A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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Shortly afterwards Stephen came upstairs to his bedroom, and was
almost immediately followed by her father, who also retired for
the night. Not inclined to get a light, she partly undressed and
sat on the bed, where she remained in pained thought for some
time, possibly an hour. Then rising to close her door previously
to fully unrobing, she saw a streak of light shining across the
landing. Her father's door was shut, and he could be heard
snoring regularly. The light came from Stephen's room, and the
slight sounds also coming thence emphatically denoted what he was
doing. In the perfect silence she could hear the closing of a lid
and the clicking of a lock,--he was fastening his hat-box. Then
the buckling of straps and the click of another key,--he was
securing his portmanteau. With trebled foreboding she opened her
door softly, and went towards his. One sensation pervaded her to
distraction. Stephen, her handsome youth and darling, was going
away, and she might never see him again except in secret and in
sadness--perhaps never more. At any rate, she could no longer
wait till the morning to hear the result of the interview, as she
had intended. She flung her dressing-gown round her, tapped
lightly at his door, and whispered 'Stephen!' He came instantly,
opened the door, and stepped out.

'Tell me; are we to hope?'

He replied in a disturbed whisper, and a tear approached its
outlet, though none fell.

'I am not to think of such a preposterous thing--that's what he
said. And I am going to-morrow. I should have called you up to
bid you good-bye.'

'But he didn't say you were to go--O Stephen, he didn't say that?'

'No; not in words. But I cannot stay.'

'Oh, don't, don't go! Do come and let us talk. Let us come down
to the drawing-room for a few minutes; he will hear us here.'

She preceded him down the staircase with the taper light in her
hand, looking unnaturally tall and thin in the long dove-coloured
dressing-gown she wore. She did not stop to think of the
propriety or otherwise of this midnight interview under such
circumstances. She thought that the tragedy of her life was
beginning, and, for the first time almost, felt that her existence
might have a grave side, the shade of which enveloped and rendered
invisible the delicate gradations of custom and punctilio.
Elfride softly opened the drawing-room door and they both went in.
When she had placed the candle on the table, he enclosed her with
his arms, dried her eyes with his handkerchief, and kissed their
lids.

'Stephen, it is over--happy love is over; and there is no more
sunshine now!'

'I will make a fortune, and come to you, and have you. Yes, I
will!'

'Papa will never hear of it--never--never! You don't know him. I
do. He is either biassed in favour of a thing, or prejudiced
against it. Argument is powerless against either feeling.'

'No; I won't think of him so,' said Stephen. 'If I appear before
him some time hence as a man of established name, he will accept
me--I know he will. He is not a wicked man.'

'No, he is not wicked. But you say "some time hence," as if it
were no time. To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be
comparatively a short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its
real length trebled! Every summer will be a year--autumn a year--
winter a year! O Stephen! and you may forget me!'

Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-
hearted woman. The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear.
'You, too, may be persuaded to give me up, when time has made me
fainter in your memory. For, remember, your love for me must be
nourished in secret; there will be no long visits from me to
support you. Circumstances will always tend to obliterate me.'

'Stephen,' she said, filled with her own misgivings, and unheeding
his last words, 'there are beautiful women where you live--of
course I know there are--and they may win you away from me.' Her
tears came visibly as she drew a mental picture of his
faithlessness. 'And it won't be your fault,' she continued,
looking into the candle with doleful eyes. 'No! You will think
that our family don't want you, and get to include me with them.
And there will be a vacancy in your heart, and some others will be
let in.'

'I could not, I would not. Elfie, do not be so full of
forebodings.'

'Oh yes, they will,' she replied. 'And you will look at them, not
caring at first, and then you will look and be interested, and
after a while you will think, "Ah, they know all about city life,
and assemblies, and coteries, and the manners of the titled, and
poor little Elfie, with all the fuss that's made about her having
me, doesn't know about anything but a little house and a few
cliffs and a space of sea, far away." And then you'll be more
interested in them, and they'll make you have them instead of me,
on purpose to be cruel to me because I am silly, and they are
clever and hate me. And I hate them, too; yes, I do!'

