Night and Day
home. His Honor—a pretty title, but still, not at the top of the tree.
However,” she sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children, and
people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well, you have
to take what you can get,” she concluded.
“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather
confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for
his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him,
of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t
ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law,
clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used
to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by
looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it
always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered
remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his
profession.”
Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity
from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head,
and in the second by remarking:
“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the
truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to
write ‘The Prince’—a sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost
tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can
be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no
heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”
“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humoredly. “I’m only a solicitor.”
“But you write, too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be
balked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to
literature.
“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.
“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a proof of devotion,
indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a
fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret,
writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip. But the romance
which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages
was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare
about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How
far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of
fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even
of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain
characters in the old novels, for she came out, after a pause, with:
“Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura,” she
pronounced energetically, “for not marrying George, in spite of
everything. George Eliot did the very same thing; and Lewes was a
little frog-faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But
Warrington, now, had everything in his favor; intellect, passion,
romance, distinction, and the connection was a mere piece of
undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit
of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura married him. But you say you’re a
solicitor, Mr. Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like to
ask you—about Shakespeare—” She drew out her small, worn volume with
some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. “They say,
nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say, that accounts for
his knowledge of human nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr.
Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer
one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out of it,
now; better or worse than you expected?”
Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words,
Ralph answered unhesitatingly:
“Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the ordinary man is
a bit of a rascal—”
“And the ordinary woman?”
“No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either—”
“Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.” Mrs. Cosham
sighed. “Swift would have agreed with you, anyhow—” She looked at him,
and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow. He
would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.
“Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,” Mrs. Milvain
interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking
about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people.
“But you wouldn’t remember him, Katharine.”
“Mr. Lavington? Oh, yes, I do,” said Katharine, waking from other
thoughts with her little start. “The summer we had a house near Tenby.
I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making
haystacks with Mr. Lavington.”
“She is right. There _was_ a pond with tadpoles,” Mrs. Cosham
corroborated. “Millais made studies of it for ‘Ophelia.’ Some say that
is the best picture he ever painted—”
“And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes
hanging in the toolhouse.”
“It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,” Mrs. Milvain
continued. “But that you couldn’t remember, though it’s true you were a
wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her
father, ‘She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.’
And they had a nurse in those days,” she went on, telling her story
with charming solemnity to Ralph, “who was a good woman, but engaged to
a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes
were on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her name
was—to have him to stay in the village. They abused her goodness, I’m
sorry to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they stood the
perambulator alone in a field where there was a bull. The animal became
enraged by the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows what
might have happened if a gentleman had not been walking by in the nick
of time, and rescued Katharine in his arms!”
“I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine.
“My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not long after it
gored a man to death and had to be destroyed. And your mother forgave
Susan—a thing I could never have done.”
“Maggie’s sympathies were entirely with Susan and the sailor, I am
sure,” said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. “My sister-in-law,” she
continued, “has laid her burdens upon Providence at every crisis in her
life, and Providence, I must confess, has responded nobly, so far—”
“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which
irritated the rest of the family. “My mother’s bulls always turn into
cows at the critical moment.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have some one to protect you
from bulls now.”
“I can’t imagine William protecting any one from bulls,” said
Katharine.
It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced her pocket volume
of Shakespeare, and was consulting Ralph upon an obscure passage in
“Measure for Measure.” He did not at once seize the meaning of what
Katharine and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred to
some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child in a pinafore;
but, nevertheless, he was so much distracted that his eye could hardly
follow the words on the paper. A moment later he heard them speak
distinctly of an engagement ring.
“I like rubies,” he heard Katharine say.
“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world....”
Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant “Rodney” fitted itself to
“William” in Ralph’s mind. He felt convinced that Katharine was engaged
to Rodney. His first sensation was one of violent rage with her for
having deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with pleasant old
wives’ tales, let him see her as a child playing in a meadow, shared
her youth with him, while all the time she was a stranger entirely, and
engaged to marry Rodney.
But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in his eyes she
was still a child. He paused so long over the book that Mrs. Cosham had
time to look over his shoulder and ask her niece:
“And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?”
This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea. He looked up at
once and said:
“Yes, it’s a difficult passage.”
His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such curtness and even
with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham looked at him fairly puzzled.
Happily she belonged to a generation which expected uncouthness in its
men, and she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very, very
clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham seemed to have no more
to say, and secreted it once more about her person with the infinitely
pathetic resignation of the old.
“Katharine’s engaged to William Rodney,” she said, by way of filling in
the pause; “a very old friend of ours. He has a wonderful knowledge of
literature, too—wonderful.” She nodded her head rather vaguely. “You
should meet each other.”
Denham’s one wish was to leave the house as soon as he could; but the
elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing to visit Mrs. Hilbery in
her bedroom, so that any move on his part was impossible. At the same
time, he wished to say something, but he knew not what, to Katharine
alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him
once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.
“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?” and she
laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the
tea-party.
But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.
“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to me.” He saw her
face change, but only to become graver than before.
“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney.”
Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in
absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them.
He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of him.
No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.
“Well, I must go,” he said at length.
She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said
merely:
“You will come again, I hope. We always seem”—she hesitated—“to be
interrupted.”
He bowed and left the room.
Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle
was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside.
For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed
against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without
understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under
observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain
spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and
met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first
effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river
embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him at
its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt himself
now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and
far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances
any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of public-houses now
seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a
mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and
certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and
shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the
substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to
the invisible distance, had slipped from him, since Katharine was
engaged. Now all his life was visible, and the straight, meager path
had its ending soon enough. Katharine was engaged, and she had deceived
him, too. He felt for corners of his being untouched by his disaster;