It was past eleven, and the clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s clock in the hall ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr. Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and the large table, with its spread of white papers, now illumined by a green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the “Turkish Knight,” or that the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been John rather than Richard, for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet’s system of punctuation. He saw the humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity.
He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair smoking a cigar, and ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general. When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for, and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” and her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that her father waited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:
“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father…. It seems to be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”
“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr. Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.
Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.
“He’s about done for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted his eyeglasses, and read them through.
At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.
“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell her?”
“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing whatever for us to do.”
“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.
Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.
“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at last, rather to himself than to her.
Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler…. He has sent me a letter full of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”
“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.
“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?” Katharine asked rather wearily.
“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with sudden irritation.
“Only as the head of the family—”
“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family. Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his arm-chair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot, however, in mentioning the family.
“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,” she observed.
“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with you.”
“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.
“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked rather sharply.
Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even?
“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”
Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room. What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance.
Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next morning in order to question him.
“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark of her eyes.
Mr. Hilbery sighed.
“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note round from the office…. I’m late this morning, and I’ve any amount of proofs to get through.”
“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be told—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”
Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on the door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood, when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into his eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded his head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroit movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone, Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him.
Chapter IX
Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage, from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine, moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father
