Chapter 21

‘Well, independent or no, she’s Mrs. Bollens now. Ah, I shall never forget once when I went by Farmer Bollens’s garden--years ago now--years, when he was taking up ashleaf taties. A merry feller I was at that time, a very merry feller--for ‘twas before I took holy orders, and it didn’t prick my conscience as ‘twould now. “Farmer,” says I, “little taties seem to turn out small this year, don’t em?” “O no, Crickett,” says he, “some be fair-sized.” He’s a dull man--Farmer Bollens is--he always was. However, that’s neither here nor there; he’s a-married to a sharp woman, and if I don’t make a mistake she’ll bring him a pretty good family, gie her time.’

‘Well, it don’t matter; there’s a Providence in it,’ said the scullery-maid. ‘God A’mighty always sends bread as well as children.’

‘But ‘tis the bread to one house and the children to another very often. However, I think I can see my lady Hinton’s reason for chosen yesterday to sickness-or-health-it. Your young miss, and that one, had crossed one another’s path in regard to young Master Springrove; and I expect that when Addy Hinton found Miss Graye wasn’t caren to have en, she thought she’d be beforehand with her old enemy in marrying somebody else too. That’s maids’ logic all over, and maids’ malice likewise.’

Women who are bad enough to divide against themselves under a man’s partiality are good enough to instantly unite in a common cause against his attack. ‘I’ll just tell you one thing then,’ said the cook, shaking out her words to the time of a whisk she was beating eggs with. ‘Whatever maids’ logic is and maids’ malice too, if Cytherea Graye even now knows that young Springrove is free again, she’ll fling over the steward as soon as look at him.’

‘No, no: not now,’ the coachman broke in like a moderator. ‘There’s honour in that maid, if ever there was in one. No Miss Hinton’s tricks in her. She’ll stick to Manston.’

‘Pifh!’

‘Don’t let a word be said till the wedden is over, for Heaven’s sake,’ the clerk continued. ‘Miss Aldclyffe would fairly hang and quarter me, if my news broke off that there wedden at a last minute like this.’

‘Then you had better get your wife to bolt you in the closet for an hour or two, for you’ll chatter it yourself to the whole boiling parish if she don’t! ‘Tis a poor womanly feller!’

‘You shouldn’t ha’ begun it, clerk. I knew how ‘twould be,’ said the gardener soothingly, in a whisper to the clerk’s mangled remains.

The clerk turned and smiled at the fire, and warmed his other hand.

3. NOON

The weather gave way. In half-an-hour there began a rapid thaw. By ten o’clock the roads, though still dangerous, were practicable to the extent of the half-mile required by the people of Knapwater Park. One mass of heavy leaden cloud spread over the whole sky; the air began to feel damp and mild out of doors, though still cold and frosty within.

They reached the church and passed up the nave, the deep-coloured glass of the narrow windows rendering the gloom of the morning almost night itself inside the building. Then the ceremony began. The only warmth or spirit imported into it came from the bridegroom, who retained a vigorous--even Spenserian--bridal-mood throughout the morning.

Cytherea was as firm as he at this critical moment, but as cold as the air surrounding her. The few persons forming the wedding-party were constrained in movement and tone, and from the nave of the church came occasional coughs, emitted by those who, in spite of the weather, had assembled to see the termination of Cytherea’s existence as a single woman. Many poor people loved her. They pitied her success, why, they could not tell, except that it was because she seemed to stand more like a statue than Cytherea Graye.

Yet she was prettily and carefully dressed; a strange contradiction in a man’s idea of things--a saddening, perplexing contradiction. Are there any points in which a difference of sex amounts to a difference of nature? Then this is surely one. Not so much, as it is commonly put, in regard to the amount of consideration given, but in the conception of the thing considered. A man emasculated by coxcombry may spend more time upon the arrangement of his clothes than any woman, but even then there is no fetichism in his idea of them--they are still only a covering he uses for a time. But here was Cytherea, in the bottom of her heart almost indifferent to life, yet possessing an instinct with which her heart had nothing to do, the instinct to be particularly regardful of those sorry trifles, her robe, her flowers, her veil, and her gloves.

