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“No; I didn’t think about that at all. But I was puzzled and ashamed.”

“No – no,” he said eagerly, “you must not feel as if you were guilty. What chance have you had, a child – and kept ignorant of it all – of feeling the wrong or doing anything to rectify it?”

“Rectify it? How could I? It is all done.”

Walter could have bitten his tongue out for his imprudence.

“Oh, I did not mean to make a suggestion,” he said hurriedly.

“Every one means something they will not say. What? do you mean that I could give it back to Emberance?”

“No – no – I meant nothing. I have no right to say anything of the kind to you.”

“But you can tell me what you would do in my place. Could you give it up? would you give it up?”

“I don’t know. How can I tell how I should act under such a trial?” said Walter, feeling himself in a great scrape.

“But do you think a good person would give it up? Would that make it all right again? Walter, I will know if you think it would be right.”

“Well, yes, for myself – for a perfectly independent agent – I think I should not find much satisfaction in keeping it – I hope not. But a lady – that is perhaps different.”

“Why!” said Kate, to his great surprise, as her mother’s step sounded, “that would be very easy! I did not know that I could!”

Chapter Thirteen
The Real Sacrifice

Major Clare sat by the fire in his brother’s study at the Vicarage, smoking a cigar, and reflecting on the course of events. He had gone from home with a half intention of delaying that course of events, and he had returned with another half intention of precipitating it.

With much affection on both sides, he was getting tired of his stay at the Vicarage, and his brother’s family were perhaps beginning to feel that they had suited all their arrangements to him for a long enough time.

“It would be such a good thing for Robert to marry and settle,” and Robert himself thought so too. It was many a long year since that great unsettlement had come to him when things had gone wrong with his first hopes, and he could not have the girl he wanted. He had tried to fall in love several times since, and he was trying now, moved certainly by Kate’s fair fortune, and yet not quite mercenary enough to be indifferent to the want of spontaneous pleasure in his wooing. If either face could have recalled to him that never-forgotten one, it would not have been Kate’s. He had idly wished that the cousins would change places in the beginning of their acquaintance, but he could not allow himself to wish it now; and had indeed fully made up his mind to the piece of good fortune that seemed to have fallen at his feet – only, he was not in a hurry to secure it. Nevertheless it was dull, and he should like to see Kate blush and brighten at the sight of him.

So he discovered that Minnie wanted to go up to Kingsworth, and prepared to escort her thither.

Walter Kingsworth meanwhile had been seized with a fit of compunction and alarm, at the idea he had suggested to the unprepared mind of his cousin; the lawyer and the man of business awoke within him, as he reflected on the responsibility he had incurred in driving to a hasty resolution a girl so inexperienced as Kate.

He reflected on this, it is to be feared, all through the afternoon service to which he accompanied his cousins, and afterwards as they walked along the road till their ways divided, he caught a chance of saying, —

“Miss Kingsworth, you must not suppose I meant to say that any special line of conduct is incumbent on you. So imperfectly knowing the circumstances, how can I judge?”

“You can’t put the idea out of my head, now that you have put it in, cousin Walter,” said Kate, with blunt gravity. “But I shall not be of age for thirteen months, so I have plenty of time to think about it.”

And she did think about it with a new reticence that proved her to be, after all, her mother’s daughter. Slowly she recognised that she must make her own decision, that she did stand alone. She read her uncle’s letter over again, and saw that it was framed so as not to exclude the possibility of any decision. She was still child enough not to care very much about the position she would sacrifice, “for I might make mamma promise not to go back to Applehurst,” she thought, but the view that came to her most forcibly, perhaps from a sort of unconscious opposition to the pressure of her mother’s feelings, was that by declaring herself the false heiress, she might be doing a wrong to her father’s memory. “It would make people sure he had cheated, and perhaps, after all, he did not,” she thought, and then suddenly there came over her hard struggle for wisdom and sense, a thought so sweet, so absorbing, that all her trouble seemed to melt away in the warmth of it. If Major Clare were her lover, then he would know what was right. If she could tell him– poor Kate’s heart went out with a yearning longing desire, and it never struck her then that in honour, he ought to be told of her doubts if ever in real truth he were her lover. Never – till in some novel that she was reading, the plot turned on such a concealment. “Should I be a ‘villain’ if I didn’t tell him that perhaps I mean to give it up?” she thought. “Dear me, I had no idea how easy it was to be wicked! How he would despise me!”

