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."