Desperate Remedies
sight of her shadow moving about the room.
THE CORONER: ‘Did her shadow appear to be that of a woman undressing?’
SPRINGROVE: ‘I cannot say, as I didn’t take particular notice. It moved
backwards and forwards; she might have been undressing or merely pacing
up and down the room.’
Mrs. Fitler, the ostler’s wife and chambermaid, said that she preceded
Mrs. Manston into the room, put down the candle, and went out. Mrs.
Manston scarcely spoke to her, except to ask her to bring a little
brandy. Witness went and fetched it from the bar, brought it up, and put
it on the dressing-table.
THE CORONER: ‘Had Mrs. Manston begun to undress, when you came back?’
‘No, sir; she was sitting on the bed, with everything on, as when she
came in.’
‘Did she begin to undress before you left?’
‘Not exactly before I had left; but when I had closed the door, and was
on the landing I heard her boot drop on the floor, as it does sometimes
when pulled off?’
‘Had her face appeared worn and sleepy?’
‘I cannot say as her bonnet and veil were still on when I left, for she
seemed rather shy and ashamed to be seen at the Three Tranters at all.’
‘And did you hear or see any more of her?’
‘No more, sir.’
Mrs. Crickett, temporary servant to Mr. Manston, said that in accordance
with Mr. Manston’s orders, everything had been made comfortable in the
house for Mrs. Manston’s expected return on Monday night. Mr. Manston
told her that himself and Mrs. Manston would be home late, not till
between eleven and twelve o’clock, and that supper was to be ready. Not
expecting Mrs. Manston so early, she had gone out on a very important
errand to Mrs. Leat the postmistress.
Mr. Manston deposed that in looking down the columns of Bradshaw he
had mistaken the time of the train’s arrival, and hence was not at the
station when she came. The broken watch produced was his wife’s--he knew
it by a scratch on the inner plate, and by other signs. The bunch of
keys belonged to her: two of them fitted the locks of her two boxes.
Mr. Flooks, agent to Lord Claydonfield at Chettlewood, said that Mr.
Manston had pleaded as his excuse for leaving him rather early in the
evening after their day’s business had been settled, that he was going
to meet his wife at Carriford Road Station, where she was coming by the
last train that night.
The surgeon said that the remains were those of a human being. The small
fragment seemed a portion of one of the lumbar vertebrae--the other
the head of the os femoris--but they were both so far gone that it was
impossible to say definitely whether they belonged to the body of a male
or female. There was no moral doubt that they were a woman’s. He did
not believe that death resulted from burning by fire. He thought she was
crushed by the fall of the west gable, which being of wood, as well as
the floor, burnt after it had fallen, and consumed the body with it.
Two or three additional witnesses gave unimportant testimony.
The coroner summed up, and the jury without hesitation found that the
deceased Mrs. Manston came by her death accidentally through the burning
of the Three Tranters Inn.
3. DECEMBER THE SECOND. AFTERNOON
When Mr. Springrove came from the door of the Rising Sun at the end of
the inquiry, Manston walked by his side as far as the stile to the park,
a distance of about a stone’s-throw.
‘Ah, Mr. Springrove, this is a sad affair for everybody concerned.’
‘Everybody,’ said the old farmer, with deep sadness, ‘’tis quite a
misery to me. I hardly know how I shall live through each day as it
breaks. I think of the words, “In the morning thou shalt say, Would God
it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for
the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of
thine eyes which thou shalt see.”’ His voice became broken.
‘Ah--true. I read Deuteronomy myself,’ said Manston.
‘But my loss is as nothing to yours,’ the farmer continued.
‘Nothing; but I can commiserate you. I should be worse than unfeeling
if I didn’t, although my own affliction is of so sad and solemn a kind.
Indeed my own loss makes me more keenly alive to yours, different in
nature as it is.’
‘What sum do you think would be required of me to put the houses in
place again?’
‘I have roughly thought six or seven hundred pounds.’
‘If the letter of the law is to be acted up to,’ said the old man, with
more agitation in his voice.
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘Do you know enough of Miss Aldclyffe’s mind to give me an idea of how
she means to treat me?’
‘Well, I am afraid I must tell you that though I know very little of her
mind as a rule, in this matter I believe she will be rather peremptory;
she might share to the extent of a sixth or an eighth perhaps, in
consideration of her getting new lamps for old, but I should hardly
think more.’
The steward stepped upon the stile, and Mr. Springrove went along the
road with a bowed head and heavy footsteps towards his niece’s cottage,
in which, rather against the wish of Edward, they had temporarily taken
refuge.
The additional weight of this knowledge soon made itself perceptible.
Though indoors with Edward or Adelaide nearly the whole of the
afternoon, nothing more than monosyllabic replies could be drawn from
him. Edward continually discovered him looking fixedly at the wall or
floor, quite unconscious of another’s presence. At supper he ate just as
usual, but quite mechanically, and with the same abstraction.