The irrevocable words were soon spoken--the indelible writing soon written--and they came out of the vestry. Candles had been necessary here to enable them to sign their names, and on their return to the church the light from the candles streamed from the small open door, and across the chancel to a black chestnut screen on the south side, dividing it from a small chapel or chantry, erected for the soul’s peace of some Aldclyffe of the past. Through the open-work of this screen could now be seen illuminated, inside the chantry, the reclining figures of cross-legged knights, damp and green with age, and above them a huge classic monument, also inscribed to the Aldclyffe family, heavily sculptured in cadaverous marble.

Leaning here--almost hanging to the monument--was Edward Springrove, or his spirit.

The weak daylight would never have revealed him, shaded as he was by the screen; but the unexpected rays of candle-light in the front showed him forth in startling relief to any and all of those whose eyes wandered in that direction. The sight was a sad one--sad beyond all description. His eyes were wild, their orbits leaden. His face was of a sickly paleness, his hair dry and disordered, his lips parted as if he could get no breath. His figure was spectre-thin. His actions seemed beyond his own control.

Manston did not see him; Cytherea did. The healing effect upon her heart of a year’s silence--a year and a half’s separation--was undone in an instant. One of those strange revivals of passion by mere sight--commoner in women than in men, and in oppressed women commonest of all--had taken place in her--so transcendently, that even to herself it seemed more like a new creation than a revival.

Marrying for a home--what a mockery it was!

It may be said that the means most potent for rekindling old love in a maiden’s heart are, to see her lover in laughter and good spirits in her despite when the breach has been owing to a slight from herself; when owing to a slight from him, to see him suffering for his own fault. If he is happy in a clear conscience, she blames him; if he is miserable because deeply to blame, she blames herself. The latter was Cytherea’s case now.

First, an agony of face told of the suppressed misery within her, which presently could be suppressed no longer. When they were coming out of the porch, there broke from her in a low plaintive scream the words, ‘He’s dying--dying! O God, save us!’ She began to sink down, and would have fallen had not Manston caught her. The chief bridesmaid applied her vinaigrette.

‘What did she say?’ inquired Manston.

Owen was the only one to whom the words were intelligible, and he was far too deeply impressed, or rather alarmed, to reply. She did not faint, and soon began to recover her self-command. Owen took advantage of the hindrance to step back to where the apparition had been seen. He was enraged with Springrove for what he considered an unwarrantable intrusion.

But Edward was not in the chantry. As he had come, so he had gone, nobody could tell how or whither.

4. AFTERNOON

It might almost have been believed that a transmutation had taken place in Cytherea’s idiosyncrasy, that her moral nature had fled.

The wedding-party returned to the house. As soon as he could find an opportunity, Owen took his sister aside to speak privately with her on what had happened. The expression of her face was hard, wild, and unreal--an expression he had never seen there before, and it disturbed him. He spoke to her severely and sadly.

‘Cytherea,’ he said, ‘I know the cause of this emotion of yours. But remember this, there was no excuse for it. You should have been woman enough to control yourself. Remember whose wife you are, and don’t think anything more of a mean-spirited fellow like Springrove; he had no business to come there as he did. You are altogether wrong, Cytherea, and I am vexed with you more than I can say--very vexed.’

‘Say ashamed of me at once,’ she bitterly answered.

‘I am ashamed of you,’ he retorted angrily; ‘the mood has not left you yet, then?’

‘Owen,’ she said, and paused. Her lip trembled; her eye told of sensations too deep for tears. ‘No, Owen, it has not left me; and I will be honest. I own now to you, without any disguise of words, what last night I did not own to myself, because I hardly knew of it. I love Edward Springrove with all my strength, and heart, and soul. You call me a wanton for it, don’t you? I don’t care; I have gone beyond caring for anything!’ She looked stonily into his face and made the speech calmly.

