Mrs. Oliphant

“ If he had the Duke of Westminster’s revenues he would still open his mouth for more. “But you may be sure I shall put their duty very plainly before them,” she said.
“Oh, don’t, please don’t,” cried Katherine. “I do not want to have anything from Stella’s pity—I am not to be pitied at all. I have a very sufficient income of my own.”
“A very sufficient income—for Mr. Tredgold’s daughter!” cried Lady Jane, and she hurried away biting her lips to prevent a string of evil names as long as her arm bursting from them. The old wretch! the old brute! the old curmudgeon! ”

“ They were at that moment in another room, making themselves tidy, as they said, with the supercilious aid of Katherine’s maid. Stella did not part with hers in any circumstances, though she was about to dine in something very like a dressing-gown with her hair upon her shoulders. Mr. Tredgold liked to see Stella with her hair down, and she was not herself averse to the spectacle of the long rippled locks falling over her shoulders. Stella was one of the girls who find a certain enjoyment in their own beauty even when there is nobody to see. ”

“ To be papa’s daughter and yet not his heiress, you know, is a kind of injury to people that might come after you. You will be going into the world upon false pretences. I wonder now that you did not marry somebody before it was all known.”
“It was only known on the night of papa’s funeral, Stella. I could not have married many people between then and now,” said Katherine, trying to take this speech as lightly as it was made.
“That is true—still you must have had people after you. With your expectations, and a good-looking girl. You always were quite a good-looking girl, Kate.” ”

“ Your poor old Simmons, Miss Katherine, as made cakes for you, and them apples as you were so fond of when you were small! And as was always ready, no matter for what, if it was a lunch or if it was a supper, or a picnic, or whatever you wanted, and never a grumble; if it was ever so unreasonable, Miss Katherine, dear! If this house is Miss Stella’s house, take me with you! I shouldn’t mind a smaller ’ouse. Fifteen is a many to manage, and so long as I’ve my kitchenmaid I don’t hold with no crowds in the kitchen. ”

“ They shall not see me at all, however I look. I am not going to answer to them for what I do.”
“Certainly not,” said Katherine. “If that is what they have come for, you had better leave them to me.”
“I don’t know, either,” said Stella, “it rains, and nobody else will come. They might be fun. I shall say everything I can think of to shock them, Kate.”
“They deserve it, the old inquisitors,” cried Kate, who was more indignant than her sister; “but I think I would not, Stella. Don’t do anything unworthy of yourself, dear, whatever other people may say.” ”

“ Sir Charles pulled his moustache more than ever. “Deuced hard case,” he said, “for Kate.”
“Yes, there is no question about that; but for you, there is no question about that either. It is your first duty, it is the only course of action for a gentleman. As for Stella, if she does not see it, it only proves that what’s bred in the bone—I’m sure I don’t want to say anything uncivil. Indeed, Stella, it is only as your friend, your relation,” cried Lady Jane, putting much emphasis on the word, “that I allow myself to speak.” ”

“ Miss Mildmay said in a fierce whisper in her friend’s ear.
“Why should I have spoilt it all? Katherine has excellent sense, we all know; the poor man married—men always do: how can they help it, poor creatures?—but as little harm was done as could be done, for she died so very soon, poor young thing.”
Katherine by this time was perfectly serene and smiling—too smiling and too serene.
“Katherine,” said Miss Mildmay, “if you hear the one side you should hear the other. This poor fellow, James Stanford, came to Jane Shanks and me before he went back to India the last time. ”

“ I am much older than you are. I am—but your true lover notwithstanding—for years; and your most fond and faithful—— Katherine! if you will be my wife——”
“And the mother of Charlotte and Bertie!” said Katherine, looking at him with shining eyes. “Charlotte is a year younger than I am. She comes between Stella and me; and Bertie thinks he is in love with me too. Is it that you come and offer to a girl, Mr. Stanley? Oh, I know. Girls who are governesses and poor have it offered to them and are grateful. ”

“ You always want something to do, don’t you? Come along, come along!” Stella ran on before them with heated cheeks and blazing eyes. It was not that she was angry with them, but with herself, to think that she could not do what Mrs. Seton did. She could not amuse them, or keep up to their high level of spirits, and the vacancy of the look which came over both their faces—the mouth of Algy under his moustache, the eyes of Charlie staring blankly about in search of a sensation—were more than her nerves could bear. ”

