again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of houses, lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky. The sun had set, and a star or two began to peep out. They drew nearer their destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly with his eyes the red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear as black ones in the increasing dusk of evening. She surveyed the long line of lamps on the sea-wall of the town, now looking small and yellow, and seeming to send long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea. By-and-by they reached the landing-steps. He took her hand as before, and found it as cold as the water about them. It was not relinquished till he reached her door. His assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner: he saw that she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured sparrow. Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the Esplanade.
Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she did in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out of sight she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to see him sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement behind him, forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as she mused in his neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding, the notes of pianos and singing voices from the fashionable houses at her back, from the open windows of which the lamp-light streamed to join that of the orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay in front. Then Edward began to pace up and down, and Cytherea, fearing that he would notice her, hastened homeward, flinging him a last look as she passed out of sight. No promise from him to write: no request that she herself would do so – nothing but an indefinite expression of hope in the face of some fear unknown to her. Alas, alas!
When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room, and creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered her there lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her hat and jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and succumbed to the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-blown love. The wet traces of tears were yet visible upon her long drooping lashes.
‘Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
A living death, and ever-dying life.’
‘Cytherea,’ he whispered, kissing her. She awoke with a start, and vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment. ‘He’s gone!’ she said.
‘He has told me all,’ said Graye soothingly. ‘He is going off early to-morrow morning. ‘Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.’
‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then jumping up – ‘Owen, has he told you all?’
‘All of your love from beginning to end,’ he said simply.
Edward then had not told more – as he ought to have done: yet she could not convict him. But she would struggle against his fetters. She tingled to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility that he might be deluding her.
‘Owen,’ she continued, with dignity, ‘what is he to me? Nothing. I must dismiss such weakness as this – believe me, I will. Something far more pressing must drive it away. I have been looking my position steadily in the face, and I must get a living somehow. I mean to advertise once more.’
‘Advertising is no use.’
‘This one will be.’ He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it him. ‘See what I am going to do,’ she said sadly, almost bitterly. This was her third effort: —
‘LADY’S-MAID. Inexperienced. Age eighteen. – G., 3 Cross Street, Budmouth.’
Owen – Owen the respectable – looked blank astonishment. He repeated in a nameless, varying tone, the two words —
‘Lady’s-maid!’
‘Yes; lady’s-maid. ‘Tis an honest profession,’ said Cytherea bravely.
‘But you, Cytherea?’
‘Yes, I – who am I?’
‘You will never be a lady’s-maid – never, I am quite sure.’
‘I shall try to be, at any rate.’
‘Such a disgrace – ’
‘Nonsense! I maintain that it is no disgrace!’ she said, rather warmly. ‘You know very well – ’
‘Well, since you will, you must,’ he interrupted. ‘Why do you put “inexperienced?”’
‘Because I am.’
‘Never mind that – scratch out “inexperienced.” We are poor, Cytherea, aren’t we?’ he murmured, after a silence, ‘and it seems that the two months will close my engagement here.’
‘We can put up with being poor,’ she said, ‘if they only give us work to do… Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as a curse, and even that is denied. However, be cheerful, Owen, and never mind!’
In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the brighter endurance of women at these epochs – invaluable, sweet, angelic, as it is – owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness intense enough to quell them.
IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea’s last note of hope in the way of advertisement – not from a distance of hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent – as Cytherea seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means adopted for obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of that in which she was living – a country mansion not twenty miles off. The reply ran thus: —
‘Miss Aldclyffe is in want of a young person as lady’s-maid. The duties of the place are light. Miss Aldclyffe will be in Budmouth on Thursday, when (should G. still not have heard of a place) she would like to see her at the Belvedere Hotel, Esplanade, at four o’clock. No answer need be returned to this note.’
A little earlier than the time named, Cytherea, clothed in a modest bonnet, and a black silk jacket, turned down to the hotel. Expectation, the fresh air from the water, the bright, far-extending outlook, raised the most delicate of pink colours to her cheeks, and restored to her tread a portion of that elasticity which her past troubles, and thoughts of Edward, had well-nigh taken away.
She entered the vestibule, and went to the window of the bar.
‘Is Miss Aldclyffe here?’ she said to a nicely-dressed barmaid in the foreground, who was talking to a landlady covered with chains, knobs, and clamps of gold, in the background.
‘No, she isn’t,’ said the barmaid, not very civilly. Cytherea looked a shade too pretty for a plain dresser.
‘Miss Aldclyffe is expected here,’ the landlady said to a third person, out of sight, in the tone of one who had known for several days the fact newly discovered from Cytherea. ‘Get ready her room – be quick.’ From the alacrity with which the order was given and taken, it seemed to Cytherea that Miss Aldclyffe must be a woman of considerable importance.
‘You are to have an interview with Miss Aldclyffe here?’ the landlady inquired.
‘Yes.’
