Old Mr. Tredgold

CHAPTER XLIV

“Do away, me not do wid you, me fader’s boy,” said little Job, as Katherine exerted her persuasions to bring him downstairs.

“That is quite true, Job; but father has not come back yet. Come downstairs with me, and we shall see him come back.”

Job answered with a kick from the little boot which had just come in somewhat muddy from a walk—a kick which, as it happened to touch a tender point, elicited from Katherine a little cry. The child backed against the ayah, holding her fast; then glared at Katherine with eyes in which malice mingled with fright. “Me dlad to hurt you, me dlad to hurt you!” he cried. It was evident that he expected a blow.

“It is a pity to hurt anyone,” said Katherine; “but if it has made you glad you shouldn’t be cross. Come with me downstairs.”

“I hate you,” said the child. “You punith me moment I let ayah do.”

“No, I shall not punish you. I shall only take you downstairs to see your pretty mamma, and wait till father comes back. I think I hear the dog-cart now. Hark! that is your father now.”

The child ran to the window with a flush of eagerness. “Lift me up, lift me up!” he cried. It did not matter to him who did this so long as he got his will; and though he hit with his heels against Katherine’s dress, he did not kick her again. “Fader, fader—me’s fader’s boy!” cried little Job. The little countenance changed; it was no longer that of a little gnome, but caught an angelic reflection. He waved his thin small arms over his head from Katharine’s arms. “Fader, fader—Fader’s tome back! Job’s good boy!” he cried. Then the little waving arm struck against Katherine’s head, and he paused to look at her. The expression of his face changed again. A quiver of fierce terror came upon it; he was in the power of a malignant being stronger than himself. He looked at her with a sort of impotent, disappointed fury. “Put me down, and I’ll not kick you no more,” he said.

“Certainly I’ll put you down. Will you come with me now and meet your father?” Katherine said.

He had his hand ready to seize her hair, to defend himself, but shrunk away when she put him down without any more expressions of animosity, and ran for the head of the staircase. At that dreadful passage, however, the little creature paused. He was afraid for the descent; the hall was not yet lighted up below, and it seemed a well of darkness into which it was not wonderful that so small a being should be terrified to go down. “Is fader there?” he said to Katherine, “will they hurt fader?” There were vaguely visible forms in the hall, a gleam of vague daylight from the doorway, and then it became dreadfully apparent to Job that something must have happened to fader, who had disappeared within the drawing-room. “Dhey have swallowed him up—Dhey have eaten him up!” he cried. “Oh, fader, fader!” with a frantic shout, clinging to Katherine’s knees.

“No, no, my little boy. Your father has not been hurt. Come, we’ll go down and find him,” Katherine said. When they were nearly at the foot of the stairs, during which time he had clung to her with a little hot grip, half piteous half painful, there suddenly sprung up in the dark hall below, at the lighting of the lamp, a gleam of bright light, and Sir Charles became visible at the foot of the stairs, coming towards them. The child gave a shriek of joy and whirled himself from the top of some half-dozen steps into his father’s arms. “You’re not eated up,” he said; “fader, fader! Job fader’s boy.”

“Has he been cross?” said Sir Charles. He held the little creature in his arms lovingly, with a smile that irradiated his own heavy countenance like a gleam of sunshine.

“I hates her,” cried Job. “I kicked her. She dot nothing to do with me.”

“Job, Job,” said the father gently, “you shouldn’t be so cross and so hasty to a kind lady who only wanted to bring you to father. If you behave like that she will never be kind to you again.”

“I don’t tare. I hates ze lady,” Job said.

His father lifted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders apologetically to Katherine, and then laughed and carried his little son away. Decidedly, whatever Katherine was to make a success in, it was not in the rôle of maiden aunt.

Next day, to the distress and trouble of Katherine, early in the afternoon there came a visitor whose appearance made Stella turn towards her sister with an open-eyed look of malice and half ridicule. No; Lady Somers did not intend it so. It was a look of significance, “I told you so,” and call upon Katherine’s attention. The visitor was James Stanford, their fellow-passenger by the Aurungzebe. He explained very elaborately that Sir Charles had given him an invitation, and that, finding himself on business of his own in the Isle of Wight, he had taken advantage of it. He was not a man who could quickly make himself at his ease. He seemed oppressed with a consciousness that he ought not to be there, that he wanted some special permission, as if it had been with some special purpose that he had come.

