Mary went down to Disham without knowing whether Ralph intended to come; but two or three days before Christmas she received a telegram from Ralph, asking her to take a room for him in the village. This was followed by a letter explaining that he hoped he might have his meals with them; but quiet, essential for his work, made it necessary to sleep out.
Mary was walking in the garden with Elizabeth, and inspecting the roses, when the letter arrived.
‘But that’s absurd,’ said Elizabeth decidedly, when the plan was explained to her. ‘There are five spare rooms, even when the boys are here. Besides, he wouldn’t get a room in the village. And he ought-n’ t to work if he’s overworked.’
‘But perhaps he doesn’t want to see so much of us,’ Mary thought to herself, although outwardly she assented, and felt grateful to Elizabeth for supporting her in what was, of course, her desire. They were cutting roses at the time, and laying them, head by head, in a shallow basket.
‘If Ralph were here, he’d find this very dull,’ Mary thought, with a little shiver of irritation, which led her to place her rose the wrong way in the basket. Meanwhile, they had come to the end of the path, and while Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand upright within their fence of string, Mary looked at her father, who was pacing up and down, with his hand behind his back and his head bowed in meditation. Obeying an impulse which sprang from some desire to interrupt this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the grass walk and put her hand on his arm.
‘A flower for your buttonhole, father,’ she said, presenting a rose.
‘Eh, dear?’ said Mr Datchet, taking the flower, and holding it at an angle which suited his bad eyesight, without pausing in his walk.
‘Where does this fellow come from? One of Elizabeth’s s roses—I hope you asked her leave. Elizabeth doesn’t like having her roses picked without her leave, and quite right, too.’
He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed it so clearly before, of letting his sentences tail away into a continuous murmur, whereupon he passed into a state of abstraction, presumed by his children to indicate some train of thought too profound for utterance.
‘What?’ said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in her life, perhaps, when the murmur ceased. He made no reply. She knew very well that he wished to be left alone, but she stuck to his side much as she might have stuck to some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right gradually to awaken. She could think of nothing to rouse him with except:
‘The garden’s looking very nice, father.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Mr Datchet, running his words together in the same abstracted manner, and sinking his head yet lower upon his breast. And suddenly, as they turned their steps to retrace their way, he jerked out:
‘The traffic’s very much increased, you know. More rolling-stock needed already. Forty trucks went down yesterday by the 12.15—counted them myself. They’ve taken off the 9.3, and given us an 8.30 instead—suits the business men, you know. You came by the old 3.10 yesterday, I suppose?’
She said ‘Yes,’ as he seemed to wish for a reply, and then he looked at his watch, and made off down the path towards the house, holding the rose at the same angle in front of him. Elizabeth had gone round to the side of the house, where the chickens lived, so that Mary found herself alone, holding Ralph’s letter in her hand. She was uneasy. She had put off the season for thinking things out very successfully, and now that Ralph was actually coming, the next day, she could only wonder how her family would impress him. She thought it likely that her father would discuss the train service with him; Elizabeth would be bright and sensible, and always leaving the room to give messages to the servants. Her brothers had already said that they would give him a day’s shooting. She was content to leave the problem of Ralph’s relations to the young men obscure, trusting that they would find some common ground of masculine agreement. But what would he think of her? Would he see that she was different from the rest of the family? She devised a plan for taking him to her sitting-room, and artfully leading the talk towards the English poets, who now occupied prominent places in her little bookcase. Moreover, she might give him to understand, privately, that she, too, thought her family a queer one—queer, yes, but not dull. That was the rock past which she was bent on steering him. And she thought how she would draw his attention to Edward’s passion for Jorrocks,bt and the enthusiasm which led Christopher to collect moths and butterflies, though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s sketching, if the fruits were invisible, might lend colour to the general effect which she wished to produce of a family, eccentric and limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward, she perceived, was rolling the lawn, for the sake of exercise; and the sight of him, with pink cheeks, bright little brown eyes, and a general resemblance to a clumsy young cart-horse in its winter coat of dusty brown hair, made Mary violently ashamed of her ambitious scheming. She loved him precisely as he was; she loved them all; and as she walked by his side, up and down, and down and up, her strong moral sense administered a sound drubbing to the vain and romantic element aroused in her by the mere thought of Ralph. She felt quite certain that, for good or for bad, she was very like the rest of her family.
Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a commercial traveller in the opposite corner. They centred round a village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln; was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman of the name of Otway?
The traveller knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue, reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the address.
‘Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,’ he read out.
‘You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,’ said the man; and Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.
‘I’ve got to walk over from Disham,’ he said, and in the heart of him could not help marvelling at the pleasure which he derived from making a bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr Hilbery’s address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her he thought; she, too, had seen these grey fields, and, perhaps, she was there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in the windows of an old grey house, he thought. He lay back in his corner and forgot the commercial traveller altogether. The process of visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old grey manor-house; instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect the figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over the grey fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the platform. A tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag, and led the way without uttering one articulate word.