Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Meanwhile, Jack was nobody down town. His cousin Hamilton Bright, who was a junior partner in Beman Brothers’, was a vastly more important person than he. For he had behind him what Ralston had before him, and a fair amount of capital in the present, besides. It was all very ridiculous, Katharine thought, and depended on the false state of society in which she was obliged to live.

  She thought bitterly of her father. He was a prominent figure in that false state — a man of fine principles and opportunist practice — she had caught the latter expression from Walter Crowdie, Bright’s brother-in-law, the well-known painter, who had painted a portrait of her during the winter, and who, as the husband of a distant cousin, was counted in the Lauderdale tribe.

  Her father, she thought, preached, prayed — and then acted far worse than average people who prayed little and sat still to be preached at on Sundays, in order that Providence might have a sort of weekly photograph of their souls, so to say, and because others did the same and it was expected of them. She and her father had never agreed very well, and had come into open conflict about John Ralston; but hitherto she had respected him for his uncompromising, unashamed piety. There had seemed to her to be something masculine and bold about it, and such as it was, she had believed in it. It had been far from being an idol, but it had been a very creditable statue, so to say, and now, on a sudden, the head had been knocked off it, and she saw, or thought she saw, that it was hollow and a sham. She was too young yet to admit the presence of good in the same place with evil, and the evil itself had been thrown directly in her path as a stumbling-block for herself, and in the hope that she might fall over it.

  And as though it were not enough to torment her perpetually with questions, there was that other thing which she had just concealed from John, because he had been so angry about the first. Her father and mother were apparently determined that she should be married before the summer was out, and were thrusting a match upon her in a way of which she would not have believed them capable. Ever since her mother had discovered that she was losing her beauty and that Katharine received three-fourths of all the admiration which had once been hers, the relations of the two had been changed. Mrs. Lauderdale was constantly between two conflicting emotions, which almost amounted to passions, — her real affection for Katharine, and her detestable envy of the girl’s freshness and youth. She was a good woman, and she despised herself more than any one else could possibly have despised her, for wishing that she might not be daily compared with her, handicapped, as she was, with nearly twenty years more to carry. To marry her daughter was to remove her from home, and perhaps from New York — and with her, to do away with the foundation of envy, the cause of the offence, the visible temptation to the sin which was destroying the elder woman’s happiness and undermining her peace of mind. Mrs. Lauderdale, whose sins had hitherto been few and pardonable, felt that if Katharine were once away, she should become again a good woman, and find courage to bear the terrible loss of her once supreme beauty.

  For she was keenly alive to the wickedness of what she felt, though she could not quite understand it. No man could boast that he had ever had a meaning look or an over-sympathetic pressure of the hand from Mrs. Lauderdale, during the five and twenty years of her married life, though she had loved society intensely, and enjoyed its amusements with a real innocence of which not every woman in her position would have been capable. But no man who had laid eyes upon her could boast — and it would have been a poor boast — that he had turned away at the first glance, without looking again and wondering at her loveliness, and saying to himself that Mrs. Lauderdale was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

  It hurt her bodily to miss those eyes turned upon her from all sides, as she began to miss them now. It hurt her still more — and in spite of secret prayers and solemn resolutions and litanies of self-contempt, she turned pale with quiet, deadly anger against the world — when, as she entered a crowded room with Katharine, she felt, as well as saw, that those same eyes sought the pale, severe face of the dark-haired young girl, and overlooked her own fading perfection. The stately rose was drooping, just as the sweet white summer myrtle burst the bud.

  Let her not be judged too harshly, if she longed to be separated from Katharine just at that time. There was no ill-will, nothing like hatred, no touch of cruelty in the simple desire to be spared that daily contrast. It was rather that wish which many have felt, despairing of grace and strength to resist temptation, to have the cause of it removed, that they may find peace. A worse woman would not so long have been satisfied with beauty alone, and with compelling by her mere presence the admiration of a crowd in which no one face was dearer than the rest, nor than it should be.

  She longed with all her heart to see Katharine married, as her husband did from very different reasons. Nor were his arguments bad or unkind from his point of view. He feared lest she should marry Ralston in spite of him, and he honestly believed Ralston to be a worthless young fellow, who could make no woman happy. As for his daughter, he was attached to her, fond of her, perhaps, in his cold way; though loving with him seemed to be a negative affair and not able to go much further than a cessation of fault-finding, except for his wife, who had overcome him and kept him by her beauty alone. It was not until Katharine aroused the deep-seated passion of his unsatisfied avarice that he ceased to be kind to her, as he understood kindness.

  CHAPTER VI.

  KATHARINE WAS IN her room that afternoon towards five o’clock, when a servant knocked at her door, disturbing her as she was composing a letter to her best friend, Hester Crowdie. She looked up with an expression of annoyance as the door opened and the maid entered.

  “Oh — what’s the matter?” she asked, impatiently striking the point of her pen upon the edge of the glass inkstand.

  “Mr. Wingfield’s downstairs, Miss Katharine,” answered the girl.

