her sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by
the light leafless hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of
clematis would completely obscure Cassiopeia, or blot
out with its black pattern myriads of miles of the Milky
Way. At the end of the pergola, however, there was a
stone seat, from which the sky could be seen completely
swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right,
indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled
with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of
quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney.
It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars
was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman’s
form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed
almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the
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winter’s night, which was mild enough, not so much to
look with scientific eyes upon the stars, as to shake herself
free from certain purely terrestrial discontents. Much
as a literary person in like circumstances would begin,
absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she
stepped into the garden in order to have the stars at
hand, even though she did not look at them. Not to be
happy, when she was supposed to be happier than she
would ever be again—that, as far as she could see, was
the origin of a discontent which had begun almost as
soon as she arrived, two days before, and seemed now so
intolerable that she had left the family party, and come
out here to consider it by herself. It was not she who
thought herself unhappy, but her cousins, who thought it
for her. The house was full of cousins, much of her age, or
even younger, and among them they had some terribly
bright eyes. They seemed always on the search for something
between her and Rodney, which they expected to
find, and yet did not find; and when they searched,
Katharine became aware of wanting what she had not
been conscious of wanting in London, alone with William
and her parents. Or, if she did not want it, she missed it.
And this state of mind depressed her, because she had
been accustomed always to give complete satisfaction,
and her self-love was now a little ruffled. She would have
liked to break through the reserve habitual to her in order
to justify her engagement to some one whose opinion
she valued. No one had spoken a word of criticism,
but they left her alone with William; not that that would
have mattered, if they had not left her alone so politely;
and, perhaps, that would not have mattered if they had
not seemed so queerly silent, almost respectful, in her
presence, which gave way to criticism, she felt, out of it.
Looking now and then at the sky, she went through the
list of her cousins’ names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke,
Silvia, Henry, Cassandra, Gilbert, and Mostyn—Henry, the
cousin who taught the young ladies of Bungay to play
upon the violin, was the only one in whom she could
confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the
hoops of the pergola, she did begin a little speech to
him, which ran something like this:
“To begin with, I’m very fond of William. You can’t deny
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that. I know him better than any one, almost. But why
I’m marrying him is, partly, I admit—I’m being quite
honest with you, and you mustn’t tell any one—partly
because I want to get married. I want to have a house of
my own. It isn’t possible at home. It’s all very well for
you, Henry; you can go your own way. I have to be there
always. Besides, you know what our house is. You wouldn’t
be happy either, if you didn’t do something. It isn’t that
I haven’t the time at home—it’s the atmosphere.” Here,
presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had listened
with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows
a little, and interposed:
“Well, but what do you want to do?”
Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found
it difficult to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.
“I should like,” she began, and hesitated quite a long
time before she forced herself to add, with a change of
voice, “to study mathematics—to know about the stars.”
Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all
his doubts; he only said something about the difficulties
of mathematics, and remarked that very little was known
about the stars.
Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her
case.
“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—
but I want to work out something in figures—
something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I
don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I’m
a humbug—I mean, I’m not what you all take me for. I’m
not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I
could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to
work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was
wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should
give William all he wants.”
Having reached this point, instinct told her that she
had passed beyond the region in which Henry’s advice
could be of any good; and, having rid her mind of its
superficial annoyance, she sat herself upon the stone seat,
raised her eyes unconsciously and thought about the
deeper questions which she had to decide, she knew, for
herself. Would she, indeed, give William all he wanted?
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In order to decide the question, she ran her mind rapidly
over her little collection of significant sayings, looks,
compliments, gestures, which had marked their intercourse
during the last day or two. He had been annoyed because
a box, containing some clothes specially chosen by him
for her to wear, had been taken to the wrong station,
owing to her neglect in the matter of labels. The box had
arrived in the nick of time, and he had remarked, as she
came downstairs on the first night, that he had never
seen her look more beautiful. She outshone all her cousins.
He had discovered that she never made an ugly movement;
he also said that the shape of her head made it
possible for her, unlike most women, to wear her hair
low. He had twice reproved her for being silent at dinner;
and once for never attending to what he said. He had
been surprised at the excellence of her French accent,
but he thought it was selfish of her not to go with her
mother to call upon the Middletons, because they were
old family friends and very nice people. On the whole,
the balance was nearly even; and, writing down a kind of
conclusion in her mind which finished the sum for the
present, at least, she changed the focus of her eyes, and
saw nothing but the stars.
To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in
the blue, and flashed back such a ripple of light into her
eyes that she found herself thinking that to-night the
stars were happy. Without knowing or caring more for
Church practices than most people of her age, Katharine
could not look into the sky at Christmas time without
feeling that, at this one season, the Heavens bend over
the earth with sympathy, and signal with immortal radiance
that they, too, take part in her festival. Somehow, it
seemed to her that they were even now beholding the
procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a
distant part of the earth. And yet, after gazing for another
second, the stars did their usual work upon the
mind, froze to cinders the whole of our short human history,
and reduced the human body to an ape-like, furry
form, crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod
of mud. This stage was soon succeeded by another, in
which there was nothing in the universe save stars and
the light of stars; as she looked up the pupils of her eyes
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so dilated with starlight that the whole of her seemed
dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars
for ever and ever indefinitely through space. Somehow
simultaneously, though incongruously, she was riding with
the magnanimous hero upon the shore or under forest
trees, and so might have continued were it not for the
rebuke forcibly administered by the body, which, content
with the normal conditions of life, in no way furthers any
attempt on the part of the mind to alter them. She grew
cold, shook herself, rose, and walked towards the house.
