"There it is," he whispered.
He was staring before him over the grave. Uniacke followed his eyes. He saw the short grass stirring faintly in the night wind. He thought it looked like hair bristling, and his hair moved on his head. He saw the churchyard in a maze of moon-rays. And with the moonlight had come manyshadows. But not one of them was deceptive. Not one took the form of any spectre. Nevertheless Uniacke recoiled from this little grave at his feet, for it seemed to him as if the power that had been sleeping there stirred, forsook its recumbent position, rose up warily, intent on coming forth to confront him.
"You see it?" whispered Sir Graham, still keeping hold of his arm.
"No, no I see nothing; there is nothing. It's your fancy, your imagination that plays tricks on you."
"No, it's Jack. Oh, Uniacke, see—see how he poses! He knows that I shall paint him to-morrow. How horrible he is! Do the drowned always look like that?"
"Come away, Sir Graham. This is a hideous hallucination. Come away."
"How he is altered. All his features are coarsened, bloated. My wonder-child! He is tragic now, and he is disgusting. How loathsomely he twists his fingers! Must I paint him like that—with that grinning, ghastly mouth—little Jack? Ah! ah! He poses—he poses always. He would have me paint him now,—here in the moonlight—here—here—standing on this grave!"
"Sir Graham, come with me!" exclaimed Uniacke.
And this time he forcibly drew his companion with him from the grave. The painter seemed inclined to resist for a moment. He turned his headand looked long and eagerly behind him. Then suddenly he acquiesced.
"It has gone," he said. "You have driven it away."
Uniacke hurried forward to the Rectory. That night he implored the painter for the last time to leave the island.
"Can't you feel," he said, almost passionately, "the danger you are running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes in this abominable way."
"You swear you saw nothing?"
"I do. There was nothing. You have thought of that boy until you actually see him before you."
"As he is?"
"As he is not, as he will never be."
The painter got up from his chair, came over to Uniacke, and looked piercingly into his eyes.
"Then you declare—on your honour as a priest," he said slowly, "that you do not know that my wonder-child is the boy who is buried beneath that stone?"
"I buried that boy, and I declare on my honouras a priest that I do not know it," Uniacke answered, desperately but unflinchingly.
It was his last throw for this man's salvation.
"I believe you," the painter said.
He returned to the fireplace, and leaned his face on his arm against the mantelpiece.
"I believe you," he repeated presently. "I have been mistaken."
"Mistaken—how?"
"Sometimes I have thought that you have lied to me."
Uniacke's heart grew heavier at the words.
In the morning Sir Graham said to him, with a curious calmness:
"I think perhaps you are right, Uniacke. I have been considering your words, your advice."
"And you will take it?" Uniacke said, with a sudden enormous sense of gratefulness.
"I think I shall."
"Think—Sir Graham!"
"I'll decide to-night. I must have the day to consider. But—yes, you are right. That—that horrible appearance. I suppose it must be evoked by the trickery of my own brain."
"Undoubtedly."
"There can be no other reason for it?"
"None—none."
"Then—then, yes, I had better go from here. But you will come with me?"
"To London?"
"Anywhere—it does not matter."
He looked round him wistfully.
"If I am to leave the island," he said sorrowfully, "it does not matter where I go."
"To London then," Uniacke said, almost joyously. "I will make my arrangements."
"To-morrow?"
"To-morrow. Yes. Excuse me for the present. I must run over to the mainland to settle about the Sunday services. I shall be back in a few hours."
He went out, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from brain and heart. So good could come out of evil. Had he not done right to lie? He began to believe that he had. As he crossed to the mainland he wrapped himself in warm and comfortable sophistries. The wickedness of subterfuge vanished now that subterfuge was found to be successful in attaining a desired end. For that which is successful seldom appears wholly evil. To-day Uniacke glowed in the fires of his sinfulness.
He transacted his business on the mainland and set out on his return home, driving through the shallow sea in a high cart. The day, which had opened in sunshine, was now become grey, very still and depressing. An intense and brooding silence reigned, broken by the splashing of the horse's hoofs in the scarcely ruffled water, and by the occasional peevish cackle of a gull hovering, on purposeless wings, between the waters and the mists. The low island lay in the dull distance ahead, wan and deprecatory of aspect, like a thingdesiring to be left alone in the morose embrace of solitude. Uniacke, gazing towards it out of the midst of the sea, longed ardently for the morrow when Sir Graham would be caught away from this pale land of terror. He no longer blamed himself for what he had done. Conscience was asleep. He exulted, and had a strange feeling that God smiled on him with approval of his sin.
As he reached the island, the grey pall slightly lifted and light broke through the mist. He came up out of the sea, and, whipping the wet and weary horse, drove along the narrow lanes towards the Rectory. But when he came within hail of the churchyard all his abnormal exultation was suddenly quenched, and the oppressive sense of threatening danger which had for so long a time persecuted him, returned with painful force. He saw ahead of him Sir Graham seated before his easel painting. Behind the artist, bending down, his eyes fixed intently on the canvas, his huge hands gripping one another across his chest, stood the mad Skipper. As the wheels of the cart ground the rough road by the churchyard wall, Sir Graham looked up and smiled.
"I'm doing a last day's work," he called.
Uniacke stopped the cart and jumped out. The Skipper never moved. His eyes never left the canvas. He seemed utterly absorbed.
"You are not working on the picture?" said Uniacke hastily.
"No."
"Thank God."
"Why d'you say that?"
"I—the subject was so horrible."
"This is only a study. I shall leave the picture as I am leaving the Island. Perhaps some day—" He paused. Then he said: "I call this 'Sea Change.' Go indoors. In about half an hour I will come and fetch you to see it. Where will you be?"
"In my little room at the back of the house. I have some letters to write."
"I'll come there. Don't disturb me, till then. I think the picture will be strange—and I hope beautiful."
And again he smiled. Reassured, Uniacke made his way into the Rectory. He sat down at his writing-table, took up his pen and wrote a few words of a letter. But his mind wandered. The pen dropped on the table and he fell into thought. It was strangely still weather, and there was a strange stillness in his heart and conscience, a calm that was sweet to him. He felt the relief of coming to an end after a journey that had not been without dangers. For, during his intercourse with Sir Graham, he had often walked upon the edge of tragedy. Now he no longer looked down from that precipice. He leaned his arm on the table, among the litter of papers connected with parish affairs, and rested his head in his hand. Almost unconsciously, at that moment he began to rejoice at his own boldness in deviating fromthe strict path of uncompromising rectitude. For he thought of it as boldness, and of his former unyielding adherence to the principles he believed to be right, as timidity. After all, he said to himself, it is easy to be too rigid, too strict. In all human dealings we must consider not only ourselves, but also the individuals with whom we have to do. Have we the right to injure them by our determination to take care of the welfare of our own souls? It seemed to him just then as if virtue was often merely selfishness and implied a lack of sympathy with others. He might have refused to lie and destroyed his friend. Would not that have been selfishness? Would not that have been sheer cowardice? He told himself that it would.
Calm flowed upon him. He was lost in the day-dream of the complacent man whose load of care has fallen away into the abyss from which he has fortunately escaped. The silence of the Island was intense to-day. His conscience slept with the winds. And the sea slept too with all its sorrow. He sat there like a carven figure with his face in his hand. And, by degrees, he ceased to feel, to think actively. Conscious, not asleep, with open eyes he remained in a placid attitude, lulled in the arms of a quiet happiness.
He was distracted at length by some sound at a distance. It broke through his day-dream. At first he could not tell what it was, but presently he became aware that a hoarse voice was ejaculatingsome word outside, probably in the churchyard. He took his hand from his face, sat up straight by the writing-table and began to listen, at first with some slight irritation. For he had been happy in his day-dream. The voice outside repeated the word. Uniacke thought of the street-cries of London to which he was going, and that this cry was like one of them. He heard it again. Now it was nearer. Short and sharp, it sounded both angry and—something else—what? Dolorous, he fancied, keen with a horror of wonder and of despair. He remembered where he was, and that he had never before heard such a cry on the Island. But he still sat by the table. He was listening intently, trying to hear what was the word the voice kept perpetually calling.
"Jack! Jack!"
Uniacke sprang up, pushing back his chair violently. It caught in a rug that lay on the bare wooden floor and fell with a crash to the ground.
"Jack! Jack!"
The word came to his ears now in a sort of strident howl that was hardly human. He began to tremble. But still he did not recognise the voice.
"Jack!"
It was cried under the window of the parlour, fiercely, frantically. Uniacke knew the voice for the mad Skipper's. He delayed no longer, but hastened to the front room and stared out across the churchyard.
The Skipper, with his huge hands uplifted, his fingers working as if they strove to strangle something invisible in the air, was stumbling among the graves. His face was red and convulsed with excitement.
"Jack!" he shouted hoarsely, "Jack!"
And he went on desperately towards the sea, pursuing—nothing.
Uniacke looked away from him towards the place where Sir Graham had been painting. The easel stood there with the canvas resting upon the wooden pins. On the ground before it was huddled a dark thing.
Uniacke went out from his house. Although he did not know it he walked very slowly as if he dragged a weight. His feet trod upon the graves. As he walked he could hear the hoarse shout of the skipper dying away in the distance towards the sea.
"Jack!"
The voice faded as he gained the churchyard wall.
The dark thing huddled at the foot of the easel was the painter's dead body. On his discoloured throat there were the marks of fingers. Mechanically Uniacke turned his eyes from those purple and red marks to the picture the dead man had been painting. He saw the figure of a boy in a seaman's jersey and long sea-boots dripping with water. The face of the boy was pale and swollen. The mouth hung down hideously. The hair wasmatted with moisture. Only the eyes were beautiful, for they looked upward with a rapt and childlike expression.
"He sees the rainbow!" murmured the clergyman.
And he fell forward against the churchyard wall with his face buried in his arms. The voice of the grey sea was very loud in his ears. Darkness seemed to close in on him. He had done evil to do good, and the evil he had done had been in vain. His heart beat hard, and seemed to be in his throat choking him. And in the darkness he saw a vision of a dirty child, dressed in rags and a tall paper cap, and pointing upwards.
And he heard a voice, that sounded far off and unearthly, say:
"Look at that there rainbow! Look at that there rainbow!"
He wondered, as a man wonders in a dream, whether the dead painter heard the voice too, but more clearly—and elsewhere.
Onesad cold day in London, city of sad cold days, a man in a Club had nothing on earth to do. He had glanced through the morning papers and found them full of adjectives and empty of news. He had smoked several cigarettes. He had exchanged a word or two of gossip with two or three acquaintances. And he had stared moodily out of a bow window, and had been rewarded by a vision of wet paving stones, wet beggars and wet sparrows. He felt depressed and inclined to wonder why he existed. Turning from the window to the long room at his back he saw an elderly Colonel yawning, with a sherry and bitters in one hand and a toothpick in the other. He decided not to remain in the Club. So he took his hat and went out into the street. It was raining in the street and he had no umbrella. He hailed a hansom and got in.
"Where to, sir?" asked the cabby through the trap door.
"What?" said the man.
"Where to, sir?"
"Oh! go to—to——"
He tried to think of some place where he might contrive to pass an hour or two agreeably.
"Sir?" said the cabby.
"Go to Madame Tussaud's," said the man.
It was the only place he could think of at the moment. He had lived in London for years but he had never been there. He had never had the smallest desire to go there. Wax and glass eyes did not attract him. Dresses that hung from corpses, which had never been alive, did not appeal to him. Nor did he care for buns. He had never been to Tussaud's. He was only going there now because literally, at the moment, he knew not where to go. He leaned back in the cab and looked at the wet pedestrians, and at the puddles.
