A Pair of Blue Eyes

‘Indeed,’ the vicar said, in a voice dry and without inflection.

This being a word which depends entirely upon its tone for its meaning, Mr. Swancourt’s enunciation was equivalent to no expression at all.

‘I have to go now,’ said Stephen, with an agitated bearing, and a movement as if he scarcely knew whether he ought to run off or stay longer. ‘On my return, sir, will you kindly grant me a few minutes’ private conversation?’

‘Certainly. Though antecedently it does not seem possible that there can be anything of the nature of private business between us.’

Mr. Swancourt put on his straw hat, crossed the drawing-room, into which the moonlight was shining, and stepped out of the French window into the verandah. It required no further effort to perceive what, indeed, reasoning might have foretold as the natural colour of a mind whose pleasures were taken amid genealogies, good dinners, and patrician reminiscences, that Mr. Swancourt’s prejudices were too strong for his generosity, and that Stephen’s moments as his friend and equal were numbered, or had even now ceased.

Stephen moved forward as if he would follow the vicar, then as if he would not, and in absolute perplexity whither to turn himself, went awkwardly to the door. Elfride followed lingeringly behind him. Before he had receded two yards from the doorstep, Unity and Ann the housemaid came home from their visit to the village.

‘Have you heard anything about John Smith? The accident is not so bad as was reported, is it?’ said Elfride intuitively.

‘Oh no; the doctor says it is only a bad bruise.’

‘I thought so!’ cried Elfride gladly.

‘He says that, although Nat believes he did not check the beetle as it came down, he must have done so without knowing it – checked it very considerably too; for the full blow would have knocked his hand abroad, and in reality it is only made black-and-blue like.’

‘How thankful I am!’ said Stephen.

The perplexed Unity looked at him with her mouth rather than with her eyes.

‘That will do, Unity,’ said Elfride magisterially; and the two maids passed on.

‘Elfride, do you forgive me?’ said Stephen with a faint smile. ‘No man is fair in love;’ and he took her fingers lightly in his own.

With her head thrown sideways in the Greuze attitude, she looked a tender reproach at his doubt and pressed his hand. Stephen returned the pressure threefold, then hastily went off to his father’s cottage by the wall of Endelstow Park.

‘Elfride, what have you to say to this?’ inquired her father, coming up immediately Stephen had retired.

With feminine quickness she grasped at any straw that would enable her to plead his cause. ‘He had told me of it,’ she faltered; ‘so that it is not a discovery in spite of him. He was just coming in to tell you.’

‘COMING to tell! Why hadn’t he already told? I object as much, if not more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the fact itself. It looks very much like his making a fool of me, and of you too. You and he have been about together, and corresponding together, in a way I don’t at all approve of – in a most unseemly way. You should have known how improper such conduct is. A woman can’t be too careful not to be seen alone with I-don’t-know-whom.’

‘You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.’

‘My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be thinking of! He, a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the Luxellians. We have been coming to nothing for centuries, and now I believe we have got there. What shall I next invite here, I wonder!’

Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs. ‘O papa, papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one another, papa – O, so much! And what he was going to ask you is, if you will allow of an engagement between us till he is a gentleman as good as you. We are not in a hurry, dear papa; we don’t want in the least to marry now; not until he is richer. Only will you let us be engaged, because I love him so, and he loves me?’

Mr. Swancourt’s feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and he was annoyed that such should be the case. ‘Certainly not!’ he replied. He pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously, so that the ‘not’ sounded like ‘n-o-o-o-t!’

‘No, no, no; don’t say it!’

‘Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and disgraced by having him here, – the son of one of my village peasants, – but now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above us, are you mad, Elfride?’

‘You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit, papa, and you knew they were a sort of – love-letters; and since he has been here you have let him be alone with me almost entirely; and you guessed, you must have guessed, what we were thinking of, and doing, and you didn’t stop him. Next to love-making comes love-winning, and you knew it would come to that, papa.’

The vicar parried this common-sense thrust. ‘I know – since you press me so – I know I did guess some childish attachment might arise between you; I own I did not take much trouble to prevent it; but I have not particularly countenanced it; and, Elfride, how can you expect that I should now? It is impossible; no father in England would hear of such a thing.’

‘But he is the same man, papa; the same in every particular; and how can he be less fit for me than he was before?’

‘He appeared a young man with well-to-do friends, and a little property; but having neither, he is another man.’

‘You inquired nothing about him?’

