KITTY.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 13, Issue 1063, 6 July 1869, Page 4

KITTY.

IN IHBEE CHAPTERS. — CHAPTER 11.

(From > • Chambers' Journal.')

"How absurd I am j" Kitty Courtney said to herself the moment after. " How very . absurd lam 1 Here have I been talking to Abie Musgrave and never said a syllable to .him about Ashbuiy Hall! And he looked so sad and overborne tool I might have thought of something that would have been a little pleasure. Bah I .As though a mmi would care about a picnic 1 At any rate, such a man as Abie — when, too, he has busintess^matters troubling him, and has to fight only to keep his home ! But I might have Said something kind 1 No man is too manly to be moved when people are kind. Certainly if he thinks I am a hard-hearted, unsympathetic person, I have only myself to blame. But why is he always so distant ? — No, not distant, but just — just — just what I don't wish him to be, and that I never would be to him 1 I wish he knew that I had spoken up so much for him this morning, that I don't care in the least for money, and like him eveiy bit as much now that he is poor I"

Miss Courtney sauntered on— down the laurel hedge, to where some tall trees sheltered her from the sun. The same song was sung by her thoughts still. The next time she saw ' Mr. Mvisgrave, she would know from his manner whether he cared for her or not. It. was only tho certainty she wanted ; it was only that she was longing to be sure f If he did not love her, why, then, so be it — amen. That would be the all. She supposed she could sustain a struggle as well as other men and women who had .had tp deliver up their best hope. She could chain her thoughts as others had to chain theirs. She could stay her heart; It was to be done. But surely, surely, Abie must care i She could not have mistaken all the signs that made up the tale that was such heaven ! Surely he must — he must !

And Miss Courtney sauntered on still : past the verbena beds and hollyhocks — past the vinery on. to the lawn ; the scales adjusted in her mind still ; the balance down on the side that was heavy with her heart's big wish. Then she told herself she was a little fool — which was pretty much what she had begun with — and she put an end to all her cogitations by a toss in the air of her pretty head, and a movement of her hands as if she would clear the mist from before her eyes.

Nevertheless, in spite of all renunciation, Kitty found that thoughts of Mr. Musgrave would steal to her. An unexpected opportunity to meet him came. Those administrative girls, the Folletts, determined to have a little tea before the Ashbury Hall picnic, that arrangements might be talked over, and so be insured to run smooth ; and to this Mr. Musgrave and the Courtneys were invited. It made Kitty in a rapturous state of elevation. Her toilette for that happy evening became a matter of serious and blissful moment. Should she be dressed in white muslin, with rolls of blue velvet twisted in and out of her hair ? Or should she choose her pale gray silk with poppy trimmings, and nothing in her hair at all ? There were no eyes she thought of pleasing but Abel Musgrave' s ; and, of course, she knew his taste. And she made her choico for the neat gray ; and, when the evening came, she put it on, and before the great cloak was wrapped round her that was to hide her all the way during the half-hour's drive to town, she went down to her father, to give him her kiss and her goodbye. A good ". auntie," a small sister of the big Mrs Courtney, was with him (and able to stay with him all the evening, or Kitty would not have gone away), and the two looked, up, brightened, when she opened the door and came in. '*« Pap," she said," with her hand upon his round bald head, *' it seems so unkind to bo going out, and to leave you here." She was so glad herself— she was warmed to such ecstasy — she felt more than ever howmuch her father was denied. " Don't you think mamma and me very wicked tbhigs?"

* fib's no use going, Kitty," said Mr. Courtney simply ; " I can't walk, and I can't see/

Kitty knew that, and that was why such love and pity came from her in a deeppressed kiss. -?« You, dear old pap," she saidrr-*.' you good dear old pap !"

, f * And I .went once, Kitty," continued tho old man. "I was a'spiy young fellow in my day;"

Kitty Ifriew that too; and she thought still more cjf tfoe pleasure that was hers now, and that she trusted would soon be hers, nevgj^£,go.a u w.ay, " You aro a good pap," she iCrigd again—'* you are a good, charmmg^dmi.old pap : l" t sgsnwpn%bo long, Kitty ?" asked Mr. Courtney.,,'.- "You will come back vory 8ooni?"c*; . : '

<<yes;-' very soon," Kitty soothed him with-^he never liked her or her mother to be away, ■ And she thought of what the "sbori " would be to her, and of the happiness tho next few hours would reveal.

Sh<3 could not stay any more. Her iriotli6'r*sent to tell her the carriage was at the d!6or,"fibd she gave her aunt and father a . p'^foblng' kiss, and went down. Then, wjth a,^sh:iipon her cheek that made her look so much prettier than usual, that even Mrs,. Courtney noticed it, and gave a sharp glance at her as they passed through the hall, the drive to Aberminstor and the Folletts' house began. There was much to listen to during its pleasant two miles. Mrs. Courtney always had plenty to say on every subject 1 in : existence, and there was no reason why she should be less loquacious todkf than was her wont; so Kitty's dress— sWcjri&l-^would certainly hang over the p|biet6n t sfi(We and get spoiled with mud— and ft&Fnair would get sadly roughened if s^e did not draw down her veil— and her otyn dress was so tight and uncomfortable across .the chest, she was sorry now she had put ifc on. :.''. But Kitty was little the. worse, or better, for the perpetual stream. She W&J going to fiee Abie Musgrave, . and that was enough .talk for her. When her motHqfojijpld he? o/,her dress,, she quietly drew it in ; when she spokei.a|put her hair, she let her hair fall "down j ftrt her theme was

Abie Musgrave, and all the rest was only foreign chords. She was going to Abie Musgrave, to talk to him, to sit by his side — perhaps, even she was going to sing to him ; she had some of his songs with her in the pkaeton now, and she would just say to him gently, delicately, that she had other music to please him when he had inclination enough to come ; and sho was sure his answer would be the very substance of her bright hope. It" couldn't bo in any other way !

Sho looked very pretty, stepping into the large cool room, by her tall and handsome mother's side. Her ample cloak was gono then, and the grace and heartiness of her manners had nothing to conceal them, as she gave and received a cordial greeting from everybody there. — Had Mr. Musgrave come? was the sharp question of every pulse she had. — Yes ! was the answer the same moment from her eyes. And she was led to him by Jinny Follett, and placed on a chair the very next to the one on which he sat.

Then, of course, her glad story ran ? and she had warm answers exactly as she had hoped ? No ; not at all. Not one of the phrases she had rehearsed would come to her — not one could leave her tonguo ! Nothing was just as she had imagined it, so all her scheme was tangled, and no speech would fit ! She had not expected to have found Mr. Musgravo already arrived ; she had thought to have been seated on the couch when he was helped in, and that this would have been tho very couch on which naturally ho would have been brought to sit. She had thought, then, that when those who knew him best had been up to make a little court to him, she would have been left alone to have made, just as naturally, the court that little much the more; but now she saw her mother and she must have left the Combe considerably too late, precise the Folletts were hurrying things on considerably too soon, for here was tea announced directly, and she had only asked Abie about his health, and other conventional little pros and cons, and she positively had not another opportunity for a word with him at all I

No, not all the evening long ; actually, not all the evening long. She was not seated next to him at tea. Tea was a real meal at such times in Midlandshire, entailing placement, at the table, and consequent shutting-off from chat with any folk but those at either hand. She could speak to him, of course, but it was. only of such things as any Anne or Mary opposite to her could have talked about just as well, and as could have been transmitted from one end of the table to the other openly, like the apricot jelly and rich almond-coated cake. She was not seated next to him at cards; those, and not music, were brought forward as the entertainment of the evening, and she and Abie both were marshalled off among the young and merry folk to the lively " round gamo at cards; " but she might as well have been as far off from him as the Combe, for she could only ask him from tho distance, as slip asked all the others, about a "natural," and whether he was "content." Then supper brought tho same disappointment : he was four people from her, on the same side. She would not even have known that ho was there, unless she had bent her head. His, therefore, wero not tho eyes that were attentive to her — Ms were not the hands that passed her anything she might desiro. And, directly supper was over, Mrs. Courtney rose to go away. She always did. She always would be the first, punctiliously, to rise from table — resisting every entreaty to remain for supplemental and freer gaiety after cold fowl and riddles had done their work. So there was Kitty up again in the bedroom, being helped on with her cloak, tucking her music bundle behind her drapery, that it might not be seen that she had brought it, and feeling that she was no nearer the knowledge she had been longing for than if she had said no to the Folletts' invitation, and had staid at home !

