“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.