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 indirection 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 sbrubbery, 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.
