The next morning he was in no better spirits. Afternoon came: his son
was alarmed, and managed to draw from him an account of the conversation
with the steward.
‘Nonsense; he knows nothing about it,’ said Edward vehemently. ‘I’ll see
Miss Aldclyffe myself. Now promise me, father, that you’ll not believe
till I come back, and tell you to believe it, that Miss Aldclyffe will
do any such unjust thing.’
Edward started at once for Knapwater House. He strode rapidly along the
high-road, till he reached a wicket where a footpath allowed of a short
cut to the mansion. Here he leant down upon the bars for a few minutes,
meditating as to the best manner of opening his speech, and surveying
the scene before him in that absent mood which takes cognizance of
little things without being conscious of them at the time, though they
appear in the eye afterwards as vivid impressions. It was a yellow,
lustrous, late autumn day, one of those days of the quarter when morning
and evening seem to meet together without the intervention of a noon.
The clear yellow sunlight had tempted forth Miss Aldclyffe herself, who
was at this same time taking a walk in the direction of the village.
As Springrove lingered he heard behind the plantation a woman’s dress
brushing along amid the prickly husks and leaves which had fallen into
the path from the boughs of the chestnut trees. In another minute she
stood in front of him.
He answered her casual greeting respectfully, and was about to request
a few minutes’ conversation with her, when she directly addressed him
on the subject of the fire. ‘It is a sad misfortune for your father’ she
said, ‘and I hear that he has lately let his insurances expire?’
‘He has, madam, and you are probably aware that either by the general
terms of his holding, or the same coupled with the origin of the fire,
the disaster may involve the necessity of his rebuilding the whole row
of houses, or else of becoming a debtor to the estate, to the extent of
some hundreds of pounds?’
She assented. ‘I have been thinking of it,’ she went on, and then
repeated in substance the words put into her mouth by the steward.
Some disturbance of thought might have been fancied as taking place in
Springrove’s mind during her statement, but before she had reached the
end, his eyes were clear, and directed upon her.
‘I don’t accept your conditions of release,’ he said.
‘They are not conditions exactly.’
‘Well, whatever they are not, they are very uncalled-for remarks.’
‘Not at all--the houses have been burnt by your family’s negligence.’
‘I don’t refer to the houses--you have of course the best of all rights
to speak of that matter; but you, a stranger to me comparatively, have
no right at all to volunteer opinions and wishes upon a very delicate
subject, which concerns no living beings but Miss Graye, Miss Hinton,
and myself.’
Miss Aldclyffe, like a good many others in her position, had plainly
not realized that a son of her tenant and inferior could have become an
educated man, who had learnt to feel his individuality, to view society
from a Bohemian standpoint, far outside the farming grade in Carriford
parish, and that hence he had all a developed man’s unorthodox opinion
about the subordination of classes. And fully conscious of the labyrinth
into which he had wandered between his wish to behave honourably in the
dilemma of his engagement to his cousin Adelaide and the intensity of
his love for Cytherea, Springrove was additionally sensitive to any
allusion to the case. He had spoken to Miss Aldclyffe with considerable
warmth.
And Miss Aldclyffe was not a woman likely to be far behind any second
person in warming to a mood of defiance. It seemed as if she were
prepared to put up with a cold refusal, but that her haughtiness
resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke. By this,
Manston’s discreditable object, which had been made hers by compulsion
only, was now adopted by choice. She flung herself into the work.
A fiery man in such a case would have relinquished persuasion and tried
palpable force. A fiery woman added unscrupulousness and evolved daring
strategy; and in her obstinacy, and to sustain herself as mistress, she
descended to an action the meanness of which haunted her conscience to
her dying hour.
‘I don’t quite see, Mr. Springrove,’ she said, ‘that I am altogether
what you are pleased to call a stranger. I have known your family, at
any rate, for a good many years, and I know Miss Graye particularly
well, and her state of mind with regard to this matter.’
Perplexed love makes us credulous and curious as old women. Edward was
willing, he owned it to himself, to get at Cytherea’s state of mind,
even through so dangerous a medium.
‘A letter I received from her’ he said, with assumed coldness, ‘tells me
clearly enough what Miss Graye’s mind is.’
‘You think she still loves you? O yes, of course you do--all men are
like that.’
‘I have reason to.’ He could feign no further than the first speech.
‘I should be interested in knowing what reason?’ she said, with
sarcastic archness.
Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he
rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his
antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the early
evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a keenly
conscious man. Her bearing had charmed him into toleration, as Mary
Stuart’s charmed the indignant Puritan visitors. He again answered her
honestly.
‘The best of reasons--the tone of her letter.’
‘Pooh, Mr. Springrove!’
‘Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe! Miss Graye desired that we should be
strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that intimacy
could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack of
love--love is only suppressed.’
‘Don’t you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman’s pity
for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is
often mistaken for suppressed love?’ said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft
insidiousness.
This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea’s tone which he had
certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own it.
‘I had never thought of it,’ he said.
‘And don’t believe it?’
‘Not unless there was some other evidence to support the view.’