Part 23 (1/2)
CHAPTER VIII
Meanwhile, for Catharine Elsmere and Mary these days of early autumn were pa.s.sing in a profound external quiet which bore but small relation to the mental history of mother and daughter.
The tranquillity indeed of the little water-locked cottage was complete.
Mrs. Flaxman at the big house took all the social brunt upon herself. She set no limit to her own calls, or to her readiness to be called upon. The Flaxman dinner and tennis parties were soon an inst.i.tution in the neighbourhood; and the distinguished persons who gathered at Maudeley for the Flaxman week-ends shed a reflected l.u.s.tre on Upcote itself. But Rose Flaxman stoutly protected her widowed sister. Mrs. Elsmere was delicate and in need of rest; she was not to be expected to take part in any social junketings, and callers were quite plainly warned off.
For all of which Catharine Elsmere was grateful to a younger sister, grotesquely unlike herself in temperament and character, yet brought steadily closer to her by the mere pa.s.sage of life. Rose was an artist and an optimist. In her youth she had been an eager and exquisite musician; in her middle life she was a loving and a happy woman, though she too had known a tragic moment in her first youth. Catharine, her elder by some years, still maintained, beneath an exquisite refinement, the strong north-country characteristics of the Westmoreland family to which the sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race.
She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her pa.s.sionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved the more enduring.
For years past she had spent herself in missionary work for the Church, in London; and though for Robert's sake she had maintained for long a slender connection that no one misunderstood with the New Brotherhood, the slow effect of his withdrawal from her life made itself inevitably felt. She stiffened and narrowed intellectually; while for all sinners and sufferers, within the lines of sympathy she gradually traced out for herself, she would have willingly given her body to be burned, so strong was the Franciscan thirst in her for the self-effacement and self-sacrifice that belong to the Christian ideal, carried to intensity.
So long as Mary was a child, her claim upon her mother had to some extent balanced the claims of what many might have thought a devastating and depersonalizing charity. Catharine was a tender though an austere mother; she became and deserved to become the idol of her daughter. But as Mary grew up she was drawn inevitably into her mother's activities; and Catharine, in the blindness of her ascetic faith, might have injured the whole spring of the girl's youth by the tremendous strain thus put upon it by affection on the one hand and pity on the other.
Mercifully, perhaps, for them both, Catharine's nerve and strength suddenly gave way; and with them that abnormal exaltation and clearness of spiritual vision which had carried her through many sorrowing years.
She entered upon a barren and darkened path; the Christian joy deserted her, and there were hours and days when little more than the Christian terrors remained. It was her perception of this which roused such a tender and desperate pity in Mary. Her mother's state fell short indeed of religious melancholy; but for a time it came within sight of it.
Catharine dreaded to be found herself a castaway; and the memory of Robert's denials of the faith--magnified by her mental state, like trees in mist--had now become an ever-haunting misery which tortured her unspeakably. Her mind was possessed by the parables of judgment--the dividing of the sheep from the goats, the shutting of the door of salvation on those who had refused the heavenly offers, and by all those sayings of the early Church that make ”faith” the only pa.s.sport to eternal safety.
Her saner mind struggled in vain against what was partly a physical penalty for defied physical law. And Mary also, her devoted companion, whose life depended hour by hour on the aspects and changes of her mother, must needs be drawn within the shadow of Catharine's dumb and phantom-ridden pain. The pain itself was dumb, because it concerned the deepest feelings of a sternly reserved woman. But mingled with the pain were other matters--resentments, antagonisms--the expression of which often half consciously relieved it. She rose in rebellion against those sceptical and deadly forces of the modern world which had swept her beloved from the narrow way. She fled them for herself; she feared them for Mary, in whom she had very early divined the working of Robert's apt.i.tudes and powers.
And now--by ill-fortune--a tired and suffering woman had no sooner found refuge and rest in the solitude of Forked Pond than, thanks partly to the Flaxmans' new friends.h.i.+p for Upcote's revolutionary parson, and partly to all the public signs, not to be escaped, of the commotion brewing in the diocese, and in England generally, the same agitations, the same troubles which had destroyed her happiness and peace of mind in the past, came clattering about her again.
