A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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'Would it be considered an intrusion by the family if we went into
the vault?'

'Oh, bless ye, no, sir; scores of folk have been stepping down.
'Tis left open a-purpose.'

'We will go down, Elfride.'

'I am afraid the air is close,' she said appealingly.

'Oh no, ma'am,' said John. 'We white-limed the walls and arches
the day 'twas opened, as we always do, and again on the morning of
the funeral; the place is as sweet as a granary.

'Then I should like you to accompany me, Elfie; having originally
sprung from the family too.'

'I don't like going where death is so emphatically present. I'll
stay by the horses whilst you go in; they may get loose.'

'What nonsense! I had no idea your sentiments were so flimsily
formed as to be perturbed by a few remnants of mortality; but stay
out, if you are so afraid, by all means.'

'Oh no, I am not afraid; don't say that.'

She held miserably to his arm, thinking that, perhaps, the
revelation might as well come at once as ten minutes later, for
Stephen would be sure to accompany his friend to his horse.

At first, the gloom of the vault, which was lighted only by a
couple of candles, was too great to admit of their seeing anything
distinctly; but with a further advance Knight discerned, in front
of the black masses lining the walls, a young man standing, and
writing in a pocket-book.

Knight said one word: 'Stephen!'

Stephen Smith, not being in such absolute ignorance of Knight's
whereabouts as Knight had been of Smith's instantly recognized his
friend, and knew by rote the outlines of the fair woman standing
behind him.

Stephen came forward and shook him by the hand, without speaking.

'Why have you not written, my boy?' said Knight, without in any
way signifying Elfride's presence to Stephen. To the essayist,
Smith was still the country lad whom he had patronized and tended;
one to whom the formal presentation of a lady betrothed to himself
would have seemed incongruous and absurd.

'Why haven't you written to me?' said Stephen.

'Ah, yes. Why haven't I? why haven't we? That's always the query
which we cannot clearly answer without an unsatisfactory sense of
our inadequacies. However, I have not forgotten you, Smith. And
now we have met; and we must meet again, and have a longer chat
than this can conveniently be. I must know all you have been
doing. That yon have thriven, I know, and you must teach me the
way.'

Elfride stood in the background. Stephen had read the position at
a glance, and immediately guessed that she had never mentioned his
name to Knight. His tact in avoiding catastrophes was the chief
quality which made him intellectually respectable, in which
quality he far transcended Knight; and he decided that a tranquil
issue out of the encounter, without any harrowing of the feelings
of either Knight or Elfride, was to be attempted if possible. His
old sense of indebtedness to Knight had never wholly forsaken him;
his love for Elfride was generous now.

As far as he dared look at her movements he saw that her bearing
towards him would be dictated by his own towards her; and if he
acted as a stranger she would do likewise as a means of
deliverance. Circumstances favouring this course, it was
desirable also to be rather reserved towards Knight, to shorten
the meeting as much as possible.

'I am afraid that my time is almost too short to allow even of
such a pleasure,' he said. 'I leave here to-morrow. And until I
start for the Continent and India, which will be in a fortnight, I
shall have hardly a moment to spare.'

Knight's disappointment and dissatisfied looks at this reply sent
a pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of
Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true,
but their tone was far from being so. He would have been
gratified to talk with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead
loss to himself that, to save the woman who cared nothing for him,
he was deliberately throwing away his friend.

'Oh, I am sorry to hear that,' said Knight, in a changed tone.
'But of course, if you have weighty concerns to attend to, they
must not be neglected. And if this is to be our first and last
meeting, let me say that I wish you success with all my heart!'
Knight's warmth revived towards the end; the solemn impressions he
was beginning to receive from the scene around them abstracting
from his heart as a puerility any momentary vexation at words.
'It is a strange place for us to meet in,' he continued, looking
round the vault.

Stephen briefly assented, and there was a silence. The blackened
coffins were now revealed more clearly than at first, the whitened
walls and arches throwing them forward in strong relief. It was a
scene which was remembered by all three as an indelible mark in
their history. Knight, with an abstracted face, was standing
between his companions, though a little in advance of them,
Elfride being on his right hand, and Stephen Smith on his left.
The white daylight on his right side gleamed faintly in, and was
toned to a blueness by contrast with the yellow rays from the
candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly shrinking back, and
nearest the entrance, received most of the light therefrom, whilst
Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the spot of outer
sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch, and
nothing more.

