by Thomas Hardy
At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It was the head of Elfride.
Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.
The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where, without any immediate terror of death, the inmates experience the gloom of monotonous seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their countenances at the greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the visit, is enough to stir the emotions of the most careless observer.
Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His lips moved to the word ‘Elfride,’ though the emotion evolved no sound. His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.
Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and not deserted him utterly, and it was much.
It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance, thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.
‘How calm he is!’ she thought. ‘How great and noble he is to be so calm!’ She would have died ten times for him then.
The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no longer.
‘How much longer can you wait?’ came from her pale lips and along the wind to his position.
‘Four minutes,’ said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.
‘But with a good hope of being saved?’
‘Seven or eight.’
He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but Elfride’s seemed to cling to her like a glove.
Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long.
‘Can you wait while I bind it?’ she said, anxiously extending her gaze down to him.
‘Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of strength.’
Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread abroad.
‘Now,’ said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, ‘I can hold three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the strength of the knots, one by one.’
She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots slipped.
‘Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,’ Elfride exclaimed apprehensively.
She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.
‘When you have let it down,’ said Knight, already resuming his position of ruling power, ‘go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end with both hands.’
He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.
‘I have tied it round my waist,’ she cried, ‘and I will lean directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.’
It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.
‘I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,’ she continued, ‘to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the greatest care, I beg you!’
She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and disappeared as she had done before.
The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it twitched three times.
He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.
The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now. Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
He was saved, and by Elfride.
He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over the bank.
At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy. Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each other’s arms.
At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no longer to be seen.
An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling — volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result — a glorious crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along the impressionable soul of Elfride.
Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow him to take advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.
Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had obtained the rope.
‘Elfride, my Elfride!’ he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
‘I must leave you now,’ she said, her face doubling its red, with an expression between gladness and shame ‘You follow me, but at some distance.’
‘The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.’
‘No; I shall get warm running.’
Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or ‘costume.’ The door had been made upon a woman’s wit, and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton rope.
‘I am used to being wet through,’ she added. ‘I have been drenched on Pansy do
zens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right minds, by the fireside at home!’
She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most grievous loss to him.
He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand. It was blown to the right, blown to the left — it floated to the edge of the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in the air, and then flew back over his head.
Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to discover if it had been worth securing.
The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds, placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had totally forgotten she carried with her.
Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.
CHAPTER XXIII
‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot?’
By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle Boterel, and breathed his native air.
A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard, were the chief additions and changes noticeable in his appearance.
In spite of the falling rain, which had somewhat lessened, he took a small valise in his hand, and, leaving the remainder of his luggage at the inn, ascended the hills towards East Endelstow. This place lay in a vale of its own, further inland than the west village, and though so near it, had little of physical feature in common with the latter. East Endelstow was more wooded and fertile: it boasted of Lord Luxellian’s mansion and park, and was free from those bleak open uplands which lent such an air of desolation to the vicinage of the coast — always excepting the small valley in which stood the vicarage and Mrs. Swancourt’s old house, The Crags.
Stephen had arrived nearly at the summit of the ridge when the rain again increased its volume, and, looking about for temporary shelter, he ascended a steep path which penetrated dense hazel bushes in the lower part of its course. Further up it emerged upon a ledge immediately over the turnpike-road, and sheltered by an overhanging face of rubble rock, with bushes above. For a reason of his own he made this spot his refuge from the storm, and turning his face to the left, conned the landscape as a book.
He was overlooking the valley containing Elfride’s residence.
From this point of observation the prospect exhibited the peculiarity of being either brilliant foreground or the subdued tone of distance, a sudden dip in the surface of the country lowering out of sight all the intermediate prospect. In apparent contact with the trees and bushes growing close beside him appeared the distant tract, terminated suddenly by the brink of the series of cliffs which culminated in the tall giant without a name — small and unimportant as here beheld. A leaf on a bough at Stephen’s elbow blotted out a whole hill in the contrasting district far away; a green bunch of nuts covered a complete upland there, and the great cliff itself was outvied by a pigmy crag in the bank hard by him. Stephen had looked upon these things hundreds of times before to-day, but he had never viewed them with such tenderness as now.
Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure, running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain which had caused Stephen’s halt in this place, dropped down the heathery hill, entered the vale, and was out of sight.
Whilst he meditated upon the meaning of this phenomenon, he was surprised to see swim into his ken from the same point of departure another moving speck, as different from the first as well could be, insomuch that it was perceptible only by its blackness. Slowly and regularly it took the same course, and there was not much doubt that this was the form of a man. He, too, gradually descended from the upper levels, and was lost in the valley below.
The rain had by this time again abated, and Stephen returned to the road. Looking ahead, he saw two men and a cart. They were soon obscured by the intervention of a high hedge. Just before they emerged again he heard voices in conversation.
