and sentimental as well as really devout and fervent, at first gained
the ascendancy over Catherine. Holy but narrow-minded, she compressed
the girl's naturally expansive temperament, and taught her something of
the hideous and brooding melancholy of the bigot and the fanatic. Then
the father, quick-sighted, and roused to an almost angry activity by his
appreciation of Catherine's danger, threw himself into the combat, and
endeavoured to imbue the girl with his own comprehension of life's
meaning, exaggerating all his theories in the endeavour to make them
seem sufficiently vital and impressive. Catherine lived in the centre of
this battle, which became continually more fierce, until she was
eighteen. Then she fell in love with Mark Sirrett, married him, and left
her parents alone with their mutual hostility, now complicated by a sort
of paralysis of surprise and sense of mutual failure. They had forgotten
that their child's future might hold a lover, a husband. Now they found
themselves in the rather absurd position of enemies who have quarrelled
over a shadow which suddenly vanishes away. They had lost their love for
each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given
to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her
mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts
in the guidance of her strange and terrible destiny.
Mark Sirrett, when he married Catherine, was twenty-five, dark,
handsome, warm-hearted and rich. It seemed that he had an exceptionally
sweet and attractive nature. He had been an affectionate son, a kind
brother in his home, a generous comrade at school and college. Everybody
had a good word for him; his family, his tutors, his friends, his
servants. Like most young and ardent men he had had some follies. At
least they were never mean or ungenerous. He entered upon married life
with an unusually good record. Those who knew him casually, even many
who knew him well, considered that he was easily read, that he was
transparently frank, that, though highly intelligent, he was not
particularly subtle, and that no still waters ran deep in Mark Sirrett.
All these people were utterly wrong. Mark had a very curious side to his
nature, which remained almost unsuspected until after his marriage with
Catherine, but which eventually was to make a name very well known to
the world. He was, although apparently so open, in reality full of
reserve. He was full of ambition. And he had an exceptionally peculiar,
and exceptionally riotous, imagination. And this imagination he was
quite determined to express in an art--the art of literature. But his
reserve kept him inactive until he had left Oxford, when he went to live
in London, where eventually he met Catherine.
His reserve, and his artistic hesitation to work until he felt able to
do good work, held Mark's imagination in check as a dam holds water in
check. He sometimes wrote, but nobody knew that he wrote except one
friend, Frederic Berrand. And Berrand could be a silent man. Even to
Catherine, when he fell in love with her and wooed her, Mark did not
reveal his desire for fame, or his intention to win it. The girl loved
her lover for what he was, but not for all he was. Of the still water
that ran deep she as yet knew nothing. She thought her husband, who was
rich, who appeared gay, who had lived so far, as it seemed, idly enough,
would continue to live with her, as he had apparently lived without her,
brightly, honestly, a little thoughtlessly, a little vainly.
She had no sort of suspicion that she had married that very curious
phenomenon--a born artist. Had her mother suspected it she would have
been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted.
And Catherine herself? well, she was still a child at this time.
She and Mark went to Spain for their honeymoon, and lived in a tiny
white villa at Granada. It stood on the edge of the hill whose crown is
the exquisite and dream-like Alhambra. Its long and narrow garden ran
along the hillside, a slope of roses and of orange flowers, of thick,
hot grass and of tangled green shrubs. The garden wall was white and
uneven, and almost hidden by wild, pink flowers. Beneath was spread the
plain in which lies the City, bounded by the mountains over which, each
evening, the sun sets. And every day the drowsy air hummed in answer to
the huge and drowsy voice of the wonderful Cathedral bell, which struck
the hours and filled this lovely world with almost terrible vibrations
of romance. In the thick woods that steal to the feet of the ethereal
Palace the murmur of the streams was ever heard, and the white snows of
the Sierra Nevada stared over the yellow and russet plain, and were
touched with a blue blush as the night came on.
Catherine, although she loved her parents and had never fully realised
the enmity grown up between them, felt a strange happiness, that was
more than the happiness of new-born passion, in her emancipation. She
was by nature exquisitely sensitive, and she had often been vaguely
troubled by the contest between her parents. Their fighting instincts
had sometimes set her face to face with a sort of shadowed valley, in
whose blackness she faintly heard the far-off clash of weapons. Now she
was caught away from this subtle tumult, and as she looked into her
husband's vivacious dark eyes she felt that a little weight which had
lain long on her heart was lifted from it. She had thought herself happy
before, now she knew herself utterly happy. Life seemed to have no dark
background. Even love itself was not spoiled by a too great wonder of
seriousness. They loved in sunshine and were gay--like grasshoppers in
the grass that the sun has filled with a still rapture of warmth. Not
till two days before their departure for England was this chirping,
grasshopper mood disturbed or dispelled.
At one end of the long and narrow garden there was a little crude
pavilion, open to the air on three sides. The domed roof was supported
on painted wooden pillars up which red and white roses audaciously
climbed. Rugs covered the floor. A wooden railing ran along the front
facing the steep hillside. The furniture was simple and homely, a few
low basket chairs and an oval table. In this pavilion the newly married
pair took tea nearly every afternoon after their expeditions in the
neighbourhood, or their strolls through the sunny Moorish Courts. After
tea they sat on and watched the sunset, and fancied they could see the
birds that flew away above the City towards the distant mountains drop
down to their nests in Seville ere the darkness came. This last evening
but one was intensely hot; the town at their feet seemed drowning in a
dust of gold. Cries, softened and made utterly musical, rose up to them
from this golden world, beyond which the sky reddened as the sun sank
lower. Sometimes they heard the jingling bells of mules and horses in
the hidden streets; they saw the pigeons circling above the house-tops,
and doll-like figures moving whimsically in gardens that seemed as small
as pocket-handkerchiefs. Thin laughter of playing children stole to
them. And then the huge and veiled voice of the Cathedral bell tolled
the hour, like Time become articulate.
A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell
of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the
world, deep with a depth of old and vanished ages, heavy with the burden
of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed suddenly to
strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on
the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes.
Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to
protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Nevada with the
dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that
Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced round and up at
him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were
parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared.
He looked like an entranced man.
"Mark!" Catherine exclaimed. "Mark! why, how strange you look!"
"Do I?" he said, staring out over the wide plain below.
The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and
vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the
little houses to the sunset and faint towards Seville.
"Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like
this--till now."
He made no answer.
"Are you sad because we are going so soon?" she asked. "But then why
should we go? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us
away."
"Kitty, does not that bell give you the lie?" he answered.
"The bell of the Cathedral?" she asked, wondering.
"Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of
the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the great
river, of the sorrows, of the terrors, of the crimes."
"Mark!" said Catherine in amazement.
"Nothing to call us away from our idle happiness here!" he continued.
"Do you say--nothing?"
"Why--no. For we are free; we have no ties. You have no profession,
Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father--how
he worships the arts!"
"And you, Kitty--you?"
Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excitement.
"He has taught me to love them too."
"How much, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth?"
She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered:
"Ah no. For my mother----"
She paused.
"My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than
any art, more important, more beautiful."
"What can that be?"
"Oh, Mark--religion!"
He leaned over the railing at her side, and the white and red roses that
embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant
breeze of evening.
"But there are many religions," he said. "A man's art may be his
religion."
A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's.
"Oh no, Mark."
"Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnestness, putting aside his
reserve for the first time with her. "Indeed it may."
"You mean when he uses it to do good?"
He shook his head. The roses shivered.
"The true artist never thinks of that. To have a definite moral purpose
is destructive."
The City at their feet was sinking into shadow now, and the air grew
cold, filled with the snowy breath of the Sierra.
"When we go back to England I will teach you the right way to follow an
art, to worship it; the way that will be mine."
"Yours, Mark? But I don't understand."
"No," he said. "You don't understand all of me yet, Kitty. Do you want
to?"
"Yes," she said.
There was a sound of fear in her voice. Mark sat down beside her and put
his arm round her.
"Kitty," he began. "I'm only on the threshold of my life, of my real
life, my life with you and with my work."
"You are going to work?" she exclaimed.
