“A very sufficient income—for Mr. Tredgold’s daughter!” cried Lady Jane, and she hurried away biting her lips to prevent a string of evil names as long as her arm bursting from them. The old wretch! the old brute! the old curmudgeon! were a few of the things she would have liked to say. But it does not do to scatter such expressions about a man’s house before he has been buried a week. These are decorums which are essential to the very preservation of life.
Then Katherine’s mind turned to the other side of the question, and she thought of herself as Stella’s pensioner, of living on sufferance in Stella’s house, with a portion of Stella’s money substracted from the rest for her benefit. It would have been just the same had it been she who had endowed Stella, as she had intended, and given her the house and the half of the fortune. The same, and yet how different. Stella would have taken everything her sister had given, and waited and craved for more. But to Katherine it seemed impossible that she should take anything from Stella. It would be charity, alms, a hundred ugly things; it would have been mere and simple justice, as she would have felt it had the doing of it been in her own hands.
But it was not with any of these feelings, it was with the happiness of real affection in seeing her sister again, and the excitement of a great novelty and change and of a new chapter of life quite different from all that she had known before, and probably better, more happy, more comforting than any of her anticipations, that she set out next day to meet Stella and to bring her home.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
A river-sea between two widely separated banks, so calm that it was like a sea of oil bulging towards the centre from over-fullness; a big ship upon an even keel, moving along with almost imperceptible progress, the distant hazy banks gliding slowly past; the ease and relief of a long voyage over, not only on every face, but on every line of cordage; a bustle of happy people rushing up upon deck to see how near home they were, and of other people below crowding, bustling over portmanteaux to be packed, and all the paraphernalia of the voyage to be put away. It was a very curious scene to Katherine’s eyes, not to speak of the swarming dark figures everywhere—the Lascars, who were the crew, the gliding ayhas in their white wrappings. She was led to the cabin in which Stella, half-dressed, was standing in the midst of piles of clothes and other belongings, all thrown about in a confusion which it seemed impossible ever to reduce to order, with a box or two open and ready to receive the mass which never could be got in. She was so busy that she could not at first be got to understand that somebody from shore had come for her. And even then, though she gave a little cry and made a little plunge at Katherine, it was in the midst of a torrent of directions, addressed sometimes in English, sometimes in Hindostanee, to an English maid and a Hindoo woman who encumbered the small cabin with their presence. A pink-and-white—yet more white than pink—baby lay sprawling, half out of its garments, upon the red velvet steamboat couch. Katherine stood confused, disappointed, longing to take her sister to her heart, and longing to snatch up the little creature who was so new and so strange an element, yet suddenly caught, stopped, set down, in the exaltation of her love and eagerness by the deadly commonplace of the scene. Stella cried, with almost a shriek:
“You, Katherine! Is it possible?” and gave her a hurried kiss; and then, without drawing breath, called out to the women: “For goodness’ sake take care what you’re doing. That’s my best lace. And put all the muslins at the bottom—I sha’n’t want them here,” with a torrent of other directions in a strange tongue to the white-robed ayah in the background. Then—“Only wait,” Stella cried, “till I get a dress on. But there is never anything ready when I want it. Give me that gown—any gown—and look sharp, can’t you? I am never ready till half an hour after everybody. I never can get a thing to put on.”
“Don’t mind for to-day, Stella; anything will do for to-day. I have so much to tell you.”
“Oh!” said Stella, looking at her again, “I see. Your crape’s enough, Kate, without a word. So it’s all over? Well, perhaps it is for the best. It would have made me miserable if he had refused to see me. And Charlie would have insisted—and—— Poor papa! so he’s gone—really gone. Give me a handkerchief, quick! I was, of course, partly prepared. It’s not such a shock as it might have been.” A tear fell from Stella’s eyes upon the dress which her maid was arranging. She wiped it off carefully, and then her eyes. “You see how careful I have to be now-a-days,” she said; “I can’t have my dress spotted, I haven’t too many of them now. Poor papa! Well, it is a good thing it has happened when I have all the distractions of the journey to take off my mind. Have you done now fumbling? Pin my veil properly. Now I’ll go on deck with you, Katherine, and we’ll watch the ship getting in, and have our talk.”
“Mayn’t I kiss the baby first?” Katherine said. She had been looking at that new and wonderful thing over the chaos of the baggage, unable to get further than the cabin door.
“Oh, you’ll see the baby after. Already you’re beginning to think of the baby and not of me. I knew that was how it would be,” said Stella, pettishly. She stepped over an open box, dragging down a pile of muslins as she moved. “There’s no room to turn round here. Thank heaven we’ve done with it at last. Now, Kate—Kate, tell me; it will be the first thing Charlie will want to know. Did he relent to me at the last?”