Her attempt at concealment of her wellfilled leathern music-roll was seen, and a sharp comment on it made.

"Why, we have never .had a song 1" the Folletts and a group of other girls cried. "What a shame, Kitty, to bring your music, and then to leave it here !"

It is not pleasant, certainly, to take a music-budget anywhere, and then not to be asked to open it ; but this was so small a matter to Kitty Courtney compared to that other budget she had had no chance to open, that she could afford it a very good-natured laugh. "Oh!" she cried, pushing the obtruding portion of her roll tight in, "it will do another time I It is not like the cream-cheese some of you have been declining to take to Ashbury — it will keep 1"

And she laughed still more when she was in tho quiet moonlight, in the phaeton, being driven homo ; and moro still when the drive was over, and she was in the solitude of her own silent room. What — she asked herself— had her evening been ? What had it all come to, now it was at an end ? Its little events wcro all before her, spread out like one of her old school-sums, and what were they, now she could reckon them all up ? — Tho lines wero filled with ciphers, and there was no unit to make them anything more ! She had been, and she had come away; but that was tho Alpha and tho Omega, and there was no midway on which she could lay her head and dream. She had been twisted in, and then she had been twisted out. She reviewed the little divisions of the evening ; how she had been carried. off after supper with the tide — past Mr. Musgrave, past all chance of any word or look from him but the then said good-night — out from tho room, out from the house, out from tho very town in which he breathed, into tho even, unflurried placidity of tho Combe; and, obliged to bo moved either by its cruelty or its absurdity, she vaulted from the former, as too sober-serious, and turned her eyes only oii the last.

Well, it was all over now ; ifc was done ; there was no more to be said or thought about it; and it was far better to let it go : she should be free now ; indeed, she was free. Her heart was still, her pulses calm ; she should never again deliver herself to such foolish hope and expectation; sUo

have fact for her subsistence from now ; fact that she was sure that she could clutch when sho wanted it, and that would not mock her by vanishing into air. She would sink back into the reposo and serenity of the Combo ; she would be her father's solace, her mother's listener, with only her music Jind her cheorfulness to be the gilding spread upon her way. Two days after, she was ready for a walk to Abenninster. Ashbury Hall picnic was her errand, of course. In all history, the lives of men, being traced from outside points, approach the centre of some great event, and there become woven into one harmonious whole ; and it was the same with Kitty and her friends. They were walking stoadily towards their great plea-sure-party ; they carried each their thread to add it to the general woof; and though each was but an individual, a single purpose was actuating every one ; and Kitty — any more than any other— could not wrestle against her fate. She was to go to the grocer's, aud the chemist's, and the Cedars (the name of the Folletts' house), and if she did not execute her commissions properly, there would ensue a general woe. "Pray, don't forget," Mrs. Courtney called after her, for the dozentli time: "there is the essence of almonds, and the isinglass ; the anchovy paste, and sardines ; and then there is the message to the Folletts — altogether five things. Don't forget one ; there's a good girl."

"To be sure, mamma," Kitty cried. "I will recollect that I have five fingers, and five senses ; aud I will even go so far as to remember that there are five lancets in the church east windows, and that between our seat and the pulpit there are five pews ; and then I shall be just as good as when I was a little girl home for the holidays at school ! I will not forget 1" Upon which she went a few steps out of her way to look in through the drawing-room window, and give an extra nod to her dear " pap ;" and then gathering a just-opened blush-rose, that was looking for too beautiful to be heedlessly passed by, she was really off Combe precincts, and set out upon her road.

If anybody else could have forgotten that Bracklington House — Abel Musgrave's — was next door to the Cedars, where she was going, Kitty Courtney didn't. Magnificently free as she was, superlatively superior to tho fetters that might once have bound her, she was as conscious of tho fact as if it had been a fierce Indian sun, and wero pouring down vertically on her unprotected head. She knew the owner would not be there ; she knew it was the time he would be absent at his factory ; but she gave a long look at the well-known windows, and at tho great hall-door that stood between them, nevertheless. Nearly all the shutters wore closed ; tho flower-beds were unfilled ; there was a thorough air of desertion and neglect everywhere about. And Kitty knew what this meant for Abol Musgrave. She knew it pointed at rigid self-denial — altered habits that must have seemed to him like migration to another land. But she walked on ; made her call ; walked by again ; executed her little errands — with a salutation hero and .there as she passed any one she knew; and was down tho hill again, leaving the narrow pavements of real Aborminster town. Then she had to choose between ono more street agaiu or a pathway through the minster-yard ; and, having had enough of bustle and confusion, she decidod to avoid the chance of any more, and she passed through the posts that formed the headway of the quiot path.

