The Making of a Prig Part 36

"No--yes--perhaps. I am going to write to you quite soon. I'm a rotten a.s.s, as you know, but--you will try and understand, won't you, Kitty?"

The train went on, and she leaned out of the window and laughed.

"I am sure I shall understand," she said.

CHAPTER XIX

She waited in vain during the next two days for Ted's letter. His parting words to her, however, seemed to have again restored her peace of mind; and the virtuous mood in which she returned to Ivingdon was so unprecedented as to rouse surprise rather than the admiration it deserved. The climax was reached when Miss Esther insisted on giving her a tonic.

"It is very ridiculous," she remonstrated, "that one is never allowed to drop one's characteristic att.i.tude for a moment. If I had come home and behaved as childishly as I usually do, you would have been quite satisfied; but just because I am inclined to be civilised for a change, you choose to resent it. One would think you had taken out a patent for all the virtues."

"My dear, that is doubtless very clever, but I wish you would drink up this and not keep me standing," returned her aunt, who was, as ever, occupied with actions and not with theories about them; and Katharine had to seek consolation for her temporary discomfort in the absurdity of the situation.

She wondered slightly why Ted had not written to her at once, but after the vacillation he had already shown she was not unprepared for a further delay; it was more than likely that he found the complexities of writing what he could not speak to be greater than he supposed, and it amused her to conjecture that he would probably end in coming to her for the help he had learnt to expect from her in all the crises of his life. Meanwhile, there was a whole lifetime before them in which they could work out the effects of their action, and in her present mood she saw no satisfactory reason for hurrying it; she did not realise how persistently she was recalling every instance of Ted's kindness to her, as if to strengthen her resolution, and she was unconscious of the doggedness with which she avoided dwelling on a certain episode in the London visit which she had never even mentioned to her father. She had cheated herself, by degrees, into a complacency that she mistook for resignation.

At last, by the mid-day post on Sat.u.r.day morning, she received her letter. It came with another one, written in a hand that brought a.s.sociation without distinct recollection to her mind; and she opened the latter first, princ.i.p.ally because it was the one that interested her least. The first page revealed its ident.i.ty; it was from Mrs.

Downing, and was characteristically full of underlined words and barely legible interpolations, and she was obliged to read it through twice before she was able to grasp its meaning. The drift of it was that the enterprising lady princ.i.p.al was about to open a branch of her school in Paris, where everything was to be French, "_quite_ French, you know, my dear Miss Austen,--staff, conversation, cooking, games, _everything_; a place to which I can send on the dear children from here when they want finis.h.i.+ng. The French are such _delicious_ people, are they not? _So_ unique, and _so_ French!" The morals, however, were to be English; so, in spite of the unique French element in the French character, there was to be an English head to the establishment, and it was this position that she proceeded in a maze of extravagant compliments to offer to her former junior mistress. "Not a duenna, of _course_, for that will be supplied in the person of the excellent Miss Smithson, who will act nominally as housekeeper, and make an _exquisite_ background to the whole. There are always some of those dear foolish mammas who will insist on placing propriety before education,--so benighted, is it not? But Miss Smithson was intended by Nature, I am sure, to propitiate that kind of mamma; while _you_, my dear Miss Austen, I intend to be something more than a background. I look to you to give a _tone_ to the school, to manage the working of it all,--the amus.e.m.e.nts, the lectures, indeed, the whole _regime_; to be responsible for the dear children's happiness, and to see that they write happy letters home every week,--to take _my_ place, in fact. I could tell you _all_ in two minutes, etc., etc."

Katharine laid down the letter with an involuntary sigh; the position it offered was full of attractions to her, and the salary would have been more than she had ever hoped to demand. "I wish she had asked me six weeks ago," she said aloud, and then accused herself fiercely of disloyalty and picked up Ted's letter, and studied the boyish handwriting on the envelope as though to give herself courage to open it. She had wanted to be alone with his letter, and had carefully watched her father out of the house before shutting herself into the study; so the sound of a footstep on the gravel path outside brought a frown to her face, and she remained purposely with her back to the window so that the intruder, whoever he was, should see that she did not mean to be disturbed. But the voice in which she heard her name spoken through the open window arrested her attention.

She dropped the unopened letter on the table, and turned slowly round to face the speaker. The strangeness of his coming, when she had been obstinately putting him out of her thoughts since last Monday, had a paralysing effect upon her nerves; and Paul swung himself over the low window seat, and reached her side in time to save her from falling.

She recovered herself immediately, however, and shrank back from his touch.

"I do not understand why you are here," she found herself saying with difficulty.

"That is what I have come to explain," he replied. "I could hardly expect you to understand."

His tone was curiously gentle. It struck her, as she looked at him again, that he was very much altered. She had not noticed his appearance much as he stood outside the book shop, with the dark fog at his back; but now, as the light from the window behind fell full on his head she saw the fresh streaks of white in the black hair, and the sight affected her strangely. Perhaps, while she in her arrogance had believed him to be living in an ill-gotten contentment, he, too, had had something to suffer.

