Elfride

“ 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. ”

“ Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in hand. At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at school.
Women accept their destiny more readily than men. Elfride had now resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her lover’s sorry antecedents; Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance that Elfride had known earlier admiration than his own.
“What was that young man’s name?” he inquired.
“Felix Jethway; a widow’s only son.” ”

“ He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: “The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are the women who fall.”
Hours and days went by, and Knight remained inactive. Lengthening time, which made fainter the heart-awakening power of her presence, strengthened the mental ability to reason her down. Elfride loved him, he knew, and he could not leave off loving her but marry her he would not. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Swancourt. “But oleanders, though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily wounded as to be unprunable—giants with the sensitiveness of young ladies. Oh, here is Elfride!”
Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the dropping of the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half comically, and Knight in a minute or two placed himself beside the young lady.
A complexity of instincts checked Elfride’s conventional smiles of complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less comfortable, Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them together to seek her husband. ”

“ Swancourt, floundering into the boat. “Worse than Famine and Sword upon one. I thought such customs were confined to continental ports. Aren’t you astonished, Elfride?”
“Oh no,” said Elfride, appearing amid the dingy scene like a rainbow in a murky sky. “It is a pleasant novelty, I think.”
“Where in the wide ocean is our steamer?” the vicar inquired. “I can see nothing but old hulks, for the life of me.”
“Just behind that one,” said Knight; “we shall soon be round under her.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All children instinctively ran after Elfride, looking upon her more as an unusually nice large specimen of their own tribe than as a grown-up elder. It had now become an established rule, that whenever she met them—indoors or out-of-doors, weekdays or Sundays—they were to be severally pressed against her face and bosom for the space of a quarter of a minute, and other-wise made much of on the delightful system of cumulative epithet and caress to which unpractised girls will occasionally abandon themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know my hair is beautiful; everybody says so.”
“Why, my dear Miss Swancourt,” he tenderly replied, “I have not said anything against it. But you know what is said about handsome being and handsome doing.”
“Poor Miss Handsome-does cuts but a sorry figure beside Miss Handsome-is in every man’s eyes, your own not excepted, Mr. Knight, though it pleases you to throw off so,” said Elfride saucily. And lowering her voice: “You ought not to have taken so much trouble to save me from falling over the cliff, for you don’t think mine a life worth much trouble evidently.” ”

“ The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at Knight’s heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight went on again, wrapt in meditation.
“A nice voice,” Elfride thought; “but what a singular temper!”
“Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,” said Mrs. Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a stile, entering the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.
Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and Elfride felt too nervous to await their visitor’s arrival in the drawing-room with Mrs. Swancourt. ”

“ Till to-night she had never received masculine attentions beyond those which might be contained in such homely remarks as “Elfride, give me your hand;” “Elfride, take hold of my arm,” from her father. Her callow heart made an epoch of the incident; she considered her array of feelings, for and against. Collectively they were for taking this offered arm; the single one of pique determined her to punish Stephen by refusing.
“No, thank you, Mr. Smith; I can get along better by myself”
It was Elfride’s first fragile attempt at browbeating a lover. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again found himself thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a chess problem in one of the illustrated periodicals.
“You like chess, Miss Swancourt?”
“Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every other. Do you play?”
“I have played; though not lately.”
“Challenge him, Elfride,” said the vicar heartily. “She plays very well for a lady, Mr. Knight.”
“Shall we play?” asked Elfride tentatively. ”

“ But Knight, being in an exceptionally genial mood, merely saw this distressful exclamation as modesty. “Well,” he added, after a minute, “I like you all the better, you know, for such moral precision, although I called it absurd.” He went on with tender earnestness: “For, Elfride, there is one thing I do love to see in a woman—that is, a soul truthful and clear as heaven’s light. I could put up with anything if I had that—forgive nothing if I had it not. Elfride, you have such a soul, if ever woman had ”

“ 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. ”

“ Knight led her about, and being by this time accustomed to her sudden changes of mood, overlooked the necessity of a cause in regarding the conditions—impressionableness and elasticity.
Elfride looked stealthily to the other end of the vessel. Mrs. Jethway, or her double, was sitting at the stern—her eye steadily regarding Elfride.
“Let us go to the forepart,” she said quickly to Knight. “See there—the man is fixing the lights for the night.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ No actress of twenty years’ standing, no bald-necked lady whose earliest season “out” was lost in the discreet mist of evasive talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly make up ingenuousness.
There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance: spinsters there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some think only those of the latter. However, Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by nature. ”

“ This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other side. “Ah,” she thought inwardly, “I shall have nothing to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.”
“I think you will find,” resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for engaging her attention, “that in actual life it is merely a matter of instinct with men—this trying to push on. ”

“ Unity was uttering a sentence that concluded with “when Miss Elfride comes.”
“When d’ye expect her?”
“Not till evening now. She’s safe enough at Miss Bicknell’s, bless ye.”
Elfride went round to the door. She did not knock or ring; and seeing nobody to take the horse, Elfride led her round to the yard, slipped off the bridle and saddle, drove her towards the paddock, and turned her in. Then Elfride crept indoors, and looked into all the ground-floor rooms. Her father was not there.
On the mantelpiece of the drawing-room stood a letter addressed to her in his handwriting. ”