NOT only Sliplin, but the entire island was in commotion next day. Stella Tredgold had disappeared in the night, in her ball dress, which was the most startling detail, and seized the imagination of the community as nothing else could have done. Those of them who had seen her, so ridiculously over-dressed for a girl of her age, sparkling with diamonds from head to foot, as some of these spectators said, represented to themselves with the dismayed delight of excitement that gleaming figure in the white satin dress which many people had remarked was like a wedding dress, the official apparel of a bride. In this wonderful garb she had stolen away down the dark private path from the Cliff to the beach, and got round somehow over the sands and rocks to the little harbour; and, while her sister was waiting for her on the cold cliff in the moonlight, had put out to sea and fled away—Stella the girl, and Stella the yacht, no one knew where. Was it her wedding dress, indeed? or had she, the misguided, foolish creature, flung herself into Charlie Somers’s life without any safeguard, trusting to the honour of a man like that, who was a profligate and without honour, as everybody knew.
No one, however, except the most pessimistic—who always exist in every society, and think the worst, and alas! prove in so many cases right, because they always think the worst—believed in this. Indeed, it would be only right to say that nobody believed Stella to have run away to shame. There was a conviction in the general mind that a marriage licence, if not a marriage certificate, had certainly formed part of her baggage; and nobody expected that her father would be able to drag her back “by the hair of her head,” as it was believed the furious old man intended to do. Mr. Tredgold’s fury passed all bounds, it was universally said. He had discharged a gun into the group on the lawn, who were searching for Stella in the shrubberies (most absurd of them!), and wounded, it was said, the gardener’s wife, who kept the lodge, and who had taken to her bed and made the worst of it, as such a person would naturally do. And then he had stood at the open window in his dressing-gown, shouting orders to the people as they appeared—always under the idea that burglars had got into the grounds.
“Have the girls come back? Is Stella asleep? Don’t let them disturb my little Stella! Don’t let them frighten my pet,” he had cried, while all the servants ran and bobbed about with lanterns and naked candles, flaring and blowing out, and not knowing what they were looking for. A hundred details were given of this scene, which no outsider had witnessed, which the persons involved were not conscious of, but which were nevertheless true. Even what Katherine said to her father crept out somehow, though certainly neither he nor she reported the details of that curious scene.
When she had a little organised the helpless body of servants and told them as far as she could think what to do—which was for half of them at least to go back to bed and keep quiet; when she had sent a man she could trust to make inquiries about the Stella at the pier, and another to fetch a doctor for the woman who considered herself to be dying, though she was, in fact, not hurt at all, and who made a diversion for which Katherine was thankful, she went indoors with Mrs. Simmons, the housekeeper, who was a person of some sense and not helpless in an emergency as the others were. And Mrs. Simmons had really something to tell. She informed Katherine as they went in together through the cold house, where the candles they carried made faintly visible the confusion of rooms abandoned for the night, with the ashes of last night’s fires in the grate, and last night’s occupations in every chair carelessly pushed aside, and table heaped with newspapers and trifles, that she had been misdoubting as something was up with Stevens at least. Stevens was the point at which the story revealed itself to Mrs. Simmons. She had been holding her head very high, the little minx. She had been going on errands and carrying letters as nobody knew where they were to; and yesterday was that grand she couldn’t contain herself, laughing and smiling to herself and dressed up in her very best. She had gone out quite early after breakfast on the day of the ball to get some bit of ribbon she wanted, but never came back till past twelve, when she came in the brougham with Miss Stella, and laughing so with her mistress in her room (you were out, Miss Katherine) as it wasn’t right for a maid to be carrying on like that. And out again as soon as you young ladies was gone to the ball, and never come back, not so far as Mrs. Simmons knew. “Oh, I’ve misdoubted as there was something going on,” the housekeeper said. Katherine, who was shivering in the dreadful chill of the house in the dead of night, in the confusion of this sudden trouble, was too much depressed and sick at heart to ask why she had not been told of these suspicions. And then her father’s voice calling to her was audible coming down the stairs. He stood at the head of the staircase, a strange figure in his dressing-gown and night-cap, with a candle held up in one hand and his old gun embraced in the other arm.
“Who’s there?” he cried, staring down in the darkness. “Who’s there? Have you got ’em?—have you got ’em? Damn the fellows, and you too, for keeping me waitin’!” He was foaming at the mouth, or at least sending forth jets of moisture in his excitement. Then he gave vent to a sort of broken shout—“Kath-i-rine!” astonishment and sudden terror driving him out of familiarity into her formal name.
