Katherine Lauderdale; Vol. 2 of 2

by F. Marion Crawford

She was a married woman, and she must behave as one, for the rest of her natural life, though no one was ever to know that she was married. It was a very general idea, with her, but it was a very strong one, and none the less so for its ingenuous simplicity.

But the fact that she regretted her liberty did not even distantly suggest that she might ever fall in love with any one but John Ralston. Her only wish was to make him feel bitterly what he had done, that he might regret it as long as he lived, just as she must regret her liberty. The offence was so monstrous that the possibility of forgiving it did not cross her mind. She did not, however, ask herself whether the love that still remained was making the injury he had done it seem yet more atrocious. Love was still in a state of suspended animation—there was no telling what he might do when he came to life again. For the time being he was not to be taken into consideration at all. If she were to love him during the coming years, that would only make matters much worse.

There is not, perhaps, in the yet comparatively passionless nature of most young girls so great a capacity for real suffering as there is in older women. But there is something else instead. There is a sensitiveness which most women lose by degrees to a certain point, though never altogether, the sensitiveness of the very young animal when it is roughly exposed to the first storm of its first winter, if it has been born under the spring breezes and reared amongst the flowers of summer.

It will suffer much more acutely later,—lash and spur, or shears and knife, sharper than wind and snow,—but it will never be so sensitive again. It will never forget how the cruel cold bit its young skin, and got into its delicate throat, and made its slender limbs tremble like the tendrils of a creeper.

It was snowing again, but Katharine walked slowly, and went out of her way in her unformulated wish to lose time, and to put off the moment at which she must meet the familiar faces and hear the well-known voices at home. Until Griggs had broached the fatal subject at table, she had been taken out of herself at the Crowdies’. She must go back to herself now, and she hated the thought as she hated all her own existence. But the regions between Clinton Place and Fourth Avenue are not the part of New York in which it is best for a young girl to walk about alone. She did not like to be stared at by the loafers at the corners, nor to be treated with too much familiarity by the patronizing policeman who saw her over the Broadway crossing. Then, too, she remembered that she had given no notice of her absence from luncheon, and that her mother might perhaps be anxious about her. There was nothing for it but to take courage and go home. She only hoped that Charlotte might not be there.

But Charlotte had come, in the hope of enjoying herself as she had done on the previous day. Katharine ascertained the fact from the girl who let her in, and went straight to her room, sending word to her mother that she had lunched with the Crowdies and would come down presently. Even as she went up the stairs she felt a sharp pain at the thought that her mother and sister were probably at that very moment discussing John’s mishaps, and comparing notes about the stories they had heard—and perhaps reading more paragraphs from the papers. The shame of the horrible publicity of it all overcame her, and she locked her door, and tried the handle to be sure that it was fast—with a woman’s distrust of all mechanical contrivances when she wishes to be quite sure of a situation. It was instinctive, and she had no second thought which she tried to hide from herself.

As she took off her hat and coat she grew very pale, and the deep shadows came under her eyes—so dark that she wondered at them vaguely as she glanced at herself in the mirror. She felt faint and sick. She drank a little water, and then, with a sudden impulse, threw herself upon her bed, and lay staring at the ceiling, as she had lain at dawn. The same glare still came in from the street and penetrated every corner, but not so vividly as before, for the snow was falling fast, and the mist of the whirling flakes softened the light.

It was a forlorn little room. Robert the Rich would have been very much surprised if he could have seen it. He was a generous man, and was very fond of his grand-niece, and if he had known exactly how she lived under her father’s roof it would have been like him to have interfered. All that he ever saw of the house was very different. There was great simplicity downstairs, and his practised eye detected the signs of a rigid economy—far too rigid, he thought, when he calculated what Alexander Junior must be worth; a ridiculously exaggerated economy, he considered, when he thought of his own wealth, and that his only surviving brother lived in the house in Clinton Place. But there was nothing squalid or mean about it all. The meanness was relative. It was like an aspersion upon the solidity of Robert’s fortune, and upon his intention of providing suitably for all his relations.

Upstairs, however, and notably in Katharine’s room, things had a different aspect. Nothing had been done there since long before Charlotte had been married. The wall-paper was old-fashioned, faded, and badly damaged by generations of tacks and pins. The carpet was threadbare and patched, and there were holes where even a patch had not been attempted. The furniture was in the style of fifty years ago or more, veneered with dark mahogany, but the veneering was coming off in places, leaving bare little surfaces of dusty pine wood smeared with yellowish, hardened glue. Few objects can look more desperately shabby than veneered furniture which is coming to pieces. There was nothing in the room which Katharine could distinctly remember to have seen in good condition, except the old carpet, which had been put down when she and Charlotte had been little girls. To Charlotte herself, when she had come in on Wednesday afternoon, there had been something delightful in the renewal of acquaintance with all her old dinginess of intimate surroundings. Charlotte’s own life was almost oppressed with luxury, so that it destroyed her independence. But to Katharine, worn out and heartsore with the troubles of her darkening life, it was all inexpressibly depressing. She stared at the ceiling as she lay there, in order not to look at the room itself. She was very tired, too, and she would have given anything to go to sleep.

It was not merely sleep for which she longed. It was a going out. Again the thought crossed her mind, as it had that morning, that if the whole world were a single taper, she would extinguish the flame with one short breath, and everything would be over. And now, too, in her exhaustion, came the idea that something less complete, but quite as effectual, was in her power. It had passed through her brain half an hour previously, when she had bidden Hester Crowdie good-bye—with a sort of intuitive certainty that she was never to see her friend again. She had left Hester with a vague and sudden presentiment of darkness. She had assuredly not any intention of seeking death in any definite form, but it had seemed to be close to her as she had said those few words of farewell. It came nearer still as she lay alone in her own room. It came nearer, and hovered over her, and spoke to her.