A pair of blue eyes
“Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was noticing:
I mean yourself,” he answered gently.
“Now, Mr. Smith!”
“It is perfectly true; I don’t hear much singing. You mistake what I
am, I fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded spot, you think
I must needs come from a life of bustle, and know the latest movements
of the day. But I don’t. My life is as quiet as yours, and more
solitary; solitary as death.”
“The death which comes from a plethora of life? But seriously, I can
quite see that you are not the least what I thought you would be before
I saw you. You are not critical, or experienced, or—much to mind.
That’s why I don’t mind singing airs to you that I only half know.”
Finding that by this confession she had vexed him in a way she did not
intend, she added naively, “I mean, Mr. Smith, that you are better, not
worse, for being only young and not very experienced. You don’t think
my life here so very tame and dull, I know.”
“I do not, indeed,” he said with fervour. “It must be delightfully
poetical, and sparkling, and fresh, and——”
“There you go, Mr. Smith! Well, men of another kind, when I get them to
be honest enough to own the truth, think just the reverse: that my life
must be a dreadful bore in its normal state, though pleasant for the
exceptional few days they pass here.”
“I could live here always!” he said, and with such a tone and look of
unconscious revelation that Elfride was startled to find that her
harmonies had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen’s heart. She
said quickly:
“But you can’t live here always.”
“Oh no.” And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.
Elfride’s emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of
woman’s lesser infirmities—love of admiration—caused an inflammable
disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as
meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her.
Chapter IV
“Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap.”
For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after
dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first,
two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards
the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small.
On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour,
stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations. The
lonely edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the
very tip of the hill. It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither
battlement nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one
substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round
the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape
with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the
sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial
stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous
gray-green grass.
Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty,
and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.
At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on his
first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he
looked, after that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph
of its class. It was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of
William Pitt, as represented in the well or little known bust by
Nollekens—a mouth which is in itself a young man’s fortune, if properly
exercised. His round chin, where its upper part turned inward, still
continued its perfect and full curve, seeming to press in to a point
the bottom of his nether lip at their place of junction.
Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the lawn in
a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy’s velocity,
superadded to a girl’s lightness, after a tame rabbit she was
endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of coaxing words
alternating with desperate rushes so much out of keeping with them,
that the hollowness of such expressions was but too evident to her pet,
who darted and dodged in carefully timed counterpart.
The scene down there was altogether different from that of the hills. A
thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot from the
wilderness without; even at this time of the year the grass was
luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting belt of evergreens,
wasting its force upon the higher and stronger trees forming the outer
margin of the grove.
Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and calling
“Mr. Smith!” Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr. Swancourt. The
young man expressed his gladness to see his host downstairs.
“Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the
acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally goes off
the second night. Well, where have you been this morning? I saw you
come in just now, I think!”
“Yes; I have been for a walk.”
“Start early?”
“Yes.”
“Very early, I think?”
“Yes, it was rather early.”
“Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes seaward.”
“No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.”
“You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild place is
a novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?”
“Not altogether a novelty. I like it.”
The youth seemed averse to explanation.
“You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a journey of
fourteen or sixteen hours. But there’s no accounting for tastes, and I
am glad to see that yours are no meaner. After breakfast, but not
before, I shall be good for a ten miles’ walk, Master Smith.”
Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr.
Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common with
the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims to be
considered handsome,—handsome, that is, in the sense in which the moon
is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a close inspection, are
seen to diversify its surface being left out of the argument. His face
was of a tint that never deepened upon his cheeks nor lightened upon
his forehead, but remained uniform throughout; the usual neutral
salmon-colour of a man who feeds well—not to say too well—and does not
think hard; every pore being in visible working order. His tout
ensemble was that of a highly improved class of farmer, dressed up in
the wrong clothes; that of a firm-standing perpendicular man, whose
fall would have been backwards in direction if he had ever lost his
balance.
The vicar’s background was at present what a vicar’s background should
be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the chimneypiece
were ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines, and against the
wall was a high table, made up of the fragments of an old oak Iychgate.
Upon this stood stuffed specimens of owls, divers, and gulls, and over
them bunches of wheat and barley ears, labelled with the date of the
year that produced them. Some cases and shelves, more or less laden
with books, the prominent titles of which were Dr. Brown’s “Notes on
the Romans,” Dr. Smith’s “Notes on the Corinthians,” and Dr. Robinson’s
“Notes on the Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,” just saved the
character of the place, in spite of a girl’s doll’s-house standing
above them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride’s hat hanging
on its corner.
“Business, business!” said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began to
find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the somewhat
irregular forces of his visitor.
They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts,
mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much at
starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him. “Worm!” the
vicar shouted.
A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the
building, mumbling, “Ah, I used to be strong enough, but ’tis altered
now! Well, there, I’m as independent as one here and there, even if
they do write “squire after their names.”
“What’s the matter?” said the vicar, as William Worm appeared; when the
remarks were repeated to him.
“Worm says some very true things sometimes,” Mr. Swancourt said,
turning to Stephen. “Now, as regards that word ‘esquire.’ Why, Mr.
Smith, that word ‘esquire’ is gone to the dogs,—used on the letters of
every jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else, Worm?”
“Ay, the folk have begun frying again!”
“Dear me! I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes,” Worm said groaningly to Stephen, “I’ve got such a noise in my
head that there’s no living night nor day. ’Tis just for all the world
like people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in my poor head,
till I don’t know whe’r I’m here or yonder. There, God A’mighty will
find it out sooner or later, I hope, and relieve me.”
“Now, my deafness,” said Mr. Swancourt impressively, “is a dead
silence; but William Worm’s is that of people frying fish in his head.
Very remarkable, isn’t it?”
“I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,” said Worm
corroboratively.
“Yes, it is remarkable,” said Mr. Smith.
“Very peculiar, very peculiar,” echoed the vicar; and they all then
followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a little stone
wall, from which gleamed fragments of quartz and blood-red marbles,
apparently of inestimable value, in their setting of brown alluvium.
Stephen walked with the dignity of a man close to the horse’s head,
Worm stumbled along a stone’s throw in the rear, and Elfride was
nowhere in particular, yet everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes
behind, sometimes at the sides, hovering about the procession like a
butterfly; not definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in
at points with the general progress.
The vicar explained things as he went on: “The fact is, Mr. Smith, I
didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was
necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those
d——dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not
as an expletive.”
“How very odd!” said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious
friendliness.
“Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the
churchwardens are——; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk
and the sexton as well.”
“How very strange!” said Stephen.
“Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of
Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some
progress soon.”
“You must trust to circumstances.”
“There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in
Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it?
But I like it on such days as these.”
The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which
having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not
being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open
freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight
can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was
nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds
bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than
whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people
in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or
wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or
cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and
bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our