Маргарет Олифант
Old Mr. Tredgold
CHAPTER XLVII
It is very difficult to change every circumstance of your life when a sudden resolution comes upon you all in a moment. To restless people indeed it is a comfort to be up and doing at once—but when there is no one to do anything for but yourself, and you have never done anything for yourself alone in all your life, then it is very hard to know how to begin. To resolve that this day, this very hour you will arise and go; that you will find out a new shelter, a new foundation on which, if not to build a house, yet to pitch a tent; to transfer yourself and everything that may belong to you out of the place where you have been all your life, where every one of your little possessions has its place and niche, into another cold unknown place to which neither you nor they belong—how could anything be harder than that? It was so hard that Katherine did not do it for day after day. She put it off every morning till to-morrow. You may think that, with her pride, to be an undesired visitor in her sister’s house would have been insupportable to her. But she did not feel as if she had any pride. She felt that she could support anything better than the first step out into the cold, the decision where she was to go.
The consequence of this was that the Somerses, always tranquilly pursuing their own way, and put out in their reckoning by no one, were the first to make that change. Sir Charles made an expedition to his own old house of which all the Somerses were so proud, and found that it could not only be made (by the spending of sixty thousand a year in it) a very grand old house, but that even now it was in very tolerable order and could receive his family whenever the family chose to inhabit it. When he had made this discovery he was, it was only natural, very anxious to go, to faire valoir as far as was possible what was very nearly his unique contribution to the family funds. There was some little delay in order that fires might be lighted and servants obtained, but it was still October when the party which had arrived from the Aurungzebe at the beginning of the month, departed again in something of the same order, the ayah more cold, and Pearson more worried; for though the latter had Lady Somers’ old rivière in her own possession, another rivière of much greater importance was now in her care, and her responsibilities instead of lessening were increased. It could scarcely be said even that Stella was more triumphant than when she arrived, the centre of all farewells and good wishes, at Tilbury Docks; for she had believed then in good fortune and success as she did now, and she had never felt herself disappointed. Sir Charles himself was the member of the party who had changed most. There was no embarrassment about him now, or doubt of that luck in which Stella was so confident. He had doubted his luck from time to time in his life, but he did so no longer. He carried down little Job on his shoulder from the nursery regions. “I say, old chap,” he said, “you’ll have to give up your nonsense now and be a gentleman. Take off your hat to your Aunt Kate, like a man. If you kick I’ll twist one of those little legs off. Hear, lad! You’re going home to Somers and you’ll have to be a man.”
Job had no answer to make to this astounding address; he tried to kick, but found his feet held fast in a pair of strong hands. “Me fader’s little boy,” he said, trying the statement which had always hitherto been so effectual.
“So you are, old chap; but you’re the young master at Somers too,” said the father, who had now a different meaning. Job drummed upon that very broad breast as well as he could with his little imprisoned heels, but he was not monarch of all he surveyed as before. “Good-bye, Kate,” Sir Charles said. “Stay as long as ever you like, and come to Somers as soon as you will. I’m master there, and I wish you were going to live with us for good and all—but you and your sister know your own ways best.”
“Good-bye, Charles. I shall always feel that you have been very kind.”
“Oh, kind!” he cried, “but I’m only Stella’s husband don’t you know, and I have to learn my place.”
“Good-bye, Kate,” cried Stella, coming out with all her little jingle of bracelets, buttoning her black gloves. “I am sure you will be glad to get us out of the way for a bit to get your packing done, and clear out all your cupboards and things. You’ll let me know when you decide where you’re going, and keep that old wretch Simmons in order, and don’t give her too flaming a character. You’ll be sending them all off with characters as long as my arm, as if they were a set of angels. Mind you have proper dinners, and don’t sink into tea as ladies do when they’re alone. Good-bye, dear.” Stella kissed her sister with every appearance of affection. She held her by the shoulders for a moment and looked into her eyes. “Now, Kate, no nonsense! Take the good the Gods provide you—don’t be a silly, neglecting your own interest. At your age you really ought to take a common-sense view.”
