A pair of blue eyes
looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And coming
gallantly to her own rescue, “If I really seem vain, it is that I am
only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in
their hearts, and not in their ways.”
“An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more objectionable
of the two,” said Knight.
“Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell me.”
“I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of life is
too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through
it.”
“Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to make her
life, in its higher sense, a failure?”
“Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.”
“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected
and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “Because I utter commonplace
words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor
stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast
all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the
substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”
“Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the
subject in hand—lives which are failures—you need not trouble yourself.
Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if
he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that
the last chapter is wanting in the story. If a man of power tries to do
a great deed, and just falls short of it by an accident not his fault,
up to that time his history had as much in it as that of a great man
who has done his great deed. It is whimsical of the world to hold that
particulars of how a lad went to school and so on should be as an
interesting romance or as nothing to them, precisely in proportion to
his after renown.”
They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself. Their
shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of becoming
obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the opposite direction
which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
“I consider my life to some extent a failure,” said Knight again after
a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic shadows.
“You! How?”
“I don’t precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.”
“Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel that
you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?”
“Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are conscious
of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it seems, there is
nothing truer than that people who have always gone right don’t know
half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who
have gone wrong. However, it is not desirable for me to chill your
summer-time by going into this.”
“You have not told me even now if I am really vain.”
“If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you’ll think I don’t
mean it,” he replied, looking curiously into her face.
“Ah, well,” she replied, with a little breath of distress, “‘That which
is exceeding deep, who will find it out?’ I suppose I must take you as
I do the Bible—find out and understand all I can; and on the strength
of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple faith. Think me vain, if
you will. Worldly greatness requires so much littleness to grow up in,
that an infirmity more or less is not a matter for regret.”
“As regards women, I can’t say,” answered Knight carelessly; “but it is
without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be
born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the
workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for vanity.”
“No, no, I don’t do that,” she said regretfully.
Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you have
lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true self—the
cynic you have been this evening, or the nice philosopher you were up
to to-night?”
“Ah, which? You know as well as I.”
Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico till
the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said idly—
“There’s a bright star exactly over me.”
“Each bright star is overhead somewhere.”
“Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?” and she pointed with her
finger.
“That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde Islands.”
“And that?”
“Looking down upon the source of the Nile.”
“And that lonely quiet-looking one?”
“He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator for
his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have
almost rolled away from, is in India—over the head of a young friend of
mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs
low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as marking where his true love
dwells.”
Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She could
not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show unconsciousness.
“The star is over MY head,” she said with hesitation.
“Or anybody else’s in England.”
“Oh yes, I see:” she breathed her relief.
“His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don’t know them,
though I have been in correspondence with him for many years till
lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in love, and then
went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very little of him.”
Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though Elfride
at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in honesty he had
just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the intention dispersed
into silence. There seemed a reproach in Knight’s blind words, and yet
she was not able to clearly define any disloyalty that she had been
guilty of.
Chapter XX
“A distant dearness in the hill.”
Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed over
to Cork.
One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and proportionately
weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of Killarney, rambled
amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the infinite variety of island,
hill, and dale there to be found, listened to the marvellous echoes of
that romantic spot; but altogether missed the glory and the dream he
formerly found in such favoured regions.
Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not
perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious that
her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but now that
she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal being
abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and Knight was in
love.
Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing
to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew not: certain
he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he had felt none of
that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural to such severances,
seeing how delightful a subject of contemplation Elfride had been ever
since. Had he begun to love her when she met his eye after her mishap
on the tower? He had simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her
whilst standing on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He
had thought her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that
had sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-playing
anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her at that time
a rather conceited child.
Knight’s experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that love
always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the
fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the moment of
generation. Not till they were parted, and she had become sublimated in
his memory, could he be said to have even attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not
act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him, he appeared
to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which had temporarily
assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to analysis,
he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this
new force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life. He
became restless: then he forgot all collateral subjects in the pleasure
of thinking about her.
Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than with
romance.
He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on coquetry.
Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible translation of favour
into suspicion was able to uphold such a theory. The performance had
been too well done to be anything but real. It had the defects without
which nothing is genuine. No actress of twenty years’ standing, no
bald-necked lady whose earliest season “out” was lost in the discreet
mist of evasive talk, could have played before him the part of
ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways
which partly make up ingenuousness.
There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance: spinsters
there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some think only those of
the latter. However, Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by
nature. What was he coming to? It was very odd to himself to look at
his theories on the subject of love, and reading them now by the full
light of a new experience, to see how much more his sentences meant
than he had felt them to mean when they were written. People often
discover the real force of a trite old maxim only when it is thrust
upon them by a chance adventure; but Knight had never before known the
case of a man who learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such
means.
He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred in him
was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer in a woman’s
heart. He had discovered within himself the condition that if ever he
did make up his mind to marry, it must be on the certainty that no
cropping out of inconvenient old letters, no bow and blush to a
mysterious stranger casually met, should be a possible source of
discomposure. Knight’s sentiments were only the ordinary ones of a man
of his age who loves genuinely, perhaps exaggerated a little by his
pursuits. When men first love as lads, it is with the very centre of
their hearts, nothing else being concerned in the operation. With added
years, more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till
at Knight’s age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it. It may
as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains as a gauge of
his position is as one determining a ship’s longitude from a light at
the mast-head.
Knight argued from Elfride’s unwontedness of manner, which was matter
of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of inference
only. Incredules les plus credules. “Elfride,” he said, “had hardly
looked upon a man till she saw me.”
He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times by
thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and how
necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to complete the
delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind. So at the end of the
week’s absence, which had brought him as far as Dublin, he resolved to
curtail his tour, return to Endelstow, and commit himself by making a
reality of the hypothetical offer of that Sunday evening.