‘I understood you to say that you were not engaged to him,’ he said at length, fixing his eyes upon his daughter.
‘We are not engaged,’ she said.
‘It should be a matter of indifference to you, then, whether he comes here or not—I will not have you listening to other things when I am speaking to you!’ he broke off angrily, perceiving a slight movement on her part to one side. ‘Answer me frankly, what is your relationship with this young man?’
‘Nothing that I can explain to a third person,’ she said obstinately.
‘I will have no more of these equivocations,’ he replied.
‘I refuse to explain,’ she returned, and as she said it the front door banged to. ‘There!’ she exclaimed. ‘He is gone!’ She flashed such a look of fiery indignation at her father that he lost his self-control for a moment.
‘For God’s sake, Katharine, control yourself!’ he cried.
She looked for a moment like a wild animal caged in a civilized dwelling-place. She glanced over the walls covered with books, as if for a second she had forgotten the position of the door. Then she made as if to go, but her father laid his hand upon her shoulder. He compelled her to sit down.
‘These emotions have been very upsetting, naturally,’ he said. His manner had regained all its suavity, and he spoke with a soothing assumption of paternal authority. ‘You’ve been placed in a very difficult position, as I understand from Cassandra. Now let us come to terms; we will leave these agitating questions in peace for the present. Meanwhile, let us try to behave like civilized beings. Let us read Sir Walter Scott. What d’you say to “The Antiquary”, eh? Or “The Bride of Lammermoor”?’
He made his own choice, and before his daughter could protest or make her escape, she found herself being turned by the agency of Sir Walter Scott into a civilized human being.
Yet Mr Hilbery had grave doubts, as he read, whether the process was more than skin-deep. Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics. His house was in a state of revolution; he had a vision of unpleasant encounters on the staircase; his meals would be poisoned for days to come; was literature itself a specific against such disagreeables? A note of hollowness was in his voice as he read.
CHAPTER XXXIII
CONSIDERING THAT MR HILBERY lived in a house which was accurately numbered in order with its fellows, and that he filled up forms, paid rent, and had seven more years of tenancy to run, he had an excuse for laying down laws for the conduct of those who lived in his house, and this excuse, though profoundly inadequate, he found useful during the interregnum of civilization with which he now found himself faced. In obedience to those laws, Rodney disappeared; Cassandra was dispatched to catch the eleven-thirty on Monday morning; Denham was seen no more; so that only Katharine, the lawful occupant of the upper rooms, remained, and Mr Hilbery thought himself competent to see that she did nothing further to compromise herself. As he bade her good morning next day he was aware that he knew nothing of what she was thinking, but, as he reflected with some bitterness, even this was an advance upon the ignorance of the previous mornings. He went to his study, wrote, tore up, and wrote again a letter to his wife, asking her to come back on account of domestic difficulties which he specified at first, but in a later draft more discreetly left unspecified. Even if she started the very moment that she got it, he reflected, she would not be home till Tuesday night, and he counted lugubriously the number of hours that he would have to spend in a position of detestable authority alone with his daughter.
What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed the envelope to his wife. He could not control the telephone. He could not play the spy. She might be making any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought did not disturb him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit atmosphere of the whole scene with the young people the night before. His sense of discomfort was almost physical.
Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn, both physically and spiritually, from the telephone. She sat in her room with the dictionaries spreading their wide leaves on the table before her, and all the pages which they had concealed for so many years arranged in a pile. She worked with the steady concentration that is produced by the successful effort to think down some unwelcome thought by means of another thought. Having absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went on with additional vigour, derived from the victory; on a sheet of paper lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly written down marked the different stages of its progress. And yet it was broad daylight; there were sounds of knocking and sweeping, which proved that living people were at work on the other side of the door, and the door, which could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection against the world. But she had somehow risen to be mistress in her own kingdom; assuming her sovereignty unconsciously.
Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were steps that lingered, divagated, and mounted with the deliberation natural to one past sixty whose arms, moreover, are full of leaves and blossoms; but they came on steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the door arrested Katharine’s pencil as it touched the page. She did not move, however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting for the interruption to cease. Instead, the door opened. At first, she attached no meaning to the moving mass of green which seemed to enter the room independently of any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her mother’s face and person behind the yellow flowers and soft velvet of the palm-buds.
‘From Shakespeare’s tomb!’1 exclaimed Mrs Hilbery, dropping the entire mass upon the floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate an act of dedication. Then she flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.
‘Thank God, Katharine!’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank God!’ she repeated.
‘You’ve come back?’ said Katharine, very vaguely, standing up to receive the embrace.
Although she recognized her mother’s presence, she was very far from taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to be amazingly appropriate that her mother should be there, thanking God emphatically for unknown blessings, and strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from Shakespeare’s tomb.
‘Nothing else matters in the world!’ Mrs Hilbery continued. ‘Names aren’t everything; it’s what we feel that’s everything. I didn’t want silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn’t want your father to tell me. I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so.’
‘You knew it?’ Katharine repeated her mother’s words softly and vaguely, looking past her. ‘How did you know it?’ She began, like a child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother’s cloak.
