After breakfast, Plymouth arose into view, and grew distincter to their nearing vision, the Breakwater appearing like a streak of phosphoric light upon the surface of the sea. Elfride looked furtively around for Mrs. Jethway, but could discern no shape like hers. Afterwards, in the bustle of landing, she looked again with the same result, by which time the woman had probably glided upon the quay unobserved. Expanding with a sense of relief, Elfride waited whilst Knight looked to their luggage, and then saw her father approaching through the crowd, twirling his walking-stick to catch their attention. Elbowing their way to him they all entered the town, which smiled as sunny a smile upon Elfride as it had done between one and two years earlier, when she had entered it at precisely the same hour as the bride-elect of Stephen Smith.
XXX
“Vassal unto Love.”
Elfride clung closer to Knight as day succeeded day. Whatever else might admit of question, there could be no dispute that the allegiance she bore him absorbed her whole soul and existence. A greater than Stephen had arisen, and she had left all to follow him.
The unreserved girl was never chary of letting her lover discover how much she admired him. She never once held an idea in opposition to any one of his, or insisted on any point with him, or showed any independence, or held her own on any subject. His lightest whim she respected and obeyed as law, and if, expressing her opinion on a matter, he took up the subject and differed from her, she instantly threw down her own opinion as wrong and untenable. Even her ambiguities and espièglerie were but media of the same manifestation; acted charades, embodying the words of her prototype, the tender and susceptible daughter-in-law of Naomi: “Let me find favour in thy sight, my lord; for that thou hast comforted me, and for that thou hast spoken friendly unto thine handmaid.”
She was syringing the plants one wet day in the greenhouse. Knight was sitting under a great passionflower observing the scene. Sometimes he looked out at the rain from the sky, and then at Elfride’s inner rain of larger drops, which fell from trees and shrubs, after having previously hung from the twigs like small silver fruit.
“I must give you something to make you think of me during this autumn at your chambers,” she was saying. “What shall it be? Portraits do more harm than good, by selecting the worst expression of which your face is capable. Hair is unlucky. And you don’t like jewellery.”
“Something which shall bring back to my mind the many scenes we have enacted in this conservatory. I see what I should prize very much. That dwarf myrtle tree in the pot, which you have been so carefully tending.”
Elfride looked thoughtfully at the myrtle.
“I can carry it comfortably in my hat box,” said Knight. “And I will put it in my window, and so, it being always before my eyes, I shall think of you continually.”
It so happened that the myrtle which Knight had singled out had a peculiar beginning and history. It had originally been a twig worn in Stephen Smith’s buttonhole, and he had taken it thence, stuck it into the pot, and told her that if it grew, she was to take care of it, and keep it in remembrance of him when he was far away.
She looked wistfully at the plant, and a sense of fairness to Smith’s memory caused her a pang of regret that Knight should have asked for that very one. It seemed exceeding a common heartlessness to let it go.
“Is there not anything you like better?” she said sadly. “That is only an ordinary myrtle.”
“No: I am fond of myrtle.” Seeing that she did not take kindly to the idea, he said again, “Why do you object to my having that?”
“Oh no—I don’t object precisely—it was a feeling.—Ah, here’s another cutting lately struck, and just as small—of a better kind, and with prettier leaves—myrtus microphylla.”
“That will do nicely. Let it be put in my room, that I may not forget it. What romance attaches to the other?”
“It was a gift to me.”
The subject then dropped. Knight thought no more of the matter till, on entering his bedroom in the evening, he found the second myrtle placed upon his dressing-table as he had directed. He stood for a moment admiring the fresh appearance of the leaves by candlelight, and then he thought of the transaction of the day.
Male lovers as well as female can be spoilt by too much kindness, and Elfride’s uniform submissiveness had given Knight a rather exacting manner at crises, attached to her as he was. “Why should she have refused the one I first chose?” he now asked himself. Even such slight opposition as she had shown then was exceptional enough to make itself noticeable. He was not vexed with her in the least: the mere variation of her way today from her usual ways kept him musing on the subject, because it perplexed him. “It was a gift”—those were her words. Admitting it to be a gift, he thought she could hardly value a mere friend more than she valued him as a lover, and giving the plant into his charge would have made no difference. “Except, indeed, it was the gift of a lover,” he murmured.
“I wonder if Elfride has ever had a lover before?” he said aloud, as a new idea, quite. This and companion thoughts were enough to occupy him completely till he fell asleep—rather later than usual.
The next day, when they were again alone, he said to her rather suddenly—
“Do you love me more or less, Elfie, for what I told you on board the steamer?”
“You told me so many things,”
