Catharine Furze Part 22

"n.o.body would listen to you, and if you were to make a noise Mr. Furze might prosecute, and with the evidence he has we do not know what the end might be; I will do my part, as I am bound to do, to set you right. But, above everything, Mr. Catchpole, endeavour to put yourself where the condemnation of the world and even crucifixion by it are of no consequence." Mr. Cardew gave Tom one more shake of the hand, mounted his horse, and rode off. He had asked Tom for no proofs: he had merely heard the tale and had given his certificate.

Mr Furze distinctly enjoined Orkid Jim to hold his tongue. Neither Mr.

nor Mrs. Furze wished to appear in court, and they were uncertain what Catharine might do if they went any further. Mr. Orkid Jim had the best of reasons for silence, but Mr. Humphries, the builder, of course repeated what he himself knew, and so it went about that Tom was wrong in his accounts, and all Eastthorpe affirmed him to be little better than a rascal. Mr. Cardew, with every t.i.ttle of much stronger and apparently irresistible testimony before him, never for a moment considered it as a feather's weight in the balance.

"But the facts, my good sir, the facts; the facts--there they are: the receipt to the bill; Jim's declaration; his brother's declaration; the marked coin; the absolute proof that Catchpole gave it to b.u.t.terfield, and he could not, as some may think, have changed silver of his own for it, for Mr. Furze paid him in gold, and there was not twenty s.h.i.+llings worth of silver in the till; what _have_ you got to say? Do you tell me all this may be accident and coincidence? If you do, we may just as well give up reasoning and the whole of our criminal procedure."

Mr. Cardew did know the facts, _the_ facts, and relying on them he delivered his judgment. Catharine, Phoebe, and Tom's father agreed with him--four jurors out of one thousand of full age; but the four were right and the nine hundred odd were wrong. In the four dwelt what aforetime would have been called faith, nothing magical, nothing superst.i.tious, but really the n.o.blest form of reason, for it is the ability to rest upon the one reality which is of value, neglecting all delusive appearances which may apparently contradict it.

Tom left Eastthorpe the next morning, and on that day Catharine received the following letter from her mother:

"MY DEAR CATHARINE,--I write to tell you that we have made an awful discovery. Catchpole has appropriated money belonging to your father, and the evidence against him is complete. (Mrs. Furze then told the story.) You will now, my dear Catharine, be able, I hope, to do justice to your father and mother, and to understand their anxiety that you should form no connection with a man like this. It is true that on the morning when we spoke to you we did not know the extent of his guilt, but we had suspected him for some time. It is quite providential that the disclosure comes--at the present moment, and I hope it will detach you from him for ever. Your father and I send our love, and please a.s.sure Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy of our regard.

"Your affectionate mother,

"AMELIA FURZE."

On the same morning Mr. Furze received the following note from Mr.

Cardew:--

"DEAR SIR,--I regret to hear that a false charge has been preferred against my friend Mr. Catchpole. By my advice he has left Eastthorpe without any attempt to defend himself, but I consider it my duty to tell you he is innocent; that you have lost a faithful servant, and, what is worse, you have done him harm, not only in body, but in soul, for there are not many men who can be wrongfully accused and remain calm and resigned. You ask me on what evidence I acquit him. I know the whole story, but I also know him, and I know that he cannot lie. I beg you to consider what you do in branding as foul that which G.o.d has made good. I offer no apology for thus addressing you, for I am a minister of G.o.d's Word, and I have to do all that He bids. I should consider I was but a poor servant of the Most High if I did not protest against wrong-doing face to face with the doer of it.

"Faithfully yours,

"THEOPHILUS CARDEW."

Both Mr. and Mrs. Furze Were greatly incensed, and Mr. Cardew received the following reply, due rather to Mrs. than to Mr. Furze--

"SIR,--I am greatly surprised at the receipt of your letter. You have taken up the cause of a servant against his master, and a dishonest servant, too: you have taken it up with only an imperfect acquaintance with the case, and knowing nothing of it except from his representation. If you were the clergyman of this parish I might, perhaps, recognise your right to address me, although I am inclined to believe that the clergy do far more harm than good by meddling with matters outside their own sphere. How can we listen with respect to a minister who is occupied with worldly affairs rather than with those matters which befit his calling and concern our salvation? Sir, I must decline any discussion with you as to Mr. Catchpole's innocence or guilt, and respectfully deny your right to interfere.

