A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy
T >>
Thomas Hardy >> A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 | 15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30
'My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost
one of my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy
any more, or allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I
wish I had some like them--that's what my meaning is--indeed it
is, Mr. Knight.'
'I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,' said Knight, with a
look of regret at seeing how disturbed she was. 'But seriously,
if women only knew how they ruin their good looks by such
appurtenances, I am sure they would never want them.'
'They were lovely, and became me so!'
'Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff
their ears with nowadays--like the governor of a steam-engine, or
a pair of scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists'
palettes, and compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what
besides.'
'No; they were not one of those things. So pretty--like this,'
she said with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her
parasol an enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a
scale that would have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
'Yes, very pretty--very,' said Knight dryly. 'How did you come to
lose such a precious pair of articles?'
'I only lost one--nobody ever loses both at the same time.'
She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of
the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith
was attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her
confusion was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been
awkward, and received no direct answer.
Knight seemed not to notice her manner.
'Oh, nobody ever loses both--I see. And certainly the fact that
it was a case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your
choice.'
'As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don't now,' she
said, looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And
coming gallantly to her own rescue, 'If I really seem vain, it is
that I am only vain in my ways--not in my heart. The worst women
are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.'
'An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more
objectionable of the two,' said Knight.
'Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell
me.'
'I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of
life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of
passing through it.'
'Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to
make her life, in its higher sense, a failure?'
'Nobody's life is altogether a failure.'
'Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly
selected and commonplace,' she said impatiently. 'Because I utter
commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace
thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of
rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and
the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the
coarse triteness of the form.'
'Very well; I'll believe that ingenious representation. As to the
subject in hand--lives which are failures--you need not trouble
yourself. Anybody's life may be just as romantic and strange and
interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the
difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If
a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of
it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had
as much in it as that of a great man who has done his great deed.
It is whimsical of the world to hold that particulars of how a lad
went to school and so on should be as an interesting romance or as
nothing to them, precisely in proportion to his after renown.'
They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the
dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself.
Their shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of
becoming obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the
opposite direction which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
'I consider my life to some extent a failure,' said Knight again
after a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic
shadows.
'You! How?'
'I don't precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.'
'Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel
that you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?'
'Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly
experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are
conscious of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it
seems, there is nothing truer than that people who have always
gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of
going right as those do who have gone wrong. However, it is not
desirable for me to chill your summer-time by going into this.'
'You have not told me even now if I am really vain.'
'If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you'll think I
don't mean it,' he replied, looking curiously into her face.
'Ah, well,' she replied, with a little breath of distress, '"That
which is exceeding deep, who will find it out?" I suppose I must
take you as I do the Bible--find out and understand all I can; and
on the strength of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple
faith. Think me vain, if you will. Worldly greatness requires so
much littleness to grow up in, that an infirmity more or less is
not a matter for regret.'
'As regards women, I can't say,' answered Knight carelessly; 'but
it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to
get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a
man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for
vanity.'
'No, no, I don't do that,' she said regretfully.
Mr. Knight, when you are gone, will you send me something you have
written? I think I should like to see whether you write as you
have lately spoken, or in your better mood. Which is your true
self--the cynic you have been this evening, or the nice
philosopher you were up to to-night?'
'Ah, which? You know as well as I.'
Their conversation detained them on the lawn and in the portico
till the stars blinked out. Elfride flung back her head, and said
idly--
'There's a bright star exactly over me.'
'Each bright star is overhead somewhere.'
'Is it? Oh yes, of course. Where is that one?' and she pointed
with her finger.
'That is poised like a white hawk over one of the Cape Verde
Islands.'
'And that?'
'Looking down upon the source of the Nile.'
'And that lonely quiet-looking one?'
'He watches the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator
for his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that
we have almost rolled away from, is in India--over the head of a
young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our
zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as
marking where his true love dwells.'
Elfride glanced at Knight with misgiving. Did he mean her? She
could not see his features; but his attitude seemed to show
unconsciousness.
'The star is over MY head,' she said with hesitation.
'Or anybody else's in England.'
'Oh yes, I see:' she breathed her relief.
