Night and Day
upon the polished table. Denham forgot his despair in wondering what
thoughts now occupied her.
“You don’t believe me?” he said. His tone was humble, and made her
smile at him.
“As far as I understand you—but what should you advise me to do with
this ring?” she asked, holding it out.
“I should advise you to let me keep it for you,” he replied, in the
same tone of half-humorous gravity.
“After what you’ve said, I can hardly trust you—unless you’ll unsay
what you’ve said?”
“Very well. I’m not in love with you.”
“But I think you _are_ in love with me.... As I am with you,” she added
casually enough. “At least,” she said slipping her ring back to its old
position, “what other word describes the state we’re in?”
She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search of help.
“It’s when I’m with you that I doubt it, not when I’m alone,” he
stated.
“So I thought,” she replied.
In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted his
experience with the photograph, the letter, and the flower picked at
Kew. She listened very seriously.
“And then you went raving about the streets,” she mused. “Well, it’s
bad enough. But my state is worse than yours, because it hasn’t
anything to do with facts. It’s an hallucination, pure and simple—an
intoxication.... One can be in love with pure reason?” she hazarded.
“Because if you’re in love with a vision, I believe that that’s what
I’m in love with.”
This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory to
Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments
during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful
exaggeration.
“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost
bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the
melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the
two upstairs.
“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as
if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then—”
“Like lights in a storm—”
“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook
beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in
silence.
Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery’s
head appeared, at first with an air of caution, but having made sure
that she had admitted herself to the dining-room and not to some more
unusual region, she came completely inside and seemed in no way taken
aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual, bound on some quest
of her own which was interrupted pleasantly but strangely by running
into one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people
thought fit to indulge in.
“Please don’t let me interrupt you, Mr.—” she was at a loss, as usual,
for the name, and Katharine thought that she did not recognize him. “I
hope you’ve found something nice to read,” she added, pointing to the
book upon the table. “Byron—ah, Byron. I’ve known people who knew Lord
Byron,” she said.
Katharine, who had risen in some confusion, could not help smiling at
the thought that her mother found it perfectly natural and desirable
that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at
night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that
was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her
mother’s eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery
held the book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.
“My dear mother, why aren’t you in bed?” Katharine exclaimed, changing
astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of
authoritative good sense. “Why are you wandering about?”
“I’m sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron’s,”
said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.
“Mr. Denham doesn’t write poetry; he has written articles for father,
for the Review,” Katharine said, as if prompting her memory.
“Oh dear! How dull!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, with a sudden laugh that
rather puzzled her daughter.
Ralph found that she had turned upon him a gaze that was at once very
vague and very penetrating.
“But I’m sure you read poetry at night. I always judge by the
expression of the eyes,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. (“The windows of the
soul,” she added parenthetically.) “I don’t know much about the law,”
she went on, “though many of my relations were lawyers. Some of them
looked very handsome, too, in their wigs. But I think I do know a
little about poetry,” she added. “And all the things that aren’t
written down, but—but—” She waved her hand, as if to indicate the
wealth of unwritten poetry all about them. “The night and the stars,
the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah
dear,” she sighed, “well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes
think that poetry isn’t so much what we write as what we feel, Mr.
Denham.”
During this speech of her mother’s Katharine had turned away, and Ralph
felt that Mrs. Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire to
ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the
vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by
the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance
of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a
ship sinking beneath the horizon might wave its flag of greeting to
another setting out upon the same voyage. He bent his head, saying
nothing, but with a curious certainty that she had read an answer to
her inquiry that satisfied her. At any rate, she rambled off into a
description of the Law Courts which turned to a denunciation of English
justice, which, according to her, imprisoned poor men who couldn’t pay
their debts. “Tell me, shall we ever do without it all?” she asked, but
at this point Katharine gently insisted that her mother should go to
bed. Looking back from half-way up the staircase, Katharine seemed to
see Denham’s eyes watching her steadily and intently with an expression
that she had guessed in them when he stood looking at the windows
across the road.
CHAPTER XXXI
The tray which brought Katharine’s cup of tea the next morning brought,
also, a note from her mother, announcing that it was her intention to
catch an early train to Stratford-on-Avon that very day.
“Please find out the best way of getting there,” the note ran, “and
wire to dear Sir John Burdett to expect me, with my love. I’ve been
dreaming all night of you and Shakespeare, dearest Katharine.”
