman about twice his size, with a large umbrella over her head.
This was Mrs. Worm, William’s wife.
“Come in, William,” said John Smith. “We don’t kill a pig every day.
And you, likewise, Mrs. Worm. I make ye welcome. Since ye left Parson
Swancourt, William, I don’t see much of “ee.”
“No, for to tell the truth, since I took to the turn-pike-gate line, I’ve been
out but little, coming to church o’ Sundays not being my duty now, as ’twas
in a parson’s family, you see. However, our boy is able to mind the gate
now, and I said, says I, ‘Barbara, let’s call and see John Smith.’”
“I am sorry to hear yer pore head is so bad still.”
“Ay, I assure you that frying o’ fish is going on for nights and days. And,
you know, sometimes ’tisn’t only fish, but rashers o’ bacon and inions. Ay, I
can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral as life; can’t I, Barbara?”
Mrs. Worm, who had been all this time engaged in closing her umbrella,
corroborated this statement, and now, coming indoors, showed herself to be
a wide-faced, comfortable-looking woman, with a wart upon her cheek,
bearing a small tuft of hair in its centre.
“Have ye ever tried anything to cure yer noise, Maister Worm?” inquired
Martin Cannister.
“Oh ay; bless ye, I’ve tried everything. Ay, Providence is a merciful man,
and I have hoped He’d have found it out by this time, living so many years
in a parson’s family, too, as I have, but ’a don’t seem to relieve me. Ay, I be
a poor wambling man, and life’s a mint o’ trouble!”
“True, mournful true, William Worm. ’Tis so. The world wants looking
to, or ’tis all sixes and sevens wi’ us.”
“Take your things off, Mrs. Worm,” said Mrs. Smith. “We be rather in a
muddle, to tell the truth, for my son is just dropped in from Indy a day
sooner than we expected, and the pig-killer is coming presently to cut up.”
Mrs. Barbara Worm, not wishing to take any mean advantage of persons
in a muddle by observing them, removed her bonnet and mantle with eyes
fixed upon the flowers in the plot outside the door.

“What beautiful tiger-lilies!” said Mrs. Worm.
“Yes, they be very well, but such a trouble to me on account of the
children that come here. They will go eating the berries on the stem, and
call ’em currants. Taste wi’ junivals is quite fancy, really.”
“And your snapdragons look as fierce as ever.”
“Well, really,” answered Mrs. Smith, entering didactically into the
subject, “they are more like Christians than flowers. But they make up well
enough wi’ the rest, and don’t require much tending. And the same can be
said o’ these miller’s wheels. ’Tis a flower I like very much, though so
simple. John says he never cares about the flowers o’ ’em, but men have no
eye for anything neat. He says his favourite flower is a cauliflower. And I
assure you I tremble in the springtime, for ’tis perfect murder.”
“You don’t say so, Mrs. Smith!”
“John digs round the roots, you know. In goes his blundering spade,
through roots, bulbs, everything that hasn’t got a good show above ground,
turning ’em up cut all to slices. Only the very last fall I went to move some
tulips, when I found every bulb upside down, and the stems crooked round.
He had turned ’em over in the spring, and the cunning creatures had soon
found that heaven was not where it used to be.”
“What’s that long-favoured flower under the hedge?”
“They? O Lord, they are the horrid Jacob’s ladders! Instead of praising
’em, I be mad wi’ ’em for being so ready to bide where they are not wanted.
They be very well in their way, but I do not care for things that neglect
won’t kill. Do what I will, dig, drag, scrap, pull, I get too many of ’em. I
chop the roots: up they’ll come, treble strong. Throw ’em over hedge; there
they’ll grow, staring me in the face like a hungry dog driven away, and
creep back again in a week or two the same as before. ’Tis Jacob’s ladder
here, Jacob’s ladder there, and plant ’em where nothing in the world will
grow, you get crowds of ’em in a month or two. John made a new manure
mixen last summer, and he said, ‘Maria, now if you’ve got any flowers or
such like, that you don’t want, you may plant ’em round my mixen so as to
hide it a bit, though ’tis not likely anything of much value will grow there.’
I thought, ‘There’s them Jacob’s ladders; I’ll put them there, since they
can’t do harm in such a place;’ and I planted the Jacob’s ladders sure
enough. They growed, and they growed, in the mixen and out of the mixen,
all over the litter, covering it quite up. When John wanted to use it about the