Poor Katharine had not much notion of that other and Higher Counsel, which her uncle’s letter had advised her to seek. She had been taught to be dutiful and reverent; but it did not occur to her that “saying her prayers” would help her in her present trouble, though as she scrupulously asked in the unaltered language of her childhood to be “made good,” and helped to obey her mother, she found perhaps more guidance than she knew.

And then Major Clare came back, and in the glow and brightness of his increased attention, Kate was too happy to think of anything else, definitely or long. Emberance was wide awake now, and scrupulously careful not to interfere, and as Minnie and Rosa Clare were equally on the alert, opportunities did not lack. To go to the Vicarage and help to cover books for the Lending Library was a piece of parochial usefulness that even Mrs Kingsworth could not forbid to her young ladies, and if Uncle Bob did hang about with his newspaper, till he finally discarded it, and pasted and papered, with a firmness and handiness astonishing to the young ladies, it could only be regarded as good nature to his nieces – nay, between dining-room and drawing-room, mixing paste and getting afternoon tea, if a tête-à-tête could have been avoided, at least it did not seem unnatural.

Not unnatural, only intensely important, more important than anything in the world to Kate, and strangely silencing and embarrassing to the Major, as he looked at the little figure kneeling on the hearth-rug, stroking the Vicarage cat, with the firelight reddening and brightening her hair, and the uncertain light or her uncertain feeling, softening her fresh rosy face.

“Well,” said Major Clare, “I never thought to paste my fingers in Rosa’s service.”

“You paste better than any of us.”

“Masculine superiority?”

“I suppose so,” said the straightforward Kate.

“Do you think it has been a very dull day?” said Major Clare, coming nearer, and leaning his arms on the mantelpiece, “though we have been employed in such a dull occupation?”

“I haven’t been dull at all.”

“Nor I. Kate, do you think I have been pasting books to please Rosa?”

“Haven’t you?”

“No, indeed – shall I tell you what brought me? shall I tell you what I hope may be the end of a wandering homeless life?”

She looked up with that in her eyes, which, had he met them, must have brought the scene to a point at once, and given it a very different ending. But he was looking into the fire, and went on with a sort of sense that explanation was her due – went on talking of himself. “There has always been a great want in my life, and I’m grown old. I want to tell you something that a younger fellow would have got out in half the time. Has a battered old soldier any right to think his story would interest you?”

“I don’t think you’re old,” said Kate, abruptly, “but I ought, I want to tell you something first.”

Poor child, in the last word she showed that she understood him, as half with a longing for his counsel, half with a sense of honour towards himself, she said, “You know, I suppose, all the story about my father and Emberance’s.”

“I do not care a straw for old scandals.”

“They’re not scandals, at least mamma says it is true. So I am not sure if when I come of age – I ought not to give it back – I haven’t decided. But they say it is mine only through – a cheat.”

“Who has filled your mind with such a ridiculous scruple?” exclaimed the Major in rather unloverlike tones.

“No one, but I haven’t decided, only if I do decide that Kingsworth ought to belong to Emberance, I shall give it to her. That’s all.”

She spoke with a blunt simplicity, that jarred on Major Clare. If she had been woman enough to care for him, he thought she could not have checked his love tale with her scruple. She paused, half choked with the effort of speaking, and a sudden whirl of temptation seized the Major’s soul – Emberance! Emberance the heiress! What then? What did the child mean? Was there a flaw in her title? He hesitated and was silent, and forgot that the child was a woman after all, though in her very simplicity unable to understand a doubt.

She saw the test that she had never meant for a test, tell its tale. She knew the sacrifice that honour demanded, she knew how she must suffer for her father’s sin.

“He only cared for Kingsworth!” she thought, “he doesn’t love me!” and without giving Major Clare a moment’s time to achieve the self-conquest, on which he would probably have resolved, without letting him adjust his thoughts or his feelings, she sprang up from the hearth-rug.

“You needn’t tell me the rest of your story now. I don’t want to hear any more of it. I shall go to tea,” and she fled from him before he could say a word. She threw away her chance, where an older or more prudent woman would have kept it. The question was if it were worth keeping. He did not rush after her, and catch her, and silence all her doubts with one vehement protest, but he stamped his foot with anger at her impatience and want of confidence, and believed that he would have been true to her had she given him the chance.

