A RIVER-SEA between two widely separated banks, so calm that it was like a sea of oil bulging towards the centre from over-fullness; a big ship upon an even keel, moving along with almost imperceptible progress, the distant hazy banks gliding slowly past; the ease and relief of a long voyage over, not only on every face, but on every line of cordage; a bustle of happy people rushing up upon deck to see how near home they were, and of other people below crowding, bustling over portmanteaux to be packed, and all the paraphernalia of the voyage to be put away. It was a very curious scene to Katherine’s eyes, not to speak of the swarming dark figures everywhere—the Lascars, who were the crew, the gliding ayhas in their white wrappings. She was led to the cabin in which Stella, half-dressed, was standing in the midst of piles of clothes and other belongings, all thrown about in a confusion which it seemed impossible ever to reduce to order, with a box or two open and ready to receive the mass which never could be got in. She was so busy that she could not at first be got to understand that somebody from shore had come for her. And even then, though she gave a little cry and made a little plunge at Katherine, it was in the midst of a torrent of directions, addressed sometimes in English, sometimes in Hindostanee, to an English maid and a Hindoo woman who encumbered the small cabin with their presence. A pink-and-white—yet more white than pink—baby lay sprawling, half out of its garments, upon the red velvet steamboat couch. Katherine stood confused, disappointed, longing to take her sister to her heart, and longing to snatch up the little creature who was so new and so strange an element, yet suddenly caught, stopped, set down, in the exaltation of her love and eagerness by the deadly commonplace of the scene. Stella cried, with almost a shriek:
“You, Katherine! Is it possible?” and gave her a hurried kiss; and then, without drawing breath, called out to the women: “For goodness’ sake take care what you’re doing. That’s my best lace. And put all the muslins at the bottom—I sha’n’t want them here,” with a torrent of other directions in a strange tongue to the white-robed ayah in the background. Then—“Only wait,” Stella cried, “till I get a dress on. But there is never anything ready when I want it. Give me that gown—any gown—and look sharp, can’t you? I am never ready till half an hour after everybody. I never can get a thing to put on.”
“Don’t mind for to-day, Stella; anything will do for to-day. I have so much to tell you.”
“Oh!” said Stella, looking at her again, “I see. Your crape’s enough, Kate, without a word. So it’s all over? Well, perhaps it is for the best. It would have made me miserable if he had refused to see me. And Charlie would have insisted—and—— Poor papa! so he’s gone—really gone. Give me a handkerchief, quick! I was, of course, partly prepared. It’s not such a shock as it might have been.” A tear fell from Stella’s eyes upon the dress which her maid was arranging. She wiped it off carefully, and then her eyes. “You see how careful I have to be now-a-days,” she said; “I can’t have my dress spotted, I haven’t too many of them now. Poor papa! Well, it is a good thing it has happened when I have all the distractions of the journey to take off my mind. Have you done now fumbling? Pin my veil properly. Now I’ll go on deck with you, Katherine, and we’ll watch the ship getting in, and have our talk.”
“Mayn’t I kiss the baby first?” Katherine said. She had been looking at that new and wonderful thing over the chaos of the baggage, unable to get further than the cabin door.
“Oh, you’ll see the baby after. Already you’re beginning to think of the baby and not of me. I knew that was how it would be,” said Stella, pettishly. She stepped over an open box, dragging down a pile of muslins as she moved. “There’s no room to turn round here. Thank heaven we’ve done with it at last. Now, Kate—Kate, tell me; it will be the first thing Charlie will want to know. Did he relent to me at the last?”
“There is so much to tell you, Stella.”
“Yes—yes—about his illness and all. Poor papa! I am sure I am just as sorry as if I knew all about it already. But Kate, dear, just one word. Am I cut off in the will? That is what I want to know.”
“No,” said Katherine, “you are not cut off in the will.”
“Hurrah!” cried Stella, clapping her hands. It was but for one second, and then she quieted down. “Oh, we have had such a time,” she cried, “and Charlie always insinuating, when he didn’t say it outright, that it was my fault, for, of course, we never, never believed, neither he nor I, that papa would have held out. And so he did come to at the end? Well, it is very hard, very hard to have been kept out of it so long but I am glad we are to have what belongs to us now. Oh—h!” cried Stella, drawing a long breath as she emerged on deck, leading the way, “here’s the old Thames again, bless it, and the fat banks; and we’re at home, and have come into our money. Hurrah!”
“What are you so pleased about, Lady Somers? The first sight of ugly old England and her grey skies,” said someone who met them. The encounter sobered Stella, who paused a moment with a glance from her own coloured dress to Katherine’s crape, and a sudden sense of the necessities of the position.
“They aren’t very much to be pleased about, are they?” she said. “Will you find Charlie for me, please. Tell him my sister has come to meet us, and that there’s news which he will like to hear.”
“Stella,” cried Katherine, “there may not be much sorrow in your heart, yet I don’t think you should describe your own father’s death as something your husband will like to hear.”
