CYRIL RENOUNCES LOVE AND FORTUNE.
CYRIL CULVERHOUSE was a miserable man. The woman he loved--the only
woman he had ever loved--was free to become his wife, dowered with
estates worth ten thousand a year, and yet he held himself aloof from
her, and shrank from any act which should ratify in the present the
tie that had bound them in the past. He, who should have been the
first to console the fatherless girl in the hour of bereavement and
desolation, to support and counsel her under the difficulties of sudden
independence--he, whose heart yearned towards her in her loneliness,
stood apart and allowed her to believe him cold and heartless. The
struggle had been a hard one; but, after many troubled days and wakeful
nights, he had made up his mind that it must be so. Beatrix and he
could never go hand in hand along the path of life.
The cloud that hung over her young life might be a shadow which the
light of truth would by and by dispel; but, until the truth should
appear, broad and clear as sunlight, he could not take Beatrix
Harefield to his heart, he could not bind his life with hers.
Did he believe her guilty of that last and worst of crimes, the murder
of a father? Hardly. But he was not fully assured of her innocence. His
mind had been racked with doubt--ever since that day of the inquest
when he had stood in the doorway and watched her agonized face and
listened to her faltering words. There is nothing that the human
mind more unwillingly believes than a strange coincidence; and that
coincidence of Miss Harefield’s purchase of the laudanum within a week
of her father’s death by laudanum had been too much for Cyril’s faith.
Had his beloved been a penniless orphan, and no worldly gain to be had
from loving her, he might have reconciled his doubt with his honour
and married her, trusting to time for the elucidation of the mystery
that now stained her young life with the taint of possible guilt. But
in this case there was too much for him to win--and in every feeling
that drew him to Beatrix he recognised a snare of Satan. Little by
little he had come to know that public opinion in Little Yafford--and
even in the neighbouring town of Great Yafford--had condemned Beatrix
Harefield. Every detail of her conduct had been canvassed. Her late
appearance on the morning of her father’s death was taken as an
evidence of guilt. She had feared to face the catastrophe her crime
had brought about, and had feigned sleep to stave off the appalling
moment. Or she had simulated that heavy slumber in order to support
her story about the laudanum. Her suggestion that her father should be
sought for in a certain room, and the fact that he was found in that
very room; her lame story--obviously an after thought--of the laudanum
bottle in her mother’s room--all told against her. The fact that an
empty bottle had been found there proved nothing. Beatrix had no doubt
placed it where it was found. There had been ample time for her to do
so between the first and second meetings of the coroner’s jury. Then as
to motive? Well, one need not look very far for that, argued Little
Yafford. Mr. Harefield had been a tyrant, and had made his daughter’s
life miserable. She saw in his death a release from his tyranny, with
the assurance of wealth and independence. Everybody knew--thanks to
Mrs. Dulcimer--how cruelly the wretched girl had been treated, even
forbidden to visit the Vicarage, where she had always been so happy.
And then there was that secret love affair which had been spoken about
at the inquest. That would give a still stronger motive than her own
wrongs. The more cultured inhabitants of Little Yafford, gentlemen who
had dipped into old magazines and Annual Registers, quoted the case of
Miss Blandy, an unfortunate young woman in the last century, who had
given Henley-on-Thames, the place of her birth and residence, a classic
fame by poisoning her father with ratsbane mixed in his water gruel.
Again, as to character. Everybody who was familiar with Miss
Harefield--by meeting her occasionally in her drives and rides, or
seeing her once a week at church--was aware that she was a girl of
reserved and even melancholy temperament, from whom anything strange
in conduct or morals might be expected. Then, again, she was of foreign
extraction on the mother’s side, and as such prone to crime. She was
Italian, and with a natural leaning to poison and parricide. And again,
those stock figures of the Borgia and Cenci were brought forward and
contemplated shudderingly in the lurid glare of their guilt.
Some weak-minded persons clung to the idea that Mr. Harefield had taken
an overdose of opium unwittingly, but this tame and uninteresting
theory was scouted by the majority.
‘If Miss Harefield had not been an heiress we should have heard a good
deal more about her father’s death,’ said Miss Coyle, draining her
ancestral teapot at one of her temperate symposia.
