A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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'Tell me seriously--apart from the subject--why don't you write a
volume instead of loose articles?' she insisted.

'Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you
seriously,' said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his
young friend than he was interested in her appearance. 'As I have
implied, I have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not
now concentrate sufficiently. We all have only our one cruse of
energy given us to make the best of. And where that energy has
been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter, as mine has for
the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back behind
the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book
on any subject requires. Then there is the self-confidence and
waiting power. Where quick results have grown customary, they are
fatal to a lively faith in the future.'

'Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?'

'No, I don't choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from
a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the
constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the
accident.'

'Why don't you object--I mean, why do you feel so quiet about
things?' Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her
intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight
was like, kept her going on.

Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of
this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent
from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a
listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them,
or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world
become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.

'Why I don't mind the accidental constraint,' he replied, 'is
because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is
often better than absolute freedom.'

'I see--that is, I should if I quite understood what all those
generalities mean.'

'Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one's work, which no
length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix
itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.'

'Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that
tongue,' she said mischievously. 'And I suppose where no limit
exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants
to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously
than to have none.'

'Yes,' he said meditatively. 'I can go as far as that.'

'Well,' resumed Elfride, 'I think it better for a man's nature if
he does nothing in particular.'

'There is such a case as being obliged to.'

'Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any
other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought
many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing
now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to
an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.'

'Why, that's the very thing I said just now as being the principle
of all ephemeral doers like myself.'

'Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,' she said with some
confusion. 'Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not
trying to be famous.' And she added, with the quickness of
conviction characteristic of her mind: 'There is much littleness
in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself,
and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at
all.'

'But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man's thinking a
good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong,
and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that
a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong
sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do
with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.'

This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner
did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took
the other side. 'Ah,' she thought inwardly, 'I shall have nothing
to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.'

'I think you will find,' resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation
more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject
than for engaging her attention, 'that in actual life it is merely
a matter of instinct with men--this trying to push on. They awake
to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to
try a little, and they say to themselves, "Since I have tried thus
much, I will try a little more." They go on because they have
begun.'

Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words
at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of
seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which
interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her
own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in
continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person
speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes
seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your
future; and past your future into your eternity--not reading it,
but gazing in an unused, unconscious way--her mind still clinging
to its original thought.

This is how she was looking at Knight.

Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was
painfully confused.

'What were you so intent upon in me?' he inquired.

'As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever
you are,' she said, with a want of premeditation that was
startling in its honesty and simplicity.

Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose
and stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father
and Mrs. Swancourt coming up below the terrace. 'Here they are,'
she said, going out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her.
She stood upon the edge of the terrace, close to the stone
balustrade, and looked towards the sun, hanging over a glade just
now fair as Tempe's vale, up which her father was walking.

Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten
degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and
heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion
red, their moderate pink hue being only seen in its natural tone
where the cheek curved round into shadow. The ends of her hanging
hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her
shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it.
Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked
like tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward
from shady folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous
orange glow.

Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of
about thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to
a conversation of deep earnestness on Knight's fine old family
name, and theories as to lineage and intermarriage connected
therewith. Knight's portmanteau having in the meantime arrived,
they soon retired to prepare for dinner, which had been postponed
two hours later than the usual time of that meal.

An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were
again in the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing
one. And that evening she went to bed for the first time without
thinking of Stephen at all.

Chapter XVIII

'He heard her musical pants.'

The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks
of its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the
designs of Mr. Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen.
Planks and poles had arrived in the churchyard, iron bars had been
thrust into the venerable crack extending down the belfry wall to
the foundation, the bells had been taken down, the owls had
forsaken this home of their forefathers, and six iconoclasts in
white fustian, to whom a cracked edifice was a species of Mumbo
Jumbo, had taken lodgings in the village previous to beginning the
actual removal of the stones.

This was the day after Knight's arrival. To enjoy for the last
time the prospect seaward from the summit, the vicar, Mrs.
Swancourt, Knight, and Elfride, all ascended the winding turret--
Mr. Swancourt stepping forward with many loud breaths, his wife
struggling along silently, but suffering none the less. They had
hardly reached the top when a large lurid cloud, palpably a
reservoir of rain, thunder, and lightning, was seen to be
advancing overhead from the north.

The two cautious elders suggested an immediate return, and
proceeded to put it in practice as regarded themselves.

'Dear me, I wish I had not come up,' exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt.

'We shall be slower than you two in going down,' the vicar said
over his shoulder, 'and so, don't you start till we are nearly at
the bottom, or you will run over us and break our necks somewhere
in the darkness of the turret.'

