Desperate Remedies
They were standing by the ruinous foundations of an old mill in the
midst of a meadow. Between grey and half-overgrown stonework--the only
signs of masonry remaining--the water gurgled down from the old millpond
to a lower level, under the cloak of rank broad leaves--the sensuous
natures of the vegetable world. On the right hand the sun, resting on
the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below copper-coloured
and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft
green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were
overspread by a purple haze, against which a swarm of wailing gnats
shone forth luminously, rising upward and floating away like sparks of
fire.
The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity. The only
wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless.
The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such
temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a
single entity under the sky.
He came so close that their clothes touched. ‘Will you try to love me?
Do try to love me!’ he said, in a whisper, taking her hand. He had never
taken it before. She could feel his hand trembling exceedingly as it
held hers in its clasp.
Considering his kindness to her brother, his love for herself, and
Edward’s fickleness, ought she to forbid him to do this? How truly
pitiful it was to feel his hand tremble so--all for her! Should she
withdraw her hand? She would think whether she would. Thinking, and
hesitating, she looked as far as the autumnal haze on the marshy
ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of a
hedge--all that remained of a ‘wet old garden’--standing in the middle
of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending, purposeless and
valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with mandrakes, and she could
almost fancy she heard their shrieks.... Should she withdraw her hand?
No, she could not withdraw it now; it was too late, the act would not
imply refusal. She felt as one in a boat without oars, drifting with
closed eyes down a river--she knew not whither.
He gave her hand a gentle pressure, and relinquished it.
Then it seemed as if he were coming to the point again. No, he was not
going to urge his suit that evening. Another respite.
7. THE EARLY PART OF SEPTEMBER
Saturday came, and she went on some trivial errand to the village
post-office. It was a little grey cottage with a luxuriant jasmine
encircling the doorway, and before going in Cytherea paused to admire
this pleasing feature of the exterior. Hearing a step on the gravel
behind the corner of the house, she resigned the jasmine and entered.
Nobody was in the room. She could hear Mrs. Leat, the widow who acted
as postmistress, walking about over her head. Cytherea was going to the
foot of the stairs to call Mrs. Leat, but before she had accomplished
her object, another form stood at the half-open door. Manston came in.
‘Both on the same errand,’ he said gracefully.
‘I will call her,’ said Cytherea, moving in haste to the foot of the
stairs.
‘One moment.’ He glided to her side. ‘Don’t call her for a moment,’ he
repeated.
But she had said, ‘Mrs. Leat!’
He seized Cytherea’s hand, kissed it tenderly, and carefully replaced it
by her side.
She had that morning determined to check his further advances, until she
had thoroughly considered her position. The remonstrance was now on her
tongue, but as accident would have it, before the word could be
spoken Mrs. Leat was stepping from the last stair to the floor, and no
remonstrance came.
With the subtlety which characterized him in all his dealings with her,
he quickly concluded his own errand, bade her a good-bye, in the tones
of which love was so garnished with pure politeness that it only showed
its presence to herself, and left the house--putting it out of her
power to refuse him her companionship homeward, or to object to his late
action of kissing her hand.
The Friday of the next week brought another letter from her brother. In
this he informed her that, in absolute grief lest he should distress her
unnecessarily, he had some time earlier borrowed a few pounds. A week
ago, he said, his creditor became importunate, but that on the day
on which he wrote, the creditor had told him there was no hurry for a
settlement, that ‘his _sister’s suitor_ had guaranteed the sum.’ ‘Is he
Mr. Manston? tell me, Cytherea,’ said Owen.
He also mentioned that a wheeled chair had been anonymously hired
for his especial use, though as yet he was hardly far enough advanced
towards convalescence to avail himself of the luxury. ‘Is this Mr.
Manston’s doing?’ he inquired.
She could dally with her perplexity, evade it, trust to time for
guidance, no longer. The matter had come to a crisis: she must once and
for all choose between the dictates of her understanding and those of
her heart. She longed, till her soul seemed nigh to bursting, for her
lost mother’s return to earth, but for one minute, that she might have
tender counsel to guide her through this, her great difficulty.
As for her heart, she half fancied that it was not Edward’s to quite
the extent that it once had been; she thought him cruel in conducting
himself towards her as he did at Budmouth, cruel afterwards in making so
light of her. She knew he had stifled his love for her--was utterly
lost to her. But for all that she could not help indulging in a woman’s
pleasure of recreating defunct agonies, and lacerating herself with them
now and then.
‘If I were rich,’ she thought, ‘I would give way to the luxury of being
morbidly faithful to him for ever without his knowledge.’
But she considered; in the first place she was a homeless dependent;
and what did practical wisdom tell her to do under such desperate
circumstances? To provide herself with some place of refuge from
poverty, and with means to aid her brother Owen. This was to be Mr.
Manston’s wife.
She did not love him.