‘‘A must soon be in the naibourhood, too, if so be he’s a-coming,’ said a tenor tongue, which Stephen instantly recognized as Martin Cannister’s.
‘‘A must ‘a b’lieve,’ said another voice — that of Stephen’s father.
Stephen stepped forward, and came before them face to face. His father and Martin were walking, dressed in their second best suits, and beside them rambled along a grizzel horse and brightly painted spring-cart.
‘All right, Mr. Cannister; here’s the lost man!’ exclaimed young Smith, entering at once upon the old style of greeting. ‘Father, here I am.’
‘All right, my sonny; and glad I be for’t!’ returned John Smith, overjoyed to see the young man. ‘How be ye? Well, come along home, and don’t let’s bide out here in the damp. Such weather must be terrible bad for a young chap just come from a fiery nation like Indy; hey, naibour Cannister?’
‘Trew, trew. And about getting home his traps? Boxes, monstrous bales, and noble packages of foreign description, I make no doubt?’
‘Hardly all that,’ said Stephen laughing.
‘We brought the cart, maning to go right on to Castle Boterel afore ye landed,’ said his father. ‘“Put in the horse,” says Martin. “Ay,” says I, “so we will;” and did it straightway. Now, maybe, Martin had better go on wi’ the cart for the things, and you and I walk home-along.’
‘And I shall be back a’most as soon as you. Peggy is a pretty step still, though time d’ begin to tell upon her as upon the rest o’ us.’
Stephen told Martin where to find his baggage, and then continued his journey homeward in the company of his father.
‘Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,’ said John, ‘you’ll find us in a turk of a mess, sir — ”sir,” says I to my own son! but ye’ve gone up so, Stephen. We’ve killed the pig this morning for ye, thinking ye’d be hungry, and glad of a morsel of fresh mate. And ‘a won’t be cut up till to-night. However, we can make ye a good supper of fry, which will chaw up well wi’ a dab o’ mustard and a few nice new taters, and a drop of shilling ale to wash it down. Your mother have scrubbed the house through because ye were coming, and dusted all the chimmer furniture, and bought a new basin and jug of a travelling crockery-woman that came to our door, and scoured the cannel-sticks, and claned the winders! Ay, I don’t know what ‘a ha’n’t a done. Never were such a steer, ‘a b’lieve.’
Conversation of this kind and inquiries of Stephen for his mother’s wellbeing occupied them for the remainder of the journey. When they drew near the river, and the cottage behind it, they could hear the master-mason’s clock striking off the bygone hours of the day at intervals of a quarter of a minute, during which intervals Stephen’s imagination readily pictured his mother’s forefinger wandering round the dial in company with the minute-hand.
‘The clock stopped this morning, and your mother in putting en right seemingly,’ said his father in an explanatory tone; and they went up the garden to the door.
When they had entered, and Stephen had dutifully and warmly greeted his mother — who appeared in a cotton dress of a dark-blue ground, covered broadcast w
ith a multitude of new and full moons, stars, and planets, with an occasional dash of a comet-like aspect to diversify the scene — the crackle of cart-wheels was heard outside, and Martin Cannister stamped in at the doorway, in the form of a pair of legs beneath a great box, his body being nowhere visible. When the luggage had been all taken down, and Stephen had gone upstairs to change his clothes, Mrs. Smith’s mind seemed to recover a lost thread.
‘Really our clock is not worth a penny,’ she said, turning to it and attempting to start the pendulum.
‘Stopped again?’ inquired Martin with commiseration.
‘Yes, sure,’ replied Mrs. Smith; and continued after the manner of certain matrons, to whose tongues the harmony of a subject with a casual mood is a greater recommendation than its pertinence to the occasion, ‘John would spend pounds a year upon the jimcrack old thing, if he might, in having it claned, when at the same time you may doctor it yourself as well. “The clock’s stopped again, John,” I say to him. “Better have en claned,” says he. There’s five shillings. “That clock grinds again,” I say to en. “Better have en claned,” ‘a says again. “That clock strikes wrong, John,” says I. “Better have en claned,” he goes on. The wheels would have been polished to skeletons by this time if I had listened to en, and I assure you we could have bought a chainey-faced beauty wi’ the good money we’ve flung away these last ten years upon this old green-faced mortal. And, Martin, you must be wet. My son is gone up to change. John is damper than I should like to be, but ‘a calls it nothing. Some of Mrs. Swancourt’s servants have been here — they ran in out of the rain when going for a walk — and I assure you the state of their bonnets was frightful.’
‘How’s the folks? We’ve been over to Castle Boterel, and what wi’ running and stopping out of the storms, my poor head is beyond everything! fizz, fizz fizz; ‘tis frying o’ fish from morning to night,’ said a cracked voice in the doorway at this instant.
