Catharine Furze Part 12

"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 pa.s.sion.

"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; n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 p.r.o.ne 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 h.e.l.l, 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 acc.u.mulation 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 l.u.s.tre 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 circ.u.mlocutions, 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sert 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 a.s.sented.

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 pa.s.sion."

"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."