A very popular local excursion by steamboat to Lulstead Cove was
announced through the streets of Budmouth one Thursday morning by
the weak-voiced town-crier, to start at six o’clock the same day. The
weather was lovely, and the opportunity being the first of the kind
offered to them, Owen and Cytherea went with the rest.
They had reached the Cove, and had walked landward for nearly an hour
over the hill which rose beside the strand, when Graye recollected that
two or three miles yet further inland from this spot was an interesting
mediaeval ruin. He was already familiar with its characteristics through
the medium of an archaeological work, and now finding himself so close
to the reality, felt inclined to verify some theory he had formed
respecting it. Concluding that there would be just sufficient time for
him to go there and return before the boat had left the shore, he parted
from Cytherea on the hill, struck downwards, and then up a heathery
valley.
She remained on the summit where he had left her till the time of his
expected return, scanning the details of the prospect around. Placidly
spread out before her on the south was the open Channel, reflecting a
blue intenser by many shades than that of the sky overhead, and dotted
in the foreground by half-a-dozen small craft of contrasting rig, their
sails graduating in hue from extreme whiteness to reddish brown, the
varying actual colours varied again in a double degree by the rays of
the declining sun.
Presently the distant bell from the boat was heard, warning the
passengers to embark. This was followed by a lively air from the harps
and violins on board, their tones, as they arose, becoming intermingled
with, though not marred by, the brush of the waves when their crests
rolled over--at the point where the check of the shallows was first
felt--and then thinned away up the slope of pebbles and sand.
She turned her face landward and strained her eyes to discern, if
possible, some sign of Owen’s return. Nothing was visible save the
strikingly brilliant, still landscape. The wide concave which lay at the
back of the hill in this direction was blazing with the western light,
adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the heather, now at the
very climax of bloom, and free from the slightest touch of the invidious
brown that so soon creeps into its shades. The light so intensified the
colours that they seemed to stand above the surface of the earth and
float in mid-air like an exhalation of red. In the minor valleys,
between the hillocks and ridges which diversified the contour of the
basin, but did not disturb its general sweep, she marked brakes of tall,
heavy-stemmed ferns, five or six feet high, in a brilliant light-green
dress--a broad riband of them with the path in their midst winding like
a stream along the little ravine that reached to the foot of the hill,
and delivered up the path to its grassy area. Among the ferns grew
holly bushes deeper in tint than any shadow about them, whilst the whole
surface of the scene was dimpled with small conical pits, and here and
there were round ponds, now dry, and half overgrown with rushes.
The last bell of the steamer rang. Cytherea had forgotten herself, and
what she was looking for. In a fever of distress lest Owen should
be left behind, she gathered up in her hand the corners of her
handkerchief, containing specimens of the shells, plants, and fossils
which the locality produced, started off to the sands, and mingled with
the knots of visitors there congregated from other interesting points
around; from the inn, the cottages, and hired conveyances that had
returned from short drives inland. They all went aboard by the primitive
plan of a narrow plank on two wheels--the women being assisted by a
rope. Cytherea lingered till the very last, reluctant to follow,
and looking alternately at the boat and the valley behind. Her delay
provoked a remark from Captain Jacobs, a thickset man of hybrid stains,
resulting from the mixed effects of fire and water, peculiar to sailors
where engines are the propelling power.
‘Now then, missy, if you please. I am sorry to tell ‘ee our time’s up.
Who are you looking for, miss?’
‘My brother--he has walked a short distance inland; he must be here
directly. Could you wait for him--just a minute?’
‘Really, I am afraid not, m’m.’ Cytherea looked at the stout,
round-faced man, and at the vessel, with a light in her eyes so
expressive of her own opinion being the same, on reflection, as his, and
with such resignation, too, that, from an instinctive feeling of pride
at being able to prove himself more humane than he was thought to
be--works of supererogation are the only sacrifices that entice in this
way--and that at a very small cost, he delayed the boat till some among
the passengers began to murmur.
‘There, never mind,’ said Cytherea decisively. ‘Go on without me--I
shall wait for him.’
‘Well, ‘tis a very awkward thing to leave you here all alone,’ said the
captain. ‘I certainly advise you not to wait.’
‘He’s gone across to the railway station, for certain,’ said another
passenger.
‘No--here he is!’ Cytherea said, regarding, as she spoke, the half
hidden figure of a man who was seen advancing at a headlong pace down
the ravine which lay between the heath and the shore.
‘He can’t get here in less than five minutes,’ a passenger said. ‘People
should know what they are about, and keep time. Really, if--’
‘You see, sir,’ said the captain, in an apologetic undertone, ‘since
‘tis her brother, and she’s all alone, ‘tis only nater to wait a minute,
now he’s in sight. Suppose, now, you were a young woman, as might be,
and had a brother, like this one, and you stood of an evening upon
this here wild lonely shore, like her, why you’d want us to wait, too,
wouldn’t you, sir? I think you would.’
The person so hastily approaching had been lost to view during this
remark by reason of a hollow in the ground, and the projecting cliff
immediately at hand covered the path in its rise. His footsteps were
now heard striking sharply upon the flinty road at a distance of about
twenty or thirty yards, but still behind the escarpment. To save time,
Cytherea prepared to ascend the plank.
‘Let me give you my hand, miss,’ said Captain Jacobs.
‘No--please don’t touch me,’ said she, ascending cautiously by sliding
one foot forward two or three inches, bringing up the other behind it,
and so on alternately--her lips compressed by concentration on the feat,
her eyes glued to the plank, her hand to the rope, and her immediate
thought to the fact of the distressing narrowness of her footing. Steps
now shook the lower end of the board, and in an instant were up to her
heels with a bound.
