She shivered. Now she was determined to go to sleep; there could be nothing else left to be heard or to imagine--it was horrid that her imagination should be so restless. Yet just for an instant before going to sleep she would think this--suppose another sound _should_ come--just suppose it should! Before the thought had well pa.s.sed through her brain, a third sound came.
The third was a very soft gurgle or rattle--of a strange and abnormal kind--yet a sound she had heard before at some past period of her life--when, she could not recollect. To make it the more disturbing, it seemed to be almost close to her--either close outside the window, close under the floor, or close above the ceiling. The accidental fact of its coming so immediately upon the heels of her supposition, told so powerfully upon her excited nerves that she jumped up in the bed. The same instant, a little dog in some room near, having probably heard the same noise, set up a low whine. The watch-dog in the yard, hearing the moan of his a.s.sociate, began to howl loudly and distinctly. His melancholy notes were taken up directly afterwards by the dogs in the kennel a long way off, in every variety of wail.
One logical thought alone was able to enter her flurried brain. The little dog that began the whining must have heard the other two sounds even better than herself. He had taken no notice of them, but he had taken notice of the third. The third, then, was an unusual sound.
It was not like water, it was not like wind; it was not the night-jar, it was not a clock, nor a rat, nor a person snoring.
She crept under the clothes, and flung her arms tightly round Miss Aldclyffe, as if for protection. Cytherea perceived that the lady"s late peaceful warmth had given place to a sweat. At the maiden"s touch, Miss Aldclyffe awoke with a low scream.
She remembered her position instantly. "O such a terrible dream!" she cried, in a hurried whisper, holding to Cytherea in her turn; "and your touch was the end of it. It was dreadful. Time, with his wings, hour-gla.s.s, and scythe, coming nearer and nearer to me--grinning and mocking: then he seized me, took a piece of me only... But I can"t tell you. I can"t bear to think of it. How those dogs howl! People say it means death."
The return of Miss Aldclyffe to consciousness was sufficient to dispel the wild fancies which the loneliness of the night had woven in Cytherea"s mind. She dismissed the third noise as something which in all likelihood could easily be explained, if trouble were taken to inquire into it: large houses had all kinds of strange sounds floating about them. She was ashamed to tell Miss Aldclyffe her terrors.
A silence of five minutes.
"Are you asleep?" said Miss Aldclyffe.
"No," said Cytherea, in a long-drawn whisper.
"How those dogs howl, don"t they?"
"Yes. A little dog in the house began it."
"Ah, yes: that was Totsy. He sleeps on the mat outside my father"s bedroom door. A nervous creature."
There was a silent interval of nearly half-an-hour. A clock on the landing struck three.
"Are you asleep, Miss Aldclyffe?" whispered Cytherea.
"No," said Miss Aldclyffe. "How wretched it is not to be able to sleep, isn"t it?"
"Yes," replied Cytherea, like a docile child.
Another hour pa.s.sed, and the clock struck four. Miss Aldclyffe was still awake.
"Cytherea," she said, very softly.
Cytherea made no answer. She was sleeping soundly.
The first glimmer of dawn was now visible. Miss Aldclyffe arose, put on her dressing-gown, and went softly downstairs to her own room.
"I have not told her who I am after all, or found out the particulars of Ambrose"s history," she murmured. "But her being in love alters everything."
3. HALF-PAST SEVEN TO TEN O"CLOCK A.M.
Cytherea awoke, quiet in mind and refreshed. A conclusion to remain at Knapwater was already in possession of her.
Finding Miss Aldclyffe gone, she dressed herself and sat down at the window to write an answer to Edward"s letter, and an account of her arrival at Knapwater to Owen. The dismal and heart-breaking pictures that Miss Aldclyffe had placed before her the preceding evening, the later terrors of the night, were now but as shadows of shadows, and she smiled in derision at her own excitability.
But writing Edward"s letter was the great consoler, the effect of each word upon him being enacted in her own face as she wrote it. She felt how much she would like to share his trouble--how well she could endure poverty with him--and wondered what his trouble was. But all would be explained at last, she knew.
At the appointed time she went to Miss Aldclyffe"s room, intending, with the contradictoriness common in people, to perform with pleasure, as a work of supererogation, what as a duty was simply intolerable.
Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed. The bright penetrating light of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady"s behaviour to her dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea"s judgment, had effected the same for Miss Aldclyffe. Though practical reasons forbade her regretting that she had secured such a companionable creature to read, talk, or play to her whenever her whim required, she was inwardly vexed at the extent to which she had indulged in the womanly luxury of making confidences and giving way to emotions. Few would have supposed that the calm lady sitting aristocratically at the toilet table, seeming scarcely conscious of Cytherea"s presence in the room, even when greeting her, was the pa.s.sionate creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.
It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these ant.i.theses are to be observed in the individual most open to our observation--ourselves. We pa.s.s the evening with faces lit up by some flaring illumination or other: we get up the next morning--the fiery jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few crinkled pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline of the blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.
Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light. Probably nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession are written after nine or ten o"clock in the evening, and sent off before day returns to leer invidiously upon them. Few that remain open to catch our glance as we rise in the morning, survive the frigid criticism of dressing-time.
The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus cooled from their fires, were not the visionary ones of the later hours, but the hard facts of their earlier conversation. After a remark that Cytherea need not a.s.sist her in dressing unless she wished to, Miss Aldclyffe said abruptly--
"I can tell that young man"s name." She looked keenly at Cytherea. "It is Edward Springrove, my tenant"s son."
The inundation of colour upon the younger lady at hearing a name which to her was a world, handled as if it were only an atom, told Miss Aldclyffe that she had divined the truth at last.
"Ah--it is he, is it?" she continued. "Well, I wanted to know for practical reasons. His example shows that I was not so far wrong in my estimate of men after all, though I only generalized, and had no thought of him." This was perfectly true.
"What do you mean?" said Cytherea, visibly alarmed.
"Mean? Why that all the world knows him to be engaged to be married, and that the wedding is soon to take place." She made the remark bluntly and superciliously, as if to obtain absolution at the hands of her family pride for the weak confidences of the night.
But even the frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe"s morning mood was overcome by the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered words had produced upon Cytherea"s face. She sank back into a chair, and buried her face in her hands.
"Don"t be so foolish," said Miss Aldclyffe. "Come, make the best of it.
I cannot upset the fact I have told you of, unfortunately. But I believe the match can be broken off."
"O no, no."
"Nonsense. I liked him much as a youth, and I like him now. I"ll help you to captivate and chain him down. I have got over my absurd feeling of last night in not wanting you ever to go away from me--of course, I could not expect such a thing as that. There, now I have said I"ll help you, and that"s enough. He"s tired of his first choice now that he"s been away from home for a while. The love that no outer attack can frighten away quails before its idol"s own homely ways; it is always so.... Come, finish what you are doing if you are going to, and don"t be a little goose about such a trumpery affair as that."
"Who--is he engaged to?" Cytherea inquired by a movement of her lips but no sound of her voice. But Miss Aldclyffe did not answer. It mattered not, Cytherea thought. Another woman--that was enough for her: curiosity was stunned.
She applied herself to the work of dressing, scarcely knowing how. Miss Aldclyffe went on:--
"You were too easily won. I"d have made him or anybody else speak out before he should have kissed my face for his pleasure. But you are one of those precipitantly fond things who are yearning to throw away their hearts upon the first worthless fellow who says good-morning. In the first place, you shouldn"t have loved him so quickly: in the next, if you must have loved him off-hand, you should have concealed it. It tickled his vanity: "By Jove, that girl"s in love with me already!" he thought."
To hasten away at the end of the toilet, to tell Mrs. Morris--who stood waiting in a little room prepared for her, with tea poured out, bread-and-b.u.t.ter cut into diaphanous slices, and eggs arranged--that she wanted no breakfast: then to shut herself alone in her bedroom, was her only thought. She was followed thither by the well-intentioned matron with a cup of tea and one piece of bread-and-b.u.t.ter on a tray, cheerfully insisting that she should eat it.
To those who grieve, innocent cheerfulness seems heartless levity. "No, thank you, Mrs. Morris," she said, keeping the door closed. Despite the incivility of the action, Cytherea could not bear to let a pleasant person see her face then.
Immediate revocation--even if revocation would be more effective by postponement--is the impulse of young wounded natures. Cytherea went to her blotting-book, took out the long letter so carefully written, so full of gushing remarks and tender hints, and sealed up so neatly with a little seal bearing "Good Faith" as its motto, tore the missive into fifty pieces, and threw them into the grate. It was then the bitterest of anguishes to look upon some of the words she had so lovingly written, and see them existing only in mutilated forms without meaning--to feel that his eye would never read them, n.o.body ever know how ardently she had penned them.
Pity for one"s self for being wasted is mostly present in these moods of abnegation.
The meaning of all his allusions, his abruptness in telling her of his love, his constraint at first, then his desperate manner of speaking, was clear. They must have been the last flickerings of a conscience not quite dead to all sense of perfidiousness and fickleness. Now he had gone to London: she would be dismissed from his memory, in the same way as Miss Aldclyffe had said. And here she was in Edward"s own parish, reminded continually of him by what she saw and heard. The landscape, yesterday so much and so bright to her, was now but as the banquet-hall deserted--all gone but herself.
Miss Aldclyffe had wormed her secret out of her, and would now be continually mocking her for her trusting simplicity in believing him. It was altogether unbearable: she would not stay there.
She went downstairs and found Miss Aldclyffe had gone into the breakfast-room, but that Captain Aldclyffe, who rose later with increasing infirmities, had not yet made his appearance. Cytherea entered. Miss Aldclyffe was looking out of the window, watching a trail of white smoke along the distant landscape--signifying a pa.s.sing train.