第95章

How should I greet thee?

Love frequently dies of time alone--much more frequently of displacement.With Elfride Swancourt,a powerful reason why the displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a greater man than the first.By the side of the instructive and piquant snubbings she received from Knight,Stephens general agreeableness seemed watery;by the side of Knights spare love-making,Stephens continual outflow seemed lackadaisical.She had begun to sigh for somebody further on in manhood.Stephen was hardly enough of a man.

Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature--a nature,to those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that inconstancy,the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready sympathies.Partly,too,Stephens failure to make his hold on her heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself beside her--a peculiarity which,exercised towards sensible men,stirs a kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave untouched,but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to undervalue him who practises it.Directly domineering ceases in the man,snubbing begins in the woman;the trite but no less unfortunate fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement.The abiding perception of the position of Stephens parents had,of course,a little to do with Elfrides renunciation.To such girls poverty may not be,as to the more worldly masses of humanity,a sin in itself;but it is a sin,because graceful and dainty manners seldom exist in such an atmosphere.Few women of old family can be thoroughly taught that a fine soul may wear a smock-frock,and an admittedly common man in one is but a worm in their eyes.John Smiths rough hands and clothes,his wifes dialect,the necessary narrowness of their ways,being constantly under Elfrides notice,were not without their deflecting influence.

On reaching home after the perilous adventure by the sea-shore,Knight had felt unwell,and retired almost immediately.The young lady who had so materially assisted him had done the same,but she reappeared,properly clothed,about five oclock.She wandered restlessly about the house,but not on account of their joint narrow escape from death.The storm which had torn the tree had merely bowed the reed,and with the deliverance of Knight all deep thought of the accident had left her.The mutual avowal which it had been the means of precipitating occupied a far longer length of her meditations.

Elfrides disquiet now was on account of that miserable promise to meet Stephen,which returned like a spectre again and again.The perception of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly.She now thought how sound had been her fathers advice to her to give him up,and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto been averse.Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.

The hour of appointment came,and with it a crisis;and with the crisis a collapse.

God forgive me--I cant meet Stephen!she exclaimed to herself.

I dont love him less,but I love Mr.Knight more!

Yes:she would save herself from a man not fit for her--in spite of vows.She would obey her father,and have no more to do with Stephen Smith.Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion of a virtue.

The following days were passed without any definite avowal from Knights lips.Such solitary walks and scenes as that witnessed by Smith in the summer-house were frequent,but he courted her so intangibly that to any but such a delicate perception as Elfrides it would have appeared no courtship at all.The time now really began to be sweet with her.She dismissed the sense of sin in her past actions,and was automatic in the intoxication of the moment.

The fact that Knight made no actual declaration was no drawback.

Knowing since the betrayal of his sentiments that love for her really existed,she preferred it for the present in its form of essence,and was willing to avoid for awhile the grosser medium of words.Their feelings having been forced to a rather premature demonstration,a reaction was indulged in by both.

But no sooner had she got rid of her troubled conscience on the matter of faithlessness than a new anxiety confronted her.It was lest Knight should accidentally meet Stephen in the parish,and that herself should be the subject of discourse.

Elfride,learning Knight more thoroughly,perceived that,far from having a notion of Stephens precedence,he had no idea that she had ever been wooed before by anybody.On ordinary occasions she had a tongue so frank as to show her whole mind,and a mind so straightforward as to reveal her heart to its innermost shrine.

But the time for a change had come.She never alluded to even a knowledge of Knights friend.When women are secret they are secret indeed;and more often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

The elopement was now a spectre worse than the first,and,like the Spirit in Glenfinlas,it waxed taller with every attempt to lay it.Her natural honesty invited her to confide in Knight,and trust to his generosity for forgiveness:she knew also that as mere policy it would be better to tell him early if he was to be told at all.The longer her concealment the more difficult would be the revelation.But she put it off.The intense fear which accompanies intense love in young women was too strong to allow the exercise of a moral quality antagonistic to itself:

Where love is great,the littlest doubts are fear;

Where little fears grow great,great love grows there.