"Yes. That bell just now seemed to strike the hour of commencement--to
tell me it was time for me to begin. I should like, some day--far in the
future, Kitty,--to hear it strike that other hour, the hour when I must
finish, when the little bit of work that I can do in the world is done.
I shan't be afraid of that hour any more than I'm afraid of this one.
Perhaps, when you and I are old we shall come here again, and listen to
that bell once more, the same, when we are changed."
He pointed towards the Cathedral which was still touched by the sun.
Catherine leaned against his shoulder. She said nothing, and did not
move.
"Everything in life has its appointed recorder," he continued. "They are
a big band, the band of the recorders who strive accurately to write
down life as it is. Well, Kitty, I am going to be one of that band."
"You are going to be a writer, Mark?"
"Yes."
"Then, you will record the beauty, the joy, the purity, the goodness of
life?"
His usually bright face had become sombre and thoughtful. It looked
strangely dark and saturnine in the twilight.
"I shall record what I see most clearly."
"And what is that?"
"Not the things on the surface, but the things beneath the surface, of
life."
And then he told Catherine more fully of his ambition and gave her a
glimpse of the hidden side of his duplex nature.
She gazed up at him in the gathering twilight and it seemed to her that
she was looking at a stranger. The climbing roses still shook against
Mark in the wind. While he talked his voice grew almost fierce, and his
dark eyes shone like the eyes of a fanatic. When he ceased to speak,
Catherine's lips were pursed together, like her mother's when she
listened to the pagan rhapsodies of Mr. Ardagh.
Two days later the Sirretts left Granada for England.
* * * * *
On their return they paid a short visit to Catherine's parents, who were
living in Eaton Square. Mr. and Mrs. Ardagh received them with a sort of
dulled and narcotic affection. In truth, for different reasons, the
Puritan and the pagan cherished a certain resentment against the man
who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare.
Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was
anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to
have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found
the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had,
therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her
every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and
earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount of
interest and pleasure from forming the pliant mind of her protegee, who
was with her always from eleven till six in the evening, who read aloud
to her, accompanied her on her charitable missions, and took--so far as
a stranger might,--the place of Catherine in her life. Catherine met
Jenny upon the doorstep of her parents' house on the evening of her
arrival, and hastened to ask her mother who the slim girl, with the tall
figure, narrow shoulders, fluffy brown hair, and large oriental eyes
was.
"My paid daughter," said Mrs. Ardagh, almost bitterly. "But she can't
fill the place of my lost Catherine."
Nevertheless, Catherine discovered that her mother was truly attached to
Jenny.
"I took her partly because she is easily led," she said, "easily
influenced and so very pretty and poor. I want to save her for God, and
when I met her there was one who wished to lead her to the devil. She
won't see him now. She won't hear his name."
Then she dropped the subject.
Catherine was alternately questioned by her father and by her mother as
to the influence of Mark. But something within her prevented her from
telling them of the conversation in the Pavilion, when the cries of the
toy city died down into the night. Mrs. Ardagh, now sinking in the
confusion of a rather dreary middle age, complicated by a natural
melancholy, and by incessant confession to a ritualistic clergyman
seductive in receptivity, was relieved to think that Mark was harmless.
Art for Art's sake--the motto of her husband--had apparently little
meaning for Mark. As Mrs. Ardagh thought it the devil's motto she was
glad of this and said so to Catherine. Mr. Ardagh, on the other hand,
was vexed to find Mark apparently so frivolous; and he also expressed
his feelings to Catherine, who became slightly confused.
"I should like to see your husband doing something," he said. "You have
much of me in you, Kit, despite your poor dear mother's extravagant
attempts to limit your reading to Frances Ridley Havergal. Why didn't
you marry an artist, eh? A painter or an author, somebody who can give
us more beauty than we have already, or more truth? You're too good for
Frances Ridley Havergal. Leave her to your mother and that girl, Jenny,
who is like wax in your mother's hands and the hands of the Rev. Father
Grimshaw. Piff!"
Catherine said nothing, but she sought an opportunity of seeing
something of Jenny. She found it, just before the day on which she and
Mark were to leave London for their country house. Jenny had come as
usual one morning, to read aloud to Mrs. Ardagh. They were just then
deep in the "Memoirs" of a certain pious divine, whose chief claim upon
the attention and gratitude of posterity seemed to be that, during a
very long career, he had "confessed" more Anglican notabilities than any
of his rivals, and had used up, in his church, an amount of incense that
would have put a Roman Catholic priest to shame. On the morning in
question the reading was interrupted. Mrs. Ardagh was called away to
consult with a lay-worker in the slums upon some scheme for reclaiming
the submerged masses, and Catherine, running in to her mother's boudoir
after a walk with Mark, found the tall, narrow-shouldered girl with the
oriental eyes sitting alone with the apostolic memoirs lying open upon
her knees. Catherine was not sorry. She took off her fur coat and sat
down.
"What are you and my mother reading, Miss Levita?" she asked.
Jenny told her.
"Is it interesting?"
"I suppose it ought to be," Jenny answered, thoughtlessly.
Then a flush ran over her thin cheeks, on which there were a great many
little freckles.
"I mean that it is very interesting," she added. "Your mother will tell
you so, Mrs. Sirrett."
"Perhaps. But I was asking your opinion."
It struck Catherine that Jenny had her opinion and was scarcely as
compliant as Mr. Ardagh evidently supposed her to be. At Catherine's
last remark Jenny glanced up. The two girls looked into each other's
eyes, and, in Jenny's, Catherine thought she saw a flickering defiance.
"I was asking your opinion," she repeated.
"Well, Mrs. Sirrett," Jenny said, more hardily, "I don't know why it is.
I admire and love goodness, yes, as your mother--who's a saint, I
think--does. But I'll tell you frankly that I think it's often very dull
to read about. Don't you think so?"
She blushed again, and let the heavy white lids droop over her eyes,
which had glittered almost like the eyes of a fever patient while she
was speaking.
"Only when dull people write about it, surely," said Catherine.
"I don't know," Jenny said, twisting her black stuff dress with nervous
fingers. "I often think that in the books of the cleverest authors there
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 embarrassed. She even shifted, like
an awkward child, in her chair. But there was something of obstinate
honesty in her that would have its way.
"If you must know,--I mean, if you care to know, please," she said at
length, "the most interesting person I ever met was--yes, I suppose he
was a wicked man."
Her curious, sharp-featured, yet attractive, face was hot all over as
she finished. Catherine divined at once that she was speaking of the
person who, according to Mrs. Ardagh, had wished "to lead her to the
devil." At this moment, while the two girls were silent, Mrs. Ardagh
returned to the room. As Catherine left it she heard the soft and high
voice of Jenny taking up once more the parable of the highly-honoured
divine.
Catherine was not altogether sorry when she and her husband left Eaton
Square for the house in Surrey which Mark had rented for the summer
months.
In this house the young couple were to face 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 masses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge
rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping
sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer
house. In winter it must have been but a dreary hermitage.
The servants greeted them respectfully. The horses neighed in the
stables. The dogs barked, and leaped up in welcome, then, when they were
noticed and patted, depressed their backs in joyous humility, and,
lifting their flexible lips, grinned amorously, glancing sideways from
the hands that they desired. It was an eminently unvulgar, and ought to
have been a very sweet, home-coming.
But was it sweet to Catherine?
She asked herself that question, and the fact that she did so proved
that it was not wholly sweet. Already the future oppressed her. In this
house, which seemed full of the smell of the country, of the very odour
of peace, she felt that the stranger, the second Mark--scarcely known to
her as yet--was to be born, was to gain strength and grow. She feared
him. She watched for him. But, for the first few days, he did not show
himself. The grasshoppers chirped and revelled in the grass. Mark and
Catherine sat in the wood, wandered on the hills, rode in the valleys,
cooed a little even, like the doves hidden in the green shadows of the
glades, and making ceaseless music. The lovers--for they were still
lovers at this time--made a gay dreamland for themselves. But dreams
cannot and ought not to last. If they did they would become painfully
enervating. One day, in the wood, Mark resumed the conversation of the
Pavilion.
