CHAPTER I_Dark Hester

DARK HESTER

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1929

THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

DARK HESTER

CHAPTER I

‘I suppose I have hated her from the first moment I saw her,’ Monica

Wilmott heard herself saying, and she saw Hester as she had first seen

her, sitting in the open window of the Chelsea drawing-room against the

background of the river; extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured,

with black eyebrows and a thin black cloak lined with red. She had

thought of Hester almost constantly since Clive had married her, but

this habit of thinking aloud had crept upon her only since she had come

to live alone in Essex, and it frightened her a little when she caught

herself at it; it was dangerous, as anything automatic in life might be

dangerous; a thing like that, said aloud, became much more real; more

real than it was; one might shut oneself up in the cell of a

self-suggestion if one listened to it. So now, on this solitary

afternoon, darkened by cold summer rain, she rose from the window-seat

where she had been looking out at the village-green, and walked with a

swift step down the oddly shaped room that turned an angle at the

chimney-piece and fell to a lower level reached by three shallow steps.

The casement windows in the upper portion opened under a thatch, and the

ceiling there was low and crossed by ancient beams; the little house had

been contrived from two old cottages, and the second, loftier room was

modern.

Monica Wilmott descended to it and looked out on the altered view, as

uneventful as the first had been. There was a touch of romance in the

silhouettes of the hedgerow elms; but it was a tame romance and her own

house made part of it, so comfortably, so consciously picturesque with

its beams and plaster, its eddying thatch and climbing roses. Never

would she have chosen to live in such a house, nor to live in Essex at

all, were it not that Clive lived in London and that here, though parted

from him, she was near him. Oddley Green was almost suburban and the

railway station lay but a mile away; she could hear the whistle of the

trains as they passed all day and night, and she was glad to hear them;

they seemed a link with London and with Clive.

Turning from the window she glanced at her husband’s Indian

water-colours, hanging in a row round the walls as they had hung in all

her makeshift homes all the thirty years since his death, and then at

the goldfish in their bowl. Clive, from babyhood, had loved goldfish and

she had always had them, too, in her drawing-rooms. Her eyes gathered an

intentness as she watched the glancing fish, seeing herself suddenly

like them, like them bright, rapid, frustrated, and the bitter flicker

of a smile crossed her face as she took ants’ eggs from a little

porcelain box and scattered them on the water. She went back, then, to

the upper room,—‘I am restless,’ she thought. ‘Like the goldfish,’—and,

beside the fireplace, she came to a standstill, putting her foot on the

stone curbing, her hand on the high stone shelf and looking round her—at

the walnut bureau where her mother had sat every day in the spacious

London home of her girlhood; at the French clock that she and her

father, the clever London judge, had bought in Paris; at the portrait of

her Scotch great-grandmother, a girl with bare shoulders above white

satin, pearls in her tawny hair, and blue eyes like her own; not soft,

not gentle blue; intrepid, rather, and ardent with their smile. The

faded chintzes on the chairs and sofas she and Clive had chosen together

seven years ago, for the flat in Chelsea; every rose and pheasant and

carnation brought memories of that one epoch of her life when she had

been aware of a garnered, a conscious happiness. And, as she remembered

it, her eyes fell and in her stillness she might have been standing

there to have her picture painted, a touch of something gracefully

obsolete, for all the modernity of her straight lines and shortened

skirts, in the falling sleeves of her black dress, the loose short

jacket, the bow of velvet at her throat. Resolutely drawn against the

dark background, the lines of her downcast profile were at once gay,

impatient and imperative; the lifted upper lip sweet, the lower lip

stubborn, the nose a little thick, a little clumsy, like a child’s nose,

but with a nostril all delicacy and decision. Her golden hair, twisted

round her head, made a brightness in the room. Clive had said that she

had the hair of Helen of Troy. He had also said, playing at their game

of analogies, that she was like a falcon, a jar of honey, a spray of

rosemary; and there was, indeed, an almost vestal fierceness in Monica

Wilmott; something high, hovering, and perhaps a little ruthless. Her

tresses might be the tresses of Helen, her fair glancing face might

allure like the face of a siren over the sea, but her two distant years

of marriage had left intact something of girlhood that survived into her

middle years, and her maternity had expressed itself not only in

passionate comradeship with her child, but in swift repudiation of all

matrimonial approaches. She was impatient of sentimental predicaments;

averse, even hostile to any display of amorous emotion.

She was remembering those years after the war as she stood there, that

time of halcyon sweetness when, like two tempest-tossed sea-gulls, she

and Clive had floated side by side in a sunlit harbour; the happiest

time of her life. She had never been inclined to pathos or self-pity.

She had, for all the years of his boyhood, eaten her cold mutton in the

West Kensington lodgings, run the hat shop, written the articles on the

French countryside, since only so could she send him to Winchester and

Oxford; and the road she trod was never dusty to her, since Clive’s

future was its goal. But when, her goal attained, the tidal wave of the

war broke over the world, she had, for a suffocating and swooning

moment, seen herself as a collapsed and falling form with bubbles rising

from its mouth. She remembered now the turmoil of horrifying darkness,

the sensation, while it lasted, of holding her breath and swimming under

water, and then the emergence, tragic, since Clive was brought back to

her almost dying of his wounds, yet ecstatic, for he was in her arms

again and death now was an antagonist that they could face together. His

slow return to life and to her had recalled the trembling sweetness of

her pregnancy, and when he was safe at last it was as if he had been

born again. All the good things had come to her at once; Clive’s

recovery and Aunt Janet’s legacy and the post in the staunch old City

shipping-office to make them in their own eyes opulent. It was true that

she had never thought of a shipping-office as the end of all her

efforts; she had thought of Clive as a soldier, like his father, or a

lawyer, like his grandfather, or the poet that his verses had seemed to

promise; but the shipping-office, when it came, was indeed a harbour and

what wonder, with all the sudden security, that she had been blind to

the change in Clive, the change, she saw so clearly now, that had made

him Hester’s prey. His child face rose before her as she tried to define

to herself in what it had consisted; one day, when very tiny, he had had

little friends to tea and been horribly shy and afraid of them. Fear,

with Clive, never took the form of subterfuge or awkwardness. He had sat

there, very upright in his white suit, at the end of the nursery table,

a pale, golden little boy; and though he could not assume a smile he

could muster a perfect courtesy. The only signs by which his mother had

read his deep distress were the stiffening of his small upper lip and

the way in which he repeatedly raised his eyebrows, opening his eyes

very wide the while. And only to-day did this distant memory supply its

link of association; for Clive, when he came back to life, was

constantly raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes very wide; and if

he as constantly contrived to smile, she saw now that that had been

because of her and because, for love of her, he could dissemble. A

mother might give life; but even a mother could not give the zest for

life. The war had left him a frightened bird huddled under a hedge with

its wing broken. That was the truth of it. That was what Hester must

have felt in him; helplessness; helplessness and beauty. Even her

prosaic eye had been charmed by the bird’s beauty; commonplace young

huntress as she had been, striding through the woods in search of prey.

But it was unjust; she knew it was unjust. Hatred made one unjust and

horrible. She looked a moment longer at the dark fireplace and then,

taking the matches, stooped and lighted the logs. Let us have more

light, was the instinct within her. Let us face things.—Own up and see

yourself as you are; perhaps the merely jealous mother, unable to endure

that another woman should make your son happy. Did it really come to

that? Or had it been because of Celia that she had seen Hester from the

first with hostile eyes?

‘How did it all begin?’ said Monica, watching the flames leap up.

‘Who is Clive’s new friend?’ Margaret Orde had asked. ‘The queer dark

girl who dresses like a boy?’ It was so it had begun, the first hint

brushing lightly yet sharply, like a branch of briar drawn across one’s

face on a woodland ramble. Clive had seemed to share his life to every

jot and tittle with her; and he had told her nothing of a new friend who

was dark and queer. From the very first there had been a sharpness, a

surmise.

‘Where did you see them? He has so many friends and all girls dress like

boys nowadays,’ she had said.

Good old Margaret who lived out at Chiswick with her ancient father,

loved these tea-table talks and to hear every detail of Monica and

Clive’s London life. She insisted now, all interest and all innocence,

on her topic.

‘Boys don’t curl their hair over their ears, or wear pink silk

stockings, and neither did this girl. Her hair was brushed back and she

wore what looked like riding boots; but I expect they were rubber; very

sensible, for it was raining.’

‘Could it have been Agatha Milford?—but Agatha would hardly come to

London in riding clothes.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t Miss Milford—I remember her perfectly; I met her here at

tea one day, you know. She’s lovely. This girl had very big eyes and

looked rather ill-tempered; but perhaps she was only very intellectual

or artistic. It was at that show of queer pictures in Grafton

Street.—Clive didn’t see me, so I didn’t interrupt them.’

