IT was perhaps well, on the whole, for the comfort of all the party, that Mr Crediton had behaved so very badly on the first announcement of this news. His self-betrayal put him on his guard. It recalled him to a sense of needful restraint, and that the Mitfords were not, after all, people to be treated with contempt. He was very serious and somewhat stiff during the luncheon, which was sufficiently trying to all the party, but he was not uncivil. Of John he took no notice at all after the first formal recognition, but to Mrs Mitford and the Doctor he was studiously polite, making them little speeches of formal gratitude. “I find my child perfectly recovered, thanks to your kind care,” he said. “I can never sufficiently express my deep sense of obligation to you.” This speech called up an angry flush on John’s cheek, but not a word was spoken by any of the party to imply that there was any stronger bond than that of kindness between Kate and the people who had been so good to her. The two young people were made to feel that they were secondary altogether. The thoughts of their elders might, indeed, be occupied about them, but they themselves were struck out of the front of the action, and relegated to their natural place. Mr Crediton carried this so far that, when luncheon was over, he turned to Dr Mitford and asked to speak with him, altogether ignoring the existence of Dr Mitford’s son. But John had risen, and had taken matters into his own hands.
“May I ask you to see me first, Mr Crediton?” he said. “There are some things of which I am most anxious to speak to you at once.”
Mr Crediton rose too, and made John a little formal bow. “I am at your service,” he said; and Dr Mitford stood up, looking somewhat scared, and listened; no doubt feeling himself, in his turn, thrust aside.
“I must not interfere,” he said, with a kind of ghastly smile, “and I take no responsibility in what my son is going to say; but if you will both come to my library——”
“I should prefer speaking to Mr Crediton alone,” said John. And then it seemed that his father shrank like a polite ghost, and gave way to the real hero of the situation. Mrs Mitford shrank too, joining in her husband’s involuntary gesture; and John marched boldly out, leading the way, while Mr Crediton followed, and the Doctor went after them, shrugging his shoulders with a faint assumption of indifference. It seemed as if some magician had waved a wand, and the three gentlemen disappeared out of the room, leaving Mrs Mitford and Kate looking at each other. And there they sat half stupefied, with their hearts beating, till Jervis came in to clear the table, and looked at them as a good servant looks, with suspicious watchful eyes, as if to say, What is it all about, and what do you mean by it, sitting there after your meal is over, and giving yourselves up to untimely agitations, disturbing Me? Mrs Mitford obeyed that look as a well-brought-up woman always does. She said, “Come, Kate! what can you and I be thinking of?” and led the way into the drawing-room. She did this with an assumption of liveliness and light-heartedness which was overdoing her part. “We need not take the servants into our confidence, at least,” she said, sitting down by her work-table, and taking out her knitting as usual. But it was a very tremulous business, and soon the needles dropped upon her knee. Kate, too, attempted to resume the piece of worsted work she had been doing, and to look as if nothing had happened; but her attempt was even more futile. When they had sat in this way silent for some five minutes, the girl’s agitation got the better of her. She threw the work aside, and ran and threw herself at Mrs Mitford’s feet. “Oh, mamma, say something to me!” she cried; “I feel as if I could not breathe. And I never had any mother of my own.”
Then John’s mother lost the composure for which she had been struggling. Her heart was not softened to Kate personally at that climax of all the trouble which Kate had brought upon her, but she could not resist such an appeal; and she too could scarcely breathe, and wanted companionship in her trouble. It was hard to take into her heart the girl who was the occasion of it all; but yet Kate was suffering too. Mrs Mitford fell a-crying, which was the first natural expression of her feelings, and then she laid her hand softly on Kate’s head, and by degrees allowed herself to be taken possession of. They were just beginning to talk to each other, to open their hearts, and enter into all those mutual explanations which women love, when Kate’s quick youthful eyes caught sight of two black figures in the distance among the trees on the other side of the blazing summer lawn. She broke off in the middle of a sentence, and gave a low cry, and clutched at Mrs Mitford’s gown. “They are there!” cried Kate, with a gasp of indescribable suspense. And Mrs Mitford, when she saw them, began to cry softly again.
“Oh, what is he saying to my boy?” cried the agitated woman, wringing her hands. To see the discussion going on before their eyes gave the last touch of the intolerable to their anxiety.
