Томас Харди (Гарди)
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Chapter XXXI
‘A worm i’ the bud.’
One day the reviewer said, ‘Let us go to the cliffs again, Elfride;’ and, without consulting her wishes, he moved as if to start at once.
‘The cliff of our dreadful adventure?’ she inquired, with a shudder. ‘Death stares me in the face in the person of that cliff.’
Nevertheless, so entirely had she sunk her individuality in his that the remark was not uttered as an expostulation, and she immediately prepared to accompany him.
‘No, not that place,’ said Knight. ‘It is ghastly to me, too. That other, I mean; what is its name? – Windy Beak.’
Windy Beak was the second cliff in height along that coast, and, as is frequently the case with the natural features of the globe no less than with the intellectual features of men, it enjoyed the reputation of being the first. Moreover, it was the cliff to which Elfride had ridden with Stephen Smith, on a well-remembered morning of his summer visit.
So, though thought of the former cliff had caused her to shudder at the perils to which her lover and herself had there been exposed, by being associated with Knight only it was not so objectionable as Windy Beak. That place was worse than gloomy, it was a perpetual reproach to her.
But not liking to refuse, she said, ‘It is further than the other cliff.’
‘Yes; but you can ride.’
‘And will you too?’
‘No, I’ll walk.’
A duplicate of her original arrangement with Stephen. Some fatality must be hanging over her head. But she ceased objecting.
‘Very well, Harry, I’ll ride,’ she said meekly.
A quarter of an hour later she was in the saddle. But how different the mood from that of the former time. She had, indeed, given up her position as queen of the less to be vassal of the greater. Here was no showing off now; no scampering out of sight with Pansy, to perplex and tire her companion; no saucy remarks on LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI. Elfride was burdened with the very intensity of her love.
Knight did most of the talking along the journey. Elfride silently listened, and entirely resigned herself to the motions of the ambling horse upon which she sat, alternately rising and sinking gently, like a sea bird upon a sea wave.
When they had reached the limit of a quadruped’s possibilities in walking, Knight tenderly lifted her from the saddle, tied the horse, and rambled on with her to the seat in the rock. Knight sat down, and drew Elfride deftly beside him, and they looked over the sea.
Two or three degrees above that melancholy and eternally level line, the ocean horizon, hung a sun of brass, with no visible rays, in a sky of ashen hue. It was a sky the sun did not illuminate or enkindle, as is usual at sunsets. This sheet of sky was met by the salt mass of gray water, flecked here and there with white. A waft of dampness occasionally rose to their faces, which was probably rarefied spray from the blows of the sea upon the foot of the cliff.
Elfride wished it could be a longer time ago that she had sat there with Stephen as her lover, and agreed to be his wife. The significant closeness of that time to the present was another item to add to the list of passionate fears which were chronic with her now.
Yet Knight was very tender this evening, and sustained her close to him as they sat.
Not a word had been uttered by either since sitting down, when Knight said musingly, looking still afar —
‘I wonder if any lovers in past years ever sat here with arms locked, as we do now. Probably they have, for the place seems formed for a seat.’
Her recollection of a well-known pair who had, and the much-talked-of loss which had ensued therefrom, and how the young man had been sent back to look for the missing article, led Elfride to glance down to her side, and behind her back. Many people who lose a trinket involuntarily give a momentary look for it in passing the spot ever so long afterwards. They do not often find it. Elfride, in turning her head, saw something shine weakly from a crevice in the rocky sedile. Only for a few minutes during the day did the sun light the alcove to its innermost rifts and slits, but these were the minutes now, and its level rays did Elfride the good or evil turn of revealing the lost ornament.
Elfride’s thoughts instantly reverted to the words she had unintentionally uttered upon what had been going on when the earring was lost. And she was immediately seized with a misgiving that Knight, on seeing the object, would be reminded of her words. Her instinctive act therefore was to secure it privately.
It was so deep in the crack that Elfride could not pull it out with her hand, though she made several surreptitious trials.
‘What are you doing, Elfie?’ said Knight, noticing her attempts, and looking behind him likewise.
She had relinquished the endeavour, but too late.
