Her lips quivered, and she pressed her hands tightly between her knees.
“That’s a murderer’s thought,” she muttered querulously. “And yet I wasn’t a bad girl to begin with.”
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:
“Don’t thank me—don’t. Just let us enjoy ourselves.”
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.
*
There could be, to the purely normal geniality of Emily Walderhurst’s nature, no greater relief than the recognition that a cloud had passed from the mood of another.
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 everyday 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.
“Send for him,” she said quite suddenly; “send for him now.”
There was an eagerness expressed in the dark thinness of her face which moved Emily.
“It is dear of you to care so much, Hester,” she said. “I didn’t know you thought it mattered.”
“He must come,” said Hester. “That’s all. Send for him.”
“I wrote a letter yesterday,” was Lady Walderhurst’s meek rejoinder. “I got nervous.”
“So did I get nervous,” said Hester; “so did I.”
That she was disturbed Emily could see. The little laugh she ended her words with had an excited ring in it.
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.”
“You feel responsible for me!” exclaimed Emily, with wondering eyes.
“Yes, I do,” she almost snapped. “You represent so much. Walderhurst ought to be here. I’m not fit to take care of you.”
“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.”
Hester startled her by bursting into tears.
“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.
“I will do as you wish,” she answered.
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