Part 17 (2/2)
In this house the young couple were to face for the first time the reality of married life. Hitherto they had only faced its romance.
The house was beautiful in an old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Its rooms were low and rather dark. A wood stood round it. The garden was a wild clearing, fringed with enormous clumps of rhododendron. Wood doves cooed in the trees like invisible lovers unable to cease from gus.h.i.+ng. Under the trees ferns grew in ma.s.ses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer house. In winter it must have been but a dreary hermitage.
The servants greeted them respectfully. The horses neighed in the stables. The dogs barked, and leaped up in welcome, then, when they were noticed and patted, depressed their backs in joyous humility, and, lifting their flexible lips, grinned amorously, glancing sideways from the hands that they desired. It was an eminently unvulgar, and ought to have been a very sweet, home-coming.
But was it sweet to Catherine?
She asked herself that question, and the fact that she did so proved that it was not wholly sweet. Already the future oppressed her. In this house, which seemed full of the smell of the country, of the very odour of peace, she felt that the stranger, the second Mark--scarcely known to her as yet--was to be born, was to gain strength and grow. She feared him. She watched for him. But, for the first few days, he did not show himself. The gra.s.shoppers chirped and revelled in the gra.s.s. Mark and Catherine sat in the wood, wandered on the hills, rode in the valleys, cooed a little even, like the doves hidden in the green shadows of the glades, and making ceaseless music. The lovers--for they were still lovers at this time--made a gay dreamland for themselves. But dreams cannot and ought not to last. If they did they would become painfully enervating. One day, in the wood, Mark resumed the conversation of the Pavilion.
”Because I am rich I must not be idle, Kitty,” he said.
And into his dark eyes there crept that look of the stranger man.
”Thank G.o.d that I am rich,” he added.
”Why, Mark dear?”
”Because I can dare to do what sort of work I choose,” he answered. ”The pot boils without my labour. So I am independent of the public, whom I will win in my own way. If I have to wait it will not matter.”
And then, speaking with growing enthusiasm, he gave Kitty a sketch of a book he had projected. The doves cooed all through the plot, which was a sad and terrible one, very uncommon and very unlike Mark. Catherine listened to it with, alternately, the mind of her father and the mind of her mother. It was the old antagonism of the Puritan and the pagan. But now it raged in one person instead of in two, as the girl sat under the soft darkness of the trees, listening to the eager voice of her boy husband, who was beginning at last to cast the skin of his reserve. The voice went on and on, interrupted only by the doves. But sometimes Catherine felt as if she leaned upon the painted railing of the Pavilion, and heard the distant cries of the golden City. At last Mark said,
”Kitty, that is what I mean to do.”
”It is terrible,” she said.
And she pursed her lips like her mother.
”Yes,” Mark answered, with enthusiasm. ”It is terrible. It is ghastly.”
Catherine looked at him with an intense and growing surprise. She was wondering how the conception of such horrors could take place in a man so gay as Mark.
At last she said,
”Mark, you feel your own power, do you not?”
”Kitty,” he replied quietly, almost modestly, yet with a firm gravity that was strong, ”I do feel that I have something to say and that I shall be able to say it in my book. I have waited a long while. Now I believe that I am ready, that it is time for me to begin.”
”Then, Mark, if you feel that you have this power, don't you feel a desire to conquer the greatest difficulties in your art, to show that you can succeed where others have failed?”
He looked at her curiously, realising that she had something to say to him, and that she was trying to prepare the way before it.
”Come, Kitty,” he said. ”Say what you wish to say. You have the right.
What is it?”
Catherine told him of her conversation with Jenny.
”That little thin girl,” he said. ”So she thinks wickedness more interesting, more many-sided than virtue, more dramatic in its possibilities. Well, she and I are agreed. But what was it you wanted?”
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