“Of course it will come to something,” cried Kate. “I am not so good as John. If papa were to stand out, I should just wait till I was one-and-twenty; and then, if John pleased—— Now they are turning back again. Oh, will they never be done? It is just like men, walking and talking, walking and talking for ever, and us poor women waiting here.”
“But, Kate, listen to me,” said Mrs Mitford, solemnly; “if it ever comes to anything, you must be very very careful with my John. Look at his dear face, how it shines with feeling! He loves you so—he would put himself under your father’s feet. I feel as if I could tell you the very words he is saying. And you—you have been brought up so differently. If you were tempted to be careless, and forget his ways of thinking, and prefer society and the world——”
“I see how it is,” said Kate, with a mournful cadence in her voice—she did not turn her head, for her eyes were still intently fixed on the distant figures out of doors; “I see how it is—you don’t think I am the right girl for John.”
“I did not say so,” said Mrs Mitford, humbly; “how can I tell? I can’t divine what is in my own boy’s heart, and how can I divine yours? But I will love you for his sake. Oh, Kate! if you are good to him——”
Here the conversation came to a sudden pause; for the two who were outside were seen to turn in the direction of Dr Mitford’s study, and to enter the house, which made the crisis come nearer, as it were. Neither of the two ladies could have told how the afternoon passed. Every sound that went through the house seemed to them significant. Sometimes a door would open or shut, and paralyse them for the moment. Sometimes a sound as of a single step would be heard in one of the passages, and then Mrs Mitford and Kate would rise up and flush crimson, and listen as if they had not been listening all the time. “Now they are coming!” one or the other would say, with a gasp, for the waiting affected their very breathing. Except on these occasions, they scarcely exchanged two words in half an hour. From time to time Kate looked at her watch, and made a remark under her breath about the hour. “It is too late for the four o’clock train,” she said; and then it was too late for the mail at half-past five; and all this time not a word came out of the stillness to relieve their anxiety. The bees buzzed about the garden, and the sun shone and shone as if he never could weary of shining, and blazed across the monotonous lawn and vacant paths, which no step or shadow disturbed. Oh the burden of the silence that lay upon that whole smiling world outside, where not even a leaf would move, so eager was nature to have the first word of the secret! When Mrs Mitford’s needles clicked in her tremulousness, Kate glanced up with eyes of feverish reproach; and when Kate’s scissors fell, the room echoed with the sound, and Mrs Mitford felt it an injury. Thus the long, weary, languid afternoon passed on. When Jervis began to stir with his preparations for dinner, and to move about his pantry, with clink and clang of glass and silver, laying the table, the sounds were to them like the return of a jury into their box to the anxious wretches waiting for their verdict. Dinner was coming, that augustest of modern ceremonies, and the ladies felt instinctively that things must now come to a decision. And accordingly, it was just after Jervis had carried his echoing tray out of the pantry to the sideboard when the door of the study at last opened, and steps were heard coming along the passage—Dr Mitford’s steps, creaking as they came, and another footstep, which Kate knew to be her father’s. Not John! The ladies sat bolt upright, and grew red and grew pale, and felt the blood tingle to their finger-points. And then they looked at each other, and asked, silently, “Where has he gone?”
This time it was no longer the jurymen. It was the judge himself, coming solemn with his verdict. The gentlemen came into the room one behind the other, Mr Crediton looking worn and tired, and even Dr Mitford’s white tie grown limp with suspense and emotion. But it was he who was the first to speak.
“I am sorry to have left you so long by yourselves,” he said, with a little air of attempted jauntiness, which sat very strangely on him, “and to have kept Mr Crediton away from you; but we had a great deal to talk over, and business, you know, must be attended to. My dear, it was business of a very momentous kind. And now, Miss Kate,” said the Rector, turning upon her, and holding out both his hands—he smiled, but his smile was very limp, like his tie, and even his hands, though not expressive generally, trembled a little—“now, Miss Kate, for the first time I feel at liberty to speak to you. You must have thought me very hard and cold the other night; but now I have your father’s permission to bid you welcome to my family,” Dr Mitford went on, smiling a ghastly smile; and he stooped over her and kissed her forehead, and held her hands, waving them up and down as if he did not know what to do with them. “I don’t know why my son has not come to be the first to tell you. Everything is settled at last!”
“Where is John?” cried Mrs Mitford, with her soft cheeks blazing. And her husband dropped Kate’s hands as if they had burned him, and they all paused and looked at each other with an embarrassment and restraint which nobody could disguise.
“To do him justice, I don’t think he felt himself equal to a grand tableau of family union and rapture,” said Mr Crediton. “Mrs Mitford, I don’t pretend to be overjoyed. I don’t see why we should make any pretences about it. They have done a very foolish thing, and probably they will repent of it——”
But this was more than John’s mother could bear. “One of them, I am sure, will never have any reason to repent of it,” she said, with irrepressible heat, not thinking of the double meaning that her words might bear.