← catalogue

Desperate Remedies

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #3044 · 817,311 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Desperate Remedies
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Desperate Remedies

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: October 2, 2004 [eBook #3044]
                Most recently updated: October 14, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3044

Credits: Produced by Les Bowler, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESPERATE REMEDIES ***




Produced by Les Bowler








DESPERATE REMEDIES


By Thomas Hardy



CONTENTS

PREFATORY NOTE

     I.     THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
     II.    THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
     III.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
     IV.    THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
     V.     THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
     VI.    THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
     VII.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
     VIII.  THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
     IX.    THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
     X.     THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
     XI.    THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
     XII.   THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
     XIII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
     XIV.   THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
     XV.    THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
     XVI.   THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
     XVII.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
     XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
     XIX.   THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
     XX.    THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
     XXI.   THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
            SEQUEL




PREFATORY NOTE

The following story, the first published by the author, was written
nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a
method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt, too
exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and moral
obliquity are depended on for exciting interest; but some of the scenes,
and at least one of the characters, have been deemed not unworthy of a
little longer preservation; and as they could hardly be reproduced in a
fragmentary form the novel is reissued complete--the more readily that
it has for some considerable time been reprinted and widely circulated
in America. January 1889.

To the foregoing note I have only to add that, in the present edition of
‘Desperate Remedies,’ some Wessex towns and other places that are common
to the scenes of several of these stories have been called for the
first time by the names under which they appear elsewhere, for the
satisfaction of any reader who may care for consistency in such matters.

This is the only material change; for, as it happened that certain
characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story were
present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no French
name for them it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered.

T.H. February 1896.




I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS

1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36

In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the issue
was a Christmas visit.

In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect who
had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland town of
Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to spend the
Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury. They had
gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after graduating together,
Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought
which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness;
on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three.

Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in
a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it
was ever a surprise.

While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived in
a street not far from Russell Square. Though they were in no more than
comfortable circumstances, the captain’s wife came of an ancient family
whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of the most illustrious
and well-known in the kingdom.

The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most
beautiful and queenly being he had ever beheld. She was about nineteen
or twenty, and her name was Cytherea. In truth she was not so very
unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one respect.
She was perfect in her manner and bearing, and they were not. A mere
distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, is often read as
the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him no less than
perfection throughout--transcending her rural rivals in very nature.
Graye did a thing the blissfulness of which was only eclipsed by its
hazardousness. He loved her at first sight.

His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her parents
two or three times on the first week of his arrival in London, and
accident and a lover’s contrivance brought them together as frequently
the week following. The parents liked young Graye, and having few
friends (for their equals in blood were their superiors in position), he
was received on very generous terms. His passion for Cytherea grew not
only strong, but ineffably exalted: she, without positively encouraging
him, tacitly assented to his schemes for being near her. Her father and
mother seemed to have lost all confidence in nobility of birth, without
money to give effect to its presence, and looked upon the budding
consequence of the young people’s reciprocal glances with placidity, if
not actual favour.

Graye’s whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and unaccountable
episode. After passing through three weeks of sweet experience, he had
arrived at the last stage--a kind of moral Gaza--before plunging into an
emotional desert. The second week in January had come round, and it was
necessary for the young architect to leave town.

Throughout his acquaintanceship with the lady of his heart there had
been this marked peculiarity in her love: she had delighted in his
presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had
repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which
drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural
tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The present
seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually, even if love is
in itself an end, it must be regarded as a beginning to be enjoyed.

In spite of evasions as an obstacle, and in consequence of them as a
spur, he would put the matter off no longer. It was evening. He took
her into a little conservatory on the landing, and there among the
evergreens, by the light of a few tiny lamps, infinitely enhancing the
freshness and beauty of the leaves, he made the declaration of a love as
fresh and beautiful as they.

‘My love--my darling, be my wife!’

She seemed like one just awakened. ‘Ah--we must part now!’ she faltered,
in a voice of anguish. ‘I will write to you.’ She loosened her hand and
rushed away.

In a wild fever Graye went home and watched for the next morning. Who
shall express his misery and wonder when a note containing these words
was put into his hand?

‘Good-bye; good-bye for ever. As recognized lovers something divides us
eternally. Forgive me--I should have told you before; but your love was
sweet! Never mention me.’

That very day, and as it seemed, to put an end to a painful condition of
things, daughter and parents left London to pay off a promised visit to
a relative in a western county. No message or letter of entreaty could
wring from her any explanation. She begged him not to follow her, and
the most bewildering point was that her father and mother appeared, from
the tone of a letter Graye received from them, as vexed and sad as he
at this sudden renunciation. One thing was plain: without admitting her
reason as valid, they knew what that reason was, and did not intend to
reveal it.

A week from that day Ambrose Graye left his friend Huntway’s house
and saw no more of the Love he mourned. From time to time his friend
answered any inquiry Graye made by letter respecting her. But very poor
food to a lover is intelligence of a mistress filtered through a friend.
Huntway could tell nothing definitely. He said he believed there had
been some prior flirtation between Cytherea and her cousin, an officer
of the line, two or three years before Graye met her, which had suddenly
been terminated by the cousin’s departure for India, and the young
lady’s travelling on the Continent with her parents the whole of the
ensuing summer, on account of delicate health. Eventually Huntway said
that circumstances had rendered Graye’s attachment more hopeless still.
Cytherea’s mother had unexpectedly inherited a large fortune and estates
in the west of England by the rapid fall of some intervening lives. This
had caused their removal from the small house in Bloomsbury, and, as it
appeared, a renunciation of their old friends in that quarter.

Young Graye concluded that his Cytherea had forgotten him and his love.
But he could not forget her.

2. FROM 1843 TO 1861

Eight years later, feeling lonely and depressed--a man without
relatives, with many acquaintances but no friends--Ambrose Graye met
a young lady of a different kind, fairly endowed with money and good
gifts. As to caring very deeply for another woman after the loss of
Cytherea, it was an absolute impossibility with him. With all, the
beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit;
but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will
make a passing love permanent for ever.

This second young lady and Graye were married. That he did not, first
or last, love his wife as he should have done, was known to all; but
few knew that his unmanageable heart could never be weaned from useless
repining at the loss of its first idol.

His character to some extent deteriorated, as emotional constitutions
will under the long sense of disappointment at having missed their
imagined destiny. And thus, though naturally of a gentle and pleasant
disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly regarded by his acquaintances
as it is the lot of some of those persons to be. The winning and
sanguine receptivity of his early life developed by degrees a moody
nervousness, and when not picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope
he was the victim of indescribable depression. The practical issue of
such a condition was improvidence, originally almost an unconscious
improvidence, for every debt incurred had been mentally paid off with a
religious exactness from the treasures of expectation before mentioned.
But as years revolved, the same course was continued from the lack of
spirit sufficient for shifting out of an old groove when it has been
found to lead to disaster.

In the year 1861 his wife died, leaving him a widower with two children.
The elder, a son named Owen, now just turned seventeen, was taken from
school, and initiated as pupil to the profession of architect in his
father’s office. The remaining child was a daughter, and Owen’s junior
by a year.

Her christian name was Cytherea, and it is easy to guess why.

3. OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863

We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event of
these persons’ lives. The scene is still the Grayes’ native town of
Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month of
October.

The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be seen
wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account of the
time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the practical
garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long shadows and
enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any perceptible
advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing tones which grace
its decline. Next, it was that stage in the progress of the week when
business--which, carried on under the gables of an old country place,
is not devoid of a romantic sparkle--was well-nigh extinguished. Lastly,
the town was intentionally bent upon being attractive by exhibiting
to an influx of visitors the local talent for dramatic recitation, and
provincial towns trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.

Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they
interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious
of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to
be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable
caricatures which spoil them.

The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing at the
intersection of the three chief streets was expressing half-past two
to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of reading from
Shakespeare was about to begin. The doors were open, and those persons
who had already assembled within the building were noticing the entrance
of the new-comers--silently criticizing their dress--questioning the
genuineness of their teeth and hair--estimating their private means.

Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who glowed amid
the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown stubble.
She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress, hat with grey strings
and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to harmonize. She lightly walked
up the side passage of the room, cast a slight glance around, and
entered the seat pointed out to her.

The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about eighteen.
During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in her seat and
listening to the reader on the platform, her personal appearance formed
an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring eyes.

Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less perfect
than her figure, which approached unusually near to the standard of
faultlessness. But even this feature of hers yielded the palm to the
gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating and delightful to an
extreme degree.

Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most extended
scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the uplifting of
her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting of her lip. The
carriage of her head--motion within motion--a glide upon a glide--was
as delicate as that of a magnetic needle. And this flexibility and
elasticity had never been taught her by rule, nor even been acquired by
observation, but, nullo cultu, had naturally developed itself with her
years. In childhood, a stone or stalk in the way, which had been the
inevitable occasion of a fall to her playmates, had usually left her
safe and upright on her feet after the narrowest escape by oscillations
and whirls for the preservation of her balance. At mixed Christmas
parties, when she numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was
heartily despised on that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her
apt lightness in the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood,
and compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize upon
her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to contemn.
And in later years, when the instincts of her sex had shown her this
point as the best and rarest feature in her external self, she was not
found wanting in attention to the cultivation of finish in its details.

Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a shining
corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite nut-brown as
each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of a sapphire hue,
though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears; they possessed
the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and good faith as
distinguishable from that harder brightness which seems to express
faithfulness only to the object confronting them.

But to attempt to gain a view of her--or indeed of any fascinating
woman--from a measured category, is as difficult as to appreciate the
effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern--or of a
full chord of music by piping the notes in succession. Nevertheless it
may readily be believed from the description here ventured, that
among the many winning phases of her aspect, these were particularly
striking:--

  During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and
  smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the
  space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of
  degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea
  and Nay.

  During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily
  accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of
  the listener’s arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree
  of intimacy dictated.

  When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.

She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress of the
present entertainment. Her glance was directed out of the window.

Why the particulars of a young lady’s presence at a very mediocre
performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion which their
intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why they were
remembered and individualized by herself and others through after
years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it were, upon the
extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in which the real
meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It was the last hour of
experience she ever enjoyed with a mind entirely free from a knowledge
of that labyrinth into which she stepped immediately afterwards--to
continue a perplexed course along its mazes for the greater portion of
twenty-nine subsequent months.

The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone, and
through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of the room
the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also the upper
part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of completion under
the superintendence of Miss Graye’s father, the architect to the work.

That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in the
room was a fact which Cytherea’s idling eyes had discovered with some
interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that was being
enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical stonework rose a cage
of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon this stood five men--four
in clothes as white as the new erection close beneath their hands, the
fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a gentleman.

The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason’s labourer.
The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been giving
directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow footway
allowed, stood perfectly still.

The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was curious
and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by the dark
margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which emphasized by
contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.

The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and the
five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere and
experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared little larger
than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft, spirit-like
silentness. One idea above all others was conveyed to the mind of a
person on the ground by their aspect, namely, concentration of purpose:
that they were indifferent to--even unconscious of--the distracted world
beneath them, and all that moved upon it. They never looked off the
scaffolding.

Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye. Again he stood motionless,
with attention to the operations of the others. He appeared to be lost
in reflection, and had directed his face towards a new stone they were
lifting.

‘Why does he stand like that?’ the young lady thought at length--up to
that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient Tarentines,
who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the Theatre the entry
into their Harbour of a power that overturned the State.

She moved herself uneasily. ‘I wish he would come down,’ she whispered,
still gazing at the skybacked picture. ‘It is so dangerous to be
absent-minded up there.’

When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid hold
of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then let it go
and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An instant of doubling
forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the air, immediately
disappearing downwards.

His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement. Her
lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no sound. One by
one the people about her, unconscious of what had happened, turned their
heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible upon their faces at the
sight of the poor child. A moment longer, and she fell to the floor.

The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of being
carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the steps of her
own house by her brother and an older man. Recollection of what had
passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they entered the
door--through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few
instants before--her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and,
without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a
rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that
are simultaneous--however foreign in essence these scenes may be--as
chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after that
time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea’s mind the scene
from the Town Hall windows than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.

4. OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH

When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of
horror accompany it. Sadness, from the death itself: horror, from the
clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.

The funeral had taken place. Depressed, yet resolved in his demeanour,
Owen Graye sat before his father’s private escritoire, engaged
in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of
papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of all
to one under the influence of a great grief. Laminae of white paper
tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other white papers
bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap wrapped round with
crude red tape.

The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted
to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were
ascertained:--

  First, that their father’s income from professional sources had
  been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
  and that his own and his wife’s property, upon which he had relied
  for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
  unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father’s too
  open-hearted trustfulness.

  Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
  his standing by the illusory path of speculation. The most notable
  instance of this was the following. He had been induced, when at
  Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
  spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which
  had put into the harbour in distress. The profit was to be
  considerable, so was the risk. There turned out to be no security
  whatever. The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
  unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
  such matters--could possibly engage in. The vessel went down, and
  all Mr. Graye’s money with it.

  Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
  knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
  pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.

  Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
  awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
  his children. He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
  in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
  portion of the little fortune he had let go.

Cytherea was frequently at her brother’s elbow during these
examinations. She often remarked sadly--

‘Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time, didn’t
he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he never would
claim it. I never forget that original disheartening blow, and how that
from it sprang all the ills of his life--everything connected with his
gloom, and the lassitude in business we used so often to see about him.’

‘I remember what he said once,’ returned the brother, ‘when I sat up
late with him. He said, “Owen, don’t love too blindly: blindly you
will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to
a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine,”
 father said. “Cultivate the art of renunciation.” And I am going to,
Cytherea.’

‘And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa’s ruin, because he
did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her. I wonder where
she is now, Owen? We were told not to try to find out anything about
her. Papa never told us her name, did he?’

‘That was by her own request, I believe. But never mind her; she was not
our mother.’

The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye’s disheartening blow was
precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but girls
ponder in their hearts.

5. FROM OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH TO JULY THE NINTH

Thus Ambrose Graye’s good intentions with regard to the reintegration of
his property had scarcely taken tangible form when his sudden death put
them for ever out of his power.

Heavy bills, showing the extent of his obligations, tumbled in
immediately upon the heels of the funeral from quarters previously
unheard and unthought of. Thus pressed, a bill was filed in Chancery to
have the assets, such as they were, administered by the Court.

‘What will become of us now?’ thought Owen continually.

There is in us an unquenchable expectation, which at the gloomiest time
persists in inferring that because we are _ourselves_, there must be a
special future in store for us, though our nature and antecedents to the
remotest particular have been common to thousands. Thus to Cytherea and
Owen Graye the question how their lives would end seemed the deepest of
possible enigmas. To others who knew their position equally well with
themselves the question was the easiest that could be asked--‘Like those
of other people similarly circumstanced.’

Then Owen held a consultation with his sister to come to some decision
on their future course, and a month was passed in waiting for answers to
letters, and in the examination of schemes more or less futile. Sudden
hopes that were rainbows to the sight proved but mists to the touch.
In the meantime, unpleasant remarks, disguise them as some well-meaning
people might, were floating around them every day. The undoubted
truth, that they were the children of a dreamer who let slip away every
farthing of his money and ran into debt with his neighbours--that the
daughter had been brought up to no profession--that the son who had, had
made no progress in it, and might come to the dogs--could not from the
nature of things be wrapped up in silence in order that it might not
hurt their feelings; and as a matter of fact, it greeted their ears in
some form or other wherever they went. Their few acquaintances passed
them hurriedly. Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving shopkeepers, in
their intervals of leisure, stood at their shop-doors--their toes
hanging over the edge of the step, and their obese waists hanging over
their toes--and in discourses with friends on the pavement, formulated
the course of the improvident, and reduced the children’s prospects to a
shadow-like attenuation. The sons of these men (who wore breastpins of
a sarcastic kind, and smoked humorous pipes) stared at Cytherea with a
stare unmitigated by any of the respect that had formerly softened it.

Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think of
us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means, parentage, or
object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon in isolation. It is
the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most; and the possession
by a hundred acquaintances, severally insulated, of the knowledge of our
skeleton-closet’s whereabouts, is not so distressing to the nerves as a
chat over it by a party of half-a-dozen--exclusive depositaries though
these may be.

Perhaps, though Hocbridge watched and whispered, its animus would have
been little more than a trifle to persons in thriving circumstances. But
unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and before the skin has
had time to thicken, makes people susceptible inversely to their
opportunities for shielding themselves. In Owen was found, in place of
his father’s impressibility, a larger share of his father’s pride, and a
squareness of idea which, if coupled with a little more blindness, would
have amounted to positive prejudice. To him humanity, so far as he had
thought of it at all, was rather divided into distinct classes than
blended from extreme to extreme. Hence by a sequence of ideas which
might be traced if it were worth while, he either detested or respected
opinion, and instinctively sought to escape a cold shade that mere
sensitiveness would have endured. He could have submitted to separation,
sickness, exile, drudgery, hunger and thirst, with stoical indifference,
but superciliousness was too incisive.

After living on for nine months in attempts to make an income as his
father’s successor in the profession--attempts which were utterly
fruitless by reason of his inexperience--Graye came to a simple and
sweeping resolution. They would privately leave that part of England,
drop from the sight of acquaintances, gossips, harsh critics, and bitter
creditors of whose misfortune he was not the cause, and escape the
position which galled him by the only road their great poverty left open
to them--that of his obtaining some employment in a distant place by
following his profession as a humble under-draughtsman.

He thought over his capabilities with the sensations of a soldier
grinding his sword at the opening of a campaign. What with lack of
employment, owing to the decrease of his late father’s practice, and the
absence of direct and uncompromising pressure towards monetary results
from a pupil’s labour (which seems to be always the case when a
professional man’s pupil is also his son), Owen’s progress in the art
and science of architecture had been very insignificant indeed. Though
anything but an idle young man, he had hardly reached the age at which
industrious men who lack an external whip to send them on in the world,
are induced by their own common sense to whip on themselves. Hence his
knowledge of plans, elevations, sections, and specifications, was not
greater at the end of two years of probation than might easily have
been acquired in six months by a youth of average ability--himself, for
instance--amid a bustling London practice.

But at any rate he could make himself handy to one of the
profession--some man in a remote town--and there fulfil his indentures.
A tangible inducement lay in this direction of survey. He had a slight
conception of such a man--a Mr. Gradfield--who was in practice in
Budmouth Regis, a seaport town and watering-place in the south of
England.

After some doubts, Graye ventured to write to this gentleman, asking the
necessary question, shortly alluding to his father’s death, and stating
that his term of apprenticeship had only half expired. He would be glad
to complete his articles at a very low salary for the whole remaining
two years, provided payment could begin at once.

The answer from Mr. Gradfield stated that he was not in want of a
pupil who would serve the remainder of his time on the terms Mr. Graye
mentioned. But he would just add one remark. He chanced to be in want of
some young man in his office--for a short time only, probably about two
months--to trace drawings, and attend to other subsidiary work of the
kind. If Mr. Graye did not object to occupy such an inferior position as
these duties would entail, and to accept weekly wages which to one with
his expectations would be considered merely nominal, the post would give
him an opportunity for learning a few more details of the profession.

‘It is a beginning, and, above all, an abiding-place, away from the
shadow of the cloud which hangs over us here--I will go,’ said Owen.

Cytherea’s plan for her future, an intensely simple one, owing to the
even greater narrowness of her resources, was already marked out. One
advantage had accrued to her through her mother’s possession of a fair
share of personal property, and perhaps only one. She had been carefully
educated. Upon this consideration her plan was based. She was to take
up her abode in her brother’s lodging at Budmouth, when she would
immediately advertise for a situation as governess, having obtained
the consent of a lawyer at Aldbrickham who was winding up her father’s
affairs, and who knew the history of her position, to allow himself to
be referred to in the matter of her past life and respectability.

Early one morning they departed from their native town, leaving behind
them scarcely a trace of their footsteps.

