第91章

The scratch of a striking light was heard,and a bright glow radiated from the interior of the building.The light gave birth to dancing leaf-shadows,stem-shadows,lustrous streaks,dots,sparkles,and threads of silver sheen of all imaginable variety and transience.It awakened gnats,which flew towards it,revealed shiny gossamer threads,disturbed earthworms.Stephen gave but little attention to these phenomena,and less time.He saw in the summer-house a strongly illuminated picture.

First,the face of his friend and preceptor Henry Knight,between whom and himself an estrangement had arisen,not from any definite causes beyond those of absence,increasing age,and diverging sympathies.

Next,his bright particular star,Elfride.The face of Elfride was more womanly than when she had called herself his,but as clear and healthy as ever.Her plenteous twines of beautiful hair were looking much as usual,with the exception of a slight modification in their arrangement in deference to the changes of fashion.

Their two foreheads were close together,almost touching,and both were looking down.Elfride was holding her watch,Knight was holding the light with one hand,his left arm being round her waist.Part of the scene reached Stephens eyes through the horizontal bars of woodwork,which crossed their forms like the ribs of a skeleton.

Knights arm stole still further round the waist of Elfride.

It is half-past eight,she said in a low voice,which had a peculiar music in it,seemingly born of a thrill of pleasure at the new proof that she was beloved.

The flame dwindled down,died away,and all was wrapped in a darkness to which the gloom before the illumination bore no comparison in apparent density.Stephen,shattered in spirit and sick to his hearts centre,turned away.In turning,he saw a shadowy outline behind the summer-house on the other side.His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.Was the form a human form,or was it an opaque bush of juniper?

The lovers arose,brushed against the laurestines,and pursued their way to the house.The indistinct figure had moved,and now passed across Smiths front.So completely enveloped was the person,that it was impossible to discern him or her any more than as a shape.The shape glided noiselessly on.

Stephen stepped forward,fearing any mischief was intended to the other two.Who are you?he said.

Never mind who I am,answered a weak whisper from the enveloping folds.WHAT I am,may she be!Perhaps I knew well--ah,so well!--a youth whose place you took,as he there now takes yours.Will you let her break your heart,and bring you to an untimely grave,as she did the one before you?

You are Mrs.Jethway,I think.What do you do here?And why do you talk so wildly?

Because my heart is desolate,and nobody cares about it.May hers be so that brought trouble upon me!

Silence!said Stephen,staunch to Elfride in spite of himself She would harm nobody wilfully,never would she!How do you come here?

I saw the two coming up the path,and wanted to learn if she were not one of them.Can I help disliking her if I think of the past?

Can I help watching her if I remember my boy?Can I help ill-

wishing her if I well-wish him?

The bowed form went on,passed through the wicket,and was enveloped by the shadows of the field.

Stephen had heard that Mrs.Jethway,since the death of her son,had become a crazed,forlorn woman;and bestowing a pitying thought upon her,he dismissed her fancied wrongs from his mind,but not her condemnation of Elfrides faithlessness.That entered into and mingled with the sensations his new experience had begotten.The tale told by the little scene he had witnessed ran parallel with the unhappy womans opinion,which,however baseless it might have been antecedently,had become true enough as regarded himself.

A slow weight of despair,as distinct from a violent paroxysm as starvation from a mortal shot,filled him and wrung him body and soul.The discovery had not been altogether unexpected,for throughout his anxiety of the last few days since the night in the churchyard,he had been inclined to construe the uncertainty unfavourably for himself.His hopes for the best had been but periodic interruptions to a chronic fear of the worst.

A strange concomitant of his misery was the singularity of its form.That his rival should be Knight,whom once upon a time he had adored as a man is very rarely adored by another in modern times,and whom he loved now,added deprecation to sorrow,and cynicism to both.Henry Knight,whose praises he had so frequently trumpeted in her ears,of whom she had actually been jealous,lest she herself should be lessened in Stephens love on account of him,had probably won her the more easily by reason of those very praises which he had only ceased to utter by her command.She had ruled him like a queen in that matter,as in all others.Stephen could tell by her manner,brief as had been his observation of it,and by her words,few as they were,that her position was far different with Knight.That she looked up at and adored her new lover from below his pedestal,was even more perceptible than that she had smiled down upon Stephen from a height above him.

The suddenness of Elfrides renunciation of himself was food for more torture.To an unimpassioned outsider,it admitted of at least two interpretations--it might either have proceeded from an endeavour to be faithful to her first choice,till the lover seen absolutely overpowered the lover remembered,or from a wish not to lose his love till sure of the love of another.But to Stephen Smith the motive involved in the latter alternative made it untenable where Elfride was the actor.