Countess Kate Part 8

The new friends consented, seeing how much she was set on it; but f.a.n.n.y, who had returned from the nursery, insisted on precautions-- took off the jacket, turned up the frock sleeves, and tied on an ap.r.o.n; 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y; 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 n.o.bODY'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 pa.s.sages 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y 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.

After that first visit, Kate did see something of the De la Poers, but not more than enough to keep her in a constant ferment with the uncertain possibility, and the longing for the meetings.

The advances came from them; Lady Barbara said very truly, that she could not be responsible for making so naughty a child as her niece the companion of any well-regulated children; she was sure that their mother could not wish it, since nice and good as they naturally were, this unlucky Katharine seemed to infect them with her own spirit of riot and turbulence whenever they came near her.

There was no forwarding of the attempts to make appointments for walks in the Park, though really very little harm had ever come of them, guarded by the two governesses, and by Lady f.a.n.n.y's decided ideas of propriety. That Kate embarked in long stories, and in their excitement raised her voice, was all that could be said against her on those occasions, and Mrs. Lacy forbore to say it.

Once, indeed, Kate was allowed to ask her friends to tea; but that proved a disastrous affair. f.a.n.n.y was prevented from coming; and in the absence of her quiet elder-sisterly care, the spirits of Grace and Adelaide were so excited by Kate's drollery, that they were past all check from Mary, and drew her along with them into a state of frantic fun and mad pranks.

They were full of merriment all tea time, even in the presence of the two governesses; and when that was over, and Kate showed "the bracket," they began to grow almost ungovernable in their spirit of frolic and fun: they went into Kate's room, resolved upon being desert travellers, set up an umbrella hung round with cloaks for a tent, made camels of chairs, and finding those tardy, attempted riding on each other--with what results to Aunt Jane's ears below may be imagined--dressed up wild Arabs in bournouses of shawls, and made muskets of parasols, charging desperately, and shrieking for attack, defence, "for triumph or despair," as Kate observed, in one of her magnificent quotations. Finally, the endangered traveller, namely Grace, rushed down the stairs headlong, with the two Arabs clattering after him, banging with their muskets, and shouting their war-cry the whole height of the house.

The ladies in the drawing-room had borne a good deal; but Aunt Jane was by this time looking meekly distracted; and Lady Barbara sallying out, met the Arab Sheikh with his white frock over his head, descending the stairs in the rear, calling to his tribe in his sweet voice not to be so noisy--but not seeing before him through the said bournouse, he had very nearly struck Lady Barbara with his parasol before he saw her.

No one could be more courteous or full of apologies than the said Sheikh, who was in fact a good deal shocked at his unruly tribe, and quite acquiesced in the request that they would all come and sit quiet in the drawing-room, and play at some suitable game there.

It would have been a relief to Mary to have them thus disposed of safely; and Adelaide would have obeyed; but the other two had been worked up to a state of wildness, such as befalls little girls who have let themselves out of the control of their better sense.

They did not see why they should sit up stupid in the drawing-room; "Mary was as cross as Lady Barbara herself to propose it," said Grace, unfortunately just as the lady herself was on the stairs to enforce her desire, in her gravely courteous voice; whereupon Kate, half tired and wholly excited, burst out into a violent pa.s.sionate fit of crying and sobbing, declaring that it was very hard, that whenever she had ever so little pleasure, Aunt Barbara always grudged it to her.

None of them had ever heard anything like it; to the little De la Poers she seemed like one beside herself, and Grace clung to Mary, and Adelaide to Miss Oswald, almost frightened at the screams and sobs that Kate really could not have stopped if she would. Lady Jane came to the head of the stairs, pale and trembling, begging to know who was hurt; and Mrs. Lacy tried gentle reasoning and persuading, but she might as well have spoken to the storm beating against the house.

Lady Barbara sternly ordered her off to her room; but the child did not stir--indeed, she could not, except that she rocked herself to and fro in her paroxysms of sobbing, which seemed to get worse and worse every moment. It was Miss Oswald at last, who, being more used to little girls and their naughtiness than any of the others, saw the right moment at last, and said, as she knelt down by her, half kindly, half severely, "My dear, you had better let me take you up- stairs. I will help you: and you are only shocking everyone here."

Kate did let her take her up-stairs, though at every step there was a pause, a sob, a struggle; but a gentle hand on her shoulder, and firm persuasive voice in her ear, moved her gradually onwards, till the little pink room was gained; and there she threw herself on her bed in another agony of wild subs, unaware of Miss Oswald's parley at the door with Lady Barbara and Mrs. Lacy, and her entreaty that the patient might be left to her, which they were nothing loth to do.

When Kate recovered her speech, she poured out a wild and very naughty torrent, about being the most unhappy girl in the world; the aunts were always unkind to her; she never got any pleasure; she could not bear being a countess; she only wanted to go back to her old home, to Papa and Mary and Sylvia; and n.o.body would help her.

Miss Oswald treated the poor child almost as if she had been a little out of her mind, let her say it all between her sobs, and did not try to argue with her, but waited till the talking and the sobbing had fairly tried her out; and by that time the hour had come at which the little visitors were to go home. The governess rose up, and said she must go, asking in a quiet tone, as if all that had been said were mere mad folly, whether Lady Caergwent would come down with her, and tell her aunts she was sorry for the disturbance she had made.

Kate shrank from showing such a spectacle as her swollen, tear- stained, red-marbled visage. She was thoroughly sorry, and greatly ashamed; and she only gasped out, "I can't, I can't; don't let me see anyone."

"Then I will wish Mary and her sisters good-bye for you."

"Yes, please." Kate had no words for more of her sorrow and shame.

"And shall I say anything to your aunt for you?"