“One minute,” said the solicitor, “the position is very serious. It is very awkward for us to have no other member of the family, no one in Miss Tredgold’s interest to talk it over with. I thought, perhaps, that you, Dr. Burnet, being I presume, by this time, an old family friend as well as——”
“I can’t pretend to any such distinction,” he said quickly with an angry smile, for indeed although he never showed it, he had never forgiven Katherine. Then it occurred to him, though a little late, that these personal matters might as well be kept to himself. He added quickly, “I have, of course, seen Miss Tredgold daily, for many years.”
“Well,” said Mr. Sturgeon, “that’s always something, as she has nobody to stand by her, no relation, no husband—nothing but—what’s worse than nothing,” he added with a contemptuous glance at Robert Tredgold, who sat grasping his bag, and looking from one to another with curious and bewildered eyes.
Dr. Burnet grew red, and buttoned up more tightly than ever the buttons he had undone. “If I can be of any use to Miss Tredgold,” he said. “Is there anything disagreeable before her—any prohibition—against helping her sister?”
“Dr. Burnet,” said the solicitor imperiously, “we can find nothing among Mr. Tredgold’s papers, and I have nothing, not an indication of his wishes, except the will of eighteen hundred and seventy-one.”
CHAPTER XXXVII.
When Katherine came into the room again at the call of her father’s solicitor it was with a sense of being unduly disturbed and interfered with at a moment when she had a right to repose. She was perhaps half angry with herself that her thoughts were already turning so warmly to the future, and that Stella’s approaching arrival, and the change in Stella’s fortunes which it would be in her power to make, were more and more occupying the foreground of her mind, and crowding out with bright colours the sombre spectacle which was just over, and all the troublous details of the past. When a portion of one’s life has been brought to an end by the closure of death, something to look forward to is the most natural and best of alleviations. It breaks up the conviction of the irrevocable, and opens to the soul once more the way before it, which, on the other hand, is closed up and ended. Katherine had allowed that thought to steal into her mind, to occupy the entire horizon. Stella was coming home, not merely back, which was all that she had allowed herself to say before, but home to her own house, or rather to that which was something still more hers than her own by being her sister’s. There had been, no doubt, grievances against Stella in Katherine’s mind, in the days when her own life had been entirely overshadowed by her sister’s; but these were long gone, long lost in boundless, remorseful (notwithstanding that she had nothing to blame herself with) affection and longing for Stella, who after all was her only sister, her only near relation in the world. She had begun to permit herself to dwell on that delightful thought. It had been a sort of forbidden pleasure while her father lay dead in the house, and she had felt that every thought was due to him, that she had not given him enough, had not shown that devotion to him of which one reads in books, the triumph of filial love over every circumstance. Katherine had not been to her father all that a daughter might have been, and in these dark days she had much and unjustly reproached herself with it. But now everything had been done for him that he could have wished to be done, and his image had gone aside amid the shadows of the past, and she had permitted herself to look forward, to think of Stella and her return. It was a great disturbance and annoyance to be called again, to be brought back from the contemplation of those happier things to the shadow of the grave once more—or, still worse, the shadow of business, as if she cared how much money had come to her or what was her position. There would be plenty—plenty to make Stella comfortable she knew, and beyond that what did Katherine care?
The men stood up again as she came in with an air of respect which seemed to her exaggerated and absurd—old Mr. Turny, who had known her from a child and had allowed her to open the door for him and run errands for him many a day, and the solicitor, who in his infrequent visits had never paid any attention to her at all. They stood on each side letting her pass as if into some prison of which they were going to defend the doors. Dr. Burnet, who was there too, closely buttoned and looking very grave, gave her a seat; and then she saw her Uncle Robert Tredgold sunk down in a chair, with Mr. Sturgeon’s bag in his arms, staring about him with lack-lustre eyes. She gave him a little nod and encouraging glance. How small a matter it would be to provide for that unfortunate so that he should never need to carry Mr. Sturgeon’s bag again! She sat down and looked round upon them with for the first time a sort of personal satisfaction in the thought that she was so wholly independent of them and all that it was in their power to do—the mistress of her own house, not obliged to think of anyone’s pleasure but her own. It was on her lips to say something hospitable, kind, such as became the mistress of the house; she refrained only from the recollection that, after all, it was her father’s funeral day.
“Miss Tredgold,” said the solicitor, “we have now, I am sorry to say, a very painful duty to perform.”
Katherine looked at him without the faintest notion of his meaning, encouraging him to proceed with a faint smile.