CHAPTER XVII.

Castalia was driven home, and walked up the path of the tiny garden in front of Ivy Lodge with a step much like her ordinary one. She went into the drawing-room and looked about her curiously, as if she were a stranger seeing the place for the first time. Then she sat down for a minute, still in her bonnet and shawl. But she got up again quickly from the sofa, holding her hand to her throat as if she were choking, and went out to the garden behind the house, and from thence to the meadows near the river. There was at the bottom of the garden, and outside of it, a miserable, dilapidated wooden shed, euphoniously called a summer-house. There was a worm-eaten wooden bench in it looking towards the Whit, and commanding a view of the wide meadows on the other side of it, of a turn in the river, now lead-coloured beneath a dreary sky, and of the distant spire of Duckwell Church rising beyond the hazy woods of Pudcombe. No one ever entered this summer-house. It was rotting to pieces with damp and decay, and was inhabited by a colony of insects and a toad that squatted in one corner. In this wretched place Castalia sat down, being indeed unable to walk farther, but feeling a sensation of suffocation at the mere thought of returning to the house. She fancied she could not breathe there. A steaming mist was rising from the river and the damp meadows beyond it. The grey clouds seemed to touch the grey horizon. It was cold, and the last brown leaf or two, hanging, as it seemed, by a thread on the boughs of a tree just within sight from the summer-house, twirled, and shook, and shuddered in the slight gusts of wind that arose now and again. There was not a sound to be heard except the mournful lowing of some cattle in a distant field, until all at once a movement of the air brought from Whitford the sound of the old chimes muffled by the heavy atmosphere. There sat Castalia and stared at the river, and the mist, and the brown withered leaves, much as she had stared at the blank yard wall in the office.

"My heart is sore pained within me, and the terrors of death are fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me!"

She heard a voice saying these words distinctly. She did not start. She scarcely felt surprise. The direful lamentation was in harmony with all she saw, and heard, and felt.

Again the voice spoke: "Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee and were delivered; they trusted in thee and were not confounded. But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people!"

Castalia heard, scarcely listening. The words flowed by her like a tune that brings tears to the eyes by mere sympathy with its sad sound.

Presently a man passed before her, walking with an unequal pace—now quick, now slow, now stopping outright. He had his hands clasped at the back of his neck; his head was bent down, and he was talking aloud to himself.

"Aye, there have been such. The lot has fallen upon me. I know it with a sure knowledge. It is borne in upon me with a certainty that pierces through bone and marrow. I am of the number of those that go down to the pit. Why, O Lord—Nay! though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment."

He stopped in his walk; stood still for a second or two, and then turned to pace back again. In so doing he saw Castalia. She also looked full at him, and recognised the Methodist preacher. David Powell went up to her without hesitation. He remembered her at once; and he remembered, too, in a confused way, something of what Mrs. Thimbleby had been recently telling him about dissensions between this woman and her husband; of unhappiness and quarrels; and—what was that the widow had said of young Mrs. Errington being jealous of Rhoda? Ah, yes! He had it all now.

The time had been when David Powell would have had to wrestle hard with indignation against anyone who should have spoken evil of Rhoda. He would have felt a hot, human flush of anger; and would have combated it as a stirring of the unregenerate man within him. But all such feelings were over with him. No ray from the outside world appeared able to pierce the gloom which had gathered thicker and thicker in his own mind, unless it touched his sense of sympathy with suffering. He was still sensitive to that, as certain chemicals are to the light.

He went close up to Castalia, and said, without any preliminary or usual greeting, "You are in affliction. Have you called upon the Lord? Have you cast your burthen upon him? He is a good shepherd. He will carry the weary and footsore of his flock lest they faint by the way and perish utterly."

It was noticeable when he spoke that his voice, which had been of such full sweetness, was now hoarse, and even harsh here and there, like a fine instrument that has been jarred. This did not seem to be altogether due to physical causes; for there still came out of his mouth every now and then a tone that was exquisitely musical. But the discord seemed to be in the spirit that moved the voice, and could not guide it with complete freedom and mastery.

Castalia shook her head impatiently, and turned her eyes away from him. But she did not do so with any of her old hauteur and intimation of the vast distance which separated her from her humbler fellow-creatures. Pain of mind had familiarised her with the conception that she held her humanity in common with a very heterogeneous multitude. Had Powell been a sleek, smug personage like Brother Jackson, veiling profound self-complacency under the technical announcement of himself as a miserable sinner, she might have turned from him in disgust. As it was, she felt merely the unwillingness to be disturbed, of a creature in whom the numbness of apathy has succeeded to acute anguish. She wanted to be rid of him. He looked at her with the yearning pity which was so fundamental a part of his nature. "Pray!" he said, clasping his hands together. "Go to your Father, which is in Heaven, and He shall give you rest. Oh, God loves you—he loves you!"

