Catharine Furze Part 24

"Is he quite happy?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"I encountered Mr. Colston, junior, a few minutes ago. He was on his way to Eastthorpe. I am afraid I was rather rude to him, for, to tell you the truth, I did not want his society. He is not an interesting young man. Do you care anything for him?"

"Nothing."

"I should like to see the picture you have formed of the man for whom you would care. I do not remember"--speaking slowly and dreamily--"ever to have seen a woman who would frame a loftier ideal."

He unconsciously came nearer to her; his arm moved into hers, and she did not resist.

"What is the use of painting pictures when reality is unattainable?"

"Unattainable! Yes, just what I imagined: you paint something unattainable to ordinary mortality. It is strange that most men and women, even those who more or less in all they do strive after perfection, seem to be satisfied with so little when it comes to love and marriage. The same sculptor, who unweariedly refines day after day to put in marble the image which haunts him, forms no such image of a woman whom he seeks unceasingly, or, if he does, he descends on one of the first twenty he meets and thinks he adores her. There is some strong thwarting power which prevents his search after the best, and it is as if nature had said that we should not pick and choose. But the consequences are tremendous. I honour you for your aspirations."

"You give me credit for a strength I do not possess, Mr. Cardew. I said 'unattainable.' That was all. I did not say how."

They had come to a gate which led out of the field into the road, and they paused there. They leaned against the gate, and Mr. Cardew, although his arm was withdrawn from Catharine's, had placed it upon the top rail so that she felt it. The pressure would not have moved an ounce weight; there were half a dozen thicknesses of wool and linen between the arm and her shoulder, but the encircling touch sent a quiver through every nerve in her and shook her like electricity. She stood gazing on the ground, digging up the blades of gra.s.s with her foot.

"Do you mean," said Mr. Cardew, "that you have ever seen him, and that--"

The pressure behind her was a little more obvious; he bent his head nearer to hers, looked in her face, and she leaned back on the arm heavily. Suddenly, without a word, she put both her hands to her head, pushed aside her hair, and stood upright as a spear.

"Good-bye," she said, with her eyes straight on his. Another second and she had pa.s.sed through the gate, and was walking fast along the road homewards alone. She heard behind her the sound of wheels, and an open carriage overtook her. It was Dr. Turnbull's, and of course he stopped.

"Miss Furze, you are taking a long walk."

She told him she had been to see Phoebe, and of her death.

"You must be very tired: you must come with me." She would have preferred solitude, but he insisted on her accompanying him, and she consented.

"I believe I saw Mr. Cardew in the meadow: I have just called on his wife."

"Is she ill?"

"Yes, not seriously, I hope. You know Mr. Cardew?"

"Yes, a little. I have heard him preach, and have been to his house when I was living at Abchurch."

"A remarkable man in many ways, and yet not a man whom I much admire. He thinks a good deal, and when I am in company with him I am unaccountably stimulated, but his thinking is not directed upon life. My notion is that our intellect is intended to solve real difficulties which confront us, and that all intellectual exercise upon what does not concern us is worse than foolish. My brain finds quite enough to do in contriving how to remove actual hard obstacles which lie in the way of other people's happiness and my own."

"His difficulties may be different from yours."

"Certainly, but they are to a great extent artificial, and all the time spent upon them is so much withdrawn from the others which are real. He goes out into the fields reading endless books, containing records of persons in various situations. He is not like any one of those persons, and he never will be in any one of those situations. The situation in which he found himself that morning at home, or that in which a poor neighbour found himself, is that which to him is important. It is a pernicious consequence of the sole study of extraordinary people that the customary standards of human action are deposed, and other standards peculiar to peculiar creatures under peculiar circ.u.mstances are set up. I have known Cardew do very curious things at times. I do not believe for one moment he thought he was doing wrong, but nevertheless, if any other man had done them, I should have had nothing more to say to him."

"Perhaps he ought to have his own rules. He may not be const.i.tuted as we are."

"My dear Miss Furze, as a physician, let me give you one word of solemn counsel. Nothing is more dangerous, physically and mentally, than to imagine we are not as other people. Strive to consider yourself, not as Catharine Furze, a young woman apart, but as a piece of common humanity and bound by its laws. It is infinitely healthier for you. Never, under any pretext whatever, allow yourself to do what is exceptional. If you have any originality, it will better come out in an improved performance of what everybody ought to do, than in the indulgence in singularity. For one person who, being a person of genius, has been injured by what is called conventionality--I do not, of course, mean foolish conformity to what is absurd--thousands have been saved by it, and self-separation means mischief. It has been the beginning even of insanity in many cases which have come under my notice." The doctor paused a little.

"I am glad Mrs. Cardew is better," said Catharine. "I did not know she had been ill."

