A pair of blue eyes
as she had just been guilty of herself.
This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.
Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by
her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to
determine a resultant:
First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its object:
inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the above-named
issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of ultimate exoneration:
indignation at parental inconsistency in first encouraging, then
forbidding: a chilling sense of disobedience, overpowered by a
conscientious inability to brook a breaking of plighted faith with a
man who, in essentials, had remained unaltered from the beginning: a
blessed hope that opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a
bright faith that things would mend thereby, and wind up well.
Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have been
drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:
“If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been
made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?”
“Do you mean in the family by marriage?” he replied inattentively, and
continuing to peel his egg.
The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.
“I should have put up with it, no doubt,” Mr. Swancourt observed.
“So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy, but
have made the best of him?”
Elfride’s erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in
the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on
absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the
mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of
circumstances, he answered it with customary complacency.
“If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any sensible
man, should accept conditions that could not be altered; certainly not
be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don’t believe anything in the
world would make me hopelessly melancholy. And don’t let anything make
you so, either.”
“I won’t, papa,” she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased him.
Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the
brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no longer
from the mad action she had planned.
In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It was an
unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again almost
impelled by her feelings to pour out all.
“Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?” she said, and looked at him
longingly.
“I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,” he said cheerily; “not
before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and
so far will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.”
She was repressed and hurt.
“I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,” she
murmured.
He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter, as
his indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.
It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud upon
an orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to walk towards
them, as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach. She went through
the field to the privet hedge, clambered into the middle of it, and
reclined upon the thick boughs. After looking westward for a
considerable time, she blamed herself for not looking eastward to where
Stephen was, and turned round. Ultimately her eyes fell upon the
ground.
A peculiarity was observable beneath her. A green field spread itself
on each side of the hedge, one belonging to the glebe, the other being
a part of the land attached to the manor-house adjoining. On the
vicarage side she saw a little footpath, the distinctive and altogether
exceptional feature of which consisted in its being only about ten
yards long; it terminated abruptly at each end.
A footpath, suddenly beginning and suddenly ending, coming from nowhere
and leading nowhere, she had never seen before.
Yes, she had, on second thoughts. She had seen exactly such a path
trodden in the front of barracks by the sentry.
And this recollection explained the origin of the path here. Her father
had trodden it by pacing up and down, as she had once seen him doing.
Sitting on the hedge as she sat now, her eyes commanded a view of both
sides of it. And a few minutes later, Elfride looked over to the manor
side.
Here was another sentry path. It was like the first in length, and it
began and ended exactly opposite the beginning and ending of its
neighbour, but it was thinner, and less distinct.
Two reasons existed for the difference. This one might have been
trodden by a similar weight of tread to the other, exercised a less
number of times; or it might have been walked just as frequently, but
by lighter feet.
Probably a gentleman from Scotland-yard, had he been passing at the
time, might have considered the latter alternative as the more
probable. Elfride thought otherwise, so far as she thought at all. But
her own great To-Morrow was now imminent; all thoughts inspired by
casual sights of the eye were only allowed to exercise themselves in
inferior corners of her brain, previously to being banished altogether.
Elfride was at length compelled to reason practically upon her
undertaking. All her definite perceptions thereon, when the emotion
accompanying them was abstracted, amounted to no more than these:
“Say an hour and three-quarters to ride to St. Launce’s.
“Say half an hour at the Falcon to change my dress.
“Say two hours waiting for some train and getting to Plymouth.
“Say an hour to spare before twelve o’clock.
“Total time from leaving Endelstow till twelve o’clock, five hours.
“Therefore I shall have to start at seven.”
No surprise or sense of unwontedness entered the minds of the servants
at her early ride. The monotony of life we associate with people of
small incomes in districts out of the sound of the railway whistle, has
one exception, which puts into shade the experience of dwellers about
the great centres of population—that is, in travelling. Every journey
there is more or less an adventure; adventurous hours are necessarily
chosen for the most commonplace outing. Miss Elfride had to leave
early—that was all.
Elfride never went out on horseback but she brought home
something—something found, or something bought. If she trotted to town
or village, her burden was books. If to hills, woods, or the seashore,
it was wonderful mosses, abnormal twigs, a handkerchief of wet shells
or seaweed.
