“I know, I know,” he said. “It is a great shock for you, it is very painful; but if, as I hear, he was violently against the marriage, and she was violently determined on it, was not something of the kind to be expected? You know your sister was very much accustomed to her own way.”
“Oh, doctor, how can you say that!—as if you took it for granted—as if it was not the most terrible thing that could happen! Eloped, only imagine it! Stella! in her ball dress, and with that man!”
“I hope there is nothing very bad about the man,” said the doctor with hesitation.
“And how are we to get her back? The ship sails to-morrow. If she is once carried away in the ship, she will never, never—— Oh, doctor, can I go? who can go? What can we do? Do tell me something, or I will go out of my senses,” she cried.
“Is there another room where we can talk? I think he is going to sleep,” said the doctor.
Katherine, in her distress, had got beyond the power of the terrible eyes on the bed, which still gleamed, but fitfully. Her father did not notice her as she went out of the room. And by this time the whole house was astir—fires lighted in all the rooms—to relieve the minds of the servants, it is to be supposed, for nobody knew why. The tray that had been carried to her room was brought downstairs, and there by the perturbed fire of a winter morning, burning with preternatural vigilance and activity as if eager to find out what caused it, she poured out the hot tea for the doctor, and he ate bread and butter with the most wholesome and hearty appetite—which was again a very curious scene.
The Tredgolds were curiously without friends. There was no uncle, no intimate to refer to, who might come and take the lead in such an emergency. Unless Katherine could have conducted such inquiries herself, or sent a servant, there was no one nearer than the doctor, or perhaps the vicar, who had always been so friendly. He and she decided between them that the doctor should go off at once, or at least as soon as there was a train to take him, to the great ship which was to embark the regiment early that morning, to discover whether Sir Charles Somers was there; while the vicar, whom he could see and inform in the meantime, should investigate the matter at home and at Steephill. The gardener, a trustworthy man, had, as soon as his wife was seen to be “out of danger,” as they preferred to phrase it—“scarcely hurt at all,” as the doctor said—been sent off to trace the Stella, driving in a dog-cart to Bunbridge, which was the nearest port she was likely to put in at. By noon the doctor thought they would certainly have ascertained among them all that was likely to be ascertained. He tried to comfort Katherine’s mind by an assurance that no doubt there would be a marriage, that Somers, though he had not a good character, would never—but stopped with a kind of awe, perceiving that Katherine had no suspicion of the possibility of any other ending, and condemning himself violently as a fool for putting any such thought into her head; but he had not put any such thought in her head, which was incapable of it. She had no conception of anything that could be worse than the elopement. He hastened to take refuge in something she did understand. “All this on one condition,” he said, “that you go to bed and try to sleep. I will do nothing unless you promise this, and you can do nothing for your sister. There is nothing to be done; gazing out over the sea won’t bring the yacht back. You must promise me that you will try to go to sleep. You will if you try.”
“Oh, yes, I will go to sleep,” Katharine said. She reflected again that she was of commoner clay than Thompson, who could not have closed an eye.
CHAPTER XVIII.
It proved not at all difficult to find out everything, or almost everything, about the runaway pair. The doctor’s mission, though it seemed likely to be the most important of all, did not produce very much. In the bustle of the embarkation he had found it difficult to get any information at all, but eventually he had found Captain Scott, whom he had attended during his illness, and whom he now sent peremptorily down below out of the cold. “If that’s your duty, you must not do it, that’s all,” he had said with the decision of a medical man, though whether he had secured his point or not, Katherine, ungratefully indifferent to Algy, did not ascertain. But he found that Sir Charles Somers had got leave and was going out with a P. and O. from Brindisi to join his regiment when it should reach India.