Kit and Kitty: A Story of West Middlesex

by R. D. Blackmore

“You were kind enough to say just now,” I answered, “that you did not know anything about me. Even my name was strange to you. I am not ashamed of my business; and I lay no traps for any one.”

“Have you the insolence to refer to me?” Her guilty conscience caught her here, and under its sting she grew so wild that I thought she would have flown at me, though no thought of her had been in my words. “But you are below my contempt, and I wonder that I even deign to speak to you. And I will make short work of it. Go back to your spade, or your heap of manure, or whatever it is you live in, and never dare to think again of Miss Kitty Fairthorn. She is engaged to a gentleman of family, and title, and large property; and I mean to have her married to him very shortly. Go back to your manure-heap; I have done with you.”

“Not quite so easily as you think.” To her great amazement I approached her, not only without terror, but with calm contempt. “You have a foul scheme in hand, as is widely known, for selling a poor girl, whom you have vilely misused, and starved for some years, and made her life a misery; and you think you will be allowed to sell her to a reprobate old man, who has not even gold enough to cover the blackness of his character. As a girl she has borne your blows, as a woman she would have to bear those of a cowardly and godless scoundrel. You like plain speaking, and there it is for you. Do you think that God will allow such crimes? I tell you, poor tyrant, that the right will conquer. Miss Fairthorn shall have a happy home, with the affection and kindness of which you have robbed her; and you—you shall suffer the misery you have inflicted.”

Now I had not meant to say a single word of this, and was thoroughly astonished at my own strong language. Bitterly angry with myself as well, for what I felt to be unmanly conduct (even under fiercest provocation), when I saw the effect upon this haughty lady. It must have been many years now, since any one had dared to show her thus what she was like; for her strong will had swept black and white into one—the one she chose to make of them. Weak indolence, and cowardice, a thousandfold more common than the resolute will, had got out of her way, until her way turned to a resistless rush.

She looked at me now, as if utterly unable to believe that her ears could be true to her. Then glancing at one of her daughters, she said, “Geraldine, this young man does not mean it. He has no idea what he is talking about. Take him away, my dear; I feel unwell. I shall be able to think of things, by-and-by. Euphrasia, run for the sal volatile, or the Cognac in the square decanter. And then he may come back, and tell me what he means.”

This strange turn of mind puzzled me, as much as my straightforward speech had puzzled her. Dr. Sippets—our great man at Sunbury—said, when I spoke of it many years afterwards, that he quite understood, and could easily explain it. To wit, that with people of choleric habit, the vessels of the brain become so charged up to a certain tension, that if anything more—but I had better not try to put his hundred-tun words into my pint pot. He is a choleric man himself; and his vessels might become so charged as to vent themselves in a heavy charge to me. It is enough to say, that when the lady sank, with a face as white as death, upon the sofa, proper feeling told me to depart.

This I was doing, in a sad haze of mind; doubting whether duty did not require that I should halt on the premises, until I had learned how the sufferer passed through her trial. But now another strange thing happened to me, and perhaps the very last I should have dreamed of. I was lingering uneasily near the door, with many pricks of self-reproach and even shame, when a slim figure glided out and came to me. Although the night had quite fallen now, I could see that it was not my Kitty who came out, but some one much shorter, and smaller altogether. With great anxiety I went to meet her, fearing almost to hear fatal tidings; for who can tell in such a case what may be the end of it?

“You need not be alarmed, Mr. Orchardson,” said a voice which I recognized as that of Miss Jerry; “my mother is all right again, and quite ready to have another turn at you, if you are anxious to come back.”

“The Lord forbid!” I replied devoutly. “I would run into the hottest of the brick-kilns yonder, rather than meet the good lady again. But I am delighted that it is no worse. It was very kind of you to come and tell me. My best thanks to you, Miss Geraldine.”