Emily Fox-Seton

Chapter 18

Hester sat at the open window of her boudoir in the dark. She had

herself put out the wax candles, because she wanted to feel herself

surrounded by the soft blackness. She had sat through the dinner and

heard her husband's anxious inquiries about the rotten handrail, and had

watched his disturbed face and Emily's pale one. She herself had said

but little, and had been glad when the time came that she could decently

excuse herself and come away.

As she sat in the darkness and felt the night breath of the flowers in

the garden, she was thinking of all the murderers she had ever heard of.

She was reflecting that some of them had been quite respectable people,

and that all of them must have lived through a period in which they

gradually changed from respectable people to persons in whose brains a

thought had worked which once they would have believed impossible to

them, which they might have scouted the idea of their giving room to.

She was sure the change must come about slowly. At first it would seem

too mad and ridiculous, a sort of angry joke. Then the angry joke would

return again and again, until at last they let it stay and did not laugh

at it, but thought it over. Such things always happened because some one

wanted, or did not want, something very much, something it drove them

mad to think of being forced to live without, or with. Men who hated a

woman and could not rid themselves of her, who hated the sight of her

face, her eyes, her hair, the sound of her voice and step, and were

rendered insane by her nearness and the thought that they never could be

free from any of these things, had before now, commonplace or

comparatively agreeable men, by degrees reached the point where a knife

or a shot or a heavy blow seemed not only possible but inevitable.

People who had been ill-treated, people who had faced horrors through

want and desire, had reached the moment in which they took by force what

Fate would not grant them. Her brain so whirled that she wondered if she

was not a little delirious as she sat in the stillness thinking such

strange things.

For weeks she had been living under a strain so intense that her

feelings had seemed to cease to have any connection with what was

normal.

But she and Alec were like the people who began with a bad joke, and

then were driven and driven. It was impossible not to think of what

might come, and of what might be lost for ever. If the rail had not been

tried this afternoon, if big, foolish Emily Walderhurst had been lying

peacefully among the weeds to-night!

She began to see things. The chief thing was a sort of vision of how

Emily would have looked lying in the depths of the water among the

weeds. Her brown hair would have broken loose, and perhaps tangled

itself over her white face. Would her eyes be open and glazed, or half

shut? And her childish smile, the smile that looked so odd on the face

of a full-grown woman, would it have been fixed and seemed to confront

the world of life with a meek question as to what she had done to

people--why she had been drowned? Hester felt sure that was what her

helpless stillness would have expressed.

How happy the woman had been! To see her go about with her unconsciously

joyous eyes had sometimes been maddening. And yet, poor thing! why had

she not the right to be happy? She was always trying to please people

and help them. She was so good that she was almost silly. The day she

had brought the little things from London to The Kennel Farm, Hester

remembered that, despite her own morbid resentment, she had ended by

kissing her with repentant tears. She heard again, in the midst of her

delirious thoughts, the nice, prosaic emotion of her voice as she said:

And she might have been lying among the long, thick weeds of the pond.

And it would not have been the accident it would have appeared to be. Of

that she felt sure. Brought face to face with this definiteness of

situation, she began to shudder.

She went out into the night feeling that she wanted air. She was not

strong enough to stand the realisation that she had become part of a web

into which she had not meant to be knitted. No; she had had her

passionate and desperate moments, but she had not meant things like

this. She had almost hoped that disaster might befall, she had almost

thought it possible that she would do nothing to prevent it--almost. But

some things were too bad.

She felt small and young and hopelessly evil as she walked in the dark

along a grass path to a seat under a tree. The very stillness of the

night was a horror to her, especially when once an owl called, and again

a dreaming bird cried in its nest.

She sat under the tree in the dark for at least an hour. The thick

shadow of the drooping branches hid her in actual blackness and

seclusion.

She said to herself later that some one of the occult powers she

believed in had made her go out and sit in this particular spot, because

there was a thing which was not to be, and she herself must come

between.

When she at last rose it was with panting breath. She stole back to her

room, and lighted with an unsteady hand a bedroom candle, whose flame

flickered upon a distorted, little dark face. For as she had sat under

the tree she had, after a while, heard whispering begin quite near her;

had caught, even in the darkness, a gleam of white, and had therefore

deliberately sat and listened.

When Hester appeared the next morning at the breakfast-table, she had

emerged from her humour of the day before and was almost affectionate in

her amiability. The meal at an end, she walked with Emily in the garden.

She had never shown such interest in what pertained to her as she

revealed this morning. Something she had always before lacked Emily

recognised in her for the first time,--a desire to ask friendly

questions, to verge on the confidential. They talked long and without

reserve. And how pretty it was of the girl, Emily thought, to care so

much about her health and her spirits, to be so interested in the

details of her every-day life, even in the simple matter of the

preparation and serving of her food, as if the merest trifle was of

consequence. It had been unfair, too, to fancy that she felt no interest

in Walderhurst's absence and return. She had noticed everything closely,

and actually thought he ought to come back at once.

During the Osborns' stay at Palstrey the two women had naturally seen a

good deal of each other, but for the next two days they were scarcely

separated at all. Emily, feeling merely cheered and supported by the

fact that Hester made herself so excellent a companion, was not aware of

two or three things. One was that Mrs. Osborn did not lose sight of her

unless at such times as she was in the hands of Jane Cupp.

"I may as well make a clean breast of it," the young woman said. "I have

a sense of responsibility about you that I haven't liked to speak of

before. It's half hysterical, I suppose, but it has got the better of

me."

"I ought to be taking care of you," said Emily, with gentle gravity. "I

am the older and stronger. You are not nearly so well as I am."

"Then do as I tell you," she said. "Don't go anywhere alone. Take Jane

Cupp with you. You have nearly had two accidents. Make Jane sleep in

your dressing-room."

Emily felt a dreary chill creep over her. That which she had felt in the

air when she had slowly turned an amazed face upon Jane in the Lime

Avenue, that sense of the strangeness of things again closed her in.

But before the next day closed all was made plain to her, all the

awfulness, all the cruel, inhuman truth of things which seemed to lose

their possibility in the exaggeration of proportion which made their

incongruous ness almost grotesque.

The very prettiness of the flowered boudoir, the very softness of the

peace in the velvet spread of garden before the windows, made it even

more unreal.

That day, the second one, Emily had begun to note the new thing. Hester

was watching her, Hester was keeping guard. And as she realised this,

the sense of the abnormalness of things grew, and fear grew with it. She

began to feel as if a wall were rising around her, built by unseen

hands.

The afternoon, an afternoon of deeply golden sun, they had spent

together. They had read and talked. Hester had said most. She had told

stories of India,--curious, vivid, interesting stories, which seemed to

excite her.

At the time when the sunlight took its deepest gold the tea-tray was

brought in. Hester had left the room a short time before the footman

appeared with it, carrying it with the air of disproportionate solemnity

with which certain male domestics are able to surround the smallest

service. The tea had been frequently served in Hester's boudoir of late.

During the last week, however, Lady Walderhurst's share of the meal had

been a glass of milk. She had chosen to take it because Mrs. Cupp had

suggested that tea was "nervous." Emily sat down at the table and filled

a cup for Hester. She knew she would return in a few moments, so set the

cup before Mrs. Osborn's place and waited. She heard the young woman's

footsteps outside, and as the door opened she lifted the glass of milk

to her lips.

She was afterwards absolutely unable to describe to herself clearly what

happened the next moment. In fact, it was the next moment that she saw

Hester spring towards her, and the glass of milk had been knocked from

her hand and rolled, emptying itself, upon the floor. Mrs. Osborn stood

before her, clenching and unclenching her hands.

Hester Osborn dropped into a chair and leaned forward, covering her face

with her hands. She looked like a woman on the verge of an outbreak of

hysteria, only to be held in check by a frenzied effort.

"Wait a minute." The girl was trying to recover her breath. "Wait till I

can hold myself still. I am going to tell you now. I am going to tell

you."