"No one loves me," returned Castalia, with white rigid lips. Then she got up from the bench, and went back into her own garden and into the house, with the air of a person walking in sleep.

Powell looked after her sadly. "If she would but pray!" he murmured. "I would pray for her. I would wrestle with the Lord on her behalf. But—of late I have feared more and more that my prayers are not acceptable; that my voice is an abomination to the Lord."

He resumed his walk along the river bank, speaking aloud, and gesticulating to himself as he went.

Meanwhile, Castalia wandered about her own house "like a ghost," as the servants said. She went from the little dining-room to the drawing-room, and then she painfully mounted the steep staircase to her bed-room, opened the door of her husband's little dressing-closet, shut it again, and went downstairs once more. She could not sit still; she could not read; she could not even think. She could only suffer, and move about restlessly, as if with a dim instinctive idea of escaping from her suffering. Presently she began to open the drawers of a little toy cabinet in the drawing-room, and examine their contents, as if she had never seen them before. From that she went to a window-seat, made hollow, and with a cushioned lid, so that it served as a seat and a box, and began to rummage among its contents. These consisted chiefly of valueless scraps, odds and ends, put there to be hidden and out of the way. Among them were some of poor Mrs. Errington's wedding-presents to her son and daughter-in-law. Castalia's maid, Slater, had unceremoniously consigned these to oblivion, together with a few other old-fashioned articles, under the generic name of "rubbish." There was a pair of hand-screens elaborately embroidered in silk, very faded and out of date. Mrs. Errington declared them to be the work of her grand-aunt, the beautiful Miss Jacintha Ancram, who made such a great match, and became a Marchioness. There was an ancient carved ivory fan, yellow with age, brought by a cadet of the house of Ancram from India, as a present to some forgotten sweetheart. There was a little cardboard box, covered with fragments of raised rice-paper, arranged in a pattern. This was the work of Mrs. Errington's own hands in her school-girl days, and was of the kind called then, if I mistake not, "filagree work." Castalia took these and other things out of the window-seat, and examined them and put them back, one by one, moving exactly like an automaton figure that had been wound up to perform those motions. When she came to the filagree box, she opened that too. There was a Tonquin bean in it, filling the box with its faint sweet odour. There was a pair of gold buckles, that seemed to be attenuated with age; and a garnet-brooch, with one or two stones missing. And then at the bottom of the box was something flat, wrapped in silver paper. She unwrapped it and looked at it.

It was a water-colour drawing done by Algernon immediately on his return from Llanryddan, in the first flush of his love-making, and represented himself and Rhoda standing side by side in front of the little cottage where they had lodged there. Algernon had given himself pinker cheeks, bluer eyes, and more amber-coloured hair than nature had endowed him with. Rhoda was equally over-tinted. There was no merit in the drawing, which was stiff and school-boyish, but the very exaggerations of form and colour emphasised the likeness in a way not to be mistaken.

Castalia trembled from head to foot as she looked on the two rosy simpering faces. A curious ripple or tremor ran over her body, such as may be observed in persons recovering consciousness after a swoon. She tore the drawing into small fragments. Her teeth were set. Her eyes glared. She looked like a murderess. She trod the scattered bits into the carpet with her heel. Then, as if with an afterthought, she swept them contemptuously into the bright steel shovel, and threw them into the fire, and stood and watched them blaze and smoulder. After that she wrapped her shawl more tightly round her—she had forgotten to remove either it or her bonnet on coming in—and went out at the front door, and walked straight into Whitford, and to Jonathan Maxfield's house.

She asked for "the master." The old man was at home, in the little parlour, and Sally showed Mrs. Errington into the room almost without the ceremony of tapping with her knuckles at the door, and then made off to the kitchen to tell Mrs. Grimshaw. The lady's face had scared her.

Old Max was sitting near the dull fire which burned in the grate. The big Bible, his constant companion now, lay open on the table. But he had not been devoting his attention to that solely. He had had a large old-fashioned wooden desk brought down from his own room, and had been fingering the papers in it, reading some, and merely glancing at the outside folds of others. He now looked up at Castalia without recognising her.

"What is your business with me?" he asked, peering at her in perplexity.

