Dark Hester/Chapter 11

It was only half-past three when she started, and I she would be half an hour too early for Celia and Norah’s tea-party, but they would be glad to see her and there would be thus an opportunity to make some casual enquiry about Aunt Harriet. Clive and Hester were to come, and Captain Ingpen would surely be there: more surely because of this morning; his was the task of nonchalance and unawareness; all that was left him to do was to watch her and to hold his hand, hoping that by some stroke of fortune she would be baffled and perhaps satisfied. Her heart was sick and heavy in her side as she thought of him, and with him now came the thought of Jeremy and of the other little dog;—but the lassitude that had fallen upon her tumult was in itself a strength. What she needed was stillness and calm; and it gave her this. She could promise herself that even the sight of the three together, Hester, Ingpen and Clive,—would not make her quail, and as she stepped out into the sunlight, the heavy beating of her heart, the bright hot sun, brought back, by some odd trick of association, just such another day in London, twenty-five years ago, when she had set ​forth down the dusty little street in West Kensington to make her way to the unknown London of the City and publishers’ offices for her first business interview. She had been horribly frightened, no doubt, though not until this minute had she known it—so armed had she been with Clive and Winchester and Oxford—and looking back, really understanding at last that girl of twenty-five years ago, she saw her as incredibly ignorant of herself and of life. Until then she had only seen life from the deck of a ship, her father’s gallant craft, with its stout engine throbbing beneath one, its pennons flying above. But now her father was dead, and she was to know what it was to swim in the open sea alone, and the first intimation of the contrast had come to her from the manner of the editors who received her. Until then, in her relations with men, she had met with implicit homage, with deference or assiduity, and had taken them for granted as a woman’s due. It was revealed to her, now, in the cool jocose eye, the note of familiarity that greeted her, that to the employing male a woman in search of work was in a very different category from a woman secure and independent. The editor was kind and had agreed to take her series of articles on the French countryside; but her cheek had oddly ​burned as, not waiting for the lift, she had run down the steep, echoing stone staircase. Things, perhaps, were better for women now;—because of Hester and her kind. And as she paused thus, looking back into the past, she saw Hester approaching her from across the green.

Hester had just come down from The Crofts and was evidently arrayed for the tea-party in her best dark blue coat and skirt. She wore a red silk jumper and a small red hat, and, among the geese and ducks and care-free dogs, advanced with steady deliberation. Monica stood still at her gate, fixing her with a guarded eye. Her instinct that morning in meeting Captain Ingpen had been well justified; she had waited for him to speak first. She would wait for Hester to speak first now.

There was no hesitation in Hester’s demeanour and, as far as Monica could perceive, no calculation. Her eyes were set in mauve circles, almost as though she had wept—but Monica could not imagine that Hester had been weeping—and the ageing lines that ran along her cheeks were apparent and seemed to drag at the corners of her mouth with a bitter savour. And what she said at once—what she had come to say—was: ‘I am very sorry about yesterday, Monica. Clive told me that you felt I ​had been rude. I didn’t mean to be and I beg your pardon.’

So unexpected were these words, so astonishing to Monica’s ear, that for a moment she felt that Hester had struck her between the eyes. She stood there stunned. Then, as the singing in her head subsided, she saw a clue given into her hand. Hester suspected nothing and, because she was unsuspicious, might reveal everything. Her apology was part of her plot. How little it could cost her to apologize to Clive’s mother when she had everything to gain by keeping him quiet. It was of Clive she was thinking. She would never dream, Monica was sure of that as she looked at her, of casting him off. She intended to keep husband and lover. Monica felt herself armed and she seized her opportunity. ‘That’s very nice of you, Hester, very nice indeed,’ she said; ‘I was rather startled.’ And she went on, not too casually—for of course Hester would see that she intended to make herself disagreeable: ‘But really—after what Clive told me, I perfectly understand. It wasn’t really me you were angry with at all, was it?—though of course at the moment I could not be expected to see that’

Hester’s eye lighted from its brooding calm. It fixed itself on her mother-in-law and the sullen, ​dragging line in her cheek deepened. ‘What Clive told you? What has Clive got to do with it?’ she questioned haughtily.

‘Why—he has everything to do with it. He found me very much upset; and he was upset, too. He was as much at sea as I was really—to account for your temper, though he felt sure that I misunderstood you;—but when I told him that Captain Ingpen was there, everything became clear. Your dislike of him—because of the past—was so intense.’

Ah. That did draw the blood! Not a shred of doubt—or of hope—survived in Monica as she seemed to see it trickle, as though from a dagger blow. This was to taste, in one sharp moment, knowledge and hatred and vengeance. For Hester was white to the lips. White, with the gauntly circled eyes, as she stood there and as she said: ‘Because of the past? What do you mean? I don’t understand you.’

No; she did not; nor should she. Hester should be left to grope, irate, perplexed and meshed, until she tumbled into the pit dug for her.

‘Why, you had known him—very well, I suppose,’ said Monica. ‘And I suppose you had quarrelled with him, since the sight of him could dis​compose you as much as it did yesterday, and the other night. I understood the other night, too, and your behaviour to me then, after what Clive said.’

Hester carried a small, stumpy sunshade—a red sunshade that matched her hat and jumper (all was very nicely thought out)—and now her hands grasped it tightly and fiercely, as fiercely as though she restrained herself from hurling it at her mother-in-law’s head.—‘Clive never said it! Clive could not have said such a thing! I never spoke of him to Clive!’ she exclaimed, and her lip lifted from her teeth as she clenched them in what was almost a snarl of fury. The blaze of the conflagration was indeed revealing. A wide landscape, till then unseen, leaped into view. Clive had not dared to tell his wife of his surmise. His mother remembered now how deep had been his discomposure. Clive, too, had his intuitions. And through it all—all that she was seeing—Monica was aware that Hester, at all events, was telling no lies and that, illumined by the lurid moment, she was looking almost beautiful.

She could not pause for Hester’s beauty. She held her thought steady, like a sword in her hand, and its edge was in her voice as she said: ‘That’s very strange: That shows Clive’s insight. I did not ​gather from him how long or how well you had known Captain Ingpen, but what he made me see was that you disliked him so bitterly that you could not control yourself in his presence. If you had said nothing at all of him to Clive, it only shows us how deeply he felt it for himself. He understands you through and through, doesn’t he, Hester? You are touched, I am sure, by such devotion and such insight.’

The eyes of the Byzantine Madonna were on her as she uttered these penetrating phrases; the old image reasserted itself and Monica found herself wondering at them, the great irises almost encircled with white, so wide, so fixed was their ominous stare; down at her; across at her; as if from high up, as if through the half-pagan, half-sacred darkness of a vast basilica. Stonily, repudiatingly, Hester stared at her and, in all her cruel security, Monica felt as if a rigid hand had been thrust out from hieratic vestments to push her away, to strike her down, to annihilate her. ‘You know nothing about Clive and me,’ said Hester, ‘absolutely nothing. You never have. I am not touched. He had no right to say such things to you and not to me.’

‘No right to defend you? No right to tell his mother that he understood his wife?’ Monica found ​the words with difficulty. Her sword had been turned in her hand.

‘I don’t need defences,’ said Hester, moving now away. ‘When I want Clive to defend me with you, I’ll tell him so. He has no right to make up stories about his wife in order to placate his mother and then to conceal from her what he has been doing.—But that side of it concerns him and me;—not you.—That is all I have to say.’ She walked off towards the station road.

‘You remember, perhaps, that Celia and Norah expect you to tea?’ Monica slightly raised her voice to follow her with an icy conciseness. ‘I understood that you and Clive were coming.’

Hester paused to listen, her back to her. ‘I perfectly remember,’ she said, not turning her head. ‘I don’t care to come. I don’t care to smile and pretend after this scene; you give me too much of it to do as it is. I shall take the train to town and not get back until after dinner:—you may tell Clive so if you see him. I am not such an actress as you are.’ She walked rapidly away.

‘Well, there’s that.’ Monica heard herself utter the absurd comment as she stood still and watched Hester disappearing round the corner of the road. ‘There’s that,’ she repeated and, slowly turning, she ​walked in the opposite direction. She felt struck, stunned, rather than enraged; and after she had walked for a little while it came over her that a sick admiration for Hester coloured her detestation. Yes, Hester undoubtedly was guilty, and had been her victim, or, rather, her trapped quarry; yet, without insolence, without retort, could any creature have contrived more indubitably to preserve dignity in overthrow? She had avowed nothing; she had denied nothing. ‘She hasn’t a fibre of weakness in her; or of meanness,’ Monica thought, hardly aware of the strangeness of such a tribute at such a moment. ‘I almost understand why they both fell in love with her.’ Something inviolate, unconquerable in herself recognized and did homage to the strength of her mortal enemy.

It was already half-past four when she reached Norah’s, and she saw Celia in the garden, bare-headed, in a very lovely little grey dress. Here was Celia and Hester was walking away to the station. It almost seemed to Monica, as she opened the gate and went in, that Hester was walking out of their lives. After her anguish, her lassitude, her stupefaction, it was now an oblivious blitheness that overtook her; the reckless mood of a fairy-tale make-believe. Here was Celia; Clive would soon be here ​and everything was to end happily as it ought to have done years and years ago.

‘Well, my dear child,’ she said, going up to her. ‘What delicious weather—and you match it.—That darling dress.—Where is Norah? Are you expecting anyone except just ourselves?’

‘Only the tiniest little tea-party—for Clive and Hester;—Captain Ingpen, Mr. and Mrs. Fellows, Rosemary Dixon and Lady Tyler. Norah is in the drawing-room with Lady Tyler now. She came early so that she could go early. She has a meeting at the other side of the county, as usual, and she’s talking Women’s Institutes, as usual. I’m afraid poor Norah will have to be Secretary after all. Her hens won’t exonerate her,’ laughed Celia, who was merry to-day. ‘Your dress is a darling, too, Monica,’ she went on, clasping her hands on her friend’s arm. ‘You are dazzling in black and white,—only that’s too violent a word for anything so soft and bright.—You are like Helen of Troy, as Clive always said—there’s something so ageless, so “is this the face” about you, and you always smell of violets,’ Celia sniffed at her cheek.—‘I’m sure Helen did too—fresh violets out of the wood.—Oh, Monica, isn’t it your doing that Captain Ingpen is going to plant all sorts of lovely things in his ​wood—for the spring? I am sure it is; it’s such a dull wood now; nothing grows there you know except a few bluebells. Won’t it be too wonderful to pick anemones and primroses? He says we shall.—Norah thinks he is really settling in and beginning to like it here, and if he is it must be because of you.’

A pang shot through Monica’s heart as she heard the happy babble. Was it possible—even yet—that it was because of her? Was it the tired dog laying its head in her hand? But for Clive, how little power the past would have had to harm the present, if that were so. A dark confusion hung before her eyes, obscuring Celia and the light fairy-tale, bringing back the thoughts of the wood;—that apprehension of leaving Clive behind her if she went on with Captain Ingpen. To stay her hand now would be to leave Clive behind; it would be to betray Clive if she paused to listen to the voices of pity and tenderness that whispered in her heart. He was a crafty, an ambiguous, an unscrupulous man, and she remembered suddenly—Celia’s fond words of praise brought it back, placing her in a category where beauty still had power—that a thread of flame had passed between them, quenched from all rising, as if by a pressure from her foot, yet, per​haps, leaving her not unscathed. ‘Yes; look deep into your complicity,’ she told herself, while she walked so calmly, held by Celia, and seemed to listen to her; for was it not complicity to understand, even though she had quenched the thread of flame, why Hester had loved him desperately and loved him, perhaps, as desperately now?—to understand, even, why she loved him more than Clive?

There was no flame in Clive, was that it? He was light, not fire; he illumined, he did not burn; and did she not understand the deep craving to perish, if need be, in the flame? She felt herself tremble inwardly as her thought, so coldly it seemed, gazed at Captain Ingpen’s ambiguous homage. Yes; he was an unscrupulous man, for he had come seeking the old passion and had dared to pause and offer homage on his way.

‘Did Clive tell you that he took me for a drive on Saturday?’ Celia said. ‘Robin came too and sat on my lap and we had a dear talk. It made me feel,’ Celia smiled round at her with unclouded candour, ‘that everything might come back again. I had tea with him and Hester afterwards and she was so sweet to me, in her funny, terse way. I know that Clive hopes very much we are to be friends.’

It would satisfy Celia to be illumined. She ​craved no flame. Monica’s mind still followed the probing simile while she asked, schooling her voice: ‘Do you feel that possible?’

‘Perfectly possible. I feel as if it had begun already,’ said Celia. ‘We might never have made friends in London, but we may be friends here in the country. Her London, I mean, could never be mine, but her country may be. It’s quite different, isn’t it? One wants such different things in the country.’

‘One always wants affinity, I think.’

‘But affinity grows, Monica. And funny little things can make it grow.—I’ve never really seen Hester in her own home before,’ said Celia, her eyes on her friend. ‘And she showed me her new dress, that red and silver dress she got for your dinner; I never imagined Hester showing her dresses or caring about them, but she ran up to fetch it, when Clive asked her to—so eager and pleased—and she looked at me with such an earnest, wistful look, and said: ‘Do you think she’ll like it?’ as though she were outside and wanted to come in. And I felt such a queer little pang, Monica, for I knew you wouldn’t really like it;—that it wasn’t a bit your sort of dress. And when you feel pangs for people, it makes you fond of them.’

​‘So you are already fond of Hester. That is indeed a great step towards friendship.’ Monica could not quell the irony of her voice. The emotion with which she heard Celia’s guileless recital, touched with the breathless, headlong quality as it was—brought a sudden heat to her cheek. ‘I certainly didn’t like the dress; it was a dress suitable to the stage rather than to my little drawing-room; but I very much admired Hester in it; as did everyone present.’

Celia, arrested in her advocacy, looked at her askance. It reminded her of Clive’s look the day before.

Norah called them in to tea. The Fellows had arrived and Rosemary Dixon who bred Angora rabbits and read French memoirs. Monica sat down by Lady Tyler, a lean-faced woman harassed yet stimulated by unnecessary public cares. Her garden was her relaxation and Monica asked her at once about her gladioli so that there should be no danger of hearing about some new committee, and as she talked, her thought passed to and fro over the pictures Celia had put before it; Hester displaying her dress and pretending that it had been bought to please her:—Clive and Celia driving with Robin. Perhaps, on that Saturday, Hester and Ingpen had ​already met and laid their plans. It would be part of their plan that Clive should often take Celia out for drives; with Robin.

Mr. Fellows, the rector—a devout, submissive man who had lost three sons in the war—was passing the tea and as Lady Tyler hastily quaffed her cup and rose, saying she must fly to her meeting, Monica saw Clive’s face appear in the doorway, Clive’s radiant face. She remembered, as she met his eager eyes, that they had parted in love and trust only yesterday and with painful effort her mind constructed the full meaning of his radiance. He had sent Hester to her with her apology. He believed that it had been understood and accepted, reconcilingly. He expected to find Hester with her now and as his smile, sharp and shining, found and rested on her, her eyes dropped before it.

‘You’re late, Clive,’ said Celia, ‘and so is Captain Ingpen.—Is Hester with you?’

She had joined him and already his smile was stiffened to the cold attentiveness.

‘She was coming with Mummy,’ he said. ‘No tea, thanks; I had some in the city before starting.—Is she following you, Mummy?—You have seen Hester?’

‘Yes; I’ve seen her.’ They were standing there ​before her. What could she do for Clive? What could she do for herself? Until she could see him alone all that she could do was to present him with a clear surface. She prayed that she kept it clear as she looked up at the two before her and went on: ‘She didn’t come with me and asked me to tell you that she was going to town and wouldn’t be back till after dinner.—Perhaps you and Celia will come and dine with me—since you’ll be alone.—Robin will be all right with Nurse, won’t he?’

