“Jealousy is cruel as the grave.”
Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and
once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the distractions of
his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight had lingered
on in him. Perhaps this staunchness was because Knight ever treated him
as a mere disciple—even to snubbing him sometimes; and had at last,
though unwittingly, inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all, that
of taking away his sweetheart. The emotional side of his constitution
was built rather after a feminine than a male model; and that
tremendous wound from Knight’s hand may have tended to keep alive a
warmth which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.
Knight, on his part, was vexed, after they had parted, that he had not
taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner. Those words which
Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior claim to Elfride,
would, if uttered when the man was younger, have provoked such a query
as, “Come, tell me all about it, my lad,” from Knight, and Stephen
would straightway have delivered himself of all he knew on the subject.
Stephen the ingenuous boy, though now obliterated externally by Stephen
the contriving man, returned to Knight’s memory vividly that afternoon.
He was at present but a sojourner in London; and after attending to the
two or three matters of business which remained to be done that day, he
walked abstractedly into the gloomy corridors of the British Museum for
the half-hour previous to their closing. That meeting with Smith had
reunited the present with the past, closing up the chasm of his absence
from England as if it had never existed, until the final circumstances
of his previous time of residence in London formed but a yesterday to
the circumstances now. The conflict that then had raged in him
concerning Elfride Swancourt revived, strengthened by its sleep.
Indeed, in those many months of absence, though quelling the intention
to make her his wife, he had never forgotten that she was the type of
woman adapted to his nature; and instead of trying to obliterate
thoughts of her altogether, he had grown to regard them as an infirmity
it was necessary to tolerate.
Knight returned to his hotel much earlier in the evening than he would
have done in the ordinary course of things. He did not care to think
whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had
slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance, or
from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen
had hastily pronounced, betokening that he knew something more of
Elfride than Knight had supposed.
He made a hasty dinner, inquired for Smith, and soon was ushered into
the young man’s presence, whom he found sitting in front of a
comfortable fire, beside a table spread with a few scientific
periodicals and art reviews.
“I have come to you, after all,” said Knight. “My manner was odd this
morning, and it seemed desirable to call; but that you had too much
sense to notice, Stephen, I know. Put it down to my wanderings in
France and Italy.”
“Don’t say another word, but sit down. I am only too glad to see you
again.”
Stephen would hardly have cared to tell Knight just then that the
minute before Knight was announced he had been reading over some old
letters of Elfride’s. They were not many; and until to-night had been
sealed up, and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk, with a few
other mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels.
The familiar sights and sounds of London, the meeting with his friend,
had with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard
to Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world
had to some extent suspended, though never ruptured. He at first
intended only to look over these letters on the outside; then he read
one; then another; until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to
sad memories. He folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and
instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic
world, had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had
returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.
The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of
its necessity. Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more
intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his
life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his
Maker.
They sat by the fire, chatting on external and random subjects, neither
caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed to
discuss. On the table with the periodicals lay two or three
pocket-books, one of them being open. Knight seeing from the exposed
page that the contents were sketches only, began turning the leaves
over carelessly with his finger. When, some time later, Stephen was out
of the room, Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the
sketches more carefully.
The first crude ideas, pertaining to dwellings of all kinds, were
roughly outlined on the different pages. Antiquities had been copied;
fragments of Indian columns, colossal statues, and outlandish ornament
from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri, were carelessly intruded
upon by outlines of modern doors, windows, roofs, cooking-stoves, and
household furniture; everything, in short, which comes within the range
of a practising architect’s experience, who travels with his eyes open.
Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval
subjects for carving or illumination—heads of Virgins, Saints, and
Prophets.
Stephen was not professedly a free-hand draughtsman, but he drew the
human figure with correctness and skill. In its numerous repetitions on
the sides and edges of the leaves, Knight began to notice a
peculiarity. All the feminine saints had one type of feature. There
were large nimbi and small nimbi about their drooping heads, but the
face was always the same. That profile—how well Knight knew that
profile!
Had there been but one specimen of the familiar countenance, he might
have passed over the resemblance as accidental; but a repetition meant
more. Knight thought anew of Smith’s hasty words earlier in the day,
and looked at the sketches again and again.
