Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1324 page)

It was a hard struggle, but it was for her sake: he mastered his weakness, and forced his trembling voice to submit to his will.

“Is the man whom you are going to marry worthy of
this?
” he asked, still pointing to the letter.

She answered, firmly: “More than worthy of it.”

“Marry him, Catherine — and forget Me.”

The great heart that he had so sorely wounded pitied him, forgave him, answered him with a burst of tears. She held out one imploring hand.

His lips touched it — he was gone.

Chapter LI. Dum Spiro, Spero.

Brisk and smiling, Mrs. Presty presented herself in the waiting-room. “We have got rid of our enemy!” she announced, “I looked out of the window and saw him leaving the hotel.” She paused, struck with the deep dejection expressed in her daughter’s attitude. “Catherine!” she exclaimed, “I tell you Herbert has gone, and you look as if you regretted it! Is there anything wrong? Did my message fail to bring him here?”

“No.”

“He was bent on mischief when I saw him last. Has he told Bennydeck of the Divorce?”

“No.”

“Thank Heaven for that! There is no one to be afraid of now. Where is the Captain?”

“He is still in the sitting-room.”

“Why don’t you go to him?”

“I daren’t!”

“Shall I go?”

“Yes — and give him this.”

Mrs. Presty took the letter. “You mean, tear it up,” she said, “and quite right, too.”

“No; I mean what I say.”

“My dear child, if you have any regard for yourself, if you have any regard for me, don’t ask me to give Bennydeck this mad letter! You won’t hear reason? You still insist on it?”

“I do.”

“If Kitty ever behaves to you, Catherine, as you have behaved to me — you will have richly deserved it. Oh, if you were only a child again, I’d beat it out of you — I would!”

With that outburst of temper, she took the letter to Bennydeck. In less than a minute she returned, a tamed woman. “He frightens me,” she said.

“Is he angry?”

“No — and that is the worst of it. When men are angry, I am never afraid of them. He’s quiet, too quiet. He said: ‘I’m waiting for Mr. Herbert Linley; where is he?’ I said. ‘He has left the hotel.’ He said: ‘What does that mean?’ I handed the letter to him. ‘Perhaps this will explain,’ I said. He looked at the address, and at once recognised your handwriting. ‘Why does she write to me when we are both in the same house? Why doesn’t she speak to me?’ I pointed to the letter. He wouldn’t look at it; he looked straight at me. ‘There’s some mystery here,’ he said; ‘I’m a plain man, I don’t like mysteries. Mr. Linley had something to say to me, when the message interrupted him. Who sent the message? Do you know?’ If there is a woman living, Catherine, who would have told the truth, in such a position as mine was at that moment, I should like to have her photograph. I said I didn’t know — and I saw he suspected me of deceiving him. Those kind eyes of his — you wouldn’t believe it of them! — looked me through and through. ‘I won’t detain you any longer,’ he said. I’m not easily daunted, as you know — the relief it was to me to get away from him is not to be told in words. What do you think I heard when I got into the passage? I heard him turn the key of the door. He’s locked in, my dear; he’s locked in! We are too near him here. Come upstairs.”

Catherine refused. “I ought to be near him,” she said, hopefully; “he may wish to see me.”

Her mother reminded her that the waiting-room was a public room, and might be wanted.

“Let’s go into the garden,” Mrs. Presty proposed. “We can tell the servant who waits on us where we may be found.”

Catherine yielded. Mrs. Presty’s excitement found its overflow in talking perpetually. Her daughter had nothing to say, and cared nothing where they went; all outward manifestation of life in her seemed to be suspended at that terrible time of expectation. They wandered here and there, in the quietest part of the grounds. Half an hour passed — and no message was received. The hotel clock struck the hour — and still nothing happened.

“I can walk no longer,” Catherine said. She dropped on one of the garden-chairs, holding by her mother’s hand. “Go to him, for God’s sake!” she entreated. “I can endure it no longer.”

Mrs. Presty — even bold Mrs. Presty — was afraid to face him again. “He’s fond of the child,” she suggested; “let’s send Kitty.”

Some little girls were at play close by who knew where Kitty was to be found. In a few minutes more they brought her back with them. Mrs. Presty gave the child her instructions, and sent her away proud of her errand, and delighted at the prospect of visiting the Captain by herself, as if she “was a grown-up lady.”

This time the period of suspense was soon at an end. Kitty came running back. “It’s lucky you sent me,” she declared. “He wouldn’t have opened the door to anybody else — he said so himself.”

“Did you knock softly, as I told you?” Mrs. Presty asked.

“No, grandmamma, I forgot that. I tried to open the door. He called out not to disturb him. I said, ‘It’s only me,’ and he opened the door directly. What makes him look so pale, mamma? Is he ill?”

“Perhaps he feels the heat,” Mrs. Presty suggested, judiciously.

