with you; and when I am kind you treat me unfairly.”

“No, no. Don’t say so.”

The origin of their acquaintanceship had been such as to render their
manner towards each other peculiar and uncommon. It was of a kind to
cause them to speak out their minds on any feelings of objection and
difference: to be reticent on gentler matters.

“I have a good mind to go away and never trouble you again,” continued
Knight.

She said nothing, but the eloquent expression of her eyes and wan face
was enough to reproach him for harshness.

“Do you like me to be here, then?” inquired Knight gently.

“Yes,” she said. Fidelity to the old love and truth to the new were
ranged on opposite sides, and truth virtuelessly prevailed.

“Then I’ll stay a little longer,” said Knight.

“Don’t be vexed if I keep by myself a good deal, will you? Perhaps
something may happen, and I may tell you something.”

“Mere coyness,” said Knight to himself; and went away with a lighter
heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces at work in
women at given times, which with some men is an unerring instinct, is
peculiar to minds less direct and honest than Knight’s.

The next evening, about five o’clock, before Knight had returned from a
pilgrimage along the shore, a man walked up to the house. He was a
messenger from Camelton, a town a few miles off, to which place the
railway had been advanced during the summer.

“A telegram for Miss Swancourt, and three and sixpence to pay for the
special messenger.” Miss Swancourt sent out the money, signed the
paper, and opened her letter with a trembling hand. She read:

“Johnson, Liverpool, to Miss Swancourt, Endelstow, near Castle Boterel.

“Amaryllis telegraphed off Holyhead, four o’clock. Expect will dock and
land passengers at Canning’s Basin ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

Her father called her into the study.

“Elfride, who sent you that message?” he asked suspiciously.

“Johnson.” “Who is Johnson, for Heaven’s sake?”

“I don’t know.”

“The deuce you don’t! Who is to know, then?”

“I have never heard of him till now.”

“That’s a singular story, isn’t it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come, come, miss! What was the telegram?”

“Do you really wish to know, papa?”

“Well, I do.”

“Remember, I am a full-grown woman now.”

“Well, what then?”

“Being a woman, and not a child, I may, I think, have a secret or two.”

“You will, it seems.”

“Women have, as a rule.”

“But don’t keep them. So speak out.”

“If you will not press me now, I give my word to tell you the meaning
of all this before the week is past.”

“On your honour?”

“On my honour.”

“Very well. I have had a certain suspicion, you know; and I shall be
glad to find it false. I don’t like your manner lately.”

“At the end of the week, I said, papa.”

Her father did not reply, and Elfride left the room.

She began to look out for the postman again. Three mornings later he
brought an inland letter from Stephen. It contained very little matter,
having been written in haste; but the meaning was bulky enough. Stephen
said that, having executed a commission in Liverpool, he should arrive
at his father’s house, East Endelstow, at five or six o’clock that same
evening; that he would after dusk walk on to the next village, and meet
her, if she would, in the church porch, as in the old time. He proposed
this plan because he thought it unadvisable to call formally at her
house so late in the evening; yet he could not sleep without having
seen her. The minutes would seem hours till he clasped her in his arms.

Elfride was still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled her to
meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent additional weight
to the conviction; for she was markedly one of those who sigh for the
unattainable—to whom, superlatively, a hope is pleasing because not a
possession. And she knew it so well that her intellect was inclined to
exaggerate this defect in herself.

So during the day she looked her duty steadfastly in the face; read
Wordsworth’s astringent yet depressing ode to that Deity; committed
herself to her guidance; and still felt the weight of chance desires.

But she began to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the
sacrifice of herself to the man whom a maidenly sense of propriety
compelled her to regard as her only possible husband. She would meet
him, and do all that lay in her power to marry him. To guard against a
relapse, a note was at once despatched to his father’s cottage for
Stephen on his arrival, fixing an hour for the interview.

Chapter XXI

“On thy cold grey stones, O sea!”

Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence by a
steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey over the
hills from St. Launce’s. He did not know of the extension of the
railway to Camelton.

During the afternoon a thought occurred to Elfride, that from any cliff
along the shore it would be possible to see the steamer some hours
before its arrival.

She had accumulated religious force enough to do an act of
supererogation. The act was this—to go to some point of land and watch
for the ship that brought her future husband home.

It was a cloudy afternoon. Elfride was often diverted from a purpose by
a dull sky; and though she used to persuade herself that the weather
was as fine as possible on the other side of the clouds, she could not
bring about any practical result from this fancy. Now, her mood was
such that the humid sky harmonized with it.

Having ascended and passed over a hill behind the house, Elfride came
to a small stream. She used it as a guide to the coast. It was smaller
than that in her own valley, and flowed altogether at a higher level.
Bushes lined the slopes of its shallow trough; but at the bottom, where
the water ran, was a soft green carpet, in a strip two or three yards
wide.

In winter, the water flowed over the grass; in summer, as now, it
trickled along a channel in the midst.

Elfride had a sensation of eyes regarding her from somewhere. She
turned, and there was Mr. Knight. He had dropped into the valley from
the side of the hill. She felt a thrill of pleasure, and rebelliously
allowed it to exist.

“What utter loneliness to find you in!”

“I am going to the shore by tracking the stream. I believe it empties
itself not far off, in a silver thread of water, over a cascade of
great height.”

“Why do you load yourself with that heavy telescope?”

“To look over the sea with it,” she said faintly.

“I’ll carry it for you to your journey’s end.” And he took the glass
from her unresisting hands. “It cannot be half a mile further. See,
there is the water.” He pointed to a short fragment of level muddy-gray
colour, cutting against the sky.

Elfride had already scanned the small surface of ocean visible, and had
seen no ship.

They walked along in company, sometimes with the brook between them—for
it was no wider than a man’s stride—sometimes close together. The green
carpet grew swampy, and they kept higher up.

One of the two ridges between which they walked dwindled lower and
became insignificant. That on the right hand rose with their advance,
and terminated in a clearly defined edge against the light, as if it
were abruptly sawn off. A little further, and the bed of the rivulet
ended in the same fashion.

They had come to a bank breast-high, and over it the valley was no
longer to be seen. It was withdrawn cleanly and completely. In its
place was sky and boundless atmosphere; and perpendicularly down
beneath them—small and far off—lay the corrugated surface of the
Atlantic.

The small stream here found its death. Running over the precipice it
was dispersed in spray before it was half-way down, and falling like
rain upon projecting ledges, made minute grassy meadows of them. At the
bottom the water-drops soaked away amid the debris of the cliff. This
was the inglorious end of the river.

“What are you looking for? said Knight, following the direction of her
eyes.

She was gazing hard at a black object—nearer to the shore than to the
horizon—from the summit of which came a nebulous haze, stretching like
gauze over the sea.

“The Puffin, a little summer steamboat—from Bristol to Castle Boterel,”
she said. “I think that is it—look. Will you give me the glass?”

Knight pulled open the old-fashioned but powerful telescope, and handed
it to Elfride, who had looked on with heavy eyes.

“I can’t keep it up now,” she said.

“Rest it on my shoulder.”

“It is too high.”

“Under my arm.”

“Too low. You may look instead,” she murmured weakly.

Knight raised the glass to his eye, and swept the sea till the Puffin
entered its field.

“Yes, it is the Puffin—a tiny craft. I can see her figure-head
distinctly—a bird with a beak as big as its head.”

“Can you see the deck?”

“Wait a minute; yes, pretty clearly. And I can see the black forms of
the passengers against its white surface. One of them has taken
something from another—a glass, I think—yes, it is—and he is levelling
it in this direction. Depend upon it we are conspicuous objects against
the sky to them. Now, it seems to rain upon them, and they put on
overcoats and open umbrellas. They vanish and go below—all but that one
who has borrowed the glass. He is a slim young fellow, and still
watches us.”

Elfride grew pale, and shifted her little feet uneasily.

Knight lowered the glass.

“I think we had better return,” he said. “That cloud which is raining
on them may soon reach us. Why, you look ill. How is that?”

“Something in the air affects my face.”

“Those fair cheeks are very fastidious, I fear,” returned Knight
tenderly. “This air would make those rosy that were never so before,
one would think—eh, Nature’s spoilt child?”

Elfride’s colour returned again.

“There is more to see behind us, after all,” said Knight.

She turned her back upon the boat and Stephen Smith, and saw, towering
still higher than themselves, the vertical face of the hill on the
right, which did not project seaward so far as the bed of the valley,
but formed the back of a small cove, and so was visible like a concave
wall, bending round from their position towards the left.

The composition of the huge hill was revealed to its backbone and
marrow here at its rent extremity. It consisted of a vast
stratification of blackish-gray slate, unvaried in its whole height by
a single change of shade.

It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is
called a presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their
actual bulk. A little cliff will impress you powerfully; a great one
not at all. It depends, as with man, upon the countenance of the cliff.

“I cannot bear to look at that cliff,” said Elfride. “It has a horrid
personality, and makes me shudder. We will go.”

“Can you climb?” said Knight. “If so, we will ascend by that path over
the grim old fellow’s brow.”

“Try me,” said Elfride disdainfully. “I have ascended steeper slopes
than that.”

From where they had been loitering, a grassy path wound along inside a
bank, placed as a safeguard for unwary pedestrians, to the top of the
precipice, and over it along the hill in an inland direction.

“Take my arm, Miss Swancourt,” said Knight.

“I can get on better without it, thank you.”

When they were one quarter of the way up, Elfride stopped to take
breath. Knight stretched out his hand.

She took it, and they ascended the remaining slope together. Reaching
the very top, they sat down to rest by mutual consent.

“Heavens, what an altitude!” said Knight between his pants, and looking
far over the sea. The cascade at the bottom of the slope appeared a
mere span in height from where they were now.

Elfride was looking to the left. The steamboat was in full view again,
and by reason of the vast surface of sea their higher position
uncovered it seemed almost close to the shore.

“Over that edge,” said Knight, “where nothing but vacancy appears, is a
moving compact mass. The wind strikes the face of the rock, runs up it,
rises like a fountain to a height far above our heads, curls over us in
an arch, and disperses behind us. In fact, an inverted cascade is
there—as perfect as the Niagara Falls—but rising instead of falling,
and air instead of water. Now look here.”

Knight threw a stone over the bank, aiming it as if to go onward over
the cliff. Reaching the verge, it towered into the air like a bird,
turned back, and alighted on the ground behind them. They themselves
were in a dead calm.

“A boat crosses Niagara immediately at the foot of the falls, where the
water is quite still, the fallen mass curving under it. We are in
precisely the same position with regard to our atmospheric cataract
here. If you run back from the cliff fifty yards, you will be in a
brisk wind. Now I daresay over the bank is a little backward current.”

Knight rose and leant over the bank. No sooner was his head above it
than his hat appeared to be sucked from his head—slipping over his
forehead in a seaward direction.

“That’s the backward eddy, as I told you,” he cried, and vanished over
the little bank after his hat.

Elfride waited one minute; he did not return. She waited another, and
there was no sign of him.

A few drops of rain fell, then a sudden shower.

She arose, and looked over the bank. On the other side were two or
three yards of level ground—then a short steep preparatory slope—then
the verge of the precipice.

On the slope was Knight, his hat on his head. He was on his hands and
knees, trying to climb back to the level ground. The rain had wetted
the shaly surface of the incline. A slight superficial wetting of the
soil hereabout made it far more slippery to stand on than the same soil
thoroughly drenched. The inner substance was still hard, and was
lubricated by the moistened film.

“I find a difficulty in getting back,” said Knight.