Knight peered into the joint from which her hand had been withdrawn, and saw what she had seen. He instantly took a penknife from his pocket, and by dint of probing and scraping brought the earring out upon open ground.
‘It is not yours, surely?’ he inquired.
‘Yes, it is,’ she said quietly.
‘Well, that is a most extraordinary thing, that we should find it like this!’ Knight then remembered more circumstances; ‘What, is it the one you have told me of?’
‘Yes.’
The unfortunate remark of hers at the kiss came into his mind, if eyes were ever an index to be trusted. Trying to repress the words he yet spoke on the subject, more to obtain assurance that what it had seemed to imply was not true than from a wish to pry into bygones.
‘Were you really engaged to be married to that lover?’ he said, looking straight forward at the sea again.
‘Yes – but not exactly. Yet I think I was.’
‘O Elfride, engaged to be married!’ he murmured.
‘It would have been called a – secret engagement, I suppose. But don’t look so disappointed; don’t blame me.’
‘No, no.’
‘Why do you say “No, no,” in such a way? Sweetly enough, but so barely?’
Knight made no direct reply to this. ‘Elfride, I told you once,’ he said, following out his thoughts, ‘that I never kissed a woman as a sweetheart until I kissed you. A kiss is not much, I suppose, and it happens to few young people to be able to avoid all blandishments and attentions except from the one they afterwards marry. But I have peculiar weaknesses, Elfride; and because I have led a peculiar life, I must suffer for it, I suppose. I had hoped – well, what I had no right to hope in connection with you. You naturally granted your former lover the privileges you grant me.’
A ‘yes’ came from her like the last sad whisper of a breeze.
‘And he used to kiss you – of course he did.’
‘Yes.’
‘And perhaps you allowed him a more free manner in his love-making than I have shown in mine.’
‘No, I did not.’ This was rather more alertly spoken.
‘But he adopted it without being allowed?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much I have made of you, Elfride, and how I have kept aloof!’ said Knight in deep and shaken tones. ‘So many days and hours as I have hoped in you – I have feared to kiss you more than those two times. And he made no scruples to…’
She crept closer to him and trembled as if with cold. Her dread that the whole story, with random additions, would become known to him, caused her manner to be so agitated that Knight was alarmed and perplexed into stillness. The actual innocence which made her think so fearfully of what, as the world goes, was not a great matter, magnified her apparent guilt. It may have said to Knight that a woman who was so flurried in the preliminaries must have a dreadful sequel to her tale.
‘I know,’ continued Knight, with an indescribable drag of manner and intonation, – ‘I know I am absurdly scrupulous about you – that I want you too exclusively mine. In your past before you knew me – from your very cradle – I wanted to think you had been mine. I would make you mine by main force. Elfride,’ he went on vehemently, ‘I can’t help this jealousy over you! It is my nature, and must be so, and I HATE the fact that you have been caressed before: yes hate it!’
She drew a long deep breath, which was half a sob. Knight’s face was hard, and he never looked at her at all, still fixing his gaze far out to sea, which the sun had now resigned to the shade. In high places it is not long from sunset to night, dusk being in a measure banished, and though only evening where they sat, it had been twilight in the valleys for half an hour. Upon the dull expanse of sea there gradually intensified itself into existence the gleam of a distant light-ship.
‘When that lover first kissed you, Elfride was it in such a place as this?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘You don’t tell me anything but what I wring out of you. Why is that? Why have you suppressed all mention of this when casual confidences of mine should have suggested confidence in return? On board the Juliet, why were you so secret? It seems like being made a fool of, Elfride, to think that, when I was teaching you how desirable it was that we should have no secrets from each other, you were assenting in words, but in act contradicting me. Confidence would have been so much more promising for our happiness. If you had had confidence in me, and told me willingly, I should – be different. But you suppress everything, and I shall question you. Did you live at Endelstow at that time?’
‘Yes,’ she said faintly.
‘Where were you when he first kissed you?’
‘Sitting in this seat.’
‘Ah, I thought so!’ said Knight, rising and facing her.
