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 unwritten poetry all about them. ‘The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting... Ah dear,’ she sighed, ‘well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn’t so much what we write as what we feel, Mr Denham.’
During this speech of her mother’s Katharine had turned away, and Ralph felt that Mrs Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire to ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a ship sinking beneath the horizon might wave its flag of greeting to another setting out upon the same voyage. He bent his head, saying nothing, but with a curious certainty that she had read an answer to her inquiry that satisfied her. At any rate, she rambled off into a description of the Law Courts which turned to a denunciation of English justice, which, according to her, imprisoned poor men who couldn’t pay their debts. ‘Tell me, shall we ever do without it all?’ she asked, but at this point Katharine gently insisted that her mother should go to bed. Looking back from halfway up the staircase, Katharine seemed to see Denham’s eyes watching her steadily and intently with an expression that she had guessed in them when he stood looking at the windows across the road.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE TRAY WHICH BROUGHT Katharine’s cup of tea the next morning brought, also, a note from her mother, announcing that it was her intention to catch an early train to Stratford-on-Avon that very day.
‘Please find out the best way of getting there,’ the note ran, ‘and wire to dear Sir John Burdett to expect me, with my love. I’ve been dreaming all night of you and Shakespeare, dearest Katharine.’
This was no momentary impulse. Mrs Hilbery had been dreaming of Shakespeare any time these six months, toying with the idea of an excursion to what she considered the heart of the civilized world. To stand six feet above Shakespeare’s bones, to see the very stones worn by his feet, to reflect that the oldest man’s oldest mother had very likely seen Shakespeare’s daughter—such thoughts roused an emotion in her, which she expressed at unsuitable moments, and with a passion that would not have been unseemly in a pilgrim to a sacred shrine. The only strange thing was that she wished to go by herself. But, naturally enough, she was well provided with friends who lived in the neighbourhood of Shakespeare’s tomb, and were delighted to welcome her; and she left later to catch her train in the best of spirits. There was a man selling violets in the street. It was a fine day. She would remember to send Mr Hilbery the first daffodil she saw. And, as she ran back into the hall to tell Katharine, she felt, she had always felt, that Shakespeare’s command to leave his bones undisturbed applied only to odious curiosity- mongers1—not to dear Sir John and herself. Leaving her daughter to cogitate the theory of Anne Hathaway’s sonnets, and the buried manuscripts here referred to, with the implied menace to the safety of the heart of civilization itself, she briskly shut the door of her taxi-cab, and was whirled off upon the first stage of her pilgrimage.
The house was oddly different without her. Katharine found the maids already in possession of her room, which they meant to clean thoroughly during her absence. To Katharine it seemed as if they had brushed away sixty years or so with the first flick of their damp dusters. It seemed to her that the work she had tried to do in that room was being swept into a very insignificant heap of dust. The china shepherdesses were already shining from a bath of hot water. The writing-table might have belonged to a professional man of methodical habits.
Gathering together a few papers upon which she was at work, Katharine proceeded to her own room with the intention of looking through them, perhaps, in the course of the morning. But she was met on the stairs by Cassandra, who followed her up, but with such intervals between each step that Katharine began to feel her purpose dwindling before they had reached the door. Cassandra leant over the banisters, and looked down upon the Persian rug that lay on the floor of the hall.
‘Doesn’t everything look odd this morning?’ she inquired. ‘Are you really going to spend the morning with those dull old letters, because if so—’
The dull old letters, which would have turned the heads of the most sober of collectors, were laid upon a table, and, after a moment’s pause, Cassandra, looking grave all of a sudden, asked Katharine where she should find the ‘History of England’ by Lord Macaulay.dk It was downstairs in Mr Hilbery’s study. The cousins descended together in search of it. They diverged into the drawing-room for the good reason that the door was open. The portrait of Richard Alardyce attracted their attention.
‘I wonder what he was like?’ It was a question that Katharine had often asked herself lately.
‘Oh, a fraud like the rest of them—at least Henry says so,’ Cassandra replied. ‘Though I don’t believe everything Henry says,’ she added a little defensively.
Down they went into Mr Hilbery’s study, where they began to look among his books. So desultory was this examination that some fifteen minutes failed to discover the work they were in search of.