Her impulsive words had power to impress him at any rate with the
recognition of the uncertainty of all that is not accomplished.
And, worse than that general feeling, there of course remained the
sadness which arose from the special features of his own case.
However remote a desired issue may be, the mere fact of having
entered the groove which leads to it, cheers to some extent with a
sense of accomplishment. Had Mr. Swancourt consented to an
engagement of no less length than ten years, Stephen would have
been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that
they were somewhere on the road to Cupid's garden. But, with a
possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any
prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached.
Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the
waiting for marriage could even set in. And this was despair.

'I wish we could marry now,' murmured Stephen, as an impossible
fancy.

'So do I,' said she also, as if regarding an idle dream. ''Tis
the only thing that ever does sweethearts good!'

'Secretly would do, would it not, Elfie?'

'Yes, secretly would do; secretly would indeed be best,' she said,
and went on reflectively: 'All we want is to render it absolutely
impossible for any future circumstance to upset our future
intention of being happy together; not to begin being happy now.'

'Exactly,' he murmured in a voice and manner the counterpart of
hers. 'To marry and part secretly, and live on as we are living
now; merely to put it out of anybody's power to force you away
from me, dearest.'

'Or you away from me, Stephen.'

'Or me from you. It is possible to conceive a force of
circumstance strong enough to make any woman in the world marry
against her will: no conceivable pressure, up to torture or
starvation, can make a woman once married to her lover anybody
else's wife.'

Now up to this point the idea of an immediate secret marriage had
been held by both as an untenable hypothesis, wherewith simply to
beguile a miserable moment. During a pause which followed
Stephen's last remark, a fascinating perception, then an alluring
conviction, flashed along the brain of both. The perception was
that an immediate marriage COULD be contrived; the conviction that
such an act, in spite of its daring, its fathomless results, its
deceptiveness, would be preferred by each to the life they must
lead under any other conditions.

The youth spoke first, and his voice trembled with the magnitude
of the conception he was cherishing. 'How strong we should feel,
Elfride! going on our separate courses as before, without the fear
of ultimate separation! O Elfride! think of it; think of it!'

It is certain that the young girl's love for Stephen received a
fanning from her father's opposition which made it blaze with a
dozen times the intensity it would have exhibited if left alone.
Never were conditions more favourable for developing a girl's
first passing fancy for a handsome boyish face--a fancy rooted in
inexperience and nourished by seclusion--into a wild unreflecting
passion fervid enough for anything. All the elements of such a
development were there, the chief one being hopelessness--a
necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of feelings
united under the name of loving to distraction.

'We would tell papa soon, would we not?' she inquired timidly.
'Nobody else need know. He would then be convinced that hearts
cannot be played with; love encouraged be ready to grow, love
discouraged be ready to die, at a moment's notice. Stephen, do
you not think that if marriages against a parent's consent are
ever justifiable, they are when young people have been favoured up
to a point, as we have, and then have had that favour suddenly
withdrawn?'

'Yes. It is not as if we had from the beginning acted in
opposition to your papa's wishes. Only think, Elfie, how pleasant
he was towards me but six hours ago! He liked me, praised me,
never objected to my being alone with you.'

'I believe he MUST like you now,' she cried. 'And if he found
that you irremediably belonged to me, he would own it and help
you. 'O Stephen, Stephen,' she burst out again, as the
remembrance of his packing came afresh to her mind, 'I cannot bear
your going away like this! It is too dreadful. All I have been
expecting miserably killed within me like this!'

Stephen flushed hot with impulse. 'I will not be a doubt to you--
thought of you shall not be a misery to me!' he said. 'We will be
wife and husband before we part for long!'

She hid her face on his shoulder. 'Anything to make SURE!' she
whispered.

'I did not like to propose it immediately,' continued Stephen.
'It seemed to me--it seems to me now--like trying to catch you--a
girl better in the world than I.'

