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