On the young man’s entry, Knight said with palpable agitation—
“Stephen, who are those intended for?”
Stephen looked over the book with utter unconcern, “Saints and angels,
done in my leisure moments. They were intended as designs for the
stained glass of an English church.”
“But whom do you idealize by that type of woman you always adopt for
the Virgin?”
“Nobody.”
And then a thought raced along Stephen’s mind and he looked up at his
friend.
The truth is, Stephen’s introduction of Elfride’s lineaments had been
so unconscious that he had not at first understood his companion’s
drift. The hand, like the tongue, easily acquires the trick of
repetition by rote, without calling in the mind to assist at all; and
this had been the case here. Young men who cannot write verses about
their Loves generally take to portraying them, and in the early days of
his attachment Smith had never been weary of outlining Elfride. The
lay-figure of Stephen’s sketches now initiated an adjustment of many
things. Knight had recognized her. The opportunity of comparing notes
had come unsought.
“Elfride Swancourt, to whom I was engaged,” he said quietly.
“Stephen!”
“I know what you mean by speaking like that.”
“Was it Elfride? YOU the man, Stephen?”
“Yes; and you are thinking why did I conceal the fact from you that
time at Endelstow, are you not?”
“Yes, and more—more.”
“I did it for the best; blame me if you will; I did it for the best.
And now say how could I be with you afterwards as I had been before?”
“I don’t know at all; I can’t say.”
Knight remained fixed in thought, and once he murmured—
“I had a suspicion this afternoon that there might be some such meaning
in your words about my taking her away. But I dismissed it. How came
you to know her?” he presently asked, in almost a peremptory tone.
“I went down about the church; years ago now.”
“When you were with Hewby, of course, of course. Well, I can’t
understand it.” His tones rose. “I don’t know what to say, your
hoodwinking me like this for so long!”
“I don’t see that I have hoodwinked you at all.”
“Yes, yes, but”——
Knight arose from his seat, and began pacing up and down the room. His
face was markedly pale, and his voice perturbed, as he said—
“You did not act as I should have acted towards you under those
circumstances. I feel it deeply; and I tell you plainly, I shall never
forget it!”
“What?”
“Your behaviour at that meeting in the family vault, when I told you we
were going to be married. Deception, dishonesty, everywhere; all the
world’s of a piece!”
Stephen did not much like this misconstruction of his motives, even
though it was but the hasty conclusion of a friend disturbed by
emotion.
“I could do no otherwise than I did, with due regard to her,” he said
stiffly.
“Indeed!” said Knight, in the bitterest tone of reproach. “Nor could
you with due regard to her have married her, I suppose! I have
hoped—longed—that HE, who turns out to be YOU, would ultimately have
done that.”
“I am much obliged to you for that hope. But you talk very
mysteriously. I think I had about the best reason anybody could have
had for not doing that.”
“Oh, what reason was it?”
“That I could not.”
“You ought to have made an opportunity; you ought to do so now, in bare
justice to her, Stephen!” cried Knight, carried beyond himself. “That
you know very well, and it hurts and wounds me more than you dream to
find you never have tried to make any reparation to a woman of that
kind—so trusting, so apt to be run away with by her feelings—poor
little fool, so much the worse for her!”
“Why, you talk like a madman! You took her away from me, did you not?”
“Picking up what another throws down can scarcely be called ‘taking
away.’ However, we shall not agree too well upon that subject, so we
had better part.”
“But I am quite certain you misapprehend something most grievously,”
said Stephen, shaken to the bottom of his heart. “What have I done;
tell me? I have lost Elfride, but is that such a sin?”
“Was it her doing, or yours?”
“Was what?”
“That you parted.”
“I will tell you honestly. It was hers entirely, entirely.”
“What was her reason?”
“I can hardly say. But I’ll tell the story without reserve.”
Stephen until to-day had unhesitatingly held that she grew tired of him
and turned to Knight; but he did not like to advance the statement now,
or even to think the thought. To fancy otherwise accorded better with
the hope to which Knight’s estrangement had given birth: that love for
his friend was not the direct cause, but a result of her suspension of
love for himself.
