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.