In the night she woke after long, swooning sleep, clear-minded. She had
been dreaming of her mother, who had, in the dream, come laughing to the
breakfast-table and said, as she stood behind the coffee-urn: ‘I am
going to become a Catholic to-day, and you must all come and see me take
the veil at Brompton Oratory.’ It was a very characteristic
announcement. They had always, all of them, been a family for sudden
resolutions, and later in the dream she saw her mother, dressed like a
bride, before an altar blazing with candles, and she herself and Alison,
her younger sister, were bridesmaids and smiled at each other over the
shower bouquets of the period. Then they were both crying and everything
was dark and they were standing on either side of a black catafalque and
their mother lay beneath; dead: ‘Of course we all knew that she killed
herself,’ said Alison. Not until this dream had the truth been
spoken—that her mother had indeed taken the overdose purposely; but she
knew now that she had always known it. The dreadful grief drifted above
her like a pall of smoke and when she woke she lay beneath it, thinking
of all those she had loved, who were dead.—Her father, her mother,
Charlie, her brothers Christopher and Martin, and the young sister
Alison who had died in girlhood, nearly breaking her mother’s
heart—though that had not finally broken until her father went. And it
was strange to think of them all ending so sadly when they had been such
a happy family. And all were dead: for ever and ever and ever. She felt
herself repeating the words ‘For ever.’ Such strange words. In form they
seemed to possess something; but it was only the dust of oblivion. They
were all gone; irretrievably submerged in the salt, dissolving ocean of
time, and even the few sparkling memories that lingered on in the minds
of the living would soon be extinguished.
Now, detached, emotionless, yet stricken to the heart as if by a deadly
drug, she lay and saw a vast cliff rising as far as the eye could reach;
as vast and dark and towering as a tidal wave, reared eternally against
an abyss of empty space. And it plunged beneath further than thought
could fathom into a sea of death. The cliff was the world, and line upon
line, like the minutely fretted ledges of a coral reef, the human
generations emerged, just above the last sea-level, like a desperate
striving crepitation of insects. The cliff was immutable. The sea, but
for its imperceptible upward movement, motionless; only the line of life
pulsed with a fierce, miniature rhythm as the insects struggled up,
always up, always away from the engulfing sea, and fought with each
other, and tore each other down, and mounted upon each other in their
effort to escape and rise above the creeping tide; all with a
hallucinated ardour of faith, their little eyes fixed on the cliff that
all sought unavailingly to scale. Then silence; stillness. The tide of
death had mounted and they sank, generation after generation, line after
line; and the ledge of stilled consciousness that lay just below the
surface was as distant in reality, as inaccessible and perished, as the
ledges on which the Pharaohs slept, or ape-like men lay curled in
profundities of oblivion. ‘Yes; that’s life,’ Monica heard herself say
in the darkness.
When Miriam brought her her early tea, she told her that she would spend
the morning in bed and see no one. ‘No one, Miriam, not even Mr.
Wilmott. I’m too tired after that horrid fall last night.’ She knew that
Clive would not come. It was Hester she feared. A terror had waked in
her with her later waking and the ledge of life to which she still clung
was real to her again and the cliff and the sea half forgotten, a terror
that Hester might come and summon her forth to retribution. She saw
herself now as the creeping thing that Clive saw, the thing he would
have shown to Hester last night. She had not thought explicitly of the
revelation that had been conveyed to her with Clive’s words; but during
the hours of stunned sleep all her awareness of Hester had shifted and
on waking to the direful daylight she knew that she had traduced her and
had never seen her truly. The fiercely believed myth of her present
infidelity revealed itself for what it was; the shadow cast by her own
hatred. Not only Ingpen’s face was there to dispel it—with those
tears—but Hester’s also; the face of the repudiating Madonna. Such a
woman, who had from the first avowed all her past to the man she loved,
would not lie and creep clandestinely. She had loved Ingpen and put him
out of her life; and if she had seen him yesterday it was because he had
sought her out; or because she had summoned him to tell him that he must
go. Yes; that must be the truth. But she would not have seen it unless
Clive’s words had unsealed her eyes. ‘You know nothing about Clive and
me: you never have,’ came back to her. It was the truth. Their lives
had, from the first, been founded on sorrows, acceptances,
understandings from which she had been shut out. She had no place in it.