'I have been here two or three times since it was opened,' said
Stephen. 'My father was engaged in the work, you know.'

'Yes. What are you doing?' Knight inquired, looking at the note-
book and pencil Stephen held in his hand.

'I have been sketching a few details in the church, and since then
I have been copying the names from some of the coffins here.
Before I left England I used to do a good deal of this sort of
thing.'

'Yes; of course. Ah, that's poor Lady Luxellian, I suppose.'
Knight pointed to a coffin of light satin-wood, which stood on the
stone sleepers in the new niche. 'And the remainder of the family
are on this side. Who are those two, so snug and close together?'

Stephen's voice altered slightly as he replied 'That's Lady
Elfride Kingsmore--born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her
husband. I have heard my father say that they--he--ran away with
her, and married her against the wish of her parents.'

'Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss
Swancourt?' said Knight, turning to her. 'I think you told me it
was three or four generations ago that your family branched off
from the Luxellians?'

'She was my grandmother,' said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to
moisten her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the
conscience-stricken look of Guido's Magdalen, rendered upon a more
childlike form. She kept her face partially away from Knight and
Stephen, and set her eyes upon the sky visible outside, as if her
salvation depended upon quickly reaching it. Her left hand rested
lightly within Knight's arm, half withdrawn, from a sense of shame
at claiming him before her old lover, yet unwilling to renounce
him; so that her glove merely touched his sleeve. '"Can one be
pardoned, and retain the offence?"' quoted Elfride's heart then.

Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on
in the shape of disjointed remarks. 'One's mind gets thronged
with thoughts while standing so solemnly here,' Knight said, in a
measured quiet voice. 'How much has been said on death from time
to time! how much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy
each of these who lie here saying:

'For Thou, to make my fall more great,
Didst lift me up on high.'

What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
thinking of.'

'Yes, I know it,' she murmured, and went on in a still lower
voice, seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of
her nature to reach Stephen:

'"My days, just hastening to their end,
Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither'd grass,
With waning lustre fade."'

'Well,' said Knight musingly, 'let us leave them. Such occasions
as these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away
from the fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our
perception grows so vast that our physical reality bears no sort
of proportion to it. We look back upon the weak and minute stem
on which this luxuriant growth depends, and ask, Can it be
possible that such a capacity has a foundation so small? Must I
again return to my daily walk in that narrow cell, a human body,
where worldly thoughts can torture me? Do we not?'

'Yes,' said Stephen and Elfride.

'One has a sense of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth
as a sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail
casket of a body. What weakens one's intentions regarding the
future like the thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves
to a more cheerful chord, for there's a great deal to be done yet
by us all.'

As Knight meditatively addressed his juniors thus, unconscious of
the deception practised, for different reasons, by the severed
hearts at his side, and of the scenes that had in earlier days
united them, each one felt that he and she did not gain by
contrast with their musing mentor. Physically not so handsome as
either the youthful architect or the vicar's daughter, the
thoroughness and integrity of Knight illuminated his features with
a dignity not even incipient in the other two. It is difficult to
frame rules which shall apply to both sexes, and Elfride, an
undeveloped girl, must, perhaps, hardly be laden with the moral
responsibilities which attach to a man in like circumstances. The
charm of woman, too, lies partly in her subtleness in matters of
love. But if honesty is a virtue in itself, Elfride, having none
of it now, seemed, being for being, scarcely good enough for
Knight. Stephen, though deceptive for no unworthy purpose, was
deceptive after all; and whatever good results grace such strategy
if it succeed, it seldom draws admiration, especially when it
fails.

On an ordinary occasion, had Knight been even quite alone with
Stephen, he would hardly have alluded to his possible relationship
to Elfride. But moved by attendant circumstances Knight was
impelled to be confiding.

'Stephen,' he said, 'this lady is Miss Swancourt. I am staying at
her father's house, as you probably know.' He stepped a few paces
nearer to Smith, and said in a lower tone: 'I may as well tell you
that we are engaged to be married.'

