green, unspotted by a single daisy, and on the other
side of it two straight paths led past beds of tall, standing
flowers to a charming grassy walk, where the Rev.
Wyndham Datchet would pace up and down at the same
hour every morning, with a sundial to measure the time
for him. As often as not, he carried a book in his hand,
into which he would glance, then shut it up, and repeat
the rest of the ode from memory. He had most of Horace
by heart, and had got into the habit of connecting this
particular walk with certain odes which he repeated duly,
at the same time noting the condition of his flowers, and
stooping now and again to pick any that were withered
or overblown. On wet days, such was the power of habit
over him, he rose from his chair at the same hour, and
paced his study for the same length of time, pausing now
and then to straighten some book in the bookcase, or
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alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing
upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece.
His children had a great respect for him, credited him
with far more learning than he actually possessed, and
saw that his habits were not interfered with, if possible.
Like most people who do things methodically, the Rector
himself had more strength of purpose and power of self-
sacrifice than of intellect or of originality. On cold and
windy nights he rode off to visit sick people, who might
need him, without a murmur; and by virtue of doing dull
duties punctually, he was much employed upon committees
and local Boards and Councils; and at this period of
his life (he was sixty-eight) he was beginning to be commiserated
by tender old ladies for the extreme leanness
of his person, which, they said, was worn out upon the
roads when it should have been resting before a comfortable
fire. His elder daughter, Elizabeth, lived with him
and managed the house, and already much resembled him
in dry sincerity and methodical habit of mind; of the two
sons one, Richard, was an estate agent, the other, Christopher,
was reading for the Bar. At Christmas, naturally,
they met together; and for a month past the arrangement
of the Christmas week had been much in the mind of
mistress and maid, who prided themselves every year more
confidently upon the excellence of their equipment. The
late Mrs. Datchet had left an excellent cupboard of linen,
to which Elizabeth had succeeded at the age of nineteen,
when her mother died, and the charge of the family rested
upon the shoulders of the eldest daughter. She kept a
fine flock of yellow chickens, sketched a little, certain
rose-trees in the garden were committed specially to her
care; and what with the care of the house, the care of the
chickens, and the care of the poor, she scarcely knew
what it was to have an idle minute. An extreme rectitude
of mind, rather than any gift, gave her weight in the
family. When Mary wrote to say that she had asked Ralph
Denham to stay with them, she added, out of deference
to Elizabeth’s character, that he was very nice, though
rather queer, and had been overworking himself in London.
No doubt Elizabeth would conclude that Ralph was
in love with her, but there could be no doubt either that
not a word of this would be spoken by either of them,
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unless, indeed, some catastrophe made mention of it unavoidable.
Mary went down to Disham without knowing whether
Ralph intended to come; but two or three days before
Christmas she received a telegram from Ralph, asking her
to take a room for him in the village. This was followed
by a letter explaining that he hoped he might have his
meals with them; but quiet, essential for his work, made
it necessary to sleep out.
Mary was walking in the garden with Elizabeth, and
inspecting the roses, when the letter arrived.
“But that’s absurd,” said Elizabeth decidedly, when the
plan was explained to her. “There are five spare rooms,
even when the boys are here. Besides, he wouldn’t get a
room in the village. And he oughtn’t to work if he’s overworked.”
“But perhaps he doesn’t want to see so much of us,”
Mary thought to herself, although outwardly she assented,
and felt grateful to Elizabeth for supporting her in what
was, of course, her desire. They were cutting roses at the
time, and laying them, head by head, in a shallow basket.
“If Ralph were here, he’d find this very dull,” Mary
thought, with a little shiver of irritation, which led her
to place her rose the wrong way in the basket. Meanwhile,
they had come to the end of the path, and while
Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand
upright within their fence of string, Mary looked at her
father, who was pacing up and down, with his hand behind
his back and his head bowed in meditation. Obeying
an impulse which sprang from some desire to interrupt
this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the
grass walk and put her hand on his arm.
“A flower for your buttonhole, father,” she said, presenting
a rose.
“Eh, dear?” said Mr. Datchet, taking the flower, and
holding it at an angle which suited his bad eyesight,
without pausing in his walk.
“Where does this fellow come from? One of Elizabeth’s
roses—I hope you asked her leave. Elizabeth doesn’t like having
her roses picked without her leave, and quite right, too.”
He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed
it so clearly before, of letting his sentences tail
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away in a continuous murmur, whereupon he passed into
a state of abstraction, presumed by his children to indicate
some train of thought too profound for utterance.
“What?” said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in
her life, perhaps, when the murmur ceased. He made no
reply. She knew very well that he wished to be left alone,
but she stuck to his side much as she might have stuck to
some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right gradually
to awaken. She could think of nothing to rouse him with
except:
“The garden’s looking very nice, father.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Datchet, running his words together
in the same abstracted manner, and sinking his
head yet lower upon his breast. And suddenly, as they
turned their steps to retrace their way, he jerked out:
“The traffic’s very much increased, you know. More rolling-
stock needed already. Forty trucks went down yesterday
by the 12.15—counted them myself. They’ve taken
off the 9.3, and given us an 8.30 instead—suits the business
men, you know. You came by the old 3.10 yesterday,
I suppose?”
She said “Yes,” as he seemed to wish for a reply, and
then he looked at his watch, and made off down the path
towards the house, holding the rose at the same angle in
front of him. Elizabeth had gone round to the side of the
house, where the chickens lived, so that Mary found herself
alone, holding Ralph’s letter in her hand. She was
uneasy. She had put off the season for thinking things
out very successfully, and now that Ralph was actually
coming, the next day, she could only wonder how her
family would impress him. She thought it likely that her
father would discuss the train service with him; Elizabeth
would be bright and sensible, and always leaving
the room to give messages to the servants. Her brothers
had already said that they would give him a day’s shooting.
She was content to leave the problem of Ralph’s
relations to the young men obscure, trusting that they
would find some common ground of masculine agreement.
But what would he think of her? Would he see that she
was different from the rest of the family? She devised a
plan for taking him to her sitting-room, and artfully leading
the talk towards the English poets, who now occu
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pied prominent places in her little bookcase. Moreover,
she might give him to understand, privately, that she,
too, thought her family a queer one—queer, yes, but not
dull. That was the rock past which she was bent on steering
him. And she thought how she would draw his attention
to Edward’s passion for Jorrocks, and the enthusiasm
which led Christopher to collect moths and butterflies
though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s
sketching, if the fruits were invisible, might lend color to
the general effect which she wished to produce of a family,
eccentric and limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward,
she perceived, was rolling the lawn, for the sake of exercise;
and the sight of him, with pink cheeks, bright little
brown eyes, and a general resemblance to a clumsy young
cart-horse in its winter coat of dusty brown hair, made
Mary violently ashamed of her ambitious scheming. She
loved him precisely as he was; she loved them all; and as
she walked by his side, up and down, and down and up,
her strong moral sense administered a sound drubbing to
the vain and romantic element aroused in her by the mere
thought of Ralph. She felt quite certain that, for good or
for bad, she was very like the rest of her family.
Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage,
on the afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several
inquiries of a commercial traveler in the opposite
corner. They centered round a village called Lampsher,
not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln; was there a
big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman
of the name of Otway?
The traveler knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway
on his tongue, reflectively, and the sound of it gratified
Ralph amazingly. It gave him an excuse to take a letter
from his pocket in order to verify the address.
“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.
“You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said
the man; and Ralph had to confess that he was not bound
there this very evening.
“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the
heart of him could not help marveling at the pleasure
which he derived from making a bagman in a train believe
what he himself did not believe. For the letter, though
signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or
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warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there;
the only fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this
address would be Mr. Hilbery’s address. But when he looked
out of the window, it was of her he thought; she, too,
had seen these gray fields, and, perhaps, she was there
where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone
now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The
light shone in the windows of an old gray house, he
thought. He lay back in his corner and forgot the commercial
traveler altogether. The process of visualizing
Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;
instinct warned him that if he went much further with
this process reality would soon force itself in; he could
not altogether neglect the figure of William Rodney. Since
the day when he had heard from Katharine’s lips of her
engagement, he had refrained from investing his dream
of her with the details of real life. But the light of the
late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees,
and became a symbol of her. The light seemed to expand
his heart. She brooded over the gray fields, and was with
him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful, silent, and
infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and
must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt
jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a
sturdy russet figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as
the carriage slid down the platform. A tall youth who
accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag,
and led the way without uttering one articulate word.
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening,
when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue
from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard
by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s voice when she
greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the
winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves.
He felt himself at once stepping on to the firm ground of
an entirely different world, but he did not allow himself
to yield to the pleasure of it directly. They gave him his
choice of driving with Edward or of walking home across
the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they explained,
but Mary thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with
her, being conscious, indeed, that he got comfort from
her presence. What could be the cause of her cheerful
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ness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously, as
the pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam
between their eyes and the tall form of Edward, standing
up to drive, with the reins in one hand and the whip in
the other. People from the village, who had been to the
market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off
home down the road together in little parties. Many salutations
were addressed to Mary, who shouted back, with
the addition of the speaker’s name. But soon she led the
way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker
than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the
sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of
some semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while
a fringe of black trees with distinct branches stood against
the light, which was obscured in one direction by a hump
of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the
very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds
of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the
field, circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing
and returning again and again.
Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the
course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages
