"H'm," said Mr. Furze, "it's very disagreeable. I don't quite like it."

"Don't quite like it?--why, what _would_ you have done? would you have had Catharine marry him? I have no patience with you, Furze!"

Mr. Furze subsided, but he did not move to go to his business, and Mrs.

Furze went down into the kitchen. Mr. Eaton had called at the shop at that early hour wishing to see Mr. Furze or Tom. He was to return shortly, and Mr. Orkid Jim, not knowing exactly what to do with such a customer, and, moreover, being rather curious, had left a boy in charge and walked back to the Terrace.

"There's Jim again at the door," said Mrs. Furze to Phoebe; "let him in."

"Excuse me, ma'am, but never will I go to the door to let that man in again as long as I live."

"Phoebe! do you know what you are saying? I direct you to let him in."

"No, ma'am; you may direct, but I shan't. Nothing shall make me go to the door to the biggest liar and scoundrel in this town, and if you don't know it yourself, Mrs. Furze, you ought."

"You do not expect me to stand this, Phoebe? You will have a month's wages and go to-night."

"This morning, ma'am, if you please."

Before noon her box was packed, and she too had departed.

CHAPTER XVII

Tom began to understand, as soon as he left the Terrace, that a consciousness of his own innocence was not all that was necessary for his peace of mind. What would other people say? There was a d.a.m.ning chain of evidence, and what was he to do for a living with no character?

He did not return home nor to the shop. He took the road to Chapel Farm.

He did not go to the house direct, but went round it, and walked about, and at last found himself on the bridge. It was there that he met Catharine after her jump into the water; it was there, although he knew nothing about it, that she parted from Mr. Cardew. It was no thundery, summer day now, but cold and dark. The wind was north-east, persistent with unvarying force; the sky was covered with an almost uniform sheet of heavy grey clouds, with no form or beauty in them; there was nothing in the heavens or earth which seemed to have any relationship with man or to show any interest in him. Tom was not a philosopher, but some of his misery was due to a sense of carelessness and injustice somewhere in the government of the world. He was religious after his fashion, but the time had pa.s.sed when a man could believe, as his forefathers believed, that the earth is a school of trial, and that after death is the judgment. What had he done to be visited thus? How was his integrity to be discovered? He had often thought that it was possible that a man should be convicted of some dreadful crime; that he should be execrated, not only by the whole countryside, but by his own wife and children; that his descendants for ages might curse him as the solitary ancestor who had brought disgrace into the family, and that he might be innocent. There might be hundreds of such; doubtless there have been. Perhaps, even worse, there have been men who have been misinterpreted, traduced, forsaken, because they have been compelled for a reason sacredly secret to take a certain course which seemed disreputable, and the word which would have explained everything they have loyally sworn, for the sake of a friend, never to speak, and it has remained unspoken for ever. As he stood leaning over the parapet he saw Catharine coming along the path.

She did not attempt to avoid him, for she wandered what he could be doing. He told her the whole story. "Miss Catharine, there is just one thing I want to know: do you believe I am guilty?"

"I know you are not."

"Thank G.o.d for that."

Both remained silent for a minute or two. At last Tom spoke.

"Oh, Miss Catharine, this makes it harder to bear. You are the one person, perhaps, in the world now who has any faith in me; there is, perhaps, no human being at this moment, excepting yourself, who, after having heard what you have heard, would at once put it all aside. What do you suppose I think of you now? If I loved you before, what must my love now be? Miss Catharine, I could tear out my heart for you, and if you can trust me so much, why can you not love me too? What is it that prevents your love? Why cannot I alter it? And yet, what am I saying?

You may think me honest, but how can I expect you to take a discharged felon?"

Catharine knew what Tom did not know. She was perfectly sure that the accusation against him was the result of the supposed discovery of their love for one another. If she had denied it promptly nothing perhaps would have happened. It was all due to her, then. She gazed up the stream; the leaden clouds drove on; the leaden water lay rippled; the willows and the rushes, vexed with the bitter blast, bent themselves continually. She turned and took her ring off her finger.

"It can never be," she slowly said; "here is my ring; you may keep it, but while I am alive you must never wear it."

Tom took it mechanically, bent his head over the parapet, and his anguish broke out in sobs and tears. Catharine took his hand in hers, leaned over him, and whispered:

"Tom, listen--I shall never be any man's wife."

Before he could say another word she had gone, and he felt that he should never see her again.