‘Well, poor Cytherea, don’t talk like that!’ he said, alarmed at her manner.

‘I thought that I did not love him at all,’ she went on hysterically. ‘A year and a half had passed since we met. I could go by the gate of his garden without thinking of him--look at his seat in church and not care. But I saw him this morning--dying because he loves me so--I know it is that! Can I help loving him too? No, I cannot, and I will love him, and I don’t care! We have been separated somehow by some contrivance--I know we have. O, if I could only die!’

He held her in his arms. ‘Many a woman has gone to ruin herself,’ he said, ‘and brought those who love her into disgrace, by acting upon such impulses as possess you now. I have a reputation to lose as well as you. It seems that do what I will by way of remedying the stains which fell upon us, it is all doomed to be undone again.’ His voice grew husky as he made the reply.

The right and only effective chord had been touched. Since she had seen Edward, she had thought only of herself and him. Owen--her name--position--future--had been as if they did not exist.

‘I won’t give way and become a disgrace to _you_, at any rate,’ she said.

‘Besides, your duty to society, and those about you, requires that you should live with (at any rate) all the appearance of a good wife, and try to love your husband.’

‘Yes--my duty to society,’ she murmured. ‘But ah, Owen, it is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all! Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said? What do our own acquaintances care about us? Not much. I think of mine. Mine will now (do they learn all the wicked frailty of my heart in this affair) look at me, smile sickly, and condemn me. And perhaps, far in time to come, when I am dead and gone, some other’s accent, or some other’s song, or thought, like an old one of mine, will carry them back to what I used to say, and hurt their hearts a little that they blamed me so soon. And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, “Poor girl!” believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, “Poor girl!” was a whole life to me; as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and they in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another’s nature truly, that’s what is so grievous.’

‘Well, it cannot be helped,’ said Owen.

‘But we must not stay here,’ she continued, starting up and going. ‘We shall be missed. I’ll do my best, Owen--I will, indeed.’

It had been decided that on account of the wretched state of the roads, the newly-married pair should not drive to the station till the latest hour in the afternoon at which they could get a train to take them to Southampton (their destination that night) by a reasonable time in the evening. They intended the next morning to cross to Havre, and thence to Paris--a place Cytherea had never visited--for their wedding tour.

The afternoon drew on. The packing was done. Cytherea was so restless that she could stay still nowhere. Miss Aldclyffe, who, though she took little part in the day’s proceedings, was, as it were, instinctively conscious of all their movements, put down her charge’s agitation for once as the natural result of the novel event, and Manston himself was as indulgent as could be wished.

At length Cytherea wandered alone into the conservatory. When in it, she thought she would run across to the hot-house in the outer garden, having in her heart a whimsical desire that she should also like to take a last look at the familiar flowers and luxuriant leaves collected there. She pulled on a pair of overshoes, and thither she went. Not a soul was in or around the place. The gardener was making merry on Manston’s and her account.

The happiness that a generous spirit derives from the belief that it exists in others is often greater than the primary happiness itself. The gardener thought ‘How happy they are!’ and the thought made him happier than they.

Coming out of the forcing-house again, she was on the point of returning indoors, when a feeling that these moments of solitude would be her last of freedom induced her to prolong them a little, and she stood still, unheeding the wintry aspect of the curly-leaved plants, the straw-covered beds, and the bare fruit-trees around her. The garden, no part of which was visible from the house, sloped down to a narrow river at the foot, dividing it from the meadows without.

A man was lingering along the public path on the other side of the river; she fancied she knew the form. Her resolutions, taken in the presence of Owen, did not fail her now. She hoped and prayed that it might not be one who had stolen her heart away, and still kept it. Why should he have reappeared at all, when he had declared that he went out of her sight for ever?

She hastily hid herself, in the lowest corner of the garden close to the river. A large dead tree, thickly robed in ivy, had been considerably depressed by its icy load of the morning, and hung low over the stream, which here ran slow and deep. The tree screened her from the eyes of any passer on the other side.

She waited timidly, and her timidity increased. She would not allow herself to see him--she would hear him pass, and then look to see if it had been Edward.

But, before she heard anything, she became aware of an object reflected in the water from under the tree which hung over the river in such a way that, though hiding the actual path, and objects upon it, it permitted their reflected images to pass beneath its boughs. The reflected form was that of the man she had seen further off, but being inverted, she could not definitely characterize him.

He was looking at the upper windows of the House--at hers--was it Edward, indeed? If so, he was probably thinking he would like to say one parting word. He came closer, gazed into the stream, and walked very slowly. She was almost certain that it was Edward. She kept more safely hidden. Conscience told her that she ought not to see him. But she suddenly asked herself a question: ‘Can it be possible that he sees my reflected image, as I see his? Of course he does!’

He was looking at her in the water.

She could not help herself now. She stepped forward just as he emerged from the other side of the tree and appeared erect before her. It was Edward Springrove--till the inverted vision met his eye, dreaming no more of seeing his Cytherea there than of seeing the dead themselves.

‘Cytherea!’

‘Mr. Springrove,’ she returned, in a low voice, across the stream.

He was the first to speak again.

‘Since we have met, I want to tell you something, before we become quite as strangers to each other.’

‘No--not now--I did not mean to speak--it is not right, Edward.’ She spoke hurriedly and turned away from him, beating the air with her hand.

‘Not one common word of explanation?’ he implored. ‘Don’t think I am bad enough to try to lead you astray. Well, go--it is better.’

Their eyes met again. She was nearly choked. O, how she longed--and dreaded--to hear his explanation!

‘What is it?’ she said desperately.

‘It is that I did not come to the church this morning in order to distress you: I did not, Cytherea. It was to try to speak to you before you were--married.’

He stepped closer, and went on, ‘You know what has taken place? Surely you do?--my cousin is married, and I am free.’

‘Married--and not to you?’ Cytherea faltered, in a weak whisper.

‘Yes, she was married yesterday! A rich man had appeared, and she jilted me. She said she never would have jilted a stranger, but that by jilting me, she only exercised the right everybody has of snubbing their own relations. But that’s nothing now. I came to you to ask once more if.... But I was too late.’

‘But, Edward, what’s that, what’s that!’ she cried, in an agony of reproach. ‘Why did you leave me to return to her? Why did you write me that cruel, cruel letter that nearly killed me!’

‘Cytherea! Why, you had grown to love--like--Mr. Manston, and how could you be anything to me--or care for me? Surely I acted naturally?’

‘O no--never! I loved you--only you--not him--always you!--till lately.... I try to love him now.’

‘But that can’t be correct! Miss Aldclyffe told me that you wanted to hear no more of me--proved it to me!’ said Edward.

‘Never! she couldn’t.’

‘She did, Cytherea. And she sent me a letter--a love-letter, you wrote to Mr. Manston.’

‘A love-letter I wrote?’

‘Yes, a love-letter--you could not meet him just then, you said you were sorry, but the emotion you had felt with him made you forgetful of realities.’

The strife of thought in the unhappy girl who listened to this distortion of her meaning could find no vent in words. And then there followed the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all the misery of an explanation which comes too late. The question whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over by Cytherea, under the immediate oppressiveness of her despair in the sense that her position was irretrievable.

Not so Springrove. He saw through all the cunning half-misrepresentations--worse than downright lies--which had just been sufficient to turn the scale both with him and with her; and from the bottom of his soul he cursed the woman and man who had brought all this agony upon him and his Love. But he could not add more misery to the future of the poor child by revealing too much. The whole scheme she should never know.