"Won't you sit down?" she said, and took a chair herself, and waited for him to begin. The one idea in her mind was that he should not suspect her of nervousness.

"You were kind enough, when we last met in the summer," began Paul, "to congratulate me on my engagement to your cousin. I am going to ask you to extend your kindness now, and to congratulate us both on being released from that engagement."

Katharine looked wonderingly at him. But there was nothing to be gathered from his face. She smiled rather sadly.

"Poor Marion!" she said, softly. "Isn't anybody to be allowed to remain happy?"

"You mistake me," he corrected her carefully. "Your cousin took the initiative in the matter; she is obviously the one to be congratulated."

"And you?"

"I? Oh, I suppose I have only my own ignorance to blame. If I had had more knowledge of women, I should have known better what was expected of me. As it is, my engagement has proved a complete failure."

There was a pause, till Katharine roused herself to speak in a lifeless kind of voice that did not seem to belong to her.

"I am sorry if it has made you unhappy," she said. Paul looked at her critically.

"Are you sure?" he asked, smiling.

Katharine folded and unfolded her hands uneasily, and wished he would go away and remove his disquieting presence from her life for ever.

"Oh, yes," she said. "One is always sorry when people are unhappy, of course."

"Only that?" His voice had a touch of disappointment in it, and she began to tremble for her composure. He got up and walked to the window and looked across the lawn, where the wintry sun was struggling through the bare branches of the elm trees and making faint intricate patterns on the whitened gra.s.s below. "This is where I first met you, three years ago," he went on as though he were talking to himself.

"You were only a child then, and you interested me. I used to wonder what there was about you that interested me so much, a mere child like you! You were very sweet to me in those days, Katharine."

"I--I wish you wouldn't," said Katharine. But he did not seem to hear her.

"Most men would have behaved differently, I suppose," he went on, still looking away from her. "It is very fatal to admit the possibility, even to ourselves, of making a new system for an effete civilisation like ours; and I was a fool to suppose that women could be dealt with by any but the obvious methods. It is my own fault, of course, that in my anxiety to keep your respect I managed to destroy your affection."

She wanted to vindicate herself, to protest against what seemed to her his confident self-righteousness; but the old influence was creeping over her again, and it numbed her.

"I wish you would not say those things," she said, weakly. The unopened letter lying on the red table-cloth seemed like a protest against the futility of the scene that was pa.s.sing, and she found herself controlling a desire to laugh at the mockery of it all.

He turned round again with a half-suppressed sigh, and took out his watch.

"Just twelve," he said, reflectively. "I must be off if I mean to walk to the station. You will forgive me for having worried you with all this? I had a sort of feeling that I should like to tell you about it myself; our old friends.h.i.+p seemed to demand that little amount of frankness, though I suppose you will think I have no right to talk about friends.h.i.+p any longer. I acknowledge that I have given you every reason to be vexed with me; if I can ever do anything to remove the disagreeable impression from your mind, I hope you will let me know.

Good-bye."

"You--you are not going?" She had risen too, and was standing between him and the door. She did not know why she wished to keep him, but she knew she could not let him go.

"Unless you can show me a satisfactory reason for remaining," was his reply. She was trembling violently from head to foot.

"I cannot bear that you should leave me like this," she said in a low voice.

"It rests with you to say whether I am to go or not," said Paul in the same tone. She was looking straight into his eyes; but what she saw, for all that, was the unopened letter on the red table-cloth. She put out her hands as if to push him away from her, but he mistook her movement and grasped them both in his own.

"Don't, oh, don't!" she cried, struggling feebly to release herself.

"I want you to go away, please. I thought it was all over and that I should never see you again, and I was beginning to feel happy, just a little happy; and now you have come back, and you want it to begin all over again, and I can't let it,--I am not strong enough! Oh, won't you go, please?"

"If you send me, I will go," said Paul, and waited for her answer. But none came, and he laughed out triumphantly. She had never heard him laugh so thoroughly before.

"I knew you couldn't, you proud little person," he said, with a sudden tenderness in his smile. "The woman in you is so strong, is it not, Katharine? Ah, I know far more about you than you know yourself; but you don't believe that, do you? Shall I tell you why I came to you to-day? It was just to say to you that I could not live without you any longer. Isn't that strange? I have been brutally frank with you to-day, Katharine, there is not another woman in the world who would have taken it as you have done. I knew you would, before I came to you; and the knowledge gives me courage to tell you one thing more.

You know the failure of my attempt to marry for ambition; will you, in your sweetness, help me to marry for love?"

He dropped her hands and moved away from her. The delicacy of his action, slight though it was, appealed to her strongly. She turned her back to the table to avoid seeing the white letter on the red table-cloth.

"I cannot marry you," she said, hurriedly. "I would have been your slave a few months ago, but I cannot be your wife now."

Except for a tightening of his lips, he did not move a feature.

"That is not true; I cannot believe it," he said shortly.

"Why not?" she asked in a tired voice. She hoped he would not guess how near she was to submission.