of the sin than by the sin itself. She looked splendidly
roused and indignant; and Katharine felt an immense relief
and pride in her mother. It was plain that her indignation
was very genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly
focused upon the facts as any one could wish—
more so, by a long way, than Aunt Celia’s mind, which
seemed to be timidly circling, with a morbid pleasure, in
these unpleasant shades. She and her mother together
would take the situation in hand, visit Cyril, and see the
whole thing through.
“We must realize Cyril’s point of view first,” she said,
speaking directly to her mother, as if to a contemporary,
but before the words were out of her mouth, there was
more confusion outside, and Cousin Caroline, Mrs. Hilbery’s
maiden cousin, entered the room. Although she was by
birth an Alardyce, and Aunt Celia a Hilbery, the complexities
of the family relationship were such that each was at
once first and second cousin to the other, and thus aunt
and cousin to the culprit Cyril, so that his misbehavior
was almost as much Cousin Caroline’s affair as Aunt Celia’s.
Cousin Caroline was a lady of very imposing height and
circumference, but in spite of her size and her handsome
trappings, there was something exposed and unsheltered
in her expression, as if for many summers her thin red
skin and hooked nose and reduplication of chins, so much
resembling the profile of a cockatoo, had been bared to
the weather; she was, indeed, a single lady; but she had,
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it was the habit to say, “made a life for herself,” and was
thus entitled to be heard with respect.
“This unhappy business,” she began, out of breath as
she was. “If the train had not gone out of the station just
as I arrived, I should have been with you before. Celia
has doubtless told you. You will agree with me, Maggie.
He must be made to marry her at once for the sake of the
children—”
“But does he refuse to marry her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired,
with a return of her bewilderment.
“He has written an absurd perverted letter, all quotations,”
Cousin Caroline puffed. “He thinks he’s doing a very
fine thing, where we only see the folly of it… . The girl’s
every bit as infatuated as he is—for which I blame him.”
“She entangled him,” Aunt Celia intervened, with a very
curious smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey
a vision of threads weaving and interweaving a close,
white mesh round their victim.
“It’s no use going into the rights and wrongs of the
affair now, Celia,” said Cousin Caroline with some acerbity,
for she believed herself the only practical one of the
family, and regretted that, owing to the slowness of the
kitchen clock, Mrs. Milvain had already confused poor
dear Maggie with her own incomplete version of the facts.
“The mischief’s done, and very ugly mischief too. Are we
to allow the third child to be born out of wedlock? (I am
sorry to have to say these things before you, Katharine.)
He will bear your name, Maggie—your father’s name, remember.”
“But let us hope it will be a girl,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
Katharine, who had been looking at her mother constantly,
while the chatter of tongues held sway, perceived
that the look of straightforward indignation had already
vanished; her mother was evidently casting about in her
mind for some method of escape, or bright spot, or sudden
illumination which should show to the satisfaction
of everybody that all had happened, miraculously but
incontestably, for the best.
“It’s detestable—quite detestable!” she repeated, but
in tones of no great assurance; and then her face lit up
with a smile which, tentative at first, soon became almost
assured. “Nowadays, people don’t think so badly of
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these things as they used to do,” she began. “It will be
horribly uncomfortable for them sometimes, but if they
are brave, clever children, as they will be, I dare say it’ll
make remarkable people of them in the end. Robert Browning
used to say that every great man has Jewish blood in
him, and we must try to look at it in that light. And, after
all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree with
his principle, but, at least, one can respect it—like the
French Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the King’s head
off. Some of the most terrible things in history have been
done on principle,” she concluded.
“I’m afraid I take a very different view of principle,”
Cousin Caroline remarked tartly.
“Principle!” Aunt Celia repeated, with an air of deprecating
such a word in such a connection. “I will go tomorrow
and see him,” she added.
“But why should you take these disagreeable things
upon yourself, Celia?” Mrs. Hilbery interposed, and Cousin
Caroline thereupon protested with some further plan involving
sacrifice of herself.
Growing weary of it all, Katharine turned to the win
dow, and stood among the folds of the curtain, pressing
close to the window-pane, and gazing disconsolately at
the river much in the attitude of a child depressed by the
meaningless talk of its elders. She was much disappointed
in her mother—and in herself too. The little tug which
she gave to the blind, letting it fly up to the top with a
snap, signified her annoyance. She was very angry, and
yet impotent to give expression to her anger, or know
with whom she was angry. How they talked and moralized
and made up stories to suit their own version of the becoming,
and secretly praised their own devotion and tact!
No; they had their dwelling in a mist, she decided; hundreds
of miles away —away from what? “Perhaps it would
be better if I married William,” she thought suddenly,
and the thought appeared to loom through the mist like
solid ground. She stood there, thinking of her own destiny,
and the elder ladies talked on, until they had talked
themselves into a decision to ask the young woman to
luncheon, and tell her, very friendlily, how such behavior
appeared to women like themselves, who knew the world.