Elfride’s heart fell like lead.

“But you can get back?” she wildly inquired.

Knight strove with all his might for two or three minutes, and the
drops of perspiration began to bead his brow.

“No, I am unable to do it,” he answered.

Elfride, by a wrench of thought, forced away from her mind the
sensation that Knight was in bodily danger. But attempt to help him she
must. She ventured upon the treacherous incline, propped herself with
the closed telescope, and gave him her hand before he saw her
movements.

“O Elfride! why did you?” said he. “I am afraid you have only
endangered yourself.”

And as if to prove his statement, in making an endeavour by her
assistance they both slipped lower, and then he was again stayed. His
foot was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the verge of
the precipice. Fixed by this, he steadied her, her head being about a
foot below the beginning of the slope. Elfride had dropped the glass;
it rolled to the edge and vanished over it into a nether sky.

“Hold tightly to me,” he said.

She flung her arms round his neck with such a firm grasp that whilst he
remained it was impossible for her to fall.

“Don’t be flurried,” Knight continued. “So long as we stay above this
block we are perfectly safe. Wait a moment whilst I consider what we
had better do.”

He turned his eyes to the dizzy depths beneath them, and surveyed the
position of affairs.

Two glances told him a tale with ghastly distinctness. It was that,
unless they performed their feat of getting up the slope with the
precision of machines, they were over the edge and whirling in mid-air.

For this purpose it was necessary that he should recover the breath and
strength which his previous efforts had cost him. So he still waited,
and looked in the face of the enemy.

The crest of this terrible natural facade passed among the neighbouring
inhabitants as being seven hundred feet above the water it overhung. It
had been proved by actual measurement to be not a foot less than six
hundred and fifty.

That is to say, it is nearly three times the height of Flamborough,
half as high again as the South Foreland, a hundred feet higher than
Beachy Head—the loftiest promontory on the east or south side of this
island—twice the height of St. Aldhelm’s, thrice as high as the Lizard,
and just double the height of St. Bee’s. One sea-bord point on the
western coast is known to surpass it in altitude, but only by a few
feet. This is Great Orme’s Head, in Caernarvonshire.

And it must be remembered that the cliff exhibits an intensifying
feature which some of those are without—sheer perpendicularity from the
half-tide level.

Yet this remarkable rampart forms no headland: it rather walls in an
inlet—the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far from
being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling
direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into
the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in
the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill,
chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the
precipice the Cliff without a Name.*

* See Preface

What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And upon
this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had formed a kind
of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that of a Hambro’ grape.
Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror
through the lungs.

“This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of the
cliff,” said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid stoical
meditation. “Now what you are to do is this. Clamber up my body till
your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be
able to climb on to level ground.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait whilst you run for assistance.”

“I ought to have done that in the first place, ought I not?”

“I was in the act of slipping, and should have reached no stand-point
without your weight, in all probability. But don’t let us talk. Be
brave, Elfride, and climb.”

She prepared to ascend, saying, “This is the moment I anticipated when
on the tower. I thought it would come!”

“This is not a time for superstition,” said Knight. “Dismiss all that.”

“I will,” she said humbly.

“Now put your foot into my hand: next the other. That’s good—well done.
Hold to my shoulder.”

She placed her feet upon the stirrup he made of his hand, and was high
enough to get a view of the natural surface of the hill over the bank.

“Can you now climb on to level ground?”

“I am afraid not. I will try.”

“What can you see?”

“The sloping common.”

“What upon it?”

“Purple heather and some grass.”

“Nothing more—no man or human being of any kind?”

“Nobody.”

“Now try to get higher in this way. You see that tuft of sea-pink above
you. Get that well into your hand, but don’t trust to it entirely. Then
step upon my shoulder, and I think you will reach the top.”

With trembling limbs she did exactly as he told her. The preternatural
quiet and solemnity of his manner overspread upon herself, and gave her
a courage not her own. She made a spring from the top of his shoulder,
and was up.

Then she turned to look at him.

By an ill fate, the force downwards of her bound, added to his own
weight, had been too much for the block of quartz upon which his feet
depended. It was, indeed, originally an igneous protrusion into the
enormous masses of black strata, which had since been worn away from
the sides of the alien fragment by centuries of frost and rain, and now
left it without much support.

It moved. Knight seized a tuft of sea-pink with each hand.

The quartz rock which had been his salvation was worse than useless
now. It rolled over, out of sight, and away into the same nether sky
that had engulfed the telescope.

One of the tufts by which he held came out at the root, and Knight
began to follow the quartz. It was a terrible moment. Elfride uttered a
low wild wail of agony, bowed her head, and covered her face with her
hands.

Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock
intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet
steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon
these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of
vegetation—the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock
appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight
was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow
being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was
sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but was very
far from offering an adequately flat face to support him.

In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found time
for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.

She lay on her side above him—her fingers clasped. Seeing him again
steady, she jumped upon her feet.

“Now, if I can only save you by running for help!” she cried. “Oh, I
would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver me?” And
she turned away wildly to run for assistance.

“Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?”

“Three-quarters of an hour.”

“That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there
nobody nearer?”

“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”

“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or
stick of any kind on the common?”

She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and
grass.

A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a
sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over
the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

Chapter XXII

“A woman’s way.”

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked
and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are
not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of
air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his dismay.

He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold
of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his
every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to
Elfride’s intentions, whatever they might be.

He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade,
not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the
past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all
strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the
paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost
ledges.

Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride’s hasty disappearance, but
could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a
doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of
deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and
this possibility was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was
left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles, except by a
casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose of
collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of
subsistence thereon.

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected
with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature’s treacherous
attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a
huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which
enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see
the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down
the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.
Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical
shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low
relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never
in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless
slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name.
Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those
ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented
had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but
they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with
the small in his death.

Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful
juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the
varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and
his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home
such imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts,
and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears,
rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They
lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the
neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was
there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the
tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the
myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and
overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish
creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister
crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating
in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms
and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of
lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil
confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. These
images passed before Knight’s inner eye in less than half a minute, and
he was again considering the actual present. Was he to die? The mental
picture of Elfride in the world, without himself to cherish her, smote
his heart like a whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a
girl do? He dared not move an inch. Was Death really stretching out his
hand? The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die, was
fainter now.

However, Knight still clung to the cliff.

To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater
part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems to have moods
in other than a poetical sense: predilections for certain deeds at
certain times, without any apparent law to govern or season to account
for them. She is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who
does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and
in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in
lawless caprice. Man’s case is always that of the prodigal’s favourite
or the miser’s pensioner. In her unfriendly moments there seems a
feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in
swallowing the victim.

Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to adopt
it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures followed. The
rain increased, and persecuted him with an exceptional persistency
which he was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in
such a wretched state already. An entirely new order of things could be
observed in this introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards
instead of down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with
it in its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that
they stuck into his flesh like cold needles. Each drop was virtually a
shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-shafts seemed to lift
him on their points: no downward rain ever had such a torturing effect.
In a brief space he was drenched, except in two places. These were on
the top of his shoulders and on the crown of his hat.

The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here. It
tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon
all opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable
hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the
strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and
sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for
conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in the way.

Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were getting
weak already. “She will never come again; she has been gone ten
minutes,” he said to himself.

This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just
now: she had really been gone but three.

“As many more minutes will be my end,” he thought.

Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.

“This is a summer afternoon,” he said, “and there can never have been
such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.”

He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity; the air
in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing attitude in which
they approached him that magnified their powers.

He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids, and
into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of the
sea—visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them. We
colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea would have
been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer it
was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow
white border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so
distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely
audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain descended
from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown; above
him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was the
voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and
thrust him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the moan of
that unplummetted ocean below and afar—rubbing its restless flank
against the Cliff without a Name.

Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride? Perhaps.
Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live
on.

Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this.
Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its natural golden
fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape, not with the
strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative
to colour, but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red
face looking on with a drunken leer.

Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to disguise
this fact from themselves or others, even though an ostentatious
display may be called self-conceit. Knight, without showing it much,
knew that his intellect was above the average. And he thought—he could
not help thinking—that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of
good material; that such an experiment in killing might have been
practised upon some less developed life.

A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that inexorable
circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts. Renounce
a desire for a long-contested position, and go on another tack, and
after a while the prize is thrown at you, seemingly in disappointment
that no more tantalizing is possible.

Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned to
contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond. Into the
shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him. Let it
suffice to state what ensued.

At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It was
the head of Elfride.

Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.

The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend
first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to
a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where, without any immediate
terror of death, the inmates experience the gloom of monotonous
seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their countenances at the
greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the visit, is enough to stir
the emotions of the most careless observer.

Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had
deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His
lips moved to the word “Elfride,” though the emotion evolved no sound.
His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole
diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude
for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.

Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She
could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and
not deserted him utterly, and it was much.

It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride
was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who
mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance,
thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her
face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.

“How calm he is!” she thought. “How great and noble he is to be so
calm!” She would have died ten times for him then.

The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.

“How much longer can you wait?” came from her pale lips and along the
wind to his position.

“Four minutes,” said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.

“But with a good hope of being saved?”

“Seven or eight.”

He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and
that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and
flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under
the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and
bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a
thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but
Elfride’s seemed to cling to her like a glove.

Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her
hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more
particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending
the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards
twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she
had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long.

“Can you wait while I bind it?” she said, anxiously extending her gaze
down to him.

“Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of
strength.”

Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow
tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller
scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round
the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread
abroad.

“Now,” said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this
time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, “I can hold
three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the
strength of the knots, one by one.”

She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope
between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots
slipped.

“Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,” Elfride
exclaimed apprehensively.

She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.

“When you have let it down,” said Knight, already resuming his position
of ruling power, “go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank
as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end
with both hands.”

He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it
involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.

“I have tied it round my waist,” she cried, “and I will lean directly
upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.”

It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.

“I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,” she
continued, “to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the
greatest care, I beg you!”

She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would
be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and
disappeared as she had done before.

The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it
twitched three times.

He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.

The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only
of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now.
Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half
a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures
of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.

He was saved, and by Elfride.

He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over
the bank.

At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each
told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved
by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each
other’s arms.

At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed
towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no
longer to be seen.

An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle
girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to
Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of
her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a
guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now,
encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious
crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and
did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the
slave of the greater than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as
this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along
the impressionable soul of Elfride.

Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of
impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s
peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow him to take
advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.

Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.

He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to
toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had
obtained the rope.

“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.

“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an
expression between gladness and shame “You follow me, but at some
distance.”

“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God
bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”

“No; I shall get warm running.”

Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit,
and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined
upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole
clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of
the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton
rope.

“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on
Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right
minds, by the fireside at home!”

She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more
like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a
mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.

Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour
nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in
refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that
necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most
grievous loss to him.

He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground
an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its
proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had
contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand.
It was blown to the right, blown to the left—it floated to the edge of
the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in
the air, and then flew back over his head.

Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to
discover if it had been worth securing.

The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds,
placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had
totally forgotten she carried with her.

Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put
it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.

Chapter XXIII

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”

By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle
Boterel, and breathed his native air.

A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard,
were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.

In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a
small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at
the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a
vale of its own, further inland than the west village, and though so
near it, had little of physical feature in common with the latter. East
Endelstow was more wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s
mansion and park, and was free from those bleak open uplands which lent
such an air of desolation to the vicinage of the coast—always excepting
the small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old
house, The Crags.

Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain
again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter,
he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the
lower part of its course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge
immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by an overhanging
face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a reason of his own he made
this spot his refuge from the storm, and turning his face to the left,
conned the landscape as a book.

He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.

From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity
of being either brilliant foreground or the subdued tone of distance, a
sudden dip in the surface of the country lowering out of sight all the
intermediate prospect. In apparent contact with the trees and bushes
growing close beside him appeared the distant tract, terminated
suddenly by the brink of the series of cliffs which culminated in the
tall giant without a name—small and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf
on a bough at Stephen’s elbow blotted out a whole hill in the
contrasting district far away; a green bunch of nuts covered a complete
upland there, and the great cliff itself was outvied by a pigmy crag in
the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these things hundreds of
times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with such tenderness
as now.

Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see
the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his
Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the
hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a
sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure,
running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain
which had caused Stephen’s halt in this place, dropped down the
heathery hill, entered the vale, and was out of sight.

Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was
surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of departure
another moving speck, as different from the first as well could be,
insomuch that it was perceptible only by its blackness. Slowly and
regularly it took the same course, and there was not much doubt that
this was the form of a man. He, too, gradually descended from the upper
levels, and was lost in the valley below.

The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to the
road. Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were soon obscured
by the intervention of a high hedge. Just before they emerged again he
heard voices in conversation.

“’A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he’s a-coming,” said
a tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin
Cannister’s.

“’A must ’a b’lieve,” said another voice—that of Stephen’s father.

Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His father
and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best suits, and beside
them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly painted spring-cart.

“All right, Mr. Cannister; here’s the lost man!” exclaimed young Smith,
entering at once upon the old style of greeting. “Father, here I am.”

“All right, my sonny; and glad I be for’t!” returned John Smith,
overjoyed to see the young man. “How be ye? Well, come along home, and
don’t let’s bide out here in the damp. Such weather must be terrible
bad for a young chap just come from a fiery nation like Indy; hey,
naibour Cannister?”

“Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous bales,
and noble packages of foreign description, I make no doubt?”

“Hardly all that,” said Stephen laughing.

“We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel afore ye
landed,” said his father. “‘Put in the horse,’ says Martin. ‘Ay,’ says
I, ‘so we will;’ and did it straightway. Now, maybe, Martin had better
go on wi’ the cart for the things, and you and I walk home-along.”

“And I shall be back a’most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty step
still, though time d’ begin to tell upon her as upon the rest o’ us.”

Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued his
journey homeward in the company of his father.

“Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,” said John,
“you’ll find us in a turk of a mess, sir—‘sir,’ says I to my own son!
but ye’ve gone up so, Stephen. We’ve killed the pig this morning for
ye, thinking ye’d be hungry, and glad of a morsel of fresh mate. And ’a
won’t be cut up till to-night. However, we can make ye a good supper of
fry, which will chaw up well wi’ a dab o’ mustard and a few nice new
taters, and a drop of shilling ale to wash it down. Your mother have
scrubbed the house through because ye were coming, and dusted all the
chimmer furniture, and bought a new basin and jug of a travelling
crockery-woman that came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks,
and claned the winders! Ay, I don’t know what ’a ha’n’t a done. Never
were such a steer, ’a b’lieve.”

Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his mother’s
wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey. When they
drew near the river, and the cottage behind it, they could hear the
master-mason’s clock striking off the bygone hours of the day at
intervals of a quarter of a minute, during which intervals Stephen’s
imagination readily pictured his mother’s forefinger wandering round
the dial in company with the minute-hand.

“The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en right
seemingly,” said his father in an explanatory tone; and they went up
the garden to the door.

When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly greeted his
mother—who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue ground, covered
broadcast with a multitude of new and full moons, stars, and planets,
with an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect to diversify the
scene—the crackle of cart-wheels was heard outside, and Martin
Cannister stamped in at the doorway, in the form of a pair of legs
beneath a great box, his body being nowhere visible. When the luggage
had been all taken down, and Stephen had gone upstairs to change his
clothes, Mrs. Smith’s mind seemed to recover a lost thread.

“Really our clock is not worth a penny,” she said, turning to it and
attempting to start the pendulum.

“Stopped again?” inquired Martin with commiseration.

“Yes, sure,” replied Mrs. Smith; and continued after the manner of
certain matrons, to whose tongues the harmony of a subject with a
casual mood is a greater recommendation than its pertinence to the
occasion, “John would spend pounds a year upon the jimcrack old thing,
if he might, in having it claned, when at the same time you may doctor
it yourself as well. ‘The clock’s stopped again, John,’ I say to him.
‘Better have en claned,’ says he. There’s five shillings. ‘That clock
grinds again,’ I say to en. ‘Better have en claned,’ ’a says again.
‘That clock strikes wrong, John,’ says I. ‘Better have en claned,’ he
goes on. The wheels would have been polished to skeletons by this time
if I had listened to en, and I assure you we could have bought a
chainey-faced beauty wi’ the good money we’ve flung away these last ten
years upon this old green-faced mortal. And, Martin, you must be wet.
My son is gone up to change. John is damper than I should like to be,
but ’a calls it nothing. Some of Mrs. Swancourt’s servants have been
here—they ran in out of the rain when going for a walk—and I assure you
the state of their bonnets was frightful.”

“How’s the folks? We’ve been over to Castle Boterel, and what wi’
running and stopping out of the storms, my poor head is beyond
everything! fizz, fizz fizz; ’tis frying o’ fish from morning to
night,” said a cracked voice in the doorway at this instant.

“Lord so’s, who’s that?” said Mrs. Smith, in a private exclamation, and
turning round saw William Worm, endeavouring to make himself look
passing civil and friendly by overspreading his face with a large smile
that seemed to have no connection with the humour he was in. Behind him
stood a woman about twice his size, with a large umbrella over her
head. This was Mrs. Worm, William’s wife.

“Come in, William,” said John Smith. “We don’t kill a pig every day.
And you, likewise, Mrs. Worm. I make ye welcome. Since ye left Parson
Swancourt, William, I don’t see much of “ee.”

“No, for to tell the truth, since I took to the turn-pike-gate line,
I’ve been out but little, coming to church o’ Sundays not being my duty
now, as ’twas in a parson’s family, you see. However, our boy is able
to mind the gate now, and I said, says I, ‘Barbara, let’s call and see
John Smith.’”

“I am sorry to hear yer pore head is so bad still.”

“Ay, I assure you that frying o’ fish is going on for nights and days.
And, you know, sometimes ’tisn’t only fish, but rashers o’ bacon and
inions. Ay, I can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral as life; can’t
I, Barbara?”

Mrs. Worm, who had been all this time engaged in closing her umbrella,
corroborated this statement, and now, coming indoors, showed herself to
be a wide-faced, comfortable-looking woman, with a wart upon her cheek,
bearing a small tuft of hair in its centre.

“Have ye ever tried anything to cure yer noise, Maister Worm?” inquired
Martin Cannister.

“Oh ay; bless ye, I’ve tried everything. Ay, Providence is a merciful
man, and I have hoped He’d have found it out by this time, living so
many years in a parson’s family, too, as I have, but ’a don’t seem to
relieve me. Ay, I be a poor wambling man, and life’s a mint o’
trouble!”

“True, mournful true, William Worm. ’Tis so. The world wants looking
to, or ’tis all sixes and sevens wi’ us.”

“Take your things off, Mrs. Worm,” said Mrs. Smith. “We be rather in a
muddle, to tell the truth, for my son is just dropped in from Indy a
day sooner than we expected, and the pig-killer is coming presently to
cut up.”

Mrs. Barbara Worm, not wishing to take any mean advantage of persons in
a muddle by observing them, removed her bonnet and mantle with eyes
fixed upon the flowers in the plot outside the door.

“What beautiful tiger-lilies!” said Mrs. Worm.

“Yes, they be very well, but such a trouble to me on account of the
children that come here. They will go eating the berries on the stem,
and call ’em currants. Taste wi’ junivals is quite fancy, really.”

“And your snapdragons look as fierce as ever.”

“Well, really,” answered Mrs. Smith, entering didactically into the
subject, “they are more like Christians than flowers. But they make up
well enough wi’ the rest, and don’t require much tending. And the same
can be said o’ these miller’s wheels. ’Tis a flower I like very much,
though so simple. John says he never cares about the flowers o’ ’em,
but men have no eye for anything neat. He says his favourite flower is
a cauliflower. And I assure you I tremble in the springtime, for ’tis
perfect murder.”

“You don’t say so, Mrs. Smith!”

“John digs round the roots, you know. In goes his blundering spade,
through roots, bulbs, everything that hasn’t got a good show above
ground, turning ’em up cut all to slices. Only the very last fall I
went to move some tulips, when I found every bulb upside down, and the
stems crooked round. He had turned ’em over in the spring, and the
cunning creatures had soon found that heaven was not where it used to
be.”

“What’s that long-favoured flower under the hedge?”

“They? O Lord, they are the horrid Jacob’s ladders! Instead of praising
’em, I be mad wi’ ’em for being so ready to bide where they are not
wanted. They be very well in their way, but I do not care for things
that neglect won’t kill. Do what I will, dig, drag, scrap, pull, I get
too many of ’em. I chop the roots: up they’ll come, treble strong.
Throw ’em over hedge; there they’ll grow, staring me in the face like a
hungry dog driven away, and creep back again in a week or two the same
as before. ’Tis Jacob’s ladder here, Jacob’s ladder there, and plant
’em where nothing in the world will grow, you get crowds of ’em in a
month or two. John made a new manure mixen last summer, and he said,
‘Maria, now if you’ve got any flowers or such like, that you don’t
want, you may plant ’em round my mixen so as to hide it a bit, though
’tis not likely anything of much value will grow there.’ I thought,
‘There’s them Jacob’s ladders; I’ll put them there, since they can’t do
harm in such a place;’ and I planted the Jacob’s ladders sure enough.
They growed, and they growed, in the mixen and out of the mixen, all
over the litter, covering it quite up. When John wanted to use it about
the garden, ’a said, ‘Nation seize them Jacob’s ladders of yours,
Maria! They’ve eat the goodness out of every morsel of my manure, so
that ’tis no better than sand itself!’ Sure enough the hungry mortals
had. ’Tis my belief that in the secret souls o’ ’em, Jacob’s ladders be
weeds, and not flowers at all, if the truth was known.”

Robert Lickpan, pig-killer and carrier, arrived at this moment. The
fatted animal hanging in the back kitchen was cleft down the middle of
its backbone, Mrs. Smith being meanwhile engaged in cooking supper.

Between the cutting and chopping, ale was handed round, and Worm and
the pig-killer listened to John Smith’s description of the meeting with
Stephen, with eyes blankly fixed upon the table-cloth, in order that
nothing in the external world should interrupt their efforts to conjure
up the scene correctly.

Stephen came downstairs in the middle of the story, and after the
little interruption occasioned by his entrance and welcome, the
narrative was again continued, precisely as if he had not been there at
all, and was told inclusively to him, as to somebody who knew nothing
about the matter.

“‘Ay,’ I said, as I catched sight o’ en through the brimbles, ‘that’s
the lad, for I d’ know en by his grand-father’s walk;’ for ’a stapped
out like poor father for all the world. Still there was a touch o’ the
frisky that set me wondering. ’A got closer, and I said, ‘That’s the
lad, for I d’ know en by his carrying a black case like a travelling
man.’ Still, a road is common to all the world, and there be more
travelling men than one. But I kept my eye cocked, and I said to
Martin, ‘’Tis the boy, now, for I d’ know en by the wold twirl o’ the
stick and the family step.’ Then ’a come closer, and a’ said, ‘All
right.’ I could swear to en then.”

