Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  A month passed away; throughout this period, Cytherea visited him as often as the limited time at her command would allow, and wore as cheerful a countenance as the womanly determination to do nothing which might depress him could enable her to wear. Another letter from him then told her these additional facts: —

  ‘The doctors find they are again on the wrong tack. They cannot make out what the disease is. O Cytherea! how I wish they knew! This suspense is wearing me out. Could not Miss Aldclyffe spare you for a day? Do come to me. We will talk about the best course then. I am sorry to complain, but I am worn out.’

  Cytherea went to Miss Aldclyffe, and told her of the melancholy turn her brother’s illness had taken. Miss Aldclyffe at once said that Cytherea might go, and offered to do anything to assist her which lay in her power. Cytherea’s eyes beamed gratitude as she turned to leave the room, and hasten to the station.

  ‘O, Cytherea,’ said Miss Aldclyffe, calling her back; ‘just one word. Has Mr. Manston spoken to you lately?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cytherea, blushing timorously.

  ‘He proposed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you refused him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tut, tut! Now listen to my advice,’ said Miss Aldclyffe emphatically, ‘and accept him before he changes his mind. The chance which he offers you of settling in life is one that may possibly, probably, not occur again. His position is good and secure, and the life of his wife would be a happy one. You may not be sure that you love him madly; but suppose you are not sure? My father used to say to me as a child when he was teaching me whist, “When in doubt win the trick!” That advice is ten times as valuable to a woman on the subject of matrimony. In refusing a man there is always the risk that you may never get another offer.’

  ‘Why didn’t you win the trick when you were a girl?’ said Cytherea.

  ‘Come, my lady Pert; I’m not the text,’ said Miss Aldclyffe, her face glowing like fire.

  Cytherea laughed stealthily.

  ‘I was about to say,’ resumed Miss Aldclyffe severely, ‘that here is Mr. Manston waiting with the tenderest solicitude for you, and you overlooking it, as if it were altogether beneath you. Think how you might benefit your sick brother if you were Mrs. Manston. You will please me very much by giving him some encouragement. You understand me, Cythie dear?’

  Cytherea was silent.

  ‘And,’ said Miss Aldclyffe, still more emphatically, ‘on your promising that you will accept him some time this year, I will take especial care of your brother. You are listening, Cytherea?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, leaving the room.

  She went to Budmouth, passed the day with her brother, and returned to Knapwater wretched and full of foreboding. Owen had looked startlingly thin and pale — thinner and paler than ever she had seen him before. The brother and sister had that day decided that notwithstanding the drain upon their slender resources, another surgeon should see him. Time was everything.

  Owen told her the result in his next letter: —

  ‘The three practitioners between them have at last hit the nail on the head, I hope. They probed the place, and discovered that the secret lay in the bone. I underwent an operation for its removal three days ago (after taking chloroform)... Thank God it is over. Though I am so weak, my spirits are rather better. I wonder when I shall be at work again? I asked the surgeons how long it would be first. I said a month? They shook their heads. A year? I said. Not so long, they said. Six months? I inquired. They would not, or could not, tell me. But never mind.

  ‘Run down, when you have half a day to spare, for the hours drag on so drearily. O Cytherea, you can’t think how drearily!’

  She went. Immediately on her departure Miss Aldclyffe sent a note to the Old House, to Manston. On the maiden’s return, tired and sick at heart as usual, she found Manston at the station awaiting her. He asked politely if he might accompany her to Knapwater. She tacitly acquiesced. During their walk he inquired the particulars of her brother’s illness, and with an irresistible desire to pour out her trouble to some one, she told him of the length of time which must elapse before he could be strong again, and of the lack of comfort in lodgings.

  Manston was silent awhile. Then he said impetuously: ‘Miss Graye, I will not mince matters — I love you — you know it. Stratagem they say is fair in love, and I am compelled to adopt it now. Forgive me, for I cannot help it. Consent to be my wife at any time that may suit you — any remote day you may name will satisfy me — and you shall find him well provided for.’

  For the first time in her life she truly dreaded the handsome man at her side who pleaded thus selfishly, and shrank from the hot voluptuous nature of his passion for her, which, disguise it as he might under a quiet and polished exterior, at times radiated forth with a scorching white heat. She perceived how animal was the love which bargained.

  ‘I do not love you, Mr. Manston,’ she replied coldly.

  5. FROM THE FIRST TO THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST

  The long sunny days of the later summer-time brought only the same dreary accounts from Budmouth, and saw Cytherea paying the same sad visits.

  She grew perceptibly weaker, in body and mind. Manston still persisted in his suit, but with more of his former indirectness, now that he saw how unexpectedly well she stood an open attack. His was the system of Dares at the Sicilian games —

  ‘He, like a captain who beleaguers round

  Some strong-built castle on a rising ground,

  Views all the approaches with observing eyes,

  This and that other part again he tries,

  And more on industry than force relies.’