"There is a woman for you--a really wonderful woman, un.o.btrusive, devoted to her husband, almost annihilating herself for him, and, what is very noteworthy, she denies herself in studies to which she is much attached, and for which she has a remarkable capacity, merely in order that she may the better sympathise with him. Then her care of the poor in his parish makes her almost a divinity to them. While he is luxuriating amongst the cowslips, in what he calls thinking, she is teaching the sick people patience and nursing them. She is a saint, and he does not know half her worth. It would do you a world of good now, Miss Furze, to live with her for six months if she were alone, but I am not quite sure that his influence on you would be wholesome. I was alarmed about her, but she will not die yet if I can help it. I want her to recover for her own sake, but also for her husband's and for her friends' sake. Perhaps I was a little too severe upon the husband, for I believe he does really love her very much; at least, if he does not, he ought."

"Ought? Do you think, Dr. Turnbull, a man ought to love what he cannot love?"

"Yes, but I must explain myself. I have no patience with people who seem to consider that they may yield themselves to something they know not what, and allow themselves to be swayed by it. A man marries a woman whom he loves. Is it possible that she, of all women in the world, is the one he would love best if he were to know all of them? Is it likely that he would have selected this one woman if he had seen, say, fifty more before he had married her? Certainly not; and when he sees other women afterwards, better than the one he has chosen, he naturally admires them. If he does not--he is a fool, but he is bound to check himself. He puts them aside and is obliged to be satisfied with his wife. If it were permissible in him in such a case to abandon her, a pretty chaos we should be in. It is clearly his duty, and quite as clearly in his power, to be thus contented--at least, in nine cases out of ten. He _may_--and this is my point--he _may_ wilfully turn away from what is admirable in his own house, or he may turn towards it. He is as responsible for turning away from it, or turning towards it, as he is for any of his actions. If he says he cannot love a wife who is virtuous and good, I call him not only stupid, but wicked--yes, wicked: people in Eastthorpe will tell you I do not know what that word means, because I do not go to church, and do not believe in what they do not believe themselves, but still I say wicked--wicked because he _can_ love his wife, just as he can refrain from robbing his neighbour, and wicked because there is a bit of excellence stuck down before him for _him_ to value. It is not intended for others, but for _him_, and he deserts the place appointed him by Nature if he neglects it."

"You have wonderful self-control, Dr. Turnbull. I can understand that a man might refrain from open expression of his love for a woman, whatever his pa.s.sion for her might be, for, if he did not so restrain himself, he might mar the peace of some other person who was better than himself, and better deserved that his happiness should not be wrecked; but as for love, it may be beyond him to suppress it."

"Well, Miss Furze," replied the doctor, smiling, "we are going beyond our own experience, I hope. However, what I have said is true. I suppose it is because it is my business to cure disease that I always strive to extend the realm of what is _subject_ to us. You seem to be fond of an argument. Some day we will debate the point how far the proper appreciation even of a picture or a melody is within our own power. But I am a queer kind of doctor. I have never asked you how you are, and you are one of my patients."

"Better."

"That is good, but you must be careful, especially in the evening. It was not quite prudent to sit up last night at the Crowhursts', but yet, on the whole, it was right. No, you shall not get down here; I will drive you up to the Terrace."

He drove her home, and she went upstairs to lie down.

"Commonplace rubbish!" she said to herself; "what I used to hear at Miss Ponsonby's, but dressed up a little better, the moral prosing of an old man of sixty who never knew what it was to have his pulse stirred; utterly incapable of understanding Mr. Cardew, one of whose ideas moves me more than volumes of Turnbull copybook."

Pulse stirred! The young are often unjust to the old in the matter of pulsation, and the world in general is unjust to those who prefer to be silent, or to whom silence is a duty. Dr. Turnbull's pulse was unmistakably stirred on a certain morning thirty years ago, when he crept past a certain door in Bloomsbury Square very early. The blinds were still all drawn down, but he lingered and walked past the house two or three times. He had come there to take a last look at the bricks and mortar of that house before he went to Eastthorpe, under vow till death to permit no word of love to pa.s.s his lips, to be betrayed into no emotion warmer than that of man to man. His pulse was stirred, too, when he read the announcement of her marriage in the _Times_ five years afterwards, and then in a twelvemonth the birth of her first child. How he watched for that birth! Ten days afterwards she died. He went to the funeral, and after the sorrowing husband and parents had departed he remained, and the most scalding tears shed by the grave were his. It was not exactly moral prosing, but rather inextinguishable fire just covered with a sprinkling of grey ash.