And now, as she felt the intentness of their gaze, she remembered that she had said no word to Celia of Hester’s defection and knew that Celia as well as Clive scented disaster.

‘But—didn’t she?—I mean———Hadn’t Hester anything to say to you?’ Clive’s light was all extinguished. ‘Don’t go, Celia.’ He laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder as she made a movement to leave them. He took refuge in Celia, who understood him and Hester; who, already, was fond of Hester.

‘Yes; stay, Celia,’ said Monica, glancing at the girl’s pale face. ‘It was dear of you to send her, Clive, and we had quite a little talk. Perhaps she had some message calling her to town? She seemed quite decided about it.—Though I reminded her of the tea.’

​To see Celia standing there under Clive’s hand gave her a cutting comfort. It put her out, but it kept them, and the future, together. It was well, even if it put her out, that he had Celia to turn to.

‘I don’t understand,’ he muttered.

‘It’s bad of Hester,’ Celia tried to help them both as best she could, ‘because the tea-party is really given for her; but we know what a busy person she is. Probably it was a message. Mrs. Travers may have sent for her, Clive. You know she said on Saturday that Mrs. Travers was in some difficulty.’

‘Yes. Perhaps it is Mrs. Travers.’ Clive looked at her unseeingly. ‘But I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll dine, Mother’ (he called her ‘Mother’)—‘I think I’d rather wait for Hester at home. Shall we have a little turn in the garden, Celia? Isn’t it rather hot in here?’

‘May I come—alone?’ Celia stooped to her to ask it. But it was less to ask than to look her tenderness, to implore her to take heart.

‘The truth is that my heart is broken, Celia’—that was what Monica felt she would have liked to reply. Even if Clive were to understand all and to forgive all, how was she to forget that he could look at her like that, with that pallid alienation? He saw her as cruel; he believed her vindictive. She had ​driven his beloved to strange, uncharacteristic strategems, and as he and Celia left her Monica heard an echo of her own specious voice as it had found the prevarications which were all that she could give him.

She sat now alone in the drawing-room. The evening was marvellously warm and still and all the others were in the garden. It was part of old age, Monica thought, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the piano, that one could never tell anybody that one’s heart was broken. No one cared if old hearts broke; it was taken for granted that they must break; and in silence.

She was suddenly aware that somebody was looking at her. It was as if a presence had, soundlessly, entered the room, and opening her eyes she saw Ingpen’s face outside the window. The sky behind his head was like the sky in an early Italian picture; pale yet deep in tone, still, remote and merciful; his head was dark against it and his face featureless. She only felt his intent gaze and knew that it had searched and summoned her. It was so a ghost might look in on one and she must look like a ghost to him, gazing back, with her sorrowful face, from the dusky room. So they might always remember each other, the future, not the past, thus taking ​spectral shape between them. ‘Everything fades,’ she thought. But this would not fade, for it had never lived. They had never meant more to each other than this interchange could give them. This was their reality.

He was gone. He would not come in. He would not obtrude the jarring world of time on the moment of possessed eternity. It was strange to know of this man whom she must judge, condemn, and thrust forth, how deeply, where eternity was concerned, she could trust him.

Voices of farewell were passing along the little path that led to the garden gate and in a moment Norah entered, exclaiming: ‘Why, are you all alone, Mrs. Wilmott? I thought Uncle Godfrey was with you. He must have gone as soon as he came;—what’s the matter with him? My tea-party was rather a failure, I feel, with him and Hester away. Clive has driven Celia off to see the sunset from the hill and she’s dining with you, she says. They asked me to say they’d come back for you.’

Her heart might be broken but it could still rouse itself and even feel again a stir of the fairy-tale as she heard Norah’s cheerful tones. After all, why not? Without phantasy, was not everything moving in that direction? All her standards, all her tastes ​and traditions, shrank from hateful public rendings; but Hester had walked away; and that ghost at the window had no power over the present. Why should not beautiful things grow up where old things had been blasted?

