Before it was light the next morning, two little naked feet pattered
along the passage in Knapwater House, from which Owen Graye’s bedroom
opened, and a tap was given upon his door.
‘Owen, Owen, are you awake?’ said Cytherea in a whisper through the
keyhole. ‘You must get up directly, or you’ll miss the train.’
When he descended to his sister’s little room, he found her there
already waiting with a cup of cocoa and a grilled rasher on the table
for him. A hasty meal was despatched in the intervals of putting on his
overcoat and finding his hat, and they then went softly through the long
deserted passages, the kitchen-maid who had prepared their breakfast
walking before them with a lamp held high above her head, which cast
long wheeling shadows down corridors intersecting the one they followed,
their remoter ends being lost in darkness. The door was unbolted and
they stepped out.
Owen had preferred walking to the station to accepting the pony-carriage
which Miss Aldclyffe had placed at his disposal, having a morbid horror
of giving trouble to people richer than himself, and especially to their
men-servants, who looked down upon him as a hybrid monster in social
position. Cytherea proposed to walk a little way with him.
‘I want to talk to you as long as I can,’ she said tenderly.
Brother and sister then emerged by the heavy door into the drive. The
feeling and aspect of the hour were precisely similar to those under
which the steward had left the house the evening previous, excepting
that apparently unearthly reversal of natural sequence, which is caused
by the world getting lighter instead of darker. ‘The tearful glimmer of
the languid dawn’ was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy
red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon
loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had
collected from the foggy air.
They passed the Old House, engaged in a deep conversation, and had
proceeded about twenty yards by a cross route, in the direction of the
turnpike road, when the form of a woman emerged from the porch of the
building.
She was wrapped in a grey waterproof cloak, the hood of which was drawn
over her head and closely round her face--so closely that her eyes were
the sole features uncovered.
With this one exception of her appearance there, the most perfect
stillness and silence pervaded the steward’s residence from basement to
chimney. Not a shutter was open; not a twine of smoke came forth.
Underneath the ivy-covered gateway she stood still and listened for two,
or possibly three minutes, till she became conscious of others in the
park. Seeing the pair she stepped back, with the apparent intention
of letting them pass out of sight, and evidently wishing to avoid
observation. But looking at her watch, and returning it rapidly to her
pocket, as if surprised at the lateness of the hour, she hurried out
again, and across the park by a still more oblique line than that traced
by Owen and his sister.
These in the meantime had got into the road, and were walking along it
as the woman came up on the other side of the boundary hedge, looking
for a gate or stile, by which she, too, might get off the grass upon the
hard ground.
Their conversation, of which every word was clear and distinct, in the
still air of the dawn, to the distance of a quarter of a mile, reached
her ears, and withdrew her attention from all other matters and sights
whatsoever. Thus arrested she stood for an instant as precisely in the
attitude of Imogen by the cave of Belarius, as if she had studied the
position from the play. When they had advanced a few steps, she followed
them in some doubt, still screened by the hedge.
‘Do you believe in such odd coincidences?’ said Cytherea.
‘How do you mean, believe in them? They occur sometimes.’
‘Yes, one will occur often enough--that is, two disconnected events will
fall strangely together by chance, and people scarcely notice the fact
beyond saying, “Oddly enough it happened that so and so were the same,”
and so on. But when three such events coincide without any apparent
reason for the coincidence, it seems as if there must be invisible means
at work. You see, three things falling together in that manner are ten
times as singular as two cases of coincidence which are distinct.’
‘Well, of course: what a mathematical head you have, Cytherea! But I
don’t see so much to marvel at in our case. That the man who kept the
public-house in which Miss Aldclyffe fainted, and who found out her name
and position, lives in this neighbourhood, is accounted for by the fact
that she got him the berth to stop his tongue. That you came here was
simply owing to Springrove.’
‘Ah, but look at this. Miss Aldclyffe is the woman our father first
loved, and I have come to Miss Aldclyffe’s; you can’t get over that.’
From these premises, she proceeded to argue like an elderly divine on
the designs of Providence which were apparent in such conjunctures, and
went into a variety of details connected with Miss Aldclyffe’s history.
‘Had I better tell Miss Aldclyffe that I know all this?’ she inquired at
last.
‘What’s the use?’ he said. ‘Your possessing the knowledge does no harm;
you are at any rate comfortable here, and a confession to Miss Aldclyffe
might only irritate her. No, hold your tongue, Cytherea.’
‘I fancy I should have been tempted to tell her too,’ Cytherea went on,
‘had I not found out that there exists a very odd, almost imperceptible,
and yet real connection of some kind between her and Mr. Manston, which
is more than that of a mutual interest in the estate.’
‘She is in love with him!’ exclaimed Owen; ‘fancy that!’
‘Ah--that’s what everybody says who has been keen enough to notice
anything. I said so at first. And yet now I cannot persuade myself that
she is in love with him at all.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘She doesn’t act as if she were. She isn’t--you will know I don’t say it
from any vanity, Owen--she isn’t the least jealous of me.’
‘Perhaps she is in some way in his power.’
‘No--she is not. He was openly advertised for, and chosen from forty or
fifty who answered the advertisement, without knowing whose it was. And
since he has been here, she has certainly done nothing to compromise
herself in any way. Besides, why should she have brought an enemy here
at all?’
‘Then she must have fallen in love with him. You know as well as I do,
Cyth, that with women there’s nothing between the two poles of emotion
towards an interesting male acquaintance. ‘Tis either love or aversion.’
They walked for a few minutes in silence, when Cytherea’s eyes
accidentally fell upon her brother’s feet.
‘Owen,’ she said, ‘do you know that there is something unusual in your
manner of walking?’
‘What is it like?’ he asked.
‘I can’t quite say, except that you don’t walk so regularly as you used
to.’
The woman behind the hedge, who had still continued to dog their
footsteps, made an impatient movement at this change in their
conversation, and looked at her watch again. Yet she seemed reluctant to
give over listening to them.
‘Yes,’ Owen returned with assumed carelessness, ‘I do know it. I think
the cause of it is that mysterious pain which comes just above my ankle
sometimes. You remember the first time I had it? That day we went by
steam-packet to Lulstead Cove, when it hindered me from coming back to
you, and compelled me to sleep with the gateman we have been talking
about.’
‘But is it anything serious, dear Owen?’ Cytherea exclaimed, with some
alarm.
‘O, nothing at all. It is sure to go off again. I never find a sign of
it when I sit in the office.’
Again their unperceived companion made a gesture of vexation, and looked
at her watch as if time were precious. But the dialogue still flowed
on upon this new subject, and showed no sign of returning to its old
channel.
Gathering up her skirt decisively she renounced all further hope, and
hurried along the ditch till she had dropped into a valley, and came to
a gate which was beyond the view of those coming behind. This she softly
opened, and came out upon the road, following it in the direction of the
railway station.
Presently she heard Owen Graye’s footsteps in her rear, his quickened
pace implying that he had parted from his sister. The woman thereupon
increased her rapid walk to a run, and in a few minutes safely distanced
her fellow-traveller.
The railway at Carriford Road consisted only of a single line of rails;
and the short local down-train by which Owen was going to Budmouth was
shunted on to a siding whilst the first up-train passed. Graye entered
the waiting-room, and the door being open he listlessly observed the
movements of a woman wearing a long grey cloak, and closely hooded, who
had asked for a ticket for London.
He followed her with his eyes on to the platform, saw her waiting there
and afterwards stepping into the train: his recollection of her ceasing
with the perception.