What makes the peculiar pang of parting? The coach comes up; the friend mounts; there is the wave of a handkerchief. I follow him to the crest of the hill; he disappears, and I am left to walk down the dusty lane alone. Am I melancholy simply because I shall not see him for a month or a year? She whom I have loved for half a life lies dying. I kiss her and bid her good-bye. Is the bare loss the sole cause of my misery, my despair, breeding that mad longing that I myself might die? In all parting there is something infinite. We see in it a symbol of the order of the universe, and it is because that death-bed farewell stands for so much that we break down. "If it pleases G.o.d," says Swift to Pope, "to restore me to my health, I shall readily make a third journey; if not, we must part _as all human creatures have parted_." As all human creatures have parted! Swift did not say that by way of consolation.

Tom turned homewards. Catharine's last words were incessantly in his mind. What they meant he knew not and could not imagine, but in the midst of his trouble rose up something not worth calling joy, a little thread of water in the waste: it was a little relief that n.o.body was preferred before him, and that n.o.body would possess what to him was denied. He told his father, and found his faith unshakable. There was a letter for him in a handwriting he thought he knew, but he was not quite sure. It was as follows:--

"DEAR MR. CATCHPOLE,--I hope you will excuse the liberty I have taken in writing to you. I have left my place at the Terrace. I cannot help sending these few lines to say that Orkid Jim has been causing mischief here, and if he's had anything to do with your going he's a liar. It was all because I wouldn't go to the door and let him in, and gave missus a bit of my mind about him that I had notice. I wasn't sorry, however, for my cough is bad, and I couldn't stand running up and down those Terrace stairs. It was different at the shop. I thought I should just like to let you know that whatever missus and master may say, _I'm_ sure you have done nothing but what is quite straight.

"Yours truly,

"PHOEBE CROWHURST."

Tom was grateful to Phoebe, and he put her letter in his pocket: it remained there for some time: it then came out with one or two other papers, was accidentally burnt with them, and was never answered. Day after day poor Phoebe watched the postman, but nothing came. She wondered if she had made any mistake in the address, but she had not the courage to write again. "He may be very much taken up," thought she, "but he might have sent me just a line;" and then she felt ashamed, and wished she had not written, and would have given the world to have her letter back again. She had been betrayed into a little tenderness which met with no response. She was only a housemaid, and yet when she said to herself that maybe she had been too forward, the blood came to her cheeks; beautifully, too beautifully white they were. Poor Phoebe!

Tom met Mr. Cardew in Eastthorpe the evening after the interview with Catharine, and told him his story.

"I am ruined," he said: "I have no character."

"Wait a minute; come with me into the Bell where my horse is."

They went into the coffee-room, and Mr. Cardew took a sheet of note-paper and wrote:--

"MY DEAR ROBERT,--The bearer of this note, Mr. Thomas Catchpole, is well known to me as a perfectly honest man, and he thoroughly understands his business. He is coming to London, and I hope you will consider it your duty to obtain remunerative employment for him. He has been wickedly accused of a crime of which he is as innocent as I am, and this is an additional reason why you should exert yourself on his behalf.

"Your affectionate cousin,

"THEOPHILUS CARDEW.

"TO ROBERT BERDOE, Esq.,

"Clapham Common."

Mr. Cardew married a Berdoe, it will be remembered, and this Robert Berdoe was a wealthy wholesale ironmonger, who carried on business in Southwark.

"You had better leave Eastthorpe, Mr. Catchpole, and take your father with you. Are you in want of any money?"

"No, sir, thank you; I have saved a little. I cannot speak very well, Mr. Cardew; you know I cannot; I cannot say to you what I ought."

"I want no thanks, my dear friend. What I do is a simple duty. I am a minister of G.o.d's Word, and I know no obligation more pressing which He has laid upon me than that of bearing witness to the truth."

Mr. Cardew went off as usual away from what was before him.

"The duty of Christ's minister is, generally speaking, _to take the other side_--that is to say, to resist the verdicts pa.s.sed by the world upon men and things. Preaching mere abstractions, too, is not by itself of much use. What we are bound to do is not only to preserve the eternal standard, but to measure actual human beings and human deeds by it. I sometimes think, too, it is of more importance to say _this is right_ than to say _this is wrong_, to save that which is true than to a.s.sist into perdition that which is false. Especially ought we to defend character unjustly a.s.sailed. A character is something alive, a soul; to rescue it is the salvation of a soul!"

He stopped and seemed to wake up suddenly.

"Good-bye! G.o.d's blessing on you." He shook Tom's hand and was going out of the yard.

"There is just one thing more, sir: I do not want to leave Eastthorpe with such a character behind me--to leave in the dark, one may say, and not defend myself. It looks as if it were an admission I was wrong. I should, above everything, like to get to the bottom of it, and see who is the liar or what the mistake is."