‘Oh, Mr Fortescue,’ exclaimed Mrs Hilbery, as he finished, ‘I had just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the
‘There is the University,’ said the thin gentleman, who had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.
‘I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the other day,’ said Katharine.
‘I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,’ Mr Hilbery remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do, and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and reflect than to attain any result.
Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr Fortescue built up another rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, and these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by her hair, her colouring, and the shape of her features, she was striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character, and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some quiet colour, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that, although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all these elderly people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic to him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it very generously.
‘Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada,2 Katharine?’ her mother demanded.
‘Trafalgar, mother.’
‘Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr Fortescue, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.’
Mr Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the changes which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some legal matter, published by Mr Hilbery in his Review, had brought them acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs Sutton Bailey was announced, he turned to her, and Mr Denham found himself sitting silent, rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too. Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man, in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to another, ‘D’you know, Mr Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr Ruskin...cIs it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr Denham, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Some one, the other day, said to me, “Oh no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs Hilbery.” What
She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing articulate, and then at Katharine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs Hilbery seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:
‘I’m sure Mr Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr Ponting, who told me that he considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present. After all, what is the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I should say,’ she added, turning to Mr Fortescue.
Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that there was to see, but Katharine rose at the same moment, and saying, ‘Perhaps you would like to see the pictures,’ led the way across the drawing-room to a smaller room opening out of it.
The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.
As Katharine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and revealed a square mass of red-and-gold books, and then a long skirt in blue-and-white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany writing-table, with its orderly equipment, and, finally, a square picture above the table, to which special illumination was accorded. When Katharine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to say, ‘There!’ Denham found himself looked down upon by the eyes of the great poet, Richard Alardyce, and suffered a little shock which would have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine friendliness, which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the entire world. The paint had so faded that very little but the beautiful large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness.
Katharine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and then she said:
‘This is his writing-table. He used this pen,’ and she lifted a quill pen and laid it down again. The writing-table was splashed with old ink, and the pen dishevelled in service. There lay the gigantic gold-rimmed spectacles, ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a pair of large, worn slippers, one of which Katharine picked up, remarking:
‘I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as any one is nowadays. This,’ she went on, as if she knew what she had to say by heart, ‘is the original manuscript of the “Ode to Winter”. The early poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at it?’
While Mr Denham examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her grandfather, and, for the thousandth time,
