A pair of blue eyes
graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the
forms of the mounds it covered,—themselves irregularly shaped, with no
eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain that all
this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside
were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive
sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with
the effect of a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel.
Detached rocks stood upright afar, a collar of foam girding their
bases, and repeating in its whiteness the plumage of a countless
multitude of gulls that restlessly hovered about.
“Now, Worm!” said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself
were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the
afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen
running up the hill without a bonnet.
Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in
the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during
dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came
into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by
“the purple light” in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by
sending him to measure the height of the tower.
What could she do but come close—so close that a minute arc of her
skirt touched his foot—and asked him how he was getting on with his
sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical
mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the
pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a
preacher.
Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
“Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?”
she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
“Oh no, that I won’t,” said he, staring up.
“Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them
better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and
to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote
it for him. Isn’t it absurd?”
“How clever you must be!” said Stephen. “I couldn’t write a sermon for
the world.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough,” she said, descending from the pulpit and coming
close to him to explain more vividly. “You do it like this. Did you
ever play a game of forfeits called ‘When is it? where is it? what is
it?’”
“No, never.”
“Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing
that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so
on. You put that down under ‘Generally.’ Then you proceed to the First,
Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys—says they are all my
eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being
put in great black brackets, writing opposite, ‘LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE
FARMERS ARE FALLING ASLEEP.’ Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few
Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of
each page, ‘KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN’—I mean,” she added, correcting
herself, “that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he
gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up
a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!”
Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as
if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had
outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught
by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had
the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the
self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two
with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the
church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it
freshens the glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched
Elfride down the hill with a smile.
“You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,” he said, and turned to
Stephen. “But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as
you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.”
“I think Miss Swancourt very clever,” Stephen observed.
“Yes, she is; certainly, she is,” said papa, turning his voice as much
as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. “Now,
Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the
world—not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead
secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job
she makes of them!”
“She can do anything.”
“She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade.
But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!”
“Not a word,” said Smith.
“Look there,” said Mr. Swancourt. “What do you think of my roofing?” He
pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,
“Did you do that, sir?”
“Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I
pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens,
slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We
worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?”
“Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there—hee, hee!” said
William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. “Like slaves, ’a b’lieve—hee,
hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go
straight? Mighty I! There, ’tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to
cuss and let it out, is it, sir?”
“Well—why?”
“Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to
cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.”
“I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.”
“Oh, doan’t I, sir—hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir,
and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there.
Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the
candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the
chancel?”
“Yes; what of that?”
“I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ’twas only
a dog or cat—maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.”
“Ah, I remember.”
“No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ’A was very well to look at; but,
Lord!——”
“Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?”
“—’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow.
’Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat
down upon the chair. ‘Get up, Worm,’ says you, when you seed the chair
go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and
brimstone to t’other end of your shop—all in a passion. ‘Damn the
chair!’ says I. ‘Just what I was thinking,’ says you, sir. ‘I could see
it in your face, sir,’ says I, ‘and I hope you and God will forgi’e me
for saying what you wouldn’t.’ To save your life you couldn’t help
laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay,
I’m as wise as one here and there.”
“I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church
and tower with you,” Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following
morning, “so I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when
you came. I told him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very
intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to know about the
state of the walls. His name is John Smith.”
Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I
will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said
laughingly. “I shall see your figure against the sky.”
“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss
Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,”
he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for
you.”
She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch
him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church
stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his
working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they
both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and
remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine
of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of
moving. More minutes passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered.
It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to
slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.
“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique.
“Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of
with——”
The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
She returned to the porch.
“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?”
she inquired of her father.
“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s
master-mason, John Smith.”
“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak
station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a
childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But
her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect
of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to
its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being
wounded that little hits struck her hard.
It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen
above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a
ruined mosque. Even then Stephen was not true enough to perform what he
was so courteous to promise, and he vanished without making a sign.
He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that his
eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her attitude of
coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and she could no longer
utter feigned words of indifference.
“Ah, you weren’t kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break your
promise,” she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low for her
father’s powers of hearing.
“Forgive, forgive me!” said Stephen with dismay. “I had forgotten—quite
forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.”
“Any further explanation?” said Miss Capricious, pouting.
He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.
“None,” he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.
Chapter V
“Bosom’d high in tufted trees.”
It was breakfast time.
As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of light
from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have stereotyped
themselves in unrelieved shades of gray. The long-armed trees and
shrubs of juniper, cedar, and pine varieties, were grayish black; those
of the broad-leaved sort, together with the herbage, were
grayish-green; the eternal hills and tower behind them were
grayish-brown; the sky, dropping behind all, gray of the purest
melancholy.
Yet in spite of this sombre artistic effect, the morning was not one
which tended to lower the spirits. It was even cheering. For it did not
rain, nor was rain likely to fall for many days to come.
Elfride had turned from the table towards the fire and was idly
elevating a hand-screen before her face, when she heard the click of a
little gate outside.
“Ah, here’s the postman!” she said, as a shuffling, active man came
through an opening in the shrubbery and across the lawn. She vanished,
and met him in the porch, afterwards coming in with her hands behind
her back.
“How many are there? Three for papa, one for Mr. Smith, none for Miss
Swancourt. And, papa, look here, one of yours is from—whom do you
think?—Lord Luxellian. And it has something HARD in it—a lump of