THE Rectory at Fanshawe Regis was a very good house. Indeed it was the old manor-house of the Fanshawes, which had been thus appropriated at the time when the great castle was built, which had eventually ruined the race. Dr Mitford and his son were both in the library on the morning of Kate’s descent. It was the most picturesque room in the house. It was, indeed, a kind of double room, one end of it being smaller than the other, and contracted by two pillars which stood out at a little distance from the walls, and looked almost like a doorway to the larger end, which was the Doctor’s especial domain. It was clothed with books from ceiling to floor, and the contraction made by the pillars framed in the apartment behind, giving a certain aspect of distance to the fine interior. There was a great old-fashioned fireplace at the very end, with a projecting oak canopy, also supported by pillars, and to the right of that a broad, deeply recessed Elizabethan window, throwing a full side light upon the Doctor’s writing-table, at which he sat absorbed, with his fine white head shining as in a picture. When Kate opened the door cautiously and looked in at this picture, she was so moved by a sense of her own temerity, and by involuntary, half-childish fright lest she should be scolded or punished for it, that it was at least a minute before she took in the scene before her; and even then she did not take it all in. She never even glanced at the foreground—at the other Elizabethan window, with coloured shields of painted glass obscuring the sunshine, in which sat another reader, who raised his eyes at the sound of the opening door with a surprise which it would be difficult to describe. There were three of them all in the same room, and none was aware of the scrutiny with which each was severally regarded. It was like a scene in a comedy. Kate peeping frightened at the door, growing a little bolder as she perceived herself unnoticed, gazing at Dr Mitford’s white head over his books and papers, and gradually getting to see the fun of it, and calculate on his start of amazement when he should look up and see her. And opposite to her, in the anteroom, John Mitford at his table, with eyes in which a kindred laughter began to gleam, one hand resting upon his open book, arrested in his work, his looks bent upon the pretty spy, who was as unconscious of his presence as his father was of hers. When John stirred in his seat and suddenly directed Kate’s attention to him, she gave a little jump and a cry, and turned round and fled in her amazement. She did not even take time to look and recognise him, but flew from the door, letting it swing after her in a sudden panic. She had found the position very amusing when she was peeping at his unsuspecting father—but to be spied upon in her turn! Kate burst away and fled, taking the first passage she saw. “What’s that, eh?” cried Dr Mitford. “I’ll go and see, sir,” said John, dutifully; and he got up with beautiful promptitude, and followed the runaway. He saw the gleam of her blue dress down the passage, and followed her before she could draw breath. It was the most curious meeting, for two well-bred persons who did not know each other, and yet were already so deeply connected with each other. Kate, all one desperate blush, turned round when she heard his step and faced him, trembling with shame and fear, and a little weakness—for this violent exercise was not quite in accordance with her weak condition. She scorned to run away farther, and clutched at such remnants of dignity as she could muster. “Mr John Mitford, I am sure,” she said, making him a stately little curtsy, and swallowing at once her fright and her laughter as best she could.
“I am so glad to see you down-stairs,” said John. The mirth went out of his face when he saw her embarrassment. “Come into the drawing-room and rest—it is the coolest room in the house,” he added, opening the door. It was very good of him, Kate felt; but she burst into a peal of nervous laughter as soon as she had got into the shelter of the shaded room; and then had to exert all her strength to keep from tears.
“I am sure I beg your pardon,” she said, “for laughing. I am so ashamed of myself; but it was so nice to be out of my room, and it was so funny to be in a strange house, and there was something so tempting in the closed door——”
“I only wish you had stayed,” said John, who would himself have felt very awkward but for her confusion; “but my mother will be back presently from the village, and then we can show you the house. I am afraid you are tired. Can I get you anything? I am so sorry my mother is out.”
