As far as he dared look at her movements he saw that her bearing towards him would be dictated by his own towards her; and if he acted as a stranger she would do likewise as a means of deliverance. Circumstances favouring this course, it was desirable also to be rather reserved towards Knight, to shorten the meeting as much as possible.
“I am afraid that my time is almost too short to allow even of such a pleasure,” he said. “I leave here tomorrow. And until I start for the Continent and India, which will be in a fortnight, I shall have hardly a moment to spare.”
Knight’s disappointment and dissatisfied looks at this reply sent a pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true, but their tone was far from being so. He would have been gratified to talk with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead loss to himself that, to save the woman who cared nothing for him, he was deliberately throwing away his friend.
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” said Knight, in a changed tone. “But of course, if you have weighty concerns to attend to, they must not be neglected. And if this is to be our first and last meeting, let me say that I wish you success with all my heart!” Knight’s warmth revived towards the end; the solemn impressions he was beginning to receive from the scene around them abstracting from his heart as a puerility any momentary vexation at words. “It is a strange place for us to meet in,” he continued, looking round the vault.
Stephen briefly assented, and there was a silence. The blackened coffins were now revealed more clearly than at first, the whitened walls and arches throwing them forward in strong relief. It was a scene which was remembered by all three as an indelible mark in their history. Knight, with an abstracted face, was standing between his companions, though a little in advance of them, Elfride being on his right hand, and Stephen Smith on his left. The white daylight on his right side gleamed faintly in, and was toned to a blueness by contrast with the yellow rays from the candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly shrinking back, and nearest the entrance, received most of the light therefrom, whilst Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the spot of outer sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch, and nothing more.
“I have been here two or three times since it was opened,” said Stephen. “My father was engaged in the work, you know.”
“Yes. What are you doing?” Knight inquired, looking at the notebook and pencil Stephen held in his hand.
“I have been sketching a few details in the church, and since then I have been copying the names from some of the coffins here. Before I left England I used to do a good deal of this sort of thing.”
“Yes; of course. Ah, that’s poor Lady Luxellian, I suppose.” Knight pointed to a coffin of light satinwood, which stood on the stone sleepers in the new niche. “And the remainder of the family are on this side. Who are those two, so snug and close together?”
Stephen’s voice altered slightly as he replied “That’s Lady Elfride Kingsmore—born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her husband. I have heard my father say that they—he—ran away with her, and married her against the wish of her parents.”
“Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss Swancourt?” said Knight, turning to her. “I think you told me it was three or four generations ago that your family branched off from the Luxellians?”
“She was my grandmother,” said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to moisten her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the conscience-stricken look of Guido’s Magdalen, rendered upon a more childlike form. She kept her face partially away from Knight and Stephen, and set her eyes upon the sky visible outside, as if her salvation depended upon quickly reaching it. Her left hand rested lightly within Knight’s arm, half withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover, yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched his sleeve. “ ‘Can one be pardoned, and retain the offence?’ ” quoted Elfride’s heart then.
Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in the shape of disjointed remarks. “One’s mind gets thronged with thoughts while standing so solemnly here,” Knight said, in a measured quiet voice. “How much has been said on death from time to time! how much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy each of these who lie here saying:
‘For Thou, to make my fall more great,
Didst lift me up on high.’
What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am thinking of.”
“Yes, I know it,” she murmured, and went on in a still lower voice, seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of her nature to reach Stephen:
“ ‘My days, just hastening to their end,
Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither’d grass,
With waning lustre fade.’ ”
“Well,” said Knight musingly, “let us leave them. Such occasions as these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so vast that our physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant growth depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a foundation so small? Must I again return to my daily walk in that narrow cell, a human body,