‘I was indifferent to my own future,’ Edward said, ‘and was urged to promise adherence to my engagement with my cousin Adelaide by Miss Aldclyffe: now you are married I cannot tell you how, but it was on account of my father. Being forbidden to think of you, what did I care about anything? My new thought that you still loved me was first raised by what my father said in the letter announcing my cousin’s marriage. He said that although you were to be married on Old Christmas Day--that is to-morrow--he had noticed your appearance with pity: he thought you loved me still. It was enough for me--I came down by the earliest morning train, thinking I could see you some time to-day, the day, as I thought, before your marriage, hoping, but hardly daring to hope, that you might be induced to marry me. I hurried from the station; when I reached the village I saw idlers about the church, and the private gate leading to the House open. I ran into the church by the small door and saw you come out of the vestry; I was too late. I have now told you. I was compelled to tell you. O, my lost darling, now I shall live content--or die content!’

‘I am to blame, Edward, I am,’ she said mournfully; ‘I was taught to dread pauperism; my nights were made sleepless; there was continually reiterated in my ears till I believed it--

‘“The world and its ways have a certain worth, And to press a point where these oppose Were a simple policy.”

‘But I will say nothing about who influenced--who persuaded. The act is mine, after all. Edward, I married to escape dependence for my bread upon the whim of Miss Aldclyffe, or others like her. It was clearly represented to me that dependence is bearable if we have another place which we can call home; but to be a dependent and to have no other spot for the heart to anchor upon--O, it is mournful and harassing!... But that without which all persuasion would have been as air, was added by my miserable conviction that you were false; that did it, that turned me! You were to be considered as nobody to me, and Mr. Manston was invariably kind. Well, the deed is done--I must abide by it. I shall never let him know that I do not love him--never. If things had only remained as they seemed to be, if you had really forgotten me and married another woman, I could have borne it better. I wish I did not know the truth as I know it now! But our life, what is it? Let us be brave, Edward, and live out our few remaining years with dignity. They will not be long. O, I hope they will not be long!... Now, good-bye, good-bye!’

‘I wish I could be near and touch you once, just once,’ said Springrove, in a voice which he vainly endeavoured to keep firm and clear.

They looked at the river, then into it; a shoal of minnows was floating over the sandy bottom, like the black dashes on miniver; though narrow, the stream was deep, and there was no bridge.

‘Cytherea, reach out your hand that I may just touch it with mine.’

She stepped to the brink and stretched out her hand and fingers towards his, but not into them. The river was too wide.

‘Never mind,’ said Cytherea, her voice broken by agitation, ‘I must be going. God bless and keep you, my Edward! God bless you!’

‘I must touch you, I must press your hand,’ he said.

They came near--nearer--nearer still--their fingers met. There was a long firm clasp, so close and still that each hand could feel the other’s pulse throbbing beside its own.

‘My Cytherea! my stolen pet lamb!’

She glanced a mute farewell from her large perturbed eyes, turned, and ran up the garden without looking back. All was over between them. The river flowed on as quietly and obtusely as ever, and the minnows gathered again in their favourite spot as if they had never been disturbed.

Nobody indoors guessed from her countenance and bearing that her heart was near to breaking with the intensity of the misery which gnawed there. At these times a woman does not faint, or weep, or scream, as she will in the moment of sudden shocks. When lanced by a mental agony of such refined and special torture that it is indescribable by men’s words, she moves among her acquaintances much as before, and contrives so to cast her actions in the old moulds that she is only considered to be rather duller than usual.

5. HALF-PAST TWO TO FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.

Owen accompanied the newly-married couple to the railway-station, and in his anxiety to see the last of his sister, left the brougham and stood upon his crutches whilst the train was starting.

When the husband and wife were about to enter the railway-carriage they saw one of the porters looking frequently and furtively at them. He was pale, and apparently very ill.