garden, ’a said, ‘Nation seize them Jacob’s ladders of yours, Maria!
They’ve eat the goodness out of every morsel of my manure, so that ’tis no
better than sand itself!’ Sure enough the hungry mortals had. ’Tis my belief
that in the secret souls o’ ’em, Jacob’s ladders be weeds, and not flowers at
all, if the truth was known.”
Robert Lickpan, pig-killer and carrier, arrived at this moment. The fatted
animal hanging in the back kitchen was cleft down the middle of its
backbone, Mrs. Smith being meanwhile engaged in cooking supper.
Between the cutting and chopping, ale was handed round, and Worm and
the pig-killer listened to John Smith’s description of the meeting with
Stephen, with eyes blankly fixed upon the table-cloth, in order that nothing
in the external world should interrupt their efforts to conjure up the scene
correctly.
Stephen came downstairs in the middle of the story, and after the little
interruption occasioned by his entrance and welcome, the narrative was
again continued, precisely as if he had not been there at all, and was told
inclusively to him, as to somebody who knew nothing about the matter.
“‘Ay,’ I said, as I catched sight o’ en through the brimbles, ‘that’s the lad,
for I d’ know en by his grand-father’s walk;’ for ’a stapped out like poor
father for all the world. Still there was a touch o’ the frisky that set me
wondering. ’A got closer, and I said, ‘That’s the lad, for I d’ know en by his
carrying a black case like a travelling man.’ Still, a road is common to all
the world, and there be more travelling men than one. But I kept my eye
cocked, and I said to Martin, ‘’Tis the boy, now, for I d’ know en by the
wold twirl o’ the stick and the family step.’ Then ’a come closer, and a’ said,
‘All right.’ I could swear to en then.”
Stephen’s personal appearance was next criticised.
“He d’ look a deal thinner in face, surely, than when I seed en at the
parson’s, and never knowed en, if ye’ll believe me,” said Martin.
“Ay, there,” said another, without removing his eyes from Stephen’s face,
“I should ha’ knowed en anywhere. ’Tis his father’s nose to a T.”
“It has been often remarked,” said Stephen modestly.
“And he’s certainly taller,” said Martin, letting his glance run over
Stephen’s form from bottom to top.
“I was thinking ’a was exactly the same height,” Worm replied.

“Bless thy soul, that’s because he’s bigger round likewise.” And the
united eyes all moved to Stephen’s waist.
“I be a poor wambling man, but I can make allowances,” said William
Worm. “Ah, sure, and how he came as a stranger and pilgrim to Parson
Swancourt’s that time, not a soul knowing en after so many years! Ay, life’s
a strange picter, Stephen: but I suppose I must say Sir to ye?”
“Oh, it is not necessary at present,” Stephen replied, though mentally
resolving to avoid the vicinity of that familiar friend as soon as he had made
pretensions to the hand of Elfride.
“Ah, well,” said Worm musingly, “some would have looked for no less
than a Sir. There’s a sight of difference in people.”
“And in pigs likewise,” observed John Smith, looking at the halved
carcass of his own.
Robert Lickpan, the pig-killer, here seemed called upon to enter the lists
of conversation.
“Yes, they’ve got their particular naters good-now,” he remarked initially.
“Many’s the rum-tempered pig I’ve knowed.”
“I don’t doubt it, Master Lickpan,” answered Martin, in a tone expressing
that his convictions, no less than good manners, demanded the reply.
“Yes,” continued the pig-killer, as one accustomed to be heard. “One that
I knowed was deaf and dumb, and we couldn’t make out what was the
matter wi’ the pig. ’A would eat well enough when ’a seed the trough, but
when his back was turned, you might a-rattled the bucket all day, the poor
soul never heard ye. Ye could play tricks upon en behind his back, and a’
wouldn’t find it out no quicker than poor deaf Grammer Cates. But a’ fatted
well, and I never seed a pig open better when a’ was killed, and ’a was very
tender eating, very; as pretty a bit of mate as ever you see; you could suck
that mate through a quill.
“And another I knowed,” resumed the killer, after quietly letting a pint of
ale run down his throat of its own accord, and setting down the cup with
mathematical exactness upon the spot from which he had raised it
—“another went out of his mind.”
“How very mournful!” murmured Mrs. Worm.
“Ay, poor thing, ’a did! As clean out of his mind as the cleverest
Christian could go. In early life ’a was very melancholy, and never seemed

