“Do away, me not do wid you, me fader’s boy,” said little Job, as
Katherine exerted her persuasions to bring him downstairs.
“That is quite true, Job; but father has not come back yet. Come
downstairs with me, and we shall see him come back.”
Job answered with a kick from the little boot which had just come in
somewhat muddy from a walk--a kick which, as it happened to touch a
tender point, elicited from Katherine a little cry. The child backed
against the ayah, holding her fast; then glared at Katherine with eyes
in which malice mingled with fright. “Me dlad to hurt you, me dlad to
hurt you!” he cried. It was evident that he expected a blow.
“It is a pity to hurt anyone,” said Katherine; “but if it has made you
glad you shouldn’t be cross. Come with me downstairs.”
“I hate you,” said the child. “You punith me moment I let ayah do.”
“No, I shall not punish you. I shall only take you downstairs to see
your pretty mamma, and wait till father comes back. I think I hear the
dog-cart now. Hark! that is your father now.”
The child ran to the window with a flush of eagerness. “Lift me up, lift
me up!” he cried. It did not matter to him who did this so long as he
got his will; and though he hit with his heels against Katherine’s
dress, he did not kick her again. “Fader, fader--me’s fader’s boy!”
cried little Job. The little countenance changed; it was no longer that
of a little gnome, but caught an angelic reflection. He waved his thin
small arms over his head from Katharine’s arms. “Fader, fader--Fader’s
tome back! Job’s good boy!” he cried. Then the little waving arm struck
against Katherine’s head, and he paused to look at her. The expression
of his face changed again. A quiver of fierce terror came upon it; he
was in the power of a malignant being stronger than himself. He looked
at her with a sort of impotent, disappointed fury. “Put me down, and
I’ll not kick you no more,” he said.
“Certainly I’ll put you down. Will you come with me now and meet your
father?” Katherine said.
He had his hand ready to seize her hair, to defend himself, but shrunk
away when she put him down without any more expressions of animosity,
and ran for the head of the staircase. At that dreadful passage,
however, the little creature paused. He was afraid for the descent; the
hall was not yet lighted up below, and it seemed a well of darkness into
which it was not wonderful that so small a being should be terrified to
go down. “Is fader there?” he said to Katherine, “will they hurt fader?”
There were vaguely visible forms in the hall, a gleam of vague daylight
from the doorway, and then it became dreadfully apparent to Job that
something must have happened to fader, who had disappeared within the
drawing-room. “Dhey have swallowed him up--Dhey have eaten him up!” he
cried. “Oh, fader, fader!” with a frantic shout, clinging to Katherine’s
knees.
“No, no, my little boy. Your father has not been hurt. Come, we’ll go
down and find him,” Katherine said. When they were nearly at the foot of
the stairs, during which time he had clung to her with a little hot
grip, half piteous half painful, there suddenly sprung up in the dark
hall below, at the lighting of the lamp, a gleam of bright light, and
Sir Charles became visible at the foot of the stairs, coming towards
them. The child gave a shriek of joy and whirled himself from the top of
some half-dozen steps into his father’s arms. “You’re not eated up,” he
said; “fader, fader! Job fader’s boy.”
“Has he been cross?” said Sir Charles. He held the little creature in
his arms lovingly, with a smile that irradiated his own heavy
countenance like a gleam of sunshine.
“I hates her,” cried Job. “I kicked her. She dot nothing to do with me.”
“Job, Job,” said the father gently, “you shouldn’t be so cross and so
hasty to a kind lady who only wanted to bring you to father. If you
behave like that she will never be kind to you again.”
“I don’t tare. I hates ze lady,” Job said.
His father lifted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders apologetically to
Katherine, and then laughed and carried his little son away. Decidedly,
whatever Katherine was to make a success in, it was not in the _rôle_ of
maiden aunt.
Next day, to the distress and trouble of Katherine, early in the
afternoon there came a visitor whose appearance made Stella turn towards
her sister with an open-eyed look of malice and half ridicule. No; Lady
Somers did not intend it so. It was a look of significance, “I told you
so,” and call upon Katherine’s attention. The visitor was James
Stanford, their fellow-passenger by the _Aurungzebe_. He explained very
elaborately that Sir Charles had given him an invitation, and that,
finding himself on business of his own in the Isle of Wight, he had
taken advantage of it. He was not a man who could quickly make himself
at his ease. He seemed oppressed with a consciousness that he ought not
to be there, that he wanted some special permission, as if it had been
with some special purpose that he had come.
“Oh, you need not apologise,” said Stella; “if you had not come then you
might have apologised. We expect everybody to come to see us. Fancy,
we’ve seen scarcely anyone for a week almost, except some old friends
who have lectured us and told us what was our duty. Do you like to be
told what is your duty, Mr. Stanford? I don’t; if I were ever so much
inclined to do it before, I should set myself against it then. That is
exactly how narrow country people do; they turn you against everything.
They tell you this and that as if you did not know it before, and make
you turn your back on the very thing you wanted to do.”
“I don’t think,” said Stanford, “that I could be turned like that from
anything I wanted to do.”