4. DECEMBER THE THIRD
The next morning he was in no better spirits. Afternoon came: his son
was alarmed, and managed to draw from him an account of the conversation
with the steward.
‘Nonsense; he knows nothing about it,’ said Edward vehemently. ‘I’ll see
Miss Aldclyffe myself. Now promise me, father, that you’ll not believe
till I come back, and tell you to believe it, that Miss Aldclyffe will
do any such unjust thing.’
Edward started at once for Knapwater House. He strode rapidly along the
high-road, till he reached a wicket where a footpath allowed of a short
cut to the mansion. Here he leant down upon the bars for a few minutes,
meditating as to the best manner of opening his speech, and surveying
the scene before him in that absent mood which takes cognizance of
little things without being conscious of them at the time, though they
appear in the eye afterwards as vivid impressions. It was a yellow,
lustrous, late autumn day, one of those days of the quarter when morning
and evening seem to meet together without the intervention of a noon.
The clear yellow sunlight had tempted forth Miss Aldclyffe herself, who
was at this same time taking a walk in the direction of the village.
As Springrove lingered he heard behind the plantation a woman’s dress
brushing along amid the prickly husks and leaves which had fallen into
the path from the boughs of the chestnut trees. In another minute she
stood in front of him.
He answered her casual greeting respectfully, and was about to request
a few minutes’ conversation with her, when she directly addressed him
on the subject of the fire. ‘It is a sad misfortune for your father’ she
said, ‘and I hear that he has lately let his insurances expire?’
‘He has, madam, and you are probably aware that either by the general
terms of his holding, or the same coupled with the origin of the fire,
the disaster may involve the necessity of his rebuilding the whole row
of houses, or else of becoming a debtor to the estate, to the extent of
some hundreds of pounds?’
She assented. ‘I have been thinking of it,’ she went on, and then
repeated in substance the words put into her mouth by the steward.
Some disturbance of thought might have been fancied as taking place in
Springrove’s mind during her statement, but before she had reached the
end, his eyes were clear, and directed upon her.
‘I don’t accept your conditions of release,’ he said.
‘They are not conditions exactly.’
‘Well, whatever they are not, they are very uncalled-for remarks.’
‘Not at all--the houses have been burnt by your family’s negligence.’
‘I don’t refer to the houses--you have of course the best of all rights
to speak of that matter; but you, a stranger to me comparatively, have
no right at all to volunteer opinions and wishes upon a very delicate
subject, which concerns no living beings but Miss Graye, Miss Hinton,
and myself.’
Miss Aldclyffe, like a good many others in her position, had plainly
not realized that a son of her tenant and inferior could have become an
educated man, who had learnt to feel his individuality, to view society
from a Bohemian standpoint, far outside the farming grade in Carriford
parish, and that hence he had all a developed man’s unorthodox opinion
about the subordination of classes. And fully conscious of the labyrinth
into which he had wandered between his wish to behave honourably in the
dilemma of his engagement to his cousin Adelaide and the intensity of
his love for Cytherea, Springrove was additionally sensitive to any
allusion to the case. He had spoken to Miss Aldclyffe with considerable
warmth.
And Miss Aldclyffe was not a woman likely to be far behind any second
person in warming to a mood of defiance. It seemed as if she were
prepared to put up with a cold refusal, but that her haughtiness
resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke. By this,
Manston’s discreditable object, which had been made hers by compulsion
only, was now adopted by choice. She flung herself into the work.
A fiery man in such a case would have relinquished persuasion and tried
palpable force. A fiery woman added unscrupulousness and evolved daring
strategy; and in her obstinacy, and to sustain herself as mistress, she
descended to an action the meanness of which haunted her conscience to
her dying hour.
‘I don’t quite see, Mr. Springrove,’ she said, ‘that I am altogether
what you are pleased to call a stranger. I have known your family, at
any rate, for a good many years, and I know Miss Graye particularly
well, and her state of mind with regard to this matter.’
Perplexed love makes us credulous and curious as old women. Edward was
willing, he owned it to himself, to get at Cytherea’s state of mind,
even through so dangerous a medium.
‘A letter I received from her’ he said, with assumed coldness, ‘tells me
clearly enough what Miss Graye’s mind is.’
‘You think she still loves you? O yes, of course you do--all men are
like that.’
‘I have reason to.’ He could feign no further than the first speech.
‘I should be interested in knowing what reason?’ she said, with
sarcastic archness.
Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he
rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his
antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the early
evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a keenly
conscious man. Her bearing had charmed him into toleration, as Mary
Stuart’s charmed the indignant Puritan visitors. He again answered her
honestly.
‘The best of reasons--the tone of her letter.’
‘Pooh, Mr. Springrove!’
‘Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe! Miss Graye desired that we should be
strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that intimacy
could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack of
love--love is only suppressed.’
‘Don’t you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman’s pity
for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is
often mistaken for suppressed love?’ said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft
insidiousness.
This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea’s tone which he had
certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own it.
‘I had never thought of it,’ he said.
‘And don’t believe it?’