Old Mr. Tredgold

“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.

CHAPTER XLV

Mr. Sturgeon arrived that evening with all his accounts and papers. He had not come, indeed, when Lady Somers left her sister to entertain James Stanford and joined her husband in the room which he had incontinently turned into a smoking-room, and which had already acquired that prevailing odour of tobacco and whiskey from which Mr. Tredgold’s house had hitherto afforded no refuge. Stella had no objection to these odours. She told her husband that she had “scuttled” in order to leave Kate alone with her visitor. “For that’s what he wants, of course,” she said. “And Kate will be much better married. For one thing, with your general invitations and nonsense she might take it into her head she was to stay here, which would not suit my plans at all. I can’t bear a sister always in the house.”

“It seems hard,” said Sir Charles, “that you should take all her money and not even give her house room. I think it’s a deuced hard case.”

“Bosh!” said Stella; “I never took a penny of her money. Papa, I hope, poor old man, had a right to do whatever he liked with his own. She had it all her own way for seven long years. If she had been worth her salt she could have made him do anything she pleased in that time. We used to rely upon that, don’t you remember? And a pretty business it would have been had we had nothing better to trust to. But he never meant to be hard upon Stella, I was always sure of that. Poor old papa! It was nice of him not to change his mind. But I can’t see that Katherine’s is any very hard case, for it was settled like this from the first.”

“A wrong thing isn’t made right because it’s been settled from the very first,” said Sir Charles, oracularly.

“Don’t be a fool, Charlie. Perhaps you’d like me to give it all away to Kate? It is a good thing for you and your spoiled little monkey Job that I am not such an idiot as that.”

“We should have expected our share had she had it,” said Somers always half inaudibly into his moustache.

“I daresay. But how different was that! In the first place, she would have had it in trust for me; in the second place, we’re a family and she is a single person. And then she has money of her own; and then, at the end of all, she’s Kate, you know, and I–”

“You are Stella,” he cried, with a big laugh. “I believe you; and, by Jove! I suppose that’s the only argument after all!”

Stella took this, which seemed to be a compliment, very sedately. “Yes,” she said, “I am Stella; you needn’t recommend Kate’s ways to me, nor mine to Kate; we’ve always been different, and we always will be. If she will marry this man it will save a great deal of trouble. We might make her a nice present—I shouldn’t object to that. We might give her her outfit: some of my things would do quite nicely; they are as good as new and of no use to me; for certainly, whatever happens, we shall never go to that beastly place again.”

Sir Charles roared forth a large laugh, overpowered by the joke, though he was not without a touch of shame. “By Jove! Stella, you are the one!” he cried.

And a short time after Mr. Sturgeon arrived. He had a great deal of business to do, a great many things to explain. Stella caught with the hereditary cleverness her father had discovered in her the involutions of Mr. Tredgold’s investments, the way in which he had worked one thing by means of or even against another, and in what artful ways he had held the strings.

“Blessed if I can make head or tail of it,” said Somers, reduced to partial imbecility by his effort to understand.

But Stella sat eager at the table with two red spots on her cheeks, shuffling the papers about and entering into everything.

“I should like to work it all myself, if I hadn’t other things to do,” she said.

“And excellently well you would do it,” said the lawyer with a bow.

It was one of Stella’s usual successes. She carried everything before her wherever she went. Mr. Sturgeon asked punctiliously for Miss Tredgold, but he felt that Kate was but a feeble creature before her sister, this bright being born to conquer the world.

“And now,” he said, “Lady Somers, about other things.”

“What things?” cried Stella. “So far as I know there are no other things.”

“Oh, yes, there are other things. There are some that you will no doubt think of for the credit of your father, and some for your own. The servants, for instance, were left without any remembrance. They are old faithful servants. I have heard him say, if they were a large household to keep up, that at least he was never cheated of a penny by them.”

“That’s not much to say,” cried Stella; “anyone who took care could ensure that.”

“Your father thought it was, or he would not have repeated it so often. There was not a penny for the servants, not even for Harrison, whose care was beyond praise—and Mrs. Simmons, and the butler. It will be a very small matter to give them a hundred pounds or two to satisfy them.”

“A hundred pounds!” cried Stella. “Oh, I shouldn’t call that a small matter! It is quite a sum of money. And why should they want hundreds of pounds? They have had good wages, and pampered with a table as good as anything we should think of giving to ourselves. Simmons is an impertinent old woman. She’s given—I mean, I’ve given her notice. And the butler the same. As for Harrison, to hear him you would think he was papa’s physician and clergyman and everything all in one.”

“He did a very great deal for him,” said the lawyer. “Then another thing, Lady Somers, your uncle–”

“My uncle! I never had an uncle,” cried Stella with a shriek.

