“I wonder if that is Charlie Somers’ feeling,” Katharine said with an involuntary laugh. It was not that she meant to laugh at Charlie Somers; it was rather the irrestrainable expression of a lightening and rising of her own heart.
“No doubt every man must,” James Stanford said.
And they went on talking, he telling her many things which she did not fully understand or even receive into her mind at all, her chief consciousness being that this man—her first love—was the only one who had felt what a true lover should, the only one to whom her heart made any response. She did not even feel this during the course of that too rapid journey. She felt only an exhilaration, a softening and expansion of her whole being. She could not meet his eyes as she met Dr. Burnet’s; they dazzled her; she could not tell why. Her heart beat, running on with a tremulous accompaniment to those words of his, half of which her intelligence did not master at the time, but which came to her after by degrees. He told her that he was soon going back to India, and that he would like to go and see Stella, to let her know by an independent testimony how her sister was. Might he write and give her his report? Might he come—this was said hurriedly as the train dashed into the precincts of London, and the end of the interview approached—to Sliplin again one day before he left on the chance of perhaps seeing her—to inquire for Mr. Tredgold—to take anything she might wish to send to Lady Somers? Katherine felt the flush on her own face to be overwhelming. Ah, how different from that half-angry confused colour which she had been conscious of when the Rector offered his congratulations!
“Oh no,” she said with a little shake of her head, and a sound of pathos in her voice of which she was quite conscious; “my father is ill; he is better now, but his condition is serious. I am very—sorry—I am distressed—to say so—but he must not be disturbed, he must not. I have escaped for a little to-day. I—had to come. But at home I am altogether taken up by papa. I cannot let you—lose your time—take the trouble—of coming for nothing. Oh, excuse me—I cannot——” Katherine said.
And he made no reply, he looked at her, saying a thousand things with his eyes. And then there came the jar of the arrival. He handed her out, he found a cab for her, performing all the little services that were necessary, and then he held her hand a moment while he said goodbye.
“May I come and see you off? May I be here when you come back?”
“Oh, no, no!” Katherine said, she did not know why. “I don’t know when we go back; it perhaps might not be till to-morrow—it might not be till—that is, no, you must not come, Mr. Stanford—I—cannot help it,” she said.
Still he held her hand a moment. “It must still be hope then, nothing but hope,” he said.
She drove away through London, leaving him, seeing his face wherever she looked. Ah, that was what the others had wanted to look like but had not been able—that was—all that one wanted in this world; not the Tredgold money, nor the fortune of the great City young man, nor the Rector’s dignity, nor Dr. Burnet’s kindness—nothing but that, it did not matter by what accompanied. What a small matter to be poor, to go away to the end of the earth, to be burned by the sun and wasted by the heat, to endure anything, so long as you had that. She trembled and was incoherent when she tried to speak. She forgot where to tell the cabman to go, and said strange things to Hannah, not knowing what she said. Her heart beat and beat, as if it was the only organ she possessed, as if she were nothing but one pulse, thumping, thumping with a delicious idiocy, caring for nothing, and thinking of nothing. Thinking of nothing, though rays and films of thought flew along in the air and made themselves visible to her for a moment. Perhaps she should never see him again; she had nothing to do with him, there was no link between them; and yet, so to speak, there was nothing else but him in the world. She saw the tall tower of the Parliament in a mist that somehow encircled James Stanford’s face, and broad Whitehall was full of that vapour in which any distinctions of other feature, of everything round about her, was lost.
How curious an effect to be produced upon anyone so reasonable, so sensible as Katherine! After a long time, she did not know how long, she was recalled to common day by her arrival at the dressmaker’s where she had to get out and move and speak, all of which she seemed to do in a dream. And then the day turned round and she had to think of her journey back again. Why did she tell him not to come? It would have harmed nobody if he had come. Her father had not forbidden her to see him, and even had he forbidden her, a girl who was of age, who was nearly twenty-four, who had after all a life of her own to think of, should she have refrained from seeing him on that account? All her foundations were shaken, not so much by feeling of her own as by the sight and certainty of his feeling. She would not desert her father, never, never run away from him like Stella. But at least she might have permitted herself to see James Stanford again. She said to herself, “I may never marry him; but now I shall marry nobody else.” And why had she not let him come, why might they not at least have understood each other? The influence of this thought was that Katherine did not linger for the afternoon train, to which Stanford after all did go, on the chance of seeing her, of perhaps travelling with her again, but hurried off by the very first, sadly disappointing poor Hannah, who had looked forward to the glory of lunching with her young mistress in some fine pastrycook’s as Stevens had often described. Far from this, Hannah was compelled to snatch a bun at the station, in the hurry Miss Katherine was in; and why should she have hurried? There was no reason in the world. To be in London, and yet not in London, to see nothing, not even the interior of Verey’s, went to Hannah’s heart. Nor was Katherine’s much more calm when she began to perceive that her very impetuosity had probably been the reason why she did not see him again; for who could suppose that she who had spoken of perhaps not going till to-morrow, should have fled back again in an hour, by a slow train in which nobody who could help it ever went?