I do not know how to begin this story otherwise than by a confession
that I cannot describe its very first scene. It was a scene such as
happens very often in romance, and which a great many writers could
describe to the life. I know who could do it so well that you would
think you saw the accident--the plunge of the frightened horse, the
sudden change in the sensations of the rider from voluntary progress
on her own part to a gradual confused wild mad rush past of trees
and houses and hedgerows, and all the whirling level green of the
country round--the flash before her eyes--the jar--the stillness of
insensibility. Many writers whom I know could make a great point of
it; but I never was run away with by my horse, and I do not know how it
feels. Therefore I will begin where the excitement ends, and take up
my story from the moment when Kate Crediton opened her eyes, without
any notion where she was, with a thousand bells ringing in her ears,
and awful shadows of something that had happened or was going to happen
flitting about her brain--and by degrees found that she was not on her
horse, as she had been when last she had any acquaintance with herself,
but lying on a sofa with a sense of wetness and coolness about her
head, and the strangest incapacity to move or speak or exercise any
energy of her own. She began to hear the voices and to feel the things
that were being done to her before she was capable of opening her
eyes, or indeed had come to herself. There was a soft plash of water,
and sensation as if a sudden shower had come over her face, and then
consciousness struggled back, and she began to divine what it was.
“Where am I?” she said, faintly, in her great wonder; and then her
father came forward, and with tears in his eyes implored her not to
stir or speak. And there was another man who was dimly apparent to her,
holding her hand or her pulse or something; and at her feet a pair of
anxious, astonished eyes gazing at her, and somebody behind who was
sprinkling something fragrant over her head, and shedding the heavy
hair off her forehead. She had fainted, and yet somehow had escaped
being dead, as she ought to have been. Or was she dead, and were these
phantoms that were round her, moving so ghostly, speaking with their
voices miles off through the plaintive air? But she could not put the
question, though she was so curious. She could not move, though she was
the most active, restless little creature possible. All the bells of
all the country round were booming dully in her ears; or was it rather
a hive of bees that had clustered round her with dull, small, murmurous
trumpeting? The mist went and came across her eyes like clouds on the
sky, and every time it blew aside there was visible that pair of eyes.
Whom did they belong to? or were they only floating there in space,
with perhaps a pair of wings attached?--a hypothesis not inconsistent
with Kate’s sense that after all she might have died, for anything she
could say to the contrary. But the eyes were anxious, puckered up at
the corners, with a very intent, disturbed, eager look in them, such as
eyes could scarcely have in heaven.
“She will do now,” Kate heard some one say beside her; “let her be kept
quite quiet, and not allowed to speak--and you may continue the cold
compress on the head. I think it will be best to leave her quite alone
with Mrs Mitford. Quiet is of the first consequence. I shall come back
again in an hour and see how she is.”
“But, doctor,” said the anxious voice of Mr Crediton, “you don’t
think----”
“My dear sir, there is no use in thinking anything just now. I hope she
will be all right again this evening; but pray come with me, and leave
her quiet. At present we can do no good.”
I do not mean to say that this connected conversation penetrated to
the poor little brain which had just received such a shock; but she
heard it, and caught the name, Mrs Mitford, out of the mist, and her
mind began vaguely to revolve round the new idea so oddly thrown
into it. Mrs Mitford?--who was she? The name seemed to get into the
murmurs of the bees somehow, and buzz and buzz about her. The big eyes
disappeared; the sense of other moving living creatures about her died
off into the general hum. But for that, everything now was still,
except just one rustle behind her at her head. And sometimes a hand
came out of the stillness, and dropped new freshness on her forehead;
and once it lingered with a soft half caress, and shed back the hair
once more, and there came to her the soft coo of a voice as the buzzing
became less loud. Yes; the bees began to hum away to their hives,
farther and farther off into the slumberous distance. And this?--was it
the wood-pigeons among the bees?
Thus it will be seen that poor Kate had received a considerable shock;
but yet, as she was young, and had unfathomable fountains of life and
energy to draw from, she had quite come to herself by the evening, as
the doctor hoped. Her father was allowed to come in for ten minutes
to see her, and almost wept over his child, though that was not by
any means his usual frame of mind; and Mrs Mitford emerged from the
darkness at the end of the sofa and sat by the side of her charge,
and even talked to her sometimes in that voice which was like the
wood-pigeon’s coo. But who was she? and whose were those two eyes which
had floated in the curious cloudy darkness? Perhaps it was because
of the general state of confusion in which she found herself that
Kate’s mind was so occupied with those eyes, thinking whom they could
belong to, and who Mrs Mitford could be, who was taking charge of her
so simply, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. As the
evening darkened, an uncomfortable sense that she ought to get up and
get ready to go home came over her. And she did not want to go home.
