Part 42

He did not call her Kitty.

"I fear them, Mark," Catherine replied.

"Fear them! Why?"

"They are doing great harm in the world."

Mark uttered an impatient exclamation. As a man he was kind and gentle, but as an artist he was wilful and intolerant. Soon after this he wrote to Berrand and invited him to stay. Berrand came. This time Catherine shuddered at his coming. She began to look upon him as her husband's evil genius. Berrand did not apparently notice any change in her, for he treated her as usual, and spoke much to her of Mark. And Catherine was too reserved to express the feelings which tortured her to a comparative stranger. For this reason Berrand did not understand the terrible conflict that was raging within her as "William Foster's" new work grew, and he often spoke to her about the book, and described, with mischievous intellectual delight, its terror, its immorality and its pain. Catherine listened with apparent calm. She was waiting for that interruption from heaven. She was wondering why it did not come.

One night in summer it chanced that she and Berrand spoke of Fate. Catherine, dominated by her fixed idea that God would intervene in some strange and abrupt way to interrupt the activities of Mark, spoke of Fate as something inevitably ordained, certain as the rising of the sun or the dropping down of the darkness. Berrand laughed.

"There is no Fate," he said. "There is man, there is woman. Man and woman make circumstance. We fashion our own lives and the lives of others."

"And our deaths?" said Catherine.

"We die when we've done enough, when we've done our best or worst, when we've pushed our energy as far as it will go--that is, if we die what is called a natural death. But of course now and then some other human being chooses to think for us, and to think we have lived long enough or too long. And then----"

He paused with a smile.

"Then----?" said Catherine, leaning slightly forward.

"Then that human being may cut our thread prematurely, and down we go to death."

Catherine drew in her breath sharply.

"But that again," continued Berrand. "Is man--or woman--not the fantasy you call Fate?"

"Perhaps Fate can take possession of a man or a woman," Catherine said slowly and thoughtfully, "govern them, act through them."

"That's a dangerous doctrine. You believe that criminals are irresponsible then?"

"I don't know," she said. "I suppose there must be an agent. Yes, I suppose there must."

She spoke as one who is thinking out a problem.

"God," she continued, after a moment of silence, "may choose to use a man or woman as an agent instead of a disease."

"Oh, well," said Berrand, with his odd, high laugh, "I cannot go with you on that road of thought, Mrs. Sirrett. I am not afflicted with a religion. Oh, here's Mark. How have you been getting on, Mr. William Foster?"

"Grandly," he replied.

His dark eyes were blazing with excitement. Catherine suddenly turned very cold. She got up and left the room. The two men scarcely noticed her departure. They plunged into an eager discussion on the book. They debated it till the night waned and the melancholy breath of dawn stole in at the open window.

Meanwhile, Catherine, who had gone to bed, lay awake. This summer was so like last summer. Now, as then, she was sleepless, and heard the distant, excited voices rising and falling, murmuring on and on hour after hour. Now, as then, they accompanied activity. Now, as then, the activity was deadly, harmful to an invisible multitude, hidden out in the great world. But there was a difference between last year and this, so like in many ways. Mark's power had grown in the interval. He had become more dangerous. And Catherine had developed also. Circumstance--spoken of by Berrand--had changed, twisted into a different shape by dying hands, twisted again by the hands--all unconscious--of that man who talked downstairs, of Berrand. Was he, too, an agent of Fate, at which he scornfully laughed? Why not?

Oh, those everlasting voices! they rang hatefully in the sleepless woman's ears. Their eagerness, their enthusiasm, were terrible to her. For now their joy seemed to summon her to a great darkness. Their sound seemed to call her to the making of a great silence. She put her hands over her ears, but she still heard them till it was dawn. She still heard them when they were no more speaking.

From this time Catherine waited indeed, but with a patience quite different from that which possessed her formerly. Then she was expectant, almost superstitiously expectant, of an abrupt interposition of Fate. Now she waited, but with less expectancy, and with a strange and growing sense of personal obligation which had been totally absent from her before the issue lay between the thing invisible and herself. And each day that passed brought the issue a step nearer to her. How pathetical seemed to her the ignorance of the two men who were her companions in the cloistered house at this time. Tears rose in her eyes at the thought of her secret and their impotence to know it. But then she thought of her mother's death-bed and the tears ran dry. For the spirit of her mother surely was with her in the dark, the spirit that knew all now and that could inspire and direct her.

The book grew and Catherine waited. Would Mark be allowed to complete it? that was the great question. If he was, then the burden of action was laid upon her by the will of God. She had quite made up her mind on that. She had even prayed, and believed that an answer had been given to her prayer, and that the answer was--"In the event you anticipate it is God's will that you should act." She was fully resolved to do God's will. And so she waited, with a strong, but how anxious, patience. The growth of the book was now become ironical to her as the growth of a plant which must die when it attains a certain height; the labour spent upon it, the discussion that raged around it, the decisions that were arrived at as to its course--all these things were now most pitifully pathetic to Catherine. As she watched Mark and Berrand, as she listened to them, she seemed to watch and listen to children, playing idly, chattering idly, on the edge of events that must stop their play, their chatter--perhaps for ever.

For this book would never see the light. No one would ever read it. No one would ever speak of it but these two men, whose lives seemed bound up in it. And Catherine alone knew this.

Sometimes she had a longing to tell them of this knowledge, to say to Mark, "Do not waste yourself in this useless energy!" to say to Berrand, "Do not rejoice over the future of that which has no future." But she refrained, knowing that to speak would be to give the lie to what she spoke. For such revelation must frustrate her contemplated action. So nobody knew what she knew, except the spirit that stood by her in the night. She waited, and the book drew slowly towards its climax and its close. As Berrand grew more excited about it he spoke more of it to Catherine. But Mark--conscious of that veil dropped between him and his wife--scarcely mentioned it to her, and declined to read any passages from it aloud. Catherine understood that he distrusted her and knew her utterly unsympathetic and adverse to his labours. The sign for which she had hoped, which she had once most confidently expected, did not come. And at length she almost ceased to think of it, and was inclined to put the idea from her as a foolish dream.