Chapter XXXV
'And wilt thou leave me thus?--say nay--say nay!'
The scene shifts to Knight's chambers in Bede's Inn. It was late
in the evening of the day following his departure from Endelstow.
A drizzling rain descended upon London, forming a humid and dreary
halo over every well-lighted street. The rain had not yet been
prevalent long enough to give to rapid vehicles that clear and
distinct rattle which follows the thorough washing of the stones
by a drenching rain, but was just sufficient to make footway and
roadway slippery, adhesive, and clogging to both feet and wheels.
Knight was standing by the fire, looking into its expiring embers,
previously to emerging from his door for a dreary journey home to
Richmond. His hat was on, and the gas turned off. The blind of
the window overlooking the alley was not drawn down; and with the
light from beneath, which shone over the ceiling of the room,
came, in place of the usual babble, only the reduced clatter and
quick speech which were the result of necessity rather than
choice.
Whilst he thus stood, waiting for the expiration of the few
minutes that were wanting to the time for his catching the train,
a light tapping upon the door mingled with the other sounds that
reached his ears. It was so faint at first that the outer noises
were almost sufficient to drown it. Finding it repeated Knight
crossed the lobby, crowded with books and rubbish, and opened the
door.
A woman, closely muffled up, but visibly of fragile build, was
standing on the landing under the gaslight. She sprang forward,
flung her arms round Knight's neck, and uttered a low cry--
'O Harry, Harry, you are killing me! I could not help coming.
Don't send me away--don't! Forgive your Elfride for coming--I love
you so!'
Knight's agitation and astonishment mastered him for a few
moments.
'Elfride!' he cried, 'what does this mean? What have you done?'
'Do not hurt me and punish me--Oh, do not! I couldn't help coming;
it was killing me. Last night, when you did not come back, I
could not bear it--I could not! Only let me be with you, and see
your face, Harry; I don't ask for more.'
Her eyelids were hot, heavy, and thick with excessive weeping, and
the delicate rose-red of her cheeks was disfigured and inflamed by
the constant chafing of the handkerchief in wiping her many tears.
'Who is with you? Have you come alone?' he hurriedly inquired.
'Yes. When you did not come last night, I sat up hoping you would
come--and the night was all agony--and I waited on and on, and you
did not come! Then when it was morning, and your letter said you
were gone, I could not endure it; and I ran away from them to St.
Launce's, and came by the train. And I have been all day
travelling to you, and you won't make me go away again, will you,
Harry, because I shall always love you till I die?'
'Yet it is wrong for you to stay. O Elfride! what have you
committed yourself to? It is ruin to your good name to run to me
like this! Has not your first experience been sufficient to keep
you from these things?'
'My name! Harry, I shall soon die, and what good will my name be
to me then? Oh, could I but be the man and you the woman, I would
not leave you for such a little fault as mine! Do not think it was
so vile a thing in me to run away with him. Ah, how I wish you
could have run away with twenty women before you knew me, that I
might show you I would think it no fault, but be glad to get you
after them all, so that I had you! If you only knew me through and
through, how true I am, Harry. Cannot I be yours? Say you love me
just the same, and don't let me be separated from you again, will
you? I cannot bear it--all the long hours and days and nights
going on, and you not there, but away because you hate me!'
'Not hate you, Elfride,' he said gently, and supported her with
his arm. 'But you cannot stay here now--just at present, I mean.'
'I suppose I must not--I wish I might. I am afraid that if--you
lose sight of me--something dark will happen, and we shall not
meet again. Harry, if I am not good enough to be your wife, I
wish I could be your servant and live with you, and not be sent
away never to see you again. I don't mind what it is except
that!'
'No, I cannot send you away: I cannot. God knows what dark future
may arise out of this evening's work; but I cannot send you away!
You must sit down, and I will endeavour to collect my thoughts and
see what had better be done.
At that moment a loud knocking at the house door was heard by
both, accompanied by a hurried ringing of the bell that echoed
from attic to basement. The door was quickly opened, and after a
few hasty words of converse in the hall, heavy footsteps ascended
the stairs.
The face of Mr. Swancourt, flushed, grieved, and stern, appeared
round the landing of the staircase. He came higher up, and stood
beside them. Glancing over and past Knight with silent
indignation, he turned to the trembling girl.
'O Elfride! and have I found you at last? Are these your tricks,
madam? When will you get rid of your idiocies, and conduct
yourself like a decent woman? Is my family name and house to be
disgraced by acts that would be a scandal to a washerwoman's
daughter? Come along, madam; come!'
'She is so weary!' said Knight, in a voice of intensest anguish.
