A Pair of Blue Eyes

‘You are deceived. Can such a woman as this be worthy?

‘One who encouraged an honest youth to love her, then slighted him, so that he died.

‘One who next took a man of no birth as a lover, who was forbidden the house by her father.

‘One who secretly left her home to be married to that man, met him, and went with him to London.

‘One who, for some reason or other, returned again unmarried.

‘One who, in her after-correspondence with him, went so far as to address him as her husband.

‘One who wrote the enclosed letter to ask me, who better than anybody else knows the story, to keep the scandal a secret.

‘I hope soon to be beyond the reach of either blame or praise. But before removing me God has put it in my power to avenge the death of my son.

‘GERTRUDE JETHWAY.’

The letter enclosed was the note in pencil that Elfride had written in Mrs. Jethway’s cottage:

‘DEAR MRS. JETHWAY, – I have been to visit you. I wanted much to see you, but I cannot wait any longer. I came to beg you not to execute the threats you have repeated to me. Do not, I beseech you, Mrs. Jethway, let any one know I ran away from home! It would ruin me with him, and break my heart. I will do anything for you, if you will be kind to me. In the name of our common womanhood, do not, I implore you, make a scandal of me. – Yours,

‘E. SWANCOURT.

Knight turned his head wearily towards the house. The ground rose rapidly on nearing the shrubbery in which he stood, raising it almost to a level with the first floor of The Crags. Elfride’s dressing-room lay in the salient angle in this direction, and it was lighted by two windows in such a position that, from Knight’s standing-place, his sight passed through both windows, and raked the room. Elfride was there; she was pausing between the two windows, looking at her figure in the cheval-glass. She regarded herself long and attentively in front; turned, flung back her head, and observed the reflection over her shoulder.

Nobody can predicate as to her object or fancy; she may have done the deed in the very abstraction of deep sadness. She may have been moaning from the bottom of her heart, ‘How unhappy am I!’ But the impression produced on Knight was not a good one. He dropped his eyes moodily. The dead woman’s letter had a virtue in the accident of its juncture far beyond any it intrinsically exhibited. Circumstance lent to evil words a ring of pitiless justice echoing from the grave. Knight could not endure their possession. He tore the letter into fragments.

He heard a brushing among the bushes behind, and turning his head he saw Elfride following him. The fair girl looked in his face with a wistful smile of hope, too forcedly hopeful to displace the firmly established dread beneath it. His severe words of the previous night still sat heavy upon her.

‘I saw you from my window, Harry,’ she said timidly.

‘The dew will make your feet wet,’ he observed, as one deaf.

‘I don’t mind it.’

‘There is danger in getting wet feet.’

‘Yes…Harry, what is the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing. Shall I resume the serious conversation I had with you last night? No, perhaps not; perhaps I had better not.’

‘Oh, I cannot tell! How wretched it all is! Ah, I wish you were your own dear self again, and had kissed me when I came up! Why didn’t you ask me for one? why don’t you now?’

‘Too free in manner by half,’ he heard murmur the voice within him.

‘It was that hateful conversation last night,’ she went on. ‘Oh, those words! Last night was a black night for me.’

‘Kiss! – I hate that word! Don’t talk of kissing, for God’s sake! I should think you might with advantage have shown tact enough to keep back that word “kiss,” considering those you have accepted.’

She became very pale, and a rigid and desolate charactery took possession of her face. That face was so delicate and tender in appearance now, that one could fancy the pressure of a finger upon it would cause a livid spot.

Knight walked on, and Elfride with him, silent and unopposing. He opened a gate, and they entered a path across a stubble-field.

‘Perhaps I intrude upon you?’ she said as he closed the gate. ‘Shall I go away?’

‘No. Listen to me, Elfride.’ Knight’s voice was low and unequal. ‘I have been honest with you: will you be so with me? If any – strange – connection has existed between yourself and a predecessor of mine, tell it now. It is better that I know it now, even though the knowledge should part us, than that I should discover it in time to come. And suspicions have been awakened in me. I think I will not say how, because I despise the means. A discovery of any mystery of your past would embitter our lives.’

