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AS for Kate and Dr Mitford, they did not know very well what to say to each other. “What a charming day!” the girl said at intervals; “and what a pretty country! I never knew it until I took that unfortunate ride.”
“Don’t speak of that,” said the old gentleman; “at least don’t speak of it so. It was a most fortunate ride, I am sure, for us.”
“It makes me giddy when I think of it,” said Kate, shutting her eyes.
“You are very fond of riding, I suppose? I am always rather nervous when I see a lady on a spirited horse. You are very charming riders, and very full of courage, and all that,” said the Doctor, who was himself considerably bothered by the mild animal he was driving; “but it requires a man’s hand, my dear Miss Crediton. There are some things, believe me, that require a man’s hand.”
“Yes, no doubt,” said Kate, politely, longing all the time to take the reins into her own small nervous fingers. Dr Mitford had a nice little white soft hand—a clergyman’s hand—without any bone or fibre in it. “We made up our minds quite suddenly,” she went on, “that we would go back from Humbledon to Camelford, riding. I had often heard of Fanshawe Regis, but I never saw it before.”
“Most people have heard of Fanshawe Regis,” said the Doctor. “I consider my library one of the lions of the country—not that it is so very old, only Elizabethan, or, at the farthest, Henry the Seventh; but household architecture is a thing by itself. We expect the Archæological Society to hold its next meeting at Camelford, and then I hope much light may be thrown upon our antiquities. We shall make an excursion to Dulchester, Miss Crediton, and you must come with us there.”
“Oh, I am sure I am much obliged,” said Kate.
“You would enjoy that,” said Dr Mitford. “Downy is sure to be there from Oxford, and I should not wonder if he gave a lecture on it. He is one of the very great guns. He understands more about it than almost any man in England, I must say, to do him justice. But almost is not all, my dear Miss Crediton; and when you see a man setting himself up for an authority in presence of others who——” Here the Doctor stopped, and laughed a conscious complacent laugh; by which Kate perceived that Dr Mitford himself was a greater authority still, or at least thought he was.
“It is very funny,” said Kate, “but I shall be better off going with you than if I had half-a-dozen archæological societies. I feel quite sure of that.”
“Well, well, we must not brag,” said Dr Mitford, waving his white hand softly. “This camp, you must know, was one of the camps of Agricola, which he made on his journey northwards. It is constructed——”
And so the narrative went on. Kate kept looking up at him with her bright eyes, and said yes, and said no, and made herself very agreeable; but I cannot undertake to say that she was much the better for it. In the first place, she took no interest whatever in Roman camps, and then she had a good deal on her mind. What was John about all this time? Why did not he manage to get into the phaeton in his father’s place, and drive her? If the horse had not been the meekest and most long-suffering of animals, Kate felt that there must have been another running away, and another accident. And her recent experience had made her nervous. When she had received an immense deal of information about the castrum which she was going with so little enthusiasm to visit, she suddenly caught a glimpse of a group of turrets among the trees, and gave a start, which made Dr Mitford and his horse swerve aside, and shook the hood of the phaeton so that it nearly descended upon the party, burying them alive.
“Oh, there is Westbrook, where the Huntleys live!” cried Kate. “I beg your pardon, Dr Mitford, I am sure. Mrs Mitford said we were to call. Don’t you think we had better go now, in case they should be out? There was a message, you know, that you were to give.”