Low as the words had been spoken, Elfride had heard them, and
awaited Stephen's reply in breathless silence, if that could be
called silence where Elfride's dress, at each throb of her heart,
shook and indicated it like a pulse-glass, rustling also against
the wall in reply to the same throbbing. The ray of daylight
which reached her face lent it a blue pallor in comparison with
those of the other two.

'I congratulate you,' Stephen whispered; and said aloud, 'I know
Miss Swancourt--a little. You must remember that my father is a
parishioner of Mr. Swancourt's.'

'I thought you might possibly not have lived at home since they
have been here.'

'I have never lived at home, certainly, since that time.'

'I have seen Mr. Smith,' faltered Elfride.

'Well, there is no excuse for me. As strangers to each other I
ought, I suppose, to have introduced you: as acquaintances, I
should not have stood so persistently between you. But the fact
is, Smith, you seem a boy to me, even now.'

Stephen appeared to have a more than previous consciousness of the
intense cruelty of his fate at the present moment. He could not
repress the words, uttered with a dim bitterness:

'You should have said that I seemed still the rural mechanic's son
I am, and hence an unfit subject for the ceremony of
introductions.'

'Oh, no, no! I won't have that.' Knight endeavoured to give his
reply a laughing tone in Elfride's ears, and an earnestness in
Stephen's: in both which efforts he signally failed, and produced
a forced speech pleasant to neither. 'Well, let us go into the
open air again; Miss Swancourt, you are particularly silent. You
mustn't mind Smith. I have known him for years, as I have told
you.'

'Yes, you have,' she said.

'To think she has never mentioned her knowledge of me!' Smith
murmured, and thought with some remorse how much her conduct
resembled his own on his first arrival at her house as a stranger
to the place.

They ascended to the daylight, Knight taking no further notice of
Elfride's manner, which, as usual, he attributed to the natural
shyness of a young woman at being discovered walking with him on
terms which left not much doubt of their meaning. Elfride stepped
a little in advance, and passed through the churchyard.

'You are changed very considerably, Smith,' said Knight, 'and I
suppose it is no more than was to be expected. However, don't
imagine that I shall feel any the less interest in you and your
fortunes whenever you care to confide them to me. I have not
forgotten the attachment you spoke of as your reason for going
away to India. A London young lady, was it not? I hope all is
prosperous?'

'No: the match is broken off.'

It being always difficult to know whether to express sorrow or
gladness under such circumstances--all depending upon the
character of the match--Knight took shelter in the safe words: 'I
trust it was for the best.'

'I hope it was. But I beg that you will not press me further: no,
you have not pressed me--I don't mean that--but I would rather not
speak upon the subject.'

Stephen's words were hurried.

Knight said no more, and they followed in the footsteps of
Elfride, who still kept some paces in advance, and had not heard
Knight's unconscious allusion to her. Stephen bade him adieu at
the churchyard-gate without going outside, and watched whilst he
and his sweetheart mounted their horses.

'Good heavens, Elfride,' Knight exclaimed, 'how pale you are! I
suppose I ought not to have taken you into that vault. What is
the matter?'

'Nothing,' said Elfride faintly. 'I shall be myself in a moment.
All was so strange and unexpected down there, that it made me
unwell.'

'I thought you said very little. Shall I get some water?'

'No, no.'

'Do you think it is safe for you to mount?'

'Quite--indeed it is,' she said, with a look of appeal.

'Now then--up she goes!' whispered Knight, and lifted her tenderly
into the saddle.

Her old lover still looked on at the performance as he leant over
the gate a dozen yards off. Once in the saddle, and having a firm
grip of the reins, she turned her head as if by a resistless
fascination, and for the first time since that memorable parting
on the moor outside St. Launce's after the passionate attempt at
marriage with him, Elfride looked in the face of the young man she
first had loved. He was the youth who had called her his
inseparable wife many a time, and whom she had even addressed as
her husband. Their eyes met. Measurement of life should be
proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its
actual length. Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a
season in their history. To Elfride the intense agony of reproach
in Stephen's eye was a nail piercing her heart with a deadliness
no words can describe. With a spasmodic effort she withdrew her
eyes, urged on the horse, and in the chaos of perturbed memories
was oblivious of any presence beside her. The deed of deception
was complete.

