Night and Day
childlessness seemed always to impose these painful duties on her, and
to revere the family, and to keep it in repair, had now become the
chief object of her life. She told her story in a low, spasmodic, and
somewhat broken voice.
“I have suspected for some time that he was not happy. There were new
lines on his face. So I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged
at the poor men’s college. He lectures there—Roman law, you know, or it
may be Greek. The landlady said Mr. Alardyce only slept there about
once a fortnight now. He looked so ill, she said. She had seen him with
a young person. I suspected something directly. I went to his room, and
there was an envelope on the mantelpiece, and a letter with an address
in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road.”
Mrs. Hilbery fidgeted rather restlessly, and hummed fragments of her
tune, as if to interrupt.
“I went to Seton Street,” Aunt Celia continued firmly. “A very low
place—lodging-houses, you know, with canaries in the window. Number
seven just like all the others. I rang, I knocked; no one came. I went
down the area. I am certain I saw some one inside—children—a cradle.
But no reply—no reply.” She sighed, and looked straight in front of her
with a glazed expression in her half-veiled blue eyes.
“I stood in the street,” she resumed, “in case I could catch a sight of
one of them. It seemed a very long time. There were rough men singing
in the public-house round the corner. At last the door opened, and some
one—it must have been the woman herself—came right past me. There was
only the pillar-box between us.”
“And what did she look like?” Mrs. Hilbery demanded.
“One could see how the poor boy had been deluded,” was all that Mrs.
Milvain vouchsafed by way of description.
“Poor thing!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed.
“Poor Cyril!” Mrs. Milvain said, laying a slight emphasis upon Cyril.
“But they’ve got nothing to live upon,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “If
he’d come to us like a man,” she went on, “and said, ‘I’ve been a
fool,’ one would have pitied him; one would have tried to help him.
There’s nothing so disgraceful after all—But he’s been going about all
these years, pretending, letting one take it for granted, that he was
single. And the poor deserted little wife—”
“She is _not_ his wife,” Aunt Celia interrupted.
“I’ve never heard anything so detestable!” Mrs. Hilbery wound up,
striking her fist on the arm of her chair. As she realized the facts
she became thoroughly disgusted, although, perhaps, she was more hurt
by the concealment of the sin than by the sin itself. She looked
splendidly roused and indignant; and Katharine felt an immense relief
and pride in her mother. It was plain that her indignation was very
genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly focused upon the facts as
any one could wish—more so, by a long way, than Aunt Celia’s mind,
which seemed to be timidly circling, with a morbid pleasure, in these
unpleasant shades. She and her mother together would take the situation
in hand, visit Cyril, and see the whole thing through.
“We must realize Cyril’s point of view first,” she said, speaking
directly to her mother, as if to a contemporary, but before the words
were out of her mouth, there was more confusion outside, and Cousin
Caroline, Mrs. Hilbery’s maiden cousin, entered the room. Although she
was by birth an Alardyce, and Aunt Celia a Hilbery, the complexities of
the family relationship were such that each was at once first and
second cousin to the other, and thus aunt and cousin to the culprit
Cyril, so that his misbehavior was almost as much Cousin Caroline’s
affair as Aunt Celia’s. Cousin Caroline was a lady of very imposing
height and circumference, but in spite of her size and her handsome
trappings, there was something exposed and unsheltered in her
expression, as if for many summers her thin red skin and hooked nose
and reduplication of chins, so much resembling the profile of a
cockatoo, had been bared to the weather; she was, indeed, a single
lady; but she had, it was the habit to say, “made a life for herself,”
and was thus entitled to be heard with respect.
“This unhappy business,” she began, out of breath as she was. “If the
train had not gone out of the station just as I arrived, I should have
been with you before. Celia has doubtless told you. You will agree with
me, Maggie. He must be made to marry her at once for the sake of the
children—”
“But does he refuse to marry her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired, with a return
of her bewilderment.
“He has written an absurd perverted letter, all quotations,” Cousin
Caroline puffed. “He thinks he’s doing a very fine thing, where we only
see the folly of it.... The girl’s every bit as infatuated as he is—for
which I blame him.”
“She entangled him,” Aunt Celia intervened, with a very curious
smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey a vision of threads
weaving and interweaving a close, white mesh round their victim.
“It’s no use going into the rights and wrongs of the affair now,
Celia,” said Cousin Caroline with some acerbity, for she believed
herself the only practical one of the family, and regretted that, owing
to the slowness of the kitchen clock, Mrs. Milvain had already confused
poor dear Maggie with her own incomplete version of the facts. “The
mischief’s done, and very ugly mischief too. Are we to allow the third
child to be born out of wedlock? (I am sorry to have to say these
things before you, Katharine.) He will bear your name, Maggie—your
father’s name, remember.”
