Desperate Remedies
heavy clouds that daylight seemed delayed indefinitely. The rays of
the lantern were rendered individually visible upon the thick mist, and
seemed almost tangible as they passed off into it, after illuminating
the faces and knees of the two stooping figures dripping with wet; the
postman’s cape and private bags, and the steward’s valise, glistening as
if they had been varnished.
‘It fell on the grass,’ said the postman.
‘No; it fell in the mud,’ said Manston. They searched again.
‘I’m afraid we shan’t find it by this light,’ said the steward at
length, washing his muddy fingers in the wet grass of the bank.
‘I’m afraid we shan’t,’ said the other, standing up.
‘I’ll tell you what we had better do,’ said Manston. ‘I shall be back
this way in an hour or so, and since it was all my fault, I’ll look
again, and shall be sure to find it in the daylight. And I’ll hide the
key here for you.’ He pointed to a spot behind the post. ‘It will be too
late to turn the index then, as the people will have been here, so that
the box had better stay as it is. The letter will only be delayed a day,
and that will not be noticed; if it is, you can say you placed the iron
the wrong way without knowing it, and all will be well.’
This was agreed to by the postman as the best thing to be done under
the circumstances, and the pair went on. They had passed the village and
come to a crossroad, when the steward, telling his companion that their
paths now diverged, turned off to the left towards Carriford.
No sooner was the postman out of sight and hearing than Manston stalked
back to the vicarage letter-box by keeping inside a fence, and thus
avoiding the village; arrived here, he took the key from his pocket,
where it had been concealed all the time, and abstracted Owen’s letter.
This done, he turned towards home, by the help of what he carried in
his valise adjusting himself to his ordinary appearance as he neared the
quarter in which he was known.
An hour and half’s sharp walking brought him to his own door in
Knapwater Park.
2. EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.
Seated in his private office he wetted the flap of the stolen letter,
and waited patiently till the adhesive gum could be loosened. He took
out Edward’s note, the accounts, the rosebud, and the photographs,
regarding them with the keenest interest and anxiety.
The note, the accounts, the rosebud, and his own photograph, he restored
to their places again. The other photograph he took between his finger
and thumb, and held it towards the bars of the grate. There he held it
for half-a-minute or more, meditating.
‘It is a great risk to run, even for such an end,’ he muttered.
Suddenly, impregnated with a bright idea, he jumped up and left the
office for the front parlour. Taking up an album of portraits, which lay
on the table, he searched for three or four likenesses of the lady who
had so lately displaced Cytherea, which were interspersed among the
rest of the collection, and carefully regarded them. They were taken in
different attitudes and styles, and he compared each singly with that he
held in his hand. One of them, the one most resembling that abstracted
from the letter in general tone, size, and attitude, he selected from
the rest, and returned with it to his office.
Pouring some water into a plate, he set the two portraits afloat upon
it, and sitting down tried to read.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, after several ineffectual attempts,
he found that each photograph would peel from the card on which it was
mounted. This done, he threw into the fire the original likeness and the
recent card, stuck upon the original card the recent likeness from the
album, dried it before the fire, and placed it in the envelope with the
other scraps.
The result he had obtained, then, was this: in the envelope were now two
photographs, both having the same photographer’s name on the back and
consecutive numbers attached. At the bottom of the one which showed his
own likeness, his own name was written down; on the other his wife’s
name was written; whilst the central feature, and whole matter to which
this latter card and writing referred, the likeness of a lady mounted
upon it, had been changed.
Mrs. Manston entered the room, and begged him to come to breakfast. He
followed her and they sat down. During the meal he told her what he had
done, with scrupulous regard to every detail, and showed her the result.
‘It is indeed a great risk to run,’ she said, sipping her tea.
‘But it would be a greater not to do it.’
‘Yes.’
The envelope was again fastened up as before, and Manston put it in
his pocket and went out. Shortly afterwards he was seen, on horseback,
riding in a direction towards Tolchurch. Keeping to the fields, as well
as he could, for the greater part of the way, he dropped into the road
by the vicarage letter-box, and looking carefully about, to ascertain
that no person was near, he restored the letter to its nook, placed the
key in its hiding-place, as he had promised the postman, and again rode
homewards by a roundabout way.
3. AFTERNOON
The letter was brought to Owen Graye, the same afternoon, by one of the
vicar’s servants who had been to the box with a duplicate key, as usual,
to leave letters for the evening post. The man found that the index had
told falsely that morning for the first time within his recollection;
but no particular attention was paid to the mistake, as it was
considered. The contents of the envelope were scrutinized by Owen and
flung aside as useless.
The next morning brought Springrove’s second letter, the existence of
which was unknown to Manston. The sight of Edward’s handwriting again
raised the expectations of brother and sister, till Owen had opened the
envelope and pulled out the twig and verse.
‘Nothing that’s of the slightest use, after all,’ he said to her; ‘we
are as far as ever from the merest shadow of legal proof that would
convict him of what I am morally certain he did, marry you, suspecting,
if not knowing, her to be alive all the time.’
‘What has Edward sent?’ said Cytherea.