This was no momentary impulse. Mrs. Hilbery had been dreaming of
Shakespeare any time these six months, toying with the idea of an
excursion to what she considered the heart of the civilized world. To
stand six feet above Shakespeare’s bones, to see the very stones worn
by his feet, to reflect that the oldest man’s oldest mother had very
likely seen Shakespeare’s daughter—such thoughts roused an emotion in
her, which she expressed at unsuitable moments, and with a passion that
would not have been unseemly in a pilgrim to a sacred shrine. The only
strange thing was that she wished to go by herself. But, naturally
enough, she was well provided with friends who lived in the
neighborhood of Shakespeare’s tomb, and were delighted to welcome her;
and she left later to catch her train in the best of spirits. There was
a man selling violets in the street. It was a fine day. She would
remember to send Mr. Hilbery the first daffodil she saw. And, as she
ran back into the hall to tell Katharine, she felt, she had always
felt, that Shakespeare’s command to leave his bones undisturbed applied
only to odious curiosity-mongers—not to dear Sir John and herself.
Leaving her daughter to cogitate the theory of Anne Hathaway’s sonnets,
and the buried manuscripts here referred to, with the implied menace to
the safety of the heart of civilization itself, she briskly shut the
door of her taxi-cab, and was whirled off upon the first stage of her
pilgrimage.
The house was oddly different without her. Katharine found the maids
already in possession of her room, which they meant to clean thoroughly
during her absence. To Katharine it seemed as if they had brushed away
sixty years or so with the first flick of their damp dusters. It seemed
to her that the work she had tried to do in that room was being swept
into a very insignificant heap of dust. The china shepherdesses were
already shining from a bath of hot water. The writing-table might have
belonged to a professional man of methodical habits.
Gathering together a few papers upon which she was at work, Katharine
proceeded to her own room with the intention of looking through them,
perhaps, in the course of the morning. But she was met on the stairs by
Cassandra, who followed her up, but with such intervals between each
step that Katharine began to feel her purpose dwindling before they had
reached the door. Cassandra leant over the banisters, and looked down
upon the Persian rug that lay on the floor of the hall.
“Doesn’t everything look odd this morning?” she inquired. “Are you
really going to spend the morning with those dull old letters, because
if so—”
The dull old letters, which would have turned the heads of the most
sober of collectors, were laid upon a table, and, after a moment’s
pause, Cassandra, looking grave all of a sudden, asked Katharine where
she should find the “History of England” by Lord Macaulay. It was
downstairs in Mr. Hilbery’s study. The cousins descended together in
search of it. They diverged into the drawing-room for the good reason
that the door was open. The portrait of Richard Alardyce attracted
their attention.
“I wonder what he was like?” It was a question that Katharine had often
asked herself lately.
“Oh, a fraud like the rest of them—at least Henry says so,” Cassandra
replied. “Though I don’t believe everything Henry says,” she added a
little defensively.
Down they went into Mr. Hilbery’s study, where they began to look among
his books. So desultory was this examination that some fifteen minutes
failed to discover the work they were in search of.
“Must you read Macaulay’s History, Cassandra?” Katharine asked, with a
stretch of her arms.
“I must,” Cassandra replied briefly.
“Well, I’m going to leave you to look for it by yourself.”
“Oh, no, Katharine. Please stay and help me. You see—you see—I told
William I’d read a little every day. And I want to tell him that I’ve
begun when he comes.”
“When does William come?” Katharine asked, turning to the shelves
again.
“To tea, if that suits you?”
“If it suits me to be out, I suppose you mean.”
“Oh, you’re horrid.... Why shouldn’t you—?”
“Yes?”
“Why shouldn’t you be happy too?”
“I am quite happy,” Katharine replied.
“I mean as I am. Katharine,” she said impulsively, “do let’s be married
on the same day.”
“To the same man?”
“Oh, no, no. But why shouldn’t you marry—some one else?”
“Here’s your Macaulay,” said Katharine, turning round with the book in
her hand. “I should say you’d better begin to read at once if you mean
to be educated by tea-time.”
“Damn Lord Macaulay!” cried Cassandra, slapping the book upon the
table. “Would you rather not talk?”
“We’ve talked enough already,” Katharine replied evasively.
“I know I shan’t be able to settle to Macaulay,” said Cassandra,
looking ruefully at the dull red cover of the prescribed volume, which,
however, possessed a talismanic property, since William admired it. He
had advised a little serious reading for the morning hours.
“Have _you_ read Macaulay?” she asked.
“No. William never tried to educate me.” As she spoke she saw the light
fade from Cassandra’s face, as if she had implied some other, more
mysterious, relationship. She was stung with compunction. She marveled