Then the town pitied their want of wisdom in taking such a step.
‘Rashness; they would have made a better income in Hocbridge, where they
are known! There is no doubt that they would.’

But what is Wisdom really? A steady handling of any means to bring about
any end necessary to happiness.

Yet whether one’s end be the usual end--a wealthy position in life--or
no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to that usual
end.




II. THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT

1. THE NINTH OF JULY

The day of their departure was one of the most glowing that the climax
of a long series of summer heats could evolve. The wide expanse of
landscape quivered up and down like the flame of a taper, as they
steamed along through the midst of it. Placid flocks of sheep reclining
under trees a little way off appeared of a pale blue colour. Clover
fields were livid with the brightness of the sun upon their deep red
flowers. All waggons and carts were moved to the shade by their careful
owners, rain-water butts fell to pieces; well-buckets were lowered
inside the covers of the well-hole, to preserve them from the fate of
the butts, and generally, water seemed scarcer in the country than the
beer and cider of the peasantry who toiled or idled there.

To see persons looking with children’s eyes at any ordinary scenery, is
a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations
from an old experience--a healthy sign, rare in these feverish days--the
mark of an imperishable brightness of nature.

Both brother and sister could do this; Cytherea more noticeably. They
watched the undulating corn-lands, monotonous to all their companions;
the stony and clayey prospect succeeding those, with its angular and
abrupt hills. Boggy moors came next, now withered and dry--the spots
upon which pools usually spread their waters showing themselves as
circles of smooth bare soil, over-run by a net-work of innumerable
little fissures. Then arose plantations of firs, abruptly terminating
beside meadows cleanly mown, in which high-hipped, rich-coloured cows,
with backs horizontal and straight as the ridge of a house, stood
motionless or lazily fed. Glimpses of the sea now interested them, which
became more and more frequent till the train finally drew up beside the
platform at Budmouth.

‘The whole town is looking out for us,’ had been Graye’s impression
throughout the day. He called upon Mr. Gradfield--the only man who had
been directly informed of his coming--and found that Mr. Gradfield had
forgotten it.

However, arrangements were made with this gentleman--a stout, active,
grey-bearded burgher of sixty--by which Owen was to commence work in his
office the following week.

The same day Cytherea drew up and sent off the advertisement appended:--


  ‘A YOUNG LADY is desirous of meeting with an _engagement_ as
  _governess_ or _companion_. She is competent to teach English,
  French, and Music. Satisfactory references--Address, C. G.,
  Post-Office, Budmouth.’


It seemed a more material existence than her own that she saw thus
delineated on the paper. ‘That can’t be myself; how odd I look!’ she
said, and smiled.

2. JULY THE ELEVENTH

On the Monday subsequent to their arrival in Budmouth, Owen Graye
attended at Mr. Gradfield’s office to enter upon his duties, and his
sister was left in their lodgings alone for the first time.

Despite the sad occurrences of the preceding autumn, an unwonted
cheerfulness pervaded her spirit throughout the day. Change of
scene--and that to untravelled eyes--conjoined with the sensation of
freedom from supervision, revived the sparkle of a warm young nature
ready enough to take advantage of any adventitious restoratives.
Point-blank grief tends rather to seal up happiness for a time than to
produce that attrition which results from griefs of anticipation that
move onward with the days: these may be said to furrow away the capacity
for pleasure.

Her expectations from the advertisement began to be extravagant. A
thriving family, who had always sadly needed her, was already definitely
pictured in her fancy, which, in its exuberance, led her on to picturing
its individual members, their possible peculiarities, virtues, and
vices, and obliterated for a time the recollection that she would be
separated from her brother.

Thus musing, as she waited for his return in the evening, her eyes fell
on her left hand. The contemplation of her own left fourth finger by
symbol-loving girlhood of this age is, it seems, very frequently, if
not always, followed by a peculiar train of romantic ideas. Cytherea’s
thoughts, still playing about her future, became directed into this
romantic groove. She leant back in her chair, and taking hold of the
fourth finger, which had attracted her attention, she lifted it with the
tips of the others, and looked at the smooth and tapering member for a
long time.

She whispered idly, ‘I wonder who and what he will be?

‘If he’s a gentleman of fashion, he will take my finger so, just with
the tips of his own, and with some fluttering of the heart, and the
least trembling of his lip, slip the ring so lightly on that I shall
hardly know it is there--looking delightfully into my eyes all the time.

‘If he’s a bold, dashing soldier, I expect he will proudly turn round,
take the ring as if it equalled her Majesty’s crown in value, and
desperately set it on my finger thus. He will fix his eyes unflinchingly
upon what he is doing--just as if he stood in battle before the enemy
(though, in reality, very fond of me, of course), and blush as much as I
shall.

‘If he’s a sailor, he will take my finger and the ring in this way,
and deck it out with a housewifely touch and a tenderness of expression
about his mouth, as sailors do: kiss it, perhaps, with a simple air, as
if we were children playing an idle game, and not at the very height of
observation and envy by a great crowd saying, “Ah! they are happy now!”

‘If he should be rather a poor man--noble-minded and affectionate, but
still poor--’

Owen’s footsteps rapidly ascending the stairs, interrupted this
fancy-free meditation. Reproaching herself, even angry with herself
for allowing her mind to stray upon such subjects in the face of their
present desperate condition, she rose to meet him, and make tea.

Cytherea’s interest to know how her brother had been received at Mr.
Gradfield’s broke forth into words at once. Almost before they had sat
down to table, she began cross-examining him in the regular sisterly
way.

‘Well, Owen, how has it been with you to-day? What is the place like--do
you think you will like Mr. Gradfield?’

‘O yes. But he has not been there to-day; I have only had the head
draughtsman with me.’

Young women have a habit, not noticeable in men, of putting on at a
moment’s notice the drama of whosoever’s life they choose. Cytherea’s
interest was transferred from Mr. Gradfield to his representative.

‘What sort of a man is he?’

‘He seems a very nice fellow indeed; though of course I can hardly tell
to a certainty as yet. But I think he’s a very worthy fellow; there’s
no nonsense in him, and though he is not a public school man he has read
widely, and has a sharp appreciation of what’s good in books and art.
In fact, his knowledge isn’t nearly so exclusive as most professional
men’s.’

‘That’s a great deal to say of an architect, for of all professional men
they are, as a rule, the most professional.’

‘Yes; perhaps they are. This man is rather of a melancholy turn of mind,
I think.’

‘Has the managing clerk any family?’ she mildly asked, after a while,
pouring out some more tea.

‘Family; no!’

‘Well, dear Owen, how should I know?’

‘Why, of course he isn’t married. But there happened to be a
conversation about women going on in the office, and I heard him say
what he should wish his wife to be like.’

‘What would he wish his wife to be like?’ she said, with great apparent
lack of interest.

‘O, he says she must be girlish and artless: yet he would be loth to do
without a dash of womanly subtlety, ‘tis so piquant. Yes, he said, that
must be in her; she must have womanly cleverness. “And yet I should like
her to blush if only a cock-sparrow were to look at her hard,” he said,
“which brings me back to the girl again: and so I flit backwards and
forwards. I must have what comes, I suppose,” he said, “and whatever she
may be, thank God she’s no worse. However, if he might give a final hint
to Providence,” he said, “a child among pleasures, and a woman among
pains was the rough outline of his requirement.”’

‘Did he say that? What a musing creature he must be.’

‘He did, indeed.’

3. FROM THE TWELFTH TO THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY

As is well known, ideas are so elastic in a human brain, that they have
no constant measure which may be called their actual bulk. Any important
idea may be compressed to a molecule by an unwonted crowding of others;
and any small idea will expand to whatever length and breadth of vacuum
the mind may be able to make over to it. Cytherea’s world was tolerably
vacant at this time, and the young architectural designer’s image became
very pervasive. The next evening this subject was again renewed.

‘His name is Springrove,’ said Owen, in reply to her. ‘He is a thorough
artist, but a man of rather humble origin, it seems, who has made
himself so far. I think he is the son of a farmer, or something of the
kind.’

‘Well, he’s none the worse for that, I suppose.’

‘None the worse. As we come down the hill, we shall be continually
meeting people going up.’ But Owen had felt that Springrove was a little
the worse nevertheless.

‘Of course he’s rather old by this time.’

‘O no. He’s about six-and-twenty--not more.’

‘Ah, I see.... What is he like, Owen?’

‘I can’t exactly tell you his appearance: ‘tis always such a difficult
thing to do.’

‘A man you would describe as short? Most men are those we should
describe as short, I fancy.’

‘I should call him, I think, of the middle height; but as I only see
him sitting in the office, of course I am not certain about his form and
figure.’

‘I wish you were, then.’

‘Perhaps you do. But I am not, you see.’

‘Of course not, you are always so provoking. Owen, I saw a man in the
street to-day whom I fancied was he--and yet, I don’t see how it could
be, either. He had light brown hair, a snub nose, very round face, and
a peculiar habit of reducing his eyes to straight lines when he looked
narrowly at anything.’

‘O no. That was not he, Cytherea.’

‘Not a bit like him in all probability.’

‘Not a bit. He has dark hair--almost a Grecian nose, regular teeth, and
an intellectual face, as nearly as I can recall to mind.’

‘Ah, there now, Owen, you _have_ described him! But I suppose he’s not
generally called pleasing, or--’

‘Handsome?’

‘I scarcely meant that. But since you have said it, is he handsome?’

‘Rather.’

‘His tout ensemble is striking?’

‘Yes--O no, no--I forgot: it is not. He is rather untidy in his
waistcoat, and neck-ties, and hair.’

‘How vexing!... it must be to himself, poor thing.’

‘He’s a thorough bookworm--despises the pap-and-daisy school of
verse--knows Shakespeare to the very dregs of the foot-notes. Indeed,
he’s a poet himself in a small way.’

‘How delicious!’ she said. ‘I have never known a poet.’

‘And you don’t know him,’ said Owen dryly.

She reddened. ‘Of course I don’t. I know that.’

‘Have you received any answer to your advertisement?’ he inquired.

‘Ah--no!’ she said, and the forgotten disappointment which had showed
itself in her face at different times during the day, became visible
again.

Another day passed away. On Thursday, without inquiry, she learnt more
of the head draughtsman. He and Graye had become very friendly, and he
had been tempted to show her brother a copy of some poems of his--some
serious and sad--some humorous--which had appeared in the poets’ corner
of a magazine from time to time. Owen showed them now to Cytherea, who
instantly began to read them carefully and to think them very beautiful.

‘Yes--Springrove’s no fool,’ said Owen sententiously.

‘No fool!--I should think he isn’t, indeed,’ said Cytherea, looking up
from the paper in quite an excitement: ‘to write such verses as these!’

‘What logic are you chopping, Cytherea? Well, I don’t mean on account of
the verses, because I haven’t read them; but for what he said when the
fellows were talking about falling in love.’

‘Which you will tell me?’

‘He says that your true lover breathlessly finds himself engaged to a
sweetheart, like a man who has caught something in the dark. He doesn’t
know whether it is a bat or a bird, and takes it to the light when he is
cool to learn what it is. He looks to see if she is the right age, but
right age or wrong age, he must consider her a prize. Sometime later he
ponders whether she is the right kind of prize for him. Right kind or
wrong kind--he has called her his, and must abide by it. After a time he
asks himself, “Has she the temper, hair, and eyes I meant to have, and
was firmly resolved not to do without?” He finds it is all wrong, and
then comes the tussle--’

‘Do they marry and live happily?’

‘Who? O, the supposed pair. I think he said--well, I really forget what
he said.’

‘That _is_ stupid of you!’ said the young lady with dismay.

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s a satirist--I don’t think I care about him now.’

‘There you are just wrong. He is not. He is, as I believe, an impulsive
fellow who has been made to pay the penalty of his rashness in some love
affair.’

Thus ended the dialogue of Thursday, but Cytherea read the verses again
in private. On Friday her brother remarked that Springrove had informed
him he was going to leave Mr. Gradfield’s in a fortnight to push his
fortunes in London.

An indescribable feeling of sadness shot through Cytherea’s heart.
Why should she be sad at such an announcement as that, she thought,
concerning a man she had never seen, when her spirits were elastic
enough to rebound after hard blows from deep and real troubles as if she
had scarcely known them? Though she could not answer this question, she
knew one thing, she was saddened by Owen’s news.

4. JULY THE TWENTY-FIRST

A very popular local excursion by steamboat to Lulstead Cove was
announced through the streets of Budmouth one Thursday morning by
the weak-voiced town-crier, to start at six o’clock the same day. The
weather was lovely, and the opportunity being the first of the kind
offered to them, Owen and Cytherea went with the rest.

They had reached the Cove, and had walked landward for nearly an hour
over the hill which rose beside the strand, when Graye recollected that
two or three miles yet further inland from this spot was an interesting
mediaeval ruin. He was already familiar with its characteristics through
the medium of an archaeological work, and now finding himself so close
to the reality, felt inclined to verify some theory he had formed
respecting it. Concluding that there would be just sufficient time for
him to go there and return before the boat had left the shore, he parted
from Cytherea on the hill, struck downwards, and then up a heathery
valley.

She remained on the summit where he had left her till the time of his
expected return, scanning the details of the prospect around. Placidly
spread out before her on the south was the open Channel, reflecting a
blue intenser by many shades than that of the sky overhead, and dotted
in the foreground by half-a-dozen small craft of contrasting rig, their
sails graduating in hue from extreme whiteness to reddish brown, the
varying actual colours varied again in a double degree by the rays of
the declining sun.

Presently the distant bell from the boat was heard, warning the
passengers to embark. This was followed by a lively air from the harps
and violins on board, their tones, as they arose, becoming intermingled
with, though not marred by, the brush of the waves when their crests
rolled over--at the point where the check of the shallows was first
felt--and then thinned away up the slope of pebbles and sand.

She turned her face landward and strained her eyes to discern, if
possible, some sign of Owen’s return. Nothing was visible save the
strikingly brilliant, still landscape. The wide concave which lay at the
back of the hill in this direction was blazing with the western light,
adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the heather, now at the
very climax of bloom, and free from the slightest touch of the invidious
brown that so soon creeps into its shades. The light so intensified the
colours that they seemed to stand above the surface of the earth and
float in mid-air like an exhalation of red. In the minor valleys,
between the hillocks and ridges which diversified the contour of the
basin, but did not disturb its general sweep, she marked brakes of tall,
heavy-stemmed ferns, five or six feet high, in a brilliant light-green
dress--a broad riband of them with the path in their midst winding like
a stream along the little ravine that reached to the foot of the hill,
and delivered up the path to its grassy area. Among the ferns grew
holly bushes deeper in tint than any shadow about them, whilst the whole
surface of the scene was dimpled with small conical pits, and here and
there were round ponds, now dry, and half overgrown with rushes.

The last bell of the steamer rang. Cytherea had forgotten herself, and
what she was looking for. In a fever of distress lest Owen should
be left behind, she gathered up in her hand the corners of her
handkerchief, containing specimens of the shells, plants, and fossils
which the locality produced, started off to the sands, and mingled with
the knots of visitors there congregated from other interesting points
around; from the inn, the cottages, and hired conveyances that had
returned from short drives inland. They all went aboard by the primitive
plan of a narrow plank on two wheels--the women being assisted by a
rope. Cytherea lingered till the very last, reluctant to follow,
and looking alternately at the boat and the valley behind. Her delay
provoked a remark from Captain Jacobs, a thickset man of hybrid stains,
resulting from the mixed effects of fire and water, peculiar to sailors
where engines are the propelling power.

‘Now then, missy, if you please. I am sorry to tell ‘ee our time’s up.
Who are you looking for, miss?’

‘My brother--he has walked a short distance inland; he must be here
directly. Could you wait for him--just a minute?’

‘Really, I am afraid not, m’m.’ Cytherea looked at the stout,
round-faced man, and at the vessel, with a light in her eyes so
expressive of her own opinion being the same, on reflection, as his, and
with such resignation, too, that, from an instinctive feeling of pride
at being able to prove himself more humane than he was thought to
be--works of supererogation are the only sacrifices that entice in this
way--and that at a very small cost, he delayed the boat till some among
the passengers began to murmur.

‘There, never mind,’ said Cytherea decisively. ‘Go on without me--I
shall wait for him.’

‘Well, ‘tis a very awkward thing to leave you here all alone,’ said the
captain. ‘I certainly advise you not to wait.’

‘He’s gone across to the railway station, for certain,’ said another
passenger.

‘No--here he is!’ Cytherea said, regarding, as she spoke, the half
hidden figure of a man who was seen advancing at a headlong pace down
the ravine which lay between the heath and the shore.

‘He can’t get here in less than five minutes,’ a passenger said. ‘People
should know what they are about, and keep time. Really, if--’

‘You see, sir,’ said the captain, in an apologetic undertone, ‘since
‘tis her brother, and she’s all alone, ‘tis only nater to wait a minute,
now he’s in sight. Suppose, now, you were a young woman, as might be,
and had a brother, like this one, and you stood of an evening upon
this here wild lonely shore, like her, why you’d want us to wait, too,
wouldn’t you, sir? I think you would.’

The person so hastily approaching had been lost to view during this
remark by reason of a hollow in the ground, and the projecting cliff
immediately at hand covered the path in its rise. His footsteps were
now heard striking sharply upon the flinty road at a distance of about
twenty or thirty yards, but still behind the escarpment. To save time,
Cytherea prepared to ascend the plank.

‘Let me give you my hand, miss,’ said Captain Jacobs.

‘No--please don’t touch me,’ said she, ascending cautiously by sliding
one foot forward two or three inches, bringing up the other behind it,
and so on alternately--her lips compressed by concentration on the feat,
her eyes glued to the plank, her hand to the rope, and her immediate
thought to the fact of the distressing narrowness of her footing. Steps
now shook the lower end of the board, and in an instant were up to her
heels with a bound.

‘O, Owen, I am so glad you are come!’ she said without turning. ‘Don’t,
don’t shake the plank or touch me, whatever you do.... There, I am up.
Where have you been so long?’ she continued, in a lower tone, turning
round to him as she reached the top.

Raising her eyes from her feet, which, standing on the firm deck,
demanded her attention no longer, she acquired perceptions of the
new-comer in the following order: unknown trousers; unknown waistcoat;
unknown face. The man was not her brother, but a total stranger.

Off went the plank; the paddles started, stopped, backed, pattered in
confusion, then revolved decisively, and the boat passed out into deep
water.

One or two persons had said, ‘How d’ye do, Mr. Springrove?’ and looked
at Cytherea, to see how she bore her disappointment. Her ears had but
just caught the name of the head draughtsman, when she saw him advancing
directly to address her.

‘Miss Graye, I believe?’ he said, lifting his hat.

‘Yes,’ said Cytherea, colouring, and trying not to look guilty of a
surreptitious knowledge of him.

‘I am Mr. Springrove. I passed Corvsgate Castle about an hour ago, and
soon afterwards met your brother going that way. He had been deceived in
the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the ruin, on account
of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot. I proposed that
he should go on, since he had got so near; and afterwards, instead of
walking back to the boat, get across to Anglebury Station--a shorter
walk for him--where he could catch the late train, and go directly home.
I could let you know what he had done, and allay any uneasiness.’

‘Is the lameness serious, do you know?’

‘O no; simply from over-walking himself. Still, it was just as well to
ride home.’

Relieved from her apprehensions on Owen’s score, she was able slightly
to examine the appearance of her informant--Edward Springrove--who now
removed his hat for a while, to cool himself. He was rather above her
brother’s height. Although the upper part of his face and head was
handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine
regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely
pencilled for one of his sex; without prejudice, however, to the belief
which the sum total of his features inspired--that though they did not
prove that the man who thought inside them would do much in the
world, men who had done most of all had had no better ones. Across his
forehead, otherwise perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy
freshness of his remaining features expressing that it had come there
prematurely.

Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids
good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to house-hunting
and investments, he had reached the period in a young man’s life when
episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a disappointing death, have
begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit of generalities; his glance
sometimes seeming to state, ‘I have already thought out the issue of
such conditions as these we are experiencing.’ At other times he wore an
abstracted look: ‘I seem to have lived through this moment before.’

He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black
kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and stood
obliquely--a deposit of white dust having lodged in the creases.

‘I am sorry for your disappointment,’ he continued, glancing into
her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked
together, and the single instant only which good breeding allows as
the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear penetrating ray of
intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those
unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand
has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger
than mathematical proof, the conviction, ‘A tie has begun to unite us.’

Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much in
each other’s thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young architect of
his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young architect.

A conversation began, which was none the less interesting to the parties
engaged because it consisted only of the most trivial and commonplace
remarks. Then the band of harps and violins struck up a lively melody,
and the deck was cleared for dancing; the sun dipping beneath the
horizon during the proceeding, and the moon showing herself at their
stern. The sea was so calm, that the soft hiss produced by the
bursting of the innumerable bubbles of foam behind the paddles could be
distinctly heard. The passengers who did not dance, including Cytherea
and Springrove, lapsed into silence, leaning against the paddle-boxes,
or standing aloof--noticing the trembling of the deck to the steps of
the dance--watching the waves from the paddles as they slid thinly and
easily under each other’s edges.

Night had quite closed in by the time they reached Budmouth harbour,
sparkling with its white, red, and green lights in opposition to the
shimmering path of the moon’s reflection on the other side, which
reached away to the horizon till the flecked ripples reduced themselves
to sparkles as fine as gold dust.

‘I will walk to the station and find out the exact time the train
arrives,’ said Springrove, rather eagerly, when they had landed.

She thanked him much.

‘Perhaps we might walk together,’ he suggested hesitatingly. She looked
as if she did not quite know, and he settled the question by showing the
way.

They found, on arriving there, that on the first day of that month
the particular train selected for Graye’s return had ceased to stop at
Anglebury station.

‘I am very sorry I misled him,’ said Springrove.

‘O, I am not alarmed at all,’ replied Cytherea.

‘Well, it’s sure to be all right--he will sleep there, and come by the
first in the morning. But what will you do, alone?’

‘I am quite easy on that point; the landlady is very friendly. I must go
indoors now. Good-night, Mr. Springrove.’

‘Let me go round to your door with you?’ he pleaded.

‘No, thank you; we live close by.’

He looked at her as a waiter looks at the change he brings back. But she
was inexorable.

‘Don’t--forget me,’ he murmured. She did not answer.

‘Let me see you sometimes,’ he said.

‘Perhaps you never will again--I am going away,’ she replied in
lingering tones; and turning into Cross Street, ran indoors and
upstairs.

The sudden withdrawal of what was superfluous at first, is often felt as
an essential loss. It was felt now with regard to the maiden. More, too,
after a meeting so pleasant and so enkindling, she had seemed to imply
that they would never come together again.

The young man softly followed her, stood opposite the house and watched
her come into the upper room with the light. Presently his gaze was cut
short by her approaching the window and pulling down the blind--Edward
dwelling upon her vanishing figure with a hopeless sense of loss akin to
that which Adam is said by logicians to have felt when he first saw the
sun set, and thought, in his inexperience, that it would return no more.

He waited till her shadow had twice crossed the window, when, finding
the charming outline was not to be expected again, he left the street,
crossed the harbour-bridge, and entered his own solitary chamber on the
other side, vaguely thinking as he went (for undefined reasons),

   ‘One hope is too like despair
   For prudence to smother.’




III. THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS

1. FROM THE TWENTY-SECOND TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF JULY

But things are not what they seem. A responsive love for Edward
Springrove had made its appearance in Cytherea’s bosom with all the
fascinating attributes of a first experience, not succeeding to or
displacing other emotions, as in older hearts, but taking up entirely
new ground; as when gazing just after sunset at the pale blue sky we see
a star come into existence where nothing was before.

His parting words, ‘Don’t forget me,’ she repeated to herself a hundred
times, and though she thought their import was probably commonplace, she
could not help toying with them,--looking at them from all points,
and investing them with meanings of love and faithfulness,--ostensibly
entertaining such meanings only as fables wherewith to pass the time,
yet in her heart admitting, for detached instants, a possibility of
their deeper truth. And thus, for hours after he had left her, her
reason flirted with her fancy as a kitten will sport with a dove,
pleasantly and smoothly through easy attitudes, but disclosing its cruel
and unyielding nature at crises.

To turn now to the more material media through which this story moves,
it so happened that the very next morning brought round a circumstance
which, slight in itself, took up a relevant and important position
between the past and the future of the persons herein concerned.

At breakfast time, just as Cytherea had again seen the postman pass
without bringing her an answer to the advertisement, as she had fully
expected he would do, Owen entered the room.

‘Well,’ he said, kissing her, ‘you have not been alarmed, of course.
Springrove told you what I had done, and you found there was no train?’

‘Yes, it was all clear. But what is the lameness owing to?’

‘I don’t know--nothing. It has quite gone off now... Cytherea, I hope
you like Springrove. Springrove’s a nice fellow, you know.’

‘Yes. I think he is, except that--’

‘It happened just to the purpose that I should meet him there, didn’t
it? And when I reached the station and learnt that I could not get on by
train my foot seemed better. I started off to walk home, and went about
five miles along a path beside the railway. It then struck me that I
might not be fit for anything to-day if I walked and aggravated the
bothering foot, so I looked for a place to sleep at. There was
no available village or inn, and I eventually got the keeper of a
gate-house, where a lane crossed the line, to take me in.’

They proceeded with their breakfast. Owen yawned.

‘You didn’t get much sleep at the gate-house last night, I’m afraid,
Owen,’ said his sister.

‘To tell the truth, I didn’t. I was in such very close and narrow
quarters. Those gate-houses are such small places, and the man had
only his own bed to offer me. Ah, by-the-bye, Cythie, I have such an
extraordinary thing to tell you in connection with this man!--by Jove,
I had nearly forgotten it! But I’ll go straight on. As I was saying,
he had only his own bed to offer me, but I could not afford to be
fastidious, and as he had a hearty manner, though a very queer one, I
agreed to accept it, and he made a rough pallet for himself on the floor
close beside me. Well, I could not sleep for my life, and I wished I had
not stayed there, though I was so tired. For one thing, there were the
luggage trains rattling by at my elbow the early part of the night. But
worse than this, he talked continually in his sleep, and occasionally
struck out with his limbs at something or another, knocking against the
post of the bedstead and making it tremble. My condition was altogether
so unsatisfactory that at last I awoke him, and asked him what he had
been dreaming about for the previous hour, for I could get no sleep at
all. He begged my pardon for disturbing me, but a name I had casually
let fall that evening had led him to think of another stranger he had
once had visit him, who had also accidentally mentioned the same name,
and some very strange incidents connected with that meeting. The affair
had occurred years and years ago; but what I had said had made him think
and dream about it as if it were but yesterday. What was the word? I
said. “Cytherea,” he said. What was the story? I asked then. He then
told me that when he was a young man in London he borrowed a few pounds
to add to a few he had saved up, and opened a little inn at Hammersmith.
One evening, after the inn had been open about a couple of months,
every idler in the neighbourhood ran off to Westminster. The Houses of
Parliament were on fire.

‘Not a soul remained in his parlour besides himself, and he began
picking up the pipes and glasses his customers had hastily relinquished.
At length a young lady about seventeen or eighteen came in. She asked
if a woman was there waiting for herself--Miss Jane Taylor. He said no;
asked the young lady if she would wait, and showed her into the small
inner room. There was a glass-pane in the partition dividing this room
from the bar to enable the landlord to see if his visitors, who sat
there, wanted anything. A curious awkwardness and melancholy about the
behaviour of the girl who called, caused my informant to look frequently
at her through the partition. She seemed weary of her life, and sat with
her face buried in her hands, evidently quite out of her element in
such a house. Then a woman much older came in and greeted Miss Taylor by
name. The man distinctly heard the following words pass between them:--

‘“Why have you not brought him?”

‘“He is ill; he is not likely to live through the night.”

‘At this announcement from the elderly woman, the young lady fell to the
floor in a swoon, apparently overcome by the news. The landlord ran in
and lifted her up. Well, do what they would they could not for a long
time bring her back to consciousness, and began to be much alarmed. “Who
is she?” the innkeeper said to the other woman. “I know her,” the other
said, with deep meaning in her tone. The elderly and young woman seemed
allied, and yet strangers.

‘She now showed signs of life, and it struck him (he was plainly of an
inquisitive turn), that in her half-bewildered state he might get some
information from her. He stooped over her, put his mouth to her ear,
and said sharply, “What’s your name?” “To catch a woman napping
is difficult, even when she’s half dead; but I did it,” says the
gatekeeper. When he asked her her name, she said immediately--

‘“Cytherea”--and stopped suddenly.’

‘My own name!’ said Cytherea.

‘Yes--your name. Well, the gateman thought at the time it might be
equally with Jane a name she had invented for the occasion, that they
might not trace her; but I think it was truth unconsciously uttered,
for she added directly afterwards: “O, what have I said!” and was quite
overcome again--this time with fright. Her vexation that the woman now
doubted the genuineness of her other name was very much greater than
that the innkeeper did, and it is evident that to blind the woman was
her main object. He also learnt from words the elderly woman casually
dropped, that meetings of the same kind had been held before, and that
the falseness of the soi-disant Miss Jane Taylor’s name had never been
suspected by this dependent or confederate till then.

‘She recovered, rested there for an hour, and first sending off her
companion peremptorily (which was another odd thing), she left the
house, offering the landlord all the money she had to say nothing about
the circumstance. He has never seen her since, according to his
own account. I said to him again and again, “Did you find any more
particulars afterwards?” “Not a syllable,” he said. O, he should never
hear any more of that! too many years had passed since it happened. “At
any rate, you found out her surname?” I said. “Well, well, that’s my
secret,” he went on. “Perhaps I should never have been in this part of
the world if it hadn’t been for that. I failed as a publican, you know.”
 I imagine the situation of gateman was given him and his debts paid off
as a bribe to silence; but I can’t say. “Ah, yes!” he said, with a long
breath. “I have never heard that name mentioned since that time till
to-night, and then there instantly rose to my eyes the vision of that
young lady lying in a fainting fit.” He then stopped talking and fell
asleep. Telling the story must have relieved him as it did the Ancient
Mariner, for he did not move a muscle or make another sound for the
remainder of the night. Now isn’t that an odd story?’

‘It is indeed,’ Cytherea murmured. ‘Very, very strange.’

‘Why should she have said your most uncommon name?’ continued Owen. ‘The
man was evidently truthful, for there was not motive sufficient for his
invention of such a tale, and he could not have done it either.’

Cytherea looked long at her brother. ‘Don’t you recognize anything else
in connection with the story?’ she said.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Do you remember what poor papa once let drop--that Cytherea was
the name of his first sweetheart in Bloomsbury, who so mysteriously
renounced him? A sort of intuition tells me that this was the same
woman.’

‘O no--not likely,’ said her brother sceptically.

‘How not likely, Owen? There’s not another woman of the name in England.
In what year used papa to say the event took place?’

‘Eighteen hundred and thirty-five.’

‘And when were the Houses of Parliament burnt?--stop, I can tell you.’
She searched their little stock of books for a list of dates, and found
one in an old school history.

‘The Houses of Parliament were burnt down in the evening of the
sixteenth of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-four.’

‘Nearly a year and a quarter before she met father,’ remarked Owen.

They were silent. ‘If papa had been alive, what a wonderful absorbing
interest this story would have had for him,’ said Cytherea by-and-by.
‘And how strangely knowledge comes to us. We might have searched for a
clue to her secret half the world over, and never found one. If we had
really had any motive for trying to discover more of the sad history
than papa told us, we should have gone to Bloomsbury; but not caring to
do so, we go two hundred miles in the opposite direction, and there
find information waiting to be told us. What could have been the secret,
Owen?’

‘Heaven knows. But our having heard a little more of her in this way (if
she is the same woman) is a mere coincidence after all--a family story
to tell our friends if we ever have any. But we shall never know any
more of the episode now--trust our fates for that.’

Cytherea sat silently thinking.

‘There was no answer this morning to your advertisement, Cytherea?’ he
continued.

‘None.’

‘I could see that by your looks when I came in.’

‘Fancy not getting a single one,’ she said sadly. ‘Surely there must be
people somewhere who want governesses?’

‘Yes; but those who want them, and can afford to have them, get them
mostly by friends’ recommendations; whilst those who want them, and
can’t afford to have them, make use of their poor relations.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘Never mind it. Go on living with me. Don’t let the difficulty trouble
your mind so; you think about it all day. I can keep you, Cythie, in a
plain way of living. Twenty-five shillings a week do not amount to
much truly; but then many mechanics have no more, and we live quite as
sparingly as journeymen mechanics... It is a meagre narrow life we are
drifting into,’ he added gloomily, ‘but it is a degree more tolerable
than the worrying sensation of all the world being ashamed of you, which
we experienced at Hocbridge.’

‘I couldn’t go back there again,’ she said.

‘Nor I. O, I don’t regret our course for a moment. We did quite right in
dropping out of the world.’ The sneering tones of the remark were almost
too laboured to be real. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘something better for
me is sure to turn up soon. I wish my engagement here was a permanent
one instead of for only two months. It may, certainly, be for a longer
time, but all is uncertain.’

‘I wish I could get something to do; and I must too,’ she said firmly.
‘Suppose, as is very probable, you are not wanted after the beginning of
October--the time Mr. Gradfield mentioned--what should we do if I were
dependent on you only throughout the winter?’

They pondered on numerous schemes by which a young lady might be
supposed to earn a decent livelihood--more or less convenient and
feasible in imagination, but relinquished them all until advertising had
been once more tried, this time taking lower ground. Cytherea was vexed
at her temerity in having represented to the world that so inexperienced
a being as herself was a qualified governess; and had a fancy that this
presumption of hers might be one reason why no ladies applied. The new
and humbler attempt appeared in the following form:--


  ‘NURSERY GOVERNESS OR USEFUL COMPANION. A young person wishes to
  hear of a situation in either of the above capacities. Salary very
  moderate. She is a good needle-woman--Address G., 3 Cross Street,
  Budmouth.’


In the evening they went to post the letter, and then walked up and down
the Parade for a while. Soon they met Springrove, said a few words
to him, and passed on. Owen noticed that his sister’s face had become
crimson. Rather oddly they met Springrove again in a few minutes. This
time the three walked a little way together, Edward ostensibly talking
to Owen, though with a single thought to the reception of his words by
the maiden at the farther side, upon whom his gaze was mostly resting,
and who was attentively listening--looking fixedly upon the pavement the
while. It has been said that men love with their eyes; women with their
ears.

As Owen and himself were little more than acquaintances as yet, and as
Springrove was wanting in the assurance of many men of his age, it now
became necessary to wish his friends good-evening, or to find a reason
for continuing near Cytherea by saying some nice new thing. He thought
of a new thing; he proposed a pull across the bay. This was assented
to. They went to the pier; stepped into one of the gaily painted boats
moored alongside and sheered off. Cytherea sat in the stern steering.

They rowed that evening; the next came, and with it the necessity of
rowing again. Then the next, and the next, Cytherea always sitting in
the stern with the tiller ropes in her hand. The curves of her figure
welded with those of the fragile boat in perfect continuation, as she
girlishly yielded herself to its heaving and sinking, seeming to form
with it an organic whole.

Then Owen was inclined to test his skill in paddling a canoe. Edward
did not like canoes, and the issue was, that, having seen Owen on board,
Springrove proposed to pull off after him with a pair of sculls; but
not considering himself sufficiently accomplished to do finished rowing
before a parade full of promenaders when there was a little swell on,
and with the rudder unshipped in addition, he begged that Cytherea might
come with him and steer as before. She stepped in, and they floated
along in the wake of her brother. Thus passed the fifth evening on the
water.

But the sympathetic pair were thrown into still closer companionship,
and much more exclusive connection.

2. JULY THE TWENTY-NINTH

It was a sad time for Cytherea--the last day of Springrove’s management
at Gradfield’s, and the last evening before his return from Budmouth to
his father’s house, previous to his departure for London.

Graye had been requested by the architect to survey a plot of land
nearly twenty miles off, which, with the journey to and fro, would
occupy him the whole day, and prevent his returning till late in the
evening. Cytherea made a companion of her landlady to the extent of
sharing meals and sitting with her during the morning of her
brother’s absence. Mid-day found her restless and miserable under this
arrangement. All the afternoon she sat alone, looking out of the window
for she scarcely knew whom, and hoping she scarcely knew what. Half-past
five o’clock came--the end of Springrove’s official day. Two minutes
later Springrove walked by.

She endured her solitude for another half-hour, and then could endure no
longer. She had hoped--while affecting to fear--that Edward would have
found some reason or other for calling, but it seemed that he had not.
Hastily dressing herself she went out, when the farce of an accidental
meeting was repeated. Edward came upon her in the street at the first
turning, and, like the Great Duke Ferdinand in ‘The Statue and the
Bust’--

   ‘He looked at her as a lover can;
   She looked at him as one who awakes--
   The past was a sleep, and her life began.’

‘Shall we have a boat?’ he said impulsively.

How blissful it all is at first. Perhaps, indeed, the only bliss in
the course of love which can truly be called Eden-like is that which
prevails immediately after doubt has ended and before reflection has set
in--at the dawn of the emotion, when it is not recognized by name, and
before the consideration of what this love is, has given birth to the
consideration of what difficulties it tends to create; when on the man’s
part, the mistress appears to the mind’s eye in picturesque, hazy, and
fresh morning lights, and soft morning shadows; when, as yet, she is
known only as the wearer of one dress, which shares her own personality;
as the stander in one special position, the giver of one bright
particular glance, and the speaker of one tender sentence; when, on
her part, she is timidly careful over what she says and does, lest she
should be misconstrued or under-rated to the breadth of a shadow of a
hair.

‘Shall we have a boat?’ he said again, more softly, seeing that to
his first question she had not answered, but looked uncertainly at the
ground, then almost, but not quite, in his face, blushed a series of
minute blushes, left off in the midst of them, and showed the usual
signs of perplexity in a matter of the emotions.

Owen had always been with her before, but there was now a force of habit
in the proceeding, and with Arcadian innocence she assumed that a row on
the water was, under any circumstances, a natural thing. Without another
word being spoken on either side, they went down the steps. He carefully
handed her in, took his seat, slid noiselessly off the sand, and away
from the shore.

They thus sat facing each other in the graceful yellow cockle-shell,
and his eyes frequently found a resting-place in the depths of hers. The
boat was so small that at each return of the sculls, when his hands came
forward to begin the pull, they approached so near to her that her vivid
imagination began to thrill her with a fancy that he was going to clasp
his arms round her. The sensation grew so strong that she could not run
the risk of again meeting his eyes at those critical moments, and turned
aside to inspect the distant horizon; then she grew weary of looking
sideways, and was driven to return to her natural position again. At
this instant he again leant forward to begin, and met her glance by
an ardent fixed gaze. An involuntary impulse of girlish embarrassment
caused her to give a vehement pull at the tiller-rope, which brought the
boat’s head round till they stood directly for shore.

His eyes, which had dwelt upon her form during the whole time of her
look askance, now left her; he perceived the direction in which they
were going.

‘Why, you have completely turned the boat, Miss Graye?’ he said, looking
over his shoulder. ‘Look at our track on the water--a great semicircle,
preceded by a series of zigzags as far as we can see.’

She looked attentively. ‘Is it my fault or yours?’ she inquired. ‘Mine,
I suppose?’

‘I can’t help saying that it is yours.’

She dropped the ropes decisively, feeling the slightest twinge of
vexation at the answer.

‘Why do you let go?’

‘I do it so badly.’

‘O no; you turned about for shore in a masterly way. Do you wish to
return?’

‘Yes, if you please.’

‘Of course, then, I will at once.’