Stephen’s personal appearance was next criticised.

“He d’ look a deal thinner in face, surely, than when I seed en at the
parson’s, and never knowed en, if ye’ll believe me,” said Martin.

“Ay, there,” said another, without removing his eyes from Stephen’s
face, “I should ha’ knowed en anywhere. ’Tis his father’s nose to a T.”

“It has been often remarked,” said Stephen modestly.

“And he’s certainly taller,” said Martin, letting his glance run over
Stephen’s form from bottom to top.

“I was thinking ’a was exactly the same height,” Worm replied.

“Bless thy soul, that’s because he’s bigger round likewise.” And the
united eyes all moved to Stephen’s waist.

“I be a poor wambling man, but I can make allowances,” said William
Worm. “Ah, sure, and how he came as a stranger and pilgrim to Parson
Swancourt’s that time, not a soul knowing en after so many years! Ay,
life’s a strange picter, Stephen: but I suppose I must say Sir to ye?”

“Oh, it is not necessary at present,” Stephen replied, though mentally
resolving to avoid the vicinity of that familiar friend as soon as he
had made pretensions to the hand of Elfride.

“Ah, well,” said Worm musingly, “some would have looked for no less
than a Sir. There’s a sight of difference in people.”

“And in pigs likewise,” observed John Smith, looking at the halved
carcass of his own.

Robert Lickpan, the pig-killer, here seemed called upon to enter the
lists of conversation.

“Yes, they’ve got their particular naters good-now,” he remarked
initially. “Many’s the rum-tempered pig I’ve knowed.”

“I don’t doubt it, Master Lickpan,” answered Martin, in a tone
expressing that his convictions, no less than good manners, demanded
the reply.

“Yes,” continued the pig-killer, as one accustomed to be heard. “One
that I knowed was deaf and dumb, and we couldn’t make out what was the
matter wi’ the pig. ’A would eat well enough when ’a seed the trough,
but when his back was turned, you might a-rattled the bucket all day,
the poor soul never heard ye. Ye could play tricks upon en behind his
back, and a’ wouldn’t find it out no quicker than poor deaf Grammer
Cates. But a’ fatted well, and I never seed a pig open better when a’
was killed, and ’a was very tender eating, very; as pretty a bit of
mate as ever you see; you could suck that mate through a quill.

“And another I knowed,” resumed the killer, after quietly letting a
pint of ale run down his throat of its own accord, and setting down the
cup with mathematical exactness upon the spot from which he had raised
it—“another went out of his mind.”

“How very mournful!” murmured Mrs. Worm.

“Ay, poor thing, ’a did! As clean out of his mind as the cleverest
Christian could go. In early life ’a was very melancholy, and never
seemed a hopeful pig by no means. ’Twas Andrew Stainer’s pig—that’s
whose pig ’twas.”

“I can mind the pig well enough,” attested John Smith.

“And a pretty little porker ’a was. And you all know Farmer Buckle’s
sort? Every jack o’ em suffer from the rheumatism to this day, owing to
a damp sty they lived in when they were striplings, as ’twere.”

“Well, now we’ll weigh,” said John.

“If so be he were not so fine, we’d weigh en whole: but as he is, we’ll
take a side at a time. John, you can mind my old joke, ey?”

“I do so; though ’twas a good few years ago I first heard en.”

“Yes,” said Lickpan, “that there old familiar joke have been in our
family for generations, I may say. My father used that joke regular at
pig-killings for more than five and forty years—the time he followed
the calling. And ’a told me that ’a had it from his father when he was
quite a chiel, who made use o’ en just the same at every killing more
or less; and pig-killings were pig-killings in those days.”

“Trewly they were.”

“I’ve never heard the joke,” said Mrs. Smith tentatively.

“Nor I,” chimed in Mrs. Worm, who, being the only other lady in the
room, felt bound by the laws of courtesy to feel like Mrs. Smith in
everything.

“Surely, surely you have,” said the killer, looking sceptically at the
benighted females. “However, ’tisn’t much—I don’t wish to say it is. It
commences like this: ‘Bob will tell the weight of your pig, ’a
b’lieve,’ says I. The congregation of neighbours think I mane my son
Bob, naturally; but the secret is that I mane the bob o’ the steelyard.
Ha, ha, ha!”

“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Martin Cannister, who had heard the
explanation of this striking story for the hundredth time.

“Huh, huh, huh!” laughed John Smith, who had heard it for the
thousandth.

“Hee, hee, hee!” laughed William Worm, who had never heard it at all,
but was afraid to say so.

“Thy grandfather, Robert, must have been a wide-awake chap to make that
story,” said Martin Cannister, subsiding to a placid aspect of
delighted criticism.

“He had a head, by all account. And, you see, as the first-born of the
Lickpans have all been Roberts, they’ve all been Bobs, so the story was
handed down to the present day.”

“Poor Joseph, your second boy, will never be able to bring it out in
company, which is rather unfortunate,” said Mrs. Worm thoughtfully.

“’A won’t. Yes, grandfer was a clever chap, as ye say; but I knowed a
cleverer. ’Twas my uncle Levi. Uncle Levi made a snuff-box that should
be a puzzle to his friends to open. He used to hand en round at wedding
parties, christenings, funerals, and in other jolly company, and let
’em try their skill. This extraordinary snuff-box had a spring behind
that would push in and out—a hinge where seemed to be the cover; a
slide at the end, a screw in front, and knobs and queer notches
everywhere. One man would try the spring, another would try the screw,
another would try the slide; but try as they would, the box wouldn’t
open. And they couldn’t open en, and they didn’t open en. Now what
might you think was the secret of that box?”

All put on an expression that their united thoughts were inadequate to
the occasion.

“Why the box wouldn’t open at all. ’A were made not to open, and ye
might have tried till the end of Revelations, ’twould have been as
naught, for the box were glued all round.”

“A very deep man to have made such a box.”

“Yes. ’Twas like uncle Levi all over.”

“’Twas. I can mind the man very well. Tallest man ever I seed.”

“’A was so. He never slept upon a bedstead after he growed up a hard
boy-chap—never could get one long enough. When ’a lived in that little
small house by the pond, he used to have to leave open his chamber door
every night at going to his bed, and let his feet poke out upon the
landing.”

“He’s dead and gone now, nevertheless, poor man, as we all shall,”
observed Worm, to fill the pause which followed the conclusion of
Robert Lickpan’s speech.

The weighing and cutting up was pursued amid an animated discourse on
Stephen’s travels; and at the finish, the first-fruits of the day’s
slaughter, fried in onions, were then turned from the pan into a dish
on the table, each piece steaming and hissing till it reached their
very mouths.

It must be owned that the gentlemanly son of the house looked rather
out of place in the course of this operation. Nor was his mind quite
philosophic enough to allow him to be comfortable with these
old-established persons, his father’s friends. He had never lived long
at home—scarcely at all since his childhood. The presence of William
Worm was the most awkward feature of the case, for, though Worm had
left the house of Mr. Swancourt, the being hand-in-glove with a
ci-devant servitor reminded Stephen too forcibly of the vicar’s
classification of himself before he went from England. Mrs. Smith was
conscious of the defect in her arrangements which had brought about the
undesired conjunction. She spoke to Stephen privately.

“I am above having such people here, Stephen; but what could I do? And
your father is so rough in his nature that he’s more mixed up with them
than need be.”

“Never mind, mother,” said Stephen; “I’ll put up with it now.”

“When we leave my lord’s service, and get further up the country—as I
hope we shall soon—it will be different. We shall be among fresh
people, and in a larger house, and shall keep ourselves up a bit, I
hope.”

“Is Miss Swancourt at home, do you know?” Stephen inquired

“Yes, your father saw her this morning.”

“Do you often see her?”

“Scarcely ever. Mr. Glim, the curate, calls occasionally, but the
Swancourts don’t come into the village now any more than to drive
through it. They dine at my lord’s oftener than they used. Ah, here’s a
note was brought this morning for you by a boy.”

Stephen eagerly took the note and opened it, his mother watching him.
He read what Elfride had written and sent before she started for the
cliff that afternoon:

“Yes; I will meet you in the church at nine to-night.—E. S.”

“I don’t know, Stephen,” his mother said meaningly, “whe’r you still
think about Miss Elfride, but if I were you I wouldn’t concern about
her. They say that none of old Mrs. Swancourt’s money will come to her
step-daughter.”

“I see the evening has turned out fine; I am going out for a little
while to look round the place,” he said, evading the direct query.
“Probably by the time I return our visitors will be gone, and we’ll
have a more confidential talk.”

Chapter XXIV

“Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour.”

The rain had ceased since the sunset, but it was a cloudy night; and
the light of the moon, softened and dispersed by its misty veil, was
distributed over the land in pale gray.

A dark figure stepped from the doorway of John Smith’s river-side
cottage, and strode rapidly towards West Endelstow with a light
footstep. Soon ascending from the lower levels he turned a corner,
followed a cart-track, and saw the tower of the church he was in quest
of distinctly shaped forth against the sky. In less than half an hour
from the time of starting he swung himself over the churchyard stile.

The wild irregular enclosure was as much as ever an integral part of
the old hill. The grass was still long, the graves were shaped
precisely as passing years chose to alter them from their orthodox form
as laid down by Martin Cannister, and by Stephen’s own grandfather
before him.

A sound sped into the air from the direction in which Castle Boterel
lay. It was the striking of the church clock, distinct in the still
atmosphere as if it had come from the tower hard by, which, wrapt in
its solitary silentness, gave out no such sounds of life.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.” Stephen
carefully counted the strokes, though he well knew their number
beforehand. Nine o’clock. It was the hour Elfride had herself named as
the most convenient for meeting him.

Stephen stood at the door of the porch and listened. He could have
heard the softest breathing of any person within the porch; nobody was
there. He went inside the doorway, sat down upon the stone bench, and
waited with a beating heart.

The faint sounds heard only accentuated the silence. The rising and
falling of the sea, far away along the coast, was the most important. A
minor sound was the scurr of a distant night-hawk. Among the minutest
where all were minute were the light settlement of gossamer fragments
floating in the air, a toad humbly labouring along through the grass
near the entrance, the crackle of a dead leaf which a worm was
endeavouring to pull into the earth, a waft of air, getting nearer and
nearer, and expiring at his feet under the burden of a winged seed.

Among all these soft sounds came not the only soft sound he cared to
hear—the footfall of Elfride.

For a whole quarter of an hour Stephen sat thus intent, without moving
a muscle. At the end of that time he walked to the west front of the
church. Turning the corner of the tower, a white form stared him in the
face. He started back, and recovered himself. It was the tomb of young
farmer Jethway, looking still as fresh and as new as when it was first
erected, the white stone in which it was hewn having a singular
weirdness amid the dark blue slabs from local quarries, of which the
whole remaining gravestones were formed.

He thought of the night when he had sat thereon with Elfride as his
companion, and well remembered his regret that she had received, even
unwillingly, earlier homage than his own. But his present tangible
anxiety reduced such a feeling to sentimental nonsense in comparison;
and he strolled on over the graves to the border of the churchyard,
whence in the daytime could be clearly seen the vicarage and the
present residence of the Swancourts. No footstep was discernible upon
the path up the hill, but a light was shining from a window in the
last-named house.

Stephen knew there could be no mistake about the time or place, and no
difficulty about keeping the engagement. He waited yet longer, passing
from impatience into a mood which failed to take any account of the
lapse of time. He was awakened from his reverie by Castle Boterel
clock.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, TEN.

