A Pair of Blue Eyes

Chapter XXXVI

‘The pennie’s the jewel that beautifies a’.’

‘I can’t think what’s coming to these St. Launce’s people at all at all.’

‘With their “How-d’ye-do’s,” do you mean?’

‘Ay, with their “How-d’ye-do’s,” and shaking of hands, asking me in, and tender inquiries for you, John.’

These words formed part of a conversation between John Smith and his wife on a Saturday evening in the spring which followed Knight’s departure from England. Stephen had long since returned to India; and the persevering couple themselves had migrated from Lord Luxellian’s park at Endelstow to a comfortable roadside dwelling about a mile out of St. Launce’s, where John had opened a small stone and slate yard in his own name.

‘When we came here six months ago,’ continued Mrs. Smith, ‘though I had paid ready money so many years in the town, my friskier shopkeepers would only speak over the counter. Meet ‘em in the street half-an-hour after, and they’d treat me with staring ignorance of my face.’

‘Look through ye as through a glass winder?’

‘Yes, the brazen ones would. The quiet and cool ones would glance over the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks; the butcher’s daughters; the upholsterer’s young men. Hand in glove when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a’ old woman when playing the genteel away from all signs of their trade.’

‘True enough, Maria.’

‘Well, to-day ‘tis all different. I’d no sooner got to market than Mrs. Joakes rushed up to me in the eyes of the town and said, “My dear Mrs. Smith, now you must be tired with your walk! Come in and have some lunch! I insist upon it; knowing you so many years as I have! Don’t you remember when we used to go looking for owls’ feathers together in the Castle ruins?” There’s no knowing what you may need, so I answered the woman civilly. I hadn’t got to the corner before that thriving young lawyer, Sweet, who’s quite the dandy, ran after me out of breath. “Mrs. Smith,” he says, “excuse my rudeness, but there’s a bramble on the tail of your dress, which you’ve dragged in from the country; allow me to pull it off for you.” If you’ll believe me, this was in the very front of the Town Hall. What’s the meaning of such sudden love for a’ old woman?’

‘Can’t say; unless ‘tis repentance.’

‘Repentance! was there ever such a fool as you. John? Did anybody ever repent with money in’s pocket and fifty years to live?’

‘Now, I’ve been thinking too,’ said John, passing over the query as hardly pertinent, ‘that I’ve had more loving-kindness from folks to-day than I ever have before since we moved here. Why, old Alderman Tope walked out to the middle of the street where I was, to shake hands with me – so ‘a did. Having on my working clothes, I thought ‘twas odd. Ay, and there was young Werrington.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Why, the man in Hill Street, who plays and sells flutes, trumpets, and fiddles, and grand pehanners. He was talking to Egloskerry, that very small bachelor-man with money in the funds. I was going by, I’m sure, without thinking or expecting a nod from men of that glib kidney when in my working clothes – ’

‘You always will go poking into town in your working clothes. Beg you to change how I will, ‘tis no use.’

‘Well, however, I was in my working clothes. Werrington saw me. “Ah, Mr. Smith! a fine morning; excellent weather for building,” says he, out as loud and friendly as if I’d met him in some deep hollow, where he could get nobody else to speak to at all. ‘Twas odd: for Werrington is one of the very ringleaders of the fast class.’

At that moment a tap came to the door. The door was immediately opened by Mrs. Smith in person.

‘You’ll excuse us, I’m sure, Mrs. Smith, but this beautiful spring weather was too much for us. Yes, and we could stay in no longer; and I took Mrs. Trewen upon my arm directly we’d had a cup of tea, and out we came. And seeing your beautiful crocuses in such a bloom, we’ve taken the liberty to enter. We’ll step round the garden, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ said Mrs. Smith; and they walked round the garden. She lifted her hands in amazement directly their backs were turned. ‘Goodness send us grace!’

‘Who be they?’ said her husband.

‘Actually Mr. Trewen, the bank-manager, and his wife.’

