[CHAPTER VII.]
A GAME AT CHESS.
When Kate Rothwell promised to be Sidney Harding's wife she was very honestly in love with the handsome young fellow. But this happy frame of mind had been preceded by a period of revolt and disgust when she did not know him, and had resolved vaguely on a marriage—any marriage—which should fulfil certain conditions. And that she should be in love with the man she married was not one of them. In fact, the conditions were almost all negative ones. She had decreed that her husband should not be a conspicuous fool, should not be vicious, should not be repulsively vulgar, and should not be an unendurable bore. On the other hand he should be fairly well off. She did not demand a large fortune, she was inclined to rate the gift and prospect of making money as something more than the possession of a certain sum which its owner could do nothing but guard. Given a fairly cultivated man, and she felt that she would absolutely prefer that he should be engaged in some business which might grow and expand, stimulating the hopes and energies of all connected with it. The sterility and narrowness of life at Mitchelhurst had sickened her very soul. She was conscious of a fund of rebellious strength, and she demanded liberty to develop herself, liberty to live. She knew very well how women fared among the Rothwells. She had seen two of her father's sisters, faded spinsters, worshipping the family pride which had blighted them. Nobody wanted them, their one duty was to cost as little as possible. That they would not disgrace the Rothwell name was taken for granted. Kate used to look at their pinched and dreary faces, and recognise some remnants of beauty akin to her own. She listened to their talk, which was full of details of the pettiest economy, and remembered that these women had been intent on shillings and half-pence all their lives, that neither of them had ever had a five-pound note which she could spend as it pleased her. And their penurious saving had been for—what? Had it been for husband or child it would have been different, the half-pence would have been glorified. But they paid this life-long penalty for the privilege of being the Misses Rothwell of Mitchelhurst. Life with them was simply a careful picking of their way along a downward slope to the family vault, and it was almost a comfort to think that the poor ladies were safely housed there, with their dignity intact, while Kate was yet in her teens.
Later came the little episode of Minnie Newton and her admirer. Kate perceived her brother's indifference to the girl's welfare, and the brutality of his revenge on the man whose crime was his habit of chinking the gold in his waistcoat pocket. Probably, with her finer instincts, she perceived all this more clearly than did John Rothwell himself. She did not actively intervene, because, in her contemptuous strength, she felt very little pity for a couple whose fate was ostensibly in their own hands. Minnie was not even in love with Hayes, and Kate did not care to oppose her brother in order to force a pliant fool to accept a fortunate chance. She let events take their course, but she drew from them the lesson that her future depended on herself. And, miserably as life at Mitchelhurst was maintained, she was, perhaps, the first of the family to see that the time drew near when it would not be possible to maintain it at all, partly from the natural tendency of all embarrassments to increase, and partly from John Rothwell's character. He could not be extravagant, but he had a dull impatience of his father's minute supervision. Kate made up her mind that the crash would come in her brother's reign.
She had already looked round the neighbourhood of her home and found no deliverer there. Had there been any one otherwise suitable the Rothwell pride was so notorious that he would never have dreamed of approaching her. An invitation from a girl who had been a school friend offered a possible chance, and Kate coaxed the necessary funds from the old squire, defied her brother's grudging glances, and went, with a secret, passionate resolve to escape from Mitchelhurst for ever. She saw no other way. She was not conscious of any special talent, and she said frankly to herself that she was not sufficiently well educated to be a governess. Moreover, the independence which achieves a scanty living was not her ideal. She was cramped, she was half-starved, she wanted to stretch herself in the warmth of the world, and take its good things while she was young.
Fate might have decreed that she should meet Mr. Robert Harding, a successful man of business in the city, twenty years older than herself, slightly bald, rather stout, keen in his narrow range, but with very little perception of anything which lay right or left of the road by which he was travelling to fortune. The beautiful Miss Rothwell would have thanked Fate and set to work to win him. But it is not only our good resolutions that are the sport of warring chances. Our unworthy schemes do not always ripen into fact. Kate did not meet Mr. Robert Harding, she met his brother Sidney, a tall, bright-eyed, red-lipped young fellow, with the world before him, and the pair fell in love as simply and freshly as if the croquet ground at Balaclava Lodge were the Garden of Eden, or a glade in Arcady. In a week they were engaged to be married, and were both honestly ready to swear that no other marriage had ever been possible for either. To her he appeared with the golden light of the future about his head; to him she came with all the charm and shadowy romance of long descent, and of a poverty far statelier than newly-won wealth. Friends reminded Sidney that with his liberal allowance from his brother, and his prospect of a partnership at twenty-five, he might have married a girl with money had he chosen. Friends also mentioned to Kate, with bated breath, that the Hardings' father, dead twenty years earlier, had been a pork-butcher. Sidney laughed, and Kate turned away in scorn. She was absolutely glad that she could make what the world considered a sacrifice for her darling.
At Mitchelhurst her engagement, though not welcomed, was not strongly opposed. John Rothwell sneered as much as he dared, but he knew his sister's temper, and it was too like his own for him to care to trifle with it. So he stood aside, very wisely, for there was a touch of the lioness about Kate with this new love of hers, and he saw mischief in the eyes that were so sweet while she was thinking about Sidney. It was at that time that she spoke her word of half-scornful sympathy to Herbert Hayes.
And in a year her married life, with all its tender and softening influences, was over. An accident had killed Sidney Harding before he was twenty-five, before his child was born, and Kate was left alone in comparatively straitened circumstances. For her child's sake she endured her sorrow, demanding almost fiercely of God that He would give her a son to grow up like his dead father, and when the boy was born she called him Reynold. Sidney was too sacred a name; there could be but one Sidney Harding for her, but she remembered that he had once said that he wished he had been called Reynold, after his father.
It was pathetic to see her dark eyes fixed upon the baby features, trying to trace something of Sidney in them, trying hard not to realise that it was her own likeness that was stamped upon her child. "He is darker, of course," she used to say, "but—" He could not be utterly unlike his father, this child of her heart's desire! It was not possible—it must not be—it would be too monstrous a cruelty. But month by month, and year by year, the little one grew into her remembrance of her brother's solitary boyhood, and faced her with a moody temper that mocked her own. No one knew how long she waited for a tone or a glance which should remind her of her dead love, remind her of anything but the old days that she hated. None ever came. The boy grew tall and slim, handsome after the Rothwell type, with a curious instinctive avidity for any details connected with Mitchelhurst and his mother's people. He would not confess his interest, but she divined it and disliked it. And Reynold, on his side, unconsciously resented her eternal unspoken demand for something which he could not give. He would scowl at her over his shoulder, irritated by his certainty that her unsatisfied eyes were upon him. Mother and son were so fatally alike that they chafed each other continually. Every outbreak of temper was a pitched battle, the combatants knew the ground on which they fought, and every barbed speech was scientifically planted where it would rankle most.