‘But old friends from the Isle of Wight don’t turn up everywhere like this. Did he come about Sir Herbert Eldridge?’
‘He knows nothing about Sir Herbert Eldridge. He came to tell me about—my cousin.’
‘Oh! your cousin! La demoiselle aux deux chevaliers,’ said Lady Caryisfort. ‘And did he bring you news of her?’
‘A little,’ said Kate, faintly, driven to her wit’s end; but she was not a weak-minded young woman, to be driven to despair; and here she drew up and resisted. ‘So little, that it is not worth repeating,’ she added, firmly. ‘I knew it almost all before, but he was not aware of that. He meant it very kindly.’
‘Did he come on purpose, dear?’
‘Yes, I suppose so, the good fellow,’ said Kate, gracefully.
‘My dear, he may be a very good fellow; but curates are like other men, and don’t do such things without hope of reward,’ said Lady Caryisfort, doubtfully. ‘So I would not encourage him to go on secret missions—unless I meant to reward him,’ she added.
‘He does not want any of my rewards,’ said Kate, with that half bitterness of still resentment which she occasionally showed at the suspicions which were so very ready to enter the minds of all about her. ‘I at least have no occasion to think as they do,’ she added to herself, with a feeling of sore humility. ‘Of all the people I have ever known, no one has given me this experience—they have all preferred her, without thinking of me.’
It was with this thought in her mind that she withdrew herself from Lady Caryisfort’s examination. She had nothing more to say, and she would not be made to say any more. But when she was in the sanctuary of her own room, she went over and over, with a heart which beat heavily within her breast, Mr. Sugden’s information. That Ombra should have married Bertie did not surprise her—that she had foreseen, she said to herself. But that they should have married so long ago, under her very eyes, as it were, gave her a strange thrill of pain through and through her. They had not told her even a thing so important as that. Her aunt and Ombra, her dearest friends, had lived with her afterwards, and kissed her night and morning, and at last had broken away from her, and given her up, and yet had never told her. The one seemed to Kate as wonderful as the other. Not in their constant companionship, not when that companionship came to a breach—neither at one time nor the other did they do her so much justice. And Bertie!—that was worst of all. Had his look of gladness to see her at the brook in the park, when they last met, been all simulation?—or had it been worse than simulation?—a horrible disrespect, a feeling that she did not deserve the same observance as men were forced to show to other girls! When she came to this question her brain swam so with wrath and a sense of wrong that she became unable to discriminate. Poor Kate!—and nothing of this did she dare to confide to a creature round her. She who had been so outspoken, so ready to disclose her thoughts—she had to lock them up in her own bosom, and never breathe a word.
Unconnected with this, but still somehow connected with it, was the extraordinary message she had received. On examining it afterwards in her own room, she found it was sent to her by ‘Bertie.’ What did it mean? How did he dare to send such a message to her, and what had she to do with it? Had it been a mistake? Could it have been sent to her, instead of to the Rectory? But Kate ascertained that a similar telegram had been received by the Hardwicks the same night when they went home from her dinner-party. Minnie Hardwick stole up two days later to tell her about it. Minnie was very anxious to do her duty, and to feel sad, as a girl ought whose uncle has just died; but though the blinds were all down in the Rectory, and the village dress-maker and Mrs. Hardwick’s maid were labouring night and day at ‘the mourning,’ Minnie found it hard to be so heart-broken as she thought necessary.