Irresolute Catherine

by Violet Jacob

Opposite to the house, but on the farther side of the way, a paved channel was cut from the stream to a square pool the sides of which were walled by slabs of stone. From this another channel led to the edge of the high ground, but at the present moment it was blocked by a single slab, the removal of which would drain the basin dry. The inlet from the main flow was controlled in like manner, and now both these sluices were closed and more than three feet of water lay in the pool, dark, and spotted with islands of bursting bubbles. A couple of two-wheeled vehicles rested on their shafts in the yard, while the beasts belonging to them, tethered upon the grass, got all they could out of their situation.

As Heber emerged from the outhouse in which he had tied up his pony to approach the pool, two persons were standing apart from the rest, with their backs turned to him, and he went towards a thick place, from which he could see them without being noticed. The woman was a young, slight creature, soft-eyed, and with a swift gentleness of movement unlike that of the working class to which she belonged. Her clear skin flushed when her companion spoke to her as she stood by him holding a hymn-book and nervously turning its leaves. She had a sensitive mouth and when she looked down her lashes rested in a broad fringe upon her cheek.

The other was a human being of a very different type, a man of ruddy complexion, with white teeth showing in a pleasant smile when he spoke; he was well dressed and had the assured bearing of one who expects well of the world. Moorhouse watched the pair from where he stood in the background of alder stems. It was easy now to see why he was called ‘Black Heber.’

As more people arrived at the spot the girl seemed to shrink closer to the man beside her; and when three women went off alone towards the house, she gave her book into his hand and prepared to follow them.

“It’s time now,” she said tremulously. “I must go. You’ll follow soon, Charles.”

“I suppose you must have your way, Catherine,” he said.

He looked after her as she disappeared and the door of the old inn closed behind her. Then a dark-coated man held up his hand for silence and the whole assembly went down upon its knees; Heber, too, knelt in his brake of alder. The dark-coated man began to pray aloud.

The prayer had continued a little time when Charles, who was looking eagerly towards the house from under the hand with which he had covered his face, saw the four women emerge again and come across the yard.

They approached slowly, one behind the other, a grey-headed woman first; and there was something in the solemn demeanour of each that sent Charles Saunders’s mind back to the woodcuts of martyrdoms and executions he had seen as a boy in his school history-books. This half-barbarous scene was heightening the barrier which his slightly superior station had raised between himself and Catherine Dennis, though he was to be married to her in a week, and though he believed it to have fallen altogether. He frowned as the prayer ceased and he took his hands from his eyes. So far as he was anything, he was a Baptist by force of parentage and tradition, though the doctrine of total immersion appealed neither to him nor to his family. Nevertheless, he had promised her that he would embrace it practically, and he glanced at the small knot of men who awaited their turn to be baptized and with whom he was to present himself when the women came up from the pool.

The quiet figures stood modestly in a row behind the minister, Catherine and the grey-haired woman together; the girl’s colour was mounting and fading again in her face. She looked over for a moment at her affianced husband, and he could see the exaltation that burned in her eyes, suggesting to him more than ever the idea of martyrdom. That sexless exaltation divided her from him too. He shifted from foot to foot and a smouldering anger was in him. It grew as he noticed that, though the other three wore boots and stockings, she had slipped her feet into a pair of shoes only and her bare ankles could be seen under her stuff petticoat. Heber’s eyes, which looked dark indeed, were set on her, and, as Saunders suddenly perceived him among the trees, the anger kindled in him like a flame.