Old Mr. Tredgold

“Surely much better,” said Katherine.

“I think so. And then there are the hills—Simla, and so forth, which never were thought of in my father’s time. They had to make up their minds and put up with everything. We have many alleviations—the ladies have especially,” he added, with a look that said a great deal more. Why should he add by his looks so much importance to that fact? And how was it that Katherine, knowing nothing of the life in India, took up his meaning in the twinkling of an eye?

“But the ladies,” she said, “don’t desert the plains where their—their husbands are, I hope, to find safety for themselves on the hills?”

“I did not mean that,” he said, with a flush of colour all over his brown face (Katherine compared it, in spite of herself, to Dr. Burnet’s recent blush, with conclusions not favourable to the latter). “I mean that it is such a comfort to men to think that—what is most precious to them in the world—may be placed in safety at any critical moment.”

“I wonder if that is Charlie Somers’ feeling,” Katharine said with an involuntary laugh. It was not that she meant to laugh at Charlie Somers; it was rather the irrestrainable expression of a lightening and rising of her own heart.

“No doubt every man must,” James Stanford said.

And they went on talking, he telling her many things which she did not fully understand or even receive into her mind at all, her chief consciousness being that this man—her first love—was the only one who had felt what a true lover should, the only one to whom her heart made any response. She did not even feel this during the course of that too rapid journey. She felt only an exhilaration, a softening and expansion of her whole being. She could not meet his eyes as she met Dr. Burnet’s; they dazzled her; she could not tell why. Her heart beat, running on with a tremulous accompaniment to those words of his, half of which her intelligence did not master at the time, but which came to her after by degrees. He told her that he was soon going back to India, and that he would like to go and see Stella, to let her know by an independent testimony how her sister was. Might he write and give her his report? Might he come—this was said hurriedly as the train dashed into the precincts of London, and the end of the interview approached—to Sliplin again one day before he left on the chance of perhaps seeing her—to inquire for Mr. Tredgold—to take anything she might wish to send to Lady Somers? Katherine felt the flush on her own face to be overwhelming. Ah, how different from that half-angry confused colour which she had been conscious of when the Rector offered his congratulations!

“Oh no,” she said with a little shake of her head, and a sound of pathos in her voice of which she was quite conscious; “my father is ill; he is better now, but his condition is serious. I am very—sorry—I am distressed—to say so—but he must not be disturbed, he must not. I have escaped for a little to-day. I—had to come. But at home I am altogether taken up by papa. I cannot let you—lose your time—take the trouble—of coming for nothing. Oh, excuse me—I cannot–” Katherine said.

And he made no reply, he looked at her, saying a thousand things with his eyes. And then there came the jar of the arrival. He handed her out, he found a cab for her, performing all the little services that were necessary, and then he held her hand a moment while he said goodbye.

“May I come and see you off? May I be here when you come back?”

“Oh, no, no!” Katherine said, she did not know why. “I don’t know when we go back; it perhaps might not be till to-morrow—it might not be till—that is, no, you must not come, Mr. Stanford—I—cannot help it,” she said.

Still he held her hand a moment. “It must still be hope then, nothing but hope,” he said.

She drove away through London, leaving him, seeing his face wherever she looked. Ah, that was what the others had wanted to look like but had not been able—that was—all that one wanted in this world; not the Tredgold money, nor the fortune of the great City young man, nor the Rector’s dignity, nor Dr. Burnet’s kindness—nothing but that, it did not matter by what accompanied. What a small matter to be poor, to go away to the end of the earth, to be burned by the sun and wasted by the heat, to endure anything, so long as you had that. She trembled and was incoherent when she tried to speak. She forgot where to tell the cabman to go, and said strange things to Hannah, not knowing what she said. Her heart beat and beat, as if it was the only organ she possessed, as if she were nothing but one pulse, thumping, thumping with a delicious idiocy, caring for nothing, and thinking of nothing. Thinking of nothing, though rays and films of thought flew along in the air and made themselves visible to her for a moment. Perhaps she should never see him again; she had nothing to do with him, there was no link between them; and yet, so to speak, there was nothing else but him in the world. She saw the tall tower of the Parliament in a mist that somehow encircled James Stanford’s face, and broad Whitehall was full of that vapour in which any distinctions of other feature, of everything round about her, was lost.

