only a day or two ago would have been inconceivable to
him. That a relationship such as he had glanced at with
desire could be possible between him and Katharine, he
would have been the first, two days ago, to deny with
indignation. But now his life had changed; his attitude
had changed; his feelings were different; new aims and
possibilities had been shown him, and they had an almost
irresistible fascination and force. The training of a
life of thirty-five years had not left him defenceless; he
was still master of his dignity; he rose, with a mind made
up to an irrevocable farewell.
“I leave you, then,” he said, standing up and holding
out his hand with an effort that left him pale, but lent
him dignity, “to tell your mother that our engagement is
ended by your desire.”
She took his hand and held it.
“You don’t trust me?” she said.
“I do, absolutely,” he replied.
“No. You don’t trust me to help you… . I could help
you?”
“I’m hopeless without your help!” he exclaimed passionately,
but withdrew his hand and turned his back.
When he faced her, she thought that she saw him for the
first time without disguise.
“It’s useless to pretend that I don’t understand what
you’re offering, Katharine. I admit what you say. Speaking
to you perfectly frankly, I believe at this moment
that I do love your cousin; there is a chance that, with
your help, I might—but no,” he broke off, “it’s impossible,
it’s wrong—I’m infinitely to blame for having allowed
this situation to arise.”
“Sit beside me. Let’s consider sensibly—”
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“Your sense has been our undoing—” he groaned.
“I accept the responsibility.”
“Ah, but can I allow that?” he exclaimed. “It would
mean—for we must face it, Katharine—that we let our
engagement stand for the time nominally; in fact, of
course, your freedom would be absolute.”
“And yours too.”
“Yes, we should both be free. Let us say that I saw
Cassandra once, twice, perhaps, under these conditions;
and then if, as I think certain, the whole thing proves a
dream, we tell your mother instantly. Why not tell her
now, indeed, under pledge of secrecy?”
“Why not? It would be over London in ten minutes,
besides, she would never even remotely understand.”
“Your father, then? This secrecy is detestable—it’s dishonorable.”
“My father would understand even less than my mother.”
“Ah, who could be expected to understand?” Rodney
groaned; “but it’s from your point of view that we must
look at it. It’s not only asking too much, it’s putting you
into a position—a position in which I could not endure
to see my own sister.”
“We’re not brothers and sisters,” she said impatiently,
“and if we can’t decide, who can? I’m not talking nonsense,”
she proceeded. “I’ve done my best to think this
out from every point of view, and I’ve come to the conclusion
that there are risks which have to be taken,—
though I don’t deny that they hurt horribly.”
“Katharine, you mind? You’ll mind too much.”
“No I shan’t,” she said stoutly. “I shall mind a good deal,
but I’m prepared for that; I shall get through it, because
you will help me. You’ll both help me. In fact, we’ll help
each other. That’s a Christian doctrine, isn’t it?”
“It sounds more like Paganism to me,” Rodney groaned,
as he reviewed the situation into which her Christian
doctrine was plunging them.
And yet he could not deny that a divine relief possessed
him, and that the future, instead of wearing a
lead-colored mask, now blossomed with a thousand varied
gaieties and excitements. He was actually to see
Cassandra within a week or perhaps less, and he was more
anxious to know the date of her arrival than he could
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own even to himself. It seemed base to be so anxious to
pluck this fruit of Katharine’s unexampled generosity and
of his own contemptible baseness. And yet, though he
used these words automatically, they had now no meaning.
He was not debased in his own eyes by what he had
done, and as for praising Katharine, were they not partners,
conspirators, people bent upon the same quest together,
so that to praise the pursuit of a common end as
an act of generosity was meaningless. He took her hand
and pressed it, not in thanks so much as in an ecstasy of
comradeship.
“We will help each other,” he said, repeating her words,
seeking her eyes in an enthusiasm of friendship.
Her eyes were grave but dark with sadness as they rested
on him. “He’s already gone,” she thought, “far away—he
thinks of me no more.” And the fancy came to her that,
as they sat side by side, hand in hand, she could hear the
earth pouring from above to make a barrier between them,
so that, as they sat, they were separated second by second
by an impenetrable wall. The process, which affected
her as that of being sealed away and for ever from all
companionship with the person she cared for most, came
to an end at last, and by common consent they unclasped
their fingers, Rodney touching hers with his lips, as the
curtain parted, and Mrs. Hilbery peered through the opening
with her benevolent and sarcastic expression to ask
whether Katharine could remember was it Tuesday or
Wednesday, and did she dine in Westminster?
“Dearest William,” she said, pausing, as if she could
not resist the pleasure of encroaching for a second upon
this wonderful world of love and confidence and romance.
“Dearest children,” she added, disappearing with an impulsive
gesture, as if she forced herself to draw the curtain
upon a scene which she refused all temptation to
interrupt.
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CHAPTER XXV
At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following
Saturday Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in
Kew Gardens, dividing the dial-plate of his watch into
sections with his forefinger. The just and inexorable nature
of time itself was reflected in his face. He might
have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and
unresting march of that divinity. He seemed to greet the
lapse of minute after minute with stern acquiescence in
the inevitable order. His expression was so severe, so
serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him
at least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which
no petty irritation on his part was to mar, although the
wasting time wasted also high private hopes of his own.
His face was no bad index to what went on within him.
