Jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and once-beloved exemplar.He was grieved,for amid all the distractions of his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight had lingered on in him.Perhaps this staunchness was because Knight ever treated him as a mere disciple--even to snubbing him sometimes;and had at last,though unwittingly,inflicted upon him the greatest snub of all,that of taking away his sweetheart.The emotional side of his constitution was built rather after a feminine than a male model;and that tremendous wound from Knights hand may have tended to keep alive a warmth which solicitousness would have extinguished altogether.
Knight,on his part,was vexed,after they had parted,that he had not taken Stephen in hand a little after the old manner.Those words which Smith had let fall concerning somebody having a prior claim to Elfride,would,if uttered when the man was younger,have provoked such a query as,Come,tell me all about it,my lad,from Knight,and Stephen would straightway have delivered himself of all he knew on the subject.
Stephen the ingenuous boy,though now obliterated externally by Stephen the contriving man,returned to Knights memory vividly that afternoon.He was at present but a sojourner in London;and after attending to the two or three matters of business which remained to be done that day,he walked abstractedly into the gloomy corridors of the British Museum for the half-hour previous to their closing.That meeting with Smith had reunited the present with the past,closing up the chasm of his absence from England as if it had never existed,until the final circumstances of his previous time of residence in London formed but a yesterday to the circumstances now.The conflict that then had raged in him concerning Elfride Swancourt revived,strengthened by its sleep.
Indeed,in those many months of absence,though quelling the intention to make her his wife,he had never forgotten that she was the type of woman adapted to his nature;and instead of trying to obliterate thoughts of her altogether,he had grown to regard them as an infirmity it was necessary to tolerate.
Knight returned to his hotel much earlier in the evening than he would have done in the ordinary course of things.He did not care to think whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance,or from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen had hastily pronounced,betokening that he knew something more of Elfride than Knight had supposed.
He made a hasty dinner,inquired for Smith,and soon was ushered into the young mans presence,whom he found sitting in front of a comfortable fire,beside a table spread with a few scientific periodicals and art reviews.
I have come to you,after all,said Knight.My manner was odd this morning,and it seemed desirable to call;but that you had too much sense to notice,Stephen,I know.Put it down to my wanderings in France and Italy.
Dont say another word,but sit down.I am only too glad to see you again.
Stephen would hardly have cared to tell Knight just then that the minute before Knight was announced he had been reading over some old letters of Elfrides.They were not many;and until to-night had been sealed up,and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk,with a few other mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels.The familiar sights and sounds of London,the meeting with his friend,had with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard to Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world had to some extent suspended,though never ruptured.He at first intended only to look over these letters on the outside;then he read one;then another;until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to sad memories.He folded them away again,placed them in his pocket,and instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic world,had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.
The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of its necessity.Stephen gave the rein to his imagination,and felt more intensely than he had felt for many months that,without Elfride,his life would never be any great pleasure to himself,or honour to his Maker.
They sat by the fire,chatting on external and random subjects,neither caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed to discuss.On the table with the periodicals lay two or three pocket-books,one of them being open.Knight seeing from the exposed page that the contents were sketches only,began turning the leaves over carelessly with his finger.When,some time later,Stephen was out of the room,Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the sketches more carefully.
The first crude ideas,pertaining to dwellings of all kinds,were roughly outlined on the different pages.Antiquities had been copied;fragments of Indian columns,colossal statues,and outlandish ornament from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri,were carelessly intruded upon by outlines of modern doors,windows,roofs,cooking-stoves,and household furniture;everything,in short,which comes within the range of a practising architects experience,who travels with his eyes open.Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval subjects for carving or illumination--heads of Virgins,Saints,and Prophets.