When the cab stopped he got out and entered a large building. He paid money at a turnstile and drifted aimlessly into a waxen world. Some fat men in strange costumes, with bulging eyes like black velvet, and varying expressions of heavy lethargy, played Hungarian music on violins. It was evident that they did not thrill themselves. Their aspect was at the same time fierce and dull, they looked like volcanoes that had been drenched with water. The man passed on, the music grew softer and the waxen world pressed more closely round. Kings, cricketers, actresses, and statesmen beset him in vistas. He trod a maze of death that had not lived. There were very few school treats about, for the fashionableschool treat season had not yet fully set in. So the man had the wax almost entirely to himself. He spread his wings to it like a bird to the air. By degrees, as he wandered—pursued by the distant music from the drenched volcanoes—a feeling of suffocation overtook him. All these men and women about him stared and smiled, but all were breathless. They wore their gaudy clothes with an air, no doubt. The Kings struck regal attitudes. The cricketers had a set manner of bringing off dreamy, difficult catches. The actresses were properly made up to charm, and the statesmen must surely have brought plenty of empires to ruin, if insipidity has power to cause such wreckage. But they were all decisively breathless. They seemed caught by some ghastly physical spell. And this spell was laid also upon the man who wandered among them. The breath of life withdrew from him to a long, long distance—he fancied. He felt as one who, taken by a trance, is bereft of power though not of knowledge. The staring silence was as the silence of a tomb, whose walls were full of eyes, intent and fatigued. He started when a person in uniform, hitherto apparently waxen, said in a cockney voice,
"See the Chamber of Horrors, sir?" But he recovered in time to acquiesce.
He descended towards a subterranean vault: as if to a lower circle of this inferno full of breathless demons. Here there were no rustic strangers,no clergymen with their choirs, no elderly ladies in command of "Bands of Hope." The silence was great, and the murderers stood together in companies, looking this way and that as if in search of victims. Some sat on chairs or stools. Some crouched in the dock. Some prepared for a mock expiation in their best clothes. One was at work in his house, digging in quicklime a hole the length of a human body. His waxen visage gleamed pale in the dim light, and he appeared to pause in his digging and to listen for sounds above his head. For he was in the cellar of his house.
The man stood still and looked at him. He had a mean face. All the features were squeezed and venomous, and expressive of criminal desires and of extreme cruelty. And so it was with most of his comrades. They varied in height, in age, in social status and in colouring. But upon all their faces was the same frigid expression, a sort of thin hatefulness touched with sarcasm. The man wandered on among them and saw it everywhere, on the lips of a youth in rags, in the eyes of an old woman in a bonnet, lurking in the wrinkles of a labourer, at rest upon the narrow brow of a doctor, alive in the puffed-out wax of an attorney's bloated features. Yes, it was easy to recognise the Devil's hall-mark on them all, he thought. And he wondered a little how it came about that they had been able, in so many cases, to gain the confidence of their unhappyvictims. Here, for instance, were the man and woman who had lured servant girls into the depths of a forest and there murdered them for the sake of their boxes. Even the silliest girl, one would have supposed, must have fled in terror from the ape-like cunning of those wicked faces. Here was the housekeeper who had made away with her aged mistress. Surely any one with the smallest power of observation would have refused to sit in the evening, to sleep at night, in company with so horrible a countenance. Here was the man who killed his paramour with a knife. How came he to have a paramour? The desire to kill lurked in his bony cheeks, his small, intent eyes, his narrow slit of a mouth, but no desire to love. God seemed to have set his warning to humanity upon each of these creatures of the Devil. Yet they had deceived mankind to mankind's undoing. They had won confidence, respect, even love.
The man was confused by this knowledge, as he moved among them in the dimness and the silence, brushing the sleeve of one, the skirt of another, looking into the curiously expressive eyes of all. But presently his wondering recognition of the world's fatuous and frantic gullibility ceased. For at the end of an alley of murderers he stood before a woman. She was young, pretty and distinguished in appearance. Her features were small and delicate. Her brow was noble. Her painted mouth was tender andsaintly; and, though her eyes were sightless, truth and nobility surely gazed out of them. For a moment the man was seized by a conviction that a mistake had been made by the proprietors of the establishment, and that some being, famous for charitable deeds, or intellect, or heroic accomplishment had been put in penance among these tragic effigies. He glanced at her number, consulted his catalogue, and found that this woman was named Catherine Sirrett, and that she had been convicted of the murder of her husband by poison some few years before. Then he looked at her again and, before this criminal, he felt that she might, nay, must, have deceived any man, the most acute and enlightened observer. No one could have looked into that face and seen blackness in the heart of that woman. Everyone must have trusted her. Many must have loved her. Her appearance inspired more than confidence—reverence; there was something angelic in its purity. There was something religious in its quiet gravity. His heart grew heavy as he looked at her, heavy with a horror far more great than any that had overcome him as he examined the bestial company around. And when he came away, and long afterwards, Catherine Sirrett's face remained in his memory as the most horrible face in all that silent, watchful crowd of beings who had wrought violence upon the earth. For it was dressed in deceit. The other faces were naked. So he thought.He did not know Catherine Sirrett's story, though he remembered that a woman of her name had been hanged in England some years before, when he was in India, and that she had gained many sympathisers by her bearing and roused some newspaper discussion by her fate.
This is her story, the inner story which the world never knew.
Catherine Sirrett's mother was an intensely, even a morbidly, religious woman. Her father was an atheist and an æsthete. Yet her parents were fond of each other at first and made common cause in spoiling their only child. Sometimes the mother would whisper in the little girl's ear that she must pray for poor father who was blind to the true light and deaf to the beautiful voice. Sometimes the father would tell her that if she would worship she must worship genius, the poet, the painter, the musician; that if she would pray she must pray to Nature, the sea, the sunset and the spring-time. But as a rule these two loving antagonists thought it was enough for their baby, their treasure, to develop quietly, steadily, in an atmosphere of adoration, in which arose no mist of theories, no war of words. Till she was ten years old Catherine was untroubled. At that age a parental contest began to rage—at first furtively,—about her. With the years her mother's morbidity waxed, her father's restraint waned. The one became more intenselyand frantically devout, the other more frankly pagan. And now, as the child grew, and her mind and heart stood up to meet life and girlhood, each of her parents began to feel towards her the desire of sole possession. She had been brought up a Christian. The father had permitted that. So long as she was an ignorant infant he had felt no anxiety to attach her to his theories. But when he saw the intelligence growing in her eyes, the dawn of her soul deepening, there stirred within him a strong desire that she should face existence as he faced it, free from trammels of superstition. The mother, with the quick intuition of woman, soon understood his unexpressed feeling and thrilled with religious fear. Although—or indeed because—she loved her husband so much she was tortured by his lack of faith. And now she was alarmed at the thought of the effect his influence might have upon Catherine. She was roused to an intense activity of the soul. She said nothing to her husband of her fear and horror. He said nothing to her of his secret determination that his only child should grow up in his own faithless faith. But a silent and determined battle began to rage between them for the possession of Catherine's soul. And, at last, this battle turned the former love of the parents into a sort of uneasy hatred. The child did not fully comprehend what was going on around her, but she dimly felt it. And it influenced her whole nature.
