“You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,” he said, and turned to Stephen. “But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.”
“I think Miss Swancourt very clever,” Stephen observed.
“Yes, she is; certainly, she is,” said papa, turning his voice as much as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. “Now, Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the world—not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead secret. Why, she writes my sermons for me often, and a very good job she makes of them!”
“She can do anything.”
“She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade. But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!”
“Not a word,” said Smith.
“Look there,” said Mr. Swancourt. “What do you think of my roofing?” He pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof.
“Did you do that, sir?”
“Yes, I worked in shirtsleeves all the time that was going on. I pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens, slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?”
“Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there—hee, hee!” said William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. “Like slaves, ’a b’lieve—hee, hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go straight? Mighty I! There, ’tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to cuss and let it out, is it, sir?”
“Well—why?”
“Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.”
“I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.”
“Oh, doan’t I, sir—hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir, and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there. Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the chancel?”
“Yes; what of that?”
“I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ’twas only a dog or cat—maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.”
“Ah, I remember.”
“No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ’A was very well to look at; but, Lord!—”
“Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?”
“—’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow. ’Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat down upon the chair. ‘Get up, Worm,’ says you, when you seed the chair go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and brimstone to t’other end of your shop—all in a passion. ‘Damn the chair!’ says I. ‘Just what I was thinking,’ says you, sir. ‘I could see it in your face, sir,’ says I, ‘and I hope you and God will forgi’e me for saying what you wouldn’t.’ To save your life you couldn’t help laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay, I’m as wise as one here and there.”
“I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church and tower with you,” Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following morning, “so I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when you came. I told him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to know about the state of the walls. His name is John Smith.”
Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said laughingly. “I shall see your figure against the sky.”
“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,” he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for you.”
She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of moving. More minutes passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered. It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.
“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique. “Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of with—”
The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
She returned to the porch.
“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?” she inquired of her father.
“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s master-mason, John Smith.”
“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits struck her hard.
It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen above the