‘I fear what the people will think of us--going in such absurd
directions, and all through my wretched steering.’

‘Never mind what the people think.’ A pause. ‘You surely are not so weak
as to mind what the people think on such a matter as that?’

Those words might almost be called too firm and hard to be given by him
to her; but never mind. For almost the first time in her life she felt
the charming sensation, although on such an insignificant subject, of
being compelled into an opinion by a man she loved. Owen, though
less yielding physically, and more practical, would not have had the
intellectual independence to answer a woman thus. She replied quietly
and honestly--as honestly as when she had stated the contrary fact a
minute earlier--

‘I don’t mind.’

‘I’ll unship the tiller that you may have nothing to do going back but
to hold your parasol,’ he continued, and arose to perform the operation,
necessarily leaning closely against her, to guard against the risk
of capsizing the boat as he reached his hands astern. His warm breath
touched and crept round her face like a caress; but he was apparently
only concerned with his task. She looked guilty of something when he
seated himself. He read in her face what that something was--she had
experienced a pleasure from his touch. But he flung a practical glance
over his shoulder, seized the oars, and they sped in a straight line
towards the shore.

Cytherea saw that he noted in her face what had passed in her heart,
and that noting it, he continued as decided as before. She was inwardly
distressed. She had not meant him to translate her words about returning
home so literally at the first; she had not intended him to learn her
secret; but more than all she was not able to endure the perception of
his learning it and continuing unmoved.

There was nothing but misery to come now. They would step ashore; he
would say good-night, go to London to-morrow, and the miserable She
would lose him for ever. She did not quite suppose what was the fact,
that a parallel thought was simultaneously passing through his mind.

They were now within ten yards, now within five; he was only now waiting
for a ‘smooth’ to bring the boat in. Sweet, sweet Love must not be
slain thus, was the fair maid’s reasoning. She was equal to the
occasion--ladies are--and delivered the god--

‘Do you want very much to land, Mr. Springrove?’ she said, letting her
young violet eyes pine at him a very, very little.

‘I? Not at all,’ said he, looking an astonishment at her inquiry which a
slight twinkle of his eye half belied. ‘But you do?’

‘I think that now we have come out, and it is such a pleasant evening,’
she said gently and sweetly, ‘I should like a little longer row if you
don’t mind? I’ll try to steer better than before if it makes it easier
for you. I’ll try very hard.’

It was the turn of his face to tell a tale now. He looked, ‘We
understand each other--ah, we do, darling!’ turned the boat, and pulled
back into the Bay once more.

‘Now steer wherever you will,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Never mind the
directness of the course--wherever you will.’

‘Shall it be Creston Shore?’ she said, pointing to a stretch of beach
northward from Budmouth Esplanade.

‘Creston Shore certainly,’ he responded, grasping the sculls. She took
the strings daintily, and they wound away to the left.

For a long time nothing was audible in the boat but the regular dip
of the oars, and their movement in the rowlocks. Springrove at length
spoke.

‘I must go away to-morrow,’ he said tentatively.

‘Yes,’ she replied faintly.

‘To endeavour to advance a little in my profession in London.’

‘Yes,’ she said again, with the same preoccupied softness.

‘But I shan’t advance.’

‘Why not? Architecture is a bewitching profession. They say that an
architect’s work is another man’s play.’

‘Yes. But worldly advantage from an art doesn’t depend upon mastering
it. I used to think it did; but it doesn’t. Those who get rich need have
no skill at all as artists.’

‘What need they have?’

‘A certain kind of energy which men with any fondness for art possess
very seldom indeed--an earnestness in making acquaintances, and a love
for using them. They give their whole attention to the art of
dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve up in
conversation. Now after saying that, do I seem a man likely to make a
name?’

‘You seem a man likely to make a mistake.’

‘What’s that?’

‘To give too much room to the latent feeling which is rather common
in these days among the unappreciated, that because some remarkably
successful men are fools, all remarkably unsuccessful men are geniuses.’

‘Pretty subtle for a young lady,’ he said slowly. ‘From that remark I
should fancy you had bought experience.’

She passed over the idea. ‘Do try to succeed,’ she said, with wistful
thoughtfulness, leaving her eyes on him.

Springrove flushed a little at the earnestness of her words, and mused.
‘Then, like Cato the Censor, I shall do what I despise, to be in the
fashion,’ he said at last... ‘Well, when I found all this out that I
was speaking of, what ever do you think I did? From having already
loved verse passionately, I went on to read it continually; then I went
rhyming myself. If anything on earth ruins a man for useful occupation,
and for content with reasonable success in a profession or trade, it is
the habit of writing verses on emotional subjects, which had much better
be left to die from want of nourishment.’

‘Do you write poems now?’ she said.

‘None. Poetical days are getting past with me, according to the usual
rule. Writing rhymes is a stage people of my sort pass through, as they
pass through the stage of shaving for a beard, or thinking they are
ill-used, or saying there’s nothing in the world worth living for.’

‘Then the difference between a common man and a recognized poet is, that
one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues
deluded all his days.’

‘Well, there’s just enough truth in what you say, to make the remark
unbearable. However, it doesn’t matter to me now that I “meditate the
thankless Muse” no longer, but....’ He paused, as if endeavouring to
think what better thing he did.

Cytherea’s mind ran on to the succeeding lines of the poem, and their
startling harmony with the present situation suggested the fancy that he
was ‘sporting’ with her, and brought an awkward contemplativeness to her
face.

Springrove guessed her thoughts, and in answer to them simply said
‘Yes.’ Then they were silent again.

‘If I had known an Amaryllis was coming here, I should not have made
arrangements for leaving,’ he resumed.

Such levity, superimposed on the notion of ‘sport’, was intolerable to
Cytherea; for a woman seems never to see any but the serious side of her
attachment, though the most devoted lover has all the time a vague and
dim perception that he is losing his old dignity and frittering away his
time.

‘But will you not try again to get on in your profession? Try once
more; do try once more,’ she murmured. ‘I am going to try again. I have
advertised for something to do.’

‘Of course I will,’ he said, with an eager gesture and smile. ‘But we
must remember that the fame of Christopher Wren himself depended upon
the accident of a fire in Pudding Lane. My successes seem to come very
slowly. I often think, that before I am ready to live, it will be time
for me to die. However, I am trying--not for fame now, but for an easy
life of reasonable comfort.’

It is a melancholy truth for the middle classes, that in proportion
as they develop, by the study of poetry and art, their capacity for
conjugal love of the highest and purest kind, they limit the possibility
of their being able to exercise it--the very act putting out of their
power the attainment of means sufficient for marriage. The man who works
up a good income has had no time to learn love to its solemn extreme;
the man who has learnt that has had no time to get rich.

‘And if you should fail--utterly fail to get that reasonable wealth,’
she said earnestly, ‘don’t be perturbed. The truly great stand upon no
middle ledge; they are either famous or unknown.’

‘Unknown,’ he said, ‘if their ideas have been allowed to flow with
a sympathetic breadth. Famous only if they have been convergent and
exclusive.’

‘Yes; and I am afraid from that, that my remark was but discouragement,
wearing the dress of comfort. Perhaps I was not quite right in--’

‘It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great. But the
long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a thing if
they want to succeed in it--not giving way to over-much admiration
for the flowers they see growing in other people’s borders; which I am
afraid has been my case.’ He looked into the far distance and paused.

Adherence to a course with persistence sufficient to ensure success is
possible to widely appreciative minds only when there is also found
in them a power--commonplace in its nature, but rare in such
combination--the power of assuming to conviction that in the outlying
paths which appear so much more brilliant than their own, there are
bitternesses equally great--unperceived simply on account of their
remoteness.

They were opposite Ringsworth Shore. The cliffs here were formed of
strata completely contrasting with those of the further side of the Bay,
whilst in and beneath the water hard boulders had taken the place of
sand and shingle, between which, however, the sea glided noiselessly,
without breaking the crest of a single wave, so strikingly calm was the
air. The breeze had entirely died away, leaving the water of that rare
glassy smoothness which is unmarked even by the small dimples of the
least aerial movement. Purples and blues of divers shades were reflected
from this mirror accordingly as each undulation sloped east or west.
They could see the rocky bottom some twenty feet beneath them,
luxuriant with weeds of various growths, and dotted with pulpy creatures
reflecting a silvery and spangled radiance upwards to their eyes.

At length she looked at him to learn the effect of her words of
encouragement. He had let the oars drift alongside, and the boat had
come to a standstill. Everything on earth seemed taking a contemplative
rest, as if waiting to hear the avowal of something from his lips. At
that instant he appeared to break a resolution hitherto zealously kept.
Leaving his seat amidships he came and gently edged himself down beside
her upon the narrow seat at the stern.

She breathed more quickly and warmly: he took her right hand in his own
right: it was not withdrawn. He put his left hand behind her neck till
it came round upon her left cheek: it was not thrust away. Lightly
pressing her, he brought her face and mouth towards his own; when, at
this the very brink, some unaccountable thought or spell within him
suddenly made him halt--even now, and as it seemed as much to himself as
to her, he timidly whispered ‘May I?’

Her endeavour was to say No, so denuded of its flesh and sinews that its
nature would hardly be recognized, or in other words a No from so near
the affirmative frontier as to be affected with the Yes accent. It was
thus a whispered No, drawn out to nearly a quarter of a minute’s length,
the O making itself audible as a sound like the spring coo of a pigeon
on unusually friendly terms with its mate. Though conscious of her
success in producing the kind of word she had wished to produce, she at
the same time trembled in suspense as to how it would be taken. But the
time available for doubt was so short as to admit of scarcely more than
half a pulsation: pressing closer he kissed her. Then he kissed her
again with a longer kiss.

It was the supremely happy moment of their experience. The ‘bloom’ and
the ‘purple light’ were strong on the lineaments of both. Their hearts
could hardly believe the evidence of their lips.

‘I love you, and you love me, Cytherea!’ he whispered.

She did not deny it; and all seemed well. The gentle sounds around them
from the hills, the plains, the distant town, the adjacent shore, the
water heaving at their side, the kiss, and the long kiss, were all ‘many
a voice of one delight,’ and in unison with each other.

But his mind flew back to the same unpleasant thought which had been
connected with the resolution he had broken a minute or two earlier. ‘I
could be a slave at my profession to win you, Cytherea; I would work at
the meanest, honest trade to be near you--much less claim you as mine; I
would--anything. But I have not told you all; it is not this; you don’t
know what there is yet to tell. Could you forgive as you can love?’ She
was alarmed to see that he had become pale with the question.

‘No--do not speak,’ he said. ‘I have kept something from you, which has
now become the cause of a great uneasiness. I had no right--to love you;
but I did it. Something forbade--’

‘What?’ she exclaimed.

‘Something forbade me--till the kiss--yes, till the kiss came; and now
nothing shall forbid it! We’ll hope in spite of all... I must, however,
speak of this love of ours to your brother. Dearest, you had better go
indoors whilst I meet him at the station, and explain everything.’

Cytherea’s short-lived bliss was dead and gone. O, if she had known of
this sequel would she have allowed him to break down the barrier of mere
acquaintanceship--never, never!

‘Will you not explain to me?’ she faintly urged. Doubt--indefinite,
carking doubt had taken possession of her.

‘Not now. You alarm yourself unnecessarily,’ he said tenderly. ‘My only
reason for keeping silence is that with my present knowledge I may tell
an untrue story. It may be that there is nothing to tell. I am to blame
for haste in alluding to any such thing. Forgive me, sweet--forgive me.’
Her heart was ready to burst, and she could not answer him. He returned
to his place and took to the oars.

They again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of houses,
lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky. The sun
had set, and a star or two began to peep out. They drew nearer their
destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly with his eyes the
red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear as black ones in the
increasing dusk of evening. She surveyed the long line of lamps on the
sea-wall of the town, now looking small and yellow, and seeming to send
long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea. By-and-by they
reached the landing-steps. He took her hand as before, and found it as
cold as the water about them. It was not relinquished till he reached
her door. His assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner:
he saw that she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured
sparrow. Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the
Esplanade.

Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she did
in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out of sight
she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to see him
sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement behind him,
forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as she mused in his
neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding, the notes of pianos
and singing voices from the fashionable houses at her back, from the
open windows of which the lamp-light streamed to join that of the
orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay in front. Then Edward
began to pace up and down, and Cytherea, fearing that he would notice
her, hastened homeward, flinging him a last look as she passed out of
sight. No promise from him to write: no request that she herself would
do so--nothing but an indefinite expression of hope in the face of some
fear unknown to her. Alas, alas!

When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room, and
creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered her there
lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her hat and
jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and succumbed to
the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-blown love. The wet
traces of tears were yet visible upon her long drooping lashes.

     ‘Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
     A living death, and ever-dying life.’

‘Cytherea,’ he whispered, kissing her. She awoke with a start, and
vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment. ‘He’s gone!’ she
said.

‘He has told me all,’ said Graye soothingly. ‘He is going off early
to-morrow morning. ‘Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and
cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.’

‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then jumping up--‘Owen, has he told
you _all_?’

‘All of your love from beginning to end,’ he said simply.

Edward then had not told more--as he ought to have done: yet she could
not convict him. But she would struggle against his fetters. She tingled
to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility that he might be
deluding her.

‘Owen,’ she continued, with dignity, ‘what is he to me? Nothing. I must
dismiss such weakness as this--believe me, I will. Something far more
pressing must drive it away. I have been looking my position steadily
in the face, and I must get a living somehow. I mean to advertise once
more.’

‘Advertising is no use.’

‘This one will be.’ He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her
answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it him.
‘See what I am going to do,’ she said sadly, almost bitterly. This was
her third effort:--


  ‘LADY’S-MAID. Inexperienced. Age eighteen.--G., 3 Cross Street,
  Budmouth.’


Owen--Owen the respectable--looked blank astonishment. He repeated in a
nameless, varying tone, the two words--

‘Lady’s-maid!’

‘Yes; lady’s-maid. ‘Tis an honest profession,’ said Cytherea bravely.

‘But _you_, Cytherea?’

‘Yes, I--who am I?’

‘You will never be a lady’s-maid--never, I am quite sure.’

‘I shall try to be, at any rate.’

‘Such a disgrace--’

‘Nonsense! I maintain that it is no disgrace!’ she said, rather warmly.
‘You know very well--’

‘Well, since you will, you must,’ he interrupted. ‘Why do you put
“inexperienced?”’

‘Because I am.’

‘Never mind that--scratch out “inexperienced.” We are poor, Cytherea,
aren’t we?’ he murmured, after a silence, ‘and it seems that the two
months will close my engagement here.’

‘We can put up with being poor,’ she said, ‘if they only give us work
to do.... Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as a curse, and
even that is denied. However, be cheerful, Owen, and never mind!’

In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the
brighter endurance of women at these epochs--invaluable, sweet, angelic,
as it is--owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out
many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness
intense enough to quell them.




IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY

1. AUGUST THE FOURTH. TILL FOUR O’CLOCK

The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea’s last
note of hope in the way of advertisement--not from a distance of
hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent--as Cytherea
seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means adopted for
obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of that in which
she was living--a country mansion not twenty miles off. The reply ran
thus:--


                      KNAPWATER HOUSE,
                         August 3, 1864.

‘Miss Aldclyffe is in want of a young person as lady’s-maid. The duties
of the place are light. Miss Aldclyffe will be in Budmouth on Thursday,
when (should G. still not have heard of a place) she would like to see
her at the Belvedere Hotel, Esplanade, at four o’clock. No answer need
be returned to this note.’


A little earlier than the time named, Cytherea, clothed in a modest
bonnet, and a black silk jacket, turned down to the hotel. Expectation,
the fresh air from the water, the bright, far-extending outlook, raised
the most delicate of pink colours to her cheeks, and restored to her
tread a portion of that elasticity which her past troubles, and thoughts
of Edward, had well-nigh taken away.

She entered the vestibule, and went to the window of the bar.

‘Is Miss Aldclyffe here?’ she said to a nicely-dressed barmaid in the
foreground, who was talking to a landlady covered with chains, knobs,
and clamps of gold, in the background.

‘No, she isn’t,’ said the barmaid, not very civilly. Cytherea looked a
shade too pretty for a plain dresser.

‘Miss Aldclyffe is expected here,’ the landlady said to a third person,
out of sight, in the tone of one who had known for several days the fact
newly discovered from Cytherea. ‘Get ready her room--be quick.’ From the
alacrity with which the order was given and taken, it seemed to Cytherea
that Miss Aldclyffe must be a woman of considerable importance.

‘You are to have an interview with Miss Aldclyffe here?’ the landlady
inquired.

‘Yes.’

‘The young person had better wait,’ continued the landlady. With a
money-taker’s intuition she had rightly divined that Cytherea would
bring no profit to the house.

Cytherea was shown into a nondescript chamber, on the shady side of the
building, which appeared to be either bedroom or dayroom, as occasion
necessitated, and was one of a suite at the end of the first-floor
corridor. The prevailing colour of the walls, curtains, carpet, and
coverings of furniture, was more or less blue, to which the cold light
coming from the north easterly sky, and falling on a wide roof of new
slates--the only object the small window commanded--imparted a more
striking paleness. But underneath the door, communicating with the next
room of the suite, gleamed an infinitesimally small, yet very powerful,
fraction of contrast--a very thin line of ruddy light, showing that the
sun beamed strongly into this room adjoining. The line of radiance was
the only cheering thing visible in the place.

People give way to very infantine thoughts and actions when they wait;
the battle-field of life is temporarily fenced off by a hard and fast
line--the interview. Cytherea fixed her eyes idly upon the streak, and
began picturing a wonderful paradise on the other side as the source
of such a beam--reminding her of the well-known good deed in a naughty
world.

Whilst she watched the particles of dust floating before the brilliant
chink she heard a carriage and horses stop opposite the front of the
house. Afterwards came the rustle of a lady’s skirts down the corridor,
and into the room communicating with the one Cytherea occupied.

The golden line vanished in parts like the phosphorescent streak caused
by the striking of a match; there was the fall of a light footstep
on the floor just behind it: then a pause. Then the foot tapped
impatiently, and ‘There’s no one here!’ was spoken imperiously by a
lady’s tongue.

‘No, madam; in the next room. I am going to fetch her,’ said the
attendant.

‘That will do--or you needn’t go in; I will call her.’

Cytherea had risen, and she advanced to the middle door with the chink
under it as the servant retired. She had just laid her hand on the knob,
when it slipped round within her fingers, and the door was pulled open
from the other side.

2. FOUR O’CLOCK

The direct blaze of the afternoon sun, partly refracted through the
crimson curtains of the window, and heightened by reflections from the
crimson-flock paper which covered the walls, and a carpet on the floor
of the same tint, shone with a burning glow round the form of a lady
standing close to Cytherea’s front with the door in her hand. The
stranger appeared to the maiden’s eyes--fresh from the blue gloom, and
assisted by an imagination fresh from nature--like a tall black figure
standing in the midst of fire. It was the figure of a finely-built
woman, of spare though not angular proportions.

Cytherea involuntarily shaded her eyes with her hand, retreated a step
or two, and then she could for the first time see Miss Aldclyffe’s face
in addition to her outline, lit up by the secondary and softer light
that was reflected from the varnished panels of the door. She was not
a very young woman, but could boast of much beauty of the majestic
autumnal phase.

‘O,’ said the lady, ‘come this way.’ Cytherea followed her to the
embrasure of the window.

Both the women showed off themselves to advantage as they walked forward
in the orange light; and each showed too in her face that she had
been struck with her companion’s appearance. The warm tint added to
Cytherea’s face a voluptuousness which youth and a simple life had not
yet allowed to express itself there ordinarily; whilst in the elder
lady’s face it reduced the customary expression, which might have been
called sternness, if not harshness, to grandeur, and warmed her decaying
complexion with much of the youthful richness it plainly had once
possessed.

She appeared now no more than five-and-thirty, though she might easily
have been ten or a dozen years older. She had clear steady eyes, a Roman
nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent chin with which
the Caesars are represented in ancient marbles; a mouth expressing a
capability for and tendency to strong emotion, habitually controlled by
pride. There was a severity about the lower outlines of the face which
gave a masculine cast to this portion of her countenance. Womanly
weakness was nowhere visible save in one part--the curve of her forehead
and brows--there it was clear and emphatic. She wore a lace shawl over a
brown silk dress, and a net bonnet set with a few blue cornflowers.

‘You inserted the advertisement for a situation as lady’s-maid giving
the address, G., Cross Street?’

‘Yes, madam. Graye.’

‘Yes. I have heard your name--Mrs. Morris, my housekeeper, mentioned
you, and pointed out your advertisement.’

This was puzzling intelligence, but there was not time enough to
consider it.

‘Where did you live last?’ continued Miss Aldclyffe.

‘I have never been a servant before. I lived at home.’

‘Never been out? I thought too at sight of you that you were too
girlish-looking to have done much. But why did you advertise with such
assurance? It misleads people.’

‘I am very sorry: I put “inexperienced” at first, but my brother said it
is absurd to trumpet your own weakness to the world, and would not let
it remain.’

‘But your mother knew what was right, I suppose?’

‘I have no mother, madam.’

‘Your father, then?’

‘I have no father.’

‘Well,’ she said, more softly, ‘your sisters, aunts, or cousins.’

‘They didn’t think anything about it.’

‘You didn’t ask them, I suppose.’

‘No.’

‘You should have done so, then. Why didn’t you?’

‘Because I haven’t any of them, either.’

Miss Aldclyffe showed her surprise. ‘You deserve forgiveness then at
any rate, child,’ she said, in a sort of drily-kind tone. ‘However, I
am afraid you do not suit me, as I am looking for an elderly person. You
see, I want an experienced maid who knows all the usual duties of the
office.’ She was going to add, ‘Though I like your appearance,’ but the
words seemed offensive to apply to the ladylike girl before her, and she
modified them to, ‘though I like you much.’

‘I am sorry I misled you, madam,’ said Cytherea.

Miss Aldclyffe stood in a reverie, without replying.

‘Good afternoon,’ continued Cytherea.

‘Good-bye, Miss Graye--I hope you will succeed.’

Cytherea turned away towards the door. The movement chanced to be one
of her masterpieces. It was precise: it had as much beauty as was
compatible with precision, and as little coquettishness as was
compatible with beauty.

And she had in turning looked over her shoulder at the other lady with a
faint accent of reproach in her face. Those who remember Greuze’s ‘Head
of a Girl,’ have an idea of Cytherea’s look askance at the turning.
It is not for a man to tell fishers of men how to set out their
fascinations so as to bring about the highest possible average of takes
within the year: but the action that tugs the hardest of all at an
emotional beholder is this sweet method of turning which steals the
bosom away and leaves the eyes behind.

Now Miss Aldclyffe herself was no tyro at wheeling. When Cytherea had
closed the door upon her, she remained for some time in her motionless
attitude, listening to the gradually dying sound of the maiden’s
retreating footsteps. She murmured to herself, ‘It is almost worth while
to be bored with instructing her in order to have a creature who could
glide round my luxurious indolent body in that manner, and look at me
in that way--I warrant how light her fingers are upon one’s head and
neck.... What a silly modest young thing she is, to go away so suddenly
as that!’ She rang the bell.

‘Ask the young lady who has just left me to step back again,’ she said
to the attendant. ‘Quick! or she will be gone.’

Cytherea was now in the vestibule, thinking that if she had told her
history, Miss Aldclyffe might perhaps have taken her into the household;
yet her history she particularly wished to conceal from a stranger.
When she was recalled she turned back without feeling much surprise.
Something, she knew not what, told her she had not seen the last of Miss
Aldclyffe.

‘You have somebody to refer me to, of course,’ the lady said, when
Cytherea had re-entered the room.

‘Yes: Mr. Thorn, a solicitor at Aldbrickham.’

‘And are you a clever needlewoman?’

‘I am considered to be.’

‘Then I think that at any rate I will write to Mr. Thorn,’ said Miss
Aldclyffe, with a little smile. ‘It is true, the whole proceeding is
very irregular; but my present maid leaves next Monday, and neither of
the five I have already seen seem to do for me.... Well, I will write to
Mr. Thorn, and if his reply is satisfactory, you shall hear from me. It
will be as well to set yourself in readiness to come on Monday.’

When Cytherea had again been watched out of the room, Miss Aldclyffe
asked for writing materials, that she might at once communicate with Mr.
Thorn. She indecisively played with the pen. ‘Suppose Mr. Thorn’s reply
to be in any way disheartening--and even if so from his own imperfect
acquaintance with the young creature more than from circumstantial
knowledge--I shall feel obliged to give her up. Then I shall regret that
I did not give her one trial in spite of other people’s prejudices. All
her account of herself is reliable enough--yes, I can see that by her
face. I like that face of hers.’

Miss Aldclyffe put down the pen and left the hotel without writing to
Mr. Thorn.




V. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY

1. AUGUST THE EIGHTH. MORNING AND AFTERNOON

At post-time on that following Monday morning, Cytherea watched so
anxiously for the postman, that as the time which must bring him
narrowed less and less her vivid expectation had only a degree less
tangibility than his presence itself. In another second his form came
into view. He brought two letters for Cytherea.

One from Miss Aldclyffe, simply stating that she wished Cytherea to come
on trial: that she would require her to be at Knapwater House by Monday
evening.

The other was from Edward Springrove. He told her that she was the
bright spot of his life: that her existence was far dearer to him than
his own: that he had never known what it was to love till he had met
her. True, he had felt passing attachments to other faces from time to
time; but they all had been weak inclinations towards those faces
as they then appeared. He loved her past and future, as well as her
present. He pictured her as a child: he loved her. He pictured her of
sage years: he loved her. He pictured her in trouble; he loved her.
Homely friendship entered into his love for her, without which all love
was evanescent.

He would make one depressing statement. Uncontrollable circumstances (a
long history, with which it was impossible to acquaint her at present)
operated to a certain extent as a drag upon his wishes. He had felt this
more strongly at the time of their parting than he did now--and it was
the cause of his abrupt behaviour, for which he begged her to forgive
him. He saw now an honourable way of freeing himself, and the perception
had prompted him to write. In the meantime might he indulge in the
hope of possessing her on some bright future day, when by hard labour
generated from her own encouraging words, he had placed himself in a
position she would think worthy to be shared with him?

Dear little letter; she huddled it up. So much more important a
love-letter seems to a girl than to a man. Springrove was unconsciously
clever in his letters, and a man with a talent of that kind may write
himself up to a hero in the mind of a young woman who loves him without
knowing much about him. Springrove already stood a cubit higher in her
imagination than he did in his shoes.

During the day she flitted about the room in an ecstasy of pleasure,
packing the things and thinking of an answer which should be worthy
of the tender tone of the question, her love bubbling from her
involuntarily, like prophesyings from a prophet.

In the afternoon Owen went with her to the railway-station, and put her
in the train for Carriford Road, the station nearest to Knapwater House.

Half-an-hour later she stepped out upon the platform, and found nobody
there to receive her--though a pony-carriage was waiting outside. In two
minutes she saw a melancholy man in cheerful livery running towards her
from a public-house close adjoining, who proved to be the servant sent
to fetch her. There are two ways of getting rid of sorrows: one by
living them down, the other by drowning them. The coachman drowned his.

He informed her that her luggage would be fetched by a spring-waggon in
about half-an-hour; then helped her into the chaise and drove off.

Her lover’s letter, lying close against her neck, fortified her against
the restless timidity she had previously felt concerning this new
undertaking, and completely furnished her with the confident ease of
mind which is required for the critical observation of surrounding
objects. It was just that stage in the slow decline of the summer days,
when the deep, dark, and vacuous hot-weather shadows are beginning to be
replaced by blue ones that have a surface and substance to the eye. They
trotted along the turnpike road for a distance of about a mile, which
brought them just outside the village of Carriford, and then turned
through large lodge-gates, on the heavy stone piers of which stood a
pair of bitterns cast in bronze. They then entered the park and wound
along a drive shaded by old and drooping lime-trees, not arranged in the
form of an avenue, but standing irregularly, sometimes leaving the track
completely exposed to the sky, at other times casting a shade over it,
which almost approached gloom--the under surface of the lowest boughs
hanging at a uniform level of six feet above the grass--the extreme
height to which the nibbling mouths of the cattle could reach.

‘Is that the house?’ said Cytherea expectantly, catching sight of a grey
gable between the trees, and losing it again.

‘No; that’s the old manor-house--or rather all that’s left of it. The
Aldycliffes used to let it sometimes, but it was oftener empty. ‘Tis
now divided into three cottages. Respectable people didn’t care to live
there.’

‘Why didn’t they?’

‘Well, ‘tis so awkward and unhandy. You see so much of it has been
pulled down, and the rooms that are left won’t do very well for a small
residence. ‘Tis so dismal, too, and like most old houses stands too low
down in the hollow to be healthy.’

‘Do they tell any horrid stories about it?’

‘No, not a single one.’

‘Ah, that’s a pity.’

‘Yes, that’s what I say. ‘Tis jest the house for a nice ghastly
hair-on-end story, that would make the parish religious. Perhaps it will
have one some day to make it complete; but there’s not a word of
the kind now. There, I wouldn’t live there for all that. In fact, I
couldn’t. O no, I couldn’t.’

‘Why couldn’t you?’

‘The sounds.’

‘What are they?’

‘One is the waterfall, which stands so close by that you can hear that
there waterfall in every room of the house, night or day, ill or well.
‘Tis enough to drive anybody mad: now hark.’

He stopped the horse. Above the slight common sounds in the air came the
unvarying steady rush of falling water from some spot unseen on account
of the thick foliage of the grove.

‘There’s something awful in the timing o’ that sound, ain’t there,
miss?’

‘When you say there is, there really seems to be. You said there were
two--what is the other horrid sound?’

‘The pumping-engine. That’s close by the Old House, and sends water up
the hill and all over the Great House. We shall hear that directly....
There, now hark again.’

From the same direction down the dell they could now hear the whistling
creak of cranks, repeated at intervals of half-a-minute, with a sousing
noise between each: a creak, a souse, then another creak, and so on
continually.

‘Now if anybody could make shift to live through the other sounds, these
would finish him off, don’t you think so, miss? That machine goes on
night and day, summer and winter, and is hardly ever greased or visited.
Ah, it tries the nerves at night, especially if you are not very well;
though we don’t often hear it at the Great House.’

‘That sound is certainly very dismal. They might have the wheel greased.
Does Miss Aldclyffe take any interest in these things?’

‘Well, scarcely; you see her father doesn’t attend to that sort of thing
as he used to. The engine was once quite his hobby. But now he’s getten
old and very seldom goes there.’

‘How many are there in family?’

‘Only her father and herself. He’s a’ old man of seventy.’

‘I had thought that Miss Aldclyffe was sole mistress of the property,
and lived here alone.’

‘No, m--’ The coachman was continually checking himself thus, being
about to style her miss involuntarily, and then recollecting that he was
only speaking to the new lady’s-maid.

‘She will soon be mistress, however, I am afraid,’ he continued, as if
speaking by a spirit of prophecy denied to ordinary humanity. ‘The poor
old gentleman has decayed very fast lately.’ The man then drew a long
breath.

‘Why did you breathe sadly like that?’ said Cytherea.

‘Ah!... When he’s dead peace will be all over with us old servants. I
expect to see the old house turned inside out.’

‘She will marry, do you mean?’

‘Marry--not she! I wish she would. No, in her soul she’s as solitary
as Robinson Crusoe, though she has acquaintances in plenty, if
not relations. There’s the rector, Mr. Raunham--he’s a relation by
marriage--yet she’s quite distant towards him. And people say that if
she keeps single there will be hardly a life between Mr. Raunham and the
heirship of the estate. Dang it, she don’t care. She’s an extraordinary
picture of womankind--very extraordinary.’

‘In what way besides?’

‘You’ll know soon enough, miss. She has had seven lady’s-maids this last
twelvemonth. I assure you ‘tis one body’s work to fetch ‘em from the
station and take ‘em back again. The Lord must be a neglectful party at
heart, or he’d never permit such overbearen goings on!’

‘Does she dismiss them directly they come!’

‘Not at all--she never dismisses them--they go theirselves. Ye see ‘tis
like this. She’s got a very quick temper; she flees in a passion with
them for nothing at all; next mornen they come up and say they are
going; she’s sorry for it and wishes they’d stay, but she’s as proud as
a lucifer, and her pride won’t let her say, “Stay,” and away they go.
‘Tis like this in fact. If you say to her about anybody, “Ah, poor
thing!” she says, “Pooh! indeed!” If you say, “Pooh, indeed!” “Ah, poor
thing!” she says directly. She hangs the chief baker, as mid be, and
restores the chief butler, as mid be, though the devil but Pharaoh
herself can see the difference between ‘em.’

Cytherea was silent. She feared she might be again a burden to her
brother.

‘However, you stand a very good chance,’ the man went on, ‘for I
think she likes you more than common. I have never known her send the
pony-carriage to meet one before; ‘tis always the trap, but this time
she said, in a very particular ladylike tone, “Roobert, gaow with the
pony-kerriage.”... There, ‘tis true, pony and carriage too are getten
rather shabby now,’ he added, looking round upon the vehicle as if to
keep Cytherea’s pride within reasonable limits.

‘’Tis to be hoped you’ll please in dressen her to-night.’

‘Why to-night?’

‘There’s a dinner-party of seventeen; ‘tis her father’s birthday, and
she’s very particular about her looks at such times. Now see; this is
the house. Livelier up here, isn’t it, miss?’

They were now on rising ground, and had just emerged from a clump of
trees. Still a little higher than where they stood was situated the
mansion, called Knapwater House, the offices gradually losing themselves
among the trees behind.

2. EVENING

The house was regularly and substantially built of clean grey freestone
throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed
at the latter end of the last century, when the copyists called
designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in the Roman orders.
The main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, having a
projection in the centre of each side, surmounted by a pediment. From
each angle of the inferior side ran a line of buildings lower than the
rest, turning inwards again at their further end, and forming
within them a spacious open court, within which resounded an echo of
astonishing clearness. These erections were in their turn backed by
ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole mass of
subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs and
trees.

There was opening sufficient through the foliage on the right hand to
enable her on nearer approach to form an idea of the arrangement of the
remoter or lawn front also. The natural features and contour of this
quarter of the site had evidently dictated the position of the
house primarily, and were of the ordinary, and upon the whole, most
satisfactory kind, namely, a broad, graceful slope running from the
terrace beneath the walls to the margin of a placid lake lying below,
upon the surface of which a dozen swans and a green punt floated at
leisure. An irregular wooded island stood in the midst of the lake;
beyond this and the further margin of the water were plantations and
greensward of varied outlines, the trees heightening, by half veiling,
the softness of the exquisite landscape stretching behind.

The glimpses she had obtained of this portion were now checked by the
angle of the building. In a minute or two they reached the side door, at
which Cytherea alighted. She was welcomed by an elderly woman of lengthy
smiles and general pleasantness, who announced herself to be Mrs.
Morris, the housekeeper.

‘Mrs. Graye, I believe?’ she said.

‘I am not--O yes, yes, we are all mistresses,’ said Cytherea, smiling,
but forcedly. The title accorded her seemed disagreeably like the first
slight scar of a brand, and she thought of Owen’s prophecy.

Mrs. Morris led her into a comfortable parlour called The Room. Here
tea was made ready, and Cytherea sat down, looking, whenever occasion
allowed, at Mrs. Morris with great interest and curiosity, to discover,
if possible, something in her which should give a clue to the secret
of her knowledge of herself, and the recommendation based upon it.
But nothing was to be learnt, at any rate just then. Mrs. Morris was
perpetually getting up, feeling in her pockets, going to cupboards,
leaving the room two or three minutes, and trotting back again.

‘You’ll excuse me, Mrs. Graye,’ she said, ‘but ‘tis the old gentleman’s
birthday, and they always have a lot of people to dinner on that
day, though he’s getting up in years now. However, none of them are
sleepers--she generally keeps the house pretty clear of lodgers (being a
lady with no intimate friends, though many acquaintances), which, though
it gives us less to do, makes it all the duller for the younger maids in
the house.’ Mrs. Morris then proceeded to give in fragmentary speeches
an outline of the constitution and government of the estate.

‘Now, are you sure you have quite done tea? Not a bit or drop more? Why,
you’ve eaten nothing, I’m sure.... Well, now, it is rather inconvenient
that the other maid is not here to show you the ways of the house a
little, but she left last Saturday, and Miss Aldclyffe has been making
shift with poor old clumsy me for a maid all yesterday and this morning.
She is not come in yet. I expect she will ask for you, Mrs. Graye, the
first thing.... I was going to say that if you have really done tea,
I will take you upstairs, and show you through the wardrobes--Miss
Aldclyffe’s things are not laid out for to-night yet.’

She preceded Cytherea upstairs, pointed out her own room, and then took
her into Miss Aldclyffe’s dressing-room, on the first-floor; where,
after explaining the whereabouts of various articles of apparel, the
housekeeper left her, telling her that she had an hour yet upon her
hands before dressing-time. Cytherea laid out upon the bed in the next
room all that she had been told would be required that evening, and then
went again to the little room which had been appropriated to herself.

Here she sat down by the open window, leant out upon the sill like
another Blessed Damozel, and listlessly looked down upon the brilliant
pattern of colours formed by the flower-beds on the lawn--now richly
crowded with late summer blossom. But the vivacity of spirit which had
hitherto enlivened her, was fast ebbing under the pressure of prosaic
realities, and the warm scarlet of the geraniums, glowing most
conspicuously, and mingling with the vivid cold red and green of the
verbenas, the rich depth of the dahlia, and the ripe mellowness of the
calceolaria, backed by the pale hue of a flock of meek sheep feeding in
the open park, close to the other side of the fence, were, to a great
extent, lost upon her eyes. She was thinking that nothing seemed worth
while; that it was possible she might die in a workhouse; and what did
it matter? The petty, vulgar details of servitude that she had just
passed through, her dependence upon the whims of a strange woman, the
necessity of quenching all individuality of character in herself, and
relinquishing her own peculiar tastes to help on the wheel of this alien
establishment, made her sick and sad, and she almost longed to pursue
some free, out-of-doors employment, sleep under trees or a hut, and know
no enemy but winter and cold weather, like shepherds and cowkeepers, and
birds and animals--ay, like the sheep she saw there under her window.
She looked sympathizingly at them for several minutes, imagining their
enjoyment of the rich grass.

‘Yes--like those sheep,’ she said aloud; and her face reddened with
surprise at a discovery she made that very instant.

The flock consisted of some ninety or a hundred young stock ewes: the
surface of their fleece was as rounded and even as a cushion, and white
as milk. Now she had just observed that on the left buttock of every one
of them were marked in distinct red letters the initials ‘E. S.’

‘E. S.’ could bring to Cytherea’s mind only one thought; but that
immediately and for ever--the name of her lover, Edward Springrove.

‘O, if it should be--!’ She interrupted her words by a resolve. Miss
Aldclyffe’s carriage at the same moment made its appearance in the
drive; but Miss Aldclyffe was not her object now. It was to ascertain to
whom the sheep belonged, and to set her surmise at rest one way or the
other. She flew downstairs to Mrs. Morris.

‘Whose sheep are those in the park, Mrs. Morris?’

‘Farmer Springrove’s.’

‘What Farmer Springrove is that?’ she said quickly.

‘Why, surely you know? Your friend, Farmer Springrove, the cider-maker,
and who keeps the Three Tranters Inn; who recommended you to me when he
came in to see me the other day?’

Cytherea’s mother-wit suddenly warned her in the midst of her excitement
that it was necessary not to betray the secret of her love. ‘O yes,’
she said, ‘of course.’ Her thoughts had run as follows in that short
interval:--

‘Farmer Springrove is Edward’s father, and his name is Edward too.

‘Edward knew I was going to advertise for a situation of some kind.

‘He watched the Times, and saw it, my address being attached.

‘He thought it would be excellent for me to be here that we might meet
whenever he came home.

‘He told his father that I might be recommended as a lady’s-maid; and he
knew my brother and myself.

‘His father told Mrs. Morris; Mrs. Morris told Miss Aldclyffe.’

The whole chain of incidents that drew her there was plain, and there
was no such thing as chance in the matter. It was all Edward’s doing.

The sound of a bell was heard. Cytherea did not heed it, and still
continued in her reverie.

‘That’s Miss Aldclyffe’s bell,’ said Mrs. Morris.

‘I suppose it is,’ said the young woman placidly.

‘Well, it means that you must go up to her,’ the matron continued, in a
tone of surprise.

Cytherea felt a burning heat come over her, mingled with a sudden
irritation at Mrs. Morris’s hint. But the good sense which had
recognized stern necessity prevailed over rebellious independence; the
flush passed, and she said hastily--

‘Yes, yes; of course, I must go to her when she pulls the bell--whether
I want to or no.’

However, in spite of this painful reminder of her new position in life,
Cytherea left the apartment in a mood far different from the gloomy
sadness of ten minutes previous. The place felt like home to her
now; she did not mind the pettiness of her occupation, because Edward
evidently did not mind it; and this was Edward’s own spot. She found
time on her way to Miss Aldclyffe’s dressing-room to hurriedly glide out
by a side door, and look for a moment at the unconscious sheep bearing
the friendly initials. She went up to them to try to touch one of the
flock, and felt vexed that they all stared sceptically at her kind
advances, and then ran pell-mell down the hill. Then, fearing any one
should discover her childish movements, she slipped indoors again,
and ascended the staircase, catching glimpses, as she passed, of
silver-buttoned footmen, who flashed about the passages like lightning.

Miss Aldclyffe’s dressing-room was an apartment which, on a casual
survey, conveyed an impression that it was available for almost any
purpose save the adornment of the feminine person. In its hours of
perfect order nothing pertaining to the toilet was visible; even the
inevitable mirrors with their accessories were arranged in a roomy
recess not noticeable from the door, lighted by a window of its own,
called the dressing-window.

The washing-stand figured as a vast oak chest, carved with grotesque
Renaissance ornament. The dressing table was in appearance something
between a high altar and a cabinet piano, the surface being richly
worked in the same style of semi-classic decoration, but the
extraordinary outline having been arrived at by an ingenious joiner and
decorator from the neighbouring town, after months of painful toil in
cutting and fitting, under Miss Aldclyffe’s immediate eye; the materials
being the remains of two or three old cabinets the lady had found in the
lumber-room. About two-thirds of the floor was carpeted, the remaining
portion being laid with parquetry of light and dark woods.

Miss Aldclyffe was standing at the larger window, away from the
dressing-niche. She bowed, and said pleasantly, ‘I am glad you have
come. We shall get on capitally, I dare say.’

Her bonnet was off. Cytherea did not think her so handsome as on the
earlier day; the queenliness of her beauty was harder and less warm.
But a worse discovery than this was that Miss Aldclyffe, with the usual
obliviousness of rich people to their dependents’ specialities, seemed
to have quite forgotten Cytherea’s inexperience, and mechanically
delivered up her body to her handmaid without a thought of details, and
with a mild yawn.

Everything went well at first. The dress was removed, stockings and
black boots were taken off, and silk stockings and white shoes were
put on. Miss Aldclyffe then retired to bathe her hands and face, and
Cytherea drew breath. If she could get through this first evening, all
would be right. She felt that it was unfortunate that such a crucial
test for her powers as a birthday dinner should have been applied on the
threshold of her arrival; but set to again.

Miss Aldclyffe was now arrayed in a white dressing-gown, and dropped
languidly into an easy-chair, pushed up before the glass. The instincts
of her sex and her own practice told Cytherea the next movement. She let
Miss Aldclyffe’s hair fall about her shoulders, and began to arrange it.
It proved to be all real; a satisfaction.

Miss Aldclyffe was musingly looking on the floor, and the operation went
on for some minutes in silence. At length her thoughts seemed to turn to
the present, and she lifted her eyes to the glass.

‘Why, what on earth are you doing with my head?’ she exclaimed, with
widely opened eyes. At the words she felt the back of Cytherea’s little
hand tremble against her neck.

‘Perhaps you prefer it done the other fashion, madam?’ said the maiden.

‘No, no; that’s the fashion right enough, but you must make more show of
my hair than that, or I shall have to buy some, which God forbid!’

‘It is how I do my own,’ said Cytherea naively, and with a sweetness
of tone that would have pleased the most acrimonious under favourable
circumstances; but tyranny was in the ascendant with Miss Aldclyffe
at this moment, and she was assured of palatable food for her vice by
having felt the trembling of Cytherea’s hand.

‘Yours, indeed! _Your_ hair! Come, go on.’ Considering that Cytherea
possessed at least five times as much of that valuable auxiliary to
woman’s beauty as the lady before her, there was at the same time some
excuse for Miss Aldclyffe’s outburst. She remembered herself, however,
and said more quietly, ‘Now then, Graye--By-the-bye, what do they call
you downstairs?’

‘Mrs. Graye,’ said the handmaid.

‘Then tell them not to do any such absurd thing--not but that it is
quite according to usage; but you are too young yet.’

This dialogue tided Cytherea safely onward through the hairdressing
till the flowers and diamonds were to be placed upon the lady’s brow.
Cytherea began arranging them tastefully, and to the very best of her
judgment.

‘That won’t do,’ said Miss Aldclyffe harshly.

‘Why?’

‘I look too young--an old dressed doll.’

‘Will that, madam?’

‘No, I look a fright--a perfect fright!’

‘This way, perhaps?’

‘Heavens! Don’t worry me so.’ She shut her lips like a trap.

Having once worked herself up to the belief that her head-dress was to
be a failure that evening, no cleverness of Cytherea’s in arranging
it could please her. She continued in a smouldering passion during the
remainder of the performance, keeping her lips firmly closed, and the
muscles of her body rigid. Finally, snatching up her gloves, and taking
her handkerchief and fan in her hand, she silently sailed out of the
room, without betraying the least consciousness of another woman’s
presence behind her.

Cytherea’s fears that at the undressing this suppressed anger would find
a vent, kept her on thorns throughout the evening. She tried to read;
she could not. She tried to sew; she could not. She tried to muse; she
could not do that connectedly. ‘If this is the beginning, what will
the end be!’ she said in a whisper, and felt many misgivings as to the
policy of being overhasty in establishing an independence at the expense
of congruity with a cherished past.

3. MIDNIGHT

The clock struck twelve. The Aldclyffe state dinner was over. The
company had all gone, and Miss Aldclyffe’s bell rang loudly and
jerkingly.

Cytherea started to her feet at the sound, which broke in upon a fitful
sleep that had overtaken her. She had been sitting drearily in her chair
waiting minute after minute for the signal, her brain in that state
of intentness which takes cognizance of the passage of Time as a real
motion--motion without matter--the instants throbbing past in the
company of a feverish pulse. She hastened to the room, to find the
lady sitting before the dressing shrine, illuminated on both sides, and
looking so queenly in her attitude of absolute repose, that the younger
woman felt the awfullest sense of responsibility at her Vandalism in
having undertaken to demolish so imposing a pile.

The lady’s jewelled ornaments were taken off in silence--some by her own
listless hands, some by Cytherea’s. Then followed the outer stratum of
clothing. The dress being removed, Cytherea took it in her hand and
went with it into the bedroom adjoining, intending to hang it in the
wardrobe. But on second thoughts, in order that she might not keep Miss
Aldclyffe waiting a moment longer than necessary, she flung it down on
the first resting-place that came to hand, which happened to be the
bed, and re-entered the dressing-room with the noiseless footfall of a
kitten. She paused in the middle of the room.

She was unnoticed, and her sudden return had plainly not been expected.
During the short time of Cytherea’s absence, Miss Aldclyffe had pulled
off a kind of chemisette of Brussels net, drawn high above the throat,
which she had worn with her evening dress as a semi-opaque covering to
her shoulders, and in its place had put her night-gown round her.
Her right hand was lifted to her neck, as if engaged in fastening her
night-gown.

But on a second glance Miss Aldclyffe’s proceeding was clearer to
Cytherea. She was not fastening her night-gown; it had been carelessly
thrown round her, and Miss Aldclyffe was really occupied in holding up
to her eyes some small object that she was keenly scrutinizing. And
now on suddenly discovering the presence of Cytherea at the back of the
apartment, instead of naturally continuing or concluding her inspection,
she desisted hurriedly; the tiny snap of a spring was heard, her hand
was removed, and she began adjusting her robes.

Modesty might have directed her hasty action of enwrapping her
shoulders, but it was scarcely likely, considering Miss Aldclyffe’s
temperament, that she had all her life been used to a maid, Cytherea’s
youth, and the elder lady’s marked treatment of her as if she were a
mere child or plaything. The matter was too slight to reason about, and
yet upon the whole it seemed that Miss Aldclyffe must have a practical
reason for concealing her neck.

With a timid sense of being an intruder Cytherea was about to step back
and out of the room; but at the same moment Miss Aldclyffe turned, saw
the impulse, and told her companion to stay, looking into her eyes as if
she had half an intention to explain something. Cytherea felt certain
it was the little mystery of her late movements. The other withdrew her
eyes; Cytherea went to fetch the dressing-gown, and wheeled round
again to bring it up to Miss Aldclyffe, who had now partly removed her
night-dress to put it on the proper way, and still sat with her back
towards Cytherea.

Her neck was again quite open and uncovered, and though hidden from the
direct line of Cytherea’s vision, she saw it reflected in the glass--the
fair white surface, and the inimitable combination of curves between
throat and bosom which artists adore, being brightly lit up by the light
burning on either side.

And the lady’s prior proceedings were now explained in the simplest
manner. In the midst of her breast, like an island in a sea of pearl,
reclined an exquisite little gold locket, embellished with arabesque
work of blue, red, and white enamel. That was undoubtedly what Miss
Aldclyffe had been contemplating; and, moreover, not having been put
off with her other ornaments, it was to be retained during the night--a
slight departure from the custom of ladies which Miss Aldclyffe had at
first not cared to exhibit to her new assistant, though now, on further
thought, she seemed to have become indifferent on the matter.

‘My dressing-gown,’ she said, quietly fastening her night-dress as she
spoke.

Cytherea came forward with it. Miss Aldclyffe did not turn her head, but
looked inquiringly at her maid in the glass.

‘You saw what I wear on my neck, I suppose?’ she said to Cytherea’s
reflected face.

‘Yes, madam, I did,’ said Cytherea to Miss Aldclyffe’s reflected face.

Miss Aldclyffe again looked at Cytherea’s reflection as if she were
on the point of explaining. Again she checked her resolve, and said
lightly--

‘Few of my maids discover that I wear it always. I generally keep it
a secret--not that it matters much. But I was careless with you, and
seemed to want to tell you. You win me to make confidences that....’

She ceased, took Cytherea’s hand in her own, lifted the locket with the
other, touched the spring and disclosed a miniature.

‘It is a handsome face, is it not?’ she whispered mournfully, and even
timidly.

‘It is.’

But the sight had gone through Cytherea like an electric shock, and
there was an instantaneous awakening of perception in her, so thrilling
in its presence as to be well-nigh insupportable. The face in the
miniature was the face of her own father--younger and fresher than she
had ever known him--but her father!

Was this the woman of his wild and unquenchable early love? And was this
the woman who had figured in the gate-man’s story as answering the name
of Cytherea before her judgment was awake? Surely it was. And if so,
here was the tangible outcrop of a romantic and hidden stratum of the
past hitherto seen only in her imagination; but as far as her scope
allowed, clearly defined therein by reason of its strangeness.

Miss Aldclyffe’s eyes and thoughts were so intent upon the miniature
that she had not been conscious of Cytherea’s start of surprise. She
went on speaking in a low and abstracted tone.

‘Yes, I lost him.’ She interrupted her words by a short meditation, and
went on again. ‘I lost him by excess of honesty as regarded my past. But
it was best that it should be so.... I was led to think rather more
than usual of the circumstances to-night because of your name. It is
pronounced the same way, though differently spelt.’

The only means by which Cytherea’s surname could have been spelt to
Miss Aldclyffe must have been by Mrs. Morris or Farmer Springrove. She
fancied Farmer Springrove would have spelt it properly if Edward was his
informant, which made Miss Aldclyffe’s remark obscure.

Women make confidences and then regret them. The impulsive rush of
feeling which had led Miss Aldclyffe to indulge in this revelation,
trifling as it was, died out immediately her words were beyond recall;
and the turmoil, occasioned in her by dwelling upon that chapter of her
life, found vent in another kind of emotion--the result of a trivial
accident.

Cytherea, after letting down Miss Aldclyffe’s hair, adopted some plan
with it to which the lady had not been accustomed. A rapid revulsion
to irritation ensued. The maiden’s mere touch seemed to discharge the
pent-up regret of the lady as if she had been a jar of electricity.

‘How strangely you treat my hair!’ she exclaimed.

A silence.

‘I have told you what I never tell my maids as a rule; of course
_nothing_ that I say in this room is to be mentioned outside it.’ She
spoke crossly no less than emphatically.

‘It shall not be, madam,’ said Cytherea, agitated and vexed that the
woman of her romantic wonderings should be so disagreeable to her.

‘Why on earth did I tell you of my past?’ she went on.

Cytherea made no answer.

The lady’s vexation with herself, and the accident which had led to the
disclosure swelled little by little till it knew no bounds. But what was
done could not be undone, and though Cytherea had shown a most winning
responsiveness, quarrel Miss Aldclyffe must. She recurred to the subject
of Cytherea’s want of expertness, like a bitter reviewer, who finding
the sentiments of a poet unimpeachable, quarrels with his rhymes.

‘Never, never before did I serve myself such a trick as this in engaging
a maid!’ She waited for an expostulation: none came. Miss Aldclyffe
tried again.

‘The idea of my taking a girl without asking her more than three
questions, or having a single reference, all because of her good l--,
the shape of her face and body! It _was_ a fool’s trick. There, I am
served right, quite right--by being deceived in such a way.’

‘I didn’t deceive you,’ said Cytherea. The speech was an unfortunate
one, and was the very ‘fuel to maintain its fires’ that the other’s
petulance desired.

‘You did,’ she said hotly.

‘I told you I couldn’t promise to be acquainted with every detail of
routine just at first.’

‘Will you contradict me in this way! You are telling untruths, I say.’

Cytherea’s lip quivered. ‘I would answer the remark if--if--’

‘If what?’

‘If it were a lady’s!’

‘You girl of impudence--what do you say? Leave the room this instant, I
tell you.’

‘And I tell you that a person who speaks to a lady as you do to me, is
no lady herself!’

‘To a lady? A lady’s-maid speaks in this way. The idea!’

‘Don’t “lady’s-maid” me: nobody is my mistress I won’t have it!’

‘Good Heavens!’

‘I wouldn’t have come--no--I wouldn’t! if I had known!’

‘What?’

‘That you were such an ill-tempered, unjust woman!’

‘Possest beyond the Muse’s painting,’ Miss Aldclyffe exclaimed--

‘A Woman, am I! I’ll teach you if I am a Woman!’ and lifted her hand as
if she would have liked to strike her companion. This stung the maiden
into absolute defiance.

‘I dare you to touch me!’ she cried. ‘Strike me if you dare, madam! I am
not afraid of you--what do you mean by such an action as that?’

Miss Aldclyffe was disconcerted at this unexpected show of spirit, and
ashamed of her unladylike impulse now it was put into words. She sank
back in the chair. ‘I was not going to strike you--go to your room--I
beg you to go to your room!’ she repeated in a husky whisper.

Cytherea, red and panting, took up her candlestick and advanced to
the table to get a light. As she stood close to them the rays from the
candles struck sharply on her face. She usually bore a much stronger
likeness to her mother than to her father, but now, looking with a
grave, reckless, and angered expression of countenance at the kindling
wick as she held it slanting into the other flame, her father’s features
were distinct in her. It was the first time Miss Aldclyffe had seen her
in a passionate mood, and wearing that expression which was invariably
its concomitant. It was Miss Aldclyffe’s turn to start now; and the
remark she made was an instance of that sudden change of tone from
high-flown invective to the pettiness of curiosity which so often makes
women’s quarrels ridiculous. Even Miss Aldclyffe’s dignity had not
sufficient power to postpone the absorbing desire she now felt to settle
the strange suspicion that had entered her head.

‘You spell your name the common way, G, R, E, Y, don’t you?’ she said,
with assumed indifference.

‘No,’ said Cytherea, poised on the side of her foot, and still looking
into the flame.

‘Yes, surely? The name was spelt that way on your boxes: I looked and
saw it myself.’

The enigma of Miss Aldclyffe’s mistake was solved. ‘O, was it?’ said
Cytherea. ‘Ah, I remember Mrs. Jackson, the lodging-house keeper at
Budmouth, labelled them. We spell our name G, R, A, Y, E.’

‘What was your father’s trade?’

Cytherea thought it would be useless to attempt to conceal facts any
longer. ‘His was not a trade,’ she said. ‘He was an architect.’

‘The idea of your being an architect’s daughter!’

‘There’s nothing to offend you in that, I hope?’

‘O no.’

‘Why did you say “the idea”?’

‘Leave that alone. Did he ever visit in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, one
Christmas, many years ago?--but you would not know that.’

‘I have heard him say that Mr. Huntway, a curate somewhere in that part
of London, and who died there, was an old college friend of his.’

‘What is your Christian name?’

‘Cytherea.’

‘No! And is it really? And you knew that face I showed you? Yes, I see
you did.’ Miss Aldclyffe stopped, and closed her lips impassibly. She
was a little agitated.

‘Do you want me any longer?’ said Cytherea, standing candle in hand and
looking quietly in Miss Aldclyffe’s face.

‘Well--no: no longer,’ said the other lingeringly.

‘With your permission, I will leave the house to morrow morning, madam.’

‘Ah.’ Miss Aldclyffe had no notion of what she was saying.

‘And I know you will be so good as not to intrude upon me during the
short remainder of my stay?’

Saying this Cytherea left the room before her companion had answered.
Miss Aldclyffe, then, had recognized her at last, and had been curious
about her name from the beginning.

The other members of the household had retired to rest. As Cytherea went
along the passage leading to her room her skirts rustled against the
partition. A door on her left opened, and Mrs. Morris looked out.

‘I waited out of bed till you came up,’ she said, ‘it being your first
night, in case you should be at a loss for anything. How have you got on
with Miss Aldclyffe?’

‘Pretty well--though not so well as I could have wished.’

‘Has she been scolding?’

‘A little.’

‘She’s a very odd lady--‘tis all one way or the other with her. She’s
not bad at heart, but unbearable in close quarters. Those of us who
don’t have much to do with her personally, stay on for years and years.’

‘Has Miss Aldclyffe’s family always been rich?’ said Cytherea.

‘O no. The property, with the name, came from her mother’s uncle. Her
family is a branch of the old Aldclyffe family on the maternal side. Her
mother married a Bradleigh--a mere nobody at that time--and was on that
account cut by her relations. But very singularly the other branch of
the family died out one by one--three of them, and Miss Aldclyffe’s
great-uncle then left all his property, including this estate, to
Captain Bradleigh and his wife--Miss Aldclyffe’s father and mother--on
condition that they took the old family name as well. There’s all about
it in the “Landed Gentry.” ‘Tis a thing very often done.’

‘O, I see. Thank you. Well, now I am going. Good-night.’




VI. THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS

1. AUGUST THE NINTH. ONE TO TWO O’CLOCK A.M.

Cytherea entered her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed, bewildered
by a whirl of thought. Only one subject was clear in her mind, and it
was that, in spite of family discoveries, that day was to be the first
and last of her experience as a lady’s-maid. Starvation itself should
not compel her to hold such a humiliating post for another instant.
‘Ah,’ she thought, with a sigh, at the martyrdom of her last little
fragment of self-conceit, ‘Owen knows everything better than I.’

She jumped up and began making ready for her departure in the morning,
the tears streaming down when she grieved and wondered what practical
matter on earth she could turn her hand to next. All these preparations
completed, she began to undress, her mind unconsciously drifting away
to the contemplation of her late surprises. To look in the glass for an
instant at the reflection of her own magnificent resources in face and
bosom, and to mark their attractiveness unadorned, was perhaps but the
natural action of a young woman who had so lately been chidden whilst
passing through the harassing experience of decorating an older beauty
of Miss Aldclyffe’s temper.

But she directly checked her weakness by sympathizing reflections on the
hidden troubles which must have thronged the past years of the solitary
lady, to keep her, though so rich and courted, in a mood so repellent
and gloomy as that in which Cytherea found her; and then the young girl
marvelled again and again, as she had marvelled before, at the strange
confluence of circumstances which had brought herself into contact with
the one woman in the world whose history was so romantically intertwined
with her own. She almost began to wish she were not obliged to go away
and leave the lonely being to loneliness still.

In bed and in the dark, Miss Aldclyffe haunted her mind more
persistently than ever. Instead of sleeping, she called up staring
visions of the possible past of this queenly lady, her mother’s rival.
Up the long vista of bygone years she saw, behind all, the young girl’s
flirtation, little or much, with the cousin, that seemed to have been
nipped in the bud, or to have terminated hastily in some way. Then the
secret meetings between Miss Aldclyffe and the other woman at the little
inn at Hammersmith and other places: the commonplace name she adopted:
her swoon at some painful news, and the very slight knowledge the elder
female had of her partner in mystery. Then, more than a year afterwards,
the acquaintanceship of her own father with this his first love; the
awakening of the passion, his acts of devotion, the unreasoning heat of
his rapture, her tacit acceptance of it, and yet her uneasiness under
the delight. Then his declaration amid the evergreens: the utter
change produced in her manner thereby, seemingly the result of a rigid
determination: and the total concealment of her reason by herself
and her parents, whatever it was. Then the lady’s course dropped into
darkness, and nothing more was visible till she was discovered here at
Knapwater, nearly fifty years old, still unmarried and still beautiful,
but lonely, embittered, and haughty. Cytherea imagined that her father’s
image was still warmly cherished in Miss Aldclyffe’s heart, and was
thankful that she herself had not been betrayed into announcing that
she knew many particulars of this page of her father’s history, and the
chief one, the lady’s unaccountable renunciation of him. It would have
made her bearing towards the mistress of the mansion more awkward, and
would have been no benefit to either.

Thus conjuring up the past, and theorizing on the present, she lay
restless, changing her posture from one side to the other and back
again. Finally, when courting sleep with all her art, she heard a clock
strike two. A minute later, and she fancied she could distinguish a soft
rustle in the passage outside her room.

To bury her head in the sheets was her first impulse; then to uncover
it, raise herself on her elbow, and stretch her eyes wide open in the
darkness; her lips being parted with the intentness of her listening.
Whatever the noise was, it had ceased for the time.

It began again and came close to her door, lightly touching the panels.
Then there was another stillness; Cytherea made a movement which caused
a faint rustling of the bed-clothes.

Before she had time to think another thought a light tap was given.
Cytherea breathed: the person outside was evidently bent upon finding
her awake, and the rustle she had made had encouraged the hope. The
maiden’s physical condition shifted from one pole to its opposite. The
cold sweat of terror forsook her, and modesty took the alarm. She became
hot and red; her door was not locked.

A distinct woman’s whisper came to her through the keyhole: ‘Cytherea!’

Only one being in the house knew her Christian name, and that was Miss
Aldclyffe. Cytherea stepped out of bed, went to the door, and whispered
back, ‘Yes?’

‘Let me come in, darling.’

The young woman paused in a conflict between judgment and emotion. It
was now mistress and maid no longer; woman and woman only. Yes; she must
let her come in, poor thing.

She got a light in an instant, opened the door, and raising her eyes and
the candle, saw Miss Aldclyffe standing outside in her dressing-gown.

‘Now you see that it is really myself; put out the light,’ said the
visitor. ‘I want to stay here with you, Cythie. I came to ask you to
come down into my bed, but it is snugger here. But remember that you are
mistress in this room, and that I have no business here, and that you
may send me away if you choose. Shall I go?’

‘O no; you shan’t indeed if you don’t want to,’ said Cythie generously.

The instant they were in bed Miss Aldclyffe freed herself from the
last remnant of restraint. She flung her arms round the young girl, and
pressed her gently to her heart.

‘Now kiss me,’ she said.

Cytherea, upon the whole, was rather discomposed at this change of
treatment; and, discomposed or no, her passions were not so impetuous as
Miss Aldclyffe’s. She could not bring her soul to her lips for a moment,
try how she would.

‘Come, kiss me,’ repeated Miss Aldclyffe.

Cytherea gave her a very small one, as soft in touch and in sound as the
bursting of a bubble.

‘More earnestly than that--come.’

She gave another, a little but not much more expressively.

‘I don’t deserve a more feeling one, I suppose,’ said Miss Aldclyffe,
with an emphasis of sad bitterness in her tone. ‘I am an ill-tempered
woman, you think; half out of my mind. Well, perhaps I am; but I have
had grief more than you can think or dream of. But I can’t help loving
you--your name is the same as mine--isn’t it strange?’

Cytherea was inclined to say no, but remained silent.

‘Now, don’t you think I must love you?’ continued the other.

‘Yes,’ said Cytherea absently. She was still thinking whether duty to
Owen and her father, which asked for silence on her knowledge of her
father’s unfortunate love, or duty to the woman embracing her, which
seemed to ask for confidence, ought to predominate. Here was a solution.
She would wait till Miss Aldclyffe referred to her acquaintanceship and
attachment to Cytherea’s father in past times: then she would tell her
all she knew: that would be honour.

‘Why can’t you kiss me as I can kiss you? Why can’t you!’ She impressed
upon Cytherea’s lips a warm motherly salute, given as if in the outburst
of strong feeling, long checked, and yearning for something to love and
be loved by in return.

‘Do you think badly of me for my behaviour this evening, child? I don’t
know why I am so foolish as to speak to you in this way. I am a very
fool, I believe. Yes. How old are you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Eighteen!... Well, why don’t you ask me how old I am?’

‘Because I don’t want to know.’

‘Never mind if you don’t. I am forty-six; and it gives me greater
pleasure to tell you this than it does to you to listen. I have not told
my age truly for the last twenty years till now.’

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘I have met deceit by deceit, till I am weary of it--weary, weary--and I
long to be what I shall never be again--artless and innocent, like you.
But I suppose that you, too, will, prove to be not worth a thought, as
every new friend does on more intimate knowledge. Come, why don’t you
talk to me, child? Have you said your prayers?’

‘Yes--no! I forgot them to-night.’

‘I suppose you say them every night as a rule?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Because I have always done so, and it would seem strange if I were not
to. Do you?’

‘I? A wicked old sinner like me! No, I never do. I have thought all such
matters humbug for years--thought so so long that I should be glad to
think otherwise from very weariness; and yet, such is the code of the
polite world, that I subscribe regularly to Missionary Societies and
others of the sort.... Well, say your prayers, dear--you won’t omit them
now you recollect it. I should like to hear you very much. Will you?’

‘It seems hardly--’

‘It would seem so like old times to me--when I was young, and
nearer--far nearer Heaven than I am now. Do, sweet one,’

Cytherea was embarrassed, and her embarrassment arose from the following
conjuncture of affairs. Since she had loved Edward Springrove, she had
linked his name with her brother Owen’s in her nightly supplications to
the Almighty. She wished to keep her love for him a secret, and, above
all, a secret from a woman like Miss Aldclyffe; yet her conscience and
the honesty of her love would not for an instant allow her to think of
omitting his dear name, and so endanger the efficacy of all her previous
prayers for his success by an unworthy shame now: it would be wicked
of her, she thought, and a grievous wrong to him. Under any worldly
circumstances she might have thought the position justified a little
finesse, and have skipped him for once; but prayer was too solemn a
thing for such trifling.

‘I would rather not say them,’ she murmured first. It struck her then
that this declining altogether was the same cowardice in another dress,
and was delivering her poor Edward over to Satan just as unceremoniously
as before. ‘Yes; I will say my prayers, and you shall hear me,’ she
added firmly.

She turned her face to the pillow and repeated in low soft tones the
simple words she had used from childhood on such occasions. Owen’s name
was mentioned without faltering, but in the other case, maidenly shyness
was too strong even for religion, and that when supported by excellent
intentions. At the name of Edward she stammered, and her voice sank to
the faintest whisper in spite of her.

‘Thank you, dearest,’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘I have prayed too, I verily
believe. You are a good girl, I think.’ Then the expected question came.

‘“Bless Owen,” and whom, did you say?’

There was no help for it now, and out it came. ‘Owen and Edward,’ said
Cytherea.

‘Who are Owen and Edward?’

‘Owen is my brother, madam,’ faltered the maid.

‘Ah, I remember. Who is Edward?’

A silence.

‘Your brother, too?’ continued Miss Aldclyffe.

‘No.’

Miss Aldclyffe reflected a moment. ‘Don’t you want to tell me who Edward
is?’ she said at last, in a tone of meaning.

‘I don’t mind telling; only....’

‘You would rather not, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

Miss Aldclyffe shifted her ground. ‘Were you ever in love?’ she inquired
suddenly.

Cytherea was surprised to hear how quickly the voice had altered from
tenderness to harshness, vexation, and disappointment.

‘Yes--I think I was--once,’ she murmured.

‘Aha! And were you ever kissed by a man?’

A pause.

‘Well, were you?’ said Miss Aldclyffe, rather sharply.

‘Don’t press me to tell--I can’t--indeed, I won’t, madam!’

Miss Aldclyffe removed her arms from Cytherea’s neck. ‘’Tis now with
you as it is always with all girls,’ she said, in jealous and gloomy
accents. ‘You are not, after all, the innocent I took you for. No, no.’
She then changed her tone with fitful rapidity. ‘Cytherea, try to love
me more than you love him--do. I love you more sincerely than any man
can. Do, Cythie: don’t let any man stand between us. O, I can’t bear
that!’ She clasped Cytherea’s neck again.

‘I must love him now I have begun,’ replied the other.

‘Must--yes--must,’ said the elder lady reproachfully. ‘Yes, women are
all alike. I thought I had at last found an artless woman who had
not been sullied by a man’s lips, and who had not practised or been
practised upon by the arts which ruin all the truth and sweetness and
goodness in us. Find a girl, if you can, whose mouth and ears have
not been made a regular highway of by some man or another! Leave the
admittedly notorious spots--the drawing-rooms of society--and look in
the villages--leave the villages and search in the schools--and you can
hardly find a girl whose heart has not been _had_--is not an old thing
half worn out by some He or another! If men only knew the staleness of
the freshest of us! that nine times out of ten the “first love” they
think they are winning from a woman is but the hulk of an old wrecked
affection, fitted with new sails and re-used. O Cytherea, can it be that
you, too, are like the rest?’

‘No, no, no,’ urged Cytherea, awed by the storm she had raised in the
impetuous woman’s mind. ‘He only kissed me once--twice I mean.’

‘He might have done it a thousand times if he had cared to, there’s no
doubt about that, whoever his lordship is. You are as bad as I--we are
all alike; and I--an old fool--have been sipping at your mouth as if
it were honey, because I fancied no wasting lover knew the spot. But
a minute ago, and you seemed to me like a fresh spring meadow--now you
seem a dusty highway.’

‘O no, no!’ Cytherea was not weak enough to shed tears except on
extraordinary occasions, but she was fain to begin sobbing now. She
wished Miss Aldclyffe would go to her own room, and leave her and her
treasured dreams alone. This vehement imperious affection was in one
sense soothing, but yet it was not of the kind that Cytherea’s instincts
desired. Though it was generous, it seemed somewhat too rank and
capricious for endurance.

‘Well,’ said the lady in continuation, ‘who is he?’

Her companion was desperately determined not to tell his name: she too
much feared a taunt when Miss Aldclyffe’s fiery mood again ruled her
tongue.

‘Won’t you tell me? not tell me after all the affection I have shown?’

‘I will, perhaps, another day.’

‘Did you wear a hat and white feather in Budmouth for the week or two
previous to your coming here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I have seen you and your lover at a distance! He rowed you round
the bay with your brother.’

‘Yes.’

‘And without your brother--fie! There, there, don’t let that little
heart beat itself to death: throb, throb: it shakes the bed, you silly
thing. I didn’t mean that there was any harm in going alone with him. I
only saw you from the Esplanade, in common with the rest of the people.
I often run down to Budmouth. He was a very good figure: now who was
he?’

‘I--I won’t tell, madam--I cannot indeed!’

‘Won’t tell--very well, don’t. You are very foolish to treasure up his
name and image as you do. Why, he has had loves before you, trust him
for that, whoever he is, and you are but a temporary link in a long
chain of others like you: who only have your little day as they have had
theirs.’

‘’Tisn’t true! ‘tisn’t true! ‘tisn’t true!’ cried Cytherea in an agony
of torture. ‘He has never loved anybody else, I know--I am sure he
hasn’t.’

Miss Aldclyffe was as jealous as any man could have been. She
continued--

‘He sees a beautiful face and thinks he will never forget it, but in a
few weeks the feeling passes off, and he wonders how he could have cared
for anybody so absurdly much.’

‘No, no, he doesn’t--What does he do when he has thought that--Come,
tell me--tell me!’

‘You are as hot as fire, and the throbbing of your heart makes me
nervous. I can’t tell you if you get in that flustered state.’

‘Do, do tell--O, it makes me so miserable! but tell--come tell me!’

‘Ah--the tables are turned now, dear!’ she continued, in a tone which
mingled pity with derision--

   ‘“Love’s passions shall rock thee
    As the storm rocks the ravens on high,
    Bright reason will mock thee
    Like the sun from a wintry sky.”

‘What does he do next?--Why, this is what he does next: ruminate on what
he has heard of women’s romantic impulses, and how easily men torture
them when they have given way to those feelings, and have resigned
everything for their hero. It may be that though he loves you heartily
now--that is, as heartily as a man can--and you love him in return, your
loves may be impracticable and hopeless, and you may be separated for
ever. You, as the weary, weary years pass by will fade and fade--bright
eyes _will_ fade--and you will perhaps then die early--true to him to
your latest breath, and believing him to be true to the latest breath
also; whilst he, in some gay and busy spot far away from your last quiet
nook, will have married some dashing lady, and not purely oblivious of
you, will long have ceased to regret you--will chat about you, as you
were in long past years--will say, “Ah, little Cytherea used to tie her
hair like that--poor innocent trusting thing; it was a pleasant useless
idle dream--that dream of mine for the maid with the bright eyes and
simple, silly heart; but I was a foolish lad at that time.” Then he will
tell the tale of all your little Wills and Wont’s and particular ways,
and as he speaks, turn to his wife with a placid smile.’

‘It is not true! He can’t, he c-can’t be s-so cruel--and you are cruel
to me--you are, you are!’ She was at last driven to desperation: her
natural common sense and shrewdness had seen all through the piece how
imaginary her emotions were--she felt herself to be weak and foolish in
permitting them to rise; but even then she could not control them: be
agonized she must. She was only eighteen, and the long day’s labour,
her weariness, her excitement, had completely unnerved her, and worn her
out: she was bent hither and thither by this tyrannical working upon her
imagination, as a young rush in the wind. She wept bitterly. ‘And now
think how much I like you,’ resumed Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea grew
calmer. ‘I shall never forget you for anybody else, as men do--never. I
will be exactly as a mother to you. Now will you promise to live with me
always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?’

‘I cannot. I will not be anybody’s maid for another day on any
consideration.’

‘No, no, no. You shan’t be a lady’s-maid. You shall be my companion. I
will get another maid.’

Companion--that was a new idea. Cytherea could not resist the evidently
heartfelt desire of the strange-tempered woman for her presence. But she
could not trust to the moment’s impulse.

‘I will stay, I think. But do not ask for a final answer to-night.’

‘Never mind now, then. Put your hair round your mamma’s neck, and give
me one good long kiss, and I won’t talk any more in that way about your
lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as others; but even
if he’s the ficklest, there is consolation. The love of an inconstant
man is ten times more ardent than that of a faithful man--that is, while
it lasts.’

Cytherea did as she was told, to escape the punishment of further talk;
flung the twining tresses of her long, rich hair over Miss Aldclyffe’s
shoulders as directed, and the two ceased conversing, making themselves
up for sleep. Miss Aldclyffe seemed to give herself over to a luxurious
sense of content and quiet, as if the maiden at her side afforded her a
protection against dangers which had menaced her for years; she was soon
sleeping calmly.

2. TWO TO FIVE A.M.

With Cytherea it was otherwise. Unused to the place and circumstances,
she continued wakeful, ill at ease, and mentally distressed. She
withdrew herself from her companion’s embrace, turned to the other
side, and endeavoured to relieve her busy brain by looking at the
window-blind, and noticing the light of the rising moon--now in her last
quarter--creep round upon it: it was the light of an old waning moon
which had but a few days longer to live.

The sight led her to think again of what had happened under the rays of
the same month’s moon, a little before its full, the ecstatic
evening scene with Edward: the kiss, and the shortness of those happy
moments--maiden imagination bringing about the apotheosis of a status
quo which had had several unpleasantnesses in its earthly reality.

But sounds were in the ascendant that night. Her ears became aware of a
strange and gloomy murmur.

She recognized it: it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and low,
brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House by a faint
breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason of the utter
absence of all disturbing sounds. The groom’s melancholy representation
lent to the sound a more dismal effect than it would have had of its own
nature. She began to fancy what the waterfall must be like at that hour,
under the trees in the ghostly moonlight. Black at the head, and over
the surface of the deep cold hole into which it fell; white and
frothy at the fall; black and white, like a pall and its border; sad
everywhere.

She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears
to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind. Another
soon came.

The second was quite different from the first--a kind of intermittent
whistle it seemed primarily: no, a creak, a metallic creak, ever and
anon, like a plough, or a rusty wheelbarrow, or at least a wheel of some
kind. Yes, it was, a wheel--the water-wheel in the shrubbery by the old
manor-house, which the coachman had said would drive him mad.

She determined not to think any more of these gloomy things; but now
that she had once noticed the sound there was no sealing her ears to it.
She could not help timing its creaks, and putting on a dread expectancy
just before the end of each half-minute that brought them. To imagine
the inside of the engine-house, whence these noises proceeded, was now a
necessity. No window, but crevices in the door, through which, probably,
the moonbeams streamed in the most attenuated and skeleton-like rays,
striking sharply upon portions of wet rusty cranks and chains; a
glistening wheel, turning incessantly, labouring in the dark like a
captive starving in a dungeon; and instead of a floor below, gurgling
water, which on account of the darkness could only be heard; water which
laboured up dark pipes almost to where she lay.

She shivered. Now she was determined to go to sleep; there could be
nothing else left to be heard or to imagine--it was horrid that her
imagination should be so restless. Yet just for an instant before going
to sleep she would think this--suppose another sound _should_ come--just
suppose it should! Before the thought had well passed through her brain,
a third sound came.

The third was a very soft gurgle or rattle--of a strange and abnormal
kind--yet a sound she had heard before at some past period of her
life--when, she could not recollect. To make it the more disturbing, it
seemed to be almost close to her--either close outside the window, close
under the floor, or close above the ceiling. The accidental fact of
its coming so immediately upon the heels of her supposition, told so
powerfully upon her excited nerves that she jumped up in the bed. The
same instant, a little dog in some room near, having probably heard the
same noise, set up a low whine. The watch-dog in the yard, hearing
the moan of his associate, began to howl loudly and distinctly. His
melancholy notes were taken up directly afterwards by the dogs in the
kennel a long way off, in every variety of wail.

One logical thought alone was able to enter her flurried brain. The
little dog that began the whining must have heard the other two sounds
even better than herself. He had taken no notice of them, but he had
taken notice of the third. The third, then, was an unusual sound.

It was not like water, it was not like wind; it was not the night-jar,
it was not a clock, nor a rat, nor a person snoring.

She crept under the clothes, and flung her arms tightly round Miss
Aldclyffe, as if for protection. Cytherea perceived that the lady’s late
peaceful warmth had given place to a sweat. At the maiden’s touch, Miss
Aldclyffe awoke with a low scream.

She remembered her position instantly. ‘O such a terrible dream!’ she
cried, in a hurried whisper, holding to Cytherea in her turn; ‘and
your touch was the end of it. It was dreadful. Time, with his wings,
hour-glass, and scythe, coming nearer and nearer to me--grinning and
mocking: then he seized me, took a piece of me only... But I can’t tell
you. I can’t bear to think of it. How those dogs howl! People say it
means death.’

The return of Miss Aldclyffe to consciousness was sufficient to
dispel the wild fancies which the loneliness of the night had woven in
Cytherea’s mind. She dismissed the third noise as something which in all
likelihood could easily be explained, if trouble were taken to inquire
into it: large houses had all kinds of strange sounds floating about
them. She was ashamed to tell Miss Aldclyffe her terrors.

A silence of five minutes.

‘Are you asleep?’ said Miss Aldclyffe.

‘No,’ said Cytherea, in a long-drawn whisper.

‘How those dogs howl, don’t they?’

‘Yes. A little dog in the house began it.’

‘Ah, yes: that was Totsy. He sleeps on the mat outside my father’s
bedroom door. A nervous creature.’

There was a silent interval of nearly half-an-hour. A clock on the
landing struck three.

‘Are you asleep, Miss Aldclyffe?’ whispered Cytherea.

‘No,’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘How wretched it is not to be able to sleep,
isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ replied Cytherea, like a docile child.

Another hour passed, and the clock struck four. Miss Aldclyffe was still
awake.

‘Cytherea,’ she said, very softly.

Cytherea made no answer. She was sleeping soundly.

The first glimmer of dawn was now visible. Miss Aldclyffe arose, put on
her dressing-gown, and went softly downstairs to her own room.

‘I have not told her who I am after all, or found out the particulars
of Ambrose’s history,’ she murmured. ‘But her being in love alters
everything.’

3. HALF-PAST SEVEN TO TEN O’CLOCK A.M.

Cytherea awoke, quiet in mind and refreshed. A conclusion to remain at
Knapwater was already in possession of her.

Finding Miss Aldclyffe gone, she dressed herself and sat down at the
window to write an answer to Edward’s letter, and an account of her
arrival at Knapwater to Owen. The dismal and heart-breaking pictures
that Miss Aldclyffe had placed before her the preceding evening, the
later terrors of the night, were now but as shadows of shadows, and she
smiled in derision at her own excitability.

But writing Edward’s letter was the great consoler, the effect of each
word upon him being enacted in her own face as she wrote it. She felt
how much she would like to share his trouble--how well she could endure
poverty with him--and wondered what his trouble was. But all would be
explained at last, she knew.

At the appointed time she went to Miss Aldclyffe’s room, intending, with
the contradictoriness common in people, to perform with pleasure, as a
work of supererogation, what as a duty was simply intolerable.

Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed. The bright penetrating light
of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady’s behaviour to her
dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea’s judgment, had effected
the same for Miss Aldclyffe. Though practical reasons forbade her
regretting that she had secured such a companionable creature to read,
talk, or play to her whenever her whim required, she was inwardly vexed
at the extent to which she had indulged in the womanly luxury of making
confidences and giving way to emotions. Few would have supposed that the
calm lady sitting aristocratically at the toilet table, seeming scarcely
conscious of Cytherea’s presence in the room, even when greeting her,
was the passionate creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.

It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these
antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our
observation--ourselves. We pass the evening with faces lit up by some
flaring illumination or other: we get up the next morning--the fiery
jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few crinkled
pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline of the
blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.

Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light. Probably
nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession are written
after nine or ten o’clock in the evening, and sent off before day
returns to leer invidiously upon them. Few that remain open to catch
our glance as we rise in the morning, survive the frigid criticism of
dressing-time.

The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus cooled
from their fires, were not the visionary ones of the later hours,
but the hard facts of their earlier conversation. After a remark that
Cytherea need not assist her in dressing unless she wished to, Miss
Aldclyffe said abruptly--

‘I can tell that young man’s name.’ She looked keenly at Cytherea. ‘It
is Edward Springrove, my tenant’s son.’

The inundation of colour upon the younger lady at hearing a name which
to her was a world, handled as if it were only an atom, told Miss
Aldclyffe that she had divined the truth at last.

‘Ah--it is he, is it?’ she continued. ‘Well, I wanted to know for
practical reasons. His example shows that I was not so far wrong in my
estimate of men after all, though I only generalized, and had no thought
of him.’ This was perfectly true.

‘What do you mean?’ said Cytherea, visibly alarmed.

‘Mean? Why that all the world knows him to be engaged to be married, and
that the wedding is soon to take place.’ She made the remark bluntly and
superciliously, as if to obtain absolution at the hands of her family
pride for the weak confidences of the night.

But even the frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe’s morning mood was overcome by
the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered words
had produced upon Cytherea’s face. She sank back into a chair, and
buried her face in her hands.

‘Don’t be so foolish,’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘Come, make the best of it.
I cannot upset the fact I have told you of, unfortunately. But I believe
the match can be broken off.’

‘O no, no.’

‘Nonsense. I liked him much as a youth, and I like him now. I’ll help
you to captivate and chain him down. I have got over my absurd feeling
of last night in not wanting you ever to go away from me--of course, I
could not expect such a thing as that. There, now I have said I’ll help
you, and that’s enough. He’s tired of his first choice now that he’s
been away from home for a while. The love that no outer attack can
frighten away quails before its idol’s own homely ways; it is always
so.... Come, finish what you are doing if you are going to, and don’t be
a little goose about such a trumpery affair as that.’

‘Who--is he engaged to?’ Cytherea inquired by a movement of her lips but
no sound of her voice. But Miss Aldclyffe did not answer. It mattered
not, Cytherea thought. Another woman--that was enough for her: curiosity
was stunned.

She applied herself to the work of dressing, scarcely knowing how. Miss
Aldclyffe went on:--

‘You were too easily won. I’d have made him or anybody else speak out
before he should have kissed my face for his pleasure. But you are one
of those precipitantly fond things who are yearning to throw away their
hearts upon the first worthless fellow who says good-morning. In the
first place, you shouldn’t have loved him so quickly: in the next,
if you must have loved him off-hand, you should have concealed it. It
tickled his vanity: “By Jove, that girl’s in love with me already!” he
thought.’

To hasten away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris--who
stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out,
bread-and-butter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged--that she
wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her
only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned
matron with a cup of tea and one piece of bread-and-butter on a tray,
cheerfully insisting that she should eat it.

To those who grieve, innocent cheerfulness seems heartless levity. ‘No,
thank you, Mrs. Morris,’ she said, keeping the door closed. Despite
the incivility of the action, Cytherea could not bear to let a pleasant
person see her face then.

Immediate revocation--even if revocation would be more effective by
postponement--is the impulse of young wounded natures. Cytherea went
to her blotting-book, took out the long letter so carefully written, so
full of gushing remarks and tender hints, and sealed up so neatly with
a little seal bearing ‘Good Faith’ as its motto, tore the missive into
fifty pieces, and threw them into the grate. It was then the bitterest
of anguishes to look upon some of the words she had so lovingly written,
and see them existing only in mutilated forms without meaning--to feel
that his eye would never read them, nobody ever know how ardently she
had penned them.

Pity for one’s self for being wasted is mostly present in these moods of
abnegation.

The meaning of all his allusions, his abruptness in telling her of his
love, his constraint at first, then his desperate manner of speaking,
was clear. They must have been the last flickerings of a conscience not
quite dead to all sense of perfidiousness and fickleness. Now he had
gone to London: she would be dismissed from his memory, in the same way
as Miss Aldclyffe had said. And here she was in Edward’s own parish,
reminded continually of him by what she saw and heard. The landscape,
yesterday so much and so bright to her, was now but as the banquet-hall
deserted--all gone but herself.

Miss Aldclyffe had wormed her secret out of her, and would now be
continually mocking her for her trusting simplicity in believing him. It
was altogether unbearable: she would not stay there.

She went downstairs and found Miss Aldclyffe had gone into the
breakfast-room, but that Captain Aldclyffe, who rose later with
increasing infirmities, had not yet made his appearance. Cytherea
entered. Miss Aldclyffe was looking out of the window, watching a trail
of white smoke along the distant landscape--signifying a passing train.
At Cytherea’s entry she turned and looked inquiry.

‘I must tell you now,’ began Cytherea, in a tremulous voice.

‘Well, what?’ Miss Aldclyffe said.

‘I am not going to stay with you. I must go away--a very long way. I am
very sorry, but indeed I can’t remain!’

‘Pooh--what shall we hear next?’ Miss Aldclyffe surveyed Cytherea’s face
with leisurely criticism. ‘You are breaking your heart again about that
worthless young Springrove. I knew how it would be. It is as Hallam says
of Juliet--what little reason you may have possessed originally has all
been whirled away by this love. I shan’t take this notice, mind.’

‘Do let me go!’

Miss Aldclyffe took her new pet’s hand, and said with severity, ‘As to
hindering you, if you are determined to go, of course that’s absurd.
But you are not now in a state of mind fit for deciding upon any such
proceeding, and I shall not listen to what you have to say. Now, Cythie,
come with me; we’ll let this volcano burst and spend itself, and after
that we’ll see what had better be done.’ She took Cytherea into her
workroom, opened a drawer, and drew forth a roll of linen.

‘This is some embroidery I began one day, and now I should like it
finished.’

She then preceded the maiden upstairs to Cytherea’s own room. ‘There,’
she said, ‘now sit down here, go on with this work, and remember one
thing--that you are not to leave the room on any pretext whatever for
two hours unless I send for you--I insist kindly, dear. Whilst you
stitch--you are to stitch, recollect, and not go mooning out of the
window--think over the whole matter, and get cooled; don’t let the
foolish love-affair prevent your thinking as a woman of the world. If
at the end of that time you still say you must leave me, you may. I will
have no more to say in the matter. Come, sit down, and promise to sit
here the time I name.’

To hearts in a despairing mood, compulsion seems a relief; and docility
was at all times natural to Cytherea. She promised, and sat down. Miss
Aldclyffe shut the door upon her and retreated.

She sewed, stopped to think, shed a tear or two, recollected the
articles of the treaty, and sewed again; and at length fell into a
reverie which took no account whatever of the lapse of time.

4. TEN TO TWELVE O’CLOCK A.M.

A quarter of an hour might have passed when her thoughts became
attracted from the past to the present by unwonted movements downstairs.
She opened the door and listened.

There were hurryings along passages, opening and shutting of doors,
trampling in the stable-yard. She went across into another bedroom, from
which a view of the stable-yard could be obtained, and arrived there
just in time to see the figure of the man who had driven her from the
station vanishing down the coach-road on a black horse--galloping at the
top of the animal’s speed.

Another man went off in the direction of the village.

Whatever had occurred, it did not seem to be her duty to inquire or
meddle with it, stranger and dependent as she was, unless she were
requested to, especially after Miss Aldclyffe’s strict charge to her.
She sat down again, determined to let no idle curiosity influence her
movements.

Her window commanded the front of the house; and the next thing she saw
was a clergyman walk up and enter the door.

All was silent again till, a long time after the first man had left,
he returned again on the same horse, now matted with sweat and trotting
behind a carriage in which sat an elderly gentleman driven by a lad in
livery. These came to the house, entered, and all was again the same as
before.

The whole household--master, mistress, and servants--appeared to have
forgotten the very existence of such a being as Cytherea. She almost
wished she had not vowed to have no idle curiosity.

Half-an-hour later, the carriage drove off with the elderly gentleman,
and two or three messengers left the house, speeding in various
directions. Rustics in smock-frocks began to hang about the road
opposite the house, or lean against trees, looking idly at the windows
and chimneys.

A tap came to Cytherea’s door. She opened it to a young maid-servant.

‘Miss Aldclyffe wishes to see you, ma’am.’ Cytherea hastened down.

Miss Aldclyffe was standing on the hearthrug, her elbow on the mantel,
her hand to her temples, her eyes on the ground; perfectly calm, but
very pale.

‘Cytherea,’ she said in a whisper, ‘come here.’

Cytherea went close.

‘Something very serious has taken place,’ she said again, and then
paused, with a tremulous movement of her mouth.

‘Yes,’ said Cytherea.

‘My father. He was found dead in his bed this morning.’

‘Dead!’ echoed the younger woman. It seemed impossible that the
announcement could be true; that knowledge of so great a fact could be
contained in a statement so small.

‘Yes, dead,’ murmured Miss Aldclyffe solemnly. ‘He died alone, though
within a few feet of me. The room we slept in is exactly over his own.’

Cytherea said hurriedly, ‘Do they know at what hour?’

‘The doctor says it must have been between two and three o’clock this
morning.’

‘Then I heard him!’

‘Heard him?’

‘Heard him die!’

‘You heard him die? What did you hear?’

‘A sound I heard once before in my life--at the deathbed of my mother. I
could not identify it--though I recognized it. Then the dog howled: you
remarked it. I did not think it worth while to tell you what I had heard
a little earlier.’ She looked agonized.

‘It would have been useless,’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘All was over by that
time.’ She addressed herself as much as Cytherea when she continued, ‘Is
it a Providence who sent you here at this juncture that I might not be
left entirely alone?’

Till this instant Miss Aldclyffe had forgotten the reason of Cytherea’s
seclusion in her own room. So had Cytherea herself. The fact now
recurred to both in one moment.

‘Do you still wish to go?’ said Miss Aldclyffe anxiously.

‘I don’t want to go now,’ Cytherea had remarked simultaneously with the
other’s question. She was pondering on the strange likeness which Miss
Aldclyffe’s bereavement bore to her own; it had the appearance of being
still another call to her not to forsake this woman so linked to her
life, for the sake of any trivial vexation.

Miss Aldclyffe held her almost as a lover would have held her, and said
musingly--

‘We get more and more into one groove. I now am left fatherless and
motherless as you were.’ Other ties lay behind in her thoughts, but she
did not mention them.

‘You loved your father, Cytherea, and wept for him?’

‘Yes, I did. Poor papa!’

‘I was always at variance with mine, and can’t weep for him now! But you
must stay here always, and make a better woman of me.’

The compact was thus sealed, and Cytherea, in spite of the failure of
her advertisements, was installed as a veritable Companion. And,
once more in the history of human endeavour, a position which it was
impossible to reach by any direct attempt, was come to by the seeker’s
swerving from the path, and regarding the original object as one of
secondary importance.




VII. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS

1. AUGUST THE SEVENTEENTH

The time of day was four o’clock in the afternoon. The place was the
lady’s study or boudoir, Knapwater House. The person was Miss Aldclyffe
sitting there alone, clothed in deep mourning.

The funeral of the old Captain had taken place, and his will had been
read. It was very concise, and had been executed about five years
previous to his death. It was attested by his solicitors, Messrs.
Nyttleton and Tayling, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The whole of his estate,
real and personal, was bequeathed to his daughter Cytherea, for her sole
and absolute use, subject only to the payment of a legacy to the rector,
their relative, and a few small amounts to the servants.

Miss Aldclyffe had not chosen the easiest chair of her boudoir to sit
in, or even a chair of ordinary comfort, but an uncomfortable, high,
narrow-backed, oak framed and seated chair, which was allowed to
remain in the room only on the ground of being a companion in artistic
quaintness to an old coffer beside it, and was never used except to
stand in to reach for a book from the highest row of shelves. But she
had sat erect in this chair for more than an hour, for the reason that
she was utterly unconscious of what her actions and bodily feelings
were. The chair had stood nearest her path on entering the room, and she
had gone to it in a dream.

She sat in the attitude which denotes unflagging, intense, concentrated
thought--as if she were cast in bronze. Her feet were together, her body
bent a little forward, and quite unsupported by the back of the chair;
her hands on her knees, her eyes fixed intently on the corner of a
footstool.

At last she moved and tapped her fingers upon the table at her side.
Her pent-up ideas had finally found some channel to advance in. Motions
became more and more frequent as she laboured to carry further and
further the problem which occupied her brain. She sat back and drew
a long breath: she sat sideways and leant her forehead upon her
hand. Later still she arose, walked up and down the room--at first
abstractedly, with her features as firmly set as ever; but by degrees
her brow relaxed, her footsteps became lighter and more leisurely; her
head rode gracefully and was no longer bowed. She plumed herself like a
swan after exertion.

‘Yes,’ she said aloud. ‘To get _him_ here without letting him know that
I have any other object than that of getting a useful man--that’s the
difficulty--and that I think I can master.’

She rang for the new maid, a placid woman of forty with a few grey
hairs.

‘Ask Miss Graye if she can come to me.’

Cytherea was not far off, and came in.

‘Do you know anything about architects and surveyors?’ said Miss
Aldclyffe abruptly.

‘Know anything?’ replied Cytherea, poising herself on her toe to
consider the compass of the question.

‘Yes--know anything,’ said Miss Aldclyffe.

‘Owen is an architect and surveyor’s draughtsman,’ the maiden said, and
thought of somebody else who was likewise.

‘Yes! that’s why I asked you. What are the different kinds of work
comprised in an architect’s practice? They lay out estates, and
superintend the various works done upon them, I should think, among
other things?’

‘Those are, more properly, a land or building steward’s duties--at least
I have always imagined so. Country architects include those things in
their practice; city architects don’t.’

‘I know that, child. But a steward’s is an indefinite fast and loose
profession, it seems to me. Shouldn’t you think that a man who had been
brought up as an architect would do for a steward?’

Cytherea had doubts whether an architect pure would do.

The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting
it. Miss Aldclyffe replied decisively--

‘Nonsense; of course he would. Your brother Owen makes plans for country
buildings--such as cottages, stables, homesteads, and so on?’

‘Yes; he does.’

‘And superintends the building of them?’

‘Yes; he will soon.’

‘And he surveys land?’

‘O yes.’

‘And he knows about hedges and ditches--how wide they ought to be,
boundaries, levelling, planting trees to keep away the winds, measuring
timber, houses for ninety-nine years, and such things?’

‘I have never heard him say that; but I think Mr. Gradfield does those
things. Owen, I am afraid, is inexperienced as yet.’

‘Yes; your brother is not old enough for such a post yet, of course.
And then there are rent-days, the audit and winding up of tradesmen’s
accounts. I am afraid, Cytherea, you don’t know much more about the
matter than I do myself.... I am going out just now,’ she continued. ‘I
shall not want you to walk with me to-day. Run away till dinner-time.’

Miss Aldclyffe went out of doors, and down the steps to the lawn: then
turning to the left, through a shrubbery, she opened a wicket and passed
into a neglected and leafy carriage-drive, leading down the hill. This
she followed till she reached the point of its greatest depression,
which was also the lowest ground in the whole grove.

The trees here were so interlaced, and hung their branches so near the
ground, that a whole summer’s day was scarcely long enough to change
the air pervading the spot from its normal state of coolness to even a
temporary warmth. The unvarying freshness was helped by the nearness of
the ground to the level of the springs, and by the presence of a deep,
sluggish stream close by, equally well shaded by bushes and a high wall.
Following the road, which now ran along at the margin of the stream,
she came to an opening in the wall, on the other side of the water,
revealing a large rectangular nook from which the stream proceeded,
covered with froth, and accompanied by a dull roar. Two more steps,
and she was opposite the nook, in full view of the cascade forming its
further boundary. Over the top could be seen the bright outer sky in the
form of a crescent, caused by the curve of a

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/3044