She had no place in any life. She had become a mere parasite, a
crawling, stinging parasite; something too vile for contemplation. So it
was that he had shown her to Hester. Never, never, in her shame, let her
see Hester again.
After lunch she got up and dressed carefully. The day was bright. It was
still warm enough for her grey coat and skirt. She tied the knot of
_crêpe-de-chine_ beneath her throat, pressed her pretty hat to its
becoming level above her eyebrows, drew on her soft grey gloves and
slipped her wrist-watch into place. Miriam had put a bunch of verbenas,
all bright, delicate colours, like an old sprigged muslin, on her
dressing-table, and she selected three,—deep pink, pale pink and purple,
and pinned them into the lapel of her coat. Brightly, if with a specious
brightness, her eyes looked back at her in the mirror, and, with the
eddy of gold against her cheek, she was the most serene and youthful of
ageing ladies. She tipped a drop of lavender-water on her handkerchief
before she went and tucked it in her sleeve.
Miriam met her at the foot of the stairs selecting a stick from the
stand. ‘Oh, Ma’am, you are too tired to go out,’ said Miriam, who, trim
and crisp, was a parlour-maid to match such a lady. ‘That was a bad turn
you had last night, and Cook and me think you had better stay in bed and
have the doctor.’
‘But see how well I look, Miriam,’ said Monica, smiling. ‘I think I must
have been a little bilious and air and exercise are the best things for
me. I shall be in for tea. If Miss Bowen should come with her violin
tell her to go over her music until I get back.—And, oh, Miriam’—no
explicit stratagem was in her mind; only a deep instinct led her—‘I will
put on my old georgette tea-gown to-night; the sleeve is a little
ripped, so please have a look at it.’
There was no stratagem: but if anything unforeseen should happen to her,
Miriam would be able to say that when last seen she had been quite
herself. Nothing, she felt as she walked swiftly away, could seem more
natural, more securely fastened to the ledge. Miriam, afterwards, would
even remember the verbenas.
What, she thought, walking so rapidly down the station-road that the
blood mounted hotly to her weary cheek and she had to pause more than
once and draw breath—what if she took the 3.50 to London? She could go
to a hotel, telegraph to Miriam for her clothes, and then on to France
or Italy or Africa, anywhere where she might hide. But as she approached
the station she knew that London was not her intention, nor foreign
travel. She turned aside into the woods that ran beside the line and
walked out into the country beyond and along deep lanes and up over a
common thick with gorse bushes where she stripped a cluster of flowers
into her palm in passing by. She had always picked gorse on this common,
ever since she had come to Oddley, held it until it was warm and sniffed
at the thick soft fragrance. To-day she picked and held, but forgot to
smell it. She lifted her wrist presently and saw that it was 3.35. It
was time to turn. So she crossed the fields and climbed a gate and came
again to the railway woods, went through them, creeping under the wire
and up the steep embankment, and stood for a moment looking up and down
the line. But, she remembered, walking on, if she stood here she herself
would be seen from a distance by the engine-driver. A little further on
the line curved above the woods and she would be invisible until the
train was almost upon her. There was plenty of time; and raising her
wrist again to look at her watch, she walked quickly along the cinder
path beside the sleepers and saw, as she approached the curve, a little
gate, forgotten till then, that, below her, opened from the copse to a
right of way across the line. All was fitted to her need. She would
stand here, just above it, as if she had just ascended from the gate and
was waiting for the train to pass before she crossed.
‘I can stand here to watch it pass,’ she thought, ‘and then go home, and
no one will ever know. And it will become to me only a desperate dream.
