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Catharine Furze

by William Hale White · English · Gutenberg #6023 · 389,562 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Catharine Furze

Author: William Hale White


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6023]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2006

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6023

Credits: Transcribed from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CATHARINE FURZE ***






Transcribed from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





CATHARINE FURZE


CHAPTER I


It was a bright, hot, August Saturday in the market town of Eastthorpe,
in the eastern Midlands, in the year 1840.  Eastthorpe lay about five
miles on the western side of the Fens, in a very level country on the
banks of a river, broad and deep, but with only just sufficient fall to
enable its long-lingering waters to reach the sea.  It was an ancient
market town, with a six-arched stone bridge, and with a High Street from
which three or four smaller and narrower streets connected by courts and
alleys diverged at right angles.  In the middle of the town was the
church, an immense building, big enough to hold half Eastthorpe, and
celebrated for its beautiful spire and its peal of eight bells.  Round
the church lay the churchyard, fringed with huge elms, and in the Abbey
Close, as it was called, which was the outer girdle of the churchyard on
three sides, the fourth side of the square being the High Street, there
lived in 1840 the principal doctor, the lawyer, the parson, and two aged
gentlewomen with some property, who were daughters of one of the former
partners in the bank, had been born in Eastthorpe, and had scarcely ever
quitted it.  Here also were a young ladies' seminary and an ancient
grammar school for the education of forty boys, sons of freemen of the
town.  The houses in the Close were not of the same class as the rest;
they were mostly old red brick, with white sashes, and they all had
gardens, long, narrow, and shady, which, on the south side of the Close,
ran down to the river.  One of these houses was even older,
black-timbered, gabled, plastered, the sole remains, saving the church,
of Eastthorpe as it was in the reign of Henry the Eighth.

Just beyond the church, going from the bridge, the High Street was so
wide that the houses on either side were separated by a space of over two
hundred feet.  This elongated space was the market-place.  In the centre
was the Moot Hall, a quaint little building, supported on oak pillars,
and in the shelter underneath the farmers assembled on market day.  All
round the Moot Hall, and extending far up and down the street, were
cattle-pens and sheep-pens, which were never removed.  Most of the shops
were still bow-windowed, with small panes of glass, but the first
innovation, indicative of the new era at hand, had just been made.  The
druggist, as a man of science and advanced ideas, had replaced his bow-
window with plate-glass, had put a cornice over it, had stuccoed his
bricks, and had erected a kind of balustrade of stucco, so as to hide as
much as possible the attic windows, which looked over, meekly protesting.
Nearly opposite the Moot Hall was the Bell Inn, the principal inn in the
town.  There were other inns, respectable enough, such as the Bull, a
little higher up, patronised by the smaller commercial travellers and
farmers, but the entrance passage to the Bull had sand on the floor, and
carriers made it a house of call.  To the Bell the two coaches came which
went through Eastthorpe, and there they changed horses.  Both the Bull
and the Bell had market dinners, but at the Bell the charge was three-and-
sixpence; sherry was often drunk, and there the steward to the Honourable
Mr. Eaton, the principal landowner, always met the tenants.  The Bell was
Tory and the Bull was Whig, but no stranger of respectability, Whig or
Tory, visiting Eastthorpe could possibly hesitate about going to the
Bell, with its large gilded device projecting over the pathway, with its
broad archway at the side always freshly gravelled, and its handsome
balcony on the first floor, from which the Tory county candidates, during
election times, addressed the free and independent electors and cattle.

Eastthorpe was a malting town, and down by the water were two or three
large malthouses.  The view from the bridge was not particularly
picturesque, but it was pleasant, especially in summer, when the wind was
south-west.  The malthouses and their cowls, the wharves and the gaily
painted sailing barges alongside, the fringe of slanting willows turning
the silver-gray sides of their foliage towards the breeze, the island in
the middle of the river with bigger willows, the large expanse of sky,
the soft clouds distinct in form almost to the far distant horizon, and,
looking eastwards, the illimitable distance towards the fens and the
sea--all this made up a landscape, more suitable perhaps to some persons
than rock or waterfall, although no picture had ever been painted of it,
and nobody had ever come to see it.

Such was Eastthorpe.  For hundreds of years had the shadow of St. Mary's
swept slowly over the roofs underneath it, and, of all those years,
scarcely a line of its history survived, save what was written in the
churchyard or in the church registers.  The town had stood for the
Parliament in the days of the Civil War, and there had been a skirmish in
the place; but who fought in it, who were killed in it, and what the
result was, nobody knew.  Half a dozen old skulls of much earlier date
and of great size were once found in a gravel pit two miles away, and
were the subject of much talk, some taking them for Romans, some for
Britons, some for Saxons, and some for Danes.  As it was impossible to be
sure if they were Christian, they could not be put in consecrated ground;
they were therefore included in an auction of dead and live stock, and
were bought by the doctor.  Surnames survived in Eastthorpe with singular
pertinacity, for it was remote from the world, but what was the
relationship between the scores of Thaxtons, for example, whose deaths
were inscribed on the tombstones, some of them all awry and weather-worn,
and the Thaxtons of 1840, no living Thaxton could tell, every spiritual
trace of them having disappeared more utterly than their bones.  Their
bones, indeed, did not disappear, and were a source of much trouble to
the sexton, for in digging a new grave they came up to the surface in
quantities, and had to be shovelled in and covered up again, so that the
bodily remains of successive generations were jumbled together, and
Puritan and Georgian Thaxtons were mixed promiscuously with their
descendants.  Nevertheless, Eastthorpe had really had a history.  It had
known victory and defeat, love, hatred, intrigue, hope, despair, and all
the passions, just as Elizabeth, King Charles, Cromwell, and Queen Anne
knew them, but they were not recorded.

It was a bright, hot, August Saturday, as we have said, and it was market
day.  Furthermore, it was half-past two in the afternoon, and the guests
at Mr. Furze's had just finished their dinner.  Mr. Furze was the largest
ironmonger in Eastthorpe, and sold not only ironmongery, but ploughs and
all kinds of agricultural implements.  At the back of the shop was a
small foundry where all the foundry work for miles round Eastthorpe was
done.  It was Mr. Furze's practice always to keep a kind of open house on
Saturday, and on this particular day, at half-past two, Mr. Bellamy, Mr.
Chandler, Mr. Gosford, and Mr. Furze were drinking their
whiskey-and-water and smoking their pipes in Mr. Furze's parlour.  The
first three were well-to-do farmers, and with them the whiskey-and-water
was not a pretence.  Mr. Furze was a tradesman, and of a different build.
Strong tobacco and whiskey at that hour and in that heat were rather too
much for him, and he played with his pipe and drank very slowly.  The
conversation had subsided for a while under the influence of the beef,
Yorkshire pudding, beer, and spirits, when Mr. Bellamy observed--

"Old Bartlett's widow still a-livin' up at the Croft?"

"Yes," said Mr. Gosford, after filling his pipe again and pausing for at
least a minute, "Bartlett's dead."

"Bartlett wur a slow-coach," observed Mr. Chandler, after another pause
of a minute, "so wur his mare.  I mind me I wur behind his mare about
five years ago last Michaelmas, and I wur well-nigh perished.  I wur a-
goin' to give her a poke with my stick, and old Bartlett says, 'Doan't
hit her, doan't hit her; yer can't alter her.'"

The three worthy farmers roared with laughter, Mr. Furze smiling gently.

"That was a good 'un," said Mr. Bellamy.

"Ah," replied Chandler, "I mind that as well as if it wur yesterday."

Mr. Bellamy at this point had to leave, and Mr. Furze was obliged to
attend to his shop.  Gosford and Chandler, however, remained, and Gosford
continued the subject of Bartlett's widow.

"What's she a-stayin' on for up there?"

"Old Bartlett's left her a goodish bit."

"She wur younger than he."

A dead silence of some minutes.

"She ain't a-goin' to take the Croft on herself," observed Gosford.

"Them beasts of the squire's," replied Chandler, "fetched a goodish lot.
Scaled just over ninety stone apiece."

"Why doan't you go in for the widow, Chandler?"

Mr. Chandler was a widower.

"Eh!" (with a nasal tone and a smile)--"bit too much for me."

"Too much?  Why, there ain't above fourteen stone of her.  Keep yer warm
o' nights up at your cold place."

Mr. Chandler took the pipe out of his mouth, put it inside the fender,
compressed his lips, rubbed his chin, and looked up to the ceiling.

"Well, I must be a-goin'."

"I suppose I must too," and they both went their ways, to meet again at
tea-time.

At five punctually all had again assembled, the additions to the party
being Mrs. Furze and her daughter Catharine, a young woman of nineteen.
Mrs. Furze was not an Eastthorpe lady; she came from Cambridge, and Mr.
Furze had first seen her when she was on a visit in Eastthorpe.  Her
father was a draper in Cambridge, which was not only a much bigger place
than Eastthorpe, but had a university, and Mrs. Furze talked about the
university familiarly, so that, although her education had been slender,
a university flavour clung to her, and the farmers round Eastthorpe would
have been quite unable to determine the difference between her and a
senior wrangler, if they had known what a senior wrangler was.

"Ha," observed Mr. Gosford, when they were seated, "I wur sayin', Mrs.
Furze, to Chandler as he ought to go in for old Bartlett's widow.  Now
what do _you_ think?  Wouldn't they make a pretty pair?" and he twisted
Chandler's shoulders round a little till he faced Mrs. Furze.

"Don't you be a fool, Gosford," said Chandler in good temper, but as he
disengaged himself, he upset his tea on Mrs. Furze's carpet.

"Really, Mr. Gosford," replied Mrs. Furze, with some dignity and
asperity, "I am no judge in such matters.  They are best left to the
persons concerned."

"No offence, ma'am, no offence."

Mrs. Furze was not quite a favourite with her husband's friends, and he
knew it, but he was extremely anxious that their dislike to her should
not damage his business relationships with them.  So he endeavoured to
act as mediator.

"No doubt, my dear, no doubt, but at the same time there is no reason why
Mr. Gosford should not make any suggestion which may be to our friend
Chandler's advantage,"

But Mr. Gosford was checked and did not pursue the subject.  Catharine
sat next to him.

"Mr. Gosford, when may I come to Moat Farm again?"

"Lord, my dear, whenever you like you know that.  Me and Mrs. G. is
always glad to see you.  _When_ever you please," and Mr. Gosford
instantly recovered the good-humour which Mrs. Furze had suppressed.

"Don't forget us," chimed in Mr. Bellamy.  "We'll turn out your room and
store apples in it if you don't use it oftener."

"Now, Mr. Bellamy," said Catharine, holding up her finger at him, "you'll
be sick of me at last.  You've forgotten when I had that bad cold at your
house, and was in bed there for a week, and what a bother I was to Mrs.
Bellamy."

"Bother!" cried Bellamy--"bother!  Lord have mercy on us! why the missus
was sayin' when you talked about bother, my missus says, 'I'd sooner have
Catharine here, and me have tea up there with her, notwithstanding there
must be a fire upstairs and I've had to send Lucy to the infirmary with a
whitlow on her thumb--yes, I would, than be at a many tea-parties I
know.'"

Mrs. Furze gave elaborate tea-parties, and was uncomfortably uncertain
whether or not the shaft was intended for her.

"My dear Catharine, I shall be delighted if you go either to Mr.
Gosford's or to Mr. Bellamy's, but you must consider your wardrobe a
little.  You will remember that the last time on each occasion a dress
was torn in pieces."

"But, mother, are not dresses intended to keep thorns from our legs; or,
at any rate, isn't that _one_ reason why we wear them?"

"Suppose it to be so, my dear, there is no reason why you should plunge
about in thorns."

Catharine had a provoking way of saving "yes" or "no" when she wished to
terminate a controversy.  She stated her own opinion, and then, if
objection was raised, at least by some people, her father and mother
included, she professed agreement by a simple monosyllable, either
because she was lazy, or because she saw that there was no chance of
further profit in the discussion.  It was irritating, because it was
always clear she meant nothing.  At this instant a servant opened the
door, and Alice, a curly brown retriever, squeezed herself in, and made
straight for Catharine, putting her head on Catharine's lap.

"Catharine, Catharine!" cried her mother, with a little scream, "she's
dripping wet.  Do pray, my child, think of the carpet."

But Catharine put her lips to Alice's face and kissed it deliberately,
giving her a piece of cake.

"Mr. Gosford, my poor bitch has puppies--three of them--all as true as
their mother, for we know the father."

"Ah!" replied Gosford, "you're lucky, then, Miss Catharine, for dogs,
especially in a town--"

Mrs. Furze at this moment hastily rang the bell, making an unusual
clatter with the crockery: Mr. Furze said the company must excuse him,
and the three worthy farmers rose to take their departure.




CHAPTER II


It was Mr. Furze's custom on Sunday to go to sleep for an hour between
dinner and tea upstairs in what was called the drawing-room, while Mrs.
Furze sat and read, or said she read, a religious book.  On hot summer
afternoons Mr. Furze always took off his coat before he had his nap, and
sometimes divested himself of his waistcoat.  When the coat and waistcoat
were taken off, Mrs. Furze invariably drew down the blinds.  She had
often remonstrated with her husband for appearing in his shirt-sleeves,
and objected to the neighbours seeing him in this costume.  There was a
sofa in the room, but it was horsehair, with high ends both alike, not
comfortable, which were covered with curious complications called
antimacassars, that slipped off directly they were touched, so that
anybody who leaned upon them was engaged continually in warfare with
them, picking them up from the floor or spreading them out again.  There
was also an easy chair, but it was not easy, for it matched the sofa in
horsehair, and was so ingeniously contrived, that directly a person
placed himself in it, it gently shot him forwards.  Furthermore, it had
special antimacassars, which were a work of art, and Mrs. Furze had
warned Mr. Furze off them.  "He would ruin them," she said, "if he put
his head upon them."  So a windsor chair with a high back was always
carried by Mr. Furze upstairs after dinner, together with a common
kitchen chair, and on these he slumbered.  The room was never used, save
on Sundays and when Mrs. Furze gave a tea-party.  It overlooked the
market-place, and, although on a Sunday afternoon the High Street was
almost completely silent, Mrs. Furze liked to sit so near the window that
she could peep out at the edge of the blind when she was not dozing.  It
is true no master nor mistress ever stirred at that hour, but every now
and then a maidservant could be seen, and she was better than nothing for
the purpose of criticism.  A round table stood in the middle of the room
with a pink vase on it containing artificial flowers, and on the
mantelpiece were two other pink vases and two great shells.  Over the
mantelpiece was a portrait of His Majesty King George the Fourth in his
robes, and exactly opposite was a picture of the Virgin Mary, which was
old and valuable.  Mr. Furze bought it at a sale with some other things,
and did not quite like it.  It savoured of Popery, which he could not
abide; but the parson one day saw it and told Mrs. Furze it was worth
something; whereupon she put it in a new maple frame, and had it hung in
a place of honour second to that occupied by King George, and so arranged
that he and the Virgin were always looking at one another.  On the other
side of the room were a likeness of Mr. Eaton in hunting array, with the
dogs, and a mezzotint of the Deluge.

Mr. Furze had just awaked on the Sunday afternoon following the day of
which the history is partly given in the first chapter.

"My dear," said his wife, "I have been thinking a good deal of Catharine.
She is not quite what I could wish."

"No," replied Mr. Furze, with a yawn.

"To begin with, she uses bad language.  I was really quite shocked
yesterday to hear the extremely vulgar word, almost--almost,--I do not
know what to call it--profane, I may say, which she applied to her dog
when talking of it to Mr. Gosford.  Then she goes in the foundry; and I
firmly believe that all the money which has been spent on her music is
utterly thrown away."

"The thing is--what is to be done?"

"Now, I have a plan."

In order to make Mrs. Furze's plan fully intelligible, it may be as well
to explain that, up to the year 1840, the tradesmen of Eastthorpe had
lived at their shops.  But a year or two before that date some houses had
been built at the north end of the town and called "The Terrace."  A new
doctor had taken one, the brewer another, and a third had been taken by
the grocer, a man reputed to be very well off, who not only did a large
retail business, but supplied the small shops in the villages round.

"Well, my dear, what is your plan?"

"Your connection is extending, and you want more room.  Now, why should
you not move to the Terrace?  If we were to go there, Catharine would be
withdrawn from the society in which she at present mixes.  You could not
continue to give market dinners, and gradually her acquaintance with the
persons whom you now invite would cease.  I believe, too, that if we were
in the Terrace Mrs. Colston would call on us.  As the wife of a brewer,
she cannot do so now.  Then there is just another thing which has been on
my mind for a long time.  It is settled that Mr. Jennings is to leave,
for he has accepted an invitation from the cause at Ely.  I do not think
we shall like anybody after Mr. Jennings, and it would be a good
opportunity for us to exchange the chapel for the church.  We have
attended the chapel regularly, but I have always felt a kind of prejudice
there against us, or at least against myself, and there is no denying
that the people who go to church are vastly more genteel, and so are the
service and everything about it--the vespers--the bells--somehow there is
a respectability in it."

Mr. Furze was silent.  At last he said, "It is a very serious matter.  I
must consider it in all its bearings."

It _was_ a serious matter, and he did consider it--but not in all its
bearings, for he did nothing but think about it, so that it enveloped
him, and he could not put himself at such a distance that he could see
its real shape.  He was now well over fifty and was the kind of person
with whom habits become firmly fixed.  He was fixed even in his dress.  He
always wore a white neckcloth, and his shirt was frilled--fashions which
were already beginning to die out in Eastthorpe.  His manner of life was
most regular: breakfast at eight, dinner at one, tea at five, supper at
nine with a pipe afterwards, was his unvarying round.  He never left
Eastthorpe for a holiday, and read no books of any kind.  He was a most
respectable member of a Dissenting congregation, but he was not a member
of the church, and was never seen at the week-night services or the
prayer-meetings.  He went through the ceremony of family worship morning
and evening, but he did not pray extempore, as did the elect, and
contented himself with reading prayers from a book called "Family
Devotions."  The days were over for Eastthorpe when a man like Mr. Furze
could be denounced, a man who paid his pew-rent regularly, and
contributed to the missionary societies.  The days were over when any
expostulations could be addressed to him, or any attempts made to bring
him within the fold, and Mr. Jennings therefore called on him, and
religion was not mentioned.  It may seem extraordinary that, without
convictions based on any reasoning process, Mr. Furze's outward existence
should have been so correct and so moral.  He had passed through the
usually stormy period of youth without censure.  It is true he was
married young, but before his marriage nobody had ever heard a syllable
against him, and, after marriage, he never drank a drop too much, and
never was guilty of a single dishonest action.  Day after day passed by
like all preceding days, in unbroken, level succession, without even the
excitement of meeting-house emotion.  Naturally, therefore, his wife's
proposals made him uneasy, and even alarmed him.  He shrank from them
unconsciously, and yet his aversion was perfectly wise; more so, perhaps,
than any action for which he could have assigned a definite motive.  With
men like Mr. Furze the unconscious reason, which is partly a direction by
past and forgotten experiences, and partly instinct, is often more to be
trusted than any mental operation, strictly so-called.  An attempt to use
the mind actively on subjects which are too large, or with which it has
not been accustomed to deal, is pretty nearly sure to mislead.  He knew,
or it knew, whatever we like to call it, that to break him from his
surroundings meant that he himself was to be broken, for they were a part
of him.

His wife attacked him again the next day.  She was bent upon moving, and
it is only fair to her to say that she did really wish to go for
Catharine's sake.  She loved the child in her own way, but she also
wanted to go for many other reasons.

"Well, my dear, what have you to say to my little scheme?"

"How about my dinner and tea?"

"Come home to the Terrace.  How far is it?"

"Ten minutes' walk."

"An hour every day, in all weathers; and then there's the expense."

"As to the expense, I am certain we should save in the long run, because
you would not be expected to be continually asking people to meals."

"I am afraid that the business might suffer."

"Nonsense!  In what way, my dear?  Your attention will be more fixed upon
it than it can be with the parlour always behind you."

There was something in that, and Mr. Furze was perplexed.  He was not
sufficiently well educated to know that something, and a great deal, too,
can be said for anything, and he had not arrived at that callousness to
argument which is the last result of culture.

"Yes, but I was thinking that perhaps if we leave off chapel and go to
church some of our customers may not like it."

"Now, my good man, Furze, why you know you have as many customers who go
to church as to chapel."

"Ah! but those who go to chapel may drop off."

"Why should they?  We have plenty of customers who go to church.  They
don't leave us because we are Dissenters, and, as there are five times as
many church people as Dissenters, your connection will be extended."

Mrs. Furze was unanswerable, but her poor husband, after all, was right.
The change, when it took place, did not bring more people to the shop,
and some left who were in the habit of coming.  His dumb, dull
presentiment was a prophecy, and his wife's logic was nothing but words.