'His parents, I believe, are natives of this county. I don't know
them, though I have been in correspondence with him for many years
till lately. Fortunately or unfortunately for him he fell in
love, and then went to Bombay. Since that time I have heard very
little of him.'
Knight went no further in his volunteered statement, and though
Elfride at one moment was inclined to profit by the lessons in
honesty he had just been giving her, the flesh was weak, and the
intention dispersed into silence. There seemed a reproach in
Knight's blind words, and yet she was not able to clearly define
any disloyalty that she had been guilty of.
Chapter XX
'A distant dearness in the hill.'
Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed
over to Cork.
One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and
proportionately weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of
Killarney, rambled amid their luxuriant woods, surveyed the
infinite variety of island, hill, and dale there to be found,
listened to the marvellous echoes of that romantic spot; but
altogether missed the glory and the dream he formerly found in
such favoured regions.
Whilst in the company of Elfride, her girlish presence had not
perceptibly affected him to any depth. He had not been conscious
that her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but
now that she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal
being abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and
Knight was in love.
Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by
ceasing to do so. When or how the spirit entered into him he knew
not: certain he was that when on the point of leaving Endelstow he
had felt none of that exquisite nicety of poignant sadness natural
to such severances, seeing how delightful a subject of
contemplation Elfride had been ever since. Had he begun to love
her when she met his eye after her mishap on the tower? He had
simply thought her weak. Had he grown to love her whilst standing
on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He had thought
her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that had
sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-
playing anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her
at that time a rather conceited child.
Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that
love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of
the fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the
moment of generation. Not till they were parted, and she had
become sublimated in his memory, could he be said to have even
attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind
did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him,
he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which
had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his
way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to
analysis, he almost trembled at the possible result of the
introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of
his ordinary life. He became restless: then he forgot all
collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking about her.
Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than
with romance.
He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on
coquetry. Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible
translation of favour into suspicion was able to uphold such a
theory. The performance had been too well done to be anything but
real. It had the defects without which nothing is genuine. No
actress of twenty years' standing, no bald-necked lady whose
earliest season 'out' was lost in the discreet mist of evasive
talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as
Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly
make up ingenuousness.
There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance:
spinsters there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some
think only those of the latter. However, Knight had been looked
upon as a bachelor by nature. What was he coming to? It was very
odd to himself to look at his theories on the subject of love, and
reading them now by the full light of a new experience, to see how
much more his sentences meant than he had felt them to mean when
they were written. People often discover the real force of a
trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a chance
adventure; but Knight had never before known the case of a man who
learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.
He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred
in him was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer
in a woman's heart. He had discovered within himself the
condition that if ever he did make up his mind to marry, it must
be on the certainty that no cropping out of inconvenient old
letters, no bow and blush to a mysterious stranger casually met,
should be a possible source of discomposure. Knight's sentiments
were only the ordinary ones of a man of his age who loves
genuinely, perhaps exaggerated a little by his pursuits. When men
first love as lads, it is with the very centre of their hearts,
nothing else being concerned in the operation. With added years,
more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till
at Knight's age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it.
It may as well be left out. A man in love setting up his brains
as a gauge of his position is as one determining a ship's
longitude from a light at the mast-head.
Knight argued from Elfride's unwontedness of manner, which was
matter of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of
inference only. Incredules les plus credules. 'Elfride,' he
said, 'had hardly looked upon a man till she saw me.'
He had never forgotten his severity to her because she preferred
ornament to edification, and had since excused her a hundred times
by thinking how natural to womankind was a love of adornment, and
how necessary became a mild infusion of personal vanity to
complete the delicate and fascinating dye of the feminine mind.
So at the end of the week's absence, which had brought him as far
as Dublin, he resolved to curtail his tour, return to Endelstow,
and commit himself by making a reality of the hypothetical offer
of that Sunday evening.
Notwithstanding that he had concocted a great deal of paper theory
on social amenities and modern manners generally, the special
ounce of practice was wanting, and now for his life Knight could
not recollect whether it was considered correct to give a young
lady personal ornaments before a regular engagement to marry had
been initiated. But the day before leaving Dublin he looked
around anxiously for a high-class jewellery establishment, in
which he purchased what he considered would suit her best.