One little fall of the hammer in addition to the number it had been
sharp pleasure to hear, and what a difference to him!

He left the churchyard on the side opposite to his point of entrance,
and went down the hill. Slowly he drew near the gate of her house. This
he softly opened, and walked up the gravel drive to the door. Here he
paused for several minutes.

At the expiration of that time the murmured speech of a manly voice
came out to his ears through an open window behind the corner of the
house. This was responded to by a clear soft laugh. It was the laugh of
Elfride.

Stephen was conscious of a gnawing pain at his heart. He retreated as
he had come. There are disappointments which wring us, and there are
those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are
so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever
obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of
happiness. Such a one was Stephen’s now: the crowning aureola of the
dream had been the meeting here by stealth; and if Elfride had come to
him only ten minutes after he had turned away, the disappointment would
have been recognizable still.

When the young man reached home he found there a letter which had
arrived in his absence. Believing it to contain some reason for her
non-appearance, yet unable to imagine one that could justify her, he
hastily tore open the envelope.

The paper contained not a word from Elfride. It was the deposit-note
for his two hundred pounds. On the back was the form of a cheque, and
this she had filled up with the same sum, payable to the bearer.

Stephen was confounded. He attempted to divine her motive. Considering
how limited was his knowledge of her later actions, he guessed rather
shrewdly that, between the time of her sending the note in the morning
and the evening’s silent refusal of his gift, something had occurred
which had caused a total change in her attitude towards him.

He knew not what to do. It seemed absurd now to go to her father next
morning, as he had purposed, and ask for an engagement with her, a
possibility impending all the while that Elfride herself would not be
on his side. Only one course recommended itself as wise. To wait and
see what the days would bring forth; to go and execute his commissions
in Birmingham; then to return, learn if anything had happened, and try
what a meeting might do; perhaps her surprise at his backwardness would
bring her forward to show latent warmth as decidedly as in old times.

This act of patience was in keeping only with the nature of a man
precisely of Stephen’s constitution. Nine men out of ten would perhaps
have rushed off, got into her presence, by fair means or foul, and
provoked a catastrophe of some sort. Possibly for the better, probably
for the worse.

He started for Birmingham the next morning. A day’s delay would have
made no difference; but he could not rest until he had begun and ended
the programme proposed to himself. Bodily activity will sometimes take
the sting out of anxiety as completely as assurance itself.

Chapter XXV

“Mine own familiar friend.”

During these days of absence Stephen lived under alternate conditions.
Whenever his emotions were active, he was in agony. Whenever he was not
in agony, the business in hand had driven out of his mind by sheer
force all deep reflection on the subject of Elfride and love.

By the time he took his return journey at the week’s end, Stephen had
very nearly worked himself up to an intention to call and see her face
to face. On this occasion also he adopted his favourite route—by the
little summer steamer from Bristol to Castle Boterel; the time saved by
speed on the railway being wasted at junctions, and in following a
devious course.

It was a bright silent evening at the beginning of September when Smith
again set foot in the little town. He felt inclined to linger awhile
upon the quay before ascending the hills, having formed a romantic
intention to go home by way of her house, yet not wishing to wander in
its neighbourhood till the evening shades should sufficiently screen
him from observation.

And thus waiting for night’s nearer approach, he watched the placid
scene, over which the pale luminosity of the west cast a sorrowful
monochrome, that became slowly embrowned by the dusk. A star appeared,
and another, and another. They sparkled amid the yards and rigging of
the two coal brigs lying alangside, as if they had been tiny lamps
suspended in the ropes. The masts rocked sleepily to the infinitesimal
flux of the tide, which clucked and gurgled with idle regularity in
nooks and holes of the harbour wall.

The twilight was now quite pronounced enough for his purpose; and as,
rather sad at heart, he was about to move on, a little boat containing
two persons glided up the middle of the harbour with the lightness of a
shadow. The boat came opposite him, passed on, and touched the
landing-steps at the further end. One of its occupants was a man, as
Stephen had known by the easy stroke of the oars. When the pair
ascended the steps, and came into greater prominence, he was enabled to
discern that the second personage was a woman; also that she wore a
white decoration—apparently a feather—in her hat or bonnet, which spot
of white was the only distinctly visible portion of her clothing.

Stephen remained a moment in their rear, and they passed on, when he
pursued his way also, and soon forgot the circumstance. Having crossed
a bridge, forsaken the high road, and entered the footpath which led up
the vale to West Endelstow, he heard a little wicket click softly
together some yards ahead. By the time that Stephen had reached the
wicket and passed it, he heard another click of precisely the same
nature from another gate yet further on. Clearly some person or persons
were preceding him along the path, their footsteps being rendered
noiseless by the soft carpet of turf. Stephen now walked a little
quicker, and perceived two forms. One of them bore aloft the white
feather he had noticed in the woman’s hat on the quay: they were the
couple he had seen in the boat. Stephen dropped a little further to the
rear.

From the bottom of the valley, along which the path had hitherto lain,
beside the margin of the trickling streamlet, another path now
diverged, and ascended the slope of the left-hand hill. This footway
led only to the residence of Mrs. Swancourt and a cottage or two in its
vicinity. No grass covered this diverging path in portions of its
length, and Stephen was reminded that the pair in front of him had
taken this route by the occasional rattle of loose stones under their
feet. Stephen climbed in the same direction, but for some undefined
reason he trod more softly than did those preceding him. His mind was
unconsciously in exercise upon whom the woman might be—whether a
visitor to The Crags, a servant, or Elfride. He put it to himself yet
more forcibly; could the lady be Elfride? A possible reason for her
unaccountable failure to keep the appointment with him returned with
painful force.

They entered the grounds of the house by the side wicket, whence the
path, now wide and well trimmed, wound fantastically through the
shrubbery to an octagonal pavilion called the Belvedere, by reason of
the comprehensive view over the adjacent district that its green seats
afforded. The path passed this erection and went on to the house as
well as to the gardener’s cottage on the other side, straggling thence
to East Endelstow; so that Stephen felt no hesitation in entering a
promenade which could scarcely be called private.

He fancied that he heard the gate open and swing together again behind
him. Turning, he saw nobody.

The people of the boat came to the summer-house. One of them spoke.

“I am afraid we shall get a scolding for being so late.”

Stephen instantly recognised the familiar voice, richer and fuller now
than it used to be. “Elfride!” he whispered to himself, and held fast
by a sapling, to steady himself under the agitation her presence caused
him. His heart swerved from its beat; he shunned receiving the meaning
he sought.

“A breeze is rising again; how the ash tree rustles!” said Elfride.
“Don’t you hear it? I wonder what the time is.”

Stephen relinquished the sapling.

“I will get a light and tell you. Step into the summer-house; the air
is quiet there.”

The cadence of that voice—its peculiarity seemed to come home to him
like that of some notes of the northern birds on his return to his
native clime, as an old natural thing renewed, yet not particularly
noticed as natural before that renewal.

They entered the Belvedere. In the lower part it was formed of close
wood-work nailed crosswise, and had openings in the upper by way of
windows.

The scratch of a striking light was heard, and a bright glow radiated
from the interior of the building. The light gave birth to dancing
leaf-shadows, stem-shadows, lustrous streaks, dots, sparkles, and
threads of silver sheen of all imaginable variety and transience. It
awakened gnats, which flew towards it, revealed shiny gossamer threads,
disturbed earthworms. Stephen gave but little attention to these
phenomena, and less time. He saw in the summer-house a strongly
illuminated picture.

First, the face of his friend and preceptor Henry Knight, between whom
and himself an estrangement had arisen, not from any definite causes
beyond those of absence, increasing age, and diverging sympathies.

Next, his bright particular star, Elfride. The face of Elfride was more
womanly than when she had called herself his, but as clear and healthy
as ever. Her plenteous twines of beautiful hair were looking much as
usual, with the exception of a slight modification in their arrangement
in deference to the changes of fashion.

Their two foreheads were close together, almost touching, and both were
looking down. Elfride was holding her watch, Knight was holding the
light with one hand, his left arm being round her waist. Part of the
scene reached Stephen’s eyes through the horizontal bars of woodwork,
which crossed their forms like the ribs of a skeleton.

Knight’s arm stole still further round the waist of Elfride.

“It is half-past eight,” she said in a low voice, which had a peculiar
music in it, seemingly born of a thrill of pleasure at the new proof
that she was beloved.

The flame dwindled down, died away, and all was wrapped in a darkness
to which the gloom before the illumination bore no comparison in
apparent density. Stephen, shattered in spirit and sick to his heart’s
centre, turned away. In turning, he saw a shadowy outline behind the
summer-house on the other side. His eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness. Was the form a human form, or was it an opaque bush of
juniper?

The lovers arose, brushed against the laurestines, and pursued their
way to the house. The indistinct figure had moved, and now passed
across Smith’s front. So completely enveloped was the person, that it
was impossible to discern him or her any more than as a shape. The
shape glided noiselessly on.

Stephen stepped forward, fearing any mischief was intended to the other
two. “Who are you?” he said.

“Never mind who I am,” answered a weak whisper from the enveloping
folds. “WHAT I am, may she be! Perhaps I knew well—ah, so well!—a youth
whose place you took, as he there now takes yours. Will you let her
break your heart, and bring you to an untimely grave, as she did the
one before you?”

“You are Mrs. Jethway, I think. What do you do here? And why do you
talk so wildly?”

“Because my heart is desolate, and nobody cares about it. May hers be
so that brought trouble upon me!”

“Silence!” said Stephen, staunch to Elfride in spite of himself. “She
would harm nobody wilfully, never would she! How do you come here?”

“I saw the two coming up the path, and wanted to learn if she were not
one of them. Can I help disliking her if I think of the past? Can I
help watching her if I remember my boy? Can I help ill-wishing her if I
well-wish him?”

The bowed form went on, passed through the wicket, and was enveloped by
the shadows of the field.

Stephen had heard that Mrs. Jethway, since the death of her son, had
become a crazed, forlorn woman; and bestowing a pitying thought upon
her, he dismissed her fancied wrongs from his mind, but not her
condemnation of Elfride’s faithlessness. That entered into and mingled
with the sensations his new experience had begotten. The tale told by
the little scene he had witnessed ran parallel with the unhappy woman’s
opinion, which, however baseless it might have been antecedently, had
become true enough as regarded himself.

A slow weight of despair, as distinct from a violent paroxysm as
starvation from a mortal shot, filled him and wrung him body and soul.
The discovery had not been altogether unexpected, for throughout his
anxiety of the last few days since the night in the churchyard, he had
been inclined to construe the uncertainty unfavourably for himself. His
hopes for the best had been but periodic interruptions to a chronic
fear of the worst.

A strange concomitant of his misery was the singularity of its form.
That his rival should be Knight, whom once upon a time he had adored as
a man is very rarely adored by another in modern times, and whom he
loved now, added deprecation to sorrow, and cynicism to both. Henry
Knight, whose praises he had so frequently trumpeted in her ears, of
whom she had actually been jealous, lest she herself should be lessened
in Stephen’s love on account of him, had probably won her the more
easily by reason of those very praises which he had only ceased to
utter by her command. She had ruled him like a queen in that matter, as
in all others. Stephen could tell by her manner, brief as had been his
observation of it, and by her words, few as they were, that her
position was far different with Knight. That she looked up at and
adored her new lover from below his pedestal, was even more perceptible
than that she had smiled down upon Stephen from a height above him.

