CHAPTER VIII.
CYRIL RENOUNCES LOVE AND FORTUNE.
Cyril Culverhousewas a miserable man. The woman he loved—the only woman he had ever loved—was free to become his wife, dowered with estates worth ten thousand a year, and yet he held himself aloof from her, and shrank from any act which should ratify in the present the tie that had bound them in the past. He, who should have been the first to console the fatherless girl in the hour of bereavement and desolation, to support and counsel her under the difficulties of sudden independence—he, whose heart yearned towards her in her loneliness, stood apart and allowed her to believe him cold and heartless. The struggle had been a hard one; but, after many troubled days and wakeful nights, he had made up his mind that it must be so. Beatrix and he could never go hand in hand along the path of life.
The cloud that hung over her young life might be a shadow which the light of truth would by and by dispel; but, until the truth should appear, broad and clear as sunlight, he could not take Beatrix Harefield to his heart, he could not bind his life with hers.
Did he believe her guilty of that last and worst of crimes, the murder of a father? Hardly. But he was not fully assured of her innocence. His mind had been racked with doubt—ever since that day of the inquest when he had stood in the doorway and watched her agonized face and listened to her faltering words. There is nothing that the human mind more unwillingly believes than a strange coincidence; and that coincidence of Miss Harefield’s purchase of the laudanum within a week of her father’s death by laudanum had been too much for Cyril’s faith. Had his beloved been a penniless orphan, and no worldly gain to be had from loving her, he might have reconciled his doubt with his honour and married her, trusting to time for the elucidation of the mystery that now stained her young life with the taint of possible guilt. But in thiscase there was too much for him to win—and in every feeling that drew him to Beatrix he recognised a snare of Satan. Little by little he had come to know that public opinion in Little Yafford—and even in the neighbouring town of Great Yafford—had condemned Beatrix Harefield. Every detail of her conduct had been canvassed. Her late appearance on the morning of her father’s death was taken as an evidence of guilt. She had feared to face the catastrophe her crime had brought about, and had feigned sleep to stave off the appalling moment. Or she had simulated that heavy slumber in order to support her story about the laudanum. Her suggestion that her father should be sought for in a certain room, and the fact that he was found in that very room; her lame story—obviously an after thought—of the laudanum bottle in her mother’s room—all told against her. The fact that an empty bottle had been found there proved nothing. Beatrix had no doubt placed it where it was found. There had been ample time for her to do so between the first and second meetings of the coroner’s jury. Then as to motive? Well, one need not look veryfar for that, argued Little Yafford. Mr. Harefield had been a tyrant, and had made his daughter’s life miserable. She saw in his death a release from his tyranny, with the assurance of wealth and independence. Everybody knew—thanks to Mrs. Dulcimer—how cruelly the wretched girl had been treated, even forbidden to visit the Vicarage, where she had always been so happy. And then there was that secret love affair which had been spoken about at the inquest. That would give a still stronger motive than her own wrongs. The more cultured inhabitants of Little Yafford, gentlemen who had dipped into old magazines and Annual Registers, quoted the case of Miss Blandy, an unfortunate young woman in the last century, who had given Henley-on-Thames, the place of her birth and residence, a classic fame by poisoning her father with ratsbane mixed in his water gruel.
Again, as to character. Everybody who was familiar with Miss Harefield—by meeting her occasionally in her drives and rides, or seeing her once a week at church—was aware that she was a girl of reserved and even melancholy temperament,from whom anything strange in conduct or morals might be expected. Then, again, she was of foreign extraction on the mother’s side, and as such prone to crime. She was Italian, and with a natural leaning to poison and parricide. And again, those stock figures of the Borgia and Cenci were brought forward and contemplated shudderingly in the lurid glare of their guilt.
Some weak-minded persons clung to the idea that Mr. Harefield had taken an overdose of opium unwittingly, but this tame and uninteresting theory was scouted by the majority.
‘If Miss Harefield had not been an heiress we should have heard a good deal more about her father’s death,’ said Miss Coyle, draining her ancestral teapot at one of her temperate symposia.
Miss Coyle was quite angry with the coroner for not having looked deeper into things. She spoke of him contemptuously as a hireling and a time-server.
