Countess Kate

At last came a message that Lady Caergwent was to be dressed for going out to make a call with Lady Barbara as soon as luncheon was over.

It could be on no one but the De la Poers; and Kate was so delighted, that she executed all manner of little happy hops, skips, and fidgets, all the time of her toilette, and caused many an expostulation of “Mais, Miladi!” from Josephine, before the pretty delicate blue and white muslin, worked white jacket, and white ribboned and feathered hat, were adjusted.  Lady Barbara kept her little countess very prettily and quietly dressed; but it was at the cost of infinite worry of herself, Kate, and Josephine, for there never was a child whom it was so hard to keep in decent trim.  Armyn’s old saying, that she ought to be always kept dressed in sacking, as the only thing she could not spoil, was a true one; for the sharp hasty movements, and entire disregard of where she stepped, were so ruinous, that it was on the records of the Bruton Street household, that she had gone far to demolish eight frocks in ten days.

However, on this occasion she did get safe down to the carriage—clothes, gloves, and all, without detriment or scolding; and jumped in first.  She was a long way yet from knowing that, though her aunts gave the first place to her rank, it would have been proper in her to yield it to their years, and make way for them.

She was too childish to have learnt this as a matter of good breeding, but she might have learnt it of a certain parable, which she could say from beginning to end, that she should “sit not down in the highest room.”

Her aunt sat down beside her, and spent the first ten minutes of the drive in enjoining on her proper behaviour at Lady de la Poer’s.  The children there were exceedingly well brought up, she said, and she was very desirous they should be her niece’s friends; but she was certain that Lady de la Poer would allow no one to associate with them who did not behave properly.

“Lord de la Poer was very kind to me just as I was,” said Kate, in her spirit of contradiction, which was always reckless of consequences.

“Gentlemen are no judges of what is becoming to a little girl,” said Lady Barbara severely.  “Unless you make a very different impression upon Lady de la Poer, she will never permit you to be the friend of her daughters.”

“I wonder how I am to make an impression,” meditated Kate, as they drove on; “I suppose it would make an impression if I stood up and repeated, ‘Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!’ or something of that sort, as soon as I got in.  But one couldn’t do that; and I am afraid nothing will happen.  If the horses would only upset us at the door, and Aunt Barbara be nicely insensible, and the young countess show the utmost presence of mind!  But nothing nice and like a book ever does happen.  And after all, I believe that it is all nonsense about making impressions.  Thinking of them is all affectation; and one ought to be as simple and unconscious as one can.”  A conclusion which did honour to the countess’s sense.  In fact, she had plenty of sense, if only she had ever used it for herself, instead of for the little ladies she drew on her quires of paper.

Lady Barbara had started early, as she really wished to find her friends at home; and accordingly, when the stairs were mounted, and the aunt and niece were ushered into a pretty bright-looking drawing-room, there they found all that were not at school enjoying their after-dinner hour of liberty with their father and mother.

Lord de la Poer himself had the youngest in his arms, and looked very much as if he had only just scrambled up from the floor; his wife was really sitting on the ground, helping two little ones to put up a puzzle of wild beasts; and there was a little herd of girls at the farther corner, all very busy over something, towards which Kate’s longing eyes at once turned—even in the midst of Lord de la Poer’s very kind greeting, and his wife’s no less friendly welcome.

It was true that, as Lady Barbara had said, they were all exceedingly well-bred children.  Even the little fellow in his father’s arms, though but eighteen months old, made no objection to hold out his fat hand graciously, and showed no shyness when Lady Barbara kissed him! and the others all waited quietly over their several occupations, neither shrinking foolishly from notice, nor putting themselves forward to claim it.  Only the four sisters came up, and took their own special visitor into the midst of them as their own property; the elder of them, however, at a sign from her mamma, taking the baby in her arms, and carrying him off, followed by the other two small ones—only pausing at the door for him to kiss his little hand, and wave it in the prettiest fashion of baby stateliness.

The other sisters drew Kate back with them into the room, where they had been busy.  Generally, however much she and Sylvia might wish it, they had found acquaintance with other children absolutely impossible in the presence of grown-up people, whose eyes and voices seemed to strike all parties dumb.  But these children seemed in no wise constrained: one of them said at once, “We are so glad you are come.  Mamma said she thought you would before we went out, one of those days.”