The suddenness of Elfride’s renunciation of himself was food for more
torture. To an unimpassioned outsider, it admitted of at least two
interpretations—it might either have proceeded from an endeavour to be
faithful to her first choice, till the lover seen absolutely
overpowered the lover remembered, or from a wish not to lose his love
till sure of the love of another. But to Stephen Smith the motive
involved in the latter alternative made it untenable where Elfride was
the actor.

He mused on her letters to him, in which she had never mentioned a
syllable concerning Knight. It is desirable, however, to observe that
only in two letters could she possibly have done so. One was written
about a week before Knight’s arrival, when, though she did not mention
his promised coming to Stephen, she had hardly a definite reason in her
mind for neglecting to do it. In the next she did casually allude to
Knight. But Stephen had left Bombay long before that letter arrived.

Stephen looked at the black form of the adjacent house, where it cut a
dark polygonal notch out of the sky, and felt that he hated the spot.
He did not know many facts of the case, but could not help
instinctively associating Elfride’s fickleness with the marriage of her
father, and their introduction to London society. He closed the iron
gate bounding the shrubbery as noiselessly as he had opened it, and
went into the grassy field. Here he could see the old vicarage, the
house alone that was associated with the sweet pleasant time of his
incipient love for Elfride. Turning sadly from the place that was no
longer a nook in which his thoughts might nestle when he was far away,
he wandered in the direction of the east village, to reach his father’s
house before they retired to rest.

The nearest way to the cottage was by crossing the park. He did not
hurry. Happiness frequently has reason for haste, but it is seldom that
desolation need scramble or strain. Sometimes he paused under the
low-hanging arms of the trees, looking vacantly on the ground.

Stephen was standing thus, scarcely less crippled in thought than he
was blank in vision, when a clear sound permeated the quiet air about
him, and spread on far beyond. The sound was the stroke of a bell from
the tower of East Endelstow Church, which stood in a dell not forty
yards from Lord Luxellian’s mansion, and within the park enclosure.
Another stroke greeted his ear, and gave character to both: then came a
slow succession of them.

“Somebody is dead,” he said aloud.

The death-knell of an inhabitant of the eastern parish was being
tolled.

An unusual feature in the tolling was that it had not been begun
according to the custom in Endelstow and other parishes in the
neighbourhood. At every death the sex and age of the deceased were
announced by a system of changes. Three times three strokes signified
that the departed one was a man; three times two, a woman; twice three,
a boy; twice two, a girl. The regular continuity of the tolling
suggested that it was the resumption rather than the beginning of a
knell—the opening portion of which Stephen had not been near enough to
hear.

The momentary anxiety he had felt with regard to his parents passed
away. He had left them in perfect health, and had any serious illness
seized either, a communication would have reached him ere this. At the
same time, since his way homeward lay under the churchyard yews, he
resolved to look into the belfry in passing by, and speak a word to
Martin Cannister, who would be there.

Stephen reached the brow of the hill, and felt inclined to renounce his
idea. His mood was such that talking to any person to whom he could not
unburden himself would be wearisome. However, before he could put any
inclination into effect, the young man saw from amid the trees a bright
light shining, the rays from which radiated like needles through the
sad plumy foliage of the yews. Its direction was from the centre of the
churchyard.

Stephen mechanically went forward. Never could there be a greater
contrast between two places of like purpose than between this graveyard
and that of the further village. Here the grass was carefully tended,
and formed virtually a part of the manor-house lawn; flowers and shrubs
being planted indiscriminately over both, whilst the few graves visible
were mathematically exact in shape and smoothness, appearing in the
daytime like chins newly shaven. There was no wall, the division
between God’s Acre and Lord Luxellian’s being marked only by a few
square stones set at equidistant points. Among those persons who have
romantic sentiments on the subject of their last dwelling-place,
probably the greater number would have chosen such a spot as this in
preference to any other: a few would have fancied a constraint in its
trim neatness, and would have preferred the wild hill-top of the
neighbouring site, with Nature in her most negligent attire.

The light in the churchyard he next discovered to have its source in a
point very near the ground, and Stephen imagined it might come from a
lantern in the interior of a partly-dug grave. But a nearer approach
showed him that its position was immediately under the wall of the
aisle, and within the mouth of an archway. He could now hear voices,
and the truth of the whole matter began to dawn upon him. Walking on
towards the opening, Smith discerned on his left hand a heap of earth,
and before him a flight of stone steps which the removed earth had
uncovered, leading down under the edifice. It was the entrance to a
large family vault, extending under the north aisle.

Stephen had never before seen it open, and descending one or two steps
stooped to look under the arch. The vault appeared to be crowded with
coffins, with the exception of an open central space, which had been
necessarily kept free for ingress and access to the sides, round three
of which the coffins were stacked in stone bins or niches.

The place was well lighted with candles stuck in slips of wood that
were fastened to the wall. On making the descent of another step the
living inhabitants of the vault were recognizable. They were his father
the master-mason, an under-mason, Martin Cannister, and two or three
young and old labouring-men. Crowbars and workmen’s hammers were
scattered about. The whole company, sitting round on coffins which had
been removed from their places, apparently for some alteration or
enlargement of the vault, were eating bread and cheese, and drinking
ale from a cup with two handles, passed round from each to each.

“Who is dead?” Stephen inquired, stepping down.

Chapter XXVI

“To that last nothing under earth.”

All eyes were turned to the entrance as Stephen spoke, and the
ancient-mannered conclave scrutinized him inquiringly.

“Why, ’tis our Stephen!” said his father, rising from his seat; and,
still retaining the frothy mug in his left hand, he swung forward his
right for a grasp. “Your mother is expecting ye—thought you would have
come afore dark. But you’ll wait and go home with me? I have all but
done for the day, and was going directly.”

“Yes, ’tis Master Stephy, sure enough. Glad to see you so soon again,
Master Smith,” said Martin Cannister, chastening the gladness expressed
in his words by a strict neutrality of countenance, in order to
harmonize the feeling as much as possible with the solemnity of a
family vault.

“The same to you, Martin; and you, William,” said Stephen, nodding
around to the rest, who, having their mouths full of bread and cheese,
were of necessity compelled to reply merely by compressing their eyes
to friendly lines and wrinkles.

“And who is dead?” Stephen repeated.

“Lady Luxellian, poor gentlewoman, as we all shall, said the
under-mason. “Ay, and we be going to enlarge the vault to make room for
her.”

“When did she die?”

“Early this morning,” his father replied, with an appearance of
recurring to a chronic thought. “Yes, this morning. Martin hev been
tolling ever since, almost. There, ’twas expected. She was very
limber.”

“Ay, poor soul, this morning,” resumed the under-mason, a marvellously
old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would
not stay in position. “She must know by this time whether she’s to go
up or down, poor woman.”

“What was her age?”

“Not more than seven or eight and twenty by candlelight. But, Lord! by
day ’a was forty if ’a were an hour.”

“Ay, night-time or day-time makes a difference of twenty years to rich
feymels,” observed Martin.

“She was one and thirty really,” said John Smith. “I had it from them
that know.”

“Not more than that!”

“’A looked very bad, poor lady. In faith, ye might say she was dead for
years afore ’a would own it.”

“As my old father used to say, ‘dead, but wouldn’t drop down.’”

“I seed her, poor soul,” said a labourer from behind some removed
coffins, “only but last Valentine’s-day of all the world. ’A was arm in
crook wi’ my lord. I says to myself, ‘You be ticketed Churchyard, my
noble lady, although you don’t dream on’t.’”

“I suppose my lord will write to all the other lords anointed in the
nation, to let ’em know that she that was is now no more?”

“’Tis done and past. I see a bundle of letters go off an hour after the
death. Sich wonderful black rims as they letters had—half-an-inch wide,
at the very least.”

“Too much,” observed Martin. “In short, ’tis out of the question that a
human being can be so mournful as black edges half-an-inch wide. I’m
sure people don’t feel more than a very narrow border when they feels
most of all.”

“And there are two little girls, are there not?” said Stephen.

“Nice clane little faces!—left motherless now.”

“They used to come to Parson Swancourt’s to play with Miss Elfride when
I were there,” said William Worm. “Ah, they did so’s!” The latter
sentence was introduced to add the necessary melancholy to a remark
which, intrinsically, could hardly be made to possess enough for the
occasion. “Yes,” continued Worm, “they’d run upstairs, they’d run down;
flitting about with her everywhere. Very fond of her, they were. Ah,
well!”

“Fonder than ever they were of their mother, so ’tis said here and
there,” added a labourer.

“Well, you see, ’tis natural. Lady Luxellian stood aloof from ’em
so—was so drowsy-like, that they couldn’t love her in the
jolly-companion way children want to like folks. Only last winter I
seed Miss Elfride talking to my lady and the two children, and Miss
Elfride wiped their noses for em’ SO careful—my lady never once seeing
that it wanted doing; and, naturally, children take to people that’s
their best friend.”

“Be as ’twill, the woman is dead and gone, and we must make a place for
her,” said John. “Come, lads, drink up your ale, and we’ll just rid
this corner, so as to have all clear for beginning at the wall, as soon
as ’tis light to-morrow.”

Stephen then asked where Lady Luxellian was to lie.

“Here,” said his father. “We are going to set back this wall and make a
recess; and ’tis enough for us to do before the funeral. When my lord’s
mother died, she said, ‘John, the place must be enlarged before another
can be put in.’ But ’a never expected ’twould be wanted so soon. Better
move Lord George first, I suppose, Simeon?”

He pointed with his foot to a heavy coffin, covered with what had
originally been red velvet, the colour of which could only just be
distinguished now.

“Just as ye think best, Master John,” replied the shrivelled mason.
“Ah, poor Lord George!” he continued, looking contemplatively at the
huge coffin; “he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when
one is a lord and t’other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He’d clap his
hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familial and neighbourly as if
he’d been a common chap. Ay, ’a cussed me up hill and ’a cussed me
down; and then ’a would rave out again, and the goold clamps of his
fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while I,
being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a
strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liked en
sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height,
I’d think in my inside, ‘What a weight you’ll be, my lord, for our arms
to lower under the aisle of Endelstow Church some day!’”

“And was he?” inquired a young labourer.

“He was. He was five hundredweight if ’a were a pound. What with his
lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t’other”—here
the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that
caused a rattle among the bones inside—“he half broke my back when I
took his feet to lower en down the steps there. ‘Ah,’ saith I to John
there—didn’t I, John?—‘that ever one man’s glory should be such a
weight upon another man!’ But there, I liked my lord George sometimes.”

“’Tis a strange thought,” said another, “that while they be all here
under one roof, a snug united family o’ Luxellians, they be really
scattered miles away from one another in the form of good sheep and
wicked goats, isn’t it?”

“True; ’tis a thought to look at.”

“And that one, if he’s gone upward, don’t know what his wife is doing
no more than the man in the moon if she’s gone downward. And that some
unfortunate one in the hot place is a-hollering across to a lucky one
up in the clouds, and quite forgetting their bodies be boxed close
together all the time.”

“Ay, ’tis a thought to look at, too, that I can say ‘Hullo!’ close to
fiery Lord George, and ’a can’t hear me.”

“And that I be eating my onion close to dainty Lady Jane’s nose, and
she can’t smell me.”

“What do ’em put all their heads one way for?” inquired a young man.

“Because ’tis churchyard law, you simple. The law of the living is,
that a man shall be upright and down-right, and the law of the dead is,
that a man shall be east and west. Every state of society have its
laws.”

“We must break the law wi’ a few of the poor souls, however. Come,
buckle to,” said the master-mason.

And they set to work anew.

