Part 38 (1/2)
”No,” she repeated desperately; and she crept away from him at last, and took her letter from the table and tried to walk to the door.
A slippered footstep shuffled along the hall and stopped outside the library door. The next moment the Rector was in the room.
”Kitty, my child, have you seen my hat anywhere? I feel convinced I put it down somewhere, and for the life of me--”
He paused as he saw Paul, and held out his hand with a smile of welcome.
”Delighted to see you again, my dear sir, delighted! That is to say,”
added the old man, looking to Katharine for a.s.sistance, ”I suppose I _have_ seen you before, though for the moment I cannot quite recall your name. But my memory is getting a bad one for names, a very bad one, eh, Kitty? Anyhow, you will stop to lunch, of course; and meanwhile, if I can only find my hat--”
”Daddy, it is Mr. Wilton,” explained Katharine, making an effort to speak in her usual voice. Strange to say, it did not seem difficult to become usual again now that her father was in the room. ”He stayed with us once, a long time ago; you remember Mr. Wilton, don't you?”
”To be sure, to be sure; of course I remember Mr. Wilton perfectly!”
said the Rector, shaking hands with him again. ”I can remember distinctly many of our little talks on archaeology and so forth. Let me see, any relation to the great numismatist? Ah, now I know who you are quite well. There was an accident, or a calamity of some sort, if I recollect rightly. Kitty, my child, have you found my hat?”
”Will you stay to lunch?” Katharine was asking him.
”Of course he will stay to lunch,” cried the Rector, without giving him time to reply. ”I've picked up some fine specimens of old Sheffield plate that I should like to show you, Mr. Wilton. Stay to lunch? Why, of course. Dear me, I know I saw it somewhere-- Got to catch the two-thirty? Oh, that's all right; we'll drive you to the station after lunch. That child will like a chat with you, eh, Kitty?
You used to be great friends, and she has something--no, no, I've looked there twice--something of interest to tell you, something of very great interest, eh, Kitty? A nice young fellow he is, too,”
continued the old man, stopping for a moment in his fruitless search.
”By the way, you know him, don't you? It's young-- Ah, now I remember!
I left it in the vestry; so stupid of me!”
Paul stopped him as he was hurrying out of the room.
”I must be off, thank you, sir. I am not going to catch the two-thirty at all. I think I will walk on somewhere and catch something else, if there happens to be anything. I am sure I wish Miss Katharine every happiness. Good-morning.”
He went out by the window as he had come, and they watched him as he walked across the lawn, the neat figure crowned by the conventional felt hat. He had not shaken hands with Katharine nor looked at her again.
The Rector glanced after him and smoothed his hair thoughtfully.
”Curious man that,” he remarked with his simple smile. ”He always looks to me as though there were a tragedy in his life.”
”Oh, I don't think so,” said Katharine, coldly. ”It is only his manner. He takes a joke tragically. Besides, he has never married unhappily, or anything like that.”
”That may be,” said Cyril Austen, with one of his occasional flashes of intuition; ”but it means a tragedy to some men if they haven't got married at all, and I fancy that's one of them. Ah, well, his father was one of our best--”
Miss Esther's voice came shrilly down the pa.s.sage, and the Rector hastened out of the room without finis.h.i.+ng his sentence.
”The annoyances of life,” thought Katharine cynically, ”are much more important than the tragedies.”
She picked up her letter once more and tore it open. Even then she did not read it at once, but looked out of the window first and beyond the garden, where a man's felt hat was moving irregularly along the top of the hedge. She made an impatient gesture and turned her back to the light, and unfolded Ted's letter at last. And this is what it contained:--
”By the time you get this, I shall have cleared out. I may be an infernally rotten a.s.s, but I won't let the best girl in the world marry me out of kindness, and that is all you were going to do. I tried to think you were a little keen on me a few weeks ago, but of course I was wrong. Don't mind me. I shall come up smiling again after a bit. It was just like my poorness to think I could ever marry any one so clever and spry as yourself. Of course you will buck up and marry some played-out literary chap, who will gas about books and things all day and make you happy. Good old Kit, it has been a mistake all along, hasn't it? When I come back, we will be chums again, won't we? I am off to Melbourne in the morning and shall travel about for a year, I think. You might write to me--the jolly sort of letters you used to write. Monty knows all my movements.
Yours ever,