To lie there quite still, full of dreamy wonderings, which were half
pleasant, half confusing, seemed all she was fit for. The very idea of
raising herself, of putting her foot on the ground, seemed to bring
back all those buzzing bees--and yet night was coming on, and that of
course would be the necessary thing to do.
It was almost dark when, for the second time, her father came to the
side of her sofa. He came very softly, and hushed her when she first
attempted to speak. “Not a word, my darling,” he said--“not a word; you
must not talk.”
“But I must,” said Kate, though even her own voice sounded at least
five miles off. “Papa, must not I get up and go home?”
“You are not able,” he said, stooping over and kissing her. “Don’t
trouble yourself about that. Mrs Mitford has promised to take charge
of you till you are better. You must lie quite quiet, and not think of
anything till you get well.”
“I am--pretty well,” said Kate, “and who is Mrs----?” She stopped, for
there was a shadow behind Mr Crediton, who could only be Mrs Mitford
herself, and Kate’s sense of courtesy was not gone, though she was so
strangely confused. Then she gave a little exclamation of surprise.
“I am still in my habit,” she said, with vague wonder, “though it is
almost night!”
“We are going to get you out of your habit presently, my dear,” said
Mrs Mitford. “Say good-night to your father, for we must send him away.
You will soon know who I am, and all about it; but you must not talk
to-night.”
And then, before she knew how, she was released from her warm clinging
dress, and laid, all white and fresh and cool, in a cool, soft, shaded
bed, where the confusion gradually deepened round her. Kate could have
vowed she had never slept at all, but had been all the while sensible
of the strangeness and stillness of the place--of now and then a sound
and touch that felt like the embodiment of the silence--of a faint
glimmer of light in the darkness--of sometimes a wandering breath of
air, as if the window had been opened; and the sense of some one by her
all the while. But yet, no doubt, she must have slept; for it became
apparent to her all at once that day had returned--that the morning
air was coming in, and the whole dim chamber was flooded through and
through with light,--light which was not sunshine, and yet looked
like the essence of sunshine. She seemed to herself to look up all at
once out of the soft darkness which had prevented her from identifying
anything, to see this daylight room all bright and clear, with its
pictures and its furniture, and a bright-faced soft-eyed woman who
stood by her bed-side, no longer a shadow among the shadows. Such soft
eyes, though they were no longer young, a complexion so softly, sweetly
tinted, a look that caressed every young creature it rested upon:--If
this was Mrs Mitford, it was very pleasant to be left in her charge.
She had a little tray in her hands, white-covered, with fragrant tea
and delicate bits of dry toast. Kate, not knowing how it was that she
had woke so suddenly to this pleasant spectacle, tried to start up,
with her usual impetuosity, but fell back again immediately, with her
head all buzzing and confused, as it had been on the previous night.
“Oh dear! what is the matter with me?” cried Kate, so much overwhelmed
by her sensations that she forgot civility.
“Nothing very much, I hope, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford; “but you are
not well enough to jump up like that. You had a bad fall yesterday; but
you have slept so well all night----”
“Oh no--I think not,” protested Kate; and then it suddenly occurred to
her how ungrateful she was. “I am sure you were sitting up with me,”
she said. “It is so very good of you; and I don’t even know--my head is
so strange.”
“You shall hear all about it in time,” said her cheerful nurse. “You
have only to keep quiet, that is all, and take some tea, and be content
to be an invalid. Is that hard? But it might have been so much worse;
and oh! we have such reason to be thankful, my dear!”
Kate did not say anything, but she gazed so, throwing all her
awe-stricken thoughts into her eyes, that the kind woman answered the
thought as if it had been spoken.
“Yes, you might have been killed--and my John too. Thank God, you are
both safe! But you must not ask any more questions. You must let me
settle your pillows for you, and try to take some tea.”