“But let us hope it will be a girl,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
Katharine, who had been looking at her mother constantly, while the
chatter of tongues held sway, perceived that the look of
straightforward indignation had already vanished; her mother was
evidently casting about in her mind for some method of escape, or
bright spot, or sudden illumination which should show to the
satisfaction of everybody that all had happened, miraculously but
incontestably, for the best.
“It’s detestable—quite detestable!” she repeated, but in tones of no
great assurance; and then her face lit up with a smile which, tentative
at first, soon became almost assured. “Nowadays, people don’t think so
badly of these things as they used to do,” she began. “It will be
horribly uncomfortable for them sometimes, but if they are brave,
clever children, as they will be, I dare say it’ll make remarkable
people of them in the end. Robert Browning used to say that every great
man has Jewish blood in him, and we must try to look at it in that
light. And, after all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree
with his principle, but, at least, one can respect it—like the French
Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the King’s head off. Some of the most
terrible things in history have been done on principle,” she concluded.
“I’m afraid I take a very different view of principle,” Cousin Caroline
remarked tartly.
“Principle!” Aunt Celia repeated, with an air of deprecating such a
word in such a connection. “I will go to-morrow and see him,” she
added.
“But why should you take these disagreeable things upon yourself,
Celia?” Mrs. Hilbery interposed, and Cousin Caroline thereupon
protested with some further plan involving sacrifice of herself.
Growing weary of it all, Katharine turned to the window, and stood
among the folds of the curtain, pressing close to the window-pane, and
gazing disconsolately at the river much in the attitude of a child
depressed by the meaningless talk of its elders. She was much
disappointed in her mother—and in herself too. The little tug which she
gave to the blind, letting it fly up to the top with a snap, signified
her annoyance. She was very angry, and yet impotent to give expression
to her anger, or know with whom she was angry. How they talked and
moralized and made up stories to suit their own version of the
becoming, and secretly praised their own devotion and tact! No; they
had their dwelling in a mist, she decided; hundreds of miles away—away
from what? “Perhaps it would be better if I married William,” she
thought suddenly, and the thought appeared to loom through the mist
like solid ground. She stood there, thinking of her own destiny, and
the elder ladies talked on, until they had talked themselves into a
decision to ask the young woman to luncheon, and tell her, very
friendlily, how such behavior appeared to women like themselves, who
knew the world. And then Mrs. Hilbery was struck by a better idea.
CHAPTER X
Messrs. Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm Ralph Denham
was clerk, had their office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there Ralph
Denham appeared every morning very punctually at ten o’clock. His
punctuality, together with other qualities, marked him out among the
clerks for success, and indeed it would have been safe to wager that in
ten years’ time or so one would find him at the head of his profession,
had it not been for a peculiarity which sometimes seemed to make
everything about him uncertain and perilous. His sister Joan had
already been disturbed by his love of gambling with his savings.
Scrutinizing him constantly with the eye of affection, she had become
aware of a curious perversity in his temperament which caused her much
anxiety, and would have caused her still more if she had not recognized
the germs of it in her own nature. She could fancy Ralph suddenly
sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination; some
cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a
railway train, hanging up clothes in a back yard. When he had found
this beauty or this cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain
him from pursuit of it. She suspected the East also, and always
fidgeted herself when she saw him with a book of Indian travels in his
hand, as though he were sucking contagion from the page. On the other
hand, no common love affair, had there been such a thing, would have
caused her a moment’s uneasiness where Ralph was concerned. He was
destined in her fancy for something splendid in the way of success or
failure, she knew not which.
And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better in all the
recognized stages of a young man’s life than Ralph had done, and Joan
had to gather materials for her fears from trifles in her brother’s
behavior which would have escaped any other eye. It was natural that
she should be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from
the start that she could not help dreading any sudden relaxation of his
grasp upon what he held, though, as she knew from inspection of her own
life, such sudden impulse to let go and make away from the discipline
and the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with Ralph, if
he broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under
harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under
a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some
fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city
slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong
which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in
the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half
proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat,
late at night, talking together over the gas-stove in Ralph’s bedroom.
It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his own dream of a
future in the forecasts which disturbed his sister’s peace of mind.
Certainly, if any one of them had been put before him he would have
rejected it with a laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions
for him. He could not have said how it was that he had put these absurd
notions into his sister’s head. Indeed, he prided himself upon being