Dear, dear 1 There was Abel Musgrave ! What should she do? He did not see her ! Should she turn back? He was toiling, with two sticks to help him, to the seat in the south porch (quite close upon the path), and he need never know that she had been so near ! — "What should she do?

There was no choice now. Musgrave had accomplished his sharp difficulty of climbing into the porch, and had no sooner thrown himself heavily on to the seat than he had seen her, and was struggling to draw himself tip once more, that ho might do the mcn.'ui^ luting honour. She could only run to i tii n the same moment, hindering him, and laying a thoughtful hand upon his arm.

"You must not get up," she cried, "now I see you are so tired. I will sit by you rather than that ; then I, too, shall get a rest."

She did as she said , and tho old south porch held them ; and the sculptured angels were the only audience, with their folded hands and low-bent heads.

Abie thanked her warmly, so that the blushes flew into her cheeks. His restingplace would have an association now, he said. He always stopped there on his slow way from his home to his factory, and it would have a memory now it had always lacked before. She was very kind.

Kitty thought of the shrouded windows she had just passed by, and the flowerless garden beds ; and she could not reply with all of her usual cheoriness and laugh.

"It is no harm, Mr. Musgrave," she said, "to have to do things to which we arc not used. It is very good that there is a seat her exactly where you want it."

"Yes, that is very good," answered Musgrave, "especially now," — and here Kitty was obliged to look up with a little smile and bow, because it was her nature, and she could not help it — " but tho poverty that brings me here is no pastime ! It requires a strong will to battle with that 1"

Poor Kitty 1 This was just the time when she could have said : " Poverty, Abie, is nothing 1 I am yours all the same !" or, rather, -this was just the time when she could have sighed out that, if shrhad not been so magnificently free 1 so superlatively superior to love's every little chain ! — but what could she do now ? Nothing. Nothing but let her eyes again fall down ; but trace round the dim carving of a gravestone at her foot ; but feel her heart was beating very hard. "May I tell you," asked Musgrave, " what poverty brings to me ?" "Yes," said Kitty, with her eyes quite down. Then she heard Musgrave say that poverty meant, for him, the giving up of the one thing he wished for, the determination to do his all — to endure everything — till lie could get back into his former position, and enjoy what he had enjoyed before. She heard him say that to do this, perhaps, he ought to have given up Bracklington House ; but it was tho mere shell of what it had been, ho was living there with only one sorvant — all tho furniture boing gone — and he thought ho might have been many months before he could have found any one to take it ; and so, with that much of his former self, there ho stayed. And then poverty, he said, made him work : it made him be his own overlooker, his own head-clerk ; for lie was resolved to pay off all his debts ; ho would recover his position no other way. But, he went on to tell, this was tho mere sketch of poverty. The filling up came to a great deal more. Those were the few broad facts, which in themselves would be small and easy ; but a hundred things that had become his nature had now to be checked a hundred times a day ; and then there was the great wide fear, that when ho had worked up to the prize he longed for, the prize might have been grasped by some other, and be gone away 1

And there was nothing more. The old dinvcarved grave-stone had other feet to tread it, the listening sculpture heard what other voices said. A group of visitors, led by the sexton, came up to enter that way into the church, and as they referred to l&r, J&yj-sgwe for some matter of architec-

tural history that was a point of dispute, Kitty said a little fluttering good-bye, and went her way, but she thoiight Abie pressed her hand ; she thought his eyes had some special moaning in them as they rested on her face ; and somehow she was not so confidently certain of hor freedom when she got back to the Combe as she had been when she had started from it 1 And somehow she was not so confidently certain that it was so very happy to be free ! It seemed to her — there was just a sweet savour coming — that there was something else that might possibly become a great deal more delicious still I

(To be continued.)