‘An old amatory verse in Manston’s writing. Fancy,’ he said bitterly,
‘this is the strain he addressed her in when they were courting--as he
did you, I suppose.’
He handed her the verse and she read--
‘EUNICE.
‘Whoso for hours or lengthy days
Shall catch her aspect’s changeful rays,
Then turn away, can none recall
Beyond a galaxy of all
In hazy portraiture;
Lit by the light of azure eyes
Like summer days by summer skies:
Her sweet transitions seem to be
A kind of pictured melody,
And not a set contour.
‘AE. M.’
A strange expression had overspread Cytherea’s countenance. It rapidly
increased to the most death-like anguish. She flung down the paper,
seized Owen’s hand tremblingly, and covered her face.
‘Cytherea! What is it, for Heaven’s sake?’
‘Owen--suppose--O, you don’t know what I think.’
‘What?’
’”_The light of azure eyes_,”’ she repeated with ashy lips.
‘Well, “the light of azure eyes”?’ he said, astounded at her manner.
‘Mrs. Morris said in her letter to me that her eyes are _black_!’
‘H’m. Mrs. Morris must have made a mistake--nothing likelier.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘They might be either in this photograph,’ said Owen, looking at the
card bearing Mrs. Manston’s name.
‘Blue eyes would scarcely photograph so deep in tone as that,’ said
Cytherea. ‘No, they seem black here, certainly.’
‘Well, then, Manston must have blundered in writing his verses.’
‘But could he? Say a man in love may forget his own name, but not that
he forgets the colour of his mistress’s eyes. Besides she would have
seen the mistake when she read them, and have had it corrected.’
‘That’s true, she would,’ mused Owen. ‘Then, Cytherea, it comes to
this--you must have been misinformed by Mrs. Morris, since there is no
other alternative.’
‘I suppose I must.’
Her looks belied her words.
‘What makes you so strange--ill?’ said Owen again.
‘I can’t believe Mrs. Morris wrong.’
‘But look at this, Cytherea. If it is clear to us that the woman had
blue eyes two years ago, she _must_ have blue eyes now, whatever Mrs.
Morris or anybody else may fancy. Any one would think that Manston could
change the colour of a woman’s eyes to hear you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and paused.
‘You say yes, as if he could,’ said Owen impatiently.
‘By changing the woman herself,’ she exclaimed. ‘Owen, don’t you see
the horrid--what I dread?--that the woman he lives with is not Mrs.
Manston--that she was burnt after all--and that I am _his wife_!’
She tried to support a stoicism under the weight of this new trouble,
but no! The unexpected revulsion of ideas was so overwhelming that she
crept to him and leant against his breast.
Before reflecting any further upon the subject Graye led her upstairs
and got her to lie down. Then he went to the window and stared out of
it up the lane, vainly endeavouring to come to some conclusion upon
the fantastic enigma that confronted him. Cytherea’s new view seemed
incredible, yet it had such a hold upon her that it would be necessary
to clear it away by positive proof before contemplation of her fear
should have preyed too deeply upon her.
‘Cytherea,’ he said, ‘this will not do. You must stay here alone all the
afternoon whilst I go to Carriford. I shall know all when I return.’
‘No, no, don’t go!’ she implored.
‘Soon, then, not directly.’ He saw her subtle reasoning--that it was
folly to be wise.
Reflection still convinced him that good would come of persevering
in his intention and dispelling his sister’s idle fears. Anything was
better than this absurd doubt in her mind. But he resolved to wait till
Sunday, the first day on which he might reckon upon seeing Mrs. Manston
without suspicion. In the meantime he wrote to Edward Springrove,
requesting him to go again to Mrs. Manston’s former lodgings.
XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
1. MARCH THE EIGHTEENTH
Sunday morning had come, and Owen was trudging over the six miles of
hill and dale that lay between Tolchurch and Carriford.
Edward Springrove’s answer to the last letter, after expressing his
amazement at the strange contradiction between the verses and Mrs.
Morris’s letter, had been to the effect that he had again visited the
neighbour of the dead Mr. Brown, and had received as near a description
of Mrs. Manston as it was possible to get at second-hand, and by
hearsay. She was a tall woman, wide at the shoulders, and full-chested,
and she had a straight and rather large nose. The colour of her eyes the
informant did not know, for she had only seen the lady in the street
as she went in or out. This confusing remark was added. The woman had
almost recognized Mrs. Manston when she had called with her husband
lately, but she had kept her veil down. Her residence, before she came
to Hoxton, was quite unknown to this next-door neighbour, and Edward
could get no manner of clue to it from any other source.
Owen reached the church-door a few minutes before the bells began
chiming. Nobody was yet in the church, and he walked round the aisles.
From Cytherea’s frequent description of how and where herself and others
used to sit, he knew where to look for Manston’s seat; and after two
or three errors of examination he took up a prayer-book in which was
written ‘Eunice Manston.’ The book was nearly new, and the date of the
writing about a month earlier. One point was at any rate established:
that the woman living with Manston was presented to the world as no
other than his lawful wife.