“Oh, Kate, I am a bad woman!” said Mrs Mitford; “I could hate you, and I could hate your father, for bringing all this trouble on my John.”
“I don’t wonder,” cried Kate, in her passion; and then she made an effort to conquer herself. “Papa cannot eat him,” she added, with a little harsh laugh of emotion. “I have had the worst of it. He will never say to John what he said to me.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Oh, nothing!” she cried, recollecting herself. “He is my own papa; he has a right to say what he likes to me. It is John who is speaking now—that is a good sign. And when he chooses, and takes the trouble, John can speak so well; he is so clever. I never meant to have let him do all this, and give everybody so much trouble; but when he began to talk like that, what was I to do?”
“Oh, Kate!” cried the mother, with her eyes full of tears, “we are so selfish—we never thought of that! How were you to resist him more than the rest of us? My dear boy—he had always such a winning way!”
“John is speaking still,” said Kate. “Mamma, I think things must be coming round. There—papa has put his hand on his arm. When he does that he is beginning to give in. Oh, if we could only hear what they say!”
“He is so earnest in all he does,” said Mrs Mitford. “Kate! listen to what I am going to say to you. If this ever comes to anything——”
“Of course it will come to something,” cried Kate. “I am not so good as John. If papa were to stand out, I should just wait till I was one-and-twenty; and then, if John pleased—— Now they are turning back again. Oh, will they never be done? It is just like men, walking and talking, walking and talking for ever, and us poor women waiting here.”
“But, Kate, listen to me,” said Mrs Mitford, solemnly; “if it ever comes to anything, you must be very very careful with my John. Look at his dear face, how it shines with feeling! He loves you so—he would put himself under your father’s feet. I feel as if I could tell you the very words he is saying. And you—you have been brought up so differently. If you were tempted to be careless, and forget his ways of thinking, and prefer society and the world——”
“I see how it is,” said Kate, with a mournful cadence in her voice—she did not turn her head, for her eyes were still intently fixed on the distant figures out of doors; “I see how it is—you don’t think I am the right girl for John.”
“I did not say so,” said Mrs Mitford, humbly; “how can I tell? I can’t divine what is in my own boy’s heart, and how can I divine yours? But I will love you for his sake. Oh, Kate! if you are good to him——”
Here the conversation came to a sudden pause; for the two who were outside were seen to turn in the direction of Dr Mitford’s study, and to enter the house, which made the crisis come nearer, as it were. Neither of the two ladies could have told how the afternoon passed. Every sound that went through the house seemed to them significant. Sometimes a door would open or shut, and paralyse them for the moment. Sometimes a sound as of a single step would be heard in one of the passages, and then Mrs Mitford and Kate would rise up and flush crimson, and listen as if they had not been listening all the time. “Now they are coming!” one or the other would say, with a gasp, for the waiting affected their very breathing. Except on these occasions, they scarcely exchanged two words in half an hour. From time to time Kate looked at her watch, and made a remark under her breath about the hour. “It is too late for the four o’clock train,” she said; and then it was too late for the mail at half-past five; and all this time not a word came out of the stillness to relieve their anxiety. The bees buzzed about the garden, and the sun shone and shone as if he never could weary of shining, and blazed across the monotonous lawn and vacant paths, which no step or shadow disturbed. Oh the burden of the silence that lay upon that whole smiling world outside, where not even a leaf would move, so eager was nature to have the first word of the secret! When Mrs Mitford’s needles clicked in her tremulousness, Kate glanced up with eyes of feverish reproach; and when Kate’s scissors fell, the room echoed with the sound, and Mrs Mitford felt it an injury. Thus the long, weary, languid afternoon passed on. When Jervis began to stir with his preparations for dinner, and to move about his pantry, with clink and clang of glass and silver, laying the table, the sounds were to them like the return of a jury into their box to the anxious wretches waiting for their verdict. Dinner was coming, that augustest of modern ceremonies, and the ladies felt instinctively that things must now come to a decision. And accordingly, it was just after Jervis had carried his echoing tray out of the pantry to the sideboard when the door of the study at last opened, and steps were heard coming along the passage—Dr Mitford’s steps, creaking as they came, and another footstep, which Kate knew to be her father’s. Not John! The ladies sat bolt upright, and grew red and grew pale, and felt the blood tingle to their finger-points. And then they looked at each other, and asked, silently, “Where has he gone?”
