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

Chapter 5

Cecily Marlow had watched all four of those winters, and she had made her own thing of them, and the thing she made was not kind.

She could not forbid it. That was the difficulty, and it was the whole of her temper. There is no way to forbid a woman for sitting with the blind and the old; you cannot say you may not be kind to that person without the words coming out of your mouth in their own ugly shape. So Cecily did what people do who have a grievance they cannot say plainly. She said it sideways. She said it kindly. She said it so that it would sound like love.

She said it that autumn, over the work basket, to a Mrs. Dodridge, with Hester in the next room and the door standing open.

It was the speech the whole of that evening was built on, and it is worth setting down exactly, because everything that happened afterwards happened because a woman said these words in a warm room with a witness who carried them home.

“I will tell you what I have decided about Hester,” she said, “and you may think me hard. I have thought about it a great deal, and I believe I am right.”

Mrs. Dodridge made the small encouraging noise that women make when they are about to be given a confidence.

“I have given up hoping for her,” Cecily said. “I do not say it unkindly. I am fonder of Hester than of almost anyone alive. But one must be honest, and honestly she has no notion at all of how to help herself. Look at how she spends an assembly. Every other unmarried woman in that room is doing the work of being seen, as she ought to, as I did at her age and was glad to. And Hester goes and buries herself in the darkest corner of the place with old Mrs. — whoever she is — from the cottage, where not a soul can see her and not a soul would care to.”

She drew a thread through and bit it off.

“And she calls it goodness,” she said. “That is the part I cannot abide. It is not goodness. It is hiding. It is a want of spirit got up as charity. And it has cost her every chance she ever had, and now she is thirty and the chances are spent.”

Mrs. Dodridge murmured something about it being very sad.

“It is,” said Cecily, “and I have three of them to think of. My own two and her. And I cannot pour the whole of my strength into the one who will not lift a finger for herself. So I have made my peace with it. Hester will be an old maid. She will live with us and be useful, and I shall be very good to her, and I shall never once reproach her with it. But I will not pretend she has not thrown herself away.”

She looked up, then, and her eyes were bright and steady, and she was not lying. That was the terrible part. She was not lying. In the small warm room of her own head, every word of it was true.

“She has thrown herself away,” she said, “on people who cannot even keep her name in their heads from one week to the next. And there is no sadder waste in the world than a woman who spends her kindness where it will never be seen.”

Mrs. Dodridge said that it was very true and very generously felt.

And in the next room, with the door open, Hester Marlow sat with her father’s green book in her lap and heard every syllable of it, and did not move, and did not cry, and turned the page she had been on when the speech began and read the same four lines over eleven times without taking in one of them.

There was no surprise in her. That is what she noticed afterwards, lying awake. Not one grain of surprise. She had known all of it. She had known it for six years. She had simply never heard it said out loud in one piece, and hearing it said out loud did something the knowing had never done: it closed a door. It made the thing settled. It turned a suspicion she had been carrying around like a stone in her pocket into a fact she could put down.

She was not going to be rescued by her brother’s house. There was no version of the next thirty years in which she became anything other than useful.

She closed the green book. She sat with her hands in her lap in the dark, and she thought — and this was the beginning of everything, though she did not know it — then I shall have to be something to somebody outside this house, and there is only one person in this county who has ever looked at me as though I were a person, and she cannot see.

Every word of Cecily’s speech would be repeated back to her within the year, in a shape she could not bear. Mrs. Dodridge was not a malicious woman. Mrs. Dodridge was a woman with a warm heart and a warm fire and nothing to do with either of them but talk. She carried the speech home and set it out at her own table the way you set out a dish you have been given, and it was admired, and it travelled, and by the spring it had gone round three parishes in four different versions, and each version was less kind than the last.

But that was a year off, and by then it would not matter.

First there was the winter assembly.

And the stranger at the top of it.