A pair of blue eyes
and you have not. And yet I am not so unfit for you as strict-thinking
people might imagine, who would assume the difference in age to signify
most surely an equal addition to my practice in love-making.”
Elfride shivered.
“You are cold—is the wind too much for you?”
“No,” she said gloomily. The belief which had been her sheet-anchor in
hoping for forgiveness had proved false. This account of the
exceptional nature of his experience, a matter which would have set her
rejoicing two years ago, chilled her now like a frost.
“You don’t mind my asking you?” she continued.
“Oh no—not at all.”
“And have you never kissed many ladies?” she whispered, hoping he would
say a hundred at the least.
The time, the circumstances, and the scene were such as to draw
confidences from the most reserved. “Elfride,” whispered Knight in
reply, “it is strange you should have asked that question. But I’ll
answer it, though I have never told such a thing before. I have been
rather absurd in my avoidance of women. I have never given a woman a
kiss in my life, except yourself and my mother.” The man of two and
thirty with the experienced mind warmed all over with a boy’s ingenuous
shame as he made the confession.
“What, not one?” she faltered.
“No; not one.”
“How very strange!”
“Yes, the reverse experience may be commoner. And yet, to those who
have observed their own sex, as I have, my case is not remarkable. Men
about town are women’s favourites—that’s the postulate—and superficial
people don’t think far enough to see that there may be reserved, lonely
exceptions.”
“Are you proud of it, Harry?”
“No, indeed. Of late years I have wished I had gone my ways and trod
out my measure like lighter-hearted men. I have thought of how many
happy experiences I may have lost through never going to woo.”
“Then why did you hold aloof?”
“I cannot say. I don’t think it was my nature to: circumstance hindered
me, perhaps. I have regretted it for another reason. This great
remissness of mine has had its effect upon me. The older I have grown,
the more distinctly have I perceived that it was absolutely preventing
me from liking any woman who was not as unpractised as I; and I gave up
the expectation of finding a nineteenth-century young lady in my own
raw state. Then I found you, Elfride, and I felt for the first time
that my fastidiousness was a blessing. And it helped to make me worthy
of you. I felt at once that, differing as we did in other experiences,
in this matter I resembled you. Well, aren’t you glad to hear it,
Elfride?”
“Yes, I am,” she answered in a forced voice. “But I always had thought
that men made lots of engagements before they married—especially if
they don’t marry very young.”
“So all women think, I suppose—and rightly, indeed, of the majority of
bachelors, as I said before. But an appreciable minority of slow-coach
men do not—and it makes them very awkward when they do come to the
point. However, it didn’t matter in my case.”
“Why?” she asked uneasily.
“Because you know even less of love-making and matrimonial
prearrangement than I, and so you can’t draw invidious comparisons if I
do my engaging improperly.”
“I think you do it beautifully!”
“Thank you, dear. But,” continued Knight laughingly, “your opinion is
not that of an expert, which alone is of value.”
Had she answered, “Yes, it is,” half as strongly as she felt it, Knight
might have been a little astonished.
“If you had ever been engaged to be married before,” he went on, “I
expect your opinion of my addresses would be different. But then, I
should not——”
“Should not what, Harry?”
“Oh, I was merely going to say that in that case I should never have
given myself the pleasure of proposing to you, since your freedom from
that experience was your attraction, darling.”
“You are severe on women, are you not?”
“No, I think not. I had a right to please my taste, and that was for
untried lips. Other men than those of my sort acquire the taste as they
get older—but don’t find an Elfride——”
“What horrid sound is that we hear when we pitch forward?”
“Only the screw—don’t find an Elfride as I did. To think that I should
have discovered such an unseen flower down there in the West—to whom a
man is as much as a multitude to some women, and a trip down the
English Channel like a voyage round the world!”
“And would you,” she said, and her voice was tremulous, “have given up
a lady—if you had become engaged to her—and then found she had had ONE
kiss before yours—and would you have—gone away and left her?”
“One kiss,—no, hardly for that.”
“Two?”
“Well—I could hardly say inventorially like that. Too much of that sort
of thing certainly would make me dislike a woman. But let us confine
our attention to ourselves, not go thinking of might have beens.”
So Elfride had allowed her thoughts to “dally with false surmise,” and
every one of Knight’s words fell upon her like a weight. After this
they were silent for a long time, gazing upon the black mysterious sea,
and hearing the strange voice of the restless wind. A rocking to and
fro on the waves, when the breeze is not too violent and cold, produces
a soothing effect even upon the most highly-wrought mind. Elfride
slowly sank against Knight, and looking down, he found by her soft
regular breathing that she had fallen asleep. Not wishing to disturb
her, he continued still, and took an intense pleasure in supporting her
warm young form as it rose and fell with her every breath.
