Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1318 page)

Catherine seated herself under the trees, and watched in solitude the decline of the sun in a cloudless sky. The memory of the happy years of her marriage had never been so sadly and persistently present to her mind as at this time, when the choice of another married life waited her decision to become an accomplished fact. Remembrances of the past, which she had such bitter reason to regret, and forebodings of the future, in which she was more than half inclined to believe, oppressed her at one and the same moment. She thought of the different circumstances, so widely separated by time, under which Herbert (years ago) and Bennydeck (twenty-four hours since) had each owned his love, and pleaded for an indulgent hearing. Her mind contrasted the dissimilar results.

Pressed by the faithless man who had so cruelly wronged her in after-years, she only wondered why he had waited so long before he asked her to marry him. Addressed with equal ardor by that other man, whose age, whose character, whose modest devotion offered her every assurance of happiness that a woman could desire, she had struggled against herself, and had begged him to give her a day to consider. That day was now drawing to an end. As she watched the setting sun, the phantom of her guilty husband darkened the heavenly light; imbittered the distrust of herself which made her afraid to say Yes; and left her helpless before the hesitation which prevented her from saying No.

The figure of a man appeared on the lonely path that led to the lodge gate.

Impulsively she rose from her seat as he advanced. She sat down again. After that first act of indecision, the flutter of her spirits abated; she was able to think.

To avoid him, after he had spared her at her own request, would have been an act of ingratitude: to receive him was to place herself once more in the false position of a woman too undecided to know her own mind. Forced to choose between these alternatives, her true regard for Bennydeck forbade her to think of herself, and encouraged her to wait for him. As he came nearer, she saw anxiety in his face and observed an open letter in his hand. He smiled as he approached her, and asked leave to take a chair at her side. At the same time, when he perceived that she had noticed his letter, he put it away hurriedly in his pocket.

“I hope nothing has happened to annoy you,” she said.

He smiled again; and asked if she was thinking of his letter. “It is only a report,” he added, “from my second in command, whom I have left in charge of my Home. He is an excellent man; but I am afraid his temper is not proof against the ingratitude which we sometimes meet with. He doesn’t yet make allowances for what even the best natures suffer, under the deteriorating influence of self-distrust and despair. No, I am not anxious about the results of this case. I forget all my anxieties (except one) when I am with you.”

His eyes told her that he was about to return to the one subject that she dreaded. She tried — as women will try, in the little emergencies of their lives — to gain time.

“I am interested about your Home,” she said: “I want to know what sort of place it is. Is the discipline very severe?”

“There is no discipline,” he answered warmly. “My one object is to be a friend to my friendless fellow-creatures; and my one way of governing them is to follow the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. Whatever else I may remind them of, when they come to me, I am determined not to remind them of a prison. For this reason — though I pity the hardened wanderers of the streets, I don’t open my doors to them. Many a refuge, in which discipline is inevitable, is open to these poor sinners already. My welcome is offered to penitents and sufferers of another kind — who have fallen from positions in life, in which the sense of honour has been cultivated; whose despair is associated with remembrances which I may so encourage, with the New Testament to help me, as to lead them back to the religious influences under which their purer and happier lives may have been passed. Here and there I meet with disappointments. But I persist in my system of trusting them as freely as if they were my own children; and, for the most part, they justify my confidence in them. On the day — if it ever comes — when I find discipline necessary, I shall suffer my disappointment and close my doors.”

“Is your house open,” Catherine asked, “to men and women alike?”

He was eager to speak with her on a subject more interesting to him even than his Home. Answering her question, in this frame of mind, his thoughts wandered; he drew lines absently with his walking-stick on the soft earth under the trees.

“The means at my disposal,” he said, “are limited. I have been obliged to choose between the men and the women.”

“And you have chosen women?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because a lost woman is a more friendless creature than a lost man.”

“Do they come to you? or do you look for them?”

“They mostly come to me. There is one young woman, however, now waiting to see me, whom I have been looking for. I am deeply interested in her.”

“Is it her beauty that interests you?”

“I have not seen her since she was a child. She is the daughter of an old friend of mine, who died many years ago.”

“And with that claim on you, you keep her waiting?”

“Yes.”

He let his stick drop on the ground and looked at Catherine; but he offered no explanation of his strange conduct. She was a little disappointed. “You have been some time away from your Home,” she said; still searching for his reasons. “When do you go back?”

“I go back,” he answered, “when I know whether I may thank God for being the happiest man living.”

They were both silent.

Chapter XLIV. Think of Consequences.

Catherine listened to the fall of water in the basin of the fountain. She was conscious of a faint hope — a hope unworthy of her — that Kitty might get weary of the gold-fishes, and might interrupt them. No such thing happened; no stranger appeared on the path which wound through the garden. She was alone with him. The influences of the still and fragrant summer evening were influences which breathed of love.