‘O, Owen, I am so glad you are come!’ she said without turning. ‘Don’t,
don’t shake the plank or touch me, whatever you do.... There, I am up.
Where have you been so long?’ she continued, in a lower tone, turning
round to him as she reached the top.
Raising her eyes from her feet, which, standing on the firm deck,
demanded her attention no longer, she acquired perceptions of the
new-comer in the following order: unknown trousers; unknown waistcoat;
unknown face. The man was not her brother, but a total stranger.
Off went the plank; the paddles started, stopped, backed, pattered in
confusion, then revolved decisively, and the boat passed out into deep
water.
One or two persons had said, ‘How d’ye do, Mr. Springrove?’ and looked
at Cytherea, to see how she bore her disappointment. Her ears had but
just caught the name of the head draughtsman, when she saw him advancing
directly to address her.
‘Miss Graye, I believe?’ he said, lifting his hat.
‘Yes,’ said Cytherea, colouring, and trying not to look guilty of a
surreptitious knowledge of him.
‘I am Mr. Springrove. I passed Corvsgate Castle about an hour ago, and
soon afterwards met your brother going that way. He had been deceived in
the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the ruin, on account
of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot. I proposed that
he should go on, since he had got so near; and afterwards, instead of
walking back to the boat, get across to Anglebury Station--a shorter
walk for him--where he could catch the late train, and go directly home.
I could let you know what he had done, and allay any uneasiness.’
‘Is the lameness serious, do you know?’
‘O no; simply from over-walking himself. Still, it was just as well to
ride home.’
Relieved from her apprehensions on Owen’s score, she was able slightly
to examine the appearance of her informant--Edward Springrove--who now
removed his hat for a while, to cool himself. He was rather above her
brother’s height. Although the upper part of his face and head was
handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine
regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely
pencilled for one of his sex; without prejudice, however, to the belief
which the sum total of his features inspired--that though they did not
prove that the man who thought inside them would do much in the
world, men who had done most of all had had no better ones. Across his
forehead, otherwise perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy
freshness of his remaining features expressing that it had come there
prematurely.
Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids
good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to house-hunting
and investments, he had reached the period in a young man’s life when
episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a disappointing death, have
begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit of generalities; his glance
sometimes seeming to state, ‘I have already thought out the issue of
such conditions as these we are experiencing.’ At other times he wore an
abstracted look: ‘I seem to have lived through this moment before.’
He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black
kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and stood
obliquely--a deposit of white dust having lodged in the creases.
‘I am sorry for your disappointment,’ he continued, glancing into
her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked
together, and the single instant only which good breeding allows as
the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear penetrating ray of
intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those
unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand
has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger
than mathematical proof, the conviction, ‘A tie has begun to unite us.’
Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much in
each other’s thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young architect of
his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young architect.
A conversation began, which was none the less interesting to the parties
engaged because it consisted only of the most trivial and commonplace
remarks. Then the band of harps and violins struck up a lively melody,
and the deck was cleared for dancing; the sun dipping beneath the
horizon during the proceeding, and the moon showing herself at their
stern. The sea was so calm, that the soft hiss produced by the
bursting of the innumerable bubbles of foam behind the paddles could be
distinctly heard. The passengers who did not dance, including Cytherea
and Springrove, lapsed into silence, leaning against the paddle-boxes,
or standing aloof--noticing the trembling of the deck to the steps of
the dance--watching the waves from the paddles as they slid thinly and
easily under each other’s edges.
Night had quite closed in by the time they reached Budmouth harbour,
sparkling with its white, red, and green lights in opposition to the
shimmering path of the moon’s reflection on the other side, which
reached away to the horizon till the flecked ripples reduced themselves
to sparkles as fine as gold dust.
‘I will walk to the station and find out the exact time the train
arrives,’ said Springrove, rather eagerly, when they had landed.
She thanked him much.
‘Perhaps we might walk together,’ he suggested hesitatingly. She looked
as if she did not quite know, and he settled the question by showing the
way.
They found, on arriving there, that on the first day of that month
the particular train selected for Graye’s return had ceased to stop at
Anglebury station.
‘I am very sorry I misled him,’ said Springrove.
‘O, I am not alarmed at all,’ replied Cytherea.
‘Well, it’s sure to be all right--he will sleep there, and come by the
first in the morning. But what will you do, alone?’
‘I am quite easy on that point; the landlady is very friendly. I must go
indoors now. Good-night, Mr. Springrove.’
‘Let me go round to your door with you?’ he pleaded.
‘No, thank you; we live close by.’
He looked at her as a waiter looks at the change he brings back. But she
was inexorable.
‘Don’t--forget me,’ he murmured. She did not answer.
‘Let me see you sometimes,’ he said.
‘Perhaps you never will again--I am going away,’ she replied in
lingering tones; and turning into Cross Street, ran indoors and
upstairs.
The sudden withdrawal of what was superfluous at first, is often felt as
an essential loss. It was felt now with regard to the maiden. More, too,
after a meeting so pleasant and so enkindling, she had seemed to imply
that they would never come together again.
The young man softly followed her, stood opposite the house and watched
her come into the upper room with the light. Presently his gaze was cut
short by her approaching the window and pulling down the blind--Edward
dwelling upon her vanishing figure with a hopeless sense of loss akin to
that which Adam is said by logicians to have felt when he first saw the
sun set, and thought, in his inexperience, that it would return no more.
He waited till her shadow had twice crossed the window, when, finding
the charming outline was not to be expected again, he left the street,
crossed the harbour-bridge, and entered his own solitary chamber on the
other side, vaguely thinking as he went (for undefined reasons),
‘One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother.’