Desperate Remedies
position. Cytherea proposed to walk a little way with him.
‘I want to talk to you as long as I can,’ she said tenderly.
Brother and sister then emerged by the heavy door into the drive. The
feeling and aspect of the hour were precisely similar to those under
which the steward had left the house the evening previous, excepting
that apparently unearthly reversal of natural sequence, which is caused
by the world getting lighter instead of darker. ‘The tearful glimmer of
the languid dawn’ was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy
red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon
loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had
collected from the foggy air.
They passed the Old House, engaged in a deep conversation, and had
proceeded about twenty yards by a cross route, in the direction of the
turnpike road, when the form of a woman emerged from the porch of the
building.
She was wrapped in a grey waterproof cloak, the hood of which was drawn
over her head and closely round her face--so closely that her eyes were
the sole features uncovered.
With this one exception of her appearance there, the most perfect
stillness and silence pervaded the steward’s residence from basement to
chimney. Not a shutter was open; not a twine of smoke came forth.
Underneath the ivy-covered gateway she stood still and listened for two,
or possibly three minutes, till she became conscious of others in the
park. Seeing the pair she stepped back, with the apparent intention
of letting them pass out of sight, and evidently wishing to avoid
observation. But looking at her watch, and returning it rapidly to her
pocket, as if surprised at the lateness of the hour, she hurried out
again, and across the park by a still more oblique line than that traced
by Owen and his sister.
These in the meantime had got into the road, and were walking along it
as the woman came up on the other side of the boundary hedge, looking
for a gate or stile, by which she, too, might get off the grass upon the
hard ground.
Their conversation, of which every word was clear and distinct, in the
still air of the dawn, to the distance of a quarter of a mile, reached
her ears, and withdrew her attention from all other matters and sights
whatsoever. Thus arrested she stood for an instant as precisely in the
attitude of Imogen by the cave of Belarius, as if she had studied the
position from the play. When they had advanced a few steps, she followed
them in some doubt, still screened by the hedge.
‘Do you believe in such odd coincidences?’ said Cytherea.
‘How do you mean, believe in them? They occur sometimes.’
‘Yes, one will occur often enough--that is, two disconnected events will
fall strangely together by chance, and people scarcely notice the fact
beyond saying, “Oddly enough it happened that so and so were the same,”
and so on. But when three such events coincide without any apparent
reason for the coincidence, it seems as if there must be invisible means
at work. You see, three things falling together in that manner are ten
times as singular as two cases of coincidence which are distinct.’
‘Well, of course: what a mathematical head you have, Cytherea! But I
don’t see so much to marvel at in our case. That the man who kept the
public-house in which Miss Aldclyffe fainted, and who found out her name
and position, lives in this neighbourhood, is accounted for by the fact
that she got him the berth to stop his tongue. That you came here was
simply owing to Springrove.’
‘Ah, but look at this. Miss Aldclyffe is the woman our father first
loved, and I have come to Miss Aldclyffe’s; you can’t get over that.’
From these premises, she proceeded to argue like an elderly divine on
the designs of Providence which were apparent in such conjunctures, and
went into a variety of details connected with Miss Aldclyffe’s history.
‘Had I better tell Miss Aldclyffe that I know all this?’ she inquired at
last.
‘What’s the use?’ he said. ‘Your possessing the knowledge does no harm;
you are at any rate comfortable here, and a confession to Miss Aldclyffe
might only irritate her. No, hold your tongue, Cytherea.’
‘I fancy I should have been tempted to tell her too,’ Cytherea went on,
‘had I not found out that there exists a very odd, almost imperceptible,
and yet real connection of some kind between her and Mr. Manston, which
is more than that of a mutual interest in the estate.’
‘She is in love with him!’ exclaimed Owen; ‘fancy that!’
‘Ah--that’s what everybody says who has been keen enough to notice
anything. I said so at first. And yet now I cannot persuade myself that
she is in love with him at all.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘She doesn’t act as if she were. She isn’t--you will know I don’t say it
from any vanity, Owen--she isn’t the least jealous of me.’
‘Perhaps she is in some way in his power.’
‘No--she is not. He was openly advertised for, and chosen from forty or
fifty who answered the advertisement, without knowing whose it was. And
since he has been here, she has certainly done nothing to compromise
herself in any way. Besides, why should she have brought an enemy here
at all?’
‘Then she must have fallen in love with him. You know as well as I do,
Cyth, that with women there’s nothing between the two poles of emotion
towards an interesting male acquaintance. ‘Tis either love or aversion.’
They walked for a few minutes in silence, when Cytherea’s eyes
accidentally fell upon her brother’s feet.
‘Owen,’ she said, ‘do you know that there is something unusual in your
manner of walking?’
‘What is it like?’ he asked.
‘I can’t quite say, except that you don’t walk so regularly as you used
to.’
The woman behind the hedge, who had still continued to dog their
footsteps, made an impatient movement at this change in their
conversation, and looked at her watch again. Yet she seemed reluctant to
give over listening to them.
