A pair of blue eyes
one is a lord and t’other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He’d clap his
hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familial and neighbourly as if
he’d been a common chap. Ay, ’a cussed me up hill and ’a cussed me
down; and then ’a would rave out again, and the goold clamps of his
fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while I,
being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a
strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liked en
sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height,
I’d think in my inside, ‘What a weight you’ll be, my lord, for our arms
to lower under the aisle of Endelstow Church some day!’”
“And was he?” inquired a young labourer.
“He was. He was five hundredweight if ’a were a pound. What with his
lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t’other”—here
the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that
caused a rattle among the bones inside—“he half broke my back when I
took his feet to lower en down the steps there. ‘Ah,’ saith I to John
there—didn’t I, John?—‘that ever one man’s glory should be such a
weight upon another man!’ But there, I liked my lord George sometimes.”
“’Tis a strange thought,” said another, “that while they be all here
under one roof, a snug united family o’ Luxellians, they be really
scattered miles away from one another in the form of good sheep and
wicked goats, isn’t it?”
“True; ’tis a thought to look at.”
“And that one, if he’s gone upward, don’t know what his wife is doing
no more than the man in the moon if she’s gone downward. And that some
unfortunate one in the hot place is a-hollering across to a lucky one
up in the clouds, and quite forgetting their bodies be boxed close
together all the time.”
“Ay, ’tis a thought to look at, too, that I can say ‘Hullo!’ close to
fiery Lord George, and ’a can’t hear me.”
“And that I be eating my onion close to dainty Lady Jane’s nose, and
she can’t smell me.”
“What do ’em put all their heads one way for?” inquired a young man.
“Because ’tis churchyard law, you simple. The law of the living is,
that a man shall be upright and down-right, and the law of the dead is,
that a man shall be east and west. Every state of society have its
laws.”
“We must break the law wi’ a few of the poor souls, however. Come,
buckle to,” said the master-mason.
And they set to work anew.
The order of interment could be distinctly traced by observing the
appearance of the coffins as they lay piled around. On those which had
been standing there but a generation or two the trappings still
remained. Those of an earlier period showed bare wood, with a few
tattered rags dangling therefrom. Earlier still, the wood lay in
fragments on the floor of the niche, and the coffin consisted of naked
lead alone; whilst in the case of the very oldest, even the lead was
bulging and cracking in pieces, revealing to the curious eye a heap of
dust within. The shields upon many were quite loose, and removable by
the hand, their lustreless surfaces still indistinctly exhibiting the
name and title of the deceased.
Overhead the groins and concavities of the arches curved in all
directions, dropping low towards the walls, where the height was no
more than sufficient to enable a person to stand upright.
The body of George the fourteenth baron, together with two or three
others, all of more recent date than the great bulk of coffins piled
there, had, for want of room, been placed at the end of the vault on
tressels, and not in niches like the others. These it was necessary to
remove, to form behind them the chamber in which they were ultimately
to be deposited. Stephen, finding the place and proceedings in keeping
with the sombre colours of his mind, waited there still.
“Simeon, I suppose you can mind poor Lady Elfride, and how she ran away
with the actor?” said John Smith, after awhile. “I think it fell upon
the time my father was sexton here. Let us see—where is she?”
“Here somewhere,” returned Simeon, looking round him.
“Why, I’ve got my arms round the very gentlewoman at this moment.” He
lowered the end of the coffin he was holding, wiped his face, and
throwing a morsel of rotten wood upon another as an indicator,
continued: “That’s her husband there. They was as fair a couple as you
should see anywhere round about; and a good-hearted pair likewise. Ay,
I can mind it, though I was but a chiel at the time. She fell in love
with this young man of hers, and their banns were asked in some church
in London; and the old lord her father actually heard ’em asked the
three times, and didn’t notice her name, being gabbled on wi’ a host of
others. When she had married she told her father, and ’a fleed into a
monstrous rage, and said she shouldn’ hae a farthing. Lady Elfride said
she didn’t think of wishing it; if he’d forgie her ’twas all she asked,
and as for a living, she was content to play plays with her husband.
This frightened the old lord, and ’a gie’d ’em a house to live in, and
a great garden, and a little field or two, and a carriage, and a good
few guineas. Well, the poor thing died at her first gossiping, and her
husband—who was as tender-hearted a man as ever eat meat, and would
have died for her—went wild in his mind, and broke his heart (so ’twas
said). Anyhow, they were buried the same day—father and mother—but the
baby lived. Ay, my lord’s family made much of that man then, and put
him here with his wife, and there in the corner the man is now. The
Sunday after there was a funeral sermon: the text was, ‘Or ever the
silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken;’ and when ’twas
preaching the men drew their hands across their eyes several times, and
every woman cried out loud.”
