“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 Her left hand rested lightly within Knight’s arm, half withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover, yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched his sleeve.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.