A pair of blue eyes
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,