Every one talked of them; every one took a pa.s.sionate concern in them; the newspapers were full of them. The personality of Meynell, or that of the Bishop; the characters and motives of his opponents; the chances of the struggle--and the points on which it turned; even in the little solitary house between the waters Catharine could not escape them. The Bishop, too, was an old friend; before his promotion he had been the inc.u.mbent of a London parish in which Catharine had worked. She was no sooner settled at Forked Pond than he came to see her; and what more natural than he should speak of the anxieties weighing upon him to one so able to feel for them?
Then!--the first involuntary signs of Mary's interest in, Mary's sympathy with, the offender! In Catharine's mind a thousand latent terrors sprang at once to life. For a time--some weeks--she had succeeded in checking all developments. Invitations were refused; meetings were avoided. But gradually the situation changed. Points of contact began inevitably to multiply between Mary and the disturber of Christ's peace in Upcote.
Mary's growing friends.h.i.+p for Alice Puttenham, her chance encounters with Meynell there, or in the village, or in the Flaxmans' drawing-room, were all distasteful and unwelcome to Catharine Elsmere. At least her Robert had sacrificed himself--had done the honest and honourable thing. But this man--wounding the Church from within--using the opportunities of the Church for the destruction of the Church--who would make excuses for such a combatant?
And the more keenly she became aware of the widening gulf between her thoughts and Mary's--of Mary's involuntary, instinctive sympathy with the enemy--the greater was her alarm.
For the first time in all her strenuous, self-devoted life she would sometimes make much of her physical weakness in these summer days, so as to keep Mary with her, to prevent her from becoming more closely acquainted with Meynell and Meynell's ideas. And in fact this new anxiety interfered with her recovery; she had only to let herself be ill, and ill most genuinely she was.
Mary understood it all, and submitted. Her mother's fears were indeed amply justified! Mary's secret mind was becoming absorbed, from a distance, in Meynell's campaign; Meynell's personality, through all hindrance and difficulty--nay, perhaps, because of them--was gradually seizing upon and mastering her own; and processes of thought that, so long as she and her mother were, so to speak, alone in the world together, were still immature and potential, grew apace. The woods and glades of Maudeley, the village street, the field paths, began to be for her places of magic, whence at any moment might spring flowers of joy known to her alone. To see him pa.s.s at a distance, to come across him in a miner's cottage, or in Miss Puttenham's drawing-room--these rare occasions were to her the events of the summer weeks. Nevertheless, when September arrived, she had long since forbidden herself to hope for anything more.
Meanwhile, Rose Flaxman was the only person who ever ventured to feel and show the irritation of the natural woman toward her sister's idiosyncrasies.
”Do for heaven's sake stop her reading these books!” she said impatiently one evening to Mary, when she had taken leave of Catharine, and her niece was strolling back with her toward Maudeley.
”What books?”
”Why, lives of bishops and deans and that kind of thing! I never come but I find a pile of them beside her. It should be made absolutely illegal to write the life of a clergyman! My dear, your mother would be well in a week if we could only stop it and put her on a course of Gaboriau!”
Mary smiled rather sadly.
”They seem to be the only things that interest her now.”
”What, the deans? I know. It's intolerable. She went to speak to the postman just now while I was with her, and I looked at the book she had been reading with her mark in it. I should like to have thrown it into the pond! Some tiresome canon or other writing to a friend about Eternal Punishment. What does he know about it? I should like to ask! I declare I hope he may know something more about it some day! There was your mother as white as her ruffles, with dark lines under her eyes. I tell you clerical intimidation should be made a punishable offence. It's just as bad as any other!”
Mary let her run on. She moved silently along the gra.s.sy path, her pretty head bent, her hands clasped behind her. And presently her aunt resumed: ”And the strange thing is, my dear, saving your presence--that your beloved mother is quite lax in some directions, while she is so strict in others. I never can make her pay the smallest attention to the things I tell her about Philip Meryon, for instance, that Hugh tells me. 'Poor fellow!' she always calls him, as though his abominable ways were like the measles--something you couldn't help. And as for that wild minx Hester!--she has positively taken a fancy to her. It reminds me of what an old priest said to me once in Rome--'Sins, madame!--the only sins that matter are those of the intellect!' There!--send me off--before I say any more _inconvenances_!”