Tongues of Conscience Part 16

"Mark!" said Catherine in amazement.

"Nothing to call us away from our idle happiness here!" he continued.

"Do you say--nothing?"

"Why--no. For we are free; we have no ties. You have no profession, Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father--how he wors.h.i.+ps the arts!"

"And you, Kitty--you?"

Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excitement.

"He has taught me to love them too."

"How much, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth?"

She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered:

"Ah no. For my mother----"

She paused.

"My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than any art, more important, more beautiful."

"What can that be?"

"Oh, Mark--religion!"

He leaned over the railing at her side, and the white and red roses that embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant breeze of evening.

"But there are many religions," he said. "A man's art may be his religion."

A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's.

"Oh no, Mark."

"Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnestness, putting aside his reserve for the first time with her. "Indeed it may."

"You mean when he uses it to do good?"

He shook his head. The roses s.h.i.+vered.

"The true artist never thinks of that. To have a definite moral purpose is destructive."

The City at their feet was sinking into shadow now, and the air grew cold, filled with the snowy breath of the Sierra.

"When we go back to England I will teach you the right way to follow an art, to wors.h.i.+p it; the way that will be mine."

"Yours, Mark? But I don't understand."

"No," he said. "You don't understand all of me yet, Kitty. Do you want to?"

"Yes," she said.

There was a sound of fear in her voice. Mark sat down beside her and put his arm round her.

"Kitty," he began. "I'm only on the threshold of my life, of my real life, my life with you and with my work."

"You are going to work?" she exclaimed.

"Yes. That bell just now seemed to strike the hour of commencement--to tell me it was time for me to begin. I should like, some day--far in the future, Kitty,--to hear it strike that other hour, the hour when I must finish, when the little bit of work that I can do in the world is done.

I shan't be afraid of that hour any more than I'm afraid of this one.

Perhaps, when you and I are old we shall come here again, and listen to that bell once more, the same, when we are changed."

He pointed towards the Cathedral which was still touched by the sun.

Catherine leaned against his shoulder. She said nothing, and did not move.

"Everything in life has its appointed recorder," he continued. "They are a big band, the band of the recorders who strive accurately to write down life as it is. Well, Kitty, I am going to be one of that band."

"You are going to be a writer, Mark?"

"Yes."

"Then, you will record the beauty, the joy, the purity, the goodness of life?"

His usually bright face had become sombre and thoughtful. It looked strangely dark and saturnine in the twilight.

"I shall record what I see most clearly."

"And what is that?"

"Not the things on the surface, but the things beneath the surface, of life."

And then he told Catherine more fully of his ambition and gave her a glimpse of the hidden side of his duplex nature.

She gazed up at him in the gathering twilight and it seemed to her that she was looking at a stranger. The climbing roses still shook against Mark in the wind. While he talked his voice grew almost fierce, and his dark eyes shone like the eyes of a fanatic. When he ceased to speak, Catherine's lips were pursed together, like her mother's when she listened to the pagan rhapsodies of Mr. Ardagh.

Two days later the Sirretts left Granada for England.

On their return they paid a short visit to Catherine's parents, who were living in Eaton Square. Mr. and Mrs. Ardagh received them with a sort of dulled and narcotic affection. In truth, for different reasons, the Puritan and the pagan cherished a certain resentment against the man who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare.

Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had, therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount of interest and pleasure from forming the pliant mind of her protegee, who was with her always from eleven till six in the evening, who read aloud to her, accompanied her on her charitable missions, and took--so far as a stranger might,--the place of Catherine in her life. Catherine met Jenny upon the doorstep of her parents' house on the evening of her arrival, and hastened to ask her mother who the slim girl, with the tall figure, narrow shoulders, fluffy brown hair, and large oriental eyes was.

"My paid daughter," said Mrs. Ardagh, almost bitterly. "But she can't fill the place of my lost Catherine."

Nevertheless, Catherine discovered that her mother was truly attached to Jenny.

"I took her partly because she is easily led," she said, "easily influenced and so very pretty and poor. I want to save her for G.o.d, and when I met her there was one who wished to lead her to the devil. She won't see him now. She won't hear his name."