Kate rushed into the drawing-room because it was the easiest way of escape from him, and not till she was there in the midst of the group of girls did she become conscious that she was trembling, and almost sobbing, hardly able to make a pretence of composure.

“Where’s Uncle Bob?” said Minnie.

Kate murmured something about the dining-room. Emberance glanced at her, and said, —

“Kitty, we mustn’t stay for tea, it is so dark, let us go home. Come, – come and put your hat on.”

Rosa and Minnie were not so utterly devoid of expectation that “something might have happened,” as to offer any objection to this proposal, and Kate hurried away with scarcely a word of farewell. She sped along the lane, still in silence, and Emberance thought it better not to speak to her, though much at a loss to know what could have passed. Surely no happy emotion could take such a form as this, such bitter sobs could not come of any mere excitement and agitation.

“Kitty, my darling,” she said at length, “what has happened to you?”

Kate turned round on her, and said passionately and bitterly, —

“Nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“No – but oh! I hate myself, and despise myself! I wish I could drown myself,” cried Katharine in her agony. “Have you quarrelled with Major Clare?”

“No!”

“Refused him?”

“No – oh no!” cried Kate, “never, never speak about him any more.”

Her grief was so violent, and in its free expression seemed so childish, that Emberance had no scruple in following her to her room, and in trying to soothe and comfort her; and for some minutes Kate sat with her head on her cousin’s lap, and sobbed as if her heart would break. At last she seemed to gather herself together, ceased crying, and sat up, gazing into the fire with a strange dreary look, as the quivering mouth grew still and set itself into harder lines.

“Emmy,” she said, “I’ve been a silly girl. He doesn’t care for me, he liked Kingsworth.”

“I don’t think you have been at all silly in thinking Major Clare liked you. Any one would have thought so,” said Emberance, warmly.

Kate turned and kissed her, while Emberance went on.

“But how can you tell – how can you possibly tell that he doesn’t really care about you? What makes you think so?”

“I don’t think I can tell you,” said Kate; “but I do know that he meant – meant to marry me because – I was rich. No, I cannot tell you how I found it out.”

“Oh, Kitty, are you sure? I don’t think it can have been all that.”

“Well, it is enough if it was partly that,” said Kate disdainfully, “I will never listen to him any more.” Emberance was puzzled, she could not tell how the discovery had come about, and moreover, she guessed that the facts were more complicated than Kate supposed. She saw that Kate was angry, and sore, and miserable, full of pain and disappointment; but she doubted if the very depths of her heart had been touched, thinking that if so, she would have been more ready to find excuses for her lover.

“Kate,” she said, “sometimes I have felt doubtful whether Major Clare was quite in earnest. I think he is rather a flirt, do you know?”

“No, he is a fortune-hunter,” said Kate, with great decision. She cried again as she spoke. It was a bitter experience even if it might have been bitterer still.

“Mamma is right,” she said, “it is hateful to be rich or to care about it.”

She kept her secret, Emberance could not tell what had passed, and Kate never told her, and never talked about her disappointment any more. She held her tongue, and felt brave and strong in her anger. Her mother hoped that the change in her ways showed that she was reflecting on her position altogether, and Kate said no word, not even when she heard that Major Clare had gone away on another visit. She was too straightforward to have expected him to try again to “deceive her,” as she called it; but as she stood alone, and looked out towards the Vicarage, there came over the poor child all in a minute the weariest feeling of wishing that he had. There came to her a moment, when if Major Clare had been beside her and spoken tenderly to her again, she would not have cared about asking the reason, would not, could not have turned away, – a moment when all her scruples seemed utterly valueless, compared to the love that they had cost her. Kate could not know that the sick pain of that hour of ungratified yearning was a light price to pay for the inheritance of her mother’s honesty which had saved her from her mother’s fate.

Chapter Fourteen
Mother and Daughter

Major Clare did not come back to the Vicarage, and Minnie and Rosa ceased to talk much of him to their friend. Katharine never knew with what explanation he had satisfied his family as to the cessation of their intercourse, nor for that matter did his nieces, while “She won’t do, Charley, I can’t work it this time,” had been the brief explanation with which he had disappointed his brother’s hopes on his behalf. The Vicar feared that Miss Kingsworth must be disappointed, and his daughters were sure of it, as they observed the change in Kate’s girlish gaiety. After much debate as to whether matters had gone far enough for a word or two of explanation to be Katharine’s due, Mrs Clare, a kind gentle person, resolved on confiding to Emberance the story of Major Clare’s youthful disappointment, as the kindest way to both parties of accounting for his supposed vacillation, ending with, “You see, my dear, he never can forget poor Alice, who was made to refuse him because of his poor prospects. And then his manners are so engaging.”

