“You are surely much too severe a judge,” she said. “I never heard that to come to grief, as you say, was a desirable end. If one cannot win, one would at least be glad to retire decently—to make a retreat with honour, not to fling up everything. You might live then to fight another day, which is a thing commended in the finest poetry,” she added with a laugh.
He rose up and began to walk about the room. “You crush me all the more by seeming to agree with me,” he said. “But if you knew how I feel the contrast between what I am and what I was when last I was here! I went away from your father burning with energy, feeling that I could face any danger—that there was nothing I couldn’t overcome. I found myself off, walking to London, I believe, before I knew. I felt as if I could have walked to India, and overcome everything on the way! That was the heroic for a moment developed. Of course, I had to come to my senses—to take the train, to see about my berth, to get my outfit, &c. These hang weights about a man’s neck. And then, of course, I found that fate does not appear in one impersonation to be assaulted and overcome, as I suppose I must have thought, and that a civil servant has got other things to think of than fortune and fame. The soldiers have the advantage of us in that way. They can take a bold step, as Somers did, and carry out their ideal and achieve their victory——”
“Don’t put such high-flown notions into my brother-in-law’s head. I don’t think he had any ideal. He thought Stella was a very pretty girl. They do these things upon no foundation at all, to make you shiver—a girl and a man who know nothing of each other. But it does well enough in most cases, which is a great wonder. They get on perfectly. Getting on is, I suppose, the active form of that condition—senza gloria e senza infamia—of which you were speaking?” Katherine had quite recovered her spirits. The Italian, the reference to Dante, had startled her at first, but had gradually re-awakened in her a multitude of gentle thoughts. They had read Dante together in the old far past days of youth. It is one of the studies, grave as the master is, which has facilitated many a courtship, as Browning, scarcely less grave, does also.
The difficulties, to lay two heads together over, are so many, and the poetry which makes the heart swell is so akin to every emotion. She remembered suddenly a seat under one of the acacias where she had sat with him over this study. She had always had an association with that bench, but had not remembered till now that it flashed upon her what it was. She could see it almost without changing her position from the window. The acacia was ragged now, all its leaves torn from it by the wind, the lawn in front covered with rags of foliage withered and gone—not the scene she remembered, with the scent of the acacias in the air, and the warm summer sunshine and the gleam of the sea. She was touched by the recollection, stirred by it, emotions of many kinds rising in her heart. No one had ever stirred or touched her heart but this man—he, no doubt, more by her imagination than any reality of feeling. But yet she remembered the quickened beat, the quickened breath of her girlhood, and the sudden strange commotion of that meeting they had had, once and no more, in the silence of the long years. And now, again, and he in great excitement, strained to the utmost, his face and his movements full of nervous emotion, turning towards her once more.
“Miss Tredgold,” he said, but his lips were dry and parched. He stopped again to take breath. “Katherine,” he repeated, then paused once more. Whatever he had to say, it surely was less easy than a love tale. “I came to England,” he said, bringing it out with a gasp, “in the first place for a pretence, to bring home—my little child.”
All the mist that was over the sea seemed to sweep in and surround Katherine. She rose up instinctively, feeling herself wrapped in it, stifled, blinded. “Your little child?” she said, with a strange muffled cry.
CHAPTER XLV.
Mr. Sturgeon arrived that evening with all his accounts and papers. He had not come, indeed, when Lady Somers left her sister to entertain James Stanford and joined her husband in the room which he had incontinently turned into a smoking-room, and which had already acquired that prevailing odour of tobacco and whiskey from which Mr. Tredgold’s house had hitherto afforded no refuge. Stella had no objection to these odours. She told her husband that she had “scuttled” in order to leave Kate alone with her visitor. “For that’s what he wants, of course,” she said. “And Kate will be much better married. For one thing, with your general invitations and nonsense she might take it into her head she was to stay here, which would not suit my plans at all. I can’t bear a sister always in the house.”
“It seems hard,” said Sir Charles, “that you should take all her money and not even give her house room. I think it’s a deuced hard case.”
“Bosh!” said Stella; “I never took a penny of her money. Papa, I hope, poor old man, had a right to do whatever he liked with his own. She had it all her own way for seven long years. If she had been worth her salt she could have made him do anything she pleased in that time. We used to rely upon that, don’t you remember? And a pretty business it would have been had we had nothing better to trust to. But he never meant to be hard upon Stella, I was always sure of that. Poor old papa! It was nice of him not to change his mind. But I can’t see that Katherine’s is any very hard case, for it was settled like this from the first.”