a hopeful pig by no means. ’Twas Andrew Stainer’s pig—that’s whose pig
’twas.”
“I can mind the pig well enough,” attested John Smith.
“And a pretty little porker ’a was. And you all know Farmer Buckle’s
sort? Every jack o’ em suffer from the rheumatism to this day, owing to a
damp sty they lived in when they were striplings, as ’twere.”
“Well, now we’ll weigh,” said John.
“If so be he were not so fine, we’d weigh en whole: but as he is, we’ll
take a side at a time. John, you can mind my old joke, ey?”
“I do so; though ’twas a good few years ago I first heard en.”
“Yes,” said Lickpan, “that there old familiar joke have been in our family
for generations, I may say. My father used that joke regular at pig-killings
for more than five and forty years—the time he followed the calling. And ’a
told me that ’a had it from his father when he was quite a chiel, who made
use o’ en just the same at every killing more or less; and pig-killings were
pig-killings in those days.”
“Trewly they were.”
“I’ve never heard the joke,” said Mrs. Smith tentatively.
“Nor I,” chimed in Mrs. Worm, who, being the only other lady in the
room, felt bound by the laws of courtesy to feel like Mrs. Smith in
everything.
“Surely, surely you have,” said the killer, looking sceptically at the
benighted females. “However, ’tisn’t much—I don’t wish to say it is. It
commences like this: ‘Bob will tell the weight of your pig, ’a b’lieve,’ says
I. The congregation of neighbours think I mane my son Bob, naturally; but
the secret is that I mane the bob o’ the steelyard. Ha, ha, ha!”
“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Martin Cannister, who had heard the
explanation of this striking story for the hundredth time.
“Huh, huh, huh!” laughed John Smith, who had heard it for the
thousandth.
“Hee, hee, hee!” laughed William Worm, who had never heard it at all,
but was afraid to say so.
“Thy grandfather, Robert, must have been a wide-awake chap to make
that story,” said Martin Cannister, subsiding to a placid aspect of delighted

criticism.
“He had a head, by all account. And, you see, as the first-born of the
Lickpans have all been Roberts, they’ve all been Bobs, so the story was
handed down to the present day.”
“Poor Joseph, your second boy, will never be able to bring it out in
company, which is rather unfortunate,” said Mrs. Worm thoughtfully.
“’A won’t. Yes, grandfer was a clever chap, as ye say; but I knowed a
cleverer. ’Twas my uncle Levi. Uncle Levi made a snuff-box that should be
a puzzle to his friends to open. He used to hand en round at wedding
parties, christenings, funerals, and in other jolly company, and let ’em try
their skill. This extraordinary snuff-box had a spring behind that would
push in and out—a hinge where seemed to be the cover; a slide at the end, a
screw in front, and knobs and queer notches everywhere. One man would
try the spring, another would try the screw, another would try the slide; but
try as they would, the box wouldn’t open. And they couldn’t open en, and
they didn’t open en. Now what might you think was the secret of that box?”
All put on an expression that their united thoughts were inadequate to the
occasion.
“Why the box wouldn’t open at all. ’A were made not to open, and ye
might have tried till the end of Revelations, ’twould have been as naught,
for the box were glued all round.”
“A very deep man to have made such a box.”
“Yes. ’Twas like uncle Levi all over.”
“’Twas. I can mind the man very well. Tallest man ever I seed.”
“’A was so. He never slept upon a bedstead after he growed up a hard
boy-chap—never could get one long enough. When ’a lived in that little
small house by the pond, he used to have to leave open his chamber door
every night at going to his bed, and let his feet poke out upon the landing.”
“He’s dead and gone now, nevertheless, poor man, as we all shall,”
observed Worm, to fill the pause which followed the conclusion of Robert
Lickpan’s speech.
The weighing and cutting up was pursued amid an animated discourse on
Stephen’s travels; and at the finish, the first-fruits of the day’s slaughter,
fried in onions, were then turned from the pan into a dish on the table, each
piece steaming and hissing till it reached their very mouths.

It must be owned that the gentlemanly son of the house looked rather out
of place in the course of this operation. Nor was his mind quite philosophic
enough to allow him to be comfortable with these old-established persons,
his father’s friends. He had never lived long at home—scarcely at all since
his childhood. The presence of William Worm was the most awkward
feature of the case, for, though Worm had left the house of Mr. Swancourt,
the being hand-in-glove with a ci-devant servitor reminded Stephen too
forcibly of the vicar’s classification of himself before he went from
England. Mrs. Smith was conscious of the defect in her arrangements which
had brought about the undesired conjunction. She spoke to Stephen
privately.
“I am above having such people here, Stephen; but what could I do? And
your father is so rough in his nature that he’s more mixed up with them than
need be.”
“Never mind, mother,” said Stephen; “I’ll put up with it now.”
“When we leave my lord’s service, and get further up the country—as I
hope we shall soon—it will be different. We shall be among fresh people,
and in a larger house, and shall keep ourselves up a bit, I hope.”
“Is Miss Swancourt at home, do you know?” Stephen inquired
“Yes, your father saw her this morning.”
“Do you often see her?”
“Scarcely ever. Mr. Glim, the curate, calls occasionally, but the
Swancourts don’t come into the village now any more than to drive through
it. They dine at my lord’s oftener than they used. Ah, here’s a note was
brought this morning for you by a boy.”
Stephen eagerly took the note and opened it, his mother watching him.
He read what Elfride had written and sent before she started for the cliff that
afternoon:
“Yes; I will meet you in the church at nine to-night.—E. S.”
“I don’t know, Stephen,” his mother said meaningly, “whe’r you still
think about Miss Elfride, but if I were you I wouldn’t concern about her.
They say that none of old Mrs. Swancourt’s money will come to her step-
daughter.”
“I see the evening has turned out fine; I am going out for a little while to
look round the place,” he said, evading the direct query. “Probably by the

time I return our visitors will be gone, and we’ll have a more confidential
talk.”

Chapter XXIV
“Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour.”

The rain had ceased since the sunset, but it was a cloudy night; and the
light of the moon, softened and dispersed by its misty veil, was distributed
over the land in pale gray.
A dark figure stepped from the doorway of John Smith’s river-side
cottage, and strode rapidly towards West Endelstow with a light footstep.
Soon ascending from the lower levels he turned a corner, followed a cart-
track, and saw the tower of the church he was in quest of distinctly shaped
forth against the sky. In less than half an hour from the time of starting he
swung himself over the churchyard stile.
The wild irregular enclosure was as much as ever an integral part of the
old hill. The grass was still long, the graves were shaped precisely as
passing years chose to alter them from their orthodox form as laid down by
Martin Cannister, and by Stephen’s own grandfather before him.
A sound sped into the air from the direction in which Castle Boterel lay.
It was the striking of the church clock, distinct in the still atmosphere as if it
had come from the tower hard by, which, wrapt in its solitary silentness,
gave out no such sounds of life.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.” Stephen carefully
counted the strokes, though he well knew their number beforehand. Nine
o’clock. It was the hour Elfride had herself named as the most convenient
for meeting him.
Stephen stood at the door of the porch and listened. He could have heard
the softest breathing of any person within the porch; nobody was there. He
went inside the doorway, sat down upon the stone bench, and waited with a
beating heart.

