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3. OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863

3. OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event

of these persons' lives. The scene is still the Grayes' native town

of Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month

of October.

The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be

seen wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account

of the time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the

practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long

shadows and enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any

perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing

tones which grace its decline. Next, it was that stage in the

progress of the week when business—which, carried on under the

gables of an old country place, is not devoid of a romantic

sparkle—was well-nigh extinguished. Lastly, the town was

intentionally bent upon being attractive by exhibiting to an influx

of visitors the local talent for dramatic recitation, and

provincial towns trying to be lively are the dullest of dull

things.

Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they

interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities

unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they

attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce

disagreeable caricatures which spoil them.

The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing

at the intersection of the three chief streets was expressing

half-past two to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of

reading from Shakespeare was about to begin. The doors were open,

and those persons who had already assembled within the building

were noticing the entrance of the new-comers—silently criticizing

their dress—questioning the genuineness of their teeth and

hair—estimating their private means.

Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who

glowed amid the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field

of brown stubble. She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress,

hat with grey strings and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to

harmonize. She lightly walked up the side passage of the room, cast

a slight glance around, and entered the seat pointed out to

her.

The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about

eighteen. During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in

her seat and listening to the reader on the platform, her personal

appearance formed an interesting subject of study for several

neighbouring eyes.

Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less

perfect than her figure, which approached unusually near to the

standard of faultlessness. But even this feature of hers yielded

the palm to the gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating

and delightful to an extreme degree.

Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most

extended scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the

uplifting of her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting

of her lip. The carriage of her head—motion within motion—a glide

upon a glide—was as delicate as that of a magnetic needle. And this

flexibility and elasticity had never been taught her by rule, nor

even been acquired by observation, but, nullo cultu, had naturally

developed itself with her years. In childhood, a stone or stalk in

the way, which had been the inevitable occasion of a fall to her

playmates, had usually left her safe and upright on her feet after

the narrowest escape by oscillations and whirls for the

preservation of her balance. At mixed Christmas parties, when she

numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was heartily despised on

that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her apt lightness

in the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood, and

compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize

upon her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to

contemn. And in later years, when the instincts of her s*x had

shown her this point as the best and rarest feature in her external

self, she was not found wanting in attention to the cultivation of

finish in its details.

Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a

shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite

nut-brown as each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of

a sapphire hue, though rather darker than the gem ordinarily

appears; they possessed the affectionate and liquid sparkle of

loyalty and good faith as distinguishable from that harder

brightness which seems to express faithfulness only to the object

confronting them.

But to attempt to gain a view of her—or indeed of any

fascinating woman—from a measured category, is as difficult as to

appreciate the effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with

a lantern—or of a full chord of music by piping the notes in

succession. Nevertheless it may readily be believed from the

description here ventured, that among the many winning phases of

her aspect, these were particularly striking:—

During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and

smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the

space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of

degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea

and Nay.

During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily

accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of the

listener's arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree of

intimacy dictated.

When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.

She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress

of the present entertainment. Her glance was directed out of the

window.

Why the particulars of a young lady's presence at a very

mediocre performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion

which their intrinsic insignificance would naturally have

involved—why they were remembered and individualized by herself and

others through after years—was simply that she unknowingly stood,

as it were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life,

in which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known.

It was the last hour of experience she ever enjoyed with a mind

entirely free from a knowledge of that labyrinth into which she

stepped immediately afterwards—to continue a perplexed course along

its mazes for the greater portion of twenty-nine subsequent

months.

The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown

stone, and through one of the windows could be seen from the

interior of the room the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent

street, and also the upper part of a neighbouring church spire, now

in course of completion under the superintendence of Miss Graye's

father, the architect to the work.

That the top of this spire should be visible from her position

in the room was a fact which Cytherea's idling eyes had discovered

with some interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene

that was being enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical

stonework rose a cage of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon

this stood five men—four in clothes as white as the new erection

close beneath their hands, the fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a

gentleman.

The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's

labourer. The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been

giving directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow

footway allowed, stood perfectly still.

The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was

curious and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by

the dark margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which

emphasized by contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.

The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet,

and the five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the

sphere and experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared

little larger than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a

soft, spirit-like silentness. One idea above all others was

conveyed to the mind of a person on the ground by their aspect,

namely, concentration of purpose: that they were indifferent

to—even unconscious of—the distracted world beneath them, and all

that moved upon it. They never looked off the scaffolding.

Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye. Again he stood

motionless, with attention to the operations of the others. He

appeared to be lost in reflection, and had directed his face

towards a new stone they were lifting.

'Why does he stand like that?' the young lady thought at

length—up to that moment as listless and careless as one of the

ancient Tarentines, who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from

the Theatre the entry into their Harbour of a power that overturned

the State.

She moved herself uneasily. 'I wish he would come down,' she

whispered, still gazing at the skybacked picture. 'It is so

dangerous to be absent-minded up there.'

When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively

laid hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength,

then let it go and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An

instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into

the air, immediately disappearing downwards.

His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement.

Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no

sound. One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had

happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible

upon their faces at the sight of the poor child. A moment longer,

and she fell to the floor.

The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was

of being carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the

steps of her own house by her brother and an older man.

Recollection of what had passed evolved itself an instant later,

and just as they entered the door—through which another and sadder

burden had been carried but a few instants before—her eyes caught

sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white

sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud.

Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are

simultaneous—however foreign in essence these scenes may be—as

chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after

that time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea's mind

the scene from the Town Hall windows than sunlight streaming in

shaft-like lines.