At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no longer to be seen.
An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. 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.
Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had obtained the rope.
“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an expression between gladness and shame. “You follow me, but at some distance.”
“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”
“No; I shall get warm running.”
Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit, and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton rope.
“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on Pansy dozens of times. Goodbye till we meet, clothed and in our right minds, by the fireside at home!”
She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most grievous loss to him.
He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand. It was blown to the right, blown to the left—it floated to the edge of the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in the air, and then flew back over his head.
Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to discover if it had been worth securing.
The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds, placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had totally forgotten she carried with her.
Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.
XXIII
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”
By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle Boterel, and breathed his native air.
A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard, were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.
In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a vale of its own, further inland than the west village, and though so near it, had little of physical feature in common with the latter. East Endelstow was more wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s mansion and park, and was free from those bleak open uplands which lent such an air of desolation to the vicinage of the coast—always excepting the small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old house, The Crags.
Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter, he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the lower part of its course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by an overhanging face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a reason of his own he made this spot his refuge from the storm, and turning his face to the left, conned the landscape as a book.
He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.
From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity of being either brilliant