‘I went by Hewby’s introduction. He should have told me. So should the young man himself; of course he should. I consider it a most dishonourable thing to come into a man’s house like a treacherous I-don’t-know-what.’

‘But he was afraid to tell you, and so should I have been. He loved me too well to like to run the risk. And as to speaking of his friends on his first visit, I don’t see why he should have done so at all. He came here on business: it was no affair of ours who his parents were. And then he knew that if he told you he would never be asked here, and would perhaps never see me again. And he wanted to see me. Who can blame him for trying, by any means, to stay near me – the girl he loves? All is fair in love. I have heard you say so yourself, papa; and you yourself would have done just as he has – so would any man.’

‘And any man, on discovering what I have discovered, would also do as I do, and mend my mistake; that is, get shot of him again, as soon as the laws of hospitality will allow.’ But Mr. Swancourt then remembered that he was a Christian. ‘I would not, for the world, seem to turn him out of doors,’ he added; ‘but I think he will have the tact to see that he cannot stay long after this, with good taste.’

‘He will, because he’s a gentleman. See how graceful his manners are,’ Elfride went on; though perhaps Stephen’s manners, like the feats of Euryalus, owed their attractiveness in her eyes rather to the attractiveness of his person than to their own excellence.

‘Ay; anybody can be what you call graceful, if he lives a little time in a city, and keeps his eyes open. And he might have picked up his gentlemanliness by going to the galleries of theatres, and watching stage drawing-room manners. He reminds me of one of the worst stories I ever heard in my life.’

‘What story was that?’

‘Oh no, thank you! I wouldn’t tell you such an improper matter for the world!’

‘If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of England,’ gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to interrupt her articulation, ‘anywhere but here – you – would have – only regarded – HIM, and not THEM! His station – would have – been what – his profession makes it, – and not fixed by – his father’s humble position – at all; whom he never lives with – now. Though John Smith has saved lots of money, and is better off than we are, they say, or he couldn’t have put his son to such an expensive profession. And it is clever and – honourable – of Stephen, to be the best of his family.’

‘Yes. “Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess.”’

‘You insult me, papa!’ she burst out. ‘You do, you do! He is my own Stephen, he is!’

‘That may or may not be true, Elfride,’ returned her father, again uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself ‘You confuse future probabilities with present facts, – what the young man may be with what he is. We must look at what he is, not what an improbable degree of success in his profession may make him. The case is this: the son of a working-man in my parish who may or may not be able to buy me up – a youth who has not yet advanced so far into life as to have any income of his own deserving the name, and therefore of his father’s degree as regards station – wants to be engaged to you. His family are living in precisely the same spot in England as yours, so throughout this county – which is the world to us – you would always be known as the wife of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a London professional man. It is the drawback, not the compensating fact, that is talked of always. There, say no more. You may argue all night, and prove what you will; I’ll stick to my words.’

Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with large heavy eyes and wet cheeks.

‘I call it great temerity – and long to call it audacity – in Hewby,’ resumed her father. ‘I never heard such a thing – giving such a hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me as he did. Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don’t blame you at all, so far.’ He went and searched for Mr. Hewby’s original letter. ‘Here’s what he said to me: “Dear Sir, – Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to survey and make drawings,” et cetera. “My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,” – assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn’t he say “clerk”?’

‘They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do not write. Stephen – Mr. Smith – told me so. So that Mr. Hewby simply used the accepted word.’

‘Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning…MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM…YOU MAY PUT EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of church architecture.” Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.’

‘Professional men in London,’ Elfride argued, ‘don’t know anything about their clerks’ fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live. What they can do – what profits they can bring the firm – that’s all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.’

‘Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.’

‘It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim succession from directed.’

‘That’s some more of what he’s been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was inclined to suspect him, because he didn’t care about sauces of any kind. I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The idea of my bringing out a bottle of my ‘40 Martinez – only eleven of them left now – to a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I, who haven’t looked into a classical author for the last eighteen years, shouldn’t have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had better go to your room; you’ll get over this bit of tomfoolery in time.’

‘No, no, no, papa,’ she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

‘Elfride,’ said her father with rough friendliness, ‘I have an excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A scheme to benefit you and me. It has been thrust upon me for some little time – yes, thrust upon me – but I didn’t dream of its value till this afternoon, when the revelation came. I should be most unwise to refuse to entertain it.’

‘I don’t like that word,’ she returned wearily. ‘You have lost so much already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?’

‘No; not a mining scheme.’

‘Railways?’