"Then there are all the rooms here; what shall we do with them?"

"I have told you; you want more space.  Besides, you do not make half
enough show.  You ought to go with the times.  Why, at Cross's at
Cambridge their upstairs windows are hung full of spades and hoes and
such things, and you can see it is business up to the garret.  I should
turn the parlour into a counting-house.  It isn't the proper thing for
you to be standing always at that pokey little desk at the end of the
counter with a pen behind your ear.  Turn the parlour, I say, into a
counting-house, and come out when Tom finds it necessary to call you.
That makes a much better impression.  The rooms above the drawing-room
might be used for lighter goods, so as not to weight the floors too
much."

Mr. Furze was not sentimental, but he shuddered.  In the big front
bedroom his father and he had been born.  The first thing he could
remember was having measles there, and watching day by day, when he was a
little better, what went on in the street below.  His brothers and
sisters were also born there.  He remembered how his mother was shut up
there, and he was not allowed to enter; how, when he tried the door,
Nurse Judkins came and said he must be a good boy and go away, and how he
heard a little cry, and was told he had a new sister, and he wondered how
she got in.  In that room his father had died.  He was very ill for a
long time, and again Nurse Judkins came.  He sat up with his father there
night after night, and heard the church clock sound all the hours as the
sick man lay waiting for his last.  He rallied towards the end, and,
being very pious, he made his son sit down by the bedside and read to him
the ninety-first Psalm.  He then blessed his boy in that very room, and
five minutes afterwards he had rushed from it, choked with sobbing when
the last breath was drawn.  He did not relish the thought of taking down
the old four-post bedstead and putting rakes and shovels in its place,
but all he could say was--

"I don't quite fall in with it."

"_Why_ not?  Now, my dear, I will make a bargain with you.  If you can
assign a good reason, I will give it up; but, if you cannot, then, of
course, we ought to go, because _I_ have plenty of reasons for going.
Nothing can be fairer than that."

Mr. Furze was not quite clear about the "ought," although it was so fair,
but he was mute, and, after a pause, went into his shop.  An accident
decided the question.  Catharine was the lightest sleeper in the house,
notwithstanding her youth.  Two nights after this controversy she awoke
suddenly and smelt something burning.  She jumped out of bed, flung her
dressing-gown over her, opened her door, and found the landing full of
smoke.  Without a moment's hesitation she rushed out and roused her
parents.  They were both bewildered, and hesitated, ejaculating all sorts
of useless things.  Catharine was impatient.

"Now, then, not a second; upstairs through Jane's bedroom, out into the
gutter, and through Hopkins's attic.  You cannot go downstairs."

Still there was trembling and indecision.

"But the tin box," gasped Mr. Furze; "it is in the wardrobe.  I must take
it."

Catharine replied by literally driving them before her.  They picked up
the maid-servant, crept behind the high parapet, and were soon in safety.
By this time the smoke was pouring up thick and fast, although no flame
had appeared.  Suddenly Catharine cried--

"But where is Tom?"

Tom was the assistant, and slept in an offset at the back.  Underneath
him was the kitchen, and beyond was the lower offset of the scullery.
Catharine darted towards the window.

"Catharine!" shrieked her mother, "where are you going?  You cannot; you
are not dressed."

But she answered not a word, and had vanished before anybody could arrest
her.  The smoke was worse, and almost suffocating, but she wrapped her
face and nose in her woollen gown, and reached Tom's door.  He never
slept with it fastened, and the amazed youth was awakened by a voice
which he knew to be that of Miss Furze.  Escape by the way she had come
was hopeless.  The staircase was now opaque.  Fortunately Tom's casement,
instead of being in the side wall, was at the end, and the drop to the
scullery roof was not above four feet.  Catharine reached it easily, and,
Tom coming after her, helped her to scramble down into the yard.  The
gate was unbarred, and in another minute they were safe with their
neighbours.  The town was now stirring, and a fire-engine came, a machine
which attended fires officially, and squirted on them officially, but was
never known to do anything more, save to make the road sloppy.  The
thick, brick party walls of the houses adjoining saved them, but Mr.
Furze's house was gutted from top to bottom.  It was surrounded by a
crowd the next day, which stared unceasingly.  The fire-engine still
operated on the ashes, and a great steam and smother arose.  A charred
oak beam hung where it had always hung, but the roof had disappeared
entirely, and the walls of the old bedchamber, which had seen so much of
sweetness and of sadness, of the mysteries of love, birth, and death, lay
bare to the sky and the street.




CHAPTER III


The stone bridge was deeply recessed, and in each recess was a stone
seat.  In the last recess but one, at the north end, and on the east
side, there sat daily, some few years before 1840, a blind man, Michael
Catchpole by name, selling shoelaces.  He originally came out of Suffolk,
but he had lived in Eastthorpe ever since he was a boy, and had worked
for Mr. Furze's father.  He was blinded by a splash of melted iron, and
was suddenly left helpless, a widower with one boy, Tom, fifteen years
old.  His employer, the present Mr. Furze, did nothing for him, save
sending him two bottles of lotion which he had heard were good for the
eyes, and Mike for a time was confounded.  His club helped him so long as
he was actually suffering and confined to his house, but their pay did
not last above six weeks.  In these six weeks Mike learned much.  He was
brought face to face with a blank wall with the pursuer behind him--an
experience which teaches more than most books, and he was on the point of
doing what some of us have been compelled to do--that is to say, to
recognise that the worst is inevitable, throw up the arms and bravely
yield.  But Mike also learned that this is not always necessary to a man
with courage, and that very often escape lies in the last moment, the
very last, when endurance seems no longer possible.  His deliverance did
not burst upon him in rainbow colours out of the sky complete.  It was a
very slow affair.  He heard that an old woman had died who lived in
Parker's Alley and sold old clothes, old iron, bottles, and such like
trash.  Parker's Alley was not very easy to find.  Going up High Street
from the bridge, you first turned to the right through Cross Street, and
then to the right again down Lock Lane, and out of Lock Lane ran the
alley, a little narrow gutter of a place, dark and squalid, paved with
round stones, through which slops of all kinds perpetually percolated,
and gave forth on the cleanest days a faint and sickening odour.  Mike
thought he could buy the stock for five shillings; the rent was only half
a crown a week, and with the help of Tom, a remarkably sharp boy, who
could tell him in what condition the goods were which were offered him
for purchase, he hoped he could manage to make way.  It was a dreadful
trial.  The old woman had lived amongst all her property.  She had eaten
and drunk and slept amidst the dirty rags of Eastthorpe, but Mike could
not.  Fortunately the cottage was at the end of the alley.  One window
looked out on it, but the door was in a kind of indentation in it round
the corner.  On the right-hand side of the door was the room looking into
the alley, and this Mike made his shop; on the left was a little cupboard
of a living-room.  He kept the shop window open, so that no customer came
through the doorway, and he begged some scarlet geranium cuttings, which,
in due time, bloomed into brilliant colour on his sitting-room window-
sill, proclaiming that from their possessor hope and delight in life had
not departed.  Alas! the enterprise was a failure.  Mike was no hand at
driving hard bargains, and frequently, when the Jew from Cambridge came
round to sweep up what Mike had been unable to sell in the town, he found
himself the worse for his purchases.  The unscalable wall was again in
front of him, and his foe at his heels, closer than before, and raging
for his blood.  He had gone out one morning, Tom leading him, and was
passing the bank, when the cashier ran out.  Miss Foster, one of the
maiden ladies who, it will be remembered, lived in the Abbey Close, had
left a sovereign on the counter, and the cashier was exceedingly anxious
to show his zeal by promptly returning it, for Miss Foster, it will also
be remembered, was a daughter of a former partner in the bank, and still,
as it was supposed, retained some interest in it.  She had gone too far,
however, and the cashier could not venture to leave his post and follow
her.  Knowing Mike and Tom perfectly well, he asked Mike to take the
sovereign at once to the lady.  He promptly obeyed, and was in time to
restore it to its owner before it was missed.  She was not particularly
sensitive, but the sight of Mike and Tom standing at the hall entrance
rather touched her, and she rewarded them with a shilling.  She was also
pleased to inquire how Mike was getting on, and he briefly told her he
did not get on in any way, save as the most unsuccessful happily get on,
and so at last terminate their perplexities.  Miss Foster, although well-
to-do, kept neither footman nor page, and a thought struck her.  She
abhorred male servants, but it was very often inconvenient to send her
maids on errands.  She therefore suggested to Mike that, if he and Tom
could station themselves within call, they would not only be useful, but
earn something of a livelihood.  The bank wanted an odd man occasionally,
and she was sure that other people in the town would employ him.
Accordingly Mike and Tom one morning established themselves in the recess
of the bridge, after having given notice to everybody who would be likely
to assist them, and Mike set up a stock of boot-laces and shoe-laces of
all kinds.  He thus managed to pick up a trifle.  He wrapped sacking
round his legs to keep off the cold as he sat, and had for a footstool a
box with straw in it.  He also rigged up a little awning on some sticks
to keep off the sun and a shower, but of course when a storm came he was
obliged to retreat.  He was then allowed a shelter in the bank.  The dust
was a nuisance, for it was difficult to predict its capricious eddies,
but he learnt its laws at last, and how to choose his station so as to
diminish annoyance.  At first he was depressed at the thought of sitting
still for so many hours with nothing to do, but he was not left to
himself so much as he anticipated.  Two hours on the average were spent
on errands; then there was his dinner: Tom talked to him; people went by
and said a word or two, and thus he discovered that a foreseen trouble
may look impenetrable, but when we near it, or become immersed in it, it
is often at least semi-transparent, and even sometimes admits a ray of
sunshine.  Gradually his employment became sweet to him; he was a part of
the town; he heard all its news; it was gentle within him; even the rough
boys never molested him: he tamed a black kitten to stay with him, and a
red ribbon and a bell were provided for her by a friend.  When the kitten
grew to be a cat she gravely watched under Mike's awning during his short
absences with Tom, and not a soul ever touched the property she guarded.
Country folk who came to market on Saturday invariably saluted Mike with
their kind country friendliness, and brought him all sorts of little
gifts in the shape of fruit, and even of something more substantial when
a pig was killed.  Thus with Mike time and the hour wore out the roughest
day.

Two years had now passed since his accident, and Tom was about seventeen,
when Miss Catharine crossed the bridge one fine Monday morning in June
with the servant, and, as was her wont, stopped to have a word or two
with her friend Mike.  Mike was always at his best on Monday morning.
Sunday was a day of rest, but he preferred Monday.  It was a delight to
him to hear again the carts and the noise of feet, and to feel that the
world was alive once more.  Sunday with its enforced quietude and
inactivity was a burden to him.

"Well, Miss Catharine, how are you to-day?"

"How did you know I was Miss Catharine?  I hadn't spoken."

"Lord, Miss, I could tell.  Though it's only about two years since I lost
my eyes, I could tell.  I can make out people's footsteps.  What a lovely
morning!  What's going on now down below?"

Mike always took much interest in the wharves by the side of the river.

"Why, Barnes's big lighter is loading malt."

"Ah! what, the new one with the yellow band round it! that's a beautiful
lighter, that is."

Mike had never seen it.

"What days do you dislike the most?  Foggy, damp, dull, dark days?"

These foggy, damp, dull, dark days were particularly distasteful to
Catharine.

"No, Miss, I can't say I do, for, you know, I don't see them."

"Cold, bitter days?"

"They are a bit bad; but somehow I earn more money on cold days than on
any other; how it is I don't know."

"I hate the dust."

"Ah now! that _is_ unpleasant, but there again, Miss, I dodge it, and
it's my belief that it wouldn't worry people half so much if they
wouldn't look at it."

"How much have you earned this morning?"

"Not a penny yet, Miss, but it will come."

"I want two pairs of shoe-laces," and Miss Catharine, selecting two
pairs, put down a fourpenny-piece, part of her pocket-money, twice the
market value of the laces, and tripped over the bridge.  When she was at
dinner with her father and mother that day she suddenly said--

"Father, didn't Mike Catchpole lose his sight in our foundry?"

"Yes."

"Have you been talking with him again?" interposed Mrs. Furze.  "I wish
you would not stop on the bridge as you do.  It does not look nice for a
girl like you to stay and gossip with Mike."

Catharine took no notice.

"Did you ever do anything for him?"

"What an odd question!" again interposed Mrs. Furze.  "What should we do?
There was his club besides, we sent him the lotion."

"Why cannot you take Tom as an apprentice?"

"Because," said her father, "there is nobody to pay the premium; you know
what that means.  When a boy is bound apprentice the master has a sum of
money for teaching him the business."

Catharine did not quite comprehend, inasmuch as there were two boys in
the back shop who were paid wages, and who were learning their trade.  She
was quiet for a few minutes, but presently returned to the charge.

"You _must_ take Tom.  Why shouldn't you give him what you give the other
boys?"

"Really, Catharine," said her mother, "why _must_?"

"Must!" cried the little miss--"yes, I say _must_, because Mike lost his
eyes for you, and you've done nothing for him; it's a shame."

"Catharine, Catharine!" said her father, but in accordance with his usual
habit he said nothing more, and the mother, also in accordance with her
usual habit, collapsed.

Miss Catharine generally, even at that early age, carried all before her,
much to her own detriment.  Her parents unfortunately were perpetually
making a brief show of resistance and afterwards yielding.  Frequently
they had no pretext for resistance, for Catharine was right and they were
wrong.  Consequently the child grew up accustomed to see everything bend
to her own will, and accustomed to believe that what she willed was in
accordance with the will of the universe--not a healthy education, for
the time is sure to come when a destiny which will not bend stands in the
path before us, and we are convinced by the roughest processes that what
we purpose is to a very small extent the purpose of Nature.  The shock
then is serious, especially if the collision be postponed till mature
years.  The parental opposition, such as it was, was worse than none,
because it enabled her to feel her strength.  She continued to press her
point, and not only was victorious, but was empowered to tell Mike that
his son would be taken into the foundry and paid five shillings and
sixpence a week--"a most special case," as Mr. Furze told Mike, in order
to stimulate his gratitude.

Mike was now able to find his way about by himself, but before the date
of the first chapter in this history he had left the bridge, and Tom
supported him.

The morning after the fire beheld the Furze family at breakfast with the
hospitable Hopkins.  They had saved scarcely any clothes, but Tom and his
master were equipped from a ready-made shop.  The women had to remain
indoors in borrowed garments till they could be made presentable by the
dressmaker.  Mr. Furze was so unfitted to deal with events which did not
follow in anticipated, regular order, that he was bewildered.  He and Tom
went out to look at the ruins, and everything which had to be done seemed
to crowd in upon him at once, one thing tumbling incessantly over the
other, and nothing staying long enough before him to be settled.  Although
his business had been fairly large, he had nothing of the faculty of the
captain or the manager, who can let details alone and occupy himself with
principles.  He had a stock of copper bolt-stave in the front shop, and
he poked about and pestered the men to know if any of it could be found
melted.  Then it occurred to him the next instant, and before the inquiry
about the bolt-stave could be answered, that he had lost his
account-books, and he began to try to recollect what one of his principal
customers owed him.  Before his memory was fairly exercised on the
subject it struck him that the men in the foundry--which was
untouched--would not know what to do, and he hurried in, but came out
again without leaving any directions.  At last he became so confused that
he would have broken down if Tom had not come to the rescue, and gently
laid hold of his arm.

"Let us go into the Bell"; and into the Bell they went, into the large,
empty coffee-room, very quiet at that time of the morning.  "We are
better here," said Tom, "if we want to know what we ought to do.  The
first thing is to write to the insurance company."

"Of course, of course!"

"We will do that at once; I will write the letter, and you sign it."

In less than ten minutes this stage of the business was passed.

"The next thing is to find a shop while they are rebuilding."

That was not quite so easy a matter.  There was not one in the High
Street to be let.  At last an idea struck Tom.

"There is the Moot Hall--underneath it, I mean.  We shall have to buy
fittings, but I will have them so arranged that they will do for the new
building.  All that is necessary is to obtain leave; but we shall be sure
to get it: only half of it is wanted on market days, and that's the part
that isn't shut off.  We'll then write to Birmingham and Sheffield about
the stock.  We'd better have a few posters stuck about at once, saying
that business will be carried on in the Hall for the present."

Mr. Furze saw the complexity unravel itself, and the knot in his head
began to loosen, but he did not quite like to reflect that he owed his
relief to Tom, and that Tom had seen his agitation.  Accordingly, when a
proof of the poster was brought, he was the master, most particularly the
master, and observed with much dignity and authority that it ought not to
have been set up without the benefit of his revision; that it would not
do by any means as it stood, and that it had better be left with him.

Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins insisted upon continuing their hospitality until a
new home could be found, and Mrs. Furze urged her project of the Terrace
with such eagerness, that at last her husband consented.

"I think," said Mrs. Furze, when the debate was concluded, "that
Catharine had better go away for a short time until we are settled in the
Terrace and the shop is rebuilt.  She would not be of much use in the new
house, and would only knock herself up."

That was not Mrs. Furze's reason.  She had said nothing to Catharine, but
she instinctively dreaded her hostility to the scheme.  Mr. Furze knew
that was not Mrs. Furze's reason, but he accepted it.  Mrs. Furze knew it
was not her own reason, but she also accepted it, and believed it to be
the true reason.  Such contradictions are quite possible in that mystery
of mysteries the human soul.

"My dear Catharine," quoth her mother that evening, "you look worried and
done up.  No wonder, considering what we have gone through.  A change
would do you good, and you had better go and stay with your aunt at Ely
till we have a roof of our own over our heads once more.  She will be
delighted to see you."

Catharine particularly objected to her aunt at Ely.  She was a maiden
lady and elder sister to Mrs. Furze.  She had a small annuity, had turned
herself into a most faithful churchwoman, and went to live at Ely because
it was cheap and a cathedral city.  Every day, morning and afternoon, was
Aunt Matilda to be seen at the cathedral services, and frequently she was
the only attendant, save the choir and officials.

"Why do you want me out of the way?" said Catharine, dismissing without
the least notice the alleged pretext.

"I have told you, my dear."

"I cannot go to Ely.  If you wish me to go anywhere, I will go to Mrs.
Bellamy's."

"My dear, that is not a sufficient change for you.  Ely is a different
climate, and I cannot consent to quartering you on a stranger for so
long."

"Mrs. Bellamy will not object.  Will the new house be like the old one?"

"Well, really, may dear, nothing at present is quite determined; no doubt
your father will take the opportunity of making a few improvements."

"My bedroom, I hope, will be what it was before, and in the same place."

"Oh, I--I trust there will be no serious alteration, except what--what
will be agreeable to us all, but your father is so much bothered now;
perhaps you will have a room which is a little larger, but I really do
not know.  I cannot say anything: how can you _expect_ me to say anything
just at present, my dear child?"

Again there was the same contradiction.  Mrs. Furze knew this was wrong,
but she believed it was right.  There was, however, a slight balance in
favour of what she knew against what she believed, and she hastened to
appease her conscience by a mental promise that, as soon as possible, she
would tell Catharine that, upon full consideration, they had determined,
&c., &c.  That would put everything straight morally.  Had Catharine put
her question yesterday--so Mrs. Furze argued--the answer now given would
have been perfectly right.  She was doing nothing more than giving a
reply which was a trifle in arrear of the facts, and, if she rectified it
at the earliest date, the impropriety would be nothing.  It is sometimes
thought that it is those who habitually speak the truth who are most
easily deceived.  It is not quite so.  If the deceivers are not entirely
deceived, they profess acquiescence, and perpetual acquiescence induces
half-deception.  It is, perhaps, more correct to say that the word
deception has no particular meaning for them, and implies a standard
which is altogether inapplicable.  There is a tacit agreement through all
society to say things which nobody believes, and that being the
constitution under which we live, it is absurd to talk of truth or
falsity in the strict sense of the terms.  A thing is true when it is in
accordance with the system and on a level with it, and false when it is
below it.  Every now and then at rarest intervals a creature is
introduced to us who speaks the veritable reality and wakes in us the
slumbering conviction of universal imposture.  We know that he is not as
other men are; we look into his eyes and see that they penetrate us
through and through, but we cannot help ourselves, and we jabber to him
as we jabber to the rest of the world.  It was ridiculous that her mother
should talk as she did to Catharine.  Mrs. Furze was perfectly aware that
she was not deluding her daughter; but she assumed that the delusion was
complete.

"Well, mother, I say I cannot go to Ely."

Catharine again had her own way.  She went to Mrs. Bellamy's, and Mrs.
Furze, after having told Mrs. Bellamy what was going to happen, begged
her not to say anything to Catharine about it.