Gaining a knoll on which the park transformed itself into wood and
copse, Knight came still closer to her side, and said, 'Are you
better now, dearest?'

'Oh yes.' She pressed a hand to her eyes, as if to blot out the
image of Stephen. A vivid scarlet spot now shone with
preternatural brightness in the centre of each cheek, leaving the
remainder of her face lily-white as before.

'Elfride,' said Knight, rather in his old tone of mentor, 'you
know I don't for a moment chide you, but is there not a great deal
of unwomanly weakness in your allowing yourself to be so
overwhelmed by the sight of what, after all, is no novelty? Every
woman worthy of the name should, I think, be able to look upon
death with something like composure. Surely you think so too?'

'Yes; I own it.'

His obtuseness to the cause of her indisposition, by evidencing
his entire freedom from the suspicion of anything behind the
scenes, showed how incapable Knight was of deception himself,
rather than any inherent dulness in him regarding human nature.
This, clearly perceived by Elfride, added poignancy to her self-
reproach, and she idolized him the more because of their
difference. Even the recent sight of Stephen's face and the sound
of his voice, which for a moment had stirred a chord or two of
ancient kindness, were unable to keep down the adoration re-
existent now that he was again out of view.

She had replied to Knight's question hastily, and immediately went
on to speak of indifferent subjects. After they had reached home
she was apart from him till dinner-time. When dinner was over,
and they were watching the dusk in the drawing-room, Knight
stepped out upon the terrace. Elfride went after him very
decisively, on the spur of a virtuous intention.

'Mr. Knight, I want to tell you something,' she said, with quiet
firmness.

'And what is it about?' gaily returned her lover. 'Happiness, I
hope. Do not let anything keep you so sad as you seem to have
been to-day.'

'I cannot mention the matter until I tell you the whole substance
of it,' she said. 'And that I will do to-morrow. I have been
reminded of it to-day. It is about something I once did, and
don't think I ought to have done.'

This, it must be said, was rather a mild way of referring to a
frantic passion and flight, which, much or little in itself, only
accident had saved from being a scandal in the public eye.

Knight thought the matter some trifle, and said pleasantly:

'Then I am not to hear the dreadful confession now?'

'No, not now. I did not mean to-night,' Elfride responded, with a
slight decline in the firmness of her voice. 'It is not light as
you think it--it troubles me a great deal.' Fearing now the
effect of her own earnestness, she added forcedly, 'Though,
perhaps, you may think it light after all.'

'But you have not said when it is to be?'

'To-morrow morning. Name a time, will you, and bind me to it? I
want you to fix an hour, because I am weak, and may otherwise try
to get out of it.' She added a little artificial laugh, which
showed how timorous her resolution was still.

'Well, say after breakfast--at eleven o'clock.'

'Yes, eleven o'clock. I promise you. Bind me strictly to my
word.'

Chapter XXVIII

'I lull a fancy, trouble-tost.'

Miss Swancourt, it is eleven o'clock.'

She was looking out of her dressing-room window on the first
floor, and Knight was regarding her from the terrace balustrade,
upon which he had been idly sitting for some time--dividing the
glances of his eye between the pages of a book in his hand, the
brilliant hues of the geraniums and calceolarias, and the open
window above-mentioned.

'Yes, it is, I know. I am coming.'

He drew closer, and under the window.

'How are you this morning, Elfride? You look no better for your
long night's rest.'

She appeared at the door shortly after, took his offered arm, and
together they walked slowly down the gravel path leading to the
river and away under the trees.

Her resolution, sustained during the last fifteen hours, had been
to tell the whole truth, and now the moment had come.

Step by step they advanced, and still she did not speak. They
were nearly at the end of the walk, when Knight broke the silence.

'Well, what is the confession, Elfride?'

She paused a moment, drew a long breath; and this is what she
said:

'I told you one day--or rather I gave you to understand--what was
not true. I fancy you thought me to mean I was nineteen my next
birthday, but it was my last I was nineteen.'

The moment had been too much for her. Now that the crisis had
come, no qualms of conscience, no love of honesty, no yearning to
make a confidence and obtain forgiveness with a kiss, could string
Elfride up to the venture. Her dread lest he should be
unforgiving was heightened by the thought of yesterday's artifice,
which might possibly add disgust to his disappointment. The
certainty of one more day's affection, which she gained by
silence, outvalued the hope of a perpetuity combined with the risk
of all.

