She made a pause, but nobody either contradicted or agreed with her. Stella expected either the one or the other. Sir Charles went up and down swearing by Jupiter and thinking in a whirl of all the fine things before him, and Katherine sat at the end of the sofa saying nothing. In sheer self-defence Stella had to begin again.
“And nobody knows what it is beginning a house and all that without any money. I had to part with my diamonds—those last ones, don’t you remember, Kate? which he gave me to make me forget Charlie. Oh, how silly girls are! I shouldn’t be so ready, I can tell you, to run away another time. I should keep my diamonds. And I have not had a decent dress since I went to India—not one. The other ladies got boxes from home, but I never sent to Louise except once, and then she did so bother me about a bill to be paid, as if it were likely I could pay bills when we had no money for ourselves! Tradespeople are so unreasonable about their bills, and so are servants, for that matter, going on about wages. Why, there is Pearson—she waits upon me with a face like a mute at a funeral all because she has not got her last half year’s wages! By the way, I suppose she can have them now? They have got such a pull over us, don’t you know, for they can go away, and when a maid suits you it is such a bore when she wants to go away. I have had such experiences, all through the want of money. And I can’t help feeling, oh how hard of him, when he hadn’t really changed his mind at all, to keep me out of it for those seven years! Seven years is a dreadful piece out of one’s life,” cried Stella, “and to have it made miserable and so different to what one had a right to expect, all for the caprice of an old man! Why did he keep me out of it all these years?” And Stella, now thoroughly excited, sobbed to herself over the privations that werepast, from which her father could have saved her at any moment had he pleased.
“You ought to be pleased now at least,” said her husband. “Come, Stella, my little girl, let’s shake hands upon it. We’re awfully lucky, and you shall have a good time now.”
“I think I ought to have a good time, indeed!” cried Stella. “Why, it’s all mine! You never would have had a penny but for me. Who should have the good of it, if not I? And I am sure I deserve it, after all I have had to go through. Pearson, is that you?” she cried. “Bring me my jewel-box. Look here,” she said, taking out a case and disclosing what seemed to Katherine a splendid necklace of diamonds, “that’s what I’ve been driven to wear!” She seized the necklace out of the case and flung it to the other end of the room. The stones swung from her hand, flashing through the air, and fell in a shimmer and sparkle of light upon the carpet. “The odious, false things!” cried Stella. “Paris—out of one of those shops, don’t you know? where everything is marked ‘Imitation.’ Charlie got them for me for about ten pounds. And that is what I had to go to Government House in, and all the balls, and have compliments paid me on my diamonds. ‘Yes, they are supposed to be of very fine water,’ I used to say. I used to laugh at first—it seemed a capital joke; but when you go on wearing odious glass things and have to show them off as diamonds—for seven years!”
Sir Charles paused in his walk, and stooped and picked them up. “Yes,” he said, “I gave ten pounds for them, and we had a lot of fun out of them, and you looked as handsome in them, Stella, as if they had been the best. By Jove! to be imitation, they are deuced good imitation. I don’t think I know the difference, do you?” He placed the glittering thing on Katherine’s knee. He wanted to bring her into the conversation with a clumsy impulse of kindness, but he did not know how to manage it. Then, leaving them there, he continued his walk. He could not keep still in his excitement, and Stella could not keep silence. The mock diamonds made a great show upon Katherine’s black gown.
“Oh, I wish you’d take them away! Give them to somebody—give them to the children to play with. I’d give them to Pearson, but how could she wear arivière? Fancy my wearing those things and having nothing better! You have no feeling, Kate; you don’t sympathise a bit. And to think that everything might have been quite different, and life been quite happy instead of the nightmare it was! Papa has a great, great deal to answer for,” Stella said.
“If that is all you think about it, I may go away,” said Katherine, “for we shall not agree. You ought to speak very differently of your father, who always was so fond of you, and now he’s given you everything. Poor papa! I am glad he does not know.”
“But he must have known very well,” cried Stella, “how he left me after pretending to be so fond of me. Do you think either Charlie or I would have done such a thing if we had not been deceived? And so was Lady Jane—and everybody. There was not one who did not say he was sure to send for us home, and see what has happened instead. Oh, he may have made up for it now. But do you think that was being really fond of me, Kate, to leave me out in India without a penny for seven years?”
Katherine rose, and the glittering stones, which had only yesterday been Lady Somers’ diamonds, and as such guarded with all the care imaginable—poor Pearson having acquired her perennial look of worry as much from that as anything, having had the charge of them—rattled with a sound like glass, and fell on the floor, where they lay disgraced as Katherine went hurriedly away. And there they were found by Pearson after Lady Somers had finished her toilet and gone downstairs to lunch. Pearson gave a kick at them where they lay—the nasty imitation things that had cost her so many a thought—but then picked them up, with a certain pity, yet awe, as if they might change again into something dangerous in her very hands.
Katherinehad put herself unconsciously in her usual place at the head of the luncheon table before Stella came downstairs. At the other end was Sir Charles with little Job, set up on a pile of cushions beside him.
“Don’t wait for Stella, she’s always late,” said Somers, helping his son from the dish before him; but at this moment Stella, rustling in a coloured dress, came briskly in.
“Oh, I say, Kate, let me have my proper place,” she said; “you can’t sit down with Charlie opposite, it’s not decent. And oh the funny old room! Did you ever see such a rococo house, Charlie, all gilding and ornament? Poor papa could never have anything grand enough according to his views. We must have it all pulled to pieces, I couldn’t live in such a place. Eh? why, Kate, you don’t pretend you like it, you who always made a fuss.”
Katherine had transferred herself to a seat at the side of the table, not without a quick sensation of self-reproach and that inevitable shame upon being thus compelled to take a lower place which no philosophy can get rid of. “I did not think where I was sitting,” she cried, in instinctive apology; and then, “Let the poor house be, at least for the first week, Stella,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all sentiment and nonsense,” cried Lady Somers. “My experience is when you’re going to change a thing, do it directly; or else you just settle down and grow accustomed and think no more of it. For goodness’ sake, Charlie, don’t stuff that child with all the most improper things! He ought to have roast mutton and rice pudding, all the doctors say; and you are ruining his constitution, youknow you are. Why isn’t there some roast mutton, William? Oh, Harrison! why can’t you see that there’s some roast mutton or that sort of thing, when you’ve got to feed a little boy.”
“Me don’t like roast mutton,” cried Job, with a whine. “Me dine wid fader; fader give Job nice tings.”
“I’ll look after you, my boy,” said Sir Charles, at one end of the table, while Harrison at the other, with a very solemn bow, discussed his position.
“It is not my place to horder the dinner, my lady; if your ladyship will say what you requires, I will mention it to Mrs. Simmons.”
“It is I who am in fault, I suppose, Stella,” cried Katherine, more angry than she could have imagined possible. “Perhaps you will see Simmons yourself to-morrow.”
