The next stage in Manston’s advances towards her hand was a clearly
defined courtship. She was sadly perplexed, and some contrivance was
necessary on his part in order to meet with her. But it is next to
impossible for an appreciative woman to have a positive repugnance
towards an unusually handsome and gifted man, even though she may not be
inclined to love him. Hence Cytherea was not so alarmed at the sight of
him as to render a meeting and conversation with her more than a matter
of difficulty.
Coming and going from church was his grand opportunity. Manston was very
religious now. It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by
argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in
England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a
zealous Episcopalian--the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from
his pew.
Manston introduced into his method a system of bewitching flattery,
everywhere pervasive, yet, too, so transitory and intangible, that, as
in the case of the poet Wordsworth and the Wandering Voice, though she
felt it present, she could never find it. As a foil to heighten its
effect, he occasionally spoke philosophically of the evanescence of
female beauty--the worthlessness of mere appearance. ‘Handsome is that
handsome does’ he considered a proverb which should be written on the
looking-glass of every woman in the land. ‘Your form, your motions, your
heart have won me,’ he said, in a tone of playful sadness. ‘They are
beautiful. But I see these things, and it comes into my mind that they
are doomed, they are gliding to nothing as I look. Poor eyes, poor
mouth, poor face, poor maiden! “Where will her glories be in twenty
years?” I say. “Where will all of her be in a hundred?” Then I think
it is cruel that you should bloom a day, and fade for ever and ever. It
seems hard and sad that you will die as ordinarily as I, and be buried;
be food for roots and worms, be forgotten and come to earth, and grow up
a mere blade of churchyard-grass and an ivy leaf. Then, Miss Graye, when
I see you are a Lovely Nothing, I pity you, and the love I feel then
is better and sounder, larger and more lasting than that I felt at the
beginning.’ Again an ardent flash of his handsome eyes.
It was by this route that he ventured on an indirect declaration and
offer of his hand.
She implied in the same indirect manner that she did not love him enough
to accept it.
An actual refusal was more than he had expected. Cursing himself for
what he called his egregious folly in making himself the slave of a mere
lady’s attendant, and for having given the parish, should they know
of her refusal, a chance of sneering at him--certainly a ground for
thinking less of his standing than before--he went home to the Old
House, and walked indecisively up and down his back-yard. Turning aside,
he leant his arms upon the edge of the rain-water-butt standing in the
corner, and looked into it. The reflection from the smooth stagnant
surface tinged his face with the greenish shades of Correggio’s nudes.
Staves of sunlight slanted down through the still pool, lighting it
up with wonderful distinctness. Hundreds of thousands of minute living
creatures sported and tumbled in its depth with every contortion that
gaiety could suggest; perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head,
or a tail, or at most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within
the twenty-four hours.
‘Damn my position! Why shouldn’t I be happy through my little day too?
Let the parish sneer at my repulses, let it. I’ll get her, if I move
heaven and earth to do it!’
Indeed, the inexperienced Cytherea had, towards Edward in the first
place, and Manston afterwards, unconsciously adopted bearings that would
have been the very tactics of a professional fisher of men who wished
to have them each successively dangling at her heels. For if any rule
at all can be laid down in a matter which, for men collectively, is
notoriously beyond regulation, it is that to snub a petted man, and to
pet a snubbed man, is the way to win in suits of both kinds. Manston
with Springrove’s encouragement would have become indifferent. Edward
with Manston’s repulses would have sheered off at the outset, as he did
afterwards. Her supreme indifference added fuel to Manston’s ardour--it
completely disarmed his pride. The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to
him than a susceptible Princess.