account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession
of that strangely attractive masculine power, made
her rouse herself from her torpor.
Why should she not simply tell him the truth—which
was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind
when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was
deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was
out of the question? She did not want to marry any one.
She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some
bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and
the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain
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the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he
had told her once more how he loved her and why. She
summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-
splintered ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a
writing fixed to the trunk, began:
“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make
you happy. I have never loved you.”
“Katharine!” he protested.
“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t
you see, I didn’t know what I was doing?”
“You love some one else?” he cut her short.
“Absolutely no one.”
“Henry?” he demanded.
“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you—”
“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a
change in the last few weeks. You owe it to me to be
honest, Katharine.”
“If I could, I would,” she replied.
“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he
demanded.
Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden con
viction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the
illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven
and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with
facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from
a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender.
But who could give reasons such as these for doing
what she had done? She shook her head very sadly.
“But you’re not a child—you’re not a woman of moods,”
Rodney persisted. “You couldn’t have accepted me if you
hadn’t loved me!” he cried.
A sense of her own misbehavior, which she had succeeded
in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness
of Rodney’s faults, now swept over her and almost
overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with
the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in
comparison with the fact that she did not care for him?
In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost
sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and
she felt herself branded for ever.
He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his,
nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her
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his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would
submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women,
perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every
second of such submission to his strength was a second
of treachery to him.
“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she
forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to
annul even the seeming submission of that separate part
of her; “for I don’t love you, William; you’ve noticed it,
every one’s noticed it; why should we go on pretending?
When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I
knew to be untrue.”
As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to
represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized
them without realizing the effect that they might
have upon a man who cared for her. She was completely
taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then
she saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing,
it flashed across her? In another moment she saw
that he was in tears. In her bewilderment at this apparition
she stood aghast for a second. With a desperate
sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she
then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment
upon her shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of
consolation, until he heaved a great sigh. They held fast
to each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and
were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which
he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her
own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment
where the bracken was brown and shriveled beneath
an oak-tree. He assented. Once more he gave a
great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness,
and began to speak without a trace of his
previous anger. The idea came to her that they were like
the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood,
and with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of
dead leaves all round them which had been blown by the
wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.
“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said;
“for it isn’t true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit
I was unreasonable the first night when you found that
your clothes had been left behind. Still, where’s the fault
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in that? I could promise you never to interfere with your
clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you upstairs
with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But
that’s not unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask
your mother. And now this terrible thing—” He broke off,
unable for the moment to proceed any further. “This decision
you say you’ve come to—have you discussed it
with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with
her hand. “But you don’t understand me, William—”
“Help me to understand you—”
“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how
could you? I’ve only now faced them myself. But I haven’t
got the sort of feeling—love, I mean—I don’t know what
to call it”—she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk
under mist—”but, anyhow, without it our marriage would
be a farce—”
“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is
disastrous!” he exclaimed.
“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.
“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he
continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as
his manner was. “Believe me, Katharine, before we came
here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for
our house—the chair-covers, don’t you remember?—like
any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no
reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling
and about my feeling, with the usual result. I assure you,
Katharine, I’ve been through it all myself. At one time I
was always asking myself absurd questions which came
to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is
some occupation to take you out of yourself when this
morbid mood comes on. If it hadn’t been for my poetry, I
assure you, I should often have been very much in the
same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he continued,
with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost
assured, “I’ve often gone home from seeing you in such a
state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page
or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham;
he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll tell you what
a state he found me in.”
Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of
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Ralph’s name. The thought of the conversation in which
her conduct had been made a subject for discussion with
Denham roused her anger; but, as she instantly felt, she
had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of her
name, seeing what her fault against him had been from
first to last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a
judge. She figured him sternly weighing instances of her
levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine
morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family
with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed
her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having
met him so lately, the sense of his character was strong
in her. The thought was not a pleasant one for a proud
woman, but she had yet to learn the art of subduing her
expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows
drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the
resentment that she was forcing herself to control. A certain
degree of apprehension, occasionally culminating in
a kind of fear, had always entered into his love for her,
and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater
intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, ex
emplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to
him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never
took the normal channel of glorification of him and his
doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good
sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a
more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could not
deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in
his thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to
be born to them.
“She will make a perfect mother—a mother of sons,”
he thought; but seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent,
he began to have his doubts on this point. “A farce,
a farce,” he thought to himself. “She said that our marriage
would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware
of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the
dead leaves, not fifty yards from the main road, so that it
was quite possible for some one passing to see and recognize
them. He brushed off his face any trace that might
remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he
was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat
rapt in thought upon the ground, than by his own; there
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was something improper to him in her self-forgetfulness.
A man naturally alive to the conventions of society, he
was strictly conventional where women were concerned,
and especially if the women happened to be in any way
connected with him. He noticed with distress the long
strand of dark hair touching her shoulder and two or three
dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but to recall
her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of
these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious
of everything. He suspected that in her silence
she was reproaching herself; but he wished that she would
think of her hair and of the dead beech-leaves, which
were of more immediate importance to him than anything
else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention
strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind;
for relief, mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious
hurry and tumult in his breast, almost concealing his
first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming disappointment.
In order to relieve this restlessness and close a
distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped
Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute
care with which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed
the dead leaves from his own coat, she flinched, seeing
in that action the gesture of a lonely man.
“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make
you happy.”
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CHAPTER XIX
The afternoon was already growing dark when the two
other wayfarers, Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on
the high road beyond the outskirts of Lincoln. The high
road, as they both felt, was better suited to this return
journey than the open country, and for the first mile or
so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph
was following the passage of the Otway carriage over the
heath; he then went back to the five or ten minutes that
he had spent with Katharine, and examined each word
with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities
of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow,
the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not
paint what he must in future regard as sober facts. On
her side Mary was silent, not because her thoughts took
much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of
thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph’s presence, as
she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee
a time of loneliness when many varieties of pain would
beset her. At the present moment her effort was to pre
serve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, for
such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so
involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it
did not much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to
be careful of that vision of herself which keeps pace so
evenly beside every one of us, and had been damaged by
her confession. The gray night coming down over the
country was kind to her; and she thought that one of
these days she would find comfort in sitting upon the
earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking through the darkness,
she marked the swelling ground and the tree. Ralph
made her start by saying abruptly;
“What I was going to say when we were interrupted at
lunch was that if you go to America I shall come, too. It
can’t be harder to earn a living there than it is here.
However, that’s not the point. The point is, Mary, that I
want to marry you. Well, what do you say?” He spoke
firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his.
“You know me by this time, the good and the bad,” he
went on. “You know my tempers. I’ve tried to let you
know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?”
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She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.
“In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you
said, we know each other and we think alike. I believe
you are the only person in the world I could live with
happily. And if you feel the same about me—as you do,
don’t you, Mary?—we should make each other happy.”
Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an
answer; he seemed, indeed, to be continuing his own
