The Career of Katherine Bush

"How wonderful," said Katherine.

"Good day, Jacob! – The family well? Jane quite recovered from the chicken-pox, eh?"

"Quite well, Your Ladyship," and the old man's wandering eyes were fixed in adoration upon his mistress's face. "And Your Ladyship's godchild, Sarah, is growing that knowing my daughter can hardly keep her from the front garden."

"I am delighted to hear it. I shall be stopping in to see you to-morrow, tell Mrs. Peterson. This is my new secretary, Miss Bush, Jacob – you will know her again, won't you?"

"I'll try to, Your Ladyship," a little doubtfully, and he bowed deeply as the motor rolled on along a beautiful drive through the vast park, with its groups of graceful deer peering at them from under the giant trees.

Katherine was taking in the whole scene, the winter day, and the brown earth, and the blue sky, and the beauty of it all!

Yes – this sort of thing was what must be hers some day when she had fitted herself to possess it. They came to another gate – and yet another – iron ones with no lodges, and then they swept through a wide avenue with sprucely kept edges and so on up to the front door.

It was a long irregular building which Katherine saw, principally built in the middle of the seventeenth century, and added to from time to time. It was very picturesque, and when they were inside, the hall proved to be very fine. It was huge and square and panelled with some good Grinling Gibbons carving, and quantities of indifferently painted ancestors, for the most part in stiff peers' robes. – They had been a distinguished crew, not of the fox-hunting type.

"These are my people, Miss Bush, not Garribardines," Her Ladyship said, pointing to the portraits. "They were not handsome, as you see, and evidently did not encourage the best artists – the few who did are in the other rooms and the picture gallery. Come, we will go straight in to lunch; I am as hungry as a schoolboy – You will lunch with me."

Bronson had gone down much earlier and was awaiting them with two footmen, as dignified as usual.

The dining-room was in a panelled passage to the right and was a long, low room of much earlier date.

"A relic incorporated later in the present structure," Katherine was told.

It was perfectly beautiful, she thought, with its deep brown oak, wax polished to the highest lustre, and its curtains of splendid Venetian velvet in faded crimson and green, on a white satin ground all harmonious with age and mellowing.

"I had a terrible struggle to oust the Victorian horrors I had been brought up with, and which had insinuated themselves, as all vulgar things do, into almost every room among their betters – taste was quite dead sixty years ago in my father's day. I had to combat sentiment in myself and ruthlessly condemn the whole lot."

"It is most beautiful." Katherine's admiration was indeed sincere.

"Yes – it has been a great pleasure to me getting it perfect. You shall see the whole house presently, but now food is the only important matter. – Bronson – I distrust the look of that ham soufflé – are you sure it has not been kept waiting? A second or two alters its consistency. Take it away at once, man!" – with an indignant sniff – "and tell François never to hazard so precarious a dish again for arrivals by motor!"

"Very good, Your Ladyship."

"One can eat bread and cheese, but one cannot stomach an indifferent soufflé – it is like an emotional woman, its charm is just as capricious and just as ephemeral!"

The rest of the lunch was to her taste and no further disapproval was expressed.

It was the first time Katherine had broken bread with her mistress, or indeed had even assisted at a whole luncheon. Coffee was the extent of her knowledge hitherto. It interested her to see the varied dishes, to watch the perfect service, the style of the placing and removing of the plates – the rapidity and noiselessness of it all. She thought of the pressed beef and the stout and the cheese-cakes and the frightful untidiness of everything at Laburnum Villa. That was the strange difference, the utter want of method and order which always rendered the home table a mass of litter and miscellaneous implements towards the end of a repast, plates and cups pushed here and there and everywhere.

How very good to be out of it all!

To her great surprise, Her Ladyship drank beer – clear golden stuff poured from a lovely crystal and silver jug into a chased silver tankard.

