Chapter VI

Antoinette smiled tenderly over those letters; he must be a queer person, Dennis Blackwood, to write to her like that, after having only spoken to her once. She liked his letters from an artistic point of view, and the bulk of them gave her a feeling of warmth and contentment; but once read, she put them aside; did not pore over them as she pored over Hester’s, striving to read between the lines, and to put into the words meanings which did not exist. Hester at a distance was most unsatisfactory, so much so, that it sometimes cost Antoinette a real effort to conjure up the image of her personality. She ventured to express the hope that she might soon be allowed to see Hester again; and to her infinite surprise, Hester replied that she was at Birmingham now, and that if Antoinette thought it worth while, she might come and spend a day with her there.

Antoinette trembled with joy on receiving that letter. It lay beside the one in which Dennis had told her about Eric Rubenstein, and Grand’mère peered inquisitively over the silver coffee-pot. But Antoinette cared naught for Grand’mère that morning: she was going to see Hester, and Dennis was evidently in love with her, and the world was altogether an excellent place; gratefully Antoinette accepted the gifts that fate was showering upon her—gratefully as a flower opens its petals to the sun.

Some days later, by dint of a series of lies and precautions, she set out for Birmingham. She could not tell the family where she was going. They knew nothing about Hester, and had they done so, would doubtless have deemed the two hours’ journey to see her, crazy and an unnecessary expense. She had stated that she was spending the day at Rosabel’s in Hampstead; and Rosabel, good soul, had been sworn to secrecy.

What would the day give her? Antoinette wondered, as the train bore her northwards, her excitement growing and growing with every beat of the wheels. In what circumstances and in what state of mind would she find Hester? She was entirely in the dark, her imagination free to illuminate it with the most fantastic of pictures. It was fantastic enough in itself that she should be tearing across England just to spend a day with Hester. Just one day—that was the joy of it! One magic day standing out in high relief from the monotonous flat background of days all alike; one day to look back upon, robbed from the calendar.... Would Hester be as unapproachable as ever, or would she at last overcome her fierce reserve, and of her own free will admit Antoinette to her confidence? Antoinette’s heart beat faster, as she pictured this eventuality. She stood up in the corridor, too restless to sit down, feverish with anticipation....

Then the train swung into the station, and Antoinette saw Hester on the platform; and suddenly all the fever and excitement that had been worked up to such a pitch died down, so that it required no special effort to greet Hester with nonchalant calm. It was as if her pulses had become tired of beating and hammering merely in anticipation, and had ceased to do so, now that anticipation was about to merge into realisation.

“It was nice of you to come,” smiled Hester.

“It was nice of you to let me,” responded Antoinette.

They made their way through the crowd and out into the street.

“You’ll lunch with me at my lodgings, won’t you?” said Hester.

“Thanks very much.”

After that they walked in silence. Obviously Hester waited for her to open conversation, but their unsatisfactory correspondence had established no link of intimacy between them, and Antoinette was at a loss, not knowing where or how to begin. Hester stopped in front of a boarding-house in a rather dingy side-street, and Antoinette followed her in through a dark and stuffy hall that smelt of roast mutton, and thence into a drawing-room with cheap lace curtains and bamboo tables ornamented with dusty ferns.

“We can stop here for the present,” said Hester; “everybody seems to be out.”

Antoinette glanced at the pretentious knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, the dirty crinkled paper round the flower-pots, the gaudily-framed pictures ... a third-rate boarding-house was about the last place in the world, in which she would have expected to find Hester. Her sense of the fitness of things was outraged.

“Do you—do you live here?” she began at last tentatively.

“For the moment, yes.”

“But ... do you like it?”

Hester shrugged her shoulders. “If you can’t be where you want to be, this place is as good as any other. And I’m not a millionaire, you know.”

All the same, Antoinette reflected, millionaire or not, surely it was possible to live in surroundings less actively repellent than these! Apparently Hester carried her habitual detachment even to the lengths of being quite oblivious of their sordidness.

She hunted in her mind for a suitable topic of conversation. “What was Bristol like?” But almost before the words were out of her mouth, she realised that she had infringed that unwritten law which decreed that she should display no curiosity with regard to Hester’s private affairs.

She was prepared for the inevitable cold and evasive reply, when Hester said: “Bristol? Oh, good enough while it lasted. But what are two weeks in a year, compared with the fifty bad ones?”

“Are they always bad—the odd fifty?”

