“Phœbe, my Phœbe, listen,” said Catharine: “I shall never be Tom’s wife.”
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as that I am here with my head on your pillow.”
“I am sorry.”
She then became silent, and so continued for two hours. Catharine thought she was asleep, but a little after dawn her mother came into the room. She knew better, and saw that the silence was not sleep, but the insensibility of death. In a few minutes she hurried Catharine downstairs, and when she was again admitted Phœbe lay dead, and her pale face, unutterably peaceful and serious, was bound up with a white neckerchief. The soul of the poor servant girl had passed away—only a servant girl—and yet there was something in that soul equal to the sun whose morning rays were pouring through the window. She lies at the back of the meeting-house amongst her kindred, and a little mound was raised over her. Her father borrowed the key of the gate every now and then, and, after his work was over, cut the grass where his child lay, and prevented the weeds from encroaching; but when he died, not long after, his wife had to go into the workhouse, and in one season the sorrel and dandelions took possession, and Phœbe’s grave became like all the others—a scarcely distinguishable undulation in the tall, rank herbage.
CHAPTER XIX
Catharine left the cottage that afternoon, and began to walk home to Eastthorpe. She thought, as she went along, of Phœbe’s confession. She had loved Tom, but had reached the point of perfect acquiescence in any award of destiny, provided only he could be happy. She had faced sickness and death without a murmur; she had no theory of duty, no philosophy, no religion, as it is usually called, save a few dim traditional beliefs, and she was the daughter of common peasants; but she had attained just the one thing essential which religion and philosophy ought to help us to obtain, and, if they do not help us to obtain it, they are nothing. She lived not for herself, nor in herself, and it was not even justice to herself which she demanded. She had not become what she was because death was before her. Death and the prospect of death do not work any change. Catharine called to mind Phœbe’s past life; it was all of a piece, and countless little incidents unnoticed at the time obtained a significance and were interpreted. She knew herself to be Phœbe’s superior intellectually, and that much had been presented to her which was altogether over Phœbe’s horizon. But in all her purposes, and in all her activity, she seemed to have had self for a centre, and she felt that she would gladly give up every single advantage she possessed if she could but depose that self and enthrone some other divinity in its place. Oh the bliss of waking up in the morning with the thoughts turned outwards instead of inwards! Her misery which so weighed upon her might perhaps depart if she could achieve that conquest. She remembered one of Mr. Cardew’s first sermons, when she was at Miss Ponsonby’s, the sermon of which we have heard something, and she cried to herself, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death!”
Strange, but true, precisely at that moment the passion for Mr. Cardew revived with more than its old intensity. Fresh from a deathbed, pondering over what she had learned or thought she had learned there—the very lesson which ought to have taught her to give up Mr. Cardew—she loved him more than ever, and was less than ever able to banish his image from her. She turned out of her direct road and took that which led past his house—swept that way as irresistibly as a mastless hull is swept by the tide. She knew that Mr. Cardew was in the habit of walking out in the afternoon, and she knew the path he usually took. She had not gone far before she met him. She explained what her errand had been, and added that she preferred the bypath because she was able to avoid the dusty Eastthorpe lane.
“I do not know these Crowhursts,” said Mr. Cardew; “they are Dissenters, I believe.”
The subject dropped, and Catharine had not another word to say about Phœbe.