Monica asked no further question but she had, already, a sense of

something surreptitious that faintly menaced her. She telephoned to

Celia that evening and asked her to come and dine with them and bring

her violin. Since they had first played together, since Celia’s

childhood, Clive had been their audience, so much at one with them in

his part of listener that they made a trio rather than a duet. But he

had seemed tired that night when he came in and she had felt, all

through the lovely Schubert Sonatina, that he was not really listening,

that he was not thinking of her or Celia or Schubert but of the queer

dark girl. And after that, as the days passed and he said nothing of the

new friend, he suddenly became much older in her eyes; a man as he had

never been before; never again to be her child only.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Celia could come with us to Paris this Easter?’

It must have been a fortnight later that she had asked him this

question, one evening when he and she had returned together from the

play and were drinking hot bouillon in the drawing-room. He was standing

opposite her, his cup in his hand, and as he looked at her she saw that

his sweet, attentive face was jaded, almost haggard.

‘Paris? Were we thinking of Paris, Mummy?’ he asked.

‘Well, wouldn’t it be rather nice for Easter? We have not been there

since before the war, nor has Celia. We could show her everything.’

France had been one of the family traditions in Monica’s youth and she

had seen to it that Clive inherited it. She was always scraping and

saving in the West Kensington days to give him his holidays in France,

to see cathedrals and follow the course of the great French rivers with

knapsacks on their backs.

‘That would be delightful,’ said Clive, ‘but what about summer? Isn’t

Easter rather early for Paris?’

‘Oh, I always think it a heavenly time then, the horse-chestnuts just

beginning to bud, and violets in the streets.—Had you thought of

anything else?’

He was still looking at her, and now he lifted his eyebrows and opened

his eyes very widely; then said: ‘I have been asked to go to Cornwall

for Easter—some new friends of mine.—But of course I could give that up

if you have fixed your heart on Paris, Mummy.’

A violent struggle took place within her, but she mastered it. ‘Of

course you mustn’t give it up. Who are the new friends?’ It was

inevitable that she should ask that now; he could feel no pressure in

that.

‘Rather a nice couple,’ said Clive. ‘He is the editor of “The

Protest”—you know that clever weekly—and she is artistic and does batik

scarves and curtains. Jessup is their name and they have three nice

little children. I am not sure you would care for them though, Mummy. I

shall find out, in Cornwall.’

He was now smiling at her quite clearly. He was grateful to her for not

holding him back from Cornwall.

‘Only those two?’

‘And some friends of theirs, two or three friends, who have cottages

near by. It’s on the cliffs near the Lizard; it’s lovely there in early

spring they say.’

‘Are the friends artistic too?’ She felt as if she were creeping after a

tiger in the jungle.

‘Yes, they are all artistic I think,’ said Clive, moving to the

fireplace. ‘Write or paint or act, you know;—all very busy and modern.’

‘What form does their modernness take?’

‘What form does it take? Well, I don’t quite know. Talk in the main, I

think; they are great talkers; very unshackled,’ and Clive tried to

smile, looking over at her, but his smile was no longer clear. He knew

now that he had something to hide and that she was trying to find it,

and, while bitterness surged in her against the dark girl who made Clive

hide from her, who made them both, suddenly, fear each other—she

contrived to ask, lightly: ‘Is anybody shackled nowadays, my dear?’

‘Oh, _we_ all are!’ said Clive, and he laughed. ‘People who dress for

dinner, I mean, and are presented at Court and take in the “Quarterly

Review”——’ He glanced at it lying on his mother’s table.

Her bitterness found an outlet. ‘I haven’t painted, it’s true, or acted,

or made batik scarves, but I have written, and run an antique shop, and

trimmed hats! It seems to me that I know the dusty arena as well as any

modern woman—that I am as modern in that as any of them;—even though I

_was_ presented at Court in the dark ages!’

Clive crossed over to her. She had done what she intended; made herself

real and near to him; bound him to her—but, when he came to her like

that and put his arms around her, she had known that the heavy beating

of his heart was for the secret he hid from her as much as for his love

and retrospective pity. And she had known, with a cruel pain, that she

had asked her son for gratitude. She hardly kept herself from weeping as

she heard him say: ‘Oh, darling Mummy—don’t I know it! Do you think that

you need ever remind me? Do you think that I shall ever forget all that

you have done for me!’

So they had clung together—their embrace effacing nothing, and he had

gone to Cornwall for Easter and when he came back was engaged to Hester

Blakeston.