She turned her handsome quiet face upon him at such length that it might indeed have been for the last time. “I don’t know what you’re like.”
“No more do I, my dear. I’ve spent my life in trying in vain to discover. Like nothing — more’s the pity. If there had been many of us and we could have found each other out there’s no knowing what we mightn’t have done. But it doesn’t matter now. Goodbye, love.” He looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. “I wish there were some one here who might serve — for any contingency — as a witness that I HAVE put it to you that I’m ready to come.”
“Would you like me,” her father asked, “to call the landlady?”
“You may not believe me,” she pursued, “but I came really hoping you might have found some way. I’m very sorry at all events to leave you unwell.” He turned away from her on this and, as he had done before, took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. “Let me put it — unfortunately without a witness,” she added after a moment, “that there’s only one word you really need speak.”
When he took these words up it was still with his back to her. “If I don’t strike you as having already spoken it our time has been singularly wasted.”
“I’ll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I WILL choose. I’ll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune.”
He at last brought himself round. “Do you know, dear, you make me sick? I’ve tried to be clear, and it isn’t fair.”
But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. “Father!”
“I don’t quite see what’s the matter with you,” he said, “and if you can’t pull yourself together I’ll — upon my honour — take you in hand. Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate.”
She was really absent, distant. “Father.”
It was too much, and he met it sharply. “Well?”
“Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there’s a good you can do me and a help you can render.”
“Isn’t it then exactly what I’ve been trying to make you feel?”
“Yes,” she answered patiently, “but so in the wrong way. I’m perfectly honest in what I say, and I know what I’m talking about. It isn’t that I’ll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid or support from you. The case is changed — that’s what has happened; my difficulty is a new one. But even now it’s not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to ‘do.’ It’s simply a question of your not turning me away — taking yourself out of my life. It’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then, since you will, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have a faith and find a way.’ That’s all — THAT would be the good you’d do me. I should HAVE you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?”
If he didn’t it wasn’t for want of looking at her hard. “The matter with you is that you’re in love, and that your aunt knows and — for reasons, I’m sure, perfect — hates and opposes it. Well she may! It’s a matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please.” Though he spoke not in anger — rather in infinite sadness — he fairly turned her out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. “I’m sorry for her, deluded woman, if she builds on you.”
Kate stood a moment in the draught. “She’s not the person I pity most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she’s not the person who’s most so. I mean,” she explained, “if it’s a question of what you call building on me.”
He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of it. “You’re deceiving TWO persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?”
She shook her head with detachment. “I’ve no intention of that sort with respect to any one now — to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me” — she seemed to make it out for herself— “that has the merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way — as I see my way.”
“Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a penny?”
“You demand a great deal of satisfaction,” she observed, “for the little you give.”
It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to be hustled, and though he glared at her a little this had long been the practical limit to his general power of objection. “If you’re base enough to incur your aunt’s reprobation you’re base enough for my argument. What, if you’re not thinking of an utterly improper person, do your speeches to me signify? Who IS the beggarly sneak?” he went on as her response failed.
Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct. “He has every disposition to make the best of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to you.”
“Then he MUST be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to improve him for me,” her father pursued, “that he’s also destitute and impossible? There are boobies and boobies even — the right and the wrong — and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows THEM, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you, her judgement for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I won’t hear of any one of whom SHE won’t.” Which led up to his last word. “If you should really defy us both — !”
“Well, papa?”
“Well, my sweet child, I think that — reduced to insignificance as you may fondly believe me — I should still not be quite without some way of making you regret it.”
She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might measure this danger. “If I shouldn’t do it, you know, it wouldn’t be because I’m afraid of you.”
“Oh if you don’t do it,” he retorted, “you may be as bold as you like!”
“Then you can do nothing at all for me?”
He showed her, this time unmistakeably — it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell that seemed to cling to them — how vain her appeal remained. “I’ve never pretended to do more than my duty; I’ve given you the best and the clearest advice.” And then came up the spring that moved him. “If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be consoled.” What he couldn’t forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with HIM.
Chapter II
She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother’s death — gone with an effort the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them, reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been nothing else to do — not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money on, since everything belonged to the “estate.” How the estate would turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it had proved in fact since then a residuum a trifle less scant than, with her sister, she had for some