Kate looked at him, recovering herself, while he stammered through these expressions of solicitude. Now she saw him close at hand, he was a new kind of man. Her scrutiny was not demonstrative, and yet it was exhaustive and penetrating. He was not a foeman worthy of her steel. He was one whom it would be but little credit to subjugate, reckoning by his powers of resistance. He would be an easy, even a willing victim. But it was something else in John which startled the young manslayer. She had seen various specimens of the fashionable young man, such as Providence throws now and then in the way of country girls; and she knew the genus squire, and all that can be produced in the way of professional in such a place as Camelford. It was the county town, and twice a-year there were assizes and barristers within reach; and there were county balls and hunt balls, and various other possibilities which brought the world as represented by the county families and their visitors within reach of the banker’s daughter. Mr Crediton was not a common banker. He was well connected, to begin with, and he was the Rothschild of the neighbourhood. Even to the large red-brick house in the High Street, to which he had been always faithful, very fine people would now and then condescend to come. And Fernwood, his country “place,” was always as full as he liked to make it of autumn guests, so that Kate’s knowledge of men was not inconsiderable. But John Mitford did not belong to any of the types she knew. He was not the ordinary university man, with which she was so well acquainted. He was not the budding curate—mellifluous and deferential. He was not handsome, nor graceful, nor so much as self-possessed. He did not look even as if he were endowed with that ordinary chatter of society which gets people over the difficulty of an eccentric introduction. If she talked the usual nonsense to him, Kate felt doubtful whether he would understand her. “But if one wanted anything done for one!——” she said to herself, with more surprise than ever in her pretty ingenuous-looking eyes. His face was not beautiful, was even a little heavy when in repose, and apt to cloud over with embarrassment, and lose all the light it had when driven into self-consciousness; and yet there was something in it she had never identified, never realised, before. All this passed through her mind while poor John was standing very awkwardly before her, begging her to tell him if he could not get her something, and regretting over and over again that his mother should be out. Goose! Kate thought to herself; and yet felt the influence of that something, which was beyond her reckoning, and which she had never made acquaintance with before.
“Oh, never mind,” she said; “I am quite comfortable, now I am here. I don’t want anything, thanks. Never mind me. If you are busy, don’t take the trouble to stay. You know I am at home, though I never was here before.”
“I hope so,” said John, standing before her, not knowing what to do or say. He took it for granted, in his innocence, that she wished him to go away. And he had something to do; but yet did not think it quite civil to leave her, and felt that his mother would not like it—and, to tell the truth, did not like it himself.
“Oh, pray don’t wait,” said Kate; “I shall be quite comfortable. There are plenty of books here, and I can go to the garden if I get tired.” Then there was a little pause. John never budged, standing thus in the height of awkwardness before her—wishing for his mother—wishing for anything to happen to deliver him, and yet feeling a charm in the position, which was very amazing to him. Kate, for her part, began to recover. She forgot the impression which had been made upon her by that unknown something in his face, and gradually came back to herself. She sat on the sofa playing with the picture-books on the table beside it, very demure; with cast-down eyes; and he balancing himself on one foot, not knowing what to make of himself, watching her anxiously for guidance. Kate resisted as long as she could, and then burst into a peal of unsteady laughter, in which John, very much surprised, did not find himself able to share.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she cried, when she could command her voice, “for being silly. I don’t know, I am sure, why I should laugh, only it is all so funny. I don’t know you in the least, and yet I know you quite well; and I have been living in the house ever so long, and yet go about like a thief, peeping in at the doors. It is all so very odd. I can’t tell what to make of it. And you who are looking at me so puzzled—you saved my life!” cried Kate, with another burst of laughter. She had never been so ashamed of herself before, but she could not help it. The whole business was so droll. He kept standing, balancing himself in the funniest way, looking down upon her with the strangest incomprehension—and he had saved her life! Though she was ashamed, she could not restrain herself. She laughed till the tears came into her eyes, more and more stimulated thereto by the gravity and astonishment with which he regarded her. As for John, he tried to laugh at first, but finally settled into quiet, and looked at her with an amazed and wondering observation, as if it was a new species that had thus come suddenly under his eyes.
“I am very glad you are so much amused,” he said at last, quite seriously, poor fellow, without the slightest ironical meaning. Was she by any possibility a little fool, giggling like a baby at the gravest matters? or was it some deeper sense in her of the phantasmagoria of life which had called forth this curious outburst of incomprehensible laughter? Laughter (John reflected in his perplexity—being, as will be perceived, a young intellectualist, and fond of such questions) is one of the most subtle and least comprehensible of things. It may express folly, levity, mere amusement—or it may express that deep sense of the humour which lies at the bottom of most earthly transactions, which is possible only to very rare spirits. Gazing at Kate with his eyes full of romance, he could not tell which it was, but felt it most probable that it was the latter, the depths being more natural to him than the shallows. “I don’t wonder that you laugh,” he added, after a pause, in the grave way which was so quaint to Kate. “It is like a thing that happened in a dream.”
At this strange comment she looked up at him, puzzled in her turn. Did he mean something? or was he laughing as she had been? But there was no laugh on John’s face; and suddenly it occurred to her that the eyes with which he was looking at her were those same eyes which she had seen, as in a vision, at the foot of the sofa, on the day of her accident. They were full of wonder, and anxiety, and alarm then; they were only serious and perplexed, and anxious to understand her now: but yet they were the same eyes; and the whole scene flashed back upon Kate’s impatient mind, and changed her mood in a moment. A sudden cloud, almost like that which comes over a child’s face when it is about to cry, enveloped her. “Ah!” she cried, suddenly, “I remember you now. I remember your eyes!”
“My eyes!” cried John, growing scarlet with amazement.
“Yes, your eyes. The day it all happened, you know—though I am sure I don’t know even now what did happen. When I came to myself, I suppose—the first thing I was conscious of was a pair of eyes looking at me. They had no body to them,” said Kate, with a sudden moisture coming into her own—“they looked so anxious, so unhappy, about me. I see now it was you. How awfully good of you to care!”
“Good of me!” said John, feeling this sudden praise steal all over him with a melting weakening softness of delight. “I was very anxious, and very much alarmed. I think—they thought—you would never come to yourself.”
“Was it so long?” said Kate, with that intense wistful interest which youth feels in itself.
“It was long to us—please don’t speak of it; it felt like an age,” said John, with a shudder. He turned half away from her in the pain of the recollection, and then turned back to find those moist surprised child eyes of hers fixed upon him with an incipient tear in each of them, and a look of—what was it?—tenderness, gratitude, admiration—yes, admiration—from her to him! It took away his breath, and took the strength out of him. He gave a low sort of chuckle of laughter, most bizarre expression of his feelings, and dropped into the first chair he could find in such agonies of bashfulness and pleasure as would have better beseemed a charity boy than a man trained to encounter with the world. “It is very funny, as you say,” he gasped; and then saw how ridiculous his speech was, and put his hands in his pockets, and blushed all over a violent painful red.
“I don’t think it is the least funny,” said Kate, now altogether in a different humour. “I might have been killed, and you might have been killed, your mother told me; and we are both only children, and what would they have done? I don’t mind so much about us, for we should but have died, and there would have been an end of it; but only think—what would they have done?” cried Kate, turning upon him eyes which were full of the suggested woe.
“Ah!” he cried, despising himself, “there you go above me, as is natural. It is like you to think it would not have mattered for yourself—only for those who loved you, and the desolate world it would have left them. It is like you to think of that.”
“How can you tell it is like me,” said Kate, “when you don’t know me? I was thinking of papa, and of your mother, not of anything so fine as a desolate world.”
“You were thinking like a true woman,” said the young man, gazing at her with all the romance of a mother’s only son in his unsophisticated eyes.
This was all very well for the moment, but Kate had dispersed the real impression which she had actually felt by uttering it, and it was too early in their acquaintance to plunge into romance; so she changed the subject skilfully. “Please don’t abuse women,” she said. “I know it is the fashion—and most girls rather like to give in to it, and think it is clever to like men’s society best. But I am fond of women, though, perhaps, you will think it weak of me. If I had to choose, I should rather have all women than all men—though, of course, one likes a mixture best.”
“Abuse women!” cried John; “I should as soon think of blaspheming heaven. It would be blasphemy. They are heaven to our earth—they are——”
“Hush,” said Kate, holding up her little white rose-tipped hand with a certain maternal superiority. “Don’t be extravagant. When you are in love, you know, it is quite proper to say all that sort of thing to one girl; but I don’t think it ought to be wasted upon anybody. Please tell me, did your father see me? and did you think it very dreadful when I came like that, peeping in at the door?”
