Captain Ingpen called next morning while she was at her letters after
breakfast. She had felt sure that he would call early. He would miss his
ring and he would hope that no one else would find it, and as she rose
to meet him she wondered if yesterday’s episode could cover the pallor
and fixity of her face; for her sleepless night had ravaged it. It had
been with more than a hateful surmise that she had battled; there had
been a hope as hateful. She had seen the vast form of a tidal wave rear
itself on the horizon and had lain all night wondering whether its crash
and engulfing was to sweep Hester out of their lives;—fearing, hoping,
hating herself for the hope, yet not knowing whether to fear most or
hope most that what seemed a wave was a mere cloud that a word with her
friend would dissolve into thin air. If Hester was swept away, Godfrey
Ingpen would be swept too; and Clive would be shattered. And as she saw
Captain Ingpen and went forward in the bright morning light and smiled
upon him, her integrity was restored to her; it was the cloud she hoped
for; the cloud that he was to disperse. She waited for him to speak
first.
‘I hope I am not being tiresome, coming so early,’ he said, and he
looked exceedingly affable and easy, yet, her perception sharpened to a
razor edge, she imagined that he was watching her as she watched him.
‘I’ve lost a ring, an old ring I’ve worn for years. It occurred to me
that it might have slipped off in the fountain yesterday. May I go and
have a look?’
Still smiling and still silent, Monica went to the mantelpiece and took
the ring from a little porcelain box that stood there. She held it out
to him on the palm of her hand: ‘I thought it might be yours,’ she said.
Ingpen as he came forward was looking not at the ring, but at her. Did
she still only imagine that he sounded her dexterity and her
disingenuousness? ‘Was it in the fountain?’ he asked.—‘Thanks, most
awfully.’ He slipped it on his finger, not taking his eyes from hers.
‘No; on the ground, and found by the merest chance. I was walking in the
dark and the moonlight struck it. It was half buried already. It’s quite
possible that by daylight you would not have seen it at all. You might
have trodden it under foot and it would have been lost for ever.’
Was he not wishing, with all his heart, that it had been? For a moment
she saw, clearly and horribly, that he did not know what to do; that she
baffled him. And she went on, marvelling at her own resource, ‘It
doesn’t look like a man’s ring, somehow; it looks like a
great-grandmother’s ring.’ She stood with her back to the mantelpiece
facing him, her hands locked behind her.
Ingpen now looked down at the ring and turned it on his finger and
smiled, still very easily. ‘You are not far wrong,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a
man’s ring and it belonged to a great-aunt, a racy old lady, very much
of a figure in my boyhood.—My mother was brought up by her and she was
fond of me. She left me the ring when she died. Harriet Beaton was her
name.’
Monica met his eye; his eye with its straight upper lid cutting across
the pupil; his eye so candid and so calculating, and as she met it she
remembered that he had spent his life dealing with warrior-tribes.
Calculating candour had been his frequent weapon. And suddenly she was
sick at heart—seeing the tidal wave glide forward, and a trail of fiery
mockery sped through her as she thought: ‘Ah, my friend, you are as
swift, as adroit as I am;—but your memory has played you false. You
should have looked, again, at your ring before you said that. You have
forgotten that there is a date engraved inside it.’—Yet—was it just
possible that Aunt Harriet Beaton had lived to a great age and died in
1918?
‘Well, I must be off.—You are busy,’ said Ingpen. There had been a
pause, a heavy suspended pause, like a weight held in the air between
them, and it seemed to come down with a thud and crash as his voice
broke into it. ‘There is nothing worse than losing things, is there?’
‘No; there’s not,’ said Monica. She had remained standing on the stone
kerb of the fireplace, a little lifted above the floor, so that their
eyes were on a level as they looked across at each other.
‘I never minded anything so much in my life, I think,’ said Ingpen, who
had not moved to go and who still turned his ring while he looked at
her, ‘as losing a dog once, in Marseilles. It was my fault. I had just
landed; and there was a great crowd; and I ought to have had him on a
lead. I looked for him all day and all night.’
‘And you never found him?’ Monica asked, after another pause, in which
she wondered whether there were some symbolic intention in this
reminiscence.
‘Yes. I found him. The heat was terrific and he had run all day, half
demented I suppose. And he had been stoned to death. They thought he was
mad. A West Highland terrier he was; such a pretty little fellow. They
spoiled him horribly.’
Suddenly, while he spoke, thus dryly, Monica saw that strange hot tears
had sprung to his eyes. She put her hands before her face, ‘Oh.
