"Yes," she replied, flushing. "No," she contradicted herself. "Nothing particular, I mean. But I was thinking about plants. I was enjoying myself. In fact, I've seldom enjoyed an afternoon more. But I want to hear what you've settled, if you don't mind telling me.""Oh, it's all settled," he replied. "I'm going to this infernal cottage to write a worthless book.""How I envy you," she replied, with the utmost sincerity.
"Well, cottages are to be had for fifteen shillings a week.""Cottages are to be had--yes," she replied. "The question is--" She checked herself. "Two rooms are all I should want," she continued, with a curious sigh; "one for eating, one for sleeping. Oh, but Ishould like another, a large one at the top, and a little garden where one could grow flowers. A path--so--down to a river, or up to a wood, and the sea not very far off, so that one could hear the waves at night. Ships just vanishing on the horizon--" She broke off. "Shall you be near the sea?""My notion of perfect happiness," he began, not replying to her question, "is to live as you've said.""Well, now you can. You will work, I suppose," she continued; "you'll work all the morning and again after tea and perhaps at night. You won't have people always coming about you to interrupt.""How far can one live alone?" he asked. "Have you tried ever?""Once for three weeks," she replied. "My father and mother were in Italy, and something happened so that I couldn't join them. For three weeks I lived entirely by myself, and the only person I spoke to was a stranger in a shop where I lunched--a man with a beard. Then I went back to my room by myself and--well, I did what I liked. It doesn't make me out an amiable character, I'm afraid," she added, "but I can't endure living with other people. An occasional man with a beard is interesting; he's detached; he lets me go my way, and we know we shall never meet again. Therefore, we are perfectly sincere--a thing not possible with one's friends.""Nonsense," Denham replied abruptly.
"Why 'nonsense'?" she inquired.
"Because you don't mean what you say," he expostulated.
"You're very positive," she said, laughing and looking at him. How arbitrary, hot-tempered, and imperious he was! He had asked her to come to Kew to advise him; he then told her that he had settled the question already; he then proceeded to find fault with her. He was the very opposite of William Rodney, she thought; he was shabby, his clothes were badly made, he was ill versed in the amenities of life;he was tongue-tied and awkward to the verge of obliterating his real character. He was awkwardly silent; he was awkwardly emphatic. And yet she liked him.
"I don't mean what I say," she repeated good-humoredly. "Well--?""I doubt whether you make absolute sincerity your standard in life,"he answered significantly.
She flushed. He had penetrated at once to the weak spot--her engagement, and had reason for what he said. He was not altogether justified now, at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could not enlighten him and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp. Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused;partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
"Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don't you think?" she inquired, with a touch of irony.
"There are people one credits even with that," he replied a little vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or repressed for some reason either of loneliness or--could it be possible--of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked, unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. "I went back to my room by myself and I did--what I liked." She had said that to him, and in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the irony of her reply he heard her resentment.
He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his character must make good those vows in her presence.
She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished to make Denham understand.