How curious an effect to be produced upon anyone so reasonable, so sensible as Katherine! After a long time, she did not know how long, she was recalled to common day by her arrival at the dressmaker’s where she had to get out and move and speak, all of which she seemed to do in a dream. And then the day turned round and she had to think of her journey back again. Why did she tell him not to come? It would have harmed nobody if he had come. Her father had not forbidden her to see him, and even had he forbidden her, a girl who was of age, who was nearly twenty-four, who had after all a life of her own to think of, should she have refrained from seeing him on that account? All her foundations were shaken, not so much by feeling of her own as by the sight and certainty of his feeling. She would not desert her father, never, never run away from him like Stella. But at least she might have permitted herself to see James Stanford again. She said to herself, “I may never marry him; but now I shall marry nobody else.” And why had she not let him come, why might they not at least have understood each other? The influence of this thought was that Katherine did not linger for the afternoon train, to which Stanford after all did go, on the chance of seeing her, of perhaps travelling with her again, but hurried off by the very first, sadly disappointing poor Hannah, who had looked forward to the glory of lunching with her young mistress in some fine pastrycook’s as Stevens had often described. Far from this, Hannah was compelled to snatch a bun at the station, in the hurry Miss Katherine was in; and why should she have hurried? There was no reason in the world. To be in London, and yet not in London, to see nothing, not even the interior of Verey’s, went to Hannah’s heart. Nor was Katherine’s much more calm when she began to perceive that her very impetuosity had probably been the reason why she did not see him again; for who could suppose that she who had spoken of perhaps not going till to-morrow, should have fled back again in an hour, by a slow train in which nobody who could help it ever went?

By that strange luck which so often seems to regulate human affairs, Dr. Burnet chose this evening of all others for the explanation of his sentiments. He paid Mr. Tredgold an evening visit, and found him very well; and then he went out to join Katherine, whom he saw walking on the path that edged the cliff. It was a beautiful June evening, serene and sweet, still light with the lingering light of day, though the moon was already high in the sky. There was no reason any longer why Dr. Burnet should restrain his feelings. His patient was well; there was no longer any indecorum, anything inappropriate, in speaking to Katherine of what she must well know was nearest to his heart. He, too, had been conscious of the movement in the air—the magnetic communication from him to her on the day of Mr. Tredgold’s first outing, when they had met the Rector, and he had congratulated them. To Katherine it had seemed almost as if in some way unknown to herself everything had been settled between them, but Dr. Burnet knew different. He knew that nothing had been settled, that no words nor pledge had passed between them; but he had little doubt what the issue would be. He felt that he had the matter in his own hands, that he had only to speak and she to reply. It was a foregone conclusion, nothing wanting but the hand and seal.

Katherine had scarcely got beyond the condition of dreaming in which she had spent the afternoon. She was a little impatient when she saw him approaching. She did not want her thoughts to be disturbed. Her thoughts were more delightful to her than anything else at this moment, and she half resented the appearance of the doctor, whom her mind had forsaken as if he had never been. The dreaming state in which she was, the preoccupation with one individual interest is a cruel condition of mind. At another moment she would have read Dr. Burnet’s meaning in his eyes, and would have been prepared at least for what was coming—she who knew so well what was coming, who had but a few days ago acquiesced in what seemed to be fate. But now, when he began to speak, Katherine was thunderstruck. A sort of rage sprang up in her heart. She endeavoured to stop him, to interrupt the words on his lips, which was not only cruel but disrespectful to a man who was offering her his best, who was laying himself, with a warmth which he had scarcely known to be in him, at her feet. He was surprised at his own ardour, at the fire with which he made his declaration, and so absorbed in that that he did not for the first moment see how with broken exclamations and lifted hands she was keeping him off.

