Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the conversation at the Hall, described—in broken words of fire and pain—the moment of spiritual wreck which had come upon him in the August lane, his night of struggle, his resolve to go to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so much narrating as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love's. Love was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the pale varying face, were really pleading, through all the long story of intellectual change.
At the mention of Mr. Grey Catherine grew restless; she sat up suddenly, with a cry of bitterness.
'Robert, why did you go away from me? It was cruel. I should have known first. He had no right—no right!'
She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth set and stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this time, and as Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught her face, and brought out the haggard change in it. He held out his hands to her with a low groan, helpless against her reproach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what Mr. Grey had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel towards her specially. He felt that everything he could say would but torture the wounded heart still more.
But she did not notice the outstretched hands. She covered her face in silence a moment, as though trying to see her way more clearly through the mazes of disaster; and he waited. At last she looked up.
'I cannot follow all you have been saying,' she said, almost harshly. 'I know so little of books, I cannot give them the place you do. You say you have convinced yourself the Gospels are like other books, full of mistakes, and credulous, like the people of the time; and therefore you can't take what they say as you used to take it. But what does it all quite mean? Oh, I am not clever—I cannot see my way clear from thing to thing as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so—so—terribly to you?' and she faltered. 'Do you think nothing is true because something may be false? Did not—did not—Jesus still live, and die, and rise again?—can you doubt—do you doubt—that He rose—that He is God—that He is in heaven—that we shall see Him?'
She threw an intensity into every word, which made the short breathless questions thrill through him, through the nature saturated and steeped as hers was in Christian association, with a bitter accusing force. But he did not flinch from them.
'I can believe no longer in an Incarnation and Resurrection,' he said slowly, but with a resolute plainness. 'Christ is risen in our hearts, in the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a natural product of human feeling and imagination; and God was in Jesus—pre-eminently, as He is in all great souls, but not otherwise—not otherwise in kind than He is in me or you.'
His voice dropped to a whisper. She grew paler and paler.
'So to you,' she said presently in the same strange altered voice. 'My father—when I saw that light on his face before he died, when I heard him cry, "Master, I come!" was dying—deceived—deluded. Perhaps even,' and she trembled, 'you think it ends here—our life—our love?'