  Miss Aldclyffe made it appear more clearly than ever that aid to Owen from herself depended entirely upon Cytherea’s acceptance of her steward. Hemmed in and distressed, Cytherea’s answers to his importunities grew less uniform; they were firm, or wavering, as Owen’s malady fluctuated. Had a register of her pitiful oscillations been kept, it would have rivalled in pathos the diary wherein De Quincey tabulates his combat with Opium — perhaps as noticeable an instance as any in which a thrilling dramatic power has been given to mere numerals. Thus she wearily and monotonously lived through the month, listening on Sundays to the well-known round of chapters narrating the history of Elijah and Elisha in famine and drought; on week-days to buzzing flies in hot sunny rooms. ‘So like, so very like, was day to day.’ Extreme lassitude seemed all that the world could show her.

  Her state was in this wise, when one afternoon, having been with her brother, she met the surgeon, and begged him to tell the actual truth concerning Owen’s condition.

  The reply was that he feared that the first operation had not been thorough; that although the wound had healed, another attempt might still be necessary, unless nature were left to effect her own cure. But the time such a self-healing proceeding would occupy might be ruinous.

  ‘How long would it be?’ she said.

  ‘It is impossible to say. A year or two, more or less.’

  ‘And suppose he submitted to another artificial extraction?’

  ‘Then he might be well in four or six months.’

  Now the remainder of his and her possessions, together with a sum he had borrowed, would not provide him with necessary comforts for half that time. To combat the misfortune, there were two courses open — her becoming betrothed to Manston, or the sending Owen to the County Hospital.

  Thus terrified, driven into a corner, panting and fluttering about for some loophole of escape, yet still shrinking from the idea of being Manston’s wife, the poor little bird endeavoured to find out from Miss Aldclyffe whether it was likely Owen would be well treated in the hospital.

  ‘County Hospital!’ said Miss Aldclyffe; ‘why, it is only another name for slaughter-house — in surgical cases at any rate. Certainly if anything about your body is snapt in two they do join you together in a fashion, but ‘tis so askew and ugly, that you may as well be apart again.’
Then she terrified the inquiring and anxious maiden by relating horrid stories of how the legs and arms of poor people were cut off at a moment’s notice, especially in cases where the restorative treatment was likely to be long and tedious.

  ‘You know how willing I am to help you, Cytherea,’ she added reproachfully. ‘You know it. Why are you so obstinate then? Why do you selfishly bar the clear, honourable, and only sisterly path which leads out of this difficulty? I cannot, on my conscience, countenance you; no, I cannot.’

  Manston once more repeated his offer; and once more she refused, but this time weakly, and with signs of an internal struggle. Manston’s eye sparkled; he saw for the hundredth time in his life, that perseverance, if only systematic, was irresistible by womankind.

  6. THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF AUGUST

  On going to Budmouth three days later, she found to her surprise that the steward had been there, had introduced himself, and had seen her brother. A few delicacies had been brought him also by the same hand. Owen spoke in warm terms of Manston and his free and unceremonious call, as he could not have refrained from doing of any person, of any kind, whose presence had served to help away the tedious hours of a long day, and who had, moreover, shown that sort of consideration for him which the accompanying basket implied — antecedent consideration, so telling upon all invalids — and which he so seldom experienced except from the hands of his sister.

  How should he perceive, amid this tithe-paying of mint, and anise, and cummin, the weightier matters which were left undone?

  Again the steward met her at Carriford Road Station on her return journey. Instead of being frigid as at the former meeting at the same place, she was embarrassed by a strife of thought, and murmured brokenly her thanks for what he had done. The same request that he might see her home was made.

  He had perceived his error in making his kindness to Owen a conditional kindness, and had hastened to efface all recollection of it. ‘Though I let my offer on her brother’s — my friend’s — behalf, seem dependent on my lady’s graciousness to me,’ he whispered wooingly in the course of their walk, ‘I could not conscientiously adhere to my statement; it was said with all the impulsive selfishness of love. Whether you choose to have me, or whether you don’t, I love you too devotedly to be anything but kind to your brother.... Miss Graye, Cytherea, I will do anything,’ he continued earnestly, ‘to give you pleasure — indeed I will.’

  She saw on the one hand her poor and much-loved Owen recovering from his illness and troubles by the disinterested kindness of the man beside her, on the other she drew him dying, wholly by reason of her self-enforced poverty. To marry this man was obviously the course of common sense, to refuse him was impolitic temerity. There was reason in this. But there was more behind than a hundred reasons — a woman’s gratitude and her impulse to be kind.

  The wavering of her mind was visible in her tell-tale face. He noticed it, and caught at the opportunity.

  They were standing by the ruinous foundations of an old mill in the midst of a meadow. Between grey and half-overgrown stonework — the only signs of masonry remaining — the water gurgled down from the old millpond to a lower level, under the cloak of rank broad leaves — the sensuous natures of the vegetable world. On the right hand the sun, resting on the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which a swarm of wailing gnats shone forth luminously, rising upward and floating away like sparks of fire.

  The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity. The only wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless. The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single entity under the sky.

  He came so close that their clothes touched. ‘Will you try to love me? Do try to love me!’ he said, in a whisper, taking her hand. He had never taken it before. She could feel his hand trembling exceedingly as it held hers in its clasp.

