第68章

Love was in the next degree.

Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which,by judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery,obliterate a womans recollection of the speakers abstract opinions.So no more was said by either on the subject of hair,eyes,or development.

Elfrides mind had been impregnated with sentiments of her own smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness,and her discomfort was visible in her face.The whole tendency of the conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage her;and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence.

He would not have been so unloving,she said,as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own.True,Stephen had declared he loved her:Mr.Knight had never done anything of the sort.Somehow this did not mend matters,and the sensation of her smallness in Knights eyes still remained.Had the position been reversed--had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing taste,and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance to his ideal,it would have engendered far happier thoughts.As matters stood,Stephens admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of passion.Perhaps any keen mans judgment was condemnatory of her.

During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with their seniors,and no conversation arose which was exclusively their own.When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the same subject.At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him to speak so decisively as he had done;the next,that it was sterling honesty.

Ah,what a poor nobody I am!she said,sighing.People like him,who go about the great world,dont care in the least what I am like either in mood or feature.

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a womans mind in this manner,is half way to her heart;the distance between those two stations is proverbially short.

And are you really going away this week?said Mrs.Swancourt to Knight on the following evening,which was Sunday.

They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church,where a last service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening instead of in the afternoon,previous to the demolition of the ruinous portions.

I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,returned Knight;and then I go on to Dublin.

Return this way,and stay a little longer with us,said the vicar.A week is nothing.We have hardly been able to realize your presence yet.I remember a story which----

The vicar suddenly stopped.He had forgotten it was Sunday,and would probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had not a turn in the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown within the range of his vision,and so reminded him.He at once diverted the current of his narrative with the dexterity the occasion demanded.

The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah,from which I took my text the Sunday before last,is quite to the point,he continued,with the pronunciation of a man who,far from having intended to tell a week-day story a moment earlier,had thought of nothing but Sabbath matters for several weeks.

What did he gain after all by his restlessness?Had he remained in the city of the Jebusites,and not been so anxious for Gibeah,none of his troubles would have arisen.

But he had wasted five days already,said Knight,closing his eyes to the vicars commendable diversion.His fault lay in beginning the tarrying system originally.

True,true;my illustration fails.

But not the hospitality which prompted the story.

So you are to come just the same,urged Mrs.Swancourt,for she had seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her stepdaughter at Knights announcement.

Knight half promised to call on his return journey;but the uncertainty with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride with a regretful interest in all he did during the few remaining hours.The curate having already officiated twice that day in the two churches,Mr.Swancourt had undertaken the whole of the evening service,and Knight read the lessons for him.The sun streamed across from the dilapidated west window,and lighted all the assembled worshippers with a golden glow,Knight as he read being illuminated by the same mellow lustre.Elfride at the organ regarded him with a throbbing sadness of mood which was fed by a sense of being far removed from his sphere.As he went deliberately through the chapter appointed--a portion of the history of Elijah--and ascended that magnificent climax of the wind,the earthquake,the fire,and the still small voice,his deep tones echoed past with such apparent disregard of her existence,that his presence inspired her with a forlorn sense of unapproachableness,which his absence would hardly have been able to cause.

At the same time,turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of the dying sun as it fell on his form,her eyes were arrested by the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery.It was the bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway,whom Elfride had not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen Smith.Possessing the smallest of competencies,this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings between Endelstow Churchyard and that of a village near Southampton,where her father and mother were laid.

She had not attended the service here for a considerable time,and she now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat.From the gallery window the tomb of her son was plainly visible--standing as the nearest object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by the changeless horizon of the sea.

The streaming rays,too,flooded her face,now bent towards Elfride with a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of the place raised to a tragic dignity it did not intrinsically possess.The girl resumed her normal attitude with an added disquiet.