“Have you drunk any of it?” she demanded.
“No,” Emily answered. “I have not.”
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.
Lady Walderhurst, quite slowly, turned the colour of the milk itself. But she did nothing but sit still and gaze at Hester.
“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.”
“Yes,” Emily answered faintly.
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.
She spoke in a low voice, such a voice as a listener outside could not have heard.
“Do you know,” she demanded, “what you represent to us—to me and to my husband—as you sit there?”
Emily shook her head. The movement of disclaimer was easier than speech. She felt a sort of exhaustion.
“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.
“Would you hurt me?” she faltered. “Could you let other people hurt me?”
Hester leaned further forward in her chair, widening upon her such hysterically insistent, terrible young eyes as made her shudder.
“Don’t you see?” she cried. “Can’t you see? But for you my son would be what Walderhurst is—my son, not yours.”
“I understand,” said Emily. “I understand.”
“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—”
Lady Walderhurst put out her hand to a letter which lay on the table.
“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.”
She was shivering, though she was determined to keep still.
“What was in the milk?” she asked.
“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.”
There was a singular gravity in the words poor Lady Walderhurst spoke in reply.
“That,” she said, “would have been the cruelest thing of all.”
Mrs. Osborn got up and came close to her.
“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.”
Emily gasped for breath, and lifted her head as if to raise it above the wall which was being slowly built round her.
“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.”
She bent down and picked up the empty glass from the carpet.
“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.”
As she said it she began to cry a little, like a child.
“Nothing will save me,” she said. “I shall have to go back, I shall have to go back!”
“No, no!” cried Emily.
The girl swept away her tears with the back of a clenched hand.
“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.
“What must I do?” she asked, as if she was speaking to a friend. “I am afraid. Tell me.”
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.”
Emily Walderhurst passed her hand over her forehead.
“It is like something in a play,” she said, with a baffled, wondering face. “It isn’t even respectable.”
Hester began to laugh.
“No, it isn’t even respectable,” she cried. And her laughter was just in time. The door opened and Alec Osborn came in.
“What isn’t respectable?” he asked.
“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.”
He grinned, but faintly scowled at the same time.
“You’ve upset something,” he remarked, looking at the carpet.
“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