Miss Coyle was quite angry with the coroner for not having looked
deeper into things. She spoke of him contemptuously as a hireling and a
time-server.
Cyril Culverhouse knew what people thought about the woman he
loved--for he loved her none the less because he held himself aloof
from her. His love was deathless. Innocent or guilty he must love her
to the end. He knew what people thought of his beloved; he knew that
even kindly Mrs. Dulcimer shook her head, and shrank from familiar
contact with her husband’s ward. There was no one in Little Yafford
except the Vicar who would take the slandered girl by the hand and
boldly demonstrate his belief in her innocence. He, so easy-going
on most occasions, was firm as a rock here. He would have Beatrix
at his house, as often as she chose to come there--although the
all-powerful Rebecca would hardly look civilly at her as she waited
at table--and although poor Mrs. Dulcimer was sorely perplexed by her
presence. Clement Dulcimer was staunch, and defied his parishioners,
whom he stigmatised generally as a pack of venomous scandalmongers,
whose uncultured minds, unable to appreciate the strong sound meat of
literature, battened upon carrion.
If Cyril could have had Mr. Dulcimer’s faith he would have had Mr.
Dulcimer’s courage. He was no slave of other men’s opinions, and would
have snapped his fingers in the face of Little Yafford, if all had
been well within. But there was the difficulty. That stricken face
of Beatrix’s, those wild startled eyes--as he had seen them in the
candle-lit room at the Water House--haunted him like an evil dream. He
saw guilt and remorse in those troubled looks--the fear of God and man.
Had he been a man who lived for himself alone, who had no higher aim in
life than his own happiness, Cyril Culverhouse might have stifled the
voice of doubt, and listened only to love’s pleading. But it was not so
with him--he had chosen a loftier kind of life, he had given himself a
loftier aim. He was to live for others, and to make the lives of others
better than their own unaided weakness could make them. He, who was
to be the teacher and counsellor of others, must be, so far as it is
possible for humanity, spotless in his life and in his surroundings.
Could he marry a wife of whom it could be said in one breath, ‘She was
suspected of poisoning her father,’ and in the next, ‘Yes, but she
brought her husband ten thousand a year’?
No. It was clear to him that this fatal cloud of suspicion must make a
life-long severance between Beatrix and him. Love might have bridged
the gulf, but honour and duty held him back. He had not seen Beatrix
since her father’s death, and he had made up his mind to leave Little
Yafford without seeing her. His business was to announce his resolve in
a manner that would give her the least pain possible; but he knew the
blow would be hard to bear. He knew that she loved him with an intense
and all-absorbing love.
‘Oh, God, if she has sinned so deeply for the love of me,’ he thought,
in a moment of horror, finding himself suddenly on the edge of a black
abyss of doubt, down which he dared not look, ‘if to bring about our
union she has done this hideous thing! But no, I will not believe her
guilty. I will pity and deplore her position, the victim of groundless
suspicion. If I dare not sacrifice my duty to my love, I will at least
believe her innocent.’
He remembered that little speech of hers during their chance meeting on
the moor, a speech that had shocked and revolted him at the time, and
had been a painful recollection to him afterwards.
‘Is it wicked to wish for my father’s death?’
Did not that question imply that she had already committed the sin? Was
it possible that the wicked wish, nursed and cherished, had culminated
in the fatal act? The doubt tortured him.
He had wavered for some weeks, not quite clear in his own mind what
step he ought to take, hoping that some new piece of evidence, some
detail in the story of Christian Harefield’s death, might place the
whole business in a new light, and demonstrate Beatrix’s innocence. But
Mr. Harefield had been dead a month, the first snowdrops were lifting
their heads out of the dark borders, the robins were singing sweetly in
the lengthening afternoons, and nothing had been discovered to improve
Miss Harefield’s position in the eyes of Little Yafford. Nay rather,
slander had grown and intensified with discussion, and people who had
timorously hinted their doubts three weeks ago, now boldly declared
their conviction of the young lady’s guilt.
‘How she can live in that big lonely house, with no one but her
governess for company, is more than I can understand,’ said Miss Coyle;
‘she must be dreadfully hardened.’
‘Something more will come out before long, you may depend upon it,’
said Mrs. Pomfret, the pew-opener, to her Sunday afternoon gossips over
the black crockery teapot, with a sphinx squatting on the lid.