“Yes, papa, I am coming. Go back to your room. I will tell you everything—or, at least, all I know.” She was vaguely thankful in her heart that the doctor would be there, that there would be some one to fall back upon if it made him ill. Katherine seemed by this time to have all feeling deadened in her. If she could only have gone to her own room and lain down and forgotten everything, above all, that Stella was not there breathing softly within the ever-open door between! She stopped a moment, in spite of herself, at the window on the landing which looked out upon the sea, and there, just rounding the white cliff, was that moving speck of whiteness sharing in the intense illumination of the moonlight, which even as she looked disappeared, going out of sight in a minute as if it had been a cloud or a dream.
“Have they got ’em, Katie? and what were you doing there at this time of night, out on the lawn in your—— George!” cried the old man—“in your ball finery? Have you just come back? Why, it’s near five in the morning. What’s the meaning of all this? Is Stella in her bed safe? And what in the name of wonder are you doing here?”
“Papa,” said Katherine in sheer disability to enter on the real subject, “you have shot the woman.”
“Damn the woman!” he cried.
“And there were no burglars,” she said with a sob. The cold, moral and physical, had got into her very soul. She drew her fur cloak more closely about her, but it seemed to give no warmth, and then she dropped upon her knees by the cold fireplace, in which, as in all the rest, there was nothing but the ashes of last night’s fire. Mr. Tredgold stood leaning on the mantel-piece, and he was cold too. He bade her tell him in a moment what was the matter, and what she had been doing out of the house at this hour of the night—with a tremulous roar.
“Papa! oh, how can I tell you! It is Stella—Stella——”
“What!” he cried. “Stella ill? Stella ill? Send for the doctor. Call up Simmons. What is the matter with the child? Is it anything bad that you look so distracted? Good Lord—my Stella!”
“Oh, have patience, sir,” said Mrs. Simmons, coming in with wood to make a fire; “there’ll be news of her by the morning—sure there’ll be news by the morning. Miss Katherine have done everything. And the sea is just like a mill-pond, and her own gentlemen to see to her——”
“The sea?” cried the old man. “What has the sea to do with my Stella?” He aimed a clumsy blow at the housekeeper, kneeling in front of the fire, with the butt end of the gun he still had in his hand, in his unreflecting rage. “You old hag! what do you know about my Stella?” he cried.
Mrs. Simmons did not feel the blow which Katherine diverted, but she was wounded by the name, and rose up with dignity, though not before she had made a cheerful blaze. “I meant to have brought you some tea, Miss Katherine, but if Master is going on with his abuse—— He did ought to think a little bit of you as are far more faithful. What do I know—more than that innocent lamb does of all their goings on?”
“Katie,” cried Mr. Tredgold, “put that wretched woman out by the shoulders. And why don’t you go to your sister? Doesn’t Stella go before everything? Have you sent for the doctor? Where’s the doctor? And can’t you tell me what is the matter with my child?”
“If I’m a wretched woman,” cried Mrs. Simmons, “I ain’t fit to be at the head of your servants, Mr. Tredgold; and I’m quite willing to go this day month, sir, for it’s a hard place, though very likely better now Miss Stella’s gone. As for Miss Stella, sir, it’s no doctor, but maybe a clergyman as she is wanting; for she is off with her gentleman as sure as I am standing here.”
Mr. Tredgold gave an inarticulate cry, and felt vaguely for the gun which was still within his arm; but he missed hold of it and it fell on the floor, where the loaded barrel went off, scattering small shot into all the corners. Mrs. Simmons flew from the room with a conviction, which never left her, that she had been shot at, to meet the trembling household flocking from all quarters to know the meaning of this second report. Katherine, whose nerves were nearly as much shaken as those of Mrs. Simmons, and who could not shut out from her mind the sensation that some one must have been killed, shut the door quickly, she hardly knew why; and then she came back to her father, who was lying back very pale, and looking as if he were the person wounded, on the cushions of his great chair.
“What—what—does she mean?” he half said, half looked. “Is—is—it true?”
“Oh, papa!” cried Katherine, kneeling before him, trying to take his hand. “I am afraid, I am afraid——”
He pushed her off furiously. “You—afraid!” Impossible to describe the scorn with which he repeated this word. “Is it—is it true?”
Katherine could make no reply, and he wanted none, for thereupon he burst into a roar of oaths and curses which beat down on her head like a hailstorm. She had never heard the like before, nor anything in the least resembling it. She tried to grasp at his hands, which he dashed into the air in his fury, right and left. She called out his name, pulled at his arm in the same vain effort. Then she sprang to her feet, crying out that she could not bear it—that it was a horror and a shame. Katherine’s cloak fell from her; she stood, a vision of white, with her uncovered shoulders and arms, confronting the old man, who, with his face distorted like that of a demoniac, sat volleying forth curses and imprecations. Katherine had never been so splendidly adorned as Stella, but a much smaller matter will make a girl look wonderful in all her whiteness shining, in the middle of the gloom against the background of heavy curtains and furniture, at such a moment of excitement and dismay. It startled the doctor as he came in, as with the effect of a scene in a play. And indeed he had a totally different impression of Katherine, who had always been kept a little in the shade of the brightness of Stella, from that day.
“Well,” he said, coming in, energetic but calm, into the midst of all this agitation, with a breath of healthful freshness out of the night, “what is the matter here? I have seen the woman, Miss Katherine, and she is really not hurt at all. If it had touched her eyes, though, it might have been bad enough. Hullo! the gun again—gone off of itself this time, eh? I hope you are not hurt—nor your father.”
“We are in great trouble,” said Katherine. “Papa has been very much excited. Oh, I am so glad—so glad you have come, doctor! Papa——”
“Eh? what’s the matter? Come, Mr. Tredgold, you must get into bed—not a burglar about, I assure you, and the man on the alert. What do you say? Oh, come, come, my friend, you mustn’t swear.”
To think he should treat as a jest that torrent of oaths that had made Katherine tremble and shrink more than anything else that had happened! It brought her, like a sharp prick, back to herself.
“Don’t speak to me, d—— you,” cried the old man. “D—— you all—d——”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “cursed be the whole concern, I know—and a great relief to your mind, I shouldn’t wonder. But now there’s been enough of that and you must get to bed.”
He made Katherine a sign to go away, and she was thankful beyond expression to do so, escaping into her own room, where there was a fire, and where the head housemaid, very serious, waited to help her to undress—“As Stevens, you are aware, Miss Katherine, ’as gone away.” The door of the other room was open, the gleam of firelight visible within. Oh, was it possible—was it possible that Stella was not there, that she was gone away without a sign, out on the breadths of the moonlit sea, from whence she might never come again? Katherine had not realised this part of the catastrophe till now. “I think I can manage by myself, Thompson,” she said faintly; “don’t let me keep you out of bed.”
“Oh, there’s no question of bed now for us, Miss,” said Thompson with emphasis; “it’s only an hour or two earlier than usual, that’s all. We’ll get the more forwarder with our work—if any one can work, with messengers coming and going, and news arriving, and all this trouble about Miss Stella. I’m sure, for one, I couldn’t close my eyes.”
Katherine vaguely wondered within herself if she were of more common clay than Thompson, as she had always been supposed to be of more common clay than her sister; for she felt that she would be very glad to close her eyes and forget for a moment all this trouble. She said in a faint voice, “We do not know anything about Miss Stella, Thompson, as yet. She may have gone—up to Steephill with Lady Jane.”
“Oh, I know, Miss, very well where she’s gone. She’s gone to that big ship as sails to-morrow with all the soldiers. How she could do it, along of all those men, I can’t think. I’m sure I couldn’t do it,” cried Thompson. “Oh, I had my doubts what all them notes and messages was coming to, and Stevens that proud she wouldn’t speak a word to nobody. Well, I always thought as Stevens was your maid, Miss Katherine, as you’re the eldest; but I don’t believe she have done a thing for you.”
“Oh, she has done all I wanted. I don’t like very much attendance. Now that you have undone these laces, you may go. Thank you very much, Thompson, but I really do not want anything more.”
“I’ll go and get you some tea, Miss Katherine,” the woman said. Another came to the door before she had been gone a minute. They were all most eager to serve the remaining daughter of the house, and try to pick up a scrap of news, or to state their own views at the same time. This one put in her head at the door and said in a hoarse confidential whisper, “Andrews could tell more about it than most, Miss, if you’d get hold of him.”
“Andrews!” said Katherine.