CHAPTER IV


Mr. Bellamy's farm of Westchapel--Chapel Farm it was usually called--lay
about half a mile from Lampson's Ford, and about five miles from
Eastthorpe.  The road from Eastthorpe running westerly and parallel with
the river at a distance of about a mile from it sends out at the fourth
milestone a byroad to the south, which crosses the river by a stone
bridge, and there is no doubt that before the bridge existed there was a
ford, and that there was also a chapel hard by where people probably
commended their souls to God before taking the water.  In the angle
formed by the main road, the lane, and the river, lay Chapel Farm.  The
house stood on a gentle slope, just enough to lift it above the range of
the worst of winter floods, and faced the south.  It was not in the lane,
but on a kind of private road or cart-track which issued from it; went
through a gate and under a hedge; expanded itself in an open space of
carefully weeded gravel just opposite the front door, and became a more
insignificant and much rougher track on the other side, passing by the
stacks into the field, and finally disappearing altogether.  From the
hand-post on the main road to the gate was half a mile, and from the gate
to the farm nearly another half-mile.  In driving from Chapel Farm you
feel, when you reach the gate, you are in the busy world again, and when
you reach the hand-post and turn to Eastthorpe you are in the full tide
of life, although not a soul is to be seen.  Opposite the house were the
farm-buildings and the farmyard.  The gate to the right of the
farm-buildings led into the meadow, and thus anybody sitting in the front
rooms could see the barges slowly and silently towed from the sea to the
uplands and back again, the rising ground beyond, and so on to Thingleby,
whose little spire just emerged above the horizon.  The river, deep and
sluggish for the most part, was fringed with willows on the side opposite
the towing-path.  At the bridge, just where the ford used to be, it was
broken into shallows, over which the stream slipped faster, and here and
there there were not above two or three feet of water, so that sometimes
the barges were almost aground.  The farmhouse was not quite ideal.  It
was plain red brick, now grey and lichen-covered, about a hundred years
old; the windows were white-painted, with heavy frames, and the only
attempt at ornament was a kind of porch over the front door, supported by
brackets, but with no sides to it.  Nevertheless, it had its charms.  Save
on the northern side, where it was backed by the huge elms in the home-
field, it lay bare to the winds, breezy, airy, full of light.  In summer
the front door was always open, and even when it was shut in cold weather
no knocker was ever used.  If a visitor came by daylight he was always
seen, and if after dark he was heard.  The garden, which lay on the west
side of the house and at the back, was rather warm in hot weather, but
was delicious.  Under the wall on the north side the apricot and Orleans
plum ripened well, and round to the right was the dairy, always cool,
sweet, and clean, with the big elder trees before the barred window.

The mistress of the house, Mrs. Bellamy, was not a very robust woman.  She
was generally ailing, but never very seriously ill.  She had had two
children, but they had both died.  Mrs. Bellamy's mind, unoccupied with
parental cares, with politics, or with literature, let itself loose upon
her house, her dairy, and her fowls.  She established a series of
precautions to prevent dirt, and the precautions themselves became
objects to be protected.  There was a rough scraper intervening on behalf
of the black-leaded scraper; there was a large mat to preserve the mat
beyond it: and although a drugget coveted the stair carpet, Mrs. Bellamy
would have been sorely vexed if she had found a footmark upon it.  If a
friend was expected she put some straw outside the garden gate, and she
asked him in gentle tones when he dismounted if he would kindly "just
take the worst off" there.  The kitchen was scoured and scrubbed till it
was fleckless.  It was theoretically the living-room, and a defence for
the parlour, but it also was defended in its turn like the scraper, and
the back kitchen, which had a fireplace, was used for cooking, the fire
in the state kitchen not being lighted in summer time.  Partly Mrs.
Bellamy's excessive neatness was due to the need of an occupation.  She
brooded much, and the moment she had nothing to do she became
low-spirited and unwell.  Partly also it was due to a touch of poetry.
She polished her verses in beeswax and turpentine, and sought on her
floors and tables for that which the poet seeks in Eden or Atlantis.  It
must not be imagined that because she was so particular she was stingy.
She was one of the most open-handed creatures that ever breathed.  She
loved plenty.  The jug was always full to overflowing with beer, and the
dishes were always heaped up with good things, so that nobody was ever
afraid of robbing his neighbour.

Catharine was never weary of Chapel Farm.  She was busy from morning to
night, and the living creatures on it were her especial delight.
Naturally, as is the case with all country girls, the circumference of
her knowledge embraced a region which a town matron would have veiled
from her daughters with the heaviest curtains.

"How's the foal going on?" said Mrs. Bellamy to her husband one evening
when he came in to supper.

"Oh, the foal's all right; he'll be just like his father--just the same
broad hind-quarters.  Lord! we shall hardly get him into the shafts.  You
remember, Miss Catharine, as I showed you what extrornary quarters King
Tom had when he came here?  It is a curious thing, there ain't one of his
foals that hasn't got that mark of him.  I allus likes a horse, I do,
that leaves his mark strong.  If you pay pretty heavy you ought to have
something for your money.  The mother, though, is in a bad way: my belief
is she'll have milk-fever."

"That mare never seemed healthy to me," said Catharine.

"No; she was brought up anyhow.  When she was about a fortnight old her
mother died.  They didn't know how to manage her, and half starved her."

"I don't believe in starvin' creatures when they are young," said Mrs.
Bellamy, who was herself a very small eater.

"Nor I, either, and yet that mare, although, as you say, Miss Catharine,
she was never healthy, has the most wonderful pluck, as you know.  I
remember once I had two ton o' muck in the waggon, and we were stuck.
Jack and Blossom couldn't stir it, and, after a bit, chucked up.  I put
in Maggie--you should have seen her!  She moved it, a'most all herself,
aye, as far as from here to the gate, and then of course the others took
it up.  That's blood!  What a thing blood is!--you may load it, but you
can't break it.  Never a touch of the whip would she stand, and yet it's
quite true she isn't right, and never was.  Maybe the foal will be like
her; the shape goes after the father mostly, but the sperrit and temper
after the mother."

The next morning Maggie was worse.  Catharine was in the stable as soon
as anybody was stirring, and the poor creature was trembling violently.
She was watched with the most tender care, and when she became too weak
to stand to eat or drink she was slung with soft bands and pads.  Her
groans were dreadful.  After about a week of cruel misery she died.  It
was evening, and Catharine sat down and looked at what was left of her
friend.  She had never before even partly realised what death meant.  She
was too young to feel its full force.  The time was yet to come when
death would mean despair--when the insolubility of the problem would
induce carelessness to all other problems and their solution.
Furthermore, this was only a horse.  Still, the contrast struck her
between the corpse before her and Maggie with her bright eyes and vivid
force.  What had become of all that strength; what had become of
_her_?--and the girl mused, as countless generations had mused before
her.  Then there was the pathos of it.  She thought of the brave animal
which she had so often seen, apparently for the mere love of difficulty,
struggling as if its sinews would crack.  She thought of its glad
recognition when she came into the stable, and of its evident affection,
half human, or perhaps wholly human, and imprisoned in a form which did
not permit full expression.  She looked at its body as it lay there
extended, quiet, pleading as it were against the doom of man and of
beast, and tears came to her eyes as she noted the appeal--tears not
altogether of sorrow, but partly of revolt.

Mr. Bellamy came in.

"Ah, Miss Catharine, I don't wonder at it.  There's many a human as I
should less have missed than Maggie.  I can't make out at times why we
should love the beasts so as perish."

"Perhaps they don't."

"Really, Miss, of course they do.  What's the Lord to do with all the
dead horses and cows?"

Catharine thought, "Or with the dead men and women," but she said
nothing.  The subject was new to her.  She took her scissors and cut off
a wisp of Maggie's beautiful mane, twisted it up, put it carefully in a
piece of paper, and placed it in a little pocket-book which she always
carried.  The next morning as soon as it was daylight a man came over
from Eastthorpe; Maggie was hoisted into a cart, her legs dangling down
outside, and was driven away to be converted into food for dogs.

One of Catharine's favourite haunts was a meadow by the bridge.  She was
not given to reading, but she liked a stroll and, as there were plenty of
rats, the dog enjoyed the stroll too.  Not a week after Maggie's death
she had wandered to this point without her usual companion.  A barge had
gone down just before she arrived, and for some reason or other had made
fast to the bank about a quarter of a mile below her on the side opposite
to the towing-path.  She sat down under a willow with her face to the
water and back to the sun, for it was very hot, and in a few minutes she
was half dozing.  Suddenly she started, and one of the bargemen stood
close by her.

"Hullo, my beauty!  Why, you was asleep!  Wot's the time?"

"I haven't a watch."

"Haven't a watch!  Now that's a shame; if you was mine, my love, you
should 'ave one o' gold."

"It is time I was at home," said Catharine, rising with as much presence
of mind as she could muster; "and I should think it must be your dinner-
hour."

"Damn my dinner-hour, when I've got the chance of sittin' alongside a gal
with sich eyes as yourn, my beauty.  Why, you make me all of a tremble.
Sit down for a bit."

Catharine moved away, but the bargee caught her round the waist.

"Sit down, I tell yer, jist for a minute.  Who's a-goin' to hurt yer?"

It was of no use to resist, and she did not scream.  She sat down, and
his arm relaxed its hold to pick up his pipe which had fallen on the
other side.  Instantly, without a second's hesitation she leaped up, and,
before his heavy bulk could lift itself, she had turned and rushed along
the bank.  Had she made for the bridge, he would have overtaken her in
the lane, but she went the other way.  About fifty yards down the stream,
and in the direction of Chapel Farm, was a deep hole in the river bed,
about five feet wide.  On the other side of it there were not more than
eighteen inches of water at any point.  Catharine knew that hole well, as
the haunt of the jack and the perch.  She reached it, cleared it at a
bound, and alighted on the bit of shingle just beyond it.  Her pursuer
came up and stared at her silently, with his mouth half open.  Just at
that moment the instant sound of wheels was heard, and he slowly
sauntered back to his barge.  Catharine boldly waded over the intervening
shallows, and was across just as the cart reached the top of the bridge,
but her shoes remained behind her in the mud.  It proved to be her
father's cart, and to contain Tom, who had been over to Thingleby that
morning to see what chance there was of getting any money out of a
blacksmith who was largely in Mr. Furze's debt.  He saw there was
something wrong, and dismounted.

"Why, Miss Catharine, you are all wet!  What is the matter?"

"I slipped down."

She could not tell the truth, although usually so straightforward.  Tom
looked at her inquiringly as if he was not quite sure, but there was
something in her face which forbade further investigation.

"You've lost your shoes; you cannot walk home; will you let me give you a
lift to Chapel Farm?"

"They do not matter a straw: it is grass nearly the whole way."

"I'll fish them out, if you will show me where they are."

"Carried down by this time ever so far."

"But you will hurt your feet; it isn't all grass; you had better get in."

She thought suddenly of the bargee again, and reflected that the barge
might still be moored where it was an hour ago.

"Very well, then, I will go."

She essayed to put her foot upon the step, but the mud on her stocking
was greasy, and she fell backwards.  Tom caught her in his arms, and a
strange thrill passed through him when he felt that the whole weight of
her body rested on him.  Many a man there is who can call to mind, across
forty years, a silly passage like this in his life.  His hair has
whitened; all passion ought long ago to have died out of him; thousands
of events of infinitely greater consequence have happened; he has read
much in philosophy and religion, and has forgotten it all, and a slip on
the ice when skating together, or a stumble on the stair, or the pressure
of a hand prolonged just for a second in parting, is felt with its
original intensity, and the thought of it drives warm blood once more
through the arteries.

"Let me get in first," said Tom, putting some straw on the step.

He got into the cart, and he gently pulled her up, relinquishing her very
carefully, and, in fact, not until after his assistance was no longer
needed.

"How _did_ you manage it?"

"You know how these things happen: it was all-over in a minute: how are
father and mother?"

"They are very well."

There was a pause for a minute or two.

"Well, how are things going on at Eastthorpe?"

"Oh, pretty well; the building is three parts done.  I don't think, Miss
Catharine, you'll ever go back to the old spot again."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't think your father and mother will leave the Terrace."

"Very likely," she replied, decisively.  "It will be better, perhaps,
that they should not.  I am sure that whatever they do will be quite
right."

"Of course, Miss Catharine, but _I_ shall be sorry.  I wish my bedroom
could have been built up again between the old walls.  In that bedroom
you saved my life."

"Rubbish!  Even suppose _I_ had done it, as you say, I should have done
just the same for my silkworms, and then, somehow when I do a thing on a
sudden like that, I always feel as if _I_ had not done it.  I am sure I
didn't do it."

The last few words were spoken in a strangely different tone, much softer
and sweeter.

"I don't quite understand."

"I mean," said Catharine, speaking slowly, as if half surprised at what
had occurred to her, and half lost in looking at it--"I mean that I do
not a bit reflect at such times upon what I do.  It is as if something or
somebody took hold of me, and, before I know where I am, the thing is
done, and yet there is no something nor somebody--at least, so far as I
can see.  It is wonderful, for after all it is I who do it."

Tom looked intently at her.  She seemed to be taking no notice of him and
to be talking to herself.  He had never seen her in that mood before,
although he had often seen her abstracted and heedless of what was
passing.  In a few moments she recovered herself, and the usual everyday
accent returned with an added hardness.

"Here we are at Chapel Farm.  Mind you say nothing to father or mother;
it will only frighten them."

Mrs. Bellamy came to the gate.

"Lor' bless the child! wherever have you been!"

"Slipped into the water and left my shoes behind me, that's all"; and she
ran indoors, jumping from mat to mat, and without even so much as bidding
Tom goodbye, who rode home, not thinking much about his business, but
lost in a muddle of most contradictory presentations, a constant glimmer
of Catharine's ankles, wonderment at her accident--was it all true?--the
strange look when she disclaimed the honour of his rescue and expounded
her philosophy, and the fall between his shoulders.  When he slept, his
sleep was usually dreamless, but that night he dreamed as he hardly ever
dreamed before.  He perpetually saw the foot on the step, and she was
slipping into his arms continually, until he awoke with the sun.




CHAPTER V


Catharine went home, or rather to the Terrace, soon afterwards, and found
that there was no intention of removing to the High Street, although,
notwithstanding their three months' probation in the realms of
respectability, Mrs. Colston had not called, and Mrs. Furze was beginning
to despair.  The separation from the chapel was nearly complete.  It had
been done by degrees.  On wet days Mrs. Furze went to church because it
was a little nearer, and Mr. Furze went to chapel; then Mrs. Furze went
on fine days, and, after a little interval, Mr. Furze went on a fine day.
A fund had been set going to "restore" the church: the heavy roof was to
be removed, and a much lighter and handsomer roof covered with slate was
to be substituted; the stonework of many of the windows, which the rector
declared had begun to show "signs of incipient decay," was to be cut out
and replaced with new, so as to make, to use the builder's words, "a good
job of it," and a memorial window was to be put in near the great west
window with its stained glass, the Honourable Mr. Eaton having determined
upon this mode of commemorating the services of his nephew, Lieutenant
Eaton, who had died of dysentery in India, brought on by inattention to
tropical rules of eating and drinking, particularly the latter.  Oliver
Cromwell, it was said, had stabled his horses in the church.  This,
however, is doubtful, for the quantity of stable accommodation he must
have required throughout the country, to judge from vergers and
guidebooks, must have been much larger than his armies would have needed,
if they had been entirely composed of cavalry; and the evidence is not
strong that his horses were so ubiquitous.  It was further affirmed that,
during the Cromwellian occupation, the west window was mutilated; but
there was also a tradition that, in the days of George the Third, there
were complaints of dinginess and want of light, and that part of the
stained glass was removed and sold.  Anyhow, there was stained glass in
the Honourable Mr. Eaton's mansion wonderfully like that at Eastthorpe.
It was now proposed to put new stained glass in the defective lights.
Some of the more advanced of the parishioners, including the parson and
the builder, thought the old glass had better all come out, "the only way
to make a good job of it"; but at an archidiaconal visitation the
archdeacon protested, and he was allowed to have his own way.  Then there
was the warming, and this was a great difficulty, because no natural exit
for the pipe could be found.  At last it was settled to have three
stoves, one at the west end of the nave, and one in each transept.  With
regard to the one in the nave there was no help for it but to bore a hole
through the wall.  The builder undertook "to give the pipe outside a
touch of the Gothic, so that it wouldn't look bad," and as for the other
stoves, there were two windows just handy.  By cutting out the head of
Matthew in one and that of Mark in another, the thing was done, and, as
Mrs. Colston observed, "the general confused effect remained the same."
There were one or two other improvements, such as pointing all over
outside, also strongly recommended by the builder, and the shifting some
of the tombs, and repairing the tracery, so that altogether the sum to be
raised was considerable.  Mrs. Colston was one of the collectors, and
Mrs. Furze called on her after two months' residence in the Terrace, and
intimated her wish to subscribe.  Mrs. Colston took the money very
affably, but still she did not return the visit.

Meanwhile Mrs. Furze was doing everything she could to make herself
genteel.  The Terrace contained about a dozen houses; the two in the
centre were higher than the rest, and above them, flanked by a large
scroll at either end, were the words "THE TERRACE," moulded out of the
stucco; up to each door was a flight of stone steps; before each front
window on the dining-room floor and the floor above was a balcony
protected by cast-iron filigree work, and between each house and the road
was a little piece of garden surrounded by dwarf wall and arrow-head
railings.  Mrs. Furze's old furniture had, nearly all, been discarded or
sold, and two new carpets had been bought.  The one in the dining-room
was yellow and chocolate, and the one upstairs in the drawing-room was a
lovely rose-pattern, with large full-blown roses nine inches in diameter
in blue vases.  The heavy chairs had disappeared, and nice light elegant
chairs were bought, insufficient, however, for heavy weights, for one of
Mr. Furze's affluent customers being brought to the Terrace as a special
mark of respect, and sitting down with a flop, as was his wont, smashed
the work of art like card-board and went down on the door with a curse,
vowing inwardly never again to set foot in Furze's Folly, as he called
it.  The pictures, too, were all renewed.  The "Virgin Mary" and "George
the Fourth" went upstairs to the spare bedroom, and some new oleographs,
"a rising art," Mrs. Furze was assured, took their places.  They had very
large margins, gilt frames, and professed to represent sunsets, sunrises,
and full moons, at Tintern, Como, and other places not named, which Mrs.
Furze, in answer to inquiries, always called "the Continent."

Mr. Furze had had a longish walk one morning, and was rather tired.  When
he came home to dinner he found the house upset by one of its periodical
cleanings, and consequently dinner was served upstairs, and not in the
half-underground breakfast-room, as it was called, which was the real
living-room of the family.  Mr. Furze, being late and weary, prolonged
his stay at home till nearly four o'clock, and, notwithstanding a rebuke
from Mrs. Furze, insisted on smoking his pipe in the dining-room.
Presently he took off his coat and put his feet on a chair, Sunday
fashion.

"My dear," said his wife.  "I don't want to interfere with your comfort,
but don't you think you might give up that practice of sitting in your
shirt-sleeves now we have moved?"

"Why because we've moved?" interposed Catharine.

"Catharine, I did not address you; you have no tact, you do not
understand."

"Coat doesn't smell so much of smoke," replied Mr. Furze, giving, of
course, any reason but the true reason.

"My dear if that is the reason, put on another coat, or, better still,
buy a proper coat and a smoking-cap.  Nothing could be more appropriate
than some of those caps we saw at the restoration bazaar."

"Really, mother, would you like to see father in a velvet jacket and one
of those red-tasselled things on his head?  I prefer the shirt-sleeves."

"No doubt you do; you are a Furze, every inch of you."

There is no saying to what a height the quarrel would have risen if a
double knock had not been heard.  A charwoman was in the passage with a
pail of water and answered the door at once, before she could be
cautioned.  In an instant she appeared, apron tucked up.

"Mrs. Colston, mum," and in Mrs. Colston walked.

Mrs. Furze made a dash at her husband's clay pipe, forgetting that its
destruction would not make matters better; but she only succeeded in
upsetting the chair on which his legs rested, and in the confusion he
slipped to the ground.

"Oh, Mrs. Colston, I am so sorry you have taken us by surprise; our house
is being cleaned; pray walk upstairs--but oh dear, now I recollect the
drawing-room is also turned out; what _will_ you do, and the smell of the
smoke, too!"

"Pray do not disconcert yourself," replied the brewer's wife,
patronisingly; "I do not mind the smoke, at least for a few minutes."

Mrs. Colston herself had objected strongly to calling on Mrs. Furze, but
Mr. Colston had urged it as a matter of policy, with a view to Mr.
Furze's contributions to Church revenues.

"I have come purely on a matter of business, Mrs. Furze, and will not
detain you."