‘And that accounts for everything – the exclamation which you explained deceitfully, and all! Forgive the harsh word, Elfride – forgive it.’ He smiled a surface smile as he continued: ‘What a poor mortal I am to play second fiddle in everything and to be deluded by fibs!’
‘Oh, don’t say it; don’t, Harry!’
‘Where did he kiss you besides here?’
‘Sitting on – a tomb in the – churchyard – and other places,’ she answered with slow recklessness.
‘Never mind, never mind,’ he exclaimed, on seeing her tears and perturbation. ‘I don’t want to grieve you. I don’t care.’
But Knight did care.
‘It makes no difference, you know,’ he continued, seeing she did not reply.
‘I feel cold,’ said Elfride. ‘Shall we go home?’
‘Yes; it is late in the year to sit long out of doors: we ought to be off this ledge before it gets too dark to let us see our footing. I daresay the horse is impatient.’
Knight spoke the merest commonplace to her now. He had hoped to the last moment that she would have volunteered the whole story of her first attachment. It grew more and more distasteful to him that she should have a secret of this nature. Such entire confidence as he had pictured as about to exist between himself and the innocent young wife who had known no lover’s tones save his – was this its beginning? He lifted her upon the horse, and they went along constrainedly. The poison of suspicion was doing its work well.
An incident occurred on this homeward journey which was long remembered by both, as adding shade to shadow. Knight could not keep from his mind the words of Adam’s reproach to Eve in PARADISE LOST, and at last whispered them to himself —
‘Fool’d and beguiled: by him thou, I by thee!’
‘What did you say?’ Elfride inquired timorously.
‘It was only a quotation.’
They had now dropped into a hollow, and the church tower made its appearance against the pale evening sky, its lower part being hidden by some intervening trees. Elfride, being denied an answer, was looking at the tower and trying to think of some contrasting quotation she might use to regain his tenderness. After a little thought she said in winning tones —
“Thou hast been my hope, and a strong tower for me against the enemy.”’
They passed on. A few minutes later three or four birds were seen to fly out of the tower.
‘The strong tower moves,’ said Knight, with surprise.
A corner of the square mass swayed forward, sank, and vanished. A loud rumble followed, and a cloud of dust arose where all had previously been so clear.
‘The church restorers have done it!’ said Elfride.
At this minute Mr. Swancourt was seen approaching them. He came up with a bustling demeanour, apparently much engrossed by some business in hand.
‘We have got the tower down!’ he exclaimed. ‘It came rather quicker than we intended it should. The first idea was to take it down stone by stone, you know. In doing this the crack widened considerably, and it was not believed safe for the men to stand upon the walls any longer. Then we decided to undermine it, and three men set to work at the weakest corner this afternoon. They had left off for the evening, intending to give the final blow to-morrow morning, and had been home about half an hour, when down it came. A very successful job – a very fine job indeed. But he was a tough old fellow in spite of the crack.’ Here Mr. Swancourt wiped from his face the perspiration his excitement had caused him.
‘Poor old tower!’ said Elfride.
‘Yes, I am sorry for it,’ said Knight. ‘It was an interesting piece of antiquity – a local record of local art.’
‘Ah, but my dear sir, we shall have a new one, expostulated Mr. Swancourt; ‘a splendid tower – designed by a first-rate London man – in the newest style of Gothic art, and full of Christian feeling.’
‘Indeed!’ said Knight.
‘Oh yes. Not in the barbarous clumsy architecture of this neighbourhood; you see nothing so rough and pagan anywhere else in England. When the men are gone, I would advise you to go and see the church before anything further is done to it. You can now sit in the chancel, and look down the nave through the west arch, and through that far out to sea. In fact,’ said Mr. Swancourt significantly, ‘if a wedding were performed at the altar to-morrow morning, it might be witnessed from the deck of a ship on a voyage to the South Seas, with a good glass. However, after dinner, when the moon has risen, go up and see for yourselves.’
Knight assented with feverish readiness. He had decided within the last few minutes that he could not rest another night without further talk with Elfride upon the subject which now divided them: he was determined to know all, and relieve his disquiet in some way. Elfride would gladly have escaped further converse alone with him that night, but it seemed inevitable.
