We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event of
these persons’ lives. The scene is still the Grayes’ native town of
Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month of
October.
The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be seen
wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account of the
time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the practical
garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long shadows and
enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any perceptible
advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing tones which grace
its decline. Next, it was that stage in the progress of the week when
business--which, carried on under the gables of an old country place,
is not devoid of a romantic sparkle--was well-nigh extinguished. Lastly,
the town was intentionally bent upon being attractive by exhibiting
to an influx of visitors the local talent for dramatic recitation, and
provincial towns trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.
Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they
interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious
of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to
be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable
caricatures which spoil them.
The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing at the
intersection of the three chief streets was expressing half-past two
to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of reading from
Shakespeare was about to begin. The doors were open, and those persons
who had already assembled within the building were noticing the entrance
of the new-comers--silently criticizing their dress--questioning the
genuineness of their teeth and hair--estimating their private means.
Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who glowed amid
the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown stubble.
She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress, hat with grey strings
and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to harmonize. She lightly walked
up the side passage of the room, cast a slight glance around, and
entered the seat pointed out to her.
The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about eighteen.
During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in her seat and
listening to the reader on the platform, her personal appearance formed
an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring eyes.
Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less perfect
than her figure, which approached unusually near to the standard of
faultlessness. But even this feature of hers yielded the palm to the
gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating and delightful to an
extreme degree.
Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most extended
scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the uplifting of
her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting of her lip. The
carriage of her head--motion within motion--a glide upon a glide--was
as delicate as that of a magnetic needle. And this flexibility and
elasticity had never been taught her by rule, nor even been acquired by
observation, but, nullo cultu, had naturally developed itself with her
years. In childhood, a stone or stalk in the way, which had been the
inevitable occasion of a fall to her playmates, had usually left her
safe and upright on her feet after the narrowest escape by oscillations
and whirls for the preservation of her balance. At mixed Christmas
parties, when she numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was
heartily despised on that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her
apt lightness in the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood,
and compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize upon
her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to contemn.
And in later years, when the instincts of her sex had shown her this
point as the best and rarest feature in her external self, she was not
found wanting in attention to the cultivation of finish in its details.
Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a shining
corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite nut-brown as
each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of a sapphire hue,
though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears; they possessed
the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and good faith as
distinguishable from that harder brightness which seems to express
faithfulness only to the object confronting them.
But to attempt to gain a view of her--or indeed of any fascinating
woman--from a measured category, is as difficult as to appreciate the
effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern--or of a
full chord of music by piping the notes in succession. Nevertheless it
may readily be believed from the description here ventured, that
among the many winning phases of her aspect, these were particularly
striking:--
During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and
smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the
space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of
degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea
and Nay.
During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily
accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of
the listener’s arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree
of intimacy dictated.
When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.
She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress of the
present entertainment. Her glance was directed out of the window.
Why the particulars of a young lady’s presence at a very mediocre
performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion which their
intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why they were
remembered and individualized by herself and others through after
years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it were, upon the
extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in which the real
meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It was the last hour of
experience she ever enjoyed with a mind entirely free from a knowledge
of that labyrinth into which she stepped immediately afterwards--to
continue a perplexed course along its mazes for the greater portion of
twenty-nine subsequent months.
The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone, and
through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of the room
the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also the upper
part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of completion under
the superintendence of Miss Graye’s father, the architect to the work.
That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in the
room was a fact which Cytherea’s idling eyes had discovered with some
interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that was being
enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical stonework rose a cage
of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon this stood five men--four
in clothes as white as the new erection close beneath their hands, the
fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a gentleman.
The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason’s labourer.
The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been giving
directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow footway
allowed, stood perfectly still.
The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was curious
and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by the dark
margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which emphasized by
contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.
The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and the
five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere and
experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared little larger
than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft, spirit-like
silentness. One idea above all others was conveyed to the mind of a
person on the ground by their aspect, namely, concentration of purpose:
that they were indifferent to--even unconscious of--the distracted world
beneath them, and all that moved upon it. They never looked off the
scaffolding.
Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye. Again he stood motionless,
with attention to the operations of the others. He appeared to be lost
in reflection, and had directed his face towards a new stone they were
lifting.
‘Why does he stand like that?’ the young lady thought at length--up to
that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient Tarentines,
who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the Theatre the entry
into their Harbour of a power that overturned the State.
She moved herself uneasily. ‘I wish he would come down,’ she whispered,
still gazing at the skybacked picture. ‘It is so dangerous to be
absent-minded up there.’
When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid hold
of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then let it go
and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An instant of doubling
forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the air, immediately
disappearing downwards.
His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement. Her
lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no sound. One by
one the people about her, unconscious of what had happened, turned their
heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible upon their faces at the
sight of the poor child. A moment longer, and she fell to the floor.
The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of being
carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the steps of her
own house by her brother and an older man. Recollection of what had
passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they entered the
door--through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few
instants before--her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and,
without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a
rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that
are simultaneous--however foreign in essence these scenes may be--as
chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after that
time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea’s mind the scene
from the Town Hall windows than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.