The Career of Katherine Bush

CHAPTER XXVIII

Mordryn spent a most unrestful day; he found it very difficult to settle to anything. He felt it wiser whenever his thoughts turned to Katherine Bush, immediately to picture Bindon's Green and the auctioneer father and butcher grandfather! – they acted as a kind of antidote to the very powerful intoxicant which was flooding his veins.

And Katherine sat typing mechanically her morning's work, but some third sense beyond eye and hand was busy with agitating thoughts. No, she could play no further game with the Duke, fate had beaten her. It would be no acting. She knew that she was just a woman, after all, and he was a man, and the Dukedom had gone into shadowland.

He possessed everything that Algy had lacked, there would be no blank half-hours when passion was lulled, with him. His perfectly cultivated intellect could enchant her always. She adored his point of view, as unconsciously arrogant as Lady Garribardine's, and yet as free and expanded. How she could soar with him to guide her! What happiness to take refuge from everything in his arms.

He did not seem old to her; indeed, except for his thick, iron-grey hair and the expression of having greatly suffered, which now and then showed in his proud eyes, there were no unlovely signs of age about him. He could still call forth for many years the passionate love of women. And what was age? A ridiculous phantasy – the soul was the thing.

Katherine was beginning to believe that she herself had a soul, and that Otto Weininger was altogether wrong about individuals, even if his deductions were correct concerning the majority of women.

Several guardsmen from Windsor came over to luncheon, which was so crowded that there was no necessity for Katherine to go down, and tea came before she again saw the Duke. He deliberately allowed himself to be entrapped by one of the trio of Graces, and did not come near her; and when Katherine got into the drawing-room after dinner, he was nowhere in sight. A Cabinet Minister, one of the few Her Ladyship considered sufficiently worthy to be allowed to visit Blissington, had arrived in the afternoon, and the Duke and the hostess, and another man and woman, made a group in the small, red drawing-room in earnest converse; while most of the rest of the company danced in the hall. And Katherine went among these, and presently she slipped up to her old schoolroom.

His Grace was carrying out her request, it appeared, but therein she found no joy.

And later, Mordryn drank his final hock and seltzer in his old friend's boudoir, where they had a little talk together alone.

"It has been dear of you to stay so long, Mordryn," she told him. "Especially as the diversions which I hoped I had provided for you turned out of no more use than a plague of gnats. I hope you have not been too bored?"

"I am never bored with you, dear friend."

"No, I know that; but in a big party, I cannot give you as much time as I should like. You will come again when we are quiet, though, just as you always used to, and I will really find you a suitable bride."

The Duke was in a cynical mood, it seemed, for he treated this proposal not at all in the light fashion he had done at the beginning of the visit.

He replied gloomily that he had decided to select something steady and plain, if he must marry – he knew he could never care for a woman again, and a healthy, quiet, well-bred creature with tact, who would leave him alone, was all he asked. Life was a hideous disappointment and very difficult to understand, and to try to do one's duty to one's state, and get through with it, was all that anyone could hope to accomplish.

But to this Her Ladyship said a vigorous, "Tut – tut! You speak like a boy crossed in love, Mordryn! If you were five-and-twenty, you could not have a more delightful vista opening out in front of you, 'Si jeunesse savait. Si vieillesse pouvait' – that was cried from a wise and envious heart! Well, you both know and can, so what more could a man ask of fate! I have no patience with you! I don't want you now only to do your duty, to fulfil the obligations of your station. You have always done so. Your life has been one long carrying out of noblesse oblige. I want you to kick over the traces and be happy, Mordryn! Ridiculously, boyishly happy! – do you hear, conscientious martyr!"

Mordryn heard, but his smile was still bitter, as he answered:

"We are not so made, Seraphim, neither you nor I – we could not do as you say, even when we were young, and tradition and obligation to our order will still dominate us to the end of time, dear friend."

Then he said good-night and good-bye – for he was leaving at cock-crow for a place of his in the North.

When Lady Garribardine was alone, she did not look at all disturbed at the passage of events, as she reviewed her Easter party. She smiled happily, in fact, and decided that she would take her secretary to Valfreyne for Whitsuntide, after all!

Man "proposed," but, she reflected sagely, God often "disposed" in favour of intelligent women!

In the following week, the establishment from Blissington moved up to Berkeley Square for the season, and Katherine's duties became heavy again.

Her first meeting with Gerard Strobridge happened quite soon; he came into the secretary's room from the library after luncheon.

"Now tell me all about everything," he said. "I have gathered from Gwendoline that you came down every night and had your usual success at the Easter party, and that Mordryn evidently liked you, for he told Gwen that you were the most intelligent girl that he had ever met."

Katherine half smiled, a little sadly.