“ And then there was a little pause, for tea was brought in with a footman’s instinct for the most dramatic moment. Tea singularly changed the face of affairs. Gossip may be exchanged over the teacups; but to come fully prepared for mortal combat, and in the midst of it to be served by your antagonist with a cup of tea, is terribly embarrassing. Katherine, being excited and innocent, would have left it there with its fragrance rising fruitlessly in the midst of the fury melting the assailants’ hearts; but Stella, guilty and clever, saw her advantage. ”

“ Katherine’s grand-father, as has been said, had been a respectable linen-draper, while the Turnys sprung from a house of business devoting itself to the sale of crockery at an adjoining corner; yet Katherine felt herself as much insulted by the suggestion of young Turny as a suitor as if she had been a lady of high degree and he a low-born squire. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. ”

“ Take her away, Katie. If she cries till Christmas she won’t change me. Crying’s good for many things, but not for business. Stella, you can go away.”
“Oh, papa, how can you say Stella, and be so cruel!” Stella threw herself down suddenly by his side and seized his hand, upon which she laid down her wet cheek. “You have always done everything for Stella. Never—never has my papa refused me anything. I am not used to it. I can’t bear it! Papa, it is me whose heart you are breaking. Papa, me! Stella, it is Stella!”
“Kate, for goodness’ sake take her away. It is no use. ”

“ She was perhaps half angry with herself that her thoughts were already turning so warmly to the future, and that Stella’s approaching arrival, and the change in Stella’s fortunes which it would be in her power to make, were more and more occupying the foreground of her mind, and crowding out with bright colours the sombre spectacle which was just over, and all the troublous details of the past. When a portion of one’s life has been brought to an end by the closure of death, something to look forward to is the most natural and best of alleviations. ”

“ Burnet take up Stella’s interests?” cried Katherine, surprised and perhaps a little offended too.
“My dear Katherine, a medical man has the most tremendous opportunities—all that the priest had in old times, and something additional which belongs to himself. He can often say a word when none of the rest of us would dare to do so. I have immense trust in a medical man. He can bring people together that have quarrelled, and—and influence wills, and—do endless things. I always try to have the doctor on my side.” ”

“ Seton I don’t like,” said Katherine, with her gum-brush arrested in her hand.
“Papa, am I to ask the people I want, or is Kate to dictate in everything?” cried Stella, putting up another note.
“Let the child have her way, Katie, my dear; you know she has always had her way all her life.”
Katherine’s countenance was perhaps not so amiable as Stella’s, who was radiant with fun and expectation and contradiction. “I think I may sometimes have my way too,” she said. “They are not nice people; they may bring any kind of man, there is always a crowd of men about her. ”

“ Shanks; “your girls, Mr. Tredgold, put such a spirit in everything. Dear girls! Stella is always the most active and full of fun, and Katherine the one that looks after one’s comfort. Don’t you find the Stanleys, Kate, a little heavy in hand?—excellent good people, don’t you know, always a stand-by, but five of them, fancy! Marion that is always at her drawing, and Edith that can talk of nothing but the parish, and that little romp Evelyn who is really too young and too childish! Poor Mr. Stanley has his quiver too full, poor man, like so many clergymen.” ”

“ Was it her wedding dress, indeed? or had she, the misguided, foolish creature, flung herself into Charlie Somers’s life without any safeguard, trusting to the honour of a man like that, who was a profligate and without honour, as everybody knew.
No one, however, except the most pessimistic—who always exist in every society, and think the worst, and alas! prove in so many cases right, because they always think the worst—believed in this. Indeed, it would be only right to say that nobody believed Stella to have run away to shame. ”

“ The inferiority of the “old things” was pleasant to the old man, who was older than they. The cackle of his laugh swept every objection away. And then I think Katherine would have liked to steal away outside and look at the view, and console herself with the sight of the Sliplin lights and all the twinkling villages along the coast; which, it will be seen, was no disinterested devotion to Nature, but only a result of the sensation of being out of it, and not having, which Stella had, her own way. ”

“ As for the doctor, he climbed up into his dog-cart and took the reins from the benumbed hands of Jim, who was one mass of whiteness now instead of the black form sprinkled over with flakes of white which he had appeared at the Cliff. It was a difficult thing to drive home between the hedges, which were no longer visible, and with the big snow-flakes melting into his eyes and confusing the atmosphere, and he had no time to think as long as he was still out in the open country, without even the lights of Sliplin to guide him. ”

