There was something almost like timidity in her tone. She felt how he had been wronged by her father and mother, and in her trouble she was willing to believe that she was really a little to blame herself. She realized, too, that he was acting very bravely and honestly, and that he was really suffering. It was not a grand, dramatic agony, and eloquence was the least of his gifts, but he was strong, young, and in earnest, and had been made to undergo pain for her sake. She was ashamed of having been the cause of it.
No other words suggested themselves to her, but he waited one moment, as though expecting that she would speak again. Then he silently dropped her hand, and bowing his head a little, went quietly to the door without looking back. She did not follow him with her eyes, but she listened for the sound of the latch, and it did not come quite so soon as she expected. He had turned to look at her once more, his hand on the door.
“God bless you—Katharine,” he said, in a low voice.
She looked round at him quickly, and the faint, sorrowful smile came back to her face. Her lips moved, but no words came. He gazed at her one moment, and then took his young grief out into the spring air and the evening sunshine.
When Katharine was alone, she sighed and gazed at the hearth-rug, bending forward in a thoughtful attitude, her chin supported in her hand.
“How hard it is!” she exclaimed to herself.
It seemed to her that the difficulties of her life grew with every passing day. She had, indeed, cut the knot of one of them within the last half hour, and so far as Archibald Wingfield was concerned, the hard thing had been done, and he knew the worst. But she, on her part, had much to bear yet. She had seen to-day, for the first time, how her father and mother longed to have her married. Even now, she found it difficult to suspect either of them of intentional cruelty, or of attempting to use anything more than persuasion in pushing her into the match. With her faculty for seeing both sides of a question at once, she was just. It was natural, perhaps, that they should wish her to marry such a man. She had never seen any one like him—such a magnificent specimen of youthful manhood. Even her father could not compare with him. And he had much besides his looks to recommend him, much besides his fortune and his position and his popularity. He was brave and honest, and able to love truly, as it seemed.
He would recover, of course, she said to herself. He was sought after, flattered, and pursued for many reasons. He could find plenty of young girls only too delighted to marry him, and he would certainly marry one of them before long. His life was not blighted, and she had not broken his heart, if hearts ever break at all. She remembered what she had once borne, in the belief that John Ralston was disgraced for life on that memorable occasion when all New York had learned that he had been brought home, apparently drunk, after a midnight encounter with a pugilist, who had found occasion to quarrel with him in a horse-car. The belief had lasted a whole night and a whole day, and she did not think that young Wingfield could be suffering anything like that. Moreover, her love for Ralston made her ruthless and almost hard about every other man. Nevertheless, she was sincerely sorry for the man who had just left her—the more so, perhaps, because she had little or nothing with which to reproach herself.
Katharine was not left to her own reflections very long. By a process akin to telepathy, Mrs. Lauderdale was soon aware that Archibald Wingfield had left the house. In the half hour during which his visit had lasted, she had not touched her miniature, though she had looked at it, and turned it to and from the light many times. She was very nervous, and she wished that when he went away he might forthwith take himself off to China, at the very least. She did not wish to meet him that evening, nor the next, to be called to account by him for having exceeded her powers in the impression she had conveyed of Katharine’s readiness to marry him. Yet she remembered that she had acted very much in the same way when Charlotte had married Benjamin Slayback. It was true that Slayback was a much older man, and well able to take care of himself, and that Charlotte had not at the time been showing any especial preference for any of her adorers. She had, in fact, just then dismissed one for the grievous offence of having turned out an unutterable bore after three weeks of almost unbroken conversation, during which she had exhausted his not fertile intellect, as furnace heat dries a sponge. Charlotte’s heart had been comparatively free, therefore, and she had been indulging in dreams of power and personal influence. But Mrs. Lauderdale and her husband had on that occasion used to Mr. Slayback almost the identical words which she had lately repeated to Wingfield; Slayback had come, had proposed,—in what manner Charlotte had never revealed,—and had been immediately accepted. Surely, there was nothing wrong in assuming that Katharine might possibly behave in the same way, seeing how very much more desirable a suitor Wingfield was than Slayback. Thus argued Mrs. Lauderdale, as she tried to trip up her conscience and step over it. But she was too good by nature to be successful in such a fraud upon goodness, and in the midst of her involuntary self-reproaches, her heart was beating with anxiety to know the result of the interview.
It meant a great deal to her, for she was sure that if Katharine could be removed from the household, peace must descend upon her own soul once more, and she longed for peace. Somehow, she felt that if she could only enjoy that supremacy of her wonderful beauty for one month more—for one last month, before she grew old—she could meet Katharine again, and forgive her all her youth and freshness, and forgive herself for having envied them. As her life was now, she could not, try how she would. The pain was upon her hourly, and she could not but resent it, and almost hate the cause of it.