Mr. Furze had retreated into a dark corner, and was putting on his
waistcoat with his back to his distinguished guest.  Catharine sat at the
window quite immovable.  Suddenly Mrs. Furze bethought herself she ought
to introduce her husband and daughter.

"My husband and daughter, Mrs. Colston."

Mr. Furze turned half round, put his other arm into his waistcoat, and
bowed.  He had, of course, spoken to her scores of times in his shop, but
he was not supposed to have seen her till that minute.  Catharine rose,
bowed, and sat down again.

"Take a chair, Mrs. Colston, take a chair," said Mr. Furze, although he
had again turned towards the curtain, and was struggling with his coat.
Mrs. Furze, annoyed that her husband had anticipated her, pulled the easy-
chair forward.

"I am afraid I deprived you of your seat," said the lady, alluding, as
Mrs. Furze had not the slightest doubt, to his tumble.

"Not a bit, ma'am, not a bit," and he moved towards Catharine, feeling
very uncomfortable, and not knowing what to do with his hands and legs.

"We are so much obliged to you, Mrs. Furze, for your subscription to the
restoration fund, we find that a new pulpit is much required; the old
pulpit, you will remember, is much decayed in parts, and will be out of
harmony with the building when it is renovated.  Young Mr. Cawston, who
is being trained as an architect--the builder's son, you know--has
prepared a design which is charming, and the ladies wish to make the new
pulpit a present solely from themselves."  The smoke got into Mrs.
Colston's throat, and she coughed.  "We want you, therefore, to help us."

"With the greatest pleasure."

"Then how much shall I say?  Five pounds?"

"Would you allow me just to look at the subscription list?" interposed
Mr. Furze, humbly; but before it could be handed to him Mrs. Furze had
settled the matter.

"Five pounds--oh yes, certainly, Mrs. Colston.  Mr. Cawston is, I
believe, a young man of talent?"

"Undoubtedly, and he deserves encouragement.  It must be most gratifying
to his father to see his son endeavouring to raise himself from a
comparatively humble occupation and surroundings into something demanding
ability and education, from a mere trade into a profession."

Catharine shifted uneasily, raised her eyes, and looked straight at Mrs.
Colston but said nothing.

Meanwhile Mr. Furze was perusing the list with both elbows on his knees.
The difficulty with his hands and legs increased.  He was conscious to a
most remarkable degree that he had them, and yet they seemed quite
foreign members of his body which he could not control.

"Well, ma'am, I think I must be going.  I'll bid you good-bye."

"I have finished my errand, Mr. Furze, and I must be going too."

"Oh, pray, do not go yet," said Mrs. Furze, hoping, in the absence of her
husband, to establish some further intimacy.  Mr. Furze shook Mrs.
Colston's hand with its lemon-coloured glove and departed.  Catharine
noticed that Mrs. Colston looked at the glove--for the ironmonger had
left a mark on it--and that she wiped it with her pocket-handkerchief.

"I wish to ask," said Mrs. Furze, in her mad anxiety to secure Mrs.
Colston, "if you do not think a new altar-cloth would be acceptable.  I
should be so happy--I will not say to give one myself, but to undertake
the responsibility, and to contribute my share.  The old altar-cloth will
look rather out of place."

"Thank you, Mrs. Furze; I am sure I can answer at once.  It will be most
acceptable.  You will not, I presume, object to adopting the design of
the committee!  We will send you a correct pattern.  We have thought
about the matter for some time, but had at last determined to wait
indefinitely on the ground of the expense."

The expense!  Poor Mrs. Furze had made her proposal on the spur of the
moment.  She, in her ignorance, had not thought an altar-cloth a very
costly affair, and now she remembered that she had no friends who were
not Dissenters.  Moreover, to be on the committee was the object of her
ambition, and it was clear that not only had nobody thought of putting
her on it, but that she was to pay and take its directions.

"I believe," continued Mrs. Colston, "that the altar-cloth which we had
provisionally adopted can be had in London for 20 pounds."

A ring at the front bell during this interesting conversation had not
been noticed.  The charwoman, still busy with broom and pail outside,
knocked at the door with a knock which might have been given with the
broom-handle and announced another visitor.

"Mrs. Bellamy, mum."

Catharine leaped up, rushed to meet her friend, caught her round the
neck, and kissed her eagerly.

"Well, Miss Catharine, glad to see you looking so well; still kept the
colour of Chapel Farm.  This is the first time I've seen you in your new
house, Mrs. Furze.  I had to come over to Eastthorpe along with Bellamy,
and I said I _must_ go and see my Catharine, though--and her
mother--though they _do_ live in the Terrace, but I couldn't get Bellamy
to come--no, he said the Terrace warn't for him; he'd go and smoke a pipe
and have something to drink at your old shop, or rather your new shop,
but it's in the old place in the High Street--leastways if you keep any
baccy and whiskey there now--and he'd call for me with the gig, and I
said as I knew my Catharine--her mother--would give me a cup of tea; and,
Miss Catharine, you remember that big white hog as you used to look at
always when you went out into the meadow?--well, he's killed, and I know
Mr. Furze likes a bit of good, honest, country pork--none of your nasty
town-fed stuff--you never know what hogs eat in towns--so Bellamy has a
leg about fourteen pounds in the gig, but I thought I'd bring you about
two or three pounds of the sausages myself in my basket here," and Mrs.
Bellamy pointed to a basket she had on her arm.  She paused and became
aware that there was a stranger sitting near the fireplace.  "But you've
got a visitor here; p'r'aps I shall be in the way."

"In the way!" said Catharine.  "Never, never; give me your basket and
your bonnet; or stay, Mrs. Bellamy, I will go upstairs with you, and you
shall take off your things."

And so, before Mrs. Furze had spoken a syllable, Catharine and Mrs.
Bellamy marched out of the room.

"Who is that--that person?" said Mrs. Colston.  "I fancy I have seen her
before.  She seems on intimate terms with your daughter."

"She is a farmer's wife, of humble origin, at whose house my
daughter--lodged--for the benefit of her health."

"I must bid you good-day, Mrs. Furze.  If you will kindly send a cheque
for the five pounds to me, the receipt shall be returned to you in due
course, and the drawing of the altar-cloth shall follow.  I can assure
you of the committee's thanks."

Mrs. Furze recollected she ought to ring the bell, but she also
recollected the servant could not appear in proper costume.  Accordingly
she opened the dining-room door herself.

"Let me move that ere pail, mum, or you'll tumble over it," said the
charwoman to Mrs. Colston, "and p'r'aps you won't mind steppin' on this
side of the passage, 'cause that side's all wet.  'Ere, Mrs. Furze, don't
you come no further, I'll open the front door"; and this she did.

Mrs. Furze felt rather unwell, and went to her bedroom, where she sat
down, and, putting her face on the bedclothes, gave way to a long fit of
hysterical sobbing.  She would not come down to tea, and excused herself
on the ground of sickness.  Catharine went up to her mother and inquired
what was the matter, but was repulsed.

"Nothing is the matter--at least, nothing you can understand.  I am very
unwell; I am better alone; go down to Mrs. Bellamy."

"But, mother, it will do you good to be downstairs.  Mrs. Bellamy will be
so glad to see you, and she was so kind to me; it will be odd if you
don't come."

"Go _away_, I tell you; I am best by myself; I can endure in solitude;
you cannot comprehend these nervous attacks, happily for you; go _away_,
and enjoy yourself with Mrs. Bellamy and your sausages."

Catharine had had some experience of these nervous attacks, and left her
mother to herself.  Mrs. Bellamy and Catharine consequently had tea
alone, Mr. Furze remaining at his shop that afternoon, as he had been
late in arrival.

"Sorry mother's so poorly, Catharine.  Well, how do you like the
Terrace?"

"I hate it.  I detest every atom of the filthy, stuck-up, stuccoed hovel.
I hate--"  Catharine was very excited, and it is not easy to tell what
she might have said if Mrs. Bellamy had not interrupted her.

"Now, Miss Catharine, don't say that; it's a bad thing to hate what we
must put up with.  You never heard, did you, as Bellamy had a sister a
good bit older than myself?  She _was_ a tartar, and no mistake.  She
lived with Bellamy and kept house for him, and when we married, Bellamy
said she must stay with us.  She used to put on him as you never saw, but
he, somehow, seemed never to mind it; some men don't feel such things,
and some do, but most on 'em don't when it's a woman, but I think a
woman's worse.  Well, what was I saying?--she put on me just in the same
way and come between me and the servant-girl and the men, and when I told
them to go and do one thing, went and told them to do another, and I was
young, and I thought when I was married I was going to be mistress, and
she called me 'a chit' to her brother, and I mind one day I went upstairs
and fell on my knees and cried till I thought my heart would break, and I
said, 'O my God, when will it please Thee to take that woman to Thyself!'
Now to wish anybody dead is bad enough, but to ask the Lord to take 'em
is awful; but then it was so hard to bear 'cause I couldn't say nothing
about it, and I'm one of them as can't keep myself bottled up like ginger-
beer.  You don't remember old Jacob?  He had been at Chapel Farm in
Bellamy's father's time, and always looked on Bellamy as his boy, and
used to be very free with him, notwithstanding he was the best creature
as ever lived.  He took a liking to me, and I needn't say that, liking of
me, he didn't like Bellamy's sister.  Well, I came down, and I went out
of doors to get a bit of fresh air--for I'm always better out of
doors--and I went up by the cart-shed, and being faint a bit, sat down on
the waggon shafts.  Old Jacob, he came by; I can see him now; it was just
about Michaelmas time, a-getting dark after tea, though I hadn't had any,
and he said to me, 'Hullo, missus, what are here for? and you've been a-
cryin',' for I had my face toward the sky and was looking at it.  I never
spoke.  'I know what's the matter with you,' says he; 'do you think I
don't?  Now if you go on chafing of yourself, you'll worrit yourself into
your grave, that's all.  Last week there was something the matter with
that there dog, and she howled night after night, and I never slept a
wink.  The first morning after she'd been a-yelping I was in a temper,
and had half a mind to kill her.  I felt as if she'd got a spite against
me; but it come to me as she'd got no spite against _me_, and then all my
worriting went away.  I don't say as I slept much till she was better,
but I didn't _worrit_.  Now Bellamy's sister don't mean nothing against
you.  That's the way God-a-mighty made her.'  I've never forgot what
Jacob said, and I know it made a difference, but the Lord took her not
long afterwards."

"But I don't see what that has to do with me.  It isn't the same thing."

"Yes, that's just what Bellamy says.  He says I always go on with
anything that comes into my head; but then it has nothing to do with
anything he is saying, and maybe that's true, for one thing seems always
to draw me on to another, and so I go round like, and I don't know myself
where I am when I've finished.  A little more tea, my dear, if you
please.  And yet," continued Mrs. Bellamy, when she had finished half of
her third cup, "what I meant to say really has to do with you.  It's all
the same.  You wouldn't hate the Terrace so much if you knew that nobody
meant to spite you, as Jacob says.  Suppose your father was driven to the
Terrace and couldn't help it, and there wasn't another house for him, you
wouldn't hate it so much then.  It isn't the Terrace altogether.  Now,
Miss Catharine, you won't mind my speaking out to you.  You know you are
my girl," and Mrs. Bellamy turned and kissed her; "you mustn't, you
really mustn't.  I've seen what was coming for a long time.  Your mother
and you ain't alike, but you mustn't rebel.  I'm a silly old fool, and I
know I haven't got a head, and what is in it is all mixed up somehow, but
you'll be ever so much better if you leave your mother out of it, and
don't, as I've told you before, go on dreaming she came here because you
didn't want to come, or that she set herself up on purpose against you.
And then you can always run over to Chapel Farm just whenever you like,
my pet, and there's your own room always waiting for you."

An hour afterwards, when Mrs. Bellamy had left, Mr. Furze came home.  Mrs.
Furze was still upstairs, but consented to be coaxed down to supper.  She
passed the drawing-room; the door was wide open, and she reflected
bitterly upon the new carpet, the oleographs, and the schemes erected
thereon.  To think on what she had spent and what she had done, and then
that Mrs. Colston should be received by a charwoman with a pail, should
be shown into the room downstairs, and find it like a public-house bar!
If Mr. Furze had been there alone it would not so much have mattered, but
the presence of wife and daughter sanctioned the vulgarity, not to say
indecency.  Mrs. Colston would naturally conclude they were accustomed to
that sort of thing--that the pipe, Mrs. Bellamy and the sausages, the
absence of Mr. Furze's coat and waistcoat, were the "atmosphere," as Mrs.
Furze put it, in which they lived.

"That's right; glad to see you are able to come down," said Mr. Furze.

"I must say that Catharine is partly the cause of my suffering.  When
Mrs. Colston called here Catharine sat like a statue and said not a word,
but when her friend Mrs. Bellamy came she precipitated herself--yes, I
say precipitated herself--into her arms.  I've nothing to say against
Mrs. Bellamy, but Catharine knows perfectly well that Mrs. Colston's
intimacy is desired, and _that's_ the way she chose to behave.  Mrs.
Bellamy was the last person I should have wished to see here this
afternoon; an uneducated woman, a woman whom we could not pretend to know
if we moved in Mrs. Colston's circle; and what we have done was all done
for my child's benefit.  She, I presume, would prefer decent society to
that of peasants."

Catharine stopped eating.

"Mrs. Bellamy was the last person _I_ should have wished to see here."

"I don't know quite what you mean, but it is probably something
disobedient and cruel," and Mrs. Furze became slightly hysterical again.

Catharine made no offer of any sympathy, but, leaving her supper
unfinished, rose without saying good-night, and appeared no more that
evening.




CHAPTER VI


"My dear," said Mrs. Furze to her husband the next night when they were
alone, "I think Catharine would be much better if she were sent away from
home for a time.  Her education is very imperfect, and there are
establishments where young ladies are taken at her age and finished.  It
would do her a world of good."

Mr. Furze was not quite sure about the finishing.  It savoured of a
region outside the modest enclosure within which he was born and brought
up.

"The expense, I am afraid, will be great, and I cannot afford it just
now.  There is no denying that business is no better; in fact, it is not
so good as it was, notwithstanding the alterations."

"You cannot expect it to recover at once.  Something must be done to put
Catharine on a level with the young women in her position, and my notion
is that everything which will help to introduce us into society will help
you.  Why does Mrs. Butcher go out so much?  It is because she knows it
is a good investment."

"An ironmonger is not a doctor."

"Who said he was?" replied Mrs. Furze, triumphant in the consciousness of
mental superiority.  "Furze," she once said to him, when it was proposed
to elect him a guardian of the poor, "take my advice and refuse.  Your
_forte_ is not argument: you will never held your own in debate."

"I know an ironmonger is not a doctor," she continued.  "_I_ of all
people have reason to know it; but what I do say is, that the more we mix
with superior people, the more likely you are to succeed, and that if you
bury yourself in these days you will fail."

The italicised "I" was an allusion to a fiction that once Mrs. Furze
might have married a doctor if she had liked, and thereby have secured
the pre-eminence which the wife of a drug-dispenser assumes in a country
town.  The grades in Eastthorpe were very marked, and no caste
distinctions could have been more rigid.  The county folk near were by
themselves.  They associated with none of the townsfolk, save with the
rector, and even in that relationship there was a slight tinge of
ex-officiosity.  Next to the rector were the lawyer and the banker and
the two maiden banker ladies in the Abbey Close.  Looked at from a
distance these might be supposed to stand level, but, on nearer approach,
a difference was discernible.  The banker and the ladies, although they
visited the lawyer, were a shade beyond him.  Then came the brewer.  The
days had not arrived when brewing--at least, on the large scale--is
considered to be more respectable than a learned profession, and Mrs.
Colston, notwithstanding her wealth, was incessantly forced by the
lawyer's wife to confess subordination.  The brewer kept three or four
horses for pleasure, and the lawyer kept only one; but "Colston's Entire"
was on a dozen boards in the town, and he supplied private families and
sent in bills.  The position of Mrs. Butcher was perhaps the most
curious.  She visited the rector, banker, lawyer, and brewer, and was
always well received, for she was clever, smart, young, and well behaved.
She had established her position solely by her wits.  She did not spend a
quarter as much as Mrs. Colston, but she always looked better.  She was
well shaped, to begin with, and the fit of her garments was perfect.  Not
a wrinkle was to be seen in gown, gloves, or shoes.  Mrs. Colston's
fashion was that imposed on her by the dressmaker, but Ms. Butcher always
had a style peculiarly her own.  She knew the secret that a woman's
attractiveness, so far as it is a matter of clothes, depends far more
upon the manner in which they are made and worn than upon costliness.  It
was always thought that she ruled her husband and had just a spice of
contempt for him.  She gained thereby in Eastthorpe, at least with the
men, for her superiority to him gave her an air which was slightly
detached, free, and fascinating.  She always drove when she went out with
him, and it was really a sight worth seeing she bolt upright with her
hands well down, her pretty figure showing to the best advantage the neat
turn-out--for she was very particular on this point and understood horses
thoroughly--and Butcher, leaning back, submissive but satisfied.  She had
made friends with the women too.  She was much too shrewd to incur their
hostility by openly courting the admiration of their husbands.  She knew
they did admire her, and that was enough.  She was most deferential to
Mrs. Colston, so much so that the brewer's wife openly expressed the
opinion that she was evidently well bred, and wondered how Butcher
managed to secure her.  Furthermore she was useful, for her opinion, when
anything had to be done, was always the one to be followed, and without
her the church restoration would never have been such a success.
Eastthorpe, like Mrs. Colston, often marvelled that Butcher should have
been so fortunate.  It mostly knew everything about the antecedents of
everybody in the town, but Mrs. Butcher's were not so well known.  She
came from Cornwall, she always said, and Cornwall was a long way off in
those days.  Her maiden name was Treherne, and Mrs. Colston had been told
that Treherne was good Cornish.  Moreover, soon after the marriage she
found on the table, when she called on Mrs. Butcher, a letter which she
could not help partly reading, for it lay wide open.  All scruples were
at once removed.  It had a crest at the top, was dated from Helston,
addressed Mrs. Butcher by a nickname, and was written in a most
aristocratic hand--so Mrs. Colston averred to her intimate friends.  She
could not finish the perusal before Mrs. Butcher came into the room; but
she had read enough, and the doctor's elect was admitted at once without
reservation.  Eastthorpe was slightly mistaken, but Mrs. Butcher's
history cannot be told here.

So much by way of digression on Eastthorpe society.  Mrs. Furze carried
her point as usual.  As for Catharine, she did not object, for there was
nothing in Eastthorpe attractive to her.  The Limes, Abchurch, was the
"establishment" chosen.  It was kept by the Misses Ponsonby, Abchurch
being a large village five miles farther eastward.  It was a peculiar
institution.  It was a school for girls, but not for little girls, and it
was also an educational home for young ladies up to one- or
two-and-twenty whose training had been neglected or had to be completed
beyond the usual limits.  It was widely-known, and, as its purpose was
special, it had little or no competition, and consequently flourished.
Many parents who had become wealthy, and who hardily knew the manners and
customs of the class to which they aspired, sent their daughters to the
Limes.  The Misses Ponsonby--Mrs Ponsonby and Miss Adela Ponsonby--were
of Irish extraction, and had some dim connection with the family of that
name.  They also preserved in their Calvinistic evangelicalism a trace of
the Cromwellian Ponsonby, the founder of the race.  There was a
difference of two years in the age of the two ladies, but no perceptible
difference in their characters.  The same necessity to conceal or
suppress all individuality on subjects disputable in their own sect had
been imposed on each.  Both had the same "views" on all matters religious
and social, and both of them confessed that on many points their "views"
were "strict"--whatever that singular phrase may have meant.
Nevertheless, they displayed remarkable tact in reconciling parents with
the defects and peculiarities of their children.  There were always girls
in the school of varying degrees of intelligence, from absolute stupidity
to brilliancy, but the report at the end of the term was so fashioned
that the father and mother of the idiot were not offended, and the idiocy
was so handled that it appeared to have some advantages.  If Miss Carter
had been altogether unable to master the French verbs, or to draw the
model vase until the teacher had put in nearly the whole of the outline,
there was a most happy counterpoise, as a rule, in her moral conduct.  In
these days of effusive expression, when everybody thinks it his duty to
deliver himself of everything in him--doubts, fears, passions--no matter
whether he does harm thereby or good, the Misses Ponsonby would be
considered intolerably dull and limited.  They did not walk about without
their clothes--figuratively speaking--it was not then the fashion.  They
were, on the contrary, heavily draped from head to foot, but underneath
the whalebone and padding, strange to say, were real live women's hearts.
They knew what it was to hope and despair; they knew what it was to
reflect that with each of them life might and ought to have been
different; they even knew what it was sometimes to envy the beggar-women
on the doorstep of the Limes who asked for a penny and clasped a child to
her breast.  We mistake our ancestors who read Pope and the _Spectator_.
They were very much like ourselves essentially, but they did not believe
that there was nothing in us which should be smothered or strangled.
Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the
Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine
metaphysics.  Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses
Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and
even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether
unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public
charge of injustice against its Maker because it is unattainable.

