She had always liked the clean, bullet-shaped head, his black eyes, his sturdiness and set, square shoulders, his colour and his strength. She had always liked him, but to-day, in this sudden glimpse, he seemed to be revealed to her as someone whom she was seeing for the first time. Millie, in all the freshness of her anticipated attack upon the world, had at this period very little patience for bunglers, for sentimentalists, for nervous and hesitating souls. Now, strangely, she saw in Philip’s eyes some hinted weakness, and yet she did not despise him. “I believe,” she thought, “he’s afraid of us.” That discovery came as though it had been whispered to her by someone who knew. Her old conviction that she knew him better than did the others showed now no signs of faltering. “I believe I could help him as they none of them can,” she thought. “No, not even Katherine.” She had, in spite of her determined, practical common-sense, the most romantic idea of love, and now, as she thought of the two of them wrapped up there before her eyes in one another, she felt irritated by her own isolation. “I wonder whether Katherine understands him really,” she thought. “Katherine’s so simple, and takes everything for granted. It’s enough for her that she’s in love. I don’t believe it’s enough for him.” She had always in very early days felt some protecting, motherly element in her love for Katherine. That protection seemed now to spread to Philip as well. “Oh! I do hope they’re going to be happy,” she thought, and so, taking them both with her under her wing, dozed off to sleep again....
The other was, of course, Henry.
No one could ever call Henry a gay youth. I don’t think that anyone ever did, and although with every year that he grows he is stronger, more cheerful and less clumsy and misanthropic, he will never be really gay. He will always be far too conscious of the troubles that may tumble on to his head, of the tragedies of his friends and the evils of his country.
And yet, in spite of his temperament, he had, deep down in his soul, a sense of humour, an appreciation of his own comic appearance, a ready applause for the optimists (although to this he would never, never confess). “He’s a surly brute,” I heard someone say of him once—but it is possible (I do not say probable) that he will be a great man one of these days, and then everyone will admire his fine reserve, “the taciturnity of a great man”; in one of his sudden moments of confidence he confessed to me that this particular journey down to Glebeshire was the beginning of the worst time in his life—not, of course, quite the beginning. Philip’s appearance on that foggy night of his grandfather’s birthday was that—and he is even now not so old but that there may be plenty of bad times in store for him. But he will know now how to meet them; this was his first test of responsibility.
He had always told himself that what he really wanted was to show, in some heroic fashion, his love for Katherine. Let him be tested, he cried, by fire, stake, torture and the block, and he would “show them.” Well, the test had come. As he sat opposite her in the railway carriage he faced it. He might go up to Philip and say to him: “Look here, is it true? Did you have a mistress in Moscow for three years and have a son by her?” But what then? If Philip laughed, and said: “Why, of course ... everyone knows it. That’s all over now. What is it to you?” He would answer: “It’s this to me. I’m not going to have a rotten swelp of a fellow marrying my sister and making her miserable.”
Then Philip might say: “My dear child—how young you are! all men do these things. I’ve finished with that part of my life. But, anyway, don’t interfere between me and Katherine, you’ll only make her miserable and you’ll do no good.”
Ah! that was just it. He would make her miserable; he could not look at her happiness and contemplate his own destruction of it. And yet if Philip were to marry her and afterwards neglect her, and leave her as he had left this other woman, would not Henry then reproach himself most bitterly for ever and ever? But perhaps, after all, the story of that wretched man at the Club was untrue, it had been, perhaps, grossly exaggerated. Henry had a crude but finely-coloured fancy concerning the morals of the Man of the World. Had not Seymour dismissed such things with a jolly laugh and “my dear fellow, it’s no business of ours. We’re all very much alike if we only knew.” Had he not a secret envy of this same Man of the World who carried off his sins so lightly with so graceful an air? But now it was no case of an abstract sinner—it was a case of the happiness or unhappiness of the person whom Henry loved best in life.
A subtler temptation attacked him. He knew (he could not possibly doubt) that if his parents were told, Philip would have to go. One word from him to his mother, and the family were rid of this fellow who had come out of nowhere to disturb their peace. The thing was so infernally easy. As he sat there, reading, apparently, his novel, his eyes were on Katherine’s face. She was leaning back, her eyes closed, smiling at her thoughts. What would Katherine do? Would she leave them all and go with him? Would she hate him, Henry, for ever afterwards? Yes, that she would probably do.... Ah, he was a weak, feeble, indeterminate creature. He could make up his mind about nothing.... That evening he had had with Philip, it had been glorious and disgusting, thrilling and sordid. He was rather glad that he had been drunk—he was also ashamed. He was intensely relieved that none of the family had seen him, and yet he saw himself shouting to them: “I was drunk the other night, and I talked to rotten women and I didn’t care what happened to me.... I’m a boy no longer.”
He hated Philip, and yet, perhaps, Philip was leading him to freedom. That fellow in the novel about the sea and the forests (Henry could see him challenging his foes, walking quietly across the square towards his friend, who was waiting to slay him). He would have admired Philip. Henry saw himself as that fine solitary figure waiting for his opportunity. How grand he could be had he a chance, but life was so lofty, so unromantic, so conventional. Instead of meeting death like a hero, he must protect Katherine ... and he did not know how to do it....
As the sun was sinking in a thick golden web that glittered behind the dark purple woods—woods that seemed now to stand like watchers with their fingers upon their lips—the train crossed the boundary river. That crossing bad been, ever since he could remember, a very great moment to Henry. To-day the recognition of it dragged him away from Philip and Katherine, from everything but Glebeshire.