"The best beverage in Christendom!" that epicure said, as she quaffed it. "Have some, Miss Bush. You are young enough to have no dread of gout. It is a vice with me, the worst thing in the world for my rheumatism, and yet I cannot resist the temptation! The day I return home I must fall to my tankard! To-morrow, Bronson removes the accursed thing to the sideboard, out of sight, and I keep up my courage on ridiculously thin Zeltinger."

Katherine tasted it; it was delicious, and as different from what she knew as beer as the tea had been from her original idea of tea.

"Isn't it a heavenly drink, girl! I am glad to see you like it."

Then Lady Garribardine chatted on, giving crisp, witty descriptions of the village and the inhabitants, in language which would often have shocked the genteel sensibilities of Mabel Cawber, but the tones of her voice, whether loud or soft, were the dulcet tones of angels. She had indeed that "excellent thing in woman."

Katherine's workroom was the old schoolroom up in a wing which contained rooms as ancient as the dining-room, and her bedroom adjoined it; and from this a little passage led to a narrow staircase going down to a door which opened into the small enclosed rose garden. Up another set of steps from her corridor you were brought into the splendid gallery which ran round two sides of the hall, and into which Her Ladyship's own rooms gave. But in Katherine's corner she was isolated and could come and go abroad without ever passing the general living rooms – what an advantage, she felt!

And when, later in the afternoon, her things were unpacked, and she was sitting before a glorious wood fire in the old chimney, sniffing the scent of the burning logs and taking in the whole picture of quaint chintz and shining oak, she felt a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

Fate was indeed treating her handsomely.

CHAPTER XIII

Katherine saw nothing more of her employer on the Saturday, but on the Sunday morning a message came to say she would expect her to go to church with her. As no mention of church had ever been made in London, Katherine was quite unprepared for this, and was obliged to scurry to be ready.

"In the country and at one's home, one must always go to church, Miss Bush," she was informed when they were in the motor. "It is tradition again."

Then there was silence until they were almost at the door.

"It is rather a fine little church, with some good tombs of my ancestors in it, prolific people who seemed to have married either widows with like proclivities, or to have commemorated their own marital achievements. – There are two very curious monuments, one of a marriage with about seven or eight children behind both the man and the woman, proofs of their former activities, and another of a second pair with numerous olive branches owned mutually. They were of an enchanting ingenuousness in those days. You will face these figures during the sermon. You can examine them, a not unpleasing pastime I used to find it in my youth."

Lady Garribardine's walk from the church was a kind of triumphal progress. All the faces of the clustering local groups beamed with joy and welcome for her – she had a word and a nod for everyone and to Katherine's amusement stopped threateningly in front of a biggish boy who was handling a bandanna handkerchief.

"If I hear one sniffle, Thomas Knoughton – out you go! – It is a habit you have got into, flaunting these colds every time I get home. I won't put up with it!"

"Very good, Yer Leddyship," the boy returned stolidly, pulling his forelock.

It was evident to be seen that their Lady Bountiful was held in deep respect by her tenants. The service was quite cheerful and merry with Christmas music from a fine organ, one of the patroness's gifts, and the monuments were certainly diverting, Henry VII and Edward VI costumes carved in stone adorning meek-faced women and grave men.

When they came out, a number of the local farmers and their wives had to be greeted. Lady Garribardine seemed to know all their domestic affairs, and to wield an absolute dominion over them. She was kindly and autocratic, and not in the least condescending; they evidently loved her dearly.

Katherine stood by respectfully, and once or twice her mistress said, "This is my new secretary, Miss Bush," with a wave of her hand.

Apparently the bounties and teas and Christmas feasting being prepared for everyone knew no bounds by what Katherine heard discussed.

As they motored back Her Ladyship said:

"Now, before lunch I want you for an hour to explain the country duties to you as I explained the London ones – and this afternoon you must see over the house. Mrs. Illingworth will show you round, and to-morrow I have to start very early to see my poor people – You have those lists copied out, have you not?"

Katherine lunched alone in her sitting-room and before her inspection of the house began she went for a little walk. The old park delighted her, the sense that it was not public property gave her pleasure. She could go for miles, it seemed, upon the soft turf, or along the smooth avenues, without meeting a soul. There was something in her nature which enjoyed this isolation from the common herd.

"I believe if it were mine I should dislike even a right of way!" she said to herself.

She stopped close to some deer; they were so tame they hardly started from her. The whole place, when she came to a rising ground and could look back at the house, exalted her in some strange way. The atmosphere of it was so different from anything which she had been accustomed to. It was no wonder that people living in such houses should have wider scopes of imagination than the inhabitants of Bindon's Green with every little semi-detached villa watching the habits of its neighbour. She made up her mind that she would study Lady Garribardine's methods with her people for her own future guidance. The perfect certainty with which she looked forward to obtaining the same sort of situation was almost sublime!

When her inspection of the house came her feelings were further stirred; there was a great bump of veneration in her for ancient things. Her artistic sensibilities which had not yet been as awakened as her practical ones now began to assert themselves. She felt she must read books upon architecture, and learn the dates and styles of furniture. She admired, but she was conscious that she had not yet sufficiently cultivated critical faculties to appreciate fully. Her tour opened a new field of study for her – a new consciousness of her own ignorance, and a new determination to acquire the necessary knowledge on these points.

Ever since her outing with Lord Algy, she had been aware that mere book-learning is not enough. There were many things of interest in life that she would never have heard of or realised the existence of but for that first opening to her imagination.

Mr. Strobridge would be an invaluable teacher, but she must get up a few technical points first. She would at once ask her mistress if she might take some books from the library, up to her sitting-room for the evening. She would immediately look up the bald facts in the Encyclopedia to begin with, and then study individual volumes. Then there were the painters and the sculptors to learn about more fully, although she had often gone to the galleries and museums in London, but not with what – she now knew, after her inspection of this home where for hundreds of years the owners had been cultivated collectors – was a critical eye. She felt as if the key to understanding had only just been given to her. Even the housekeeper (not Mrs. Pepperdon of Berkeley Square, but this elderly, portly Mrs. Illingworth) knew more about the beauties that she was showing off than she did. This state of ignorance must not continue for even a week!

Permission was accorded about the books when Lady Garribardine looked into the secretary's room before her tea – and until three o'clock in the morning this indefatigable young woman kept her lights on, cramming facts into her head – and then when her work was over before lunch next day she walked again through the picture gallery and the big drawing-rooms to see if she had mastered anything. The picture gallery was filled with early and late Italian works, and some fine specimens of Spanish Renaissance as well as English portraits. She found that with even this much knowledge gained she had already grown more appreciative, but she realised that it was a question of training her eye as well as her brain.

The guests were all to arrive on Christmas Eve and a message came for Katherine that she was to come down and pour out the tea for them, because "Her Ladyship's hand was very rheumatic."

She had been extremely occupied with the dispatching of parcels of presents and various matters all the afternoon. This would be an occasion to wear the grey blouse again, and she had discovered that the becoming waves upon her brow could be achieved also by water and combing, so she would not be at the mercy of a hairdresser in the future for her improved looks!

She was seated behind the tea-table in the library when the first batch of the visitors arrived by train. Mr. Strobridge and Lady Beatrice were motoring; the three grandchildren and their attendants had come early in the afternoon.

The party consisted of the two old maiden cousins, the Misses d'Estaire by name, and a young niece of theirs, and two or three stray men, and Mrs. Delemar. Katherine attended to their wants and watched the whole scene – no one had greeted her, but whoever chanced to be near her exchanged a friendly word; Mrs. Delemar was even gracious, it was her way always to be polite to everyone.

How easy they all were! No stiffness, no self-consciousness, and one of the men was quite witty and the young Miss d'Estaire a most lively modern girl. Katherine enjoyed herself although she never spoke unless spoken to, and then returned monosyllabic answers.

When they had all been chaffing and eating quantities of muffins and buns and blackberry jam and cream for half an hour, Gerard Strobridge and his wife came in.