But what was love without a home? Misery. What was a home without love?
Alas, not much; but still a kind of home.
‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘I am urged by my common sense to marry Mr.
Manston.’
Did anything nobler in her say so too?
With the death (to her) of Edward her heart’s occupation was gone. Was
it necessary or even right for her to tend it and take care of it as she
used to in the old time, when it was still a capable minister?
By a slight sacrifice here she could give happiness to at least two
hearts whose emotional activities were still unwounded. She would do
good to two men whose lives were far more important than hers.
‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘even Christianity urges me to marry Mr.
Manston.’
Directly Cytherea had persuaded herself that a kind of heroic
self-abnegation had to do with the matter, she became much more content
in the consideration of it. A wilful indifference to the future was what
really prevailed in her, ill and worn out, as she was, by the perpetual
harassments of her sad fortune, and she regarded this indifference, as
gushing natures will do under such circumstances, as genuine resignation
and devotedness.
Manston met her again the following day: indeed, there was no escaping
him now. At the end of a short conversation between them, which took
place in the hollow of the park by the waterfall, obscured on the outer
side by the low hanging branches of the limes, she tacitly assented to
his assumption of a privilege greater than any that had preceded it. He
stooped and kissed her brow.
Before going to bed she wrote to Owen explaining the whole matter. It
was too late in the evening for the postman’s visit, and she placed the
letter on the mantelpiece to send it the next day.
The morning (Sunday) brought a hurried postscript to Owen’s letter of
the day before:--
‘September 9, 1865.
‘DEAR CYTHEREA--I have received a frank and friendly letter from Mr.
Manston explaining the position in which he stands now, and also that in
which he hopes to stand towards you. Can’t you love him? Why not? Try,
for he is a good, and not only that, but a cultured man. Think of the
weary and laborious future that awaits you if you continue for life in
your present position, and do you see any way of escape from it except
by marriage? I don’t. Don’t go against your heart, Cytherea, but be
wise.--Ever affectionately yours, OWEN.’
She thought that probably he had replied to Mr. Manston in the same
favouring mood. She had a conviction that that day would settle her
doom. Yet
‘So true a fool is love,’
that even now she nourished a half-hope that something would happen at
the last moment to thwart her deliberately-formed intentions, and favour
the old emotion she was using all her strength to thrust down.
8. THE TENTH OF SEPTEMBER
The Sunday was the thirteenth after Trinity, and the afternoon service
at Carriford was nearly over. The people were singing the Evening Hymn.
Manston was at church as usual in his accustomed place two seats forward
from the large square pew occupied by Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea.
The ordinary sadness of an autumnal evening-service seemed, in
Cytherea’s eyes, to be doubled on this particular occasion. She looked
at all the people as they stood and sang, waving backwards and forwards
like a forest of pines swayed by a gentle breeze; then at the village
children singing too, their heads inclined to one side, their eyes
listlessly tracing some crack in the old walls, or following the
movement of a distant bough or bird with features petrified almost to
painfulness. Then she looked at Manston; he was already regarding her
with some purpose in his glance.
‘It is coming this evening,’ she said in her mind. A minute later, at
the end of the hymn, when the congregation began to move out, Manston
came down the aisle. He was opposite the end of her seat as she stepped
from it, the remainder of their progress to the door being in contact
with each other. Miss Aldclyffe had lingered behind.
‘Don’t let’s hurry,’ he said, when Cytherea was about to enter the
private path to the House as usual. ‘Would you mind turning down this
way for a minute till Miss Aldclyffe has passed?’
She could not very well refuse now. They turned into a secluded path on
their left, leading round through a thicket of laurels to the other gate
of the church-yard, walking very slowly. By the time the further gate
was reached, the church was closed. They met the sexton with the keys in
his hand.
‘We are going inside for a minute,’ said Manston to him, taking the keys
unceremoniously. ‘I will bring them to you when we return.’
The sexton nodded his assent, and Cytherea and Manston walked into the
porch, and up the nave.
They did not speak a word during their progress, or in any way interfere
with the stillness and silence that prevailed everywhere around them.
Everything in the place was the embodiment of decay: the fading
red glare from the setting sun, which came in at the west window,
emphasizing the end of the day and all its cheerful doings, the mildewed
walls, the uneven paving-stones, the wormy pews, the sense of recent
occupation, and the dank air of death which had gathered with the
evening, would have made grave a lighter mood than Cytherea’s was then.
‘What sensations does the place impress you with?’ she said at last,
very sadly.
‘I feel imperatively called upon to be honest, from very despair of
achieving anything by stratagem in a world where the materials are such
as these.’ He, too, spoke in a depressed voice, purposely or otherwise.
‘I feel as if I were almost ashamed to be seen walking such a world,’
she murmured; ‘that’s the effect it has upon me; but it does not induce
me to be honest particularly.’