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for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without

saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted

his eyeglasses, and read them through.

 

At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.

 

“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell

her?”

 

“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing

whatever for us to do.”

 

“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.

 

Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.

 

“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at

last, rather to himself than to her.

 

Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now

quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler… . He has sent me a letter

full of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”

 

“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those

lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.

 

“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?”

Katharine asked rather wearily.

 

“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with

sudden irritation.

 

“Only as the head of the family—”

 

“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family.

Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his

armchair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot,

however, in mentioning the family.

 

“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,”

she observed.

 

“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with

unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why

they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s

got anything to do with you.”

 

“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.

 

“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked

rather sharply.

 

Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril

had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet

might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile

even?

 

“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he

seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell

her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to

talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m

sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”

 

Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly

cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of

many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling

rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room.

What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed

these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own

view of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the

hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely

seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way

which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He

seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of

miles in the distance.

 

Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened

made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next

morning in order to question him.

 

“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost

stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark

of her eyes.

 

Mr. Hilbery sighed.

 

“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat

energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note

round from the office… . I’m late this morning, and I’ve any

amount of proofs to get through.”

 

“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be told

—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”

 

Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on

the door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her

childhood, when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty,

came into his eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended

in it. He nodded his head to and fro significantly, opened the door

with an adroit movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected

at his age. He waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left

alone, Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as

usual in domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the

disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him.

CHAPTER IX

Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite

as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both

shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,

from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,

moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s

misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother

did not see, and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s

behavior in her mind without any qualification at all. They would

think whether it was good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that

had happened.

 

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her

pen in the ink.

 

“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such

a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six

months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been

his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to

me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,

and get a lot done.”

 

She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own

table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,

smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded

script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her

mood. Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her

lips were parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth,

controlled inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding

itself with a building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each

brick is placed in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the

skies and trees of the past with every stroke of her pen, and

recalling the voices of the dead. Quiet as the room was, and

undisturbed by the sounds of the present moment, Katharine could fancy

that here was a deep pool of past time, and that she and her mother

were bathed in the light of sixty years ago. What could the present

give, she wondered, to compare with the rich crowd of gifts bestowed

by the past? Here was a Thursday morning in process of manufacture;

each second was minted fresh by the clock upon the mantelpiece. She

strained her ears and could just hear, far off, the hoot of a

motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer and dying away again,

and the voices of men crying old iron and vegetables in one of the

poorer streets at the back of the house. Rooms, of course, accumulate

their suggestions, and any room in which one has been used to carry on

any particular occupation gives off memories of moods, of ideas, of

postures that have been seen in it; so that to attempt any different

kind of work there is almost impossible.

 

Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her

mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth

years ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn

about them, and connected themselves with early memories of the

cavernous glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her

grandfather lay buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs

and tables, had belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the

china dogs on the mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their

sheep had been bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used

to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine

had often heard her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with

her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could

almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips, and had given to

each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his coat and his

cravat. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among them, an

invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than

with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed a

divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such

muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them

what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they

would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own

antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their

conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she

felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass

judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a

separate being, with a future of her own. On a morning of slight

depression, such as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to

the muddle which their old letters presented; some reason which seemed

to make it worth while to them; some aim which they kept steadily in

view—but she was interrupted.

 

Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of

the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.

 

Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and

exclaimed:

 

“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see,

something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can’t find

‘em.”

 

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but

she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the

backs of books.

 

“Besides,” she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, “I

don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the

Hebrides, Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her

daughter. “My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help

writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the

beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from

the way they go on, you know.” Katharine read what her mother had

written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s

essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground

for hope.

 

“It’s very beautiful,” she stated, “but, you see, mother, we ought to

go from point to point—”

 

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “And that’s just what I can’t

do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know

everything and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I

can’t put it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,” she said,

touching her forehead, “there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I

fancy I shall die without having done it.”

 

From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the

imagination of her

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