"I am, sir,

"Your obedient servant,

"J. FURZE."

Catharine's first impulse was to go home instantly and vindicate Tom, but she did not move, and the letter remained unanswered. What could she say to her own parents which would meet the case or would be worthy of such a conspiracy? She would not be believed, and no good would be done. A stronger reason for not speaking was a certain pride and a determination to retaliate by silence, but the strongest of all reasons was a kind of collapse after she arrived at Chapel Farm, and the disappearance of all desire to fight. Her old cheerfulness began to depart, and a cloud to creep over her like the shadow of an eclipse. Young as she was, strange thoughts possessed her. The interval between the present moment and death appeared annihilated; life was a mere span; a day would go by and then a week, and in a few months, which could easily be counted, would come the end; nay, it was already out there, visible, approaching, and when she came to think what death really meant, the difference between right and wrong was worth nothing. Terrors, vague and misty possessed her, all the worse because they were not substantial. She could not put into words what ailed her, and she wrestled with shapeless clinging forms which she could hardly discern, and could not distangle from her, much less overthrow. They wound themselves about her, and although they were but shadows, they made her shriek, and at times she fainted under their grasp, and thought she could not survive. She had no peace. If soldiers lie dead upon a battle-field there is an end of them; new armies may be raised, but the enemy is at any rate weaker by those who are killed. It is not quite the same with our ghostly foes, for they rise into life after we think they are buried, and often with greater strength than ever. There is something awful in the obstinacy of the a.s.saults upon us.

Day after day, night after night, and perhaps year after year, the wretched citadel is environed, and the pressure of the attack is unremitting, while the force which resists has to be summoned by a direct effort of the will, and the moment that effort relaxes the force fails, and the besiegers swarm upon the fortifications. That which makes for our destruction, everything that is horrible, seems spontaneously active, and the opposition is an everlasting struggle.

At last the effect upon Catharine's health was so obvious that Mrs.

Bellamy was alarmed, and went over to Eastthorpe to see Mrs. Furze. Mrs.

Furze in her own mind instantly concluded that Tom was the cause of her daughter's trouble, but she did not mean to admit it to her. In a sense Tom was the cause; not that she loved him, but because her refusal of him brought it vividly before her that her life would be spent without love, or, at least, without a love which could be acknowledged. It was a crisis, for the pattern of her existence was henceforth settled, and she was to live not only without that which is sweetest for woman, but with no definite object before her. The force in woman is so great that something with which it can grapple, on which it can expend itself, is a necessity, and Catharine felt that her strength would have to occupy itself in twisting straws. It is really this which is the root of many a poor girl's suffering. As the world is arranged at present, there is too much power for the mills which have to be turned by it.

Mrs. Furze requested Mrs. Bellamy to send back Catharine at once in order that a doctor might be consulted. She returned; she did not really much care where she was; and to the doctor she went. Dr. Turnbull was the gentleman selected.

CHAPTER XVIII

Dr. Turnbull was the doctor who, it will be remembered, lived in the square near the church. There was another doctor in Eastthorpe, Mr.

Butcher, of whom we have heard, but Dr. Turnbull's reputation as a doctor was far higher than Mr. Butcher's. What Eastthorpe thought of Dr.

