Chapter Fourteen.
Mother and Daughter.
Major Clare did not come back to the Vicarage, and Minnie and Rosa ceased to talk much of him to their friend. Katharine never knew with what explanation he had satisfied his family as to the cessation of their intercourse, nor for that matter did his nieces, while “She won’t do, Charley, I can’t work it this time,” had been the brief explanation with which he had disappointed his brother’s hopes on his behalf. The Vicar feared that Miss Kingsworth must be disappointed, and his daughters were sure of it, as they observed the change in Kate’s girlish gaiety. After much debate as to whether matters had gone far enough for a word or two of explanation to be Katharine’s due, Mrs Clare, a kind gentle person, resolved on confiding to Emberance the story of Major Clare’s youthful disappointment, as the kindest way to both parties of accounting for his supposed vacillation, ending with, “You see, my dear, he never can forget poor Alice, who was made to refuse him because of his poor prospects. And then his manners are so engaging.”
“I think,” said the prudent Emberance, with due regard for her cousin’s dignity, “that Katharine found out the nature of Major Clare’s attentions for herself. I don’t think he altered or dropped them. I believe her mind is quite made up. And she is very young. I don’t at all think Aunt Mary would wish her to many yet,” concluded Emberance, as if she had been Kate’s maiden aunt at least.
Mrs Clare, a little embarrassed, murmured something about “a little passing experience,” and Emberance, after some hesitation, decided on telling Kate what had been said.
“Oh yes,” said Kate, quietly, “I know all about that Alice; he told me—once, just down by Widow Sutton’s gate, when we were gathering the last blackberries. He said—other things—I don’t want to repeat them.”
“Dear Kitty, I hope you won’t be very dull and unhappy, after I have gone.”
“I suppose I shall be unhappy,” said Kate, “there’s plenty to make me so.”
She cried a little as she spoke, in a half melancholy, half impatient way.
“But you’ll come after Christmas and stay with Uncle Kingsworth, and then we shall see each other again?”
“Oh yes, and I shall be as tired of Kingsworth as I used to be of Applehurst. Nothing turns out well for mamma and me.”
Indeed, when Emberance, reluctantly enough, went home for Christmas, Katharine felt as if all the unsatisfactoriness of the old Applehurst life had returned, added to the new dreariness that hung over Kingsworth.
Strange puzzle, while the mother sat longing and praying that her child might have strength to sacrifice her worldly prospects to her sense of truth, the daughter felt that the sacrifice had all been made already, and that to push the burden away would be likely to come in the light of a relief.
She had lost her lover, and had in fact discovered that she had never inspired him with any real affection; and life with her mother at Kingsworth seemed but a dreary prospect. She hated the responsibilities in which she was involved, and was altogether vexed, disappointed and unhappy.
But perhaps the very fact that life had opened to her in so many aspects all at once, had prevented one of them from being utterly overpowering. Her feelings had not had time to become full grown, and as she read a story of an utterly heart-broken maiden, she thought to herself,—
“After all, I don’t feel quite like this.”
And happily, it never occurred to Kate that it was a pity that she did not.
She was quite enough to be pitied, poor little thing, under the weight of her troubles, even if her heart was only three quarters broken.
“I think, Katie,” said her mother, one morning when she had been for some time watching her listless attitude, “that you find it as possible to be dull at Kingsworth as at Applehurst.”
“I suppose,” said Kate, “that one may be dull anywhere? Aren’t you ever dull, mamma?”
“No,” said Mrs Kingsworth, “I don’t think I am ever quite what you call dull. Of course I don’t mean to say that I find life always enjoyable.”
“You care more for reading and that sort of thing than I do,” said Kate.
“Yes, Katie, but even a love of intellectual pursuits is not enough by itself. There is only one thing that can keep up one’s interest in life,—that it should be filled by an earnest purpose.”
“You mean trying to be good,” said Kate, with less impatience than her mother’s formal sentences awoke within her in general.
Mrs Kingsworth felt a little rebuked, she hardly knew why.
“Every one is called to some duty,” she said, “I meant the strict fulfilment of that. It is a call to arms.”
There was a slight ring in the mother’s voice that might have seemed more proper to the girl, but then, much as such a view would have astonished Kate, the old Canon was wont to say that “Mary had kept herself shut up till she was just as romantic as a girl of eighteen.” Perhaps her high-mindedness with all its defects had kept her heart young. She went on, her eyes kindling.
“Each soldier has his post, it is dishonour to desert it; we have a post in life, a special duty, if we shrink from it we are deserters, cowards, while the sense that we are at our guard is quite enough to atone for any amount of dulness as you call it, or, I should say, for any sacrifice.”
