Desperate Remedies
‘Not unless there was some other evidence to support the view.’
She paused a minute and then began hesitatingly--
‘My intention was--what I did not dream of owning to you--my intention
was to try to induce you to fulfil your promise to Miss Hinton not
solely on her account and yours (though partly). I love Cytherea Graye
with all my soul, and I want to see her happy even more than I do you. I
did not mean to drag her name into the affair at all, but I am driven
to say that she wrote that letter of dismissal to you--for it was a
most pronounced dismissal--not on account of your engagement. She is old
enough to know that engagements can be broken as easily as they can be
made. She wrote it because she loved another man; very suddenly, and not
with any idea or hope of marrying him, but none the less deeply.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr. Manston.’
‘Good--! I can’t listen to you for an instant, madam; why, she hadn’t
seen him!’
‘She had; he came here the day before she wrote to you; and I could
prove to you, if it were worth while, that on that day she went
voluntarily to his house, though not artfully or blamably; stayed for
two hours playing and singing; that no sooner did she leave him than she
went straight home, and wrote the letter saying she should not see you
again, entirely because she had seen him and fallen desperately in love
with him--a perfectly natural thing for a young girl to do, considering
that he’s the handsomest man in the county. Why else should she not have
written to you before?’
‘Because I was such a--because she did not know of the connection
between me and my cousin until then.’
‘I must think she did.’
‘On what ground?’
‘On the strong ground of my having told her so, distinctly, the very
first day she came to live with me.’
‘Well, what do you seek to impress upon me after all? This--that the
day Miss Graye wrote to me, saying it was better that we should part,
coincided with the day she had seen a certain man--’
‘A remarkably handsome and talented man.’
‘Yes, I admit that.’
‘And that it coincided with the hour just subsequent to her seeing him.’
‘Yes, just when she had seen him.’
‘And been to his house alone with him.’
‘It is nothing.’
‘And stayed there playing and singing with him.’
‘Admit that, too,’ he said; ‘an accident might have caused it.’
‘And at the same instant that she wrote your dismissal she wrote a
letter referring to a secret appointment with him.’
‘Never, by God, madam! never!’
‘What do you say, sir?’
‘Never.’
She sneered.
‘There’s no accounting for beliefs, and the whole history is a very
trivial matter; but I am resolved to prove that a lady’s word is
truthful, though upon a matter which concerns neither you nor herself.
You shall learn that she _did_ write him a letter concerning an
assignation--that is, if Mr. Manston still has it, and will be
considerate enough to lend it me.’
‘But besides,’ continued Edward, ‘a married man to do what would cause a
young girl to write a note of the kind you mention!’
She flushed a little.
‘That I don’t know anything about,’ she stammered. ‘But Cytherea didn’t,
of course, dream any more than I did, or others in the parish, that he
was married.’
‘Of course she didn’t.’
‘And I have reason to believe that he told her of the fact directly
afterwards, that she might not compromise herself, or allow him to.
It is notorious that he struggled honestly and hard against her
attractions, and succeeded in hiding his feelings, if not in quenching
them.’
‘We’ll hope that he did.’
‘But circumstances are changed now.’
‘Very greatly changed,’ he murmured abstractedly.
‘You must remember,’ she added more suasively, ‘that Miss Graye has a
perfect right to do what she likes with her own--her heart, that is to
say.’
Her descent from irritation was caused by perceiving that Edward’s faith
was really disturbed by her strong assertions, and it gratified her.
Edward’s thoughts flew to his father, and the object of his interview
with her. Tongue-fencing was utterly distasteful to him.
‘I will not trouble you by remaining longer, madam,’ he remarked,
gloomily; ‘our conversation has ended sadly for me.’
‘Don’t think so,’ she said, ‘and don’t be mistaken. I am older than you
are, many years older, and I know many things.’
Full of miserable doubt, and bitterly regretting that he had raised his
father’s expectations by anticipations impossible of fulfilment, Edward
slowly went his way into the village, and approached his cousin’s house.
The farmer was at the door looking eagerly for him. He had been waiting
there for more than half-an-hour. His eye kindled quickly.
‘Well, Ted, what does she say?’ he asked, in the intensely sanguine
tones which fall sadly upon a listener’s ear, because, antecedently,
they raise pictures of inevitable disappointment for the speaker, in
some direction or another.
‘Nothing for us to be alarmed at,’ said Edward, with a forced
cheerfulness.
‘But must we rebuild?’
‘It seems we must, father.’
The old man’s eyes swept the horizon, then he turned to go in, without
making another observation. All light seemed extinguished in him again.
When Edward went in he found his father with the bureau open, unfolding
the leases with a shaking hand, folding them up again without reading
them, then putting them in their niche only to remove them again.
Adelaide was in the room. She said thoughtfully to Edward, as she
watched the farmer--
‘I hope it won’t kill poor uncle, Edward. What should we do if anything
were to happen to him? He is the only near relative you and I have in
the world.’ It was perfectly true, and somehow Edward felt more bound up
with her after that remark.
