Tongues of Conscience Part 17

Then she dropped the subject.

Catherine was alternately questioned by her father and by her mother as to the influence of Mark. But something within her prevented her from telling them of the conversation in the Pavilion, when the cries of the toy city died down into the night. Mrs. Ardagh, now sinking in the confusion of a rather dreary middle age, complicated by a natural melancholy, and by incessant confession to a ritualistic clergyman seductive in receptivity, was relieved to think that Mark was harmless.

Art for Art's sake--the motto of her husband--had apparently little meaning for Mark. As Mrs. Ardagh thought it the devil's motto she was glad of this and said so to Catherine. Mr. Ardagh, on the other hand, was vexed to find Mark apparently so frivolous; and he also expressed his feelings to Catherine, who became slightly confused.

"I should like to see your husband doing something," he said. "You have much of me in you, Kit, despite your poor dear mother's extravagant attempts to limit your reading to Frances Ridley Havergal. Why didn't you marry an artist, eh? A painter or an author, somebody who can give us more beauty than we have already, or more truth? You're too good for Frances Ridley Havergal. Leave her to your mother and that girl, Jenny, who is like wax in your mother's hands and the hands of the Rev. Father Grimshaw. Piff!"

Catherine said nothing, but she sought an opportunity of seeing something of Jenny. She found it, just before the day on which she and Mark were to leave London for their country house. Jenny had come as usual one morning, to read aloud to Mrs. Ardagh. They were just then deep in the "Memoirs" of a certain pious divine, whose chief claim upon the attention and grat.i.tude of posterity seemed to be that, during a very long career, he had "confessed" more Anglican notabilities than any of his rivals, and had used up, in his church, an amount of incense that would have put a Roman Catholic priest to shame. On the morning in question the reading was interrupted. Mrs. Ardagh was called away to consult with a lay-worker in the slums upon some scheme for reclaiming the submerged ma.s.ses, and Catherine, running in to her mother's boudoir after a walk with Mark, found the tall, narrow-shouldered girl with the oriental eyes sitting alone with the apostolic memoirs lying open upon her knees. Catherine was not sorry. She took off her fur coat and sat down.

"What are you and my mother reading, Miss Levita?" she asked.

Jenny told her.

"Is it interesting?"

"I suppose it ought to be," Jenny answered, thoughtlessly.

Then a flush ran over her thin cheeks, on which there were a great many little freckles.

"I mean that it is very interesting," she added. "Your mother will tell you so, Mrs. Sirrett."

"Perhaps. But I was asking your opinion."

It struck Catherine that Jenny had her opinion and was scarcely as compliant as Mr. Ardagh evidently supposed her to be. At Catherine's last remark Jenny glanced up. The two girls looked into each other's eyes, and, in Jenny's, Catherine thought she saw a flickering defiance.

"I was asking your opinion," she repeated.

"Well, Mrs. Sirrett," Jenny said, more hardily, "I don't know why it is.

I admire and love goodness, yes, as your mother--who's a saint, I think--does. But I'll tell you frankly that I think it's often very dull to read about. Don't you think so?"

She blushed again, and let the heavy white lids droop over her eyes, which had glittered almost like the eyes of a fever patient while she was speaking.

"Only when dull people write about it, surely," said Catherine.

"I don't know," Jenny said, twisting her black stuff dress with nervous fingers. "I often think that in the books of the cleverest authors there are dull moments, and that those dull moments are nearly always when the good, the really excellent, characters are being written about."

"And in real life, Miss Levita?" asked Catherine. "Do you find the good people duller, less interesting, than the bad ones in real life?"

"I haven't known many very bad ones, Mrs. Sirrett."

"Well--but those you have known!"

Jenny hesitated. She was obviously embarra.s.sed. She even shifted, like an awkward child, in her chair. But there was something of obstinate honesty in her that would have its way.

"If you must know,--I mean, if you care to know, please," she said at length, "the most interesting person I ever met was--yes, I suppose he was a wicked man."