Once, in muddy weather, when Pansy was walking with her down the street
of Castle Boterel, on a fair-day, a packet in front of her and a packet
under her arm, an accident befell the packets, and they slipped down.
On one side of her, three volumes of fiction lay kissing the mud; on
the other numerous skeins of polychromatic wools lay absorbing it.
Unpleasant women smiled through windows at the mishap, the men all
looked round, and a boy, who was minding a ginger-bread stall whilst
the owner had gone to get drunk, laughed loudly. The blue eyes turned
to sapphires, and the cheeks crimsoned with vexation.
After that misadventure she set her wits to work, and was ingenious
enough to invent an arrangement of small straps about the saddle, by
which a great deal could be safely carried thereon, in a small compass.
Here she now spread out and fastened a plain dark walking-dress and a
few other trifles of apparel. Worm opened the gate for her, and she
vanished away.
One of the brightest mornings of late summer shone upon her. The
heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the
grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like
little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon
Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she looked
what she felt. But the mercury of those days had a trick of falling
unexpectedly. First, only for one minute in ten had she a sense of
depression. Then a large cloud, that had been hanging in the north like
a black fleece, came and placed itself between her and the sun. It
helped on what was already inevitable, and she sank into a uniformity
of sadness.
She turned in the saddle and looked back. They were now on an open
table-land, whose altitude still gave her a view of the sea by
Endelstow. She looked longingly at that spot.
During this little revulsion of feeling Pansy had been still advancing,
and Elfride felt it would be absurd to turn her little mare’s head the
other way. “Still,” she thought, “if I had a mamma at home I WOULD go
back!”
And making one of those stealthy movements by which women let their
hearts juggle with their brains, she did put the horse’s head about, as
if unconsciously, and went at a hand-gallop towards home for more than
a mile. By this time, from the inveterate habit of valuing what we have
renounced directly the alternative is chosen, the thought of her
forsaken Stephen recalled her, and she turned about, and cantered on to
St. Launce’s again.
This miserable strife of thought now began to rage in all its wildness.
Overwrought and trembling, she dropped the rein upon Pansy’s shoulders,
and vowed she would be led whither the horse would take her.
Pansy slackened her pace to a walk, and walked on with her agitated
burden for three or four minutes. At the expiration of this time they
had come to a little by-way on the right, leading down a slope to a
pool of water. The pony stopped, looked towards the pool, and then
advanced and stooped to drink.
Elfride looked at her watch and discovered that if she were going to
reach St. Launce’s early enough to change her dress at the Falcon, and
get a chance of some early train to Plymouth—there were only two
available—it was necessary to proceed at once.
She was impatient. It seemed as if Pansy would never stop drinking; and
the repose of the pool, the idle motions of the insects and flies upon
it, the placid waving of the flags, the leaf-skeletons, like Genoese
filigree, placidly sleeping at the bottom, by their contrast with her
own turmoil made her impatience greater.
Pansy did turn at last, and went up the slope again to the high-road.
The pony came upon it, and stood cross-wise, looking up and down.
Elfride’s heart throbbed erratically, and she thought, “Horses, if left
to themselves, make for where they are best fed. Pansy will go home.”
Pansy turned and walked on towards St. Launce’s
Pansy at home, during summer, had little but grass to live on. After a
run to St. Launce’s she always had a feed of corn to support her on the
return journey. Therefore, being now more than half way, she preferred
St. Launce’s.
But Elfride did not remember this now. All she cared to recognize was a
dreamy fancy that to-day’s rash action was not her own. She was
disabled by her moods, and it seemed indispensable to adhere to the
programme. So strangely involved are motives that, more than by her
promise to Stephen, more even than by her love, she was forced on by a
sense of the necessity of keeping faith with herself, as promised in
the inane vow of ten minutes ago.
She hesitated no longer. Pansy went, like the steed of Adonis, as if
she told the steps. Presently the quaint gables and jumbled roofs of
St. Launce’s were spread beneath her, and going down the hill she
entered the courtyard of the Falcon. Mrs. Buckle, the landlady, came to
the door to meet her.