After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked steadily at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze levelled at a point far beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never reached in all the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips just parted, the fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt contemplation, which fell like a veil between them. She noticed everything about him; if there had been other signs of his utter alienation she would have sought them out too, for she felt that it was only by heaping one truth upon another that she could keep herself sitting there, upright. The truth seemed to support her; it struck her, even as she looked at his face, that the light of truth was shining far away beyond him; the light of truth, she seemed to frame the words as she rose to go, shines on a world not to be shaken by our personal calamities.
Ralph handed her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled her fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a long and stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she took a slip of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of commissions entrusted to her—fruit, butter, string, and so on; and all the time she never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.
Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-cheeked men in white aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he began, automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing thus, superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his shoulder.
‘I’m not mistaken? Surely Mr Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you seen Katharine or William? I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the ruins.’1
It was Mrs Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many people looked at her.
‘First of all, tell me where I am,’ she demanded, but, catching sight of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. ‘The ruins—my party is waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins—or Greek, Mr Denham? Your town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it hadn’t so many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey in my life—are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of those little pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins.’
‘And now,’ she continued, having received the information and the pot of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that they should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so many turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals,ce such old blue china in the curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find her way to the ruins. ‘Now,’ she exclaimed, ‘please tell me what you’re doing here, Mr Denham—for you
They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs Hilbery caught sight of her own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as to intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some shop.
‘I’ve found something much better than ruins!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never have done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a pity that we’ve just had luncheon.’ Could they not somehow revoke that meal?
Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she shook hands:
‘I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have met? And are you staying with Mary?’ she continued, turning to Ralph. ‘What a pity we didn’t meet before.’
Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the colour either came to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined to face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige of truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not succeed in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He was struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid, fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly that he had never seen her in the daylight before.
Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of ruins as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards the stables where the carriage had been put up.
‘Do you know,’ said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest with Ralph, ‘I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window. But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all the same.’
‘Yes, I thought I saw you—but it wasn’t you,’ he replied.
This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear from him—she could not remember what it was.
‘I expect it was me,’ she said. ‘I was looking for my mother. It happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull when I was a baby—but where did we leave the carriage? Down that street or the next? The next, I think.’ She glanced back and saw that the others were following obediently, listening to certain memories of Lincoln upon which Mrs Hilbery had started. ‘But what are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here—as soon as I can find a cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.’
‘But,’ she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, ‘you will give up the Bar, then?’ It flashed across her mind that he must already be engaged to Mary.
