"God!" he exclaimed almost angrily. "I ought to be jealous of her; I am
jealous of her, I suppose! But why, oh, why, if you cared for her so
much, didn't you break away and go with her to London? Why did you let
even that go by you? I could bear anything better than to see you as you
are."
She was silent. Presently she said: "There was Mother, Richard. I loved
her too, and she needed me; she didn't seem able to do without me."
His face went white with passion; he shook his clenched fists in the
air. "How long is it to go on," he cried, "this preying of the weak on
the strong, the old on the young; this hideous, unnatural injustice that
one sees all around one, this incredibly wicked thing that tradition
sanctifies? You were so splendid. How fine you were! You had everything
in you that was needed to put life within your grasp, and you had a
right to life, to a life of your own; everyone has. You might have been
a brilliant woman, a woman that counted for a great deal, and yet what
are you now? I can't bear to think of it!
"If you _are_ a mass of ills, as you say, if your splendid brain is
atrophied, and you feel empty and unfulfilled, whose fault is that? Not
yours, who had too much heart to save yourself. I tell you, Joan, the
sin of it lies at the door of that old woman up there in Lynton; that
mild, always ailing, cruelly gentle creature who's taken everything and
given nothing and battened on you year by year. She's like an octopus
who's drained you dry. You struggled to get free, you nearly succeeded,
but as quickly as you cut through one tentacle, another shot out and
fixed on to you.
"Good God! How clearly one sees it all! In your family it was your
father who began it, by preying first on her, and in a kind of horrid
retaliation she turned and preyed on you. Milly escaped, but only for a
time; she came home in the end; then she preyed in her turn. She gripped
you through her physical weakness, and then there were two of them! Two
of them? Why, the whole world's full of them! Not a Seabourne anywhere
but has its army of octopi; they thrive and grow fat in such places.
Look at Ralph Rodney: I believe he was brilliant at college, but Uncle
John devoured him, and you know what Ralph was when he died. Look at
Elizabeth: do you think she's really happy? Well, I'm going to tell you
now what I kept from you the other day. Elizabeth got free, but not
quite soon enough; she's never been able to make up for the blood she
lost in all those years at Seabourne. She's just had enough vitality
left to patch her life together somehow, and make my brother think that
all is very well with her. But she couldn't deceive me, and she knew it;
I saw the ache in her for the thing she might have been. Elizabeth's
grasped the spar; that's what she's done, and she's just, only just
managed to save herself from going under. She's rich and popular and
ageing with dignity, but she's not, and never can be now, the woman she
once dreamt of. She's killed her dream by being busy and hard and quite
unlike her real self, by taking an interest in all the things that the
soul of her laughs at. And that's what life with Ralph in Seabourne has
done for her. That, and you, Joan. I suppose I ought to hate Elizabeth,
but I can't help knowing that when she broke away there was one tentacle
more tenacious than all the rest; it clung to her until she cut it
through, and that _was_ you, who were trying unconsciously to make her a
victim of your own circumstances.
"Joan, the thing is infectious, I tell you; it's a pestilence that
infects people one after another. Even you, who were the most generous
creature that I've ever known; the disease nearly got you unawares. If
Elizabeth hadn't gone away when she did, if she had stayed in Seabourne
for your sake, then you would have been one of them. Thank God she went!
It's horrible to know that they've victimized the thing I love, but I'd
rather you were the victim than that you should have grown to be like
the rest of them, a thing that preys on the finest instincts of others,
and sucks the very soul out of them." His voice broke suddenly, and he
let his arms drop to his sides. "And I know now that I've been loving
you for all these years," he said. "I've just been loving and loving
you."
She stood speechless before his anger and misery, unable to defend
herself or her mother, conscious that he had spoken the bitter and
brutal truth.
At last she said: "Don't be too hard on Mother, Richard; she's a very
old woman now."
"I know," he answered dully. "I know she's very old; perhaps I've been
too violent. If I have you must forgive me."
"No," she said, "you were right in everything, only one can't always
crush people because one has right on one's side."
He stroked her arm with his strong, hard fingers, "Can't you marry me?"
he reiterated stubbornly.
She said: "I shall never marry anyone. I'm not a woman who could ever
have married. I've never been what you'd call in love with a man in my
life; but I think if I'd been different, Richard, I should have wanted
to marry you."
3
The next morning Richard Benson left Lynton, and in the course of a few
days the Ogdens returned to Leaside.
"I don't think we'll go to Lynton again," said Mrs. Ogden fretfully.
"It's not done me any good at all, this year."
Joan acquiesced; she felt that she never again wanted to see the place
in which so many unwelcome memories had been aroused. She sat staring
out of the window as the train neared Seabourne, and wished that Richard
had never crossed her path; all she wanted was to be left in peace. She
dreaded remembering and he had made her remember, she was afraid of
unhappiness and he had made her unhappy.
As the familiar landmarks sped past one by one, little forgotten
incidents of her youth surged through her mind in rhythm to the glide
and jolt of the train. She pictured the Seabourne station as it used to
be before they had enlarged it, and the flower-beds and cockle-shells
that Milly had once jeered at. On the short platform stood a little army
of ghosts: the red-haired porter who had limped, and had always called
her Miss Hogden. He had been gone these ten years past, where, she did
not know. Richard, freckled and gawky, reminding you somehow of a
pleasant puppy; rather uncouth he had been in those days. Milly, small
and fragile, her yellow curls always bobbing, and Elizabeth, slim as a
larch tree, very upright and neat and quiet, her intent eyes scanning
the incoming train for a sight of Joan's face at the window. And then
herself, Joan Ogden, black-haired, grey-eyed, young; with a body all
suppleness and vigour, and a mind that could grasp and hold. She would
be leaning far out of the carriage, waving an ungloved hand. "Here I
am!" And then the meeting; the firm clasp of friendship, respect and
love; the feel of Elizabeth's signet ring cold against your fingers, and
the goodly warmth of her palm as it met your own. Ghosts, all ghosts;
ghosts of the living and the dead. Her eyelids felt hot and tingling;
she brushed the tears away angrily. Ghosts, all ghosts, every one of
them dead, to her, at all events; and she, how utterly dead she was to
herself.