"We have had the most deplorable journey, Aunt Sarah," Lady Beatrice announced plaintively. "A judgment upon one for travelling with one's husband. Gerard would drive, and of course collided with a milestone, and injured one of the wheels so that the tire, which broke, took hours to put on again and I was frozen with cold."

Everyone sympathised with her, while Mr. Strobridge only smiled complacently and asked Katherine for some tea.

"As you can guess, I shall require it very hot and very strong to keep my courage up after these reproaches," and he smiled as though to say, "I am sure you understand."

Katherine attended to him gravely; she was purposely the stiff secretary, aloof and uninterested in what was going on; Mr. Strobridge rather wondered at it, and it piqued him a little, but the lady who had been asked for his special delectation had no intention of allowing him any leisure to converse with anyone else. She gave him one of her ravishing smiles, moved her dress a little to make room for him on her sofa, and then whispered to him softly for a long time, amidst the general merry din.

Nothing escaped the eyes and intelligence of Miss Bush. She was observing behaviour, character and capability in each one of the guests and was making up her mind what she would do next for the furtherance of her plan that Gerard Strobridge should be a friend.

For one moment he looked up and met her eyes, and she allowed hers to show that sphinxlike smile before she lowered the lids. Gerard Strobridge experienced an emotion. Läo was perhaps making him look a little ridiculous. She was overdoing her pleasure at seeing him. However, he was too old a hand at dalliance with women to allow himself to stay beside her for a moment after he felt this. So he made some forcible excuse about the post's going, and got up and left the room. He was completely at home, it was plain to be seen, at Blissington Court.

Katherine smiled again to herself.

After dinner there was to be a cinematograph show for Lady Garribardine's grandchildren, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy and girls of ten and seven, and they were dining punctually at eight. Katherine was to bring them into the hall when the entertainment began, having had them with her for dinner in the old schoolroom. She was not particularly fond of children, but she did her best to make them enjoy their meal. They were stupid, unattractive creatures with none of their grandmother's wit. They were to go on to their paternal relations for the New Year, and then with their governess and tutor were to sail to join their parents in the Antipodes.

The "dressy blouse" had to do duty as evening attire on this night (the creation of Gladys' arranging must be kept for the grand occasion of the Christmas dinner in the dining-room) but Katherine had altered it a little, the wretched thing! and cut down the neck to make it more becoming. It looked quite suitable to her station in any case, she thought, as she caught sight of herself in the long glass in her room. She was beginning to take an interest in dress which surprised herself!

She took a chair in the background, close to the staircase from which the servants were to be allowed to witness the show – Her whole demeanour was quiet and unremarkable – and no one paid any attention to her at all until the lights were turned up in the interval between one set of pictures and another, when Lady Garribardine called out to her:

"Can you see from where you are, Miss Bush? The next thing ought to be very funny."

Katherine had the kind of voice which people listen to, and one or two of the men glanced round at her when she answered with thanks that she had a capital view. And old Colonel Hawthorne said to a young guardsman friend of Miss Betty d'Estaire that, by Jove! Her Ladyship's secretary, or the children's governess, or whoever she was, had a pair of eyes worth looking at!

Gerard Strobridge had found Läo charming again! He had dined well and partaken of his aunt's promised very best champagne, and he had indulged in some obviously subtle insinuations as to his further intentions in regard to their enjoyable friendship, whispered in her shell-pink ear while the lights were low.

"Oh Gerard! – I won't allow you to! – Wait – not yet!" Mrs. Delemar had gasped prettily, expecting him to press the matter further.

But unfortunately it was just then that the lights had blazed up, and Gerard had turned round and caught sight of the provoking face of Katherine Bush as his aunt spoke.

"How attractive that confounded girl looks!" he thought. "What a nuisance she is not married and a guest, instead of the typist – it is undignified and – difficult!"