Her mother, who was given over to religious forms, who was ritualistic and sentimental as well as really devout and fervent, at first gained the ascendancy over Catherine. Holy but narrow-minded, she compressed the girl's naturally expansive temperament, and taught her something of the hideous and brooding melancholy of the bigot and the fanatic. Then the father, quick-sighted, and roused to an almost angry activity by his appreciation of Catherine's danger, threw himself into the combat, and endeavoured to imbue the girl with his own comprehension of life's meaning, exaggerating all his theories in the endeavour to make them seem sufficiently vital and impressive. Catherine lived in the centre of this battle, which became continually more fierce, until she was eighteen. Then she fell in love with Mark Sirrett, married him, and left her parents alone with their mutual hostility, now complicated by a sort of paralysis of surprise and sense of mutual failure. They had forgotten that their child's future might hold a lover, a husband. Now they found themselves in the rather absurd position of enemies who have quarrelled over a shadow which suddenly vanishes away. They had lost their love for each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts in the guidance of her strange and terrible destiny.
Mark Sirrett, when he married Catherine, was twenty-five, dark, handsome, warm-hearted and rich. It seemed that he had an exceptionally sweet and attractive nature. He had been an affectionate son, a kind brother in his home, a generous comrade at school and college. Everybody had a good word for him; his family, his tutors, his friends, his servants. Like most young and ardent men he had had some follies. At least they were never mean or ungenerous. He entered upon married life with an unusually good record. Those who knew him casually, even many who knew him well, considered that he was easily read, that he was transparently frank, that, though highly intelligent, he was not particularly subtle, and that no still waters ran deep in Mark Sirrett. All these people were utterly wrong. Mark had a very curious side to his nature, which remained almost unsuspected until after his marriage with Catherine, but which eventually was to make a name very well known to the world. He was, although apparently so open, in reality full of reserve. He was full of ambition. And he had an exceptionally peculiar, and exceptionally riotous, imagination. And this imagination he was quite determined to express in an art—the art of literature. But his reserve kept him inactive until he had left Oxford, when he went to live in London, where eventually he met Catherine.
His reserve, and his artistic hesitation to workuntil he felt able to do good work, held Mark's imagination in check as a dam holds water in check. He sometimes wrote, but nobody knew that he wrote except one friend, Frederic Berrand. And Berrand could be a silent man. Even to Catherine, when he fell in love with her and wooed her, Mark did not reveal his desire for fame, or his intention to win it. The girl loved her lover for what he was, but not for all he was. Of the still water that ran deep she as yet knew nothing. She thought her husband, who was rich, who appeared gay, who had lived so far, as it seemed, idly enough, would continue to live with her, as he had apparently lived without her, brightly, honestly, a little thoughtlessly, a little vainly.
She had no sort of suspicion that she had married that very curious phenomenon—a born artist. Had her mother suspected it she would have been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted. And Catherine herself? well, she was still a child at this time.
She and Mark went to Spain for their honeymoon, and lived in a tiny white villa at Granada. It stood on the edge of the hill whose crown is the exquisite and dream-like Alhambra. Its long and narrow garden ran along the hillside, a slope of roses and of orange flowers, of thick, hot grass and of tangled green shrubs. The garden wall was white and uneven, and almost hidden by wild, pink flowers. Beneath was spread the plainin which lies the City, bounded by the mountains over which, each evening, the sun sets. And every day the drowsy air hummed in answer to the huge and drowsy voice of the wonderful Cathedral bell, which struck the hours and filled this lovely world with almost terrible vibrations of romance. In the thick woods that steal to the feet of the ethereal Palace the murmur of the streams was ever heard, and the white snows of the Sierra Nevada stared over the yellow and russet plain, and were touched with a blue blush as the night came on.
Catherine, although she loved her parents and had never fully realised the enmity grown up between them, felt a strange happiness, that was more than the happiness of new-born passion, in her emancipation. She was by nature exquisitely sensitive, and she had often been vaguely troubled by the contest between her parents. Their fighting instincts had sometimes set her face to face with a sort of shadowed valley, in whose blackness she faintly heard the far-off clash of weapons. Now she was caught away from this subtle tumult, and as she looked into her husband's vivacious dark eyes she felt that a little weight which had lain long on her heart was lifted from it. She had thought herself happy before, now she knew herself utterly happy. Life seemed to have no dark background. Even love itself was not spoiled by a too great wonder of seriousness. They loved in sunshine and were gay—like grasshoppersin the grass that the sun has filled with a still rapture of warmth. Not till two days before their departure for England was this chirping, grasshopper mood disturbed or dispelled.
At one end of the long and narrow garden there was a little crude pavilion, open to the air on three sides. The domed roof was supported on painted wooden pillars up which red and white roses audaciously climbed. Rugs covered the floor. A wooden railing ran along the front facing the steep hillside. The furniture was simple and homely, a few low basket chairs and an oval table. In this pavilion the newly married pair took tea nearly every afternoon after their expeditions in the neighbourhood, or their strolls through the sunny Moorish Courts. After tea they sat on and watched the sunset, and fancied they could see the birds that flew away above the City towards the distant mountains drop down to their nests in Seville ere the darkness came. This last evening but one was intensely hot; the town at their feet seemed drowning in a dust of gold. Cries, softened and made utterly musical, rose up to them from this golden world, beyond which the sky reddened as the sun sank lower. Sometimes they heard the jingling bells of mules and horses in the hidden streets; they saw the pigeons circling above the house-tops, and doll-like figures moving whimsically in gardens that seemed as small as pocket-handkerchiefs. Thin laughter of playing childrenstole to them. And then the huge and veiled voice of the Cathedral bell tolled the hour, like Time become articulate.
A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the world, deep with a depth of old and vanished ages, heavy with the burden of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed suddenly to strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes. Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Nevada with the dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced round and up at him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared. He looked like an entranced man.
"Mark!" Catherine exclaimed. "Mark! why, how strange you look!"
"Do I?" he said, staring out over the wide plain below.
The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the little houses to the sunset and faint towards Seville.
"Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like this—till now."
He made no answer.
