"You write as if you had been engaged a hundred times, if I may be allowed to say so," said Stephen in an injured tone.
"Yes, that may be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who half know a thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don"t take the trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a ma.s.s of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more."
Knight stopped as if he had fallen into a train of thought, and Stephen looked with affectionate awe at a master whose mind, he believed, could swallow up at one meal all that his own head contained.
There was affective sympathy, but no great intellectual fellowship, between Knight and Stephen Smith. Knight had seen his young friend when the latter was a cherry-cheeked happy boy, had been interested in him, had kept his eye upon him, and generously helped the lad to books, till the mere connection of patronage grew to acquaintance, and that ripened to friendship. And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend--or even for one of a group of a dozen friends--he somehow was his friend. Circ.u.mstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift.
"And what do you think of her?" Stephen ventured to say, after a silence.
"Taking her merits on trust from you," said Knight, "as we do those of the Roman poets of whom we know nothing but that they lived, I still think she will not stick to you through, say, three years of absence in India."
"But she will!" cried Stephen desperately. "She is a girl all delicacy and honour. And no woman of that kind, who has committed herself so into a man"s hands as she has into mine, could possibly marry another."
"How has she committed herself?" asked Knight cunously.
Stephen did not answer. Knight had looked on his love so sceptically that it would not do to say all that he had intended to say by any means.
"Well, don"t tell," said Knight. "But you are begging the question, which is, I suppose, inevitable in love."
"And I"ll tell you another thing," the younger man pleaded. "You remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don"t you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion has any GRACE in it--that awkward bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a part with them."
"It is true, quite," said Knight musingly.
It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of the master long after the master himself had forgotten them.
"Well, that was like her!" cried Stephen triumphantly. "She was in such a flurry that she didn"t know what she was doing."
"Splendid, splendid!" said Knight soothingly. "So that all I have to say is, that if you see a good opening in Bombay there"s no reason why you should not go without troubling to draw fine distinctions as to reasons.
No man fully realizes what opinions he acts upon, or what his actions mean."
"Yes; I go to Bombay. I"ll write a note here, if you don"t mind."
"Sleep over it--it is the best plan--and write to-morrow. Meantime, go there to that window and sit down, and look at my Humanity Show. I am going to dine out this evening, and have to dress here out of my portmanteau. I bring up my things like this to save the trouble of going down to my place at Richmond and back again."
Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of sunlight had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept: a dusky gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of light shone over the window.
"There!" said Knight, "where is there in England a spectacle to equal that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go home. Softly open the sash."
Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence turning sideways and pa.s.sing under an arch, so that Knight"s back window was immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the alley lengthwise. Crowds--mostly of women--were surging, bustling, and pacing up and down. Gaslights glared from butchers" stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild colouring of Turner"s later pictures, whilst the purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and mood was to this human wild-wood what the ripple of a brook is to the natural forest.
Nearly ten minutes pa.s.sed. Then Knight also came to the window.
"Well, now, I call a cab and vanish down the street in the direction of Berkeley Square," he said, b.u.t.toning his waistcoat and kicking his morning suit into a corner. Stephen rose to leave.
"What a heap of literature!" remarked the young man, taking a final longing survey round the room, as if to abide there for ever would be the great pleasure of his life, yet feeling that he had almost outstayed his welcome-while. His eyes rested upon an arm-chair piled full of newspapers, magazines, and bright new volumes in green and red.
"Yes," said Knight, also looking at them and breathing a sigh of weariness; "something must be done with several of them soon, I suppose.
Stephen, you needn"t hurry away for a few minutes, you know, if you want to stay; I am not quite ready. Overhaul those volumes whilst I put on my coat, and I"ll walk a little way with you."
Stephen sat down beside the arm-chair and began to tumble the books about. Among the rest he found a novelette in one volume, THE COURT OF KELLYON CASTLE. By Ernest Field.
"Are you going to review this?" inquired Stephen with apparent unconcern, and holding up Elfride"s effusion.
"Which? Oh, that! I may--though I don"t do much light reviewing now. But it is reviewable."
"How do you mean?"
Knight never liked to be asked what he meant. "Mean! I mean that the majority of books published are neither good enough nor bad enough to provoke criticism, and that that book does provoke it."
"By its goodness or its badness?" Stephen said with some anxiety on poor little Elfride"s score.
"Its badness. It seems to be written by some girl in her teens."
Stephen said not another word. He did not care to speak plainly of Elfride after that unfortunate slip his tongue had made in respect of her having committed herself; and, apart from that, Knight"s severe--almost dogged and self-willed--honesty in criticizing was una.s.sailable by the humble wish of a youthful friend like Stephen.
Knight was now ready. Turning off the gas, and slamming together the door, they went downstairs and into the street.
Chapter XIV
"We frolic while "tis May."
It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have pa.s.sed away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to the previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms of summer in the year following.
Stephen is in India, slaving away at an office in Bombay; occasionally going up the country on professional errands, and wondering why people who had been there longer than he complained so much of the effect of the climate upon their const.i.tutions. Never had a young man a finer start than seemed now to present itself to Stephen. It was just in that exceptional heyday of prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years ago, that he arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of the general impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity every successive day, the only disagreeable contingency connected with it being the possibility of a collapse.
Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours" escapade with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his ears by any other route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a short time, and Stephen"s departure was another ingredient in her sorrow. But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.
And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which, though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert her thoughts. The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt"s, overlooking the same valley.
Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to feminine soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled him to the change. So there was a radical "move;" the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to and fro.
Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride"s ideas in an aristocratic direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage.
Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.
The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked in line, the gra.s.s edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o"clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman--prevented from being wearisome.
"Now," she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full of admiration for the brilliant scene, "you will find that our companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures here. I always am a listener in such places as these--not to the narratives told by my neighbours" tongues, but by their faces--the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with n.o.body to give me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,--how truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day."
"Ay, that they will," said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. "I have known labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds, clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the crowing of c.o.c.ks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know the existence of, they are able to p.r.o.nounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required instant. That reminds me of an old story which I"m afraid is too bad--too bad to repeat." Here the vicar shook his head and laughed inwardly.