CHAPTER LIV.
THE news which had made so much commotion in the Hall came from the Rectory in a very simple way. Edith and Minnie had come up to call. Their mother rather wished them to do so frequently. She urged upon them that it might demand a little sacrifice of personal feeling, yet that personal feeling was always a thing that ought to be sacrificed—it was a good moral exercise, irrespective of everything else; and Miss Courtenay was older, and, no doubt, more sensible than when she went away—not likely to shock them as she did then—and that it would be good for her to see a good deal of them, and pleasant for people to know that they went a good deal to the Hall. All this mass of reasoning was scarcely required, yet Edith and Minnie, on the whole, were glad to know that it was their duty to visit Kate. They both felt deeply that a thing which you do as a duty takes a higher rank than a thing you do as a pleasure; and their visits might have taken that profane character had not all this been impressed upon them in time.
‘Oh! Miss Courtenay, we have such news,’ said Edith; and Minnie added, in a parenthesis (‘We are so happy!’) ‘Dear Bertie is coming home for a few days. He wrote that he was so busy, he could not possibly come; but papa insisted’ (‘I am so glad papa insisted,’ from Minnie, who was the accompaniment), ‘and so he is coming—just for two days. He is going to bring us the things he bought for us at Florence.’ (‘Oh! I do so want to see them!’) ‘You saw a great deal of him at Florence, did you not?’
‘Yes, we saw him—a great many times,’ said Kate, noticing, under her eyelids, how Ombra suddenly caught her breath.
‘He used to mention you in his letters at first—only at first. I suppose you made too many friends to see much of each other.’ (‘Bertie is such a fellow for society.’) ‘He is reading up now for the bar. Perhaps you don’t know that he has given up the church?’
‘I think I heard him say so,’ answered Kate.
And then there was a little pause. The Hardwick girls thought their great news was received very coldly, and were indignant at the want of interest shown in ‘our Bertie!’ After awhile Edith explained, with some dignity:
‘Of course my brother is very important to us’ (‘He is just the very nicest boy that ever was!’ from Minnie), ‘though we can’t expect others to take the same interest——’
Kate had looked up by instinct, and she caught Ombra’s eyes, which were opened in a curious little stare, with an elevation of the eyebrows which spoke volumes. Not the same interest! Kate’s heart grew a little sick—she could not tell why—and she turned away, making some conventional answer, she did not know what. A pause again, and then Mrs. Anderson asked, without looking up from her work:
‘Is Mr. Hardwick coming to the Rectory alone?’
‘Oh, yes! At least we think so,’ said the two girls in one.
‘I ask because he and his cousin were so inseparable,’ said Mrs. Anderson, smiling. ‘We used to say that when one was visible the other could not be far off.’
‘Oh! you mean Bertie Eldridge,’ said Edith. ‘No, I am sure he is not coming. Papa does not like our Bertie to be so much with him as he has been. We do not think Bertie Eldridge a nice companion for him,’ said the serious young woman, who rather looked down upon the boys, and echoed her parents’ sentiments, without any sense of inappropriateness. ‘No, we don’t at all like them to be so much together,’ said Minnie. Again Kate turned round instinctively. This time Ombra was smiling, almost laughing, with quite a gay light in her eyes.
‘Of course that is a subject beyond me,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘They seemed much attached to each other.’ And then the matter dropped, and the girls entered upon parish news, which left them full scope for prattle. Edith was engaged to be married to a neighbouring clergyman, and, accordingly, she was more than ever clerical and parochial in all her ways of thinking; while Minnie looked forward with a flutter, half of fear and half of excitement, to becoming the eldest Miss Hardwick, and having to manage the Sunday School and decorate the church by herself.
‘What shall I do when Edith is married?’ was the burden of all the talk she ventured upon alone. ‘Mamma is so much occupied, she can’t give very much assistance,’ she said. ‘Oh! dear Miss Courtenay, if you would come and help me sometimes when Edith goes away!’
‘I will do anything I can,’ said Kate, shortly. And the two girls withdrew at last, somewhat chilled by the want of sympathy. Had they but known what excitement, what commotion, their simple news carried into that still volcano of a house!
He was to come in a week. Kate schooled herself to be very strong, and think nothing of it, but her heart grew sick when she thought of the Florence scenes all over again—perhaps worse, for at Florence at least there were two. And to Ombra the day passed with feverish haste, and all her pretences at tranquillity and good humour began to fail in the rising tide of excitement.
‘I shall be better again when he has gone away,’ she said to her mother. ‘But, oh! how can I—how can I take it quietly? Could you, if you were in my position? Think of all the misery and uncertainty. And he must be coming for a purpose. He would not come unless he had something to say.’