"Are you sad because we are going so soon?" she asked. "But then why should we go? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us away."
"Kitty, does not that bell give you the lie?" he answered.
"The bell of the Cathedral?" she asked, wondering.
"Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the great river, of the sorrows, of the terrors, of the crimes."
"Mark!" said Catherine in amazement.
"Nothing to call us away from our idle happiness here!" he continued. "Do you say—nothing?"
"Why—no. For we are free; we have no ties. You have no profession, Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father—how he worships the arts!"
"And you, Kitty—you?"
Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excitement.
"He has taught me to love them too."
"How much, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth?"
She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered:
"Ah no. For my mother——"
She paused.
"My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than any art, more important, more beautiful."
"What can that be?"
"Oh, Mark—religion!"
He leaned over the railing at her side, and the white and red roses that embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant breeze of evening.
"But there are many religions," he said. "A man's art may be his religion."
A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's.
"Oh no, Mark."
"Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnestness, putting aside his reserve for the first time with her. "Indeed it may."
"You mean when he uses it to do good?"
He shook his head. The roses shivered.
"The true artist never thinks of that. To have a definite moral purpose is destructive."
The City at their feet was sinking into shadow now, and the air grew cold, filled with the snowy breath of the Sierra.
"When we go back to England I will teach you the right way to follow an art, to worship it; the way that will be mine."
"Yours, Mark? But I don't understand."
"No," he said. "You don't understand all of me yet, Kitty. Do you want to?"
"Yes," she said.
There was a sound of fear in her voice. Mark sat down beside her and put his arm round her.
"Kitty," he began. "I'm only on the threshold of my life, of my real life, my life with you and with my work."
"You are going to work?" she exclaimed.
"Yes. That bell just now seemed to strike the hour of commencement—to tell me it was time for me to begin. I should like, some day—far in the future, Kitty,—to hear it strike that other hour, the hour when I must finish, when the little bit of work that I can do in the world is done. I shan't be afraid of that hour any more than I'm afraid of this one. Perhaps, when you and I are old we shall come here again, and listen to that bell once more, the same, when we are changed."
He pointed towards the Cathedral which was still touched by the sun. Catherine leaned against his shoulder. She said nothing, and did not move.
"Everything in life has its appointed recorder," he continued. "They are a big band, the band of the recorders who strive accurately to write down life as it is. Well, Kitty, I am going to be one of that band."
"You are going to be a writer, Mark?"
"Yes."
"Then, you will record the beauty, the joy, the purity, the goodness of life?"
His usually bright face had become sombre and thoughtful. It looked strangely dark and saturnine in the twilight.
"I shall record what I see most clearly."
"And what is that?"
"Not the things on the surface, but the things beneath the surface, of life."
And then he told Catherine more fully of his ambition and gave her a glimpse of the hidden side of his duplex nature.
She gazed up at him in the gathering twilight and it seemed to her that she was looking at a stranger. The climbing roses still shook against Mark in the wind. While he talked his voice grew almost fierce, and his dark eyes shone like the eyes of a fanatic. When he ceased to speak, Catherine's lips were pursed together, like her mother's when she listened to the pagan rhapsodies of Mr. Ardagh.
Two days later the Sirretts left Granada for England.
On their return they paid a short visit to Catherine's parents, who were living in Eaton Square. Mr. and Mrs. Ardagh received them with a sort of dulled and narcotic affection. In truth, for different reasons, the Puritan and thepagan cherished a certain resentment against the man who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare. Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had, therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount of interest and pleasure from forming the pliant mind of her protégée, who was with her always from eleven till six in the evening, who read aloud to her, accompanied her on her charitable missions, and took—so far as a stranger might,—the place of Catherine in her life. Catherine met Jenny upon the doorstep of her parents' house on the evening of her arrival, and hastened to ask her mother who the slim girl, with the tall figure, narrow shoulders, fluffy brown hair, and large oriental eyes was.
"My paid daughter," said Mrs. Ardagh, almost bitterly. "But she can't fill the place of my lost Catherine."
Nevertheless, Catherine discovered that her mother was truly attached to Jenny.
"I took her partly because she is easily led," she said, "easily influenced and so very prettyand poor. I want to save her for God, and when I met her there was one who wished to lead her to the devil. She won't see him now. She won't hear his name."
Then she dropped the subject.
Catherine was alternately questioned by her father and by her mother as to the influence of Mark. But something within her prevented her from telling them of the conversation in the Pavilion, when the cries of the toy city died down into the night. Mrs. Ardagh, now sinking in the confusion of a rather dreary middle age, complicated by a natural melancholy, and by incessant confession to a ritualistic clergyman seductive in receptivity, was relieved to think that Mark was harmless.
Art for Art's sake—the motto of her husband—had apparently little meaning for Mark. As Mrs. Ardagh thought it the devil's motto she was glad of this and said so to Catherine. Mr. Ardagh, on the other hand, was vexed to find Mark apparently so frivolous; and he also expressed his feelings to Catherine, who became slightly confused.
"I should like to see your husband doing something," he said. "You have much of me in you, Kit, despite your poor dear mother's extravagant attempts to limit your reading to Frances Ridley Havergal. Why didn't you marry an artist, eh? A painter or an author, somebody who can give us more beauty than we have already,or more truth? You're too good for Frances Ridley Havergal. Leave her to your mother and that girl, Jenny, who is like wax in your mother's hands and the hands of the Rev. Father Grimshaw. Piff!"
Catherine said nothing, but she sought an opportunity of seeing something of Jenny. She found it, just before the day on which she and Mark were to leave London for their country house. Jenny had come as usual one morning, to read aloud to Mrs. Ardagh. They were just then deep in the "Memoirs" of a certain pious divine, whose chief claim upon the attention and gratitude of posterity seemed to be that, during a very long career, he had "confessed" more Anglican notabilities than any of his rivals, and had used up, in his church, an amount of incense that would have put a Roman Catholic priest to shame. On the morning in question the reading was interrupted. Mrs. Ardagh was called away to consult with a lay-worker in the slums upon some scheme for reclaiming the submerged masses, and Catherine, running in to her mother's boudoir after a walk with Mark, found the tall, narrow-shouldered girl with the oriental eyes sitting alone with the apostolic memoirs lying open upon her knees. Catherine was not sorry. She took off her fur coat and sat down.