“Oh, about croquet,” said the Doctor, and his brow was slightly ruffled. He would not allow, even to himself, that his instruction was slighted; but still he felt that she had been able to see the towers of Westbrook at the very moment when he was affording her every information. But he was too polite to make any objection. Westbrook was a very fine house, but its turrets were new, and its wealth had been made, not inherited, for which half the country said, “So much the more credit to the Huntleys;” and all the country, even the poor clergymen and the country doctors, looked down upon them, though not upon their parties, which were unexceptionable. Mr Crediton being himself only a banker, had not much indulged in this universal condescension; and Kate was very glad to bethink herself of the Huntleys at this special moment. They were better than Dulchester, and the phaeton with the unsteady hood. There were two sons and two daughters. The girls were plain, and no way remarkable; neither was Willie, the second son; but Fred was very clever—so clever that nobody knew what was to be done with him. He had taken a first-class at Oxford, and done everything else a young man can do that is gratifying and honourable. He was fellow of his college, and was understood to be able to do anything he pleased in the way of scholarship or literature. If he had but taken the trouble to write, a great many people were of opinion that he would have beaten Tennyson hollow; but he was indolent, and satisfied with his position, and had as much as ever he could desire without doing anything for it. And consequently, his great gifts were unexercised. The country, however, which had been cold to his family, and patronised them, acknowledged that such condescension would be out of character to a man who had taken a first-class. And thus the Huntleys had risen in popular estimation. Kate recalled Mrs Mitford’s words to her mind as they drove unwillingly up to the great door. “Frederick is at home.” She had known Frederick for years, but he was too much self-absorbed, Kate thought, ever to care for any girl; and so it happened that not even flirtation had ever passed between them. “That prig to play croquet!” she said to herself, with a shrug of her shoulders; and then she sprang down, and received a farewell blow from the hood of the phaeton upon her pretty bonnet. Poor Kate! It was all she could do to restrain herself from shaking her little fist at it. The tears almost came to her eyes as she straightened the injured bonnet with her hands. Was it an evil omen? for the Huntleys were out, all but Mrs Huntley—and the girls were engaged for next day; and Willie had gone to town; and Fred——“My dear, you know I never can answer for Fred,” his mother said, with pride. “He has his own engagements, and all sorts of things to do.”
“Oh yes, to be sure; it is not likely he would stoop so far as to play croquet,” said Kate; “but I am only giving Mrs Mitford’s message. You know it is not me that asks. I will tell her what you say.”
“Tell her I am so sorry,” said Mrs Huntley. “I know what it is to be disappointed when one tries to get up any little thing impromptu, and the girls would have been so glad, and so would Willie—but she knows I cannot answer for Fred. Dr Mitford, I am so sorry Mr Huntley is not at home, nor my son. If they had known there was the least chance of seeing you! But now you have come, you must have some tea.”
“I thank you, my dear madam,” said the Doctor, “but we have still a good way to go. I am taking Miss Crediton to see the Roman camp at Dulchester. It is not often I go so far, but you know I pretend to a little antiquarian knowledge——”
“Oh, a little indeed!” said Mrs Huntley; “we all know what that means. You may be very proud, Kate, to have such a cicerone. I can’t tell you how I sigh for you, Doctor, when we have people down from town, and they go to see the camp. Oh, don’t ask me, I always beg of them—you should hear all about it if Dr Mitford were here.”
“Well, one has one’s little bits of information, of course,” said Dr Mitford, with a deprecating wave of the hand; “one’s hobby, I suppose the young people would call it. I am very glad that Frederick has got his fellowship. It must be a great satisfaction to his father and you.”
“Well, we were pleased, of course,” said the lady; “though, but for the honour of the thing, it did not matter to Fred. I often say how odd it is that such things should fall to him who don’t want them, when so many poor fellows, to whom it would be a real blessing, fail. He has no business to have the money and the brains too.”
“That must make it all the more agreeable,” said the Doctor, with a stiff bow; and the looks of the two parents made Kate wonder suddenly whether John had been successful in his university career. Poor fellow! he did not look remarkably bright. There was no analogy between his looks and Fred Huntley’s sharp clever face—but then he was some years younger than Fred.
“Won’t you be persuaded to stay to dinner?” said Mrs Huntley; “you never can get back in time for your own. We have not seen Kate for ages, nor you either, Dr Mitford. Do stay—my husband and all of them will be back before dinner. Mr Huntley will be so vexed and disappointed if I let you go.”
“But Dulchester, my dear lady,” said the Doctor, rising and making her a bow.
“Oh, Dulchester!—is your heart so much set upon it, Kate?”
Fortunately Kate glanced at her guide before she replied, and saw that he was red with mortification, anticipating her answer. “Oh dear, yes! my heart is set upon it,” she cried. “Dr Mitford has come all the way to make me understand; and, indeed, it is getting late, and we must not stop, even for tea.”
“I will go and see that the carriage is brought round,” said her old cavalier, with alacrity; and he shook hands with Mrs Huntley, who mimicked him as soon as his back was turned with a sweep of her hand and smirk of affability which tried Kate’s gravity much. “Oh, my dear, you don’t know what you are going to encounter,” she said, in a rapid undertone, as soon as he was gone. “I tried to save you from it, but you would not back me up. He is the most dreadful old bore——”
“Hush! I am staying in his house, and they have been very, very kind,” said Kate, with a sudden blush.
“Staying in their house! I must speak to your papa about that, who never will let you come to us. But I did not know you knew the Mitfords, Kate.”
“We did not know them—but—my horse ran away with me—and Dr Mitford’s—son—saved my life.”
This Kate gave forth very slowly, with eyes that glittered with sudden excitement; and Mrs Huntley, for her part, received the news with the most eager interest.
“Oh, was it you?” she cried. “We heard something of it. They say it was quite a wonder that he didn’t lose his own life. But, dear me, Kate! after anything so interesting, how was it that he didn’t drive you himself instead of his papa?”
“I suppose, because he was never consulted,” said Kate, with some indignation; “and now I must not keep Dr Mitford waiting. Mrs Mitford has been so good to me—oh, so kind! She has nursed me as if I had been her own child; and papa let me stay, he was so grateful to them. I don’t know, I am sure, what the son did for me, but I know what the mother has done. She was as kind as if I had been her own child.”
“Her own child!” Mrs Huntley repeated to herself, with bewilderment, when Kate ran down-stairs; “oh yes, indeed! that one can easily understand. What a nice thing for John! But I am sure I should never think of such a little flirt for one of my sons, however rich she was—a spoiled child!”
This would have hurt Kate’s feelings if she had heard it, for she thought she was a favourite of Mrs Huntley’s—and so indeed she was; but it is hard upon a woman to hear unmoved that somebody else’s son has been braver, abler, more successful than her son, even though, as she reminded herself with a toss of her head, her boys had no need for that sort of thing, thank heaven! “Fred shall go, if I can persuade him,” she said within herself, “and spoil that John’s game, though they think so much of him;” and yet there was not a shadow of a reason why Mrs Huntley should wish to thwart that John.
After this Kate had to do the camp, and did it with a heroic show of interest. She got through it, looking up into Dr Mitford’s face with such bright and vivid looks that the good man felt he had at last found a congenial soul. Kate bore this, and she bore the assaults of the unsteady hood, though it gave her yet another thump upon her bonnet, which nearly made an end of that ornament. But there are limits to human nature, and she was very glad when she found herself approaching home. She called the Rectory home with the frankest satisfaction, such as would have awakened many thoughts in Mrs Mitford’s mind. It was sweet to see the pretty irregular house in the evening light, with its shadow turned to the east and all its windows open, and the great sheaves of lilies sending forth their fragrance. John suddenly appeared to open the gate as they drove up, as if he had sprung from the earth; and his mother was standing on the lawn with her white shawl thrown over her, like another flower; and the expedition was over, and the castrum done with, and Dr Mitford pleased, and the bonnet, perhaps, not spoiled for ever. Kate was so glad that she gave Mrs Mitford an unexpected kiss as she jumped lightly down. “How nice it is to have some one waiting for us!” she said, with almost tearful earnestness—the poor motherless girl! Mrs Mitford was touched by the accent, and Kate was touched herself, though of course she must have known how much of her emotion was delight at being free of what she considered a bore. But it was not entirely relief either, and there was some real feeling in the girl’s perverse little heart.
“I am so grieved they cannot come,” said Mrs Mitford, when they were all seated at dinner, which had been delayed. “I am so sorry, my dear, for you; but perhaps you might try a game with John—and the party could be asked for another day.”