People have so often stood and watched trains go by and had these
thoughts. They mean nothing, really.’ And she remembered that it was
always pleasant to see the tray of early-morning-tea brought into one’s
room. She could go home because of early-morning-tea. And now in the
distance she heard the low humming of the approaching train, growing in
the air, and remembered Anna Karénine and how she had read the book to
Clive one summer before the war. She had cried in reading of Anna’s
death and Clive had put his head down on her shoulder and held her.
The face of the train appeared suddenly above the copses. It was like
the face of a bee, so blank and so intent, and the sinuous following
body lurched, fore-shortened, smoothly round the curve. If she stood
quietly to watch it pass, no one could find anything to note in her
attitude (she was aware of no explicit change in her thought, but the
memory of Clive had reminded her that something intolerable hemmed her
in closely, from which she must escape);—and if, just as it approached
her, humming and throbbing, she stepped quietly before it, or better
still—her mind flashed pictures now—stumbled and fell forward, Miriam
could tell how she had fallen last night. Her sight felt empty; her
heart had melted away; she was thinking of her mother and of the dream:
‘Of course we all knew she killed herself.’ It was as if her mother,
above the swift, hungry humming, were calling to her, and she felt no
fear, only laid her stick down quickly beside her—for it would be horrid
to be entangled and impeded—and the insect whir of wheels and pistons
was close now, close——.
What was this crash and impact?—Death? She was dragged aside and
struggled for footing on the steep embankment. Great eyes were looking
into hers;—eyes of passionate reprobation; eyes of the Byzantine
Madonna, and the clutch on her arm and shoulder of hard hands. ‘That
would be a rotten thing to do,’ said Hester, and her voice floated like
a wisp borne on the roar and current of the train sweeping by above
them.
Hester had no need to drag her. She went passively; weak as a rag; like
a criminal with gyves upon his wrists. Once it was known, one could
never do it. She might almost be put into a lunatic asylum. It would not
be possible to pretend to Hester. She remembered her stick lying beside
the line on the permanent way. Hester had seen her lay it down. She had
been watching her for how long? She remembered that she consulted her
watch again and again. No; there was no use pretending. So she walked
on, held by Hester, into the little copse which, thickly planted with
pine trees, made a whispering sound above their heads. Here Hester
paused, and as Monica felt herself released she sank down upon the
ground and covered her face with her hands.
Hester remained standing beside her, leaning against a tree. ‘It would
be a rotten thing to do, wouldn’t it?’ she repeated, and a long time
must have passed. ‘What would have become of Clive if you had? He would
never have forgiven himself.’
Monica stilled her shuddering breaths. She forced her mind, from some
vast dispersal, into the channel of thought. It was like air entering
drowned lungs, cutting its way resuscitatingly. ‘It might have been an
accident,’ was what she heard herself say.
‘Well, he would have known it couldn’t have been an accident, after your
scene last night. It would have been the most awful kind of vengeance,
really,’ said Hester. ‘But we won’t talk about it. Rest, and try not to
think.’
But Monica muttered: ‘No; no;—I didn’t mean that. Try to believe that I
didn’t mean that. It was only that when I saw he hated me I couldn’t go
on.’
Hester was silent for a little while, and in the silence, over the
whispering of the pine-trees, Monica heard, far away, the deep breaths
of the engine as the 3.50 pulled out after its stop at Oddley Station.
‘You know, I think you are rather foolish,’ Hester then remarked,
bitterly, but with a strange, impersonal bitterness. ‘You ought to know
Clive better than that. People can say anything, when they’ve had a
knock-down blow, can’t they? Clive had been knocked flat. You understand
that, I’m sure. He doesn’t hate you. You couldn’t make him hate
you—whatever you did. It’s much more me he’d be likely to hate.’
Monica put down her hands and raised her head and looked up at her
daughter-in-law. Hester still stood leaning back against the pine-tree,
her elbow in her hand, her chin on her knuckles, looking before her with
a cold, intent look. Her lips were drawn; her cheek sunken; but how pale
and starry was her forehead. Monica fixed her eyes on Hester’s forehead.
