It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment they stood there together it was being impressed upon him that in fact this was what she meant, what she had contemplated from the beginning.
'Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,' she cried, again clinging to him. 'Oh, think for me! You know what I feel; that I dare not risk what is not mine!'
He kissed her again, and then moved away from her to the window. It began to be plain to him that his effort was merely futile, and had better not have been made. But his heart was very sore.
'Do you ever ask yourself,' he said presently, looking steadily into the night—no, I don't think you can, Catherine—what part the reasoning faculty, that faculty which marks us out from the animal, was meant to play in life? Did God give it to us simply that you might trample upon it and ignore it, both in yourself and me?'
She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, her hair falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the nobly-featured face blanched by the moonlight. She did not attempt a reply, but the melancholy of an invincible resolution, which was, so to speak, not her own doing, but rather was like a necessity imposed upon her from outside, breathed through her silence.
He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the gesture reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in the Murewell library—the same delicate austere beauty, the same tenderness, the same underlying reserve. He took her outstretched hands and held them against his breast. His hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly right, and that to accept the barriers she was setting up would impoverish all their future life together. But he could not struggle with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a practical trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the danger of rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the religious temper, the dread of which had once before risen spectre-like in his heart.
So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the charm, all the delightfulness, of which under the circumstances she was mistress. They wandered up the Rhone valley, through the St. Gothard, and spent a fortnight between Como and Lugano. During these days her one thought was to revive and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to the various heroic futilities by which she would try—as part of her nursing mission—to make the future look less empty and their distress less real. Of course under all this delicate give and take both suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage had failed them, and that they had come dismally down to a second best. But after all they were young, and the autumn was beautiful—and though they hurt each other, they were alone together and constantly, passionately, interested in each other. Italy, too, softened all things—even Catherine's English tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury of the Italian autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was still round them; as long as they were still among the cities of the Lombard plain—that battle-ground and highway of nations, which roused all Robert's historical enthusiasm, and set him reading, discussing, thinking, in his old impetuous way, about something else than minute problems of Christian evidence,—the new-born friction between them was necessarily reduced to a minimum.
But with their return home, with their plunge into London life, the difficulties of the situation began to define themselves more sharply. In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest memories was the memory of their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert's anxiety to make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what was æsthetically correct. But during their furnishing days he was never tired of wandering about in search of pretty things—a rug, a screen, an engraving—which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to live. He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness, and then Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely. She would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had gone, she would move slowly to the window and look out at the great mass of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth—how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the child.
But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of the senses now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the presence of the profound spiritual difference circumstance had developed between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict—All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone over me!