CHAPTER VIII.
It rained during the night. The wind blew feebly in the morning, and the sunlight glimmered dully from behind the flying gray clouds. Catharine looked out of her window, anxiously pushing aside the boughs full of wet white roses. The sense of desolation was not strong enough upon her to make her forget that Peter had not yet cut the clover in the lower meadow, and that such a rain was bad for the tomatoes. Doctor McCall was at the gate, propping up an old Bourbon rose, an especial favorite of her father's. Somebody tapped at her door, and Miss Muller rustled in in a flounced white muslin and rose-colored ribbons. She too hurried to the window and looked down.
"I asked him to meet me here, Kitty. I can't make you understand, probably, but the Water-cure House is so bald and bare! There is something in the shade here, and the old books, and this wilderness of roses, that forms a fitting background for a friendship like ours, aesthetically considered."
"I'm very glad. It's lucky I told Jane to have waffles—"
"I'll go down," interrupted Miss Muller, "and direct her about the table. Coarse tablecloths and oily butter would jar against the finest emotions. What very pretty shoulders you have, child! Such women as you, like potatoes, are best au naturel. Now, with those corsets, and this red shawl over the back of your chair, you would make a very good Madonna of the Rubens school. Men's ideal of womanhood then was to be plump, insipid and a mother."
"But about the oily butter?" said Kitty, glancing back over the aforesaid shoulders as she stooped to lace her shoes, while Maria hurried off to the kitchen. "Jane will jar against her finer emotions, I fancy, when she begins to order her about."
But Kitty lost all relish for fun before she sat down to the breakfast-table. Mr. Muller came in. The poor little man hurried to her side: "I passed a sleepless night, Catharine. I feared that I had been rough with you. I forget so often how gentle and tender you are, my darling."
Catharine was puzzled: "Upon my word, I've forgotten what happened. And I really never feel especially gentle or tender. You are mistaken about that."
When she took her place behind the urn, Maria motioned her brother to the foot of the table, and then nodded significantly. "Now you two can imagine a month or two has passed," she said.
Even Doctor McCall smiled meaningly. Mr. Muller blushed, and glanced shyly at Catharine. But she looked at him unmoved. "Our table will not be like this," gravely. "You forget the three hundred blue-coats between." Maria laughed, but Doctor McCall for the first time looked steadily at the girl.
First of all, perhaps, Kitty was just then a housekeeper. She waited anxiously to see if the steak was properly rare and the omelette light, nodded brightly to Jane, who stood watchful behind her, and then looked over at her betrothed, thinking how soon they would sit down tête-à-tête for the rest of their lives, perhaps for eternity, for, according to her orthodoxy, there could be no new loves in heaven. How fat he was, and bald! The mild blue eyes behind their glasses took possession of her and held her.
She listened to the talk between Doctor McCall and Miss Muller in a language she had never learned. Maria's share of it was largely made up of headlong dives into Spencer and Darwin, with reminiscences of The Dial, while Doctor McCall's was anchored fast down to facts; but it was all alive, suggestive, brilliant. They were young. They were drinking life and love with full cups. She (looking over at the bald head and spectacled eyes) had gone straight out of childhood into middle age and respectability.
The breakfast was over at last. Miss Muller followed Doctor McCall into the shop, where he fell to turning over the old books, and then to the garden. What was the use of a stage properly set if the drama would not begin?
"Pray do not worry any longer with that old bush," as he went back to Peter's rose. "It is not a trait of yours to be persistent about trifles. Or stay: give me a bud for my hair."
"Not these!" sharply, holding her hand. "I could not see one of these roses on any woman's head."
She smiled, very well pleased: "You perceive some subtle connection between me and the flower?"
"Nothing of the sort. There are some, planted, I suppose, by that little girl, which will be more becoming to your face."
"You are repelled by 'the little girl,' I see, John. I always told you your instincts were magnetic. That type of woman is antipathetic to you."
He laughed: "I have no instincts, hardly ideas, about either roses or types of women. If I avoided Miss Vogdes, it was because her name recalled one of the old hard experiences of my boyhood. The girl herself is harmless enough, no doubt."
"And the rose?"
"The rose? Why, we have no time to waste in such talk as this. You have not yet told me how you managed to get your profession. When I last saw you you had set all the old professors in the university at defiance. Did you carry lectures and cliniques by strategy or assault? You have good fighting qualities, Maria."
She would rather not have gone over her battle with the doctors just then: she would rather he had talked of her "magnetic instincts," her hair, her eyes—anything else than her fighting qualities. But she told him. There was an inexplicable delight to her in telling him anything—even the time of day. Was he not a pioneer, a captain among men, a seer in the realms of thought, keeping step with her in all her high imaginings? Ordinary people, it is true, set McCall down as an ordinary fellow, genial and hearty—not a very skillful physician, perhaps, but a shrewd farmer, and the best judge of mules or peaches in Kent county. Maria, however, saw him with the soul's eye.
Kitty meanwhile sat by the window mending the clothes that had come out of the wash. Mr. Muller was reading some letters relative to the school to her. This was the day of the week on which she always mended the clothes, and Mr. Muller had fallen into the habit of reading to her while she did so. But to-day the Reformatory rose before her a prison, the gates of which were about to close on her. The heap of stockings, the touch of the darning cotton, the sound of Mr. Muller's droning voice, were maddening to her: every moment she made a tangle in her thread, looking down at Maria under the Bourbon rose, and the attentive face bent over her. Where should she go? What should she do? Had the world nothing in it for her but this? Yesterday she had made up her mind to go to Delaware to find Hugh Guinness, alive or dead, and bring him to his father. That would be work worth doing. This morning she remembered that Delaware was a wide hunting-ground—that she had never been ten miles from home in her life. If there were anybody to give her advice! This Doctor McCall had seemed to her to-day as, in fact, he did to most people, practical, honest, full of information. He would too, she somehow felt, understand her wild fancy. But—
"Why should Doctor McCall dislike me?" she broke in at the close of one of Mr. Muller's expositions.
"What an absurd fancy, child!" looking up in amazement. "The man was civil enough to you for so slight an acquaintance."
"It was more than dislike," vehemently. "He watched me all through breakfast as though he owed me a grudge. I could see it in his eyes."
"You oughtn't to see any eyes but mine, Cathie dear," with anxious playfulness. "Why should you care for the opinion of any man?"
"Because he is different from any man I ever knew. He belongs to the world outside. I always did wonder if people would like me out there," said Kitty, too doggedly in earnest to see how her words hurt her listener. "If one could be like those two people yonder! They seem to know everything—they can do everything!"
"Maria is well enough—for a woman," dryly. "But I never heard McCall credited with exceptional ability of any sort."
Kitty glanced at him: "Of course you're right," quickly. "Men only can judge of character: we women are apt to be silly about such things." Her kind heart felt a wrench at having hurt this good soul. She put her fingers on his fat hand with a touch that was almost a caress. He turned red with surprise and pleasure. "But it is pleasant," she said, glancing down again to the Bourbon rose, "to see such love as that. They will be married soon, I suppose?"
"Very likely. I never knew of any love in the case before. But Maria is such a manager! And you think of love, then, sometimes?" timidly putting his arm about her.
"Oh to be sure! How can you doubt that? But it grows chilly. I must bring a sacque," hurrying away; and in fact she looked cold, and shivered.