It seemed to her that she waited twenty minutes before another word was

spoken, that she sat quite that long looking at the thin hands which

seemed to clutch the hidden face. This was a mistake arising from the

intensity of the strain upon her nerves. It was scarcely five minutes

before Mrs. Osborn lowered her hands and laid them, pressed tightly palm

to palm, between her knees.

"I don't believe you do," said Hester. "You don't seem to realise

anything. Perhaps it's because you are so innocent, perhaps it's because

you are so foolish. You represent the thing that we have the right to

_hate_ most on earth."

"Do _you_ hate me?" asked Emily, trying to adjust herself mentally to

the mad extraordinariness of the situation, and at the same time

scarcely understanding why she asked her question.

"Sometimes I do. When I do not I wonder at myself." The girl paused a

second, looked down, as if questioningly, at the carpet, and then,

lifting her eyes again, went on in a dragging, half bewildered voice:

"When I do _not_, I actually believe it is because we are both--women

together. Before, it was different."

The look which Walderhurst had compared to "that of some nice animal in

the Zoo" came into Emily's eyes as two honest drops fell from them.

Hester leaned further forward in her chair, widening upon her such

hysterically insistent, terrible young eyes as made her shudder.

"Listen!" Mrs. Osborn went on through her teeth. "Even for that, there

are things I haven't the nerve to stand. I have thought I could stand

them. But I can't. It does not matter why. I am going to tell you the

truth. You represent too much. You have been too great a temptation.

Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first. It all came by

degrees. To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that

stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people's heads, and they

grew because every chance fed them. If Walderhurst would come home--"

"I heard from him this morning," she said. "And he has been sent to the

Hills because he has a little fever. He must be quiet. So you see he

_cannot_ come yet."

"In the milk there was the Indian root Ameerah gave the village girl.

Last night as I sat under a tree in the dark I heard it talked over.

Only a few native women know it."

"If you had gone out on Faustine," she said, "you would have met with

_an accident_. It might or might not have killed you. But it would have

been an accident. If you had gone downstairs before Jane Cupp saw the

bit of broken balustrade you might have been killed--by accident again.

If you had leaned upon the rail of the bridge you would have been

drowned, and no human being could have been accused or blamed."

"Nothing will be done which can be proved," said Hester Osborn. "I have

lived among native people, and know. If Ameerah hated me and I could not

get rid of her I should die, and it would all seem quite natural."

"It is a good thing it did not break," she said, as she put it on the

tray. "Ameerah will think you drank the milk and that nothing will hurt

you. You escape them always. She will be frightened."

"At first, when I hated you," she was even petulant and plaintively

resentful, "I thought I could let it go on. I watched, and watched, and

bore it. But the strain was too great. I broke down. I think I broke

down one night, when something began to beat like a pulse against my

side."

Emily got up and stood before her. She looked perhaps rather as she had

looked when she rose and stood before the Marquis of Walderhurst on a

memorable occasion, the afternoon on the moor. She felt almost quiet,

and safe.

Little Mrs. Osborn stood still and stared at her. The most incongruous

thought came to her mind. She found herself, at this weird moment,

observing how well the woman held her stupid head, how finely it was set

on her shoulders, and that in a modern Royal Academy way she was rather

like the Venus of Milo. It is quite out of place to think such things at

such a time. But she found herself confronted with them.

"Go away," she answered. "It is all like a thing in a play, but I know

what I am talking about. Say you are ordered abroad. Be cool and

matter-of-fact. Simply go and hide yourself somewhere, and call your

husband home as soon as he can travel."

"Something I have been telling Emily," she answered, laughing even a

trifle wildly. "You are too young to hear such things. You must be kept

respectable at any cost."

"I have, indeed," said Hester. "A cup of tea which was half milk. It

will leave a grease spot on the carpet. That won't be respectable."

When she had tumbled about among native servants as a child, she had

learned to lie quickly, and she was very ready of resource.

In the 1600s, Balthasar Gracian, a jesuit priest wrote 300 aphorisms on living life called "The Art of Worldly Wisdom." Join our newsletter below and read them all, one at a time.