“Isn’t it horrid going out in London?” asked Kate, at once set at ease.

“It is not so nice as it is at home,” said one of the girls; laughing; “except when it is our turn to go out with Mamma.”

“She takes us all out in turn,” explained another, “from Fanny, down to little Cecil the baby—and that is our great time for talking to her, when one has her all alone.”

“And does she never take you out in the country?”

“Oh yes! but there are people staying with us then, or else she goes out with Papa.  It is not a regular drive every day, as it is here.”

Kate would not have had a drive with Aunt Barbara every day, for more than she could well say.  However, she was discreet enough not to say so, and asked what they did on other days.

“Oh, we walk with Miss Oswald in the park, and she tells us stories, or we make them.  We don’t tell stories in the country, unless we have to walk straight along the drives, that, as Papa says, we may have some solace.”

Then it was explained that Miss Oswald was their governess, and that they were very busy preparing for her birth-day.  They were making a paper-case for her, all themselves, and this hour was their only time for doing it out of her sight in secret.

“But why do you make it yourselves?” said Kate; “one can buy such beauties at the bazaars.”

“Yes; but Mamma says a present one has taken pains to make, is worth a great deal more than what is only bought; for trouble goes for more than money.”

“But one can make nothing but nasty tumble-to-pieces things,” objected Kate.

“That depends,” said Lady Mary, in a very odd merry voice; and the other two, Adelaide and Grace, who were far too much alike for Kate to guess which was which, began in a rather offended manner to assure her that their paper-case was to be anything but tumble-to-pieces.  Fanny was to bind it, and Papa had promised to paste its back and press it.

“And Mamma drove with me to Richmond, on purpose to get leaves to spatter,” added the other sister.

Then they showed Kate—whose eyes brightened at anything approaching to a mess—that they had a piece of coloured cardboard, on which leaves, chiefly fern, were pinned tightly down, and that the entire sheet was then covered with a spattering of ink from a tooth-brush drawn along the tooth of a comb.  When the process was completed, the form of the loaf remained in the primitive colour of the card, thrown out by the cloud of ink-spots, and only requiring a tracing of its veins by a pen.

A space had been cleared for these operations on a side-table; and in spite of the newspaper, on which the appliances were laid, and even the comb and brush, there was no look of disarrangement or untidiness.

“Oh, do—do show me how you do it!” cried Kate, who had had nothing to do for months, with the dear delight of making a mess, except what she could contrive with her paints.

And Lady Grace resumed a brown-holland apron and bib, and opening her hands with a laugh, showed their black insides, then took up her implements.

“Oh, do—do let me try,” was Kate’s next cry; “one little bit to show Sylvia Wardour.”

With one voice the three sisters protested that she had better not; she was not properly equipped, and would ink herself all over.  If she would pin down a leaf upon the scrap she held up, Grace should spatter it for her, and they would make it up into anything she liked.

But this did not satisfy Kate at all; the pinning out of the leaf was stupid work compared with the glory of making the ink fly.  In vain did Adelaide represent that all the taste and skill was in the laying out the leaves, and pinning them down, and that anyone could put on the ink; in vain did Mary represent the dirtiness of the work: this was the beauty of it in her eyes; and the sight of the black dashes sputtering through the comb filled her with emulation; so that she entreated, almost piteously, to be allowed to “do” an ivy loaf, which she had hastily, and not very carefully, pinned out with Mary’s assistance—that is, she had feebly and unsteadily stuck every pin, and Mary had steadied them.

The new friends consented, seeing how much she was set on it; but Fanny, who had returned from the nursery, insisted on precautions—took off the jacket, turned up the frock sleeves, and tied on an apron; though Kate fidgeted all the time, as if a great injury were being inflicted on her; and really, in her little frantic spirit, thought Lady Fanny a great torment, determined to delay her delight till her aunt should go away and put a stop to it.

When once she had the brush, she was full of fun and merriment, and kept her friends much amused by her droll talk, half to them, half to her work.