“Perhaps you are strong-minded,” said Stella. “I am not, oh, not a bit.
I am one of the old-fashioned silly women. I like to be left alone and
to do my own way. Perhaps it’s a silly way, but it’s mine. And so you
have had business on the island, Mr. Stanford? Have you seen that lady
again--that lady with the black eyes and the yellow hair? She will not
like it at all if she doesn’t see you. She was very attentive to you
during the voyage. Now, you can’t deny that she was attentive. She was a
great deal nicer to you than you deserved. And such a pretty woman! To
be sure that was not the natural colour of her hair. She had done
something to it; up at the roots you could see that it had once been
quite dark. Well, why not, if she likes yellow hair better? It is going
quite out of fashion, so there can be no bad object in it, don’t you
know.”
Stella laughed largely, but her visitor did not respond. He looked more
annoyed, Katherine thought, than he had any occasion to be, and her
pride was roused, for it seemed to her that they both looked at herself
as if the woman who had paid attention to Mr. Stanford could have
anything to do with her. She changed the subject by asking him abruptly
if he felt the rigour of the English climate after his long life in
India.
“Yes--no, a little,” he said. “They say that we bring so much heat with
us that we do not feel it for the first year, and as I shall have to go
back----”
“Are you going back? Why should you go back?” said Stella. “I thought
you civil servants had such good times, not ordered about like soldiers.
They always said in the regiment that the civilians were so well off;
good pay and constant leave, and off to the hills whenever they liked,
and all sorts of indulgences.”
“I am afraid the regiment romances,” said Stanford, “but I do not
complain. On the whole I like India. One is sure, or almost sure, of
being of some use, and there are many alleviations to the climate. If
that was all, I should not at all mind going out again----”
“Ah, I understand,” said Stella. And then she added quickly, “I am so
sorry I can’t ask you to stay to dinner to-night. We have a grand
function coming off to-night. The lawyer is coming down, and we are to
hear how we stand, and how much money we are to have. I think I hear him
now, and I can’t let Charlie steal a march and tackle him before I am
there. Katherine, will you look after Mr. Stanford till I come back? I
don’t trust Charlie a step further than I see him. He might be doing
some silly thing and compromising me while I am sitting here talking,
but as soon as ever I can escape I will come back.”
She rose as she spoke and gave Katherine a look--- a look significant,
malicious, such as any spectator might have read. Stanford had risen to
open the door, and perhaps he did not see it, but it left Katherine so
hot with angry feeling, so ashamed and indignant, that he could not fail
but perceive it when Stella had gone away. He looked at her a little
wistfully as he took his seat again. “I fear I am detaining you here
against your will,” he said.
“Oh, no,” said Katherine, from the mist of her confusion, “it is
nothing. Stella has not yet got over the excitement of coming home. It
has been increased very much by some--incidents which she did not
expect. You have heard her story of course? They--eloped--and my father
was supposed to have cut her off and put her out of his will; but it
appears, on the contrary, that he has left everything to her. She only
heard of papa’s death, and of--this--when she got home.”
There was a little pause, and then he said reflectively, with a curious
sort of regret, as if this brief narrative touched himself at some
point, “It seems, then, that fortune after all favours the brave.”
“The brave?” said Katherine, surprised. “Oh, you mean because of their
running away? They have paid for it, they think, very severely in seven
years of poverty in India, but now--now Stella’s turn has come.”
“I quite understand Lady Somers’ excitement without that. Even for
myself, this house has so many recollections. The mere thought of it
makes my heart beat when I am thousands of miles away. When I first
came, an uncouth boy--you will scarcely remember that, Miss Tredgold.”
“Oh, I remember very well,” said Katherine, gradually recovering her
ease, and pleased with a suggestion of recollections so early that there
could be no embarrassment in them; “but not the uncouthness. We were
very glad to have you for a play-fellow, Stella and I.”
“She was a little round ball of a girl,” he said.
“But even then,” said Katherine, and paused. She had been about to say,
“expected to be the first,” but changed her expression, “was the
favourite of everybody,” she said.
“Ah,” said Stanford, and then pursued his recollections. “I used to
count the days till I could come back. And then came the next stage.
Your father was kind to me when I was a boy. Afterwards, he was quite
right, he wanted to know what I was good for.”
“He was what people call practical,” said Katherine. “Fortunately, he
did not think it necessary with us. We were accepted as useless
creatures, _objets de luxe_, which a rich man could afford to keep up,
and which did him more credit the gayer they were and the more costly.
Poor papa! It is not for us to criticise him, Mr. Stanford, in his own
house.”
“No, indeed; but I am not criticising him. I am proving him to be right
by my own example. He thought everybody could conquer fortune as he
himself had done; but everybody cannot do that, any more than everybody
can write a great poem. You require special qualities, which he had.
Some go down altogether in the battle and are never more heard of; some
do, what perhaps he would have thought worse, like me.”
“Why like you? Have you done badly? I have not heard so,” cried
Katherine, with a quick impulse of interest, which she showed in spite
of herself.
