A pair of blue eyes
am sure I cannot understand why you behave so.”
“Nor I why you do. I have always been grateful to you, and as far as I
am concerned we need never have become so estranged as we have.”
“And have I ever been anything but well-disposed towards you, Stephen?
Surely you know that I have not! The system of reserve began with you:
you know that.”
“No, no! You altogether mistake our position. You were always from the
first reserved to me, though I was confidential to you. That was, I
suppose, the natural issue of our differing positions in life. And when
I, the pupil, became reserved like you, the master, you did not like
it. However, I was going to ask you to come round and see me.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At the Grosvenor Hotel, Pimlico.”
“So am I.”
“That’s convenient, not to say odd. Well, I am detained in London for a
day or two; then I am going down to see my father and mother, who live
at St. Launce’s now. Will you see me this evening?”
“I may; but I will not promise. I was wishing to be alone for an hour
or two; but I shall know where to find you, at any rate. Good-bye.”
Chapter XXXVIII
“Jealousy is cruel as the grave.”
Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and
once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the distractions of
his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight had lingered
on in him. Perhaps this staunchness was because Knight ever treated him
as a mere disciple—even to snubbing him sometimes; and had at last,
though unwittingly, inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all, that
of taking away his sweetheart. The emotional side of his constitution
was built rather after a feminine than a male model; and that
tremendous wound from Knight’s hand may have tended to keep alive a
warmth which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.
Knight, on his part, was vexed, after they had parted, that he had not
taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner. Those words which
Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior claim to Elfride,
would, if uttered when the man was younger, have provoked such a query
as, “Come, tell me all about it, my lad,” from Knight, and Stephen
would straightway have delivered himself of all he knew on the subject.
Stephen the ingenuous boy, though now obliterated externally by Stephen
the contriving man, returned to Knight’s memory vividly that afternoon.
He was at present but a sojourner in London; and after attending to the
two or three matters of business which remained to be done that day, he
walked abstractedly into the gloomy corridors of the British Museum for
the half-hour previous to their closing. That meeting with Smith had
reunited the present with the past, closing up the chasm of his absence
from England as if it had never existed, until the final circumstances
of his previous time of residence in London formed but a yesterday to
the circumstances now. The conflict that then had raged in him
concerning Elfride Swancourt revived, strengthened by its sleep.
Indeed, in those many months of absence, though quelling the intention
to make her his wife, he had never forgotten that she was the type of
woman adapted to his nature; and instead of trying to obliterate
thoughts of her altogether, he had grown to regard them as an infirmity
it was necessary to tolerate.
Knight returned to his hotel much earlier in the evening than he would
have done in the ordinary course of things. He did not care to think
whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had
slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance, or
from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen
had hastily pronounced, betokening that he knew something more of
Elfride than Knight had supposed.
He made a hasty dinner, inquired for Smith, and soon was ushered into
the young man’s presence, whom he found sitting in front of a
comfortable fire, beside a table spread with a few scientific
periodicals and art reviews.
“I have come to you, after all,” said Knight. “My manner was odd this
morning, and it seemed desirable to call; but that you had too much
sense to notice, Stephen, I know. Put it down to my wanderings in
France and Italy.”
“Don’t say another word, but sit down. I am only too glad to see you
again.”
Stephen would hardly have cared to tell Knight just then that the
minute before Knight was announced he had been reading over some old
letters of Elfride’s. They were not many; and until to-night had been
sealed up, and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk, with a few
other mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels.
The familiar sights and sounds of London, the meeting with his friend,
had with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard
to Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world
had to some extent suspended, though never ruptured. He at first
intended only to look over these letters on the outside; then he read
one; then another; until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to
sad memories. He folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and
instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic
world, had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had
returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.
The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of
its necessity. Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more
intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his
life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his
Maker.
They sat by the fire, chatting on external and random subjects, neither
caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed to
discuss. On the table with the periodicals lay two or three
pocket-books, one of them being open. Knight seeing from the exposed
page that the contents were sketches only, began turning the leaves
over carelessly with his finger. When, some time later, Stephen was out
of the room, Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the
sketches more carefully.
The first crude ideas, pertaining to dwellings of all kinds, were
roughly outlined on the different pages. Antiquities had been copied;
fragments of Indian columns, colossal statues, and outlandish ornament
from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri, were carelessly intruded
upon by outlines of modern doors, windows, roofs, cooking-stoves, and
household furniture; everything, in short, which comes within the range
of a practising architect’s experience, who travels with his eyes open.
Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval
subjects for carving or illumination—heads of Virgins, Saints, and
Prophets.
Stephen was not professedly a free-hand draughtsman, but he drew the
human figure with correctness and skill. In its numerous repetitions on
the sides and edges of the leaves, Knight began to notice a
peculiarity. All the feminine saints had one type of feature. There
were large nimbi and small nimbi about their drooping heads, but the
face was always the same. That profile—how well Knight knew that
profile!
Had there been but one specimen of the familiar countenance, he might
have passed over the resemblance as accidental; but a repetition meant
more. Knight thought anew of Smith’s hasty words earlier in the day,
and looked at the sketches again and again.
On the young man’s entry, Knight said with palpable agitation—
“Stephen, who are those intended for?”
Stephen looked over the book with utter unconcern, “Saints and angels,
done in my leisure moments. They were intended as designs for the
stained glass of an English church.”
“But whom do you idealize by that type of woman you always adopt for
the Virgin?”
“Nobody.”
And then a thought raced along Stephen’s mind and he looked up at his
friend.
The truth is, Stephen’s introduction of Elfride’s lineaments had been
so unconscious that he had not at first understood his companion’s
drift. The hand, like the tongue, easily acquires the trick of
repetition by rote, without calling in the mind to assist at all; and
this had been the case here. Young men who cannot write verses about
their Loves generally take to portraying them, and in the early days of
his attachment Smith had never been weary of outlining Elfride. The
lay-figure of Stephen’s sketches now initiated an adjustment of many
things. Knight had recognized her. The opportunity of comparing notes
had come unsought.
“Elfride Swancourt, to whom I was engaged,” he said quietly.
“Stephen!”
“I know what you mean by speaking like that.”
“Was it Elfride? YOU the man, Stephen?”
“Yes; and you are thinking why did I conceal the fact from you that
time at Endelstow, are you not?”
“Yes, and more—more.”
“I did it for the best; blame me if you will; I did it for the best.
And now say how could I be with you afterwards as I had been before?”
“I don’t know at all; I can’t say.”
Knight remained fixed in thought, and once he murmured—
“I had a suspicion this afternoon that there might be some such meaning
in your words about my taking her away. But I dismissed it. How came
you to know her?” he presently asked, in almost a peremptory tone.
“I went down about the church; years ago now.”
“When you were with Hewby, of course, of course. Well, I can’t
understand it.” His tones rose. “I don’t know what to say, your
hoodwinking me like this for so long!”
“I don’t see that I have hoodwinked you at all.”
“Yes, yes, but”——
Knight arose from his seat, and began pacing up and down the room. His
face was markedly pale, and his voice perturbed, as he said—
“You did not act as I should have acted towards you under those
circumstances. I feel it deeply; and I tell you plainly, I shall never
forget it!”
“What?”
“Your behaviour at that meeting in the family vault, when I told you we
were going to be married. Deception, dishonesty, everywhere; all the
world’s of a piece!”
Stephen did not much like this misconstruction of his motives, even
though it was but the hasty conclusion of a friend disturbed by
emotion.
“I could do no otherwise than I did, with due regard to her,” he said
stiffly.
“Indeed!” said Knight, in the bitterest tone of reproach. “Nor could
you with due regard to her have married her, I suppose! I have
hoped—longed—that HE, who turns out to be YOU, would ultimately have
done that.”
“I am much obliged to you for that hope. But you talk very
mysteriously. I think I had about the best reason anybody could have
had for not doing that.”
“Oh, what reason was it?”
“That I could not.”
“You ought to have made an opportunity; you ought to do so now, in bare
justice to her, Stephen!” cried Knight, carried beyond himself. “That
you know very well, and it hurts and wounds me more than you dream to
find you never have tried to make any reparation to a woman of that
kind—so trusting, so apt to be run away with by her feelings—poor
little fool, so much the worse for her!”
“Why, you talk like a madman! You took her away from me, did you not?”
“Picking up what another throws down can scarcely be called ‘taking
away.’ However, we shall not agree too well upon that subject, so we
had better part.”
“But I am quite certain you misapprehend something most grievously,”
said Stephen, shaken to the bottom of his heart. “What have I done;
tell me? I have lost Elfride, but is that such a sin?”
“Was it her doing, or yours?”
“Was what?”
“That you parted.”
“I will tell you honestly. It was hers entirely, entirely.”
“What was her reason?”
“I can hardly say. But I’ll tell the story without reserve.”