A pair of blue eyes
Stephen until to-day had unhesitatingly held that she grew tired of him
and turned to Knight; but he did not like to advance the statement now,
or even to think the thought. To fancy otherwise accorded better with
the hope to which Knight’s estrangement had given birth: that love for
his friend was not the direct cause, but a result of her suspension of
love for himself.
“Such a matter must not be allowed to breed discord between us,” Knight
returned, relapsing into a manner which concealed all his true feeling,
as if confidence now was intolerable. “I do see that your reticence
towards me in the vault may have been dictated by prudential
considerations.” He concluded artificially, “It was a strange thing
altogether; but not of much importance, I suppose, at this distance of
time; and it does not concern me now, though I don’t mind hearing your
story.”
These words from Knight, uttered with such an air of renunciation and
apparent indifference, prompted Smith to speak on—perhaps with a little
complacency—of his old secret engagement to Elfride. He told the
details of its origin, and the peremptory words and actions of her
father to extinguish their love.
Knight persevered in the tone and manner of a disinterested outsider.
It had become more than ever imperative to screen his emotions from
Stephen’s eye; the young man would otherwise be less frank, and their
meeting would be again embittered. What was the use of untoward
candour?
Stephen had now arrived at the point in his ingenuous narrative where
he left the vicarage because of her father’s manner. Knight’s interest
increased. Their love seemed so innocent and childlike thus far.
“It is a nice point in casuistry,” he observed, “to decide whether you
were culpable or not in not telling Swancourt that your friends were
parishioners of his. It was only human nature to hold your tongue under
the circumstances. Well, what was the result of your dismissal by him?”
“That we agreed to be secretly faithful. And to insure this we thought
we would marry.”
Knight’s suspense and agitation rose higher when Stephen entered upon
this phase of the subject.
“Do you mind telling on?” he said, steadying his manner of speech.
“Oh, not at all.”
Then Stephen gave in full the particulars of the meeting with Elfride
at the railway station; the necessity they were under of going to
London, unless the ceremony were to be postponed. The long journey of
the afternoon and evening; her timidity and revulsion of feeling; its
culmination on reaching London; the crossing over to the down-platform
and their immediate departure again, solely in obedience to her wish;
the journey all night; their anxious watching for the dawn; their
arrival at St. Launce’s at last—were detailed. And he told how a
village woman named Jethway was the only person who recognized them,
either going or coming; and how dreadfully this terrified Elfride. He
told how he waited in the fields whilst this then reproachful
sweetheart went for her pony, and how the last kiss he ever gave her
was given a mile out of the town, on the way to Endelstow.
These things Stephen related with a will. He believed that in doing so
he established word by word the reasonableness of his claim to Elfride.
“Curse her! curse that woman!—that miserable letter that parted us! O
God!”
Knight began pacing the room again, and uttered this at further end.
“What did you say?” said Stephen, turning round.
“Say? Did I say anything? Oh, I was merely thinking about your story,
and the oddness of my having a fancy for the same woman afterwards. And
that now I—I have forgotten her almost; and neither of us care about
her, except just as a friend, you know, eh?”
Knight still continued at the further end of the room, somewhat in
shadow.
“Exactly,” said Stephen, inwardly exultant, for he was really deceived
by Knight’s off-hand manner.
Yet he was deceived less by the completeness of Knight’s disguise than
by the persuasive power which lay in the fact that Knight had never
before deceived him in anything. So this supposition that his companion
had ceased to love Elfride was an enormous lightening of the weight
which had turned the scale against him.
“Admitting that Elfride COULD love another man after you,” said the
elder, under the same varnish of careless criticism, “she was none the
worse for that experience.”
“The worse? Of course she was none the worse.”
“Did you ever think it a wild and thoughtless thing for her to do?”
“Indeed, I never did,” said Stephen. “I persuaded her. She saw no harm
in it until she decided to return, nor did I; nor was there, except to
the extent of indiscretion.”
“Directly she thought it was wrong she would go no further?”
“That was it. I had just begun to think it wrong too.”
“Such a childish escapade might have been misrepresented by any
evil-disposed person, might it not?”
“It might; but I never heard that it was. Nobody who really knew all
the circumstances would have done otherwise than smile. If all the
world had known it, Elfride would still have remained the only one who
thought her action a sin. Poor child, she always persisted in thinking
so, and was frightened more than enough.”
“Stephen, do you love her now?”
“Well, I like her; I always shall, you know,” he said evasively, and
with all the strategy love suggested. “But I have not seen her for so
long that I can hardly be expected to love her. Do you love her still?”
“How shall I answer without being ashamed? What fickle beings we men
are, Stephen! Men may love strongest for a while, but women love
longest. I used to love her—in my way, you know.”
“Yes, I understand. Ah, and I used to love her in my way. In fact, I
loved her a good deal at one time; but travel has a tendency to
obliterate early fancies.”