“My John!” who was that? another mysterious new being in this world
of darkness. Kate gazed imploringly at her new friend, whom she had
identified and made out. But Mrs Mitford’s attention was fixed on the
pillows, which she piled up cunningly behind the patient to support
her. “Is that comfortable?” she asked. “It does not make you giddy
to sit up like that? and here is your breakfast, and a rose with
the dew on it from my--from the garden,” she added, after a little
momentary pause. Kate’s mind was very much confused, it is true,
but still her woman’s wit had not so much deserted her but that she
could make out that broken sentence. It was “my John,” no doubt, that
her friend had been about to say, and why then could not she say it
without hesitation? An involuntary smile stole over Kate’s face; she
put up the rose to hide this smile, taking in all its freshness and
dewiness and perfume into her young being. Evidently John was not
without discrimination--and Kate, we are obliged to confess, was the
kind of girl to like the rose all the better coming to her in this
half-mysterious way, than if Mrs Mitford had but gathered it in the
garden as she took her morning walk.
“It is very sweet; and it is so kind of--you, to bring it me,” said
Kate, with a little gleam of habitual mischief waking in her pretty
eyes. “But oh! my head feels so strange, I can’t make it out.”
“Perhaps you had better not talk any more, but lie down again as soon
as you have had your tea,” said Mrs Mitford; and she only smiled upon
Kate’s further attempts to enter into conversation, and shook her head.
When the little tray had been removed, and the pillows lowered, Kate
was left with her rose, in a not unwilling quiet. After all, curious
though she was, she did not feel able to talk: her head still felt, as
she said, very strange. The bees were not so far off but what they were
ready to come back when she stirred. On the whole, it was best to lie
back and keep quite still, and watch her nurse moving about the room.
She had a grey alpaca gown, which shone with pretty _reflets_
like silk, but did not rustle to vex the invalid’s nerves; and a little
white cap that set off her soft rose-tints. Kate lay and wondered how
she had managed to keep that lovely soft complexion--and then why she
wore a cap, which so few people do nowadays. Certainly Mrs Mitford had
no need to wear it; she had plenty of hair, though it was beginning to
be touched by grey, and Kate was sufficiently a young woman of her time
to know that no hair now needs to grow grey unless its owner chooses.
And then she wondered how old Mrs Mitford was. She might not have been
any more than forty, and yet she might be ten years older than that--it
was hard to say. She went about softly, not quite noiselessly, which
is as hurtful to the nerves as boisterousness, but with just sound
enough to make you aware she was there. And it was so _nice_, Kate
thought, to have her there. Her pretty rose ribbons, which brightened
the grey dress, were not so pretty as the softer roses on her cheeks.
Kate was all lilies and roses herself, and she could not but gaze with
a sympathetic admiration at the woman so much older than herself, who
still retained this special loveliness. She looked like Methuselah to
Kate, and yet she was so pretty. “Shall I be as pretty, I wonder, when
I am as old?” the girl asked herself; and once more was surprised by a
smile at the quaint, strange, incomprehensible thought. Kate Crediton
fifty, but still possessed of a pretty complexion, and considered
a nice-looking woman of her age! The idea was so odd that into the
quietness there bubbled up a little sudden fountain of laughter, of
which, as soon as she heard it, Kate was so infinitely ashamed, that
even her rose did not suffice to hide the colour which blazed up into
her cheeks.
“Laughing, my dear!” said Mrs Mitford, though not without a little
anxiety, drawing near the bed. “What has amused you?” And she came
quite close, and touched Kate’s forehead softly with her hand, and
gazed at her, with just a touch of dread lest her mind was wandering,
which the girl guessed somehow, and which instantly sobered her
thoughts.
“I was thinking how funny it is to be lying here so comfortable, and
you taking care of me as if I belonged to you, and not to know where I
am, nor--anything about it. It is all so queer.”
“It is not half so queer as you think,” said Mrs Mitford, smiling; “you
will find it is quite natural when you are a little better. But we must
not talk till the doctor comes. He gave orders you were to be kept
perfectly quiet. Perhaps he will relax when he sees how well you are,
if you keep quite quiet now.”
“When will he come!” said Kate, with a sigh of impatience; and then in
her hasty way she put up her face, as well as she was able, to her kind
nurse. “I wonder if mamma was like you,” cried the motherless creature,
with a few tears which came as suddenly as the laughter. It was Kate’s
way; but Mrs Mitford did not know that, and was wonderfully touched,
and kissed her, and bathed her face, and smoothed her hair, and did a
hundred little tender offices for her, making her “nice,” as an invalid
should look.
“My hair was much the same colour when I was your age, and I had just
such heaps of it,” the kind woman said, combing out and caressing those
great shining coils.
