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.