“He always said he was Miss Stella’s man, and he’s drove her a many places—oh, a many places—as you never knowed of. You just ast him where he took her yesterday mornin’, Miss?”
At this point Thompson came back, and drove the other skurrying away.
When Katherine went back, in the warm dressing-gown which was so comfortable, wrapping her round like a friend, to her father’s room, she found the old man in bed, very white and tremulous after his passion, but quiet, though his lips still moved and his cruel little red eyes shone. Katherine had never known before that they were cruel eyes, but the impression came upon her now with a force that made her shiver; they were like the eyes of a wild creature, small and impotent, which would fain have killed but could not—with a red glare in them, unwinking, fixed, full of malice and fury. The doctor explained to her, standing by the fireplace, what he had done; while Katherine, listening, saw across the room those fiery small eyes watching the conversation as if they could read what it was in her face. She could not take her own eyes away, nor refuse to be investigated by that virulent look.
“I have given him a strong composing draught. He’ll go to sleep presently, and the longer he sleeps the better. He has got his man with him, which is the best thing for him; and now about you, Miss Katherine.” He took her hand with that easy familiarity of the medical man which his science authorises, and in which there is often as much kindness as science. “What am I to do for you?”
“Oh, nothing, doctor, unless you can suggest something. Oh, doctor, it is of no use trying to conceal it from you—my sister is gone!” She melted suddenly, not expecting them at all, thinking herself incapable of them—into tears.
“I know, I know,” he said. “It is a great shock for you, it is very painful; but if, as I hear, he was violently against the marriage, and she was violently determined on it, was not something of the kind to be expected? You know your sister was very much accustomed to her own way.”
“Oh, doctor, how can you say that!—as if you took it for granted—as if it was not the most terrible thing that could happen! Eloped, only imagine it! Stella! in her ball dress, and with that man!”
“I hope there is nothing very bad about the man,” said the doctor with hesitation.
“And how are we to get her back? The ship sails to-morrow. If she is once carried away in the ship, she will never, never—— Oh, doctor, can I go? who can go? What can we do? Do tell me something, or I will go out of my senses,” she cried.
“Is there another room where we can talk? I think he is going to sleep,” said the doctor.
Katherine, in her distress, had got beyond the power of the terrible eyes on the bed, which still gleamed, but fitfully. Her father did not notice her as she went out of the room. And by this time the whole house was astir—fires lighted in all the rooms—to relieve the minds of the servants, it is to be supposed, for nobody knew why. The tray that had been carried to her room was brought downstairs, and there by the perturbed fire of a winter morning, burning with preternatural vigilance and activity as if eager to find out what caused it, she poured out the hot tea for the doctor, and he ate bread and butter with the most wholesome and hearty appetite—which was again a very curious scene.
The Tredgolds were curiously without friends. There was no uncle, no intimate to refer to, who might come and take the lead in such an emergency. Unless Katherine could have conducted such inquiries herself, or sent a servant, there was no one nearer than the doctor, or perhaps the vicar, who had always been so friendly. He and she decided between them that the doctor should go off at once, or at least as soon as there was a train to take him, to the great ship which was to embark the regiment early that morning, to discover whether Sir Charles Somers was there; while the vicar, whom he could see and inform in the meantime, should investigate the matter at home and at Steephill. The gardener, a trustworthy man, had, as soon as his wife was seen to be “out of danger,” as they preferred to phrase it—“scarcely hurt at all,” as the doctor said—been sent off to trace the Stella, driving in a dog-cart to Bunbridge, which was the nearest port she was likely to put in at. By noon the doctor thought they would certainly have ascertained among them all that was likely to be ascertained. He tried to comfort Katherine’s mind by an assurance that no doubt there would be a marriage, that Somers, though he had not a good character, would never—but stopped with a kind of awe, perceiving that Katherine had no suspicion of the possibility of any other ending, and condemning himself violently as a fool for putting any such thought into her head; but he had not put any such thought in her head, which was incapable of it. She had no conception of anything that could be worse than the elopement. He hastened to take refuge in something she did understand. “All this on one condition,” he said, “that you go to bed and try to sleep. I will do nothing unless you promise this, and you can do nothing for your sister. There is nothing to be done; gazing out over the sea won’t bring the yacht back. You must promise me that you will try to go to sleep. You will if you try.”
“Oh, yes, I will go to sleep,” Katharine said. She reflected again that she was of commoner clay than Thompson, who could not have closed an eye.