“Such a matter must not be allowed to breed discord between us,” Knight
returned, relapsing into a manner which concealed all his true feeling,
as if confidence now was intolerable. “I do see that your reticence
towards me in the vault may have been dictated by prudential
considerations.” He concluded artificially, “It was a strange thing
altogether; but not of much importance, I suppose, at this distance of
time; and it does not concern me now, though I don’t mind hearing your
story.”
These words from Knight, uttered with such an air of renunciation and
apparent indifference, prompted Smith to speak on—perhaps with a little
complacency—of his old secret engagement to Elfride. He told the
details of its origin, and the peremptory words and actions of her
father to extinguish their love.
Knight persevered in the tone and manner of a disinterested outsider.
It had become more than ever imperative to screen his emotions from
Stephen’s eye; the young man would otherwise be less frank, and their
meeting would be again embittered. What was the use of untoward
candour?
Stephen had now arrived at the point in his ingenuous narrative where
he left the vicarage because of her father’s manner. Knight’s interest
increased. Their love seemed so innocent and childlike thus far.
“It is a nice point in casuistry,” he observed, “to decide whether you
were culpable or not in not telling Swancourt that your friends were
parishioners of his. It was only human nature to hold your tongue under
the circumstances. Well, what was the result of your dismissal by him?”
“That we agreed to be secretly faithful. And to insure this we thought
we would marry.”
Knight’s suspense and agitation rose higher when Stephen entered upon
this phase of the subject.
“Do you mind telling on?” he said, steadying his manner of speech.
“Oh, not at all.”
Then Stephen gave in full the particulars of the meeting with Elfride
at the railway station; the necessity they were under of going to
London, unless the ceremony were to be postponed. The long journey of
the afternoon and evening; her timidity and revulsion of feeling; its
culmination on reaching London; the crossing over to the down-platform
and their immediate departure again, solely in obedience to her wish;
the journey all night; their anxious watching for the dawn; their
arrival at St. Launce’s at last—were detailed. And he told how a
village woman named Jethway was the only person who recognized them,
either going or coming; and how dreadfully this terrified Elfride. He
told how he waited in the fields whilst this then reproachful
sweetheart went for her pony, and how the last kiss he ever gave her
was given a mile out of the town, on the way to Endelstow.
These things Stephen related with a will. He believed that in doing so
he established word by word the reasonableness of his claim to Elfride.
“Curse her! curse that woman!—that miserable letter that parted us! O
God!”
Knight began pacing the room again, and uttered this at further end.
“What did you say?” said Stephen, turning round.
“Say? Did I say anything? Oh, I was merely thinking about your story,
and the oddness of my having a fancy for the same woman afterwards. And
that now I—I have forgotten her almost; and neither of us care about
her, except just as a friend, you know, eh?”
Knight still continued at the further end of the room, somewhat in
shadow.
“Exactly,” said Stephen, inwardly exultant, for he was really deceived
by Knight’s off-hand manner.
Yet he was deceived less by the completeness of Knight’s disguise than
by the persuasive power which lay in the fact that Knight had never
before deceived him in anything. So this supposition that his companion
had ceased to love Elfride was an enormous lightening of the weight
which had turned the scale against him.
“Admitting that Elfride COULD love another man after you,” said the
elder, under the same varnish of careless criticism, “she was none the
worse for that experience.”
“The worse? Of course she was none the worse.”
“Did you ever think it a wild and thoughtless thing for her to do?”
“Indeed, I never did,” said Stephen. “I persuaded her. She saw no harm
in it until she decided to return, nor did I; nor was there, except to
the extent of indiscretion.”
“Directly she thought it was wrong she would go no further?”
“That was it. I had just begun to think it wrong too.”
“Such a childish escapade might have been misrepresented by any
evil-disposed person, might it not?”
“It might; but I never heard that it was. Nobody who really knew all
the circumstances would have done otherwise than smile. If all the
world had known it, Elfride would still have remained the only one who
thought her action a sin. Poor child, she always persisted in thinking
so, and was frightened more than enough.”
“Stephen, do you love her now?”
“Well, I like her; I always shall, you know,” he said evasively, and
with all the strategy love suggested. “But I have not seen her for so
long that I can hardly be expected to love her. Do you love her still?”
