IT was afterwards discovered that Stella had calculated her elopement in a way which justified most perfectly the unwilling applause elicited from her father—that she was a chip of the old block. She had over-decorated herself, as had been remarked, it now appeared, by everybody at the ball, on the night of her flight, wearing all the diamonds she had got from her father as an equivalent for her lover—and other things besides, everything she had that was valuable. It was ridiculous enough to see a girl blazing in all those diamonds; but to have her pearl necklace as well, adjusted as an ornament on her bodice, and bracelets enough to go up almost to the elbow, was more absurd still, and Katherine, it now appeared, was the only person who had not observed this excess of jewellery. She remembered now vaguely that she had felt Stella to be more radiant, more dazzling than ever, and had wondered with a sort of dull ache whether it was want of heart, whether it was over-excitement, or what it was which made her sister’s appearance and aspect so brilliant on the very eve of her parting from her lover. “Partings which press the life from out young hearts.” How was it possible that she could be so bright, so gay, so full of life, and he going away? She had felt this, but she had not noticed, which was strange, the extraordinary number of Stella’s bracelets, or the manner in which her pearls were fastened upon the bosom of her dress. This was strange, but due chiefly perhaps to the fact that Stella had not shown herself, as usual, for her sister’s admiration, but had appeared in a hurry rather late, and already wrapped in her cloak.
It was found, however, on examining her drawers, that Stella had taken everything she had which was of any value. It was also discovered later that she had taken advantage of her father’s permission to get as many new frocks as she pleased—always to make up for the loss of Charlie—by ordering for herself an ample trousseau, which had been sent to await her to a London hotel. She had all these things now and the lover too, which was so brilliant a practical joke that it kept the regiment in laughter for a year; but was not so regarded at home, though Mr. Tredgold himself was not able to refrain from a certain admiration when he became fully aware of it, as has been seen. It afflicted Katherine, however, with a dull, enduring pain in the midst of her longing for her sister and her sense of the dreadful vacancy made by Stella’s absence. The cheerful calculation, the peaceful looks with which Stella had hid all her wiles and preparations gave her sister a pang, not acute but profound—a constant ache which took away all the spring of her life. Even when she tried to escape from it, making to herself all those banal excuses which are employed in such circumstances—about love, to which everything is permitted, and the lover’s entreaties, to which nothing can be refused, and the fact that she had to live her own life, not another’s, and was obeying the voice of Nature in choosing for herself—all these things, which Katherine presented to herself as consolations, were over and over again refused. If Stella had run away in her little white frock and garden hat, her sister could have forgiven her; but the trousseau, the maid, the diamonds, even the old pearls which had been given to both of them, and still remained the chief of Katherine’s possessions—that Stella should have settled and arranged all that was more than Katherine could bear. She locked away her own pearls, with what she felt afterwards to be a very absurd sentiment, and vowed that she would never wear them again. There seemed a sort of insult in the addition of that girlish decoration to all her other ornaments. But this, the reader will perceive, was very high-flown on Katherine’s part.
A day or two after this tremendous crisis, which, I need not say, was by far the most delightful public event which had occurred in Sliplin for centuries, and which moved the very island to its centre, Lady Jane called with solemnity at the Cliff. Lady Jane was better dressed on this occasion than I believe she had ever been seen to be in the memory of men. She was attired in black brocade with a train, and wore such a mantle as everybody said must have been got for the occasion, since it was like nothing that had ever been seen on Lady Jane’s shoulders before. The furs, too, were unknown to Sliplin; perhaps she wore them in more favoured places, perhaps she had borrowed them for the occasion. The reason of all this display was beyond the divination of Katherine, who received her visitor half with the suppressed resentment which she felt she owed to everyone who could be supposed privy to Stella’s plans, and half with the wistful longing for an old friend, a wiser and more experienced person, to console herself. Katherine had abandoned the young ladies’ room, with all its double arrangements and suggestions of a life that was over. She sat in the large drawing-room, among the costly, crowded furniture, feeling as if, though less expensive, she was but one of them—a daughter needed, like the Italian cabinets, for the due furnishing of the house.
Lady Jane came in, feeling her way between the chairs and tables. It was appropriate that so formal a visit should be received in this formal place. She shook hands with Katherine, who held back visibly from the usual unnecessary kiss. It marked at once the difference, and that the younger woman felt herself elevated by her resentment, and was no longer to be supposed to be in any way at Lady Jane’s feet.
“How do you do?” said Lady Jane, carrying out the same idea. “How is your father? I am glad to hear that he has, on the whole, not suffered in health—nor you either, Katherine, I hope?”
“I don’t know about suffering in health. I am well enough,” the girl said.
“I perceive,” said Lady Jane, “by your manner that you identify me somehow with what has happened. That is why I have come here to-day. You must feel I don’t come as I usually do. In ordinary circumstances I should probably have sent for you to come to me. Katherine, I can see that you think I’m somehow to blame, in what way, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I have never expressed any blame. I don’t know that I have ever thought anyone was to blame—except——”
“Except—except themselves. You are right. They are very hot-headed, the one as much as the other. I don’t mean to say that he—he is a sort of relation of mine—has not asked my advice. If he has done so once he has done it a hundred times, and I can assure you, Katherine, all that I have said has been consistently ‘Don’t ask me.’ I have told him a hundred times that I would not take any responsibility. I have said to him, ‘I can’t tell how you will suit each other, or whether you will agree, or anything.’ I have had nothing to do with it. I felt, as he was staying in my house at the time, that you or your father might be disposed to blame me. I assure you it would be very unjust. I knew no more of what was going on on Wednesday last—no more than—than Snap did,” cried Lady Jane. Snap was the little tyrant of the fields at Steephill, a small fox terrier, and kept everything under his control.
“I can only say that you have never been blamed, Lady Jane. Papa has never mentioned your name, and as for me——”
“Yes, Katherine, you; it is chiefly you I think of. I am sure you have thought I had something to do with it.”
Katherine made a pause. She was in a black dress. I can scarcely tell why—partly, perhaps, from some exaggerated sentiment—actually because Mrs. Simmons, who insisted on attending to her till someone could be got to replace Stevens, had laid it out. And she was unusually pale. She had not in reality “got over” the incident so well as people appeared to hope.
“To tell the truth,” she said, “all the world has seemed quite insignificant to me except my sister. I have had so much to do thinking of her that I have had no time for anything else.”
“That’s not very complimentary to people that have taken so great an interest in you.” Lady Jane was quite discomposed by having the word insignificant applied to her. She was certainly not insignificant, whatever else she might be.
“Perhaps it is not,” Katherine said. “I have had a great deal to think of,” she added with a half appeal for sympathy.
“I dare say. Is it possible that you never expected it? Didn’t you see that night? All those jewels even might have told their story. I confess that I was vaguely in a great fright; but I thought you must have been in her confidence, Katherine, that is the truth.”
“I in her confidence! Did you think I would have helped her to—to—deceive everybody—to—give such a blow to papa?”
“Is it such a blow to your papa? I am told he has not suffered in health. Now I look at you again you are pale, but I don’t suppose you have suffered in health either. Katherine, don’t you think you are overdoing it a little? She has done nothing that is so very criminal. And your own conduct was a little strange. You let her run off into the dark shrubberies to say farewell to him, as I am told, and never gave any alarm till you saw the yacht out in the bay, and must have known they were safe from any pursuit. I must say that a girl who has behaved like that is much more likely to have known all about it than an outsider like me!”
“I did not know anything about it,” cried Katherine—“nothing! Stella did not confide in me. If she had done so—if she had told me——”
“Yes; what would you have done then?” Lady Jane asked with a certain air of triumph.
Katherine looked blankly at her. She was wandering about in worlds not realised. She had never asked herself that question. And yet perhaps her own conduct, her patience in that moonlight scene was more extraordinary in her ignorance than it would have been had she sympathised and known. The question took her breath away, and she had no answer to give.
“If she had told you that she had been married to Charlie Somers that morning; that he was starting for India next day; that whatever her duty to her father and yourself might have been (that’s nonsense; a girl has no duty to her sister), her duty to her husband came first then. If she had told you that at the last moment, Katherine, what would you have done?”
Katherine felt every possibility of reply taken from her. What could she have done? Supposing Stella that night—that night in the moonlight, which somehow seemed mixed up with everything—had whispered that in her ear, instead of the lie about wishing to bid Charlie farewell. What could she have done; what would she have done? With a gasp in her throat she looked helplessly at her questioner. She had no answer to make.
“Then how could you blame me?” cried Lady Jane, throwing off her wonderful furs, loosening her mantle, beginning, with her dress tucked up a little in front, to look more like herself. “What was to be done when they had gone and taken it into their own hands? You can’t separate husband and wife, though, Heaven knows, there are a great many that would be too thankful if you could. But there they were—married. What was to be done? I made sure when you would insist on driving home with her, Katherine, that she must have told you.”
“I was not expected, then, to drive home with her?” Katherine said sharply. “It was intended that I should know nothing—nothing at all.”