Kate stood at what had been so long her own door and watched them all going away—Pearson and the soldier in the very brougham in which Stella had driven to the yacht on the night of her elopement. That and the old landau had got shabby chiefly for want of use in these long years. The baby, now so rosy, crowed in the arms of the dark nurse, and Sir Charles held his hat in his hand till he was almost out of sight. He was the only one who had felt for her a little, who had given her an honest if ineffectual sympathy. She felt almost grateful to him as he disappeared. And now to think this strange chapter in her existence was over and could never come again! Few, very few people in the world could have gone through such an experience—to have everything taken from you, and yet to have as yet given up nothing. She seemed to herself a shadow as she stood at that familiar door. She had lived more or less naturally as her sister’s dependent for the last week or two; the position had not galled her; in her desolation she might have gone on and on, to avoid the trouble of coming to a decision. But Stella was not one of the aimless people who are afraid of making decisions, and no doubt Stella was right. When a thing has to be done, it is better that it should be done, not kept on continually hanging over one. Stella had energy enough to make up half a dozen people’s minds for them. “Get us out of the way for a bit to get your packing done”—these were the words of the lease on which Katherine held this house, very succinctly set down.
This was a curious interval which was just over, in many ways. Katherine’s relation to Stella had changed strangely; it was the younger sister now who was the prudent chaperon, looking after the other’s interests—and other relationships had changed too. The sight of James Stanford coming and going, who was constantly asked to dinner and as constantly thrown in her way, but whom Katherine, put on her mettle, had become as clever to avoid as Stella was to throw them together, was the most anxious experience. It had done her good to see him so often without seeing him, so to speak. It made her aware of various things which she had not remarked in him before. Altogether this little episode in life had enlarged her horizon. She had found out many things—or, rather, she had found out the insignificance of many things that had bulked large in her vision before. She went up and down the house and it felt empty, as it never had felt in the old time when there was nobody in it. It seemed to her that it had never been empty till now, when the children, though they were not winning children, and Stella, though she was so far from being a perfect person, had gone. There was no sound or meaning left in it; it was an echoing and empty place. It was rococo, as Stella said; a place made to display wealth, with no real beauty in it. It had never been a home, as other people know homes. And now all the faint recollections which had hung about it of her own girlhood and of Stella’s were somehow obliterated. Old Mr. Tredgold and his daughters were swept away. It was a house belonging to the Somerses, who had just come back from India; it looked dreadfully forlorn and empty now they had gone away, and bare also—a place that would be sold or let in all probability to the first comer. Katherine shivered at the disorder of all the rooms upstairs, with their doors widely opened and all the signs of departure about. The household would always be careless, perhaps, under Stella’s sway. There was the look of a desecrated place, of a house in which nothing more could be private, nothing sacred, in the air of its emptiness, with all those doors flung open to the wall.
She was called downstairs again, however, and had no time to indulge these fancies—and glancing out at a window saw the familiar Midge standing before the door; the voices of the ladies talking both together were audible before she had reached the stairs.
“Gone away? Yes, Harrison, we met them all—quite a procession—as we came driving up; and did you see that dear baby, Ruth Mildmay, kissing its little fat hand?”
“I never thought they would make much of a stay,” said Miss Mildmay; “didn’t suit, you may be sure; and mark my words, Jane Shanks–”
“How’s Miss Katherine? Miss Katherine, poor dear, must feel quite dull left alone by herself,” said Mrs. Shanks, not waiting to waste any words.
“I should have felt duller the other way,” said the other voice, audibly moving into the drawing-room. Then Katherine was received by one after another once more in a long embrace.
“You dear!” Mrs. Shanks said—and Miss Mildmay held her by the shoulders as if to impart a firmness which she felt to be wanting.
“Now, Katherine, here you are on your own footing at last.”
“Am I? It doesn’t feel like a very solid footing,” said Katherine with a faint laugh.
“I never thought,” said Mrs. Shanks, “that Stella would stay.”
“It is I that have been telling you all the time, Jane Shanks, that she would not stay. Why should she stay among all the people who know exactly how she’s got it and everything about it? And the shameful behaviour–”
“Now,” said Katherine, “there must not be a word against Stella. Don’t you know Stella is Stella, whatever happens? And there is no shameful behaviour. If she had tried to force half her fortune upon me, do you think I should have taken it? You know better than that, whatever you say.”
“Look here—this is what I call shameful behaviour,” cried Miss Mildmay, with a wave of her hand.
The gilded drawing-room with all its finery was turned upside down, the curiosities carried off—some of them to be sold, some of them, that met with Stella’s approval, to Somers. The screen with which Katherine had once made a corner for herself in the big room lay on the floor half covered with sheets of paper, being packed; a number of the pictures had been taken from the walls. The room, which required to be very well kept and cared for to have its due effect, was squalid and miserable, like a beggar attired in robes of faded finery. Katherine had not observed the havoc that had been wrought. She looked round, unconsciously following the movement of Miss Mildmay’s hand, and this sudden shock did what nothing had done yet. It was sudden and unlooked for, and struck like a blow. She fell into a sudden outburst of tears.
“This is what I call shameful behaviour,” Miss Mildmay said again, “and Katherine, my poor child, I cannot bear, for one, that you should be called on to live in the middle of this for a single day.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” cried Katherine, with a laugh that was half hysterical, through her tears. “Why should it be kept up when, perhaps, they are not coming back to it? And why shouldn’t they get the advantage of things which are pretty things and are their own? I might have thought that screen was mine—for I had grown fond of it—and carried it away with my things, which clearly I should have had no right to do, had not Stella seen to it. Stella, you know, is a very clever girl—she always was, but more than ever,” she said, the laugh getting the mastery. It certainly was very quick, very smart of Lady Somers to take the first step, which Katherine certainly never would have had decision enough to do.
“You ought to be up with her in another way,” said Miss Mildmay. “Katherine, there’s a very important affair, we all know, waiting for you to decide.”
“And oh, my dear, how can you hesitate?” said Mrs. Shanks, taking her hand.
“It is quite easy to know why she hesitates. When a girl marries at twenty, as you did, Jane Shanks, it’s plain sailing—two young fools together and not a thought between them. But I know Katherine’s mind. I’ve known James Stanford, man and boy, the last twenty years. He’s not a Solomon, but as men go he’s a good sort of man.”
“Oh, Ruth Mildmay, that’s poor praise! You should see him with that poor little boy of his. It’s beautiful!” cried Mrs. Shanks with tears in her eyes.
“You’ve spoilt it all, you–” Miss Mildmay said in a fierce whisper in her friend’s ear.
“Why should I have spoilt it all? Katherine has excellent sense, we all know; the poor man married—men always do: how can they help it, poor creatures?—but as little harm was done as could be done, for she died so very soon, poor young thing.”
Katherine by this time was perfectly serene and smiling—too smiling and too serene.
“Katherine,” said Miss Mildmay, “if you hear the one side you should hear the other. This poor fellow, James Stanford, came to Jane Shanks and me before he went back to India the last time. He had met you on the train or somewhere. He said he must see you whatever happened. I told Jane Shanks at the time she was meddling with other people’s happiness.”
“You were as bad as me, Ruth Mildmay,” murmured the other abashed.
“Well, perhaps I was as bad. It was the time when—when Dr. Burnet was so much about, and we hoped that perhaps– And when he asked and pressed and insisted to see you, that were bound hand and foot with your poor father’s illness–”
“We told him—we told the poor fellow—the poor victim. Oh, Ruth Mildmay, I don’t think that I ever approved.”
“Victim is nonsense,” said Miss Mildmay sharply; “the man’s just a man, no better and no worse. We told him, it’s true, Katherine, that the doctor was there night and day, that he spared no pains about your poor father to please you—and it would be a dreadful thing to break it all up and to take you from poor Mr. Tredgold’s bedside.”
“No one need have given themselves any trouble about that,” said Katherine, very pale; “I should never have left papa.”
“Well, that was what I said,” cried Mrs. Shanks.
“So you see it was us who sent him away. Punish us, Katherine, don’t punish the man. You should have seen how he went away! Afterwards, having no hope, I suppose, and seeing someone that he thought he could like, and wanting a home—and a family—and all that–”
“Oh,” cried Mrs. Shanks with fervour, “there are always a hundred apologies for a man.” Katherine had been gradually recovering herself while this interchange went on.
