you are not engaged to Rodney; I see you on what appear
to be extremely intimate terms with another—with
Ralph Denham. What am I to conclude? Are you,” he added,
as she still said nothing, “engaged to Ralph Denham?”
“No,” she replied.
His sense of relief was great; he had been certain that
her answer would have confirmed his suspicions, but that
anxiety being set at rest, he was the more conscious of
annoyance with her for her behavior.
“Then all I can say is that you’ve very strange ideas of
the proper way to behave… . People have drawn certain
conclusions, nor am I surprised… . The more I think of it
the more inexplicable I find it,” he went on, his anger
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rising as he spoke. “Why am I left in ignorance of what is
going on in my own house? Why am I left to hear of these
events for the first time from my sister? Most disagree-
able—most upsetting. How I’m to explain to your Uncle
Francis—but I wash my hands of it. Cassandra goes tomorrow.
I forbid Rodney the house. As for the other young
man, the sooner he makes himself scarce the better. After
placing the most implicit trust in you, Katharine—”
He broke off, disquieted by the ominous silence with which
his words were received, and looked at his daughter with
the curious doubt as to her state of mind which he had
felt before, for the first time, this evening. He perceived
once more that she was not attending to what he said,
but was listening, and for a moment he, too, listened for
sounds outside the room. His certainty that there was
some understanding between Denham and Katharine returned,
but with a most unpleasant suspicion that there
was something illicit about it, as the whole position between
the young people seemed to him gravely illicit.
“I’ll speak to Denham,” he said, on the impulse of his
suspicion, moving as if to go.
“I shall come with you,” Katharine said instantly, starting
forward.
“You will stay here,” said her father.
“What are you going to say to him?” she asked.
“I suppose I may say what I like in my own house?” he
returned.
“Then I go, too,” she replied.
At these words, which seemed to imply a determination
to go—to go for ever, Mr. Hilbery returned to his position
in front of the fire, and began swaying slightly from side
to side without for the moment making any remark.
“I understood you to say that you were not engaged to
him,” he said at length, fixing his eyes upon his daughter.
“We are not engaged,” she said.
“It should be a matter of indifference to you, then,
whether he comes here or not—I will not have you listening
to other things when I am speaking to you!” he
broke off angrily, perceiving a slight movement on her
part to one side. “Answer me frankly, what is your relationship
with this young man?”
“Nothing that I can explain to a third person,” she said
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obstinately.
“I will have no more of these equivocations,” he replied.
“I refuse to explain,” she returned, and as she said it
the front door banged to. “There!” she exclaimed. “He is
gone!” She flashed such a look of fiery indignation at her
father that he lost his self-control for a moment.
“For God’s sake, Katharine, control yourself!” he cried.
She looked for a moment like a wild animal caged in a
civilized dwelling-place. She glanced over the walls covered
with books, as if for a second she had forgotten the
position of the door. Then she made as if to go, but her
father laid his hand upon her shoulder. He compelled her
to sit down.
“These emotions have been very upsetting, naturally,”
he said. His manner had regained all its suavity, and he
spoke with a soothing assumption of paternal authority.
“You’ve been placed in a very difficult position, as I understand
from Cassandra. Now let us come to terms; we
will leave these agitating questions in peace for the
present. Meanwhile, let us try to behave like civilized
beings. Let us read Sir Walter Scott. What d’you say to
‘The Antiquary,’ eh? Or ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’?”
He made his own choice, and before his daughter could
protest or make her escape, she found herself being turned
by the agency of Sir Walter Scott into a civilized human
being.
Yet Mr. Hilbery had grave doubts, as he read, whether
the process was more than skin-deep. Civilization had
been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that
evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined;
he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be
matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own
condition urgently required soothing and renovating at
the hands of the classics. His house was in a state of
revolution; he had a vision of unpleasant encounters on
the staircase; his meals would be poisoned for days to
come; was literature itself a specific against such
disagreeables? A note of hollowness was in his voice as
he read.
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CHAPTER XXXIII
Considering that Mr. Hilbery lived in a house which was
accurately numbered in order with its fellows, and that
he filled up forms, paid rent, and had seven more years of
tenancy to run, he had an excuse for laying down laws for
the conduct of those who lived in his house, and this
excuse, though profoundly inadequate, he found useful
during the interregnum of civilization with which he now
found himself faced. In obedience to those laws, Rodney
disappeared; Cassandra was dispatched to catch the
eleven-thirty on Monday morning; Denham was seen no
more; so that only Katharine, the lawful occupant of the
upper rooms, remained, and Mr. Hilbery thought himself
competent to see that she did nothing further to compromise
herself. As he bade her good morning next day
he was aware that he knew nothing of what she was thinking,
but, as he reflected with some bitterness, even this
was an advance upon the ignorance of the previous mornings.
He went to his study, wrote, tore up, and wrote
again a letter to his wife, asking her to come back on
account of domestic difficulties which he specified at
first, but in a later draft more discreetly left unspecified.
