A pair of blue eyes
adored her new lover from below his pedestal, was even more perceptible
than that she had smiled down upon Stephen from a height above him.
The suddenness of Elfride’s renunciation of himself was food for more
torture. To an unimpassioned outsider, it admitted of at least two
interpretations—it might either have proceeded from an endeavour to be
faithful to her first choice, till the lover seen absolutely
overpowered the lover remembered, or from a wish not to lose his love
till sure of the love of another. But to Stephen Smith the motive
involved in the latter alternative made it untenable where Elfride was
the actor.
He mused on her letters to him, in which she had never mentioned a
syllable concerning Knight. It is desirable, however, to observe that
only in two letters could she possibly have done so. One was written
about a week before Knight’s arrival, when, though she did not mention
his promised coming to Stephen, she had hardly a definite reason in her
mind for neglecting to do it. In the next she did casually allude to
Knight. But Stephen had left Bombay long before that letter arrived.
Stephen looked at the black form of the adjacent house, where it cut a
dark polygonal notch out of the sky, and felt that he hated the spot.
He did not know many facts of the case, but could not help
instinctively associating Elfride’s fickleness with the marriage of her
father, and their introduction to London society. He closed the iron
gate bounding the shrubbery as noiselessly as he had opened it, and
went into the grassy field. Here he could see the old vicarage, the
house alone that was associated with the sweet pleasant time of his
incipient love for Elfride. Turning sadly from the place that was no
longer a nook in which his thoughts might nestle when he was far away,
he wandered in the direction of the east village, to reach his father’s
house before they retired to rest.
The nearest way to the cottage was by crossing the park. He did not
hurry. Happiness frequently has reason for haste, but it is seldom that
desolation need scramble or strain. Sometimes he paused under the
low-hanging arms of the trees, looking vacantly on the ground.
Stephen was standing thus, scarcely less crippled in thought than he
was blank in vision, when a clear sound permeated the quiet air about
him, and spread on far beyond. The sound was the stroke of a bell from
the tower of East Endelstow Church, which stood in a dell not forty
yards from Lord Luxellian’s mansion, and within the park enclosure.
Another stroke greeted his ear, and gave character to both: then came a
slow succession of them.
“Somebody is dead,” he said aloud.
The death-knell of an inhabitant of the eastern parish was being
tolled.
An unusual feature in the tolling was that it had not been begun
according to the custom in Endelstow and other parishes in the
neighbourhood. At every death the sex and age of the deceased were
announced by a system of changes. Three times three strokes signified
that the departed one was a man; three times two, a woman; twice three,
a boy; twice two, a girl. The regular continuity of the tolling
suggested that it was the resumption rather than the beginning of a
knell—the opening portion of which Stephen had not been near enough to
hear.
The momentary anxiety he had felt with regard to his parents passed
away. He had left them in perfect health, and had any serious illness
seized either, a communication would have reached him ere this. At the
same time, since his way homeward lay under the churchyard yews, he
resolved to look into the belfry in passing by, and speak a word to
Martin Cannister, who would be there.
Stephen reached the brow of the hill, and felt inclined to renounce his
idea. His mood was such that talking to any person to whom he could not
unburden himself would be wearisome. However, before he could put any
inclination into effect, the young man saw from amid the trees a bright
light shining, the rays from which radiated like needles through the
sad plumy foliage of the yews. Its direction was from the centre of the
churchyard.
Stephen mechanically went forward. Never could there be a greater
contrast between two places of like purpose than between this graveyard
and that of the further village. Here the grass was carefully tended,
and formed virtually a part of the manor-house lawn; flowers and shrubs
being planted indiscriminately over both, whilst the few graves visible
were mathematically exact in shape and smoothness, appearing in the
daytime like chins newly shaven. There was no wall, the division
between God’s Acre and Lord Luxellian’s being marked only by a few
square stones set at equidistant points. Among those persons who have
romantic sentiments on the subject of their last dwelling-place,
probably the greater number would have chosen such a spot as this in
preference to any other: a few would have fancied a constraint in its
trim neatness, and would have preferred the wild hill-top of the
neighbouring site, with Nature in her most negligent attire.
The light in the churchyard he next discovered to have its source in a
point very near the ground, and Stephen imagined it might come from a
lantern in the interior of a partly-dug grave. But a nearer approach
showed him that its position was immediately under the wall of the
aisle, and within the mouth of an archway. He could now hear voices,
and the truth of the whole matter began to dawn upon him. Walking on
towards the opening, Smith discerned on his left hand a heap of earth,
and before him a flight of stone steps which the removed earth had
uncovered, leading down under the edifice. It was the entrance to a
large family vault, extending under the north aisle.
Stephen had never before seen it open, and descending one or two steps
stooped to look under the arch. The vault appeared to be crowded with
coffins, with the exception of an open central space, which had been
necessarily kept free for ingress and access to the sides, round three
of which the coffins were stacked in stone bins or niches.
