CHAPTER XXVII.
Katherine’s life at Sliplin was in no small degree affected by the result of the Rector’s unfortunate visit. How its termination became known nobody could tell. No one ventured to say “She told me herself,” still less, “He told me.” Yet everybody knew. There were some who had upheld that the Rector had too much respect for himself ever to put himself in the position of being rejected by old Tredgold’s daughter; but even these had to acknowledge that this overturn of everything seemly and correct had really happened. It was divined, perhaps, from Mr. Stanley’s look, who went about the parish with his head held very high, and an air of injury which nobody had remarked in him before. For it was not only that he had been refused. That is a privilege which no law or authority can take from a free-born English girl, and far would it have been from the Rector’s mind to deny to Katherine this right; but it was the manner in which it had been exercised which gave him so deep a wound. It was not as the father of Charlotte and Evelyn that Mr. Stanley had been in the habit of regarding himself, nor that he had been regarded. His own individuality was too remarkable and too attractive, he felt with all modesty, to lay him under such a risk; and yet here was a young woman in his own parish, in his own immediate circle, who regarded him from that point of view, and who looked upon his proposal as ridiculous and something like an insult to her youth. Had she said prettily that she did not feel herself good enough for such a position, that she was not worthy—but that she was aware of the high compliment he had paid her, and never would forget it—which was the thing that any woman with a due sense of fitness would have said, he might have forgiven her. But Katherine’s outburst of indignation, her anger to have been asked to be the stepmother of Charlotte and Evelyn her playfellows, her complete want of gratitude or of any sense of the honour done her, had inflicted a deep blow upon the Rector. That he should be scorned as a lover seemed to him impossible, that a woman should be so insensible to every fact of life. He did not get over it for a long time, nor am I sure that he ever did get over it; not the disappointment, which he bore like a man, but the sense of being scorned. So long as he lived he never forgave Katherine that insult to his dearest feelings.
And thus Katherine’s small diversions were driven back into a still narrower circle. She could not go to the Rectory, where the girls were divided between gratitude to her for not having turned their life upside down, and wrath against her for not having appreciated papa; nor could she go where she was sure to meet him, and to catch his look of offended pride and wounded dignity. It made her way very hard for her to have to think and consider, and even make furtive enquiries whether the Stanleys would be there before going to the mildest tea party. When Mrs. Shanks invited her to meet Miss Mildmay, she was indeed safe. Yet even there Mr. Stanley might come in to pay these ladies a call, or Charlotte appear with her portfolio of drawings, or Evelyn fly in for a moment on her way to the post. She went even to that very mild entertainment with a quiver of anxiety. The great snowstorm was over which had stopped everything, obliterating all the roads, and making the doctor’s dog-cart and the butcher’s and baker’s carts the only vehicles visible about the country—which lay in one great white sheet, the brilliancy of which made the sea look muddy where it came up with a dull colour upon the beach. Everything, indeed, looked dark in comparison with that dazzling cloak of snow, until by miserable human usage the dazzling white changed into that most squalid of all squalid things, the remnant of a snowstorm in England, drabbled by all kinds of droppings, powdered with dust of smoke and coal, churned into the chillest and most dreadful of mud. The island had passed through that horrible phase after a brief delicious ecstasy of skating, from which poor Katherine was shut out by the same reasons already given, but now had emerged green and fresh, though cold, with a sense of thankfulness which the fields seemed to feel, and the birds proclaimed better and more than the best of the human inhabitants could do.
The terrace gardens of Mrs. Shanks and Miss Mildmay shone with this refreshed and brightened greenness, and the prospect from under the verandah of their little houses was restored to its natural colour. The sea became once more the highest light in the landscape, the further cliffs were brown, the trees showed a faint bloom of pushing buds and rising sap, and glowed in the light of the afternoon sun near its setting. Mrs. Shanks’ little drawing room was a good deal darkened by its little verandah, but when the western sun shone in, as it was doing, the shade of the little green roof was an advantage even in winter; and it was so mild after the snow that the window was open, and a thrush in a neighbouring shrubbery had begun to perform a solo among the bushes, exactly, as Mrs. Shanks said, like a fine singer invited for the entertainment of the guests.
“It isn’t often you hear a roulade like that,” she said. “I consider Miss Sherlock was nothing to it.” Miss Sherlock was a professional lady who had been paying a visit in Sliplin, and who at afternoon teas and evening parties, being very kind and ready to “oblige,” had turned the season into a musical one, and provided for the people who were so kind as to invite her, an entertainment almost as cheap as that of the thrush in Major Toogood’s shrubbery.
“I hope the poor thing has some crumbs,” said Miss Mildmay. “I always took great pains to see that there was plenty of bread well peppered put out for them during the snow.”
“Was Miss Sherlock so very good?” said Katherine. “I was unfortunate, I never heard her, even at her concert. Oh, yes, I had tickets—but I did not go.”
“That is just what we want to talk to you about, my dear Katherine. Fancy a great singer in Sliplin, and the Cliff not represented, not a soul there. Oh, if poor dear Stella had but been here, she would not have stayed away when there was anything to see or hear.”
“Yes, I am a poor creature in comparison,” said Katherine, “but you know it isn’t nice to go to such places alone.”
“If there was any need to go alone! You know we would have called for you in the midge any time; but that’s ridiculous for you with all your carriages; it would have been more appropriate for you to call for us. Another time, Katherine, my dear——”