"Yes, he may have thought so, but eventually the secretary swallowed up the guest. I do not know if he will ever speak to me again."

"He felt as badly as that, did he! Poor Mordryn! No doubt you tormented him; but Mordryn is no weak creature like me. If he feels very much about you, he will either defy convention, or break away from all temptation" – then his voice changed, and he asked a little anxiously:

"Katherine, do you begin to care for him?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"I do not know – I could care a great deal – he pleases me in every way – I love his looks and his mind – and he – he makes me feel something which I have never felt before – is it the capability for devotion? – I do not know."

For the first time in their acquaintance, Mr. Strobridge saw her undecided, gentle, a little helpless even – it touched him deeply. He loved her so very dearly. He would rather see her happy if he could aid her to become so. He came over to her and leaned upon the table.

"Dearest girl – everything is a sickening jumble in this world, it seems. I have a kind of premonition, though, that you will emerge triumphant, however it goes; but after to-day, Katherine, I shall not see you until late in the autumn. I am going away – to Russia this time – and I am going to try once more not to care."

So even her one friend would be far from her. Well, she must not lose her nerve. She gave him her blessing for his journey, and they said good-bye. And the days went on apace.

Matilda was engaged to be married to Charlie Prodgers, and was full of importance and glee, and had drifted further and further away from her sister ever since the engagement was announced. Some instinctive feminine jealousy made her feel that she would prefer Katherine to be as far as possible from her fiancé.

"After all, Kitten," she said, when they met in the park to discuss the news, "you aren't one of us and we aren't one of you. I shall be moving up now into Mabel's set, and there is no use in hiding it, Mabel don't seem to dote on you."

"Yes, I feel that," agreed Katherine, meekly lowering her eyes, so that her sister might not see their twinkle. "I expect we shall not meet often in the future, Tild."

"Well, of course, Kitten, I'd always be very pleased to have tea with you up here now and then," and Matilda gave an uncomfortable laugh; "but it is always best to avoid awkwardness, isn't it, dearie, and you are only a paid servant, aren't you – living in – not like you were at Liv and Dev's, out on your own, and everyone starts better in considering her husband's position, don't they – and Charlie is manager in his department now, and very particular as to who I know."

"You are perfectly right, Tild," Katherine's voice was ominously soft, "and so is Charlie. You go ahead, and very soon you will have got above Mabel, and, of course, I would not be a drag on you for the world. I think, after to-day, we will just write to one another now and then, and you must not bother to come up to see me. We do not think alike on any point – but I shall always remember how good you were to me when I was a tiresome little girl."

"Oh, Kitten!" and Matilda felt almost tearful; for apart from her fear of reawakening her fiancé's interest in her sister, she still had a secret affection for her.

"Yes, you were very good to me, then, Tild, but now we have come to a final parting of the ways, and we are all satisfied – I shall fulfil my ideas, and you will fulfil yours."

And afterwards, when she walked back to Berkeley Square, she pondered deeply. There was no such thing as family affection really in the abstract – it only held when the individuals were in sympathy and had a community of interests. They – her family – were as glad at the thought that they had risen above her, and need not communicate in the future, as she was that she would not have to bring her mind down to their point of view. Matilda was the last link – and Matilda had shown that she desired also to break away. Katherine felt that but for Lady Garribardine's real affection for her, she was virtually alone in the world.

If only there were no backward thoughts in her mind, she would have looked upon her fair future as a certainty; sooner or later, with the visit to Valfreyne in front of her, and the frequent occasions upon which she must see the Duke at her mistress' house, she knew she could continue to attract him if she so desired, and make him love her with a great love. There was that subtle, indescribable sympathy of ideas between them. And as Algy had called forth physical passion, and Gerard the awakening of the spirit, this man seemed to arouse the essence of all three things, the body, the spirit and the soul.

But there lay this ugly shadow between them, and she began to realise the meaning of the old saw from Horace, "Black care sits behind the horseman," and she had not yet made up her mind to dislodge him and defy fate.

The three days in Paris began to haunt her until she severely took herself to task, and analysed everything. She must not look back upon them in that fashion. She must remember them gratefully, she told herself, since they had opened her eyes for the first time in a way that nothing else could have done, and she indeed felt that it was very doubtful if she could ever have obtained Lady Garribardine's situation, and so her education from Gerard Strobridge, without the experience that that episode in her life had given her to start upon.

It was contrary to all her principles to allow any past action to influence with its shadow present events. She would banish the whole subject from her mind, and leave the future in the hand of destiny – neither assisting fate by personal initiative, nor resisting its march by deliberate renunciation.

But she seemed very quiet, Her Ladyship thought, and wondered to herself at the cause. The Duke was in the North paying other visits for some weeks, and when he did come to Berkeley Square in between times he did not see Katherine.

