Surely Vere must be asleep. Such absolute stillness must mean temporary withdrawal of consciousness.
Just as Hermione was thinking this, Vere’s left hand moved. The girl lifted it up to her face, and gently and repeatedly rubbed her eyebrow.
Hermione dropped the flap of the blind. The little, oddly natural movement had suddenly made her feel that it was not right to be watching Vere when the child must suppose herself to be unobserved and quite alone with the sea.
As she came away from the window she glanced quickly round the room, and upon a small writing-table at the foot of the bed she saw a number of sheets of paper lying loose, with a piece of ribbon beside them. They had evidently been taken out of the writing-table drawer, which was partially open, and which, as Hermione could see, contained other sheets of a similar kind. Hermione looked, and then looked away. She passed the table and reached the door. When she was there she glanced again at the sheets of paper. They were covered with writing. They drew, they fascinated her eyes, and she stood still, with her hand resting on the door-handle. As a rule it would have seemed perfectly natural to her to read anything that Vere had left lying about, either in her own room or anywhere else. Until just lately her child had never had, or dreamed of having any secret from her. Never had Vere received a letter that her mother had not seen. Secrets simply did not exist between them—secrets, that is, of the child from the mother.
But it was not so now. And that was why those sheets of paper drew and held the mother’s eyes.
She had, of course, a perfect right to read them. Or had she—she who had said to Vere, “Keep your secrets”? In those words had she not deliberately relinquished such a right? She stood there thinking, recalling those words, debating within herself this question—and surely with much less than her usual great honesty.
Emile, she was sure, had read the writing upon those sheets of paper.
She did not know exactly why she was certain of this—but she was certain, absolutely certain. She remembered the long-ago days, when she had submitted to him similar sheets. What Emile had read surely she might read. Again that intense and bitter curiosity mingled with something else, a strange, new jealousy in which it was rooted. She felt as if Vere, this child whom she had loved and cared for, had done her a cruel wrong, had barred her out from the life in which she had always been till now the best loved, the most absolutely trusted dweller. Why should she not take that which she ought to have been given?
Again she was conscious of that painful, that piteous sensation of one who is yielding under a strain that has been too prolonged. Something surely collapsed within her, something of the part of her being that was moral. She was no longer a free woman in that moment. She was governed. Or so she felt, perhaps deceiving herself.
She went swiftly and softly over to the table and bent over the sheets.