“I think,” said the prudent Emberance, with due regard for her cousin’s dignity, “that Katharine found out the nature of Major Clare’s attentions for herself. I don’t think he altered or dropped them. I believe her mind is quite made up. And she is very young. I don’t at all think Aunt Mary would wish her to many yet,” concluded Emberance, as if she had been Kate’s maiden aunt at least.

Mrs Clare, a little embarrassed, murmured something about “a little passing experience,” and Emberance, after some hesitation, decided on telling Kate what had been said.

“Oh yes,” said Kate, quietly, “I know all about that Alice; he told me – once, just down by Widow Sutton’s gate, when we were gathering the last blackberries. He said – other things – I don’t want to repeat them.”

“Dear Kitty, I hope you won’t be very dull and unhappy, after I have gone.”

“I suppose I shall be unhappy,” said Kate, “there’s plenty to make me so.”

She cried a little as she spoke, in a half melancholy, half impatient way.

“But you’ll come after Christmas and stay with Uncle Kingsworth, and then we shall see each other again?”

“Oh yes, and I shall be as tired of Kingsworth as I used to be of Applehurst. Nothing turns out well for mamma and me.”

Indeed, when Emberance, reluctantly enough, went home for Christmas, Katharine felt as if all the unsatisfactoriness of the old Applehurst life had returned, added to the new dreariness that hung over Kingsworth.

Strange puzzle, while the mother sat longing and praying that her child might have strength to sacrifice her worldly prospects to her sense of truth, the daughter felt that the sacrifice had all been made already, and that to push the burden away would be likely to come in the light of a relief.

She had lost her lover, and had in fact discovered that she had never inspired him with any real affection; and life with her mother at Kingsworth seemed but a dreary prospect. She hated the responsibilities in which she was involved, and was altogether vexed, disappointed and unhappy.

But perhaps the very fact that life had opened to her in so many aspects all at once, had prevented one of them from being utterly overpowering. Her feelings had not had time to become full grown, and as she read a story of an utterly heart-broken maiden, she thought to herself, —

“After all, I don’t feel quite like this.”

And happily, it never occurred to Kate that it was a pity that she did not.

She was quite enough to be pitied, poor little thing, under the weight of her troubles, even if her heart was only three quarters broken.

“I think, Katie,” said her mother, one morning when she had been for some time watching her listless attitude, “that you find it as possible to be dull at Kingsworth as at Applehurst.”

“I suppose,” said Kate, “that one may be dull anywhere? Aren’t you ever dull, mamma?”

“No,” said Mrs Kingsworth, “I don’t think I am ever quite what you call dull. Of course I don’t mean to say that I find life always enjoyable.”

“You care more for reading and that sort of thing than I do,” said Kate.

“Yes, Katie, but even a love of intellectual pursuits is not enough by itself. There is only one thing that can keep up one’s interest in life, – that it should be filled by an earnest purpose.”

“You mean trying to be good,” said Kate, with less impatience than her mother’s formal sentences awoke within her in general.

Mrs Kingsworth felt a little rebuked, she hardly knew why.

“Every one is called to some duty,” she said, “I meant the strict fulfilment of that. It is a call to arms.”

There was a slight ring in the mother’s voice that might have seemed more proper to the girl, but then, much as such a view would have astonished Kate, the old Canon was wont to say that “Mary had kept herself shut up till she was just as romantic as a girl of eighteen.” Perhaps her high-mindedness with all its defects had kept her heart young. She went on, her eyes kindling.

“Each soldier has his post, it is dishonour to desert it; we have a post in life, a special duty, if we shrink from it we are deserters, cowards, while the sense that we are at our guard is quite enough to atone for any amount of dulness as you call it, or, I should say, for any sacrifice.”

Kate made no answer, she was conscious of no such glow of self-satisfaction.

“But we cannot fight each other’s battles,” continued Mrs Kingsworth, “and sometimes a good soldier has to see the breach that he would have given his life to defend left open by another.”

