A Little Treachery

12

A vision, gradually gaining in clarity, of the round, fair face of Mrs Forrester with a very bewildered look in its candid eyes, warned her that cries from the pit would be lost.

For to whom had she been pouring out her soul in this frantic fashion? A woman whom she hardly knew, whom she had for many years refused to know intimately, whose last letters she had rudely ignored, in her stricken state. It was not herself, it was Clem who had been Mrs Forrester’s friend.

Even at that, a little cooling in this friendship had begun towards the last. Finding the cottage what it was, Clem had avoided the Forresters, those helpful friends through whom they had been put in contact with Hungerford, who had therefore been the unwitting cause of the disaster. She had simply not known what to say to them. Kind, upright, benevolent people as they were, they could only be deeply shocked, really horrified, if ever they should learn what had come of their intervention. Besides, they were intimate friends of the Hungerfords. So that Clem, shrinking from giving hurt, with characteristic tenderness, had gone as much in fear of an encounter with these amiable people as if she had been burdened with a shameful secret. In fact, it had become just that in her sick mind: a cause of bitter shame. It had seemed to Catherine a childish resort, akin to hiding one’s head in the sand, to keep averting proposed meetings; they were bound to come to an explanation sooner or later. It was indeed a childish resort, but all that Clem was capable of at that final hour.

Not seeing this, Catherine had merely felt that these friends were being avoided and put off to a degree which they must find exceedingly odd.

Clem, however, had not been able to prevent Mrs Forrester from paying one brief, unsolicited visit to the cottage at the beginning.

The day had been sunny, all the windows open, old Flytton’s pipe was not in evidence; the house had looked its best, flooded with sunshine, its seductions spread and its rottennes hidden; had looked, in fact, as Clem and Catherine had had the misfortune to see it on each occasion of ‘viewing’ it – a delightfully quaint little house, a ‘house of character’, that phrase which of course everyone was inspired to use. And Mrs Forrester, a very feminine woman, charmingly oblivious to structural problems, had been enchanted, happily amused at the picturesque little place; all the more readily enchanted, Catherine had fancied, because she had been slightly worried at her friend’s peculiar reserve. There had been a little mystification. She had no doubt feared something wrong, and, overjoyed to find, as it seemed to her, that her premonitions were groundless, was doubly pleased and inclined to make the best of all she saw. She saw nothing against the cottage but its position on the road – she did think that very undesirable, expressing mild astonishment at their choice. And the dubiety which perhaps showed through Clem’s forced spirits could be attributed to this unfortunate detail. Mrs Forrester had rather dwelt upon it, curiously, as if gently to tax them with a degree of folly. But it was, after all, a minor point. No doubt she had gone home and given the most comfortable account possible to her husband. Henry Forrester was an unworldly, bookish man. He had availed himself of Hungerford’s talents in the matter of building a house, to his own complete satisfaction, and was the kind of man henceforth to swear by Hungerford.

Mrs Forrester had not come again, being pointedly uninvited. Correspondence had dropped also, with a touch of pained offence on her side. And Catherine, many months afterwards, had informed her briefly and belatedly of Clem’s tragedy.

For of course letters had come for Clem, and their senders had had to be answered, however briefly; and the answers were always followed by further letters of shocked enquiry. Letters, letters and letters, with the same anguishing facts to be repeated. Catherine’s replies were curt and churlish, giving the bare facts, refusing help, putting off visits of investigation, at last requesting outright that no one should come near her. Finding herself thus surrounded by Clem’s friends, people quite uncongenial to herself, she had felt it intolerable. All were burningly anxious to help, all were, of course, as helpless as herself. Some little time went by before they saw this bitter truth. But at last in their several attitudes – shocked silence, gloomy sadness, tearful consternation – they had gradually withdrawn.

There were few indeed who, like Margaret Forrester, had shown themselves ready to help even Catherine herself (in spite of herself) for poor Clem’s sake, remembering that she was their friend’s tenderly cared for sister.

Catherine knew how most of them regarded her. She had sensed the judgment in the eyes of these people, or had read it between the lines of what they had written – the measuring, cautiously appraising look which had said as plainly as words, ‘If it had been you, we could have understood it.’ For she (so they had reasoned) was the unbalanced one, the one marked out for mental catastrophe; she was the one whom melancholy had marked for its own. She, in short, was eminently one of those women whom everyone expects to become odd one day.

But of course they were wrong; she herself perceived that the chronic form of the disease keeps out its ravening counterpart. It is rarely the oddity who becomes insane. It is not a question, for the eccentric, of travelling further down the line to reach madness. The lines are different.

Yes, she constituted an awkward problem for these good folk, as she well understood; she was nobody’s business, none of them liked her, she had never been friendly with any of them. She was cruelly aware that most of them felt she had spoiled Clem’s life, that some certainly believed she was a good part of the cause of Clem’s illness.

Yet it was remembered that, although an unfortunate and deplorable person, she had been unaccountably cherished by their poor, lost friend.

Such no doubt had been Mrs Forrester’s feeling.

But her letters of sympathy and advice had gone unanswered, her offers of help had been ignored.

This was the woman who had cause to be offended with her, to whom Catherine, after discarding her first raving letter, wrote a second in a light, untruthful, entirely unnatural style, to the end of which she suddenly tacked on this savage paragraph:

‘How are the Hungerfords? I feel we owe a great deal to Mr Hungerford, and I am sure Clem never expressed her feelings properly, owing to her state, and would have liked me to do some little thing to show our gratitude. It’s a good while ago, it should have been done before, of course, but I have plenty of excuse for having neglected it. Can you suggest anything?’

And she ran out immediately and posted this letter, still in her torn and earthy garden coat and with wild hair and soiled hands, trembling with rage.

Ten minutes later, she was sitting sadly by her fire in a wretched state of dismay.

Then she tried to soothe herself, saying perhaps it was not so bad, she could not clearly remember, and probably Mrs Forrester, anyway, would not realize it was not written in good faith; and as for the last paragraph, which she remembered with perfect distinctness, word for word, the only person who could properly have assessed that pious desire to show gratitude, Hungerford himself, would certainly never see or hear of it, for Mrs Forrester would hardly treat such an overstrained sense of gratitude seriously.

So no great harm was done.

But she remained cold and sunken in her mind, like a person who has suffered a shock, looking askance at herself, sitting for a long while in the middle room between the two dark staircases, listening to the many doubtful creakings of the ancient house, and now and again hearing a dead leaf scud along the pavement past her door, like the slur of a light step drawing near home. It was turning very cold, and a bitter wind was pouring through all the crevices.

She sat there a long time before a small fire, listening to the wind, hardly thinking. Only she felt dully, ‘Well, I make no apology. I need it! I need an outlet. I am a creature in need.’