“Oh, don’t, doctor! Oh, don’t say so, don’t say so!” were the strange words that caught his ear at last; and then he shook himself up, so to speak, and saw her standing beside him in the gathering dimness of the twilight, her face not shining with any sweetness of assent, but half convulsed with pain and shame, her hands held up in entreaty, her lips giving forth these words, “Oh, don’t say so!”

It was his turn to be struck dumb. He drew up before her with a sudden pause of consternation.

“What?” he cried—“what?” not believing his ears.

And thus they stood for a moment speechless, both of them. She had stopped him in the middle of his love tale, which he had told better and with more passion than he was himself sensible of. She had stopped him, and now she did not seem to have another word to say.

“It is my anxiety which is getting too much for me,” he said. “You didn’t say that, Katherine—not that? You did not mean to interrupt me—to stop me? No. It is only that I am too much in earnest—that I am frightening myself–”

“Oh, Dr. Burnet!” she cried, instinctively putting her hands together. “It is I who am to blame. Oh, do not be angry with me. Let us part friends. Don’t—don’t say that any more!”

“Say what?—that I love you, that I want you to be my wife? Katherine, I have a right to say it! You have known for a long time that I was going to say it. I have been silent because of—for delicacy, for love’s sake; but you have known. I know that you have known!” he cried almost violently, though in a low voice.

She had appealed to him like a frightened girl; now she had to collect her forces as a woman, with her dignity to maintain. “I will not contradict you,” she said. “I cannot; it is true. I can only ask you to forgive me. How could I stop you while you had not spoken? Oh no, I will not take that excuse. If it had been last night it might have been otherwise, but to-day I know better. I cannot—it is impossible! Don’t—oh don’t let us say any more.”

“There is a great deal more to be said!” he cried. “Impossible! How is it impossible? Last night it would have been possible, but to-day– You are playing with me, Katherine! Why should it be impossible to-day?”

“Not from anything in you, Dr. Burnet,” she said; “from something in myself.”

“From what in yourself? Katherine, I tell you you are playing with me! I deserve better at your hands.”

“You deserve—everything!” she cried, “and I—I deserve nothing but that you should scorn me. But it is not my fault. I have found out. I have had a long time to think; I have seen things in a new light. Oh, accept what I say! It is impossible—impossible!”

“Yet it was possible yesterday, and it may be possible to-morrow?”

“No, never again!” she said.

“Do you know,” said the doctor stonily, “that you have led me on, that you have given me encouragement, that you have given me almost a certainty?—and now to cast me off, without sense, without reason–”

The man’s lip quivered under the sting of this disappointment and mortification. He began not to know what he was saying.

“Let us not say any more—oh, let us not say any more! That was unkind that you said. I could give you no certainty, for I had none; and to-day—I know that it is impossible! Dr. Burnet, I cannot say any more.”

“But, Miss Tredgold,” he cried in his rage, “there is a great deal more to be said! I have a right to an explanation! I have a right to– Good heavens, do you mean that nothing is to come of it after all?” he cried.

CHAPTER XXXIII

It turned out that there was indeed a great deal more to be said. Dr. Burnet came back after the extraordinary revelation of that evening. He left Katherine on the cliff in the silvery light of the lingering day, with all the tender mists of her dream dispersed, to recognise the dreadful fact that she had behaved very badly to a man who had done nothing but good to her. It was for this he had been so constant night and day. No man in the island had been so taken care of, so surrounded with vigilant attention, as old Mr. Tredgold—not for the fees he gave certainly, which were no more than those of any other man, not for love of him, but for Katherine. And now Katherine refused to pay the price—nay, more, stood up against any such plea—as if he had no right to ask her or to be considered more than another man. Dr. Burnet would not accept his dismissal, he would not listen to her prayer to say no more of it. He would not believe that it was true, or that by reasoning and explanation it might not yet be made right.

