A pair of blue eyes
forwarded some soothing draught, and gave orders that on no account
whatever was she to play chess again.
The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a
curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The women
servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as each
entered, he could not, to save his life, avoid turning his head with
the hope that she might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began reading without
waiting for her. Then somebody glided in noiselessly; Knight softly
glanced up: it was only the little kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading
prayers a bore.
He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to recognize
that holding converse with Nature’s charms was not solitude. On nearing
the house again he perceived his young friend crossing a slope by a
path which ran into the one he was following in the angle of the field.
Here they met. Elfride was at once exultant and abashed: coming into
his presence had upon her the effect of entering a cathedral.
Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in the
very act of writing therein when they came in view of each other. He
left off in the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to inquire warmly
concerning her state of health. She said she was perfectly well, and
indeed had never looked better. Her health was as inconsequent as her
actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and
their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line,
which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as
the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess,
because too ephemeral-looking to play one.
“Are you taking notes?” she inquired with an alacrity plainly arising
less from interest in the subject than from a wish to divert his
thoughts from herself.
“Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will complete
it.” Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained beside him a
moment, and afterwards walked on.
“I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,” she gaily
flung back to him over her shoulder.
“I don’t think you would find much to interest you.”
“I know I should.”
“Then of course I have no more to say.”
“But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts
concerning journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of thoughts?”
“Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists for the
most part of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed and
disconnected, of no possible interest to anybody but myself.”
“It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?”
“Yes.”
“If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article, what
must they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified spirit, above
proof; before it is lowered to be fit for human consumption: ‘words
that burn’ indeed.”
“Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless, dead.
You could hardly read them.”
“May I try?” she said coaxingly. “I wrote my poor romance in that way—I
mean in bits, out of doors—and I should like to see whether your way of
entering things is the same as mine.”
“Really, that’s rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly
refuse now you have asked so directly; but——”
“You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify me—your
writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon your book by
chance, it would have been different; but you stand before me, and say,
‘Excuse me,’ without caring whether I do or not, and write on, and then
tell me they are not private facts but public ideas.”
“Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the consequences be
upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is to leave my book
alone.”
“But with that caution I have your permission?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book, then
laughed, and saying, “I must see it,” withdrew it from his fingers.
Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the path
turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the wicket-gate he
saw that she had moved, and waited till she came up.
Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully by
the corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a nettled look.
She silently extended the volume towards him, raising her eyes no
higher than her hand was lifted.
“Take it,” said Elfride quickly. “I don’t want to read it.”
“Could you understand it?” said Knight.
“As far as I looked. But I didn’t care to read much.”
“Why, Miss Swancourt?”
“Only because I didn’t wish to—that’s all.”
“I warned you that you might not.”
“Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.”
“Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.”
“Not my name—I know that.”
“Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would recognize
you.”
“Except myself. For what is this?” she exclaimed, taking it from him
and opening a page. “August 7. That’s the day before yesterday. But I
won’t read it,” Elfride said, closing the book again with pretty
hauteur. “Why should I? I had no business to ask to see your book, and
it serves me right.”
Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the book
to see. He came to this:
“Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born.
After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness it begins to
act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first. Persons of observation
can tell to a nicety how old this consciousness is by the skill it has
acquired in the art necessary to its success—the art of hiding itself.
Generally begins career by actions which are popularly termed
showing-off. Method adopted depends in each case upon the disposition,
rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will
utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the
more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making
your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On Endelstow
Tower.)
“An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays. ‘Look at
me,’ say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice, without
reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show so very much
of themselves. (Amplify and correct for paper on Artless Arts.)”
“Yes, I remember now,” said Knight. “The notes were certainly suggested
by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not think too much
of such random observations,” he continued encouragingly, as he noticed
her injured looks. “A mere fancy passing through my head assumes a
factitious importance to you, because it has been made permanent by
being written down. All mankind think thoughts as bad as those of
people they most love on earth, but such thoughts never getting
embodied on paper, it becomes assumed that they never existed. I
daresay that you yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other
of me, which would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge
you, now, to tell me.”
“The worst thing I have thought of you?”
“Yes.”
“I must not.”
“Oh yes.”
“I thought you were rather round-shouldered.”
Knight looked slightly redder.
“And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.”
“Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,” said Knight, there being a faint
ghastliness discernible in his laugh. “They are much worse in a lady’s
eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.”
“Ah, that’s very fine,” she said, too inexperienced to perceive her
hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. “You alluded to
me in that entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I
cannot understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you
think I am?”
“How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.”
“You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like
best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?”
“Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.”
So it was not Elfride’s class.
“But it is well known,” she said eagerly, and there was something
touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she
revealed by her words, “that the slower a nature is to develop, the
richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women before they
come of age are nobodies by the time that backward people have shown
their full compass.”
“Yes,” said Knight thoughtfully. “There is really something in that
remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there
take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has
not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because
she is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for
developing.”
Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs.
Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat and drink,
had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The
morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the
old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it by the second door as
they entered by the first.
Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two portraits
on ivory.
“Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging by
what I see here,” he observed, “they had unquestionably beautiful heads
of hair.”
“Yes; and that is everything,” said Elfride, possibly conscious of her
own, possibly not.
“Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.”
“Which colour do you like best?” she ventured to ask.
“More depends on its abundance than on its colour.”
“Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?”
“Dark.”
“I mean for women,” she said, with the minutest fall of countenance,
and a hope that she had been misunderstood.
“So do I,” Knight replied.
It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride’s hair.
In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be overlooked by men
not given to ocular intentness. But hers was always in the way. You saw
her hair as far as you could see her sex, and knew that it was the
palest brown. She knew instantly that Knight, being perfectly aware of
this, had an independent standard of admiration in the matter.
Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with the
honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the more they
went against her, the more she respected them. And now, like a reckless
gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure. Her eyes: they were
her all now.
“What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?” she said slowly.
“Honestly, or as a compliment?”
“Of course honestly; I don’t want anybody’s compliment!”
And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of approval
from that man then would have been like a well to a famished Arab.
“I prefer hazel,” he said serenely.
She had played and lost again.
Chapter XIX
“Love was in the next degree.”
Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by
judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s
recollection of the speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said by
either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development. Elfride’s mind had
been impregnated with sentiments of her own smallness to an
uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her discomfort was visible in
her face. The whole tendency of the conversation latterly had been to
quietly but surely disparage her; and she was fain to take Stephen into
favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said,
as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True,
Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything