# Dark Hester/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
Monica knew when she waked next morning that her ordeal was close at hand. Last night had been a foretaste of it, though she and Celia had taken refuge in music and had played persistently for an hour after their silent dinner. There was now the long day to be got through before she could see Clive, and her bruised and trembling heart shrank from the heavy hours. She wrote letters all morning; sprightly letters, wondering at herself as she turned the crisp sentences and made the merry quips. She sat down to her piano and doggedly practised the passages where she had failed last night. And after lunch she started for a long walk, telling Miriam that she would not be back till after tea-time. Clive might stop to see her on his way from the station. If he did not come she would send for him. She was fixed on that. She would not pass another night with this spectre between them. Tonight, before they slept, she and Hester and Clive should know all. And meanwhile she could walk and walk.
The afternoon lights were slanting over the quiet stubble fields when she came, after a round that had ​led her through miles of country, to the little wood behind The Crofts where the primroses grew in spring. She had walked blindly, not caring where she went, and when she found herself now so near Hester, she knew a moment of panic. Not for any- thing must Hester see her.
She left the wood and climbed the hill with hurrying footsteps, following a sheep-track that led to the summit, where Clive and Celia had come last night, and sitting down to rest for a moment she re- traced the scene; Hester’s dark form reclining here, her angry eyes as she had raised herself and watched the two approach her. What had Hester felt on seeing them there, so confidently together? Had not a dim presage crossed her mind of her own dispossession? And how had she dared show anger towards Clive?
From where she sat she could see Oddley Green below her, her little house with its curling smoke and the thin line of the fountain on the lawn; all the roads laid out and the railway line with its bordering copses; and then her eye was drawn suddenly near; for there, appearing over the crest of the hill, was little Robin in his blue linen smock, walking slowly towards her, as if in sad meditation. Robin was a sad little boy; she thought it again as she watched ​him. The deep flaw in his parents’ union revealed itself, perhaps, in the child’s gravity. It was as if he felt a lack in the very air he breathed. He did not see her until he was quite near, and then, after looking at her in amazement, he ran forward and threw himself into her arms.
‘My darling,’ said Monica, enfolding him and looking into the troubled little face—‘what are you doing up here all by yourself?’
‘Mummy lets me come here by myself sometimes,’ said Robin after a moment; ‘we often come up here together. It’s Nannie’s afternoon out today, you see.’
‘Yes.—But does Mummy know you are up here now — alone?’ Monica smoothed back the fair hair from his forehead.
‘No,’ said Robin, after a hesitation, ‘she doesn’t know. But she told me to run away. She’s crying.’
‘Crying!’ Monica’s voice could not control its sharpness. ‘Why?’
Again Robin hesitated, as though inhibitions too mature for his years strove with the childish hungering for comfort. Then his own eyes filled with tears and he lifted them to his grandmother, saying: ‘I liked that Captain; he made the fountain go and put in the fish, and I liked him. But why does he ​make Mummy cry?—He’s with her down there’ now.
Monica felt her blood stand still. With her down there now: and Hester was crying.
‘Well, you see,’ she said, finding calm words among blazing thoughts, ‘Captain Ingpen and Mummy are old friends and old friends often have sad things to talk of.—If I were you, darling’—she was thinking intently and while she thought she still stroked Robin’s hair and looked into his eyes, ‘I would run back home now and go quietly into the nursery, and wait for Mummy there. She would not like to think of you wandering about like this.’ ‘But I'm not wandering. I'm with you,’ said Robin.
What truth was this, uttered by the innocent lips? With her. Her arm held him more closely, while her blazing thoughts paused and scorched her and her mind, so girlish still, so inexperienced, shrank from the visions that Robin’s words had set before her. She rose to her feet involuntarily and keeping Robin’s hand stood gazing down at the fading October day. Hester had no right to Robin.
‘Darling, I think you had better come back with me,’ she said. ‘Mummy is busy with her friend and Daddy would rather you were with me, I feel sure. ​Perhaps you could spend the night with me.—Wouldn’t you like that, Robin?’
He gazed up at her with his pure eyes. ‘But I can’t leave Mummy,’ he said.
A flush rose to Monica’s cheek. She felt herself rebuked. ‘Of course not,” she said. ‘Only till Daddy comes. He will fetch you.’
‘Won’t you come home with me?’ said Robin after a moment. ‘Won’t you come to the nursery and sit with me and wait for Mummy, too?’
‘No. I can’t do that!’ Monica exclaimed, to herself, rather than to the child. ‘You come with me till Daddy fetches you.’
‘Mummy wouldn’t like it,’ said Robin, still eyeing her; and as she looked down at his firm sad face she saw Clive in him; Clive’s strength. ‘She doesn’t like me to go unless she knows.’
‘But she told you to run away.’
‘She didn’t mean so far away. She meant the nursery. Perhaps she’ll be there now, Grannie. I think I'll go back and see.’
Little angel; little faithful, trusting angel; loyal like his father, and betrayed like him. What was there to do but yield to such innocence? She stooped and kissed his forehead. ‘Very well, darling; if you feel that. Yes; run home.’
​When she had seen him disappear over the brow of the hill she turned and walked swiftly down to Oddley Green. She was trembling, shuddering with fury and as she went her walk insensibly became a run. She felt like a hare with the hounds at its heels, and a terror was upon her that before she reached safety she might see Ingpen.
Clive’s car stood before her cottage. He was waiting for her. He was there, standing at the window, watching her, as she came up the path. She stood for a moment in the hall and put her stick very softly into the stand, as though afraid of waking someone. As she entered the drawing-room Clive turned to her from the window but he did not move towards her. Miriam had set the tea-table in readiness; the kettle whispered on its stand. Absurdly, grotesquely, she heard herself saying, as she paused by the door and glanced at her son: ‘Will you have some tea?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Clive. He did not move. He watched her as she sank down on a chair beside the door. ‘I want to talk to you, Mother,’ he said. ‘Are you too tired? Would you rather go up and rest first? I can wait. I can wait for as long as you like.’
‘No; I am not too tired,’ said Monica. She could ​sit upright on the chair and she certainly could not go and rest while he waited. Clive leaned back against the window-frame, his arms folded. ‘It’s this,” he said. ‘You are cruelly unfair to Hester; and you always have been.’
‘Yes; I see. Yes;—I thought that was what you were going to say,’ said Monica. ‘Won't you sit down, Clive? You look tired.’
‘No; I'd rather stand.—You do own it, then. You do see it. From the very beginning it has been,’ said Clive. ‘And from the very beginning it has spoiled everything.’
‘Not everything, Clive? You have had your happiness. She didn’t see.’
‘No; that’s true. Hester didn’t see. She’s simpler than you and I are and she didn’t expect to be cared for; didn’t ask it, or didn’t think it made any difference. That was a little stupid of Hester,’ said Clive, and across the room the white sincerity of his face flashed at her like a sword. ‘She had never met a relation like ours. Her own family life had been wretched. She didn’t in a way take parents seriously; just as a girl of her type doesn’t take the past seriously; doesn’t know that it counts, counts horribly, in the present. They are stupid in that ​way,’ Clive repeated, staring down for a moment at the floor.
‘Then, since she was too stupid to see, what do you blame me for?’ asked Monica. This was all irrelevant; this was all enmeshing; but she must let Clive speak. She could not strike him down among these thickets of misunderstanding. But the briars sprang up with every word she uttered and Clive was eyeing her with a look of scorn as he answered: ‘She did see. She began to feel I was unhappy. She was not too stupid to feel that, though I tried to hide it from her. I tried to hide from you both, to pretend to you both that you got on and that I was contented with your relation. I thought that if I went on pretending long enough it might grow; you might begin to see her a little more truly, and do her some degree of justice. But Hester saw what you failed to see; that I was wretched. And how are we to go on now, when you show her as well as me that you hate her?’
Monica sat silent, her eyes on the floor. It was true that she hated Hester now; it was perhaps true that she had hated her from the beginning; and with reason. Clive was looking at her but she could not look at him, and if he had had a lingering hope it died then, for she denied nothing. ‘I see it all now,’ ​he said, and he turned to the window and looked out as he spoke. ‘I see now why you came down here; to get away from her. I see why you couldn’t pretend to be glad when we came. We can’t help hating, I suppose; but it does seem to me, Mother, that we can help being unjust. It does seem to me that you might have put out your hand to her, and all that she was trying to do for us both — when once she had realized that I was suffering.’
She glanced up at him. ‘It seems to me, Clive,’ she said, her lips moved faintly and the words just issued; ‘ that it was always I who held out my hand and Hester who did not even see it and walked past it. It seems to me that it is you who are cruelly unjust. What you said a moment ago is the truth. Hester never thought about me at all. She didn’t care a jot whether I cared for her or not. All that she cared for was to have you, and to keep you; and while she cared to keep you, I did not exist.’
‘It’s not true! It’s not true!’ Clive cried, and he turned to her again and eyed her, fiercely, yet supplicatingly. ‘You don’t understand a girl of Hester’s type. She hasn’t your codes and symbols; she doesn’t feel or express things as you and I do. You don’t dream how shy and sensitive and apprehensive she is, under that firm surface.—She’s had ​to keep firm, poor darling—because she’s always had so much to face. She didn’t know how to please you and didn’t realize when she was displeasing you. — She was in the dark, always; for I always knew. Nothing was lost on me. You and I saw eye to eye, while she had to walk on in the dark and trust me.—And she has trusted me. She’s never once faltered or turned away; till yesterday; when you pushed her too far.’
‘Oh; I pushed her too far yesterday? How did Hester put that to you? What form did her arraignment of me take;—and of you?—For Celia informed me that she was angry with you, too.’
‘She was angry with me because you garbled my interpretation of her to suit your own purposes. She told me that she’d gone to you, as I asked her to, to beg your pardon, and that you had sneered at her and thrown her contrition in her face. She told me that you hated her and that she could bear it no longer. It was the truth, Mother. Even Celia sees it. Even Celia sees that you hate my wife.’
‘Clive,’ said Monica, ‘I must talk to you now.’ It was growing dark. His flashing face was dim to her as he stood there, leaning back, his arms tightly folded across his chest. Monica leaned forward and ​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.
​‘I see.’ She forced her lips to speak, but could not force them to speak without a horrible irony; her astonishment, her panic, were like a tempest shaking her. ‘I see. After such confidences, such forgivenesses asked and granted, it was natural that I should feel something very strange in you; as I did; and in her;—when you first brought her. That explains everything, really.’
Clive was silent for a moment, taking full cognizance of her intention. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in the sense you mean. To think in the way that you are thinking, where Hester is concerned, would be an impossibility to anyone who loves her. I was not writhing with male jealousy. I was not feeling her damaged goods;—as little as she was herself. That is precisely what you do mean, isn’t it?’—Yes.
He was looking at her with hatred. She felt it flowing into her as if every vein were an inlet for a deadly poison.—‘If I was strange,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t only because of those sad things in her life and because I knew that you would feel as you do feel, if we were to tell you of them. It was because Hester and I had faced things you never dreamed of; horrible things; I in the war; she in Russia. We weren’t ordinary happy young engaged people. I had seen suffering that had nearly turned my ​brain, and she had seen cruelty that had seared her. It was because of what we both had to hide from other people that we came to care so much for each other, at the first. We seemed, from the moment we saw each other, to understand. As for her lover, she wanted me to tell you, of course. And I refused. I knew what you would feel,’ Clive repeated, and on his sweet, pure lip she saw the echo of her own cruel irony.
‘You will admit — she has not so altered all the codes and symbols you inherit from me, obsolete as they are— you will admit that it is a natural feeling.’
‘Perfectly natural. Nothing could be more natural;—like all the rest of our primitive emotions. You see yourself as the pure and Hester as the impure woman.’
‘Do I?’ It seemed to her that Clive had thrown knives at her and that she felt them quivering in her throat and side.— All that suffering that he had hidden from her, his mother, and that Hester had understood at a glance.—‘Perhaps there is a meaning in the words, in spite of Hester’s code. Do you subscribe also to the modern doctrine of contemporaneity in love-affairs? Are you a completely complacent husband? If your wife had sad ​things in her past, are you willing that she should have pleasant ones in her present?’ She was willing, more than willing, to hurt Clive. He had done more than hurt her. She could not live after seeing that cold hatred burn in his eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked sternly. Monica rose to her feet. She felt no weariness. The poison of his hatred mounted in her, lending her a horrible strength. ‘Do you forgive your wife everything, and your mother nothing? Are you in the plot that brought her lover here to live? Was it acting on your part, too, the other night? Or must I tell you— since they have hoodwinked you—that Captain Ingpen is her lover?’
‘What are you saying? You are mad,’ said Clive. As she saw his face a ghastly happiness filled her heart. He had been deceived. ‘You are mad, Clive repeated. ‘It has become a disease in you, your hatred.’
‘Ask her if it is a disease! Monica panted. ‘Ask her whose ring he wears! Ask her when they saw Chartres together! Ask her why she cried this afternoon when he was with her and Robin was sent away!—I know it all! I have seen it all!—You unfortunate, you hoodwinked, you miserable child!’
​He stood, his face ghastly, staring, incredulous. ‘She hates him,’ he said.
‘Does she? Ask her how she hates him? She has betrayed you.’
He had stumbled forward—the bird with the broken wing—as if with an impulse of escape, and stopped in the middle of the room, staring around him, seeing the way barred. His mother stood before him. ‘Hester couldn’t lie to me,’ he said.
‘She has lied to you,’ said Monica. ‘You see now why she was so anxious to come to live here; so that I should not be lonely any longer.’
The thirsty vengeance of her voice drew his eyes to her and he stood there poised, and looked at her for a long moment. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he then said. ‘If it’s true that he was her lover, it’s not true that he is her lover now. If she has not told me, it’s because she was afraid. Yes,” he looked steadfastly at his mother, drawing, it seemed, assurance from her balefulness, ‘she’s been afraid of you; and of me. She loves me with all her heart and soul; do you understand? As I love her. Every drop of her blood is mine and every drop of mine is hers. Nothing could part us.—She wanted to tell me everything long ago in Cornwall, and I refused to ​Page:Dark Hester.djvu/230