  “Oh — is he? Well—”

  Katharine tapped her pen thoughtfully upon the glass again, and a quick contraction of the brow betrayed her displeasure.

  “Shall I tell the gentleman that you’ll be down, Miss Katharine?” enquired the other.

  “No, Annie. Tell him I’m out. That is — I’m not out, am I?”

  “No, Miss Katharine.”

  Katharine let her pen fall, rose and went to the window in hesitation. The bit of red ribbon which had served as a signal to John was pinned to the small curtain stretched over the lower sash. She looked at it thoughtfully, and forgot Mr. Wingfield for a moment.

  “Shall I show the gentleman into the library, Miss Katharine?” asked Annie, in an insinuating tone.

  “Oh, well! Yes,” said Katharine, turning suddenly. “Tell Mr. Wingfield that I’ll be down in a few minutes, if he doesn’t mind waiting. I suppose I’ve got to,” she added, audibly, before Annie was well out of the room.

  She glanced at herself in the looking-glass, but without interest. Then she slipped her unfinished letter into the drawer of the little writing-table by the window, at which she had been sitting, and turned towards the door. But before she left the room she paused, hesitated, and then went back to the table, locking the drawer and withdrawing the key, which she slipped behind the frame of an engraving. She had become unreasonably distrustful of late.

  Instead of going down to the library, she knocked at the door of her mother’s morning room. It chanced that Mrs. Lauderdale was at home that afternoon, which was unusual in fine weather. Mrs. Lauderdale was sitting by the window at the table she used for her miniature painting. She had talent, and had been well taught in her girlhood, and her work was distinctly good. Amateurs more often succeed with miniature than in any other branches of art. It is harder to detect faults when the scale of the whole is very minute.

  Mrs. Lauderdale was bending over a piece of work she had lately begun. All the little things she used were lying about her on the wooden table, the tiny brushes, the saucers for colours, the needle-pointed pencils. She looked up as Katharine entered, a
nd the latter saw all the lines in the still beautiful face accentuated by the earnest attention given to the work. The eyelids were contracted and tired, the lips drawn in, one eyebrow was raised a little higher than the other, so that there were fine, arched wrinkles in the forehead immediately over it. The faces of American women of a certain age, when the complexion is fair, favour the formation of a multitude of very delicate crossing and recrossing lines, not often seen in the features of other nationalities.

  “What is it, child?” asked Mrs. Lauderdale, quietly, with her soft southern intonation.

  “Mr. Wingfield’s there again,” answered Katharine, with unmistakable disgust.

  “Well, my dear, go down and see him,” said Mrs. Lauderdale, blandly. “Did you send word that you’d receive?”

  “Yes. I’m going to tell him not to come any more.”

  Katharine went behind the table, so that she faced her mother and looked directly into her eyes. For several seconds neither spoke.

  “I hope you won’t do anything so rude,” said Mrs. Lauderdale at last, without avoiding the gaze that met hers. “We all like Mr. Wingfield very much.”

  “I daresay. I’m not finding fault with him, nor his looks, nor his manners, nor anything.”

  “Well, then — I don’t see—”

  “Oh, yes, you do, mother, — forgive my contradicting you, — you know very well that he wants to marry me, and that you want me to marry him. But I don’t mean to. So I shall tell him, as nicely as I can, to give up the idea, and to make his visits to you, and not to me.”

  “But, Katharine, dear — nobody wishes to force you to marry him. We don’t live in the Middle Ages, you know.”

  “There’s a resemblance,” answered Katharine, bitterly.

  “Katharine! How can you say anything so unjust!”

  “Because it’s true, mother. I’m not blind, you know, and I’m not perfectly insensible. I see, and I can feel. You don’t seem to think it’s possible to hurt me — and I don’t think you mean to hurt me, as papa does.”

  “You’re quite out of your mind, my child! Your father loves you dearly. He wouldn’t hurt you for the world. Don’t talk such nonsense, Katharine. Go and see Mr. Wingfield, and be decently civil for half an hour — he won’t stay even as long as that. Besides, you can’t tell him not to come any more. He hasn’t asked you to marry him. You may think he means to, but you can hardly take it for granted like that.”

  “No, but he means to ask me to-day,” answered Katharine. “And I haven’t encouraged him in the least.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Oh — one can always tell.”

  “It’s not exactly true to say that you’ve not encouraged him,” said Mrs. Lauderdale, thoughtfully. “He’s been here very often of late, and you’ve danced the cotillion with him twice, at least. Then there was his coaching party — only the other day — and you sat beside him. He’s always sending you flowers, and books, and things, too. It isn’t fair to say that he’s had no encouragement. You’ll get the reputation of being a flirt if you go on in this way.”

  “I’d rather be called a flirt than marry Archibald Wingfield,” replied Katharine.

  “At all events you might have some consideration for him, if you’ve none for yourself. Don’t be foolish, Katharine dear. Take my advice. Of course, if you could take a fancy to him, quite naturally, we should all be very glad. I like him — I can’t help it. He’s so handsome, and has such good manners, and speaks French like a Parisian. I know — you may laugh — but in these days, when people are abroad half the time — and then, after all, my dear, you certainly can’t be really sure that he means to ask you to-day. Very likely he won’t, just because you think he’s going to.”