The number of girls was limited to thirty.  The house was tall,
four-square, built of white brick about the year 1780, had a row of
little pillars running along the roof at the top, and a Grecian portico.
It was odd that there should be such a house in Abchurch, but there it
was.  It was erected by a Spitalfields silk manufacturer, whose family
belonged to those parts.  He thought to live in it after his retirement,
but he came there to die.  The studies of the pupils were superintended
by the Misses Ponsonby and sundry teachers, all female, except the
drawing-master and the music-master.  The course embraced the usual
branches of a superior English education, French, Italian, deportment,
and the use of the globes, but, as the Misses Ponsonby truly stated in
their prospectus, their sole aim was not the inculcation of knowledge,
but such instruction as would enable the young ladies committed to their
charge to move with ease in the best society, and, above everything, the
impression of correct principles in morality and religion.  In this
impression much assistance was given by the Reverend Theophilus Cardew,
the rector of the church in the village.  The patronage was in the hands
of the Simeonite trustees, and had been bought by them in the first
fervour of the movement.

The thirty pupils occupied fifteen bedrooms, although each had a separate
bed, and to Catharine was allotted Miss Julia Arden, a young woman with a
pretty, pale face, and black hair worn in ringlets.  Her head was not
firmly fixed on her shoulders, and was always in motion, as if she had
some difficulty in balancing it, the reason being, not any physical
defect, but a wandering imagination, which never permitted her to look at
any one thing steadily for an instant.  Nine-tenths of what she said was
nonsense, but her very shallowness gave occasionally a certain value and
reality to her talk, for the simple reason that she was incapable of the
effort necessary to conceal what she thought for the moment.  In her
studies she made not the slightest progress, for her memory was shocking.
She confounded all she was taught, and never could recollect whether the
verb was conjugated and the noun declined, or whether it was the other
way round, to use one of her favourite expressions, so that her
preceptors were compelled to fall back, more exclusively than with her
schoolfellows, on her moral conduct, which was outwardly respectable
enough, but by the occupant of the other bed might perhaps have been
reported on in terms not quite so satisfactory as those in the quarterly
form signed by Miss Ponsonby.

Catharine's mother came with her on a Saturday afternoon, but left in the
evening.  At half-past eight there were prayers.  The girls filed into
the drawing-room, sat round in a ring, of which the Misses Ponsonby
formed a part, but with a break of about two feet right and left, the
servants sitting outside near the door: a chapter was read, a prayer also
read, and then, after a suitable pause, the servants rose from their
knees, the pupils rose next, and the Misses Ponsonby last; the time which
each division, servants, pupils, and Ponsonbys, remained kneeling being
graduated exactly in proportion to rank.  A procession to the supper-room
was then formed.  Catharine found herself at table next to Miss Arden,
with a spotless napkin before her, with silver forks and spoons, and a
delicately served meal of stewed fruits, milk-puddings, bread-and-butter,
and cold water.  Everything was good, sweet, and beautifully clean, and
there was enough.  At half-past nine, in accordance with the usual
practice, one of the girls read from a selected book.  On Saturday a
book, not exactly religious, but related to religion as nearly as
possible as Saturday is related to Sunday, was invariably selected.  On
this particular Saturday it was Clarke's "Travels in Palestine."
Precisely as the chock struck ten the volume was closed and the pupils
went to bed.

"I am sure I shall like you," observed Miss Arden, as they were
undressing.  "The girl who was here before was a brute, so dull and so
vulgar.  I hope you will like me."

"I hope so too."

"It's dreadful here: so different to my mother's house in Devonshire.  We
have a large place there near Torquay--do you know Torquay?  And I have a
horse of my own, on which I tear about during the holidays, and there are
boats and sailing matches, and my brothers have so many friends, and I
have all sorts of little affairs.  I suppose you've had your affairs.  Of
course you won't say.  We never see a man here, except Mr. Cardew.  Oh,
isn't he handsome?  He's only a parson, but he's such a dear; you'll see
him to-morrow.  I can't make him out: he's lovely, but he's queer, so
solemn at times, like an owl in daylight.  I'm sure he's well brought up.
I wonder why he went into the church: he ought to have been a gentleman."

"But is he not a gentleman?

"Oh, yes, of course he's a gentleman, but you know what I mean."

"No, I don't."

"There, now, you are one of those horrid creatures, I know you are, who
never _will_ understand, and do it on purpose.  It is so aggravating."

"Well, but you said he was not a gentleman, and yet that he was a
gentleman."

"You _are_ provoking.  I say he is a gentleman--but don't some gentlemen
keep a carriage?--and his father is in business.  Isn't that plain?  You
know all about it as well as I do."

"I still do not quite comprehend."

Catharine took a little pleasure in forcing people to be definite, and
Miss Arden invariably fell back on "you understand" whenever she herself
did not understand.  In fact, in exact proportion to her own inability to
make herself clear to herself, did she always insist that she was clear
to other people.

"I cannot help it if you don't comprehend.  He's lovely, and I adore
him."

Next morning, being Sunday, the Limes was, if possible, still more
irreproachable; the noise of the household was more subdued; the passions
appeared more utterly extinguished, and any indifferent observer would
have said that from the Misses Ponsonby down to the scullery-maid, a big
jug had been emptied on every spark of illegal fire, and blood was toast
and water.  Alas! it was not so.  The boots were cleaned overnight to
avoid Sunday labour, but when the milkman came, a handsome young fellow,
anybody with ears near the window overhead might have detected a
scuffling at the back door with some laughter and something like "Oh,
don't!" and might have noticed that Elizabeth afterwards looked a little
rumpled and adjusted her cap.  Nor was she singular, for many of the
young women who were supposed to be studying a brief abstract of the
history of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, in parallel columns, as
arranged by the Misses Ponsonby, were indulging in the naughtiest
thoughts and using naughty words as they sat in their bedrooms before the
time for departure to church.  At a quarter-past ten the girls assembled
in the dining-room, and were duly marshalled.  They did not, however,
walk two-and-two like ordinary schools.  In the first place, many of them
were not children, and, in the second place, the Misses Ponsonby held
that even walking to church was a thing to be taught, and they desired to
turn out their pupils so that they might distinguish themselves in this
art also as well-bred people.  It was one of the points on which the
Misses Ponsonby grew even eloquent.  How, they said, are girls to learn
to carry themselves properly if they march in couples?  They will not do
it when they leave the Limes, and will be utterly at fault.  There is no
day in the week on which more general notice is taken than on Sunday;
there is no day on which differences are more apparent.  The pupils
therefore walked irregularly, the irregularity being prescribed.  The
entering the church; the leaving the pews; the loitering and salutations
in the churchyard; the show, superior saunter homewards were all the
result of lecture, study, and even of practice on week-days.
"Deliberation, ease," said Miss Ponsonby, "are the key to this, as they
are to so much in our behaviour, and surely on the Sabbath we ought more
than on any other day to avoid indecorous hurry and vulgarity."

Catharine's curiosity, after what Miss Arden had said, was a little
excited to know what kind of a man Mr. Cardew might be, and she imagined
him a young dandy.  She saw a man about thirty-five with dark brown hair,
eyes set rather deeply in his head, a little too close together, a
delicate, thin, very slightly aquiline nose, and a mouth with curved
lips, which were, however, compressed as if with determination or
downright resolution.  There was not a trace of dandyism in him, and he
reminded her immediately of a portrait she had seen of Edward Irving in a
shop at Eastthorpe.

He stood straight up in the pulpit reading from a little Testament he
held in his hand, and when he had given out his text he put the Testament
down and preached without notes.  His subject was a passage in the life
of Jesus taken from Luke xviii. 18--

   18.  _And a certain ruler asked Him, saying, Good Master, what shall I
   do to inherit eternal life_?

   19.  _And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou Me good?  None is
   good, save one, that is God_.

   20.  _Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not
   kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and
   mother_.

   21.  _And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up_.

   22.  _Now when Jesus heard these things, He said unto him, Yet lackest
   thou one thing: sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor,
   and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me_.

Mr Cardew did not approach this theme circuitously or indifferently, but
seemed in haste to be on close terms with it, as if it had dwelt with him
and he was eager to deliver his message.

"I beseech you," he began, "endeavour to make this scene real to you.  A
rich man, an official, comes to Jesus, calls Him Teacher--for so the word
is in the Greek--and asks Him what is to be done to inherit eternal life.
How strange it is that such a question should be so put! how rare are the
occasions on which two people approach one another so nearly!  Most of us
pass days, weeks, months, years in intercourse with one another, and
nothing which even remotely concerns the soul is ever mentioned.  Is it
that we do not care?  Mainly that, and partly because we foolishly hang
back from any conversation on what it is most important we should reveal,
so that others may help us.  Whenever you feel any promptings to speak of
the soul or to make any inquiries on its behalf, remember it is a sacred
duty not to suppress them.

"This ruler was happy in being able to find a single authority to whom he
could appeal for an answer.  If anybody wishes for such an answer now, he
can find no oracle sole and decisive.  The voices of the Church, the
sects, the philosophers are clamorous but discordant, and we are
bewildered.  And yet, as I have told you over and over again in this
pulpit, it is absolutely necessary that you should have one and one only
supreme guide.  To say nothing of eternal salvation, we must, in the
conduct of life, shape our behaviour by some one standard, or the result
is chaos.  We must have some one method or principle which is to settle
beforehand how we are to do this or that, and the method or principle
should be Christ.  Leaving out of sight altogether His divinity, there is
no temper, no manner so effectual, so happy as His for handling all human
experience.  Oh, what a privilege it is to meet with anybody who is
controlled into unity, whose actions are all directed by one consistent
force!

"Jesus, as if to draw from this ruler all that he himself believed, tells
him to keep the Law.  The Law, however, is insufficient, and it is
noteworthy that the ruler felt it to be so.  To begin with, it is largely
negative: there are three negatives in this twentieth verse for one
affirmative, and negations cannot redeem us.  The law is also external.
As a proof that it is ineffectual, I ask, Have you ever _rejoiced_ in it?
Have you ever been kindled by it?  Have all its precepts ever moved you
like one single item in the story of the love of Jesus?  Is the man
attractive to you who has kept the law and done nothing more?  Would not
the poor woman who anointed our Lord's feet and wiped them with her hair
be more welcome to you than the holy people who had simply never
transgressed?

"We are struck with the magnitude of the demand made by Jesus on this
ruler.  To obtain eternal life he was to sell all he had, give up house,
friends, position, respectability, and lead a vagrant life in Palestine
with this poor carpenter's son.  Alas! eternal life is not to be bought
on lower terms.  Beware of the damnable doctrine that it is easy to enter
the kingdom of heaven.  It is to be obtained only by the sacrifice of
_all_ that stands in the way, and it is to be observed that in this, as
in other things, men will take the first, the second, the third--nay,
even the ninety-ninth step, but the hundredth and last they will not
take.  Do you really wish to save your soul?  Then the surrender must be
absolute.  What! you will say, am I to sell everything?  If Christ comes
to you--yes.  Sell not only your property, but your very self.  Part with
all your preferences, your loves, your thoughts, your very soul, if only
you can gain Him, and be sure too that He will come to you in a shape in
which it will not be easy to recognise Him.  What a bargain, though, this
ruler would have made!  He would have given up his dull mansion in
Jerusalem, Jerusalem society, which cared nothing for _him_, though it
doubtless called on him, made much of him, and even professed undying
friendship with him; he would have given this up, nothing but this, and
he would have gained those walks with Jesus across the fields, and would
have heard Him say, 'Consider the lilies!'  'Oh, yes, we would have done
it at once!' we cry.  I think not, for Christ is with us even now.'

Curiously enough, the conclusion was a piece of the most commonplace
orthodoxy, lugged in, Heaven knows how, and delivered monotonously, in
strong contrast to the former part of the discourse.--M. R.

* * * * *

These notes, made by one who was present, are the mere ashes, cold and
grey, of what was once a fire.  Mr. Cardew was really eloquent, and
consequently a large part of the effect of what he said is not to be
reproduced.  It is a pity that no record is possible of a great speaker.
The writer of this history remembers when it was his privilege to listen
continually to a man whose power over his audience was so great that he
could sway them unanimously by a passion which was sufficient for any
heroic deed.  The noblest resolutions were formed under that burning
oratory, and were kept, too, for the voice of the dead preacher still
vibrates in the ears of those who heard him.  And yet, except in their
hearts, no trace abides, and when they are dead he will be forgotten,
excepting in so far as that which has once lived can never die.

Whether it was the preacher's personality, or what he said, Catharine
could hardly distinguish, but she was profoundly moved.  Such speaking
was altogether new to her; the world in which Mr. Cardew moved was one
which she had never entered, and yet it seemed to her as if something
necessary and familiar to her, but long lost, had been restored.  She
began now to look forward to Sunday with intense expectation; a new
motive for life was supplied to her, and a new force urged her through
each day.  It was with her as we can imagine it to be with some bud long
folded in darkness which, silently in the dewy May night, loosens its
leaves, and, as the sun rises, bares itself to the depths of its cup to
the blue sky and the light.




CHAPTER VII


The Misses Ponsonby speedily came to a conclusion about Catharine, and
she was forthwith labelled as a young lady of natural ability, whose
education had been neglected, a type perfectly familiar, recurring every
quarter, and one with which they were perfectly well able to deal.  All
the examples they had had before were ticketed in exactly the same terms,
and, so classed, there was an end of further distinction.  The means
taken with Catharine were those which had been taken since the school
began, and special attention was devoted to the branches in which she was
most deficient, and which she disliked.  Her history was deplorable, and
her first task, therefore, was what were called dates.  A table had been
prepared of the kings and queens of England--when they came to the
throne, and when they died; and another table gave the years of all the
battles.  A third table gave the relationship of the kings and queens to
each other, and the reasons for succession.  All this had to be learned
by heart.  In languages, also, Catharine was singularly defective.  Her
French was intolerable and most inaccurate, and of Italian she knew
nothing.  Her dancing and deportment were so "provincial," as Miss Adela
Ponsonby happily put it, that it was thought better that the dancing and
deportment teacher should give her a few private lessons before putting
her in a class, and she was consequently instructed alone in the
rudiments of the art of entering and leaving a room with propriety, of
sitting with propriety on a sofa when conversing, of reading a book in a
drawing-room, of acknowledging an introduction, of sitting down to a meal
and rising therefrom, and in the use of the pocket-handkerchief.  She had
particularly shocked the Misses Ponsonby on this latter point, as she was
in the habit of blowing her nose energetically, "snorting," as one of the
young ladies said colloquially, but with truth, and the deportment
mistress had some difficulty in reducing them to the whisper, which was
all that was permitted in the Ponsonby establishment, even in cases of
severe cold.  On the other hand, in one or two departments she was far
ahead of the other girls, particularly in arithmetic and geometry.

It was the practice on Monday morning for the girls to be questioned on
the sermons of the preceding Sunday, and a very solemn business it was.
The whole school was assembled in the big schoolroom, and Mr. Cardew,
both the Misses Ponsonby being present, examined _viva voce_.  One Monday
morning, after Catharine had been a month at the school, Mr. Cardew came
as usual.  He had been preaching the Sunday before on a favourite theme,
and his text had been, "So then with the mind I myself serve the law of
God, but with the flesh the law of sin," and the examination at the
beginning was in the biography of St. Paul, as this had formed a part of
his discourse.  No fault was to be found with the answers on this portion
of the subject, but presently the class was in some difficulty.

"Can anybody tell me what meaning was assigned to the phrase, 'The body
of this death'?"

No reply.

"Come, you took notes, and one or two interpretations were discarded for
that which seemed to be more in accordance with the mind of St. Paul.
Miss Arden"--Miss Arden was sitting nearest to Mr. Cardew--"cannot you
say?"

Miss Arden shook her ringlets, smiled, and turned a little red, as if she
had been complimented by Mr. Cardew's inquiries after the body of death,
and, glancing at her paper, replied--"The death of this body."

"Pardon me, that was one of the interpretations rejected."

"This body of death," said Catharine.

"Quite so."

Mr. Cardew turned hastily round to the new pupil, whom he had not noticed
before, and looked at her steadily for a moment.

"Can you proceed a little and explain what that means?"

Catharine's voice trembled, but she managed to read from her paper: "It
is strikingly after the manner of St. Paul.  He opposes the two pictures
in him by the strongest words at his command--death and life.  One _is_
death, the other _is_ life, and he prays to be delivered from death; not
the death of the body, but from death-in-life."

"Thank you; that is very nearly what I intended."

Mr. Cardew took tea at the Limes about once a fortnight with Mrs. Cardew.
The meal was served in the Misses Ponsonby's private room, and the girls
were invited in turn.  About a fortnight after the examination on St.
Paul's theory of human nature, Mr. and Mrs. Cardew came as usual, and
Catharine was one of the selected guests.  The company sat round the
table, and Mrs. Cardew was placed between her husband and Miss Furze.  The
rector's wife was a fair-haired lady, with quiet, grey eyes, and regular,
but not strikingly beautiful, features.  Yet they were attractive,
because they were harmonious, and betokened a certain inward agreement.
It was a sane, sensible face, but a careless critic might have thought
that it betokened an incapability of emotion, especially as Mrs. Cardew
had a habit of sitting back in her chair, and generally let the
conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her.  She
had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant
and never stupid.  It ought to have been most serviceable to her husband,
because it might have corrected the exaggeration into which his impulse,
talent, and power of pictorial representation were so apt to fall.  She
had been brought up as an Evangelical, but she had passed through no
religious experiences whatever, and religion, in the sense in which
Evangelicalism in the Church of England of that day understood it, was
quite unintelligible to her.  Had she been born a few years later she
would have taken to science, and would have done well at it, but at that
time there was no outlet for any womanly faculty, much larger in quantity
than we are apt to suppose, which has an appetite for exact facts.

Mr. Cardew would have been called a prig by those who did not know him
well.  He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often
made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction,
without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters.  Once even,
shocking to say, he quite unexpectedly at a tea-party made an observation
about God.  Really, however, he was not a prig.  He was very sincere.  He
lived in a world of his own, in which certain figures moved which were as
familiar to him as common life, and he consequently talked about them.  He
leaned in front of his wife and said to Catharine--

"Have you read much, Miss Furze?"

"No, very little."

"Indeed!  I should have thought you were a reader.  What have you read
lately? any stories?"

"Yes, I have read 'Rasselas.'"

"'Rasselas'!  Have you really?  Now tell me what you think of it."

"Oh!  I cannot tell you all."

"No; it is not fair to put the question in that way.  It is necessary to
have some training in order to give a proper account of the scope and
purpose of a book.  Can you select any one part which struck you, and
tell me why it struck you?"

"The part about the astronomer.  I thought all that is said about the
dreadful effects of uncontrolled imagination was so wonderful."

"Don't you think those effects are exaggerated?"

She lost herself for a moment, as we have already seen she was in the
habit of doing, or rather, she did not lose herself, but everything
excepting herself, and she spoke as if nobody but herself were present.

"Not in the least exaggerated.  What a horror to pass days in dreaming
about one particular thing, and to have no power to wake!"

Her head had fallen a little forward; she suddenly straightened herself;
the blood rose in her face, and she looked very confused.

"I should like to preach about Dr. Johnson," said Mr. Cardew.

"Really, Mr. Cardew," interposed the elder Miss Ponsonby, "Dr. Johnson is
scarcely a sacred subject."

"I beg your pardon; I do not mean preaching on the Sabbath.  I should
like to lecture about him.  It is a curious thing, Miss Ponsonby, that
although Johnson was such a devout Christian, yet in his troubles his
remedy is generally nothing but that of the Stoics--courage and
patience."

Nobody answered, and an awkward pause followed.  Catharine had not
recovered from the shock of self-revelation, and the Misses Ponsonby were
uneasy, not because the conversation had taken such an unusual turn, but
because a pupil had contributed.  Mrs. Cardew, distressed at her
husband's embarrassment, ventured to come to the rescue.

"I think Dr Johnson quite right: when I am in pain, and nothing does me
any good, I never have anything to say to myself, excepting that I must
just be quiet, wait and bear it."

This very plain piece of pagan common sense made matters worse.  Mr.
Cardew seemed vexed that his wife had spoken, and there was once more
silence for quite half a minute.  Miss Adela Ponsonby then rang the bell,
and Catharine, in accordance with rule, left the room.

"Rather a remarkable young woman," carelessly observed the rector.

"Decidedly!" said both the Misses Ponsonby, in perfect unison.

