A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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Eight or ten minutes pass: he takes a pawn; she utters a little
pooh! but not the ghost of a pawn can she take in retaliation.

Ten minutes pass: he takes another pawn and says, 'Check!' She
flushes, extricates herself by capturing his bishop, and looks
triumphant. He immediately takes her bishop: she looks surprised.

Five minutes longer: she makes a dash and takes his only remaining
bishop; he replies by taking her only remaining knight.

Two minutes: he gives check; her mind is now in a painful state of
tension, and she shades her face with her hand.

Yet a few minutes more: he takes her rook and checks again. She
literally trembles now lest an artful surprise she has in store
for him shall be anticipated by the artful surprise he evidently
has in store for her.

Five minutes: 'Checkmate in two moves!' exclaims Elfride.

'If you can,' says Knight.

'Oh, I have miscalculated; that is cruel!'

'Checkmate,' says Knight; and the victory is won.

Elfride arose and turned away without letting him see her face.
Once in the hall she ran upstairs and into her room, and flung
herself down upon her bed, weeping bitterly.

'Where is Elfride?' said her father at luncheon.

Knight listened anxiously for the answer. He had been hoping to
see her again before this time.

'She isn't well, sir,' was the reply.

Mrs. Swancourt rose and left the room, going upstairs to Elfride's
apartment.

At the door was Unity, who occupied in the new establishment a
position between young lady's maid and middle-housemaid.

'She is sound asleep, ma'am,' Unity whispered.

Mrs. Swancourt opened the door. Elfride was lying full-dressed on
the bed, her face hot and red, her arms thrown abroad. At
intervals of a minute she tossed restlessly from side to side, and
indistinctly moaned words used in the game of chess.

Mrs. Swancourt had a turn for doctoring, and felt her pulse. It
was twanging like a harp-string, at the rate of nearly a hundred
and fifty a minute. Softly moving the sleeping girl to a little
less cramped position, she went downstairs again.

'She is asleep now,' said Mrs. Swancourt. 'She does not seem very
well. Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain
won't bear cudgelling like your great head. You should have
strictly forbidden her to play again.'

In truth, the essayist's experience of the nature of young women
was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led
himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences
like a workman, but practically was nowhere.

'I am indeed sorry,' said Knight, feeling even more than he
expressed. 'But surely, the young lady knows best what is good
for her!'

'Bless you, that's just what she doesn't know. She never thinks
of such things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to
command her and keep her in order, as you would a child. She will
say things worthy of a French epigrammatist, and act like a robin
in a greenhouse. But I think we will send for Dr. Granson--there
can be no harm.'

A man was straightway despatched on horseback to Castle Boterel,
and the gentleman known as Dr. Granson came in the course of the
afternoon. He pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided
state of disorder; forwarded some soothing draught, and gave
orders that on no account whatever was she to play chess again.

The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a
curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The
women servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as
each entered, he could not, to save his life, avoid turning his
head with the hope that she might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began
reading without waiting for her. Then somebody glided in
noiselessly; Knight softly glanced up: it was only the little
kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading prayers a bore.

He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to
recognize that holding converse with Nature's charms was not
solitude. On nearing the house again he perceived his young
friend crossing a slope by a path which ran into the one he was
following in the angle of the field. Here they met. Elfride was
at once exultant and abashed: coming into his presence had upon
her the effect of entering a cathedral.

Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in
the very act of writing therein when they came in view of each
other. He left off in the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to
inquire warmly concerning her state of health. She said she was
perfectly well, and indeed had never looked better. Her health
was as inconsequent as her actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT
the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the
white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged
confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the
world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too
ephemeral-looking to play one.

'Are you taking notes?' she inquired with an alacrity plainly
arising less from interest in the subject than from a wish to
divert his thoughts from herself.

'Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will
complete it.' Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained
beside him a moment, and afterwards walked on.

'I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,' she
gaily flung back to him over her shoulder.

'I don't think you would find much to interest you.'

'I know I should.'

'Then of course I have no more to say.'

'But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts
concerning journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of
thoughts?'

'Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists
for the most part of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed
and disconnected, of no possible interest to anybody but myself.'