“Have you thought of me since yesterday?” he asked gently.

She owned that she had thought of him.

“Is there no hope that your heart will ever incline toward me?”

“I daren’t consult my heart. If I had only to consider my own feelings — ” She stopped.

“What else have you to consider?”

“My past life — how I have suffered, and what I have to repent of.”

“Has your married life not been a happy one?” he asked.

“Not a happy one — in the end,” she answered.

“Through no fault of yours, I am sure?”

“Through no fault of mine, certainly.”

“And yet you said just now that you had something to repent of?”

“I was not thinking of my husband, Captain Bennydeck, when I said that. If I have injured any person, the person is myself.”

She was thinking of that fatal concession to the advice of her mother, and to the interests of her child, which placed her in a false position toward the honest man who loved her and trusted her. If he had been less innocent in the ways of the world, and not so devotedly fond of her, he might, little by little, have persuaded Catherine to run the risk of shocking him by a confession of the truth. As it was, his confidence in her raised him high above the reach of suspicions which might have occurred to other men. He saw her turn pale; he saw distress in her face, which he interpreted as a silent reproach to him for the questions he had asked.

“I hope you will forgive me?” he said simply.

She was astonished. “What have I to forgive?”

“My want of delicacy.”

“Oh, Captain Bennydeck, you speak of one of your great merits as if it were a fault! Over and over again I have noticed your delicacy, and admired it.”

He was too deeply in earnest to abandon his doubts of himself.

“I have ignorantly led you to think of your sorrows,” he said; “sorrows that I cannot console. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. May I make the one excuse in my power? May I speak of myself?”

She told him by a gesture that he had made a needless request.

“The life I have led,” he resumed, “accounts, perhaps, in some degree, for what is deficient in me. At school, I was not a popular boy; I only made one friend, and he has long since been numbered with the dead. Of my life at college, and afterward in London, I dare not speak to you; I look back at it with horror. My school-friend decided my choice of a profession; he went into the navy. After a while, not knowing what else to do, I followed his example. I liked the life — I may say the sea saved me. For years, I was never on shore for more than a few weeks at a time. I saw nothing of society; I was hardly ever in the company of ladies. The next change in my life associated me with an Arctic expedition. God forbid I should tell you of what men go through who are lost in the regions of eternal ice! Let me only say I was preserved — miraculously preserved — to profit by that dreadful experience. It made a new man of me; it altered me ( I hope for the better) into what I am now. Oh, I feel that I ought to have kept my secret yesterday — I mean my daring to love you. I should have waited till you knew more of me; till my conduct pleased you perhaps, and spoke for me. You won’t laugh, I am sure, if I confess (at my age!) that I am inexperienced. Never till I met you have I known what true love is — and this at forty years old. How some people would laugh! I own it seems melancholy to me.”

“No; not melancholy.”

Her voice trembled. Agitation, which it was not a pain but a luxury to feel, was gently taking possession of her. Where another man might have seen that her tenderness was getting the better of her discretion, and might have presumed on the discovery, this man, innocently blind to his own interests, never even attempted to take advantage of her. No more certain way could have been devised, by the most artful lover, of touching the heart of a generous woman, and making it his own. The influence exerted over Catherine by the virtues of Bennydeck’s character — his unaffected kindness, his manly sympathy, his religious convictions so deeply felt, so modestly restrained from claiming notice — had been steadily increasing in the intimacy of daily intercourse. Catherine had never felt his ascendancy over her as strongly as she felt it now. By fine degrees, the warning remembrances which had hitherto made her hesitate lost their hold on her memory. Hardly conscious herself of what she was doing, she began to search his feelings in his own presence. Such love as his had been unknown in her experience; the luxury of looking into it, and sounding it to its inmost depths, was more than the woman’s nature could resist.

“I think you hardly do yourself justice,” she said. “Surely you don’t regret having felt for me so truly, when I told you yesterday that my old friend had deserted me?”

“No, indeed!”

“Do you like to remember that you showed no jealous curiosity to know who my friend was?”

“I should have been ashamed of myself if I had asked the question.”

“And did you believe that I had a good motive — a motive which you might yourself have appreciated — for not telling you the name of that friend?”

“Is he some one whom I know?”

“Ought you to ask me that, after what I have just said?”

“Pray forgive me! I spoke without thinking.”

“I can hardly believe it, when I remember how you spoke to me yesterday. I could never have supposed, before we became acquainted with each other, that it was in the nature of a man to understand me so perfectly, to be so gentle and so considerate in feeling for my distress. You confused me a little, I must own, by what you said afterward. But I am not sure that ought to be severe in blaming you. Sympathy — I mean such sympathy as yours — sometimes says more than discretion can always approve. Have you not found it so yourself?”

“I have found it so with you.”