CHAPTER VIII
She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded hermother to go to bed directly Mr. Hilbery left them, for so long as shesat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hilbery might, at any moment,ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheetshad shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to bedirected to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place,Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which wasillustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of theirposition, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then there weretwo letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before shecould make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew thefacts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally she hadto reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found himself infinancial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial occupationof teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin.
But the two letters which each told the same story differently were thechief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to find itdefinitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril Alardyce, hadlived for the last four years with a woman who was not his wife, whohad borne him two children, and was now about to bear him another. Thisstate of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvain, her aunt Celia,a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was also underconsideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the woman at once;and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such interference withhis affairs, and would not own that he had any cause to be ashamed ofhimself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself, Katharine wondered;and she turned to her aunt again.
"Remember," she wrote, in her profuse, emphatic statement, "that hebears your grandfather's name, and so will the child that is to beborn. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded him,thinking him a gentleman, which he IS, and having money, which he hasNOT."
"What would Ralph Denham say to this?" thought Katharine, beginning topace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so that,on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could justdistinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of someone else's windows.
"What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?" she reflected, pausingby the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order tofeel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness ofnight. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowdedthoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuoushum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to representthe thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with theprogress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was inaudible.People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their own way, andan empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she cast her mindout to imagine an empty land where all this petty intercourse of men andwomen, this life made up of the dense crossings and entanglements of menand women, had no existence whatever. Even now, alone, at night, lookingout into the shapeless mass of London, she was forced to remember thatthere was one point and here another with which she had some connection.William Rodney, at this very moment, was seated in a minute speck oflight somewhere to the east of her, and his mind was occupied, not withhis book, but with her. She wished that no one in the whole worldwould think of her. However, there was no way of escaping from one'sfellow-beings, she concluded, and shut the window with a sigh, andreturned once more to her letters.
She could not doubt but that William's letter was the most genuine shehad yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he couldnot live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, andcould give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike othermarriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lackingin passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through again, couldsee in what direction her feelings ought to flow, supposing theyrevealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous sort oftenderness for him, a zealous care for his susceptibilities, and, afterall, she considered, thinking of her father and mother, what is love?
Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experienceof young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love,but, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remainedsomething of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself, hermind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing up animage of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love, and theman who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples that cameher way. Easily, and without correction by reason, her imagination madepictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich though phantom light uponthe facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters that drop withresounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards intothe blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dreamt, drawinginto it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder inthe superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothingmight be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero, riding agreat horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together,they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able tocontemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actuallyin real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who dothe most prosaic things.
At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinningher light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and wentto her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary thatshe should see her father before he went to bed. The case of CyrilAlardyce must be discussed, her mother's illusions and the rights of thefamily attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this amountedto, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her letters in herhand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the clocks hadcome into their reign, the grandfather's clock in the hall ticking incompetition with the small clock on the landing. Mr. Hilbery's study ranout behind the rest of the house, on the ground floor, and was a verysilent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime casting a mere abstractof light through a skylight upon his books and the large table, with itsspread of white papers, now illumined by a green reading-lamp. Here Mr.Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing together documents by meansof which it could be proved that Shelley had written "of" instead of"and," or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the "Nag'sHead" and not the "Turkish Knight," or that the Christian name ofKeats's uncle had been John rather than Richard, for he knew more minutedetails about these poets than any man in England, probably, and waspreparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet'ssystem of punctuation. He saw the humor of these researches, but thatdid not prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity.
He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair smoking a cigar, andruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished tomarry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have beenthe consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general.When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for,and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, hesaw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without sayinganything. She was reading "Isabella and the Pot of Basil," and her mindwas full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the hedges setwith little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that her fatherwaited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:
"I've had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father.... It seems tobe true--about his marriage. What are we to do?"
"Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner," said Mr.Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.
Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, whileher father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed toreserve so many of his thoughts for himself.
"He's about done for himself, I should say," he continued. Withoutsaying anything, he to
ok Katharine's letters out of her hand, adjustedhis 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 tellher?"
"I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothingwhatever 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 atlast, rather to himself than to her.
Katharine had begun to read her aunt's letter over again, and she nowquoted a sentence. "Ibsen and Butler.... He has sent me a letter full ofquotations--nonsense, though clever nonsense."
"Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on thoselines, it's none of our affair," he remarked.
"But isn't it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?" Katharineasked rather wearily.
"Why the dickens should they apply to me?" her father demanded withsudden 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 hisarm-chair. 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 withunwonted decision and authority. "Indeed, I don't understand why they'vedragged you into the business at all--I don't see that it's got anythingto do with you."
"I've always been friends with Cyril," Katharine observed.
"But did he ever tell you anything about this?" Mr. Hilbery asked rathersharply.
Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyrilhad not confided in her--did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchetmight think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic--hostile even?
"As to your mother," said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he seemedto be considering the color of the flames, "you had better tell her thefacts. She'd better know the facts before every one begins to talk aboutit, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I'm sure I don'tknow. And the less talk there is the better."
Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highlycultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of manythings which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling ratherpuzzled by her father's attitude, as she went back to her room. What adistance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these eventsinto 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 thecase tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to realize, ratherlanguidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was foolish, becauseother people did not behave in that way. He seemed to be looking througha telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance.
Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happenedmade her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the nextmorning in order to question him.
"Have you told mother?" she asked. Her manner to her father was almoststern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the darkof her eyes.
Mr. Hilbery sighed.
"My dear child, it went out of my head." He smoothed his silk hatenergetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. "I'll send a noteround from the office.... I'm late this morning, and I've any amount ofproofs to get through."
"That wouldn't do at all," Katharine said decidedly. "She must betold--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 thedoor-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood,when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into hiseyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He noddedhis head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroitmovement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. Hewaved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone, Katharinecould not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in domesticbargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable work whichbelonged, by rights, to him.