Night and Day
could they be in love? The fragmentary nature of their relationship was
but too apparent.
Thus they sat depressed to silence at the dining-room table, oblivious
of everything, while Rodney paced the drawing-room overhead in such
agitation and exaltation of mind as he had never conceived possible,
and Cassandra remained alone with her uncle. Ralph, at length, rose and
walked gloomily to the window. He pressed close to the pane. Outside
were truth and freedom and the immensity only to be apprehended by the
mind in loneliness, and never communicated to another. What worse
sacrilege was there than to attempt to violate what he perceived by
seeking to impart it? Some movement behind him made him reflect that
Katharine had the power, if she chose, to be in person what he dreamed
of her spirit. He turned sharply to implore her help, when again he was
struck cold by her look of distance, her expression of intentness upon
some far object. As if conscious of his look upon her she rose and came
to him, standing close by his side, and looking with him out into the
dusky atmosphere. Their physical closeness was to him a bitter enough
comment upon the distance between their minds. Yet distant as she was,
her presence by his side transformed the world. He saw himself
performing wonderful deeds of courage; saving the drowning, rescuing
the forlorn. Impatient with this form of egotism, he could not shake
off the conviction that somehow life was wonderful, romantic, a master
worth serving so long as she stood there. He had no wish that she
should speak; he did not look at her or touch her; she was apparently
deep in her own thoughts and oblivious of his presence.
The door opened without their hearing the sound. Mr. Hilbery looked
round the room, and for a moment failed to discover the two figures in
the window. He started with displeasure when he saw them, and observed
them keenly before he appeared able to make up his mind to say
anything. He made a movement finally that warned them of his presence;
they turned instantly. Without speaking, he beckoned to Katharine to
come to him, and, keeping his eyes from the region of the room where
Denham stood, he shepherded her in front of him back to the study. When
Katharine was inside the room he shut the study door carefully behind
him as if to secure himself from something that he disliked.
“Now, Katharine,” he said, taking up his stand in front of the fire,
“you will, perhaps, have the kindness to explain—” She remained silent.
“What inferences do you expect me to draw?” he said sharply.... “You
tell me that you are not engaged to Rodney; I see you on what appear to
be extremely intimate terms with another—with Ralph Denham. What am I
to conclude? Are you,” he added, as she still said nothing, “engaged to
Ralph Denham?”
“No,” she replied.
His sense of relief was great; he had been certain that her answer
would have confirmed his suspicions, but that anxiety being set at
rest, he was the more conscious of annoyance with her for her behavior.
“Then all I can say is that you’ve very strange ideas of the proper way
to behave.... People have drawn certain conclusions, nor am I
surprised.... The more I think of it the more inexplicable I find it,”
he went on, his anger rising as he spoke. “Why am I left in ignorance
of what is going on in my own house? Why am I left to hear of these
events for the first time from my sister? Most disagreeable—most
upsetting. How I’m to explain to your Uncle Francis—but I wash my hands
of it. Cassandra goes tomorrow. I forbid Rodney the house. As for the
other young man, the sooner he makes himself scarce the better. After
placing the most implicit trust in you, Katharine—” He broke off,
disquieted by the ominous silence with which his words were received,
and looked at his daughter with the curious doubt as to her state of
mind which he had felt before, for the first time, this evening. He
perceived once more that she was not attending to what he said, but was
listening, and for a moment he, too, listened for sounds outside the
room. His certainty that there was some understanding between Denham
and Katharine returned, but with a most unpleasant suspicion that there
was something illicit about it, as the whole position between the young
people seemed to him gravely illicit.
“I’ll speak to Denham,” he said, on the impulse of his suspicion,
moving as if to go.
“I shall come with you,” Katharine said instantly, starting forward.
“You will stay here,” said her father.
“What are you going to say to him?” she asked.
“I suppose I may say what I like in my own house?” he returned.
“Then I go, too,” she replied.
At these words, which seemed to imply a determination to go—to go for
ever, Mr. Hilbery returned to his position in front of the fire, and
began swaying slightly from side to side without for the moment making
any remark.
“I understood you to say that you were not engaged to him,” he said at
length, fixing his eyes upon his daughter.
“We are not engaged,” she said.
“It should be a matter of indifference to you, then, whether he comes
here or not—I will not have you listening to other things when I am
speaking to you!” he broke off angrily, perceiving a slight movement on
her part to one side. “Answer me frankly, what is your relationship
with this young man?”
“Nothing that I can explain to a third person,” she said obstinately.
“I will have no more of these equivocations,” he replied.
