Desperate Remedies
He then considered that there would be plenty of time for him to return
from his day’s engagement to meet this train. He finished his breakfast,
gave proper and precise directions to his servant on the preparations
that were to be made for the lady’s reception, jumped into his gig, and
drove off to Lord Claydonfield’s, at Chettlewood.
He went along by the front of Knapwater House. He could not help turning
to look at what he knew to be the window of Cytherea’s room. Whilst he
looked, a hopeless expression of passionate love and sensuous anguish
came upon his face and lingered there for a few seconds; then, as on
previous occasions, it was resolutely repressed, and he trotted along
the smooth white road, again endeavouring to banish all thought of the
young girl whose beauty and grace had so enslaved him.
Thus it was that when, in the evening of the same day, Mrs. Manston
reached Carriford Road Station, her husband was still at Chettlewood,
ignorant of her arrival, and on looking up and down the platform, dreary
with autumn gloom and wind, she could see no sign that any preparation
whatever had been made for her reception and conduct home.
The train went on. She waited, fidgeted with the handle of her umbrella,
walked about, strained her eyes into the gloom of the chilly night,
listened for wheels, tapped with her foot, and showed all the usual
signs of annoyance and irritation: she was the more irritated in
that this seemed a second and culminating instance of her husband’s
neglect--the first having been shown in his not fetching her.
Reflecting awhile upon the course it would be best to take, in order
to secure a passage to Knapwater, she decided to leave all her luggage,
except a dressing-bag, in the cloak-room, and walk to her husband’s
house, as she had done on her first visit. She asked one of the porters
if he could find a lad to go with her and carry her bag: he offered to
do it himself.
The porter was a good-tempered, shallow-minded, ignorant man. Mrs.
Manston, being apparently in very gloomy spirits, would probably have
preferred walking beside him without saying a word: but her companion
would not allow silence to continue between them for a longer period
than two or three minutes together.
He had volunteered several remarks upon her arrival, chiefly to the
effect that it was very unfortunate Mr. Manston had not come to the
station for her, when she suddenly asked him concerning the inhabitants
of the parish.
He told her categorically the names of the chief--first the chief
possessors of property; then of brains; then of good looks. As first
among the latter he mentioned Miss Cytherea Graye.
After getting him to describe her appearance as completely as lay in
his power, she wormed out of him the statement that everybody had been
saying--before Mrs. Manston’s existence was heard of--how well the
handsome Mr. Manston and the beautiful Miss Graye were suited for each
other as man and wife, and that Miss Aldclyffe was the only one in the
parish who took no interest in bringing about the match.
‘He rather liked her you think?’
The porter began to think he had been too explicit, and hastened to
correct the error.
‘O no, he don’t care a bit about her, ma’am,’ he said solemnly.
‘Not more than he does about me?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘Then that must be little indeed,’ Mrs. Manston murmured. She stood
still, as if reflecting upon the painful neglect her words had recalled
to her mind; then, with a sudden impulse, turned round, and walked
petulantly a few steps back again in the direction of the station.
The porter stood still and looked surprised.
‘I’ll go back again; yes, indeed, I’ll go back again!’ she said
plaintively. Then she paused and looked anxiously up and down the
deserted road.
‘No, I mustn’t go back now,’ she continued, in a tone of resignation.
Seeing that the porter was watching her, she turned about and came on as
before, giving vent to a slight laugh.
It was a laugh full of character; the low forced laugh which seeks to
hide the painful perception of a humiliating position under the mask of
indifference.
Altogether her conduct had shown her to be what in fact she was, a weak,
though a calculating woman, one clever to conceive, weak to execute:
one whose best-laid schemes were for ever liable to be frustrated by the
ineradicable blight of vacillation at the critical hour of action.
‘O, if I had only known that all this was going to happen!’ she murmured
again, as they paced along upon the rustling leaves.
‘What did you say, ma’am?’ said the porter.
‘O, nothing particular; we are getting near the old manor-house by this
time, I imagine?’
‘Very near now, ma’am.’
They soon reached Manston’s residence, round which the wind blew
mournfully and chill.
Passing under the detached gateway, they entered the porch. The porter
stepped forward, knocked heavily and waited.
Nobody came.
Mrs. Manston then advanced to the door and gave a different series of
rappings--less forcible, but more sustained.
There was not a movement of any kind inside, not a ray of light visible;
nothing but the echo of her own knocks through the passages, and the dry
scratching of the withered leaves blown about her feet upon the floor of
the porch.
The steward, of course, was not at home. Mrs. Crickett, not expecting
that anybody would arrive till the time of the later train, had set the
place in order, laid the supper-table, and then locked the door, to go
into the village and converse with her friends.
‘Is there an inn in the village?’ said Mrs. Manston, after the fourth
and loudest rapping upon the iron-studded old door had resulted only in
the fourth and loudest echo from the passages inside.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Who keeps it?’
‘Farmer Springrove.’
‘I will go there to-night,’ she said decisively. ‘It is too cold, and
altogether too bad, for a woman to wait in the open road on anybody’s
account, gentle or simple.’
They went down the park and through the gate, into the village of
Carriford. By the time they reached the Three Tranters, it was verging
upon ten o’clock. There, on the spot where two months earlier in the
season the sunny and lively group of villagers making cider under the
trees had greeted Cytherea’s eyes, was nothing now intelligible but a
vast cloak of darkness, from which came the low sough of the elms, and
the occasional creak of the swinging sign.
They went to the door, Mrs. Manston shivering; but less from the cold,
than from the dreariness of her emotions. Neglect is the coldest of
winter winds.
It so happened that Edward Springrove was expected to arrive from London
either on that evening or the next, and at the sound of voices his
father came to the door fully expecting to see him. A picture of
disappointment seldom witnessed in a man’s face was visible in old Mr.
Springrove’s, when he saw that the comer was a stranger.
Mrs. Manston asked for a room, and one that had been prepared for Edward
was immediately named as being ready for her, another being adaptable
for Edward, should he come in.
Without taking any refreshment, or entering any room downstairs, or even
lifting her veil, she walked straight along the passage and up to her
apartment, the chambermaid preceding her.
‘If Mr. Manston comes to-night,’ she said, sitting on the bed as she had
come in, and addressing the woman, ‘tell him I cannot see him.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The woman left the room, and Mrs. Manston locked the door. Before
the servant had gone down more than two or three stairs, Mrs. Manston
unfastened the door again, and held it ajar.
‘Bring me some brandy,’ she said.
The chambermaid went down to the bar and brought up the spirit in a
tumbler. When she came into the room, Mrs. Manston had not removed a
single article of apparel, and was walking up and down, as if still
quite undecided upon the course it was best to adopt.
Outside the door, when it was closed upon her, the maid paused to listen
for an instant. She heard Mrs. Manston talking to herself.
‘This is welcome home!’ she said.
2. FROM TEN TO HALF-PAST ELEVEN P.M.
A strange concurrence of phenomena now confronts us.
During the autumn in which the past scenes were enacted, Mr. Springrove
had ploughed, harrowed, and cleaned a narrow and shaded piece of ground,
lying at the back of his house, which for many years had been looked
upon as irreclaimable waste.
The couch-grass extracted from the soil had been left to wither in the
sun; afterwards it was raked together, lighted in the customary way, and
now lay smouldering in a large heap in the middle of the plot.
It had been kindled three days previous to Mrs. Manston’s arrival, and
one or two villagers, of a more cautious and less sanguine temperament
than Springrove, had suggested that the fire was almost too near the
back of the house for its continuance to be unattended with risk; for
though no danger could be apprehended whilst the air remained moderately
still, a brisk breeze blowing towards the house might possibly carry a
spark across.
‘Ay, that’s true enough,’ said Springrove. ‘I must look round before
going to bed and see that everything’s safe; but to tell the truth I
am anxious to get the rubbish burnt up before the rain comes to wash it
into ground again. As to carrying the couch into the back field to
burn, and bringing it back again, why, ‘tis more than the ashes would be
worth.’
‘Well, that’s very true,’ said the neighbours, and passed on.
Two or three times during the first evening after the heap was lit, he
went to the back door to take a survey. Before bolting and barring
up for the night, he made a final and more careful examination.
The slowly-smoking pile showed not the slightest signs of activity.
Springrove’s perfectly sound conclusion was, that as long as the heap
was not stirred, and the wind continued in the quarter it blew from
then, the couch would not flame, and that there could be no shadow of
danger to anything, even a combustible substance, though it were no more
than a yard off.
The next morning the burning couch was discovered in precisely the same
state as when he had gone to bed the preceding night. The heap smoked
in the same manner the whole of that day: at bed-time the farmer looked
towards it, but less carefully than on the first night.
The morning and the whole of the third day still saw the heap in its old
smouldering condition; indeed, the smoke was less, and there seemed a
probability that it might have to be re-kindled on the morrow.
After admitting Mrs. Manston to his house in the evening, and hearing
her retire, Mr. Springrove returned to the front door to listen for a
sound of his son, and inquired concerning him of the railway-porter,
who sat for a while in the kitchen. The porter had not noticed young
Mr. Springrove get out of the train, at which intelligence the old man
concluded that he would probably not see his son till the next day,
as Edward had hitherto made a point of coming by the train which had
brought Mrs. Manston.
Half-an-hour later the porter left the inn, Springrove at the same time
going to the door to listen again an instant, then he walked round and
in at the back of the house.
The farmer glanced at the heap casually and indifferently in passing;
two nights of safety seemed to ensure the third; and he was about to
bolt and bar as usual, when the idea struck him that there was just a
possibility of his son’s return by the latest train, unlikely as it
was that he would be so delayed. The old man thereupon left the door
unfastened, looked to his usual matters indoors, and went to bed, it
being then half-past ten o’clock.
Farmers and horticulturists well know that it is in the nature of a heap