An Unknown Lover, Mrs George de Horne Vaizey [best romantic novels in english txt] 📗

for me. When I’m turning out at night leaving Will and Dorothea alone, it understands how I feel. Its eyes follow me to the door.

“I haven’t a photograph to send you; I wouldn’t send one if I had. What’s the use of a portrait of a big skeleton of a fellow, brown as a nigger, and at thirty-five looking a lot more like forty? Let that slide; but within the walls of the skeleton lives a lonely fellow who has no one left to send him letters from home, and who for the last three years has enjoyed his mail vicariously through extracts read from a young girl’s letters.

“You write wonderful letters, Katrine! I don’t know if they are the sort a literary critic would approve, but they bring new life into our camp. Dorothea is generous in reading aloud all that she may, and I could stand a pretty stiff examination upon your life in that delightful little Cranford of a place, which you don’t appreciate as you ought. Those letters, plus the photograph, have done the damage.

“So this is what it comes to,—I want some letters for myself! I want (it sounds appallingly conceited; never mind! Let it go at that), I want you to know me, to realise my existence, even as I do yours. Will you write to me sometimes? I give you fair notice that in any case I mean to write to you. It can do you no harm to read my effusions, and if you do violence to your natural curiosity and burn them instead, the snub would miss its point, for I shall be no wiser. I’m not afraid that you will burn them. The feminine in you is too strongly developed for such a lack of curiosity, but will you answer them? That’s the question!

“Think it over, Katrine! At the moment of reading, you haven’t a doubt of what you will say. Sit down at once to write that haughty letter of reproof and denial, but—don’t send it off by the first post! Relieve yourself by letting off steam, and then think out the thing calmly.

“Your own life is not all that you could wish, but compare it just for a moment with mine, and consider the compensations which you enjoy! Friends, books, papers, happenings of world-wide interest at your door, or what seems your door to exiles across the world—all these, and into the bargain, home, and comfort, and cool! You must acknowledge, Katrine, that the odds are on your side!

“If I could take a holiday and come home, you would receive me graciously as Dorothea’s friend. Why should it require a greater effort to receive me in the spirit?

“Get away from the Cranford spirit, Katrine; refuse to be bound by it, I see signs,—I tell you frankly, I see signs of its encroachment! Here’s a fine chance of throwing it to the winds. Are you brave enough, fine enough, woman enough, to work out this thing for yourself, and to decide as your heart dictates?

“I am very humble; I ask for the moment nothing more than an occasional letter. Now, what are you going to do? At any rate there’s that box! In common decency you must write once at least to acknowledge that! Your answer ought, I calculate, to arrive about four weeks from to-day.

“Yours faithfully,

“Jim Blair.”

“Well, I’m—!” ejaculated Katrine, and stopped aghast. The failure to finish her sentence was attributable less to good feeling than the utter inability to find a word strong enough to express the sentiments of the moment. An onlooker, however, could not have failed to remark the fact that, be the sentiment what it might, it was certainly extraordinarily becoming. Katrine’s eyes shone, her pale cheeks blazed a damask rose, the firm lips gaped, showing a flash of small, white teeth. Seated bolt upright in her high-backed chair, the blue dress outlining the fine lines of her figure, she reached at that moment her highest possibilities of beauty, but there was no one to see her, and for the moment she was oblivious of her own good looks. The world of monotonous order rocked in chaos beneath her feet; volcano-like, those written words had convulsed the landscape, transforming the familiar features into new and astounding shapes.

Out of the shock and amazement it was difficult to realise the predominant sensation. Was it anger; was it excitement; was it relief that at last, at last, something had happened to lift life out of the eternal jog-trot? Katrine did not know, she did not trouble to think; for the moment it was enough to sit still, and let the whirlwind rush through her veins. Whether she were angry or glad, for the moment, at least, the latent powers of feeling were stirred into being; she was strongly, vitally, alive!

An unknown man had accosted her with what was virtually an expression of love; had flung down the gage, and challenged her to the reply. “For the moment” he demanded nothing more than an intimate correspondence, with the object of gaining an opportunity to reveal his own identity, and evoking her sympathy in return...

She looked at the brass box lying upon the table, the beautiful antique whose real nature had been so openly confessed; she looked at the stiff, three-lined message of decorum; she looked at the letter lying open in her hand, at the strong, clear lettering of that opening word.—“Katrine!” she murmured beneath her breath,—“Katrine!” The word came to her ear with a new delight. The commonplace had vanished, it seemed to breathe of beauty and romance. Her hands retained their hold of the letter, she raised it from her knee, read it once more and bit hard upon her lip. “What can he think of me? What impression must my letters have left, if he can believe that it is possible that I could agree to such a suggestion? He can’t have much respect—”

She fumed, flushed, scorched him with disdain, then suddenly found herself faced by another paragraph, and suffered a humiliating collapse. “The Cranford cramp.” He had seen signs! How had he seen signs? Could it indeed be true, that while she was complacently denouncing the narrow-mindedness of her neighbours, the infection had touched herself? Impulse prompted her to thrust aside so humiliating a suggestion, but a doubt remained...

