“You’d better not let her know if anything happens, then—or she will.”
John Ralston left the house very reluctantly at last, and returned to his home, feeling broken and helpless, as people who have nervous organizations do feel when they have been under great emotion and are left in anxiety. Naturally enough, Katharine’s present condition was uppermost in his mind, and every step which took him further from her was an added pain. But a multitude of other considerations thrust themselves upon him at the same time, and he asked himself what was to happen on the morrow.
He had made up his mind, before Alexander Junior had left the house, that it was absolutely necessary to put an end to the present situation at once, and to declare his marriage without delay. He had never wished it to be kept a secret, and he had now the best of reasons for insisting that it should be made public. He might have been willing to believe that Katharine’s fall had been an accident, and that her father had not meant to hurt her, but the fact remained that the accident had occurred through his brutal roughness, with the result that John had struck the elder man in the face. It was not safe for Katharine to stay any longer in her father’s house.
On the other hand, it seemed clear that Robert Lauderdale was near his end. It was hardly to be hoped that he could survive the strain of his late fit of passion, weakened as he was and old. Even Doctor Routh thought it improbable. What would happen if he died that night? If Katharine had to be moved,—she could scarcely stay in the house after the old man was dead,—to whose house should she go? John swore, inwardly, that she should not return to her father’s. And he thought, too, of his next meeting with the latter. Society would be amazed and horrified to hear that they had actually come to blows. Society, especially in our country, detests the idea of personal violence. Its verdict is against any use of such means to settle difficulties. Society, therefore, must be kept in ignorance of what had happened. No one had seen the blow, not even Katharine, who had just fallen to the floor. She alone had seen John and her father struggling, for they had loosed their hold on seeing that she was hurt, and the servants had found them bending over her. Consequently, a great part of what had happened would be kept secret. Robert Lauderdale would not speak of it, and Mrs. Deems was bound to secrecy by her profession. John wondered how Alexander Junior would meet him, however, and whether there was to be any renewal of hostilities.
Altogether, when he let himself into his own house, he was in need of counsel and advice. There was no one but his mother to whom he cared to appeal for either. She had known all along of his devotion to Katharine Lauderdale, though she knew nothing of the secret marriage. She knew how hard Katharine’s life was made in the girl’s own home, by her father’s determined opposition to the match, and John had told her something of other matters—how old Robert had confided to Katharine what he meant to do with his money, and how her father had tried to force her to betray the confidence. Ralston was puzzled, too, by Alexander Junior’s evident willingness to quarrel with his uncle, or at least by his determination to make no concessions whatever to him, and wondered whether his mother could not suggest some explanation.
Mrs. Ralston was, in some ways, very like her son, and the two understood one another perfectly. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that she had made him like herself, not intentionally, but by force of example, a result very unusual in the relations between mother and son. She was by no means a manlike woman, but she possessed many of the qualities which make the best men. She was fearless and truthful, and she was more than that—she had a man’s sense of honour from a man’s point of view, and admitted to herself that honour was the only religion in which she could believe. Like Katharine, she, the elder Katharine Lauderdale, had been brought up amidst contradictory influences, and had then married the Admiral, a brave officer, a man of considerable scientific attainments, and a determined agnostic, of the school of thirty years ago, when many people believed that science was to bring about a sort of millennium within the next few years. In that direction she went further than her son. Her sense of fairness had shown her how unfair it would be to make an unbeliever of him before he was old enough to judge for himself, and in this idea she had made him go to church like other boys, and had persuaded his father not to talk atheism before him. The result had been to produce, more or less, the state of mind typical in these last years of the century, amongst a certain class of people who are collectively described as cultured, though they cannot always be spoken of individually as cultivated. John felt that he believed in something, but he had not the slightest idea what that something might be, and did not take the smallest trouble to find out. In this respect he differed from Katharine. Under very similar conditions, the young girl vacillated between a set of undefinable but much discussed beliefs, which included pseudo-Buddhism, Psychological Research, the wreck of what was for a few years Theosophy, and the latest discoveries in hypnotism, taken altogether and kneaded into an amorphous mass, on the one hand, while, on the other, she was attracted by the rigid forms of actual Christianity, widely opposed, but nearest in whole-heartedness, which are found in the Presbyterian and the Roman Catholic churches. But John’s mother was a peaceable agnostic, who had transferred the questions of right, wrong, and ultimate good before the tribunal of honour which held perpetual session in her heart.
She never discussed such points if she could avoid doing so, and if drawn into discussion against her will, she said frankly that she wished she might believe, but could not. In dealing with the world, her strength of character, her directness and her humanity stood her in good stead. In her heart’s dealings with itself, she thought of Musset’s famous lines—‘If Heaven be void, then we offend no God. But if God is, let God be pitiful!’ And she offended no one, nor desired to offend any. She had in life the advantage, the only one, perhaps, which the agnostic has over the believer—the safety of her own soul was not in the balance when the humanity of others appealed to her own. He who believes that he has a soul to save can be unselfish only with his bodily safety.
Mrs. Ralston was eminently a woman of the world in the best sense of an expression which many think can mean no good. She had never been beautiful and had never been vain, but she had much which attracts as beauty does, and holds as no beauty can. Of the Lauderdales now living, she was undeniably the most gifted. Katharine might have rivalled her, had she developed under more favourable circumstances. But with the education she had received, good as it had been of its kind, it was not probable that the young girl would grow up into such a woman.
Yet Mrs. Ralston had no accomplishments, in the ordinary sense of the word. Her husband used to say that this was one of her chief attractions in his eyes—he hated women who played the piano, and sang little songs, and made little sketches, for the small price paid by cheap social admiration, and greedily accepted by the performer of such tricks. There were people who did such things well, and whose business it was to do them. Why should any one do them badly? Mrs. Ralston never attempted anything of the sort.
On the other hand, she was well acquainted with a number of modern languages, and knew enough of the classics not to talk about ‘reading Horace in the original Greek,’ which is as much knowledge in that direction, perhaps, as a woman needs, and as most men have occasion to use in daily life. She had read very widely, and her criticism, if not that of pure reason, was that of a clear judgment. She had found out early what most people never learn at all, that she could widen her experience of life vicariously by assimilating that of other people, in fact and even in fiction. Good fiction is very like reality. Bad fiction is generally made up of fragments of reality unskilfully patched together. She picked out truths wherever she found them, and set them in their places in the body of all truth.