Her curious, sharp-featured, yet attractive, face was hot all over as she finished. Catherine divined at once that she was speaking of the person who, according to Mrs. Ardagh, had wished "to lead her to the devil." At this moment, while the two girls were silent, Mrs. Ardagh returned to the room. As Catherine left it she heard the soft and high voice of Jenny taking up once more the parable of the highly-honoured divine.

Catherine was not altogether sorry when she and her husband left Eaton Square for the house in Surrey which Mark had rented for the summer months.

In this house the young couple were to face for the first time the reality of married life. Hitherto they had only faced its romance.

The house was beautiful in an old-fashioned way. Its rooms were low and rather dark. A wood stood round it. The garden was a wild clearing, fringed with enormous clumps of rhododendron. Wood doves cooed in the trees like invisible lovers unable to cease from gushing. Under the trees ferns grew in ma.s.ses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer house. In winter it must have been but a dreary hermitage.

The servants greeted them respectfully. The horses neighed in the stables. The dogs barked, and leaped up in welcome, then, when they were noticed and patted, depressed their backs in joyous humility, and, lifting their flexible lips, grinned amorously, glancing sideways from the hands that they desired. It was an eminently unvulgar, and ought to have been a very sweet, home-coming.

But was it sweet to Catherine?

She asked herself that question, and the fact that she did so proved that it was not wholly sweet. Already the future oppressed her. In this house, which seemed full of the smell of the country, of the very odour of peace, she felt that the stranger, the second Mark--scarcely known to her as yet--was to be born, was to gain strength and grow. She feared him. She watched for him. But, for the first few days, he did not show himself. The gra.s.shoppers chirped and revelled in the gra.s.s. Mark and Catherine sat in the wood, wandered on the hills, rode in the valleys, cooed a little even, like the doves hidden in the green shadows of the glades, and making ceaseless music. The lovers--for they were still lovers at this time--made a gay dreamland for themselves. But dreams cannot and ought not to last. If they did they would become painfully enervating. One day, in the wood, Mark resumed the conversation of the Pavilion.

"Because I am rich I must not be idle, Kitty," he said.

And into his dark eyes there crept that look of the stranger man.

"Thank G.o.d that I am rich," he added.

"Why, Mark dear?"

"Because I can dare to do what sort of work I choose," he answered. "The pot boils without my labour. So I am independent of the public, whom I will win in my own way. If I have to wait it will not matter."

And then, speaking with growing enthusiasm, he gave Kitty a sketch of a book he had projected. The doves cooed all through the plot, which was a sad and terrible one, very uncommon and very unlike Mark. Catherine listened to it with, alternately, the mind of her father and the mind of her mother. It was the old antagonism of the Puritan and the pagan. But now it raged in one person instead of in two, as the girl sat under the soft darkness of the trees, listening to the eager voice of her boy husband, who was beginning at last to cast the skin of his reserve. The voice went on and on, interrupted only by the doves. But sometimes Catherine felt as if she leaned upon the painted railing of the Pavilion, and heard the distant cries of the golden City. At last Mark said,

"Kitty, that is what I mean to do."

"It is terrible," she said.

And she pursed her lips like her mother.

"Yes," Mark answered, with enthusiasm. "It is terrible. It is ghastly."

Catherine looked at him with an intense and growing surprise. She was wondering how the conception of such horrors could take place in a man so gay as Mark.

At last she said,

"Mark, you feel your own power, do you not?"

"Kitty," he replied quietly, almost modestly, yet with a firm gravity that was strong, "I do feel that I have something to say and that I shall be able to say it in my book. I have waited a long while. Now I believe that I am ready, that it is time for me to begin."

"Then, Mark, if you feel that you have this power, don't you feel a desire to conquer the greatest difficulties in your art, to show that you can succeed where others have failed?"

He looked at her curiously, realising that she had something to say to him, and that she was trying to prepare the way before it.

"Come, Kitty," he said. "Say what you wish to say. You have the right.

What is it?"

Catherine told him of her conversation with Jenny.

"That little thin girl," he said. "So she thinks wickedness more interesting, more many-sided than virtue, more dramatic in its possibilities. Well, she and I are agreed. But what was it you wanted?"