Week after week, month after month, the time had flown by. Christmas had
passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given place to more dreary
winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in rain, rain in wind,
wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period of pink dawns and white
sunsets; with the third week in April the cuckoo had appeared, with the
fourth, the nightingale.
Edward Springrove was in London, attending to the duties of his
new office, and it had become known throughout the neighbourhood of
Carriford that the engagement between himself and Miss Adelaide Hinton
would terminate in marriage at the end of the year.
The only occasion on which her lover of the idle delicious days at
Budmouth watering-place had been seen by Cytherea after the time of the
decisive correspondence, was once in church, when he sat in front of
her, and beside Miss Hinton.
The rencounter was quite an accident. Springrove had come there in the
full belief that Cytherea was away from home with Miss Aldclyffe; and he
continued ignorant of her presence throughout the service.
It is at such moments as these, when a sensitive nature writhes under
the conception that its most cherished emotions have been treated with
contumely, that the sphere-descended Maid, Music, friend of Pleasure
at other times, becomes a positive enemy--racking, bewildering,
unrelenting. The congregation sang the first Psalm and came to the
verse--
‘Like some fair tree which, fed by streams,
With timely fruit doth bend,
He still shall flourish, and success
All his designs attend.’
Cytherea’s lips did not move, nor did any sound escape her; but could
she help singing the words in the depths of her being, although the man
to whom she applied them sat at her rival’s side?
Perhaps the moral compensation for all a woman’s petty cleverness
under thriving conditions is the real nobility that lies in her extreme
foolishness at these other times; her sheer inability to be simply
just, her exercise of an illogical power entirely denied to men in
general--the power not only of kissing, but of delighting to kiss the
rod by a punctilious observance of the self-immolating doctrines in the
Sermon on the Mount.
As for Edward--a little like other men of his temperament, to whom, it
is somewhat humiliating to think, the aberrancy of a given love is in
itself a recommendation--his sentiment, as he looked over his cousin’s
book, was of a lower rank, Horatian rather than Psalmodic--
‘O, what hast thou of her, of her
Whose every look did love inspire;
Whose every breathing fanned my fire,
And stole me from myself away!’
Then, without letting him see her, Cytherea slipt out of church early,
and went home, the tones of the organ still lingering in her ears as she
tried bravely to kill a jealous thought that would nevertheless live:
‘My nature is one capable of more, far more, intense feeling than hers!
She can’t appreciate all the sides of him--she never will! He is more
tangible to me even now, as a thought, than his presence itself is to
her!’ She was less noble then.
But she continually repressed her misery and bitterness of heart till
the effort to do so showed signs of lessening. At length she even tried
to hope that her lost lover and her rival would love one another very
dearly.
The scene and the sentiment dropped into the past. Meanwhile, Manston
continued visibly before her. He, though quiet and subdued in his
bearing for a long time after the calamity of November, had not
simulated a grief that he did not feel. At first his loss seemed so
to absorb him--though as a startling change rather than as a heavy
sorrow--that he paid Cytherea no attention whatever. His conduct was
uniformly kind and respectful, but little more. Then, as the date of the
catastrophe grew remoter, he began to wear a different aspect towards
her. He always contrived to obliterate by his manner all recollection on
her side that she was comparatively more dependent than himself--making
much of her womanhood, nothing of her situation. Prompt to aid her
whenever occasion offered, and full of delightful petits soins at all
times, he was not officious. In this way he irresistibly won for himself
a position as her friend, and the more easily in that he allowed not the
faintest symptom of the old love to be apparent.
Matters stood thus in the middle of the spring when the next move on his
behalf was made by Miss Aldclyffe.