“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 secondhand.”
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.
XXXIII
“O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery.”
A habit of Knight’s, when not immediately occupied with Elfride—to walk by himself for half an hour or so between dinner and bedtime—had become familiar to his friends at Endelstow, Elfride herself among them. When he had helped her over the stile, she said gently, “If you wish to take your usual turn on the hill, Harry, I can run down to the house alone.”
“Thank you, Elfie; then I think I will.”
Her form diminished to blackness in the moonlight, and Knight, after remaining upon the churchyard stile a few minutes longer, turned back again towards the building. His usual course was now to light a cigar or pipe, and indulge in a quiet meditation. But tonight his mind was too tense to bethink itself of such a solace. He merely walked round to the site of the fallen tower, and sat himself down upon some of the large stones which had composed it until this day, when the chain of circumstance originated by Stephen Smith, while in the employ of Mr. Hewby, the London man of art, had brought about its overthrow.
Pondering on the possible episodes of Elfride’s past life, and on how he had supposed her to have had no past justifying the name, he sat and regarded the white tomb of young Jethway, now close in front of him. The sea, though comparatively placid, could as usual be heard from this point along the whole distance between promontories to the right and left, floundering and entangling itself among the insulated stacks of rock which dotted the water’s edge—the miserable skeletons of tortured old cliffs that would not even yet succumb to the wear and tear of the tides.
As a change from thoughts not of a very cheerful kind, Knight attempted exertion. He stood up, and prepared to ascend to the summit of