She had always granted that Hester’s forehead was beautiful, and the
shape of her dark, proud head. She looked at her, carefully, for a long
time. And Hester, unaware of her scrutiny, remained sunken in her own
dark thoughts.
‘Hester, how did you know that I was here?’ Something so new had come
into Monica’s apprehension that she was filled with dispassionate
wonder. ‘What made you come?’ she asked.
‘Robin saw you,’ said Hester. She kept her eyes fixed before her and
spoke with a change of tone, with relief, perhaps, at the adjournment of
their personal question. ‘He was on the hill and saw you starting and
came and told me that you were going out. He looked so queer that I
asked him if anything were the matter and he said: ‘Grannie’s unhappy.
She can’t walk properly. She keeps stopping all the time.’—Of course he
was badly upset yesterday—by me and Godfrey,’ said Hester, uttering the
name steadily, though after a slight pause. ‘Clive saw how upset he was,
when he came back last night, from you, and found him sitting alone in
the garden. That’s another reason, you see.—For hatred, I mean.—A good
reason, don’t you think? Mothers oughtn’t to have pasts that let their
children in for such experiences, ought they?—their nervous children.’
And now Hester glanced down at her with a smile of cutting self-mockery.
‘So I ran up the hill,’ she went on, after the comment, which Monica
received with a deepening absorption, ‘and I could still see you, on the
station road, walking very fast and, as he’d said, stopping now and
then. It didn’t need a nervous little boy to see that something was
wrong. So I told him to stay in the nursery and that I’d find you and
cheer you up, and I ran down by the lane and through the woods and I’ve
been dogging you ever since. When I saw you walking over the common and
picking gorse, I thought that perhaps you didn’t mean anything. But when
you came back into the copse and crept under the wires and looked up and
down the line—and at your watch—I knew; of course. So I followed you,
keeping well out of sight, till you stopped above the gate—I saw how you
were thinking it all out—and you didn’t hear me when I got up close
behind you; the train was coming and you were listening too hard for
that. I stood there, just below you, as if we were waiting for the train
together. I don’t think they suspected anything;—though they must have
thought it odd—about your stick, and my dragging you back so
suddenly.—But I don’t think they suspected anything, really.’
Monica’s marvelling gaze remained fixed upon her face. ‘I suppose,’ she
said, after a pause, ‘that it was for Clive’s sake you did it.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Hester, also after a pause and again
glancing at her. ‘I didn’t want you to commit suicide.’ And again with
the bitter flicker of a smile she added: ‘And I can understand wanting
to get under a train just as well as you can, Monica.’
Now a long silence fell. A golden sunset had slowly embued the sky and
through the openings of the wood it slanted over the pine-needles to
Monica’s feet and fell warmly on her face and hands. It was like a
peaceful tide stealing in upon them, and she was content to sit there
and feel it take her, hearing suddenly that the air was full of soft,
autumnal insect murmurs, rising and falling joyously, while the brooding
fields were like a mother’s breast. She closed her eyes. It seemed to
her that she slept, listening in her sleep to the joyous murmur. She
could rest safely, for Hester was there beside her and would watch over
her.
‘Hester,’ she said suddenly, still with closed eyes,—‘Hester, what did
you mean by saying that Clive might hate you? You must know that it was
because of you that he hated me; after what I’d believed of you.’
‘Don’t you believe it any longer?’ Hester enquired after a moment. She
had got out her cigarettes and was smoking; looking up at her, Monica
saw her through a waft of smoke.
‘No; I believe it no longer.’
‘Because Clive told you I’d been straight with him in the past?’
‘Not only that. That didn’t touch the present, did it? No; it all
dropped away.—Because of what I felt of you and of Captain Ingpen. I
saw, when I woke this morning, that it could not be true, of either of
you.’