Turnbull as a man is another matter. Mr. Butcher was married, church- going, polite, smiling to everybody, and when he called he always said, "Well, and how are _we_?" in such a nice way, identifying himself with his patient. But even Eastthorpe had not much faith in him, and in very serious cases always preferred Dr. Turnbull. Eastthorpe had remarked that Mr. Butcher's medicines had a curious similarity. He believed in two cla.s.ses of diseases--sthenic and asthenic. For the former he prescribed bleeding and purgatives; for the latter he "threw in" bark and iron, and ordered port wine. Eastthorpe thought him very fair for colds, measles, chicken-pox, and for rashes of all sorts, and so did all the country round. He generally attended everybody for such complaints, but as Mr. Gosford said after his recovery from a dangerous attack, "when it come to a stoppage, I thought I'd better have Turnbull," and Mr. Gosford sent for him promptly.

Dr. Turnbull was born three or four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was consequently a little older than the great Dr.

Elliotson, whose memory some of us still piously cherish, and Dr.

Elliotson and he were devoted friends. Dr. Turnbull was tall, thin, upright, with undimmed grey eyes and dark hair, which had hardly yet begun to turn in colour, but was a little worn off his forehead. He had a curiously piercing look in his face, so that it was impossible if you told him an untruth not to feel that you were detected. He never joked or laughed in the sickroom or in his consulting-room, and his words were few. But what was most striking in him was his mute power of command, so that everybody in contact with him did his bidding without any effort on his part. He kept three servants--two women and a man. They were very good servants, but all three had been p.r.o.nounced utterly intractable before they went to him. Master and mistress dared not speak to them; but with Dr. Turnbull they were suppressed as completely as if he had been Napoleon and they had been privates. He was kind to them, it is true, but at times very severe, and they could neither reply to him nor leave him. He did not affect the dress nor the manners of the doctors who preceded him. He wore a simple, black necktie, a s.h.i.+rt with no frill, and a black frock-coat. The poor wors.h.i.+pped him, as well they might, for his generosity to them was unexampled, and he took as much pains with them and was as kind to them as if they were the first people in Eastthorpe. He was perhaps even gentler with the poor than with the rich. He was very apt to be contemptuous, and to snarl when called to a rich man suffering from some trifling disorder who thought that his wealth justified a second opinion, but he watched the whole night through with the tenderness of a woman by the bedside of poor Phoebe Crowhurst when she had congestion of the lungs before she lived with Mrs. Furze. He saved that girl and would not take a sixpence, and when the mother, overcome with grat.i.tude, actually fell on her knees before him and clung to him and sobbed and could not speak, he lifted her up with a "Nonsense, my good woman!" and quickly departed. He was a materialist, and described himself as one: he disbelieved in what he called the soap-bubble theory, that somewhere in us there is something like a bubble, which controls everything, and is everything, and escapes invisible and gaseous to some other place after death. Consequently he never went to church. He was not openly combative, but Eastthorpe knew his heresies, and was taught to shudder at them. His professionally religious neighbours of course put him in h.e.l.l in the future, but the common people did not go so far as that, although they could not believe him saved. They somehow confounded his denial of immortality with his own mortality, and imagined he would be at an end when he was put into the grave. As time wore on the att.i.tude, even of the clergy, towards the doctor was gradually changed. They hastened to recognise him on week- days as he walked in his rapid, stately manner through the streets, although if they saw him on Sundays they considered it more becoming to avoid him. He was, as we have seen, a materialist, but yet he was the most spiritual person in the whole district. He took the keenest interest in science; he was generous, and a believer in a spiritualism infinitely beyond that of most of his neighbours, for they had not a single spiritual interest. He was spiritual in his treatment of disease.

He was before his age by half a century, and instead of "throwing in"

drugs after the fas.h.i.+on of Butcher, he prescribed fresh air, rest, and change, and, above everything, administered his own powerful individuality. He did not follow his friend Elliotson into mesmerism, but he had a mesmerism of his own, subduing all terror and sanative like light. Mr. Gosford was not capable of great expression, but he was always as expressive as he could be when he told the story of that dreadful illness.

"He come into the room and ordered all the physic away, and then he sat down beside me, and it was just afore hay-harvest, and I was in mortal fright, and I said to him, 'Oh, doctor, I shall die.' Never shall I forget what I had gone through that night, for I'd done nothing but see the grave afore me, and I was lying in it a-rotting. Well, he took my hand, and he said, 'Why, for that matter, my friend, I must die too; but there's nothing in it; you won't complain when you find out what death is. You won't die yet, though, and you'll get this lot of hay in at any rate; what a heavy crop it is!' and he opened the winder and looked out.