Knight waited with a slow manner of calmness. His eyes were sad and imperative. They went farther along the path.

‘Will you forgive me if I tell you all?’ she exclaimed entreatingly.

‘I can’t promise; so much depends upon what you have to tell.’

Elfride could not endure the silence which followed.

‘Are you not going to love me?’ she burst out. ‘Harry, Harry, love me, and speak as usual! Do; I beseech you, Harry!’

‘Are you going to act fairly by me?’ said Knight, with rising anger; ‘or are you not? What have I done to you that I should be put off like this? Be caught like a bird in a springe; everything intended to be hidden from me! Why is it, Elfride? That’s what I ask you.’

In their agitation they had left the path, and were wandering among the wet and obstructive stubble, without knowing or heeding it.

‘What have I done?’ she faltered.

‘What? How can you ask what, when you know so well? You KNOW that I have designedly been kept in ignorance of something attaching to you, which, had I known of it, might have altered all my conduct; and yet you say, what?’

She drooped visibly, and made no answer.

‘Not that I believe in malicious letter-writers and whisperers; not I. I don’t know whether I do or don’t: upon my soul, I can’t tell. I know this: a religion was building itself upon you in my heart. I looked into your eyes, and thought I saw there truth and innocence as pure and perfect as ever embodied by God in the flesh of woman. Perfect truth is too much to expect, but ordinary truth I WILL HAVE or nothing at all. Just say, then; is the matter you keep back of the gravest importance, or is it not?’

‘I don’t understand all your meaning. If I have hidden anything from you, it has been because I loved you so, and I feared – feared – to lose you.’

‘Since you are not given to confidence, I want to ask you some plain questions. Have I your permission?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and there came over her face a weary resignation. ‘Say the harshest words you can; I will bear them!’

‘There is a scandal in the air concerning you, Elfride; and I cannot even combat it without knowing definitely what it is. It may not refer to you entirely, or even at all.’ Knight trifled in the very bitterness of his feeling. ‘In the time of the French Revolution, Pariseau, a ballet-master, was beheaded by mistake for Parisot, a captain of the King’s Guard. I wish there was another “E. Swancourt” in the neighbourhood. Look at this.’

He handed her the letter she had written and left on the table at Mrs. Jethway’s. She looked over it vacantly.

‘It is not so much as it seems!’ she pleaded. ‘It seems wickedly deceptive to look at now, but it had a much more natural origin than you think. My sole wish was not to endanger our love. O Harry! that was all my idea. It was not much harm.’

‘Yes, yes; but independently of the poor miserable creature’s remarks, it seems to imply – something wrong.’

‘What remarks?’

‘Those she wrote me – now torn to pieces. Elfride, DID you run away with a man you loved? – that was the damnable statement. Has such an accusation life in it – really, truly, Elfride?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Knight’s countenance sank. ‘To be married to him?’ came huskily from his lips.

‘Yes. Oh, forgive me! I had never seen you, Harry.’

‘To London?’

‘Yes; but I – ’

‘Answer my questions; say nothing else, Elfride Did you ever deliberately try to marry him in secret?’

‘No; not deliberately.’

‘But did you do it?’

A feeble red passed over her face.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And after that – did you – write to him as your husband; and did he address you as his wife?’

‘Listen, listen! It was – ’

‘Do answer me; only answer me!’

‘Then, yes, we did.’ Her lips shook; but it was with some little dignity that she continued: ‘I would gladly have told you; for I knew and know I had done wrong. But I dared not; I loved you too well. Oh, so well! You have been everything in the world to me – and you are now. Will you not forgive me?’

It is a melancholy thought, that men who at first will not allow the verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts or wives to be disturbed by God’s own testimony to the contrary, will, once suspecting their purity, morally hang them upon evidence they would be ashamed to admit in judging a dog.

The reluctance to tell, which arose from Elfride’s simplicity in thinking herself so much more culpable than she really was, had been doing fatal work in Knight’s mind. The man of many ideas, now that his first dream of impossible things was over, vibrated too far in the contrary direction; and her every movement of feature – every tremor – every confused word – was taken as so much proof of her unworthiness.