“It is not papa’s death, bless you,” cried Stella, lightly. “Oh, look, they are getting out the ropes. We shall soon be there now—it is the money, to be sure. You have never been hard up for money, Kate, or you would know what it was. Look, there’s Charlie on the bridge with little Job; we call him Job because he’s always been such a peepy-weepy little fellow, always crying and cross for nothing at all; they say it was because I was in such a temper and misery when he was coming, about having no money, and papa’s cruelty. Charlie! That silly man has never found him, though he might have known he was on the bridge. Cha—arlie!” Stella made a tube of her two hands and shouted, and Katherine saw a tall man on the bridge over their heads turn and look down. He did not move, however, for some minutes till Stella’s gestures seemed to have awakened his curiosity. He came down then, very slowly, leading with much care an extremely small child, so small that it was curious to see him on his legs at all, who clung to his hand, and whom he lifted down the steep ladder stairs.
“Well,” he said, “what’s the matter now?” when he came within speaking distance. Katherine had scarcely known her sister’s husband in the days of his courtship. She had not seen him more than three or four times, and his image had not remained in her mind. She saw now a tall man a little the worse for wear, with a drooping moustache, and lips which drooped, too, at the corners under the moustache, with a look which was slightly morose—the air of a discontented, perhaps disappointed, man. His clothes were slightly shabby, perhaps because they were old clothes worn for the voyage, his hair and moustache had that rusty dryness which comes to hair which does not grow grey, and which gives a shabby air, also as of old clothes, to those natural appendages. The only attractive point about him was the child, the very, very small child which seemed to walk between his feet—so close did it cling to him, and so very low down.
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Stella. “Here is Kate come to bid us welcome home.”
“O—oh,” he said, and lifted his limp hat by the crown; “it’s a long time since we have met; I don’t know that I should have recognised you.” His eyes went from her hat to her feet with a curious inspection of her dress.
“Yes,” said Katherine, “you are right; it is so. My father is dead.”
A sudden glimmer sprang into his eyes and a redness to his face; it was as if some light had flashed up over them; he gave his wife a keen look. But decorum seemed more present with him than with Stella. He did not put any question. He said mechanically, “I am sorry,” and stood waiting, giving once more a glance at his wife.
“All Kate has condescended to tell me,” said Stella, “is that I am not out of the will. That’s the great thing, isn’t it? How much there’s for us she doesn’t say, but there’s something for us. Tell him, Kate.”
“There is a great deal for you,” Katherine said, quietly, “and a great deal to say and to tell you; but it is very public and very noisy here.”
The red light glowed up in Somers’ face. He lifted instinctively, as it seemed, the little boy at his feet into his arms, as if to control and sober himself. “We owe this,” he said, “no doubt to you, Miss Tredgold.”
“You would have owed it to me had it been in my power,” said Katherine, with one little flash of self-assertion, “but as it happens,” she added hastily, “you do not owe anything to me. Stella will be as rich as her heart can desire. Oh, can’t we go somewhere out of this noise, where I can tell you, Stella? Or, if we cannot, wait please, wait for the explanations. You have it; isn’t that enough? And may I not make acquaintance with the children? And oh, Stella, haven’t you a word for me?”
Stella turned round lightly and putting her arms round Katherine kissed her on both cheeks. “You dear old thing!” she said. And then, disengaging herself, “I hope you ordered me some mourning, Kate. How can I go anywhere in this coloured gown? Not to say that it is quite out of fashion and shabby besides. I suppose I must have crape—not so deep as yours, though, which is like a widow’s mourning. But crape is becoming to a fair complexion. Oh, he won’t have anything to say to you, don’t think it. He is a very cross, bad-tempered, uncomfortable little boy.”
“Job fader’s little boy,” said the pale little creature perched upon his father’s shoulder and dangling his small thin legs on Somers’ breast. He would indeed have nothing to say to Katherine’s overtures. When she put out her arms to him he turned round, and, clasping his arms round his father’s head, hid his own behind it. Meanwhile a look of something which looked like vanity—a sort of sublimated self-complacence—stole over Sir Charles’ face. He was very fond of the child; also, he was very proud of the fact that the child preferred him to everybody else in the world.