It was with a most awkward and unwonted feeling that after
entering and closing the door of his room he sat down, opened the
morocco case, and held up each of the fragile bits of gold-work
before his eyes. Many things had become old to the solitary man
of letters, but these were new, and he handled like a child an
outcome of civilization which had never before been touched by his
fingers. A sudden fastidious decision that the pattern chosen
would not suit her after all caused him to rise in a flurry and
tear down the street to change them for others. After a great
deal of trouble in reselecting, during which his mind became so
bewildered that the critical faculty on objects of art seemed to
have vacated his person altogether, Knight carried off another
pair of ear-rings. These remained in his possession till the
afternoon, when, after contemplating them fifty times with a
growing misgiving that the last choice was worse than the first,
he felt that no sleep would visit his pillow till he had improved
upon his previous purchases yet again. In a perfect heat of
vexation with himself for such tergiversation, he went anew to the
shop-door, was absolutely ashamed to enter and give further
trouble, went to another shop, bought a pair at an enormously
increased price, because they seemed the very thing, asked the
goldsmiths if they would take the other pair in exchange, was told
that they could not exchange articles bought of another maker,
paid down the money, and went off with the two pairs in his
possession, wondering what on earth to do with the superfluous
pair. He almost wished he could lose them, or that somebody would
steal them, and was burdened with an interposing sense that, as a
capable man, with true ideas of economy, he must necessarily sell
them somewhere, which he did at last for a mere song. Mingled
with a blank feeling of a whole day being lost to him in running
about the city on this new and extraordinary class of errand, and
of several pounds being lost through his bungling, was a slight
sense of satisfaction that he had emerged for ever from his
antediluvian ignorance on the subject of ladies' jewellery, as
well as secured a truly artistic production at last. During the
remainder of that day he scanned the ornaments of every lady he
met with the profoundly experienced eye of an appraiser.
Next morning Knight was again crossing St. George's Channel--not
returning to London by the Holyhead route as he had originally
intended, but towards Bristol--availing himself of Mr. and Mrs.
Swancourt's invitation to revisit them on his homeward journey.
We flit forward to Elfride.
Woman's ruling passion--to fascinate and influence those more
powerful than she--though operant in Elfride, was decidedly
purposeless. She had wanted her friend Knight's good opinion from
the first: how much more than that elementary ingredient of
friendship she now desired, her fears would hardly allow her to
think. In originally wishing to please the highest class of man
she had ever intimately known, there was no disloyalty to Stephen
Smith. She could not--and few women can--realize the possible
vastness of an issue which has only an insignificant begetting.
Her letters from Stephen were necessarily few, and her sense of
fidelity clung to the last she had received as a wrecked mariner
clings to flotsam. The young girl persuaded herself that she was
glad Stephen had such a right to her hand as he had acquired (in
her eyes) by the elopement. She beguiled herself by saying,
'Perhaps if I had not so committed myself I might fall in love
with Mr. Knight.'
All this made the week of Knight's absence very gloomy and
distasteful to her. She retained Stephen in her prayers, and his
old letters were re-read--as a medicine in reality, though she
deceived herself into the belief that it was as a pleasure.
These letters had grown more and more hopeful. He told her that
he finished his work every day with a pleasant consciousness of
having removed one more stone from the barrier which divided them.
Then he drew images of what a fine figure they two would cut some
day. People would turn their heads and say, 'What a prize he has
won!' She was not to be sad about that wild runaway attempt of
theirs (Elfride had repeatedly said that it grieved her).
Whatever any other person who knew of it might think, he knew well
enough the modesty of her nature. The only reproach was a gentle
one for not having written quite so devotedly during her visit to
London. Her letter had seemed to have a liveliness derived from
other thoughts than thoughts of him.
Knight's intention of an early return to Endelstow having
originally been faint, his promise to do so had been fainter. He
was a man who kept his words well to the rear of his possible
actions. The vicar was rather surprised to see him again so soon:
Mrs. Swancourt was not. Knight found, on meeting them all, after
his arrival had been announced, that they had formed an intention
to go to St. Leonards for a few days at the end of the month.