Was it possible to live for years in a narrow sphere, surrounded by an atmosphere of petty detail, and yet keep one’s own attitude broad and free?

With a certain fierceness of sincerity Katrine searched her conscience, summoned the image of herself before a mental bar, and passed sentence. It was true! Compared with friends from afar; compared even with the Katrine of years ago, she was slowly, surely stiffening into the Cranford Model. Another ten years of steady following would find her with a horizon limited by the High Street and the tennis ground, and a mind incapable of braving the verdict of a village tea-party. Katrine sighed; a short, impatient sigh. Self-pride suffered in the revelation, but she told herself boldly that she was not to blame. She had had no change, no distractions. Year after year she had vegetated in the same small place. The past tense came unconsciously to her lips, for already her thoughts dwelt upon yesterday as a far-off past. Yesterday Jim Blair had been but a name, the most shadowy of figures; to-day, with amazing audacity, the shadowy figure had stepped into the very foreground of life!

Katrine searched her memory for the stray items of information which her friend’s letters had from time to time contained with regard to her husband’s friend. The two men were fellow-captains in the same regiment. Blair was the senior of the two, but even so his chances of promotion were small, owing to the hopeless blocking which is the soldier’s greatest handicap. Blair had seen active service, had distinguished himself in an expedition to Tibet, could with ease have achieved an exchange, but he was devoted to the regiment, a prime favourite with the mess, and having private means, preferred to defer the evil day.

Dorothea’s descriptions, though flattering, were somewhat vague. She had stated frequently, and with conviction, that “Jim was a dear!” but to which particular brand or type of dear he belonged was left to the imagination. Jim was the godfather of the son and heir; in descriptions of domestic scenes and conversations he seemed naturally to play a part; Dorothea was complacently convinced that in the society of her husband and herself he found complete satisfaction. It had never occurred to her to consider the part played by a fourth person in those same interviews! A quiet, well-mannered young person who sat on the mantelpiece, taking notes!

“Katrine and I!”

The real Katrine gasped once more at the remembrance of those words. So extraordinary were they, so unbelievable, that to make sure that they were not the creation of her own brain, she turned back to the letter, and re-read the sentence.

“Katrine and I have shared many a joke together.”

For a moment the girl frowned, then suddenly a wistful expression stole into her eyes. She herself had enjoyed so few jokes in these long flat years! The photographs had the advantage there. She found herself for the moment almost envying the photographs. The laughing one, that was to say; not the sad. The sad one had been guilty of unpardonable boldness in looking sorry for a strange man; in exchanging glances with him, forsooth! from the doorway, in covert sympathy with his bachelor estate!

“If it had been just an ordinary friendly correspondence, one might—perhaps—have agreed! It would be interesting to be friends with a man, but—but it is not! He doesn’t mean it to be; he doesn’t mean me to believe that he means it. It’s a kind of verbal ‘walking out’; a correspondence ‘with a view to matrimony!’ In a few months’ time he would be asking—”

Katrine jumped to her feet, and paced excitedly to the window, the letter still clutched in her hand. It crackled beneath her fingers, as she stood staring out into the lane.

A man in a white apron was walking rapidly along the farther side. Rogers, the butcher’s foreman, homeward bound for his mid-day meal. The clock of Saint Dunstan’s struck twelve chimes, and celebrated the occasion by chiming a verse of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Every morning of the year that white-robed figure passed up the lane at precisely the same hour; every morning the same verse was ground out on the church bells.

“And there is Martin!” said Katrine, in a slow, dull tone of finality. “There is Martin!”

For the first time in her experience she felt a flood of pity for her own self-enforced celibacy. Hitherto marriage had presented no especial lure and the two men who had appeared as suitors had failed to awaken even a passing interest. No one could look at Katrine’s face and fail to realise that she was capable of deep and passionate love, but she had none of the easy sentiment of the ordinary young girl, and having failed to meet her mate, the softer part of her nature was still dormant. Moreover she had an immense advantage over the ordinary unmarried woman, in being mistress of a home, in the management of which she could indulge to the full her natural feminine instincts. It had appeared to her that if Martin were more responsive, she could be satisfied with her lot. There was a certain flatness, no doubt; a certain dread in envisaging the years, but experience showed that such moods were not confined to spinsters alone. They followed as a natural sequence the awakening from youth’s bright dreams; to encourage them would be both morbid and weak! But with the reading of that amazing letter a new rebellion surged in her soul...

She was giving up her life for Martin, and Martin was not made happy thereby. Her mind travelled back to the interview of an hour before—she saw the tall