Clayhanger - Arnold Bennett (best business books of all time .TXT) 📗

lifted her veil as far as her nose. She had not smiled before.

"Charlie's gone back?"

"Oh yes. Two days ago. He left a message for you."

"Yes. Maggie gave it me. By the way, I'm sorry she's not in."

"I've just seen her," said Hilda.

"Oh!"

"She came in to see Janet. They're having a cup of tea in George's bedroom. So I put my things on and walked round here at once."

As Hilda made this surprising speech she gazed full at Edwin.

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THREE.

A blush slowly covered his face. They both sat silent. Only the fire crackled lustily. Edwin thought, as his agitation increased and entirely confused him, "No other woman was ever like this woman!" He wanted to rise masterfully, to accomplish some gesture splendid and decisive, but he was held in the hollow of the easy chair as though by paralysis. He looked at Hilda; he might have been looking at a stranger. He tried to read her face, and he could not read it. He could only see in it vague trouble. He was afraid of her. The idea even occurred to him that, could he be frank with himself, he would admit that he hated her. The moments were intensely painful; the suspense exasperating and excruciating. Ever since their last encounter he had anticipated this scene; his fancy had been almost continuously busy in fashioning this scene. And now the reality had swept down upon him with no warning, and he was overwhelmed.

She would not speak. She had withdrawn her gaze, but she would not speak. She would force him to speak.

"I say," he began gruffly, in a resentful tone, careless as to what he was saying, "you might have told me earlier what you told me on Wednesday night. Why didn't you tell me when I was at Brighton?"

"I wanted to," she said meekly. "But I couldn't. I really couldn't bring myself to do it."

"Instead of telling me a lie," he went on. "I think you might have trusted me more than that."

"A lie?" she muttered. "I told you the truth. I told you he was in prison."

"You told me your husband was in prison," he corrected her, in a voice meditative and judicial. He knew not in the least why he was talking in this strain.

She began to cry. At first he was not sure that she was crying. He glanced surreptitiously, and glanced away as if guilty. But at the next glance he was sure. Her eyes glistened behind the veil, and tear-drops appeared at its edge and vanished under her chin.

"You don't know how much I wanted to tell you!" she wept.

She hid her half-veiled face in her hands. And then he was victimised by the blackest desolation. His one desire was that the scene should finish, somehow, anyhow.

"I never wrote to you because there was nothing to say. Nothing!" She sobbed, still covering her face.

"Never wrote to me--do you mean--"

She nodded violently twice. "Yes. Then!" He divined that suddenly she had begun to talk of ten years ago. "I knew you'd know it was because I couldn't help it." She spoke so indistinctly through her emotion and her tears, and her hands, that he could not distinguish the words.

"What do you say?"

"I say I couldn't help doing what I did. I knew you'd know I couldn't help it. I couldn't write. It was best for me to be silent. What else was there for me to do except be silent? I knew you'd know I couldn't help it. It was a--" Sobs interrupted her.

"Of course I knew that," he said. He had to control himself very carefully, or he too would have lost command of his voice. Such was her power of suggestion over him that her faithlessness seemed now scarcely to need an excuse.

(Somewhere within himself he smiled as he reflected that he, in his father's place, in his father's very chair, was thus under the spell of a woman whose child was nameless. He smiled grimly at the thought of Auntie Hamps, of Clara, of the pietistic Albert! They were of a different race, a different generation! They belonged to a dead world!)

"I shall tell you," Hilda recommenced mournfully, but in a clear and steady voice, at last releasing her face, which was shaken like that of a child in childlike grief. "You'll never understand what I had to go through, and how I couldn't help myself"--she was tragically plaintive--"but I shall tell you... You must understand!"

She raised her eyes. Already for some moments his hands had been desiring the pale wrists between her sleeve and her glove. They fascinated his hands, which, hesitatingly, went out towards them. As soon as she felt his touch, she dropped to her knees, and her chin almost rested on the arm of his chair. He bent over a face that was transfigured.

"My heart never kissed any other man but you!" she cried. "How often and often and often have I kissed you, and you never knew! ... It was for a message that I sent George down here--a message to you! I named him after you... Do you think that if dreams could make him your child--he wouldn't be yours?"

Her courage, and the expression of it, seemed to him to be sublime.

"You don't know me!" she sighed, less convulsively.

"Don't I!" he said, with lofty confidence.

After a whole decade his nostrils quivered again to the odour of her olive skin. Drowning amid the waves of her terrible devotion, he was recompensed in the hundredth part of a second for all that through her he had suffered or might hereafter suffer. The many problems and difficulties which marriage with her would raise seemed trivial in the light of her heart's magnificent and furious loyalty. He thought of the younger Edwin whom she had kissed into rapture, as of a boy too inexperienced in sorrow to appreciate this Hilda. He braced himself to the exquisite burden of life.
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Publication Date: 08-16-2010

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