II
Dorchester no longer asserted that her mistress was "better than she had ever been"—Since that terrible morning when Dr. Christopher had broken the news of Sir Roderick's accident Dorchester had made no pretence about anything. This was the time that must, she had always known, one day arrive, but what she had not known was that it would be quite like this.
She was a woman of some imagination; moreover, were there one person in the world who touched her heart, then was it her mistress; she had penetrated, she thought, some of the strange secrets and fantasies of that old woman's soul, and it seemed that now, in these later days, she was at last in touch with every motive and grim artifice that her mistress adopted—
But no—since that terrible day at the beginning of the year Dorchester had lost touch, was left, bewildered, at a loss, as though she were suddenly in the service of some stranger.
She had known that nothing more terrible could happen to her mistress than this—When she heard it she said to herself, "This will kill her—bound to—" She had known too that her mistress would not flinch, outwardly, and that to the ordinary observer there would be no sign, but the thing for which she had not been prepared was this silence, a silence so profound and yet so eloquent that one could obtain from it no clue, could discern no visible wound, but daily, almost hourly, as she sat there, change was at work ... she was dying before their eyes—
What Dorchester did not know was that the Duchess had been aware, for a long time, that this was to occur, if not exactly this, why, then, something like it.
All through that autumn she had sat there waiting—the War, the rebellion of her children—it only needed that disaster should overtake Roddy and the circle was complete.
She did not doubt that it was because he had married Rachel that this had happened to him, and she might have prevented his marriage to Rachel had she wished.
The girl had now for her sitting there in her room the fatal inevitability of some hostile spirit. She saw all her past years as a duel with this girl, the one soul in rebellion against hers. Rachel had taken everything from her; she had first stirred Adela and John into rebellion, she had encouraged Francis Breton, she had destroyed Roddy ... she rose, before the old woman's eyes, black, titanic, sweeping, with great dark wings, across the horizon.
The Duchess did not in so many words state that Rachel had flung her husband from his horse and then watched whilst his body was dragged along the stones, but, in some way, the girl had plotted it.