So April passed and May came, and with it the prospect of Whitsuntide, early that year. Whitsunday fell upon the eleventh of May.

"You must have some decent clothes," Lady Garribardine had said, a week or two beforehand, "another evening dress and an afternoon frock. I think I should like the first to be white and the other black, and in your own excellent taste. You will dine down every night as a guest, and we shall stay from Saturday until Tuesday."

"It is extremely exciting for me," Katherine admitted. "I wonder so much what the house will be like."

"It is a huge Palladian Monument, very splendid and ducal, everything is on an immense scale, and the Duke keeps it up with great state. It is more like some royal residence than a house, but there are some cosy rooms to be found in odd corners. It will interest and educate you, child. You had better read up all about it in one of the old volumes of Country Life– some three years ago, I think, it was described."

Katherine lost no time in doing this, and read of its building in 1680, and of its wonderful gardens "in the French style" – and of its superb collections of pictures and art treasures, and of its avenues and lake and waterways and fountains. Yes, it must be a very noble place.

They were to arrive early in time for luncheon, since Her Ladyship was to act hostess to the party who would come in the afternoon. And when they approached the gates, Katherine felt that one of the supreme moments in her life had come.

The park was vast, larger even than Blissington, and with more open spaces, and the house could be viewed from a distance – a symmetrical, magnificent pile. And it seemed that they walked through an endless succession of halls and great salons, until they were ushered into the Duke's presence in his own particular panelled room.

It was very lofty and partly filled with bookcases arranged in rather an unusual way, sunk into the wall itself, with very beautiful decorations by Grinling Gibbons surrounding them and also the intervening panels wherein fine pictures hung. The curtains and chair coverings were of the most superb old blue silk, faded now to a wonderful greenish tone, and harmonizing with the beautiful Savonnerie carpet with its soft tints of citron and puce and green.

Katherine was frankly awed. Blissington was a very fine gentleman's house – but this was a palace. And suddenly, the Duke seemed a million miles away from her, and she wondered how she had ever dared to be familiar with him, and rebuke him for coming to her schoolroom to talk!

She was meek as a mouse, and never opened her lips after the first words of greeting.

The host had come forward with cordial graciousness and bidden them welcome, and he had looked a very magnificent person somehow in his morning country riding clothes. And all the glamour of high rank and power and fastidiousness enhanced his natural charms, so that Katherine felt a little cold and sick with the emotion which she was experiencing. He was courtly and aloof in his manner with all his kindness, and in a moment or two he accompanied them along to the Venetian suite himself.

"I must come, dear friend," he had said to Lady Garribardine, "to be sure that you have everything you can possibly want."

The Venetian suite was on a par in splendour with the rest of the house. It was on the same floor as His Grace's own sitting-room which they had left, and it was reached by a passage place which led to the same terrace, which the windows looked upon; this was marble paved, with a splendid balustrade. The ante-chamber had been arranged with a writing table near the great window, and every convenience for Miss Bush to do any writing her mistress might require. For the rest, the Venetian suite was always reserved for the most honoured guest. Here were a sitting-room, a great bedroom and dressing-room for Her Ladyship – all with the same lofty ceilings and fine windows as the room they had left, and behind it came that charming green damask-hung chamber designed for Miss Bush.

"Here in this apartment you will find yourselves completely quiet and shut off from the world," the Duke said. "Once you have passed the great door, as you know, Seraphim, your suite makes the end of this wing, and only I can approach you from my sitting-room!"

Lady Garribardine, who knew every nook in the house, smiled as she expressed herself as content, and he left them alone.

Katherine examined her room; it would have struck her as very large if it had been in any other house. It looked on to an inner courtyard with a fountain playing, and statuary and hundred-year-old lilac bushes in huge tubs. The room was hung with pale green silk, and had beautiful painted Italian, eighteenth century furniture, and on the dressing-table were bowls of lilies of the valley.

She thrilled a little; was this accidental or deliberate?

She was very well acquainted with the workings of a great house, and the duties of the housekeeper and groom of the chambers. She saw from a technical point of view that these retainers of Valfreyne must be of a very high order of merit because of the result of their work; but even their intelligence could hardly have selected the volumes of her favourite authors, which she had discussed with the Duke, and which were placed in bookstands, with the "Letters of Abelard and Héloise" and a beautiful edition of "Eothen" out on the top!

These silent testimonies of someone's personal thought gave her unbounded pleasure; they restored her submerged self-confidence, and made her eyes glow. It was divine to feel that he cared enough to have troubled to do this. The subtle flattery was exquisite.

