Tongues of Conscience Part 21

This book Mark is writing will be awful in its intensity. It will make the world turn cold. It is terrible. People will shudder at it."

He walked about the room enthusiastically.

"And its terror is the true terror--mental. How the papers will hate it, and how every one will read it!"

"May it--may it not do a great deal of harm?" said Catherine, slowly.

"What if it does? Nothing can prevent it from being a great book."

And he broke out into a dissertation on art that would have delighted Mr. Ardagh.

Catherine listened to him in silence, but when he had finished she said,

"But you are one-sided, Mr. Berrand."

"I!" he cried. "How so?"

"You see only the horrible in life, even in love. You care only for the horrible in art."

"The truth is more often horrible than not," he answered. "We dress it in pink paper as we dress a burning lamp. We fear its light will hurt our weak eyes. Almost all the pretty theories of future states, happy hunting grounds, and so forth, almost all the fallacies of life to which we are inclined to cling, are only pink paper shades which we make to save ourselves from blinking at the light."

"You call it light?" she said.

And she felt a profound pity for him. There was no need of that. Berrand was one of those strange men who are happy in the contemplation of misery.

While Berrand was staying with the Sirretts, Mrs. Ardagh came to them on a visit. She was now in very poor health, and her mind was greatly set, in consequence, on that other world of which the healthy scarcely think, unless they wake at night or lose a near relation unexpectedly. Mr.

Berrand immediately horrified her. Of course he did not speak of "William Foster." "William Foster's" existence in the house was a secret. But he freely aired his sentiments on all other subjects, and each sentiment went like a sword through Mrs. Ardagh's soul.

"How can Mark make a friend of such a man," she said to Catherine. "Like your father, he has no religious belief. He wors.h.i.+ps art instead of G.o.d.

He loves, he positively loves, the evil of the world. Such men are a curse. They go to people h.e.l.l."

Her feverish eyes glowed with fanaticism.

"Oh, mother!" said Catherine, thinking of "William Foster."

"They do not care to do good, they do not fear to do harm," continued Mrs. Ardagh. "Why are they not cut off?"

She made her daughter kneel down with her and pray against such men.

Then they went down to dinner, and dined with "William Foster."

Catherine felt like one in a fever. She knew that her mother had an exaggerated mind. Nevertheless, she was deeply moved by it, recognising that it exaggerated truth, not a lie.

At dinner Mrs. Ardagh, by some ill-chance, was led to mention "William Foster's" book. Mark raised gay eyebrows at Berrand and Catherine grew hot. For Mrs. Ardagh denounced the author as she had denounced him in London, but with more excitement.

"I trust," she said, "that he will never live to write another."

Catherine felt as if a knife were thrust into her breast, and even Mark started slightly and looked almost uneasy, as if he fancied that the force of Mrs. Ardagh's desire might accomplish its fulfilment. Only Berrand was undismayed. There was a devil of mischief in him. His eyes of a toad gleamed as he said, turning to Mrs. Ardagh,

"I happen to know that 'William Foster' is writing another book at this very time."

Catherine bent her eyes on her plate. She was tingling with nervous excitement.

"Do you know him, then?" said Mrs. Ardagh, in her fervid, and yet dreary, voice.

"Slightly."

"Then tell him of the dreadful harm he has done."

"What harm?"

Mrs. Ardagh spoke of Jenny Levita. It seemed that she had now fallen into an evil way of life.

"But why should you attribute the folly of a weak girl to William Foster's influence?" said Berrand.

"Her soul was trembling in the balance," said Mrs. Ardagh, striking her thin hand excitedly on the table. "That book turned the scale. She went down. Tell him of her, Mr. Berrand, tell him of the ruin of that poor child. It may influence him."

"I'm afraid not," said Berrand, with a glance at Mark. "William Foster is an artist."

"It is terrible that he should be permitted to work such evil," said Mrs. Ardagh.

During that summer a vague and hollow darkness seemed to brood round the life of Catherine. It stood behind the glory of the golden days. She felt night even at noontide, and a damp mist floated mysteriously to her out of the very heart of the sun. Yet she had some happy, or at least some feverishly excited, moments, for Berrand was generally staying with them, and Catherine--abnormally sensitive as she always was to her undoing,--came under his curious influence and caught some of his enthusiasm for the talent of "William Foster."

Once again Mark began to speak to her of his work, to read parts of it aloud to both his companions. And there were evenings when Catherine, carried away by the intellectual joy of the two men, exulted with them in the horrible fascination of the book and in the intensity of its dramatic force. But, when these moments were over, and she was gone, she brooded darkly over her mother's words. For she knew that the book was evil. Like a snake it carried poison with it, and, presently, it was going to carry that poison out from this house in the woods, out into the world. Ah! the poor world, on which a thousand things preyed, in which a thousand snakes set their poisoned fangs!

And then she wept. Mark and Berrand were eagerly talking of the snake, praising its l.u.s.trous skin, marvelling at its jewelled eyes, foretelling its lithe progress through Society. She heard the murmur of their voices until far into the night. And sometimes she thought that distant murmur sounded like the hum of evil, or like the furtive whisper of conspirators.

Berrand did not leave them until the new book was nearly finished. As he pressed Catherine's hand in farewell he said,

"You will have a sensational autumn, Mrs. Sirrett."

"Sensational. Why?" she asked.

"London will ring with William Foster's name. My word how the Journalists will curse! They protect the morality of the nation you know--on paper."

He was gone. As the carriage drove away Catherine saw his beautiful, and yet rather dreadful, eyes gleaming with mischievous excitement. Suddenly she felt heavy-hearted. Those last words of his cleared away any mist of doubt that lingered about her own terror. She recognised fully for the first time the essential difference between Mark and Berrand. Mark was really possessed by the spirit of the artist, was driven by something strange and dominating within him to do what he did. Berrand was possessed by a spirit of mischievous devilry, by the poor and degrading desire to shock and startle the world at whatever cost. For the moment Catherine mentally saw Mark in a light of n.o.bility; Berrand in a darkness of degradation.

Yet--this thought followed in a moment,--Berrand was harmless to the world, while Mark--

"Kitty, come in here," called her husband's voice from the study. "I want to consult you about this last chapter."

In the Autumn "William Foster's" new book was issued by an "advanced"

publisher, who loved to hear his wares called dangerous, and who walked on air when the reviewers said that such men as he were a curse to Society--as they occasionally did when there was nothing special to write about.

In the autumn also Mrs. Ardagh's illness grew worse and it appeared that she could not live much longer. Catherine was terribly grieved, and was for a time so much engaged with her mother that she scarcely heeded what was going on in the world around. Incessantly immured in the sick-room she did not trace the progress of the snake through Society until--as Berrand had foretold--the cries of the Journalists rose to Heaven like cries from a burning city. "William Foster" was held up to execration so universal that his book could hardly be printed in sufficient quant.i.ties to satisfy the demands of a public frantically eager to be harmed. In her sick-room Mrs. Ardagh, now not far from death, yet still religiously interested in the well-being of the world she was leaving, heard the echoes of the journalistic cries. Some friend, perhaps, conveyed them.

For Catherine was silent on the matter, keeping a silence of fear and of shame. And these echoes stayed with the dying woman, as stay the voices in the hills.

One night, when Catherine came into her mother's room, Mrs. Ardagh was crying feebly. On the sheet of the bed lay a letter which she had crumpled in her pale hands and then tried, vainly, to fling away from her. Catherine leaned over the bed.