‘I like your little dot with the flames round it,’ she said meditatively.
Ralph nearly tore the page from her hand in shame and despair when he saw her actually contemplating the idiotic symbol of his most confused and emotional moments.
He was convinced that it could mean nothing to another, although somehow to him it conveyed not only Katharine herself but all those states of mind which had clustered round her since he first saw her pouring out tea on a Sunday afternoon. It represented by its circumference of smudges surrounding a central blot all that encircling glow which for him surrounded, inexplicably, so many of the objects of life, softening their sharp outline, so that he could see certain streets, books, and situations wearing a halo6 almost perceptible to the physical eye. Did she smile? Did she put the paper down wearily, condemning it not only for its inadequacy but for its falsity? Was she going to protest once more that he only loved the vision of her? But it did not occur to her that this diagram had anything to do with her. She said simply, and in the same tone of reflection:
‘Yes, the world looks something like that to me too.’
He received her assurance with profound joy. Quietly and steadily there rose up behind the whole aspect of life that soft edge of fire which gave its red tint to the atmosphere and crowded the scene with shadows so deep and dark that one could fancy pushing farther into their density and still farther, exploring indefinitely. Whether there was any correspondence between the two prospects now opening before them they shared the same sense of the impending future, vast, mysterious, infinitely stored with undeveloped shapes which each would unwrap for the other to behold; but for the present the prospect of the future was enough to fill them with silent adoration. At any rate, their further attempts to communicate articulately were interrupted by a knock on the door, and the entrance of a maid who, with a due sense of mystery, announced that a lady wished to see Miss Hilbery, but refused to allow her name to be given.
When Katharine rose, with a profound sigh, to resume her duties, Ralph went with her, and neither of them formulated any guess, on their way downstairs, as to who this anonymous lady might prove to be. Perhaps the fantastic notion that she was a little black hunchback provided with a steel knife, which she would plunge into Katharine’s heart, appeared to Ralph more probable than another, and he pushed first into the dining-room to avert the blow. Then he exclaimed ‘Cassandra!’ with such heartiness at the sight of Cassandra Otway standing by the dining-room table that she put her finger to her lips and begged him to be quiet.
‘Nobody must know I’m here,’ she explained in a sepulchral whisper. ‘I missed my train. I have been wandering about London all day. I can bear it no longer. Katharine, what am I to do?’
Katharine pushed forward a chair; Ralph hastily found wine and poured it out for her. If not actually fainting, she was very near it.
‘William’s upstairs,’ said Ralph, as soon as she appeared to be recovered. ‘I’ll go and ask him to come down to you.’ His own happiness had given him a confidence that every one else was bound to be happy too. But Cassandra had her uncle’s commands and anger too vividly in mind to dare any such defiance. She became agitated and said that she must leave the house at once. She was not in a condition to go, had they known where to send her. Katharine’s common sense, which had been in abeyance for the past week or two, still failed her, and she could only ask, ‘But where’s your luggage?’ in the vague belief that to take lodgings depended entirely upon a sufficiency of luggage. Cassandra’s reply, ‘I’ve lost my luggage,’ in no way helped her to a conclusion.
‘You’ve lost your luggage,’ she repeated. Her eyes rested upon Ralph, with an expression which seemed better fitted to accompany a profound thanksgiving for his existence or some vow of eternal devotion than a question about luggage. Cassandra perceived the look, and saw that it was returned; her eyes filled with tears. She faltered in what she was saying. She began bravely again to discuss the question of a lodging when Katharine, who seemed to have communicated silently with Ralph, and obtained his permission, took her ruby ring from her finger and giving it to Cassandra, said: ‘I believe it will fit you without any alteration.’
These words would not have been enough to convince Cassandra of what she very much wished to believe had 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—’