“There’s rather a draught, dear,” said Aunt Aggie, “my neuralgia ... thank you, my dear.”
“I’ve done it!” cried Aunt Betty, flushed with pleasure. “It’s come out! If you hadn’t shown me that seven, Katie, it never would have come!”
Upon the very next afternoon Aunt Aggie made up her mind. After luncheon she went, alone, for a walk; she climbed the fields above the house, threaded little lanes sunk between high hedges, crossed an open common, dropped into another lane, was lost for awhile, finally emerged on the hill above that tiny Cove known as Smuggler’s Button. Smuggler’s Button is the tiniest cove in Glebeshire, the sand of it is the whitest, and it has in the very middle a high jagged rock known as the Pin. Aunt Aggie, holding an umbrella, a black bonnet on her head and an old shabby rain-coat flapping behind her, sat on the Pin. It was a long way for her to have come—five miles from Garth—and the day was windy, with high white clouds that raced above her head like angry birds ready to devour her. Aunt Aggie sat there and looked at the sea, which approached her in little bowing and beckoning white waves, as though she were a shrivelled and pouting Queen Victoria holding a drawing-room. Once and again her head trembled, as though it were fastened insecurely to her body, and her little fat, swollen cheeks shook like jelly. Sometimes she raised a finger, encased in a black glove, and waved it in the air, as though she were admonishing the universe.
She clutched vigorously in one hand her umbrella.
She gazed at the sea with passion. This love for the sea had been a dominant power in her ever since she could remember, and had come she knew not whence. It had been, in earlier days, one of the deep, unspoken bonds between herself and Katherine, and it had been one of her most active criticisms of Millie that ‘the girl cared nothing about the sea whatever’. But she, Aunt Aggie, could not say why she loved it. She was no poet, and she knew not the meaning of the word ‘Enthusiasm’. She was ashamed a little of her passion, and, when she had walked five miles to Smuggler’s Button or seven miles to Lingard Sand ‘just to look at it’, she would walk stiffly home again, would give no answer to those who asked questions, and, if driven into a corner would say she had been ‘just for a walk.’ But she loved it in all its moods, grave, gay and terrible, loved it even when it was like a grey cotton garment designed for the poor or when it slipped into empty space under a blind and soaking mist. She loved the rhythm of it, the indifference of it, above all, the strength of it. Here at last, thank God, was something that she could admire more than herself.
She had, nevertheless, always at the back of her mind the thought that it would be bad for it if it knew how much she thought of it; she was always ready to be disappointed in it, although she knew that it would never disappoint her—she was grim and unbending in her attitude to it lest, in a moment of ecstasy, she should make cheap of her one devotion. To-day she did not actively consider it. She sat on the rock and made up her mind that she would take steps ‘that very day.’ Harriet, her sister-in-law, had, during these last months, often surprised her, but there would be no question of her action in this climax of the whole unfortunate business.
“The young man,” as she always called Philip, would never show his face in Trenchard circles again. Harriet might forgive, because of her love for Katherine, his impertinence, his conceit, his irreligion, his leading Henry into profligacy and drunkenness, she would not—could not—forgive his flagrant and open immorality, an immorality that had extended over many years. As she thought of this vicious life she gave a little shiver—a shiver of indignation, of resolution, of superiority, and of loneliness. The world—the gay, vital, alluring world, had left her high and dry upon that rock on which she was sitting, and, rebuke and disapprove of it as she might, it cared little for her words.
It was, perhaps, for this reason that she felt strangely little pleasure in her approaching triumph. She had hated “the young man” since her first meeting with him, and at last, after many months of patient waiting, the means had been placed in her hands for his destruction.... Well, she did not know that she cared to-day very greatly about it. She was old, she was tired, she had neuralgia in one side of her face, there was a coming headache in the air. Why was it that she, who had always held so steadily for right, whose life had been one long struggle after unselfishness, who had served others from early morning until late at night, should now find no reward, but only emptiness and old age and frustration? She had not now even the pleasure of her bitternesses. They were dust and ashes in her mouth.
She resolved that at once, upon that very afternoon, she would tell Harriet about Philip—and then suddenly, for no reason, with a strange surprise to herself, she did a thing that was quite foreign to her; she began to cry, a desolate trickling of tears that tasted salt in her mouth, that were shed, apparently, by some quite other person.