your loves may be impracticable and hopeless, and you may be separated for ever. You, as the weary, weary years pass by will fade and fade – bright eyes will fade – and you will perhaps then die early – true to him to your latest breath, and believing him to be true to the latest breath also; whilst he, in some gay and busy spot far away from your last quiet nook, will have married some dashing lady, and not purely oblivious of you, will long have ceased to regret you – will chat about you, as you were in long past years – will say, “Ah, little Cytherea used to tie her hair like that – poor innocent trusting thing; it was a pleasant useless idle dream – that dream of mine for the maid with the bright eyes and simple, silly heart; but I was a foolish lad at that time.” Then he will tell the tale of all your little Wills and Wont’s and particular ways, and as he speaks, turn to his wife with a placid smile.’
‘It is not true! He can’t, he c-can’t be s-so cruel – and you are cruel to me – you are, you are!’ She was at last driven to desperation: her natural common sense and shrewdness had seen all through the piece how imaginary her emotions were – she felt herself to be weak and foolish in permitting them to rise; but even then she could not control them: be agonized she must. She was only eighteen, and the long day’s labour, her weariness, her excitement, had completely unnerved her, and worn her out: she was bent hither and thither by this tyrannical working upon her imagination, as a young rush in the wind. She wept bitterly. ‘And now think how much I like you,’ resumed Miss Aldclyffe, when Cytherea grew calmer. ‘I shall never forget you for anybody else, as men do – never. I will be exactly as a mother to you. Now will you promise to live with me always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?’
‘I cannot. I will not be anybody’s maid for another day on any consideration.’
‘No, no, no. You shan’t be a lady’s-maid. You shall be my companion. I will get another maid.’
Companion – that was a new idea. Cytherea could not resist the evidently heartfelt desire of the strange-tempered woman for her presence. But she could not trust to the moment’s impulse.
‘I will stay, I think. But do not ask for a final answer to-night.’
‘Never mind now, then. Put your hair round your mamma’s neck, and give me one good long kiss, and I won’t talk any more in that way about your lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as others; but even if he’s the ficklest, there is consolation. The love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a faithful man – that is, while it lasts.’
Cytherea did as she was told, to escape the punishment of further talk; flung the twining tresses of her long, rich hair over Miss Aldclyffe’s shoulders as directed, and the two ceased conversing, making themselves up for sleep. Miss Aldclyffe seemed to give herself over to a luxurious sense of content and quiet, as if the maiden at her side afforded her a protection against dangers which had menaced her for years; she was soon sleeping calmly.
2. TWO TO FIVE A.M.
With Cytherea it was otherwise. Unused to the place and circumstances, she continued wakeful, ill at ease, and mentally distressed. She withdrew herself from her companion’s embrace, turned to the other side, and endeavoured to relieve her busy brain by looking at the window-blind, and noticing the light of the rising moon – now in her last quarter – creep round upon it: it was the light of an old waning moon which had but a few days longer to live.
The sight led her to think again of what had happened under the rays of the same month’s moon, a little before its full, the ecstatic evening scene with Edward: the kiss, and the shortness of those happy moments – maiden imagination bringing about the apotheosis of a status quo which had had several unpleasantnesses in its earthly reality.
But sounds were in the ascendant that night. Her ears became aware of a strange and gloomy murmur.
She recognized it: it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and low, brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House by a faint breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason of the utter absence of all disturbing sounds. The groom’s melancholy representation lent to the sound a more dismal effect than it would have had of its own nature. She began to fancy what the waterfall must be like at that hour, under the trees in the ghostly moonlight. Black at the head, and over the surface of the deep cold hole into which it fell; white and frothy at the fall; black and white, like a pall and its border; sad everywhere.
She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind. Another soon came.
The second was quite different from the first – a kind of intermittent whistle it seemed primarily: no, a creak, a metallic creak, ever and anon, like a plough, or a rusty wheelbarrow, or at least a wheel of some kind. Yes, it was, a wheel – the water-wheel in the shrubbery by the old manor-house, which the coachman had said would drive him mad.
She determined not to think any more of these gloomy things; but now that she had once noticed the sound there was no sealing her ears to it. She could not help timing its creaks, and putting on a dread expectancy just before the end of each half-minute that brought them. To imagine the inside of the engine-house, whence these noises proceeded, was now a necessity. No window, but crevices in the door, through which, probably, the moonbeams streamed in the most attenuated and skeleton-like rays, striking sharply upon portions of wet rusty cranks and chains; a glistening wheel, turning incessantly, labouring in the dark like a captive starving in a dungeon; and instead of a floor below, gurgling water, which on account of the darkness could only be heard; water which laboured up dark pipes almost to where she lay.
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 passed 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 associate, 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-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
