A pair of blue eyes
minutes, as if undecided how to act. Determining to wait, she sat down
on a chair. The minutes drew on, and after sitting on the thorns of
impatience for half an hour, she searched her pocket, took therefrom a
letter, and tore off the blank leaf. Then taking out a pencil she wrote
upon the paper:
“DEAR MRS. JETHWAY,—I have been to visit you. I wanted much to see you,
but I cannot wait any longer. I came to beg you not to execute the
threats you have repeated to me. Do not, I beseech you, Mrs. Jethway,
let any one know I ran away from home! It would ruin me with him, and
break my heart. I will do anything for you, if you will be kind to me.
In the name of our common womanhood, do not, I implore you, make a
scandal of me.—Yours, E. SWANCOURT.”
She folded the note cornerwise, directed it, and placed it on the
table. Then again drawing the hood over her curly head she emerged
silently as she had come.
Whilst this episode had been in action at Mrs. Jethway’s cottage,
Knight had gone from the dining-room into the drawing-room, and found
Mrs. Swancourt there alone.
“Elfride has vanished upstairs or somewhere,” she said.
“And I have been reading an article in an old number of the PRESENT
that I lighted on by chance a short time ago; it is an article you once
told us was yours. Well, Harry, with due deference to your literary
powers, allow me to say that this effusion is all nonsense, in my
opinion.”
“What is it about?” said Knight, taking up the paper and reading.
“There: don’t get red about it. Own that experience has taught you to
be more charitable. I have never read such unchivalrous sentiments in
my life—from a man, I mean. There, I forgive you; it was before you
knew Elfride.”
“Oh yes,” said Knight, looking up. “I remember now. The text of that
sermon was not my own at all, but was suggested to me by a young man
named Smith—the same whom I have mentioned to you as coming from this
parish. I thought the idea rather ingenious at the time, and enlarged
it to the weight of a few guineas, because I had nothing else in my
head.”
“Which idea do you call the text? I am curious to know that.”
“Well, this,” said Knight, somewhat unwillingly. “That experience
teaches, and your sweetheart, no less than your tailor, is necessarily
very imperfect in her duties, if you are her first patron: and
conversely, the sweetheart who is graceful under the initial kiss must
be supposed to have had some practice in the trade.”
“And do you mean to say that you wrote that upon the strength of
another man’s remark, without having tested it by practice?”
“Yes—indeed I do.”
“Then I think it was uncalled for and unfair. And how do you know it is
true? I expect you regret it now.”
“Since you bring me into a serious mood, I will speak candidly. I do
believe that remark to be perfectly true, and, having written it, I
would defend it anywhere. But I do often regret having ever written it,
as well as others of the sort. I have grown older since, and I find
such a tone of writing is calculated to do harm in the world. Every
literary Jack becomes a gentleman if he can only pen a few indifferent
satires upon womankind: women themselves, too, have taken to the trick;
and so, upon the whole, I begin to be rather ashamed of my companions.”
“Ah, Henry, you have fallen in love since and it makes a difference,”
said Mrs. Swancourt with a faint tone of banter.
“That’s true; but that is not my reason.”
“Having found that, in a case of your own experience, a so-called goose
was a swan, it seems absurd to deny such a possibility in other men’s
experiences.”
“You can hit palpably, cousin Charlotte,” said Knight. “You are like
the boy who puts a stone inside his snowball, and I shall play with you
no longer. Excuse me—I am going for my evening stroll.”
Though Knight had spoken jestingly, this incident and conversation had
caused him a sudden depression. Coming, rather singularly, just after
his discovery that Elfride had known what it was to love warmly before
she had known him, his mind dwelt upon the subject, and the familiar
pipe he smoked, whilst pacing up and down the shrubbery-path, failed to
be a solace. He thought again of those idle words—hitherto quite
forgotten—about the first kiss of a girl, and the theory seemed more
than reasonable. Of course their sting now lay in their bearing on
Elfride.
Elfride, under Knight’s kiss, had certainly been a very different woman
from herself under Stephen’s. Whether for good or for ill, she had
marvellously well learnt a betrothed lady’s part; and the fascinating
finish of her deportment in this second campaign did probably arise
from her unreserved encouragement of Stephen. Knight, with all the
rapidity of jealous sensitiveness, pounced upon some words she had
inadvertently let fall about an earring, which he had only partially
understood at the time. It was during that “initial kiss” by the little
waterfall:
“We must be careful. I lost the other by doing this!”
A flush which had in it as much of wounded pride as of sorrow, passed
over Knight as he thought of what he had so frequently said to her in
his simplicity. “I always meant to be the first comer in a woman’s
heart, fresh lips or none for me.” How childishly blind he must have
seemed to this mere girl! How she must have laughed at him inwardly! He
absolutely writhed as he thought of the confession she had wrung from
him on the boat in the darkness of night. The one conception which had
sustained his dignity when drawn out of his shell on that occasion—that
of her charming ignorance of all such matters—how absurd it was!