The way he spoke was wonderful, and what it was which come into me when he said, '_I must die too_,' I don't know, but all my terrors went away, and I lay as calm as a child. 'Fore G.o.d I did, as calm as a child, and I felt the wind upon me across the meadow while he stood looking at it, and I could almost have got up that minute. I warn't out of bed for a fortnight, but I did go out into the hayfield, as he said."

Why did Dr. Turnbull come to Eastthorpe? n.o.body ever knew while he lived. The question had been put at least some thousands of times, and all kinds of inquiries made, but with no result. The real reason, discovered afterwards, was simply that he had bad health, and that he had fled from temptation in the shape of a woman whom he loved, but whom duty, as he interpreted it, forbade him to marry, because he considered it wicked to run the risk of bringing diseased children into the world.

This was the man to whom Catharine went. Mrs. Furze went with her. He was perfectly acquainted with Mrs. Furze, and had seen Catharine, but had never spoken to her. Mrs. Furze told her story, which was that Catharine had no appet.i.te, and was wasting from no a.s.signable cause. The doctor sounded her carefully, and then sat down without speaking. There was undoubtedly a weakness in one lung, but he was not satisfied. He knew how difficult it is to get people to tell the real truth to a physician, and that if a third person is present, it is impossible. He therefore asked Mrs. Furze if she would step into the next room. "A girl," he said, "will not say all she has to say even to her mother." Mrs. Furze did not quite like it, but obeyed.

"Miss Furze," said the doctor, "I imagine you are a person who would not like to be deceived: you have a slight tenderness in the chest; there is no reasonable cause for alarm, but you will have to be careful."

Catharine's face lighted up a little when the last sentence was half finished, and the careful observer noticed it instantly.

"That, however, is not the cause of your troubles: there is something on your mind. I never make any inquiries in such cases, because I know if I did I should be met with evasions."

Catharine's eyes were on the floor. After a long pause she said--

"I am wretched: I have no pleasure in life; that is all I can say."

"If there is no definite cause for it--mind, I say that--I may do something to relieve your distress. When people have no pleasure in living, and there is no concrete reason for it, they are out of health, and argument is of no avail. If a man does not find that food and light and the air are pleasant, it is of no use to debate with himself. Have you any friends at a distance?"

"None."

"What occupation have you?"

"None."

"It is not often that people are so miserable that they are unable to make others less miserable. If instead of thinking about yourself you were to think a little about those who are worse, if you would just consider that you have duties and attempt to do them, the effort might be a mere dead lift at first, but it would do you good, and you would find a little comfort in knowing at the end of the day that, although it had brought no delight to you, it had through you been made more tolerable to somebody. Disorders of the type with which you are afflicted are terribly selfish. Mind, I repeat it, I presuppose nothing but general depression. If it is more than that I can be of no use."

Catharine was dumb, and Dr. Turnbull's singular power of winning confidence was of no avail to extract anything more from her.

"I am sorry you cannot leave home. I shall give you no medicine. With regard to the chest, the single definite point, you know what precautions to take; as to the nervous trouble, do not discuss, ponder, or even directly attack, but turn the position, if I may so speak, by work and a determination to be of some use. If you were tempted by what you call wicked thoughts you would not nurse them. It is a great pity that people are so narrow in their notions of what wicked thoughts are. Every thought which maims you is wicked, horribly wicked, I call it. By the way, going to another subject, that poor girl, Phoebe Crowhurst, who lived at your house, is very ill again. She would like to see you."

Catharine left, and Mrs. Furze came in.

"Has anything unsettled your daughter lately?"

"No, nothing particular."

She thought of Tom, but to save Catharine's life she would not have acknowledged that it was possible for a Catchpole to have power to disturb a Furze. Had it been Mr. Colston now, the case would have been different.