‘Oh! Ombra, if there was anything, why should it not be said in a letter?’ cried her mother. ‘You have letters often enough. I wish you would just put them in your pocket, and not read them at the breakfast table. You keep me in terror lest Kate should see the handwriting or something. After all our precautions——’
‘Can you really suppose that Kate is so ignorant?’ said Ombra. ‘Do you think she does not know well enough whom my letters are from?’
‘Then, for God’s sake, if you think so, let me tell her, and be done with this horrible secret,’ cried her mother. ‘It kills me to keep up this concealment; and if you think she knows, why, why should it go on?’
‘You are so impetuous, mamma!’ said Ombra, with a smile. ‘There is a great difference between her guessing and direct information procured from ourselves. And how can we tell what she might do? She would interfere; it is her nature. You could not trust anything so serious to such a child.’
‘Kate is not a child now,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘And oh! Ombra, if you will consider how ungrateful, how untrue, how unkind it is——’
‘Stop, mamma!’ cried Ombra, with a flush of angry colour. ‘That is enough—that is a great deal too much—ungrateful! Are we expected to be grateful to Kate? You will tell me next to look up to her, to reverence her——’
‘Ombra, you have always been hard upon Kate.’
‘It is not my fault,’ cried Ombra, suddenly giving way to a little burst of weeping. ‘If you consider how different her position is—— All this wretched complication—everything that has happened lately—would have been unnecessary if I had had the same prospects as Kate. Everything would have gone on easily then. There would have been no need for concealment—no occasion for deceit.’
‘That is not Kate’s fault,’ said Mrs. Anderson, who was at her wit’s end.
‘Oh! mother, mother, don’t worry me out of my senses. Did I say it was Kate’s fault? It is no one’s fault. But all we poor miserables must suffer as if it were. And there is no help for it; and it is so hard, so hard to bear!’
‘Ombra, I told you to count the cost,’ said Mrs. Anderson. ‘I told you it would be no easy business. You thought you had strength of mind for the struggle then.’
‘And it turns out that I have no strength of mind,’ cried Ombra, almost wildly. And then she started up and went to her own room again, where her mother could hear her sighing and moaning till she fell asleep.
These night scenes took away from Mrs. Anderson’s enjoyment of the great mansion and the many servants, and that luxurious room which Kate’s affection had selected for her aunt. She sat over the fire when she was left alone, and would wonder and ask herself what would come of it, what could ever come of it, and whether it was possible that she should ever be happy again. She looked back with a longing which she could not subdue upon the humble days at Shanklin, when they were all so happy. The little tiny cottage, the small rooms, all rose up before her. The drawing-room itself was not half so large as Mrs. Anderson’s bed-room at Langton-Courtenay. But what happy days these had been! She was not an old woman, though she was Ombra’s mother. It was not as if life was nearly over for her, as if she could look forward to a speedy end of all her troubles. And she knew better than Ombra that somehow or other the world always exacts punishment, whether immediately or at an after period, from those who transgress its regulations. She said to herself mournfully that things do not come right in life as they do in story-books. Her daughter had taken a weak and foolish step, and she too had shared in the folly by consenting to it. She had done so, she could not explain to herself why, in a moment of excitement. And though Ombra was capable of hoping that some wonderful chain of accidents might occur to solve every difficulty, Mrs. Anderson was not young enough, or inexperienced enough, to think anything of the kind possible. Accidents happen, she was aware, when you do not want them, not when you do. When a catastrophe is foreseen and calculated upon, it never happens. In such a case, the most rotten vessel that ever sunk in a storm will weather a cyclone. Fate would not interfere to help; and when Mrs. Anderson considered how slowly and steadily the ordinary course of nature works, and how little it is likely to suit itself to any pressure of human necessity, her heart grew sick within her. She had a higher opinion of her niece than Ombra had, and she knew that Kate would have been a tower of strength and protection to them, besides all the embarrassment that would have been avoided, and all the pain and shame of deceit. But what could she do? The young people were stronger than she, and had overridden all her remonstrances; and now all that could be done was to carry on as steadily as possible—to conceal the secret—to hope that something might happen, unlikely though she knew that was.
Thus was this gentle household distracted and torn asunder; for there is no such painful thing in the world to carry about with one as a secret;—it will thrust itself to the surface, notwithstanding the most elaborate attempts to heap trifles and the common routine of life over it. It is like a living thing, and moves, or breathes, or cries out at the wrong moment, disclosing itself under the most elaborate covers; and finally, howsoever people may deceive themselves, it is never really hidden. While we are throwing the embroidered veil over it, and flattering ourselves that it is buried in concealment dark as night, our friends all the time are watching it throb under the veil, and wondering with a smile or a sigh, according to their dispositions, how we can be so foolish as to believe that it is hidden from them. The best we can do for our secret is to confuse the reality of it, most often making it look a great deal worse than it is. And this was what Ombra and her mother were doing, while poor Kate looked on wistful, seeing all their transparent manœuvres; and a choking, painful sense of concealment was in the air—a feeling that any moment some volcano might burst forth.