Just after moonrise they left the house. How little any expectation of the moonlight prospect – which was the ostensible reason of their pilgrimage – had to do with Knight’s real motive in getting the gentle girl again upon his arm, Elfride no less than himself well knew.
Chapter XXXII
‘Had I wist before I kist’
It was now October, and the night air was chill. After looking to see that she was well wrapped up, Knight took her along the hillside path they had ascended so many times in each other’s company, when doubt was a thing unknown. On reaching the church they found that one side of the tower was, as the vicar had stated, entirely removed, and lying in the shape of rubbish at their feet. The tower on its eastern side still was firm, and might have withstood the shock of storms and the siege of battering years for many a generation even now. They entered by the side-door, went eastward, and sat down by the altar-steps.
The heavy arch spanning the junction of tower and nave formed to-night a black frame to a distant misty view, stretching far westward. Just outside the arch came the heap of fallen stones, then a portion of moonlit churchyard, then the wide and convex sea behind. It was a coup-d’oeil which had never been possible since the mediaeval masons first attached the old tower to the older church it dignified, and hence must be supposed to have had an interest apart from that of simple moonlight on ancient wall and sea and shore – any mention of which has by this time, it is to be feared, become one of the cuckoo-cries which are heard but not regarded. Rays of crimson, blue, and purple shone upon the twain from the east window behind them, wherein saints and angels vied with each other in primitive surroundings of landscape and sky, and threw upon the pavement at the sitters’ feet a softer reproduction of the same translucent hues, amid which the shadows of the two living heads of Knight and Elfride were opaque and prominent blots. Presently the moon became covered by a cloud, and the iridescence died away.
‘There, it is gone!’ said Knight. ‘I’ve been thinking, Elfride, that this place we sit on is where we may hope to kneel together soon. But I am restless and uneasy, and you know why.’
Before she replied the moonlight returned again, irradiating that portion of churchyard within their view. It brightened the near part first, and against the background which the cloud-shadow had not yet uncovered stood, brightest of all, a white tomb – the tomb of young Jethway.
Knight, still alive on the subject of Elfride’s secret, thought of her words concerning the kiss that it once had occurred on a tomb in this churchyard.
‘Elfride,’ he said, with a superficial archness which did not half cover an undercurrent of reproach, ‘do you know, I think you might have told me voluntarily about that past – of kisses and betrothing – without giving me so much uneasiness and trouble. Was that the tomb you alluded to as having sat on with him?’
She waited an instant. ‘Yes,’ she said.
The correctness of his random shot startled Knight; though, considering that almost all the other memorials in the churchyard were upright headstones upon which nobody could possibly sit, it was not so wonderful.
Elfride did not even now go on with the explanation her exacting lover wished to have, and her reticence began to irritate him as before. He was inclined to read her a lecture.
‘Why don’t you tell me all?’ he said somewhat indignantly. ‘Elfride, there is not a single subject upon which I feel more strongly than upon this – that everything ought to be cleared up between two persons before they become husband and wife. See how desirable and wise such a course is, in order to avoid disagreeable contingencies in the form of discoveries afterwards. For, Elfride, a secret of no importance at all may be made the basis of some fatal misunderstanding only because it is discovered, and not confessed. They say there never was a couple of whom one had not some secret the other never knew or was intended to know. This may or may not be true; but if it be true, some have been happy in spite rather than in consequence of it. If a man were to see another man looking significantly at his wife, and she were blushing crimson and appearing startled, do you think he would be so well satisfied with, for instance, her truthful explanation that once, to her great annoyance, she accidentally fainted into his arms, as if she had said it voluntarily long ago, before the circumstance occurred which forced it from her? Suppose that admirer you spoke of in connection with the tomb yonder should turn up, and bother me. It would embitter our lives, if I were then half in the dark, as I am now!’
Knight spoke the latter sentences with growing force.
‘It cannot be,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ he asked sharply.
Elfride was distressed to find him in so stern a mood, and she trembled. In a confusion of ideas, probably not intending a wilful prevarication, she answered hurriedly —
‘If he’s dead, how can you meet him?’
