Night and Day
“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said; “for it isn’t
true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the
first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind.
Still, where’s the fault in that? I could promise you never to
interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you
upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that’s not
unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask your mother. And now this
terrible thing—” He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any
further. “This decision you say you’ve come to—have you discussed it
with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with her hand.
“But you don’t understand me, William—”
“Help me to understand you—”
“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I’ve
only now faced them myself. But I haven’t got the sort of feeling—love,
I mean—I don’t know what to call it”—she looked vaguely towards the
horizon sunk under mist—“but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be
a farce—”
“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is disastrous!” he
exclaimed.
“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.
“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he continued,
becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. “Believe me,
Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full
of plans for our house—the chair-covers, don’t you remember?—like any
other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever,
you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the
usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I’ve been through it all myself.
At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to
nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to
take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn’t
been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in
the same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he continued, with
his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, “I’ve often gone
home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force
myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head.
Ask Denham; he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll tell you what
a state he found me in.”
Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph’s name. The
thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a
subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she
instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of
her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to
last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him
sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of
inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her
family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her
doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately,
the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was not a
pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of
subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows
drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that
she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension,
occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his
love for her, and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater
intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran
a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely
irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of
him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good
sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a more romantic
bond. But passion she had, he could not deny it, and hitherto he had
tried to see it employed in his thoughts upon the lives of the children
who were to be born to them.
“She will make a perfect mother—a mother of sons,” he thought; but
seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his
doubts on this point. “A farce, a farce,” he thought to himself. “She
said that our marriage would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware
of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not
fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for some
one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any
trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he
was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in thought
upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him
in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of
society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and
especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him.
He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her
shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but
to recall her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these
details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of
everything. He suspected that in her silence she was reproaching
herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair and of the dead
beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance to him than
anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention strangely from
his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself
with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in his breast,
almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming
disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and close a
distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped Katharine
to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with which he
tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his own coat,
she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely man.
“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make you happy.”
CHAPTER XIX
The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,
Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts
of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to this
return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or so of
the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following the
passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to the
five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined each
word with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities of
an ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, the
atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in future
regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because her
thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of
thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph’s presence, as she knew,
preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness
when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her
effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect,
for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarily
revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not much matter,
perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that vision of
herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us, and had been
damaged by her confession. The gray night coming down over the country
was kind to her; and she thought that one of these days she would find
comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking
through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground and the tree.
Ralph made her start by saying abruptly;
“What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if
you go to America I shall come, too. It can’t be harder to earn a
living there than it is here. However, that’s not the point. The point
is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?” He spoke
firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. “You know me by
this time, the good and the bad,” he went on. “You know my tempers.
I’ve tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?”
She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.
“In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know
each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in the
world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about me—as
you do, don’t you, Mary?—we should make each other happy.” Here he
paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed, indeed,
to be continuing his own thoughts.
“Yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it,” Mary said at last. The casual
and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that
she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say,
baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her
arm and she withdrew it quietly.
“You couldn’t do it?” he asked.
“No, I couldn’t marry you,” she replied.
“You don’t care for me?”
She made no answer.
“Well, Mary,” he said, with a curious laugh, “I must be an arrant fool,
for I thought you did.” They walked for a minute or two in silence, and
suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed: “I don’t
believe you, Mary. You’re not telling me the truth.”
“I’m too tired to argue, Ralph,” she replied, turning her head away
from him. “I ask you to believe what I say. I can’t marry you; I don’t
want to marry you.”
The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one in
some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her. And
as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise faded
from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken the
truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a
natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency
until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark the
whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed
with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with it a
sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good had
ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her had
been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there
had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present
catastrophe upon his dreams.
“Haven’t I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I
might have loved Mary if it hadn’t been for that idiocy of mine. She
cared for me once, I’m certain of that, but I tormented her so with my
humors that I let my chances slip, and now she won’t risk marrying me.
And this is what I’ve made of my life—nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate
nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the
silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had
seen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of
William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that,
when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—that seemed to
her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base
upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole past
seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell
of an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of Ralph; and now, as
she saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she had
thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had made to help