Dark Hester/Chapter 13

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 today, 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 rthythm 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, under​standings 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 fore-head. She had always granted that Hester’s fore-head 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 under​stand 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 for​give 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.