A pair of blue eyes
The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only
of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now.
Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half
a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures
of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
He was saved, and by Elfride.
He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over
the bank.
At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each
told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved
by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each
other’s arms.
At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed
towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no
longer to be seen.
An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle
girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to
Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of
her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a
guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now,
encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious
crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and
did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the
slave of the greater than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as
this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along
the impressionable soul of Elfride.
Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of
impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s
peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow him to take
advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.
Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to
toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had
obtained the rope.
“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an
expression between gladness and shame “You follow me, but at some
distance.”
“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God
bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”
“No; I shall get warm running.”
Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit,
and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined
upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole
clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of
the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton
rope.
“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on
Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right
minds, by the fireside at home!”
She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more
like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a
mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour
nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in
refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that
necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most
grievous loss to him.
He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground
an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its
proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had
contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand.
It was blown to the right, blown to the left—it floated to the edge of
the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in
the air, and then flew back over his head.
Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to
discover if it had been worth securing.
The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds,
placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had
totally forgotten she carried with her.
Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put
it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.
Chapter XXIII
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”
By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle
Boterel, and breathed his native air.
A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard,
were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.
In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a
small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at
the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a
vale of its own, further inland than the west village, and though so
near it, had little of physical feature in common with the latter. East
Endelstow was more wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s
mansion and park, and was free from those bleak open uplands which lent
such an air of desolation to the vicinage of the coast—always excepting
the small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old
house, The Crags.
Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain
again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter,
he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the
lower part of its course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge
immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by an overhanging
face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a reason of his own he made
this spot his refuge from the storm, and turning his face to the left,
conned the landscape as a book.
He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.
From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity
of being either brilliant foreground or the subdued tone of distance, a
sudden dip in the surface of the country lowering out of sight all the
intermediate prospect. In apparent contact with the trees and bushes
growing close beside him appeared the distant tract, terminated
suddenly by the brink of the series of cliffs which culminated in the
tall giant without a name—small and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf
on a bough at Stephen’s elbow blotted out a whole hill in the
contrasting district far away; a green bunch of nuts covered a complete
upland there, and the great cliff itself was outvied by a pigmy crag in
the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these things hundreds of
times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with such tenderness
as now.
Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see
the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his
Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the
hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a
sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure,
running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain
which had caused Stephen’s halt in this place, dropped down the
heathery hill, entered the vale, and was out of sight.
Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was
surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of departure
another moving speck, as different from the first as well could be,
insomuch that it was perceptible only by its blackness. Slowly and
regularly it took the same course, and there was not much doubt that
this was the form of a man. He, too, gradually descended from the upper
levels, and was lost in the valley below.
The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to the
road. Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were soon obscured
by the intervention of a high hedge. Just before they emerged again he
heard voices in conversation.
“’A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he’s a-coming,” said
a tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin
Cannister’s.
“’A must ’a b’lieve,” said another voice—that of Stephen’s father.
Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His father
and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best suits, and beside
them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly painted spring-cart.
“All right, Mr. Cannister; here’s the lost man!” exclaimed young Smith,
entering at once upon the old style of greeting. “Father, here I am.”
“All right, my sonny; and glad I be for’t!” returned John Smith,
overjoyed to see the young man. “How be ye? Well, come along home, and
don’t let’s bide out here in the damp. Such weather must be terrible
bad for a young chap just come from a fiery nation like Indy; hey,
naibour Cannister?”
“Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous bales,
and noble packages of foreign description, I make no doubt?”
“Hardly all that,” said Stephen laughing.
“We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel afore ye
landed,” said his father. “‘Put in the horse,’ says Martin. ‘Ay,’ says
I, ‘so we will;’ and did it straightway. Now, maybe, Martin had better
go on wi’ the cart for the things, and you and I walk home-along.”
“And I shall be back a’most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty step
still, though time d’ begin to tell upon her as upon the rest o’ us.”
Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued his
journey homeward in the company of his father.
“Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,” said John,
“you’ll find us in a turk of a mess, sir—‘sir,’ says I to my own son!
but ye’ve gone up so, Stephen. We’ve killed the pig this morning for
ye, thinking ye’d be hungry, and glad of a morsel of fresh mate. And ’a
won’t be cut up till to-night. However, we can make ye a good supper of
fry, which will chaw up well wi’ a dab o’ mustard and a few nice new
taters, and a drop of shilling ale to wash it down. Your mother have
scrubbed the house through because ye were coming, and dusted all the
chimmer furniture, and bought a new basin and jug of a travelling
crockery-woman that came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks,
and claned the winders! Ay, I don’t know what ’a ha’n’t a done. Never
were such a steer, ’a b’lieve.”
Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his mother’s
wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey. When they
drew near the river, and the cottage behind it, they could hear the
master-mason’s clock striking off the bygone hours of the day at
intervals of a quarter of a minute, during which intervals Stephen’s
imagination readily pictured his mother’s forefinger wandering round
the dial in company with the minute-hand.
“The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en right
seemingly,” said his father in an explanatory tone; and they went up
the garden to the door.
When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly greeted his
mother—who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue ground, covered
broadcast with a multitude of new and full moons, stars, and planets,
with an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect to diversify the
scene—the crackle of cart-wheels was heard outside, and Martin
Cannister stamped in at the doorway, in the form of a pair of legs
beneath a great box, his body being nowhere visible. When the luggage