Hester smoked, her eyes on the sunlit fields. She wore her straight blue
linen dress, with the narrow black belt around her hips; rather like a
French child’s apron. She was bareheaded and looked like a child. ‘All
the same,’ she said presently, ‘I see why you believed it. You don’t
know anything about me, really, do you? and when you found out that
Godfrey and I had been lovers, all the rest must have seemed inevitable.
I understood, even last night, when Clive came back, what had
happened.—All the same, I do rather wonder at you;—not so much because
of me and Godfrey—whom you don’t know;—but because of Clive.—How you
could think, I mean, that Clive’s wife would deceive him. But then you
have never understood what I feel about Clive; how I care for him, I
mean.’
‘Do you mind telling me?—What you feel about him? I always knew you
loved him,’ said Monica, after the long pause that followed Hester’s
words; ‘but even loving wives do sometimes deceive their husbands.’
Hester knocked off the end of her cigarette and held it away and looked
at it, frowning. ‘I’d like to try,’ she said. ‘I’d like to try to
explain. It would be a pity not to get it clear, wouldn’t it, while we
are like this.—What I mean is that I feel you would understand anything
I told you.’
‘I am sure I should, Hester. Anything you told me.’
‘About Clive, then. He was so different from all the men I’d known. He
made the rest of them seem so—grubby—somehow.—One can’t say why one
falls in love, can one?’ said Hester, ‘but perhaps difference is one of
the chief reasons. I suppose Clive was almost the only gentleman I’d
ever really known—except Godfrey;—and he isn’t quite so much of one, is
he?—It wasn’t only that, of course; that would seem so very trivial,
wouldn’t it?—though I don’t think now that it’s as trivial as I once
did.—The things you jibe at when you’re outside seem so different when
you’re inside.—My father, poor old fellow, isn’t quite a gentleman, to
begin with;—rather a saint, but not quite a gentleman. Clive is rather a
saint, and a gentleman as well. I was like a dull blade when he met me.
He’s sharpened and sharpened me;—by his difference; by his belief in me;
by having to live up to what he takes for granted.—It has hurt
frightfully, sometimes, to see what he took for granted and how far from
it one was; but by the time one had had a few turns on the wheel one was
a good deal sharper.—Of course that’s a clumsy metaphor.—He makes one
open like a flower; a tight, hard, distrustful flower.—That’s more like
it. Godfrey never did that. He trampled one under foot.’
‘Oh, Hester;—not under foot? Was he cruel? Must I believe it of him? Did
you know I liked him? It hurts me to have you say that.’
‘Yes. I saw you liked him. So do I,’ said Hester, glancing at her. ‘No,
he was never cruel. Never. He was kind, always. But kindness can
trample, too, you know, if it’s blind. I only mean that he tore me to
pieces without meaning to, because he was blind. It was because of him
that my father cast me off, you know. It would be utterly unfair to
blame Godfrey for that. I had all my theories, and if it hadn’t been him
it would probably have been someone else. But my father came over to
Paris and found me living there, in sin, as he called it, and cast me
off. He is of that type and generation. And although Godfrey was very
sorry about it, and wanted to make up in every way he could, he is of
the type and generation that would never dream of marrying their
mistress. He wasn’t free; and I never thought about marriage; and I’m
not blaming him. All the same,’ said Hester, holding off her cigarette
and surveying it, the bitter savour on her lip, ‘I don’t think I ever
quite forgave him—among all the other things I didn’t forgive—when I
realized that he looked upon me as a mistress. I’ve never told anyone
about this; not even Clive. I am telling you because it makes you
understand what I feel about Clive. He could never have made such
mistakes about me, even if he’d been my lover, and not married to me. We
love the people who don’t make mistakes about us, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Monica. What mistakes had she not made about Hester?