“I am so glad,” said Kate. “It is so nice to escape the croquet-parties, and all the stuff one has to think about at home.”
“But, my dear, you must miss your amusements,” said Mrs Mitford. “I should not think a quiet life was the kind of life for you.”
“Changes are what I like,” said Kate, bravely. “I could not live always in a turmoil, and I could not live always in a hermitage. I should like sometimes the one and sometimes the other. The dreadful thing would be, to be always the same.”
Mrs Mitford gave her son a piteous look, and then cast an instinctive glance round the room. She did not herself feel the full meaning that was in her eyes. She glanced at all the signs of her own changeless existence. For years and years she had visited the same places at the same hours, sat down to the same work, made the same engagements, discharged the same duties. The dinner-party, which, contrary to her own lights, she was going to give in honour of Kate, would have the same people at it as had been at her first dinner-party after her wedding. She said to herself that if John were rich he could give his wife a great deal more change; but still there remained the fact that John’s wife would have the parish to think of, and the schools, and the old women. It would not do, alas! it could not do, Mrs Mitford concluded, as she rose from dinner with a sigh. And yet it would be such a thing for John.
And to see poor John’s miserable look when he came into the drawing-room, and found that Kate had a headache and had gone to bed. “It must have been that confounded camp,” he said, through his teeth, which grieved his mother more.
“Oh, my dear, don’t swear,” she said; “things are bad enough without that.”
“What things? and what do you mean, mother?” growled John.
“It is—that girl. I am so sorry she came here—so sorry you saved her, John; that she should come where no one wanted her, disturbing my boy!”
“Sorry I saved her! Are you mad, mother?” cried her son.
“Oh, you know I did not mean that. I am glad she is saved, poor thing—very glad; but oh, John, my dear, why should she come disturbing you? You must not think anything more about her, my own boy. See what pains she takes to show you it is no use. She could not live where it is always the same! Oh, John, after so many warnings, if you fall into her wiles at last!”
“What folly!” he said, leaving her, and throwing himself on a sofa in a dark corner, where the light of the lamp did not reach him. The anxious mother could no longer see his face. It was not with her as in days past, when he would poke into the light, under the shade of the lamp, and put his book on the top of her work, getting many a tender scold for it, or read aloud to her, which was her greatest pleasure. The Doctor was in his study, busy with his paper for the Archæological Society, and as indifferent to his wife’s loneliness as if she had been his housekeeper. Mrs Mitford had long ago got over that. She had accepted it as the natural course of affairs that your husband should go back to his study after dinner. Perhaps it would have plagued more than pleased her now had he suddenly made his appearance in the drawing-room. What she liked was to get her work or her knitting (John’s socks, which she always made with her own hands), and listen, in a soft rapture of ineffable content, as he read to her. It did not matter much what he read; his voice, and the work in her hand, and the consciousness that her boy was there, wrapt her in a silent atmosphere of happiness. But now how different it was! The Doctor by himself in his study, and Kate by herself in her chamber, and the mother and son, with almost the whole breadth of the room between them, each in a corner, he in the dark, she in the light, alone too. And it was all that girl’s fault. It was she who was making him unhappy.
“John, won’t you read to me a little, dear?” said his mother from the table.
“I can’t to-night,” he answered from the sofa, glad that his face was not visible. He was so vexed and disappointed and mortified, coming in full of the expectation of a long evening in Kate’s society, and finding her gone. A year or two ago it would have brought tears to John’s eyes. He was a man now, and it was not possible to cry, but he was so disappointed that he could scarcely endure himself. Mrs Mitford bore his silence and abstraction as long as she could. It went to her heart—but she was all mother, down to the tips of her fingers; and though it gave her a deep wound to think her boy had thus given her over, she could not bear to see him unhappy. She laid down her work at last, and stole out of the room, wondering if he noticed her going, and went and knocked at Kate’s door. “My dear, I have just made the tea, and it smells so refreshing. I thought, if you had not gone to bed, a cup would do you good,” she said, coming in and taking Kate’s hand. Her eyes were so wistful, such an unspoken prayer was in her face, that a glimmering of what she must mean just flashed upon Kate.
