“You’d better try Mrs. Gibson. She may have some rooms to let before long.”
“But then, I don’t want to leave you, Mona Lisa. You are the extenuating circumstance.”
“I don’t extenuate indefinitely.”
“Ah, you’re wanting to change your lodgings too! Now, if you’d start a boarding house of your own—”
“I’ve thought of that but I’ve no money and I’ve been told I’m too young. That surprises you, doesn’t it? But it shows you what some people think about me! And now they’d add that I haven’t enough sense! No, I can’t bother with a boarding house. All I want is a little hole to crawl into—a nice dry cave, but people aren’t allowed to live in caves nowadays, are they? Everything always belongs to someone else. When I leave my present situation, I’m going to be a charwoman. A home of my own, if it’s only an attic, and no questions asked so long as I can scrub. I ought to have done it years ago, but I suppose I had some ridiculous notions about gentility. You’d better go to bed. I’m waiting up for Ethel and it will be no help to me if she finds you here!”
XXXVI
Sitting by the fire and waiting for Ethel’s arrival, Hannah was almost annoyed to find that the acute stage of her suffering had passed before she had had an opportunity to lie on her bed and cry until she could cry no longer. That was what she had meant to do, but first Ruth and then Robert Corder had made demands on her and the contact with their minds and Wilfrid’s, had diverted her thoughts into several channels and the strength had gone from the main one. “And a good thing, too!” Hannah said to herself. She was able to analyse the emotions she had no need to control and did not wish to express in an extravagance of weeping, and she could wonder how much the presence of Mr. Blenkinsop had contributed to her pain and whether, meeting the circumstances alone, she could have dealt with them more sanely, with her usual acceptance of human frailty. She ought to have gone on and got what humour she could out of a situation in which her lover offered her house to Mr. Blenkinsop, but she was not callous enough for that, nor cruel enough to put the offerer to such confusion. And his shame would have been hers; the worse he proved himself, the greater was her folly and, at once, she began to find excuses for him. Perhaps he wanted to let the house for her sake and intended to send her the money; perhaps his conscience had begun to prick him after ten years of somnolence, but even to Hannah’s eagerness, these explanations were unsatisfactory, and she knew it was more likely that he was weary of the place and wanted to get rid of it, and saw no difference between living there for nothing and taking the proceeds of someone else’s tenancy. There was the chance, and Hannah unwisely clung to it, that Mr. Blenkinsop’s information, received in such a roundabout fashion, had been distorted in transit, but all these speculations were useless. Though she had cured Mr. Blenkinsop of wishing to see her again, though she had given him food for curious thought, she was not otherwise much worse off than she had been before, and she would be actually better off if she could be ruthless with her memories and face the fact that the man she had loved, with a recklessness due to a hero who had risked death and been grievously wounded, had not been worth loving at all; that he, at least, had had no romantic notions of a lifelong attachment; that he had merely seen her as a young woman, enamoured, like many others, of a soldier, who had offered him a home when he had none. He had taken her as part of the house, like the furniture and the fowls, and it was horrible to think that probably at no stage of their intercourse had he considered her as more than a temporary and amusing convenience. If there had been any other sentiment, at any time, any realisation that a woman of her character was not one for easy alliances, or that she had imperilled her future while she made the present secure for him, he could not have treated her to years of silence and to this final insult.
Yet it was well that this had happened, Hannah thought. She was bare, she was bereft, but she was no longer trying to be blind, and she was the stronger to meet Mr. Pilgrim. She could transform herself into cousin Hilda without any sickening qualms of disloyalty to a memory and, given a little time, she could put these hurts so far from her that she would persuade herself it was really cousin Hilda who had endured them.
The expedition to her house had been an odd coincidence and, with the imminence of Mr. Pilgrim, it would have persuaded some people that God approved of the laws men had made, and ratified them with cunningly contrived punishments for offenders, but this would be to make God responsible for Mr. Pilgrim, who had spared a little time