She continued: ‘And he was only saying so hopefully the day before the
fire, that he wouldn’t for the world let any one else give me away to
you when we are married.’
For the first time a conscientious doubt arose in Edward’s mind as to
the justice of the course he was pursuing in resolving to refuse the
alternative offered by Miss Aldclyffe. Could it be selfishness as well
as independence? How much he had thought of his own heart, how little he
had thought of his father’s peace of mind!
The old man did not speak again till supper-time, when he began asking
his son an endless number of hypothetical questions on what might induce
Miss Aldclyffe to listen to kinder terms; speaking of her now not as an
unfair woman, but as a Lachesis or Fate whose course it behoved nobody
to condemn. In his earnestness he once turned his eyes on Edward’s
face: their expression was woful: the pupils were dilated and strange in
aspect.
‘If she will only agree to that!’ he reiterated for the hundredth time,
increasing the sadness of his listeners.
An aristocratic knocking came to the door, and Jane entered with a
letter, addressed--
‘MR. EDWARD SPRINGROVE, Junior.’
‘Charles from Knapwater House brought it,’ she said.
‘Miss Aldclyffe’s writing,’ said Mr. Springrove, before Edward had
recognized it himself. ‘Now ‘tis all right; she’s going to make an
offer; she doesn’t want the houses there, not she; they are going to
make that the way into the park.’
Edward opened the seal and glanced at the inside. He said, with a
supreme effort of self-command--
‘It is only directed by Miss Aldclyffe, and refers to nothing connected
with the fire. I wonder at her taking the trouble to send it to-night.’
His father looked absently at him and turned away again. Shortly
afterwards they retired for the night. Alone in his bedroom Edward
opened and read what he had not dared to refer to in their presence.
The envelope contained another envelope in Cytherea’s handwriting,
addressed to ‘---- Manston, Esq., Old Manor House.’ Inside this was the
note she had written to the steward after her detention in his house by
the thunderstorm--
‘KNAPWATER HOUSE,
September 20th.
‘I find I cannot meet you at seven o’clock by the waterfall as I
promised. The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities. ‘C. GRAYE.’
Miss Aldclyffe had not written a line, and, by the unvarying rule
observable when words are not an absolute necessity, her silence seemed
ten times as convincing as any expression of opinion could have been.
He then, step by step, recalled all the conversation on the subject of
Cytherea’s feelings that had passed between himself and Miss Aldclyffe
in the afternoon, and by a confusion of thought, natural enough under
the trying experience, concluded that because the lady was truthful
in her portraiture of effects, she must necessarily be right in her
assumption of causes. That is, he was convinced that Cytherea--the
hitherto-believed faithful Cytherea--had, at any rate, looked with
something more than indifference upon the extremely handsome face and
form of Manston.
Did he blame her, as guilty of the impropriety of allowing herself to
love the newcomer in the face of his not being free to return her love?
No; never for a moment did he doubt that all had occurred in her
old, innocent, impulsive way; that her heart was gone before she knew
it--before she knew anything, beyond his existence, of the man to whom
it had flown. Perhaps the very note enclosed to him was the result
of first reflection. Manston he would unhesitatingly have called a
scoundrel, but for one strikingly redeeming fact. It had been patent
to the whole parish, and had come to Edward’s own knowledge by that
indirect channel, that Manston, as a married man, conscientiously
avoided Cytherea after those first few days of his arrival during which
her irresistibly beautiful and fatal glances had rested upon him--his
upon her.
Taking from his coat a creased and pocket-worn envelope containing
Cytherea’s letter to himself, Springrove opened it and read it through.
He was upbraided therein, and he was dismissed. It bore the date of the
letter sent to Manston, and by containing within it the phrase, ‘All the
day long I have been thinking,’ afforded justifiable ground for assuming
that it was written subsequently to the other (and in Edward’s sight far
sweeter one) to the steward.
But though he accused her of fickleness, he would not doubt the
genuineness, in its kind, of her partiality for him at Budmouth. It was
a short and shallow feeling--not perfect love:
‘Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.’
But it was not flirtation; a feeling had been born in her and had died.
It would be well for his peace of mind if his love for her could flit
away so softly, and leave so few traces behind.
Miss Aldclyffe had shown herself desperately concerned in the whole
matter by the alacrity with which she had obtained the letter from
Manston, and her labours to induce himself to marry his cousin. Taken in
connection with her apparent interest in, if not love for, Cytherea, her
eagerness, too, could only be accounted for on the ground that Cytherea
indeed loved the steward.
5. DECEMBER THE FOURTH
Edward passed the night he scarcely knew how, tossing feverishly from
side to side, the blood throbbing in his temples, and singing in his
ears.
Before the day began to break he dressed himself. On going out upon
the landing he found his father’s bedroom door already open. Edward
concluded that the old man had risen softly, as was his wont, and gone
out into the fields to start the labourers. But neither of the outer
doors was unfastened. He entered the front room, and found it empty.
Then animated by a new idea, he went round to the little back parlour,
in which the few wrecks saved from the fire were deposited, and looked
in at the door. Here, near the window, the shutters of which had been