“I refuse to explain,” she returned, and as she said it the front door
banged to. “There!” she exclaimed. “He is gone!” She flashed such a
look of fiery indignation at her father that he lost his self-control
for a moment.
“For God’s sake, Katharine, control yourself!” he cried.
She looked for a moment like a wild animal caged in a civilized
dwelling-place. She glanced over the walls covered with books, as if
for a second she had forgotten the position of the door. Then she made
as if to go, but her father laid his hand upon her shoulder. He
compelled her to sit down.
“These emotions have been very upsetting, naturally,” he said. His
manner had regained all its suavity, and he spoke with a soothing
assumption of paternal authority. “You’ve been placed in a very
difficult position, as I understand from Cassandra. Now let us come to
terms; we will leave these agitating questions in peace for the
present. Meanwhile, let us try to behave like civilized beings. Let us
read Sir Walter Scott. What d’you say to ‘The Antiquary,’ eh? Or ‘The
Bride of Lammermoor’?”
He made his own choice, and before his daughter could protest or make
her escape, she found herself being turned by the agency of Sir Walter
Scott into a civilized human being.
Yet Mr. Hilbery had grave doubts, as he read, whether the process was
more than skin-deep. Civilization had been very profoundly and
unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still
undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be
matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition
urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics.
His house was in a state of revolution; he had a vision of unpleasant
encounters on the staircase; his meals would be poisoned for days to
come; was literature itself a specific against such disagreeables? A
note of hollowness was in his voice as he read.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Considering that Mr. Hilbery lived in a house which was accurately
numbered in order with its fellows, and that he filled up forms, paid
rent, and had seven more years of tenancy to run, he had an excuse for
laying down laws for the conduct of those who lived in his house, and
this excuse, though profoundly inadequate, he found useful during the
interregnum of civilization with which he now found himself faced. In
obedience to those laws, Rodney disappeared; Cassandra was dispatched
to catch the eleven-thirty on Monday morning; Denham was seen no more;
so that only Katharine, the lawful occupant of the upper rooms,
remained, and Mr. Hilbery thought himself competent to see that she did
nothing further to compromise herself. As he bade her good morning next
day he was aware that he knew nothing of what she was thinking, but, as
he reflected with some bitterness, even this was an advance upon the
ignorance of the previous mornings. He went to his study, wrote, tore
up, and wrote again a letter to his wife, asking her to come back on
account of domestic difficulties which he specified at first, but in a
later draft more discreetly left unspecified. Even if she started the
very moment that she got it, he reflected, she would not be home till
Tuesday night, and he counted lugubriously the number of hours that he
would have to spend in a position of detestable authority alone with
his daughter.
What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed the envelope to
his wife. He could not control the telephone. He could not play the
spy. She might be making any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought
did not disturb him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit
atmosphere of the whole scene with the young people the night before.
His sense of discomfort was almost physical.
Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn, both physically
and spiritually, from the telephone. She sat in her room with the
dictionaries spreading their wide leaves on the table before her, and
all the pages which they had concealed for so many years arranged in a
pile. She worked with the steady concentration that is produced by the
successful effort to think down some unwelcome thought by means of
another thought. Having absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went
on with additional vigor, derived from the victory; on a sheet of paper
lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly written down marked
the different stages of its progress. And yet it was broad daylight;
there were sounds of knocking and sweeping, which proved that living
people were at work on the other side of the door, and the door, which
could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection against the
world. But she had somehow risen to be mistress in her own kingdom,
assuming her sovereignty unconsciously.
Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were steps that
lingered, divagated, and mounted with the deliberation natural to one
past sixty whose arms, moreover, are full of leaves and blossoms; but
they came on steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the door
arrested Katharine’s pencil as it touched the page. She did not move,
however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting for the interruption to
cease. Instead, the door opened. At first, she attached no meaning to
the moving mass of green which seemed to enter the room independently
of any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her mother’s face and
person behind the yellow flowers and soft velvet of the palm-buds.
“From Shakespeare’s tomb!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, dropping the entire
mass upon the floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate an act of
dedication. Then she flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.
“Thank God, Katharine!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!” she repeated.
“You’ve come back?” said Katharine, very vaguely, standing up to
receive the embrace.
Although she recognized her mother’s presence, she was very far from
taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to be amazingly appropriate
that her mother should be there, thanking God emphatically for unknown
blessings, and strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from
Shakespeare’s tomb.
“Nothing else matters in the world!” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “Names
aren’t everything; it’s what we feel that’s everything. I didn’t want
silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn’t want your father to tell me.