“There’s a portentous cloud, isn’t there?  An inky cloud, if ever there was one!  Take care, inhabitants below; growl, growl, there’s the thunder; now comes the rain; hail, hail, all hail, like the beginning of Macbeth.”

“Which the Frenchman said was in compliment to the climate,” said Fanny; at which the whole company fell into convulsions of laughing; and neither Kate nor Grace exactly knew what hands or brush or comb were about; but whereas the little De La Poers had from their infancy laughed almost noiselessly, and without making faces, Kate for her misfortune had never been broken of a very queer contortion of her lips, and a cackle like a bantam hen’s.

When this unlucky cackle had been several times repeated, it caused Lady Barbara, who had been sitting with her back to the inner room, to turn round.

Poor Lady Barbara!  It would not be easy to describe her feelings when she saw the young lady, whom she had brought delicately blue and white, like a speedwell flower, nearly as black as a sweep.

Lord de la Poer broke out into an uncontrollable laugh, half at the aunt, half at the niece.  “Why, she has grown a moustache!” he exclaimed.  “Girls, what have you been doing to her?” and walking up to them, he turned Kate round to a mirror, where she beheld her own brown eyes looking out of a face dashed over with black specks, thicker about the mouth, giving her altogether much the colouring of a very dark man closely shaved.  It was so exceedingly comical, that she went off into fits of laughing, in which she was heartily joined by all the merry party.

“There,” said Lord de la Poer, “do you want to know what your Uncle Giles is like? you’ve only to look at yourself!—See, Barbara, is it not a capital likeness?”

“I never thought her like Giles,” said her aunt gravely, with an emphasis on the name, as if she meant that the child did bear a likeness that was really painful to her.

“My dears,” said the mother, “you should not have put her in such a condition; could you not have been more careful?”

Kate expected one of them to say, “She would do it in spite of us;” but instead of that Fanny only answered, “It is not so bad as it looks, Mamma; I believe her frock is quite safe; and we will soon have her face and hands clean.”

Whereupon Kate turned round and said, “It is all my fault, and nobody’s else’s.  They told me not, but it was such fun!”

And therewith she obeyed a pull from Grace, and ran upstairs with the party to be washed; and as the door shut behind them, Lord de la Poer said, “You need not be afraid of that likeness, Barbara.  Whatever else she may have brought from her parsonage, she has brought the spirit of truth.”

Though knowing that something awful hung over her head, Kate was all the more resolved to profit by her brief minutes of enjoyment; and the little maidens all went racing and flying along the passages together; Kate feeling as if the rapid motion among the other young feet was life once more.

“Well! your frock is all right; I hope your aunt will not be very angry with you,” said Adelaide.  (She know Adelaide now, for Grace was the inky one.)

“It is not a thing to be angry for,” added Grace.

“No, it would not have been at my home,” said Kate, with a sigh; “but, oh! I hope she will not keep me from coming here again.”

“She shall not,” exclaimed Adelaide; “Papa won’t let her.”

“She said your mamma would mind what your papa did not,” said Kate, who was not very well informed on the nature of mammas.

“Oh, that’s all stuff,” decidedly cried Adelaide.  “When Papa told us about you, she said, ‘Poor child!  I wish I had her here.’”

Prudent Fanny made an endeavour at chocking her little sister; but the light in Kate’s eye, and the responsive face, drew Grace on to ask, “She didn’t punish you, I hope, for your tumbling off the bracket?”

“No, your papa made her promise not; but she was very cross.  Did he tell you about it?”

“Oh yes; and what do you think Ernest wrote?  You must know he had grumbled excessively at Papa’s having business with Lady Barbara; but his letter said, ‘It wasn’t at all slow at Lady Barbara’s, for there was the jolliest fellow there you ever knew; mind you get her to play at acting.’”

Lady Fanny did not think this improving, and was very glad that the maid came in with hot water and towels, and put an end to it with the work of scrubbing.

Going home, Lady Barbara was as much displeased as Kate had expected, and with good reason.  After all her pains, it was very strange that Katharine should be so utterly unfit to behave like a well-bred girl.  There might have been excuse for her before she had been taught, but now it was mere obstinacy.

She should be careful how she took her out for a long time to come!

