Part 30 (1/2)
”Mustn't I? How shall you prevent me? I am a relative, you know. You can't treat me as a stranger.”
”You are quite too audacious--” she was beginning, when a slim young cornet came back from the billiard-room.
”The Colonel wants you, Mrs. Ormonde,” he said; ”and you too, De Burgh.
We are not enough for pool, and you play a capital game, Mrs. Ormonde.”
”What are the stakes?” asked De Burgh, rising readily enough.
”Oh, I can't play well at all,” said Mrs. Ormonde, following him with evident reluctance. ”Certainly not when Colonel Ormonde is looking on.”
”Oh, never mind him. I'll screen you from his hypercritical eyes,”
returned De Burgh, as he held the door open for her to pa.s.s out.
So it was, after a spell of heavenly tranquility, as Katherine and her mother were on their way to England, intending to make a home in or near London, Mrs. Liddell had been struck down with fever, and Katherine was left unspeakably desolate. Then she turned to her old friend Mr. Newton, and found him of infinite use and comfort.
A short s.p.a.ce of numb inaction followed, during which she fully realized the loneliness of her position, and from which she roused herself to plan her future.
At the time Mrs. Liddell was first attacked with fever they had just renewed their acquaintance with a Miss Payne, whom they had met in Rome and at Berlin. She was not unknown in society, for she came of a good old county family, and was half-sister of the Bertie whose name has already appeared in these pages.
Their father, with an old man's pride in a handsome only son, had left the bulk of his fortune to Bertie, while Hannah, who had ministered to his comfort and borne his ill-humor, inherited only a paltry couple of hundred a year, with a fairly well furnished house in Wilton Street, Hyde Park. Her brother would have willingly added to this pittance, but she sternly refused to accept what did not of right belong to her.
Bertie went with his regiment to India, whence he returned a wiser, a poorer, and a physically weaker man.
His sister, whose business instincts were much too strong to permit her wrapping up such a ”talent” as a freehold house in the napkin of unfruitful occupation, looked round to see how she could best turn it to account. Accident threw in her way a girl of large fortune with no relations, whose guardians, thankful to find a respectable home for her, readily agreed to pay Miss Payne handsomely for taking charge of the orphan. Her first _protegee_ married well, under her auspices, and from henceforth her house was rarely empty. Sometimes she accepted a roving commission and travelled with her charge, meanwhile letting her house in town, so making a double profit. It was on one of these expeditions that she was introduced to Mrs. and Miss Liddell. There was an air of sincerity and common-sense about the composed elderly gentlewoman which rather attracted the former, and, when they met again in Paris, Miss Payne came to Katie in her trouble and proved a brave and capable nurse; nor was she unsympathetic, though far from effusive. So, finding that Miss Payne's last young lady had left her, Katherine, with the approval of Mr. Newton, proposed to become her inmate for a year--an arrangement entirely in accordance with Miss Payne's wishes.
”I did not know you were acquainted with Miss Liddell,” she said one evening when she was sitting with her brother, Katherine having retired early, as she often did. ”It is quite a surprise to me.”
”I can hardly say I am acquainted with her; I happened to be of some slight use to her once, and I met her after by accident, when we spoke; that is all.”
”I wonder she did not mention it to me.”
”I imagine she hardly knew my name.” Miss Payne uttered an inarticulate sound between a h'm and a groan, by which she generally expressed indefinite dissent and disapprobation. Then she rose and walked to the dwarf bookcase at the end of the room to fetch her tatting. She was tall and slight. Following her, you might imagine her young, for her figure was good and her step brisk. Meeting her face to face, her pale, slightly puckered cheeks, closely compressed lips, keen light eyes, and crisp pepper-and-salt hair--Cayenne pepper, for it had once been red--suggested at least twenty or twenty-five additional years as compared with the back view.
Returning to her seat, she began to tat, slowing drawing each knot home with a reflective air.
”That woman is hunting her up,” she exclaimed suddenly, after a few minutes' silence, during which Bertie looked thoughtfully at the fire--his quiet face, with its look of unutterable peace, the strongest possible contrast to his sister's hard, shrewd aspect.
”What woman?” asked, as if recalled from a dream.
”Mrs. Ormonde. There was a telegram from her this afternoon. She has been worrying Miss Liddell to go to them ever since she set foot in England; and as that won't do, she is coming up to-morrow to see what personal persuasion will do.”
”I dare say Mrs. Ormonde is fond of her sister-in-law. She is too well off to have any mercenary designs.”
”Is that all your experience has taught you?” (contemptuously). ”If there is any truth in hand-writing, that Mrs. Ormonde is a fool. Her letter after Mrs. Liddell's death, which Katherine showed me because it touched her, was the production of an effusive idiot. I don't trust sentimentalists; they seldom have much honesty or justice. Katherine Liddell is a little soft too, but she is by no means so asinine as the others I have had. Wait, however--wait till some man takes her fancy; that is the divining-rod to show where the springs of folly lie.”
”Miss Liddell is a good deal changed,” returned Bertie, slowly. ”She looks considerably older. No, that is not the right expression: I mean she seems more mature than when I saw her before. What she says is said deliberately; what she does is with the full consciousness of what she is doing; but she looks as if she had suffered.”
”She has,” said Miss Payne, with an air of conviction. ”Her grief for her mother was, is, deep and real. I don't believe in floods of tears--they are a relief.”
”Yes; and though she looks so pale and sad, she is not a whit less beautiful than she was.”