Dark Hester/Chapter 10

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 moon-light 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.