Indiscretion Read Online Free Page B

At Torres Vedras he would turn out of a morning and go hunting poisonous snakes with nothing but a soda-bottle. Fierce as a yard-goose. But there was one thing, and one thing only, that he was afraid of.’
    ‘Mrs Catling?’
    ‘Aye! “The commander-in-chief” he used to call her,’ Captain Fortune said, with a reminiscent chuckle. ‘They used to say Devil’s-Eye Catling could stare down old Douro himself, but to his wife he always deferred. Well, he’s been dead above a year now: the gout did what the Frenchies couldn’t; and there’s Mrs Catling a rich widow without any children, past sixty, quite alone. She lives mainly at Brighton, for the air, but she’s been staying in London for the past month, seeing to some legal business. It was Stanton of Ours who told me this. I ran into him again, at Tattersall’s. And it was he who very thoughtfully put the notion in my head.’
    ‘What notion, Papa?’ Rackety as he was, he had always remained faithful to the memory of her mother, and disdained any thought of marrying again; but perhaps his desperate straits had brought him to the point. ‘Do you mean — do you mean Mrs Catling as a wife?’
    ‘A wife — dear God, whatever made you think of that? She is above sixty, I tell you — and besides, that is not it at all. ‘The Captain sniffed: he had felt the insult to his vanity rather than his fidelity, and had made it too plain. ‘Hearken to me, my dear — you girls will be talking — listen, I say, to what Stanton told me. Mrs Catling was a true army wife, as loyal to the colours as the Colonel. Now as a widow it’s her way always to look kindly on anyone connected with the regiment, in his memory, and help them where she can. There’s an old corporal of Ours that she lately found a job in the Excise, through a word in the right ear, so I hear; for she’s pretty well connected. Old Devil’s-Eye was cousin to Lord Dereham, and a rich man in his own right, besides what he raked off: so all in all she’s comfortably situated. Except in one regard, my dear — she’s solitary. She’s in need of a companion.’
    Caroline, feeling from her father’s benignly smiling pause that she was expected to make a remark, asked if the widow had no relations.
    ‘She does! And here, as Stanton pointed out to me, is the most interesting circumstance of all — she has quarrelled with them! There are, I understand, a nephew and a niece, who presume on their expectations from the old lady. But she and they do not agree. It is not a congenial family Mrs Catling is now minded to look elsewhere for company to cheer her solitude, to comfort her infirmity, and to be perhaps — who knows? — what she cannot find in her ungrateful kin: a worthy heir.’ The Captain took Caroline’s hand in both of his, patted it, and appeared momentarily preoccupied with the shape of one of her nails as he added: ‘Or heiress.’
    ‘Papa,’ she said, staring at the top of his lowered head, ‘I can hardly mistake your meaning. But what can we have to do with this lady, and why —?’
    ‘Her business in Town is not only legal. She has been seeking a companion also — but has not found one to suit. Now you cannot fail to follow me, my dear.’
    Indeed she could not; but it was with perplexity, and some heartsinking, that she contemplated the path her father was throwing open. Besides governessing, acting as a paid companion was one of the few occupations open to the unprovided woman; and it was true that she had thought of it. But instructing children was at least making herself truly useful; whereas the profession of toad-eating, as it was unflatteringly called, often amounted to nothing more than placating the capricious temper of a rich old woman who could not purchase companionship at any lower rate. The dependence she must face in any event: the sacrifice of dignity she could face if need be; but what Caroline doubted she could manage was the self-control demanded by a situation in