Cyril Culverhouse knew what people thought about the woman he loved—for he loved her none the less because he held himself aloof from her. Hislove was deathless. Innocent or guilty he must love her to the end. He knew what people thought of his beloved; he knew that even kindly Mrs. Dulcimer shook her head, and shrank from familiar contact with her husband’s ward. There was no one in Little Yafford except the Vicar who would take the slandered girl by the hand and boldly demonstrate his belief in her innocence. He, so easy-going on most occasions, was firm as a rock here. He would have Beatrix at his house, as often as she chose to come there—although the all-powerful Rebecca would hardly look civilly at her as she waited at table—and although poor Mrs. Dulcimer was sorely perplexed by her presence. Clement Dulcimer was staunch, and defied his parishioners, whom he stigmatised generally as a pack of venomous scandalmongers, whose uncultured minds, unable to appreciate the strong sound meat of literature, battened upon carrion.
If Cyril could have had Mr. Dulcimer’s faith he would have had Mr. Dulcimer’s courage. He was no slave of other men’s opinions, and would have snapped his fingers in the face of Little Yafford, ifall had been well within. But there was the difficulty. That stricken face of Beatrix’s, those wild startled eyes—as he had seen them in the candle-lit room at the Water House—haunted him like an evil dream. He saw guilt and remorse in those troubled looks—the fear of God and man. Had he been a man who lived for himself alone, who had no higher aim in life than his own happiness, Cyril Culverhouse might have stifled the voice of doubt, and listened only to love’s pleading. But it was not so with him—he had chosen a loftier kind of life, he had given himself a loftier aim. He was to live for others, and to make the lives of others better than their own unaided weakness could make them. He, who was to be the teacher and counsellor of others, must be, so far as it is possible for humanity, spotless in his life and in his surroundings. Could he marry a wife of whom it could be said in one breath, ‘She was suspected of poisoning her father,’ and in the next, ‘Yes, but she brought her husband ten thousand a year’?
No. It was clear to him that this fatal cloud of suspicion must make a life-long severance betweenBeatrix and him. Love might have bridged the gulf, but honour and duty held him back. He had not seen Beatrix since her father’s death, and he had made up his mind to leave Little Yafford without seeing her. His business was to announce his resolve in a manner that would give her the least pain possible; but he knew the blow would be hard to bear. He knew that she loved him with an intense and all-absorbing love.
‘Oh, God, if she has sinned so deeply for the love of me,’ he thought, in a moment of horror, finding himself suddenly on the edge of a black abyss of doubt, down which he dared not look, ‘if to bring about our union she has done this hideous thing! But no, I will not believe her guilty. I will pity and deplore her position, the victim of groundless suspicion. If I dare not sacrifice my duty to my love, I will at least believe her innocent.’
He remembered that little speech of hers during their chance meeting on the moor, a speech that had shocked and revolted him at the time, and had been a painful recollection to him afterwards.
‘Is it wicked to wish for my father’s death?’
Did not that question imply that she had already committed the sin? Was it possible that the wicked wish, nursed and cherished, had culminated in the fatal act? The doubt tortured him.
He had wavered for some weeks, not quite clear in his own mind what step he ought to take, hoping that some new piece of evidence, some detail in the story of Christian Harefield’s death, might place the whole business in a new light, and demonstrate Beatrix’s innocence. But Mr. Harefield had been dead a month, the first snowdrops were lifting their heads out of the dark borders, the robins were singing sweetly in the lengthening afternoons, and nothing had been discovered to improve Miss Harefield’s position in the eyes of Little Yafford. Nay rather, slander had grown and intensified with discussion, and people who had timorously hinted their doubts three weeks ago, now boldly declared their conviction of the young lady’s guilt.
‘How she can live in that big lonely house, with no one but her governess for company, is more than I can understand,’ said Miss Coyle; ‘she must be dreadfully hardened.’
‘Something more will come out before long, you may depend upon it,’ said Mrs. Pomfret, the pew-opener, to her Sunday afternoon gossips over the black crockery teapot, with a sphinx squatting on the lid.
This was the general opinion. Everybody was waiting for something to come out. The servants had doubtless been paid to hold their tongues—dark facts had been kept back by bribery. But the truth would come out sooner or later—even if Mr. Harefield’s ghost had to walk, like the elder Hamlet.
‘It may be a very long time, but it will all come out sooner or later,’ said Mr. Tudway, an old bachelor retired from the button trade, a great reader of magazines and annual registers, who knew all about Miss Blandy, and talked learnedly of Lucretia Borgia and Beatrice Cenci. ‘Look at Eliza Fenning.’
‘Ah!’ sighed Miss Coyle. ‘Very true.’
She had the vaguest recollection of Eliza Fenning, as associated uncomfortably with beefsteak dumplings, and hanged in consequence of the association, but she was not going to exhibit her ignorancebefore Mr. Tudway, who was disagreeably self-satisfied on the strength of his stray paragraphs, and unconsidered scraps of information.
Beatrix Harefield was slow to discover the current of public feeling. The shock of her father’s death left her for a little while apathetic to all smaller emotions, and when that apathy wore off she had a new and pressing grief in Cyril’s abandonment. Her new sense of liberty brought her no happiness—no desire to taste the sweets of freedom, or to exchange the gloom and solitude of the Water House for brighter scenes. If her independence did not bring Cyril to her side it brought nothing. Wealth, power, liberty, were valueless without him.
The slow days went by, and she waited for her lover to make some sign. At first she was inclined to impute his conduct to a restraining delicacy, but as time went on a horrible fear began to take hold of her aching heart. He was purposely avoiding her. She had spent her Sunday evenings at the Vicarage. Kenrick had been there, but never Cyril. She had heard Mrs. Dulcimerexpress her regret at the curate’s absence, heard his excuses, which seemed hardly valid—a sick parishioner to visit—letters to write.
‘I should have thought he would not like to write letters on a Sunday evening,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘It seems rather lax.’
‘Do you think it more lax to write letters than to sit at this table and talk of worldly things—from the last village scandal to the newest fashion in bonnet crowns?’ speculated Mr. Dulcimer.
Kenrick was staying at the Vicarage. Mrs. Dulcimer had pressed him hospitably to remain. There was plenty of shooting in the neighbourhood. Mr. Piper had made him free of the Park preserves, and there was good sport to be had on the moor. Altogether Kenrick felt that he might as well finish out his leave at Little Yafford. The curate worked so hard that Kenrick and he saw very little of each other, and Kenrick had not yet ventured to sound Cyril about Beatrix. It was a delicate subject, and Kenrick felt greatly puzzled by his cousin’s conduct. Could Cyril be such a fool as to give any heed to the poisonous tongues of LittleYafford? Kenrick could hardly imagine such folly, but he found it difficult to account for his cousin’s avoidance of Miss Harefield on any other ground, unless indeed it were an overstrained delicacy which held him back from pushing his suit.
On the evening on which Cyril had arrived at a definite conclusion as to his line of conduct, his cousin dropped in at his lodgings, after the Vicarage tea, to smoke a friendly pipe.
‘You are not going out this evening,’ inquired Kenrick when they had shaken hands.
‘No, I have some letters to write.’
‘Does that mean that I shall be a nuisance if I stay with you for an hour or two?’
‘Not at all,’ answered Cyril ‘I shall be very glad to have an evening’s talk, and my letters can be written better towards midnight than earlier.’
‘That sounds as if the letters were important.’
‘They are important,’ said Cyril, gravely, as he closed the desk before which he had been sitting for nearly an hour in troubled thought, trying to frame his letter to Beatrix so that it should wound as little as possible.
‘What a hermit you are growing!’ said Kenrick. ‘You hardly ever come to the Vicarage now.’
‘I have so much to do else where.’
‘But on Sunday evenings,’ suggested Kenrick, helping himself to a pipe from the neat arrangement of meerschaums and briar-woods on the mantelpiece. ‘Surely you could spare an hour or two after evening service for social intercourse. That is always the pleasantest time at the Vicarage.’
‘I have been engaged even on Sunday evenings.’
‘Yes, of course; for a man who visits the poor there must be always an engagement. That kind of thing has no limit. Poor people like to be read to and talked to and compassionated. You can’t suppose they would ever say, “Hold, enough!” But you ought to have some consideration for your own health and spirits. You are looking ill and depressed.’
‘I am not ill, but I plead guilty to feeling depressed.’
‘What is the trouble?’
‘I have made up my mind to leave this place—dearas it is to me. I am going to write to Mr. Dulcimer this evening to tell him my intention.’
‘You must be mad,’ cried Kenrick. ‘Leave Little Yafford, just when fortune is ready to pour her favours into your lap—just when Miss Harefield is free to be your wife. You must be mad, Cyril.’
‘No, I have been sorely perplexed, but I am not mad. I have deliberately weighed this question. Beatrix Harefield is to me the one perfect woman—the only woman I can ever love,—but I cannot ask her to be my wife.’
‘Why not, in heaven’s name?’
‘I had rather not enter into my feelings on that point.’
‘Do you mean that you, a reasonable man, with eyes of your own and a mind of your own to see and judge with, are going to be led and ruled by the petty slanderers of Little Yafford; malicious creatures who envy Miss Harefield her ten thousand a year, and would like to think—or at any rate to make others think—that she jumped into fortune by crime?’
‘I despise slanderers and evil speakers,’ said Cyril, ‘but my wife must be spotless.’
‘Yes, in your own eyes and in the sight of heaven. It can matter to you very little what Little Yafford thinks of her.’
‘To me individually nothing—to my office a great deal. The wife of a priest must be above suspicion—her name and fame must be unshadowed.’
‘Abandon your office, then. You can afford to do it if you marry a woman with ten thousand a year.’
Cyril turned upon the speaker with eyes that flashed angrily across a cloud of gray smoke.
‘Kenrick, can you believe for one moment that I took that office as a means of living, or that the gain of wealth or happiness would tempt me to surrender it? I should think myself a new Judas if I could turn my back upon my Master to marry the woman I love.’
‘Keep your office, then, and marry her all the same. Live down this slander. Stand up bravely before the world with your wife by your side, and letmen say the worst they can of you. Your life and hers will be your answer.’
‘They would say I had married her because she has ten thousand a year,’ said Cyril. ‘I should do no good with her money. It would turn to withered leaves in my keeping. No, I love her—shall love her to the end—innocent or guilty—but I will not link my life with hers. Every hour of life would be a struggle between love and doubt.’
‘Innocent or guilty!’ echoed Kenrick. ‘I see you are as bad as the rest. I should not have thought that possible. You have quite made up your mind then, Cyril. You abandon all hope of winning Miss Harefield?’
‘Entirely.’
‘So be it,’ said Kenrick. ‘Then let us talk of other things.’
Though Sir Kenrick proposed a change of conversation he was curiously silent and absent for the next half-hour, and gave Cyril ample leisure for thought. The two young men sat smoking and looking at the fire as they had done on many a previous evening, each wrapped in his ownthoughts. When the clock in the hall struck ten, Sir Kenrick emptied the ashes out of his pipe, and put it back in its proper place on the mantelpiece.
‘Well, good night, old fellow,’ he said, in his usual careless style. ‘How soon do you think of leaving this place?’
‘Before the end of the week.’
‘That’s sudden.’
‘Yes; but you remember what the Giaour said,—
‘“Better to sink beneath the shockThan moulder piecemeal on the rock.”’
‘“Better to sink beneath the shockThan moulder piecemeal on the rock.”’
‘“Better to sink beneath the shockThan moulder piecemeal on the rock.”’
‘“Better to sink beneath the shock
Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.”’
Painful partings cannot be too sudden.’
‘You will inconvenience Mr. Dulcimer.’
‘Not much. He got on without a curate for six months before I came.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Bridford.’
‘A horrible manufacturing hole!’ exclaimed Sir Kenrick.
‘A place where there is good work to be done by any man strong enough to do it.’
‘Oh, you are mad, Cyril, that is all—a fanatic. No fakir with shrivelled arms was ever worse. But I wish you well, dear fellow, wherever you go.’
Kenrick went away, wondering at his cousin’s foolishness. He did not know how far things had gone between Cyril and Beatrix, or he might have wondered still more. He thought Cyril might have won Miss Harefield by trying. He did not know she was already won.