not Ralph taken the bare hand in his and demanded:
‘Why don’t you tell us you’re glad?’ Cassandra was so glad that the tears ran down her cheeks. The certainty of Katharine’s engagement not only relieved her of a thousand vague fears and self-reproaches, but entirely quenched that spirit of criticism which had lately impaired her belief in Katharine. Her old faith came back to her. She seemed to behold her with that curious intensity which she had lost; as a being who walks just beyond our sphere, so that life in their presence is a heightened process, illuminating not only us but a considerable stretch of the surrounding world. Next moment she contrasted her own lot with theirs and gave back the ring.
‘I won’t take that unless William gives it me himself,’ she said. ‘Keep it for me, Katharine.’
‘I assure you everything’s perfectly all right,’ said Ralph. ‘Let me tell William—’
He was about, in spite of Cassandra’s protest, to reach the door, when Mrs Hilbery, either warned by the parlourmaid or conscious with her usual prescience of the need for her intervention, opened the door and smilingly surveyed them.
‘My dear Cassandra!’ she exclaimed. ‘How delightful to see you back again! What a coincidence!’ she observed, in a general way. ‘William is upstairs. The kettle boils over. Where’s Katharine, I say? I go to look, and I find Cassandra!’ She seemed to have proved something to her own satisfaction, although nobody felt certain precisely what thing it was.
‘I find Cassandra,’ she repeated.
‘She missed her train,’ Katharine interposed, seeing that Cassandra was unable to speak.
‘Life,’ began Mrs Hilbery, drawing inspiration from the portraits on the wall apparently, ‘consists in missing trains and in finding—’ But she pulled herself up and remarked that the kettle must have boiled completely over everything.
To Katharine’s agitated mind it appeared that this kettle was an enormous kettle, capable of deluging the house in its incessant showers of steam, the enraged representative of all those household duties which she had neglected. She ran hastily up to the drawing-room, and the rest followed her, for Mrs Hilbery put her arm round Cassandra and drew her upstairs. They found Rodney observing the kettle with uneasiness but with such absence of mind that Katharine’s catastrophe was in a fair way to be fulfilled. In putting the matter straight no greetings were exchanged, but Rodney and Cassandra chose seats as far apart as possible, and sat down with an air of people making a very temporary lodgment. Either Mrs Hilbery was impervious to their discomfort, or chose to ignore it, or thought it high time that the subject was changed, for she did nothing but talk about Shakespeare’s tomb.
‘So much earth and so much water and that sublime spirit brooding over it all,’ she mused, and went on to sing her strange, half-earthly song of dawns and sunsets, of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of noble loving which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and one age is linked with another, and no one dies, and we all meet in spirit, until she appeared oblivious of any one in the room. But suddenly her remarks seemed to contract the enormously wide circle in which they were soaring and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon matters of more immediate moment.
‘Katharine and Ralph,’ she said, as if to try the sound. ‘William and Cassandra.’
‘I feel myself in an entirely false position,’ said William desperately, thrusting himself into this breach in her reflections. ‘I’ve no right to be sitting here. Mr Hilbery told me yesterday to leave the house. I’d no intention of coming back again. I shall now—’
‘I feel the same too,’ Cassandra interrupted. ‘After what Uncle Trevor said to me last night—’
‘I have put you into a most odious position,’ Rodney went on, rising from his seat, in which movement he was imitated simultaneously by Cassandra. ‘Until I have your father’s consent I have no right to speak to you—let alone in this house, where my conduct’—he looked at Katharine, stammered, and fell silent—‘where my conduct has been reprehensible and inexcusable in the extreme,’ he forced himself to continue. ‘I have explained everything to your mother. She is so generous as to try and make me believe that I have done no harm—you have convinced her that my behaviour, selfish and weak as it was—selfish and weak—’ he repeated, like a speaker who has lost his notes.
Two emotions seemed to be struggling in Katharine; one the desire to laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of William making her a formal speech across the tea-table, the other a desire to weep at the sight of something childlike and honest in him which touched her inexpressibly. To every one’s surprise she rose, stretched out her hand, and said:
‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with—you’ve been always—’ but here her voice died away, and the tears forced themselves into her eyes, and ran down her cheeks, while William, equally moved, seized her hand and pressed it to his lips. No one perceived that the drawing-room door had opened itself sufficiently to 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 extremely courtly, 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 all together 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 ardour 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
