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admit at least

half the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene round the

tea-table with an expression of the utmost disgust and expostulation.

He withdrew unseen. He paused outside on the landing trying to recover

his self-control and to decide what course he might with most dignity

pursue. It was obvious to him that his wife had entirely confused the

meaning of his instructions. She had plunged them all into the most

odious confusion. He waited a moment, and then, with much preliminary

rattling of the handle, opened the door a second time. They had all

regained their places; some incident of an absurd nature had now set

them laughing and looking under the table, so that his entrance passed

momentarily unperceived. Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her

head and said:

 

“Well, that’s my last attempt at the dramatic.”

 

“It’s astonishing what a distance they roll,” said Ralph, stooping to

turn up the corner of the hearthrug.

 

“Don’t trouble—don’t bother. We shall find it—” Mrs. Hilbery began,

and then saw her husband and exclaimed: “Oh, Trevor, we’re looking for

Cassandra’s engagement-ring!”

 

Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably enough, the

ring had rolled to the very point where he stood. He saw the rubies

touching the tip of his boot. Such is the force of habit that he could

not refrain from stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at

being the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking the

ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was courtly in the extreme,

to Cassandra. Whether the making of a bow released automatically

feelings of complaisance and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his

resentment completely washed away during the second in which he bent

and straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek and

received his embrace. He nodded with some degree of stiffness to

Rodney and Denham, who had both risen upon seeing him, and now

altogether sat down. Mrs. Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the

entrance of her husband, and for this precise moment in order to put

to him a question which, from the ardor with which she announced it,

had evidently been pressing for utterance for some time past.

 

“Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first

performance of ‘Hamlet’?”

 

In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact

scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent

authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted

once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the

authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of

literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back

to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing

balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so

painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly

from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was

sufficiently sure of his command of language at length to look at

Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had

acted as a soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She

leaned back in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly

silent, looking vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized

ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls,

against curtains of deep crimson velvet. Denham, to whom he turned

next, shared her immobility under his gaze. But beneath his restraint

and calm it was possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with

unalterable tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery

had at command appear oddly irrelevant. At any rate, he said nothing.

He respected the young man; he was a very able young man; he was

likely to get his own way. He could, he thought, looking at his still

and very dignified head, understand Katharine’s preference, and, as he

thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute jealousy. She might

have married Rodney without causing him a twinge. This man she loved.

Or what was the state of affairs between them? An extraordinary

confusion of emotion was beginning to get the better of him, when Mrs.

Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden pause in the conversation,

and had looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice, remarked:

 

“Don’t stay if you want to go, Katharine. There’s the little room over

there. Perhaps you and Ralph—”

 

“We’re engaged,” said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking

straight at her father. He was taken aback by the directness of the

statement; he exclaimed as if an unexpected blow had struck him. Had

he loved her to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken

from him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless, ignored?

Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her! He nodded very curtly to

Denham.

 

“I gathered something of the kind last night,” he said. “I hope you’ll

deserve her.” But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of

the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half

of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male,

outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which

still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing-rooms.

Then Katharine, looking at the shut door, looked down again, to hide

her tears.

CHAPTER XXXIV

The lamps were lit; their luster reflected itself in the polished

wood; good wine was passed round the dinner-table; before the meal was

far advanced civilization had triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over

a feast which came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful,

dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from the expression

in Katharine’s eyes it promised something—but he checked the approach

sentimentality. He poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.

 

They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham abstract themselves

directly Cassandra had asked whether she might not play him something

—some Mozart? some Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the door

closed softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door for some

seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look of expectation died

out of them, and, with a sigh, he listened to the music.

 

Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word of discussion as

to what they wished to do, and in a moment she joined him in the hall

dressed for walking. The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking,

though any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more than

anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence, and the open air.

 

“At last!” she breathed, as the front door shut. She told him how she

had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never coming, listened for the

sound of doors, half expected to see him again under the lamp-post,

looking at the house. They turned and looked at the serene front with

its gold-rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration. In

spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery on his arm, he

would not resign his belief, but with her hand resting there, her

voice quickened and mysteriously moving in his ears, he had not time—

they had not the same inclination—other objects drew his attention.

 

How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many

lamps, corners radiant with light, and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell;

nor account for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of

these wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving

through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the

blinds were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one

of those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close

together, thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne

on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat

against the sky.

 

“Are you cold?” he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.

 

“Yes, I am rather,” she replied, becoming conscious that the splendid

race of lights drawn past her eyes by the superb curving and swerving

of the monster on which she sat was at an end. They had followed some

such course in their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in

the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant enacted

for them, masters of life. But standing on the pavement alone, this

exaltation left them; they were glad to be alone together. Ralph stood

still for a moment to light his pipe beneath a lamp.

 

She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of light.

 

“Oh, that cottage,” she said. “We must take it and go there.”

 

“And leave all this?” he inquired.

 

“As you like,” she replied. She thought, looking at the sky above

Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same everywhere; how she was now

secure of all that this lofty blue and its steadfast lights meant to

her; reality, was it, figures, love, truth?

 

“I’ve something on my mind,” said Ralph abruptly. “I mean I’ve been

thinking of Mary Datchet. We’re very near her rooms now. Would you

mind if we went there?”

 

She had turned before she answered him. She had no wish to see any one

to-night; it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the

problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment

the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole,

and entire from the confusion of chaos. To see Mary was to risk the

destruction of this globe.

 

“Did you treat her badly?” she asked rather mechanically, walking on.

 

“I could defend myself,” he said, almost defiantly. “But what’s the

use, if one feels a thing? I won’t be with her a minute,” he said.

“I’ll just tell her—”

 

“Of course, you must tell her,” said Katharine, and now felt anxious

for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold

his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.

 

“I wish—I wish—” she sighed, for melancholy came over her and

obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before

her as if obscured by tears.

 

“I regret nothing,” said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as

if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still

was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her

a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.

 

“Go on,” she said. “You regret nothing—”

 

“Nothing—nothing,” he repeated.

 

“What a fire!” she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing

splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she

held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame

that roared upwards.

 

“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more

and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with

smoke this flame rushing upwards.

 

“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously, noticing

her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

 

“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take

such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I

to tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”

 

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more

fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him,

listening

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