"Because I am rich I must not be idle, Kitty," he said.
And into his dark eyes there crept that look of the stranger man.
"Thank God that I am rich," he added.
"Why, Mark dear?"
"Because I can dare to do what sort of work I choose," he answered. "The
pot boils without my labour. So I am independent of the public, whom I
will win in my own way. If I have to wait it will not matter."
And then, speaking with growing enthusiasm, he gave Kitty a sketch of a
book he had projected. The doves cooed all through the plot, which was a
sad and terrible one, very uncommon and very unlike Mark. Catherine
listened to it with, alternately, the mind of her father and the mind of
her mother. It was the old 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?"
"Mark, I want you to prove to her--to everyone--that it is not so."
"How?"
"By writing a different kind of book--a noble book. You can do it. Where
others have failed, you can succeed."
He laughed at her, gaily.
"Perhaps, some day, I'll try," he said. "But I can only write at present
what I have conceived. Till this book is done, I can think of nothing
else. I see you are interested, Kitty. I must tell you all I am
intending to do."
He continued, until it was quite evening, expatiating on the force with
which he intended to realise in literature the terrors that trooped in
his imagination. And by the time he had finished and darkness stood
under the trees, Catherine was carried away by the pagan spirit. She
thought no more of the possible harm the projected book might work in
sensitive natures. She thought only of its power, which she acclaimed.
Mark kissed her with a solemnity of passion he had never shown before,
and they went back to the house.
It was an immense relief to Mark to open his book of revelation and to
allow Catherine to read these pages in it. But he could not be
continuously unreserved to any human being. And that evening he subsided
into his former light-hearted gaiety, and shrouded the stranger man in
an impenetrable veil. Catherine sat with him in wonderment, while the
moon came up behind the trees and shone over the clearing before the
house. She did not yet understand the inflexible secrecies of genius. A
nightingale sang. Its voice was so sweet that Catherine felt as if the
whole world were full of tenderness and of sympathy. She said so to
Mark, just as she was turning from him to go to bed.
"Ah, Kitty," he said, "there are other things in the world besides
tenderness and sympathy, thank Heaven. There are terrors, there are
crimes, there are strange and fearful things both within us and outside
of us."
"How sad that is, Mark!" said Catherine.
He smiled at her gaily--cruelly, she thought a moment afterwards when
she was alone in her bedroom.
"Sad?" he said. "I don't think so, for I love drama. Life is dramatic.
If it were not it would be intolerable."
And still the nightingale sang. But he did not hear it. Catherine heard
it till she fell asleep.
Now Mark began to write with assiduity. Catherine busied herself with
her household duties, with the garden and with charities in the
neighbouring Parish. Her mother's rather hysterical beliefs lost their
hysteria in her, at this period, and were softened and rendered large
hearted. Catherine's sympathy with the world was indeed a living thing,
not simply a fine idea. While Mark was shut up every morning with his
writing she visited the poor, sat by the sick, and played with the
village children. The Parish--this came out forcibly at her trial,--grew
to love her. She was the prettiest Lady Bountiful. The impress made upon
her by her mother was visible in all this. For Mrs. Ardagh, rigid,
melancholy as she was sometimes, was genuinely charitable, genuinely
dutiful. If she adored the forms of religion she loved also its
essence,--the doing of good. In these many mornings Catherine was like
her mother--improved. But in the evenings she no longer resembled Mrs.
Ardagh, but rather, in a degree, echoed her father, and responded to his
vehement, if furtive, teachings. For in the evenings Mark read to her
what he had written during the day and discussed it with her in all its
bearings. He recognised the clear quickness of Catherine's intellect.
Yet she very soon noticed that he was exceedingly inflexible with
regard to his work. He liked to discuss, he did not like to alter, it.
One night, when he had finished the last completed chapter, he laid down
the manuscript and said,
"Well, Kitty?"
Catherine was lying on a couch near the open French window. She did not
speak until Mark repeated,
"Well?"
Then she said,
"I think that far the finest chapter of your book----"
Mark smiled triumphantly.
"But it seems to me terribly immoral," she finished.
"Oh, that's all right, dear. So long as it is properly worked out,
inevitable."
"It teaches----"
"Nothing, Kitty--nothing. It merely describes what is."
"But surely it may do harm."
"Not if it is truly artistic. And you think----"
"It that? Yes, I do. But, Mark, art is not all."
"Your father would say so."
"My father--yes."
"And he is right. I neither inculcate nor do I condemn. I only produce,
or try to produce, a work of art. You admire the chapter? You think it
truly dramatic?"
"Indeed I do--that's just why I am afraid of it."
"Little timorous bird."
He came over to the sofa and kissed her tenderly. She shivered. She
thought his lips had never been dry and cold like that before.
The book was finished by the end of the summer. It was published in
November and created a considerable sensation. Mark issued it under the
name of "William Foster." Only Catherine and his friend Frederic Berrand
knew who William Foster really was. The newspapers praised the
workmanship of the book almost universally. But many of them severely
condemned it as dangerous, morbidly imaginative, horrible in subject,
and likely to do great mischief because of its undoubted power and
charm. It was forbidden at some libraries.
Mark was delighted with its reception. Now, that he had brought forth
his child, he seemed more light-hearted, gay and boyish than ever. His
too vivid imagination had been toiling. It rested now. Catherine and he
came up to town for the winter. They meant to spend only their summers
in Surrey. They took a house in Chester Street, and often dined with the
Ardaghs in Eaton Square. At one of these dinners Jenny Levita was
present. Mark, remembering what Catherine had told him about her in
Surrey, looked at her with some interest, and talked to her a little in
his most light-hearted way. She replied briefly and without much
apparent animation, seeming indeed rather absent-minded and distraite.
Presently Mr. Ardagh said,
"This new man, William Foster, is that very rare thing in England--a
pitiless artist. He has the audacity of genius and the fine
impersonality."
Catherine started and flushed violently. As she did so she saw Jenny's
long dark eyes fixed earnestly upon her. Mark smiled slightly. Mrs.
Ardagh looked pained.
"His book is doing frightful harm, I am sure," she said.
"Nonsense, my dear," said her husband. "Nothing so absolutely right, so
absolutely artistic, can do harm."
An obstinate expression came into Mrs. Ardagh's face, but she said
nothing. Catherine looked down at her plate. She felt as if small
needles were pricking her all over.
"Have you read the book?" said Mr. Ardagh to his wife.
"Yes," she replied. "It was recommended to me, I began it not knowing
what sort of book it was."
"And did you finish it?" asked her husband, with rather a satirical
smile.
"Yes. I confess I could not leave off reading it. That is why it is so
dangerous. It is both powerful and evil."
Then the subject dropped. Mark was still smiling quietly, but
Catherine's face was grave. When she and her mother and Jenny went up
into the drawing-room, leaving the men to their cigarettes, Catherine
recurred to the subject of "William Foster's" book.
"Do you really think that a novel can do serious harm, mother?" she
began. "After all, it is only a work of the imagination. Surely people
read it and forget it, as they would not forget an actual fact."
Mrs. Ardagh sighed wearily. She was a pale woman with feverish eyes. The
expression in them grew almost fierce as she answered,
"It is the black imagination of this William Foster that will come like
a suffocating cloud upon the imaginations of others, especially of----"
She suddenly broke off. Catherine, wondering why, glanced up at her
mother and saw that she was looking towards the far end of the big
drawing-room. Jenny was sitting there, under a shaded lamp. She had some
work in her hands but her hands were still. Her head was turned away,
but her attitude, the curve of her soft, long, white throat, the
absolute immobility of her thin body betrayed the fact that she was
listening attentively.
"I would not let that child read William Foster's book for the world,"
Mrs. Ardagh whispered to Catherine.
Then she changed the subject, and spoke of some charity that she was
interested in at the East End of London. Jenny's hands instantly began
to move about her embroidery.
That night Catherine spoke to Mark of what her mother had said.
He only laughed.
