“Yes, that’s just what Bellamy says. He says I always go on with anything that comes into my head; but then it has nothing to do with anything he is saying, and maybe that’s true, for one thing seems always to draw me on to another, and so I go round like, and I don’t know myself where I am when I’ve finished. A little more tea, my dear, if you please. And yet,” continued Mrs. Bellamy, when she had finished half of her third cup, “what I meant to say really has to do with you. It’s all the same. You wouldn’t hate the Terrace so much if you knew that nobody meant to spite you, as Jacob says. Suppose your father was driven to the Terrace and couldn’t help it, and there wasn’t another house for him, you wouldn’t hate it so much then. It isn’t the Terrace altogether. Now, Miss Catharine, you won’t mind my speaking out to you. You know you are my girl,” and Mrs. Bellamy turned and kissed her; “you mustn’t, you really mustn’t. I’ve seen what was coming for a long time. Your mother and you ain’t alike, but you mustn’t rebel. I’m a silly old fool, and I know I haven’t got a head, and what is in it is all mixed up somehow, but you’ll be ever so much better if you leave your mother out of it, and don’t, as I’ve told you before, go on dreaming she came here because you didn’t want to come, or that she set herself up on purpose against you. And then you can always run over to Chapel Farm just whenever you like, my pet, and there’s your own room always waiting for you.”
An hour afterwards, when Mrs. Bellamy had left, Mr. Furze came home. Mrs. Furze was still upstairs, but consented to be coaxed down to supper. She passed the drawing-room; the door was wide open, and she reflected bitterly upon the new carpet, the oleographs, and the schemes erected thereon. To think on what she had spent and what she had done, and then that Mrs. Colston should be received by a charwoman with a pail, should be shown into the room downstairs, and find it like a public-house bar! If Mr. Furze had been there alone it would not so much have mattered, but the presence of wife and daughter sanctioned the vulgarity, not to say indecency. Mrs. Colston would naturally conclude they were accustomed to that sort of thing—that the pipe, Mrs. Bellamy and the sausages, the absence of Mr. Furze’s coat and waistcoat, were the “atmosphere,” as Mrs. Furze put it, in which they lived.
“That’s right; glad to see you are able to come down,” said Mr. Furze.
“I must say that Catharine is partly the cause of my suffering. When Mrs. Colston called here Catharine sat like a statue and said not a word, but when her friend Mrs. Bellamy came she precipitated herself—yes, I say precipitated herself—into her arms. I’ve nothing to say against Mrs. Bellamy, but Catharine knows perfectly well that Mrs. Colston’s intimacy is desired, and that’s the way she chose to behave. Mrs. Bellamy was the last person I should have wished to see here this afternoon; an uneducated woman, a woman whom we could not pretend to know if we moved in Mrs. Colston’s circle; and what we have done was all done for my child’s benefit. She, I presume, would prefer decent society to that of peasants.”
Catharine stopped eating.
“Mrs. Bellamy was the last person I should have wished to see here.”
“I don’t know quite what you mean, but it is probably something disobedient and cruel,” and Mrs. Furze became slightly hysterical again.
Catharine made no offer of any sympathy, but, leaving her supper unfinished, rose without saying good-night, and appeared no more that evening.
CHAPTER VI
“My dear,” said Mrs. Furze to her husband the next night when they were alone, “I think Catharine would be much better if she were sent away from home for a time. Her education is very imperfect, and there are establishments where young ladies are taken at her age and finished. It would do her a world of good.”