‘Nor railways. It is like those mysterious offers we see advertised, by which any gentleman with no brains at all may make so much a week without risk, trouble, or soiling his fingers. However, I am intending to say nothing till it is settled, though I will just say this much, that you soon may have other fish to fry than to think of Stephen Smith. Remember, I wish, not to be angry, but friendly, to the young man; for your sake I’ll regard him as a friend in a certain sense. But this is enough; in a few days you will be quite my way of thinking. There, now, go to your bedroom. Unity shall bring you up some supper. I wish you not to be here when he comes back.’

Chapter X

‘Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.’

Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only two or three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich foliage growing about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty lights and shades from the shining moon maintaining a race over his head and down his back in an endless gambol. When he crossed the plank bridge and entered the garden-gate, he saw an illuminated figure coming from the enclosed plot towards the house on the other side. It was his father, with his hand in a sling, taking a general moonlight view of the garden, and particularly of a plot of the youngest of young turnips, previous to closing the cottage for the night.

He saluted his son with customary force. ‘Hallo, Stephen! We should ha’ been in bed in another ten minutes. Come to see what’s the matter wi’ me, I suppose, my lad?’

The doctor had come and gone, and the hand had been pronounced as injured but slightly, though it might possibly have been considered a far more serious case if Mr. Smith had been a more important man. Stephen’s anxious inquiry drew from his father words of regret at the inconvenience to the world of his doing nothing for the next two days, rather than of concern for the pain of the accident. Together they entered the house.

John Smith – brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes – was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical ‘working-man’ – a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class.

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might have made a living by that calling.

Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless.

Appearing now, indoors, by the light of the candle, his stalwart healthiness was a sight to see. His beard was close and knotted as that of a chiselled Hercules; his shirt sleeves were partly rolled up, his waistcoat unbuttoned; the difference in hue between the snowy linen and the ruddy arms and face contrasting like the white of an egg and its yolk. Mrs. Smith, on hearing them enter, advanced from the pantry.

Mrs. Smith was a matron whose countenance addressed itself to the mind rather than to the eye, though not exclusively. She retained her personal freshness even now, in the prosy afternoon-time of her life; but what her features were primarily indicative of was a sound common sense behind them; as a whole, appearing to carry with them a sort of argumentative commentary on the world in general.

The details of the accident were then rehearsed by Stephen’s father, in the dramatic manner also common to Martin Cannister, other individuals of the neighbourhood, and the rural world generally. Mrs. Smith threw in her sentiments between the acts, as Coryphaeus of the tragedy, to make the description complete. The story at last came to an end, as the longest will, and Stephen directed the conversation into another channel.

‘Well, mother, they know everything about me now,’ he said quietly.

‘Well done!’ replied his father; ‘now my mind’s at peace.’

‘I blame myself – I never shall forgive myself – for not telling them before,’ continued the young man.

Mrs. Smith at this point abstracted her mind from the former subject. ‘I don’t see what you have to grieve about, Stephen,’ she said. ‘People who accidentally get friends don’t, as a first stroke, tell the history of their families.’

‘Ye’ve done no wrong, certainly,’ said his father.

‘No; but I should have spoken sooner. There’s more in this visit of mine than you think – a good deal more.’

‘Not more than I think,’ Mrs. Smith replied, looking contemplatively at him. Stephen blushed; and his father looked from one to the other in a state of utter incomprehension.

‘She’s a pretty piece enough,’ Mrs. Smith continued, ‘and very lady-like and clever too. But though she’s very well fit for you as far as that is, why, mercy ‘pon me, what ever do you want any woman at all for yet?’

John made his naturally short mouth a long one, and wrinkled his forehead, ‘That’s the way the wind d’blow, is it?’ he said.

‘Mother,’ exclaimed Stephen, ‘how absurdly you speak! Criticizing whether she’s fit for me or no, as if there were room for doubt on the matter! Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my life – socially and practically, as well as in other respects. No such good fortune as that, I’m afraid; she’s too far above me. Her family doesn’t want such country lads as I in it.’

‘Then if they don’t want you, I’d see them dead corpses before I’d want them, and go to better families who do want you.’

‘Ah, yes; but I could never put up with the distaste of being welcomed among such people as you mean, whilst I could get indifference among such people as hers.’

‘What crazy twist o’ thinking will enter your head next?’ said his mother. ‘And come to that, she’s not a bit too high for you, or you too low for her. See how careful I be to keep myself up. I’m sure I never stop for more than a minute together to talk to any journeymen people; and I never invite anybody to our party o’ Christmases who are not in business for themselves. And I talk to several toppermost carriage people that come to my lord’s without saying ma’am or sir to ‘em, and they take it as quiet as lambs.’