This time it was no longer the jurymen. It was the judge himself, coming solemn with his verdict. The gentlemen came into the room one behind the other, Mr Crediton looking worn and tired, and even Dr Mitford’s white tie grown limp with suspense and emotion. But it was he who was the first to speak.
“I am sorry to have left you so long by yourselves,” he said, with a little air of attempted jauntiness, which sat very strangely on him, “and to have kept Mr Crediton away from you; but we had a great deal to talk over, and business, you know, must be attended to. My dear, it was business of a very momentous kind. And now, Miss Kate,” said the Rector, turning upon her, and holding out both his hands—he smiled, but his smile was very limp, like his tie, and even his hands, though not expressive generally, trembled a little—“now, Miss Kate, for the first time I feel at liberty to speak to you. You must have thought me very hard and cold the other night; but now I have your father’s permission to bid you welcome to my family,” Dr Mitford went on, smiling a ghastly smile; and he stooped over her and kissed her forehead, and held her hands, waving them up and down as if he did not know what to do with them. “I don’t know why my son has not come to be the first to tell you. Everything is settled at last!”
“Where is John?” cried Mrs Mitford, with her soft cheeks blazing. And her husband dropped Kate’s hands as if they had burned him, and they all paused and looked at each other with an embarrassment and restraint which nobody could disguise.
“To do him justice, I don’t think he felt himself equal to a grand tableau of family union and rapture,” said Mr Crediton. “Mrs Mitford, I don’t pretend to be overjoyed. I don’t see why we should make any pretences about it. They have done a very foolish thing, and probably they will repent of it——”
But this was more than John’s mother could bear. “One of them, I am sure, will never have any reason to repent of it,” she said, with irrepressible heat, not thinking of the double meaning that her words might bear.
“I hope it may be so,” Mr Crediton said, and shook his head. And there was again a silence, and Kate sat with all her veins swelling as if they would burst, and her heart beating in her very throat, and nobody taking any further notice of her. What was it to any of them in comparison with what it was to her? and yet nobody even looked at her. It seemed so utterly incredible, that for the moment she was stunned and dumb, and capable of nothing but amazement.
“No,” said her father again, after a pause; “I don’t pretend to be overjoyed. We have had a great deal of talk, and the talk has not been agreeable. And, Mrs Mitford, if I am to judge by your looks, I should say you were no more happy at the thought of losing your son than I am at that of losing my daughter—in so foolish a way.”
“Let us hope it may turn out better than we think,” said Dr Mitford; and then came the inevitable pause, which made every sentence sound so harsh and clear.
“There is certainly room for the hope,” said Mr Crediton; “fortunately it must be a long time before anything comes of it. Your son seems to have quite relinquished the thought of going into the Church.”
“Have you settled that too?—is it all decided? Oh, Dr Mitford, you have been hasty with him!” cried John’s mother. “I told you if you would but take time enough, and go into things with him, and explain——”
“I don’t think explaining would have done much good,” said Mr Crediton. “It rarely does, when a young fellow has got such an idea into his head. The only thing is, that when a boy changes once he may change twice—when he is older, and this fever-fit, perhaps, may be over——”
“Oh, can you sit and hear this?” cried Kate, springing to her feet. “Oh, papa, how can you be so wicked and so rude? Do you think John is like that—to take a fancy and give it over? And you are his mother, and know him best, and you leave him to be defended by me!”
“Kate, my dear!” cried Mrs Mitford, hastening to her, “you make me hate myself. You understand my boy—you stand up for him when his own flesh and blood is silent. And I love you with all my heart! And I will never, never grudge him to you again!”
And the two women rushed into each other’s arms, and clung together in a passion of tears and mutual consolation; while the men, for their part, looked grimly on, vanquished, yet finding a certain satisfaction in their sense of superiority to any such folly. Mr Crediton sat down, with the hard unsympathetic self-possession of a man who has still a blow to deliver; and poor Dr Mitford walked up and down the room, aware of what was yet to come. But in the mean time the victims over whom the stroke was lowering had delivered themselves all at once from their special misery. The ice had broken between them. John, who had divided them, became all at once their bond of union. “Mamma, if you will stand by me I can do anything,” Kate whispered, with her lips upon Mrs Mitford’s cheek. “My own child!” John’s mother whispered in reply; and thus the treaty was made which was to set all other diplomacies at nought.