  “Of course, mother, you know that’s absurd! As though it wasn’t evident — besides, those flowers this morning. Didn’t you see them?”

  “What about them? He often sends you flowers.”

  “Why, the box was all full of primroses, and just two roses — extraordinary ones — lying in the middle and tied together with a bit of grass. Imagine doing such a thing! And I know he tied them himself, on account of the knot. He’s a yachting man, and doesn’t tie knots like the men at the flower shops.”

  “Oh, well, my dear — if you are going to judge a man by the way he ties knots—”

  Mrs. Lauderdale laughed as she broke off in her incomplete sentence. Then her face grew grave all at once.

  “Take my advice, my child — marry him,” she said, bending over her table once more and taking up a little brush, as though she wished to end the interview.

  “Certainly not!” answered Katharine, in a tone which discouraged further persuasion.

  Mrs. Lauderdale sighed.

  “Well — I don’t know what you young girls expect,” she said, in a tone of depression. “Mr. Wingfield’s young, good-looking, well-educated, rich, and he adores you. Perhaps you don’t love him precisely, but you can’t help liking him. You act as though you were always expecting a fine, irresistible, mediæval passion to come and carry you off. It won’t, you know. That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more. When you want to get married at last, you’ll be too old. You have your choice of almost any of them. For a girl who has no money and isn’t likely to have much for a long time, I don’t know any one who’s more surrounded than you are. Of course I want you to marry. I don’t believe in waiting till you’re twenty-five or thirty.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “Well, you will, my dear, unless you make up your mind soon. It’s all—”

  “Mother,” interrupted Katharine, “you know very well that I’ve made my choice, and that I mean to stand by it.”

  “Oh — Jack Ralston, you mean?” Mrs. Lauderdale affected a rather contemptuous indifference. “That was a foolish affair. Girls always fall in love with their cousins. You’ll forget all about him, and I’m sure he’s forgotten all about you. He hardly ever comes to the house now. Besides, you never could have married poor Jack, with his dissipated habits, and no money. Uncle Robert doesn’t mean to leave him anything. He’d gamble it all away.”

  “You called me unjust a moment ago,” said Katharine, in an altered voice, and growing pale.

  “Of course — you take his part. It’s no use to discuss it—”

  “It’s not discussion to abuse a man who’s bravely doing his best. Jack doesn’t need any one to take his part. Do you know that he’s altogether given up his old life at the club — and all that? He’s at Beman Brothers’ all day long, and when you don’t see him in society, he’s quietly at home with cousin Katharine.”

  “Yes — I heard he was doing a little better. But he’ll never get rid of the reputation he’s given himself. My dear, you don’t seem to remember that poor Mr. Wingfield is waiting for you all this time downstairs.”

  “It will be the last time, at all events,” answered Katharine, in a low voice. “I’ll never see him alone again.”

  She turned from her mother towards the door. Mrs. Lauderdale followed her with her eyes for a moment, then rose swiftly and overtook her before she could let herself out.

  “Katharine — I won’t let you send Mr. Wingfield away like that!” said Mrs. Lauderdale, in a quick, decided tone.

  “Won’t let me?” repeated Katharine, slowly.

  “No — certainly not. It’s quite out of the question — you really mustn’t do it!” Mrs. Lauderdale was becoming agitated.

  “Do you mean that it’s out of the question for me to refuse to marry Mr. Wingfield?” Katharine had her back against the door and her right hand upon the knob of the lock.

  “Oh — well — no. Of course you have the right to refuse him, if he asks you in so many words—”

  “Of course I have! What are you thinking of?” There was a look of something between indignation and amusement in her face.

  “Yes — but there are so many ways, child. Katharine,” she continued, almost appealingly, “you can’t just say �
�no’ and tell him to stop coming — you’ll change your mind — you don’t know what a nice young fellow he is—”

  Katharine’s hand dropped from the door-handle, and she folded her arms as she faced her mother.

  “What is all this?” she asked, deliberately and with emphasis. “You seem to me to be very excited. I should almost fancy that you had something else in your mind, though I can’t understand what it is.”

  “No — no; certainly not. It’s only for your sake and his,” answered Mrs. Lauderdale, hurriedly. “I’ve known it happen so often that a girl refuses a man just because she’s in a temper about something, and then — afterwards, you know — she regrets it, when it’s too late, and the man has married some one else out of spite.”

  “How strangely you talk!” exclaimed Katharine, gazing at her mother in genuine surprise.

  “My dear, I only don’t want you to do anything rash and unkind. You spoke as though you meant to be as hard and cold as a mill-stone — as though he’d done something outrageous in wanting to marry you.”

  “Not at all. I said that I should refuse him and beg him to stop coming to see me. There’s nothing particularly like a mill-stone in that. It’s the honest truth in the first place — for I won’t marry him, and you can’t force me to—”