Desperate Remedies
opened half way, he saw his father leaning on the bureau, his elbows
resting on the flap, his body nearly doubled, his hands clasping his
forehead. Beside him were ghostly-looking square folds of parchment--the
leases of the houses destroyed.
His father looked up when Edward entered, and wearily spoke to the young
man as his face came into the faint light.
‘Edward, why did you get up so early?’
‘I was uneasy, and could not sleep.’
The farmer turned again to the leases on the bureau, and seemed to
become lost in reflection. In a minute or two, without lifting his eyes,
he said--
‘This is more than we can bear, Ted--more than we can bear! Ted, this
will kill me. Not the loss only--the sense of my neglect about the
insurance and everything. Borrow I never will. ‘Tis all misery now. God
help us--all misery now!’
Edward did not answer, continuing to look fixedly at the dreary daylight
outside.
‘Ted,’ the farmer went on, ‘this upset of be-en burnt out o’ home makes
me very nervous and doubtful about everything. There’s this troubles me
besides--our liven here with your cousin, and fillen up her house. It
must be very awkward for her. But she says she doesn’t mind. Have you
said anything to her lately about when you are going to marry her?’
‘Nothing at all lately.’
‘Well, perhaps you may as well, now we are so mixed in together. You
know, no time has ever been mentioned to her at all, first or last,
and I think it right that now, since she has waited so patiently and so
long--you are almost called upon to say you are ready. It would simplify
matters very much, if you were to walk up to church wi’ her one of these
mornings, get the thing done, and go on liven here as we are. If you
don’t I must get a house all the sooner. It would lighten my mind, too,
about the two little freeholds over the hill--not a morsel a-piece,
divided as they were between her mother and me, but a tidy bit tied
together again. Just think about it, will ye, Ted?’
He stopped from exhaustion produced by the intense concentration of his
mind upon the weary subject, and looked anxiously at his son.
‘Yes, I will,’ said Edward.
‘But I am going to see her of the Great House this morning,’ the farmer
went on, his thoughts reverting to the old subject. ‘I must know the
rights of the matter, the when and the where. I don’t like seeing her,
but I’d rather talk to her than the steward. I wonder what she’ll say to
me.’
The younger man knew exactly what she would say. If his father asked her
what he was to do, and when, she would simply refer him to Manston: her
character was not that of a woman who shrank from a proposition she had
once laid down. If his father were to say to her that his son had at
last resolved to marry his cousin within the year, and had given her a
promise to that effect, she would say, ‘Mr. Springrove, the houses are
burnt: we’ll let them go: trouble no more about them.’
His mind was already made up. He said calmly, ‘Father, when you are
talking to Miss Aldclyffe, mention to her that I have asked Adelaide if
she is willing to marry me next Christmas. She is interested in my union
with Adelaide, and the news will be welcome to her.’
‘And yet she can be iron with reference to me and her property,’ the
farmer murmured. ‘Very well, Ted, I’ll tell her.’
6. DECEMBER THE FIFTH
Of the many contradictory particulars constituting a woman’s heart, two
had shown their vigorous contrast in Cytherea’s bosom just at this time.
It was a dark morning, the morning after old Mr. Springrove’s visit
to Miss Aldclyffe, which had terminated as Edward had intended. Having
risen an hour earlier than was usual with her, Cytherea sat at the
window of an elegant little sitting-room on the ground floor, which had
been appropriated to her by the kindness or whim of Miss Aldclyffe, that
she might not be driven into that lady’s presence against her will. She
leant with her face on her hand, looking out into the gloomy grey air.
A yellow glimmer from the flapping flame of the newly-lit fire fluttered
on one side of her face and neck like a butterfly about to settle there,
contrasting warmly with the other side of the same fair face, which
received from the window the faint cold morning light, so weak that her
shadow from the fire had a distinct outline on the window-shutter in
spite of it. There the shadow danced like a demon, blue and grim.
The contradiction alluded to was that in spite of the decisive
mood which two months earlier in the year had caused her to write a
peremptory and final letter to Edward, she was now hoping for some
answer other than the only possible one a man who, as she held, did not
love her wildly, could send to such a communication. For a lover who
did love wildly, she had left one little loophole in her otherwise
straightforward epistle. Why she expected the letter on some morning of
this particular week was, that hearing of his return to Carriford, she
fondly assumed that he meant to ask for an interview before he left.
Hence it was, too, that for the last few days, she had not been able to
keep in bed later than the time of the postman’s arrival.
The clock pointed to half-past seven. She saw the postman emerge from
beneath the bare boughs of the park trees, come through the wicket, dive
through the shrubbery, reappear on the lawn, stalk across it without
reference to paths--as country postmen do--and come to the porch. She
heard him fling the bag down on the seat, and turn away towards the
village, without hindering himself for a single pace.
Then the butler opened the door, took up the bag, brought it in, and
carried it up the staircase to place it on the slab by Miss Aldclyffe’s
dressing-room door. The whole proceeding had been depicted by sounds.