The order of interment could be distinctly traced by observing the
appearance of the coffins as they lay piled around. On those which had
been standing there but a generation or two the trappings still
remained. Those of an earlier period showed bare wood, with a few
tattered rags dangling therefrom. Earlier still, the wood lay in
fragments on the floor of the niche, and the coffin consisted of naked
lead alone; whilst in the case of the very oldest, even the lead was
bulging and cracking in pieces, revealing to the curious eye a heap of
dust within. The shields upon many were quite loose, and removable by
the hand, their lustreless surfaces still indistinctly exhibiting the
name and title of the deceased.

Overhead the groins and concavities of the arches curved in all
directions, dropping low towards the walls, where the height was no
more than sufficient to enable a person to stand upright.

The body of George the fourteenth baron, together with two or three
others, all of more recent date than the great bulk of coffins piled
there, had, for want of room, been placed at the end of the vault on
tressels, and not in niches like the others. These it was necessary to
remove, to form behind them the chamber in which they were ultimately
to be deposited. Stephen, finding the place and proceedings in keeping
with the sombre colours of his mind, waited there still.

“Simeon, I suppose you can mind poor Lady Elfride, and how she ran away
with the actor?” said John Smith, after awhile. “I think it fell upon
the time my father was sexton here. Let us see—where is she?”

“Here somewhere,” returned Simeon, looking round him.

“Why, I’ve got my arms round the very gentlewoman at this moment.” He
lowered the end of the coffin he was holding, wiped his face, and
throwing a morsel of rotten wood upon another as an indicator,
continued: “That’s her husband there. They was as fair a couple as you
should see anywhere round about; and a good-hearted pair likewise. Ay,
I can mind it, though I was but a chiel at the time. She fell in love
with this young man of hers, and their banns were asked in some church
in London; and the old lord her father actually heard ’em asked the
three times, and didn’t notice her name, being gabbled on wi’ a host of
others. When she had married she told her father, and ’a fleed into a
monstrous rage, and said she shouldn’ hae a farthing. Lady Elfride said
she didn’t think of wishing it; if he’d forgie her ’twas all she asked,
and as for a living, she was content to play plays with her husband.
This frightened the old lord, and ’a gie’d ’em a house to live in, and
a great garden, and a little field or two, and a carriage, and a good
few guineas. Well, the poor thing died at her first gossiping, and her
husband—who was as tender-hearted a man as ever eat meat, and would
have died for her—went wild in his mind, and broke his heart (so ’twas
said). Anyhow, they were buried the same day—father and mother—but the
baby lived. Ay, my lord’s family made much of that man then, and put
him here with his wife, and there in the corner the man is now. The
Sunday after there was a funeral sermon: the text was, ‘Or ever the
silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken;’ and when ’twas
preaching the men drew their hands across their eyes several times, and
every woman cried out loud.”

“And what became of the baby?” said Stephen, who had frequently heard
portions of the story.

“She was brought up by her grandmother, and a pretty maid she were. And
she must needs run away with the curate—Parson Swancourt that is now.
Then her grandmother died, and the title and everything went away to
another branch of the family altogether. Parson Swancourt wasted a good
deal of his wife’s money, and she left him Miss Elfride. That trick of
running away seems to be handed down in families, like craziness or
gout. And they two women be alike as peas.”

“Which two?”

“Lady Elfride and young Miss that’s alive now. The same hair and eyes:
but Miss Elfride’s mother was darker a good deal.”

“Life’s a strangle bubble, ye see,” said William Worm musingly. “For if
the Lord’s anointment had descended upon women instead of men, Miss
Elfride would be Lord Luxellian—Lady, I mane. But as it is, the blood
is run out, and she’s nothing to the Luxellian family by law, whatever
she may be by gospel.”

“I used to fancy,” said Simeon, “when I seed Miss Elfride hugging the
little ladyships, that there was a likeness; but I suppose ’twas only
my dream, for years must have altered the old family shape.”

“And now we’ll move these two, and home-along,” interposed John Smith,
reviving, as became a master, the spirit of labour, which had showed
unmistakable signs of being nearly vanquished by the spirit of chat,
“The flagon of ale we don’t want we’ll let bide here till to-morrow;
none of the poor souls will touch it ’a b’lieve.”

So the evening’s work was concluded, and the party drew from the abode
of the quiet dead, closing the old iron door, and shooting the lock
loudly into the huge copper staple—an incongruous act of imprisonment
towards those who had no dreams of escape.

Chapter XXVII

“How should I greet thee?”

Love frequently dies of time alone—much more frequently of
displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the
displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a greater
man than the first. By the side of the instructive and piquant
snubbings she received from Knight, Stephen’s general agreeableness
seemed watery; by the side of Knight’s spare love-making, Stephen’s
continual outflow seemed lackadaisical. She had begun to sigh for
somebody further on in manhood. Stephen was hardly enough of a man.

Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to
those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that
inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready
sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen’s failure to make his hold on her
heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself
beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a
kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave
untouched, but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to
undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering ceases in the
man, snubbing begins in the woman; the trite but no less unfortunate
fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to
appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement. The abiding
perception of the position of Stephen’s parents had, of course, a
little to do with Elfride’s renunciation. To such girls poverty may not
be, as to the more worldly masses of humanity, a sin in itself; but it
is a sin, because graceful and dainty manners seldom exist in such an
atmosphere. Few women of old family can be thoroughly taught that a
fine soul may wear a smock-frock, and an admittedly common man in one
is but a worm in their eyes. John Smith’s rough hands and clothes, his
wife’s dialect, the necessary narrowness of their ways, being
constantly under Elfride’s notice, were not without their deflecting
influence.

On reaching home after the perilous adventure by the sea-shore, Knight
had felt unwell, and retired almost immediately. The young lady who had
so materially assisted him had done the same, but she reappeared,
properly clothed, about five o’clock. She wandered restlessly about the
house, but not on account of their joint narrow escape from death. The
storm which had torn the tree had merely bowed the reed, and with the
deliverance of Knight all deep thought of the accident had left her.
The mutual avowal which it had been the means of precipitating occupied
a far longer length of her meditations.

Elfride’s disquiet now was on account of that miserable promise to meet
Stephen, which returned like a spectre again and again. The perception
of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly. She now
thought how sound had been her father’s advice to her to give him up,
and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto
been averse. Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of
young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest
wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of
some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.

The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis
a collapse.

“God forgive me—I can’t meet Stephen!” she exclaimed to herself. “I
don’t love him less, but I love Mr. Knight more!”

Yes: she would save herself from a man not fit for her—in spite of
vows. She would obey her father, and have no more to do with Stephen
Smith. Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion
of a virtue.

The following days were passed without any definite avowal from
Knight’s lips. Such solitary walks and scenes as that witnessed by
Smith in the summer-house were frequent, but he courted her so
intangibly that to any but such a delicate perception as Elfride’s it
would have appeared no courtship at all. The time now really began to
be sweet with her. She dismissed the sense of sin in her past actions,
and was automatic in the intoxication of the moment. The fact that
Knight made no actual declaration was no drawback. Knowing since the
betrayal of his sentiments that love for her really existed, she
preferred it for the present in its form of essence, and was willing to
avoid for awhile the grosser medium of words. Their feelings having
been forced to a rather premature demonstration, a reaction was
indulged in by both.

But no sooner had she got rid of her troubled conscience on the matter
of faithlessness than a new anxiety confronted her. It was lest Knight
should accidentally meet Stephen in the parish, and that herself should
be the subject of discourse.

Elfride, learning Knight more thoroughly, perceived that, far from
having a notion of Stephen’s precedence, he had no idea that she had
ever been wooed before by anybody. On ordinary occasions she had a
tongue so frank as to show her whole mind, and a mind so
straightforward as to reveal her heart to its innermost shrine. But the
time for a change had come. She never alluded to even a knowledge of
Knight’s friend. When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more
often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second
lover.

The elopement was now a spectre worse than the first, and, like the
Spirit in Glenfinlas, it waxed taller with every attempt to lay it. Her
natural honesty invited her to confide in Knight, and trust to his
generosity for forgiveness: she knew also that as mere policy it would
be better to tell him early if he was to be told at all. The longer her
concealment the more difficult would be the revelation. But she put it
off. The intense fear which accompanies intense love in young women was
too strong to allow the exercise of a moral quality antagonistic to
itself:

“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”

The match was looked upon as made by her father and mother. The vicar
remembered her promise to reveal the meaning of the telegram she had
received, and two days after the scene in the summer-house, asked her
pointedly. She was frank with him now.

“I had been corresponding with Stephen Smith ever since he left
England, till lately,” she calmly said.

“What!” cried the vicar aghast; “under the eyes of Mr. Knight, too?”

“No; when I found I cared most for Mr. Knight, I obeyed you.”

“You were very kind, I’m sure. When did you begin to like Mr. Knight?”

“I don’t see that that is a pertinent question, papa; the telegram was
from the shipping agent, and was not sent at my request. It announced
the arrival of the vessel bringing him home.”

“Home! What, is he here?”

“Yes; in the village, I believe.”

“Has he tried to see you?”

“Only by fair means. But don’t, papa, question me so! It is torture.”

“I will only say one word more,” he replied. “Have you met him?”

“I have not. I can assure you that at the present moment there is no
more of an understanding between me and the young man you so much
disliked than between him and you. You told me to forget him; and I
have forgotten him.”

“Oh, well; though you did not obey me in the beginning, you are a good
girl, Elfride, in obeying me at last.”

“Don’t call me ‘good,’ papa,” she said bitterly; “you don’t know—and
the less said about some things the better. Remember, Mr. Knight knows
nothing about the other. Oh, how wrong it all is! I don’t know what I
am coming to.”

“As matters stand, I should be inclined to tell him; or, at any rate, I
should not alarm myself about his knowing. He found out the other day
that this was the parish young Smith’s father lives in—what puts you in
such a flurry?”

“I can’t say; but promise—pray don’t let him know! It would be my
ruin!”

“Pooh, child. Knight is a good fellow and a clever man; but at the same
time it does not escape my perceptions that he is no great catch for
you. Men of his turn of mind are nothing so wonderful in the way of
husbands. If you had chosen to wait, you might have mated with a much
wealthier man. But remember, I have not a word to say against your
having him, if you like him. Charlotte is delighted, as you know.”

“Well, papa,” she said, smiling hopefully through a sigh, “it is nice
to feel that in giving way to—to caring for him, I have pleased my
family. But I am not good; oh no, I am very far from that!”

“None of us are good, I am sorry to say,” said her father blandly; “but
girls have a chartered right to change their minds, you know. It has
been recognized by poets from time immemorial. Catullus says, ‘Mulier
cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento—’ What a memory mine is! However,
the passage is, that a woman’s words to a lover are as a matter of
course written only on wind and water. Now don’t be troubled about
that, Elfride.”

“Ah, you don’t know!”

They had been standing on the lawn, and Knight was now seen lingering
some way down a winding walk. When Elfride met him, it was with a much
greater lightness of heart; things were more straightforward now. The
responsibility of her fickleness seemed partly shifted from her own
shoulders to her father’s. Still, there were shadows.

“Ah, could he have known how far I went with Stephen, and yet have said
the same, how much happier I should be!” That was her prevailing
thought.

In the afternoon the lovers went out together on horseback for an hour
or two; and though not wishing to be observed, by reason of the late
death of Lady Luxellian, whose funeral had taken place very privately
on the previous day, they yet found it necessary to pass East Endelstow
Church.