By the light of the stars, Stogdon House looked pale
and romantic, and about twice its natural size. Built by a
retired admiral in the early years of the nineteenth century,
the curving bow windows of the front, now filled
with reddish-yellow light, suggested a portly three-decker,
sailing seas where those dolphins and narwhals who disport
themselves upon the edges of old maps were scattered
with an impartial hand. A semicircular flight of shallow
steps led to a very large door, which Katharine had
left ajar. She hesitated, cast her eyes over the front of
the house, marked that a light burnt in one small window
upon an upper floor, and pushed the door open. For a
moment she stood in the square hall, among many horned
skulls, sallow globes, cracked oil-paintings, and stuffed
owls, hesitating, it seemed, whether she should open the
door on her right, through which the stir of life reached
her ears. Listening for a moment, she heard a sound which
decided her, apparently, not to enter; her uncle, Sir Francis,
was playing his nightly game of whist; it appeared probable
that he was losing.
She went up the curving stairway, which represented
the one attempt at ceremony in the otherwise rather dilapidated
mansion, and down a narrow passage until she
came to the room whose light she had seen from the
garden. Knocking, she was told to come in. A young man,
Henry Otway, was reading, with his feet on the fender.
He had a fine head, the brow arched in the Elizabethan
manner, but the gentle, honest eyes were rather skeptical
than glowing with the Elizabethan vigor. He gave the
impression that he had not yet found the cause which
suited his temperament.
He turned, put down his book, and looked at her. He
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noticed her rather pale, dew-drenched look, as of one
whose mind is not altogether settled in the body. He had
often laid his difficulties before her, and guessed, in some
ways hoped, that perhaps she now had need of him. At
the same time, she carried on her life with such independence
that he scarcely expected any confidence to be
expressed in words.
“You have fled, too, then?” he said, looking at her cloak.
Katharine had forgotten to remove this token of her stargazing.
“Fled?” she asked. “From whom d’you mean? Oh, the
family party. Yes, it was hot down there, so I went into
the garden.”
“And aren’t you very cold?” Henry inquired, placing coal
on the fire, drawing a chair up to the grate, and laying
aside her cloak. Her indifference to such details often
forced Henry to act the part generally taken by women in
such dealings. It was one of the ties between them.
“Thank you, Henry,” she said. “I’m not disturbing you?”
“I’m not here. I’m at Bungay,” he replied. “I’m giving a
music lesson to Harold and Julia. That was why I had to
leave the table with the ladies—I’m spending the night
there, and I shan’t be back till late on Christmas Eve.”
“How I wish—” Katharine began, and stopped short. “I
think these parties are a great mistake,” she added briefly,
and sighed.
“Oh, horrible!” he agreed; and they both fell silent.
Her sigh made him look at her. Should he venture to
ask her why she sighed? Was her reticence about her own
affairs as inviolable as it had often been convenient for
rather an egoistical young man to think it? But since her
engagement to Rodney, Henry’s feeling towards her had
become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse
to hurt her and an impulse to be tender to her; and
all the time he suffered a curious irritation from the sense
that she was drifting away from him for ever upon unknown
seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into his
presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her,
she knew that any intercourse between people is extremely
partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, only one or
two could be selected for Henry’s inspection, and therefore
she sighed. Then she looked at him, and their eyes
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meeting, much more seemed to be in common between them
than had appeared possible. At any rate they had a grandfather
in common; at any rate there was a kind of loyalty
between them sometimes found between relations who have
no other cause to like each other, as these two had.
“Well, what’s the date of the wedding?” said Henry, the
malicious mood now predominating.
“I think some time in March,” she replied.
“And afterwards?” he asked.
“We take a house, I suppose, somewhere in Chelsea.”
“It’s very interesting,” he observed, stealing another
look at her.
She lay back in her arm-chair, her feet high upon the
side of the grate, and in front of her, presumably to screen
her eyes, she held a newspaper from which she picked up
a sentence or two now and again. Observing this, Henry
remarked:
“Perhaps marriage will make you more human.”
At this she lowered the newspaper an inch or two, but
said nothing. Indeed, she sat quite silent for over a
minute.
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs
don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” she said suddenly.
“I don’t think I ever do consider things like the stars,”
Henry replied. “I’m not sure that that’s not the explanation,
though,” he added, now observing her steadily.
“I doubt whether there is an explanation,” she replied
rather hurriedly, not clearly understanding what he meant.
“What? No explanation of anything?” he inquired, with
