Night and Day
the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips just parted, the
fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt contemplation,
which fell like a veil between them. She noticed everything about him;
if there had been other signs of his utter alienation she would have
sought them out, too, for she felt that it was only by heaping one
truth upon another that she could keep herself sitting there, upright.
The truth seemed to support her; it struck her, even as she looked at
his face, that the light of truth was shining far away beyond him; the
light of truth, she seemed to frame the words as she rose to go, shines
on a world not to be shaken by our personal calamities.
Ralph handed her her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the
coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still
twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might
make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from
the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick
of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled her
fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a long and
stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she took a slip
of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of commissions
entrusted to her—fruit, butter, string, and so on; and all the time she
never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.
Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-cheeked men in white
aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the
determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he began,
automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing thus,
superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor
meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and
familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his
shoulder.
“I’m not mistaken? Surely Mr. Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat
through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you
seen Katharine or William? I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the
ruins.”
It was Mrs. Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many
people looked at her.
“First of all, tell me where I am,” she demanded, but, catching sight
of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. “The ruins—my party is
waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins—or Greek, Mr. Denham? Your
town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it hadn’t so
many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey in my
life—are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of those little
pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins.”
“And now,” she continued, having received the information and the pot
of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that they
should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so many
turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys
dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals, such old blue china in the
curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find her
way to the ruins. “Now,” she exclaimed, “please tell me what you’re
doing here, Mr. Denham—for you _are_ Mr. Denham, aren’t you?” she
inquired, gazing at him with a sudden suspicion of her own accuracy.
“The brilliant young man who writes for the Review, I mean? Only
yesterday my husband was telling me he thought you one of the cleverest
young men he knew. Certainly, you’ve been the messenger of Providence
to me, for unless I’d seen you I’m sure I should never have found the
ruins at all.”
They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her
own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as to
intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some shop.
“I’ve found something much better than ruins!” she exclaimed. “I’ve
found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never have
done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a pity
that we’ve just had luncheon.” Could they not somehow revoke that meal?
Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was
investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have
got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned
sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great
deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality
with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a
surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see
them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she shook
hands:
“I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have
met? And are you staying with Mary?” she continued, turning to Ralph.
“What a pity we didn’t meet before.”
Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of
the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph
stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the color either came
to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined to
face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige of
truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not succeed
in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He was
struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some
strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in
order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf
across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped
across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to
think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the
sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid,
fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly
that he had never seen her in the daylight before.
Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of ruins
as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards the
stables where the carriage had been put up.
“Do you know,” said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest
with Ralph, “I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window.
But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all
the same.”
“Yes, I thought I saw you—but it wasn’t you,” he replied.
This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory
so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked
directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the
tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or
interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear from
him—she could not remember what it was.
“I expect it was me,” she said. “I was looking for my mother. It
happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a
family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very
much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to
help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull when
I was a baby—but where did we leave the carriage? Down that street or
the next? The next, I think.” She glanced back and saw that the others
were following obediently, listening to certain memories of Lincoln
upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. “But what are you doing here?” she
asked.
“I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here—as soon as I can find a
cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.”
“But,” she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, “you will
give up the Bar, then?” It flashed across her mind that he must already
be engaged to Mary.
“The solicitor’s office? Yes. I’m giving that up.”
“But why?” she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious
change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. “I think you’re
very wise to give it up. You will be much happier.”
At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into
the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there
beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was
already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable door
by the hostler.
“I don’t know what one means by happiness,” he said briefly, having to
step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. “Why do you think I
shall be happy? I don’t expect to be anything of the kind. I expect to
be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman—if
happiness consists in that. What do you think?”
She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other
members of the party—by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and
William.
Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:
“Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that they
should put us down half-way and let us walk back.”
Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive
expression.
“Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given you
a lift,” he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually peremptory;
he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine looked at him
from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression half of
inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into her
cloak, and said to Mary:
“I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will
write.” She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast by
something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway
carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road
leading to the village of Lampsher.
The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been
in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in her
corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the
intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the
story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.
About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of
the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth
the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been
set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as
hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods
on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick round the
granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in winter the
sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and the heath was
as gray and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds above
it.
Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. Henry,
too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very slightly
in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage rolled on
immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the couple
standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had made
this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well; she was
neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed, knew what
to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew smaller and
smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not speak. Perhaps,
she thought, he waited until the last sign of the carriage had
disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were left entirely
alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on the obelisk, to
do which she had to walk completely round it. She was murmuring a word
to two of the pious lady’s thanks above her breath when Rodney joined
her. In silence they set out along the cart-track which skirted the
verge of the trees.