“It has—it has, truly.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in this conversation was the
circumstance that, though each interlocutor had at first his suspicions
of the other’s abiding passion awakened by several little acts, neither
would allow himself to see that his friend might now be speaking
deceitfully as well as he.
“Stephen.” resumed Knight, “now that matters are smooth between us, I
think I must leave you. You won’t mind my hurrying off to my quarters?”
“You’ll stay to some sort of supper surely? didn’t you come to dinner!”
“You must really excuse me this once.”
“Then you’ll drop in to breakfast to-morrow.”
“I shall be rather pressed for time.”
“An early breakfast, which shall interfere with nothing?”
“I’ll come,” said Knight, with as much readiness as it was possible to
graft upon a huge stock of reluctance. “Yes, early; eight o’clock say,
as we are under the same roof.”
“Any time you like. Eight it shall be.”
And Knight left him. To wear a mask, to dissemble his feelings as he
had in their late miserable conversation, was such torture that he
could support it no longer. It was the first time in Knight’s life that
he had ever been so entirely the player of a part. And the man he had
thus deceived was Stephen, who had docilely looked up to him from youth
as a superior of unblemished integrity.
He went to bed, and allowed the fever of his excitement to rage
uncontrolled. Stephen—it was only he who was the rival—only Stephen!
There was an anti-climax of absurdity which Knight, wretched and
conscience-stricken as he was, could not help recognizing. Stephen was
but a boy to him. Where the great grief lay was in perceiving that the
very innocence of Elfride in reading her little fault as one so grave
was what had fatally misled him. Had Elfride, with any degree of
coolness, asserted that she had done no harm, the poisonous breath of
the dead Mrs. Jethway would have been inoperative. Why did he not make
his little docile girl tell more? If on that subject he had only
exercised the imperativeness customary with him on others, all might
have been revealed. It smote his heart like a switch when he remembered
how gently she had borne his scourging speeches, never answering him
with a single reproach, only assuring him of her unbounded love.
Knight blessed Elfride for her sweetness, and forgot her fault. He
pictured with a vivid fancy those fair summer scenes with her. He again
saw her as at their first meeting, timid at speaking, yet in her
eagerness to be explanatory borne forward almost against her will. How
she would wait for him in green places, without showing any of the
ordinary womanly affectations of indifference! How proud she was to be
seen walking with him, bearing legibly in her eyes the thought that he
was the greatest genius in the world!
He formed a resolution; and after that could make pretence of slumber
no longer. Rising and dressing himself, he sat down and waited for day.
That night Stephen was restless too. Not because of the unwontedness of
a return to English scenery; not because he was about to meet his
parents, and settle down for awhile to English cottage life. He was
indulging in dreams, and for the nonce the warehouses of Bombay and the
plains and forts of Poonah were but a shadow’s shadow. His dream was
based on this one atom of fact: Elfride and Knight had become
separated, and their engagement was as if it had never been. Their
rupture must have occurred soon after Stephen’s discovery of the fact
of their union; and, Stephen went on to think, what so probable as that
a return of her errant affection to himself was the cause?
Stephen’s opinions in this matter were those of a lover, and not the
balanced judgment of an unbiassed spectator. His naturally sanguine
spirit built hope upon hope, till scarcely a doubt remained in his mind
that her lingering tenderness for him had in some way been perceived by
Knight, and had provoked their parting.
To go and see Elfride was the suggestion of impulses it was impossible
to withstand. At any rate, to run down from St. Launce’s to Castle
Poterel, a distance of less than twenty miles, and glide like a ghost
about their old haunts, making stealthy inquiries about her, would be a
fascinating way of passing the first spare hours after reaching home on
the day after the morrow.
He was now a richer man than heretofore, standing on his own bottom;
and the definite position in which he had rooted himself nullified old
local distinctions. He had become illustrious, even sanguine clarus,
judging from the tone of the worthy Mayor of St. Launce’s.
Chapter XXXIX
“Each to the loved one’s side.”
The friends and rivals breakfasted together the next morning. Not a
word was said on either side upon the matter discussed the previous
evening so glibly and so hollowly. Stephen was absorbed the greater
part of the time in wishing he were not forced to stay in town yet
another day.
“I don’t intend to leave for St. Launce’s till to-morrow, as you know,”
he said to Knight at the end of the meal. “What are you going to do
with yourself to-day?”
“I have an engagement just before ten,” said Knight deliberately; “and
after that time I must call upon two or three people.”
“I’ll look for you this evening,” said Stephen.
“Yes, do. You may as well come and dine with me; that is, if we can
meet. I may not sleep in London to-night; in fact, I am absolutely
unsettled as to my movements yet. However, the first thing I am going
to do is to get my baggage shifted from this place to Bede’s Inn.
Good-bye for the present. I’ll write, you know, if I can’t meet you.”
It now wanted a quarter to nine o’clock. When Knight was gone, Stephen
felt yet more impatient of the circumstance that another day would have
to drag itself away wearily before he could set out for that spot of
earth whereon a soft thought of him might perhaps be nourished still.