And then Mrs. Hilbery was struck by a better idea.
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CHAPTER X
Messrs. Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm
Ralph Denham was clerk, had their office in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, and there Ralph Denham appeared every morning
very punctually at ten o’clock. His punctuality, together
with other qualities, marked him out among the clerks
for success, and indeed it would have been safe to wager
that in ten years’ time or so one would find him at the
head of his profession, had it not been for a peculiarity
which sometimes seemed to make everything about him
uncertain and perilous. His sister Joan had already been
disturbed by his love of gambling with his savings. Scrutinizing
him constantly with the eye of affection, she
had become aware of a curious perversity in his temperament
which caused her much anxiety, and would have
caused her still more if she had not recognized the germs
of it in her own nature. She could fancy Ralph suddenly
sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination;
some cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for
some woman seen from a railway train, hanging up clothes
in a back yard. When he had found this beauty or this
cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain him
from pursuit of it. She suspected the East also, and always
fidgeted herself when she saw him with a book of
Indian travels in his hand, as though he were sucking
contagion from the page. On the other hand, no common
love affair, had there been such a thing, would have caused
her a moment’s uneasiness where Ralph was concerned.
He was destined in her fancy for something splendid in
the way of success or failure, she knew not which.
And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better
in all the recognized stages of a young man’s life than
Ralph had done, and Joan had to gather materials for her
fears from trifles in her brother’s behavior which would
have escaped any other eye. It was natural that she should
be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from
the start that she could not help dreading any sudden
relaxation of his grasp upon what he held, though, as she
knew from inspection of her own life, such sudden impulse
to let go and make away from the discipline and
the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with
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Ralph, if he broke away, she knew that it would be only to
put himself under harsher constraint; she figured him toiling
through sandy deserts under a tropical sun to find the
source of some river or the haunt of some fly; she figured
him living by the labor of his hands in some city slum, the
victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong
which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner
for life in the house of a woman who had seduced him by
her misfortunes. Half proudly, and wholly anxiously, she
framed such thoughts, as they sat, late at night, talking
together over the gas-stove in Ralph’s bedroom.
It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his
own dream of a future in the forecasts which disturbed
his sister’s peace of mind. Certainly, if any one of them
had been put before him he would have rejected it with a
laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions for him.
He could not have said how it was that he had put these
absurd notions into his sister’s head. Indeed, he prided
himself upon being well broken into a life of hard work,
about which he had no sort of illusions. His vision of his
own future, unlike many such forecasts, could have been
made public at any moment without a blush; he attributed
to himself a strong brain, and conferred on himself
a seat in the House of Commons at the age of fifty, a
moderate fortune, and, with luck, an unimportant office
in a Liberal Government. There was nothing extravagant
in a forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing dishonorable.
Nevertheless, as his sister guessed, it needed all
Ralph’s strength of will, together with the pressure of
circumstances, to keep his feet moving in the path which
led that way. It needed, in particular, a constant repetition
of a phrase to the effect that he shared the common
fate, found it best of all, and wished for no other; and by
repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and habits
of work, and could very plausibly demonstrate that to
be a clerk in a solicitor’s office was the best of all possible
lives, and that other ambitions were vain.
But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended
very much upon the amount of acceptance it received
from other people, and in private, when the pressure
of public opinion was removed, Ralph let himself
swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances
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upon strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been
ashamed to describe. In these dreams, of course, he figured
in noble and romantic parts, but self-glorification
was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to
some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for,
with the pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph
had made up his mind that there was no use for what,
contemptuously enough, he called dreams, in the world
which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that this
spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he thought
that by means of it he could set flowering waste tracts of
the earth, cure many ills, or raise up beauty where none
now existed; it was, too, a fierce and potent spirit which
would devour the dusty books and parchments on the
office wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a
minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it. His
endeavor, for many years, had been to control the spirit,
and at the age of twenty-nine he thought he could pride
himself upon a life rigidly divided into the hours of work
and those of dreams; the two lived side by side without
harming each other. As a matter of fact, this effort at
discipline had been helped by the interests of a difficult
profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had
come when he left college still held sway in his mind,
and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life
for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts
and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree
that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what
once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.
Denham was not altogether popular either in his office
or among his family. He was too positive, at this stage of
his career, as to what was right and what wrong, too
proud of his self-control, and, as is natural in the case of
persons not altogether happy or well suited in their conditions,
too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he
found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the
office his rather ostentatious efficiency annoyed those
who took their own work more lightly, and, if they foretold
his advancement, it was not altogether sympathetically.
Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-
sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners
that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed
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with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural,
these critics thought, in a man of no means, but not
engaging.
The young men in the office had a perfect right to these
opinions, because Denham showed no particular desire
for their friendship. He liked them well enough, but shut
them up in that compartment of life which was devoted
to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little difficulty
in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his
expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter
experiences which were not so easy to classify. Mary
