I had only seen him on horseback. I did not know how he looked on the
ground, but I would have married him myself in a second if he had asked
me, partly no doubt because he was a little like Lord K----, the hero of
my teens to whom I had never spoken, and partly because he was the exact
opposite of Uncle Tom. How Miss Collett _could_! How anybody could! Yet
Uncle Tom always talked as if he had only to choose among the flower of
English womanhood, and the stouter and more repellent he grew the more
communicative and conscientious he became about his fear of raising
expectations in female bosoms which he might not be able to gratify. How
I scorned Uncle Tom when he talked like that, knowing as I did--but
neither he nor Aunt Emmy knew I knew (it was always like that, they
always thought I did not know things)--knowing as I did that Miss Rose
Delaine and Miss Wright had both refused him. I did not realise in my
intolerant youth that the anxiety of some middle-aged bachelors still to
appear eligible, the way their minds hover round imaginary conquests,
has its pathetic side. Looking back, I believe now that Miss Collett was
not by any means poor Uncle Tom's first choice, but his last chance. And
perhaps he was her last chance too.
"I know father is dying. I have known it some time," said Aunt Emmy, and
her face became convulsed. "He spoke so beautifully about it only
yesterday. And I have known for a long time that Tom and Miss Collett
were likely to come to an arrangement."
She had not a grain of irony in her, but no word could have been more
applicable to Uncle Tom and Miss Collett than an arrangement. One felt
that each had measured the other by avoirdupois weight, and had found
the balance even.
"Is Uncle Thomas opposed to your marrying?" I ventured to say, with the
tact of eighteen.
"No, my dear; that is what is so wonderful. He was so dreadfully against
it long ago--once--indeed, until quite lately. But it's no use speaking
of that. But now he is quite anxious for it, so long as I don't leave
him. He wants me to promise Colonel Stoddart, but to tell him that I
could not leave my father during his lifetime, which of course I
couldn't."
"Won't Colonel Stoddart wait?" I said, waxing bolder. I had slipped down
on the floor beside her and was stroking her white hand. I hoped I was
saying the right thing. I was adoringly fond of her, but I was also
eighteen, and this was my first introduction to a real romance. I was
feverishly anxious to rise to the occasion, to have nothing to regret in
retrospect.
"I daresay he would. I think he said something about it," she said
apathetically.
I remembered a beautiful sentence I had read in a novel about
confidences being mutual, and I said reproachfully, "Aunt Emmy, I have
told you _all_ about Lord K----; won't you tell me, just me, no one
else--about Mr. Kingston?"
And she told me. I think it was a relief to speak to some one. I held my
cheek against her hand all the time. It seemed that a sort of demigod of
the name of Kingston had alighted in her life when she was nineteen (I
felt with a pang that I had still a whole year to wait) and he was
twenty-one. Aunt Emmy waxed boldly eloquent in her description of his
unique and heroic character, shyly eloquent in her dispassionate
indication of his almost terrifying beauty.
I think Aunt Emmy became a girl in her teens again for a few minutes,
carried away by her memory, and by the idolising sympathy of the other
girl in her teens at her feet in a seventh heaven at being a confidant.
But in one sense, on the sentimental plane, she had never ceased to be a
girl. She and I viewed the situation almost from the same standpoint.
"Aunt Emmy, _was_ he tall?"
"He was, my love."
"And slender?"
My whole life hung in the balance. I had all a young girl's repulsion
towards stout men.
"He was thin and wiry, and very athletic, a great rider."