The place was well lighted with candles stuck in slips of wood that
were fastened to the wall. On making the descent of another step the
living inhabitants of the vault were recognizable. They were his father
the master-mason, an under-mason, Martin Cannister, and two or three
young and old labouring-men. Crowbars and workmen’s hammers were
scattered about. The whole company, sitting round on coffins which had
been removed from their places, apparently for some alteration or
enlargement of the vault, were eating bread and cheese, and drinking
ale from a cup with two handles, passed round from each to each.
“Who is dead?” Stephen inquired, stepping down.
Chapter XXVI
“To that last nothing under earth.”
All eyes were turned to the entrance as Stephen spoke, and the
ancient-mannered conclave scrutinized him inquiringly.
“Why, ’tis our Stephen!” said his father, rising from his seat; and,
still retaining the frothy mug in his left hand, he swung forward his
right for a grasp. “Your mother is expecting ye—thought you would have
come afore dark. But you’ll wait and go home with me? I have all but
done for the day, and was going directly.”
“Yes, ’tis Master Stephy, sure enough. Glad to see you so soon again,
Master Smith,” said Martin Cannister, chastening the gladness expressed
in his words by a strict neutrality of countenance, in order to
harmonize the feeling as much as possible with the solemnity of a
family vault.
“The same to you, Martin; and you, William,” said Stephen, nodding
around to the rest, who, having their mouths full of bread and cheese,
were of necessity compelled to reply merely by compressing their eyes
to friendly lines and wrinkles.
“And who is dead?” Stephen repeated.
“Lady Luxellian, poor gentlewoman, as we all shall, said the
under-mason. “Ay, and we be going to enlarge the vault to make room for
her.”
“When did she die?”
“Early this morning,” his father replied, with an appearance of
recurring to a chronic thought. “Yes, this morning. Martin hev been
tolling ever since, almost. There, ’twas expected. She was very
limber.”
“Ay, poor soul, this morning,” resumed the under-mason, a marvellously
old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would
not stay in position. “She must know by this time whether she’s to go
up or down, poor woman.”
“What was her age?”
“Not more than seven or eight and twenty by candlelight. But, Lord! by
day ’a was forty if ’a were an hour.”
“Ay, night-time or day-time makes a difference of twenty years to rich
feymels,” observed Martin.
“She was one and thirty really,” said John Smith. “I had it from them
that know.”
“Not more than that!”
“’A looked very bad, poor lady. In faith, ye might say she was dead for
years afore ’a would own it.”
“As my old father used to say, ‘dead, but wouldn’t drop down.’”
“I seed her, poor soul,” said a labourer from behind some removed
coffins, “only but last Valentine’s-day of all the world. ’A was arm in
crook wi’ my lord. I says to myself, ‘You be ticketed Churchyard, my
noble lady, although you don’t dream on’t.’”
“I suppose my lord will write to all the other lords anointed in the
nation, to let ’em know that she that was is now no more?”
“’Tis done and past. I see a bundle of letters go off an hour after the
death. Sich wonderful black rims as they letters had—half-an-inch wide,
at the very least.”
“Too much,” observed Martin. “In short, ’tis out of the question that a
human being can be so mournful as black edges half-an-inch wide. I’m
sure people don’t feel more than a very narrow border when they feels
most of all.”
“And there are two little girls, are there not?” said Stephen.
“Nice clane little faces!—left motherless now.”
“They used to come to Parson Swancourt’s to play with Miss Elfride when
I were there,” said William Worm. “Ah, they did so’s!” The latter
sentence was introduced to add the necessary melancholy to a remark
which, intrinsically, could hardly be made to possess enough for the
occasion. “Yes,” continued Worm, “they’d run upstairs, they’d run down;
flitting about with her everywhere. Very fond of her, they were. Ah,
well!”
“Fonder than ever they were of their mother, so ’tis said here and
there,” added a labourer.
“Well, you see, ’tis natural. Lady Luxellian stood aloof from ’em
so—was so drowsy-like, that they couldn’t love her in the
jolly-companion way children want to like folks. Only last winter I
seed Miss Elfride talking to my lady and the two children, and Miss
Elfride wiped their noses for em’ SO careful—my lady never once seeing
that it wanted doing; and, naturally, children take to people that’s
their best friend.”
“Be as ’twill, the woman is dead and gone, and we must make a place for
her,” said John. “Come, lads, drink up your ale, and we’ll just rid
this corner, so as to have all clear for beginning at the wall, as soon
as ’tis light to-morrow.”
Stephen then asked where Lady Luxellian was to lie.
“Here,” said his father. “We are going to set back this wall and make a
recess; and ’tis enough for us to do before the funeral. When my lord’s
mother died, she said, ‘John, the place must be enlarged before another
can be put in.’ But ’a never expected ’twould be wanted so soon. Better
move Lord George first, I suppose, Simeon?”
He pointed with his foot to a heavy coffin, covered with what had
originally been red velvet, the colour of which could only just be
distinguished now.
“Just as ye think best, Master John,” replied the shrivelled mason.
“Ah, poor Lord George!” he continued, looking contemplatively at the
huge coffin; “he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when