The search began at dawn, but a quarter past nine o’clock came without
bringing any result. Manston ate a little breakfast, and crossed
the hollow of the park which intervened between the old and modern
manor-houses, to ask for an interview with Miss Aldclyffe.
He met her midway. She was about to pay him a visit of condolence, and
to place every man on the estate at his disposal, that the search
for any relic of his dead and destroyed wife might not be delayed an
instant.
He accompanied her back to the house. At first they conversed as if the
death of the poor woman was an event which the husband must of necessity
deeply lament; and when all under this head that social form seemed to
require had been uttered, they spoke of the material damage done, and of
the steps which had better be taken to remedy it.
It was not till both were shut inside her private room that she spoke
to him in her blunt and cynical manner. A certain newness of bearing in
him, peculiar to the present morning, had hitherto forbidden her this
tone: the demeanour of the subject of her favouritism had altered, she
could not tell in what way. He was entirely a changed man.
‘Are you really sorry for your poor wife, Mr. Manston?’ she said.
‘Well, I am,’ he answered shortly.
‘But only as for any human being who has met with a violent death?’
He confessed it--‘For she was not a good woman,’ he added.
‘I should be sorry to say such a thing now the poor creature is dead,’
Miss Aldclyffe returned reproachfully.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why should I praise her if she doesn’t deserve it? I
say exactly what I have often admired Sterne for saying in one of his
letters--that neither reason nor Scripture asks us to speak nothing but
good of the dead. And now, madam,’ he continued, after a short interval
of thought, ‘I may, perhaps, hope that you will assist me, or rather not
thwart me, in endeavouring to win the love of a young lady living about
you, one in whom I am much interested already.’
‘Cytherea!’
‘Yes, Cytherea.’
‘You have been loving Cytherea all the while?’
‘Yes.’
Surprise was a preface to much agitation in her, which caused her
to rise from her seat, and pace to the side of the room. The steward
quietly looked on and added, ‘I have been loving and still love her.’
She came close up to him, wistfully contemplating his face, one hand
moving indecisively at her side.
‘And your secret marriage was, then, the true and only reason for that
backwardness regarding the courtship of Cytherea, which, they tell
me, has been the talk of the village; not your indifference to her
attractions.’ Her voice had a tone of conviction in it, as well as of
inquiry; but none of jealousy.
‘Yes,’ he said; ‘and not a dishonourable one. What held me back was just
that one thing--a sense of morality that perhaps, madam, you did not
give me credit for.’ The latter words were spoken with a mien and tone
of pride.
Miss Aldclyffe preserved silence.
‘And now,’ he went on, ‘I may as well say a word in vindication of my
conduct lately, at the risk, too, of offending you. My actual motive in
submitting to your order that I should send for my late wife, and live
with her, was not the mercenary policy of wishing to retain an office
which brings me greater comforts than any I have enjoyed before, but
this unquenchable passion for Cytherea. Though I saw the weakness,
folly, and even wickedness of it continually, it still forced me to try
to continue near her, even as the husband of another woman.’
He waited for her to speak: she did not.
‘There’s a great obstacle to my making any way in winning Miss Graye’s
love,’ he went on.
‘Yes, Edward Springrove,’ she said quietly. ‘I know it, I did once want
to see them married; they have had a slight quarrel, and it will soon be
made up again, unless--’ she spoke as if she had only half attended to
Manston’s last statement.
‘He is already engaged to be married to somebody else,’ said the
steward.
‘Pooh!’ said she, ‘you mean to his cousin at Peakhill; that’s nothing to
help us; he’s now come home to break it off.’
‘He must not break it off,’ said Manston, firmly and calmly.
His tone attracted her, startled her. Recovering herself, she said
haughtily, ‘Well, that’s your affair, not mine. Though my wish has been
to see her _your_ wife, I can’t do anything dishonourable to bring about
such a result.’
‘But it must be _made_ your affair,’ he said in a hard, steady voice,
looking into her eyes, as if he saw there the whole panorama of her
past.
One of the most difficult things to portray by written words is that
peculiar mixture of moods expressed in a woman’s countenance when, after
having been sedulously engaged in establishing another’s position, she
suddenly suspects him of undermining her own. It was thus that Miss
Aldclyffe looked at the steward.
‘You--know--something--of me?’ she faltered.
‘I know all,’ he said.
‘Then curse that wife of yours! She wrote and said she wouldn’t tell
you!’ she burst out. ‘Couldn’t she keep her word for a day?’ She
reflected and then said, but no more as to a stranger, ‘I will not
yield. I have committed no crime. I yielded to her threats in a moment
of weakness, though I felt inclined to defy her at the time: it was
chiefly because I was mystified as to how she got to know of it. Pooh!
