“Go Sit With the Blind Widow, You Are No Loss to the Set” – The Duke Crossed the Room to Her

Chapter 19

There was one more thing, and it came nine years later, and it came out of a conversation in a carriage.

Edmund Marlow had died in the February — a short illness, a bad chest, and six weeks of it — and the estate had gone to a cousin, and Cecily Marlow had been left with a jointure that was smaller than she had been promised and a house she could not afford to keep.

Hester went to her. That was the whole of it; there is no more to the scene than that, and it lasted two hours, and it is worth setting down because it is the last thing that happened in this story and because nobody in the county ever knew about it.

She drove over to Marlow House in the plain carriage, the same carriage, on a Thursday, which was the only day she ever chose for anything.

Cecily Marlow was fifty-one years old and had been a widow for five weeks, and she was sitting in the morning room with the work basket on the sill exactly where it had always been, and she stood up when the Duchess came in, which she had never once done in six years when it had only been Hester.

“Sit down, Cecily,” said Hester.

“I do not —”

“Sit down. I have not come here to be stood up for.”

Cecily sat. Her hands went to the work basket and then stopped, because the work basket was empty; there was nothing left in that house that needed mending, because Cecily had sold the linen.

“I have come to say three things,” said Hester. “Then I am going, and you need not write to me about it, and I will not write to you about it either.”

“Very well.”

“The first is that the east field mortgage is due in September and the timber money will not cover it, and Edmund knew, and did not tell you, and I have known since before I was married. I have arranged with the bank. It is settled. There is nothing you need to do about it, and you will not thank me for it in writing, because I have told them it was Edmund’s arrangement, which is a lie, and I would rather it stayed a lie.”

Cecily Marlow’s face did something complicated.

“The second is that Kate and Lucy may live at Hollowfield House for as long as they want, or at Ravenshill, and I have told them both so, and neither of them needs your permission, and I am telling you so that you will not be surprised.”

“You are very good,” said Cecily.

“No,” said Hester. “That is the third thing. I am not good. I want you to hear the third thing properly, because I have been carrying it for fifteen years and I am not going to carry it any longer.”

She sat down in the chair opposite.

“You said a thing over that work basket to Mrs. Dodridge,” she said, “with the door open and me in the next room. You said I had thrown myself away on people who could not keep my name in their heads. You said there was no sadder waste in the world than a woman who spends her kindness where it will never be seen.”

Cecily Marlow went grey.

“I heard every word of it,” said Hester. “I was sitting on the other side of that door with my father’s book in my lap. And I want you to know two things about that afternoon, and then I am finished, and we shall never speak of it again.”

She leaned forward.

“The first is that you were right about the arithmetic. I was thirty, and I had forty pounds, and the chances were spent, and everything you said about what that house could give me was true. I do not hold it against you. I have never held it against you. You were frightened, and you had two daughters, and you counted everything twice, and I have run a house of forty people for fifteen years now and I have counted everything twice myself, and I understand you better than you would like.”

“And the second?” said Cecily, in a voice that was barely there.

“The second is that you were wrong about the kindness,” said Hester. “Not the arithmetic. The kindness. You said it was a waste because it would never be seen. And I sat in the dark on the other side of that door and I decided, that same afternoon, that I would go on doing it anyway. That is the whole of what happened to me. That is the entire reason I am sitting in this chair in this room in these clothes. Not because anybody saw me. Because I decided, in the dark, on the wrong side of your door, that I would go on being kind in a corner where nobody was ever going to look, and I did it for four winters, and it turned out one person had been looking the entire time.”

She stood up.

“That is all,” she said. “I do not want an apology and I would not know what to do with one. I came here to tell you that you did not break me, and that you did not waste me, and that you have been sitting in this room for fifteen years believing you had done a thing to me that you had not done, and I have decided to take that away from you, because I am going to be fifty and I am tired of the two of us carrying it.”

Cecily Marlow sat in the morning room of a house she could not afford and looked at the woman she had sent to the fire.

Then she said: “I was jealous.”

“I know,” said Hester.

“You were kind in a corner where nobody looked, and you were happy,” said Cecily. “You came home from those assemblies happy, and I came home from them with my feet ruined and nothing to show for it, and I could not bear it, and I dressed it up as being sorry for you.”

“I know that too,” said Hester. “I have known it since I was twenty-six.”

She put her gloves on.

“Come to Ravenshill for Christmas,” she said. “You need not, and I shall not ask again, and if you come I shall not mention this. But you are Kate and Lucy’s mother, and I have decided that the two of us are going to be civil for another twenty years, and you may as well have the pudding.”