A burning wave of colour overspread Katherine's face, and her nostrils quivered. If the Duke could have seen her – he would have known that that quality he appreciated – the quality of real, natural passion – was abundantly present in her nature. Strong passion controlled by an iron will – a mixture which he thought quite ideal in the woman whom a man would choose to be the companion of his life.

It was this particular suggestion about Katherine which had alike intoxicated the imaginations of these three far different men, Lord Algy, Gerard Strobridge and the Duke. The human, adorable warmth of emotion of which her white, smooth-skinned face and red, full mouth looked capable.

Lady Garribardine had told her secretary to take off her hat, as she might be required to do a little work after lunch.

"I shall settle with His Grace how I think the party had better sit, and then you can type anything we want."

So Katherine was particularly careful to arrange her silvery hair becomingly, and looked the perfection of refined neatness as she followed her mistress back into the Duke's sitting-room, and then on in to luncheon in a smaller dining-room in another wing.

They were only three at the meal, and the host talked of politics, and the party who were coming, and was gracious. He did not treat Katherine with the slightest condescension, nor with any special solicitude. If she had been an unknown niece of Lady Garribardine, his manner would have been the same.

Katherine felt chilled again for the moment, and had never appeared more subdued.

She slipped off back to her room when they went to have coffee in a small drawing-room, known as "The Gamester's Parlour," for in it was hung a world-known picture of the famous thoroughbred of that name, the riding of whom in a match against His Grace of Chandos' colt, Starlight, had been the cause of the third Duke's breaking his neck.

There was no immediate work to be done, so Katherine stood and looked from the window of her green chamber and took in the view. Surely, she thought, if people even with the intelligence of Matilda could see such men as the Duke and such splendid homes as this, with every evidence in it of fine tastes and fine living and fine achievement, stamped upon it by hundreds of years of noble owners, they could not go on being so blind to the force of heredity and environment as factors in determining the actions of the human race.

She stood for a long time quite still, with trouble in her heart, which every fresh realisation of the beauties around her augmented.

No – the Duke could never overlook the three days even if he could forget that she had come from Bindon's Green – and she could not banish their memory either, and so would never be able to rely upon her own power to carry on the great undertaking untrammelled by inward apprehension and self-contempt at the deception of so great a man – her serenity would be gone and with it her power.

Lady Garribardine opened the door presently, and saw her still standing there.

"Run out for a little walk, child," she said, kindly. "You can reach the terrace from the passage ante-chamber which has been arranged for you to write in, and there are steps at the side into the garden. I shall not want you until just before tea. The Duke has the menus and cards and door names printed by his own private press. Then come back with your eyes bright, and put on your new black frock."

Katherine thanked her; there never could be anyone kinder or more thoughtful for others than was this arrogant great lady.

The girl walked in the fresh May sunshine, but nothing lifted the weight which had fallen upon her heart, and her cheeks were paler than usual, and her air had an added delicacy and refinement when she followed her mistress into the great tapestry salon, wherein tea was laid, and which was adjacent to the hall where guests were already beginning to arrive.

She was not introduced to anyone else, but several she already knew; they were selected from the crême de la crême of Her Ladyship's set of the rather less modern sort.

Mordryn looked at her constantly unobserved. What was the meaning of this new expression in her face? Why would she never meet his eyes? And hers, when he did see them, turned upon ordinary things, had a haunting melancholy in them very different from the sphinxlike smile of old.

He found himself more disturbed than he cared to own. He wished Seraphim had not brought her, after all – He wished – but he did not even in his thoughts form words. Had her changed air anything to do with that last abrupt request on the March morning's walk, that he should remember who she was and who he was, and leave her alone? Was it possible that she felt something for him? How wrong he had been in that case to put the "Eothen" and the "Abelard and Héloise" and the lilies of the valley in her room – cruel and wrong. He knew now that he saw her again that he had thought of her very constantly ever since Easter time, and had chafed at getting no sight of her when he had twice been in London and had gone to Berkeley Square, though his determination had held at that time, and he had made no attempt to see her, or even to mention her name. But he knew that he had looked forward more eagerly each day to Whitsuntide, and that he had taken peculiar delight in the surreptitious supervision of the details of her lodgment, and the choice of volumes wherewith to refresh her mind.

But was this chivalrous on his part? Was he not playing upon the feelings of one defenceless and in a dependent position – one who could not even flee?

He grew uncomfortable. He was painfully conscious of her presence, and a sudden mad longing came to him to take her in his arms, and kiss away the trouble from her eyes! And then the cynical and humorous side of his character made him smile at the idea of such feelings in a room full of guests! Guests of his own world, and for the humble secretary of his old love! He fretted under the restraint of his unease. And she was here in his house and he must suffer the temptation of her presence for three more days. He must not look at her – must not talk to her! He must not have any subtle understanding with her about the books – must not, in short, do anything he desired.