She spoke in her usual concentrated earnest manner, and Kate having now the clue to these utterances was seized with a sudden impulse of impatience, and forgot her own determination not to commit herself, and the Canon’s advice to use her own unbiassed judgment.

“I am sure, mamma,” she said, hastily, “if you mean that you want me very much to give up Kingsworth, I don’t care a fig about it. I had much rather be quit of it now, and go away and have an easy mind to enjoy myself. I’m sure I wish it was buried in the sea!”

Mrs Kingsworth could hardly believe her ears, she started from her seat, with fleeting colour and throbbing heart. Could it be that the burden of years would be let slip at last?

“Kate, you mean it!” she said, breathlessly.

“Yes,” said Katharine, with the petulant languor of her fretted spirits. “I don’t care about it, I had much rather not have all the trouble of looking after the poor people.”

“You mean that you will make restitution – give it back to Emberance?”

“I’m sure I would if there was an end of all the bother about it!”

Mrs Kingsworth sat down again in silence. Was it true? was it possible? Was her long purpose coming to its fulfilment? Was the desire of her life fulfilled at last? Would she really soon lie down to sleep and feel that the burden had rolled away, that the great deed was done?

Katharine sat pulling at a knot in her silk. She was a little flushed and frowning, but not looking much as if she had come to the crucial moment of her life.

“You see it all now?” said her mother.

“I don’t know – I had much rather get rid of it all. That is, if it isn’t wrong.”

“Wrong?”

Kate was silent; she knew quite well that in yielding to her impatience of her mother’s hints, to her dread of the associations of her brief love story, and to the general weariness of her unsatisfactory life, she had acted entirely against the spirit of her uncle’s letter, and had relapsed into the childish love of ease and submission to her mother’s ascendancy, out of which she had been dimly struggling.

“There is no use in my saying anything till I’m twenty-one,” she said.

“But you will not retract, Katharine, you will not fall again into temptation? Give me your promise – surely I may ask for that now.”

“No, mamma,” said Kate, “I won’t promise. I’d rather get rid of it, a great deal, especially if you promise me not to go back to Applehurst. But all the same, I had better not promise, for that would be the same thing as doing it now. I’ll wait till I’m one-and-twenty.”

“But you wish now to restore it?”

“Oh yes, I’m sure it has been no good to me,” said Kate, and gathering up her work, she left the room.

Then Mrs Kingsworth rose and walked about, too restless to sit still. How often had she pictured to herself the bliss of this moment, the finding herself at one with her daughter, the cessation of the perpetual doubt of the girl’s worthiness, the joy of the united act of restitution, the peace of the ill-gotten wealth laid down. And now was it the newness of the relief, or what? she could not be sensible of this unwonted rapture, nor realise that Katharine was not a disappointment.

As for Katharine, she felt rather self-reproachful, and conscious of having acted in a fit of impatience, conscious too that a trifle might make her think and feel differently. Neither lady realised that the carrying out of the plan would involve considerable delay and difficulty. Katharine thought that she had only to tell her uncle the resolution she had come to, and then pack up her things and leave Emberance in possession; while Mrs Kingsworth had thought so much more of Katharine being willing to make restitution than of the restitution itself that she had thought very little of the process.

The projected visit to Fanchester did not however take place till March, for Mrs Kingsworth caught cold just before they had intended to start, and for the first time within Kate’s recollection was confined to her room for some weeks, and though not ill enough to cause any alarm, was sufficiently so to be unable to take a journey in the winter. She did not care very much for Kate’s attendance, and the girl was left more to herself than had ever been the case before. Major Clare did not reappear, and though she walked out with the girls at the Vicarage and saw a good deal of them, there was a check on the fervour of her friendship for them.

She was just as idle, just as often dull, just as eager for a bit of gaiety it seemed as ever, no worthier a creature so far as her mother could see than before she had resolved on the act of reparation.

And yet, under all the surface of vexation and weariness, and balked desire of a pleasanter life, there was a tiny bit of self-respect in Kate’s heart that had not been there formerly.

She had followed her poor little fluctuating uncertain conscience at the most critical moment of her life, she had done the best she knew. She had been open and honest, and she would have been a worse girl if she had stifled her instinct of telling Major Clare the truth, though she fancied now that she would have been a much happier one.

But this her mother could not know, and as Katharine did not try much to conquer and did not succeed at all in concealing her discontent and impatience, she was not likely to find it out.