see you back again! What a coincidence!” she observed,
in a general way. “William is upstairs. The kettle boils
over. Where’s Katharine, I say? I go to look, and I find
Cassandra!” She seemed to have proved something to her
own satisfaction, although nobody felt certain what thing
precisely it was.
“I find Cassandra,” she repeated.
“She missed her train,” Katharine interposed, seeing
that Cassandra was unable to speak.
“Life,” began Mrs. Hilbery, drawing inspiration from the
portraits on the wall apparently, “consists in missing trains
and in finding—” But she pulled herself up and remarked
that the kettle must have boiled completely over everything.
To Katharine’s agitated mind it appeared that this kettle
was an enormous kettle, capable of deluging the house
in its incessant showers of steam, the enraged representative
of all those household duties which she had neglected.
She ran hastily up to the drawing-room, and the
rest followed her, for Mrs. Hilbery put her arm round
Cassandra and drew her upstairs. They found Rodney ob
serving the kettle with uneasiness but with such absence
of mind that Katharine’s catastrophe was in a fair way to
be fulfilled. In putting the matter straight no greetings
were exchanged, but Rodney and Cassandra chose seats
as far apart as possible, and sat down with an air of
people making a very temporary lodgment. Either Mrs.
Hilbery was impervious to their discomfort, or chose to
ignore it, or thought it high time that the subject was
changed, for she did nothing but talk about Shakespeare’s
tomb.
“So much earth and so much water and that sublime
spirit brooding over it all,” she mused, and went on to
sing her strange, half-earthly song of dawns and sunsets,
of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of noble loving
which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and
one age is linked with another, and no one dies, and we
all meet in spirit, until she appeared oblivious of any one
in the room. But suddenly her remarks seemed to contract
the enormously wide circle in which they were soaring
and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon matters of
more immediate moment.
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“Katharine and Ralph,” she said, as if to try the sound.
“William and Cassandra.”
“I feel myself in an entirely false position,” said William
desperately, thrusting himself into this breach in her
reflections. “I’ve no right to be sitting here. Mr. Hilbery
told me yesterday to leave the house. I’d no intention of
coming back again. I shall now—”
“I feel the same too,” Cassandra interrupted. “After what
Uncle Trevor said to me last night—”
“I have put you into a most odious position,” Rodney
went on, rising from his seat, in which movement he was
imitated simultaneously by Cassandra. “Until I have your
father’s consent I have no right to speak to you—let
alone in this house, where my conduct”—he looked at
Katharine, stammered, and fell silent—”where my conduct
has been reprehensible and inexcusable in the extreme,”
he forced himself to continue. “I have explained
everything to your mother. She is so generous as to try
and make me believe that I have done no harm—you
have convinced her that my behavior, selfish and weak as
it was—selfish and weak—” he repeated, like a speaker
who has lost his notes.
Two emotions seemed to be struggling in Katharine;
one the desire to laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of
William making her a formal speech across the tea-table,
the other a desire to weep at the sight of something
childlike and honest in him which touched her inexpressibly.
To every one’s surprise she rose, stretched out her
hand, and said:
“You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with—you’ve been
always—” but here her voice died away, and the tears
forced themselves into her eyes, and ran down her cheeks,
while William, equally moved, seized her hand and pressed
it to his lips. No one perceived that the drawing-room
door had opened itself sufficiently to admit at least half
the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene
round the tea-table with an expression of the utmost
disgust and expostulation. He withdrew unseen. He paused
outside on the landing trying to recover his self-control
and to decide what course he might with most dignity
pursue. It was obvious to him that his wife had entirely
confused the meaning of his instructions. She had plunged
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them all into the most odious confusion. He waited a
moment, and then, with much preliminary rattling of the
handle, opened the door a second time. They had all regained
their places; some incident of an absurd nature
had now set them laughing and looking under the table,
so that his entrance passed momentarily unperceived.
Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her head and said:
“Well, that’s my last attempt at the dramatic.”
“It’s astonishing what a distance they roll,” said Ralph,
stooping to turn up the corner of the hearthrug.
“Don’t trouble—don’t bother. We shall find it—” Mrs.
Hilbery began, and then saw her husband and exclaimed:
“Oh, Trevor, we’re looking for Cassandra’s engagement-
ring!”
Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably
enough, the ring had rolled to the very point where
he stood. He saw the rubies touching the tip of his boot.
Such is the force of habit that he could not refrain from
stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at being
the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking
the ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was
courtly in the extreme, to Cassandra. Whether the making
of a bow released automatically feelings of complaisance
and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his resentment completely
washed away during the second in which he bent and
straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek
and received his embrace. He nodded with some degree
of stiffness to Rodney and Denham, who had both risen
upon seeing him, and now altogether sat down. Mrs.
Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the entrance of
her husband, and for this precise moment in order to put
to him a question which, from the ardor with which she
announced it, had evidently been pressing for utterance
for some time past.
“Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the
first performance of ‘Hamlet’?”
In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse
to the exact scholarship of William Rodney, and before he
had given his excellent authorities for believing as he
believed, Rodney felt himself admitted once more to the
society of the civilized and sanctioned by the authority
of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power
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of literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery,
now came back to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of
human affairs its soothing balm, and providing a form
into which such passions as he had felt so painfully the
night before could be molded so that they fell roundly
from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He
was sufficiently sure of his command of language at length
to look at Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk
about Shakespeare had acted as a soporific, or rather as
an incantation upon Katharine. She leaned back in her
chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly silent, looking
vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized
ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-
tinted walls, against curtains of deep crimson velvet.
Denham, to whom he turned next, shared her immobility
under his gaze. But beneath his restraint and calm it was
possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with unalterable
tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr.
Hilbery had at command appear oddly irrelevant. At any
rate, he said nothing. He respected the young man; he
was a very able young man; he was likely to get his own
way. He could, he thought, looking at his still and very
dignified head, understand Katharine’s preference, and,
as he thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute
jealousy. She might have married Rodney without causing
him a twinge. This man she loved. Or what was the
state of affairs between them? An extraordinary confusion
of emotion was beginning to get the better of him,
when Mrs. Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden
pause in the conversation, and had looked wistfully at
her daughter once or twice, remarked:
“Don’t stay if you want to go, Katharine. There’s the
little room over there. Perhaps you and Ralph—”
“We’re engaged,” said Katharine, waking with a start,
and looking straight at her father. He was taken aback by
the directness of the statement; he exclaimed as if an
unexpected blow had struck him. Had he loved her to see
her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken from
him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless,
ignored? Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her! He
nodded very curtly to Denham.
“I gathered something of the kind last night,” he said.
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“I hope you’ll deserve her.” But he never looked at his
daughter, and strode out of the room, leaving in the minds
of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, at
the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged
somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which
still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of draw-
ing-rooms. Then Katharine, looking at the shut door,
looked down again, to hide her tears.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The lamps were lit; their luster reflected itself in the polished
wood; good wine was passed round the dinner-
table; before the meal was far advanced civilization had
triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over a feast which
came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful,
dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from
the expression in Katharine’s eyes it promised something—
but he checked the approach sentimentality. He
poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.
They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham
abstract themselves directly Cassandra had asked whether
she might not play him something —some Mozart? some
Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the door closed
softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door
for some seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look
of expectation died out of them, and, with a sigh, he
listened to the music.
Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word
of discussion as to what they wished to do, and in a
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moment she joined him in the hall dressed for walking.
The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking, though
any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more
than anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence,
and the open air.
“At last!” she breathed, as the front door shut. She told
him how she had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never
coming, listened for the sound of doors, half expected to
see him again under the lamp-post, looking at the house.
They turned and looked at the serene front with its gold-
rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration.
In spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery
on his arm, he would not resign his belief, but with
her hand resting there, her voice quickened and mysteriously
moving in his ears, he had not time—they had not
the same inclination—other objects drew his attention.
How they came to find themselves walking down a street
with many lamps, corners radiant with light, and a steady
succession of motor-omnibuses plying both ways along
it, they could neither of them tell; nor account for the
impulse which led them suddenly to select one of these
wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving
through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that
shadows on the blinds were pressed within a few feet of
their faces, they came to one of those great knots of
activity where the lights, having drawn close together,
thin out again and take their separate ways. They were
borne on until they saw the spires of the city churches
pale and flat against the sky.
“Are you cold?” he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.
“Yes, I am rather,” she replied, becoming conscious that
the splendid race of lights drawn past her eyes by the
superb curving and swerving of the monster on which she
sat was at an end. They had followed some such course in
their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in
the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant
enacted for them, masters of life. But standing on
the pavement alone, this exaltation left them; they were
glad to be alone together. Ralph stood still for a moment
to light his pipe beneath a lamp.
She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of
light.
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“Oh, that cottage,” she said. “We must take it and go
there.”
“And leave all this?” he inquired.
“As you like,” she replied. She thought, looking at the
sky above Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same
everywhere; how she was now secure of all that this lofty
blue and its steadfast lights meant to her; reality, was it,
figures, love, truth?
“I’ve something on my mind,” said Ralph abruptly. “I
mean I’ve been thinking of Mary Datchet. We’re very near
her rooms now. Would you mind if we went there?”
She had turned before she answered him. She had no
wish to see any one to-night; it seemed to her that the
immense riddle was answered; the problem had been
solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment the
globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round,
whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. To see
Mary was to risk the destruction of this globe.