'It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?'

'Yes.'

'If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article,
what must they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified
spirit, above proof; before it is lowered to be fit for human
consumption: "words that burn" indeed.'

'Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless,
dead. You could hardly read them.'

'May I try?' she said coaxingly. 'I wrote my poor romance in that
way--I mean in bits, out of doors--and I should like to see
whether your way of entering things is the same as mine.'

'Really, that's rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly
refuse now you have asked so directly; but----'

'You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify
me--your writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon
your book by chance, it would have been different; but you stand
before me, and say, "Excuse me," without caring whether I do or
not, and write on, and then tell me they are not private facts but
public ideas.'

'Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the
consequences be upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is
to leave my book alone.'

'But with that caution I have your permission?'

'Yes.'

She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book,
then laughed, and saying, 'I must see it,' withdrew it from his
fingers.

Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the
path turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the
wicket-gate he saw that she had moved, and waited till she came
up.

Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully
by the corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a
nettled look. She silently extended the volume towards him,
raising her eyes no higher than her hand was lifted.

'Take it,' said Elfride quickly. 'I don't want to read it.'

'Could you understand it?' said Knight.

'As far as I looked. But I didn't care to read much.'

'Why, Miss Swancourt?'

'Only because I didn't wish to--that's all.'

'I warned you that you might not.'

'Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.'

'Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.'

'Not my name--I know that.'

'Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would
recognize you.'

'Except myself. For what is this?' she exclaimed, taking it from
him and opening a page. 'August 7. That's the day before
yesterday. But I won't read it,' Elfride said, closing the book
again with pretty hauteur. 'Why should I? I had no business to
ask to see your hook, and it serves me right.'

Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the
book to see. He came to this:

'Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is
born. After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness
it begins to act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first.
Persons of observation can tell to a nicety how old this
consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary
to its success--the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career
by actions which are popularly termed showing-off. Method adopted
depends in each case upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the
young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral
paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more
material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making
your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On
Endelstow Tower.)

'An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays.
"Look at me," say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice,
without reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show
so very much of themselves. (Amplify and correct for paper on
Artless Arts.)'

'Yes, I remember now,' said Knight. 'The notes were certainly
suggested by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not
think too much of such random observations,' he continued
encouragingly, as he noticed her injured looks. 'A mere fancy
passing through my head assumes a factitious importance to you,
because it has been made permanent by being written down. All
mankind think thoughts as bad as those of people they most love on
earth, but such thoughts never getting embodied on paper, it
becomes assumed that they never existed. I daresay that you
yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other of me,
which would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge you,
now, to tell me.'

'The worst thing I have thought of you?'

'Yes.'

'I must not.'

'Oh yes.'

'I thought you were rather round-shouldered.'

Knight looked slightly redder.

'And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.'

'Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,' said Knight, there being a
faint ghastliness discernible in his laugh. 'They are much worse
in a lady's eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.'

'Ah, that's very fine,' she said, too inexperienced to perceive
her hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. 'You
alluded to me in that entry as if I were such a child, too.
Everybody does that. I cannot understand it. I am quite a woman,
you know. How old do you think I am?'

'How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.'

'You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do
you like best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older
than they are?'

'Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.'

So it was not Elfride's class.

'But it is well known,' she said eagerly, and there was something
touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she
revealed by her words, 'that the slower a nature is to develop,
the richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women
before they come of age are nobodies by the time that backward
people have shown their full compass.'

'Yes,' said Knight thoughtfully. 'There is really something in
that remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that
you there take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a
given age has not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness
may be not because she is slow to develop, but because she soon
exhausted her capacity for developing.'

Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors.
Mrs. Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat
and drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this
pair. The morning-room, in which they both expected to find her,
was empty; the old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it
by the second door as they entered by the first.

Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two
portraits on ivory.

'Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging
by what I see here,' he observed, 'they had unquestionably
beautiful heads of hair.'

'Yes; and that is everything,' said Elfride, possibly conscious of
her own, possibly not.

'Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.'

'Which colour do you like best?' she ventured to ask.

'More depends on its abundance than on its colour.'

'Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?'

'Dark.'

'I mean for women,' she said, with the minutest fall of
countenance, and a hope that she had been misunderstood.

'So do I,' Knight replied.

It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride's
hair. In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be
overlooked by men not given to ocular intentness. But hers was
always in the way. You saw her hair as far as you could see her
sex, and knew that it was the palest brown. She knew instantly
that Knight, being perfectly aware of this, had an independent
standard of admiration in the matter.

Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with
the honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the
more they went against her, the more she respected them. And now,
like a reckless gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure.
Her eyes: they were her all now.

'What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?' she said
slowly.

'Honestly, or as a compliment?'

'Of course honestly; I don't want anybody's compliment!'

And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of
approval from that man then would have been like a well to a
famished Arab.

'I prefer hazel,' he said serenely.

She had played and lost again.

Chapter XIX

'Love was in the next degree.'

Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by
judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman's
recollection of the speaker's abstract opinions. So no more was
said by either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development.
Elfride's mind had been impregnated with sentiments of her own
smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her
discomfort was visible in her face. The whole tendency of the
conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage
her; and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence.
He would not have been so unloving, she said, as to admire an
idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True, Stephen
had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything of
the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of
her smallness in Knight's eyes still remained. Had the position
been reversed--had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing
taste, and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance
to his ideal, it would have engendered far happier thoughts. As
matters stood, Stephen's admiration might have its root in a
blindness the result of passion. Perhaps any keen man's judgment
was condemnatory of her.

During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown
with their seniors, and no conversation arose which was
exclusively their own. When Elfride was in bed that night her
thoughts recurred to the same subject. At one moment she insisted
that it was ill-natured of him to speak so decisively as he had
done; the next, that it was sterling honesty.

'Ah, what a poor nobody I am!' she said, sighing. 'People like
him, who go about the great world, don't care in the least what I
am like either in mood or feature.'

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman's mind in this
manner, is half way to her heart; the distance between those two
stations is proverbially short.

'And are you really going away this week?' said Mrs. Swancourt to
Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.

They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a
last service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of
evening instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of
the ruinous portions.

'I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,' returned Knight;
'and then I go on to Dublin.'

'Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,' said the
vicar. 'A week is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize
your presence yet. I remember a story which----'

The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and
would probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had
not a turn in the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown
within the range of his vision, and so reminded him. He at once
diverted the current of his narrative with the dexterity the
occasion demanded.

'The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from
which I took my text the Sunday before last, is quite to the
point,' he continued, with the pronunciation of a man who, far
from having intended to tell a week-day story a moment earlier,
had thought of nothing but Sabbath matters for several weeks.
'What did he gain after all by his restlessness? Had he remained
in the city of the Jebusites, and not been so anxious for Gibeah,
none of his troubles would have arisen.'

'But he had wasted five days already,' said Knight, closing his
eyes to the vicar's commendable diversion. 'His fault lay in
beginning the tarrying system originally.'

'True, true; my illustration fails.'

'But not the hospitality which prompted the story.'

'So you are to come just the same,' urged Mrs. Swancourt, for she
had seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her
stepdaughter at Knight's announcement.

Knight half promised to call on his return journey; but the
uncertainty with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride
with a regretful interest in all he did during the few remaining
hours. The curate having already officiated twice that day in the
two churches, Mr. Swancourt had undertaken the whole of the
evening service, and Knight read the lessons for him. The sun
streamed across from the dilapidated west window, and lighted all
the assembled worshippers with a golden glow, Knight as he read
being illuminated by the same mellow lustre. Elfride at the organ
regarded him with a throbbing sadness of mood which was fed by a
sense of being far removed from his sphere. As he went
deliberately through the chapter appointed--a portion of the
history of Elijah--and ascended that magnificent climax of the
wind, the earthquake, the fire, and the still small voice, his
deep tones echoed past with such apparent disregard of her
existence, that his presence inspired her with a forlorn sense of
unapproachableness, which his absence would hardly have been able
to cause.

At the same time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory
of the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by
the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the
bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had
not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen
Smith. Possessing the smallest of competencies, this unhappy
woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings between Endelstow
Churchyard and that of a village near Southampton, where her
father and mother were laid.

