CHAPTER XI.
Catharine sprang from her bed at daybreak that morning. She could scarcely stop singing in the bath. She had so much to do, so much to do! The air blew briskly, the factory bells were clanging, the bees buzzed, the pretty white curtains were flapping. It was a busy world, and she was busiest of all. Had she not Hugh Guinness's fate in hand? She felt like a lad when he comes of age or makes his first venture in business. Jane heard her singing noisily for a while, but when breakfast was ready she did not come down.
She was standing in front of her glass, staring at it as though the chubby, insignificant face there were the Sphinx and could answer the riddles of life. McCall's remark had suddenly recurred to her: "What is Hugh Guinness to you? You belong to another man." With a flash, Mr. Muller, natty and plump, had stood before her, curiously unfamiliar, mildly regarding her through his spectacles. Her husband! Why had she never understood that until this morning? Her crossed hands lay on her wide blue-veined shoulders. She almost tore the flesh from them. "I belong to no man!" she cried.
She could not shake off the thought of him, as she usually did. He stood beside her, do what she would—the fat body and legs, the finical dress, the wearisome platitudes, a regiment of blue-coated, thick-lipped children behind him.
"If the best were done for them that could be hoped, they would but grow up miniature Mullers; and to think of that!" said Kitty. She had given her life to him. If she lived to be gray-headed, he alone owned her, mind and body. "If I were dead in my coffin, he would put his mild, fat little hand on me, and look forward to owning me in heaven! Oh-h!" This last was the one unendurable pang to Catharine.
Jane at the moment thrust her black face in: "He's come. Hurry up, honey! Mr. Muller, ob course. Shell I do up your hair, chile?"
Kitty shook her head and smiled. She would have had a kind smile for Jane and her like if she had been held by thumbscrews. Stooping to button her gaiters, she caught sight of her face in the glass. There were dark hollows under the eyes: they had the look of an older, graver woman than she had ever been before. Kitty hung up the green dress she had meant to wear, and took down a rose-colored one. Mr. Muller was talking down stairs. There was reality. There was her work and her husband. Why, she had the account-books of the school in her upper bureau-drawer at that moment, and in the lower ones her wedding things. Dresses and cloaks all made; and such lovely linen! As for Hugh Guinness, he was, after all, but a perplexing shadow, a riddle that turned from her the more she tried to make him real. She went down.
"Why, Catharine!" He held her hand, patting it between his own, which were warm and moist. "I really could not deny myself a glimpse of you, though I was sent on an errand by Maria to the station. But all roads end for me in the Book-shop. That is natural—he! he!"
"Yes, it is natural."
"It must be only a glimpse, though. I begged of Jane a cup of hot tea, to take off the chill of this morning air. Ah, here it is: thank you, my good girl. Only a glimpse, for Maria's business was urgent: Maria's business always is urgent. But I was to intercept Doctor McCall on his way to the cars."
"Is he going this morning?"
"Yes. Not to return, it appears."
"Not to return?" Her voice seemed hardly to have the energy of a question in it.
"But I," with a shrug and significant laugh, "am not to allow him to go. Behold in me an emissary of Love! You; would not have suspected a Mercury in your William, Catharine?" Within the last month he had begun to talk down in this fashion to her, accommodating himself to her childish tastes.
"What is Mercury's errand?"
"Aha! you curious little puss! How a woman does prick her ears at the mention of a love-story! Though, I suppose, this one is wellnigh its end. Maria made no secret of it. Doctor McCall, I inferred from what she said, had been pouring out his troubles in her ear, and she sent me to bring him back to her with the message that she had found a way of escape from them. Eh? Did you speak? You did not know what, dear?"
"I did not know that Maria had the right to bring him back. They are—"
"Engaged? Oh, certainly. At least—It is an old attachment, and Maria is such a woman to manage, you know! Is that the tea-pot, Jane? Just fill my cup again. Oh yes, I suppose it is all settled."
Catharine was standing by the window. The wind blew in chilly and strong, while Mr. Muller behind her sipped his tea and ambled in his talk. Crossing the meadow, going down the road, she saw the large figure of a man in a loose light overcoat, who swung in his gait and carried his hat in his hand as a boy would do. Even if he had loved her, she could not, like Maria, have gone a step to meet him, nor intoned the Song of Solomon. But he did not love her.