This was the general opinion. Everybody was waiting for something
to come out. The servants had doubtless been paid to hold their
tongues--dark facts had been kept back by bribery. But the truth would
come out sooner or later--even if Mr. Harefield’s ghost had to walk,
like the elder Hamlet.
‘It may be a very long time, but it will all come out sooner or later,’
said Mr. Tudway, an old bachelor retired from the button trade, a great
reader of magazines and annual registers, who knew all about Miss
Blandy, and talked learnedly of Lucretia Borgia and Beatrice Cenci.
‘Look at Eliza Fenning.’
‘Ah!’ sighed Miss Coyle. ‘Very true.’
She had the vaguest recollection of Eliza Fenning, as associated
uncomfortably with beefsteak dumplings, and hanged in consequence of
the association, but she was not going to exhibit her ignorance before
Mr. Tudway, who was disagreeably self-satisfied on the strength of his
stray paragraphs, and unconsidered scraps of information.
Beatrix Harefield was slow to discover the current of public feeling.
The shock of her father’s death left her for a little while apathetic
to all smaller emotions, and when that apathy wore off she had a new
and pressing grief in Cyril’s abandonment. Her new sense of liberty
brought her no happiness--no desire to taste the sweets of freedom,
or to exchange the gloom and solitude of the Water House for brighter
scenes. If her independence did not bring Cyril to her side it brought
nothing. Wealth, power, liberty, were valueless without him.
The slow days went by, and she waited for her lover to make some sign.
At first she was inclined to impute his conduct to a restraining
delicacy, but as time went on a horrible fear began to take hold of her
aching heart. He was purposely avoiding her. She had spent her Sunday
evenings at the Vicarage. Kenrick had been there, but never Cyril. She
had heard Mrs. Dulcimer express her regret at the curate’s absence,
heard his excuses, which seemed hardly valid--a sick parishioner to
visit--letters to write.
‘I should have thought he would not like to write letters on a Sunday
evening,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘It seems rather lax.’
‘Do you think it more lax to write letters than to sit at this table
and talk of worldly things--from the last village scandal to the newest
fashion in bonnet crowns?’ speculated Mr. Dulcimer.
Kenrick was staying at the Vicarage. Mrs. Dulcimer had pressed
him hospitably to remain. There was plenty of shooting in the
neighbourhood. Mr. Piper had made him free of the Park preserves,
and there was good sport to be had on the moor. Altogether Kenrick
felt that he might as well finish out his leave at Little Yafford.
The curate worked so hard that Kenrick and he saw very little of each
other, and Kenrick had not yet ventured to sound Cyril about Beatrix.
It was a delicate subject, and Kenrick felt greatly puzzled by his
cousin’s conduct. Could Cyril be such a fool as to give any heed to
the poisonous tongues of Little Yafford? Kenrick could hardly imagine
such folly, but he found it difficult to account for his cousin’s
avoidance of Miss Harefield on any other ground, unless indeed it were
an overstrained delicacy which held him back from pushing his suit.
On the evening on which Cyril had arrived at a definite conclusion as
to his line of conduct, his cousin dropped in at his lodgings, after
the Vicarage tea, to smoke a friendly pipe.
‘You are not going out this evening,’ inquired Kenrick when they had
shaken hands.
‘No, I have some letters to write.’
‘Does that mean that I shall be a nuisance if I stay with you for an
hour or two?’
‘Not at all,’ answered Cyril ‘I shall be very glad to have an evening’s
talk, and my letters can be written better towards midnight than
earlier.’
‘That sounds as if the letters were important.’
‘They are important,’ said Cyril, gravely, as he closed the desk before
which he had been sitting for nearly an hour in troubled thought,
trying to frame his letter to Beatrix so that it should wound as little
as possible.
‘What a hermit you are growing!’ said Kenrick. ‘You hardly ever come to
the Vicarage now.’
‘I have so much to do else where.’
‘But on Sunday evenings,’ suggested Kenrick, helping himself to a
pipe from the neat arrangement of meerschaums and briar-woods on the
mantelpiece. ‘Surely you could spare an hour or two after evening
service for social intercourse. That is always the pleasantest time at
the Vicarage.’