“More or less. He’s married, you see. His wife’s in an asylum; and things are difficult on account of his position; he’s a schoolmaster.... The good times just have to be snatched.”

Antoinette felt stunned—and then disappointed. Hester had revealed to her the secret of her life, but she had expected so much more drama from the actual moment of revelation. And the secret itself struck her as very commonplace; it seemed as if Hester, by taking Antoinette into her confidence, had forfeited some of her mysterious charm.... Antoinette tried in vain to fathom the reason why her burning love for Hester should be thus transformed into a feeling of faint repulsion—repulsion, no, that was absurd. What she felt was jealousy, perhaps; jealousy of the man to whom Hester gave all there was to be given, so that she had nothing left over for Antoinette.... It was not that, either. She had always dimly suspected the existence of such a man, and assuming that Hester’s happiness lay with him, she had been generous enough not to be jealous. And now that his existence was no longer a hypothesis but a certainty, she was less inclined than ever to be jealous—but she knew it was from indifference rather than from generosity.

Hester was saying: “As you know, I never discuss my life with anyone, but I thought I had better tell you just the bare facts, as you’ve been foolish enough to honour me with a certain amount of your affection.” Her great eyes gazed straight into Antoinette’s with the old look, which only three weeks ago had stirred in her such depths of feeling. But now she could only flush and avert her eyes from Hester’s, so that Hester might not see that all the affection she had ever had for her was dead. Also, she had a shrinking fear that Hester would come to elaborate the “bare facts.” It struck Antoinette as indecent that Hester should do so now, when she lacked the tenderness with which she would once have received such confidence.... So she talked feverishly and brilliantly, and was all the while full of a pitiful amazement, because Hester’s appreciative laugh, that could so wonderfully transform her sullen face was powerless to rekindle the dead emotion. Antoinette was relieved when they sat down to lunch with the other inhabitants of the boarding-house at the one long table in the dining-room. She was getting tired of the strain.... And by the end of the day she was more tired of it still, tired of pretending to Hester, pretending to herself. And evidently she had not pretended so very well after all, because Hester said as she walked with her to the station: “You’re disappointed—but remember, I warned you....”

“Oh, I’m _not_!” cried Antoinette, in a last attempt to delude herself even more than Hester.

But Hester only smiled and shook her head. “It’s no use, my child, I know you are, as I knew you would be. People who pour out such great floods of feeling as you do are bound to suffer from disillusionment. Especially if they come up against people like me.”

“How d’you mean—people like you?” stammered Antoinette.

Hester laughed harshly. “I suppose I’m deceptive. Oh, you’re not the first person I’ve deceived—involuntarily, of course, because I’ve always warned them as I warned you. Imaginative people of your type are drawn to me because, apparently, I give the impression of having more in me than I have. That’s all. It’s not a tragedy. But I don’t think we’ll see each other again, you and I.”

“Not...?”

“Better not. And by the time you get home you’ll realise if you haven’t done so already, that you don’t want to either.”

... The world would be a terribly dreary place, now that there was no one left in it to love. Even if Hester had been cruel to her, it would have been easier to bear, than just discovering that she no longer cared for Hester. The greatest cruelty on her part could not have killed the love that Antoinette had had for her only three weeks ago, only yesterday.... But Hester had been kind; kinder than ever before; and it was not her kindness that was to blame. Nor was it the mere fact of having found her in the wrong setting. Again, only yesterday, Antoinette’s adoration would have been proof against such trivialities—would have deepened at the thought of Hester in that depressing environment.

It was not Hester’s fault. Antoinette knew that; Hester was unchanged. It was only she who had lost the power of endowing her with a charm that she had never possessed. The queer impetus that had made her love Hester had suddenly become paralysed, just as her pulses had ceased to hammer, the moment she arrived at the station.

But if the whole of that brief magical passion had been but a fever of Antoinette’s own imagination, a temporary madness, and if her present state of mind heralded her return to sanity, then with all her soul she longed to become mad again, so that she might go on loving....

Her wonderful day was over, and it had not held one single moment upon which it would be good to look back. She was returning empty-handed. And she would have to rouse herself into giving the family a chatty and fictitious description of how she had spent the day with Rosabel.

In the midst of her desolation, it gave her a little comfort to remember that Dennis’s promised letter from Exeter would be awaiting her at home. She hoped it would be one of his specially nice ones. She was in a mood to appreciate it to-night....

But that night there was no letter from Dennis; neither the next night; nor the one after.