‘Nothing more than is necessary. You don’t suppose things like this can be said without hurting the feelings,’ said the curate. ‘Poor boy,’ he added, after a moment, ‘I would do a great deal to get him his wishes. It seems hard that I should be the one to say he’s not to have them.’
‘But you approve? You see there is nothing else to be done: you agree with me that it would be impossible to let it go on? I am sure, whoever else may misconceive my meaning, you understand,’ Mrs. Egerton said, with a sudden little pressure of her hand upon his arm.
He looked at her with a kind of appeal in his eyes.
‘I think I understand,’ he said, ‘and I approve, too, in a kind of way. But you will be kind? You will not push it too far?’
‘I hope I am not unkind,’ Mrs. Egerton said.
Thus it was that Mr. Cattley went, in the afternoon of the day following Susie’s arrival, to the old house of the Sandfords. He went somewhat against the grain; but yet there was sufficient justice in the commission given him. He thought with a little sigh how entirely natural and appropriate it would be that John should love Elly, and Elly John. If it was so, they would be delivered at once, in the happiness and harmony of nature, from all the constraints which distracted life. He himself had loved, if he had ever ventured to think so, amiss. He had given his affections to a woman entirely out of his sphere, of a different development, almost of a different generation. Any idea of marrying her, of a house made bright by her love, had never been possible. Many moments of a happiness very sweet, though always subdued, he had no doubt possessed. She had been if impossible as a wife, yet his dearest friend, his frequent companion, and his years had passed very sweetly by her side. But if it had chanced to him in his youth, like John, to love somebody of his own age, somebody within his reach! If she had been young, like Elly, and fancy-free when he was as John! He sighed to think how many embarrassments, how many self-denials those two young creatures would escape in the love which had no complications in it. And then he recollected, with a shock, that he was going to put a stop to this love, that he was going as the accepted messenger of family pride and importance, of the difference between the rector’s daughter and an obscure young man whose pedigree would not bear examination. Mr. Cattley shook his head a little and rubbed his eyes; was it possible that this was the errand upon which he was going? He then began to think of the matter from the other point of view. It was indeed very natural that it should be thought undesirable for Elly, who might, as people say, marry anybody, to have her affections surprised before she knew anything of the world, or had seen anyone, by a young man of obscure origin and uncertain prospects. They were quite justified in thinking so, quite right, indeed, and in trying to save her from a connection which was almost too natural, into which she might be drawn by the mere force of circumstances, by the habit of liking John, and the impossibility of understanding the difference between liking and love. Yes, he said to himself, Elly must be saved. She must not be drawn inadvertently into a union which was too natural, which seemed inevitable, the expedient of a story. No, no! Elly, and John, too, must be saved from drifting into that.
He carried on this controversy, which was not really a controversy, for his heart first took one side and then the other, and he was the partisan of both, as he went down the street, mechanically returning all the salutations made to him. He said to himself that it was a strange world, that wherever one turned there was trouble, things not going right in the battle of life, all for want of being put in the right way at the beginning. His sense of all these contradictions was possibly deepened by the consciousness which never left him that he was going away. He was to leave all these people whom he knew, and whose troubles he understood, and to leave the way of life to which he had become accustomed, and the sweetness of the friendship which was his, that sweetness in his life which replaced the wife and children of other men. Mr. Cattley’s heart rebelled a little in spite of himself. Why had he to go away? Not by his own wish entirely. He would have gone on for ever if they would let him, and nobody would have been the worse. He was going away to better himself, so they all said, because at his age it was right he should be independent and have a living of his own and settle down.
Settle down! How was he ever to settle down? He thought drearily of the new rectory in which he had already spent a dreary month or two. And now he had come back to initiate Percy into his duties, and to take leave of all he was most used to, and cared for most. John! That he should have to interfere with Jack,—to whom everything was possible,—he, in his middle-aged desolation! What should he himself do? The worst thing would be if he were ever forced by stress of circumstances to marry some innocent woman who might be put in his way, and do her grievous wrong, marrying for convenience because it would not be possible for him to live alone. It was John who ought to interfere, who should take his old tutor by the shoulders and say to him— What do you mean by it? What right have you to yield to external pressure in this way and tear yourself from all you care for in life? If the tables were turned on him, either by John or Elly, Mr. Cattley felt it would be only just: but nevertheless, holding to his consigne to the last moment, he went on—to do her bidding dutifully, and her business, and make an end of any dream that might be stealing into John’s imagination. Poor John!
Mr. Cattley walked into the parlour which he knew so well, and where he could not help feeling the old people must be sitting, waiting to upbraid him, for conspiring—he who had always professed to be so proud of the boy—against Jack’s happiness. He did not pay any attention to what the maid said in answer to his inquiry for Mr. Sandford, but went in straight, as he had been accustomed to do, without announcement or preliminary. And then there occurred to Mr. Cattley something of the same miraculous effect which on the evening before had paralysed Percy. There rose up as he entered, meeting him with the honest, modest look of a pair of eyes sincere and sweet, and that tranquil air of home-dwelling and content which makes an ordinary room into a sort of palace of the soul—Susie, not John. He looked at her in great surprise: for, though he knew that John’s sister had come, he had not realised nor thought of her, and for the first moment did not even comprehend that this was she.
‘My brother is out,’ said Susie. ‘If you will sit down, I am sure he will not be long. He has gone up to the rectory, I think, with some books.’