"I cannot write for any one person, Kitty," he said, "or if I do it must
be----"
"For whom?" she asked quickly.
"Myself," he replied.
Catherine slept very badly that night. She was thinking of William
Foster and of Mark. They seemed to her two different men. And she had
married--which?
Mark did no work in London. He knew too many people, he said, and
besides, he wanted to rest. Catherine and he went out a great deal into
society. At Christmas they ran over to Paris and spent three weeks
there. During this holiday William Foster, it almost seemed, had ceased
to exist. Mark Sirrett was light-hearted, gay, and the kindest, most
thoughtful husband in the world. When they came back to London,
Catherine went at once to see her mother. Mr. Ardagh had gone to the
Riviera and Catherine found Mrs. Ardagh quite alone in the big house in
Eaton Square.
"Why, where is Jenny Levita?" she asked.
Mrs. Ardagh made no reply for a moment. Her face, which was rather
straw-colour than white, worked grotesquely as if under the influence
of some strong emotion that she was trying to suppress. At length she
said, in a chill, husky voice,
"Jenny has left me."
"Left you--why?"
"She was taken away from me. She was taken back to the sin from which I
hoped I had rescued her."
"Oh, mother! By whom?"
Mrs. Ardagh put her handkerchief to her eyes.
"William Foster," she answered.
Catherine felt cold and numb.
"William Foster--I don't understand," she said slowly.
Mrs. Ardagh rolled and unrolled her handkerchief with trembling fingers.
"She got hold of that book--that black, wicked book," she said, and
there was a sort of fury in her voice. "It upset her faith. It tarnished
her moral sense. It reminded her of the--the man from whose influence I
had drawn her. All her imagination was set in a flame by that hateful
chapter."
"Which one?" Catherine asked.
Mrs. Ardagh mentioned the chapter which Catherine had most hated, most
admired, and most feared.
"I fought with William Foster for Jenny's soul," she said, passionately.
"But I am not clever. I have no power. I am getting old and tired. She
cried. She said she loved me, but that goodness was not for her, that
she must go, that life was calling her, that she must live--live!
William Foster had shown her death and she thought it life. I always
knew that in Jenny good and evil were fighting, that her fate was
trembling in the balance. That book turned the scale."
She sobbed heavily, then with a catch of her breath, she added,
"William Foster is a very wicked man."
Catherine flushed all over her face. But she said nothing. That night
she told Mark of Jenny's fate. She expected him to be grieved. But he
was not.
"An author who respects his art cannot consider every hysterical girl
while he is writing," he said. "And, besides, it is only your mother's
idea that she was influenced by my book. Long ago she showed you the
bent of her mind."
"But, Mark, don't you remember how that chapter struck me when you first
read it to me?"
"I remember that you thought it the finest chapter in the book, and you
were right, Kitty. You've got artistic discernment, like your father.
Berrand and you would get on together. Directly he comes back I'll
introduce you to each other."
Catherine said no more. From that time she devoted herself more than
ever to her mother, who now, under the influence of sorrow, allowed her
nature to come to its full flower. Abandoning the pleasures of society,
which had long wearied her, she gave herself up to services, charities
and good works in the poor parts of London. She carried Catherine with
her on many of her expeditions, and there can be no doubt that her
fervour and curious exaltation had a marked effect upon the girl.
Catherine had always been highly susceptible to influence, but she had
been during most of her life attacked perpetually by two absolutely
opposite influences. Now one of these, her father's, was removed from
her. She came more than ever before under her mother's domination. For
Mark, when he was not "William Foster," was simply a high-spirited and
happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and
intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the
dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine.
In the spring the Sirretts made ready to leave London. As the day drew
near for their departure Mark's manner changed, and he displayed
symptoms of restlessness and of impatience. Catherine noticed them and
asked their reason.
"I am longing to return to 'William Foster,' Kitty," he said.
She felt a sharp pain at her heart, but she only smiled and replied,
"I almost thought you had forgotten him."
"On the contrary, I have been preparing to meet him again all these
months."
His dark eyes shone as he spoke. And once again that stranger stood
before Catherine. She turned and went upstairs, saying that she must see
to her packing. But when she was alone in her bedroom she shed some
tears. That afternoon she went to Eaton Square to bid her mother
good-bye. Mrs. Ardagh was looking unhappy.
"Your father returns from Italy on Wednesday," she said. "You'll just
miss him."
"I am so sorry, mother," Catherine said.
Mrs. Ardagh looked at her in silence for a moment. Then she said in a
low voice,
"I am not."
"Mother--but why?"
"I think you are better away from him. My heart tells me so. Oh, Kitty,
I thank God every day of my life that Mark is--is such a good fellow,
without those terrible ideas and theories of your poor father. You
cannot think what I suffer."
It was the first time she had ever spoken so plainly on the subject, and
even now she quickly changed to another topic. Mark had never introduced
poor Mrs. Ardagh to "William Foster." And Catherine would not add
another burden to those she already had to bear.
Surrey was looking very lovely in the spring weather. The trees were
just beginning to let out the tips of their green secrets. The ground
was dashed with blue and with yellow, where bloomed those flowers that
are the sweetest of the year because they come the first, and whisper
wonderful promises in the ears of all who love them. There had been some
rain and the grass of lawns and hillsides was exquisite in the startling
freshness of its vivid colour. Nature seemed uneasy with delight, like a
child on a birthday morning. The tender beauty of everything around her
reassured Catherine, who had come from town in a mood of strange
apprehension. As she looked at the expectant woods awaiting their lovely
costume in fragile nudity, at the violets that seemed to sing in odours,
at that pale and shallow sky which is a herald of the deeper skies to
come, it seemed to her impossible that Mark, who could be so blithe, so
radiant, could turn to dark imaginings in such an atmosphere of
exquisite enterprise. She was filled with hope and with a species of
religious optimism. Some days passed, Catherine and Mark spent them in a
renewal of friendship with their domain. They were like two children and
were gayer than the spring. Then one evening Mark said,
"And now, Kitty, I am going to start work again. Berrand has written
that he will be in England next week and will come on here at once. But
he won't disturb me. And my scheme is ready."
Catherine felt the breath fluttering in her throat as she murmured,
"Your scheme is ready?"
"Yes. It's a great one. Berrand thinks so. I have written something of
it to him. I am going to trace the downfall of a nature from nobility to
utter degradation."
His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm, as he repeated in thrilling tones,
"Utter degradation."
Catherine thought of the spring night, in which such holy preparations
for joy were silently being carried on, of all the youthful things just
coming into life. An inspiration came to her. She caught her husband's
hand and drew him to the window.
"Pull up the blind, Mark," she said.
He obeyed, smiling at her as if in wonder at this freak.
"Now open the window."
"Yes, dear. There! What next?"
In front of the window there was a riband of pavement protected by an
overhanging section of roof. Catherine stepped out on this pavement.
Mark followed her. They stood together facing the spring night. There
was no moon, but the sky was clear and starlit. Nature seemed breathing
quietly, like a thing alive but asleep. The surrounding woods were a
dusky wall. The clearing was a vague sea of dew. And the air was full of
that wonderful scent that all things seem to have in spring. It is like
the perfume of life, of life that God has consecrated, of life that
might have been in Eden. It is odorous with hope. It stings and
embraces. It stirs the imagination to magic. It stirs the heart to
tears. For it is ineffably beautiful and expectant.
"How delicious!" Mark said.
Catherine's hand tightened on his arm.
"The trees are talking," he said. "That damp scent comes from their
roots, and the flowers and grasses round them."
He drew in his breath with a gasp of pleasure.
"Yes?" Catherine said.
He bent down and touched the lawn with his hand.
"What a dew! Look, Kitty, there goes a rabbit!"
A hunched shadow suddenly flattened and vanished.
"Little beggar! He's gone into the wood. What a jolly time he and his
relations must have."
"Yes, Mark. Isn't the night happy, and the spring?"
He drew in his breath again.
"Yes."
"Mark!"
"Well, dear?"
"Mark--don't write this book."
Mark started slightly with surprise.
"Kitty! what are you saying?"