The steps to the vault, as has been stated, were on the outside of the
building, immediately under the aisle wall. Being on horseback, both
Knight and Elfride could overlook the shrubs which screened the
church-yard.

“Look, the vault seems still to be open,” said Knight.

“Yes, it is open,” she answered

“Who is that man close by it? The mason, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if it is John Smith, Stephen’s father?”

“I believe it is,” said Elfride, with apprehension.

“Ah, and can it be? I should like to inquire how his son, my truant
protegé, is going on. And from your father’s description of the vault,
the interior must be interesting. Suppose we go in.”

“Had we better, do you think? May not Lord Luxellian be there?”

“It is not at all likely.”

Elfride then assented, since she could do nothing else. Her heart,
which at first had quailed in consternation, recovered itself when she
considered the character of John Smith. A quiet unassuming man, he
would be sure to act towards her as before those love passages with his
son, which might have given a more pretentious mechanic airs. So
without much alarm she took Knight’s arm after dismounting, and went
with him between and over the graves. The master-mason recognized her
as she approached, and, as usual, lifted his hat respectfully.

“I know you to be Mr. Smith, my former friend Stephen’s father,” said
Knight, directly he had scanned the embrowned and ruddy features of
John.

“Yes, sir, I b’lieve I be.”

“How is your son now? I have only once heard from him since he went to
India. I daresay you have heard him speak of me—Mr. Knight, who became
acquainted with him some years ago in Exonbury.”

“Ay, that I have. Stephen is very well, thank you, sir, and he’s in
England; in fact, he’s at home. In short, sir, he’s down in the vault
there, a-looking at the departed coffins.”

Elfride’s heart fluttered like a butterfly.

Knight looked amazed. “Well, that is extraordinary.” he murmured. “Did
he know I was in the parish?”

“I really can’t say, sir,” said John, wishing himself out of the
entanglement he rather suspected than thoroughly understood.

“Would it be considered an intrusion by the family if we went into the
vault?”

“Oh, bless ye, no, sir; scores of folk have been stepping down. ’Tis
left open a-purpose.”

“We will go down, Elfride.”

“I am afraid the air is close,” she said appealingly.

“Oh no, ma’am,” said John. “We white-limed the walls and arches the day
’twas opened, as we always do, and again on the morning of the funeral;
the place is as sweet as a granary.

“Then I should like you to accompany me, Elfie; having originally
sprung from the family too.”

“I don’t like going where death is so emphatically present. I’ll stay
by the horses whilst you go in; they may get loose.”

“What nonsense! I had no idea your sentiments were so flimsily formed
as to be perturbed by a few remnants of mortality; but stay out, if you
are so afraid, by all means.”

“Oh no, I am not afraid; don’t say that.”

She held miserably to his arm, thinking that, perhaps, the revelation
might as well come at once as ten minutes later, for Stephen would be
sure to accompany his friend to his horse.

At first, the gloom of the vault, which was lighted only by a couple of
candles, was too great to admit of their seeing anything distinctly;
but with a further advance Knight discerned, in front of the black
masses lining the walls, a young man standing, and writing in a
pocket-book.

Knight said one word: “Stephen!”

Stephen Smith, not being in such absolute ignorance of Knight’s
whereabouts as Knight had been of Smith’s instantly recognized his
friend, and knew by rote the outlines of the fair woman standing behind
him.

Stephen came forward and shook him by the hand, without speaking.

“Why have you not written, my boy?” said Knight, without in any way
signifying Elfride’s presence to Stephen. To the essayist, Smith was
still the country lad whom he had patronized and tended; one to whom
the formal presentation of a lady betrothed to himself would have
seemed incongruous and absurd.

“Why haven’t you written to me?” said Stephen.

“Ah, yes. Why haven’t I? why haven’t we? That’s always the query which
we cannot clearly answer without an unsatisfactory sense of our
inadequacies. However, I have not forgotten you, Smith. And now we have
met; and we must meet again, and have a longer chat than this can
conveniently be. I must know all you have been doing. That you have
thriven, I know, and you must teach me the way.”

Elfride stood in the background. Stephen had read the position at a
glance, and immediately guessed that she had never mentioned his name
to Knight. His tact in avoiding catastrophes was the chief quality
which made him intellectually respectable, in which quality he far
transcended Knight; and he decided that a tranquil issue out of the
encounter, without any harrowing of the feelings of either Knight or
Elfride, was to be attempted if possible. His old sense of indebtedness
to Knight had never wholly forsaken him; his love for Elfride was
generous now.

As far as he dared look at her movements he saw that her bearing
towards him would be dictated by his own towards her; and if he acted
as a stranger she would do likewise as a means of deliverance.
Circumstances favouring this course, it was desirable also to be rather
reserved towards Knight, to shorten the meeting as much as possible.

“I am afraid that my time is almost too short to allow even of such a
pleasure,” he said. “I leave here to-morrow. And until I start for the
Continent and India, which will be in a fortnight, I shall have hardly
a moment to spare.”

Knight’s disappointment and dissatisfied looks at this reply sent a
pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of
Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true, but
their tone was far from being so. He would have been gratified to talk
with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead loss to himself that,
to save the woman who cared nothing for him, he was deliberately
throwing away his friend.

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” said Knight, in a changed tone. “But of
course, if you have weighty concerns to attend to, they must not be
neglected. And if this is to be our first and last meeting, let me say
that I wish you success with all my heart!” Knight’s warmth revived
towards the end; the solemn impressions he was beginning to receive
from the scene around them abstracting from his heart as a puerility
any momentary vexation at words. “It is a strange place for us to meet
in,” he continued, looking round the vault.

Stephen briefly assented, and there was a silence. The blackened
coffins were now revealed more clearly than at first, the whitened
walls and arches throwing them forward in strong relief. It was a scene
which was remembered by all three as an indelible mark in their
history. Knight, with an abstracted face, was standing between his
companions, though a little in advance of them, Elfride being on his
right hand, and Stephen Smith on his left. The white daylight on his
right side gleamed faintly in, and was toned to a blueness by contrast
with the yellow rays from the candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly
shrinking back, and nearest the entrance, received most of the light
therefrom, whilst Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the
spot of outer sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch,
and nothing more.

“I have been here two or three times since it was opened,” said
Stephen. “My father was engaged in the work, you know.”

“Yes. What are you doing?” Knight inquired, looking at the note-book
and pencil Stephen held in his hand.

“I have been sketching a few details in the church, and since then I
have been copying the names from some of the coffins here. Before I
left England I used to do a good deal of this sort of thing.”

“Yes; of course. Ah, that’s poor Lady Luxellian, I suppose.” Knight
pointed to a coffin of light satin-wood, which stood on the stone
sleepers in the new niche. “And the remainder of the family are on this
side. Who are those two, so snug and close together?”

Stephen’s voice altered slightly as he replied “That’s Lady Elfride
Kingsmore—born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her husband. I have heard
my father say that they—he—ran away with her, and married her against
the wish of her parents.”

“Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss
Swancourt?” said Knight, turning to her. “I think you told me it was
three or four generations ago that your family branched off from the
Luxellians?”

“She was my grandmother,” said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to moisten
her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the conscience-stricken
look of Guido’s Magdalen, rendered upon a more childlike form. She kept
her face partially away from Knight and Stephen, and set her eyes upon
the sky visible outside, as if her salvation depended upon quickly
reaching it. Her left hand rested lightly within Knight’s arm, half
withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover,
yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched his
sleeve. “‘Can one be pardoned, and retain the offence?’” quoted
Elfride’s heart then.

Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in
the shape of disjointed remarks. “One’s mind gets thronged with
thoughts while standing so solemnly here,” Knight said, in a measured
quiet voice. “How much has been said on death from time to time! how
much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy each of these who lie
here saying:

“For Thou, to make my fall more great,
        Didst lift me up on high.”

What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
thinking of.”

“Yes, I know it,” she murmured, and went on in a still lower voice,
seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of her nature to
reach Stephen:

“‘My days, just hastening to their end,
    Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither’d grass,
    With waning lustre fade.’”

“Well,” said Knight musingly, “let us leave them. Such occasions as
these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the
fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so
vast that our physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We
look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant growth
depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a
foundation so small? Must I again return to my daily walk in that
narrow cell, a human body, where worldly thoughts can torture me? Do we
not?”

“Yes,” said Stephen and Elfride.

“One has a sense of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a
sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a
body. What weakens one’s intentions regarding the future like the
thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful
chord, for there’s a great deal to be done yet by us all.”

As Knight meditatively addressed his juniors thus, unconscious of the
deception practised, for different reasons, by the severed hearts at
his side, and of the scenes that had in earlier days united them, each
one felt that he and she did not gain by contrast with their musing
mentor. Physically not so handsome as either the youthful architect or
the vicar’s daughter, the thoroughness and integrity of Knight
illuminated his features with a dignity not even incipient in the other
two. It is difficult to frame rules which shall apply to both sexes,
and Elfride, an undeveloped girl, must, perhaps, hardly be laden with
the moral responsibilities which attach to a man in like circumstances.
The charm of woman, too, lies partly in her subtleness in matters of
love. But if honesty is a virtue in itself, Elfride, having none of it
now, seemed, being for being, scarcely good enough for Knight. Stephen,
though deceptive for no unworthy purpose, was deceptive after all; and
whatever good results grace such strategy if it succeed, it seldom
draws admiration, especially when it fails.

On an ordinary occasion, had Knight been even quite alone with Stephen,
he would hardly have alluded to his possible relationship to Elfride.
But moved by attendant circumstances Knight was impelled to be
confiding.

“Stephen,” he said, “this lady is Miss Swancourt. I am staying at her
father’s house, as you probably know.” He stepped a few paces nearer to
Smith, and said in a lower tone: “I may as well tell you that we are
engaged to be married.”

Low as the words had been spoken, Elfride had heard them, and awaited
Stephen’s reply in breathless silence, if that could be called silence
where Elfride’s dress, at each throb of her heart, shook and indicated
it like a pulse-glass, rustling also against the wall in reply to the
same throbbing. The ray of daylight which reached her face lent it a
blue pallor in comparison with those of the other two.

“I congratulate you,” Stephen whispered; and said aloud, “I know Miss
Swancourt—a little. You must remember that my father is a parishioner
of Mr. Swancourt’s.”

“I thought you might possibly not have lived at home since they have
been here.”

“I have never lived at home, certainly, since that time.”

“I have seen Mr. Smith,” faltered Elfride.

“Well, there is no excuse for me. As strangers to each other I ought, I
suppose, to have introduced you: as acquaintances, I should not have
stood so persistently between you. But the fact is, Smith, you seem a
boy to me, even now.”

Stephen appeared to have a more than previous consciousness of the
intense cruelty of his fate at the present moment. He could not repress
the words, uttered with a dim bitterness:

“You should have said that I seemed still the rural mechanic’s son I
am, and hence an unfit subject for the ceremony of introductions.”

“Oh, no, no! I won’t have that.” Knight endeavoured to give his reply a
laughing tone in Elfride’s ears, and an earnestness in Stephen’s: in
both which efforts he signally failed, and produced a forced speech
pleasant to neither. “Well, let us go into the open air again; Miss
Swancourt, you are particularly silent. You mustn’t mind Smith. I have
known him for years, as I have told you.”

“Yes, you have,” she said.

“To think she has never mentioned her knowledge of me!” Smith murmured,
and thought with some remorse how much her conduct resembled his own on
his first arrival at her house as a stranger to the place.

They ascended to the daylight, Knight taking no further notice of
Elfride’s manner, which, as usual, he attributed to the natural shyness