‘I have been engaged even on Sunday evenings.’
‘Yes, of course; for a man who visits the poor there must be always an
engagement. That kind of thing has no limit. Poor people like to be
read to and talked to and compassionated. You can’t suppose they would
ever say, “Hold, enough!” But you ought to have some consideration for
your own health and spirits. You are looking ill and depressed.’
‘I am not ill, but I plead guilty to feeling depressed.’
‘What is the trouble?’
‘I have made up my mind to leave this place--dear as it is to me. I am
going to write to Mr. Dulcimer this evening to tell him my intention.’
‘You must be mad,’ cried Kenrick. ‘Leave Little Yafford, just when
fortune is ready to pour her favours into your lap--just when Miss
Harefield is free to be your wife. You must be mad, Cyril.’
‘No, I have been sorely perplexed, but I am not mad. I have
deliberately weighed this question. Beatrix Harefield is to me the one
perfect woman--the only woman I can ever love,--but I cannot ask her to
be my wife.’
‘Why not, in heaven’s name?’
‘I had rather not enter into my feelings on that point.’
‘Do you mean that you, a reasonable man, with eyes of your own and a
mind of your own to see and judge with, are going to be led and ruled
by the petty slanderers of Little Yafford; malicious creatures who envy
Miss Harefield her ten thousand a year, and would like to think--or at
any rate to make others think--that she jumped into fortune by crime?’
‘I despise slanderers and evil speakers,’ said Cyril, ‘but my wife must
be spotless.’
‘Yes, in your own eyes and in the sight of heaven. It can matter to you
very little what Little Yafford thinks of her.’
‘To me individually nothing--to my office a great deal. The wife of a
priest must be above suspicion--her name and fame must be unshadowed.’
‘Abandon your office, then. You can afford to do it if you marry a
woman with ten thousand a year.’
Cyril turned upon the speaker with eyes that flashed angrily across a
cloud of gray smoke.
‘Kenrick, can you believe for one moment that I took that office as a
means of living, or that the gain of wealth or happiness would tempt me
to surrender it? I should think myself a new Judas if I could turn my
back upon my Master to marry the woman I love.’
‘Keep your office, then, and marry her all the same. Live down this
slander. Stand up bravely before the world with your wife by your side,
and let men say the worst they can of you. Your life and hers will be
your answer.’
‘They would say I had married her because she has ten thousand a year,’
said Cyril. ‘I should do no good with her money. It would turn to
withered leaves in my keeping. No, I love her--shall love her to the
end--innocent or guilty--but I will not link my life with hers. Every
hour of life would be a struggle between love and doubt.’
‘Innocent or guilty!’ echoed Kenrick. ‘I see you are as bad as the
rest. I should not have thought that possible. You have quite made up
your mind then, Cyril. You abandon all hope of winning Miss Harefield?’
‘Entirely.’
‘So be it,’ said Kenrick. ‘Then let us talk of other things.’
Though Sir Kenrick proposed a change of conversation he was curiously
silent and absent for the next half-hour, and gave Cyril ample leisure
for thought. The two young men sat smoking and looking at the fire as
they had done on many a previous evening, each wrapped in his own
thoughts. When the clock in the hall struck ten, Sir Kenrick emptied
the ashes out of his pipe, and put it back in its proper place on the
mantelpiece.
‘Well, good night, old fellow,’ he said, in his usual careless style.
‘How soon do you think of leaving this place?’
‘Before the end of the week.’
‘That’s sudden.’
‘Yes; but you remember what the Giaour said,--
‘“Better to sink beneath the shock
Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.”’
Painful partings cannot be too sudden.’
‘You will inconvenience Mr. Dulcimer.’
‘Not much. He got on without a curate for six months before I came.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Bridford.’
‘A horrible manufacturing hole!’ exclaimed Sir Kenrick.
‘A place where there is good work to be done by any man strong enough
to do it.’
‘Oh, you are mad, Cyril, that is all--a fanatic. No fakir with
shrivelled arms was ever worse. But I wish you well, dear fellow,
wherever you go.’
Kenrick went away, wondering at his cousin’s foolishness. He did
not know how far things had gone between Cyril and Beatrix, or he
might have wondered still more. He thought Cyril might have won Miss
Harefield by trying. He did not know she was already won.