‘I won’t wait for them,’ she said. ‘I would really rather walk back on this lovely evening, and I must tell the maids that Celia is dining.—Won’t you come too, Norah?—The hill over The Crofts, you mean?’

‘Yes. The sunset is lovely from up there. No; I won’t dine, thank you so much.—I’ve masses of letters to write and Celia loves a tête-à-tête with you.—It’s rather wonderful to see everything turning out so well, isn’t it? You were right and I was wrong about that, do you remember? Celia and Hester seem really to have taken a fancy to one another,’ said Norah. ‘And little Robin calls her Aunt Celia.—She was very much touched.’

‘Darling Celia.—Do you remember Sonia, in “War and Peace”? Like Celia rather. The destined aunt type. Perhaps that is what we must resign ourselves to for her.’ Monica got up as she spoke and moved about the room, remembering as though from far away that there were still steps to be taken and clues to follow before the key was in her hand; the key to set Clive free.

​‘I don’t find it in the least mournful to be an aunt!’ Norah laughed. ‘All this talk about frustrated maternity amuses me. Some of the jolliest people I’ve ever known have been aunts.—It all depends, like everything else, on whether you have any money of your own.’

The clue was given into her hand and Monica heard her own voice saying: ‘Speaking of aunts, hadn’t you a rather wonderful one in your family?—An old Aunt Harriet Beaton? This picture isn’t of her by any chance?—I was hearing about her the other day.” She had stopped before a faint pencil drawing of an old lady in a cap.

‘Well—how did you hear of Aunt Harriet!’ said Norah, and Monica’s heart gave a great throb as she heard her—whether of hope or fear she did not know: ‘No; that’s not she. I’ve no picture of Aunt Harriet. She was rather wonderful; but her name was Allington, not Beaton; we have no Beatons in the family. Mother used to tell us stories about her. She travelled all over the world and made botanical paintings of flowers in every quarter of the globe. Mother has portfolios full of them.’

Monica heard her own weak voice again. ‘A great traveller?—Perhaps your uncle inherits the taste from her. Yes; that is she. I muddled the ​name. Was she very old when she died? Did you ever see her?’

‘I? See her? How could I? She was mother’s great-aunt and died before I was born,’ said Norah.

So the key was in her hand and heavy was its weight. If only he had said nothing, nothing at all, she thought, as she walked along the darkened lanes, there might still have been a loophole; but not now. One did not lie like that without a reason.

It was dark when she reached home. The curtains had been drawn and chinks of light showed between them. Wondering at the foolhardiness that had impelled her to ask Clive and Celia to dine, she paused at the gate to draw breath. Now she had Celia to face for the evening and she did not know how she was to bear it.

As she dressed she heard the car drive up and then drive off again, in the direction of The Crofts; Clive returning to wait for Hester. And in the drawing-room Celia waited for her, holding her violin, and Monica understood in a moment all that had happened as she said, not able to control the breathlessness: ‘Hester was up there, Monica. She had come back and was up there on the hill: looking at the sunset, too.—And, oh, Monica—please forgive me—but did anything happen, between ​you and Hester, I mean?—Because they are very unhappy; she and Clive are unhappy. She is angry with him, I’m afraid;—because of what happened.—Could you tell me, do you think? Do you think I could help a little?—Because I feel as if I understood you all and could, perhaps, make things clearer.’

For one moment, as she looked at her, Monica knew the wild impulse to break down before Celia, to tell her all, to ask, indeed, her help and sympathy: but, steadying her mind, as if over a whirlpool vortex, she said, in a cold voice: ‘Yes; I think something did happen, Celia, and perhaps, some day, I shall be able to explain what seems strange to you. But I can’t talk about Hester and Clive now. Not till I’ve seen Clive again, alone. We must find other topics.—Only this I’ll say:—Hester had no right, not the shadow of a right to be angry with him. Nothing passed between Hester and me that gave her a right to be angry with Clive. Don’t try to intercede for her, my dear. When I tell you my story you will feel, I think, that it is Clive and I, not Hester, who are in need of pity.’