The faint sounds heard only accentuated the silence. The rising and
falling of the sea, far away along the coast, was the most important. A minor
sound was the scurr of a distant night-hawk. Among the minutest where all
were minute were the light settlement of gossamer fragments floating in the
air, a toad humbly labouring along through the grass near the entrance, the
crackle of a dead leaf which a worm was endeavouring to pull into the
earth, a waft of air, getting nearer and nearer, and expiring at his feet under
the burden of a winged seed.
Among all these soft sounds came not the only soft sound he cared to
hear—the footfall of Elfride.
For a whole quarter of an hour Stephen sat thus intent, without moving a
muscle. At the end of that time he walked to the west front of the church.
Turning the corner of the tower, a white form stared him in the face. He
started back, and recovered himself. It was the tomb of young farmer
Jethway, looking still as fresh and as new as when it was first erected, the
white stone in which it was hewn having a singular weirdness amid the dark
blue slabs from local quarries, of which the whole remaining gravestones
were formed.
He thought of the night when he had sat thereon with Elfride as his
companion, and well remembered his regret that she had received, even
unwillingly, earlier homage than his own. But his present tangible anxiety
reduced such a feeling to sentimental nonsense in comparison; and he
strolled on over the graves to the border of the churchyard, whence in the
daytime could be clearly seen the vicarage and the present residence of the
Swancourts. No footstep was discernible upon the path up the hill, but a
light was shining from a window in the last-named house.
Stephen knew there could be no mistake about the time or place, and no
difficulty about keeping the engagement. He waited yet longer, passing
from impatience into a mood which failed to take any account of the lapse
of time. He was awakened from his reverie by Castle Boterel clock.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, TEN.
One little fall of the hammer in addition to the number it had been sharp
pleasure to hear, and what a difference to him!
He left the churchyard on the side opposite to his point of entrance, and
went down the hill. Slowly he drew near the gate of her house. This he

softly opened, and walked up the gravel drive to the door. Here he paused
for several minutes.
At the expiration of that time the murmured speech of a manly voice
came out to his ears through an open window behind the corner of the
house. This was responded to by a clear soft laugh. It was the laugh of
Elfride.
Stephen was conscious of a gnawing pain at his heart. He retreated as he
had come. There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those
which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen
that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they
become registered as a permanent loss of happiness. Such a one was
Stephen’s now: the crowning aureola of the dream had been the meeting
here by stealth; and if Elfride had come to him only ten minutes after he had
turned away, the disappointment would have been recognizable still.
When the young man reached home he found there a letter which had
arrived in his absence. Believing it to contain some reason for her non-
appearance, yet unable to imagine one that could justify her, he hastily tore
open the envelope.
The paper contained not a word from Elfride. It was the deposit-note for
his two hundred pounds. On the back was the form of a cheque, and this she
had filled up with the same sum, payable to the bearer.
Stephen was confounded. He attempted to divine her motive.
Considering how limited was his knowledge of her later actions, he guessed
rather shrewdly that, between the time of her sending the note in the
morning and the evening’s silent refusal of his gift, something had occurred
which had caused a total change in her attitude towards him.
He knew not what to do. It seemed absurd now to go to her father next
morning, as he had purposed, and ask for an engagement with her, a
possibility impending all the while that Elfride herself would not be on his
side. Only one course recommended itself as wise. To wait and see what the
days would bring forth; to go and execute his commissions in Birmingham;
then to return, learn if anything had happened, and try what a meeting might
do; perhaps her surprise at his backwardness would bring her forward to
show latent warmth as decidedly as in old times.
This act of patience was in keeping only with the nature of a man
precisely of Stephen’s constitution. Nine men out of ten would perhaps

have rushed off, got into her presence, by fair means or foul, and provoked
a catastrophe of some sort. Possibly for the better, probably for the worse.
He started for Birmingham the next morning. A day’s delay would have
made no difference; but he could not rest until he had begun and ended the
programme proposed to himself. Bodily activity will sometimes take the
sting out of anxiety as completely as assurance itself.