John was not accustomed to be driven like this from one subject to another. By the time he had got himself to the vein of laughter she had become solemn; and now when his natural enthusiasm had been roused, she tossed him back again like a shuttlecock to the fun of the situation. Transitions so quick startled his unaccustomed mind. “I—was surprised,” he faltered, looking at her, wondering what kind of creature this was that could jump from one mood to another in the twinkling of an eye.
“I never saw you sitting there in the corner,” cried Kate. “I thought I had it all my own way. It was so stupid of me. You must have thought what a stupid she is, peeping, and never perceiving that she is found out. I can’t tell you how ashamed I was when I saw you. Did you think I was a thief, or a mad woman, or what did you think?”
“I thought——” said John, and then in his embarrassment paused, not knowing how to make the compliment which rose to his lips. It was no compliment, so far as his consciousness went. Had she been able to see into his mind, she would have seen an imagination too high-flown to be put into words. He could not give it any expression, having no experience as yet in the art of insinuated meanings. “Of course I knew it must be Miss Crediton,” he said, with a blush, after that pause; and he had not even ventured with his eyes to say the rest, but looked down, confused, afraid to meet her glance, and played with his watch-chain, and felt himself a fool—which, indeed, Kate would scarcely have hesitated to say he was.
“After all it did not require a very close application of your mind to guess that,” she said, half piqued; and then yawned softly, and then opened a book, and looked at two of the pictures,—and then added, “How long Mrs Mitford is of coming home!”
“Shall I go and look for her?” cried bewildered John, rising up with an alacrity which confirmed Kate in her low opinion of him. And he actually went away to the hall-door and took his hat, and went off down the avenue to quicken his mother’s return, leaving Kate in a state of consternation, which, after a few minutes, bubbled back into laughter. “Oh what a goose he is!” she said to herself, and yet was a little angry as well as annoyed that he should have gone away voluntarily, leaving her thus unamused and alone. It awoke a momentary question in her mind as to whether he was worth the trouble—a question which she summarily answered in the negative. Certainly not; he was a very good son, no doubt, and a handy man to have close by when your horse ran away with you—but as for anything else! Thus Kate resolved, making up her mind to leave him tranquil in his usual peace—a conclusion which had not the least practical effect upon her after-proceedings, as may be supposed.
Meanwhile John strode down the avenue in a very different frame of mind. The bees that had buzzed in Kate’s ears when she saw him first had come into his now, and hummed and hummed about him, confusing his mind hopelessly. He had held her once for one moment in his arms, fighting a desperate battle for her with death and destruction. Such a thing might have been as that they should have perished together, and been thus associated for evermore in an icy virginal union of death. If it had been so! the romance and the pathos charmed the foolish young fellow. And now here she was by his side, this creature whose life he had saved—who was his, as it were, by that very act, and belonged to him, whatever any one might say against it. All the same, she was nothing to him. She laughed when she mentioned lightly that strange bond. He had given her her life over again when she had lost it. It was his life, notwithstanding her laughter; and yet he did not know her, and she might pass away and leave no trace. But no—that was impossible. The trace was ineffaceable, he said to himself, and all that might come hereafter would never obliterate the fact that he had given her back her life, and that therefore that life belonged to him. It was not love at first sight, nor indeed any kind of love, which had smitten John; but he felt as if his claims were being ignored and laughed at, and yet were so real. She belonged to him, and yet she was nothing to him. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” This was the favourite principle of John Mitford’s thoughts, and he let it take such possession of him on the strength of the curious connection and non-connection between himself and Kate, that he went along under the trees, crossing the sunshine, with the fumes of that talk in his head, like a man walking in his sleep. Mrs Mitford was coming up the avenue in her grey gown and white shawl, a point of brightness in the long green vista. She had a basket on her arm, and looked like the fairy godmother with miraculous gifts for the house. The way in which her white shawl blazed out and toned down as she passed from the light to the shade, and from the shade to the light, was wonderful. Half of the trees were lime-trees, and threw such silken dainty greennesses and softened tones of shadow upon that pretty apparition; and perhaps the bees in John’s ears were only those which made the entire atmosphere harmonious, with that mingling of scent and sound which is the very crown of summer and June. There is no telling how pleased he was to see that white figure. There are moments, though perhaps few sons would confess it, in which a man’s mother is more shield to him than she even is to a girl. He could stay in the room without embarrassment if she were there. He would know what to say, or at least she would know what to lead him to say. She would save him from being thrust into the front of the conversation, and left to bear the brunt of it, which he was not equal to in his present state. The unknown heroine was her guest, and became at once natural and a matter of course in her presence. After-times, perhaps, might bring other necessities, but this was the most important now.