“Now let us say no more about Mr. Stanford,” she cried with a sudden movement. “Come into the morning room, it is not in such disorder as this, and there we can sit down and talk, and you can give me your advice. I must decide at once between these two lodgings, now—oh,” she cried, “but it is still worse here!” The morning room, the young ladies’ room of old, had many dainty articles of furniture in it, especially an old piano beautifully painted with an art which is now reviving. Sir Charles had told his wife that it would suit exactly with the old furniture of his mother’s boudoir at Somers, and with Stella to think was to do. The workmen had at that moment brought the box in which the piano was to travel, and filled the room, coaxing the dainty instrument into the rough construction of boards that was to be its house. Katherine turned her visitors away with a wild outbreak of laughter. She laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks—all the men, and one or two of the servants, and the two ladies standing about with the gravest faces. “Oh, Stella is wonderful!” she said.
They had their consultation afterwards in that grim chamber which had been Mr. Tredgold’s, and which Somers had turned into a smoking-room. It was the only place undisturbed where his daughter, thrown off by him upon the world, could consult with her friends about the small maidenly abode which was all she could afford henceforward. The visitors were full of advice, they had a hundred things to say; but I am not sure that Katherine’s mind had much leisure to pay attention to them. She thought she saw her father there, sitting in his big chair by the table in which his will was found—the will he had kept by him for years, but never had changed. There she had so often seen him with his hands folded, his countenance serene, saying “God damn them!” quite simply to himself. And she, whom he had never cared for? Had he ever cursed her too, where he sat, without animosity, and without compunction? She was very glad when the ladies had said everything they could think of, although she had derived but little benefit by it; and following them out of the room turned the key sharply in the door. There was nothing there at least which anyone could wish to take away.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Katherine was restless that afternoon; there was not much to delight her indoors, or any place where she could find refuge and sit down and rest, or read, or write, or occupy herself in any natural way, unless it had been in her own bedroom, and there Hannah was packing—a process which promoted comfort as little as any of the others. This condition of the house wounded her to the bottom of her heart. A few days, she said to herself, could have made no difference. Stella need not have set the workmen to work until the house at least was empty. It was a poor thing to invite her sister to remain and then to make her home uninhabitable. With anxious justice, indeed, she reminded herself that the house was not uninhabitable—that she might still live in the drawing-room if she pleased, after the screen and the pictures and the curiosities were taken away; or in the morning-room, though the piano was packed in a rough box; but yet, when all was said, it was not generous of Stella. She had nowhere to sit down—nowhere to rest the sole of her foot. She went out at last to the walk round the cliff. She had always been fond of that, the only one in the family who cared for it. It was like a thread upon which she had strung so many recollections—that time, long ago, when papa had sent James Stanford away, and the many times when Katherine, still so young, had felt herself “out of it” beside the paramount presence of Stella, and had retired from the crowd of Stella’s adorers to gaze out upon the view and comfort herself in the thought that she had some one of her own who wanted not Stella, but Katherine. And then there had been the day of Stella’s escapade, and then of Stella’s elopement all woven round and round about the famous “view.” Everything in her life was associated with it. That blue sky, that shining headland with the watery sun picking it out like a cliff of gold, the great vault of the sky circling over all, the dim horizon far away lost in distance, in clouds and immeasurable circles of the sea. Just now a little white sail was out as it might have been that fated little Stella, the yacht which Mr. Tredgold sold after her last escapade, and made a little money by, to his own extreme enjoyment. Katherine walked up and down, with her eyes travelling over the familiar prospect on which they had dwelt for the greater part of her life. She was very lonely and forlorn; her heart was heavy and her vitality low, she scarcely knew where she was going or what she might be doing to-morrow. The future was to-morrow to her as it is to a child. She had to make up her mind to come to some decision, and to-morrow she must carry it out.