She had a presentiment that her letter was in the bag at last. She
thought then in diminishing pulsations of confidence, ‘He asks to see
me! Perhaps he asks to see me: I hope he asks to see me.’
A quarter to eight: Miss Aldclyffe’s bell--rather earlier than usual.
‘She must have heard the post-bag brought,’ said the maiden, as,
tired of the chilly prospect outside, she turned to the fire, and drew
imaginative pictures of her future therein.
A tap came to the door, and the lady’s-maid entered.
‘Miss Aldclyffe is awake,’ she said; ‘and she asked if you were moving
yet, miss.’
‘I’ll run up to her,’ said Cytherea, and flitted off with the utterance
of the words. ‘Very fortunate this,’ she thought; ‘I shall see what is
in the bag this morning all the sooner.’
She took it up from the side table, went into Miss Aldclyffe’s bedroom,
pulled up the blinds, and looked round upon the lady in bed, calculating
the minutes that must elapse before she looked at her letters.
‘Well, darling, how are you? I am glad you have come in to see me,’
said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘You can unlock the bag this morning, child, if you
like,’ she continued, yawning factitiously.
‘Strange!’ Cytherea thought; ‘it seems as if she knew there was likely
to be a letter for me.’
From her bed Miss Aldclyffe watched the girl’s face as she tremblingly
opened the post-bag and found there an envelope addressed to her in
Edward’s handwriting; one he had written the day before, after the
decision he had come to on an impartial, and on that account torturing,
survey of his own, his father’s, his cousin Adelaide’s, and what he
believed to be Cytherea’s, position.
The haughty mistress’s soul sickened remorsefully within her when she
saw suddenly appear upon the speaking countenance of the young lady
before her a wan desolate look of agony.
The master-sentences of Edward’s letter were these: ‘You speak truly.
That we never meet again is the wisest and only proper course. That I
regret the past as much as you do yourself, it is hardly necessary for
me to say.’
XII. THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
1. DECEMBER TO APRIL
Week after week, month after month, the time had flown by. Christmas had
passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given place to more dreary
winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in rain, rain in wind,
wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period of pink dawns and white
sunsets; with the third week in April the cuckoo had appeared, with the
fourth, the nightingale.
Edward Springrove was in London, attending to the duties of his
new office, and it had become known throughout the neighbourhood of
Carriford that the engagement between himself and Miss Adelaide Hinton
would terminate in marriage at the end of the year.
The only occasion on which her lover of the idle delicious days at
Budmouth watering-place had been seen by Cytherea after the time of the
decisive correspondence, was once in church, when he sat in front of
her, and beside Miss Hinton.
The rencounter was quite an accident. Springrove had come there in the
full belief that Cytherea was away from home with Miss Aldclyffe; and he
continued ignorant of her presence throughout the service.
It is at such moments as these, when a sensitive nature writhes under
the conception that its most cherished emotions have been treated with
contumely, that the sphere-descended Maid, Music, friend of Pleasure
at other times, becomes a positive enemy--racking, bewildering,
unrelenting. The congregation sang the first Psalm and came to the
verse--
‘Like some fair tree which, fed by streams,
With timely fruit doth bend,
He still shall flourish, and success
All his designs attend.’
Cytherea’s lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but could
she help singing the words in the depths of her being, although the man
to whom she applied them sat at her rival’s side?
Perhaps the moral compensation for all a woman’s petty cleverness
under thriving conditions is the real nobility that lies in her extreme
foolishness at these other times; her sheer inability to be simply
just, her exercise of an illogical power entirely denied to men in
general--the power not only of kissing, but of delighting to kiss the
rod by a punctilious observance of the self-immolating doctrines in the
Sermon on the Mount.
As for Edward--a little like other men of his temperament, to whom, it
is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love is in
itself a recommendation--his sentiment, as he looked over his cousin’s
book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic--
‘O, what hast thou of her, of her
Whose every look did love inspire;
Whose every breathing fanned my fire,
And stole me from myself away!’
Then, without letting him see her, Cytherea slipt out of church early,
and went home, the tones of the organ still lingering in her ears as she
tried bravely to kill a jealous thought that would nevertheless live:
‘My nature is one capable of more, far more, intense feeling than hers!
She can’t appreciate all the sides of him--she never will! He is more
tangible to me even now, as a thought, than his presence itself is to
her!’ She was less noble then.
But she continually repressed her misery and bitterness of heart till
the effort to do so showed signs of lessening. At length she even tried
to hope that her lost lover and her rival would love one another very
dearly.
The scene and the sentiment dropped into the past. Meanwhile, Manston
continued visibly before her. He, though quiet and subdued in his
bearing for a long time after the calamity of November, had not
simulated a grief that he did not feel. At first his loss seemed so
to absorb him--though as a startling change rather than as a heavy
sorrow--that he paid Cytherea no attention whatever. His conduct was
uniformly kind and respectful, but little more. Then, as the date of the
catastrophe grew remoter, he began to wear a different aspect towards