When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come in—her young husband, to whom she had been married not yet four years—with that indescribable look in the eyes which seemed to divine and confirm all those terrors which had been shaking her during her agonised waiting, there followed a moment between them which words cannot render. When it ended—that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish—she found herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her breast, his hand clasping hers.
'Do you wish me to go, Catherine?' he asked her gently,—'to Algiers?'
Her eyes implored for her.
'Then I will,' he said, but with a long sigh. 'It will only prolong it two months,' he thought; 'and does one not owe it to the people for whom one has tried to live, to make a brave end among them? Ah, no! no! those two months are hers!'
So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary preparations be made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could not wring hers by staying.
After his interview with Robert, and his further interview with Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to make the true state of the case more ghastly plain to the wife than ever, Edmondson went off to Flaxman.
Flaxman heard his news with horror.
'A bad case, you say—advanced?'
'A bad case!' Edmondson repeated gloomily. 'He has been fighting against it too long under that absurd delusion of clergyman's throat. If only men would not insist upon being their own doctors! And, of course, that going down to Murewell the other day was madness. I shall go with him to Algiers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that career, cut short! This is a queer sort of world!'
When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the afternoon, he went like a man going himself to execution. In the hall he met Catherine.