'Mr. Swancourt, don't be harsh with her--let me beg of you to be
tender with her, and love her!'
'To you, sir,' said Mr. Swancourt, turning to him as if by the
sheer pressure of circumstances, 'I have little to say. I can
only remark, that the sooner I can retire from your presence the
better I shall be pleased. Why you could not conduct your
courtship of my daughter like an honest man, I do not know. Why
she--a foolish inexperienced girl--should have been tempted to
this piece of folly, I do not know. Even if she had not known
better than to leave her home, you might have, I should think.'
'It is not his fault: he did not tempt me, papa! I came.'
'If you wished the marriage broken off, why didn't you say so
plainly? If you never intended to marry, why could you not leave
her alone? Upon my soul, it grates me to the heart to be obliged
to think so ill of a man I thought my friend!'
Knight, soul-sick and weary of his life, did not arouse himself to
utter a word in reply. How should he defend himself when his
defence was the accusation of Elfride? On that account he felt a
miserable satisfaction in letting her father go on thinking and
speaking wrongfully. It was a faint ray of pleasure straying into
the great gloominess of his brain to think that the vicar might
never know but that he, as her lover, tempted her away, which
seemed to be the form Mr. Swancourt's misapprehension had taken.
'Now, are you coming?' said Mr. Swancourt to her again. He took
her unresisting hand, drew it within his arm, and led her down the
stairs. Knight's eyes followed her, the last moment begetting in
him a frantic hope that she would turn her head. She passed on,
and never looked back.
He heard the door open--close again. The wheels of a cab grazed
the kerbstone, a murmured direction followed. The door was
slammed together, the wheels moved, and they rolled away.
From that hour of her reappearance a dreadful conflict raged
within the breast of Henry Knight. His instinct, emotion,
affectiveness--or whatever it may be called--urged him to stand
forward, seize upon Elfride, and be her cherisher and protector
through life. Then came the devastating thought that Elfride's
childlike, unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only
proved that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that
the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant
indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman
had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of
the bitterest cynicism: 'The suspicious discreet woman who
imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far
too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are
the women who fall.'
Hours and days went by, and Knight remained inactive. Lengthening
time, which made fainter the heart-awakening power of her
presence, strengthened the mental ability to reason her down.
Elfride loved him, he knew, and he could not leave off loving her
but marry her he would not. If she could but be again his own
Elfride--the woman she had seemed to be--but that woman was dead
and buried, and he knew her no more! And how could he marry this
Elfride, one who, if he had originally seen her as she was, would
have been barely an interesting pitiable acquaintance in his eyes--
no more?
It cankered his heart to think he was confronted by the closest
instance of a worse state of things than any he had assumed in the
pleasant social philosophy and satire of his essays.
The moral rightness of this man's life was worthy of all praise;
but in spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a
modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in
scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and
pure an abstraction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as
practical persons find it. Having now seen himself mistaken in
supposing Elfride to be peerless, nothing on earth could make him
believe she was not so very bad after all.
He lingered in town a fortnight, doing little else than vibrate
between passion and opinions. One idea remained intact--that it
was better Elfride and himself should not meet.
When he surveyed the volumes on his shelves--few of which had been
opened since Elfride first took possession of his heart--their
untouched and orderly arrangement reproached him as an apostate
from the old faith of his youth and early manhood. He had
deserted those never-failing friends, so they seemed to say, for
an unstable delight in a ductile woman, which had ended all in
bitterness. The spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism,
which had ever animated Knight in old times, announced itself as
having departed with the birth of love, with it having gone the
self-respect which had compensated for the lack of self-
gratification. Poor little Elfride, instead of holding, as
formerly, a place in his religion, began to assume the hue of a
temptation. Perhaps it was human and correctly natural that
Knight never once thought whether he did not owe her a little
sacrifice for her unchary devotion in saving his life.
With a consciousness of having thus, like Antony, kissed away
kingdoms and provinces, he next considered how he had revealed his
higher secrets and intentions to her, an unreserve he would never
have allowed himself with any man living. How was it that he had
not been able to refrain from telling her of adumbrations
heretofore locked in the closest strongholds of his mind?
Knight's was a robust intellect, which could escape outside the
atmosphere of heart, and perceive that his own love, as well as
other people's, could be reduced by change of scene and
circumstances. At the same time the perception was a superimposed
sorrow:
'O last regret, regret can die!'
But being convinced that the death of this regret was the best
thing for him, he did not long shrink from attempting it. He
closed his chambers, suspended his connection with editors, and
left London for the Continent. Here we will leave him to wander
without purpose, beyond the nominal one of encouraging
obliviousness of Elfride.