‘You curtseyed to the vicar, mother; and I wish you hadn’t.’

‘But it was before he called me by my Christian name, or he would have got very little curtseying from me!’ said Mrs. Smith, bridling and sparkling with vexation. ‘You go on at me, Stephen, as if I were your worst enemy! What else could I do with the man to get rid of him, banging it into me and your father by side and by seam, about his greatness, and what happened when he was a young fellow at college, and I don’t know what-all; the tongue o’ en flopping round his mouth like a mop-rag round a dairy. That ‘a did, didn’t he, John?’

‘That’s about the size o’t,’ replied her husband.

‘Every woman now-a-days,’ resumed Mrs. Smith, ‘if she marry at all, must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father. The men have gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every man you meet is more the dand than his father; and you are just level wi’ her.’

‘That’s what she thinks herself.’

‘It only shows her sense. I knew she was after ‘ee, Stephen – I knew it.’

‘After me! Good Lord, what next!’

‘And I really must say again that you ought not to be in such a hurry, and wait for a few years. You might go higher than a bankrupt pa’son’s girl then.’

‘The fact is, mother,’ said Stephen impatiently, ‘you don’t know anything about it. I shall never go higher, because I don’t want to, nor should I if I lived to be a hundred. As to you saying that she’s after me, I don’t like such a remark about her, for it implies a scheming woman, and a man worth scheming for, both of which are not only untrue, but ludicrously untrue, of this case. Isn’t it so, father?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the matter well enough to gie my opinion,’ said his father, in the tone of the fox who had a cold and could not smell.

‘She couldn’t have been very backward anyhow, considering the short time you have known her,’ said his mother. ‘Well I think that five years hence you’ll be plenty young enough to think of such things. And really she can very well afford to wait, and will too, take my word. Living down in an out-step place like this, I am sure she ought to be very thankful that you took notice of her. She’d most likely have died an old maid if you hadn’t turned up.’

‘All nonsense,’ said Stephen, but not aloud.

‘A nice little thing she is,’ Mrs. Smith went on in a more complacent tone now that Stephen had been talked down; ‘there’s not a word to say against her, I’ll own. I see her sometimes decked out like a horse going to fair, and I admire her for’t. A perfect little lady. But people can’t help their thoughts, and if she’d learnt to make figures instead of letters when she was at school ‘twould have been better for her pocket; for as I said, there never were worse times for such as she than now.’

‘Now, now, mother!’ said Stephen with smiling deprecation.

‘But I will!’ said his mother with asperity. ‘I don’t read the papers for nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by marriage. Men of her class, that is, parsons, marry squires’ daughters; squires marry lords’ daughters; lords marry dukes’ daughters; dukes marry queens’ daughters. All stages of gentlemen mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of gentlewomen are left single, or marry out of their class.’

‘But you said just now, dear mother – ’ retorted Stephen, unable to resist the temptation of showing his mother her inconsistency. Then he paused.

‘Well, what did I say?’ And Mrs. Smith prepared her lips for a new campaign.

Stephen, regretting that he had begun, since a volcano might be the consequence, was obliged to go on.

‘You said I wasn’t out of her class just before.’

‘Yes, there, there! That’s you; that’s my own flesh and blood. I’ll warrant that you’ll pick holes in everything your mother says, if you can, Stephen. You are just like your father for that; take anybody’s part but mine. Whilst I am speaking and talking and trying and slaving away for your good, you are waiting to catch me out in that way. So you are in her class, but ‘tis what HER people would CALL marrying out of her class. Don’t be so quarrelsome, Stephen!’

Stephen preserved a discreet silence, in which he was imitated by his father, and for several minutes nothing was heard but the ticking of the green-faced case-clock against the wall.

‘I’m sure,’ added Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a terminative speech, ‘if there’d been so much trouble to get a husband in my time as there is in these days – when you must make a god-almighty of a man to get en to hae ye – I’d have trod clay for bricks before I’d ever have lowered my dignity to marry, or there’s no bread in nine loaves.’

The discussion now dropped, and as it was getting late, Stephen bade his parents farewell for the evening, his mother none the less warmly for their sparring; for although Mrs. Smith and Stephen were always contending, they were never at enmity.

‘And possibly,’ said Stephen, ‘I may leave here altogether to-morrow; I don’t know. So that if I shouldn’t call again before returning to London, don’t be alarmed, will you?’