John Smith, staggered in mind, went out of doors and looked over the garden gate, to collect his ideas. He had not been there two minutes when wheels were heard, and a carriage and pair rolled along the road. A distinguished-looking lady, with the demeanour of a duchess, reclined within. When opposite Smith’s gate she turned her head, and instantly commanded the coachman to stop.

‘Ah, Mr. Smith, I am glad to see you looking so well. I could not help stopping a moment to congratulate you and Mrs. Smith upon the happiness you must enjoy. Joseph, you may drive on.’

And the carriage rolled away towards St. Launce’s.

Out rushed Mrs. Smith from behind a laurel-bush, where she had stood pondering.

‘Just going to touch my hat to her,’ said John; ‘just for all the world as I would have to poor Lady Luxellian years ago.’

‘Lord! who is she?’

‘The public-house woman – what’s her name? Mrs. – Mrs. – at the Falcon.’

‘Public-house woman. The clumsiness of the Smith family! You MIGHT say the landlady of the Falcon Hotel, since we are in for politeness. The people are ridiculous enough, but give them their due.’

The possibility is that Mrs. Smith was getting mollified, in spite of herself, by these remarkably friendly phenomena among the people of St. Launce’s. And in justice to them it was quite desirable that she should do so. The interest which the unpractised ones of this town expressed so grotesquely was genuine of its kind, and equal in intrinsic worth to the more polished smiles of larger communities.

By this time Mr. and Mrs. Trewen were returning from the garden.

‘I’ll ask ‘em flat,’ whispered John to his wife. ‘I’ll say, “We be in a fog – you’ll excuse my asking a question, Mr. and Mrs. Trewen. How is it you all be so friendly to-day?” Hey? ‘Twould sound right and sensible, wouldn’t it?’

‘Not a word! Good mercy, when will the man have manners!’

‘It must be a proud moment for you, I am sure, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, to have a son so celebrated,’ said the bank-manager advancing.

‘Ah, ‘tis Stephen – I knew it!’ said Mrs. Smith triumphantly to herself.

‘We don’t know particulars,’ said John.

‘Not know!’

‘No.’

‘Why, ‘tis all over town. Our worthy Mayor alluded to it in a speech at the dinner last night of the Every-Man-his-own-Maker Club.’

‘And what about Stephen?’ urged Mrs. Smith.

‘Why, your son has been feted by deputy-governors and Parsee princes and nobody-knows-who in India; is hand in glove with nabobs, and is to design a large palace, and cathedral, and hospitals, colleges, halls, and fortifications, by the general consent of the ruling powers, Christian and Pagan alike.’

‘’Twas sure to come to the boy,’ said Mr. Smith unassumingly.

‘’Tis in yesterday’s St. Launce’s Chronicle; and our worthy Mayor in the chair introduced the subject into his speech last night in a masterly manner.’

‘’Twas very good of the worthy Mayor in the chair I’m sure,’ said Stephen’s mother. ‘I hope the boy will have the sense to keep what he’s got; but as for men, they are a simple sex. Some woman will hook him.’

‘Well, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the evening closes in, and we must be going; and remember this, that every Saturday when you come in to market, you are to make our house as your own. There will be always a tea-cup and saucer for you, as you know there has been for months, though you may have forgotten it. I’m a plain-speaking woman, and what I say I mean.’

When the visitors were gone, and the sun had set, and the moon’s rays were just beginning to assert themselves upon the walls of the dwelling, John Smith and his wife sat dawn to the newspaper they had hastily procured from the town. And when the reading was done, they considered how best to meet the new social requirements settling upon them, which Mrs. Smith considered could be done by new furniture and house enlargement alone.

‘And, John, mind one thing,’ she said in conclusion. ‘In writing to Stephen, never by any means mention the name of Elfride Swancourt again. We’ve left the place, and know no more about her except by hearsay. He seems to be getting free of her, and glad am I for it. It was a cloudy hour for him when he first set eyes upon the girl. That family’s been no good to him, first or last; so let them keep their blood to themselves if they want to. He thinks of her, I know, but not so hopelessly. So don’t try to know anything about her, and we can’t answer his questions. She may die out of his mind then.’

