They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself. Their shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of becoming obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the opposite direction which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
“I consider my life to some extent a failure,” said Knight again after a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic shadows.
“You! How?”
“I don’t precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.”
“Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel that you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?”
“Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are conscious of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it seems, there is nothing truer than that people who have always gone right don’t know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong. However, it is not desirable for me to chill your summertime by going into this.”
“You have not told me even now if I am really vain.”
“If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you’ll think I don’t mean it,” he replied, looking curiously into her face.
“Ah, well,” she replied, with a little breath of distress, “ ‘That which is exceeding deep, who will find it out?’ I suppose I must take you as I do the Bible—find out and understand all I can; and on the strength of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple faith. Think me vain, if you will. Worldly greatness requires so much littleness to grow up in, that an infirmity more or less is not a matter for regret.”
“As regards women, I can’t say,” answered Knight carelessly; “but it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for vanity.”
“No, no, I don’t do that,” she said regretfully. “Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you have lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true self—the cynic you have been this evening, or the nice philosopher you were up to tonight?”
“Ah, which? You know as well as I.”
Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico till the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said idly—
“There’s a bright star exactly over me.”
“Each bright star is overhead somewhere.”
“Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?” and she pointed with her finger.
“That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde Islands.”
“And that?”
“Looking down upon the source of the Nile.”
“And that lonely quiet-looking one?”
“He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator for his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have almost rolled away from, is in India—over the head of a young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as marking where his true love dwells.”
Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She could not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show unconsciousness.
“The star is over my head,” she said with hesitation.
“Or anybody else’s in England.”
“Oh yes, I see,” she breathed her relief.
“His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don’t know them, though I have been in correspondence with him for many years till lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in love, and then went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very little of him.”
Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though Elfride at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in honesty he had just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the intention dispersed into silence. There seemed a reproach in Knight’s blind words, and yet she was not able to clearly define any disloyalty that she had been guilty of.
XX
“A distant dearness in the hill.”
Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed over to Cork.
One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and proportionately weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of Killarney, rambled amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the infinite variety of island, hill, and dale there to be found, listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot; but altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in such favoured regions.
Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious that her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but now that she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal being abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and Knight was in love.
Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew not: certain he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he had felt none of that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural to such severances, seeing how delightful a subject of contemplation Elfride had been ever since. Had he begun to love her when she met his eye after her mishap on