It did not surprise her at all, on turning back after she had been there for some time, at the end of her promenade to see a figure almost by her side, which turned out to be that of Mr. Stanford. She was not surprised to see him. She had seen him so often, they were quite accustomed to meet. She spoke to him quite in a friendly tone, without any start or alarm: “You have come—to see the last of them, Mr. Stanford?” It was not a particularly appropriate speech, for there was no one here to see the last of, unless it had been Katherine herself; but nevertheless these were the words that came to her lips.
“They seem to have gone very soon,” he said, which was not a brilliant remark any more than her own.
“Immediately after lunch,” said Katherine, severely practical, “that they might get home in good time. You must always make certain allowances when you travel with young children. But,” she added, with a sudden rise of colour, “I should not attempt to enlighten you on that subject.”
“I certainly know what it is,” he said, with a grave face, “to consider the interests of a little child.”
“I know, I know,” cried Katherine with a sudden compunction, “I should not have said that.”
“I wish,” he said, “that you would allow me to speak to you on this subject. No, it is not on this subject. I tried to say what was in my heart before, but either you would not listen, or—I have a good deal to say to you that cannot be said. I don’t know how. If I could but convey it to you without saying it. It is only just to me that you should know. It may be just—to another—that it should not be said.”
“Let nothing be said,” she cried anxiously; “oh, nothing—nothing! Yet only one thing I should like you to tell me. That time we met on the railway—do you remember?”
“Do I remember!”
“Well; I wish to know this only for my own satisfaction. Were you married then?”
She stood still as she put the question in the middle of the walk; but she did not look at him, she looked out to sea.
He answered her only after a pause of some duration, and in a voice which was full of pain. “Are you anxious,” he said, “Katherine, to make me out not only false to you, but false to love and to every sentiment in the world?”
“I beg you will not think,” she cried, “that I blame you for anything. Oh, no, no! You have never been false to me. There was never anything between us. You were as free and independent as any man could be.”
“Let me tell you then as far as I can what happened. I came back by the train that same afternoon when you said you were coming, and you were not there. I hung about hoping to meet you. Then I saw our two old friends in the Terrace—and they told me that there were other plans—that the doctor was very kind to your father for your sake, and that you were likely–”
Katherine waved her hand with great vivacity; she stamped her foot slightly on the ground. What had this to do with it? It was not her conduct that was in dispute, but his. Her meaning was so clear in her face without words that he stopped as she desired.
“I went back to India very much cast down. I was without hope. I was at a lonely station and very dreary. I tried to say the other day how strongly I believed in my heart that it was better to hold for the best, even if you could never attain it, than to try to get a kind of makeshift happiness with a second best.”
“Mr. Stanford,” cried Katherine, with her head thrown back and her eyes glowing, “from anything I can discern you are about to speak of a lady of whom I know nothing; who is dead—which sums up everything; and whom no one should dare to name, you above all, but with the most devout respect.”
He looked at her surprised, and then bowed his head. “You are right, Miss Katherine,” he said; “my poor little wife, it would ill become me to speak of her with any other feeling. I told you that I had much to tell you which could not be said–”
“Let it remain so then,” she cried with a tremble of excitement; “why should it be discussed between you and me? It is no concern of mine.”
“It’s a great, a very great concern of mine. Katherine, I must speak; this is the first time in which I have ever been able to speak to you, to tell you what has been in my heart—oh, not to-day nor yesterday—for ten long years.” She interrupted him again with the impatient gesture, the same slight stamp on the ground. “Am I to have no hearing,” he cried, “not even to be allowed to tell you, the first and only time that I have had the chance?”
Katherine cleared her throat a great many times before she spoke. “I will tell you how it looks from my point of view,” she said. “I used to come out here many a time after you went away first, when we were told that papa had sent you away. I was grateful to you. I thought it was very, very fine of you to prefer me to Stella; afterwards I began to think of you a little for yourself. The time we met made you a great deal more real to me. It was imagination, but I thought of you often and often when I came out here and walked about and looked at the view. The view almost meant you—it was very vague, but it made me happy, and I came out nearly every night. That is nearly ten years since, too; it was nothing, and yet it was the chief I had to keep my life going upon. Finally you come back, and the first thing you have to say to me is to explain that, though you like me still and all that, you have been married, you have had a child, and another life between whiles. Oh, no, no, Mr. Stanford, that cannot be.”