‘That shall be it,’ said John.

Chapter XXXVII

‘After many days.’

Knight roamed south, under colour of studying Continental antiquities.

He paced the lofty aisles of Amiens, loitered by Ardennes Abbey, climbed into the strange towers of Laon, analyzed Noyon and Rheims. Then he went to Chartres, and examined its scaly spires and quaint carving then he idled about Coutances. He rowed beneath the base of Mont St. Michel, and caught the varied skyline of the crumbling edifices encrusting it. St. Ouen’s, Rouen, knew him for days; so did Vezelay, Sens, and many a hallowed monument besides. Abandoning the inspection of early French art with the same purposeless haste as he had shown in undertaking it, he went further, and lingered about Ferrara, Padua, and Pisa. Satiated with mediaevalism, he tried the Roman Forum. Next he observed moonlight and starlight effects by the bay of Naples. He turned to Austria, became enervated and depressed on Hungarian and Bohemian plains, and was refreshed again by breezes on the declivities of the Carpathians.

Then he found himself in Greece. He visited the plain of Marathon, and strove to imagine the Persian defeat; to Mars Hill, to picture St. Paul addressing the ancient Athenians; to Thermopylae and Salamis, to run through the facts and traditions of the Second Invasion – the result of his endeavours being more or less chaotic. Knight grew as weary of these places as of all others. Then he felt the shock of an earthquake in the Ionian Islands, and went to Venice. Here he shot in gondolas up and down the winding thoroughfare of the Grand Canal, and loitered on calle and piazza at night, when the lagunes were undisturbed by a ripple, and no sound was to be heard but the stroke of the midnight clock. Afterwards he remained for weeks in the museums, galleries, and libraries of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris; and thence came home.

Time thus rolls us on to a February afternoon, divided by fifteen months from the parting of Elfride and her lover in the brown stubble field towards the sea.

Two men obviously not Londoners, and with a touch of foreignness in their look, met by accident on one of the gravel walks leading across Hyde Park. The younger, more given to looking about him than his fellow, saw and noticed the approach of his senior some time before the latter had raised his eyes from the ground, upon which they were bent in an abstracted gaze that seemed habitual with him.

‘Mr. Knight – indeed it is!’ exclaimed the younger man.

‘Ah, Stephen Smith!’ said Knight.

Simultaneous operations might now have been observed progressing in both, the result being that an expression less frank and impulsive than the first took possession of their features. It was manifest that the next words uttered were a superficial covering to constraint on both sides.

‘Have you been in England long?’ said Knight.

‘Only two days,’ said Smith.

‘India ever since?’

‘Nearly ever since.’

‘They were making a fuss about you at St. Launce’s last year. I fancy I saw something of the sort in the papers.’

‘Yes; I believe something was said about me.’

‘I must congratulate you on your achievements.’

‘Thanks, but they are nothing very extraordinary. A natural professional progress where there was no opposition.’

There followed that want of words which will always assert itself between nominal friends who find they have ceased to be real ones, and have not yet sunk to the level of mere acquaintance. Each looked up and down the Park. Knight may possibly have borne in mind during the intervening months Stephen’s manner towards him the last time they had met, and may have encouraged his former interest in Stephen’s welfare to die out of him as misplaced. Stephen certainly was full of the feelings begotten by the belief that Knight had taken away the woman he loved so well.

Stephen Smith then asked a question, adopting a certain recklessness of manner and tone to hide, if possible, the fact that the subject was a much greater one to him than his friend had ever supposed.

‘Are you married?’

‘I am not.’

Knight spoke in an indescribable tone of bitterness that was almost moroseness.

‘And I never shall be,’ he added decisively. ‘Are you?’

‘No,’ said Stephen, sadly and quietly, like a man in a sick-room. Totally ignorant whether or not Knight knew of his own previous claims upon Elfride, he yet resolved to hazard a few more words upon the topic which had an aching fascination for him even now.

‘Then your engagement to Miss Swancourt came to nothing,’ he said. ‘You remember I met you with her once?’