“How shall I answer without being ashamed? What fickle beings we men
are, Stephen! Men may love strongest for a while, but women love
longest. I used to love her—in my way, you know.”
“Yes, I understand. Ah, and I used to love her in my way. In fact, I
loved her a good deal at one time; but travel has a tendency to
obliterate early fancies.”
“It has—it has, truly.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in this conversation was the
circumstance that, though each interlocutor had at first his suspicions
of the other’s abiding passion awakened by several little acts, neither
would allow himself to see that his friend might now be speaking
deceitfully as well as he.
“Stephen.” resumed Knight, “now that matters are smooth between us, I
think I must leave you. You won’t mind my hurrying off to my quarters?”
“You’ll stay to some sort of supper surely? didn’t you come to dinner!”
“You must really excuse me this once.”
“Then you’ll drop in to breakfast to-morrow.”
“I shall be rather pressed for time.”
“An early breakfast, which shall interfere with nothing?”
“I’ll come,” said Knight, with as much readiness as it was possible to
graft upon a huge stock of reluctance. “Yes, early; eight o’clock say,
as we are under the same roof.”
“Any time you like. Eight it shall be.”
And Knight left him. To wear a mask, to dissemble his feelings as he
had in their late miserable conversation, was such torture that he
could support it no longer. It was the first time in Knight’s life that
he had ever been so entirely the player of a part. And the man he had
thus deceived was Stephen, who had docilely looked up to him from youth
as a superior of unblemished integrity.
He went to bed, and allowed the fever of his excitement to rage
uncontrolled. Stephen—it was only he who was the rival—only Stephen!
There was an anti-climax of absurdity which Knight, wretched and
conscience-stricken as he was, could not help recognizing. Stephen was
but a boy to him. Where the great grief lay was in perceiving that the
very innocence of Elfride in reading her little fault as one so grave
was what had fatally misled him. Had Elfride, with any degree of
coolness, asserted that she had done no harm, the poisonous breath of
the dead Mrs. Jethway would have been inoperative. Why did he not make
his little docile girl tell more? If on that subject he had only
exercised the imperativeness customary with him on others, all might
have been revealed. It smote his heart like a switch when he remembered
how gently she had borne his scourging speeches, never answering him
with a single reproach, only assuring him of her unbounded love.
Knight blessed Elfride for her sweetness, and forgot her fault. He
pictured with a vivid fancy those fair summer scenes with her. He again
saw her as at their first meeting, timid at speaking, yet in her
eagerness to be explanatory borne forward almost against her will. How
she would wait for him in green places, without showing any of the
ordinary womanly affectations of indifference! How proud she was to be
seen walking with him, bearing legibly in her eyes the thought that he
was the greatest genius in the world!
He formed a resolution; and after that could make pretence of slumber
no longer. Rising and dressing himself, he sat down and waited for day.
That night Stephen was restless too. Not because of the unwontedness of
a return to English scenery; not because he was about to meet his
parents, and settle down for awhile to English cottage life. He was
indulging in dreams, and for the nonce the warehouses of Bombay and the
plains and forts of Poonah were but a shadow’s shadow. His dream was
based on this one atom of fact: Elfride and Knight had become
separated, and their engagement was as if it had never been. Their
rupture must have occurred soon after Stephen’s discovery of the fact
of their union; and, Stephen went on to think, what so probable as that
a return of her errant affection to himself was the cause?
Stephen’s opinions in this matter were those of a lover, and not the
balanced judgment of an unbiassed spectator. His naturally sanguine
spirit built hope upon hope, till scarcely a doubt remained in his mind
that her lingering tenderness for him had in some way been perceived by
Knight, and had provoked their parting.
To go and see Elfride was the suggestion of impulses it was impossible
to withstand. At any rate, to run down from St. Launce’s to Castle
Poterel, a distance of less than twenty miles, and glide like a ghost
about their old haunts, making stealthy inquiries about her, would be a
fascinating way of passing the first spare hours after reaching home on
the day after the morrow.
He was now a richer man than heretofore, standing on his own bottom;
and the definite position in which he had rooted himself nullified old
local distinctions. He had become illustrious, even sanguine clarus,
judging from the tone of the worthy Mayor of St. Launce’s.