Part 18 (1/2)
”Mark, I want you to prove to her--to everyone--that it is not so.”
”How?”
”By writing a different kind of book--a n.o.ble book. You can do it. Where others have failed, you can succeed.”
He laughed at her, gaily.
”Perhaps, some day, I'll try,” he said. ”But I can only write at present what I have conceived. Till this book is done, I can think of nothing else. I see you are interested, Kitty. I must tell you all I am intending to do.”
He continued, until it was quite evening, expatiating on the force with which he intended to realise in literature the terrors that trooped in his imagination. And by the time he had finished and darkness stood under the trees, Catherine was carried away by the pagan spirit. She thought no more of the possible harm the projected book might work in sensitive natures. She thought only of its power, which she acclaimed.
Mark kissed her with a solemnity of pa.s.sion he had never shown before, and they went back to the house.
It was an immense relief to Mark to open his book of revelation and to allow Catherine to read these pages in it. But he could not be continuously unreserved to any human being. And that evening he subsided into his former light-hearted gaiety, and shrouded the stranger man in an impenetrable veil. Catherine sat with him in wonderment, while the moon came up behind the trees and shone over the clearing before the house. She did not yet understand the inflexible secrecies of genius. A nightingale sang. Its voice was so sweet that Catherine felt as if the whole world were full of tenderness and of sympathy. She said so to Mark, just as she was turning from him to go to bed.
”Ah, Kitty,” he said, ”there are other things in the world besides tenderness and sympathy, thank Heaven. There are terrors, there are crimes, there are strange and fearful things both within us and outside of us.”
”How sad that is, Mark!” said Catherine.
He smiled at her gaily--cruelly, she thought a moment afterwards when she was alone in her bedroom.
”Sad?” he said. ”I don't think so, for I love drama. Life is dramatic.
If it were not it would be intolerable.”
And still the nightingale sang. But he did not hear it. Catherine heard it till she fell asleep.
Now Mark began to write with a.s.siduity. Catherine busied herself with her household duties, with the garden and with charities in the neighbouring Parish. Her mother's rather hysterical beliefs lost their hysteria in her, at this period, and were softened and rendered large hearted. Catherine's sympathy with the world was indeed a living thing, not simply a fine idea. While Mark was shut up every morning with his writing she visited the poor, sat by the sick, and played with the village children. The Parish--this came out forcibly at her trial,--grew to love her. She was the prettiest Lady Bountiful. The impress made upon her by her mother was visible in all this. For Mrs. Ardagh, rigid, melancholy as she was sometimes, was genuinely charitable, genuinely dutiful. If she adored the forms of religion she loved also its essence,--the doing of good. In these many mornings Catherine was like her mother--improved. But in the evenings she no longer resembled Mrs.
Ardagh, but rather, in a degree, echoed her father, and responded to his vehement, if furtive, teachings. For in the evenings Mark read to her what he had written during the day and discussed it with her in all its bearings. He recognised the clear quickness of Catherine's intellect.
Yet she very soon noticed that he was exceedingly inflexible with regard to his work. He liked to discuss, he did not like to alter, it.
One night, when he had finished the last completed chapter, he laid down the ma.n.u.script and said,
”Well, Kitty?”
Catherine was lying on a couch near the open French window. She did not speak until Mark repeated,
”Well?”
Then she said,
”I think that far the finest chapter of your book----”
Mark smiled triumphantly.
”But it seems to me terribly immoral,” she finished.
”Oh, that's all right, dear. So long as it is properly worked out, inevitable.”
”It teaches----”