Stephen’s voice gave way a little here, in defiance of his firmest will to the contrary. Indian affairs had not yet lowered those emotions down to the point of control.

‘It was broken off,’ came quickly from Knight. ‘Engagements to marry often end like that – for better or for worse.’

‘Yes; so they do. And what have you been doing lately?’

‘Doing? Nothing.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘I can hardly tell you. In the main, going about Europe; and it may perhaps interest you to know that I have been attempting the serious study of Continental art of the Middle Ages. My notes on each example I visited are at your service. They are of no use to me.’

‘I shall be glad with them…Oh, travelling far and near!’

‘Not far,’ said Knight, with moody carelessness. ‘You know, I daresay, that sheep occasionally become giddy – hydatids in the head, ‘tis called, in which their brains become eaten up, and the animal exhibits the strange peculiarity of walking round and round in a circle continually. I have travelled just in the same way – round and round like a giddy ram.’

The reckless, bitter, and rambling style in which Knight talked, as if rather to vent his images than to convey any ideas to Stephen, struck the young man painfully. His former friend’s days had become cankered in some way: Knight was a changed man. He himself had changed much, but not as Knight had changed.

‘Yesterday I came home,’ continued Knight, ‘without having, to the best of my belief, imbibed half-a-dozen ideas worth retaining.’

‘You out-Hamlet Hamlet in morbidness of mood,’ said Stephen, with regretful frankness.

Knight made no reply.

‘Do you know,’ Stephen continued, ‘I could almost have sworn that you would be married before this time, from what I saw?’

Knight’s face grew harder. ‘Could you?’ he said.

Stephen was powerless to forsake the depressing, luring subject.

‘Yes; and I simply wonder at it.’

‘Whom did you expect me to marry?’

‘Her I saw you with.’

‘Thank you for that wonder.’

‘Did she jilt you?’

‘Smith, now one word to you,’ Knight returned steadily. ‘Don’t you ever question me on that subject. I have a reason for making this request, mind. And if you do question me, you will not get an answer.’

‘Oh, I don’t for a moment wish to ask what is unpleasant to you – not I. I had a momentary feeling that I should like to explain something on my side, and hear a similar explanation on yours. But let it go, let it go, by all means.’

‘What would you explain?’

‘I lost the woman I was going to marry: you have not married as you intended. We might have compared notes.’

‘I have never asked you a word about your case.’

‘I know that.’

‘And the inference is obvious.’

‘Quite so.’

‘The truth is, Stephen, I have doggedly resolved never to allude to the matter – for which I have a very good reason.’

‘Doubtless. As good a reason as you had for not marrying her.’

‘You talk insidiously. I had a good one – a miserably good one!’

Smith’s anxiety urged him to venture one more question.

‘Did she not love you enough?’ He drew his breath in a slow and attenuated stream, as he waited in timorous hope for the answer.

‘Stephen, you rather strain ordinary courtesy in pressing questions of that kind after what I have said. I cannot understand you at all. I must go on now.’

‘Why, good God!’ exclaimed Stephen passionately, ‘you talk as if you hadn’t at all taken her away from anybody who had better claims to her than you!’

‘What do you mean by that?’ said Knight, with a puzzled air. ‘What have you heard?’

‘Nothing. I too must go on. Good-day.’

‘If you will go,’ said Knight, reluctantly now, ‘you must, I suppose. I am sure I cannot understand why you behave so.’

‘Nor I why you do. I have always been grateful to you, and as far as I am concerned we need never have become so estranged as we have.’

‘And have I ever been anything but well-disposed towards you, Stephen? Surely you know that I have not! The system of reserve began with you: you know that.’

‘No, no! You altogether mistake our position. You were always from the first reserved to me, though I was confidential to you. That was, I suppose, the natural issue of our differing positions in life. And when I, the pupil, became reserved like you, the master, you did not like it. However, I was going to ask you to come round and see me.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘At the Grosvenor Hotel, Pimlico.’

‘So am I.’