She had not attended the service here for a considerable time, and
she now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat. From the
gallery window the tomb of her son was plainly visible--standing
as the nearest object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by
the changeless horizon of the sea.

The streaming rays, too, flooded her face, now bent towards
Elfride with a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of
the place raised to a tragic dignity it did not intrinsically
possess. The girl resumed her normal attitude with an added
disquiet.

Elfride's emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert
itself on a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free--a
poem, a sunset, a cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague
imagining, being the usual accidents of its exhibition. The
longing for Knight's respect, which was leading up to an incipient
yearning for his love, made the present conjuncture a sufficient
one. Whilst kneeling down previous to leaving, when the sunny
streaks had gone upward to the roof, and the lower part of the
church was in soft shadow, she could not help thinking of
Coleridge's morbid poem 'The Three Graves,' and shuddering as she
wondered if Mrs. Jethway were cursing her, she wept as if her
heart would break.

They came out of church just as the sun went down, leaving the
landscape like a platform from which an eloquent speaker has
retired, and nothing remains for the audience to do but to rise
and go home. Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt went off in the carriage,
Knight and Elfride preferring to walk, as the skilful old
matchmaker had imagined. They descended the hill together.

'I liked your reading, Mr. Knight,' Elfride presently found
herself saying. 'You read better than papa.'

'I will praise anybody that will praise me. You played
excellently, Miss Swancourt, and very correctly.'

'Correctly--yes.'

'It must be a great pleasure to you to take an active part in the
service.'

'I want to be able to play with more feeling. But I have not a
good selection of music, sacred or secular. I wish I had a nice
little music-library--well chosen, and that the only new pieces
sent me were those of genuine merit.'

'I am glad to hear such a wish from you. It is extraordinary how
many women have no honest love of music as an end and not as a
means, even leaving out those who have nothing in them. They
mostly like it for its accessories. I have never met a woman who
loves music as do ten or a dozen men I know.'

'How would you draw the line between women with something and
women with nothing in them?'

'Well,' said Knight, reflecting a moment, 'I mean by nothing in
them those who don't care about anything solid. This is an
instance: I knew a man who had a young friend in whom he was much
interested; in fact, they were going to be married. She was
seemingly poetical, and he offered her a choice of two editions of
the British poets, which she pretended to want badly. He said,
"Which of them would you like best for me to send?" She said, "A
pair of the prettiest earrings in Bond Street, if you don't mind,
would be nicer than either." Now I call her a girl with not much
in her but vanity; and so do you, I daresay.'

'Oh yes,' replied Elfride with an effort.

Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and
noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure,
he appeared to have misgivings.

'You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have
preferred the nicknacks?'

'No, I don't think I should, indeed,' she stammered.

'I'll put it to you,' said the inflexible Knight. 'Which will you
have of these two things of about equal value--the well-chosen
little library of the best music you spoke of--bound in morocco,
walnut case, lock and key--or a pair of the very prettiest
earrings in Bond Street windows?'

'Of course the music,' Elfride replied with forced earnestness.

'You are quite certain?' he said emphatically.

'Quite,' she faltered; 'if I could for certain buy the earrings
afterwards.'

Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the
palpitating mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such
thing a species of cruelty.

He looked at her rather oddly, and said, 'Fie!'

'Forgive me,' she said, laughing a little, a little frightened,
and blushing very deeply.

'Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn't you say at first, as any firm woman
would have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?'

'I don't know,' said Elfride wofully, and with a distressful
smile.

'I thought you were exceptionally musical?'

'So I am, I think. But the test is so severe--quite painful.'

'I don't understand.'

'Music doesn't do any real good, or rather----'

'That IS a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what----'

'You don't understand! you don't understand!'

'Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?'

'No, no, no, no!' she cried petulantly; 'I didn't mean what you
think. I like the music best, only I like----'

'Earrings better--own it!' he said in a teasing tone. 'Well, I
think I should have had the moral courage to own it at once,
without pretending to an elevation I could not reach.'

Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the
defensive. So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she
answered desperately:

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