* * * * *
Catharine went slowly back to the little sitting-room. Meynell was standing abstracted before the fire, his hands clasped in front of him, his head bent. Catharine approached him—drawing quick breath.
"Mr. Meynell—what shall I do—what do you wish me to do or say—with regard to my daughter?"
He turned—pale with amazement.
And so began what one may call—perhaps—the most romantic action of a noble life!
CHAPTER XVII
When Catharine returned to the little sitting-room, in which the darkness of a rainy October evening was already declaring itself, she came shaken by many emotions in which only one thing was clear—that the man before her was a good man in distress, and that her daughter loved him.
If she had been of the true bigot stuff she would have seen in the threatened scandal a means of freeing Mary from an undesirable attachment. But just as in her married life, her heart had not been able to stand against her husband while her mind condemned him, so now. While in theory, and toward people with whom she never came in contact, she had grown even more bitter and intransigent since Robert's death than she had been in her youth, she had all the time been living the daily life of service and compassion which—unknown to herself—had been the real saving and determining force. Impulses of love, impulses of sacrifice toward the miserable, the vile, and the helpless—day by day she had felt them, day by day she had obeyed them. And thus all the arteries, so to speak, of the spiritual life had remained soft and pliant—that life itself in her was still young. It was there in truth that her Christianity lay; while she imagined it to lie in the assent to certain historical and dogmatic statements. And so strong was this inward and vital faith—so strengthened in fact by mere living—that when she was faced with this second crisis in her life, brought actually to close grips with it, that faith, against all that might have been expected, carried her through the difficult place with even greater sureness than at first. She suffered indeed. It seemed to her all through that she was endangering Mary, and condoning a betrayal of her Lord. And yet she could not act upon this belief. She must needs act—with pain often, and yet with mysterious moments of certainty and joy, on quite another faith, the faith which has expressed itself in the perennial cry of Christianity: "Little children, love one another!" And therein lay the difference between her and Barron.
It was therefore in this mixed—and yet single—mood that she came back to Meynell, and asked him—quietly—the strange question: "What shall I do—what do you wish me to do or say—with regard to my daughter?"
Meynell could not for a moment believe that he had heard aright. He stared at her in bewilderment, at first pale, and then in a sudden heat and vivacity of colour.