"Katharine," said Mr. Guyon to his daughter on the following day, as she sat opposite him at breakfast, while he furtively watched her countenance from behind the defence of a convenient newspaper, "I have something to say to you."
"Have you, papa? What is it?"
She looked at him uninterested and unconcerned. Mr. Guyon threw down his newspaper, left his chair, and took up a position on the hearthrug suggestive of wintry weather. He felt and he looked awkward; he cleared his throat, and pulled at the blue-silk ribbon which encircled it, as though its pressure incommoded him. His daughter did not move, and the expression of her face was still uninterested, unconcerned.
"Yes, Katie," he recommenced. "I have indeed, my dear, something very particular to say to you. I don't often speak seriously to you, you know, and never bother you about business. So you must not think I want to bother you now, and you must really attend to me."
"If it's about going out of town, papa, I really don't care where----"
"No, no, Kate, it's not that," said her father, interrupting her; "it's nothing so easily settled as that. The fact is--Kate," he said abruptly, and in a changed tone, "what do you think of our friend Streightley?"
"What do I think of Mr. Streightley, papa? I can hardly tell you; I don't think I know,--I don't think I have any thoughts about him. But what has that to do with any thing important or particular that you want to speak to me about?"
"It has every thing to do with it, Kate. Robert Streightley is the best friend I have in the world, and he is the best fellow I know."
Katharine looked at her father with surprise. She was very far from understanding him perfectly; but she certainly had a notion that Mr. Streightley did not resemble the sort of person to whom she would have expected her father to apply the favourite epithet, "good-fellow." She said nothing, however; and Mr. Guyon, watching her more eagerly than he suffered his features to tell, continued:
"I need not weary you by explaining the services Streightley has done me in detail, but I must tell you that I have been unfortunate in money matters in many ways; I have trusted friends, and been deceived--" again Katharine's face expressed surprise, which she certainly felt, and yet would have been puzzled to explain. "I have been speculating, and have been ill-advised; the result has been disastrous; in short, Katie, I must have gone to the wall had it not been for Robert Streightley."
Katharine had become exceedingly pale now, and she fixed her eyes on her father with more steadiness than he liked. He leaned his right elbow on the chimney-piece, and kept his right hand hovering about his mouth and chin, ready to cover an undesirable expression of candour or embarrassment.
"Do you mean that Mr. Streightley has lent you money, papa?" asked Katharine.
"Yes, my dear, he has, and large sums too; and I have lost so heavily by those speculations I mentioned, that I cannot pay him without the greatest inconvenience indeed almost ruin. He does not know how I am situated; and of course it would be painful and humiliating to me to tell him, unless I could also tell him the best news he could hear, Kate----"
"What is that, papa?" she asked, perfectly without suspicion. Mr. Guyon found his change of attitude very useful now, and he critically examined his boots before he said:
"Well, my dear--I know you will be surprised, and indeed I was astonished when he mentioned the subject to me. The best news that Mr. Streightley could hear, Katie, would be that you had consented to become his wife--" and at the last words he raised his head and looked at her. Katharine started up, and exclaimed:
"Me! I!--O papa, what are you saying?"
Her father approached her, put one arm round her waist, and took her hand in his. He seldom caressed his daughter, and she instinctively shrunk from the encircling arm, as if a danger threatened her; but he held her firmly, and she stood still and listened.
"I daresay you can't understand it, Kate, but it's quite true for all that; and you know you are a doosid sensible girl, and doosid lucky too, I can tell you." Mr. Guyon was recovering himself. "Now look here. You've always lived like a lady--a long way better than many ladies, by Jove--and you don't know what difficulties and poverty mean; and it will be your own fault if you do know now, or ever. You've no fortune, Kate; and a girl who hasn't can't choose for herself--that's a fact. Men can't and won't marry without money; and though you don't know much of the world, except the ball, supper, promenade, and park side of it, Katie, I daresay you know enough of it not to deny that. You don't know much of Streightley; and I daresay he's not the sort of fellow you would fancy if you did know ever so much of him. But then, you see, the sort of fellow you would fancy can't marry you, because you have no money, or won't, which comes to the same thing,--at all events doesn't--" Here Katharine released herself, and sat down. Still she turned her white face and attentive eyes steadfastly upon him, and showed no sign of emotion, save the occasional twitching of the hand which she laid upon the table. Immensely reassured by her quietness, Mr. Guyon went on, quite cheerily:
"It's all nonsense thinking about love-matches in these days; and indeed at any time I don't think they turned out well. Now, Kate, this is the real fact. If you don't marry Streightley, who is a first-rate fellow, and immensely rich, and ready to do all sorts of generous and noble things, in addition to giving me time to look about me until I can pay him the money I owe him, absolute ruin is staring me in the face, and you too. Don't speak, Kate; don't say any thing in a hurry; and don't say I ask you to marry Streightley for my sake; but just listen to the alternative. Well, suppose that you determine not to accept Streightley;--and remember, beautiful and admired as you are, he is the first man who has ever asked you to marry him--a pretty strong proof, I think, of the truth of my statement that men won't marry without money, especially if you will take the trouble to count up the number of ugly heiresses married since you have been out, and to several of your own admirers too;--we all go to smash here; I must shift for myself the best way I can--get off abroad, and escape imprisonment; though I can't escape disgrace--and never hope to show my face in England again. And as for you, Katie, don't think me hard or cruel--I must tell you the truth; I must tell you the whole truth, that you may know what you really reject or accept. I see nothing for you but becoming a companion to a lady--which I take it is the most infernal kind of white slavery going--or being dependent on the charity of Lady Henmarsh. You can't live with your aunt, because she is going to live with her daughter; and you can't come abroad with me, for many reasons, the chief being that I could not afford to take you. Cousin Hetty is very pleasant and nice now, and a capital chaperone; but you are, as I said before, a doosid sensible girl, and I daresay you can guess what cousin Hetty would be to a poor relation, with a shady father, living on her charity,--so I won't dwell upon that."