“But there is such a person. He is not a very creditable relation. Still he ought not to be left to starve.”

“I never heard of any uncle! Papa never spoke of anyone. He said he had no relations, except some far-off cousins. How can I tell that this is not some old imposition trumped up for the sake of getting money? Oh, I am not going to allow myself to be fleeced so easily as that!”

“It is no imposition. Bob Tredgold has been in my office for a long number of years. I knew him as I knew your father when we were boys together. The one took the right turning, the other the wrong—though who can tell what is right and what is wrong with any certainty? One has gone out of the world with great injustice, leaving a great deal of trouble behind him; the other would be made quite happy with two pounds a week till he dies.”

“Two pounds a week—a hundred pounds a year!” cried Stella. “Mr. Sturgeon, I suppose you must think we are made of money. But I must assure you at once that I cannot possibly undertake at the very first outset such heavy responsibility as that.”

Sir Charles said nothing, but pulled his moustache. He had no habit of making allowances or maintaining poor relations, and the demand seemed overwhelming to him too.

“These are things which concern your father’s credit, Lady Somers. I think it would be worth your while to attend to them for his sake. The other is for your own. You cannot allow your sister, Miss Katherine, to go out into the world on five hundred a year while you have sixty thousand. I am a plain man and only an attorney, and you are a beautiful young lady, full, I have no doubt, of fine feelings. But I don’t think, if you consider the subject, that for your own credit you can allow this singular difference in the position of two sisters to be known.”

Stella was silent for a moment. She was struck dumb by the man’s grave face and his importance and the confidence of his tone. She said at last, almost with a whimper, “It was none of my doing. I was not here; I could not exercise any influence,” looking up at the old executor with startled eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “I am aware you were far away, and your sister ought to have been the person to exercise influence. She did not, however,” he added with a little impatience. “There are some people who are too good for this world.”

Too ineffectual—capable of neither good nor evil! Was it the same kind of incapacity as the others were discussing in the other room?

“I’ve been saying that, don’t you know, to my wife, about Miss Kate,” said Sir Charles.

“Oh, you’ve been saying!” cried Stella with a quick movement of impatience. She paused again for a little, and then fixing her eyes upon Mr. Sturgeon, said with some solemnity, “You wish me then, as soon as I have got over the first wonder of it, and being so glad that papa had forgiven me, to go right in his face and upset his last will?”

The rectitude, the pathos, the high feeling that were in Stella’s voice and attitude are things that no ordinary pen could describe. Her father’s old executor looked at her startled. He took off his spectacles to see her more clearly, and then he put them on again. His faculties were not equal to this sudden strain upon them.

“It would not be upsetting the will,” he said.

“Would it not? But I think it would. Papa says a certain thing very distinctly. You may say it is not just. Many people are turning upon me—as if I had anything to do with it!—and saying it is unjust. But papa made all his money himself, I suppose? And if he had a special way in which he wished to spend it, why shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? It is not any vanity in me to say he was fondest of me, Mr. Sturgeon—everybody knew he was.”

Mr. Sturgeon sat silent, revolving many things in his mind. He was one of the few people who had seen old Tredgold after his daughter’s flight; he had heard him say with the calmest countenance, and his hands on his knees, “God damn them!” and though he was an attorney and old, and had not much imagination, a shiver ran through Sturgeon’s mind, if not through his body. Was it as a way of damning her that the old fellow had let all this money come to his undutiful child?

“So you see,” said Stella with grave triumph, as one who feels that she has reasoned well, “I am tied up so that I cannot move. If you say, Will I upset papa’s will? I answer, No, not for all the world! He says it quite plain—there is no doubt as to what he meant. He kept it by him for years and never changed it, though he was angry with me. Therefore I cannot, whom he has trusted so much and been so kind to, upset his will. Oh, no, no! If Katherine will accept a present, well, she shall have a present,” cried Stella with a great air of magnanimity, “but I will do nothing that would look like flying in the face of papa.”

“By Jove! she is right there, don’t-ye-know,” said the heavy dragoon, looking up at the man of law, with great pride in his clever wife.