‘That’s convenient, not to say odd. Well, I am detained in London for a day or two; then I am going down to see my father and mother, who live at St. Launce’s now. Will you see me this evening?’

‘I may; but I will not promise. I was wishing to be alone for an hour or two; but I shall know where to find you, at any rate. Good-bye.’

Chapter XXXVIII

‘Jealousy is cruel as the grave.’

Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the distractions of his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight had lingered on in him. Perhaps this staunchness was because Knight ever treated him as a mere disciple – even to snubbing him sometimes; and had at last, though unwittingly, inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all, that of taking away his sweetheart. The emotional side of his constitution was built rather after a feminine than a male model; and that tremendous wound from Knight’s hand may have tended to keep alive a warmth which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.

Knight, on his part, was vexed, after they had parted, that he had not taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner. Those words which Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior claim to Elfride, would, if uttered when the man was younger, have provoked such a query as, ‘Come, tell me all about it, my lad,’ from Knight, and Stephen would straightway have delivered himself of all he knew on the subject.

Stephen the ingenuous boy, though now obliterated externally by Stephen the contriving man, returned to Knight’s memory vividly that afternoon. He was at present but a sojourner in London; and after attending to the two or three matters of business which remained to be done that day, he walked abstractedly into the gloomy corridors of the British Museum for the half-hour previous to their closing. That meeting with Smith had reunited the present with the past, closing up the chasm of his absence from England as if it had never existed, until the final circumstances of his previous time of residence in London formed but a yesterday to the circumstances now. The conflict that then had raged in him concerning Elfride Swancourt revived, strengthened by its sleep. Indeed, in those many months of absence, though quelling the intention to make her his wife, he had never forgotten that she was the type of woman adapted to his nature; and instead of trying to obliterate thoughts of her altogether, he had grown to regard them as an infirmity it was necessary to tolerate.

Knight returned to his hotel much earlier in the evening than he would have done in the ordinary course of things. He did not care to think whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance, or from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen had hastily pronounced, betokening that he knew something more of Elfride than Knight had supposed.

He made a hasty dinner, inquired for Smith, and soon was ushered into the young man’s presence, whom he found sitting in front of a comfortable fire, beside a table spread with a few scientific periodicals and art reviews.

‘I have come to you, after all,’ said Knight. ‘My manner was odd this morning, and it seemed desirable to call; but that you had too much sense to notice, Stephen, I know. Put it down to my wanderings in France and Italy.’

‘Don’t say another word, but sit down. I am only too glad to see you again.’

Stephen would hardly have cared to tell Knight just then that the minute before Knight was announced he had been reading over some old letters of Elfride’s. They were not many; and until to-night had been sealed up, and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk, with a few other mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels. The familiar sights and sounds of London, the meeting with his friend, had with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard to Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world had to some extent suspended, though never ruptured. He at first intended only to look over these letters on the outside; then he read one; then another; until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to sad memories. He folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic world, had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.

The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of its necessity. Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his Maker.

They sat by the fire, chatting on external and random subjects, neither caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed to discuss. On the table with the periodicals lay two or three pocket-books, one of them being open. Knight seeing from the exposed page that the contents were sketches only, began turning the leaves over carelessly with his finger. When, some time later, Stephen was out of the room, Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the sketches more carefully.

The first crude ideas, pertaining to dwellings of all kinds, were roughly outlined on the different pages. Antiquities had been copied; fragments of Indian columns, colossal statues, and outlandish ornament from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri, were carelessly intruded upon by outlines of modern doors, windows, roofs, cooking-stoves, and household furniture; everything, in short, which comes within the range of a practising architect’s experience, who travels with his eyes open. Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval subjects for carving or illumination – heads of Virgins, Saints, and Prophets.

Stephen was not professedly a free-hand draughtsman, but he drew the human figure with correctness and skill. In its numerous repetitions on the sides and edges of the leaves, Knight began to notice a peculiarity. All the feminine saints had one type of feature. There were large nimbi and small nimbi about their drooping heads, but the face was always the same. That profile – how well Knight knew that profile!