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-glass, 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 passed, 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 passionate creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.
It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our observation – ourselves. We pass 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 assist 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