“I assure you, Stella, I have no such thought.”
“What then—to be nobody? Do you think you will like to be nobody, Kate, after all the respect that’s been paid to you, and at the head of a large house, and carriages at your command, and all that—to drop down to be Miss Tredgold, the old maid in lodgings with one woman servant? Oh, I know you well enough for that. You will not like it, you will hate it. Marry one of them, for Heaven’s sake! If you have a preference I am sure I don’t object to that. But marry one of them, James Stanford for choice! or else, mark my words, Kate Tredgold, you will regret it all your life.”
Katherine got free at last, with a laugh on her lips at the solemnity of her sister’s address. If Stella had only known how little her common-sense meant, or the extreme seriousness of these views with which she endeavoured to move a mind so different from her own! Lady Somers went off full of the importance of the question, to discuss it over again with her husband, whose sense of humour was greatly tickled by the suggestion that the pension which James Stanford’s widow might have if he were made member of Council was an important matter to be taken into consideration, while Katherine went back again to her room, passing once more the nursery door where Job lay nervously half awake, calling out a dreary “Zat oo, fader?” as her step sounded upon the corridor. But she had no time to think of little Job in the midst of this darkness of her own life. “What does it matter to me, what does it matter to me?” she kept saying to herself as she went along—and yet it mattered so much, it made so great a change! If she had never seen James Stanford again it would not have mattered, indeed; but thus suddenly to find out that while she had been making of him the one little rainbow in her sky—had enshrined him as something far more than any actual lover, the very image of love itself and fidelity, he had been the lover, the husband of another woman, had gone through all the circle of emotion, had a child to remind him for ever of what had been. Katherine, on her side, had nothing save the bitter sense of an illusion fled. It was not anybody’s fault. The man had done nothing he had not a perfect right to do—the secret had not been kept from her by any malice or evil means—all was quite natural, simple, even touching and sad. She ought to be sorry for him, poor fellow! She was in a manner sorry for him—if only he had not come to insult her with words that could have no meaning, words repeated, which had answered before with another woman. The wrench of her whole nature turning away from the secret thing that had been so dear to her was more dreadful than any convulsion. She had cherished it in her very heart of hearts, turned to it when she was weary, consoled herself with it in the long, long endless flatness of those years that were past. And it had all been a lie; there was nothing of the kind, nothing to fall back upon, nothing to dream of. The man had not loved her, he had loved his wife, as was most just and right. And she had been a woman voluntarily deceived, a dreamer, a creature of vanity, attributing to herself a power which she had never possessed. There is no estimating the keenness of mortified pride with which a woman makes such a discovery. Her thoughts have been dwelling on him with a visionary longing which is not painful, which is sometimes happiness enough to support the structure of a life for years; but his had not been satisfied with this: the chain that held her had been nothing to him; he had turned to other consolations and exhausted them, and then came back. The woman’s instinct flung him from her, as she would have flung some evil thing. She wrenched herself away twisting her very heart out of its socket; that which had been, being shattered for ever by this blow, could be no more.
There was, as Stella said, no common-sense at all in the argument, or proper appreciation of a position which, taking into consideration everything, inclusive of the widow’s pension, was well worth any woman’s while.
CHAPTER XLVII.
It is very difficult to change every circumstance of your life when a sudden resolution comes upon you all in a moment. To restless people indeed it is a comfort to be up and doing at once—but when there is no one to do anything for but yourself, and you have never done anything for yourself alone in all your life, then it is very hard to know how to begin. To resolve that this day, this very hour you will arise and go; that you will find out a new shelter, a new foundation on which, if not to build a house, yet to pitch a tent; to transfer yourself and everything that may belong to you out of the place where you have been all your life, where every one of your little possessions has its place and niche, into another cold unknown place to which neither you nor they belong—how could anything be harder than that? It was so hard that Katherine did not do it for day after day. She put it off every morning till to-morrow. You may think that, with her pride, to be an undesired visitor in her sister’s house would have been insupportable to her. But she did not feel as if she had any pride. She felt that she could support anything better than the first step out into the cold, the decision where she was to go.
The consequence of this was that the Somerses, always tranquilly pursuing their own way, and put out in their reckoning by no one, were the first to make that change. Sir Charles made an expedition to his own old house of which all the Somerses were so proud, and found that it could not only be made (by the spending of sixty thousand a year in it) a very grand old house, but that even now it was in very tolerable order and could receive his family whenever the family chose to inhabit it. When he had made this discovery he was, it was only natural, very anxious to go, to faire valoir as far as was possible what was very nearly his unique contribution to the family funds. There was some little delay in order that fires might be lighted and servants obtained, but it was still October when the party which had arrived from the Aurungzebe at the beginning of the month, departed again in something of the same order, the ayah more cold, and Pearson more worried; for though the latter had Lady Somers’ old rivière in her own possession, another rivière of much greater importance was now in her care, and her responsibilities instead of lessening were increased. It could scarcely be said even that Stella was more triumphant than when she arrived, the centre of all farewells and good wishes, at Tilbury Docks; for she had believed then in good fortune and success as she did now, and she had never felt herself disappointed. Sir Charles himself was the member of the party who had changed most. There was no embarrassment about him now, or doubt of that luck in which Stella was so confident. He had doubted his luck from time to time in his life, but he did so no longer. He carried down little Job on his shoulder from the nursery regions. “I say, old chap,” he said, “you’ll have to give up your nonsense now and be a gentleman. Take off your hat to your Aunt Kate, like a man. If you kick I’ll twist one of those little legs off. Hear, lad! You’re going home to Somers and you’ll have to be a man.”
Job had no answer to make to this astounding address; he tried to kick, but found his feet held fast in a pair of strong hands. “Me fader’s little boy,” he said, trying the statement which had always hitherto been so effectual.
“So you are, old chap; but you’re the young master at Somers too,” said the father, who had now a different meaning. Job drummed upon that very broad breast as well as he could with his little imprisoned heels, but he was not monarch of all he surveyed as before. “Good-bye, Kate,” Sir Charles said. “Stay as long as ever you like, and come to Somers as soon as you will. I’m master there, and I wish you were going to live with us for good and all—but you and your sister know your own ways best.”
“Good-bye, Charles. I shall always feel that you have been very kind.”