Mr. Cattley did not disturb her for some time. He let that passion wear itself out. Then he went and stood with his back to the fireplace, as Englishmen use, though it was empty.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘that we understand, let us lay our heads together and think what can be done.’
‘There is nothing to be done,’ said Susie. ‘Oh, Mr. Cattley, go away, don’t pity me. I can’t bear it. There is only one thing for me to do, and that is to go home to mother and John.’
‘I do not pity you,’ he said, ‘far from that. You have got the same work as the angels have. Why should I pity you? It hurts them too, perhaps, if they are as fair spirits as we think. But I am going with you, Susie: for two, even when the second is not good for much, are better than one.’
She clasped her hands and looked up at him with a gaze of entreaty.
‘Don’t,’ she cried, ‘don’t mix yourself up with us! Oh, go away to the people who are fond of you, to the people who are your equals. What has a clergyman to do with a man who has been in prison? Oh, never mind me, Mr. Cattley. I am going to my own belongings. We must all put up with it together the best way we can.’
‘Susie,’ he said, softly, ‘you are losing time. Don’t you know there is an evening train?’
CHAPTER XIII.
THE DARKNESS THAT COULD BE FELT.
John rose late next morning to a changed world. It no longer seemed to be of any importance what he did. For the first time in his life he got up in the forenoon and breakfasted as late as if he had been a fashionable young man with nothing to do. He was not fashionable indeed, but there was no longer any occupation that claimed him. He had nothing to do. He flung himself on his sofa, after the breakfast, which he had no heart to touch, had been taken away. What did it matter what he did now? He had not slept till morning. He was fagged and jaded, as if he had been travelling all night. Travelling all night! that was nothing, not worth a thought. How often had he stepped out of a train, and, after his bath and his breakfast, rushed off to the office with his report of what he had been doing, as fresh as if he had passed the night in the most comfortable of beds! that was nothing. Very, very different was it to lie all night tossing, with a fever swarm of intolerable thoughts going through and through your head, and to rise up to feel yourself without employment or vocation, to see the world indifferently swinging on without you, when you yourself perhaps had thought that some one train of things, at least, would come to a dead stand without you. But there was no stoppage visible anywhere. It was he who had stopped like a watch that has run down, but everything else went on as before.
He had written his letter to Elly on the previous night. Thus everything was crammed into one day—his bad reception at the office, his discovery of the man who had thus injured him, who had injured him so much more sorely by the mere fact of existing; and the conclusion of his early romance and love-dream. He had not sent the letter yet. He had kept it open to read it in the morning, to see whether anything should be added or taken away. So many words rose to his lips which appealed involuntarily to Elly’s love, to her sympathy—and he did not want to do that. He wanted to be quite imperative about it, as a thing on which there could be no second word to say. Elly could not call a convict father. She must never even know of the man who was John’s destroyer, though he was at the same time John’s father. He shuddered at the words, notwithstanding that a great melting and softening was in his heart towards the strange, loosely-knitted intelligence which seemed to drift through everything—life, and morality, and natural affection—without feeling any one influence stronger than the other, or any moral necessity, either logical or practical. To be brought thus in all the absolutism of youth, and in all the rigid rightness of young respectability, face to face with a man to whom nothing was absolute, and the most fundamental principles were matters of argument and opinion, gave such a shock to John’s being as it is impossible to estimate. It seemed to cut him adrift from everything that kept him to his place. Had the discovery been uncomplicated by anything at the office, John might have felt it differently. It would, in any way, have taken the heart out of him, but it would not, perhaps, have interfered with his work. But now everything was gone.