"Write a happy book."
"My dear babe--how uninteresting!"
"Write a good book, a book to make people better and happier."
"A book with a purpose! No, Kitty."
"Well then, a spring book. This night isn't a night with a purpose,
because it's lovely."
He laughed quite gaily.
"Humorist! Why did you bring me out into it?"
"To influence you against that book."
He was silent.
"Are you angry, Mark?"
"No, dear."
"Will you do what I ask?"
"No, Kitty."
He spoke very quietly and gently, then changed the subject, talked of
the coming summer, the garden, prospective pleasures. But he talked no
more of his work. Next day he shut himself up in his study, and
thenceforward his life became a repetition of his life during the
previous summer. A fortnight later Frederic Berrand arrived.
Catherine had long felt an eager desire to see this one intimate friend
of Mark's. She expected him to be no ordinary man, and she was not
mistaken. Berrand was much older than Mark. He looked about forty. He
was thin, sallow, eager in manner, with shining eyes--almost
toad-like--a yellowish-white complexion, and coal-black hair. His
vivacity was un-English, yet at the back of his nature there lay surely
a stagnant reservoir of melancholy. He was a pessimist, full of ardour.
He revelled, intellectually, in the sorrows and in the evils that
afflict the world.
It was easy to see that he had a great influence over Mark. And it was
easy to see also that the dismal genius of "William Foster" appealed to
all the peculiarities of his nature with intense force. He was at once
on friendly terms with Catherine, to whom he spoke openly of his
admiration of her husband.
"Mrs. Sirrett," he said one evening, when Mark was working--he had taken
to working at night now as well as in the morning--"your husband will do
great things. He will found a school. The young men will be captivated
by his sombre genius, and we shall have less of the thoughtless rubbish
that the journalist loves and calls sane, healthy, and all the rest of
it."
"But surely sanity and health----"
"My dear Mrs. Sirrett, we want originality and imagination."
"Yes, indeed. But can't they be sane and healthy?"
"Was Gautier healthy when he wrote of the Priest and of the Vampire?
This book Mark is writing will be awful in its intensity. It will make
the world turn cold. It is terrible. People will shudder at it."
He walked about the room enthusiastically.
"And its terror is the true terror--mental. How the papers will hate it,
and how every one will read it!"
"May it--may it not do a great deal of harm?" said Catherine, slowly.
"What if it does? Nothing can prevent it from being a great book."
And he broke out into a dissertation on art that would have delighted
Mr. Ardagh.
Catherine listened to him in silence, but when he had finished she said,
"But you are one-sided, Mr. Berrand."
"I!" he cried. "How so?"
"You see only the horrible in life, even in love. You care only for the
horrible in art."
"The truth is more often horrible than not," he answered. "We dress it
in pink paper as we dress a burning lamp. We fear its light will hurt
our weak eyes. Almost all the pretty theories of future states, happy
hunting grounds, and so forth, almost all the fallacies of life to which
we are inclined to cling, are only pink paper shades which we make to
save ourselves from blinking at the light."
"You call it light?" she said.
And she felt a profound pity for him. There was no need of that. Berrand
was one of those strange men who are happy in the contemplation of
misery.
While Berrand was staying with the Sirretts, Mrs. Ardagh came to them on
a visit. She was now in very poor health, and her mind was greatly set,
in consequence, on that other world of which the healthy scarcely think,
unless they wake at night or lose a near relation unexpectedly. Mr.
Berrand immediately horrified her. Of course he did not speak of
"William Foster." "William Foster's" existence in the house was a
secret. But he freely aired his sentiments on all other subjects, and
each sentiment went like a sword through Mrs. Ardagh's soul.
"How can Mark make a friend of such a man," she said to Catherine. "Like
your father, he has no religious belief. He worships art instead of God.
He loves, he positively loves, the evil of the world. Such men are a
curse. They go to people hell."
Her feverish eyes glowed with fanaticism.
"Oh, mother!" said Catherine, thinking of "William Foster."
"They do not care to do good, they do not fear to do harm," continued
Mrs. Ardagh. "Why are they not cut off?"
She made her daughter kneel down with her and pray against such men.
Then they went down to dinner, and dined with "William Foster."
Catherine felt like one in a fever. She knew that her mother had an
exaggerated mind. Nevertheless, she was deeply moved by it, recognising
that it exaggerated truth, not a lie.
At dinner Mrs. Ardagh, by some ill-chance, was led to mention "William
Foster's" book. Mark raised gay eyebrows at Berrand and Catherine grew
hot. For Mrs. Ardagh denounced the author as she had denounced him in
London, but with more excitement.
"I trust," she said, "that he will never live to write another."
Catherine felt as if a knife were thrust into her breast, and even Mark
started slightly and looked almost uneasy, as if he fancied that the
force of Mrs. Ardagh's desire might accomplish its fulfilment. Only
Berrand was undismayed. There was a devil of mischief in him. His eyes
of a toad gleamed as he said, turning to Mrs. Ardagh,
"I happen to know that 'William Foster' is writing another book at this
very time."
Catherine bent her eyes on her plate. She was tingling with nervous
excitement.
"Do you know him, then?" said Mrs. Ardagh, in her fervid, and yet
dreary, voice.
"Slightly."
"Then tell him of the dreadful harm he has done."
"What harm?"
Mrs. Ardagh spoke of Jenny Levita. It seemed that she had now fallen
into an evil way of life.
"But why should you attribute the folly of a weak girl to William
Foster's influence?" said Berrand.
"Her soul was trembling in the balance," said Mrs. Ardagh, striking her
thin hand excitedly on the table. "That book turned the scale. She went
down. Tell him of her, Mr. Berrand, tell him of the ruin of that poor
child. It may influence him."
"I'm afraid not," said Berrand, with a glance at Mark. "William Foster
is an artist."
"It is terrible that he should be permitted to work such evil," said
Mrs. Ardagh.
During that summer a vague and hollow darkness seemed to brood round the
life of Catherine. It stood behind the glory of the golden days. She
felt night even at noontide, and a damp mist floated mysteriously to her
out of the very heart of the sun. Yet she had some happy, or at least
some feverishly excited, moments, for Berrand was generally staying with
them, and Catherine--abnormally sensitive as she always was to her
undoing,--came under his curious influence and caught some of his
enthusiasm for the talent of "William Foster."
Once again Mark began to speak to her of his work, to read parts of it
aloud to both his companions. And there were evenings when Catherine,
carried away by the intellectual joy of the two men, exulted with them
in the horrible fascination of the book and in the intensity of its
dramatic force. But, when these moments were over, and she was gone, she
brooded darkly over her mother's words. For she knew that the book was
evil. Like a snake it carried poison with it, and, presently, it was
going to carry that poison out from this house in the woods, out into
the world. Ah! the poor world, on which a thousand things preyed, in
which a thousand snakes set their poisoned fangs!
And then she wept. Mark and Berrand were eagerly talking of the snake,
praising its lustrous skin, marvelling at its jewelled eyes, foretelling
its lithe progress through Society. She heard the murmur of their voices
until far into the night. And sometimes she thought that distant murmur
sounded like the hum of evil, or like the furtive whisper of
conspirators.
Berrand did not leave them until the new book was nearly finished. As he
pressed Catherine's hand in farewell he said,
"You will have a sensational autumn, Mrs. Sirrett."
"Sensational. Why?" she asked.
"London will ring with William Foster's name. My word how the
Journalists will curse! They protect the morality of the nation you
know--on paper."
He was gone. As the carriage drove away Catherine saw his beautiful, and
yet rather dreadful, eyes gleaming with mischievous excitement. Suddenly
she felt heavy-hearted. Those last words of his cleared away any mist of
doubt that lingered about her own terror. She recognised fully for the
first time the essential difference between Mark and Berrand. Mark was
really possessed by the spirit of the artist, was driven by something
strange and dominating within him to do what he did. Berrand was
possessed by a spirit of mischievous devilry, by the poor and degrading
desire to shock and startle the world at whatever cost. For the moment
Catherine mentally saw Mark in a light of nobility; Berrand in a
darkness of degradation.
