Anna paused a moment before she answered truthfully:
‘I don’t know.’
In her mind she thought: ‘You will never believe me, of course; but actually I have no more idea than you have what induced me to go.’
‘So you won’t even trouble to explain!’ said Rachel bitterly. ‘I’m not even worth an explanation to you.’
Suddenly, her bitterness had got the better of her. All the gentleness, the warmth, went out of her face. She was the avenging goddess now, emanating a cold, merciless passion of revenge. And as if carried away in a deistic transport, she was just a little hysterical, a little bit out of control. Her quick, strong, eager voice struck now and then a vibrating high note of hysteria.
‘I let you go off with Sidney. I didn’t complain at you leaving me. I gave you up to her because I thought it would be good for you to have a friend of your own age. But do you think it was easy for me to let you go? Do you think it was pleasant for me to stand aside — I who was so fond of you, who understood you so well, who would have done anything for you!’
Her voice added accusation to bitterness till it rang out, angry and shrill with its sinister undertone of exultancy in revenge.
Anna looked at her in amazement and a certain horror, because Rachel had made her realize the actual existence of vengeance as a motive force. She was silent and uneasy.
‘But this is too much,’ the elder woman went on. ‘This open rebellion against my authority is too much even for me. You have gone too far this time.’
She gazed at Anna in complete bitterness, the deadly bitterness of her wounded pride.
‘You will have to go,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you here after this.’
‘Do you mean that I am to be expelled?’ asked Anna in astonishment. She was dismayed at this sudden menace which had flourished at her from the familiar face of the woman who had been her closest friend.
‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘I shall tell your aunt not to send you back next term.’
She sat watching Anna with shining hazel eyes, and the strange, vindictive coldness hardening her face. Her anger and her vindictiveness seemed implacable and profound, and so, in a way, they were. But all the time, just out of sight, her love for Anna was lurking, a poor tormented ghost, banished, unacknowledged, but still creeping back even now to peer through the black fog of anger.
But her wounded pride was stronger than her love. She could not bear to be slighted by this cool waif of a girl. Rachel was the goddess-woman, mysterious and powerful. She was accustomed to be adored, and perhaps feared a little as well. Most people stood a little in awe of her, for she was majestic and potent in her handsome maturity.
But Anna was quite unimpressed. She refused to feel any awe at all. Isolated in her arrogant young aloofness, she had come to look upon Rachel’s lavish female power as a sort of trick. And Rachel knew this. She even knew that Anna felt a certain repugnance for her beautiful, florid fullness, for her goddess-ship. Bread of humiliation for Rachel.
Anna shivered slightly as she went out of the study. She had really been repelled by Rachel. Really, Rachel in her slight abandonment, in her zest for revenge, seemed sinister to her, almost disgusting. A chilly breath of far-distant alarm had blown upon Anna’s spirit, a distant threat of nightmare menace from the world. She went to find Sidney, feeling somewhat dismayed.
But Sidney, when she heard of the affair, had no consolation to offer.
‘You fool!’ she cried in a harsh voice of extreme, intolerant provocation. ‘You utter fool to go and get yourself expelled and throw away our last term together!’
And she marched off with an expression of cold, disgusted exasperation on her face, and her thin nose piercing the air protestingly.
It was hard for Sidney to forgive Anna for cutting short their time together. But perhaps, more than anything, it was difficult for her to get over the fact that Anna had gone to the dance with Catherine.
‘But why with her? Why with Catherine, of all people?’ she growled irritably, in her gruff, young man’s voice.
She did not like Catherine. There was a slow, undying fire of hostility between the two of them, the hostility of the assured, handsome, well-dressed, worldly-experienced person for the equally assured but less conventional type whose standards of values are quite different. All this in embryo, but none the less potent for that. And Anna could not explain in the least her sudden association with the bold, sophisticated girclass="underline" which only made matters worse.
‘I believe you were just showing off in front of her,’ Sidney accused.
The more or less random shot seemed to come fairly near hitting the mark.
But in the end, of course, Sidney had to allow herself to be reconciled. She couldn’t go on very long treating Anna to her disapproval. During the last few days of the term her affection flamed up with a new intensity, fanned by the poignancy of approaching separation. She enveloped Anna in a clear, bright light of love; and from time to time her amber-coloured eyes would flash at her under the tilted brows, and her mouth would give a little wry smile of pure, bottomless devotion.
Anna was very happy in this aura of affection. She became serene and assured, a little conceited in the knowledge of Sidney’s appreciation, yet at the same time naive and good-natured, something lovable in her confidence of being loved. Only in such an atmosphere did she really seem to come to fulfilment. Her nature required this assurance for its perfecting.
The two were always together during these last days. Even at night they could not be divided, but spent dark hours that passed as swiftly as a dream, talking in low voices in the sleeping house.
The last night of all was cloudy with a faint greyish gleam on the horizon. It was rather warm for the time of year. Anna sat up in bed, leaning against the pillow, and looking out of the wide-open window which faced the low line of hills. There was no light in the room. In the dim, even pallor which came from outside, she could see Sidney sitting at the bottom of the bed, a colourless, indistinct shape in her dark dressing-gown. They had been talking for a long while, but now were silent, subdued and melancholy under the shadow of imminent parting.
Far away in the silent darkness a goods train rumbled off into the distance. It was the nightly signal for Sidney to go back to her own room. She moved and stretched herself, running her fingers through her thick hair. Then she got up.
Anna’s heart stood still at the sudden thought: ‘She is going away now, and tomorrow I am leaving Haddenham for good. It is as if she were going away from me altogether.’ She seemed to realize their parting for the first time.
‘Don’t go!’ she said impulsively, stretching out her hand.
Like a materialization, the hand of Sidney moved out of the darkness and took Anna’s in a firm, cool grip.
‘Feeling sentimental?’ The low, masculine voice was rough with tenderness, and a heavy sadness under the mockery.
Anna gave an unhappy murmur, and said:
‘It’s rather beastly, isn’t it? Having to go away like this.’
‘Damnable!’ said Sidney, her hard fingers tightening about Anna’s hand.
Anna felt tired and unreal. A deep, indefinable uneasiness stirred in her like a foreboding. Sidney seemed to have become remote, the clasp of her hand was chilly and detached as a spectral grip; there was no longer any comfort in it.
‘I feel worried,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why. As if something horrible were going to happen.’ Her face was a troubled blur in the dimness.
‘What could happen?’ Sidney said. ‘Things aren’t so bad really. It will be pleasant for you to have a lazy summer at home. You like your aunt, don’t you?’
‘I don’t dislike her,’ Anna replied. ‘But somehow she’s not quite a real person. One can’t talk to her at all. She’s too —’ she paused a moment, searching her mind for the descriptive word, ‘— too papilionaceous!’ she ended, with a faint smile.