‘Elfride, we must bid good-bye to compliment,’ said Knight: ‘we must do without politeness now. Look in my face, and as you believe in God above, tell me truly one thing more. Were you away alone with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you return home the same day on which you left it?’

‘No.’

The word fell like a bolt, and the very land and sky seemed to suffer. Knight turned aside. Meantime Elfride’s countenance wore a look indicating utter despair of being able to explain matters so that they would seem no more than they really were, – a despair which not only relinquishes the hope of direct explanation, but wearily gives up all collateral chances of extenuation.

The scene was engraved for years on the retina of Knight’s eye: the dead and brown stubble, the weeds among it, the distant belt of beeches shutting out the view of the house, the leaves of which were now red and sick to death.

‘You must forget me,’ he said. ‘We shall not marry, Elfride.’

How much anguish passed into her soul at those words from him was told by the look of supreme torture she wore.

‘What meaning have you, Harry? You only say so, do you?’

She looked doubtingly up at him, and tried to laugh, as if the unreality of his words must be unquestionable.

‘You are not in earnest, I know – I hope you are not? Surely I belong to you, and you are going to keep me for yours?’

‘Elfride, I have been speaking too roughly to you; I have said what I ought only to have thought. I like you; and let me give you a word of advice. Marry your man as soon as you can. However weary of each other you may feel, you belong to each other, and I am not going to step between you. Do you think I would – do you think I could for a moment? If you cannot marry him now, and another makes you his wife, do not reveal this secret to him after marriage, if you do not before. Honesty would be damnation then.’

Bewildered by his expressions, she exclaimed —

‘No, no; I will not be a wife unless I am yours; and I must be yours!’

‘If we had married – ’

‘But you don’t MEAN – that – that – you will go away and leave me, and not be anything more to me – oh, you don’t!’

Convulsive sobs took all nerve out of her utterance. She checked them, and continued to look in his face for the ray of hope that was not to be found there.

‘I am going indoors,’ said Knight. ‘You will not follow me, Elfride; I wish you not to.’

‘Oh no; indeed, I will not.’

‘And then I am going to Castle Boterel. Good-bye.’

He spoke the farewell as if it were but for the day – lightly, as he had spoken such temporary farewells many times before – and she seemed to understand it as such. Knight had not the power to tell her plainly that he was going for ever; he hardly knew for certain that he was: whether he should rush back again upon the current of an irresistible emotion, or whether he could sufficiently conquer himself, and her in him, to establish that parting as a supreme farewell, and present himself to the world again as no woman’s.

Ten minutes later he had left the house, leaving directions that if he did not return in the evening his luggage was to be sent to his chambers in London, whence he intended to write to Mr. Swancourt as to the reasons of his sudden departure. He descended the valley, and could not forbear turning his head. He saw the stubble-field, and a slight girlish figure in the midst of it – up against the sky. Elfride, docile as ever, had hardly moved a step, for he had said, Remain. He looked and saw her again – he saw her for weeks and months. He withdrew his eyes from the scene, swept his hand across them, as if to brush away the sight, breathed a low groan, and went on.

Chapter XXXV

‘And wilt thou leave me thus? – say nay – say nay!’

The scene shifts to Knight’s chambers in Bede’s Inn. It was late in the evening of the day following his departure from Endelstow. A drizzling rain descended upon London, forming a humid and dreary halo over every well-lighted street. The rain had not yet been prevalent long enough to give to rapid vehicles that clear and distinct rattle which follows the thorough washing of the stones by a drenching rain, but was just sufficient to make footway and roadway slippery, adhesive, and clogging to both feet and wheels.

Knight was standing by the fire, looking into its expiring embers, previously to emerging from his door for a dreary journey home to Richmond. His hat was on, and the gas turned off. The blind of the window overlooking the alley was not drawn down; and with the light from beneath, which shone over the ceiling of the room, came, in place of the usual babble, only the reduced clatter and quick speech which were the result of necessity rather than choice.

