Soft as was Cytherea’s motion along the corridors of Knapwater House,
the preternaturally keen intelligence of the suffering woman caught
the maiden’s well-known footfall. She entered the sick-chamber with
suspended breath.
In the room everything was so still, and sensation was as it were so
rarefied by solicitude, that thinking seemed acting, and the lady’s
weak act of trying to live a silent wrestling with all the powers of the
universe. Nobody was present but Mr. Raunham, the nurse having left the
room on Cytherea’s entry, and the physician and surgeon being engaged
in a whispered conversation in a side-chamber. Their patient had been
pronounced out of danger.
Cytherea went to the bedside, and was instantly recognized. O, what a
change--Miss Aldclyffe dependent upon pillows! And yet not a forbidding
change. With weakness had come softness of aspect: the haughtiness was
extracted from the frail thin countenance, and a sweeter mild placidity
had taken its place.
Miss Aldclyffe signified to Mr. Raunham that she would like to be alone
with Cytherea.
‘Cytherea?’ she faintly whispered the instant the door was closed.
Cytherea clasped the lady’s weak hand, and sank beside her.
Miss Aldclyffe whispered again. ‘They say I am certain to live; but I
know that I am certainly going to die.’
‘They know, I think, and hope.’
‘I know best, but we’ll leave that. Cytherea--O Cytherea, can you
forgive me!’
Her companion pressed her hand.
‘But you don’t know yet--you don’t know yet,’ the invalid murmured. ‘It
is forgiveness for that misrepresentation to Edward Springrove that I
implore, and for putting such force upon him--that which caused all the
train of your innumerable ills!’
‘I know all--all. And I do forgive you. Not in a hasty impulse that is
revoked when coolness comes, but deliberately and sincerely: as I myself
hope to be forgiven, I accord you my forgiveness now.’
Tears streamed from Miss Aldclyffe’s eyes, and mingled with those of her
young companion, who could not restrain hers for sympathy. Expressions
of strong attachment, interrupted by emotion, burst again and again from
the broken-spirited woman.
‘But you don’t know my motive. O, if you only knew it, how you would
pity me then!’
Cytherea did not break the pause which ensued, and the elder woman
appeared now to nerve herself by a superhuman effort. She spoke on in a
voice weak as a summer breeze, and full of intermission, and yet there
pervaded it a steadiness of intention that seemed to demand firm tones
to bear it out worthily.
‘Cytherea,’ she said, ‘listen to me before I die.
‘A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of seventeen
was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six-and-twenty. He
went to India, and died.
‘One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her
parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the
money she possessed, pinned it on her infant’s bosom, together with
a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child’s
Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with it to
Clapham. Here, in a retired street, she selected a house. She placed
the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then ran away and
watched. They took it up and carried it indoors.
‘Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly for
cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents’ counsel to
secretly hire a nurse. She longed to see it. She didn’t know what to do.
She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had taken it in, and asked
her to meet the writer with the infant at certain places she named.
These were hotels or coffee-houses in Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith.
The woman, being well paid, always came, and asked no questions. At one
meeting--at an inn in Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the
child, and told the girl it was so ill that it would not live through
the night. The news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit....’
Miss Aldclyffe’s sobs choked her utterance, and she became painfully
agitated. Cytherea, pale and amazed at what she heard, wept for her,
bent over her, and begged her not to go on speaking.
‘Yes--I must,’ she cried, between her sobs. ‘I will--I must go on! And
I must tell yet more plainly!... you must hear it before I am gone,
Cytherea.’ The sympathizing and astonished girl sat down again.
‘The name of the woman who had taken the child was _Manston_. She was
the widow of a schoolmaster. She said she had adopted the child of a
relation.
‘Only one man ever found out who the mother was. He was the keeper of
the inn in which she fainted, and his silence she has purchased ever
since.
‘A twelvemonth passed--fifteen months--and the saddened girl met a
man at her father’s house named Graye--your father, Cytherea, then
unmarried. Ah, such a man! Inexperience now perceived what it was to
be loved in spirit and in truth! But it was too late. Had he known her
secret he would have cast her out. She withdrew from him by an effort,
and pined.
‘Years and years afterwards, when she became mistress of a fortune and
estates by her father’s death, she formed the weak scheme of having near
her the son whom, in her father’s life-time, she had been forbidden to
recognize. Cytherea, you know who that weak woman is.
* * * * *
‘By such toilsome labour as this I got him here as my steward. And I
wanted to see him _your husband_, Cytherea!--the husband of my true
lover’s child. It was a sweet dream to me.... Pity me--O, pity me! To
die unloved is more than I can bear! I loved your father, and I love him
now.’
That was the burden of Cytherea Aldclyffe.
‘I suppose you must leave me again--you always leave me,’ she said,
after holding the young woman’s hand a long while in silence.
‘No--indeed I’ll stay always. Do you like me to stay?’
Miss Aldclyffe in the jaws of death was Miss Aldclyffe still, though the
old fire had degenerated to mere phosphorescence now. ‘But you are your
brother’s housekeeper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, of course you cannot stay with me on a sudden like this.... Go
home, or he will be at a loss for things. And to-morrow morning come
again, won’t you, dearest, come again--we’ll fetch you. But you mustn’t
stay now, and put Owen out. O no--it would be absurd.’ The absorbing
concern about trifles of daily routine, which is so often seen in very
sick people, was present here.
Cytherea promised to go home, and come the next morning to stay
continuously.
‘Stay till I die then, will you not? Yes, till I die--I shan’t die till
to-morrow.’
‘We hope for your recovery--all of us.’
‘I know best. Come at six o’clock, darling.’
‘As soon as ever I can,’ returned Cytherea tenderly.
‘But six is too early--you will have to think of your brother’s
breakfast. Leave Tolchurch at eight, will you?’
Cytherea consented to this. Miss Aldclyffe would never have known
had her companion stayed in the house all night; but the honesty of
Cytherea’s nature rebelled against even the friendly deceit which such a
proceeding would have involved.
An arrangement was come to whereby she was to be taken home in the
pony-carriage instead of the brougham that fetched her; the carriage
to put up at Tolchurch farm for the night, and on that account to be in
readiness to bring her back earlier.