Desperate Remedies
know what there is yet to tell. Could you forgive as you can love?’ She
was alarmed to see that he had become pale with the question.
‘No--do not speak,’ he said. ‘I have kept something from you, which has
now become the cause of a great uneasiness. I had no right--to love you;
but I did it. Something forbade--’
‘What?’ she exclaimed.
‘Something forbade me--till the kiss--yes, till the kiss came; and now
nothing shall forbid it! We’ll hope in spite of all... I must, however,
speak of this love of ours to your brother. Dearest, you had better go
indoors whilst I meet him at the station, and explain everything.’
Cytherea’s short-lived bliss was dead and gone. O, if she had known of
this sequel would she have allowed him to break down the barrier of mere
acquaintanceship--never, never!
‘Will you not explain to me?’ she faintly urged. Doubt--indefinite,
carking doubt had taken possession of her.
‘Not now. You alarm yourself unnecessarily,’ he said tenderly. ‘My only
reason for keeping silence is that with my present knowledge I may tell
an untrue story. It may be that there is nothing to tell. I am to blame
for haste in alluding to any such thing. Forgive me, sweet--forgive me.’
Her heart was ready to burst, and she could not answer him. He returned
to his place and took to the oars.
They again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of houses,
lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky. The sun
had set, and a star or two began to peep out. They drew nearer their
destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly with his eyes the
red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear as black ones in the
increasing dusk of evening. She surveyed the long line of lamps on the
sea-wall of the town, now looking small and yellow, and seeming to send
long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea. By-and-by they
reached the landing-steps. He took her hand as before, and found it as
cold as the water about them. It was not relinquished till he reached
her door. His assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner:
he saw that she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured
sparrow. Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the
Esplanade.
Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she did
in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out of sight
she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to see him
sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement behind him,
forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as she mused in his
neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding, the notes of pianos
and singing voices from the fashionable houses at her back, from the
open windows of which the lamp-light streamed to join that of the
orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay in front. Then Edward
began to pace up and down, and Cytherea, fearing that he would notice
her, hastened homeward, flinging him a last look as she passed out of
sight. No promise from him to write: no request that she herself would
do so--nothing but an indefinite expression of hope in the face of some
fear unknown to her. Alas, alas!
When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room, and
creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered her there
lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her hat and
jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and succumbed to
the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-blown love. The wet
traces of tears were yet visible upon her long drooping lashes.
‘Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
A living death, and ever-dying life.’
‘Cytherea,’ he whispered, kissing her. She awoke with a start, and
vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment. ‘He’s gone!’ she
said.
‘He has told me all,’ said Graye soothingly. ‘He is going off early
to-morrow morning. ‘Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and
cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.’
‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then jumping up--‘Owen, has he told
you _all_?’
‘All of your love from beginning to end,’ he said simply.
Edward then had not told more--as he ought to have done: yet she could
not convict him. But she would struggle against his fetters. She tingled
to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility that he might be
deluding her.
‘Owen,’ she continued, with dignity, ‘what is he to me? Nothing. I must
dismiss such weakness as this--believe me, I will. Something far more
pressing must drive it away. I have been looking my position steadily
in the face, and I must get a living somehow. I mean to advertise once
more.’
‘Advertising is no use.’
‘This one will be.’ He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her
answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it him.
‘See what I am going to do,’ she said sadly, almost bitterly. This was
her third effort:--
‘LADY’S-MAID. Inexperienced. Age eighteen.--G., 3 Cross Street,
Budmouth.’
Owen--Owen the respectable--looked blank astonishment. He repeated in a
nameless, varying tone, the two words--
‘Lady’s-maid!’
‘Yes; lady’s-maid. ‘Tis an honest profession,’ said Cytherea bravely.
‘But _you_, Cytherea?’
‘Yes, I--who am I?’
‘You will never be a lady’s-maid--never, I am quite sure.’
‘I shall try to be, at any rate.’
‘Such a disgrace--’
‘Nonsense! I maintain that it is no disgrace!’ she said, rather warmly.
‘You know very well--’
‘Well, since you will, you must,’ he interrupted. ‘Why do you put
“inexperienced?”’
‘Because I am.’
‘Never mind that--scratch out “inexperienced.” We are poor, Cytherea,
aren’t we?’ he murmured, after a silence, ‘and it seems that the two
months will close my engagement here.’
‘We can put up with being poor,’ she said, ‘if they only give us work
to do.... Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as a curse, and
even that is denied. However, be cheerful, Owen, and never mind!’
In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the
brighter endurance of women at these epochs--invaluable, sweet, angelic,
as it is--owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out
many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness
intense enough to quell them.
IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
1. AUGUST THE FOURTH. TILL FOUR O’CLOCK
The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea’s last
note of hope in the way of advertisement--not from a distance of
hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent--as Cytherea
seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means adopted for
obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of that in which
she was living--a country mansion not twenty miles off. The reply ran
thus:--
KNAPWATER HOUSE,
August 3, 1864.
‘Miss Aldclyffe is in want of a young person as lady’s-maid. The duties
of the place are light. Miss Aldclyffe will be in Budmouth on Thursday,
when (should G. still not have heard of a place) she would like to see
her at the Belvedere Hotel, Esplanade, at four o’clock. No answer need
be returned to this note.’
A little earlier than the time named, Cytherea, clothed in a modest
bonnet, and a black silk jacket, turned down to the hotel. Expectation,
the fresh air from the water, the bright, far-extending outlook, raised
the most delicate of pink colours to her cheeks, and restored to her
tread a portion of that elasticity which her past troubles, and thoughts
of Edward, had well-nigh taken away.
She entered the vestibule, and went to the window of the bar.
‘Is Miss Aldclyffe here?’ she said to a nicely-dressed barmaid in the
foreground, who was talking to a landlady covered with chains, knobs,
and clamps of gold, in the background.
‘No, she isn’t,’ said the barmaid, not very civilly. Cytherea looked a
shade too pretty for a plain dresser.
‘Miss Aldclyffe is expected here,’ the landlady said to a third person,
out of sight, in the tone of one who had known for several days the fact
newly discovered from Cytherea. ‘Get ready her room--be quick.’ From the
alacrity with which the order was given and taken, it seemed to Cytherea
that Miss Aldclyffe must be a woman of considerable importance.
‘You are to have an interview with Miss Aldclyffe here?’ the landlady
inquired.
‘Yes.’
‘The young person had better wait,’ continued the landlady. With a
money-taker’s intuition she had rightly divined that Cytherea would
bring no profit to the house.
Cytherea was shown into a nondescript chamber, on the shady side of the
building, which appeared to be either bedroom or dayroom, as occasion
necessitated, and was one of a suite at the end of the first-floor
corridor. The prevailing colour of the walls, curtains, carpet, and
coverings of furniture, was more or less blue, to which the cold light
coming from the north easterly sky, and falling on a wide roof of new
slates--the only object the small window commanded--imparted a more
striking paleness. But underneath the door, communicating with the next
room of the suite, gleamed an infinitesimally small, yet very powerful,
fraction of contrast--a very thin line of ruddy light, showing that the
sun beamed strongly into this room adjoining. The line of radiance was
the only cheering thing visible in the place.
People give way to very infantine thoughts and actions when they wait;
the battle-field of life is temporarily fenced off by a hard and fast
line--the interview. Cytherea fixed her eyes idly upon the streak, and
began picturing a wonderful paradise on the other side as the source
of such a beam--reminding her of the well-known good deed in a naughty
world.
Whilst she watched the particles of dust floating before the brilliant
chink she heard a carriage and horses stop opposite the front of the
house. Afterwards came the rustle of a lady’s skirts down the corridor,
and into the room communicating with the one Cytherea occupied.
The golden line vanished in parts like the phosphorescent streak caused
by the striking of a match; there was the fall of a light footstep
on the floor just behind it: then a pause. Then the foot tapped
impatiently, and ‘There’s no one here!’ was spoken imperiously by a
lady’s tongue.
‘No, madam; in the next room. I am going to fetch her,’ said the
attendant.
‘That will do--or you needn’t go in; I will call her.’
Cytherea had risen, and she advanced to the middle door with the chink
under it as the servant retired. She had just laid her hand on the knob,
when it slipped round within her fingers, and the door was pulled open
from the other side.
2. FOUR O’CLOCK
The direct blaze of the afternoon sun, partly refracted through the
crimson curtains of the window, and heightened by reflections from the
crimson-flock paper which covered the walls, and a carpet on the floor
of the same tint, shone with a burning glow round the form of a lady
standing close to Cytherea’s front with the door in her hand. The
stranger appeared to the maiden’s eyes--fresh from the blue gloom, and
assisted by an imagination fresh from nature--like a tall black figure
standing in the midst of fire. It was the figure of a finely-built
woman, of spare though not angular proportions.
Cytherea involuntarily shaded her eyes with her hand, retreated a step
or two, and then she could for the first time see Miss Aldclyffe’s face
in addition to her outline, lit up by the secondary and softer light
that was reflected from the varnished panels of the door. She was not
a very young woman, but could boast of much beauty of the majestic
autumnal phase.
‘O,’ said the lady, ‘come this way.’ Cytherea followed her to the
embrasure of the window.