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

Chapter 9

He got up, and he turned, and he spoke to the room, because his grandmother had turned her face to it and he would give her the hearing she had earned.

“I am new among you,” he said. “So let me be plain, and then we will all go back to the dancing.”

He was not a man who had ever made a speech, and it showed, and it did not matter. His voice was the voice of somebody who has given orders in bad weather and been obeyed.

“That lady is my grandmother. She is the Dowager Duchess of Ellingham. She has lived at Hollowfield Cottage these seven years, since she lost her sight and chose to live quietly. I took a house in this county this autumn to be near her. She has gone among you as a stranger, because she cannot see and does not care to be made a show of, and I let her, and I did not think it my business to announce her.”

He looked around the room, and the room found somewhere else to look.

“I was wrong. I left her among you as a stranger, and you did to a stranger what a careless county does. All but one of you.”

He said that sentence flatly. He did not put any weight on it. That was the thing people remembered afterwards — that he had not been angry. He had been exact.

“I have heard this lady’s name from my grandmother these four years, in her letters and at her fire. I knew it before I knew a single other name in this county. If you want the truth of why I came into this neighbourhood at all, a part of it was this: to find the woman who had sat with my grandmother when nobody else on earth would.”

He paused.

“I did not look to have her handed to me, sent out of the light like a servant. I own I am glad she was. It has told me everything about this room that I needed to know, and it has cost me nothing but a dance I did not want.”

At the top of the set, the young woman he had left standing there had gone a deep and permanent red, and would be a long time forgiving him, and would in the end be grateful.

“I will scold nobody,” he said. “My grandmother does not scold you, and it is her right and not mine. But hear this, and then I have done.”

He put his hand on the back of the chair — the chair by the fire, the chair in the corner.

“You had a great lady among you for seven years and never troubled to learn it. The one person who treated her as worth knowing did not know she was great. She would have done the same if my grandmother had been the pauper you all took her for. That is the only kindness worth the name. It was in the corner of your own assembly the whole time, and you sent it there.”

Then he turned his back on the room.

And he did the thing the beginning of this story promised you.

He held out his hand to Hester Marlow, and he asked her — not the room, a quiet question the room was not meant to hear, and heard anyway, because a room like that hears everything.

“My grandmother has had you four winters,” he said. “Might I have one dance, before she takes you back?”

Hester found her voice. It was not much of one.

“I do not dance well, your grace. I am long out of practice.”

“Then we are matched,” he said. “I have not wanted to dance in years. We can be out of practice together, and the room may make of it what it likes.”

And he handed her up himself, in front of all of them.

He led her back the whole length of that room — past the pillar, past the mothers, past the girl who had laughed, past Cecily Marlow with a daughter on each arm and nothing at all to say — to the top of the set. An hour before, he had stood there with the county’s finest. Now he stood there with a poor relation in a made-over gown.

He did not seem to feel the difference. To him there was none.

They danced one dance. Hester was stiff for the first eight bars and then, somewhere in the middle of it, stopped being stiff, because the man opposite her was not looking at the room and was not performing a task, and had begun to talk to her in an ordinary voice about the fact that neither of them could remember the steps and both of them were pretending to.

The county watched. The county had never watched anything so hard in its life.

And in the corner by the fire, an old woman sat with her hands folded and her blind face turned toward the music, and smiled the whole way through it, and did not say a word.