  Considering his kindness to her brother, his love for herself, and Edward’s fickleness, ought she to forbid him to do this? How truly pitiful it was to feel his hand tremble so — all for her! Should she withdraw her hand? She would think whether she would. Thinking, and hesitating, she looked as far as the autumnal haze on the marshy ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of a hedge — all that remained of a ‘wet old garden’ — standing in the middle of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending, purposeless and valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with mandrakes, and she could almost fancy she heard their shrieks.... Should she withdraw her hand? No, she could not withdraw it now; it was too late, the act would not imply refusal. She felt as one in a boat without oars, drifting with closed eyes down a river — she knew not whither.

  He gave her hand a gentle pressure, and relinquished it.

  Then it seemed as if he were coming to the point again. No, he was not going to urge his suit that evening. Another respite.

  7. THE EARLY PART OF SEPTEMBER

  Saturday came, and she went on some trivial errand to the village post-office. It was a little grey cottage with a luxuriant jasmine encircling the doorway, and before going in Cytherea paused to admire this pleasing feature of the exterior. Hearing a step on the gravel behind the corner of the house, she resigned the jasmine and entered. Nobody was in the room. She could hear Mrs. Leat, the widow who acted as postmistress, walking about over her head. Cytherea was going to the foot of the stairs to call Mrs. Leat, but before she had accomplished her object, another form stood at the half-open door. Manston came in.

  ‘Both on the same errand,’ he said gracefully.

  ‘I will call her,’ said Cytherea, moving in haste to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘One moment.’ He glided to her side. ‘Don’t call her for a moment,’ he repeated.

  But she had said, ‘Mrs. Leat!’

  He seized Cytherea’s hand, kissed it tenderly, and carefully replaced it by her side.

  She had that morning determined to check his further advances, until she had thoroughly considered her position. The remonstrance was now on her tongue, but as accident would have it, before the word could be spoken Mrs. Leat was stepping from the last stair to the floor, and no remonstrance came.

  With the subtlety which characterized him in all his dealings with her, he quickly concluded his own errand, bade her a good-bye, in the tones of which love was so garnished with pure politeness that it only showed its presence to herself, and left the house — putting it out of her power to refuse him her companionship homeward, or to object to his late action of kissing her hand.

  The Friday of the next week brought another letter from her brother. In this he informed her that, in absolute grief lest he should distress her unnecessarily, he had some time earlier borrowed a few pounds. A week ago, he said, his creditor became importunate, but that on the day on which he wrote, the creditor had told him there was no hurry for a settlement, that ‘his sister’s suitor had guaranteed the sum.’ ‘Is he Mr. Manston? tell me, Cytherea,’ said Owen.

  He also mentioned that a wheeled chair had been anonymously hired for his especial use, though as yet he was hardly far enough advanced towards convalescence to avail himself of the luxury. ‘Is this Mr. Manston’s doing?’ he inquired.

  She could dally with her perplexity, evade it, trust to time for guidance, no longer. The matter had come to a crisis: she must once and for all choose between the dictates of her understanding and those of her heart. She longed, till her soul seemed nigh to bursting, for her lost mother’s return to earth, but for one minute, that she might have tender counsel to guide her through this, her great difficulty.

  As for her heart, she half fancied that it was not Edward’s to quite the extent that it once had been; she thought him cruel in conducting himself towards her as he did at Budmout
h, cruel afterwards in making so light of her. She knew he had stifled his love for her — was utterly lost to her. But for all that she could not help indulging in a woman’s pleasure of recreating defunct agonies, and lacerating herself with them now and then.

  ‘If I were rich,’ she thought, ‘I would give way to the luxury of being morbidly faithful to him for ever without his knowledge.’

  But she considered; in the first place she was a homeless dependent; and what did practical wisdom tell her to do under such desperate circumstances? To provide herself with some place of refuge from poverty, and with means to aid her brother Owen. This was to be Mr. Manston’s wife.

  She did not love him.

  But what was love without a home? Misery. What was a home without love? Alas, not much; but still a kind of home.

  ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘I am urged by my common sense to marry Mr. Manston.’

  Did anything nobler in her say so too?

  With the death (to her) of Edward her heart’s occupation was gone. Was it necessary or even right for her to tend it and take care of it as she used to in the old time, when it was still a capable minister?

  By a slight sacrifice here she could give happiness to at least two hearts whose emotional activities were still unwounded. She would do good to two men whose lives were far more important than hers.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘even Christianity urges me to marry Mr. Manston.’

  Directly Cytherea had persuaded herself that a kind of heroic self-abnegation had to do with the matter, she became much more content in the consideration of it. A wilful indifference to the future was what really prevailed in her, ill and worn out, as she was, by the perpetual harassments of her sad fortune, and she regarded this indifference, as gushing natures will do under such circumstances, as genuine resignation and devotedness.

  Manston met her again the following day: indeed, there was no escaping him now. At the end of a short conversation between them, which took place in the hollow of the park by the waterfall, obscured on the outer side by the low hanging branches of the limes, she tacitly assented to his assumption of a privilege greater than any that had preceded it. He stooped and kissed her brow.