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.