"What are you and my mother reading, Miss Levita?" she asked.
Jenny told her.
"Is it interesting?"
"I suppose it ought to be," Jenny answered, thoughtlessly.
Then a flush ran over her thin cheeks, on which there were a great many little freckles.
"I mean that it is very interesting," she added. "Your mother will tell you so, Mrs. Sirrett."
"Perhaps. But I was asking your opinion."
It struck Catherine that Jenny had her opinion and was scarcely as compliant as Mr. Ardagh evidently supposed her to be. At Catherine's last remark Jenny glanced up. The two girls looked into each other's eyes, and, in Jenny's, Catherine thought she saw a flickering defiance.
"I was asking your opinion," she repeated.
"Well, Mrs. Sirrett," Jenny said, more hardily, "I don't know why it is. I admire and love goodness, yes, as your mother—who's a saint, I think—does. But I'll tell you frankly that I think it's often very dull to read about. Don't you think so?"
She blushed again, and let the heavy white lids droop over her eyes, which had glittered almost like the eyes of a fever patient while she was speaking.
"Only when dull people write about it, surely," said Catherine.
"I don't know," Jenny said, twisting her black stuff dress with nervous fingers. "I often think that in the books of the cleverest authors there aredull moments, and that those dull moments are nearly always when the good, the really excellent, characters are being written about."
"And in real life, Miss Levita?" asked Catherine. "Do you find the good people duller, less interesting, than the bad ones in real life?"
"I haven't known many very bad ones, Mrs. Sirrett."
"Well—but those you have known!"
Jenny hesitated. She was obviously embarrassed. She even shifted, like an awkward child, in her chair. But there was something of obstinate honesty in her that would have its way.
"If you must know,—I mean, if you care to know, please," she said at length, "the most interesting person I ever met was—yes, I suppose he was a wicked man."
Her curious, sharp-featured, yet attractive, face was hot all over as she finished. Catherine divined at once that she was speaking of the person who, according to Mrs. Ardagh, had wished "to lead her to the devil." At this moment, while the two girls were silent, Mrs. Ardagh returned to the room. As Catherine left it she heard the soft and high voice of Jenny taking up once more the parable of the highly-honoured divine.
Catherine was not altogether sorry when she and her husband left Eaton Square for the house in Surrey which Mark had rented for the summer months.
In this house the young couple were to face forthe first time the reality of married life. Hitherto they had only faced its romance.
The house was beautiful in an old-fashioned way. Its rooms were low and rather dark. A wood stood round it. The garden was a wild clearing, fringed with enormous clumps of rhododendron. Wood doves cooed in the trees like invisible lovers unable to cease from gushing. Under the trees ferns grew in masses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer house. In winter it must have been but a dreary hermitage.
The servants greeted them respectfully. The horses neighed in the stables. The dogs barked, and leaped up in welcome, then, when they were noticed and patted, depressed their backs in joyous humility, and, lifting their flexible lips, grinned amorously, glancing sideways from the hands that they desired. It was an eminently unvulgar, and ought to have been a very sweet, home-coming.
But was it sweet to Catherine?
She asked herself that question, and the fact that she did so proved that it was not wholly sweet. Already the future oppressed her. In this house, which seemed full of the smell of the country, of the very odour of peace, she felt that the stranger, the second Mark—scarcely known to her as yet—was to be born, was to gainstrength and grow. She feared him. She watched for him. But, for the first few days, he did not show himself. The grasshoppers chirped and revelled in the grass. Mark and Catherine sat in the wood, wandered on the hills, rode in the valleys, cooed a little even, like the doves hidden in the green shadows of the glades, and making ceaseless music. The lovers—for they were still lovers at this time—made a gay dreamland for themselves. But dreams cannot and ought not to last. If they did they would become painfully enervating. One day, in the wood, Mark resumed the conversation of the Pavilion.
"Because I am rich I must not be idle, Kitty," he said.
And into his dark eyes there crept that look of the stranger man.
"Thank God that I am rich," he added.
"Why, Mark dear?"
"Because I can dare to do what sort of work I choose," he answered. "The pot boils without my labour. So I am independent of the public, whom I will win in my own way. If I have to wait it will not matter."
And then, speaking with growing enthusiasm, he gave Kitty a sketch of a book he had projected. The doves cooed all through the plot, which was a sad and terrible one, very uncommon and very unlike Mark. Catherine listened to it with, alternately, the mind of her father and the mind of her mother. It was the old antagonismof the Puritan and the pagan. But now it raged in one person instead of in two, as the girl sat under the soft darkness of the trees, listening to the eager voice of her boy husband, who was beginning at last to cast the skin of his reserve. The voice went on and on, interrupted only by the doves. But sometimes Catherine felt as if she leaned upon the painted railing of the Pavilion, and heard the distant cries of the golden City. At last Mark said,
"Kitty, that is what I mean to do."
"It is terrible," she said.
And she pursed her lips like her mother.
"Yes," Mark answered, with enthusiasm. "It is terrible. It is ghastly."
Catherine looked at him with an intense and growing surprise. She was wondering how the conception of such horrors could take place in a man so gay as Mark.
At last she said,
"Mark, you feel your own power, do you not?"
"Kitty," he replied quietly, almost modestly, yet with a firm gravity that was strong, "I do feel that I have something to say and that I shall be able to say it in my book. I have waited a long while. Now I believe that I am ready, that it is time for me to begin."
"Then, Mark, if you feel that you have this power, don't you feel a desire to conquer the greatest difficulties in your art, to show that you can succeed where others have failed?"
He looked at her curiously, realising that she had something to say to him, and that she was trying to prepare the way before it.
"Come, Kitty," he said. "Say what you wish to say. You have the right. What is it?"
Catherine told him of her conversation with Jenny.
"That little thin girl," he said. "So she thinks wickedness more interesting, more many-sided than virtue, more dramatic in its possibilities. Well, she and I are agreed. But what was it you wanted?"
"Mark, I want you to prove to her—to everyone—that it is not so."
"How?"
"By writing a different kind of book—a noble book. You can do it. Where others have failed, you can succeed."
He laughed at her, gaily.
"Perhaps, some day, I'll try," he said. "But I can only write at present what I have conceived. Till this book is done, I can think of nothing else. I see you are interested, Kitty. I must tell you all I am intending to do."