With that dreadful capacity which some people possess, for the realisation of that which is not present, the parting with Mr. Cardew came before Catharine as she shut her eyes on her pillow: the arm was behind her--she actually felt it; his eyes were on hers; she was on fire, and once more, as she had done before, she cursed herself for what she almost called her cowardice in leaving him. She wrestled with her fancies, turned this way and that way; at times they sent the blood hot into her face, and she rose and plunged it into cold water. She was weary, but sleep was impossible. "Commonplace rubbish!" she repeated: "of what use is it to me?" She was young. When we grow old we find that what is commonplace is true. _We must learn to bear our troubles patiently_, says the copper-plate line for small text, and the revolving years bring nothing more. She heard outside a long-drawn breath, apparently just under the door. She opened it, and found Alice, her retriever. Alice came in, sat down by the chair, and put her head on her mistress's lap, looking up to her with large, brown, affectionate eyes which spoke almost. There is something very touching in the love of a dog. It is independent of all our misfortunes, mistakes, and sins. It may not be of much account, but it is constant, and it is a love for _me_, and does not desert me for anything accidental, not even if I am a criminal. That is because a dog is a dog, it may be said; if it had a proper sense of sin it would instantly leave the house. Perhaps so, perhaps not: it may be that with a proper sense of sin it would still continue to love me. Anyhow, it loves me now, and I take its fidelity to be significant of something beyond sin. Alice had a way of putting her feet on her mistress's lap, as if she asked to be noticed. When no notice was taken she generally advanced her nose to Catharine's face--a very disagreeable habit, Mrs. Furze thought, but Catharine never would check it. The poor beast was more than usually affectionate to-day, and just turned Catharine's gloom into tears. She was disturbed by a note from Dr. Turnbull. He thought that what she needed was rest, and she was to go to bed and take his medicine. This she did, and she fell into a deep slumber from which she did not wake till morning.

Mr. Cardew, when Catharine left him, walked homewards, but he went a long distance out of his way, much musing. As he went along something came to him--the same Something which had so often restrained Catharine. It smote him as the light from heaven smote Saul of Tarsus journeying to Damascus. His eyes were opened; he crept into an outhouse in the fields, and there alone in an agony he prayed. It was almost dark when he reached his own gate, and he went up to his wife's bedroom, where she lay ill. He sat down by the bed: some of her flowers were on a little table at her side.

"I am so ignorant of flowers, Doss (the name he called her before they were married); you really _must_ teach me."

"You know enough about them."

He took her hand in his, put his head on the pillow's beside her, and she heard a gasp which sounded a little hysterical.

"What is the matter, my dear? You are tired. You have walked a long way."

She turned round, and then without another word he rose a little, leaned over her, and kissed her pa.s.sionately. She never knew what his real history during the last year or two had been. He outlived her, and one of his sorrows when she was lying in the grave was that he had told her nothing. He was wrong to be silent. A man with any self-respect will not be anxious to confess his sins, save when reparation is due to others. If he be completely ashamed of them he will hold his tongue about them. But the perfect wife may know them. She will not love him the less: he will love her the more as the possessor of his secrets, and the consciousness of her knowledge of him and of them will strengthen and often, perhaps, save him.

CHAPTER XX

Mrs. Cardew recovered, but Dr. Turnbull recommended that as soon as she could be moved she should have an entire change, and at the end of the autumn she and her husband went abroad.

That winter was a bad winter for Mr. Furze. The harvest had been the worst known for years: farmers had no money; his expenses had increased; many of his customers had left him, and Catharine's cough had become so much worse that, except on fine days, she was not allowed to go out of doors. For the first time in his life he was obliged to overdraw his account at the bank, and when his wife questioned him about his troubles he became angry and vicious. One afternoon he had a visit from one of the partners in the bank, who politely informed him that no further advances could be made. It was near Christmas, and it was Mr. Furze's practice at Christmas to take stock. He set to work, and his balance- sheet showed that he was a poorer man by three hundred pounds than he was a twelvemonth before. Catharine did not see him on the night on which he made this discovery. He came home very late, and she had gone to bed. At breakfast he was unlike himself--strange, excited, and with a hunted, terrified look in the eyes which alarmed her. It was not so much the actual loss which upset him as the old incapacity of dealing with the unusual. Oh, for one hour with Tom! What should he do? Should he retrench? Should he leave the Terrace? Should he try and borrow money?

A dizzy whirl of a dozen projects swung round and round in his brain, and he could resolve on nothing. He pictured most vividly and imagined most vividly the consequences of bankruptcy. His intellectual activity in that direction was amazing, and if one-tenth part of it could have been expended on the consideration of the next best thing to be done, not only would he have discovered what the next best thing was, but the dreadful energy of his imagination would have been enfeebled. He was sitting at his desk at the back of the shop with his head propped on his elbows, when he heard a soft footstep behind him. He turned round: it was Catharine.

"Dearest father," she said, "what is the matter? Why do you not tell me?"

"I am a ruined man. The bank refuses to make any further advances to me, and I cannot go on."