I will put up with threats no more. O, can _you_ threaten me?’ she added
softly, as if she had for the moment forgotten to whom she had been
speaking.
‘My love must be made your affair,’ he repeated, without taking his eyes
from her.
An agony, which was not the agony of being discovered in a secret,
obstructed her utterance for a time. ‘How can you turn upon me so when I
schemed to get you here--schemed that you might win her till I found
you were married. O, how can you! O!... O!’ She wept; and the weeping of
such a nature was as harrowing as the weeping of a man.
‘Your getting me here was bad policy as to your secret--the most absurd
thing in the world,’ he said, not heeding her distress. ‘I knew all,
except the identity of the individual, long ago. Directly I found that
my coming here was a contrived thing, and not a matter of chance, it
fixed my attention upon you at once. All that was required was the mere
spark of life, to make of a bundle of perceptions an organic whole.’
‘Policy, how can you talk of policy? Think, do think! And how can you
threaten me when you know--you know--that I would befriend you readily
without a threat!’
‘Yes, yes, I think you would,’ he said more kindly; ‘but your
indifference for so many, many years has made me doubt it.’
‘No, not indifference--‘twas enforced silence. My father lived.’
He took her hand, and held it gently.
* * * * *
‘Now listen,’ he said, more quietly and humanly, when she had become
calmer: ‘Springrove must marry the woman he’s engaged to. You may make
him, but only in one way.’
‘Well: but don’t speak sternly, AEneas!’
‘Do you know that his father has not been particularly thriving for the
last two or three years?’
‘I have heard something of it, once or twice, though his rents have been
promptly paid, haven’t they?’
‘O yes; and do you know the terms of the leases of the houses which are
burnt?’ he said, explaining to her that by those terms she might compel
him even to rebuild every house. ‘The case is the clearest case of
fire by negligence that I have ever known, in addition to that,’ he
continued.
‘I don’t want them rebuilt; you know it was intended by my father,
directly they fell in, to clear the site for a new entrance to the
park?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t affect the position, which is that Farmer
Springrove is in your power to an extent which is very serious for him.’
‘I won’t do it--‘tis a conspiracy.’
‘Won’t you for me?’ he said eagerly.
Miss Aldclyffe changed colour.
‘I don’t threaten now, I implore,’ he said.
‘Because you might threaten if you chose,’ she mournfully answered. ‘But
why be so--when your marriage with her was my own pet idea long before
it was yours? What must I do?’
‘Scarcely anything: simply this. When I have seen old Mr. Springrove,
which I shall do in a day or two, and told him that he will be expected
to rebuild the houses, do you see the young man. See him yourself, in
order that the proposals made may not appear to be anything more than an
impulse of your own. You or he will bring up the subject of the houses.
To rebuild them would be a matter of at least six hundred pounds, and
he will almost surely say that we are hard in insisting upon the extreme
letter of the leases. Then tell him that scarcely can you yourself
think of compelling an old tenant like his father to any such painful
extreme--there shall be no compulsion to build, simply a surrender of
the leases. Then speak feelingly of his cousin, as a woman whom you
respect and love, and whose secret you have learnt to be that she is
heart-sick with hope deferred. Beg him to marry her, his betrothed and
your friend, as some return for your consideration towards his father.
Don’t suggest too early a day for their marriage, or he will suspect you
of some motive beyond womanly sympathy. Coax him to make a promise to
her that she shall be his wife at the end of a twelvemonth, and get him,
on assenting to this, to write to Cytherea, entirely renouncing her.’
‘She has already asked him to do that.’
‘So much the better--and telling her, too, that he is about to fulfil
his long-standing promise to marry his cousin. If you think it worth
while, you may say Cytherea was not indisposed to think of me before she
knew I was married. I have at home a note she wrote me the first evening
I saw her, which looks rather warm, and which I could show you. Trust
me, he will give her up. When he is married to Adelaide Hinton, Cytherea
will be induced to marry me--perhaps before; a woman’s pride is soon
wounded.’
‘And hadn’t I better write to Mr. Nyttleton, and inquire more
particularly what’s the law upon the houses?’
‘O no, there’s no hurry for that. We know well enough how the case
stands--quite well enough to talk in general terms about it. And I want
the pressure to be put upon young Springrove before he goes away from
home again.’
She looked at him furtively, long, and sadly, as after speaking he
became lost in thought, his eyes listlessly tracing the pattern of the
carpet. ‘Yes, yes, she will be mine,’ he whispered, careless of Cytherea
Aldclyffe’s presence. At last he raised his eyes inquiringly.
‘I will do my best, AEneas,’ she answered.
Talibus incusat. Manston then left the house, and again went towards the
blackened ruins, where men were still raking and probing.