'Not that, indeed! And am I better in worldly station? What's the
use of have beens? We may have been something once; we are nothing
now.'

Then they whispered long and earnestly together; Stephen
hesitatingly proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them,
with quick breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright
eyes. It was two o'clock before an arrangement was finally
concluded.

She then told him to leave her, giving him his light to go up to
his own room. They parted with an agreement not to meet again in
the morning. After his door had been some time closed he heard
her softly gliding into her chamber.

Chapter XI

'Journeys end in lovers meeting.'

Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a
monotonous parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that
night.

Early the next morning--that is to say, four hours after their
stolen interview, and just as the earliest servant was heard
moving about--Stephen Smith went downstairs, portmanteau in hand.
Throughout the night he had intended to see Mr. Swancourt again,
but the sharp rebuff of the previous evening rendered such an
interview particularly distasteful. Perhaps there was another and
less honest reason. He decided to put it off. Whatever of moral
timidity or obliquity may have lain in such a decision, no
perception of it was strong enough to detain him. He wrote a note
in his room, which stated simply that he did not feel happy in the
house after Mr. Swancourt's sudden veto on what he had favoured a
few hours before; but that he hoped a time would come, and that
soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as Mr. Swancourt's
guest might be recovered.

He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and
cheerless aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the
sun. He found in the dining room a breakfast laid, of which
somebody had just partaken.

Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that
Mr. Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early
breakfast. He was not going away that she knew of.

Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and
turned into the lane. It was so early that the shaded places
still smelt like night time, and the sunny spots had hardly felt
the sun. The horizontal rays made every shallow dip in the ground
to show as a well-marked hollow. Even the channel of the path was
enough to throw shade, and the very stones of the road cast
tapering dashes of darkness westward, as long as Jael's tent-nail.

At a spot not more than a hundred yards from the vicar's residence
the lane leading thence crossed the high road. Stephen reached
the point of intersection, stood still and listened. Nothing
could be heard save the lengthy, murmuring line of the sea upon
the adjacent shore. He looked at his watch, and then mounted a
gate upon which he seated himself, to await the arrival of the
carrier. Whilst he sat he heard wheels coming in two directions.

The vehicle approaching on his right he soon recognized as the
carrier's. There were the accompanying sounds of the owner's
voice and the smack of his whip, distinct in the still morning
air, by which he encouraged his horses up the hill.

The other set of wheels sounded from the lane Stephen had just
traversed. On closer observation, he perceived that they were
moving from the precincts of the ancient manor-house adjoining the
vicarage grounds. A carriage then left the entrance gates of the
house, and wheeling round came fully in sight. It was a plain
travelling carriage, with a small quantity of luggage, apparently
a lady's. The vehicle came to the junction of the four ways half-
a-minute before the carrier reached the same spot, and crossed
directly in his front, proceeding by the lane on the other side.

Inside the carriage Stephen could just discern an elderly lady
with a younger woman, who seemed to be her maid. The road they
had taken led to Stratleigh, a small watering-place sixteen miles
north.

He heard the manor-house gates swing again, and looking up saw
another person leaving them, and walking off in the direction of
the parsonage. 'Ah, how much I wish I were moving that way!' felt
he parenthetically. The gentleman was tall, and resembled Mr.
Swancourt in outline and attire. He opened the vicarage gate and
went in. Mr. Swancourt, then, it certainly was. Instead of
remaining in bed that morning Mr. Swancourt must have taken it
into his head to see his new neighbour off on a journey. He must
have been greatly interested in that neighbour to do such an
unusual thing.

The carrier's conveyance had pulled up, and Stephen now handed in
his portmanteau and mounted the shafts. 'Who is that lady in the
carriage?' he inquired indifferently of Lickpan the carrier.

'That, sir, is Mrs. Troyton, a widder wi' a mint o' money. She's
the owner of all that part of Endelstow that is not Lord
Luxellian's. Only been here a short time; she came into it by
law. The owner formerly was a terrible mysterious party--never
lived here--hardly ever was seen here except in the month of
September, as I might say.'