He continued, until it was quite evening, expatiating on the force with which he intended to realise in literature the terrors that trooped in his imagination. And by the time he had finished and darkness stood under the trees, Catherine was carried away by the pagan spirit. She thought no more of the possible harm the projectedbook might work in sensitive natures. She thought only of its power, which she acclaimed.
Mark kissed her with a solemnity of passion he had never shown before, and they went back to the house.
It was an immense relief to Mark to open his book of revelation and to allow Catherine to read these pages in it. But he could not be continuously unreserved to any human being. And that evening he subsided into his former light-hearted gaiety, and shrouded the stranger man in an impenetrable veil. Catherine sat with him in wonderment, while the moon came up behind the trees and shone over the clearing before the house. She did not yet understand the inflexible secrecies of genius. A nightingale sang. Its voice was so sweet that Catherine felt as if the whole world were full of tenderness and of sympathy. She said so to Mark, just as she was turning from him to go to bed.
"Ah, Kitty," he said, "there are other things in the world besides tenderness and sympathy, thank Heaven. There are terrors, there are crimes, there are strange and fearful things both within us and outside of us."
"How sad that is, Mark!" said Catherine.
He smiled at her gaily—cruelly, she thought a moment afterwards when she was alone in her bedroom.
"Sad?" he said. "I don't think so, for I lovedrama. Life is dramatic. If it were not it would be intolerable."
And still the nightingale sang. But he did not hear it. Catherine heard it till she fell asleep.
Now Mark began to write with assiduity. Catherine busied herself with her household duties, with the garden and with charities in the neighbouring Parish. Her mother's rather hysterical beliefs lost their hysteria in her, at this period, and were softened and rendered large hearted. Catherine's sympathy with the world was indeed a living thing, not simply a fine idea. While Mark was shut up every morning with his writing she visited the poor, sat by the sick, and played with the village children. The Parish—this came out forcibly at her trial,—grew to love her. She was the prettiest Lady Bountiful. The impress made upon her by her mother was visible in all this. For Mrs. Ardagh, rigid, melancholy as she was sometimes, was genuinely charitable, genuinely dutiful. If she adored the forms of religion she loved also its essence,—the doing of good. In these many mornings Catherine was like her mother—improved. But in the evenings she no longer resembled Mrs. Ardagh, but rather, in a degree, echoed her father, and responded to his vehement, if furtive, teachings. For in the evenings Mark read to her what he had written during the day and discussed it with her in all its bearings. He recognised the clear quickness of Catherine's intellect. Yet she very soonnoticed that he was exceedingly inflexible with regard to his work. He liked to discuss, he did not like to alter, it.
One night, when he had finished the last completed chapter, he laid down the manuscript and said,
"Well, Kitty?"
Catherine was lying on a couch near the open French window. She did not speak until Mark repeated,
"Well?"
Then she said,
"I think that far the finest chapter of your book——"
Mark smiled triumphantly.
"But it seems to me terribly immoral," she finished.
"Oh, that's all right, dear. So long as it is properly worked out, inevitable."
"It teaches——"
"Nothing, Kitty—nothing. It merely describes what is."
"But surely it may do harm."
"Not if it is truly artistic. And you think——"
"It that? Yes, I do. But, Mark, art is not all."
"Your father would say so."
"My father—yes."
"And he is right. I neither inculcate nor do I condemn. I only produce, or try to produce, awork of art. You admire the chapter? You think it truly dramatic?"
"Indeed I do—that's just why I am afraid of it."
"Little timorous bird."
He came over to the sofa and kissed her tenderly. She shivered. She thought his lips had never been dry and cold like that before.
The book was finished by the end of the summer. It was published in November and created a considerable sensation. Mark issued it under the name of "William Foster." Only Catherine and his friend Frederic Berrand knew who William Foster really was. The newspapers praised the workmanship of the book almost universally. But many of them severely condemned it as dangerous, morbidly imaginative, horrible in subject, and likely to do great mischief because of its undoubted power and charm. It was forbidden at some libraries.
Mark was delighted with its reception. Now, that he had brought forth his child, he seemed more light-hearted, gay and boyish than ever. His too vivid imagination had been toiling. It rested now. Catherine and he came up to town for the winter. They meant to spend only their summers in Surrey. They took a house in Chester Street, and often dined with the Ardaghs in Eaton Square. At one of these dinners Jenny Levita was present. Mark, remembering what Catherine had told him about her in Surrey,looked at her with some interest, and talked to her a little in his most light-hearted way. She replied briefly and without much apparent animation, seeming indeed rather absent-minded and distraite. Presently Mr. Ardagh said,
"This new man, William Foster, is that very rare thing in England—a pitiless artist. He has the audacity of genius and the fine impersonality."
Catherine started and flushed violently. As she did so she saw Jenny's long dark eyes fixed earnestly upon her. Mark smiled slightly. Mrs. Ardagh looked pained.
"His book is doing frightful harm, I am sure," she said.
"Nonsense, my dear," said her husband. "Nothing so absolutely right, so absolutely artistic, can do harm."
An obstinate expression came into Mrs. Ardagh's face, but she said nothing. Catherine looked down at her plate. She felt as if small needles were pricking her all over.
"Have you read the book?" said Mr. Ardagh to his wife.
"Yes," she replied. "It was recommended to me, I began it not knowing what sort of book it was."
"And did you finish it?" asked her husband, with rather a satirical smile.
"Yes. I confess I could not leave off reading it. That is why it is so dangerous. It is both powerful and evil."
Then the subject dropped. Mark was still smiling quietly, but Catherine's face was grave. When she and her mother and Jenny went up into the drawing-room, leaving the men to their cigarettes, Catherine recurred to the subject of "William Foster's" book.
"Do you really think that a novel can do serious harm, mother?" she began. "After all, it is only a work of the imagination. Surely people read it and forget it, as they would not forget an actual fact."
Mrs. Ardagh sighed wearily. She was a pale woman with feverish eyes. The expression in them grew almost fierce as she answered,
"It is the black imagination of this William Foster that will come like a suffocating cloud upon the imaginations of others, especially of——" She suddenly broke off. Catherine, wondering why, glanced up at her mother and saw that she was looking towards the far end of the big drawing-room. Jenny was sitting there, under a shaded lamp. She had some work in her hands but her hands were still. Her head was turned away, but her attitude, the curve of her soft, long, white throat, the absolute immobility of her thin body betrayed the fact that she was listening attentively.