There were two or three very painful interviews in that corner of the drawing-room where Katherine had established herself, and which had so many happy associations to him. He reminded her of how he had come there day after day during the dreary winter, of that day of the snowstorm, of other days, during which things had been said and allusions made in which now there was no meaning. Sometimes he accused her vehemently of having played hot and cold with him, of having led him on, of having permitted him up to the very last to believe that she cared for him. And to some of these accusations Katherine did not know how to reply. She had not led him on, but she had permitted a great deal to be implied if not said, and she had acquiesced. She could not deny that she had acquiesced even in her own mind. If she had confessed to him how little of her heart was in it at any time, or that it was little more than a mental consent as to something inevitable, that would have been even less flattering to him than her refusal; this was an explanation she could not make. And her whole being shrank from a disclosure of that chance meeting on the railway and the self-revelation it brought with it. As a matter of fact the meeting on the railway had no issue any more than the other. Nothing came of it. There was nothing to tell that could be received as a reason for her conduct. She could only stand silent and pale, and listen to his sometimes vehement reproaches, inalterable only in the fact that it could not be.

There had been a very stormy interview between them one of those evenings after he had left her father. He was convinced at last that it was all over, that nothing could be done, and the man’s mortification and indignant sense of injury had subsided into a more profound feeling, into the deeper pang of real affection rejected and the prospects of home and happiness lost.

“You have spoiled my life,” he had said to her. “I have nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for. Here I am and here I shall be, the same for ever—a lonely man. Home will never mean anything to me but dreary rooms to work in and rest in; and you have done it all, not for any reason, not with any motive, in pure wantonness.” It was almost more than he could bear.

“Forgive me,” Katherine said. She did not feel guilty to that extent, but she would not say so. She was content to put up with the imputation if it gave him any comfort to call her names.

And then he had relented. After all had been said that could be said, he had gone back again to the table by which she was sitting, leaning her head on her arm and half covering it with her hand. He put his own hand on the same table and stooped a little towards her.

“All this,” he said with difficulty, “will of course make no difference. You will send for me when I am wanted for your father all the same.”

“Oh, Dr. Burnet!” was all she said.

“Of course,” he said almost roughly, “you will send for me night or day all the same. It makes no difference. You may forsake me, but I will not forsake you.” And with that, without a word of leavetaking or any courtesy, he went away.

Was that how she was to be represented to herself and the world now and for ever? Katherine sat with her head on her hand and her thoughts were bitter. It seemed hard, it seemed unjust, yet what could she say? She had not encouraged this man to love her or build his hopes upon her, but yet she had made no stand against it; she had permitted a great deal which, if she had not been so much alone, could not have been. Was it her fault that she was alone? Could she have been so much more than honest, so presumptuous and confident in her power, as to bid him pause, to reject him before he asked her? These self-excusing thoughts are self-accusing, as everybody knows. All her faults culminated in the fact that whereas she was dully acquiescent before, after that going to London the thing had become impossible. From that she could not save herself—it was the only truth. One day the engagement between them was a thing almost consented to and settled; next day it was a thing that could not be, and that through no fault in the man. He had done nothing to bring about such a catastrophe. It was no wonder that he was angry, that he complained loudly of being deceived and forsaken. It was altogether her fault, a fault fantastic, without any reason, which nothing she could say would justify. And indeed how could she say anything? It was nothing—a chance encounter, a conversation with her maid sitting by, and nothing said that all the world might not hear.

There was the further sting in all this that, as has been said, nothing had come, nothing probably would ever come, of that talk. Time went on and there was no sign—not so much as a note to say– What was there to say? Nothing! And yet Katherine had not been able to help a faint expectation that something would come of it. As a matter of fact Stanford came twice to Sliplin with the hope of seeing Katherine again, but he did not venture to go to the house where his visits had been forbidden, and either Katherine did not go out that day or an evil fate directed her footsteps in a different direction. The second time Mr. Tredgold was ill again and nothing could possibly be seen of her. He went to Mrs. Shanks’, whom he knew, but that lady was not encouraging. She told him that Katherine was all but engaged to Dr. Burnet, that he had her father’s life in his hands, and that nothing could exceed his devotion, which Katherine was beginning to return. Mrs. Shanks did not like lovers to be unhappy; if she could have married Katherine to both of them she would have done so; but that being impossible, it was better that the man should be unhappy who was going away, not he who remained. And this was how it was that Katherine saw and heard no more of the man whose sudden appearance had produced so great an effect upon her, and altered at a touch what might have been the current of her life.

