Old Mr. Tredgold

by Mrs. Oliphant

She had trouble, too, from another quarter, which was perhaps worst of all. As the months, went on and ran into years, Stella’s astonishment that she was not recalled, her complaints, her appeals and denunciation of her sister as able to help her if she would do so, became manifold and violent. She accused Katherine of the most unlikely things, of shutting up their father, and preventing him from carrying out his natural impulses—of being her, Stella’s, enemy when she had so often pledged herself to be her friend, even of having encouraged her, Stella, in the rash step she had taken, with intent to profit by it, and build her own fortune on her sister’s ruin. Any stranger who had read these letters would have supposed that Katherine had been the chief agent in Stella’s elopement—that it had been she that had arranged everything, and flattered Stella with hopes of speedy recall, only to betray her. Katherine was deeply moved by this injustice and unkindness at first, but soon she came to look at them with calm, and to take no notice of the outcries which were like outcries of a hurt child. There were so many things that called forth pity that the reproaches were forgotten. Stella’s life—which had been so triumphant and gay, and which she had intended and expected should be nothing but a course of triumph and gaiety—had fallen into very different lines from any she had anticipated. After she had upbraided her sister for keeping her out of her rights, and demanded with every threat she could think of their restoration, and that Katherine should conspire no more against her, her tone would sink into one of entreaty, so that the epistle which had begun like an indictment ended like a begging letter. Stella wanted money, always money; money to keep her position, money to pay her debts, money at last for what she called the common necessaries of life. There was scarcely a mail which did not bring over one of these appeals, which tore Katherine’s heart. Though she was the daughter of so rich a man, she had very little of her own. Her allowance was very moderate, for Mr. Tredgold, though he was liberal enough, loved to be cajoled and flattered out of his money, as Stella had done—an art which Katherine had never possessed. She had a little from her mother, not enough to be called a fortune, and this she sent almost entirely to her sister. She sent the greater part of her allowance to Lady Somers, content to confine herself to the plainest dress, in order to satisfy the wants of one who had always had so many wants. It was thus that her best years, the years of her brightest bloom and what ought to have been the most delightful of her life, passed drearily away.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

The regiment had been six years in India and was ordered home before that lingering and perpetually-recurring malady of Mr. Tredgold’s came to an end. It had come and gone so often—each seizure passing off in indeed a reduced condition of temporary relief and comfort, but still always in a sort of recovery—that the household had ceased to be alarmed by them as at first. He was a most troublesome patient, and all had to be on the alert when he was ill, from his personal attendant down to the grooms, who might at a moment’s notice be sent scouring over the country after the doctor, without whom the old man did not think he could breathe when his attacks came on, and this notwithstanding the constant presence of the professional nurse, who was now a regular inmate; but the certainty that he would “come round” had by this time got finally established in the house. This gave a sense of security, but it dispelled the not altogether unpleasant solemnity of excitement with which a household of servants await the end of an illness which may terminate in death. There was nothing solemn about it at all—only another of master’s attacks!—and even Katherine was now quite accustomed to be called up in the middle of the night, or sent for to her father’s room at any moment, as the legitimate authority, without any thrill of alarm as to how things might end. Nobody was afraid of his life, until suddenly the moment came when the wheel was broken at the cistern and the much frayed thread of life snapped at last.

These had been strange years. Fortunately the dark times that pass over us come only one day at a time, and we are not aware that they are to last for years, or enabled to grasp them and consent that so much of life should be spent in that way. It would no doubt have appalled Katherine, or any other young woman, to face steadily so long a period of trouble and give herself up to live it through, consenting that all the brightness and almost all the interest of existence should drop from her at the moment when life is usually at its fairest. She would have done it all the same, for what else could she do? She could not leave her father to go through all these agonies of ending life by himself, even though she was of so little use to him and he had apparently such small need of natural affection or support. Her place was there under all circumstances, and no inducement would have made her leave it; but when Katherine looked back upon that course of years it appalled her as it had not done when it was in course of passing day by day. She was twenty-three when it began and she was twenty-nine when it came to an end. She had been old for her age at the first, and she was still older for her age in outward appearance, though younger in heart, at the last—younger in heart, for there had been no wear and tear of actual life any more than if she had spent these years in a convent, and older because of the seclusion from society and even the severe self-restraint in the matter of dress, which, however, was not self-restraint so much as submission to necessity, for you cannot do two things with one sum of money, as many a poor housekeeper has to ascertain daily. Dressmakers’ bills for Katherine were not consistent with remittances to Stella, and it was naturally the least important thing that was sacrificed. She had accordingly lost a great deal of her bloom and presented an appearance less fair, less graceful—perhaps less loveable—to the eyes of Dr. Burnet as she rose from the lonely fireside in her black dress, slim and straight, slimmer perhaps and straighter than of old—pale, without either reflection or ornament about her, looking, he thought, five-and-thirty, without any elasticity, prematurely settled down into the rigid outlines of an old maid, when he went into the well-known drawing-room in an October evening to tell her that at last the dread visitor, anticipated yet not believed in for so long, was now certainly at hand.