‘Is he dead? Oh, that’s different altogether!’ said Knight, immensely relieved. ‘But, let me see – what did you say about that tomb and him?’
‘That’s his tomb,’ she continued faintly.
‘What! was he who lies buried there the man who was your lover?’ Knight asked in a distinct voice.
‘Yes; and I didn’t love him or encourage him.’
‘But you let him kiss you – you said so, you know, Elfride.’
She made no reply.
‘Why,’ said Knight, recollecting circumstances by degrees, ‘you surely said you were in some degree engaged to him – and of course you were if he kissed you. And now you say you never encouraged him. And I have been fancying you said – I am almost sure you did – that you were sitting with him ON that tomb. Good God!’ he cried, suddenly starting up in anger, ‘are you telling me untruths? Why should you play with me like this? I’ll have the right of it. Elfride, we shall never be happy! There’s a blight upon us, or me, or you, and it must be cleared off before we marry.’ Knight moved away impetuously as if to leave her.
She jumped up and clutched his arm
‘Don’t go, Harry – don’t!
‘Tell me, then,’ said Knight sternly. ‘And remember this, no more fibs, or, upon my soul, I shall hate you. Heavens! that I should come to this, to be made a fool of by a girl’s untruths – ’
‘Don’t, don’t treat me so cruelly! O Harry, Harry, have pity, and withdraw those dreadful words! I am truthful by nature – I am – and I don’t know how I came to make you misunderstand! But I was frightened!’ She quivered so in her perturbation that she shook him with her {Note: sentence incomplete in text.}
‘Did you say you were sitting on that tomb?’ he asked moodily.
‘Yes; and it was true.’
‘Then how, in the name of Heaven, can a man sit upon his own tomb?’
‘That was another man. Forgive me, Harry, won’t you?’
‘What, a lover in the tomb and a lover on it?’
‘Oh – Oh – yes!’
‘Then there were two before me?
‘I – suppose so.’
‘Now, don’t be a silly woman with your supposing – I hate all that,’ said Knight contemptuously almost. ‘Well, we learn strange things. I don’t know what I might have done – no man can say into what shape circumstances may warp him – but I hardly think I should have had the conscience to accept the favours of a new lover whilst sitting over the poor remains of the old one; upon my soul, I don’t.’ Knight, in moody meditation, continued looking towards the tomb, which stood staring them in the face like an avenging ghost.
‘But you wrong me – Oh, so grievously!’ she cried. ‘I did not meditate any such thing: believe me, Harry, I did not. It only happened so – quite of itself.’
‘Well, I suppose you didn’t INTEND such a thing,’ he said. ‘Nobody ever does,’ he sadly continued.
‘And him in the grave I never once loved.’
‘I suppose the second lover and you, as you sat there, vowed to be faithful to each other for ever?’
Elfride only replied by quick heavy breaths, showing she was on the brink of a sob.
‘You don’t choose to be anything but reserved, then?’ he said imperatively.
‘Of course we did,’ she responded.
‘“Of course!” You seem to treat the subject very lightly?’
‘It is past, and is nothing to us now.’
‘Elfride, it is a nothing which, though it may make a careless man laugh, cannot but make a genuine one grieve. It is a very gnawing pain. Tell me straight through – all of it.’
‘Never. O Harry! how can you expect it when so little of it makes you so harsh with me?’
‘Now, Elfride, listen to this. You know that what you have told only jars the subtler fancies in one, after all. The feeling I have about it would be called, and is, mere sentimentality; and I don’t want you to suppose that an ordinary previous engagement of a straightforward kind would make any practical difference in my love, or my wish to make you my wife. But you seem to have more to tell, and that’s where the wrong is. Is there more?’
‘Not much more,’ she wearily answered.
Knight preserved a grave silence for a minute. ‘“Not much more,”’ he said at last. ‘I should think not, indeed!’ His voice assumed a low and steady pitch. ‘Elfride, you must not mind my saying a strange-sounding thing, for say it I shall. It is this: that if there WERE much more to add to an account which already includes all the particulars that a broken marriage engagement could possibly include with propriety, it must be some exceptional thing which might make it impossible for me or any one else to love you and marry you.’