Don’t.—Don’t.’ She did not know what it was she begged him not to do. ‘I
can’t bear it,’ she murmured. ‘There can’t be anything worse.’
‘No; there can’t, can there?’ said Ingpen. ‘And I ought to have had him
on a lead. It happened twenty years ago, but I wake up in the night and
think of it.—Well, good-bye.’
He was gone and she had not uncovered her face. Trembling suddenly,
spent, she went to her writing-bureau, sank on the chair and leant her
forehead on her hands. What did it mean? What was she to do? Must their
friendship be stoned to death? She sat there, for how long? motionless,
except that from time to time she moved the papers on her desk—glancing
at them from under her hand: Edith’s letter about the invalid child;—she
must answer that; it had to be sent to the sea: the coal bill;—it must
be cut down; the kitchen range was very wasteful; it might save money to
get a new one: the tickets for the English Association lecture and the
long envelope from the Bank with the certificates to be signed.
But was it possible, really possible, that for all these years Hester
had lived a lie? Must she choose between stoning the poor lost dog and
tacitly sheltering Hester and her former lover, assenting to the
deception, making part of it? She, too, to lie to Clive and keep him in
his fool’s paradise? Oh, loathsome, hateful girl, creeping
surreptitiously into their lives like a hidden fire, sitting there in
her black cloak, extraordinarily quiet—like an octopus in the dark,
holding its prey. And as the memory came, half suffocating her with the
horrible old sense of hatred, it lighted a sudden shape unseen till
then, yet evident, substantial, once made visible. How far did the
betrayal go? Was it not only in the past but in the present too? Was the
contempt, the hostility displayed by Hester towards Ingpen and expressed
to Clive, merely a blind and subterfuge, merely part of the murky
artifice? Was it all planned and plotted between them? His coming, and
theirs, at the same time?—Their coming down Hester’s idea, as Clive had
assured her.—How impossible, now that she saw it, to think
otherwise;—though the thought tore at her heart as she saw it sweeping
Ingpen, too, into the murk and foulness.—Oh, this could not be borne!
This was too much to bear! And it might still not be true; for there was
Aunt Harriet and, her arms laid out before her on the desk, her hands
clenched, Monica stared at Aunt Harriet—the racy old lady with grey side
curls and stiffly flowered silk dress. Even if Aunt Harriet were
fiction—even if she were fiction, he would be justified in dexterity to
shield a friendship innocent, passionate and shattered. ‘It still may
not be true,’ Monica muttered, rising to her feet. ‘They may have been
friends, great friends.’ And she stared out of the window and saw now,
not the nebulous figure of Aunt Harriet, but Ingpen’s eyes fixed upon
her, measuring her suspicion, measuring her knowledge, asking himself:
‘Has she read the inscription?’ Oh, no! No! The ring had its history.
1918. During the war. What did the phrase bring back? Chartres and the
muffled windows; Ingpen’s head bent to the engravings in the hall;
Hester’s repudiating, sullen eyes as she said it was like a skull. They
had been at Chartres together and Ingpen, ten years ago, would have been
engaged in no platonic friendship with a girl of twenty-two, a girl who
could look as Hester looked the other night;—and she flashed on Monica’s
eye naked and silver and rose, in the new dress chosen for the old
lover. How wonderfully they had acted. How marvellously. She was a
loathsome girl, and she had known it from the first; and he a
conscienceless, a crafty man; and she had known that from the
first;—although he had smiled at her over little Robin’s head, with the
released fountain shining above them;—although the strange, hot tears
had come to his eyes in telling of his little dog.—‘It’s not to stone
him.—What did he mean by that?—It’s not to stone him—if I must see the
truth.’ She pressed her hand to her forehead standing in the sunlight
that flowed warmly about her.—‘I must see the truth: because of Clive.
Then I can judge. If they are here together—betraying Clive—they must
go; they must both go.’ And still the tearing was at her heart, and she
remembered his tears and saw, not his dog now but her own little Jeremy,
who had died so quietly with his head laid in her hand.—Was that not all
that he had asked of her?
She felt now that her tears were trickling from beneath her fingers and
that they brought a lassitude, almost an appeasement.—Death, peaceful
death; the thought of death, of rest, had often of late come to her
mind. All that there was to do, all that remained of life, was to think
of Clive, to secure him. And she was to see Norah that afternoon;—the
memory had come with the tears and the sense of appeasement; she could
find out from Norah whether Aunt Harriet had ever existed. That was the
first step. But she must lie down; for she felt as though she had passed
through a long illness.