Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta & A Laodicean: Complete Illustrated Trilogy. Томас Харди

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      Edward’s thoughts flew to his father, and the object of his interview with her. Tongue-fencing was utterly distasteful to him.

      ‘I will not trouble you by remaining longer, madam,’ he remarked, gloomily; ‘our conversation has ended sadly for me.’

      ‘Don’t think so,’ she said, ‘and don’t be mistaken. I am older than you are, many years older, and I know many things.’

      Full of miserable doubt, and bitterly regretting that he had raised his father’s expectations by anticipations impossible of fulfilment, Edward slowly went his way into the village, and approached his cousin’s house. The farmer was at the door looking eagerly for him. He had been waiting there for more than half-an-hour. His eye kindled quickly.

      ‘Well, Ted, what does she say?’ he asked, in the intensely sanguine tones which fall sadly upon a listener’s ear, because, antecedently, they raise pictures of inevitable disappointment for the speaker, in some direction or another.

      ‘Nothing for us to be alarmed at,’ said Edward, with a forced cheerfulness.

      ‘But must we rebuild?’

      ‘It seems we must, father.’

      The old man’s eyes swept the horizon, then he turned to go in, without making another observation. All light seemed extinguished in him again. When Edward went in he found his father with the bureau open, unfolding the leases with a shaking hand, folding them up again without reading them, then putting them in their niche only to remove them again.

      Adelaide was in the room. She said thoughtfully to Edward, as she watched the farmer —

      ‘I hope it won’t kill poor uncle, Edward. What should we do if anything were to happen to him? He is the only near relative you and I have in the world.’ It was perfectly true, and somehow Edward felt more bound up with her after that remark.

      She continued: ‘And he was only saying so hopefully the day before the fire, that he wouldn’t for the world let any one else give me away to you when we are married.’

      For the first time a conscientious doubt arose in Edward’s mind as to the justice of the course he was pursuing in resolving to refuse the alternative offered by Miss Aldclyffe. Could it be selfishness as well as independence? How much he had thought of his own heart, how little he had thought of his father’s peace of mind!

      The old man did not speak again till supper-time, when he began asking his son an endless number of hypothetical questions on what might induce Miss Aldclyffe to listen to kinder terms; speaking of her now not as an unfair woman, but as a Lachesis or Fate whose course it behoved nobody to condemn. In his earnestness he once turned his eyes on Edward’s face: their expression was woful: the pupils were dilated and strange in aspect.

      ‘If she will only agree to that!’ he reiterated for the hundredth time, increasing the sadness of his listeners.

      An aristocratic knocking came to the door, and Jane entered with a letter, addressed —

      ‘MR. EDWARD SPRINGROVE, Junior.’

      ‘Charles from Knapwater House brought it,’ she said.

      ‘Miss Aldclyffe’s writing,’ said Mr. Springrove, before Edward had recognized it himself. ‘Now ’tis all right; she’s going to make an offer; she doesn’t want the houses there, not she; they are going to make that the way into the park.’

      Edward opened the seal and glanced at the inside. He said, with a supreme effort of self-command —

      ‘It is only directed by Miss Aldclyffe, and refers to nothing connected with the fire. I wonder at her taking the trouble to send it to-night.’

      His father looked absently at him and turned away again. Shortly afterwards they retired for the night. Alone in his bedroom Edward opened and read what he had not dared to refer to in their presence.

      The envelope contained another envelope in Cytherea’s handwriting, addressed to ‘—— Manston, Esq., Old Manor House.’ Inside this was the note she had written to the steward after her detention in his house by the thunderstorm —

      ‘KNAPWATER HOUSE,

       September 20th.

      ‘I find I cannot meet you at seven o’clock by the waterfall as I promised. The emotion I felt made me forgetful of realities.

      ‘C. GRAYE.’

      Miss Aldclyffe had not written a line, and, by the unvarying rule observable when words are not an absolute necessity, her silence seemed ten times as convincing as any expression of opinion could have been.

      He then, step by step, recalled all the conversation on the subject of Cytherea’s feelings that had passed between himself and Miss Aldclyffe in the afternoon, and by a confusion of thought, natural enough under the trying experience, concluded that because the lady was truthful in her portraiture of effects, she must necessarily be right in her assumption of causes. That is, he was convinced that Cytherea — the hitherto-believed faithful Cytherea — had, at any rate, looked with something more than indifference upon the extremely handsome face and form of Manston.

      Did he blame her, as guilty of the impropriety of allowing herself to love the newcomer in the face of his not being free to return her love? No; never for a moment did he doubt that all had occurred in her old, innocent, impulsive way; that her heart was gone before she knew it — before she knew anything, beyond his existence, of the man to whom it had flown. Perhaps the very note enclosed to him was the result of first reflection. Manston he would unhesitatingly have called a scoundrel, but for one strikingly redeeming fact. It had been patent to the whole parish, and had come to Edward’s own knowledge by that indirect channel, that Manston, as a married man, conscientiously avoided Cytherea after those first few days of his arrival during which her irresistibly beautiful and fatal glances had rested upon him — his upon her.

      Taking from his coat a creased and pocket-worn envelope containing Cytherea’s letter to himself, Springrove opened it and read it through. He was upbraided therein, and he was dismissed. It bore the date of the letter sent to Manston, and by containing within it the phrase, ‘All the day long I have been thinking,’ afforded justifiable ground for assuming that it was written subsequently to the other (and in Edward’s sight far sweeter one) to the steward.

      But though he accused her of fickleness, he would not doubt the genuineness, in its kind, of her partiality for him at Budmouth. It was a short and shallow feeling — not perfect love:

      ‘Love is not love

       Which alters when it alteration finds.’

      But it was not flirtation; a feeling had been born in her and had died. It would be well for his peace of mind if his love for her could flit away so softly, and leave so few traces behind.

      Miss Aldclyffe had shown herself desperately concerned in the whole matter by the alacrity with which she had obtained the letter from Manston, and her labours to induce himself to marry his cousin. Taken in connection with her apparent interest in, if not love for, Cytherea, her eagerness, too, could only be accounted for on the ground that Cytherea indeed loved the steward.

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