A pair of blue eyes
the two living heads of Knight and Elfride were opaque and prominent
blots. Presently the moon became covered by a cloud, and the
iridescence died away.
“There, it is gone!” said Knight. “I’ve been thinking, Elfride, that
this place we sit on is where we may hope to kneel together soon. But I
am restless and uneasy, and you know why.”
Before she replied the moonlight returned again, irradiating that
portion of churchyard within their view. It brightened the near part
first, and against the background which the cloud-shadow had not yet
uncovered stood, brightest of all, a white tomb—the tomb of young
Jethway.
Knight, still alive on the subject of Elfride’s secret, thought of her
words concerning the kiss that it once had occurred on a tomb in this
churchyard.
“Elfride,” he said, with a superficial archness which did not half
cover an undercurrent of reproach, “do you know, I think you might have
told me voluntarily about that past—of kisses and betrothing—without
giving me so much uneasiness and trouble. Was that the tomb you alluded
to as having sat on with him?”
She waited an instant. “Yes,” she said.
The correctness of his random shot startled Knight; though, considering
that almost all the other memorials in the churchyard were upright
headstones upon which nobody could possibly sit, it was not so
wonderful.
Elfride did not even now go on with the explanation her exacting lover
wished to have, and her reticence began to irritate him as before. He
was inclined to read her a lecture.
“Why don’t you tell me all?” he said somewhat indignantly. “Elfride,
there is not a single subject upon which I feel more strongly than upon
this—that everything ought to be cleared up between two persons before
they become husband and wife. See how desirable and wise such a course
is, in order to avoid disagreeable contingencies in the form of
discoveries afterwards. For, Elfride, a secret of no importance at all
may be made the basis of some fatal misunderstanding only because it is
discovered, and not confessed. They say there never was a couple of
whom one had not some secret the other never knew or was intended to
know. This may or may not be true; but if it be true, some have been
happy in spite rather than in consequence of it. If a man were to see
another man looking significantly at his wife, and she were blushing
crimson and appearing startled, do you think he would be so well
satisfied with, for instance, her truthful explanation that once, to
her great annoyance, she accidentally fainted into his arms, as if she
had said it voluntarily long ago, before the circumstance occurred
which forced it from her? Suppose that admirer you spoke of in
connection with the tomb yonder should turn up, and bother me. It would
embitter our lives, if I were then half in the dark, as I am now!”
Knight spoke the latter sentences with growing force.
“It cannot be,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked sharply.
Elfride was distressed to find him in so stern a mood, and she
trembled. In a confusion of ideas, probably not intending a wilful
prevarication, she answered hurriedly—
“If he’s dead, how can you meet him?”
“Is he dead? Oh, that’s different altogether!” said Knight, immensely
relieved. “But, let me see—what did you say about that tomb and him?”
“That’s his tomb,” she continued faintly.
“What! was he who lies buried there the man who was your lover?” Knight
asked in a distinct voice.
“Yes; and I didn’t love him or encourage him.”
“But you let him kiss you—you said so, you know, Elfride.”
She made no reply.
“Why,” said Knight, recollecting circumstances by degrees, “you surely
said you were in some degree engaged to him—and of course you were if
he kissed you. And now you say you never encouraged him. And I have
been fancying you said—I am almost sure you did—that you were sitting
with him ON that tomb. Good God!” he cried, suddenly starting up in
anger, “are you telling me untruths? Why should you play with me like
this? I’ll have the right of it. Elfride, we shall never be happy!
There’s a blight upon us, or me, or you, and it must be cleared off
before we marry.” Knight moved away impetuously as if to leave her.
She jumped up and clutched his arm
“Don’t go, Harry—don’t!
“Tell me, then,” said Knight sternly. “And remember this, no more fibs,
or, upon my soul, I shall hate you. Heavens! that I should come to
this, to be made a fool of by a girl’s untruths——”
“Don’t, don’t treat me so cruelly! O Harry, Harry, have pity, and
withdraw those dreadful words! I am truthful by nature—I am—and I don’t
know how I came to make you misunderstand! But I was frightened!” She
quivered so in her perturbation that she shook him with her {Note:
sentence incomplete in text.}
“Did you say you were sitting on that tomb?” he asked moodily.
“Yes; and it was true.”
“Then how, in the name of Heaven, can a man sit upon his own tomb?”
“That was another man. Forgive me, Harry, won’t you?”
“What, a lover in the tomb and a lover on it?”
“Oh—Oh—yes!”
“Then there were two before me?
“I—suppose so.”
“Now, don’t be a silly woman with your supposing—I hate all that,” said
Knight contemptuously almost. “Well, we learn strange things. I don’t
know what I might have done—no man can say into what shape
circumstances may warp him—but I hardly think I should have had the
conscience to accept the favours of a new lover whilst sitting over the
poor remains of the old one; upon my soul, I don’t.” Knight, in moody
meditation, continued looking towards the tomb, which stood staring
them in the face like an avenging ghost.
“But you wrong me—Oh, so grievously!” she cried. “I did not meditate
any such thing: believe me, Harry, I did not. It only happened so—quite
of itself.”
