And then she put her arms down on a table near and hid her face upon them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves—sore, poor passionate child, that she was betraying herself; sorer still that, as she told herself, Catherine was sending her to Berlin as a consolation. When girls have love-troubles the first thing their elders do is to look for a diversion. She felt sick and humiliated. Catherine had been talking her over with the family, she supposed.
Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her hair and saying soothing things.
'I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you mustn't leave me out of your life, dear, though I am so stupid and unmusical. You must write to me about all you do. We must begin a new time. Oh, I feel so guilty sometimes,' she went on, falling into a low intensity of voice that startled Rose, and made her look hurriedly up. 'I fought against your music, I suppose, because I thought it was devouring you—leaving no room for—for religion—for God. I was jealous of it for Christ's sake. And all the time I was blundering! Oh, Rose,' and she sank on her knees beside the chair, resting her head against the girl's shoulder, 'papa charged me to make you love God, and I torture myself with thinking that, instead, it has been my doing, my foolish clumsy doing, that you have come to think religion dull and hard. Oh, my darling, if I could make amends—if I could get you not to love your art less but to love it in God! Christ is the first reality; all things else are real and lovely in Him. Oh, I have been frightening you away from Him! I ought to have drawn you near. I have been so—so silent, so shut up, I have never tried to make you feel what it was kept me at His feet! Oh, Rose, darling, you think the world real, and pleasure and enjoyment real. But if I could have made you see and know the things I have seen up in the mountains—among the poor, the dying—you would have felt Him saving, redeeming, interceding, as I did. Oh, then you must, you would have known that Christ only is real, that our joys can only truly exist in Him. I should have been more open—more faithful—more humble.'
She paused with a long quivering sigh. Rose suddenly lifted herself, and they fell into each other's arms.
Rose, shaken and excited, thought, of course, of that night at Burwood, when she had won leave to go to Manchester. This scene was the sequel to that—the next stage in one and the same process. Her feeling was much the same as that of the naturalist who comes close to any of the hidden operations of life. She had come near to Catherine's spirit in the growing. Beside that sweet expansion, how poor and feverish and earth-stained the poor child felt herself!
But there were many currents in Rose—many things striving for the mastery. She kissed Catherine once or twice, then she drew herself back suddenly, looking into the other's face. A great wave of feeling rushed up and broke.
'Catherine, could you ever have married a man that did not believe in Christ?'
She flung the question out—a kind of morbid curiosity, a wild wish to find an outlet of some sort for things pent up in her, driving her on.
Catherine started. But she met Rose's half-frowning eyes steadily.
'Never, Rose! To me it would not be marriage.'