Kate drove away alone, and had a hearty cry in the carriage, and was very unhappy; and the mother and daughter went and walked against time in the frost-bound park. It was a bright Winter afternoon, with a pleasant sharpness in the air, and a gorgeous sunset of red and gold. They stopped and pointed it out to each other, and dwelt on all the different gradations of colour, with an artificial delight. The change had come in a way which they had not expected, and they did not know how to face it. It was the only situation which Mrs. Anderson, in her long musings, had not foreseen, and she did not know how to meet it. There was nothing but dismay in her mind—dismay and wonder. All her sagacity was at fault.
This went on for some time. Kate was very kind to her guests; but more and more every day they came to feel themselves guests in the house. She was scarcely ever with them, except at meals; and they would sit together all the long morning, and sometimes all the long afternoon, silent, saying nothing to each other, and hear Kate’s voice far off, perhaps singing as she went through one of the long passages, perhaps talking to Maryanne, or to a dog whom she had brought in from the stable. They sat as if under a spell, for even Ombra was hushed. Her feelings had somehow changed. Instead of the horror with which she had regarded the probable arrival of her lover, she seemed now possessed with a feverish desire to receive him, to see him when he came, to watch him, perhaps to make sure that he was true to her.
‘How can I go away, and know that he is here, and endure it?’ she said to her mother. ‘I must stay!—I must stay! It is wretched; but it would be more wretched to go.’
This was her mood one day; and the next she would be impatient to leave Langton-Courtenay at once, and found the yoke which was upon her intolerable. These were terrible days, as smiling and smooth as of old to all beholders, but with complete change within. Kate was as brave as a lion in carrying out the rôle she had marked out for herself. Even when her heart failed her, she hid it, and went on stoutly in the almost impossible way.
‘I will not interfere with them—I will not ask anything; but otherwise there shall be no change,’ she said to herself, with something of the arrogance of youth, ready to give all, and to believe that it could be accepted without the return of anything. But sometimes it was very hard for her to keep it up; sometimes the peculiar aspect of the scene would fill her with sudden compunctions, sudden longings. Everything looked so like the old, happy days, and yet it was all so different! Sometimes a tone of her aunt’s voice, a movement or a look of Ombra, would bring some old tender recollection back to her mind, and she would feel driven to the last extremity to prevent herself from bursting into tears, or making a wild appeal to them to let things be as they were again. But she resisted all these impulses, saying to herself, with forlorn pride, that the old love had never existed, that it had been but a delirium of her own, and that consequently there was nothing to appeal to. She resumed her German, and worked at it with tremendous zeal in the library by herself. German is an admirable thing when one has been crossed in love, or mortified in friendship. How often has it been resorted to in such circumstances—and has always afforded a certain consolation! And Kate plunged into parish business, to the great delight and relief of Minnie Hardwick, and showed all her old love of the ‘human interest’ of the village, the poor folk’s stories and their difficulties. She tired herself out, and went back and put off her grey frock, and arrayed herself, and sat down at the table with Ombra, languid and heavy-eyed, and Mrs. Anderson, who greeted her with faint smiles. There was little conversation at the table; and it grew less and less as the days went on. These dinners were not amusing; and yet they had some interest too, for each watched the other, wondering what she would next do or say.
I cannot tell exactly how long this lasted. It seemed to all three an eternity. But one afternoon, when Kate came in from a long walk to the other side of the parish, she found a letter conspicuously placed on the hall-table, where she could not fail to see it. She trembled a little when she saw her aunt’s handwriting. And there were fresh carriage-wheels marking the way down the avenue; she had noticed this as she came up. She sat down on the settle in the hall, where Mrs. Anderson had placed herself on the day of their return, and read the following letter with surprise, and yet without surprise. It gave her a shock as of suddenness and strangeness; and yet she had known that it must happen all along.
‘My dearest Kate,
‘If you can think, when you read this, that I do not mean what I say, you will be very, very wrong. All these years I have loved you as if you were my own child. I could not have done otherwise—it is not in nature. But this is not what I want to say. We are going away. It is not with my will, and yet it is not against my will; for even to leave you alone in the house is better than forcing you to live this unnatural life. Good-bye, my dear, dear child! I cannot tell you—more’s the pity!—the circumstances that have made my poor Ombra bitter with everything, including her best friends; but she is very, very sorry, always, after she has said those dreadful words which she does not mean, but which seem to give a little relief to her suffering and bitterness. This is all I can tell you now. Some time or other you will know everything; and then, though you may blame us, you will pity us too. I want to tell you that it never was my wish to keep the secret from you—nor even Ombra’s. At least, she would have yielded, but the other party to the secret would not. Dearest child, forgive me! I go away from you, however, with a very sore heart, and I don’t know where we shall go, or what we shall do. Ever your most affectionate
‘A. Anderson.
‘P.S.—I have written to your uncle, that unavoidable circumstances, over which I have no control, compelled my leaving. I should prefer that you did not say anything to him about what these circumstances were.’