‘I think we’d better be going back now.’ Hester tossed away her
cigarette. ‘You can walk, leaning on my arm, can’t you? Robin will be
wondering, poor lamb, and I must get back to him;—and you must go to bed
at once and have some hot milk with brandy in it and then get a good
long sleep.—Pretty rotten for you, too, it’s been;—and don’t think I
don’t see it!’ And Hester smiled at her as she held out her hand to
assist her to rise. ‘Lean on me,’ she said.
They went slowly along the little grass track that, at the edge of the
field, ran beside the copse. The sun had set and a soft evening breeze
fanned their cheeks, but the golden light still enveloped them—the light
in which everything could be said, and thinking of Hester’s smile just
now, as she held out her hand, a smile so sweet and childlike that it
brought again the sense of bewilderment and marvel, Monica asked:
‘Why did you think Clive might hate you, Hester? You haven’t told me
that. It seems to me that where there is such love as that between you
and Clive it is secure against all such danger.’
Hester, sustaining her arm, walked beside her, illumined in her blue
against the pine-trees, and glancing at her, as she kept silence, Monica
saw that it was with an effort that she now kept back her tears. ‘Tell
me, Hester,’ she said.
‘Can’t you see?’ said Hester, holding her head high and keeping her eyes
fixed before her. ‘It’s partly you and partly Godfrey. He couldn’t stand
finding out like that. You will say that I ought to have told him at
once when I found that Godfrey was living here. Perhaps I should have.
Only I’m accustomed, in a way, to protecting Clive. He goes under so
horribly, you know; while I’m as strong as a horse. And I couldn’t bear
to make him so miserable; to bring it all up, after we’d said nothing
for all these years. He begged me to say nothing more, when I told him,
down in Cornwall. He didn’t want to hear the name of the man who had
made me so unhappy;—though I did tell him that it was in Paris, just
after I’d left Girton; but he said we’d forget it and that the only
difference it made was that I was the dearer to him because of what I’d
suffered. But I don’t think he ever really did forget it, poor darling,’
said Hester, smiling the bitter smile over her unshed tears. ‘I think it
haunted him and tore at him, frightfully, and that the more we were to
each other the more he minded. His loveliness unshackled him in so many
directions, but somehow it didn’t unshackle him in that.—I mean, he felt
about it, really, just as his father would have felt—if you’d had to
tell him such a thing. And that was why, when I saw Godfrey again on
Saturday night, I was so dreadfully upset. I knew how Clive would feel.
That’s why I behaved so devilishly. I was so upset that I had to set my
teeth in something; and it seemed to me that Godfrey was sneering at me
and taunting me. But he was upset, too. We had parted with the most
grisly quarrel—out there—at Chartres, you see;—that’s why I hate
Chartres, Monica; do you remember?—and never to run into each other
again, or hear of each other, and then find ourselves face to face
between a husband who hadn’t forgotten and a mother-in-law who didn’t
like you!—Well, you can see for yourself that it needed strong nerves.
Godfrey was clever that night, wasn’t he? He played up well. I never
dreamed you would find out, or guess, and thought I could manage it all
and get him to go away and no one the wiser. I thought, for a day or
two, that he’d go of himself, and when I found he didn’t I wrote and
asked him to come and he told me—yesterday when he was with me, you
know—how it had happened and the horrible ill-luck about the ring and
your seeing the initials.—I saw that ring, while we played bridge that
night. I gave it to him in Paris; we found it together in an old shop
and I never dreamed he would have gone on wearing it.—He gave me one
too; a beautiful ring; but I went out in Paris, after parting from him,
and threw it into the Seine. What a little fool I was! But I couldn’t
wear it myself and I couldn’t bear to think of anybody else wearing
it.—Well—I seemed to see nothing while we played and while I made those
imbecile mistakes—except that ring of mine on his finger.—He is going
off first thing to-morrow morning, Monica. He said at once that he would
go. “Give me one day to pack and settle accounts,” he said, “and none of
you will ever see me again.” He left me, of course, before Clive got
back. He never made muddles about things like that.—But it was too late,
in a way. I mean, Clive found me crying. Can you understand that?’
