Besides her supper now, Catharine wanted her share of this visitor.
Nothing else, in fact, came in or went out of her life. Outside lay
emancipated Berrytown, to unemancipated Kitty only a dumb panorama:
inside, her meals, her lessons and perpetual consultations with her
mother on bias folds and gussets while they made their dresses or
sewed for the Indian missions. Kitty was quite willing to believe that
the Berrytown women were mad and unsexed, but ought the events of
life to consist of beef and new dresses and far-off Sioux? She laughed
good-humoredly at her own grumbling, but she looked longingly out of
the window at the girls going by chattering in the evenings with their
sweet-hearts; and certainly the Man coming into her life had affected
her not unpleasantly. Not that the clergyman, with his small jokes and
small enthusiasms, was any high revelation to her mind; but there was
no other.
"It's something to hear a heavy step about the house, and to see the
carpet kicked crooked," she said sometimes. Her mother would shake her
hand gently and smile.
She shook her head and smiled in precisely the same way now. Mr.
Muller, who had grown excited as he talked, felt a wave of insipid
propriety wash over his emotions, bringing them to a dead level.
"However the matter may conclude," said Mrs. Guinness pleasantly, "why
should you and I lose our self-control, Mr. Muller? Now, why should
we? Ah?"
There was something numbing in the very note of prolonged
interrogation. The folds of Mrs. Guinness's glossy alpaca lay calmly
over her plump breast; her colorless hair (both her own and the
switch) rolled and rose high above her head; her round cheeks were
unchanging pink, her light eyes steady; the surprised lift of those
flaxen eyelashes had made many a man ashamed of his emotions and his
slipshod grammar together.
Mr. Muller was humbled, he did not know why. "It is practical enough,
I suppose," he said irritably, "to ask what Catharine herself thinks
of marriage with me?"
"You never tried to discover for yourself?" with an attempt at roguish
shrewdness.
"No, upon my honor, no!" The little man fairly lost his breath in his
haste. "I have a diffidence in speaking to her."
"To Kitty!" with an amused, indulgent smile, which worsted him again.
He struggled back into the hardest common sense: "Of course it is not
diffidence in me. I feel no hesitation in discussing the question of
marriage with anybody else. My family wish me to marry: my sister has
suggested several young ladies to me in well-to-do religious families
in the city. There are marriageable young women here, too, whose
acquaintance I have made with that object in view. Very intelligent
girls: they have given me some really original views on religion and
politics. One can talk to them about anything--social evils or what
not. But Catharine--she is so young! It is like broaching marriage to
a baby!"
Mrs. Guinness was silent. The sudden silence struck like a dead wall
before the little man, and bewildered and alarmed him: "Perhaps, Mrs.
Guinness, you think I ought not to look upon Catharine as another man
would? I should regard a wife only as a fellow-servant of the Lord? I
oughtn't to--to make love to Kitty, in short?"
"She is a dear, pious child. I love to think of her in the midst of
your Reformed boys," said the lady evasively.
There was another pause. "Of course, you know," he said with an
anxious laugh, "I never had a serious thought of those young ladies
chosen by my sister. Social position or wealth does not weigh with me,
Mrs. Guinness--not a feather!" earnestly. If he really had meant to
give her a passing reminder that marriage with Kitty would be a step
down the social grade for him, he was thoroughly scared out of his
intention. As he talked, reiterating the same thing again and again,
the heat rose into his neatly-shaved face and little aquiline nose.
Mrs. Guinness observed his agitation with calm triumph. She knew but
one ladder into heaven, and that, short and narrow, was through her
own Church. Kitty was stepping up on a high rung of it. Once the wife
of this good Christian man, and her soul was safe. A sudden vision of
her flitted before her mother in grave but rich attire (fawn-colored
velvet, for instance, for next winter, trimmed with brown fur),
to suit her place as the wife of the wealthy Muller, head of the
congregation and the Reformatory school: she would be instant, too, at
prayer--meetings and Dorcas societies. This was Mrs. Guinness's world,
and she reasoned according to the laws of it. She rejoiced as Hannah
did when she had safely placed her child within the temple of the
Lord.
And yet with that hint of the social position of the Mullers had come
the certainty to her that this marriage could never be. A shadow had
stood suddenly before her--a boy's face, the only one before which
her calm, complacent soul had ever quailed or shrunk. The pleasant,
apple-cheeked woman, like the rest of us, had her ghost--her sin
unwhipped of justice. She stood calmly as Mr. Muller hurried his
explanations, piling them one on top of the other, but she did not
hear a word of them. If he should ever hear Hugh's story! Dead though
he was, if that were known not a beggar in the street would marry
Catharine.
But since Fanny Guinness was an amiable, pink-cheeked belle in the
village choir, she had never turned her back on an enemy: why should
she now? Hugh Guinness had hated her as the vicious always hate
the good, but she was thankful she had smiled and greeted him with
Christian forbearance to the very last. As for this danger coming from
him, now that he was dead, the safest way was to drag it to the light
at once. All things worked together for good to those who loved the
Lord--if you managed them right.
"Of course," she said, as if just finishing a sentence, "you are
indifferent to social rank. And yet it will be no slight advantage to
you that Catharine has no swarm of needy kinsfolk. Her own father died
when she was a baby. Mr. Guinness is the only near friend she has ever
known except myself. He had a son when I married him--" The boy's
name stuck in her throat. For a moment she felt as the murderer
does, forced to touch his victim with his naked hand. "Hugh--Hugh
Guinness--was the lad's name."
"I never heard of him," indifferently.
"No, it is not probable you should. Long before Berrytown was built
he went to Nicaragua. He died there. Well," with a little wave of the
hand, "there you have Kitty's whole family. It will be better that she
should be so untrammeled, for the interests of the school."
"The school? I'm not a Reformatory machine altogether, I suppose!" He
had been watching Catharine, who was moving about in the shop. When
he was not in sight of her he always remembered that she was a mere
child, to be instructed from the very rudiments up after marriage,
and that the Guinnesses were ten degrees, at least, below him in the
social scale. But she was near--she was coming! The complacent smile
went out of his trig little features: he moved his tongue about
to moisten his dry lips before he could speak. He was absolutely
frightened at himself. "There's more than the school to be thought of,
Mrs. Guinness," he blurted out. "I--I love Catharine. And I want this
matter settled. Immediately--within the hour."
"Very well. You will be satisfied with the result, I am sure, Mr.
Muller. I give Catharine to you with all my heart." But she did not
look any more at ease than he. They both turned to look at Kitty, who
came toward them in her usual headlong gait through the shop.