She turned to her companion: "There is something I wished to say."
"In one moment, my dear." He was sweetening his tea. Hanging the silver tongs on the lid, he looked up: "Good God, Catharine! what is it?"
"I wished to tell you—no, don't touch me, please—this is a mistake which we have made, and it is better to let it go no farther. It ought to end now."
"End? Now?" But he was not surprised. The pale face staring at her over the half-emptied cup looked as if it had been waiting to hear this; so that they began the subject, as it were, in the middle. So much had already been said between them without words. He set the cup down, even in that moment folding his napkin neatly with shaking fingers. Kitty did not laugh. She never laughed at him afterward. Something in that large, loose figure yonder, going away from her to the woman he loved, had whetted her eyesight and her judgment. She saw the man at last under Muller's weak finical ways, and the manly look he gave her.
"You mean that there must be no—no marriage?"
"No. I'm very sorry. It has been my fault. But I thought—"
"You thought you loved me, and you do not. Don't cry, Kitty."
A long silence followed, which seemed to Catharine like that of death. It was noticeable that he did not make a single effort to change her resolution or to keep her. It seemed as if he must have been waiting for her to waken some day and see the gulf between them.
"Don't cry, Kitty," he said again, under his breath. He stood by the empty fireplace, resting his dainty foot on the fender and looking down on it: he took out his handkerchief, shook out its folds and wiped his face, which was hot and parched. Kitty was sorry, as she said—sorry and scared, as though she had been called on to touch the corpse of one dear to her friends, but whose death cost her nothing. That she was breaking an obligation she had incurred voluntarily troubled her very little.
"Yes, I thought you would say this one day," he said at last. "I think you are right to take care of yourself. I was too old a man for you to marry. But I would have done all I could. I have been very fond of you," looking at her.
"Yes. You never seemed old to me sir."
"And your work for the poor children? I thought, dear, you felt that the Lord called you to that?"
"So I did. But I don't think I feel it so much to-day." Catharine's eyes were wide with this new terror. Was she, then, turning her back on her God?
She was, after all, he thought, nothing but a frightened, beautiful child.
"I should have been too rough for you," he said. How was he to suspect the heights from which she had looked down on his softness and flippancy?
She observed that he said not a word of the preparations he had made, the house furnished, the expectant congregation, or the storm of gossip and scandal which would follow him as a jilted lover. Was the real wound, then, so deep? Or did he overlook such trifles, as men do?
"I did not forget the new dresses and underclothes," thought Kitty, mean and mortified.
He roused himself as Jane came in: "No, Jane, no more tea. Yes, that is my cup on the mantel-shelf."
"Dah's a gen'leman, Miss Kitty. I took him in the Book-shop. 'T mought be Spellissy 'bout de oats. Tink it is Spellissy."
"You had better go, Catharine," taking up his hat.
"It is not important." The door closed after Jane. She came close to him, irresolute. What could she say? She thought, with the heat of childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by drop, to comfort him. She wished that she had gone on and married him. "But I cannot say that I love him." This was a matter for life and death—even Kitty's polite soul recognized that—and not for a civil lie.
Again the man asserted himself before the woman: "No, there is nothing for you to say, Catharine," smiling. "There are some things it is better not to varnish over with words." He took up his hat after a pause, and turned a feeble, uncertain face to the window: "I—I might as well go now: I have a prayer-meeting this afternoon."
"And when you go you mean never to come back again?" cried Kitty, pale and red in a moment. "That's to be the end of it all?"
"What more can there be? It's all said." Yet after he had walked to the door he stood on the steps, looking about the room which had grown so familiar and dear to him. At Kitty he did not look.
"Will you have a rose?" breaking one hastily from the trailing branches at the window. "To remember the old Book-shop." She had never given him anything before.
He threw it down: "I do not need a rose to make me remember," bitterly. "It is all said, child? You have nothing to tell me?" looking furtively at her.
For a long time she did not speak: "No, nothing."
"Good-bye, Kitty."
Kitty did not answer him. The tears ran hot and salt over her round cheeks as she watched the little man disappear through the walnuts. She went up stairs, and, still crying, chose one or two maudlin sonnets and a lock of black hair as mementoes to keep of him. She did keep them as long as she lived, and used frequently to sigh over them with a sentimental tenderness which the real Muller never had won from her.