“Katherine! must I not say a word in my own defence?”
“There is no defence,” she cried, “and no wrong. I am only not that kind of woman. I am very sorry for you and the poor little child. But you have that, it is a great deal. And I have nothing not even the view. I am bidding farewell to the view and to all those recollections. It is good-bye,” she said, waving her hand out to the sea, “to my youth as well as to the cliff, and to all my visions as well as to you. Good-bye, Mr. Stanford, good-bye. I think it is beginning to rain, and to-morrow I am going away.”
Was this the conclusion? Was it not a conclusion at all? Next day Katherine certainly did go away. She went to a little house at some distance from Sliplin—a little house in the country, half-choked in fallen leaves, where she had thought she liked the rooms and the prospect, which was no longer that of the bay and the headland, but of what we call a home landscape—green fields and tranquil woods, a village church within sight, and some red-roofed cottages. Katherine’s rooms were on the upper floor, therefore not quite on a level with the fallen leaves. It was a most digne retirement for a lady, quite the place for Katherine, many people thought; not like rooms in a town, but with the privacy of her own garden and nobody to interfere with her. There was a little pony carriage in which she could drive about, with a rough pony that went capitally, quite as well as Mr. Tredgold’s horses—growing old under the charge of the old coachman, who never was in a hurry—would ever go. Lady Jane, who approved so highly, was anxious to take a great deal of notice of Katherine. She sent the landau to fetch her when, in the first week of her retirement, Katherine went out to Steephill to lunch. But Katherine preferred the pony chaise. She said her rooms were delightful, and the pony the greatest diversion. The only grievance she had, she declared, was that there was nothing to find fault with. “Now, to be a disinherited person and to have no grievance,” she said, “is very hard. I don’t know what is to become of me.” Lady Jane took this in some unaccountable way as a satirical speech, and felt aggrieved. But I cannot say why.
It is a great art to know when to stop when you are telling a story—the question of a happy or a not happy ending rests so much on that. It is supposed to be the superior way nowadays that a story should end badly—first, as being less complete (I suppose), and, second, as being more in accord with truth. The latter I doubt. If there was ever any ending in human life except the final one of all (which we hope is exactly the reverse of an ending), one would be tempted rather to say that there are not half so many tours de force in fiction as there are in actual life, and that the very commonest thing is the god who gets out of the machine to help the actual people round us to have their own way. But this is not enough for the highest class of fiction, and I am aware that a hankering after a good end is a vulgar thing. Now, the good ending of a novel means generally that the hero and heroine should be married and sent off with blessings upon their wedding tour. What am I to say? I can but leave this question to time and the insight of the reader. If it is a fine thing for a young lady to be married, it must be a finer thing still that she should have, as people say, two strings to her bow. There are two men within her reach who would gladly marry Katherine, ready to take up the handkerchief should she drop it in the most maidenly and modest way. She had no need to go out into the world to look for them. There they are—two honest, faithful men. If Katherine marries the doctor, James Stanford will disappear (he has a year’s furlough), and no doubt in India will marry yet another wife and be more or less happy. If she should marry Stanford, Dr. Burnet will feel it, but it will not break his heart. And then the two who make up their minds to this step will live happy—more or less—ever after. What more is there to be said?
I think that few people quite understand, and no one that I know of, except a little girl here and there, will quite sympathise with the effect produced upon Katherine by her discovery of James Stanford’s marriage. They think her jealous, they think her ridiculous, they say a great many severe things about common-sense. A man in James Stanford’s position, doing so well, likely to be a member of Council before he dies, with a pension of thousands for his widow—that such a man should be disdained because he had married, though the poor little wife was so very discreet and died so soon, what could be more absurd? “If there had been a family of girls,” Stella said, “you could understand it, for a first wife’s girls are often a nuisance to a woman. But one boy, who will be sent out into the world directly and do for himself and trouble nobody–” Stella, however, always ends by saying that she never did understand Katherine’s ways and never should, did she live a hundred years.