Accordingly Elfride and Knight waited on the leads till the
staircase should be clear. Knight was not in a talkative mood
that morning. Elfride was rather wilful, by reason of his
inattention, which she privately set down to his thinking her not
worth talking to. Whilst Knight stood watching the rise of the
cloud, she sauntered to the other side of the tower, and there
remembered a giddy feat she had performed the year before. It was
to walk round upon the parapet of the tower--which was quite
without battlement or pinnacle, and presented a smooth flat
surface about two feet wide, forming a pathway on all the four
sides. Without reflecting in the least upon what she was doing
she now stepped upon the parapet in the old way, and began walking
along.

'We are down, cousin Henry,' cried Mrs. Swancourt up the turret.
'Follow us when you like.'

Knight turned and saw Elfride beginning her elevated promenade.
His face flushed with mingled concern and anger at her rashness.

'I certainly gave you credit for more common sense,' he said.

She reddened a little and walked on.

'Miss Swancourt, I insist upon your coming down,' he exclaimed.

'I will in a minute. I am safe enough. I have done it often.'

At that moment, by reason of a slight perturbation his words had
caused in her, Elfride's foot caught itself in a little tuft of
grass growing in a joint of the stone-work, and she almost lost
her balance. Knight sprang forward with a face of horror. By
what seemed the special interposition of a considerate Providence
she tottered to the inner edge of the parapet instead of to the
outer, and reeled over upon the lead roof two or three feet below
the wall.

Knight seized her as in a vice, and he said, panting, 'That ever I
should have met a woman fool enough to do a thing of that kind!
Good God, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!'

The close proximity of the Shadow of Death had made her sick and
pale as a corpse before he spoke. Already lowered to that state,
his words completely over-powered her, and she swooned away as he
held her.

Elfride's eyes were not closed for more than forty seconds. She
opened them, and remembered the position instantly. His face had
altered its expression from stern anger to pity. But his severe
remarks had rather frightened her, and she struggled to be free.

'If you can stand, of course you may,' he said, and loosened his
arms. 'I hardly know whether most to laugh at your freak or to
chide you for its folly.'

She immediately sank upon the lead-work. Knight lifted her again.
'Are you hurt?' he said.

She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying,
with a fitful aversion of her face, 'I am only frightened. Put me
down, do put me down!'

'But you can't walk,' said Knight.

'You don't know that; how can you? I am only frightened, I tell
you,' she answered petulantly, and raised her hand to her
forehead. Knight then saw that she was bleeding from a severe cut
in her wrist, apparently where it had descended upon a salient
corner of the lead-work. Elfride, too, seemed to perceive and
feel this now for the first time, and for a minute nearly lost
consciousness again. Knight rapidly bound his handkerchief round
the place, and to add to the complication, the thundercloud he had
been watching began to shed some heavy drops of rain. Knight
looked up and saw the vicar striding towards the house, and Mrs.
Swancourt waddling beside him like a hard-driven duck.

'As you are so faint, it will be much better to let me carry you
down,' said Knight; 'or at any rate inside out of the rain.' But
her objection to be lifted made it impossible for him to support
her for more than five steps.

'This is folly, great folly,' he exclaimed, setting her down.

'Indeed!' she murmured, with tears in her eyes. 'I say I will not
be carried, and you say this is folly!'

'So it is.'

'No, it isn't!'

'It is folly, I think. At any rate, the origin of it all is.'

'I don't agree to it. And you needn't get so angry with me; I am
not worth it.'

'Indeed you are. You are worth the enmity of princes, as was said
of such another. Now, then, will you clasp your hands behind my
neck, that I may carry you down without hurting you?'

'No, no.'

'You had better, or I shall foreclose.'

'What's that!'

'Deprive you of your chance.'

Elfride gave a little toss.

'Now, don't writhe so when I attempt to carry you.'

'I can't help it.'

'Then submit quietly.'

'I don't care. I don't care,' she murmured in languid tones and
with closed eyes.

He took her into his arms, entered the turret, and with slow and
cautious steps descended round and round. Then, with the
gentleness of a nursing mother, he attended to the cut on her arm.
During his progress through the operations of wiping it and
binding it up anew, her face changed its aspect from pained
indifference to something like bashful interest, interspersed with
small tremors and shudders of a trifling kind.

In the centre of each pale cheek a small red spot the size of a
wafer had now made its appearance, and continued to grow larger.
Elfride momentarily expected a recurrence to the lecture on her
foolishness, but Knight said no more than this--

'Promise me NEVER to walk on that parapet again.'

