A pair of blue eyes
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