"She has been much neglected," continued Miss Ponsonby.  "Her manners
leave much to be desired.  She has evidently not been accustomed to the
forms of good society, or to express herself in accordance with the usual
practice.  We have endeavoured to impress upon her that, not only is much
care necessary in the choice of topics of conversation, but in the mode
of dealing with them.  I thought it better not to encourage any further
remarks from her, or I should have pointed out that, if what you say of
Dr. Johnson is correct, as I have no doubt it is, considering the party
in the church to which he belonged, it only shows that he was
unacquainted experimentally with the consolations of religion."

"Isn't Mr. Cardew a dear?" asked Miss Arden, when she and Catharine were
together.

"I hardly understand what you mean, and I have not known Mr. Cardew long
enough to give any opinion upon him."

"How exasperating you are again!  You _do_ know what I mean; but you
always pretend never to know what anybody means."

"I do _not_ know what you mean."

"Why, isn't he handsome; couldn't you doat on him, and fall in love with
him?"

"But he's married."

"You fearful Catharine! of course he's married; you do take things so
seriously."

"Well, I'm more in the dark than ever."

"There you shall stick," replied Miss Arden, lightly shaking her curls
and laughing.  "Married!--yes, but they don't care for one another a
straw."

"Have they ever told you so?"

"How very ridiculous!  Cannot you see for yourself?"

"I am not sure: it is very difficult to know whether people really love
one another, and often equally difficult to know if they dislike one
another."

"What a philosopher you are!  I'll tell you one thing, though: I believe
he has just a little liking for me.  Not for his life dare he show it.
Oh, my goodness, wouldn't the fat be in the fire!  Wouldn't there be a
flare-up!  What would the Ponsonbys do?  Polite letter to papa announcing
that my education was complete!  That's what they did when Julia Jackson
got in a mess.  They couldn't have a scandal: so her education was
complete, and home she went.  Now the first time we are out for a walk
and he passes us and bows, you watch."

Miss Julia Arden went to sleep directly she went to bed, but Catharine,
contrary to her usual custom, lay awake till she heard twelve o'clock
strike from St. Mary, Abchurch.  She started, and thought that she alone,
perhaps, of all the people who lay within reach of those chimes had heard
them.  Why did she not go to sleep?  She was unused to wakefulness, and
its novelty surprised her with all sorts of vague terrors.  She turned
from side to side anxiously while midnight sounded, but she was young,
and in ten minutes afterwards she was dreaming.  She was mistaken in
supposing that she was the only person awake in Abchurch that night.  Mrs.
Cardew heard the chimes, and over her their soothing melody had no power.
When she and her husband left the Limes he broke out at once, with all
the eagerness with which a man begins when he has been repeating to
himself for some time every word of his grievance--

"I don't know how it is, Jane, but whenever I say anything I feel you are
just the one person on whom it seems to make an impression.  You have a
trick of repetition, and you manage to turn everything into a platitude.
If you cannot do better than that, you might be silent."

He was right so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the
noblest sentiment into commonplace.  No more than a touch is necessary.
The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus.  The
elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of
a hair, throws an image which is useless.  But Mr. Cardew was far more
wrong than he was right.  He did not take into account that what his wife
said and what she felt might not be the same; that persons, who have no
great command over language, are obliged to make one word do duty for a
dozen, and that, if his wife was defective at one point, there were in
her whole regions of unexplored excellence, of faculties never
encouraged, and an affection to which he offered no response.  He had not
learned the art of being happy with her: he did not know that happiness
is an art: he rather did everything he could do to make the relationship
intolerable.  He demanded payment in coin stamped from his own mint, and
if bullion and jewels had been poured before him he would have taken no
heed of them.

She said nothing.  She never answered him when he was angry with her.  It
was growing dark as they went home, and the tears came into her eyes and
the ball rose in her throat, and her lips quivered.  She went back--does
a woman ever forget them?--to the hours of passionate protestation before
marriage, to the walks together when he caught up her poor phrases and
refined them, and helped her to see herself, and tried also to learn what
few things she had to teach.  It was all the worse because she still
loved him so dearly, and felt that behind the veil was the same face, but
she could not tear the veil away.  Perhaps, as they grew older, matters
might become worse, and they might have to travel together estranged down
the long, weary path to death.  Death!  She did not desire to leave him,
but she would have lain down in peace to die that moment if he could be
made to see her afterwards as she knew she was--at least in her love for
him.  But then she thought what suffering the remembrance of herself
would cost him, and she wished to live.  He felt that she moved her hand
to her pocket, and he knew why it went there.  He pitied her, but he
pitied himself more, and though her tears wrought on him sufficiently to
prevent any further cruelty, he did not repent.




CHAPTER VIII


Mrs. Cardew met Catharine two or three times accidentally within the next
fortnight.  There were Dorcas meetings and meetings of all kinds at which
the young women at the Limes were expected to assist.  One afternoon,
after tea, the room being hot, two or three of the company had gone out
into the garden to work.  Catharine and Mrs. Cardew sat by themselves at
one corner, where the ground rose a little, and a seat had been placed
under a large ash tree.  From that point St. Mary's spire was visible,
about half a mile away in the west, rising boldly, confidently, one might
say, into the sky, as if it dared to claim that it too, although on earth
and finite, could match itself against the infinite heaven above.  On
this particular evening the spire was specially obvious and attractive,
for it divided the sunset clouds, standing out black against the long,
narrow interspaces of tender green which lay between.  It was one of
those evenings which invite confidence, when people cannot help drawing
nearer than usual to one another.

"Is it not beautiful, Miss Furze?"

"Beautiful; the spire makes it so lovely."

"I wonder why."

"I am sure I do not know; but it is so."

"Catharine--you will not mind my calling you by your Christian name--you
can explain it if you like."

Catharine smiled.  "It is very kind of you, Mrs. Cardew, to call me
Catharine, but I have no explanation.  I could not give one to save my
life, unless it is the contrast."

"You cannot think how I wish I had the power of saying what I think and
feel.  I cannot express myself properly--so my husband says."

"I sympathise with you.  I am so foolish at times.  Mr. Cardew, I should
think, never felt the difficulty."

"No, and he makes so much of it.  He says I do not properly enjoy a thing
if I cannot in some measure describe my enjoyment--articulate it, to use
his own words."

He had inwardly taunted her, even when she was suffering, and had said to
himself that her trouble must be insignificant, for there was no colour
nor vivacity in her description of it.  She did not properly even
understand his own shortcomings.  He could pardon her criticism, so he
imagined, if she could be pungent.  Mistaken mortal! it was her patient
heroism which made her dumb to him about her sorrows and his faults.  A
very limited vocabulary is all that is necessary on such topics.

"I am just the same."

"Oh, no, you are not; Mr. Cardew says you are not."

"Mr. Cardew?--he has not noticed anything in me, I am certain, and if he
has, why nobody could be less able to talk to him than I am."

Catharine knew nothing of what had passed between husband and wife--one
scene amongst many--and consequently could not understand the peculiar
earnestness, somewhat unusual with her, with which Mrs. Cardew dwelt upon
this subject.  We lead our lives apart in close company, with private
hopes and fears unknown to anybody but ourselves, and when we go abroad
we often appear inexplicable and absurd, simply because our friends have
not the proper key.

"Do you think, Catharine--you know that, though I am older than you and
married, I feel we are friends."  Here Mrs. Cardew took Catharine's hand
in hers.  "Do you think I could learn how to talk?  What I mean is, could
I be taught how to say what is appropriate?  I _do_ feel something when
Mr. Cardew reads Milton to me.  It is only the words I want--words such
as you have."

"Oh, Mrs. Cardew!"--Catharine came closer to her, and Mrs. Cardew's arm
crept round her waist--"I tell you again I have not so many words as you
suppose.  I believe, though, that if people take pains they can find
them."

"Couldn't you help me?"

"I?  Oh, no!  Mr. Cardew could.  I never heard anybody express himself as
he does."

"Mr. Cardew is a minister, and perhaps I should find it easier with you.
Suppose I bring the 'Paradise Lost' out into the garden when we next
meet, and I will read, and you shall help me to comment on it."

Catharine's heart went out towards her, and it was agreed that "Paradise
Lost" should be brought, and that Mrs. Cardew would endeavour to make
herself "articulate" thereon.  The party broke up, and Catharine's
reflections were not of the simplest order.  Rather let us say her
emotions, for her heart was busier than her head.  Mrs. Cardew had deeply
touched her.  She never could stand unmoved the eyes of her dog when the
poor beast came and laid her nose on her lap and looked up at her, and
nobody could have persuaded her of the truth of Mr. Cardew's doctrine
that the reason why a dog can only bark is that his thoughts are nothing
but barks.  Mrs. Cardew's appeal, therefore, was of a kind to stir her
sympathy; but--had she not heard that Mr. Cardew had observed and praised
her?  It was nothing--ridiculously nothing; it was his duty to praise and
blame the pupils at the Limes; he had complimented Miss Toogood on her
Bible history the other day, and on her satisfactory account of the
scheme of redemption.  He had done it publicly, and he had pointed out
the failings of the other pupils, she, Catharine herself, being included.
He had reminded her that she had not taken into account the one vital
point, that as we are the Almighty Maker's creatures, His absolutely, we
have no ground of complaint against Him in whatever way He may be pleased
to make us.  Nevertheless, just those two or three words Mrs. Cardew
reported were like yeast, and her whole brain was in a ferment.

The Milton was produced next week.  Since Catharine had been at the Limes
she had read some of it, incited by Mr. Cardew, for he was an enthusiast
for Milton.  Mrs. Cardew was a bad reader; she had no emphasis, no light
and shade, and she missed altogether the rhythm of the verse.  To
Catharine, on the other hand, knowing nothing of metre, the proper
cadence came easily.  They finished the first six hundred lines of the
first book.

"You have not said anything, Catharine."

"No; but what have you to say?"

"It is very fine; but there I stick; I cannot say any more; I want to say
more; that is where I always am.  I can _not_ understand why I cannot go
on as some people do; I just stop there with 'very fine.'"

"Cannot you pick out some passage which particularly struck you?"

"That is very true, is it not, that the mind can make a heaven of hell
and a hell of heaven?"

"Most true; but did you not notice the description of the music?"

Catharine was fond of music, but only as an expression of her own
feelings.  For music as music--for a melody of Mozart, for example--that
is to say, for pure art, which is simply beauty, superior to our
personality, she did not care.  She liked Handel, and there was a choral
society in Eastthorpe which occasionally performed the "Messiah."

"Don't you remember what Mr. Cardew said about it--it was remarkable that
Milton should have given to music the power to chase doubt from the mind,
doubt generally, and yet music is not argument?"

"Oh, yes, I recollect, but I do not quite comprehend him, and I told him
I did not see how music could make me sure of a thing if there was not a
reason for it."

"What did he say then?"

"Nothing."

Mr. Cardew called that evening to take his wife home.  He was told that
she was in the garden with Miss Furze, and thither he at once went.

"Milton!" he exclaimed.  "What are you doing with Milton here?"

"Miss Furze and I were reading the first book of the 'Paradise Lost'
together."

Mrs. Cardew looked at her husband inquiringly, and with a timid smile,
hoping he would show himself pleased.  His brow, however, slightly
wrinkled itself with displeasure.  He had told her to read Milton, had
said, "Fancy an Englishwoman with any pretensions to education not
knowing Milton!" and now, when she was doing exactly what she was
directed to do, he was vexed.  He was annoyed to find he was precisely
obeyed, and perhaps would have been in a better temper if he had been
contradicted and resisted.  Mrs. Cardew turned her head away.  What was
she to do with him?  Every one of her efforts to find the door had
failed.

"What has struck you particularly in that book, Miss Furze?"

Catharine was about to say something, but she caught sight of Mrs.
Cardew, and was arrested.  At last she spoke, but what she said was not
what she at first had intended to say.

"Mrs. Cardew and I were discussing the lines about doubt and music, and
we cannot see what Milton means.  We cannot see how music can make us
sure of a thing if there is not good reason for it."

Catharine used the first person plural with the best intention, but her
object was defeated.  The rector recognised the words at once.

"Yes, yes," he replied, impatiently; "but, Miss Furze, you know better
than that.  Milton does not mean doubt whether an arithmetical
proposition is true.  I question if he means theological doubt.  Doubt in
that passage is nearer despondency.  It is despondency taking an
intellectual form and clothing itself with doubts which no reasoning will
overcome, which re-shape themselves the moment they are refuted."  He
stopped for a moment.  "Don't you think so, Miss Furze?"

She forgot Mrs. Cardew, and looked straight into Mr. Cardew's face bent
earnestly upon her.

"I understand."

Mrs. Cardew had lifted her eyes from the ground, on which they had been
fixed.  "I think," said she, "we had better be going."

"We can go out by the door at the end of the garden, if you will go and
bid the Misses Ponsonby good-bye."

Mrs. Cardew lingered a moment.

"I have bidden them good-bye," said her husband.

She went, and Miss Ponsonby detained her for a few minutes to arrange the
details of an important quarterly meeting of the Dorcas Society for next
week.

"What do you think of the subject of the 'Paradise Lost.'  Miss Furze?"

"I hardly know; it seems so far away."

"Ah! that is just the point.  I thought so once, but not now.  Milton
could not content himself with a common theme; nothing less than God and
the man--mortal feud between Him and Satan would suffice.  Milton is
representative to me of what I may call the heroic attitude towards
existence.  Mark, too, the importance of man in the book.  Men and women
are not mere bubbles--here for a moment and then gone--but they are
actually important, all-important, I may even say, to the Maker of the
universe and his great enemy.  In this Milton follows Christianity, but
what stress he lays on the point!  Our temptation, notwithstanding our
religion, so often is to doubt our own value.  All appearances tend to
make us doubt it.  Don't you think so?"

Catharine looked earnestly at the excited preacher, but said nothing.

"I do not mean our own personal worth.  The temptation is to doubt
whether it is of the smallest consequence whether we are or are not, and
whether our being here is not an accident.  Oh, Miss Furze, to think that
your existence and mine are part of the Divine eternal plan, and that
without us it would be wrecked!  Then there is Satan.  Milton has gone
beyond the Bible, beyond what is authorised, in giving such a distinct,
powerful, and prominent individuality to Satan.  You will remember that
in the great celestial battle--

         "'Long time in even scale
   The battle hung.'

But what a wonderful conception that is of the great antagonist of God!
It comes out even more strongly in the 'Paradise Regained.'  Is it not a
relief to think that the evil thought in you or me is not altogether
yours and mine, but is foreign; that it is an incident in the war of
wars, an attack on one of the soldiers of the Most High?"

Mr. Cardew paused.

"Have you never written anything which I could read?"

"Scarcely anything.  I wrote some time ago a little story of a few pages,
but it was never published.  I will lend you the manuscript, but you will
please remember that it is anonymous, and that I do not wish the
authorship revealed.  I believe most people would not think any the
better of me, certainly as a clergyman, if they knew it was mine."

"That is very kind of you."

Catharine felt the distinction, the confidence.  The sweetest homage
which can be offered us is to be entrusted with something which others
would misinterpret.

"I should like, Miss Furze, to have some further talk with you about
Milton, but I do not quite see" (musingly) "how it is to be managed."

"Could you not tell us something about him when you and Mrs. Cardew next
have tea with us at the Limes?"

"I do not think so.  I meant with you, yourself.  It is not easy for me
to express myself clearly in company--at any rate, I should not hear your
difficulties.  You seem to possess a sympathy which is unusual, and I
should be glad to know more of your mind."

"When Mrs. Cardew comes here, could you not fetch her, and could we not
sit out here together?"

He hesitated.  They were walking slowly over the grass towards the gate,
and were just beginning to turn off to the right by the side path between
the laurels.  At that point, the lawn being levelled and raised, there
were two stone steps.  In descending them Catharine slipped, and he
caught her arm.  She did not fall, but he did not altogether release her
for at least some seconds.

"Mrs. Cardew has no liking for poetry."

Catharine was silent.

"It is quite a new thing to me, Miss Furze, to find anybody in Abchurch
who cares anything for that which is most interesting to me."

"But, Mr. Cardew, I am sure I have not shown any particular capacity, and
I am very ignorant, for I have read very little."

"It does not need much to reveal what is in a person.  It would be a
great help to me if we could read a book together.  This
self-imprisonment day after day and self-imposed reticence is very
unwholesome.  I would give much to have a pupil or a friend whose world
is my world."

To Catharine it seemed as if she was being sucked in by a whirlpool and
carried she knew not whither.  They had reached the gate, and he had
taken her hand in his to bid her good-bye.  She felt a distinct and
convulsive increase of pressure, and she felt also that she returned it.
Suddenly something passed through her brain swift as the flash of the
swiftest blazing meteor: she dropped his hand, and, turning instantly,
went back to the house, retreating behind the thick bank of evergreens.

"Where is Miss Furze?" said Mrs. Cardew, who came down the path a minute
or two afterwards.

"I do not know: I suppose she is indoors."

"A canting, hypocritical parson, type not uncommon, described over and
over again in novels, and thoroughly familiar to theatre-goers."  Such,
no doubt, will be the summary verdict passed upon Mr. Cardew.  The truth
is, however, that he did not cant, and was not a hypocrite.  One or two
observations here may perhaps be pertinent.  The accusation of hypocrisy,
if we mean lofty assertion, and occasional and even conspicuous moral
failure, may be brought against some of the greatest figures in history.
But because David sinned with Bathsheba, and even murdered her husband,
we need not discredit the sincerity of the Psalms.  The man was
inconsistent, it is true, inconsistent exactly because there was so much
in him that was great, for which let us be thankful.  Let us take notice
too, of what lies side by sidle quietly in our own souls.  God help us if
all that is good in us is to be invalidated by the presence of the most
contradictory evil.

Secondly it is a fact that vitality means passion.  It does not mean
avarice or any of the poor, miserable vices.  If David had been a wealthy
and most pious Jerusalem shopkeeper, who subscribed largely to missionary
societies to the Philistines, but who paid the poor girls in his employ
only two shekels a week, refusing them ass-hire when they had to take
their work three parts of the way to Bethlehem, and turning them loose at
a minute's warning, he certainly would not have been selected to be part
author of the Bible, even supposing his courtship and married life to
have been most exemplary and orthodox.  We will, however, postpone any
further remarks upon Mr. Cardew: a little later we shall hear something
about his early history, which may perhaps explain and partly exculpate
him.  As to Catharine, she escaped.  It is vexatious that a complicated
process in her should be represented by a single act which was transacted
in a second.  It would have been much more intelligible if it could have
written itself in a dramatic conversation extending over two or three
pages, but, as the event happened, so it must be recorded.  The
antagonistic and fiercely combatant forces did _so_ issue in that deed,
and the present historian has no intention to attempt an analysis.  One
thing is clear to him, that the quick stride up the garden path was urged
not by any single, easily predominating impulse which had been enabled to
annihilate all others.  Do not those of us, who have been mercifully
prevented from damming ourselves before the whole world, who have
succeeded and triumphed--do we not know, know as we know hardly anything
else, that our success and our triumph were due to superiority in
strength by just a grain, no more, of our better self over the raging
rebellion beneath it?  It was just a tremble of the tongue of the
balance: it might have gone this way, or it might have gone the other,
but by God's grace it was this way settled--God's grace, as surely, in
some form of words, everybody must acknowledge it to have been.  When she
reached her bedroom she sat down with her head on her hands, rose, walked
about, looked out of window in the hope that she might see him, thought
of Mrs. Cardew; forgot her; dwelt on what she had passed through till she
almost actually felt the pressure of his hand; cursed herself that she
had turned away from him; prayed for strength to resist temptation, and
longed for one more chance of yielding to it.

The next morning a little parcel was left for Miss Furze.  It contained
the promised story, which is here presented to my readers:--



"Did he Believe?


"Charmides was born in Greece, but about the year 300 A.D. was living in
Rome.  He had come there, like many of his countrymen, to pursue his
calling as sculptor in the imperial city, and he cherished a great love
for his art.  He knew too well that it was not the art of the earlier
days of Athens, and that he could never catch the spirit of that golden
time, but he loved it none the less.  He was also a philosopher in his
way.  He had read not only the literature of Greece, but that of his
adopted land, and he was especially familiar with Lucretius and his pupil
Virgil.  His intellectual existence, however, was not particularly happy.
Rome was a pleasant city; his occupation was one in which he delighted;
the thrill of a newly noticed Lucretian idea or of a tender touch in
Virgil were better to him than any sensual pleasure, but his dealings
with his favourite authors ended in his own personal emotion, and it was
sad to think that the Hermes on which he had spent himself to such a
degree should become a mere decoration to a Roman nobleman's villa,
valued only because it cost so much, and that nobody who looked at it
would ever really care for it.  Once, however, he was rewarded.  He had
finished a Pallas Athene just as the sun went down.  He was excited, and
after a light sleep he rose very early and went into the studio with the
dawn.  There stood the statue, severe, grand in the morning twilight, and
if there was one thing in the world clear to him, it was that what he saw
was no inanimate mineral mass, but something more.  It was no mere
mineral mass with an outline added.  Part of the mind which formed the
world was in it, actually in it, and it came to Charmides that intellect,
thought, had their own rights, that they were as much a fact as the
stone, and that what he had done was simply to realise a Divine idea
which was immortal, no matter what might become of its embodiment.  The
weight of the material world lifted, an avenue of escape seemed to open
itself to him from so much that oppressed and deadened him, and he felt
like a man in an amphitheatre of overhanging mountains, who should espy
in a far-off corner some scarcely perceptible track, and on nearer
inspection a break in the walled precipices, a promise, or at least a
hint, of a passage from imprisonment to the open plain.  It was nothing
more than he had learned in his Plato, but the truth was made real to
him, and he clung to it.