It was not only Dr. Burnet who avenged his wrongs upon her. Lady Jane came down in full panoply of war to ask what Katherine meant by it.

“Yes, you did encourage him,” she said. “I have seen it with my own eyes—if it were no more than that evening at my own house. He asked you to go into the conservatory with him on the most specious pretext, with his intentions as plainly written in his face as ever man’s were. And you went like a lamb, though you must have known–”

“But, Lady Jane,” said Katherine, “he said nothing to me, whatever his intentions may have been.”

“No,” said Lady Jane with a little snort of displeasure; “I suppose you snubbed him when you got him there, and he was frightened to speak. That is exactly what I object to. You have blown hot and blown cold, made him feel quite sure of you, and then knocked him down again like a ninepin. All that may be forgiven if you take a man at the end. But to refuse him when it comes to the point at last, after having played him off and on so long—it is unpardonable, Katherine, unpardonable.”

“I am very sorry,” Katherine said, though indeed Lady Jane’s reproaches did not touch her at all. “It is a fact that I might have consented a few days ago; no, not happily, but with a kind of dull acquiescence because everybody expected it.”

“Then you allow that everybody had a right to expect it?”

“I said nothing about any right. You did all settle for me it appears without any will of mine; but I saw on thinking that it was impossible. One has after all to judge for oneself. I don’t suppose that Dr. Burnet would wish a woman to—to marry him—because her friends wished it, Lady Jane.”

“He would take you on any terms, Katherine, after all that has come and gone.”

“No one shall have me on any terms,” cried Katherine. “It shall be because I wish it myself or not at all.”

“You have a great opinion of yourself,” said Lady Jane. “Under such a quiet exterior I never saw a young woman more self-willed. You ought to think of others a little. Dr. Burnet is far the best man you can marry in so many different points of view. Everybody says he has saved your father’s life. He is necessary, quite necessary, to Mr. Tredgold; and how are you to call him in as a doctor after disappointing him so? And then there is Stella. He would have done justice to Stella.”

“It will be strange,” cried Katherine, getting up from her seat in her agitation, “if I cannot do justice to Stella without the intervention of Dr. Burnet—or any man!”

Lady Jane took this action as a dismissal, and rose up, too, with much solemnity. “You will regret this step you have taken,” she said, “Katherine, not once but all your life.”

The only person who did not take a similar view was the Rector, upon whom the news, which of course spread in the same incomprehensible way as his own failure had done, had a very consolatory effect. It restored him, indeed, to much of his original comfort and self-esteem to know that another man had been treated as badly as himself—more badly indeed, for at least there had been no blowing hot and cold with him. He said that Miss Katherine Tredgold was a singular young lady, and evidently, though she had the grace to say little about them, held some of the advanced ideas of the time. “She feels herself called to avenge the wrongs of her sex,” he said with a bitterness which was mitigated by the sense that another man was the present sufferer. But from most of her neighbours she received nothing but disapproval—disapproval which was generally unexpressed in words, for Katherine gave little opening for verbal remonstrance, but was not less apparent for that.

Miss Mildmay was, I think, the only one who took approvingly something of the same view. “If she is capricious,” that lady said, “there is plenty of caprice on the other side; loving and riding away and so forth; let them just try how they like it for once! I don’t object to a girl showing a little spirit, and doing to them as others have been done by. It is a very good lesson to the gentlemen.”

“Oh, Ruth Mildmay!” said Mrs. Shanks half weeping; “as if it could ever be a good thing to make a man unhappy for life!”