Countess Kate Read online

  And what was it that Kate did want? I believe nothing could have made her perfectly happy, or suited to her aunt; but that she would have been infinitely happier and better off had she had the spirit of obedience, of humility, or of unselfishness.

  CHAPTER V.

  The one hour of play with Ernest de la Poer had the effect of making Kate long more and more for a return of "fun," and of intercourse with beings of her own age and of high spirits.

  She wove to herself dreams of possible delights with Sylvia and Charlie, if the summer visit could be paid to them; and at other times she imagined her Uncle Giles's two daughters still alive, and sent home for education, arranging in her busy brain wonderful scenes, in which she, with their assistance, should be happy in spite of Aunt Barbara.

  These fancies, however, would be checked by the recollection, that it was shocking to lower two happy spirits in Heaven into playful little girls upon earth; and she took refuge in the thought of the coming chance of playfellows, when Lord de la Poer was to bring his family to London. She had learnt the names and ages of all the ten; and even had her own theories as to what her contemporaries were to be like--Mary and Fanny, Ernest's elders, and Adelaide and Grace, who came next below him; she had a vision for each of them, and felt as if she already knew them.

  Meanwhile, the want of the amount of air and running about to which she had been used, did really tell upon her; she had giddy feelings in the morning, tired limbs, and a weary listless air, and fretted over her lessons at times. So they showed her to the doctor, who came to see Lady Jane every alternate day; and when he said she wanted more exercise, her morning walk was made an hour longer, and a shuttlecock and battledores were bought, with which it was decreed that Mrs. Lacy should play with her for exactly half an hour every afternoon, or an hour when it was too wet to go out.

  It must be confessed that this was a harder task to both than the music lessons. Whether it were from the difference of height, or from Kate's innate unhandiness, they never could keep that unhappy shuttlecock up more than three times; and Mrs. Lacy looked as grave and melancholy all the time as if she played it for a punishment, making little efforts to be cheerful that were sad to see. Kate hated it, and was always cross; and willingly would they have given it up by mutual consent, but the instant the tap of the cork against the parchment ceased, if it were not half-past five, down sailed Lady Barbara to inquire after her prescription.

  She had been a famous battledore-player in the galleries of Caergwent Castle; and once when she took up the battledore to give a lesson, it seemed as if, between her and Mrs. Lacy, the shuttlecock would not come down--they kept up five hundred and eighty-one, and then only stopped because it was necessary for her to go to dinner.

  She could not conceive anyone being unable to play at battledore, and thought Kate's failures and dislike pure perverseness. Once Kate by accident knocked her shuttlecock through the window, and hoped she had got rid of it; but she was treated as if she had done it out of naughtiness, and a new instrument of torture, as she called it, was bought for her.

  It was no wonder she did not see the real care for her welfare, and thought this intensely cruel and unkind; but it was a great pity that she visited her vexation on poor Mrs. Lacy, to whom the game was even a greater penance than to herself, especially on a warm day, with a bad headache.

  Even in her best days at home, Kate had resisted learning to take thought for others. She had not been considerate of Mary's toil, nor of Mr. Wardour's peace, except when Armyn or Sylvia reminded her; and now that she had neither of them to put it into her mind, she never once thought of her governess as one who ought to be spared and pitied. Yet if she had been sorry for Mrs. Lacy, and tried to spare her trouble and annoyance, how much irritability and peevishness, and sense of constant naughtiness, would have been prevented! And it was that feeling of being always naughty that was what had become the real dreariness of Kate's present home, and was far worse than the music, the battledore, or even the absence of fun.

  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!