"Rome at the end of the third century was one of the most licentious of
cities.  It was invaded by all the vices of Greece, and the counterpoise
of the Greek virtues was absent.  The reasoning powers assisted rather
than prevented the degradation of morals, for they dissected and
represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men
upright.  The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have
been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, _What is
there in it_?--and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired
itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast.
Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to be denied that though his life
as a whole was pure, he had yielded to temptation, not without loathing
himself afterwards.  He did not feel conscious of any transgression of a
moral law, for no such law was recognised, but he detested himself
because he had been drawn into close contact with a miserable wretch
simply in order to satisfy a passion, and in the touch of mercenary
obscenity there was something horrible to him.  It was bitter to him to
reflect that, notwithstanding his aversion from it, notwithstanding his
philosophy and art, he had been equally powerless with the uttermost fool
of a young aristocrat to resist the attraction of the commonest of
snares.  What were his books and fine pretensions worth if they could not
protect him in such ordinary danger?  Thus it came to pass that after a
fall, when he went back to his work, it was so unreal to him, such a
mockery, that days often elapsed before he could do anything.  It was a
mere toy, a dilettante dissipation, the embroidery of corruption.  Oh,
for a lawgiver, for a time of restraint, for the time of Regulus and the
republic!  Then, said Charmides to himself, my work would have some
value, for heroic obedience would he behind it.  He was right, for the
love of the beautiful cannot long exist where there is moral pollution.
The love of the beautiful itself is moral--that is to say, what we love
in it is virtue.  A perfect form or a delicate colour are the expression
of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires
or meanness, and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true
interpretation of a cloud or falling wave.

"One night Charmides was walking through the lowest part of the city, and
he heard from a mere hovel the sound of a hymn.  He knew what it was--that
it was the secret celebration of a religious rite by the despised sect of
the Jews and their wretched proselytes.  The Jews were especially hateful
to him and to all cultured people in Rome.  They were typical of all the
qualities which culture abhorred.  No Jew had ever produced anything
lovely in any department whatever--no picture, statue, melody, nor poem.
Their literature was also barbaric: there was no consecutiveness in it,
no reasoning, no recognition in fact of the reason.  It was a mere mass
of legends without the exquisite charm and spiritual intention of those
of Greece, of bloody stories and obscure disconnected prophecies by
shepherds and peasants.  Their god was a horror, a boor upon a mountain,
wielding thunder and lightning.  Aphrodite was perhaps not all that could
be wished, but she was divine compared with the savage Jehovah.  It was
true that a recent Jewish sect professed better things and recognised as
their teacher a young malefactor who was executed when Tiberius was
emperor.  So far, however, as could be made out he was a poor
crack-brained demagogue, who dreamed of restoring a native kingdom in
Palestine.  What made the Jews especially contemptible to culture was
that they were retrograde.  They strove to put back the clock.  There is
only one path, so culture affirmed, and that is the path opened by
Aristotle, the path of rational logical progress from what we already
know to something not now known, but which can be known.  If our present
state is imperfect, it is because we do not know enough.  Every other
road, excepting this, the king's highway, heads into a bog.  These Jews
actually believed in miracles; they had no science, and thought they
could regenerate the world by hocus-pocus.  They ought to be suppressed
by law, and, if necessary, put to death, for they bred discontent.

"Nevertheless, Charmides decided to enter the hovel.  He was in idle
mood, and he was curious to see for himself what the Jews were like.  He
pushed open the door, and when he went in he found himself in a low, mean
room very dimly lighted and crowded with an odd medley of Greeks, Romans,
tolerably well-dressed persons, and slaves.  The poor and the shaves were
by far the most numerous.  The atmosphere was stifling, and Charmides sat
as near the door as possible.  Next to him was a slave-girl, not
beautiful, but with a peculiar expression on her face very rare in Rome
at that time.  The Roman women were, many of them, lovely, but their
loveliness was cold--the loveliness of indifference.  The somewhat common
features of this slave, on the contrary, were lighted up with eagerness:
to her there was evidently something in life of consequence--nay, of
immense importance.  There were few of her betters in Rome to whom
anything was of importance.  A hymn at that moment was being sung, the
words of which Charmides could not catch, and when it was finished an
elderly man rose and read what seemed the strangest jargon about
justification and sin.  The very terms used were in fact unintelligible.
The extracts were from a letter addressed to the sect in Rome by one
Paul, a disciple of that Jesus who was crucified.  After the reading was
over came an address, very wild in tone and gesture, and equally
unintelligible, and then a prayer or invocation, partly to their god, but
also, as it seemed, to this Jesus, who evidently ranked as a daemon, or
perhaps as Divine, Charmides was quite unaffected.  The whole thing
appeared perfect nonsense, not worth investigation, but he could not help
wondering what there was in it which could so excite that girl, whom he
could hardly conclude to be a fool, and whose earnestness was a surprise
to him.  He thought no more about the affair until some days afterwards
when he happened to visit a friend.  Just as he was departing he met this
very slave in the porch.  He involuntarily stopped, and she whispered to
him.

"'You will not betray us?'

"'I?  Certainly not.'

"'I will lend you this.  Read it and return it to me.'  So saying, she
vanished.

"Charmides, when he reached home, took out the manuscript.  He recognised
it as a copy of the letter which he had partly heard at the meeting.  He
was somewhat astonished to find that it was written by a man of learning,
who was evidently familiar with classic authors, but surely never was
scholarship pressed into such a service!  The confusion of metaphor, the
suddenness of transition, the illogical muddles were bad enough, but the
chief obstacle to comprehension was that the author's whole scope and
purpose, the whole circle of his ideas, were outside Charmides
altogether.  He was not attracted any more than he was at the meeting,
but he was a little piqued because Paul had certainly been well educated,
and he determined to attend the meeting again.  This time he was late,
and did not arrive till it was nearly at an end.  His friend was there,
and again he sat down next to her.  When they went out it was dark, and
he walked by her side.

"'Have you read the letter?'

"'Yes, but I do not understand it, and I have brought it back.'

"'May Christ the Lord open your eyes!'

"'Who is this Christ whom you worship?'

"'The Son of God, He who was crucified; the man Jesus; He who took upon
Himself flesh to redeem us from our sins; in whom by faith we are
justified and have eternal life.'

"It was all pure Hebrew to him, save the phrase 'Son of God,' which
sounded intelligible.

"'You are Greek,' he said, for he recognised her accent although she
spoke Latin.

"'Yes, from Corinth: my name is Demariste;' and she explained to him
that, although she was a slave, she was partly employed in teaching Greek
to the children of her mistress.

"'If you are Greek and well brought up, you must know that I cannot
comprehend a word of what you have spoken.  It is Judaism.'

"'To me, too,' she replied, speaking Greek to him, 'it was
incomprehensible, but God by the light which lighteth every man hath
brought me into His marvellous light, and now this that I have told you
is exceedingly clear--nay, clearer than anything which men say they see.'

"'Tell me how it happened.'

"'When I first came to Rome I had a master who desired to make me his
concubine, and I hated him; but what strength had I?--and I was tempted
to yield.  My parents were dead; I had no friends who cared for me--what
did it matter!  I had read in my books of the dignity of the soul, but
that was a poor weapon with which to fight, and, moreover, sin was not
exceeding sinful to me.  By God's grace I was brought amongst these
Christians, and I was convinced of sin.  I saw that it was not only
transgression against myself, but against the eternal decrees of the Most
High, against those decrees which, as one of our own poets still dear to
me has said--

   "'[Greek text].' {1}

"'I saw that all art, all learning, everything which men value, were as
straw compared with God's commandments, and that it would be well to
destroy all our temples, and statues, and all that we have which is
beautiful, if we could thereby establish the kingdom of God within us,
and so become heirs of the life everlasting.  Oh, my friend, my friend in
Christ, I hope, believe me, Rome will perish, and we shall all perish,
not because we are ignorant, but because we have not obeyed His word.  But
how was I to obey it?  Then I heard told the life of Christ the Lord: how
God the Father in His infinite pity sent His Son into the world; how He
lived amongst his and died a shameful death upon the cross that we might
not die: and all His strength passed into me and became mine through
faith, and I was saved; saved for this life; saved eternally; justified
through Him; worthy to wait for Him and meet Him at His coming, for He
shall come, and I shall be for ever with the Lord.'

"Demariste stood straight upright as she spoke, and the light in her
transfigured her countenance as the sun penetrating a grey mass of vapour
informs it with such an intensity of brightness that the eye can scarcely
endure it.  It was a totally new experience to Charmides, an entire
novelty in Rome.  He did not venture to look in her face directly, for he
felt that there was nothing in him equal to its sublime, solemn pleading.

"'I do not know anything of your Jesus,' he said at last, timidly; 'upon
what do you rest His claims?'

"'Read His life.  I will lend it to you; you will want no other evidence
for Him.  And was He not raised from the dead to reign for ever at His
Father's right hand?  No, keep the letter for a little while, and perhaps
you will understand it better when you know upon what it is based.'

"A day or two afterwards the manuscript was sent to him secretly with
many precautions.  He was not smitten suddenly by it.  The Palestinian
tale, although he confessed it was much more to his mind than Paul, was
still _rude_.  It was once more the rudeness which was repellent, and
which almost outweighed the pathos of many of the episodes and the
undeniable grandeur of the trial and death.  Moreover, it was full of
superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide.  He was in
his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he
was carving.  The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced
sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of
the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for
meddling with it.  He opened his Lucretius.  Here was order and sequence;
he knew where he was; he was at home.  Was all this nought, were the
accumulated labour and thought of centuries to be set aside and trampled
on by the crude, frantic inspiration of clowns?  The girl's face,
however, recurred to him; he could not get rid of it, and he opened the
biography again.  He stumbled upon what now stand as our twenty-third and
twenty-fourth chapters of Matthew, containing the denunciation of the
Pharisees, and the prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man.  He was
amazed at the new turn which was given to life, at the reasons assigned
for the curses which were dealt to these Jewish doctors.  They were
damned for their lack of mercy, judgment, faith, for their extortion,
excess, and because they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity.  They were
fools and blind, but not through defects which would have condemned them
in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and
Rome took small account.  Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that
this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society.  This, then, was
the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single
meaning.  Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the
twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent.  'For as the lightning cometh out
of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the
Son of Man be.'  Was it not intelligible that He to whom right and wrong
were so diverse, to whom their diversity was the one fact for man, should
believe that Heaven would proclaim and enforce it?  He read more and
more, until at last the key was given to him to unlock even that strange
mystery, that being justified by faith we have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ.  Still it was idle for him to suppose that he could
ever call himself a Christian in the sense in which those poor creatures
whom he had seen were Christians.  Their fantastic delusions, their
expectation that any day the sky might open and their Saviour appear in
the body, were impossible to him; nor could he share their confidence
that once for all their religion alone was capable of regenerating the
world.  He could not, it is true, avoid the reflection that the point was
not whether the Christians were absurd, nor was it even the point whether
Christianity was not partly absurd.  The real point was whether there was
not more certainty in it than was to be found in anything at that time
current in the world.  Here, in what Paul called faith, was a new spring
of action, a new reason for the blessed life, and, what was of more
consequence, a new force by which men might be enabled to persist in it.
He could not, we say, avoid this reflection; he could not help feeling
that he was bound not to wait for that which was in complete conformity
with an ideal, but to enlist under the flag which was carried by those
who in the main fought for the right, and that it was treason to cavil
and stand aloof because the great issue was not presented in perfect
purity.  Nevertheless, he was not decided, and could not quite decide.  If
he could have connected Christianity with his own philosophy; if it had
been the outcome, the fulfilment of Plato, his duty would have been so
much simpler; it was the complete rupture--so it seemed to him--which was
the difficulty.  His heart at times leaped up to join this band of
determined, unhesitating soldiers; to be one in an army; to have a cause;
to have a banner waving over his head; to have done with isolation,
aloofness, speculation ending in nothing, and dreams which profited
nobody: but even in those moments when he was nearest to a confession of
discipleship he was restrained by faintness and doubt.  If he were to
enrol himself as a convert his conversion would be due not to an
irresistible impulse, but to a theory, to a calculation, one might almost
say, that such and such was the proper course to take.

"He went again to the meeting, and he went again and again.  One night,
as he came home, he walked as he had walked before, with Demariste.  She
was going as far as his door for the manuscript which he had now copied
for his own use.  As they went along a man met them who raised a lantern,
and directed it full in their faces.

"'The light of death,' said Demariste.

"'Who is he?'

"'I know him well; he is a spy.  I have often seen him at the door of our
assembly.'

"'Do you fear death?'

"'I?  Has not Christ died?'

"Charmides hath fallen in love with this slave, but it was love so
different from any love which he had felt before for a woman, that it
ought to have had some other name.  It was a love of the soul, of that
which was immortal, of God in her; it was a love too, of no mere
temporary phenomenon, but of reality outlasting death into eternity.
There was thus a significance, there was a grandeur in it wanting to any
earthly love.  It was the new love with which men were henceforth to love
women--the love of Dante for Beatrice.

"She waited at the door while he went inside to fetch in the parchment.
He brought it out and gave it to her, and as he stood opposite to her he
looked in her face, and her eyes were not averted.  He caught her hand,
but she drew back.

"''Tis but for a day or two,' she said; 'a week will see the end.'

"'A week!' he cried!  'Oh, my Demariste, rather a week with thee than an
age with anything less than thee!'

"'You will have to die too.  Dare you die?  The spirit may be willing,
but the flesh may be weak.'

"'Death?  Yes, death, if only I am yours!'

"'Nay, nay, my beloved, not for me, but for the Lord Jesus!'

"He bent nearer to her; his head was on her neck, and his arms were round
her body.  Oh, son and daughter of Time! oh, son and daughter of
Eternity!

"He had hardly returned to his house, when he was interrupted by his
friend Callippus, just a little the worse for wine.

"'What new thing is this?' said Callippus.  'I hear you have consorted
with the Jews, and have been seen at their assembly.'

"'True, my friend.'

"True!  By Jupiter! what is the meaning of it?  You do not mean to say
that you are bitten by the mad dog?'

"'I believe.'

"'Oh, by God, that it should have come to this!  Are you not ashamed to
look him in the face?' pointing to the Apollo statue.  'Ah! the old
prophecy is once more verified!--

   "'Tutemet a nobis iam quovis tempore vatum
   terriloquis victus dictis desciscere quaeres.' {2}

But I must be prudent.  I saw somebody watching your house on the other
side of the street.  If I am caught they will think I belong to the
accursed sect too.  Farewell."

"The morning came, and about an hour after Charmides had risen two
soldiers presented themselves.  He was hurried away, brought before the
judges, and examined.  Some little pity was felt for him by two or three
members of the court, as he was well known in Rome, and one of them
condescended to argue with him and to ask him how he could become
ensnared by a brutal superstition which affirmed, so it was said, the
existence of devil-possessed pigs, and offered sacrifices to them.

"'You,' said he, 'an artist and philosopher--if it be true that you are a
pervert, you deserve a heavier punishment than the scum whom we have
hitherto convicted.'

"'For Christ and His Cross!' cried Charmides.

"'Take him away!'

"The next day Charmides and Demariste met outside the prison gates.  They
were chained together in mockery, the seducer, Demariste, and the
seduced, Charmides.  They were marched through the streets of Rome, the
crowd jeering them and thronging after them to enjoy the sport of their
torments and death.  Charmides saw the eyes of Demariste raised
heavenward and her lips moving in prayer.

"'He has heard me,' she said, 'and you will endure.'

"He pressed her hand, and replied, with unshaken voice, 'Fear not.'

"They came to the place of execution, but before the final stroke they
were cruelly tortured.  Charmides bore his sufferings in silence, but in
her extremest agony the face of Demariste was lighted with rapture.

"'Look, look, my beloved, there, there!' trying to lift her mangled arm,
'Christ the Lord!  One moment more and we are for ever with Him.'

"Charmides could just raise his head, and saw nothing but Demariste.  He
was able to turn himself towards her and move her hand to his lips, the
second, only the second and the last kiss.

"So they died.  Charmides was never considered a martyr by the Church.
The circumstances were doubtful, and it was not altogether clear that he
deserved the celestial crown."




CHAPTER IX


The school broke up next week for the summer holidays, and Catharine went
home.  Her mother was delighted with her daughter.  She was less awkward,
straighter, and her air and deportment showed the success of the plan.
The father acquiesced, although he did not notice the change till Mrs.
Furze had pointed it out.  As to Mrs. Bellamy, she declared, when she met
Catharine in the street the first market afternoon, that "she had all at
once become a woman grown."  Mrs. Furze's separation from her former
friends was now complete, but she had, unfortunately, not yet achieved
admission into the superior circle.  She had done so in a measure, but
she was not satisfied.  She felt that these people were not intimate with
her, and that, although she had screwed herself with infinite pains into
a bowing acquaintance, and even into a shaking of hands, they formed a
set by themselves, with their own secrets and their own mysteries, into
which she could not penetrate.  Their very politeness was more annoying
than rudeness would have been.  It showed they could afford to be polite.
Had she been wealthy, she could have crushed all opposition by sheer
weight of bullion; but in Eastthorpe everybody's position was known with
tolerable exactitude, and nobody was deluded into exaggerating Mr.
Furze's resources because of the removal to the Terrace.  Eastthorpe, on
the contrary, affirmed that the business had not improved, and that
expenses had increased.

When Catharine came home a light suddenly flashed across Mrs. Furze's
mind.  What might not be done with such a girl as that!  She was good-
looking--nay, handsome; she had the manners which Mrs. Furze knew that
she herself lacked, and Charlie Colston, aged twenty-eight, was still
disengaged.  It was Mrs. Furze's way when she proposed anything to
herself, to take no account of any obstacles, and she had the most
wonderful knack of belittling and even transmuting all moral objections.
Mr. Charlie Colston was a well-known figure in Eastthorpe.  He was an
only son, about five feet eleven inches high, thin, unsteady on his legs,
smooth-faced, unwholesome, and silly.  He had been taken into his
father's business because there was nothing else for him, and he was a
mere shadow in it, despised by every cask-washer.  There was nothing
wicked recorded against him; he did not drink, he did not gamble, he
cared nothing for horses or dogs; but Eastthorpe thought none the better
of him for these negative virtues.  He was not known to be immoral, but
he was for ever playing with this girl or the other, smiling, mincing,
toying, and it all came to nothing.  A very unpleasant creature was Mr.
Charlie Colston, a byword with women in Eastthorpe, even amongst the
nursery-maids.  Mrs. Furze knew all about his youth; but she brought out
her philosopher's stone and used it with effect.  She did not intend to
mate Catharine with a fool, and make her miserable.  If she could not
have persuaded herself that the young man was everything that could be
desired she would have thought no more about him.  The whole alchemical
operation, however, of changing him into purest gold occupied only a few
minutes, and the one thought now was how to drop the bait.  It did cross
her mind that Catharine herself might object; but she was convinced that
if her daughter could have a distinct offer made to her, all opposition
might somehow be quenched.

Fate came to her assistance, as it does always to those who watch
persistently and with patience.  One Sunday evening at church it suddenly
began to rain.  The Furze family had not provided themselves with
umbrellas, but Mrs. Furze knew that Mr. Charlie Colston never went out
without one.  Her strategy, when the service was over, was worthy of
Napoleon, and, with all the genius of a great commander, she brought her
forces into exact position at the proper moment.  She herself and Mr.
Furze detained the elder Mr. Colston and his wife, and kept them in check
a little way behind, so that Catharine and their son were side by side
when the entrance was reached.  Of course he could do nothing but offer
Catharine his umbrella, and his company on the way homewards, but to his
utter amazement, and the confusion of Mrs. Furze, who watched intently
the result of her manoeuvres, Catharine somewhat curtly declined, and
turned back to wait for her parents.  Mr. Charlie rejoined his father and
mother, who naturally forsook the Furzes at the earliest possible moment
in such a public place as a church porch.  In a few minutes the shower
abated.  Mrs. Furze could not say anything to her daughter; she could not
decently appear to force Charlie on her by rebuking her for not
responding to his generosity, but she was disappointed and embittered.