“And what became of the baby?” said Stephen, who had frequently heard
portions of the story.
“She was brought up by her grandmother, and a pretty maid she were. And
she must needs run away with the curate—Parson Swancourt that is now.
Then her grandmother died, and the title and everything went away to
another branch of the family altogether. Parson Swancourt wasted a good
deal of his wife’s money, and she left him Miss Elfride. That trick of
running away seems to be handed down in families, like craziness or
gout. And they two women be alike as peas.”
“Which two?”
“Lady Elfride and young Miss that’s alive now. The same hair and eyes:
but Miss Elfride’s mother was darker a good deal.”
“Life’s a strangle bubble, ye see,” said William Worm musingly. “For if
the Lord’s anointment had descended upon women instead of men, Miss
Elfride would be Lord Luxellian—Lady, I mane. But as it is, the blood
is run out, and she’s nothing to the Luxellian family by law, whatever
she may be by gospel.”
“I used to fancy,” said Simeon, “when I seed Miss Elfride hugging the
little ladyships, that there was a likeness; but I suppose ’twas only
my dream, for years must have altered the old family shape.”
“And now we’ll move these two, and home-along,” interposed John Smith,
reviving, as became a master, the spirit of labour, which had showed
unmistakable signs of being nearly vanquished by the spirit of chat,
“The flagon of ale we don’t want we’ll let bide here till to-morrow;
none of the poor souls will touch it ’a b’lieve.”
So the evening’s work was concluded, and the party drew from the abode
of the quiet dead, closing the old iron door, and shooting the lock
loudly into the huge copper staple—an incongruous act of imprisonment
towards those who had no dreams of escape.
Chapter XXVII
“How should I greet thee?”
Love frequently dies of time alone—much more frequently of
displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the
displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a greater
man than the first. By the side of the instructive and piquant
snubbings she received from Knight, Stephen’s general agreeableness
seemed watery; by the side of Knight’s spare love-making, Stephen’s
continual outflow seemed lackadaisical. She had begun to sigh for
somebody further on in manhood. Stephen was hardly enough of a man.
Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to
those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that
inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready
sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen’s failure to make his hold on her
heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself
beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a
kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave
untouched, but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to
undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering ceases in the
man, snubbing begins in the woman; the trite but no less unfortunate
fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to
appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement. The abiding
perception of the position of Stephen’s parents had, of course, a
little to do with Elfride’s renunciation. To such girls poverty may not
be, as to the more worldly masses of humanity, a sin in itself; but it
is a sin, because graceful and dainty manners seldom exist in such an
atmosphere. Few women of old family can be thoroughly taught that a
fine soul may wear a smock-frock, and an admittedly common man in one
is but a worm in their eyes. John Smith’s rough hands and clothes, his
wife’s dialect, the necessary narrowness of their ways, being
constantly under Elfride’s notice, were not without their deflecting
influence.
On reaching home after the perilous adventure by the sea-shore, Knight
had felt unwell, and retired almost immediately. The young lady who had
so materially assisted him had done the same, but she reappeared,
properly clothed, about five o’clock. She wandered restlessly about the
house, but not on account of their joint narrow escape from death. The
storm which had torn the tree had merely bowed the reed, and with the
deliverance of Knight all deep thought of the accident had left her.
The mutual avowal which it had been the means of precipitating occupied
a far longer length of her meditations.
Elfride’s disquiet now was on account of that miserable promise to meet
Stephen, which returned like a spectre again and again. The perception
of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly. She now
thought how sound had been her father’s advice to her to give him up,
and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto
been averse. Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of
young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest
wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of
some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.
The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis
a collapse.
“God forgive me—I can’t meet Stephen!” she exclaimed to herself. “I
don’t love him less, but I love Mr. Knight more!”
Yes: she would save herself from a man not fit for her—in spite of
vows. She would obey her father, and have no more to do with Stephen
Smith. Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion
of a virtue.
The following days were passed without any definite avowal from
Knight’s lips. Such solitary walks and scenes as that witnessed by
Smith in the summer-house were frequent, but he courted her so
intangibly that to any but such a delicate perception as Elfride’s it
would have appeared no courtship at all. The time now really began to
be sweet with her. She dismissed the sense of sin in her past actions,
and was automatic in the intoxication of the moment. The fact that
Knight made no actual declaration was no drawback. Knowing since the