'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornburgh than I am already.'
Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which the worn wedding-ring lay slipping forward—in itself a history—left her at last to sleep.
'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed widow to herself. 'Oh, I wish Richard was here—I do!'
Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification, for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so many of the older complications of the sentiment of honour. And meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life—the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.
As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of the dying girl, took a couple of hours' rest, and hurried off again. She passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.
'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking after her sister's retreating figure. 'It is all over! They can't meet now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'
The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine's coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling—to fling a hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.
The stormy light of the afternoon was fading towards sunset. Catherine walked on fast towards the group of houses at the head of the valley, in one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with Mrs. Thornburgh's housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically, but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve, extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed to her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious over-estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like one ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepening her discomfiture at every step. How rich her life had always been in the conviction of usefulness—nay, indispensableness! Her mother's persuasions had dashed it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her her past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light.
And he? Still near her for a few short hours! Every pulse in her had thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered him. But she will see him no more. And she is glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have discovered how cheaply they held her—those dear ones of hers for whom she had lived till now! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity what she had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured, half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is gone she will recover something of that moral equilibrium which has been so shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she has no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years crumbling beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self-control.