The Making of a Prig Part 38

"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,

Ted."

The letter fell from her hand, and she turned and gazed blankly out of the window. The felt hat was no longer to be seen at the top of the hedge.

CHAPTER XX

High up in one of the houses on the shady side of the Rue Ruhmhorff, Katharine sat on her balcony and thought. Her reflections were of the desultory order begotten of early spring lethargy and early spring suns.h.i.+ne, relating to street cries innumerable and to the mingled scent of violets and asphalt in the air, to the children playing their perpetual game of hop-scotch on the white pavements, and to the artisan opposite who was mixing his salad by the open window with a nave disregard for the public gaze. Her pupils were all in the Bois under the able supervision of the excellent Miss Smithson, and there was temporary calm in the three _etages_ that formed Mrs. Downing's Parisian establishment for the daughters of gentlemen.

"Will he ever have done, I wonder?" speculated Katharine lazily. She was taking quite a languid interest in the progress of the salad, and smiled to herself when the man took off his blue blouse and attacked it afresh in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves. His wife joined him after a while, evidently, to judge from her emphatic gestures, with critical intent.

But the man received her volley of suggestions with an expressive shrug of the shoulders, and they finally went off to their mid-day meal.

"What pitiable jargon we talk, all the world over, about the triumph of mind over matter," murmured Katharine, yawning as she spoke. "And all the while matter goes on triumphing over mind on every conceivable occasion! It even gets into the street cries," she added with another yawn, as a flower vender came along the street below and sent up his minor refrain in unvarying repet.i.tion. "Des violettes pour embaumer la chambre," he chanted, "du cresson pour la sante du corps!"

It was more than a year since she had accepted Mrs. Downing's offer and settled here in Paris; more than a year since Ted had gone abroad and Paul Wilton had bidden her farewell. But she never looked back on those days now, though not so much from design as from lack of incentive; for her life had strayed into another channel, and her days were full of the kind of occupation that leaves no room for the luxury of reminiscence. It never even occurred to her to wonder whether she was happy or not; she seemed to have completely lost her old trick of wanting a reason for everything she thought or felt, and for the time being she had become eminently practical. Even now, in spite of the enervating effect of the first spring weather, her thoughts returned to the business of the moment, and she wondered why the father of her newest pupil, who had made an appointment with her for eleven o'clock, was so late in coming. A ring at the electric bell seemed to answer her thought, and the maid came in almost immediately with a gentleman's card on a tray.

"British caution," was Katharine's criticism, as Julie explained that the English monsieur had not attempted to teach her his name. By the merest chance she glanced at the card before her visitor came in, and was spared the annoyance of betraying the surprise she must otherwise have felt. As it was, she had time to recover from her astonishment, even to remark how different the familiar name and address seemed to her when, for the first time as now, she saw them transcribed on a visiting card,--"Mr. Paul Wilton, Ess.e.x Court, Temple."

"I am so glad to see you," she exclaimed, with a look that did not contradict the welcome in her voice. And Julie, who had never seen her mistress look so joyous before, went back to Marie in the kitchen with a highly coloured account of the meeting she had just witnessed, which explained to that frivolous but astute little person how it was that Madame always looked so leniently on her flirtations with the _charcutier_ round the corner.

"I have never caught you idling before," said Paul, referring to the att.i.tude in which he had seen her through the open door before she had turned round with that glad look in her eyes.

"I don't suppose you have," she said. "It isn't so very long since I learnt how to idle. Do you remember how bitterly you used to complain because I never wanted to lounge? I often lounge now; and my greatest joy is to think about nothing at all. Don't you know how restful it is to think about nothing at all?"

"You must have altered a good deal," he observed.

"Do you think I have, then?"

"Ask me that presently," he replied, with an answering smile. "I have got to hear all the news first,--how keeping school agrees with you, and everything there is to tell about yourself. So make haste and begin, please."

"Oh, there is nothing to tell about myself; at least, nothing more than you can learn from the prospectus! Would you like to see one? You can read it and learn what an important person I am, while I go and leave a message for Miss Smithson."

When she came back, he regarded her with a look of amused interest.

"This is a very novel sensation," he remarked.

"I am glad it amuses you," said Katharine; "but I never knew before that the prospectus was funny."

"Oh, no; it isn't that," he explained. "The humour of a prospectus is the kind of grim joke that could only be expected to appeal to a parent. What I meant was the fact of your appearing to me for the first time in the character of hostess."

"I wondered how it was that I did not feel so awed by your presence as usual," she remarked. "Now I know it is because you, even you, are sensible to the chastening atmosphere of the home of the young idea.

You had better come round the establishment at once, before the favourable impression begins to wear off."

"Oh, please!" he implored. "You will surely let me off? I haven't a daughter or a niece, or any kind of feminine relation who could be of the least commercial value to you. And I really don't feel equal to facing crowds of unsophisticated girls in short frocks, with pocket editions of their favourite poets in their hands. Girls of that age always expect you to be so well informed, and I haven't run a favourite poet for years."

"When you first met me," she said emphatically, "_I_ was an unsophisticated girl in a short frock, with a whole list of favourite poets. And I distinctly remember one occasion on which I bored you for half an hour with my views on Browning."

"I am not here to deny it," said Paul. "It is only an additional reason for my wis.h.i.+ng to stay and talk to you, now that you have ceased to have any views on any subject whatever. Besides, I exhausted the subject of unsophistication in short frocks when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, four years ago. And, interesting as I found it then, I have no particular wish to renew it now."