The horses were started again, and noise rendered further
discourse a matter of too great exertion. Stephen crept inside
under the tilt, and was soon lost in reverie.

Three hours and a half of straining up hills and jogging down
brought them to St. Launce's, the market town and railway station
nearest to Endelstow, and the place from which Stephen Smith had
journeyed over the downs on the, to him, memorable winter evening
at the beginning of the same year. The carrier's van was so timed
as to meet a starting up-train, which Stephen entered. Two or
three hours' railway travel through vertical cuttings in
metamorphic rock, through oak copses rich and green, stretching
over slopes and down delightful valleys, glens, and ravines,
sparkling with water like many-rilled Ida, and he plunged amid the
hundred and fifty thousand people composing the town of Plymouth.

There being some time upon his hands he left his luggage at the
cloak-room, and went on foot along Bedford Street to the nearest
church. Here Stephen wandered among the multifarious tombstones
and looked in at the chancel window, dreaming of something that
was likely to happen by the altar there in the course of the
coming month. He turned away and ascended the Hoe, viewed the
magnificent stretch of sea and massive promontories of land, but
without particularly discerning one feature of the varied
perspective. He still saw that inner prospect--the event he hoped
for in yonder church. The wide Sound, the Breakwater, the light-
house on far-off Eddystone, the dark steam vessels, brigs,
barques, and schooners, either floating stilly, or gliding with
tiniest motion, were as the dream, then; the dreamed-of event was
as the reality.

Soon Stephen went down from the Hoe, and returned to the railway
station. He took his ticket, and entered the London train.

That day was an irksome time at Endelstow vicarage. Neither
father nor daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr.
Swancourt's manner towards her partook of the compunctious
kindness that arises from a misgiving as to the justice of some
previous act.

Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d'oeil,
or from a natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women
are cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form.
Probably, in Elfride's case at least, it was blindness to the
greater contingencies of the future she was preparing for herself,
which enabled her to ask her father in a quiet voice if he could
give her a holiday soon, to ride to St. Launce's and go on to
Plymouth.

Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was
in consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country
girl, and a good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it had been her
delight to canter, without the ghost of an attendant, over the
fourteen or sixteen miles of hard road intervening between their
home and the station at St. Launce's, put up the horse, and go on
the remainder of the distance by train, returning in the same
manner in the evening. It was then resolved that, though she had
successfully accomplished this journey once, it was not to be
repeated without some attendance.

But Elfride must not be confounded with ordinary young feminine
equestrians. The circumstances of her lonely and narrow life made
it imperative that in trotting about the neighbourhood she must
trot alone or else not at all. Usage soon rendered this perfectly
natural to herself. Her father, who had had other experiences,
did not much like the idea of a Swancourt, whose pedigree could be
as distinctly traced as a thread in a skein of silk, scampering
over the hills like a farmer's daughter, even though he could
habitually neglect her. But what with his not being able to
afford her a regular attendant, and his inveterate habit of
letting anything be to save himself trouble, the circumstance grew
customary. And so there arose a chronic notion in the villagers'
minds that all ladies rode without an attendant, like Miss
Swancourt, except a few who were sometimes visiting at Lord
Luxellian's.

'I don't like your going to Plymouth alone, particularly going to
St. Launce's on horseback. Why not drive, and take the man?'

'It is not nice to be so overlooked.' Worm's company would not
seriously have interfered with her plans, but it was her humour to
go without him.

'When do you want to go?' said her father.

She only answered, 'Soon.'

'I will consider,' he said.

Only a few days elapsed before she asked again. A letter had
reached her from Stephen. It had been timed to come on that day
by special arrangement between them. In it he named the earliest
morning on which he could meet her at Plymouth. Her father had
been on a journey to Stratleigh, and returned in unusual buoyancy
of spirit. It was a good opportunity; and since the dismissal of
Stephen her father had been generally in a mood to make small
concessions, that he might steer clear of large ones connected
with that outcast lover of hers.

