第71章

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 the tower?He had simply thought her weak.Had he grown to love her whilst standing on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun?He had thought her complexion good:no more.Was it her conversation that had sown the seed?He had thought her words ingenious,and very creditable to a young woman,but not noteworthy.Had the chess-playing anything to do with it?Certainly not:he had thought her at that time a rather conceited child.

Knights experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the fingers:that,like flame,it makes itself palpable at the moment of generation.Not till they were parted,and she had become sublimated in his memory,could he be said to have even attentively regarded her.

Thus,having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him,he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul,which had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.

She began to rule him so imperiously now that,accustomed to analysis,he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life.He became restless:then he forgot all collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking about her.

Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than with romance.

He thought of her manner towards him.Simplicity verges on coquetry.Was she flirting?he said to himself.No forcible translation of favour into suspicion was able to uphold such a theory.The performance had been too well done to be anything but real.It had the defects without which nothing is genuine.No actress of twenty yearsstanding,no bald-necked lady whose earliest season outwas lost in the discreet mist of evasive talk,could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it.She had the little artful ways which partly make up ingenuousness.

There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance:spinsters there doubtless are also of both kinds,though some think only those of the latter.However,Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by nature.What was he coming to?It was very odd to himself to look at his theories on the subject of love,and reading them now by the full light of a new experience,to see how much more his sentences meant than he had felt them to mean when they were written.People often discover the real force of a trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a chance adventure;but Knight had never before known the case of a man who learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.

He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair.Inbred in him was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer in a womans heart.He had discovered within himself the condition that if ever he did make up his mind to marry,it must be on the certainty that no cropping out of inconvenient old letters,no bow and blush to a mysterious stranger casually met,should be a possible source of discomposure.Knights sentiments were only the ordinary ones of a man of his age who loves genuinely,perhaps exaggerated a little by his pursuits.When men first love as lads,it is with the very centre of their hearts,nothing else being concerned in the operation.With added years,more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion,till at Knights age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it.

It may as well be left out.A man in love setting up his brains as a gauge of his position is as one determining a ships longitude from a light at the mast-head.

Knight argued from Elfrides unwontedness of manner,which was matter of fact,to an unwontedness in love,which was matter of inference only.Incredules les plus credules.Elfride,he said,had hardly looked upon a man till she saw me.

He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred ornament to edification,and had since excused her a hundred times by thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment,and how necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to complete the delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind.

So at the end of the weeks absence,which had brought him as far as Dublin,he resolved to curtail his tour,return to Endelstow,and commit himself by making a reality of the hypothetical offer of that Sunday evening.