We pass over the intervening weeks. The time of the story is thus
advanced more than a quarter of a year.
On the midnight preceding the morning which would make her the wife of
a man whose presence fascinated her into involuntariness of bearing,
and whom in absence she almost dreaded, Cytherea lay in her little bed,
vainly endeavouring to sleep.
She had been looking back amid the years of her short though varied
past, and thinking of the threshold upon which she stood. Days and
months had dimmed the form of Edward Springrove like the gauzes of a
vanishing stage-scene, but his dying voice could still be heard faintly
behind. That a soft small chord in her still vibrated true to his
memory, she would not admit: that she did not approach Manston with
feelings which could by any stretch of words be called hymeneal, she
calmly owned.
‘Why do I marry him?’ she said to herself. ‘Because Owen, dear Owen my
brother, wishes me to marry him. Because Mr. Manston is, and has been,
uniformly kind to Owen, and to me. “Act in obedience to the dictates
of common-sense,” Owen said, “and dread the sharp sting of poverty. How
many thousands of women like you marry every year for the same reason,
to secure a home, and mere ordinary, material comforts, which after all
go far to make life endurable, even if not supremely happy.”
‘’Tis right, I suppose, for him to say that. O, if people only knew what
a timidity and melancholy upon the subject of her future grows up in the
heart of a friendless woman who is blown about like a reed shaken with
the wind, as I am, they would not call this resignation of one’s self
by the name of scheming to get a husband. Scheme to marry? I’d rather
scheme to die! I know I am not pleasing my heart; I know that if I only
were concerned, I should like risking a single future. But why should I
please my useless self overmuch, when by doing otherwise I please those
who are more valuable than I?’
In the midst of desultory reflections like these, which alternated
with surmises as to the inexplicable connection that appeared to exist
between her intended husband and Miss Aldclyffe, she heard dull noises
outside the walls of the house, which she could not quite fancy to be
caused by the wind. She seemed doomed to such disturbances at critical
periods of her existence. ‘It is strange,’ she pondered, ‘that this my
last night in Knapwater House should be disturbed precisely as my first
was, no occurrence of the kind having intervened.’
As the minutes glided by the noise increased, sounding as if some one
were beating the wall below her window with a bunch of switches. She
would gladly have left her room and gone to stay with one of the maids,
but they were without doubt all asleep.
The only person in the house likely to be awake, or who would have
brains enough to comprehend her nervousness, was Miss Aldclyffe, but
Cytherea never cared to go to Miss Aldclyffe’s room, though she was
always welcome there, and was often almost compelled to go against her
will.
The oft-repeated noise of switches grew heavier upon the wall, and was
now intermingled with creaks, and a rattling like the rattling of dice.
The wind blew stronger; there came first a snapping, then a crash, and
some portion of the mystery was revealed. It was the breaking off and
fall of a branch from one of the large trees outside. The smacking
against the wall, and the intermediate rattling, ceased from that time.
Well, it was the tree which had caused the noises. The unexplained
matter was that neither of the trees ever touched the walls of the house
during the highest wind, and that trees could not rattle like a man
playing castanets or shaking dice.
She thought, ‘Is it the intention of Fate that something connected with
these noises shall influence my future as in the last case of the kind?’
During the dilemma she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt that she
was being whipped with dry bones suspended on strings, which rattled at
every blow like those of a malefactor on a gibbet; that she shifted and
shrank and avoided every blow, and they fell then upon the wall to which
she was tied. She could not see the face of the executioner for his
mask, but his form was like Manston’s.
‘Thank Heaven!’ she said, when she awoke and saw a faint light
struggling through her blind. ‘Now what were those noises?’ To settle
that question seemed more to her than the event of the day.
She pulled the blind aside and looked out. All was plain. The evening
previous had closed in with a grey drizzle, borne upon a piercing air
from the north, and now its effects were visible. The hoary drizzle
still continued; but the trees and shrubs were laden with icicles to an
extent such as she had never before witnessed. A shoot of the diameter
of a pin’s head was iced as thick as her finger; all the boughs in
the park were bent almost to the earth with the immense weight of the
glistening incumbrance; the walks were like a looking-glass. Many boughs
had snapped beneath their burden, and lay in heaps upon the icy grass.
Opposite her eye, on the nearest tree, was a fresh yellow scar, showing
where the branch that had terrified her had been splintered from the
trunk.
‘I never could have believed it possible,’ she thought, surveying the
bowed-down branches, ‘that trees would bend so far out of their true
positions without breaking.’ By watching a twig she could see a drop
collect upon it from the hoary fog, sink to the lowest point, and there
become coagulated as the others had done.
‘Or that I could so exactly have imitated them,’ she continued. ‘On this
morning I am to be married--unless this is a scheme of the great Mother
to hinder a union of which she does not approve. Is it possible for my
wedding to take place in the face of such weather as this?’