"I've come to speak to you——" began Castalia; and at the first sound of her voice, Maxfield recognised her. He remembered the only visit she had paid him previously, when she came to beg that Rhoda might be allowed to visit her. She had taken a great fancy to his pretty Rhoda, this skinny, yellow-faced, fine lady. Ha! Well, she might show what civilities she pleased to Rhoda. No objection to that. Indeed, it was a proceeding to be encouraged, seeing that it probably caused a good deal of discomfort and embarrassment to Algernon! So he gave a little nod, meant to be courteous, and said, "Oh, I didn't just know you at first. Won't you be seated?"

Castalia refused by a gesture, and stood still opposite to him with one hand on the table, apparently in some embarrassment how to begin. Then it flashed on old Max that this "Honourable Missis," as he called her, had probably come to thank him, and found it not altogether easy to do so. But what could Castalia have to thank him for? This; Rhoda had so implored her father to relieve Algernon from his anxiety about the bills, that at length the old man had said with a chuckle, "Tell you what, Rhoda, I'll hand 'em over to Mr. Diamond, and maybe he will give them to you as a wedding present if he gets the school. And then you can do what you like with 'em. My gentleman won't be above taking a present from you or your husband. I've seen what meanness she can do and what dirt he can swallow, and not even make a wry face over it! Aye, dirt as would turn many a poor labouring man's stomach."

Rhoda, upon this, had consulted Matthew Diamond, and had not found it difficult to make him agree with her wish to give up the bills to Algernon. Indeed, although he had almost come to old Max's opinion of his former pupil, he would not for the world have behaved so as to make Rhoda suppose that he bore him a grudge. Rhoda's errand to the post-office that afternoon had been to bring Algernon this comforting news. She had taken care not to tell her father of Mrs. Algernon's behaviour, but had come home and cried a little quietly in her own room, and kept her tears and the cause of them to herself. Therefore it was that Jonathan Maxfield supposed the fine lady to have come to thank him for his magnanimity on behalf of her absent husband, and he was already preparing to give her "a dose," as he phrased it, and to spare her no item of Rhoda's prosperity, and wealth, and good prospects in the world.

Castalia remained leaning with one hand on the table, and did not continue her speech during the second or two in which these thoughts and intentions were passing through old Maxfield's brain. But it was by no means that she hesitated from embarrassment or lack of words: rather the words crowded to her lips too quickly and fiercely for utterance.

"I've come to speak to you about your daughter," she said at length.

"Aye, aye. Miss Maxfield's a bit of a friend o' yours. Miss Maxfield's allus been very kind to all the fam'ly ever since we've known 'em. But you'd best be seated."

"They say you are an honest, decent man," Castalia went on, neither seating herself nor noticing the invitation to do so. "It may be so. I am willing to believe it. But, if so, you are grossly deceived, cheated, and played upon by that vile girl."

Maxfield brought his two clenched fists heavily down on the table, and half raised himself in his chair. "Stop!" said he. "Who are you talking of?"

"You may believe me. I tell you I have watched—I have seen. She was in love with my husband years ago. She used every art to catch him. And now—now that he is married, she receives secret visits from him. Do you know that he came at night—ten o'clock at night—to your house when you were away? She goes to the post-office slily to see him. I caught her there this morning leaving a private message for him with the clerk! Is that decent? Is it what you wish? Do you sanction it? She writes to him. She has turned his heart against me. He schemes to keep me out of the office. I know why now. Oh yes; I am not the blind dupe they think for. She has made him more cruel, more wicked to me than I could have imagined any man could be. My heart is broken. But as true as there is a God in Heaven I'll have amends made to me. She shall beg my pardon on her knees. And you had better look to it, if you don't want her character to be torn to pieces by every foul tongue in this town. I have borne enough. Keep her at home. Keep her from decoying other women's husbands, I warn you——"

Maxfield, who had been struggling to reach the bell, pulled it so violently that the wire was broken. At the peal Betty Grimshaw came running in, terrified. "Mercy, brother-in-law!" she cried. "What is it?"

"Get the police," gasped old Max, as if he were choking. "Send some one for a policeman, to turn that mad quean out of my house. She's not fit for a decent house. She's—she's——Oh, but you shall repent this! I'll sell you up, every stick of trumpery in the place. You audacious Jezebel! Turn her out of doors, I say! Do you hear me?"

Betty and the servant stood white and quivering, looking from the old man unable to rise from his chair without help, and the lady who stood opposite to him, glaring with a Medusa face. Neither of the two frightened women stirred hand or foot to fulfil the master's behest. But Castalia relieved them from any perplexity on that score, at least, by voluntarily turning to leave the room. In the doorway she met Rhoda, who had run downstairs in alarm at the violent pealing of the bell. Castalia drew herself suddenly aside, as though something unspeakably loathsome stood in her path, held her dress away from any passing contact with the amazed girl, and rushed out of the house.