“Oh, not I!” cried Stella. “Fancy the bore of ordering dinner with an old-fashioned English cook that would not understand a word one says. You can do it, Charlie. Don’t give the childpâté de foie gras,” she added, with a scream. “Who’s the doctor on the strength of the establishment now, Kate? He’ll have to be called in very soon, I can see, and the sooner Job has a bad liver attack the better, for then it may be possible to get him properly looked after. And I must have an English nurse that understands children, instead of that stupid ayah who gives them whatever they cry for. Don’t you think it’s dreadful training to give them whatever they cry for, Kate? You ought to know about children, living all this while at home and never marrying or anything. You must have gone in for charity or nursing, or Churchy things, having nothing to do. Oh, I wish you would take Job in hand! He minds nobody but his father, and his father stuffs him with everything he oughtn’t to have, and keeps him up half the night. One of these days he’ll have such a liver attack that it will cut him off, Charlie; and then you will have the satisfaction of feeling that it’s you that have killed him, and you will not be able to say I haven’t warned you hundreds of times.”
“We’ve not come to any harm as yet, have we, Job?” said the father, placing clandestinely another objectionable morsel on the child’s plate.
“No, fader. Job not dut off yet,” cried, in his little shrill voice, the unfortunate small boy.
In this babble the rest of the mid-day meal was carried on, Stella’s voice flowing like the principal part of the entertainment, interrupted now and then by a bass note from her husband or a little cry from her child, with a question to a servant and the respectful answer in an aside now and then. Katherine sat quite silent listening, not so much from intention as that there was no room for her to put in a word, and no apparent need for any explanation or intervention. The Somerses took calm possession, unsurprised, undisturbed by any question of right or wrong, of kindness or unkindness. Nor did Katherine blame them; she felt that they would have done exactly the same had the house and all that was in it been hers, and the real circumstances of the case made it more bearable and took away many embarrassments. She went out to drive with Stella in the afternoon, Sir Charles accompanying them that he might see whether the carriage horses were fit for his wife’s use. Stella had been partly covered with Katherine’s garments to make her presentable, and the little crape bonnet perched upon her fuzzy fair hair was happily very becoming, and satisfied her as to her own appearance. “Mourning’s not so very bad, after all,” she said, “especially when you are very fair. You are a little too dark to look nice in it, Kate. I shouldn’t advise you to wear crape long. It isn’t at all necessary; the rule now is crape three months, black six, and then you can go into greys and mauves. Mauve’s a lovely colour. It is just as bright as pink, though it’s mourning; and it suits me down to the ground—I am so fair, don’t you know.”
“These brutes will never do,” said Sir Charles. “Is this the pace you have been going, Miss Kate? Stella will not stand it, that’s clear. Not a likely person to nod along like a hearse or an old dowager, is she?—and cost just as much, the old fat brutes, as a proper turn-out.”
“It’s the same old landau, I declare,” cried Stella, “that we used to cram with people for picnics and dances and things. Mine was the victoria. Have you kept the victoria all the time, Kate? Jervis made it spin along I can tell you. And the little brougham I used to run about in, that took us down to the yacht, don’t you remember, Charlie, that last night; me in my wedding dress, though nobody suspected it—that is, nobody but those that knew. What a lot there were, though,” cried Stella, with a laugh, “that knew!—and what a dreadful bore, Kate, when you would insist upon coming with me, and everybody guessing and wondering how we’d get out of it. We did get out of it capitally, didn’t we, all owing to my presence of mind.”
“All’s well that ends well,” said Sir Charles. “We’ve both had a deuced lot of doubts on that question—between times. Miss Kate, would you mind telling me what kind of a figure it is, this fortune that Stella is supposed to have come into? Hang me if I know; it might be hundreds or it might be thousands. You see I’m a disinterested sort of fellow,” he said, with an uneasy laugh.
“The lawyer said,” Katherine explained, “that it could not be under, but might be considerably over, fifty thousand a year.”
Sir Charles was silent for a moment and grew very red, which showed up his sunburnt brick-red complexion like a sudden dye of crimson. He caught his breath a little, but with an effort at an indifferent tone repeated, “Fifty thousand pounds!”
“A year,” Katherine said.
“Well!” cried Stella, “what are you sitting there for, like a stuck pig, staring at me? Need there have been so much fuss about it if it had been less than that? Papa wasn’t a man to leave a few hundreds, was he? I wonder it’s so little, for my part. By the time you’ve got that old barrack of yours done up, and a tidy little house in town, and all our bills paid, good gracious, it’s nothing at all, fifty thousand a year! I hope it will turn out a great deal more, Kate. I daresay yourlawyer is the sort of person to muddle half of it away in expenses and so forth. Who is he? Oh, old Sturgeon that used to come down sometimes. Well, he is not up to date, I am sure. He’ll be keeping the money in dreadful consols or something, instead of making the best of it. You can tell him that I shan’t stand that sort of thing. It shall be made the best of if it is going to belong to me.”
“And what have you, Miss Kate?” said her brother-in-law, “to balance this fine fortune of Stella’s—for it is a fine fortune, and she knows nothing about it, with her chatter.”
“Oh, I know nothing about it; don’t I?” said Stella. “Papa didn’t think so. He said I had a capital head for money, and that I was a chip of the old block, and all that sort of thing. What has Kate got? Oh, she’s got money of her own. I used to envy her so when we were girls. I had a deal more than she had, for papa was always silly about me—dresses and jewels and so forth that I had no business to have at that age; but Kate had money of her own. I could always get plenty from papa, but she had it of her own; don’t you remember, Kate? I always wished to be you; I thought that it was a shame that you should have all that left to you and me nothing. And if you come to that, so it was, for mamma was my mother as well as Kate’s, and she had no business to leave her money to one of us and take no notice of me.”
“We are quits now, at all events, Stella,” said Katherine, with the best sort of a smile which she could call up on her face.
“Quits! I don’t think so at all,” cried Stella, “for you have had it and I have been kept out of it for years and years. Quits, indeed; no, I’m sure I don’t think so. I have always envied you for having mamma’s money since I was twelve years old. I don’t deny I had more from papa; but then it wasn’t mine. And now I have everything from papa, which is the least he could do, having kept me out of it for so long; but not a penny from my mother, which isn’t justice, seeing I am quite as much her child as you.”
“Shut up, Stella!” said Sir Charles, in his moustache.
“Why should I shut up? It’s quite true that Katherine has had it since she was fifteen; that’s—let me see—fourteen years, nearly the half of her life, and no expenses to speak of. There must be thousands and thousands in the bank, and so little to do with it. She’s richer than we are, when all is said.”
“Stella, you must remember,” cried Katherine excitedly in spite of herself, “that the money in the bank was always——”
“Oh, I knew you would say that,” cried Stella, in an aggrieved tone; “you’ve lent it to me, haven’t you? Though not so very much of it, and of course you will get it back. Oh, don’t be afraid, you will get it back! It will be put among the other bills, and it will be paid with the rest. I would rather be in debt to Louise or any one than to a sister who is always thinking about what she has lent me. And it is not so very much, either; you used to dole it out to me a hundred at a time, or even fifty at a time, as if it were a great favour, while all the time you were enjoying papa’s money, which by law was mine. I don’t think very much of favours like that.”
“I hope, Miss Tredgold,” said Sir Charles, lifting his hat, “that after this very great injustice, as it seems to me, you will at least make your home with us, and see if—if we can’t come to any arrangement. I suppose it’s true that ladies alone don’t want very much, not like a family—or—or two careless spendthrift sort of people like Stella and me, but——”
“Well, of course,” cried Stella, “I hope, Kate, you’ll pay us a visit when—whenever you like, in short. I don’t say make your home with us, as Charlie says, for I know you wouldn’t like it, and it’s a mistake, I think, for relations to live together. You know yourself, it never works. Charlie, do hold your tongue and let me speak. I know all about it a great deal better than you do. To have us to fall back upon when she wants it, to be able to write and say, take me in—which, of course, I should always do if it were possible—that is the thing that would suit Kate. Of course you will have rooms of your own somewhere. I shouldn’t advise a house,for that is such a bother with servants and things, and runs away with such a lot of money, but—— Oh, I declare, there is the Midge, with the two old cats! Shall we have to stop and speak if they see us? I am not going to do that. I heard of papa’s death only yesterday, and I am not fit to speak to anybody as yet,” she cried, pulling over her face the crape veil which depended from her bonnet behind. And the two old ladies in the Midge were much impressed by the spectacle of Stella driving out with her husband and her sister, and covered with a crape veil, on the day after her return. “Poor thing,” they said, “Katherine has made her come out to take the air; but she has a great deal of feeling, and it has been a great shock to her. Did you see how she was covered with that great veil? Stella was a little thing that I never quite approved of, but she had a feeling heart.”
Katherine was a little sick at heart with all the talk, with Stella’s rattle running through everything, with the fulfilment of all her fears, and the small ground for hope of any nobler thoughts. She was quite decided never under any circumstances to take anything from her sister. That from the first moment had been impossible. She had seen the whole position very clearly, and made up her mind without a doubt or hesitation. She was herself perfectly well provided for, she had said to herself, she had no reason to complain; and she had known all along how Stella would take it, exactly as she did, and all that would follow. But a thing seldom happens exactly as you believe it will happen; and the extreme ease with which this revolution had taken place, the absence of excitement, of surprise, even of exultation, had the most curious effect upon her. She was confounded by Stella’s calm, and yet she knew that Stella would be calm. Nothing could be more like Stella than her conviction that she herself, instead of being extraordinarily favoured, was on the whole rather an injured person when all was said and done. The whole of this had been in Katherine’s anticipations of the crisis. And yet she was as bitterly disappointed as if she had not known Stella, and as if her sister had been her ideal, and she hadthought her capable of nothing that was not lofty and noble. A visionary has always that hope in her heart. It is always possible that in any new emergency a spirit nobler and better than of old may be brought out.
Katherine stole out in the early twilight to her favourite walk. The sea was misty, lost in a great incertitude, a suffusion of blueness upon the verge of the sand below, but all besides mist in which nothing could be distinguished. The horizon was blurred all round, so that no one could see what was there, though overhead there was a bit of sky clear enough. The hour just melting out of day into night, the mild great world of space, in which lay hidden the unseen sea and the sky, were soothing influences, and she felt her involuntary anger, her unwilling disappointment, die away. She forgot that there was any harm done. She only remembered that Stella was here with her children, and that it was so natural to have her in her own home. The long windows of the drawing-room were full of light, so were those of Stella’s bedroom, and a number of occupied rooms shining out into the dimness. It was perhapsrococo, as they said, but it was warm and bright. Katherine had got herself very well in hand before she heard a step near her on the gravel, and looking up saw that her brother-in-law was approaching. She had not been much in charity with Sir Charles Somers before, but he had not shown badly in these curious scenes. He had made some surprised exclamations, he had exhibited some kind of interest in herself. Katherine was very lonely, and anxious to think well of someone. She was almost glad to see him, and went towards him with something like pleasure.
“I have come to bring you in,” he said; “Stella fears that you will catch cold. She says it is very damp, even on the top of the cliff.”
“I don’t think I shall take cold; but I will gladly go in if Stella wants me,” said Katherine; then, as Somers turned with her at the end of her promenade, she said: “The house isrococo, I know; but I do hope you will like it a little and sometimes live in it, for the sake of our youth which was passed here.”
“You don’t seem to think where you are to live yourself,” he said hurriedly. “I think more of that. We seem to be putting you out of everything. Shouldn’t you like it for yourself? You have more associations with it than anyone I wish you would say you would like to have it—for yourself——”
“Oh, no,” said Katherine, “not for the world. I couldn’t keep it up, and I should not like to have it—not for the world.”
“I am afraid all this is dreadfully unjust. There should be a—partition, there should be some arrangement. It isn’t fair. You were always with the old man, and nursed him, and took care of him, and all that——”
“No,” said Katherine; “my father was a little peculiar—he liked to have the nurse who was paid, as he said, for that. I have not any claim on that ground. And then I have always had my own money, as Stella told you. I am much obliged to you, but you really do not need to trouble yourself about me.”
“Are you really sure that is so?” he said in a tone between doubt and relief. Then he looked round, shivering a little at the mist, and said that Stella was looking for her sister, and that he thought it would be much more comfortable if they went in to tea.
Thepublic of Sliplin gave Lady Jane thepas. Though every individual who had the least right of acquaintance with Lady Somers longed to call, to see how she was looking, to see how she was taking it, to see the dear babies, &c., &c., yet there was a universal consent, given tacitly, that Lady Jane, not only as the head of the local society, but as having been so deeply involved in Stella’s marriage, should come first; and, accordingly, for two whole days the neighbours had refrained, even Mrs. Shanks and Miss Mildmay holding back. When Lady Jane’s carriage appeared at last, there was a little rustle of interest and excitement through the place. The Stanhopes of the old Leigh House, who were half-way between Steephill and Sliplin, saw it sweep past their lodge gates, and ran in in a body to say to their mother, “Now, to-morrow we can call!” and the same sentiment flew over the place from one house to another. “Lady Jane has just driven down to the Cliff. I have just seen Lady Jane’s carriage pass on her way to see Lady Somers.” “Well, that will be a meeting!” some ladies said. It appeared to a number of them somehow that it must have been Lady Jane’s machinations that secured Mr. Tredgold’s fortune for his undutiful child—though, indeed, they could not have told how.
These days of seclusion would have been very dreary to Stella had she not been occupied with her dressmaker, a visitor who is always more exciting and delightful than any other. Louise, who had insisted so on the payment of her little bill in Stella’s days of humiliation, was now all obsequiousness, coming down herself to receive Lady Somers’ orders, to fit Lady Somers’ mourning, to suggest everything that could bedone in the way of lightening it now, and changing it at the earliest opportunity. Hours of delightful consultation as to Stella’s figure, which she discussed as gravely as if it had been a matter of national importance—as well as the stuffs which were to clothe it, and the fashion in which they were to be made—flew over her head, during which time her husband mooned about the stables, generally with little Job upon his shoulder, and finally, unable to endure it any longer, went up to town, where no doubt he was happy—though the wail of the little boy left behind did not add to the peace of the house. The dressmaker had been dismissed by the time that Lady Jane arrived, and Stella sat contemplating her crape in all the mirrors round, and assuring herself that when it was perfectly fresh as now, it was not so bad, and unquestionably becoming to a very fair complexion. “I can’t say you look very well in it, Kate; you are darker, and then yours is not quite fresh. To be quite fresh is indispensable. If one was a widow, for instance, and obliged to wear it, it ought to be renewed every week; but I do think it’s becoming to me. It throws up one’s whiteness, don’t you think, and brings out the colour,” said Stella standing before the glass. “Oh, Kate, you are so unsympathetic; come and see what I mean,” she cried.
“Yes, I see—you look very nice, Stella. The black is becoming to you—but, after all, we don’t wear crape to be becoming.”
“Oh, Fudge!” cried Stella, “what do you wear it for? Because it’s the custom, and you can’t help yourself. What does it matter to poor papa what we wear? He always liked to see me in gay colours—he had too florid a taste, if the truth must be told. If I hadn’t known better by instinct (for I’m sure I never had any teaching), and if we hadn’t been so fortunate as to fall into the hands of Louise, I should have been dressed like ‘Arriet out for a holiday. It’s curious,” said Stella reflectively, “taste is just born in some people and others you can’t teach it to. I am so glad the first was my case. We labour under disadvantages, you know, being ourfather’s daughters—that is, not me, now everything has come straight, but you will, Kate, especially as you have not got the money. To be papa’s daughter and yet not his heiress, you know, is a kind of injury to people that might come after you. You will be going into the world upon false pretences. I wonder now that you did not marry somebody before it was all known.”
“It was only known on the night of papa’s funeral, Stella. I could not have married many people between then and now,” said Katherine, trying to take this speech as lightly as it was made.
“That is true—still you must have had people after you. With your expectations, and a good-looking girl. You always were quite a good-looking girl, Kate.”
“I am grateful for your approbation, Stella.”
“Only a little stuck-up looking—and—well, not quite so young as you used to be. If I were you I would go in for that old fellow, don’t you remember, whom papa got rid of in such a hurry—the man that came over with us in theAurungzebe. Somebody told me he had done very well out there, and, of course, Charlie asked him to come and see us. And you know you were his fancy, Kate; it was you, not me—don’t you remember how everybody laughed? I should go in for him now if I were you. An old affair like that is quite a nice foundation. And I hear he has done very well, and he is just a suitable age, and it doesn’t really matter that—— What is passing the window? Oh,” cried Stella, clapping her hands, “the very same old landau that I remember all my life, and Lady Jane in her war paint, just the same. Let’s prepare to receive cavalry!” she cried. With a twist of her hand she drew two chairs into position, one very low, graceful and comfortable for herself, another higher, with elbows for Lady Jane. And Stella seated herself, with her fresh crape falling about her in crisp folds, her fair face and frizzy locks coming out of its blackness with greatéclat, and her handkerchief in her hand. It was as good as a play (she herself felt, for I doubt whether Katherine relishedthe scene) to see her rise slowly and then drop, as it were, as lightly as a feather, but beyond speech, into Lady Jane’s arms, who, deeply impressed by this beautiful pose, clasped her and kissed her and murmured, “My poor child; my poor, dear child!” with real tears in her eyes.
“But what a comfort it must be to your mind,” Lady Jane said, when she had seated herself and was holding Stella’s hand, “to feel that there could be nothing against you in his mind—no rancour, no unkindness—only the old feeling that he loved you beyond everything; that you were still his pet, his little one, his favourite——” Lady Jane herself felt it so much that she was almost choked by a sob.
“Oh, dear Lady Jane,” cried Stella, evidently gulping down her own, “if I did not feelthat, how could I ever have endured to come to this house—to dear papa’s house—to my own old home! that I was so wicked as to run away from, and so silly, never thinking. My only consolation is, though Kate has so little, so very little, to tell me of that dreadful time, that he must have forgiven me at the last.”
It was a very dreadful recollection to obtrude into the mind of the spectator in such a touching scene; but Katherine could not keep out of her eyes the vision of an old man in his chair saying quite calmly, “God damn them,” as he sat by his fireside. The thought made her shudder; it was one never to be communicated to any creature; but Lady Jane perceived the little tremulous movement that betrayed her, and naturally misinterpreted its cause.
“Yes,” she said, “my dear Stella, I am very happy for you; but there is poor Katherine left out in the cold who has done so much for him all these years.”
Stella, as was so natural to her, went on with the catalogue of her own woes without taking any notice of this. “Such a time as we have gone through, Lady Jane! Oh, I have reflected many a time, if it had not been for what everybody told us, I never, never, would have done so silly a thing. You all said, you remember, that papa would not hold out, that he could not get on without me, that he would be quitesure to send for me home. And I was over-persuaded. India is a dreadful place. You have double pay, but, oh, far more than double expenses! and as for dress, you want as much, if not more, than you would in London, and tribes upon tribes of servants that can do nothing. And then the children coming. And Job that has never had a day’s health, and how he is to live in England with a liver like a Strasburg goose, and his father stuffing him with everything that is bad for him, I don’t know. It has been a dreadful time; Kate has had all the good and I’ve had all the evil for seven years—fancy, for seven long years.”
“But you’ve had a good husband, at all events, Stella; and some pleasant things,” Lady Jane murmured in self-defence.
“Oh, Charlie! I don’t say that he is any worse than the rest. But fancy me—me, Stella, that you knew as a girl with everything I could think of—going to Government House over and over again in the same old dress; and Paris diamonds that cost ten pounds when they were new.”
At this dreadful picture Lady Jane bowed her head. What could she reply? Katherine had not required to go anywhere a number of times in the same old dress—but that was probably because she went to very few places—nor in Paris diamonds at ten pounds, for she had not any diamonds at all, false or true. To change the subject, which had taken a turn more individual than was pleasant, she asked whether she might not see the dear children?
“Oh yes,” said Stella, “if they will come—or, at least, if Job will come, for baby is too small to have a will of her own. Kate, do you think that you could bring Job? It isn’t that it is any pleasure to see him, I’m sure. When his father is here he will speak to no one else, and when his father isn’t here he just cries and kicks everybody. I think, Kate, he hates you less than the rest. Will you try and get him to come if Lady Jane wants to see him? Why anybody should want to see him I am sure is a mystery to me.”
It was an ill-advised measure on Stella’s part, for Katherinehad no sooner departed somewhat unwillingly on her mission than Lady Jane seized her young friend’s hand again: “Oh, Stella, I must speak to you, I must, while she is away. Of course, you and Charlie have settled it between you—you are going to set everything right for Katherine? It was all settled on her side that if she got the money you should have your share at once. And you will do the same at once, won’t you, without loss of time, Charlie and you?”
“You take away my breath,” cried Stella, freeing her hand. “What is it that I have got to do in such a hurry? I hate a hurry; it makes me quite ill to be pressed to do anything like running for a train. We only came a few days ago, Lady Jane; we haven’t been a week at home. We haven’t even seen the lawyer yet; and do you think Charlie and I discuss things about money without loss of time—oh, no! we always like to take the longest time possible. They have never been such very agreeable things, I can tell you, Lady Jane, discussions about money between Charlie and me.”
“That, to be sure, in the past,” said Lady Jane, “but not now, my dear. I feel certain he has said to you, ‘We must put things right for Katherine—’ before now.”
“Perhaps he has said something of the kind; but he isn’t at all a man to be trusted in money matters, Charlie. I put very little faith in him. I don’t know what the will is, as yet; but so far as I possibly can I shall keep the management of the money in my own hands. Charlie would make ducks and drakes of it if he had his way.”
“But, my dear Stella, this is a matter that you cannot hesitate about for a moment; the right and wrong of it are quite clear. We all thought your father’s money would go to Katherine, who had never crossed him in any way——”
“What does that matter? It was me he was fond of!” Stella cried, with disdain.
“Well; so it has proved. But Katherine was prepared at once to give you your share. You must give her hers, Stella—you must, and that at once. You must not leave a question upon your own sense of justice, your perception of right andwrong. Charlie!” cried Lady Jane with excitement, “Charlie is a gentleman at least. He knows what is required of him. I shall stay until he comes home, for I must speak to him at once.”
“That is his dog-cart, I suppose,” said Stella calmly, “passing the window; but you must remember, Lady Jane, that the money is not Charlie’s to make ducks and drakes with. I don’t know how the will is drawn, but I am sure papa would not leave me in the hands of any man he didn’t know. I shall have to decide for myself; and I know more about it than Charlie does. Katherine has money of her own, which I never had. She has had the good of papa’s money for these seven years, while I have not had a penny. She says herself that she did not nurse him or devote herself to him, beyond what was natural, that she should require compensation for that. He liked the nurse that had her wages paid her, and there was an end of it; which is exactly what I should say myself. I don’t think it’s a case for your interference, or Charlie’s, or anybody’s. I shall do what I think right, of course, but I can’t undertake that it shall be what other people think right. Oh, Charlie, there you are at last. And here’s Lady Jane come to see us and give us her advice.”
“Hallo, Cousin Jane,” said Sir Charles, “just got back from town, where I’ve had a bit of a run since yesterday. Couldn’t stand it any longer here; and I say, Stella, now you’ve got your panoply, let’s move up bag and baggage, and have a bit of a lark.”
“You are looking very well, Charlie,” said Lady Jane, “and so is Stella, considering, and I am waiting to see the dear children. You’d better come over to us, there is some shooting going on, and you are not supposed to have many larks while Stella is in fresh crape. I have been speaking to her about Katherine.” Here Lady Jane made a sudden and abrupt stop by way of emphasis.
“Oh, about Kate!” Sir Charles said, pulling his moustache.
“Stella doesn’t seem to see, what I hope you see, that yourhonour’s concerned. They say women have no sense of honour; I don’t believe that, but there are cases. You, however, Charlie, you’re a gentleman; at least you know what’s your duty in such a case.”
Sir Charles pulled his moustache more than ever. “Deuced hard case,” he said, “for Kate.”
“Yes, there is no question about that; but for you, there is no question about that either. It is your first duty, it is the only course of action for a gentleman. As for Stella, if she does not see it, it only proves that what’s bred in the bone—I’m sure I don’t want to say anything uncivil. Indeed, Stella, it is only as your friend, yourrelation,” cried Lady Jane, putting much emphasis on the word, “that I allow myself to speak.”
It cost Lady Jane something to call herself the relation of Mr. Tredgold’s daughter, and it was intended that the statement should be received with gratitude; but this Stella, Lady Somers, neither felt nor affected. She was quite well aware that she had now no need of Lady Jane. She was herself an extremely popular person wherever she went, of that there could be no doubt—she had proved it over and over again in the seven years of her humiliation. Popular at Government House, popular at every station, wherever half-a-dozen people were assembled together. And now she was rich. What need she care for anyone, or for any point of honour, or the opinion of the county even, much less of a place like Sliplin? Lady Jane could no longer either make her or mar her. She was perfectly able to stand by herself.
“It is very kind of you,” she said, “to say that, though it doesn’t come very well after the other. Anyhow, I’m just as I’ve been bred, as you say, though I have the honour to be Charlie’s wife. Lady Jane wants to see Job; I wish you’d go and fetch him. I suppose Kate has not been able to get that little sprite to come. You need not try,” said Stella calmly, when Somers had left the room, “to turn Charlie against me, Lady Jane. He is a fool in some things, but he knows on which side his bread is buttered. If I have fifty thousand a yearand he not half as many farthings, you may believe he will think twice before he goes against me. I am very proud to be your relation, of course, but it hasn’t a money value, or anything that is of the first importance to us. Kate won’t be the better, but the worse, for any interference. I have my own ways of thinking, and I shall do what I think right.”
“Oh, here is the dear baby at last!” cried Lady Jane, accomplishing her retreat, though routed horse and foot, behind the large infant, looking rather bigger than the slim ayah who carried her, who now came triumphantly into the room, waving in her hand the rather alarming weapon of a big coral, and with the true air of Stella’s child in Stella’s house. A baby is a very good thing to cover a social defeat, and this one was so entirely satisfactory in every particular that the visitor had nothing to do but admire and applaud. “What a specimen for India,” she cried; but this was before Job made his remarkable entrance in the dimness of the twilight, which had begun by this time to veil the afternoon light.
“Doaway, me not do wid you, me fader’s boy,” said little Job, as Katherine exerted her persuasions to bring him downstairs.
“That is quite true, Job; but father has not come back yet. Come downstairs with me, and we shall see him come back.”
Job answered with a kick from the little boot which had just come in somewhat muddy from a walk—a kick which, as it happened to touch a tender point, elicited from Katherine a little cry. The child backed against the ayah, holding her fast; then glared at Katherine with eyes in which malice mingled with fright. “Me dlad to hurt you, me dlad to hurt you!” he cried. It was evident that he expected a blow.
“It is a pity to hurt anyone,” said Katherine; “but if it has made you glad you shouldn’t be cross. Come with me downstairs.”
“I hate you,” said the child. “You punith me moment I let ayah do.”
“No, I shall not punish you. I shall only take you downstairs to see your pretty mamma, and wait till father comes back. I think I hear the dog-cart now. Hark! that is your father now.”
The child ran to the window with a flush of eagerness. “Lift me up, lift me up!” he cried. It did not matter to him who did this so long as he got his will; and though he hit with his heels against Katherine’s dress, he did not kick her again. “Fader, fader—me’s fader’s boy!” cried little Job. The little countenance changed; it was no longer that of a little gnome, but caught an angelic reflection. He wavedhis thin small arms over his head from Katharine’s arms. “Fader, fader—Fader’s tome back! Job’s good boy!” he cried. Then the little waving arm struck against Katherine’s head, and he paused to look at her. The expression of his face changed again. A quiver of fierce terror came upon it; he was in the power of a malignant being stronger than himself. He looked at her with a sort of impotent, disappointed fury. “Put me down, and I’ll not kick you no more,” he said.
“Certainly I’ll put you down. Will you come with me now and meet your father?” Katherine said.
He had his hand ready to seize her hair, to defend himself, but shrunk away when she put him down without any more expressions of animosity, and ran for the head of the staircase. At that dreadful passage, however, the little creature paused. He was afraid for the descent; the hall was not yet lighted up below, and it seemed a well of darkness into which it was not wonderful that so small a being should be terrified to go down. “Is fader there?” he said to Katherine, “will they hurt fader?” There were vaguely visible forms in the hall, a gleam of vague daylight from the doorway, and then it became dreadfully apparent to Job that something must have happened to fader, who had disappeared within the drawing-room. “Dhey have swallowed him up—Dhey have eaten him up!” he cried. “Oh, fader, fader!” with a frantic shout, clinging to Katherine’s knees.
“No, no, my little boy. Your father has not been hurt. Come, we’ll go down and find him,” Katherine said. When they were nearly at the foot of the stairs, during which time he had clung to her with a little hot grip, half piteous half painful, there suddenly sprung up in the dark hall below, at the lighting of the lamp, a gleam of bright light, and Sir Charles became visible at the foot of the stairs, coming towards them. The child gave a shriek of joy and whirled himself from the top of some half-dozen steps into his father’s arms. “You’re not eated up,” he said; “fader, fader! Job fader’s boy.”
“Has he been cross?” said Sir Charles. He held the little creature in his arms lovingly, with a smile that irradiated his own heavy countenance like a gleam of sunshine.
“I hates her,” cried Job. “I kicked her. She dot nothing to do with me.”
“Job, Job,” said the father gently, “you shouldn’t be so cross and so hasty to a kind lady who only wanted to bring you to father. If you behave like that she will never be kind to you again.”
“I don’t tare. I hates ze lady,” Job said.
His father lifted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders apologetically to Katherine, and then laughed and carried his little son away. Decidedly, whatever Katherine was to make a success in, it was not in therôleof maiden aunt.
Next day, to the distress and trouble of Katherine, early in the afternoon there came a visitor whose appearance made Stella turn towards her sister with an open-eyed look of malice and half ridicule. No; Lady Somers did not intend it so. It was a look of significance, “I told you so,” and call upon Katherine’s attention. The visitor was James Stanford, their fellow-passenger by theAurungzebe. He explained very elaborately that Sir Charles had given him an invitation, and that, finding himself on business of his own in the Isle of Wight, he had taken advantage of it. He was not a man who could quickly make himself at his ease. He seemed oppressed with a consciousness that he ought not to be there, that he wanted some special permission, as if it had been with some special purpose that he had come.
“Oh, you need not apologise,” said Stella; “if you had not come then you might have apologised. We expect everybody to come to see us. Fancy, we’ve seen scarcely anyone for a week almost, except some old friends who have lectured us and told us what was our duty. Do you like to be told what is your duty, Mr. Stanford? I don’t; if I were ever so much inclined to do it before, I should set myself against it then. That is exactly how narrow country people do; they turn you against everything. They tell you this and that as if you didnot know it before, and make you turn your back on the very thing you wanted to do.”
“I don’t think,” said Stanford, “that I could be turned like that from anything I wanted to do.”
“Perhaps you are strong-minded,” said Stella. “I am not, oh, not a bit. I am one of the old-fashioned silly women. I like to be left alone and to do my own way. Perhaps it’s a silly way, but it’s mine. And so you have had business on the island, Mr. Stanford? Have you seen that lady again—that lady with the black eyes and the yellow hair? She will not like it at all if she doesn’t see you. She was very attentive to you during the voyage. Now, you can’t deny that she was attentive. She was a great deal nicer to you than you deserved. And such a pretty woman! To be sure that was not the natural colour of her hair. She had done something to it; up at the roots you could see that it had once been quite dark. Well, why not, if she likes yellow hair better? It is going quite out of fashion, so there can be no bad object in it, don’t you know.”
Stella laughed largely, but her visitor did not respond. He looked more annoyed, Katherine thought, than he had any occasion to be, and her pride was roused, for it seemed to her that they both looked at herself as if the woman who had paid attention to Mr. Stanford could have anything to do with her. She changed the subject by asking him abruptly if he felt the rigour of the English climate after his long life in India.
“Yes—no, a little,” he said. “They say that we bring so much heat with us that we do not feel it for the first year, and as I shall have to go back——”
“Are you going back? Why should you go back?” said Stella. “I thought you civil servants had such good times, not ordered about like soldiers. They always said in the regiment that the civilians were so well off; good pay and constant leave, and off to the hills whenever they liked, and all sorts of indulgences.”
“I am afraid the regiment romances,” said Stanford, “butI do not complain. On the whole I like India. One is sure, or almost sure, of being of some use, and there are many alleviations to the climate. If that was all, I should not at all mind going out again——”
“Ah, I understand,” said Stella. And then she added quickly, “I am so sorry I can’t ask you to stay to dinner to-night. We have a grand function coming off to-night. The lawyer is coming down, and we are to hear how we stand, and how much money we are to have. I think I hear him now, and I can’t let Charlie steal a march and tackle him before I am there. Katherine, will you look after Mr. Stanford till I come back? I don’t trust Charlie a step further than I see him. He might be doing some silly thing and compromising me while I am sitting here talking, but as soon as ever I can escape I will come back.”
She rose as she spoke and gave Katherine a look—- a look significant, malicious, such as any spectator might have read. Stanford had risen to open the door, and perhaps he did not see it, but it left Katherine so hot with angry feeling, so ashamed and indignant, that he could not fail but perceive it when Stella had gone away. He looked at her a little wistfully as he took his seat again. “I fear I am detaining you here against your will,” he said.
“Oh, no,” said Katherine, from the mist of her confusion, “it is nothing. Stella has not yet got over the excitement of coming home. It has been increased very much by some—incidents which she did not expect. You have heard her story of course? They—eloped—and my father was supposed to have cut her off and put her out of his will; but it appears, on the contrary, that he has left everything to her. She only heard of papa’s death, and of—this—when she got home.”
There was a little pause, and then he said reflectively, with a curious sort of regret, as if this brief narrative touched himself at some point, “It seems, then, that fortune after all favours the brave.”
“The brave?” said Katherine, surprised. “Oh, you mean because of their running away? They have paid for it, theythink, very severely in seven years of poverty in India, but now—now Stella’s turn has come.”
“I quite understand Lady Somers’ excitement without that. Even for myself, this house has so many recollections. The mere thought of it makes my heart beat when I am thousands of miles away. When I first came, an uncouth boy—you will scarcely remember that, Miss Tredgold.”
“Oh, I remember very well,” said Katherine, gradually recovering her ease, and pleased with a suggestion of recollections so early that there could be no embarrassment in them; “but not the uncouthness. We were very glad to have you for a play-fellow, Stella and I.”
“She was a little round ball of a girl,” he said.
“But even then,” said Katherine, and paused. She had been about to say, “expected to be the first,” but changed her expression, “was the favourite of everybody,” she said.
“Ah,” said Stanford, and then pursued his recollections. “I used to count the days till I could come back. And then came the next stage. Your father was kind to me when I was a boy. Afterwards, he was quite right, he wanted to know what I was good for.”
“He was what people call practical,” said Katherine. “Fortunately, he did not think it necessary with us. We were accepted as useless creatures,objets de luxe, which a rich man could afford to keep up, and which did him more credit the gayer they were and the more costly. Poor papa! It is not for us to criticise him, Mr. Stanford, in his own house.”
“No, indeed; but I am not criticising him. I am proving him to be right by my own example. He thought everybody could conquer fortune as he himself had done; but everybody cannot do that, any more than everybody can write a great poem. You require special qualities, which he had. Some go down altogether in the battle and are never more heard of; some do, what perhaps he would have thought worse, like me.”
“Why like you? Have you done badly? I have not heard so,” cried Katherine, with a quick impulse of interest, which she showed in spite of herself.
“I have done,” he said, “neither well nor ill. I am of that company that Dante was so contemptuous about, don’t you remember? I think he is too hard upon them,che senza infamia e senza gloria vive. Don’t you think there is a little excuse—a little pardon for them, Miss Tredgold? The poor fellows aim at the best. They know it when they see it; they put out their hands to it, but cannot grasp it. And then what should the alternative be?”
“It is a difficult question,” said Katherine with a smile, not knowing what he would be at. He meant something, it was evident, beyond the mere words. His eyes had a strained look of emotion, and there was a slight quiver under the line of his moustache. She had not been used to discussions of this kind. The metaphysics of life had little place in the doctor’s busy mind, and still less in the noisy talk of the Sir Charles Somers of existence. She did not feel herself quite equal to the emergency. “I presume that a man who could not get the best, as you say, would have to content himself with the best he could get. At least, that is how it would come out in housekeeping, which is my sole science, you know,” she said, with a faint laugh.
“Yes,” he said, almost eagerly. “That is perhaps natural. But you don’t know how a man despises himself for it. Having once known a better way, to fall back upon something that is second or third best, that has been my way. I have conquered nothing. I have made no fortune or career. I have got along. A man would feel less ashamed of himself if he had made some great downfall—if he had come to grief once and for all. To win or lose, that’s the only worthy alternative. But we nobodies do neither—we don’t win, oh, far from it! and haven’t the heart to lose—altogether——”
What did he mean? To do Katherine justice, she had not the smallest idea. She kept her eyes upon him with a little curiosity, a little interest. Her sense of embarrassment and consciousness had entirely passed away.
“You are surely much too severe a judge,” she said. “I never heard that to come to grief, as you say, was a desirableend. If one cannot win, one would at least be glad to retire decently—to make a retreat with honour, not to fling up everything. You might live then to fight another day, which is a thing commended in the finest poetry,” she added with a laugh.
He rose up and began to walk about the room. “You crush me all the more by seeming to agree with me,” he said. “But if you knew how I feel the contrast between what I am and what I was when last I was here! I went away from your father burning with energy, feeling that I could face any danger—that there was nothing I couldn’t overcome. I found myself off, walking to London, I believe, before I knew. I felt as if I could have walked to India, and overcome everything on the way! That was the heroic for a moment developed. Of course, I had to come to my senses—to take the train, to see about my berth, to get my outfit, &c. These hang weights about a man’s neck. And then, of course, I found that fate does not appear in one impersonation to be assaulted and overcome, as I suppose I must have thought, and that a civil servant has got other things to think of than fortune and fame. The soldiers have the advantage of us in that way. They can take a bold step, as Somers did, and carry out their ideal and achieve their victory——”
“Don’t put such high-flown notions into my brother-in-law’s head. I don’t think he had any ideal. He thought Stella was a very pretty girl. They do these things upon no foundation at all, to make you shiver—a girl and a man who know nothing of each other. But it does well enough in most cases, which is a great wonder. They get on perfectly. Getting on is, I suppose, the active form of that condition—senza gloria e senza infamia—of which you were speaking?” Katherine had quite recovered her spirits. The Italian, the reference to Dante, had startled her at first, but had gradually re-awakened in her a multitude of gentle thoughts. They had read Dante together in the old far past days of youth. It is one of the studies, grave as the master is, which has facilitated many a courtship, as Browning, scarcely less grave, does also.
The difficulties, to lay two heads together over, are so many, and the poetry which makes the heart swell is so akin to every emotion. She remembered suddenly a seat under one of the acacias where she had sat with him over this study. She had always had an association with that bench, but had not remembered till now that it flashed upon her what it was. She could see it almost without changing her position from the window. The acacia was ragged now, all its leaves torn from it by the wind, the lawn in front covered with rags of foliage withered and gone—not the scene she remembered, with the scent of the acacias in the air, and the warm summer sunshine and the gleam of the sea. She was touched by the recollection, stirred by it, emotions of many kinds rising in her heart. No one had ever stirred or touched her heart but this man—he, no doubt, more by her imagination than any reality of feeling. But yet she remembered the quickened beat, the quickened breath of her girlhood, and the sudden strange commotion of that meeting they had had, once and no more, in the silence of the long years. And now, again, and he in great excitement, strained to the utmost, his face and his movements full of nervous emotion, turning towards her once more.
“Miss Tredgold,” he said, but his lips were dry and parched. He stopped again to take breath. “Katherine,” he repeated, then paused once more. Whatever he had to say, it surely was less easy than a love tale. “I came to England,” he said, bringing it out with a gasp, “in the first place for a pretence, to bring home—my little child.”
All the mist that was over the sea seemed to sweep in and surround Katherine. She rose up instinctively, feeling herself wrapped in it, stifled, blinded. “Your little child?” she said, with a strange muffled cry.
Mr. Sturgeonarrived that evening with all his accounts and papers. He had not come, indeed, when Lady Somers left her sister to entertain James Stanford and joined her husband in the room which he had incontinently turned into a smoking-room, and which had already acquired that prevailing odour of tobacco and whiskey from which Mr. Tredgold’s house had hitherto afforded no refuge. Stella had no objection to these odours. She told her husband that she had “scuttled” in order to leave Kate alone with her visitor. “For that’s what he wants, of course,” she said. “And Kate will be much better married. For one thing, with your general invitations and nonsense she might take it into her head she was to stay here, which would not suit my plans at all. I can’t bear a sister always in the house.”
“It seems hard,” said Sir Charles, “that you should take all her money and not even give her house room. I think it’s a deuced hard case.”
“Bosh!” said Stella; “I never took a penny of her money. Papa, I hope, poor old man, had a right to do whatever he liked with his own. She had it all her own way for seven long years. If she had been worth her salt she could have made him do anything she pleased in that time. We used to rely upon that, don’t you remember? And a pretty business it would have been had we had nothing better to trust to. But he never meant to be hard upon Stella, I was always sure of that. Poor old papa! It was nice of him not to change his mind. But I can’t see that Katherine’s is any very hard case, for it was settled like this from the first.”
“A wrong thing isn’t made right because it’s been settled from the very first,” said Sir Charles, oracularly.
“Don’t be a fool, Charlie. Perhaps you’d like me to give it all away to Kate? It is a good thing for you and your spoiled little monkey Job that I am not such an idiot as that.”
“We should have expected our share had she had it,” said Somers always half inaudibly into his moustache.
“I daresay. But how different was that! In the first place, she would have had it in trust for me; in the second place, we’re a family and she is a single person. And then she has money of her own; and then, at the end of all, she’s Kate, you know, and I——”
“You are Stella,” he cried, with a big laugh. “I believe you; and, by Jove! I suppose that’s the only argument after all!”
Stella took this, which seemed to be a compliment, very sedately. “Yes,” she said, “I am Stella; you needn’t recommend Kate’s ways to me, nor mine to Kate; we’ve always been different, and we always will be. If she will marry this man it will save a great deal of trouble. We might make her a nice present—I shouldn’t object to that. We might give her her outfit: some of my things would do quite nicely; they are as good as new and of no use to me; for certainly, whatever happens, we shall never go to that beastly place again.”
Sir Charles roared forth a large laugh, overpowered by the joke, though he was not without a touch of shame. “By Jove! Stella, you are the one!” he cried.
And a short time after Mr. Sturgeon arrived. He had a great deal of business to do, a great many things to explain. Stella caught with the hereditary cleverness her father had discovered in her the involutions of Mr. Tredgold’s investments, the way in which he had worked one thing by means of or even against another, and in what artful ways he had held the strings.
“Blessed if I can make head or tail of it,” said Somers, reduced to partial imbecility by his effort to understand.
But Stella sat eager at the table with two red spots on her cheeks, shuffling the papers about and entering into everything.
“I should like to work it all myself, if I hadn’t other things to do,” she said.
“And excellently well you would do it,” said the lawyer with a bow.
It was one of Stella’s usual successes. She carried everything before her wherever she went. Mr. Sturgeon asked punctiliously for Miss Tredgold, but he felt that Kate was but a feeble creature before her sister, this bright being born to conquer the world.
“And now,” he said, “Lady Somers, about other things.”
“What things?” cried Stella. “So far as I know there are no other things.”
“Oh, yes, there are other things. There are some that you will no doubt think of for the credit of your father, and some for your own. The servants, for instance, were left without any remembrance. They are old faithful servants. I have heard him say, if they were a large household to keep up, that at least he was never cheated of a penny by them.”
“That’s not much to say,” cried Stella; “anyone who took care could ensure that.”
“Your father thought it was, or he would not have repeated it so often. There was not a penny for the servants, not even for Harrison, whose care was beyond praise—and Mrs. Simmons, and the butler. It will be a very small matter to give them a hundred pounds or two to satisfy them.”
“A hundred pounds!” cried Stella. “Oh, I shouldn’t call that a small matter! It is quite a sum of money. And why should they want hundreds of pounds? They have had good wages, and pampered with a table as good as anything we should think of giving to ourselves. Simmons is an impertinent old woman. She’s given—I mean, I’ve given her notice. And the butler the same. As for Harrison, to hear him you would think he was papa’s physician and clergyman and everything all in one.”
“He did a very great deal for him,” said the lawyer. “Then another thing, Lady Somers, your uncle——”
“My uncle! I never had an uncle,” cried Stella with a shriek.
“But there is such a person. He is not a very creditable relation. Still he ought not to be left to starve.”
“I never heard of any uncle! Papa never spoke of anyone. He said he had no relations, except some far-off cousins. How can I tell that this is not some old imposition trumped up for the sake of getting money? Oh, I am not going to allow myself to be fleeced so easily as that!”
“It is no imposition. Bob Tredgold has been in my office for a long number of years. I knew him as I knew your father when we were boys together. The one took the right turning, the other the wrong—though who can tell what is right and what is wrong with any certainty? One has gone out of the world with great injustice, leaving a great deal of trouble behind him; the other would be made quite happy with two pounds a week till he dies.”
“Two pounds a week—a hundred pounds a year!” cried Stella. “Mr. Sturgeon, I suppose you must think we are made of money. But I must assure you at once that I cannot possibly undertake at the very first outset such heavy responsibility as that.”
Sir Charles said nothing, but pulled his moustache. He had no habit of making allowances or maintaining poor relations, and the demand seemed overwhelming to him too.
“These are things which concern your father’s credit, Lady Somers. I think it would be worth your while to attend to them for his sake. The other is for your own. You cannot allow your sister, Miss Katherine, to go out into the world on five hundred a year while you have sixty thousand. I am a plain man and only an attorney, and you are a beautiful young lady, full, I have no doubt, of fine feelings. But I don’t think, if you consider the subject, that for your own credit you can allow this singular difference in the position of two sisters to be known.”
Stella was silent for a moment. She was struck dumb by the man’s grave face and his importance and the confidence of his tone. She said at last, almost with a whimper, “It was none of my doing. I was not here; I could not exercise any influence,” looking up at the old executor with startled eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “I am aware you were far away, and your sister ought to have been the person to exercise influence. She did not, however,” he added with a little impatience. “There are some people who are too good for this world.”
Too ineffectual—capable of neither good nor evil! Was it the same kind of incapacity as the others were discussing in the other room?
“I’ve been saying that, don’t you know, to my wife, about Miss Kate,” said Sir Charles.
“Oh, you’ve been saying!” cried Stella with a quick movement of impatience. She paused again for a little, and then fixing her eyes upon Mr. Sturgeon, said with some solemnity, “You wish me then, as soon as I have got over the first wonder of it, and being so glad that papa had forgiven me, to go right in his face and upset his last will?”
The rectitude, the pathos, the high feeling that were in Stella’s voice and attitude are things that no ordinary pen could describe. Her father’s old executor looked at her startled. He took off his spectacles to see her more clearly, and then he put them on again. His faculties were not equal to this sudden strain upon them.
“It would not be upsetting the will,” he said.
“Would it not? But I think it would. Papa says a certain thing very distinctly. You may say it is not just. Many people are turning upon me—as if I had anything to do with it!—and saying it is unjust. But papa made all his money himself, I suppose? And if he had a special way in which he wished to spend it, why shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? It is not any vanity in me to say he was fondest of me, Mr. Sturgeon—everybody knew he was.”
Mr. Sturgeon sat silent, revolving many things in his mind. He was one of the few people who had seen old Tredgoldafter his daughter’s flight; he had heard him say with the calmest countenance, and his hands on his knees, “God damn them!” and though he was an attorney and old, and had not much imagination, a shiver ran through Sturgeon’s mind, if not through his body. Was it as a way of damning her that the old fellow had let all this money come to his undutiful child?
“So you see,” said Stella with grave triumph, as one who feels that she has reasoned well, “I am tied up so that I cannot move. If you say, Will I upset papa’s will? I answer, No, not for all the world! He says it quite plain—there is no doubt as to what he meant. He kept it by him for years and never changed it, though he was angry with me. Therefore I cannot, whom he has trusted so much and been so kind to, upset his will. Oh, no, no! If Katherine will accept a present, well, she shall have a present,” cried Stella with a great air of magnanimity, “but I will do nothing that would look like flying in the face of papa.”
“By Jove! she is right there, don’t-ye-know,” said the heavy dragoon, looking up at the man of law, with great pride in his clever wife.
“I suppose she is—in a kind of way,” Mr. Sturgeon said. He was a humiliated man—he was beaten even in argument. He did not know how to answer this little sharp woman with her superficial logic. It was old Tredgold’s money; if he wanted it to go in a particular way, why should his will be gainsaid? He had wished it to go to Stella, he had remorselessly cut out her sister; the quick-witted creature had the adversary at a disadvantage. Old Tredgold had not been a just or noble man. He had no character or credit to keep up. It was quite likely that he fully intended to produce this very imbroglio, and to make both his daughters unhappy. Not that Stella would make herself unhappy or disturb her composure with feeling over the subject. She was standing against the big chair covered with red velvet in which old Tredgold used to sit. Nobody cared about that chair or had any associations with it; it had been pushed out of the waybecause it was so big, and the mass of its red cover threw up the figure of Stella before it with her black dress and her fair crisped hair. She was triumphant, full of energy and spirit, a princess come into her kingdom, not a new heir troubled with the responsibilities of inheritance. It would not disturb her that Katherine should have nothing, that poor old Bob Tredgold should starve. She was quite strong enough to put her foot on both and never feel a pang.