第88章

Breeze,bird,and flower confess the hour.

The rain had ceased since the sunset,but it was a cloudy night;and the light of the moon,softened and dispersed by its misty veil,was distributed over the land in pale gray.

A dark figure stepped from the doorway of John Smiths river-side cottage,and strode rapidly towards West Endelstow with a light footstep.Soon ascending from the lower levels he turned a corner,followed a cart-track,and saw the tower of the church he was in quest of distinctly shaped forth against the sky.In less than half an hour from the time of starting he swung himself over the churchyard stile.

The wild irregular enclosure was as much as ever an integral part of the old hill.The grass was still long,the graves were shaped precisely as passing years chose to alter them from their orthodox form as laid down by Martin Cannister,and by Stephens own grandfather before him.

A sound sped into the air from the direction in which Castle Boterel lay.It was the striking of the church clock,distinct in the still atmosphere as if it had come from the tower hard by,which,wrapt in its solitary silentness,gave out no such sounds of life.

One,two,three,four,five,six,seven,eight,nine.Stephen carefully counted the strokes,though he well knew their number beforehand.Nine oclock.It was the hour Elfride had herself named as the most convenient for meeting him.

Stephen stood at the door of the porch and listened.He could have heard the softest breathing of any person within the porch;nobody was there.He went inside the doorway,sat down upon the stone bench,and waited with a beating heart.

The faint sounds heard only accentuated the silence.The rising and falling of the sea,far away along the coast,was the most important.A minor sound was the scurr of a distant night-hawk.

Among the minutest where all were minute were the light settlement of gossamer fragments floating in the air,a toad humbly labouring along through the grass near the entrance,the crackle of a dead leaf which a worm was endeavouring to pull into the earth,a waft of air,getting nearer and nearer,and expiring at his feet under the burden of a winged seed.

Among all these soft sounds came not the only soft sound he cared to hear--the footfall of Elfride.

For a whole quarter of an hour Stephen sat thus intent,without moving a muscle.At the end of that time he walked to the west front of the church.Turning the corner of the tower,a white form stared him in the face.He started back,and recovered himself.It was the tomb of young farmer Jethway,looking still as fresh and as new as when it was first erected,the white stone in which it was hewn having a singular weirdness amid the dark blue slabs from local quarries,of which the whole remaining gravestones were formed.

He thought of the night when he had sat thereon with Elfride as his companion,and well remembered his regret that she had received,even unwillingly,earlier homage than his own.But his present tangible anxiety reduced such a feeling to sentimental nonsense in comparison;and he strolled on over the graves to the border of the churchyard,whence in the daytime could be clearly seen the vicarage and the present residence of the Swancourts.No footstep was discernible upon the path up the hill,but a light was shining from a window in the last-named house.