Kate’s heart swelled within her.  It was not obstinacy, she know; and that bit of injustice hindered her from seeing that it was really wilful recklessness.  She was elated with Ernest’s foolish school-boy account of her, which a more maidenly little girl would not have relished; she was strengthened in her notion that she was ill-used, by hearing that the De la Poers pitied her; and because she found that Aunt Barbara was considered to be a little wrong, she did not consider that she herself had ever been wrong at all.

And Lady Barbara was not far from the truth when she told her sister “that Katharine was perfectly hard and reckless; there was no such thing as making her sorry!”

CHAPTER VI

After that first visit, Kate did see something of the De la Poers, but not more than enough to keep her in a constant ferment with the uncertain possibility, and the longing for the meetings.

The advances came from them; Lady Barbara said very truly, that she could not be responsible for making so naughty a child as her niece the companion of any well-regulated children; she was sure that their mother could not wish it, since nice and good as they naturally were, this unlucky Katharine seemed to infect them with her own spirit of riot and turbulence whenever they came near her.

There was no forwarding of the attempts to make appointments for walks in the Park, though really very little harm had ever come of them, guarded by the two governesses, and by Lady Fanny’s decided ideas of propriety.  That Kate embarked in long stories, and in their excitement raised her voice, was all that could be said against her on those occasions, and Mrs. Lacy forbore to say it.

Once, indeed, Kate was allowed to ask her friends to tea; but that proved a disastrous affair.  Fanny was prevented from coming; and in the absence of her quiet elder-sisterly care, the spirits of Grace and Adelaide were so excited by Kate’s drollery, that they were past all check from Mary, and drew her along with them into a state of frantic fun and mad pranks.

They were full of merriment all tea time, even in the presence of the two governesses; and when that was over, and Kate showed “the bracket,” they began to grow almost ungovernable in their spirit of frolic and fun: they went into Kate’s room, resolved upon being desert travellers, set up an umbrella hung round with cloaks for a tent, made camels of chairs, and finding those tardy, attempted riding on each other—with what results to Aunt Jane’s ears below may be imagined—dressed up wild Arabs in bournouses of shawls, and made muskets of parasols, charging desperately, and shrieking for attack, defence, “for triumph or despair,” as Kate observed, in one of her magnificent quotations.  Finally, the endangered traveller, namely Grace, rushed down the stairs headlong, with the two Arabs clattering after him, banging with their muskets, and shouting their war-cry the whole height of the house.

The ladies in the drawing-room had borne a good deal; but Aunt Jane was by this time looking meekly distracted; and Lady Barbara sallying out, met the Arab Sheikh with his white frock over his head, descending the stairs in the rear, calling to his tribe in his sweet voice not to be so noisy—but not seeing before him through the said bournouse, he had very nearly struck Lady Barbara with his parasol before he saw her.

No one could be more courteous or full of apologies than the said Sheikh, who was in fact a good deal shocked at his unruly tribe, and quite acquiesced in the request that they would all come and sit quiet in the drawing-room, and play at some suitable game there.

It would have been a relief to Mary to have them thus disposed of safely; and Adelaide would have obeyed; but the other two had been worked up to a state of wildness, such as befalls little girls who have let themselves out of the control of their better sense.

They did not see why they should sit up stupid in the drawing-room; “Mary was as cross as Lady Barbara herself to propose it,” said Grace, unfortunately just as the lady herself was on the stairs to enforce her desire, in her gravely courteous voice; whereupon Kate, half tired and wholly excited, burst out into a violent passionate fit of crying and sobbing, declaring that it was very hard, that whenever she had ever so little pleasure, Aunt Barbara always grudged it to her.

None of them had ever heard anything like it; to the little De la Poers she seemed like one beside herself, and Grace clung to Mary, and Adelaide to Miss Oswald, almost frightened at the screams and sobs that Kate really could not have stopped if she would.  Lady Jane came to the head of the stairs, pale and trembling, begging to know who was hurt; and Mrs. Lacy tried gentle reasoning and persuading, but she might as well have spoken to the storm beating against the house.