“I think it is a great pity,” said Mr Crediton again, “but of course, in the turn that circumstances have taken, I must help him as best I can. It is not very much I can do, for you are aware when a young man changes his profession all in a minute, it is a difficult thing to provide for him. And he did not seem to have any clear idea what to do with himself. Probably you will feel it is not equal to your son’s pretensions, Mrs Mitford—but I have offered him a clerkship in my bank.”
“A clerkship in your bank!” cried Mrs Mitford, petrified. She withdrew a little from Kate in her consternation, and sat down and gazed, trying to take in and understand this extraordinary piece of news.
“Papa, you cannot mean it,” cried Kate, vehemently. “Oh, are you papa, or somebody come to mock us? A clerkship in the bank—for Dr Mitford’s son—for—John!”
“John is no doubt possessed of many attractions,” said Mr Crediton, in his hardest tones, “but I am only an ordinary mortal, and I cannot make him Prime Minister. When a man throws himself out of his proper occupation, he must take what he can get. And he has accepted my offer, Kate. He is not so high-flown as you are; and I can assure you a man may do worse than be a clerk in my bank.”
“It is a most honourable introduction to commerce,” said Dr Mitford, coming forward very limp and conciliatory; “and commerce, as I have often said, is the great power of the nineteenth century. My dear, it is not what we expected—of course it is very different from what we expected; but if I put up with it—— It cannot be such a disappointment to you as it is to me.”
Mrs Mitford turned away with an impatient cry. Her very sense of decorum failed her. Though she had kept up the tradition of her husband’s superiority so long that she actually believed in it, yet on this point he was not superior. She was driven even out of politeness, the last stronghold of a well-bred woman. She could not be civil to the man who had thus outraged her pride and all her hopes. She sat and moaned and rocked herself, saying, “My boy! my boy!” in a voice of despair.
“He is saying it only to try us,” cried Kate. “He is not cruel. Papa, you have always been so good to me! Oh, he does not mean it. It is only—some frightful—joke or other. Papa, you don’t mean what you say?”
“I do mean what I say,” said Mr Crediton, abruptly; “and when I say so, I think I may congratulate both Mrs Mitford and myself that, whatever foolish thing our children may make up their minds to do, they cannot do it very soon. We have had enough of this nonsense for the present, Kate. Dr Mitford is so kind as to ask us to stop for dinner. We must wait now for the nine o’clock train.”
And just then Jervis, curious but unenlightened, rang the first bell. And what are all the passions and all the struggles of the heart compared to Dinner, invincible potentate? Mrs Mitford and Kate gathered themselves together meekly at the sound of that summons. Against it they did not dare to remonstrate. They gave each other a silent kiss as they parted at the door of Kate’s room, but they could not resist nor trifle with such a stern necessity. “Where was John?” they asked themselves, as each stood before her glass, trying as best she could to clear away the trace of tears, and to hide from their own eyes and from the sharp eyes of the servants all signs of the crisis they had been going through. Kate had to retain her morning dress, as she had still a journey before her; but she was elaborate about her hair, by way of demonstrating her self-possession. “Papa has put off till the nine o’clock train; and it is so tiresome of him, making one go down to dinner like a fright,” she said to Parsons, trying to throw dust in the eyes of that astute young woman. As if Parsons did not know!
As for John, he had been wandering about stupefied ever since that amazing conclusion had been come to, in such a state of confusion that he could not realise what had happened. Kate was to be his. That was the great matter which had been decided upon. But notwithstanding his passionate love for Kate, this was not what bulked largest in his mind. The world somehow had turned a somersault with him, and he could not make out whether he had lighted on solid earth again, or was still whirling in the dizzy air. His past life had all shrivelled away from him as if it had never been. His sensations were those of a man who has rolled over some tremendous precipice; or who wakes out of a swoon to find himself lying on some battle-field. He was very sore and battered and beaten, tingling all over with bruises; and the relative position of the world, and everything in it, to himself was changed. It might be the same sky and the same soil to others, but to him everything was different. Kate was to be his; but that was in the future. And for the present he was to begin life, not in any noble way for the service of others, but as a clerk in Mr Crediton’s bank.