Charles hardly knew what to say. In his heart he really acquitted Catherine of the immodest behaviour with which he had charged her, but his humour demanded an outlet. What really wrung his withers was his smarting sense of the gulf between himself and the community from which he was taking a wife. His origin was no higher than that of the people whose voices he could still hear as they chatted round the precincts of Bethesda, but his uncle’s business had led him into a more sophisticated class, and he had identified himself passionately with it. In this access of contempt and wrath he had been stung into positive fury by the meeting with Heber Moorhouse; for he was a jealous man, and the thought that the girl he loved had been the promised wife of such an one as Black Heber was more than he could bear. It had almost made him hate Catherine.
They walked on in silence. She turned her face from him and wept on; and Saunders’s sense of justice was beginning to be touched—as the sense of justice in the weak so often is—not by the actual rights of the matter, but by his own sentiments. He grew a little less furious. By the time they neared their destination he put out his hand and drew her closer to him.
“There, there,” he said, speaking more gently, “we’ll say no more about it. You’ll have more than one gown, I’ll go bail, when we’re man an’ wife.”
Catherine Dennis’s existence had been dependent upon the will of others ever since she could remember and no thought of rebellion against her lover’s unreasonableness came to her. A so-called aunt had brought her up and at her death she had gone into service; she had never had any choice in her course of life until ‘Black Heber’ had found his way into it. Even the quarrel which parted them had been the work of a third person, and Catherine had suffered and wept in secret and been barely consoled by those who never ceased telling her that he was a wild fellow and that she was well rid of him.
Only one person had taken a different line, and that was Mrs. Job Williams who lived near Pencoed Chapel, on the lower slope of the Black Mountain.
“Mrs. Job,” as she was called by her neighbours, was a sharp-featured, middle-aged matron, whose absolute ascendency over her husband had made him almost a negligible quantity with his acquaintance. Her own personality was so marked, and the impression she made upon the minds of her neighbours so keen, that it was considered a lucky thing for Catherine Dennis, tossed about, as she was, to have found anchorage in ‘Mrs. Job’s’ goodwill. Her mission was to keep the little Baptist Chapel of Pencoed in order, and she lived in a cottage beside the green track connecting that place with the more frequented ways along the hill. She was a fervent Baptist and it was owing to her that Catherine had been brought into the community. Only her feeling of responsibility for the girl’s soul had prevented her from turning her angular back upon her when Heber arrived one evening at her door, and she discovered that the two had parted; she had wrestled sorely with herself in her determination to keep friendly with Catherine, and that responsibility was probably the one thing that could have enabled her to do so. The girl was impressionable and excitable; she was determined that it should not be her fault if the lamb she had brought into the fold wandered back into the Church. She it was who had influenced Catherine to persuade Saunders to be rebaptized in Bethesda pool. Mrs. Job’s heart was hot within her, for she liked the shepherd more than she did most people. She had no child and the lonely visions that came to her of the son she might have borne wore the face of Black Heber.
And now Catherine’s wedding was only a few days off. It was to take place at an early hour in the morning and she was to sleep at Mrs. Job’s house on the preceding night. But though her prospects were so good and though she was leaving a life of hard work for one of comparative ease; though Charles’s wrath had cooled during their long walk, she stood at the gate of the farm looking after him with a downcast heart. She had expected to be so happy, but it had been a day of tears. He had not said a word about his broken promise, and she had not found courage to speak of it.