Lady Barbara sternly ordered her off to her room; but the child did not stir—indeed, she could not, except that she rocked herself to and fro in her paroxysms of sobbing, which seemed to get worse and worse every moment.  It was Miss Oswald at last, who, being more used to little girls and their naughtiness than any of the others, saw the right moment at last, and said, as she knelt down by her, half kindly, half severely, “My dear, you had better let me take you up-stairs.  I will help you: and you are only shocking everyone here.”

Kate did let her take her up-stairs, though at every step there was a pause, a sob, a struggle; but a gentle hand on her shoulder, and firm persuasive voice in her ear, moved her gradually onwards, till the little pink room was gained; and there she threw herself on her bed in another agony of wild subs, unaware of Miss Oswald’s parley at the door with Lady Barbara and Mrs. Lacy, and her entreaty that the patient might be left to her, which they were nothing loth to do.

When Kate recovered her speech, she poured out a wild and very naughty torrent, about being the most unhappy girl in the world; the aunts were always unkind to her; she never got any pleasure; she could not bear being a countess; she only wanted to go back to her old home, to Papa and Mary and Sylvia; and nobody would help her.

Miss Oswald treated the poor child almost as if she had been a little out of her mind, let her say it all between her sobs, and did not try to argue with her, but waited till the talking and the sobbing had fairly tried her out; and by that time the hour had come at which the little visitors were to go home.  The governess rose up, and said she must go, asking in a quiet tone, as if all that had been said were mere mad folly, whether Lady Caergwent would come down with her, and tell her aunts she was sorry for the disturbance she had made.

Kate shrank from showing such a spectacle as her swollen, tear-stained, red-marbled visage.  She was thoroughly sorry, and greatly ashamed; and she only gasped out, “I can’t, I can’t; don’t let me see anyone.”

“Then I will wish Mary and her sisters good-bye for you.”

“Yes, please.”  Kate had no words for more of her sorrow and shame.

“And shall I say anything to your aunt for you?”

“I—I don’t know; only don’t let anyone come up.”

“Then shall I tell Lady Barbara you are too much tired out now for talking, but that you will tell her in the morning how sorry you are?”

“Well, yes,” said Kate rather grudgingly.  “Oh, must you go?”

“I am afraid I must, my dear.  Their mamma does not like Addie and Grace to be kept up later than their usual bed-time.”

“I wish you could stay.  I wish you were my governess,” said Kate, clinging to her, and receiving her kind, friendly, pitying kiss.

And when the door had shut upon her, Kate’s tears began to drop again at the thought that it was very hard that the little De la Poers, who had father, mother, and each other, should likewise have such a nice governess, while she had only poor sad dull Mrs. Lacy.

Had Kate only known what an unselfish little girl and Mrs. Lacy might have been to each other!

However, the first thing she could now think of was to avoid being seen or spoken to by anyone that night; and for this purpose she hastily undressed herself, bundled-up her hair as best she might, as in former days, said her prayers, and tumbled into bed, drawing the clothes over her head, resolved to give no sign of being awake, come who might.

Her shame was real, and very great.  Such violent crying fits had overtaken her in past times, but had been thought to be outgrown.  She well recollected the last.  It was just after the death of her aunt, Mrs. Wardour, just when the strange stillness of sorrow in the house was beginning to lessen, and the children had forgotten themselves, and burst out into noise and merriment, till they grew unrestrained and quarrelsome; Charlie had offended Kate, she had struck him, and Mary coming on them, grieved and hurt at their conduct at such a time, had punished Kate for the blow, but missed perception of Charlie’s offence; and the notion of injustice had caused the shrieking cries and violent sobs that had brought Mr. Wardour from the study in grave sorrowful severity.

What she had heard afterwards from him about not making poor Mary’s task harder, and what she had heard from Mary about not paining him, had really restrained her; and she had thought such outbreaks passed by among the baby faults she had left behind, and was the more grieved and ashamed in consequence.  She felt it a real exposure: she remembered her young friends’ surprised and frightened eyes, and not only had no doubt their mother would really think her too naughty to be their playfellow, but almost wished that it might be so—she could never, never bear to see them again.

She heard the street door close after them, she heard the carriage drive away; she felt half relieved; but then she hid her face in the pillow, and cried more quietly, but more bitterly.