The moment the servant left the room, Miss Pounteney came forward, and stood in renewed rage over the fragile, melancholy Kate, and burst out with “What is this, Kate? Is it really possible, after what you know of my mind, and all our minds, that you have dared to bring your poor relations into my brother’s house? That it is not enough that we are to have the disgrace of your mean connections, but we are to have your sisters and brothers to no end coming into the very house, and sending up their beggarly names and designations by the very servants! Kate, I must not permit this. I will not—I shall not;” and she stamped with rage.
“Oh, Miss Pounteney,” said Kate, with clasped hands, “will you not let me go and see my sister? Will you just let me go and weep on the neck of my poor Flora? I will go to a private place—I will go to another house, if you please; I will do anything when I return to you, if I ever return, for I care not if I never come into this unhappy house more!” and, uttering this, almost with a shriek, she burst past the two women, and ran through the rooms to seek her sister.
Meantime, Flora had sat so long waiting, without seeing her sister, that she began to feel intense anxiety; and, fancying her little Kate wished to forget her, because she was poor, had worked herself up into a resolution of assumed coldness, when she heard a hurried step, and the door was instantly opened. Kate paused for a moment after her entrance, and stood gazing upon the companion of her youth, with a look of such passionate joy, that Flora’s intended coldness was entirely subdued; and the two sisters rushed into each other’s arms in all the ecstacy of sisterly love.
“Oh, Flora, Flora! my dear happy Flora!” cried Kate, when she could get words, after the first burst of weeping; “have you really come all the way to London to see me?—poor me!” and her tears and sobs were again like to choke her. “Kate—my dear little Kate!” said Flora, “this is not the way I expected to find you. Do not greet so dreadfully; surely you are not happy, Kate?”
“But you are happy,” said Kate, weeping. “And how is my good Highland father, and mother, and my brother Daniel? Ah! I think, Flora, your clothes have the very smell of the seashore, and of the bark of the nets, and of the heather hills of Argyleshire. Alas the happy days you remind me of, Flora!”
“And so, Kate, you are not so very happy, after all,” said Flora, looking incredulously in her face; “and you are so thin, and pale, and your eyes are so red; and yet you have such a grand house, Kate! Tell me if you are really not happy.”
“I have no house, Flora,” said Kate, after a little, “and, I may say, no husband. They are both completely ruled by his two vixen sisters, who kept house for him before he married me, and still have the entire ascendancy over him. My husband, too, is not naturally good tempered; yet he once loved me, and I might enjoy some little happiness in this new life, if he had the feeling, or the spirit, to treat me as his wife, and free himself and the house from the dominion of his sisters, especially the eldest. But I believe he is rather disappointed in his ambitious career, and in the hopes he entertained of matches for his sisters, and he is somewhat sour and unhappy; and I have to bear it all, for he is afraid of these women; and I, the youngest in the family, and the only one who has a chance of being good tempered, am, on account of my low origin, forced to bear the spleen of all in this unhappy house.”
“But, Kate, surely your husband would not behave so bad as to cast up to you that your father was a fisherman, when he took you from the bonnie seaside himself, and when he thought himself once so happy to get you?”
“Alas! he does indeed!—too often—too often—when he is crossed abroad, and when his sisters set him on; and it so humbles me, Flora, when I am sitting at his table, that I cannot lift my head; and I am so sad, and so heart-broken among them all!”
“Bless me! and can people be really so miserable,” said Flora, simply, “who have plenty of money, and silk dresses to wear every day they rise?”