When the noonday meal was over, and David and Theo had gone, she went again to Vine Cottage. Judith was in the library, an open volume of Browning on the table before her. Her face was pale and her eyes showed flecks of hazel.
“We had a misunderstanding this morning, my dear, and I don’t want to leave things that way.” The words came with a brave show of confidence, but Lavinia Trench looked like a corpse, an automaton that was made to speak by a force other than its own. “I am going to ask you to forgive me, and help me as you did Eileen.”
“Oh, mother!” The cry was from her heart.
“I knew you would be surprised. I never apologized to any one in my life. I’ve been fighting it for a week. When I said those things, this morning, it was to keep from saying what—what I’m going to say now. Since Eileen came home, I’ve been going over my life. David said she had missed the path, and you showed her the right way. I am the most unhappy woman in the world. If you could do that for Eileen, you could do it for me.”
It was a challenge, flung like a pelting of hail stones. Judith looked at her with troubled gaze. How could she deal with a mentality so different from her own? Eileen was young, and Eileen loved her. That her mother-in-law cordially detested her, she could not doubt.
“You know I would gladly....”
“It’s all perfectly simple—excepting two points. By all the rules of right and wrong, Eileen ought to be a miserable girl, broken in soul and body—and not respected by good people. It doesn’t make a particle of difference that she hid her wickedness. God knows what she did, and it is God that punishes sin. Instead of that, she comes back here better in every way than she was before. She’s prettier now than Sylvia. She used to be cross and hateful most of the time. Now she laughs and sings and whistles till I wish she would pout for a change. She sits up and discusses the most serious topics with grown men and women—and you know how she used to rattle slang, and sneer at people who were serious.”
“Her experience developed her marvellously. It might have wrecked her, just as a powerful dose of medicine might destroy your body, if administered in the wrong way. It was fearful medicine, but it was what her sick mind needed.”
“That takes care of one of the points,” Lavinia cried, her black eyes dilating. “You call it medicine. I saw it only as the consequences of sin.”
“The name doesn’t matter.”