“He said, ‘Dear little Kitty,’ and he caught me up in his arms and kissed me. When he sat down again he took me on his knee, and he asked if I was fond of him, and I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ and he kissed me again, and he asked if I had come to stay with him and keep him company. I forgot what you wanted me to say,” Kitty acknowledged, addressing Mrs. Presty; “so I made it up out of my own head.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him, mamma was as fond of him as I was, and I said, ‘We will both keep you company.’ He put me down on the floor, and he got up and went to the window and looked out. I told him that wasn’t the way to find her, and I said, ‘I know where she is; I’ll go and fetch her.’ He’s an obstinate man, our nice Captain. He wouldn’t come away from the window. I said, ‘You wish to see mamma, don’t you?’ And he said ‘Yes.’ ‘You mustn’t lock the door again,’ I told him, ‘she won’t like that’; and what do you think he said? He said ‘Good-by, Kitty!’ Wasn’t it funny? He didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. If you ask my opinion, mamma, I think the sooner you go to him the better.” Catherine hesitated. Mrs. Presty on one side, and Kitty on the other, led her between them into the house.

Chapter LII. L’homme propose, et Dieu dispose.

Captain Bennydeck met Catherine and her child at the open door of the room. Mrs. Presty, stopping a few paces behind them, waited in the passage; eager to see what the Captain’s face might tell her. It told her nothing.

But Catherine saw a change in him. There was something in his manner unnaturally passive and subdued. It suggested the idea of a man whose mind had been forced into an effort of self-control which had exhausted its power, and had allowed the signs of depression and fatigue to find their way to the surface. The Captain was quiet, the Captain was kind; neither by word nor look did he warn Catherine that the continuity of their intimacy was in danger of being broken — and yet, her spirits sank, when they met at the open door.

He led her to a chair, and said she had come to him at a time when he especially wished to speak with her. Kitty asked if she might remain with them. He put his hand caressingly on her head; “No, my dear, not now.”

The child eyed him for a moment, conscious of something which she had never noticed in him before, and puzzled by the discovery. She walked back, cowed and silent, to the door. He followed her and spoke to Mrs. Presty.

“Take your grandchild into the garden; we will join you there in a little while. Good-by for the present, Kitty.”

Kitty said good-by mechanically — like a dull child repeating a lesson. Her grandmother led her away in silence.

Bennydeck closed the door and seated himself by Catherine.

“I thank you for your letter,” he said. “If such a thing is possible, it has given me a higher opinion of you than any opinion that I have held yet.”

She looked at him with a feeling of surprise, so sudden and so overwhelming that she was at a loss how to reply. The last words which she expected to hear from him, when he alluded to her confession, were the words that had just passed his lips.

“You have owned to faults that you have committed, and deceptions that you have sanctioned,” he went on — ”with nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by telling the truth. Who but a good woman would have done that?”

There was a deeper feeling in him than he had ventured to express. It betrayed itself by a momentary trembling in his voice. Catherine drew a little closer to him.

“You don’t know how you surprise me, how you relieve me,” she said, warmly — and pressed his hand. In the eagerness of her gratitude, in the gladness that had revived her sinking heart, she failed to feel that the pressure was not returned.

“What have I said to surprise you?” he asked. “What anxiety have I relieved, without knowing it?”

“I was afraid you would despise me.”

“Why should I despise you?”

“Have I not gained your good opinion under false pretenses? Have I not allowed you to admire me and to love me without telling you that there was anything in my past life which I have reason to regret? Even now, I can hardly realize that you excuse and forgive me; you, who have read the confession of my worst faults; you, who know the shocking inconsistencies of my character — ”

“Say at once,” he answered, “that I know you to be a mortal creature. Is there any human character, even the noblest, that is always consistently good?”

“One reads of them sometimes,” she suggested, “in books.”

“Yes,” he said. “In the worst books you could possibly read — the only really immoral books written in our time.”

“Why are they immoral?”

“For this plain reason, that they deliberately pervert the truth. Clap-trap, you innocent creature, to catch foolish readers! When do these consistently good people appear in the life around us, the life that we all see? Never! Are the best mortals that ever lived above the reach of temptation to do ill, and are they always too good to yield to it? How does the Lord’s Prayer instruct humanity? It commands us all, without exception, to pray that we may not be led into temptation. You have been led into temptation. In other words, you are a human being. All that a human being could do you have done — you have repented and confessed. Don’t I know how you have suffered and how you have been tried! Why, what a mean Pharisee I should be if I presumed to despise you!”

She looked at him proudly and gratefully; she lifted her arm as if to thank him by an embrace, and suddenly let it drop again at her side.

“Am I tormenting myself without cause?” she said. “Or is there something that looks like sorrow, showing itself to me in your face?”

“You see the bitterest sorrow that I have felt in all my sad life.”

“Is it sorrow for me?”

“No. Sorrow for myself.”

“Has it come to you through me? Is it my fault?”

“It is more your misfortune than your fault.”

“Then you can feel for me?”

“I can and do.”

He had not yet set her at ease.

“I am afraid your sympathy stops somewhere,” she said. “Where does it stop?”

For the first time, he shrank from directly answering her. “I begin to wish I had followed your example,” he owned. “It might have been better for both of us if I had answered your letter in writing.”