Hester’s arm was steady under her mother-in-law’s hand, but Monica now
saw that a slow flush had crept up to her cheek. ‘I feel as if you
would. I feel as if you would understand that one might not get over the
man one first loves, even if one loves someone else so much better. He
tore me to pieces and made me sick with rage and shame, but I did love
him most awfully, and when I saw him again, yesterday, I knew that I
still did—can you understand?—And when Clive came in and found me
crying, I couldn’t deny it. Why should one change because one is parted?
But Clive couldn’t understand. He said he’d half killed you for my sake,
because he trusted me, and that he could never forgive himself and that
you had every reason to believe what you did—since half of it was
true;—and I was in a rage then and said that all of it would be true,
unless he were careful.—We said terrible things to each other;—for the
first time.’ Hester spoke brokenly, with short, hot sentences. ‘And
though we were horribly sorry afterwards and said we didn’t mean it,
it’s all there still, in our minds.—For even then—even afterwards—I
couldn’t tell him that I didn’t still love Godfrey, too.’
They had reached Oddley Green now. Sad old Mr. Fellows passed them,
taking off his hat with a gentle, mournful glance. Hester’s bare head
and hot cheeks must strike him as singular. Standing at her cottage
gate, a little further on, was Rosemary Dixon and Monica felt that
Hester’s eye fixed itself upon these neighbours with a look of
desperation. ‘We will cut across the Green here,’ she said. ‘Rosemary
won’t follow us. We don’t want to listen to her latest impressions of
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, do we?’
‘No; we don’t,’ said Hester, with a broken laugh, and Monica now felt
that it was she who watched over Hester.
They crossed the Green and reached safety at the gate. The fountain was
playing and Hester was looking at it remembering, perhaps, the afternoon
of its release: ‘When will you come and see Clive?’ she asked.
‘Will he want to see me?’ Monica questioned. She could watch over Hester
for these last steps, but she knew that she had no strength left in her
and she laid her hand on the gate-post as she spoke.
‘Of course he’ll want to see you. More than anything,’ said Hester. ‘But
you are neither of you fit for it to-day. Clive is in bed with a
temperature. To-morrow will be better and I’ll tell him that I’ve had a
talk with you and that you understand everything and that he mustn’t
brood any more on what happened between you yesterday.—That will be
right, won’t it?’
‘That will be right, Hester.’ Monica’s eyes were fixed on her
daughter-in-law’s face.
‘Well, good-bye, then,’ said Hester. ‘You’ll come to-morrow, after that
sleep, you know.’ She was turning away when Monica put out her hand and
detained her. ‘Wait.—I want to say something first.—I want to ask you
something.—Do you forgive me, Hester?’ she said.
Hester stared. ‘For what?’
‘For misjudging you. For traducing you—to your husband.’
‘Well, if you call it traducing when, as Clive said, half of it was
true.’
‘Not the half I minded most; not the half he would have minded most.’
‘Well; no; I see.’ Hester gazed at her with a new attention. ‘But of
course the other half, the old half;—having a lover, living with someone
you’re not married to;—I suppose you really hate all that sort of thing
as much as my father did.’
‘Not as he did. Certainly not as he did. I am not thinking of that. I
can’t judge that. That’s over. It has nothing to do with me. I did
traduce you.’
‘Well, that’s over, too; forgotten and forgiven,’ said Hester with her
smile, strangely compounded now of bitterness and benignancy. ‘You must
forgive _me_, if it comes to that, for being so unutterably the wrong
person.’
‘The wrong person?’
‘Yes. As you always found me. Wrong for you; wrong for Clive.—He has
made me feel it now.—Yes,’ Hester turned her head away and the smile
still held her lip but Monica saw her tears; ‘I have ruined both of your
lives;—or almost.—He ought to have married Celia, of course; as you
wanted him to.—Don’t you suppose I see that now?—Good-bye.’ And Hester
walked rapidly away over the Green.