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 her. He always contrived to obliterate by his manner all recollection on her side that she was comparatively more dependent than himself--making much of her womanhood, nothing of her situation. Prompt to aid her whenever occasion offered, and full of delightful petits soins at all times, he was not officious. In this way he irresistibly won for himself a position as her friend, and the more easily in that he allowed not the faintest symptom of the old love to be apparent.
Matters stood thus in the middle of the spring when the next move on his behalf was made by Miss Aldclyffe.
2. THE THIRD OF MAY
She led Cytherea to a summer-house called the Fane, built in the private grounds about the mansion in the form of a Grecian temple; it overlooked the lake, the island on it, the trees, and their undisturbed reflection in the smooth still water. Here the old and young maid halted; here they stood, side by side, mentally imbibing the scene.
The month was May--the time, morning. Cuckoos, thrushes, blackbirds, and sparrows gave forth a perfect confusion of song and twitter. The road was spotted white with the fallen leaves of apple-blossoms, and the sparkling grey dew still lingered on the grass and flowers. Two swans floated into view in front of the women, and then crossed the water towards them.
‘They seem to come to us without any will of their own--quite involuntarily--don’t they?’ said Cytherea, looking at the birds’ graceful advance.
‘Yes, but if you look narrowly you can see their hips just beneath the water, working with the greatest energy.’
‘I’d rather not see that, it spoils the idea of proud indifference to direction which we associate with a swan.’
‘It does; we’ll have “involuntarily.” Ah, now this reminds me of something.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of a human being who involuntarily comes towards yourself.’
Cytherea looked into Miss Aldclyffe’s face; her eyes grew round as circles, and lines of wonderment came visibly upon her countenance. She had not once regarded Manston as a lover since his wife’s sudden appearance and subsequent death. The death of a wife, and such a death, was an overwhelming matter in her ideas of things.
‘Is it a man or woman?’ she said, quite innocently.
‘Mr. Manston,’ said Miss Aldclyffe quietly.
‘Mr. Manston attracted by me _now_?’ said Cytherea, standing at gaze.
‘Didn’t you know it?’
‘Certainly I did not. Why, his poor wife has only been dead six months.’
‘Of course he knows that. But loving is not done by months, or method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as “falling in love.” He does not want his love to be observed just yet, on the very account you mention; but conceal it as he may from himself and us, it exists definitely--and very intensely, I assure you.’
‘I suppose then, that if he can’t help it, it is no harm of him,’ said Cytherea naively, and beginning to ponder.
‘Of course it isn’t--you know that well enough. She was a great burden and trouble to him. This may become a great good to you both.’
A rush of feeling at remembering that the same woman, before Manston’s arrival, had just as frankly advocated Edward’s claims, checked Cytherea’s utterance for awhile.
‘There, don’t look at me like that, for Heaven’s sake!’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘You could almost kill a person by the force of reproach you can put into those eyes of yours, I verily believe.’
Edward once in the young lady’s thoughts, there was no getting rid of him. She wanted to be alone.
‘Do you want me here?’ she said.
‘Now there, there; you want to be off, and have a good cry,’ said Miss Aldclyffe, taking her hand. ‘But you mustn’t, my dear. There’s nothing in the past for you to regret. Compare Mr. Manston’s honourable conduct towards his wife and yourself, with Springrove towards his betrothed and yourself, and then see which appears the more worthy of your thoughts.’
3. FROM THE FOURTH OF MAY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE
The next stage in Manston’s advances towards her hand was a clearly defined courtship. She was sadly perplexed, and some contrivance was necessary on his part in order to meet with her. But it is next to impossible for an appreciative woman to have a positive repugnance towards an unusually handsome and gifted man, even though she may not be inclined to love him. Hence Cytherea was not so alarmed at the sight of him as to render a meeting and conversation with her more than a matter of difficulty.
Coming and going from church was his grand opportunity. Manston was very religious now. It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian--the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.
Manston introduced into his method a system of bewitching flattery, everywhere pervasive, yet, too, so transitory and intangible, that, as in the case of the poet Wordsworth and the Wandering Voice, though she felt it present, she could never find it. As a foil to heighten its effect, he occasionally spoke philosophically of the evanescence of female beauty--the worthlessness of mere appearance. ‘Handsome is that handsome does’ he considered a proverb which should be written on the looking-glass of every woman in the land. ‘Your form, your motions, your heart have won me,’ he said, in a tone of playful sadness. ‘They are beautiful. But I see these things, and it comes into my mind that they are doomed, they are gliding to nothing as I look. Poor eyes, poor mouth, poor face, poor maiden! “Where will her glories be in twenty years?” I say. “Where will all of her be in a hundred?” Then I think it is cruel that you should bloom a day, and fade for ever and ever. It seems hard and sad that you will die as ordinarily as I, and be buried; be food for roots and worms, be forgotten and come to earth, and grow up a mere blade of churchyard-grass and an ivy leaf. Then, Miss Graye, when I see you are a Lovely Nothing, I pity you, and the love I feel then is better and sounder, larger and more lasting than that I felt at the beginning.’ Again an ardent flash of his handsome eyes.