‘Yes,’ Owen returned with assumed carelessness, ‘I do know it. I think
the cause of it is that mysterious pain which comes just above my ankle
sometimes. You remember the first time I had it? That day we went by
steam-packet to Lulstead Cove, when it hindered me from coming back to
you, and compelled me to sleep with the gateman we have been talking
about.’
‘But is it anything serious, dear Owen?’ Cytherea exclaimed, with some
alarm.
‘O, nothing at all. It is sure to go off again. I never find a sign of
it when I sit in the office.’
Again their unperceived companion made a gesture of vexation, and looked
at her watch as if time were precious. But the dialogue still flowed
on upon this new subject, and showed no sign of returning to its old
channel.
Gathering up her skirt decisively she renounced all further hope, and
hurried along the ditch till she had dropped into a valley, and came to
a gate which was beyond the view of those coming behind. This she softly
opened, and came out upon the road, following it in the direction of the
railway station.
Presently she heard Owen Graye’s footsteps in her rear, his quickened
pace implying that he had parted from his sister. The woman thereupon
increased her rapid walk to a run, and in a few minutes safely distanced
her fellow-traveller.
The railway at Carriford Road consisted only of a single line of rails;
and the short local down-train by which Owen was going to Budmouth was
shunted on to a siding whilst the first up-train passed. Graye entered
the waiting-room, and the door being open he listlessly observed the
movements of a woman wearing a long grey cloak, and closely hooded, who
had asked for a ticket for London.
He followed her with his eyes on to the platform, saw her waiting there
and afterwards stepping into the train: his recollection of her ceasing
with the perception.
4. EIGHT TO TEN O’CLOCK A.M.
Mrs. Crickett, twice a widow, and now the parish clerk’s wife, a
fine-framed, scandal-loving woman, with a peculiar corner to her eye by
which, without turning her head, she could see what people were doing
almost behind her, lived in a cottage standing nearer to the old
manor-house than any other in the village of Carriford, and she had on
that account been temporarily engaged by the steward, as a respectable
kind of charwoman and general servant, until a settled arrangement could
be made with some person as permanent domestic.
Every morning, therefore, Mrs. Crickett, immediately she had lighted
the fire in her own cottage, and prepared the breakfast for herself and
husband, paced her way to the Old House to do the same for Mr. Manston.
Then she went home to breakfast; and when the steward had eaten his, and
had gone out on his rounds, she returned again to clear away, make his
bed, and put the house in order for the day.
On the morning of Owen Graye’s departure, she went through the
operations of her first visit as usual--proceeded home to breakfast, and
went back again, to perform those of the second.
Entering Manston’s empty bedroom, with her hands on her hips, she
indifferently cast her eyes upon the bed, previously to dismantling it.
Whilst she looked, she thought in an inattentive manner, ‘What a
remarkably quiet sleeper Mr. Manston must be!’ The upper bed-clothes
were flung back, certainly, but the bed was scarcely disarranged.
‘Anybody would almost fancy,’ she thought, ‘that he had made it himself
after rising.’
But these evanescent thoughts vanished as they had come, and Mrs.
Crickett set to work; she dragged off the counterpane, blankets and
sheets, and stooped to lift the pillows. Thus stooping, something
arrested her attention; she looked closely--more closely--very closely.
‘Well, to be sure!’ was all she could say. The clerk’s wife stood as if
the air had suddenly set to amber, and held her fixed like a fly in it.
The object of her wonder was a trailing brown hair, very little less
than a yard long, which proved it clearly to be a hair from some woman’s
head. She drew it off the pillow, and took it to the window; there
holding it out she looked fixedly at it, and became utterly lost in
meditation: her gaze, which had at first actively settled on the hair,
involuntarily dropped past its object by degrees and was lost on the
floor, as the inner vision obscured the outer one.
She at length moistened her lips, returned her eyes to the hair, wound
it round her fingers, put it in some paper, and secreted the whole in
her pocket. Mrs. Crickett’s thoughts were with her work no more that
morning.
She searched the house from roof-tree to cellar, for some other trace of
feminine existence or appurtenance; but none was to be found.
She went out into the yard, coal-hole, stable, hay-loft, green-house,
fowl-house, and piggery, and still there was no sign. Coming in again,
she saw a bonnet, eagerly pounced upon it; and found it to be her own.
Hastily completing her arrangements in the other rooms, she entered the
village again, and called at once on the postmistress, Elizabeth Leat,
an intimate friend of hers, and a female who sported several unique
diseases and afflictions.
Mrs. Crickett unfolded the paper, took out the hair, and waved it on
high before the perplexed eyes of Elizabeth, which immediately mooned
and wandered after it like a cat’s.
‘What is it?’ said Mrs. Leat, contracting her eyelids, and stretching
out towards the invisible object a narrow bony hand that would have been
an unmitigated delight to the pencil of Carlo Crivelli.
‘You shall hear,’ said Mrs. Crickett, complacently gathering up the
treasure into her own fat hand; and the secret was then solemnly
imparted, together with the accident of its discovery.
A shaving-glass was taken down from a nail, laid on its back in the