“Oh, you need not apologise,” said Stella; “if you had not come then you might have apologised. We expect everybody to come to see us. Fancy, we’ve seen scarcely anyone for a week almost, except some old friends who have lectured us and told us what was our duty. Do you like to be told what is your duty, Mr. Stanford? I don’t; if I were ever so much inclined to do it before, I should set myself against it then. That is exactly how narrow country people do; they turn you against everything. They tell you this and that as if you did not know it before, and make you turn your back on the very thing you wanted to do.”

“I don’t think,” said Stanford, “that I could be turned like that from anything I wanted to do.”

“Perhaps you are strong-minded,” said Stella. “I am not, oh, not a bit. I am one of the old-fashioned silly women. I like to be left alone and to do my own way. Perhaps it’s a silly way, but it’s mine. And so you have had business on the island, Mr. Stanford? Have you seen that lady again—that lady with the black eyes and the yellow hair? She will not like it at all if she doesn’t see you. She was very attentive to you during the voyage. Now, you can’t deny that she was attentive. She was a great deal nicer to you than you deserved. And such a pretty woman! To be sure that was not the natural colour of her hair. She had done something to it; up at the roots you could see that it had once been quite dark. Well, why not, if she likes yellow hair better? It is going quite out of fashion, so there can be no bad object in it, don’t you know.”

Stella laughed largely, but her visitor did not respond. He looked more annoyed, Katherine thought, than he had any occasion to be, and her pride was roused, for it seemed to her that they both looked at herself as if the woman who had paid attention to Mr. Stanford could have anything to do with her. She changed the subject by asking him abruptly if he felt the rigour of the English climate after his long life in India.

“Yes—no, a little,” he said. “They say that we bring so much heat with us that we do not feel it for the first year, and as I shall have to go back–”

“Are you going back? Why should you go back?” said Stella. “I thought you civil servants had such good times, not ordered about like soldiers. They always said in the regiment that the civilians were so well off; good pay and constant leave, and off to the hills whenever they liked, and all sorts of indulgences.”

“I am afraid the regiment romances,” said Stanford, “but I do not complain. On the whole I like India. One is sure, or almost sure, of being of some use, and there are many alleviations to the climate. If that was all, I should not at all mind going out again–”

“Ah, I understand,” said Stella. And then she added quickly, “I am so sorry I can’t ask you to stay to dinner to-night. We have a grand function coming off to-night. The lawyer is coming down, and we are to hear how we stand, and how much money we are to have. I think I hear him now, and I can’t let Charlie steal a march and tackle him before I am there. Katherine, will you look after Mr. Stanford till I come back? I don’t trust Charlie a step further than I see him. He might be doing some silly thing and compromising me while I am sitting here talking, but as soon as ever I can escape I will come back.”

She rose as she spoke and gave Katherine a look– a look significant, malicious, such as any spectator might have read. Stanford had risen to open the door, and perhaps he did not see it, but it left Katherine so hot with angry feeling, so ashamed and indignant, that he could not fail but perceive it when Stella had gone away. He looked at her a little wistfully as he took his seat again. “I fear I am detaining you here against your will,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Katherine, from the mist of her confusion, “it is nothing. Stella has not yet got over the excitement of coming home. It has been increased very much by some—incidents which she did not expect. You have heard her story of course? They—eloped—and my father was supposed to have cut her off and put her out of his will; but it appears, on the contrary, that he has left everything to her. She only heard of papa’s death, and of—this—when she got home.”

There was a little pause, and then he said reflectively, with a curious sort of regret, as if this brief narrative touched himself at some point, “It seems, then, that fortune after all favours the brave.”

“The brave?” said Katherine, surprised. “Oh, you mean because of their running away? They have paid for it, they think, very severely in seven years of poverty in India, but now—now Stella’s turn has come.”

“I quite understand Lady Somers’ excitement without that. Even for myself, this house has so many recollections. The mere thought of it makes my heart beat when I am thousands of miles away. When I first came, an uncouth boy—you will scarcely remember that, Miss Tredgold.”

