Chapter Five.
Speculations.
That hot autumn day was destined, little as she knew it, to be a crisis in Katharine Kingsworth’s life. She was very far from expecting that anything should happen to her, as she sauntered along by the garden wall, eating her peaches, and wondering what to do when she had finished them. She was accustomed to have her time pretty well filled up with her studies; but the absence of object and of emulation had made these of late very wearisome to her, and her mother had half unconsciously relaxed the rein, having indeed nearly come to the end of her own powers. Carefully as she learned and taught, the want of contact with other minds deprived her own of its freshness. Katharine at nineteen was sick of reading history and doing sums, and of talking French one day and German the next. She did not like drawing, and her musical taste was of a commonplace kind, and could not flourish “itself its own delight.”
She loved her mother; but she was afraid of her, and conscious of failing to satisfy her, and the impatient desire of Change hid from her all the pleasure of association and long habit.
“I wonder if mamma means this to go on for ever,” she thought. “Am I to live here till I am as old as she is? Surely other girls have more variety. I don’t know much about it—but I begin to think our lives are odd as well as disagreeable. Surely we could go again and see Uncle Kingsworth—or go and stay somewhere else? We could—why don’t we? Are we rich, I wonder?”
The childishness of a mind which had never had anything to measure itself with, and the unvarying ascendancy of a most resolute will, had so acted that Katharine had never distinctly put these questions to herself before. Often as she had murmured, she had never resisted, nor realised the possibility of resistance. Often as she had declared that her life was hateful to her, she had no more expected that it would change than that the sun would come out because she complained when it was raining.
Katharine was impetuous; but if she had any of her mother’s strength of purpose it was as yet undeveloped. Yet all sorts of impulses and desires were awakening within her, and gradually driving her to a settled purpose—namely, to question her mother as to her reasons for living at Applehurst, and her intentions for the future.
It would be difficult to realise how tremendous a step this seemed to Katharine. To have an opinion of her own and grumble about it, was one thing—to act upon it, quite another—still she got up from her knees by the lavender bush, which she had been cutting while indulging in these meditations, and walked slowly into the house. Katharine never remembered coming into her mother’s presence in her life without a certain sense of awe and of expectation of criticism, and now as she opened the drawing-room door, her heart beat fast, and her colour, always bright enough, burnt all over her forehead and neck.