Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/688

664 He sat down in his accustomed place beside the hearth, and, for a minute or more, talked on quickly, jestingly, of lords and ladies, of gossip and of weddings, Then, in a second, his voice broke—his face sank down between his hands—and Barbara, awe-struck, crept from the kitchen and left him alone. After a year's stoicism, it had come to this. Nature was stronger than he; the man's stout heart had given way at last.

So much for Steven. Now for the manner in which Katharine, in her differently-ordered life, had continued, during the past twelvemonth, to exist. The story, again, is short. Through many a long month after Dora's death, she rose, went to rest, went to church, visited the poor at Clithero; endured, until she sickened at her own endurance, the sight of the low, white walls of Ashcot, across the bay. Then, when Spring came round, yielding to Mrs. Deering's entreaty, went up to London, and, by degrees, drifted back—what, with lost delight in life, with paralyzed energy, can one do but drift?—into the old London routine of two years ago. The day on which she was to become Lord Petres' wife was settled for her (their marriage had been put off in November by reason of her mourning), and she saw Lord Petres, for an hour daily, at her sister's house, and, at times, tried to persuade herself she was growing to love him! And Mrs. Deering took her to dinners and to operas; and if she found no zest in conquests, she, at least, went back easily into the old habit of making conquests. And she dressed, with a certain languid renewal of interest in her own beauty; and now—at the time Steven was busy with his grass-cutting—was deep in the counsels of jewellers and mantua-makers for her trousseau. Katharine went on existing; as common opinion goes, went on living; and a very enviable, pleasant life, too. Aged, a good deal, people said; had never looked the same after that dreadful misalliance of her cousin Dora's; and, it was sadly visible, cared no more for poor, little Lord Petres than ever! But heart did not belong to the Fane nature. Look at Mrs. Deering, placid and contented with her terrible old General!—look at Mrs. Deering, and you see the future Lady Petres; handsome, popular, decorous; ice-cold to everything in the universe, as to her own household! So prophesied the world, and truly. Katharine, herself, would have been the first to endorse the truth of the prophecy.

Her marriage-day, I say, was now fixed not a week distant, and one afternoon, the same brightness in the London streets that there had been on the afternoon of Dora's death, she found herself driving home with Mrs. Deering, after a long last visit on bridal business to the milliner. With a repugnance she would scarcely acknowledge to herself, Katharine had hitherto shrunk fi-om trying on her wedding-dress; and to-day, for the first time, had seen, shuddering as she saw, the reflection of the future Lady Petres, veiled, wreathed with orange blossoms, stately, as she would stand before the altar. A beautiful picture in the sisterly sight of Mrs. Deering; an awful picture to herself; one that made her cheeks turn crimson, then white, and every pulse in her body throb with shame. "Steven, Steven, if it had been for him." All through the sunny streets, as they drove back, and while Mrs. Deering talked, in cheerful voice, over the details of the approaching marriage, this cry rose from her heart. Oh, white wedding-dress; oh, speaking of holiest vows—if all had been for him! How had the marriage feast been a consecrated one; the dress symbolic, indeed, of a heart given, in the whiteness of love, to its new allegiance; the vows, not legal stipulations of a deed of sale, in the keeping of whose barren letter a cold future