She nodded. "Yes, she could have saved me, but I let her go."
"God!" he exclaimed almost angrily. "I ought to be jealous of her; I am jealous of her, I suppose! But why, oh, why, if you cared for her so much, didn't you break away and go with her to London? Why did you let even that go by you? I could bear anything better than to see you as you are."
She was silent. Presently she said: "There was Mother, Richard. I loved her too, and she needed me; she didn't seem able to do without me."
His face went white with passion; he shook his clenched fists in the air. "How long is it to go on," he cried, "this preying of the weak on the strong, the old on the young; this hideous, unnatural injustice that one sees all around one, this incredibly wicked thing that tradition sanctifies? You were so splendid. How fine you were! You had everything in you that was needed to put life within your grasp, and you had a right to life, to a life of your own; everyone has. You might have been a brilliant woman, a woman that counted for a great deal, and yet what are you now? I can't bear to think of it!
"If you are a mass of ills, as you say, if your splendid brain is atrophied, and you feel empty and unfulfilled, whose fault is that? Not yours, who had too much heart to save yourself. I tell you, Joan, the sin of it lies at the door of that old woman up there in Lynton; that mild, always ailing, cruelly gentle creature who's taken everything and given nothing and battened on you year by year. She's like an octopus who's drained you dry. You struggled to get free, you nearly succeeded, but as quickly as you cut through one tentacle, another shot out and fixed on to you.
"Good God! How clearly one sees it all! In your family it was your father who began it, by preying first on her, and in a kind of horrid retaliation she turned and preyed on you. Milly escaped, but only for a time; she came home in the end; then she preyed in her turn. She gripped you through her physical weakness, and then there were two of them! Two of them? Why, the whole world's full of them! Not a Seabourne anywhere but has its army of octopi; they thrive and grow fat in such places. Look at Ralph Rodney: I believe he was brilliant at college, but Uncle John devoured him, and you know what Ralph was when he died. Look at Elizabeth: do you think she's really happy? Well, I'm going to tell you now what I kept from you the other day. Elizabeth got free, but not quite soon enough; she's never been able to make up for the blood she lost in all those years at Seabourne. She's just had enough vitality left to patch her life together somehow, and make my brother think that all is very well with her. But she couldn't deceive me, and she knew it; I saw the ache in her for the thing she might have been. Elizabeth's grasped the spar; that's what she's done, and she's just, only just managed to save herself from going under. She's rich and popular and ageing with dignity, but she's not, and never can be now, the woman she once dreamt of. She's killed her dream by being busy and hard and quite unlike her real self, by taking an interest in all the things that the soul of her laughs at. And that's what life with Ralph in Seabourne has done for her. That, and you, Joan. I suppose I ought to hate Elizabeth, but I can't help knowing that when she broke away there was one tentacle more tenacious than all the rest; it clung to her until she cut it through, and that was you, who were trying unconsciously to make her a victim of your own circumstances.
"Joan, the thing is infectious, I tell you; it's a pestilence that infects people one after another. Even you, who were the most generous creature that I've ever known; the disease nearly got you unawares. If Elizabeth hadn't gone away when she did, if she had stayed in Seabourne for your sake, then you would have been one of them. Thank God she went! It's horrible to know that they've victimized the thing I love, but I'd rather you were the victim than that you should have grown to be like the rest of them, a thing that preys on the finest instincts of others, and sucks the very soul out of them." His voice broke suddenly, and he let his arms drop to his sides. "And I know now that I've been loving you for all these years," he said. "I've just been loving and loving you."
She stood speechless before his anger and misery, unable to defend herself or her mother, conscious that he had spoken the bitter and brutal truth.
At last she said: "Don't be too hard on Mother, Richard; she's a very old woman now."
"I know," he answered dully. "I know she's very old; perhaps I've been too violent. If I have you must forgive me."