He was in a condition of mind rather too exalted for the
trivialities of daily life. He could not accept the fact that
a lady was fifteen minutes late in keeping her appointment
without seeing in that accident the frustration of
his entire life. Looking at his watch, he seemed to look
deep into the springs of human existence, and by the
light of what he saw there altered his course towards the
north and the midnight… . Yes, one’s voyage must be
made absolutely without companions through ice and
black water—towards what goal? Here he laid his finger
upon the half-hour, and decided that when the minute-
hand reached that point he would go, at the same time
answering the question put by another of the many voices
of consciousness with the reply that there was undoubtedly
a goal, but that it would need the most relentless
energy to keep anywhere in its direction. Still, still, one
goes on, the ticking seconds seemed to assure him, with
dignity, with open eyes, with determination not to accept
the second-rate, not to be tempted by the unworthy,
not to yield, not to compromise. Twenty-five minutes
past three were now marked upon the face of the
watch. The world, he assured himself, since Katharine
Hilbery was now half an hour behind her time, offers no
happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty. In a scheme
of things utterly bad from the start the only unpardonable
folly is that of hope. Raising his eyes for a moment
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from the face of his watch, he rested them upon the
opposite bank, reflectively and not without a certain wistfulness,
as if the sternness of their gaze were still capable
of mitigation. Soon a look of the deepest satisfaction
filled them, though, for a moment, he did not move.
He watched a lady who came rapidly, and yet with a trace
of hesitation, down the broad grass-walk towards him.
She did not see him. Distance lent her figure an indescribable
height, and romance seemed to surround her
from the floating of a purple veil which the light air filled
and curved from her shoulders.
“Here she comes, like a ship in full sail,” he said to
himself, half remembering some line from a play or poem
where the heroine bore down thus with feathers flying
and airs saluting her. The greenery and the high presences
of the trees surrounded her as if they stood forth
at her coming. He rose, and she saw him; her little exclamation
proved that she was glad to find him, and then
that she blamed herself for being late.
“Why did you never tell me? I didn’t know there was
this,” she remarked, alluding to the lake, the broad green
space, the vista of trees, with the ruffled gold of the
Thames in the distance and the Ducal castle standing in
its meadows. She paid the rigid tail of the Ducal lion the
tribute of incredulous laughter.
“You’ve never been to Kew?” Denham remarked.
But it appeared that she had come once as a small
child, when the geography of the place was entirely different,
and the fauna included certainly flamingoes and,
possibly, camels. They strolled on, refashioning these legendary
gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely to stroll
and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her
eyes encountered—a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated
goose—as if the relaxation soothed her. The warmth of
the afternoon, the first of spring, tempted them to sit
upon a seat in a glade of beech-trees, with forest drives
striking green paths this way and that around them. She
sighed deeply.
“It’s so peaceful,” she said, as if in explanation of her
sigh. Not a single person was in sight, and the stir of the
wind in the branches, that sound so seldom heard by
Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted from fathomless
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oceans of sweet air in the distance.
While she breathed and looked, Denham was engaged
in uncovering with the point of his stick a group of green
spikes half smothered by the dead leaves. He did this
with the peculiar touch of the botanist. In naming the
little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus
disguising some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and
making her exclaim, half in amusement, at his knowledge.
Her own ignorance was vast, she confessed. What
did one call that tree opposite, for instance, supposing
one condescended to call it by its English name? Beech
or elm or sycamore? It chanced, by the testimony of a
dead leaf, to be oak; and a little attention to a diagram
which Denham proceeded to draw upon an envelope soon
put Katharine in possession of some of the fundamental
distinctions between our British trees. She then asked
him to inform her about flowers. To her they were variously
shaped and colored petals, poised, at different seasons
of the year, upon very similar green stalks; but to
him they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and
later, living things endowed with sex, and pores, and
susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner
of ingenious devices to live and beget life, and could be
fashioned squat or tapering, flame-colored or pale, pure
or spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets
of human existence. Denham spoke with increasing ardor
of a hobby which had long been his in secret. No discourse
could have worn a more welcome sound in
Katharine’s ears. For weeks she had heard nothing that
made such pleasant music in her mind. It wakened echoes
in all those remote fastnesses of her being where
loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.
She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants,
and showing her how science felt not quite blindly for
the law that ruled their endless variations. A law that
might be inscrutable but was certainly omnipotent appealed
to her at the moment, because she could find
nothing like it in possession of human lives. Circumstances
had long forced her, as they force most women in the
flower of youth, to consider, painfully and minutely, all
that part of life which is conspicuously without order;
she had had to consider moods and wishes, degrees of
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Night and Day
liking or disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of
people dear to her; she had been forced to deny herself
any contemplation of that other part of life where thought
constructs a destiny which is independent of human beings.
As Denham spoke, she followed his words and considered
their bearing with an easy vigor which spoke of a
capacity long hoarded and unspent. The very trees and
the green merging into the blue distance became symbols
of the vast external world which recks so little of the
happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals. In
order to give her examples of what he was saying, Denham
led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and then to the
Orchid House.
For him there was safety in the direction which the talk
had taken. His emphasis might come from feelings more
personal than those science roused in him, but it was
disguised, and naturally he found it easy to expound and
explain. Nevertheless, when he saw Katharine among the
orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic
plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from
striped hoods and fleshy throats, his ardor for botany
waned, and a more complex feeling replaced it. She fell