It was with the most tremendous exertion that the party at last was disembarked, the little boy still on his father’s shoulder, the baby in the arms of the ayah. The countless packages and boxes, which to the last moment the aggrieved and distracted maid continued to pack with items forgotten, came slowly to light one after another, and were disposed of in the train, or at least on shore. Stella had forgotten everything except the exhilaration of knowing that she had come into her fortune as she made her farewells all round. “Oh, do you know? We have had great news; we have come into our money,” she told several of her dearest friends. She was in a whirl of excitement, delight, and regrets. “We have had such a good time, and I’m so sorry to part; you must come and see us,” she said to one after another. Everybody in the ship was Stella’s friend. She had not done anything for them, but she had been good-humoured and willing to please, and she was Stella! This was Katherine’s involuntary reflection as she stood like a shadow watching the crowd of friends, the goodbyes and hopes of future meeting, the kisses of the ladies and close hand-clasping of the men. Nobody was so popular as Stella. She was Stella, she was born to please; wherever she went, whatever she did, it was always the same. Katherine felt proud of her sister and subdued by her, and a little amused at the same time. Stella—with her husband by her side, the pale baby crowing in its dark nurse’s arms, and the little boy clinging round his father, the worried English maid, the serene white-robed ayah, the soldier-servant curt and wooden, expressing no feeling, and the heaps of indiscriminate baggage which formed a sort of entrenchment round her—was a far more important personage than Katherine could ever be. Stella did not require the wealth which was now to be poured down at her feet to make her of consequence. Without it, in her present poverty, was she not the admired of all beholders—the centre of a world of her own? Her sister looked on with a smile, with a certain admiration, half pleased with the impartiality (after all) of the world, half jarred by the partiality of nature. Her present want of wealth did not discredit Stella, but nature somehow discredited Katherine and put her aside, whatever her qualities might be. She looked on without any active feeling in these shades of sentiment, neutral tinted, like the sky and the oily river, and the greyness of the air, with a thread of interest and amusement running through, as if she were looking on at the progress of a story—a story in which the actors interested her, but in which there was no close concern of her own.
“Kate!” she heard Stella call suddenly, her voice ringing out (she had never had a low voice) over the noise and bustle. “Kate, I forgot to tell you, here’s an old friend of yours. There she is, there she is, Mr.——. Go and speak to her for yourself.”
Katherine did not hear the name, and had not an idea who the old friend was. She turned round with a faint smile on her face.
Well! There was nothing wonderful in the fact that he had come home with them. He had, it turned out afterwards, taken his passage in the Aurungzebe without knowing that the Somers were going by it, or anything about them. It would be vain to deny that Katherine was startled, but she did not cling to anything for support, nor—except by a sudden change of colour, for which she was extremely angry with herself—betray any emotion. Her heart gave a jump, but then it became quite quiet again. “We seem fated to meet in travelling,” she said, “and nowhere else.” Afterwards she was very angry with herself for these last words. She did not know why she said them—to round off her sentence perhaps, as a writer often puts in words which he does not precisely mean. They seemed to convey a complaint or a reproach which she did not intend at all.
“I have been hoping,” he said, “since ever I knew your sister was on board that perhaps you might come, but——” He looked at Katherine in her mourning, and then over the crowd to Stella, talking, laughing, full of spirit and movement. “I was going to say that I—feared some sorrow had come your way, but when I look at Lady Somers——”
“It is that she does not realise it,” said Katherine. “It is true—my father is dead.”
He stood looking at her again, his countenance changing from red to brown (which was now its natural colour). He seemed to have a hundred things to say, but nothing would come to his lips. At last he stammered forth, with a little difficulty it appeared, “I am—sorry—that anything could happen to bring sorrow to you.”
Katherine only answered him with a little bow. He was not sorry, nor was Stella sorry, nor anyone else involved. She felt with a keen compunction that to make up for this universal satisfaction over her father’s death she ought to be sorry—more sorry than words could say.
“It makes a great difference in my life,” she said simply, and while he was still apparently struggling for something to say, the Somers party got into motion and came towards the gangway, by which most of the passengers had now landed. The little army pushed forward, various porters first with numberless small packets and bags, then the man and worried maid with more, then the ayah with the baby, then Lady Somers, who caught Katherine by the arm and pushed through with her, putting her sister in front, with the tall figure of the husband and the little boy seated on his shoulder bringing up the rear. Job’s little dangling legs were on a level with Stanford’s shoulder, and kicked him with a friendly farewell as they passed, while Job’s father stretched out a large hand and said, “Goodbye, old fellow; we’re going to the old place in the Isle of Wight. Look us up some time.” Katherine heard these words as she landed, with Stella’s hand holding fast to her arm. She was amused, too, faintly to hear her sister’s husband’s instant adoption of the old place in the Isle of Wight. Sir Charles did not as yet know any more than that Stella was not cut off, that a great deal was coming to her. Stella had not required any further information. She had managed to say to him that of course to go to the Cliff would be the best thing, now that it was Katherine’s. It would be a handy headquarters and save money, and not be too far from town.
The party was not fatigued as from an inland journey. They had all bathed and breakfasted in such comfort as a steamship affords, so that there was no need for any delay in proceeding to their journey’s end. And the bustle and the confusion, and the orders to the servants, and the arrangements about the luggage, and the whining of Job on his father’s shoulder, and the screams of the baby when it was for a moment moved from its nurse’s arms, and the sharp remarks of Sir Charles and the continual talk of Stella—so occupied every moment that Katherine found herself at home again with this large and exigent party before another word on the important subject which was growing larger and larger in her mind could be said.