The Young Clementina by D. E. Stevenson

Author:D. E. Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2013-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

“She Was Beautiful”

One day in June, when I had been at Hinkleton Manor for about eight months I received a telegram from George Hamilton asking me to come at once to an address in Brighton: Kitty was ill and wanted to see me. The telegram had been forwarded from Wentworth’s, and I realized that Kitty did not know that I had taken up my abode at the Manor. It seemed strange that Kitty should want me, but I could not refuse to go to her when she was ill. I showed the telegram to Nanny and told her I must catch the ten o’clock train.

“I suppose you must go, Miss Char,” she said. “But come back as soon as you can. We won’t tell Clemmie about it. It would only upset her.”

I had no time to arrange anything; I threw a few clothes into a suitcase and set off. All the way down to Brighton I thought of Kitty and wondered about her—how ill was she? Why did she want to see me, me of all people?

Kitty had dropped out of my mind so completely in the last few months that I had scarcely thought of her at all except in a vague way as the mother of Clementina. And now she had come back into my life like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. She had a habit of doing that, I mused. She had a habit of disappearing out of my life for months—or even years—and returning suddenly and unexpectedly with peremptory demands upon my time. What kind of Kitty should I find when I reached Brighton? Would she be the old carefree Kitty of her little girlhood, or the Kitty who had come to me in trouble and made me the receptacle of her moods, or would she be the hard woman with the hatred in her eyes who had looked at me across the crowded courtroom and frightened me so?

I was still frightened when I remembered that look of scorn and hatred; it came back to me very vividly, and a cold shiver ran up my spine. That look was the last I had had from Kitty; I had not seen her since.

I gazed out of the window at the flying fields and tried to calm myself and to reason with the strange fear which had seized upon me—was I afraid of Kitty? I thought about it for a little and decided that it was not Kitty of whom I was afraid; it was the hatred which had terrified me. And surely the hatred must have gone now or she would not have sent for me to come to her when she was ill. It was a comforting thought, and I held on to it and elaborated it. If Kitty had married Mr. Hamilton and was happy with him—as Garth had seemed to expect—she would bear me no grudge for the part I had played in the divorce. Happy people do not cherish grievances.

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