Yet--this thought followed in a moment,--Berrand was harmless to the
world, while Mark--
"Kitty, come in here," called her husband's voice from the study. "I
want to consult you about this last chapter."
In the Autumn "William Foster's" new book was issued by an "advanced"
publisher, who loved to hear his wares called dangerous, and who walked
on air when the reviewers said that such men as he were a curse to
Society--as they occasionally did when there was nothing special to
write about.
In the autumn also Mrs. Ardagh's illness grew worse and it appeared that
she could not live much longer. Catherine was terribly grieved, and was
for a time so much engaged with her mother that she scarcely heeded what
was going on in the world around. Incessantly immured in the sick-room
she did not trace the progress of the snake through Society until--as
Berrand had foretold--the cries of the Journalists rose to Heaven like
cries from a burning city. "William Foster" was held up to execration so
universal that his book could hardly be printed in sufficient quantities
to satisfy the demands of a public frantically eager to be harmed. In
her sick-room Mrs. Ardagh, now not far from death, yet still religiously
interested in the well-being of the world she was leaving, heard the
echoes of the journalistic cries. Some friend, perhaps, conveyed them.
For Catherine was silent on the matter, keeping a silence of fear and of
shame. And these echoes stayed with the dying woman, as stay the voices
in the hills.
One night, when Catherine came into her mother's room, Mrs. Ardagh was
crying feebly. On the sheet of the bed lay a letter which she had
crumpled in her pale hands and then tried, vainly, to fling away from
her. Catherine leaned over the bed.
"What is it, mother?" she said. "You are not in pain?"
Mrs. Ardagh shifted in the bed. There was a suggestion of almost
intolerable uneasiness in the movement.
"I am in pain, horrible pain," she answered. "No--no," as Catherine was
about to ring for the nurse, "not in the body--not that."
Catherine sat down by the bed and clasped her mother's hot hand.
"What is it?" she whispered.
Mrs. Ardagh was silent for a moment. She blinked her heavy eyelids to
stop the tears from falling on her wasted cheeks. At length she said,
"William Foster has done more evil."
Catherine did not speak. Her heart beat irregularly, and then seemed to
stop, and then beat with unnatural force again.
"Catherine," her mother continued, "Jenny is utterly lost."
"No, mother, no!" Catherine said. "I will go to her. Let me go. I will
rescue her. I will make her see----"
"Hush--you can't. She is dead and she died in shame."
She paused. Catherine did not speak.
"And now," Mrs. Ardagh continued feebly, "that man is spreading the net
for others. Do you know, Catherine, I often pray for him?"
"Do you, mother?"
"Yes. He has great powers. I never let your father know it, but that
first book of his made an impression upon me that has never faded.
That's why I think of him even now--that and the fate of poor Jenny."
She lifted herself up a little in the bed.
"His last book, I am told, is much more terrible, much more deadly than
the first."
"Is it?"
"You haven't read it?"
Catherine hesitated a moment, then she said,
"I know something about it."
Mrs. Ardagh lay still for a while, as if thinking. Presently she said,
"Catherine, such an odd, foolish idea keeps coming to me."
"What is it, mother?"
"That I should like to see 'William Foster' and--and try to make him
understand what he is doing. Perhaps he doesn't know, doesn't realise.
God often lets the devil blind us, you know. If I told him about Jenny,
told him all about her, he might see--he might understand. Don't you
think so?"
Catherine was holding her mother's hand. She pressed it vehemently.
"Oh, mother, perhaps he might!"
Mrs. Ardagh sat up still more among her pillows.
"You don't think it's a silly fancy?"
"I don't know. I wonder."
Catherine was crying quietly.
"It keeps coming," said Mrs. Ardagh, "as if God sent it to me. What can
I do? How can I send to William Foster? I don't know where he is. Could
that Mr. Berrand----?"
"Mother," Catherine said. "Leave it to me, I will bring William Foster
to you."
She was trembling. But the invalid, exhausted with the excitement of the
conversation, was growing drowsy. She sank down again in her pillows.
"Yes," she murmured. "I--might--tell--him--William Foster."
She slept heavily.
"Mark," Catherine said to her husband the next day. "Mother is dying.
She can only live a very few days."
"Oh, Kitty! How grieved I am!"
His face was full of the most tender sympathy. He took her hand gently
and kissed her.
"My Kitty, how will you bear this great sorrow?"
"Mark," Catherine said, and her voice sounded curiously strained.
"Mother wants very much to see you, before she dies. She has something
to say to you. I think she cares more about seeing you than about
anything else in the world."
Mark looked surprised.
"I will go to her at once," he said. "What can it be? Ah, it must be
something about you."
"No, I don't think so."
"What then?"
"She will tell you, Mark. It is better she should tell you herself."
"I will go to her then. I will go now."
"Wait a moment"--Catherine was very pale--"Promise me, Mark, that you
won't--you won't be angry if--if mother--you will----"
She stopped. Her emotion was painful. Mark was more and more puzzled.
"Angry with your mother? At such a time!" he said.
"No--you wouldn't. I am upset. I am foolish. Let me go first to tell her
you are coming. Follow me in a few minutes."
She went out leaving her husband amazed. When she arrived in Eaton
Square Mr. Ardagh met her in the hall.
"She is worse," he said. "Much worse. The end cannot be far off."
"The beginning," Catherine said, looking him straight in the eyes.
He understood then which parental spirit had conquered the spirit of the
child, and he smiled--sadly or gladly? He hardly knew. So strangely does
death play with us all. Catherine went upstairs into her mother's room,
which was dim and very hot. She shut the door, sent away the nurse, and
went up to the bedside.
"Mother," she said, "William Foster is coming. Do you feel that you can
see him?"
Mrs. Ardagh was perfectly conscious, although so near death.
"Yes," she said. "God means me to give him a message--God means me."
She lay silent; Catherine sat by her. Presently she spoke again.
"I shall convince him," she said quietly. "That is meant. If I did not
God would strike him down. He would be cut off. But I shall make him
know himself."
And then she repeated, with a sort of feeble but intense conviction,
"If I did not God would strike him down--yes--yes."
Something--perhaps the fact that her mother was so near death, so close
to that great secret,--made her words, faltering though they were, go
home to Catherine with the most extraordinary poignancy, as words had
never gone before. She felt that it was true, that there was no
alternative. Either Mark must be convinced now, by this bedside, in
this hot, dark room from which a soul was passing, or he would, by some
accident, by some sudden means, be swept away from the world that he was
injuring, that he was poisoning.
Mrs. Ardagh seemed to grow more feeble with every moment that passed.
And suddenly a great fear overtook Catherine, the dread that Mark would
come too late, and then--God's other means! She trembled, and strained
her ears to catch the sound of wheels. Mrs. Ardagh now seemed to be
sinking into sleep--Catherine strove to rouse her. She stirred and said,
"What is it?" in a voice that sounded peevish.
Just then there was a gentle tap on the door. Catherine sprang up, and
hastened to it with a fast beating heart. Mr. Ardagh stood there.
"How is she?" he whispered.
"I think she is not in pain. She is just resting. Has Mark come?"
"No."
"Please send him up directly he comes."
She spoke with a hushed, but with an intense, excitement.
"I want him to--to say good-bye to her," she added.
Mr. Ardagh nodded, and went softly downstairs.
"Is that he--is that William Foster?" said Mrs. Ardagh feebly from the
bed.
"No, mother. But he will be here directly."
"I'm very tired," said the sick woman in reply. And again her thin voice
sounded irritable.
Catherine sat down by her and held her hand tightly, as if that grasp
could keep her in this life. A few minutes passed. Then there was the
sound of a cab in the Square. It ceased in front of the house. Catherine
could scarcely breathe. She bent down to the dying woman.
"Mother!"
"Well?"
"Mother, he has come--but I want to tell you something--are you
listening?"
"Move the pillow."
Catherine did so.
"Mother, I want to tell you. William Foster is----"
The bedroom door opened and Mark entered softly. Catherine stood up,
still holding her mother's hand, which was now very cold. Mark came to
the bed on tiptoe.