“ Fred Turny, it was certain, would not hear of dividing his wife’s fortune with her sister, should her father’s will give it all to herself; neither would Charlie Somers, Lady Jane assured her. Would Dr. Burnet do this? Katherine, possessed for the moment of a prejudice against the doctor, doubted, though that was the ground on which he was recommended. Would any man do so? There was one man she thought (of whom she knew nothing) who would; who cared nothing about the money; whose heart had chosen herself while Stella was there in all her superior attractions. ”

“ You may trust to Stella, my dear boy. She will soon bring her father to reason. He may be all sorts of queer things to you, but he can’t stand against her. She can twist him round her little finger. If it had been Katherine I should not have been so confident. But Stella—he never has refused anything to Stella since ever she was born.”{120}
“Think so, really?” said Somers through his moustache. He was beginning to revive a little again, but yet the impression of old Tredgold’s chuckling laugh and his contemptuous certainty was not to be got over lightly. ”

“ I want no fling and no fun, but to settle down with Charlie, and to be always ready when you want me as long as I live.”
“You shall settle down with some man as I approve of, as can count down his hundreds and his thousands on the table, Stella. That’s what you are going to do.”
“Papa, you never would be so cruel to me, your little Stella? I will have no man if I have not Charlie—never, never, if he had all the money in the world.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ She was confounded by Stella’s calm, and yet she knew that Stella would be calm. Nothing could be more like Stella than her conviction that she herself, instead of being extraordinarily favoured, was on the whole rather an injured person when all was said and done. The whole of this had been in Katherine’s anticipations of the crisis. And yet she was as bitterly disappointed as if she had not known Stella, and as if her sister had been her ideal, and she had{398} thought her capable of nothing that was not lofty and noble. A visionary has always that hope in her heart. ”

“ But Stella herself, was it possible that papa could ever hold head against her, look her in the face and deny her anything? No, certainly no! She was going over this in her mind while the visitors were talking, and even when she was giving them an account of what she wore. Her new white, and her diamonds—what diamonds! Oh, hadn’t they heard? A rivière that papa had given her; not a big one, you know, like an old lady’s—a little one, but such stones, exactly like drops of dew! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Do you imagine for a moment that any man who could do that would please Stella? What kind of man could do that? Only perhaps an old horror like himself, whom a nice girl would never look at. Oh! I think I should be easy in my mind, Charlie, if I were you. It is impossible, you know! There’s no such man, no such young man. Can you fancy Stella accepting an old fellow made of money? I don’t believe in it for a moment,” said Lady Jane.
“Old fellows got sons—sometimes,” said Sir Charles, “City men, rolling in money, don’t you know?” ”

“ A hundred pounds, a thousand pounds—anything to the man who would bring Stella back!
The little harbour was in wild commotion with all these offers. There were not many boats, but they were all preparing; the men clattering down the rolling shingle, with women after them calling to them to take care, or not to go out in the teeth of the gale. “If you’re lost too what good will that do?” they shrieked in the wind, their hair flying like Katherine’s, but not so speechless as she was. ”

“ He was much clearer about it than Katherine, who did not yet realise the sequence of events or that Stella was already Charlie Somers’s wife when she came innocently back with her white flowers, and hung about her father at his luncheon, doing everything possible to please him; but he perceived all this without the hesitation of a moment and with apparent composure. “It was all over, then,” he said to himself; “she had done it, then. She took us in finely, you and me, Kate. We are a silly lot—to believe what everyone tells us. ”

“ But Katherine’s outburst of indignation, her anger to have been asked to be the stepmother of Charlotte and Evelyn her playfellows, her complete want of gratitude or of any sense of the honour done her, had inflicted a deep blow upon the Rector. That he should be scorned as a lover seemed to him impossible, that a woman should be so insensible to every fact of life. ”

“ She remembered now vaguely that she had felt Stella to be more radiant, more dazzling than ever, and had wondered with a sort of dull ache whether it was want of heart, whether it was over-excitement, or what it was which made her sister’s appearance and aspect so brilliant on the very eve of her parting from her lover. “Partings which press the life from out young hearts.” How was it possible that she could be so bright, so gay, so full of life, and he going away? ”