Whilst he thus stood, waiting for the expiration of the few minutes that were wanting to the time for his catching the train, a light tapping upon the door mingled with the other sounds that reached his ears. It was so faint at first that the outer noises were almost sufficient to drown it. Finding it repeated Knight crossed the lobby, crowded with books and rubbish, and opened the door.

A woman, closely muffled up, but visibly of fragile build, was standing on the landing under the gaslight. She sprang forward, flung her arms round Knight’s neck, and uttered a low cry —

‘O Harry, Harry, you are killing me! I could not help coming. Don’t send me away – don’t! Forgive your Elfride for coming – I love you so!’

Knight’s agitation and astonishment mastered him for a few moments.

‘Elfride!’ he cried, ‘what does this mean? What have you done?’

‘Do not hurt me and punish me – Oh, do not! I couldn’t help coming; it was killing me. Last night, when you did not come back, I could not bear it – I could not! Only let me be with you, and see your face, Harry; I don’t ask for more.’

Her eyelids were hot, heavy, and thick with excessive weeping, and the delicate rose-red of her cheeks was disfigured and inflamed by the constant chafing of the handkerchief in wiping her many tears.

‘Who is with you? Have you come alone?’ he hurriedly inquired.

‘Yes. When you did not come last night, I sat up hoping you would come – and the night was all agony – and I waited on and on, and you did not come! Then when it was morning, and your letter said you were gone, I could not endure it; and I ran away from them to St. Launce’s, and came by the train. And I have been all day travelling to you, and you won’t make me go away again, will you, Harry, because I shall always love you till I die?’

‘Yet it is wrong for you to stay. O Elfride! what have you committed yourself to? It is ruin to your good name to run to me like this! Has not your first experience been sufficient to keep you from these things?’

‘My name! Harry, I shall soon die, and what good will my name be to me then? Oh, could I but be the man and you the woman, I would not leave you for such a little fault as mine! Do not think it was so vile a thing in me to run away with him. Ah, how I wish you could have run away with twenty women before you knew me, that I might show you I would think it no fault, but be glad to get you after them all, so that I had you! If you only knew me through and through, how true I am, Harry. Cannot I be yours? Say you love me just the same, and don’t let me be separated from you again, will you? I cannot bear it – all the long hours and days and nights going on, and you not there, but away because you hate me!’

‘Not hate you, Elfride,’ he said gently, and supported her with his arm. ‘But you cannot stay here now – just at present, I mean.’

‘I suppose I must not – I wish I might. I am afraid that if – you lose sight of me – something dark will happen, and we shall not meet again. Harry, if I am not good enough to be your wife, I wish I could be your servant and live with you, and not be sent away never to see you again. I don’t mind what it is except that!’

‘No, I cannot send you away: I cannot. God knows what dark future may arise out of this evening’s work; but I cannot send you away! You must sit down, and I will endeavour to collect my thoughts and see what had better be done.

At that moment a loud knocking at the house door was heard by both, accompanied by a hurried ringing of the bell that echoed from attic to basement. The door was quickly opened, and after a few hasty words of converse in the hall, heavy footsteps ascended the stairs.

The face of Mr. Swancourt, flushed, grieved, and stern, appeared round the landing of the staircase. He came higher up, and stood beside them. Glancing over and past Knight with silent indignation, he turned to the trembling girl.

‘O Elfride! and have I found you at last? Are these your tricks, madam? When will you get rid of your idiocies, and conduct yourself like a decent woman? Is my family name and house to be disgraced by acts that would be a scandal to a washerwoman’s daughter? Come along, madam; come!’

‘She is so weary!’ said Knight, in a voice of intensest anguish. ‘Mr. Swancourt, don’t be harsh with her – let me beg of you to be tender with her, and love her!’

‘To you, sir,’ said Mr. Swancourt, turning to him as if by the sheer pressure of circumstances, ‘I have little to say. I can only remark, that the sooner I can retire from your presence the better I shall be pleased. Why you could not conduct your courtship of my daughter like an honest man, I do not know. Why she – a foolish inexperienced girl – should have been tempted to this piece of folly, I do not know. Even if she had not known better than to leave her home, you might have, I should think.’