On the following morning Catharine announced her intention of going to
Chapel Farm for a few days.  Her mother remonstrated, but she knew she
would have to yield, and Catharine went.  Mrs. Bellamy poured forth the
pent-up tale of three months--gossip we may call it if we wish to be
contemptuous; but what is gossip?  A couple of neighbours stand at the
garden gate on a summer's evening and tell the news of the parish.  They
discuss the inconsistency of the parson, the stony-heartedness of the
farmer, the behaviour of this young woman and that young man; and what
better could they do?  They certainly deal with what they
understand--something genuinely within their own circle and experience;
and there is nothing to them in politics, British or Babylonian, of more
importance.  There is no better conversation than talk about Smith,
Brown, and Harris, male and female, about Spot the terrier or Juno the
mare.  Catharine had many questions to answer about the school, but Mr.
Cardew's name was not once mentioned.

One afternoon, late in August, Catharine had gone with the dog down to
the riverside, her favourite haunt.  Clouds, massive, white, sharply
outlined, betokening thunder, lay on the horizon in a long line; the fish
were active; great chub rose, and every now and then a scurrying dimple
on the pool showed that the jack and the perch were busy.  It was a day
full of heat, a day of exultation, for it proclaimed that the sun was
alive; it was a day on which to forget winter with its doubts, its
despairs, and its indistinguishable grey; it was a day on which to
believe in immortality.  Catharine was at that happy age when summer has
power to warm the brain; it passed into her blood and created in her
simple, uncontaminated bliss.  She sat down close to an alder which
overhung the bank.  It was curious, but so it was, that her thoughts
suddenly turned from the water and the thunderclouds and the blazing heat
to Mr. Cardew, and it is still more strange that at that moment she saw
him coming along the towing-path.  In a minute he was at her side, but
before he reached her she had risen.

"Good morning, Miss Furze."

"Mr. Cardew!  What brings you here?"

"I have been here several times; I often go out for the day; it is a
favourite walk."

He was silent, and did not move.  He seemed prepossessed and anxious,
taking no note of the beauty of the scene around him.

"How is Mrs. Cardew?"

"She is well, I believe."

"You have not left home this morning, then?"

"No; I was not at home last night."

"I think I must be going."

"I will walk a little way with you."

"My way is over the bridge to the farmhouse, where I am staying."

"I will go as far as you go."

Catharine turned towards the bridge.

"Is it the house beyond the meadows?"

"Yes."

It is curious how indifferent conversation often is just at the moment
when the two who are talking may be trembling with passion.

"You should have brought Mrs. Cardew with you," said Catharine, tearing
to pieces a water lily, and letting the beautiful white petals fall bit
by bit into the river.

Mr. Cardew looked at her steadfastly, scrutinisingly, but her eyes were
on the thunderclouds, and the lily fell faster and faster.  The face of
this girl had hovered before him for weeks, day and night.  He never for
a moment proposed to himself deliberate love for her--he could not do it,
and yet he had come there, not, perhaps, consciously in order to find
her, but dreaming of her all the time.  He was literally possessed.  The
more he thought about her, the less did he see and hear of the world
outside him, and no motive for action found access to him which was not
derived from her.  Of course it was all utterly mad and unreasonable,
for, after all, what did he really know about her, and what was there in
her to lay hold of him with such strength?  But, alas! thus it was, thus
he was made; so much the worse for him.  Was this a Christian believer?
was he really sincere in his belief?  He was sincere with a sincerity, to
speak arithmetically, of the tenth power beyond that of his exemplary
churchwarden Johnson, whose religion would have restrained him from
anything warmer than the extension of a Sunday black-gloved finger-tip to
any woman save "Mrs. J."  Here he was by the riverside with her; he was
close to her; nobody was present, but he could not stir nor speak!
Catharine felt his gaze, although her eyes were not towards him.  At last
the lily came to an end and she tossed the naked stalk after the flower.
She loved this man; it was a perilous moment: one touch, a hair's breadth
of oscillation, and the two would have been one.  At such a crisis the
least external disturbance is often decisive.  The first note of the
thunder was heard, and suddenly the image of Mrs. Cardew presented itself
before Catharine's eyes, appealing to her piteously, tragically.  She
faced Mr. Cardew.

"I am sorry Mrs. Cardew is not here.  I wish I had seen more of her.  Oh,
Mr. Cardew! how I envy her! how I wish I had her brains for scientific
subjects!  She is wonderful.  But I _must_ be going; the thunder is
distant; you will be in Eastthorpe, I hope, before the storm comes.  Good-
bye," and she had gone.

She did not go straight to the house, however, but went into the garden
and again cursed herself that she had dismissed him.  Who had dismissed
him?  Not she.  How had it been done?  She could not tell.  She crept out
of the garden and went to the corner of the meadow where she could see
the bridge.  He was still there.  She tried to make up an excuse for
returning; she tried to go back without one, but it was impossible.
Something, whatever it was, stopped her; she struggled and wrestled, but
it was of no avail, and she saw Mr. Cardew slowly retrace his steps to
the town.  Then she leaned upon the wall and found some relief in a great
fit of sobbing.  Consolation she had none; not even the poor reward of
conscience and duty.  She had lost him, and she felt that, if she had
been left to herself, she would have kept him.  She went out again late
in the evening.  The clouds had passed away to the south and east, but
the lightning still fired the distant horizon far beyond Eastthorpe and
towards Abchurch.  The sky was clearing in the west, and suddenly in a
rift Arcturus, about to set, broke through and looked at her, and in a
moment was again eclipsed.  What strange confusion!  What inexplicable
contrasts!  Terror and divinest beauty; the calm of the infinite
interstellar space and her own anguish; each an undoubted fact, but each
to be taken by itself as it stood: the star was there, the dark blue
depth was there, but they were no answer to the storm or her sorrow.

She returned to Eastthorpe on the following day and immediately told her
mother she should not go back to the Misses Ponsonby.




CHAPTER X


The reader has, doubtless, by this time judged with much severity not
only Catharine, but Mr. Cardew.  It is admitted to the full that they are
both most unsatisfactory and most improbable.  Is it likely that in a
sleepy Midland town, such as Eastthorpe, knowing nothing but the common
respectabilities of the middle of this century, the daughter of an
ironmonger would fall in love with a married clergyman?  Perhaps to their
present biographer it seems more remarkable than to his readers.  He
remembers what the Eastern Midlands were like fifty years ago and they do
not.  They are thinking of Eastthorpe of the present day, of its
schoolgirls who are examined in Keats and Shelley, of the Sunday morning
walks there, and of the, so to speak, smelling acquaintance with
sceptical books and theories which half the population now boasts.  But
Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different.  It
knew what it was for parsons to go wrong.  It had not forgotten a former
rector and the young woman at the Bell.  What talk there was about that
affair!  Happily his friends were well connected: they exerted
themselves, and he obtained a larger sphere of usefulness two hundred
miles away.  Mr. Cardew, however, was not that rector, and Catharine was
not the pretty waitress, and it is time now to tell the promised early
history of Mr. Cardew.

He was the son of a well-to-do London merchant, who lived in Stockwell,
in a large, white house, with a garden of a couple of acres, shaded by a
noble cedar in its midst.  There were four children, but he was the only
boy.  His mother belonged to an old and very religious family, and
inherited all its traditions of Calvinistic piety and decorum.  Her love
for this boy was boundless, and she had a double ambition for him, which
was that he might become a minister of God's Word, and in due time might
marry Jane Berdoe, the only daughter of the Reverend Charles Berdoe,
M.A., and Euphemia, her dearest friend.  Mrs. Cardew had heard so much of
the contamination of boys' schools that Theophilus was educated at home
and sent straight from home to Cambridge.  At the University he became a
member of the ultra-evangelical sect of young men there, and devoted
himself entirely to theology.  He thus passed through youth and early
manhood without any intercourse with the world so called, and he lacked
that wholesome influence which is exercised by healthy companionship with
those who differ from us and are not afraid to oppose us.  Of course he
married Jane Berdoe.  His mother was always contriving that Jane should
be present when he was at home; he was young; he had never known what it
was to go astray with women, and he was unable to stand at a distance
from her and ask himself if he really cared for her.  He fell in love
with himself, married himself, and soon after discovered that he did not
know who his wife was.  After his marriage he became wholly unjust to
her, and allowed her defects to veil the whole of her character.

The ultra-evangelical school in the Church preserved at that time the
religious life of England, although in a very strange form.  They
believed and felt certain vital truths, although they did not know what
was vital and what has not.  They had real experience, and their roots
lay, not upon the surface, but went deep down to the perennial springs,
and the articles of their creed became a vehicle for the expression of
the most real emotions.  Evangelicalism, however, to Mr. Cardew was
dangerous.  He was always prone to self-absorption, and the tendency was
much increased by his religion.  He lived an entirely interior life, and
his joys and sorrows were not those of Abchurch, but of another sphere.
Abchurch feared wet weather, drought, ague, rheumatism, loss of money,
and, on Sundays, feared hell, but Mr. Cardew's fears were spiritual or
even spectral.  His self-communion produced one strange and perilous
result, a habit of prolonged evolution from particular ideas uncorrected
by reference to what was around him.  If anything struck him it remained
with him, deduction followed deduction in practice unfortunately as well
as in thought, and he was ultimately landed in absurdity or something
worse.  The wholesome influence of ordinary men and women never permits
us to link conclusion to conclusion from a single premiss, or at any rate
to act upon our conclusions, but Mr. Cardew had no world at Abchurch save
himself.  He saw himself in things, and not as they were.  A sunset was
just what it might happen to symbolise to him at the time, and his
judgments upon events and persons were striking, but they were frequently
judgments upon creations of his own imagination, and were not in the
least apposite to what was actually before him.  The happy, artistic,
Shakespearean temper, mirroring the world like a lake, was altogether
foreign to him.

When he saw Catharine a new love awoke in him instantaneously.  Was it
legitimate or illegitimate?  In many cases of the same kind the answer
would be that the question is one which cannot be put.  No matter how
pure the intellectual bond between man and woman may be, it is certain to
carry with it a sentiment which cannot be explained by the attraction of
mere mental similarity.  A man says to a man, "Do you really believe it?"
and, if the answer is "yes," the two become friends; but if it is a woman
who responds to him, something follows which is sweeter than friendship,
whether she be bound or free.  It cannot be helped; there is no reason
why we should try to help it, provided only we do no harm to others, and
indeed these delicate threads are the very fairest in the tissue of life.
With Mr. Cardew it was a little different.  Undoubtedly he was drawn to
Catharine because her thoughts were his thoughts.  St. Paul and Milton in
him saluted St. Paul and Milton in her.  But he did not know where to
stop, nor could he look round and realise whither he was being led.  Any
other person in six weeks would have noticed the milestones on the road,
and would have determined that it was time to turn, but he gaily walked
forward with his head in the clouds.  If anybody at that particular
moment when he left the bridge could have made him comprehend that he was
making love to a girl; that what he was doing was an ordinary,
commonplace criminal act, or one which would justifiably be interpreted
as such, he not only would have been staggered and confounded, but would
instantly have drawn back.  As it was, he was neither staggered nor
confounded, and went home to his wife with but one image in his brain,
that of Catharine Furze.

Catharine was one of those creatures whose life is not uniform from
sixteen to sixty, a simple progressive accumulation of experiences, the
addition of a ring of wood each year.  There had come a time to her when
she had suddenly opened.  The sun shone with new light, a new lustre lay
on river and meadow, the stars became something more than mere luminous
points in the sky, she asked herself strange questions, and she loved
more than ever her long wanderings at Chapel Farm.  This phenomenon of a
new birth is more often seen at some epochs than at others.  When a
nation is stirred by any religious movement it is common, but it is also
common in a different shape during certain periods of spiritual activity,
such as the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of
the nineteenth in England and Germany.  Had Catharine been born two
hundred years earlier, life would have been easy.  All that was in her
would have found expression in the faith of her ancestors, large enough
for any intellect or any heart at that time.  She would have been happy
in the possession of a key which unlocks the mystery of things, and there
would have been ample room for emotion.  How impatient she became of
those bars which nowadays restrain people from coming close to one
another!  Often and often she felt that she could have leaped out towards
the person talking to her, that she could have cried to him to put away
his circumlocutions, his forms and his trivialities, and to let her see
and feel what he really was.  Often she knew what it was to thirst like
one in a desert for human intercourse, and she marvelled how those who
pretended to care for her could stay away so long: she could have
humiliated herself if only they would have permitted her to love them and
be near them.  Poor Catharine! the world as it is now is no place for
people so framed!  When life runs high and takes a common form men can
walk together as the disciples walked on the road to Emmaus.  Christian
and Hopeful can pour out their hearts to one another as they travel
towards the Celestial City and are knit together in everlasting bonds by
the same Christ and the same salvation.  But when each man is left to
shift for himself, to work out the answers to his own problems, the
result is isolation.  People who, if they were believers, would find the
richest gift of life in utter confidence and mutual help are now
necessarily strangers.  One turns to metaphysics; another to science; one
takes up with Rousseau's theory of existence, and another with Kant's;
they meet; they have nothing to say; they are of no use to one another in
trouble; one hears that the other is sick; what can be done?  There is a
nurse; he does not go; his old friend dies, and as to the funeral--well,
we are liable to catch cold.  Not so Christian and Hopeful! for when
Christian was troubled "with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits,
even on the borderland of Heaven--oh, Bunyan!  Hopeful kept his brother's
head above water, and called upon him to turn his eyes to the Gate and
the men standing by it to receive him."  My poor reader-friend, how many
times have you in this nineteenth century, when the billows have gone
over you--how many times have you felt the arm of man or woman under you
raising you to see the shining ones and the glory that is inexpressible?

Had Catharine been born later it would have been better.  She would
perhaps have been able to distract herself with the thousand and one
subjects which are now got up for examinations, or she would perhaps.
have seriously studied some science, which might at least have been
effectual as an opiate in suppressing sensibility.  She was, however, in
Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented.
There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history,
plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature,
chemistry, conic sections, music, English history, and mental philosophy,
to draw off the electricity within her, nor did she possess the
invaluable privilege of being able, after studying a half-crown handbook,
to unbosom herself to women of her own age upon the position of Longland
as an English poet.

Shakespeare or Wordsworth might have been of some use to her, but to
Shakespeare she was not led, although there was a brown, dusty,
one-volume edition at the Terrace; and of Wordsworth nobody whom she knew
in Eastthorpe had so much as heard.  A book would have turned much that
was vague in her into definite shape; it would have enabled her to
recognise herself; it would have given an orthodox expression to cloud
singularity, and she would have seen that she was a part of humanity in
her most extravagant and personal emotions.  As it was, her position was
critical because she stood by herself, affiliated to nothing, an
individual belonging to no species, so far as she knew.  She then met Mr.
Cardew.  It was through him the word was spoken to her, and he was the
interpreter of the new world to her.  She was in love with him--but what
is love?  There is no such thing: there are loves, and they are all
different.  Catharine's was the very life of all that was Catharine,
senses, heart, and intellect, a summing-up and projection of her whole
selfhood.  He was more to her than she to him--was any woman ever so much
to a man as a man is to a woman?  She was happy when she was near him.
When she was in ordinary Eastthorpe society she felt as a pent-up lake
might feel if the weight of its waters were used in threading needles,
but when Mr. Cardew talked to her, and she to him, she rejoiced in the
flow of all her force, and that horrible oppression in her chest
vanished.

Nevertheless, the fear, the shudder, came to her and not to him; the
wrench came from her and not from him.  It was she and not he who watched
through the night and found no motive for the day, save a dull, miserable
sense that it was her duty to live through it.




CHAPTER XI


It was a fact, and everybody noticed it, that since the removal to the
Terrace, and the alteration in their way of living, Mr. Furze was no
longer the man he used to be, and seemed to have lost his grasp over his
business.  To begin with, he was not so much in the shop.  His absences
in the Terrace at meal-times made a great gap in the day, and Tom
Catchpole was constantly left in sole charge.  Mr. Bellamy came home one
evening and told his wife that he had called at Furze's to ask the
meaning of a letter Furze had signed, explaining the action of a
threshing-machine which was out of order.  To his astonishment Furze, who
was in his counting-house, called for Tom, and said, "Here, Tom, this is
one of your letters; you had better tell Mr. Bellamy how the thing
works."

"I held my tongue, Mrs. Bellamy, but I had my thoughts all the same, and
the next time I go there, _if_ I go at all, I shall ask for Tom."

Mr. Furze was aware of Tom's growing importance, and Mrs. Furze was aware
of it too.  The worst of it was that Mr. Furze, at any rate, knew that he
could not do without him.  It is very galling to the master to feel that
his power is slipping from him into the hands of a subordinate, and he is
apt to assert himself by spasmodic attempts at interference which
generally make matters worse and rivet his chains more tightly.  There
was a small factory in Eastthorpe in which a couple of grindstones were
used which were turned by water-power at considerable speed.  One of them
had broken at a flaw.  It had flown to pieces while revolving, and had
nearly caused a serious accident.  The owner called at Mr. Furze's to buy
another.  There were two in stock, one of which he would have taken; but
Tom, his master being at the Terrace, strongly recommended his customer
not to have that quality, as it was from the same quarry as the one which
was faulty, but that another should be ordered.  To this he assented.
When Mr. Furze returned Tom told him what had happened.  He was in an
unusually irritable, despotic mood.  Mrs. Furze had forced him to yield
upon a point which he had foolishly made up his mind not to concede, and
consequently he was all the more disposed to avenge his individuality
elsewhere.  After meditating for a minute or two he called Tom from the
counter.

"Mr. Catchpole, what do you mean by taking upon yourself to promise you
would obtain another grindstone?"

"Mean, sir!  I do not quite understand.  The two out there are of the
same sort as the one that broke, and I did not think them safe."

"Think, sir!  What business had you to think?  I tell you what it is, you
are much too fond of thinking.  If you would only leave the thinking to
me, and do what you are told, it would be much better for you."

Tom's first impulse was to make a sharp reply, and to express his
willingness to leave, but for certain private reasons he was silent.
Encouraged by the apparent absence of resistance, Mr. Furze continued--

"I've meant to have a word or two with you several times.  You seem to
have forgotten your position altogether, and that I am master here, and
not you.  You, perhaps, do not remember where you came from, and what you
would have been if I had not picked you up.  Let there be no
misunderstanding in future."

"There shall be none, sir.  Shall I call at the factory and explain your
wishes about the grindstone?  I will tell them I was mistaken, and that
they had better have one of those in stock."

"No, you cannot do that now; let matters remain as they are; I must lose
the sale of the stone and put up with it."

Tom withdrew.  That evening, after supper, Mr. Furze, anxious to show his
wife that he possessed some power to quell opposition, told her what had
happened.  It met with her entire approval.  She hated Tom.  For all
hatred, as well as for all love, there is doubtless a reason, but the
reasons for the hatreds of a woman of Mrs. Furze's stamp are often
obscure, and perhaps more nearly an exception than any other known fact
in nature to the rule that every effect must have a cause.

"I would get rid of him," said she.  "I think that his not replying to
you is ten times more aggravating than if he had gone into a passion."

"You cannot get rid of him," said Catharine.

"Cannot!  What do you mean, Catharine--cannot?  I like that!  Do you
suppose that I do not understand my own business--I who took him up out
of the gutter and taught him?  Cannot, indeed!"

"Of course you _can_ get rid of him, father; but I would not advise you
to try it."

"Now, do take _my_ advice," said Mrs. Furze: "send him about his
business, at once, before he does any further mischief, and gets hold of
your connection.  Promise me."

"I will," said Mr. Furze, "to-morrow morning, the very first thing."

Morning came, and Mr. Furze was not quite so confident.  Mrs. Furze had
not relented, and as her husband went out at the door she reminded him of
his vow.

"You will, now?  I shall expect to hear when you come home that he has
had notice."

"Oh, certainly he shall go, but I am doubtful whether I had better not
wait till I have somebody in my eye whom I can put in his place."

"Nonsense! you can find somebody easily enough."

Mr. Furze strode into his shop looking and feeling very important.
Instead of the usual kindly "Good morning," he nodded almost
imperceptibly and marched straight into his counting-house.  It had been
his habit to call Tom in there and open the letters with him, Tom
suggesting a course of action and replies.  To-day he opened his
correspondence in silence.  It happened to be unusually bulky for a small
business, and unusually important.  The Honourable Mr. Eaton was about to
make some important alterations in his house and grounds

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