"I would not let that child read William Foster's book for the world," Mrs. Ardagh whispered to Catherine.
Then she changed the subject, and spoke ofsome charity that she was interested in at the East End of London. Jenny's hands instantly began to move about her embroidery.
That night Catherine spoke to Mark of what her mother had said.
He only laughed.
"I cannot write for any one person, Kitty," he said, "or if I do it must be——"
"For whom?" she asked quickly.
"Myself," he replied.
Catherine slept very badly that night. She was thinking of William Foster and of Mark. They seemed to her two different men. And she had married—which?
Mark did no work in London. He knew too many people, he said, and besides, he wanted to rest. Catherine and he went out a great deal into society. At Christmas they ran over to Paris and spent three weeks there. During this holiday William Foster, it almost seemed, had ceased to exist. Mark Sirrett was light-hearted, gay, and the kindest, most thoughtful husband in the world. When they came back to London, Catherine went at once to see her mother. Mr. Ardagh had gone to the Riviera and Catherine found Mrs. Ardagh quite alone in the big house in Eaton Square.
"Why, where is Jenny Levita?" she asked.
Mrs. Ardagh made no reply for a moment. Her face, which was rather straw-colour than white, worked grotesquely as if under the influenceof some strong emotion that she was trying to suppress. At length she said, in a chill, husky voice,
"Jenny has left me."
"Left you—why?"
"She was taken away from me. She was taken back to the sin from which I hoped I had rescued her."
"Oh, mother! By whom?"
Mrs. Ardagh put her handkerchief to her eyes.
"William Foster," she answered.
Catherine felt cold and numb.
"William Foster—I don't understand," she said slowly.
Mrs. Ardagh rolled and unrolled her handkerchief with trembling fingers.
"She got hold of that book—that black, wicked book," she said, and there was a sort of fury in her voice. "It upset her faith. It tarnished her moral sense. It reminded her of the—the man from whose influence I had drawn her. All her imagination was set in a flame by that hateful chapter."
"Which one?" Catherine asked.
Mrs. Ardagh mentioned the chapter which Catherine had most hated, most admired, and most feared.
"I fought with William Foster for Jenny's soul," she said, passionately. "But I am not clever. I have no power. I am getting old and tired. She cried. She said she loved me, butthat goodness was not for her, that she must go, that life was calling her, that she must live—live! William Foster had shown her death and she thought it life. I always knew that in Jenny good and evil were fighting, that her fate was trembling in the balance. That book turned the scale."
She sobbed heavily, then with a catch of her breath, she added,
"William Foster is a very wicked man."
Catherine flushed all over her face. But she said nothing. That night she told Mark of Jenny's fate. She expected him to be grieved. But he was not.
"An author who respects his art cannot consider every hysterical girl while he is writing," he said. "And, besides, it is only your mother's idea that she was influenced by my book. Long ago she showed you the bent of her mind."
"But, Mark, don't you remember how that chapter struck me when you first read it to me?"
"I remember that you thought it the finest chapter in the book, and you were right, Kitty. You've got artistic discernment, like your father. Berrand and you would get on together. Directly he comes back I'll introduce you to each other."
Catherine said no more. From that time she devoted herself more than ever to her mother, who now, under the influence of sorrow, allowed her nature to come to its full flower. Abandoningthe pleasures of society, which had long wearied her, she gave herself up to services, charities and good works in the poor parts of London. She carried Catherine with her on many of her expeditions, and there can be no doubt that her fervour and curious exaltation had a marked effect upon the girl. Catherine had always been highly susceptible to influence, but she had been during most of her life attacked perpetually by two absolutely opposite influences. Now one of these, her father's, was removed from her. She came more than ever before under her mother's domination. For Mark, when he was not "William Foster," was simply a high-spirited and happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine.
In the spring the Sirretts made ready to leave London. As the day drew near for their departure Mark's manner changed, and he displayed symptoms of restlessness and of impatience. Catherine noticed them and asked their reason.
"I am longing to return to 'William Foster,' Kitty," he said.
She felt a sharp pain at her heart, but she only smiled and replied,
"I almost thought you had forgotten him."
"On the contrary, I have been preparing to meet him again all these months."
His dark eyes shone as he spoke. And once again that stranger stood before Catherine. She turned and went upstairs, saying that she must see to her packing. But when she was alone in her bedroom she shed some tears. That afternoon she went to Eaton Square to bid her mother good-bye. Mrs. Ardagh was looking unhappy.
"Your father returns from Italy on Wednesday," she said. "You'll just miss him."
"I am so sorry, mother," Catherine said.
Mrs. Ardagh looked at her in silence for a moment. Then she said in a low voice,
"I am not."
"Mother—but why?"
"I think you are better away from him. My heart tells me so. Oh, Kitty, I thank God every day of my life that Mark is—is such a good fellow, without those terrible ideas and theories of your poor father. You cannot think what I suffer."
It was the first time she had ever spoken so plainly on the subject, and even now she quickly changed to another topic. Mark had never introduced poor Mrs. Ardagh to "William Foster." And Catherine would not add another burden to those she already had to bear.
Surrey was looking very lovely in the spring weather. The trees were just beginning to let out the tips of their green secrets. The ground was dashed with blue and with yellow, where bloomed those flowers that are the sweetest of the year because they come the first, and whisperwonderful promises in the ears of all who love them. There had been some rain and the grass of lawns and hillsides was exquisite in the startling freshness of its vivid colour. Nature seemed uneasy with delight, like a child on a birthday morning. The tender beauty of everything around her reassured Catherine, who had come from town in a mood of strange apprehension. As she looked at the expectant woods awaiting their lovely costume in fragile nudity, at the violets that seemed to sing in odours, at that pale and shallow sky which is a herald of the deeper skies to come, it seemed to her impossible that Mark, who could be so blithe, so radiant, could turn to dark imaginings in such an atmosphere of exquisite enterprise. She was filled with hope and with a species of religious optimism. Some days passed, Catherine and Mark spent them in a renewal of friendship with their domain. They were like two children and were gayer than the spring. Then one evening Mark said,