Even if she started the very moment that she got it, he
reflected, she would not be home till Tuesday night, and
he counted lugubriously the number of hours that he would
have to spend in a position of detestable authority alone
with his daughter.
What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed
the envelope to his wife. He could not control the telephone.
He could not play the spy. She might be making
any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought did not disturb
him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit atmosphere
of the whole scene with the young people the night
before. His sense of discomfort was almost physical.
Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn,
both physically and spiritually, from the telephone. She
sat in her room with the dictionaries spreading their wide
leaves on the table before her, and all the pages which
they had concealed for so many years arranged in a pile.
She worked with the steady concentration that is produced
by the successful effort to think down some un
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welcome thought by means of another thought. Having
absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went on with
additional vigor, derived from the victory; on a sheet of
paper lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly
written down marked the different stages of its progress.
And yet it was broad daylight; there were sounds of knocking
and sweeping, which proved that living people were
at work on the other side of the door, and the door, which
could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection
against the world. But she had somehow risen to be
mistress in her own kingdom, assuming her sovereignty
unconsciously.
Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were
steps that lingered, divagated, and mounted with the
deliberation natural to one past sixty whose arms, moreover,
are full of leaves and blossoms; but they came on
steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the
door arrested Katharine’s pencil as it touched the page.
She did not move, however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting
for the interruption to cease. Instead, the door opened.
At first, she attached no meaning to the moving mass of
green which seemed to enter the room independently of
any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her
mother’s face and person behind the yellow flowers and
soft velvet of the palm-buds.
“From Shakespeare’s tomb!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery,
dropping the entire mass upon the floor, with a gesture
that seemed to indicate an act of dedication. Then she
flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.
“Thank God, Katharine!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!”
she repeated.
“You’ve come back?” said Katharine, very vaguely, standing
up to receive the embrace.
Although she recognized her mother’s presence, she was
very far from taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to
be amazingly appropriate that her mother should be there,
thanking God emphatically for unknown blessings, and
strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from
Shakespeare’s tomb.
“Nothing else matters in the world!” Mrs. Hilbery continued.
“Names aren’t everything; it’s what we feel that’s
everything. I didn’t want silly, kind, interfering letters. I
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didn’t want your father to tell me. I knew it from the
first. I prayed that it might be so.”
“You knew it?” Katharine repeated her mother’s words
softly and vaguely, looking past her. “How did you know
it?” She began, like a child, to finger a tassel hanging
from her mother’s cloak.
“The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands
of times —dinner-parties—talking about books—
the way he came into the room—your voice when you
spoke of him.”
Katharine seemed to consider each of these proofs separately.
Then she said gravely:
“I’m not going to marry William. And then there’s
Cassandra—”
“Yes, there’s Cassandra,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “I own I was
a little grudging at first, but, after all, she plays the
piano so beautifully. Do tell me, Katharine,” she asked
impulsively, “where did you go that evening she played
Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?”
Katharine recollected with difficulty.
“To Mary Datchet’s,” she remembered.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment
in her voice. “I had my little romance—my
little speculation.” She looked at her daughter. Katharine
faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating gaze; she
flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright
eyes.
“I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.
“Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery
very quickly. “But,” she added, glancing momentarily at
her daughter, “aren’t there different ways, Katharine—
different—?”
“We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,”
Katharine continued.
“To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the
street.” Mrs. Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were
trying chords that did not quite satisfy her ear. It was
plain that she had her sources of information, and, indeed,
her bag was stuffed with what she called “kind
letters” from the pen of her sister-in-law.
“Yes. Or to stay away in the country,” Katharine concluded.
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Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration
from the window.
“What a comfort he was in that shop—how he took me
and found the ruins at once—how safe I felt with him—”
“Safe? Oh, no, he’s fearfully rash—he’s always taking
risks. He wants to throw up his profession and live in a
little cottage and write books, though he hasn’t a penny
of his own, and there are any number of sisters and brothers
dependent on him.”
“Ah, he has a mother?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.
“Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.”
Katharine began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs.
Hilbery elicited the facts that not only was the house of
excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore without complaint,
but that it was evident that every one depended on him,
and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful
view over London, and a rook.
“A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers
out,” she said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed
to commiserate the sufferings of humanity while resting
assured in the capacity of Ralph Denham to alleviate them,
so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help exclaiming:
“But, Katharine, you are in love!” at which Katharine
flushed, looked startled, as if she had said something
that she ought not to have said, and shook her head.
Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this
extraordinary house, and interposed a few speculations
about the meeting between Keats and Coleridge in a lane,
which tided over the discomfort of the moment, and drew
Katharine on to further descriptions and indiscretions. In
truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being thus
free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally
benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose
silence seemed to answer questions that were never asked.
Mrs. Hilbery listened without making any remark for a
considerable time. She seemed to draw her conclusions
rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to
her, and, if cross-examined, she would probably have given
a highly inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history
except that he was penniless, fatherless, and lived
at Highgate—all of which was much in his favor. But by
means of these furtive glances she had assured herself
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