Kate made no answer, she was conscious of no such glow of self-satisfaction.
“But we cannot fight each other’s battles,” continued Mrs Kingsworth, “and sometimes a good soldier has to see the breach that he would have given his life to defend left open by another.”
She spoke in her usual concentrated earnest manner, and Kate having now the clue to these utterances was seized with a sudden impulse of impatience, and forgot her own determination not to commit herself, and the Canon’s advice to use her own unbiassed judgment.
“I am sure, mamma,” she said, hastily, “if you mean that you want me very much to give up Kingsworth, I don’t care a fig about it. I had much rather be quit of it now, and go away and have an easy mind to enjoy myself. I’m sure I wish it was buried in the sea!”
Mrs Kingsworth could hardly believe her ears, she started from her seat, with fleeting colour and throbbing heart. Could it be that the burden of years would be let slip at last?
“Kate, you mean it!” she said, breathlessly.
“Yes,” said Katharine, with the petulant languor of her fretted spirits. “I don’t care about it, I had much rather not have all the trouble of looking after the poor people.”
“You mean that you will make restitution—give it back to Emberance?”
“I’m sure I would if there was an end of all the bother about it!”
Mrs Kingsworth sat down again in silence. Was it true? was it possible? Was her long purpose coming to its fulfilment? Was the desire of her life fulfilled at last? Would she really soon lie down to sleep and feel that the burden had rolled away, that the great deed was done?
Katharine sat pulling at a knot in her silk. She was a little flushed and frowning, but not looking much as if she had come to the crucial moment of her life.
“You see it all now?” said her mother.
“I don’t know—I had much rather get rid of it all. That is, if it isn’t wrong.”
“Wrong?”
Kate was silent; she knew quite well that in yielding to her impatience of her mother’s hints, to her dread of the associations of her brief love story, and to the general weariness of her unsatisfactory life, she had acted entirely against the spirit of her uncle’s letter, and had relapsed into the childish love of ease and submission to her mother’s ascendancy, out of which she had been dimly struggling.
“There is no use in my saying anything till I’m twenty-one,” she said.
“But you will not retract, Katharine, you will not fall again into temptation? Give me your promise—surely I may ask for that now.”
“No, mamma,” said Kate, “I won’t promise. I’d rather get rid of it, a great deal, especially if you promise me not to go back to Applehurst. But all the same, I had better not promise, for that would be the same thing as doing it now. I’ll wait till I’m one-and-twenty.”
“But you wish now to restore it?”
“Oh yes, I’m sure it has been no good to me,” said Kate, and gathering up her work, she left the room.
Then Mrs Kingsworth rose and walked about, too restless to sit still. How often had she pictured to herself the bliss of this moment, the finding herself at one with her daughter, the cessation of the perpetual doubt of the girl’s worthiness, the joy of the united act of restitution, the peace of the ill-gotten wealth laid down. And now was it the newness of the relief, or what? she could not be sensible of this unwonted rapture, nor realise that Katharine was not a disappointment.
As for Katharine, she felt rather self-reproachful, and conscious of having acted in a fit of impatience, conscious too that a trifle might make her think and feel differently. Neither lady realised that the carrying out of the plan would involve considerable delay and difficulty. Katharine thought that she had only to tell her uncle the resolution she had come to, and then pack up her things and leave Emberance in possession; while Mrs Kingsworth had thought so much more of Katharine being willing to make restitution than of the restitution itself that she had thought very little of the process.
The projected visit to Fanchester did not however take place till March, for Mrs Kingsworth caught cold just before they had intended to start, and for the first time within Kate’s recollection was confined to her room for some weeks, and though not ill enough to cause any alarm, was sufficiently so to be unable to take a journey in the winter. She did not care very much for Kate’s attendance, and the girl was left more to herself than had ever been the case before. Major Clare did not reappear, and though she walked out with the girls at the Vicarage and saw a good deal of them, there was a check on the fervour of her friendship for them.
She was just as idle, just as often dull, just as eager for a bit of gaiety it seemed as ever, no worthier a creature so far as her mother could see than before she had resolved on the act of reparation.
And yet, under all the surface of vexation and weariness, and balked desire of a pleasanter life, there was a tiny bit of self-respect in Kate’s heart that had not been there formerly.
She had followed her poor little fluctuating uncertain conscience at the most critical moment of her life, she had done the best she knew. She had been open and honest, and she would have been a worse girl if she had stifled her instinct of telling Major Clare the truth, though she fancied now that she would have been a much happier one.
But this her mother could not know, and as Katharine did not try much to conquer and did not succeed at all in concealing her discontent and impatience, she was not likely to find it out.