“I shall be just the same-looking woman when I am old,” was the comment
Kate made to herself; and the thought almost made her laugh again. But
this time she had warning of the inclination, and restrained herself;
and thus the morning wore away.
When the doctor came he pronounced her a great deal better, and Kate
lay wondering, and listened with all her ears to the conversation
that went on in hushed tones near her bed-side. “Not light-headed at
all?” said the doctor; “not talking nonsense?” “And oh,” cried Kate to
herself, “if I did not talk nonsense, it is the first time in all my
life!” “Oh no, she has been quite rational--quite herself,” said Mrs
Mitford; and Kate, exercising intense self-control, did not laugh. If
she had ever been called rational before, it would not have been so
hard; and how little they must know about her! “It is rather nice to
be considered sensible,” she said within herself; but she could not
suppress the laughing mischief in her eye, which the doctor perceived
when he turned round to feel her pulse again.
“She looks as if she were laughing at us all,” he said. “Miss Crediton,
tell me do you feel quite well? able to get up this moment and ride
home?”
“I am very well when I lie still,” said Kate; “but I don’t want to
go home, please. _She_ is not at home; I am obliged to call her
_she_, which is very uncivil, because nobody will tell me her
name.”
“I can do that much for you,” said the doctor. “This is Mrs Mitford of
Fanshawe Regis; and I can tell you you were in luck to be run away with
close to her door.”
“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Kate. “Please, Mrs Mitford, will
you kiss me, now we are introduced? I am Kate Crediton--perhaps you
know; and I am sure I don’t know why I did not talk nonsense all last
night, for they say I always do at home.”
“But you must not here,” said the doctor, who was an old man, and
smiled at her kindly,--“nor chatter at all, indeed, for several days.
See how it brings the blood to her face! If you will be very good you
may see your father, and ask--let me see--six questions; but not one
word more.”
“Is papa still here?” cried Kate.
“That is one,” said the doctor; “be careful, or you will come to the
end of your list, as the man in the fairy tale came to the end of his
wishes. He is waiting to come in.”
“Have I only five left?” said Kate. “Please, let him come in. I
shall ask him how it all happened; and then I shall ask him where we
are--that is three; and when he is going home; and what is the matter
with me that I must lie here--and then----” She had been counting on
her fingers, and paused with the forefinger of one hand resting on the
little finger of the other. Mrs Mitford had gone to the door to admit
Mr Crediton, and Kate was alone with the old doctor, who looked at her
so kindly. She laid back her head among the pillows, a little flushed
by talking; her pretty hair, which Mrs Mitford had just smoothed, had
begun to ruffle up again in light little puffs of curls. She lay back,
looking up at the doctor like a certain Greuze I know of, with fingers
like bits of creamy pink shells, half transparent, doing their bit of
calculation. “And then,” she added, with a long-drawn breath, half of
mischief, half of fatigue, “I will ask him who is ‘my John’?”
“Has she been talking to you about my John?” said the doctor, amused;
and Kate gave a little nod of her pretty head at him, where she lay
back like a rosebud upon the pillows. It was too late to answer in
words, for Mrs Mitford was coming back from the door, followed by Mr
Crediton, who looked excited and anxious, and had something like a tear
in the corner of his eyes.
“Well, my pet, so you are better!” he said. “That is right, Kate. I
have had a most miserable night, doctor, thinking of her. But now I
hear it’s going to be all right. It is not, of course, for any special
virtue in her,” he said, turning round to them with a strained little
laugh when he had kissed her, “but one has all sorts of prejudices
about one’s only child.”
“Yes, indeed. I know very well what it is to have an only child,”
said Mrs Mitford. “You could not find more sympathy anywhere in that
particular. When there is anything the matter with my boy, the whole
world is turned upside down.”
Kate looked at the doctor with an inquiring glance, and he gave her a
little confidential nod. The eyes of the young girl and the old man
laughed and communicated while the two foolish parents were making
their mutual confessions. “Is that my John she is speaking of?” asked
Kate’s eyes; and the doctor replied merrily, delighted with his
observing patient. To be sure there had been a grave enough moment on
the previous day, when these two lives first crossed each other; but
this was how the idea of him was formally introduced to Kate Crediton’s
mind. It was a foolish, flighty, light, little mind, thinking of
nothing but fun and nonsense. Yet even now it did cross the doctor’s
mind, with a momentary compunction, that the business might turn out
serious enough for poor John.