'It will be pulled down soon: so I do.' In a few minutes she
continued in a lower tone, and seriously, 'You are familiar of
course, as everybody is, with those strange sensations we
sometimes have, that our life for the moment exists in duplicate.'

'That we have lived through that moment before?'

'Or shall again. Well, I felt on the tower that something similar
to that scene is again to be common to us both.'

'God forbid!' said Knight. 'Promise me that you will never again
walk on any such place on any consideration.'

'I do.'

'That such a thing has not been before, we know. That it shall
not be again, you vow. Therefore think no more of such a foolish
fancy.'

There had fallen a great deal of rain, but unaccompanied by
lightning. A few minutes longer, and the storm had ceased.

'Now, take my arm, please.'

'Oh no, it is not necessary.' This relapse into wilfulness was
because he had again connected the epithet foolish with her.

'Nonsense: it is quite necessary; it will rain again directly, and
you are not half recovered.' And without more ado Knight took her
hand, drew it under his arm, and held it there so firmly that she
could not have removed it without a struggle. Feeling like a colt
in a halter for the first time, at thus being led along, yet
afraid to be angry, it was to her great relief that she saw the
carriage coming round the corner to fetch them.

Her fall upon the roof was necessarily explained to some extent
upon their entering the house; but both forbore to mention a word
of what she had been doing to cause such an accident. During the
remainder of the afternoon Elfride was invisible; but at dinner-
time she appeared as bright as ever.

In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with
Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again
found himself thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a
chess problem in one of the illustrated periodicals.

'You like chess, Miss Swancourt?'

'Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every
other. Do you play?'

'I have played; though not lately.'

'Challenge him, Elfride,' said the vicar heartily. 'She plays
very well for a lady, Mr. Knight.'

'Shall we play?' asked Elfride tentatively.

'Oh, certainly. I shall be delighted.'

The game began. Mr. Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance
with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had
begun to take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity
of continuing faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a
fickle behaviour almost as imperatively as fickleness itself; a
fact, however, which would give a startling advantage to the
latter quality should it ever appear.

Knight, by one of those inexcusable oversights which will
sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms
of one of her pawns. It was her first advantage. She looked
triumphant--even ruthless.

'By George! what was I thinking of?' said Knight quietly; and then
dismissed all concern at his accident.

'Club laws we'll have, won't we, Mr. Knight?' said Elfride
suasively.

'Oh yes, certainly,' said Mr. Knight, a thought, however, just
occurring to his mind, that he had two or three times allowed her
to replace a man on her religiously assuring him that such a move
was an absolute blunder.

She immediately took up the unfortunate rook and the contest
proceeded, Elfride having now rather the better of the game. Then
he won the exchange, regained his position, and began to press her
hard. Elfride grew flurried, and placed her queen on his
remaining rook's file.

'There--how stupid! Upon my word, I did not see your rook. Of
course nobody but a fool would have put a queen there knowingly!'

She spoke excitedly, half expecting her antagonist to give her
back the move.

'Nobody, of course,' said Knight serenely, and stretched out his
hand towards his royal victim.

'It is not very pleasant to have it taken advantage of, then,' she
said with some vexation.

'Club laws, I think you said?' returned Knight blandly, and
mercilessly appropriating the queen.

She was on the brink of pouting, but was ashamed to show it; tears
almost stood in her eyes. She had been trying so hard--so very
hard--thinking and thinking till her brain was in a whirl; and it
seemed so heartless of him to treat her so, after all.

'I think it is----' she began.

'What?'

--'Unkind to take advantage of a pure mistake I make in that way.'

'I lost my rook by even a purer mistake,' said the enemy in an
inexorable tone, without lifting his eyes.

'Yes, but----' However, as his logic was absolutely unanswerable,
she merely registered a protest. 'I cannot endure those cold-
blooded ways of clubs and professional players, like Staunton and
Morphy. Just as if it really mattered whether you have raised
your fingers from a man or no!'

Knight smiled as pitilessly as before, and they went on in
silence.

'Checkmate,' said Knight.

'Another game,' said Elfride peremptorily, and looking very warm.

'With all my heart,' said Knight.

'Checkmate,' said Knight again at the end of forty minutes.

'Another game,' she returned resolutely.

'I'll give you the odds of a bishop,' Knight said to her kindly.

'No, thank you,' Elfride replied in a tone intended for courteous
indifference; but, as a fact, very cavalier indeed.

'Checkmate,' said her opponent without the least emotion.