“I thought—I sincerely thought,” said Lady Jane, hanging her head a little, “that she would have told you then. I suppose she was angry at the delay.”
Katherine’s heart was very sore. She had been the one who knew nothing, from whom everything had been kept. It had been intended that she should be left at the ball while Stella stole off with her bridegroom; and her affectionate anxiety about Stella’s headache had been a bore, the greatest bore, losing so much time and delaying the escape. And shut up there with her sister, her closest friend, her inseparable companion of so many years, there had not been even a whisper of the great thing which had happened, which now stood between them and cut them apart for ever. Katherine, in her life of the secondary person, the always inferior, had learned unconsciously a great deal of self-repression; but it taxed all her powers to receive this blow full on her breast and make no sign. Her lips quivered a little; she clasped her hands tightly together; and a hot and heavy moisture, which made everything awry and changed, stood in her eyes.
“Was that how it was?” she said at last when she had controlled her voice to speak.
“Katherine, dear child, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Nobody thought that you would feel it——” Lady Jane added after a moment, “so much,” and put out her hand to lay it on Katherine’s tightly-clasped hands.
“Nobody thought of me, I imagine, at all,” said Katherine, withdrawing from this touch, and recovering herself after that bitter and blinding moment. “It would have been foolish to expect anything else. And it is perhaps a good thing that I was not tried—that I was not confided in. I might perhaps have thought of my duty to my father. But a woman who is married,” she added quickly, with an uncontrollable bitterness, “has, I suppose, no duties, except to the man whom—who has married her.”
“He must always come first,” said Lady Jane with a little solemnity. She was thunderstruck when Katherine, rising quickly to her feet and walking about the room, gave vent to Brabantio’s exclamation before the Venetian senators:
“Look to her, thou: have a quick eye to see.
She hath deceived her father and may thee.”
Lady Jane was not an ignorant woman for her rank and position. She had read the necessary books, and kept up a kind of speaking acquaintance with those of the day. But it may be excused to her, a woman of many occupations, if she did not remember whence this outburst came, and thought it exceedingly ridiculous and indeed of very doubtful taste, if truth must be told.
“I could not have thought you would be so merciless,” she said severely. “I thought you were a kind creature, almost too kind. It is easy to see that you have never been touched by any love-affair of your own.”
Katherine laughed—there seemed no other reply to this assumption—and came back and sat down quietly in her chair.
“Was that all, Lady Jane?” she said. “You came to tell me you had nothing to do with the step my sister has taken, and then that you knew all about it, and that it was only I who was left out.”
“You are a very strange girl, Katherine Tredgold. I excuse you because no doubt you have been much agitated, otherwise I should say you were very rude and impudent.” Lady Jane was gathering on again her panoply of war—her magnificent town-mantle, the overwhelming furs which actually belonged to her maid. “I knew nothing about the first step,” she said angrily. “I was as ignorant of the marriage as you were. Afterwards, I allow, they told me; and as there was nothing else to be done—for, of course, as you confess, a woman as soon as she is married has no such important duty as to her husband—I did not oppose the going away. I advised them to take you into their confidence; afterwards, I allow, for their sakes, I promised to keep you engaged, if possible, to see that you had plenty of partners and no time to think.”
Katherine was ashamed afterwards to remember how the prick of injured pride stung her more deeply than even that of wounded affection. “So,” she said, her cheeks glowing crimson, “it was to your artifice that I owed my partners! But I have never found it difficult to get partners—without your aid, Lady Jane!”
“You will take everything amiss, however one puts it,” said Lady Jane. And then there was a long pause, during which that poor lady struggled much with her wraps without any help from Katherine, who sat like stone and saw her difficulties without lifting so much as a little finger. “You are to be excused,” the elder lady added, “for I do not think you have been very well treated, though, to be sure, poor Stella must have felt there was very little sympathy likely, or she certainly would have confided in you. As for Charlie Somers——” Lady Jane gave an expressive wave of her hand, as if consenting that nothing was to be expected from him; then she dropped her voice and asked with a change of tone, “I don’t see why it should make any difference between you and me, Katherine. I have really had nothing to do with it—except at the very last. Tell me now, dear, how your father takes it? Is he very much displeased?”
“Displeased is a weak word, Lady Jane.”
“Well, angry then—enraged—any word you like; of course, for the moment no word will be strong enough.”
“I don’t think,” said Katherine, “that he will ever allow her to enter his house, or consent to see her again.”
“Good Heavens!” cried Lady Jane. “Then what in the world is to become of them? But I am sure you exaggerate—in the heat of the moment; and, of course, Katherine, I acknowledge you have been very badly used,” she said.