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.