Kingsworth: or, The Aim of a Life

“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.

Chapter Fifteen

Love Lane

Emberance, meanwhile, had been welcomed home with great warmth by her mother and aunt, who had both missed her cheerful young presence, and set herself energetically to take up all her broken threads, and resume the little duties that had been interrupted by her long visit. Emberance taught at a Sunday school, and helped to manage a lending library, and a working party, besides ruling despotically over the caps and other ornaments of her mother and aunt, and being a leading spirit at a choral class in the neighbourhood.

She felt dull when she first came back; but she had too much sense and too much management of herself to fret and dawdle like poor Kate; there was no use, she thought, in thinking more of Malcolm than could be helped.

Her mother was disappointed at finding her so unaltered. She had vaguely hoped that “something might happen” to her daughter during her long absence, and when she could not gather that Emberance had received any offers, and seemed to take up her old life just where she left it, she hazarded a hint.

“At any rate, Emberance, I suppose the society you met at Kingsworth was very superior to the Fanchester set, – of course excepting the cathedral.”

“Well, yes, – in some ways perhaps; but we went out very little.”

“I dare say the young men were of a different stamp from any you could meet here?”

“They were more in the style of Mr Mackenzie,” said Emberance with a flush, which was a literal falsehood, however true in spirit; for neither Walter Kingsworth, nor Major Clare, nor Alfred Deane were at all in the style of her grave young Scot.

“Ah, you might forget that romance, for young Mackenzie is never likely to do much – ”

“How do you know, mother, – have you heard?” cried Emberance eagerly.

“Yes, his aunt was telling me the other day that he found it a bad speculation, – more capital was required than he could ever hope for.”

Emberance said nothing. She believed that the report was made the worst of for her benefit, and she did not think her Malcolm would give in so easily; but it cost her some hot stinging tears.

Oh, why – why did things go so ill with her? She wished most heartily that she was by Malcolm’s side, scrubbing the floor and cooking the dinner, while he felled trees and drove up cattle. She knew that she could have borne anything cheerfully then, but to wait and have her life spoiled, and no hope of sharing his – Emberance cried and chafed, and, for the first time, wished that she was heiress of Kingsworth. What good was the place to Kitty?

Emberance however rebuked herself for these thoughts by reflecting how wicked Malcolm would have thought them. Nor had she nearly so much time as Kate to indulge in sorrowful musings; for besides all her ordinary business, the Canon had her a good deal at his house, and, as her mother expressed it, “took very gratifying notice of her.”

She had originally met Malcolm Mackenzie at the house of his uncle, who was the principal doctor in Fanchester, and scraps of intelligence of a kind that was not very reassuring reached her from this source. Malcolm had arrived, and had written, but could not say that he saw his way much yet. He was afraid his little capital would not go very far, – still it was early days to despond, and he hoped for the best. If one thing failed, he should try another. Emberance knew that these discouraging facts were purposely brought to the hearing of the penniless girl with whom Malcolm had foolishly entangled himself. She felt miserable, and tried to distract her mind by enjoying to the utmost all her little gaieties; with the result of causing Mrs Mackenzie to write to her nephew that “Emberance Kingsworth was looking particularly well, and was much admired. She was a bit of a fine lady, and more than a bit of a flirt. It is very well for you, my dear boy, that there is no real engagement, – a most unfit girl for a settler’s wife.” And this assurance in more complimentary forms met Emberance very often.

She had been out one day for a walk with some of her girl friends, and coming back with them just at dusk, with the intention of giving them a cup of tea, she found the household in rather an unusual state of excitement.

“Well, Emmy,” her mother said, “it is a great pity that you were out. A friend of yours has been here to see you.”

“A friend of mine?” said Emberance, as she inquired into the state of the teapot. “Oh, Lily Wood, I suppose, she was coming to stay with her aunt.”

“No, my dear,” said Miss Bury, “one of your friends from Kingsworth.”

“Not Katie come already? I can’t guess, mamma; I hate guessing.”

“Well, my dear, it was Major Clare. He said that he was going to return shortly to his brother’s, and would be glad to take any message or parcel for you. A most agreeable person.”

There was a kind of consciousness in her mother’s manner which annoyed Emberance extremely. She was greatly surprised at Major Clare’s visit, and set it down to a possible desire to reopen relations with Katharine.

“I dare say he might like to have a message to take to Kingsworth,” she said in a tone intended to convey to her friends and to her mother that his interest was in another direction. “Where is he staying?” she added; “how did he come here?”

“He was staying, he said, in the neighbourhood, and would call again. Such pleasing manners!”

The Major had evidently created a favourable impression, and Emberance could not help being secretly flattered that he had sought her out, even with a view to renew his relations with Katharine.

The Major did call again, and Emberance also met him at Canon Kingsworth’s. He was very agreeable, and said very little about Kate, rather renewing that sort of manner which in the early days of Kingsworth had made Emberance doubt of his real intentions. She perceived that all her relations, including the Canon, regarded his appearance as significant; and indeed that excellent old gentleman would probably not have regarded a young lady’s change of mind towards a not very eligible suitor as a matter of great regret. And Emberance knew herself to be charming, the Major confirmed in her that sweet sense of the power of attraction, which is more intoxicating to a girl than the knowledge of beauty or any other personal advantage. It would take too long to tell all the little incidents, all the words, and half the glances that carried a vain man a little further than he had intended, and went far to turn the head of a vain girl.