“I suppose she is—in a kind of way,” Mr. Sturgeon said. He was a humiliated man—he was beaten even in argument. He did not know how to answer this little sharp woman with her superficial logic. It was old Tredgold’s money; if he wanted it to go in a particular way, why should his will be gainsaid? He had wished it to go to Stella, he had remorselessly cut out her sister; the quick-witted creature had the adversary at a disadvantage. Old Tredgold had not been a just or noble man. He had no character or credit to keep up. It was quite likely that he fully intended to produce this very imbroglio, and to make both his daughters unhappy. Not that Stella would make herself unhappy or disturb her composure with feeling over the subject. She was standing against the big chair covered with red velvet in which old Tredgold used to sit. Nobody cared about that chair or had any associations with it; it had been pushed out of the way because it was so big, and the mass of its red cover threw up the figure of Stella before it with her black dress and her fair crisped hair. She was triumphant, full of energy and spirit, a princess come into her kingdom, not a new heir troubled with the responsibilities of inheritance. It would not disturb her that Katherine should have nothing, that poor old Bob Tredgold should starve. She was quite strong enough to put her foot on both and never feel a pang.

“I am perhaps going beyond my instructions,” Mr. Sturgeon said. “Your sister Katherine is a proud young woman, my Lady Stella—I mean my Lady Somers; I doubt if she will receive presents even from you. Your father’s will is a very wicked will. I remarked that to him when he made it first. I was thankful to believe he had felt it to be so after your ladyship ran away. Then I believed the thing would be reversed and Miss Katherine would have had all; and I knew what her intentions were in that case. It was only natural, knowing that you were two sisters, to suppose that you would probably act in some degree alike.”

“Not for people who know us, Mr. Sturgeon,” said Stella. “Kate and I never did anything alike all our days. I may not be as good as Kate in some things, but I am stronger than she is in being determined to stick by what is right. I would not interfere with papa’s will for all the world! I should think it would bring a curse on me. I have got children of my own, and that makes me go much deeper into things than an unmarried young woman like Kate can be supposed to do. Fancy Charlie, our boy, turning on us and saying, You made mincemeat of grandpapa’s will, why should I mind about yours? That is what I could not look forward to—it would make me perfectly wretched,” Stella said. She stood up, every inch of her height, with her head tossed back full of matronly and motherly importance; but the force of the situation was a little broken by a muffled roar of laughter from Sir Charles, who said—

“Go it, Stella! You’re going to be the death of me,” under his breath.

“My husband laughs,” said Lady Somers with dignity, “because our boy is a very little boy, and it strikes him as absurd; but this is precisely the moment when the mind receives its most deep impressions. I would not tamper with dear papa’s will if even there was no other reason, because it would be such a fearfully bad example for my boy.”

“I waive the question, I waive the question,” cried Mr. Sturgeon. “I will talk it over with the other executor; but in the meantime I hope you will reconsider what you have said on the other subject. There’s the servants and there is poor old Bob.”

“Oh, the servants! As they’re leaving, and a good riddance, give them fifty pounds each and be done with them,” Stella said.

“And Bob Tredgold?”

“I never heard of that person; I don’t believe in him. I think you have been taken in by some wretched impostor.”

“Not likely,” said Mr. Sturgeon. “I have known him, poor fellow, from a boy, and a more promising boy I can tell you than any other of his name. He is a poor enough wretch now. You can have him here, if you like, and judge of him for yourself.”

“Stella,” said Sir Charles, pulling his wife’s dress.

“Oh, Charlie, let me alone with your silly suggestions. I am sure Mr. Sturgeon has been taken in. I am sure that papa–”

“Look here,” said the husband, “don’t be a little fool. I’m not going to stand a drunken old beast coming here saying he’s my wife’s relation. Settle what he wants and be done. It’s not my affair? Oh, yes, some things are my affair. Settle it here, I say. Mr. Sturgeon, she’s ready to settle whatever you say.”

Sir Charles had his wife’s wrist in his hand. She was far cleverer than he was and much more steady and pertinacious, but when she got into that grip Stella knew there was no more to be said. Thus she bought off the powers of Nemesis, had there been any chance of their being put in motion against her; and there was no further question of setting the worst of examples to Job by upsetting his grandfather’s will. Stella religiously watched over Mr. Tredgold’s fortune and kept every penny of it to herself from that day.

“And do you think of building that cottage, Miss Katherine, as your father suggested?” Mr. Sturgeon asked as he rose from the dinner at which he had been entertained, Lady Somers making herself very agreeable to him and throwing a great deal of dust into his eyes. He was going back to town by the last train, and he had just risen to go away. Katherine had been as silent as Stella was gay. She had not shown well, the old lawyer was obliged to admit, in comparison with her sister, the effect no doubt of having lived all her life at Sliplin and never having seen the great world, besides that of being altogether duller, dimmer than Stella. She was a little startled when he spoke to her, and for a moment did not seem to understand what was being said.

“Oh, the cottage! I don’t think I can afford it. No, Mr. Sturgeon,” she said at length.

“Then I have a good opportunity of selling the bit of land for you,” he said. “There is a new railway station wanted, and this is the very spot that will be most suitable. I can make an excellent bargain if you put it in my hands.”

“There!” cried Stella, holding up a lively finger, “I told you! It is always Kate that has the luck among us all!”

CHAPTER XLVI

Katherine scarcely heard what Stanford said to her after that astounding speech about his little child. She rose to her feet as if it had touched some sudden spring in her; though she could no more have told why than she could have told what it was that made her head giddy and her heart beat. She had a momentary sense that she had been insulted; but that too was so utterly unreasonable that she could not explain her conduct to herself by it, any more than by any other rule. She did not know how she managed to get out of the room, on what pretext, by what excuse to the astonished visitor, whose look alone she saw in her mind afterwards, startled and disturbed, with the eyelids puckered over his eyes. He had been conscious, too, that she had received a shock; but he had not been aware, any more than she was, what he had done to produce this impression upon her.

She ran upstairs to her own room, and concealed herself there in the gathering twilight, in the darkest corner, as if somebody might come to look for her. There had been a great many thoughts in that room through these long years—thoughts that, perhaps, were sometimes impatient, occasionally pathetic, conscious of the passing of her youth from her, and that there had been little in it that was like the youth of other women. To be sure, she might have married had she been so minded, which is believed to be the chief thing in a young woman’s life; but that had not counted for very much in Katherine’s. There had been one bit of visionary romance, only one, and such a little one! but it had sufficed to make a sort of shining, as of a dream, over her horizon. It had never come nearer than the horizon; it had been a glimmer of colour, of light, of poetry, and the unknown. It had never been anything, she said to herself, with emphasis, putting her foot down firmly on the ground, with a faint sound of purpose and meaning—never—anything! She was the most desperate fool in the world to feel herself insulted, to feel as if he had struck her in the face when he spoke of his little child. Why should he not have a little child like any other man, and a kind wife waiting for him, amid all the brightness of a home? Why not? Why not? There was no reason in the world. The effect it produced upon her was absurd in the last degree. It was an effect of surprise, of sudden disillusion. She was not prepared for that disclosure. This was the only way in which she could account for the ridiculous impression made upon her mind by these few words.

She had so much to do accounting to herself for this, that it was not for a long time that she came to imagine what he would think of her sudden start and flight. What could he think of it? Could he think she was disappointed, that she had been building hopes upon his return? But that was one of the thoughts that tend to madness, and have to be crushed upon the threshold of the mind. She tried not to think of him at all, to get rid of the impression which he had made on her. Certainly he had not meant to insult her, certainly it was no blow in the face. There had been some foolish sort of talk before—she could not recall it to mind now—something that had nothing in the world to do with his position, or hers, or that of anyone in the world, which probably was only to pass the time; and then he had begun to speak to her about his child. How natural to speak about his child! probably with the intention of securing her as a friend for his child—she who had been a playmate of his own childhood. If she had not been so ridiculous she would have heard of the poor little thing brought from India (like little Job, but that was scarcely an endearing comparison) to be left alone among strangers. Poor little thing! probably he wanted her to be kind to it, to be a friend to it—how natural that idea was!—his own playfellow, the girl whom he had read Dante with in those days. But why, why did he recall those days? It was that that made her feel—when he began immediately after to speak of his child—as if he had given her a blow in the face.

Katherine went down to dinner as if she were a visitor in the house. She passed the nursery door, standing wide open, with the baby making a great whiteness in the middle of the room, and Job watching like an ill-tempered little dog, ready to rush out with a snarl and bite at any passer-by whom he disliked; and her sister’s door, where Stella’s voice was audibly high and gay, sometimes addressing her maid, sometimes in a heightened tone her husband, in his dressing-room at the other side. They were the proprietors of the place, not Katherine. She knew that very well, and wondered at herself that she should still be here, and had made no other provision for her loneliness. She was a guest—a guest on sufferance—one who had not even been invited. William, the soldier-servant, was in possession of the hall. He opened the door for her with a respectful tolerance. She was missus’s sister to William. In the drawing-room was Mr. Sturgeon, who rose as she entered from the side of the fire. He was going back by the train immediately after dinner, and was in his old-fashioned professional dress, a long black coat and large black tie. One looked for a visionary bag of papers at his feet or in his hands. His influence had a soothing effect upon Katherine; it brought her back to the practical. He told her what he had been able to do—to get gratuities for the servants, and a pension, such as it was, for poor old Bob Tredgold. “It will keep him in comfort if he can be kept off the drink,” he said. All this brought her out of herself, yet at the same time increased the sense in her of two selves, one very much interested in all these inconsiderable arrangements, the other standing by looking on. “But about your affairs, Miss Katherine, not a thing could I do,” Mr. Sturgeon was beginning, when happily Sir Charles came downstairs.