A pair of blue eyes
rising to close her door previously to fully unrobing, she saw a streak
of light shining across the landing. Her father’s door was shut, and he
could be heard snoring regularly. The light came from Stephen’s room,
and the slight sounds also coming thence emphatically denoted what he
was doing. In the perfect silence she could hear the closing of a lid
and the clicking of a lock,—he was fastening his hat-box. Then the
buckling of straps and the click of another key,—he was securing his
portmanteau. With trebled foreboding she opened her door softly, and
went towards his. One sensation pervaded her to distraction. Stephen,
her handsome youth and darling, was going away, and she might never see
him again except in secret and in sadness—perhaps never more. At any
rate, she could no longer wait till the morning to hear the result of
the interview, as she had intended. She flung her dressing-gown round
her, tapped lightly at his door, and whispered “Stephen!” He came
instantly, opened the door, and stepped out.
“Tell me; are we to hope?”
He replied in a disturbed whisper, and a tear approached its outlet,
though none fell.
“I am not to think of such a preposterous thing—that’s what he said.
And I am going to-morrow. I should have called you up to bid you
good-bye.”
“But he didn’t say you were to go—O Stephen, he didn’t say that?”
“No; not in words. But I cannot stay.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t go! Do come and let us talk. Let us come down to the
drawing-room for a few minutes; he will hear us here.”
She preceded him down the staircase with the taper light in her hand,
looking unnaturally tall and thin in the long dove-coloured
dressing-gown she wore. She did not stop to think of the propriety or
otherwise of this midnight interview under such circumstances. She
thought that the tragedy of her life was beginning, and, for the first
time almost, felt that her existence might have a grave side, the shade
of which enveloped and rendered invisible the delicate gradations of
custom and punctilio. Elfride softly opened the drawing-room door and
they both went in. When she had placed the candle on the table, he
enclosed her with his arms, dried her eyes with his handkerchief, and
kissed their lids.
“Stephen, it is over—happy love is over; and there is no more sunshine
now!”
“I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I will!”
“Papa will never hear of it—never—never! You don’t know him. I do. He
is either biassed in favour of a thing, or prejudiced against it.
Argument is powerless against either feeling.”
“No; I won’t think of him so,” said Stephen. “If I appear before him
some time hence as a man of established name, he will accept me—I know
he will. He is not a wicked man.”
“No, he is not wicked. But you say ‘some time hence,’ as if it were no
time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be comparatively a
short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its real length trebled!
Every summer will be a year—autumn a year—winter a year! O Stephen! and
you may forget me!”
Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-hearted
woman. The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear. “You, too, may be
persuaded to give me up, when time has made me fainter in your memory.
For, remember, your love for me must be nourished in secret; there will
be no long visits from me to support you. Circumstances will always
tend to obliterate me.”
“Stephen,” she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding his
last words, “there are beautiful women where you live—of course I know
there are—and they may win you away from me.” Her tears came visibly as
she drew a mental picture of his faithlessness. “And it won’t be your
fault,” she continued, looking into the candle with doleful eyes. “No!
You will think that our family don’t want you, and get to include me
with them. And there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others
will be let in.”
“I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of forebodings.”
“Oh yes, they will,” she replied. “And you will look at them, not
caring at first, and then you will look and be interested, and after a
while you will think, ‘Ah, they know all about city life, and
assemblies, and coteries, and the manners of the titled, and poor
little Elfie, with all the fuss that’s made about her having me,
doesn’t know about anything but a little house and a few cliffs and a
space of sea, far away.’ And then you’ll be more interested in them,
and they’ll make you have them instead of me, on purpose to be cruel to
me because I am silly, and they are clever and hate me. And I hate
them, too; yes, I do!”
Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the
recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished. And,
worse than that general feeling, there of course remained the sadness
which arose from the special features of his own case. However remote a
desired issue may be, the mere fact of having entered the groove which
leads to it, cheers to some extent with a sense of accomplishment. Had
Mr. Swancourt consented to an engagement of no less length than ten
years, Stephen would have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they
would have felt that they were somewhere on the road to Cupid’s garden.
But, with a possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any
prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr.
Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the waiting
for marriage could even set in. And this was despair.
“I wish we could marry now,” murmured Stephen, as an impossible fancy.
“So do I,” said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. “’Tis the only
thing that ever does sweethearts good!”
“Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?”
“Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,” she said, and
went on reflectively: “All we want is to render it absolutely
impossible for any future circumstance to upset our future intention of
being happy together; not to begin being happy now.”
“Exactly,” he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of hers.
“To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living now; merely
to put it out of anybody’s power to force you away from me, dearest.”
“Or you away from me, Stephen.”
“Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of circumstance
strong enough to make any woman in the world marry against her will: no
conceivable pressure, up to torture or starvation, can make a woman
once married to her lover anybody else’s wife.”
Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had been
held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to beguile a
miserable moment. During a pause which followed Stephen’s last remark,
a fascinating perception, then an alluring conviction, flashed along
the brain of both. The perception was that an immediate marriage COULD
be contrived; the conviction that such an act, in spite of its daring,
its fathomless results, its deceptiveness, would be preferred by each
to the life they must lead under any other conditions.
The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude of the
conception he was cherishing. “How strong we should feel, Elfride!
going on our separate courses as before, without the fear of ultimate
separation! O Elfride! think of it; think of it!”
It is certain that the young girl’s love for Stephen received a fanning
from her father’s opposition which made it blaze with a dozen times the
intensity it would have exhibited if left alone. Never were conditions
more favourable for developing a girl’s first passing fancy for a
handsome boyish face—a fancy rooted in inexperience and nourished by
seclusion—into a wild unreflecting passion fervid enough for anything.
All the elements of such a development were there, the chief one being
hopelessness—a necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of
feelings united under the name of loving to distraction.
“We would tell papa soon, would we not?” she inquired timidly. “Nobody
else need know. He would then be convinced that hearts cannot be played
with; love encouraged be ready to grow, love discouraged be ready to
die, at a moment’s notice. Stephen, do you not think that if marriages
against a parent’s consent are ever justifiable, they are when young
people have been favoured up to a point, as we have, and then have had
that favour suddenly withdrawn?”
“Yes. It is not as if we had from the beginning acted in opposition to
your papa’s wishes. Only think, Elfie, how pleasant he was towards me
but six hours ago! He liked me, praised me, never objected to my being
alone with you.”
“I believe he MUST like you now,” she cried. “And if he found that you
irremediably belonged to me, he would own it and help you. “O Stephen,
Stephen,” she burst out again, as the remembrance of his packing came
afresh to her mind, “I cannot bear your going away like this! It is too
dreadful. All I have been expecting miserably killed within me like
this!”
Stephen flushed hot with impulse. “I will not be a doubt to you—thought
of you shall not be a misery to me!” he said. “We will be wife and
husband before we part for long!”
She hid her face on his shoulder. “Anything to make SURE!” she
whispered.
“I did not like to propose it immediately,” continued Stephen. “It
seemed to me—it seems to me now—like trying to catch you—a girl better
in the world than I.”
“Not that, indeed! And am I better in worldly station? What’s the use
of have beens? We may have been something once; we are nothing now.”
Then they whispered long and earnestly together; Stephen hesitatingly
proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them, with quick
breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright eyes. It was two
o’clock before an arrangement was finally concluded.
She then told him to leave her, giving him his light to go up to his
own room. They parted with an agreement not to meet again in the
morning. After his door had been some time closed he heard her softly
gliding into her chamber.
Chapter XI
“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a monotonous
parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that night.
Early the next morning—that is to say, four hours after their stolen
interview, and just as the earliest servant was heard moving
about—Stephen Smith went downstairs, portmanteau in hand. Throughout
the night he had intended to see Mr. Swancourt again, but the sharp
rebuff of the previous evening rendered such an interview particularly
distasteful. Perhaps there was another and less honest reason. He
decided to put it off. Whatever of moral timidity or obliquity may have
lain in such a decision, no perception of it was strong enough to
detain him. He wrote a note in his room, which stated simply that he
did not feel happy in the house after Mr. Swancourt’s sudden veto on
what he had favoured a few hours before; but that he hoped a time would
come, and that soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as Mr.
Swancourt’s guest might be recovered.
He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and cheerless
aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the sun. He found
in the dining room a breakfast laid, of which somebody had just
partaken.
Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that Mr.
Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early breakfast. He
was not going away that she knew of.
Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and turned
into the lane. It was so early that the shaded places still smelt like
night time, and the sunny spots had hardly felt the sun. The horizontal
rays made every shallow dip in the ground to show as a well-marked