Oh, the difference between Elfride's condition of mind now, and
when she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!

It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb
itself out of her head, she went off to her chamber, full of
mortification at being beaten time after time when she herself was
the aggressor. Having for two or three years enjoyed the
reputation throughout the globe of her father's brain--which
almost constituted her entire world--of being an excellent player,
this fiasco was intolerable; for unfortunately the person most
dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that one, the
possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not true.

In bed no sleep came to soothe her; that gentle thing being the
very middle-of-summer friend in this respect of flying away at the
merest troublous cloud. After lying awake till two o'clock an
idea seemed to strike her. She softly arose, got a light, and
fetched a Chess Praxis from the library. Returning and sitting up
in bed, she diligently studied the volume till the clock struck
five, and her eyelids felt thick and heavy. She then extinguished
the light and lay down again.

'You look pale, Elfride,' said Mrs. Swancourt the next morning at
breakfast. 'Isn't she, cousin Harry?'

A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming
so when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table
in obedience to some remark. Everybody looked at Elfride. She
certainly was pale.

'Am I pale?' she said with a faint smile. 'I did not sleep much.
I could not get rid of armies of bishops and knights, try how I
would.'

'Chess is a bad thing just before bedtime; especially for
excitable people like yourself, dear. Don't ever play late
again.'

'I'll play early instead. Cousin Knight,' she said in imitation
of Mrs. Swancourt, 'will you oblige me in something?'

'Even to half my kingdom.'

'Well, it is to play one game more.'

'When?'

'Now, instantly; the moment we have breakfasted.'

'Nonsense, Elfride,' said her father. 'Making yourself a slave to
the game like that.'

'But I want to, papa! Honestly, I am restless at having been so
ignominiously overcome. And Mr. Knight doesn't mind. So what
harm can there be?'

'Let us play, by all means, if you wish it,' said Knight.

So, when breakfast was over, the combatants withdrew to the quiet
of the library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have
an idea that her conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly
free from conventional restraint. And worse, she fancied upon
Knight's face a slightly amused look at her proceedings.

'You think me foolish, I suppose,' she said recklessly; 'but I
want to do my very best just once, and see whether I can overcome
you.'

'Certainly: nothing more natural. Though I am afraid it is not
the plan adopted by women of the world after a defeat.'

'Why, pray?'

'Because they know that as good as overcoming is skill in effacing
recollection of being overcome, and turn their attention to that
entirely.'

'I am wrong again, of course.'

'Perhaps your wrong is more pleasing than their right.'

'I don't quite know whether you mean that, or whether you are
laughing at me,' she said, looking doubtingly at him, yet
inclining to accept the more flattering interpretation. 'I am
almost sure you think it vanity in me to think I am a match for
you. Well, if you do, I say that vanity is no crime in such a
case.'

'Well, perhaps not. Though it is hardly a virtue.'

'Oh yes, in battle! Nelson's bravery lay in his vanity.'

'Indeed! Then so did his death.'

Oh no, no! For it is written in the book of the prophet
Shakespeare--

"Fear and be slain? no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die, is death destroying death!"

And down they sat, and the contest began, Elfride having the first
move. The game progressed. Elfride's heart beat so violently
that she could not sit still. Her dread was lest he should hear
it. And he did discover it at last--some flowers upon the table
being set throbbing by its pulsations.

'I think we had better give over,' said Knight, looking at her
gently. 'It is too much for you, I know. Let us write down the
position, and finish another time.'

'No, please not,' she implored. 'I should not rest if I did not
know the result at once. It is your move.'

Ten minutes passed.

She started up suddenly. 'I know what you are doing?' she cried,
an angry colour upon her cheeks, and her eyes indignant. 'You
were thinking of letting me win to please me!'

'I don't mind owning that I was,' Knight responded phlegmatically,
and appearing all the more so by contrast with her own turmoil.

'But you must not! I won't have it.'

'Very well.'

'No, that will not do; I insist that you promise not to do any
such absurd thing. It is insulting me!'

'Very well, madam. I won't do any such absurd thing. You shall
not win.'

'That is to be proved!' she returned proudly; and the play went
on.

Nothing is now heard but the ticking of a quaint old timepiece on
the summit of a bookcase. Ten minutes pass; he captures her
knight; she takes his knight, and looks a very Rhadamanthus.

More minutes tick away; she takes his pawn and has the advantage,
showing her sense of it rather prominently.

Five minutes more: he takes her bishop: she brings things even by
taking his knight.

Three minutes: she looks bold, and takes his queen: he looks
placid, and takes hers.

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