Emberance looked prettier and took more trouble with her dress than usual during this important fortnight. But if she had a vain head she had an honest heart, and Major Clare’s former attentions to Katharine could not be forgotten. It was flattering to be preferred to her heiress-cousin; but still he had won Kate’s affections first, and Emberance never really contemplated his urging any serious suit upon her. Only it was pleasant to be known as the object of his attentions.

“I am a foolish, horrid girl,” thought Emberance, “and it is a mean thing to care about, but that’s all, and I am sure they are all mistaken in fancying he has any serious intentions. Besides, as if I would listen to any one but Malcolm. I never, never will.”

She was walking by herself home from the High Street, where she had gone to buy some little bit of finery, and down the lane that led by a short cut to the suburban district where she lived. It was only a dull lane, narrow and dirty, with a wall on one side and a close-clipped hedge on the other; but Emberance always chose it because it was here that she and Malcolm had met on the day when he had told her of his love and of his poverty, and asked her if she could bear to wait while he made his home, if she could put up with the weariness and the waiting that fell to the lot of a poor man’s betrothed.

“Oh, I can!” Emberance had answered warmly, and Love Lane or Hatchard’s Lane, as it was called, according to the tastes of the speaker, always brought her promise to her mind. She stopped a minute in her walk, and looked over the hedge across the cabbages in Hatchard’s market garden, and said to herself, —

“I’m not bearing it, I’m trying to escape it. I am giving in just as mother always said I should. And all because I like to feel that a man like Major Clare admires me. And I can’t even tell Malcolm that I am sorry.”

Tears filled her eyes and dimmed the long rows of cabbages. Emberance said a little prayer to herself, and made up her mind. She would stick to her true love and to her true self. Not bound indeed! Did not her conscience bind her?

“Ah, Miss Kingsworth, good morning. I am just coming from your house. Mrs Kingsworth gave me a hope of meeting you.”

Emberance turned with a violent blush to see Major Clare standing beside her.

“Is this a favourite walk of yours?” he said as she gave him a confused greeting.

“Yes,” said Emberance, “it is.”

“From a fine sense of natural beauty?” said Major Clare, lightly.

“No,” said Emberance, as bluntly as Kate could have, spoken. “It’s not pretty. But I don’t care about that.”

“Indeed, there are times when outward beauty makes very little difference to us!”

“Yes,” said Emberance, “but it would not do for me to think very much about places being pretty, – or particularly comfortable, because, – because I’m not likely to live in pretty or comfortable places.”

“Why, how so?” said Major Clare, surprised.

“Because,” said Emberance, looking straight before her, “a girl who hopes to be a settler’s wife mustn’t care about comforts. I am engaged to be married, Major Clare. I —I prefer to tell my friends about it, but mother would rather nothing was said, as we expect to wait for a long time first. But my uncle knows it, and Katharine.”

She made her little speech in a ladylike and dignified manner, though her face was crimson, and she wished that the old wall would tumble down and hide her.

Of course her motive in the confidence could not but be apparent enough, hard as she had tried to hide it; and Major Clare felt a pang of intense vexation as he felt that a second time his tale had been stopped before it was uttered. But he kept his counsel.

“Indeed! allow me to congratulate you,” he said lightly. “You have kept your secret well, Miss Kingsworth; no one would have guessed it.”

“I was desired to keep it,” said Emberance, ashamed. “Please do not mention it in Fanchester.”

“Of course,” said Major Clare, “I feel your confidence an honour, – most undeserved, I am sure, and unexpected.”

Emberance hated the Major more intensely as they walked down the remaining bit of Love Lane together than she had ever hated any one in her life. He had carried off the rebuff cleverly, and had stung her too keenly to allow her to perceive that he was stung also.

They wished each other good morning cheerfully and courteously, and parted at the lane’s end. Emberance hurried home feeling rather small and foolish; but with a sense of relief predominating. She was duly asked if she had met the Major, and after a little preamble her mother said, —

“It is very pleasant to meet any one who is so discriminating. He is well acquainted with all our family history, and takes a very proper view of it.”

“Mamma, what have you been saying to him?” cried Emberance vehemently and rather disrespectfully.

“Nothing, I assure you, that he did not know before. He only expressed his sympathy with us, and said that your unconsciousness of any wrong couldn’t hide how well you were fitted – in short, one couldn’t help seeing that he thought you would make a much better heiress than Kate.”

Emberance stood for a moment with her hat in her hand.

“Then,” she said, with much emphasis, “he is worse than any villain in a book.”

She walked away without further explanation, and Major Clare vanished from the lives of Emberance and Katharine Kingsworth.

He returned to India still unmarried, – still faithful, his brother said, to his first love. And perhaps he was so, but his efforts to replace her, and his love of producing an impression had made a crisis in the life and in the character of the two Kingsworth cousins.