Knight fell to dreaming too, though he continued wide awake. It was
pleasant to realize the implicit trust she placed in him, and to think
of the charming innocence of one who could sink to sleep in so simple
and unceremonious a manner. More than all, the musing unpractical
student felt the immense responsibility he was taking upon himself by
becoming the protector and guide of such a trusting creature. The quiet
slumber of her soul lent a quietness to his own. Then she moaned, and
turned herself restlessly. Presently her mutterings became distinct:
“Don’t tell him—he will not love me....I did not mean any
disgrace—indeed I did not, so don’t tell Harry. We were going to be
married—that was why I ran away....And he says he will not have a
kissed woman....And if you tell him he will go away, and I shall die. I
pray have mercy—Oh!”
Elfride started up wildly.
The previous moment a musical ding-dong had spread into the air from
their right hand, and awakened her.
“What is it?” she exclaimed in terror.
“Only ‘eight bells,’” said Knight soothingly. “Don’t be frightened,
little bird, you are safe. What have you been dreaming about?”
“I can’t tell, I can’t tell!” she said with a shudder. “Oh, I don’t
know what to do!”
“Stay quietly with me. We shall soon see the dawn now. Look, the
morning star is lovely over there. The clouds have completely cleared
off whilst you have been sleeping. What have you been dreaming of?”
“A woman in our parish.”
“Don’t you like her?”
“I don’t. She doesn’t like me. Where are we?”
“About south of the Exe.”
Knight said no more on the words of her dream. They watched the sky
till Elfride grew calm, and the dawn appeared. It was mere wan
lightness first. Then the wind blew in a changed spirit, and died away
to a zephyr. The star dissolved into the day.
“That’s how I should like to die,” said Elfride, rising from her seat
and leaning over the bulwark to watch the star’s last expiring gleam.
“As the lines say,” Knight replied——
“‘To set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darken’d west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven.’”
“Oh, other people have thought the same thing, have they? That’s always
the case with my originalities—they are original to nobody but myself.”
“Not only the case with yours. When I was a young hand at reviewing I
used to find that a frightful pitfall—dilating upon subjects I met
with, which were novelties to me, and finding afterwards they had been
exhausted by the thinking world when I was in pinafores.”
“That is delightful. Whenever I find you have done a foolish thing I am
glad, because it seems to bring you a little nearer to me, who have
done many.” And Elfride thought again of her enemy asleep under the
deck they trod.
All up the coast, prominences singled themselves out from recesses.
Then a rosy sky spread over the eastern sea and behind the low line of
land, flinging its livery in dashes upon the thin airy clouds in that
direction. Every projection on the land seemed now so many fingers
anxious to catch a little of the liquid light thrown so prodigally over
the sky, and after a fantastic time of lustrous yellows in the east,
the higher elevations along the shore were flooded with the same hues.
The bluff and bare contours of Start Point caught the brightest,
earliest glow of all, and so also did the sides of its white
lighthouse, perched upon a shelf in its precipitous front like a
mediaeval saint in a niche. Their lofty neighbour Bolt Head on the left
remained as yet ungilded, and retained its gray.
Then up came the sun, as it were in jerks, just to seaward of the
easternmost point of land, flinging out a Jacob’s-ladder path of light
from itself to Elfride and Knight, and coating them with rays in a few
minutes. The inferior dignitaries of the shore—Froward Point, Berry
Head, and Prawle—all had acquired their share of the illumination ere
this, and at length the very smallest protuberance of wave, cliff, or
inlet, even to the innermost recesses of the lovely valley of the Dart,
had its portion; and sunlight, now the common possession of all, ceased
to be the wonderful and coveted thing it had been a short half hour
before.
After breakfast, Plymouth arose into view, and grew distincter to their
nearing vision, the Breakwater appearing like a streak of phosphoric
light upon the surface of the sea. Elfride looked furtively around for
Mrs. Jethway, but could discern no shape like hers. Afterwards, in the
bustle of landing, she looked again with the same result, by which time
the woman had probably glided upon the quay unobserved. Expanding with
a sense of relief, Elfride waited whilst Knight looked to their
luggage, and then saw her father approaching through the crowd,
twirling his walking-stick to catch their attention. Elbowing their way
to him they all entered the town, which smiled as sunny a smile upon
Elfride as it had done between one and two years earlier, when she had
entered it at precisely the same hour as the bride-elect of Stephen
Smith.
Chapter XXX
“Vassal unto Love.”
Elfride clung closer to Knight as day succeeded day. Whatever else
might admit of question, there could be no dispute that the allegiance
she bore him absorbed her whole soul and existence. A greater than
Stephen had arisen, and she had left all to follow him.
The unreserved girl was never chary of letting her lover discover how
much she admired him. She never once held an idea in opposition to any
one of his, or insisted on any point with him, or showed any
independence, or held her own on any subject. His lightest whim she
respected and obeyed as law, and if, expressing her opinion on a
matter, he took up the subject and differed from her, she instantly
threw down her own opinion as wrong and untenable. Even her ambiguities
and espieglerie were but media of the same manifestation; acted
charades, embodying the words of her prototype, the tender and
susceptible daughter-in-law of Naomi: “Let me find favour in thy sight,
my lord; for that thou hast comforted me, and for that thou hast spoken
friendly unto thine handmaid.”
She was syringing the plants one wet day in the greenhouse. Knight was