“Mother, we want you,” said John; “give me your basket, and make haste. Miss Crediton has come down-stairs.”
“Miss Crediton!” cried his mother, with a gasp. “Oh, the impatient naughty child! to take advantage as soon as I was out of the way. And have you made acquaintance with her, John?”
“Yes,” he said, succinctly, taking the basket from his mother’s hand.
“Yes—is that all? But how did you introduce yourself, and what did she say, and what do you think of her? Oh dear, dear! I am afraid you must have been looking very forbidding, and frightened poor Kate—why was I away?”
“I don’t think I frightened her,” said John; “at least she laughed. I know I never laugh when I am frightened. She is all by herself in the big drawing-room. Take my arm, and come as quick as you can; she ought not to be left alone.”
“I don’t think she can come to any harm for five minutes,” said Mrs Mitford, and looked anxiously in her son’s face. She was a very good woman—as good a woman as ever was. But John was her only child, and Kate Crediton would be very rich, and was very nice and pretty and unexceptionable, and he had saved her life. Could it be wondered at if his mother was a little anxious about their first meeting? If she had not liked Kate, Mrs Mitford said to herself, of course she would never have thought of it. But she was very fond of Kate, and they were quite suitable in point of age; and John was so good—worthy a princess! What a husband he would make! his mother thought, looking up at him fondly. If Kate Crediton had such a companion as that, instead of some man of the world who would think less of her than of her money, what a happy thing it would be for her! But “Don’t you think she is very charming, John?” was all the designing woman said.
“Pretty, certainly,” said the young man, as if he had been speaking of a cabbage-rose, and with looks as steady as if his heart had not been working like a steam-engine, pumping warmth and life and waves of wild fancy through all his veins.
“Pretty!” cried Mrs Mitford, and drew her arm out of his in her impetuosity; “I don’t know what you young men are made of nowadays. Why, I was thought pretty once; and not in that calm manner neither,” she exclaimed, with a pretty blush, and a laugh at herself.
“Mamma mia, I never see anybody so pretty now,” said John, caressingly. “Perhaps if Miss Crediton lives thirty years longer, and keeps on improving every day, she may get somewhere near you at last. She has the roses and lilies, but not the same sweet eyes.”
“Foolish boy,” said Mrs Mitford; “her eyes are far nicer than ever mine were. Mine were only brown, like most other people’s—and Kate’s are the loveliest blue, and that expression in them! I thought my son would know better, if nobody else did.”
“But perhaps if your son did know better, it would be the worse for him,” said John, without looking at her. He put his hands into his pockets again, and stared straight before him, and attempted a little weak distracted sort of whistle as he went on; and then a strange thrill ran all over the little woman by his side. She had been dreaming of it—planning it secretly in her mind for all these days—thinking how nice a thing it would be for John, who was not one to get riches for himself, or acquire gain in this selfish world. And now, what if it had come true? What if her son, who was all hers, had at this moment, in this innocent June morning, while she, all unsuspecting, was comforting the village people—strayed off from her side for ever—taken the first step in that awful divergence which should lead him more and ever more apart into his own life, and his own house, and the arms of the wife who should supersede his mother? She bore it bravely, standing up, with a gasp in her throat and a momentary quiver of her lips and eyelids, to receive the blow. And he never knew anything about it, stalking on there with his shadow creeping sideways behind him, and his hands buried deep in his pockets; not a handsome figure, take him at his best, but yet all the world to the mother who bore him—and perhaps not much less, should she be such a woman as his mother was, to the coming wife. But surely that could never be Kate!