“Oh, Alice, we would have paid with our heart’s blood for your story,” cried Mrs Kingsworth. “Then it was pure accident; they would have saved each other if they could! Oh come, come, tell Canon Kingsworth.”
“I was afraid of being took up for the earrings,” said Alice, “and frightened and scared out of my wits, and Mr James was one who had a word for one one day and for another the next,—but now, the tale’s worth something, may be, and I’ll come.”
Chapter Nineteen.
“Lady Clare.”
Alice Taylor’s story, when repeated to the Canon, and sifted as carefully as could be, lifted the weight of vague suspicion off the memories of the two brothers, and at any rate enabled those concerned to believe each innocent of a hand in the other’s death. As to the earrings, they had only the woman’s own word for her innocence, and her silence seemed to have been accounted for by fright on her own account, and a stupid ignorance of the value of what she had to tell. Whether there had not been in it a dash of revenge for the suspicion, and of anger at the cessation of the careless attentions which James Kingsworth had not been above paying to so pretty a girl, might be doubted, and her subsequent history had not been particularly creditable. She had spoken now simply to gain money, and a small allowance was settled on her, for her tale had indeed lifted a dark cloud from the past. It brought her into much notice, though it had been known in hints to many whom it did not concern: before the Kingsworths themselves had been informed of it. A great talk and excitement was raised in the neighbourhood, people went to visit the cove, and the old story of the Kingsworth succession was in every mouth. Canon Kingsworth took the whole party back to Fanchester, and then wrote to Mr Clare an authorised version of Mrs Taylor’s confession, and also of the arrangement for the sale of Kingsworth. The truth was thus on record, and the wild stories must subside as they had arisen. Mrs Kingsworth cared little for them. She had been put in charity with her past, and was ready to be in charity with the present, even with her sister-in-law, who hardly knew how to dispose of her gratitude and sense of former harsh judgments of the heiress and her mother.
So it was “all settled,” as Kate said, and desirable houses in Fanchester were inspected. Applehurst was to be let, and Kate talked of belonging to the choral society and of “improving her mind” by attending Shakespeare classes with the other Fanchester young ladies. Nothing unusual was likely to occur to her any more. At last she was “just like other girls.”
Why did she feel that being like other girls was a little dull? No answer had yet been received from Malcolm Mackenzie, but Emberance was in all the flutter of expectation of it, and Kate, as she thought of all her past excitements, the lover who had proved no lover, the duty to be done, the crisis that had passed, felt thankful, but a little flat.
It was just a year since the visit of Walter and Eva Kingsworth to Fanchester, which had done so much to open her eyes, when the Canon announced that he had invited Walter to come and see him again. Kate sparkled up eagerly. Now she could talk to Walter and tell him how it had all been, now he could tell her freely what he thought; she was not an ignorant child any more, but a wise, experienced woman, able to recognise the wisdom of his former silence.