“I have done,” he said, “neither well nor ill. I am of that company that
Dante was so contemptuous about, don’t you remember? I think he is too
hard upon them, _che senza infamia e senza gloria vive_. Don’t you think
there is a little excuse--a little pardon for them, Miss Tredgold? The
poor fellows aim at the best. They know it when they see it; they put
out their hands to it, but cannot grasp it. And then what should the
alternative be?”
“It is a difficult question,” said Katherine with a smile, not knowing
what he would be at. He meant something, it was evident, beyond the mere
words. His eyes had a strained look of emotion, and there was a slight
quiver under the line of his moustache. She had not been used to
discussions of this kind. The metaphysics of life had little place in
the doctor’s busy mind, and still less in the noisy talk of the Sir
Charles Somers of existence. She did not feel herself quite equal to the
emergency. “I presume that a man who could not get the best, as you say,
would have to content himself with the best he could get. At least, that
is how it would come out in housekeeping, which is my sole science, you
know,” she said, with a faint laugh.
“Yes,” he said, almost eagerly. “That is perhaps natural. But you don’t
know how a man despises himself for it. Having once known a better way,
to fall back upon something that is second or third best, that has been
my way. I have conquered nothing. I have made no fortune or career. I
have got along. A man would feel less ashamed of himself if he had made
some great downfall--if he had come to grief once and for all. To win or
lose, that’s the only worthy alternative. But we nobodies do neither--we
don’t win, oh, far from it! and haven’t the heart to
lose--altogether----”
What did he mean? To do Katherine justice, she had not the smallest
idea. She kept her eyes upon him with a little curiosity, a little
interest. Her sense of embarrassment and consciousness had entirely
passed away.
“You are surely much too severe a judge,” she said. “I never heard that
to come to grief, as you say, was a desirable end. If one cannot win,
one would at least be glad to retire decently--to make a retreat with
honour, not to fling up everything. You might live then to fight another
day, which is a thing commended in the finest poetry,” she added with a
laugh.
He rose up and began to walk about the room. “You crush me all the more
by seeming to agree with me,” he said. “But if you knew how I feel the
contrast between what I am and what I was when last I was here! I went
away from your father burning with energy, feeling that I could face any
danger--that there was nothing I couldn’t overcome. I found myself off,
walking to London, I believe, before I knew. I felt as if I could have
walked to India, and overcome everything on the way! That was the heroic
for a moment developed. Of course, I had to come to my senses--to take
the train, to see about my berth, to get my outfit, &c. These hang
weights about a man’s neck. And then, of course, I found that fate does
not appear in one impersonation to be assaulted and overcome, as I
suppose I must have thought, and that a civil servant has got other
things to think of than fortune and fame. The soldiers have the
advantage of us in that way. They can take a bold step, as Somers did,
and carry out their ideal and achieve their victory----”
“Don’t put such high-flown notions into my brother-in-law’s head. I
don’t think he had any ideal. He thought Stella was a very pretty girl.
They do these things upon no foundation at all, to make you shiver--a
girl and a man who know nothing of each other. But it does well enough
in most cases, which is a great wonder. They get on perfectly. Getting
on is, I suppose, the active form of that condition--_senza gloria e
senza infamia_--of which you were speaking?” Katherine had quite
recovered her spirits. The Italian, the reference to Dante, had startled
her at first, but had gradually re-awakened in her a multitude of gentle
thoughts. They had read Dante together in the old far past days of
youth. It is one of the studies, grave as the master is, which has
facilitated many a courtship, as Browning, scarcely less grave, does
also.
The difficulties, to lay two heads together over, are so many, and the
poetry which makes the heart swell is so akin to every emotion. She
remembered suddenly a seat under one of the acacias where she had sat
with him over this study. She had always had an association with that
bench, but had not remembered till now that it flashed upon her what it
was. She could see it almost without changing her position from the
window. The acacia was ragged now, all its leaves torn from it by the
wind, the lawn in front covered with rags of foliage withered and
gone--not the scene she remembered, with the scent of the acacias in the
air, and the warm summer sunshine and the gleam of the sea. She was
touched by the recollection, stirred by it, emotions of many kinds
rising in her heart. No one had ever stirred or touched her heart but
this man--he, no doubt, more by her imagination than any reality of
feeling. But yet she remembered the quickened beat, the quickened breath
of her girlhood, and the sudden strange commotion of that meeting they
had had, once and no more, in the silence of the long years. And now,
again, and he in great excitement, strained to the utmost, his face and
his movements full of nervous emotion, turning towards her once more.
“Miss Tredgold,” he said, but his lips were dry and parched. He stopped
again to take breath. “Katherine,” he repeated, then paused once more.
Whatever he had to say, it surely was less easy than a love tale. “I
came to England,” he said, bringing it out with a gasp, “in the first
place for a pretence, to bring home--my little child.”
All the mist that was over the sea seemed to sweep in and surround
Katherine. She rose up instinctively, feeling herself wrapped in it,
stifled, blinded. “Your little child?” she said, with a strange muffled
cry.