No satisfactory conjuncture offered itself on this first evening
of his return for presenting Elfride with what he had been at such
pains to procure. He was fastidious in his reading of
opportunities for such an intended act. The next morning chancing
to break fine after a week of cloudy weather, it was proposed and
decided that they should all drive to Barwith Strand, a local lion
which neither Mrs. Swancourt nor Knight had seen. Knight scented
romantic occasions from afar, and foresaw that such a one might be
expected before the coming night.
The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which
hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these
uplands revealed the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white
and a solitary white sail, the whole brimming up to a keen horizon
which lay like a line ruled from hillside to hillside. Then they
rolled down a pass, the chocolate-toned rocks forming a wall on
both sides, from one of which fell a heavy jagged shade over half
the roadway. A spout of fresh water burst from an occasional
crevice, and pattering down upon broad green leaves, ran along as
a rivulet at the bottom. Unkempt locks of heather overhung the
brow of each steep, whence at divers points a bramble swung forth
into mid-air, snatching at their head-dresses like a claw.
They mounted the last crest, and the bay which was to be the end
of their pilgrimage burst upon them. The ocean blueness deepened
its colour as it stretched to the foot of the crags, where it
terminated in a fringe of white--silent at this distance, though
moving and heaving like a counterpane upon a restless sleeper.
The shadowed hollows of the purple and brown rocks would have been
called blue had not that tint been so entirely appropriated by the
water beside them.
The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached,
and an ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions
down to the shore.
Knight found his opportunity. 'I did not forget your wish,' he
began, when they were apart from their friends.
Elfride looked as if she did not understand.
'And I have brought you these,' he continued, awkwardly pulling
out the case, and opening it while holding it towards her.
'O Mr. Knight!' said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively
red; 'I didn't know you had any intention or meaning in what you
said. I thought it a mere supposition. I don't want them.'
A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater
decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. To-morrow
was the day for Stephen's letter.
'But will you not accept them?' Knight returned, feeling less her
master than heretofore.
'I would rather not. They are beautiful--more beautiful than any
I have ever seen,' she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully
at the temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. 'But I
don't want to have them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr.
Knight.'
'No kindness at all,' said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at
this unexpected turn of events.
A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather
wofully at the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to
procure; turning it about and holding it up as if, feeling his
gift to be slighted by her, he were endeavouring to admire it very
much himself.
'Shut them up, and don't let me see them any longer--do!' she said
laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.
'Why, Elfie?'
'Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them.
There, I am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for
not taking them--now.' She kept in the last word for a moment,
intending to imply that her refusal was finite, but somehow the
word slipped out, and undid all the rest.
'You will take them some day?'
'I don't want to.'
'Why don't you want to, Elfride Swancourt?'
'Because I don't. I don't like to take them.'
'I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,' said
Knight. 'Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be
towards me?'
'No, it isn't.'
'What, then? Do you like me?'
Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with
features shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as
regarded her answer.
'I like you pretty well,' she at length murmured mildly.
'Not very much?'
'You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?'
she replied evasively.
'You think me a fogey, I suppose?'
'No, I don't--I mean I do--I don't know what I think you, I mean.
Let us go to papa,' responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried
delivery.
'Well, I'll tell you my object in getting the present,' said
Knight, with a composure intended to remove from her mind any
possible impression of his being what he was--her lover. 'You see
it was the very least I could do in common civility.'
Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.
Knight continued, putting away the case: 'I felt as anybody
naturally would have, you know, that my words on your choice the
other day were invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should
take a practical shape.'
'Oh yes.'
Elfride was sorry--she could not tell why--that he gave such a
legitimate reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the
time a cool motive, which might be stated to anybody without
raising a smile. Had she known they were offered in that spirit,
she would certainly have accepted the seductive gift. And the
tantalizing feature was that perhaps he suspected her to imagine
them offered as a lover's token, which was mortifying enough if
they were not.
Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a
flat boulder for spreading their table-cloth upon, and, amid the
discussion on that subject, the matter pending between Knight and
Elfride was shelved for a while. He read her refusal so certainly
as the bashfulness of a girl in a novel position, that, upon the
whole, he could tolerate such a beginning. Could Knight have been
told that it was a sense of fidelity struggling against new love,
whilst no less assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might have
entirely abstracted the wish to secure it.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 | 15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30