Chapter XXV
“Mine own familiar friend.”

During these days of absence Stephen lived under alternate conditions.
Whenever his emotions were active, he was in agony. Whenever he was not
in agony, the business in hand had driven out of his mind by sheer force all
deep reflection on the subject of Elfride and love.
By the time he took his return journey at the week’s end, Stephen had
very nearly worked himself up to an intention to call and see her face to
face. On this occasion also he adopted his favourite route—by the little
summer steamer from Bristol to Castle Boterel; the time saved by speed on
the railway being wasted at junctions, and in following a devious course.
It was a bright silent evening at the beginning of September when Smith
again set foot in the little town. He felt inclined to linger awhile upon the
quay before ascending the hills, having formed a romantic intention to go
home by way of her house, yet not wishing to wander in its neighbourhood
till the evening shades should sufficiently screen him from observation.
And thus waiting for night’s nearer approach, he watched the placid
scene, over which the pale luminosity of the west cast a sorrowful
monochrome, that became slowly embrowned by the dusk. A star appeared,
and another, and another. They sparkled amid the yards and rigging of the
two coal brigs lying alangside, as if they had been tiny lamps suspended in
the ropes. The masts rocked sleepily to the infinitesimal flux of the tide,
which clucked and gurgled with idle regularity in nooks and holes of the
harbour wall.
The twilight was now quite pronounced enough for his purpose; and as,
rather sad at heart, he was about to move on, a little boat containing two
persons glided up the middle of the harbour with the lightness of a shadow.

The boat came opposite him, passed on, and touched the landing-steps at
the further end. One of its occupants was a man, as Stephen had known by
the easy stroke of the oars. When the pair ascended the steps, and came into
greater prominence, he was enabled to discern that the second personage
was a woman; also that she wore a white decoration—apparently a feather
—in her hat or bonnet, which spot of white was the only distinctly visible
portion of her clothing.
Stephen remained a moment in their rear, and they passed on, when he
pursued his way also, and soon forgot the circumstance. Having crossed a
bridge, forsaken the high road, and entered the footpath which led up the
vale to West Endelstow, he heard a little wicket click softly together some
yards ahead. By the time that Stephen had reached the wicket and passed it,
he heard another click of precisely the same nature from another gate yet
further on. Clearly some person or persons were preceding him along the
path, their footsteps being rendered noiseless by the soft carpet of turf.
Stephen now walked a little quicker, and perceived two forms. One of them
bore aloft the white feather he had noticed in the woman’s hat on the quay:
they were the couple he had seen in the boat. Stephen dropped a little
further to the rear.
From the bottom of the valley, along which the path had hitherto lain,
beside the margin of the trickling streamlet, another path now diverged, and
ascended the slope of the left-hand hill. This footway led only to the
residence of Mrs. Swancourt and a cottage or two in its vicinity. No grass
covered this diverging path in portions of its length, and Stephen was
reminded that the pair in front of him had taken this route by the occasional
rattle of loose stones under their feet. Stephen climbed in the same
direction, but for some undefined reason he trod more softly than did those
preceding him. His mind was unconsciously in exercise upon whom the
woman might be—whether a visitor to The Crags, a servant, or Elfride. He
put it to himself yet more forcibly; could the lady be Elfride? A possible
reason for her unaccountable failure to keep the appointment with him
returned with painful force.
They entered the grounds of the house by the side wicket, whence the
path, now wide and well trimmed, wound fantastically through the
shrubbery to an octagonal pavilion called the Belvedere, by reason of the
comprehensive view over the adjacent district that its green seats afforded.