‘That you’ve suffered so horribly, that you loved her so terribly——’
And he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and he couldn’t, because this simply wasn’t Catherine.
‘But it isn’t that only,’ she said,—and hesitated for an instant.
For an instant her heart failed her. Why tell him? After all, all she had done was for love of him; for a greedy, clutching love it was true, made up chiefly of vanity and possessiveness and fear, but still love. Why not forget the whole thing, and let him think she had grown old in a week from grief?
Creditable and touching explanation. And so nearly true, too, for if passion had begun the ruin, grief had completed it, and the night and day of that birth and death, of the agony of Stephen and her own long-drawn-out torment, had put the finishing touches of age beyond her age on a face and hair left defenceless to lines and greyness without Maria Rome’s massage and careful dyes, and anyhow twice as worn and grey as they had been before she began the exhausting processes of Dr. Sanguesa.
But she put this aside. She had had enough of nearly truth and the wretched business of taking him in. How could she go on doing him such wrongs? She had done him the greatest of wrongs marrying him, of that she was certain, but at least she would leave off making fools of them both. Rotten, rotten way of living. Let him see her as she was; and if his love—how natural that would be at his age, how inevitable—came to an end, she would set him free.
For in those remarkable hours that followed Virginia’s death, when it seemed to Catherine as if she had suddenly opened the door out of a dark passage and gone into a great light room, she saw for the first time quite plainly; and what she saw in that strange new clearness, that merciless, yet somehow curiously comforting, clearness, was that love has to learn to let go, that love if it is real always does let go, makes no claims, sets free, is content to love without being loved—and that nothing was worth while, nothing at all in the tiny moment called life except being good. Simply being good. And though people might argue as to what precisely being good meant, they knew in their hearts just as she knew in her heart; and though the young might laugh at this conviction as so much sodden sentiment, they would, each one of them who was worth anything, end by thinking exactly that. Impossible to live as she had lived the last week close up to death and not see this. For four extraordinary days she had sat in its very presence, watching by the side of its peace. She knew now. Life was a flicker; the briefest thing, blown out before one was able to turn round. There was no time in it, no time in the infinitely precious instant, for anything except just goodness.
So she said, intent on simple truth, ‘I did deeply love Virginia, and I have suffered, but I looked very nearly like this before.’
And Christopher, who hadn’t lived these days close up to death, and hadn’t seen and recognised what she so clearly did, and wasn’t feeling any of this, was shocked out of his bewilderment by such blasphemy, and took a quick, almost menacing step forward, as if to silence the ghost daring to profane his lovely memory.
‘You didn’t look like it—you didn’t!’ he cried. ‘You were my Catherine. You weren’t this—this——’