“How good of you to come and tell me! May Parsons go down and bring me a cup?” said the girl. She had been seated by the open window, with the breath of the lilies stealing up from the dark garden, and a reverie had stolen over her, about nothing in particular; only the soft night was in it, and the lilies, and the vague delights of youth. I almost think she had felt John Mitford’s incipient undeveloped sentiment breathing up to her in the vagueness and darkness, with an indefinite perfume, like the flowers. And Kate had no mind to leave this sweet confusion of dreams and odours and far-off suggestion, for actual talk and commonplace intercourse; and her first impulse was to get gently rid of her visitor, if that might be.
“It would lose all its fragrance coming up-stairs,” said Mrs Mitford. “You have not begun to undress, or even taken down your pretty hair; come down, my dear, for half an hour,—I know it will do your head good. You know, everybody says ours is such good tea.”
“Don’t I know it!” said Kate; “but——”
“But I can’t take any refusal,” said Mrs Mitford, drawing the girl’s arm within her own. Oh, how little she wanted her at that moment, had the truth been known! and yet she coaxed and wooed her as if it were a personal grace. And the girl yielded, thinking more a great deal of the sweetness of being thus sought and coaxed by the mother, than of the son who was sitting in the dumps on the sofa in the dark corner down-stairs.
“If you want me,” she said, with a faint accent of inquiry, and gave Mrs Mitford a soft little kiss. “I think mamma must have been like you,” she said in apology, a remark which confused John’s mother, and made her feel guilty. For it was not kindness to this motherless creature that moved her, but the maternal passion which paused at nothing which could give pleasure to her boy.
John was standing in the open window hesitating whether he should plunge out into the darkness, when he heard the voices of the two ladies coming down-stairs, and all the room immediately filled with radiance and splendour. In a moment he was back again, standing, hovering over Kate, who sank into an easy-chair close to the light, and gave herself up to the delights of the promised cup of tea. He did not say a dozen words to her all the rest of the evening, but he was happy; and she lying back at her ease, with the consciousness of an admiring audience, chattered and sipped, and was happy too. It did not occur to Kate that every word she said was being closely criticised by the woman who had gone to seek her, who was basking in the pleasant rays of her youth, and smiling at all her nonsense and chatter, and looking so wistfully at her by times. She thought she had made a conquest of Mrs Mitford too, and was pleased and proud. “I cannot be just a little flirt and a stupid,” Kate was saying to herself, “for Mrs Mitford is fond of me too.” And with this pleasant sense of having an utterly indulgent audience, she rattled on more freely than she had ever before found it possible to do at Fanshawe. And Mrs Mitford made secret notes of all the nonsense, and laid up in her memory everything that was said. And then the Doctor came in from his study, and the bell was rung, and the servants appeared dimly, and sat down in a row against the further wall where it was dark; and they had prayers. Mrs Mitford was scrupulous about having a shade over the lamp—she thought it was good for the eyes—so that there was one brilliant spot round the table, and all the rest was dim and vague, darkness deepening into the corners, and intensifying to a centre in the great window full of night, the open abyss into the garden all sweet with roses and lilies, through which there puffed by times a breath of summer wind. Now that the tea-things were removed, it was Dr Mitford’s white head, and his open book, and the whiter hand which was laid upon it, that were the foremost objects in the room; and in the middle distance among the shadows was Mrs Mitford; and at the back, like ghosts, the maids and the man. Kate joined very devoutly in the prayers, and felt glad she had come down-stairs. “How good they are, how quiet it is, how nice to have prayers! and oh, what sweetness in the air!” she said to herself, when she ought to have been praying. It was novel to her, and the composition of the picture was so pretty. And they were all so kind—fond of her, indeed. Kate went back to her room, when all was over, with a soft complacency and satisfaction with herself possessing her heart.