'Next Thursday week I am going from home in a different
direction,' said her father. 'In fact, I shall leave home the
night before. You might choose the same day, for they wish to
take up the carpets, or some such thing, I think. As I said, I
don't like you to be seen in a town on horseback alone; but go if
you will.'

Thursday week. Her father had named the very day that Stephen
also had named that morning as the earliest on which it would be
of any use to meet her; that was, about fifteen days from the day
on which he had left Endelstow. Fifteen days--that fragment of
duration which has acquired such an interesting individuality from
its connection with the English marriage law.

She involuntarily looked at her father so strangely, that on
becoming conscious of the look she paled with embarrassment. Her
father, too, looked confused. What was he thinking of?

There seemed to be a special facility offered her by a power
external to herself in the circumstance that Mr. Swancourt had
proposed to leave home the night previous to her wished-for day.
Her father seldom took long journeys; seldom slept from home
except perhaps on the night following a remote Visitation. Well,
she would not inquire too curiously into the reason of the
opportunity, nor did he, as would have been natural, proceed to
explain it of his own accord. In matters of fact there had
hitherto been no reserve between them, though they were not
usually confidential in its full sense. But the divergence of
their emotions on Stephen's account had produced an estrangement
which just at present went even to the extent of reticence on the
most ordinary household topics.

Elfride was almost unconsciously relieved, persuading herself that
her father's reserve on his business justified her in secrecy as
regarded her own--a secrecy which was necessarily a foregone
decision with her. So anxious is a young conscience to discover a
palliative, that the ex post facto nature of a reason is of no
account in excluding it.

The intervening fortnight was spent by her mostly in walking by
herself among the shrubs and trees, indulging sometimes in
sanguine anticipations; more, far more frequently, in misgivings.
All her flowers seemed dull of hue; her pets seemed to look
wistfully into her eyes, as if they no longer stood in the same
friendly relation to her as formerly. She wore melancholy
jewellery, gazed at sunsets, and talked to old men and women. It
was the first time that she had had an inner and private world
apart from the visible one about her. She wished that her father,
instead of neglecting her even more than usual, would make some
advance--just one word; she would then tell all, and risk
Stephen's displeasure. Thus brought round to the youth again, she
saw him in her fancy, standing, touching her, his eyes full of sad
affection, hopelessly renouncing his attempt because she had
renounced hers; and she could not recede.

On the Wednesday she was to receive another letter. She had
resolved to let her father see the arrival of this one, be the
consequences what they might: the dread of losing her lover by
this deed of honesty prevented her acting upon the resolve. Five
minutes before the postman's expected arrival she slipped out, and
down the lane to meet him. She met him immediately upon turning a
sharp angle, which hid her from view in the direction of the
vicarage. The man smilingly handed one missive, and was going on
to hand another, a circular from some tradesman.

'No,' she said; 'take that on to the house.'

'Why, miss, you are doing what your father has done for the last
fortnight.'

She did not comprehend.

'Why, come to this corner, and take a letter of me every morning,
all writ in the same handwriting, and letting any others for him
go on to the house.' And on the postman went.

No sooner had he turned the corner behind her back than she heard
her father meet and address the man. She had saved her letter by
two minutes. Her father audibly went through precisely the same
performance as she had just been guilty of herself.

This stealthy conduct of his was, to say the least, peculiar.

Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner
life by her only parent, and the following forces alive within
her; to determine a resultant:

First love acted upon by a deadly fear of separation from its
object: inexperience, guiding onward a frantic wish to prevent the
above-named issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of
ultimate exoneration: indignation at parental inconsistency in
first encouraging, then forbidding: a chilling sense of
disobedience, overpowered by a conscientious inability to brook a
breaking of plighted faith with a man who, in essentials, had
remained unaltered from the beginning: a blessed hope that
opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a bright faith that
things would mend thereby, and wind up well.

Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.

Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have
been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:

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