She lifted the latch and paused on the threshold, looking back into the room like some ominous, uncouth shadow between Catherine and the star-set night outside. Her steps were audible crossing the space between the barn and her own house, and the bang of the door, and the loud scrape of the key as she locked it, had a suggestive finality that awed the listener sitting alone with the guttering candle.
Catherine remained crouched where she was; she did not go to bed, for her body seemed as numb and frozen as her heart. The sound of the shutting door brought home the truth that another door had closed for good and all; though Mrs. Job befriended her still and was giving her the hospitality of her roof on this last night of her girlhood, she was as much cut off from her as if she had openly declared herself an enemy. Catherine understood that. She felt herself lost, somehow, in the incalculable ways of life; she knew herself to be timid and irresolute to an absolutely fatal degree and she clung all the more to any hand that was stretched forward.
She wondered why she had parted from Heber Moorhouse; for, in spite of the half-hearted fear with which his uncommon personality and decided doings inspired her, she had liked him better than Saunders. He might look like an outlaw, but he was an honest man. Why had she listened to her mistress at the farm when she told her nobody but a born fool would refuse Charles Saunders? Heber was a proud man, she knew; an unforgiving one, she believed. No doubt he hated her now and Mrs. Job was turning away from her for ever. She remembered Charles’s bitter words and heavy-browed rage on the way home from Bethesda. She had seen a new Charles that day. Was that the man she was to live with the rest of her life, and for whose sake she was parting with her old ways and her old friends? He had said a good deal to her about the home he was going to give her and enumerated its comforts and glories many times; and she had listened with pleasure and looked forward to the realisation of his pictures; but now she did so no more. These things were untried, terrible, full of pitfalls. And worse than any vision she could raise, or any misgiving about her betrothed, was the half-superstitious belief growing on her that she was doing wrong.
Catherine’s fears had been worked on as much by Mrs. Job’s grim appearance and the menace in her voice as by any words she had said. She was dazed and weary, so weary that the effort of undressing was too much for her slackened will. There was no clock in the barn to tell her how the hours went by, or how many lay between her and to-morrow’s fate. It seemed that everything had passed out of her control and that she could only be still, a sad, helpless heap, her hands clasped round her knees and her head bowed on the footboard of the wooden bedstead. And this was the eve of her wedding!
She did not know how long she had stayed there when there was a sound outside which made her sit upright to listen. Before she could collect her wits, a smart, short rap fell upon the door and a hand passed over the outside of it as though groping for the latch.
Despairing fear seized Catherine. She did not move nor answer and her heart bounded in her as though it would beat her side to pieces. As the knock sounded again she hid her face in her palms. When she looked up the door was open, and a tall figure stood on the threshold, with a star looking over either shoulder out of the patch of fathomless sky framed in the doorway.
She could not even scream as Heber Moorhouse strode towards her, but she was aware of a horse which stood outside and the warm contact of a man’s hands as they closed over her own.
“I’ve come for ye, Catherine,” he said, drawing her to her feet.
She tried to free her hands, but he held them fast.
“Saunders shan’t have ye,” he went on. “When he comes to Pencoed in the morning there’ll be nobody to meet him but Mrs. Job. You’re coming with me.”