Dr. Burnet had behaved extremely well during all these years. He had not been like the rector. He had borne no malice, though he had greater reason to do so had he chosen. He never now made use of her Christian name and never allowed himself to be betrayed into any sign of intimacy, never lingered in her presence, never even looked at the tea on the little tea-table over which he had so often spent pleasant moments. He was now severely professional, giving her his account of his patient in the most succinct phrases and using medical terms, which in the long course of her father’s illness Katherine had become acquainted with. But he had been as attentive to Mr. Tredgold as ever, people said; he had never neglected him, never hesitated to come at his call night or day, though he was aware that he could do little or nothing, and that the excellent nurse in whose hands the patient was was fully capable of caring for him; yet he always came, putting a point of honour in his sedulous attendance, that it never might be said of him that he had neglected the father on account of the daughter’s caprice and failure. It might be added that Mr. Tredgold was a little revenue to the doctor—a sort of landed estate producing so much income yearly and without fail—but this was a mean way of accounting for his perfect devotion to his duty. He had never failed, however other persons might fail.

He came into the drawing-room very quietly and unannounced. He was not himself quite so gallant a figure as he had been when Katherine had left him planté là; he was a little stouter, not so perfect in his outline. They had both suffered more or less from the progress of years. She was thinner, paler, and he fuller, rougher—almost, it might be said, coarser—from five years more of exposure to all-weathers and constant occupation, without any restraining influence at home to make him think of his dress, of the training of his beard, and other small matters. It had been a great loss to him, even in his profession, that he had not married. With a wife, and such a wife as Katherine Tredgold, he would have been avowedly the only doctor, the first in the island, in a position of absolute supremacy. As it was a quite inferior person, who was a married man, ran him hard, although not fit to hold a candle to Dr. Burnet. And this, too, he set down more or less to Katherine’s account. It is to be hoped that he did not think of all this on the particular evening the events of which I take so long to come to. And yet I am afraid he did think of it, or at least was conscious of it all in the midst of the deeper consciousness of his mission to-night. He could scarcely tell whether it was relief or pain he was bringing to her—a simpler or a more complex existence—and the sense of that enigma mingled with all his other feelings. She rose up to meet him as he came in. The room was dimly lighted; the fire was not bright. There was no chill in the air to make it necessary. And I don’t know what it was which made Katherine divine the moment she saw the doctor approaching through the comparative gloom of the outer room that he was bringing her news of something important. Mr. Tredgold had not been worse than usual in the beginning of this attack; the nurse had treated it just as usual, not more seriously than before. But she knew at once by the sound of the doctor’s step, by something in the atmosphere about him, that the usual had departed for ever and that what he came to tell her of was nothing less than death. She rose up to meet him with a sort of awe, her lips apart, her breath coming quick.

“I see,” he said, “that you anticipate what I am going to say.”

“No,” she said with a gasp, “I know of nothing—nothing more than usual.”

“That is all over,” he answered with a little solemnity. “I am sorry I can give you so little hope—this time I fear it is the end.”

“The end!” she cried, “the end!” She had known it from the first moment of his approach, but this did not lessen the shock. She dropped again upon her seat, and sat silent contemplating that fact—which no reasoning, no explanation, could get over. The end—this morning everything as usual, all the little cares, the hundred things he wanted, the constant service—and afterwards nothing, silence, stillness, every familiar necessity gone. Katherine’s heart seemed to stand still, the wonder of it, the terror of it, the awe—it was too deep and too appalling for tears.