Manston mounted his gig and set out from Chettlewood that evening in no
very enviable frame of mind. The thought of domestic life in Knapwater
Old House, with the now eclipsed wife of the past, was more than
disagreeable, was positively distasteful to him.
Yet he knew that the influential position, which, from whatever
fortunate cause, he held on Miss Aldclyffe’s manor, would never again
fall to his lot on any other, and he tacitly assented to this dilemma,
hoping that some consolation or other would soon suggest itself to him;
married as he was, he was near Cytherea.
He occasionally looked at his watch as he drove along the lanes, timing
the pace of his horse by the hour, that he might reach Carriford Road
Station just soon enough to meet the last London train.
He soon began to notice in the sky a slight yellow halo, near the
horizon. It rapidly increased; it changed colour, and grew redder; then
the glare visibly brightened and dimmed at intervals, showing that its
origin was affected by the strong wind prevailing.
Manston reined in his horse on the summit of a hill, and considered.
‘It is a rick-yard on fire,’ he thought; ‘no house could produce such a
raging flame so suddenly.’
He trotted on again, attempting to particularize the local features in
the neighbourhood of the fire; but this it was too dark to do, and the
excessive winding of the roads misled him as to its direction, not being
an old inhabitant of the district, or a countryman used to forming
such judgments; whilst the brilliancy of the light shortened its real
remoteness to an apparent distance of not more than half: it seemed so
near that he again stopped his horse, this time to listen; but he could
hear no sound.
Entering now a narrow valley, the sides of which obscured the sky to an
angle of perhaps thirty or forty degrees above the mathematical horizon,
he was obliged to suspend his judgment till he was in possession of
further knowledge, having however assumed in the interim, that the fire
was somewhere between Carriford Road Station and the village.
The self-same glare had just arrested the eyes of another man. He was
at that minute gliding along several miles to the east of the steward’s
position, but nearing the same point as that to which Manston tended.
The younger Edward Springrove was returning from London to his father’s
house by the identical train which the steward was expecting to bring
his wife, the truth being that Edward’s lateness was owing to the
simplest of all causes, his temporary want of money, which led him to
make a slow journey for the sake of travelling at third-class fare.
Springrove had received Cytherea’s bitter and admonitory letter, and he
was clearly awakened to a perception of the false position in which
he had placed himself, by keeping silence at Budmouth on his long
engagement. An increasing reluctance to put an end to those few days of
ecstasy with Cytherea had overruled his conscience, and tied his tongue
till speaking was too late.
‘Why did I do it? how could I dream of loving her?’ he asked himself as
he walked by day, as he tossed on his bed by night: ‘miserable folly!’
An impressionable heart had for years--perhaps as many as six or seven
years--been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself to yearn
for somebody wanting, he scarcely knew whom. Echoes of himself, though
rarely, he now and then found. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women,
his cousin Adelaide being one of these; for in spite of a fashion which
pervades the whole community at the present day--the habit of exclaiming
that woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse, the fact remains that,
after all, women are Mankind, and that in many of the sentiments of life
the difference of sex is but a difference of degree.
But the indefinable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself still
continued invisible. He grew older, and concluded that the ideas, or
rather emotions, which possessed him on the subject, were probably too
unreal ever to be found embodied in the flesh of a woman. Thereupon,
he developed a plan of satisfying his dreams by wandering away to the
heroines of poetical imagination, and took no further thought on the
earthly realization of his formless desire, in more homely matters
satisfying himself with his cousin.
Cytherea appeared in the sky: his heart started up and spoke:
‘Tis She, and here
Lo! I unclothe and clear
My wishes’ cloudy character.’
Some women kindle emotion so rapidly in a man’s heart that the judgment
cannot keep pace with its rise, and finds, on comprehending the
situation, that faithfulness to the old love is already treachery to the
new. Such women are not necessarily the greatest of their sex, but there
are very few of them. Cytherea was one.
On receiving the letter from her he had taken to thinking over these
things, and had not answered it at all. But ‘hungry generations’ soon
tread down the muser in a city. At length he thought of the strong
necessity of living. After a dreary search, the negligence of which was
ultimately overcome by mere conscientiousness, he obtained a situation
as assistant to an architect in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross: the
duties would not begin till after the lapse of a month.
He could not at first decide whither he should go to spend the
intervening time; but in the midst of his reasonings he found himself
on the road homeward, impelled by a secret and unowned hope of getting a
last glimpse of Cytherea there.