Mr. Furze retired from the table, where the sun fell full upon him, and sat in the easy chair, where he was more in the shade.
“He overtook me somewhere near the Rectory.”
“Now, Catharine, don’t answer your mother like that,” interposed Mr. Furze; “you know what you heard, or might have heard, last Sunday morning, that prevarication is very much like a lie; why don’t you speak out the truth?”
Catharine was silent for a moment.
“I have answered exactly the question mother asked.”
“Catharine, you know perfectly well what I mean,” said Mrs. Furze; “what is the use of pretending you do not! Tom would never dare to walk with you in a public street, and at night, too, if there were not something more than you like to say. Tom Catchpole! whose father sold laces on the bridge; and to think of all we have done for you, and the money we have spent on you, and the pains we have taken to bring you up respectably! I will not say anything about religion, and all that, for I daresay that is nothing to you, but you might have had some consideration for your mother, especially in her weak state of health, before you broke her heart, and yet I blame myself, for you always had low tastes—going to Bellamy’s, and consorting with people of that kind rather than with your mother’s friends. Do you suppose Mrs. Colston will come near us again! And it all comes of trying to do one’s best, for there’s Carry Hawkins, only a grocer’s daughter, who never had a sixpence spent on her compared with what you have, and she is engaged to Carver, the doctor at Cambridge. Oh, it’s a serpent’s tooth, it is, and if we had never scraped and screwed for you, and denied ourselves, but left you to yourself, you might have been better; oh dear, oh dear!”
Catharine held her tongue. She saw instantly that if she denied any engagement with Tom she would not be believed, and that in any case Tom would have to depart. Moreover, one of her defects was a certain hardness to persons for whom she had small respect, and she did not understand that just because Mrs. Furze was her mother, she owed her at least deference, and, if possible, a tenderness due to no other person. However weak, foolish, and even criminal parents may be, a child ought to honour them as Moses commanded, for the injunction is, and should be, entirely unconditional.
“Catharine,” said Mr. Furze, “why do you not answer your mother?”
“I cannot; I had better leave.”
She opened the door and went to her room. After she had left further debate arose, and three points were settled: First, that no opposition should be offered to a visit to Chapel Farm, which had been proposed for the next day, as she would be better at the Farm than at the Terrace; secondly, that Tom and she were in love with one another; and thirdly, that not a word should be said to Tom. “Leave that to me,” said Mrs. Furze again. Although she saw nothing distinctly, a vague, misty hope dawned upon her, the possibility of something she could not yet discern, and, notwithstanding the blow she had received, she was decidedly more herself within an hour after breakfast than she had been during the twelve hours preceding.