"Mother," Catherine said, "William Foster"--Mark started--"is here. Tell
him--tell him."
There was no reply from the bed.
"Kitty," Mark whispered, "what is this?"
"Hush!" she said. "Mother--mother, don't you hear me?"
Again there was no reply. Then Catherine bent down and cast a hard,
staring glance of enquiry on her mother.
Mrs. Ardagh was dead.
Catherine looked up at Mark.
"God's other means," she thought.
* * * * *
The death of her mother left a strong and terrible impression upon
Catherine. She brooded over it continually and over Mrs. Ardagh's last
words. The last words of the dying often dwell in the memories of the
living. Faltering, feeble, sometimes apparently inconsequent, they
appear nevertheless prophetic, touched with the dignity of Eternal
truths. Lives have been moulded by such last words. Natures have been
diverted into new and curious paths. So it was now. For the future Mr.
Ardagh's influence had no force over his daughter. An influence from the
grave dominated her. Mr. Ardagh recognised the fact, shrugged his
shoulders and travelled. His philosophy taught him to accept the
inevitable with the fortitude of the Stoic. From henceforward the
Sirretts saw little of him. As to Mark, with his habitual tenderness he
set about consoling his wife for her loss. He was kindness itself.
Catherine seemed grateful, was indeed grateful to him. Nevertheless,
after the death of Mrs. Ardagh, something seemed to stand between her
and her husband, dividing them. Mark did not know what this was. For
some time he was unconscious of this thin veil dropped between them.
Even when he became aware of it he could not tell why it was there. He
strove to put it aside, but in vain. Then he strove not to see it, not
to think of it. He forgot it in his work. But Catherine always knew what
set her apart from her husband. It was that influence from the grave. It
was the memory of her mother's last words. She recognised them from the
first, blindly, as words of prophecy. Yet the days went by. "William
Foster" sat in his study in the Surrey home once more, while the spring
grew, imitative of last year's spring. And there was no sign from God.
Catherine never doubted that the dying woman had been inspired. She
never doubted that "William Foster" would be stayed, however tragically,
from working fresh evil in the world. Indeed she waited, as one assured
of some particular future, breathless in expectation of its approach.
Sometimes she strove to picture precisely what it might be, and,
fancifully, she set two men before her--Mark and "William Foster." Even
in real life they seemed two different men. Why not in the life of the
imagination? And that was sweeter, for then she could look forward to
the one standing fast, to the other being stricken. Might not his genius
die in a man while the man lived on? There had been instances of men who
had written one or two brilliant books and had seemed to exhaust
themselves in that effort. And she dreamed of her husband's gift being
stolen from him--divinely--of the stranger being slain. Yet this
dreaming was idle and fantastic, the image which greets closed eyes. For
Mark's energy and enthusiasm were growing. The fury of the papers fed
him. The cries of pious fear emboldened his dogged and dreary talent.
His genius grew darker as its darkness became recognised.
This third book of his promised to be more powerful, more deadly, than
either of its forerunners. He did not speak much of it to Catherine. But
now and then, carried away by excitement and by the need of sympathy, he
dropped a hint of what he was doing. She listened attentively but said
little. Mark noticed her lack of responsiveness, and one night he said
rather bitterly,
"You no longer care for your husband's achievements, Catherine."
He did not call her Kitty.
"I fear them, Mark," Catherine replied.
"Fear them! Why?"
"They are doing great harm in the world."
Mark uttered an impatient exclamation. As a man he was kind and gentle,
but as an artist he was wilful and intolerant. Soon after this he wrote
to Berrand and invited him to stay. Berrand came. This time Catherine
shuddered at his coming. She began to look upon him as her husband's
evil genius. Berrand did not apparently notice any change in her, for he
treated her as usual, and spoke much to her of Mark. And Catherine was
too reserved to express the feelings which tortured her to a comparative
stranger. For this reason Berrand did not understand the terrible
conflict that was raging within her as "William Foster's" new work grew,
and he often spoke to her about the book, and described, with
mischievous intellectual delight, its terror, its immorality and its
pain. Catherine listened with apparent calm. She was waiting for that
interruption from heaven. She was wondering why it did not come.
One night in summer it chanced that she and Berrand spoke of Fate.
Catherine, dominated by her fixed idea that God would intervene in some
strange and abrupt way to interrupt the activities of Mark, spoke of
Fate as something inevitably ordained, certain as the rising of the sun
or the dropping down of the darkness. Berrand laughed.
"There is no Fate," he said. "There is man, there is woman. Man and
woman make circumstance. We fashion our own lives and the lives of
others."
"And our deaths?" said Catherine.
"We die when we've done enough, when we've done our best or worst, when
we've pushed our energy as far as it will go--that is, if we die what is
called a natural death. But of course now and then some other human
being chooses to think for us, and to think we have lived long enough or
too long. And then----"
He paused with a smile.
"Then----?" said Catherine, leaning slightly forward.
"Then that human being may cut our thread prematurely, and down we go to
death."
Catherine drew in her breath sharply.
"But that again," continued Berrand. "Is man--or woman--not the fantasy
you call Fate?"
"Perhaps Fate can take possession of a man or a woman," Catherine said
slowly and thoughtfully, "govern them, act through them."
"That's a dangerous doctrine. You believe that criminals are
irresponsible then?"
"I don't know," she said. "I suppose there must be an agent. Yes, I
suppose there must."
She spoke as one who is thinking out a problem.
"God," she continued, after a moment of silence, "may choose to use a
man or woman as an agent instead of a disease."
"Oh, well," said Berrand, with his odd, high laugh, "I cannot go with
you on that road of thought, Mrs. Sirrett. I am not afflicted with a
religion. Oh, here's Mark. How have you been getting on, Mr. William
Foster?"
"Grandly," he replied.
His dark eyes were blazing with excitement. Catherine suddenly turned
very cold. She got up and left the room. The two men scarcely noticed
her departure. They plunged into an eager discussion on the book. They
debated it till the night waned and the melancholy breath of dawn stole
in at the open window.
Meanwhile, Catherine, who had gone to bed, lay awake. This summer was so
like last summer. Now, as then, she was sleepless, and heard the distant,
excited voices rising and falling, murmuring on and on hour after hour.
Now, as then, they accompanied activity. Now, as then, the activity was
deadly, harmful to an invisible multitude, hidden out in the great world.
But there was a difference between last year and this, so like in many
ways. Mark's power had grown in the interval. He had become more
dangerous. And Catherine had developed also. Circumstance--spoken of by
Berrand--had changed, twisted into a different shape by dying hands,
twisted again by the hands--all unconscious--of that man who talked
downstairs, of Berrand. Was he, too, an agent of Fate, at which he
scornfully laughed? Why not?
Oh, those everlasting voices! they rang hatefully in the sleepless
woman's ears. Their eagerness, their enthusiasm, were terrible to her.
For now their joy seemed to summon her to a great darkness. Their sound
seemed to call her to the making of a great silence. She put her hands
over her ears, but she still heard them till it was dawn. She still
heard them when they were no more speaking.
From this time Catherine waited indeed, but with a patience quite
different from that which possessed her formerly. Then she was
expectant, almost superstitiously expectant, of an abrupt interposition
of Fate. Now she waited, but with less expectancy, and with a strange
and growing sense of personal obligation which had been totally absent
from her before the issue lay between the thing invisible and herself.
And each day that passed brought the issue a step nearer to her. How
pathetical seemed to her the ignorance of the two men who were her
companions in the cloistered house at this time. Tears rose in her eyes
at the thought of her secret and their impotence to know it. But then
she thought of her mother's death-bed and the tears ran dry. For the
spirit of her mother surely was with her in the dark, the spirit that
knew all now and that could inspire and direct her.