The trepidation caused by these thoughts on what she had intended
to say shook so naturally the words she did say, that Knight never
for a moment suspected them to be a last moment's substitution.
He smiled and pressed her hand warmly.

'My dear Elfie--yes, you are now--no protestation--what a winning
little woman you are, to be so absurdly scrupulous about a mere
iota! Really, I never once have thought whether your nineteenth
year was the last or the present. And, by George, well I may not;
for it would never do for a staid fogey a dozen years older to
stand upon such a trifle as that.'

'Don't praise me--don't praise me! Though I prize it from your
lips, I don't deserve it now.'

But Knight, being in an exceptionally genial mood, merely saw this
distressful exclamation as modesty. 'Well,' he added, after a
minute, 'I like you all the better, you know, for such moral
precision, although I called it absurd.' He went on with tender
earnestness: 'For, Elfride, there is one thing I do love to see in
a woman--that is, a soul truthful and clear as heaven's light. I
could put up with anything if I had that--forgive nothing if I had
it not. Elfride, you have such a soul, if ever woman had; and
having it, retain it, and don't ever listen to the fashionable
theories of the day about a woman's privileges and natural right
to practise wiles. Depend upon it, my dear girl, that a noble
woman must be as honest as a noble man. I specially mean by
honesty, fairness not only in matters of business and social
detail, but in all the delicate dealings of love, to which the
licence given to your sex particularly refers.'

Elfride looked troublously at the trees.

'Now let us go on to the river, Elfie.'

'I would if I had a hat on,' she said with a sort of suppressed
woe.

'I will get it for you,' said Knight, very willing to purchase her
companionship at so cheap a price. 'You sit down there a minute.'
And he turned and walked rapidly back to the house for the article
in question.

Elfride sat down upon one of the rustic benches which adorned this
portion of the grounds, and remained with her eyes upon the grass.
She was induced to lift them by hearing the brush of light and
irregular footsteps hard by. Passing along the path which
intersected the one she was in and traversed the outer
shrubberies, Elfride beheld the farmer's widow, Mrs. Jethway.
Before she noticed Elfride, she paused to look at the house,
portions of which were visible through the bushes. Elfride,
shrinking back, hoped the unpleasant woman might go on without
seeing her. But Mrs. Jethway, silently apostrophizing the house,
with actions which seemed dictated by a half-overturned reason,
had discerned the girl, and immediately came up and stood in front
of her.

'Ah, Miss Swancourt! Why did you disturb me? Mustn't I trespass
here?'

'You may walk here if you like, Mrs. Jethway. I do not disturb
you.'

'You disturb my mind, and my mind is my whole life; for my boy is
there still, and he is gone from my body.'

'Yes, poor young man. I was sorry when he died.'

'Do you know what he died of? '

'Consumption.'

'Oh no, no!' said the widow. 'That word "consumption" covers a
good deal. He died because you were his own well-agreed
sweetheart, and then proved false--and it killed him. Yes, Miss
Swancourt,' she said in an excited whisper, 'you killed my son!'

'How can you be so wicked and foolish!' replied Elfride, rising
indignantly. But indignation was not natural to her, and having
been so worn and harrowed by late events, she lost any powers of
defence that mood might have lent her. 'I could not help his
loving me, Mrs. Jethway!'

'That's just what you could have helped. You know how it began,
Miss Elfride. Yes: you said you liked the name of Felix better
than any other name in the parish, and you knew it was his name,
and that those you said it to would report it to him.'

'I knew it was his name--of course I did; but I am sure, Mrs.
Jethway, I did not intend anybody to tell him.'

'But you knew they would.'

'No, I didn't.'

'And then, after that, when you were riding on Revels-day by our
house, and the lads were gathered there, and you wanted to
dismount, when Jim Drake and George Upway and three or four more
ran forward to hold your pony, and Felix stood back timid, why did
you beckon to him, and say you would rather he held it? '

'O Mrs. Jethway, you do think so mistakenly! I liked him best--
that's why I wanted him to do it. He was gentle and nice--I
always thought him so--and I liked him.'

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