He paused a little, but still she did not speak. Still she looked at him, her face white, her lips firmly closed, and the hand on the table twitching occasionally. Once or twice there was a sound in her throat as if she swallowed with difficulty, but she uttered no word. Mr. Guyon felt exceedingly hot and uncomfortable, but he went on, less glibly perhaps, and looking rather over than at her.
"The other side of the medal is this, Katie. You have the opportunity of marrying a rich man, in an honourable and advancing position, so desperately in love with you that you may choose your own manner of life. He is very good-looking and well-bred, and I don't see any reason why you may not like him quite well enough to get on with him as happily as any woman gets on with any man. Let me tell you, my dear, the strength of your position will be incalculably increased by your not being in love with him; in nine cases out of ten a woman in love with her husband bores him horribly, and brings out all the bad points in his temper, which she might never find out, or at all events might easily manage, otherwise. You will have every material of reasonable happiness, and the power of indulging your tastes--and they are not economical, Kate. And now choose for yourself; and remember I don't play the sentimental parent, and urge you to this for my sake. We have always been good friends, Katie, but I don't expect a sacrifice from you; and I don't talk the absurd nonsense of representing a splendid offer like this, involving advantages which no girl in London knows better than yourself how to appreciate, as a fearful trial, affording you an opportunity of performing martyrdom to filial duty."
There was a coarse sneer in his voice, which he would have done well to repress, which was dangerous; but his temper was getting the better of his prudence. Katharine shrunk from the tone, and felt even in that moment of tumultuous emotion that the love she had for her father was but a weak affection. It was dying while he spoke, dying as her fresh knowledge of him was born; it would soon be dead she knew, with that other love now for ever lost to her; and only the hopeless pain, the weariness of contempt, would live where the two honest natural affections had sprung up, to be blighted. Mutual avoidance, something like mutual fear, was in the faces that looked at each other, and were so strangely like, now that the expression of each was one of its worst. With no enviable sensations Mr. Guyon waited for Katharine to speak. She rose from her seat before she did so; then she said:
"Mr. Streightley does not imagine that I entertain any feeling of regard for him, I suppose?"
This was a puzzling question, and Mr. Guyon allowed the embarrassment it caused him to be evident.
"Except as a friend of mine, and--" he stammered.
"I understand," said Katharine, and she bent her head slowly and emphatically. "And he is willing to purchase me on those terms? It is well the bargain should be distinctly understood."
If Mr. Guyon had ever understood, had ever cared to understand his daughter, these words must have taught him how great a change had passed upon her. They would have been impossible of utterance to the Katharine of three weeks ago; but a wide gulf, never to be spanned, of pain and injury lay between that time and the present. He felt afraid of the girl; but rallying courage for a decisive effort, he said:
"Your answer, Katharine; you see the case as clearly as I do;--what am I to say to Mr. Streightley?"
"Nothing," she answered, "but that I will see him myself. Tell him to come here this evening, to-morrow, any time you please,--I will see him, I will hear what he has to say. There must be no mistake in this case, no self-deception, no mutual deception. The truth is not beautiful or holy, but at least it shall be told."
She left the room as soon as she had spoken the last words. Her father remained as she had left him; an ugly dark shadow had spread itself over his face. After some minutes he looked up, shrugged his shoulders, and strolled over to one of the windows. He looked out idly for a little then roused himself, and went into his own room. There he wrote two letters, bestowing considerable: time and pains on the first, which was addressed to Robert Streightley, but scribbling the other off with careless rapidity. It bore Lady Henmarsh's name upon the envelope, and contained the following words:
"DEAR HETTY,--I have done my part of this business, and I think things look well. As to my having very little trouble, perhaps if you had heard and seen, you would have continued to think so; but I should be devilish sorry to do it over again.--Yours, E. G."
Katharine did not appear at dinner that day, and Mr. Streightley partook of that meal, for which he had a very moderate appetite, tête-à-tête with her father. When the two gentlemen adjourned to the drawing-room, Katharine was seated by the window, and they could hardly discern her features, so rapidly was the autumn twilight deepening into darkness. While Mr. Guyon was calling rather angrily for lights, Robert Streightley advanced towards the motionless figure, awaiting his greeting; and as Mr. Guyon heard his daughter reply to the confused and agitated words which Robert addressed to her, he started at the changed tone of the voice, as if a stranger had spoken.