The book grew and Catherine waited. Would Mark be allowed to complete
it? that was the great question. If he was, then the burden of action
was laid upon her by the will of God. She had quite made up her mind on
that. She had even prayed, and believed that an answer had been given to
her prayer, and that the answer was--"In the event you anticipate it is
God's will that you should act." She was fully resolved to do God's
will. And so she waited, with a strong, but how anxious, patience. The
growth of the book was now become ironical to her as the growth of a
plant which must die when it attains a certain height; the labour spent
upon it, the discussion that raged around it, the decisions that were
arrived at as to its course--all these things were now most pitifully
pathetic to Catherine. As she watched Mark and Berrand, as she listened
to them, she seemed to watch and listen to children, playing idly,
chattering idly, on the edge of events that must stop their play, their
chatter--perhaps for ever.
For this book would never see the light. No one would ever read it. No
one would ever speak of it but these two men, whose lives seemed bound
up in it. And Catherine alone knew this.
Sometimes she had a longing to tell them of this knowledge, to say to
Mark, "Do not waste yourself in this useless energy!" to say to Berrand,
"Do not rejoice over the future of that which has no future." But she
refrained, knowing that to speak would be to give the lie to what she
spoke. For such revelation must frustrate her contemplated action. So
nobody knew what she knew, except the spirit that stood by her in the
night. She waited, and the book drew slowly towards its climax and its
close. As Berrand grew more excited about it he spoke more of it to
Catherine. But Mark--conscious of that veil dropped between him and his
wife--scarcely mentioned it to her, and declined to read any passages
from it aloud. Catherine understood that he distrusted her and knew her
utterly unsympathetic and adverse to his labours. The sign for which she
had hoped, which she had once most confidently expected, did not come.
And at length she almost ceased to think of it, and was inclined to put
the idea from her as a foolish dream.
The burden of action was, it seemed, to be laid upon her. She would
accept it calmly, dutifully. So the summer waned, drawing towards
autumn. The atmosphere grew heavy and mellow. The garden was languid
with its weight of bearing plants and with its fruits. Mists rose at
evening in the woods, clouding the trunks of the trees, and spreading
melancholy as a sad tale that floats, like a mist, over those who hear
it. And, one day, the book was finished.
Berrand came to tell Catherine. He was radiant. While he spoke he never
noticed that she closed her hands tightly as one who prepares to face an
enemy.
"We are going to London this afternoon," he added. "Mark must see his
publisher."
"He is taking up the manuscript?" said Catherine hastily.
"No, no. There are one or two finishing touches to be put. But he must
arrange about the date of publishing. He will return by the midnight
train, but I shall stay in town for the night."
Mark locked up the manuscript in a drawer of his writing table, the key
of which he carried about him on a chain. And the two men took their
departure, leaving Catherine alone.
So the time of her duty was fully come. She had waited till now,
because, till now, she had not been absolutely sure that she was to be
the agent through whom Fate was to work. But she could no longer dare to
doubt. The book was finished. Mark had been allowed to finish it. But
its deadly work was not accomplished till it was given to the world. It
must never be given to the world.
The day was not cold. Yet Catherine ordered the footman to light a fire
in Mark's study. When he had done so she told him not to allow her to be
disturbed. Then she went into the room and shut the door behind her. She
walked up to the writing table, at which Mark had spent so many hours,
labouring, thinking, imagining, working out, fashioning that shell which
was to burst and maim a world. The silence in the room seemed curiously
intense. The fire gleamed, and the sun gleamed too; though already it
was slanting to the West. Catherine stood for some time by the table.
Then she tried the drawer in which Mark kept his manuscript and found it
locked. The resistance of the drawer to her hand roused her.
Two or three minutes later one of the maids in the servant's hall said,
"Whatever's that?"
"What?" said the footman who had lit the study fire.
"Listen!" said the maid.
They listened and heard a sound like a blow struck on some hard
substance.
"There it is again," said the maid. "What ever can it be?"
The footman didn't know, but they both agreed that the noise seemed to
come from the study. While they were still gossiping about it Catherine
stood at Mark's writing table, and drew out from an open drawer the
manuscript of the book. She lifted it in her hands slowly and her face
was hard and set. Then she turned and carried it to the hearth, where
the fire was blazing. By the hearth she paused. She meant to destroy the
book in the fire. But now that she saw the book, now that she held it in
her hands, the deed seemed so horribly merciless that she hesitated.
Then she knelt down on the hearth and leaned towards the flames. Their
light played upon her face, their heat scorched her skin. She held the
book towards them, over them. The flames flew up towards it eagerly,
seeming to desire it. Catherine tantalised them by withholding from them
their prey. For now, in this crisis of action, doubts assailed her. She
remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much
of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous.
Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of
its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the
clear, even writing. It fascinated her eyes.
At eight the footman opened the door, announcing dinner.
Catherine started as if from a dream. Her face was white and her eyes
were ablaze with excitement. She put the manuscript back in the drawer,
went into the dining-room and made a pretence of dining. But very soon
she was back again in the study. She sat down under a lamp by the fire
and went on reading the book. She knew that Mark would not be home till
midnight; there was plenty of time. She turned the leaves one by one,
and presently she forgot the passing of time, she forgot everything in
the evil fascination of the book. She was enthralled. She was
horror-stricken. But she could not cease from reading. Only when she had
finished she meant to burn the book. No one else should ever come under
its spell. She never heard the clock striking the hours. She never heard
the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the drive. She never heard
a step in the hall, the opening of the study door. Only when Mark stood
before her with an exclamation of keen surprise did she start up. The
manuscript dropped from her hands on to the hearth. The drawer in the
writing table, broken open, gaped wide.
"Catherine," Mark said, and he bent hastily and picked up the book.
"Catherine, what is the meaning of this? You have--you have----"
He stopped, struck dumb by flooding astonishment. She stared up at him
without a word and with a dazed expression in her eyes. He looked
towards the drawer.
"You have dared to break open my writing table!"
"Yes," she said, finding a voice. "I have dared."
"And to read--to read----"
She nodded. Mark seemed utterly confused by surprise. He looked almost
sheepish, as men do in blank amazement. She got up and stood before him
and laid her hands on his, which held the book.
"You see that fire?" she said in a low voice.
He looked at it, as if he had not noticed it before.
"What's it for?" he said, also in a low voice.
"Don't you know?"
They looked into each other's eyes for a moment.
"To--to--you intended to burn----"
She nodded again, and closed her hands tightly on the book.
"Mark," she said solemnly. "It's an evil thing. Let it go."
His face changed. Astonishment died in fierce excitement.
"You're mad!" he said brutally.
And he struck her hands away from the book with his clenched fist. She
did not cry out, but her face became utterly dogged. He saw that.
"D'you hear me?" he said.
"Yes."
His passion rose, as he began fully to grasp the enormity of the deed
that his coming had prevented.
"You would destroy my labour, my very soul," he said hoarsely. "You who
pretended to love me!"
"Because I love you," she said.
He laughed aloud.
"You hate me," he cried.
"I hate to see you do evil," she said.
"This is fanaticism," he muttered, looking at her obstinate white face,
and steady eyes. "Sheer fanaticism."
It began almost to frighten him.
"You shall not do this evil," she said. "You shall not."
Mark stared at her for a moment. Then he turned away.
"I'll not argue with you," he said. "But, if you had done what you meant
to do, if you had destroyed my labour, I would have recreated it, every
sentence, every word."
"No, Mark!"
"I would, I would," he said. "The world shall have it, the world should
have had it even then. Go to your room."
She left him. But her face had not changed or lost its expression.
She went upstairs slowly. And the spirit of her mother went with her.
She felt sure of that.
* * * * *
When two days afterwards, late in the evening, Mark Sirrett suddenly
died,--from poison, as was proved at Catherine's trial--she had no
feeling that Mark was dead. That only came to her afterwards, as she sat
by the body, awaiting the useless arrival of the doctor. She only knew
that the stranger was gone, the stranger into whose wild eyes she had
gazed for the first time in the Pavilion of Granada, when the world was
golden beneath them and the roses touched his hair. She looked at the
body, and she seemed to hear again the bell of the cathedral, filling
the drowsy valley with terrible vibrations of romance. It was a passing
bell. For God had stricken down "William Foster."
THE CRY OF THE CHILD.