‘It is not his fault: he did not tempt me, papa! I came.’

‘If you wished the marriage broken off, why didn’t you say so plainly? If you never intended to marry, why could you not leave her alone? Upon my soul, it grates me to the heart to be obliged to think so ill of a man I thought my friend!’

Knight, soul-sick and weary of his life, did not arouse himself to utter a word in reply. How should he defend himself when his defence was the accusation of Elfride? On that account he felt a miserable satisfaction in letting her father go on thinking and speaking wrongfully. It was a faint ray of pleasure straying into the great gloominess of his brain to think that the vicar might never know but that he, as her lover, tempted her away, which seemed to be the form Mr. Swancourt’s misapprehension had taken.

‘Now, are you coming?’ said Mr. Swancourt to her again. He took her unresisting hand, drew it within his arm, and led her down the stairs. Knight’s eyes followed her, the last moment begetting in him a frantic hope that she would turn her head. She passed on, and never looked back.

He heard the door open – close again. The wheels of a cab grazed the kerbstone, a murmured direction followed. The door was slammed together, the wheels moved, and they rolled away.

From that hour of her reappearance a dreadful conflict raged within the breast of Henry Knight. His instinct, emotion, affectiveness – or whatever it may be called – urged him to stand forward, seize upon Elfride, and be her cherisher and protector through life. Then came the devastating thought that Elfride’s childlike, unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only proved that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: ‘The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are the women who fall.’

Hours and days went by, and Knight remained inactive. Lengthening time, which made fainter the heart-awakening power of her presence, strengthened the mental ability to reason her down. Elfride loved him, he knew, and he could not leave off loving her but marry her he would not. If she could but be again his own Elfride – the woman she had seemed to be – but that woman was dead and buried, and he knew her no more! And how could he marry this Elfride, one who, if he had originally seen her as she was, would have been barely an interesting pitiable acquaintance in his eyes – no more?

It cankered his heart to think he was confronted by the closest instance of a worse state of things than any he had assumed in the pleasant social philosophy and satire of his essays.

The moral rightness of this man’s life was worthy of all praise; but in spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an abstraction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it. Having now seen himself mistaken in supposing Elfride to be peerless, nothing on earth could make him believe she was not so very bad after all.

He lingered in town a fortnight, doing little else than vibrate between passion and opinions. One idea remained intact – that it was better Elfride and himself should not meet.

When he surveyed the volumes on his shelves – few of which had been opened since Elfride first took possession of his heart – their untouched and orderly arrangement reproached him as an apostate from the old faith of his youth and early manhood. He had deserted those never-failing friends, so they seemed to say, for an unstable delight in a ductile woman, which had ended all in bitterness. The spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism, which had ever animated Knight in old times, announced itself as having departed with the birth of love, with it having gone the self-respect which had compensated for the lack of self-gratification. Poor little Elfride, instead of holding, as formerly, a place in his religion, began to assume the hue of a temptation. Perhaps it was human and correctly natural that Knight never once thought whether he did not owe her a little sacrifice for her unchary devotion in saving his life.

With a consciousness of having thus, like Antony, kissed away kingdoms and provinces, he next considered how he had revealed his higher secrets and intentions to her, an unreserve he would never have allowed himself with any man living. How was it that he had not been able to refrain from telling her of adumbrations heretofore locked in the closest strongholds of his mind?

Knight’s was a robust intellect, which could escape outside the atmosphere of heart, and perceive that his own love, as well as other people’s, could be reduced by change of scene and circumstances. At the same time the perception was a superimposed sorrow:

‘O last regret, regret can die!’

But being convinced that the death of this regret was the best thing for him, he did not long shrink from attempting it. He closed his chambers, suspended his connection with editors, and left London for the Continent. Here we will leave him to wander without purpose, beyond the nominal one of encouraging obliviousness of Elfride.