Page:Dark Hester.djvu/225

pressed her hand against her brows. ‘You have said what Hester has told you to say, and now I must speak. I am not going to defend myself. All that is past. Perhaps what you say is true. I may have hated Hester from the beginning. But if I did, I know now that I had reason to hate her.’ She dropped her hand and looked across the room at him. ‘She is a bad woman,’ she said.

He leaned against the window staring at her with no change of countenance. It was only the look of cold attention that met her, as though, in a trench, he awaited the approaching bomb and computed where it was to fall.

‘That’s a Victorian word.’ She remembered the other day and his faint laugh. ‘I don’t mean it in that way. I mean it because she has deceived you. Hester, when she came to you, had things to hide; things to fear. Before she met you she had a lover.’

There was silence, deep silence for a moment. Then he said: ‘I knew that.’

‘You knew it? Since when?’

‘Since the beginning,’ said Clive. ‘She told me at the very first; down in Cornwall.’ He looked across the room at his mother and it seemed to her now that it was a look of hatred. She had uncovered Hester’s past; and his; with all its suffering.