But the brief glance had disturbed him and rearoused his interest; he found that he could not bring himself up to the desired level of enthusiasm again with Läo, and contented himself by talking enigmatically about the parrot rooms that she was in – their situation and their comfort – while he looked unutterable things with his deep grey eyes. Then presently when they all moved, and the show was over, he allowed himself to be supplanted in her favours by a promising youth of three and twenty, a distant cousin of the house, who would not have been permitted the ghost of a chance at another time! But Gerard's emotions did not show on the surface and Katherine Bush slipped up to bed presently in rather a depressed frame of mind.

She realised fully that the goal was yet a long, long way from attainment, and that it would require all her intelligence to walk warily through this coming week.

No one had been in the least slighting or unkind to her, but naturally no one had troubled to converse with her; she was just the secretary and was treated exactly as she would treat her own, when she had one, she felt. It would not be safe to attract any of the party; her employer's good will and contentment with her mattered far more than the gratification of her vanity.

Mr. Strobridge, however, was one of the chief pieces in her game, and him she would see often as long as she remained in Lady Garribardine's service, so there was no hurry – she could afford to wait.

But all the same she settled down to read "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" without the buoyant feeling of self-confidence which usually gave her such a proud carriage of head.

CHAPTER XIV

A message came up to Katherine next morning – the morning of Christmas Day – from Lady Garribardine to say that she could walk across the park to church with the two elder children and that she was to take them into the front pew that faced the large carved family one behind the choir at right angles.

And from this well-placed outlook Miss Bush later on observed the house party enter by a door in the chancel. They filled the whole long seat and overflowed into the pew where she and the children sat, and it happened that Gerard Strobridge was next her and knelt to say his prayers.

Propinquity is a very curious thing, and when all possibility of conversation is nil, propinquity has sometimes been known to exert a very powerful influence. Gerard Strobridge was conscious with every throb of his pulse of the nearness of Katherine Bush; there was a magnetic disturbing emanation he felt coming from her, which excited him unaccountably. He kept glancing at her regular profile from time to time. Her very pale skin and large red mouth attracted him immensely. She never once looked at him, and maintained an air of absolute unconsciousness.

"What is she thinking about, I wonder?" he mused. "I have never seen a face more sphinxlike; she could be good or devilishly bad, she could love passionately and hate coldly, she could be cruel as the grave and hard as adamant. She is a woman that a man were wiser not to know too well for his own safety."

But reflections of this sort never yet made son of Adam avoid the object of them, so when they came out and Katherine was waiting for instructions from her employer as to the disposal of the children, Mr. Strobridge came up to her.

"A happy Christmas, Miss Bush," he said. "Are you going to walk back through the Park? Here, Teddy, I will come with you."

"We are going in the motor with Grandmamma," both children cried at once as Katherine returned his greeting, and they ran off to Lady Garribardine. So Katherine started to walk on alone, while the rest of the party lingered about the porch and made up their minds as to whether or no they would drive.

She had gone some way and was on a path by a copse in the Park, when Mr. Strobridge caught her up.

"Why did you race ahead, Miss Bush?" he asked. "Did you not want any companion in your solitude?"

"I never thought about it," she returned quite simply.

"I did – I wanted to walk with you, I have been watching you all the time in church. I believe that you were in dreamland again; now will be the very moment to finish our discussion upon it."

"I don't think we had begun it."

"Well, we will."

"How are we to start?"

"You are going to tell me where yours is – in the heart or in the head?"

"Such a conversation would be altogether unprofitable." There was mischief lurking in the corner of her eye and trembling in the curves of her full mouth.

"I must judge of that."

"How so? Do I not count?"

"Enormously – that is why I want to hear of your dreamland."

"It is a place where only I can go."

"How unsociable – but you look disobliging."

"I am."

"Very well, I give up the task of trying to make you tell me about it. By the way, I have not had the chance to thank you for so kindly finishing those papers for that confounded charity. My aunt said they were in perfect order."

"I am glad of that."

He raised his head and looked away in front of them down into a dell and so up again to the house.

"Isn't this a beautiful view? I always think of 'the stately homes of England' when I walk back from church."