This man, whose imagination had been fed up to preternatural size by
lonely study and silent observations of his kind—whose emotions had
been drawn out long and delicate by his seclusion, like plants in a
cellar—was now absolutely in pain. Moreover, several years of poetic
study, and, if the truth must be told, poetic efforts, had tended to
develop the affective side of his constitution still further, in
proportion to his active faculties. It was his belief in the absolute
newness of blandishment to Elfride which had constituted her primary
charm. He began to think it was as hard to be earliest in a woman’s
heart as it was to be first in the Pool of Bethesda.
That Knight should have been thus constituted: that Elfride’s second
lover should not have been one of the great mass of bustling mankind,
little given to introspection, whose good-nature might have compensated
for any lack of appreciativeness, was the chance of things. That her
throbbing, self-confounding, indiscreet heart should have to defend
itself unaided against the keen scrutiny and logical power which
Knight, now that his suspicions were awakened, would sooner or later be
sure to exercise against her, was her misfortune. A miserable
incongruity was apparent in the circumstance of a strong mind
practising its unerring archery upon a heart which the owner of that
mind loved better than his own.
Elfride’s docile devotion to Knight was now its own enemy. Clinging to
him so dependently, she taught him in time to presume upon that
devotion—a lesson men are not slow to learn. A slight rebelliousness
occasionally would have done him no harm, and would have been a world
of advantage to her. But she idolized him, and was proud to be his
bond-servant.
Chapter XXXI
“A worm i’ the bud.”
One day the reviewer said, “Let us go to the cliffs again, Elfride;”
and, without consulting her wishes, he moved as if to start at once.
“The cliff of our dreadful adventure?” she inquired, with a shudder.
“Death stares me in the face in the person of that cliff.”
Nevertheless, so entirely had she sunk her individuality in his that
the remark was not uttered as an expostulation, and she immediately
prepared to accompany him.
“No, not that place,” said Knight. “It is ghastly to me, too. That
other, I mean; what is its name?—Windy Beak.”
Windy Beak was the second cliff in height along that coast, and, as is
frequently the case with the natural features of the globe no less than
with the intellectual features of men, it enjoyed the reputation of
being the first. Moreover, it was the cliff to which Elfride had ridden
with Stephen Smith, on a well-remembered morning of his summer visit.
So, though thought of the former cliff had caused her to shudder at the
perils to which her lover and herself had there been exposed, by being
associated with Knight only it was not so objectionable as Windy Beak.
That place was worse than gloomy, it was a perpetual reproach to her.
But not liking to refuse, she said, “It is further than the other
cliff.”
“Yes; but you can ride.”
“And will you too?”
“No, I’ll walk.”
A duplicate of her original arrangement with Stephen. Some fatality
must be hanging over her head. But she ceased objecting.
“Very well, Harry, I’ll ride,” she said meekly.
A quarter of an hour later she was in the saddle. But how different the
mood from that of the former time. She had, indeed, given up her
position as queen of the less to be vassal of the greater. Here was no
showing off now; no scampering out of sight with Pansy, to perplex and
tire her companion; no saucy remarks on LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
Elfride was burdened with the very intensity of her love.
Knight did most of the talking along the journey. Elfride silently
listened, and entirely resigned herself to the motions of the ambling
horse upon which she sat, alternately rising and sinking gently, like a
sea bird upon a sea wave.
When they had reached the limit of a quadruped’s possibilities in
walking, Knight tenderly lifted her from the saddle, tied the horse,
and rambled on with her to the seat in the rock. Knight sat down, and
drew Elfride deftly beside him, and they looked over the sea.
Two or three degrees above that melancholy and eternally level line,
the ocean horizon, hung a sun of brass, with no visible rays, in a sky
of ashen hue. It was a sky the sun did not illuminate or enkindle, as
is usual at sunsets. This sheet of sky was met by the salt mass of gray
water, flecked here and there with white. A waft of dampness
occasionally rose to their faces, which was probably rarefied spray
from the blows of the sea upon the foot of the cliff.
Elfride wished it could be a longer time ago that she had sat there
with Stephen as her lover, and agreed to be his wife. The significant
closeness of that time to the present was another item to add to the
list of passionate fears which were chronic with her now.
Yet Knight was very tender this evening, and sustained her close to him
as they sat.
Not a word had been uttered by either since sitting down, when Knight
said musingly, looking still afar—
“I wonder if any lovers in past years ever sat here with arms locked,
as we do now. Probably they have, for the place seems formed for a
seat.”
Her recollection of a well-known pair who had, and the much-talked-of
loss which had ensued therefrom, and how the young man had been sent
back to look for the missing article, led Elfride to glance down to her
side, and behind her back. Many people who lose a trinket involuntarily
give a momentary look for it in passing the spot ever so long
afterwards. They do not often find it. Elfride, in turning her head,
saw something shine weakly from a crevice in the rocky sedile. Only for
a few minutes during the day did the sun light the alcove to its
innermost rifts and slits, but these were the minutes now, and its
level rays did Elfride the good or evil turn of revealing the lost
ornament.
Elfride’s thoughts instantly reverted to the words she had
unintentionally uttered upon what had been going on when the earring
was lost. And she was immediately seized with a misgiving that Knight,