“Oh, I remember very well,” said Katherine, gradually recovering her ease, and pleased with a suggestion of recollections so early that there could be no embarrassment in them; “but not the uncouthness. We were very glad to have you for a play-fellow, Stella and I.”

“She was a little round ball of a girl,” he said.

“But even then,” said Katherine, and paused. She had been about to say, “expected to be the first,” but changed her expression, “was the favourite of everybody,” she said.

“Ah,” said Stanford, and then pursued his recollections. “I used to count the days till I could come back. And then came the next stage. Your father was kind to me when I was a boy. Afterwards, he was quite right, he wanted to know what I was good for.”

“He was what people call practical,” said Katherine. “Fortunately, he did not think it necessary with us. We were accepted as useless creatures, objets de luxe, which a rich man could afford to keep up, and which did him more credit the gayer they were and the more costly. Poor papa! It is not for us to criticise him, Mr. Stanford, in his own house.”

“No, indeed; but I am not criticising him. I am proving him to be right by my own example. He thought everybody could conquer fortune as he himself had done; but everybody cannot do that, any more than everybody can write a great poem. You require special qualities, which he had. Some go down altogether in the battle and are never more heard of; some do, what perhaps he would have thought worse, like me.”

“Why like you? Have you done badly? I have not heard so,” cried Katherine, with a quick impulse of interest, which she showed in spite of herself.

“I have done,” he said, “neither well nor ill. I am of that company that Dante was so contemptuous about, don’t you remember? I think he is too hard upon them, che senza infamia e senza gloria vive. Don’t you think there is a little excuse—a little pardon for them, Miss Tredgold? The poor fellows aim at the best. They know it when they see it; they put out their hands to it, but cannot grasp it. And then what should the alternative be?”

“It is a difficult question,” said Katherine with a smile, not knowing what he would be at. He meant something, it was evident, beyond the mere words. His eyes had a strained look of emotion, and there was a slight quiver under the line of his moustache. She had not been used to discussions of this kind. The metaphysics of life had little place in the doctor’s busy mind, and still less in the noisy talk of the Sir Charles Somers of existence. She did not feel herself quite equal to the emergency. “I presume that a man who could not get the best, as you say, would have to content himself with the best he could get. At least, that is how it would come out in housekeeping, which is my sole science, you know,” she said, with a faint laugh.

“Yes,” he said, almost eagerly. “That is perhaps natural. But you don’t know how a man despises himself for it. Having once known a better way, to fall back upon something that is second or third best, that has been my way. I have conquered nothing. I have made no fortune or career. I have got along. A man would feel less ashamed of himself if he had made some great downfall—if he had come to grief once and for all. To win or lose, that’s the only worthy alternative. But we nobodies do neither—we don’t win, oh, far from it! and haven’t the heart to lose—altogether–”

What did he mean? To do Katherine justice, she had not the smallest idea. She kept her eyes upon him with a little curiosity, a little interest. Her sense of embarrassment and consciousness had entirely passed away.

“You are surely much too severe a judge,” she said. “I never heard that to come to grief, as you say, was a desirable end. If one cannot win, one would at least be glad to retire decently—to make a retreat with honour, not to fling up everything. You might live then to fight another day, which is a thing commended in the finest poetry,” she added with a laugh.

He rose up and began to walk about the room. “You crush me all the more by seeming to agree with me,” he said. “But if you knew how I feel the contrast between what I am and what I was when last I was here! I went away from your father burning with energy, feeling that I could face any danger—that there was nothing I couldn’t overcome. I found myself off, walking to London, I believe, before I knew. I felt as if I could have walked to India, and overcome everything on the way! That was the heroic for a moment developed. Of course, I had to come to my senses—to take the train, to see about my berth, to get my outfit, &c. These hang weights about a man’s neck. And then, of course, I found that fate does not appear in one impersonation to be assaulted and overcome, as I suppose I must have thought, and that a civil servant has got other things to think of than fortune and fame. The soldiers have the advantage of us in that way. They can take a bold step, as Somers did, and carry out their ideal and achieve their victory–”