Knight’s disturbed mood led him much further than he would have gone in a quieter moment. And, even as it was, had she been assertive to any degree he would not have been so peremptory; and had she been a stronger character – more practical and less imaginative – she would have made more use of her position in his heart to influence him. But the confiding tenderness which had won him is ever accompanied by a sort of self-committal to the stream of events, leading every such woman to trust more to the kindness of fate for good results than to any argument of her own.
‘Well, well,’ he murmured cynically; ‘I won’t say it is your fault: it is my ill-luck, I suppose. I had no real right to question you – everybody would say it was presuming. But when we have misunderstood, we feel injured by the subject of our misunderstanding. You never said you had had nobody else here making love to you, so why should I blame you? Elfride, I beg your pardon.’
‘No, no! I would rather have your anger than that cool aggrieved politeness. Do drop that, Harry! Why should you inflict that upon me? It reduces me to the level of a mere acquaintance.’
‘You do that with me. Why not confidence for confidence?’
‘Yes; but I didn’t ask you a single question with regard to your past: I didn’t wish to know about it. All I cared for was that, wherever you came from, whatever you had done, whoever you had loved, you were mine at last. Harry, if originally you had known I had loved, would you never have cared for me?’
‘I won’t quite say that. Though I own that the idea of your inexperienced state had a great charm for me. But I think this: that if I had known there was any phase of your past love you would refuse to reveal if I asked to know it, I should never have loved you.’
Elfride sobbed bitterly. ‘Am I such a – mere characterless toy – as to have no attrac – tion in me, apart from – freshness? Haven’t I brains? You said – I was clever and ingenious in my thoughts, and – isn’t that anything? Have I not some beauty? I think I have a little – and I know I have – yes, I do! You have praised my voice, and my manner, and my accomplishments. Yet all these together are so much rubbish because I – accidentally saw a man before you!’
‘Oh, come, Elfride. “Accidentally saw a man” is very cool. You loved him, remember.’
– ‘And loved him a little!’
‘And refuse now to answer the simple question how it ended. Do you refuse still, Elfride?’
‘You have no right to question me so – you said so. It is unfair. Trust me as I trust you.’
‘That’s not at all.’
‘I shall not love you if you are so cruel. It is cruel to me to argue like this.’
‘Perhaps it is. Yes, it is. I was carried away by my feeling for you. Heaven knows that I didn’t mean to; but I have loved you so that I have used you badly.’
‘I don’t mind it, Harry!’ she instantly answered, creeping up and nestling against him; ‘and I will not think at all that you used me harshly if you will forgive me, and not be vexed with me any more? I do wish I had been exactly as you thought I was, but I could not help it, you know. If I had only known you had been coming, what a nunnery I would have lived in to have been good enough for you!’
‘Well, never mind,’ said Knight; and he turned to go. He endeavoured to speak sportively as they went on. ‘Diogenes Laertius says that philosophers used voluntarily to deprive themselves of sight to be uninterrupted in their meditations. Men, becoming lovers, ought to do the same thing.’
‘Why? – but never mind – I don’t want to know. Don’t speak laconically to me,’ she said with deprecation.
‘Why? Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their idol was second-hand.’
She looked down and sighed; and they passed out of the crumbling old place, and slowly crossed to the churchyard entrance. Knight was not himself, and he could not pretend to be. She had not told all.
He supported her lightly over the stile, and was practically as attentive as a lover could be. But there had passed away a glory, and the dream was not as it had been of yore. Perhaps Knight was not shaped by Nature for a marrying man. Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards women, which he had attributed to accident, was not chance after all, but the natural result of instinctive acts so minute as to be undiscernible even by himself. Or whether the rough dispelling of any bright illusion, however imaginative, depreciates the real and unexaggerated brightness which appertains to its basis, one cannot say. Certain it was that Knight’s disappointment at finding himself second or third in the field, at Elfride’s momentary equivoque, and at her reluctance to be candid, brought him to the verge of cynicism.