“Well, I suppose you didn’t INTEND such a thing,” he said. “Nobody ever
does,” he sadly continued.
“And him in the grave I never once loved.”
“I suppose the second lover and you, as you sat there, vowed to be
faithful to each other for ever?”
Elfride only replied by quick heavy breaths, showing she was on the
brink of a sob.
“You don’t choose to be anything but reserved, then?” he said
imperatively.
“Of course we did,” she responded.
“‘Of course!’ You seem to treat the subject very lightly?”
“It is past, and is nothing to us now.”
“Elfride, it is a nothing which, though it may make a careless man
laugh, cannot but make a genuine one grieve. It is a very gnawing pain.
Tell me straight through—all of it.”
“Never. O Harry! how can you expect it when so little of it makes you
so harsh with me?”
“Now, Elfride, listen to this. You know that what you have told only
jars the subtler fancies in one, after all. The feeling I have about it
would be called, and is, mere sentimentality; and I don’t want you to
suppose that an ordinary previous engagement of a straightforward kind
would make any practical difference in my love, or my wish to make you
my wife. But you seem to have more to tell, and that’s where the wrong
is. Is there more?”
“Not much more,” she wearily answered.
Knight preserved a grave silence for a minute. “‘Not much more,’” he
said at last. “I should think not, indeed!” His voice assumed a low and
steady pitch. “Elfride, you must not mind my saying a strange-sounding
thing, for say it I shall. It is this: that if there WERE much more to
add to an account which already includes all the particulars that a
broken marriage engagement could possibly include with propriety, it
must be some exceptional thing which might make it impossible for me or
any one else to love you and marry you.”
Knight’s disturbed mood led him much further than he would have gone in
a quieter moment. And, even as it was, had she been assertive to any
degree he would not have been so peremptory; and had she been a
stronger character—more practical and less imaginative—she would have
made more use of her position in his heart to influence him. But the
confiding tenderness which had won him is ever accompanied by a sort of
self-committal to the stream of events, leading every such woman to
trust more to the kindness of fate for good results than to any
argument of her own.
“Well, well,” he murmured cynically; “I won’t say it is your fault: it
is my ill-luck, I suppose. I had no real right to question
you—everybody would say it was presuming. But when we have
misunderstood, we feel injured by the subject of our misunderstanding.
You never said you had had nobody else here making love to you, so why
should I blame you? Elfride, I beg your pardon.”
“No, no! I would rather have your anger than that cool aggrieved
politeness. Do drop that, Harry! Why should you inflict that upon me?
It reduces me to the level of a mere acquaintance.”
“You do that with me. Why not confidence for confidence?”
“Yes; but I didn’t ask you a single question with regard to your past:
I didn’t wish to know about it. All I cared for was that, wherever you
came from, whatever you had done, whoever you had loved, you were mine
at last. Harry, if originally you had known I had loved, would you
never have cared for me?”
“I won’t quite say that. Though I own that the idea of your
inexperienced state had a great charm for me. But I think this: that if
I had known there was any phase of your past love you would refuse to
reveal if I asked to know it, I should never have loved you.”
Elfride sobbed bitterly. “Am I such a—mere characterless toy—as to have
no attrac—tion in me, apart from—freshness? Haven’t I brains? You
said—I was clever and ingenious in my thoughts, and—isn’t that
anything? Have I not some beauty? I think I have a little—and I know I
have—yes, I do! You have praised my voice, and my manner, and my
accomplishments. Yet all these together are so much rubbish because
I—accidentally saw a man before you!”
“Oh, come, Elfride. ‘Accidentally saw a man’ is very cool. You loved
him, remember.”
—“And loved him a little!”
“And refuse now to answer the simple question how it ended. Do you
refuse still, Elfride?”
“You have no right to question me so—you said so. It is unfair. Trust
me as I trust you.”
“That’s not at all.”
“I shall not love you if you are so cruel. It is cruel to me to argue
like this.”
“Perhaps it is. Yes, it is. I was carried away by my feeling for you.
Heaven knows that I didn’t mean to; but I have loved you so that I have
used you badly.”
“I don’t mind it, Harry!” she instantly answered, creeping up and
nestling against him; “and I will not think at all that you used me
harshly if you will forgive me, and not be vexed with me any more? I do
wish I had been exactly as you thought I was, but I could not help it,
you know. If I had only known you had been coming, what a nunnery I
would have lived in to have been good enough for you!”
“Well, never mind,” said Knight; and he turned to go. He endeavoured to
speak sportively as they went on. “Diogenes Laertius says that
philosophers used voluntarily to deprive themselves of sight to be
uninterrupted in their meditations. Men, becoming lovers, ought to do
the same thing.”
“Why?—but never mind—I don’t want to know. Don’t speak laconically to
me,” she said with deprecation.
“Why? Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their
idol was second-hand.”
She looked down and sighed; and they passed out of the crumbling old
place, and slowly crossed to the churchyard entrance. Knight was not
himself, and he could not pretend to be. She had not told all.
He supported her lightly over the stile, and was practically as
attentive as a lover could be. But there had passed away a glory, and
the dream was not as it had been of yore. Perhaps Knight was not shaped
by Nature for a marrying man. Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards