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Old Mr. Tredgold
“You see, it doesn’t do to shilly-shally, doctor,” said Miss Mildmay. “You should come to the point. While you think about it someone else is sure to come in and do it. And the Cantrells are people that know their own minds.”
“Yes, indeed,” he said—“yes, indeed,” shaking his head. “Poor George—they know their own minds with a vengeance. That poor fellow now is very likely to go to the dogs.”
“No; he will go to London,” said the other old lady. “I know some such nice people there in the same trade, and I have recommended him to them. You know the people, Katherine—they used to send us down such nice French loaves by the parcel post, that time when I quarrelled with the old Cantrells, don’t you remember, about–”
“I don’t think there is any other house about Sliplin that will suit you now, Dr. Burnet,” said Miss Mildmay. “You will have to wait a little, and keep on the look-out.”
“I suppose so,” he said dejectedly, thrusting his hands down to the depths of his pockets, as if it were possible that he should find some consolation there.
And he saw the two ladies out with great civility, putting them into the midge with a care for their comfort which melted their hearts.
“I should wait a little now, if I were you,” said Miss Mildmay, gripping his hand for a moment with the thin old fingers, which she had muffled up in coarse woollen gloves drawn on over the visiting kid. “I should wait a little, since you have let this chance slip.”
“Do you think so?” he said.
“Ruth Mildmay,” said Mrs. Shanks, when they had driven away. “This is not treating me fairly. There is something private between you and that young man which you have never disclosed to me.”
“There is nothing private,” said Miss Mildmay. “Do you think I’m an improper person, Jane Shanks? There is nothing except that I’ve got a pair of eyes in my head.”
Dr. Burnet went slowly back to the drawing-room, where Katherine had promised him a cup of tea. His step sounded differently, and when he knocked against the furniture the sound was dull. He looked a different man altogether. He had come in so briskly, half an hour before, that Katherine was troubled for him.
“I am afraid you are very much disappointed about the house,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Katherine, I am. I had set my heart on it somehow—and on other things connected with it,” he said.
She was called Miss Katherine by everybody in consequence of the dislike of her father to have any sign of superiority over her sister shown to his eldest daughter. Miss Katherine and Miss Stella meant strict equality. Neither of them was ever called Miss Tredgold.
“I am very sorry,” she said, with her soft sympathetic voice.
He looked at her, and she for a moment at him, as she gave him his cup of tea. Again she was startled, almost confused, by his look, but could not make out to herself the reason why. Then she made a little effort to recover herself, and said, with a half laugh, half shiver, “You are thinking how we once took tea together in the middle of the night.”
“On that dreadful morning?” he said. “No, I don’t know that I was, but I shall never forget it. Don’t let me bring it back to your mind.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I think of it often enough. And I don’t believe I ever thanked you, Dr. Burnet, for all you did for me, leaving everything to go over to Portsmouth, you that are always so busy, to make those inquiries—which were of so little good—and explaining everything to the Rector, and sending him off too.”
“And his inquiries were of some use, though mine were not,” he said. “Well, we are both your very humble servants, Miss Katherine: I will say that for him. If Stanley could keep the wind from blowing upon you too roughly he would do so, and it’s the same with me.”
Katherine looked up with a sudden open-eyed glance of pleasure and gratitude. “How very good of you to say that!” she cried. “How kind, how beautiful, to think it! It is true I am very solitary now. I haven’t many people to feel for me. I shall always be grateful and happy to think that you have so kind a feeling for me, you two good men.”
“Oh, as for the goodness,” he said. And then he remembered Miss Mildmay’s advice, and rubbed his hands over his eyes as if to take something out of them which he feared was there. Katherine sat down and looked at him very kindly, but her recollection was chiefly of the strong white teeth with which he had eaten the bread-and-butter in the dark of the winter morning after that night. It was the only breakfast he was likely to have, going off as he did on her concerns, and he had been called out of his bed in the middle of the night, and had passed a long time by her father’s bedside. All these things made the simple impromptu meal very necessary; but still she had kept the impression on her mind of his strong teeth taking a large bite of the bread-and-butter, which was neither sentimental nor romantic. This was about all that passed between them on that day.
CHAPTER XXIII
The village society in Sliplin was not to be despised, especially by a girl who had no pretensions, like Katherine. When a person out of the larger world comes into such a local society, it is inevitable that he or she should look upon it with a more or less courteous contempt, and that the chief members should condole with him or her upon the inferiority of the new surroundings, and the absence of those intellectual and other advantages which he or she is supposed to have tasted in London, for example. But, as a matter of fact, the intellectual advantages are much more in evidence on the lower than on the higher ground. Lady Jane, no doubt, had her own particular box from Mudie’s and command of all the magazines, &c., at first hand; but then she read very little, having the Mudie books chiefly for her governess, and glancing only at some topic of the day, some great lady’s predilections on Society and its depravity, or some fad which happened to be on the surface for the moment, and which everybody was expected to be able to discuss. Whereas the Sliplin ladies read all the books, vying with each other who should get them first, and were great in the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly, and all the more weighty periodicals. They were members of mutual improvement societies, and of correspondence classes, and I don’t know all what. Some of them studied logic and other appalling subjects through the latter means, and many of them wrote modest little essays and chronicles of their reading for the press. When the University Extension Lectures were set up quite a commotion was made in the little town. Mr. Stanley, the rector, and Dr. Burnet were both on the committee, and everybody went to hear the lectures. They were one year on the History of the Merovingians, and another year on Crockery—I mean Pottery, or rather Ceramic Art—and a third upon the Arctic Circle. They were thus calculated to produce a broad general intelligence, people said, though it was more difficult to see how they extended the system of the Universities, which seldom devote themselves to such varied studies. But they were very popular, especially those which were illustrated by the limelight.
All the ladies in Sliplin who had any respect for themselves attended these lectures, and a number read up the subjects privately, and wrote essays, the best of which were in their turn read out at subsequent meetings for the edification of the others. I think, however, these essays were rarely appreciated except by the families of the writers. But it may be easily perceived that a great deal of mental activity was going on where all this occurred.
The men of the community took a great deal less trouble in the improvement of their minds—two or three of them came to the lectures, a rather shame-faced minority amid the ranks of the ladies, but not one, so far as I have heard, belonged to a mutual improvement society, or profited by a correspondence class, or joined a Reading Union. Whether this was because they were originally better educated, or naturally had less intellectual enthusiasm, I cannot tell. In other places it might have been supposed to be because they had less leisure; but that was scarcely to be asserted in Sliplin, where nobody, or hardly anybody, had anything to do. There was a good club, and very good billiard tables, which perhaps supplied an alternative; but I would not willingly say anything to the prejudice of the gentlemen, who were really, in a general way, as intelligent as the ladies, though they did so much less for the improvement of their minds. Now, the people whom Katherine Tredgold had met at Steephill did none of these things—the officers and their society as represented by Charlie Somers and Algy Scott, and their original leader, Mrs. Seton, were, it is needless to state, absolutely innocent of any such efforts. Therefore Katherine, as may be said, had gained rather than lost by being so much more drawn into this intellectually active circle when dropped by that of Lady Jane.
The chief male personages in this society were certainly the doctor and the clergyman. Curates came and curates went, and some of them were clever and some the reverse; but Mr. Stanley and Dr. Burnet went on for ever. They were of course invariably of all the dinner parties, but there the level of intelligence was not so high—the other gentlemen in the town and the less important ones in the country coming in as a more important element. But in the evening parties, which were popular in Sliplin during the winter, and the afternoon-tea parties which some people, who did not care to go out at night, tried hard to introduce in their place, they were supreme. It was astonishing how the doctor, so hard-worked a man, managed to find scraps of time for so many of these assemblages. He was never there during the whole of these symposia. He came very late or he went away very early, he put in half an hour between two rounds, or he ran in for ten minutes while he waited for his dog-cart. But the occasions were very rare on which he did not appear one time or another during the course of the entertainment. Mr. Stanley, of course, was always on the spot. He was a very dignified clergyman, though he had not risen to any position in the Church beyond that of Rector of Sliplin. He preached well, he read well, he looked well, he had not too much to do; he had brought up his motherless family in the most beautiful way, with never any entanglement of governesses or anything that could be found fault with for a moment. Naturally, being the father of a family, the eldest of which was twenty-two, he was not in his first youth; but very few men of forty-seven looked so young or so handsome and well set up. He took the greatest interest in the mental development of the Sliplin society, presiding at the University Extension as well as all the other meetings, and declaring publicly, to the great encouragement of all the other students, that he himself had “learned a great deal” from the Merovingians lectures and the Ceramic lectures, and those on the Arctic regions.
Mr. Stanley had three daughters, and a son who was at Cambridge; and a pretty old Rectory with beautiful rooms, and everything very graceful and handsome about him. The young people were certainly a drawback to any matrimonial aspirations on his part; but it was surmised that he entertained them all the same. Miss Mildmay was one of the people who was most deeply convinced on this subject. She had an eye which could see through stone walls in this particular. She knew when a man conceived the idea of asking a woman to marry him before he knew it himself. When she decided that a thing was to be (always in this line) it came to pass. Her judgment was infallible. She knew all the signs—how the man was being wrought up to the point of proposing, and what the woman’s answer was going to be—and she took the keenest interest in the course of the little drama. It was only a pity that she had so little exercise for her faculty in that way, for there were few marriages in Sliplin. The young men went away and found their wives in other regions; the young women stayed at home, or else went off on visits where, when they had any destiny at all, they found their fate. It was therefore all the more absorbing in its interest when anything of the kind came her way. Stella’s affair had been outside her orbit, and she had gained no advantage from it; but the rector and the doctor and Katherine Tredgold were a trio that kept her attention fully awake.
There was a party in the Rectory about Christmas, at which all Sliplin was present. It was a delightful house for a party. There was a pretty old hall most comfortably warmed—which is a rare attraction in halls—with a handsome oak staircase rising out of it, and a gallery above which ran along two sides. The drawing-room was also a beautiful old room, low, but large, with old furniture judiciously mingled with new, and a row of recessed windows looking to the south and clothed outside with a great growth of myrtle, with pink buds still visible at Christmas amid the frost and snow. Inside it was bright with many lamps and blazing fires; and there were several rooms to sit in, according to the dispositions of the guests—the hall where the young people gathered together, the drawing-rooms to which favoured people went when they were bidden to go up higher, and Mr. Stanley’s study, where a group of sybarites were always to be found, for it was the warmest and most luxurious of all. The hall made the greatest noise, for Bertie was there with various of his own order, home, like himself, for Christmas, and clusters of girls, all chattering at the tops of their voices, and urging each other to the point of proposing a dance, for which the hall was so suitable, and quite large enough. The drawing-room was full of an almost equally potent volume of sound, for everybody was talking, though the individual voices might be lower in tone. But in the study it was more or less quiet. The Rector himself had taken Katherine there to show her some of his books. “It would be absurd to call them priceless,” he said, “for any chance might bring a set into the market, and then, of course, a price would be put upon them, varying according to the dealer’s knowledge and the demand; but they are rare, and for a poor man like me to have been able to get them at all is—well, I think that, with all modesty, it is a feather in my cap; I mean, to get them at a price within my means.”
“It is only people who know that ever get bargains, I think,” Katherine said, in discharge of that barren duty of admiration and approval on subjects we do not understand, which makes us all responsible for many foolish speeches. Mr. Stanley’s fine taste was not quite pleased with the idea that his last acquisition was a bargain, but he let that pass.
“Yes; I think that, without transgressing the limits of modesty, I may allow that to be the case. It holds in everything; those who know what a friend is attain to the best friends; those who can appreciate a noble woman–”
“Oh!” said Katherine, a little startled, “that is carrying the principle perhaps too far. I was thinking of china, you know, and things of that sort—when you see an insignificant little pot which you would not give sixpence for, and suddenly a connoisseur comes in who puts down the sixpence in a great hurry and carries it off rejoicing—and you hear afterwards that it was priceless, too, though not, of course,” she added apologetically, “like your books.”
“Quite true, quite true,” said the Rector blandly; “but I maintain my principle all the same, and the real prize sometimes stands unnoticed while some rubbish is chosen instead. I hope,” he added in a lower tone, “that you have good news from your sister, Miss Katherine, and at this season of peace and forgiveness that your father is thinking a little more kindly–”
“My father says very little on the subject,” Katherine said. She knew what he did say, which nobody else did, and the recollection made her shiver. It was very concise, as the reader knows.
“We must wait and hope—he has such excellent—perceptions,” said the Rector, stumbling a little for a word, “and so much—good sense—that I don’t doubt everything will come right.” Then he added, bending over her, “Do you think that I could be of any use?” He took her hand for a moment, half fatherly in his tender sympathy. “Could I help you, perhaps, to induce him–”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Katherine, drawing her hand away; her alarm, however, was not for anything further that the Rector might say to herself, but in terror at the mere idea of anyone ever hearing what Mr. Tredgold said.
“Ah, well,” he said with a sigh, “another time—perhaps another time.” And then by way of changing the subject Katherine hurried off to a little display of drawings on the table. Charlotte Stanley, the Rector’s eldest daughter, had her correspondence class like the other ladies; but it was a Drawing Union. She was devoted to art. She had made little drawings since ever she could remember in pencil and in slate-pencil, and finally in colour. Giotto could not have begun more spontaneously; and she was apt to think that had she been taken up as Giotto was, she, too, might have developed as he did. But short of that the Drawing Union was her favourite occupation. The members sent little portfolios about from one to another marked by pretty fictitious names. Charlotte signed herself Fenella, though it would have been difficult to tell why; for she was large and fair. The portfolio, with all the other ladies’ performances, was put out to delight the guests, and along with that several drawings of her own. She came up hastily to explain them, not, perhaps, altogether to her father’s satisfaction, but he yielded his place with his usual gentleness.
“We send our drawings every month,” said the young artist, “and they are criticised first and then sent round. Mr. Strange, of the Water Colour Society, is our critic. He is quite distinguished; here is his little note in the corner. ‘Good in places, but the sky is heavy, and there is a want of atmospheric effect’—that is Fair Rosamond’s. Oh, yes, I know her other name, but we are not supposed to mention them; and this is one of mine—see what he says: ‘Great improvement, shows much desire to learn, but too much stippling and great hardness in parts.’ I confess I am too fond of stippling,” Charlotte said. “And then every month we have a composition. ‘The Power of Music’ was the subject last time—that or ‘Sowing the Seed.’ I chose the music. You will think, perhaps, it is very simple.” She lifted a drawing in which a little child in a red frock and blue pinafore stood looking up at a bird of uncertain race in a cage. “You see what he says,” Charlotte continued—“‘Full of good intention, the colour perhaps a little crude, but there is much feeling in the sketch.’ Now, feeling was precisely what I aimed at,” she said.
Katherine was no judge of drawing any more than she was of literature, and though the little picture did not appeal to her (for there were pictures at the Cliff, and she had lived in the same room with several Hunts and one supreme scrap of Turner—bought a bargain on the information that it was a safe investment many years ago—and therefore had an eye more cultivated than she was aware of) she was impressed by her friend’s achievement, and thought it was a great thing to employ your time in such elevated ways. Evelyn, who was only seventeen and very frolicsome, wrote essays for the Mutual Improvement Society. This filled Katherine, who did nothing particular, with great respect. She found a little knot of them consulting and arguing what they were to say in the next paper, and she was speechless with admiration. Inferior! Lady Jane did not think much of the Sliplin people. She had warned the girls in the days of her ascendency not to “mix themselves up” with the village folk, not to conduct themselves as if they belonged to the nobodies. But Lady Jane had never, Katherine felt sure, written an essay in her life. She had her name on the Committee of the University Extension centre at Sliplin, but she never attended a lecture. She it was who was inferior, she and her kind: if intellect counted for anything, surely, Katherine thought, the intellect was here.
And then Dr. Burnet, came flying in, bringing a gust of fresh air with him. Though he had but a very short time to spare, he made his way to her through all the people who detained him. “I am glad to see you here; you don’t despise the village parties,” he said.
“Despise them!—but I am not nearly good enough for them. I feel so small and so ignorant—they are all thinking of so many things—essays and criticisms and I don’t know what. It is they who should despise me.”
“Oh, I don’t think very much of the essays—nor would you if you saw them,” Dr. Burnet said.
“I tell you all,” said Miss Mildmay, “though you are so grand with your theories and so forth, it is the old-fashioned girls who know nothing about such nonsense that the gentlemen like best.”
“The gentlemen—what gentlemen?” said Katherine, not at all comforted by this side of the question, and, indeed, not very clear what was meant.
“Oh, don’t pretend to be a little fool,” said Miss Mildmay. She was quite anxious to promote what she considered to be Katherine’s two chances—the two strings she had to her bow—but to put up with this show of ignorance was too much for her. She went off angrily to where her companion sat, yawning a little over an entertainment which depended so entirely for its success upon whether you had someone nice to talk to or not. “Kate Tredgold worries me,” she said. “She pretends she knows nothing, when she is just as well up to it as either you or I.”
“I am up to nothing,” said Mrs. Shanks; “I only know what you say; and I don’t believe Mr. Tredgold would give his daughter and only heiress to either of them—if Stella is cut off, poor thing–”
“Stella will not be cut off,” said Miss Mildmay. “Mark my words. He’ll go back to her sooner or later; and what a good thing if Katherine had someone to stand by her before then!”
“If you saw two straws lying together in the road you would think there was something between them,” cried Mrs. Shanks, yawning more than ever. “Oh, Ruth Mildmay, fancy our being brought out on a cold night and having to pay for the Midge and all that, and nothing more in it than to wag our heads at each other about Katherine Tredgold’s marriage, if it ever comes off!”
“Let me take you in to supper,” said the rector, approaching with his arm held out.
And then Mrs. Shanks felt that there was compensation in all things. She was taken in one of the first, she said afterwards; not the very first—she could not expect that, with Mrs. Barry of Northcote present, and General Skelton’s wife. The army and the landed gentry naturally were first. But Miss Mildmay did not follow till long after—till the doctor found her still standing in a corner, with that grim look of suppressed scorn and satirical spectatorship with which the proud neglected watch the vulgar stream pressing before them.
“Have you not been in yet?” the doctor said.
“No,” said Miss Mildmay. “You see, I am not young to go with the girls, nor married to go with the ladies who are at the head of society. I only stand and look on.”
“That is just my case,” said Dr. Burnet. “I am not young to go with the girls, nor married to disport myself with Mrs. Barry or such magnates. Let us be jolly together, for we are both in the same box.”
“Don’t you let that girl slip through your fingers,” said Miss Mildmay solemnly, as she went “in” on his arm.
“Will she ever come within reach of my fingers?” the doctor said, shaking his head.
“You are not old, like that Stanley man; you’ve got no family dragging you back. I should not stand by if I were you, and let her be seduced into this house as the stepmother!” said Miss Mildmay with energy.
“Don’t talk like that in the man’s house. He is a good man, and we are just going to eat his sandwiches.”
“If there are any left,” Miss Mildmay said.
