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the room as if he wished to make sure that the scene in which he
played a part had some real existence. “Quite mad,” he repeated. “Even
Katharine—” His gaze rested upon her finally, as if she, too, had
changed from his old view of her. He smiled at her as if to encourage
her. “Katharine shall explain,” he said, and giving a little nod to
Denham, he left the room.
Katharine sat down at once, and leant her chin upon her hands. So long
as Rodney was in the room the proceedings of the evening had seemed to
be in his charge, and had been marked by a certain unreality. Now that
she was alone with Ralph she felt at once that a constraint had been
taken from them both. She felt that they were alone at the bottom of
the house, which rose, story upon story, upon the top of them.
“Why were you waiting out there?” she asked.
“For the chance of seeing you,” he replied.
“You would have waited all night if it hadn’t been for William. It’s
windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but
our windows.”
“It was worth it. I heard you call me.”
“I called you?” She had called unconsciously.
“They were engaged this morning,” she told him, after a pause.
“You’re glad?” he asked.
She bent her head. “Yes, yes,” she sighed. “But you don’t know how
good he is—what he’s done for me—” Ralph made a sound of
understanding. “You waited there last night too?” she asked.
“Yes. I can wait,” Denham replied.
The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine
connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying
along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the
darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the
lamp-post.
“Waiting in the dark,” she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw
what she was seeing. “Ah, but it’s different—” She broke off. “I’m
not the person you think me. Until you realize that it’s impossible—”
Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down
her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound
books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly
concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of
herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant
and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same
time.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”
“Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else,” she mused.
Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book
which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked
over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the
book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the
portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed
the frontispiece.
“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book.
“It’s only for moments that I go mad.”
“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”
“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you
are. No one has ever known you as I know you… . Could you have
taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”
“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided—how
I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality—the
dark—the waiting outside in the wind—yes, when you look at me, not
seeing me, and I don’t see you either… . But I do see,” she went
on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of
things, only not you.”
“Tell me what you see,” he urged.
But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single
shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an
atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind
scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon
cornfields and pools.
“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting
any part of this into words.
“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.
“But I can’t—I’m talking a sort of nonsense—the sort of nonsense one
talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and
despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North
of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly—I won’t go on.”
“We were there together?” he pressed her.
“No. I was alone.” She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a
child. His face fell.
“You’re always alone there?”
“I can’t explain.” She could not explain that she was essentially
alone there. “It’s not a mountain in the North of England. It’s an
imagination—a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?”
“You’re with me in mine. You’re the thing I make up, you see.”
“Oh, I see,” she sighed. “That’s why it’s so impossible.” She turned
upon him almost fiercely. “You must try to stop it,” she said.
“I won’t,” he replied roughly, “because I—” He stopped. He realized
that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance
which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the
Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it
to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half
attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight
roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his
impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon
the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of
her existence and of his own. “Because I love you, Katharine,” he
said.
Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from
his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him
to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He
thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned
the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision.
It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of
her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her
with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither
disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give
effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring
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
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